Out of season

Jon Snowdon reflects on how the pandemic has affected what he and his deer group have done over the past year

- Jon Snowdon

The roebuck season is about to start on 1 April. What sort of season it will be depends a great deal on what COVID-19 restrictions are still in place and for how long. Looking back over the whole roe deer season since last March, it has become apparent that the control of deer was affected in various ways depending on the extent to which it could be carried out and where.

It seems incredible to think that 23 March will mark the first anniversary of the Government announcing the initial lockdown, when it decreed that all unnecessary social contact should cease as the pandemic took hold in our country. Deer management was stopped and all unnecessary travel was forbidden as we were restricted to our houses and gardens, those of us lucky enough to have the latter.

Closed

For us here in Northumberland it meant that the estates were closed, which, in turn, meant that the deer control we would normally carry out at the end of the doe season could not take place. At the time we were just about on our target and the few deer that could not be removed were not going to create any problems for the woodland. However, as the lockdown progressed into the buck season then that did have an effect.