From The Vancouver Sun newspaper in Vancouver BC.
U.S. man bags B.C. sheep for $250,000. Auction marks largest amount ever paid to hunt big-game animal here
An Ohio trophy hunter paid $172,000 US for an exclusive sheep hunt auctioned off by the B.C. environment ministry. The bid by Bernie Fiedeldey, 60, the owner of a steel-fabricating business in Cincinnati, amounts to about $250,000 in Canadian funds and is the highest amount a hunter has ever paid to kill a big-game animal in B.C
After a 15-per-cent deduction for the foundation's overhead, 75 per cent of the proceeds go to improving sheep habitat in B.C. and 25 per cent to other wildlife programs.
"That's an expensive piece of mutton," Fiedeldey quipped in a phone interview. "[But] it's not about that. It's about the opportunity and where the money is going. Taking one sheep is not going to hurt anything for the benefit that it gets. Show me one of anything that can generate those kind of dollars."
After a dozen years of lobbying by hunters, the province put up the mountain sheep permit for auction last January at the annual convention of the 7,000-member Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, in Reno, Nev.
The permit allows the successful bidder to kill a trophy ram anywhere in B.C. three weeks after the close of the regular hunting season.
Doug Dryden, a big-game hunter and chief of wildlife for the B.C. environment ministry, said in Victoria he is pleased with the auction and expects the ministry to put up another sheep permit at the foundation's 2001 auction. But he is not about to expand the program to other species. "That's not in the cards right now."
Exactly how the proceeds will be spent will be determined over the next couple of months through the province's Habitat Conservation Trust Fund.
Vicky Husband, conservation chair of the Sierra Club of B.C., said she "can't really knock" the sheep permit since it's going to a good cause, but would prefer the province improve funding for habitat protection itself while limiting the harassment of wild sheep from helicopters involved in ecotourism.
"I have mixed feelings," she said of the auction. "I see the level of desperation, that this is what we have to go to."
Fiedeldey chose to hunt with guide-outfitter Robert Fontana of Elk Valley Bighorn Outfitters near Fernie in southeastern B.C. "I hunted with him before, we get along well," Fiedeldey said. "For me, the most important thing on a hunting trip is that I have a good time. If we get an animal, that's a big bonus."
Fiedeldey flew to Kalispell, Mont., where Fontana picked him up and drove to a base camp in the mountains. From there, Fiedeldey, Fontana and four hunting guides ventured daily into the high country on horseback in 15 centimetres of snow and temperatures of minus-15 degrees Celsius. On his fourth day of hunting, on Nov. 9, Fiedeldey shot a 13-year-old ram from 200 metres with his custom-built, 270-calibre Weatherby magnum. "We were looking for something special, and I finally found one, a true trophy."
The ram measured in at 191 1/8th points -- a scoring system based on length and girth of the horns -- not a record, but well above the 180 points required to get into the Boone and Crockett trophy-hunting record books. "He had no fat on him. Would he have made the winter? Maybe. At 13, he didn't have too many years left."
Fiedeldey figures it was worth the $172,000 bidding price. "It went very well, absolutely wonderful," he said, adding: "If it wasn't for these tags, especially in the U.S., our sheep program would not be where it's at today." Fiedeldey noted that he paid $70,000 US to hunt a sheep in Texas in 1994. Money from that auction was used to relocate 19 sheep from Nevada to create a new herd. The population is now more than 30 sheep and growing.
"Those are my sheep," he said. "That's how I look at it."
Fiedeldey is no stranger to hunting or to B.C. He bought his first shotgun at age 12 with savings from his paper route. As his interest grew over the years, he devoted more attention to sheep, considered one of the purest hunts because it takes place in wild high country. Of the 15 trophy sheep he has killed, seven were taken in B.C., which he calls the finest hunting territory in North America because of its diversity of big-game species, including three of the four types of sheep -- the bighorn, as well as the Dall and Stone sheep. Only desert sheep do not live here.
"You have to put it right at the top, as good as it gets," he said of B.C., noting white-tailed deer and wild turkeys are about all Ohio has to offer. "Something you take for granted is something real special for me."
Non-resident trophy hunters, mostly Americans, shot almost 4,000 big-game animals in B.C. in 1999, of which five per cent, or 218 animals, were wild sheep.