Alabama`s Quail Trail - Alabama Black Belt Adventures

DueSouth
June / July
2010
T RAVEL & A DVENTURE FOR THE S OUTHERN S OUL
Bird Hunters
Colvin Davis, of Davis
Quail Hunts, and
one of his best dogs
Alabama’s
Quail Trail
The Black Belt of
Alabama is known for
its history, its soil,
and its poverty. But it
should also be known for
its bird hunting
by GEOFFREY NORMAN
photographs by CALEB CHANCEY
June | July 2010 GARDENANDGUN.COM 95
R
DueSouth
Adventures
ROLLING DOWN THE HIGHWAY ON MY
way to hunt some birds and what could be
finer than that? Actually, things could be
a little better. The Atlanta airport and a
nameless airline might, for instance, not
have lost my shotgun. I had waited around
the airport for three or fours hours and finally decided the hell with it. Someone at
the lodge would have a spare.
Now I am headed west, across the waist of
Alabama, and my mind is on other things.
This road, for instance. Highway 80 is
the route that some six hundred protesters took on a fifty-four-mile march from
Selma to Montgomery. They were marching for the right to vote, which was still
pretty much a notional thing for blacks in
Alabama in 1965.
Much has changed since then and vastly
for the better. Still…as you approach Selma
the scene is one of neglect and abandonment. Shotgun houses with boarded windows. Rows of depressing project homes—
empty now and gutted. Concrete buildings
that were once bars or rib shacks and are
now just empty eyesores. The neglect and
the poverty are as palpable and oppressive here as they were before the clash at
Edmund Pettus Bridge. Worse, actually,
since so much of the rest of the world has
moved on and prospered. They make automobiles in Alabama these days. But not
here. In the Black Belt, poverty still rules.
I’ve been invited down to learn how an effort to promote bird
hunting might help improve things around here. And having
never, in my life, turned down an invitation to go bird hunting, I
am not about to start now.
So I drive on through Selma, west toward the Mississippi line,
and then turn off the main highway. Another turn and the road is
now dirt. The dwellings are small and rough. Then, I come to the
drive that leads into a hunting lodge called Cottonwoods where I
am expected and where I will hunt birds and spend the night.
The lodge is rustically handsome, but that’s not what draws your
attention. If you are a sportsman, you will find yourself looking—
with lust—at a forty-acre lake with the banks grown up in the kind
of cover that you just know hides large, belligerent bass.
Nobody, however, is fishing. Not today. Wrong season. Things
still happen according to the old rhythms in the Black Belt. There
is a time when you plant and a time when you pick. You burn the
woods once a year, and you hunt turkeys when the dogwoods are
blooming. And you hunt birds (aka quail, aka bobwhites) from
November, sometime, until February, sometime.
I’ve caught the tail end of that season in the coldest winter any-
96 GARDENANDGUN.COM June | July 2010
one can remember. The fire inside the lodge
feels good. The big stone fireplace is at one
with the rest of the interior. Hardwood
floors. Overstuffed furniture. Mounts of
deer with heavy racks.
The lodge is run by an affable man
named Montgomery Smith. You find yourself immediately at ease in his company
and start talking about bass fishing and
bird hunting and other essential things.
Smith has hunted these parts all his life, and he remembers a
time when bird hunting was a matter of knocking on doors and
asking for permission and almost always getting it…and getting
some birds. Those days are gone. Farming and forestry practices
changed, and the wild bird population declined to the point where
it was hardly worth hunting them. Deer hunting came on. So did
turkey hunting. The local boys kept hunting; they just didn’t hunt
birds much anymore.
But there were plenty of people who missed it. Missed walking behind a couple of big-going dogs, watching as they coursed
This Is Quail Country
Clockwise from top
left: The lodge at Davis
Quail Hunts; a setter at
Shenandoah; ejecting a
spent .410; walking up
birds at Shenandoah.
Opposite: Owner Tom
Lanier at Shenandoah,
where they typically
hunt on horseback.
through the broomweed and then feeling that little thrill when
one went on point and the other backed.
So, commercial lodges began to appear. These were places
where you could replicate the old experience. The biggest difference was that you hunted what are called planted birds. Or
release birds.
They don’t fly as explosively as wild birds, but for people who
love the sport, this is not necessarily a deal breaker.
“Good dog work and good ground,” Smith says. “Those things
make a lot of difference.”
We go out after lunch and the ground looks just right, if a little
damp. We will be walking today, and after the hours spent in airplanes and rental cars, this suits me fine. Walking was the way we
hunted them when I was growing up, and it has always seemed the
sovereign way of doing it.
The rolling country around Cottonwoods is grown up in broom
sage, briars, and islands of pine, scrubby oak, and honey locust.
There are a few small plots of tilled ground, planted in millet.
Smith’s dog is a sturdy male pointer.
“Hunt ’em up,” Smith says when he lets the dog off his lead.
Bird hunters say this to their dogs the way that preachers say,
“Let us pray” to their congregations. It translates to “Game on.”
The dog gets right to work and he is all business. He dives into
the briars and works through thick brush, moving fast but with
deliberation. A few minutes later, the dog stops moving as if someone has hit a switch. The dog is motionless except for the soft
heaving of his rib cage. He does not flinch as we move in past him.
Or when four quail get up, making more noise than seems possible, and angle off toward a stand of pines. I’m slow, then quick,
and miss with both barrels. But I have an excuse. I’m shooting a
borrowed gun.
I feel, as I always do after a miss, that I have somehow let the
dog down. But this one is not dismayed. He picks up the two
that Smith has killed and goes back to work. We hear a few distant shots and, briefly, the hum of farm machinery. Otherwise
the countryside is quiet and still. We hunt until dark, and we
shoot plenty of birds and miss a fair number, too. We stop at
one point to admire the ground and the dark prairie soil that
is the reason—one of them, anyway—that this region is called
the Black Belt.
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DueSouth
Adventures
Quail Economics
THE RICH ALLUVIAL DEPOSITS FROM THE REGION’S SEV-
eral rivers that flooded routinely, before they were brought under
control by dams, made this Alabama’s agricultural tenderloin. The
rivers that deposited those fine soils also made it possible to move
the crops downstream to market. Cotton, of course, was the crop
of choice in the early nineteenth century. And with cotton came
slave labor.
A large percentage of the population in these parts has always
been black. First slave. Then free. Hence, a second definition of
Black Belt, the one accepted by people who are not from here and
do not know the place or its history.
Many freed slaves moved on after the Civil War, but many
also stayed—enough that some counties were majority black.
Farming and timber remained the foundation of the economy.
Misfortunes—including the destruction of the cotton crop by the
boll weevil—followed misfortune until poverty began to seem like
the natural condition of the Black Belt.
My education on how bird hunting fits into the picture and
might actually bring some economic development to the Black
Belt begins back at the lodge, where there is, of course, a bar. After
Smith has built up the fire, he pours whiskey and explains.
“It’s about going with what we’ve got,” he says.
That would be great hunting and fishing. Which people will
come—and pay—to enjoy. Smith normally has a lodgeful during
bird season. “A lot of corporate parties but also people who just love
bird hunting and maybe have dogs that don’t get enough work.”
In addition to the bass fishing, an operation like his could put on
a dove shoot or two on fields that have been planted and prepared.
Or provide a guided turkey hunt. Then, there is the sporting clays
course. But bird hunting, here and at several other lodges around
the Black Belt, is the real draw.
The economics are simple enough. Consider Cottonwoods an
agricultural enterprise and its chief crop quail. The value added
in using an acre of this ground to farm quail is far greater than it
would be for soybeans, cotton, or timber. And then there are the
benefits to the local economy. Smith buys farm machinery, seed,
fertilizer, fuel, and all the other necessities of a farming operation from local suppliers. Somebody has to raise the birds that he
releases, and a couple of high school kids have to pluck the birds
at the end of a hunt. There is money to be made in all of it.
Adventures in the Black Belt
IN THE MORNING, I DRIVE TO DAVIS QUAIL HUNTS NEAR
Minter. This operation is run by Colvin Davis, a legendary dog
trainer, and his wife, Mazie. It is not quite the size of Cottonwoods.
Cozier and more like a family home where you are a houseguest.
Colvin is one of those men who are in no hurry, which probably
explains his ability with dogs. To work successfully with strongwilled bird dogs, you need patience bordering on serenity. That
would be Colvin.
We hunt off a wagon here, which allows us to watch the dogs
without distraction. And Colvin’s dogs are worth watching. They
98 GARDENANDGUN.COM June | July 2010
65
Alabama
On to Shenandoah
Cottonwoods
Sportsman’s Lodge
Montgomery
✘ Selma
80
Minter
✘
65
move like oil through the cover, and when
they make game, they stop so suddenly
that it doesn’t quite seem possible.
A little English cocker rides along in
Colvin’s lap until someone knocks a bird
down. Then she comes down off the wagon
and goes to work. She scours the brush
until she finds the downed bird, picks it up
in her mouth, then hustles back to Colvin’s lap before she drops the
bird and waits for praise. Which she always gets.
We shoot all afternoon and the shooting is good. It is always
going to be good at one of these places. Or there are always going
to be birds, anyway; the shooting part is up to you. I do okay.
We are joined for dinner by Thomas Harris, who has driven
from his home in Montgomery to talk about his idea for economic
development in the Black Belt. Harris is gracious, almost courtly.
At dinner, he tells me about the thinking behind his creation,
Alabama Black Belt Adventures.
“People in this part of the state keep waiting for something to
happen, hoping for the day when they will get their automobile
BEFORE HE LEAVES TO DRIVE BACK
to Montgomery, Harris says he hopes my
hunt the next morning at Shenandoah
★
Shenandoah
Plantation will be successful.
Plantation
Shenandoah is west of Union Springs, a
✘
place famous for field trials and bird huntUnion
ing. Its lodge is the most well-appointed of
Springs
the ones I visit. The sort of place you could
bring a non-hunting spouse with a fond35 miles
ness for comfort.
With the owners, Tom and Sue Ellen
Lanier, I ride horseback through piney
woods and broom sage. There was fog early but it burns off and
turns into one of those brilliant late winter days with a high, clear
sky and plenty of sunlight, just warm enough that you don’t need a
jacket. We admire the day and remark on how fine it is and every
few minutes, dismount when the dogs go on point. You could do
a lot of things with a day like this, I think, but the inspired way to
spend it would be on horseback, hunting birds.
Late in the morning, after we have found perhaps a dozen coveys
of birds, I look up to find the source of an unusual call and watch as
an adult bald eagle lands on a top branch in a tall loblolly.
We end it at noon and eat a big meal, the kind they called “dinner” way back when. Fried chicken, butter beans, collards, cornbread. I wouldn’t mind a nap but it is time to leave. My gun has
been found and after a morning like this, nothing seems impossible except, perhaps, the Atlanta airport. G
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21
Davis Quail
Hunts
Supper Time A typical
meal at Davis Quail
Hunts. Opposite page,
clockwise from top left:
A successful retrieve; the
rolling hills at Davis; the
heart of the quail belt;
signaling a point.
are nascent marketing plans. People are
getting aboard, and there is momentum
behind the project.
Fortunes have been made, in these parts,
on recreation. Ray Scott, who founded
B.A.S.S. (Bass Anglers Sportsman Society),
has a place near here and is involved in the
project. So is Jackie Bushman, who founded Buckmasters, the deer hunter’s association based in Montgomery. Harris believes
that quail hunting could be the next thing
and that, if it is promoted, could do for the
Black Belt what pheasant hunting has done
for South Dakota and duck hunting has
done for Stuttgart, Arkansas.
It may be a stretch. But then, Harris says,
the golf trail had plenty of skeptics in the
early days. In Alabama, people have seen
what can happen, and they believe.
plant. But that day will never happen.
“So it seemed to some of us that if there was going to be economic development in the Black Belt, it would have to be based
on the assets that we already have. We have a wonderful tradition
of hunting and fishing on eleven million acres of land that hasn’t
been developed and where there isn’t any sprawl and where people can come and experience things that just aren’t available any
longer anywhere else.”
He came to the idea after studying perhaps the most celebrated
of all the economic development through tourism efforts, not just
in Alabama, but anywhere. That, of course, would be the Robert
Trent Jones Golf Trail.
If it could work for golf, then maybe it could work for bird hunting and maybe it could do something good for the Black Belt, a
place he loved and where he had hunted birds all of his life.
“It’s such a beautiful, special place,” he says.
When I ask how it is going, he says he is optimistic. They are
just getting started but making progress. There is a Web site that
is up, and on it are listed nearly fifty lodges affiliated with Alabama
Black Belt Adventures. The state is coming in with money. There
For more information about Cottonwoods Sportsman’s Lodge
(334-628-8693), Davis Quail Hunts (334-412-4904), Shenandoah
Plantation (334-321-4992), and many other lodges in the Black Belt
of Alabama, go to alabamablackbeltadventures.com.
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