Shotgunner: Reflections on Birds, Guns, and Dogs

Review: Shotgunner: Reflections on Birds, Guns, and Dogs

Shotgunner: Reflections on Birds, Guns, and Dogs

By Steve Smith
Illustrated by Christopher Smith
Wilderness Adventures Press, $29.95, hardback, 230 pages

If in the course of the year you pop a cap at a flying object, then reading this book will result in your doing it better. Better means more birds or clays per case for a start. If you feel that there is little room for improvement there, then try cleaner shooting and in any event a restoration of civility to your/our sport. Shotgunning calls for guns, dogs, and birds, which by no coincidence are the first three chapters of this book. It also calls for skills matched to the quarry. Given available cash, anyone can buy a gun or a dog or access to birds. It is the skills part that has to be learned. Time was that you learned these skills with your peers and from your elders. Now there are more who come to field sports, hunting or fishing, de novo. They need the guidance that this book offers.
Come to think of it, few of us are so skilled that this book would be superfluous. Steve Smith is the editor of The Retriever Journal, managing editor of The Pointing Dog Journal and founder of Shooting Sportsman. With a shotgun in hand he may not have done it all, but he certainly has done, seen, experienced more of this field sport than 99+% of the rest of us. He has a finely honed sense of what is good shooting. “That yardstick is birds bagged per shells fired.” His sense of civility in an increasingly uncivilized world is even more finely tuned and well expressed. Civility is the essential element that makes good sport of good shooting.
Dogs are an integral part of bird hunting. Not absolutely essential but close. Most of us don’t own a hunting dog let alone have the ability to train one. We hunt behind someone else’s dog. This is a good place to be introduced to Smith’s understanding of civility. It has been said, “Men trifle with their politics and they trifle with their careers, but they do not trifle with their sport.” Try this: Walk into a tavern and announce, in this order: 1. “Anyone who voted for Clinton is a jerk.” 2. “Anyone who dropped out of college is a loser.” 3. “Anyone who spends time walking around after a bird dog is an imbecile.” See which one of those gets you punched in the mouth.
Did I mention that Steve Smith has a sense of humor? It is sprinkled throughout the book but the last 20 pages are the dedicated humor section. Alone in a room I laughed so loud that my wife came to look and see if I was having a stroke.
Under the title “A Respect for Game” Smith offers his concept of sporting ethics:

We do not trespass.
We do not handle our firearms in an unsafe manner.
We don’t steal another hunter’s shots.
We do not place anyone, including our dogs, in harm’s way.
We have a respect for game that calls for it to be shot, retrieved, and dispatched if necessary with all due speed and in a humane manner.

With a word processor and a few simple substituted words this should be the code of sporting ethics for our river, the Au Sable. This is a fine book and highly recommended. RWOL

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