Update

This is mainly for those who travel to Idaho and eastern Oregon to hunt. They don’t get to see much of what the Idaho weather was like the last two days.

We get a lot of thunderstorms during the summers here, but not like those that rolled through the valley last night and this morning. Last evening, Conner called and told me of the flooding going on by his house in Meridian, and Amaia told me the same was happening in Homedale. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I saw the news this morning. It really was a downpour. The kind that would kill young chicks in the desert country. I tried to track its path, and although that particular storm didn’t hit most of the Owyhees, there were several smaller thunderstorms moving across that area. Hopefully they weren’t as bad.

Twenty miles away, as the crow flies, we didn’t get any rain. But this morning, a cloud burst came by my place, and although it wasn’t quite as severe, it flooded my drive way some and would have done a lot of damage to young chicks also. Once again, I tracked the storm the best I could. It didn’t seem to hit the Brownlee reservoir area, but I could see smaller storms in that area also.

Going back to my last post. Most of the chukar chicks that were born a couple of weeks ago should survive. But the birds that were hatched this week would definitely die if one of these storms hit them. I hope that I’m wrong about this being the approximate date the main hatch is.

The good thing is that chukars are persistent nesters. If their whole clutch dies, they will renest and have plenty of time to raise a second hatch. They may not lay as many eggs, but there will still be more later birds. This is the only way there are those second and third hatches. Game birds can’t raise a clutch of birds and sit on a nest at the same time. My point here is, if we see a lot of young birds come hunting season, these storms are probably the reason.

Mother Nature is cruel in a way and a savior in another. These same storms will produce lots of insects and growth for any birds hatched after the storms come through to thrive. I’m sure we’re going to be alright, come hunting season, but we can’t afford to see more storms like these in the future.