Flushes & Noteworthy Points

Quite a Story from One Little Bird

Ernie Foster, longtime “Classic Upland Guns” columnist for The Upland Almanac, scored a special bird during last autumn’s hunting season: a banded woodcock fitted with a GPS transmitter.

Following his traditions formed over his 60-plus woodcock seasons, Foster was hunting in the Berkshire Mountains area of Massachusetts in early October. He and his two friends had already bagged several woodcock the first two days of the season. He shot the bird, and once the dog retrieved it, says Foster, “I noticed something that appeared to be a very thin black stick attached to the back of the bird. I did not pay any attention to what I saw and quickly stored the bird in my game pocket, making ready for another shot opportunity.”

Back at his lodge, Foster collected the day’s harvest and stored it in the bird refrigerator. Caleb, a youngster whom Foster and his son Mike have been mentoring of late, arrived at the lodge that weekend for a hunt. He went to the bird refrigerator to check out the week’s harvest and returned to the lodge’s social area to inform Ernie that the “stick” on the bird’s back had actually been the GPS transmitter’s antenna.

Foster is no stranger to banded woodcock, saying he’s harvested “several” of them. “In fact, in the 1970s, I hunted an area that, unknown to me, was near a capture banding site.” He harvested several banded birds from that area and reported them to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One night he got a call from the woodcock banding project leader who asked him not to hunt there anymore because he was “harvesting all our banded birds, bringing the project to a screeching halt.”