Feral deer in South Westland are devouring native forest, farm pasture and profits – but the Department of Conservation has neither the budget nor a plan to do anything about it.
The West Coast Tai Poutini Conservation Board was warned this month that the deer problem is escalating in the region.
Board member Dr Barry Wards who has advocated for a Department of Conservation deer policy, suggested the Board should think about pushing for a better management options.
“Just to get a bit more awareness of the status quo, and whether there’s some opportunity for more integrated management; it’s quite fragmented at the moment and the deer problem is getting worse,” Wards said.
Other Conservation Boards, including Southland and Wellington, were also worried, Wards said.
The Conservation Department – which the Boards advise on behalf of the public – confirmed it has no specific national policy on feral deer.
Department of Conservation’s Wild Animal manager Mike Perry told LDR the department carried out deer control on about 140,000 hectares – a small fraction of the conservation estate.
“The majority of our wild animal control work is focused on goat, tahr, and deer control outside their feral range, with a particular focus on Northland’s sika herd,” he said.
To make the most of its pest-control budget, the Department of Conservation had to set priority areas for deer management – and, at this point, controlling feral numbers in South Westland was not one of them.
But feral deer herds were still on the increase across the country, board member Perry confirmed.
“We are looking at ways to tackle the problem through recreational and commercial hunting, and we’re doing a bit of extra deer control in places like Maruia and Mokihinui in Buller, and in Fiordland.”
Hunters had access to 97% of conservation land including most of South Westland with a recreational permit, while commercial hunters could apply for concessions, Perry said.
But South Westland locals say relying on recreational and commercial hunters to get deer numbers down, is wishful thinking.
Veteran conservationist Gerry McSweeney, who runs a guest lodge at Lake Moeraki north of Haast, says there are too many deer and too few shooters.
“There aren’t enough recreational hunters. We see deer every time we do the 40-minute Monro Beach walk. It would be great to get commercial wild-animal control back up to the level of past years – Department of Conservation’s Wild Animal Recovery Operations programme was taking about 60,000 deer a year off conservation land.”
Over large areas of pristine native forest, deer were stripping out all the palatable understorey plants, leaving a barren forest floor, McSweeney said.
South Westland beef farmer Thomas Condon, whose family has farmed in the Mahitahi Valley south of Fox Glacier since the 1880s on a mix of freehold land, DOC or Māori grazing leases, says the damage to pasture and forest is drastic.
“I took my horse up the valley the other day to the bush edge – it used to be so thick there you couldn’t walk through. Now it’s so thinned out you could canter through it.
“The possums take the tops and the deer take the rest.”
The few hunters who do show up in the remote valley have no impact on the mobs of deer that plunder up to 50% of his best pasture, Condon says.
“We paid a guy at one point to cull them and we had a Northland farmer come down a few times to shoot in the valley after he read about our deer problem in a farming magazine.
“They shot a few animals but when you’re seeing mobs of 30 a night, there’s no point. You’re just making space for more deer to come down out of the bush and fill in the gaps. “
The carrying capacity of the farm had dropped drastically – along with his income – as deer numbers grow, Condon said.
“I’d say our productivity is down about 20% overall and I’ve just spent $35,000 on fencing so we can keep the deer out of one area at least, and grow some feed crops again.“
The South Westland farmer says the only realistic way of culling the deer population to low numbers now, would be aerial 1080 drops.
“It would help bring back the native plants we used to have, like the mistletoe. The deer are destroying all that. But apparently it’s not of high enough conservation value for DOC to do it. “
DOC’s Mike Perry says the primary focus in South Westland is controlling tahr numbers.
“We’d like to do more work everywhere – but we have to prioritise ecosystems where we have the resources to do the work.”
Perry said DOC spent about $306 million last year combating plant and animal pests and was granted an extra $10 million from the International Visitor Levy in 2022, to tackle deer and goat populations in National Parks and high visitor areas.
By Lois Williams for Local Democracy Reporting
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
