Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 129, No. 1 - Waters - 2024 i Field & Stream

WHOEVER SAID you can’t go home again never had my job. The last time I wrote to you in this space was more than three years ago, when I penned the Editor’s Page for Field & Stream’s 125th Anniversary Issue, in October 2020. I knew at the time that F&S was about to be sold, and that under the new ownership, the print magazine would be discontinued. As gutted as I was by that decision, I at least took solace in knowing that we went out swinging with that remarkable final issue. After it was finished, I never expected to work on a print magazine again. Jump to December 2023: F&S was sold again. To my surprise—and sheer delight—the first decision the new owners made was to revive the…

No. 1 BRINGING AN AX with you into the woods? Wrap the handle just below the head with 20-gauge galvanized wire. This will protect the handle in case of an overstrike, and the wire comes in handy for hanging a pot over a fire or for lashing sticks together. No. 2 ASK FOR PAPER instead of plastic when you’re shopping at Target. The bags are printed on both sides with, you guessed it, a target. They’re great on the range, stapled to a backboard. No backboard? Put a little dirt in the bottom of the bag and it will stand up on its own. No. 3 THERE’S AN EASIER—and more delicious—way to care for a cast-iron skillet. Just deep-fry in it occasionally. The heat opens the metal’s pores, and…

STEP 1: Choose and cut the block. A nail call starts with a simple, solid block of wood, cut to roughly 1½ inches tall by 2 inches wide by 3 inches long. “You can customize the dimensions to fit your hand, but this is a good starting point,” Herman says. Initially, he used only solid oak but found over time that just about any wood will work. “You can use a scrap of two-by-four if you want.” One caveat: “Make sure the grain runs horizontally and not vertically; you want the nail going through the layers of grain rather than between them, otherwise the block might crack.” STEP 2: Drill a pilot hole for the nail. Choose which side of the block will be the top of the call.…

THEY ARE NOT THERE, and they are there—all at once. This is the great mystery of fish on a saltwater flat. “Two o’clock,” my guide says. “Sixty feet.” He is standing on the poling platform, which gives his voice the effect of some edict from a sky god. I look toward the right, where 2 o’clock would lie on a clockface. I reply with silence. “Moving right to left.” Urgency gravels the man’s voice. “Now 1 o’clock and 40 feet.” I squint. I bore my eyes through the glare, but I see nothing save a seemingly endless plain of water—the surface set in glittering prisms of blue and green, the bottom of a canvas that catches sunlight and shadow in an underwater confusion. I stare. I sweep the water…

THE LAYOUT BLINDS are doing us no good at all. That’s because they are more than 100 miles away in host John Cooper’s garage in Pierre. We’re set up at the end of a long spit of land in a glacial lake, 10 miles south of the North Dakota border, seated on buckets behind a small pop-up panel blind that sticks up like a billboard advertising the presence of two hunters. Cooper and his black Lab, Millie, tuck back into the weeds 20 yards behind me and fellow hunter Charlie Potter. We do our best to keep our heads down and hold still. When the show starts, however, we can’t help but look skyward in awe. Canada geese of all sizes—snows, specks, mallards, pintails, teal, and more—lift off a…

There is no shortage of good things in the world today. Thanks to the advancement of technology and manufacturing, good is everywhere. Good is the new average. Good is the new standard. Good is the price of admission. There’s nothing inherently bad about good. It’s only that it is so plentiful and, as a consequence, unremarkable. From this day forward, we declare good to be our enemy. If good is the enemy of great, then we will work tirelessly to flush good from our thinking and our rods. Starting now, we no longer accept the terms of good’s offer, no matter how easy, agreeable, practical, cost-effective, or efficient those terms may seem. Good has no guts Good doesn't want to push the envelope. Good just wants to lick the…

UPSTREAM, ABOVE the pond, along the creek that drains the hardwoods, a bird began to sing. Already, shadows had darkened half the water. I had been fishing for a few hours, paddling the canoe slowly along the pond bank, casting to moonscape craters where spawning bluegills hover. I stilled the paddle, laid the fly rod on the canoe’s gunwales, and listened. The song is my favorite of all the birdsong: the upwelling, flutelike whistle of a wood thrush. Eight or 10 clear, complex notes, climbing the scales in a single spurt, like a startled garden spider ascending its web, ending with a trilling ee-oh-lay that hovers in the woods air. That’s how I knew the best fishing for spawning bluegills was nearly over at Carpenter Pond: the spawning beds…

AFTERIMAGES OF DUCKS flitted in my head the night after my first timber hunt. I’d spent the day at a cypress reservoir, hunting with a club run by local farmers. Dues were $25 a year, and if there were ever a better way to spend $25, I can’t imagine what it would be. We shot plenty of birds that day, feet down over the decoys or climbing out of the hole, but the ones I remember, the ones I saw when I closed my eyes, were the ducks we didn’t shoot. It started with a pair circling the hole. Then the pair grew to four ducks, then to eight, then 20. The sight of ducks working a timber hole attracts more ducks. It’s like squirrels running out onto branches…

THE CUTTHROAT TROUT surfaced 100 feet below me, in a slick run where the creek worked its way along a steep talus slope. The fish was out of reach, for the moment. I had just broken out of dark timber, the horse picking its way carefully across the scree, and I could look down through the tops of the tall Engelmann spruce to the pool where I thought a trout might live—and in that moment, the cutthroat showed its cards. The water was clear, and I had an osprey’s-eye view from my saddle: I saw the big fish rise 5 or 6 feet through the water column, suck in a bug, and turn back like a copper-colored shooting star toward the stream bottom. I stared at a spot where…

WHEN A MONTH has two full moons, we call the second one a blue moon. It happens once every three years or so, on average, and all sorts of strange legends have been associated with it. When the full moon arrives in May or June, just as water temperatures push into the 70s, some real magic happens. It takes place every spring, and you could call it the bluegill moon—but most hardcore bream anglers just call it go time. “I’m on the water every day, and when the moon gets bigger and brighter, the emergent weedbeds just come to life with spawning bluegills,” says Minnesota bluegill guide Brian Brosdahl. “We catch some of the largest’gills of the year during a full moon.” May’s full moon—which falls on the 23rd…

THE WOOD DUCK FLIGHT lasted 10 minutes, the first five of which passed before legal light. The second five were just enough time for me to collect a limit. With that show over, I settled in to wait on a pair of Canada geese that I knew liked this pond as a loafing spot. They came right on schedule, at 8:30, announcing their arrival with honks. I didn’t see them through the canopy of yellow leaves until they were almost skimming the pond’s surface. As they backpedaled, I raised the 28-gauge Super Black Eagle 3 and doubled, dropping 20-plus pounds of geese with two shots from a 5½-pound gun. Just about any shotgun will do the job on 25-yard head shots, and yet dropping geese with a featherlight 28…

MY BUDDIES AND I dubbed it “the corn ditch.” Perfectly rectangular, the old man-made irrigation pond is hidden by a grove of trees at the edge of a New Jersey farm field. A small, meandering creek flows into one end and out the other, but while the whole thing can’t be more than 80 feet long and 25 feet wide, it’s deep. Whenever I go there, I send my first cast under the overhanging brush in the top left corner. I want a giant chain pickerel to rocket out and hammer my lure. This has happened before. In my mind, I can vividly see the flanks of the 30-incher as it turned out of the murk to inhale my inline spinner. With each visit, as I squish across the…

WE ARRIVED AT our destination—the glacial lakes country of northwestern Iowa—in time for a short hunt at the end of the day. The magic hour, it’s often called, and while it earned that label because birds can seem to come out of the woodwork then, to me what makes it magical is the gilded quality of the light, the way it floods the landscape and renders its details in sharp relief. We’d driven to a state hunting area a few miles east of town—a rolling quarter section of shaggy native grass that gave us plenty of room to spread out and follow our own dogs. For me, it marked the pheasant-hunting debut of Rumor, the black-and-tan English cocker spaniel I’d acquired earlier that fall. The first flushing dog I…

BOY, DID I MISS YOU. For the past three-plus years, you and I have been meeting online, and frankly, neither of us has been themselves. This is because a screen is to print as decaffeinated coffee is to regular. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it lacks the jolt you need to go out and face the onslaught of daily life. You ever flip through a magazine from back to front? This is a potent form of communication between you and the magazine. It puts each page on notice that you’re not committing yet, you’re just kicking the tires. Scientific tests have proven that this actually makes the magazine sit up straighter, try a little harder. Magazines want to make you happy. Screens couldn’t care less. Read’em, don’t read’em,…

If aliens visited Earth and happened to walk into the NWTF Grand National Turkey Calling Championship, how would you explain it to them? —D. Dalton, via email D.E.P. I would say, through my intergalactic interpreting device: “These people are trying to converse with avian dinosaurs that have brains about the size of a pea. They are doing it so that they can shoot them. Speaking of shooting, is that a gun you’re holding there? May I look at it?” “Ugly is a strictly human concept and has no meaning when applied to animals. Warthogs no doubt think other warthogs are beautiful. All animals, from wapiti to wildebeest, are fascinating and deserve a place of honor on your wall.” I keep hearing about the 280 Ackley Improved. Am I weird…

This hatch should give you plenty of opportunities to throw giant dry flies to hungry fish and watch them pounce like you’ve never seen before. THE ALTERNATE NAMES FOR BROOD XIII (Northern Illinois Brood) and Brood XIX (Great Southern Brood) give away the general location of the historic hatches (see map below). But the timing of each is a little more difficult to predict. “We are expecting Brood XIX to hatch around the third week of April in the southernmost states of its range, like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia,” says Evan Lampert, entomologist and biology professor at the University of North Georgia.“Cicadas tend to be around forests and habitat edges,” Lampert says. “They often emerge near rivers, lakes, and ponds before dropping into the water and serving as…

DOUG HERMAN was guiding turkey hunters in Nebraska in 2009 when he got wind of another client in camp calling to birds with a nail set into a block of wood. “I thought, No way, and had to see it for myself,” Herman says. When he did see it, and played it, he plunked $100 on the table, offering to buy the call on the spot. No dice, the man told him; it wasn’t for sale. On the last night of the hunt, after a few drinks, Herman asked to play the strange call again—and plunked $200 on the table. Nope, the man insisted. But the next morning, the hunter gave the call to Herman as part of his tip. “I used that nail call for the next 14…

THIS PAST FEBRUARY, at the National Wild Turkey Federation show in Nashville, Dave Constantine won the Grand National Champion of Champions award for his hand-carved decorative turkey call of an Eastern longbeard. For just about anyone else, it would’ve been the achievement of their career. For Constantine, it’s just one more accolade to add to his résumé as the country’s most decorated wildlife wood-carver and custom-​call maker. Long before Constantine ever picked up a chisel, he was combining two of his passions: art and the outdoors. “I laid the groundwork in my high-school years, doing illustrations for hunting and fishing magazines and books,” he says. Even though his artwork never made it into Field & Stream (until now), the magazine was still a big presence early on. “I probably…

THE YOUNG PEACE CORPS doctorleaned across the table and put his question bluntly. “Just how fine is the line between life and death?” he asked. “Too fine,” I answered. “The difference is much less than most of us will ever know.” “What made the difference in your case?” I hesitated a moment as the memory of the past several days welled up in me. “The will to live certainly had a lot to do with it,” I finally said. “Yes, but physical condition is perhaps most important,” he argued. “When the body gives up, so does the mind.” We argued the subject further, but what is more important is the experience that brought this discussion about. This incident has a few lessons for all of us. It all started…

AMONG ANGLING ARISTOCRATS, Atlantic salmon have long been celebrated as “the fish of kings,” no doubt because the two have so much in common: the aloof arrogance and inflated sense of self-worth, a fussiness about habitat, expensive tastes. And as far as I’m concerned, they deserve each other. Give me a panfish any day—a fish of the people, blue-collar rather than blue blood, a working-class fish, a fish for a great republic. I’ve never understood how the bald eagle, a scavenger and a thief, could have been chosen as our national symbol, whereas the honest, sweat-of-thebrow bluegill never even made the shortlist. I guess the Founding Fathers didn’t fish much. Panfish, of course, doesn’t denote a particular species but a loosely defined assemblage with varying regional representatives—a little like…

THE DOGS WERE BARKING in that rhythmic chop that tells you they’ve found the end of the trail. Looking up, I could see two glimmering eyes blinking intermittently between big yellow poplar leaves. As I raised the 22 rifle to my shoulder, Grandpa leaned in and whispered, “Hold a fine bead. ”I was raised in a family of raccoon hunters, and when the dogs treed one, we kids did all the shooting. The youngest shot first, and with each miss, the rifle passed up the line to the oldest—and back around if necessary—until the raccoon hit the ground. From the time I was 5 until I was about 10, I was the youngest, and I knew that if I missed and the rifle made it to my older cousin…

IT’S EASY TO BE a purist turkey hunter when you stumble into a mob of 2-year-old gobblers on opening morning. I was sneaking along the spine of a hardwood ridge in Tennessee, working toward a distant bird I’d heard earlier, when the flock sounded off suddenly, less than 100 yards ahead. Their gobbles were jarring and terrible, as if a pack of kids had all been given box calls loosely bound with rubber bands and told to make a ruckus. That sounds so awful, it has to be a gang of jakes, I thought. All alone, I then wondered, Could I get a jake back to the truck without another hunter seeing me? Mid-thought, the birds roared again, and I decided to call them into shotgun range for a…