My dog’s a little rusty, but that’s to be expected. It has been eight months since we last hunted.
We haven’t hunted just yet this fall either. Chukar season doesn’t open in these parts until Oct. 1. We’ve done a little scouting in some hills in Montana where the season opened Sept. 1, in country a BLM biologist suggested might be full of birds, but I haven’t found any coveys yet.
I did find a badger. While I was out on a ridgeline looking for bird-holding country, I saw it sauntering through some nearby sage, sauntering until he sensed he was being watched. Then he whirled in my direction, stared at my motionless form for a moment or two, then ran off.
I decided to find a better spot to run the dog. Badgers and pooches — there isn’t much good that can come from that combination.
The dog eventually got out of the truck with a chance to run a bit in those hills south of Belfry in Carbon County, the only Treasure State county with huntable populations of wild chukar. It was still a little too hot for serious bird chasing, and I’m not convinced there are many birds there. I didn’t see much of the habitat that holds birds south of the border in Wyoming where I live.
Doll and I hunt the slopes of hills near home, but we don’t find birds everywhere. On the driest south-facing slopes, where the cover is thin, we usually don’t find birds. Chukar seem to prefer more sheltered draws where the soil favors sagebrush, and it grows at least waist high.
We recently visited a spot where we’ve killed birds before, quite a few times actually. It’s a north-facing draw and the benches hold the right amount of moisture for sage, as the stuff grows over my head.
We usually don’t find coveys in that tall stuff. I’m not sure why but I suspect there isn’t the right understory of food-producing plants. There’s not a lot of cheatgrass in the shade of that tall stuff.
Instead, we find the birds in lower-growing sage that is immediately adjacent to the bigger stuff. The lower plants seem to have plenty of cheatgrass growing around it, and chukar love to eat cheatgrass awns. The big sage is usually where they land after we’ve moved a covey.
Doll found birds, a covey of eight or nine, but she didn’t point as the wind was howling and she never got scent. I should say she never got a hard scent, as she was working the country in a generally birdy way. There was plenty of old scent, but she bumped the covey, running over the top of them without having ever made their location.
This happens in wind, and sometimes even when scenting conditions are just right. The dog can’t always approach every covey from the perfect downwind approach.
Doll responded appropriately when three or four birds flushed. She froze, then looked at me with an expression that seemed intended to say, “I’m sorry.”
I released her, and as she went back on the hunt, she then flushed another pair of birds, which were about 10 feet downwind. She again stopped and gave me that look, but there wasn’t anything to be done.
We eventually put the whole covey up, and in each case the wind foiled Doll. I assured her that it was fine, that we were both a little rusty and we had time before the opener to get our act together.
We’ve got a couple weeks to go before the season starts. I’m getting ready. I pulled the final two chukar from last season out of the freezer the other day, making chilaquiles and balancing my game bird account.
Soon the season will begin and I’ll be awash in the smell of sage. That’s the point of fall.