winter day hunt clements

One of the apprentices from work has shown an interest in learning to hunt so after my last trip be turangi in some shitty bush and spotting a sika he was still pretty keen! i checked the forecast for today and worked out that it would hold out until the late afternoon so gave him a txt and it was all arranged.
We headed off from hamilton at gents hours as we were going to explore a new area and i didn't really expect to see much this late in the season. We arrived at clements rd just in time for the fog to lift, revealing an awesome sunny and not to cold day.
We set off on one of the well worn tracks and after a bit of a climb after about an hour I decided to head up and likely looking ridge in search of some nice clear country. the ridge opened up and as we climbed up away from the track the fresh sign was evident much to our surprise.
Most of it was fresh from the early morning, hinds feeding up ready for when the real cold starts. we sidled around at about 850 m and we discovered a fresh scrape and fresh stag droppings. This really surprised me as i assumed that the stags would have stopped this at the end of May. We snuck around carefully stopping at likely spots for about an hour y before of them scented us and it was all over.This was encouraging for my young mate as he hadn't seen any thing like this before.We decided to head up to the top which in hind sight wasn't the best move as we struck a thick batch of noisy crown fern and then thick pepper wood which spoilt the hunt mainly as it was impossible to stalk quietly.
We had covered a fair bit of country by this stage so we decided to head back down towards the main stream.
We discovered a couple of nice clearings but the grass had long gone. There was plenty of fresh sign about indicating that the sika had been actively feed earlier on.
On our way down in between some bush bashing I spotted one of the deer bolting down the hill and managed to get a shot away but missed it completely,,
An hour later we found our way back to the car. my mate is now very keen to learn more which is good, some one keen to go hunting with and the next gen wanting to get into the hunting scene

Attachment 25327


Attachment 25328


Attachment 25331

p.s not sure why the images cant be rotated, preview is correct way up