billrquimby

"Bill Quimby, thanks for the conversation and lunch on Friday. It was a pleasure to meet you, and hope to again later this summer or fall." It was my pleasure, Doug. It was a shame Jean wasn't feeling well, or I could have shown you a few of my heads at the cabin. It was great to put a face to your RR posts and photos. Next time I promise not to talk so much about myself. Bill Quimby

I've been told that the Arizona Game and Fish Commision (supposedly at its meeting on Saturday) will hear a request from the Sierra Club to auction a mountain lion tag. The letter requesting the tag is said to have stated that the buyer most likely will NOT use it to “harvest” a lion. Does anyone know anything about this? Bill Quimby

Don't really know, Amanda. All the other books I've worked on have been released within six months to a year of the signing of a contract. Last month, the publisher said my book was "progressing" but would not give me a firm date for its release other than it "would be ready for the SCI convention" in January 2010;. I later heard from one of his employees that it has been sent to Asia for printing and should ship to purchasers "this fall," whatever that means. How did you pay for it? The publisher's catalog and website say that credit cards will not be charged until books are shipped. Learned a lesson here. Next time I sign a contract there will be a publish-by date with a penalty clause. Bill Quimby

Hope this doesn't seem like self-serving ego-puffing, but some of you have asked when my own book will be available. Safari Press is taking orders now for "Sixty Years A Hunter," if anyone is interested. It's listed on the SP website and in the company's next catalog as being a signed and numbered limited edition available in "Winter 2009" for $65. About a third of the chapters cover my quest to take the Arizona Big Ten; another third cover a few hunts in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia; and the final third are about hunting in Europe, Asia, New Zealand, and South America. There also is a chapter with some insights into SCI and its founder gained from sixteen years as a contractor producing that club's magazines, newspapers and record books. It and some of my other books are described at the publisher's site if you do a search for "Quimby" under "author." https://www.safaripress.com/search.php?mode=search Bill Quimby

Wow, Youngbuck. All I can say is wow! There's a 4x4 whitetail rack near the foreground that is truly nice. What's the story on that buck? Bill Quimby

That's one of my favorite places in the world! I have fished the stretch from Lee's Ferry to the dam many times over the years since the dam was built, and was fortunate to have made two trips through the canyon on press junkets with commercial river runners. The first was from Lee's Ferry to Bright Angel Trail, where I walked out. The second trip went the full length of the canyon to just past Lava Falls, where we were helicoptered to an airstrip on the North Rim and then flown back to Page in single-engine Cessnas. I'd join another river trip in a heartbeat. They were fun and the scenery was absolutely spectacular. Years ago, my friend and fellow outdoor writer Bob Whitaker was allowed to drive his boat trailer down one of the spillway tubes and launch directly below the dam. I always wished I'd gone with him on that trip. Bill Quimby

Bret/Jim -- When I was there years ago, there were deer literally everywhere. In fact, we had to buzz the dirt airstrip on the ranch twice to run the deer off it so we could land the Cessna! Unfortunately, I had only an afternoon and a morning to hunt and good bucks were scarce. I passed up maybe 75-80 bucks before I shot one. Thirty minutes after that, I shot the first adult boar (we had been seeing a lot of them while deer hunting) we came across, I quickly caped both of them, and flew back to San Jose, where I had to run to catch my flight to Tucson. I arrived home that night with my hunting boots still wet from dragging my boar out of a pond it had flopped into as it died. Bill Quimby

You will need Apache licenses to fish on Sunrise and camp on the reservation.. The Greer lakes would work, but Hoyer campground still is closed and you probably will have to find a place for a throwdown camp outside the Greer recreation area. Benny Creek campground fills fast. If you leave tomorrow (Tuesday) it should be early enough, I think, to get a campsite at Big lake. It's not that far a drive back to Sunrise, and the road is in good shape. Bill Quimby

I thought the terrain looked familiar. Is the region still overpopulated with deer? Bill Quimby

Amanda: State and federal laws govern what you found. I'm not certain whom you need to call, but I'd try the Arizona State Museum offices at the University of Arizona and ask the curator to point you in the right direction. As NRS said, the site and its history need to be preserved. Bill Quimby

Thanks, but although I agree completely with it, the comment you're quoting was CMC's. Bill Quimby

Paso Robles: The ranch I hunted in the early 1990s was a co-op with multiple owners that was being managed by one of the original owners, a guy named Brude Eade (I think that's how he spelled it). Have you heard about him or the ranch? It was somewhere between Paso Robles and San Jose. We flew there in a Cessna and landed on a dirt strip on the ranch. The place was loaded with deer and feral hogs. Bill Quimby

Bret: The terrain where you hunted looks like where I shot a feral hog years ago. Is it near San Jose, and was it loaded with black-tailed deer? The turkeys where I was were Merriams that had been introduced a few years earlier, though, and they were as tame as domestic birds. The state was talking about releasing Tule elk when I was there, and I've since learned that the stocking took place and elk are now being hunted on the ranch where I was. Congratulations. Bill Quimby

My concerns equal yours, as well as the distinct possibility of groups that definitely are not in our corner asking to auction bighorn and elk tags. Bill Quimby

Thanks for your volunteer effort, but you shouldn't count the 150,000 people who apply for tags as "deer hunters." Because of our permit system, there are only about 40,000 people who will be allowed to hunt deer in any given year. To get one in 40 to show up for work projects that aren't adequately advertised is quite a feat, I'd say. Bill Quimby

Congratulations to him ... and to you, too, Amanda. Bill Quimby

Congratulations on your retirement, Lark. You obviously are much more intelligent than I, because I waited until I was 63 before I walked away from regular employment. You'll find that retirement is the best time of your life, so enjoy it. Bill Quimby

Danny: Don't know how this will affect you, but this was posted on www.africahunting.com today: "The Namibian MET has placed a moratorium on issuing CITES Export Permits for the remainder of 2009 on Leopard. Apparently, the Export Quota assigned to Namibia (250 Leopard per year) has been reached, which is the reason for this course of action. It seems this problem stems from the quota being exceeded for 2008 and the excess was rolled-over into this year. Because of this, the actual number of permits issued for 2009 was less than 250. You can still hunt Leopard there this year but, unless your outfitter/PH had already applied for a permit, you won't be able to export the trophy until next year at the earliest. (Of course this only applies to Trophy Leopard, not PAC hunts.)" Bill Quimby

I've seen many over the past 60 years, and for the first five years after we had our swimming pool built it seemed as if I was constantly pulling drowned Gila monsters from the pool's skimmer. I don't know about the 3,000-foot level catclaw mentioned, but the place I used to see them more than anywhere else (especially after a rain) was the Willow Springs Ranch country north of Tucson. Bill Quimby

My wife and I have had three vehicles stolen over our lifetimes. The first was a 1950 Willy's Jeepster that was taken in 1955 by joyriders and recovered two days later without being damaged. The last two were pre-2000 GM vehicles, which were said at the time to be the easiest for car thieves to drive away. All that was required was a heavy screwdriver to smash a window and rip off the steering column shroud. Once the shroud was out of the way, the car could be started and driven away by pushing something under the shroud. In 1998, my six-month-old Chevrolet 4x4 pickup along with my secretary's five-year Jeep Cherokee were stolen from the parking lot in front of the SCI offices in broad daylight and driven into Sonora. Witnesses said an old car drove up, two young Hispanic men jumped out and broke into our vehicles, and then drove away -- all this in just seconds. A year later, an official at the U.S. embassy in Hermosillo called me to say the federales had turned my truck over to his office. By then, though, the truck belonged to my insurance company. A couple of years after that, my wife's Cadillac was stolen from our home and wrecked in what the police say was a gang initiation. Her car was just one of five GM vehicles the same two punks stole and crashed that night. They had used my wife's car to ram a security guard's truck a mile from us, and then burned up its engine while racing away with a smashed radiator. Before the engine froze up, they hit a road-construction area at more than 75 mph, bounced off something and flew up onto a 10-foot-high berm and got stuck in the sand. They left it, ran to an apartment complex, stole another GM vehicle, and got away. The attitude of the Tucson Police Department, Pima County Sheriff's Office, and the Arizona Highway Patrol was that having a vehicle stolen was (ho-hum) something that happened to everyone and was no big deal because our insurance company would cover our losses. To its credit, Farmers insurance was more than fair in both instances. Bill Quimby

Here's a northeastern whitetail (Odocoileus virginianus borealus) that I shot in Michigan in the late 1990s. Its mount is hanging in my cabin in Greer, so I guess you might say that the Texas whitetails that Ernesto posted are not the only "eastern" whitetails that can be found in Arizona. Bill Quimby

What a wonderful experience for your children. That bushbuck is a great trophy. A note about the CITES permit for your leopard: Be sure you get the paperwork from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before the hunt, and be darned certain that the trophy will reach the U.S. within one year of the permit's issuance. Bill Quimby

Haha yeah I am having trouble swallowing it myself. Hence the post. But I figured this would be the best site to post on because the members here should actually be able to tell the difference between deer species. There is only one species of white-tailed deer in the world, and that is the Odocoileus virginianus. Depending upon who is counting, there are about 30 subspecies of this species in North America (of which our Coues whitetail is just one) and another eight subspecies in South America. The deer you call a "eastern" whitetail could be any of about two dozen subspecies found in the eastern United States and Canada, but one thing is certain and that is this: only O.v. couesi occurs naturally in Arizona. If someone says he has seen an "eastern" whitetail roaming within our borders, he was either 1.) drunk, 2.) totally ignorant, or 3.) a world-class fibber. Bill Quimby

I agree with elkoholic: Let the people at Motorola know their product "takes a licking and keeps on ticking." Bill Quimby

Below is from my book, "Sixty Years A Hunter," which the publisher has promised to publish late this year. -- Bill Quimby One of the things that bothered me on our trips to Texas was the many white-tailed deer we found caught in barbed wire fences. We couldn’t drive very far on a country road without seeing a deer hanging by a front or rear foot from a fence. They must have died horrible deaths. I found several fence-kills on my friend's ranches over the years I hunted there, and Alex was with me when we found a deer hung up in a fence and still alive. It was a buck with good antlers and either of us would have shot it under any other circumstance. Instead, we spent at least ten minutes working with a stick to get enough slack in the twisted strands of wire to free the buck’s leg, all the while it was struggling and bleating pathetically. Both of us expected the deer to run off when we freed it but it was so exhausted that it couldn’t stand up. It obviously was terrified to have two humans handle it but it wasn’t strong enough to escape us. We watched it for a while then left it alone to recover while we hunted elsewhere. We found the buck dead, apparently from shock and exhaustion, when we returned later that day to check on it. It hadn’t moved from the spot where we’d left it.* BEGIN FOOTNOTE: *Alex and I also found a mule deer doe caught by its front hoof by the top two strands of a barbed-wire fence on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau. It still was alive even though a large portion of its rump had been eaten by coyotes during the night. We saw one of them run away when we drove up, and were attracted to the deer by its pitiful bleating. END FOOTNOTE.