I have had the good fortune to be invited along on a wonderful Audad hunt in the SE corner of New Mexico in mid-Nov. I am an experienced hunter... but unfamiliar with the game and the terrian. I will be taking along my pre-64 M70 Fwt .30'06. Any information on bullet selection, hunting tactics, other game that I might encounter, etc. would be helpful. This will be an unguided do-it-yourself hunt on about 13,000 acres. We will also be hunting quail and I will have along a trusty varmint gun for coyotes. What would the normal weather patterns be?
Thanks for any help
Iowaboy

Iowaboy,

Mid-November in SE NM is highly unpredictable! You could have snow and cold or you could have hot(mid 70's)-- there is usually a significant wind blowing (15 to 45 mph.) The terrain will likely be mountainous (hilly) and fairly open. Shots on the same side of a canyon as you will be rather short and across-canyon shots @ 400+ yards are also possible. A well-constructed 180 grainer should do well on those tough goats.

Good Hunting,

As ACRecurve said, the whether is fairly unpredictable in November. I lived in the area for more than 20 years. I have seen the tempature near 90 and I also have seen it near 0 that time of year. Depending on exactly where you are (the Guadalupe Rim?), the terrain should be desert mountains with lots of pinon, cedar and prickly pear cactus. Most of the canyons are fairly rocky and many of the plants have thorns, so wear good boots. Nothing hurts worse than having a long thorn work its way into your foot while you try to find a place to lay your gun down. I have never hunted auodad, but I hear they are pretty wary and hard to find. Being a 30-06 and pre-64 model 70 fan, I applaud your choice. I generally used 180 grains with IMR4350 when I hunted that country. Have fun!

Nothing wrong with what you've been told. My weapon of choice in the past for aoudad has been a 25.06 Rem. with 120 gr. Sierra HPBT.

Hit poorly, an aoudad can take a lot of punishment and keep moving. My choice of bullet weight in your gun would be 150 gr.

Have a good pair of binoculars ( mine are 10x) and be patient. Glass slowly. You will have a lot of country to cover. Aoudad are extremely hard to see unless they move, even if they are in the open. Once they are spooked they will generally keep up a steady dog-trot until they disappear over the horizon.

There are some big rams 30+" in the area you describe. Have some one (more than one is better) help you pack him out. If you drag him far you will ruin the cape. The long hair going down the underside of the neck, from his chin down between his forelegs is the most impressive feature of a shoulder mount, after the horn size. I shot a big ram east of Van Horn, Texas and went to get the jeep. When I got back a friend, thinking he was doing me a favor had dragged the ram about 200 yards, ruining the cape.

You should see more desert mule deer on your hunt than aoudad. If you have a license for them you could walk away with two fine trophies. I've doubled on mule deer and aoudad a number of times.

If you are from Iowa and have never hunted blue quail you are in for a treat. Leave your genteel bobwhite-hunting-ways behind. Blues will run you ragged. Don't wait for them to flush. Shoot them on the ground if you get a chance. They are not going to wait for you. Take a 12 ga. and shoot high-power 7 1/2 shot. You had better have your legs, heart, and lungs in good shape or the blues will leave you in their dust. (Watch a Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote cartoon and you will have some idea of blue quail hunting. You are Wiley Coyote. He is both faster than you, and smarter than you.)

You will see and hear coyotes I'm sure, but you will have to make a choice. Shoot the coyote and spook any aoudad or mule deer in the immediate area, or let him walk. (You could dedicate a day or night just to varmint calling.)

Wish I was going with you. Sounds like a great hunt.

Thanks guys for all the help! All these things will be tucked away in my memory bank. I just got back from the range and did a little work with my .30'06. Although I have about 23 varmint type calibers this is the only gun suitable for large game at the moment. I think that I settled on a 180gr. Failsafe on top of AA 4350XMR. From my FWT it prints just over 1 MOA and is now dead on at 200 yards. I will run the MV on my computer program and get a print out of windage and elevation as it sounds like I could be making some long shots.

I am looking forward to the quail. We don't have any bobwhite in N. IA, so I will be pretty green when it comes to the type of flush. Thanks for the advice. One thing that I have going right now is that I'm 33 and in great shape. I will be taking a Browning Lightning. It was a recent trade on a custom varmint rig in .17 Mach IV. I have been told that with 5s or 6s in near max loades I should be OK.

We will be dedicating at least one day to the coyote hunt only. This is where I'm really proficient as this is my true love. The other over-riding factor... the ranch owners reimburses hunts for any coyote taken! For a young man with a family this is worth trying.

Good advice on the cape etc. Any place you can tell me about that would give a good ref. on what a trophy should look like? I would like to be familiar with the looks of these guys before I head out.

Iowaboy

Go to www.jesseshuntingpage.com under the forums go to Sheep & Goat Hunting, then to Vninhunt's Sheep Pic. You will be staring at the aoudad of your dreams, a 35" ram taken in Southeastern New Mexico. Typical country is in the background.

You will be making a mistake shooting 5s or 6s on blues. That's a pheasant load. You need more shot in the pattern for quail. Buy 7 1/2s. (Personally I load 8s.)

Tell me more about that hunt. What's he charging for aoudad and mule deer?

I have hunted more quail than anything in that area, and I have to say I have to disagree with Kensco's post about the use of no. 6s. I used no. 7 1/2s for years and quite often the birds had just enough life to crawl under a bush or into a hole to die. It really makes them hard to find. If you happen to do some of your bird hunting in the sandhills 50 or 60 miles away from the mountains, you will find both blues and bobwhites. But these bobwhites don't know they are supposed to stick; they run just as much as blues but are less predicatable than their scaled cousins. And bobwhites match the oak shinery in the sandhills as if they were native to that country (they're not). So, they are hard to find. Especially without a dog to find the birds, you'll want to flatten them. Also, the shots tend to be longer than traditional quail hunting. You will normally have a 15 to 20 mph wind. If a front is blowing in, the wind my be blowing 25 to 35 mph. The birds will come up, put the wind to their backs and move on out. When the wind is blowing 30 mph it is hard to get a shot off before they are out of range. With that in mind, I used no.6s with a modified choke. I generally used 1 ounce in my 20 gauges, 1 ounce or 1 1/8 ounce in my 16 gauges and 1 1/8 ounce in my 12 gauges. Before I went to the modified choke and no. 6s, I lost about half my birds. After, I only lost about 10 percent.

I forgot to mention it, but I would not use no. 5s; they are too big. Also, I talked to my dad the other day, and he said that it looks like there are more quail this year than their have been in a long time.

I just came from the local sporting good store in my area and the 7.5 and 6 Rem super velocity shots was on sale. I picked up three boxes of each. I have always been a true believer in velocity over shot size so will settle on these. 1290 FPS over the chrony... this should work well. They mimic my skeet rounds quite well and I have been doing well with this new game. When you two refer to blues to you mean Gamble's?

Blues are also known as scaled quail. They are bluish-grey in color. They have a mixture of these bluish-grey feathers and lighter colored feathers. It sort of gives them a scaled appearance. I don't believe you will run into any gambels in that area. I think, there are gambels in areas from about Las Cruces westward, but I have never hunted them.

I'm shooting heavier loads than you use Mr. MD. My personal load for a 12 Ga. is 1 1/4 Oz. of 8s. I've never owned anything but a modified choke. If you are losing a lot of cripples something else is wrong. After twenty years of hunting blues I guarantee you it's not the shot size.

At 10% you are still losing way too many birds with 6s. You may be trying to reach out too far.

When I lived in Odessa the line for blues/bobs ran north/south about through Stanton. I never cared much for hunting bobs, too easy.

I lived in Las Cruces for ten years. We'd hunt blues up against the Organs, and chase Gambel's out west of town on the other side of the river.

I'd rather hunt blues than anything that flies, with wild pheasant a close second.

I was probably hunting on too many of those days in which the wind was blowing so hard the birds were 40 yards out before I could shoulder my gun (walk into the wind and you jump a lot of deer, though). This year, I will hunt quail for the first time in five years. I will be out in the sandhills west of Lovington. I'm also scheduled for a hog hunt between Eunice and Andrews this weekend. I am excited about seeing that area again. I agree with you about the pheasants; they are fun. Where's a good area to hunt gambels a near Las Cruces? I don't know that area as well as I do other parts of the state.

I forgot to mention the reason the bobwhites were so tame was probably because you were hunting them on private land in Texas. In New Mexico, they get quite a bit more hunting pressure and wise up quickly. A month or so into the season I found the blues much more predictable. By the geography and plant life, you can pretty much tell when a blue would run and when it would stick. After a little hunting pressure, you just don't know whether bobwhites are going to run three miles or stick, but they usually are easy to get on opening day. Starting in about 1987, we seemed to pretty much have a 50/50 mixture of blues and bobwhites in the Lovington area. Before that, they were almost all blues.