JOHN MacLEOD: Let's not fawn over Bambi - there's only one way to get deer numbers down...

Published: 18:54, 15 July 2026 | Updated: 18:54, 15 July 2026 One evening last week I was on the final leg of a long journey home to Lewis from Glasgow. It had been a nightmarish day – tourist-clotted roads, general drizzle and a hideously delayed ferry. What should have been a brief blithe trundle up my island on a blithe summer evening became a climb through the misted mountains of north Harris and nightfall, pretty well, by the Lewis border, stuck in a crocodile of cars behind drivers who evidently did not know the road. It was as we cleared the straggling village of Ballalan that it happened. Deer suddenly mustered by the roadside and a stag vaulted the highway right in front of me. As I slammed the brakes he seemed to fill the windscreen. For an instant, I thought he might actually come through it. But, somehow, we just evaded collision; and then he was away, beyond my sight, in the Hebridean dusk. Not that the monarchs of the glen were done with me. The sun rose on the morrow on a peerless summer day and, that evening, I took my little dog for a trot to the village road end. It was Rommel who noticed first; he began to whimper and grouse and pull determinedly on the lead. Then I noticed strange dung on the tarmac – very fresh – and a certain musky scent in the air. Even before we rounded the bend, I knew we were very near a stag. Unfortunately, we were actually past him before I saw him. He had vaulted some curly, venerable fencing; stood stock-still among the rushes. Taut. Imperious. Quite the hat-rack of antlers, and most aware we were there. I chivvied Rommel along; but the road end – a big turning circle for the bus, before the Pentland Road sweeps over the Great Moor to distant shores – was not three minutes away. A Beware of Deer sign on the Isle of Lewis A majestic stag can cause serious harm with its antlers When we would have to turn round and retrace our steps past a large and nervy wild animal, not that chilled about dogs and – if he felt himself cornered – capable of doing serious harm; a woman was badly gored by a terrified stag in Lochaber some years ago. Turn about we duly did. And, slowly, no drama Obama, padded home. The stag popped out from behind this wall; retreated behind those trees with a clatter of dainty hooves. Explored one neighbour’s garden; then another. Occasionally, we paused to stare at one another. But the pattern of retreat continued. Finally, when he was deep in still another garden, we safely overhauled him, and so for home – untrampled; ungored. These might seem trivial encounters – a fright behind the steering wheel; a faintly fraught spell during a dog-walk. But they reflect a growing environmental emergency. Deer numbers in Scotland are completely out of control. There are now nearly a million of them, across a range of species and double the population of 1990. And it is especially evident on my island. It was about 2002 before I ever saw a deer in flat, northern Lewis. You just didn’t. They stuck to the hills of Uig, the lonely corries of Park and the rugged mountains of Harris. Here we are, though, in 2026, and they’re bouncing round the suburbs of Stornoway. Flinging themselves across busy roads when not gratefully munching your pelargoniums. The reason for this Hebridean population boom is prosaic. Thirty years ago most crofters kept flocks of wiry native sheep breeds like the Hebridean Blackface and these spent much of the year, with minimal attention, roaming moor and hill on our vast common grazings. Then, partly because of a dreadful slump in lamb prices – in one particularly dismal autumn, you were lucky if mainland graziers took the beasts off your hands for 20p a head – and, too, a change in subsidy arrangements, the sheep all but disappeared. There are far fewer sheep on the island these days, most are of softer mainland breeds – Cheviots, Swaledales, Texels – and most these days are kept year-round on the ‘byland,’ the fields surrounding a crofter’s home. In other words, the deer have had the moors all to themselves for some 20 years now and taken full advantage of all the extra grub. Sheep like the Hebridean Blackface have all but disappeared from the islands Perhaps memories of Bambi have made the public reluctant to consume deer NatureScot is doing what it can, with deer density in some airts as high as fifteen to twenty per square kilometre – munching up woodland, precluding forest regeneration, damaging fragile peatlands and threatening such treasures as the capercaillie. Our sporting estates do knock off some 100,000 deer a year, the paying gentry going for stags in the autumn and estate staff then culling the hind population. NatureScot wants that number doubled and has decreed compulsory culls on private estates. But there are odd complications. For one, no one actually owns deer: merely the land on which they roam. If your fine stags choose to drift out of your chunk of the Highlands to range over that of your neighbours, they are now his lawful prey and there is nothing you can do about it. If you are a crofter at your wit’s end over devastated corn and so on, you are theoretically at entire liberty to haul the flintlock from the thatch and have a pop at the marauding beasts yourself. In reality, there are strict rules about shooting deer. You cannot use a rifle of smaller calibre than a .303, and you must of course go through all the hoops necessary to be licensed for one. And if you plan to shoot out of season or at night then you must be listed on the NatureScot Fit and Competent Register – which necessitates a recognised deer management qualification. There are exceptions to this – lairds and their employees do not need to be on this list – but beyond all this is a weirder complication still: our extraordinary reluctance to eat venison. It has never been so widely available, it is now found in most supermarkets, it is low-fat and high-protein – and yet the public largely recoil. Partly because it has a reputation for being very difficult to cook (it isn’t) or perhaps wider folk memory, thanks to Walt Disney, of the death of Bambi’s mother. Absurdly, a quarter of all the venison sold in the UK is imported from New Zealand, even as plump deer bounce around every other highway from the A87 to the Edinburgh City Bypass – and ten to 20 of us, on average, every year, perish as a result of collisions with them. There is one obvious, eminently sensible solution. For hundreds of years Scotland’s countryside has lacked an apex-predator. I cannot see how we can regain control of our deer until we bring back the lynx.