Member Details - Tips From This Hunt

• Do not flock shoot, pick a bird and follow it until it drops. I even take a second shot at birds while they are fluttering if they are hit but not dropping fast enough. I’ve lost too many birds that hit the ground running.
• If a bird is down and it is running hard, sluice the bird if it is safe to do so. This can mean the difference between harvesting the bird or not, even with a dog.
• If you are not finding birds where you expect to find them search the escape cover, this may produce some great shooting.
• Scotch is good anytime of the day.

Scotch in the Morning

By Karl DeHart

The two Hungarian partridge rose together, close together, and also within 20 feet of the end of Z’s nose and me. Their flight was low and straight at first but as they caught the breeze a smooth arc developed in their flight path to my left, perfect. The whole time they remained only a foot apart. When they started to arc away, still close together, I said to myself, “Oh yeah, Scotch!” I had to let them get out a little before I shot to allow the shot pattern to open up. I was focused intently on the birds and as they got out to around 25 yards my body mechanically reacted; swinging the gun to follow and then the shot sent both tumbling. As if they had coordinated a routine, they somersaulted in unison to the ground. I smiled and called out “Dead birds” to encourage Z but she didn’t need any encouragement. It was awesome to have called the shot in my mind and then follow through with it. For those that haven’t heard the term before a Scotch is when you take multiple birds with one shot, in this case a Scotch double. Hmmm…the last sentence…key words…shot, Scotch, case, double, multiple…you’d think I was having a grand morning! I was.

My hunt north of Emmett was turning out to be a banner day. I had only been in the field for a couple hours and I had 4 chukar and 4 Hungarian partridge in the bag. I had bagged the Scotch double but also taken a double off of a chukar partridge rise but it took 3 shots with the chukar. The morning hunt would end an hour or so later with another hun and a quail, 10 birds total. I wish my hunting partners had had as much success but they did get some shooting in and Zoë had a really nice point that I really enjoyed watching.

Sunday proved to be just as exciting for me as Saturday, I had returned to the area with an Upland Idaho member, Justin. He brought a nice Rossi side-by-side 12-gauge and was ready to do some shooting. He’s a Marine, and you can tell by how he holds his shotgun when moving in to flush birds. He was relatively new to upland game bird hunting and

looking to bag his first bird and he did, watch the video clip. We found him lots of birds too, well I should say Z found him birds and he got shots at a half dozen or more flushes. He brought down a couple birds and fulfilled a promise to his mom of a dinner of upland game birds for her birthday.

The conditions were perfect for both days. Earlier in the week we had a

few inches of snow followed by a couple days of bright sunshine. The snow on the south facing slopes was melting fast, clearing up and drawing the birds. The wind was minimal; I expected the breeze to be coming uphill so we worked each hillside from ¾ up to the top and this allowed the dogs to scent much of the terrain. The odd thing that happened is the birds were not in the spots I expected.

I had encourage Carl and Colleen to hunt the areas I thought were most likely to hold birds and they ran into far fewer birds then I did while hunting the margins. The birds were often in what I would imagine as escape cover or marginal areas. These are areas that I believe the birds learn to go to when they have significant hunting pressure. These are the spots that most hunters ignore because the brush is too thick, the snow too deep, or the slope too steep. Maybe I have Colleen and Carl to thank for my success since they could have been pushing birds to me as they worked the more favorable areas.

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