West Sussex has always been home to healthy herds of roe and, increasingly, fallow. Over the last ten years, however, those herds have expanded beyond what most estates, farms and woodlands can now comfortably sustain. Rising browse lines, bark stripping and bare-floored coppice coups are no longer isolated observations, they have become the backdrop to day-to-day forestry, game rearing and arable production across the county.
The question confronting every land manager is no longer whether deer are doing harm, but how quickly that harm can be brought back under control before another season of recruitment doubles the challenge.
The Roots of Today’s Pressure
Several factors have converged to place fallow, in particular, front and centre. Milder winters have pushed fawn survival to levels few records show in living memory. Meanwhile, the county’s patchwork of maize game strips, rotational cover crops, sweet chestnut coppice and sheltered vineyard margins provides reliable grazing in every month of the year. Add to that a licensing framework that often struggles to keep pace with legitimate requests for night or out-of-season authorisations, and West Sussex now delivers the perfect conditions for simple population arithmetic: more food, higher survival, faster growth.
For the farms of the coastal plain this means neat rows of wheat heads clipped off just as grain is setting. For estates in the Weald it means carefully regenerated broadleaf struggling for light under a solid ceiling of browsing pressure. For private landowners, it means gardens and parkland once thought securely fenced suddenly reduced to a tangle of stripped shrubs and flattened lawns.
Where Estate Operations Collide
Game-shoot operators are watching partridge and pheasant cover take the brunt of summer browsing, only to find their heavy-seeded kale and maize demolished before the season opens. Forestry contractors, already juggling tight restock deadlines and UKWAS conditions, discover that their freshly planted oak have been browsed flat within weeks. Vineyard managers, keen to capitalise on the county’s chalk slopes, lose young vines just as they break bud. It is no longer enough for each of these operations to address deer in isolation; what happens in one compartment on one night now echoes through every neighbouring enterprise.
One Woodland, Many Lessons
A 100-acre block on the north face of the South Downs illustrates the new reality. Designated as Ancient Semi-Natural Woodland and classed as PAWS, it was brought under our management in February. Despite two months of daylight culling that removed almost thirty does, fallow sign persisted across every ride and coupe.
With public footpaths dissecting the wood and two fast roads bordering the boundary, safe daytime shot angles were increasingly limited. A night-shoot licence, plainly justified in habitat terms, ought to have been rubber-stamped quickly, our application was lost!
Why Collaboration Must Replace Isolation
This single site is flanked by three estates, each with its own shoot and forestry schedule. If any one of those holdings opts to reduce culling or pause because of public access concerns, the vacuum is felt across every boundary. The notion that an estate can stabilise its own population in a vacuum, while neighbours do less or nothing, belongs to another era. Today’s deer spend as much time on the margins crossing lanes, dipping into cover crops, bedding down in neglected corners as they do in the heart of any woodland.
That reality demands regular conversation, not just polite awareness, but shared mapping of crossing points, joint planning of fencing lines, and frank discussion of cull figures. For our part, Wildscape encourages clusters of three or four adjacent owners to treat their ground as a single management unit. A coordinated cull season, common deer-impact monitoring and one shared processing facility can achieve in two years what piecemeal action cannot deliver in ten.
Guidance for Woodland and Estate Owners
When damage first appears, the instinct is often to reach for deterrents: lights, scents, noise cannons. Yet in a county criss-crossed by public rights-of-way and narrow B-roads, scaring deer merely shifts the risk often pushing herds into headlights or neighbouring crops.
For farms and vineyards, field-edge observations remain invaluable. Drone footage taken at first light routinely shows fallow trails that daytime scouting misses. Combine-yield maps, where available, give hard numbers to what would otherwise be anecdote. Such evidence proves vital when backing Countryside Stewardship claims. Immediate culling on known crossing points, coordinated with neighbouring land, is the only reliable way to reduce pressure.
Reframing Regulation
Natural England, police wildlife teams and local councils carry a genuine duty to safeguard safety and animal welfare. Yet when licence decisions lag weeks behind rising damage, the outcome is the very harm the rules aim to prevent: deer dying on roads, crops lost, and costly restocks failing. Faster, more transparent pathways for night and out-of-season approvals are now essential.
A Shared Responsibility
West Sussex cannot fence itself out of a deer problem, nor can it cull its way forward without careful planning. Balanced populations arise where professionals, regulators, landowners and farmers pull in the same direction, setting realistic density targets, monitoring honestly and intervening decisively when those targets are missed, the weight of that responsibility rests squarely on our collective shoulders.
Wildscape Deer Management is committed to helping landowners meet that responsibility. Our services span impact assessment, PA7-compliant species plans, grant navigation, licence preparation and hands-on culling. If your woodland, your crops or your gardens are showing early signs of pressure, now is the moment to act—before this year’s fawns double next year’s challenge.
Reach out; let’s turn shared pressure into shared action, and return West Sussex woodlands and farmland to balance once more.
