I try to be an ethical hunter. I take seriously the need to conserve game birds and protect the habitat they require to survive.
I limit how many birds I kill, especially in the lean years. I have a couple of nice spots near where I live that consistently hold bobwhite quail. I visit these spots often early in the season when I’m frequently graced with the raucous flush of coveys of tight-holding birds. When I keep my wits about me I even kill a few. Four or five per spot in a season.
I have a pretty good sense of when to leave a spot be until next fall.
The coveys that once counted 12, maybe 15 birds, begin to thin out. Soon, I’m seeing coveys of six or eight birds. When the numbers drop that low, I may take one on the flush, but I’m not chasing singles the way I might earlier in the season. And if I’m just hitting scattered birds, singles or pairs, it’s time to cross that covey off my list so there will be a next year.
Last weekend, despite some excellent dog work, I killed just a lone bobwhite. My English setter Jade, after shaking off some early season rust, was magnificent, offering solid points on a covey and then singles and pairs. But I’m always the weakest link.
Late in the day, we went looking for a pheasant for Thanksgiving. We walked a cedar windbreak hoping to scare up a rooster. On one side of the cedars was a strip of low grass, then a field of harvested corn. On the other was a sea of waist- to shoulder-high big bluestem.
I realized I hadn’t seen Jade for a spell.
It’s easy to lose track of her in that cover, but she’s the sort of dog who checks in, frequently. If I don’t see her for more than a minute or two it’s almost always because she is on birds, somewhere.
When I found her she was fixed on the narrow band of grass between the cedars and cut corn. She was staring to her left, away from the cedars on the edge of the corn, but when I stepped in the birds had moved to her right, closer to the trees.
In circumstances like this, quail offer virtually no opportunity to shoot. The birds will flush into and through the cedars before you can raise your gun. But this covey of bobwhite was huge, close to 20 birds, and after the initial flush, they came up in waves of three or four for what seemed an eternity.
By now I had raised my gun and might have fired off a round or two, but something was off about this covey. These quail were a mix of strong flying mature birds and barely capable youngsters. It seemed this covey was a blend of hatchlings — older birds that had been on the ground since mid-summer along with a late hatch of birds still gaining the strength and know-how to fly hard and fast from danger.
It had been an unseasonably warm fall and bobwhite are notorious late nesters. These unsteady flyers might have been eggs as recently as mid-September.
I watched the youngsters careen into the trees and lowered my gun. It might not have harmed the covey one bit if I killed a few of these prepubescent quail. Birds born this late are rarely strong enough to survive winter, and they would have been tasty.
I’ve got to live with myself, however, and that’s hard enough without killing helpless, albeit delicious chicken nuggets of the prairie.
Did I do the ethical thing? I suppose, but I can’t say that shooting and eating those doomed fryers would have been unethical, just unsporting. That’s a matter of human conceit rather than of wildlife sustainability.
I’m never certain which takes precedence.