The World's Greatest Bird Dog by Jim Fergus "...Biff's modus operandi when he sees other dogs pointing is to run right through the birds, flushing them wildly ahead and then chasing after them for miles." Jim and Henri in Arizona. It's funny, isn't it, how all bird hunters, no matter what evidence to the contrary, believe that they own THE WORLD'S GREATEST BIRD DOG. (This notion is always capitalized in our minds, as if our dog is the subject of a major documentary film showcasing his or her extraordinary talents.) And it's amazing, too, how hunters tend to remember only the good things that their dogs do and rarely the bad. I have, for instance, a close hunting friend who owns an English pointer that may be the most worthless bird dog I've ever seen in the field, and believe me, in the course of my travels, I see truckloads of bird dogs. I have yet to witness this dog -- let's call him Biff for purposes of this article -- make a single point in the field. Indeed, the only time Biff's beeper collar goes into point mode is when he is taking a poop, which is about every 15 minutes since Biff seems to suffer from chronic diarrhea. "Oh, there goes Biff's collar. He must be on point," my friend will insist, even though we've never actually seen Biff on point. Nor has Biff, to my knowledge, ever backed another dog on point. Rather Biff's modus operandi when he sees other dogs pointing is to run right through the birds, flushing them wildly ahead and then chasing after them for miles. Biff is also a chronic runner of deer, and, in truth, my favorite times hunting with Biff are when he takes off after a deer and is gone for several hours, during which time we actually have an opportunity to shoot some birds. Again, because we all like to think the best of our dogs, forgive them their shortcomings and exaggerate their talents, my friend always manages to rationalize Biff's bad behavior. When he runs through birds, for instance, he'll say, "Boy, those birds really got up wild, didn't they?" Or he'll blame one of the other dogs for bumping the birds, even though the other dogs were as solid on point as statues. Of Biff's frequent absences chasing birds or deer, he'll say: "Well, he must be on point somewhere. I guess I'd better go look for him, or he'll stay on point forever." Again, no one has ever actually seen Biff on point. But it is bad manners to run down a friend's dog, and I would never speak a word against Biff in my friend's presence. And anyway, I am as guilty, more guilty, than the next person of exaggerating my own dogs' abilities. Hell, I've written entire books about my beloved old Lab, Sweetzer, who, though rich in experience and well-educated in the ways of American game birds from nearly a decade of travel and hunting all over the country, is, truth be told, just another half-trained gun dog with myriad faults, almost all of them due to my own shortcomings as a dog trainer. Still, I can't remember any of her mistakes; I remember only the triumphs. In my heart, Sweetz will always be THE WORLD'S GREATEST BIRD DOG. And don't ever suggest otherwise. Now there's Henri, my young French Brittany, about whom I have also written in this column (January 1998.) Although Henri is still a couple of months shy of his second birthday, due to the nature of my job he, too, has experience way beyond his years. I told you last year where he had been and what he had seen before he'd even turned a year old. And I described his very first point. Well, in the first month-and-a-half of this past season Henri pointed six species of North American grouse, including sage grouse, ptarmigan and blue grouse in our home country of Colorado; sharptail grouse in South Dakota; prairie chickens in Nebraska; and ruffed grouse in Michigan. In this same period he also pointed snipe, woodcock and Hungarian partridge. Later in the fall he pointed chukars on the Green River in Utah, and currently he is pointing bobwhite quail in northern Florida. Later this month we're heading back to Arizona for desert quail. Henri is, I'm not afraid to say, THE WORLD'S GREATEST BIRD DOG. And he's less than two years old. How much greater he may yet become is nearly frightening to contemplate. Other than the fact that I took Henri to lots of interesting places full of various species of game birds, I take no personal credit for his abilities as a bird dog. About all I taught him was the "whoa" command, which only took some 10 minutes when he was four months old, with lots of repetition after that. And I taught him to come, which was equally painless, because he's so eager to please and likes to be around me anyway. I did take him, briefly, to a professional trainer the first time I introduced him to live birds, just to be on the safe side. Beyond that Henri is entirely self-educated. He learned to point as a natural genetic response and with no help whatsoever from me, and he learned to back other dogs on point from hunting quail with his father and mother at their owner's (my friend Guy de la Valdene's) farm in Florida. When his parents went on point, Henri just stopped, and has ever since. As simple as that. Besides his early education in the bosom of his family, equally valuable was the time that Henri spent in the field with some experienced bird dogs on their own home turf -- from outfitter Bob Tinker's championship English setters on the vast grassland prairies of South Dakota, to Jim Harrison's, Nick Reens's, and Doug Truax's flawless setters in the dark woods of northern Michigan, to Ben Williams's legendary Brittanies on the spare plains of Montana. If you're going to own THE WORLD'S GREATEST BIRD DOG, it doesn't hurt a bit for him to hunt in his formative years with a couple dozen of the other WORLD'S GREATEST BIRD DOGS. By the same token, I have, so far anyway, managed to keep Henri away from the dreaded Biff -- just as you don't want your children hanging around a juvenile delinquent in school. Who knows, perhaps a single day in the field with Biff might undo all of the days spent hunting with the great dogs. So now we were back at Dogwood Farm, where Henri was born. Guy kept one of Henri's brothers, Obie, from the litter, and had given another, Oscar, to our friend Jimbo Meador who was hunting with us. Along with Henri's father, Carnac, and his mother, Julep, we were hunting behind five members of the immediate family. Only Henri had ever gotten very far away from Dogwood Farm. Jimbo lived several hours away in Alabama and hunted Oscar primarily at Dogwood or on his local quail, and Henri's parents and other brother had also stayed pretty close to the farm. So Henri was a little like the precocious son who had left the farm for a life of travel and adventure, and now returned home, newly sophisticated, to show his hayseed family a thing or two. The dew was still on the ground when we set out, the piney woods cool and misty. Five French Brittanies scurried busily ahead of us -- mother, father and three sons covering the southern winter landscape in intersecting tangents. Through sere food plots of corn and milo and patches of lespedeza, beneath massive live oak trees draped in Spanish moss like tarnished silver, into dense thickets of kudzu and sundry underbrush, our army of eager little dogs left no cover uninvestigated. We used beeper collars on the dogs to more easily locate them in the woods and the frequently thick undergrowth, and eventually they all dispersed, running their own course, following their own scent trails, so that different-toned beepers sounded from near and far, the music of the hunt. Now we heard Carnac's collar go on point mode in the distance, the steady beep-beep-beep that signaled a point, and then immediately afterwards, Julep's, then in rapid succession and in no particular order, the boys' -- Oscar, Obie and Henri -- all the collars with their distinctive settings, sounding like some weird electronic symphony in the woods, growing in volume as we approached. And there they were, the whole family locked up in a semi-circle around a small thicket at the edge of the woods. "I'd say they have them surrounded," Jimbo remarked. And we almost didn't want to flush the birds and spoil the scene, all those related Brittanies -- one roan, Carnac; two black-and-whites, Henri and Julep; and one tri-color, Oscar -- locked up intently, frozen in various strange crouching postures, all of which said unmistakably: "Birds here." It is moments like this, of course, that convinces us all over again that we own THE WORLD'S GREATEST BIRD DOG, in this case an honor shared by the whole family. And no matter how many times we've witnessed it, no matter how many bird dogs we've seen assume the position, each time is like the first. It's as if no dog has ever made such a magnificent point in the history of the sport. Which, of course, is what keeps us coming back year after year. When the birds got up, a big covey of 15 or 16, they flew for the woods as we knew they would, the shooting began, and the dogs broke to make retrieves, the perfect symmetry of the moment shattered, but like all the others, preserved forever in our hunters' memories. Copyright © 1999 Jim Fergus. All rights reserved.