Dr. James Kroll displays several of Jamie Veint's trophy whitetails from the Dart River Valley above scenic Lake Wakatipu. In New Zealand, a 130-class whitetail is considered to be a real monster. Photo by Gordon Whittington.
After a welcomed night of rest at the Stone House in Queenstown, James and I met Dave on the morning of March 16 and headed west toward the village of Glenorchy, at the head of Lake Wakatipu. The scenery en route was superb . . . and it only improved near Glenorchy, where the Rees and Dart river valleys empty out of vast snow-capped mountains. (Note to "Lord of the Rings" movie buffs: This is where the scenes of Isengard, Lothlorien and Amon Hen were filmed. If you ever make it here, you won't question why the area is labeled "Paradise" on New Zealand maps.)
The whitetails stocked here in March 1905 were transported by several means. After arriving at New Zealand's southern tip on the ship from St. Louis, they presumably were loaded onto a train that ran 100 miles north, to the lower end of Lake Wakatipu. From there they most likely were loaded (in crates) onto a steamship for the run to Glenorchy at the head of the lake, a distance of perhaps 30 miles. But even there the journey didn't end. The travel-weary deer would have gone a few miles farther by horse-drawn wagon, into the lower end of the Rees River Valley, before being released once and for all in their new home.
Eager to see this land the whitetails had colonized, we met up with local hunter Jamie Veint, whose family owns a large "station" (farm/ranch) in the lower Dart River Valley. James and I spent a few hours quizzing him about local whitetail history and how the animals have adapted to the rugged landscape.
"In the summer months (late December into late March), you mostly see them feeding up in the grassy areas on the higher parts of the mountainsides," Jamie noted. "During the rut (late April through May) they move to lower elevations. We see them more in our sheep and cattle pastures in the valley as we start to get snow up high."
These mountains are largely covered with a canopy of several types of beech trees (all evergreen, and with far smaller leaves than beech trees in North America). High on the slopes, timber gives way to grassland dominated by a reddish bunchgrass known as tussock. From the timberline to the top of the rocky crags the countryside would seem better suited to mountain goats than whitetails. So why would deer be hanging out up there?
As is so often the case with wildlife, the answer is food. The beech forest itself has relatively little of it, for this is "crown" (public) land, and over many years the lack of timber cutting has resulted in a relatively old, stable forest. Under most circumstances, that doesn't exactly describe the sort of area in which whitetails would prefer to feed. Conversely, the native clovers and other forbs that lure sheep to the more open high country during the short growing season have great appeal to deer. As a result, in the summer the whitetails tend to bed below their feeding areas, bringing to mind the summer pattern exhibited by many Rocky Mountain mule deer.
Jamie is an avid hunter with a number of good whitetails to his credit. Several would score 130 inches or more on the Boone and Crockett system. However, as he notes, "Anything over about 100 B&C would be considered a good buck here." And this is generally regarded as the better of New Zealand's two whitetail areas in terms of trophy potential. The nation's top-scoring typical buck -- a 10-pointer that would score around 160 B&C -- came from not far away.
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