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A farming couple who lost many deer to the heavy Mid Canterbury flood two years ago can thank a pet hind called Bambi for helping regather their herd.
Lyn Butterick’s headstrong pet hind had been the bane of her husband Darryl’s life until she earned her keep in the weeks after 2021 floodwaters swept livestock, fences and farm soils off their Plains Pastoral farm at Greenstreet.
Most of their deer herd, raised for trophy hunting and velvet, bolted for one of the branches of the Ashburton River. Just about all of their sire stags perished among a total of 30 deer, including hinds and weaners, that drowned or were never seen again.
They managed to get many of the surviving animals back through river searches by vehicle or helicopter and their deer-detecting hind.
"The pet hind has been a pain in the ass all her life," says Mr Butterick. "But she probably hooked 30-odd deer back.
"Once we’d got fenced in a bit we’d kick her out and she would just cruise around here and you’d go find her in the morning and she’d be parked up and might have two or three or half a dozen with her. We’d slide them in a paddock and kick her out again. So she was worth her weight in gold for the first time in her life."
Mr Butterick revealed Bambi’s role in rounding up the escapees at a field day during the Deer Industry New Zealand conference in Ashburton.
The Buttericks retrieved the last deer in the river scrub six to seven weeks after the May flood.
"To be fair there was starting to get [to be] a lot more traffic around the river then, so we stopped putting Bambi out because we thought some clown might smoke her."
Bambi proved better at finding deer than thermal detection gear they also used, as it picked up wild pigs — resulting in wasted effort spent searching for them instead.
Bambi now has pride of place in one of the lower paddocks at their deer block which wore much of the flooding carnage.
Mr Butterick says he could not believe how quickly the deer reverted to their wild instincts when the fences were down.
"What was left after three weeks was feral. They were just mongrels and they were in twos and threes in the scrub down by the river. So we fenced a lane to bring them in [the deer block] and I thought we’d just dig them out of the scrub and everything would be great and wonderful ... You’d have to bring them out bloody near by hand or shotgun.
"One would come out and they’d just go a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the river.
"We caught one a couple of miles down the river — we just had to get them back."
