There is not much that is more exciting than approaching your bird dog on point waiting for the eruption of sound and feathers. What is even more exciting is not knowing what type of bird is going to rise in front of your dog. One of the great things about living in Idaho as a bird hunter and bird dog trainer is the variety of upland game birds. While most upland game birds stick to a preferred habitat, often these habitats overlap. This offers hunters a chance at bagging multiple species on a single hunt.

While some species of birds will hardly ever be found together, quite a few have habitat that overlaps. Blue and Ruffed Grouse are often found in the same hunt because their habitats overlap. While you won’t generally find forest grouse in the rocks and chukars in the forest, many species lend themselves to a multiple species bag hunt.

If you are looking to bag multiple species in a single hunt, hunt the fringes of habitats when possible. Huns and pheasants like being around agriculture fields so hunt those edges. Sharptails and sage grouse like big expanses of sage and grass. It is possible to get into all of those species in certain areas. Chukars and huns can be found together, but usually huns are taken incidentally in chukar country. There are many other species that can be mixed and we’ve found it really fun getting mixed bags. It really adds to the excitement and mystery of what might flush in front of the dog. – Nick Muckerman

Another cool sight we had while camping on Cove Mountian. They were just hanging out midday feeding together. One thing that was interesting was the difference in development stage in the elk antlers and the mule deer antlers we saw. The mule deer bucks we saw seemed to be way behind the elk in stage of development.

If you live in Utah and didn’t draw a deer or elk tag, today is the day to get online and purchase remaining permits. There are still spike elk and any-bull elk tags, as well as archery deer permits. Last year I my hunting buddy waited to purchase his archery deer tag and didn’t get a tag, because they were sold out.

If you are interested, it is also time to put in for the antlerless big game drawing. Go to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources web site and click on the on-line licence sales.

 

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My sister, brother-in-law, my wife and I went turkey hunting in Southern Utah this weekend. As we always do when we get together, we had a ball. There were turkeys around, but they were pretty quiet and they didn’t much to do with our calling; that is, they didn’t want much to do with the guy’s calling. One of the evenings the two ladies went out together to see if they could find a turkey. About an hour before sunset they came driving back into camp. When they drove up we were just about to head out to try to put some turkeys to bed for the night so we would be ready for the morning hunt.

We asked them what was up and they said that they had already put them to bed. “Huh?” Yeah, put one to bed in the back of the truck! Turns out that they just went about a half mile up the road and saw a couple of toms displaying for some hens off in a meadow. When they drove by the hens moved off, but the toms stayed around. The girls drove on up the road and snuck back to the edge of the meadow and started yelping on a slate call. (We showed them how to use it about 10 minute before leaving camp.)

The toms fired right up and came in. At one point the birds got a little nervous, slicked down and started to move off, but a purr and a yelp turned them right around and brought them back in to within gun range. Unfortunately the ladies were sitting about 20 yards apart and there was only one tom within shotgun range, but that tom was a dandy. He had a 10″ beard and spurs over an inch long.

They great thing was that where the guys couldn’t call a tom in to save our souls, the ladies pulled one within range with all the finesse of a coy hen. Congratulations, ladies!
 

 

I just heard what some of the 2008 Utah Governor’s hunting permits went for this last week at the Sportsman Show in Salt Lake. All I have to say is WOW!

       Mule Deer $187,500
       Rocky Mt. Elk $150,000
       Bighorn Sheep $85,000
       Desert Bighorn Sheep $55,000
       Shiras Moose $24,000 

This is hard to wrap my head around.

 

Friday, when we were walking through the marsh to our duck spot we flushed quite a few snipe. I have been known to drive quite a ways for a good snipe hunt, so we left early for the blind Saturday. I stopped at the hardware store on the way and bought the smallest steel shot I could find (#4 shot) since I actually missed a snipe Friday through a hole within my pattern of Kent #2′s at 35 yards.

On the mile walk through the marsh out to the blind, there is an area perfect for snipe. We spent an hour trying to walk up birds. Quite a few of them flushed out of range, but I did manage to shoot a brace. They are a beautiful bird that is so cryptically colored that they are impossible to retrieve without a dog.

If you are looking for snipe, look for wetmeadow areas or marshy areas where the soil is totally saturated or the water is no more than 2″ deep. Look for areas where there is good grass type cover from 5″ to 16″ tall and thick enough to hide birds, but not so thick that they can’t flush right out of it.

When snipe hunting, be cognizant of the dog and your partner’s location; snipe flush low and fast, and quick level shots are the norm. Similar to quail hunting, these shots are the most dangerous. The safety advantage here is that the cover is very low and things tend to stand out. 

The duck hunt…? We had a fun evening. It wasn’t as good as yesterday because the wind wasn’t blowing, but we did have quite a few decoy right in.

 

 Photo: http://www.bentler.us/

When your dog has done his part to find the birds for you, now its is up to you. Here are three ideas to help you improve your shooting success this season. First, always carry your gun at the ready. I have learned this from personal experience and from watching some exceptional upland gunners.  

Have the gun at the ready, slanted across the front of your body about waist level. This is the beginning of smooth mount, one which brings your cheek to the stock and the barrel in line with your eye. Your eye is tracking the bird followed by a crisp trigger pull and continuing the follow through; all which culminates in a successful shot.

 Now, I understand that you can’t walk all day long in this position, but when you are in good bird habitat, try to spend more of your time in this ready position than not. I was amazed when I actually watched a good friend of mine, and very successful bird hunter, spend most of his time with his gun in front of him at the ready. When he mounts it seems slow and deliberate, yet in reality, it is fast and accurate. “Slow is steady, and steady is fast (and accurate).”

Second, as the bird flushes, take the extra fraction of a second to ensure your footing so that you have a stable shooting base. If you don’t have a stable, balanced shooting base, nothing else matters. I think this is one of the main reasons chukars are so hard to hit; you are always on steep rocky slopes with difficult footing, where it’s tough to quickly get a stable shooting base. A sound base allows you to smoothly swing through a flying bird, which is critical to connecting.

Third, as the bird flushes, look for its eye. Narrowing your focus down to the birds eye ensures that you are tracking the bird (aim small, miss small), and it helps you hit the bird in the killing zone (head and neck). When I can tell the gender of a flushing quail I am confident that the bird is going to fall. This doesn’t happen very often with these feathery buzz-balls, but when my focus is so narrow that I can see that much detail, the bird crumples every time.

By having your gun at the ready, and taking the extra fractions of a second to ensure a stable shooting base and narrowing your focus to the eye of the bird, you will find that you connect more often and improve your success on birds this season. After all, you owe it to your dog.

It’s August and it’s hot! Nevertheless, fall bird season is right around the corner. (Just a reminder, if you want a Utah Sage-grouse permit, tomorrow is the day.) Dove season is less than 4 weeks away. Right now I am looking at a passel of doves on my training ground; I’m praying that we don’t get the usual rainy, cool weather about August 28th, which sends the doves packing. Another 15 days after the dove season and the forest grouse season will be underway. The grouse season is when I get really keyed up (it has begun!).

For most hunters in Utah, they are dreaming of antlers about now. Not me, I’m dreaming of a dog locked up on point and having the rush of two following pairs of chukars coming up at my feet. I also can hear the whistling wings of ducks zipping over head just as the gray light is forming.

It’s nice now, that the training birds are just getting old enough to start using them for dog training. Now’s the time to get the dog tuned up in the yard before you can hit a game preserve to really tune him up for the field.

My last post got me thinking about unlikely hunting dogs. When I was a kid hunting in Rexford, Kansas, one of my hunting mentors, (Mr.) Carol Gould had a great little cocker spaniel that would shag doves as long as you would shoot them. He was like a ferret working up pheasants, though Carol didn’t take him too much because his coat would get so tangled with cockle-burrs.

A friend of mine recently took up hunting and converted his mongrel dog, Tyson, to hunt grouse and rabbits. There’s no telling what breeds Tyson descends from, at least not from any hunting stock I recognize. But he does a great job.

The funniest though, was a guy we ran into duck hunting along Farmington Bay near the Great Salt Lake. He was hunting with an Australian Heeler. It was bitter cold; he had a neoprene vest on the dog, and the dog seemed to be loving the outing. The owner, I never did catch his name, had shot a merganser and it had sailed way way out on some thin ice, where he was still up and alive. (My favorite part was the dog’s name, “Kowalski.”) Kowalski was sent on the retrieve. He blasted out there, then when confronted with a large hissing duck, instead of picking it up, he started circling and driving it back to the blind. I can still hear the owner yelling, “fetch it up, Kowalski!” He looked at my hunting partner and I and said, a little sheepishly, ”He doesn’t exactly come by it naturally.” We still laugh about that today.

The fact is that all dog are canines and are related back to wolves and wild dogs, so it shouldn’t be suprising that with some work, they all can hunt. On the other hand, hard-wiring (genetics and breeding) can’t be overlooked. It’s what makes a cow dog circle the herd and a retriever fetch.

Send me your stories about your unlikely hunting dog.

  

Two of my favorite things about spring: Hunting wild turkeys and hunting wild morels. Oh yeah, and eating BBQ turkey and sauteed morels.

The turkey was a Merriam’s turkey from the Paunsagaunt unit in southern Utah (near Tropic Reservoir) and the morels came from a top secret spot somewhere nearby. All in the same day. What a day!

I’d like to say that the dogs helped out somehow (my awesome truffel sniffing hounds), but they didn’t.