Georgia friend Gil Stacy has more sense than we did when I hunted Woodcock: he keeps some for the summer mushroom harvests… chanterelles in this case. Also notice the color of the cut flesh. Like all good Woodcock (and snipe) cooks, he sort of passes them through a very hot oven. I get tired of …
Tag: Bird Hunting
Tim Murphy
In a just world, North Dakota’s Tim Murphy would be not just the Poet Laureate of his beautiful Siberian state, our truest North; he would be the Poet Laureate of the USA. Good (but lesser) honored real poets, like Dana Gioia, know and say this,.. But like any cradle Catholic, even one lapsed or “relapsed”, …
Woodcock Here and There..
Well, not really here. The only Woodcock I ever saw in Magdalena was a storm-blown starving vagrant that some neighbors brought me and that died of starvation by the next day–being 500 miles off course does not bode well for birds. No, I mean in the US, and in the traditional haunts of ‘Cock in …
New England Woodcock
I have been saving this for Fall. Nobody in the west knows, or at least believes, how thick the Woodcock (and Ruffed grouse) cover is in the east. This is EXACTLY right; it breeds snap shooters like me, who fire too soon out here, “throwing away” our first shots… And they are often small, and …
Season
This year a combination of utterly un – concentrated doves (because of widespread abundant rain and food), and deadlines, have delayed my opening day. Not so Carlos in Laramie– Blue grouse AND Snipe. I feel unemployed… Some years I have actually started on Opening day..
Caroline Gordon
The minor great (is that contradictory?) southern writers are always being revived, sometimes by friends of mine; their agrarian roots make them more appealing to me than old Yankees generally. A person descended from Alpine peasants and mercenary Celtic soldiers can remember misty maritime coasts with nostalgia, but be impatient with the old cultural hegemony …
Happy New Year Hunt
I try to hunt at least a little on New Year’s Day, which is a bit superstitious (Thanksgiving too, another story). I have been worried that Ataika, best of all dogs, was getting depressed from lack of activity; hell, I was, beleagured by, first, lack of feedback and misleading written advice from the new Rheumatology …
Opening day, Dunhill Ranch, with New Mexico Miscellany…
2012 and 2014 (what were we doing in 2013?), both with no game in the bag, though this year we saw plenty and expect to get some doves, and with luck GOOD quail. Best grass in years, food plants everywhere, cottontails same, and probably more jacks. Deer sign. If we have a snowy winter we …
Opening day; Photos not ready, Light guns
Trying to get out of the house and return to serenity or at least not black depression. Had goofy and unsuccessful day opening dove on Piet’s Dunhill Ranch but saw all kinds of game– rain makes a difference. We’ve got yr address, birds… Pics tomorrow, the usual 1st day of Pieter and I with nice …
Another Poet
Tim Murphy is not just one of our finest living poets, and the only one I know who celebrates what I have called “our Siberia”, the chilly plains of North Dakota. He is a living rebuke to stereotypes: a farmer, a businessman, a Yale graduate who studied under Robert Penn Warren; a classicist who writes …