Jamie Veint, whose family owns a large station (farm) near Glenorchy, holds a tremendous set of sheds found by his grandfather decades ago. One story holds that the whitetails founding New Zealand's herd came from New Hampshire. Photo by Gordon Whittington.

Elk readily adapted to some of the same habitat that had proved suitable for red deer. However, the elk interbred so easily with their smaller cousins that there probably isn't a purebred wild wapiti left in New Zealand. As for moose, the jury remains out; some experts think a few still exist in the steep, densely forested backcountry of the South Island's Fiordland region, though none has been documented in a half-century now.

Neither the mulies nor the blacktails fared very well, in part because settlers began shooting them off soon after their release. Perhaps the same fate befell the first group of whitetails. That failed whitetail experiment occurred near the northern tip of the South Island in 1901, but little else is known of it.

MEET ME AT THE FAIR
Now our story shifts back to North America, to the 1904 World's Fair. Held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, this amazing exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, was a sight to behold. Covering more than 1,200 acres and playing host to nearly 20 million visitors over a seven-month span, it was up to that point the most spectacular such event in history, and it remains the largest world's fair ever held. Nearly all of the then-45 states had lavish displays of their resources, as did around 60 other countries from all over the globe.

What makes the 1904 World's Fair relevant to our story is that of the many exhibits on display there, one included a herd of whitetails. Reportedly they had been trapped in deep snow in New Hampshire and then taken to St. Louis, though precisely when, how and by whom they were captured and transported no one today seems certain. What we do know is that at the time there were probably only around a half-million whitetails on earth, and most folks in the crowd likely had never seen one.

Apparently President Theodore Roosevelt decided to give these whitetails to the Kiwis. And so, at some time in late 1904 or early 1905, a ship carrying them headed down the Mississippi River from St. Louis, bound for New Zealand.

Remarkably, of the 22 deer that went onto the ship, 18 of them -- four bucks and 14 does -- made it across the Pacific alive. Even today that would seem a major achievement, so back then it was nothing short of remarkable. Because the Panama Canal was still roughly a decade away from completion, the ship bearing this cargo (which also included some Canada geese and black ducks) had to chug all the way down the east coast of South America and then loop around Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of the continent. By then the deer had traveled roughly 7,000 miles from where their voyage had begun -- and they still had around 5,000 miles to go, across what can be a mighty rough stretch of the South Pacific. The greatest straight-line distance between any two points on earth is right at 12,000 miles, so it's no exaggeration to say this was an epic journey.

By the time the animals reached their destination, it was late March 1905. It was also autumn, not spring. With seasons south of the equator being the opposite of those in North America, the deer found themselves traveling from winter into summer and, finally, early fall.

How confused these whitetails must have been. When they'd left St. Louis, the does presumably had just been bred, and the bucks still had worn their antlers. As they moved south toward and finally across the equator, the days had lengthened rapidly and then shortened at the same pace. When the ship pulled into port in Invercargill, New Zealand, the does were two-thirds of the way through their gestation period, and the bucks had dropped their antlers. Now all they had to do was get their land legs back after months at sea and immediately learn to live on a diet made up entirely of plants they'd never even tasted!

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