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Northern Flight Retrievers!
Published in |
written
by Butch Goodwin Northern
Flight Retrievers
Hello, my name is Butch Goodwin, and I am an addict. (Editors Note: Everybody, “Hi, Butch!”) As many readers probably know, I spent the greater part of my adult life living in Colorado. The waterfowl hunting on the rivers in the area of Colorado where I lived was good, but the upland hunting was dismal at best. Dismal, that is, unless there was a hunting club in the area where pen-raised birds were released. I was lucky; there was a “pheasant farm” close by. My Chesapeakes got lots of exposure to released pheasants and chukars but not much practical hunting experience dealing with terrain and cover where chukars, in particular, actually live — as I discovered when I moved to western Idaho! First, for those of you who continue to hold to the defunct view that the modern Chesapeake Bay retriever still remains merely the quintessential cold-water duck and goose retrieving specialist, let me update your thinking: Chesapeakes show the same intensity for upland hunting that has long made them legendary in the toughest of water and weather conditions. And, chukar hunting requires nearly every bit of intensity a hunter and his dog can muster. From my limited experience chasing chukars at a bird farm, I had long held the view that they were simply some form of a “big quail” that drove dogs crazy with their running in the ditches and across the fields and flew like they were shot out of a wrist-rocket when cornered! Well, at least I was kind of right.
It’s true, chukars absolutely will drive dogs nuts with their running, and they sure do fly like bottle rockets; but it is the terrain that wild chukars favor and their use of that terrain for playing hide-and-seek among the rocks that separates them from their game- farm cousins and from almost every other gamebird on the continent. Terming their preferred home turf as "tough” is an understatement - an understatement that will have all but the best-built and best-conditioned dogs walking at heel in short order. And, I discovered this the hard way when I moved and found myself in close proximity to some of the most prime chukar habitat in the U.S. Around the turn of the 20th century, the first chukars imported to America were released in Illinois; but even with the tremendous amount of feed and cover available, they couldn’t survive. As natives of the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains, the birds were adapted to high, dry country rather than the humid conditions of the East. Then in 1935, when chukars were released in Nevada in arid and rocky areas that more closely resembled their native ranges, the birds flourished. Today, the chukar partridge has become an important gamebird in many Western states where conditions are more closely comparable to its historical habitat. Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho really top the list as prime chukar-hunting states; Washington, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, California, Montana, and parts of western Canada all have significant and steadily increasing populations.
Rather than finding any chukars in the flat ground areas, it is more likely that a covey will be spotted moving up the steep slopes of the hillsides and canyons, and, as I quickly discovered, it is all but futile for a man or dog to attempt to catch up with them. You see, chukars are programmed by Mother Nature to outrun their pursuers by heading uphill along the steepest of slopes and, when pressed or cornered by a dog or hunter, flush like they’re shot out of a cannon and fly back downhill. But over the years, I discovered that taking these natural tendencies of the birds into account could work in my favor if I was smart enough to use the terrain to my advantage. The key to getting into coveys of chukars is to move high across the hillsides, trying to stay parallel with the birds, and to teach my dogs to hunt above me on the hillside (which is often easier said than done). That way, using the bird's natural tendency to fly downhill when flushed, they often come directly over my gun. A flushing dog that puts chukars up below the hunter’s position causes the birds to fly down and away; making for a long downhill, going-away shot - which is tough to hit and often even tougher to retrieve. There are some dogs in any of the retrieving breed that are going to excel at upland hunting and some that simply aren’t going to be able to keep going. It can be futile to continually have to encourage a dog to get out and hunt - when the “hunt” simply may not be in him. This shows itself much more quickly when hunting in the hills than it does when hunting for birds in ditches or on the flat. Hunters need to realize that very often it isn’t the dog’s fault that he doesn’t excel at upland hunting - it is probably the fault of his conformation, i.e., the build or structure that he inherited from his ancestors. It’s a fact of mechanical efficiency that for a dog to be able to hunt all day in the field or the hills, he must have good functional conformation. Put simply, that means a dog with a bit longer legs and longer back with good “reach” in the front and “drive” in the rear. I lost my best chukar hunting Chesapeake a few months back at nearly 15 years of age. He had a show championship, but when he was first put into the show ring, the reaction of the judges and other “knowledgeable” experts was that he was too “rangy.” What they meant was that he didn’t fit the typical example of Chesapeakes commonly seen in the ring; his legs and back were too long compared with what they expected to see. Well, he finished his conformation title in rather short order and spent the rest of his life hunting chukars, pheasants, ducks, and geese; and, now that he is gone, I have a young great-grandson of his with nearly identical structure that I am hoping will someday be able to fill his shoes. I’ll take “rangy,” thank you very much, if it means this youngster is capable of hunting chukars all day long like his granddad!
It’s a natural tendency of a dog to want to drift downhill rather than holding a high line when moving across a hillside. Nothing unusual about that - retriever field trial and hunt test judges use this “downhill suction” to their advantage all the time when setting up marking tests or blinds where the dog must carry a high line across a hillside in order to make the retrieve. It certainly isn’t natural for a dog to hunt uphill unless they are taught to do it, or unless the scent of birds drifting down the hill gives the dog the perception of a reward. So it is particularly important for the chukar hunter to teach his dogs to hunt above him and continue to stay high so that the downhill flushing birds fly over his position - presenting at least a reasonable chance for a shot. Honestly, I don’t think that it is possible for a flushing dog to get too far above a hunter when hunting chukars in steep hills (as long as the dog is controllable from a distance and can be called back if conditions warrant); the birds are going to present themselves flying downhill and overhead regardless of how far above the hunter the dog hunts. When I started teaching my dogs to stay above me, I would pick up a handful of small rocks and keep them in the pocket of my hunting vest and continually toss them uphill along with giving a whistle and arm command to encourage the dog up the hill. Then, as the dogs began finding birds above me on the hillside - with the chukars’ tendency to run uphill, away from them - they caught on and began holding to a high, uphill hunting line on their own. And when they drifted too low, I would just give a whistle command together with an arm signal to hunt back up higher.
You know, I’ve been hunting my Chesapeakes in the canyons and steep hills for chukars for a bit over a decade now, and I can actually think of only one drawback to hunting in these conditions with a Chesapeake: their natural fearlessness and tendency to leap off of things in an effort to make a retrieve. This could make for a dangerous situation if the dog isn’t controllable and broke on a flush to follow the birds’ flight downhill. Although I have never had one of my dogs go off a cliff following a chukar (knock on wood), my friend and Retriever Field Trial Hall of Fame member Dr. John Lundy tells the story of chukar hunting in the 1960s with one of his Chesapeakes that he called The Big Fellow. It seems that this athletic dog, without hesitation, took a huge leap off of a cliff in pursuit of a chukar, landing in the reservoir quite a distance below. Dr. Lundy says that it was so steep that he had to walk nearly a mile along the side of the reservoir to be able to get close enough to the water so that the dog could get out!
So, that’s it. Not long after moving to Idaho, I was introduced to real chukar hunting, and I quickly became an addict. Now I look forward all year long to the days when I can sneak off to hunt these little gray rockets. Let me just check my calendar....
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The two key ingredients for finding chukars are cheatgrass and water. Chukars often consume other food sources, but it is the cheatgrass of the high Western desert that serves their year-round needs. And, just as important to the chukars’ survival as cheatgrass is access to a water source in some of the most arid and rugged terrain imaginable. The birds spend the day high on the broken rocky and talus slopes but must go to water twice each day. During the dry, early weeks of the hunting seasons, knowing water locations is vital to locating birds.
