Woodcock in Paradise

Following the flight to phenomenal hunting

Louisiana’s license plates proclaim the state to be a “Sportsman’s Paradise,” and from what I saw there this past January, I can confirm that this is no euphemistic rhetoric. Driving into the vast watery lands of the Atchafalaya Basin from Henderson, east of Lafayette, I saw shorelines laced with houses, trailers and camps that appeared to serve as collecting points for boats and RVs, ATVs and all manner of hunting and fishing paraphernalia.

“This place is so great. I love it here,” said my guide and driver, Charles Driza, a fellow Mainer who winters in Louisiana. “Everyone hunts and fishes,” he said, emphasizing “everyone” to mean literally no one is excluded. “Hunting and fishing is their culture; it’s what they do.” We were in the heart of Cajun country, and “they” are the sportsmen in paradise.

During my visit I heard a joke in several forms, each slightly derogatory, with the upshot being that if something walks, swims, flies or crawls—be it covered in fur, feathers, scales or slime—the Cajun will kill it and eat it. The list on that menu is long, and much of it an adventurous counterpoint to mainstream American foodstuffs, but the woodcock we’d come for are nowhere near the top. That’s because the economics of the effort don’t justify keeping an upland hunting dog or the hours spent pursuing quarry so small. The locals, it is said, gladly will take woodcock when presented with them, which often is incidentally while they’re hunting real food, like rabbits. For two days Driza, his dogs and I had our niche in the food pyramid all to ourselves.

The first morning of my hunt Driza picked me up at the Bayou Cabins Bed & Breakfast, in Breaux Bridge, ready to show me woodcock hunting at the southern end of the birds’ migration. I’d flown in from the north myself the night prior, and I could see the sense in an annual pilgrimage. Twenty-four hours before I’d faced the sting of a winter gale while crossing the ice-crusted airport parking lot. Now I found myself on the banks of the quiet Bayou Teche, comfortable in shirtsleeves, with an azure sky filtering through the foliage of live oaks and songbirds trilling tunes that wouldn’t be heard back home for more than three months.

At something like six-foot-two and with an athletic build, Driza has a salt-and-pepper beard that speaks of years of experience. His frayed and faded field clothes evidence seasons spent following dogs. You would pick him for a bird-dog man even if you didn’t know his name or his game.

“Whaddya think I asked Rocky first thing?” Driza asked as we walked to his truck. (Rocky Sonnier and his wife, Lisa, own Bayou Cabins, and I’d just eaten breakfast cooked by Rocky in the café.) Seeing that I had no quick response, Driza answered with a follow-up: “‘Is he fit?’”

I am reasonably fit, or at least I’m not unfit, and I can thrash heavy cover with the subtle grace of any Mainer. It was the latter that Driza cared about, because although he can take clients along the edges of coverts if necessary, he wanted to show me where the birds really live—which in the South, as up North, is in the thickest stuff you can find.

Southern Louisiana is set apart from the country and the culture that surrounds it. The Cajuns live as distinctly within the American melting pot as any ethnic group. And as we know from grade school and documentaries—and saw confirmed by recent disasters—Southern Louisiana is a unique topography. More bayou and swamp than terra firma, the perpetual meanderings of the Mississippi River have given rise to the immense system of levees that more or less protect the region from nature’s whims. The controls include the levees that surround the Atchafalaya Basin—20 miles wide by 150 miles long, the largest swamp in the US—keeping the waters of the Atchafa-laya River system in and, more importantly, keeping the Mississippi out.

Despite the terminology, the Basin is not all wet. Part of its 595,000 acres is a fecund bottomland of hardwoods—fingers and islands of bald cypress, tupelo, cottonwood, saw palmetto and wax myrtle interspersed among the swamps and backwater lakes, frequently flooded with the nutrient-rich waters. I might never have understood such a place without a visit—and without a reason to venture off of the roads that follow the levees. And I might never have had a reason were it not for the happy fact that by virtue of both biological abundance and geographic suitability, American woodcock love the Atchafalaya Basin.

Much of the Central population of woodcock (as opposed to the Eastern population; the regions are comparable to the Missisippi and Atlantic Flyways) spends some part of each winter in Louisiana to keep from starving and/or freezing, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that in 2007-’08 more than 10 percent of the Central population harvest came from the state. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota typically enjoy higher overall harvest numbers, but Louisiana routinely leads all states in both woodcock bagged per hunt and season take per hunter.

Driza owns Leen’s Lodge in Grand Lake Stream, Maine. It is a classic sporting camp, located on waters that offer some of the state’s best fishing for bass and landlocked salmon and surrounded by commercial timberlands holding grouse and woodcock. As good as Maine’s bird hunting can be, the state’s woodcock season runs only the month of October, and chasing grouse is productive for about a month or so more. Driza’s bird hunting passion is even more refined than most other hunters’: He raises and trains a string of pointers to find grouse and woodcock. He’s nearly ambivalent about shotguns and seems sincere when he says, “I really don’t care if I kill any more birds.” The dogs are nearly the whole game for him, and so the short Maine season is frustrating. About five years ago Driza’s wish to continue hunting led him to the fabled woodcock wintering grounds of the Atchafalaya Basin, and what he found there led him to buy a small home near Henderson and extend his guiding business under the appropriate name Follow the Flight.

We turned onto a side road that led through the levees, and then pulled off onto the grass near a one-lane bridge that crossed perhaps 30 feet of dark water. Driza’s scouting has consisted of using maps, talking with residents and biologists, and, most important, running his dogs, and as we pulled a canoe off of the truck he said we would cross to an island of prime woodcock habitat. We paddled perhaps 10 minutes (next year Driza plans to have a boat for easier access and exploring) with Bud, the four-year-old star of his string, on the floor between us.

We made landfall and pulled our gear into the thickets that form a shoulder about eight feet above the surrounding water. We talked about safety and strategy, Driza strapped a beeper around Bud’s neck and we started into a surprisingly open forest. The plan was to work into the island several hundred yards before cutting left to parallel the shore for a mile, and then reverse direction back toward the canoe but closer to the shore.

We headed in across a springy mat of brown leaf litter, among large, snake-rooted cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss. We zigzagged through an understory of hardwood whips and around the occasional mudhole. Bud’s beeper gave us the path of his purposeful coursing, and after a couple of minutes I was thinking, Yeah, this looks like great wormy woodcock ground. Then the understory thickened and I had to start pushing through the brush to keep up. When a few yards farther I could no longer find  holes in the defensive line, I had to adopt the twisting, ducking, high-stepping moves of a running back to maintain my forward progress. I realized that the thicket was what we had come for, and it continued for as far as I could see in our direction of travel. This was, indeed, the kind of woodcock ground any Northern boy who’s ever thrashed through an alder hell would recognize.

Ten minutes in, Bud’s beeper switched tones. “We’ve got a point!” Driza called. He was 50 feet away, but all I could see through the thicket was his orange hat and a patch of the same color on his torso. I moved toward the sound but got snagged in briers that pierced my skin and plucked off my hat. Soldiering on, I reached Driza and walked in on Bud, who was holding point with his nose toward a dense clump of the now-familiar undergrowth. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the bird had walked off by then, but when it twittered up 15 feet away, I fired a 24-gram poke-and-hope salute well above its low flight path. We started to the right to follow and prompted another flush to the left. From then on the bird finds got confusing. There were woodcock in every direction, it seemed; birds all around us.

After a couple more points, a bird finally twisted through a space I could see and I finally connected. Bud delivered the woodcock to Driza, and we photographed it on a fallen log beside a crawfish that had wriggled out of some wet spot in the forest. We continued to find singles and small clusters of birds every few minutes, and woodcock splash was everywhere. I touched off nearly a box of shells on my way to shooting a three-bird limit. I was able to count 42 points in four hours before losing track, and most of them were “original” finds, not birds that had been flushed and followed up. Bud had a talent for pinning birds, and he held point as well as any dog I’ve hunted over. How he could even distinguish live birds and hunt dead amidst that entire woodcock stink was testament to his experience.

My own experience that day was one of amazement. In that single outing Bud showed me more birds than I’ve seen in some seasons in Maine. And the next day Driza’s three-year-old pointer, Rock, found half again as many birds when we hunted some state land with less-challenging vegetation and then a smaller private tract at the end of a rural road.

At times wild birds can prove phenomenal in number, although more often than not they are fickle. Either way, I don’t expect to see as many woodcock this season in Maine as Driza and Bud showed me during the second week of January in Louisiana. Until, perhaps, I can make another migration of my own.

Author’s Note: For more information on woodcock hunting in Louisiana, contact Charles Driza at Follow the Flight, 207-796-2929; www.followtheflight.com.

Ed Carroll is Shooting Sportsman’s Associate Editor.

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