THE FLYWAY

By GORDY GORDON, Editor/Publisher If we stop and really think about it, no two waterfowlers are alike. Even within a family or duck-blind buddies, no two individuals hunt or equip him or herself precisely the same as the others. We are set apart by preferences in duck guns, shells, decoys or even items as mundane as what's in the lunch bag -- and those are just the beginning. Likewise, no two have identical passion for the birds or the games we play to bag them, or possess identical skills & knowledge & experience. If you doubt that, just listen to a blind-ful of duck-callers in action! Yet when someone says "I'm a duck hunter," other members of The Brethren understand. We get it. From whistler-shooters hugging icy rock shores in New England, to Deep South pin oak swampers and Midwest pond-jumpers, across the map to mallard-infested wheatlands of the Pac Northwest and posh California clubs with their sprigs and specks ... we are all totally different a...

Essay by GORDY GORDON, Editor/Publisher Sumner, Missouri, October 1963. You think this is a photo of a beginning. It's not. Men at left and right, respectively, were my adopted uncles, Ray and Randy. That's a somewhat excited young Gordy at center. And yes that is my first goose. Moments beforehand, it fell to my shot. I had fired from a concrete pit in the ground so deep that I had to stand on a wooden box to see out and shoot. Now, my Dad was a Waterfowler, through and through. He chose the location where I grew up based heavily on the fact it was smack-dab in the center of duck and goose hunting grounds. And perhaps it was Dad's adult lifetime of wishing and hoping and working toward this moment that essentially willed my shot and the goose to collide in a burst of fate some 24 yards east of where three men and a boy huddled within the goose pit. A generation or two earlier, famed outdoorsman and conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold had -- and wrote about -- the exp...