THE WILD WEST OF NEW ZEALAND

Lord of the Rings Meets Elk Hunting With Helicopters

- Gwyneth Hyndman

In 1966, Richard “Dick” Deaker bought a World War II-era Tiger Moth biplane with money he’d earned as a young deer hunter hired by the New Zealand government in the South Island’s Fiordland National Park. Culling the red deer that had been destroying native vegetation was lucrative employment, and Deaker had a little inkling then how hunting and flying would become such intertwined trades in years to come. At 21, it was an impulse buy with surplus cash. His mother took one look at the plane and told him he’d be dead in a week.

“I tell you what, I never forgot that,” says Decker, who still flies commercially at age 75, with more than 50 years and thousand flight hours behind him. He keeps a photo of that plane on his lounge room wall above his chair, flanked by windows that look out to the edges of the 3 million acres of Fiordland and the Murchison Mountains where he was first hired on as a hunter at 19. Deaker would go on to use the flight hours he had accumulated in that Tiger Moth to become a helicopter pilot in 1972, surviving an adrenaline-fueled and deadly sliver of history when aviation and hunting came together, known here as the “deer wars.”