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I grew up around bird dogs. As a kid, my dad bred and trained English pointers. We had anywhere from five to 10 dogs at a time, and I’ve had a dog of my own since the fourth grade. Having a good bird dog is like owning a boat or a prime whitetail lease—you get to pick who tags along. I’ve hunted with a variety of people, from first time hunters to seasoned veterans and everything in between. The first thing to understand about most dog owners is...

I’ve always loved hometown tackle stores. The kind of places with “Beer, Bait, Ammo” advertised in neon out front. Some of them stick to the basics: hooks, sinkers, bait, and licenses. Others are highly specialized tackle warehouses with unique lures for local waters and up-to-date intel on what’s biting and where. They’re places where you can grab what you need and go, or hang out, talk fishing, and not feel pressured to buy anything. Sadly, I...

My wife and I rarely buy meat from the grocery story, instead opting for the variety of game meat and fish stored in our freezer. When we have people over for dinner, we might cook quail, deer, duck, goose, pheasant, some of the fish we’ve recently caught, or any number of wild things most Americans aren’t accustomed to eating. In my mind, our chest freezer is a literal treasure chest and I’m always excited to prepare wild game for uninitiated...

When I moved to Ontario, our neighbor’s teenage son helped us unload boxes. Spying copious boxes labeled “fishing,” the boy looked at me with excitement. He said he had been fishing almost every day that summer, and I told him to pick out something as a gift for helping us.
He was a little confused when he opened the first box and found wads of flamboyantly colored feathers and semi-preserved animal skins.
“What is this stuff?” he asked
I...

Bowhunting sparked my interest in fly fishing. When I first picked up a bow as a teenager, it brought a new set of challenges and added depth to a sport I already loved. When I bought my first fly rod some years later, I knew absolutely nothing about fly fishing, but assumed it would be the bowhunting equivalent to fishing, and, in many ways, it was. I quickly spiraled down the long-rod rabbit hole. Fly fishing became an obsession, one that...

This is the third installment in a three-part series asking readers to take a fresh look at carp despite their lowly reputation. Part One covered the history of carp in North America. Part Two explained how to find and catch carp using a variety of methods. This installment describes several ways to prepare them for the table.
When I lived in Iowa, I frequently fished for carp in a large reservoir. One day while wading the shoreline, my feet...

Bugle-mouth, scaled whale, golden bonefish, mud marlin, river Roomba, suburban salmon—those in the know have a variety of colorful names for carp. As more people come to the realization that carp are a plentiful and challenging gamefish, they are challenging the widely-held perception that carp are trash fish.
This is the second installment in a three-part series that asks readers to take a fresh look at carp and their reputation as a “trash fish...

In the spring of 2007, I accidentally hooked a carp while bass fishing in a Nebraska farm pond. It fought hard, peeling line and bending my rod deeper than any bass I’d ever caught. When I drug it to the bank, I had no idea it would inspire a personal investigation that would lead me from the farm ponds of my youth to the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes.
This is the first installment in a three-part series about all things carp. Part One...