Wild Quail and Dove Wingshooting in Northeastern Mexico

Since this essay was first posted the accolades have continued to pile up for Rancho Caracol, including special commendation by Orvis and placement in "the listing" by prestigious Gray's Sporting Journal.  As of this writing there very few 2006-2007 bookings available, except clustered near holidays. 

Introduction

This is an unusual essay for the cloudtravel website. It features a sporting destination in northeastern Mexico famous for quail and dove wingshooting.  Generally, this site reports on locations without regard to destination activities, but this outfitter merits a special write up.

Shooting enthusiasts have heard about the fabled white wing dove hunts along the Rio Grande where clouds of wild birds crowd the skyline so densely that hunters often boast a 100-bird harvest in an afternoon.  These same enthusiasts also know about the shrinking opportunities for wild-quail hunting in this country, which used to be commonplace through the American Southeast.  These days quail hunting with bird dogs is mostly restricted to preserves that rely on pen-raised birds.  Only a pocketful of wild-bird areas remain in Texas and parts of Oklahoma. 

At least one destination in Tamapoulitas State, Mexico features both kinds of hunts, wild quail and white wing dove.  But beyond the once-in-a-lifetime quantity of wild dove and quail, this essay features the unexpectedly luxurious and hassle-free hunting experience at the only Orivs-endorsed shooting lodge in Mexico: Rancho Caracol.

About Rancho Caracol

Dean Putegnat is the latest of several generations of Brownsville natives, a town that dips low on that southernmost tip of Texas.  After graduation from University of Texas and a short career managing a string of Bar-B-Que restaurants in the Austin area, Dean opened Rancho Caracol with his father six years ago.  The Rancho is located near the foothills of the Sierra Madres 150 miles south of Texas at the edge of Lake Guerrero, a local freshwater fishing destination.  

World wide there are 27 Orvis-endorsed properties and Rancho Caracol is one of this elite club.  To become part of this exclusive group Dean Putegnat’s Rancho Caracol satisfied stringent membership requirements that set minimum standards for hunting resources, hospitality and for the lodge facilities. What is significant about this Mexican destination is not just the affability of the staff, the reliability of hunting abundance and the luxury of the facilities.  What is unusual is how Rancho Caracol partners with its (mostly) American guests to shepherd them through a hunting experience south of the border.

If you begin to ponder the many complications involved in hunting in Mexico you appreciate the craftwork of the coordinated services offered by Rancho Caracol.  The Mexican border is often cited in Department of State warnings related to drug violence.  The Mexican government has a complicated and longstanding culture of corruption and the Americans have been pressing for years for more stringent border controls.  The Rancho Caracol experience includes hospitable protection from these concerns and others that stand between you and an enjoyable Mexican hunting adventure.  You are so insulated by their hospitality that all expenses and gratuity can go right on your credit card and you need never see nor handle a Mexican peso.

American visitors who travel more than 20 miles south of the first Mexican border town require a visa.   Rancho Caracol processes the visa paperwork in advance and then transports you from Harlingen Airport baggage claim right to the door of the Rancho and back.  The customs inspections and Mexican military checkpoints are bridged for you by bi-lingual Rancho Caracol staff, people who have lived in the area for years and know the shades of many different local customs experiences.  All the visas and customs forms are tucked in clear-plastic document holders, ready for submission and the staff handles the entire transaction. Your hunting licenses are pre-arranged and the Rancho can manage for you to return to the States with a limited quantity of game from the expedition.

If you want to bring your own shotguns for the trip the staff can arrange it, though with the firearm concerns of this region you have to expect an extra layer of complication.  Expect to pay about $300 and allow for some additional paperwork and border crossing scrutiny.  But to alleviate the complication of transporting shotguns the Rancho has an arsenal of Mexican-licensed Beretta guns, 20 and 12 gauges, both semiautomatic and over/under models.

Consider also the food and water, a common concern US citizens have for any Latin American trip.  Rancho Caracol is your dedicated partner in supplying great, Mexican-accented food that is served fast (the way hunters like) and purified to keep you healthy during your hunting trip.  Every ice cube from their kitchen is frozen from purified water.  Every lettuce leaf and vegetable is washed with filtered and sanitized water (you are formally warned on arrival not to drink the tap water in the guest rooms). 

Travel to Rancho Caracol

What is the journey like to get down you to Rancho Caracol?  Most visitors arrive via Valley International Airport in Harlingen, a few miles north of Brownsville.  Flights into Harlingen are generally routed from Houston International.  Continental and Southwest have a dozen flights a day on this route.  Amigo Airlines charters flights from Harlingen to a paved airstrip a couple of miles from the Rancho, which saves you the three-hour drive into Mexico.  The approximate cost for the chartered flight is $400 per person, four person minimum.  

The majority of guests are greeted at Valley International by Rancho Caracol staff and driven into Mexico, usually in special vans equipped with captain’s chairs and coolers of cold drinks.  Sometimes the pick-up schedule causes the Rancho staff to pick you up in a pick-up truck or quail rig, which makes the drive notably less comfortable.  If this is a concern (and it probably should be) you would be wise to check the arrangement and see if it would better to wait an hour or so after arrival to hook up with one of the van couriers.

The drive out of Harlingen takes you over the Free Trade Bridge to the startling visible change of prosperity that occurs just over the Mexican border.  Modest Mexican dwellings and “Mini Super” convenience stores dot highway 101 on your trip south.  Many of these structures have corrugated tin roofs.   The knowledgeable Rancho staff handles any rest stops along the way.  The terrain is pancake flat for the first two thirds of the trip, with clear visibility to the very curvature of the planet.   Slowly, the ground gains contour and by the last 50 miles of the journey you can see the light blue, serrated line of the Sierra Madres to the south.  This majestic range of mountains remains in view in clear weather from most of the Rancho’s hunting localities across the region. 

As you leave highway 101 near Abasolo, Mexico, and then take to the unpaved road to the Rancho, there is an abrupt change in topography as you glimpse the steep valley down to Lake Guerrero.  Unfortunately, the Rancho doesn’t boast any cleared vistas of the Lake, which is scenically beautiful and usually only viewed the hunters in snatched glimpses from a bounding hunting rig.

Guest Features

The Rancho itself has a main hall for dining, with both indoor and outdoor patio areas.  A separate wing has 20, three-bed rooms and there are private “casitas” for guests.  There is daily maid service, including laundry for the asking.  The showers provide a powerful, sulphur-scented dousing and there is a five-gallon drum of drinking water in each room.  Cell phone service is sketchy, but the Rancho will rent you a local cell phone for $10, plus $1.50 per minute for calls.  My rented phone had reception in every hunting location I checked.  There is internet access via the lodge’s gift shop and most hunters print up their airline boarding passes from this computer the night before departure.

The facilities are rounded out with a small library, swimming pool, multiple televisions, pit bar-b-que, screen-projected laser shooting game and all the top-shelf liquor you want.  For busy hunters the lodge is more then enough entertainment, though I wouldn’t want to test it for a whole day.  I was told that contingents of non-hunting wives and girlfriends visit the Rancho on occasion and there was some description of the limited tourist attractions in Ciudad Victoria and beyond, but I wager from the limit of entertainment options that most non-hunters visit Rancho Caracol once at the most.

The Hunting

What about the hunting?  The staff is clearly dedicated to maximizing your hunting time and they will oblige you from sun to sun, with lunch served in the field to conserve daylight hours if you like.  Generally, hunting days start at 5:00 am with a hearty breakfast swiftly served up to allow for 6:00 roll out of quail rigs and dove vans.   Each “hunt” is either morning or an afternoon, broken up by the mid-day meal.  The Rancho books two-day excursions (four hunts total) on Monday and Tuesday.  Three-day excursions are booked Thursday to Saturday.  Sunday and Wednesday of each week are non-hunt transportation days.

For quail hunting the Rancho has Texas-style quail rigs that carry 2-4 hunters each.  The Rancho has five equipped rigs in all.  They are generally staffed with a head guide who leads the expedition and is authorized with licenses for the vehicle, guns and visits to the different hunting locations.  The head guide often has two junior helpers who come in handy to corral quail in open fields.  Sometimes you are joined by a scout who has sought out prime shooting locations in advance.   The rig is equipped with dog cages and top-mounted bench seats. 

The bird dogs are an assortment of English pointers, a few German shorthairs and often Labs to seek out fallen birds.  The bird dogs are graded “X” for best all around, “A” for a good dog with one major deficiency, and “B” for dogs in training.  Each rig has a variety of dogs, usually about eight in number.  On my trip we had a superb “X” dog, a German shorthaired pointer named “Mike,” along with a number of lesser dogs.  “Mike” lacked the customary bobbed tail of German shorthairs but was a credit to the bloodline.  Our black Lab, “Lady,” drew repeated praise from the veteran hunters on our trip.

Quail hunting takes place in irrigated valleys where the Rancho has leased property or struck arrangements with local landowners.  Shooting is arranged in open stretches between orange groves, in grain fields and on cattle ranches.  The birds are all bobwhites, no valley quail.  The quail are smaller than many birds in the states and they run fast.  Seldom were we able to raise a covey and then track down any of the singles in the thick cover, even when we watched them land.   Scouting for birds with the dogs takes place both from the outdoor bench on the quail rig and while walking the terrain, depending on the location of the birds and the weather conditions.   We were told to expect 15 to 25 coveys per day and experienced a number in the middle of that range, even during two days that had some rain.  Some Texas newspaper write ups I’ve seen chronicled 40 coveys in a day, which doesn’t surprise me.  There were times when we would hit a vein of six coveys in an hour.

Before mentioning the characteristics of the dove hunts, a word about the weather and the season as it pertains to quail hunting.  The season opens in early November and extends to late February.  From what I hear it seems that the January and February hunts are superior because that is after the grain is harvested on many of the hunting locations so the terrain is cleared and there is more grain on the ground.  Earlier-season hunts can suffer from waist to shoulder-high brush over tough, furrowed ground.  The Mexican chaparral is thick with briers and rough brush so be sure to bring chaps.  (The experienced guides donned their chaps immediately at the start of each of our hunts.)   If you get any rain the heavy brush will soak you through in just a few minutes.  Average rainfall in this region during the winter is only a couple of days per month, but rain changes the disposition of the hunting for the worse and you will sense the staff scrambling a little, getting creative about hunting options, as soon as any rainfall threatens.

Rancho Caracol hosts white wing dove hunts from opening day in mid August through to the middle of October.  Thereafter, mourning dove hunts are offered, either exclusively, or in combo packages with quail hunts.  The opening weeks of white wing season are infamous for the quantity of birds, though it goes with the season and location that these hunts are oppressively hot.  We were told that the late-season, October white wing hunts are as active as the opening of the season, but I could not test this.  As white wing hunts change to mourning dove in the maturity of the season the standard of shooting volume becomes four boxes of shells for a good hunt (either morning or afternoon), two or three boxes for a fair hunt and one box for a poor hunt.

Hunting dove at the Rancho is less expensive for both hunter and outfitter.  It offers a little less independence and customization than quail hunting.  For the dove hunts you are ferried to the field in a van with the other hunters.  Your gun is waiting in the field at a pre-selected location with a Mexican bird boy (a “palomeros”) who greets you, chases downed birds and supplies shells and cold drinks.  At the close of the day your palomeros gathers the spent shells and you wait for the van to make its circuit back to your location.  

The polameros generally get $10 US.  My guy, Manuel, was delighted to receive $15 in Yankee green backs and he so admired my ventilated floppy hunting hat that I was happy to part with it on the last day of my adventure.  I studied entirely the wrong romance language for a Mexican hunting trip so Manuel gave me a crash course:  alto is for high birds, bajo is for low birds, and something that sounds like “watch’ yoo lay” means look out, birds coming.

The Rancho describes three kinds of dove hunting outings field hunts, brush hunts, and waterhole hunts.  These are arranged on a daily basis relying on scout teams who access over 500,000 acres of available territory.  Field hunts are in local crop fields.  Brush hunts are held in denser scrub areas and waterhole hunts are arranged near the doves’ major drinking sources.

Conclusion

The places on this earth are shrinking where you can enjoy wingshooting like at Rancho Caracol.  The waves of wild dove and covey after covey of quail seem inexhaustible in Tamapaulitas State and it’s inspiring to be a part of it.  Rancho Caracol has not only the birds, but just the right formula to get you comfortably into the action.   

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© Copyright 2006 Chris Cloud. Last update: 9/5/2006; 8:37:49 PM.