Not just for the birds

Tag: bird dogs

  • Praising Canines

    Praising Canines

    Our little burg has a “town square” group on Facebook. Notices of dogs running loose, accompanied by blurry photos, is probably its most common theme. Often, follow-up posts report that the mystery dog’s owner has been found and that the dog has returned safely to its home. Very occasionally, as happened yesterday, someone reports a dead dog. A close-up of creamy and mocha short-haired fur, a Christmassy collar with little bells on it, and lots of small black and white-tipped porcupine barbs. No face or even an indication of breed. Not necessary. Someone’s beloved pet, judging by the remarkable collar. Most people who respond do so empathetically, posting a “sad” or “caring” emoji. Sometimes the keyboard commandos come out, though, as one did in this case, chiding the author of the post for not including a “better” photo of the whole dog. But when it comes to dogs, the better angels win and these j-holes get put in their place publicly. Which is gratifying in a way because people seem compelled to affirm that these creatures really are our best friends. You get it.

    I was a cat-person, childless, until age 36. My first dog was Glenna, a backyard breeder’s last Brittany puppy out of a litter of ten. I think she cost me $300. After she passed at the early age of 10 from megaesophagus I tracked her life’s vet bills (I’m one of those organized OCD types): it was more than $10,000. If I’d never gotten another dog after her — the thought had settled in me for a while there — I wouldn’t be writing this. My time with her would have been written off as a failed experiment. Glenna was a good test for a first dog: headstrong, increasingly irritable as she aged and was overtaken by her discomfort from having an esophagus that went on strike: her food just piled up in her throat, created a lot of foam, and the bolus (a word I’d never heard of before this) would get coughed up spectacularly in stages, piles of sticky white foam surrounding still-dry kibble. Gruesome, and emotionally wretched. The pounds slid off her and I finally had to end her life.

    Fortunately, we’d gotten Angus when Glenna was 7. If you’ve followed this blog, I don’t need to say anything else, but you might want to see Leslie’s post from 2019, “Saved by a Dog.” Then, later than we should have, we got Peat when Angus was 8. But if we hadn’t gotten him then, we wouldn’t have, and we might now be dogless. I was convinced Peat was the Devil. Initially. Well, for about three years. Now that we’ve had almost ten years to adjust to him (he hasn’t changed at all), he’s just adorable. At least we think so. Maybe our lack of friends has something to do with that. Peat. My nephew put it well when introducing Peat to a friend of his when we were all about to float the Missouri this summer: “He’s a 10-year-old that acts like a 2-year-old.”

    Now we have Bloom, who’s 3. Bloom, Peat, and Angus all came from the same breeder. They each couldn’t be more different from the rest. Each has been the world. Bloom, by design, is more Leslie’s dog. I’ll let her write something much better than this about him. She has the knack, and he’s worth some buckets of words.

    Peat and Bloom hunted with, for, us yesterday. It was hot. Early season, where there’s no water anywhere and we might as well have been in the Australian Outback. Within the first five minutes, Peat pointed a covey of Huns. Bloom pointed something else, closer to me, about 50 yards away. Peat’s covey went up and Leslie took one shot, killing two birds. Bloom’s birds didn’t materialize. Halfway through the hunt, both dogs started slowing down, hop-scotching from bitterbrush to sage in search of shade. We took a break, gave the dogs some treats to go with the mass quantities of water they’d been drinking, hoping they didn’t get hyponatremia. I ate a Payday. We did a 180, and the sun was, finally, at our back. Peat got a second wind and hunted hard all the way back to the truck. But we encountered no more birds.

    I probably have a few more seasons with Peat, and each will be diminished somehow. If I’m lucky. I can’t really face it. Don’t want to. Yesterday tried to get me to glimpse the future. When Angus was a puppy, even before I started really hunting with him (I had to wait for Glenna to die, when he was 3), I’d begun grieving his death. It was stupid, but that’s what I was called to do with him. Peat guaranteed I wouldn’t do that, and before I knew it (he was a little more than 3) I was hopelessly in love with him. I’ve never experienced anything like it. He’s a cartoon. There’s nothing remotely noble about him, and he doesn’t give a shit. I suppose, then, he’s like me.

    But I do give a shit. That’s what makes him better than me. I shouldn’t. Dogs do that: no matter what they’re like they make you wish you were better, wish you were more like you think they see you. If you give a shit, that means there’s something not quite right with you. Dogs don’t have that burden. They just want to connect. That’s all that matters. Thank god. Dog.

    Glenna teaching the puppy Angus about sticks
    One of my favorite shots of Angus
    Leslie taking a break with Bloom (wearing Angus’s collar)
    Peat looking at the future (Bloom)
    Peat. MENSA Dog.
    Leslie and Angus in a happy place
    Peat, pointing with a tibia, and style
    Spring in Cambridge with Angus and Peat
    Peat, in my classroom, showing Angus where chukar originate

  • The Face of Death

    The Face of Death

    “Maybe we fear that the work we depend on images to do for us — the work of immobilizing, and therefore making tolerable — will be undone if we throw the image back into the flow of time.” — T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death (8)

    “I think we hide, necessarily, from an understanding of what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.” — T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death (227)

    What is the “face of death”? We’re in a sport that makes us face death whenever we’re successful. And instead of shying away from it, discomforting as it might be, we photograph it, and most of us post the photos for others — friends and strangers alike — to see.

    Why do we do this? Where does our current publicization of this taking of life fit on the continuum of monumentalized, frozen-in-time death? If T.J. Clark is right (and I’m inclined to agree with him, except maybe for the “necessarily” part), we take and share these photos of our kills both to acknowledge and avoid understanding what we’ve done. I have to think there’s something in our DNA that compels us not only to record the fact of our death-causing (and even death-gazing) but also to share it so we don’t have to think about it too much; McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” rings in my head. This compulsion might be limited to those of us outside the hunter-gatherer lines; even though we’re hunting, we don’t need to and neither have our ancestors for thousands of years. In fact, the compulsion might be because hunting isn’t necessary for our survival. It might be compensatory somehow.

    I’ve written about Brightman’s Grateful Prey before, specifically how traditional Cree animal-human (prey-predator) relationships differ from those of Invader/Agricultural traditions (i.e., most of us who are not Native Americans or First Nations people). I’ve tried to fit the imagistic depiction of prey into the Cree system but can’t, nor does it fit in Hugh Brody’s account of Inuit hunting culture, which I’ve also recently mentioned. For hunter-gatherers, at best, static portrayals of a formerly alive thing are disrespectful. At worst, they’re like putting a curse on yourself. But that’s a different tradition, different culture than this. So let’s see.

    Even without doing a thorough historical analysis, it’s fair to say that there are a couple major (let’s call them “Western,” as in Western European) traditions in how dead prey get represented. One, for lack of a better term, might be called the “Still Life Tradition,” and the other the “Hero Shot.” In super simple terms, “still life” images foreground the prey as objets d’art (removing, mostly, the hunter), and the “hero shot” foregrounds the hunter and/or his “achievement” (dead prey). I’m going to talk mostly about the Hero Shot, but I’ve included some fantastic “still life” paintings, too, mainly because they’re amazing (you’ll know why).

    Classic Hero Shot: hunters posing with their alectoris prey, Spain, 2014
    An older version of the above shot, also in Spain, 1959
    Solo Hero Shot: 1937 photo of a young Australian bird hunter with his day’s take.
    A more creative Hero Shot, 1940s, Australia, by the same photographer as the above photo (looks like some sort of snipe)
    1912 Hero Shot, including dogs (no location indicated)
    1903 group Hero Shot, Nome, Alaska (ptarmigan)
    Still Life: Jan Fyt, “Dead Partridges with Hound,” 1647
    Paul de Vos, “Hunter and Dogs by a Table with Dead Game and Fruit,” Flanders, 1640s or 1650s.
    Hendrik de Fromantiou, “A Still Life with Dead Partridge, Pheasant, and Hunting Gear,” Holland, 1670. View this full size for impressive feather detail on this perdix perdix specimen.
    Carstian Luyckx, “Gentleman hunter with his pack of dogs and hunting trophies,” ca. 1650-58, Belgium.
    John Constable, “Study of a Dead French Partridge,” circa 1830-1838. Constable was my favorite artist when I was young, mostly because of his romantic, highly detailed landscapes such as “The Hay Wain.” I was surprised to find this relative of alectoris chukar among his works.
    My favorite kind of Hero Shot, for the true hero of the affair, although he (the bird dog) has relied on me to do the killing, the middle part: he found it, I shot it, and he retrieved it.
    The Solo Bird and Hunter Hero Shot, on location
    My last “tailgate shot” (2017): to me, it’s appropriate that the drone I found sits alongside the chukar because I think it accentuates the undesirable “out-of-place-ness” of this type of image. I see a huge, distasteful imbalance between technology and nature here.
    Classic “tailgate” Hero Shot with dogs, hunters, and prey arranged with heads hanging off the edge of the tailgate. 2016.
    One of my favorite all-time dead-prey photos. Angus, who never stopped hunting is still hunting while Peat poses with a bird that came out of the conifers on an after-school hunt in a place I thought I’d only find grouse. Adding to the image’s dearness to me is the history of Peat’s initial reluctance to retrieve and radical, sudden change of course, becoming a flawless retriever to this day. It’s one of the purest gestures of reconciliation I’ve known, even though he’s “just” a dog and probably doesn’t think of it like that.
    4 years in the making: The Kid with his first chukar, after trying hard for most of 4 seasons with me, he finally got one (he actually got three that day). Doesn’t speak much for my guiding abilities, but a worthwhile Hero Shot.

    Chukar hunting is hard, and bagged birds come at a price, whether it’s the calories you burned in the pursuit, the abrasions on your dogs’ pads, the pride you had to swallow when you couldn’t get up the hill to your dog’s stealthy point in time, or the axle you broke trying to get just a little farther up that nasty road. Lining birds up on a tailgate for a photo, with your amazing dog whose praises you’ve made a habit to sing and your best human buddy you’ve shared the challenge with, makes a certain amount of sense. This photo is not intended to say, “Screw these stupid birds, I’m glad they’re dead and I’m gladder I killed them.” It’s not meant to say, as the truly stupid saying about chukar hunting goes, “The first one’s for fun, and the rest are for revenge.” Rather, it’s meant to say, I think, “I respect these birds, love where they live, admire beyond description my dog’s singular flotation of the whole proposition, and am grateful for the opportunity to hunt them.” It says, “Chukar are beautiful, and a worthy pursuit, and I’ve hunted them fairly, ethically, and shot well enough to harvest some of them, who — I admit — gave their lives in exchange for all of the above.”

    So, going back to T.J. Clark’s thoughts about these images of death, the faces we see probably daily (at least during bird season) of these multitudes of expired prey, I still can’t help wondering what we’re avoiding, “what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.” I do think something’s not being said here, whether it’s in the image or outside it, behind it, surrounding it. What, for example, really, is remorse? Pity? Sorrow? Projection? Reciprocity? Do those register? And, if so, since they’re all necessarily (aha!) irreconcilable (unless you commit suicide every time you kill a bird), where do they go, what do they do to us, what can we do with them? And how can we participate in a tradition (whether it’s a Hero Shot or a still life) saturated with adulation but based entirely on death that’s not our own, without avoiding something important? Is that possible? Does it matter?

    On a very crass and basic level, what we’re doing is trying to connect (with others?) and using the death of birds to do so. Somehow, posting pictures of bird dogs pointing or of the sun rising beautifully over a ridge just doesn’t garner the same kind of response (or we think it won’t) from whomever we’re trying to connect with. The result rather than the experience. The bottom line. It used to bug me when I’d go back to work on Monday and the dudes who didn’t chukar hunt would ask, sincerely, “How many birds did you kill this weekend?” Once I answered, “None, but you should have heard the wind carry a slow sound in the hawthorn.” Connection aborted.

    One of the loveliest poems I know is Robert Burns’ “Song Composed in August,” which situates bird hunting naturally in the middle of courtship:

    Avaunt, away! the cruel sway,
    Tyrannic man’s dominion;
    The sportsman’s joy, the murd’ring cry,
    The flutt’ring, gory pinion!

    Part of what I like about this is that it just puts it out there, this is what we do, they’re birds, they’re beautiful, and some of them, when we’re not trying to get laid, we kill. Chalk it up to “tyrannic man’s dominion” and the “joy” of sportsmen. We hear and see and might even be the cause of the murderous gore, and then get on with things. This, it seems, is exactly in the right cultural milieu. Harvest. Death isn’t really faced because it doesn’t have to be (as long as it’s not your own, and even then…). So, killing birds — and posting photos of them — isn’t the end of the world. Unless you’re the bird. I just think, aesthetically, that photos of dead birds look way better in natural settings (rocks, grass, dogs’ mouths) as opposed to tailgates or (the absolute worst) impaled on barbed wire. But that’s just me.

  • December Chukar Hills

    December Chukar Hills

    The two years we lived in Washington, as I’ve said here before, were not the easiest two years for us. We missed the chukar hills, empathized with our dogs’ longings for open hills of bunchgrass and sage, and just simply were unable to ignore the call to the hills. Local surrogates paled in comparison. When we returned to those hills last February, they were buried in snow. So we had to wait. Now that the snow’s here again, we’re recalling the patience required but it’s easier being here, no longer two days’ drive away. I’m busy trying to gainfully employ myself, and I’m liking the challenge and channeling some of that into the new blog/website. But the industry’s hurting, I’ve yet to land a client, and so am doing what I do (when I’m not hunting): reading and writing on topic. Here’s my latest:

    https://chukarhillsrealty.com/2023/12/06/residential-specialist/

    I did get out with Peat into the chukar hills for a long hunt yesterday. December 5th. T-shirt weather in the midst of lots of precipitation. Gorgeous. Not as much action as we’ve typically seen in this above-average bird year, but enough. Bizarrely, even though I filled my 100-ounce Cambelbak bladder, I ran out of water (three miles from the truck). A first for December. Still, stellar day.

  • Legend

    Legend

    50 miles from home, I realized that I forgot to pack my extra shells for our hunting and camping trip. I sat there for a few minutes in the passenger seat in silence and mad at myself at my unthinkable mistake and embarrassed to say anything to Bob. I wanted to run off and hide.

    It wasn’t totally unthinkable. It wasn’t like we forgot the shotguns or our boots this time. A couple of years ago, heading down the road for an out-of-town hunting trip we were about 45 minutes from home when I realized that both of our hunting boots were still on the boot warmers in the garage. We immediately turned around and went back to get the boots which made for a very uncomfortable and quiet detour back home. We swore from that moment on that we’d always have a check-off list for packing.

    I fessed up about my stupid forgetfulness just before crossing the border into Oregon and the big to city to us, Ontario. We exited into the parking lot of the Walmart, parked and headed into the far back corner of the store to shop for shells and to also look for a cheap dog-proof cooler (or in our case Peat proof cooler without zippers like the soft sided ones have). The Walmart Superstore wasn’t so super when we discovered they didn’t sell ammo anymore and the cooler selection wasn’t very impressive. We left empty handed.

    We then drove all the way across town to a couple of other stores that were open but their selection of 20 gauge shells for upland was pretty dismal or non-existent, focusing mostly on waterfowl shot. On the bright side, at least we found a small Igloo Playmate plastic cooler at Bi-Mart and were fairly confident Peat shouldn’t be able to figure out how to open it.

    We forged ahead and originally wanted to stop for a quick hunt somewhere in the desert along the way but it started snowing sideways and then it rained. Not the best hunting weather for us or the dogs. Once we headed south the clouds opened up and we could see blue skies.

    Arriving to the campground in the late afternoon we set up camp. I pulled out my pack from the pickup and opened up the shell pouch to see what exactly was in there and analyzed the situation in my head. Okay, I rarely shoot more than once on a covey and I’ve got 12 shells so that would last maybe four hunts if I only shot three times per hunt. Of those shells three of them were Angus shells that Bob hand-loaded four years ago and they’re filled with some ashes from our Brittany named Angus who died four years ago. I’ve been carrying them around for good luck ever since.

    Good luck Angus shells.

    It wasn’t going to be the end of the world to only have 12 shells but I’d definitely have to be discretionary in my shooting and not waste any shots unless it seemed like it was a sure thing which in the chukar hunting world is totally laughable.

    Just before dinner, we met a fellow hunter in the campground who had been out the previous two days and according to him, the hunting was terrible and he hadn’t seen many birds. It was ridiculous but I was actually relieved to think that chances of shooting would be limited.

    The opposite turned out on our first two days of hunting. It was really good, and the dogs found plenty of birds. We were pleased. Thrilled.

    On our third day of hunting we found an area to hunt that looked good on the maps but in person it wasn’t very promising and no visible water sources were nearby for miles even though the map showed what looked like a small pond which was now drier than a bone.

    Bob and I decided to stay together since I was down to my last three shells, all of which were Angus shells. Not very long after we started our hike from the pickup the dogs started finding birds but I couldn’t get a good shot and passed on ones that were borderline too far away. Towards the end of the day the dogs found and pointed one last covey of chukar up in the rocks above us. Bob got up to them first and they erupted and flew downhill towards me. I quickly mounted my gun, shot, and hit one on a crossing overhead shot. Bloom hauled down the hill past me to retrieve it and beat Peat to it. On the way up heading towards me with the chukar in his mouth, Peat snatched it away from him and continued to run past me taking my chukar to Bob as if I didn’t exist.

    The only other times (yes, plural) Peat stole a bird from another dog was back in 2015 when he was eight months old. Instead of simply attempting to retrieve them, he watched Angus do all the work of finding, pointing, and holding the birds and then would take the bird Bob shot from Angus’s mouth on the retrieve and go off and eat it. He did this for the first 6 birds Bob shot that season. Angus, gentlemanly at the wrong time, didn’t put up much of a fight. Bloom, like his blood relative Angus, didn’t either.

    Peat’s first season was frustrating, legendary, but epic in its own twisted way. Luckily after the sixth time stealing a bird from Angus, a switch turned off or maybe on in his brain and he started retrieving them directly to us and didn’t stop to eat them.

    On the morning of what would have been our fourth hunt in Oregon, we woke up early and noticed a flat tire on the pickup. It was no surprise with all the rocky backroads we’d been driving on the day before. It was 10 degrees outside but at least it we were parked on a flat piece of ground and not pulled off on a shoulder of a busy highway. Bob changed it but now without a spare tire and with the nearest tire repair shop 60 miles away we decided pack up instead of hunting and head home rather than risk being stranded out on some remote rocky and gravel road without cell phone coverage.

    A couple of days after arriving home and anxious to head out again, I went for a solo hunt with Bloom at a place where I’d been before. 20 minutes into the hunt Bloom went on point below me and held them until I arrived. The covey of maybe 15 birds busted and flew downhill. I shot one chukar, it tumbled to the earth, and Bloom retrieved it right to my hand. I was elated! I searched around and found my bright yellow shell on the ground and picked it up and looked at Angus’s name on it. It was an emotional moment. The place where this happened was almost the exact spot where I shot my first chukar back in 2016 that was pointed and retrieved by Angus.

    Divine Intervention?

    Bloom with his super sensitive nose is still figuring out this game but with each hunt he’s getting better. Yesterday, hunting solo with him in a new spot, I thought it would be too windy to find anything but I remembered my friend and longtime hunter Sam telling me years ago, “Birds are on the ground and their world is much calmer; it’s not as windy down there.” Bloom tracked down birds just below tops of ridges in the frigid and howling wind and went on point on at least 6 different coveys and a couple of solos. I didn’t think that I would be able to shoot with my fingers being bitter cold to the bone but it’s funny how you forget the coldness when your dog goes on point.

    Bloom has a lot to live up to with his legendary genetics and with our high expectations but after the last few hunts and seeing him work, he’s going to be fine.

    My first chukar (2017), compliments of Angus (and Peat)
    Bloom pointing a covey of chukar yesterday.
  • Fake

    Fake

    We’ve bragged for years about our dogs. It’s part of the game, I think. Part of the culture. Everybody does it, or badly wants to. The dog work this season, though, has not begun as expected. The theme so far has been The False Point. Maybe the chickens are coming home to roost from the two years the dogs spent pointing ghostbirds in the timber farms on the Olympic Peninsula. There were birds there, both ruffed and sooty grouse, and the daily walks sometimes witnessed actual birds, sometimes by sight but more often by wing sounds when they busted. Most often, though, probably by a real-to-fake ratio of 1:100, it was Bloom pointing scent, backed spectacularly by Peat. This pattern grew increasingly boring for us, especially because the “forest” was so dense that you or the dogs literally could not penetrate into it at all off of the logging roads to try to relocate the birds. We did not, though, suspect that this daily routine might be damaging our dogs for chukar hunting.

    Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe the preponderance of false pointing so far this season is just a phase and evidence of their incredible noses working to “recalibrate the stations of the [living].” “Never doubt your dog” has always been our mantra, but it’s being tested, and frequently conflicts with another mantra: “Never lose altitude.” I’ve lost track of the times this season that Leslie or I have descended far down a slope to reach a pointing Bloom, only to learn it was fake. This is a new one on us. Even Peat, whose batting average isn’t quite as high as Angus’s (I don’t recall Angus ever false pointing) but is still stellar, has begun fooling himself and, thus, us.

    We don’t want to lose faith. Losing faith in your dog is like wondering if the sun will rise tomorrow, and really not knowing. You don’t want to go there. One hunt last week, Bloom false pointed at least 20 times, and never pointed actual birds. Leslie and I were nearly despondent, and afterward pored over the Internet searching for answers. There were as many differing opinions on the matter as there were people giving them. We decided that the most sensible thing to try was to speedily walk past Bloom when he pointed, letting him know we didn’t acknowledge his fake, and hope that eventually he’d find and hold real birds, whereupon we’d fire, hopefully hit one, and get him a full cycle out of the deal, re-cementing what’s supposed to happen: point – hold – bust – shot – retrieve. But the very next hunt, he nailed five straight real points, so that plan went out the window, thankfully. We thought, “Oh, we’ve been too neurotic about this whole thing; it was just a phase.” But on the next hunt, he only false pointed. Numerous times. And Peat did, too. Arg.

    So we’re back to scratching our heads. I considered keeping this quiet because it probably makes us look like idiots (nothing new), and because I didn’t want to malign in any way these incredible dogs from a fantastic breeder, but I’m wondering if the smart people I’m used to hearing from here might have something helpful to say about it.

    Classic Bloom false point on a logging road near Neah Bay, WA on a bizarrely sunny day.
    This one, yesterday, was real. Of course it’s the one I shot with my camera and not the gun.
    The classic double false point, or “Point-off.” The upside is that we have two dogs that love to honor.