I’ve lost my head over chukar.
That’s a weird thing to admit, but the little bird has won me over. Chukar have most of what I look for in a game bird, with the added advantage of being a heck of a lot closer to my home than the reigning champion of my favorite game bird competition: quail.
Mearns’ and Gambel’s quail especially. Still, Arizona is a heck of a long drive, and I’ve got coveys of chukar close enough to home to hunt after work. I’ve long imagined living where I could walk out the back door with a shotgun and start shooting birds once I was a respectable distance from the house. These chukar are as close as I’ve come to making this fantasy real.
There are many fine game birds in northwestern Montana. How can you not love pheasant? But in the Flathead hunting pheasant pretty much means knowing someone with that mythical farmhouse built on the edge of bird habitat (who hasn’t yet subdivided), or contending with the madhouse down on Ninepipes. I’ve killed birds south of the lake, but on weekends early in the season you’re more likely to find hunters in your sight lines rather than birds.
Huns — birds I love to hunt though I’ve rarely done so with much success — suffer from the same problem: it’s mostly a private land thing west of the divide.
Of course there are plenty of huns and pheasant east of the mountains, but that’s a three- or four-hour drive from the Flathead. That distance makes day hunts a little unrealistic, and certainly not habit forming.
There are grouse out and about. I’ve killed a few of those, though never a ruffed grouse, which is the forest bird I’d really like to target. We used to hunt blue grouse on the San Francisco Peaks outside of Flagstaff, Ariz. They were called blues then, though the species has been carved in two in the years since. I don’t know if those Arizona birds were dusky or sooty grouse, but I do know they were a challenge. We drove for a half hour, then hiked from 7,000 feet up to about 10,000 where the birds hung out. We were obsessed with hunting birds near town, though the grouse thing with the necessary alpine assent was a bit foolish. A drive of just an hour and a half the other way — on I-17 no less — put us in the middle of quail country. But that drive required we leave the high country for the Sonoran Desert and for some reason that seemed like it was a drive too far.
Back in Montana there are the Sweetgrass Hills and my favorite grouse: sharptails. They’re great birds though you’ve got to cook them just right — either medium rare with breast meat that reveals a fair bit of pink when you slice it, or, taken to the other extreme, a long, slow confit.
What I really like about chukar and quail is the excitement of hunting coveys. The other day the dog and I surprised a covey of chukar while walking a ridgeline. This was the motherload covey of more than 25 birds that I’ve been chasing all season. I bumped these birds once before, but that was on a pre-opening day scouting run. This time the birds had clearly been shot at before as most flew to a place that would’ve taken hours for me follow. But a few chukar stayed in the vicinity and the dog and I worked singles for an hour or so, killing two.
So there’s the covey thing: the big flush followed by the methodical hunting of the scattered birds. Pheasant just don’t do that, and sharpies are frankly a bit too reckless for my tastes. Chukar, however, make you work for every bird and are also dynamite on the plate; in a class with pheasant and quail.
Finally there’s place. The birds prefer sagebrush steppe, though in the case of chukar country the steppe is usually tilted into near vertical terrain so it’s not so much steppe as it is sagebrush cliff. No matter. It’s big sage grassland and the late afternoon shadows fall across some beautiful country.
That’s a bird worth obsessing over.