tripwire (n.)—any kind of fence wire, often barbed, left lying on or just above the ground for the specific purpose of causing grouse hunters to stumble.
twig (v.)—poke with a stick; “When twigged in the eye, ask for time out, or take it, and wait until it clears up.”
VWF (abbrev.)—Veritable Winter Fairyland; the appearance of a grouse cover after a late-autumn snowstorm.
wall bird (n.)—a grouse perched on a stone wall alongside a dirt road; most wall birds are former road birds that moved at the approach of a vehicle.
WGC (abbrev.)—Wild Goose Chase; a fruitless hunt; more frequently used in reference to grouse than geese.
Nowadays, it seems, the southern Maine covers that Keith and I treasure—Hippie House, Stick Farm, and Rusty Bedspring—come up empty, or close to it, all too often. We rarely spot road birds or wallbirds anymore, and few doodles seem to gather in their old favorite parlors.
But at least now, after rambling over dirt roads together for all these years, Keith and I can communicate. Last Saturday, for example, we were feeling pretty bogged down by noontime, so we sat on the ground and leaned our backs against an old stonewall to recharge our batteries. We’d had slim pickins that morning. We’d heard the flush of one sentinel bird, and Burt had bumped a pair of doodles out of their parlor on the sunny side of John’s Knoll, and that was it.
“Well,” observed Keith between bites of his guess-what sandwich and sips of battery acid, “another WGC. All them pickers must’ve been-through by a bunch of jeesly rabbit hunters.”
Chapter 10
FRANK WOOLNER’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH RUFFED GROUSE
Among shotgunners who have made their acquaintance, ruffed grouse consistently arouse the strongest passions. All agree that this partridge is the smartest, wildest, hardest-flying, and altogether most challenging, frustrating, and lovable game bird on two wings.
Such a bird deserves a passionate chronicler, and no man I’ve hunted with or whose stories I’ve read was more passionate—about life, writing, friends, hunting and fishing, the outdoors in general, and ruffed grouse in particular—than Frank Woolner.
Woolner’s life overlapped those of Burton L. Spiller, William Harnden Foster, Gorham “Grampa Grouse” Cross, and John Alden Knight, who all wrote timeless elegies to the ruffed grouse. Anybody who has read Spiller’s Grouse Feathers and More Grouse Feathers, Foster’s New England Grouse Shooting, Cross’s Partridge Shortenin’, or Knight’s The Ruffed Grouse will agree that Frank Woolner’s Grouse and Grouse Hunting, published in 1970, deserves an honored place on the bird-hunter’s shelf alongside those older classics.
“Mine is a love story,” Woolner wrote, “a sometimes personal treatise on the game bird that is more important to me than wild geese coursing an autumn sky, than black ducks cupping their wings and dropping into the blocks, than woodcock spiraling over the alders in the red hush of an October twilight.”
Like most outdoor writers of his generation, Frank Woolner was a generalist, a jack of all trades and a master of most of them. He spent his life in the New England out-of-doors, passionately devouring whatever the season offered. He hunted upland birds and waterfowl, rabbits and squirrels, foxes and deer. He cast flies and drifted worms for brook trout, and he heaved live eels and wooden plugs into the Cape Cod surf for striped bass. When no game or fish was in season, he tromped the fields and forests anyway, absorbing nature’s stories.
I grew up believing that men like Frank Woolner had the best job in the world. He fished and hunted and called it research. He went out and had adventures, then he wrote about them—and people gave him money for it. What a life!
Woolner’s prose came out of his typewriter so clean and pure that he fooled me into believing that writing was easy, a delusion that persisted until I tried doing it myself.
Back in the 1930s and ’40s, my father edited a sporting magazine called Hunting and Fishing. He bought Frank Woolner’s first outdoor story and thereby helped to launch a career that lasted half a century.
My father launched a lot of other careers, too, and being the man he was, he usually ended up hunting and fishing with the writers he did business with. I was the lucky kid who got to tag along. Thus I made the acquaintance of a whole generation of sporting writers, including Frank Woolner.
Frank shared the tangled grouse coverts near his home in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, with me, and later, when I decided I wanted to emulate his enviable lifestyle, he shared his wisdom on the writing business with me, too, as he did unselfishly with countless other novice outdoor writers. He taught me that it wasn’t as easy as it looked, and he encouraged me when I needed encouragement.
Frank learned to write the same way he learned to catch stripers and hunt grouse—by trying, erring, and pondering it, then trying some more.
I’m not sure how many stories Frank sold after that first one that my father bought. Several hundred, certainly. He also published half a dozen books, including Grouse and Grouse Hunting and Timberdoodle!, its companion piece on woodcock, which is also a classic.
He wrote about hunting and fishing, true, but he also wrote about the chill of an autumn afternoon and the warmth of the sun’s rays when they reflect off a pewter sea. He wrote about robins, bats, wildflowers, stonewalls, mosquitoes, and tree frogs—which Frank called, delightfully and evocatively, “the bells of springtime.”
When Frank Woolner died in 1994, he was still counseling young writers, turning out silky prose on all manner of outdoorsy subjects, and sharing his hard-earned wisdom on the comings and goings of striped bass, bluefish, flounder, and weakfish for Salt Water Sportsman.
And that, I’ve learned, is how outdoor writers do it. They hunt, they fish, they wander around in the woods, and then they write until they drop. They never retire from doing what’s in their blood.
What a life!
Frank Woolner began writing in a simpler time, when the morality of the blood sports was rarely challenged by animal-rights activists or anti-gun crusaders. A thoughtful man, however, didn’t need a challenge to think about it. “I make no apology for being a gunner and an angler,” he wrote, “but I am a hunter without malice and maybe a fisher who seeks much more than any limit catch of trout.”
Today’s naturalists might raise an eyebrow at Frank’s readiness to shoot grouse predators, but his reasoning was neither simplistic nor hard-headed. Nobody understood the complexities of nature’s ways better than Frank Woolner. “It is characteristic of well-meaning yet ill-informed nature lovers to insist that all predators are beneficial,” he wrote. “This product of wishful thinking contains just enough truth to make it dangerous.”
On the other hand, he understood that “extremists who rant that every flesh-eating bird or mammal should be shot on sight betray an abject ignorance of wildlife dynamics.”
Woolner’s middle ground, whether you agree with it or not, is based on a commonsense understanding of nature’s interconnectedness, coupled with his unabashed love for ruffed grouse. “If I am hunting in a state where the great horned owl is unprotected,” he declared, “I will shoot each and every one that shows in upland cover ... I have a bone to pick with do-gooders who have convinced legislatures that the great horned owl should be protected at all seasons. Ill-informed nature lovers are robbing Peter to pay Paul: the ruffed grouse suffers.”
Grouse and Grouse Hunting, which has been reprinted several times since 1970, most recently in 1999 by The Lyons Press with the title, Grouse Hunting Strategies, contains equal parts of natural history and hunting lore. The book is proof that a respect for nature and a passion for hunting go hand-in-hand. As much as he loved grouse, I can vouch for the fact that Frank hunted them hard and never lost track of the point of it. He liked to find birds, he liked to shoot them, and he took pride in being very good at both. His chapters on recognizing likely grouse cover, wingshooting, hunting with and without dogs, and choosing guns and other gear remain as fresh and practical as they were 35 years ago when he wrote the
m.
Grouse hunting is hard work. Frank liked that. It’s what made it worthwhile. “You will hike the birch woods and struggle through junipers and bull-brier, breast laurel jungles and scrub oak thickets,” he wrote. “You will pause to take a breather after steaming climbs to beech ridges and plateaus where mountain winds are keen in the pines and hemlocks. If you decide to hunt partridges, one thing is certain: you’ll walk.”
But “every grouse hunter is an incurable romantic,” he wrote, “else he would not seek this bird above all others.” Frank Woolner was surely a romantic. “Usually,” he wrote, “during the final afternoon of a grouse-hunting season, I take pleasure in tracking a fast-flying pat with my shotgun and, instead of pressing the trigger, I grin crookedly and lower the piece. There is a secret satisfaction in this sort of thing. I am sure that nobody ever bears witness, and it really doesn’t matter. In essence, I have ended the season on my own terms.”
Frank was also an optimist. “So far as this great bird is concerned,” he wrote, “the elements are seldom hostile. Ruffed grouse conquered their environment centuries before any white man appeared on these shores. They are profligate enough to survive the attentions of wild predator and man. They retreat before the artificial lava flow of steel and cement, but they never concede victory while any fringe of woodland remains. If in the end of it, any game bird graces our wild lands, it will be the cocky, self-assured, and completely independent partridge of the north.”
Developments in the 35 years since he wrote Grouse and Grouse Hunting might have tempered Woolner’s optimism. These days the peaks in grouse population cycles barely reach what were, in his best days afield, the valleys.
Certainly highways and housing developments have stolen habitat from the ruffed grouse. But biologists tell us that the greatest threat to healthy grouse populations is not the bulldozer or the chainsaw, and certainly not the man with a shotgun.
Grouse thrive in the tangled edges where woods meet fields. There they find shelter from their enemies and the grasses, grains, leaves, and berries that make up their varied diet. The 19th-century New England farmers cleared the land, and when Frank Woolner began hunting grouse, he found the abandoned orchards and grapevine tangles, the old pastures grown to clumps of juniper and thornapple and edged with briar and brush, the cellarholes, graveyards, and stonewalls, and the second-growth birch and poplar hillsides that the pioneers left behind. It all made perfect grouse cover, and the birds were thick.
Today, in spite of the encroachments of civilization, New England actually boasts more woodland than it did a century ago. The problem is that it’s rapidly reverting to mature forest. Tall trees and a open shaded understory make for poor grouse habitat.
If he would shoot predators to save grouse, Frank surely would have approved of the pro-active approach of the Ruffed Grouse Society, which promotes selective clear-cutting to let the sunshine into the forest and create the openings and thick edges that attract grouse, thus intentionally mimicking what the settlers created inadvertently a century ago. “To be entirely effective in this highly technical age,” he wrote presciently, “successful grouse management may have to be a massive undertaking—and an expensive one. Perhaps a development of forestry practices that will benefit timbermen and hunters alike is one possibility. This is no dream, and it may be realized in the foreseeable future. The knowledge acquired by game biologists in their trysts with failure will be put to good use as natural resources practices mesh for the common good of mankind.”
Those of us who savor Frank Woolner’s words and love the woods in the fall and thrill to the roar of the sudden flush can only hope that his plea for intelligent management of grouse habitat will be heeded.
“There is time!” he wrote in 1970.
Let’s hope he was right.
Chapter 11
WOOLNER’S TIMBERDOODLE!
When I was much younger than I am now, I asked a grizzled old outdoorsman to tell me all about woodcock. He rubbed his chin and gazed up at the sky. “Well,” he said, “they eat worms, they whistle when they fly, and they migrate. That’s about it.”
“But,” I persisted, “how do you find them?”
He squinted at me and shrugged. “Woodcock,” he said, “are where you find ’em.”
I figured the old buzzard was putting me on. But after decades of hunting woodcock, I’ve come to realize that he was telling me everything there was to know. Woodcock eat worms, migrate, and whistle when they fly; otherwise they are mysterious, elusive, and altogether entrancing.
Nobody understood this better than Frank Woolner.
Those of us who have made their acquaintance know woodcock to be a peculiar, private, funny looking, and altogether lovable little birds. Aside from serious ornithologists, a few dedicated biologists, and a small but passionate breed of peculiar, private, and lovable sportsmen like Frank Woolner, who hunt them in the fall with pointing dogs and double-barreled shotguns, few people have ever even seen a woodcock.
As Woolner writes, the woodcock is “a shorebird odd-ball that has forgotten its ancient origins and prefers thick, moist, brushy uplands to the aboriginal edges of the sea. It is a secret and retiring atom of life, so given to elusive comings and goings in shadowy woodlands and the dark of night that millions of Americans are unaware of its very existence.”
This worries those of us who hunt them and love them. Americans everywhere write letters to their legislators and donate large sums of money to conservation groups when the population declines of gaudier, more public birds like eagles and bluebirds are documented. Widely hunted game birds such as quail, ducks, and ruffed grouse have their own well-funded and politically savvy organizations dedicated to their preservation. Woodcock, meanwhile, cling to the coattails of the Ruffed Grouse Society, primarily because they share the same habitat and have historically been a happy byproduct of grouse hunting.
Timberdoodle!, Frank Woolner’s book on the subject, covers just about everything anyone would want to know about the American woodcock: how to spy on them during their passionate springtime mating dances, how to select and train dogs that will find them, how to choose a suitable shotgun, how shoot them (and how to fabricate an effective alibi when you miss), and how to cook them.
The book omits the most important current fact about American woodcock, however, and that’s this: For the past 35 or 40 years—roughly the time period since Timberdoodle! was first published—woodcock numbers have been declining at the steady and terrifying rate of 5 percent per year. The culprit, according to the experts, is loss of habitat.
In part, of course, it’s the inexorable spread of civilization, the bulldozing and paving of the landscape that unselectively destroys the habitat of all wild creatures. Woolner knew all about this, and he railed against it. “If you’re a cynic,” he wrote, “the law seems to declare that biological ecosystems must be maintained—unless the destroyer files a plan that documents their proportion of destruction and promises to make amends. Having prepared such a blue-print, the developer may then tear the living earth apart, divert its streams, drain its wetlands, fill swamps, and kill all flora and fauna thereon. The paranoid assumption is that nature will not be affected, even though gravel, tarmac, cement, and steel replace peat bogs and alders.”
Good woodcock cover is tangly, shadowy, and boggy. It’s not good for much except harboring woodcock, and since most people wouldn’t recognize a woodcock if they saw one, they tend not to value the bird’s habitat or see much purpose in preserving it. Thirty-five years ago, the spread of gravel, tarmac, cement, and steel appeared to be the main threat to the prosperity of woodcock, and Woolner’s tempered optimism made sense.
But the encroachments of civilization turn out to be a relatively minor factor in the loss of woodcock cover. Forest-fire prevention policies, restrictions on logging practices, and well-meaning but misinformed efforts to preserve rather than manage wilderness have combined to produce mature forests with high, thick canopies that prevent s
unlight from reaching the ground. The rich mixes of hard and soft woods, bushes, briars, weeds, and vines that blanketed the New England landscape half a century ago are giving way to tall, homogeneous forests. Without brushy understory, sun-drenched open patches, and thick, tangly edges, woodcock and myriad other species are left without shelter, forage, and nesting grounds.
Adaptable species such as ruffed grouse are suffering, but they’re hanging in there. Woodcock aren’t particularly adaptable. Their needs are quite specific. Earthworms comprise more than 90 percent of their diet, and they must have soft boggy earth under their feet and low cover overhead. They simply cannot thrive in mature forests.
Had Woolner known of these developments, I have no doubt that he would have written a different book. This one is cheerful, quirky, optimistic, opinionated, and anecdotal, full of stories and debates about men and dogs, hits and misses, guns and recipes. “Nothing,” wrote Woolner in 1974, “—not the clearing of lands, the guns of sportsmen, or the killing pesticides—has entered [the woodcock] on the lists of endangered species. He is prospering, still trading up and down the old flyways in spring and fall.”
Alas, today the woodcock is not prospering. In this respect, you can read Timberdoodle! as a memoir of a happier, simpler era. Seasons and bag limits have been steadily reduced for both the Atlantic and the Mississippi flyways, but biologists agree with Woolner that men with guns are the least of the woodcock’s problems.
Frank Woolner was a serious, albeit self-taught, natural historian and a passionate sportsman, and his love affair with woodcock glimmers in every word of this important book, which has been out of print for too long. He was born in 1916, lived his entire life in central Massachusetts, and died in 1994. He considered himself a political independent and a religious agnostic. Those of us who knew him can vouch for his straight-shooting Yankee independence. Read his words about woodcock and you’ll understand that he was, in his way, a highly religious man. His cathedral was the outdoors and his pulpit was his writing desk.
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