Training on wild quail yesterday

Yesterday I went to my lease in West Texas for the first time this year.  It was as described by friends who went this past weekend, lots of tall native grasses and weeds.  Lots of rain at the right time meant a good hatch for sure but it also means taller than normal cover.

The coveys are healthy with …20 plus birds per covey but the broom weed, essential weed for quail habitat, was waist high and taller in some places.  Broom weed not only produces a tiny seed for quail to eat but more importantly, it provides overhead camouflage / cover from avian predators.

We ran Gunner first.  He is an hour all-age dog (big running bird dog) and it was extremely difficult to follow him due to the tall cover.  He did a nice job and was not very tired at the end of his hour.  He had a stop to flush 45 and a non-productive 54 minutes.  He looked good overall, that is, when we could see him!

Then I ran a hunting dog (Mandy) with a fully trained shooting dog (Lady - shooting dog is a bigger ranging gun dog).  It was warm and the cover really stifled their run.  Though we ran them two different locations, there was no bird work.  The birds can run freely with the good overhead cover thus they either ran or flushed rather than hold.  Quite interesting.

Next we ran Katie and Annie.  Annie is a young pup that got into deer and ran off in good fashion.  Katie hung with us but her owner had not gotten her into shape so she was out of gas in 15 minutes.

My dog Sarah ran and also had a stop to flush but Don managed to kill a bobwhite cock bird over her with his new Huglu 28 ga. sxs in which Sarah promptly retrieved.  Sarah was out of shape as I did not take her to Montana so she was out of gas in about 15 minutes.  Again, heavy cover was taking its toll in many ways.

Several times the weeds were taller than the ranger and I was wishing I had brought horses and ridden Mike, a horse of nearly 16 hands.

It was a short day overall as I left home around 6:45 a.m. and did not arrive to the lease until about 9:45.  Time was taken to get dogs out, watered and pottied.  The ranger was made ready and by the time we put a dog on the ground it was 10:45.  We ran dogs all day with the exception of lunch.

I had planned on running approximately double what ran but the heavy cover made following dogs tough and many times we had to stop, turn off the engine and page the dogs with my DT systems SPT 2432 to find out where they were located.  On one occasion we had to pull out my Tracker Radio brand receiver to locate the lost dog as the dog was out of pager range.  Thank goodness for Tracker Radio’s!

At sunset we were done and dogs, ranger, equipment were loaded to go home.  We were covered in pollen and various seeds, dust, etc from plants that had blown on us in the process of running dogs. 

I have skin allergies to some weeds and so a 3 hour trip home and I was quickly in the shower scrubbing pollen etc. off.  Bathe in some HC 1% to prevent red rash and swelling and I was good to go

I plan on returning but with my horse until we get some good wet killing freezes to reduce the cover!

Take care and take a kid hunting (when the cover is reduced!).

Dave