2 Articles

Jack Hubley

Sunday News Lancaster

http://www.lancnews.com

11/01/98

(Copyright 1998 Lancaster Newspapers)

Eli, Buster, Shawnee and Trusty in the back, Dot up front. I asked Rob if he thought we had enough dogs. He said he figured we could squeak by, especially since Tom and Dave were bound to have four or five more in the back of Tom's pickup.

Tom Gingher is a pro pointing dog trainer from Bloomsburg, and his buddy Dave Nazarchyk has been chasing upland birds with pointing dogs most of his life.

My old pal Rob Frame, a field trialer and English setter breeder from Manheim, invited me to partner up with the three of them for a woodcock hunt last week, but when we arrived at Tom's upstate camp on Monday our host wasn't optimistic. The flight birds hadn't dropped into his Tioga County coverts yet, and the woods was so dry that the

resident birds weren't hanging out in their regular digs, either.

On the other hand, Tom was moving about five grouse per hour, which is enough excitement to keep any wingshot on his toes. Looked like our woodcock safari was destined to become a grouse hunt.

No doubt about it, grouse hunting is the ultimate upland challenge, but when the 'cock are coming through I like to give them their due. It's the mystery, I guess.

Woodcock are birds of contradiction, often found side by side with our state bird, yet so very different from grouse. The woodcock's brain is positioned upside-down; its ears are located ahead of its eyes. The 'cock is a shorebird that prefers the uplands; he's fairly easy to shoot yet often hard to find.

The woodcock's virtues aren't lost on a man like Tom Gingher who's been following pointing dogs for nearly 40 years. "They're a relatively easy bird for dogs to point," says the ex-field trialer who, at any given time, is boarding and training about a dozen

clients' dogs.

Easy to point: that's what I had in mind for my English setter, Trusty. He'd never buried his nose in woodcock feathers, and I was hoping to give him an introduction. Their tendency to stick like Velcro under a point makes woodcock an ideal training bird - wild,

yet not too wild. When a group of birds drops into a thicket, the lucky hunter can give his dog a crash course in pointing in an area the size of your average suburban yard.

The operative word, of course,is when. "You can go into a cover five times and there's nothing there, and the sixth time it's full of them," says Tom. "They're just hard to find."

That's because the birds you're chasing in the fall could be anywhere from New Brunswick to Florida. Woodcock feed primarily on earthworms, which puts them out of business when the ground freezes. We know that the peak of the fall flight here in Pennsylvania occurs during late October and early November. We also know that woodcock migrate at night and spend the day in thickets located on wet soil where they're likely to find worms.

The little birds prefer a thick overstory that provides refuge from avian predators and fairly sparse ground cover that allows them to walk around and probe for breakfast.

Let's see...early successional woodland cover, thick overhead, thin at ground level, wet soil...that narrows things down a bit. This ought to be a cinch.

We split up. Dave and Rob took Dot into a thick, low stream valley and Tom and I took Trusty for a hike through a series of long-defunct farmsteads. All that remained of civilization were stone walls and old apple trees.

Occasionally we'd work our way into small islands of young aspen, and it was in one of those thickets that Tom found the splash. Those signature chalky, white droppings left no doubt: woodcock were here. With any luck, they hadn't left.

Trusty was working a different end of the cover when that unmistakable whistle of wings came from behind my right shoulder. Normally, Tom shoots woodcock only when his dogs point them, but he'd given me the nod to shoot wild-flushed birds, since I wanted Trusty to know what woodcock looked and smelled like up close.

BOOM! Darned if the bird didn't drop! Trusty flash-pointed the woodcock before walking in to investigate. Frankly, he didn't seem all that impressed.

Based on the amount of whitewash in the covert, Tom figured it for at least four or five birds, but evidently our bird was the only one that hadn't moved on.

A pair of 20-gauge claps in the distance told us Rob and Dave were finding birds, too. When we finally got together, Dave seemed a little embarrassed at having missed a grouse that Dot showed him, but he made up for it by grassing a woodcock that she pointed moments later. In just a handful of minutes little 27-pound Dot was showing that she was already a heavyweight contender in the grouse and woodcock coverts.

Later we put Rob's Shawnee (another little spit of an English setter) into cover and watched her ricochet around the woods like a furry flashlight beam. Ideally, a dog bred to point the maximum number of birds in the least amount of time has as much stop as she

does go. I'm no field trial judge, but the action that followed appeared to be an ideal bird dog performance to me.

One of Shawnee's blazing orbits took her parallel to the trail and maybe 40 yards distant. One instant she was sending up a roostertail and the next she was motionless. My eyes skidded past, then backed up in disbelief.

We were on our way in to flush the grouse when Rob shouted that the bird was running. A second later the grouse was airborne, too far away to draw shotgun fire.

I write this knowing full well that most of you will discount it as so much fish wrap. You really had to see it to believe it.

Grouse being so high-strung and paranoid, you'd naturally assume that any dog that can pin them on a regular basis would be a crackerjack woodcock dog. Well, yes and no, says Tom.

"Woodcock are easy for dogs to point, but they're not easy for dogs to find. A good woodcock dog knows where to look," he says, adding that he's seen an experienced 'cock dog detour 75 yards to check a spring seep that held no birds. He figures the dog was

keying on the smell of moist earth that he'd come to associate with productive woodcock habitat.

And the grouse specialist, bred to hit the skids at the slightest whiff of birds, may be too cautious for his own good when it comes to locating woodcock, says Tom. Afraid to make a move, the dog fails to pinpoint the bird for the hunter. "Yeah, there's a bird out there," says Tom, "but the question is where?"

So, ironically, the hotshots of the pointing dog world may turn out to be too "hot" to turn in a stellar performance on the here-today-gone-tomorrow bird of spongy alder thickets - just one more page in the woodcock's book of personal ironies.

"Woodcock have a special place in my heart," says Dave Nazarchyk," basically because...they're woodcock."

Jack Hubley

Sunday News Lancaster

http://www.lancnews.com

11/01/98

(Copyright 1998 Lancaster Newspapers)

Here's an inside tip for all you bird hunters from Dave Nazarchyk, a veteran grouse and woodcock hunter from the Bloomsburg area:

"Nobody really hunts woodcock anymore, so you've almost got the covers to yourself."

To which the skeptic would ask, if nobody's hunting them, are there any woodcock to hunt?

Certainly not as many as there once were, according to federal and state estimates. Here in Pennsylvania, our resident population has decreased 2.5 percent annually for the past 20 years, according to Game Commission biologist John Dunn.

Based on PGC's annual Game Take Survey, in 1980, 148,000 hunters bagged more than 170,000 woodcock. By 1997 the ranks had thinned to 12,000 hunters who bagged only 23,000 birds.

The situation here in the Keystone State pretty much mirrors conditions throughout the Atlantic and Mississippi flyways, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist Graham Smith. "Ever since the start of our surveys, they've been in general decline due to

things beyond our control," says Smith.

Those "things" amount to loss of habitat, says Smith. "The whole decline in woodcock is probably due to the fact that they like recently cut-over areas." Smith points to the current interest in preserving mature forests (and wildlife such as neotropical migrants

that depend on big timber) as a trend that's bound to hinder woodcock recovery.

PGC's Dunn agrees. "Long-term, it doesn't look too good," says the biologist.

But two of the hunters I spent time with last week aren't convinced that bird numbers are as low as the agencies claim. "I don't think there's as many woodcock as there were 50 years ago, but I truly don't believe that they're as scarce as the Game Commission

thinks they are," says Tom Gingher, a pro dog trainer who spends nearly every day in grouse and woodcock country during the fall.

Dave Nazarchyk agrees. "I don't believe they're in the decline that everybody says they are," he says, adding that these nocturnal migrants tend to "slip right on by," without anyone knowing they've come and gone. "How would you know how many woodcock are around when you've just got a handful of woodcock hunters?

"If you want to go hunting woodcock, you can find woodcock," he says. "It's not uncommon to get into 30 or 40 or 50 birds, but you've gotta hit it."

Most biologists agree that hunters aren't "hitting it" too hard, particularly in Pennsylvania, where a concerned Game Commission cut the season to two weeks in 1993. The daily bag limit is also a very conservative three, and John Dunn suspects that Pennsylvania's season is more conservative than it has to be.

To test that theory, Pennsylvania is one of four states (New York, Vermont and Maine are the other three) cooperating in a study to investigate woodcock mortality during the hunting season.

From August to October, biologists in the four states caught more than 300 woodcock and equipped them with tiny radio transmitters, which will allow them to keep track of these resident birds until they cross the state line. Dunn says the two-year study is the first

time biologists have used telemetry to investigate woodcock hunting mortality. He says that if hunting proves to have no significant impact on populations PGC could elect to lengthen the season in the fall of 200. Currently, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service regulations

limit Atlantic Flyway states to no more than 30 hunting PHOTO;