Skip Knowles

Sep 24, 2024 | petersenshunting.com | Skip Knowles

Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. We earn from qualifying purchases. This was not how an early October hunt was supposed to go. Blowing snow plastered everything sideways, sticking to the roads, the trees, the truck windows and to all of us, as we hustled to put on the noisy Gore-Tex outer shells we’d planned on never wearing.

Sep 3, 2024 | wildfowlmag.com | Skip Knowles

Waterfowlers are the only group of hunters that are constantly referred to as crazy. Deer hunting, by contrast, just makes sense. Big bucks are innately exciting and provide venison, and across most of the country, a deer hunt involves a short walk to a stand, most often in fair fall weather. Elk? Their pursuit is aspirational, with mountain adventures, giant horns, truckloads of meat, bugling bulls in the golden aspens. Upland hunting?

Jun 20, 2024 | wildfowlmag.com | Skip Knowles

Sometimes, it can be hard to see how everything old is new again. Literally tough to see. My buddy gestured toward the barbed wire fenceline that had windblown chaff and dead weeds backed up against it at the edge of the grain field. “What do you see when you look at that?” he asked rhetorically, shouting over the wind. “Nothing, that’s what! Those layouts are invisible. Put a bunch of panel blinds up there, and what are the geese gonna see?

Sep 11, 2023 | wildfowlmag.com | Skip Knowles

Waterfowling happens in a lot of dreary places, and autumn on the Canadian prairies can often rank right up there. But not this time. The prairie practically glowed it was so green as the plane spiraled down to Edmonton, and I realized I had only seen this vast potholes region of the Great Duck Factory in the fall when things were mostly dead and brown. This was late, late spring, almost summer, and I’d made the run north to chase the tail end of the snow goose migration with old buddy Jordan Moll.

Jan 22, 2022 | wildfowlmag.com | Skip Knowles