Flying High Thanks To A Wet Spring And Hot, Dry Summer, Bird Seasons A Walk In The Park For Hunters

The last of the upland bird seasons end today, but the smile is likely to linger on a hunter’s face.

A booming hatch of pheasants, quail and partridge throughout much of Eastern Washington last summer made way for a memorable season to go afield with a bird dog.

A wet spring provided cover. Then the hot, dry summer produced perfect nesting and chick-rearing conditions.

The weather also allowed rodents and other prey to prosper. I don’t recall a year when I saw more mice scurry under my feet, or more hawks plunging into the fields around me.

A good bird year snaps you to your senses and gets you out of the house. You realize the best hiking is off the beaten paths where discovery is down every draw and around every rubble of scabrock.

You remember the satisfaction of sore legs in the evening, and an exhausted dog at your feet.

While hunting along the Snake River recently I noticed numerous deer skeletons, picked clean by scavengers. Sportsmen and a few ranchers and farmers are about the only ones who knew about the outbreak of blue-tongue disease that killed hundreds of deer in the Snake River country late this summer.

The coyotes I saw there seemed to be bushy and prospering on the windfall.

News about the good hatch of upland birds roused many sportsmen who hadn’t uncased their shotguns in years. The faint-hearted, however, tend to fade away even during a great pheasant season.

There’s something humbling about pursuing a prey that has a brain the size of a marble and still outsmarts you nine times out of 10.

Two weeks ago, a couple of buddies and I didn’t see another hunter in a serious day of hiking on public land and a 200-mile round trip.

Wind-chill factors in the minus degrees may have had something to do with it.

Certainly, it wasn’t a shortage of game.

As we drove home, with the dogs steaming in the back of the van, covies of Hungarian partridge glided across the road in front of the windshield. Dozens of ringnecks beamed with bronze, red, green and white in the late afternoon light as they picked gravel along the highway.

While yuppies wearing clean T-shirts were heading out on manicured forest trails this fall, bird hunters were tramping through the cheatgrass and along the edges of stubble fields.

Hunters hike like kids. They don’t travel in straight lines. They walk with their eyes open wide.

While working ahead one day, my Brittany spaniel spooked a great-horned owl that dived from its perch and careened through the same tunnel in the hawthorns the predator had used many times to harvest a meal.

This time, however, there was a problem.

Me.

The breeze fanned my face as wings flared and the bird found a few inches to spare around my head for an escape.

I may be the only creature that’s come eyeball-to-eyeball with the big owl - and lived to shudder about it.

My dog, Radar, was the source of many discoveries this fall. He flushed a rare brace of sharp-tailed grouse out of the Lincoln County sagebrush. He led me to owl pellets and a rattlesnake, too.

One day, he gave himself an acupuncture treatment by rolling in a rotting porcupine carcass I never would have noticed without his nose for detail.

I plucked the quills and put them in a jar for my daughters.

No bird hunting experience needs to be wasted.

I still have the cape from the last ringneck that folded to a load of No. 5 shot just before the pheasant season ended with December.

The weather was cold and sunny. When Radar brought the rooster to my numb hands, I paused longer than usual over the stunning quality of the feathers.

A late-season pheasant is full and bright, like a Christmas tree once the last ornament has been put in place.

Kent Mason, an electrician, was doing some work at my house the next day. He said he had more to do, but the job would have to wait a day or two.

“I was just looking at the rooster hanging in your garage,” he said. “It reminds me the season’s about over and I need to get out.”

Even in sparse bird years, there’s no greater adventure than following a bird dog’s nose.

This year was sweeter, though, because the walks usually ended with a point, a shot, and the best meal a hunter can spread on a family table.