The author (left) and Dr. James Kroll pose with their 5 1/2-year-old doe, which had a live weight of around 80 pounds. Photo by Dave McCarlie.

The final morning of our hunt, James and I went out for a brief look around. I didn't spot any deer, but my partner saw two. One was a young buck making his way back up through the trees to bed just af-ter sunrise; the other was a doe with an NZDA tag in one ear. (More on that later.) But neither deer offered a shot.

WEIRDNESS ON THE BEACH
After hiking back out to the "airstrip" in early afternoon, we walked along the beach and soaked up more of the scenery. Then James spotted an object the outgoing tide had left behind. It was a blue penguin, apparently dead of natural causes.

As my friend snapped a photo of the 16-inch-tall bird, I could only marvel at this surreal scene. From where we stood, looking down at the world's smallest penguin and waiting on the plane to retrieve us from a beach at the far end of the planet, I could see the bush-covered slope on which I'd shot my doe two days earlier. Finding a penguin while on a whitetail hunt is definitely not something the aver-age hunter can say he's done!

What had the deer stocked on Stewart Island a century ago thought upon seeing that first penguin? How had they learned to live off broadleaf and kelp? How long had it taken them to adjust to the seasons: starting antler growth in October, breeding in May and shedding racks in August? All we know is that enough of them did these things well enough to sow the seeds of the herd living there today.

By the time our plane arrived, the sea was far more restless than it had been upon our arrival. It was March 24 -- the third day of autumn south of the equator -- and in another two days it would be exactly a century since those nine pioneer deer had stepped onto Stewart Island. We would have loved to hang around for the anniversary, but we couldn't. Our whirlwind tour of New Zealand whitetail country was over.

RESEARCHING THE HERD
Once back in Invercargill, James and I spent some time visiting with John deLury. As a serious hunter with several big Stewart Island bucks on his wall, John knows what a unique resource the local whitetail population represents. And he could explain that ear-tagged doe seen near our hut. As it turned out, John and some of his "mates" in NZDA had caught her, along with several other deer, in cage traps baited with broadleaf a few years earlier. Some of those whitetails received ear tags, while others actually were fitted with radio collars before being released.

The NZDA members tried their best to keep tabs on the marked whitetails, to see which ones ended up where. Not surprisingly, the does proved to be homebodies, while the bucks were relatively nomadic. It seems wanderlust is in a buck's blood no matter where on earth he lives.

Because New Zealand's wild deer aren't protected by any regulations, there are no rules against NZDA members -- or anyone else, for that matter -- live-trapping them for informal research purposes. But such experiments are only a tiny part of what NZDA does for the good of New Zealand outdoorsmen. The organization has long been active in building and maintaining huts on Stewart Island and elsewhere in the Kiwi backcountry. Without these shelters -- which are used by hunters and non-hunters alike -- getting to the deer would present even more logistical challenges than it does.

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