The Game Management Authority recently published data on Victoria’s recreational deer harvest for 2022. It shows that, after around a decade of double-digit growth in the annual harvest, it now appears to have flattened off.
One year of data is not enough to definitively pick a trend; however, as a leading indicator, it is consistent with what we would expect with the main hunting areas now being a decade or more on from their last major fire events. Sambar thrive in early successional growth post bushfire, with both breeding success and calf survival increasing due to several related factors, all linked to habitat. As the forest cover returns and the understory recedes, food and cover availability decreases, and the carrying capacity (and consequently the population) follows suit.
This graph shows the Victorian recreational wild deer harvest from 2009 to 2022 (the ‘missed harvest’ of 2020 shows a sharp decline, this was due largely to COVID-related lockdowns).
Whilst the scale of the non-recreational harvest is not well quantified, what we can confidently say is that it is dwarfed by the recreational harvest.
It is reasonable to expect that deer populations are increasing now in areas burnt during the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires; this will have been slowed to some degree by extensive aerial culling operations. The areas where those fires occurred were mostly a long distance from the Melbourne population centre, and include a lot of areas that are not available for recreational hunting.
