Thought I’d write up the experience I’ve had with the new Howa Varminter 6.5 Creedmoor these last few days, and describe the environment and what we get up to in the Manawatu-Whanganui region of the central North Island. It’s a long, warm summer evening, solar power in the cabin, me and two worn out Staffies and a cold ale or three. All the jobs are done, so here goes.
NB! This is way too long. Give yourself a couple of days. Or give up now! See notes towards the end about being rained in. You have been warned.
Background to the requirement
After a red spiker cull in August, a step taken by the locals to ward off pressure from the Department of Conservation (DOC), I realised I needed a new rifle to step up my normal hunting ranges into proper “medium” range, further than what I shoot with my .243 Win and .308 Win. For lighter framed deer, which is mostly what we hunt (yearlings, young dry hinds, spikers) the .243 is energy limited to around 350m, fallow it will still drop easily a ways past that. The .308 is scope limited. It wears a Zeiss Duralyt with the #6 Plex reticle, set up to shoot MPBR. I don’t like using a Plex reticle to holdover as it’s too imprecise. But it’s very good for point and shoot type hunting where you can run into a deer suddenly and time is not on your side. Generally speaking, I use the .243 in open country from good vantage points where I have a lot of time to set up the shot, and the .308 in closer, scrubby or wooded country. I could have just put a different scope on the .308, but it’s not got the barrel contour I need, more on that later.
The objective was to build a rifle / cartridge / scope combo that would enable hunting between 300-700m or thereabouts. Primary target species: smallish reds, fallow, goats and occasionally pigs. The properties here (sheep and cattle farms) are all carrying way too many deer and goats, and accessing the animals for sub-300m shooting can be very hard in the most densely populated areas, due to the terrain.
The properties in question ring a region of heavily forested hills running ~15km along a N-S ridge, of variable width but typically 4-6km; this area falls under DOC. This bush block is landlocked by the private properties on all sides; this means that there is no public access to the conservation land without a permit from one of the adjacent landowners. And access agreement permits to the bush will never be granted, to anyone. Whilst the conservation land is nominally managed by the DOC, in practice they have very little to do with it other than poison it periodically.
What this all means is that high numbers of red deer, goats and pigs bed down in the bush block and come out onto the farms to browse and graze. There has been a dramatic increase in honey money here, so all the farms have allowed the manuka scrub to regrow across the uppermost paddocks to feed the bees, so there are a great many scrubby gullies and wide swathes of manuka interspersed with lush grass clearings. It’s perfect deer and goat habitat. The fallow inhabit the lower elevations and will stay in smaller bush blocks on the private land if they don’t get much pressure, preferring not to move around. The reds move quite far, and retreat to the upper bush blocks above ~500m most nights. Here’s a picture of typical red deer habitat and a hunting scenario that would require a bankable 500m rifle shooting a 130-150gr pill.
(Sorry for the crappy picture off the phone, in the rain.)
These two hinds were very shootable, the wind was directly into my face at a steady 6km/h. Access to bone them out would have been the very long way round, but possible, from the boundary down. You can’t get across the stream at the bottom of the face as there’s an 8-10m sheer vertical drop to the water. That’s typical in this area – it’s soft muddy limestone country and the streams erode treacherously deep ravines that have claimed many a pig dog and the odd unwary hunter over the years.
To get closer to these hinds in the interests of “sporting chance” would 90% of the time result in being seen, heard or winded – the winds swirl around the gullies and will be in your face one moment, in your back the next. And time is always short – to get round to a potential sub-200m shot on foot would probably take an hour plus of hard yakka one way, with usually 2-3 creek crossings and extremely steep, dangerous, slippery sections of dense bush thickets. The best bet is to quad bike to a high point and assess options from there, walking the ridgelines to the saddles for the best vantage points. Once you’ve parked up and secured the dogs, expect to walk 5-10km, you’ll need to open up those lungs for the long, ball-busting 1:3 and steeper climbs. On this saddle, where the photo was taken, the wind is consistent, measureable and generally quite reliable, so you can stay out of earshot, sight and smell of usually glass high numbers of reds and goats.
For meat hunting, animal selection will be based on age, gender, fawn dependency and most important of all, where it is located. If you can’t get to it, don’t shoot it. You need to know the land – if it’s a new area, looking at a gradient from a perpendicular angle across the gully, it’s very hard to judge how steep the opposing face is. Many times when goat shooting I have been surprised by how far they tumble, sometimes a 100m in elevation on a clear face. You don’t want tumbling deer! To counter the threat of runners, the best shooting positions are the ones where you have a wide field of view from slightly above the animal, on more open grassy faces. You want to watch the bullet strike, the usually very short journey to the Pearly Gates, to where it drops and then what happens next… does it stay right there, slide down a bit, or tumble? A spotter is handy for this task – ranging, observing and calling the wind. Shooting a lot with my neighbour, and my missus, we have got this kind of shooting worked out pretty well where ranges don’t much exceed 350m. With a waterproof notebook dope sheet in 10m intervals we can range / call / adjust elevation as the animals are on the move, all the while keeping the target animal in the scope’s field of view, hitting it the very moment it stops in a good position. A quality tilting and swivelling bipod is a good accessory to have, along with high levels of tolerance for lying in the mud, wet grass and thistles for extended periods.
This kind of central North Island scenario is why deer shooting is commonly undertaken at much longer ranges than in woods and fields of England, or the open Scottish Highlands. In the regions where the hills top out in bush below ~800m, the severity of the gradients and deep gullies covered in impenetrable thickets make close stalking pretty much impossible. It is precisely because of the severity of these environments that they make ideal deer, goat and pig habitat – they are hard to get to. Above 800m in this region and you break out into sub-alpine tussock, and on up into rocky snow country. That area lies just to the east of us around Mt. Ruapehu.
The one important thing to emphasise is time. We hunt like this with time on our side. There are no hurried shots. Blokes that are used to hunting on the knife edge of adrenalin and excitement after hours painstakingly stalking an animal… they get a bit bored with what we do after a while. All the range checking, consulting tables of numbers, smart phone apps, waiting for the wind… it all requires time. And at least 50% of the time the shot is canned at the last minute anyway as the animal is partially obscured, or standing wrong, or something else comes into view that requires assessment.
In lower country on both private and public land, on the river flats and surrounding rolling hills, close stalking is common and popular. A lot of low grade land that was cleared in the earlier days has been let go and returned to patchy scrub, and a fair amount has been absorbed into conservation estate. Manuka honey has brought a new lease of life to some of the poor quality, lower elevation country around here. What were smaller, marginal sheep farms are now mixed dry stock at much lower stocking rates, with lots of hives, and frequently a single owner / worker who lives in town and has another job. Trying to control the scrub is often just too hard for the lone farmer in wet hill country like this, once it’s got a foot hold, he’s on a hiding to nothing. The upside for the deer hunter is that this kind of land makes for the best traditional stalking country, as it is easy to get around on foot and you’re not far from access points for quads, ATVs or 4WDs. On productive properties adjacent to wild open country, if the owner has made the decision to harbour deer, there will be heaps of fallow plus some lowland reds, usually hinds and young stags. We don’t have sika over this side, and the sambar population (small in New Zealand) is a little to the south of here. There’s a very popular NZ YouTube channel that is filmed in this kind of lower country in the foothills of the Ureweras, on the other side of the central North Island from here.
The following photo is a classic close stalking environment in the lower country adjacent to our block. It’s a failed farm that’s now a small DOC block, teeming with deer, goats and pigs. There are two ways to hunt it: walk very quietly, or sit and wait. Walking, it’s easy to take multiple goats, they are so oblivious. It is fantastic bow hunting country for goats. For deer it’s probably too hard for good quality stalking, there are better places higher up where the scrub transitions to woods and it’s more open.
The most productive way to hunt this area is to scout it the day before and look at the sign, working out what’s goat and what’s deer, and how big, then pick the most likely game trails heading down from the bush into the clearings. Find a suitable location to watch these clearings in the evening with the wind in mind (difficult) and 9 times out of 10 you’ll go home with a deer. Usually a yearling that’s been kicked out by its mother, and yet to learn the essential survival skill of resisting the open green clearings until after dark. I took this photo in the middle of the day, scouting, and about 5 minutes later walked right into a large red stag browsing in a cool glade in the shade. He’s a well-known beast, very heavy in the body with reliable 20-22 points every year, he’s in velvet now. He’s been a keeper for a few years, we’ve been trying to protect him from being shot by chasing him out of the DOC block, not that the public are actually allowed to hunt it. However, he is starting to become a liability… he’s been observed rounding up large harems and fending off good quality younger stags, but due to his weight he struggles to mount the lighter hinds, and on this trip we have noticed that there’s a fair few dry hinds in the big boy’s area of influence. So it might be time soon to send him on his way. The arrow at the top of the hill is where he likes to roar from when he starts up in April.
However, all this comes with a conundrum. If the landowners don’t control red deer and goat numbers, then the control will be taken out of our hands by DOC and (a) the helicopters will be called in to deal to the deer, and (b) there’s a higher likelihood of more 1080 poison drops into the bush blocks. We despise 1080, it is a curse and kills pretty much everything, targeted or not. DOC says it’s just for the possums, that’s bollox. It’s for everything introduced. So it’s imperative that deer populations are not allowed to get away on us, plus, in terms of paid hunts it’s in our interest obviously to control the males to promote the best heads. Personally, I’m not interested in trophies. I far prefer nurturing and watching the really big boys. When they get too old, heavy and impotent, that’s the time to take them out. Two of the six private properties bordering the conservation bush land conduct guided trophy and meat hunting.
When goat hunting, with the usual light-contour barrelled sporting rifles we can struggle to take advantage of the good shooting positions. The number of animals in a mob requires rapid successive shots, followed by a quick reload and then another full magazine…. and that can be terminally bad for throats and barrels, as well as obviously resulting in wandering POIs and misses.
For the deer, the trick is to nail them with heavy suppression, far enough away that they can’t wind you or easily work out where the threat is coming from. They will often run around in a circle and actually work towards the shooting position, hearing the reflected sound from the face opposite
the shooting position, thinking the threat is the other side. Red deer here always stop to look back after running off – always – and that is often when your best opportunity of a second animal. An experienced shooter here will follow the second targeted animal in the scope and hold over for additional range if the animal ran away, slightly under if the animal runs down and towards the shooting position.
NB! This is way too long. Give yourself a couple of days. Or give up now! See notes towards the end about being rained in. You have been warned.
Background to the requirement
After a red spiker cull in August, a step taken by the locals to ward off pressure from the Department of Conservation (DOC), I realised I needed a new rifle to step up my normal hunting ranges into proper “medium” range, further than what I shoot with my .243 Win and .308 Win. For lighter framed deer, which is mostly what we hunt (yearlings, young dry hinds, spikers) the .243 is energy limited to around 350m, fallow it will still drop easily a ways past that. The .308 is scope limited. It wears a Zeiss Duralyt with the #6 Plex reticle, set up to shoot MPBR. I don’t like using a Plex reticle to holdover as it’s too imprecise. But it’s very good for point and shoot type hunting where you can run into a deer suddenly and time is not on your side. Generally speaking, I use the .243 in open country from good vantage points where I have a lot of time to set up the shot, and the .308 in closer, scrubby or wooded country. I could have just put a different scope on the .308, but it’s not got the barrel contour I need, more on that later.
The objective was to build a rifle / cartridge / scope combo that would enable hunting between 300-700m or thereabouts. Primary target species: smallish reds, fallow, goats and occasionally pigs. The properties here (sheep and cattle farms) are all carrying way too many deer and goats, and accessing the animals for sub-300m shooting can be very hard in the most densely populated areas, due to the terrain.
The properties in question ring a region of heavily forested hills running ~15km along a N-S ridge, of variable width but typically 4-6km; this area falls under DOC. This bush block is landlocked by the private properties on all sides; this means that there is no public access to the conservation land without a permit from one of the adjacent landowners. And access agreement permits to the bush will never be granted, to anyone. Whilst the conservation land is nominally managed by the DOC, in practice they have very little to do with it other than poison it periodically.
What this all means is that high numbers of red deer, goats and pigs bed down in the bush block and come out onto the farms to browse and graze. There has been a dramatic increase in honey money here, so all the farms have allowed the manuka scrub to regrow across the uppermost paddocks to feed the bees, so there are a great many scrubby gullies and wide swathes of manuka interspersed with lush grass clearings. It’s perfect deer and goat habitat. The fallow inhabit the lower elevations and will stay in smaller bush blocks on the private land if they don’t get much pressure, preferring not to move around. The reds move quite far, and retreat to the upper bush blocks above ~500m most nights. Here’s a picture of typical red deer habitat and a hunting scenario that would require a bankable 500m rifle shooting a 130-150gr pill.
(Sorry for the crappy picture off the phone, in the rain.)
These two hinds were very shootable, the wind was directly into my face at a steady 6km/h. Access to bone them out would have been the very long way round, but possible, from the boundary down. You can’t get across the stream at the bottom of the face as there’s an 8-10m sheer vertical drop to the water. That’s typical in this area – it’s soft muddy limestone country and the streams erode treacherously deep ravines that have claimed many a pig dog and the odd unwary hunter over the years.
To get closer to these hinds in the interests of “sporting chance” would 90% of the time result in being seen, heard or winded – the winds swirl around the gullies and will be in your face one moment, in your back the next. And time is always short – to get round to a potential sub-200m shot on foot would probably take an hour plus of hard yakka one way, with usually 2-3 creek crossings and extremely steep, dangerous, slippery sections of dense bush thickets. The best bet is to quad bike to a high point and assess options from there, walking the ridgelines to the saddles for the best vantage points. Once you’ve parked up and secured the dogs, expect to walk 5-10km, you’ll need to open up those lungs for the long, ball-busting 1:3 and steeper climbs. On this saddle, where the photo was taken, the wind is consistent, measureable and generally quite reliable, so you can stay out of earshot, sight and smell of usually glass high numbers of reds and goats.
For meat hunting, animal selection will be based on age, gender, fawn dependency and most important of all, where it is located. If you can’t get to it, don’t shoot it. You need to know the land – if it’s a new area, looking at a gradient from a perpendicular angle across the gully, it’s very hard to judge how steep the opposing face is. Many times when goat shooting I have been surprised by how far they tumble, sometimes a 100m in elevation on a clear face. You don’t want tumbling deer! To counter the threat of runners, the best shooting positions are the ones where you have a wide field of view from slightly above the animal, on more open grassy faces. You want to watch the bullet strike, the usually very short journey to the Pearly Gates, to where it drops and then what happens next… does it stay right there, slide down a bit, or tumble? A spotter is handy for this task – ranging, observing and calling the wind. Shooting a lot with my neighbour, and my missus, we have got this kind of shooting worked out pretty well where ranges don’t much exceed 350m. With a waterproof notebook dope sheet in 10m intervals we can range / call / adjust elevation as the animals are on the move, all the while keeping the target animal in the scope’s field of view, hitting it the very moment it stops in a good position. A quality tilting and swivelling bipod is a good accessory to have, along with high levels of tolerance for lying in the mud, wet grass and thistles for extended periods.
This kind of central North Island scenario is why deer shooting is commonly undertaken at much longer ranges than in woods and fields of England, or the open Scottish Highlands. In the regions where the hills top out in bush below ~800m, the severity of the gradients and deep gullies covered in impenetrable thickets make close stalking pretty much impossible. It is precisely because of the severity of these environments that they make ideal deer, goat and pig habitat – they are hard to get to. Above 800m in this region and you break out into sub-alpine tussock, and on up into rocky snow country. That area lies just to the east of us around Mt. Ruapehu.
The one important thing to emphasise is time. We hunt like this with time on our side. There are no hurried shots. Blokes that are used to hunting on the knife edge of adrenalin and excitement after hours painstakingly stalking an animal… they get a bit bored with what we do after a while. All the range checking, consulting tables of numbers, smart phone apps, waiting for the wind… it all requires time. And at least 50% of the time the shot is canned at the last minute anyway as the animal is partially obscured, or standing wrong, or something else comes into view that requires assessment.
In lower country on both private and public land, on the river flats and surrounding rolling hills, close stalking is common and popular. A lot of low grade land that was cleared in the earlier days has been let go and returned to patchy scrub, and a fair amount has been absorbed into conservation estate. Manuka honey has brought a new lease of life to some of the poor quality, lower elevation country around here. What were smaller, marginal sheep farms are now mixed dry stock at much lower stocking rates, with lots of hives, and frequently a single owner / worker who lives in town and has another job. Trying to control the scrub is often just too hard for the lone farmer in wet hill country like this, once it’s got a foot hold, he’s on a hiding to nothing. The upside for the deer hunter is that this kind of land makes for the best traditional stalking country, as it is easy to get around on foot and you’re not far from access points for quads, ATVs or 4WDs. On productive properties adjacent to wild open country, if the owner has made the decision to harbour deer, there will be heaps of fallow plus some lowland reds, usually hinds and young stags. We don’t have sika over this side, and the sambar population (small in New Zealand) is a little to the south of here. There’s a very popular NZ YouTube channel that is filmed in this kind of lower country in the foothills of the Ureweras, on the other side of the central North Island from here.
The following photo is a classic close stalking environment in the lower country adjacent to our block. It’s a failed farm that’s now a small DOC block, teeming with deer, goats and pigs. There are two ways to hunt it: walk very quietly, or sit and wait. Walking, it’s easy to take multiple goats, they are so oblivious. It is fantastic bow hunting country for goats. For deer it’s probably too hard for good quality stalking, there are better places higher up where the scrub transitions to woods and it’s more open.
The most productive way to hunt this area is to scout it the day before and look at the sign, working out what’s goat and what’s deer, and how big, then pick the most likely game trails heading down from the bush into the clearings. Find a suitable location to watch these clearings in the evening with the wind in mind (difficult) and 9 times out of 10 you’ll go home with a deer. Usually a yearling that’s been kicked out by its mother, and yet to learn the essential survival skill of resisting the open green clearings until after dark. I took this photo in the middle of the day, scouting, and about 5 minutes later walked right into a large red stag browsing in a cool glade in the shade. He’s a well-known beast, very heavy in the body with reliable 20-22 points every year, he’s in velvet now. He’s been a keeper for a few years, we’ve been trying to protect him from being shot by chasing him out of the DOC block, not that the public are actually allowed to hunt it. However, he is starting to become a liability… he’s been observed rounding up large harems and fending off good quality younger stags, but due to his weight he struggles to mount the lighter hinds, and on this trip we have noticed that there’s a fair few dry hinds in the big boy’s area of influence. So it might be time soon to send him on his way. The arrow at the top of the hill is where he likes to roar from when he starts up in April.
However, all this comes with a conundrum. If the landowners don’t control red deer and goat numbers, then the control will be taken out of our hands by DOC and (a) the helicopters will be called in to deal to the deer, and (b) there’s a higher likelihood of more 1080 poison drops into the bush blocks. We despise 1080, it is a curse and kills pretty much everything, targeted or not. DOC says it’s just for the possums, that’s bollox. It’s for everything introduced. So it’s imperative that deer populations are not allowed to get away on us, plus, in terms of paid hunts it’s in our interest obviously to control the males to promote the best heads. Personally, I’m not interested in trophies. I far prefer nurturing and watching the really big boys. When they get too old, heavy and impotent, that’s the time to take them out. Two of the six private properties bordering the conservation bush land conduct guided trophy and meat hunting.
When goat hunting, with the usual light-contour barrelled sporting rifles we can struggle to take advantage of the good shooting positions. The number of animals in a mob requires rapid successive shots, followed by a quick reload and then another full magazine…. and that can be terminally bad for throats and barrels, as well as obviously resulting in wandering POIs and misses.
For the deer, the trick is to nail them with heavy suppression, far enough away that they can’t wind you or easily work out where the threat is coming from. They will often run around in a circle and actually work towards the shooting position, hearing the reflected sound from the face opposite
the shooting position, thinking the threat is the other side. Red deer here always stop to look back after running off – always – and that is often when your best opportunity of a second animal. An experienced shooter here will follow the second targeted animal in the scope and hold over for additional range if the animal ran away, slightly under if the animal runs down and towards the shooting position.
But you already knew that 
