March/April 08 | 

This is Quail Country

Sporting traditions, conservation, and history abound on the plantations of Thomasville, Georgia.

Boss, we got a point,”the huntsman calmly announced after tipping his hat and smiling amid the towering pines. He said nothing about hurrying, and not the first word about how these were wild birds and sure to get moving real quickly.

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.