Author: Brendan Menchions

With the advent of modern cameras, a photograph can adequately capture the magic of a moment.  What I find lacking in photography is the emotion felt when absorbing everything in. A photo can spark a memory, and that memory brings back the emotions.  But when someone who wasn’t present looks at your photo it is just as the saying goes, it will take a thousand words to put them in your place. When looking at a well done painting you can feel the artists emotions.  Through shades and colour the artist is able to tell a story in the blink of an eye. Sadly, the paintings I have attempted read less like Dickens and more like Seuss.

A few years back I was blessed with the opportunity to host a few hunters from New York.  One of my favourite aspects of hunting is the openness of conversation that often happens on a long walk in the grouse woods.  Two men can enter the cover complete strangers and emerge life long friends in the matter of minutes.  I met Larry and Perry at the local Tim Hortons, because what better way to begin your first hunt in Canada.  We hunted hard for the next four days, and I would alternate which of them I would wander with.  We shared moments in those four days that I would estimate to take four years in any other atmosphere.  One question that I always find myself asking is “how did you get your start bird hunting?”. On a particularly casual walk with Perry, we decided to take a rest in a mossy clearing amongst some thick pines. His dog elk loafed around us, taking periodical rolls on the soft damp moss in an attempt to cool off.  I posed my favourite question to Perry and his answer still rings in my ears today.  As a young boy Perry would see hunting magazines at the barber shop with their beautiful cover art enthralling him in the magic of the moments captured. This answer is the exact reason why I wish I could paint!  I am constantly seeking ways to share the emotional connection that I have with hunting.

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”Henry David Thoreau

This quote perfectly matches a thought that I find floating in my head often as I’m wandering behind my dogs.  Recently I was hunting with my young GSP Hattie, hoping that things would come together for her this fall before the snow fly’s.  I loaded her kennel onto the back of an old Honda four-wheeler, and we headed out to hit my “best” covers.  Being on the back of the Honda was another first for Hattie but being the ever cooperative girl that she is I heard no complaints.  We shot straight towards my favourite cover, one that I know to hold both grouse and woodcock.  There would be no disappointment.  Within 50 yards of the bike Hattie began her cat-like slink, and I readied myself for the point.  On the edge of the old logging road there was a small clump of 8ft tall pines.  All around was roughly 15-year-old poplar and birch, with an impenetrable base of tag alders.  Hattie was locked up staring directly under the pines.  I approached wide around her with the thought of a grouse flushing out the backside.  I was directly on top of the pines when a woodcock took flight and fell to the first barrel of my 20 gauge.  This moment would make a beautiful painting, but there was better yet to come.  We carried on with our hunt, and after four very wild grouse flushes and a bumped woodcock we made our way back towards the Honda.  I was relaxing to the methodical sound of her bell, looking at a moss-covered slash pile of wood left behind by the logging company many years ago.  I was so taken in the beauty of life growing out of these dead trees that I didn’t notice the silence of the bell.  The point-only beep brought me back to reality, and as I fired both barrels at the weeble wobble of that woodcock I wished for a pause button. To be able to share the emotions felt between a perfectly pointed bird, the freedom to hunt in such beautiful country, the disappointment yet joy of a bird flying away, and the memories of what must be a hundred walks on the same trail.  A picture cannot do that justice.  I guess I will have to rely on my long windedness when it comes to bird hunting for the foreseeable future!