I don’t pay much attention to the names of the full moons, at least not until September when the Harvest Moon makes its appearance. A month later the Hunter’s Moon rises. That’s when the full-moon-name business gets serious.
In October hunters head out in force. The general hunting season in Montana began Oct. 23. I’m no longer a big game hunter, but that’s around the time I get serious about chasing upland birds.
I sometimes sneak out in hunter’s orange during the Harvest Moon, but that’s subject to the vagaries of weather. I prefer to wait for it to cool off for the benefit of my dogs, and to lessen the likelihood we will run into snakes.
Rattlesnakes aren’t a huge problem in Montana, though the farther east you travel the more likely you are to find buzzworms. By the Hunter’s Moon, in Montana at least, rattlesnakes have mostly bedded down for the winter.
That goes for the Chukar Grounds as well, though rattlesnakes have interrupted my hunts a time or two, especially during unseasonably warm periods in October. I suppose it depends on which fall you’re talking about. Last year, a mid-October blizzard chased me off the Chukar Grounds with a beard weighed down by a heavy load of ice.
You can hunt with a beard heavy with ice, by the way, but when the wind depositing that ice is blowing parallel to the ground at about 50 mph, there’s really not much fun in it.
This year the Hunter’s Moon was far more accommodating. It was sunny, but cool, and at least some of the time the wind laid down long enough for the dogs to put up some solid points. There are never a lot of points with chukars — running banshees which sometimes make shot-over roosters seem lackadaisical, but we caught a couple breaks.
At one of my favorite spots, the chukars started flushing out of some big sagebrush even before the dogs got a whiff of them. It was a big covey that came up in waves. First 10 birds, then another dozen 20 feet away, then the whole lot of them took to the air.
You can’t really count that many birds flushing that fast, just out of range, but I’m guessing it was 50 birds. Maybe more.
While counting wasn’t easy, I could tell there were plenty of young birds in the mix. Chukar coveys are generally mostly young birds, often a pair of breeding adults and their brood of youngsters hatched in spring or early summer. As fall tends toward winter, the coveys will group up in bigger, 50-plus battalions like the one we found.
They flew, but not all of them travelled that far. This was about as good a scenario as I could wish for, running a setter who was still a youngster herself.
Upland bird hunters love broken up coveys. When birds get up all at once they tend to fly long, then run hard when they land. Scattered birds behave differently, flushing short, then making a quick dash into cover where they often hold tight for pointing dogs.
Jade has plenty of learning to do, but was impressive the way she went to work on the hillside, searching for scattered birds. I watched her as she sidehilled, reading scent on the wind. Then she got a little birdy and swung to her left, freezing in a classic over-the-shoulder point.
She held tight while I stepped up to flush the birds. I hit a double, which folks who are familiar with my shooting skills like to describe as a Hunter’s Moon miracle.
We got a few more birds, all youngsters with plenty of pin feathers. I’ll roast them for supper as the days grow shorter and the moons give way to winter.
Rob Breeding writes and blogs at www.mthookandbullet.com.