Remember that old Simon and Garfunkel tune, “The Sound of Silence”? If you’re using your ears to follow a Brittany’s bell through manzanita brush and live oaks along the Mexican border, silence is a wonderful sound. It means you may be closing in on a covey of Mearns quail.
I scrambled up the rocky slope and found Chief crouched beneath the branches of an evergreen oak, his eyes locked on a sun-dappled patch of ground where something had scratched up the dead leaves and forest litter. I took a deep breath, readied my 20 gauge over/under, and moved ahead of the dog. Nothing. The next step detonated an explosion of Mearns quail so close I could nearly have touched them with my shotgun. The first shot with the skeet choke sent a shower of twigs and leaves cascading to the ground. When the last bird in the covey flashed through an opening I snapped off another shot. This time, along with more leaves, a few feathers circled to earth.
Chief’s bell tinkled busily for ten seconds and then stopped … a good sign. His bell started up again and when he emerged from the shadows, walking slowly, he held a cock quail in his mouth. It had white polka dots on its sides, a chestnut breast, and a black belly and rump. Its face—striped with bluish-black and white—reminded me of a painted-up college kid at a football game.
Named for Edgar Alexander Mearns, a naturalist and U.S. Army surgeon who led a biological survey of the Southwestern border region in the late 1800s, the little clown-faced birds are also known as harlequin quail, Montezuma quail, and, in the early days, Massena quail. In Mexico, where they’re more abundant, they are sometimes called codorniz pinta, painted quail.
Joe Elliott called to me from across the canyon: “Get one?”
“Sure did,” I yelled back. “Edgar’s bird.”
Our quail-hunting trip to southern Arizona had its origins several years earlier on East Africa’s Mount Kenya. Joe had just finished a teaching stint at the University of Nairobi and I had joined him for a month of travel through Kenya’s game parks. Reading about Mount Kenya, I learned that Dr. Mearns had accompanied Teddy Roosevelt to Africa in 1908, serving as the expedition’s naturalist. Roosevelt hailed him as “the best field naturalist and collector in the United States, and a superb shot.” During that trip Mearns and a companion climbed Mount Kenya, where they collected “1,112 birds, of 210 species … 1,320 mammals and 771 reptiles.”
Joe and I and another friend spent several days on Mount Kenya, scrambling to the top of Point Lenana at more than 16,000 feet and gazing in awe at the strange plants and animals, some of which exist nowhere else in the world. We had all we could do to get up and down the mountain without oxygen, let alone collect thousands of plant and animal specimens. A tough man, that Dr. Mearns. Now, a decade after following his footsteps up Mount Kenya, we were retracing his tracks along the Mexican border, searching for the quail named in his honor.
Just getting to southern Arizona had been an adventure. We had driven south from Montana in January in my old Ford van, which I had adapted for traveling with bird dogs. The back of the van had room for four travel crates on the floor—two for Joe’s springer spaniels and two for my Brittany pup and a black Lab. A fifth dog, my male Brittany, Chief, rode on the floor behind my seat.
The van’s only drawback was its poor traction on snow and ice, both of which had vexed us in the 1,400 miles between Montana and southern Arizona. By the time we dropped off the Mogollon Rim south of Flagstaff, the snow had turned to rain. Unlike summer rains, which arrive in the form of afternoon thunderstorms, winter rains in Arizona arise from major frontal systems that sweep in from the coast. These storms, accompanied by strong winds and steady rain, often last a day or two.
We camped for the night in the desert south of Sedona, and in the morning we stopped at Fort Verde State Historical Park, where Dr. Mearns had been stationed in the 1880s. At Fort Verde we toured the surgeon’s quarters and other buildings, and I picked up a copy of a booklet called “Birds in Arizona’s Sedona-Oak Creek Area, Observed and Taken as Specimens by Dr. Edgar Mearns, January, 1885.” In this book Mearns describes his first encounter with the quail eventually named in his honor:
I noticed that the sexes were plainly distinguishable when flying, even at a distance. They ran and flew a short distance alternately until well up on the steep hillside of sliding rocks that were covered with long grass and low scrub oaks, affording the very finest kind of cover. As I clambered up this difficult slope, one after another they flew up before me, always from right in front of me, uttering their singular notes, and generally taking me when I was badly balanced and unprepared. I got three shots and brought down two birds, a pair.
That afternoon we drove south through on-and-off showers and spent the night about fifty miles south of Tucson in the little town of Patagonia. Early the next morning while walking down the main street I saw a truck with Michigan plates and a couple of English setters in the back. I figured the setters belonged to the two hunters I could see through the window of the nearby cafe, so I went in to chat. One of the men turned out to be part-time Montanan Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and other literary works. Between bites of their huevos rancheros, Harrison and his partner graciously gave me a rundown on where to look for Mearns quail.
After stocking up on groceries, Joe and I headed east on a gravel road that winds through the Coronado National Forest toward the San Rafael Valley. The rain had stopped during the night, but ragged gray clouds rested atop the peaks of the Patagonia Mountains.
We hadn’t gone far into the snow-powdered hills before we ran into trouble. The road crosses Harshaw Creek in numerous places and at the first crossing, the creek, normally just a trickle, was now a muddy torrent from the heavy rains. Several vehicles sat lined up on both sides of the crossing, their drivers standing outside watching a backhoe operator rearrange the creekbed.
After a half-hour of filling and leveling, the backhoe jockey parked his machine on the far side of the wash, jumped down and sent the first truck across from the other side. “I’m glad we’re not first,” Joe said.
The vehicle, a small pickup, made it across okay, its driver looking relieved as the truck sloshed out of the creek and past us. When our turn came, we too made the crossing without incident. The backhoe operator, a Hispanic man in his thirties, had left his backhoe and was now hoofing it up the road, so we offered him a ride.
“Where are you headed?” Joe asked.
“Harshaw. About a mile up the road,” he replied.
“Jump in. Grab a seat on the cooler and we’ll give you a lift.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Does your dog bite?”
“Only quail,” I said, laughing.
“A quail dog! What’s his name?”
“Chief.”
“El jefe de las codornices,” he said, scratching Chief’s ear. “Boss of the quail.”
We let our rider out at the old mining town of Harshaw and continued south toward the Mexican border. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds and quickly melted the remaining snow. The countryside looked like anything but the Arizona desert. We were in the mountains, climbing to an elevation of about 5,000 feet, and instead of saguaros and paloverdes we were surrounded by evergreen oaks, junipers, and manzanita. Here and there a leafless sycamore with spreading gray branches shaded the creek. Lush grasses—grama, beardgrass, and bluestem—stood knee-high under the oak trees. Ideal Mearns quail habitat, according to Jim Harrison.
We pulled off the road at a likely spot and uncased our shotguns. Since we intended this to be a hasty recon to stretch our legs and get a feel for the country, we took only one dog, Chief. We hadn’t gone far up the steep canyon when the little drama I described at the beginning of this chapter unfolded.
While I waited for Joe to join me on my side of the wash, I poured Chief a drink in the collapsible bowl I carry in my game vest. The day was warming despite the cool breeze rustling through the leaves of the oak trees. When Joe arrived we spent a few minutes admiring the first Mearns quail either of us had seen up close.
“Check out those claws,” Joe said, pointing to the bird’s half-inch long, scythe-shaped toenails. “That’s what they use to scratch for breakfast.”
Mearns quail prefer digging for the bulbs of wood sorrel and the tubers of sedges, but they also eat acorns, seeds, and insects.
After Chief had rested and drunk his fill, we walked in the direction the covey had gone. Mearns quail don’t fly far, and they are notorious for sitting tight after being scattered. A short time later Chief’s bell stopped again.
“I think he’s got one,” Joe said.
I was screened out by the trees and before I could work my way into shooting position a single whirred out. Joe had a clear shot and grassed it just before it could escape behind an alligator juniper.
Chief brought it to me and I held it next to my bird for comparison. A cinnamon-colored hen with brown and black markings, it had an almost pinkish tinge.
We crisscrossed the area a couple of times and Chief pointed two more quail, one of which went into my game vest. The remaining birds in the covey had found secure hiding places and weren’t about to move, so we headed back to the van for a cold drink and a sandwich.
After lunch we drove down the road until we found a track branching off into the national forest. The road wound down and across a sandy wash and continued on into a series of oak-covered hills dissected by steep, dark canyons. The sun-cured grama and bluestem appeared only lightly grazed and it looked like good quail country. We found a flat spot for the tent and set up camp. Then we grabbed our shotguns and headed into the hills with Chief and the springers, Zeke and Zelda. We split up so the springers wouldn’t bust in on Chief’s points—should there be any—and agreed to meet back at camp in a few hours.
Just above a stock pond on a grassy hillside, Chief tiptoed to a point. This time I was ready for the noisy flush of Edgar’s birds, and I dropped one with my first shot. Over the next twenty minutes I bagged a couple of singles, then moved on toward the top of a long ridge dotted with Mexican oaks. When I glimpsed a Coues whitetail slipping through the trees ahead of me, I thought of a Mearns quail hunt described by Jack O’Connor in his book Game in the Desert, published in 1939:
I had hunted a half-hour and got five or six birds when I kicked one up that had hidden under the leaves of a yucca. He flew straight away, and when he was directly over a patch of chaparral I let him have it. He crumpled in mid-air and dropped straight into the brush. The moment he hit, a white- tail buck jumped out of that little brush patch. Despite my astonishment I automatically gave him the full-choke barrel. At twenty yards the charge penetrated to his heart and I came down the mountain that day with the rarest deer and a mess of the rarest game birds in the United States. Such is luck!
During the next two hours Chief nailed three more coveys; I shot up a pocketful of shells, collecting several more quail. I could hear the bark of Joe’s shotgun a couple of draws over so I knew he and the springers were having similar luck.
Back at camp we counted our quail. We had a total of twelve, not bad for two gringos from the far north. Sitting around the campfire that night after a grilled quail dinner, Joe hoisted a cold Corona in Chief’s honor: “El jefe de las codornices, I salute you.” Then we toasted Zeke and Zelda, the quail, and our hero, Dr. Edgar Mearns, the indefatigable naturalist who had inspired our journey.