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She’s Hard to Live With
The Core Sound of North Carolina is a lagoon located between the mainland of Carteret County and Core Banks, and she is as deadly as she is beautiful. One cold December day the Sound reminded local Casey Arthur just how hard her icy grip can be.
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Hunting With Dad
Like most of us that are avid waterfowlers, I was raised on bird hunting by my dad. Now, it remains to be seen if this was his way of torturing me, giving me this passion(some may say addiction) for waking up at an ungodly time of day, driving all morning, setting up decoys in the worst weather imaginable(of course the best weather for ducks), just for the chance to see a duck in the sky.
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Ghostly Tales : The Bridge
It’s long been said that “the darkest hour is just before the dawn,” and even before these words were first spoken, man has feared the darkness and what it conceals in its shadows. So for a man to have a desire to pursue a creature such as a duck (my chosen species) into the early morning darkness of a swamp, one must have the ability to, at the very least, suppress his fears with the reason that you are more likely to be killed by a snapping turtle falling from a cypress tree, than to be killed by a ghost. But I will never forget the morning that I began…
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Ghostly Tales Of Big Marsh Swamp Pt.2
The rest of 2013 I did not return to this swamp, I frequently made excuses not to go. But November 2014 the ducks got too thick and once more the itch became too strong. One evening I made up my mind I was going back, but this time not by myself. I called my long-time friend Johnathon to go with me. I was careful to not sound desperate for his company, but I had decided if he did not go I sure as black berry bush has thorns, was not going into that hole alone
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The Off Button
The pair had come back. When mallards return to a recently rejected decoy spread, they usually coast right in without circling, but these aren’t mallards. The birds circle again and pull off in almost exactly the same pattern they did when they initially vetoed my presentation. I have a rule that once a duck responds to a call, I need to continue calling or risk losing interest, so I let the déjà vu continue to play out. Two or three false approaches, and they finally break the mold and cut back towards the decoys rather than away.
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Wigeon Point
An October blizzard sweeping across the North Dakota prairie could not keep three South Carolina waterfowlers from making their annual hunting trip. For hunter Matt McCaskill this trip would allow him to mark a special duck off his bucket list.
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Five Quotes By Nash Buckingham
American author and conservationist Nash Buckingham is best remembered for his shorts stories collected in the book De Shootinest Gent'man.
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Ward Allen: The Shakespeare Quoting Market Hunter Of Savannah
Its the late 1800s in Savannah, Georgia, on a warm fall evening, you are walking down the street and hear the familiar lines of Shakespeare coming from inside a bar. Outside the bar lay a couple of Chesapeake Bay retrievers patiently waiting for someone. Intrigued, you step inside, as the smoke burns your eyes and your nose fills with the smell of whiskey you see a figure in a wide-brimmed Stetson hat and a handlebar mustache quoting sonnets and speaking Latin. The man in the hat is Ward Allen, heir to the Allen Plantation and the last of Savannah's market hunters.
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Five Quotes About Waterfowling
The time spent in pursuit of wildfowl gives a hunter a chance to reflect on their passion for the game they pursue and the enjoyment of those moments spent with hunting buddies two- legged and four. The thoughts of the day are jotted down, and when the words are read, they remind us of the days when the birds worked the decoys, and we spent another day pursuing waterfowl. Here are five quotes on waterfowling that will transport you back to a day in the duck blind.
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One Last Bluebill
The boy was older now, so much older than his daddy who died at the age of twenty-five, a year after enlisting in the army to fight in “The Great War”. His father was killed by a German machine gunner in a land that he saw only when it was being blown apart by war. The son of the soldier, now seventy-five, was reflecting on his life and upon the man, he never truly knew. His daddy had been a market gunner for wildfowl in coastal North Carolina, but times and attitudes towards game were changing, and to make money for the family, he enlisted and went off to war.…
