WESTERN TARARUA ROAR
The week prior we had done a scouting trip, pushing out a bit further to a spur we hadn’t hunted down before. This was our first Red stag roar and to be honest, we weren’t taking it too seriously.
I wasn’t convinced that hunting during the roar was for us as we were primarily after meat and from everything I had read, rutting stags weren’t going to be in the best condition.
We set out as normal up the main ridge. We hadn’t bothered to get a roaring horn as we figured we could just roar back through our hands, but weren’t really expecting to hear anything anyway so we didn’t think it was a big deal. After a five hour walk up the main ridge, we reached our spur and started making our way down, slowing the pace and taking in the new area. It looked good and we followed an old logging road. We came across a couple of good-sized wallows, some old logged trees and a random yellow hard hat in a tree (the things you find in the bush!).
As we moved on a bit further, we heard our first roar. It sounded some way off and we couldn’t really believe it. We decided to give it a reply and see what happened. We hadn’t done a lot of reading
