Some time back, here in these pages, I announced my intention to make the switch from upland birds to waterfowl. This intent emerged from a hard look at the signs of the times here in my home state of Iowa.

The author and Woody with something important.

State government cars, driven by those entrusted with the guardianship of our natural resources, now wear bumper stickers proudly announcing, “This car fueled with 85 percent ethanol.” So the government has enlisted itself with agribusiness and the bio-fuels industry in a great Sherman’s March to extirpate grass from our landscape. The pheasants, of course, are going with the grass, because they cannot lay their eggs in corn. Here in the “Heartland,” a strange new day has arrived when riding a bicycle or even filling up with Regular have become bold forms of civil disobedience.

This year alone, Iowa has lost another 450,000 acres of CRP to the plows, and pheasant hunter numbers are predicted to plummet as many folks understandably lose interest. Add this to the 800,000 acres we lost with the passage of the 1996 Farm Bill, and the total comes to more than 2,000 square miles of lost habitat in the Hawkeye State. Imagine a six-mile-wide band of grass from Nebraska to Illinois—gone.

Meanwhile, record moisture levels and the current pond-happy fancies of suburban landscape designers have brought back the Good Ol’ Days for ducks and geese. Because Iowa is not a major waterfowl breeding ground, the lack of grass here affects our duck hunting relatively little, and the honkers have shown that they are perfectly happy to nest in the landscaping. We will continue to have decent fall flights at least until Sherman gets to Canada, or the suburbs. The writing seems to be on the wall: hang up thy canvas chaps, and take decoys unto thyself.

But I can’t pull it off. The failure certainly isn’t from a lack of trying, either. Two years ago I bought a Labrador retriever. I learned how to call geese and how to tune duck and goose calls for just the right pitch and rasp. My decoy shelves are stacked higher than ever with plastic facsimiles of mallards, honkers, teal, and wood ducks. Last year I shot a lot of ducks and geese, but still couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I was wasting days that could have been spent hunting birds. For me, “birds” will always refer to creatures with no flesh between their toes.

Speaking of Labrador retrievers, Woody seems to be a bird hunter at heart, too. I figured he would love waterfowl hunting, being a Labrador and all, but he has given the lie to that stereotype. Sure, he likes to retrieve ducks. But he hunts pheasants with intense desire and absolute aplomb.

As Labs go, Woody is rather slender and leggy—an ideal build for running in the uplands. He almost never strays beyond a comfortable distance from the gun. He has excellent olfactory judgment, knowing when to put his nose to the ground for foot scent, when to keep it high for molecules on the breeze, and how to interpret the results in either case. In short, he might be the best pheasant dog I’ve ever owned— maybe the best I’ve ever seen. I bought him to make a switch, but he keeps trying to take me back to where my heart has always been.

Or did he turn out that way because he lives with me?