OLD MAN, YELLING AT CLOUDS

Hello, young men with cameras on your heads. You probably don’t notice me sitting here from afar, eating a sandwich on my tailgate in the sublime, sunshine-kissed perfection of this unseasonably warm late winter day, but I can’t help but notice your group— or “crew” if you prefer— walking across the rolling, sand-sage hills of my favorite public hunting area.

I notice that you’re all sporting sticker-festooned shotguns with extended mag tubes, that you seem to have a number of video cameras poking from your headbands and shotgun barrels, and that you’re following some sort of dog of indeterminate Continental breeding.

Seeing this, I assume you’re here to partake of the wild, public-land quail hunting offered by this region. I don’t blame you. That’s exactly why I live here.

See, I’m a bird hunter, too. In fact, I proudly self-identify as one when asked, even though I doubt that qualifies as building a personal brand or online persona.

All I know is that a life without wild birds and dogs with which to chase them is a life antithetical to my own existence, and that the bobwhite quail in particular has been my totem bird and spirit animal since the first time I held one in my hand as a clueless adolescent.

So who knows? Maybe that constitutes my brand, but I’m no expert in such things.

But what I am an expert in is how I feel about that vanishingly small covey of already-hard-hunted bobs I’m watching you shoot out of existence (and—I assume from your antics—filming for your online audience).

Awe. And reverence. That’s how I feel about those little bits of feather and bone and blood your entire group is blasting to hell and whooping and high-fiving and fist-bumping over. Those are the two feelings that first, long-ago quail evoked within me, as has every other gamebird I’ve shot since that day.

You know why? Because quail—and all the gamebirds I hunt, wherever I hunt them—represent the pursuit of perfection; the fleeting, addictive rightness of that singular moment when the alignment of the holy trinity of dog, bird, and place all come together and you are given the gift of something wondrous.

I ask: What else would a person seek in walking all those miles across all those landscapes but that one precious moment and the gift it bestows?

Because that’s what those quail now lying in a row on your tailgate being filmed are: they are a gift.

They belong here, on this ground I walk. They are of this landscape.

They weren’t brought here from somewhere else and released to be targets for human recreation.

They sprang from what this land is, and their song is the song of time and eons and meaning.

They’re not big, or flashy, or particularly colorful. They’re hard to hunt and they’re hard to hit.

They’re best hunted alone, just you and your dog, or a close friend. Preferably a silent one.

They prefer landscapes to parcels, and their pursuit requires a level of commitment beyond walking a cornfield in a crowd.

They don’t read books or articles written by people like myself, they don’t follow social media goobers, and they don’t give a damn about my or your expert opinion on how, what, or where they’re supposed to be.

They live where they live, they be what they are, and they do what they do totally apart from our human-based perspective of existence, and they are wonderfully, inscrutably indifferent to what we think we know of them.

And this bears repeating: They are a gift. So, please, try to be worthy of that gift.

And when you’re lucky enough to kill one, or a few, remember that the act of killing them doesn’t make you special. It doesn’t make you a brand, and it sure as hell doesn’t make you a bird hunter.

It just means you were blessed enough to be given something that will always be larger than who or what you are, or ever will be.

Now, times have changed, I know, and I suppose I probably sound hopelessly outdated to you and your friends. Or maybe I’m just old, and this is simply an upland-specific manifestation of the eons-old gulf between one generation and the next. Perhaps I am indeed that old man shaking his fist into the sky as he loudly berates passing clouds in that popular meme my children and younger friends like to text me when I get particularly cranky about something.

But what doesn’t change across generations is truth, or respect for the things you hunt, and the life you take.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not suggesting that you should scrub all joy and celebration and fun from the hunt. I like all those things, too, without any shame or guilt whatsoever. Hell, the time I watched my eldest son shoot his first prairie chicken over the dog he grew up with, I whooped, too.

There is, however, something else to be felt in the pursuit of fragile, beautiful wild things that die at your hand in order to give you whatever spiritual and physical sustenance you derive from the act, and that is respect.

Respect for the birds you hunt, and a little appreciation for what the life you’ve taken has given you, and the meaning it has bestowed upon this moment.

Perhaps in the future, if you can press pause on your guncam footage long enough to ponder and appreciate that point, then maybe—just maybe— the act of killing something so perfect and so worthy of veneration as a quail (or any other gamebird) can hopefully help to make you into what I assume you strive to be. Which is a bird hunter.

You see, any asshole with a shotgun can kill a bird. But it takes a bit of grace to be a bird hunter.

So please, don’t be jackasses; in the field, the parking area, or your social media accounts.

Maybe, instead of acting like peckerheads and repeatedly blasting the hell out of the same covey hoping to get cool footage for your YouTube channel, you could simply kill a bird or two, enjoy the sublime perfection of the moment, and move on to the next moment, the next gift.

Sometimes—but especially with a creature as wondrous as a quail—being content with “enough” adds an appreciation to the act of bird hunting that sheer body count cannot.

Try it sometime. A little class, a little courtesy, and a little respect toward the birds, the land, and the larger world you are a part of goes a long way toward honoring—rather than trashing—the ethics and ideals and traditions of what I assume you hoped to aspire to when you first picked up a shotgun with the intent of hunting quail with it.

Signed,

An old man, yelling at clouds.