Report from December 2006.

I popped out for a day hunt on Christmas Eve and saw 3 good stags. One was going to grow into an 11pointer, and the other two were going to grow into VERY big 8pointers

Here is the 11pointer, he was a healthy looking stag - we are 229m from them at this point.

The front one is a very wide 8pointer, the one in the background behind in the scrub is the other VERY wide 8pointer. Both of these stags will grow into very nice trophy animals give them a couple of years :)

I wonder what these stags will be like in a few years time =) Only time will tell!

Report from Janurary 2006.

Popped out for another day hunt with Andre Alipate and Wade Robertson and covered some nice red deer country. Wade setup camp and stayed overnight, while Andre and I just accompanied him for the day.

Spotted a yearling hind feeding down in a beautiful tussock gut, so dropped down into shooting range as Wade and Andre were both dead keen to put one on the deck. At this stage we had only seen half of the tussock, so there may in fact have been other animals out of sight.

She kept feeding up towards us and looked to be quite a lean yearling... We all didn't think she had a fawn so Wade put her down at 230m with a beck shot from the 243.

Upon closer inspection her teets were NOT swollen nor did they have any milk - but what surprised us was after we had dressed out the yearling, some 40minutes later as we were heading out of the gut, we stumbled across a fawn sitting in the tussock.

There were fresh tracks in the soils and clay pans around the fawn but it was hard to tell whether these were from the yearling hind, or whether there was another hind that was obscured by the spur in front of us. Nonetheless, I packed the fawn [stag] out. He is in the backyard now and will rear him up until he's fully weaned and will either release him, or put him on a farm to see what his antler growth is like :) He shouldn't be too bad being a rakaia descendant.

And here is the wee fella back at the flat. At the time when Wade found him we were talking and laughing about the movie Nacho Libro, so in the moment we named him Nachooooo, ha. Guess you had to be there