Hunting small game...

By Rob Bettaso

In the twilight of an October morning, Dave and I are bouncing along the Vernon-McNary road heading north through the Apache tribal lands and toward the Sitgreaves National Forest. I’m in the passenger’s seat in Dave’s pick-up and looking out the side window without really paying too much attention to the dimly lit scenery. Suddenly, Dave pumps the brakes and I shift my attention to the road ahead, where, just past the illumination of the headlights, I see a line of ghostly shadows trotting across the road and into the pines to our left.

The forest is open enough that we can count the elk that have now slowed to a walk and are moving, single file, away from our direction of travel. Dave comes to a complete stop and puts his truck in reverse so that he can back up and re-direct his headlights toward the cow-elk at the front of the line and says that a bull might be trailing this group of a dozen cows. Sure enough, before long a big 6x6 male appears and keeps the herd moving deeper into the forest and, eventually, out of sight.

Dave puts the truck back in forward gear and drives on, saying as we go: “Too bad we don’t have elk tags.” In fact, I not only do not have an elk tag, I haven’t even submitted an application into the elk lottery for several years. Instead, I have several friends (including Dave) that periodically invite me to join them on their elk hunts and invariably, my friends are generous and offer me elk meat if I’ve helped them on their hunts. Such occasional big game hunts essentially keep my freezer full since I don’t eat as much red meat as I used to, although, game meat is probably very much more healthy (physiologically and environmentally) than what we get from the domestic livestock industry.

We continue on our way and, before long, we reach our destination -- one of the many local mountains exceeding 8000 feet in elevation. We exit the truck, grab our daypacks, and get ready for a couple of hours of hiking. Dave also takes his shotgun from its case and loads it with a 71/2 shot since he has a “migratory bird stamp” for his hunting license, which, allows him to shoot a “bag limit” of 2 Band-tailed Pigeons on any given day of the short season for this species (with a maximum of 6 “in possession”). As long as we are hiking in suitable habitat, he might as well take advantage of having the ability to legally live off the fat of the land; me, well, lacking a dove stamp I will have to settle for living off the fat of my waistline….

The air is brisk so it feels good to start up the steep slope. It’s light enough now that we have no problem making out the songbirds that are flitting through the spruce and fir boughs – mostly juncos, chickadees, and nuthatches. Squirrels and jays are also calling as we continue our uphill hike. Since we’re following a fairly wide dirt road we are walking side by side and after a few minutes of hiking, Dave quietly asks if I know what a Band-tailed Pigeon sounds like. I assume he’s referring to their vocalizations and ask: “Isn’t it sort of an owl-like ‘whoo-ing’?” “Well, yes,” he says, “but what we’re listening for is the clapping sound their wings make when they fly out of the trees.” The sound of flapping pigeon wings (both domestic and wild) is something I’ve heard many times and I immediately know what he means.

After about a half-mile, we are both winded and are walking slower than when we started. Dave is on the side of the road that is nearest the trees that are on the downward slope of the mountain; I am slightly behind and on the other side of the road, the uphill side. From Dave’s side of the dirt road, we can look out across the land and see for probably 50 miles to the southeast. Our recent rains have washed the dust from the air and the mountains dotting the landscape seem in sharper focus than usual. Dave, however, is directing his attention much closer and notices that a flock of pigeons is perched on a snag that is both in front and downhill from us. As we move toward the resting flock, a few other pigeons that we hadn’t noticed fly up from the trees that are very close to us. Reflexively, Dave draws up his Berretta 12 gauge, follows a bird, and squeezes the trigger. It all happens so fast that I only see the pigeons that keep flying and somehow don’t even notice the one that had dropped from the sky. Dave, however, who has been hunting since he was a kid, walks on ahead and then stoops, picks up a pigeon feather and points down the hill, and says “He’s down there in all that thick, thorny locust.”

I watch the first flock of pigeons land in a distant snag and soon they are joined by the stragglers that Dave had shot into, felling the bird which he is still searching for down the steep hillside. After a few minutes, Dave finds his bird and huff and puffs his way back up to the road. I watch as he closely examines the pigeon, which is a somewhat drab, gray-brown bird with large and brilliantly yellow feet. Band-tailed Pigeons are the most heavily built of our Arizona doves and pigeons and I can see how the daily bag limit of 2 would be just about right for a hunter’s dinner, assuming one had plenty of rice or potatoes to go with it.

Dave puts the pigeon in his game pocket and we continue walking up the road. Seeing the size of a Band-tailed Pigeon up close brings back a distant memory from my days living in Zaire. Back then, the Peace Corps had supplied all of its Fisheries Extension Agents, of which I was one of about 30 in the country, with 125cc Yamaha dirt bikes. Our jobs required a fair amount of traveling over trails and unpaved roads and we were much more productive because we could visit prospective and established fish growers by way of economical and rugged motorcycles.

After a few months in the country, I had taken to tying chicken feathers to my handlebars. I had kept the feathers from the chickens that my neighbors and I had eaten, but I would tell the Zairoise in the distant villages that the feathers were from chickens that I had accidentally hit on the roads when zipping along on my Yamaha. I told them this little white lie because I wanted to encourage them to try more intensively raising their birds in fenced areas and not allow the chickens to run wild through the village where an occasional civet, hawk, or python could prey upon a careless hen.

One day, I was leaving a village and I was in too big a hurry to get home. I had really opened up the throttle once I passed the village limits as the dirt road was in good condition and the terrain was open and with good visibility. I didn’t expect to see any livestock because the pigs, goats, and chickens that the villagers raised weren’t allowed to stray much past the village boundaries.

Unfortunately, one of the villagers had recently come back from a larger town where he had procured a few pigeons to raise. Said villager allowed his pigeons to come and go from their new coop during the day and would only lock them in the coop at night. Just as I was hitting top gear, a few of his pigeons streaked across the airspace just above the road and I unintentionally hit the hindmost with my headlight and watched the bird as he careened into the ditch that ran along the side of the road. I was savvy enough to tell a domestic pigeon from the wild fruit pigeons and so I felt bad knowing that I had killed some poor farmer’s stock. I decided that I had better take the dead pigeon back to the village so that someone could give it to its owner. The next time I visited the village, the pigeon grower came up to me while I was visiting some fish farmers and introduced himself. I was embarrassed and apologized profusely and to this day the one thing that I remember him saying over and over again was: “How could you hit a pigeon, they fly so fast!”

My mind returns to the present when I noticed that, up ahead, Dave has stopped hiking and has his binoculars trained on another tall snag about 200 yards away. I assume he’s looking at a pigeon but I can only see a single bird and that seems odd for a flocking species such as the Band-tailed. I look through my binos and notice that it’s a small accipiter hawk and catch up with Dave and ask if he can tell which of two species it is. “Looks more like a Cooper’s,” he replies and adds: “It has the blacker crown and the more rounded tail feathers; plus, it looks big enough to be a Cooper’s Hawk.” I concur and soon we are on our way.

As we near the summit we flush up a few more flocks of pigeons but Dave doesn’t feel he has a good shot so doesn’t fire. After enjoying the spectacular view from the top, we head back down the mountain and return to the truck. At the vehicle, Dave plucks the feathers from the pigeon he bagged and mentions that wild pigeons, and our various wild doves, have feathers that pull free from the body very easily. He adds that, by comparison, the domestic pigeon has feathers that are much more difficult to remove. The domestic pigeon (also known as the “Rock Dove,” “squab,” or “feral pigeon,”) was introduced into North America long ago and has come to dominate our urban areas and is also spreading into more rural areas. I wonder if perhaps their difficult-to-remove feathers are an adaptation that has helped to make them one of the most successful birds in the world, despite the fact that it seems like a break-away feather might allow for more rapid escapes from predators.



After checking out a few more spots that Dave has hunted over the years, we decide it is time to head home. As with the few other small game hunts I’ve done with Dave in the past, he has generously shared his hard-earned knowledge with me. I have also had lots of fun and have gotten plenty of exercise on the morning’s pigeon hunt. As always, before we part ways Dave reminds me that I’m welcome to some game meat and, as I often do, I have to decline because I have no more room in my freezer. I do tell him that one of these days I will take up hunting small game in earnest; and, when that day comes, I will need some lessons on preparing/cooking small game for the table. One of the more appealing aspects of small game is that one can almost always eat it at its freshest since it comes in a convenient single-serving size -- which is ideal for my solitary home life.