With little or no guiding activity since late March 2020, no AATH, and limited recreational access due to Covid there was potential for some big bulls and bulls that had not seen much hunting pressure.
With DOC cull numbers on females and juveniles passing 35,000 there was potential (that word again) to find more than one bull working any nannies – the trick was to find the nannies. Find the nanny groups and the bulls had to be present.
WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS AND WHY SHOULD THEY BE IMPORTANT?
No one knew how many tahr there were when the culls began and no one knows how many there are now. Counting tahr to a meaningful degree of accuracy has proven to be too expensive, yet DOC still try. We did know there were considerably more than the 10,000 allowed for in the Himalayan Thar Control Plan 1993(HTCP). The unanswered and impossible to know was – how many did we start with. Best estimates in 2019 had numbers within the feral range at 35-50,000. That was an
