ARGENTINA: Red Stag & Russian Boar Hunt With Algar Safaris

[MontanaPat]

Catching up on posting hunt reports from this year I thought I would post this brief report on a red stag hunt I did this past March 2023 with Algar Safaris in Argentina. I booked this hunt with Algar in Jan 2022 on one of their DSC show specials. I booked the hunt for the 3rd week in March hoping I would hit the roar and the timing worked out perfectly as the stags were roaring big time. My wife wanted to accompany me on this trip since she had joined me in 2017 for a fishing trip to Patagonia and we would be hunting in the same general area, however was the caveat that adtrer the hunt we go to Mendoza for a week to tour wineries and drink Malbec to our hearts content, how could I argue with a proposition like that!

We left Montana on Delta flights through Atlanta on March 16th arriving into Buenos Aires on March 17th and stayed overnight at the ParkTower Hotel. We had some empanadas for lunch at a nice cafe we like to frequent and then a great dinner that night at a good steakhouse that was recommended to us. Saturday morning we were up and headed to the domestic airport for our flight to Bariloche where we were met by one of the guides Lucio who drove us about an hour north to the Algar ranch main lodge.Algar has two properties they hunt, the main lodge/ranch which encompasses something around 50-60,000 acres and also a lodge further north called Calcatere near the town of San Martin de los Andes that I think is about 20,000 acres in size. The main lodge Property lies just north and northwest of Lago Alicura between the towns of Bariloche and San Martin de los Andes. To the southwest and west of Algar is the Estancia Chacabuco which is a large estancia (~250,000 acres) owned by the Anheuser Busch family. This estancia lies at the foothills and rises up into the Andes, the Algar ranch abuts Chacabuco in the Andes foothills.

They have a very nice lodge on the main ranch and it is run by the owner Mariano Fernandez. The property has some high border fencing around most of it but in places the fencing would be down allowing mountain stags to freely migrate down from the foothills onto the ranch. They run hereford cattle on parts of the ranch so you see in cattle fencing in some areas. They price their hunts by size range and the hunt I had booked was for a stag between 400-440" so we were looking for a particular size of stag during our hunt. The first morning I went out with Tomas my guide just driving the western end of the property, we parked on a ridge after daybreak and you could hear dozens of stags roaring up and down the valley and over into the next drainage. We saw several stags that looked nice to me but Tomas kept saying that those were smaller 350" stags.

The first day was spent driving and glassing at various vantage points. Each valley drainage would have willow type thickets in the bottoms and they would have several stags and hinds up and down the drainage. I had chosen to use a rifle provided by Algar since importing a rifle into Argentina was quite tedious to get the paperwork done and approved. They had given me a stainless Winchester M70 in 7mm Rem Mag with a composite stock that fit well and shot very accurately at the range. There were 5 other hunters at the ranch besides myself for the week and a couple of them connected on a stag on the first day, but we never saw anything worth putting a stalk on that day.

On day 2 Tomas and I went to another area that morning and started seeing stags right away in a drainage bottom that was thick with willow and brush. We saw a nice stag but he was directly into the rising sun and hard to get a good look at him so we drove on past for a couple of miles and then circled back onto a ridge headed back his direction. Tomas parked the truck and we got out to hike the ridgeline back towards where we had seen that one stag. What seemed like just open grassland once you got out into it there would be big grass clumps several feet tall, particularly everywhere there would be a small gully or drainage going down into the bottom.
We saw a couple of nice stags move up the hill out of the bottom in front of us several hundred yards but after glassing them decided they were not in the size range we were after. After going about a mile up the drainage weaving in and out of the tall grass to stay hidden we finally spotted a nice stag down in the creek bottom feeding along by himself. Tomas glassed him for a bit and said this was a shooter stag we should move in one. We slowly worked our way among the grass clumps and brush and got within about 100 yards of where we thought the stag was at, but he was over the edge of the creek bank and hidden. Finally we saw the tops of his horms moving so we snuck in closer and set up the shooting sticks waiting for him to come up out of the creek. After several minutes he walked up out of the creek into an open area about 75 yards away and stood looking at us, we remained motionless and he kept staring trying to figure out what we were, finally he turned quartering to me somewhat giving me a good shot. I lined up, pulled the trigger and heard the loud bullet slap as he reared back went about 10 yards and stumbled down for good.

This image shows the double crown he has on the left side.

We got some of the skinners to come from the lodge to meet us and load him up for the trip to the skinning shed. Later in the week Mariano gave me the scoring sheet they had completed showing that he measured out at 419" SCI, my plan is to have a shoulder mount done with him.

 

[MontanaPat]

After getting my stag I told Tomas that I was interested in shooting a Russian Boar if we got the chance. Algar Ranch has quite a few boar on the property along with fallow deer, patagonian dall ram, multihorned sheep that you can hunt. They also allow you to shoot as many cull stags as you want once you've gotten your trophy stag. They get a lot of stags that move onto the ranch that don't have the genetics they want breeding so they try to cull as many of them as possible. The venison gets eaten by hunters, the ranch workers, guides and skinners as well as some of it gets passed on to local markets and is sold. Later that day we took a drive until dark down towards Lago Alicura to see if we could find some boar or cull stags. We got glimpses of a few boar but they were younger ones. Just before dark we spotted a nice cull stag up a steep hillside and Tomas told me to jump out and take him. I laid the &mm RM across the hood of the truck and had to really almost kneel down to get a shot at the steep uphill angle. Tomas whispered he is 250 yards so I held where I thought I need and shot, loud slap and the stag just started tumbling down the steep hillside ending up about a hundred yards above us. We hiked up to him and found him tangled in a big clump of brush and willows, Tomas had me put another round into him to finish him off. By now it was almost completely dark so we removed the head, leaving the carcass until the next morning as it was getting down to about freezing at night and the stag would chill and keep. He was a nice 5x5 but no crown as you can see in the photo below and yet was a 7-8 year old stag, just didn't have the genes to pass along.

The next morning one of the skinners went back with Tomas and I and we hiked up to the cull stag carcass and quatered him out and brought the quarters down to the truck to take back to camp. On our way back we saw a large boar going through the brush in a side canyon, we parked and jumped out to follow but he gave us the sllip and we never could find him to get a shot. We spent that afternoon and all of the next day trying to find a boar to shoot but all we could find were sows with piglets. The follwing night the guides at dinner said there had been a big board coming down from the hills and hanging out in one of the fenced areas where they do breeding of stags. I guess I should mention that Algar was started about 30+ years ago by Mariano's father and they have some large pens covering several acres in size in the valley close to the lodge where they have some very large breeding red stags. They have imported stags from New Zealand and Europe years ago to build the genetics of their stag herd, hence why they want to cull out inferior stags. If I understand it right (and maybe I don't) they open up pens and round up females during the breeding season and release them into the breeding pens to allow the stags to breed then they later push the females out of the pens and let them free range across the entire ranch thereby spreading the genetics they want to grow, although a lot of natural reproduction occurs across the ranch as well.

Anyway after dinner one evening we are hanging out in the lodge bar area and playing pool when Tomas and Lucio come running in to find me. I go outside and they tell that a large russian boar has been coming into the pen to feed and that Lucio has just seen him through his thermal scoped .243. They want me to come with them down to the pasture where the boar was seen and see if I can get a shot on him with Lucio's thermal scoped rifle. I've never looked thru a scope like this before and not sure what I will see but sounds worth a try. We sneek past the skinning shed and guides housing down to an open pature area and I'm looking for the boar thru the scope not sure what I'm looking for, Lucio takes a look and points me towards where he saw the boar. Now I see hi in the scope and as he stops walking I take a shot at about 100 yards. hear the bullet hit and the boar takes off. Now we are stalking thru the pitch black darkness looking to find the boar and we get glimpses every once in a while but we aren't sure how hard he is hit. Tomas goes back to get his truck and we jump in the back driving slowly through the pasture watching for movement along the brush. We stop and see the boar laying about 75 yards further away stone dead thru the thermal scope. That was a new experience and not how I was expecting to get a shot at a boar but he was a nice 300 pounder and tasted pretty good at dinner the following evening. We propped him up using an antler shed we had found hiking earlier that day and put into the back of the truck, made a good prop.

 

[MontanaPat]

We continued to hunt cull stags the following day which was our last day to hunt. We ran across a cull stag that someone had shot the previous week and wounded. The stag was hurt badly with a broken shoulder that was festering and couldn't run so I got out on the sticks and put him down. I did not plan to bring the skull home but when my trophy shipment came into the US they had included the smaller stag horns and skull. Not sure what I will do with the euro skulls but will put the larger one up in my shop building.

The next day they took all of the hunters and spouses that came back to Bariloche to catch flights home. My wife and I flew up to Mendoza and did wine touring for the next week and had a wonderful time and some of the best meals you can imagine, I never drank so much wine in all of my life! If you ever go to Argentina to hunt and take a spouse you should really do the wine touring in that area, phenomenal wineries and people. PM me if you want more info. After Mendoza we caught a flight back to BA and then on home to the US and Montana. Great trip overall, and Algar's facilities were very nice and the food there great as well. It took about 6 months to get the trophies and cape dried and treated to be shipped back into the US and they arrived here in late Sept. Again I used Coppersmith in Seattle to import the trophies and ship them to my taxidermist in Helena MT.

Interesting thing on this import was that Jennifer at Coppersmith contacted me once she got the shipping manifest that showed there were three red stag skulls in the shipment along with the Russian boar tusks. She said that USFW was being very stringent on multiple animals of the same species coming in a single shipment as they are looking for hunters putting trophies from multiple hunters into the same shipment to save shipping costs and it is an import no-no which I had always heard from shipping African trophies. Coppersmith requested photo documentation if I could produce it showing me with each of the hunted trophies. otherwise they might be confiscated by USFW during inspection. Fortunately I could provide the two photos shown in this post but didn't have the last smaller stag as I didn't expect Algar to include it in my shipment back. But with a statement from Algar that the shipment contained one trophy stag and two culls that were all taken by me, we had no issues during the inspections as Coppersmith proactively gave them my photos and the Algar email. They also had concerns about the boar tusks but I had them mounted into a finished piece in Argentina so when they realized it was a finished mount that alleviated any concerns. Here are boar tusks mounted.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

 

[gillettehunter]

Sounds like a great hunt and a really nice tour. One question that comes up is the cost of import of trophies back into the US. If you don't mind I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering. Thanks
Bruce

 

[cpr0312]

Congrats and thanks for sharing!

 

[375Fox]

Nice report. I’m surprised USFW would request hunting photos for something as common as a red stag, but very good to know.

 

[CamoManJ]

Fantastic report, glad y’all had a great time.

 

[MontanaPat]

Sounds like a great hunt and a really nice tour. One question that comes up is the cost of import of trophies back into the US. If you don't mind I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering. Thanks
Bruce

Hey Bruce, the import cost from Argentina was very similar to what I've experienced on a crate coming from Africa, I guess a little lower overall. They didn't charge much for the dip and pack portion, I paid $250 and that was partially for the boar tusks to be mounted. The exporter in Buenos Aires charged $1194 for all of their fees including the Intl freight cost to the US for 1 crate with a volumetric weight / chargeable mass of 164 kg. The crate was shipped to Seattle via American Airlines. Once Coppersmith received it in Seattle they did the import and ground transfer to my taxidermist in Helena MT, the Coppersmith bill was $1477. So total for getting the trophies back to the US was $2671. When it all arrived into Helena around the last week of August I went by and picked up the cull euros and boar tusk plaque from them.

 

[MontanaPat]

Nice report. I’m surprised USFW would request hunting photos for something as common as a red stag, but very good to know.

I'm not sure that USFW actually did request them, I got the impression that Jennifer at Coppersmith was doing due diligence and gathering the information proactively to ward off any potential issue. She said that USFW was cracking down on individuals they thought might be importing for others under one name when they saw multiples animals of the same species in a single crate. I appreciated them being proactive to gather info up front to minimize any delays and incurring of extra storage fees.

 

[Greenhorn]

Awesome report it looks like it was a great hunt. I'll have to add this one to the list for sure! Thanks for writing up this report.

 

[-- Jr --]

Great hunt! Congrats!