You just walk through the brush until you either kick them up or, more often than not, you hear them clucking their distinct alarm call which you home in on and head towards, looking hard. Quite often they'll sit and let you get pretty close; not today though for the most part. Most of them flushed pretty wild or I would have had more than the three I got. The creek bed isn't all that wide either so you can pretty easily cover it all by weaving around some and they generally start giving an alarm call from pretty far out and often hop onto a hump or a lookout will go up into a tree for a better view of what's coming, which certainly helps. You learn to ID and follow fresh, and I mean really fresh tracks also. I find a lot of ptarmigan that way; I'm constantly assessing the tracks I cross and often follow them. A lot of people seem to not know how one finds birds without a dog. The simple answer is that you just have to become a better hunter. Once in the creek today I got the 16 flushes in less than 1.5hrs, and most were within an hour; that's not bad. I don't think a dog would do well in some of this deep snow either and certainly not a smaller or short legged dog. There's places where you sink to over your knees on these big snowshoes. Some winters the snow up there is waist deep powder when I go up; that would be pretty tough for any dog. Sure wears me out.
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