Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Full curl sheep

Holy chitt.....NO question about those!!!.

This thread has been even more helpfull than i had hoped and thanks to Sitka for balanceing views with science.

In Alberta,sheep must be 4/5 curl or full curl depending on the particular unit you are hunting in.If you aren't sure,don't shoot,because people have been charged when a ram was less than 1/4" short.

Couple of bighorn shots I took last year, outside a park but in an area with no sheep season, though deer and elk seasons were open when I took the photo. You can count the annual rings on this ram (and see how hard that is to do accurately on some animals!)



In the photo below, an older ram has laid his horns on the ground to sleep, taking the weight off his neck. My wife felt sorry for him and would not let me wake him. When he did lift his head, he looked old and worn down with life, a little scruffy. The ram with his head up beside him is almost exactly full curl as defined by horn tip reaching the bridge of the nose. He has a longer tip just showing above his nose on the off side. If he straightens his head to a true side view, that will drop the horn on the off side and raise the one on the near side slightly. He is so close to full curl that I'd not put money on it either way, but I think that he is short a quarter inch or so.

A superb sheep guide, now passed on, told me how to accurately judge curl length in the field. He held up his first and second fingers curved like the bases of a ram's horns, and turned them till the knuckles were lined up. He said to watch the offside horn and when it exactly lines up with the near one just above the bases, at that moment the ram's head is 90 degrees from you. Where his horn tips are when his head is in that position relative to your eye is an accurate measure of curl length.

That's true if the ram is level with the observer. If the ram is above the observer, the tips will look longer, and if the ram is below, they will look shorter, as Art dramatically showed us once with photos of the same ram taken from high and low angles.

For the northern sheep, that might be. But not for desert sheep. That's because the harvest of even the older rams is very restricted. As a rule, it only allows 1-2% of the total herd to be harvested. Or about 1/3 of the 7-8 yr. old sheep.
That actually helps the youngest sheep to survive a bit better. E.

Okanagan
I looked for those photos to post again... Spent more time than it would have taken to redo them, and still didn't find them...

The fellow bragging about his "Clearly beyond full" 7/8 curl ram that happened to be 8... while he bragged about the 200+ yard shot... and then claimed he counted rings...
art

Some states have different curl minimums (Colorado is 1/2 curl).
In Alaska and British Columbia, full curl and/or age minimums may be private outfitter or government imposed, depending on area and/or outfitter.

When I took this full curl+ Stone ram in 1997, the outfitter's area was encouraged to take 8+ year old rams to keep their yearly quota of permits.

Yep, that was the thread. Brings back memories... !!! What a train wreck that was!

One more point on Alaska...almost all areas now require that horns be sealed...so you have to go to F&G no matter what. You either get your seal/plug on your legal sheep or a trip to the Troopers.

waterrat...holy crap!

Here's one past full, but tight, so not especially big.

JRaw
That is a perfect example of the angle enhancing the curl and it may not be full. Look through a round hole, like the center of a CD, and place the perfect round against the outside of your horns.

The circle is squashed fore and aft and is slightly below the axis of the center of the hole.

Next look at the "kink" in the curve, especially near the tip. that flare looks like it is rearward curl, but it is not.

The lack of anything resembling normal drop is the next clue. Those horns were shot from far enough in front and below the right side horn shows completely inside the curl and at the neck... Using a fairly wide lens up close allows the angle to work.

My money would be on that sheep NOT making full. Using the same angle trick I photographed a 3/4 curl Nabesna ram and made it look a full curl and a quarter.

Looking at the horn color, shape and size makes me guess that is also a Nabesna sheep.
art

Art, no attempt at camera tricks, just an effort to get a "the tip of which has grown through 360 degrees of a circle described by the outer surface of the horn, as viewed from the side" photo in the field as it was getting dark and the rain was starting to fall. Might not have gotten the perfect circle but it's pretty close, certainly not the full-blown, fore-aft ellipsis you often see in photos, just a wee-bit north-south elongated. Drop doesn't look great because it's not - not a big sheep.

Here's your fore-aft elongation, at the bottom of the page: AKF&G

Fish and Game said full when they plugged it, didn't even hesitate. So has everyone else that's seen it. Right side looks the same.

I agree on the flare making it seem like a kink, and that the sharp turn rearward is odd, but under the regs (360 degrees of a circle when viewed from the side) kink counts ... usually I'd defer to your expertise but as you are certainly aware there's a number of ways to judge full curl. Tony Russ has his "angle of degrees" [my name for his technique] method, some use the stick in front [lots of folks don't like this one], some just look for the tip to contact the base when viewing a circle from the side. Not that I'm agreeing or disagreeing with any of those methods, certainly don't want to start a full-curl war, there's enough of that on the other forum!

Again, I'm not putting it out there as big, old, huge, trophy or anything other than full. Gotta go make some burgers now!

Art, by no means is any offense intended...just including details for the masses; you may have seen the fracas a few months ago on the other forum when someone posted pics of their sheep before having it sealed...a really big oops!

OK.
What would happen to the shooter if he thought he had shot a full curl or one that just made minimum requirement and he gets it plugged and it turns out its a 1/2inch short or so?

It seems that with the restrictions on length it can/could get alittle tight (around the but hole) if you get to the sheep and its not what you thought? and has anybody had first hand experiance of this very situation?

Mr. UKdave;
Again, I'll give the BC perspective, as it's all I've experience with.

They place the caped head of the sheep into a jig which measures the amount of curl. If it makes it, the biologist will then plug it. If it doesn�t make the minimum requirement, it will not be plugged and we�re back to my first answer.

As an interesting side note, I was told when I took my one and only ram in to get inspected that they send the horn material taken from the drill bit into a provincial lab to get analyzed. It tells them the condition of the ram as well as verifying where it was shot, as they have a database of what minerals should appear in the horns of rams from different areas.

It prevents me from shooting a local ram where we have only LEH now and claiming I shot it 5 hours north where they have a general open season. I thought that was kind of cool anyway.

Hopefully that answered a bit of your query. All the best on your upcoming hunts.

Regards,
Dwayne

So what your saying is that should it come up short, even by 1/2" your in for a hard time?

UKdave;
Yes, that's pretty much it.

One tends to do a lot of looking before shooting and tries to err on the long side of things.

The sheep I mentioned was past � curl by 35mm, which was considered lots to spare by the biologist that measured and plugged it.

Dwayne

While Trooper reports and witnessing carries weight, it is the DA who determines what you are charged with and how vigoriously he wants to press it, the jury (if any) who determines guilt, and the judge who determines the penalty.

F&G and Troopers will tell you you are better off fessing up and being co0pertive, than not.

Not having seen any study on it, i can't say...

The year I made an honest (tho uninformed) mistake and shot a sublegal bull (the second year of the antler restrictions down here) I lost the antlers, which I didn't care about, and kept the meat. The antlers were then used in a display for hunter education as an "almost but not quite" example of what to let walk.

The third year the honeymoon phase was over, and I'd have at least lost the meat as well, and likely been fined, but by then I was much better educated on antler configuration - in fact, the Protection Officer at the game-check station where I brought the moose through in mid-day, spent about 15 minutes going over this stuff, point by point, including some tips not found in the regulations book.

We had a young Texan who outfitted for Stone Sheep a few years back. He lost his hunting area after showing up at the game department with a short full curl ram. It was his 4th.
I hear some people are able to crank a ram up a bit by soaking the horns in water and sinching them up tight to dry. May just be an urban myth but I believe this is some truth to it.

If your 1/2" short you might as well be 10"s short as it makes no difference up here. While I was sealing my ram at the Anchorage F&G office, I got to talking with the trooper who was there at the time and he confessed to me that this year had the highest number of sub-legal rams since the inception of the sealing requirement. They have a few different methods of checking a ram for full curl but the one I found the strangest was the "tube" method where the person checking the ram looks through a piece of pvs pipe to see if the horn maes a complete circle. I did this prior to getting mine sealed and from what I could tell, it did not follow along the insided edges of the tube BUT, when viewed from the side it was a full curl. With that being said, the trooper checking my ram did the "tube" inspection and after a minute or so, determined it to be full curl. He had also said it was a full curl before he did the "tube" inspection, so either way it was good.

As for the full curl regulation, I have to side with Art on this one, 7/8 curl would be a much better rule to go by, then we don't have so many full curl rams taken out of the herds and those that are hunting them and see that they are "close" to full curl don't have to worry that maybe it's a 1/2" short from full curl. This was my first ram to be sealed and I have to say that I don't care for them drilling holes in my sheep horns but I guess if it's neccessary for sheep management, then I can live with it.

It is not needed for management... It is "needed" for enforcement...