Thursday, April 26, 2012

Crazy what's on your doorstep

My god, NZ is beautiful. I have to admit that I had never been to Andy & Christa's part of the world, which is kinda shameful to admit. Flown over and gazed down a ton of times.  And only 2 and a bit hours from the big smoke…. Andy & Christa’s place is a wee chunk of paradise. Matt and I were there at Andy’s invitation to hunt Canada geese. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the sheer beauty of the region, so the hunting inadvertently took a back seat to lapping up the peace and quiet.



Layout blinds on a sunny day accompanied by bird song after a poor night’s sleep are a recipe for a nice doze… at one stage Matt & I were asleep when a rather large flock of paradise ducks came in to join the goose dekes. I snapped a few pictures of a young drake bird and Matt may have got some video too.


Our hunt was quite exciting even if the shooting part was over all too soon as the geese had ideas other than alighting with a few mates in a paddock. Those that came to us from the west were decoyed, but the majority of birds wanted to join their several thousand other compadres in locations other than where we were. The birds are definitely mobbed up and consequently hard to hunt. However a few nice flocks came in none the less, and we took a few ranging from young birds to a couple of wizened old campaigners.

Trout shot....
 Packing up in the early evening light and crisp air was pleasant, the drive back uneventful and all in all it was nice to be able to reflect on how lucky we are to live here. Crazy what's on your doorstep if you take time to stop and observe.
Thanks Andy, Christa and Matt, for a glorious day in paradise.

Popeye

2 comments:

  1. Good job, mate or how we say it in California-dude! I hope your season continues to be a good one. Our waterfowl season was a joke. Absolutely no birds came down as we had an extremely hot winter.

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    1. I'm not sure how our main duck season will pan out, as tens of thousands of birds were killed by an outbreak of botulism in February very near our main hunting location. Our birds are residents in that they don't migrate as yours do, so we're very much dependent on a solid local population. Fingers crossed!

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