I like to go to Arizona in the winter as this is a terrible time to hunt up north. The desert in winter — when the sun casts long shadows even at midday making the landscape seem lush rather than hard and foreboding as it does in the summer — is a bird hunter’s heaven.
It’s a homecoming for my older setter, Jack, a native Arizonan. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the old boy on this trip. He’s now 10 and his best hunting years are probably behind him. He’s recently looked less like a bird dog and more a piece of furniture the way he curls up on his bed and lies motionless for hours.
But the desert agrees with Jack. He took to that country like time had erased the last five years. We didn’t find birds at our first spot, searching for scaled quail, but Jack still covered the country in wide casts. With his nose taking it all in we were certain we hadn’t walked past any coveys.
The scalies were a bust, but we did find a few Gambel’s quail. Gambel’s are the ubiquitous quail most folks associate with Arizona. The top-knotted birds adorn the state’s Game and Fish Department logo, and are often seen by non-hunters on the fringes of desert subdivisions or golf courses. My daughters still talk about the Gambel’s family we saw in the parking lot of a shopping center in the Village of Oak Creek more than a decade ago. Mom and dad were herding a dozen freshly hatched chicks off the asphalt into some adjoining shrubbery.
The chicks, yellow, fuzz-covered ping-pong balls, tried in vain to climb up the curb, but kept bouncing back to the parking lot.
Finally, the adults found an easier path and the fuzz balls were gone.
Gambel’s are desert quail, but scalies and Mearns’ are birds of grass. Scalies prefer the open grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert, while Mearns’ live in the oak woodlands along the Mexico border. After we failed on scaled quail we moved south for a day in Mearns’ country. The hunting was tough, but we did find birds.
Then we moved to a place near Sedona that, due to its proximity to my old home in Flagstaff, is probably my all-time favorite Gambel’s spot. It’s on the fringes of the bird’s range, being a little too high and too cool to be ideal, but Jack and I always find quail there.
We hunted on a tough day. A storm had left snow inches deep in the shade of the prickly pear, and a hard wind blew out of the east. I heard a male Gambel’s calling from a ridgeline (the distinctive “a-ha-ha, a-ha-ha” soundtrack of many a western) and we followed. As we worked the ridgeline, Jack kept moving downhill, into the wind, into scent. His movements echoed those of the birds, movements that now existed only in the molecules suspended in the ether.
The wind did the old dog no favors, carrying scent off before Jack could determine the birds’ escape route. Each time Jack peeled off into the wind he’d catwalk, stalking slowly with his body close to the ground. But each time, maybe a half dozen in all, he eventually relaxed and put his nose back up in the air, his path no longer an echo of birds but random, searching casts that told me he’d lost ’em.
Jack’s struggle was understandable. Strong wind scrubs the ground of scent like a Brillo pad. He couldn’t tell the birds were probably running out ahead, then peeling off to the left or right to get behind us. That’s an old Gambel’s trick.
But then, as we looped back to the truck to call it a day, Jack went on point. I stepped in, flushing a covey. I shot wild, missing, but we followed the singles and managed a few birds, descendants of the Gambel’s Jack and I have been hunting together since he was old enough to hunt.
We left many more behind. That’s good. The way my old boy hunted it looks like he’s planning on coming back next winter.