Thread: Doc land hunting report or lack of!)

Originally Posted by Happy Jack

If I had to live in Chch again I would never be home either, but that's because I hated living there for the 3 years we did.

Try, Auckland, ChCh is a paradise.

Originally Posted by flock

Try, Auckland, ChCh is a paradise.

You will never catch me living on that Island

Originally Posted by Trout

If I lived up in chch,I'd never be home.Theres so many deer within 2 to 3 hrs drive of Chch.

Yep!

In the middle of a 4WD trip visiting a bunch of places. Carting the thermal but no rifle. Exquisite campsites above remote rivers each night and there's deer out all over the show just on last light, and more so at leak time at half five in the morning!!!

My hunting sickness started after reading those hunting books, no background in hunting as parents were competative sports folk. Year was 1980, Kiangaroa forrest and only shanks pony to get around. I came to believe that deer were ghosts. Point being the place was shot out in those times. Gave deer hunting away as a bad joke, went fishing AK based, as time went on that dried up as well. Now times have inproved, ended up in Mainland, health wise not up for these mountain hoping aventures. I now pay to knock over a animal every year or so. Still do a fair amount of the small stuff, even back to PCP air rifles. Yep, Deer hunting requires putting the time and effort, sounds like the hard yards will pay off for you, good luck.

Have a favourite spot just down from our hut on the Coast, we can only get there if the river is low and that's via 4wd or quad bike. Down there...sit and wait and I've found as a new hunter they come to you. I've just spent the last couple days there and couldn't get down the river unfortunately so I wandered around the upper river bed, despite prints in the sand I didn't see any either. Yes it's demoralising and I headed back to the shed at 9.30pm when it was just still light.

Keep at it. Law of odds says the more you go out, the probability of encountering something gets higher and higher. Just try to keep the basics like wind and being as quiet as possible. It will happen.

This won't be much of a consolation for some of you younger guys in a deer drought.

But quite a few of us on here were in our teens in 80s when commercial deer recovery ( dead and alive ) was at its height.
Tahr were nearly wiped out.

We used to make a lot of trips and not even see any sign.
We could hit a barn door with our budget rifles
Binoculars were pretty basic
We didn't often see animals and shot very few.

But we learned to be persistent because it was what we wanted to do.
We grew up on cullers stories of huge numbers shot.

As we learned the art and craft of hunting and shooting things slowly improved.

Currently these are the best of times for several generations.
Deer and tahr numbers are easily the highest I have known in my lifetime.
Both species ( and fallow) are vastly more wide spread and abundant.
They all pop up in some very unexpected places ( CHCH suburbs recently ).

About 25 years ago when numbers increased and I had time ( after farm, business and family sorted ) to hunt more often again.
The gear was vastly improved.
I was older, stronger, wiser and more patient.
We started see and WATCHING a lot more animals.

In my younger days when deer were rarely seen we tried to shoot everything we saw.
I learned very little.

Once I stopped shooting everything I saw, I learned a lot and saw even more.

So to you new aspiring hunters.
Knock over a few to get started but then slow down, sit for a day in a place with good sign, learn how to hunt and not just shoot.

Stay fit, active and healthy and even when you are older like some of us you will still love hunting.
And you might even get pretty good at it once you slow down.

And don't worry that you get home with nothing tangible to show for your efforts.
It's just part of the process of becoming a Hunter

@akaroa1
..... amen
to both above posts

^^ post of the year so far, followed by @canross excellent guide for visitors! Thanks @akaroa1

The other thing that can help is to just see it as exploring with a rifle, when I first started deer stalking I shot two in my first four hunts, I thought I had natural ability until it took over a year to get a third one. But if the hunting had been as easy as it was at the start, I probably wouldn’t have bothered looking anywhere else. I would have just stuck to the one catchment and would have had a relatively boring hunting career.
Perceiving that necessity of trying other spots was the driver of me getting to explore some amazing locations and getting a bit of meat here and there along the way. Although I have much better strategies now for where I started hunting, I don’t often hunt that area simply because there are more interesting locations as options.

If you are young and keen you are more likely to keep looking over the next ridge or around the next bend long after all the sensible ( alive. Darwin etc ) animals are out of sight.

The more you move through good country with good sign the more you muck things up for later that day or the next morning when the animals are out feeding again.

So find the hot spot of sign and have a snooze, go fishing.
But don't keep hunting.
Or find some better sign for the evening.

If you finally see animals miles away late evening chances are some will pop up nearer to you now also.
They are all wired to the same body clock.

Learn to be confident getting back to your hut or tent in the dark.
If it looks like an animal should be there stay until you really can't shoot at all.


When bush stalking evenings stick at it until you really can't see at all.
It will still be light out of the bush.

I do a lot of walking in the dark and really love it.
Once you're back in camp it's a quick meal and sleep then back out long before it's light to be on the right spot to shoot the stragglers who are still out

Let the deer do the walking,you sit and wait as light changes from sunset to dark, dark to daylight.

Originally Posted by Trout

Let the deer do the walking,you sit and wait as light changes from sunset to dark, dark to daylight.

I wish they would walk back to my truck and sit down and wait for me.

This big boy was walking towards me at 9.45pm 2 weeks ago.Day light enough to still see him without thermals.Then he turned left and walked away.Only about 350yds away,I was sitting in the truck having coffee.It was pouring with rain at the time.

One thing I learnt years ago, if there's sign keep hunting the same area until you know it better than your back yard, not a lot gained by moving district to district, hoping to trip over something. As mentioned earlier, in todays climate the best deer hunting in 50 plus years, animals where they weren't 10-15 years ago plus the long established areas, numbers are great.