Hunting
Of all the activities I do in the outdoors, be it dog training, shooting, trout fishing, turkey hunting, waterfowling, striper fishing, horseback riding, or anything else, grouse and woodcock hunting ranks first. I count down every day until the season begins like a kid counts down days until summer vacation. I anticipate opening days, and cannot wait to get into the field.
Still, every year around the third week in October I begin to get mixed emotions about pursuing my favorite game birds in my coverts. Around that time I experience a profound change that slows me down. I don’t spring out of bed in the pre-dawn darkness. I walk through the alders and white birch runs more leisurely. Sometimes I take a break and just stop and sit a while.
At about that time my dogs wonder just what the heck is wrong with me. When I pull out a collar with a bell they claw at their kennel doors like caged lions, and to them my lack-luster condition is unbecoming. It’s really a simple thing that is my cross to bear: I’m sad.
I’m sad because I know that the end of the season is near. Think about it. A 45-day woodcock season is about 12% of the year. That means I have another 88% to go until opening day. To me that’s a long time. Don’t get me wrong, I totally enjoy my other sporting activities and the folks I share them with. But compared to grouse and woodcock hunting which occupies my top slot, the rest are sort of a consolation prize. I still enjoy an ice cream sundae even though I really want a piece of double-chocolate cake.
Initially I thought that I would follow the woodcock flights and hunt them along their southern route. For a while I hunted grouse in the winter but then decided they were having a hard enough time finding food in the snowy uplands. Upon closer reflection I felt that I had harassed the birds enough during October and November and that I would leave them alone. Instead, I’d pursue a species native to my home hunting grounds in coastal Massachusetts, the bobwhite quail.
Trading my beloved alder runs and poplar stands is something that is not done very easily. When we get used to bull briars, raspberry thickets, and thick cover with narrow shooting windows we can sometimes get lost in the wide open fields and the softness found in wiregrass, lovegrass, and broom sedge. Pines like loblollys, slash, and longleaf grow tall and majestically.
Most dyed-in-the-wool grouse and woodcock hunters need a few flights to adjust to the open space. At least I do. A snap shot in thick covert on a grouse contrasts sharply with the openness of the quail terrain. At first blush I count them all as gimmees. After a few easy misses I sharpen my focus and bear down to give the dogs a few feathers in their mouths.
I stumbled upon Southern quail hunting naturally. My Tennessee-born and North Carolina-raised wife has a family large enough to fill 15 long tables at an after-church bar-be-que. At the last gathering the count was about 100. Visiting family always made for a few easy sorties to the quail fields, and most of her family helped with introductions to landowners.
In recent history, populations of wild bobwhites have been impacted like many other of our favorite game birds. Southern quail hunting is an incredibly strong tradition no different than Northern ruffed grouse hunting. Long-time quail hunters remember the days that Robert Ruark chronicled in The Old Man and the Boy. Ruark believed that hunting bobs between Christmas and New Year’s was the ideal time. “By this time the birds are steadied down and the dogs have had a lot of practice and they’ve steadied down, too.”
When his New England uplands and lowlands were frozen solid, Corey Ford headed to North Carolina, and he gave pause to running his grouse dogs on quail. “Take a northern-trained setter out of his native alder coverts and put him down in a southern environment of sand and sedge and honeysuckle tangle, I wondered what would happen?” So, too was the fact that most grouse hunters run one dog at a time while quail dogs are run as a pack. Add to the mix the lack of bells on a Southern dog and you’ve got some more differences. Ford goes on to talk about a dog’s thick, winter coat being a handicap with the heat, and combined with pulling a wad of hitchhikers from a long-haired setter you’ll know why pointers are so well received.
My easy acceptance of hunting quail in the winter was unique to me, but it wasn’t new to the world. The Red Hills region in South Georgia and North Florida has attracted New Englanders and Midwesterners for over a century. I wasn’t creating a new movement by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, I was just falling into line with the great ideas that were set forth ahead of me.
I no longer get sad in the third week of October. As I’ve had a goal of hunting grouse and woodcock in all of their reaches, I’ve now added a goal of hunting bobwhites in all of their native lands. Their terrain is expansive and the environments diverse. For now I’ll focus on Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Once I get a flavor for those areas I’ll gradually head further west. Nowadays I look forward to the winter. And my wait until grouse and woodcock season reopens at home is far shorter because of it.
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2012 edition of Ruffed Grouse Society.
Dogs, Hunting
My heart skipped a beat when my wife told me she loved Albert. He was a young, muscular, good-looking tricolor setter of North Carolina quail stock, part of the field-dog rotation at The Webb Farm. Bill Webb owned him, Wade Meacham trained him and Kenny Rabb hunted him. One day, Albert tore a ligament, and despite surgery he would never get back to the rigorous hunting schedule required of him at the farm.
Bill knew the setter still had a lot more bird-chasing years in him. If Albert were worked out regularly and hunted for shorter periods of time, he’d be just fine. And so it came to be during our annual winter hunt at The Webb Farm. Bill could think of no better fit for Albert since we work our dogs regularly and each of our coverts takes about an hour to hunt. We were shoeins for the Adopt Albert program, and everyone wanted the dog to find a home in our kennel – except for me.
How do you take a big running dog whelped on fields full of wiregrass, lovegrass, milo and bicolor lespedeza and get him to like the tight, harsh New England coverts? The term “exercise in futility” came to mind, and I was concerned that I could take the dog out of the South but that I wouldn’t be able to take the South out of the dog.
Any protest I may have had was over by the time my daughter met Albert. She liked the tan and black patches around his eyes, and she smiled when he flopped into her lap. I folded like a house of cards, and we picked up Albert on an 85-degree, Carolina-blue spring day. Love was in the air.
The dog adjusted just fine to his new life above the Mason-Dixon Line. I ran him in the woods, we did casting two-a-days to shorten his range and he showed a lot of promise. He was a smart, experienced, well-trained gun dog, and it helped that our summers reminded him of his days on the piedmont. Albert proved that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
There was just one hitch. As horses balk at jumping fences, field dogs usually reject thick cover. Unless it’s in their blood, hat dog – or for that matter, what hunter – would trade the softness of wheat, milo, and barley fields for the impenetrable white birch runs, the stabbing Hawthorne tines, the shrouds of bull briars, and the snarling tangles of raspberry vines? Dogs usually don’t volunteer to run through that kind of mess, and Albert was no exception.
Anything done in moderation shows a lack of interest, so I tried a mentorship program. I ran Albert with one of my cover dogs, which made about as much sense as socks on a rooster. I had one dog in the cover and one dog in the field, and I was in the middle. If you’re wondering about that patch of gray hair on my head, it blossomed on that day.
I like to build on successes, and Albert’s came slowly. His first win came in the Ed Gray covert. The covert was one of Ed’s favorites, and it is a delightful old farm with a hillside slope that was chock-a-block with apples, high-bush cranberries and haws so thick you could barely see daylight on the other side. A river runs through the bottom, and alder and white birch are everywhere. On a good day, you could shoot grouse on your way down to the bottom, and on a great day you’d find a few woodcock. A tremendous field separated the two sections, and that was where Albert flash-pointed his first grouse. Later on I shot a pair of timberdoodles over his points, and my friend Cabe shot a few woodcock over Albert in the King’s Covert, too. But when we were slow to find birds, Albert headed straight for the nearest field.
Albert didn’t much care to get shredded and stabbed by the bush and briars. When it’s hot and the birds are tucked away in the shade and the moisture of the thickest of thick coverts, you’ve got to have the patience of Job to work your way through. At the end of a season, my double-faced chaps are shredded and I’ve got scars on my face and wrists, but my scrapes pale in comparison to a dog on the ground. Albert wanted no part of the jungle, and the only way I could get him into the coverts was to show him a benefit. That magic arrived when the woodcock flights were heavy.
I looked forward to the full moon at the end October. The temperatures would be lower, and a killing frost would open up the woods. The heavy west-northwest winds would knock down the leaves from the trees, and there would be more chalk on the ground than on a teacher’s blackboard. I decided to put him in Freight Train, my best covert, and hoped that a flight of woodcock had dropped in for a visit.
Albert was cranked and ran over the first few before he settled down and got to work. It helped that the woodcock were spread perfectly throughout the covert. His casting tightened up to a 30- to 35-yard range on the whistle, he figured out the difference between ground and body scent and he found the birds where they always are – right in the thickness. Repetition makes the master, and after 24 birds in under an hour, Albert was well on his way to becoming a New England cover dog.
Birds make a bird dog, and for the rest of the season old Albert ran as good as my other setters, Ocracoke and Rowdy. Sometimes he ranges a little too far, and when he does he stands back off the bird a ways to let me catch up. When I get done zigzagging through the woods, he’ll reposition closer toward the bird; when I find a space open enough to take a shot, he’ll lock right up. Albert has added grouse and woodcock to his repertoire, but he’ll forever be a Southern gentleman, just the way we love him.
Hunting
Follow a famed hunter from the past’s footsteps through New Brunswick’s backcountry.
The fall is an extraordinary time of year to be in New Brunswick. In September and October, Atlantic salmon return to the storied rivers to spawn, big game animals are on the move, and bird hunters roam the upland and lowland coverts that are splashed with remarkable color. The white birch, alders, and maples turn brilliant shades of yellow, orange and red, and if we quiet our minds, autumn affords us an opportunity to see life the way an artist sees it every day.
I have travelled to the Mirimichi River Valley every year for a very long time. I’m not sure what originally prompted me to go. Maybe it was the shortness of my stateside woodcock seasons, maybe it was the loss of good, local habitat, or maybe it was to get my setters more work. Once thing is for sure, and that is once I started going to New Brunswick I’ve never stopped.
Logging is a main industry up here so an adequate supply of primary and secondary growth is always right around the corner. These are places where I can run my dogs for hours on end through an endless mix of alder runs, white birch and poplar stands, and old orchards fringed with Hawthorns, raspberries, and high-bush cranberries. Sometimes the ‘cock are mixed in with ruffed grouse, but for the most part I’ll find the timber-doodles in the dark, dampness of river bottoms and seeps. The grouse are in the uplands where they should be.
An aged smell accompanies the lowlands and it is caused by the moisture and the near eternity of decaying leaves. It’s a damp and musty smell that any veteran woodcock hunter recognizes immediately as home. The leaves and moisture create a fertile soil rich in the woodcock’s favorite meal of earthworms.
There is something entirely unusual about a bird with an upside-down brain that migrates best on a Full Moon and a WNW wind. One day the coverts are chock-a-block while other days they closely resemble Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. When I go through them and find no birds I look for their calling cards. Sometimes there are bore holes in soft terrain which show where they extracted a number of meaty earthworms while other times they leave behind traces of pre-flight excrement that woodcock hunter’s call chalk. If a flight of birds dropped in over night and the pointing and shooting is fast and furious I smile. But I also smile when I come out of a covert and bore witness only to sign. In those instances I tell my dogs that we’ll find birds in the next few coverts. I haven’t lied to them yet.
I stay in an old log cabin that was assembled from logs cut just a few miles away. Over the years the wood has dried in the summer sun, and the winter snow and spring rains have caused the foundation to settle quite a bit. Most of the angles aren’t as true as they used to be, and there is a porch that overlooks the river. A stack of firewood for the wood stove is in the living room and it’ll take off the morning and evening chill in no time. The cabin is owned by Debbie and Dale Norton and is a part of their Upper Oxbow camp. Debbie is from a lineage of guides five-generations long. It’s absolutely perfect.
Sometimes Cabe Loring, my Spartanburg friend, comes up for a change of pace from all of the dove and quail he chases in South Carolina. We’ll hunt with an outstanding New Brunswick guide named Brett Silliker. Brett has birds and salmon in his blood from a number of generations, and he is a passionate Brittney man. We bomb around in his Suburban and rumble down dirt logging roads, we roll past old pines, and tuck into out-of-sight spaces in the coverts, just like our favorite birds do.
A while back I learned that other New Englanders headed to New Brunswick long before I did. In fact, a Providence, Rhode Island hunter named Edmund Davis began heading to New Brunswick in the fall during the Edwardian Period. Most hunters were reveling in Teddy Roosevelt’s big game exploits, but Davis was different; he headed to Canada to bird hunt. Because he was notoriously well-heeled he rode the expanding railroad circuit that connected places like Manhattan, New Haven, Providence, and Boston with Fredericton, St. John, and Moncton. He spent every fall hunting birds and even died in camp: a single gunshot wound to the back of his head inflicted by his own shotgun in his cabin living room. Ruled a hunting accident by authorities. Go figure, there’s obviously more to the story than hunting.
Hunting woodcock has always had a cult-like following, and Davis went so far as to write a book about it. Published in 1908, Woodcock Shooting chronicled his annual Fall excursions to hunt ‘cock. If I could find an original I’d expect to pay the same amount as a 20-gauge Parker VHE in good condition. Is it worth it? Heck yeah.
Pictures show him emerging from coverts wearing high-laced boots and breeches, and a tweed jacket. He is said to have been the first man to hunt woodcock in New Brunswick with an English setter which made him far more deadly than dogless hunters. He favored a light shotgun, preferably weighing in at about six pounds. After a few years of learning, Davis switched to a 20-bore while a gunning companion favored the 28. They were well ahead of their time in a lot of ways. Imagine that; using a setter to hunt birds. What will they think of next?
The more things change the more they stay the same, and while I may think I am unique in my hunting approach I am not. Like many woodcock hunters I follow in the shadows of Edmund Davis. I tighten the laces of my knee-high L.L. Bean boots that are ideal for walking through mucky river bottoms and feeder streams. In the early season I’ll shoot a 20-bore and when the leaves fall I’ll switch to a 28. I have three English setters and my Parkers weigh in a bit more than 6 pounds. The difference is that instead of a train I’ll load up my perfectly broken-in 4Runner with 204,000 miles on it. I may have fewer zeros following the commas in my bank account, but I feel just as rich in my New Brunswick experience.
I wonder if Debbie Norton or Brett Silliker’s great-grandparents might have taken Edmund Davis for a turn in the woods? I’ll have to ask them when I go next year. It’ll just be a matter of time and I’m already counting down the days.
This article originally appeared in the Premier Collector’s Edition of Covey Rise magazine in the Fall of 2012.
