Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 57 - February/March 2017 i NZ Hunter

There was you and Jim and Robb. On arrival at the helicopter base, the pilot informed you it was too windy to fly so while you were waiting for the wind to drop, he spent a bit of time explaining some principles of flight and how a helicopter flies. He also answered some questions you had. Robb had never flown before and he wasn’t happy when he learned that rotor blades have tinfoil honeycomb sandwiched between two aluminum skins. IN THIS ARTICLE, I WILL DISCUSS FLIGHT OPERATIONS AND HOW THE WIND AFFECTS FLIGHT IN THE HILLS . I’ll also cover engine failures. So say we’re loaded up and in a 3 foot hover in calm conditions aligned with our departure path. After completing the pre take-off checks, ensuring all temperatures…

I hadn’t been into the area where I was heading for months because the hinds had been having fawns and the stags were in soft velvet. Besides, it had been just too hot for any big hunting missions that summer. I had planned a half-day hunt in an area that had a few good pigs and deer. There had been some OK stags there post-roar but they would have long since shed those antlers and now they should all have new headgear. As I rounded the last bend in the truck, the land before me was completely blanketed in heavy cloud. This would make hunting the open, broken country hard work but at least the easterly cloud would keep out the extreme January sun. When I got to my parking…

Before we start, I want to touch on the fact that many pig hunters seem to consider it to be a badge of honour to use rough gear. You don’t need to be like that. All a rough kennel or dog box says to me is that the dogs could be better looked after. And a rough rifle or one that’s not sighted in will eventually cost you pigs – or maybe even a dog. Not smart. HERE ARE THE MAIN BITS: DOG KENNELS You’re going to need a few of these. A good rule of thumb is to take the number you think you’ll need and add one or two more. » The box part should be big enough for the dog to comfortably stand up and turn around…

I would like to go a step further and suggest that as a hunter, you should not only check your eye performance but ask yourself whether you know the process of seeing. I’m not expert enough to fill you in on the science of the route that the image your eyes receive takes to form the picture you see but I would like to share some interesting information I have come across over the years, from a hunter’s perspective. I have had a number of experiences that led me to ask myself ‘How the hell did that happen?!’ Most traumatic was an incident in the 1960-70s era. I was spotlighting when I saw three stags on a swede paddock. When I went to retrieve them after shooting them, I…

For some time the only aftermarket stock option available was the heavy and not particularly rigid chopped strand composite by Bell&Carson, but recently we've seen some other options, including a super lightweight and strong carbon fibre option ideal for hunting rifles. There have also been the aluminium chassis stocks available in the USA, although not many have made it to New Zealand. With the popularity of the AR type looking tube guns like the recently reviewed Ruger Precision Rifle, it is great to see a locally made chassis stock is now available for Tikkas. DPT Machinists should need no introduction to New Zealand shooters and hunters, with Darren’s well-made, affordable modular cans taking a large share of the suppressor market. Recently Darren has been working on an alloy chassis stock…

We knew that after the pressure of the silly season, the stags would be feeding up hard before the chill of winter drove them out of the tussock country. The chosen destination was ‘top of the south’ tussock country and I had enlisted the help of a good keen man by the name of Simon Buschl to come with me. This was the first time we’d be hunting together, so we’d hatched a plan a few days before. With the help of some maps and wams.org.nz (the walking access mapping system website) we chose a decent-looking spot for a campsite up in a big top basin, where we wouldn’t disturb the area we wanted to hunt. With high hopes, we started our journey on a Friday night, talking of past…

We were going to try to fill the youth antlerless Elk tag that Jax was fortunate enough to get in a special draw. This is the ‘boring’ part of the story, but it’s important that folks know that shots like these are not at all ‘lucky’ shots. A tremendous amount of effort, work, learning, practice and preparation is behind each and every shot like this. The 338 Edge that Jax was shooting is a wildcat chambering based on the 300 Remington Ultra Magnum (RUM) case as a ‘parent’ case. That 300 RUM case is ‘necked up’ to 338 calibre from 308. (In this case, I ‘necked down’ 375 RUM brass.) Then, I’ve got it pushing the 300 grain Berger Elite Hunter bullet at a moderate and very consistent 2720 feet…

The cold weather has also brought a sense of excitement to camp – who will hear the first roar of the season?! It’s all stag prep and strategy chat now; how can we best position our trap lines to get in some roar hunts after work when the stags start to kick off? It’s mid-March and I’m the most involuntarily fit I have ever been in my life. You really have no choice: you can either sit in the hut and be bored or get out and shake ya money maker. Work is becoming the ‘same sh*t, different day’, so I’ve started to conveniently place possum bodies in handy spots, creating an all-you-can-eat-at-Valentines buffet for pigs. It doesn’t take long for them to get a whiff of the delicious rotting…

I liked the story but the best thing about well written articles like this is the positive discussion it creates and that’s very healthy for the Wapiti herd, which is even better. In this article I’m going to touch on the subject of the bull (let’s call him the ‘2016 bull’) that was shot in this article from the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation’s (FWF) perspective. The FWF is judged by hunters for just about everything we do; comments are mostly positive, but some are not so good. Most seasoned Wapiti hunters will agree the Wapiti experience is the best hunting experience in town and most of the negativity is based around this: hunters cannot get enough of the place and opportunities for people wanting to hunt the area are suffering because…

With only a few days available in my calendar, and as bleak as the weather looked, I still figured I’d catch a chamois on the tops in a sheltered hollow. Animals still had to eat, right? But, I was heading for a battering…and more training in the school of hunting! Metvuw is an annoying website. Clicking on the seven or ten day wind and rain charts just showed band after band of fronts – racked and stacked – and they seemed to intensify around the days I was hoping to get on the hill. Sometimes it seems better not to know. I was going anyway. I needed the hill time. I was away real early and after an hour’s drive was ascending a leading spur in a rapid dash for…

We have reviewed some of their clothing and their packs previously, but we’ve also been testing their tents for the last six months. As with all Kuiu gear, performance for weight is the number one design criteria, and all their tents are at the lower end of the weight spectrum for their application. ULTRA STAR 1P Starting with the Ultra Star 1 person, this tent really intrigued me. Weighing just 680gms/24oz, this is one seriously lightweight tent! There are no poles supplied with it which obviously keeps the weight down, but it only uses just one pole anyway, which needs to be about 44 inches/112cm long. The idea is you use your telescoping/ folding adjustable walking pole, but most standard length rifles work just fine as a pole (BushPigs are…

Tim Robertson and I have hunted most, if not all, of the major catchments on the Canterbury side of the Alps for tahr. Each winter over the past 25-odd years, we did an annual trip south. This summer in mid-February, I decided to do something about the big South Island stags that had been playing on my mind. I did my homework, leafing through the pages of some of Bruce Banwell’s great ‘NZ Deer Heads’ books to narrow down some spots that had produced good heads in the past. After a 6am ferry sailing, I drove south and surprised myself by making the big Canterbury riverbed several hours before dark. Dropping my tyre pressures and hooking up my snorkel under the bonnet with duct tape, I got into the…

The next morning we drove around the Crown Range rather than over the top to avoid the snow on the pass so we’d make the scheduled helicopter flight at 10am. We got there in good time and had a yak with some of the other ballot block holders, one of whom had been in the block where we were waiting for the chopper. As we were talking to him, another hunter walked out of the block right in front of us. He was completely oblivious to the existence of the ballot system on the West Coast – unbelievable. I hoped we weren’t going to have the same problem. After a good flight in, the slog began and it didn’t let up for quite a few hours. My knees are something…

Our VW Amarok powered towards the Inland Patea. Visibility in the headlights improved as the rain slowly receded to drizzle and the sky turned from black to the grey of a new dawn. That was the second good thing about the day after getting Emma out of bed and on the road – the wind wasn’t blowing a gale! Those of you who have hunted stags in the bush will know that swirling wind can be your biggest enemy. Light wind and misty drizzle are almost perfect conditions as the bush floor is quieter to stalk on and your scent isn’t as strong on the breeze. And those were the conditions we had as we stalked up the big podocarp-covered ridge, Emma cradling her trusty 308 Bushpig while I tried…

EVENTUALLY THE TERRIFIC HUNTING STARTED TO SLOW UP SO IT WAS TIME TO PUT A BIG EFFORT INTO FINDING THE OWNER. Normally I don’t bother chasing anything else but ducks during May, June and July but the chance of a catch-up with Noid and the opportunity to hunt on some really cool private land made me break the rules. As we neared home, Noid informed me of a good mob of Mallards he’d spotted on his way to an out-of-town job. Since it wasn’t far out of our way and it was still duck season in the south, it wasn’t hard for us to take a bit of a detour. As we passed a dairy shed, the sight of a big flock of ducks lined up in the sun on…

As we said last time, the “Back” command is for sending your dog on a blind (unsighted) or distant retrieve from by your side. It is also used to direct a dog on a straight away bird, after whistle sitting it to take a new direction. The “Over” command is to send the dog at right angles to the direct line between you and it, again mainly after a whistle sit. Teaching the initial “Back” is fairly straight forward. While the dog is sitting by your side and looking ahead, get someone to throw a bird that ends up out of sight around 80 metres away. Initially you want the dog to see the fall of the bird and mark it, so it knows where to head. While the dog…