Thread: the OFF TOPIC to Stags shot 21 (discussion of wild animal management)

Originally Posted by bigbear

Last year before going south i had a couple areas of interest so i made contact with doc and ask to speak with a field officer, I wanted to get a idea of animal numbers in a couple areas. They were completely useless and had no idea and were of no help. .
This day and age you should be able to go on there web site load up one of there maps and all the overlays should have the information on it, also should have a tahr and waro overlay.
Like if you bring up x valley all the over lays they have should show recent 1080, high animal numbers or culls they have had in that area
I have found you have to jump backwards and forward trying to gather information on there

In general, most DOC district offices don't have any formal wild animal monitoring programmes to inform answers to this sort of question. Individual staff may have personal anecdotal knowledge but you'd be relying on finding the right person to talk to.

The only thing that really exists is the Tier 1 monitoring. This is a Nationwide broadscale monitoring program of biodiversity, and the work includes faecal pellet counts which give a relative abundance index of ungulates.

It's important to note that it is only measured to the level of "ungulates" - which includes deer, chamois, tahr, goats - not to a finer level of specific species.

More about the Tier 1 program and results can be found publicly available on the DOC website - https://www.doc.govt.nz/our-work/mon...-level-report/


This isn't the most user-friendly system but it's publicly available monitoring data on ungulate abundance on PCL.

You can select an individual monitoring plot from the interactive map, e.g. I have selected a plot on D'urville Island



If you then scroll down and use the drop-down menus you can generate a histogram that shows that this plot has an ungulate FPI (Faecal pellet index) of 184.95, and this gives you a visual representation of where that figure falls across the range of FPI on plots nationally - it appears to be towards the higher end.



You can then scroll down further and see a table of what mammal species were observed to be present through sign, sightings, or DNA sampling - in this case no possums (unsurprising as there are none known to be on D'urville island), pigs, and ungulates.