Feature RJ
January 10

pland gamebirds, depending upon the species, have specific areas where they thrive best – for pheasants, it’s farmland; sharptails and Huns, the grasslands; Gambel’s quail, the cactus-studded desert. These are these birds’ chosen areas where they can establish their home range – the area where they can find in close proximity food, water, shelter from weather and predators, and breeding cover.

Home range size varies, but essentially, the farther apart these factors are – the more time that the bird has to spend getting from one to the other – the less likely there will be a good population. Gamebirds are a prey species, and they don’t like being exposed to predators where they can get picked off for somebody’s dinner. Birds in transit are birds in danger.

We often hear this home range referred to as a bird’s “territory,” but that’s incorrect. Territory is part of the reason a bird chooses a certain home range, but territory is actually linked to breeding; it’s the area within the home range (and sometimes outside it, like when prairie grouse collect at a lek, scattering after breeding) where a bird will go to seek out or attract a mate and make a clutch of little gamebirds.

Typically, territories are established and defended by males of the species, and not just birds. A male ruffed grouse may have a home range of several acres, for example, but his territory is the area immediately around his drumming log, which is where he attracts the hen grouse. Woe be to any other male that ambles into this sphere he controls. Some species have to travel far outside their home ranges to find mates, the best example I can think of being grizzly bears. Such large predators need huge amounts of land to provide enough food to keep their massive carcasses breathing in and breathing out. Overpopulation can become a problem if there are only a few too many grizzlies trying to scratch a living from the same piece of real estate. So, as a species, they are hardwired to practice a strategy of scarcity, those photos of a couple dozen bears temporarily working the same salmon-fishing hole notwithstanding. But that means at breeding time, they have to take their hormones on the road to find a date.

In general, gamebirds don’t defend their home range against others of their species, but they defend their territories from other members of the same sex and species – ever seen a big longbeard tom turkey beat up on an interloping jake? Okay – biology lesson over.

The thing is, those turkeys aside, we don’t hunt birds during their breeding season, so what’s important is the birds’ home range, not territory; not many of us seek out drumming logs during grouse season, though, of course, fall drumming is not uncommon. A bird’s home range is what we hunt when we hunt the bird; and if he has been there any length of time, he knows his home range better than you know your sock drawer. And he will use what it gives him to escape predators, of which we and our dogs are two. Short version: We’re on his turf.

round-based birds (that would include all gamebirds save the migratory ones) escape predators in only three ways: flying, running, or hiding. Usually, from the time your dog starts making game and the bird’s actions indicate it is aware of us, it will use all three to some degree. But a survey of the bird’s habitat – its home range – can give you an idea of which of these options it is most likely to use.
 
Of course, each bird has its preference among these three escape styles: pheasants would rather run, Mearns’s quail would rather hide, and sharptails would, all things considered, just as soon fly. Knowing what style each likes the most and an examination of the habitat you’re hunting can help your success.

For example, if you have ever tried to corner or drive a flock of pheasants in a clean-rowed cornfield, you know it’s like herding cats. Their preference is to run, and you are trying to get them up in the air in gun range in a habitat that’s just flat out made for running; the odds and conditions are all of the birds’ side. The pointing dog guys’ dogs aren’t going to point anything – sorry, they’re not. The birds are going to run far ahead and then fly away well out of range, unless you have a blocker, which is less a blocker and more a designated shooter of birds flushing out of range of the drivers. And they don’t wait until the drivers are near the end of the field before they start flushing. More often these days, it’s when they are being pinched but still out of range of everybody, often the majority of the birds leave the immediate vicinity from the middle of the field.

If we had a choice, the method we wish all birds would choose is the sit-tight-and-hide gambit, because they can hide from our eyes, but not the dog’s nose, one of the three reasons we’ve got hunting dogs, the other two being, in order, to find and retrieve downed birds, and to act as a sandwich-tester at lunch break. 
 
If thin cover makes them run, thick cover encourages them to sit because it’s harder to run in there, and they figure hiding will work and we’ll walk right on by. So, obviously, the best place to hunt pheasants is in habitat that discourages their favorite method and steers them toward ours – thick cover. The bird doesn’t feel the need to run – doesn’t feel as exposed – and is more likely to use the cover to stay put: CRP fields, cattail sloughs, brushy ditchbanks and creekbeds – you know the places. And you know how tight they will sit sometimes. Twice, I have actually stepped on hens.

Take bobwhite quail. “Gentleman Bob” disappeared from the experiences of wingshooters about the same time as nickel beer. After WWII ended, the guys came home, married their lady pen pals, and started families; the country’s population boomed, and with it the need for food and other staples. That meant more and better farming. Very few coveys flushed from the broomstraw because it was now a peanut or cotton field. In the Midwest, habitat changes affected overall populations as well, and even in the last great stronghold of these wonderful birds, Texas, things have changed. The birds no longer play fair.

In the mesquite-studded pastures of that state that make up the majority of the hunting leases most Texans must have to get quality hunting, the cover gets awfully thin toward the middle of the season; and the periodic droughts that restrict the growth of vegetation don’t help, either. Thin cover for bobwhite quail in no different from thin cover for Gambel’s or scaled quail. They run. Boy, do they run, a few splitting off here and there until your dog ends up chasing down one lone bird, the rest having found refuge in places unknown.

Where habitat or vegetation types meet will often cause birds to change their tactics. A thick CRP field or a cattail slough may encourage pheasants to hold, but should that habitat butt up against a cornfield, the birds are likely to chuck the sit tight tactic and beat it while the getting’s good. A grouse in a blowdown, holding to wait things out, may use the nearby open forest floor to leg it into the next zip code if he thinks that’s a better option. Even woodcock will leave an alder thicket and run like deadbeat dads if the ground cover is thin under the bracken ferns next door. Of course, the reverse is true – birds will run from thin to thick, and then sit. That’s what we want, but it seems the other way is more prevalent.

There is not a gamebird that will not run, and the tactics for each are not all that different: Try to gently push them from the thin stuff into the thick stuff where they’ll be more likely to sit for the dog. Easier said that done, I know, but it’s a place to start.

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