The Yass Valley Veterinary clinic in Southern New South Wales has published some interesting images on Facebook of a GPS collaring project for sambar and red deer which is currently being conducted in the Kosciuszko National Park.
The clinic outlined some of the methodology of the capture which involved two NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service helicopters; the first carrying a shooter who would fire a net over the deer from low altitude, to capture the deer and the second helicopter carrying the vet and collaring team.
This capture and collaring method has been widely used in New Zealand and, more recently, helicopters have been used in the capture of chital in North Queensland.
This is the first time to our knowledge that this methodology (using helicopters and net guns) has been used to capture sambar in Australia.
The clinic erroneously claimed that “this was the first time in the world that Sambar Deer had been captured and sedated” which is demonstrably false. We have first-hand knowledge (and first-hand experience with the Bunyip sambar project) of numerous chemical captures of sambar in Australia and there are at least two published research papers on collared sambar internationally.
Internationally these studies have broadly found that deer movement is largely dictated by climatic conditions and available habitat and that male deer tend to wander further than female deer.
As with all wild deer research we will follow this with interest.
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