Remember our report this past August on hunting Armenia for mouflon and bezoar ibex? (See Article ID 2304.) It was by subscriber J.Y. Jones, who is also an accomplished hunting author and occasional contributor to The Hunting Report. Jones reported on an April hunt, when, he says, the mouflon hunting was very difficult. In seven days of climbing mountain- sides and ridges up to 13,000 feet in elevation, he never saw a single ram. He planned to return later in the year when the rams are reportedly more visible. Well, he did just that this past October, flying into Armenia through Moscow after hunting in Mongolia. Due to a delay in getting his luggage from Aeroflot, he says he donated some time at the local eye hospital (Jones is an eye surgeon) performing eye surgeries for them until his bags arrived. While he was in surgery, he says hunt organizer Vardges Matevosyan, who is also a provincial governor, had the guides out scouting for him. In the middle of conducting surgery, Jones said they told him the guides had located a band of 30 rams.
He writes, "I finished the operation, and we hurried an hour and a half southward to the location, where I broke out my rifle, put on my boots and went hunting in the clothes I had been wearing since leaving Ulaanbaatar after my hunt in Mongolia. We found the rams bedded on a cliff, and I took mine with a single shot at 240 yards. It was almost anticlimactic.
"Matevosyan himself was my guide; the assistant who found the rams was named Ariek. The ram I shot was mediocre compared to the giants from Iran listed in the SCI Record Book of Trophy Animals, but it is probably the only one listed from Armenia. The longest horn measured just over 26 inches, and the SCI raw score was 112 4/8. (The minimum is 110.) It should be the first Armenian mouflon listed by an American since the 1970s. I assisted with trophy preparation, because there isn't a high level of experience here in doing full........(continued)
