Thread: Pre roar reccy trip

Scotty and I did a bit of a mish into a public land block over the weekend, in search of a decent stag prior to the roar. Neither of us had visited the area, but it looked ok on Google earth.

After a late night arrival on Friday and a short sleep, we were in prime hunting country at daybreak Saturday, and within minutes of glassing had spotted our first deer for the weekend. After watching the hind and its little one for a while we spotted a group of five deer, one of which was a mature stag. This got the adrenalin pumping as we closed the gap to within half a km to get a better look. He lacked a bit up top, but had good lower tines and nice spread. Not big enough for us, maybe for someone else, but ideally needed another couple of years. As soon as the sun hit the slopes he was feeding on he slinked back into the cover of the bush.

Over the weekend we had planned to hunt two catchments, aiming to hunt our way in through some good looking country. We initially climbed high quickly to use katabatic winds to our advantage, as a couple of hours after sunrise the breeze had switched to an uphill pull. Our plan was to use one main ridge as an entry into the first head basin, focussing on beech filled guts and gullies down each side and across the steep gorges.

We hunted our way in to the head basin, seeing the odd animal as we travelled inland, and we arrived at our planned camp spot about midday. This gave us enough time to hunt into a third catchment to have a quick look before dark.

Over the course of the trip we covered about 20kms, most of it with packs on, hunted three separate catchments and saw enough animals to keep most hunters happy. While we never found a mature/trophy sized stag, we did take a few photos. Most were from a fair way off as we did not want to get into close proximity with the animals we were glassing and risk scenting the valleys up. Instead we opted to spend time looking into likely spots from afar, hoping to catch a big boy in the open and plan a stalk from there. In the end we never fired a shot and left the area undisturbed

Here's a few photos;

First deer for a trip, hind and young one;




Group of four spikers and a maturing stag;




By mid morning, most deer we'd seen were sunning themselves;




The odd chamois was spotted in the head of the valley;




Plus one cheeky buck that hung around our camp valley most of the day;




If we were hunting Chamois, he'd have been worth shooting as was 9.5 plus easily, except we were after stags;




In the 3rd catchment we hunted we were treated to a group of fallow, the buck was ok, but still looked soft. So we didn't disturb them at all;







And finally, mother and daughter caught me unawares by wandering up the ridge below me while I was glassing across the valley. They had me pinned down for quite a while until I waited till both were sleeping and snuck out of view!










With temps hitting the high 20's yesterday avo it was two pretty pooped boys that waddled back into sight of the truck ;D

All in all, a pretty good trip. Sure has potential to produce a decent stag, so we will return another time for another look-see.


Cheers
Josh