by Phil Bourjaily

Today’s tip: Have a backup plan, and have a backup to your backup plan.

This morning’s Plan A was to hunt a gobbler I found earlier in the week. The season is almost over and the wildlife area I hunt has been deserted for days so I was very surprised to find the only other vehicle on 6,000 acres parked at my spot this morning. So much for Plan A.

by Phil Bourjaily

I have written a lot of how-to turkey stories over the years, but I generally ignore my own advice. Instead my personal approach to hunting boils down to: sleep late, get lucky. This morning I actually woke up at 4:30 a.m., thought about getting out of bed, then decided against it. It’s not that I don’t like getting up in the early morning, it’s that I hate feeling wiped out later in the day when I do.

So I left the house at the crack of 6:30 a.m. As an afterthought, on my way out the door, I grabbed a new mouth call from the box where I store the calls sent to me by manufacturers to try. I had noticed yesterday the ones in my vest were starting to fall apart and thought I should add a new one.

by Phil Bourjaily

Last weekend I took a National Sporting Clays Association class for my Level I instructor certification. It was a wonderful experience, I learned a ton, and I’ll be writing a column about it in the magazine in the future.

However, since this blog space is supposed to contain “rantings and ravings” let me take the only complaint I have about the class and run with it. We did not learn to teach students how to shoot from a low-gun, unmounted start. Sporting Clays--once called “Hunter’s Clays”--used to be about hunting practice, just as skeet (another game that has abandoned the low-gun start) was. American sporting clays rules now allow a premounted gun as in trap and skeet. Unless you shoot international skeet or FITASC which do require a low-gun, there is no need to learn how to mount a shotgun.

by Phil Bourjaily

At SHOT I ran into my friend Mike who works for a maker of game calls and accessories of all kinds. I asked if there was anything new in duck and goose calls. “Waterfowl sales are soft,” he said. “Having a duck lease costs a lot of money and not many people can afford it anymore. Waterfowl is getting to be our own little sport of kings here in America.” I had just come from the Benelli booth, where I saw the new Performance Shop Super Black Eagle II.

It’s an already expensive gun with enough aftermarket barrel and choke work done to give it a $2900 sticker price. Yes, that is a lot of money for a semiautomatic shotgun. And yes, the first run of 600 had already sold out.*

So, while affordable duck calls like the ones Mike’s company makes aren’t selling in huge numbers, at least 600 people in the United States apparently have money to spend on a high-end waterfowl gun, and, I assume, a lot to spend on their waterfowl hunting in general. Waterfowling has always attracted the wealthy, but there used to be room for the regular guy in the sport, too.