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2 months ago | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Sean Weaver
If you spend a single day out hunting waterfowl, you’ll quickly learn that their eyesight is almost second to none. They can pick out even the most hidden blinds, they’ll flare off the simplest of movements, and they have an uncanny ability to see and land with a lone real duck instead of your...
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
themeateater.com | Matthew Every |Sean Weaver |Joe Genzel
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty broken up about waterfowl seasons being over. Late winter means the days are short and depressing, and just when I’ve missed enough ducks and geese to actually start hitting some, it seems like things are about to close. But it isn’t all lost yet. March is the final gasp for waterfowlers before they need to hang up their waders for the summer—and March is all about snow goose hunting. A snow goose hunt is a big production.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Sillars |Bethany Beathard |Ryan Callaghan |Sean Weaver
Two experienced Louisiana duck hunters are lucky to be alive after their boat sank and they were forced to light a fire in their cooler to keep warm. Texas Game Wardens reported on January 19th that they were called the week prior to Bois D'Arc Lake to look for two hunters who had been reported missing. The men had been hunting the North Texas lake for the past two days, but their wives became concerned after not hearing from them after the sun had set.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Keith Crowley |Sean Weaver
If you want to see a pheasant hunter lose his shit (yes, it’ll be a dude), watch how someone deals with a dog that suddenly decides to go into bootlicker mode. This is one of the most embarrassing and frustrating things a pheasant dog can do. With some dogs, that’s their natural mode of travel. Low-drive dogs aren’t going to suddenly find a work ethic that genetics and training didn’t already install in them. It doesn’t happen that way.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Matthew Every |Sean Weaver
This election season, most people are thinking about donkeys and elephants, but I’ve got geese on my mind—specifically, the windfall of free honker decoys I’m about to get come November 6. Most of the year, I find corrugated election signs a bit annoying, no matter the party. But they have one shining virtue. The plastic itself is tough as nails and sized perfectly for making decoys.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Bethany Beathard |Sean Weaver |Tony Peterson
Waterfowl diets are as diverse as the birds themselves, and knowing what they eat can really influence your hunting strategy. From puddle ducks dabbling the shallows to divers plunging the deep, what these birds eat shapes everything from where they hang out to how they taste on your plate.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Matthew Every |Joe Genzel |Sean Weaver
Recently, I practically gave away the last of my plastic mallard decoys. It was such a deal, that the guy I sold them to almost felt guilty. But I didn’t have use for them any more. For about two years, I’ve slowly been building up a rig of all wooden decoys. Most come from decoy carver friends of mine, others are antiques, and one I even carved myself. You might think this is stupid, crazy, or just another hipster-hunter idiosyncrasy like shooting a side-by-side (and yeah, I do that sometimes, too).
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Sillars |Dylan Tramp |Sean Weaver
There are more new gun owners in our country right now than at any time in the last 25 years. If you count yourself among them, welcome! Gun ownership is a constitutional right in the US of A, but that doesn’t mean you should check your common sense at the gun shop door. I didn’t grow up around guns, so here are a few of the things I wish I’d been told after I took home my first shooting iron. Learning the four rules of gun safety is just the first step.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Bethany Beathard |Patrick Durkin |Sean Weaver |John Pollmann
My first introduction to the concept of flyways, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, was spotting flocks of Canada geese in open fields on our drives home as a kid. Our continent has four major flyways—Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific. Together, they make up the four paths waterfowl take on their yearly migrations north and south across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Kubie Brown |Sean Weaver |Mark Kenyon |Tony Peterson
The first thing I heard as I got into my blind was the whirring of wings. I was hip-deep in muddy water, clutching my gun and staring up into the darkness above my head. Flocks of birds were zipping past just above me like wraiths, causing me to involuntarily duck in the blackness. I glanced down at my watch and saw that I had a few minutes left before legal light, but with the thick cloud cover, it may as well have been midnight.
