It’s been a good December for Upland bird hunting.

Good looking lab, got that crazy hunter look. LOL

Looks like you guys had fun.

What specie birds in the bottom pic?

Nice!!

Great pics. Unfortunately the only birds my lab gets to retrieve are doves.

very nice!

Very nice.Congrats

Looks like the very good eating Hungarian partridge, Huns.

Osky

Great Pictures

Correct. They are fantastic table fair.

The lab is 2 1/2 and she’s figured out her purpose in life. This is my 3rd lab and she has big paws to fill! I think she’ll be fine.

Thanks Osky. We don’t have them here. Pheasants, grouse and woodcock are our upland birds in PA.

Lug if you get a chance at them, great fun to hunt and along with young sandhill crane, best tasting critter with feathers bar none.
Love a couple Huns left in the morning crock pot with homemade wild rice soup makings. Dinner from heaven.

Edited… you may have some out there? They do love being around grain fields and the like. Hunt em like pheasants. I’m no authority at all but I’ve shot them from Wisconsin west well across to western Montana prairie country. I’d imagine they go much farther in range. Pretty significant cycles.
Osky

Great outing,yep those Hun's are fun to hunt and the table fair is excellent....young Sandhill cranes are excellent also.

The Huns definitely have a great hatch. The area we hunted had good numbers.

I was out in ND at the first part of the month and we saw lots of Huns, most at 150 yards or so. They were pretty jittery but I did manage to find a dumb one. Any day spent behind a dog is a good day.

I did a little research on them. Our PGC did attempt stocking them back in the 1920s and 30s as did a bunch of other states. Obviously they took in some states but not in Pennsylvania. There is currently no wild population here in PA.

There has been some talk recently about allowing them to be released along with chukkar for dog training purposes and for people to hunt like they do with chukkars.

It sounds like they would be fun to hunt and good to eat!

They are definitely fun to hunt. I’ve never hunted quail but I heard they flush similar. Every direction!

We used to have a wild, huntable population of Bob White Quail here in Pennsylvania. They are a lot of fun to hunt. There hasn’t been a season on them in quite a while because they basically don’t exist here anymore.

I've never gotten to hunt wild Hungarian Partridge. I used to raise a fair number of them. Even the captive ones were good for dog training. They recall better and from farther than Bobwhite Quail. I suspect the wild Huns are even better flyers.

I wish Ohio would release Hungarian Partridge instead of Chukar. Chukar don't live long in our wet environment. Huns would do well here. They have less trouble with coccidia and enteritis. They don't need much cover.

Huns are a lot more work to raise than Chukar, because during the breeding season, males will kill males and females will kill females, unless they can get away from each other. Chukar will stay in perfect feather even when crowded during the breeding season. I had to keep my Hun breeders in pairs, in individual pens. Nobody wanted to pay more for Huns than Chukar and most people didn't want to pay more for either than quail, which are cheaper to feed, so I stopped raising partridge.

Keith

Here too. I haven’t ran into too many since the snow flew, I imagine they’re hanging in the buck brush and I’ve been hunting the cattail drains for pheasants.

How far from Custer were you hunting?