Tom Davis

2 months ago | fieldandstream.com | Christine Peterson |Tom Davis |Phil Bourjaily |Mike Dickerson

_We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more ›_It’s late. Your shoulders are tired from carrying a pack, or your ass is tired from driving on rutted roads, and all you want is to find a camping spot and stay. But before you commit to the first place that suggests it could house a tent, there are a couple of questions you’ll want to ask yourself:Am I a late sleeper? Do I want to watch the sunrise? Are there bears around?

Sep 25, 2024 | shootingsportsman.com | Tom Davis

In May the leadership of the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation (RPQRF) and the Park Cities Quail Coalition—and, for that matter, the entire West Texas/Oklahoma quail hunting community—got something they’d been waiting for, eagerly and somewhat impatiently, for what felt like an eternity: notification from the Food and Drug Administration that QuailGuard, the medicated feed developed by Dr. Ron Kendall of the Wildlife Toxicology Laboratory at Texas Tech University to treat eyeworm and...

Sep 19, 2024 | fieldandstream.com | Scott Bestul |David E. Petzal |Richard Mann |Tom Davis

Every early-season hunter who has walked away from his stand sweaty and empty-handed knows that high fall temperatures can turn whitetails into slugs. Already clad in their winter coats, most warm-weather bucks move sparingly and almost exclusively at night. But successful whitetail hunting isn’t about finding most bucks. It’s about finding one buck you can kill. To make hot hunts pay off, you have to continually remind yourself that somewhere out there, a buck is moving during shooting hours.

Sep 12, 2024 | shootingsportsman.com | Tom Davis

In his Introduction to An Outside Chance, Thomas McGuane’s classic collection of sporting essays, Geoffrey Wolf grumbles, “Sometimes it pisses me off what he knows.”I thought of this when, a little more than halfway through On the Wing, E. Donnall Thomas Jr.’s wide-ranging new collection of essays, the author describes shooting a handsome drake bufflehead—a bird he normally lets fly—because he “hadn’t taken a duck to the taxidermist all year.” This brought me up short.

Sep 9, 2024 | fieldandstream.com | Jonathan Miles |Tom Davis |Phil Bourjaily

Today is the opening day of hunting season. And if it isn’t, just wait a few days. Maybe a week at most. Either way, get ready. It’s funny. We tend to think of opening day as a single date on the calendar, when in fact, more than 2,000 different hunting seasons—early seasons, late seasons, youth, bow, and gun seasons for dozens of critters in scores of zones—will open in 2018. And more than 700 of them will open in August and September.