'It's a plague' On the night trail with the wallaby hunters

Pete Peeti flicks off the headlights, cuts the ignition and lets his truck roll quietly down a bush track, deep in the heart of New Zealand's North Island. Twilight is slipping into night and rain is falling in thick drapes.

- Eva Corlett

He slings his gun over his shoulder and scans the track with thermal vision goggles. "The hardier ones will brave the rain," he says quietly.

The goggles render the landscape ghostly skeletal trees and blotted shadows. Barely a minute passes before a splash of bright light moves into frame 30 metres away. It grazes for a moment, then with the unmistakable bounce of a wallaby, hops toward a new patch of grass. Peeti drops flat against the wet earth and readies his shot. His gun cracks. "Got it," he says, disappearing to retrieve the animal.

Peeti can kill 100 dama wallabies in this patch of bush in a night - a tiny dent in the population of thousands that have become pests in this one 55,000-hectare forest block above Rotoiti Lake.

"The wallaby has reached plague proportions," Peeti says. "They are eating all the shrubs, baby seedlings, stopping the natives from growing." Peeti - who is also a culinary and hunting TV star - has been culling wallabies and other pests including deer, pigs, possums and rabbits for more than 20 years. Recently, he was contracted by the Bay of Plenty regional council as a wallaby pest controller.