Thread: ohakune , national park hunting

hey guys , staying in the national park / ohakune area for a few days and not having much luck with finding any deer. any good buggers be able to help us out and point us in the right direction? cheers!

Possibly go down to the murumuru reserve of the ruatiti road, erua, or of the mountain road, rangataua forest, kariori lakes.
Pretty hard to get onto private land unless you have contacts

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head up the big hill and have a look...... if its public land,just go look,there are deer all over that area,always has been and always will be.

Lots of nice country around Mangaehuehu hut .

Neilsons Conservation Area has plenty of goats and supposed to have fallows too.
Need to cross river and get your feet wet, should be easy at this time of the year.

Originally Posted by Chur Bay

Lots of nice country around Mangaehuehu hut .

I second this comment.

thanks everyone for your input checked out a few of the spots but no luck, can’t get lucky every time

This is just an amazing thread.
An internet random person asks for good places to hunt and half a dozen forum members put up good solid suggestions.

agree...the hope is the "random" sticks around and gives back with contributions of some sort.... and doesnt(as so many do) cut n run once have the goods they wanted.

Originally Posted by Monty2005

thanks everyone for your input checked out a few of the spots but no luck, can’t get lucky every time

I have just returned after hunting in that area (private). I am assuming you understand what time of year it is in relation to the breeding cycle. In areas down there that in late winter / spring I routinely see dozens of hinds and a few stags feeding openly, I’ll be lucky if I see one or two hinds at this time of year. In fact we saw just two hinds with fawns all week, a couple of dry hinds at deer o’clock and one right on dusk that we are 99% sure was still carrying her fawn.

They’re hidden away from dawn ‘til dusk, especially in the recent heat. A couple might come out before the last of the light if you’re lucky but the majority will stay in cover with their fawn. Give it another few weeks and they’ll start to venture out a bit more. As a general observation pretty much everything is a month late in the annual cycle this year, several blokes in that area I knockabout with have all said the Roar was weak and late (I didn’t go last year) and lots of pregnant hinds were still feeding openly into the second week of Dec, which is very late. My observation was that a lot of the hinds have only just dropped their fawns, in the last 2-4 weeks. It will have a lot to do with the general over population of deer in the Ruapehu region.

It’s summer stag / spiker season if the area you are is carrying a decent population. Some quite impressive mobs of males doing the rounds between the private land, using the chain of landlocked DOC forest on the higher ground as their highway. The farms have heaps of grass, haven’t seen some of those backcountry paddocks looking like this for a long time. Biggest mob we saw from afar numbered ~20 animals, several big boys in there.

Sorry that probably doesn’t help you much but I think your problem is simply one of timing and weather.

I had a few days at Neilson this time last year, plenty of goats and good pig sign, no fallow seen. River was easy to cross but it’s the 20-30m down the bank that made it interesting. @Flyblown great info thanks, mirrors what I saw down in Wairarapa just after Christmas.

My go to used to be Erua, but after the 1080 some real arseholes have been turning up there so ill probably go up the mountain again like i used to. At Erua in the last few months have been everything from people getting thereatened with getting shot by some "hunter" right to someone taking powertools to the 1 gate and shooting off the locks on the other so now both pileon tracks have become 4x4 tracks, i was there 2 weeks ago and saw very little in the places where i used to see lots this time of the year so ive decided to no longer go there. ive been hunting that block for 7 years. I wont be surprised if this restarts the local farmers blocking hunting or harassing hunters in their campsites liek it used to be a few years back. us guys who regularly hunt there have managed to build good relations with the farmers there but now these new cocks turning up will probably ruin it for all yet again. this new lot seems to be cashed up out of towners based on the flash toys they turn up in.

Take the track behind the Mangahuia campsite https://goo.gl/maps/6cw3jMuEH1iYWTEd6
Go to where it crosses the Whakapapiti river and follow your nose, usually a few hanging around there, try get there early before the trampers start coming past. Get well away from the track

Or just take any of the tracks behind ohakune on the mountain road, follow your nose and get off the track. they are there