Skilled Canines are a Marvel in Action

Fin, a 15-month-old Labrador, sits at heel waiting for the command to deliver the bird to Steve Armstrong while Paul Sica watches.

By Dennis Smith

The first time I went on a pheasant hunt in Colorado was a disturbingly long time ago. But I remember it like it happened yesterday because, well, for one thing, it was supposed to be a duck hunt. However, when we arrived at our destination near Crook, the air was bone-cracking cold and the duck pond was frozen thicker than a Manhattan bomb shelter. Sigh.

We were trudging back to the truck when Sage, our little Labrador retriever, suddenly flushed a big cock pheasant from beneath a frozen dome of rabbitbrush. It shot straight up in a trailing plume of snow, ice and feathers, then lined out for the other end of the field. I was struck dumb at the sight and just stood staring at it in disbelief. However, to the obvious delight of the dog, one of the boys had the presence of mind to shoot at it. Sage raced off to make the retrieval and immediately upon dropping the bird at Derek’s feet began bouncing around excitedly with a look on her face that distinctly said, “To heck with the ducks. Let’s hunt pheasants.” So we did, and we bagged a three-man limit in just under four hours.

Despite the number of times we hunted pheasants since, that proved to be the only time we ever limited out on the big colorful birds. The sad fact is pheasant hunting on public land in Colorado is an extremely dicey game; we simply don’t have the number of birds found in neighboring states. In fact, most of the devoted pheasant hunters I know enroll in private hunting clubs or make annual pilgrimages to pheasant rich states like Kansas, Nebraska or the Dakotas. Some do both.

Last fall, my friend, Steve Armstrong, and his two buddies, John Dodge and Paul Sica, invited me to accompany them as a guest hunter at Stillroven Farms, a prestigious hunting club near Mead where they are members. Steve’s yellow Labrador, Fin, recently earned both his Junior Hunter and Certified Pointing Retriever titles from the American Pointing Labrador Association (quite an accomplishment for a puppy not yet 15 months old), and Steve was anxious to show us his little champion at work. I jumped at the chance, but chose to tag along with a camera instead of a shotgun.

Unless you hunted behind one, you can’t appreciate the fluid grace, precision and astounding discipline of a highly trained bird dog in action. Fin quartered back and forth in front of us, head high, nose in the air, testing the currents for the telltale scent of a hidden pheasant, all the while carefully maintaining a comfortable distance ahead of his hunters. When his nostrils filled with scent, he went rigid as a rail, quivered excitedly from head to toe, stretched his neck in the direction of his prey and waited for Steve’s next command. At the signal, Fin flushed the bird, sat patiently until given the command to retrieve, then rushed off at top speed to pick up the pheasant and return to the hunter with his prize, where he sat at heel until given the command to deliver the bird. Watching him was a thing of beauty.