Member Details - Tips From This Hunt

 

 

Here Today Gone Tomorrow

(By Karl DeHart)

 

“This is my honey hole, I guarantee there will be birds!” or “I’ve never been there without bagging close to my limit” or “I was just there a week ago and the birds were thick!” or how about the comment, “This is my secret spot” and then you pull up on a Thursday at 8 a.m. with 2 cars already there.  Any avid bird hunter has had these experiences, a hint at a grand spot and then nothing or next to nothing when you hunt it.  Did you hunt it wrong, was your dog chasing everything up out of sight, are you in the right spot, or were the moon and Venus just not aligned properly?

 

Humans are most times just as patterned as the birds are, we keep returning to the same spots even when we aren’t successful all the time.  Most of us, even avid bird hunters do not pay attention to the minute details, which may help you avoid the less productive days.  I recently sent Upland Idaho member Devon to my favorite chukar spot.  This spot is not far from Boise, requires a river crossing, and has always produced birds when I’ve been there.  In fact, while deer hunting the area less than a week before I had run into a large covey of chukar.  Devon showed up and could not find a single bird!  Not one, Nada, Zilch, Zero…Wow!  After a week or so of banging my head against the wall for not guiding him to the right spot and reviewing some journal entries I think I’ve figured out part of the problem.  I hadn’t ever hunted this area this early in the season.  So even with seeing one covey the week before it didn’t mean the area was loaded, as it had been when I’ve hunted it.  The next question to answer is why not, but that is a book in itself.

 

Here is another example, the email from Todd, an Upland Idaho member, read something like, “…we saw 20 ruffed grouse within the first 200 yards and got into quail and chukar too”.  They had an awesome trip hunting western Idaho.  Three weeks later I went to the spot they hunted and I didn’t see a single ruffed grouse and just one very skittish chukar.  So where did I go wrong.  I didn’t pay attention to the details in his email and they were there.  Also, I didn’t think about ruffed grouse ecology before I took my trip to this ruffed grouse hot spot.  While I was there I should have switched the area I was hunting instead of focusing on the basic idea that the birds would still be where someone else found them. 

 

Todd’s email provided important information, he told me it was hot which concentrates the birds around water sources.  His email was sent to me when there were plenty of leaves on the shrubs and trees to provide cover and his email was sent to me (I bet) when the shrubs and plants still had fruit in the riparian zones.  I hunted after days of regular rain, there were puddles of water scattered around from the rain, it had cooled to around a 50 degree high, there were no leaves on the deciduous vegetation for cover, and I only found one little area of snowberry that had fruit.  Conditions were completely different then when Todd hunted.  I should have pushed the side ravines; which contained thick shrubs for the birds to hide in and that is where I found them the next day at a different spot. 

 

And by the way, take your own advice…this means me!  Do you remember the Member Tip of keeping your gun ready at all times, yeah, that’s right, it bit me hard this time.  I hoofed my butt hard for a couple hours and was returning to the truck.  I was carrying my gun in my left hand just about to bring it up to start unloading it.  I was 30 yards from the truck.  Z all of a sudden takes a right turn and 2 roosters and a hen blast out from the high grass around a cement covert.  It took me by surprise enough that all I did was watch them sail into the next county much like sharp-tail grouse do.  What a way to end that part of my hunt.

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