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Lottery Ticket Time

Getting my limit of chukar for the day

By Rob Breeding

There’s a joke shared among bird hunters that goes something like this.

Hunter No. 1: I heard you killed your first chukar the other day. Whad’ya do with it?

Hunter No. 2: Had it mounted.

Chukar hunters get the joke. These birds have a nasty reputation as the toughest upland game bird in North America. Many a pair of hiking boot has been shredded in the rugged terrain chukar prefer. That first bird is such an accomplishment it becomes a trophy worth mounting for some.

I’d hunted chukar a few times in the California desert and in the Arizona drainages that empty into the Grand Canyon. There are birds on both the North and South rims, but not many, and they live in remote canyons where hunters can walk for weeks without seeing a bird.

I finally killed my first chukar about a decade ago, in Idaho. My old bird dog Jack pointed a small covey on the side of a steep hill. I knocked one down, and as Jack was prone to do at that time, he raced over and pointed dead until I picked the dang thing up.

That chukar didn’t wind up at the taxidermist, however. I sautéed it in a hot skillet, and while it finished in the oven I made a quick pan sauce with bourbon and sweet vermouth — yeah, like a Manhattan — and drizzled it over the bird when it was cooked through.

I killed a few more after that, but in Idaho there were other birds to chase, more hospitable birds that lived on flat ground. Later, when I moved to the Flathead, chukar got tucked away somewhere in the recesses of my gamebird-obsessed brain.

Kalispell is a long way from chukar country.

But I moved again, this time to Wyoming. Shortly after my arrival, I attended a lecture by a local bird photographer. It was mostly eagles and waterfowl and cranes, but then he came to a couple of slides from the hills near town. In the photos of the dry, barren slopes were my old friend: chukar.

“Chukar are the national bird of Pakistan,” the photographer proclaimed. “You can see from these photos that Wyoming looks a lot like Pakistan.”

The three keys for chukar — water, sage and rimrock — are in abundance in the hills. Well, the water is actually down in the irrigated valley, but the sheltered draws of the hills are thick with sage. Sage means cover from weather, cover from predators, and an understory of forage.

Rimrock means escape. That’s where the birds go when threatened. It’s the power of those uphill runs that makes these birds so tough to hunt.

I had a good day last week. With a couple hours free after work, Doll and I headed for the Bench to see if we could scare up a covey or two. The ground was moist from recent rains and that meant conditions would be good for the dog’s nose. You could almost feel the ground breathing in scent, as if it was respirating.

Doll found chukar. Three quick points led to four birds. The fifth came a short while later. The dog got on ground scent and led me on a zig-zagged path 100 yards straight uphill.

English setters usually work air scent, but it’s always a thrill when Doll gets her nose on the ground, tracking a bird. As the hill crested out, I barely noticed I was huffing from the climb, but when your dog is so hot on scent that she resembles the Tasmanian Devil, you sometimes overlook minor details, such as your lungs preparing to detonate.

The bird got up wild while Doll still had her nose buried in cover. I knocked it down and we were statutorily required to stop hunting.

Five is the limit in these parts. We stopped to buy a lottery ticket on the way home.