La Grulla - Los Coches Dec 10, 1979 Chuck Cotton drove all this way in search of some doves, but we didn't find any. Instead we found the biggest quail concentration I have ever seen. On the way in we stopped periodically to admire one big covey after another. Finally came back to the joint where we just roped up a big bunch last year (with Boyle, Selmins, Dick Sinclair) and when we flushed the bunch of jackyns too they went east across the big plain, picking up other coveys of 100 to 300 as they flew. Bride literally rolled across the plain ahead of us. Chuck and I added our estimates of separate groups, and figured 2000 quail were on that flat. Nor did we jump them all. Some good groups peeled off to the left running. No covey ever really scattered. They just kept running ahead of us in the sparse cover and across some big burned areas. Yet I though slowed down so we got our limits in an hour. I shot well at first (I think, 10 shells) my last bird - then disintegrated and lost two, missed several more. My eighth bird came finally from another covey on the way out. On the basis of previous sampling I expected this interior population to be very high in young, but it wasn't - 8 adults, 12 young. Must have been a big carry-over of adults in this locality if our sample represented the population. There have been many very large fires this year. Cotton estimates that at least one-eighth of the country has burned. Some fires are thousands of acres in extent. Presumably the heavy rains produced lots of grass and fuel that could not be consumed by the standing crop of cows. Hence the country was highly flammable.