Philippa Stevenson: Hot-shot couple who always get their goat

With a good keen man and a good keen woman on your tail it doesn't pay to be a goat in the Hakarimata hills this week.

After 12 days of hunting the bush-stripping pests, top hunter Gerry Newman told me on Tuesday night that he and partner Ann Peart - the country's only female professional hunter - had dispatched 111 goats.

After meeting the couple those in the know rate as New Zealand's best hunting duo, I'm confident the tally will go much higher in the last eight days of the Conservation Department goat culling operation.

The 1800ha Hakarimata Scenic Reserve - the bush-clad hills between Ngaruawahia and Huntly bounded by the west bank of the Waikato River and clearly visible from State Highway 1 - is the largest remaining stretch of lowland forest in the Waikato.

After 40-years or more of logging, quarrying and inroads by pasture, weeds and animals, the Hakarimata Restoration Trust has begun a 10-year plan to return it to a healthy and sustainable state. Earlier this year, possums were targeted in a 1080 poisoning operation and now goats are on the agenda. They require a whole different approach.

Sitting in the rundown caravan on the bush edge that Newman, 45, and Peart, 46, use as home base, I'm awed by exploits they regard as a normal day's work but that most of us who never stray far from the tarseal and flat whites would consider extraordinary.

And you probably can't imagine anyone less like stereotypical stinky, hairy, mountain man, goat hunters. Peart may not own a dress or makeup but even in shorts, tramping boots and khaki putties this slight, dark-haired woman would put many another more finely dressed in the shade. This Ann can get her gun and fly a helicopter, too.

Newman, too, has a small, slim build - "a racing sardine", as he puts it. He does a nice turn in philosophy, which, despite his rugged lifestyle, is more new-age than backwoods. His current sleeping bag-side reading reflects his interests on and off the job. It's Out of Nowhere, a history of military snipers.

It's also clear the frighteningly fit couple have a vastly different perspective on physical health and body weight than most. They talk of ensuring they eat enough good, wholesome food to fuel their strenuous work rather than, as many of us do, finding enough activity outside our sedentary occupations to justify our food intake.

That's how it is when you are up at sparrow's fart to unleash your dogs and head into the bush for another eight hours' slog up hills and down gullies, packing a .223 rifle with silencer, knife, lunch, first aid kit, radio telephone, handheld GPS monitor and 12 years of goat hunting savvy.

In their years on the job for DoC, forestry companies, regional councils and farmers, the pair have bagged around 30,000 goats. That means sneak and snipe with the pointer or "indicator" dogs - Newman's four, russet gold, bloodhound-like hungarian vizslas Ruby, Sika, Cayce and Tiger, and Peart's labrador collie-cross Blade.

They are not into spook and shoot or blunder and blast. "We don't want to herd goats we want to kill them," says Peart.

"Anybody can get one goat," says Newman. "It's a challenge to get everyone you get on to."

Newman tackles the steeper country - goats like a room with a view, especially when threatened, he says, so that means scaling the highest bluffs. Peart takes the easier ground and sometimes that means they create a pincer effect - one sending the quarry right into the cross hairs of the other.

At the end of the day their bright yellow, cellphone size GPS sets have recorded almost every step they've taken while the hunters have used them as mobile notebooks to record their kill sites and tally. Before turning in each night they transpose the data on to a map of the range - evidence of the job done and a guide to the areas most popular with the goats, which could be targeted on subsequent operations. A plastic bread bag holds harder evidence - a bunch of short, matted goat tails.

Between operations, which have them trekking goat-infested land from one end of the country to the other, Newman and Peart head to their 9ha block with garden, fruit trees and grazing stock overlooking the sea near Whakatane. They bought it three years ago and it's their first home.

Peart can see a time when she'll be happy that the only block she tramps will be her own. She'll put down her gun and take up her paintbrush.

Newman's pretty sure he'll still be after those goats, or deer, or the occasional pig. But then this is a man who knocks off hunting to go target shooting.

Just as well, really. There is a nationwide shortage of goat hunters but the goats just keep on coming.