By David Draper

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas on the Central Flyway as winter storm Draco pushed across the northern plains this week, bringing snow, freezing temperature and high winds with it. Hopefully this equates to an early gift of new ducks for hunters as the mallard migration works its way down the Flyway, where hunters have been impatiently waiting all season for a push of greenheads. [ Read Full Post ]

By Duane Dungannon

West Coast waterfowlers are counting on Jack Frost to make it a happy new year. The latest push of cold, wet weather that dumped snow even on valley floors in mild coastal climates has put waterfowl on the move in the Pacific Flyway, but some hunters have complained that flooding has scattered the birds to the point where they may not be few, but they may be far between.
 
My friend David Wei, who hunts on the frontline of the flyway in British Columbia, said the ducks and geese in his area have turned into chickens.
 
“There are lots of ducks around from the coast all the way up the Fraser Valley, but they are quite skittish,” he said. “They've been pounded pretty hard this fall, and with lots of water in the fields, they can hop over to a safe location right in the middle of a field.” [ Read Full Post ]

By David Draper

Goose pâté makes a great holiday appetizer, but unless you shoot a lot of geese or have a foie gras connection, it might be hard to come up with enough livers to make a batch big enough for a party. This ingenious recipe comes courtesy of goose hunter Klint Andreas (that’s Klint’s golden retriever Par in the photo). The recipe uses skinned and trimmed goose breasts in place of the livers. It makes a fine spread for your upcoming holiday’s parties. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

Yesterday I did something I never would have imagined doing even a few years ago: I stopped one pheasant short of a limit. Five minutes out of the car a rooster flushed at my feet and I shot it. About 10 minutes after that Jed pointed another. Since the landowner lets me hunt this farm a lot and he hunts himself from time to time, I decided two birds was enough even though the law allows a third. Any bird I didn’t shoot was one he or I could chase on another day.

It wouldn’t have been fair to Jed to put him up after 15 minutes so we hunted the rest of the farm. I told myself I would shoot another rooster only as a reward for a perfect point. We found a covey of quail, which I never shoot on this place. Jed pointed a single and I shot behind it so he would know quail are something we’re interested in. [ Read Full Post ]

By Chad Love

We all know that our dogs' noses are pretty amazing. They can detect literally almost anything, from bombs, drugs and cadavers to detecting tumors and tracking whales across open ocean.

Now here's the latest wrinkle: their sense of smell is so acute and so discriminatory that they can be trained to find not bodies, but bones, ancient bones hundreds of years old. They can, quite literally, smell the distant past.

From this story on National Geographic:
Australian dog trainer Gary Jackson of Multinational K9 has trained a black lab mix named Migaloo as the world's first "archaeology dog," able to locate bones that are hundreds of years old. [ Read Full Post ]

By Michael R. Shea

Earlier this week I reported on poor puddle duck hunting along the Atlantic flyway. Well, the bad news extends to seaduck hunters. A survey of guides up and down the coast points to low numbers, high pressure, and hard days on the salt water. 

“I hate to say it,” said Clifton Ames of Ten Mile Guide Service. “I don’t want to give you a bad report and have no one come hunt, but we’re seeing fewer ducks.” Ames hunts Maine’s mid-coast, traditionally know for some of the best eider hunting in the country, but over the last three or four years, as winters seem to get warmer and warmer, the flocks are getting thinner and thinner.

“The biggest flocks you’ll see now is 400 and 500 birds,” he said. “Ten years ago it was 10 times that. We’re still getting birds--the guides that are good at it--but the hey day of setting up the decoys and three guys having a limit in the first half hour doesn’t happen any more. The hey day is over.” [ Read Full Post ]