Table of contents for August/September 2019 in Field & Stream

I STRUGGLED TO STABILIZE the shaking pronghorn in the lens of the magnified-to-the-max spotting scope. The buck was more than a mile away, but it was clear that he was big enough for a closer look. So my buddy and I got to hatching a stalk plan. That hunt—a DIY trip on state land in Wyoming—went down in 2014, before today’s long-range shooting trend had fully taken hold. My rifle was a well-used, wood-stocked Model 700 chambered in .270. I hadn’t yet heard the words 6.5 Creedmoor, and my scope didn’t have a built-in rangefinder. Given that only five years has passed since that hunt, it is staggering to consider how far shooting technology has come. As you’ll read in “The Long Game” (p. 30), the guns, ammo, and…

I WENT FROM SERIOUSLY pissed off to a murderous rage at some point in the wee hours of the morning. This was after I’d given up all hope of sleep. My cognitive function was frazzled. My grip on sanity had slipped. By then, my buddy Lee Davis and I had pulled everything out of the back of the truck. We booted the dog. We shoveled sleeping bags and pads, shotguns, dove stools, a cooler, drink cans, bags of chips, and candy bar wrappers into a heaping pile in the cornfield. We pulled out the spare tire and toolbox, and flung them on the ground. There was nothing left but a bare-metal camper shell overhead and the bare-metal bed of a ’73 Chevy pickup below. We scoured every inch with…

Break out some aquavit. This Scandanavian spirit, distilled like gin but steeped with different botanicals, is increasingly showing up on American store shelves, and is the perfect match for cured fish. Linie, from Norway, is the most widely distributed brand and packs a mellow caraway flavor. But keep an eye out for aquavits from American microdistillers, such as Montana’s Skadi (named for the Norse goddess of bowhunting) or the stellar dill aquavit from Wisconsin’s Gamle Ode. Drink it neat or ice-cold or, to ward off a streamside chill, do as the Danes do: Drop a coin into a coffee mug, add just enough coffee to cover the coin, and then add aquavit until you can see the coin again.…

There are few books about the mental side of shotgunning—and a zillion good ones on golf. Read them, substituting the word “shotgun” for “club.” Start with Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, by Bob Rotella. Then read Zen Putting and Zen Golf, by Dr. Joe Parent. Here’s a sample quote from Parent: “If you are free from hope and fear about how the shot will turn out, you won’t decelerate [your swing].” He’s talking about putting, but it’s valuable advice for shooters too. I may not let myself play golf, but I learn a lot by reading and thinking about it.…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST problems with chronic wasting disease is that it doesn’t kill deer fast enough. If hunters were finding dead bucks by the dozen around their food plots, we might heed the dire warnings of state agencies and conservation groups. Our laissez-faire attitude toward captive-deer breeders might change. But whitetails can live for a year or more with CWD and not exhibit any symptoms—and many wild deer with CWD end up dying from something else due to a wrecked immune system. After years of being told that the disease is “always fatal” and yet still finding no dead bucks, many hunters have simply tuned out CWD. What they need to make them take notice and get on board is more concrete evidence. They need proof that CWD…

Want to see the long-range debate get ugly? Hang out with some bowhunters. It starts with the crossbow guys saying, “Our implement helps recruit new hunters.” The compound guys answer, “Yeah, but you’re all carrying guns.” Which is totally unfair. They should call crossbows what they are: bows with rangefinding scopes and match-grade triggers that you shoot from the shoulder. This is when the crossbow guys argue that compound bows have only been around since the 1960s, while crossbows—like the latest 425 fps screamer—have been here since the Middle Ages. Finally comes the heart of the matter: distance. “Sixty yards used to be out of bow range,” say the compound guys. “Now any kid who’s shot a crossbow once can make that shot.” They look to the traditional archers…

Lots of hunters talk casually about today’s 400-yard shot being yesterday’s 300-yard shot. Better equipment has made it so. Except it isn’t. Even with something as magical as a 6.5 Creedmoor, there’s an entire deer’s worth of bullet drop from 300 to 400 yards. Rangefinders and custom scope turrets have made accounting for bullet drop easier, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of hunters have never practiced—not one time—beyond 100 yards, let alone at 400. That’s still a very long shot to take at an animal, even for a practiced expert. Most of us are not practiced experts.…

I’D BEEN IN THE TREESTAND for an hour and a half when the doe walked into the field. It had been an hour and a half of pure bliss. The trees were painted in fall colors. The blue sky was so crisp, it was hard to look at. I’d seen the tail end of a small buck cross the back field not long after I’d settled into the stand, so my head was on a swivel. The hunt had an air about it that anything could happen. It was one of those sits where you feel like you could sit forever. I watched the doe cross the pasture, undisturbed, tail flicking, pausing to browse after every few steps. The deer was just what I wanted. A decent doe, alone,…

A basic duplex reticle is wonderful in its simplicity, but it has its limits—specifically, it limits the distance a hunter can shoot and be confident of hitting his target. As the desire to shoot farther has grown among sportsmen, and the accuracy of factory rifles and ammunition has dramatically improved, scopes have evolved to keep pace. A modern precision-rifle scope would scarcely be recognizable to hunters from a couple of generations ago. Here’s what’s changed. Reticles: At first glance, target reticles might seem like a jumble of hashmarks, lines, dots, and numbers. But the design behind those reference marks is highly sophisticated. The goal of these reticles is to provide sufficient reference marks to make shots easier while avoiding excess clutter. The new Mil-XT reticle by Nightforce is one…

I freely confess that I have shot at steel plates on the range and enjoyed myself. It’s diverting, but will it make you a better distance shooter? Maybe. A little. Or not. What will make you a better shot, or else drive you to beach volleyball instead, is NRA bull’s-eye competition. I’m referring to F-Class and its tactically inclined cousin F-TR, which stands for Target Rifle. In F-Class, either brand, you can shoot at 300 to 600 yards, which is Mid Range, or 800 to 1,200 yards, which is Long Range. F-Class is fired prone with a pedestal rest. F-TR is shot prone with a bipod. Having competed in F-TR since 2016, I can say that it will do a number of things for your shooting that ringing steel…

TOdd Gifford IS ANXIOUS. From our elaborate hide of pressure-treated lumber and trimmed branches on the edge of a cut cornfield, he stares at a row of heavy pines a few hundred yards away. “Look at that mob way out there,” he says. A murder of 200 crows sits in the trees. From here, they look like Halloween decorations. Gifford—better known as the Crow Man around here—taps his foot. He picks up his 12-gauge o/u—the stock dipped in a skull-and-crossbones pattern—then sets it down. He does this again and again, his eyes never straying from the birds in the trees. “A scout!” he says, suddenly. We hunker down as a lone crow floats in over our spread of two dozen black flocked decoys that Gifford designed himself. I shoot…

Over the last decade or so, it’s become an accepted axiom among archery elk hunters that bugling rarely works anymore, that pressured bulls have heard too many screams from a growing throng of eager newbies, and that if you want to call in and arrow a herd bull, you need to back off the bugle and sweet-talk him with cow calls. There’s just one problem with that: None of it is true. “I believe that 90 percent of the hunters who are calling in and killing bulls consistently are bugling them in,” says Rockie Jacobsen, four-time World Elk Calling Champion and owner of Rocky Mountain Hunting Calls and Supplies (buglingbull.com). “We talk to a lot of elk hunters, and my staff and I spend the entire month of September…

Most good bait sites are thick with undergrowth, and it can be tough to see approaching bears. In those situations, consider using a treestand. I’m a fan of the Lone Wolf Hand Climber Combo II ($390; lonewolfhuntingproducts.com) because it’s easy to use, quiet, and very lightweight—a big consideration since there’s precious little flat ground where I hunt. The flexibility to hunt from any tree with a straight, limbless trunk and quickly adjust to changing wind directions is a big plus too.…

Accomplished Finger Lakes duck hunter Rick Murphy has been decoying divers to net spreads since before it was cool. The key, he says, is using the presentation to imitate how divers actually feed. He spends more time watching birds than hunting, then gets close by building spreads that replicate divers in a feeding frenzy. Here’s how he does it. THROW A SINGLES PARTY Murphy believes in single-species spreads, especially for redheads and goldeneyes, unless he finds multiple species feeding together nearby. “I’d rather use fewer redhead decoys than have a bigger spread with other species,” he says. Goldeneyes keep to themselves too, so even if they’re in an area with other birds, he puts them 5 yards or so to one side of the main rig. SET THE TABLE…

There aren’t a lot of brant decoys on the market, probably because their populations are geographically limited and relatively few people hunt them. Many hunters enjoy the nostalgia of gunning over a hand-carved rig, but this isn’t necessary. I’ve been using Sport Plast decoys ($124 per six; knutsondecoys.com) for the better part of two decades, and they have held up well and lured in countless birds. I’ve been hearing good things about Tanglefree’s Migration Edition brant decoys too ($130 per four; tanglefree.com).…

Writer and flyfishing guide John Fedorka wrote “Extra Terrestrials” (p. 86), his first-ever story for this magazine. CK: Congrats on your F&S debut, John. JF: Thanks. I like to think of F&S as the Yankees of magazines. Gene Hill is Babe Ruth, Heavey is Don Mattingly, and Cermele is Derek Jeter, you know? My grandfather was a longtime reader. I wish he was around to see my name in it. CK: You guide on the upper Delaware River, which is the unofficial home water of the staff here. How’s the terrestrial bite there? JF: Terrestrials here are a match-the-hatch game—it’s technical. But we have some giant browns, and they love ants, so the fishing can be great. CK: What do you enjoy most about fishing these bugs? JF: I…

At this time of year, you shouldn’t walk out of your house without a pair of binoculars and a rangefinder. Or, if you want to simplify things by throwing money at the problem, the new Vortex Fury HD 5000 rangefinding binoculars ($1,599; vortexoptics.com). The newest Vortex glass ranges out to an incredible 5,000 yards and includes a scan function with which you can actively pan a scene for a continuously updated range reading. It’s useful for dialing in on small targets.…

What is the scariest encounter you or someone you know has had with a snake? —V. MARCHBANK, CARSON CITY, NEV. A: Once, my friend the late G. Sitton was sleeping off a drunken night in a hut in Zimbabwe when a large mambalike snake fell out of the roof thatch and landed on his neck, where it coiled. Sitton first thought he was having a nightmare, but when he realized the reptile was real, he rushed out of the hut in such a state that it required six people to hold him down while two others unwound the scaly visitor. Sitton never really got over it. Q: Do you think the 6mm Creedmoor will become wildly popular with hunters like the 6.5 has?—JAMES HARWOOD, ERIE, PA. A: Nope. One…

When I first got this last season, I thought, “This thing could really use a better name.” Then I repeated it to myself a few times, softly. Gut Daddy. Gut Daddy. It grew on me. But the Gut Daddy ($130; gutdaddy.com) has more going for it than an awesome moniker. It’s a simple product that’s highly practical. Sometimes, when I’m field-dressing a deer, I can ask whoever’s closest to “hold that leg right there.” But usually, I’m field-dressing by myself, with a flashlight in my teeth because my headlamp’s dead, and that’s when the Gut Daddy is handiest. It secures a deer, hog, or similar-size critter by the front legs and belly-up for field dressing, while a pair of hooks hold the rib cage open so you can slice…

Maybe you’ve noticed that not everyone sees eye-to-eye on the long-range craze’s darling cartridge. (You have seen the memes, right?) That includes our own shooting and hunting editors. So we told them to go ahead and have it out—but to try not to let things get too ugly. ONE OF LIFE’S GREAT pleasures is talking up the virtues of the 6.5 Creedmoor, which I enjoy doing in no small part because it triggers such cross-eyed rage among the hordes of 6.5 haters. As I’ve come to learn, one thing that unifies these critics is a lack of meaningful experience with the cartridge. Look, if you want to beat yourself to smithereens with a .300 Win. Mag. because you think nothing else will kill an elk, knock yourself out, literally.…

The single best trigger-control training device ever is a ballpoint pen, says Gary Smith, my precision- rifle instructor at Gunsite Academy. He holds one loosely between his middle finger and thumb, his trigger finger slowly cycling the top button over and again. “You want steady, gentle contact and to control the motion throughout,” he says. If you do it right, the point of the pen doesn’t wobble. He practices this two or three times a week for 15 minutes at a time, usually while watching TV. “Drives my wife crazy,” he says. I’m near Paulden, Arizona, trying to cram Gunsite’s seven-day precision-rifle course into three. Before we start, Smith asks what my goal is. Avoiding abject humiliation jumps to mind, but I tell him I wouldn’t mind hitting a…

For a group of people who love their independence, some hunters sure like telling the rest of us what to do. I imagine our forebears’ opinions weren’t so different from today’s Facebook jabs. Damn, Ootouk, what were you thinking trying a hit a mammoth with a spear from 27 yards? Technology has improved, but there’s still no app that measures yardage, adjusts for wind, divides by experience, and spits out an error message that blinks DO NOT ATTEMPT. Fortunately, the answer is a primitive one: Know your limits, and hunt accordingly. Don’t tell me my effective range, and I won’t tell you yours.…

The four biggest bucks I’ve taken with a bow have all come on early-season hunts. Two of those deer I owe to a fair amount of luck. But the others, the two I’m most proud of, were the result of a more careful approach based on thorough scouting, careful study of trail-cam pics, and personal observation. When the bucks showed up, I was thrilled but not surprised; they were doing exactly what I thought they would under specific conditions. It’s tempting to move right in for a kill any time you see a buck visit a field or repeat some behavior. Our hunter’s brain screams “pattern,” and we’re anxious to jump on the activity. But in most cases, waiting to gather even more information is the better approach. Many…

If you haven’t taken the time to set your bow sight’s third axis correctly, your housing bubble can lie to you. That’s a big deal when you’re taking angled shots. Getting it set right is a little bit technical, but it’s worth the effort. Here’s why it matters—and how to fix the problem. Think of the third axis as a door hinge that allows you to swing your sight open or closed in relation to the riser. If you don’t set it correctly, your arrow could be off the mark by 5 inches or more on a 40-yard shot with a 30-degree downhill angle. To fix it, do these three things. Step One: Verify that the second axis is correct. Clamp your bow in a bow vise, and use…

Often while fishing at a cabin, I eat way too much trout cooked over fire or cast iron,” says Doug Adams, chef at Bullard restaurant in Portland, Oregon. “I love it, but then all I have for breakfast before heading to the river is black coffee. This has a couple of results: an early lunch when I should still be on the river, or a few beers catching up way too quickly in midafternoon.” The solution Adams devised for his morning deprivation: curing the trout he’s caught with a salt, sugar, and dill rub using the ancient Scandinavian method for gravlax. “I can carry it in the truck and eat it on a bagel for a light breakfast,” he says. “And because it’s cured, I can bring the trout…

THERE’S MORE THAN one reason sporting clays is called “golf with a shotgun.” The mental demands of golf and shotgun shooting—whether it’s trap, skeet, sporting clays, or hunting—are uncannily similar. So are some of the instructional techniques, from swing thoughts to training aids. Observing golf from a safe distance so it doesn’t get its hooks into me, I can only envy the number of gadgets and hacks available to golfers: Spray athlete’s-foot powder on the club face to see where you’re striking the ball, swing a knotted towel, hit a basketball with a lightbulb changer…. They’re endless. Shooters don’t have as many training aids, and some are worthless. (Generally, anything that goes on the muzzle of your gun will only make you look at it, which we want to…

WE’RE IN A LABYRINTH of sod banks. The water has a purple sheen in the dawn light and it’s mirror-flat. In every direction, another creek arm snakes away into the vast expanse of green marsh grass. As my friend Capt. Eric Kerber nudges us forward with the trolling motor toward a point with mullet flipping off the end, we spook a few fish. Three mud plumes erupt on the shallow bottom in front of us. Along the bank, a bulging push of water zooms away. If you didn’t know this was New Jersey, you’d swear those were redfish and this was South Carolina, yet less than a mile west of our position behind the seaside city of Wildwood lies the Garden State Parkway in rare form—free of traffic because…

BETTER BULLETS Once upon a time, I entered each fall with the expectation that I would see a bullet fail, and would then get to write something nasty about it. In 1973, I saw three different bullets fail on one hunt. Everyone admitted then that game bullets were pretty crummy and had been that way for quite a long time. This was especially true of aerodynamic slugs, the ones with high BCs, because the factors that make a bullet streamlined—a long, tapering nose and a boattail base—made it structurally weak at the time, and while it might hit an animal, it would not hold together and kill it. We’ve since overcome that by diverse means, such as chemical and mechanical jacket bonding, thicker jackets, and better jacket designs, and…

I attribute the rising popularity of long-range hunting to what has become the cornerstone of modern American childhood—video games. A friend recently recounted watching the son of a long-range hunter in Colorado take his first elk at some crazy distance. It was an amazing shot, he recalled. His dad and his buddies were high-fiving each other. “But it terrified me because the boy showed zero emotion,” my friend said. “It was just another target. The experience should have been a lifetime memory—yet it wasn’t any more real to him than if he’d pushed a button on his Xbox controller.”…

Years ago, I told my high-school buddies about a doe I’d shot the evening before. “Swear to God, boys, she was from here to the Minit Mart. Five hundred yards, easy.” I didn’t have a rangefinder to check my bs back then. Today’s hunters do—and that digital readout frequently becomes the focus of the hunting story. It’s easy to talk specifics—like 473.2 yards—while omitting other details, like the three bullets in the dirt, and the long chase and finishing shot. I never told my buddies that I later stepped that shot off at 294 paces. Not quite “here to the Minit Mart.” Now that I’m coming clean: It’s the longest shot I have ever made on an animal. A long-range story is fine, but I’m betting there’d be a…

If you’d like to do something really dumb involving your own money, buy a heavy, high-powered, first-focal-plane tactical scope for your hunting rifle. I admit that I have a number of such heavy scopes. But they go on my heavy tactical rifles and are for targets. When optical engineers figured out how to get the reticle into the second focal plane so it does not swell up like a dead squirrel at the roadside and obscure the target, it was counted as a great advance. Why, then, would you want a first-focal-plane scope? For the added difficulty? Why would you want a complicated reticle like a Horus for hunting? Horus was the Egyptian god of confusion. And why would you unbalance your hunting rifle with a hunk of aluminum…

Here’s a list of every early teal season in the country:* Alabama: Sept. 8–23 Arkansas: Sept. 15–30 Colorado: Sept. 14–22 Delaware: Sept. 12–29 Florida: Sept. 26–29 Georgia: Sept. 14–29 Illinois: Sept. 7–22 Indiana: Sept. 14–29 Kansas: Sept. 14–29 (east of U.S. 283); Sept 21–29 (west of U.S. 283) Kentucky: Sept. 21–29 Louisiana: Sept. 14–29 Maryland: Sept. 16–30 Michigan: Sept. 1–16 Mississippi: Sept. 14–29 Missouri: Sept. 7–22 Nebraska: Sept. 7–22 (low plains); Sept. 7–15 (high plains) New Mexico: Sept. 15–23 North Carolina: Sept. 12–30 Ohio: Sept. 7–22 Oklahoma: Sept. 7–22 South Carolina: Sept. 15–30 Tennessee: Sept. 8–12 Texas: Sept. 14–29 Virginia: Sept. 17–30 (east of I-95); Sept. 21–30 (west of I-95) Wisconsin: Sept. 1-9 *Dates and seasons are subject to change. Check local regs.…

THERE’S NOTHING like walking far enough into the backcountry to leave every-thing else behind. But if you want to walk out, especially with a load of mountain meat, you need the right gear. Not much on this list is cheap, but there’s a reason for that: The hinterlands can switch from serene to downright dangerous in a matter of hours. By all means go, but go prepared. LOWA INNOX PRO GTX MID $235 • lowaboots.com It’s tempting to bargain-shop for boots, but a quality pair that fits well is always worth the investment. That’s how I justified my new Innox Pros from Lowa, a lightweight (1.5 to 2 pounds per pair) version of the company’s existing GTX Mid boots. They’re nimble and comfortable enough to remind me of my…

I COULD BE OUT FISHING right now. Or scouting deer-stand locations. Or buying some idiot product that I’m convinced will make me a better angler or hunter. But as I look down the sidewalk, I see one lawn that ruins the view. It’s ugly, riotously long—at least 4 inches—and marred by unsightly weeds. It’s my lawn. It’s dragging down property values left and right. I’d like to fertilize it with a half-ton of salt and be done with it, but that would really upset the neighbors, among whom I must live. And so I mow. We are in thrall to our lawns like no other people on Earth. The American lawn is an invisible boa constrictor wrapped around our heads. When I moved in, for example, my landlady took…

The early goose season follows a familiar pattern: You have one or two big shoots, then resident Canadas get spooky. Hunting the same shell-shocked locals day after day becomes frustrating enough that some people quit until it gets cold. Stick with it. Your reward will come when the molt migrators return. WHAT IS THE MOLT MIGRATION? You’ve probably seen flocks of geese flying north in the summer when the molt migration begins. Young Canadas and unsuccessful breeders migrate to the safety of big lakes, where they can avoid predators during the flightless stage of the molting process. The molt migration is also nature’s way of clearing out the breeding grounds so the locals can raise their young. What goes up must come down, and molt migrants often return toward…