Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301140031
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
QUAIL HUNTERS MAKE THEIR POINT
Charles Bays was driving the Bedford County hardtop the other morning saying that maybe - just maybe - the quail recession had bottomed out and the long-awaited population curve had started back up."If you can find cover, I believe the hunting is the best it has been in several years," he said.
You don't ride far in a pickup with a quail hunter up front and an English setter in the back before the conversation turns to the "good old days." That's when quail were abundant and you found them in large farm fields where they held well for a pointing dog.
Then came the lean years. The bird grew scarce, and those that were left moved from the fields to vault-like thickets. If you located more than one covey during a day's hunt, you had something to talk about.
It had gotten so bad in recent years that Bays had to scramble to come up with enough game for his annual Super Bowl Sunday party, a 20-year tradition when he serves quail to his hunting buddies at his Roanoke County home.
"We just had to ration those things out," he said.
But this year the freezer holds a decent supply, and three weeks of hunting remain.
Bays' hunting partner for the day is Frank Basham, a retired-age farm manager who savored the golden era of quail hunting in Bedford and Franklin counties and beyond. Basham owned his first pointing dog at age 13 and followed many a good one through the fields and years until birds got so scarce it became difficult to find enough to hone a dog's skills.
Bays meets Basham at a barnyard, drives a short distance, then opens the tailgate of his pickup so 3-year-old Maggie can bound out into the waiting cover. Smith Mountain Lake is in the distance.
With the exception of a spot on the left side of her head, Maggie's long, silky hair is white, which makes here highly visible in cover. When Bays got her, she hardly was one of those fancy thousand-dollar finished bird dogs. In fact, two people had owned her and given up on her. Bays saw some potential.
"She wasn't real impressive when I got her," he said. "In fact, she still has faults."
A man who does not soften his most combative thoughts, Basham is quick to point out those faults, even though criticizing another man's dog is as dangerous as telling him his wife is ugly and his kids are stupid.
"She is working too close," Basham says. "You need to get her out more. I like a dog that circles the field first thing."
Bays stops so he can look Basham in the eye.
"You don't know how hard I've worked to get her in," he says.
Then he pauses.
"If you don't care, let me work her like I think she should be."
It is the kind of exchange only a couple of friends who have spent considerable time pushing through bird cover together could pull off without feelings being hurt.
Basham is a product of the old days, the big fields and braces of wide-running dogs and so many coveys you didn't have to worry about following up on the singles.
Bays knows the reality of spot hunting, putting your dog down in a 10-acre weed patch, then reloading and driving up the road to the next spot, which might be a creek-bottom thicket so dense that you'd have a hard time seeing even a white dog on point 40 yards away.
Just how good were the old days?
"We'd flush 15-18 coveys many a day," says Basham.
And why did bird hunting suddenly go sour?
Basham has a quick, one-word answer.
"Cows."
Cows have a way of turning quail cover into pie-shaped piles of dung. There have been other factors, too, the excesses of the modern world: Highways, housing developments and shopping centers that spread asphalt across old farm fields.
The lake didn't help. It covered the rich bottomland and "`pushed everybody back up on the hills," said Basham.
The field Bays and Basham hunted is reclaiming itself as it goes full circle. As a young man, Basham had bulldozed the native pines and hardwoods into a cattle operation, but his boss recently sold the cows and last spring stately rows of loblolly pines were planted along the contours of the land. Quail cover should flourish for three or four years until the fast-growing trees canopy out the sun.
Suddenly Maggie is on point. Her head is high and extended, her tail upward like a saber. She is out in the open, locked into the kind of statuesque pose that puts a spring in the step of a hunter like Basham.
The covey rises with a roar, maybe a dozen birds, their rapid wingbeats building tension and swelling confidence in Maggie. With grace and skill, she follows up the singles that have penetrated the kind of thickets where you'd expect to find grouse.
"She is a good hunting dog," Basham will say during a lunch break. "She just needs to learn to work cover better. If you can put her in 18 coveys a day for about a week, you'll have a dog."
But only one precious covey will be unseated this day. Even when Bays and Basham load up and go down along the lake, where a covey has been all but a certainity in the past, there is nothing.
As the sun starts to sink, they follow Maggie across growth that is only a little taller than what you'd find in an urban yard. There are cow piles everywhere.
At a couple of spots Maggie starts to make game, as if attempting to fabricate something to please her master, but there is nothing to point.
When Bays and Basham follow Maggie over a hill sloping toward the lake they confront a herd of well-fed cattle. Basham gives them more than passing interest.
"That's my little herd," he finally says.
Bays says nothing.