Not just for the birds
Sunday, September Sunday ... Outdoors, Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead, Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface, Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch, A crow calls, deep in its own darkness, Something like water ticks on Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock ... …
Lucky to spend the weekend in Hells Canyon, and lucky to be able to hike in great weather in that awe-inspiring place. We didn't find as many birds as I thought we might, but we found some. The lack of moisture has so parched the earth and all its vegetable accoutrements that it feels like …
One thing I love about hunting chukar is trying to find the birds. That involves working with my dogs, looking at maps, doing lots of exploring (often in vain), figuring out why birds are where we do find them and why they're not where we don't. It's a mysterious thing, and -- for me -- …
It's this. I spent most of today's hike weaving together phrases of future, present, and past memory fragments: stressing to keep up with the dogs through backlit bunchgrass on 45-degree slopes toward the water punctuated by dried cattle hoove divots; no concept of my identity but just a pursuit; no concept of the fact that …
There's a gorgeous but reviled magpie out the window scarfing up birdseed. A Eurasian dove just landed 5 yards away. Peat and Angus are snoozing after today's opener, dreaming of getting skunked because their idiotic "master" took them to a parched desert landscape to look, duh, in vain, for the first chukar of the season. …
UPDATE July 23: Jessie will be heading to a family in Colorado, and doing a lot of hunting. She'll have two other GSP siblings (a pup and an old warrior). We wish her, and her soon-to-be former family, the best. I'm posting this as a favor to someone who finds himself in the unthinkable situation …
Optimism has arrived with spring, in more ways than one. Chukar sounds have returned to the reservoirs in Hells Canyon, after last year's spring silence along most of the shorelines we surveyed. The mild winter and easy spring conditions make finger-crossing less necessary than last year at this time. My mom follows a bird photographer's …
Found my radio. Three days later after a Pretty good snowfall. "After I shot the cock and took him from Nora's mouth, I looked at him a little longer than is probably usual, reached blindly and settled him down with the other quail in the game bag hanging from the back of my vest. But …
So much of bird hunting is about loss. Take yesterday, for example. In the truck, on the icy road to our destination, I lost traction a couple of times. On the hunt, I lost track of Leslie periodically, as well as the friends we hunted with. Peat, whose pad has healed nicely thanks to the …
After Peat's pad debacle, and the post that generated more comments than any other post on this blog, along with a boatload of very helpful recommendations and suggestions, I'm writing to report on a successful first try of one of the recommended products (thanks, Jeff): 1000 Cordura booties from dogbooties.com. At only $3 each (yes, …