This Neighborhood’s Going to the Dogs.

Actually, hunting dogs will very soon be gone from this emerging neighborhood.

I’ve been hunting on a particular piece of ground since shortly after I was married in 1978. In the 1980s, I hunted rabbits there behind my first dog beagle Jupp. Since 1994, I’ve hunted woodcock there behind flushing spaniels. One day last fall while woodcocking behind Gordie, I noticed earth moving equipment on the far side of our best hunting spots. It has not taken the developers long to bring the land to this point:

Now I have no legitimate *right* to bitch about this. First and last, I’ve never owned this land. Its owners heretofore had simply benignly neglected those of us geezers who still head out in the autumn with dog and gun hoping to bag maybe a bird or two. Further, the road in the picture, and the lots that will spring off it at 90°, is on land I haven’t hunted in years, as it’s too close to older houses that have always been sited along the main road. But the end of this road, very near a tiny flow sometimes glorified as a “creek,” will necessarily move my hunting areas 500’ back from some really good, and historically precious, thickets. So, although I have no legal basis to complain, still I’m bummed.