I grew up in North Dakota, lived in Colorado for five years, and moved to New Mexico in 1992. I have always been an avid hunter and first started hunting with my father when I was just a kid. My father and I hunted waterfowl, upland game, and whitetails. We were not trophy hunters. There were so few bucks in the 1970s in North Dakota that if you saw any buck during the deer season you’d better shoot it because you may not get a second chance.
When I moved to New Mexico, I was amazed that we had free- ranging African animals that were in our state and we could actually hunt them. As a resident, I have been fortunate enough to draw several tags for gemsbok, which are commonly called oryx. My daughter, Madison, drew a youth tag for a White Sands Missile Range hunt when she was 14 years old. WSMR is the best oryx hunt in the state. We have also been fortunate enough to fill all of our tags.
Since moving to the southwest, I have had the good fortune to harvest a mountain goat, a bighorn sheep, a really nice bear, and a moose in Colorado, plus a mountain goat in Utah. I killed a Pope and Young Coues deer in Arizona as well as a Pope and Young elk in the Gila in New Mexico. I’ve also had a lot of fun along the way and hunted with some great friends.
In 2019, I drew a McGregor Range oryx tag for December 21st and 22nd. This was the third time I had drawn a McGregor Range oryx tag, beating pretty tough draw odds. Even as a resident, my odds of drawing were less than 4%. On this hunt, I would be hunting with my friend, Ross Morgan. The challenge of these on-range hunts is that they are only three days long. The good animal that you passed up on day, one hoping for a bigger animal, can easily become your first choice on day two. With 50 oryx hunters and a deer hunt with another 50 hunters going on at the same time, the animals can get pretty stirred up very quickly.
The other oryx hunting option is to apply for an off-range tag, and those seasons run for a full month. You have an entire month to hunt but with fewer animals spread out over a lot of country. It’s a much tougher hunt, and the success rates are always lower.
The day before the hunt, we scouted for a couple hours in an area that I had previously hunted. While scouting, we saw a fair number of animals, which included a couple 36" cows and a couple 34-35" bulls that we both considered shooters for the next day. That was until we got a tip from the local game warden. Sgt. Kline gave us some information on what he considered to be a 40"+ cow oryx. Cow oryx have longer horns than the bulls, and a 40" cow would be a great animal to harvest. He told us which part of McGregor the cow had been spotted in, and we debated back and forth about whether or not we should go after that single animal that neither of us had actually seen.
Ross and I discussed the chance of that oryx being in that area the next day and the fact that we’d be driving in the dark Saturday morning past all the animals we had already determined would be opening day shooters. I said that we should give it a try since this sounded like a real trophy. Although I had seen a couple of 40" oryx, I had never seen one during a hunt. A 40" oryx is very uncommon. Maybe we’d get lucky. We both thought that the chance of finding that same oryx was slim to none. I made the decision to start there the next day.
Saturday morning, we found ourselves on a high spot at first light and started glassing the mesquite and creosote. Ross glassed up a 35" bull with one broken horn at 800 yards. We kept glassing. Within a half hour, we found our bedded cow less than 100 yards from us. After a brief discussion, we agreed that it was the right animal. She was a great big animal and definitely a shooter. While we talked, Ross quickly took some pictures as she lay in her bed. I got a steady rest, and after one shot with my 7mm, down she went.
Neither one of us had a tape measure in our packs, so using a dollar bill, we measured her at over 42"! We knew she was big, and we were both happy with our success. We took our time, and Ross took some nice pictures as the morning sun rose and then we started quartering and packing the animal.
This is where it gets really interesting. We took the animal to the mandatory check station and Carlos Romero, the McGregor Staff Biologist, put a tape measure on her and filled out a harvest report. She measured 43 7/8" and 43 5/8" with 7" bases. Just then, Game Warden Sgt. Jason Kline showed up at the check station. We showed him the head and the measurements. He was more excited than we were. He texted someone and found out that the previous longest oryx horn measurement taken in the state was 43 6/8". A quick search on the New Mexico Game and Fish webpage showed the current New Mexico record oryx at 99" from an animal taken in 2008. My animal was green scoring at 101 4/8" and was now a possible new state record. Shooting the state record oryx was the last thing on my mind when this hunt started. Jason was ecstatic and so were we.
Since it was one of the top animals ever taken in the U.S., it needed a 60-day drying period to get the official SCI score. It was rescored after the drying period and the score held up. It is officially 101 3/8". It is now the #1 oryx taken in New Mexico and one of the top 50 free-ranging oryx ever taken in the world.
Without Jason Kline’s help in passing along information about this oryx, none of this would have happened. He was genuinely just as happy as I was with the harvest of this animal. Truthfully, I was more in shock than anything else. I asked him if this was like shooting a 400" elk. His answer was that it was more like killing a 430" elk. That’s when it really started sinking in for me. It was all very surreal and very humbling. I had just harvested the trophy-of-a-lifetime. This was the largest oryx ever taken in New Mexico since their introduction in 1969.
Like most hunts, this was certainly a team effort with the right circumstances and a bit of luck all coming together at the right time. Thanks to Sgt. Jason Kline of the NM G&F for pointing us in the right direction. Also, a big thank you to my buddy, Ross Morgan, who was able to carve out time during a very busy time in his life to spend time in the field with me. In the end, I think we both agreed it was a pretty special early Christmas present and another great hunt that we’ll never forget.
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