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One of my al-time favorite animal encounters was with an otter spotted while bass fishing a Louisiana marsh. Was still writing outdoors stuff and had a now extinct SLR along, so I swapped to 400mm glass, lay down in the boat and tried slipping closer with the trolling motor. Then lost track of...

Using what Mike Gould called "influence training" in his book The Labrador Shooting Dog to bend even distant coyotes to his desired directional changes had enough similarity to something I was then doing with cattle that I began what turned out a good bit of correspondence and friendship...

Never could understand the "dog days of summer" thing. Seems quite the opposite. Best we've been able to do is take them into July in shape to largely sit it and August out, aside from too brief rounds of walking baseball, short swims in soupy gator-free ponds and such, and then do our best to...

I'm too lazy to hunt it down, but I've also seen a promo for a duck retrieving drone that's in the works - and will suffer much the same shortcomings.

Pretty sure PA still doesn't allow any electronic attractant, which I'd like to see continent wide. But since that's not the case...

What a wonderful keepsake.

Nicely done.

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Our spotter's helicopter had maintenance issues, but if today's test flight goes well, I'll be celebrating the 4th by mugging momma gators for their eggs (by permit), which we'll hatch and sell to the gator farms for stock. And while the only...

If you happen to have a Haydel or similar squirrel whistle, it wouldn't cost half an ounce of extra weight to add it to your lanyard, and it will mimick a black-belly's tone to a "T". (Far better than Rod demonstrates with their "black-belly call," which is just the whistle stuck in a barrel...

I can remember when a friend's wife, who then managed Laccasine NWR, was excited about having their first breeding pair, but they've since surpassed nuisance level, and this fall will see our first extra, early October, black-belly season, in addition to our regular duck dates, during which...

Don't you durn Yankees start bogarting our black-bellies, too. 'Bout all we've got left.

I'm definitely out of my league in this crowd. Once confided to a Slidell carver friend, who'd come our way for specks, that when I retired from guiding, I could happily hunt out my duck days over a couple pairs of mottleds and a pair of green-wings. Next trip he gifted me band-sawed cut-outs...

My mind is still smoldering in awe from your latest posts on the material's thread, but Step 1 in J-frame "repair" is check the reed's spine and insure it smiles, rather than frowns on its toneboard. And step 2 is replace the cork. So you've not lost your mylar touch, either.

The best shooting of my first season, '83, here in Southwest Louisiana was with a fellow who left a standing, probably 100+ spread of coots, poule d'eau here, out and placed just six or eight duck decoys between their raft and his boat blind each hunt. Was an eye-opening "first" that began my...

Given the flat toneboard, is sticking an issue? Back in the late '80s or early '90s, I hunted an elderly Cajun and his middle-aged son who'd carried on a family tradition of making their own calls, and the father chided his son for being the first of their line to curve his toneboards, instead...

Probably so.

Makes sense and would be an issue for me, as well. I can run most loud calls soft, but will lock a soft one up well before its as loud as I often want afield. Perhaps the closest I ever came to buying a call with little or no hope of using it in my work was a very simple Albert Thibodeaux...

Right up front, I'm a pretty much literally every-open-day-since-'84 call user who's never considered building one from scratch. So it may be a dumb question, but I'm curious why cedar isn't a viable option? Virtually all of the traditional Louisiana style calls I've seen had cedar floating...

Otherwise, you're apt to end up with what was a signature of Robertson's early calls: