Innehållsförteckning för Issue 50 - December/January 2016 från NZ Hunter

I had heard stories from Scotty about the area where no helicopters were allowed and the only access is via foot into incredible back country - where there were good numbers of Sika, good fishing, and a high chance of having the place to yourself. I was nervous about the big walk in, but excited for the prospect of hunting the elusive Sika. We headed off after finishing work on New Year’s Eve, leaving Te Puke around 4pm and arriving at the turn off from the Desert Road around 7pm. The forecast was for some rain and a bit of wind for New Years Eve and then clearing up for the rest of the week. We drove off-road as far as we could, parked up and got all our gear…

WINNER Joshua Thompson-Holloway aged 13, with his first deer shot with a Tikka 7mm-08, North Otago Abraham MacCormick-Hulsbosch aged 14 with his first deer, head shot at 40m using Tikka T3 223 Fabian Kullmann with his first nz big game animal, an 8.5in chamois shot with his Tikka T3 270 Dylan Beaumont with a 31 inch billy shot at 200m with a Tikka 7mm-08 Izaak, Ivan and Joshua Thompson-Holloway with a successsful morning hunt using Tikka rifles David Towgood with one of the first goats he shot using his Tikka T3 Lite 270, dropped it on the spot, 319yds While out hunting with his uncle, Callum Fowden shot this large 14pt Red stag using a Tikka 7mm-08 Nigel Williams with a Mohaka Red shot between the eyes at 210m with…

I was really looking forward to the hunt, as I had never been in this small corner of the Kaimais. It just didn’t seem like an obvious place for a deer, and that’s exactly why I wanted to check it out. I thought it could be one of those nice handy spots where no one else had been for a while. I grabbed the rifle out of the truck and Fly hopped down out of the dog box wagging her tail. We’d only gone 100 meters into the bush before she was working a faint wind and angling across a bench towards the sound of a stream. There was a nice downhill breeze as we worked our way up the creek for 300 or 400 hundred meters. Then Fly put…

I pushed open the wooden planked door of the small orange bivvy with my boot, as flakes of snow floated down magically, covering the silent landscape at Back Ridge Bivvy. The weather man had called it correctly, with snow to low levels in the central North Island. I had seen this through rose tinted glasses as an opportunity for some school holiday hunting adventures with Jonty! Often after a big front you can get days of fine frosty weather and I hoped we would be Johnny on the spot. Earlier that morning we watched the big steel doors slowly ease back on their rollers, as light filtered into the large hanger. A low growl could almost be heard as our eyes adjusted to the shadows where the big sleeping beast…

For those of you who are not aware, the Lastenkraxe is what Americans would probably refer to as a tactically integrated load-conveyance system. Kiwis would probably call it a packframe and as you can see from the accompanying photos, this is more or less exactly what the Lastenkraxe is: a packframe mounted on a shoulder/ waist harness. It is a pack……without the pack. And I, for the better part of 2 years, have been the owner and regular user of one of these packless packs. Now I am not any sort of gear guru, so I’m not well positioned to drag you exhaustively through the technical specs of the Lastenkraxe. What I can do is give my thoughts and impressions concerning the Lastenkraxe as a piece of working gear. I…

We are heading out for a hunt in the Kaweka Forest Park in search of Sika hinds. It’s early November and the first signs of new growth are just starting to appear on the small clearings scattered throughout the beech forest. Magnets for Sika at this time of year as they have spent the last few months living on leaf litter and the odd windfall, now they finally get some fresh growth. Getting a good tally of hinds is important now more than ever. After 18 years of helicopter search and destroying sika as part of the Kaweka Mountain Beech Project, this could be one of the last times Sika hinds need to be shot from a helicopter. The project has raised the benchmark of how DOC can work with…

01 Burris Fullfield E1 Riflescope 4.5-14x42mm Superb optical glass is precision ground New from Burris with a state of the art reticle with cascading windage and elevation dots so you can execute long-range shots out to 500 yards in still or windy conditions. The lenses are multi-coated for glare resistance and maximum efficiency in low-light hunting conditions. The scope features upgraded windage and elevation knobs plus side parallax and focus adjustment. The scope is housed in a one piece tube designed for a lifetime of field use, heavy recoil and featuring the Burris Forever warranty. Distributed by Beretta 02 Memory-Map Topo The latest release from Memory-Map features stunning topographical detail down to 1:25k scale. Plan trips, draw routes and waypoints and view it all in 3D or upload it to…

A fine looking chamois buck feeding his way down a big, open high-country face. My partner Sam and I had been chasing these sharp-eyed little antelope around for a few trips now. Today was no different to any other of the hunts we had put in; we would close in but couldn’t quite get chamois and arrow to connect. So as time was slowly running out, Sam opted to head back to camp while I set off to close the 800m gap - 600m down and only 200m to go had me lizard-shuffling up through the tussock. Then after some awkward and rather uncomfortable manoeuvres, I found a truck-sized rock to line up the buck and myself with to give me cover to move in. While all this went on…

“Mate, it’s Jimmy. George and I were thinking we might come up your way for a poke around in the roar if that’s ok?” “Yeah, Jimmy, no worries, we’ll see ya then” - sorted. Another equally quick call to George had the details ironed out. “George, I’ve got a roar trip sussed, keen?” “Yeah bro, we can take my truck.” “Mean” And so it was that we found ourselves heading north towards the Canterbury badlands on the Thursday before Easter. An overnight stop saw us jettison the wife and dog, and left just me and George heading towards our destiny in the back blocks for three days. All was going well until we stopped at the supermarket for some provisions, only to find that God in his almighty wisdom had…

We all grew up on Phillip Holden’s stories of culling and meat hunting in the central North Island with his favourite Sako Forrester 243. Sako has always had a reputation for providing top of the range Finnish quality, and they have always been the up market cousin of the more popular Tikka T3. Where the Tikka has modern plastics and some alloy, the Sako has solid old fashioned steel. While traditionalists praise the use of steel, many serious hunters have moaned about all the extra weight all this ‘class and quality’ has added to the Sako rifle. The first time Sako strayed from steel was with the Finnlight, with its aluminium floorplate and magazine base. While this did knock some weight off, the Finnlight was still known colloquially as the…

My first trip into that area was several years ago and not long after I bought my first DSLR. The whole photography thing was all very new to me and coming across a species of animal or bird that I hadn’t photographed before was always quite exciting not to mention challenging. We had a whole week based at the hut so I figured I would have ample opportunities to gain some great images of the little guy as he seemed to be a regular daily visitor. How wrong I was !! A lack of sightings was not the problem, nor were lighting conditions an issue as he regularly came right out into the open clearing. Even on an overcast day I was able to gain satisfactory exposure settings. My main…

Productive in many ways - the birds harvested yes but that is by no means the most significant memory. Far outweighed by the people I hunted with and the places and sights I have seen. The road trips, the laughs along the way. The constant planning, chatting, and review of what happened, and just the character of being a waterfowler in our awesome country. Man we are lucky, lets look after it eh, so it stays this way! We hunted this year from the deep south big water to south Canterbury on irrigation ponds , out to the coast on lagoons/big water, public Central Otago hydro lakes, private farms, streams, puddles , paddocks, Lake Wanaka, public gardens (camera hunting there or you might meet some characters in blue uniforms!) Every…

Today New Zealand’s national icon remains under siege by predators which threaten its’ existence. The Kaweka Forest Park contains a small, nationally important wild population of kiwi. South of Hawke’s Bay kiwi are effectively extinct. Back in 2002 it was realised that unless steps were taken to combat the decline the last remaining kiwi in the Kaweka Forest Park would soon be gone too. It was then that the Save Our Kiwi Hawke’s Bay project was initiated to help re-establish kiwi numbers in the Park for future generations of visitors to enjoy. The biggest threat facing kiwi remains the impact of predators. For kiwi to survive and breed in the wild, without human intervention, there remains a need to eradicate introduced predators like stoats, ferrets, cats, rats and possums. Dogs…

They are light, quick drying and just seem to fit much better than their other trousers, not hanging so low in the crutch. We tend to wear these on a lot of hunting trips and Willie even wears them to places like Fiordland. They do have one disadvantage there though, and that is the sandflies bite right through the air mesh sections! I prefer the microtoughs in this situation, but they are too big around the waist and in the belt to crutch length for me when I choose a size big enough to get the legs long and roomy enough to climb hills. I overcome this by putting another belt around them lower down under their actual belt loops and roll the top in front down to it, sort…

It all began with my old hunting companion George, a Hungarian Vizsla and I leaving the vehicle at day break in late January 2014. I was primed and ready for a big day and planned on putting in the hard yards to get back away from the handy areas where the pressures of the average weekend hunters are. The location I was hunting for this trip looked like ideal summer stag country, with high leading ridges and nice rolling tussock basins chocker full of lush feed. Midday ticked over and it was time for a well-deserved break. I sat on a lump of dry moss, relaxing and eating my scroggin, when a faint noise began to grow louder and louder. That familiar shape of a Hughes 500 materialised through the…

What I have found is that the more you use a GPS, the more applications and handy tricks you will learn and find that you can use it for. One of the greatest things for me is being able to easily navigate down heavily bushed ridges without ending up down a side spur and having to climb back up on to the ridge. Having a GPS in your kit also helps for peace of mind when hunting the tops and the mist comes in. Marking your camp and waypoints for key features such as where a spur you need to drop off on hits a main ridge system, can help you get back to camp at night. Newer GPS systems like the Garmin Rhino, combine the unit with a two…

2013 EBLIS TOPS Bang in the middle of the Adams Range ballot area, “Eblis” is Arabic for Devil. Far from being evil or ugly the scenery and sheer beauty of this area is stunning. This was a new landing site and we were the first party in. Anticipation was high for some good hunting. Jon had been after a decent bull since the early nineties and risked a broken neck and frostbite several times over. A 12 inch plus bull had proved elusive or out of reach. Unfortunately the weather did not play ball with only 2 ½ days of clear weather. That famous West Coast mist would roll on in every day along with frequent wind and rain. To make matters worse both of our scopes had received a…

It really helps to them to learn their bows and improve their accuracy. However most don’t utilize the time as efficiently as they can and find ways to improve. In fact a lot don’t find much improvement at all. They just go round and round in circles. I guess if you shoot a bow only for fun and don’t aspire to get better then this is just fine. They say the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. This applies very much to archery. Many archers make it to a certain level then plateau out and struggle to make any further improvements despite the amount of practice they do. If you want to become more deadly while hunting then you need…

The point of these articles is to help get you thinking outside the norms. Let me give you a couple of examples. Scheduled work had taken me to Christchurch so I had packed my gear and kept a keen watch on the seven-day forecast charts on Metvuw. However approaching fronts remained ‘racked & stacked’, with the dreaded heavy rain warnings in place for my planned hunt in South Westland. Horrendously strong winds would foil the back-up option on the Eastern side, so I reluctantly headed towards home in Nelson. With family and work commitments having squeezed the available hunting time other prospects had to be created and the situation provided an opportunity to reccy some country I’d always put off looking over. After a bit of a drive I was…

With the New Zealand Pig Hunters Association on one side and the newly created Central North Island Sika Foundation on the other we had many issues to discuss with hunters - as many will appreciate when you start with ostensibly a blank canvas (remember we have not had the ability to manage deer, tahr, chamois and wild pigs for hunting benefits since they were designated noxious animals in 1956. A year I remember well since it was also the year I was born. Prophetic some may say but I view it as a bit of bad luck to have been born the year we lost our game animal status!) So following is just a few of the key issues the GAC is dealing with. HERDS OF SPECIAL INTEREST To most…