Nature Conservancy Red Deer Section. First Progress Report. August 1967.

Edinburgh: The Nature Conservancy, 1967. Quarto, paperbound (stapled gold illustrated covers), From Foreword: The purposes of this report are to review the main findings of the Nature Conservancy’s work on red deer and to draw attention to other work in progress. Nature Conservancy research on red deer began with a survey from 1953-1959, organised by Dr. Fraser Darling. This gathered information on the distrubition and abundance of red deer in Scotland by direct survey methods, and demonstrated that red deer coud be counted. In six years this survey covered about 1,600,00 acres of deer ground (1,124,00 acres of recognised deer forest and 511,000 acres of other land regularly occupied by red deer) and 52,653 deer were counted (16,068 stags, 26, 242 hinds and 10, 343 calves). Large scale deer surveys have now become the responsibility of the Red Deer Commission, and up to the present time over half of the total ground regularly occupied by red deer (over 3 million acres) has now been surveyed. These extensive data are not discussed in this report since they have not yet been analysed in detail. When the island of Rhum was acquired in 1957 as a National Nature Reserve, the Conservancy started managing a wild red deer population. This work was later supplemented by research on the mainland to gather comparative population data. The island and mainland deer programs are discussed in this report. (Inventory #: 61171bd)