Bird hunting can be humbling and exhilarating, often compressing these extremes in a weekend or day, or even brief moments between shots.
I was fortunate to return to the chukar grounds before Thanksgiving. A friend, whose guest room I commandeer when I hunt chukars, is moving to Spain after the first of the year, so I planned one last visit to his hunting lodge.
He gave me clear orders: kill some birds for Thanksgiving dinner. I set out the morning after I arrived to pay my guest-room rent with a few chukars. It didn’t go quite as planned.
Years ago, the Chukar Grounds Lodge owner gifted me a barely fired Zoli shotgun that belonged to his father. It’s a sweet little 20 gauge over-under, with a 26-inch barrel that’s light as a feather, a good pound less than the CZ 20-gauge side by side that has been my everyday shotgun for the last decade.
The gifted Zoli isn’t a high-end model, but it’s a solid gun. It’s older, however, purchased in the 1970s, so steel shot is a no-no. Since I must shoot steel in almost all the places I hunt near home, I rarely use the Zoli and have never grown comfortable shooting it. The length of pull is a little off, the lightness of it makes it feel like I’m waving a toy gun at escaping chukars, and I’ve grown accustomed to aiming over that broad valley between the barrels of my side by side.
But I can shoot lead here, so I broke out the Zoli. It didn’t go well. While Jade hunted like a champ, tracking down coveys and singles with great efficiency, each time I raised that Zoli I felt like I did the first time I hunted quail — dazed and confused.
The Zoli has another challenge: two triggers. There are benefits to a double-trigger shotgun, but those bennies are negated if you don’t shoot one often and find yourself futilely pulling the front trigger a second time on late-flushing birds. My brain isn’t wired for a double trigger. I could make it so, but that would take time at the range in the off season.
I killed a bird on Day 1, but Jade provided three or four good opportunities that I failed to execute. By day’s end I was feeling a little too old for chukar hunting.
On Day 2, I went back to my old reliable CZ. Jade found a couple of coveys right out of the truck, but the wind was wrong and both flushed wild. The birds didn’t fly far, however. We got a second flush, but it was a tough shot, at the end of my comfort range. I took a couple shots, but the birds flew out of sight.
That was followed by Jade’s fine point on a covey of a couple dozen birds that flushed 20 feet in front of me. I resisted the urge to plot “double” as the birds took flight, taking my time on my first shot. I put that chukar on the ground then hit a second, late-flushing bird.
We ended the day with a limit of five birds; all but one came on points. The exception was a running single that Jade worked hard to keep in range before it flew.
The day ended with a fine point on a large covey near the top of a steep slope. We were above the birds with the wind in our favor. Jade got birdy in a patch of cheatgrass, moved into the sagebrush to our left, and pointed, hard. The covey flushed in a fanning arc above the sage, toward the safety of a canyon below. I picked out No. 5 and aimed like the horrors of the day before never happened.
We’ll have plenty to eat for our penultimate Thanksgiving feast at the Chukar Lodge.