This originally appeared in the June/July 2024 edition of the NZ Hunter magazine
A Better Hunting guide on where and how to hunt.
How do you hunt? It’s a broad question and one so obvious that many new and inexperienced hunters may be afraid to ask it. It is also so fundamental that many experienced hunters don’t know how to answer it fully as it’s not a ‘one cup of coffee’ conversation.
So, let’s start by pulling a ‘hunt’ back to the basics of finding and having a reasonable chance at taking an animal. Better Hunting focuses on four key parts to this process.
1 – Find a viable place to hunt
To hunt, you need a practical (and legal!) place to do it, where there is a decent chance of finding an animal. Key things when assessing a hunting area are whether you’ve got permission to hunt there, what the hunting will be like, and can you access it.
It is recommended you start with finding a location where you have permission to hunt and that you can get to! There is no point spending hours scouring Topomap finding the ultimate river flats, clearings and likely looking areas where animals may be and then realising access is denied.
Two great ways to find hunting areas and how to get to them are by using the DOC hunting and Herenga ā Nuku Aotearoa Outdoor Access Commission outdoor access maps.
DOC hunting map
The DOC hunting map has all the recreational hunting areas available on public conservation land. The map shows the boundaries of these areas, but also which areas you need an open or restricted permit for. The map also provides useful information on some areas such as what species are present, landholders to request access permission from and rules around dogs.
Outdoor Access Commission outdoor access maps
While many other maps show publicly accessible areas, the Outdoor Access Commission maps are feature-rich and offer all kinds of information. The key feature for hunters is the ability to view public roads and access routes, even unformed ones. The purple lines show you the location of public roads and routes that are otherwise indistinguishable from private land or creeks. This can help you find lesser-accessed areas and avoid inadvertently trespassing on private land.
Better Hunting multi-map tool
The Game Animal Council has recently created a multi-map tool on Better Hunting that makes it easy to cross-check information on both these maps (and many others). You can simply go to the ‘Maps’ tab in the menu bar, click on the location you are interested in on the topographic map, and this will create links to that location across the DOC hunting map, multiple Outdoor Access Commission maps, weather forecasting sites, Google Earth and more. It also links to the DOC pesticide summary map, so you can make sure your new hunting area isn’t currently unsafe to harvest from.
2 – Anticipate animal behaviour
Now that you are looking at somewhere you are allowed to hunt on and can get to, you need to think about what animals may be around and what they are likely to be doing at the time/s you’ll be there to hunt.
An entire library of books is written on this subject, but as a most basic example, if it’s winter and the tops are snowy, it is likely the animals will drop down below the snow line. As it’s cold they are likely to enjoy north faces that get some sun and perhaps easterly facing slopes in the morning.
All game species are different, but as a rule, if you think about the situation and what you’d do if you were a game animal to keep comfortable, fed and hydrated, you probably won’t be too far off in your guesstimations.
3 – Consider possible hunting approaches
Once you’ve decided on a hunting location and broadly estimated what animals might be there and what they’ll be doing, it’s time to think about how you might approach the hunt.
The wind direction should always dictate your plan because the number one rule of hunting is to always hunt into the wind. However, thinking ahead can make the task on the ground a bit easier.
If you’re bush hunting, you might hunt river flats, watch clearings on slopes (faces), sidle, or cut up and down. Early and late in the day, watching river flats, clearings and slopes may be met with success, whereas during the middle of the day you might need to get sidling or bush stalking.
Spot sign and be able to stalk effectively
There is no point quietly and diligently bush stalking an area with no animals around. You’d be better off boosting it to somewhere else to increase your chances. So how do you prevent this situation? The best way is to educate ourselves in spotting and assessing game sign.
Key animal sign includes poo, plant nibbling, trails and hoof prints. Through experience and understanding you will, over time, learn to recognise and read sign better. The Better Hunting platform gives you a head start by providing an animal sign gallery including sign from different game animal species.
The Game Animal Council is always looking for more contributions to this resource, so please if you have photos sitting on your phone that may help other aspiring hunters understand what they’re looking for, consider sending them through to info@nzgac.org.nz.
4 – Situational awareness and reflective thinking
The most successful hunters are flexible and adaptable. Those ‘must reach the top of the mountain’ type people are not always the most effective hunters.
To become a more successful hunter, you should practice good situational awareness and, once you’re done with you hunts, do some reflective thinking to help you improve.
Situational awareness
Situational awareness is all about noticing things, understanding what they mean, and responding accordingly. We do this in our lives all the time and it is particularly important in the outdoors, e.g. noticing if it’s raining hard enough to make clothes wet, knowing that wearing wet clothes can be dangerous and so putting a jacket on.
Less obvious indicators that require more intentional thinking can make a big difference to success in our hunting, e.g., being able to read what the clouds are doing can tell you a lot about the wind and its direction. In hunting this can also mean doing things that conserve your energy or finding routes through the bush that make your travel easier.
If you have ‘a plan’ and then see obvious fresh sign, a clever hunter may change their plan in response to this new information. Being situationally aware can also help you make more decisive decisions, such as when to plan for having an ‘emergency night out’. This can help ensure you have all the right survival gear and make yourself as comfortable as possible while there’s still light to set up a makeshift camp etc.
Reflective thinking
Reflective thinking is not just corporate office jargon; it’s a skill that can be applied everywhere and involves intentionally learning from your experiences.
After a hunt, you should take the time on your way home or over the next few days to think about it. What went right? What went wrong? What cues did you miss? What gear, skills, practice do you need to do better? How could you have hunted that situation better next time?
A little bit of reflective thinking like this can help you continuously improve your hunting approach, acquire the right gear for your type of hunting and, in the end, be more successful.
The ‘Accessing Hunting Areas’, ‘How to Hunt’ and ‘Situational Awareness’ modules in the Hunting Essentials course of Better Hunting cover all this stuff in much more detail. Just go to betterhunting.nz, sign up for free and get learning!