Stag Party

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Picture the scene, Braemar on a Saturday night in October. A group of immature males are lurking in the shadows. Things are getting a bit boisterous, there’s plenty of noise and it sounds like they’re roaring. This is definitely a stag party, but it doesn’t involve beer, novelty antlers or stripograms!

It’s the annual rut for red deer. The roaring is about who gets the best girlfriends, without having to physically fight it out. The dominant stag gets to mate with the females in the group.

From years of studying red deer, we’ve a pretty good idea of how they behave. We’ve used this knowledge to produce computer models that predict what effect deer might have on the places they live.

We’re writing new software to predict where deer are likely to be found in the hills. It’s a bit like being able to predict that most teenagers will hang out in the Bon Accord Centre rather than Duthie Park – we know where there’s plenty to eat and shelter from winter weather.

As you can imagine this software is hardly going to knock Grand Theft Auto off the top game rankings, but it will be useful to those people who are trying to look after the hills in Scotland.

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