The forest floor is covered in leaves, fallen branches, lifeless brown fern fronds and all manner of detritus ready to snap and crunch under foot, but Colin Wood moves over it so quietly he could almost be walking on carpet.
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He clambers over fallen mountain ash, dodges broken branches hanging from blackwoods, ducks under swinging vines covered in lichen and barely makes a sound.
With a rifle in hand, two hunting knives on a belt and a two-way radio in his pocket, Mr Wood is making his way through Sherbrooke Forest shortly after sunrise. He is hunting deer in a national park on the edge of Melbourne - and he has a special tick from authorities to do so.
He hasn't been walking for long when he pauses and whispers two words, ''sambar bed'', as he points at the soft tree fern fronds arranged neatly on the ground.
Shortly afterwards we see more evidence of recent deer activity. Hoof marks are clearly visible on the floor of Sherbrooke Forest, a special part of the Dandenong Ranges National Park renowned for its lyrebirds and towering mountain ash, but which in recent years has been home to a growing number of wild deer leaving an unwanted mark on the park. The hoofprints are broad and sunken quite deep into the soft red soil.
''We are following a stag's marks,'' Mr Wood whispers. ''Big animal.''
They are undisturbed and were made ''in the last day or two, or maybe even this morning,'' he says.
Mr Wood, who is also the hunting and conservation manager at the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, is assisting Parks Victoria with a new deer shooting program. For safety reasons he is the only shooter in this block today, which is closed to the public, while five other shooters are operating in other blocks of the 812 hectare forest until the 10am shooting cut-off.
He guides us (reporter and photographer) in silence down a steep slope towards a creek. Here there has been intense deer activity. Hoof prints have churned up the soil and there are more on both sides of the creek.
''You can see where they have slid up and down the creek bank,'' Mr Wood says.
When they trample through the creek they damage its banks and stir up the waterway. In parts of Sherbrooke there are heavily trafficked paths - dominated by deer prints - just two or three metres apart. One shooter refers to them as ''deer highways''. We also walk through an area where deer have stripped the smaller trees of vegetation up to a height of about three metres.
The morning noises in Sherbrooke are probably typical of any other morning. A lyrebird mimics a currawong, magpie and kookaburra in quick succession, and cockatoos chatter noisily overhead.
Shortly after, a wallaby hops past. A different noise reverberates throughout the forest for the only time that morning. Rhys Coote, a 30-year-old hunter from Kilmore, has just shot a sambar hind (adult female).
Parks Victoria district manager Craig Bray is pleased with Mr Coote's success, which means there is one less female to breed in the park. Eight deer have been killed at Sherbrooke (from eight shots fired) since the program started recently, with a further 18 killed at Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve.
Parks Victoria has a permit for up to 220 deer to be killed at three parks east of Melbourne (including up to 70 at Sherbrooke) until mid-January, but Mr Bray indicates that it's likely for another permit to be sought.
''We're in a program now that's not a short-term fix, we're talking about a long-term program now,'' he says.