A decent sika from a while ago..

Kushiro

Member
Hello all, I'm new here and not sure if I'm in the right place. I have been taking stags like this for a bit now. This guy is for sure not my biggest, but it is a decent pic anyway.
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Hi Kushiro

Your certainly in the right place to make some great friends and enhance your stalking knowledge ;)

Post up a bit about yourself in the introductions section

:eek: thats certainly a beauty..

Where abouts roughly did you take it?

ATB

Terry
 
I might be wrong but it looks like a Manchurian Sika and it looks like New Zealand :D

Nice trophy though. and as Stag1933 has already mentioned certainly looks in the gold medal class.

Sikamalc
 
Wow :eek:

Read the whole lot :eek:

Them boys have passed all the relevant qualifications in pro bickering...

Not a right friendly or welcoming atmosphere ;)
 
Cracking animal - but no way is it a Jap!

As for the thread :eek: - think I'll stick with SD .... at least the banter is (mostly) friendly ....
 
That AR forum has become a joke. Odd enough, it's the Americans that seem to get their feelings hurt the quickest.

Anyway, I have been shooting stags like that for a few years now. I honestly am not a sika expert, but I am pretty sure these are yesoensis subspecies. You can find many pictures on the net that you may have never seen by googling this エゾジカ, which simply means ezo shika. Ezo means Hokkaido, which is where these deer and I live. Shika means deer in Japanese, it's pronunciation is closer to "sika", and that's what they are called abroad. But it sounds funny for a Japanese person to hear the words "sika deer" as it sounds like "deer deer".

Here is another pic of a deer that I passed on for some odd reason, maybe it felt too easy.





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Sorry, I forgot the story of that first pic. It's hard to believe but that was about two in the afternoon. And yes, that is a form of bamboo. Unfortunately it is completely useless and covers much of the forest here. It can grow above a guys head and is very hard to hunt in. But as you can imagine, the deer love to live in it.

It had snowed the day before. I always love the snow because the tracks in it never lie. Driving down a podunk trail, I noticed the tracks of a group of stags going right down the road. The footprints showed the deer were relaxed and lazily browsing the edges. I guess they were just a few hundred yards in front of me because the tracks showed they took off running.

I stopped the truck and thought for a bit, then decided to back up to where I could sorta get off the trail and parked it. I quietly grabbed up my gun and pack and sneaked down the road. The wind was pretty good as I recall and I followed the winding road, slowly peeking around every corner. The deer had stopped running and were browsing again. This kept me on point the whole time. I couldn't have moved any slower, the whole time thinking that the deer are probably moving faster than me, and that I might not catch up to them. Maybe you know the feeling. But I knew that trail was a dead end and that at some point I had a chance of seeing something.

After what was probably two hours, I came up on the last corner, and there they were, standing at the old landing area for the logging that happened there decades ago. The deer had no idea of my presence. I stood behind the corner being nervous, wanting to peek at them again, but knowing better to. I got on the ground and crawled up the rut on the left side of the road, careful not to get snow up the barrel, which was in front of me. I saw three stags, two were real nice and I decided to go with the closest one. He was looking left and broadside, head down. I had him in the scope, probably 80 yards or so. Then the smaller one came up and locked horns with the stag I was about to shoot. They pushed each other in the snow a bit, then stopped, looking right at each other. I don't remember it clearly, but the gun went off and that stag reared straight up in the air like a wild stallion while letting out a death bawl, and came down and lunged forward into the brush. The other two stags came running straight down the road and passed me! I was still laying down, which was an interesting feeling. I watched them fly down the road behind me. Pretty cool. I got up and ran up to the stag and found him stone dead, shot in the neck.
Eric
 
Hi Kushiro
Nice account, really interesting to here about stalking in Japan, not an area that springs to mind when you think about overseas stalking.
It being the home of sika, i would guess, and the pics prove, you have some nice stags about.
Do you hunt any other species of deer or game?

Moose
 
I had heard about it my cousin who is now in NZ lived both in Japan and Korea previously, said it was dificult but not impossible to hunt as he also had friends that loved shooting, just required a lot more planning and I think I am right you need to go with "licensed"? operator.
I believe there is also game bird hunting in some regions.

I did actually read through the AR forum and felt you probably were a little blunt when the guys asked you a quite valid question, maybe a little more diplomacy would go down well if you want to avoid that situation again.

Very nice pics all the same.
 
Thos Sika are bloody huge, make my buggers look like they have a lot of growing to do. Never knew that about the "deer deer" thing, you learn something everyday.

I remember when you first posted on the AR and remember you got some flak then.

John
 
You're a very lucky man to be able to hunt in Japan.

It's my understanding that gun ownership is a very tightly regulated deal over there even more so than here in the UK.

My wife is from Tokyo and we go over to Japan about once a year and I've always wanted to try and tie in a bit of hunting but, it seemed like to us gaijin it was a bit of a closed shop.

Have you lived there a long time?

How did you get into it?

Were you stationed over there?

I understood that the Japanese goverment were concerned that the majority of hunters in Japan were not as young as they used to be and they were trying to encourage more young people to hunt deer as the population is rising all the time, is that true?

The "deer deer" thing is true, when I told my wife we were going to Ireland to hunt "Sika deer" she thought it was hilarious.

All the best
Moses
 
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