Author: Greg McReynolds

Kyle Smith is a MOF reader, (it continues to baffle me that we have readers) spey caster and upland hunter who blogs at This Long Haul. He kindly offered the following response to Posers.

By Kyle Smith

Maybe sometimes my hat’s brim tends towards the flatter side of the spectrum. My Tacoma has an obnoxious hood scoop. I’ve worn out a few Patagonia puffy jackets. I’d take an IPA over a Banquet beer on most occasions. And I’d love a well-coiffed beard if I wasn’t such a damned babyface.

I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in the gear I’ve bought and the shots I’ve taken and the birds I’ve flushed. But I love my time in the field as much as the next guy and wild birds on public lands are just as much my birthright as they are yours.

Admittedly, choosing a Pudelpointer is something I’d think twice about if I had it to do over again. While she’s the best animal I know, I’m beyond sick of hearing “that’s a cute/cool mix,” every time Joe Public asks me about the breed of my dog. Amongst the educated she’s still a Pudelpointer but to everyone else she’s now a German Wirehair.

I didn’t grow up in a hunting family. In fact, I came to upland hunting in my late-20s after a friend sent me a link to Smithhammer’s elegant, moving, hipster foodie fodder, “The Words We Use.” That post stuck with me and put into words some thoughts and emotions that had been banging around in my cosmopolitan brain for a long time. Not soon thereafter, I used my student loan check to buy the first 12 gauge over under I could find at the local gun shop. A couple years later and I had a gun dog.

Guess what I’m saying is that you should think a little more about the judgments you make and the words you use on this blog. There’s a bunch of us noobies out here that respect and dare say admire the writing on MOF and aspire to appreciate and understand upland bird hunting and our relationships with the natural world the way you so often capture with your posts. While we might be Posers now, I figure if we keep at it long enough maybe someday it’ll all come together and we’ll end up as Wrangler-clad, cowboy hat wearing, C-10 driving, Setter hunting hard-asses like you guys.

Sometimes you hit the truck before shooting light ends and sometimes you don’t.

“It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs,”

The Road Home, Jim Harrison

October is finite – not only in volume, but in reoccurrence.

In Idaho, October is the perfect month. The weather cools and the aspens start to drop their golden leaves. Brown trout move upstream to spawn, colored up like the aspens and hungry and edgy and mean. Sharp tail seasons line up with other upland species so the whole host of bird hunting is on the menu.

October is a marker for my years and sometimes it’s alarming how fast they tick past. Throwing out a pair of worn out boots I realize it’s been a dozen years since I bought them. Sorting boxes of factory pheasant loads with $9  price tags, I try to remember when you could buy Golden Pheasant loads for that price.

Fondly remembering a hunt with a good friend, I realize we haven’t spoken in years. I look at my dogs and see I no longer have one in her prime and one on the upswing, but one in her prime and one that may not have another October left in her.

For a good long time, I was certain my springer was faking deaf. As in, “I can’t hear you boss, but there’s birds!”

Turns out she is not faking, at least not anymore. Sometimes I walk past her bed and out the door without her waking. In the evening, I occasionally have to walk out and retrieve her from the yard. She’s healthy and happy, but she has lost most of her drive and she can’t hear anymore.

She’ll make a few trips this year. Judging by our walks and initial trips out, she will mostly be at heel, strolling along as the old lady of the pack.

Last fall, I took an ill-advised shot at a rooster on the last day of the season. He seemed well hit, but locked his wings and glided across a good-sized channel of the Snake River into some cattails on the far shore. My old girl was never a good water retriever and I never force fetched her, but as I stood there wondering if my waders were in the truck, she lit out into the cold and fast water. She hit the shore and worked the cattails for several minutes before wading out and swimming back. She held a totally live rooster in her mouth, his head erect as she braved the current again.

I remember thinking, “That could be the last great retrieve I see her make,” because even then she had slowed down. Mostly, the fire has gone out of her. She still wants to go, she wants to head out the door and ride in the truck, but the barely controlled bird craziness is gone. It’s nice to have her around. She’s mellowed. She can lay down at your feet instead of pacing constantly. She can ride in the car on a gravel road without howling to be let out.

She’s just older. It happens to all of them. And to all of us. For me as well there is a day coming where hunting turns into something else.

We only get so many Octobers.

Some very talented folks have put together one of the coolest media pieces I’ve seen and it tells a compelling story about the places we hunt and fish. Go check it out here.

Today is National Public Lands Day, a day worthy of recognition.

There are a lot of posers in the upland hunting community. In the interest of full disclosure, we here at MOF are old, mean (especially when we’ve been drinking) and skeptical of everything and everyone. In other words, we assume basically everyone is a poser.

If you say you like to hunt upland birds, my line of questioning goes something like;

You have a dog? (Answer “no” and you’re out.)

What kind? (Answer anything that includes “doodle” or requires an explanation and you’re out.)

Other grounds for dismissal include; using the word “Bra” or “Bro”, wearing a flat-brim baseball cap, party hunting, using a “loader,” having someone else handle your dog, being a dill weed, walking slow, over using your whistle, wearing neon laces on boots, fanny packs, hats with propellers, riding in a jacked up 4-wheel-drive following someone else’s pointers, coiffed beards, taking selfies in the field or wearing purple.

There’s a reason I tend to hunt alone.

Posers litter the upland landscape. Just take a gander at nearly any upland product marketing material and you will almost certainly see a bearded hipster dressed like he’s headed for Sunday afternoon cocktails pointing a shotgun at a limp-tailed pheasant flying directly at the camera. I want to shout “Don’t shoot the photographer,” then I realize it’s likely the photographer who has set up the shot and put himself in harm’s way. Of course, it’s unlikely he’ll be shot by the hipster, but there is a pretty good chance he’ll be kamikaze-ed by the pen-raised bird careening toward him.

And that’s the thing. Upland marketing seems to center around pheasants even though a passel of enthusiastic upland hunters are not chasing pen-reared pheasants. Instead, they choose to hunt wild birds, often on public land. They are hunting ruffed grouse in the Carolina’s or the UP, chasing chukar in Nevada or desert quail in Texas or Arizona. They hunt sharptail grouse in the northern plains of Montana or sage grouse in the sage brush sea of Wyoming. They chase blue grouse on high ridges of Colorado or Utah. They might even scratch down an old rooster every once in a while in a few of those places. Some of them hunt pheasants in the Dakotas or Kansas, but the ones who hunt passionately are usually hunting wild birds, often on publicly accessible tracts.

Follow dogs across enough forest and prairie and you learn to notice things. Hunters can tell by the wag of their spaniel’s tail or the way a setter carries herself when birds are close. They learn to veer towards a falcon holding high above the cholla or to walk out of their way to swing past an abandoned farm implement. They notice how a pheasant will run like hell in short grass but hold up before he crosses a low spot or how huns will flush in a circle and after a few flushes, eventually lead you back where you found them. Upland hunting is a pursuit of subtleties and when you’ve see enough flushes, you know a setup when you see one.

Sadly, many of the companies selling guns and boots and vests are pretty far removed from the realities of upland hunting. There are some exceptions like Wingworks and Russell and Quilomene and Kenetrek and Gundog Supply. Big companies who understand upland hunting are rare, but one that stands out in a good way is Orvis, whose catalogues often  feature the birds and places people actually hunt. I think that’s mostly because their CEO, Perk Perkins, and their Vice Chairman, Dave Perkins, are serious outdoorsmen and upland hunters. And damn good fly fishermen as well. And while I’m not typically prone to endorsements, Orvis gives 5 percent of company profits to conservation and I think that’s a pretty big deal.

Orvis recently posted this video about upland hunting. It’s a pretty accurate assessment of what most of us at MOF do and how we feel about upland hunting.

Perk, Dave, if you’re reading, you’re in.

GM

This afternoon I heard on the news that Apple is getting rid of the headphone jack hole on the new iPhone 7. Apparently lots of folks are upset about this but I think it’s a pretty good idea. In fact, I think there are a quite a few jack holes we could get rid of, starting with the ones in congress who are pushing to transfer (sell) the public lands where I hunt and fish.

So I say go for it Apple – dump the jack holes – just don’t stop with the iPhone.

MOF has a loyal fanbase (thanks mom) but we also have plenty of one-time visitors, many of who were captured here.

Since another hunting season is behind us, I thought I would do a quick recap of some of the actual search terms that brought people to MOF in 2015, answer a few questions and note some interesting factoids. What follows are actual search term and phrases that brought people to MOF via the magic of search algorithms.

Recently a gentleman (let’s go ahead and assume) found MOF after searching the phrase, “After I mowed grass there mocking bird is dancing with a little white part of wing open.”   I can offer no analysis of this phrase, but I certainly appreciate how search engines use MOF. I can just see some computer at google analyzing this phrase then determining “seems like this person is into birds and possibly bat-shit crazy, so let’s link them to MOF.”

“Renting a chukar dog in Winnemucca” – It was probably a good idea to use the Google for this one, as asking to rent a dog in Winnemucca seems almost guaranteed to get you an ass whooping.

“My pointing dog gets too for ahead” – We’ve all struggled with this and if your dog is young don’t sweat it, it will even out. If your dog is old and you’re still having this problem, it’s not the dog. It’s you. Consider some off-season cardio.

“Can I take a little jackal to my yard and hunt with it when it grows up with my dogs?” – I don’t know much about jackals, but offhand I’m going to call this a good idea. Worse case scenario, we will be happy to link to whatever catastrophic youtube video comes out of this experiment.

“Excuse me, but someone pooped in the hallway” – We’ve certainly all been there sir, but I think you were trying to contact the concierge. Just pick up the room phone and dial “0”.

“What do feathers taste like?” – Listen here you sick bastard, I told you to scram last year. Wrong site.

There was a significant amount of traffic around the search terms, “cross eyed”, “picture of crosseyed guy”, “cross eyed guys”, “cross side eyes”, etc. Whenever I see stuff people finding us with search terms like this, I say to myself, “Damn, what the hell are Tom and Bruce writing about these days? I really should read the content on MOF.” And then I wander over to the Drake or off the internet entirely before I commit to actually reading MOF.

“Good pheasant knives” – I prefer something medium sized with a wooden handle in case you have to hold it in your teeth. Pheasants are gaudy, but they’re not that great in a knife fight. Ignore the flash, stick them in the gizzard and basically any knife will work.

“Ground sluice” – I think I met this guy down in NM. He was an older gentleman hunting without a dog. His response to a rhetorical “how was it?” went something like, “Well, there are birds, but they are running and flushing wild, getting up at 50 yards and flying forever. I only got one shot.” A less rhetorical follow up question “get any?” was answered with, “Only three.”  Indeed.

“Why brain tend to forget hard learned lesson” – Judging by the grammar, I’ll go out on limb and say brain damage. Hunt chukar, fall, no talk good. Alternate scenarios, possibly from Utah or tried to rent a dog in Winnemucca.

“How to hunt chukar without a dog” – I’m suspicious that the guy who searched this phrase probably tried renting a dog, then resorted to ground sluicing.

Interesting note, many people found the blog while searching for specific towns and specific upland species. As in, “Chukar hunting near Salt Lake City.” We do all our hunting on Giffy Butte, so I’m sure those folks were disappointed.

Thanks for reading and if you found us by accident, I hope you’ll stay a awhile.