On Sam “Trap Man” Gibson’s Instagram page is a picture of him signing autographs at the 2024 launch of his book. It is called Sam the Trap Man: Cracking Yarns and Tall Tales from the Bush. It has proved to be popular. It was in the top 10 NZ non-fiction books in July. There is an entire chapter on how to dig a long drop. A long drop, just so you know, has to be 2.1m (7ft) deep. You will also learn how to cover up the old long drop. This is important. “You’ve got to cover the old one up adequately so someone doesn’t stand in the old pooper.”
Before launching into print, Gibson became something of a social media cult hero with his conservation message, educating a younger generation about hunting, bushlore and biodiversity and leading the Eastern Whio Link project in a bid to save the native blue duck.
In the book-signing picture, Sam (aka Hamiora) Gibson is sporting a great big bushman’s beard. He still does; it is what you might call his signature look. He’s wearing what looks like a 19th-century cowboy hat with a corduroy vest worn over a slightly puffy white shirt, a large hei tiki and one dangly pounamu earring. He looks as though he has stepped outside the frame of a portrait of a 19th-century colonial cowboy fop. “I’ve always been quite a quirky dresser,” he says.
He’s a Gisborne boy. His book-signing get-up is pretty standard, he says, for East Coast fellas. “In the East Coast, our cowboy culture is quite strong. When you get into the rural backblocks, bushmen, farmers and kaupoai [cowboys] are one and the same. We’ve got this strange western influence – so, cowboy hats, waistcoats, cowboy boots for when we go to a special occasion.”
He is going to the Beehive this month. He is still deciding “whether my cowboy hat is too much or too little”. I’d put money on him deciding to wear the hat.
He is going to the Beehive for the premiere of the documentary Think Like a Forest, which he presents. The short feature documents the Recloaking Papatūānuku project, the Pure Advantage-backed scheme to restore and enhance 2.1 million hectares of native forest over the next 10 years and help meet our carbon-capture goals.
How do you think like a forest? “Well, to me, many people walk through the bush saying, ‘Oh, that’s a tree, that’s a fern, that’s a moss.’ But we don’t really understand the roles that each individual tree or fern plays in a forest, or each individual moss.
“For me, the forest is just like our communities, and we know with strong communities, we need to understand the policy, we need to understand the market drivers. We need to understand how diverse our communities are, and we usually are more resilient when we have diversity in our communities, because everyone’s got a different job to play.”
That sounds like a pitch. And it might well be. He’s standing as an independent for a seat on the Gisborne District Council. He might be a lefty. “I’m a goofy-footed surfer, if that makes sense.” It might not, but it’s a nice image. It makes him sound like some rare wading bird.
He’s an endlessly enthusiastic conservationist, a bushman and trapper, a hunter and fisherman, a gardener, a forager and an equally enthusiastic eater of huhu bugs. I idiotically asked him if he’d eaten huhu bugs on toast for breakfast the morning we spoke. Idiotically, because he went on to describe, with gleeful relish, exactly what it is like to eat a raw huhu bug.
He did not, by the way, have huhu bugs for breakfast the day we spoke. He says he has had huhu bugs for breakfast, but never on toast. He says they taste like peanut butter if you like them or sawdust if you don’t. He prefers them cooked. But he will eat them raw. Don’t they (as in the nursery rhyme) wriggle and jiggle and tickle inside him?
“I grew up with that one, too! Usually, you give them a bit of a bite and that sorts that out. And a huhu-bug connoisseur will know that once you bite a huhu bug, your mouth just fills with lots of huhu juicy goodness.”
He was making me feel ill. “I’m sorry. We can move on if you like.” What a good idea. He almost managed to persuade me that the female berries of the kawakawa tree are a good addition to cocktails. Almost. Because at the end of Think Like a Forest, he issues a word of caution: they make you poo.
He lives in Gisborne with his partner, Roimata Sinclair, and their two children, six-year-old Rehua and three-year-old Te Kōtuku, who, like the white heron after which she is named, is obsessed with catching and eating fish. Rehua has a mullet, because he wanted a dragon haircut with racing stripes. He may have inherited his father’s style sense. They live in a lovely old villa with a “beautiful sunny garden with our chickens running around the backyard, and fruit trees. We’re really lucky to have all of that”. His favourite chicken is named My Polish Girl. He likes to count his blessings; he says he’s “living the dream”.
He likes animals. You can like animals and you can kill animals. That’s just country life. His Instagram page doesn’t flinch. Here he is with dead beasts, deer and pigs slung around his shoulders like grisly stoles.
I ask him what he likes to do when he’s not killing things. He says, amused, “That’s a funny way of phrasing it.” What I really want to know is what it’s like to kill a deer. Because, you know, who hasn’t seen Bambi?
It’s timely here to mention he is quite often compared with Barry Crump, that author of, yep, cracking yarns and tall tales from the bush. Almost nobody has a good word to say about Crump, who was, by most accounts, a shit.
“As far as writing goes, I’m absolutely flattered. I think that you don’t have to respect the man to respect his written work.”
Other than this, Trap Man could not be less like Crump. He’s not remotely blokey, despite the blokey things he does. He doesn’t drink. Not even coffee. He drinks water. He likes to garden. He likes to sit quietly and watch his chickens. The bush, for him, is a place of contemplation, not swaggering about showing off at being a tough guy.
Here is how he goes about the killing of a deer – he has a ritual: “I go and find the deer. I say my little thank you. I have a little bit of a think about who that deer is, how it’s operated in its ecosystem. I have a little think about the place that’s gone into making that deer what it is.” He hopes it had a happy life. “It all happens in my thinking. And I always make sure that I think about where the meat of that deer is going to go – whether it’s to my family or friends or older people in the community.”
Social media convert
What he really likes doing is hanging out with his kids and his partner, all of whom are beguiling. I know this because I have seen them on his Instagram page. Until relatively recently, he didn’t own a smartphone.
“No, I didn’t. I was just a straight bushman until seven years ago.”
He means he certainly didn’t have any sort of public profile. He kept coming home from the bush and telling Roimata about all of the amazing objects and plants and insects he came across. “I’d become really excited and sometimes a little bit worried that not enough young people were stepping into the bush as a career.
She said, ‘Hey, why don’t you take these things that you’re super excited about, these stories you’re telling, and put them into this space where young people are picking up knowledge … and that’s through Instagram and TikTok.’
“I wasn’t that keen, but then I just thought, ‘Nah, bugger it. Let’s give it a go.’”
Now, you can’t keep him off it. He has no qualms about his kids being on his social media forum. “I think that’s the world our children are growing up with. This is the way I put it: I wouldn’t give someone a chainsaw and not teach them how to use it. And I wouldn’t give someone a rifle and not be there beside them to teach them the dangers of it and the correct usage of it as a tool. And I think for me, that’s my approach with social media. Our children are being raised in that space, so for me, I make sure my children understand it as a tool and how to use it, and also the dangers it can provide.”
He comes from farming stock. He learnt how to fish and hunt with one grandfather and how to garden and “go to the rugby and play cricket” with the other. He was a country kid in Gisborne until his family moved to Hawke’s Bay so he could attend a Steiner school when he was 12. His father is a Steiner teacher; his mother an anthroposophic nurse, following Steiner’s holistic approach.
He is the eldest of three. He has two sisters, Briar, a Steiner school teacher, and Greer, a dietitian. His parents were hippyish. His mother had sacks of lentils and broad beans and made her own bread. His dad would cycle to work.
“I’d say we were definitely alternative sort of folk.” Steiner education is big on feeding the heart and soul as well as the mind. An example: he spent 15 minutes a day, for two weeks, sitting with a plant, simply observing it. He’d hunted and fished and gone on tramps with his dad as a kid. “But I’d never really stopped to slow down to a plant’s pace and really observe. And I think that had a big impact on me as a young person.”
Observing nature is really what he does for a job now. When he was 12, the school saw that the classroom wasn’t his natural habitat and sent him into the bush to learn from trappers and learn the ways of the bush. He is still learning about the bush. He is out in it, looking at bush things and eating weirdo things almost every day. Piripiri ferns are, by the way, and according to him, delicious. You cook them in butter and garlic.
Supporting farmers
His day job is as a Tairāwhiti East Coast catchment coordinator with the New Zealand Landcare Trust charity. He works with farmers. He knows what city people think of farmers: that they bugger up the land; that they don’t believe climate change is a thing.
“My job’s not to debate,” he says. “My job’s to support farmers … My approach really is working with farmers on their aspirations for their land. And I haven’t met a farmer yet who doesn’t want to pass their land on in better condition than they’ve received it.
“We think of farmers, and oftentimes city folk think of farmers, as wealthy people or affluent people. Really, our farming operations might be asset rich, but they’re cash poor and time poor.
“So, my job is to find the funding and the labour to help them achieve their aspirations on-farm. And usually, those aspirations are, ‘Oh, can we fence off that bush gully, and can we do that riparian planting, and can we look after the stream?’ Or, ‘I’d really like to sort of enhance that farm pond over there. We won’t call it a wetland, although it does a similar job, but we want to enhance it.’ It might be for duck shooting, but it also provides habitat for native birds.
“So, for me, my job is really helping farmers to deliver on their aspirations for their land, and usually those aspirations are really positive for the environment as well.”
He’s a decent geezer. He’s thoughtful and sensitive and doing more than his bit to look after the place we live in. There is one caveat. Should you meet him and should he invite you over for tea, you might consider asking what will be on the menu before accepting.
Think Like a Forest streams on TVNZ+ from August 21.