The wildlife – the scenery – the deerstalking. Over 12 months, we follow wildlife manager Niall Rowantree as he looks after the deer on the Ardnamurchan Estate. how does he produce a healthy population of deer? And how does deer management weave itself into the fabric of estate life? Find out in this 80-minute film. Watch it as a pay-for download on Vimeo, with bonus material, or in its four original parts on YouTube below.
Part 1
A Year in the Life of Red Deer shows a normal springtime on the Ardnamurchan peninsula with local deerstalkers and farmers dealing with the idiocy of government policy. This is part one of our four-part film A Year in the Life of Red Deer, where we follow Niall Rowantree of West Highland Hunting in his work managing red deer and other game on the estate in the West Highlands. The film is kindly supported by riflemaker Blaser and optics company Leica.
▶ For more about Blaser in the UK, visit Blaser-Sporting.com
▶ For Blaser in the rest of the world, go to Blaser.de
▶ For #LeicaHunting kit, visit uk.leica-camera.com/Sport-Optics/Leica-Hunting
▶ For Niall Rowantree and West Highland Hunting, go to WestHighland-Hunting.co.uk
Here are the other films in the series:
Part 2
It is later and, once again, we are stalking red stags with Niall on the Ardnamurchan Estate. A few weeks in the late summer and autumn are almost all the time a Scottish estate has to make money out of deerstalking. Niall and his team are working flat out to give the clients what they want: the glorious Scottish landscape and the excitement of creeping up on Scotland’s most iconic animal.
Part 3
Red stags in the rut, fighting other stags, defending their hinds, and hunted by stalkers: the cycle of life and death continues in the Scottish Highlands. Beautiful camerawork brings you the autumn film in our series. Niall takes a guest, Alkhas Khametov, out on to the hill to stalk a red stag – and we put a camera on another stag to see what it’s like to be in the centre of the rut.
Part 4
Our year ends with Niall making the difficult decision about which hinds and calves to cull. It is winter on the hill, and not all of them will survive. Niall has been nurtuting these deer for a year – but he knows that removing the weaker ones, will help the rest of the herd. Stalkers Robert Sajitz and Jon Carrington join him on the hill as he tries to track a tricky calf.
▶ For free-use pictures from this story, visit Flickr.com/photos/fieldsportschannel/albums/72157662253997207
▶ Watch the red rut #stagcam sequences on YouTube
