Thread: Deer Population Growth

Originally Posted by Tahr

The NZDA initiatives of working with DOC to take group hunts into special landing zones in high population areas is great. It can cream off good numbers of animals.
The branches that do it often subsidise the costs. Everyone benefits.

Public DOC land, fine.

Private land? Not so straightforward.

Take a look at the current economic situation. Drystock and honey are under massive pressure. Farm input and application costs have skyrocketed. Interest rates are through the roof. Margins have evaporated and many farms across the country will fail to turn a profit this year and probably next. Many discretionary development projects are on hold, as there is a lot of routine maintenance like fencing. All this stuff you know better than I do of course.

For a private landowner with a significant pest ungulate problem, the only realistic way to make a tangible difference quickly is to bring in professionals. Helicopters or maybe an outfit like Jason Hart’s BCL. But with operating cash under such pressure at the moment, many cockies are turning a blind eye to their problem in the hope that they can deal with it another time. Unfortunately they just can’t afford it right now.

It’s no surprise that so many landowners looking at the value of their properties and how to realise that value to the benefit of themselves and their heirs, are looking into carbon & trees. For a lot of these guys, they just can’t see a way out other than trees.

There are heli culling operations on the west side of the central plateau that are killing >1,000 deer in just a few hours flying time. The GoPro footage is hard to get your head around. I found it very hard to believe the numbers I was being told until I’d seen it. A game strictly for the professionals. But at significant cost to the farmer of course.

To some this appears to be whingeing and moaning, I guess you have to be living in some kind of isolated bubble outside of reality to interpret the problem like that.

A good while ago on this forum - 2-3 years? - someone posted a DOC document that discussed the challenges of controlling ungulates across the central North Island, recognising how broken up the public land is, i.e. how much of the public land is in the form of small blocks landlocked by private land, and how difficult it is to corral private landowners into a concerted regional action plan. I’d love it if we could have another look at that but I’ve not been able to find it. If you know what I’m talking about please provide a link if you’ve got one.

From my experience in the back blocks, it’s hard enough to get neighbours to agree where to place hives, to share boundary fence costs or to sign off on a helicopter cull (you have to have the permission of your neighbours). Quite a lot of the time you’d actually be not that far off the mark believing that a lot of these valleys are in a persistent state of low-level war with one another.

The conversations I’ve had about this problem suggest that if and when the dry stock schedules and other revenue streams like honey return to where they were a few years ago, then some serious dollars will be spent on helicopters. If the venison price was to return to historic highs, be it for human consumption grade or pet food, then some of the venison would be recovered. But at the moment with the MPI regulations as they are they can’t even make it pay for pet food.

It’s a multifaceted problem that’s going to require money and time. In the CNI, the response will be haphazard because some will have both and some will have little of either. Outside of some spectacular local reductions in population through the concerted use of helicopters, I don’t see the problem going away any time soon.

Originally Posted by Flyblown

with the MPI regulations as they are they can’t even make it pay...

Seems to me these MPI fellas hold at least some of the keys to this problem? And also hold the keys to farm profitability, at least for many smaller livestock farmers?
But maybe not, just a slightly educated guess.