NZ DOC DIY

glass_eye

Active Member
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373
I'll get this party started.
Back in '07 I had planned on hunting New Zealand but my passport was greatly delayed due to CBP requiring everybody to have a passport for entering Mexico. This created an enormous backlog and by the time I recieved it the ticket prices had doubled.
I then set aside the idea because I wanted to hunt as much as possible with my teenage kids while I still had them at home.
Now they are gone and I have an empty nest. So I pulled the trigger and bought tickets for myself and a friend. At $982 after all taxes, LAX to Christchurch, I think that was a great deal.
Our plan is to hunt for tahr and chamois in the alps and time permitting, waterfowl. We will be hunting DIY on public land (DOC) backpacking up to the tahr (no helicopters) and staying until we harvest or time runs out (2weeks)
We will be hunting May 13-28 but that will be like November in the Canadian Rockies. We will be using vintage 1970's jansports because they can carry it all and then some. A couple of weeks ago I was in a mountaineering store and I saw this new "old" pack for sale, the D2 "Retro" back by popular demand.
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Started out against the advise of my kiwi host. Weather forecast was looking bad but we wanted to get the party started. HIGH WINDS and frigid temps rolling in. We were searching for tahr.
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We next went up a different drainage that was a little lower in elevation but still held tahr. We found skeletons of culled animals; wallaby, chamois, and tahr. The skeletons were intact because there are no predators to scatter them.
I kicked up a wallaby from his bed and fired 3 quick off-hand shots, missed all 3 times. I suck at off-hand shots.

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Our first night was like being in a hurricane. In the morning we tried to continue on but the winds were so strong it was knocking us off our feet as we teetered on a knife-ridge. So we went back down until the storm passed.
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The following morning I glassed up a tahr near the summit and it took us nearly the entire day to reach his level. On the way up the vertical sides, a huge boulder was jarred loose by some tahr and it bounced right down the scree that were were ascending. Scary stuff !
At the top, we circled the summit but found that the tahr had moved to the other side of the drainage and too far to make a move on with the little amount of light that remained so we descended the treacherous scree. The next day we called our kiwi friend to come pick us up so that we could tend to our tahr and start the export permit process that can take up to a week to recieve the permit.
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The next day I glassed up some tahr from below and it took a few hours to reach them. When we got to our planned sniper's roost, we saw no tahr so we waited a while to see if they would show themselves. The sun was going down fast (short days, it's winter there) so we decided to make something happen, but after only advancing about 100 yards or less, a bull tahr chased 2 nannies around the corner and right to us. My friend "Doc" center punched him off-hand at 90 yards.
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On our final day, I searched for the only duck that I hadn't shot and it was it on my hit list; the NZ Shoveler. I found several near the ocean on fresh water lakes. But alas ! they were out of range. I had huge rafts of NZ Scaup swimming around me and I had hoped that they would lure in the spoonies. In time I'm sure it would have worked, but we were out of time.
ps. the NZ Scaup is a protected species, so is their teal
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Next we caught a shuttle back to Christchurch and rented a car so that we could start the waterfowl stage of our hunt. We started the export permit proccess and hooked up with another kiwi who's a hard-core fowler.
We followed the caravan of decoys up to the foot of Arthur's pass where we had permission to hunt a ranch that was plagued with honkers. There's no limit on honkers in NZ and prior to our arriving, our kiwi host and his friend killed 90 between them in a single day. That wasn't the case this time. Our orders were to pass on all birds the 1st day except for honkers. It was tough watching all the Paradise Shelducks buzzing our decoys and not being able to shoot them. However, the following morning the orders were to "shoot everything"
My first 3 "parries" as the kiwi's call them, were males. The hen's have the white head.

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The next day we hunted a private farm pond for parries and mallards and pukekos. We capped off the morning with a Black Swan hunt where the river runs into the ocean.
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