Finally, after overnight temps in the 20s brought two straight killer frosts, the front-yard Japanese maples were shedding their bright red November leaves as the upland horizons changed from their yellow to copper splendor, pinpointing oak groves and potential deer-hunting hot spots when acorns are on the ground. Yes, it’s the time of year for perceptive hunters to define distant oak groves to explore.

But enough of that. An interesting name appeared on my caller-ID Monday morning. It was Russell Dodge from Ashfield. He had called Sunday evening when I was at work. A devoted upland bird hunter, he and I for years competed for pheasants behind his Uncle Bob Thayer’s Hopewell Farm that straddled the Whately/Hatfield border west of the small, private airport off River Road. The reason I am willing to pinpoint the location of a special bird-hunting habitat now is that there are no pheasants there anymore. Sad but true. But back in the day there were plenty, with occasional partridge and woodcock to boot, plus migratory ducks stopping over in a small spring-fed pond, now a larger beaver pond covering the road we once drove through that parcel. Indeed, that once-productive piece of the Hopewell Swamp following the base of a steep escarpment that defines the western terminus of the river flood plain from Mt. Sugarloaf’s southern base to Hatfield Pond and beyond used to get stocked every week by state trucks and the Hatfield Fish & Game Club, its pheasant pen out past Hatfield Beef and the  dump.

I returned Dodge’s call to chat around 10 a.m. Monday. “Pushing 80,” he says he’s slowed down a bit and passes on dense cover he once attacked with fearless aplomb. He even  admits to not being sure  how much longer he can chase this lifelong passion that keeps him eager and spry. That said, he had just finished cleaning a couple of pheasants he bagged  in Hatfield earlier that morning, arriving just after first light with his trusted 9-year-old springer spaniel, Buddy, son of my own late gundog Ringo and Tiger Lily, today old and fading at 12.

Nearly a generation older than me, Russ has deeper memories of a Connecticut Valley bottomland dominated by working farms and a pre-development, reproductive pheasant population helped along by annual state-game-farm releases of surplus bloodstock hens. Such birds were, until the 1980’s, off limits to hunters and capable of pairing up with survivor cock birds to produce spring broods similar to those that fed under my family’s South Deerfield cherry tree out by the peony beds. We agreed that the pheasant-hunting prospects were better back when private coverts received far more birds than the state’s Wildlife Management Areas, which have multiplied like urban pigeons over the past 30 years. As a result, management areas today receive the lion’s share of birds and the hunting pressure, once spread much thinner over widespread private land, is now concentrated on an ever-growing list of state-owned coverts that are stocked at least twice a week and draw quite a crowd.

Soon, there will be no one left who remembers the good old days when pheasants could be found spread throughout the fertile valley, in its seed-filled golden rod and ragweed fields and their bordering cattail and alder swamps. Those were the days when farmers smiled and raised their arms for welcoming waves on your way through the barnyard. If you stopped to chat, the farmer would tell you when their property was last stocked, how many birds were released, and where down the road the next stop was. There are still a few places like that left. In fact, I hunted one Saturday and ran into an old friend passing by with a dead cow in his bucket loader — but these private coverts are going the way of rotary telephones, soon to be not only gone but forgotten.

A longtime member of the Hatfield club that raises and stocks some 250 birds a year to supplement state stocking in its town, Dodge has been a member of many Sunday stocking crews. He believes it’s no exaggeration to estimate that up to 35 percent of the birds stocked today are in less than 24 hours lost to predators like coyotes, foxes, fishers and especially birds of prey. Like me, he has witnessed sharp-shinned hawks fly out of a tree-line perch to catch a freshly released flying pheasant by pouncing on it just before it hits the ground, pinning it momentarily to the turf before flying back up onto the same muscular limb for lunch. “By the next morning, 30 to 35 percent of the birds we’ve stocked are gone and unavailable to hunters,” Dodge said, basing his opinion on decades of personal observation and stocking chores.

Truth be told, all of our pleasant, spontaneous chatter about this and that related to pheasants and wetlands and pheasant hunting unfolded after touching upon Dodge’s most urgent reason for calling me. With his dear gundog Buddy getting up there in age but still a flush-and-retrieve force in the field, he’d like to find a female mate to pass on what he considers to be a superior pedigree.
“If you hear of someone with a good bitch looking for a stud, let me know,” he said, admitting he may not be up to raising another dog himself at his age. But one never knows. Just last year I spoke to two 87-year-old hunters out hunting with dogs in punishing covert.

“He’s the best gundog I’ve ever owned,” said the man who’s owned many, “and I’d love keep his line going. It’s that good and, in my opinion, worth continuing. He sleeps right here at the foot of my bed and has no flaws in the field. He’s a great gundog and companion.”

Having felt the same way about many of my own gundogs, most purchased from professional field-trialers and breeders, I know what he’s feeling and will indeed keep my eyes and ears open for a good ole boy and friend from the hill towns.

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Although I hesitate to kick the rumor ball upfield, Dodge reported a peculiar turkey sighting worth sharing. Quite by coincidence, up in the hills, he ran into what he believes was the first turkey he’s seen stricken with the scabby-head disease we’ve all by now read about or heard of. LPDV and avian pox are viruses that have been around awhile, entering New England over the past five years and are characterized by ugly, scabby heads and sometimes leg scabs.

Dodge said he was driving when he spotted the peculiar bird crossing a back road. When he stopped to get a better look, the big bird appeared to be disoriented and actually headed right for the door he had opened.

“That’s when I knew there was something seriously wrong,” Dodge reported. “I believe that turkey would have jumped right in had I let it.”

That’s not to say for sure that Avian pox and/or LPDV are here in Franklin County, but, then again, why would it not be here? The disfiguring viruses have been detected in New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania and are said in online reports to be found worldwide and to have infiltrated the eastern United States. Now, with local turkey populations as strong as ever after a virtually snowless winter that minimized winter mortality, and by a dry spring creating optimal nesting conditions, maybe Mother nature is jumping in as a leveler to intervene with disease like only she is capable.

Perhaps other local observers will come forward to report sightings of wild turkeys displaying scabby heads and peculiar behavior. MassWildlife wants to know.