Deer move about a good deal. For this reason you can't really say how many there are. It's easy to double count. And many observers seem unable to avoid exaggeration. Even SWT ask me how many I think are on Blacka. I assume this is because they would like to be able to write a section in their next management plan which they can use to make some sort of calculation (in Livestock Units per Hectare or some such abomination) that then justified putting X numbers of cattle on the moor for X months in the year. I refuse to do this because I refuse to be involved in farm-style management to any degree. Anyway the evidence just doesn't begin to make sense. How will my recording of deer being in a certain place on a certain day just when I happen to be there be any guide to what they may be doing at 3 am or tomorrow evening?
Even if it was possible to be utterly certain of their every movement I would still not want to be party to any management of the deer or where they are. Blacka's best aspect is its unmanaged status - that is now increasingly threatened and there will soon be no part of Blacka that I can say has the quality I look for: freedom from intervention.
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I wish I didn't think there is a more sinister motive behind this. The new East Moorland Partnership of RSPB/NT boasts that they have one of only two wild red deer herds in the Peak District. But look at this from the EMP Draft Guiding Management Principles:
"6. Appropriate grazing to achieve conservation objectives
iv. A clear and transparent policy will be created to manage the red deer herd. The herd will be monitored and managed to a carrying capacity and sex ratio which is optimal for the habitat on the Eastern Moors and the health of the herd themselves, also minimising any potential negative impacts on neighbours."
You know what managed means! In their all consuming hunger to control wild nature, the EMP will be culling deer when it suits them. SWT is just complicit in giving them numbers to feed the blood lust of their calculations for the management plans. Thus these free-living wild animals will be another inconvenience to be dealt with, just like the birch that you show is routinely persecuted on Blacka. Don't forget also the "predator conrol" that will be carried out on these moors, the slaughter of foxes, crows and mustelids - and all in the name of conservation.
The 2,700ha of Totley, Big, Ramsley, Leash and Clod Hall Moors in the EMP that are owned by the PDNPA, plus the 1,000ha or so of Blacka, Hathersage, Burbage and Houndkirk Moors that are owned by Sheffield City Council, represent a massive chunk of contiguous PUBLICLY OWNED land. What are the chances of the public seeing that land provide a benefit to wild nature as well as for people? Why not get rid of the livestock rather than the deer? Why can't native woodland flourish in these uplands? At present, it wont happen because of the madness of managing landscapes just for a set of birds chosen by the narrow interests of the conservation industry here and in the EU.
Mass trespass was once about access. The mass "trespass" we need now has to be about seeing wild nature having an unthreatened existence in the space of our publicly owned land.
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