By Chad Love

With Christmas just a few days away, here are some last-minute gift ideas for the wingshooting, dog-owning person on your list. Or yourself.

Some of them I may have previously mentioned and am mentioning again because, well, I like them; others I just haven't gotten around to writing about yet. But all of them are things I have personally used and can recommend.

First up is L.L. Bean's technical upland pants. I tried them on a hunt in Montana and fell in love with them—hand-down my new favorite bird-hunting pants. They're light, fit well, tough where they're supposed to be tough, and stretchy where they're supposed to be stretchy. In the words of sexy Ned Flanders, "It's like I'm wearing nothing at all!" However, as comfortable as they were in the relatively thorn-free fields of Montana, I had my doubts they'd hold up to the vicious sandplum thickets back in Oklahoma. I was wrong. Halfway through our quail season and they still look great and perform flawlessly. At $109, they're not cheap, but good things rarely are. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

Response to the caption contest of me biting down on a Federal Prairie Storm round was outstanding.

At first, I thought I could pick a winner myself. Of course I preferred the ones that made me seem awesome and mythological, such as Duke123’s entry: [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

So, there I was, sitting in a box blind in Maine 10 minutes before last shooting light, looking through my scope at a hillside with a whitetail on it, trying to decide whether the creature had horns or not. This was complicated by the fact that the whitetail was already in deep shadow, and that the hillside was backlighted by the setting sun, and by the fact that it (the deer, not the sun) had its buttocks toward me and its head down in an infernal tangle of branches, weeds, and other annoying plant life.

I was looking at the critter through a Zeiss Conquest rifle scope and, good as the scope is, I was unable to tell if it was time to pull the trigger. Finally, since the light was running out, I said the hell with it and picked up a Zeiss 10x42 Conquest HD binocular (a loaner; sent it back yesterday) and saw at a glance what I could not see through the scope—that the beast was a doe and that the day was over. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

Some time ago, I called your attention to the Work Sharp Knife and Tool Sharpener, an ingenious device that enables the veriest dullard to put a murderous edge on just about anything. However, the system is for home use only as it requires electricity. Enter the Work Sharp Guided Field Sharpener 2.2.1, which solves this problem neatly. It’s around 7 inches long, weighs a couple of ounces, and consists of two diamond sharpening plates (fine and coarse) that are held in place by magnets, a ceramic rod with coarse, fine and fishhook positions, a small ceramic rod for serrated edges, and an impregnated leather strop. [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau

This may bring some pain to those of you who have already spent $5K or even $10K in years past to get your sub-MOA, long-range deer rifle with befitting scope and comparable binocular. But the gun and glass I carried last week while hunting mule deer in Oregon cost, all together, about a grand—which in this rotten economy should bring great delight and jubilation to anyone just getting into deer hunting or, say, to the Easterner or Midwesterner planning his first deer hunting trip out west where hyperaccuracy and quality optics come in handy.

I carried a Weatherby Vanguard Series 2 Synthetic in .257 Weatherby Mag (about $490 real-world price) topped with a 4.5-14x44mm Bushnell Legend Ultra HD Scope (about $280 street price) and a Bushnell Legend Ultra HD 10x42 binocular (about $250 street price). That comes to $1,020. I’ve used guns and glass costing much more and I don’t believe any of them would have served me substantially better as a practical matter. (By the way, NRA writer Aaron Carter—a far more accomplished rifleman than I—used the same rig to take his buck at 359 yards.)
[ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau

Okay, I’m done with the sixth-sense topic, but I need to reference it once more to make an entirely different point. Searching on Google before my last post to make sure Bestul’s “Sixth Sense” column had not previously run on the site, I came across a discussion on a popular whitetail forum in which one reader slams the article for mentioning the HECS StealthScreen suit, designed to insulate a human’s electromagnetic field, and the next reader then says, “Yes, I read that article…but kind of blew it off as a marketing piece….”

This brings up what I think is an unfortunate trend: a growing distrust of the outdoor media, which is not exactly unfounded in general, but I want to speak to F&S specifically.

Unlike the reader above, I know all of you have enough feel for nuance to realize that Bestul’s mention of the HECS suit was tongue-in-cheek, bordering on derisive. But I think it is worth pointing out that we do not do “marketing pieces” and try to pass them off as columns, reports, or gear reviews. [ Read Full Post ]