MESA COUNTY — Despite an abundance of quality habitat, the first indicator of our prey turned out to be a large man in a blaze orange hoodie riding shotgun in a 30-year-old pickup.
“You seen any bears up there?” he asked after the driver flagged us to a halt.
“Nope. But we didn’t make it to the top,” I replied as the drizzle began anew.
“Yeah, you need a set of chains to get up there today,” he said. “But I know there’s one up there.”
“How about chukar?” my hunting partner, Charlie Ebel, chimed in from the passenger seat. “You seen any around?”
“I haven’t seen any up here this year,” the bear hunter replied. “You want to know where there’s chukar? Baxter Pass. I’ve seen 200 at a time up there.”
Given the miserable conditions of our current locale, it was all the info needed to take the truck out of four-wheel drive and head northwest to see for ourselves. The prospect of 200 chukar partridges in a single covey was a rarity of riches too great to ignore.
Colorado is hardly known for its population of the elusive Alectoris chukar, a game bird native to Eurasia and introduced to Colorado in 1937. Inhabiting some of the harshest mountain desert terrain from Baja California to northern Idaho, the reclusive game birds are widely dispersed and notoriously difficult to hunt.
A classic description of the chukar hunt is “the first time for sport, the rest for revenge.” Although there’s a pretty good argument for dinner in there too.
Historically, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho have been the top producing states, although the huntable population in Utah is on the rise, and attempts to establish self-sustaining populations in Colorado have succeeded near the border of Mesa and Garfield counties and in the hills of Montrose and Delta counties. According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists, the greatest concentrations are along the Colorado and Gunnison river drainages below 6,600 feet.
While that elevation is relatively low by Colorado standards, the rock outcroppings, cheat grass terraces and steep rim-rock canyon access chutes that the hardy birds prefer typically make for long, hard days of pursuit.
It’s as if the birds enjoy making fools of hunters by punishing them in a footrace up the sheer, rocky slopes, then flying down the other side. Factor in their taunting vocal calls and you’d swear you were being laughed at.
“It’s like climbing a 5.0 (rock face) with a shotgun,” said Ebel, a Midwestern bird hunter-turned- Colorado mountaineering guide from Red Cliff. “Then you kind of have to get lucky to find them.”
Luck felt on our side when we encountered a pair of deer hunters who corroborated the nearby covey sightings in the past couple of days. With the aid of a young bird dog, the prospect of finding the birds felt promising.
Significant changes in the weather over the course of those few days effectively broke the promise, however, as the terrain surrounding Colorado’s Book Cliffs turned to a rain-soaked desert quagmire. The inhaling earth made scenting conditions difficult on the dog, and unimproved access roads were rendered impassable to all but specialized machinery.
A deer tag could have been filled within five minutes of parking the pickup as a healthy buck passed within 100 feet while we dressed for the increasingly lengthy slog across sloppy adobe clay. While admiring the specimen, a distant cackle rose from across the valley, and glints of increasing sunlight shone on wings descending upon the outlying cheat grass.
Whether it was merely wishful thinking or the chukars were done playing with us, by the time we made our way up the hillside, it was as close as we would come to bagging birds on this attempt. Hours of hard walking up mud-slick slopes left us to go home empty-handed.
It’s not an entirely unusual experience for the state’s chukar hunters, a relative few compared with Colorado’s pheasant, dove and grouse shooters. Yet with roughly 80 percent of approximately 650 chukar hunters reporting satisfaction with their experience and 90 percent reporting a lack of crowding in CPW surveys, success may take on a different definition.
“Well, that was disappointing,” Ebel said as the hunt came to a close. “But I really had a great day today.”
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com
