By Chad Love

If you've never visited the Nebraska sandhills, you owe it to yourself to visit this undeniably beautiful bird-hunting destination at least once. It's definitely bucket-list worthy. Greater prairie chickens and sharptails are the main upland targets here, with sharptails being the predominant bird in the northern portions of the region and prairie chickens dominating the south. But what is common throughout this ecosystem is the beauty of the area.

Undulating grass-covered sand hills, some rising as high as 300 feet, cover some 23,000 square miles of west-central Nebraska, with numerous spring-fed lakes dotting this unbroken, pristine and sparsely populated region. Being a lifelong prairie rat, it's also an area that has always intrigued me, so when hardcore bird hunter, central Nebraska native and sandhills lover Ted Gartner invited me to spend a day or two exploring the region while testing out Garmin's new Alpha track and train combination GPS/E-collar system, I jumped at the chance.

By Chad Love

I'm in the process of packing for the first extended bird-hunting trip of the season. I thought it would be interesting to list a few of the less obvious things I always take with me on these trips, and then solicit your essential items - since I always enjoy learning from you.

I carry a fairly extensive first-aid kit, but one thing I always keep in the bag are several syringes of an injectable antihistamine. Even though my dogs have the rattlesnake vaccine, an antihistamine can help stabilize a snake-bitten dog until you can reach a vet. Many guys carry Benadryl tablets for that purpose, but in the event of a snake bite I don't want to mess with trying to get a dog to swallow a pill. Plus, an injection will go to work much more quickly. Talk to your vet about it.

And speaking of vets, I always make it a point to have the phone numbers of local vets handy when I'm hunting away from home. In an emergency that can save you precious time.

By Tom Davis

Training, conditioning, and diet—that three-part foundation determines how well a dog will perform in the field. Diet probably gets the least attention of the three, yet according to Brian Zanghi, a nutrition scientist for Nestlé Purina and a waterfowl hunter, a few tweaks can make a huge difference in your dog’s ability to hold up over the course of the season. Here are his tips to a better dog diet.

DO feed your dog a performance diet—30 percent protein and 20 percent fat are the benchmarks—throughout the year. This regimen primes your dog’s metabolism to process oxygen and convert food into energy. “A dog fed a performance diet,” says Zanghi, “simply has more stamina right out of the box than a dog fed a diet lower in fat and protein—what are often called maintenance diets.”