First published on The Upland Soul.

It’s common knowledge among avid upland hunters that game birds follow boom-or-bust cycles that are largely dependent on the habitat and climatic conditions in their home range. You can add all the guzzlers you want and reduce bag limits to near-zero, but unfortunately, there’s only so much that can be done to bolster populations if Mother Nature isn’t intending on cooperating at specific times throughout the year.

Most chukar hunters are also extremely reticent to share anything in the way of, well, any form of information at all. Each of these devil birds is hard-won, and the best chukar spots out this way are protected with blood oaths of absolute silence. For good reason.

I know of the prevailing sentiment back East that the ruffed grouse is the king of all game birds, an assertation which find absolutely ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong; they’re neat. If it was all I had around me, I’d probably like them more, too. But one trip into the arid chukar hills dotted with hundred-year-old mining debris and open-range herds of black baldys and the covey flush after an easy two hundred calorie burn up the side of a cliff should disabuse even the most aggressively proud flatlander of those notions.

It’s been a banner year for chukar hunting out here… wherever here is. Building on two years of average to above-average recruitment, we’ve had the biggest coveys in a half-decade or even longer. More birds in more places and more hunters in more places, if you had to sum it up in a sentence or less.

The highlight was getting Elko Baby his first chukar. I saved one of the wings and dried it out in a sprinkle of borax, and it will go on a plaque with his first Gambel’s, too. This is what the abundance of birds meant to me this season; more trips, weekly trips with the dog so he can do his favorite thing in the world and find the birds.

With each contact he gets a little sharper.

Usually I stick closer to home and chase Gambel’s for the majority of the season. Maybe make a poke or two up north for the devil birds. But this season has been all the chukar, all the tume. Elko Baby likes the chukars. It runs in his blood, hailing from the legendary Sunburst Brittanys kennel out by Hell’s Canyon. Chukar is what they do up there.

He’s young — less than two — and he still has a bit of puppiness left in him. In between solid points and clutch recoveries, he’ll still bump birds here and there. He loves it, and I love his enthusiasm with each flush. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. I am still getting a handle on the “bird dog training” thing, and I doubt I’ll ever be as keyed-in as most of my friends. Maybe I couldn’t care less.

We hike, we shoot a lot, we have a great time. Him and I.

I’ve spent more days in the field than any season past, not solely for the promise of birds, but for the cumulative experience of it all. It is the archetypal upland hunt, the memories themselves a trophy of the highest caliber as this wonderful boom year has finally wound down.

It won’t always be this way. No real precip to speak of this year as of press time. It seems wildly unlikely that next year will be a repeat of what we experienced for the last few months. Elko won’t always be able to put on seventeen hard miles and get up and do it again the next day. There will come a time when he won’t be here at all.

Some mornings, it’s real hard to drag myself out of bed at 0400 and spend a hundred dollars on gas to drive three hours each way into the chukar hills.

I think about the Aurelius quote — “… is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” — and about the effervescent nature of every single opportunity we have. It’s some sort of moral mandate not to spoil these chances, these gifts that we’ve been given.

I think, too often actually, about another quote from a few philosophers across the pond.

“So understand
Don’t waste your time always searching for those wasted years
Face up, make your stand
And realize you’re living in the golden years”

The boom years. The golden years. They’re here for the taking and once they’re gone, they’re not coming back.