Outdoor Notes / Mike Kupper : Auction of a Bighorn Sheep Permit Could Bring as Much as $100,000

Sport hunters will bid at an auction later this year for a permit that will give someone a chance to bag the first bighorn sheep to be legally killed in California since 1873.

By holding an auction, the Department of Fish and Game hopes to find a trophy hunter willing to pay up to $100,000 for the privilege of getting the first shot at a bighorn.

The California Bighorn Sheep Assn., a Southern California conservation group, has been selected to conduct an auction in July on behalf of the department.

Dick Weaver, a biologist active in management of California’s estimated 4,800 bighorns, said that hunting of the animals was temporarily prohibited in 1873, when they were threatened with extinction, and 10 years later the ban was made permanent.

Resumption of limited bighorn hunting was authorized last year.

Under the new law, the DFG will issue permits for nine bighorn rams of the Nelson subspecies, one of three types of bighorns found in California.

Hunting will be restricted to the Marble Mountains and the Kelso Peak-Old Dad Range in San Bernardino County.

The single permit sold at auction will grant its buyer the right to stalk a bighorn for 30 days, beginning Nov. 21. That will give him a two-week head start on the other eight permit buyers, who can hunt for 16 days, beginning Dec. 5.

Several thousand hunters probably will apply for the eight permits, and the eight winners will be chosen in a drawing. The application fee is $5. Winners in the lottery will pay an additional $200 for the permits.

Money raised by the auction and the issuance of the eight special permits will go to a DFG fund for bighorn sheep research.

California is the latest of several western states to employ auctions in bighorn sheep hunting. In Montana, a bighorn permit sold for $109,000 a few years ago, Weaver said. Other states using the auction plan are Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming.

Speaking of bighorns, old Spot is gone, but certainly not forgotten.

Spot, also known as Scarface because of a badly scarred nose, a one-eyed bighorn in the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon, died sometime last fall of natural causes. A backpacker found the ram’s carcass last October and turned it over to Vic Coggins, biologist with the Oregon State Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Measurement of the ram’s horns indicate that he was the largest ram ever recorded in the continental United States, and one of the oldest at 14 1/2. Biologists say there is no record of a wild mountain ram living beyond 15.

Elvin Hawkins of the Oregon Hunters Assn. and an official Boone and Crocket Club measurer, scored the ram’s horns at 202 7/8 points in the club’s measuring system, the highest ever recorded. The previous U.S. record for a bighorn ram, 200 points, dated back to 1883 for an animal killed during a hunt in Wyoming.

Spot was well known to sheep experts. Photographers filmed him when he came down to the low country in the winter and hunters stalked him, unsuccessfully, in the high country.

Arthur Dubs, an avid sheep hunter from Medford, Ore., is donating money to the DFW for a life-size mount of Spot.

Briefly Thousands of steelhead and other fish were killed in San Mateo County recently when a high school swimming pool was cleaned and the chlorinated water was dumped into a storm drain that emptied into San Pedro Creek. Criminal charges are pending. . . . The DFG warns hikers and backpackers that fawns, apparently abandoned, are not and should be left alone by humans. People taking fawns out of the wild face a possible $500 fine. . . . The Bass Anglers Sportsman Society will hold a one-day competition among its 1,600 chapters to determine which can collect the most trash from fishing sites during National Fishing Week June 1-7. The chapters are encouraged to conduct their fight against litter on June 7, National Lake Clean-up Day. . . . Operation Bass, Inc., will conduct a $50,000 bass fishing tournament on the Wahiawa Reservoir (Lake Wilson) at Oahu, Hawaii next January. It will be the first such tournament outside the continental United States.