It's antelope time again!

By: stew1tx Mood: BIG GAME HUNTING Date: 08/26/2007 11:06:39 Music: None

What a month, fished another stop of the Texas Redfish Series, went to Florida for a week and hooked some HUGE snook, worked a little and went to the Panhandle since our NM Antelope hunt was canceled.

 We drove out to the Bell Ranch to attend Jeff Lane's service.  He had an airplane crash while flying out road placement and water line routes on the ranch.  If there is such a thing as a perfect service I think this might have been it, a great way to celebrate his life.  He loved kids, he loved friends, he loved entertaining, he loved teaching as well as learning, and he loved life, especially the life of an owner/cowboy of one of the most amazing ranches I have ever had the priveledge to step foot on. 

My prayers go out to his family in the times ahead...  Jeff was a giant among men.  he gave 100% anytime someone was talking to him, he had an infectious laugh that was larger than life, and was a true cowboy living out his dream who's candle was blown out way too early.  We will miss you Jeff, all of us....

Since our hunt was canceled due to the untimely plane crash of Jeff Lane, we had planed to stay a week, so we drove over a lease of my father's to see if we could figure out how the biologist that did the assessment and issued the antelope permits came up with his numbers.  There is some kind of variable in the way they derive the numbers for permits because after driving around for 3 days of intense scouting we can see taking 8 animals, MAYBE, but not any 15! 

I ended up getting some video footage, about 30 minutes total of animals and will be editing it and publishing some snippets of it on here.  Out of all the antelope we saw we saw 2, possibly 3, that will be potentially book animals.  The panhandle had some very timely rains early and the horn quality is much better this year.  We saw more mass and longer tops on most of the antelope we saw.  While the grass is burning up now, there were some afternoon/evening rain showers that gave everything a drink.  Gary Green, one of the cowboys on the Bell always says that my dad is a rainmaker as we always got rain when we were at the Bell, and that held true once again on his panhandle lease. 

There was a good bit of predation control early and it really helped out the mortality of the fawn crop.  We saw in some cases what we thought might be 100% fawn crop.  The animals really looked healthy this year. 

Overall, this was a wonderful trip and we got to see some great animals.

More to come with the video...

Regards,

Stew

(Brian Steward)