Should we be putting Bambi on the menu?

Yes, say the experts. As wild deer numbers hit a 1,000-year high, we are urged to tuck in to save woodland, wildlife and crops. And one of the UK's largest nursery chains has started already. The Express joins a stalk...

- Oliver Bennett 

IT'S A damp day in the woods of north Hertfordshire and I'm on a "stalk" with Nick Rout of the British Deer Society. "Hear that noise?" he asks, pausing in mid-stride. "That's the deer grunting." We slow our pace and awaken our senses. Hertfordshire's chalky acres turn out to be alive with fallow deer.

Within a few quiet minutes of observation, they appear everywhere, gambolling across fields, gliding gracefully into woodlands, disappearing into ditches and hedgerows. It's a magical sight, but there's no time to relax.

A text summons Rout and we head over damp fields in his 4x4 to find fellow deerstalker Mark Thackstone in a sylvan glade. Mark has just felled a 10 stone fallow deer, which lies dead below towering pines, guarded over by his excited dog Willow.

This sight might upset some. But Rout, 55, head of training for the BDS, is unsentimental. "It's a necessity," he says. "We have to cull deer. Having too many is stressful on the deer themselves. It reduces their environment, their food and they end up dying of malnutrition."

He then "grallochs" or disembowels the deer, right there in the woods. It's a tough watch. But perhaps a necessary one.

After all, the UK deer population stands, according to most estimates, at more than two million. While it's impossible to know for sure, numbers of the six species in the UK red, roe, fallow, sika, muntjac and Chinese water deer - are thought to be at their highest levels for a millennium.

The pandemic left them alone to breed, and now deer are doing better in the UK than almost anywhere else in the world.

To the BDS there's one easy solution - and it perhaps might come with a trigger warning: eat them. But we're starting to do just that - and not just in gastronomic homes and high-end restaurants. From food banks to schools, hospitals, the Armed Forces and even prisons, venison is tipped to become the go-to protein: wild, healthy, tasty.