Story: Game birds
Page 3 – Canada geese
Hunting Canada geese in the South Island’s high country is a sport for the fit and hardy. Dedicated hunters can be very successful when their hunts are co-ordinated.
Game bird or pest?
Geese can be a pest to farmers because they eat feed intended for stock. Keeping the birds’ numbers down is a challenge for Fish and Game New Zealand (which has a statutory mandate to manage game-bird hunting), which must co-ordinate hunting efforts and respond to farmers’ complaints. Hunters have first priority. However, if they are unsuccessful in keeping bird numbers down, geese may be culled from helicopters, or on the ground when they moult (the birds are briefly flightless as they replace flight feathers). Geese are often culled where they gather in large numbers, such as on the shores of Te Waihora (Lake Ellesmere).
Molesworth Station hunts
Since the late 1980s, Fish and Game New Zealand has organised wild goose hunts on Molesworth Station in southern Marlborough three times a year. These involve up to 260 hunters, usually in small groups, spread around the Marlborough high country for four-day stints. Almost all the station is at altitudes of 1,000 metres or higher. Most groups are self-sufficient, and sometimes camp in inhospitable heat or cold. Successful goose-hunters use a variety of techniques, including goose calls, decoys, camouflage and teamwork.
Giving them a lead
When shooting at flying birds
hunters must swing their shotgun in an arc that follows the flight path
and then overtakes it, to shoot at where the birds are going to be, not
where they are. One hunter wrote, ‘I know of some shooters who have
taken years to realise that, especially with the longer shots, you have
to lead them by the length of a farm gate. Over the years I have missed
plenty of birds behind but I can’t recall having ever missed one by
shooting too far in front.’
Long days
Goose hunters’ days start before dawn, when they climb to positions that the birds may fly past at first light. After an early shoot, the hunters return to camp for breakfast, then may walk more than 20 kilometres, sometimes at 1,800-metre altitudes, in gullies where small mobs of geese may be found. They then stalk the birds through thickets of spiky matagouri or briar rose, trying to get close enough to shoot them in flight, or cause them to fly within range over the hunting party.
Back at camp, hunters snatch a quick meal, then set up decoys to entice flying birds to land in rivers or tarns at dusk. Then it is time for supper and bed, before starting it all again the next day.
Overall the hunts are highly rewarding, with each hunter usually bagging four to eight geese per trip.
