Feed The Homeless

Last week I received an email on my blackberry from the President of the local Safari Club Chapter soliciting game meat donations for an Outdoor Channel humanitarian event to feed the homeless in Las Vegas. Since I had a freezer full of meat, I responded and with Byron subsidizing the effort with about 50 pounds of additional meat, we donated roughly 150 pounds of buffalo, deer and antelope to the project.

In the end, it was a huge success and got a write up in the Review Journal. Feels good to be philanthropic once in a while.

(by the way, despite the title of the article, not a single drop of elk in the donation)

Too Close For Comfort

In 2006 I booked an elephant, leopard, buffalo hunt with Tshbezi Safaris in Zimbabwe. I flew into the Bulawayo airport (an experience in itself) and met professional hunter Kirk Mason, with whom I spent the next 14 days hunting in the Gokwe North concession area. We drove the 6 hours to Gokwe and began immediately looking for elephant tracks and running leopard baits.

We spent the majority of the nights in a stilted river camp on the Ume river. There were several lions in the area and plenty of elephant. Unfortunately, though we tracked and looked at many bull elephant over the course of the hunt, we never located one that would have made 50 pounds (ivory weight per tusk). 50 pounds was my self-imposed, and ambitious, limit for a trophy bull.

About 4 days into the hunt early one morning we cut the tracks of, what appeared to be, two good bulls that had crossed the two track road above camp during the night. We took up the track and followed it for about 3-4 miles before we lost it in a rocky area. It's unusual for the talented trackers of Zimbabwe to lose a track, and in my experience it's the rare situation that it happens. After spending about an hour and a half trying to sort the issue out, we elected to turn back toward the cruiser in hopes that we might catch the bulls in the case they had doubled back on us.

When we were about a mile from the cuiser the trackers began hearing elephants ahead of us feeding in the thick jess. Elephants are anything but quiet as they move and feed in the brush, and sound is a frequent method for finding them. Kirk felt that we might have located the two bulls. We moved into the thick jess where visability was, at most, 15 yards in any direction. Suddenly, we could see the backs of the a herd of cow and calf elephants as they moved parallel to our position and in the direction we had come from. Since cow elephant are significantly more dangerous than bulls, we were glad to let this group move out.

I was walking slowly and watching the cows to our right at about 20 yards. They didn't appear to pose any threat and it was thrilling to be that close to them. When I looked forward the palm of Kirk's hand was held out straight to me in a frenzied warning to stop - I did! Then i noticed a young cow elephant facing us and not moving and about 7 yards in front of the lead elephant tracker who was leading the group.

The hunting group consisted of Kirk and I, two trackers, a skinner and a council game scout. There all six of us stood motionless waiting to see what this close encounter would produce. Neither Kirk or I had time or space to get our guns up. The group was in single file fashion and I was third in line with one tracker, one skinner and the game scout standing behind me.

The standoff lasted about 30 very long seconds and finally the cow turned to her left and began walking to our right, apparently content in her conclusion that we were no threat that needed aggression. Unfortunately, as she did so, Moses, the council game scout who was legendary in his fear of elephant broke ranks and spun around to run. At that point, I was the only one in the group without a tree between the cow. When she saw Moses' movement she turned on a dime to face us, dropping her head and came forward at us. By this time, both Kirk and I had raised our rifles for protection. Honestly, having never experienced such offense from an elephant, I never appreciated any emergent situation. It's a good thing Kirk did though, because the elephant had a bead on me. At 11 paces I heard the unexpected BOOM of Kirk's 500 Jeffery as Kirk stopped her charge with a shot low in the head. His shot missed the brain but turned the elephant to the side. I hurriedly put a shot in behind the shoulder, and the whole thing was over within a matter of seconds.

Obviously, the elephant was not charged to me as a trophy, and the council took possession of the hide meat and tusks. The guys went in the afternoon with the tractor and recovered the elephant. All of the meat went to the local villiagers, save a chunk of the backstrap which came down to our camp and provided a couple of very nice dinners.

Spit Jockeys

On January 30, 2009 Slim and I took the dogs to the Beaver Dam wash area in the extreme southwest corner of Utah on, what has become, the annual spit jockey bird hunting outing.

In reality it's Mark's (an orthodontist) marketing poly for the dentists of Cedar City, Utah. I had Benton Iverson (owner of the hunting ranch) plant about 35 pheasants and 50 chucker for nine hunters in two fields. Slim and his Visula Duke and myself and German Shorthair, Gus, hunted one field with five oral hygiene professionals and Benton took the others, including Mark, to the other field.

In the end the collection of birds was quite good. Something just over 30 pheasants and about 40 chucker. The weather was incredible and everyone had a good time. The dogs love it, and get a opportunity to see more birds in a day than they'd get in a lifetime of hunting wild birds (except maybe quail) in Nevada or Utah.

Smoke Pole

2008 was the year of the smoke pole. While we're certainly not die hard muzzleloader hunters, as fate would have it, we spent no time in 2008 hunting North American big game with anything other than the sulfer-spewing single shots. With muzzle deer tags in both Utah and Nevada, we'd planned to use the Utah hunt as a warm up for the more coveted late season Nevada tag in area 115 (Wheeler Peak).

We saw plenty of deer during Utah's September hunt, which we conducted from base camp at Enterprise Resevoir, but not the obscene numbers we'd encountered while we were there in 2006. Nonetheless, Slim was successful in connecting on a nice buck on his last night of hunting.

During the course of the four days we were hunting, we'd discovered that the nicer bucks were lying high in the steep ridges in the thick oak, and so we began concentrating on those areas. On the last morning, after Slim had left for a northern Utah elk hunt, Mark and I went on a lung-searing march straight uphill and were able to push a group of deer from the oak and aspen thickets. One buck was massive, but the only good look I got at him was from about 550 yards as he motored up a far hillside and over the ridge. The area is incredibly beautiful. It was more than worth all of the hiking we did. With some practice under our belts, we headed into the November Nevada hunt with renewed hope, both that our skills were honed and that hunt time/area were much better. The theory was the late season muzzleloader might give us a chance at some rutting bucks; and to some extent, it did. But, generally we didn't get the cold weather we hoped for and most of the deer we found of any significance were high (many of them literally on the base of Wheeler Peak) and not overly interested in the does.

On about the fourth morning of hunting I spoted this buck at about 1,000 yards, lying down under a pinon tree. There were two does with him, and the minute Slim put the scope on him, I knew we had to try to get on him. Fortunately, Mark and Kyle, Slim's father in law were willing to stay behind to watch with the scope to make sure he didn't sneak off over the ridge above.

Slim and I started in the valley below these deer with a ridge between us and the buck. For whatever reason, the buck didn't even stand up until we were within 250 yards. At that point we moved to within 125 yards, using a small juniper as cover. The buck was standing facing us, and I took what might have been an ill-advised frontal chest shot with a muzzleloader and open sights at 125 yards.

As it turns out, this was the biggest buck we were able to find in about 10 total days of hunting. I'm convinced that there are gigantic deer in the area, but a guy would need the perfect convergence of weather, rut and simply being in the right place at the right time. Without doubt we'll try the area again.

Left - l to r Kyle, Mark, Slim, Ryan

Delta Speedgoat

About six years ago I began applying in Utah for a pronghorn tag along with my other big game permits. Within about 2 years, the Utah Division of Wildlife, in all of it's wisdom, decided it was going to restrict applicants to one species and not allow bonus points to be transferred to a different species if the hunter decided to apply for a different species after several years of trying for the first. Hence, once I had elected the speed goat, I was married to it until successful. Fortunately, that compelled quest ended in 2008.

Two years ago, Slim and I had helped Eric Johnson hunt the Southwest Desert River Bottom area northwest of Delta, Utah. We were so impressed by the number and quality of the goats that I determined to focus future application efforts on that area, exclusively.

The area is comprised of primarily classic-looking pronghorn territory interspersed with larger rolling hills and some thick pockets of pinon/junipers which surprisingly hold a fair amount of the normally prairie-loving goat.

Always willing to drive rather than run the risk of having to sit in the back seat, Mark Webster agreed to drive. The team was rounded out by Jack Topham, a retired DWR guy from Salt Lake, who Slim and I had met last year in east central Nevada, while helping his son elk hunt. Jack had scouted the area for us for a couple of weeks and reported that there was a very nice buck on Antelope Spring. Unfortunately, try as we may, we were never able to locate that buck.

Unbeknownst to me (though I’d shot it and it was accurate about two weeks prior), my .270 WSM was shooting about three feet left and caused (note to reader: always blame the rifle if you can) me to completely air mail 2 very nice goats, multiple times. One Slim and I had put a half mile stalk on, and the other Mark followed around in the truck giving me repeated chances. I finally connecting on this one - the result of a sneak by Slim and I up the blind side of a hill, and then catching him as he steadily moved back toward a pinon/juniper hillside. I held on the goat’s rump at 120 yards to hit him in the boiler room.

He made 14 and a half, and is incredibly heavy.

A special thanks goes out to Slim for helping me spot and stalk, to Jack for coming to spot, navigate and cape and to Mark for selflessly beating the begeezus out of his truck in pursuit of the elusive speed goat.

Sunrise/Sunset

People who think African hunting is wholly or primarily about bagging a trophy don’t understand the experience which is "Africa." The more time I’m blessed to spend in this remarkable land, the more I appreciate it’s unique beauty, resilient people and amazing wildlife. If there’s a scientific explanation for the undescribable sunrises and sunsets, I certainly don’t know what it is. What I do know is the twilight and dawn hours in the bush are stunning. In 2008 I spent 8 nights of the 16 in the bush at the Masau camp on the Zambezi River. This camp is immediately on the River at the Mozambique boarder. As such, these sunrise photos show the sun appearing over the Mozambique mountains. Across the river is Zambia and the photos are taken from Zimbabwean soil; truly an international image.
Villagers travel the river in a traditional dugout canoe.










Fog lifting off the river










Taken literally from the front door of my chalet.
























Sunset over Zambia










Another

Strange (and Cantankerous) bedfellows

Two bull elephants had taken up temporary residence in a large floodplain along the Zambezi River in the Dande North concession. We were unsuccessfully baiting crocodile nearby. PH Henry Prinsloo's grown son and aspiring PH Fred, had a close call with the pair one afternoon when he left the blind to walk down the river to get a better look at a distant croc.

Ultimately, we abandoned the baiting and switched to the "spot and stock" method - simply put, we were running the river in the pontoon boat looking for sunning crocs to put the stalk on. We would occasionally see this young bull elephant, and it appeared his companion had left the floodplain for other opportunities. We caught him one midday making his way to the river for a bath/drink and pulled the boat onto the shore very near his position. We anticipated a charge into the water at the boat (hopefully stopping short of disaster for either the bull or the boat), and instead prompted the bull to charge an unsuspecting cow buffalo that had somehow separated from the herd and taken up residency with the bull elephant. To those who haven't been "among them," this may appear rather benign - it's not! The cow gets out of Dodge for good reason.

We saw these two hanging out together several times over the ensuing days. I suppose the cow thought the bull elephant was great insurance from the prides of lions that had been harassing the buffalo in that area.