Mountain Feists

By Dean Fosdick

GREENEVILLE, Va (AP) - For well over a decade, John Berry has been silent partner to ``Katie" and ``Midge''_ two Mountain Feists trained to run circles around him while he moves slowly through the woods, stalking squirrels.
Berry is a game warden in northern Virginia and a die-hard squirrel hunter. More than that, he's passionate about working with treeing dogs while hunting squirrels.

The diminutive Mountain Feists certainly qualify.

``Any breed can make a good squirrel dog, but the Mountain Feist comes from a long line of treeing dogs,'' Berry says.
That means feist dogs that are silent while following a track. They don't make a sound until they tree, and then they jump excitedly up and around its base, barking with every breath to mark the location and signal their find.

``They may look like junkyard dogs, or something like you'd get out of a pound, but they're a small breed that hunts close,'' Berry says ``They constantly scan the canopy for squirrels and they'll hold them in the tree until you get there.''

Good squirrel dogs use their ears, their sight and an enhanced sense of smell to find the cover-savvy bushy tails. The terrier-sized dogs know enough to jump up onto downed trees to enhance their view, Berry says. If they hear something, they race through the woods to get to it.

``If they can't see the squirrel, they'll use their nose,'' he says. ``They'll find the scent on the last tree the squirrel was on.''
Squirrel hunting is an American tradition dating back to the founding fathers. The meat is mild and tender and game remains plentiful.

Squirrels, primarily the fox and gray varieties, range from southern Canada to the desert Southwest, and through the forests, farms and grasslands of the Midwest, East and Southeast.

You'll find gray squirrels living mostly in mature forests and woodlots _ rural and urban. Fox squirrels can grow to twice the size of grays, and tend in color to show rust-yellow and gray. They live primarily on the forest's edge, near cornfields, fencerows and dense stands of hardwood trees.

Gray squirrels favor acorns and other nuts, called ``mast,'' while fox squirrels forage for fruits, tree buds and mast, field corn, flowers and even insects. In Virginia, hunters take more squirrels than any other game species. During the 1989-1990 season, for example, 120,534 hunters bagged an estimated 815,000 gray squirrels and 88,700 fox squirrels in every county of the state, the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries says.

For a copy of the complete article, contact Dean Fosdick at deanfosdick@netscape.net.