Measuring a Hunting Life

From our July/August 2025 Issue

As an older bird hunter, I'm discovering how many things that I experience now have a strange way of taking me back to the days of my youth. For example, after shooting a mature ring-necked pheasant recently, I wondered how long the bird's tailfeather actually was. Many years ago, young hunting pals and I rarely put a trophy like that in the game bag without first measuring its tapered tail. Those dark cross marks, which look like a tape measure anyway, begged to be counted. I recall a boyhood friend who won a local sportsmen's club contest by entering a rooster with more than 30 bars (the exact number I've long forgotten).

But the thrill I knew the other day when shooting that handsome ringneck carried over when admiring him close-up. After counting 24 bars, I pricked his spurs with my thumb to see how sharp they were, just like I used to. Then I turned the bird into the sunlight to marvel at how the breast feathers of green, blue and purple took on the sheen of spilled gasoline. Finally, warm weight in the game bag was a reminder of how success used to feel so sweet. And still does.

Successful or not, isn't it curious how the mind reels back to those formative days of youth? A whiff of someone's wet dog, for example, and I'm in the back seat of an uncle's ’53 Chevy sedan, clamping his Irish setter between my skinny legs to keep the dog and its muddy paws off the cloth seat and on the floor.

The image of a drake mallard's polished head in a magazine can peel off the years to those teenage duck hunting days. A puncture wound from a multiflora-rose bush while grouse hunting recently was a painful recap to how high-shcool denim jeans didn't turn back thorns like the tough trouser that I wear today do.

Speaking of grouse, last fall hunters in Michigan, where I live, saw more birds than usual, but the woods were dry and the foliage was intact, conditions that put birds on edge. While I walked through aspen woods, an understory of witch hazel shook itself alive when a family of grouse thundered out. Heart in mouth, I missed with both barrels, a stark rewind that I've never scored a double on these royal birds. The heartburn that followed was the same I knew on a day long ago when I took the front end of an easy-as-pie double then forfeited the back end by not bearing down on the second bird.

Yes, the mind keeps track.

Tom Huggler's Grouse of North America and A Fall of Woodcock won national acclaim and are now collectible. His Quail Hunting in America (Stackpole) is still in print. A Fall of Woodcock was reprinted recently by Skyhorse Publishing.