Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Pictures from Allen Day's Zimbabwe Trip

Posted for Allenday:













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Oregon45, thanks for posting these photos for me!

I'm headed out the door this morning for church, but I just want to say one thing about these pics for the time being:

The Cape buffalo are both from Tanzania, not Zimbabwe, but I included them anyway because I know a lot of guys are greatly interested in buffalo hunting.

The rifle photo is of my Echols-built 338, and it's a very poor photo, but it's the only one I had downloaded on the computer. It's the same rifle I used on my Zimbabwe safari last year, and it's likely my favorite all-around hunting rifle.

I'll add more to this thread a bit later..........

AD

AD,

Those are sure nice critters and that color combo on the Echols rifle looks great! Brown stock, matte bluing and red pad - very nice!

MtnHtr

Thanks for posting the pics, that second Buff is one ugly SOB. Nice waterbuck.

...Man, somebody got alot of fine meat there! Not to speak of the great heads for the hunter's den..Great hunt Allen..Good shooting.

Thanks Oregon and Allen. Very nice. That second buff, did he take one between the head lights?

Gdv

Nice Impala and a real nice tuft of red hair on the old Eland. I liken the red hair on an old Eland like the hair that grows out of the ears of an old man.

I'm not slighting any of the other animals, you always seem to knock down the good ones. Those two just stuck out to me.

Really nice nyala. They are just so beautiful. Was the nyala from this past fall's trip?

JPK

JPK, yes, that nyala was taken last year out of Roger's Humani camp on the very first morning of the safari, as well as the bushpig. I took 18 animals at Humani last year, but as far as I'm concerned, the nyala, bushpig, bushbuck, eland, kudu, and wildebeest were the top trophies.

The impala was the best of several that I took, but it still wasn't exceptional. I felt as though good warthog and good impala were somewhat in short supply at Humani. The very best southern impala that I've ever taken was with Gerry Kelly in RSA, but the very best impala in all of Africa come from east Africa, and as such the biggest I've taken have all come from Tanzania.

That second buffalo came from Tanzania's Mlele North GTA, right by Katavi National Park. There were uncountable thousands of buffalo there, and I took three superb trophy bulls in Mlele, plus traded some 458 cartridges and half of a buffalo carcass to the head Tanzanian game officer for that area in order to secure a 4th buffalo for bait, which in more ways than one proved to be a good trade. The three trophy bulls I took in Mlele went 42", 44", and 42".

The 2nd bull was taken at the end of a very long day of buffalo hunting, and I shot him at just 20 feet away with a reworked Model 70 Super Express 458 Win. Mag. firing 500 gr. Trophy Bonded 'Sledgehammer Solids' at just under 2100 fps. MV.. I ended up shooting him three times (my PH did not fire), the last shot being right in his face as he raised his head in an effort to get up, and I fired all three shots within about 10 seconds. All three bullets went clear through him, and one of the trackers actually found one of the bullets in the ground, right behind the bull, where it exited, and I have it in my collection of recovered hunting bullets.

That was one very tough old buffalo, and he took some killing. He coughed out a lot of blood, struggled and fought to get up, and he simply wasn't willing to stay down without giving it everything he had. The 458 Win. Mag. was certainly sufficient...........

AD

Thanks for the pictures. It is another 12 days before season opens & I can shoot something.

great pictures....nasty old buff with a nosebleed is priceless....reminds me of Ruarks's description that they look at you like you owe them money

Allen (and Oregon45), thanks for reposting these fine photos. Excellent stuff. I thoroughly enjoyed them.

Allen, I particularly like the shot of you standing over that big buffalo bull, with your rifle on your shoulder. Great photo.

I gather from that photo, and most of the others (with your Echols .338), that you have forsaken iron sights on your more recent custom African rifles. That does fly in the face of the conventional thinking that African rifles should have irons as backup. What's your thoughts on that time-worn notion?

The first buffalo was an old bachelor, "dugga-boy" bull, and he was taken in the K-4 block of the Selous Game Reserve, and that particular buffalo hunt is featured in Mark Sullivan's DVD, 'Death Rush'. Mark told me that he was saving a particular old buffalo for me that was seen on occasion, early in the morning, about a mile from our main camp. The way Mark told me about that buffalo, with a twinkle in his eye, I thought he was just kidding me about the whole thing. If you knew my friend Mark S. for as long as I have, you'd see why I sort of laughed that one off - at least to begin with!

Then one morning after breakfast I was in my tent, getting ready for the day's hunt, and Mark's videotographer came and told me that the buffalo Mark had told me about was out feeding in the same area where he had often been seen. So rather than ask questions, I simply grabbed by rifle, ammo belt, binos, and went out to get things underway. I stood up on the seat of the Landcruiser for a look, and sure enough, the buffalo was there, alright! Rather than take the Landcruiser, we hiked right out of camp, following a dry stream bed, to within 40 yards of that buffalo. When the bull finally looked up and spotted us, he decided to make a run for it, so I shot him and down he went on the spot, pure and simple. No muss, no fuss!

The rifle is a custom Model 70 416 Rem. Mag. with Leupold VX-III 1.5-5x on top, also built by Echols, and the load I used on that buffalo was built around the 370 gr. North Fork soft point at 2470 fps. MV. It shoots the North Fork 370 gr. Flat-Point solid and 370 gr. Cup-Point solid to exactly the same POI, and all with astounding accuracy, plus mild pressures, and these loads feed like a dream.

Actually, I didn't order that rifle myself. It was originally built for a very good friend of mine who took delivery on it, but realized that he would never be able to hunt with it due to poor health, so he was kind enough to sell it to me at an extremely fair price a few years ago. It's not only one of the best rifle buys I've ever made, but one of my favorite and best hunting rifles of all time. I'll never sell it, and I'm taking it to Zambia next year for buffalo, hippo, and whatever else I decide to shoot with it. Reliability, accuracy, shootability, and sufficient punch are what that 416 is all about.

I suppose I would have tried to talk D'Arcy into building it with open sights and detachable mounts if I would have ordered it myself (as I did a 375 H&H he built for me), but after using it in Alaska as well as Africa with just the scope in Echols', bomb-proof, fixed scopemounts, I have to say that I'm happy with it just the way it is. There's no shadowing from open sights in the scope's field-of-view, no questions about the solidarity of the scopemounts, no complication, no headaches - just a bright, flat, fast-to-acquire sight picture that works for every situation I've yet been in with that rifle.

The more I hunt, the more I realize the importance of keeping things straight, to the point, and SIMPLE...........

AD

thanks for taking the time to post the pictures and stories....great stuff! Nice to see those model 70's at work.

I haven't had time to elaborate on the 5th photo down, but there's a real story behind it:

The older gentleman on the right is PH William Finaughty III, who was my PH for much of last year's Zimbabwe safari, and he's now 73 years old. William's grandfather was THE William Finaughty, who wrote the classic African hunting book, 'The recollections of William Finaughty, Elephant Hunter, 1864-1875', which is a true must-read book about the early days of the African frontier.

William's stories about his many years as a PH, as well as about his is involvement in the Rhodesian War, the African bush, African lore, as well as his poisonous snake stories filled our days, and William is beyond question the greatest true gentleman that I've hunted with in Africa. He's one of the last living bridges between the Africa of old, and today's Africa, and his like will not be seen again. I was certainly privilaged to hunt with him.

One morning we were tooling down a dusty Humani backroad in the Landcruiser, and I spotted a snake just ahead of us. The driver didn't see the snake, and by the time I mentioned it lying in the road ahead of us, we had run it over. It proved to be a big puff adder, and as soon as the driver stopped, William jumped out of the rig, grabbed a heavy stick, and beat it over the head a few times. Then William grabbed the puff adder and threw it into the back of the Landcruiser. Even an hour later, I'd look back and watch it twist and turn in the contortions of reptile death. This wasn't exactly unnerving, but it DID capture my attention!

AD

Very cool. Thanks for re-posting the pictures...

ad

It's been interesting to see your hunting trips posted over time and am just wondering about one thing, how much room do you have for all those trophies?

The truth is, I'm running out of room fast, and I'm way behind on getting trophies finished as complete mounts, so I have a lot of capes, skulls, horns, etc. in storage. I put the hunting ahead of the taxidermy, always, but I still get mounts done, and they trickle in at a slow but steady pace. This week, I just received a finished Cape buffalo skull mount, plus another zebra rug and a hartebeest skull mount.

My wife and I are in the habit of giving zebra rugs as gifts to non-hunting friends and business associates, and that zebra rug that I just received will be presented at Christmas to some very good friends of ours. This practice furnishes sufficient excuse to shoot as many zebras as are allowed on license, and I love to hunt them anyway!

We're also converting a large room in our house into another trophy room, and I plan to work on that project this winter. At some point, I'll quit putting up trophy mounts altogether.

In many ways, photos make the best trophies, and I've got a lot of those up, and I have a local frame shop that sends out my photos to a special company that laminates and mounts them on hardwood boards. For hunting pictures, I prefer this to traditional framed and matted photos in every respect.

AD

Allen: That method of mounting the photos is a great idea.

By the way, the photos and animals are fabulous!