Innehållsförteckning för Issue 66 från NZ Hunter

As I approach an area with good stag sign, I watch Tess to see how she reacts. I hunt at other times as well but nothing else comes close to this. Preparation starts months before as I go through gear lists and try to convince myself I need the latest upgrade of some item or another. I have hunted one particular area for many years now and find this to be a very effective strategy as I’ve learned a lot about animal movements and patterns and where the good bush and feeding areas are located. Also, importantly, I’ve learned about the reasonable stags that live there and their rutting grounds. All this prior knowledge allows me to focus more acutely on one of the most important factors of all –…

I have made so many connections and friendships that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for these animals. I will admit most of the time my initial approach to people was based around pure selfishness for this addiction of mine. Sorry guys, but friendships did grow from there. Past attempts to manage the Wapiti area failed due to the political climate of the time, the big money in venison recovery, personal agendas and egos. So what’s different with this latest attempt? I think it is simple – the current Fiordland Wapiti Foundation has been very careful with its objectives, making them achievable, realistic, impersonal and purely based around what is best for this herd and the environment where the animals live. We have worked very closely with our landlord, ensuring…

An hour into it, Jack Frost started creeping into our carcasses as we made our way up the rugged Rangitata Creek. Sheer faces of sharp rocks and tight tussocks came into view around us as the deep peach of early morning sunlight stretched its way over the horizon, sending a shiver of excitement through our bones. With more light, the lads, Dan Doyle, Tom Fuller, Guy Vallance aka Ginge, Ben Curnow and I found a vantage point to have a glass. We spotted a couple of tahr silhouetted on a ridge roughly three kilometres away. They seemed to have descended from their higher perch to find a bite to eat where the snow had melted away, to satisfy their winter hunger for alpine vegetation. These animals were at an advantage.…

A modern digital camera, whether it’s a compact ‘point and shoot’ style or a full-on digital DSLR, will take astoundingly good images, even in the dreaded 'green box' auto mode. Actually, it still amazes me when I see the quality of photographs that even a cheap $200 pocket compact can achieve. If your budget will allow it and you're keen to improve your images and wanting to get more variety in the types of images you're creating, there are several affordable accessories that can make life easier and will take your photography to another level. Kingfishers are one of my favourite species of bird to photograph. They are creatures of habit when it comes to feeding and have favourite perches that they will return to each time they snatch a…

As a rule, my bows can hold a tune but given the number of components on a bow, nothing stays the same forever. Eventually a bow’s tune will change, just how quickly that happens depends on how it is treated. A tournament shooter takes his bow from its case and usually carries it no more than 50 yards. Bowhunters on the other hand drag their bows up hill and down dale, through all sorts of terrain and vegetation. It’s no wonder our bows need checking on a regular basis. Our style of hunting puts our bows through a tremendous amount of punishment. Sights and arrow rests get hooked up on bushes and vines, bows can be dropped on the ground or rocks – maybe even driven over (that one’s not…

It is located at 995m altitude in the County Stream, which is the largest tributary of the Waitaha River in South Westland. It’s big stuff here - the valley backs onto the pristine alpine snowfields and glaciers of the Mt. Evans massif. The Hut is a plain and well-constructed 6-bunker built in the early 1970s by the NZFS. The surrounding vegetation is a mix of alpine scrub with open tussock clearings. County Hut has always been a low-use hut with visits averaging around four per year currently. Along with walk-in parties there is the odd fly-in of hunters, or climbers doing the Red Lion or Mt. Evans. The access track up the County Stream from the Waitaha valley is legendary for its toughness and I won't attempt to disclaim that.…

Rock wrens are officially classed as 'nationally endangered' which puts them right up there with the brown kiwi, yellow-eyed penguin and reef heron. Secondly, they are the country's only true alpine bird, living above the bush line all year round, which makes them rather inaccessible to most New Zealanders. I think as hunters we are pretty lucky to have the opportunity to see these wonderful little 'rock bobbers' when hunting the alpine tops of the South Island. One of the things I love most about wildlife photography is the challenge of finding and then going about gaining photographs of rare species of animals and birds. Their low population numbers have you on the back foot right from the start so even finding them is difficult. I've found that the rare…

We have reviewed several of their products over the years, including the head to head test we did of all fast boil water systems available at the time back in Issue 28, 2012. Allsports recently sent us the latest upgraded version of the Jetboil Flash, which is their 1 litre pot system. They have upped the burner output from 4,500 BTU to 9,000 BTU – that’s a 100% increase! The claimed boil time is now 100 seconds for 500mls. JetBoil say they have achieved this by modelling the combustion and selecting materials to optimize efficiency, speed and precision - creating their fastest boiling stove yet. Flash 2 Features •1 Litre FluxRing cooking cup with insulating cozy • New and improved easy on and off vessel connection • New and improved…

The duck shooting season is finished but don’t put away the shotgun just yet as there is still time to bag a quail. These birds are quite often overlooked and not cooked very much, probably because of their small size, but they are genuine game birds nonetheless and worth trying for something different. This recipe is my version of a dish made by Anton Mosimann at Rules Restaurant in Covent Garden in London – a restaurant that specializes in British fare and classic cookery of game – especially game birds. To serve four people, I work on one quail each as a portion size, so scale this recipe up or down depending on how many quail you get. INGREDIENTS • 4 quail • 100g short grain rice • 40g wild…

I logged on this time and couldn’t quite believe my luck when it said ‘Upper Glaisnock’. I made a phone call immediately to my hunting mate Pete. Planning started straight away and over the coming months, Pete and I trained our arses off. We were both relatively fit before but by the time we were ready to catch our water taxi on the 29th March, we considered ourselves ‘Fiordland fit’. To be honest, I felt a sense of achievement before I had even set foot in the block. I knew this was a seriously good opportunity and it needed dedication so at the beginning of summer I had started running 100km a week – almost all hill work – sometimes up the Bluff Hill five times a night. After Christmas…

I’d been hunting for three days and now I was crouched, looking down at the stag from a precipice at the foot of the Southern Alps near the head of the mighty Whitcombe River. My partner Judith and I had been helicoptered into this remote area for seven days of fly camping along the tops in search of adventure, some meat and a trophy. I radioed Judith; she was back at camp a few hundred metres down the other side of the ridge, and suggested she head up to where I was and guide me in. She was up and ready to go in no time, keen as ever. As I watched her make her way up, I pondered a good track plan down an adjacent escarpment, placing me right…

It was there where I became friends with Norwegian hunter, Kristoffer Clausen. Over the last 20 years, Kristoffer’s passion for hunting has led him to become one of Europe’s leading hunting film producers and maker of high quality game calls. After the moose hunt, I was lucky enough to be invited to hunt capercaillie and black grouse before the season ended on 31 January 2018. Kristoffer’s generous offer was simple enough, I’d fly into Oslo and we’d go hunting. Having relocated my family from Australia to Greece for my mid-life gap year, this opportunity was too good to refuse. Days before my flight, Norway and Sweden experienced their heaviest snowfall in eight years. Despite the infrastructure they have to deal with long winters and deep snow every year, these conditions…

I wanted to wrap it up with a bit of general discussion around some of the issues and then consider the question of where to from here. Throughout this series you may have noticed that I have pretty much avoided mentioning the elephant in the room, that being the subject of 1080. I’ve done that on purpose. I am sure you will all agree with me that there are few more emotionally loaded topics than 1080, and this is particularly the case within the hunting culture. I can understand why. What I have wanted to do was discuss the issues around our big game animals and then talk about conservation and some of the challenges with introduced pests, without it being hijacked by the pro- and anti-1080 war. There is…

Several years later Toyota added a practical double cab and upgraded the standard engine to the 4 cylinder 2.8 litre diesel and voila, the LN106 model was here! It was such a popular all-rounder for farmers, commercial companies and outdoor enthusiasts that the LN106 Hilux remained pretty much unchanged for nearly 10 years. The tough chassis, solid beam axle and a motor that just wouldn’t give up was bolted onto a cab and deck design that every other ute manufacturer had no choice but to replicate. On one of our recent hunting trips we decided to leave the plastic trucks on the sealed roads and go retro, with my mate Sparky dragging his old “classic” ’96 out of the back of the woolshed. We topped up the engine oil, stacked…

Here’s a sampling from my current kit…some is gear or clothing related, a couple deal with food, and others are simply good hacks. None of these represent costly outlays or premium equipment yet they add more than their share of simple value to a hunt. WINDSHELL Overseas hunters call it a windshirt but we’d probably term it a windbreaker or windcheater. Essentially this is a featherlight nylon packaway that you throw on to shield you from cool winds or light precipitation. At under 80 grams, I reckon my windshell is gram-for-gram the most valuable piece of clothing I carry. It simply adds performance to my layering system, where the real value is not in how much warmth it adds, but in how much warmth it prevents the wind from stealing…

The Contender had/still has a great reputation as a modern, accurate and reliable version of the more traditional single shots. It was available in a wide range of calibres and barrel lengths, and as a pistol or a rifle More recently they branched out into a range of bolt action rifles, one of which also comes with rapidly interchangeable barrels/calibres – the T/C Dimension. It also has a quite futuristic shaped stock with a high comb that provides excellent cheek weld – something that’s always been missing in most factory rifles. The T/C Venture is the conventional fixed barrel version with a more traditional looking stock. It can be had in an ideal youth model with interchangeable butt stock spacers, called the Compact. While none of the T/C models could…

We use their tents, Thermarest mattresses and cookers in the TV Show. Their unique enclosed burner stove has been around in a number of manifestations since the original Reactor we tested back in our “FastBoil Cooker Head to Head” back in issue 28 .They released a personal cooking system version with a 1 litre pot in 2014 called the WindBurner, which we reviewed in issue 44. This is a unique stove that uses radiant as well as the usual convective heat transfer. Think of it like the heat you feel from the sun, as opposed to the warm air you feel from a fan heater. The enclosed head burner also entrains 100% of the air needed for combustion before the burner head surface, whereas most stoves only entrain about 60%…

At this stage we had been hunting together for well over a year. We were always keen to get out whenever we could, whether that was a weekend away or just a day hunt closer to home. On this occasion we had decided earlier on in the week to head out and explore a new public land spot, even if it was just to check out the area and the terrain. On the map it looked like steep and gnarly country. We knew though that at this time of year the deer were venturing out onto any clearings as their craving for calcium drove them to seek out the spring grass so with this in mind, even a hard walk in steep country had the potential of bringing something home.…

Photo Gallery The winning photo receives a Hunting & Fishing voucher to the value of $100. Send all your photos to editor@nzhunter.co.nz Note: Photos must be of a suitable size for printing - a minimum file size of 1MB is preferred.…

Himalayan tahr are currently administered under the Himalayan Thar Control Plan and the Himalayan Thar Management Policy. The Control Plan defines an overall population of around 10,000 throughout the tahr range comprising 6976 sq km in 7 management units. Intervention densities are set in terms of number of tahr per km2 in each of seven management units ranging from <1 to 2.5 tahr per km2 and two exclusion zones at 0 per km2. A study on tahr abundance was carried out by Dave Ramsey of the Arthur Rylah Institute, Victoria, Australia. Abundance was estimated using 2 km x 2 km plots overlaid on the location of 39 randomly selected DoC tier 1 monitoring plots. Helicopter monitoring involved three separate counts of tahr seen within each 2 km x 2 km…

Wild West Worcester Aged to perfection! You can choose between Mild, Hot or Extreme heat sauce. Just provide your email and physical address when you take out a subscription or renewal and Wild West Worcester will send you a free sample of their delicious sauce, plus you will go into the draw to win one of their gift crates. Don't forget to check out thier amazing recipes at the website below. Use the code nzhunter to get FREE Freight on purchases - valid for the next 2 months For more information: www.wildwestworcester.co.nz  | info@wildwestworcester.co.nz | 09 945 5074 “Wild West Worcester is a small artisan saucery operating on the Wild West Coast near Dargaville. We use a slow, intensive brewing process that takes 18 months to make. This was an old…

All ballots are now applied for online at www.doc.co.nz. New season ballot info will be available from August 1st Swarovski Optik Z8i 0.75-6x20 SEE MORE, ACT FASTER: The new Z8i 0.75-6x20 rifle scope offers uncompromising performance for close range hunting, with 8x zoom you never miss any of the action. Our latest masterpiece features the new VIEWPLUS 0.75x magnification for 30% more field of view. Keep your eye firmly on the target with the new D-I illuminated reticle which has been reduced to a single point of focus. The tangible click of the CLICKONE function tells you when it has reached 1x magnification fully concentrate on what matters at the crucial moment. Also available with our FLEXCHANGE 4A-IF reticle. The illuminated ring on the CD-I reticle can be switched on…