Gun Dog Forum: What the Dogs have Taught Me
I expect that my background with bird dogs is somewhat different than many PDJ subscribers. Although I grew up a small game hunter in Iowa (obviously including pheasants), my father, older brother, and I were dogless hunters; but back in the late ’50s, pheasants were sufficiently plentiful that hunting road ditches gave us a lot of opportunities.
It wasn’t until Uncle Sam sent me to work at the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, Morocco, that I had any significant contact with bird dogs. I was fortunate enough to meet Kassim (who became Casey to us Americans), a bus driver at the U.S. Navy base and one of our multinational bird-hunting group. It didn’t take me long to observe that in Deke, his Brittany, Casey had a very proficient bird dog. He did an excellent job both pointing and retrieving the Barbary partridge (close cousin of our chukars) that we hunted in the foothills of the Rif Mountains.
Casey’s well-used Ithaca 37 pump broke down in our second hunting season together. I loaned him a High Standard pump that I could spare, having purchased an Ithaca SKB side by side at the Navy Rod and Gun Club in Rota, Spain. At season’s end, Casey asked me if I would consider making the gun loan into a permanent trade for Deke. I readily agreed. I considered it good luck to start off with a fully trained bird dog like Deke.
That year, Deke and I hunted Coturnix quail together after the partridge season closed. Casey didn’t think a quail-sized bird was worth the price of a shotgun shell. When Deke stopped mid-retrieve with a quail in his mouth to point another one, I was immediately convinced that there was real magic in pointing dogs.
Back in Iowa for graduate school, Deke pointed the first woodcock and bobwhites I’d ever shot. My bird hunting grew more diverse. Then came pheasant season. Although Deke would point pheasants when they’d hold, the birds’ notorious running habits drove him to distraction. His normal obedience to my whistle vanished when he was on the trail of a running rooster. E-collars were in their infancy back then, in addition to being priced in the luxury category for a fulltime graduate student, so we suffered through his pheasant frustration together, living for the times a bird would hold and we’d put it on the ground. But Deke taught me that it was a good idea to have long-range control, just in case.
My longtime hunting partner Mike Carroll first met me when I had Deke. Mike’s never owned a bird dog, but he’s had the opportunity to observe mine (and those of others who’ve hunted with us) for the last 40-plus years. He reminded me of something that’s both very basic and very critical that we learned thanks to Deke: “I remember many times in our early years when we kept bringing poor Deke back to where we ‘knew’ the bird was – where we’d seen it hit the ground – rather than letting his nose do the work. Best way to lose a cripple I can think of.”
As annoying as Deke’s habit of pursuing and flushing healthy pheasants was, he was very proficient at tracking down cripples…once we figured that his nose knew better than our eyes.
Jerry Fagle is another hunting partner of long standing. Before Jerry switched to pointing dogs, he owned and hunted with American water spaniels and Labs. He recalls that even those who’ve hunted with bird dogs for a long time can forget this very basic lesson.
“I was hunting pheasants and quail in southern Iowa. I’d just collared my wirehair, Elsa. She rounded the truck and slammed on point in an open area of a brushy fence line. I wanted to hunt from the other end of the fence. I stepped forward, right into a covey of quail—gun and mouth both open. Elsa gave me the sideways look that said: ‘Trust the nose, boss!’” A basic lesson many of us forget from time to time.
A started pointer named Jake was my next bird dog. By then I’d taken a teaching job and could afford an e-collar. Although he had more patience with pheasants than Deke, Jake had never hunted grouse and woodcock previously. In his case, the e-collar came in handy to slow him down in the woods — and to call him off the trail of a running rooster that had wandered onto property where we didn’t have permission to hunt.
Neither Jake nor any of the bird dogs I’ve owned since ever showed any reluctance to retrieve woodcock. But I’ve found that those without woodcock hunting experience all needed to have a couple shot for them before they’d point them. I can’t prove it by my nose, but my guess has always been that a woodcock’s different diet (mostly meat in the form of worms) must give them a different odor than other upland birds. Jake taught me that dogs that were woodcock rookies needed convincing that they were real gamebirds.
By the time I owned Jake, I was putting in enough time hunting that I thought it would be wise to own a second dog. A mating between Jake and a half-sister produced a female pup I named Rebel. I alternated hunting the two of them for a couple seasons. When Jake died suddenly after Reb’s second season, that pretty much confirmed the wisdom of owning two dogs.
Prior to the following season, I bought Heidi, a started shorthair. I figured her for the understudy the following season with Rebel as the veteran. An abscess on Reb’s jaw that wouldn’t respond to treatment turned into a kidney infection. Reb pulled through but was still recovering at the start of the next season. That left only rookie Heidi for a North Woods grouse and woodcock hunt. She’d never hunted either bird, and in fact had spent very little time in the woods. For a young dog (not yet two years old), she adjusted quickly to the woods – and to woodcock, once I’d shot a couple for her. Grouse were a different story, but I was not expecting her to be an overnight sensation on ruffs.
Back in Iowa and hunting pheasants, Heidi showed me a different method of working running birds than I’d seen from pointers Jake and Rebel. They’d dash after runners, stopping if and when the bird stopped. Heidi’s method was a slow stalk—almost like a moving point. As we spent more time together, she taught me that the way she did it was both easier on me than the pointers’ stop and go tactics, and equally effective.
She also showed me that even as a pheasant rookie, she could retrieve like a seasoned pro. We put 51 roosters on the ground for her that year. She recovered all but two of them.
It was almost as if Heidi had been born a pheasant dog. That season (1987) was the beginning of a decade-plus ringneck boom in Iowa, thanks largely to the Conservation Reserve Program. With Heidi and Rebel, I had two good dogs to help me take full advantage of the situation.
My good luck only lasted for four seasons. Rebel’s compromised kidneys finally failed in September 1991. I failed to anticipate that, leaving me with only Heidi plus Gwen, a Gordon setter pup not yet six months old. Fortunately, Heidi was as close to bulletproof when it came to illness and injury as any dog I’ve ever owned. She also paced herself unusually well, which allowed me to hunt her several days in a row. But I knew I couldn’t count on that with most dogs. And with a little luck and good prior planning, I’ve always had at least two dogs I could rely on to carry me through a season in the 30 years since then.
Heidi, like many shorthairs, was pretty much all business in the field. Gwen had a very different personality. Hunting was play for her, and she was out to have a good time. But she was a proficient bird finder. And unlike my previous experience with Heidi—great at retrieving birds, but zero interest in balls or bumpers–Gwen was a dog that would play fetch as long as I wanted to toss things for her.
It was the same story with birds. She marked them well and got to them so promptly that I scarcely had time to reload my gun before she delivered the bird. However, that was assuming the retrieve didn’t require much in the way of searching or tracking. A rooster pheasant hitting the ground with two good legs? The odds were not good.
I guided nonresident pheasant hunters for a few years in the mid-’90s. By that time, in addition to Heidi and Gwen, I also had Blitz, a precocious Heidi pup to back up her mother when I was guiding. Gwen didn’t see much action when I was guiding, but even she got her chance to star when the 1997 season started off with several inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground. The snow brought what was already a late corn harvest to a halt, and all but the heaviest grass was buried and a waste of time to hunt.
Fortunately, a couple of the farms I hunted had quite a bit of unharvested corn. For the most part, hunting standing corn with a pointing dog doesn’t work well – the pheasants will run down the rows, dogs in pursuit if they see the birds. It can work if you’ve got blockers posted at the end of the field. Otherwise, it’s an exercise in futility.
But another of Gwen’s quirks was that she never wanted to lose track of me. That meant she was not the best dog when we hunted big CRP fields and I needed a dog that would cover some ground, but in unharvested corn, she was great. She worked a windshield wiper pattern in front of me and two of my three-man party. (Number three was posted as a blocker at the far end of the field.) Labs are ideal for that kind of work, and so was Gwen. She didn’t push runners too hard, and if a rooster hunkered down, she’d stick him.
She saved the day for us when we faced unusual conditions. Then the snow melted, the harvest resumed, and we were back to hunting big grass fields where she wasn’t a good choice. And where my mother and daughter team of shorthairs were very efficient. She’d had her moment of glory, however, and when I wasn’t guiding and put her on the ground in the right places—and took extra care to avoid giving her a running cripple—she taught me to appreciate hunting over a dog that was out there for pure enjoyment.
I’ve always known Greg Baehman, a more recent friend, as a setter guy. But Greg recently told me that he ran springers before making the switch to pointing dogs. On one occasion, Greg and his talented springer Duke won a spaniel field trial at which Dave Duffey, gun dog columnist for Outdoor Life magazine, was one of the judges.
It was after switching to setters that Greg learned a lesson from one named Winston. “I recall several instances of Winston detecting the presence of some threat to him. On one of those occasions, he had gone on what I thought was a point, but something wasn’t right. He kept looking around, turning his head like he was trying to get more scent.”
Greg searched for more than 15 minutes looking for the bird. He tried calling Winston off, but he wouldn’t move. He finally leashed Winston and brought him out to the logging road, where he released him. “He made a beeline back to the truck where he cowered at the back bumper until I put him in his kennel. It was then I realized he was telling me to get the heck out of there and away from any wolves! Smart dog, eh?”
That’s a different kind of lesson. But it’s a very valuable one if you’re hunting where there are wolves. And that includes the parts of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, plus Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, that also offer probably the best grouse and woodcock hunting in the country. If your dog detects wolves in the vicinity and you decide to hunt elsewhere, you’re following excellent canine advice.
