Very nice Muzza but it look's tooooo cold for me so I will have to decline the invite but thank's anyway

Just back from a two day goat culling exercise in the central North Island . The property we were culling on is about 8000 acres of steep hills and some better country , but was hammered in the February storm and many of the tracks are in a bad way . The guys who have just taken over management of the property are about to rebuild it as a sheep and beef unit so the goats - and there are thousands - have to go .

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Seven guys hunted all day Saturday and accounted for over 200 goats confirmed killed , these were groups of from 2 - fifty at a time . ranges in the vicinity of two hundred meteres were "normal" , some shots at over three hundred or more . Most of the shooting was over gullies and from one side of the valley to another , makes for very interesting times.

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Lots of places on the tracks needed some carefull manouvering to get over or around the slips , this one needed some shovelling and aa bit of pushing to safely get over the mud pile .
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This is a bit nervewracking on the side of a 1200 foot hillside with a near vertical drop below.....but kiwis have nerves of steel mostley..


Also saw some Fallow Deer , but the rules were to leave the deer alone or you dont come back , so the deer lived for next time . Once the goats have been reduced to much lower levels the deer numbers will be assessed and we will be able to selectively cull out a deer now and then . No idea of the trophy potential of this small herd but time will tell.

This sort of terrain is typical central North Island fallow country , scrubby margins and lots of clearings . Fallow deer live happily alongside farming and this is a prime example of that , it just happens to be hard to access for most people .

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Apologies for the large image size , I did try and make them smaller but obviously dont know enough about that yet .
No photos of dead goats , mostly they were too far away or they were way down or up the hill . Very few were easily accessed at all . I do hope to have a picture of a Fallow deer that one of the other guys took to post later .

Hi Muzza,

beautiful country!! Lots of 'up and down', but not much 'across' - great stuff! Be interesting to see how the fallow develop.

Muzza,what are the palm looking trees called?
They look like our Cycads(Blackboys)