A Formal Education
Early in Robert Redford’s film adaptation of “A River Runs Through It” a young Norman MacLean and his brother Paul sprawl in a meadow discussing their plans for the future. When Norman asks Paul what he wants to be when he grows up, Paul wastes no time in deliberation. “A professional fly fisherman”, he says, triggering a firm disavowal from the elder MacLean. “There is no such thing,” says Norman, to which Paul, visibly disheartened, responds by committing himself to a more realistic career as a professional boxer, laughing off Norman’s suggestion that he, Paul, might pursue the clergy.
The bitter truth is that Norman MacLean was, and remains, largely correct: there really is no such thing as a “professional” sportsman or woman. Hunting, fishing, and like outdoor pursuits have a way of defying professionalization, meaning that one who prefers to cast the fly or pull the trigger or draw the bow is rarely employed, or compensated, to do so. To the contrary, those who carry their love of outdoor sport across the threshold from avocation into vocation generally put down the rod or the gun entirely, as the day-to-day pros on the hunting and fishing scene are the guides, who, in a poetic gesture that should not go unnoticed, exercise their prowess by cultivating experiences for others to take part in. Oh the irony: while professional baseball players play, professional painters paint, professional writers write, professional hunters and anglers only sparingly shoot the animal or catch the fish, and then in their leisure time, just like the rest of us. A grizzled old bird guide once shared this qualification about his job: “I hunt birds more than anyone I know,” he allowed. “But I almost never pull the trigger.”
Guiding, therefore, becomes a craft all its own, one that requires a fundamental mastery of the activity itself, but then demands an even greater awareness of the myriad variables that allow a guide to deliver a safe, enjoyable, and educational hunting or fishing experience to a paying guest. Consider the bird hunting guide who must understand the game well enough to at once find birds in a sea of terrain, handle a string of dogs, and choreograph the progress of a team of gun-bearing hunters through unpredictable country. He or she must be a shooting coach and a hype-man, a risk assessor and a medic, one willing to enforce firm boundaries of behavior while cultivating a culture of fun. The guide must be an appeaser of egos but no pushover, tirelessly optimistic, outwardly agnostic when politics, religion, or child rearing enter the conversation. And in the end, the bird guide must enjoy executing these complex acrobatics in pursuit of a reward far more subtle than a bird in hand or a bulging game bag. The reward, for the bird guide anyway, is the knowledge that a gift of time afield was given with grace and intention.
***
March brings a hint of spring to central Idaho. The late-season grass on the sidehills of Lawyer Creek Canyon are broken and dry, but the days are getting longer, and the morning chill lingers a little less as March takes hold. Outside the small town of Kamiah, at the Flying B Ranch, the official bird-hunting season concluded a couple weeks back. Nonetheless, a group of men, women, and dogs has convened above Lawyer Creek to take to the field as part of Flying B Ranch’s Wingshooing Guide School. Over the course of a week, the guide staff at “The B” will illuminate both obvious and subtle facets of the Wingshooting Guide profession to this group. Staff will lead sessions in etiquette, field safety, dog handling, communication, professional presentation of person and gear, and management of the hunt. For their part, the students will live an approximation of the guide’s life for a few days, in as immersive a setting as can be created; they will move from classroom to field, and day by day will come to understand the dawn-to-dusk reality of delivering a guided day at the highest level, while simultaneously reacting to the wants and limitations of the most demanding customer base.
The first day of the course arrives with a chill, as the sun has yet to drain its warmth into the canyon bottom. The group is happy to gather in the Lodge dining room with cups of hot coffee, and all chatter nervously, unsure of what lies ahead. A wiry, dark-haired Flying B Guide named Chad Weber kicks school into session. “I’ve been guiding bird and big game hunters for twenty-six years at several operations across the US,” he says, “but in 2010 I started guiding at the Flying B, and quickly realized I was in the big leagues. Right out of the gates I looked around and I saw the quality of the folks working here, and I thought about how the guide staff at FBR had a level of expertise, of professionalism, that I’d not seen anywhere else. I asked myself how a place like the Flying B could leverage that expertise, could help enhance the quality of bird guides everywhere. This Wingshooting Guide School is the solution we’ve come up with.”
Chad then asks the students to introduce themselves and to share a bit about what steered them towards the FBR Guide School. One by one the students speak up, and nearly to a person, regardless of age or gender or experience, they describe a love of dogs and bird hunting, and a desire to find a pathway that would allow them to take part in the act of hunting over dogs each day. They seem to want to carry their relationship with bird hunting as far as it can go, and guiding has presented itself as the pinnacle of the bird hunter’s professional craft.
Love of bird hunting would logically be the connective tissue that binds all present, but as Chad Weber listens, it seems he knows that a genuine desire to go bird hunting is no guarantee of success in this school, or in the bird guide profession. What will reveal itself over the coming days is evidence that the bird guiding game rewards those who wish to juggle an array of dynamic variables (people/dogs/guns/terrain/weather/birds/etc.), maintain a tone of fun and safety in the field, and simultaneously never lose the desire to surprise and delight each and every client, each and every day.
***
The guide staff at the Flying B Ranch toyed with the idea of a Wingshooting Guide School for several years before launching the inaugural program in 2019. Such trainings had existed for some time in the fishing and big game disciplines, but the unique skills required by bird guides were generally learned and refined on the job. Guiding bird hunters differs distinctly from guiding anglers or big game hunters in that the hunters are constantly moving over varied terrain, typically in a team of two or three. There are dogs on the ground that need to be handled, interpreted, and attended to, and often when the quarry presents itself, multiple targets present themselves and only fleetingly, demanding a quick reaction. In a day of upland hunting, numerous guns are fired numerous times, in all sorts of directions, by people whom the guide barely knows. The guide’s ability to steer such controlled chaos through a day was a skill historically developed through seasons of trial, error, and perseverance. The staff at the Flying B saw an opportunity to streamline that learning process, and to leverage the intellectual property that they’d accumulated over decades. As the details of the concept and curriculum were refined, three primary goals titrated: overtly, the hope was to produce guides of highest caliber who might fill FBR’s employment pipeline and that of fellow Orvis Endorsed Wingshooting Lodges. Additionally, the school was meant to provide a forgiving training ground within which seasoned guides could present would-be guides with a breadth of realistic scenarios and challenges in multiple mock hunts, and provide feedback in real time. Finally, the school was structured philosophically to communicate to both existing guides and newcomers, and maybe to the wingshooting public, that bird guiding is a profession, one that requires mastery of a nuanced skill set.
Chad Weber and the staff of the FBR Guide School recognize that expertise will not be realized in a single week. That said, the school’s week-long curriculum runs students through a foundational education in the requisite skills. The first day of the course begins in the classroom with some get-to-know-you’s and intention-setting for the week. With participants and staff introduced, Chad and his fellow guides dig into guide etiquette, and the standard of excellence for a guide’s behavior and self-presentation. No stone is left unturned; students learn how to dress and communicate, maintain the professional appearance of self and vehicles, engage in acceptable topics of conversation, manage the pace and time afield, and be a clear leader of the hunt. Safety is an extensive throughline introduced on Day 1 and emphasized over the duration of the school. Similarly, the staff are unambiguous about sweatier topics, such as thoughtful dispatch of crippled birds, unobtrusive methods of correcting dogs in the field, and what to do if a wealthy, powerful, and paying client crosses a boundary of physical, emotional, or personal safety.
Recognizing that guides learn best by doing, the afternoon of Day 1 is given to student hunts. For most, the opportunity to hunt FBR’s glorious canyon is a pleasurable kick-off. As students take on the role of client, Flying B guides escort the students on a standard FBR upland hunt, modeling desired guide behavior and stopping regularly to shed light on why and how certain decisions are made. Students quickly grasp why a certain line of travel is taken through a certain field, why shooters are positioned in specific orientation to the guide and to each other, and why a distinct pace or cadence is set as it is. With a high benchmark introduced as a reference point, the students wrap the first day knowing how a professional bird guide should perform, and why.
Day 2 begins with a dog handling session presented by longtime FBR Guide BJ Walle. Though most participants either own dogs or have experience hunting over dogs, BJ is quick to tease out the unique way in which a Guide must pair and handle dogs in use with clients. Again, the Flying B model serves as the standard, and students learn that in working at a full-time Lodge such as FBR, a guide is called upon to run multiple dogs in the course of a day, often dogs that the guide does not personally own. What comes to light is the way in which guides are expected to size up dogs quickly, to establish authority and leadership, and to take mental note of each dog’s quirks, pace, and shortcomings. Though effective dog handling requires years of practice, BJ uses this half-day session to accelerate that learning process and to introduce key concepts; he dives into the characteristics of male dogs versus those of females, how to match a brace of dogs for effective hunting, and what breeds work best in what environments. He similarly covers health, care, fitness, and such ongoing needs of a working gundog before demonstrating how to handle a dog in the field. Of primary focus through the field session is the steering of dogs, how and when to make corrections, and how to maintain range that is workable for the client and the terrain.
As the week progresses, the days pivot a bit to emphasize mock hunts. In these hunts both students and guides serve as “clients”, and in rotation the students take turns delivering the hunt in a “Guide” role. Being that many contemporary bird guides will work on preserve properties, the students are called upon to “set the field” or stock birds prior to the hunt, pick up dogs, pick up clients, and drive to the pre-determined field to be hunted. As each student takes the reins and steers the hunt experience, mock “clients” present a series of scenarios to which the student guide must respond. These scenarios vary widely; student guides may be called upon to deal with a fictional presentation of challenging attitudes, health issues, injuries, disparate pacing, or clients who take unsafe shots. After the hunt is complete, these “teachable moments” are recounted and reviewed, and all present are given the chance to explore how effectively a scenario was dealt with. Over successive mock hunts and multiple imagined challenges, students learn a process or develop a mindset by which they can make decisions on the fly. In essence, the mock hunts and reviews add tools to their kit, and student guides come away with a solid foundation of what it takes to think like a professional bird guide.
“I’ve seen some students completely shut down,” says Chad Weber when asked how students typically respond to their first mock hunt. “I had one student up and quit the course then and there. But generally, students are just overwhelmed at first by how many things they need to keep track of. They make mistakes, and they get flustered. But as they stick with it, things come together. By the end of the week some people decide this is the career for them, and some people recognize that they’d rather just go hunting, with their own friends and their own dogs. Either way, when they go to bed after a day of mock hunts, they recognize that an awful lot has happened.”
Which is precisely the point that the Flying B Ranch Guide School set out to make. An awful lot happens over a guided day of bird hunting, and the guide is called upon to attend to countless variables, some of them controllable, some of them not.
***
Karen Syron, Marketing Manager and longtime employee of the Flying B Ranch, has watched guides come and go at the Ranch for nearly two decades. She was privy to the early ideation about the Guide School, and she watched it come to life. Since 2019 she has watched each cohort of students engage with the school, and she has done her best to track what each individual student has done with the education they gained. From this vantage, she reiterates a sentiment that all great bird guides know, but not all bird hunters know. “I hear lots of people set out to become a guide by saying ‘I’m a great hunter’, or ‘I love bird hunting’. What I know is that being a good hunter or loving hunting have very little to do with what kind of guide a person might be. A great guide is most interested in seeing how his dogs can perform best for a variety of hunters, how he or she can best accommodate every group that comes through the door. I guess you have to love bird hunting and be good at it at root, but being a guide is about so much more.”
In the end, it’s that quest for something more than the activity itself that drives a person to become a guide, and paradoxically, it is the guide, who gives up the need to pull the trigger, draw the bow, or cast the fly, who ultimately is the master of that very act. Guiding is a craft and a mindset all its own, one explored in depth each year at Flying B Ranch, where folks get to explore what they want to be when they grow up.
First Published in Covey Rise Magazine
