Both Barrels June 2020

This weekend is a great opportunity for you to maximise your hunting activity with it being the shortest day on Sunday.

With there being less than nine hours of daylight on the 21^st of June, you can pack in a lot of hunting as the ducks head back to the waterways to camp up.

Typically ducks will leave on dusk to raid farmland crops during the night, before returning back to river and lakes early in the morning. 

Hunters can take advantage of this day, simply by getting back out to their maimai’s, with the expectation that the ducks won’t be sitting on a vacant pond down the road, as hunters will be there too. 

This weekend  is a great opportunity to take the kids out for a hunt, or even introduce someone new to the sport as day licences are only $23. 

The mallard season has a couple of weekends to go in most North Island regions and runs until 26 July in the South Island and we advise that duck numbers are very good throughout the country. 

With the longer seasons in the South Island, there is a great opportunity for hunters to partake in some "duck tourism" you can click here to see the season lengths around the country. 

Entries are now open in the game bird photo competition, there are two competitions running at the moment and the species in question are the NZ shoveler and the pheasant, click here to enter and have a go at winning $1000. 

Another very important competition Fish & Game are running at the moment is “Banding Together” which runs alongside our banding programme for hunters that report harvested birds with a band. 

The banding programme is a team effort so don’t let the rest of the team down by not reporting birds. 

Hunting & Fishing NZ in association with Banded Avery are generously providing five prizes consisting of two boxes of Banded XD (extra detail) decoys. This includes one box of mallards and one box of NZ shoveler decoys. 

So why wouldn’t anyone ring their band number and details through on 0800 BIRD BAND, a free phone call which you can do even in the maimai? or click here to do it online.

You can check out our third instalment in our series “Getting the most out of your gun dog” from our gun dog guru John Stevens click here to read about how to approach your first season.

Spotted some unattended maimais? Hunters are reminded that 2019 maimai claim tags only remain current until the 2021 pegging day if the hunter has purchased a 2020 game bird licence. Hunters looking to claim maimai’s that are possibly unused, need to contact Fish and Game, to find out if the name on the tag is a current 2020  game bird licence holder.

Be sure to check out our regional page posts above for loads of handy information to maximise you hunting success.