Some random Connor photos

Another weekend over and done with, not really feeling like writing a complete blog entry tonight, so I'll quickly summerise what we did on the weekend.

Friday evening went for a deer hunt, didn't see anything (except for hares).
Saturday: Got a hair cut, had roast wild turkey (very very nice), and I looked after Connor for the afternoon whilst Steph played horsey.
Sunday:Dagged and Tagged the sheep, and then in the afternoon went for a rabbit hunt at a new farm, quite successfull, a few rabbits etc.

Connor's training as a carnivore starts early

Hmm, I wonder what goat tastes like!

Connor's first exam of goat bits!

The pair of new arrivals.

Parent Pacifiers.

Farms, Early hunting trips, fire and turkeys!

Well, this is really a entry for the weekend and today (or lunch time anyway!)

Early last week I got another response from the advert in the local newletter requesting hunting access, so on Saturday morning, Andy and I headed out to Stronvar to look at this block, a whopping 2100 acres, needless to say, it's huge. We spent an hour going around it on a bike, and only covered about 2/3 of it. Because the block borders on some forest, there is a chance of some pig too, which would be pretty neat. We got permission to take rabbits, hares, pigs, possum, turkeys, paradise duck and geese. We're hoping to get out this weekend for an afternoon hunt and hopefully bag a few hares for some hare sausage.

Going around that farm took up most of the morning, and then in the afternoon Jules and Andy had a bonfire, so I helped them clean up an area of their paddock with the tractor, not much but the tractor made light work of destroying a wasp nest!.

Later in the afternoon (close to dark), we brought the sheep in and weighed them once more (I had spent some time that morning calibrating the scales and making a flat section beside the race for the scales to sit on). Now they are all up to weight, they are off to the yards tomorrow hopefully.

On Sunday morning, I got up around 4:19am and headed down towards Ngawi for a hunt, upon getting there I discovered the river I was going to walk up, was private property, so I gave Steph and ring and then headed up another stream bed, unfortunatly I discovered that the area had recently been 1080'ed, so I could take any deer I saw. A little bit in, I discovered some stag sign, some really wide spread hoof prints, and some thrashing on the trees, so they are there!

A bit more walking and I discovered a nice little side gully, and had a hunt up there, and found a really nice spot, but also found a dead deer!

After that the weather started downwards, so I hiked out along a track I found. I ended up getting back to Littlebush around 11am feeling slightly tired.

That afternoon we weighed the pigs, and they are improving nicely, and the around 3pm we decided that we would finally cleanup the fallen gum branches in John's paddock, so we heaved them on the back of the trailer and took them over to the still burning bonfire.

And now for the photo..this lunch time I decided to check mail, and whilst I was at the end of the driveway, I saw a group of wild turkeys jump into our neighbours property, so I headed home, got the .22 and knocked over the cock turkey, I figure take the lead male so that the females and continue producing for next year, he'll be a bit tough, but cook him slowly with lots of bacon to keep him moist, might make a meal yet...there is certainly enough of him!

Kidding is finished

Just got a message from Steph, kidding has finished, we had a buck born last night, unfortunately he didn't survive the night.

Assisted lambing

Oh, I forgot, yesterday morning, in the frost I had to help one of Julia's ewes lamb. It was the biggest ram lamb I had seen, no wonder it got stuck!

The head was out, and unfortunately it was already dead, the ewe though seems fine.


Only 1 ewe to go and 1 doe, then it's all over till Christmas (Monkey is due then we think).

Fencing and Sore legs

And another weekend passes, and still life on the farm chugs on with the never ending list of jobs, at least this weekend I managed to knock one off.

Saturday saw the goats (and Gloria) moved up one paddock into what was supposed to be the kidding paddock (but she beat us to it), along with all the houses for them too. Once they were moved out, the ewes and new lambs were moved across from the mound paddock into the paddock the goats were (the goats only browse the grass, hence there is still a lot of fodder for the sheep to clean up), and then the ram and the ewes who have still yet to "pop" moved into the mound paddock; not much grass left there but, nice and sheltered. Also during the morning I finally finished the fencing in the mound paddock, the netting fence between that paddock and the arena was very loose, and more than once the goats had escaped (along with the sheep after them) into the arena and the flaxes around it.

After all that, I was pretty wiped out, and wanted to spend the afternoon doing something fun, so I did the ice test (video below), that was quite amusing for 30 minutes, and then I came in and veg'ed for the night (along with getting prepped for Sunday's hunt).

Sunday morning, I got up nice and early (but still a good lie in for the weekend, 7am) and after a good breakfast of porridge, I headed down to Ocean beach for a hunt on Corner Creek. Following the advice of some other hunters, I gained some altitude into the bush and left the stream bed, this worked quite well, as within the first 30 minutes of my walk, I had already spooked a small deer, wasn't quite quick enough to get a shot of, but at least I saw something. 3 hours later when I stopped for lunch (after walking 2 Kms, but the terrain was straight up!), I decided that I should head for home as I was noticing the start of fatigue, more walking required I think.

And finally today, we went out to a farm to collect some meat goats, we were going to get 5ish, but ended up coming home with the entire flock, oh well, we got them for a really good price,around $9/head now I think about it. So we'll keep them for a few days, sort out who has kidded, who belongs to who etc, and then cull or sell on the ones we don't want, I'm thinking of putting them in the freezer myself, we don't have much goat in there at the moment, only a roast, a shoulder and 3 or 4 meals of chops, so a bit more won't go amiss.

Oh, the other day I said to Steph "Honey, I think we need to cull some more sheep, we're running low on meat, we only have:

• 1 tray (30cm x 60cm) of pork chops
• 1 maybe 2 pork roasts
• a couple of lamb roasts
• 1/2 cubic metre of beef mince or sausages
• about 6 or so rabbits
• 1 hare forequarter
• 20 or so faggots (homemade)
• 15kgs of sausages (lamb or pork)
• bacon
• 5kg of pork burgers"
  

at this point I decided that we weren't really low on meat, just the freezer needed filling more.

As you can imagine, we never buy meat at the supermarket! And now we have goat.

Anyway, it's getting on towards bed time, so till later.

Oh, breaking news, just got another farm for shooting, and from the sounds of it, it's another big one with lots of hares, so that will be cool; we had hare stew this evening, and it's very yummy.

Still trying to find a private block for deer or goats, fingers crossed.

New Goats

Here are our new goats, we were only going to get 5, a few does and their kids, somehow we ended up with 11, oh well, we'll sort out who we want to keep and then cull the rest in a week or so's time, $10/head is still cheap goat meat!

Comparison of rifles.

Here's a short clip of the .22 and the .308 against the same block of ice.

Corner Creek

 

 

 

Gloria

 

 

 

More kid photos

It survived

The doe survived the night, and seems to being doing OK. She's got a name, Gloria (thanks to Alexandra). And since she's the first kid she is "LB 07-01". More photos to come as she gains strength.

Goats

Well, we finally got our first kid, we had twins ( a buck and doe), but the buck was still born.

Here are some photos, hopefully the doe will survive the night, we've got a cold one coming in...Fingers crossed.

 

 

Damn good weekend

Well, It's not often a weekend goes basically all OK, typically something goes wrong, but not this weekend.Things started looking pretty good around Tuesday when Steph bought me a new rifle, a Remington 700 SPS .308. I only went in the hunting store to look at cheap secondhand rifles as I had an offer of going deer hunting on Saturday morning, but anyway, I walked out with this near new one, very nice!Later that week I sighted in over at John's range (and got a sore shoulder). Unfortunately the deer hunting on Saturday morning at Joe's farm was called off, but I was still keen to get out, so I planned a walk in the Aorangi forest park (I was going to post the google earth kmz file, but I can't work out how to do it, if you want to see where I went, email me).I left home at 5:30am, and go to the park around 6:20, and started walking straight away. As I got onto the river bed, the first thing I saw was deer prints and poo! So I knew I was in the right area. A bit more walking up stream, and I found more prints and some sign of pigs.

I ended up fording the stream around 6 times (both up and back), and by the time I got home, my feet were very cold. I headed home, and arrived back to Littlebush around 10:30am.
The afternoon was spent weighing the sheep and pigs, and then we went out for a BBQ.
After the BBQ I went rabbit hunting with the .22 and the new lamp, and came home with 1 rabbit.

On Sunday, the weather wasn't great, but it was supposed to clear up in the afternoon, so Andy, Alex and I headed down towards Ocean beach around 12:30pm. The truck performed pretty well fording the streams and climbing the rough track around the coast.
Once we got to a nice open stream bed, we started walking up into the park

The big peak to the right is Mt Matthews, but we went up and off to the left (between the first and second ridge)

Once we got off the main river bed, the terrain went from wide to very narrow and very steep sided, here you can see Alex and I crossing the stream (again).


This is as far as we went, getting past this point looked quite tricky, and we were getting close to the time at which we had to turn around, so we had a snack, and started to head back, but not before posing for a photo.