Beautiful weather, Great Dogs, Food, and Friends. Probably last hunt of the season but it was fun! Josey (pointer) and Fannie (GSP) worked hard and we tried to hit the birds they pointed. My pics below.


This video is from "The Flush" tv show but it is in my area. The chef that hunts later in the video and does the cooking won an Iron Chef show last year.

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PTLAPTA!

What a great way to spend the day!

Good friends, good dogs, and good weather. I think you have most of us beat for the weekend

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On the Oak Savannah

Nice!. At one time my county had the highest density of Bobwhite in the United States. That was in the 1970s. By 1985 there were none left. Very sad.

Don't you love the sounds of their twin propellers when they take off?

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S&W Accumulator

When a covey flushes unexpectedly it can stop your heart! I have forgotten what I was doing for a moment, then felt like a fool standing around with a shotgun in my hands.

I always had pointers, I liked brittanys but I never had one. My last was a double elhew black and white pointer. Jeff

Sadly, I haven't even heard a quail whistle in more than 10 years. When I was young we had a healthy population here in NE Arkansas.

Those dogs love to work hard! They live for the hunt.

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Long ago, it was "how many birds did we get?" For a long time now it's.. "watch the dogs work!" In all the turmoil of this world, Saturday was a blessing!

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PTLAPTA!

One of my dad's old buddies was a Duck Hunter. He was part owner of a private duck club. Very fancy. Concretre in ground blind with flush toilet in the bathroom, microwave oven, cot to nap on, etc.. Unfortunately his arthritis got so bad it hurt to go hunting. But he couldn't stand to see the dog pout. So he would go. His hands were so bad he couldn't hit much though. So he'd invite my dad to be his guest. My dad would shoot and he got to see the dog do his thing. Eventually the dog passed. After a couple months he got a new dog. And they all went hunting some more. Both the man and the second dog are gone now, but my father got to hunt with them for about 10 years or so.
R.I.P. Harold Hansen, Buddy and Buddy II.

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The best I can with what I got

I hunt quail a lot. Not the Bob’s so many here are familiar with. We hunt Valley quail.
I guided quail hunters up until this past season. I have retired from guiding but still run the dogs every chance I get.
When I was young it was how many birds, then how many coveys. Now it is how many points.

Jrm53, you should have tried one of those Britts!!

There is nothing, and I mean nothing like watching a good bird dog or retriever work.
Question what happened to all the birds. Only quail I can hunt these days are pen raised.
Gawd I do so love bird hunting!!!

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Forum consigliere

You are so right: there is nothing like watching a good bird dog work a field. My father raised and trained bird dogs for years. It was his joy to see a pup grow to maturity and love the hunt. He and I would frequently go hunting with the dogs and he would always carry his 16 gauge, single shot Sears shotgun and I would also carry my 20 gauge, single shot, Sears, shotgun. His canvas coat pouch would get full by days' end and he would let me carry a few in my pouch. I have never strutted so tall and proudly as I did when I was with him. Sadly, he is long gone. I hope to continue the tradition in some way with my grandson. He asked me the other day if I could take him shooting. Five years old, he is... I cried.

My former boss had Britney's and German Short Hairs. In the tall grass the Britts would almost disappear, but they could sure track the singles once the covey was busted. At the beginning of the seasons the big dogs seemed a little out of shape, but it didn't take long before their muscles were tight and their veins were bulging. I loved to go out with Donny, our dog guy, with the young ones for training. We would put birds out near the trails with a dog on a long lead. I would carry a .410, not to shoot birds but to get the dog used to the gun fire. Ah, those were the days.

In this part of the country the farming has changed. I can remember small farmers and fallow fields and no rotary cutters. Farmers got bigger equipment and tilled more land and rotary cutters kept fields and edges clean but we had ditches and rough places that couldn't be cleared. Now all the farmers are big time and they have the rotary cutters on hydraulic booms that will mow the ditches so there is no habitat for small game.
There are houses and businesses being built where once were good farms. I can remember when the lay of the land was important to building but the lay of the land doesn't matter anymore. It's very common now too see land that once was only good for holding the world together and now big equipment is brought in and the land is reshaped too suit the builder. Small game habitat is being exponentially lost. Larry

Some of these relics are from the plantation, some are from a Tennessee wood carver. The Bob White is a mount I inherited when the place was sold. The Sikorsky was their transportation. There were plenty of wood ducks on the Alapaha river too.

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Why, loss of habitat, I assume?

Change in habitat and planting of non native grasses like Bermuda grass for grazing. Quail cannot survive in it. Here, there used to be a small patchwork of small cotton and peanuts farms. With the small patchworks of annual crops it actually made the habitat better, it created hedgerows and interconnected strings of prime habitat with no invasive plants. In the mid 1970s bigger and bigger tracts of land were converted to cattle ranching and thousands of acres were cleared and planted with non native grasses. Quail in good times only live about three years. It didn't take long for them to disappear. There were other minor factors like predation because the pockets of habitat kept shrinking. You will hear "fire ants", while they certainly didn't help, they were not the reason. There are portions of south Texas that have a high density of Fire ants but the habitat is still intact. Quail populations are stable there but Quail as a species, can have some pretty big swings in population from year to year. Migrating Raptors actually take more Quail each year than Fire ants.

Another problem with Bobs is that planted birds rarely if ever procreate.
The original owner of the ranch we manage tried to reintroduce them. Despite our best efforts, 8 years and almost 10,000 hatched chicks they refused to take.
We would have some for 2 years. We never allowed them to be shot, but after two years we never heard them, saw them or ever saw chicks. Then we would try again, tweeking this or that. Results never changed.
Talking with people from the now defunct Quail Unlimited we found out we were on a fools errand.
Most of our guests came from parts of the country that once held good numbers of wild Bobs but now were relegated to planted birds.
They came to relive the days of wild birds.
I never realized how good we have it here until I became familiar with the plight of Bobwhite in most of it’s native habitat.

Cool that you got out for a final hunt this year.

I grew up here in Ohio west of Columbus in an area that held loads of pheasants, rabbits and quail. I had no idea how blessed we were. We could literally walk out the door and walk down to a weed field that backed up to the house and you were hunting. We would hunt down one side of the fence rows and then when we got tired of walking cut to the other side and hunt our way back. It was nothing to kill a couple of roosters, jump a rabbit or covey of quail in an hour walk.

Ironically, I took a drive out through the area just yesterday - all houses and neighborhoods now.

A far cry from my boyhood home in the 60's. That is why I love the Dakotas. It is like going back to a really happy time.

The Indian in the commercial from the 1970s with the tear running down his cheek. He saw it coming.