New Zealand DIY Red Stag and Tahr
I’m currently sitting in the Christchurch airport. It’s raining pretty hard outside. I’m really hoping to leave on time. Thought this would be as good of a time as ever to start writing this. It was a fun hunt. I hope you enjoy reading it.
I came to New Zealand for the first time in 2018. I’ve only ever done 3 guided hunting trips. This was the first one I’d ever done. I shot a really nice big red stag. While I was hunting I became good friends with my guide, Heath, and I learned all about hunting in NZ. Before I left he even offered me a guiding job in NZ if I ever wanted one. During this trip is when I learned that a non resident can hunt public lands without a guide. A plan began to form in my head. After coming home I would message Heath every so often and ask him questions. He would always answer them to the best of his abilities.
Sometime around 2020 I became friends through Instagram with a kiwi named Barry. He reached out to me asking me questions about the Tikka rifle I built and we became friends conversing multiple times a week about hunting. We began discussing tahr hunting and he invited me to come hunting with him on public land. It took a while to plan and Covid definitely didn’t help but finally towards the end of 2022 we nailed down the dates that I’d be coming based on the tahr rut.
Barry, Mark (his father) and I would facetime every so often to get plans in place. I really wanted to red stag hunt too, so the plan was to fly into the mountains after tahr for 4-5 days then drive to a different town get in a different helicopter and head in to stag hunt. I booked my flight Charlotte-Houston-Auckland-Christchurch. I’d known this flight was coming so I’d saved airline points and I was able to cash them in on this flight (free flight, YES!!!). I got my paperwork in order and boarded the plan. A few days before departure Barry contacted me and let me know that they were calling for some absolutely awful weather in the tahr area wherewe were going so we would be going to hunt reds first. That’s fine with me. My preacher growing up always taught us to be flexible when we were on mission trips because plans would always change. I carried that over to normal trips too and I just go with the flow.
The 22+ hours of travel went off without a hitch until I arrived in Auckland. The weather was absolutely horrible. My flight to Christchurch was canceled, then canceled again, then canceled again. I was supposed to land in Christchurch at 9:15am. I finally arrived at 5:30pm. Oh well, you can’t control the weather. Barry and Mark had arranged a heli transport in to the deer and tahr areas. We were planning to get into the deer area on the day of my arrival but since I had all the delays we had to push it back a day. We left the house at 4am to be at the heli pad to take off at daylight.
My first helicopter ride was exciting but uneventful (just the way I like it). About 3 minutes after unloading the helicopter we saw 7 hinds and a decent stag (that was fast!). Barry was telling me to shoot. He said I could look for a bigger one later. I was borrowing a Tikka 270 that is identical to my 7mm08 so I was very confident with the rifle. I didn’t really know what to expect for stag size. I wanted to hold out for a good stag. I decided to not shoot. We set up our camp and let me tell you a helicopter can carry a lot a weight. We had plenty of stuff, lol.
After camp was set up we headed out to begin hunting. The stags were on the back side of the roar. The biggest stags had broken off but smaller/mid size stags were still with hinds. We started finding hinds and small to decent size stags. Plenty of 3x3s and 4x4s (Barry called them 6 pointers and 8 pointers). In my mind a traditional red stag is a 6x6 and that’s what I had in my mind. The giant stags that every one thinks about when they think of NZ are on farms and preserves. They just aren’t on public land. A 12 point stag on public is a very good stag. We only had 2 or 3 days so maybe it was a tall order, but I’m usually pretty good at hunting hard and finding good animals so I didn’t want to shoot something smallish. Mark told me when I saw something I liked to tell him and we’d shoot it.
We found stag after stag I kept holding out even passing a 8 point in easy rifle range. About 3:15 i glassed across a far ridge and saw a solo stag on his feet feeding. I knew immediately that was the one. He was definitely the biggest stag we’d seen on the trip. He was about 1200yds away so we made a plan to try to get close enough for a shot. The country we were hunting was very open, but eventually we got into position moving slowly and using the terrain the best we could. By the time we got into position the stag had bedded on a small rock ledge. I made a good 415yd shot. He rolled off the ledge. I put another one in him because he was still moving a little bit. He was a beautiful public land stag. Either 12 or 13 points (depending on who’s counting). We got him back to camp after dark.
The next day I headed out by myself. Barry wanted to hunt closer to camp and Mark hung back to hike up the ridge to contact the pilot to come pick us up that evening instead of the next day. We’d gotten word that the weather in the tahr area had cleared. Since I killed a good stag we decided to leave early to go tahr hunt. The pilot was coming at 5pm so I had from daylight until about 3pm to hunt. This would give me plenty of time to pack up my stuff before the pilot arrived. I hiked about a mile from camp to the end of a ridge to glass the rough country. I saw about 15 deer total. One was a great stag. He had 5 on his left. He was heavy and long. He was in a great location to stalk in close, but his right side was broken after his G2. Since I’d already killed a good stag I decided to let him go and I’ll try to shoot him when I go back in a couple years, haha. The pilot picked us up right on schedule and we loaded everything up to begin the 2hr drive to get to the town where the tahr portion of the hunt would take place.
IMG_6229.jpg
IMG_6227.jpg
IMG_6239.jpg
IMG_6242.jpg
IMG_6245.jpg
IMG_6248.jpg
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by JABIII
Bookmarks