Pride and I slipped up north to the game club yesterday and spent a couple of great hours with bobwhites. Last week’s adventure was drowned out with over six inches of rain and some snow thrown in too at the club. It is at 36oo feet altitude in the High Desert. The surrounding mountains rise up to about 6000 feet and here’s the view:

If you have to shoot birds at a game club you might as well pick a nice spot!

The manager put out five bobwhites for me and Pride over a three or four acre area between a ridge and the river bed. The river, normally dry, was flowing strongly with at least 18″ of water. The ground was nice and soft, ambient air cool and damp. Great conditions for Pride. I wasn’t too fond of the mud-blobs that started out as my boots, especially when they had grown to about five pounds each, but being your tough, intrepid old coot I soldiered on.

We had a grand time, found all five birds though one flushed wild and we could never relocate it in the thick brush along the river. Another flushed wild and I had a passing shot just like duck shooting at about 40 yards and was lucky enough to hit the bird. We also had two red tail hawks keeping an eye on us and one of them followed the wild flushing bird. That may be why we could never find it again: it probably hit the brush and dug a foxhole, er’, excuse me, “birdhole”, two feet deep and hunkered down!

I just love bob’s. I love Pride and I certainly feel blessed to have her. One of my lovely old AyA XXV 12 bores made the experience perfect:

One more notable event: anybody else have a retriever like my friend Digby? He lives at the club and goes everywhere with the manager, loves to flush birds and retrieve them. Of course pheasants are a little too much, but he tries!

Digby could start a whole new trend! Hey, Birddogdoc, wanna’ buy a Dachshund?