The original species introduced in 1905 still exists there today living in heavy cover and is as exclusive as its homeland cousins.

In 1904 the World's Fair was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, this amazing show in St. Louis, Missouri was a sight to behold. What makes the 1904 World's Fair relevant to New Zealand is that of the many exhibits on display there, one included a herd of whitetails. Reportedly they had been trapped in deep snow in New Hampshire and then taken to St. Louis, though precisely when, how and by whom they were captured and transported no one today seems certain. What we do know is that at the time there were only around a half-million whitetails on Earth, a crowd likely had never seen one. 

President Theodore Roosevelt decided to give these whitetails to New Zealand. Sometime in late 1904 or early 1905, a ship carrying the whitetail headed down the Mississippi River from St. Louis, bound for the South Island of New Zealand. Remarkably, of the 22 deer that went onto the ship, 18 of them -- four bucks and 14 does -- make it across the Pacific alive which was a 12,000 mile journey by boat. On Saturday March 26 nine of the deer were sent to Pegasus Sound, Stewart Island, and the remaining nine were forwarded to Rees Valley, Lake Wakatipu in the lower part of the South Island. Today these two main herds still exist and are doing well, as well as some other smaller pockets of New Zealand whitetail on private land all in the South Island. 

Our hunting is done mainly on private reserves that have small numbers of whitetail deer, where the bucks do very well. Weighing less than their cousins, we typically hunt them by sitting and glassing, waiting for the deer to feed out of the cover.

Whitetail stags come into hard antler in March, with the rut taking place in May and peaks by the middle of the month. The young are born November/December.