Hey from California Upland.
This is the quiet weeks between seasons, the vests are hanging up with the shells still in them, and the only useful work between now and the quail opener is the work you can do from a kitchen table or a dirt road. Alan is on the conditioning ramp and mildly insulted by the pace of it. Matt is dogless until spring and is spending the gap the way dogless hunters do, which is on maps.
Quail and chukar come open in October, on dates that differ by zone — which is easy to get wrong. We are not going to print them here. CDFW’s booklet is the authority, and it is worth ten minutes with a map before you plan anything around them.
First, a correction. Last Sunday’s email linked two articles to addresses that did not exist. Our mistake: the pages were live the whole time, at different URLs than the ones we typed. Here they are, with links we have clicked:
→ The Four Weeks That Decide October: Quail Prep While Dove Is Still Open — the piece about exactly this stretch. The dog work that takes the longest and therefore has to start first, patterning for a bird that flushes at fifteen yards instead of crossing at thirty, e-scouting while the country is at its ugliest and most legible, and a gear check that is mostly checking rather than buying. Plus the honest caveat: none of it finds birds. It gets you to the first morning able to take advantage of a good hatch. Read →
→ What Changes in a Sacramento Valley Dove Field After Opening Weekend — most people scout a field once, in August, and then hunt the memory of it. Four things move in the first week of a season, on four different clocks: pressure, water, cut dates, and the birds themselves. The first split is closed now, but everything in it applies again, harder, when the second one opens in November. Read →
There is no new article this morning, and that is a decision rather than a slip.
What we’re working on:
· No Thursday piece this week. A skipped Thursday is a normal week. · Wednesday — Field Notes from Peter: Cache Creek country at dusk, one covey if he finds one, at the hour of day nobody writes about. · Friday the 25th — Reader Mail, the monthly one, built out of your replies. Saturday the 26th — the first Letter from the Field: Peter on Alan’s third season. Memoir, not instruction, and not trying to teach you anything.
One thing worth doing in the gap: the second split runs November 14 to December 28. Six weeks, cool enough that a dog is not the limiting factor, on public ground that was a firing line on Sept. 1 and is close to empty by then. It is the cheapest hunting in the state and almost nobody takes it.
If you went on the opener — whichever field, however it went — hit reply and tell us. Reader Mail is Friday and it is built entirely out of what comes back.
Out the door, — Matt & Peter
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