As they fed over the knoll, I moved closer. There was another small mob of nannies and kids down to my left, and one of them saw me moving across the saddle. She turned downhill and away from where I was heading. The long grass made it hard to spot the goats, another lone nanny and kid were bypassed as I crawled through the long grass. I came across the big fellas mob feeding downhill.
They were about 50m away, and feeding on the move. As they left the last of the cover and headed out into the open pasture, I set up shop where they had just been, amongst a rocky outcrop with logs and a few coprosma bushes providing extra cover.
Some more pics and video to pass the time. I knew that they would feed back uphill at last light to bed down amongst the rocks and timber, so it was now a waiting game.
After a while, I backtracked and moved around the hill and set up in another stand of timber and coprosma and rocks. It was in the same gully that the mob used to head up to their bedding area last time I was there. I was pretty well concealed, but there was one nanny who was suspicious. She kept looking in my direction, but not always directly at me, so I figured that she couldn’t see me. The rest of the mob wasn’t paying too much attention to her intermittent sneezes and snorts.
After about a hundred pics of the big fella, I started looking around at the other billies, and noticed that there weren’t any other good heads. One billy was around 32-33” and the rest were about 20-24”. They were all black and white saddle backs or black faced billies, and most of the young goats were that colour too.
They were bigger in the body than the white billy, and had a clearly visible hump of muscle on their shoulders. Probably Boer cross, with the solid build and roman nose on them.
Then I started thinking that in this mob there was about 80% of the goats on the property. Not a huge population by any means, but I took out one big fella last year, and this is the only other big one. There might be one more billy over 100 DS with the rest lucky to make 70 DS. So by taking out this big billy, I will be taking out the best chance of keeping good genes in the herd.
The more I thought about it, the more I started thinking that I’ll let the big fella go and hopefully breed a few more nannies and take out a few of the bigger bodied saddleback billies over the next few months.
The thoughts were going to and fro in my head, but at the end of the day, I just felt that If I shot him I would be *****tting in my own nest. I’d like to bring my boys here when they are old enough and let them see a big billy, and not just tell them about the ones I shot.
Topic: Fallow deer Scouting and Big Billy (Read 399 times)
