It’s not summer yet, but I can’t help myself. Fall is always on my mind. Especially a place I spent a good chunk of my time in November: shelterbelts.
Shelterbelts are bird magnets, so despite some of the challenges they pose, you must learn to hunt them. Conifers provide thermal cover in winter when the bare twigs of deciduous trees are of little use. And the birds also appreciate the bare dirt beneath the trees and use it for loafing cover between feeding sessions.
When I regularly hunted Blasdel Waterfowl Production Area south of Kalispell, I most often found birds near the cover of shelter belts, and that was also the case at Ninepipe Wildlife Management Area south of Flathead Lake.
Shelterbelts pose plenty of challenges for hunters. One minor inconvenience is that the birds often flush out the side opposite the hunter. A shelterbelt can be an impenetrable wall of conifer. You might hear birds flushing out the far side, but getting a shot is another matter.
You also have to accept your dog is going to be out of sight most of the time. If your dog doesn’t range too far, you can usually hear it. Grass is dry and brittle in the fall so a dog makes plenty of noise as it scythes through cover. And if your dog is on the same side of the shelterbelt, you can track its progress by the quavering seed heads above as it moves about.
Both of these dog-detections techniques are a significant source of bird-hunter malice toward wind. Besides wreaking havoc on the scent cones pointing dogs use to track game birds, the noise and disruption of wind interrupts one of your fundamental sensory connections to your dog: sound.
Even when you can’t see your dog, sound tells you a lot about what’s going on. If I can’t find my dog I always stop and listen. Unless they’re far off, you can usually hear even the faintest of commotion. It is even better if you’re met with silence. Silence is hope, hope your dog was somewhere out ahead, frozen on point.
A more recent shelterbelt moment has kept my mind a little preoccupied. In January, on my last day of hunting before the close of the season, I hit a small wildlife management area where I rarely see other hunters. The WMA is a little less than a section and surrounded by cornfields, which means bare dirt in January. It can’t be reached by the primary roads in the area, so it’s overlooked. I had some free time on an unseasonably warm day so I went to check it out.
On one of the shelterbelts, my English setter Jade got birdy, and then locked up hard, pointing back into the trees. I figured the birds were on the other side, but this shelterbelt was thin enough I could climb through it. I thought I might get a shot, or at least if the birds flushed out the other side, I could mark where they landed and pursue, so I plunged in rather than walking around.
Since Jade would have stayed put, walking around might have been a better approach.
Once I got into the trees I discovered there was more than one covey that fixed my dog’s attention. To my right, about eight quail flushed, but since I was still in the trees, I couldn’t mark their landing pad. Then I heard a rustle on my left and a big covey of bobwhites, pushing 20 birds, went the other way.
I only knew the direction of travel for that covey, so we went looking for them. Jade soon found a single, but with frigid weather coming in that night, I decided to abandon our search to give the birds time to covey up.
At least I know which shelterbelt I’ll hunt first come November.