Thread: Hawkes Bay Today wild deer article

Went on a recent management hunt where there had been considerable pressure on the animals. They were very trained up, and new the score. Spent a considerable time in the area I had playing tag with a pair of does, eventually getting ghosted by them. I moved, they moved and as soon as I was stationary they were shadows. Kept the sun behind them making scoping slower than ideal as looking into the sun, and also meant I had a lovely spotlight on me highlighting every movement. Eventually they got sick of teaching me a lesson and backtracked into thin air it seemed, eventually saw them several hundred meters away gapping it into a big chunk of bush. Ranges 80-120m up til then, I had the scope on them several times just to watch them move into shadow and gone behind something. It really was an education in how well they learn to play the game with a lot of continuous pressure on, they really were dictating the rules to me. Spotting tech or a second set of eyes would really have helped me track them into the shadows and be ready for them to step out with the rifle on target, but without it I was on the wrong side of the equation. Rest of the animals were like that more or less as well, not ideal.

As far as culling, taking females is the best approach to get control of numbers as one female = 4 deer in three years. Most hunters aren't really looking for those though. Also, dropping everything you can out of the group as quickly as possible so the animals that are remaining and have learnt aren't huge in numbers. A farm I knew a while back left a buggered fence at one point on the boundary with doc land with another 5-wire further in for the farm animals to stay behind. This gave them a known access point which with the right conditions (wind direction, temp, weather and moon/sun phase) they could sit observing and drop everything trying to step through. Some nights they were getting 25 or 30 or more deer. This before the semi ban though, not sure what they are doing now. Having rec hunters coming on and paying for a couple of animals every few days is maybe a good supplementary money thing but no good for controlling animal numbers.