The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
Bats were once the only mammals living in New Zealand forests. Pacific explorers brought the kuri and kiore. But the European settlers wanted bigger animals to hunt. It wasn’t long before they introduced game animals: deer, tahr, chamois and even moose to fill the “empty” forests for recreational shooting.
Game hunting was reserved for the wealthy in Great Britain, so in the early 1900s there was a strict licensing system in New Zealand making it an exclusive sport. Without predators and with ideal feeding grounds deer spread quickly and they became anyone’s game.
It soon became clear that deer were destructive to native trees, plants and seedlings, changing the composition of the forest understory. They trample plants, graze, and ring-bark young trees. If deer populations get too large, favourite plants like schefflera, broadleaf, three-finger, hen and chicken fern and lancewood can be completely removed. Alpine buttercup, Spaniard grass and tall tussocks near the mountain tops are vulnerable to damage. This removal of undergrowth and vegetation can cause soil erosion. Also fouling waterholes, spreading weeds and transmitting disease.
In 1930 teams of deer cullers were employed by the Department of Internal Affairs. Small groups of men lived in tent camps or huts in isolated parts of the country, killing and skinning deer. They were paid wages with a bonus for each skin. It was hard work, with long days, often wet and cold, in difficult terrain, but it was the time of the Great Depression and men were desperate for work. Still it was too tough for many and they soon quit.
Between 1932 and 1954 between 1.4 to 3 million deer were killed. There were plenty to be had; an example at Lake Ohau deer culler Phillip Barren killed four deer with one shot. Government deer culling reduced the population to 5-15% of their numbers in the 1930s. Deer culling eventually stopped in 1987 with the start of the Department of Conservation.
From the 1960s commercial operators set up business. Helicopters first used to recover deer carcasses, were soon used for shooting, especially in open alpine areas. In 1965 when hunters first shot deer from helicopters they could spot several hundred deer a day.
In 1969, the high venison prices and legalization of deer farming saw some “gunships” converted for live deer recovery. Many deer were recovered live for stocking new deer farms in the Te Anau and Manapouri region springing up in the 1970s. Men jumped from helicopters using the bulldogging technique to pull down the deer, often losing teeth and incurring injury in the process. Net guns were introduced to make the capture easier.
Mossburn celebrates being the deer capital of New Zealand. It was involved with live deer recovery from the wild and the establishment in 1972 of the first deer farm, West Dome Station. Until 2016 there was also a venison processing plant. Deer hunting for recreation and food is still enjoyed by hunters in New Zealand, particularly in the roar around March, and it not uncommon to see helicopters in the region with a deer swinging from them.