| Harold Langdon, the "Beagle Man" |
The January 2011 issue of North Carolina Sportsman is now out and available for those who subscribe and it's also likely found in your favorite sporting and hunting goods stores. If you turn to pages 70-79 you can read a story, with side bars, by Craig Holt, editor, writer and photographer about our Kappa Sigma Nu brother, Harold Langdon of Johnston County.
Harold is one of the early members of the Kappa Sigma Nu Colony whose efforts, along with those of Bill Love and others lead to the establishment of the Eta Beta Chapter.
Harold trains some of the top rabbit dogs in North Carolina and Craig has done an excelent job of capturing the essence of Harold's roll in the dog training arena. With permission from the author, we have reproduced here a copy of the article, including Craig's side bars and we have featured a great photo of Harold that Craig provided.
The magazine is found on the Internet at www.NorthCarolinaSportsman.com, so check it out. Sigma Nu and Kappa Sigma Nu brothers who hunt and/or fish can also subscribe to the printed monthly editions by contacting: North Carolina Sportsman, 1131 Anderson Street, Wilson, NC 27893. You may also contact Ty Conti, publisher at tconti@ncsmag.com.
Snake Reunion wishes to thank Craig Holt for his assistance and permission to use his article. Now enjoy reading about Brother Harold Langdon, "The Beagle Man" of Sigma Nu.
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If you'd also like to learn about Brother Harold Langdon's music and his CD, Hound Dog Blues, just go to the the sub-page titled Hound Dog Blues out to the right from this link or just click here. You're gonna love Harold's blues and shag or beach music. Scroll down and click on the music icon to play the song at home on your own computer.
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| KSN Harold Langdon our "Beagle Man" brother |
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The Head Beagle
Harold Langdon trains some of the top rabbit dogs in North Carolina; what he's learned will make you a better hunter.
By Craig Holt
Harold Langdon sat on a stump last January inside a cutover that was part of a large deer lease. “Need to take a rest,” said the 74-year-old. “And besides, the dogs are running that rabbit this way. Maybe he’ll pass close by enough that we can get a shot.”
The temperature that day had started well below freezing with a blanket of frost covering the ground at daylight.
Before the beagles had been released from their dog boxes, Langdon, the designated hunt-master, had a few words of wisdom for a dozen hunters standing in a semi-circle near pickup trucks that held three dozen beagles ready to leap from tailgates and begin another day’s adventure.
“I don’t want anyone to get shot, nor any of the dogs,” said Langdon, owner of Hillcrest Hounds of Smithfield. “We also want to eat what we shoot, so if anyone shoots one of my dogs, he has to eat him — after he pays me.
“One dog I own is worth $15,000, but the most expensive one I have here today costs $10,000. The others run about $500 each. So be sure what you’re aiming at before you pull the trigger.”
The hunters received Langdon’s message with a mixture of quiet laughter and understandable concern.
It’s not difficult to lure Langdon away from his home. All he needs is an invitation to hunt rabbits or a field trial. That’s what happened last January after the end of deer season when several Alamance County hunters got together and one of them, Eric White, invited Langdon to hunt near Saxapahaw.
The property, several thousand acres in the southern part of Alamance near the county landfill, is owned and managed by a deer-hunting club. It lies undisturbed by small-game hunters until after North Carolina’s white-tail season ends January 1.
That’s when one of the club’s members, Jim Copland, who also likes to rabbit hunt, invites local hunters with top-of-the-line beagle packs to chase cottontails.
Many of the invited hunters own the best dogs money can buy, and that’s how Langdon, a champion beagle trainer (Hillcrest Hounds, 919-934-1960) wangled an invitation.
“I’ve taken Eric (White) on a lot of hunts, so I kidded him that he needed to invite me sometime,” said Langdon, a former U.S. Navy pilot and navigator and later an insurance executive. “I’ve never been here before, but this looks like a really good place for rabbits.”
Langdon is in his second life’s phase of rabbit hunting.
When he was a child, his Johnston County tobacco-farming father wasn’t keen on activities that didn’t add to the family income. So several years passed before Langdon got his first set of rabbit dogs.
Then, after he left home for college, followed by service in the military, Langdon didn’t have time to hunt nor a place to keep beagles. After making his fortune in life insurance, he decided to chuck that occupation and return to his first love — hunting rabbits and raising beagles.
“My father wasn’t a hunter,” he said. “He believed in working his farms all the time. I remember asking him when I was about 9 years old for a beagle so I could go hunting. His answer was ‘What have you lost?’ ”
When he was 10-years old, Langdon said his father finally relented and replaced a radio with a .410 shotgun as a Christmas present.
“I started rambling the fields and woods,” he said. “Then I started begging my dad again to get me some beagles, and he finally bought me four dogs. It was hard to find me (at home) after that.”
After attending N.C. State University for three years as a veterinary student, Langdon transferred to East Carolina University, where he earned a music degree.
“I started a band during junior high, then at N.C. State, my band played Junior-Seniors (proms), fraternity parties and night clubs,” he said.
Langdon made a decent income with the band and had loads of fun, but by the end of his third year in Raleigh, State College’s veterinary school officials told Langdon he’d never get his degree because his grades were too low.
“I didn’t study much during that time,” he admitted. “I was having too much fun playing in the band.”
So he transferred to ECU where he majored in music. “Actually, I majored in trumpet,” he said, “because that’s what I played in the band.”
After graduating college, Langdon was about to be drafted. On the advice of his father-in-law, a lieutenant-colonel in the U.S. Army, Langdon entered Officers Candidate School and was trained as a Navy pilot. He later switched to being a navigator, flying missions to Alaska from his base in Hawaii.
“When I was in college, my dad called me up and said he wasn’t going to feed my beagles, so I sold them,” he said.
“After I got out of the Navy, I started in the insurance business in Honolulu. Finally, the company asked me to start a branch office in Fayetteville. Can you believe I was dumb enough to leave Honolulu for Fayetteville? But I did.”
Langdon worked in insurance for 27 years and made enough money to buy a house, boats, play golf and he purchased a home at the N.C. coast. But something still was missing.
“I had to work really hard so I didn’t have time for hunting or beagles,” he said, “even though I’d made plenty of money.”
After a divorce, Langdon said he was at a golf course one day when he decided he’d had enough of the insurance world, too.
“I wanted to do something I enjoyed,” he said. “I decided I wanted to hunt again, and if I did that, I wanted beagles. So I made a list of things to do – it meant buying some land for a place to keep my dogs.”
Langdon purchased a rental house in Johnston County, built some dog pens and allowed a family to live rent free in exchange for feeding and caring for his beagles. That was 28 years ago.
“I’ve been involved in training beagles and rabbit hunting ever since,” he said.
Habitat remains the key for having good numbers of rabbits, Langdon said. He has several Raleigh businessmen friends who own large tracts of land and invite him to bring his beagles to their property to chase cottontails.
“It’s hard to find the right conditions to hunt rabbits,” he said, “but cutovers are ideal places. What you need is thick underbrush that’s close to the ground so rabbits will have good cover and protection. If you don’t have that, foxes, coyotes and other predators will eat them. They also need cover to keep the hawks and owls from getting them.
“Other great places for rabbits are farms with land in the CRP (Conservation Reserve Program),” he said. “They let their land grow up, and it provides good rabbit habitat.
“It’s kind of like that old story of ‘B’rer Rabbit and the Briar Patch.’ If you’ve got briars close to the ground, it helps rabbits survive. That’s where you’ll find the majority of your rabbits today because everything wants to eat them. Coyote numbers are growing, plus hawks are (federally) protected and owls work on them at night. Even possums and raccoons will eat baby rabbits they find in the nest, along with crows.”
Fire ants also have become a major problem for Tar Heel state rabbits, he said.
“Fire ants are spreading across North Carolina, and if a female (doe) rabbit makes a nest and the fire ants find it in the spring, all you’ll have is a bunch of dead baby rabbits because they’ll sting and kill them all of them,” Langdon said.
He has three enclosures or “rabbit pens” that he uses to train his beagles. He sprays the pens each year to control fire ants and ticks.
In fact, rabbit pens are Langdon’s real secret to training beagles.
“Without pens and shock-control collars it’d be pretty difficult to train beagles,” he said.
Langdon rarely takes a shotgun with him these days, preferring instead to work his dogs for other hunters.
“You really can’t have a good hunt if more than one person is working the dogs,” he said. “If two people are hollering at them when they jump a rabbit, they’ll get confused. “So I just like to work the dogs and let others do the shooting.”
Choosing a beagle
When Harold Langdon evaluates rabbit beagles, he has in mind a specific set of characteristics he wants each dog to have.
Desirable puppy traits include innate curiosity, friendliness and tolerance of loud noises.
“If you’re looking at puppies, you might take out two you’re interested in buying and look for the ones with their noses on the ground all the time,” Langdon said.
“Then look for puppies that are inquisitive, who want to look in brush piles and weeds. The ones running up and down the path where you’re walking is not the one you want to choose.
“It also goes almost without saying you want a friendly dog.”
A final and important test is to see if a puppy is startled by loud noises.
“What I do is clap my hands around them while we’re walking,” Langdon said. “If a puppy tucks his tail, acts scared or runs away when he hears a loud clap, he’s probably going to be gun shy.”
As for evaluating older dogs, Langdon looks for desire to hunt, a good sense of smell and ability to stay the course when a rabbit jumps and runs away.
“First of all, you want a dog with some ‘hunt’ in him,” he said. “Somebody’s got to find the rabbit, and I need beagles that will get in the briars and brush piles and look for them.
“Then I need a dog with a ‘big nose’ that can scent rabbits and stay on their trail.”
Langdon said he likes to run six dogs per pack, but one beagle needs an extra-sensitive nose for “line control.”
“When a rabbit runs off, he leaves a line of scent, so you need a dog that is able to run that line of scent and not get side-tracked by other critters, especially deer,” Langdon said. “That’s line control.”
It’s also easy to see if an experienced beagle has learned the tricks rabbits use to elude pursuers.
“It’s easy to see if they know about ‘double-backs,’ ” Langdon said.
A double-back occurs when a rabbit puts some distance between himself and a pack of beagles. He’ll stop and hop back down the trail he’s just made, then make a giant leap to the side and sit still.
“The dogs will go past that (rabbit) and often become confused because the trail seems to have run out,” Langdon said.
“That’s when you can tell an experienced beagle. It’ll only take him a few minutes to figure out the rabbit has doubled-back on him. He’ll start casting in smaller circles around the point where the rabbit’s jumped.
Usually the rabbit will take off again when a dog gets within 20 feet, and the race will be on again.”
Training rabbit dogs
Training rabbit dogs is a full-time job for Harold Langdon. Luckily he has the acreage needed for proper instruction.
“I’ve got 225 acres now and three rabbit pens,” he said.
Langdon live traps wild rabbits then releases them in his pens. That enclosure helps his dogs learn line control.
“When beagles are puppies at 6 months old, they’ll automatically run a line of scent,” he said. “So you put ’em in a pen with nothing but rabbits, and they learn early what a rabbit’s line of scent smells like.”
However, rabbit pens aren’t similar to hunting in the wild where many creatures, especially deer, may be prevalent, particularly in cutovers where cottontails live.
So how does Langdon keep his beagles from chasing deer when they encounter a hot whitetail track?
“I use control collars, which some people call shock collars,” he said.
If his dogs begin chasing deer, Langdon has a remote unit that first delivers a buzzing sound to the collar.
“If the dogs don’t respond and keep running the deer, I’ll give them a mild shock,” he said. “If they continue to run a deer, I’ll increase the shock. Pretty soon the dogs learn they shouldn’t be chasing deer, and they’ll come right back to me.”
In the old days, before the invention of control collars, the only response a hunter had was to beat his dogs.
“That only made them hate you,” Langdon said. “Now when they come back, you love up on them and pet them. They learn to associate deer scent with a shock.
“It’s funny that some places we hunt are full of deer, and we can’t get the dogs to leave our feet.
They smell those deer and don’t want to leave you because they’re afraid of a shock.”
For people who think control collars are cruel, Langdon has a quick answer.
“Coyotes,” he said. “A deer sometimes can run seven miles, and if your dogs get lost, the coyotes will kill and eat them. In fact, coyotes love beagle dinners.
“So what’s worse? Using a control collar to teach your dogs to not run deer or having coyotes eat them?”
With prices of champion beagles running up to $15,000, that’s a pretty easy answer for Langdon.
Beagle and rabbit-hunting terminology
Like most outdoors activities, rabbit hunting with beagles has its own set of terms. Here are some of those terms and explanations of each:
Line Control: A beagle’s ability to smell a particular rabbit and stay on its track no matter how many other scents the dog encounters is line control. The “line” is a single rabbit’s scent trail on the ground.
Double-Back: When a rabbit attempts to throw a pursuing pack of beagles off its trail by running backwards down a trail it’s already run, then jumping to the side with a big leap is a “double-back.”
Big-Nose Dog: A dog whose specialty is detecting a rabbit’s scent in a brush pile or briar thicket and jumping a rabbit is a big-nose dog. Big-nose dogs usually have good line control.
Check: When a beagle or pack of dogs loses the scent of a rabbit, they’ll make ever-widening circles around that spot until they re-discover the bunny’s scent. This also is how beagles detect the scent of a rabbit that has ‘doubled-back.’ In a field-trail situation, the judges put a “check” beside a beagle’s name if that dog has circled to find the scent of a lost rabbit — so it’s a “check.”
Hot trail: When beagles are chasing a recently-jumped rabbit, a “hot trail” is a scent trail left by that rabbit.
Cold-nose Dog: A dog that detects the scent of an old rabbit trail and follows it is a “cold-nose” dog. If a dog is on the scent of a “cold” rabbit trail, it’s not supposed to bark until the trail becomes hot.
Side Rabbit: A rabbit that jumps and is seen by a hunter while dogs are pursuing a different rabbit is a “side rabbit.”
Tally-Ho: A cry, repeated several times, from a hunter to call the dogs when a rabbit jumps in front of the hunter but hasn’t yet been detected by the beagles. Pronounced tally-HO, the second syllable is said loudly. Usually “tally-ho” is repeated at least three times or more. It’s often used to summon beagles to an area so they can strike a hot trail or a side rabbit.
By Craig Holt
Editor/writer/photographer
4103 Bass Mountain Road
Snow Camp, NC 27349
Phone 336.376.9387
choutdoors47@yahoo.com
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