Nothing To Do for Three Weeks
I left long before daylight, alone but not lonely. Sunday-morning stillness filled the big city. It was so quiet that I heard the whistle of duck wings as I unlocked the car door. There would be ducks leaving Lake Michigan. A fine sound, that, early of a morning. Wild...
Sam “Bird” Fite
Seven Decades of Chasing the Elusive Drummer
Woodcock Days
The best hunting spots are secrets among friends, where a bird in the bag is just a bonus. A mist conceals these mountains. They are gray like bone. The sun will not rise above them for another hour, and yet it is eight o’clock. This is a favorite spot. I find...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 5 Trailer
When bobwhite quail populations in West Texas plummeted in 2010, concerned hunters took notice and banded together to fund research to find a solution to the mystery. Now the efforts from the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation are bearing fruit for wildlife in...
Ruffed Grouse Are Not Gentlemen
Ruffed grouse are survivalists, like anything wild. Keen masters of escape, Houdini had nothing on them. I’ve had them use the back door too many times to think it’s chance. And when that door is covered, they fly out the side window. I am convinced they thumb their...
Getting Socrates Drunk
Stuck for a name, we had it when Uncle Harry christened the stray pup “Socrates,” given his proclivity to poison himself. Worse than a baby in a bathroom cabinet, right from the git-go he liked stuff he shouldn’t and revealed a fatal attraction for everything liquid....
Mr. Detwiler: A Ghostly Grouse Hunt
Who was this strange old man who handled a shotgun like no one I’d ever seen? When I first saw him, I tried to duck back into the pines, but he raised his hand in greeting and I was stuck. All the while he was coming on over through the hawthorns, I cussed under...
Birds on the Wing
“When you have shot one bird flying, you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.” Before I was old enough to own a gun, wild game came to me via a boyhood...