Sorry for the long delay in updating this thread. What can I say, I got lazy! Here's a modified version of an article that I wrote for the San Diego Sporting Dog Club's newsletter.
After Christmas, I had the opportunity to join a friend on a hunt for Mearns' quail in Southeastern Arizona. I had never heard of them before he told me about them, but there is some information about hunting them available online at YouTube.com and other websites. These birds are beautiful. Well, maybe some people think they look comical, as they are sometimes called clown quail!
What makes these birds stand out among quail is that they are slightly larger than other quail, and their coveys are smaller. Most significantly, however, is how tight they hold to cover! Because they hold so tightly, pointers are particularly well-suited for hunting them. Some say that pointers are the only way to hunt them, but we did ok with retrievers. My buddy's black lab is a machine, with an excellent nose! She ended up putting up every covey that we encountered. Many times, the birds would not flush until she put her nose on them!
The terrain these birds seem to prefer consists of rolling hills with a fifty/fifty mixture of oak and grassland. We usually tend to think of Arizona as the land of desert and cacti, but this area of the state is beautiful! The summer monsoons (which the Mearns' depend on) bring lots of grass, and when it's not over-grazed, it makes for fantastic hunting habitat. The season length is generous, as are the bag limits (currently eight per day).
We tent camped, and boy, was it cold! Temperatures at night were in the mid-twenties. As soon as the sun dipped behind the hills, our fingers got numb. Propane tanks didn't seem to want to work reliably, but we had some good meals of steaks and potatoes, or hot sausage sandwiches.
Make sure that you bring a good pair of boots, and maybe a backup pair of footwear. In our first day of hunting, the sole fell off my boot! Neither of us had brought any duct tape (note to self- bring duct tape next time!), so we had to make do with vet wrap and surgical tape from the first aid kit!
It was a fantastic trip, and I can't wait to go again!
