You might figure that any area stocked with only two bucks and seven does would have a lot of racks that are almost identical, due to a small gene pool. But that apparently isn't the case. Jamie and his dad, James, note that there are two general "looks" to racks in their area -- one high, tight and heavy, the other wider, lower and more sweeping -- but there's plenty of variation from one to the next.

One characteristic James and I did note on several of the racks was forking of the rear (G-2) tines, particularly on the left antler. It would be fascinating to know if either of the bucks turned loose near Glenorchy in 1905 had that trait -- but unless a late 1904/early 1905 photo of the stocked bucks can be located, we'll never know.

In speaking with Jamie and examining tooth wear on a number of skulls, James and I found that many of these bucks are fully mature. So what limits their antler size? It might be genetics, but marginal habitat appears to be a more likely culprit.

NO LEGAL PROTECTION
While the government was the driving force behind importing whitetails and other game during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and while the nation today has several thousand commercial deer farms, all New Zealand deer living in the wild are officially listed as "noxious species." They're regarded as threats to the native forest and are thus given no legal protection. The government simply wishes it had never imported any deer, and it isn't picky about the means used to control their numbers.

Because of this viewpoint, there is no "season" on deer; it's open all year long, with no bag limits or any real restrictions on hunting methods. Nor are you charged for a hunting license. In other words, if it's legal for killing a rat here in North America, it's for all practical purposes legal for killing a whitetail in New Zealand.

For that matter, there are remarkably few restrictions on the capture of wild deer, even if it involves the use of aircraft. In fact, while glassing the mountains above Glenorchy, we actually watched a privately owned helicopter work back and forth across the high tussock areas, looking for a buck that might be captured with a net gun and then transported to a high-fenced tract for commercial hunting purposes. A Wild Animal Recovery permit is all the operator needs in order to do this.

James and other researchers who use net-guns to capture whitetails in North America borrowed the method from the land of the kiwi, where it originated decades ago for capturing red deer in steep, thick country. It was interesting to watch practitioners of this method scour the mountainsides for potential deer to net. Of course, had we been stalking a buck high on one of those ridges, only to have a helicopter capture him out from under our noses, "interesting" wouldn't quite have been the right word for it. But that possibility is an accepted part of hunting the backcountry of New Zealand, where the helicopter has long been the preferred (though expensive) way to access remote locations for prime fishing and hunting.

At day's end, we glassed the back of a valley pasture that was filled with the Veint family's sheep and cattle. Jamie had been seeing a doe and two fawns come out there to feed in the evenings, and sure enough, we saw them as well. The doe brought her twins out of the beech forest and into the clover and ryegrass pasture just at dusk. True to her whitetail roots, the mother was teaching her young that cover and darkness are their best protection, whether from hunters on land or those in the sky. We were glassing from a public road that winds through the valley, and the deer never came within anything less than howitzer range before darkness enveloped the pasture in which they fed.

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