My longtime bowhunting partner, Paul Ziegler, and I just returned from our annual wild hog hunting trip in southern Oklahoma. Compared to recent hog hunts, this one featured almost idyllic weather — from misty, warm days to bright sunny ones that pushed the temperature well over 70 degrees.

We parked the truck behind a nondescript rambler house on a dead-end road, sandwiched among an entire block of similar homes and garages with backyards butting up against the east side of Reelfoot Lake in northwestern Tennessee. It’s a good hour before the sun will start peeking over the hor…

Southern Minnesota’s upland hunters fall into three distinct categories: Casual bird chasers who may only hit fields one weekend a season, semi-serious hunters who include several trips to pheasant fields to fill in when other seasons are closed, and those who can be accurately described as …

If you love the outdoors, you’ve learned to adjust to the annual cycle of shrinking and growing days and, with each day, your dose of light and darkness.

As the year races to a close, most hunting seasons dissolve along with it. That leaves avid outdoors folks with an empty space that needs to be filled with other activities like hard-water fishing, or harvest-free sports like cross country skiing, wildlife watching and snowshoeng. Barring ou…

Every hunting trip, whether a shot is fired or not, has something to teach the hunter, if only he pays attention. My first western big game hunt put a few gorgeous mule deer bucks in my sights.

A few days ago, pup, Cash and I spent an afternoon traversing a massive Wildlife Management Area in a mostly frustrating effort to bag a pair of rooster pheasants.

It’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other and continue, with an occasional step sliding out beneath me on a Ponderosa pine needle lined mountainside.

They say, nothing lasts forever, and this year’s Minnesota waterfowl season is no exception.

The visuals through the fall are stirring, perhaps none more than the north woods in October.

Puppy training this year has put as many gray hairs on my head as have my children, which is to say a lot.

Minnesota waterfowlers are smack dab in the midst of a DNR-mandated two- week hunting shutdown.

For anglers in the know, Madison Avenue in Mankato was where you could take your Minn Kota trolling motor for factory service. Now you’ll need to check out Power Drive.

Summers go as fast as they come in Minnesota, leaving most of us short of getting to our favorite activities.

I’m back home at the family farm, walking past barns while toting a 12-gauge shotgun. My pants pockets are filled with shotgun shells.

For most of my youth, pheasant hunting was done sans a qualified bird dog.

The driver of a pickup truck with canoe lashed to its roof rolls his window down to speak to me:

When sports folks head afield with hunting dogs a lot of positive things can happen.

Forecasting weather in Grand Marais, Minnesota is kind of like throwing a dart at a chart of possible weather conditions. You never know what you are going to land on, and like a lot of Minnesota weather, if you don’t like what you presently have, just wait a little bit.

GRAND MARAIS — It was easy to see why Shawn Perich has been an angler for more than 50 years.

Each year’s annual trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is an excuse to try out at least one new piece of equipment. Lightweight, high quality backpack camping equipment is often both high technology and expensive.

Lake Mille Lacs still has its unique fishing mystique.

Minnesota is home to all manner of migratory birds who make stops here to proliferate over spring and summer before returning to wintering grounds far to the south.

The Lura Lake Fair will celebrate its 25th anniversary next month.

Last Wednesday was idyllic by southern Minnesota standards, one of those four or five perfect days we get each spring.

The end of March found me putting ice fishing gear away and bringing the boat home.

Fishermen are funny creatures. We look at bodies of water and ponder how we’d fish them, we plan trips to places we’d like try, and we dream of taking advantage of conditions when they are right for good fishing.