Three methods cover almost every tahr hunt. Most trips use some combination of them.
Spot-and-stalk. The dominant method. You position on a knoll or across a valley, you glass for animals, you pick a target, you plan a stalk using the terrain and the wind, and you close the distance on foot until you are inside an ethical shot. On open Southern Alps country this method works for almost everything. The art of it is in the glassing and the stalk, not the shot.
Tahr have exceptional eyesight. They watch the country relentlessly. But they look downhill less reliably than uphill, so getting above an animal is the standard approach. Their hearing and scent are good but not chamois-good. Wind matters most: in the morning the convection draws air upslope; in the evening it draws it downslope; alpine basins generate cross-canyon swirls that sometimes betray a stalk for no obvious reason. A good guide reads it.
Helicopter access. Many trips begin with a flight in. There are three flavours of this, and they matter.
A fly-in spike camp, also called a drop camp, is the cleanest. The helicopter delivers you and your gear to the head of a valley, on a designated landing pad if you are on DOC land, or onto a private block. You walk and stalk for five to ten days, and the helicopter picks you up at the end. Sometimes a recovery flight comes in to lift the cape and horns out separately. Cost is concentrated up front, the rest of the hunt is on foot, the camp can be fitted out comfortably because you don't carry it.
Day flights — sometimes called heli-hunts — fly above the country, spot animals, set down on a ridge, and stalk in. This style is what gets argued about. On public conservation land it is permitted only under DOC concession, with offset shooting rules and timing restrictions. On private blocks the rules are the lessor's. A reputable outfitter will not let a paying client shoot from the helicopter — the helicopter is transport, not a platform.
Aerially-assisted trophy hunts, formally, are the DOC concession category that covers commercial helicopter access for trophy clients on public land. The rules around them — pre-approved blocks, offsets, ballot exclusions — are what make legal heli-hunting in NZ different from heli-hunting in less regulated places.
4WD access. On the eastern side of the divide, some of the great tahr country can be reached by truck. Mesopotamia, Mt Potts, Lilybank, Erewhon and the Lake Heron stations all run 4WD up into the high blocks. From the truck you walk and stalk like any other foot hunt. This style suits hunters who don't want a helicopter, who want a relatively modest cost, and who don't mind the country being slightly less wild than a fly-in catchment.
Foot-only / wilderness style. Walk in from the road end, pitch tent, hunt for a week, walk out. The Hopkins, Huxley, Ahuriri, Hunter and Whitcombe valleys all have a tradition of foot hunting. Adams and Hooker-Landsborough are foot once you are on the ground from the helicopter drop. This is the hardest, cheapest and arguably the most rewarding way to hunt tahr.
A note on glassing strategy. Plan to spend most of your hunting time glassing, not stalking. Sixty to eighty per cent glass, twenty to thirty per cent walk. The first half hour before sunrise and the last ninety minutes before sunset are gold. Animals are out on open feeding faces. Mid-day the bulls bed up on bluffs and sometimes you have to find them through patient sector-by-sector glass with the spotting scope. Sun position matters: glass faces while they are still in shade or in low golden light, not when the sun is glaring straight off the rocks.
A note on shot distances. Typical engagements run 200 to 450 metres. Closer than that is rare on open country; farther than that demands a confirmed shooter, a confirmed dope card, and honesty about the wind. Bull tahr are tough animals. The standard advice is heart-and-lung in good country and neck-and-shoulder if the bull is anywhere a wounded animal could roll into terrain you can't get to. A bull that takes one bad jump after a hit can roll three hundred metres down a bluff and the cape becomes worthless. Don't fire if you can't recover.