“Then I realised it was a group of deer cruising past.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Tim said.<\/p>\n
“They were swimming fairly quick, swimming faster than I could.”<\/p>\n
Tim was filming content for his local fishing gear business Montague Jigs at the time. As anyone would do in such a situation, he whipped out his phone to film the unlikely scene.<\/p>\n
“Have a look at this… under the powerlines boys, you never know what you might catch,” he can be heard saying in disbelief.<\/p>\n
“Are you kidding me?”<\/p>\n
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The group watched the feral deer make their way across the river on the NSW south coast on Friday morning. Source: Supplied\/Tim Wilson<\/p>\n
In another video filmed from the boat, the deer can be seen making their way to the shore and casually heading into nearby bushland.<\/p>\n
“They were heading north across the channel, I don’t know what they were doing,” Tim told Yahoo. “I think they were just commuting south to north,” he laughed.<\/p>\n
Feral deer populations causing havoc across Australia<\/p>\n
Feral deer populations have been causing problems in Queensland, NSW, the ACT, Victoria and South Australia and WA in recent years with their populations thought to be exploding in parts of the country.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, they are encroaching on our cities with deer recently filmed on train tracks in Eastwood<\/a> in Sydney’s northwest, as well as in the southern suburbs of the major city<\/a>.<\/p>\n The invasive species is reportedly responsible for millions of dollars of damage in road accidents each year and are even partly blamed for rising insurance premiums. A Canberra driver was lucky to escape unscathed last month when a deer ran out in front of their car during morning traffic \u2013 with the heart-stopping moment captured on dash-cam video<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile one Victorian produce growing business told Yahoo News in June they had lost more than $100,000 worth of crops to feral deer<\/a> in less than a year.<\/p>\n In South Australia it’s a similar story, with residents in the Adelaide Hills saying deer populations are overrunning their gardens after a purported surge in numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n In Western Australia, authorities this week completed the state’s first targeted aerial cull of feral deer, with more than 500 animals killed from helicopters over the past three weeks in Esperance and Harvey.<\/p>\n First brought to Australia by European settlers in the 1800s, deer were mainly imported for recreational hunting. Red deer were introduced followed by several other species in the following years, including fallow, sambar, chital and muntjac.<\/p>\n
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