This Is New Zealand (Second Series), Episode 10

This series of yarns, written and candidly narrated by Jim Henderson, focuses on the people, places and curiosities of the West Coast of New Zealand. In this episode, Henderson describes how the head of a bull moose ended up hanging on the kitchen wall of Percy Lyes' west coast farm house in 1952.

The story goes, Max Curtis (Nelson), Robyn Francis Smith (Canterbury) and Lyes went on a hunting trip to Wet Jacket Arm, north of Dusky Sound, in the south of the south island. Here they found fresh moose tracks which led to Lyes shooting down an eleven hundred pound bull moose. George Elliot, a Wellington taxidermist mounted it and Ken Ward displayed it in his sports shop in Hokitika for a few months before Lyes eventuallly took it home.

Henderson explains that only two other New Zealand bull moose heads are known to be hanging in New Zealand; the first in the home of Edward Herick (Havelock North) and the second, in the Grand Hotel, in Invercargill. Edward Herick bagged both heads in 1929 an 1934. The moose were descended from stock brought out from Canada in 1910.

Henderson describes Lyes' physical and mental character and tells of his, and Curtis' seasonal deer hunting successes with impressive stats. Henderson outlines the iintroduction of the various deer species to New Zealand. There are 3,000 members in the New Zealand Deer Stalkers Association, of which only a few are women.