I’m on holiday this week (Nov 11th) in Ballater a fine destination. More on that next post. So I’m taking advantage of a quiet spell before a swim in the pool here.

I’ll post a gallery of the months photos and see how that goes. But here is the story.

It is all about the deer in this month. Our count in March showed us 180 deer, with Victor Clements help we have put together the Deer Management Plan and expect to cull 40 + animals. So far we have culled 15 stags and butchered them all on the Island.

To increase the revenue to the Island we usually have stalking guests and this year we had only one full week and one cottage guest stalking in September. I will post the remaining photos in a gallery but will be posting the Season report on the Rona Red Deer page. So a fuller write up on what went on will be there soon.

In the meantime it was a busy month with lots of venison orders and full up with guests in the cottages. We also had lots of projects on and to cap it all I had a dirty cold for three weeks, not good timing.

It was a pretty wet month continuing but the sun did come out in the third week, at last. The final batch of sheep went off to Charlie from Harbro and we were sad to see them go for sure.

I do not normally post pictures of dead deer on the main page but it is what we do and we hope we do it properly. Our guests are keen hunters and outdoors men, but have jobs far away from my field. That is why they come, in this case from Germany to enjoy a week helping us with the cull.

The deformed head you will see in the gallery was caused by the damage to the hoof/fetlock area. The poor stag must have been in some discomfort and it is unusual for us on Rona to find such an animal but find them we do.

Otherwise October passed in a blur and we now look forward to culling and butchering our venison for the Christmas market. We can send a 5 kg box of venison frozen overnight to anywhere in the UK. We have trialed it for a few weeks and even with strikes we have found no problem. Call 07831293962 or click onto the Rona Venison FB page for details.

We also do a line in frozen Mince for Pets, we have a good customer base for our trimmings which we mince up for pet food, it is very popular, not to mention the bones. But we always have spare.

So once this holiday is over it will be back to the hill. Can’t wait!!!