Recent Fowl Articles

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Get-Smart Gobblers
I can't begin to tell you how many tom turkeys I've taught a thing or two during the past 25 years. Consider one gobbling bird my wife and I went after last spring. Just a little closer, I thought, as we carefully inched forward to find a suitable place to set up. Then I spotted the perfect tree only 30 yards ahead. We never got there. Instead we heard the dreaded "flap-flap-flap" sound of a turkey beating a hasty retreat. Not only had the turkey spotted us trying to make that last move, we'd "educated" him in the process.Don't get me wrong. I don't believe a gobbler is capable of reason.

Turkey Gun Accuracy
Turkey hunters aren't like wingshooters. Instead of being concerned primarily concerned with gun fit and performance with various chokes, shot sizes and loads, they are interested in how one very tight choke accurately delivers one size of shot to the target.Today there are numerous extra-tight choke tubes that either come with a turkey gun or are available through gun dealers, the Internet or by mail.

Sound Advice for Spring Toms
I've never met a turkey hunter who didn't love hearing the sounds of perfection. But have you ever stopped to think that flawless turkey talk has little to do with convincing a gobbler to approach an invisible hen? There's certainly nothing wrong with perfect calls, but I would trade them any spring day for perfect tactics. Allow me to explain.I faced a stubborn Indiana gobbler a few years ago. Because of a small hill that separated us, it was easy to get close to the eager-sounding bird.

Mastering The Layout Blind
Among waterfowlers they go by various names. Some call them layout blinds, while others refer to them as laydown blinds. I've even heard them called coffin blinds. Regardless of what we might choose to call it, this modern marvel ranks right up there in great ideas with waders that refuse to leak and shotguns that never miss. For the benefit of those who are not familiar with this wonderful piece of gear, it is a low-profile ground blind consisting of a camo-pattern fabric held in shape by an internal aluminum frame.

Worth The Wait
"To the north, straight ahead boys. Nice group…they're coming right at us. Get down! "Those were the long awaited words that I had been yearning to hear. It wasn't a morning's wait. Or even a couple of days. This had been six long years in the making.

Surefire Duck Spreads
I shot my first duck in 1974, a waiting to grow up kid in a too-big canvas coat toting a too-big--or at least it was at that time--Winchester Model 24 16-gauge side-by-side. It was a hen mallard, a one-legged hen mallard at that, which collided with my hastily thrown charge of hand-loaded #5 lead shot. To tell you the truth, I don't know who was more surprised--me, my Old Man, or that very first duck.Back then in Bob Wolfe's Swamp, we didn't use decoys. "Don't need 'em," the Old Man would say.

Are Quail On The Rebound?
They read like a series of obituaries, but the surveys and harvest reports are nothing more than a running commentary on the status of bobwhite quail. Call counts in Ohio are down over 80 percent in the last 20 years. Hunters in Missouri harvested just 258,000 birds in 2007, down from a peak of 4 million in 1969. It takes nearly twice as much time to find a covey in Mississippi in 2008 than it did just 10 years earlier. Call counts continue to slide in North Carolina. It's the same throughout the southern and eastern United States.

And The Winner Is...
Robert Bealle an artist from Waldorf, Maryland, took top honors at the 2009 Federal Duck Stamp Art Contest. Bealle's painting of an American wigeon will be made into the 2010-2011 Federal Duck Stamp, which will go on sale in late June 2010. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service produces the Federal Duck Stamp, which sells for $15 and raises about $25 million each year to fund wetland habitat acquisition for the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Water Fowlers' Haven
I don't think there would be much arguing before most water fowlers agreed that some of the best action to be had in the United States runs along the Mississippi flyway. In central Illinois in particular, the town of Pittsfield stands out.

Feathered Lightning
The scene of my first-ever dove hunt was one of those crowded fields where you have to root for a bird to get by everyone else so you can shoot it. The slow, the stupid and the unwary fell from the sky long before they got to within 100 yards of the knoll where I sat, partially hidden under the branches of a tree.The doves I shot at streaked by with their eyes and their throttles wide open. Up to that day, the only birds I had ever seen over a shotgun rib were ringneck pheasants clambering up and away over the cornfields.

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RESULTS 11-20 of 93