The Pointing Dogs
Somebody finds the birds. Then everything stops.
There is a moment on every good course where the dog goes from casting about to absolutely still, and the whole party changes speed with it. That is the part you're paying for. The shooting is almost incidental.
We run English setters, English pointers and German shorthaired pointers. They're handled by your guide, so you don't need to know a whistle from a check cord — walk in when you're told to, and keep your muzzle up.
In ridge-and-valley cover a dog has to hunt closer than it would on open longleaf ground. Ours are worked for that: pines to hardwood draws to broomsedge, with an edge every hundred yards.
The Retrievers
The half of it nobody thinks about until they've seen it.
Pointing dogs find birds. Labradors go and get them — out of the broomsedge, out of the briars, out of the places you would not send a person in shorts.
On a tower day the Labs do nearly all of the work. Guns stand at their pegs and the dogs run the ground between drives, which is why a shoot that puts a lot of birds in the air still ends with almost all of them accounted for.
Black and fox-red, and they know the sound of a truck door better than their own names.
The Birds
They live here before they fly here.
Behind the pines there's a barn full of bobwhite quail and ring-necked pheasants — feeders, roost boards, and a lot of noise at first light.
Birds that have been on the property, in the weather, with room to move, fly better than birds that came off a truck the same morning. That is most of the difference between a preserve day worth remembering and one that isn't.
Georgia licenses preserves like ours to hunt pen-raised quail from October 1 through March 31. Everything you shoot goes home with you, cleaned and iced in a DanMar cooler.
Come Watch Them Work
Book a day behind the dogs.
Two to four hunters, one party at a time, October through March.
