Cold Duck: Obituary Of A Paradise Lost

Remember Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”? It starts out

You got to know when to hold ‘em

Know when to fold ‘em

and concludes

There’ll be time enough for counting

When the dealing’s done.

Because I’ve made the sad but necessary decision to re-home Jake, I think it’s finally time for counting… woodcock. Here’s the data from which the story will flow. The totals represent birds each dog flushed and retrieved, but that didn't necessarily fall to my gun.

Bean 1994 – 2004 214 woodcock

Gordie 2005 – 2017 154 woodcock

Jake 2019 – 2023 7 woodcock

Bean and I didn’t know it then, but Day #1 of his woodcocking life marked the pinnacle of my home coverts' productivity. Their decline was glacially slow at first. And because there was a very generous supply of birds, it was impossible for me to understand that we were already sliding down the wrong side of the bell curve.

Our local fields, working farms or pasture land just a decade before, were criss-crossed by well-mowed lanes courtesy of the local snowmobile club. We thought the birds loved these as landing strips. Well, maybe. For sure we often found “splash” and probe holes there. Because these fields had only recently started reverting to wild, the brush – mainly dogwood and hawthorn – was only waist high. So we had the luxury of a second shot on a miss; and if we whiffed on that one too, we could mark the bird’s location for a reflush.

With so many birds around, I got lots of shooting practice. My mount got better and better, and I became, I suppose, a little bit better than an average shot. Over time, my dog and I became a very productive team.

In Bean’s later years, he suffered from a number of hereditary problems. I decided to give him some relief by keeping him out of the woodcock gnarlies and letting him have easier days chasing grassland pheasants. That said, I fondly remember Bean as a fellow traveler who wandered with me into a woodcock paradise.

Gordie’s first hunt in 2005 was in a landscape significantly degraded from the cover Bean enjoyed in his salad days. We lost three prime coverts either to human encroachment or unchecked succession, so that good chances in Bean’s waist-high brush became poke-and-hope rush jobs now in head-high brush. Some “micro” hot spots just disappeared as the encroaching brush completely choked them out.

Fortunately, this loss was greatly offset because Gordie grew into the best dog I’ve ever had. He was much fleeter of foot than Bean, and it took me a while to adjust; but he always flashed his speed well within comfortable gun range. On top of that, he turned out to be a fantastic natural recoverer of downed game. He honored directional signals on “blinds,” although while hunting he never needed them: his marking sense was uncanny. Gordie’s merry, effortless way made every hunt a joy.

I was increasingly introducing newbies – family, neighbors, whatever – to hunts with Gordie. I’d shot so many birds over Bean that I was content to enjoy his dog work and let them do all the shooting. I add this not as a criticism, but to suggest that Gordie’s bird total would have been much closer to Bean’s if he’d had better gunners behind him. I still vividly recall the beautiful afternoon when my nephew and his girlfriend went 1 for 11 in a 2-hour hunt.

I backed Gordie’s hunting hours off in his last years as age finally caught up to him. By then, that great little dog owed me no apologies.

Jake faced two insurmountable challenges when he assumed the mantle in 2019. From the moment he came to us, Jake had to replace the best dog I’ve ever had. On top of that, even more of our coverts were either developed or hopelessly overgrown. By October, 2024, we had precisely one covert left. Jake flushed just one woodcock all season. It instantly disappeared over 20’ high dogwood without offering me a shot.

So that seems to be that for my one-time woodcock paradise. We continued to have decent hunting in the Big West Field (it produced 75 woodcock, or exactly 20% of all the woodcock we’d ever taken) through 2021. Big West was our last good-sized covert, having multiple access points, diverse habitat, and lots of happy memories.