Twenty-Eight came to the line
Three finished
Touch’s Gallatin Fire
Handled by Mark McLean
Owned by Alex Rickert
Won with five finds Read more
The 2024 National Championship
Category: Field Trial Recollections
Last Trip to Grand Junction
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
My Love Affair With Chinquapin
My long life (85 years) has been marked by good luck. None so great as meeting Ted Baker and gaining his invitation to report the Florida Open All-Age Championship which I did from 1995 through 2022. As a result, I watched the continent’s best all-age dogs in competition head to head annually over twenty-seven consecutive years on wild quail. Just think of it. Read more
Run-off at the Invitational
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
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
When January Comes
When January comes
I will be here at home
First time since 1994
Won’t be at Chinquapin
The second week
Of that cold month at home
I spent in North Florida
From 1995 through 2022 Read more
When Field Trial History Rhymed
The field trial seasons of 2006-07 and 2022-23 rhymed, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s adage, “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Read more
1938
It was a desperate year by every measure. The Great Depression had refused to end; war threatened again in Europe as Germany, now under Hitler’s thumb, smoldered with resentment under the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles; and most Americans lived in poverty, those rural who had no debt the best off because they could at least grow and put up their own food for winter and darn their threadbare garments and socks. Read more
Silverwood at Chinquapin
“What was the best race
You ever saw?”
“Silverwood’s at Chinquapin 2002” Read more
Four Men Two Dogs One Spare Tire
They were two-man teams of rivals. Some thought enemies, but they were not. They were famous, in a very small, obscure world. Each was a trainer-handler or a scout of all-age pointing dogs.
Each handler worked with a scout, usually a black man, who traveled with him in a two-ton stock-bed truck they drove from trial to trial hauling the horses they rode to handle and scout off of and the dogs in the string of pointers (and occasionally a setter) they entered in the trials.
Read more