billrquimby

My wife and I know how you feel. We lost our Merlin last week. He was just a shaggy little, mixed-breed dog, but he lived with us, went everywhere with us, and slept with us for seventeen years. It hurts terribly to know we'll not see him again. He gave us a million hours of pleasure. Bill Quimby

You guys may want to consider a rule that says an applicant for a whitetail tag must possess optics that cost $1,000 or more. That should keep the riff-raff home. Bill Quimby

I also did not receive the e-mail. What the so-called "Cap and Trade" provisions of this thing will do to our already troubled economy is awful! Our friends in the list of supporters are blind-sided by the prospects of a new funding source for wildlife. Bill

State agencies and employees, including AGFD and its employees, used to be prohibited from lobbying. Has that rule/law changed? Bill Quimby

How about cutting and pasting it onto the forum? That's terrible! Bill Quimby

I've some questions: 1. How much will it cost to enforce the mandatory requirement? 2. What happens if there is such a rule, you mail your card, and AGFD says it didn't receive it? 3. What will be the punishment? $500? $2500? Loss of your license for a couple of years? For a long time I've felt that Statistics 101 should be a required course for every freshman college student, just as math and English are now. Believe it or not, not every card needs to be returned, and the percentage of people who fib about their success can be determined and factored in, to learn what happened during any hunt. Mailing cards to every permit holder creates a large enough sample that the rate of accuracy should be very, very high. Gathering data through surveying is not a pure and exact science, but it works when the geeks who set up the format follow proven techniques. After reading your posts, I suspect the mandatory requirement for archers began with someone in authority who felt archers would want it before they acceoted changes in archery hunting. Bill Quimby

One more thing. For some reason, there are people who draw elk tags (I won't call them hunters) who like to set up big camps smack dab in the middle of the best elk country in every unit. While you're scouting, look for their old fire rings and try to guess where these yahoos will be when your season opens ... and then find somewhere else to hunt. More than once I've patterned good a bull only to open the season by finding a fifth-wheel trailer, two trucks and four ATVs parked exactly where I lsaw "my" bull standng the previous evening. Bill Quimby

Scout the unit to learn its roads, but realize that where you see bulls now may not be where you will find them in November. Stress from the various other hunts between now and then -- and the first snow -- can change their habits. Talk with people who have hunted more than once in your area in November. I don't know unit 3, but I do know unit 1, and where I see big bulls in late summer and early fall is not where they are in the "regular" elk hunt. Bill Quimby

"I was reading some statistics of how many manuscripts are submitted to publishers vs. how many get rejected, not good! " That's why most pros send book proposal queries to publishers before they actually sit down to write a book. Bill Quimby

I worked in virtually every phase of the publishing industry over the past fifty years before I took up ghost writing books for international trophy hunters in my retirement. If you need help or want to run something past me, PM me. Bill Quimby

We took the crossover road from Wahl Knoll almost to Crescent Lake last week, only to find the road over the dam was impassable (except by bulldozers and tanks). We had no choice but to turn around and retrace our route back to pavement. Incidentally, the signs posted at the barricade near Sunrise Lake say unauthorized users found in the closed area are subject to a $25,000 fine and imprisonment. Bill Quimby

This is some cold front! I woke up Thursday in Greer to find 2 inches of snow on the ground. It was twice that deep when I left the cabin for Tucson at 3 pm. (The temp never got above 34 degrees that day.) It snowed on me constantly from Greer to just south of Forestdale, where it gradually turned to heavy rain. It was clear from Globe to Tucson, but there were big rocks and gushing water in the road indicating I'd just missed a downpour. Some of the weather forecasters were saying Greer and other elevations above 8,500 feet in the White Mountains would get more than 18 inches of snow from this storm. I'm not going back up until Wednesday. By then it should be warmer and most of the holiday weekend flatlanders should be gone. Bill

You may want to consider another title. There is at least one hunting consultant company -- as well as Dallas Safari Club's magazine -- called "Hunters Quest." If you finish writing your book later this year, don't expect to see copies by late 2008 unless you self-publish and work directly with a printer. Established publishers of hunting titles usually want at least six months to edit the manuscript, design and "build" the pages, ship and correct page proofs, and print and bind their books. If they print and bind in Asia as most do, you can add two months for shipment by boat. Six to twelve months for production is about par for the books I've worked on for my clients. My own book was bought by Safari Press and delivered to that company in late February, and I've been told it won't be released until the SCI convention in Reno in January. Have you sold yours to a publisher yet, or are you going to self-publish it? How will it be marketed? Bill Quimby

Three questions: 1. Was this thread originally titled "Outdoor writer banned?" 2. If so, would someone please provide a sanitized summary, or even just a hint of what it contained? 3. Did it refer to Tony M., aka Outdoor Writer? I opened the original posting a couple of days ago only to find a link to a YouTube site, which immediately froze my tired old laptop when I clicked on it. Because I couldn't shut down properly, the machine automatically ran a test on my operating system and software, and it was fifteen minutes before I could get back on the Net. By then the posting was deleted. Incidentally, I and others in places without high-speed internet access would appreciate it if things were cut and pasted into the original message. Links take only slightly less than forever and a day to open. Bill Quimby

Lark, your tribute made me wish I'd met your friend. May he rest in peace. Bill Quimby

Lark, I also did a lot of bowhunting in the days before compound bows, sights, carbon arrows and the other "improvements" to the sport. I also remember when Units 1 and 27 had deer behind every other tree. I don't blame hunters for the decline in deer numbers, though. The deer herd up here began falling as our elk herd grew. In the days when we could see 500 deer in a drive from Greer to P.S. Knoll on the Black River we would feel lucky to see a dozen elk. Today, it's the other way around. I do think the deer situtation is improving, though. I'm seeing more deer just about everywhere they've thinned the forest around Greer. There were nine in my yard last night, and we saw three or four groups where I took my son-in-law for a turkey Monday. Bill Quimby

According to an article I saw in the White Mountain Independent last fall, work on the road from Sunrise to Big Lake is taking longer than projected and the road probably won't reopen until summer 2009. The article said they've relocated the Sheep's Crossing bridge site and did something to the Little Colorado River there. Bill Quimby

Lark: I agree that the bureaucrats want to eliminate as many roads on forest service land as they can. Every time we turn around there's a new berm or barrier across roads we've used for 50 years. The final straw came when they spent a small fortune putting in a paved parking lot and toilets and blocking vehicular access from Squirrel Springs to Benny Creek ... just so a handful of pathwalkers could traipse on what used to be a perfectly good road. And look at what they've spent on Pole Knoll to entice a few cross-country skiers to play there when there's a good winter. That expensive bicycle path from Sheep's Crossing to the highway is another waste of our money. Has anyone ever seen someone riding a bike on the damned thing? I haven't. Bill Quimby

Lark, it isn't just the forest service's burns that conflict with the hunting seasons in unit one. My pet peeve is the ATV jamboree held on the weekend the early elk hunt starts. Those overage adolescents run all over the mountain on their @!@#$%#$!& machines, and not just on the trails the USFS created by closing perfectly good roads, and they chase the bulls I've been watching to only God knows where. I talked with one of the ATV group's organizers in Henry's barber shop in Springerville a couple of years ago and was told they'd been holding their event on that same weekend "for years" and wouldn't even consider switching it to a summer event. My response was that we'd been hunting elk here a lot longer. Don't get me started. If I were king I would chop off their heads. Bill Quimby

I covered for the Tucson Citizen the first release of Gould's turkeys into Arizona in the 1980s. It was a near-disaster. The agricultural authorities were concerned about the possibility of introducing diseases, so they held about a dozen birds captured in Mexico in quarantine for weeks in a building at Douglas. Several died, and some got out of their cages in the warehouse and presented a bunch of problems before they were caught. Came the big day, I drove down to Fort Huachuca and met with the fort's two wildlife biologists and three or four Arizona Game and Fish Department guys, and we drove up into upper Garden Canyon and released the five or six birds that had survived the quarantine. I photographed them as they came out of their boxes. Merrium's turkeys were introduced to the fort and elsewhere across southern Arizona in the 1920s and 1930s and a good number still remained in the Huachucas when the first Gould's were released. I suppose the turkeys there today have both Merrium's and Gould's in their genes. The same would hold true of those in the Santa Catalinas, where I hunted turkeys in the 1950s and 1960s. The Merrium's variety ranged from the top of the mountain to the mesquites along the San Pedro River on the east, and to the ocotillos in what we used to call the Burney Mines country on the north. I didn't know much about turkey hunting then and shot only two birds on that mountain -- one was in Rose Canyon while they were building the dam for the lake; the other was on Rose Peak where I shot a mountain lion many years later. I had friends who liked to hunt along what now is called the Aspen Trail above the Mount Lemmon ski run, and they shot several birds there. There were no spring seasons then, so we hunted turkeys by walking and glassing, and shot them with rifles when we found them. We used to see turkeys in the eastern foothills of the Galliuros near the Sunset Ranch while deer hunting. There were long fingers of oaks that stretched out into the flats, and we often came upon small flocks while jump-shooting whitetails in them. The turkeys were gone from the Galliuros and the valley by the early 1960s, and by 1970 mule deer (which were rare when we first hunted there) had replaced the whitetails. Although I never saw or hunted turkeys there, it was my understanding that there were Merrium's turkeys in the Chiricahuas and on Mount Graham and in upper Josephine Canyon in the Santa Ritas until at least the mid-1970s. Game and Fish also released a few Rio Grande turkeys near Pena Blanca Lake in the early 1980s, but nothing came of it. Bill Quimby

When I was growing up in Yuma someone killed an alligator that was more than 12 feet long near the old Cibola Landing on the river. It was back in the days when they still had five and dime stores selling 3-to-4-inch-long baby alligators for pets, and quite a few foot-long gators eventually turned up in the canals and river after their owners got tired of them. Such a big one found in the Colorado River made news across the country, though, and a photo appeared in the old Arizona Wildlife Sportsman Magazine. This was in about 1952-53. I still was in high school. I have a copy of that issue somewhere. Bill Quimby

When I was growing up in Yuma someone killed an alligator that was more than 12 feet long near the old Cibola Landing on the river. It was back in the days when they still had five and dime stores selling 3-to-4-inch-long baby alligators for pets, and quite a few foot-long gators eventually turned up in the canals and river after their owners got tired of them. Such a big one found in the Colorado River made news across the country, though, and a photo appeared in the old Arizona Wildlife Sportsman Magazine. This was in about 1952-53. I still was in high school. I have a copy of that issue somewhere. Bill Quimby

It will be a while before I can post photos of them. I'm in Tucson for the 30-day adjustment on my new pacemaker, but when I return to the cabin this weekend I'll try to find someone up there with a digital camera (I don't have one) to photograph the sheds. Thanks for your good wishes for my hunt, folks. I've taken a lot of turkeys and really don't care if I shoot another one this year. I'm happy that I'm still able to go out. Bill

I hunted elk, bear and whitetail off my mule a lot in that Chitty Creek, Strayhorse, Crabtree Park, Rose Peak country more than 30 years ago. I'd hate to try to fight a fire on foot in that country. I can't imagine any sane person scheduling a prescribed burn in April, May or June anywhere in Arizona. Bill Quimby

Lark: River Lake near Greer produced a big brown last week, I heard. If you're camping out be sure to take extra warm clothes. It's been getting down to the high 20s at night in Greer. It's below that in the higher country. Some of the roads, including the one up Escudilla, still have snow banks that block them. All the major roads are open though. Bill Quimby