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This is a journal of my 05/06 guiding season. Pictures of these hunts may be seen in the photos sections.
December 2005
3rd - Hunted with Gordon for Mearns, 7 nice coveys found, almost all pointed, more than enough opportunity for a limit.
4th - Hunted with Matt and Bill for Mearns, 5 coveys found but we hunted hard. Many shots fired and about 8 birds in the bag.
10th - Hunted with Don and Andy for Mearns, 2 coveys found. We hunted our butts off. Lots of bird sign and a few unproductive points. I know the birds were around but the dogs were having a tough time with no wind and a warm day. They made the best of what we found and baged 8 birds.
11th - Don and Andy for Mearns again, 5 coveys found. They both shot very well and both got a limit of 8 birds.
17th - Hunted with J for Mearns and Scalies. We found two coveys of Mearns fairly quickly and J got three birds. We decided to go for Scalies as J wanted to get the Arizona Slam. We walked the rest of the day for scalies and found one covey just at dark. They gave us the slip and J didn't get an opportunity for a scaled bird.
18th - Hunted with J for Gambles. This was the most birds I saw all season. We saw at least 10 coveys of gambles. We had numberous covey and singles points. J got a lot of shooting in. He finally filled his 15 bird limit at about 2PM.
January 2006
7th - Hunted with the AZ Game and Fish Dept. shooting film for the Arizona Wildlife Views TV show. We found 5 coveys of Mearns.
8th - Finished filming the TV show. Didn't hunt this day.
14th - Hunted with Jason, Stan and Terry for Mearns. They had to work hard for their birds. The coveys we found were very small and fairly wild. I think we moved about 5 small coveys. We didn't get as nice a dog work as is typical for Mearns. Stan and Jason got two or three birds each. Terry was never quite in the right spot and didn't get a shot.
15th - Hunted with Jason, Stan and Terry for Gambles. We had an odd day in the fact that we only saw one large covey of birds. All other birds were in singles and pairs. We had many points that day and there was a lot of shooting. Sorry guys, I had to tell the truth :-). Stan was the only one to come out of it with a Gambles. We hunted hard in the afternoon and didn't find a single bird.
21st - Hunted with Kurt and Scott for Mearns. These guys were big time hunters and I took them in some rough terrain. We found 10 coveys of Mearns that day. Kurt got his limit and Scott was only one or two birds away. I also took my gun out and got 6 birds. Nice day!
22nd - Hunted with Kurt and Scott again for Mearns. Nearly a repeat of the first day only the shooting was not quite as good. I think we found about 10 coveys but I don't recall exactly. I don't recall how many birds but I remember it took a long time to clean them all.
28th - Hunted with a corporate group for Mearns. I found 10 coveys with the guys I took and Erin found several coveys also. The shooting was difficult but they managed to all get a couple birds each.
29th - Hunted with the corporate group again for Mearns. We only hunted in the morning but we found 3 or 4 coveys. The shooting was very difficult again and I think only one bird was bagged.
February 2006
4th - Hunted with Steve and Bogie for Gambles. Again we were finding birds not in a covey but singled out. We had a few nice points but nobody cleanly dropped a bird. The hunting was not as good as I had hoped. We probably saw 7 singles with 5 being pointed. The group only hunted half a day as they had other plans to attend to.
I decided to head south for an afternoon Mearns hunt on my own. I got there at 3:30pm and hunted until dark. I found 5 coveys of Mearns and managed to scratch down about 5 birds. It was a sweet afternoon!
5th - I took a few potential puppy buyers out to demo the dogs. We found 3 coveys of Mearns in the morning but they were very wild. We didn't get any good points due to no air movement. We got a couple points on single birds.
In the afternoon Aron and I went back into the honey hole. We moved 7 coveys of birds to round out another 10 covey day. I think all 7 coveys were pointed due to a nice afternoon breeze. The shooting was difficult but we managed to scratch down 5 or 6 birds between us. This was the last day of the season and a great one!
