I found chukar the otherday. It was a minor triumph. I’ve been looking for them for two months.
New places require exploration, and I’ve been in a new place since August when I moved to Wyoming to accept a teaching job at a small college. But relocation requires research, and by that I mean making sure fishing and hunting opportunities are good, and in close proximity to the job. After those prerequisites are covered, I move on to secondary details such as salary and working conditions.
Once in a new place I usually ask around a bit at the local sporting good emporiums, or with local hook and bullet clubs to get some direction. These inquiries have often led to invites from nice folk who have no reservations about sharing some of their hunting spots with a newbie (though probably not their favorites).
I’ve been fortunate as I’ve wandered the West. Many of the places I love to hunt were not a discovery on my part, but a reveal from someone else.
I say my part, but the dogs really deserve most of the “discovery” credit. I moved to Pocatello, Idaho just shy of a decade ago, when my setter Jack was just a pup.
We started pursuing birds in the hillsides right outside of town. I killed my first chukar in a canyon that was no more than 15 minutes from downtown Pokey. It was the kind of place I could hit after work and be home in time to cook the birds for supper.
But our biggest find came about an hour south of town, in a remote valley near the Utah border. That’s where Jack and I hit the jackpot on Columbian sharptail. It was on those birds that that dog really taught himself how to be a bird dog.
Columbians, by the way, are the sharptail subspecies that was native to the Flathead Valley and the country west and south of the lake. It’s a dream of some Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologists to someday restore a self-sustaining population somewhere in the region. Wild Horse Island would make a great spot. It’s not OK that a rather significant piece of the native fauna of a place as magnificent as the Flathead has been extirpated. We should fix that.
But I digress. Back to killing Columbian sharpies in Idaho, where they remain plentiful. Jack and I were working a hillside in the Curlew National Grassland. We were new to the spot and had put up just a lone bird, and now he was heading up hill in a direction I really didn’t want to follow, but did. Then Jack went on point. It turned out there was a covey of more than 30 birds out in the open away from the sage. Exposed like that the birds flushed wild and Jack, all of 2 years old at the time, broke out in a full sprint chasing the bird on the wing. He went after those birds so hard he didn’t even notice the second covey, this one numbering more than 40, even as he ran right through the midst of those birds as they exploded like popcorn at his feet.
It took me something like a half hour to settle him down after that. But eventually we went to work tracking down stragglers from the broken up coveys. And we went back to that spot for years afterward. I hope to get a chance to hunt those birds with Jack at least one more time.
Those southern Idaho sharpies were special birds for a lot of reasons, but mostly because they were birds the dog and I figured out on our own. Some nice person didn’t guide us there. We found them on our own.
Now we’ve got a new place filled with chukar. Only this time there’s another dog along for the ride. Doll’s about the same age Jack was when he ran through those sharpies in Idaho. I’m hoping this one works out just as nice for the new pup.