Not just for the birds

Author: Bob McMichael

  • Hercules

    Hercules

    Hunted an old favorite yesterday, and I’m not hiding the location because I’m afraid it’s not long for this world.

    Peat and I went out for a rare solo hunt (Leslie and Bloom are nursing hurt wheels). The rationale was that the forecast was for nicer-than-normal weather with no precip, with an atmospheric river heading our way for the next week. We like to take advantage of windows. We headed out into torrential rain and wind, which I thought must be some kind of cosmic error that would soon be corrected. Instead, the rain continued for quite a while, then turned to fog so dense I couldn’t see Peat 20 yards in front of me. Finally, after a couple of hours, it got gorgeous, and stayed so.

    An abundance of birds and views, and important winter home for deer and elk
    Fog lifting. What a reveal!

    We saw a lot of chukar, and Peat pointed almost all of them we saw. Unfortunately, despite the fact that he held the birds for up to 10 minutes (some of his points were a couple hundred yards up steep hills), they all busted before I got to within 50 yards. No shots on those. Overall, it was a great hunt — by far my longest of the season (8.6 miles) and the second longest of my entire chukar hunting history, with the second most elevation gain ever for me (2800 feet). Peat ran 25 miles and did about 7,500 feet of elevation gain. He’s a bit sore today (as am I). One chukar in the bag, though, after all that doesn’t pencil out on a caloric replacement scale.

    Peat’s Strava on yesterday’s hunt

    Two things must be shared about this spot: first, it’s apparently being liked too much by hunters (I don’t know of an area in Hells Canyon that gets more pressure). Ben Jonson’s suggestion that what we love we might want not to like too much seems worth reflecting on.

    Second, it looks as though it’s about to become a huge open-pit silver and copper mine. Most of the land sits on more than one-third of the Cecil Andrus Wildlife Management Area, on land owned by the state of Idaho (and thus, you and me, right?). A Canadian mining company called Hercules Silver Corp acquired the mineral rites in 2021 and has been conducting exploratory drilling and geophysical tests since then, with a massive expansion of the project in 2023. Their investor presentation hawks the project as “Located in the state of Idaho, with a pro-mining congressional delegation, governor and state legislature, and local political support for the project.” And, “Long established mining history with streamlined permitting…” I know nothing about mining, which allows me to be flabbergasted by the Hercules’ investor newsletters bragging about finding 2.6 grams of silver per ton (I do know that there are 454 grams in a pound). It seems like not a lot of silver in a ton of excavated earth. I’m probably missing something.

    Hercules home page features a drone video of the gorgeous terrain on the Andrus WMA they’re hoping to turn into an open-pit mine

    It does seems strange that all this is happening on public land, but apparently it’s all legal and relatively easy in the state of Idaho, which is apparently populated by dupes, if I take Hercules’ implication correctly. I’ve been unable to find any reporting on this project in the press, and it doesn’t show up in a search on the Idaho Conservation League’s or Idaho Wildlife Federation’s websites; I contacted both organizations about Hercules several weeks ago and haven’t gotten a reply. Unlike federally owned BLM and Forest Service land, Idaho state land apparently doesn’t require a public comment period for projects impacting the environment. But the fact that Hercules has brought a massive amount of heavy machinery and pallets of 5-gallon buckets of chemicals related to the drilling operation up these tiny gravel roads and been running high-voltage electrical cable and high-pressure 1″ air hoses across the entire area, which covers about 10,000 acres, makes me wonder. Yesterday, Peat pointed a covey of chukar about 30 yards from heavy equipment and excavation activity; if I’d shot I’d have peppered the workers. While we searched a thicket near a pond for a grouse, a truck drove up and the driver got out and powered up a nearby high-powered air compressor. The gates to get into these areas have small handmade signs announcing the high voltage wires with “DO NOT TOUCH WIRES.” The wires are everywhere, and hard to see, only about 1/16″ of an inch thick. Peat and I tripped on them numerous times. I’m assuming we were just lucky they weren’t energized. I wonder.

    I’m trying to find out more about this situation, and will share what I discover. This was one of my all-time favorite places to hunt, so I’m part of the “liking-it-to-death” factor (although this was the first time I’d hunted there in three years; I won’t be back). I know others who love this spot, not just for birds but for big game. It’s important wintering ground for elk and deer which, unlike chukar, are endemic. But still, it makes me sad to see it getting ripped up. And it won’t get put back or made right again. Ironic that it’s happening on the Cecil Andrus Wildlife Management area, which is managed by Idaho Fish & Game. It makes me think of one of my favorite passages in literature, the last paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road.

    “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

    400psi air hoses run across much of the 10,000 acre site
  • Control

    Control

    …I went hunting wild,
    After the wildest beauty in the world,
    Which lies not calm in eyes or braided hair,
    But mocks the steady running of the hour…

    —Wilfred Owen, from “Strange Meeting “

    Hunting’s beauty lives wildly between control and chaos. What do you control? How do you deal with chaos?

    We have expensive, complicated electronic devices that tell us where our dogs are and track a ridiculous amount of data. They give us a sense of control. We got them because we disliked the chaos of hunting without them. I might argue they allow us to focus more on the beauty of hunting. The liminal.

    The dogs are licking their wounded paws. We failed to notice Bloom’s abrasions and Peat’s broken toenail at the quick until it was too bloody late. Both are on the DL now, in the best chukar country I’ve ever seen. It just seems endless. I don’t want to hunt without a dog, so we’re going home early. Spoiled stupid. Poor dogs. We should have done better by them. Running on a golf course every day, we now realize, has not toughened their pads the way the gravel trail we used to live near did. Good to get that learned.

    Peat too is a control freak. Bloom’s still figuring out how he feels about retrieving. Rough and labyrinthine at best. I know Peat notices. I winged a bird that both dogs saw hit the ground running. They competed in catching it, which Bloom did, besting Peat in that rodeo, then beelined past me toward Leslie, then away from her, bird clamped hard in his mouth, and then dropped it minus a massive mouthful of feathers and some back skin. Peat watched. A few minutes later Leslie knocked one down and Bloom quickly found it. Heading back up the hill toward Leslie with it, he dropped it a couple times, took it behind a big rock. Soon Peat emerged with the bird, ran straight past Leslie, and brought it to me.

    As a pitcher, I could appease my need for control of the game but always failed to realize and appreciate the supreme irony of struggling to throw strikes, which an external force (the freaking ump) controlled. This little nugget of life has, of course, stayed with me. All of it, especially the illusion. Rarely still am I able to see its beauty.

    The place we’ve been this week, whose exact location naturally I will not specify, is magical. But most chukar terrain seems that way to me, especially when I’m in it, and it varies dramatically. There’s a lot of beauty in that. But even more, the beauty seems to lie in what all those places afford, with or without lots of birds: a setting for an activity that “mocks the steady running of the hour.” We choose the place but have no idea what will happen, where we’ll go, or how long it will take. It’s the wildest.

  • Fake

    Fake

    We’ve bragged for years about our dogs. It’s part of the game, I think. Part of the culture. Everybody does it, or badly wants to. The dog work this season, though, has not begun as expected. The theme so far has been The False Point. Maybe the chickens are coming home to roost from the two years the dogs spent pointing ghostbirds in the timber farms on the Olympic Peninsula. There were birds there, both ruffed and sooty grouse, and the daily walks sometimes witnessed actual birds, sometimes by sight but more often by wing sounds when they busted. Most often, though, probably by a real-to-fake ratio of 1:100, it was Bloom pointing scent, backed spectacularly by Peat. This pattern grew increasingly boring for us, especially because the “forest” was so dense that you or the dogs literally could not penetrate into it at all off of the logging roads to try to relocate the birds. We did not, though, suspect that this daily routine might be damaging our dogs for chukar hunting.

    Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe the preponderance of false pointing so far this season is just a phase and evidence of their incredible noses working to “recalibrate the stations of the [living].” “Never doubt your dog” has always been our mantra, but it’s being tested, and frequently conflicts with another mantra: “Never lose altitude.” I’ve lost track of the times this season that Leslie or I have descended far down a slope to reach a pointing Bloom, only to learn it was fake. This is a new one on us. Even Peat, whose batting average isn’t quite as high as Angus’s (I don’t recall Angus ever false pointing) but is still stellar, has begun fooling himself and, thus, us.

    We don’t want to lose faith. Losing faith in your dog is like wondering if the sun will rise tomorrow, and really not knowing. You don’t want to go there. One hunt last week, Bloom false pointed at least 20 times, and never pointed actual birds. Leslie and I were nearly despondent, and afterward pored over the Internet searching for answers. There were as many differing opinions on the matter as there were people giving them. We decided that the most sensible thing to try was to speedily walk past Bloom when he pointed, letting him know we didn’t acknowledge his fake, and hope that eventually he’d find and hold real birds, whereupon we’d fire, hopefully hit one, and get him a full cycle out of the deal, re-cementing what’s supposed to happen: point – hold – bust – shot – retrieve. But the very next hunt, he nailed five straight real points, so that plan went out the window, thankfully. We thought, “Oh, we’ve been too neurotic about this whole thing; it was just a phase.” But on the next hunt, he only false pointed. Numerous times. And Peat did, too. Arg.

    So we’re back to scratching our heads. I considered keeping this quiet because it probably makes us look like idiots (nothing new), and because I didn’t want to malign in any way these incredible dogs from a fantastic breeder, but I’m wondering if the smart people I’m used to hearing from here might have something helpful to say about it.

    Classic Bloom false point on a logging road near Neah Bay, WA on a bizarrely sunny day.
    This one, yesterday, was real. Of course it’s the one I shot with my camera and not the gun.
    The classic double false point, or “Point-off.” The upside is that we have two dogs that love to honor.
  • Real

    Real

    About 24 years ago I caught a few steelhead on the 6-weight fly rod my brother had made me years before. He was fishing with me, showing me what to do, wading in shallow, clear water of the Columbia River near Richland, Washington. Seams. Green Butt Skunks. The fish were incredibly big and strong.

    The next spring I moved from what I’d always thought would be my forever home of the San Francisco Bay Area to Boise, Idaho, where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have a job. Those fish were the catalysts for the gyrational push and pull that sent me north. Aside from a recent two-year diversion, I’ve been an Idahoan since.

    Looking back, I might say the move was adventurous, but somehow — in the moment — adventure never registered. Fear, for sure. Excitement, too, and a little loneliness. Part of the plan was to get my first dog and figure out how to hunt birds with it, another thing my brother introduced me to. After I screwed up the first dog, limiting my time chasing birds with her, I got a do-over with my second dog, Angus, who was the catalyst for this blog, which in a way has been the most stable thing I’ve ever had.

    And so it goes. We’re at the beginning of a new season. Oregon hasn’t even opened yet. While knowing I’m in the worst shape since beginning to hunt chukar 23 years ago I’m grateful to be able to get out, and the hills don’t scare me. That hasn’t changed despite the degradation of muscle mass. Until we started climbing, I thought I’d fear gravity but it’s almost the opposite. Life is full of surprises: I’m still excited. I’m glad to say that.

    Another surprise, which I’ve deliberated on for a while now about sharing here, is what I’ve started doing in my “spare time.” I’ve decided to try being a realtor, and am both scared and excited about it. I’m sharing this here as a brazen advertisement of my services, and will only say that if you’ve ever thought of moving closer to chukar country I’d like the chance to help you find the right place. I’ll be the first to say that Idaho is a weird state, but it has a lot to offer if you like public land. Anyway, I’m working with the biggest broker in Idaho (Silvercreek Realty), and have started Chukar Hills Realty as my business. If you’re interested in seeing what’s out there, you can search property on my website: robertmcmichael.silvercreekrealty.com. If you click on the link, it’ll ask you to set up an account, but that’s only so I’ll get the lead. You might get some spam, but you can always unsubscribe. So there it is, and that’s all I’ll say about this here. Thanks.

  • Landslide

    Landslide

    45 years ago today my 16-year-old mind and body awoke in the dark at the usual time to find things amiss. The wood shingle roof was making popping sounds. My mind needed some explanation. It’d been hot. Perhaps rain was falling on the tinder-dry shingles, causing them to expand dramatically, thus the popping. Feeling confident of this explanation, I continued getting dressed to head out the door for my morning cross country workout with the other devotees on the team.

    I was wrong. What unfolded from that point on irrevocably impacted my life and the lives of those living in the other 28 or so houses destroyed by the landslide in Laguna Beach’s Bluebird Canyon. My mother, for example, a 39-year-old schoolteacher, was raising two teenaged boys. My soon-to-be stepfather living with us wasn’t quite yet 30. Several single elderly women owned houses in the neighborhood in the town now known for astronomical property values but which at the time was the epitome of modest. I don’t recall anyone being wealthy. Regardless, everyone faced a new challenge in a real estate landscape about to blast off: homelessness.

    Life, as they say, as if they thought nobody would understand this if they didn’t say it, is full of surprises. I couldn’t have known then what a chukar was, for example. I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d end up living on a golf course, or that I’d be a school teacher, or a professor, or a bagpiper, or a brewer, or someone who failed to appreciate avocados until after he left the home whose landslide swallowed the two big avocado trees (and my brother’s surfboard) that supplied my mother with gallons of guacamole she did not try very hard to convince me was delicious.

    And today on my way back to the truck after a hunt I found a very weathered $800 at the base of a bush . That was a surprise.

    Another surprise is coming. Stay tuned.

    Oh, birds seem to be surprisingly plentiful so far this season.