The Bird Dogs

My Dad came up on Monday with the bird dogs in anticipation for their nine days of glory. Every year since the 1960s, starting with my grandfather, my family has gone on an annual hunt in Croghan, New York. Mostly a hunt for grouse and woodcock, but occasionally we find some turkeys, duck, pheasants, etc. Anyways, the dogs are getting a bit older now, and consequently they are out of shape. So, they same up here before there hunt, to run a bit.

To get ready for their arrival, I cooked all day on Monday. And boy did I have a blast doing it. I made two loafs of bread to start -- a banana nut bread and a spiced butternut squash bread with nuts and raisins in it. The squash bread was supposed to be a pumpkin bread, but apparently they had a bad crop of pumpkins this year, and there was no pumpkin puree anywhere! After the breads, a made a squash soup that was equally as yummy as the breads...yummmmm.

They got here around 4:30, so we took a quick walk out at Silver Lake so my Dad could see what it looked like (that was the intended hunting spot for the next day.) After that, we checked out the elk farm (I'm going on an elk hunt in Colorado in two weeks). I cooked up some speedies in the broiler for dinner, and we called it a night.

Tuesday was wet again. Even so, we were headed out to hunt anyway. But first, we fooled around with the fire place. We got it all set up to run (which we have been doing, since yesterday there was snow on the top of Whiteface).

We ended up going to Potter Mountain to hunt. It poured on us the entire time, but it was still pretty fun. Gabby even pointed a grouse, and I even got to shoot at it. Of course, I didn't hit it, but still very successful day. (According to my dad, a normal grouse hunter will shoot 1 in 10 they he flushes and a great one will shoot 1 in 5.)

That night, after drying out a bit, we went to the Brewery -- they just tapped their new IPA which was very delicious.

Overall a good trip. The dogs got worked, shot the gun, drank some beer. Good times.