billrquimby

It takes little effort to comment in an email. All you need to say is, "I support target shooting on the Sonoran Desert National Monument," -- ten words -- and add your name and city. Bill Quimby

"Bill, that's because they invented jumping and throwing after you were old. But you musta been a good runner, or a saber tooth tiger or a bearcat Woulda ate ya. Lark "........Nope. I just holed up in my cave. Bill Quimby

I have no interest in running, jumping and throwing games, but my wife does. She is a Broncos fan, and whenever I couldn't hear her rooting for her team and jeering its opponent, I'd go into the TV room and watch the commercials. In my opinion, the commercials weren't as good as those in years past. Bill Quimby

I shot a few antelope here when the odds weren't too bad. When that changed, I stopped applying in Arizona because I felt tags should go to those who have never hunted them. Now, whenever I feel the need to hunt antelope, I apply for Wyoming where the odds are much better. Bill Quimby

Great buck, Ernesto! Congratulations on making it yours, and for your recovery! Bill Quimby

Great photos, and thank you for posting them again. I missed them the first time around. To answer a couple of questions raised in this thread, the same rifle apparently is shown in both photos. The Winchester Model 88 wasn't introduced until 1955, a year after I graduated from high school. The Savage Model 99 shown apparently was very close to new if the photos are from the 1930s because earliy 99s didn't have pistol grips and the butts were deeply curved. A 99 chambered for the now-obsolete .303 Savage was my first "deer rifle." I was an avid reader of Jack O'Connor's columns, and because of them I became the first hunter I knew to hunt with a scope. Everyone said I was crazy because "scopes made your gun wiggle all over the place" and "you can't get on a buck fast enough when he jumps up." Lots of hunters wore leather soles in the late 1940s when I first started hunting. There weren't many other options, and they were expensive. I wore "dress shoes" for my first couple of hunts until I could afford "work boots" with artificial hard rubber soles. Camouflage wasn't widely available before the Vietnam War. We wore red plaid "hunting shirts" and Levi's. If it was cold, we wore solid drab olive jackets and liners we bought for virtually nothing from stores that sold military surplus items from World War II. Nobody I knew (including me) carried binoculars, and anyone who walked around with a pack on his back would have been laughed off the mountain. As now, there were guys who managed to bring home a deer every year, and guys who couldn't find a deer if their lives depended on it. As for elk, it always has been difficult to draw a tag in Arizona, except for hunts on Indian reservations. The state controlled the wildlife on reservations then, but the tribes added a $25 trespass fee and few hunters were willing to pay it. Thanks again for posting the photos. They brought back a wave of good memories of a time long ago. Bill Quimby

This Cecil nonsense, is just that -- nonsense. It began with a one-man "group" who calls himself "the Zimbabwe Conservation Force" who held a press conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, to announce that a Spaniard had illegally lured a lion out of a national park by baiting, wounded it with an illegal crossbow bolt, and allowed it to suffer for 48 hours before killing it. Not only that, he said the lion was wearing a radio collar and it is illegal to kill a collared animal. He claimed the Spaniard and his professional hunter tried to destroy the collar to hide what they'd done. To make matters worse, he claimed, the lion he called "Cecil" (after Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia) was known and loved by everyone in Zimbabwe and the hunters had shown their lack of respect by decapitating this beloved animal. A BBC reporter was among those attending the press conference, and within days the "news" went global. A couple of days later, a minor Zimbabwe official announced that his country would ask the U.S. to send the dentist to Zimbabwe to face charges for his illegal and unethical actions. What was never publicized were all the untruths and outright lies that were told about the incident. 1. It was an American dentist (and not a Spaniard) who shot the lion with a compound bow and not a crossbow. 2. Cecil was not "lured" or baited out of the park, he was shot as he fed on an elephant that had died of natural causes a couple of kilometers from the park's boundary. Even if he had been lured out of the park by baiting, baiting lions is perfectly legal in Zimbabwe and nearly everywhere else in Africa. 3. It is not illegal to shoot a collared lion in Zimbabwe. Even if it were, the old lion's mane was so long that it doesn't show in any photos I've seen of the animal. 4. The collar was cut off the lion and hung on a tree branch where biologists were able to find it. There was no attempt to destroy its transmitter. 5. The lion was not decapitated out of scorn by the hunters. It was skinned for a full-body mount, and the carcass minus its head was left for vultures and hyenas. 6. This was not a well-known or beloved lion. Most Zimbabweans had never heard of it before that press conference. 7. There never was any official move to have the dentist extradited to Africa. The government agreed the only law that was violated was broken by the indigenous "landowner," who had obtained the land after it was seized from its white owners. He and a neighbor illegally swapped a hunting permit for another animal (an elephant, I think) for a lion hunting permit. For this, he was fined $250 U.S. The dentist became a pariah hated by anti-hunters around the world who are mounting campaigns and building war chests to end trophy hunting. He and his family received death threats, and he came close to losing his business even though he had done nothing wrong, legally or ethically. It will be a disaster if trophy hunting ends in Africa. Except for Kenya, most national parks on that continent are mostly funded by the hunting concessions that surround them. When that revenue is gone and the concessions become subsistence farms, there not only will be few game animals outside of parks, there also will be fewer animals inside the protected areas. There are sayings in Africa that go like this: "It stays if it pays," and "In Africa, wildlife must sing for its supper." For proof of this, one needs only look at Kenya, where wildlife populations outside of parks crashed within less than a decade after hunting ended. Bill Quimby

Congratulations to the young man (and you). Years ago, I also shot a very old javelina. Its other teeth were present, but its tusks were just rounded knobs. Because of its age, I expected it would have a big skull that would score high in the SCI book (it didn't). I also took that old animal with a muzzleloader, a flintlock that I'd built from parts. Bill Quimby

Started with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, graduated to a .22 LR Remington tube-fed semi-auto, then to a pre-1920 Savage Model 99 in .303 Savage. With that .303, I shot maybe four or five mule deer, a whitetail, five or six javelinas and a few coyotes. For my first elk hunt, I bought a Sears Model 50 .270 Winchester with a Belgium Mauser action. Lark will be happy to know I shot lots of critters and metalicas siluetas targets with this rifle. I eventually shot the .270 barrel out and bought a Czech Mauser barreled action in 7mm Remington Magnum and made a stock for it. I've used this rifle in a dozen counties on six continents and it's never let me down. Bill Quimby

The game department tried to introduce California quail to eastern Arizona in the 1960s, but the program apparently failed everywhere except along a short stretch of the Little Colorado River between Eagar and South Fork We don't have many of them, but they're still here. The last time I saw a covey was this past September, when six or seven birds flew across the highway west of the log factory as I was driving to Springerville for groceries. Seeing Sherman's title "Quail Slam Done" made me wonder if he had taken all four types of quail legal to hunt here. Has anyone done it? Bill Quimby

Roninflag: I know very little about quail, and never was much of a bird hunter. It's probably because I'm a lousy shot with a shotgun and the meat I brought home just didn't seem to be worth the effort. It's been at least 25 years since I hunted quail and nearly as long since I shot a dove. However, I do know that although California quail and Gambel's quail may look similar at first glance they are regarded as separate species. Here's what I found on the "Net:" "The California quail's range is adjacent but does not overlap the Gambel's quail's. California quail have strong light-and-dark scaling on the belly and on the nape of the neck. The crown patch of males is darker and less reddish than Gambel's quail males. Female California quail lack the female Gambel's creamy belly wash." If I were younger and my arthritic feet still allowed me to walk as I once did, I'd try to find a California quail near our cabin, just to have hunted all four quail species legal to hunt in Arizona. Bill Quimby

Jonesface: I haven't heard about another subspecies of scaled quail being reported anywhere near Springerville, but years ago someone told me he'd seen scaled quail close to Holbrook. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember he said it was near a park with petroglyphs. If they're still up there and they're not the same subspecies as those here in southern Arizona, it means Arizona has six types of quail -- Gambel's, two types of scalies, Mearns, California and masked bobwhite. No other state can say that. Bill Quimby

I forgot to mention that nearly all of this stretch of the river is private land. Bill Quimby

I have a similar recipe, except I add a half can of diced tomatoes and three or four chopped green onions (stems and all) at the end. I cook potatoes with the meat in the Crockpot, then chop them into small pieces and fry until crisp. Bill Quimby

¡Felíz Cumpleaños, amigo! May this be the year you shoot a 130 B&C buck! It was an honor to meet you last summer at the SCI banquet. Bill Quimby

I'm thinking those deep forks and heavy beams will make it rank very high in the SCI book. Bill Quimby

How about posting a list? Are there any Pennsylvania/Kentucky longrifles, either well-made replicas or originals? Bill Quimby

Hey, Lark: It's a term that was invented for the SCI record book. I was the SCI record book's editor in the 1980s when its record book committee decided that whitetail antlers varied in size so much from region-to-region that the book needed more categories to be fair to members who hunted in areas with smaller deer. At the time, the Boone & Crockett book offered only a couple of categories for the 17 different subspecies of whitetails in the U.S. and Canada (there are 20 or more in Mexico, central America and South America). There was no support for having dozens of categories for one species, so the committee created eight new categories to cover all of North America. My friend Craig Boddington drew the boundaries using state lines or major roads for boundaries. More categories were added after I retired. The gulf coast, Mexican texanus and central plateau categories were created later at the request of Mexican members who believe there are great differences between the various subspecies in their country. One of my clients owned a bunch of live so-called central plateau deer at his ranch an hour or so from Mexico City and I spent an hour in his enclosure watching them. Darned if I could tell them from the Texas Hill Country whitetails I've shot. For that matter, although I was never fortunate to have hunted them, I never could find a visual difference from our Coues deer in the dozens of photos of trophy bucks of the Carmen Mountain subspecies from Texas and Mexico that came across my desk when I edited Safari magazine and the SCI record book. Bill Quimby

Thanks, Amanda. Count me among your members who watch CW's classified ads for bargains. I've bought and sold things, and met some great people because of them. If they don't show up when I click on "new content," I will not find them. Bill Quimby

I'm with Lark. I don't worry about such things. I have handloaded every round I've ever shot since 1955 and I've shot a huge pile of game using the heaviest Nosler Partitions available at the safest but fastest speeds. The bottom line is that only thing that matters is minute-of-deer accuracy. Bill Quimby

Many years ago, I shot a whitetail buck with antlers that still were in heavy velvet when the season opened in late October. We were at the home of one of my wife's cousins in the Sierrita Mountains and I skinned the deer and sawed the antlers from its skull and draped them over a barbed wire fence. When I went to retrieve them a couple of hours later, a cow had chewed off half of one side. To say I wasn't happy would be an understatement. Bill Quimby

Hey, Lark. Saying the .264 Win Mag is a lot better than a 6.5 Rem Mag is like saying the .30-06 is a lot better than the .308 Winchester. You are correct as always, of course, but a deer, elk or black bear shot with any of them will never know there is a difference. Bill Quimby

My 6.5 Remington Magnum is a Model 700 Remington with a 24-inch barrel. Using 140-grain Nosler Partitions, I shot a mule deer in Arizona and four whitetails in Texas a couple of years ago at 50 to 300 yard ranges, and each was a one-shot kill. Although my friend Lark might not agree, it wouldn't take much to convince me that it is ballistically superior to the .270 Winchester. It certainly has much less felt recoil. Although I don't consider sub MOA accuracy is needed in a hunting rifle, my 6.5 RM shoots very tight groups. Bill Quimby

Good luck on your sale. We are using a Fridigaire refrigerator from the same era at our cabin. It just keeps going and going. Bill Quimby

Lark's right once again. They're the Rocky Mountain bighorns they moved from Morenci a couple of years ago. Fourteen or fifteen of them hung out most of the summer between Greer Junction and Eagar last summer, another group spent it along Hall Creek down to South Fork. There was an sign posted on the highway for a while warning drivers to avoid them. Like curly horned cliff carp everywhere, they're beautiful but not too bright. I rank their collective IQ just above a javelina's. Bill Quimby