 
These Thomasville, Georgia, birds were unquestionably wild, and I was not going to let them flush before I — at slightly north of age thirty and known as Dead-Eye Dick on no fewer than three continents — had a chance to show my host a thing or two. We had never hunted together, and I was determined that he would appreciate that I had actually done this more than once or twice back in South Carolina. As I began to dismount, an assistant dog handler stood nearby and grabbed the reins. I loaded the 20-gauge Browning over-and-under, which I borrowed from my father, and looked toward the huntsman, who smiled and asked someone named “Mr. Charles” to walk toward a pine tree at which he was pointing. Mr. Charles? Oh, and there was no march-to-hell dash directed from a barking Bubba guide, or an air of guilt about slow hunters letting them get away, which they did, flushing before we were both in place on that first point. It was different here: It was Thomasville. It has been more than ten years since i had the opportunity to hunt that particular exemplary old-school operation in the Red Hills, but I continue to make at least an annual pilgrimage to Thomasville, appreciating it more each visit. My college roommate Richard Parvey did not know the first thing about hunting when I met him. Twenty-plus years later my buddy is living in this mecca of quail hunting and frequently outshooting me on Tahlequah, his plantation near the Florida-Georgia border. He and his wife, Elizabeth, own the place with New Hampshire-based entrepreneur Todd Enright and his wife, Robin. The Parveys and Enrights recently asked my wife, Susan, and me to join them for another adventure in this legendary old-school bird hunting land, where preservation and tradition are sacred. You may find plenty of quail hunting operations scattered across Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and elsewhere, but you will not find the number of properties and the quality of habitat that exist in Thomasville and the surrounding North Florida-Georgia plantation belt. Thanks to the highest concentration of well-maintained bird hunting plantations in the South outside of Texas, Thomasville has been able to preserve traditional bird hunting in unrivaled scale and quality. Plantations here can range from a bit less than one thousand acres to more than twenty thousand — though you don’t ask about someone’s acres in this part of Georgia unless you are studying “the map,” a large sheet of paper that explains more than any book or history lesson. Various colors set apart vast circles and squares and connected rectangles of land that form more than three hundred thousand acres of the best quail habitat in the country. Often found near a landowner’s bar or gun room, the map tells you who owns what — and where you are hunting — and it is a fascinating trigger for discussions about the enormity and richness of this area where bird hunting is a seasonal religion. What Aspen is to skiing, Thomasville, this understated town of twenty thousand, is to bird shooting. And though it attracts hunters by the thousands, on this visit, as I do on each one, I count the ways in which the rest of the world could never love the Red Hills as much as I do. Hunting with Style Our hunting weekend began with a feast supper at Liam’s, a popular restaurant in downtown Thomasville. A short distance from the plantations, the quaint town was one of the first in Georgia to recognize the importance of historic preservation, and to date, its Main Street revival program has restored more than one hundred buildings. Most storefronts are freshly painted and ready for the seasonal shooting crowd, which tends to include a fair share of high-profile types, including Jimmy Buffett, Ted Turner, Sonny Perdue, and Dick Cheney. The locals are generally cool customers about celebrities, rather accustomed to seeing famous visitors in their town. The following afternoon, after a lunch at Relish, we were off to Tahlequah. We pulled through the gates and continued down a dirt road until we came upon the handsome day-lodge with tall windows and gray-hued clapboard designed by Richard. We caught up with the rest of the hunting party, including children and all the support for an afternoon’s hunt — horses, dogs, trailers, mule wagon, huntsman, dog handlers, and wagon driver. As is often the case in the Deep South, the weather was mild, and the pine canopy — a mixture of longleaf and loblolly — provided cool shade. Red clay hills offer variety to the landscape, as do the wire grass and the various new grasses that come after controlled burns. As a result of intensive land management, a full hunting party can navigate in the pines with relative ease: The pines are spaced apart, and the understory consists merely of what has sprouted since the spring burns. The full-scale Thomasville bird hunt begins and ends with a certain attitude, a style that has less to do with money than with hunting etiquette and respect for a tradition in which all participants are part of something larger than a day in the field. Residents treat their property, sport, and traditions with reverence. In Southern style, here you hunt at the direction of the huntsman, or hunt master. Our huntsman, Steven Jones, learned a great deal while managing a commercial operation before the Enrights hired him three years ago. In his early years, he learned at the feet of his grandfather, an accomplished dog trainer. On this day Jones had three assistants and a mule wagon with driver, who, on the most formal of hunts in Thomasville, may offer a rabbit-fur blanket to his passengers. Wagons hold observers, the dogs, extra gear and guns, water for the dogs, additional pointing dogs, one or two retrieving dogs, and refreshments or a full lunch. The four hunters, including Todd and Richard’s friend Bill Ladson, were on horseback. It could not have been five minutes before Todd and Bill were walking to the ramrod-straight pointers, certain that birds were near. Quickly, each sportsman dropped a bird, and the crew on the mule wagon released a Labrador to find the first of the day’s bounty. Richard and I were up next, and knowing that a tighter pattern required better marksmanship, I was curious to see what I might accomplish with a full-choked L.C. Smith. Soon I had an opportunity to find the answer: I fired once, and my bird fell, but it was a while before it happened again that afternoon. Never hit the first bird of the day: It must be a curse. To read the rest of the story, please subscribe to Garden & Gun. |
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