High school done right. Some families mark the years with first-day-of-school photos, but the Messer family yearbook is filled with springs and gobblers.

How it started for Haywood County’s Avery Messer: he set out with his family to take one turkey for every year of high school. Freshman year brought an Eastern in North Carolina. Sophomore year, an Osceola in Florida. This past season, as a junior, he added a Merriam’s in Kansas.

Three birds, three springs, all earned along the way with his family. Now, senior year waits, and a Rio stands between Avery and his four-year Grand Slam goal before graduation. Study up, Avery!!

Story and photos shared by Avery’s proud parents @stacee_messer & her husband Jeremy, who also run, operate, and own @lickstone016 📍Next time you’re in North Carolina, give ‘em a shout. Good folks.

👉 Grand Slam Sticker by @shed.hunters ...

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Two fishermen on the Detroit River spotted what looked like a lone white wolf working its way along a frozen culvert.

They kept watching… and it never left. So they eased closer and quickly realized it wasn’t a wolf but a stranded dog. Later named Gordie. Trapped between concrete and current with nowhere to go. They couldn’t reach him. So they made the call.

Rescue crews moved fast. Ladders dropped down the wall to the ice. Once they had Gordie, they secured him and brought him up. Hungry, freezing, and likely stranded for nearly 24 hours, he was rushed to Michigan Humane.

Now? He’s warm, fed, and safe. That ending belongs in large part to a Detroit nonprofit: KARENS (K9 Animal Rescue Emergency Network System). They shared this story with their followers and now they’re working to find Gordie a permanent home. ...

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Nearly 20 years ago, Field & Stream ran “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Eye”—a profile of turkey hunting legend Ray Eye.

Eye was the rare combination: a world-class turkey killer with the sense of humor of a man who probably shouldn’t be left unsupervised before sunrise. This was a guy who woke clients up at 3:30 a.m. by firing a flash camera in their face. Who traveled with a full-blown clown mask just in case someone needed “correcting.” Who once hid in a blind and scared a know-it-all kid so badly he sprinted 20 yards while still inside the blind. And then laughed about it like it was just good camp etiquette.

Across from him sat Bill Heavey—Field & Stream’s most self-aware outdoorsman, a guy who built a career admitting he wasn’t the best shot, caller, or fisherman in the room. Heavey didn’t fake it. He showed you what it looked like to learn, to struggle, to finally get it right.

That was the balance of the story: one man raising hell, the other just trying to keep it together long enough to break his turkey curse. And somewhere between the jokes, the chaos, and the coaching, it all finally clicked.

Field & Stream Archives // April 2007
Story by Bill Heavey // Photos by Peter Yang ...

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Somebody’s thumbing through a stack of ’90s Field & Stream like it’s the morning paper. You can feel the seasons turning in those pages. Crappie stories when the dogwoods start popping. Pike when there’s still a little ice hanging on in the back bays. Bass when the water warms and everybody starts lying about how early they got on ‘em.

Different fish, different rigs but it all runs on the same clock: a reminder that spring doesn’t ask, it shows up. And if you’re paying attention, you meet it there.

Archival Project: @fieldandstream // @yuenglingbeer ...

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He didn’t crack shad by going louder, he got quieter.

“Painting shad is one of the hardest things I’ve worked on. It’s not about bold colors or sharp contrasts it’s all about really subtle transitions that are easy to miss but make a huge difference,” said Zorba.

Color shifting is the difference maker. 15 years at the bench and it finally clicked. It’s all about the blend…

“The tricky part is that shad don’t really have clean lines. Everything kind of blends into each other soft fades and slight color shifts. You’ll get hints of green, purple, blue depending on the light and angle and that’s incrdibly hard to replicate with pearl paints,” said Zorba.

Photo & Story by U/Mr_Zorba @zorba_baits ...

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A proper send-off for a legend.
Some men play the part. Others live it.
He was the latter. RIP Chuck Norris. ...

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Luke Combs pulled up to GQ’s 10 Things He Can’t Live Without and ran the full spread: coffee, Aloha bars, arrowheads, watches, hats, the black tee rotation, Xbox controller.

Around 9:36 of the video he reaches for his turkey calls.
Two tools: a slate (pot) call and a diaphragm. The mouth call is The Haunt by Rolling Thunder Game Calls—three reeds, ghost cut, built for kee-kee runs, whistles, yelps.

Between calls, Combs goes, “this is nerdy stuff here,” but if you’ve ever chewed on a diaphragm in an Uber, sounding like a busted kazoo until it finally clicks, you know exactly what you’re looking at here. ...

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“It’s similar to a catfish setup, but your bait isn’t on the hook. It uses a pack bait [or chum] setup on an extension of line just off the hook.” @jakomac3

Jakob Mackey was fishing his neighborhood lake in Sioux City, Iowa last August when an enormous grass carp jerked his rod off the shore and into the water. Mackey had been targeting big carp in Bacon Creek Lake all summer, but he never expected to hook one weighing north of 70 pounds, the angler tells F&S. Earlier this month, the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) certified Mackey’s grass carp as a new World Record for the 30-pound line class category. 

Mackey says he’s been obsessed with carp fishing ever since spotting a group of the behemoths in the shallows at Bacon Creek Lake back in 2024. “They were like 4-and-a-half to five-feet long, just sitting right in front of me, and I could see them clearly through my polarized lenses,” he recalls.

Through his research, Mackey discovered a specialized carp-fishing setup known as the Hair Rig. It was developed in the 1970s by anglers targeting highly pressured carp in the English countryside. “It’s not well known in the U.S.,” he says.


—————————👇 worth a read👇 —————————
If you made it this far, you are our people. Check out the full story by @travishallmedia // out now 🔗 in story. ...

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Most of Carl Akeley’s story has been told enough times to sound like legend but it came from him and it holds up. In 1896, on his first African assignment, he was out on an ostrich hunt when a leopard came out of nowhere and closed the distance before he could recover.

With no shots left, the leopard hit Akeley high and went for his throat, catching his arm instead. They went to the ground leaving him with nothing but his hands to fend off the attack. Akeley drove his arm deeper into the animal’s mouth to keep its teeth off his neck. Somewhere in that scramble he found leverage. He stayed with it until the fight went out of the animal. He walked away torn up but alive. The leopard didn’t.

That moment is what most people remember, but it wasn’t the whole story. Akeley went on to help change how wildlife was understood and preserved, building lifelike habitat displays at the American Museum of Natural History that treated animals as part of a living system, not just trophies. As a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, he was also part of the early push for fair chase and wildlife protection, helping lay the groundwork for conservation efforts that still shape how we manage wild places today. ...

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