You can’t train a bird dog without birds. I think we’ve all heard that. When my German wirehaired pointer pup came home I knew I needed birds, and in my neck of the woods that means either quail or pigeons. In a moment of indecision, I decided to do both, but the quail are a story for another time.
At a NAVHDA event I was lucky enough to meet a man who happened to have extra homing pigeons that he was willing to sell, they were young and had never flown anywhere. He lived not all that far from me and arrangements were made for me to pick up five.

The Intricacies of Ownership
First I had to build a coop, or loft. Plans are available on-line, but with a little imagination a handy guy can improvise his own. Here’s a few things I learned along the way: if you build the house too tall and the door is high, the pigeons can fly right out over your head when you’re trying to catch just one or two to work with. It’s better if the door is planned so you can block most of it with your body when it is open. The bobs and trap doors, which allow pigeons in but not out, are available from hunting dog supply houses, but are not impossible to make on your own. I bought mine because life seems to have limited extra time.

Be aware that there is a lot of prejudice against pigeons. My first loft was in a residential neighborhood where neighbors that were less than enthralled with someone keeping pigeons. I’m not sure what would have happened if my flock set down next to someone’s bird feeder, but fortunately that never happened. I kept the loft at the back of our lot and out of sight, so only when the birds were flying could the neighbors know they were around, and I made sure the pigeons were always well fed.

I know now that you don’t have to acquire young birds, but birds that are older and imprinted with another home must be kept in their new loft for three or four weeks before flying them, or they may all go back to where you bought them. If you buy several older birds only fly them singly the first time, too. As a group they seem to have an abundance of courage and are more likely to fly back to their old home. But buying young birds that have never flown is the ideal way, as the only place they know then is where they are released the first time.

After an appropriate amount of time, with crossed fingers, I let my new pigeons out for their maiden flight. They flew hesitantly, like young children taking their first steps, and sat in the trees, or flew to the nearby garden shed roof, testing their wings with short little flights. I wouldn’t recommend having your dogs out when the birds take their first flight, in case a young aviator makes a crash landing.

I left and returned later to find them all inside their coop. After only one or two more feeble flights, they took off as a tight little flock, circling the house like a squadron of tiny fighter jets, staying over the lawn and inside the tree line and then landing on the roof of our home. It was almost as if they discussed the orchestration of that flight the evening before. After strutting around for a bit to show off just how cool they were, the bunch flew to the garden shed roof, swaggered around a bit more, then went back to the roof of the big house. It seemed like they loved to circle overhead, swerving through their turns and chasing one and other, dipping down and flaring skyward. It looked to me like they were having a ball. Finally I had other things to do, but when I looked in the loft later, by golly they were all inside still parading around like the winning team.

I flew them daily after that, sometimes a couple of times a day. After a week or so I took them down the road a quarter of a mile and released them. Almost immediately they were home. The next day I went further, with the same results. Over the next two weeks I increased the distances to several miles, and usually the pigeons beat me home.

Testing the Ropes
By that time I started using the birds in a release trap to train my young dog. The pup loved the training and even today, when she’s nearly nine years old, she loves to work with the pigeons in the off season just to show how smart she is. But there are lots of books on training dogs, and this article is about pigeons.

Each of the pigeons was different enough to be easily recognizable, so it was easy to get attached to them, far easier than quail which all look more or less alike. Once a pigeon disappeared overnight, which was a worry, but returned the next day with a stranger in tow. Love must have been in the air.

One night I forgot to close up the pigeon loft and the next morning when I walked toward the coop my heart sank. The bobs had been bent apart like the bars on King Kong’s cage. Inside I found all the pigeons dead, the chests of most ripped open and some of the internal organs eaten. Others were just killed and left. Don’t let anyone tell you that wild animals only kill what they are going to eat. A trap set that night caught the marauding raccoon, but killing the culprit did nothing to erase my regret.

Determined, I bought another four or five pigeons and started again. Before long I was flying my birds all over the hundred-square-mile island of Martha’s Vineyard where we live. And no matter where I planted them and worked the pup, the pigeons would beat us home.

About two miles north of home I released the birds at the top of a high knoll on a day with a clear blue sky. Watching, the little flock circled higher and higher in an ever-widening spiral, and then it appeared they might navigate by making ever widening circles until something looked familiar. But when they were tiny specks up in the sky they took off in a straight line to the west, not south which would take them home – so much for my theory. As I drove into the yard the pigeons were just setting down on the roof of the garden shed.

One morning I took them to a park just outside of town and released them in fog that limited visibility to only a couple of hundred feet at best. Now some might think they would sit in a tree to wait out the weather, sort of like sailors staying in port, but instead they beat me back to the house. How do they do that?

All About Relocation
Changing lives and changing interests led to a divorce, and hence the need to relocate my pigeons to another part of the island. I waited weeks before flying the birds at their new location, hoping the latitude and longitude of their new home would sink in. When I thought they should finally be settled in I let them out. Immediately they took off over the treetops and about five minutes later my cell phone rang. Luckily, my ex and I had an amicable split, because when I answered the phone she laughed and asked me if my pigeons were missing. And no, my keeping pigeons had nothing to do with the divorce.

The flock hung around her place that day, but then came back to the loft’s new location before dark. For several weeks they would fly up to visit the old neighborhood, but eventually stopped.
Pigeons would last for years if it were not for hawks. Once, as I sat in my office, a hawk landed outside my window with one of my pigeons in its talons and started to rip pieces off, devouring the poor dead bird no more that fifteen feet from my desk.
Another time I let the pigeons out first thing in the morning and then went in for breakfast. A hawk zipping past the window like a jet fighter caught my attention. Dashing outside, I hoped to disrupt his attack. Feathers filled the air in both the front and back yards, sort of like a fluffy snowfall, but I couldn’t find the hawk or the pigeon. Finally I found the pigeon hiding under a yew in the back yard and surprisingly still wearing most of his feathers. I could find no wound, but I carried the poor fellow back to the loft where he could regain his composure in safety.

Growing Your Flock
White pigeons are fun and pretty to fly as a flock. An enterprising individual might make money renting the white doves out at weddings. We like to sit outside on warm summer evenings with a cocktail and watch the flock do their display. Friends, I’m sure, consider it a bit eccentric. My father, while visiting once, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, some people keep hamsters.” The dogs don’t care what color they are and when the birds are stuffed into the training launcher the white doesn’t show.

Many have told me that white pigeons are hawk magnets, but I don’t find any difference. If you have several white pigeons it’s almost impossible to tell them apart unless you band a leg on each. And their eyes are a spooky red.
I have never learned how to anatomically tell the sexes apart, but usually it’s easy to tell the males by the way they puff up their feathers and court the females. Inside the loft I have nesting boxes on the wall and sometime around the first of spring eggs appear. Both the girls and the guys take turns sitting on the eggs. I try not to fly the female until the young are able to take care of themselves, not wanting to chance losing her to a hawk. Wood shavings serve for nesting material, but sometimes they just push that out of the way and just sit on the egg.

If two pigeons are hatched in the same nest one invariably grows faster and then manages to get all the food brought by the parents, which then causes the smaller pigeon to die. A couple of times I have separated the smaller bird to make sure it received enough food and sometimes they live. Make sure the young birds get grit in their diet or they will have digestive problems. Once the birds start flying outside they find their own grit.

Pigeons put up with mediocre house keeping and all sorts of weather. During the coldest of winter weather I close up the loft entrance to minimize wind chill and give them unfrozen water daily, but other than that they require little attention. Our feed and water set up requires refilling only about once a week, but during nice weather I fly them almost daily.

The pigeons have been fun and entertaining, as well as great tools for training our dogs. If I just say, “Let’s go check the pigeons,” I’ll have two German wirehairs and a vizsla dancing in circles at the back door. Dollar for dollar, they are a better deal than quail any day.

 

 

The latest light, easy-carrying upland gun is the Ellipse EVO Light Weight from Caesar Guerini. It was only a year ago that they came out with their Ellipse EVO – this one with the round-bodied steel receiver, some very ornate engraving, as well as a lot of additional innovation. It’s also the first round-body action Guerini.

Available in 20- and 28-gauge, both these Ellipse EVOs are built on the same 20-gauge-size alloy frame. Barrel length options are 26" and 28". The steel-receiver EVO I’ve been shooting weighs 6 pounds 11 ounces, but the even newer EVO Light Weight weighs considerably less – due to its receiver being made of high strength aircraft-type aluminum alloy. The catalog claims 5 pounds 6 ounces.

Another difference between these two upland over-and-unders is the engraving patterns. Caesar Guerini had to develop new technology to achieve the engraving look they wanted on the EVO Light’s aluminum receiver. The engraving patterns on both the standard EVO and the EVO Light are not only distinctive – there’s 100 percent coverage. From last year’s original EVO to the new EVO Light this year – Caesar Guerini obsessed over these engraving patterns. A number of engraving patterns were cast aside because that engraving has to look like it should wrap around the round action. Normally, engraving on each receiver side does not match engraving on the receiver bottom – or flow into it. Because of the sharp bottom edge on a normal receiver the engraving patterns can be totally different on each side and the bottom. Not so with a round body action.

But as Caesar Guerini was developing an engraving pattern for the new EVO Light yet another design problem surfaced. How could the sharp edge integrity of the engraving hold up to the softer aluminum alloy receiver (i.e. softer than its steel counterpart)? So that was yet another problem that had to be surmounted. Guerini’s proprietary Invisalloy™ process (a type of plating) has to take place after the engraving, but the company found a way to keep the high quality of the engraving after this plating. Invisalloy™, of course, is highly resistant both to corrosion and wear.

The look of a rounded receiver on an over-and-under or a side-by-side is definitely more elegant. The back of the EVO’s tang shows a new look, and I think also more elegant. The look and shape of the both the trigger guard and the trigger itself were changed. These adjustments, and others, were small but subtle – but in theory give both these new EVOs a more elegant look.

While last year’s EVO was offered only with 28-inch barrels – as already mentioned – in 20- and 28-gauge, the EVO Light will be offered in the same gauges but also with 30-inch barrels, and in one combination configuration, a second set of .410 barrels. All these barrel bores will be chrome plated for the added corrosion resistance such plating gives. The EVO Light will be marketed through the Orvis Company in Manchester, Vermont, a long time supporter of RGS.

Readers should note that both the Ellipse EVO models are not competition shotguns, a type of smoothbore that Caesar Guerini is noted for in many of its other models. No – these are pure upland bird guns. There isn’t even an EVO 12-gauge in the mix. On their website Guerini claims 6 pounds 1 ounce to 6 pounds 6 ounces for the original EVO with the steel receiver. As already mentioned, the steel receiver EVO I have for testing weighs 6 pounds 11 ounces – so the weight difference is probably all in the wood. Speaking of the wood (walnut) it appears obvious that Caesar Guerini also made some changes to the stock’s contours. The foreend is rounded off. The pistol grip is quite open. However, a straight-hand stock is an option with the EVO Light. The walnut finish is perfect for an upland gun such as this – hand-rubbed oil.

Stock dimensions are 14.75" length of pull, 1.5" drop at comb, plus there are other measurements on the website – like pitch, cast at both heel and toe, as well as reach. Another classic and elegant touch is the piece of walnut used for the butt pad. This walnut piece protects the butt stock itself from injury – as when setting the gun down too hard. If that happens (hopefully not) you only have to replace that butt pad – not the whole stock.

A walnut butt is an excellent idea on a fast-handling shotgun like this, because as the stock comes to the shoulder with much less chance of hanging up on clothing – very important on most grouse flushes. The walnut butt plate has some serrations that will help keep the stock in place after firing the first shot.

The trigger is non-selective, but a selective trigger is available as an option. The checkering on the fore-end and the pistol grip of both EVO models is at 26-lines-to-the-inch. Even under a 2X magnifying glass it’s about impossible to find a flaw. The top rib is tapered – 8mm at the breech – to 6mm at the muzzle. The rib between the barrels is non-ventilated. The 20 gauge has 3-inch chambers, 2 ¾-inches for the 28 bore. Five nickel-plated, flush mounted screw-in chokes are supplied – as well as a choke wrench. The safety is manual, but an automatic safety is an option. The gun comes in its own distinctive impact plastic case – a basic dark grey with tan leather-like panels.

So the aluminum receiver does not become a strength issue there is a hardened steel insert around the firing pin holes. The EVO Light has just hit the market, so I have not tested one yet – only the standard EVO. You can find more information on www.gueriniusa.com and www.orvis.com.

Nick Sisley has had somewhere between 4000 and 5000 magazine articles printed and written eight books, three of which are on grouse hunting. He can be reached atnicksisley@hotmail.com.

 

The year 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of your RGS - fifty years of forest conservation dedicated to enhancing habitats for ruffed grouse, American woodcock, golden-winged warblers and the many other species that require the protection afforded by all-but-impenetrable young forest habitats.

Like the animals we help, RGS doesn’t recognize any distinction between publicly owned or privately owned forestlands. We work to promote the sound stewardship of all forests. For those sportsmen and women who don’t own a tract of private ground that they can manage and hunt, our nation’s county, state and federal public lands can provide ample opportunity to pursue their passion.

The year 2011 also marks the 100th anniversary of landmark federal legislation enabling the acquisition of private forest lands by the federal government to protect and restore these forests for future generations. The “Weeks Act” of 1911, sponsored by Representative John Weeks of Massachusetts, was a logical extension of the 1891 “Forest Reserve Law” that allowed for the establishment of federally owned forest reserves in the western United States. No such mechanism existed to conserve forestlands east of the Great Plains for the public good until the Weeks Act.

In 1908, Rep. Weeks introduced a bill outlining how the federal government could purchase and protect forestlands at the headwaters of navigable waterways. The emphasis on landscapes encompassing the headwaters of “navigable” waterways was necessary to ensure that any subsequent purchases pass constitutional muster under the commerce clause, as there was no other recognized authority to do so (at the time navigable waters were a primary mode of transport for many commercial goods). The bill passed the US House of Representatives on June 24th, 1909, the US Senate on February 15th, 1911, and was signed into law by President William Howard Taft on March 1st, 1911.

The Weeks Act provided the opportunity for the eventual purchase of over 20 million acres of what would become National Forests in 26 eastern states. The first tract purchased under the auspices of the Weeks Act was a parcel in western North Carolina on what is now the Pisgah National Forest.

Perhaps even more important, the Weeks Act authorized funds to be made available to states that had agencies dedicated to forest conservation to protect all forests, public and private, from the wildfires that commonly raced across the landscape. Not surprisingly, states that had not already done so soon began to create agencies to utilize federal funding to meet this challenge. Subsequent legislation expanded this vision by authorizing the use of what had become an enlarged funding base to combat not just the threat posed by wildfire, but insect infestations and disease outbreaks as well.


The Importance of Federal Lands
The ruffed grouse is the most sought after game bird in the eastern United States and a significant proportion of ruffed grouse hunting in the east occurs on our public lands. In some eastern states, our national forests provide more hunting opportunity that all other public ownerships combined.

For example, in Virginia, the George Washington – Jefferson National Forest encompasses over 1.6 million acres, whereas state-owned and other public forestlands account for only 1 million acres. Even in Michigan, which has almost 4 million acres of state-owned public land, the Hiawatha, Huron-Manistee and Ottawa National Forests provide an additional 2.7 million acres of forest open to public hunting. Of the over 67 million acres of public forestland in the east, national forests represent 36% (24 million acres) of this total.

Because of the important role national forests play in providing room to roam for sportsmen and women in the eastern United States while chasing ruffed grouse and woodcock each fall, RGS has worked in close partnership for over three decades with the US Forest Service – the federal agency responsible for the management of our national forests. These efforts have always been singularly focused on creating the young forest and shrub-dominated habitats required by ruffed grouse and woodcock.

To date, RGS and the US Forest Service have collaborated on approximately 100 different projects affecting over 150,000 acres of national forest land in the eastern United States. Project activities include the construction and reconstruction of road and trail systems that provide access for habitat management treatments and for hunters; apple orchard restoration; shrub habitat regeneration and much more.

The vision Rep. Weeks had a century ago continues to pay huge dividends for today’s hunters and non-hunters alike. Our national forests are shining examples of what can be achieved through multiple-use management, management that includes the thoughtful harvest of a renewable timber resource to provide not only many of the products we use each day, but also the diversity of habitat conditions required to support the full array of forest wildlife. Your RGS will continue to work to make this happen, not only on national forests, but on all public and private forestlands.