Team member hunts

The start of winter brings with it high levels of anticipation, chasing rutting bull Tahr and Chamois. Jarrod was lucky enough to sneak two winter Tahr hunts in, both down on the West Coast. The first trip was in early May. He was invited in by some good lads Jack and Maddo. With not much snow around, it made for pretty good hunting conditions. He flew into one of the Tahr ballot blocks with Fox/Franz Heli. If you guys are after any information on flying into the West Coast, talk to these guys. They know the area like the back of their hand.

With five days of planned hunting and the forecast looking pretty good, the plan was to try and locate some big old scrub bulls. The days of shooting Bulls for their horn length has somewhat changed. With the DOC culls taking a toll on the Tahr heard, more emphasis must be put on the age of the bulls rather than horn length. So we set out to try and locate some age rings. Although finding scrub bulls didn't turn out the way we expected, we soon realized that most of the Tahr were up relatively high still with the minimal snow about.

The binoculars soon started to be directed up into the bluffs, and it didn't take long to start finding Tahr. Jarrod went on a solo mission on day three, climbing up high up one side of the block. With low cloud rolling in and out, it was tough going to get a good view up into the bluffs. Once the cloud broke, it had some pretty unreal scenes. A nice red Stag, some Chamois and bull Tahr were seen all on one face, one bull stood out has he come within about 30 meters, he was a nice old Bull with broomed back horns, this is the kind of bull which is never going to be anything special. Late evening Jarrod had a nice old bull on the deck. The highlight of the day, though, was seeing an epic old stag way in Tahr country. With the stag well in range, the only shooting was done via the cameras as the brute of a stag slowly wandered off into the cover of the west coast scrub.