The morning glories, which for weeks had dressed the young pine trees in white and lavender gowns, have begun to wilt. Cold nights drag the green from their leaves. The heavy underbrush sighs and looks forward to a rest.
All but a handful of the bob white broods are fledged, and the young quail have sprouted grown-up feathers. Their flight is erratic, but at least they are airborne and, if vigilant, will distance themselves from most predators. A murder of crows lands on the farm during the corn harvest, hundreds of cheeky black birds alighting on the branches of dead trees, fighting among themselves, chasing jays and woodpeckers, mocking hawks, plucking worms from behind the harrow’s job, and taunting each other like the children they are. Here and there, pink-and-white butterflies dapple aimlessly over the dying grass and once in a while a grasshopper lands weakly on my shirt. For the first time in eight months I think of quail as food and surprise myself by aiming my finger at passing doves. The year always starts for me in the fall, possibly because I spent a long decade in boarding school, but probably because September introduces the start of a new hunting season; forty seasons later, no matter how my approach to hunting differs from when I was younger, venery lives inside of me like a strong woman calling.
A recital of fall-colored feathers concealing a soft-boiled, egg-shaped body weighing less than a thought, bob-whites are baffling. How does something that soft, seemingly without a muscle in its body, run and fly so fast? Terror, perhaps. From somewhere a description returns to me: “Quail leave the ground with the speed of a snipe, the sound of a partridge, and twist through the trees like demented woodcock.”
Bobwhites remind me of Hungarian partridge, birds that run up mountains faster than mule deer, rise in front of a pointing dog with the same clamor of wings, feel just as soft in the hand, and have, when they glide across the prairie, the same wing set. If I could hunt only two species of birds they would be the gray-legged partridge on a canvas of infinite perspectives and the bobwhite quail in my backyard.
The settings for my hunts have replaced the number of birds I kill, and because I hunt behind pointing dogs, covey birds offer more to see. I am becoming more of a birdwatcher than a bird-hunter. While I won’t stop hunting, my priorities have shifted. Watching a belted kingfisher beat a brim to death on a tree limb interests me more than making a right and left double on quail. I suppose it is because I have not seen as many fish-beating birds as I have made doubles in my life.
This morning I thought I saw leaves falling from the pecan tree in the yard, but it was a dozen sparrows flying down from the tree’s branches to where the nuts lay broken on the ground, and flying back up again, unlike any leaves I’d ever seen. My paleontologist friend thinks of birds as beautiful lizards. I tell him a birder is a voyeur and I qualify, having at one point or another keyholed the private quarters of some pretty and not-so-pretty women.
The exquisite pleasure I derive from watching birds through the lenses of my binoculars, full-sized birds stylized like those in the paintings of Gould and Selby, Thorburn and Audubon, is more fun than writing, so I write very little and watch a lot. I don’t keep a count because I am more interested in what birds do. But just because I’m amused when I see a grackle shitting on a cardinal loitering around the feeders and am charmed at a dove’s offering its mate a kernel of corn, does that mean I will feel differently about shooting this fall? The answer is no, not in the slightest. I will kill doves and quail and a turkey or two just as quickly as I wring the necks of the chickens and guineas I raise and with the same dispatch I use to ship a dozen pigs each year to the slaughterhouse. While these animals are under my care I feed them corn and overripe melons and bread and the remains of what I eat. When I feed them I watch them play and fight and try to mate and it makes me happy, but when the time is right I kill them and eat them and that makes me just as happy.
I can’t shoot deer for having crippled a couple when I was growing up, but Bill Poppell loves to hunt them, and most of the deer he or his friends shoot feeds members of the community who need the meat; the rest goes to others who don’t need the meat but love to eat it. I won’t deny that I derive a certain pleasure from the act of killing the birds I spend all year raising, but who is to say that I don’t love my animals as much as the next man, or that my pleasure is more ill founded than the pleasure of eating a double burger is to another? Are there people out there so spiritually in tune with the animal world that they categorically know it isn’t better for my pigs and deer and birds to have lived and died than not to have lived at all? I think not.
The humane societies have taken advantage of our gun-flexing attitude and made great strides in implementing their agendas. They want nature to be restored, but fight against one of nature’s fundamental rules. In nature, the cruelty displayed by the hunter is a passing moment, an accepted entity, the reason why animals do not grow old in the wild. Yet the animal-rights people plod on, entrenched in their own vision of a world that never existed, a world they have conjured up with the same religious fanaticism of the deer whackers. Nature suffers while these extremes in stupidity argue and howl at each other with the fervor and rage of the mentally imbalanced.
The bobwhite’s softness and shape encourage the viewer to imagine its fears, including visions of fangs and talons tearing into flesh. Coveted by snakes and skunks before they are even born, bobwhites gather strength from a collective fear that in the presence of danger immobilizes them as a whole and then triggers a loud and chaotic escape, meant to startle and confuse whatever threatens them.
The birds that have survived this far have a 60 percent chance of surviving until spring. The weak and the foolhardy are dead, and the survivors live in communal bliss. A cold November storm blew reams of golden leaves to the forest floor. Perhaps the old birds in the coveys remember this change of scenery as a transition time between the soft mast rotting on the ground and the hard mast as yet unfallen from the trees, a continuance of the vegetal year and a preview of winter, when that same hard mast sifts and hides on the forest floor and the legumes are cold and underground. Maybe the old birds also remember this as a season of added terrors, the terrors of dog and man.
I pumped gas next to a farmer who was going through hard times. His eyes looked beyond me. He was so far away in heart that he didn’t know what day of the week it was, but he wanted to know about the birds. I said, “The drought is fixing to kill the young ones.”
He nodded and said, “Good day,” and drove away.
There is no reason to explain to a farmer why there are good quail years and poor quail years. He knows. He understands that no matter how well one manages the land, God is weather. In recent years the Bible Belt farmers and their families prayed for rain and lenient bankers, with an equal lack of success. As a newcomer to the game I curse and shake my fists above my head; so far that hasn’t worked either.