Windy Tops

Tag: hunting

  • Trespassing from public land

    A story hit the news not long ago, based on a DOC media release (alternative Stuff rendition), where a group of people (labelled ‘hunters’ but better described as a group of dope smoking idiots with guns) have been trespassed from Kaweka Forest Park. It sounds as if they’ve been going in, acting like obnoxious morons and between that breaking a variety of laws and rules in ways that ruin other people’s experience, such as discharging weapons after dark, burying caches of illegal stuff (weapons, cannabis), and so on.

    It doesn’t seem unreasonable to deal with people like this, and the behaviour described isn’t something I want anyone to have to put up with, but one thing that confused me was the reference to Trespass Law.

    The Conservation Act and the National Parks Act essentially guarantee public access to public land, unless it’s closed or access is restricted for a variety of specific reasons that are specified in law. I won’t get into the detail, but a couple of years back I wrote about it all. The result is that DOC can’t simply tell you to get out, at least without certain paperwork which isn’t common: its role is typically one of a caretaker and not a gatekeeper or an owner.
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  • FMC Bulletins now available online

    Something I meant to write about a few months back (but became distracted) is the recent achievement of Federated Mountain Clubs in managing to get all of its FMC bulletins online, and available for download, all the way back to FMC Bulletin 1 of May 1957, when then-President Bill Bridge introduced the newsletter almost as an anti-climax.

    As of late last year, all older bulletins have been scanned from paper to PDF form, and the current online archive now contains 182 issues and is growing.

    The archive is available here, and a complete downloaded collection of bulletins from the beginning amounts to approximately 360 Megabytes. Most of the older bulletins are only photo-scanned at this time and thus aren’t text searchable with regular tools, but it’s still a great resource.

    This is awesome. It’s a great history of many things back-country in New Zealand, and browsing through the bulletins I’ve found it interesting to compare what made the issues of the day (mining, roads, dams, fears of user pays with Rogernomics and the new Department of Conservation, support for the re-naming of Mt Taranaki), and how the style has changed over the years. Accident Reports, for instance, were once presented in a somewhat more direct way (often naming names) than today’s bulletin’s Back-Country Accidents section.

    There’s a lot to get through, and I think the lasting benefit of this will be a large library of information on back-country issues now being more easily available when researching past events.

  • Drive-by idiots with bright lights and loaded firearms in the Kaimanawas

    Some things can really make you angry. On Friday night I was bivvying out at a Department of Conservation road-side camp-site in the Kawekas, anticipating a great long weekend (which we had, more to come later). Having come up from Wellington we arrived a little before midnight, and were completely ignorant that this was happening just a short distance away at a similar camp-site over the range in the Kaimanawas.

    We eventually heard about the shooting via sketchy gossip on the mountain radio service on Sunday morning. Early reports suggested that a hunter had shot a woman cleaning her teeth at a river outside a hut. Later a rumour came through that not only had the shooter failed to identify what he was shooting at, the hut’s chimney was even visible from the position of the shooter, which should have made it obviously silly to be shooting near there at all. This translated into angry sarcastic chit-chat on the radio. By last night when I’d arrived home, more correct information had begun to emerge about just how reckless and stupid these guys were. Unfortunately they’re not alone, they just happened to be the ones to hurt someone.

    Want a picture? Because this one from the Herald on Sunday (pdf) more or less sums it up. Eventually the courts will reveal the facts of the case and if there’s reason to do so I’ll take this back, but right now it seems that what happened here really is disgusting.
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