Both Barrels July - Auckland Waikato

Improving your farm pond/hunting ponds

The time is now to get planting around your pond for next season, so that plants have the time to get established root systems before summer hits.

It doesn’t take a lot of work to improve gamebird habitat that will provide food and shelter for birds around your ponds. Some key things to remember include:

• Don’t plant tall trees too densely to avoid over-shading and leave plenty of room for birds to fly in and out.
• Plant good ground cover/nesting cover of grasses (such as carex) close around the water's edge.
• Weeping willow are also good for providing escape cover, so a couple of these can be planted to overhang the water.
• Food sources will help attract ducks to your pond, so consider planting a fruit tree or two, such as fejoa, apple, or plum, or oak (though note that these take a long time before they produce acorns).
• Carex seedheads are a great food source so combined with the nesting cover they provide, carex are an easy and versatile grass to plant for success.
• Also check out this method of creating overhead cover within the open water areas of your pond just by using haybales and carex

We conduct a lot of habitat work with farmers and landowners, so if you're interested in exploring planting initiatives or habitat restoration projects on your property, please give us a call. We can provide assistance and guidance.

For some more information around planting and enhancing your ponds, check out our website.

Expect a SMS from Fish & Game again this year.

This year we will be repeating the SMS survey that we piloted in 2024 to estimate band reporting rates. This has shown to help improve our estimates of band reporting rates in our region – which go on to contribute to more accurate estimates of population size.

The results of last years report can be found here.

Last year the response rate to the survey was impressive - with around 67% of hunters responding. From this, we found that around 10% of hunters shot a banded bird, and of these, between 47% to 57% reported their bands.

Thank you to those who continue to participate in this research. Such a high response rate is no doubt a testament to the passion and dedication you all have for the sport.