View Single Post
Unread 10-11-2024, 09:02 PM   #20
Member
Dean Romig
PGCA Invincible
Life Member
 
Dean Romig's Avatar

Member Info
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
Posts: 32,969
Thanks: 38,694
Thanked 35,910 Times in 13,168 Posts

Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin McCormack View Post
In October 1969 a former ag biometrics teacher of mine at the U of MD who had moved back up to NH invited me and another hunting buddy up for a week of grouse and woodcock hunting. While we were in the local feed store getting our licenses,the phone rang and the owner picked it up. "Yeah, when? Well, there was nothing there yesterday when my son and I worked though it. Must be flight birds come in overnight. Why can't you go this morning? Well, the 'Doc' (my former teacher) is here with two friends from down South; OK if I send them over? You bet!" He turned to us and said, "better get over there, Lans says they're in there like fleas!" We high-tailed it about a half-hour north to a large dairy farm with several loafing and grazing pastures. As Frank points out, the earth was moist and soft, churned up by hundreds of hooves every day. As I recall we didn't even use Tom's wonderful GSP 'Belle', simply walked the plots slowly. It was the only time I can truly claim to have been into a flight of woodcock. We put a self-imposed limit on ourselves to take only 2 birds each against the legal limit of 3. To this day I don't remember how many we shot, but I do remember we flushed somewhere in the neighborhood of dozen to 15 birds. This was about an hour northwest of Dover, NH.


Well Kevin, I’ll bet you didn’t know you were smack in the middle of “Spiller Country”. He lived right there in East Rochester. He wrote often of “those little russett fellers.”




.
__________________
"I'm a Setter man.
Not because I think they're better than the other breeds,
but because I'm a romantic - stuck on tradition - and to me, a Setter just "belongs" in the grouse picture."

George King, "That's Ruff", 2010 - a timeless classic.
Dean Romig is offline   Reply With Quote