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A brief report and a few pics
I’m guilty of not posting any hunting stories and very few photos on this forum yet enjoy reading others reports so I thought it was about time I gave a little back. It’s a slow day at work so here’s a brief write up and a few photos covering the last few months of hunting.
Starting with some post roar red deer and chamois hunting photos. I’d seen a reasonable stag in the area pre-roar but ran out of time to put a move on him before I was due home. I’m certain he would have moved out of the area for the roar so when that was over I was keen to see if he would return to his highland home, assuming of course that he had survived. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch up with him but managed to snap a few photos of Chamois and young Reds out and about including one dark buck that looked good, but I didn’t shoot for fear of disturbing the stag should he be nearby.
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This buck was a hard case prancing around as I asked him how his day was going. I eventually hit him with a rock from 25 yards before he decided to put some distance between us.
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Fast forward a week or two and I was back looking for that stag. This trip was cold, really cold! Everything had an inch think layer of ice over it which made the river slow going and very hard to sit still for any length of time on the cold faces watching the warmer feeding areas. Again, I saw a few younger animals but not the stag I saw looking for.
Turning for home on the last afternoon I found fresh stag tracks up a creek bed in the fresh snow. I followed them and eventually found the culprit, a young 10 that didn’t stick around to have a picture taken. It was then that a dark shape caught the eye up high on a scrubby face. Closing the gap to within 300yards I could see it was the same buck from last trip. Not a bad one either at just over 9.5’
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Hunting took a bit of a backseat over the next few weeks due to a badly sprained ankle which saw me out of action for 8 weeks. Time for some fishing.
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In the last few weeks the ankle has finally healed well enough to get back into the hills and with Tahr very much in the Greens cross hairs in recent weeks I’ve been spending the last few weekends chasing them around. My wife and I eat a lot of Tahr meat and prefer it to venison, so the focus of the first trip was to replenish the freezer.
For this trip I had Kevin, the Labrador, along for the walk into what was a new area for me. We didn’t see a lot of animals but put that down to not knowing where to look and the fact the area was popular with tampers. Kevin eventually put me onto a Tahr at close quarters in a tight gut and of course I missed it with an offhand shot as it got of its feet from where she was bedded down! Later that day we found a nice campsite on a terrace out of the wind. Kevin, having recently been feed had commandeered my sleeping bag was snoring his head off while I cooked my own dinner when I spied three nannies moving down the opposite face toward the creek. I watched until they were almost in the creek before shooting the lead animal, reloading and dropping the next two cleanly. Id redeemed myself from the earlier piss poor performance and we had our meat.
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Kevin very unimpressed after missing the shot!
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Tahr and Fallow on the way home.
The next weekend I got onto a fair few bulls all mobbed up. They didn’t seem to be concerned about my presence. One for the pot.
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Meat in the freezer and the pressure off I moved onto the next catchment. I watched this bull for quite some time and almost didn’t shoot him thinking he wasn’t old enough. He was with a group of 4 others on a scrub face. In the end I decided to take him and it was an easy 250 yard shot through the front shoulder as he stood up that sent him crashing into a tight matagouri gutter. Great.
Unfortunately, I had to crawl in after him and couldn’t drag him into a position to get a decent photo. He’s 12.5’ on the short side but has very badly broken tips and 9.5’ bases. Perhaps losing one and a half to two inches in length. Certainly, a character trophy!
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Over the last 3 weekends I’ve seen close to 200 Tahr. They have mainly been mobbed up in areas where the spring growth has come away and generally very low which is to be expected at this time of the year. So, ladies and gentlemen go get them before someone else does!
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What will this weekend bring?
