Beak Buster's

There is a bird from the Himalayas living above the treeline in Nevada. In 1961, the Nevada Fish and Game Commission hired a Reno trophy hunter to travel to the mountains outside Gilgit, Pakistan, and trap Himalayan snowcocks for release in the Ruby Mountains of Elko County. The birds were carried out of the Pakistani highlands by human porters, loaded onto a pony, transferred to a jeep, flown to Honolulu for quarantine, and shipped to Nevada. Six were sent. One survived the trip. The Commission was so impressed with the sole survivor that they ordered 35 more. Nineteen made it. In April 1963, those 19 birds were released into the Ruby Mountains and vanished into thin air.

They are still there.

The Himalayan snowcock is a seven-pound bird the size of a large chicken, gray-bodied with a white throat, a chestnut stripe running from eye to collar, and an orange-brown pattern across the head that resembles a chukar partridge on a bigger frame. In its native range across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and western China, it lives on steep rocky slopes between 8,000 and 20,000 feet. The Ruby Mountains of northeastern Nevada, a granite and limestone range that rises above 11,000 feet from the floor of the Great Basin, offered terrain so similar that Nevada's wildlife managers looked at the peaks and saw Pakistan.

Between 1963 and 1979, the state released more than 2,000 snowcocks into the Rubies and the adjacent East Humboldt Range, using both wild-trapped Pakistani birds and offspring from a captive breeding program at Mason Valley game farm. By the early 1980s, the population had established itself. Surveys since then have estimated between 500 and 2,000 birds depending on the year and the method, though counting an ash-gray bird on an ash-gray cliff face above 10,000 feet is roughly as reliable as counting stars through fog. The Nevada Department of Wildlife describes them simply: they live in alpine meadows surrounded by steep mountain peaks, escarpments, sheer cliffs, and steep slopes.

No other exotic game bird introduction has succeeded in the United States since. In 1970, the federal Foreign Game Investigation Program was shut down and no further exotic species introductions were permitted. The Himalayan snowcock was the last one through the door.

The birds spend their days walking uphill. Small flocks of five to ten work their way up rocky slopes from dawn through the afternoon, feeding on roots, tubers, seeds, grasses, and sedges as they climb. In the evening, they glide back down. They do not fly up. They walk up and glide down. Every day. Audubon's field guide describes it as their fundamental daily rhythm: feed uphill, fly down, repeat. The glide can cover a mile or more of slope in a single run, the birds descending on set wings with a whistling call that carries across the cirques and is sometimes the only evidence a birder gets after a full day of climbing.

Hunting Himalayan snowcock in Nevada is described by every account the same way: the hardest bird hunt in North America. Shooting Sportsman calls it the mountain sheep of bird hunting. Hunters carry mountain packs and trekking poles instead of bird vests and game bags. The approach is a multi-thousand-foot climb above the treeline, often starting before dawn, across loose scree and exposed alpine ridges where the nearest tree is a thousand feet below. A handful of snowcocks are taken each season. Most hunters come home with nothing but altitude sickness and photographs of empty cliffs.

Birders make the same pilgrimage. The Himalayan snowcock is the only bird species in the lower 48 states that lives exclusively above the treeline. Listers who want to check it off their North American record must travel to Elko, Nevada, drive to the trailhead at Lamoille Canyon, and hike to 10,000 feet on the chance of hearing a distant call echoing off a cirque wall. Many hear it and never see it. A few see it and cannot believe they are looking at a Pakistani mountain bird standing on a Nevada ridge.

A bird from the roof of the world, carried out of Gilgit by porters and ponies and airplanes, released into a desert mountain range in 1963, and still walking uphill every morning sixty years later because the Ruby Mountains were close enough to the Himalayas to fool it into staying.

Source: Nevada Department of Wildlife / Cornell Lab of Ornithology / Audubon / Shooting Sportsman / Field Ethos / Project Upland.

Turkey time