Blog

How the Florida Open All-Age Championship Was Different

November 30, 2022 | Florida Open All-Age Championship | Comments

1. No mud — ever, on Chinquapin Farm, even after heavy rain. No creeks, much less rivers. Three man-dug ponds, one at Big House, one on second morning hour course, one on second hour afternoon course. Soil: sand over lime rock, everywhere. Cover: wire grass, everywhere. No crop fields. No wooded areas that cannot be ridden through on horseback. Read more

Defining Moment – A True Thanksgiving Story from 1950

November 24, 2022 | Remembrances | Comments

Is there an event that defines you, that set your course for the rest of your life? At age 83 I look back seventy-two years to such a moment, one dramatic and thanks to Google and Wikipedia and the U S Weather Bureau, easy to research and document. Read more

He’s an Old-Time Handler

November 21, 2022 | Poetry | Comments

He’s an old-time field trial handler Rides right in front of the judges Sings to his dog Lets it hunt through the country Find its own way Read more

The Agency

November 15, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach and Sam Nixon, MD, ran a secret agency. It was sometimes an employment agency and sometimes a housing agency, and often both, but its customers and patrons never realized it. They thought the curmudgeons just by coincidence ran across opportunities to help folks, their friends, sometimes clients, sometimes patients, sometimes strangers, sometimes a combination. They did not charge for their services but gathered much personal satisfaction from rendering them. Read more

Hunting Grouse

November 8, 2022 | Grouse Hunting, Remembrances | Comments

Hunting grouse when I was young was my escape. No matter my troubles, and they sometimes seemed many, I could make them go away for a day. I would rise at four and jump into my boots, orange shirt, khakis and briar chaps and load my dogs in the trunk of my Dodge Demon and drive west to Augusta, Highland or Bath County, turn out a setter dog at the head of a holler and walk up it. Read more

The Moment

October 26, 2022 | Field Trials, Short Stories | Comments

There comes a moment in every good field trial bird dog’s life when it realizes its purpose: to win field trials with its handler. To that moment, it may understand its handler’s desire to have it do his or her will, but not the purpose of the handler’s desire. But the moment a dog comes to understand what it and its handler are trying to accomplish together, is the magic moment. Read more

For Want of a Nail

October 19, 2022 | Other Things, Remembrances | Comments

My career reporting field trials is over with the discontinuance of the Florida Open All-Age Championship following Ted Baker’s death. I was honored to report it from 1995 through 2022. Over those years I reported many others, including the Continental Derby and All-Age Championships, the National Open Free-For-All and National Derby Championships, the National Amateur Free-For-All Championship, the Lee County trial, and, most memorably, the Quail Championship Invitational at Paducah from 1996 through 2006. Read more

New Professions

October 11, 2022 | Short Stories | Comments

Thanks to Booty Blevins’ smart planning, he and Ike Eanes were now employed on Bent Pine Plantation, Ike as Manager and head dog and horse man and huntsman, Booty as Ike’s assistant. They were replacing others who had accepted similar positions on other Yankee quail plantations in the Spring Shuffle of 2024. Richard Brammer had one unfulfilled ambition, to gain membership in the Georgia-Florida Field Trial Club, an exclusive by invitation club for owners of quail plantations between Albany and Tallahassee. Richard had great influence in financial circles everywhere, having led leading venture capital and private equity firms based in Boston before his retirement. But in two years living retired at Bent Pine he had yet to gain membership. He was recently told by a sage of the quail belt that his best chance at admission lay in a large contribution to Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy Foundation for its endowment. Read more

Bound to Happen

October 5, 2022 | Ben Reach, National Championship | Comments

After Ben Reach read it on the internet he said to Sam at Breakfast next morning at Millie’s Diner, “It was bound to happen eventually. I wonder if it has happened before and no one ever knew.” The “it” was this. And the “it” has a long and short version. The short one: the National Champion bird dog of 2023 was discovered to be an impostor. Read more

FWF

September 29, 2022 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben and Sam often reflected over drams of The Macallan on FWF, their acronym for Families Will Fight. Their venerable practices of law and medicine had long been windows on human nature, sometimes heartening, often depressing. In their professional practices, both curmudgeons instinctively fought to mitigate FWF, with varying degrees of success. One thing they knew: no one won family fights. An apparent victory always became a defeat or at best a draw. Read more