CODA

November. 1998. Opening weekend. This is my place. My name may not be on the deed, it may even say “public” on the sign, but it’s mine nonetheless. I’ve purchased it with the coin of time and sweat and shoe leather and blistered skin. And I sure as hell don’t want to share it. Yet here they are, the bastards. Rich ones in their new trucks pulling shiny trailers. Poor ones, like myself, in rustbuckets with plywood boxes thrown in the bed. And all of them—regardless of social class—here to take what’s mine; what I thought I was jealously guarding by keeping my big mouth shut.

I drive around the area--my area--and the license plates read like a litany of the dead for what used to be bird country: Alabama. South Carolina. North Carolina. Tennessee. Florida. Kentucky. Virginia. Georgia. Arkansas. Louisiana. Mississippi. The in-state-but-out-of-towners. The Mongol hordes of landless Texans. And me.

I want to hate them all for being here, for screwing up my little set-piece dream of solitude and birds and the pup and me and not another living soul under this brilliant bowl of sky. But of course, I can’t. Because they are me. He is us. Not enemy, but kindred seekers trying to sate the desperate hunger for a moment when sky and birds and dogs converge into an instant of pure meaning.

And how can I begrudge my kindred their quest for such validation of existence? I can’t. So my little set-piece dream is returned from whence it came, shoved back in the mental file labeled “unfulfilled.” I load up the pup and drive home.

There will be no solitude, no magic and no first point this day. Today belongs to others. And as road dust obscures the receding prairie in my rearview mirror, I must convince myself once again: I don’t begrudge them. Really, I don’t begrudge them. But you can bet your ass I’m gonna beat those kindred sonsabitches out here next weekend.

***
November. 2012. This past weekend marked the quail opener, and despite the howling wind, the crunchy, drought-stricken vegetation, and quail populations hovering near all-time lows, I do what I have always done: I load up the dogs and go hunting on my favorite piece of public ground, the very same place I wrote about in frustration all those years ago.

I know the parking areas will be mostly empty. They are. I know I’ll have the place virtually to myself. I do. I know that on this quail opener, I’ll finally be granted the solitude I craved all those years ago. I am. Solitude. That’s what drought, rampant habitat loss, waning hunter participation and bird numbers at historic lows will buy those few of us who refuse to give up, sell the dogs, and take up something easier. Is it hope that drives us, or mere muscle memory, the vestigial liturgy of a long-gone past and a rapidly fading present?

I have no idea. All I know is that today, just like that day 14 years ago, I have a young pup who desperately needs to hunt. Solitude doesn’t make a bird dog. Birds do. So the dogs and I set out across the lonely, undulating sandhills, three tiny specks, two white, one blaze orange, crawling across a giant swath of emptiness and memory. And as distance and time grows, so too does the realization that today, solitude is all we are going to find.

At noon, the dogs and I climb a tall sandhill overlooking the riverbottom below. I shrug out of the vest, give the dogs some water, lean back against the sagebrush, and take out my lunch. My spot commands a sweeping view, and there’s not another soul anywhere within it. As I munch my sandwich, I somewhat ruefully recall that fourteen years ago, when the number of quail hunters in my state numbered in the hundreds of thousands and I was so outraged by the gall they displayed in showing up here at “my” place, that this moment would not be possible. Now, with quail hunter numbers at an estimated 17,000 and dropping fast, I might actually be able to go all season and never see another bird hunter.

And suddenly, I realize that it’s not just solitude I crave. Or even birds for the pup. No, what I’d love to see right now, more than anything, is another tiny orange speck crawling across the landscape before me, looking for the same thing I am, driven on by hope and muscle memory. Perhaps then I could finally shake the feeling, if only temporarily, that I am living in epilogue.

***

Sometimes you find a piece of old writing that is both hopelessly outdated (and, as it turns out, hopelessly wrong), and still quite relevant. I was digging around some old file folders yesterday and found the fossilized artifact above. I believe it was originally published as a blog post on the old, long-gone original Field & Stream website, way back in the day.

It’s fascinating to me in that it unwittingly demonstrates two disparate but inextricably linked subjects: The boom-and-bust nature of quail populations out here on the plains, and the equally boom-and-bust nature of bird hunter numbers and the resultant hunting pressure on public land.

In 1998, when the first section was written, there was no social media, no Facebook, no Instagram. There were newspapers, magazines, a few primitive internet message boards, and word-of-mouth. And even back then, that was often enough to create overcrowding issues on public land. 1998 was also the first year that I, as a much-younger, solitude-craving bird hunter, had to deal with that public land competition in a good bird year.

By 2012, things had changed a bit. We had Facebook, the nascent beginnings of other social media platforms, and the reach of the internet had grown much more ubiquitous. And yet, what I wrote (ironically, published on a website) about the hunting back then was not hyperbole. 2012 was, as I recall now, a dry and miserable year for quail. And as such, bird hunters simply didn’t show up in the numbers they had in prior years.

Back then, I mistakenly chalked that up to declining hunter numbers and a precipitous drop in overall bird hunting interest and culture. I even lamented it. As it turns out, I was completely wrong, in that “be careful what you wish for” way that hindsight always seems to provide.

In fact, the last line of that second section might be one of the dumbest, most hyperbolic statements I’ve ever made in a lifetime of often making dumb, hyperbolic statements.

Bird hunters hadn’t disappeared at all, of course. They just tend not to show up when there aren’t any birds. Any false notions I had about the decline of bird hunting got completely wiped away in 2016, when we had a banner year for both birds and, once again, bird hunters. And that pattern has held ever since: Birds bring bird hunters, and there are still a helluva lot of bird hunters.

Now here we are in 2026. Both the world and hunting culture is vastly different from what it was in 2012 and 1998. And how do I write the coda to this triptych of personal perspective, one spanning almost 30 years?

Well, that’s still a work in progress. There are certainly some very worrying changes, perhaps even a few existential ones, happening in the no-longer-quite-so-niche world of upland bird hunting. But maybe a change or two for the better as well. I’m still trying to reconcile the tendency of the old to view the world with jaundiced, experience-scarred eyes with the clear-eyed necessity to accept that change happens, and always will.

But I can say one thing: I do not feel that I am “living in epilogue” as that younger me once wrote. I’m still here, still following dogs, still kicking.

A lot has changed since 1998, but that never will.