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The Acreage Trap
Bird Hunters May Find Far Less Huntable Ground This Fall On paper, it can look like a great year to hunt birds in the West. The maps are full of public access. Walk-in programs advertise hundreds of thousands — in some states, millions — of acres of private land open to hunters. CRP still covers…
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Life Lists
Jon and I have been here before—heavy legs and burning lungs. We’ve circled this peak, crossing boulder field after boulder field. It’s taken nearly four hours to complete the circuit around this 12,000-foot Uinta peak. I’m drained. Ida’s standard Lab trot has surrendered to a nearby amble. But then I see it—for most, it would…
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Rio Flufferbunny
It was fall when she came to us on a plane from New Mexico, all legs and ears and sharp puppy teeth. She pointed from the womb — butterflies, song birds, turtles, tufts of grass stirred by a breeze — nothing was safe from…
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Bird Hunting Karma Exists
The idea that what goes around comes around can be captured in the simple word Karma. Go ahead and scoff if that hocus pocus doesn’t sit well with you, but Karma isn’t magic and bird hunting karma is definitely real. I believe that in the field, if you opt for what is right, even though…
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Highlights From the 2012 Bird Hunting Season
It seems like eons ago when we were climbing to 12,000 feet in the Ruby Mountains in pursuit of Snowcock. But it was just a short six months since we set off to start the 2012 bird hunting season. Now that wild bird hunting in the lower 48 has ended I sit here reflecting on…
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A Labs First Day Afield
“No, I don’t think you understand, he has NO prior hunting experience…only obedience training.” I wrote to Brian, my new upland hunting buddy. The early morning email asking for my young lab and me to attend an upland hunt had caught me by surprise, putting a nice end to a long workweek. “Kali, it doesn’t…
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End of Season Omens
Rio the setter suddenly hits the brakes, sliding to a stop on a steep grade beside an old logging road being reclaimed by the forest. We’ve spent a couple days wandering the hills of West Virginia searching for late-season Ruffed Grouse with no luck. I can tell by her stance, even on this awkward angle,…
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The Hunting Singularity
The Singularity is a hypothetical future point where self-aware machines run improvement cycles resulting in super-intelligence that is uncontrollable. Basically, humans create machines that make human ideas and intelligence obsolete and irrelevant. In ways it sounds like a far off time somewhere in outer space. But dig into interviews with some of today’s tech gurus…
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The Alaska Standoff
Alaska and I are at odds. I’m here to take her birds. She’s not giving them up easily. I’m to earn them one vertical foot at a time until she has determined that sufficient toll has been collected. She’s happy to show amazing places, jaw-dropping beauty, an abundance of nature viewing unrivaled anywhere else in…
