Behind the scenes of Victoria's deer cull

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On the hunt

As a Victorian parliamentary committee prepares its report into the management of invasive animals on public land, we go bush with some of the hunters helping control deer numbers.

It's pitch black as the hunters gather, curls of breath caught in the glow of headlamps.

Clad in camouflage pants and fluorescent orange vests, half a dozen men huddle over maps in the tray of a ute, jabbing a finger at this gully, that ridge line.

There is talk of thermal air currents and grumbles about the unfavourability of the weather. A kookaburra laughs.

We're in Victoria's Yarra Valley, between Woori Yallock and Healesville. As we bump along a dirt track into the Warramate Hills Nature Conservation Reserve, the gums are still dark shapes against a deep blue sky.

Glimpses of pasture and vineyards can be seen through the trees.

The headlights illuminate grass lush from the spring rains.

Man against beast

By the time the first rays are bathing the bush in warmth, the hunters have each peeled off from the group. This will be one-on-one, man against beast.

Laurie Rees, a wiry-framed retiree who has been hunting for 32 years, strides into the trees, following the sun around the upper edge of the gully.

The thermals are giving him trouble. In theory if he stays uphill, the breeze won't carry his scent to the deer's nostrils. But the air currents keep swirling around, changing direction. He can't get a clear run, undetected.

It's less than 10 minutes before a loud honk comes from the undergrowth. Laurie stops abruptly, holds up a hand. Another honk from the opposite side of the slope. (Until this moment I hadn't known deer made any sound at all.)

If he were a dog, Rees' ears would be pricked and his tail pointed.

Soundlessly he glasses the hillside with his binoculars before going a few steps further.

And then, in one motion, his rifle is at his shoulder. Before I register what's happening, a single shot crackles across the valley.

But he's missed.

The bullet went straight over the animal's back.

Worse, it was a stag — a decent-sized one.

Rees shakes his head.

"That's a once in a lifetime chance," he says.

He'd seen a hind, or female deer, too. Now both are gone, vanished into the green. A fence along the ridge top, ineffectual. "It's nothing to them," Rees says. They'd have sailed right over.

I'd never seen the animals at all, my city-numbed senses dumb to the nuances of the bush.

An hour later Rees is still beating himself up, eyeing the hillside, cursing his mistake.

"I rushed it, Jane. The adrenalin starts flowing and, well, I stuffed it up."

The consolation is that it was a clean miss — we find no blood, there's no injured deer loping through the scrub to a slow death.

Skills of the hunter

Nobody knows exactly how many deer are out here, but 50 have been culled from this reserve and other public land this year as part of Parks Victoria's deer control program.

The authority has been given permission to remove 215 deer this year from the Warramate Hills Nature Conservation Reserve, Dandenong Ranges National Park and Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve. Last year only 69 were culled.

Sorry, this video has expired Video: Hunters talk about what draws them to the bush (ABC News)

The program, in its third year, uses accredited volunteers from the Australian Deer Association and the Sporting Shooters' Association to target Fallow and Sambar deer in the hope of restoring sensitive plant habitat for native animals.

Spotlight shooting at night and stalking in the morning and late afternoon are the main control techniques.

For an experienced hunter, this is a sensory experience.

The pungent odour of fox pee. The smell of animal fur. A scattering of deer dung that the hunters refer to as "black jelly beans".

Rees interprets the bush as we thread our way through. A flattened patch of undergrowth where a deer has bedded down. A shrub that's been browsed into an unusual shape. A trunk scraped smooth by a stag's rubbing. More than once he's found cast off antlers on the ground.

When you're stalking an animal as elusive as the deer, success depends upon an accurate reading of the landscape.

With the leopard their natural predator in their native India, the Sambar deer is especially wary and a master of the disappearing act.

They can smell you long before you see them, if you ever do. They'll stand stock still and wait for you to walk right past and then, with a rustle of a tree or the thud of a hoof, bolt to safety.

Rees' eyes, ears and nose are in overdrive.

The crack of a twig or the flick of an ear may be all that alerts him to a deer's presence.

Sometimes it's the birds that give a deer away.

At one point a pair of sulfur-crested cockatoos screech insistently for a good minute while eyeing the ground.

"Then again, they could be alerting the deer to us," he says.

'Magnificent creatures' tough to beat

There's no mistaking the deer's advantage in this terrain.

Weighing up to 300 kilos, they're astonishingly nimble on a breakneck slope.

Meanwhile my knees and ankles ache as we scramble awkwardly up and down — the pursuit is unrelentingly physical.

From time to time we retreat to a game trail but mostly it's a case of plunging straight through the bush.

Rees picks his path with practiced efficiency and I try to step in his tracks, but keep crunching leaves loudly underfoot.

We tramp past tree ferns and bark charred by bushfire and dusted with lichen in shades I struggle to name. Blood red sap drips from one trunk, another is patterned with exquisite ochry yellows and greens.

For Rees, this is a big part of what makes hunting appealing — just being in nature.

He's here today, though, doing a job.

Deer might be beautiful creatures, but they are also an introduced pest.

This hunt, organised by Parks Victoria, is aimed at getting numbers down.

There are strict rules — no head shots, aim for the heart. Each time a weapon's fired it has to be called in to a Parks Victoria ranger, who monitors the progress of the hunt and keeps track of each man.

In return for volunteering their marksmanship, the hunters are allowed to take the meat from the animals they shoot.

In fact, the hunters insist upon it.

"They're magnificent creatures, every part of them deserves to be used," carpenter and hunter Dirk Wendt says.

On this hunt, which lasts almost five hours, he's the only man who manages to make a kill. Three, in fact.

The other hunters come back empty-handed.

When the shooting stops at 11:00am, Rees unloads his weapon and offers me a chocolate bar.

"Come on Jane, they've beaten us," he mutters as we head back to the Toyota.

Are hunters misunderstood?

Now the even harder work begins.

The hunters pitch in to help butcher the meat and haul it out of the bush — a back-breaking process that takes another three hours.

But it's against the hunting ethic to waste anything and so the hunters go to the trouble, butchering the beasts where they fell, slinging legs of venison over their shoulders to carry them up the embankment.

"I eat the good bits and the dog eats the bad bits," Wendt explains. He sees hunting deer as doing his bit for the environment, as well as filling his freezer.

By the time the men emerge from the bush for a cup of coffee from the thermos and a choc chip biscuit, eight hours have elapsed and every log has begun to look like a deer's rear end.

Rees changes out of his camouflage gear at the car.

"I never go in public dressed like this," he explains.

Hunters can be a misunderstood bunch.

For someone who plucks their steak neatly from the cold aisle, it's confronting to see an animal killed and cut up.

But spend time with these men and you quickly realise they are undeniable nature lovers — demonstrably responsible, precise shooters who are willing to get their hands dirty and care about doing things right.

As we part ways, Rees admits he'll be dreaming about the stag that got away.

"I can still see it now. And it'll haunt me for a few days."

Will he shoot it in his dreams?

"No, you always wake up," he answers with a wry smile.

The Victorian Government is due to make public the findings of a parliamentary inquiry into the management of invasive animals on public land by the end of March 2017.

Credits:

Words and images: Jane Cowan

Topics: rural, pest-management, conservation, parliament, state-parliament, national-parks, vic, healesville-3777, yellingbo-3139