Doubling Up on the Llano Estacado

When Cormac McCarthy wrote about riding across the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, he wrote about thirst, dust, the blazing sun, blood, horses and death. The prevailing theme was a lack of water and how far one had to go to find it. He failed to mention one of the few good reasons to venture onto the Staked Plains: quail. Blue quail and bobwhite quail and lots of them. Then again, guide Bob King wasn't making water for quail coveys in the old days.
You don't travel down to Portales, New Mexico, unless you have a reason-a really good reason. It's not like Santa Fe, with its old Spanish charm, or Taos, with its high peaks, bugling elk and great skiing. Portales is a long way from anything, and the flat sandy fields push cotton out of the ground and hide peanuts beneath them. The town itself is functional, spread out like a lot of Western farm towns where there's plenty of land to waste, and it's home to a new Holiday Inn Express; but it certainly is not the tourist center of the Southwest.
What Portales does have, however, is quail-lots of quail.
This past September I was standing on a mountain peak in Colorado, guiding a doctor named Mike Altman for white-tailed ptarmigan, when I mentioned that I recently had been to Portales. "I love Portales!" Altman gushed. Curious, I asked why. "Quail," he said. "Lots of quail." Suddenly he looked crestfallen. "You aren't going to write about Portales, are you?"
If you stood looking around Portales, thinking about hunting quail, you would wonder where to begin. Thankfully, Bob King of Santa Fe Guiding Co. has the answer figured out. King has a lock on a huge ranch called the Hay Ranch, south of Portales, that he and the landowner are managing for quail-both bobwhites and scaled (blue) quail.
King and I had made plans to hook up at the ranch, but I arrived a day early, so King pointed out some public land a few miles south of the ranch where I was welcome to hunt. There was barely a car on the highway as I pulled off onto a tract of native prairie, and from the absence of tire tracks I could tell that no one had hunted there for quite a while.
I dumped out my English pointers and slipped a couple of green shells into my Ugartechea 16-gauge. I made sure I had extra water for the dogs in my vest, because this looked like dry country. And it was. I made about a four-hour loop in the tiny hills covered with native grasses and what I later learned was shin oak, or "shinnery," a lowlands variation of the scrub oak we have in Colorado. (If you've ever hunted the Texas Panhandle, you know what I'm talking about: thin, tough sprigs of oak that rarely reach higher than your knees.)
We busted one covey of bobs when my male pointer, Timber, blasted in on the birds from upwind, and it was so dry that we couldn't even hunt up the singles. Another time Timber pointed nicely and the birds flushed right under my gun, but I remembered King's admonishment to not shoot any prairie chickens. Apparently the New Mexico Game & Fish Dept.'s reintroduction plan was working, as a covey of lesser prairie chickens wheeled into the wind and I slid my safety back on. (Check for new regulations-New Mexico may be reopening the season on lessers in the near future.)
At one point I encountered one of those "wishful thinking" projects that state game agencies are fond of building: a contraption that was meant to catch rainwater and sluice it into a catch basin for quail to enjoy. The boards on top were curled up, and the rusty basin hadn't seen water for months, by my guess.
It was tough hunting.
Later that evening I found my way to the old ranch house that King uses for a base camp, and there were quail scurrying around everywhere I looked. King was unloading a well-used Suburban with fly-rod stickers on it. He's a late-30s guy who has carved out a niche guiding the resort crowd in Santa Fe and Taos on fly-fishing trips, elk hunts and, yes, upland bird outings.
King introduced me to his two pudelpointers-large, rangy dogs with the builds of big Airedales, the faces of Drahthaars and the coloring of chocolate Labs. They were also nice to be around-big, friendly galoots that didn't play the game of growling at strange dogs.
"They're hell on birds," King said. "These two have a lot of endurance, and their coats can withstand the brush and stickers."
I wanted some pictures in the last of the late-evening sunlight, so King grabbed a vest and gun and we set out. In two minutes we had a point. When the covey flushed, King swung and downed a blue for me. It went a lot easier than my four-hour jaunt earlier in the day.
"The secret here is water," King said. "And we've provided it." We jumped in the Suburban, and King gave me the tour. Quail scurried across the two-track jeep road in front of us. "We have 58 sections out here," King said. "We buried a water line across 11 miles of this ranch, with a guzzler every quarter-mile." He pointed to a 10-foot-square fenced enclosure with a little spigot draining a trickle of water into an old hubcap. "That's all it takes. The quail can come in here and water. The biologists say that quail can survive without water, that they can get their water from insects and dew. But they sure do like water. In the good years, when you have a lot of rain, it's not that big of an issue. You'll see lots of quail. But in the drought years, your coveys really shrink down. Just think what it means if one more quail can survive a year. If you get a clutch of eggs out of that bird, it can make a huge difference.
" We're just putting a premium on our quail. Every year is a good year with these guzzlers. Whereas you'll see only a couple of birds together in a drought year, you'll see coveys of six or eight birds around the guzzlers." Already, in a half-hour, I had seen 10 times the quail on the Hay Ranch as I had seen in my four-hour hunt on public land, where there was no water in sight.
For Easterners who think 100 acres is a good-sized plot to hunt, there are 640 acres in a section, which is one square mile, and King has 58 sections. You do the math. Let's just say there's a lot of ground to hunt-and King is lining up more. "I'm leasing another 40 sections," he said, "and when I sent the New Mexico Game & Fish Dept. a photo of a covey of prairie chickens perched on the fence here on one of my guzzlers, I got a grant to do another 20 miles of guzzlers."
If you're looking for tidy little food plots of milo to hunt, this is not the place. Some of the local crops include peanuts and cotton, but those fields are basically bare in the fall. We were hunting wide, flat grasslands that looked similar to the public lands, with low hills, native grasses and shinnery. Interestingly, the habitat and guzzlers seem to equally benefit bobwhites and scaled quail. We seemed to run into both species in equal numbers.
The ranch is used for cattle grazing, which is inevitable anywhere you go in the Southwest, but I could tell that the grazing program was working-in other words, the cover wasn't eaten down to the nub.
"We work things out on a rotational schedule," King said, "putting the cattle in one pasture, grazing until it's down where we want it, and then moving them." It sounds pretty simple; then again, half the West is either blowing away or sliding into creeks because of overgrazing.
The two other hunters I'd be sharing the next day with arrived close to sunset, and we chatted about the usual topics of dogs, guns and birds. We stayed in the old farmhouse that night, but I have to tell you, I didn't enjoy it. The place is a rough old abode with the bare basics-no amenities-and a cold front sweeping down from Canada kept me from getting warm despite an electric heater and a sleeping bag for a comforter. Next time I'll seek lodging in Portales, 30 miles away.
The following morning I was up early airing out my dogs, and soon thereafter we were hunting. As everyone says, blue quail are track stars; however, if you have three gunners, a guide and several good dogs, you can put the pinch on them after a while. We conducted several "push and block" drives that were akin to South Dakota pheasant hunting, and the birds found no recourse but to fly in front of the guns. There were small gulleys and mounds of earth that made such maneuvers possible, and the shooting was good.
King knows his habitat and how the birds behave, and although there were the usual screw-ups of guys not mounting their guns in time or not being in the right position, we slowly started to fill a bag. And, as usual, whatever lack of success we had regarding dead birds wasn't the guide's fault. I also spent more time carrying a camera than a shotgun, although the dust was devilish to my lenses.
We hunted over the pudelpointers, as I wanted to see the big German canines in action. They were smooth-hunting dogs, enjoying their work as they busted through the brush and shinnery. Their points were solid and their retrieves stylish. One time we were approaching an old windmill when the dogs got birdy, and I thought I saw a quail run into a conical pile of dead sticks about three feet tall. I had been seeing these structures every hundred yards or so, so I asked King about them. "Those are packrat houses," he said. "They pile up sticks and make houses out of them."
"Aha," I said, and sure enough, that's when the birds flew from the pile. Thankfully, I was ready and puffed a bobwhite.
The bonus was the abundant coveys. King likes to hunt a covey once or twice, shoot a few birds out of it, and then leave it alone. As soon as a particular covey has seen dogs four or five times, he maintains, it becomes a lot harder to approach. When you have the luxury of hunting several thousand acres of untouched habitat, you can be choosy that way. The day we hunted we moved a dozen coveys-a combination of bobs and blues-and knocked off early because of howling, cold winds.
And what does the future hold for the Hay Ranch? Well, the winter of 2006-'07 was unusually wet in New Mexico, and the spring grasses grew tall and lush. "There's almost too much cover," King said, but I could sense he didn't want to complain. "It's almost hard to find the coveys, because we've got so much land to hunt. There was a lot of rain last summer, and the grass is tall and thick. I think next year will be an outstanding one for quail. I'm thinking of letting a couple of my clients bring their horses so we can hunt off of horseback."
That's the way the old-timers crossed the Staked Plains, on horseback, but there was precious little water for them. To this day, anyone who travels the Staked Plains goes there for a reason, and despite the thirst, dust, sun and blood, a little water makes quail-lots of them.

Author's Note: For more information on New Mexico quail hunting, contact Bob King, Santa Fe Guiding Co., 505-466-7964; www.santafeguidingco.com.

Gary Hubbell lives in Crawford, Colorado, and works as a ranch real-estate broker, writer and photographer. He guides blue grouse and ptarmigan hunts in the fall. Visit his Website at www.aspen ranchrealestate.com.