For the author, style is important, but he freely admits that it has no bearing on the number of birds in the bag at the end of the day.

I thought I had all the bases covered. My springer would retrieve ducks, roust roosters out of the thick stuff and put up quail on my trips to the Midwest. I would have pulled it off too, but for one persistent little glitch: Hungarian partridge.

In the summer of my thirtieth year, I moved to Montana, primarily for the upland bird hunting. Huns are a wide-open prairie bird, something neither Poke, my spaniel, nor I knew anything about. We hunted the grassy coulees, where I’d always found pheasants, but the Huns didn’t live there. We tromped through brushy bottomlands, where I’d always found quail, but the Huns didn’t live there, either. And God knows they didn’t live in the same places the ducks lived. That left the vast wheat fields and grassy hills where my close-ranging springer was simply outgunned.

The following season I bought a pint-sized but fleet-of-foot Brittany, and before she reached a year of age, I’d shot sixty Huns over her. That was more than two decades ago, and I learned a lesson that has stayed with me to this day: Buy a bird dog designed for the birds you plan to hunt.

Is there such a thing as an all-around bird dog? Sure—and my springer was one of them. Poke would hunt anything that laid down scent under his nose, and he was a phenomenal retriever—far better than any of the pointers I’ve owned since. The versatile breeds—drahthaars, wirehairs and griffons—come closer still to multi-purpose dogs, and the continental breeds, particularly German shorthaired pointers (GSPs) make a good stab at it. But will they do everything equally well? Ah, there’s the rub.

A Hard Lesson
A few seasons ago, my friend Dan and I spent a morning pass-shooting goldeneyes on the Missouri River. Dan brought along Rocky, a great, handsome Labrador who had fetched dozens of pheasants and ducks during previous seasons. Problem was, Rocky had never really been exposed to the frigid flows of an ice-choked river, and decided after a couple of feeble attempts at retrieving that he wanted nothing to do with water work—not, at least, when the water was pushing thirty-two degrees. Can’t say I blame him.

Is there such a thing as a do-it-all bird dog? Not really, but some breeds can multitask. This is the author’s Springer, Poke.

But that got me to thinking. Back home I had an English setter, Rabbit, whom I’d force-broken to retrieve on land and water. She loved it. She would, in fact, launch herself off a three-foot bank into the river behind my home. That was that, by golly. My setter would be our “duck dog.”

As it turned out, my duck dog didn’t do any better than Dan’s. On our next trip, Rabbit shot into the river after our first dead goldeneye. She paddled furiously to the bird, poked it with her nose, and promptly turned tail for shore, half-frozen from the bone-numbing cold. By the time she reached the bank she was shivering so badly all I could do was towel her off and hustle her back to my truck. Never again.

That cautionary tale works both ways, however. A few years later, I was hunting chukars with another friend and his great, handsome beast, a Lab named Baxter. My new setter, Scarlet, was combing a snow-covered hillside when she slammed into a point. I walked in, a chukar peeled away down a gully, and I dropped it. Unfortunately, it hit the ground running.

I barked at Scarlet to fetch, but she ignored the bird and blew out of the gully like a shopper hot for a blue-light special. Then the cavalry arrived. With a blare of trumpets, Baxter shot into the gully, and careening off first one side and then the other, ran the bird to earth some fifty yards downhill. He pranced all the way back, putting the bird gently in my buddy’s outstretched hand.