Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game New Zealand Thar Hunt

A couple of years ago, a mate of mine (George) was sitting in Abu Dhabi airport waiting for a connecting flight back to New Zealand. In amongst all the foreign voices he picked up one with a Kiwi accent.

He had a few hours to kill, so sat down beside the other Kiwi bloke (Russell) and introduced himself. They got on real well, and soon learned that both of them were keen hunters. Russell is from the South Island, and offered to organise a Thar trip into the Southern Alps if George could organise a Fallow Deer hunt in the North Island.

"No worries" says George, who gives me a ring when he gets home and last November saw the three of us hunting Fallow Deer in the Wanganui River region.

We had sort of forgotten about Russell's offer when he rang up George last March and told us to book our plane tickets, the Thar trip was on.

So at the end of April George and I were flying from Hamilton (North Island) to Christchurch (South Island). Russell picked us up from the airport, we stayed the night at his place and next day we are heading south for a five day / four night Thar hunt.

The helicopter ride was fun (but then again they always are), and the four of us (including Russell's son Greg) were soon unloading tons of gear into an old musterers hut which was to be our home for the next four nights. Russell had hunted this area before, but mainly in November / December so we weren't sure what would be happening at this time of year.

George and I were keen, and as we had a couple of hours of light left we decided to have a quick look around. We went down river from the hut, and then up a big side stream. You may note that the word 'UP' gets used a bit in this story, there was to be quite a lot of 'UP' over the next few days (one of the disadvantages in being based on the river).

Glassing a big tussock face a mile or so away with the light fading, George says "There's one, no two..., three..., four!" Four Red deer (one stag and three hinds) were grazing across the face. This would be a bit of a bonus we thought, and headed in their direction. Unfortunately the light beat us, but it was nice to know that there was some venison around.

To be continued...

Here's the hut...