Plan Your Entire Season
We have taken an apples-to-apples view of every state for the upland hunter to give the best snapshot of how each compares in bird hunting terms. Click on states to learn license costs, minimum requirements for hunting, season dates, bag limits, species available and more. Then follow the links to visit state DNR pages and purchase licenses before loading up the dogs and hitting the road.
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The Hunting Singularity
The Singularity is a hypothetical future point where self-aware machines run improvement cycles resulting in super-intelligence that is uncontrollable. Basically, humans create machines that make human ideas and intelligence obsolete and irrelevant. In ways it sounds like a far off time somewhere in outer space. But dig into interviews with some of today’s tech gurus…
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Challenges
Every time one of these birds comes to hand, it’s an affirmation of the core elements that can make life grand — hope, effort, skill, experience, cooperation and even a little luck. It feels easy for me to bring those pieces together into something that makes perfect sense in the uplands. The real challenge is…
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The Alaska Standoff
Alaska and I are at odds. I’m here to take her birds. She’s not giving them up easily. I’m to earn them one vertical foot at a time until she has determined that sufficient toll has been collected. She’s happy to show amazing places, jaw-dropping beauty, an abundance of nature viewing unrivaled anywhere else in…
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Bird Hunting Amid Spun Tales
Every year in Kansas we hear funny stories about birds and hunting. Maybe it was the full moon, the start of the whitetail rut or the dismal bird forecasts that contributed to tales of the extra nutty variety this season. We hunt from a small town that resides in a county with a population just…
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Making it Count
When I hunt alone, which is often the case, there’s a certain ritual to leaving the truck. It’s become habit without much thought anymore. This invisible checklist guards against hiking miles from the truck and realizing I’m without shells, water, remotes or worse. It’s this same reason everything has an assigned place in the truck,…
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Way Upland
It’s the second day of the upland season and I am in a pre-dawn traffic jam. I’m following a string of crimson taillights up a dusty grade and poor excuse for a road. I’m unsure exactly how long the line extends at this point, but we are all crawling toward a pin on a map…
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Trusting the Dog in the North Woods
Rio is fresh off her first wild bird hunt in Nebraska. It seemed like a good opportunity to start over with an absolutely clean slate, discovering the North Woods together. The way I look at it the same thing that applies to hunters applies to the young Jornada Llewellin setter; get exposure to as many…
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Way Upland Season II Episode 3
Faced with crazy hot weather and very little surface water, we’re lucky to run into some horseback riders on this trail who share info and h20. The Maah Daah Hey is taking its toll and doubts begin to set in, distances are longer than we’ve planned and the dogs are using more water than we…
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The Baseline Hike
Climbing mountains, the only way to really know how bad climbing mountains with heavy packs is gonna be. And getting the young Setter, Hawk, more familiar with the grind.
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Picking Up Right Where We Fell Apart
Bird seasons come and go. Most of the time I try to not think about the start and end dates because there’s always a half-year where we won’t be chasing birds. To focus on the beginning and end always seems like so much longing, instead of just embracing the moments afield that we actually get….
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Two Mountains Offer Different Views
Sitting here in camp staring at these two peaks in Arapaho National Forest. In the last week the dogs and I have visited both. It seems somewhat surreal, not that there is anything particularly outrageous about either. They aren’t the tallest or most dangerous. But the scale is so incredibly different from this low vantage…
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The Fountain of Youth
The old boy doesn’t leap into the truck like he once could, but he still manages to lurch up the running boards and cross the center console. Instead of stowing him in the back for this road trip, I break the rules and let him ride shotgun. He acknowledges the exemption and quickly curls into…
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Hunting in the Shadow of Roosevelt
When I hunt in North Dakota, my thoughts often drift to Teddy Roosevelt’s days at Elkhorn Ranch — He named his Dakota home for a pair of locked elk skulls he found at the site. Today, centrally located within the million acres of the Little Missouri National Grasslands, Elkhorn is a great place to visit…
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Treed Grouse Dilemma
There are times, especially early in a season, when forest grouse – Dusky, Spruce, Ruffed – have yet to recognize that almost everything loves the taste of grouse. Nearly 70% of these birds will not see a second year. The short hop to the nearest tree seems the earliest learned evasion tactic which can be…
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Making Kansas Memories
Opening day in Kansas occupies a sacred place for me since this is the territory where my upland obsession really took hold years ago. The bulk of the state has a dismal bird forecast like much of the rest of the Midwest this year. There are some bright spots which have been deemed the north…
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Lost……again
“I am lost” “Going to shoot. Let me know if you can hear it.” “Hear it?” “I was 50 yards from the truck.” It’s my hunting buddy’s first foray into the realm of the Ruffed Grouse. We’ve hunted a few days now, but this is the first overcast day in an area previously unexplored. It…
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Perspective from the Road
The alarm starts chiming, but it feels like I just laid my head down only minutes ago. It can’t be daybreak yet. I must have set the alarm incorrectly. I pick up the phone to turn off the now blaring Alice in Chains’ “Rooster” and the clock reads 5:15am. Ugh. The bird hunters’ alarm doesn’t…
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The Hunters’ Predicament
A couple of years ago I found myself hunting late season public lands in West Virginia. Having never hunted here before I took to talking to every resident I encountered, inquiring of bird numbers, conditions and terrain. This area is a fairly well-known stronghold for hunters and anglers, so it was shocking when I brought…
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The Cure for the Ailing Birdhunt
It took a decade of brush busting, sprinting after wingless phantom pheasants, whiffing on bunny shots, losing keys and warping dogs — but a buddy and I finally discovered the remedy for the bird hunt that has jumped the tracks. Spiced ham. That gelatinous, pulverized, sodium infused and form fitted rectagonal mass packaged in the convenient…
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Way Upland Season II Episode 10
River Crossing, Racing Thunderstorms and Sharptail Lasagna in the Backcountry. Maybe one of my favorite days on the trail: nice ride, great camp, lucky shooting. When I first thought of this hunt across the Maah Daah Hey, these were the kind of days I had in mind.
