Innehållsförteckning för Issue 58 - April/May 2017 från NZ Hunter

As I write this the roar is well and truly underway! Fi and I heard hee-haws and our earliest ever single call on Sunday the 19th of March. There’s been plenty of reports of Reds roaring all over the country, and Willie is in Fiordland filming bugling Wapiti in the first period while I’m stuck in the office getting this magazine to the printers. That’s all about to change very shortly though, I can assure you! The weather has had a bit of a change around in the last month, with the north and east of the N.I. getting lots of rain, and the west and south of the S.I. pretty dry and settled. All this rain has gone a long way towards filling all the duck ponds and wetlands…

Our chosen area is a small block of public land in the Awatere Valley that’s usually well stocked with game. The trip got off to a bad start when Pete was delayed for three days by a bereavement. We had planned to spend a week in the block but here I was, alone, on April 3rd. I was looking down from the saddle, full of the anticipation I felt each year, when I suddenly saw something I didn’t expect. I’ve seen goats many times on the flat a kilometre below me and occasionally a deer or two – but five blokes?! My first thought was ‘bugger’ (that’s ‘bugger’ with an ‘f’ actually) and my second thought was that the area was barely big enough for two hunters, let alone five.…

You could see it in the way they spoke and in how they held themselves. They were dressed to the nines, fully kitted out in camo, with some impressive beards among them. The next ten days seemed to be their main topic – the same as it was for us – another group of four Kiwis. This was a definite sign that the West Coast tahr ballot kicked off first thing the next morning. Landsborough Wilderness Area, here we come! All eager and excited, Woodsy, Hamish, Callum and I arrived for the James Scott pick up almost half an hour early. James was right on cue, along with his other pilot. We were split up and loaded into both whirlybirds as we were heading into one of the most distant…

I had the odd sorry fella trying to draw out the romance by letting out a sad moan. I always picture them as the sleazy guys who haven’t managed to get lucky, lingering outside the pub at closing time. Like go home mate…you don’t want what anyone is selling at this time of the morning… For the most part though, the stags had wrapped up for another year. We managed to get 13 stags for the roar and had seen half a dozen more that had either given us the slip or we’d decided to leave for another day. Our food supplies were dwindling at the rate we’d expected and it was time to start thinking of the real world and heading home. We had a few spots we wanted…

Moose hunting was a bit of a mystery to me before I went to Canada and I soon learned that those big ol’ swamp donkeys can be a bit smarter than they look. The more I chase these critters, the more I enjoy it, and I have gained a lot more admiration for them after two seasons up North. The first of October saw me once again crammed into the back of the little Super Cub as Greg the pilot tried to find a spot to land. He’d decided to try and get me and my hunter client Rod (Roderigo) from Mexico into a relatively un-hunted part of the territory by plane. After a few low passes however, he decided the ground was too soft for the plane to land…

As we progress, I consider that it’s natural to take more and more interest in the environment around you as part of the hunting experience. I freely admit that for me as a young hunter, it was mostly about shooting a deer. Over time that’s changed and I find my love of the outdoors is now more holistic. It sounds a bit flowery, but for me now, a deer is only part of my outdoor experience. Last year I stood over a huge 17 point South Island Red stag with a good mate who had searched for just such an animal for forty years and it had taken three days for him to get it. Later that same year, I stood below a breeding pair of kokako in full song…

That tape planted a seed in my mind: I wanted to go cackler hunting and I wanted it bad. I held onto that dream for almost thirty years and now, at last, it was unfolding before my very eyes. I flew from Nelson, NZ to the American east coast and then all the way to Portland, Oregon to catch up with Mario Friendy from Avian-X. This kind of thing didn’t happen to me, it happened to other people! It was awesome to think that I was on my way to fulfil a lifelong dream. It had been six months since Mario had been in NZ for the opening of our duck hunting season but it seemed just like yesterday. We had slotted together like old friends when we went hunting…

I made it to midday on Wednesday when the paper pile was no smaller and the thought of a rutting Fallow was repeating in my head. Minutes later the printer packed in and as I threw the paper in the air, I declared “Stuff it – I’m going hunting!” I’d barely recovered from the roar and I was looking like a malnourished streak of misery but we all know nothing will stop a keen hunter. Before I had time to explain to the Mrs, I’d thrown the dog in the truck, my gun and day pack in the front seat and hit the road for the Hokonui Hills. I run two hunting dogs at work: Mia is a 6 year old Hungarian Vizsla and Flint is a long haired Collie…

Jonty, Sam and I, and our dog Black Claw were on day four of a five-day Sika roar trip and we were sitting in a tussock-filled gut waiting for a stag to call again. Minutes earlier, we had heard the distinctive call of a Sika in heavy bush cover, making it extremely tricky to pinpoint where he really was. We’d quietly moved out into a handy tussock gut that was bathed in sunshine and we sat down, waiting patiently for him to repeat the process. Sika stags move around a lot and depending on which way they are facing when they roar, it can be difficult to nail down how far away they are at times. Fifteen minutes went by before a sweet sounding single call floated up from the…

From an evolutionary aspect the morepork has a few other very interesting physical features and habits. Have you ever heard a morepork in flight? I'd hazard a guess that you haven't and this is not because your hearing is stuffed from all those years using a high powered rifle but due to the morepork's feather characteristics. The bird's flight feathers have serrated or comb like edges (other birds have smooth edges) and the surfaces of the wing feathers have a velvet like covering that reduce air turbulence over the wing, enabling completely silent flight. There is also a train of thought that this evolutionary trait is to maximise the birds hearing until the prey is successfully in the talons or beak. Think about it ... as humans we stop moving…

Making sure everyone makes it home safely requires some dedicated preparation before you go and thorough, level-headed decision-making while you’re out in the bush. Safety isn’t always the most engaging topic; it can be an emotive subject, even controversial at times. Everyone has their opinion, and there’s often an attitude of ‘it won’t happen to me’. But sadly, all too often, it does happen. Everyone wants to be safe, everyone wants to make it home. No hunter goes out with the intention of getting into a tight spot, but wanting to be safe isn’t the same as actively hunting safely. A Hunter’s Tale, the Mountain Safety Council’s (MSC) new hunting insights publication, provides a comprehensive evidence base of both hunting participation and incidents, and there are some sobering statistics for…

Once we picked a likely spot, we tipped the floating decoys out of the sack and sat them on top of one of the windrows of straw that ran the length of the paddock. We then settled in to the makeshift maimai that we’d moulded out of straw. We were quite happy to sit out in the middle of the paddock as we had a cunning new tactic. Alan had been told by a bloke who knew someone who’d heard in the pub that if you wore a yellow PVC parka in a stubble paddock, the ducks couldn’t see you in the golden straw. So it was with great confidence that we sat there in our bright yellow parkas while Alan got busy on the Scotch shaker call, turning out…

The last but very important part of multiple retrieves is getting the dog to retrieve the bird you want first. This will usually be the furthest bird, or maybe a wounded bird or one drifting away quickly in fast water or wind. This is absolutely essential for actual hunting – I cannot stress this enough. If you cannot control which bird your dog picks up first, then you will not only make the retrieving job harder, but you will also lose birds. To give you some more specific examples, if shooting big water especially on a rough day and you drop two or more birds out of a flight, but one is swimming away wounded. This bird will very quickly get far enough out to be quite hard to see…

You see, I had signed up for the Godzone Adventure Race so when I should have been heading into the hills with my rifle, I was on my way down to the Tasman district with a bag full of Lycra. I was, however, committed, and the hunting had to wait a few days. I was in a team with three other hardy souls and we had a combined age of just over 200 – yes, that’s an average age of 50. We had 517 kilometres to cover, with a total altitude change of 10,650 metres. At least I would be fit by the time I landed in the Ahimanawa. Richie McCaw was entered with a team of rugby mates raising money for the Cure Kids Foundation. This was awesome for…

We continued sidling around the face as the wind drifted back and forth and round and round. There was a deer right here somewhere but the wind was making things difficult. Finally a nice steady flow of air rolled around the hillside, right into our faces and Print locked up, staring into the trees. He was looking and looking but he couldn’t see the deer. It was only the direct wind straight from the animal that was telling the young dog not to move. He took a couple of very slow and careful steps forward. I followed suit, straining to see the deer before it saw us. It took me a while to pick it up, but finally I saw a stag lying down between two trees. He was less…

During that week Nate, Mush, Roddy and I added new decoys and a new Zink caller to the team, and also carried out countless hours of reconnaissance. However the addition that I was most excited to try out was the new homemade decoy jerk string that was pieced together. Duck numbers on the usual morning dam were low, however this seemed to be quite common now as preseason duck numbers on the pond had ranged from 15-30 for the last five years. Despite the low numbers of resident birds, the pond has the potential to shoot well, being a reasonably large piece of water situated on a good trade bird flight path between Lake Waikare and the Firth of Thames. Opening weekend came and went and we were not disappointed…

LED Lenser have gone for a 18650 battery with a capacity of 3400mAh which gives a burn time of 10 hours on full power, 15 hours on mid power and an incredible 120 hours on low power (10 lumens). In comparison, the 93g SEO7 model puts out 220 lumens at full power, with a 5 hour burn time while minimum power is 20 lumens for 20 hours – the MH10 beats it hands down in this area. Recharging is done through a USB port with the same fitting found on many electronic gadgets, including Samsung phones. USB 3.0 capability means it can charge 50% faster than previous models. As far as waterproofing goes the headlamp has an IPX4 rating, meaning that it must withstand a test of 10litres of water…

April and May are probably the busiest months of the hunting calendar with the roar and the duck shooting season, so with this in mind, I have come up with two recipes that are designed to fuel hungry hunters and duck shooters. The first recipe is what I would call a muesli bar. It was developed when we had to feed the British and Irish Lions rugby team when they stayed with us 12 years ago in the hotel (no longer there now due to earthquakes) and as they’re in the country on tour again soon, why not resurrect it, I thought. There was some debate with the team’s personal chef as to what they wanted; they called it ‘flapjack’, while we called it a muesli bar or a baked…