by Terry Wieland One frosty morning in December of 1998, I was standing on a hillside in Wales with my back to an ancient gate, looking down on a small lake ringed with trees.  A few minutes earlier, a score of ducks had risen off the pond, a few had been shot, and the rest were circling, trying to make up their minds. A hundred yards below me, our host, a baronet, was walking toward the lake with one of his trio of Purdeys, hoping for a late flush, when a pheasant went up from the undergrowth.  He whirled, fired, I saw the pheasant go down, and a split second later I was slapped in ..read more

by Barbara Sheldon A few weeks ago, Old Bob darkened my doorway just before sunrise, looking a lot unhappy—and with what looked like supper still stuck between the few teeth he had left. Knowing I serve breakfast to my flocks of refugees around this time, he was determined to catch me—fresh breath be damned, apparently. “I believe this is yours,” he said, holding out one dead goose. “Sorry.”  I studied the one-eyed Canada and nodded. “Yep, that’s One-Eye, all right. (Goose naming. It’s a gift.) Is there something wrong with him?” “Aside from not breathing?” he quipped. (Bob’s gift is stat ..read more

by Terry Wieland In most midwestern states, pheasant season will open in about eight weeks (mid-October), which leaves a decent amount of time to do something about the legs that will be carrying you over plowed fields, under, through, and over barbwire fences, and forcing their way through shoulder-high CRP grass. Pheasant hunting is not the most physically demanding of the shooting sports, at least not on the surface.  But it does force you to do a few things most of us are unaccustomed to in our everyday lives. Where I used to hunt pheasants every year in South Dakota, plowing through ..read more

by Terry Wieland It’s time to recommend another book:  Olly, by Rupert Godfrey, is “The life and times of Frederick Oliver Robinson, 2nd Marquis of Ripon,” according to the subtitle, and it is all of that and more. Mr. Godfrey feels comfortable referring to Ripon throughout the book as “Olly,” as he was known to his friends, to differentiate him from his father, the first marquis, who is known throughout the book as George.  For my part, I’ll refer to him as Ripon, since his father will not play a part here, henceforth. For those who have not studied the history of wingshooting, suff ..read more

by Terry Wieland Leave us start with a confession:  I was fully prepared to dislike the Chapuis 28-gauge over/under I was sent for testing.  Accompanying it was a 20-gauge side-by-side, and I was prepared to dislike that, too. We’ll get to my reasons in a bit, but first I’ll say that the over/under was a hugely pleasant surprise when I actually started shooting it.  After a couple of rounds of Skeet, I found myself thinking fond thoughts. The test was not done under the best of conditions.  I had four guns that needed a thorough outing—the other two being Tony Galazan’s Sup ..read more

by Terry Wieland In the course of searching for some answers about some arcane aspect of shotguns, I found myself re-reading Bob Brister’s classic Shotgunning – The Art and the Science.  Brister was shotgun editor of Field & Stream for many years, and had the distinction of being not only a fine writer but a champion shooter as well, in several shotgun disciplines. Early on, Brister gets into exploring the age-old question of what type of shotgun is better—mainly side-by-side versus over/under, but also pumps and semiautos.  This is one of those ever-green subjects beloved of mag ..read more

by Terry Wieland It ain’t summertime, and the livin’ ain’t particularly easy, but if you’re a quail hunter, Georgia in the wintertime, when the grass is brown and the air is crisp…well, that gives Gershwin a run for his money. The cavalcade. The hunt master sets the pace, the dogs range far and wide, and the hunters on horseback follow, waiting for the hunt master to raise his cap to signal a point. In late January, a small group of us repaired to Sinkola Plantation (www.sinkola.com) just outside Thomasville, to spend two days communing with guns, dogs, horses, and—we hoped—some strong and fri ..read more

by Terry Wieland Just back from a few days on a plantation outside Thomasville, Georgia, spiritual and actual home of the modern-day wild bobwhite quail.  Would that I could report great success on my part, shooting at the little devils, but in the absence of that, I’ll try a general description, with a few little-known facts. First, why Thomasville?  The answer lies in the intricate relationship of bird, forest, and environment.  Georgia is renowned, in song and story, for its pine trees, and especially the long-leaf pine.  Two hundred years ago, much of Georgia was covere ..read more

by Terry Wieland For reasons that completely escape me, I have a persistent memory of a cooking show in the 1980s in which a Cajun of indeterminate age—heavy set, moustachioed, slick black hair—gave a class on preparing a goose for the table. Referring to his subject, both singular and plural as “dem gooses,” he proceeded to produce a meal that, even through the impersonal lens of television, made my mouth water. That’s one memory.  Another is Robert Ruark’s unforgettable description of hunting in the bayous with his grandfather and a raft of Cajun denizens, who then prepared a meal fit n ..read more

by Terry Wieland One of our purposes here at the Gray’s website is to deliver flash reports from our never-ending adventures afield—Scott Sadil on boats and fish, Brooke Chilvers on art, food, and wherever else her cosmopolitan tastes take her, and myself on guns, shooting, and hunting. To that end, herewith a quick dispatch from southwestern Minnesota, where I just spent a delightful three days chasing pheasants, braving the waist-high CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) prairie grass, dodging badger holes, and firing the odd shot at a disappearing rooster. This gig came about because, a year ..read more