I set out in December on a six week adventure that would take me from Connecticut to Kansas to Arizona to Sonora, Mexico to Michigan and back.
The first part of the trip is, for the most part, the story of my failed quest to shoot a Lesser Prairie-Chicken. Although population numbers were not great for chickens this year - this would have to be the year since they may not be legal game next year. There is paperwork in progress to list the Lesser Prairie-Chicken on the federal threatened and endangered list and all seasons will close if that happens.
First stop was SW Kansas to try for those little grouse. I had spots to try along the Sand Hills of Kansas and in the Cimarron National Grassland. I had 7 days to hunt chickens and in the end I could have used a couple days more. I went to the Sand Hills first and didn’t find much to my liking, a lot of overgrazed and weedy prairie and no signs of birds (other than pheasants and I wasn’t there for them).
Pete looking good in the frosted weedy Sand Sage prairie.
We moved to the National Grassland after two days - I had information on several areas to try. We found birds right away and would run into them many days. I had read a lot about the wild flushing habits of these birds, but in talking to people where I was hunting and seeing them for myself, they were runners. We would hit an area of scent, a lot of scent over a large area – as Pete would work upwind the scent would diminish and he would end up following some lukewarm scent quartering downwind. This happened over and over in a couple areas. I have shot all the other prairie grouse over Pete and he has handled them very well, but we just could not get these birds. We put up a total of 2 birds in 7 days – all flushes at distances where the shot was not an embarrassment to miss, but an embarrassment to take.
Nice numbers of Pheasants, but I wasn’t there for them. As dogs do, Pete loves the ditch chickens and likes nothing better than to get into them. One of the major heart breaks was we put up a cock pheasant in the middle of the prairie and I dropped it a long bit out. Pete brought it back and handed it to me and got birdy literally 10’ from where I had shot the bird. Anyway, I assumed another pheasant and we worked that bird for a bit and it was running really good, I released him to put that bird up in the air and once he was able to put his full pressure on it after an impressive chase a Prairie chicken popped at 60-70 yards. Ouch! We worked the area for another hour until be found another bird that held really tight. Pete paused and stuck his head in the bush and the bird ran and didn’t stop for a long time. Pete relocated that bird and put it up after a long high speed chase, it flushed low and right over his head – a good ways out but definitely shootable but it didn’t clear Pete until out of gun range. I always would rather have a bird in the air and see it than a ghost that you wonder what you had – I’m glad to have put up a couple, but that was painful.
I got pretty good at finding their loafing areas by eye and found lots of sign in places. The encounters with birds were always associated with areas where I was finding sign. One area I hunted several times was 4 adjacent sections, so a couple thousand acres and a dozen or couple dozen birds on the lek for that large area.
This is their characteristic habitat in the area I was - Sand Sage mid- to short-grass prairie, it was quite beautiful – you can kinda see it with the contrast of the yellow grass and purple sage. Spectacular in low light.
A lot of the area had been treated with herbicide in the ’70s to remove Sand Sage to improve the quality of the prairie for cattle. The herbicide was either applied to a whole section or not and the neat thing is that the grasses that are associated with the herbicide application area are dominated with reddish grasses (and no sage), whereas in the area with the sage the grass are yellow species. Very striking visually. You can see a section over in the top of the pic where they didn’t apply herbicide. We worked one covey in this area and they gave us the slip 3 times on the last day. They were using this field to fly into a weedy corn field morning and night, so I knew they were there and I suspected that they were loafing in the sand sage the next section over. We hit them once and lost them, a half hour later found them only 100 yards downwind from where we hit them the first time and again a bit later. Never saw them, but they were there and headed for the loafing cover.
People pass shoot chickens at dawn and dusk; these particular birds were flying right at legal to and from the fields. I had a shot one morning at a bird moving fast way out and whiffed. I would have like to be backed up on that shot by a certain old man with his ’97.
There was also quite a bit of this Yucca in areas. Pete really like the rodents (kangaroo rats?) that were living at the base of those Yucca. He must have sniffed 4000 of those Yucca.
Pete always interested in meeting a new friend.
Lunch break. If you haven’t done a trip like this with a dog, you have to work pretty hard not to burn the dog out. I have to manage Pete pretty carefully since he loves to run fast and hard. His feet were in good shape before we started – nice and hard, but that grass takes a toll on them and the nose and chest. After a few days, I was running him part of the day with boots to keep the damage down.
I was excited to get into some Bobwhites, since I hadn’t shot honest-to-goodness wild ones. These birds are my first two that flushed as singles. I eventually put up a few more singles and a covey that day, pretty neat.
They are pretty…
If you aren’t killing stuff like you would like at least you have sunrises and sunsets – right?!?!!?
Even cut corn can be pretty sometimes. There were so many pheasants in this field - it killed me.
So I failed on my quest for the Lesser Prairie-Chicken and headed from KS through OK, TX and NM to pick Jen and Gus up in Phoenix for the next part of the adventure….
