Pheasants Two Ways at Primland

Over dogs and overhead, pheasants took to the sky as Primland hosted a weekend of both European driven shoots and walk-up hunts in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

British best-gun maker Holland & Holland had invited a handful of clients to experience the jubilation of traditional guns-on-pegs hunting as strong-flying pheasants were driven from the fields above by a line of beaters. Meanwhile, I spent a full day with a guide and his dogs flushing pheasants in a mountain-top clearing cultivated for habitat.

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Life in the Not-So-Rough Lane: A Visit to Rough Creek Resort

I’ve never considered myself to be one of those pampered hunters who expects to be catered to and afforded the type of treatment normally reserved for royalty and rock stars.

I would not, however, completely exclude the possibility of occasionally experiencing such treatment (voicing just the right amount of protest, of course), all for the sake of reporting on one such operation, Rough Creek Lodge and Resort, a hunting and resort destination located a 90-minute drive southwest of Dallas-Ft. Worth airport.

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Nick Sisley Packs His Krieghoff and Caesar Guerini to Hunt Doves at Uruguay’s Estancia Ninette

Both Uruguay and Argentina have great dove shooting every month of the year. Of course, their perdiz and duck shooting takes place in their winter – May, June and July – in a few instances into August. Many prefer the combination of ducks and perdiz or perdiz and doves or ducks and doves. With some outfitters it’s possible to hunt all three.

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The Last Shot at Duck Season

The end of duck season always comes like a hard slap in the face. You can see it coming, almost in slow motion, but you’re still taken aback by its abrupt, stinging finality.

So when you get an unexpected shot at a post-season hunt – not just any post-season hunt, but one of epic potential – it feels like a dream.

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How I Survived the Great Texas Drought of 2011 as an Upland Outfitter

March 1, 2012 is the beginning of the final month of the upland bird hunting season at Joshua Creek Ranch (JCR). In my mind, I picture the calendar as twelve monthly segments arranged in a circle. October through March segments appear smaller than the other months, and if my circular calendar were placed over the face of a clock, those six months of October through March would be all jammed up between 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock.  That’s how fast the hunting season seems to go compared to the rest of the year.

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When Snow Falls on Kansas Pheasant Fields

Wing shooting on the farm where I grew up in Montgomery County Illinois, about 25 miles south of Springfield, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s was pretty much limited to pass shooting doves down by the pond, jump shooting ducks on local farm ponds or hunting quail along the fence rows and Osage orange hedge rows that bordered most farm fields and pastures in those days.

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Husbands, Wives and Dogs

The other day I received a call at my Joshua Creek Ranch office from the wife of a wingshooting client. She asked if I remembered a newsletter we’d sent out several years ago that had a piece in it comparing the benefits of men having dogs rather than wives. She was in hopes of getting a copy of it to share with friends. I did vaguely remember it, but to tell the truth, searching for that particular newsletter rated about minus two on my scale of things I needed to do at this particularly busy time of the hunting season. 

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Shotgun Wedding(s)

I remember so vividly the day I went to buy my first shotgun.

My boyfriend Hank and I drove a couple miles down the main drag of our dilapidated 1960s-era suburb to our local hook-n-bullet store, an utterly charmless building with windows boarded over and painted, and not so much as a sprig of greenery anywhere in the parking lot. It was ugly even compared with already-low neighborhood standards.

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