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This article appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Michigan's Streamside Journal.
By Capt. Tony Petrella It was August. Time to let Ghost kick out the jams after a summer of long walks on long ropes, and circles in her big enclosed pen. The grouse and woodcock season was getting close, and she needed serious exercise.
“Why not scout out some new territory?” I thought. “It’s always special when you find a new spot that’s filled with clutches of grouse and woodcock.”
So, we did. And it looked perfect. Besides being several square miles of public land just a few miles from my house in northern lower Michigan, this new spot had all the ingredients. There were stands of popple just the right size for grouse to munch on the tender catkins, nearby pines for protection, and open areas covered with big, ripe blackberries.
As I slowly drove through the area, I was impressed by its possibilities. And when I pulled the truck off the two-track and put Ghost on the ground I was convinced we’d found a new Honey Hole. Blueberries were everywhere, big and purplish and as thick as ground cover. Wintergreen peeked up wherever nature would let it. “Ohboyohboyohboy,” I muttered. “Sweetie, we’ve got ourselves another perfect place to hunt.” Ghost took a quick, penetrating glance around and nodded.
So, I put the beeper and bell around her neck, tucked the leash in the back of my vest, and told her “Let’s Go.” And, she did. Into the popple. Off through the thick pines. Back through the blackberry canes scratching her face till it bled. And not a solitary bird did she find.
Now, I’ve gotta brag just a little bit right now. Anyone who’s hunted over Ghost knows that she is one truly fine English setter out of the Ghost Train line. She’s got the nose and the heart and that incredibly determined stubbornness that sets a truly fine hunter apart from the rest of the pack.
So, when thirty minutes had passed and she hadn’t locked up on a bird, I was sorta puzzled. No, make that very puzzled. “Well,” I said to myself, “that’s strange. But there’s a good mix of pines and hardwoods on the other side of the two track. Maybe that’s where they are.”
I whistled Ghost back to me, leashed her, and walked back to the truck for water and a new plan of attack. She mentioned that she was having a lot of fun running loose again, and suggested that it might be time for a few liver snacks. I said sure, and after she ate, and belched indelicately, we were off for another adventure in yet more new territory.
Ghost looked at me expectantly as I unsnapped the leash. When I waved my arm and yelled “hie on” in my best imitation of The Old Man, she grinned and bolted off with her regal head sniffing the slight breeze. “The Boy”, who’s not too awfully far from actually turning into The Old Man, trudged along behind.
And “trudge” is a pretty appropriate word. Because while Ghost was casting left and casting right and generally inhaling every scent that had been left in those parts for the past 30 years or so, none of those scents apparently had anything to do with grouse or woodcock. She never found a single bird.
Cut to another covert that was introduced to me by John Norcross, J.D. Korte and Bob Popp several years ago. From all appearances, it looks very much like the place I previously described. Clumps of popple. Pines for cover. Thick blackberry brambles. And birds. Lots of birds.
Oh, yes. One other little feature about this second spot. Water.
This place looks, for all the world, like a carbon copy of the one I explored near my house. Except the water table at what I will refer to only as “Covert Number Two” is quite obviously much higher because the tire ruts are usually filled, or at least skimmed over, with water. And while I was born in the dark, it wasn’t last night.
I know, I know. Everybody who’s hunted grouse and, particularly woodcock, understands the importance of water. But the spot near my house is perhaps a mile at most from the Manistee River. I thought that certainly was close enough to a water source, given that all other conditions looked perfect.
Obviously, I was wrong. And the interesting thing about Covert Number Two is that it also holds an inordinate number of woodcock on the hillsides, as well as down in the lowlands, near the water.
I was guiding Bob Fanning, from suburban Chicago, in Covert Number Two last October and we worked the low area along the pines and popple thickets and blackberries and the water-filled ruts. Ghost sniffed out just one woodcock, and another flushed wild. “Strange,” I thought. “We’ve ALWAYS found more grouse and woodcock in here than THAT. What’s up, doc?”
So we went “up,” into the gently rolling hills of hardwoods and popples and pines all mixed together. And Ghost found birds. Mostly woodcock. And mostly hunkered down in the brown needles under the pine trees. Under the pine trees? In dead, brown needles? Not down along the moist roadside where worms should be? Nevertheless, that’s precisely where they were. Thirteen of them, to be exact. And Bob killed his limit of three.
Some grouse were strolling though the forest that day, too. Ghost and her mentor, Ben, another setter, found three of them, but Bob just couldn’t stop getting rattled every time one thundered up. “How many does that make that I’ve missed?” Bob moaned. I probably shouldn’t have answered, but I did. “Eight.” Another moan. Louder. “I’m coming back next month and we’re going to hunt grouse with a vengeance!” This, from mild-mannered Bob?
The following day, I was scouting yet more new territory. It wasn’t as enticing as Covert Number Two, but it looked at least as good as the one Ghost and I had previewed in August with such limited (should I say zero) success.
Ghost and Ben worked and worked and worked. No birds. I whistled them up and told them to head for the truck. Less than a minute later, Ghost blew out her left rear anterior cruciate ligament and her season was over. After a nothing hunt in a nothing covert. One without any standing water, might I add.
As one of my former professors once intoned, “so what have you learned from this experience, Anthony?” Well, astronomers maintain that there can be no intelligent life on planets in our solar system that do not have water. I can only add that grouse and woodcock might fall into that very same category. I just asked Ghost what she thought about it and she simply opened her right eye, snorted, closed her eye again and went back to sleep. Dreaming, no doubt, of grouse and woodcock and the water that sustains us all.
Capt. Tony Petrella is a former sportswriter who covered the Miami Dolphins for the Palm Beach Post, and the National Hockey League for the Atlanta Constitution. He guides anglers in southwest Florida half the year in pursuit of tarpon, snook, and redfish, and guides trout anglers and upland bird hunters in Michigan the other half.
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