Back in the Woods

The Woodcock Futurity winners -- top left, Wild Apple LJ, first -- top right,  Stokely's Trash Can, second --
bottom left, Stokely's Frankie B, third -- bottom right, Woodcock Haven Stella, fourth.

We spend an evening basking in the glory and then Tony and I were back in the woods Monday morning working the dogs that didn't make the trip to New Brusnwick.  Jack and Zack ran for an hour and half in the Barn and Jack dug out two woodcock with Zack backing on both.  Up in the orchard, Bee and Trip carded four woodcock between them before we made a trip to the bird field to work a couple of other dogs that  are close to getting broke.

This morning (Tuesday) we loaded up the truck again and headed out to scout more cover.  Before we got into uncharted territory we ran Zack on some of our "tame" woodcock and he had a Stop-to-Flush on the first one then went on to point three in a row perfectly. We then went to the area that I showed on a google earth map last week and proved that there's more to this then just studying the maps.  One of the roads in that picture was blocked with big rocks and we couldn't get up it.  The other put us on more of a slope then we normally like and when we ran Trip and Bertha the woods were the right age but too dry to be holding much in the way of birds.  We heard one grouse flush wild and that was it.  More exploring might find a sweet spot where there are some wet areas on the hillside that will be more productive.  The one positive aspect of this cover that may be good in the future is that there are a lot of beech trees mixed in with the other hardwoods.  There are zero beech nuts in our area this year in fact there is a very light mast crop of any type so we'll file this spot away to try again next year.  We did have a brood in the road that we threw Little Thuddy out on and he pointed one from the brood right off the road and handled it well.  He had a stop-to-flush on a second bird from the brood which had at least five birds in it.  We ran LJ and Little Thuddy for an hour off the rocked road and saw some decent cover but only had a stop-to-flush on a grouse with LJ and we heard one go when Thuddy was quite a ways from us on a good strong cast.  For the morning we had 4 woodcock and nine grouse and saw a lot of the country.