Hunting again, thanks to a guy named Oren & a dog named Rikka
By Bob Hooftallen

Oren (left), the writer and a dog named Rikka with last Saturday's limit of pheasants. Two of those belong to the writer's brother, Harry, who took the photo.

I've been old enough to hunt legally for 24 years.

For the first 12 years, I hunted as much or more than just about anyone. I skipped school to hunt. I skipped college classes to hunt and I used vacation days from work to hunt.

I hunted from the opening of archery season to the close of the late small game and archery seasons in January, pretty much steadily. I had my share of success, having killed several bucks, too many doe, several turkeys, many grouse, hundreds of pheasants and even a handful of woodcock, those odd migratory birds that most people don't even realize exist here, whether permanently or temporarily.

I never hunted bear because they just didn't seem like a game animal to me. They still don't.

My success was limited only by my stubbornness to pursue the sport from a scientific point of view, something that is common among today's hardcore sportsmen and women.

Essentially, those years were the 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet was a resource in the outdoorsman's arsenal and, frankly, before there was such a need to be so educated in order to be successful in the field.

Rikka sits over the fruits of half a day of her work: three pheasants, seven woodcock and a grouse. Notice how perfectly the birds are camoflaged. Finding them without a dog is a fool's game. That's where Rikka's noise comes in handy.

That was before the seasons and bag limits were tinkered with on an annual basis and before the Game Commission had to market itself and make those annual changes to try to keep people involved.

It was far simpler than that. In these parts in those years, every person who was able to hunt, hunted.

Right when my own life was changing rather radically as a result of the duty and obligation that goes along with approaching middle age, hunting seemed to be losing its appeal even to the masses. And I found myself putting many things ahead of hunting on my priority list.

Beginning in about 1995, I was drawn further from hunting with each passing year. Most of my old hunting buddies had embarked upon careers and families and some of them left the area completely.

I stayed in touch with hunting only because Dad did. He struggled with killing things toward the end of his own life, but he stayed an avid outdoorsman. And so I did, too, if only because he did and because I still could not go a season without hunting deer by his side at least one day. We managed to do that until cancer made it physically impossible for him to hunt.

That loss and the added responsibilities of work and children pulled me further from hunting than I had ever been. It got so bad that I bought my license the morning of the first day of what used to be buck season. And when it went to the new open season approach to deer hunting, I went a couple years without getting a license at all.

In the past couple years, I have missed hunting dearly and have been looking for the opportunity to get back into it. Being away from it seriously for a dozen years presented all kinds of logistical obstacles that i didn't look forward to, but I knew if there was a catalyst I would start addressing the challenges one by one.

The catalyst was a guy named Oren and a girl named Rikka.

Oren Stuckey, or "O" as I call him, is the poster boy for the modern sportsmen. He lives and breaths his hobby and nothing else, not even his totally adorable wife (my first cousin), really matters to him at this time of the year.

His vacation days are essentially set aside for hunting and nothing else. His truck, despite being very new, is a hunting truck and he treats it as such. His dog, of course, is a highlytrained, expensive hunting dog, of course.

When it comes to Pennsylvania sportsmen, O is the total package.

As luck would have it, he offered me along on a hunting trip last Saturday when pheasant season opened. Having grown up with two birds dogs (which I know now to be flushing dogs, not pointing dogs, thanks to O's teaching), I have always been a big fan of pheasant hunting.

Oren's dog is a German shorthaired pointer, a versatile hunting dog that is also known for its smarts, grace and pleasant disposition.

At just two years old, Rikka is far from mastering what it is for which she has been bred, but you wouldn't know it to watch her work.

A pointer, Rikka's job is to find the game, in this case one of three sporting birds, and get close enough to them so she can clearly indicate where they are, but not so close that they take flight.

Only in rare cases, most often when the terrain or fauna denies him access to the bird, will Oren allow Rikka to flush the bird. She holds steady until someone in the hunting party flushes it.

Rikka is collared with an electrical device that gives off sounds that indicate where she is and what she's doing. The collar makes a steady, slow sound when Rikka is on the move, but when she stops for longer then a couple of seconds, the speed of the sound picks up.

That's how we know she's "on point." And while this was very foreign to me at first, I learned the game rather quickly. When the collar indicates Rikka has stopped, the wise sportsman moves quickly to her.

With Rikka, limiting out on game birds is mostly a matter of whether or not the humans with the guns can hit the birds she finds.

I was awfully rusty at first, as was my brother, but we lim- ited out on pheasants (two apiece) pretty quickly on the opening day (Oren had two cockbirds in 20 minutes and worked the dog for us for the next two hours).

That's when the fun began. We headed to nearby brushy, swampy areas to take a shot at a lesser-known game bird that is a whole lot of fun to hunt, the woodcock.

Woodcocks are essentially shorebirds that don't live on the shore. The spend their summers from Pennsylvania north into upper Canada, where they feed exclusively on earth worms.

When they can no longer force their long, thin bills into the soft soil, they head for warmer climates where they can. This area is a favorite stop of theirs on the way and if winter doesn't strike too quickly, they stick around for several weeks.

They are strange birds, really, and fly in a reckless, seemingly aimless patterns. "It's almost like hunting bats," Oren says.

If you have a bird dog and want to try your hand at woodcock, we have figured out that they like partially-wooded flatlands that are adjacent to damp areas with soft soil.

We enjoyed ourselves well enough that we have hit the field a couple times since and all told have gotten nine pheasants, 10 woodcocks and two grouse, the most prized sporting bird- Oren and Rikka's favorite. They rejoice like a couple of kids on Christmas when we get one. Experienced hunters can certainly relate to that.

With a dog like Rikka, the field is about as even as it's going to get with game birds. It sure made my transition toward getting back into hunting a lot easier.