DESCRIPTION
The Last Great Southern Adventure - Helicopter Hunting, Fjordland
There was a time in New Zealand’s recent past, when every country town, had one or more helicopters based there involved with wild venison recovery to feed a growing export trade.
As the wild deer population was reduced and deer farming became widespread, helicopter recovery operations slowly ceased in most locations. Fiordland and South Westland today remain the only areas with full-time venison recovery helicopters still flying. Professional photographer Olivia Page was given the opportunity to record WARO (wild animal recovery operations) in Fiordland over the summer of 2010-2011, the result was 7000 images the best of which are shown in this book, recording an industry which is going through change and may soon be gone forever.
A bonus DVD is included, with documentary footage of Dick Deaker and Jeff Carter, on venison recovery missions in Fiordland. Shot by award winning filmmaker Marion Poizeau.??
Review from Aviation Advertiser
By the time New Zealanders had recognised the eco-disaster its feral deer problem had become, the South Islands’ population of introduced deer species was already breeding faster than professional shooters could dispatch them.
Derived over centuries of island isolation, New Zealand’s then-stable ecosystem deserved better, and even before the size and scope of the problem in the almost inaccessible wilderness was acknowledged, its government had had tried various fixes over many years.
Although it focuses on the role of helicopters today, this thoroughly-researched and generously illustrated book covers pretty much the entire history of deer culling in New Zealand. When helicopters were introduced there was a period that probably depicts what the Wild West might have been like if the all the cowboys and all the Indians had owned helicopters instead of horses.
“In the old days we used to go to a lot of funerals,” recalls veteran shooter Jeff Carter; but although still adventurously high-risk, the game is now populated by mature professionals, and it has stabilised to become an essential service, deploying light helicopters of all well-known piston and turbine types.
New Zealand first opened up deer shooting as a public sport to bring the pest back to manageable numbers, but that just didn’t work because of the inaccessibility of breeding and feeding grounds. Next came bounties for professional shooters who simply retained the tails as proof of the numbers they’d killed, but didn’t make much of a mark either, for the same reasons. Then they started recovering the carcasses, selling the hides and exporting the venison to the European market, but despite the mass culling, the shooters were still only keeping the population relatively stable rather than reducing it. As well, the various methods of getting carcasses to market all involved infrastructure and people in the form of vehicles, boats, aircraft, and even floating the carcases down a river – if there was one; and while all this generated a lot of activity, it didn’t reach into the remotest part of New Zealand where all the breeding was going on.
It took another “introduced species,” namely the helicopter, even to begin to get the problem under control, and it’s only been the ongoing efforts of highly skilled specialists that has kept that on track.
When professional photographer Olivia Page had a chance to record New Zealand’s Wild Animal Recovery Operations (WARO) in Fjordland over the 2010–2011 summer, she and her film-maker partner Marian Poizeau set about the task with skills that produced quite remarkable text and images, especially for such an unfamiliar working environment.
WARO helicopter culling operations are certainly not for the fainthearted but now, expert and professional teams of pilots and shooters (and many of these guys operate in dual roles) are engaged in a non-stop campaign to keep culling ahead of breeding. They also need to keep revenue ahead of costs, juggling the dynamics of hard-to-predict weather, high density altitude performance in some of the world’s most rugged terrain, high capital and hourly operating costs, deer population variables, and still plenty of competition.
In typical conditions each operation involves heli-mustering a helicopter-load of deer together, positioning the aircraft while the shooter lines up maybe half a dozen fast-moving targets from the aircraft, the shooter disembarking from the hovering chopper and re-boarding it in rugged terrain to recover each carcass separately; then flying them to a chosen point where they’re gutted, tied together, sling-loaded under the chopper and flown to waiting ground transport. And most of this against a background of slopes that seem to average around 45°.
Anybody who’s even thinking about becoming a helicopter pilot would learn a lot from this book, which also comes with an amazing 24 minutes of video footage that shows exactly how it’s done. Just watching shooter Jeff Carter casually stepping out of the hovering aircraft into steeply sloping rock-strewn scrub land like someone popping on and off a city bus while pilot Dick Deaker holds the ship steady, is a sight to remember. So is watching the intuitive teamwork, mutual trust and hand signals that help the two specialists achieve their outcomes with relative safety.
I’d suspect it would be quite a while before the average developing chopper pilot would feel comfortable even watching an operation like this; in fact it’s possible that some of our more advanced helicopter hotshots may find themselves twitching a little as they watch the video and wondering how they’d feel doing eight hours of this kind of flying every working day. While watching the video, try factoring in the gusty winds you expect on any mountain peak, and contemplate how you’d feel standing under a tonne of operating machinery, looping the payload to the sling on the helicopter’s belly. Or trying to get the whole deal past CASA’s “Permissions centre” for that matter.
And for Deaker, Carter and their contemporaries others as well as for the reader, the scenery is an added bonus.
The Last Great Southern Adventure – Helicopter Hunting, Fjordland.
ISBN 97-1-877566, 2011
Author Olivia Page, video by Marion Poizeau.
ITEM. TD-(10)
Wishlist
