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Originally Posted by Alfred Houde
Currently in Stafford County. I do most of my hunting at either the C.F. Phelps or Highland WMA. Due to the various travel restrictions I didn't make my annual trips home to Upstate New York to duck hunt. I did manage to get to Maine for a bear hunt, and hunted a week of the muzzleloader season in the Adirondacks. Once the muzzleloader season wrapped up in Virginia I focused on Hannah and the Woodcock. We hunted nearly every day of the second split. She found a lot of birds. Didn't want to pick them up at first. After the flush and shot she would start searching for another bird. I took a pair of wings and put them on a tennis ball with rubber bands and tossed it around the yard for her. She went bonkers over that and the light came on. Still some work to do, but it was a great second season for her. Duck season was pretty poor for me overall.
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I have hunted Phelps and Highland, but for turkeys, and long ago (or so it seems). Your tennis ball trick sounds like a good way to persuade a dog to pick up a woodcock. Just curious how many woodcock hunters you run into? I'm sure more than during my time in VA, but I imagine not many. Most of my bird hunting was on the paper company lands in the Piedmont when we lived outside of Richmond. We found woodcock then, and I never encountered another bird hunter who would admit to hunting them. Times change.
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"Doubtless the good Lord could have made a better game bird than bobwhite, and better country to hunt him in...but equally doubtless, he never did." -- Guy de la Valdene (from A Handful of Feathers )
"'I promise you,' he said, 'on my word of honor, I won't die on the opening of the bird season.'" -- Robert Ruark (from The Old Man and the Boy)
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