Not just for the birds

Author: Bob McMichael

  • Cabela’s Lite’N-Load Strap Vest: Best chukar hunting vest?

    Upland bird vest
    Cabela’s’ Lite’N-Load Vest: so far, so good

    I realize this is the third gear review I’ve done on Cabela’s gear, and am not crazy about this fact. But I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to find an upland hunting vest or pack that’s better than this one so I can buy it and review that instead of this. But I have not found one. So, for now, this is the best chukar hunting vest I know.

    I’ve used this vest exclusively over the past three seasons, totaling about 75 or 80 days with it, and – remarkably – it shows almost no wear and tear.

    The Cabela’s Lite’N-Load Strap Vest works better for me than any of the other four or five vests I’ve used because:

    1. It fits
    2. It (almost) holds everything I need for an all-day outing
    3. It accommodates a hydration system
    4. It’s easy to load lots of birds in it
    Chukar hunting vest
    Easy layering

    Nice design

    The thing I like best about this pack/vest is that I can chukar hunt with it; the vest does not impede hiking up steep hills. This is because the shell pockets are integrated right onto each side of the padded hip belt instead of hanging down off the front of the vest. I had a strap vest from another maker whose far-too-large shell pockets rode in front and made walking up steep chukar terrain even more miserable, clanging on my things with every step. The Cabela’s vest keeps the shell pockets nicely out of the way. Each pocket has a two-way zipper on top, and holds a box of shells. The outside of each pocket has a very thin pouch with a snap closure that could hold your license or car keys, with a little key tether inside each pocket. I put shells in the right pocket, and my GPS and keys in the left one.

    chukar hunting vest
    Notice the shell pockets, out of the way

    The shoulder straps are padded, easily adjustable, and have a hydration hose clamp on the left strap, as well as loops to hang all kinds of crap on. I put my e-collar control on the left strap right where the sternum strap clips together.

    The padded hip belt also has loops to hang stuff on, and a large swift-clip buckle that’s easy to use even with heavy gloves. Together, the shoulder, hip, and sternum straps offer enough adjustability to custom fit this thing to any weirdly contorted body, which is more common than one might think when considering the odd creatures who hunt chukar.

    The back of the vest, the part that rides on your back, is padded mesh, similar to the shoulder and hip straps, and has little channels in it to help ventilate. I’ve never ended even the most brutal day feeling like the pack didn’t fit well or caused me any pain.

    The vest’s main compartment has a slip for a hydration pack, and I use an insulated Camelback 100-oz. bladder in mine. It’s a tight fit, but works. I use the insulated thingy mainly to protect the bladder (I’ve punctured several in previous rigs). The bladder’s drinking hose exits the vest through a hole in the top of the pack near the hoisting strap. Simple but effective design.

    The hydration bladder leaves little room for much else, but I keep a first-aid kit in there, and extra gloves or other small doo-dads. Then there’s a smaller zippered pocket where I keep my wallet/license, cell phone, and a little food. Very little food. And this is the pack’s only problem, which I’ll get to in a minute.

    The bird pouch is very spacious, though, and easy to load on the fly. I put a limit of chukar and a large blue grouse in it one day and honestly didn’t feel loaded down or worry I’d lose birds from the vest. No issue here.

    Finally, there’s a simple bungee system that I strap layered clothing to quickly and easily. And that’s it. The best I’ve found for what I carry and how I hunt. (As I write this, it’s on sale at Cabela’s online store for $50.)

    Issues

    When I bought this vest three years ago I expected it would self destruct within a year or two because the nylon fabric appears much lighter-weight (and less durable) than other vests I’ve seen. Made in China, the vest just looked kind of cheap. As mentioned earlier, though, this thing has held up amazingly well. There are no tears, unraveling seams, broken zippers, failed snaps or buckles, or anything else. I suppose that the lightweight fabric helps give the vest its name. It truly is a lightweight pack/vest. Still, if I were to reconstruct this vest I’d use a slightly heavier-duty fabric.

    The one main issue with this thing, though, truly is the small carrying capacity of its main compartment. If I’m going out all day, I’d like to have more room for extra clothes or layering and – most importantly – extra food and water. 100 ounces in September on the steeps isn’t enough for me and my dog on an all-day hunt. Even when it gets cold, if we’re doing more up-and-down than usual on a half-day hunt, we nearly drain the hydration bladder. But there’s really no room to put another water bottle unless you stick it in the bird pouch, which – if yours is anything like mine – doesn’t appeal to me too much. If they could add two or three inches all the way around the main compartment that would make this the perfect pack. Otherwise I’m extremely pleased with this thing, which only cost me $80.

  • Goodbye Year

    Pheasant hunting in the snow
    Seems like the end is near

    Cold. Cold. Then hot.

    The virus from hell took one to the jaw yesterday and I escaped the domicile for the first time in way too long with gun, mutt, wife, and good friend. Impossible to pass this up.

    Cold, bright, dusty snow, shivering dogs, numb fingers. Crops long down. Cover at a premium. Roosters and hens out picking frozen greenup in the middle of big plow, blessed with long vision and leisurely 200-yard flushes into no-permission land. Walked two miles admiring and doing my best to imagine life at the prey level, but, of course, failed miserably at that. Thank goodness. Still, their feathers marking their takeoffs and landings in the snow made their way into my dreams. Thank goodness for that, too.

    Pheasant tail mark in the snow
    Pheasant tail mark in the snow

    Next farm. Angus gets 40 yards in front of me along a nice ditch with lots of weeds. Not too birdy, but suddenly stops cold. Before I could close the gap he pounces and the Chinese feathered kaleidoscope vectors to safety. I’m still confused about the pounce.

    But he gets birdier, and I stay closer. 30 minutes and no birds. We come to the Interstate and I’m worried he’ll find a hole in the hog tight fence, but his nose is Hoovering crazy eights across the snow still. Then he stops and a rooster elevates toward the freeway until I bring it straight down inside the fence, wondering about the pellets that escaped the bird; hit any cars? Probably not, but I don’t like the road.

    Pheasant roosters in the snow
    Snowbirds

    Back to the ditch, and another rooster blasts from the brush and I miss all three shots, semi-conscious of the butt of the gun somewhere near my armpit. WTF? Is it just the cold? Twenty yards farther, another rooster. Butt cheeked, bird down. And that was it. Pheasant 2012.

    With the epidemic of clean farming in the “Treasure Valley” around Boise pheasant get more beautiful every year. I’m lucky to have a friend with long-standing relationships among the older farmers in some of these places, but these guys are beat up and old and either converting to cleaner farming, selling or parceling, or handing it to their heirs who don’t want strangers shooting up their cattle or nephews. All understandable and not altogether lamentable in certain lights. How much longer do we have?

    Corn rows in snow
    Roostercam

  • Electronic

    Cat and treadmill
    Cat and treadmill

    Feeling a bit surly, laid up with a nasty cold, reduced to scavenging through fields of youtube garbage for something resembling authenticity. Cats on treadmills (hilarious, for a while). The immensely popular FAIL video phenomenon (people seriously injuring themselves with the help of gravity, elastics, and small engines). I need to get out, but…

    Youtube has everything. Infinite hunting videos, including a few of mine. Hoping for a find, I searched for “upland bird hunting” videos, and found myself getting increasingly irritated by the overabundance of “shooting preserve” and outfitter videos showing fat rich people shooting birds they won’t have to clean and most likely won’t eat, either.

    Then I found a longer video about hunting Huns and sharptail on public land in western Montana. Looked authentic, but had suspiciously good production quality and a soundtrack way inside Puddle of Mud or Solid Waste. Promising. I should have turned it off when one of the Kansan talking heads appeared wearing a Garmin shirt. Halfway through the vid there’s a scene with an English setter absolutely blitzing straightline through some brush with the voice-over, “The dogs are really birdy in here…” Really? Cut to the three dudes in glorious late afternoon Montana rays lumbering leisurely through tall grass. One grabs his Garmin Astro, looks at it for a second, and non-nonchalantly says, “Well, we’ve got a dog on point somewhere close; looks like he’s about 100 yards southwest. Let’s go get some birds.” Cut back to the Garmin guy: “The Garmin Astro has really changed the face of upland bird hunting.” I guess so. Now, as long as you don’t mind the price tag, you don’t even have to know where your dog is. Ever.

    Garmin Astro
    The $650 Garmin Astro

    It should go without saying that this is wrong. What are you doing out there? Why are you hunting birds? If your dog matters to you, why don’t you keep track of your four-legged partner? I see this too often. While running on a trail near my house I encountered a beautiful English setter with a couple e-collars and antennas laced around its neck, sprinting the other way. Over a half-mile later I found his owners, ablaze in hunter orange caps and Orvis chaps. Around their necks hung thousands of dollars of electronic tracking devices, and in the mouth of the patriarch of this bunch was a good ol’ fashioned whistle. He shrieked on it steadily, at least once a second, turning serenity to sheer sonic hell. About three quarters of a mile behind these folks were two other setters romping around the brush on their extended electronic leashes.

    Snow and bird dog
    Angus and my shadow, snow and e-collar

    I shouldn’t let it bother me. I should look at it as a sign that going after wild birds in wild, hard-to-hunt places is fairly safe. I don’t care that these guys with their technology and hired dogs are the ones flooding the Web with photos of tailgates littered with multi-limits on all available species. To be fair, I use an e-collar on Angus, always have. I use it to get his attention and to reinforce our working relationship by helping him stay close enough to me so I can read him. The best thing about it is that I don’t ever need to call him, and we can hunt quietly. This matters to me. Watching Angus hunt, watching him check to see where I am, to see if I might want him to shift directions, watching him apply his superior sensory equipment to the mutual pursuit, watching him creep, point, adjust, get excited: call me old fashioned, but this stuff is way more interesting to me than looking at a 2.78″ diagonal color GPS screen to see what my mutt’s up to.

  • End of the world?

    Brittany
    Angus and his pheasant, an instant before the collision

    “Next morning I got up and it did not.”  — Philip Larkin, “The Mower”

    Well, just in case we’re all toast tomorrow I thought I’d make a shout out to express some thanks. No Chinese Doomsday escape pods here, just a few images and words about a Chinese ditch parrot (thanks to the scribes at Mouthful of Feathers for this appellation).

    Brittany and pheasant
    After the collision

    Last weekend I was treated to a rare flat-ground, private land pheasant hunt with a good friend, and was able to connect with a rooster. Angus caught up to the wounded bird just before it escaped over a big irrigation ditch. As it was still quite alive Angus apparently knew he daren’t release it to readjust his grip so he might see where the heck he was going. I watched with a mixture of intense pride and mirth as he serpentined his way back to me, and I called repeatedly to give him a vocal beacon. I assumed he would stop when he got to me. Instead, he ran smack into my boots at full speed, snapping the cock’s neck in the process, relieving me of the dispatching I dread doing.

    The bird, a yearling, had his world end almost a week ago. I don’t know where his soul is, but his body has been hanging in my shed out back, and is scheduled to serve as the honored ingredient in coq au vin tomorrow night for my parents’ holiday visit arrival meal.

    pheasant hanging
    Aging pheasant

    Bird souls. I did no big game hunting this year. Avian life’s been bigger to me as a result. Bigger in lots of ways, but largest in the soul category. Bird spirits. I’ve ignored these, trivialized them deliberately to distance the remorse I’ve learned to reserve for larger prey like deer and elk. That seems wrong to me now that the winged are all I’ve killed this year. I remember the first birds I killed years ago, before I began hunting big game. I wept on their feathers. It’s a penance I regret losing and aim to recover.

    Sometimes I think the paradox of hunting is its main attraction. Trying to kill something you love and value is an irresistible hook, but I need to remind myself of this sometimes. I think the game of bird hunting with a great dog sometimes obscures the fact that it centers on wanting to kill. The days I “get” nothing, get skunked, tend to shift the meaning away from hunting – which is the pursuit of prey with intent to kill, and not strictly the killing of it – and toward an ethic where success is measured in relation to the bag limit. Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled when I bag birds and have no illusions about the day’s goal of limiting. I’m just saying that I want to remember to appreciate the losing side in this “recreational” activity. It recreates me, but uncreates the bird. I get up the next morning (or have thus far). It doesn’t.

  • Ground sluice ‘em?

    This is sort of insane, if you ask me. And it’s just way too white.