Western Wings: Back-road Birds

Originally published in the March/April 2023 issue of The Pointing Dog Journal  – Subscribe! 

Pick ’em up, put ’em down. Sounds funny, but the key to back-road birds is often boot leather, not tire rubber. Sure, especially in the West, a sturdy rig is a must for bird hunters. It is the magic carpet that takes you for a ride, but only to the end of the road. Once you put it in park, shank’s mare is what will deliver you unto decent hunting. Sometimes, it’s a lotta miles. Other times, a few thousand yards is plenty.

The devil is in the details. The West is laced with millions of miles of gravel and dirt roads, rural highways, two-tracks, and cattle trails, but which ones are worth the effort? A bad choice could mean hours of trudging, stumbling for no birds, disappointed dog, flat tire, and very real risk of someone (eventually) finding your bleached bones at the bottom of a canyon. Narrowing the focus to someplace where the odds are in your favor is step one. Identifying access, terrain, cover, and other factors that boost your chances of success are another. So let’s get started finding birds in the back of beyond.
First, we’ll narrow down our options. Step One is easy: you’re hankering for a wild chukar, or yearn for the big-sky sharptails populating your dreams. Maybe you’ve got family obligations and have a hall pass for one day in the field between in-law visits. Online and personal digging will steer you in the general direction, and that’s when the real fun begins.

Start here…or there.

Whether it’s Montana Huns or New Mexico Gambel’s quail, your success depends in large part on starting in the right place from your general jumping-off point. Online “e-scouting” helps if you’ve done your homework and understand favorable habitat for the birds you’re chasing. But here in the West, there is more good ground to fill all the seasons you and everyone you know will ever have. Social media is rife with blind alleys and overt subterfuge from less-than-generous keyboard warriors, but periodically a nugget shines through. Friends and fellow dog and conservation club members might help.
One time-honored way to narrow it down is to hedge your bets depending on time allotted, your physical condition, even your mood that day when you crank over the ignition. Draw the appropriate circle around your starting line. That’ll give you two good choices and one not so good.

Old school paper maps harken back to an era when self-reliance was a “thing,” and it still is in my house. Tangible, somewhat reliable, just plain cool, posting a big map of the region I’m going to hunt, pondering it with coffee mug in hand, instills a deeper grasp of the area, subtle folds in the landscape, details from property lines to landmarks seeping into my subconscious. On almost every hunt, a niggling detail that was buried deep in my cerebellum finds the light of day, and I’ll detour one ridge south to the only water source in the area. After all, there may be birds nearby.

Easy elk…easy birds?

A well-known big game hunter once built an entire seminar around the premise that the “best elk is 100 yards from the road.” His basic notion is a good one for a couple reasons. First, there’s no sense in working harder for game when one can work smarter. After all, we’re there for dog work, not a Navy SEAL hell week test. Second, above all else, some bird hunters believe you must earn your birds with tire-shredding drives, blisters, skinned knees, and burning lungs. But we’re already close to the middle of nowhere, and slogging miles to the exact middle may not pay off (or it may, as we’ll cover later). If everyone else parks in the next time zone then sets out on a marathon, they might be driving or walking right past a bunch of complacent, content, unmolested birds.

Case in point: I feel funny hunting this spot, because every driver on the state highway can watch my dog work and bad shooting. Luckily, most of them aren’t hunters, and the ones that are think I’m out of my mind. It’s a tiny ribbon of water in a narrow and pug-ugly canyon, the road leading to much prettier and more bird-rich locations a few dozen miles farther east. But I’ve shot valley quail, chukars, and mountain quail along that little tributary, probably because the birds are ignored by almost everyone else with a shotgun cased in their pickup.

Yeah, sometimes, being on a back road is plenty far. Park. Unleash your dog. Go hunting, right there. You may be pleasantly surprised at the lack of tire tracks in your chosen spot, and that’s the point. Once they pass the city limits sign, many hunters aim for the far horizon without a glance at the perfectly good terrain they’re racing past. Birds can’t read maps, and all things being equal, there’s as good a chance they’ve found a serene haven right there, wondering in their birdy brains what the commotion out on the highway is all about.

Here’s another prime example: We’d been roaming the darkest corner of the continental U.S., pounding out the miles from a base in the only “town” in the region. So were a dozen other chukar hunters. Every morning, it was like a Grand Prix running start, everyone peeling out of the parking lot to get to the “good spots” first. After changing yet another flat tire as trucks crammed with dog boxes roared past, my buddy pointed to a cleft in the rocky hills ignored by the hordes. After all, we were only a dozen miles from town when the good stuff with tempting names like Chukar Canyon was a bone-rattling hour or more north on a rutted, washboard road. Ours were the only tire tracks on that desert trail that led to where a limpid pool from a desert spring watered a lush oasis, and several coveys of chukars. I may be a slow learner, but eventually I do pick up a few valuable lessons, including this one. It has served me well in subsequent seasons.

The West is laced with millions of miles of gravel and dirt roads, rural highways, two-tracks, and cattle trails, but which ones are worth the effort?

Or go deep.

The polar opposite is also a sound back-road strategy. A good friend has reminded me time and again that going just one mile farther up a draw, down a valley, over one more ridge…that’s where the untouched birds scratch, unfazed by hunters. He’s right. So, if earning birds is part of your ethic, drive far and fast then lay in plenty of water, pick ’em up, and put ’em down. Just make sure you’ve done your homework and know what the habitat is like back there.

This strategy can pay off, too, as I learned (again) a couple seasons ago. We’d driven as far as we dared, the two-track fading into rocks and sage where we stopped in a cloud of alkali dust. We cut loose the two dogs and started our trek. The first covey flushed at mile seven, the last at mile 14. The dogs logged 31 miles each. We saw no evidence of other hunters: no empty shells, footprints, dust clouds, or litter. At the bottom of the next, accessible-by-Prius canyon, we knew there were at least three competing parties of hunters because we’d driven past them on the way to this godforsaken corner of chukar country. We had the nerve – and the legs, that day – and they didn’t.

Ignore the middle.

Go far or stay close, but ignore the middle ground. Like a bell curve in every 101-level college class, that vast middle is where most humans congregate. Seek the back-pocket habitat most won’t consider (too small, too close, too far, or too scary). If you do run into someone else, they’re probably pretty good folk.
It happened to me, this season. We’d battled barbed-wire gates and winding, boulder-strewn two-tracks, rounding the last ridge only to find two rigs tucked into a hollow, invisible until you were right on top of them. Damned if we were going to turn around. Instead, we crossed the little creek and hunted away from the canyon where we thought they were. Their shots got closer, and we went wider, a wave here and hello there but always a diplomatic distance.

Back at the truck, a dip in the little stream sounded like a good idea for my hard-working wirehair. We limped toward the shady creek bottom, where the other hunters were relaxing, icy bottles in hand. Chat. Who-knows-who and whose dogs. Tall cold one proffered. My kinda people.

What matters most.

Big or small, study the back-road spots you think hold promise for critical attributes besides access via gravel. A water source is one, especially early in the season. When you’re doing your homework, put a red circle around those blue lines and blobs. Terrain favorable to your chosen species narrows down your choices, as obvious as it sounds (or does it?). Flat ground may harbor valley quail but not many chukars. Knee-high grass is sharptail territory, but not Hun country. Oak woodlands are where Mearns’ quail chitter, but Gambel’s will be downslope in the sandy arroyos. Do some research, and master your mobile app’s 3-D feature or other ways to plop your digital self on the ground and look closely at the habitat. Bird’s-eye views are helpful only if you know the difference between Medusahead rye and cheatgrass. At ground level, the distinction is clear and will save you miles of fruitless “field research.”

I also like the ugly spots nobody else thinks are worth the effort. (Yeah, and I own German wirehairs, too, so….) If a place has two or three of the above attributes but lacks the one every book and video says is crucial, I’m putting it in four-wheel drive and starting right there. Birds may be muttering in the brush there because the ideal habitat one ridge over is already taken. They might have been pushed. Or they may just be passing through. The greater likelihood is, no humans will bother slowing down to check it out.

Need motivation? A couple years ago, a massive wildfire had blackened one of my favorite desert creek bottoms, now a scarred lunar landscape. But from the road, I could just see green riparian area a couple miles up the draw. A short trek through the ash put me in a surreal setting: blackened slopes contrasted with a lush green band extending a dozen yards on each side of the sparkling stream. When I cleaned them, the crops of the valley quail and chukars were full of toasted cheatgrass seed.
By definition, “back road” implies far from civilization: no search-and-rescue, absent mobile phone signal, scarce motor vehicle fuel, and few hospitals. Sometimes, the best that happens in some spots is their getting crossed off the list of future hunts. But once in a blue moon, a rose blooms among the thorns. How you find those rare blossoms is key.