Thread: WARO - anyone got advice earned through recent experience?

Fellas.

I have three mates overseas, two younger army types who are sons of my generation of friends, and one a miner I worked with in the US. They have want to come to NZ on a roving hunting / fishing / beer drinking mission in 2019, something we usually see from the friends and family network every year.

Inevitably, they want to visit the South Island. Now I'm North Island and my South Island experience is very narrow. I've hunted down South a fair bit, mostly in easy to reach places that I know, usually alone, and with time on my side. Typically the kind of place where you walk in for a day, hunt, fly camp, hunt, fly camp or hut, walk out. The advice I've given people before has usually resulted in success, a chamois or tahr, a meat deer, even a couple of reasonable stags. Particularly when my advice involves them getting together with someone I know down south. These days, for various reasons, most of my decent South Island contacts are elsewhere, here in the North or in Aus or further afield. Such is the nature of what we do.

I'm not about to ask you where to go. What I want to know is real, hard earned facts about the impact of WARO and specifically, where not to go. I've been keeping an eye on WARO as it potentially has impacts in our area which would be fairly catastrophic, and I have read and heard about some very heavy impacts on red deer numbers in particular in the last couple of years. Plus of course the tahr culls recently.

Is the impact of WARO down south as heavy as I'm being told, especially on the tops tussock land? The two younger lads are strong as, proper soldiers (officers actually), and have expressed an interest in kitting up for multiday remote area hunts. They are the kind of blokes that would do that kind of mission properly. But I am quite concerned about somehow contributing to them selecting an area that has been absolutely hammered by WARO.

I've got all the DOC maps and so on, and some info on a few areas, if you can contribute something specific or point me to a resource or knowledge base that is definitive, that would be very much appreciated.