An oasis in a sea of mesquite. All areas of Lea County, in New Mexico, are now watered by gulpers.

The wind-shorn sand dunes seemed to churn with a dusty blue drift of feather puffs. Scaled quail--maybe more than a hundred--swarmed under the broken-down barbed-wire fence in front of us and over a sandy ridge on the other side.

We figured that our three hard-nosed bird dogs would nail at least part of the horde in a dry wash at the bottom. But the scalies' tracks appeared to go on forever, getting closer together and zigzagging like a drunk on skis. We never caught so much as a glimpse of any of those birds again. The pups' tongues dragged on the ground all the way back to the truck.

Just when you think you've got a surefire game plan for thinning the blue quail population, up jumps the devil with a new set of conditions that changes everything. The aforementioned drubbing by a mob of cottontops occurred during an unusual season on the mesquite-infested high plains of New Mexico. It was just one of many such defeats we suffered that season.

Years of spotty rains had left most benches and dunes adrift in dry, shifting sands, devoid of ground vegetation except for the endless sweep of cacti and mesquite scrub. It was far too dry for forbs and grasses but there were enough stock tanks, gulpers and irrigation water to sustain concentrated coveys of drought-sensitive quail.

On one expanse of bare dunes, my son Dave made a bet with one of his friends that he couldn't toss a 12-gauge shell on the ground without it landing on a quail track. He had more than an acre in which to do it and Dave gave him three tries. We could hear and see quail, a mixture of blues and bobs, all around us. Three excellent pointing dogs, their eyes as big as volleyballs, managed to pin only a couple of birds--the only birds we put to flight. The other birds--it's anyone's guess how many--busily made new tracks in the dunes faster than the winds could erase them.

Ravaging winds rose out of the northwest by midday, spawning almost daily sandstorms. The winds always howl in that country and high-desert denizens claim that if the wind ever died everyone would fall down. For most of the quail season, however, breezes were unusually devastating, which made vision, hearing and following bird dogs difficult.

Without escape ramps, many stock tanks are death traps for quail and other wildlife.

You should have seen the gale that sent me scurrying for shelter in the lee of a tank farm to keep my Explorer's paint job from getting sandblasted. Earlier that morning, I had launched Jack the Brittany into a gentle, 20-knot west wind. He streaked around a Quail Unlimited gulper and got behind two- to three-dozen blue and bobwhite quail.

I could see them coming, streaming over and around baby dunes, surging downwind straight for me. Jack was in a frenzy, trying to corral, point and chase the fleeing birds all at once. I ducked behind a mesquite bush as if gunning a driven-quail shoot, expecting to have a bunch of birds in my lap at any moment. It never happened.

Instead, Jack's beeper went on "point" and I heard the muffled thunder of a bunch of quail rising well downwind of me. I took out my frustration on the lone scaly Jack had pointed. It had run down a rat hole under some mesquite scrub and I let him dig it out as the wind whipped up to 25 knots.

As I drove by a nearby oil well site, a cloud--yes, cloud--of wind-driven quail swept over the hood of my vehicle to descend on a steep hillside some 300 yards to the east. I guessed that the quail would swarm up and over the hill upon landing, as fast as their little legs could carry them. Less than an eighth of a mile ahead, a two-track ran due east up the hill and I goosed the SUV up it as fast as it could go.