Challenge in the Pines
When I'm invited to hunt birds on someone else's turf, my first impressions always begin with the dogs, for they are the variable over which visitors have the least control. Never mind the menu from the kitchen or the lodge decor; such considerations are always secondary. The same goes for the hunting vehicles and the indoor ambience. The local flora, fauna and terrain may prove fascinating, but I'll work that out on my own in due course. If I'm about to borrow a shotgun for the day, I don't much care what comes out of the gun cabinet as long as it's safe to shoot. But the kennel always lies at the heart of the matter. As a rule, canines take to me faster than people do, and if I get off to a good start with the dogs, the rest will follow as night the day. Conversely, an edgy beginning with the K-9 corps usually means a character-building experience ahead.
After a long day of travel from Montana to Georgia, my wife, Lori, and I awoke at Eagle Rock Plantation to a sprawling Southern breakfast table loaded with more protein (and calories) than I'd seen in one place all winter. I started and stopped with the grits. Despite my usual ambivalence toward furniture and architecture, the new lodge building left me duly impressed. While my hunting quarters usually run toward wall tents or plywood shacks (and I'm damn glad to have them when I do), the guest quarters at Eagle Rock looked like Tara; had Scarlett O'Hara herself breezed down the staircase, she would have looked right at home.
While Lori-whose sociability rating far exceeds my own-stayed behind to talk about kids and Montana winters with the rest of the company, I excused myself, headed outside and let host Mitch Slay introduce me to three of the kennel's two dozen dogs. I liked what I saw at once.
Part of my enthusiasm derived from sentimental personal history. Slay's seasoned male German shorthair, Hank, bore an uncanny resemblance to my own late, great Bits, the first bird dog I ever hunted over as a kid. Even allowing for the rose-tinted lenses through which all young hunters view the outdoor world, I don't think I've ever seen a better combination of nose, brain and heart mounted on one canine chassis, and it felt great to see a look-alike. I hadn't hunted over a shorthair in years, and now I was staring at a whole kennel full of them. And the best was yet to come.
"This is English pointer country," Slay explained as we walked back around the kennel for one more eager volunteer. "Running these shorthairs, folks were always asking me when I was going to get a dog with a tail. So I bought Maggie." And there she stood: 80 pounds of yellow Lab, a sunshine-colored bundle of enthusiasm that could have walked right out of our own kennel back at home. And as a bonus, she pointed. German shorthairs and a pointing Labrador together in the middle of classic Southern bobwhite territory" this I had to see.
And in virtually no time I did. After a pleasant 10-minute walk from the lodge, we chased several of the property's abundant and huntable wild hogs out of the way and set off down an old abandoned logging road that cut through a stand of longleaf pines whispering in the breeze. Since acquiring the property two years earlier, Slay had set about an ambitious habitat-enhancement program emphasizing controlled burns through the understory. Cleansed by fire the previous year, the ground had reseeded naturally in bluestem grass and ironweed, providing ideal security cover for bobwhites. I've hunted Southern plantations that offered easier walking, but none with more genuine-looking quail cover.
Obviously well trained, Hank and his female kennel mate Daisy covered the ground with methodical precision while Maggie tagged along at heel. The shorthairs were out of sight half the time, but it was because of thick cover rather than overextended range. Distracted by a pileated woodpecker's assault on a nearby tree and the abundant hog sign underfoot, I lost track of the dogs briefly. Fortunately, Slay had been minding the shop.
"Hank's locked up at the edge of the clearing," he said as I hustled ahead to find Daisy honoring stylishly. The dogs' attitude indicated birds holding tightly. I flicked the Beretta's unfamiliar safety forward and back again to get a feel for it. I could only hope I wouldn't need to invoke any borrowed-gun excuses, for it seemed obvious that we were about to experience a face-full of quail.
The closer I waded in behind the quivering dogs, the quieter the woods became. Hank said the birds were right there in the thick forest duff below his nose, but I couldn't make out a thing. "All set?" Slay asked from somewhere behind me.
"Reckon so," I replied, and then he urged Maggie forward. After pointing briefly herself, she eased past Hank and squirmed through a tight tangle of briers. And then there were wings everywhere.
I've lamented Montana's lack of quail in print here before, so there's no reason to reprise a whole paragraph's worth of excuses for my first whiff of the day. As always, the initial sight of all of those little bundles of feathers left me rattled, and I missed the first half of what should have been an easy double before settling down with my second barrel. The shorthairs held until Slay released them, by which time Maggie was all over the fallen bird. Her marking ability and enthusiasm certainly saved us a rough trip through the briers.
Moments later the shorthairs had located the remains of the broken covey in a creek bottom strewn with oak leaves, and I began easing in behind them. There was no need for Maggie's flushing services this time. Survivors of a long season's worth of predation by raptors, raccoons and hunters, the birds were already off and running. A pair finally flushed deep in the cover at the edge of shotgun range. The first bird folded at the Beretta's report, but I didn't even think about the second barrel.
No matter, as events soon proved. The morning was young, the dogs remained eager and Eagle Rock Plantation's 1,400 acres of challenging bird cover still held plenty of quail.
When I was a kid in upstate New York, my father and I used to work our dogs on planted pheasants once or twice every summer to tune them up for grouse season. As an adult writer, I've accepted occasional assignments to cover shooting preserves in the South. That's the sum of my experience with pen-raised birds, a subject about which I confess ambivalent feelings.
As a Westerner living in the heart of our country's best wild-bird habitat, I've always been skeptical about artificial efforts to provide wingshooters with more targets. Fencing cattle out of prime riparian habitat and saving productive wetlands from development are obviously worthwhile goals, but planting pen-raised birds raises numerous issues both aesthetic and practical.
But I am willing to keep an open mind, particularly with regard to regional differences in hunting practices. Our two-hour drive from Atlanta to Eagle Rock, in rural Oglethorpe County, illustrated the central point. The countryside around Eagle Rock (so named for a prophetic eagle sighting on the property when the big birds were still rare in Georgia) may still look like the setting for a Faulkner novel, but we had to cross 50 miles of highly developed New South to reach it. There simply isn't enough habitat to accommodate everyone who'd like to hunt Southern quail nowadays. That's just what happens when you pack 5 billion passengers into a spaceship designed to carry a fraction of that number. One can either stop hunting or learn to think outside the box.
Although meddling with nature in any way may still be anathema to some-and I acknowledge my own instinctive sympathy for this viewpoint-glib judgments invite charges of hypocrisy. For example, had we not toyed with the introduction of alien species, Western autumns would now come and go without pheasants, chukar or Huns. And isn't that 600-acre field of wheat stubble really just one giant food plot?
After devoting a lot of thought to the matter, I've concluded that Southern plantation-style hunting can offer a legitimate wingshooting experience... as long as it's done right, which, alas, is not always the case. Experienced wingshooters will have little difficulty distinguishing among the good, the bad and the ugly. When the dogs go on point, can you see quail wandering stupidly around on the ground in front of them like chickens? When the birds flush, do they fly as if they have water in their fuel tanks? When you break up a covey, do the scattered singles all wait passively for you to walk them up again? Answer these questions in the affirmative and you're likely shooting birds that haven't spent much time in the wild. And you may as well shoot them all if you can bring yourself to do it, because the foxes and owls will have the rest cleaned up soon, anyway.
In this context I found Mitch Slay's management philosophy encouraging. Slay has two decades of local experience under his belt as an outfitter. He spent part of those years-as he still does-guiding hunters for deer, hogs and turkeys, but he also guided quail hunters every season. He knows what discriminating hunters want from an honest Southern quail hunt and is setting out to make that experience available at Eagle Rock. Habitat is his prime concern, which is why he's busy creating productive edges in the property's rolling hills and encouraging native grasses to reclaim their place beneath the pines.
But you still need quail. Slay releases eight- to 10-week-old birds in August and does a second release in September. Because he's busy guiding deer and hog hunters throughout the fall, he leaves the quail alone until late November. After three months of cohabitating with all of the usual Southern predators, the quail waiting for dogs and hunters are survivors, and it shows. A post-season release takes place in March to enhance production of wild birds. Although it's difficult to quantify nesting success, Slay said that wild coveys had been abundant during the summer, and I'd guess that a quarter of the birds we flushed were born in the wild.
On a Southern plantation hunt, habitat and terrain can add to the challenge as surely as the sophistication of the birds. I've seen such hunts conducted in cover that looked like an overgrown golf course (and that's when I've usually traded my shotgun for my camera). Expect no such cakewalk at Eagle Rock. There's enough up and down to test your legs if you're into that, and a lot of the shooting takes place in heavy cover. If you think plantation quail in open fields have grown too easy, try shooting them in habitat that looks suitable for ruffed grouse or woodcock. Abandoned logging roads wander through the Eagle Rock property, and they provide good walking and access by four-wheel-drive vehicles in some cases. You can ride the old roads while the dogs work, or you can set off on foot for cover that rarely gets hunted. The choice is up to you.
"It's pretty simple," Slay said. "To produce the bird numbers we need, we have to maintain good security habitat, offer supplemental feeding and release some quail. But we can still aim to make the actual hunting experience as close to what it would have been like 50 years ago as possible. And that doesn't necessarily mean easy."
But it doesn't mean slow hunting either. Hunting at a leisurely pace that allowed plenty of time for photography and discussion, we flushed six to eight coveys both mornings we hunted.
To the earlier list of characteristics differentiating between honest quail and native late releases, I should have added a reference to the number of shells it takes to hit the first bird of the morning. Despite a month's layoff from wingshooting and the borrowed gun, I fell into my groove promptly the first day, for reasons that had nothing to do with easy birds. But the second morning I began by disappointing the dogs by missing both halves of my first opportunity at a double.
With Hank on point again, I eased in behind him intent on redemption. His nose said the birds were right in front of me, but the covey had gone to ground in a clump of ironweed, relying on the same natural camouflage that had kept them safe from hawks and owls all of the previous months. It was time to send in the clowns-in this case Maggie.
Visually isolating one bird from the explosive rise she produced, I got the Beretta swinging smoothly at last, only to send a charge of No. 8 shot into a dead tree as the bird took skilled evasive action. Utterly rattled, I left the barrels pointed safely at the sky. It was time for what our Georgia friends call a prayer meeting, conducted strictly between my own two ears. While Lori fiddled quietly with the camera and Slay politely deflected the conversation toward the dogs' strong performance, I reviewed the same mental wingshooting basics I'd been reviewing for 50 years: comfortable stance, face down on the stock, keep the barrels swinging. Fortunately, this mental exercise worked, and Hank's next point led to a redeeming double.
I've been at this long enough that I don't need to kill any more easy birds. Fortunately, at Eagle Rock that's seldom a problem.
Don Thomas finally stopped practicing medicine this year so he'd have a little time to hunt, fish and write. His latest outdoor book, Redfish, Bluefish, will be out soon from Skyhorse Press. He and his wife, Lori, spend most of their time at their home in central Montana.
