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Getting to know the Sika a bit better
I didn’t manage to get out immediately after the COVID lockdown but after a cursory reshuffle of my annual leave and a couple of phone calls I had two good trips planned into the Kawekas in June chasing winter sika. I had three goals. They were to shoot my first mature stag, to complete a good trip with older equipment and to collect some information for the Sika Foundation.
I had attended a presentation by Cam Speedy and the Foundation at my local NZDA branch and it lit a bit of a fire under my arse to be a part of the process , however big or small.
More importantly though the aim of these trips was to get rid of the stress caused by not being able to go bush for a couple of months!
The first trip was with a mate who I met on the old forum a few years back. We had always discussed the idea of doing extended trips with old gear, doing our best to replicate a trip of a typical meat hunter or deer culler. KK was pretty familiar with older gear and so we spent four days poking around a couple of different catchments on a somewhat level playing field with some front country sika.
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There were no animals around for the first couple of days in the more snow damaged bush but once we shifted into more familiar country in the Mohaka faces, we saw a couple. KK managed to tip over a spiker with his .303 not too far from our campsite, and I got outwitted by a couple of hind groups at close range in dark bush. The open sights were tough to use in gloomy bush and so I ended up empty handed. The trip was still a lot of fun and a good learning experience but for a tall skinny guy like me the old frame pack was definitely not my cup of tea!
The second trip a week later was a fly in for 9 days with Chris Crosse to my favourite of all of the huts in the Kawekas, Ngaawapurua. I spent a successful week in there last August and so I knew where a couple of good areas were. This time I took my dog Finn and my mate Reuben in with me. Reuben prefers to hunt more open country and this was a good opportunity for him to see that bush stalking can actually be pretty fun if the bush is nice.
A wise man once told me “Hunt your feet first” and not 200 metres from the hut I saw a very skinny hind who had the drop on me and found another dead one that had starved to death. The second day I sent Reuben into a face where I had seen a few deer last year and I decided to go up Herbs Creek. Finn was on form and after an hour or two of sidling just above the creek he led me to a spiker which promptly squealed at me and began to move off. A whistle from me stopped him at 40 yards and a quick shoulder shot dispatched him cleanly.
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With camp meat secured, I hung the little deer up in the broadleaf grove he was hanging out in and followed the dog up the ridge we were on. Half an hour later we were perched on a small bluff taking in the beauty of the main Harkness valley.
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While I could have sat there all day, Finn was very keen on moving further up the hill and a few hours later we bumped a hind in a scrubby gut who was a bit smarter than the spiker from that morning. In typical sika fashion she had to announce my arrival and her squeals of derision echoed through the scrub as we failed to close the gap effectively.
I had had about enough of that racket and with the spiker on board we wandered back to the hut where Reuben was waiting with a grin on his face.
“Did you get it?”
My answer was to pull out the hindquarters from my pack.
“Sure did bro!”
Our celebratory port was cracked and we ran over the events of the day. It seemed that the deer were in Herbs Creek and a plan was made to fly camp up the creek a bit and hunt the forks separately for a day or two.
The morning came clear and cold and we hustled up to the forks and crossed over into the creek, hoping for a deer on the flats. Finn was winding like mad as we snuck around corner after corner with the river covering the noise of our travel. I tapped Reubens shoulder and pointed at Finn. He nodded in acknowledgement and I put a round in the chamber with the bolt up, as he had done the same. There was sign everywhere and we both knew it was a matter of time before we found something.
We carried on for a few more metres when Finn got a few steps in front and locked up, staring up onto an open slip face. I snuck up beside him, trying to follow his gaze when a squeal broke the silence and a stag that had been watching us broke and ran uphill. It was a race to the deer as both of us raised our rifles. I found the stag in the crosshairs as he slowed down to get under a low hanging branch and a quick shot dropped him on the spot.
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I apologised to Reuben for shooting it as I had already shot the spiker but being the good bloke that he is it didn’t even enter his mind to be disappointed and he was as stoked as I was.
I had attended a presentation by Cam Speedy and the Sika Foundation at my local NZDA branch not too long ago and so with the view of sending in data to the Foundation we set to examining the stag. The stag was an old battler, with one long spike on one side and just two points on the other. He had gone orange under the skin so had been consuming a lot of his own fat, and had no real fat to speak of. His teeth were basically non existent and even the front teeth were almost gone. He had a couple of scars in his cape and across his rump from previous battles and we marvelled at the toughness of this animal.
Who knows how many hunters he had evaded in his lifetime, and how many stags he had fought and defeated? I felt very privileged indeed to have secured a truly old animal at the tail end of his life.
After dealing to the stag we set up a camp and decided to sneak off to try for another deer. Both of us ended up finding some great terraces but were concerned about the lack of an understorey of any kind where we had been. It was fairly obvious that the deer have had an impact in there.
Day Four dawned and we split up once again for the day, each choosing a fork to investigate. I sidled through some productive faces but only succeeded in spooking animals and Reuben had a similar experience.
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It was beginning to get miserable and wet so we pulled pin and went back to the hut where it rained hard for the next two days, flooding the Harkness and Ngaruroro. Reuben made the most of the shit weather and spent time hunting in it whereas I was quite content with my efforts and loafed round cutting a huge supply of wood and trying to convince the local eels to clean up the stags head.
We squeezed in a couple more shorter hunts and on the last full day we decided to go hard. I had avoided the hut faces and was sending Reuben up there because I knew they would hold animals. However, he was sick of it and I was more than happy to revisit some areas I had found last time I was in the valley.
I had one of the best days hunting of my life that day. Finn led me onto 8 separate deer but I screwed up every single one of them in various ways. I really wanted to shoot a hind for management purposes but 6 of the deer I saw were stags! One of them was an 8 pointer who I only spotted because I could see the plume of his breathing in the cold as he stood there watching me. He spooked as I drew a bead on him and pulled a vanishing act that only a sika can.
So with 2 deer and a good haul of meat we took a very marginal ride out to end the trip, having had a good go at winter sika and having collected some data to send away to the Foundation.
I'm now hanging out to get back into the park and chase these curious little deer once again!
Hot barrels:cool:
-----Regarding the data stuff, if you’re a sika hunter and want to be involved, it’s as simple as sending some info on a trip or two using this link. You don’t have to be the world's greatest hunter or anything, all data helps build a picture of the state of the herd and the environment that it lives in.
https://sikafoundation.co.nz/online-data-programme/
