Chasing chukars is sometimes more than you bargained for, the birds preferring habitat not made for man nor even four-legged beast.

After pushing through a big stand of pines, we emerged beside a creek guarded by dense brush. Fifty yards beyond, another dry, grassy chukar slope started its tortuous climb toward the top of the next ridge. We worked up the creek, one on each side of the brush, Sota crossing back and forth--until she smelled a ruffed grouse.

When the gray-phase ruff broke out in front of Dave, he dusted it and called, "Five species!" We shot two more birds before reaching the truck.

Fifty years ago, native mountain quail and introduced bobwhites added even more options to Idaho's bird hunting cornucopia, but habitat degradation (invasive weeds, overgrazing, housing developments, house cats, etc.) have nearly wiped out the former, which are now an endangered species in the state. Bobwhites initially thrived alongside southern Idaho crop fields, but the one-two-three punch of clean farming, pesticides and herbicides have them on the ropes.

Pheasants are doing slightly better, but the blinding rush to build houses in fertile valleys is ruining their long-term chances. Brush pockets in the Palouse wheat country near Moscow and the prairie wheat fields near Grangeville plus crop fields in the Snake River Plain from Weisser to Rexburg remain Idaho's best bet for ringnecks.

Sharptailed grouse and sage grouse, historically two of the most abundant native birds here, face cloudy futures. Sharpies historically ranged across the southern plains and up the Snake River canyon north to the bunchgrass Palouse hills around Moscow. They dwindled as humans converted native grasslands to crops and pastures. The advent of the Conservation Reserve Program, however, set the stage for a major rebound. Since 1985 sharptails in the southeast have doubled and redoubled their numbers (see related "News Note" in this month's "Expeditions"), finding escape from predators and weather in big fields of standing grass.

Sage grouse are in trouble nationwide, 150 years of human-made changes having caught up with them. Although miles and miles of sagebrush look like great habitat to us, subtle changes in vegetation over the decades may look frighteningly different to the grouse, which depend on a variety of succulent forbs and grasses for summer food.

Sadly, those are the plants often favored by cattle and sheep. After years of constant grazing, such plants weaken and eventually die out, and weeds from foreign lands move in to replace them--camouflaging the land in a layer of green that fools us humans. The weeds also provide tinder-dry fuel that carries fires into sagebrush, destroying thousands of acres annually.

Despite this degradation, sage grouse hunting remains fairly good in parts of south Idaho. Four years ago, my wife and I stumbled onto a flock of sage bombers that must have been staging for a migration flight. Our intent was to hunt chukars, but when our setter pointed her first sage hen, we switched gears instantly, dropping one of two birds that flushed in front of her.

We camped in the sage that night and resumed our hunt the next morning, moving 14 different sage grouse and shooting our limits of two each over our little setter's points. Afterwards we still had time to chase chukars--no surprise in the mixed-bag paradise called Idaho.