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Wing shooting and migratory birds

If you’ve never felt the satisfaction of knocking a grouse out of the air with a shotgun while it darted seemingly effortlessly through the dense woods, or dropped a pheasant as it rose from the thick underbrush, you’re missing out. If you’ve never witnessed a flock of ducks or geese locked in and about to land on your spread of decoys before taking them down and watching a retriever work a marsh or field collecting birds, you’re definitely missing out.

With thousands of hunting tales swimming through my mind, some of my fondest memories “plucked from the pool” come from hunting fowl. Ring-neck pheasants, geese, ducks, grouse, you name it, they all deliver a rush I have not found anywhere else. The challenge of hitting a moving target, and well trained pointers, flushers and retrievers effortlessly working birds the way they’re meant to.

As an avid outdoorsman, I find myself trying to fill as much time annually with hunting and fishing as a man with a wife and two young children under age six, possibly can. I’d dabbled in wing-shooting in my younger years, but it wasn’t until my 3-1/2 years of residence in Maryland that I had the chance to chase and hunt waterfowl on a regular basis.

One moment that always comes to my mind is a friend who asked me to join him and his son “in the pit” on one cold January morning. Before dawn, sitting 6 feet deep in the cold frozen ground, watching snow fall on the decoys spread across a picked corn field, we just had to wait for daylight to show itself and the sky to come alive.

Right on cue, the sun came up and the geese began flocking into the air. We had a small flock commit and I managed to take a very nice sized goose from the bunch, but much more importantly, moments later a few ducks came flying by. With a pull of the trigger, my friend Steve’s son Cody had taken not just his first duck, but his first kill. The joy that filled that pit was more than enough to keep spirits up and bring us all some much need warmth. A thermos of coffee certainly helped that cause as well.

I was part of that special moment for Steve and Cody, and I have never looked back from the joy found in waterfowl hunting since. If you have never tried bird hunting of one variety or another, you should, because you might just find another way to enjoy more time in the outdoors that you already enjoy so much.

Hunt hard, hunt safe and shoot straight friends.

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John Knouse writes about the outdoors for The Sentinel.

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