Issue 112 - April May |
On Sale Monday 30th March

By the time you read this the first period Wapiti ballot will be done and dusted and the Red roar will be starting to get into full swing

We didn’t get a ballot yet again – sob – but that’s not all bad as we get more time to concentrate on finding a big old stag from either of the two heritage Red deer herds – the Rakaia and the Otago/Highland herd. The huge increase in WARO this year will mean a lot of areas are pretty lean on the Red stag front – except for a small number of over populated back country areas where the deer are so small the WARO guys don’t bother to hunt there much. Sika and Fallow are not affected by WARO, so those middle to late April hunting opportunities should still be great – depending on the weather of course!

It’s been a pretty wet summer at times over most of the country, so duck numbers are looking pretty reasonable on the whole, although Southland doesn’t seem to have the bumper population of last year. Unfortunately as I write this ECAN has made the decision to open Lake Ellesmere to the sea, which is not good for all us shooters on the “Big Ellie”. There are good numbers on the Lake at the moment but a lot will leave when they drain the Lake and the water retreats from the vegetative margins and we end up with large mud/sand flats around the majority of the edges. Birds moving inland may help the prospects of the pond/irrigation dam and river shooters though, so every cloud has a silver lining for someone!

The summary of submissions are in on the Wapiti and Sika herd HOSI proposals. The good news is way more than half of all submissions were in favour of both HOSIs. DOC will now analyse those submissions, and the Minister will make his decision as to whether to designate those HOSIs or not. The next decision is under the legislation who should be the agency to delegate the management/oversee the Foundations implementing the HOSIs. It is simply common sense that it should be the same agency/s doing the same things for both to save doubling up on bureaucracy and wasting hunters and tax payers’ money. There is going to be two parts to HOSI implementation – the biodiversity outcomes, and the herd and hunter management outcomes. It makes perfect sense to me that DOC should be the one implementing gathering the data to set the biodiversity outcomes, and the GAC through the Foundations should be the one managing the herd and hunter outcomes. In both these cases these are the “experts” in each of these fields, and the ones who have the social licence with the respective sectors to be successful. We need to take as many people on both sides of the conservation/hunting spectrum along as possible, to give the HOSI some security and longevity. The outcomes themselves will have to be agreed upon by all parties, and set for a reasonable number of years so the process can’t be thrown out by a change of government or other political agendas. This doesn’t mean the actual outcome levels to be achieved cannot be changed by agreement from year to year as more science/information is gathered – that’s simply best practice adaptive management.

Hopefully the Minister will take advice from the sector and not just from the Department on these important decisions. There is certainly a degree of vested interest by DOC in keeping and growing their hunting and fishing bureaucracy that is not in the best interests of those affected hunters and fishers due to the legislation that DOC must operate under. It is high time for some truly pragmatic legislatively backed hunter lead management of these resources – managing the right animals in the right places for the right reasons.