What was the most challenging animal you've ever hunted?

[Thumper Mcgee]

What was your hunt that was challenging to complete

 

[Kevin Peacocke]

Stag in the Scottish Highlands, not so much the animal spooking, but the terrain - they are all at the top of the mountain. Get fit to hunt highland stag.

 

[Thumper Mcgee]

Stag in the Scottish Highlands, not so much the animal spooking, but the terrain - they are all at the top of the mountain. Get fit to hunt highland stag.

That does sound challenging

 

[spike.t]

Poachers in the rains.....wet tall grass... thick bush and humid atmosphere muffle the sound of shots at night and make it difficult to work out direction...then even if you are near you can't see fkall ....

 

[curtism1234]

Frustration wise, no question, public land turkey. They gobble once to acknowledge they hear you and they walk away the opposite direction.

 

[Randy Hanson]

Late season chukar.

 

[Dee S]

Zebra, no question for me. But I'd have to say the poachers would be hard to beat. Hats off to you for doing that.

 

[chashardy]

My first zebra in Namibia in 1987--it was still Southwest Africa back then. Had to crawl along a cliff a hundred feet above the canyon where the small group of zebra were grazing. PH and I inched up to the edge lying flat on our bellies and he says "shoot the one closest to us." I whispered back, "shoot it hell, I can't even see it." PH starts chuckling and says "look through your scope."
This was my first safari and I was shooting a pre-64 Model 70 30-06. Hanging just over the edge of the cliff, I looked through the scope and saw the zebras and picked out the closest one and squeezed off the shot. PH says, "you hit him, but shoot him again so we don't have to track so far." The zebra ran about 90 yards and stopped broadside and I shot him through the heart. He ran another 80 yards or so and fell. The first shot was from about 100 feet above and maybe 90 yards or so away and that was a challenging shot. The second shot was much easier at broadside about 175 yards away.
We spent the next three or four hours with the trackers skinning and packing the zebra back up the canyon to the truck.
It was a clear sunny day and one of the most fun days of hunting I've had. That zebra's hide is still on the floor of my guest room.

 

[JimP]

Coues deer in southern Arizona. Not just any coues but the larger bucks.

Just in the environment that they live in is challenging enough but then trying to find and stalk into one just compounds the difficulty of the hunt.

 

[Hank2211]

Three come to mind, each for a different reason.

1. Bongo. The jungle is hot, humid, overgrown, and everything wants to eat you, sting you, bite you, suck your blood or all four. It took 12 days of a 14 day hunt to get the bongo.

2. LDE. It's hot and then it's hotter, the ground is impossible to walk on without twisting an ankle (and I had no hunting boots) and you walk for miles, and then more miles and then the eland see you first and you have to start over again.

3. Mountain Nyala. High altitude brings not only less oxygen, but cold temperatures. You walk up mountains in the dark, breathing hard, you sweat and then you freeze when you stop. You spend long days looking for a mature animal, and when you find one, the shot is usually over 300 yards across a valley (380 yards in my case) and then you wound the animal and you spend days looking for it, and only find it 5 days later (well, that might be just me!).

 

[PARA45]

Alligators at night in the swaps of South Florida, in the middle of September. Every mosquito is out there to taste your blood, and it doesn't matter how much bug spray you use, it doesn't work. Also, you can't shoot the gator, you can't have a gun on the boat, and you have to use a gig attached to a buoy to hunt them. Once you gigged the gator, you let him swim away. You retrieve the buoy and you try to bring the gator next to the boat where you can shoot him with a bang stick. Once you do that, you reach in the dark murky water to retrieve your gator and to tape his mouth shut just in case. You are not on top of the food chain any more. LOL!!!!!

 

[BourbonTrail]

Black bear/Mountain Lion in back country AZ. Drive waaaaayyy out into the back country, and then hike waaaayyy back in the Galiuro Mountains...to sit and predator call for 3 days. Great hunt, but it wore me out more than a week stalking elk in the Kaibab.

 

[spike.t]

Alligators at night in the swaps of South Florida, in the middle of September. Every mosquito is out there to taste your blood, and it doesn't matter how much bug spray you use, it doesn't work. Also, you can't shoot the gator, you can't have a gun on the boat, and you have to use a gig attached to a buoy to hunt them. Once you gigged the gator, you let him swim away. You retrieve the buoy and you try to bring the gator next to the boat where you can shoot him with a bang stick. Once you do that, you reach in the dark murky water to retrieve your gator and to tape his mouth shut just in case. You are not on top of the food chain any more. LOL!!!!!

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Any beers involved just to liven it up a bit...

 

[spike.t]

Zebra, no question for me. But I'd have to say the poachers would be hard to beat. Hats off to you for doing that.

Not a lot else to do this time of the year....we would empty our bar ...and it's a 7 or so hour round trip to get more....but it's not every night so not that big a deal...but not good overall...everyone in this country looses a lot of animals to poaching....endemic here..

 

[PARA45]

Shhhhhh. But of course, and cigars. How do you think we were able stay awake all night.

 

[Thumper Mcgee]

Frustration wise, no question, public land turkey. They gobble once to acknowledge they hear you and they walk away the opposite direction.

public land hunts even for dove can be challenging, just because you rarely get a shot at a bird before bubba shoots at it 600 yards away and turns it

 

[spike.t]

Shhhhhh. But of course, and cigars. How do you think we were able stay awake all night.

Surely the ceegars keep a few mozzies away....and if you drank more the alcohol sweating out would screw up even more....

 

[PARA45]

Any beers involved just to liven it up a bit...

Surely the ceegars keep a few mozzies away....and if you drank more the alcohol sweating out would screw up even more....

The bug spray didn't work (we should have tried drinking it), cigar smoke didn't help either, drinking helped us tolerate the mosquito bites and made us into bigger hombres while we looked for big gators. LMAO!!!!

 

[spike.t]

The bug spray didn't work (we should have tried drinking it), cigar smoke didn't help either, drinking helped us tolerate the mosquito bites and made us into bigger hombres while we looked for big gators. LMAO!!!!

Oh yeah....sure you suddenly had balls of brass....

 

[375Fox]

My toughest hunt was a late April black bear hunt on prince of Wales island in SE Alaska. I knew it was early for bears and many hadn’t come out of hibernation yet, but the weather really prevented us from the best hunting. The winds were so bad it kept us off the water and forced us to hunt upland the backside of mountains that were protected from the storms/wind seeing almost no bears. Finally on the end of day 5 the weather broke and sun started to shine. We got boat on water and saw a couple bears each day, but not many. Finally on the last day 7 we got a failed stalk on a nice bear, but no shot. Then an hour later got another stalk on what my guide thought was a medium sized bear, he said it was my choice and I decided to shoot. It was 6’6” but it was a conservative measurement, I think most would’ve stretched it to 7’, it was a very heavy bear.