Category: Field Trial Recollections

Once Upon a Time

December 18, 2024 | Field Trial Recollections | Comments
Once upon a time, about 1990, a young man from Albany, Georgia, had a great job. He was dog trainer and hunt manager on one of the south’s largest Yankee Quail Plantations. His father was manager of the plantation, his brother the manager of its pecan orchards and other agricultural operations. He had won two years in a row the Yankee Trial, the Owner’s Trial of the Georgia-Florida Field Trial Club, composed of the multimillionaire owners of the quail plantations between Albany and Tallahassee. The Club has since 1916 sponsored each President’s Day (except in war years) a one-day trial for wagon dogs from the plantations.  Read more

My Thanksgiving

November 27, 2024 | Ferrel Miller, Poetry | Comments
This Thanksgiving I give thanks For the opportunities To watch great all-age dogs Looking back on those years I give thanks for the chances God gave me to write up The best dogs of those days Read more

Last Trip to Grand Junction

February 4, 2024 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments
He woke alone in the  trailer, a single-wide on concrete blocks on a rented half-acre lot on a dirt road off Route 32 ten miles east of Leesburg. Jess Clark looked at the calendar, taped on the refrigerator door, where he marked off the days with a pencil stub on a string, and read in the first un-Xd block, “February 11, Sat.”  He turned the left burner eye on the two-burner stove to high to heat water for coffee and put the enameled steel pot on it. There is something I must do today, he told himself, and strained to remember. Read more

Run-off at the Invitational

November 26, 2023 | Quail Championship Invitational | Comments
Judge Sam Scales knew them all and knew them well. That’s why he tried to talk his two fellow judges out of the run-off between Jersey Mike and Alabama Al. He agreed they were the top two dogs among the four that had gone down for two hours today, Monday. And he could have lived with giving the title to either of them and runner-up to the other. But one wanted to name Mike Champion and the other Al. Both were insisting on a run-off Tuesday morning.  Read more

First Time at Grand Junction

November 23, 2023 | National Championship, Short Stories | Comments
Billy Berg was going to Grand Junction, the Ames Plantation, for the National Bird Dog Championship! He could not believe it. He had been running dogs on the all-age circuit only three years. Before that he had apprenticed under his father, John, who ran shooting dogs for the public on the horseback shooting dog circuit out of New Jersey. Billy had endured lean times but had some success. His owners were mostly one-dog sponsors who had been patrons of his father and placed a dog with him out of affection for his father. But now he had “made his bones,” qualified a dog for the National. This required that the dog win two firsts in open all-age stakes of an hour. Not easy to do, for hour stakes attracted large entries from all-age handlers pursuing the same goals as him, most with deeper strings. Read more