Upland Hunting is Upland Gunning

Ever notice how words have an effect on your view of outdoor sports? Upland hunting showcases this phenomenon. We hunt deer and big game, but we gun upland birds.

There’s more than semantics involved. How we describe these experiences reflects our deep seated view of them.

With deer and big game, the object is to collect the animal: for food, for trophies, for the ego charge of being better than the next guy. When it comes to upland hunting, however, we are there more for the sport. Doesn’t matter whether we harvest a bird or not. The uplands aren’t about killing; they’re about being out on a glorious autumn day, with the fallen, multi-colored leaves crumbling under foot. About sharing, with a buddy, the gut-wrenching thrill of a flushing dog’s bell going silent, and the sudden wings of thunder as a grouse erupts from the bracken at your feet.

The uplands are about the singing of the hounds as a cottontail leads them in a long, circuitous loop, which, sooner or later, leads back to where you first jumped him; and the cuttings falling like confetti from hickory nuts as a squad of squirrel feed, oblivious to your presence on a nearby stump.

In short, upland hunting is really about celebrating the gunning

  sports. If you happen to take home the
  makings of a game dinner, that’s just extra
  frosting on the cake. Being there is what
  it’s all about.

  But what, exactly, is upland gunning?

  For most sportsmen, the uplands are all
  about birds. They’re about ruffed grouse
  gunning in the New England woods;
  and a covey of plantation bobwhite
  while quail hunting on the edges of a
  Georgia pine woods; and a multi-hued cock
  pheasant rising from the corn stubble of
  the Midwest while pheasant hunting. It’s
  about sharptails coming off the grasslands
  of the northern plains; and scaled
  quail hunting in the Texas chaparral; and chukar on an Idaho sidehill while you fight to catch your breath. It’s about ptarmigan on the Scandinavian tundra; and partridge from a shooting castle in Spain; and driven grouse hunting in Scotland on the Glorious 14th.

But the uplands mean more than birds. It’s about snowshoe hares in the frozen wastes of Minnesota; and marsh hares in the swamps of western Kentucky; and cottontail just about everywhere. As the late, great John Madsen described it, rabbit hunting is merely low-level wingshooting. And so it is.

With one exception, that of woodcock passing through from here to yonder, upland gunning is about homebodies. They are resident birds and small mammals, who make their homes in the woods and fields you share with them for a short while. Far too short for most of us. So to make up for it, we create games that simulate upland gunning. Trap and skeet, for instance, were designed specifically to replicate upland conditions. Indeed, trap originally used live birds, which is as close to the real experience of upland hunting as you can get.

When they failed to do it well enough, we developed other games that did, like sporting clays and a raft of other shotgunning games that use clay birds to represent real ones. Shoot a round of crazy quail and, if nothing else, you learn the humility of missing far more than you hit---just as it is in the field, when the targets are made of feathers and fur instead of molded clay.

As much as anything, the uplands are a state of mind. The reality may be a long day slogging through farm fields and woodlines with a beat up pump gun, and maybe busting one small covey holding eight or nine birds. And perhaps you took one on the rise, and, later, thanks more to the dog’s effort than your own, you took a single. But, in your head, where it really counts, you’re part of a Nash Buckingham tale. That covey held 30 or 50 birds. You dropped two, with a swinging right and a left from that old double with the side-hammers, then took two scattered singles. Then, because you’re not a hog, you changed dogs and went to find a second covey, so as to not thin them out too much.

At base, upland gunning isn’t about the birds nor the bunnies. The uplands are about being there. And being there is enough.