To Fetch a Bird

Mulak Reader - To Fetch a Bird

In this piece I express a couple opinions I’ve since retracted: Specifically, on the nature of scent, and on the unchangeable nature of the percentage of crippled birds. (My own percentages improved significantly—by 10%—once I switched from a 20 to a 12-gauge gun.) Fortunately, I’m not in a business where some ill-tempered person might use those old quotes in against me in an argument. At least, I hope not. (If those are the only things in my life I’ll ever have to take back, I figure I’m ahead of the game.) Much of this article had already appeared in Pointing Dogs Made Easy when Sports Afield used this article in their October 1984 edition.

TO FETCH A BIRD

          The old fence along the stonewall still carried a few persistent strands of rusted barbed wire. I pushed them low as I stepped across. In the fresh snow, the few sounds were quiet ones; the soft swish of my nylon briarproofs, the muffled snap of a twig underfoot, the intermittent dull clink of the dog's snow-laden bell. Among the hemlocks, a scattering of apple trees stretched their branches high in the competition for sunlight. As I passed under one, a grouse roared out above me, heading downhill. I turned and fired, then fired again, but the bird kept going. The shot is one that I practice regularly on station number one at the skeet range but miss consistently in the grouse coverts. I began reciting my standard lecture to myself, and had the gun open with the empties in my hand when the second grouse took off. I stiffened, then moved very efficiently to reload before venturing an upward glance, hoping... But there had been just two birds feeding on the frozen apples in the treetop.
          I whistled for the dog, and silently cursed the laws of physics that cause brass bells to freeze silent upon coming in contact with snow. I paused to listen for the bell I knew I wouldn't hear, then whistled again. Ten feet in front of me the snow on a low hemlock bough suddenly shook loose, and my Brittany emerged out of a veil of powder. In her mouth was the grouse I was so sure I had missed. Although the memory is as vivid as if it had happened this morning, I would have given a great deal to have had my camera at ready instead of stowed safely in the breast pocket of my vest. The bird was still very much alive, and blinked warily at me as I took it from the dog.
          On the far side of the hemlock the story of the retrieve was clearly written in the snow: The bird had fallen within 50 yards of the apple tree. Grouse tracks lead away from the spot. The chase began where the dog's footprints became widely spaced, and 20 yards farther a flurry of feathers marked the place where she caught up with the running bird. I shook my head. I was certain I'd missed that shot. My Brittany was at my side, grinning her open-mouthed dog's grin at me. I grinned back.

          A few years ago I wrote an article titled "Lost Birds and What to Do About Them". In it, I cited a statistic that the average grouse hunter loses fully one-third of the birds he shoots if he doesn't have a dog. In the following issue of the same magazine were several "letters to the editor" from dogless grouse hunters who took exception to my figures. Although none of the jump shooters offered anything but vague estimates of their own lost bird counts ("...a few per season, ...once in a blue moon...") all were certain that my figures were a gross exaggeration. One-out-of-three sounds high to everybody, including the one who compiled the statistics, but unfortunately it is a true and accurate figure.
          Why?
          First off, most wingshots—and not just grouse hunters—are better shots than they think they are. No kidding. Many seemingly "missed" shots actually put a pellet or two into the bird, but go unnoticed in screening heavy cover. In the uplands, a bird will frequently dodge behind an evergreen just as the hunter pulls on him, and there is no way of knowing for sure if the shot connected. Every good dog comes up with a few of these "go-see-if-I-got-that-one" fetches each season, but the dogless hunter walks away from most of his screened shots wondering if he has left a crippled bird hiding in the bushes. And, as in the incident that opened this article, bird dogs occasionally bring in a grouse or woodcock that had been "cleanly missed". It is something that will never happen to a dogless gunner.
          Secondly, unless daily records are kept, hunting seasons tend to "age well," improving with the passage of time. Fine shots and grand days make for lasting memories, but misses and lost birds are conveniently forgotten. The statistics I used to come up with my one-bird-in-three lost ratio have their source in the hunting journals I've kept over the years. They show that one in every four birds shot in plain sight comes down healthy enough to run and hide. If you hunt in thick cover where vision is often limited, then crank into that equation all the chancy shots, the shots through thick brush, the screened shots, and those where the bird disappears into the thick stuff immediately after the shot, and you'll find that the ratio will be more like the one-in-three I've compiled in the grouse coverts. Runners, cripples, fly-ons: few ever fly again, but nearly all escape the gamebag if a dog isn't present.
          (A word about my shooting journals: All the memorable days are there, but so are the bad days—seasons of them—all reduced to numbers untainted by the rosy glow of memory. One needn't be a genius to conclude which birds would have been lost without the assistance of a bird dog. The season totals are frighteningly consistent from year to year. And while the bulk of my gunning takes place in the grouse and woodcock coverts of New England, I also hunt pheasants and waterfowl, and have done some dove and quail shooting in other parts of the country. Whatever and wherever I hunt, I've found that the figures on "birds that would have been lost" apply universally.)
          Crippled birds fall regularly to both the best and the worst of wingshots. Depending on a man's skill with a shotgun, he may shoot more birds, or hit a greater number of the birds he shoots at, but he would be hard put to improve upon the ratio of clean kills to cripples: that is a function of the inexact nature of shotgunning. If a man hunts, he will invariably cripple a percentage of the birds he hits. Any statement to the contrary is an exercise in self-delusion, and won't change the facts. With a dog along to fetch a bird, no self-delusion is necessary.

Old Duffy stopped in mid-stride, his nostrils flared. Stretching ever higher, he turned to the left, finally rising up on his hind legs, much as he would at home when he "danced" for a dog biscuit. A scent that only he detected drifted in the air just over his head. He started up the hillside in pursuit of the fleeting scent. Deaf as a stone, my old Britt was in his last season, and after the years he spent as my first dog it seemed nothing could excite him any more. He was cool. 60 yards farther along, on the far side of the ridge where the early sun had not yet slanted, he pointed before a tumbledown stone fence. I circled widely, then paraded along both sides of the old wall with my gun at port arms, but no bird flushed. I waved Duff ahead, but, of course, he wouldn't move. Exasperated, I got down on my hands and knees and examined the face of the wall where he was pointing. Immediately under the dog's nose one of the stones turned into a grouse, sitting with its head pulled into its breast feathers, dying from my "missed" shot that had put two pellets into its belly half an hour before.
My shooting hadn't gotten that bird: Duffy had. Yet he sat aloof, wearing his Charles de Gaulle ho-hum look. As I've so often done before, I lifted the grouse to nose and smelled—nothing at all. I can smell the difference in brands of coffee my wife perks in the morning, and I can smell a bag of potato chips opened in the next room, but I've never gotten so much as a hint as to what my dogs scent when they find and point gamebirds. In every day of his life Duffy continually amazed me—not because he was exceptional, but because he wasn't. Every dog has an ability in his nose that amazes and fascinates me.

I return home from visiting friends who own a dog, and my own dogs feast upon my pant legs with their noses, breathing in a banquet of something I have no way of knowing is there ... A pheasant runs across the trail ahead of us, unseen by my setter puppy. The scent evidently has a directional quality to it, because as we cross the bird's path she turns correctly to the left without hesitation ... I bring my dogs to Texas to hunt birds they've never seen before. They point both blue quail and bobwhites on first encounter, while ignoring roadrunners and other ground birds they've not known previously... Working a pair of dogs, one of them finds the scent of a running pheasant and goes on a walking point. Although her brace-mate crosses the bird's trail time and again, she never picks up the scent and seems surprised when the bird is finally pointed and flushed... We hunt along a wooded margin where the smell of freshly spread manure from an adjoining pasture is overpowering, yet the dog works and points a pair of woodcock in seeming indifference to the nearly virulent odor... The list could go on—Things that dogs regularly do but are beyond the comprehension of humans.

We tend to measure everything in terms of our five limited and imperfect human senses, yet things such as radio waves and ultraviolet light and high-frequency sound do physically exist all around us. There is no reason to think that the rest of nature operates under the limitation of our five human senses: witness the radar sets of bats, the "extended feel" of the lateral lines of fish, the common will of colony insects, and the homing instincts of migratory birds. Similarly, I've never held to the theory that the scenting ability of bird dogs and other predator animals is simply an improved version of a sense of smell as we know it. I've read opinions that claim that a dog's sense of smell is a million times more powerful than our own.
Don't believe it.
Scenting is not smelling. A dog has something in his nose that you and I can hardly imagine, and to say that it's just a high-performance smeller is like saying that a bird's wing and a human hand are pretty much the same thing since the bone structure is similar. Science has come up with machines that can measure nearly anything, including odors, yet animal scent remains a mystery. To be sure, a dog uses his nose to gather scent, so his scenting is probably closely related to a sense of smell, but when all the special abilities of a dog's nose are considered, as well as many of the other weird and unexplainable things dogs regularly do ("What weird things?" you ask? Other than dogs, I don't have any friends who roll in cow flops or cold-nose strangers, although I do know a fireman who has a passing interest in hydrants.) the evidence points to a unique ability for which humans have no equivalent.

          In the tall grass I nearly missed Win's point. As pheasants so often do, this one slipped out as I approached. Win moved ahead, cautiously at first, then faster when the bird reached the bordering alders and began to run in earnest. I moved to cut him off, but the rooster flushed ahead, in range, but using the alders as a screen. I fired the tight barrel at him and he flipped over in the air, wing hit. We hurried to the spot where he came down. Win circled once when I told her to "find dead," then took off down the brush-lined stream course at a run. I followed as best I could, but upright critters are not meant to move quickly through alder runs, and soon I could no longer hear Win's bell.
          The thick stuff ended where the stream emptied into an open meadow. I looked for my dog, but she was nowhere to be seen. There was no other dog in the world that I would rather have chasing down a cripple for me than Win: Her years of experience and her unusual persistence made her better at it than any dog I've known before or since. Knowing that, perhaps the wise thing to do would have been to sit down and await her return. But when five minutes had passed, my thoughts began to run to muskrat traps I had sometimes found along brooks such as this one. I began searching and was soon knee-deep in the swamp.
          Far off, so far away that at first I didn't connect the distant motion to what I was searching for, I saw her. Win had been gone for only ten minutes, but it seemed like hours. As she approached I could see that her head was held at a labored angle under the burden she carried, but her step was deliberate and she came to me and stretched high to deliver to my hand a pheasant that was destined to be a lost bird from the moment I pulled the trigger.

          There are dozens of reasons to own a bird dog; The shots that a hunter will get differ both in quality and quantity from the harem-scarem opportunities of a man who flushes his own game; Your dog is ever your greatest fan, never disagrees with your judgment, and will never tell anyone how poorly you shot the morning he pointed six in a row for you. But there's hardly a need to make a case for bird dogs: Of all the many and varied reasons a man has for going afield, the companionship of a good dog can embellish every one.
          But all else aside, any bird dog can earn his groceries on retrieving alone.
          Let me repeat that: Any bird dog can earn his groceries on retrieving alone. Outside of a farm boy finding his way to the hen house in the dark, no man has ever yet found a bird by using his sense of smell. Yet, in his nose, the worst bird dog that ever wagged a tail has more ability to locate a hiding cripple than you and me and a dozen other hunters crawling around the covert on our hands and knees, peeking under every bush and deadfall. Hunters make mistakes. Bird dogs correct them.
          If stories of long and miraculous retrieves with dogs chasing runners into the next county and swimming mile-wide rivers don't impress you, perhaps a few statistics will: From 1975 through '81, my dogs picked up 41 crippled grouse that I deemed "otherwise lost". They found 15 other grouse that I wasn't certain I'd hit, and six others that I was sure I'd missed. In those seven seasons I lost only five grouse. Their retrieves in that time span totaled 703 gamebirds. The number of those that would have been lost is frightening.
          The lovely retrieves that dogs make on TV outdoor shows are the stuff that day dreams are made of. Yet, to a dogless hunter, the shows make retrieving dogs appear as nothing more than a frivolous luxury that he can easily do without—Anyone, after all, can be his own retriever so long as the birds fall cleanly on open ground, as they always do on the TV shows. Ah, but in the real world, no hunter is as consistent as he would like to be. The owner of a good bird dog knows that daydreams are only made possible by a retriever that prevents his days afield from becoming nightmares populated with lost birds.
          It isn't a secret: With a dog along to fetch a bird, the rest of the daydream follows naturally.

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This site was last updated 09/22/06