Up until this year Lira and I spent all our time hunting pheasants but this year that changed. Yes, we still hunt a lot of pheasant but we also started hunting frequently in Eastern Washington for other upland birds as well as spending some time in the woods hunting grouse. Trust me hunting is the appropriate word for grouse, we didn’t spend much time killing grouse. So far this season we’ve added four new species of birds to our list.
Chukar
Chukar have sort of always intrigued me as a game bird ever since reading East of the Mountains by David Guterson. Tough terrain to say the least and they are hard to hit. Early in the year we hunted some planted chukar at Cooke Canyon just to get Lira onto a new bird. While deer hunting in Ellensburg we saw so many chukar that I decided it was time to hunt them for real and have spent several days now along the rimrock and high flats searching for them. We have managed one wild chukar and that is one Lira literally grabbed out of a bush.