Feral deer control

Hi, my name is Mick Charlton.
I work for North Coast Local Land Services in the Invasive Pest team.
My job is to help landowners with invasive pests,
and a major part of that is feral deer.
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As with any pest species that you have on your property,
it's really important to take care of them when they're in small numbers.
In the urban area, that's a little bit difficult,
whether it might be only one or two,
but it's still important to report that to us as soon as you can.
There are five species of deer that we have in New South Wales,
and they are fallow deer, red deer, chital deer, rusa deer, and sambar.
You're likely to encounter deer in what we call a peri-urban area,
which is close to town, on the edge of town.
In some areas on the mid-North Coast, they're right in the middle of town,
so that includes parklands, walkways, bike tracks.
If you encounter deer, you really just want to stay away from them.
They can become aggressive, so the best thing to do
is just back away from the deer and report them to us or to the local council.
Especially if you're driving a car,
you want to just slow down when you go past them
because they're very quick to jump out onto the road.
They don't know what cars are, and it's just like hitting a cow.
You know, you'll do a lot of damage really, really quickly.
Deer cause a lot of damage to plants and trees.
They are browsers, so what they do,
they'll eat rose bushes, they'll eat saplings,
they'll eat, you know, just all of that type of woody stuff,
as well as grass.
Another thing they will do when they start growing their velvet
on their antlers is that will become very itchy,
and they will rub that off on saplings and trees.
You'll notice the damage to the trees when you see that
because they'll all be broken off about a foot off the ground,
and they'll have no leaves on them at all.
Deer are also grazers, and they will compete with your livestock
for that nice, sweet grass that all of our livestock love.
So the more deer you have on the property,
the less your livestock are going to have to eat.
Feral deer are also really good movers of weeds,
especially tropical soda apple.
When the seed pot opens up, it fits the deer's mouth perfectly.
They clean all the seeds out and then move along
and drop the seeds in another part of the paddock.
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Sandbar deer and rusa deer also create wallows,
which is when they get to a water source
and then they dig with their feet,
they spray it with urine and then they roll in it.
So it damages the waterway as well.
In the urban and the peri-urban area, which is virtually in town,
deer also become aggressive during the rut,
and they can damage your housing as they will go up to the window
and they'll see a reflection of themselves.
And they'll want to fight with their own reflection.
So that's another thing that you have to be really worried about
in the middle of the rut.
So with the five species of deer on the north coast,
their scat is nearly all the same.
It's individual pieces that are joined together.
If you break them apart, they're sort of pointed on one end
or they'll be oval on one end and they're blackish in colour.
And they have a sort of a black coating around them.
But if you break them open, you'll see there's nothing in there but grass.
So the five species of deer that we have on the mid-north coast
are all virtually the same footprint.
They just vary in size and they're a cloven hoofed animal,
which means that they're pointed at the front, rounded at the back.
The larger ones are the sambar and the red deer.
The smaller ones are the chital and the fallow deer.
The rusa deer and the chital deer have a much smaller footprint,
but they all virtually are the same shape.
Another thing to remember with feral deer
is that they are vectors for both parasites and disease
that can affect both livestock and humans.
We can help you in some circumstances,
but we need you to also be a part of it.
So we need you to, one, take photos, if you can, of the deer.
And then you can either call us directly
or you can use an app called Feral Scan.
That app will allow you to upload photos as well
and it will also pinpoint where you've seen the deer.
Feral Scan also has a website that you can use.
It works exactly the same way.
By using the Feral Scan app, you're actually contributing
to the mapping of the feral deer on the north coast
so that we can then see where these corridors are
that these feral deer are using,
and we may be able to target areas a lot more successfully.
Just remember that feral animal control
is best done on a large scale,
so if you get all of your neighbours involved,
we'll have a much better chance of having a successful control.