Sika deer in the Kaimanawa and Kaweka forest parks have been made the North Island’s first Herd of Special Interest, handing hunters a formal role in managing an introduced animal that has spent most of the past century being treated as a pest.
Hunting and Fishing Minister James Meager announced the designation on 15 July, covering the Kaimanawa and Kaweka forest parks and the Kaweka Conservation Area, an area of roughly 125,000 hectares. The Central North Island Sika Foundation will handle day to day delivery on the ground, working under the Game Animal Council alongside the Department of Conservation, iwi and hapū. Existing hunting permits carry over, and the Game Animal Council says changes will show up when permits come up for renewal rather than requiring anyone to reapply now.
“I am a firm believer in the power of hunter-led conservation, and this designation empowers the sector to lead sensible herd management,” Meager said.
It is the second such designation in a fortnight and the first in the North Island. Fiordland’s wapiti became the country’s first Herd of Special Interest on 13 July. The two herds will be run quite differently. Wapiti are managed largely as a trophy animal in a national park, while sika are the deer most New Zealanders actually put in the freezer, and the plan treats them accordingly.
“It’s about balancing hunting outcomes with long-term sustainability,” Sika Foundation secretary Cam Speedy told Farmers Weekly. “We will get nice venison and trophies out of more balanced deer herds.”
The status exists under the Game Animal Council Act 2013, which allows a valued introduced herd to be managed for hunting and for conservation at the same time, instead of simply being knocked down wherever it is found. It comes with a herd management plan, ecological targets, monitoring and a review at least every five years. Until now the sika herd sat under the Wild Animal Control Act 1977, legislation whose basic premise is that wild deer are something to be controlled.
Meager noted the framework has been a long time arriving. “This day has been a long-time coming, with legislation supporting the creation of HOSIs passed back in 2013,” he said. He also said the plan would be “supported by ongoing monitoring from DOC and a formal review at least every five years”, and that he retains the power to amend or remove the designation.
The point that both the Government and the Sika Foundation have been at pains to make is that the plan does not set out to grow the herd. The Department of Conservation says the aim is to maintain herd quality while supporting “long term regeneration of the forest canopy”, and the management plan’s overarching objectives include managing sika in a way that “allows for canopy regeneration and supports the maintenance of forest ecosystem processes and the protection of threatened species and their habitats”. A key focus is reducing browsing pressure on young trees in the areas of highest biodiversity value.
That pressure is real and well documented. Both parks currently carry high sika numbers, and the concern DOC has raised for years is mountain beech. Deer eat the seedlings, which means that as mature trees die there is nothing coming through to replace them, canopy gaps widen, and over a long enough run the forest can slide towards low scrub. Deer browsing has also stripped out palatable understorey plants such as five finger and seven finger in parts of the parks, leaving behind species deer will not touch, like horopito and crown fern. The Sika Foundation has been running an adaptive deer management and research programme in the two parks with DOC, including monitoring of both deer density and how the habitat responds.
Not everyone is convinced the model works. When Parliament passed the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill at the start of July, Forest and Bird argued the framework elevates introduced animals above native wildlife, saying there “shouldn’t be protected herds of pest animals” ranked above species like kākāriki and kiwi, and warning the change could lead to more auctions giving wealthy tourists exclusive access. Meager rejected that at the time as “unnecessary scaremongering tactics”, and argued an eradication goal would in practice leave hunting to the wealthy anyway. Public access to the parks and existing conservation protections are not changed by the designation.
The herd itself is a piece of accidental history. Six sika deer, a gift from the Duke of Bedford out of the Woburn Abbey herd in England, were released on the edge of the Kaimanawa in 1905 after an earlier liberation near Oamaru in 1885 failed to take. Those six animals founded a population that now ranges from Taupō south towards the Tararua, and made the central North Island the country’s sika hunting heartland. More than a century on, their descendants have gone from unwanted introduction to an animal with its own management plan, its own foundation and its own line in the statute book.
The proposal did not arrive quickly. The Sika Foundation began discussions in early 2024, the formal proposal went to the Minister and was accepted in 2025, and public consultation on the draft management plan ran through November and December last year, drawing 245 submissions that fed into the final plan.
Whether the arrangement delivers is now a question of numbers rather than argument. The measure is not how many deer are in the Kaimanawa and Kaweka, but whether the beech seedlings get tall enough to matter.
What do you make of hunters being given a formal role in managing the sika herd? Have you hunted the Kaimanawa or Kaweka, or seen the state of the forest understorey there yourself? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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