billrquimby

I have read that Jim Corbett book a couple of times. He has some excellent stories on hunting those man eating tigers in India. Corbet wrote at least four, maybe more, books about hunting man-eaters in India. All are worth reading at least once. I wish he also would have written about his time in Africa. He was quite a guy. Bill Quimby

If such stories are of interest, I suggest you hunt up some of Jim Corbet's books. He lived for a time in colonial India and his specialty was hunting man-eating tigers and leopards there. His tales will make the hair on your neck stand up, and they are true and verifiable stories. Other good books of the same genre are "Hunters of Man" by Captain John H. Brandt and "Some Bears Kill" by an author whose name I've forgotten. Check www.alibris.com for similar titles. Bill Quimby

I don't know who came up with "more oryx in New Mexico than in Africa," but it's not true and never has been. The gemsbok oryx that were introduced to New Mexico is a common antelope in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, as well as parts of Angola and Zimbabwe. They are in no way threatened or endangered. Nobody's counted them that I know of, but there must be many hundreds of thousands of them in southern Africa. I have seen many hundreds of them over the more than two decades I hunted in southern and central Africa. There also is no shortage of beisa and fringe-eared oryx in East Africa. These two antelope are the same species (Oryx gazella) as the gemsbok, but each is different in appearance. It is the scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah), found on the fringes of North Africa's Sahara Desert, that are classified as endangered -- and they are being reintroduced to several areas where they had been extirpated. They are a different species and look nothing at all like the other oryx. Their horns are scimitar shaped, of course, but they also are a pale color, have large feet, and lack the "blocky" look that the other oryx have. They are being raised on game ranches in South Africa, Namibia, several U.S. states (especially in Texas), Argentina and at least one country in Europe. As far as I know, they haven't made it to New Mexico. Bill Quimby

Your mention of the Cutter elk herd brought back some memories, Amanda. My father killed a spike bull in what was supposed to be the "elk extermination hunt" on that part of the San Carlos Indian Reservation. The tribe's cattlemen wanted all elk removed from that mountain and the Arizona Game and Fish Commission obliged by issuing permits. The Arizona Game Protective Association (later to become the Arizona Wildlife Federation) screamed and protested to no avail. I was not along on that hunt and I don't remember how old I was but I think it was in the early 1950s. Later, he told me he drove to the sawmill at Cutter, turned right and drove to the end of the road, where he went off on foot and killed his elk the first day. This was before anyone used binoculars and his elk gun at the time was a .30-40 Krag that he had "sporterized" by sawing off the barrel and forestock. The state still had jurisdiction over fish and wildlife on Indian lands then, but I'm sure he paid a fee to the tribe for his tag. I'm sure of this because I shot my second-ever bull on the point where the Little and Big Bonitas come together on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. I was going to college and had little money, but I managed to save and scrounge to pay the $25 surcharge and the state's $17.50 elk permit fee. I hunted that reservation one more time, when I shot an antelope near Burnt Corral in the early 1970s. The surcharge still was $25. Bill Quimby

I've forgotten the title, but the best book I've read about Coronado's search for the mythical seven cities of Cibola in the American Southwest also was published by the UA Press. It is somewhere around here, and I'll post the name and author when I find it. It was interesting that the expedition took 5,000 men and women across our White Mountains and everyone was close to starving before reaching what now is Eagar/Springerville/St. Johns and they were able to kill antelope. The reports the expedition filed in Spain were extensive, and included information about the animals encountered between Mexico City and Kansas. Amazingly, the hunting parties knew their craft, but no mention was made of any elk seen in Arizona's best elk country. Also interesting was how the fact that Europeans had arrived was transmitted word-of-mouth from the Grand Canyon to Yuma by Indians. A couple of good books on the North America theme are: "One Man, One Rifle, One Land" by J.Y. Jones. He's a southern state's dental surgen turned author of hunting books. This was written after he took all the huntable species and subspecies of big game in North America with his only rifle, a .30-06. He's a quiet, unassuming guy who doesn't brag in person or print, but it took a lot of determination, time, and skill to complete that quest. "The SCI Record Book of Trophy Animals, Americas." New editions come out regularly, and used versions in hardback and paperback are available by searching the 'net. Forget the record entries. It's the text and maps you will want to peruse. I edited the SCI books for 17 years and definitely am biased, but the text and maps that Jack Schwabland of Seattle created are invaluable for any hunter interested in the natural history of big game animals. "Obsessed" by Soudy Golabchi. This book covers Golabchi's lifetime of hunting virtually every type of mountain game on the planet, including his 30 or more hunts on the roof of the world for Marco Polo argalis. My wife knows the guy who ghostwrote it. Bowhunters may like "Howard Hill, The Man And The Legend" by Craig Ekin. It has been out of print for thirty years. It's a biography about Howard Hill and his hunting around the world with his self-made bamboo longbows. If you really are interested in classic and contempory books on hunting and shooting, visit www.safaripress.com or (for Africa) www.trophyroombooks.com There are other publishers of hunting books, but these are the best in my mind. I could go on and on. I've been collecting books on hunting and natural history for six decades, and for a time publishers sent me books to review for the Tucson Citizen or Safari magazine. My office and trophy room are lined with bookcases, and there are stacks of books in the corners. I have only counted them by the foot, but there must be at least 2,000 of them. I've read them all and I'm reading some of the best again. I've more than 50 mounts of animals, but I could give them all away and not regret it. Can't say the same about my collection of books! Bill Quimby

1,401

Since you liked Maneaters of Tsavo, you may enjoy these on Africa: Hunter by J.A. Hunter -- This is the book that got me interested in hunting in Africa. It was released in 1952, but it's still highly readable. Death In The Long Grass by Peter Hathaway Capstick -- Once you read this one, you'll want the rest of his books -- and you'lll start saving for your first of many African safaris. I got to know Peter before he died and I can truthfully say he is/was the best hunting writer ever -- and that includes Hemingway and Ruark. Use Enough Gun, Honey Badger, Poor No More, Uhuru, and Something of Value by Robert Ruark -- These also are from the 1950s. Any of of the Africana books by Wilbur Smith, southern Africa's answer to America's James Michener. The Covenant by James Michener -- This is a thick novel based on the history of southern Africa, dating back to the arrival of Dutch traders, the first Europeans to reach that part of the continent. McElroy Hunts Dangerous Game by C.J. McElroy -- I ghost wrote this for the founder of Safari Club International a couple of years before he died. The McElroy book is available from Trophy Room Books.com for $125, I think. Hunter's and Capstick's books are under $50. They both are available from SafariPress.com. If Safari Press is out of Hunter, you could try Amazon. Amazon also should have Ruark's, Smith's, and Michener's books. Happy reading. Bill Quimby

In my book, a lion is a far more worthy trophy than any deer, no matter the size of the antlers that deer might wear. Congratulations. Bill Quimby

PENNSYLVANIA FIREARMS HUNTERS GEARING UP FOR SEASON OPENER By Don Aines Nov. 30, 2008 CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s unofficial holiday, the two-week firearms deer season, begins with Monday’s rising sun, when a group larger than the standing armies of most nations will shoulder rifles and take to the woods. Between 850,000 and 900,000 men, women and children ages 12 years and older are expected to take part in the first day of the two-week firearms deer season, said Gerald Feaser, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. In many parts of the state, schools will be closed for the first one or two days of the season. Antlerless deer licenses went on sale Aug. 4 for the three wildlife management units (WMUs) in Franklin County, and they were sold out Sept. 9. After the initial sale, hunters could apply for a second license three weeks later, when unsold licenses became available. For the portions of the three WMUs in Franklin County, a total of 11,440 antlerless licenses were available, down from about 12,800 in 2007. “Antlerless licenses have been reduced the last three years,” Feaser said. Statewide, 849,000 were issued this year compared to 1,039,000 in the peak year of 2002, he said. The game commission has no projections on how many deer will be taken by hunters this season, but in 2007, the count was 323,070, down from 361,560 in 2006, he said. The first day’s weather made a huge difference last year. “The weather was horrendous the first day,” with poor visibility and torrential downpours through much of the state in 2007, Feaser said. The harvest was half of what it was on the opening day of the 2006 season, he said. After that opening day deficit, hunters did not have a chance to make up the difference, Feaser said. The peak days of the season are opening day and Tuesday and the first and second Saturdays, he said. The National Weather Service in State College, Pa., is forecasting Monday’s weather to be overcast with a high in the upper 30s and a 30 percent chance of precipitation. That will be followed Tuesday by partly sunny conditions and a high of 41, according to the weather service.

You might want to check the San Diego Union-Tribune's website. I found this report below by Googling the site and clicking on "sports" and then "outdoors." Something tells me that mid-winter is not a good time to go fishing off San Diego. -- Bill Quimby December 2, 2008 Ocean Fishing H&M, POINT LOMA, FISHERMAN'S LANDING – 33 anglers, one half-day boat: 5 sheephead, 1 cabezon, 25 perch, 7 sand bass, 2 calico bass, 35 white croaker, 21 rockfish. SEAFORTH – 14 anglers, one half-day boat: 20 rockfish, 2 whitefish. OCEANSIDE – 18 anglers, one half-day boat: 21 sculpin, 9 rockfish, 1 boccacio, 4 whitefish, 31 sand dabs.

White-tailed deer are the most-studied animal on earth, so I'm sure more than one researcher has investigated the effect of moon phases on deer. Just an uneducated guess, but I would say they are more active during dark nights. I came to that opinion after many long drives to/from Tucson and the Texas Hill Country. My partners and I counted deer to pass the time and it seemed we always saw fewer deer from the road during nights with full moons. On a couple of trips we counted more than 500 deer along and on the roads between El Paso and Lampasas, and I remember our realizing that these were dark nights. Bill Quimby

Hi Larry. Although it doesn't mean anything, I've hunted deer in every Arizona county since my first deer hunt in 1948 and I've never heard of the "Mexican red" until now. As for heavy Arizona whitetail deer, the late Bob Housholder (an outdoor writer and self-appointed keeper of all records pertaining Arizona hunting) once sent me a photograph of a woman with a big buck he claimed was the state record for weight. He said she had killed the deer on Fort Huachuca. If I remember correctly, her deer weighed close to 150 pounds, like 147.5 pounds, or something. It's been a long time since I saw that photo but the deer seemed close to twice the size of a regular Coues deer. I don't remember its antlers being anything special, though. I have the photo someplace, and I'll post it if I ever come across it again. I have no reason to believe it was not an Arizona whitetail. Bill Quimby

Condor Lead Ammunition Ban Expanded by Court Settlement (from an SCI news bulletin) A legal settlement approved by the Court has expanded the lead ammunition ban currently in place in Condor “range” in California, an expansive area in south and central California. The settlement requires the California fish and game agencies to ban the use of lead ammunition for killing animals under “depredation” permits, effective immediately. The settlement also requires the agencies to propose a regulation in May 2009 banning lead ammunition in the taking of jackrabbits and other hares, several species of rabbit, and tree squirrels in Condor range. The groups involved in the lawsuit, including the Center for Biological Diversity, have vowed to push for a ban on lead ammunition for all hunting throughout the state.

There is a rough canyon near Greer where I know there are whitetails, and it's not indicated on the map. I doubt that there are more than a dozen of them in any given year, though, and it's far from where whitetails usually are found. If I were creating a map, and knew that little population existed, I wouldn't bother to note it. Bill Quimby

I used to believe (still do) that wind had more to do with deer movement than cold, heat, rain or snow. On windy days, we had to kick deer out of the heads of the little canyons where they went to get out of it. Bill Quimby

Bringing home the meat is a problem now that the airlines are enforcing their overweight baggage charges. I am too old to climb trees. Anyway, the fellow who has invited me to hunt with him removed all of his treestands after one crashed and dropped him on another guy. He broke a leg, the other fellow now has chronic back problems, so he's built permanent ground blinds all over his place. Bill Quimby

Got both turkey and pig tags today.

One of the guys I've written a book for has invited me to hunt with a crossbow on his farm near Erie in 2009. (After dropping a truck on my arm during my sheep hunt, I no longer can pull a regular bow.) I've got enough frequent flyer miles to get there on Delta's dime, so I guess I will. In Pennsylvania, crossbow hunters are allowed to hunt during the archery season, which just happens to be in the rut. Bill Quimby

Very interesting, especially the fact that just 365 specimens out of the many thousands of deer in Arizona are considered a valid sample. Incidentally, although I've spent more than a half century selling words, I had never heard of the word "putative" before now and had to check my dictionary. (For those who are as ignorant as I was, it means: "reputed to be" or "generally considered to be.") As for our so-called "sky islands," (gosh, I hate those words!) I suspect there is a lot more movement of deer between southern Arizona's mountain ranges than presently putatived. Bill Quimby

"I do have a question about your comment; you say that Obama will be, "Making the sale of brass, bullets, primers, and powder illegal", are you suggesting that he will make the sale of bulllets illegal? I thought that it was only ammunition that was marketed as armor-piercing that would be banned. I understand that some ammunition used for hunting is considered armor-piercing, but it isn't marketed in that way. " It appears you are confusing the word "bullet" with "cartridge" or "shotshell." -- A bullet is the projectile that is fired through the rifled barrel of a rifle or handgun. -- A cartridge is comprised of a brass case, a primer, gunpowder, and a bullet. -- Ammunition is a supply of cartridges or shotshells. -- A shotshell is what we shoot in shotguns, and consists of a plastic or paper cylinder with a brass bottom, a primer, wads, and lead (or steel) shot. Reloading our own ammunition is a rewarding activity for millions of hunters and shooters that results in better performance and monetary savings. Reloading also allows us to tailor our ammunition to a specific purpose. Eliminating sales of the components we use in reloading our ammuntion would eliminate our freedom to do this, cost us money, and keep us from developing the best loads for our individual firearms. Incidentally, all of the so-called "solid" bullets that we use in Africa and Australia for large game animals would be banned under any definition of "armor-piercing." How a manufacturer markets them would not exempt them from prohibition. We also need larger calibers for large game, and proposals to ban .50-caliber-and-larger rifles and ammunition (as some have proposed) would make it illegal to own some very fine hunting rifles, at least two of them owned by this writer. Bill Quimby

The publisher emailed me today to say that my book will not be ready for the SCI convention in January. Bill Quimby

Depends on what Nevada might charge us non-residents. Ten dollars sounds about right, considering that we have to get up there and then find a legal horse, shoot it, pack it out, and butcher it. If horses had antlers or horns they could charge a lot more. We don't have to worry about sport hunters being used to manage out-of-whack feral horse populations, though. The squawk that would rise around the world from horse lovers would be deafening, and any politician or bureaucrat who suggested hunting horses would be drawn and quartered. Bill Quimby

Where in Minnesota? I had Safari magazine printed at a publishing plant in Long Prairie, and made a half dozen business trips there. This gave me the opportunity to hunt some very large whitetail bucks twice near a place called Black Duck. After a scary night driving the 120 miles to Long Prairie alone in a snowstorm that dumped 36 inches on the Twin Cities, I vowed to never return to Minnesota in the winter -- and I never did. Bill Quimby

Thanks for the kind words. As for my most exciting outdoor experience, please pardon the crass commercial that follows: I spent the past ten years writing and ghost-writing books about the hunting feats of Weatherby Award winners, but when a client cancelled his project late last year, I finally had time to write my own book. "Sixty Years A Hunter" should be ready for launching at the SCI convention in Reno in late January. More than a third of it covers my 39-year quest to take the Arizona Big Ten. One chapter is devoted to hunting Arizona whitetails. If I had to pick a most exciting hunt in Arizona it would be a mountain lion hunt when a horse panicked and fell, then rolled down a shale slope and over a couple of cliffs. After sorting things out, my partner and I wound up spending all night New Year's Eve on a ridge close to Baboquivari Peak without a fire, hugging each other to stay warm and listening to the hounds bark treed below us. I later killed a lion after 57 days on horseback spread over three years with three different houndsmen and their dogs. Lions had me jinxed. The rest of the book covers my hunting elsewhere in the USA, Mexico and Canada, as well as South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Mongolia, Spain, New Zealand and Argentina. The final chapter tells about some of my experiences with SCI during my 16 years as its director of publications. My longtime friend Craig Boddington did the foreword. If I had to pick my most exciting hunt of all, it would have to be my 1994 Zambia safari, when I took the lion that I now use as my avatar. Walking in the dark toward the sounds of two male lions fighting over the zebra we had hung for bait has to be the scariest thing I've ever done, and what did this dumb klutz do? I missed the shot at 30 yards with my .416 Weatherby! Lucky for me, the lions returned later that day. You can find this book and a few of my others at www.safaripress.com (type "quimby" in the space at the top left of the home page, hit "search" and then type "quimby" again in the blank space above "author"). The publisher won't charge your credit card until the book is ready to ship. The last I heard, he was going to charge $39.95 for it. It's the least expensive of the five Quimby books that publisher has published. The most expensive is the $1,250.00 (each) Morrocan leather-bound, signed and limited edition edition of "Royal Quest," a book I wrote about Prince Abdorreza of Iran. The regular version of that book is "only" $325.00. I was told an Iranian expatriate bought fifteen of the deluxe leatherbounds to give to his friends. Bill Quimby

Baiting for big game other than bears was never illegal in my memory of AZGFD rules, and that dates back to my first deer hunt in 1948. It just wasn't mentioned. I was covering the commission meeting for the Tucson Citizen when the bear-bating rule was passed, and I don't remember a single protest. Bill Quimby