It’s mid-March, the season of taxes, wildly variable weather, and mud.
The worst of winter is mostly behind us, though we can still jinx things by breaking out our spring wardrobe too soon. If your resident hipsters are running the streets in flamboyantly colored beanies, puffy vests and shorts, finished with a pair of river sandals strapped over alpaca-wool socks, you’ll know who’s to blame for any late-season blizzards.
Since I moved to the flatlands I’ve had three lanes of weather to fret over: the Northern Rockies, the Northern Plains and the desert Southwest. From top to bottom, let’s see how they’re doing.
I rarely hunt up north these days. I haven’t chased pheasants in Montana in years, though I still have some chukar spots in Wyoming I frequent, and those birds don’t seem fazed by a lack of rain. That’s probably because there’s plenty of irrigation water nearby.
This means my Northern Rockies focus is on the status of Montana and Wyoming rivers. In that regard, things don’t look too bleak. Winter started slowly in the Northern Rockies, but as the season wore on things improved. The USDA’s Snow Water Equivalent map at the end of January was concerning. Most of western Montana was yellow, meaning watersheds held 80% or less of average for that time of year. The Bitterroot was 80%, as was the Lower Clark Fork. The Flathead was 79%.
None of that spelled disaster, but it suggested it. No Snow Water Equivalent map is conclusive, however, especially one in January.
Since then, the trajectory has been good. The latest St. Patrick’s Day map is bathed in lucky green. The Bitterroot is up to 96% and the Flathead is at 92%.
Those are pretty good numbers, depending on what the weather does the next three months. If spring is mild, with a normal interval of snowpack-building storms holding back summer for as long as possible, river flows might be good for fishing. Unfortunately, the recent trend has been for early-onset summer heat, forest fires and hoot-owl Julys.
I’ve seen it go the other way: scant snowpack followed by a cool wet spring then great late-summer fishing, but that’s a Montana weather unicorn.
In the central part of the country, I’m pulling for a mild, wet spring as well. The weather here is still bouncing between sunny spring days in the 70s and winter storm watches with a dash of tornado danger mixed in for seasoning. The twisters are staying well south of my spot on the northern tier of Tornado Alley, but here the odds of a tornado passing through are never zero.
Winter was mild. We didn’t have much snow and only one brief stretch of below-zero temperatures in late February, so winter kill on pheasants and quail was almost certainly light. The key for a great fall season is what comes next: hopefully rain. If we have a mild spring with regular rain we could get a good hatch and a nice season next fall.
But just as it is up north, nothing good will come of a hot, dry summer.
The same goes for the southwest. If you traveled south to hunt quail last season, you may have encountered record numbers of birds. That’s what I saw in the Mojave Desert in California in January. I’ve never seen as many game birds as I did Gambel’s quail during those few days of hunting.
This winter California wildfires got the media attention so we forgot the previous two winters were epic El Niño monsoons. That moisture supercharged bird populations fueling some of the best quail hunting in decades.
It’s been drier this winter as La Niña takes hold, but there has been intermittent rain in the Mojave, maybe just enough to produce a decent hatch to augment the holdover birds.
Cool spring weather, may it linger across the West well into summer.