Hunting and fishing with a son or daughter are some of the most satisfying activities one can enjoy. I have been blessed to be able to hunt and fish with my son in some noteworthy venues for many years.
He grew up fishing Lake Anna with me. We’ve the fished smallmouth nirvana of the St. Lawrence/1,000 Island region, Santee-Cooper Lake, Moomaw, Buggs, Gaston, the James River, Chickahominy River, the Rappahannock River, the Pamunkey River, the Maury River, Switzer Lake and hunted the vast North Maine Woods for grouse, many Virginia Wildlife Management Areas and the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The adventure and fellowship we’ve had have been some of the best aspects of my life, and I am looking forward to more.
However, now that my #1 fishing and hunting partner has entered the working world, his time to spend with me is significantly decreased. As we all know, marriage is next, then children and one’s priorities do change from travelling around for days with Dad to minding the wife and kids.
So, our annual trip to Canaan Valley for woodcock camp was extra special this year, and I’d like to share the adventure with you in hopes I can inspire you to be more active with your youngsters before they grow up and life changes.
For woodcock camp we rent the same cabin every year in Old Timberline on the valley floor, close to the gate so I can get up, roll out and not worry about road or weather conditions on a mountain. The place has a hot tub, too, perfect for soaking your bones after a day afield. Another positive is that the cabin is a short walk to the private lakes in Old Timberline and we will often fish for a few hours on the last day of the visit.
The timing of the trip is the product of years of visits. I definitely figured out when to hunt the migration – early November most years, around Election Day. In a normal year, this is right about when the northern birds are migrating due to the arrival of cold weather in New England.
So, we have the lodging, the timing, now what about the right gear?
We hunt with 20 ga. shotguns. I use over and unders. My son uses a youth model Tristar Raptor semi-auto. While the stock is short, he shoots it well, and I think if he wants a new shotgun, he can save his money and buy one.
I use both a Daly and an American Tactical Calvary 26-inch barrel over and under. I don’t bring the Daly on a hunt if it is rainy or snowy anymore. I bought the American Tactical to see if a “cheap” gun ($639) would hold up and if I liked the lightness of aluminum (@six-pound) gun. I did have choke tubes in it (improved and modified), but I took them out eventually on this trip after I was shooting inconsistently with it. Afterward I immediately began shooting like I usually do with the Daly.
Normally when you are upland bird hunting you need very little choke, and experts recommend improved, but that’s definitely not the case with the American Tactical shotgun.
We shoot 7-1/2 loads. I bought a case of Winchester shells during Green Top’s September ammo sale and saved some money there.
A critical part of my gear is our one-and-a-half-year-old Brittany spaniel, Birdie. Except when it’s raining or very windy, she can find most woodcock, even in head high goldenrod. She came from Smoking Gun Kennels in North Carolina, and I trained her myself. While she’s not a field champion, she is a good pointer and has never lost a bird we’ve shot yet.
Now, on to this year’s hunting.
Our weather was very warm for November – over 70 degrees on our first afternoon, then dropping into the 60’s, 50’s and 40’s as the week progressed. We did have rain one day, but overall, it was a balmy week – too warm for the woodcock migration to really get underway. Most of the leaves were off the trees. The goldenrod was dead after earlier frosts but still stiff, offering excellent cover opportunities.
On the afternoon of Day 1 I walked an old farm on the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge with my wife and Birdie. It was sunny, crunchy dry and 74 degrees. Despite these conditions we flushed nine woodcock including two sets of doubles. With the choke tubes in, I was 0-14 – not very impressive. I “safetied” one and caught the gun on a tree branch on another. I just flat missed all the other shots – not something I am used to seeing.
As the sun began to set, we walked back to the truck and bumped into the one and only Lejay Graffious – keeper of the Old Hemlock Society (John Bird Evans’ line of setters) and friend of birds. Graffious has a contract to band saw-whet owls, and he sets up mist nets on the nights he has help in the woods around the refuge.
We caught up briefly and I asked him what he thought of our chances to see some grouse during our visit.
“I don’t think I’ll see another grouse in the valley in my lifetime,” he told me.
That hit me hard since I have seen some grouse around Canaan over the years, but I hadn’t seen any in about four years, so it was disappointing to hear Lejay’s dim view.
After saying good night to Lejay and his wife, we loaded into our truck and headed back to the cabin feeling pretty good about Day 2 as far as numbers of woodcock. I fell asleep looking forward to seeing my son and Birdie working.
Today – Day 2, Wednesday, Mitchell would arrive, and we would hunt together again, albeit in the late afternoon. We’d then have Thursday and Friday to hunt before heading home so he could pack up and move out to Blacksburg, Virginia near where he’d start work in Salem for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
Steady rain had moved in overnight night but there was a break predicted until about noon, so Birdie and I headed out around 7:45 am. We walked the old farm again, bumping a few birds without points but failed to connect. My shooting with the American Tactical Calvary was subpar, and I was getting frustrated. Normally I point and shoot and 75% of the time a bird drops. With nothing in my vest, I changed venue.
A short drive found us hunting a favorite spot, again on the National Wildlife Refuge. I had traded out the Calvary for the Daly on this walk, where
a stand of maples stood surrounded by goldenrod fields with a several nice, mature hawthorn and other similar trees providing “rooms” under them where woodcock find sanctuary and grass-covered moist soil where the worms they seek to eat are plentiful.
Birdie was very excited and “birdy” here, and I got the feeling that a flush was eminent. She did point a bird under one of those hawthorns and I advanced to flush. The bird bursted away, and I and the Daly dropped it with the first shot. As she went to retrieve it where it fell under a second hawthorn, another bird flushed, but I didn’t have a shot. I was happy to get bird #1 of my three-bird limit, though, and patted the Daly lovingly.
As I circled back to hunt the copse of trees more thoroughly, Birdie stopped sharp in the middle and as I moved forward there was a three-bird flush. Now I have seen plenty of two woodcock flushes, but never a triple.
I shot at the first bird that flew straight away and missed. The second bird flew low. The third flew left and I swung hard and missed again. Birdie looked annoyed. I couldn’t blame that on the Daily. I was startled, but man, what an opportunity!
I settled down and kept on hunting, glad to be racking up the flushes. I walked out of those trees and down along a heavily vegetated creek bed. There were hawthorns, spruce trees, some kind of bush with dense canes that grew along the creek and of course, goldenrod. I flushed several more birds with nothing but empty shells to show for the effort – I was making the ammo manufacturers very happy.
Two hundred yards upstream the creek flows out of an alder thicket mixed with mature spruce. Here I heard two birds flush and caught sight of one. Was that a grouse? I think it was because it didn’t whistle like a woodcock. I think I just flushed two grouse – the first two I’d seen in Canaan in years.
As the morning pushed to afternoon, I changed venues again and hunted a nearby NWR forest bordering an old farm. I figured the birds were there in a draw where the soil still held moisture. It was here Birdie pointed yet another bird and I caught it with my second shot about 25 yards out – far for this type of shooting, but more of what I was used to seeing when I pulled the Daly’s trigger. I didn’t see exactly where it fell, but Birdie bounded after it and when she pointed the bird again, I knew I had dropped #2.
A light rain began falling, and I really don’t like to get the Daly wet, so I decided to check one more area before heading in. I snuck into a small stand of aspen Chrissie and I had hunted the evening before and flushed one bird from. I walked the entire stand with no sign of a bird, no chalk, no point, nothing, until at the very end my dog went rigid, and I flushed a timberdoodle. The Daly caught it with the second shot aways out, and it dropped at 30 yards. Birdie brought it to me within 30 seconds.
That was it, I had my three-bird limit for the day, before lunch. It was a challenging day of hunting for me, but I had flushed 15 woodcock and I’m pretty sure, two grouse. My iPhone Health app had me at around 5.2 miles – nothing like grouse hunting!
I headed home for lunch and dry boots and a change of clothes before Mitchell would arrive. I also took the choke tubes out of that Calvary. Hitting what I was aiming at was the goal. I realized patterns were just too tight.
I was at home on a 3 pm Zoom call when he arrived. He wasn’t feeling well when I left our home at Lake Anna, and he said he still wasn’t quite right but was up to hunting the sundown session with me.
We only had time for one stop, and it was a special stand of aspens I had discovered one past fall and saved for he and I. It, too, is on an old homestead site with apple trees, a spring house basin, cinderblock foundation and plenty of old house junk hidden amongst the briars and limbs.
Here we flushed two woodcock on the way in with no luck mopping them up. As we walked through the middle of the stand I watched as another a bird flushed and my son raised up and shot.
“Did you just shoot a grouse?” I asked my son incredulously.
“I think, I did,” he replied with a sheepish smile.
Birdie ran to retrieve and brought the bird right to him. It was by no means a large specimen, but it flushed to a tree right in front of him and the dog and Mitchell dropped it. The grouse was a red phase and we estimated it to be a yearling from the spring. I was flabbergasted. Here’s my son who rolls in, hunts for 10 minutes and essentially drops a Canaan Valley unicorn.
I told him I had flushed two grouse the day before and that maybe, just maybe, the rumors that grouse were coming back were true.
We flushed four more woodcock coming out as the sun set but didn’t drop any.
Back at the cabin we cooked and ate that grouse (along with a feast my wife had prepared) after a toast, and I thanked the Maker for the opportunity to see my son harvest it.
Day 3, Thursday featured heavy overcast and mist with air temps in the upper 50s, low 60s.Our first stop was the stand of hawthorns and maples on that hill where I flushed the three-pack.
Here Birdie over-ran one bird that flushed away across the open field and into the woods. Then she locked up solid on a bird and Mitchell advanced to the flush only to see the bird explode behind and tree and not have shot.
The rest of the morning was pretty much a repeat with the dog over-running birds in the wet conditions and us missing a lot! I did drop a bird along that creek bed that never hit the ground. I found it laid out on top of the thick cane as Birdie was sniffing furiously underneath.
The highlight of our morning hunt turned out to be me happening upon a grouse ground roost with a pile of their characteristic j-shaped droppings. Another positive pointing to a resurgence of grouse in the valley!
With that in mind I decided to do a little exploring/scouting. We drove to the nearby Town of Davis and drove the entire Camp 70 road but didn’t hunt. We then drove a few miles out of town on Corridor H/Highway 48, turned right on the A-Frame Road, and drove the 14 miles to the end. We are above 3,800’ and clouds obscured our view of the road until we dropped below 2,800’. All we saw were deer, though. We did hunt this end of the valley and walked through some excellent cover, but there were no birds here.
A little discouraged, Mitchell and I headed back for lunch and dry clothes/boots again with hopes of better success in the afternoon.
After re-equipping, we hunted that part of the NWR that had the moist draw running across two sections of woods and found birds hiding in nearly the same places I had found them the day before.
At one point I looked down and saw chalk at the bottom of the draw along the edge of the woods and a powerline under a hawthorn tree where I had dropped a bird on Day 2. Seconds later Birdie pointed hard, and Mitchell was in the perfect position to drop a bird with one shot from the Tristar.
I think we took two more birds for a total of just four for Day 3. We did flush another grouse, this time out of a circular grove of hawthorn trees. Darn bird was up in the tree, so we never saw it until it flushed and flew back into that alder swamp!
Back at the cabin apres-hunt, Mitchell hit the hot tub and I had a hot shower and made sure the boot dryer was working overtime to keep our footwear ready for our final day afield. We watched Thursday Night Football for a bit and then both went to bed, tired but feeling good.
Day 4, our final day of hunting, started out 45 degrees and cloudy then warmed to a beautiful partly sunny afternoon with 55-degree temperatures.
We hunted all of our favorite areas today and I quickly found a groove with the now unchoked Calvary. I dropped two birds quickly in front of Birdie’s points. The final bird of my limit also came from a point, but the bird flushed up into the sun and I lost it after missing with barrel one. When I picked up the bird again it was 35-40 yards out and moving right to left among treetops. I tracked it and fired. Incredibly, the bird dropped and crashed into an oak tree about 20 yards away.
“You need to remember that shot long after I’m going because I don’t think I’ll ever top that,” I told Mitchell. We laughed and I set up my three birds for a photo with my gun and W2 cap at the base of that tree. Then I sat down in the sunshine.
“What are you doing?” my son asked, “Do you feel ok?”
“I’m fine, son. I just want to enjoy the moment.”
On that glorious afternoon with a limit in my vest, my dog and son by my side I thought, “what could be better?”
My phone vibrated. It was my wife. She wanted to join us at 10:30. That made it even better.
I gave Mitchell the Garmin remote and told him to go hunt, that I would head back to the trailhead and meet Mom.
When my wife and I met up she was making the old pair of Wrangler brush pants Mitchell had outgrown and my upland strap vest with blaze orange look better than imaginable. I smiled and put my arm around her, happy to have her with us in the field.
We went on to take the rest of Mitchell’s limit on that beautiful afternoon and were back at the cabin by 3:44 pm to clean the birds and get ready for a hike to toast the sunset from 4,200’ Cabin Mountain.
This was an ascent we had made many times over the 121 years we’d been visiting Canaan. At the summit with 50-mile views to the horizon, my wife and I offered words of encouragement to our son for the next phase of his life. I told him to always remember the way home and hoped all the years of adventures had created a person that would pass on the fishing and hunting traditions to the next generation.
The remainder of Virginia woodcock season runs Dec. 27-Jan. 20. We have plenty of birds in the Commonwealth if you know where to look. Many of the WMAs east of I-95 are good places to hunt as are wet woods near where you live. If you have green briars, purple briars and grey briars, you probably have woodcock!
I hope you are as blessed as I have been to have had a great hunting partner.
