Memories of Finnegan
CRP and Wetlands Shaped and Defined the Lives of These Long-time Hunting Companions
It was one of the saddest moments of my life. I holding my old buddy Finnegan, watching through eyes clouded with tears as he drew his last breath and found his peace. I took some solace knowing his suffering was over, but even that wasn’t much comfort.
Finny and I shared thirteen and a half glorious years together. Far from your run-of-the-mill kennel dog, Finny was a go-everywhere, do-everything companion. As a pup he came to work with me every day, either sleeping under my desk or snuggling in his kennel. He was my constant companion for trout forays in western Wisconsin and a co-conspirator in some of the less-than-glorious adventures of my youth.
But while Finnegan participated in nearly every aspect of my life, he was first and foremost a working dog, one of the most enthusiastic and capable hunting dogs I have ever been around. He was equally at home in frozen cattail sloughs chasing roosters or in a patch of native prairie chasing sharptails, but his specialty was in driving across big water to rope a drake bluebill.
His passion was both a blessing and a burden. There was no retrieve too rough or long, no cover too dense, to deter him from the task at hand. But on slow days, his penchant for retrieving often manifested itself in whining, pacing and chewing cattails.
Finny truly lived a charmed life. He was born in the fall of 1994, right after the terrible drought of the late ‘80’s and early ’90’s finally broke and a new wet period began to drench the CRP lands of the Dakotas.
Those cover-rich CRP lands produced bountiful populations of upland birds to supplement a steady diet of duck hunts. Liberal waterfowl seasons reigned, and Finny was one of the primary beneficiaries. On his first trip to North Dakota he worked for 10 gunners on a long narrow pass in central North Dakota, and he would routinely retrieve limits for each.
As I was coming to grips that my old boy’s days were numbered, I was struck by the fact that the same conditions that provided Finny with a life of plenty were eroding at the same pace.
As I watched Finny’s back-end give out due to years of strain and toil, the conservation community was struggling with the loss of CRP and native pr
airie. As his demeanor changed likely in part to his own realization that he simply couldn’t be the dog he used to be, we watched the prairies go into drought. The world Finny and I knew throughout his life was changing before our very eyes.
And while my loss of Finny will bring tears to my eyes until we are rejoined, my concern over the state of ducks and the prairie landscape on which they depend is equally chilling. We have become accustomed to abundance, and maintaining that abundance will be a difficult challenge with skyrocketing commodity prices and less-than-desirable policy outcomes. But the fight must go on, and more diligently than ever because Seamus, Finny’s replacement, deserves to see the things his older brother saw.
And I know that Finny wouldn’t want it any other way; that he would demand we work as hard for the ducks as he did in the field with the dogged determination it takes to reel in a wing-clipped whistler on freezing November day or recover a rooster from a tangle of cattail and willows.
I owe him that much.
