Bring your brain, because quail get smarter late in season

For Nevada quail hunters, November is a transition month. With the month's arrival comes much cooler temperatures and a good selection of late-season college football games, ones that decide things such as who goes to what bowl game and who stays home. Both are reasons some hunters hang up their shotguns and put up their feet, leaving the birds to the rest of us.

While you will now find less competition in the field, the birds you find generally will be of the educated variety. In other words, even the young birds have experienced enough hunting pressure to know what you and your friends are about, and those birds will do what they can to spoil your plans. Due to lower-than-average recruitment the past few seasons, many of the older adult birds have experienced an entire hunting season and will respond to your presence accordingly.

In the early part of the season, you will usually find quail in the bottoms of brushy washes or canyons or in the low, rolling swales at the bottoms of steep ridges that are fairly easy for hunters to access. But as the season progresses, especially in heavily hunted areas and those where folks tend to hunt from motorized vehicles rather than on foot, the birds' survival instinct drives them up and into steeper and rougher country. As a result, quail hunting tends to become more like deer hunting than bird hunting.

While quail will walk up a slope, they prefer to travel via cuts or depressions in the landscape, such as a draw or saddle. If you are finding tracks in the sand at the bottom of a wash, but not finding birds, try shifting your efforts to a draw or even a small cut that leads uphill into steep country. Look for something that is lined with vegetation and provides birds with cover. These are natural travel corridors in which the birds feel safe, and they will move ahead of you until they reach the head of the draw or cut. If there is sufficient cover to hide, they will often hold until you put enough pressure on them to make them fly or run out the top.

For a critter with short legs, Gambel's Quail are surprisingly fast and can easily outrun hunters and dogs alike. In fact, they prefer running to flying and will waste little time creating distance between you and them. Success will require a keen eye, the ability to cover some ground and the willingness to do just that.

Quail will generally follow a geographical feature as they seek to put distance between them and you. Use that same feature to your advantage. For example, if the birds are traveling down the bottom of a wash, you can drop into the next one and use the rise in between to mask your approach and move ahead of the birds so you can cut them off. Then wait for their approach, not unlike ambushing a deer.

Another thing to keep in mind is that quail are quail, which means they will sometimes do something you don't expect. One year, I chased a small covey down a wash and they simply disappeared. After an hour of searching for the birds, I found them hiding in a series of burrows dug into the side of the wash. Obviously, they weren't about to come out and present me with a shot.

Freelance writer Doug Nielsen is a conservation educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. His "In the Outdoors" column, published Thursday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NDOW. Any opinions he states in his column are his own. He can be reached at intheoutdoorslv@gmail.com.