Bird hunting season in these parts is only sputtering to a start. The weather hasn’t cooperated, but that hasn’t prevented long walks in the tall grass.
Opening weekend was wet. I don’t recall it ever raining in the traditional “drops falling from the sky” sense, but the grass was heavy with dew and the plains were cloaked in a heavy mist. My English setter Jade was soaked five minutes out of the truck, not that she cared much. She’s the latest in my line of bird dogs who trod a wet lawn like they are firewalking a bed of coals, yet when she’s unleashed on the hunting grounds seems impervious to liquid.
Ahh, female setters. It’s like hunting with Mariah Carey. Talented. Demanding. Head-scratchingly eccentric. What more could a bird hunter ask for in a dog?
Jade and I have reached a happy medium when it comes to retrieving. This is often cited as the breed’s greatest weakness, though my first two setters were fabulous retrievers. Jade, however, isn’t too fond of picking up birds. She finds them, and when I put wounded birds on the ground, she holds them down with her paws until I can fetch them myself. This is just the way it will be with my diva as I’m not inclined to send her to force-fetch academy.
I’m told you should never force-fetch train your own dogs; the methods employed are too harsh. I’m just going to work with what I’ve got.
Jade has pinned a couple of birds for me this fall, but the hunting has been tough. The wet weather of opening weekend wasn’t horrible, but my feet and legs were soaked and that’s not a state I’m accustomed to when I’m hunting birds in the uplands, which raises the question, who’s the real diva in my hunting partnership?
Hunting season weekend No. 2 was the opposite. It warmed up into the 70s and a stiff wind started up Halloween night and blew out of the south through Sunday. Fortunately, I was pleasantly distracted by the final two games of the World Series, so I didn’t fret conditions too much.
My old friend from Arizona, The Long Walker, was in town. He’s usually here a week or so before the season begins, scouting patches of public ground for quail and pheasants, then hunts a week or so before fall sets in and it gets too cold for him and he skedaddles south. Living in Arizona for decades does that to a bird-hunting diva — they start whining just when the temperature is getting good.
We found quail, which has become my singular obsession. I still carry three-inch, steel No. 4 pheasant rounds in my vest, but I load them in my 20-gauge side-by-side far less than I once did. The quail we found were, frustratingly, quail I never tried to shoot. These birds hold tight to the red cedar windbreaks that line the public grasslands we hunt. It’s not unusual for the dogs to find coveys of bobwhite only to have the birds flush on the other side of the trees. You might get a glimpse of them, but often the only certain sign quail are there is the soft percussion of their wing beats as they flush to safety.
That’s how it went for quail. We were slightly more fortunate out in the tall grass where pheasant tread. This cover is too thick for smallish quail to get around, and frankly, it’s getting a little too thick for me as well. But the birds were there, flushing wild in that fierce south wind.
I might have called it a loss if I’d been keeping score like it was a World Series game, but that’s not how bird hunting works for me anymore. I’m all about participation trophies these days.
If I’m out with my dog chasing birds, it’s always a win.