For a few days the sika have been whistling over the boundary around the house, I've seen some decent lads going around.

The farm land around the house that I shoot on doesn't get too many deer on it, but there are smaller areas where I see the occasional roe, red and sika . We get red stags which pass by to their rutting grounds late August early September so sometimes if lucky I can get onto a group (see one of my earlier PARD foxing videos). Some of these stags are huge. Unfortunately reds are a little too much to handle in my remote location so I tend to leave them be.

This evening, my plan worked out superbly, I was just unfortunate that it was a sika hind and calf that were mooching about in the bracken, not a stag. Having a thermal is great, but it isn't the be all and end all as more often than not you can spend ages watching something that is clearly too hidden to identify let alone take a shot!