Colorado Chukar

BleuBijou

BleuBijou

Active member
I was reading up on some info from the DOW website and small game and came across a Chukar closing in GMU's 19,9,191 for the next 2 years. I did not even know there were chukar there!!!!!! Must be a few around Poudre Canyon and some other areas as well!!! Anyone with info or has seen them up there???:cheers:
 
I was surprised by that as well. Maybe the DOW is trying to introduce a Chukar population in those GMUs and wants hunters to give them a couple years to establish themselves.
 
From CPW meeting minutes....

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has an approved transplant project to bring wild-caught chukars into the Poudre River/Livermore area (GMUs 9, 19 and 191) beginning in the late summer of 2013. The goal of the project is to establish a self-sustaining, ultimately huntable, population of chukar in that area. While the timing specifics on releasing birds won?t be known until several months from now, the assumption is that wild birds will be available for release sometime in late summer 2013 and a second transplant would be released in late summer 2014. Given that upland bird releases usually see the highest mortality immediately post-release and the goal is to establish this population before it is hunted, it seems prudent to eliminate hunter harvest as a mortality factor in the fall of each release year. These birds will be released on public lands and will be relatively vulnerable to hunting harvest. By enacting a temporary (2-year) hunting closure in the release and adjoining GMUs, initial survival and hunter disturbance of newly introduced birds would be minimized. A portion of these released chukar will be radio collared and monitored for survival, mortality causes and movement/habitat use. If they are successful in establishing a population, CPW believes that hunting these birds could begin in the fall of 2015. Given the low annual survival on upland game birds and the compensatory nature of hunter harvest, it is unlikely protection from harvest beyond the initial release years will do much to further allow the population to increase.

There are currently no wild, self-sustaining chukar populations in any of these units, so this regulation would have no impact on hunters that currently hunt wild chukar on public land. This regulation wouldnot impact private landowners in these units that want to release and hunt pen-raised birds on private property. As proposed, this regulation would also close the chukar falconry season in these units in 2013 and 2014.​

Sounds pretty cool to me. :)
 
Not much public around Livermore. There are a couple spots that I am thinking of however!!! HMMMMM??:10sign:

Thanks for the info Chocolab!!!!!
 
Wow is CDW finally doing something that might benefit upland hunters?
Hope it works and CDW stays on this track through out the state!:thumbsup:
 
birds

hope they find a flat spot to let them go and they buy the flatlander variety. don't get your hope up, the fish and game dept. doesn't get much right.

cheers
 
With the knowledge we have now of what habitats birds will thrive in a trap and transfer program is no longer a shot in the dark deal like state run game farm releases once were. These birds I'm sure will have a great chance of becoming a self sustaining, huntable population.
 
I have no knowledge of the area in question but I guess with any chukar populations I would probably start with guzzler installs to ensure a reliable water source for the birds.
 
release

this area is not the great calif. desert, even has a trout river in the area. anyway if they truly use wild trapped birds it ought to be a piece of cake. hunters won't kill em' off the the state fish and game will regulate them to death. on our western slope, in general the birds have not done particularly well. again it is likely the reg. that are the cause.

cheers
 
Without a water source on the hill they will be more susceptible to predation in the dry months when they are stacked up on or near the river bottoms but that's just me thinking.
 
birds

quail hound said:
Without a water source on the hill they will be more susceptible to predation in the dry months when they are stacked up on or near the river bottoms but that's just me thinking.
Click to expand...

glad you are awake and up moving around out there, i hope the stocking goes well enough to have them stack up. much of this area has a healthy deer and bighorn herd and if there is not a current forest fire going on, much of the vegetation is more green than brown. got your mutts in shape off the couch and ready to go? we shoot dove this sunday and typically they hang around the area for only about 3 weeks, usually, have quite a few collared and we can shoot them year around however they prefer to live in town, makes shooting kinda tough.

cheers
 
Yep, the dogs are ready. I wouldn't say they're at fighting weight but not to bad. We'll be out giving those dove hell on sunday and laughing at each other about all the poor shooting.:D
 
I have the Biologists name, so I will talk with him. They should thrive there!! Guzzlers are a great addition however! I will ask him if they need anyone to volunteer on the project. We should if we want them to get it right!!:D
 
I wish them the best of luck, but I'm skeptical. They try these things every so often and the success rate is usually poor. The DOW has invested lots of money on guzzlers and chukar releases on the western slope without much success. I think they even (unsuccessfully) tried to stock mountain quail on the western slope a while back. They also have these programs where they stock exotic species of cutthroats, which predictably get overtaken by browns and rainbows within a few years. I wish they'd spend our money on species which have already proven they can survive here, such as pheasants and quail.
 
stocking

part of the cutthroat program was surely a joke, northern pike is also problematic at best as they are now in the colorado river. a bright spot is the turkey, they are like horse shit, they are everywhere. moose they won, and goats have done pretty well. the thing they have done the best at is making the reg. so complicated they are nearly impossible to understand, think they did it to give the game wardens something to do besides ride around all day in their pickups hoping to catch some poor slob that didn't understand something about the law and give em' a ticket, harass the sportsmen mostly. and while i am wound up the reasons people quit hunting, the 2nd greatest response beside access is the reg. and attitude of the wardens

cheers
 
I wish the cutthroat program was a joke! I went up to one of my favorite alpine lakes to fish last year and found no fishing signs everywhere. The DOW had dropped some sort of poison that killed all the trout in the lake. There were cages with floats in the lake, which held "native" cutthroats the DOW was about to release. Don't tell the DOW, but the "native" subspecies of cutthroat to this part of Colorado is extinct. So they used our tax/license dollars to kill a healthy fish population for no apparent reason.

Another waste of money is the kokanee program where they net all the spawning kokanees when they enter the river and then artificially inseminate the eggs because the DOW doesn't believe that the fish know how to reproduce without their help. Fish in CO are NOT allowed to populate without the DOW's express permission and supervision. And how about the over the counter bull tags because the elk herd is too big? Anyone with half a brain knows that you need to kill cows to reduce the population, but cow tags are the hardest tags to get. So our typical elk herd is a raghorn bull running around with a harem of 30 or 40 cows. We've got the happiest raghorns in America. Oh no, I shouldn't have started . . . .
 
Does anyone have an update on the chukar project? I'd be interested to know how many wild trapped chukar they have released.
 
chukar

kinda forgot about this, while I constantly search for hunting and fishing news in a couple of our papers plus the f&g web site, not a word, sorry. chukka have been in this state for a lot of years, mostly on the western slope but at best have barely caught on and never seem to be in the news

cheers
 
It was on again off again. Some said they could not catch enough per DOW flight, so it would take to many trips in the airplane and cost to much. They were waiting for a more reliable donor that could make it more feasable. I will call him this week. Hell, they could already be there also.:cheers:
 
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