Sporting

Wheat III, who has served on the boards of the Nature Conservancy and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, says he has undertaken several measures to boost the habitat for wild birds on his property. He has thinned standing pine to help create an understory conducive to quail habitat, initiated a predator control program, and planted longleaf pines and early-warm-season grasses. Well-run shooting preserves are mindful of the high rate of predation of both wild and pen-raised quail. Everything wants to eat a quail: Snakes, skunks, and raccoons want the eggs, while foxes, hawks, feral cats and the common house cat will attack the chicks and adults. Darin Strickland, Dave Pomfret’s assistant, points out that due to predation, the plantation puts back three quail for every quail a hunter takes out.

Good stewardship, as Wheat III points out, is not possible without good people running the property. Blandfield’s waterfowl manager, 70-year-old Bobby Swineford, is an expert duck- and goose-hunting guide—he’s been managing waterfowl hunts since 1984. He’s also a double A shooter on the sporting clays circuit. He was one of the first people Wheat hired when he started Blandfield’s waterfowl hunting operation in 2001.

According to Swineford, waterfowl need three things to flourish—food, water and rest—and they get all three on Blandfield’s large marsh, impoundments and ponds near the Rappahannock River. It is a genuine sanctuary, or rest, for waterfowl. “We have places on the property where we hunt ducks and geese,” says Swineford, “but we also provide places on this property where we never hunt or disturb them. We have built impoundment sanctuaries for waterfowl that no one disturbs, not during hunting season, not when hunting season is over, not ever!” Woe to the individual, employee or guest, who does not get that message.

Pomfret, Blandfield’s upland manager, also knows his business. Hired by Wheat two years ago, Pomfret, who is in his mid-60s, has been a professional bird dog trainer and trialer of pointers and setters since 1985. In the summer, Pomfret, like a number of serious bird dog trainers, heads north to continue dog training—in his case, to his home in North Dakota. When you quail hunt at Blandfield, he says, you are not following behind some plodding dog that bumps or blinks birds. You may be shooting over Daisy, the 2007 American Pointer Club National Champion, or Specter, an English setter, who is both a Field Champion and an Amateur Field Champion, or Tripper, another Field Champion setter. In other words, the dogs used for quail hunting may often have a higher pedigree than the people who are hunting with them.