Author Archives: Liam Nolan

IRISH TROPHY COMMISSION & DEER ALLIANCE AT BORRIS COUNTRY FAIR, AUGUST 3 & 4, 2013

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Liam Nolan (left), Chairman, Irish Trophy Commissions, presents Declan Mortimor with his Gold Medal and Certificate at Borris Country Fair, following official measurement by Jonathan Murphy (right), ITC Accredited Head Measurer.

The Irish Trophy Commission shared a stand with the Deer Alliance at the National Country Fair held at Borris House, Co. Carlow on 3 & 4 August 2013. Visitors to the stand saw an impressive display of trophy heads, including medal-quality Irish deer species, as well as wild boar from Croatia, chamois from Austria and roe deer from Scotland. Several specimen heads were measured by Joe Murphy and Jonathan Murphy, accredited ITC measurers, including Declan Mortimor’s Gold Medal wild goat from Co. Clare, Michael Cleere’s Gold Medal red deer from Co. Kilkenny and the first recorded Gold Medal sika head from Co. Wexford.




"TRAINED HUNTER" PUBLIC CONSULTATION DOCUMENT

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The logo of the Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine
26 July 2013: The Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine have published a Consultation Document dealing with a requirement for training of hunters (set out below). The Deer Alliance will make a statement on this matter shortly, meanwhile stakeholders are invited to advise the Deer Alliance of their comments by email to deeralliance@gmail.com, and also to respond to the Department’s call for submissions by the consultation end date of 19th August 2013.



(For full information on requirements under Regulation (EC) 853/2004, see posting on this Blog, September 4, 2011, “FOOD CHAIN INFORMATION – REQUIREMENTS UNDER THE REGULATION”). 

PUBLIC CONSULTATION

REQUIREMENT THAT ALL WILD GAME PRESENTED TO APPROVED GAME HANDLING ESTABLISHMENTS MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A TRAINED HUNTER DECLARATION

Background

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is proposing to make it compulsory that hunters who supply wild game to the market must undergo formal training in food hygiene, as required under EU Regulations. Before introducing this requirement the Department wants to consult with interested parties. This document explains what is involved.

Trained Persons

The authorities in Ireland have encouraged hunter organisations to provide hunters with training in food hygiene. In December 2011 the authorities approved one such course for the training of hunters provided by the NARGC.  Other organisations are invited to provide similar training. It is normal practice across Europe for hunters to have this ‘trained persons’ qualification.

Hunting for Own Consumption

The hunting of wild game for own use is outside the scope of the hygiene package regulations. The ‘trained persons’ requirement is for those who hunt wild game with the intention of placing it on the market for human consumption and it does not apply to hunters who only hunt for domestic use.

Presentation to an Approved Game Handling Establishment
The Department proposes that all wild game presented to Approved Game Handling Establishments should be accompanied by a trained person declaration. Many wild deer shot in Ireland are sold to the UK ‘in the skin’. The UK authorities are now insisting that all these deer must be presented with a trained person declaration to the approved game handling establishment.

Where a hunter is part of a hunting party, it is sufficient that only one person of the hunting team has the requisite training. The trained hunter can undertake the necessary examination and sign the declaration for the other hunters in the hunting party.

Date of Introduction

The Department proposes introducing the ‘trained person’ requirement from 1stNovember 2013.

 If you wish to comment on these proposals you are invited to make a written submission to Public Consultation, Meat Hygiene Section, Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Grattan Business Centre, Portlaoise or by email to Danielle.coll@agriculture.gov.ie by Monday 19th August 2013.




HCAP CERTIFICATION & COILLTE TEORANTA

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Following enquiries received, it is important that HCAP Candidates in the process of undertaking assessment and certification (but not yet certified) be aware that it is Coillte’s policy that only holders of the HCAP qualification can hold a licence to hunt deer on Coillte lands. Tenders may be accepted and evaluated for persons who have partially completed the HCAP on the clear understanding that if successful that they will be required to pay the licence fee in full by the given date of payment, however no Permits will be issued for this licence (and therefore it may not be legally exercised) until such time as the HCAP has been completed.


IRISH TROPHY COMMISSION HEAD MEASURERS RECEIVE CERTIFICATES, 15 JUNE 2013

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Jonathan Murphy and Pat Scully recently completed their training as Irish Trophy Commission Accredited Head Measurers and are photographed here receiving their certificates at the Annual General Meeting of the Wild Deer Association of Ireland, held on 15 June 2013.

Above: Liam McGarry and Joe Murphy, Irish Trophy Commission, flank Jonathan (second from left) and Pat (third from left).


RESULTS OF HCAP MCQ, GRAIGUENAMANAGH, CO. KILKENNY, SATURDAY 15 JUNE 2013

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Sika Hind & Calf, Dublin Mountains

The following candidates (numbers, followed by mark achieved) were successful in the HCAP MCQ held in Graiguenamanagh, Co. Kilkenny on Saturday 15 June 2013 and are eligible to participate in the HCAP Range Test to be held at the Midlands Range on Saturday 31 August 2013.

2013/0076, 80%

2013/0068, 88%

2013/0075, 86%

2013/0067, 94%

2013/0071, 90%

2013/0072, 90%

2013/0083, 88%

2013/0082, 98%

2013/0073, 86%

2013/0070, 88%

2013/0069, 86%

2013/0085, 86%

The following candidates (numbers, followed by mark achieved) was unsuccessful and are required to re-sit and pass the MCQ stage before proceeding to any Range Test. The application fee for repeat candidates is €50.00. MCQ dates and venues are posted periodically on this blog site. “Fail” grades may be appealed to the HCAP Assessment Committee, subject to written application accompanied by re-checking fee, €50.00. Where written application for re-checking is received, it is reviewed by the Committee at the next scheduled Committee meeting following receipt of application. Applications for re-checking must be received within 10 (ten) days of publication of results on this blog.

2013/0081, 72%

2013/0084, 68%



IRISH TROPHY COMMISSION TRAINING DAY, 25 MAY 2013

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Photograph: Pat Scully and Jonathan Murphy undergo training in measuring a Red deer trophy head (Click to enlarge).

The Irish Trophy Commission (ITC) held a Training Day on Saturday 25 May 2013 for persons seeking to become ITC Accredited Head Measurers. The Training Day took place at the Irish Fly-Fishing & Game Shooting Museum at Attanagh, Co. Laois, by kind permission of the Museum’s Founder, Walter Phelan.
Training was provided by Joe Murphy, ITC Secretary, who is also a CIC-Accredited Measurer, with Liam Nolan, ITC Chairman, in attendance. Two candidates nominated by the Wild Deer Association of Ireland, Pat Scully and Jonathan Murphy, successfully completed the Training Day and were awarded their Certificates as ITC-Accredited Measurers.

Pat and Jonathan will now undergo a probationary period during which they will measure heads under the supervision of experienced measurers Liam McGarry and Joe Murphy, and will be available to measure heads at the forthcoming WDAI AGM on 15 June 2013.

ITC Measurers will also be available to measure heads at the Borris National Country Fair in August, and at the Birr Game Fair 2013.

Like BASC in the UK, the ITC system has been benchmarked to the CIC criteria, but incorporating various changes and rationalisations that will make the measurement of deer antlers in Ireland more accessible, more inclusive and more logical. ITC is confident that their system will still produce total scores that will be within 1-3 per cent of CIC measurements. This is the same differentiation that is normally found between all trained and experienced measurers, whatever their backgrounds – hence the requirement for panels of measurers in some European countries. ITC aim to ensure that ITC measurements remain comparable to those offered by other systems, but also bring in many previously unrecorded trophies and provide a significant contribution to Irish deer data and statistics.

For information on ITC Trophy Measuring, contact Joe Murphy, 087 283 4662.



"THE HIGH COST OF TOO MANY DEER"

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Fallow Deer in the Phoenix Park, Dublin. Photograph by David Sleator.
The following article appeared in the Irish Times on Saturday 18 May 2013 and is reproduced here with full acknowledgments to the Irish Times as publishers and to the author, Paddy Woodworth.
____________________________________________________


T
he price of ecological knowledge in our time, wrote the American environmentalist Aldo Leopold, is the constant awareness that we are living in “a world of wounds”. His haunting phrase captures the dilemma that springs to mind when a magnificent stag bounds away through an ancient Irish oak wood, or a newly created or restored native forest, early on a beautiful spring morning.

One the one hand you feel  invigorated by this primal scene. Isn’t this precisely the kind of thing you get up early to see? Well, yes it is, but these days you might see it far too often and far too easily. No comprehensive national survey has been done, which is a shame in itself, but it is evident that in many areas the deer population is unsustainable, and rising all the time. Our woods, already fragmented and depleted, are coming under chronic pressure from overbrowsing by deer. Regeneration has halted in many native forests because deer are snaffling every seedling before it gets a chance to become a tree. Healthy woodland will hold trees of every age, from venerable multicentenarians through vigorous mature specimens to fragile saplings. But that mix has become a rare sight in this country. The only seedlings to survive to adolescence now are usually those that spend their formative years inside protective plastic tubes. This is nature on a life-support system.

So the stag bounding away in the sunlight is still a joy, but it is also a reminder of the wounded world of our forests today, and of the painful choice that this situation presents. We can allow the deer population to continue growing, and thus make futile all our recent efforts to restore our forests. Or, to put it bluntly, we can kill enough deer to give the seedlings a better chance of reaching adulthood. It wounds either way, that’s for sure.


The first option is a worse choice for the deer than you might imagine. At a certain point, if uncontrolled, they will simply eat themselves towards extinction. This actually happened, in a case that became a staple of ecological textbooks. Leopold was a land manager at the Kaibab National Forest, in Arizona, in the 1930s. The hunting lobby wanted more deer, so Leopold and his colleagues exterminated the mountain lions in the region that had kept deer relatively scarce. The hunters had a couple of years of field days, bagging more trophies than they could bring home. Then they began to notice that the deer they were shooting were losing their glossy sheen. Their bones were becoming more prominent than their muscles. The condition of the vegetation, already heavily degraded by overgrazing, should have warned the hunters that their bonanza would be short lived. The deer population then crashed and, along with the vegetation, took many years to recover.

In Ireland we took the wolf, the principal predator of deer, out of our ecological equations more than two centuries ago. Since then we have introduced new species of deer to our native red and naturalised fallow deer: Japanese sika and, more recently, muntjac and Chinese water deer. And there is also a problem with wild pigs or boars in Irish forests, as described in a recent article on these pages.

Natural predators


We have removed the natural predators that once kept the population of browsers and grazers in some kind of balance with the landscape, and it seems clear that we now have no option but to control those populations ourselves. People who agonise about the pain of a deer dying slowly of gunshot wounds might spare a moment to compare that death with the agony of prolonged starvation. I’ve seen such agony in a deer on the lawn of a neighbour’s house in Glenmalure, in Co Wicklow. It was barely able to get up and stagger away when I approached.

These issues did not arise suddenly, and they have been discussed repeatedly over the past five years by various interest groups: State agencies, foresters, farmers, hunters, conservationists, venison producers and general recreational users of the countryside.

It has not been easy to bring these disparate groups together, and their interests do not always coincide. Even within the hunting lobby there are differences. Some short-sighted operators, who bring in tourist hunters demanding easy and multiple trophies in a hurry, think that the current overabundance of deer is no bad thing and fear a serious national cull by professional hunters. But most sportspeople have always understood that relative scarcity of prey makes the hunt more exciting and sharpens skills. They also understand that overabundance can’t last forever and that it creates its own opposite.

In any case, there has been an increasing degree of consensus between all serious interest groups, especially following a seminal report on deer impacts by Woodlands of Ireland, in 2009, and a landmark conference organised by the Irish Deer Society in 2011. A national deer-strategy policy has since been painstakingly developed by the Forest Service at the Department of Agriculture, supported by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and Coillte, with repeated rounds of consultation. A penultimate draft, pending final submissions, was produced last September. Its key elements are the creation of a stakeholder council, where all interests would be permanently represented, and of a national deer-management unit. The brief of this unit would include the gathering of definitive information, followed by a scientifically based, targeted cull as part of a broader overall strategy.

The draft had the blessing of the then minister of state, Shane McEntee, and funding channels were opened over the autumn. Final submissions were made; they can be seen online at agriculture.gov.ie. But since the minister’s untimely death, in December, the process seems to have stalled.


It would be a fitting memorial to this energetic politician, and it would be very good for our forests – and, ultimately, for our deer, if it could be restarted and implemented without further delay.


(Paddy Woodworth, Irish Times, 18 May 2013)


DEER ALLIANCE HCAP RANGE TEST SATURDAY 18 MAY 2013 – SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATES

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The following Candidates are certified as HCAP-qualified, having passed the HCAP Range Test held on 18 May 2013.

Date of Certification: 18 May 2013

Broughan, Thomas, 2012/0002
Bryan, David, 2013/0049
Burke, Niall, 2013/0048
Byrne, Denis, 2013/0022
Byrne, Vincent, 2013/0019
Charles, Ron, 2013/0015
Dettore, Ercolo, 2013/0027
Devaney, Joe, 2013/0023
Duffy, Vincent, 2012/0062
Durkan, Kevin, 2013/0008
Fallon, William, 2013/0044
Fogarty, Tom, 2013/0040
Freeman, Paul, 2013/0026
Insley, Terry, 2013/0047
Gantley, John, 2013/0054
Gargan, Philip, 2013/0004
Gogioman, Alin, 2013/0035
Hand (Snr.), Paul, 2013/0025
Haveron, Brian, 2013/0006
Heffernan, Luke, 2012/0078
Hogan, Dave, 2013/0059
Iancu, Bogdan Marius, 2013/0003
Kiernan, Paul, 2013/0053
Kelly, John, 2013/0005
Little, Jonathan, 2012/0094
Maher, John, 2013/0037
McAnulty, Sean, 2013/0002
McArdle, Robbie, 2013/0018
McCormack, Ruaidhri, 2013/0030
McEnroy, Brian, 2013/0021
McGlone, Donald, 2013/0020
McKay, Ambrose, 2013/0063
McMahon, Michael, 2013/0058
Mezvinskas, Vytas, 2013/0033
Murphy, Edward, 2013/0007
Murphy, Patrick, 2009/0014
O’Brien, Barry, 2013/0061
O’Connell, Barry, 2013/0013
O’Connell, Paul, 2013/0012
O’Flaherty, Brian, 2013/0050
O’Mahony, Kieran, 2013/0042
O’Malley, John Daire, 2013/0062
O‘Neill, Sean, 2013/0034
O’Regan, Oliver, 2013/0039
O’Toole, Colman, 2010/0149
Pender, Marc, 2013/0045
Peppard, Patrick, 2013/0011
Potts, Stephen, 2013/0041
Schuls, Siert, 2013/0052
Siliauskas, Erikas, 2013/0032
Walsh, Tom, 2013/0029
Wilson, Rodney, 2013/0064
Winters, William, 2013/0038   

WILDLIFE CRIME CONFERENCE, 14th & 15th SEPTEMBER 2013

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(Click to enlarge) 

Ireland’s first Wildlife Crime Conference will take place in Ashbourne, Co Meath on the 14th & 15th of September, organised by Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland.

The conference will be a two-day event that will bring together a diverse audience for a weekend of talks and practical sessions; with the intention of promoting greater understanding, cooperation and communication between the law enforcement bodies, charities, NGOs and the public in general. Topics will include: poisoning, poaching, illegal traps & snares and other crimes against wildlife. 

Conference registration and payment details can be found at: www.wri.ie/conferencewww.wri.ie/conference

JOHN CREEDON MEMORIAL AWARD FOR WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY 2013

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Red Stag at Screebe, photograph by the late Paul Wood


In memory of former Association Chairman John Creedon, the Wild Deer Association of Ireland will host the annual John Creedon Memorial Award for Wildlife Photography, kindly sponsored by Countryside Alliance Ireland, as part of their Annual General Meeting on Saturday June 15th 2013 in the Kilcoran Lodge Hotel, Co Tipperary.


The ethos of the competition is to recognise amateur photographers. This year’s theme is “Ireland’s Wildlife”. Participants must submit photographs no later than 5 p.m. on June 7th 2013 for judging, either by emailing to wilddeerireland@gmail.com, or by post to Wild Deer Association of Ireland, PO Box 31, Midleton, Co Cork. 

Photos will be on display on the night of the AGM. Prizes will be awarded following the AGM banquet meal. There is no limit on number of entries an individual may submit. Photos should not be framed. The competition is open to WDAI members only. The judge’s decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.


By submitting photographs, entrants accept that the Wild Deer Association of Ireland has the right to publish any or all entries.


Renowned wildlife photographer Fran Byrne has kindly agreed to judge the entries.