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.

You're a proper GC mate.
No experience hunting SI - EVER.
NI - unmarried and heaps of money, mostly Kaingaroa, before private forestry took over.
Like 49+ years ago, so no help there either:oh noes:

Hmmm - I've hunted a few supposed WARO areas in the past and recently, usually blissfully unaware that it had been "attacked" untill I got in there. My advice is not to give it too much thought, go the places that capture your imagination and have a history of good animals.

If you are not seeing animal where you expect too then its possibly WARO, however that doesn't mean the animals/trophies are not there, it just means they have modified their behaviour (in response to WARO pressure) and you need to modify your approach accordingly. My take is that its mostly a time thing (the one thing most visitors are short of unfortunately) to figure out where the animals are and what their habits are.

Having said this be aware I'm an "armed tramper" and get most of my pleasure from pushing up a new (to me) valley or untraveled spur, more avid hunters may see it differently.

PS - I'm always happy to share what I know (bugger all some will say) with visitors, they can PM me

I think some people throw around the word WARO when they dont want people going to their prized spots or use it as an excuse for seeing no animals.

Check out the WARO maps on this link, they are bloody hard to read and distort when you zoom but you can get the idea. It would be much easier if doc put 1080 and waro maps as an overlay on the main doc map...
https://www.doc.govt.nz/get-involved...ry-operations/

Thanks for the replies. What sparked my concerns was a conversation last summer with a pro hunter from the SI who is quite well known, suffice to say he put the wind up me about WARO impacts big time. Then I read Greg Duley’s article in NZ Hunter about 4-5 months ago and got in touch with him and asked a few questions and that amped up the concerns even more. We had some mutterings about getting the choppers in from some local pastoralists that hasn’t gone down very well.

Have had some very helpful replies by pm pointing me towards good sources of info, very much appreciated.

Waro will definitely be having an impact in places, as shown on the recent Red Stag hunters club episode in there Otago roar block, what it means is the chances of getting a trophy stag will be a lot harder but if they just want to knock a couple of deer over then there will still be enough about. I’d avoid anywhere that’s been recently 1080 as well.