Fall bird hunts bring out all sorts of hunters and all sorts of dogs. Most of the retrievers you see are familiar, like elegant goldens, and Labs that are wildly enthusiastic.

A black flat-coated retriever like Chloae first attracted the author's attention to the offbeat retrieving breeds. Photo by Christopher Butler.

One fall, however, I saw a dog that was unforgettable -- one that sparked my weakness for retrievers into a full-blown fascination. He had all the grace of a golden, with the same long, thick winter coat, but he was a glossy, shining black. He looked like a big golden someone had dipped in an inkwell.

I asked the owner if he was a black goldador crossbreed, or a cross with something like a Newfoundland.

"No," the owner said. "He's a flat-coated retriever."

Having never heard of the breed, I looked it up. That led to my discovery of not only flat-coats, but also curly-coated retrievers and that "little red dog" known as the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever. Those three, plus the Chesapeake Bay retriever, make up a foursome of lesser-known breeds that are rarely discussed, but just as versatile as their better-known cousins.

The place to begin any discussion of lesser-known retriever breeds is with the curly-coated retriever. In fact, this breed probably should be the starting point of any discussion about any of today's retrievers. Most historians say that this is the oldest of all the retrievers, and it figured significantly in the development of most related breeds. Thus, this breed deserves more recognition than it gets.

The exact lineage of all the retrievers probably will never be known exactly, since early breeders didn't keep the kinds of records or follow the same scientific approach that breeders do today. However, some generalizations are possible.

Flat-coated and curly-coated retrievers sprang from a common ancestry based on longhaired breeding producing the former and the shorthaired version becoming the curly-coated.

Flat-coated -- and even more rarely, curly-coated -- retriever breeding occasionally yielded a yellow-colored offspring. Early on, those pups were destroyed, but eventually some were bred, leading to today's golden retriever.

The Labrador retriever probably came from a cross between curly-coats and Newfoundlands, and some other breeds thrown in.

The Chesapeake Bay retriever is probably a mixture of curly-coats with some other breeds as well.

"Some of this is educated guesses," explained Jim Crosby, who has professionally trained more curly-coated title winners than anyone in the U.S., and is president of the Curly-Coated Retriever Club of America. "We're not really sure about a lot of it. Once you get back a couple hundred years, it's hard to say what really happened. But what we do know is that the curly-coated retriever has been a recognized breed for a very long time."