The 2021 Season

 It wasn't a great one, for a variety of reasons.

The Dude after the last day of hunting.  We finished up with an attempt, unsuccessful, on Chukars.  He was tired.

As with most hunters, the season doesn't quite follow the calendar year.  For me, it starts sometime in spring when spring turkey season opens up.  When that closes down, its fishing season for me, even though my state doesn't really have a dedicated fishing season.  You can fish all year long.

Indeed, when my daughter was at home, fishing season started as soon as waterfowl ended in January, with that being ice fishing season.  She's away at university now, so there hasn't been any ice fishing recently.

Anyhow, there's turkey season, and then fishing season, followed by sage grouse and dove season, antelope season, deer season, and elk season.  This assuming I didn't draw any special tags, like moose, and that would be a safe assumption.

Big game season yields into waterfowl season.

Seasons dictated by nature, the weather, and I guess the game and fish department.  A better calendar, however, than one dictated by professional sports or by actuaries.

Indeed, if I had my druthers, which would mean having the extra time, I'd add gardening season and this would effectively be my life.  Just the other day a slightly younger colleague of mine spoke about his dreams for retirement (which with five kids, only one of whom is in college, I'll predict will remain a lifelong dream).  They involved "travel", and when I mean travel, I mean global travel.

I have utterly no such desires whatsoever.  I've crossed oceans by plane more than once and if I never do so again, that's okay by me.

I'm a simple man.

Anyhow, in terms of unrealized dreams, this has been a year of unrealized dreams for me in a lot of personal ways.  2021 won't go down as a happy year for a lot of people, spirit of the times and all, and it certainly won't for me.

I did start off the year with turkey season.

Me early in the turkey season, dog behind me.  Yes, the dog goes.  The rifle in this picture may have been near its last hunt, as it was stolen this past year.  The hat is a heavy duty Park Service dress campaign hat.  The year before last my old reproduction, heavy duty, beaver felt M1911 campaign hat, which had become my fishing hat, and then hunting hat, bit the dust and, worse yet, blew out of my Jeep on the same day that the Dude was bitten by a rattlesnake.  The jacket is a surplus Swiss Army smock.

For quite a few years, I had access to some farm ground with turkeys on it.  That ground sold in 2020 and my access went with that.  This meant, of course, that finding a turkey, in the general season, in my region, was made quite a bit more difficult, but that's the way such things go.

I stumbled on an area which in 2019 I was the only one who was hunting turkeys.  Even better, early in the turkey season, you have to really hike in.  Last time I really did this heavily, in 2019, I was about the only person I saw.

The season started off that way, and I did run into turkeys.

I’m probably the only guy who takes his hunting dog out for turkey hunting, although I'm not hunting turkeys with him.  He's hiking.  Things have gotten so that I can't go out the door on a weekend anymore without the dog.  He won't allow it to happen.  This is detrimental to turkey hunting, however.

I did find a turkey at one point, but I was armed with a .22 Mag rifle, and it was in a tree.  I frankly didn't have a good enough view of it, from a distance, to tell if it was a tom or not.  I passed on the shot, and eventually he flew off.

The next trip, my luck on isolation ran out.  When I was up on the mountain, I could hear the motorized ATV brigade down in the valley.  Trying to pursue a turkey down a heavily wooded slope, I could hear them coming up. They never saw me, but I sure could hear, and then see, them.  I'm sure every turkey in the county could as well.  On the way down they passed me, and then when I was loading the dog they went by me again.

Now, like a lot of folks who are gasoline jockeys, they weren't very attune to what they were doing and where they were going.  I've had this happen twice this past year (I'll get to the other in a moment), but I was worried for the dog.  Frankly, I was highly distracted.  I put the rifle on the hood of the Jeep to load him so he wouldn't get hit.  When they passed, with the dog in, I got in and started to drive off.  I realized, however, that the rifle wasn't in the truck, and I went back to get it.

It was gone.  I walked the entire area that day, more than once, and again the next day, and again one more day after that.

I was the only one there, other than them.  I'm certain they took it.

And by took it, I mean stole it.  It wasn't hard to figure out whose it was.

I've never liked ATVs much as I think they're an insult to nature, frankly, and people abuse them.  I see people roaring over the sagebrush with them, and with their asses so welded to them that they just can't seem to get out on foot.  It's not all that uncommon for me to find somebody who will state that they didn't see anything. . . 

Yeah. . well if you are as noisy as the Afrika Korps, you aren't going to.

I did go back later, but, no turkeys.  I did run into them, but I could never get up on them.  I'm more than a bit unusual for a turkey hunter in that I stalk them, and I lack a call.  Very few people hunt them that way.  But when I first hunted them as a teenager, that's what we did, and I'm not patient enough to wait in one spot for a long time.

Then came fishing season.

Now, about that, I’m mostly a stream fisherman and always have been.  I will fish other bodies of water, and I certainly do, but that's my focus.

I can't really complain about fishing this year, other than that due to my work schedule I didn't get out nearly as much as I had hoped. And that's something to complain about.  Otherwise, my main complaint would be, I guess, that my son was off at school for most of the summer and my daughter had to have back surgery.  My daughter is a long time fisherman and my son has taken it up with more earnest recently.  

It's an odd deal to look back and realize that in some ways you're repeating your own father's history.  He taught me to fish, but at some point I became a fanatic outdoorsman and there were plenty of times that I went out on my own.  When I went to school, of course, he was left in that position, and he was a great and frequent fisherman.  So he was fishing quite often on his own.

Now I am.

One of the creeks I fished this year, and should have done a lot better in than I did.

Anyhow, before late summer yielded to other concerns, I did get out some, fishing the creeks in the mountains.  I reconfirmed a finding I'd make the prior year that a spot I found that looks good is, in fact, not.  It also looks like it ought to be populated by bears, and it probably is.

Getting into the spirit of things.

The first bird hunting season around here is blue grouse.

This has been frustrating due to interactions with novice game wardens the past few years who can't quite bring themselves to accept that a person of six decades residence knows more about how to get onto this spot and never touch foot on private ground than they do, having just arrived from California as they have, and seeing the world from a 3/4 ton pickup as they are.  When proven wrong, they varied from apologetic in the first instance, to blisteringly aggressive and rude in the second.^[1]  This year, however, the local chief warden took the matter in his hands and wrote me a note, for which I am greatly appreciative.  So I got up in to the high sticks without incident.

Didn't see a single bird, however.

That, I suspect, is because it had been so dry.  No water, no birds.

I also ended up doing this by myself.  This used to be an annual routine for me and my son, and one year for me my son and my daughter.  Indeed, since my son was hold enough to hunt birds, I've never had a bird season where I didn't have him accompany me at least once, but this year, due to university, that was the case.  And not only for blue grouse, but for everything, save for fishing and antelope hunting.

Blue grouse here is followed by the short sage chicken season.  I'd seen a lot of sage chickens in the summer, but ran into one during sage chicken season. Actually, the dog found it, not me, and I wasn't ready for it. 

No sage chickens.

After that, both kids came home, but on different weekends, for antelope.

I managed, for the third year in a row, not to draw an antelope tag, and I'm not happy about it.  I like antelope as food.  I don't like the fact that my state weights out of state tags more heavily than any neighboring state.  I am, after all, a killetarian and I figure that if you live in New Jersey there are deer in New Jersey.  Hunt them.

Lots of economic interests don't figure it that way, however.

Both kids got really nice antelope, I'll note.

Deer came after that.  I only got out once, although now I can't recall why.  I didn't see any deer, but I did get stuck pretty bad in the high country.

Well, that's not quite true.  I did get out a second time, but it was marked by the fact that I fractured a tooth, and hadn't realized it, about a day prior.  It impacted severely that morning and by the time I was where I was going, I was unbelievably sick.  I barely made the long drive home, and during that time frame a storm had come in, and the highway became a sheet of ice.  A tooth extraction followed.

And then came waterfowl.

It was a fantastic waterfowl year, the best in years and years.  I did do really well hunting ducks and geese, and got to spend some blind time with one of my oldest friends.  The only sad note is that due to various things by mid summer things were a bit sad on other score and that lingered as I recalled that my trips out to hunt ducks and geese, with more around than there have been for eons, were again alone.

It was in the late waterfowl season that I had my second vehicular run in of the year, and it was similar to the first.  I was duck and goose hunting on a stretch of the river.  Up until the last few years, this stretch, which is 7,000 feet high, closes to fishermen because of the weather.  Nobody wants to fly fish in 80 mph winds when it's 10F.

That's started to change, however.

For one thing, in spite of the high altitude, it hasn't been as cold up that high recently.  It's still really windy, however.  On the day I was out there, it was probably around 35F with 80 mph winds.

I'm a fisherman too, but when hunting starts, for me fishing stops.  I'm more of a hunter than a fish hunter.  My father was the other way around.  Anyhow, I sort of figure that guys who have the run of the river from April until late August, can ease up a bit in September through December, and most in fact do.  If you see a fisherman on any other stretch of the river from August on, they tend to be friendly as a rule and share the river.  I try to avoid them.

On this stretch its different, however, and that's because most of the fishermen who tend to be in this stretch are from the big rectangular state to our south.

Now, I'm not the only waterfowler on this stretch of the river.  A few other dedicated guys are dedicated blind hunters on the same stretch.  It must be the case that they stake their claim and the fishermen avoid them.  I generally avoid the fishermen.

On this day, however, I drove down to a stretch of the river in this area that I knew was empty.  I got things, and the dog, out a couple of hundred yards away from the river and then, as the dog was milling about, a Rectangular State SUV came blasting down the two track and nearly hit my dog. Worse yet, they saw him.  

What that was about was them getting to the river before me. They probably thought I was a fisherman too, or they knew I was a hunter and they wanted their stretch of river. I hunted it anyway.  They knew they'd been assholes as they kept looking back as I walked the long stretch down and the long stretch back.  On top of it, they put in on what amounts to a wind tunnel (I knew that) and had no luck.  

There was no need for that.

Last year I took up chukar hunting in earnest.

Me chukar hunting.  Why am I dressed like I'm in the Swiss Army?  Well the reason is that I'm too cheap to buy the quuality hunting clothes that other people do, and I grew use to miltiary style clothing as a National Guardsmen and I like its features, particularly the zillions of pockets.  On  this day, the wind was bad, and hence the hood up.  Also, I'm wearing GI field pants over Levis for the same reason.

The reason has to do with having run into chukars in a major way in 2020.  I knew all the spots they'd been in, and therefore I went back. I got. . . one.

Indeed, I saw them only once.

Another reason that I've taken chukars up is that in the last few years I haven't drawn an elk tag and chukars take me into rough country and I tend not to be very good at it.

I'm not one of those people who run around looking for challenges in life.  Indeed, quite frankly, my life had plenty of challenges early on, and I don't need anymore.  Frankly, for that matter, I tend to find people who claim to take up occupations because they're "challenging" to be full of  bull.

Having said that, I'm completely different with outdoor endeavors.  Maybe I do like a challenge, and perhaps that why I'm after chukars.

While not exactly on my seasons, my failures at chukars caused me to try to find out more about them and that lead me to this excellent blog:

The Reigning Chukar Champions

It's a great read.

Anyhow, different year, different hatch.

Last day of the season.  Yep, more unecessary camouflage for the same reason.  The jacket is an Australian wind proff SAS smock that an Australian friend gave me, the trousers are U.S. Army pants.  I'm wearing a Charhartt coat for wamrth.

Footnotes:

1. In the first instance the game warden followed me out, at my invitation, and in the end relented with "I didn't think that this could be done".  On the way, I somewhat worried about him rolling his pickup truck and warned him about a hill, turn and traverse across a dam that's no big deal for a Jeep, but is a big deal for a pickup, but he did it.  He probably didn't believe me that this was a way in and out.

Well, in the end, he did.

In the second instance, the warden started off as rude and argumentative. When I explained the road that I came on, he said "it isn't a road", claiming that 4x4s had just created it the past few years.

That claim was absolute bullshit.  I looked him up, and he was a relatively recent arrival from California.

I should note that several years prior a different game warden was hugely enthusiastic that anyone had gone to such an effort to get where I was went, which was just a jumping off point at that for a hike in the mountains in pursuit of grouse.

Anyhow, with the experience noted of the two difficult wardens, I actually called ahead for the second year in a row.  The first time I didn't get a call back, and then I got the rude warden.  I did it again this year and got the regional warden, who was apologetic about his green underlings, and wrote me a note so that they'd leave me alone.  I kept hoping to run into them, but didn't.  Indeed, coming out of the hills the only one I ran into was on the main dirt road, and he'd just stopped a party of University of Wyoming female ag students who were on some sort of expedition.  I stopped, but he just waved me on, which is what I would have done if I were him.