Deer scare over thanks to farmer’s quick action

A quick thinking farmer has shot and killed a 12-pointer red deer on farmland near Taranaki Maunga, both confirming and ending the sixmonth-old rumour of a roaming stag.

The killing of the deer has delighted Department of Conservation staff who feared the breeding male could damage the Egmont National Park’s reputation for being deer and goat free.

‘‘We heard a rumour about six months ago that there was a red stag in that area, but it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,’’ DOC biodiversity ranger Jared Coombes said.

Taranaki Maunga is in a national park surrounded by tens of thousands of hectares of farmland, with hundreds of small stands of indigenous and exotic forests. The identity of the farmer who shot the deer is unclear after he declined to share details of his kill. However, it is understood the deer was shot near Okato, about 20km south of New Plymouth.

It’s believed the farmer stumbled across the stag on his coastal Taranaki property and had enough time to get his gun unlocked and loaded to shoot the animal.

Coombes had spoken to the man and said it sounded like he had ‘‘just bumped into it’’ and taken the quick action he did.

He said it was ‘‘not normal’’ to have red deer found in the area because it was illegal for anyone to have the species within 7km of the national park.

Just how it ended up where it did was probably not an accident.

‘‘Quite often you get hunters who stumble across a fawn that’s on its own and they pick it up and take it home,’’ Coombes said.

‘‘They then obviously grow and get away from the property. We want to get that message across for hunters not to do it.’’

He had only seen a photo of the stag and could not accurately say how old it was.

Red deer had the potential to devastate areas of the national park given how quickly they populate and then damage the environment through their selective foraging, Coombes said.

‘‘We have the only national park in the country that is completely free from goats and deer and we want to keep it that way,’’ he said.