Commissions for Better or Worse
Commissioning original artwork can be a dream come true ... or a nightmare. A renowned sporting artist discusses the pros and cons, for painter and collector alike. Can a collector order a piece of art to be conceived and executed to his own specifications, much as he...
Aiming At Night
Still in the dark about night vision and thermal sights and gobbledegook thereof? To enlighten... The feral pig appeared with the first stars. I was already hiking to the car. A quick sit steadied the rifle; but the reticle vanished in night’s shadows and the boar...
World Records Tumble at Copley’s 2025 Sporting Sale
On July 10 and 11, Copley Fine Art Auctions held its 20th-annual Sporting Sale. Consisting of 637 lots, the sale surpassed its $2.6 million high estimate, achieved a 95% sell-through rate, and once again set many new world records. Categories represented in the sale...
People Like Us Never Grow Up
I do not mean to sound bitter about this, for perhaps it is not the fault of the wet-eared young... This piece is being written in a bug-ridden swamp on the banks of the sluggish yellow Tana River, in northeastern Kenya, where the big elephants bugle and the baboons...
Sporting Classics TV Season 7 Episode 4 Trailer
This week, Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey returns to the Iberian peninsula for an unforgettable wingshooting and big game combo as Chris Dorsey and friends enjoy driven partridge and Ibex hunting. The episode is a celebration of the fantastic hunting culture in...
Carving Out a Duck Hunt
Tom Modin doesn’t see himself as much of an artist, but his hand-carved, hand-painted decoys say otherwise.
Uncle Jim’s Gun
“The Model 42 was his go-to gun to put meat on the table.”
Rogue Male: Ewart Grogan
There is a certain kind of man who can get away with damn near anything. They generally come from a line of charming rebels and often combine good looks with a devil-may-care attitude and a distaste for authority. Standing alone is their superpower, vanity their...
Summer Book Sale
Now through Labor Day, enjoy 50% off select titles during our Summer Book Sale! From thrilling adventures and classic deer hunting tales to timeless stories and epic African safaris, these books capture the spirit of the hunt and the art of the wild. Click Here to...
Respect
An acronym for hunting and living, as shared and taught by a loving grandpa.
Black-Horn Buck
Toward the close of a glorious day in late September, I had gone down to the river from home to roam the wilderness of a neighboring plantation. The noble house that once stood on the bluff overlooking the lower reaches of the Santee was burned more than a century...
Voodoo Sheriff’s Colt
We had a voodoo sheriff when I was coming up. He and Pappy were best friends. Ed McTeer turned to the black arts to extract confessions and make himself bullet-proof. It served him well one night when a desperado cut loose in some dim-lit island juke joint, five shots...
The Genius of Gene Hill
Hill could take the simplest of subjects and turn them into literary magic with a blend of wit, whimsy, and wisdom.
A Rush of Black
We stood now in the shade of the trees with great smooth trunks, circled at their base with the line of roots that showed in rounded ridges up the trunks like arteries; the trunks the yellow green of a French forest on a day in winter after rain. But these trees had a...
Sporting Classics TV Season 7 Episode 3 Trailer
This week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey features a tour of the pheasant belt as Chris Dorsey and Domenico Orzi take a road trip through South Dakota to hunt at three spectacular venues. The series airs on prime-time on Thursday at 10pm ET, with...
The Art of Pointers and Flushers
The wind shifted overnight, and those northerlies sure cut yesterday’s highs in half. Replacing the hazy hot and humid was dog running weather; mid 40-degree highs, moderate humidity and a consistent, light-variable breeze. Carried on the wind was more than scent, and...
Special 44th Anniversary Two-Year Subs, Only $44
It’s our 44th anniversary and you get the gift! From now until the end of July, you can get a 2-year subscription (16 issues) at 20% off our regular price of $54.95. Right now, enjoy a 2-year subscription for only $44! Already a subscriber? We’ll automatically extend...
Passing The Buck
First published in the November, 1974 issue of Florida Sportsman, this piece is included in Dickey’s Backtrack (1977). As he so often does, the author takes a mundane matter and has you smiling in short order. The biggest problem in going hunting is that you might...
Connecticut Shotgun RSP
Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Company makes and markets a stunning array of shotguns including the A-10, Revelation, Inverness, RBL, Model 21 in an over/under version as well as the traditional side-by-side and a dedicated modular competition gun that it calls the...
Three Classic Hunting Tandems
Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison in football. Chevrolet and Corvette in automobiles. Rodgers and Hammerstein in song writing. Cotton and blue jeans. Bacon and eggs. Certain pairings make both partners more than the sum of their parts, even among rifles and...
Discovering Uruguay’s Bird Hunting Wonderland
An orange and white Brittany named Mia slinks cheetah-like through cover, crouching motionless on her belly as she peers like a weathervane into the wind, nosing the scent of a partridge-sized bird known locally as a perdiz (partridge in English). The small game bird...
Binding An Elephant
The flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg provides those unwilling to embrace the charms of Ambien with ample opportunity to think. In point of fact, beyond ample. It offers a rare and uninterrupted block of time that is best used for pondering complex issues in great...
Colonel Colt and His Pistols
For nearly two centuries, Samuel Colt's firearms have been changing the course of history. And the legacy lives on. By all indications, he never should have succeeded in life, and if he had listened to what others told him, the name of Samuel Colt would probably be...
Sporting Classics TV Season 7 Episode 2 Trailer
This week, Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey celebrates the best of land, sea and air on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains as elk, mule deer, pheasant and trout are all in play at Elk Creek Ranch. The series airs on prime-time on Thursday at 10pm ET, with...
When the Hounds Bark Treed
“They’re treed! Let’s go, let’s go, lets go!” shouted my dad while taking off at a fast trot. I did my best to follow. My six-year-old legs were not long enough to equal my Dad’s stride, but I followed as best I could at a near all-out run. Soon, Dad was a hundred...
Florida’s Proposed Bear Hunt Pits Science Versus Emotion
After years of bear population increases and growing numbers of human-bear conflicts, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) voted 4-1 last May to open a limited bear hunt for the first time since 2015. Not surprisingly, the proposed season has...
Sporting Classics TV is Back!
Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey returns to Outdoor Channel next week! The first episode of 2025 is a pursuit of Scotland's ultimate sporting quest - the MacNab - where one must take a stag, a brace of grouse, and a salmon in one day. The series airs on prime-time...
Proposed Land Sale Pits Senate Republicans Against Key Constituency
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill suddenly turned ugly for America’s 60 million hunters and anglers after Utah Senator Mike Lee proposed selling up to three million acres of federal land in the West. Sportsmen and women are traditionally among the most reliable...
Call to Glory
They mended our imagination. The most astounding canine players ever to grace the century-and-a-quarter theater of American pointing dog trials. Can we help but suppose which was best? Sioux, La Besita, Palamonium. Luminary, Red Water Rex, Native Tango. Toe the...
Gertrude the Mason Brant Decoy
Born in a small shop behind William Mason's home, Gertrude the decoy would live a life most fulfilling. Here are a few of the many stories she has to tell. Hello, my name is Gertrude. I was named after Bob’s Aunt Gertrude Reade, a woman with a special gleam in her...
Sasquatch in Arctic Alaska
Long before I came to Alaska, I had been fascinated with the folklore and reports associated with the Abominable Snowman, Yeti, Sasquatch and Bigfoot. As a senior in high school I wrote a term paper on the legendary wild men that had been reported from so many places...
The Red Knife
The old knife was one of those singular objects in life that can never be replaced, an inseparable part of what and who you are.
A Company of Gentlemen Adventurers
The huge beast literally ripped off Pickering’s head.
In My Opinion
Interesting ideas that defy proof appeal to me, because facts have a way of strangling speculation and pestering us daydreamers. I have longed to scratch some of my itches in public, so here they are. You may not itch in exactly the same places, but hear me out....
Fishing For Dinosaurs: A Quest For Sturgeon
Hook into a 250-pound fish whose ancestors date back 100 million years and you begin to wonder if you’re reeling a dinosaur through a wormhole--as if you’re about to reveal a beast that doesn’t belong in our epoch. Such are first impressions when sturgeon fishing on...
The Stalemate
Ryan Bybee is a tough guy to fish with. Well, for me, anyway. It’s not that we don’t have a good time when we’re fishing together, it’s just that we have different ways of fishing. I like to run and gun. Find the active fish, pick off the biters, move, move, move....
Hybrid Striped Bass Fight Hard But Taste Delicious
Fishing with longtime striper and hybrid guide Chip Hamilton on South Carolina’s Lake Hartwell, we were primed to get our fishing strings stretched by these powerful fish. Getting three outdoor writers on the same boat, and all in accord on the singular objective of...
The Old Man’s Leopard and the Omen
It had to be an evil omen. The first glow of the sun eased out the night and pinked the peaks of the majestic Water Berg Range. Towering mountains, like a series of huge waves about to crash onto the land below and a crumbling old stone house guarded by flat-topped...
Frank Young: An Angler for the Ages
As a trout fisherman, Frank was simply the best I have ever been privileged to witness in action, and I’ve been astream with the likes of Gary Borger and Lee Wulff.
Lynn Bogue Hunt: Angler, Hunter, Artist
Angler, hunter, and above all artist, Lynn Bogue Hunt was the most popular and prolific outdoor illustrator in mid-20th century America.
45-70 Govt. Versus Warthog
From Ron Spomer Outdoors The 45-70 Govt. carries a powerful mystique. Big bore. Heavy hitter. Knockdown power. A favorite of commercial bison hunters in the 1870s. So how do you think it performed on this 90-pound African warthog? Fort Richmond Safaris PH Geoffrey...
In The Court Of The Ruffed Grouse King
In the pine barren, the pasture’s edge, the orchard, this is the ruffed grouse’s court . . . and we are honored to be there. In an orchard, long abandoned, we make our way toward a solitary tree, one of few bearing apples this fall. That it has fruit at all strikes me...
Wild!
Just when you think a hunt couldn’t possibly get more dangerous and exciting, something really wild comes along.
A Turkey World Slam
The pursuit of mountain game throughout the world has been a passion for most of my life. But now, having reached four score and three and endured four heart operations, I was not looking for strenuous high-altitude climbing. So, finding myself once again hunting at...
Copley’s Sporting Sale 2025
On July 10 and 11, Copley Fine Art Auctions, the nation’s premier decoy and sporting art auction house, will hold its twentieth-annual Sporting Sale, coming after the firm’s record-setting $3-million Winter Sale. This major auction, and its accompanying 300-page,...
The Phantom Setter
Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1961, this story is one of the finest ever written about gundogs and grouse hunting. It is certainly the most chilling.
Deadly Botswana Cape Buffalo
The most rarefied air on Earth is the painfully thin atmosphere between you and the malignant stare of a wounded Cape buffalo. The tiny bit of oxygen on the top of Mt. Everest must seem like molasses by comparison. You are connected in a wild, primordial way, as he...
The Homecoming
Returning to his favorite squirrel woods after 40 years, he would rediscover the land and a few things about himself. Dank black pools of standing water enveloped the timber, mostly oak and hickory. The trees were massive in their maturity, casting the woodlot and its...
Why the Wye
An act of God combined with a dash of Grace creates a trout stream of royal proportion. Not far from the dirt path was a field thick with wide stalks of dark green, calf-high grass. To get a glimpse of the sun, wildflowers in nearly every hue—soft purple and blue,...
The Outdoor Writing Life
It is commonplace for long-established writers, late in their careers, to indulge in some type of retrospective look at their decades of literary endeavor. The word “indulge” is used advisedly, because to some degree virtually every such effort involves cosseting of...