As we turn off of the highway and onto the dusty dirt road heading towards the chukar hills, our bird dog stands up in the back seat of the pickup and sticks his nose out of the crack in the window, snorts, and wags his stubby tail in excitement. The last time we turned up this road we were heading out for a bitter cold January hunt. Dogs have a keen sense of memory. Does he remember the turn, the smell, or something else?
The chukar hills are always turning with the seasons. Bright red Indian paintbrush, brilliant yellow arrowleaf balsamroot, deep pink sweet pea, purple Rocky Mountain penstemon, multi-colored wild lupine, verdigris sagebrush, and spring green grasses are now flourishing after a long winter. The reward from the snow melt is habitat and food for wildlife and a new batch of chukar that soon will be hatching in these hills.
We all wandered in different directions across the hillside covered in wildflowers blanketing the ground in a blaze of yellow and red. It was a short walk to admire the views and to collect some arrowleaf balsamroot seeds for our own wildflower garden. We eventually met up and sat down on some flat rocks in the warmth of the setting sun to quietly take a moment to reflect on the last time we hunted on these chukar hills.
Six more months. Spring is such a tease. Angus and his new little buddy, Ava (I wish I could say it was our new puppy, but it’s a friend’s) got into some Huns today in some nearby BLM land. Ava watched Angus hog the points and got snoutfuls of bird scent. She’s going to be great come September. Angus missed some birds that we flushed, but finally seemed to dial it in near the end of our walk.
Still, the waiting.
Angus points in the distance while Ava takes notes
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.
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.
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.
I’m not a spring chicken anymore. Birthdays come at me with increasing speed. But what motivates me to stay healthy is knowing that to spend time in the hills with my dog I have to be pretty fit. The hills chukar prefer are steep. The steeper the better. The footing is usually terrible or worse. Loose rocks, often hidden by mats of thick medusahead, can trip you or worse. Medusahead is a noxious weed originally introduced as cattle feed, but is now recognized actually to injure the mouths of livestock when they eat the dried plant; tiny barbed seeds (awns) get impaled in their mouths and gums, which can in extreme cases be lethal if not treated. And imagine the impact on your poor hunting dog, getting the awns stuck between toes and in the ears.
Medusahead in its dried, most dangerous form
For an off-trail hiker, as all chukar hunters must be, Medusahead makes for a thick carpet of rough, sticky walking which can grab your boots and actually trip you, especially if the matted plant-carpet is covering rocks. Medusahead is different than cheat grass, which is a staple food of chukar, and also a noxious weed. But Medusahead, incredibly, is spreading so rapidly throughout the West that it’s threatening to choke out cheat grass, as well as other native grasses. As if that’s not enough, the unusually high silica content in medusahead makes it the perfect catalyst for explosive and catastrophic rangeland fires. Medusahead is a well-known, highly studied problem and some programs are having an impact on its damaging spread. But it is so widespread that it’s hard to imagine it can be eliminated.
What can you do about it? Not much. You can try not to spread it by removing any seeds or stickers from your shoes and clothing after a hike, and keeping your vehicle out of it so you don’t spread the seeds that way. Or you can contribute to programs that are trying to figure out how to manage or eliminate the weed; search for “medusahead abatement” in your state. Most states in the West have such programs. The Idaho State Department of Agriculture has a Noxious Weed Watch List you can consult for more information.
