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Presentation short abstract

I examine the uptake of drone surveying and thermal imaging technologies in deer management. I contend that these are making deer legible and killable in new ways, reconfiguring their governance via affective intervention.

Presentation long abstract

As wild deer populations in the UK grow and spread—with associated economic, ecological and biosecurity impacts—management efforts are intensifying and adapting. Deer, in response to increased culling pressure, are becoming more nocturnal and selective in their movements. This novel behavioural shift exploits spatiotemporal niches (times and places where shooting is and is not undertaken), frustrating culling efforts. Drawing on ethnographic research in the South Downs, I examine the uptake of drone surveying and thermal imaging technologies in deer management. I contend that these are making deer legible and killable in new ways, reconfiguring their governance. Rather than estimating population counts from ground-based surveys, drone surveys produce a seemingly totalising vision of deer populations in a landscape, complete with age, sex, and species characteristics. Drone surveying, however, is more-so prized for the sociality it affords. Drones, in making legible the distribution of deer across ownership boundaries, foment a local politics of countryside responsibility, shame, and care. As part of this, the cartographic representations generated by drones (of a situated deer population) are mobilised by conservationists to enrol recalcitrant landowners in a spatiotemporally integrated governmentality. In so doing, they are attempting to cement a particular ontology of deer: as an object-target of management, rather than recreation or spectacle. Drone survey, then, is a more than biopolitical technology, it is an affective and moral technology thoroughly involved in the reworking of local human–deer relations.