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Dove hunting is perhaps the easiest of the wing shooting disciplines. It is fundamentally the most basic of all hunting, a social hunt or shoot more than anything else. Dove hunting doesn’t require an abundance of gear or preparation. The most that must be done is a bit of legwork in the form of a little preseason scouting to find concentrations of doves. Once out in the field and after choosing the best spot to shoot at incoming or passing doves, it’s pretty clear and easy what needs to be done. Add in a variety of dove species like mourning dove, white-winged dove, white-tipped dove, Eurasian collared-dove, and many others and the opportunity grows.

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Look, I understand. You’ve seen countless social media posts about how productive this corner of the state is. Your news feed is stacked with photos and stories of covey after covey that hold tight for dogs with any suggestion of point drive. In reality, the vast majority of these photos were taken by local dedicated bird hunters with dogs that have a Ph.D. in the habits and terrain of their local quarry. Or are at least veteran road trip hunters who have already been there and hunted that. The tailgate shot on social media is just the sum of hundreds of hours and hundreds of miles.

But alas, you do not have the time to invest in gathering this amount of on-the-ground information. It’s been my experience that left to its own devices, an upland road trip can quickly leave a beginner flustered, unable to identify proper cover, and driving in circles looking for “the field of dreams” where birds flush from the cornucopia as you drive bye, cackling, “Come hunt here!”

As I have yet to have this happen, here are a few ideas to help avoid the road trip traps that I have found myself in over the years. 

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Whether you live in ruffed grouse country or are inspired to take a trip to covers around the United States or Canada, it’s important to have a basic understanding of how to hunt ruffed grouse. A simple look at the basics can start the wheels turning into more advanced techniques and ideas for successful ruffed grouse hunting.

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On October 19, 2018, sunny skies combined with blustery winds and warmer temperatures, 25 mph and 63 degrees to be exact, led to an oddly successful day in the grouse woods. Too warm and too windy to be considered ideal grouse hunting conditions, I hiked 9.24 miles and burned 2,624 calories over the course of 5 hours, 29 minutes and 36 seconds of hunt time. And best of all, after all the miles, minutes and calories, I flushed 16 ruffed grouse and 28 American woodcock while managing to bag 4 grouse and 3 woodcock.

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If you want to start a fight just call someone’s Deutsch-Drahthaar a wirehair . . . I know, I’ve done it before by accident, which led to my want to understand it better.

For those of us outside that world, we often scratch our head and wonder what is the difference between these two bird dog breeds? They started from the same bloodline, including such breeds as the Pudelpointer, Griffon, and the Deutsch-Kurzhaar. And in order for us to fully understand, we must go back the beginning and we should say, distinctively, when there was only one such thing as a Deutsch-Drahthaar.

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We know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. A squirrel is most definitely not an upland bird. But it is one of America’s most common small game/upland mammal species. And only a couple decades ago, virtually every hunter was also a squirrel hunter. While the squirrels are still common, the squirrel hunter has declined substantially since then. That’s a real shame because the Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) – or grey squirrel, tree rat, or bushy tail, depending on where you’re from – is a wonderful animal to hunt and makes excellent table fare. Here’s some background on this common little tree dweller, and how you can start hunting them if you haven’t before.

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The Beretta SL3 is a marriage of the cutting-edge technology Beretta is known for and the old world craftsmanship of handmade guns. I think it is always necessary to point out the success and reliability of the Beretta 686 as a staple in a world of over-and-under shotguns. This shotgun is even worlds past that, which leads to the why and how.

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Lately, there has been an increasing amount of “heat” around the shotgun choices of upland hunters of every stage and stripe. Now, the rant that could follow that statement could be contained in volumes. Instead of adding to the rants, we have decided to take the approach of addressing each myth one-by-one over the course of time so as not to cause a larger and more hostile panic from any one camp. This first myth I’d like to address is the idea that you need to shoot a double gun to be a bird hunter. The conversation certainly has some depth to it as that perception increases and decreases depending on which subculture you find yourself in. But here’s the short form summary of this whole article – shoot whatever shotgun that works for you.

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Roughly halfway between the coastal town of New Haven, Conn., and the capital of Hartford lies the city of Meridian, the one-time home to the illustrious, fabled and renowned Parker Brothers Manufacturing Company. The state of Connecticut has a storied history of firearms manufacturing and to this day is still home to some of the biggest names in the gun business. Small and large purveyors of the shooting sports, gunsmiths and even some manufacturers still call Connecticut home, though many more have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, as is the case with the subject of this article — the Parker shotgun.

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