autodetect ethernet shield

Ok, so I freed up pins 0 and 1, by moving pins to to A1 and A2.

However it turns out, I still need to autodetect the ethernet shield.

in my void setup(), if I call
networked = Ethernet.begin(mac);

it takes a long time for DHCP to give up, and the code moves on to the next line.
Is there a fast way to check for the shield?