PHOTO SUPPLIED: DEPARTMENT OF CONVERSATION
DEERSTALKERS and the Department of Conservation are talking about deer management plans, but New Zealand Deerstalkers Te Awamutu president John Gunn said farmers need to catch up.
“There also needs to be a little bit of a culture change with the farmers who have problem deer on their lands, because a lot of them don’t like letting hunters on,” he said.
“I know places where I could go now and shoot a deer without any problem at all – if I was allowed to go on there. You might be allowed to go and shoot turkeys on the place, but they go, ‘Oh, don’t shoot my deer’.
“They might have 30 deer running round on the back of the farm. Well, that’s a lot of stock units that are eating their grass, you know. But then they will complain to Environment Waikato that the deer are on their farm and eating all the grass. It’s a catch-22 situation.”
ESTIMATION VARIES New Zealand’s population of feral deer, goats, pigs did well out of the firearm seizures and subsequent Covid lockdowns. But estimating overall numbers depends on who you talk to.
“Some people say ‘oh no there’s not too many deer there’, John said.
“And some hunters will go ‘No, no it’s fine. It’s good for us because we can go out and shoot a deer when we want to’, but if they are damaging the bush they need to be controlled, it’s as simple as that.
“That’s where the management comes in, and unfortunately this country has never had a management plan in place for deer. And that’s probably why we have fallen down.”
MANAGEMENT PLAN In places where deer numbers were a problem, NZDA was trying to work with DOC and get a management plan in place using hunters rather than throwing poison all over the place, John said.
The department is also investing in deerstalkers. John said NZDA received $700,000 from DOC across three years to improve the NZDA Hunter National Training Scheme (HUNTS) courses.
EDUCATION HUNTS educates trainees about hunting in New Zealand conditions and to develop essential bushcraft and shooting skills for use in the outdoors.
“If we get more hunters on the ground, they will help control the deer,” John said.
“I think there’s been a change of thinking in DOC. For years and years and years we’ve been fighting DOC, bashing our head against the wall. But for the past five years probably, there has definitely been a change.
“They are talking to us, coming to us, asking us. It’s quite refreshing actually.”
Trampers and mountain bikers generally kept to the tracks, but recreational hunters were in on the ground and they could see the damage caused by a growing feral animal population.
In the Kaimanawas DOC was flying hunters into areas they were not normally permitted to fly into, because the sika numbers were getting so high that in places there was no understorey in the bush, and the deer were skin and bones.
“They are working hard to control the numbers there to bring the balance back,” John said.
He said game management became part of DOC’s feral control measures after Tahr Mageddon in 2019.
DOC claimed the mountain goat numbers in the South Island high country were too high at about 35,000, well above the 10,000 DOC was comfortable with.
There were lawsuits, questions in the house and Forest & Bird took legal action to enforce a DOC cull.
“DOC wanted to annihilate the whole lot of them, but they were convinced hunters could help manage it. So they did some control work to bring the numbers down initially, and they were aiming to keep them around that 10,000 mark using hunters,” John said.
“Now hunters have to come on board. Where they are shooting they don’t just target the trophy bulls but try and take our some of the nannies as well. The less females there are, the less the numbers are going to come up.
“Same with the deer. Hunters are being encouraged to take hinds when they don’t have young ones at foot, to try and stop the breeding population from getting too big.
“Because obviously everybody knows if you have got a 100 hinds, you only need a couple of stags to service all of those hinds they will breed like anything. Whereas if you have only got 20 hinds in the area, the two stags will do their business but they are not going to have such an impact.”
There were also more hunters, he said.
“The cost of food is going up through the roof. They go out and shoot an animal because it’s cheaper than going to buy beef at the supermarket,” he said.
“On the flip side of that there is a lot of poaching happening as well. There doesn’t need to be.
“There’s so many deer around it doesn’t take much to go and find a deer in a legal place. But some people just don’t seem to worry about that.”
There were about 10,000 NZDA members at the moment, but about 250,000 licensed firearms owners in the country.
“There’s a lot of people who hunt who don’t belong to the association,” he said.
He didn’t know if DOC was going to be pinged for methane emissions from all the deer running round in the bush, but said there were a lot of smallish reserves down the North Island west coast.
There would be deer in all of them, adding to the country’s methane count. But the biggest control/management problem was goats.
“We’re running a HUNTS course at the moment, and part of that course is to take the participants away for the weekend, take them out and try and get them an animal,” John said.
“We’ve got a block that we are going onto – 17 one weekend, 13 the next.
“I would be very surprised if we don’t get them all a goat on this block. It’s just crawling with them.”
(In reply to a question, The Department of Conservation stated it does not collect information on how many deer and goats are present on the DOC estate.)
