Thread: Buck fighting damage

The wife and I were glassing across the block last week and watched a wild fallow buck hobbling up the face towards the bush line. He lay down in the sun and parked off for a couple of hours so we decided to stalk in and take a closer look. At one point he got up and walked a few places along the ridge line and it was clear he was injured so we neck shot him and took him to the chiller.

I wish now I had taken photos in the chiller because he was also banged up pretty bad on the one side. There are introduced fallow down in the pine block surrounded by pasture and they don’t go far, the hinds attract a lot of interest from wild bucks and this year there has been a large black one with a massive head causing all sorts of problems for the introduced bucks. We had watched the black buck come steaming in to the fallow herd a few nights previously and wondered if there were going to be any casualties. Then couple of days later for the first time we saw a bunch of tagged hinds up in the bush about 3 km from their normal territory, being marshalled along by the big black buck. So looking forward to some decent crossbreeding now and growth in wild fallow numbers, there’s definitely been an increase in the last two years.