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Dedicated to Keeping New Zealand Cleaner and Greener!
Awesome Possum Night Shoot!
November 2007
What could be better than an evening in the bush with good mates, good guns and plenty of possums!
Hamish (old family friend and hunting buddy) came up to Auckland from Christchurch for a few days. Big Sam gave me a call to organise a possum shoot while he was here.
Friday afternoon came around and we rendezvoused at the church carpark - having met earlier in the day to plan what gear to take and organise the venue - a contact Big Sam has in Hunua - South Auckland.
4:45pm we head off through busy Auckland traffic, excited about the evening ahead, and catching up with what's been happening in each other's lives over the last six months or so.
Arriving at the farm around 6pm, we geared up, oogled each other's gear (Hamish borrowed my Papoose .22 - bipods, lazer, 3-9x50 scope and silencer), Big Sam with his Remington 597 (ditto of above, but with a 6-24x40 scope) he bought from me earlier in the year, and me with my little 410 (ladies) shot gun (with lazer).
We decided to survey the land, and this gave the owner a good chance to exercise his dog before tying him up for the night.
Within four minutes Sam spotted two rabbits grazing on the neighbors field!
This Promises to be a good night.
Hopping onto the farm where we were shooting, Big Sam lined up a bunny up in his 6-24x40 scope and let a silver jacket rip! Darn, missed by miles! Decided to put up a paper target and check Sam's alignment - after all - we've had this rifle hitting empty .22 cases at 50 meters! After missing a 150mm target at 5 meters, we decided something was terribly wrong with Sam's scopes. Appears they must have been knocked and misaligned. Well, at least his Laser was sighted in properly. Trouble is, his batteries were dying and would only last around 15 seconds each time before fading out, and his scopes just wouldn't line up, they were all over the place!
Well, with the rifles sighted in properly (at least my two were) we decided to go to the neighbors house and ask permission to shoot their property. Great reception! Now we have two farms to shoot.
Trouble is, that by now we getting a bit hungry and it was too dark for the bunnies, so decided to head back into town for some KFC and let the possums wake up. Around an hour later - with full tummies and darkness falling - we were back at the farms, ready for some action!
Walking back to the hut we stayed in during a shoot in May (I still cringe at the memory of the wettas!), Big Sam shouted, 'There's two in this tree!'
Lining up
the laser on his Remington 597 - he let a stinger rip at around 6 meters -
and our first possum for the night fell instantly to the ground. The other
possum took for cover in the thick of the
branches with only his face - and two glowing orange eyes - showing through.
A great opportunity to try out my 410 for its first real kill. Boom!
One more possum came crashing to the ground amidst shouts of, 'Look out
Hamish - it's coming down on top of you!' followed by Hamish running around
chasing a rather confused and wounded possum, with Big Sam emptying the rest
of his magazine in an attempt to bring it to an end,
and
me finally loading another cartridge in the 410 and peppering it with 4
gauge shot.
Cool, now our blood was pumping and our excitement reaching a peak!
The next hour or so was rather futile, with nothing to show for our efforts. Walking back down to the stream was a treat, with glow-worms everywhere. Looked like something out of Star Wars, with fairy lights all around amidst the bush and banks of the stream.
Decided we'd try out luck at the neighbors property, and headed back to the cars for jackets and more batteries for the torches.
Going on
ahead, I heard a loud growling from a tree around 20 meters away, only to
find a massive adult possum right at the top of a shrubby tree only 4 meters
high, fiercely defending his right to be there!
With my last shot in the back of my mind, only wounding the possum, I called Hamish and Sam over for back up. Hamish was desperate to have his first kill for the night, and wanted this one, but I reminded him of the rules - you spot it, you shoot it! Another 410 exploded, and one more possum expired in an instant, followed by Hamish and his growing bag of plucked possum fur and $ signs in his eyes.
Spotting along a massive row of pine trees, we spend the rest of the night dispatching a variety of possums from their nests. At one stage we spotted 2 possums in the same tree, around 1 meter apart from each other. Hamish was busy plucking the last possum, and Sam's laser was dead - so he lined up the lower possum in his 6-24x40 scopes (still out of alignment) and let a stinger rip, only to have the other possum higher in the tree explode in a ball of fluff and fall crashing to the ground through broken branches and twigs!
Awesome shooting Sam, that one will go down in history!!!!
Well, with midnight fast approaching, friendships renewed, torch batteries with heaps more energy than we were feeling, camera fill of memories - and smiles on our faces, we headed back to the car for the hour trip back home, talking all the way about the awesome night we had together.
Ah, that's what memories are made of :-)
For access to censored photos from this hunt - containing humane but graphic photos of dead animals - contact me to request the unlock code.
You can't access any censored photos without the specific unlock code from me.