Negligent would be an understatement

I just realized I hadn't posted anything, not one word, since Sept 2. Ok, I actually realized it a month ago but just got around to doing something about it today. It's not like nothing's been going on or so much has been going on that I haven't had time to talk about it. Lots has been going on and I have had time to talk about it, I just spent that time doing something else.

So here's the last 3 months in review....

Dove Season(s)

The first dove season was the best we've had in years. My freezer is slap full of birds, partly due to more targets and partly due to me shooting better than the recent norm. Over the summer I did a little work on my gun mount (thanks for the tip Chris Batha), mounting in front of a mirror about 100x a day. It's easier than it sounds and it's made a world of difference.

We're not really sure why there were so many more birds, but our best guess is that dry conditions over the summer ruined a lot of corn crops, leaving fewer places for the dove to eat. Whatever the reason, we had numbers every time we went into the field and even when only a few of us showed, we figured out how to put away a limit.

Shrinks the playing field considerably

The second season was a bust. Completely. Many of you heard about the Biblical rains we had in early October, but what didn't make the news was the 3+ inches we got every week after that for the next month. By the time the second season opened the weekend before Thanksgiving the ground was soggy and the feed was rotten. Any bird that came through here slowed down long enough to see that he was gonna get real hungry if he stopped.

It's dried out some and we have a nice millet field that hasn't been cut yet, so there's still hope for the third season.

The Great Bobwhite Revival

I keep promising to post an update on this, and I've been waiting until we had a little more publicly available info in case anyone's curious, but that's been slow in coming so I'm gonna talk about it anyway. This little project now has an official name (The SC Bobwhite Initiative), a logo (I'm not supposed to share that yet), a group of 24 state and federal organizations participating, and 4 focus areas where work is under way.

To say I'm excited about this is putting it mildly.  We've been working on it for 4-5 years and to see it finally take flight is both a relief and a realization that now the hard work begins. The enthusiasm has been overwhelming, and I'm pretty optimistic.

Website should be active before Christmas (fingers crossed) and I'll post a link when it is.

About that pup...

Holy cow I'd forgotten what it was like to have a bird dog pup around the house. Even though my backyard looks like the moon it's been a joy. He spent 6 weeks with the trainer letting the genes bloom and his bloodlines are no joke. 

He'll get steadied next spring and summer and right now we're just gonna look for birds. The drive is astounding and the endurance for an 8 month old is unbelievable. He's fine with the gun and will even hold a point for a little while. Smarter than a 4th grader, too. Should be a fun season.

Shot a deer last week. First time I'd been in the stand all season and 30 mins after I sat down they walked out. Every now and then I get lucky like that. I'm not a trophy deer hunter, just meat for the freezer and that means does are top of the list. This was a nice one, almost 100 lbs. 

I've been much more productive with the camera than the pen and some of that work is on the Instagram account (@spentcartridge). Even had a shot in the Orvis Digital Hunting Book (p43) a few months ago. Having a lot of fun with that. Stay tuned.

Tennessee Red

It's not whisky, as far as I know, and the BBQ joint in Portland with that name closed last year. More on this in a bit.

There are a number of places around our state, mostly well off the beaten path and not well-publicized, where a few intrepid souls have done the hard work of making the land friendly to quail. Through many, many conversations with wildlife and forestry people I'm slowly learning each of them, and learning that they're mostly on the other side of the state. Lick Fork Lake is one of these.

Sunrise through the trees

Conflicting weekend schedules sometimes demand pre-dawn departures, which isn't the worst thing that can happen to a guy and his dog. Scent conditions are ripe in the early morning hours and the birds are out feeding, casting their airborne trail in broader paths.

Got one pinned

We pulled in around 8:15 and by 8:30 the dog was locked up on point. A single bird flushed, I knocked it down, and it vanished in a gulley.  We looked and sniffed and poked around for 15 minutes and never found it.

Back to work and pretty quickly the dog was on point again and another single got up. And I whiffed with both barrels. Bag still empty.

A few minutes later another point, this time on a pair. I knocked down the first and missed the easy double, but marked that first one well. When I picked it up I noticed how well-fed it felt, a hefty bird for this time of year. Looking more closely I saw that it wasn't exactly what I thought it was.

Not quite a wild bird

These are what we call Tennessee Reds, a strain of quail bred in captivity and preferred by some breeders because of their hardiness. The chest and head feathers are a rusty brown on the hens and a cotton-white patch dominates the throat. After another hour of hunting the area and not finding any more birds, I started piecing it together. Someone must have been working his dog and put these birds out to train with. They were all good fliers, good enough that I thought they were wild until I picked up this one. They'd obviously been out for a while, maybe since last fall, and whether these were the lone survivors of a larger group or the lone survivors of that training session I don't know, but they put a smile on my face for one morning. 

Premium

If you do anything long enough, eventually all of the pieces line up for a performance that you never thought possible. Chamberlain scores 100, Bo Jackson on a Monday night in '87, Tiger at Augusta ten years later. Sometimes things just click and then keep on clicking and you feel like you couldn't ruin it if you wanted to, so you revel in it knowing the next time will be a long way off, if ever.

Reports out of South Texas last fall were beyond encouraging. Factoring in the standard embellishment and overexcitement multiplier they still suggested a pretty good season, so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit optimistic when I got the nod for an early January trip. I put off writing about it these last few weeks mainly to avoid sounding like a 7 yr old who's just spent a day with the Justice League, and I'm not sure I succeeded so just indulge me.

In quail hunting success is relative, geographically speaking. What passes for a good day here in SC would be considered somewhat of a disappointment in TX, so a good day in TX - and we're talking in terms of coveys found - is nearly unfathomable where I'm from. With the exception of one or two places where they take intensive management to a different level, and where I don't have hunting privileges, it just doesn't happen that you'll find 4-5 coveys an hour for as long as you choose to hunt. And just to be clear, I'm talking about wild birds.

What's truly surprising is that the only management done for these birds in TX is a little supplemental feeding on the roads during the season, and this is only to make them easier to find. The property is managed for trophy deer and the birds are simply a byproduct of proper cattle grazing and nature's benevolence.

Any day I can ride around big open country and find a few coveys of birds gets filed with the keepers. Any day I can find so many coveys that I stop counting gets its own file. Sure, after the first few coveys it's easy to keep up, but eventually you just lose yourself in finding the last bird someone shot or locating the dog on point. Each day I had to ask the handlers for the tally, which I've come to consider a good sign.

Without horses, GPS units for the dogs are a necessity.  You just can't see them even from the top of a rig, and once you get in the grass on foot they can disappear twenty yards in front of you. Every day we'd have a stretch when shooting singles or looking for dead birds that the handler would say "I got a point 100 yards that way" and we'd high-step it through the grass to another covey. This would happen three or four times before we'd decide to load up and head in another direction. It's the kind of shooting I've always read about and now through some strange combination of karma I'm the one telling the story.

I'd say it ruined me but that's not true. It's something close to the high water mark of my bird hunting adventures, no question, but I came home and loaded up my dog and went out looking for birds the next weekend.

Didn't find quite as many.

Cactus, Jack

I spent the better part of last week chasing birds in South TX, something I've been fortunate enough to do for the last few years at various times. This year stood apart as far as the quail are concerned (more on that later) and, unfortunately, for one other reason.

Walking after some singles I cut a corner a little too close and knew it immediately. The cactus drove through my pants just above my knee and left the spines in there when I lurched backward. The long ones have surprising penetration ability and the short ones are just plain aggravating to get out. I got them all out after several minutes of picking and pulling that also involved dropping my pants in the middle of a Texas pasture, but that was just the beginning.

Not this one, a bigger, angrier cousin.

T + 3 hrs - I start to notice some soreness in the knee.

T + 20 hrs - What the ???

T + 36 hrs - I need an aisle seat on the plane.

T + 48 hrs - Wonder what a torn meniscus feels like? Or a strained medial collateral cruciate patella femur thingy?

T + 72 hrs - This damn thing ain't gettin' any better.

T + 4 days - Stairs is another word for Bataan.

T + 6 days - Finally turning the corner.

Lessons learned? 1000 denier cordura is no match for this stuff.  Filson tin cloth might be but on most days it's too hot in my neck of the woods so I don't own a pair. After this run-in I may see what's on eBay, though. And in the future I'll be giving a wide berth to these green hornets. I'll try not to complain about briars any more.

Worth it for some of the best bird hunting I've ever had? Oh yeah.

One last post for 2014

The ink well has been running a little dry lately but through the wonder that is Craigslist I managed to pick up another media tool recently - a decent Canon dSLR that I've been having a little fun with. Photos below are from two recent excursions with the dog, one carrying a gun and another without.

We're not allowed to hunt in the national forest on Sundays, something I did for years until I learned about the rule. I always wondered why I never ran into anyone else. There's no rule against taking your dog for a walk, though.

Figures we'd stumble into a covey when I didn't have a gun on me. This photo tells the tale of just how fickle scent can be. When I rounded the corner and saw Wyatt on point, he was looking to the left, not the right as he is below. His head was gently drifting from side to side so I knew he didn't have the birds locked, but he wasn't coming off the point either. I stepped off the road toward him and the covey blew up about 3 yards off his tail, leaving him with the look below as they flew off.

I checked the wind and sure enough it was blowing left to right. My guess is the birds were feeding (it was about 4pm) and had just been in the area to the left. A few minutes after the flush the wind had shifted 180 degrees, so there's no telling what his nose picked up. I was extremely impressed he held point for as long as he did under those conditions.

This time of year you can occasionally find a few woodcock in the right places. They love the river bottoms and cane breaks and the shooting is usually pretty easy down there.

Woodcock like this...

...and love this

Well, we hunted the best spots and didn't move any so we eased on to higher ground to look for quail. It wasn't long before Wyatt went on point, at least I thought he was on point because he wasn't moving although I couldn't see him through the mess of young pine trees and saplings and briars and vines. I'm of the mind that unless it's dangerous you should always, always try to get to a dog on point. It just sends the wrong message if you wait for him to break or, God forbid, call him off.

A machete would have been highly useful as I pushed and clawed and bled my way through and after a few minutes I heard it, the chirp of a timberdoodle taking flight, and looked up just in time to see it float over the tops of the pines. Gun behind me, a shot was not a remote possibility. This routine repeated on a second bird. Eventually we escaped from the wooded prison and got two more flushes, the last of which actually presented a shot but the bird would have dropped right back in the middle of the trees and vines so I watched it sail off. Woodcock hunting.

Working the edge late in the day

Not all views are bad

Fungi

Apparently they're not too concerned about the rider.
I didn't see either of them.

Maybe this way..

End of the day

Counciled

This is what four years of work looks like:

It may not seem like much, but this is a huge step in restoring bobwhite populations in a place where there were once more quail hunters than deer or turkey hunters. It started with a few casual conversations back in 2011 that evolved into an appearance before the DNR's board of directors. A year later a finished plan was presented to that same board and the keystone to that plan was this council.

The council will be the steering committee for the work that gets done, all of the partnerships that form and all of the people we manage to bring into the fold. It's the first piece of a very large puzzle. Made up of over 20 federal, state and non-profit organizations and a handful of individuals, the level of enthusiasm and eagerness to participate was overwhelming. Seems people were just waiting to be asked. Let's hope that's the case as this little experiment grows.

Ed: Sorry to all those who clicked on the links in this post during the last 24 hrs. Appears there were some server issues. All should be working again.  11/11/14

Thermometer games

Every few years or so we get lucky and catch a spell of cooler days right in the middle of summer.  Cool as in low 60s when you wake up and maybe mid-70s when the sun's up top. May not sound like much but it's sure welcome when 95 is the norm.

Watching fireworks on the 4th I told my wife that I couldn't remember doing that without fighting the urge to stare at them through the windshield, A/C on full. And there was a breeze to boot. The next morning we had coffee in the backyard, a ritual normally reserved for April or, if we're lucky, early May.

Saturday the temps were cool again and it even rained all day, just like it does in some other seasons I know of. Mother Nature is such a tease.

And then last week the bird hunting issue of Gray's hit the shelves. New names mostly, which is nice every so often. I couldn't help noticing that there wasn't a bobwhite story anywhere in in. Great. Now they've disappeared from Gray's, too.

Semi-annual lazy links

It's May, it's hot already and bird season is a long, long way off. The right side of this equation is that while I may be thinking about birds and dogs and such, there aren't a lot of words in the pen right now, so excuse me while I stoop pretty low and point you to someone who is motivated.

Two someones, actually. The first is an article I read on Craig Koshyk's Pointing Dog Blog (found in the blogroll to the right).  The piece was written by a friend of his and is a well-presented case for preserving the remaining prairie, or what he refers to as "community pastures", for sharptail habitat by placing them in public trust. Funding for this would come from energy royalties. I know it sounds kind of dry but like I said it's well-written and is an interesting proposal that might have applications in other species and in other places. Bobwhites, prairie chickens....

Direct link here: http://pointingdogblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/lower-bag-limits-wont-save-our.html

The second someone is Daniel Wallace and he writes about a cemetery in Alabama for coon dogs. ONLY coon dogs. I can't begin to do it justice, so just follow the link: http://gardenandgun.com/article/alabamas-coon-dog-cemetery.

After reading the article and poking around, I found that the cemetery has its own website and Facebook page. If this ain't a slice of Americana I don't know what is.



We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming when this round of apathy passes.

Pointers & birds

Went hunting with some friends last weekend and took my wife's camera along. It's a 35mm SLR with a lot more capability than my pocket-size point & shoot and I'm determined to get proficient with it. Not much else on my mind this week anyway so I figured I'd post a few pics.

Show jumper

Wind blowing 25mph makes for hard work

First bird out gets shot

I never got the pic of a 20-bird covey rise that I wanted.  We found several that size but the camera was always in the bag. This was a much smaller covey but I captured a few birds in full stroke:

Ghost eye

Turn on a dime

Everyone has to wait his turn

Tools of the trade

The times, they are a changin'

Announcements from around the country over the last few weeks show that wingshooting in America is anything but stagnant. The possibility of a sandhill crane season in eastern TN, the lack of a sage grouse season in SD, the return of dove season in MN, even  increased limits on migratory birds. Some of this bodes well for hunters, some will drain a serious amount of enthusiasm.

Purists cringe when you fiddle with the established norm, and it's not just the principle of change that bothers them. Hunting is a sport of tradition, of opening days and bird camps and road trips and Saturday mornings before sunrise, and when you start messing with a man's tradition you might as well be messing with his wife or his dog. It's tradition because we like it. We also depend on it as a stabilizing element in the year, an anchor, and sometimes a beacon in the distance beyond rough water.

Sometimes what appears to be a change for the better is insult in disguise. Case in point: several years ago our mourning dove limit was raised from 12 to 15 birds. More is better, right? I've spent more time and more shells trying to get those last 3 birds....

For better or worse, hunting is also a sport of nature and subject to its ebbs and flows, and while we can't control aspects like weather, we can and often do impact other factors. I'm thinking about land and habitat, specifically those parts that hang in the balance and can be nudged and persuaded back into something more favorable to birds. It's not predestined that certain species will fade into memories.

This is why I'm putting time and effort into restoring the bobwhite populations in our state. I don't ever want to open the paper someday and read that the DNR has cancelled quail season because there just aren't enough birds.

A similar effort is under way in Montana to help the sage grouse, as detailed in this story on NPR. And there are initiatives in most other states for species that aren't yet officially threatened.

It's true that we can't fix it all, but that's no excuse for passing on what we can. Fight for your traditions. Better still, preserve them with a little forethought.

Poaching as a way of life

Earlier today I came across this article in the Idaho State Journal. It tells the utterly sad and yet completely believable story of a serial poacher and his latest bout with the law.  From the story:

"The charges against Pierce stated that he had illegally killed a number of ducks and geese with a .22 caliber rifle both during the legal take season and after the waterfowl season closure.... Some of the geese recovered at Pierce’s residence were extremely rare, naturally occurring only once in tens of thousands of birds."

His penalty?  Loss of hunting privileges for 15 years.  While this sounds severe to people like you and me, my guess is that it amounts to doing him a favor. This is a guy who takes game out of season, with an unapproved weapon, with a history of game violations dating back to 1998 when he was 15 years old.  Is he really going to let something like the lack of a license deter him?  All they've done is save him the $60 each year that he paid for it. It would've served the state better to make him buy the license but arrest him if he was caught using it.

Wait, they did fine him $1175. Yeah. He could find enough crap in his garage to pawn and pay that by Monday.

My prediction? They'll end up catching him again, maybe he'll go to jail for a month and then get out with a stern "Next time you're caught you'll do the full term, I promise," and then he'll pick up and move to another state and do it all over again. The most pathetic aspect of this tale is that after 15 years he still sucks at it. Yes, he will get caught again.

Here's the line that really got me:

"The system worked in this case exactly as it should have..."

The word they left out was finally. A well-functioning system wouldn't have let it get this far.

Ok, it's easy for me to sit here and armchair quarterback a judge I've never met without offering any suggestions, so I'll throw out what I feel is an appropriate penalty for a serial poacher:  make him live in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas) for 15 years. And tell him that rat season is only open on July 4.

Giving up

More than a few years ago someone decided that this route was no longer the best way to get there. Whether they took this bridge down and left it or whether it slowly wore itself down over time I don't know, but here it sits, keeping company with the river that borders a piece of public game land.  I hunt here often, not because it's productive but because it's very large and only an hour from home.

Last Saturday I stopped to snap this picture before heading back to the truck.  After a morning of moving no birds in two of the areas, and debating whether to give up and head home, I stopped by a third area on the way back to the interstate.  Several rabbit hunters were packing up and I asked if they'd seen any birds.

"Hadn't seen the first quail.  You might try over there off Larry Cope Rd."

"I just left there.  Didn't see any."

"You huntin' them draws?  That's where I seen 'em."

"Yep."  I'd hunted the draws, the edges, the middles, and all the way down to the river. This gentleman wasn't the first to tell me he'd seen birds there.

It was time to give up and get on home.  I knew of one more area I hadn't hit yet that had never produced a single bird for me and figured what the hell.  It was only a mile out of the way and as long as I was down here...well, what the hell.  Pulling in I saw a pickup parked by the sign and then it really was over for the day.  As I eased down the road looking for a place to turn around I scanned the woods, wondering if they were rabbit hunters or bird hunters, wondering if they were having better luck than I was.  At the turnaround I still hadn't seen anyone. Maybe they'd gone the other direction from their truck?  Maybe they were hikers? Maybe the truck broke down and there wasn't anyone here after all?  What the hell.

Walking up the ridge with Wyatt out in front I remembered what the rabbit hunter had said about seeing birds in the draws.  My plan was to walk up the ridge and try the draw on the right side, working back into the wind, then walk back up the ridge, wind at our backs, and try the draw on the left side.  A few hundred yards in a lone bobwhite jumped up, catching both of us off guard.  We watched it sail away up the ridge and as Wyatt sniffed the grass where it had appeared, I heard another flush behind and to left of us, turning in time to see eight or ten birds blast from the draw over the ridge. Before any sat down I heard another flush further up the ridge, turning back around to see Wyatt standing still while fifteen or twenty birds got up in front of him.  Wow.

All of this happened in a span of maybe seven or eight seconds, at the end of which I stood staring with my gun still broken over my shoulder.  We hunted the singles from the first flush for a while but most likely they flew farther than I guessed.  This was the largest wild covey I'd seen in South Carolina in...well, maybe ever.  In a place I'd never seen birds before, on a day when I tried to quit hunting three times already.  The words of Winston Churchill and Jimmy V whispered in my ear, "Never give up."

Last night I laid out all the gear for an early start.  I'd beat all the rabbit hunters and bird hunters to the spot and find that covey again, working into the wind this time.  One bird, one good shot and one retrieve and I'd leave them alone.  In the dark of the night a 30% chance of rain turned to this:

Indian Creek is about square in the middle of all that green.  So this is what we're doing instead...

And Now We Shall Do Manly Things

If there's one thing I enjoy in any memoir it's candor.  Speak to me honestly, don't put on makeup, give me the real you.  A writer who displays his own shortfalls unapologetically and without casting blame, placing all that he isn't out there for the world to see has my respect. As I read Craig Heimbuch's recent release, And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (not just a clever blog post title), I found all of the above woven into a tale about a man wrestling with the tribulations of manhood as he takes up bird hunting.

Heimbuch's quest begins when his father gives him a 12 ga Winchester, more in a "Here's something pretty cool" way than an ill-disguised prod to go hunting. Curiosity gets the better of him and the result is a year-long chronicle of discovery, missteps, perseverance and self-realization.

A journalist married to a schoolteacher raising three young children, he is consumed daily by a job, paying rent, and the endless challenges of parenthood.  Here is a guy who doesn't have hobbies or passions as much as he has roles: employee, employer, provider, husband, father, fixer of all that breaks.  "Life is too much about compromise," he notes, a sentiment painfully familiar to many of us. For Heimbuch, hunting evolves into a departure from an existence devoted mainly to the well-being of others.

The story is funny, at times laugh-out-loud funny, without seeming silly or contrived.  The simple truth of lines such as "like our toys, pheasant were imported from China," kept a smile on my face while an extremely witty, albeit fictional, exchange between Ted Turner and Mark Zuckerberg had me spitting milk through my nose.

"Hello, Ted?  Hi, it's Mark Zuckerberg."

"Who?"

"Mark Zuckerberg.  I created Facebook."

 "Look, if this is one of them cults or Amway or some other foolish thing, I don't want any and Jane don't live here no more."

The relatively one-sided conversation continues with Zuckerberg intent on shooting one of Turner's bison and Turner, well, just being Ted.  Heimbuch possesses a well-grounded sense of humor and never falls into the trap of taking himself or the story too seriously.

The book offers a somewhat sobering glimpse into the declining number of hunters, one extending beyond the loss of habitat and the urbanization of America.  Heimbuch experiences the difficulties facing a guy who hasn't grown up in the sport but would dearly like to give it a try, the closed doors and skepticism encountered by a grown man who wants to hunt.  Were it not for several accommodating relatives this book might never have happened.  Our sport is one that's difficult to figure out on your own, at least before you grow tired of getting skunked and give it up for something less cryptic.

Oddly, the father who gave him the shotgun and who is an avid lifelong hunter only plays a peripheral role in his son's passage into the shooting sports.  We're left to wonder whether this was intentional or merely bad luck on the calendar, but Heimbuch leaves little doubt how much he wanted his father included.

I learned of this book through an email from TLC Book Tours who subsequently sent me a copy and included this review in a month-long virtual tour.  At 324 pages it's an easy read and one any bird hunter would enjoy.  George Bird Evans or Datus Proper it's not, nor is it meant to be.  It's a modern story that most guys can relate to, and fortunately it happens to be about wingshooting.

Strangers in a strange land

Opening day of dove season is different.  People show up in droves, bring friends, kids, preachers and some guy who called them out of the blue because he was visiting his mom at the lake and heard we might be shooting (mind if I join you?).  College boys appear between the trees like those baseball players from the corn in Field of Dreams. There's a cookout, beer, good to see you again and by the way, what have you been up to?  Everyone goes home grinning.

Then starts the great decline. The crowds get thinner every week regardless of whether there are birds.  The only exception is that if you have a really hot shoot and go home and call everyone who wasn't there and rub it in, the next weekend the field will be packed with your boys and the birds will have packed up and headed south.  You shoulda been here last week...

This year the decline has held true to form.  Fewer and fewer hunters each week while bird numbers have been pretty steady.  You'd think this would be good for the few of us remaining, but as anyone who's hunted dove knows the birds get substantially smarter once the first shot is fired.  They have an uncanny ability to divert flight paths through the parts of the field where the guns aren't.  Which means you generally need enough guys around a field to plug the gaps and keep the birds moving, and if you're lucky there are a few guys who fidget and walk around and cause the birds to flare and fly toward you, the stealth hunter sitting motionless in the shadows, agent of death from below.

Last weekend Bob - one of the hard-cores - and I showed up.  Way down on the other end of the field was a guy I knew but had never seen in the dove field and he brought along a friend visiting from Israel.  And that was it.  Just the four of us.  And some birds.

So Bob and I rimmed a corner within earshot of each other, sipped a few beers and drew on the occasional kamikaze.  Mostly we watched the birds drift right through the big open spaces in middle.  When we left, the Israeli was still at the far end of the field, alone, and might still be there for all I know.

The Numbers Game

It's not that people don't like numbers, it's more that they can't always get comfortable with the stark certainty that comes with them.

"I was only late a few times." 

"Fourteen out of twenty days last month?  I'd say that's more than a few." 

"Shut up."

As is often the case, the numbers tell the story, the real story.  Educated as an engineer and currently responsible for the dollars and cents and operating metrics of several decidedly unsexy businesses, I live and breathe numbers.  It's a language I speak better than English and it makes me the unpopular winner of many an argument.  If anyone knows Huey Lewis, ask him if it's still hip to be square.

Being number-oriented is an affliction of sorts; people without it generally think things are either better or worse than they actually are while the rest of us are constantly hazed by the bare burden of reality.  It comes with a reflexive urge to count, to track, to analyze anything and everything.  It has its pluses and minuses.

When I lived in a ski town the magic number was 100.  Ski 100 days in a season, a season holding roughly 150 possible days, and you'd done something.  You were legitimate. Women would swoon, bartenders would give you drinks all over town, you'd get a $5 an hour raise, Hollywood A-listers would invite you to parties.  No, not really.  A couple of your boys would say 'way to go, dude' and you'd most likely be a better skier than you were in October but that's about it.  But that would be good enough because you'd lived it.  It's not the number, it's everything that happened along the way to the number.

If there's such a number for bird hunters it's less an accepted standard and more of a personal thing.  Last year I shot dove 9 or 10 days, hunted quail 12 or 13, didn't make it pheasant hunting at all.  And I fancy myself a bird hunter?  That's only 6% of the year spent doing what I enjoy most.  Even if I stack the deck in my favor and consider that I can't (legally) hunt birds but six months out of the year, I still took advantage of barely 12% of the available opportunities.  I should call myself a grass cutter, or a trash taker outer, or bill payer.  Problem is that I have about, oh, zero passion for any of these.

But it's unavoidable.  I'm gonna count, and then I'm gonna compare and rate and rank based on that count, and then I'm either gonna smile or think it's pathetic and swear to do better next year.  What I should do is look past the number.  Ten more days this year would be great, but it's not just "10" at all.  It's knowing that I spent those ten days - days I can't ever get back once they're gone - carrying a gun or walking behind a dog or both if I'm really lucky, about as happy as this boy gets.

The count currently stands at zero, but come tomorrow I'll be on the board.

Blair Witch or GoPro?  Either way, he was on to something.

What am I doing here?

Early May isn't that far removed from the end of bird season unless you take into account the leaves on the trees, the pollen, and the forty-plus degree difference in the temperature outside.  Right now it's as hot as the parking lot in Hell.  Aside from the blooming honeysuckle I'd need a calendar to tell me it isn't July.

But - surprise to me - there are still some guys chasing birds in the US.  Reading a random article earlier this week I saw mention that the season in Alaska didn't end until June.  At the time I felt sure this referred to some type of dog training season, a no-guns except blank pistols window before the birds started nesting.   Curiosity got the better of me and I drifted to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website get to the skinny.

Lo and behold in the land of the tundra you can hunt grouse as late as April 30th and ptarmigan as late as June 15.  Wait a minute, if I lived in Alaska I could still be hunting birds?  With a gun?  I could go tomorrow?  

All these years I've been supremely jealous of the anglers around here, what with no closed season and all. Change apparel, change gear, change your underwear once in a while and never stop fishing.  But birds you can only shoot half of the year.  Never mind that the other half of the year you'd kill the dog running him for more than fifteen minutes, it still seemed more than a little unfair.

In Alaska, though, you can hunt TEN months a year. Yes, I understand there are probably a few days in the middle of the season where it might be too chilly to hunt.  Or open the front door.  Still, it gives the idea of pitching life as I know it in favor of the Alaskan adventure some serious consideration.  Maybe I'll stick it in that drawer to be opened near retirement.

I'm not sure if the rest of us should look at this as a consolation for living in such a remote and unforgiving place or one of the rewards for doing something the masses don't have the cojones for.  Or further proof that life in general is one big game of Let's Make a Deal.

Think he'd give me a key to the gate?

Over the weekend I stumbled upon an article in The State about a Greek shipping tycoon (is there any other kind of shipping tycoon?) purchasing one of the older plantations in South Carolina for a song.  The place definitely has character and a certain John Mellencamp flavor...

Medway Plantation
courtesy of The Post and Courier

At almost 6700 acres it's a good-sized piece of dirt and all of it is in conservation easements, a flicker of hope that maybe part of my state won't be a subdivision someday. It looks like he's in it for at least one of the right reasons:

(Gregory) Callimanopulos plans to reintroduce wild quail at Medway and use the Berkeley County estate as a personal getaway and hunting retreat.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/04/14/2234094/historic-medway-plantation-sells.html#storylink=cpy

"Reintroduce" is a bit of a misnomer, the local quail underground telling me that enhancements will come from the native bobwhites already in residence.  I'm guessing that of any limiting factors, cost will not be one.

If any of you happen to know Mr. C, do me a favor and mention that a nice donation to our state's bobwhite initiative would go a long way toward establishing him as a good neighbor.

The full piece-

http://www.thestate.com/2012/04/14/2234094/historic-medway-plantation-sells.html