The Prairie in Winter:
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The Comanche National Grasslands. |
It's a clear cold day in December and the wind blows so hard in the river bottom that when the quail flush the hunter cannot hear the distinctive warning sound of buzzing wings. It's dry, the scenting conditions poor and the dogs, too, are confused by the wind.
In any case, scaled quail are notorious runners; they don't like to fly in the best of conditions and are especially reluctant to take wing in the wind. When they do get up, they hit those air currents and peel off like tiny fighter jets when the after-burners kick in. Or else they stay so low to the ground that the hunter doesn't dare shoot for fear of peppering the dogs.
In the mental disorder brought on by the howling wind, the hunter mounts his gun and tries to get on one of the soundlessly flushing, erratically flying little birds that seem no bigger than bees. He has only a split second before the covey disperses, fading back into the heavy cover. He pulls the trigger with stiff wind-frozen fingers but even as he does so he has the sense that the shot charge itself is being blown off course, scattering and collapsing feebly in the air as the birds slip away like ghosts.
He tries to watch them down, and he calls to his companions who are scattered across the sandy river bottom, but his words, like the shot charge, are snatched from his icy lips, stolen away by the wind. All he can do is holler mutely, wave and pantomime to his friends who do not hear him and did not hear or see the birds flush, each isolated in his own world of wind.
The next time I catch myself whining about federal mismanagement of public lands (as we sportsmen tend rather incessantly to do), I'll try to remind myself of a recent trip to the Comanche National Grasslands in southeastern Colorado, hard against the Oklahoma border. I'll recall the pristine beauty of the prairie in winter, the largely undisturbed hills of dried shortgrass (buffalo grass and blue gamma), sagebrush and yucca, and the mid-grasses (sand dropseed, side oats grama, little bluestem, western wheatgrass) that grow on the sandy land. I'll remember the cold springs trickling out of canyon walls and the treed river bottoms, dry this time of year, the cottowoods leafless.
But mostly, I'll remember the birds and the general diversity of wildlife. In one day we saw coyotes, road runners, several species of hawks, eagles and owls, doves, wild turkeys, wild pigeons, antelope, quail... And I'll try to remind myself of how lucky we as Americans are to own these lands, to have access to them, to enjoy the rare privilege of wandering across them with gun and dog.
Of course, I'll also remember the wind. The prairie -- both its human and its natural history -- is defined by wind. Anthropologists have even speculated that the nearly constant wind was one possible cause for the inherently warlike nature of the various plains Indian tribes. The wind, this theory has it, put them on edge, made them perpetually cranky.
Much of the land contained in the Comanche National Grasslands literally blew away in the 1930s, the Dust Bowl years. This unprecedented ecological, social and economic catastrophe was not caused by drought and wind as is commonly believed (though these climatological forces certainly contributed) but by 20 years of wholesale plowing and overgrazing of the native prairie grasses that for centuries had held this land in place. The prairie had always withstood periods of drought and was well-accustomed to the wind, but now free of its anchoring cover of grass and roots, the topsoil was simply blown away, carried off in huge black clouds that literally blackened the skies and drove settlers mad.
By 1938 the few homesteaders who had managed to hang on through the catastrophe were begging the federal government to buy back their ruined and worthless farms. Thus was born the Federal Land Purchase program in which millions of acres of severely damaged cropland -- formerly native prairie -- were retired from cultivation. Over the intervening years some of this land has been rehabilitated, some even brought back into production. And today, thanks to continuing efforts by the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies, much of the prairie that lies within the boundaries of the Comanche National Grasslands has been restored to something of its former splendor.
My group had come to southeastern Colorado to hunt scaled quail.
Sadly, the native lesser prairie chicken, once so prolific in this region, has been unable to adapt to the loss of its prairie habitat and never recovered from the ecological devastation of the Dust Bowl years. The ongoing conversion of native sandsage prairie into irrigated cropland continues to suppress populations and the prairie chicken has been listed as a threatened species by the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
Our first day in the field was cool and uncharacteristically windless. There is a tremendous diversity of country in this region, which is essentially a transition zone between plains and desert -- everything from classic shortgrass prairie -- perfectly flat and treeless -- to rolling hills, buttes and canyonlands that are reminiscent of Utah or Arizona.
We were hunting the country around Picture Canyon and the cover was some of the finest I've ever seen. With the cooperation of several private grazing associations, U.S. Forest Service administrators carefully control grazing on Comanche, rotating the cows to rest the fragile prairie, while also making a number of wildlife-related improvements -- strategic fencing, installation of water "guzzlers" to catch and hold rain water, and creation of roosting cover.
To recognize just how well-managed these grasslands are, one need merely look at some of the adjoining private lands, which side by side look something like a swatch of worn indoor/outdoor carpeting next to a piece of shag. Much evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, sometimes the feds do things pretty well.
By all reports, quail production had been good this year, aided by a mild spring with just the right amount of moisture. We had five guns and plenty of dog power -- Steve Collector's fine Brittany, Kate; my Lab, Sweetz; John Warner's English springer spaniel, Seeker; and Doug Baer's springer pup, Geronimo.
But somehow, mysteriously, despite the scenic country, great-looking cover, perfect weather, good dogs, and relatively well-conditioned hunters -- able and willing to cover the ground -- after a hard morning of hunting we had yet to see a single quail.
We broke for lunch by a small pioneer cemetery at the mouth of a spring seeping from the canyon wall to consider the problem. The headstones told of the life of one man, Warner S. Chadoeroon (born in 1848, died in 1910) and another named Wentworth (1802-1864). The country must have been settled by these people while the Comanches and the Cheyennes still inhabited it. There was another marker, a small piece of white marble, inscribed with the name Edna Capansky, a baby who lived for just the first two weeks of May, 1909. Oddly, there were fresh flowers on the child's grave.
The dogs lay on the rocks in the warm sun while we ruminated over our sandwiches.
"I just can't understand where the birds are. I've never seen better cover."
"I know it -- food, cover, water -- everything but birds."
"I wonder if maybe they're running out ahead of the dogs."
"Nah, my dog hasn't really gotten birdy once. If there were birds running in front of her, I'd know about it; she'd be trailing them."
"Yeah, my dog hasn't gotten birdy either."
"It's not as if we haven't covered plenty of ground."
"That's for sure, we should have run into at least one covey."
"It is late in the season. Maybe they've been shot out."
"All of them? I don't think so, there's a lot of country here."
"Maybe we're just in the wrong spot."
"No, this is right where the ranger told us to hunt. Besides how could it look any birdier than this?"
"There could be birds."
"That's true. I don't get it."
"Who do you suppose comes all the way out here to put flowers on that baby's grave?"
That afternoon as we hunted on, we came across ancient petroglyphs on the canyon walls, and on the crests of hills we found mysterious prehistoric rock cairns -- laid out in perfect geometric design -- their exact purpose still not clearly understood by archaeologists. Where a canyon opened up into a small parklike setting, we found the remains of old stone homesteader cabins and corrals.
Nearby was the entrance to a narrow cave that had been sealed off by the Forest Service with a gate and padlock. "Crack Cave" it is called and it contains wall markings that are illuminated and aligned perfectly by the sun twice a year to tell the spring and fall equinox. Some researchers believe the symbols to be a primitive form of writing called ogham, used by the ancient Celts of Ireland -- fuel for the theory that these people came to North America a thousand years ago.
But these archaeological mysteries only partly distracted us from the fact that we still hadn't found any quail, and by the end of that first day, things were getting downright ugly; there was mutiny in the air.
"I thought you guys said you had this place wired."
"Yeah, some sources."
"There aren't any birds in this country."
"Is that a note of whining I'm detecting in your voice?"
"I don't think I'm going on any more of these trips with you guys."
"Yeah? Who says you'll be asked?"
We still had a day and a half to turn things around, and back at the Starlight Motel -- Springfield, Colorado's finest -- Collector and I sprang into action. In the time-honored tradition of prospecting out-of-town bird hunters everywhere, we start asking around. It happened that the owner of the Starlight, Bill Shettron, was himself a quail hunter, though he had just recently moved back to the area and admitted that he hadn't been out this season. But he offered to call another local fellow on our behalf, a man widely acknowledged to be the town's quail expert.
One thing led to another -- before the evening was out we had all new information about where to find birds the next day. And we finally had a plausible answer to the puzzle of today's birdless hunt.
Evidently severe hail storms had pounded the region the previous fall, and quail populations in certain particularly hard-hit areas had still not recovered. Even the best habitat management efforts often fall victim to larger climatic forces, especially in a region that represents the northernmost range of the scaled quail -- a species more commonly associated with the deserts of the Southwest.
"You can't believe the damage the hail did," another local quail hunter we spoke to told us. "It came down so hard and thick that it killed everything in its path -- even the sagebrush on the hills. It turned huge sections of the grasslands into a moonscape."
As devastating to quail as they are to the flora, such storms can wipe out entire populations, which can then take years to recover -- which helped to explain why entire large areas of what looked to be prime quail habitat held no birds. What we needed to do the next day, by all accounts, was get out of the hail's path of destruction.
The infamous prairie wind came up in the middle of the night; we heard its distant moaning, then the rattling and whooshing and rumbling as it blew on into town like a freight train. I pulled the covers tight, knowing that we were in for it the next day.
The wind had intensified by dawn and it was bitterly cold. We fortified ourselves with a large country breakfast at the cafe on Main Street and then headed out to the grasslands. Steve Collector, who had once been a surveyor and is an excellent map reader and general navigator, led our caravan on a circuitous route down highways and section roads and farm roads, following obscure local landmarks described to us over the phone the night before, until we finally reached our first destination of the day. We unloaded dogs, uncased guns, shouted and gestured to each other against the wind to make our plan, split up and set off.
We were hunting a river bottom that morning and almost as soon as we started out we got into birds. They were running and flushing wild and, as quail tend to be, were generally uncooperative, but at least they were there. And we were surprised to find not only scalies but several coveys of bobwhites, as well.
The shooting was particularly challenging in the bottom, with thick tamarisks and willows obscuring the view so that we had to be particularly careful to keep in voice contact with each other. The relentless wind added to the difficulty and also made it hard for the dogs, who under the circumstances performed admirably. And if no one particularly distinguished themselves in the shooting department, we all had opportunities and by the end of the morning there were birds in the bag.
We ate lunch crammed into the Suburban in order to get out of the wind. Moods among our fickle group had improved immeasurably; the car filled up with cigar smoke, and the conversation was about quail flushing in the wind and shots made or missed and dog work, good or bad. We had a couple of other spots to try this afternoon back up in the grassland prairie. Suddenly the trip organizers were off the hook -- from yesterday's bums we had become today's heroes.
Now the hunters walk up on a fenced area in the middle of the prairie. Low grassy swales roll gently off to distant horizons. The fence contains a water guzzler and man-made brush piles of roosting cover. There are quail tracks in the sand all around it and though the hunters think they've got it surrounded, the quail hear them coming and squirt out one end of the cover, hightailing it into the prairie.
They are remarkably fleet-footed little birds, their gray-mottled feathers providing nearly perfect camouflage against the ground. The dogs pick up their scent trail, the hunters right behind them, and together they run the birds down and flush them. The quail get up in staggered groups of 3, 4, 10 at a time, until maybe 50 are in the air, kiting off in all directions, angles and altitudes. The guns speak a surprisingly puny language in the wind--pffft, pffft, pffft-pffft. A few birds tumble from the sky and the dogs run to retrieve them.
Copyright 1998 Jim Fergus. All rights
reserved.
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