Boom. Down. Dead with a knockout punch. As my friends know, I’m a die-hard, old-school turkey hunter who believes in the big boom: a 12-gauge shotgun, reliably choked, is my best option for dropping turkeys in their tracks with confidence. Fact is, many of my grizzled turkey buddies who might...
“If you have a turkey gobbling to your calling, but it’s far off,” my dad used to say, “and it shuts up, get ready. It might be on the way.” And man, I have thought of that tidbit of wisdom many times since. My father hunted ridge-running Pennsylvania turkeys, just...
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, hunting license sales skyrocketed across the country in 2020 as folks turned to the fields and forests to enjoy outdoor recreation away from large crowds. Hunting is a great option for entertainment and low-risk for COVID-19. But if your hunting destination is a long distance...
Defining a tough turkey hunt is tricky. Some hunters expect to easily fill tags on cooperative birds. Others measure a quality hunt by the standard of unpressured, gobbling turkeys in pretty places. Two old-school measures of toughness include shut-mouthed or henned-up strutters. Still, certain states are especially tough due to...
Feral hogs are one of the country’s great ecological disasters. Few pests are more difficult to control, or more immediately detrimental to native ecosystems. In fact, some biologists consider hogs to be the most destructive invasive species on the planet. Though their spread across the United States has been slowed...
When I moved on from squirrels to hunting deer with my dad in the 1970s, there were about 200,000 whitetails in Virginia. Today, we’ve got five times that many. In the 1980s and ’90s, we went from “if it’s brown it’s down” to the “big buck” era. Whitetail management was...
The familiar gravity of the open road is strong as black coffee, as familiar as the playlist you sing to, beating time on the steering wheel. Landscapes slip by like a movie on fast forward. Gas stop to gas stop, you wheel through the dark to the season’s first daybreak...
Jake and hen decoys? Strutter and breeder? Full flock? Even with hyper-realistic fakes in your arsenal, you still need to adjust your tactics to the time of the season and how turkeys are behaving. The truth is, sometimes decoys work. Sometimes not. Why do realistic decoys fail? Often, it’s a...
The average turkey hunter would probably be shocked at how few mature gobblers their land produces each year. World-renowned turkey researcher Michael Chamberlain explains it like this: “Let’s say you have 100 hens in your population. “80 of them attempt a nest — not all do. “Around 20% hatch at...
A talking head on outdoor TV puffs his chest and declares, “Man, the full moon is the worst time to hunt!” Sounds pretty good, and you buy it. Your daddy told you never to overhunt a spot, and you never doubt Pops. Stands to reason that if another hunter tromps...
An unexpected wind swirl whipped the flames of what had been a slow backfire and sent them suddenly quartering uphill and across the field, full of dormant broom sage and plume grass. My buddy Danny and I were standing on top of the hill, next to a box blind, leaning...
In his very first MLF tournament, Realtree Fishing Pro Dustin Connell won the season’s biggest event – the REDCREST 2021. “We added Dustin to our Realtree Fishing Team late last year after hearing so many good things about his dedication to the sport and its growth,” said Realtree Fishing Brand...
