A difficult question I'm sure, but which European country has the 'most' big game?

HUNGARY by far

I guess I should also differentiate between game density and overall numbers.

I wouldn't begin to hazard a guess as to which country has the largest numbers in absolute terms.

However, the density of deer in certain areas of the UK and Ireland is very high.

How many deer are culled in the UK every year? Certainly 100's of thousands. There are individual stalkers in the UK shooting hundreds of deer per year.

In county Wicklow alone in Ireland, in an area little more than 600 square miles, the annual cull is getting on for 10,000 deer.

If you look at the average driven hunt in central Europe that a lot of us have attended. You might have a party of 70 or 80 shooters and beaters out. The bag might be 20-30 head of game on a good day in the early season. I have seen bags as low as 8 or 10 animals.

At the "First Annual AR" UK hunt (all bow to Kiri) I think 16 of us knocked over 55 deer off one estate 30 miles from central London, and this was at the end of the season when the ground had been hunted for the previous eight months.

Number year 2008 in Swiss:

Red stag 28'736
Roe deer 120'090
Chamois 95'986
Alpine ibex 16'355
Sika deer 200
Wild boar no date



Font office of wild nature

@10,3x60r
I guess you mean the total number of animals and not the hunted animals over 2008 season.
@boghossian
Can you be a little more explicit? What you mean by "most" big game? density, biggest trophy, most wanted?

quote:

Originally posted by Dina George:
@10,3x60r
I guess you mean the total number of animals and not the hunted animals over 2008 season.
@boghossian
Can you be a little more explicit? What you mean by "most" big game? density, biggest trophy, most wanted?

This is the total number of animals in Swiss!
The best density is in kanton Graübunden, Wallais and San Gallen. Most wanted animal is alpine Chamois. Look here more information.

i am guessing
the UK
simply because of the game issuse
Pheasants Partridge Grouse Wildfowl if you call them game
walked up rabbit and hare
then lets not forget the deer
from Muntjac and CWD to Pierre Davids and Manchurian sika
even Goats and Wild boar
Big game seems to hav changed from species to oppertunities over the last few years
i feel the UK still has the edge on this
as the list of hunting that many different species has taken on a new role, just a shame not all of it is wild

perhaps it is time to define BIG game....It seems a bit misunderstood...

quote:

Originally posted by Goldeneye:
perhaps it is time to define BIG game....It seems a bit misunderstood...

I would suggest we confine ourselves to game hunted and shot with a rifle.

If we get into shotguns and pheasants, we are talking over a million head per year in England alone.

Wow - I do definitions and drafting for a living so I should apply myself with some better posts I guess.

Big game - cloven hoofed animals from roe deer upwards to include mountain game and wild boar;

Most - highest number of live Big game animals in existence. Density is too hard to gauge and compare (I think). I was in a small field choke full of deer last weekend, it would make it one of the highest densities in England for a few minutes!

European Country - any country in the European continent but not including Turkey as they are not part of Europe obviously.

Question: What European Country has the Most Big game animals?

Answers on a postcard.

quote:

I would suggest we confine ourselves to game hunted and shot with a rifle.

If we get into shotguns and pheasants, we are talking over a million head per year in England alone.

Brian - over 35 million game birds are raised a year in the UK, so I hope they manage to shoot more than 1m!

Gabe, I was going to say over 10 million, but couldn't rememer the numbers and it was too late to look it up.

At a 40% return, that is 14 million game birds shot.

Game density, quality of trophy, and quality of hunt rarely go hand in hand. Sometimes you will have places that have all three but rarely.

I am really suprised to hear that so few animals live in Switzerland. But then again Switzerland has more vertical area than most of it's neighbors.

Take a look at this Roe deer study. If you look at the top Roe nations in Europe for trophy quality and number of animals they are not always the same.

Germany by far shoots the most deer, but Hungary, the UK, and Sweden shoot larger deer, of course his is a generalisation and not 100% accurate.

D99 your comments were spot on. I was thinking of a way to say it but you did it for me.

It's like here in Alaska we really have very little big game for the huge amount of land yet people come from all around the world to hunt here because we have bigger bears, bigger moose, bigger most everything.

We take about 50,000 head of big game a year but considering that we are maybe 5 times the size of Switzerland I would say they are doing well at around 300,000 yearly.

I think it would be hard to beat Germany for the numbers of big game based on the numbers of rhebock alone. Please correct me if I'm wrong but I think the annule harvest is close to one million?
France has a huge population of boar I think annully takeing around 400,000.

Actully I'm very impressed with the 95,986 chamois reported by 10.3x60r, The mountains of Switzerland are of course less fertle than the lowlands of the rest of Europe so they are obviously doing things right there.

One more extreamly impressive resource are the moose of Scandanavia. I think you can put the combind nations of Scandanavia into Alaska two or three times. There they harvest nearly 300,000 moose each year,( I'm including Finnland in that number) We harvest 7,000 on a good year.

I want to thank the hunters of Europe for developing the science of game management.
The science has finally spread to America in the last couple of decades and throughout the country the whitetail deer and turkey populations have doubld and tripeled and even more in some areas.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Boghossian:


Big game - cloven hoofed animals from roe deer upwards to include mountain game and wild boar;



QUOTE]
i feel that is a little unfair
as i hav shot many muntjac weighing more than a roe deer and also CWD that are more than adequate in size to resemble roe
devils advocate and that
plus where else in the world are these species readly available
As for which european country has the most large game species
is anybodies guess
i suppose it is a case of counting up the species available to hunt in that country and rewarding points equivalent

That's Ok Richard, if everybody agreed on definitions Boggy would be out of a job.

Marvel now at his Defence and Counter-Claim...

The DJV keeps the yearly takes in Germany, I have no idea on the live count, but these are the takes for the 2008/2009 hunting year, which runs from 1 April-31 March, Waidmannsheil, Dom.

Red: 67,246
Dam (Fallow): 55,407
Sika: 1,637
Boar: 646,790
Roe: 1,102,604
Gams (Chamois): 4,389
Mufffel: 6,888

From:Jagd-Online

I am an Alaska resident, though the military has taken me all over the world since 1993.

I agree, we have relativly little big game in Alaska. Everywhere else has more of everything, and we have a lot of our big game locked into national parks, for the most part unhuntable by 90% of Alaskans and no non-residents.

Along with Kamchatka we have the biggest brown bears and moose on the planet. Along with Vancouver island in BC we have the biggest black bears as well, and quite a lot of them.

We have big caribou, a huge percentage of the Sitka blacktails, super mountain goats, the best Dall sheep, and excellent muskox and bison when you can draw a tag.

But what we get in quality we absolutly lose out on in total numbers and availability.

I think even little Maine kills more moose than Alaska.

I would love it if we had Scandanavian game numbers.

quote:

Originally posted by Dom:
The DJV keeps the yearly takes in Germany, I have no idea on the live count, but these are the takes for the 2008/2009 hunting year, which runs from 1 April-31 March, Waidmannsheil, Dom.

Red: 67,246
Dam (Fallow): 55,407
Sika: 1,637
Boar: 646,790
Roe: 1,102,604
Gams (Chamois): 4,389
Mufffel: 6,888

From:Jagd-Online

Dom, those are huge number of Boar and Roe.

Do we have any reliable numbers for the total take of deer in the UK per year??

I have heard the figure of 350,000 being stated as the annual offtake of UK deer but have absolutely no idea how this is reached given that most stalkers shoot on private land and don't publish any figures or answer to any organisation.

The number of deer taken by poachers (which is alive and well in many parts of the UK) is also not taken into account.

Just spent a useful 20 minutes looking into this.

Seems a bit of a concensus on various web sites that the UK population is running around 1.5 million deer with Roe being upwards of a million.

Is a take of 350K enough to keep a 1.5m population stable?

Brian, I found the numbers of came taken in 2008/09 in Norway and Finland, but the Swedish site was not accessable
Didn´t find any from Denmark eighter but PeterDK might have the numbers?

I Norway the big game harvest for 2008/9 was:
Moose 36.600
Red deer: 35.700
Roe: 30.000
Rein deer: 5.200

Finland:
Moose: 57.097
White tail: 25.624
Fallow: 162
Roe: 4.124.

No numbers available for estimated totals, but I guess... that we can easely time by 4

But I would guess that UK must be right up there on the top.

Here are you can find statistics from 2003-2008 from Finland.

http://www.rktl.fi/english/statistics/hunting/

Actually even I was a bit surprised the total amount of different game we have hunted here!

quote:

Is a take of 350K enough to keep a 1.5m population stable?

No, that is why most UK species are increasing in numbers.
As you know, culling or setting cull numbers is complicated by the Deer's annoying habit of moving onto a piece of land you don't have permission to shoot over the day after they come into open season.

Have a look here:
http://www.jncc.gov.uk/pdf/pub...usPlates02_final.pdf

Dave, I am certainly no expert, but I assumed that a cull of that level is insuffucient. We have just had a very hard winter which will have taken out a lot of deer, particularly Reds in Scotland. However, in lowland areas with Roe often producing twins and Muntjac producing all year round with a kid every 7 or 8 months, you would have to take 45% plus of these speices every year to even begin to slowly reduce the head count.

Very interesting reading. As a 'recreational/hobby' stalker, its good reading, even if the farmers and forestry commission might not agree!

Now if we had a system where hunters had to pay for damage to crops like on the Continent....

It certainly seems that big game is doing well throughout Europe, in fact the populations seem to have increased in direct proportion to the decrease in wild small game numbers in most places.