Hunting the Huns: Alberta's Big Sky Country

The prairies of southern Alberta are vast, beautiful and full of prime bird habitat. Crop fields are interspersed with abandoned farms, rolling hills are intersected by coulees and creek beds, and Hungarian partridge and sharptailed grouse occupy some of the best and most picturesque habitat on the continent.

- J. J. Faux

Southern Alberta is also considered to be Canada's pheasant capital. It's even possible to harvest all three birds on the same day in the same area if your timing is right. A visit here is on the bucket list of many upland bird hunters. It was on mine.

The Trans-Canada Highway crosses much of this area, and there are a number of small towns between Medicine Hat and Pincher Creek that make good starting points. The habitat is there. The area is sparsely populated, and most of the land is open to the public. It's so vast the cover seems endless, and the sky seems so big that it's easy to imagine you have it all to yourself. That's a significant part of its endearing charm.

When my buddy Rino Grassa suggested I accompany him on a bird hunt there, I cleared my schedule and began counting the days. It wasn't long before a quick flight into Calgary and a rental car found us driving south to Bird Country to find a motel we could use as our headquarters. The Rocky Mountains seemed to float above the prairie off in the distance.

We woke to rain with a few snow flurries the next morning, but as the day progressed it morphed into being sunny, and the temperature rose from 32 up to 44 degrees. It was interesting weather for the beginning of October, but common for this far north. We began by hunting two sections of local farmland looking for Huns - which are known as gray partridges here. It was still close to freezing, and the wind was blowing out of the northwest at about 40-50 mph when we busted our first covey of maybe 15 gray partridges a half hour into the hunt. They flushed wild from the edge of the caragana trees as Rino's English setter Simon had them pointed from over 100 yards away the stiff wind blowing directly from the birds to Simon. When they flushed, they flew across the road. Their behavior was indicative of what we repeatedly experienced on our hunt.