From the Editor

In the spring a bird hunter’s fancy turns to dogs. Whether it’s with thoughts of training a young dog, fine tuning or finishing a veteran, or adding a new charge to the team, as temperatures warm each year, passions for gundogs heat up.
    I know that melting snow and greening grass always trigger my enthusiasm for dogs. When I was involved with griffons, spring meant moving from the basement to the field in preparation for hunt tests. I remember all of the drag trails, live tracks and planted birds, as well as the waterwork as soon as the ice was gone from the ponds. These days I live vicariously through friends who still participate—and I toy with the idea of someday taking part again.
    Another rite of spring is putting together our Special Hunting Dogs Section, which this issue begins on page 66. (To be honest, we assemble this in mid-winter, but it certainly makes us think of spring.) This year we thought an interesting article would be to have Hunting Dogs Editor George Hickox run through the equipment he feels is essential for training. The comprehensive list he generated (see “Trainers’ Tools”) should be helpful to rookies and veterans alike.
    The other piece we’ve included is Tom Davis’s profile of a breed that arrived in North America a century ago this year: the Brittany. Before reading Tom’s article, I confess to having known little about these dogs, mostly due to my limited exposure to them. I did hunt over a Brittany about 20 years ago in Vermont, and I remember it being a solid performer. I also spent several days in the fall of 2004 being awed by outfitter Dave Brown’s wide-ranging Britts in Saskatchewan. But that was the sum total of my field experience.
    I was aware that Brittany owners are a dedicated lot. Michael McIntosh, for example, was a big fan, and he wrote lovingly of the breed. In his introduction to “A Feisty Little Pointing Dog,” a wonderful book anthologizing Brittany stories, Michael describes them as follows: “They were poachers’ dogs, or so legend has it: compact and biddable, close-working and quiet, the perfect accomplice for clandestine sport and the companion of choice among those whose favorite game was someone else’s.
    “I don’t know whether the legend is true, but I do know that Brittanys themselves are shameless poachers. They’ll steal your favorite chair, your wife’s affections, your lunch, and your heart.”
    Author Ben O. Williams is another staunch supporter, and his books and articles have done as much to popularize the breed as anyone’s. Who among us hasn’t been swept away by photos of Ben’s orange-and-white battalion blanketing Montana’s grasslands—and marveled at the images of four dogs locked up on point?
    But the biggest proponent of Brittanys I know works right here in our office. Dave Drinkwater is not on Shooting Sportsman’s staff, but he is a hardcore upland hunter with plenty of experience. Dave has shared his home with several Britts, and he swears by their close-working, thorough hunting style for New England’s grouse and woodcock coverts. Not only that, he says, but they also make excellent family dogs—a fact I can attest to, having spent time with his good-natured Topper near the end of his days.
    Dave keeps pictures of Brittanys on the wall above his computer, and he always has been quick to point out articles about the breed in other publications. For years he has chided: “So when you are you going to put a real dog on the cover?”
With this issue we pay a long-overdue tribute to a breed that has been stealing sportsmen’s hearts for decades.