Feathers in February

Judd, the Author and Lynden: tired, but happy

February can be a challenging month, especially living in northern Michigan. Snow and low temperatures tend to make outdoors activities besides ice fishing and snow sports improbable, if not impossible. But a road trip may completely change the landscape...literary!

On Sunday, 17th, we start early in the morning with my truck navigation systems strongly disagreeing from my sense of direction. The only positive thing is that in the first hour of the trip, between Mesick and Cadillac, we saw a beautiful male coyote in full winter fur almost at  the side of the road. A beautiful view of an accomplished predator!

I will not bother you with details, but at one point I also turned my phone navigation app on, and since it took us to our destination well ahead of the truck system we decide to follow that one. I kept both systems on just to follow the disagreements. What a fight! (Anything for entertainment on a ten hours plus trip.)

Eventually we arrived at Upland Addiction (www.kentuckywingshooting.com) fine lodge, in Marion, western Kentucky, late in the afternoon. Dinner was MacDonald's since restaurants in the Bible Belt don't open on Sundays, as explained by Judd, young entrepreneur and our guide for the next two days.

Before I forget I should mention that Lynden and I bought this hunting trip on the Traverse City Ruffed Grouse Society banquet last September, and we scheduled it around a trade show that we had to attend in Indianapolis. The good news was that the logistics were perfect, the not so good ones was that we might have run away from snow to drenched in rain: Kentucky was having some of the worst floods in the past decade!

But the forecast for Monday was dry, overcast and cool with several days of rain to follow, so Judd asked if we would mind cramming two hunts in one day. Better that then spending an afternoon reading and no more birds the next day. In the end, Tuesday morning was fair weather and we packed more bird hunting there.

What I have to tell you is that Judd knows his business. Due to the flooding we concentrate our hunting to his family farm, moving from different meadows that we divided by wooded hedges and always ended in water, at least during the floods. Judd ran three different pointing dogs for the three half-day hunts. 

First was the thirteen years old setter Bonnie, and she was a class act. I wish to have the drive she has when I am that age (in dog years!) What a sweet old lady! After Bonnie we had Queen, a strong willed German shorthair, as if any other shorthairs were not. Queen ranged a bit farther than Bonnie, and behaved differently, but produced just as well. On the Tuesday hunt we had old Jack, and English Pointer. Bigger ranging, working the wind, and suddenly freezing, holding birds for as long as we would take to be there, or maybe until hell freezes over. Jack reminds me why English Pointers are in the world: to hunt birds, period!

Besides each of the pointers Judd ran little Lady. An English Spaniel with a heart and desire to hunt bigger than her tiny body; she was the flusher and a fantastic retriever. When she didn't make to a bird before the long legged pointers, she would gently snatch the birds from the larger dogs' mouth! In the water she might believe that she was a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Once Judd could give her the bearings, she was out in the water and never failed to bring a bird back.

It is very hard to describe all the action that comes from a single quail cove rising, with birds buzzing front, right, left or towards you, let alone tell the limitless rises that we had. Let's just say that it started well, as in the first cove a dropped one bird from with the bottom barrel of my Beretta 28 gauge shotgun, and immediately after that another bird fell to the top barrel.

At the end of the third hunt we had a number of birds that was almost obscene, except for the fact that quail tastes so good!

With heavy legs and light hearts we bid farewell to Judd and his father with hopes of coming back next season We drove then to Indianapolis for a trade show and on the Friday I continued to Portage, Michigan, in order to make peace with my grandson. From the lodge I had called Sylas and told him that I was "bird hunting" and his only reply was "But without me!"

In order to remediate the diplomatic incident I called Rolling Hills Hunting Preserve in Marcellus, Michigan, about a half an hour from my daughters home, and scheduled a pheasant hunt for Saturday afternoon. Around 11:30 AM our friends Mike and Jordan met Sylas and I at my daughter's home and we departed to Rolling Hills.

When we got to the club house we were asked if we would be three hunters, and Sylas immediately corrected Bob saying that we were FOUR HUNTERS!

Let's just say that we had a well timed hunt: Mike shot the first bird, Jordan the second and then it was Sylas and my turn. We kept rotating the points and I backed up a couple flushes, but not many. At one point the birds became heavy and we went back to the truck to drop them and take a rest. Sylas wanted to warn up as well. Of we went again and we shot the last bird just before the rain started. It would turn into drenching rain by midnight and a full day high wind storm.

The pheasant became a good stroganoff served with white rice and helped down by a couple good bottles of Italian wine. And diplomatic relations were fully restored!

The Gang: Jordan, Mike, the proud grandfather and Sylas

How I Got Started in Wing Shooting

Photo by Aluísio

 

I was raised on a farm in Northern São Paulo state in Brazil and a day in 1976 we moved to town so I could attend school since there were no school buses and the sixteen miles of dirt roads were in many cases impassable during heavy rains.

We continued to come a lot to the farm, for weekends and vacations, but as the years went by, the house built in 1954 started to show signs of age, especially the old wooden windows and particularly the one in the “boys’ bedroom”, and no matter how you tried to close it, there was always some crevice or opening left.

So, it became very common for us to find bats in our room, and that was always a great time to train anti-aircraft artillery. We first closed the door so the grown-ups would not be aware of the intruder, then stuck a pillow into the gap of the window, removed our shoes and started to throw them at the bat.

Needless to say that since shoes do not have proximity fuses or the pattern capabilities of good shotgun shells it took a lot of “rounds” to bring the flying rats down, and after many such battles the ceiling got a lot of permanent marks from the mud and cow dung in our boots.

Next came a CBC 310 (8 mm rim fire) single shot shotgun. Although I shot mostly birds, I used the little gun almost as a carbine, as I stalked my prey as close as I could to make sure that the small charge of No. 12 shot hit its target (the most covered of which was the big white-winged pigeons or Asa Brancas (Paragioenas picazuro)), and that probably would not qualify as wing shooting.

If I remember correctly the first bird that I ever shot on the wing was a quero-quero (Vanellus chilensis) during a July vacation in our farm in Goiás state, central Brazil. As I walked along a two-track in a field the bird started to fly over, probably trying to protect its nest, and when it was floating on the wing I shot it with a 28 gauge side-by-side shotgun. I examined it and found that the quero-quero has spurs on its wings, and then left it behind. The next day I only found some feathers, and felt less bad for having provided a meal for some poor scavenger.

Not until after I got married I shot a couple rounds of trap and some friends allowed me to use their reloading presses to make some proper shells, plastics hulls and wads and 11/8 ounces (32 grams) of 7½ shot. If I remember one thing in particular is that those shells kicked much harder than the calves we had in the corral.

Things really changes when we relocated to Michigan and by accident or fortune we bought our home less than five miles from the Southern Michigan Gun Club outdoors range, and I started shooting skeet and buying new shotguns on a rather regular basis.

From my humble battles with bats, I have now hunted birds on the wing in Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Michigan, Indiana, North Dakota and Arkansas, and currently I regularly shoot clay pigeons in Michigan and Italy, but I must say that almost nothing that flies compares to the big white-winged pigeons that come just before sunset to roost in the giant bamboos of a certain farm in a poor country where all hunting is outlawed.

Even with all the opportunities that I currently have, another day I was almost homesick when my mother told me that my nephews had their first encounters with bats at the farm house. Poor kids, their shoes probably do not fly as well or hit as hard as my brother’s orthopedic boots.