In most of North America, big game hunting rules above all else. This makes sense, of course, given the great successes of the North American model of wildlife conservation over the last hundred years and the relative plethora of opportunities to hunt ungulates that most people in the country have available to them. These opportunities also provide the ability to fill that freezer with the highest quality of meat that exists anywhere on Earth. There’s also a cultural aspect to hunting — especially deer hunting — that goes back generations in many areas.
Of course, hunting big game of any sort is also a big deal. Out West, where tags are generally more difficult to come by and the traveling non-resident deer hunter is a fact of life, it’s an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.
For hunters, the entire year exists as just a workup to hunting season, and we enjoy the pressure to a large extent. Sometimes, though, it can get to be a bit much, both physically and mentally. I once had concurrent deer and elk tags; I got my bull, drove home and put him in the freezer, and left the next day to hike up Deer Mountain. Those who have done it before would agree with me that cutting up an entire elk is a lot of work, and by the time I re-packed the car and drove up to where I’d deer hunt, I was exhausted, and the hunt suffered for it more than I’d like to admit here.
I guess my point with all of this is to suggest that, sometimes, a change can be as good as a rest. For that change, I turn to upland hunting.
Throughout the USA, what people think of when they hear the words “upland hunting” varies almost as much as it does when they hear the phrase “deer camp.” You have ruffed grouse and woodcock in the choked forests of the northeast, bobwhites a little farther south, pheasants stocked all over the place, forest grouse in the PNW, and sage grouse in the Great Basin. Desert quail and chukar all over the Southwest, too.
Upland season typically opens mid-October in my neck of the desert, so it’s too hot for me to run my dog on Gambel’s quail here. This usually works out great; I focus on my deer or elk tags, and by the time this tags are punched (or not), it’s usually cooled down to the point where we can begin hitting the bajadas in earnest.
I’ll wake up early — real early — Saturday morning, and the dog will hop up in the back seat and we’ll drive anywhere between one and two hours to get into chukar or quail… depending how motivated I’m feeling on a given day.
In an ideal world, we’ll get there right around sunup, and I can take a little bit of time donning my vest and getting my gun and the electronics for the dog squared away. I’ll throw my trusty orange Yeti full off coffee in the vest, lace up my gaiters, and away we go.
Like the birds themselves, the hunting around here is largely boom-or-bust. The birds will be there, or they’ll be, well, somewhere else.
These days, I can let the dog do most of the work as I follow behind him, playing off his positioning and the direction of the wind. Short of chasing chukar up the side of a cliff, it’s a great day of exercise for the both of us; the best quail hunting happens in rolling topography that’s easier on the legs, and still provides a good day of exercise for me. If he really wants to run big, the dog can do over 20 miles in these conditions.
Heavier rains over the last two or three years meant that the chukar hunting we got into last year was excellent, with plenty of shooting, plenty of bird contacts, and more than a few birds in the cooler at the end of the day. Nobody fills a freezer off of upland game here, but chukar provide much more meat than the average Gambel’s quail.
We hunt until we get tired, stopping for a hillside snack in the middle of the day. Then, we work our way back to the truck. If he’s really done for the day, Elko will hop up into the back seat, and pass out on the drive back home. I’ll put some great music on — or simply enjoy the hypnotic, calming sound of the tires on the pavement — and my mind will usually wander to all the lay-up shots that I missed that day.
Then, we’ll recover for a few days, and be ready to go again the next weekend.
In the (admittedly exciting and addictive) world of high-pressure hunts for things with big antlers and lots of meat, I find upland hunting to be a wonderful excuse to unwind, spend some time with my dog, get some shooting in, and enjoy the crisp air of the desert in the winter.
I guess I’m playing myself here, because I actually don’t want to see anyone else when I’m out chasing birds. Still, the more participation in this thing that we do, the more value it has to the beancounters and the reptiles; the ones who want to sell our public lands and shut down our coyote calling contests and the rest of it all. If nobody hunts birds, well, there will be nobody that cares when there’s nowhere left to do it.
This piece is all over the place. Perhaps we’ll just leave it with this: what I take way from the uplands goes far beyond the actual hunt itself. It’s the sense of the place in that time of year, it’s watching the dog work, it’s the cold mornings and the warm afternoons, it’s coming across a cool set of sheds that nobody’s found yet, it’s the chess game with the birds.
Perhaps most obvious, though, is that upland hunting is another excuse to get out on public land with your shotgun and go have a damn adventure.
That alone is worth the price of entry.
