It’s been a real mixed bag of a roar this year, with La Nina fading and repeated Westerly weather fronts bringing more bad weather than good - especially in the South Island – the complete opposite to last year!

The roaring has been very patchy and localised as well in most areas. This has no doubt saved a few trophies in remote areas as the weather hasn’t been conducive to covering large amounts of country, and it’s been pretty quiet and harder to find the mature stags unless you struck it lucky. The odd good head has still been shot, but not in the numbers of Roar 2022 that’s for sure.

We are now three months into our flood recovery and still have at least that many to go before we get the paddocks clear and clean enough that we can contemplate planting something again, and we haven’t even started on the house and building repairs. But we have managed to squeeze in a couple of film trips with some good success, especially on Sika – so there will be another season of the TV Show next year!

We are now able to release the results of the LandCare camera trial on the efficacy of the new ProDeer deer repellent verses the existing Epro EDR. This trial was commissioned by OSPRI and run over several months before and after the Kaweka Aerial 1080 operation last September. They installed trail cameras in the southern block which had the ProDeer, the northern block which had EDR, and a control block to the west which had no 1080 applied. The results were that deer abundancy was the same before and after the 1080 operation in the block that had ProDeer repellent bait. This is very pleasing as the EDR has largely been phased out and ProDeer is the only current deer repellent solution going forward. Another big plus of the ProDeer is that it is incorporated right throughout the bait, not just applied to the outside just before being aerially distributed like the EDR. Quite a number of dead deer were observed in the EDR block after the drop and we think that was because the heavy rain straight after the drop washed the deer repellent off but wasn’t enough to wash the toxin out of the bait. No dead deer were observed in the ProDeer block – again, a very pleasing result. Now we just need to sort out the issue with kea and deer repellent and we’ll then have a viable option to protect vulnerable deer herds right throughout the country, while an alternative to aerial 1080 is found.

Well done to the GAC for the up and coming launch of their “Better Hunting” program – a safety and education program to ensure the sport of hunting continues into the future. This will also be great for hunters “social licence”, to enable the public to see all the good things that the majority of hunters do instead of reporting just the bad done by the minority. See page 99 for more details.

Make sure you keep the weekend of 1st and 2nd of July free to get on down to Te Anau for the FWF’s Winter Wapiti Weekend. There is a range of antler, horn and tusk, and photographic competitions, and seminars on a range of topics by the experts in their various fields. The Wapiti documentary “Beyond the Odds” we have been filming and producing for the FWF will also be showing at the Te Anau Fiordland Cinema.

Go to the FWF website for more information. The NZ Hunter team will be there presenting and supporting, so we hope to see you all there!!

In this issue:

• Into The Thick Of It – West Coast Red Stag with Dave Greig
• Rueben Jones ‘Out The Back of Nowhere’
• The Measure of a Man – Wilderness Tahr by Dan Lovett
• Manahau Rusa – a 143DS Urewera stag by Caleb Archer
• How Big is that Bull? By Tim Butcher
• Things A Hunter Must Know Part 3 – Survival by Mike Spray
• An Unforgettable First Chamois by Steph Pennycock
• Mitch Thorn – Chasing Game and Chasing Weather
• Part 5 of the Bush Piglet series – Going Lightweight
• Trust The Dog by Dono Gibbs
• Gun Cleaning - by Luke Care and Greg Duley
• Keeping The Faith – Pighunting with Jonathan Fulton
• Tahr Ballot Blocks – Teichelmann Creek
• Jacko Flat Hut  – RemoteHuts
• Game Animals of NZ – Franco Formisano and the NZDA
• Keen Young Lads – 15” Archery tahr by Jonathan Spence
• Gaining Access and how to keep it by Corey Carston
• Cumberland Sausage by Richard Hingston

Test Fires: We evaluate...

• Ridgeline 4k Trail Camera