Good bird dog makes hunting more enjoyable

Every year when bird season opens, I think of my grandma.

That wonderful little old lady hated quail hunters. She was the gentlest, kindest, and most wonderful grandmother a boy could have, but she would have boiled a quail hunter in oil if she couldn’t have reformed him first. And I’m afraid there never was any reforming me, I was a quail hunter at an early age. I kept that from Grandma. She would have disowned me if I hadn’t.

It was Charlie Hartman who got me hooked on hunting upland birds with dogs. He owned a big black and white male setter that was the absolute finest bird dog I have ever seen.

Charlie owned many fine dogs in his life but “Old Joe” topped them all. Born in early June, Joe was pointing and retrieving birds that fall. That was in the mid 1950s and it was about five years later that Old Joe, in his prime, showed me what a fine dog is for.

I was just a youngster, sitting beneath a multiflora rose fence clutching a sixteen-gauge single-shot watching single birds sail over my head and down into a wooded creek bottom. As I waited and reloaded after each miss, Dad and Charlie kicked up scattered birds across the road behind me in a small patch of weeds that was too close to a farmer’s house for them to shoot.

I couldn’t see Joe finding and pointing each single but after half my pocketful of shells was gone, a gliding bobwhite finally intercepted my shot pattern and plummeted to the ground in a puff of feathers. Before I could get to it, Joe cleared a low spot in the fence and dashed in to recover the fallen bird.

He brought it to me, gently placed it in my hand,

and said with his eyes, “Nice goin’, kid. I thought you’d never get one.”

I carried that one bobwhite around all afternoon, watching in awe as Joe froze on point time after time, head down and tail high. They were those calendar poses ... strong, intense points which told you that any minute the air would be filled with brown bombshells and shotgun shell hulls. My shells were gone early but I did hate to see that day end.

Charlie Hartman lives in Sarcoxie now, and hasn’t owned a bird dog in many a year. I think about those days of my youth when I was fortunate to be able to hunt with Charlie and his dogs. It made me a dedicated enthusiast of upland bird hunting and a profound admirer of good hunting dogs.

I still hunt quail a few times each fall and winter with a friend who has always had bird hunting in his blood and still owns good pointing dogs. Back in the 1970s and 80s I too raised a few English Setters and I had some good ones — perhaps only a couple of the kind Charlie raised and hunted with, but they might have been better dogs if there had just been more quail to hunt.

I didn’t think the day would ever come that quail would become so difficult to find in the Ozarks but due to changes in land use, it appears that quail hunting will always be marginal in the hills.

It is somewhat easier to find coveys in north Missouri and southern Iowa and in western Oklahoma and most of Kansas, so there’s still a reason to value a good bird dog if you can travel on occasion. In those days when I owned good pointing dogs, many years back, I hunted often in southern Iowa.

I remember one of the last seasons I went there, on a trip with my reliable old English Setter, Freckles, and a young setter which showed promise, but to that point not much more.

One beautiful November afternoon, we topped a slight rise which the dogs had worked ahead of us, and spotted them both below. The pup was frozen on point, his attention focused on a brush pile in a grassy draw. The older dog backed him and my hunting partner and I moved in to see if there really were bobwhites ready to erupt from the cover.

Only the yearling setter seemed sure that this wasn’t just another rabbit. I had never seen him so solid, so unwavering. His head and tail was high, his full attention given to that mesmerizing scent of upland birds.

In the blink of an eye, they filled the air before us, an explosion of whirring wings, 20 or more, all going in different directions at once. Some fell as five shotgun blasts followed in quick succession and feathers floated on the fall breeze. The two setters were at work finding and retrieving downed birds, and I was willing to let my hunting partner brag on his double, even though I had dropped only one.

After all, that was my pup hurrying back with a bobwhite in his mouth and I wouldn’t have traded him for a double-barreled Parker.

It isn’t a limit of quail that brings a bird-hunter out on opening day. It’s the anticipation of a covey rise before dogs on point, the product of training and attention given long before leaves begin to turn. And make no mistake, it is the dog that makes quail hunting the great past time that it is. There will always be a few of us who can never get it out of our blood.

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