The Mother of All Duck Calling Championships

Imagine if you will a place where children learn to blow a duck call before entering first grade. It is a place where the dress of the day from November through March is some brand of camo and a radio station’s call letters are KWAK. If you’re a duck hunter, you’ve most likely heard of this place. We’re talking about Stuttgart, Arkansas. It is a farm town of around 9,000 inhabitants. Most of those residents are in the farming business with rice being the primary crop.

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Why Older and Younger Duck Hunters Are Turning to 20-Gauge Shotguns

For generations, the 12-gauge shotgun has been synonymous with duck hunting, but many hunters are choosing 20 gauges for close-range environments.

There are several logical reasons for this trend. Older hunters can’t tolerate the abuse that a 12-gauge spitting 3-inch or larger waterfowl loads inflicts on arthritic or surgically repaired shoulders.

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Bettinsoli Italian Shotguns Come to America

I stepped down from the bird buggy marking our first stop on the South Georgia bobwhite quail plantation. I approached the side-mounted wood gun box and carefully removed an over/under from the padded brackets, exposed the breach and dropped in 20-gauge shells. We walked only a few yards when the pointer locked up. Our guide dispatched the hyper Boykin flusher into the understory. Shotgun at the ready, listening, watching, waiting, the pines and grasses aromatic of autumn conjuring a seductive beauty of the moment, when the covey exploded: bang, one shot, two birds down. 

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Preparing the Legendary Ames Plantation for the 121st National Championship for Bird Dogs

The heaps of papers, folders and boxes in Dr. Rick Carlisle’s office conjure an Ivy-Tower academic in pursuit of a big cosmic revelation. But wait, what about his shirt? It’s a vented short-sleeve embroidered with a prominent Ames Plantation logo of two bobwhite quail on the wing.

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CZ-USA’s Dave Miller Helps Four High-School Kids Establish a Shotgunning Guinness World Record

Setting a new Guinness Official World Record feels like a bridge too far for most of us. But Dave Miller of gunmaker CZ-USA made it a dream-come-true for the four high-school students on his team who established a world record for the most number of clay targets shot in 12 hours by a team of five.

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Muller Chokes and the Mysterious Ü

Visit the Muller Chokes web site and you’ll see choke constrictions new to the shotgunner’s vocabulary. For example, Muller Choke constrictions are marked Ü1, Ü2, Ü3 instead of Skeet, Improved Cylinder and Modified. That’s because Muller Chokes does not believe in generic constrictions. One size does not fit all. Check it out:

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Kathleen Kelly of Kevin’s Catalog: Tweed is Dead, Long Live Tweed

If the British had won the War of Independence in 1776, chances are you’d be wearing tweed instead of camo or blaze on your wingshooting adventures.  

Upland hunters in particular tend to romanticize traditional estate tweed through that gauzy sentimentality of a Doris Day close-up. Armed with our venerable double gun on a crisp autumn afternoon while adorned in tweed breeks, jacket or waistcoat and flat cap, as Fido scours the landscape, we hike though the heather ever vigilant for a flush.

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Sporting Clays Run-Through at Orvis Hill Country – The Most Recent Addition to the Orvis Shooting Grounds Collection

Covering nearly 600 acres, Orvis Hill Country in Fairfield, Pennsylvania is the latest addition to the Orvis Shooting Grounds Collection – joining the flagship Orvis Sandanona in Millbrook, New York and Orvis Pursell Farms in Sylacauga, Alabama as America’s luxury sporting clays, upland hunting and shooting school destinations.

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