Thread: Fallow activity in winter, different than summer?

Yeah nah maybe @Ryan_Songhurst.

Totally get what you’re saying, but I reckon there’s a reason they appear to survive on busy farms.

It’s cos they don’t get shot.

For years fallow have been kind of “managed” in a semi protection type of way, by many cockies. On numerous properties you can go and sit in a particular spot and pretty much guarantee that you’re going to see them. And often you’ll be told to either not shoot them at all, or to be very particular about what you do take, at certain times of the year only. This kind of relatively gentle pressure (if any) will produce a population that will tolerate humans and dogs within sight and earshot on a pretty much continual basis.

Everything changes the minute the order is given to shoot a resident fallow population. Pretty much overnight they become as skittish as hell and it only takes a couple of days of action for them to disappear altogether. Then they become really tough quarry to hunt.

I think back to a time recently on a property where I was given the instruction to go and hunt multiple fallow does from a resident farm population that had been left to breed up for this specific purpose. (For a large family feast.) As usual, I was able to run up and down the main race on the bike and watch the fallow moving gently across the face about 300-350m away. Once I got upwind and above them, I stalked back down and caught them in a gully about 100m opposite, and shot three fat does. These would’ve been the first fallow shot on that block for probably 4 or 5 years. Over the next several days, every time I went out for my afternoon fallow hunt I had to work really hard to find them, and boy were they skittish. I think on day 5 or thereabouts I gave up due to rapidly diminished returns, because we were pretty sure they’d buggered off next door and beyond.

I wrote up a hunt in the southern Taranaki on here a while ago, targeting fallow on a redeveloped farm where they are public enemy number one. If those fallow see or hear any evidence of an approaching human from 800-900m away, even further, they’re gone. Like… vanishing act.

That’s just my experience of them and as usual YMMV. I think it’s got everything to do with how much pressure they get, which oftentimes isn’t much, if any.