It's called "beggar's tick," among the more charitable names. What you call it when your long-haired setter comes back covered with the sticky little seeds can't be reproduced in anything remotely approaching a family magazine.

Others group the seeds with anything that clings to fur and brush chaps as "sticktights." Desmodium is a legume and one of its species, tick trefoil, has few parallels as a quail food. There are 19 species of desmodium in the Midwest. The kidney-shaped seeds are prized by bobwhites in the fall when they're getting ready for a long winter.

Each seedpod is covered with fine hairs that, like Velcro, stick to almost everything ' the plant's mechanism for spreading its seeds. Fortunately, unlike cockleburs, desmodium is relatively easy to comb out or scrape off.

So prevalent is it that a quail-hunting friend once complained that he'd broken open a brand-new package of underwear shorts ' and found sticktights on them. Another friend sprang for a set of hunting chaps although he doesn't hunt just because their slick surface retained fewer beggar ticks when he was birdwatching.

Desmodium is but one of the vegetative pests that upland hunters are plagued by, a bird hunter's version of the Book of Job. Spanish needle is an invasive critter, no doubt one that the Spaniards were glad to get rid of. The most familiar seed is a two-pronged affair that attacks your clothing in clusters and, if the clothing happens to be a T-shirt, the little prongs go right through to the skin beneath.

They aren't as painful as cactus or other stiletto-imitating plants, but they're irritating and usually manage to lodge somewhere you can't reach, like between your shoulder blades or, if you happen to be in the supermarket chatting with the local minister, your crotch.

Spanish needle also is grouped with the "sticktight" crowd and I grew up calling it beggar's lice (as opposed to the desmodium "ticks").

While briars don't seem to be much of a problem for dogs, they certainly are for dog owners. A friend once chased an errant dog through a multiflora rose hedge, intent on administering a religious experience to the dog, forgetting that he was wearing a down vest. "Looked like a snowstorm," he said of the resulting cloud of feathers.

Of all the sticky pests in the field, the cocklebur is the arch villain. It's said that the cocklebur was the inspiration for Velcro ' its hooked spikes grab anything soft and won't let go. While Velcro is ubiquitous today as a fastener and is beloved by all sportsmen, the cocklebur tangled in a setter's belly fur teaches new variations on old swear words.

Some dogs submit to de-burring with minimum complaint, but then many will run through brick walls, bound over broken glass and burning coals and never whimper while they're hunting. A bird dog's mind, once locked on hunt, knows no other stimulus. But flop that same dog on his side and begin untangling cockleburs and you'd think you were performing open heart surgery on him with a can opener.

The screams of anguish alert the neighbors to Vance mistreating his dogs again ' and the nearest neighbors live a half-mile away. I figure the ASPCA will be camped in my driveway any day now and I'm prepared. I'll hand the guy in the uniform my metal-toothed comb and show him my bleeding fingers and say, "You think you can do it better? Have at it!"

Meanwhile, the smirking dog will be trying to sneak away and hide.

No matter how many bur patches Streak has encountered before, he never learns to avoid them. I think all gamebirds slip into cocklebur patches when they sense bird dogs in the neighborhood. Call it avian revenge. And then there is the well-known bird dog obsession with intolerable juxtapositions: juicy cowpies, irate bovines who take out their ire on the dog's owner, porcupines and skunks.

Compared to those fond memories, cockleburs are a minor irritation, but a persistent one.