Hunting access, New Zealand
Find the animals, meet the landowner, get asked back.
The hunters with the best country aren’t luckier — they know the people who own it. This is where you start building relationships: what lives where, who owns the land, where the public can already go, and a request a farmer can answer in a minute.
Going fishing instead? Rivers and lakes · Sea
Find what lives where
Field guides to New Zealand’s deer, pigs, goats, tahr, wallabies and the rest — habitat, season and sign, what to shoot it with, and what a poison operation means for your dogs.
Open the field guideSee who owns it
Property boundaries, public conservation land, marginal strips and unformed legal roads on one map — including country you can already walk onto without asking anyone.
Open the mapAsk properly
A letter that folds into its own envelope, carrying a code the landowner scans to see your licence, insurance and references. They can say yes, no or ask a question in a minute — and the ones who say yes are the start of a list you keep.
Build your profilePlan the trip
The forecast and the climb at your entry point, whether there is 1080 on it, your entry point on the GPS, and one A4 sheet for whoever stays home.
Make a hunt plan
Ballot season
Applications for the Winter tahr ballot close Fri 30 Oct, 4 pm.
- Winter tahr ballotapplications open now, close Fri 30 Oct, 4 pm
- Wānaka roar blocksapplications close Sat 31 Oct
- Waikaia Forest roar blocksapplications open now, close Sat 31 Oct
- Leithen Bush roar blocksapplications open now, close Sat 31 Oct
Start here if you’re new
Sometimes you don’t need permission at all.
A paper road is a public road that was surveyed but never built. It is still legally a road — it just looks like paddock, scrub or riverbed. New Zealand has roughly 55,000 km of them, and many run straight through private farmland.
Along one, the public has a right to pass and repass without being obstructed. So the first question isn’t always “who owns this?” — it’s whether there is already a legal way in. When there is, you don’t need to send a request at all.
We map 65,023 of them, classified as unformed by the Outdoor Access Commission rather than guessed at. Click one and it tells you the council to ask about driving in.
Plan a hunt
Drop a pin. Find out what’s there.
Pick where you’ll go in and the dates. The plan checks that exact spot against DOC’s permit areas, its 1080 operations, the hut network and every animal record we hold — then goes onto paper and your GPS, because there is no signal where you’re going.
What the land is, and whose permit
Conservation park, marginal strip or reserve, and the DOC hunting permit area or roar block you’re in — or the nearest one, if your road end is on private land. We map 17,963 protected areas, including 3,153 marginal strips.
1080 within 2 km, for your dates
Every DOC operation inside DOC’s own 2 km buffer, with its caution period checked against the days you’ll be out. Poisoned carcasses stay lethal to a dog long after the signs come down.
The nearest huts
The closest DOC huts to your pin, whether you can just turn up or have to book, and whether there’s a fire to dry out by. How the hut network works.
Animals recorded nearby
Which species have been recorded within 5 km, how recently, and how close. Records, not a promise — they follow tracks and roads — but a deer logged 300 m away this autumn is worth knowing about.
Wind, rain and how steep it is
The forecast for your dates at your entry point, wind first. The elevation you go in at, what the block climbs to, and how far across it runs. Numbers, not a difficulty rating.
Onto the GPS, and onto paper
A GPX with your entry point, the block and the paper roads nearby. One A4 sheet with coordinates in the format Police ask for, when you’re due out, and what you’ll do if the river’s up.
New on the map: how long since the trees came down. Every patch of forest cleared since 2011, coloured by age, so you know whether a pine block is open slash or thick regrowth before you go. What the colours mean
Know what you’re hunting
Nineteen introduced animals, and where they turn up.
The game species worth the walk, the pests that get you the yes, and the managed herds you ballot for. Each one has a field guide page: habitat, season and sign, what to shoot it with, what a poison operation means for your dogs — and, where the country is serious, who to go with and what the helicopters are doing to your chances.
Deer, pigs and goats11
Possums and wallabies4
Rabbits and hares2
Turkeys and peafowl2
Numbers are recorded sightings, newest data from GBIF. Most of these are logged by the public rather than by hunters, so a cluster is a real sign the animal is about and out where it can be seen — it is not a record of where people hunt. But records follow tracks, roads and campsites, so empty country usually means nobody has walked it with a phone rather than that there is nothing there. Presence, not density. Occurrence data from GBIF.org.
And one bird
Canada geese aren’t game birds any more.
This is the animal people are most confidently wrong about, and the reason is a date. In June 2011 the Canada goose was moved out of the game schedule of the Wildlife Act 1953 and into Schedule 5, which the Act declares to be unprotected throughout New Zealand
. Fish & Game stopped managing them that day.
So there is no season, no bag limit and no game licence. DOC put it plainly: Canada geese are in Schedule 5 of the Wildlife Act 1953. Anyone can hunt or kill geese at any time of year without a need for a game licence.
- On private land you still need the owner’s permission. That is trespass law, not the Wildlife Act — nothing about Schedule 5 gives you a right to be on somebody’s place.
- On public conservation land you do still need a DOC permit, and here is the part that catches people: it is the
game bird hunting permit
, which DOC sayscovers hunting Canada geese
— even though they are no longer game birds. - Your firearms obligations do not change. Schedule 5 changed the bird’s status, not yours.
DOC on hunting game birds · the change itself is the Wildlife (Canada Goose) Order 2011, SR 2011/128. As always, the rules are theirs to state and worth checking before you go.
1080 & dog safety
If it’s signposted, hunt somewhere else.
1080 is used across New Zealand to control possums, rats and stoats. It is lethal to dogs and to people, and a deer or pig that ate bait and survived carries it in its meat — you cannot tell from the carcass, and cooking does not destroy it. DOC’s rule is simply: do not eat animals from an area while the warning signs are up. We map every operation they record.
- Heaphy Lowland NPCP 2027In caution period
- Pouiatoa Taramoukou Aerial 2026In caution period
- Kaumira/Mt NimrodIn caution period
- AR 2026 Callery 1In caution period
- Wilberforce MathiasPlanned
- Southern Ruapehu Aerial 2026Planned
Shows operations recorded by DOC from March 2022 onward. This is not a statement that 1080 is or is not present now. Always follow on-site warning signs and check DOC for the authoritative position.
Resources
Ballistics, load data and gear.
The technical references and makers hunters keep coming back to, wherever they are. We haven’t tested any of it. None of these links earn us anything — if that ever changes, the link will say so.
Ballistics and sighting in
Drop, drift and zero. Free calculators the shooting world has settled on.
Load data and reloading
Published data from the powder and bullet makers. Never work from anything else.
Ammunition and projectiles
What most factory and handloaded hunting rounds are built from.
Optics
Where the money goes after the rifle, and usually where it should.
Packs and clothing
Load carrying and layering for country like ours.
Navigation and comms
Coverage runs out long before the country does. A satellite messenger is the only thing that works where a phone will not.
Something missing that you’d expect to see? Tell us — the list is only as good as what hunters say belongs on it.
Alerts
We’ll tell you when there’s something near you.
Being straight about it: there is no queue of landowners waiting, because we have only just started asking them. Leave an address and the region you hunt, and you will hear from us when that changes where you are — not before, and not about anything else.
Or follow along on Facebook A weekly post on new 1080 operations and anything a regulator changes.
What it costs
Free — and free for good if you’re early.
There is no paid plan today. We expect to build one eventually, and when it arrives it will not arrive for the people who were already here.
Everything on the site
Free
while we’re building it
- The full map — titles, public conservation land and every unformed legal road
- 1080 operations, with the caution period and the agency that ran it
- Where each animal actually turns up, and when it is worth going
- A letter to a landowner that reads like a person wrote it
No card, and nothing to cancel. We have no billing to put you into.
If a price ever arrives
- You keep this one.
- Have an account before a paid plan exists and everything you can do today stays free for as long as that account does. Not a trial, not a founder discount — the same site, at no cost.
- We can tell who was early.
- The promise runs off the date your account was created. The database sets it, we do not type it in, and it is not something we can quietly move later.
- Landowners never pay.
- Not now and not later. There is no version of this where the person who owns the land is the customer, or where paying us puts one hunter ahead of another at a gate. Access is free unless a landowner says otherwise, and if one does choose to charge a hunter, that is between the two of them and we take none of it.
- Nothing sits behind a card today.
- We collect no payment details and run no billing. If a site asks you to pay to reach a New Zealand landowner, it is not this one.
Feedback
Tell us what’s wrong with it.
Boundaries that look off, an address that belongs to the neighbour, a page that won’t load, or something obvious we’ve missed. It goes to one person, not a queue, and you don’t need an account.