I've read Field & Stream on and off since childhood, when I discovered it in the public library on Court Street in Brooklyn and imagined myself a dove hunter, dog trainer, catcher of tarpon, shooter of duck. The fantasies stuck. I started to hunt. I started to fish. Ever so slowly, a city kid started to change.
The writing has always been good and, sometimes, as when my colleague C. J. Chivers files for them, it gets to be great. Yesterday, taking a flight from central Maine to New York, I read the October issue, cover to cover, taking notes all the way. Here's what I learned.
1. There appears to be some wickedly productive and exciting steelhead fishing going on in the shadows of the hurting cities along the coast and rivers of the eastern Great Lakes, from Cleveland up to Rochester, and over toward the Salmon River north of Syracuse. To judge from the photographs, those waters grow the fish big and smart, and it would be exciting to chase them in the sharp cold of a Western New York autumn.
2. That nervous, hyperadrenalized feeling that hunters and fishermen feel right before they take a shot or throw a fly at a passing fish? It takes a great deal of practice to lose that. But it does pass. Jerry Fisher, a custom gunmaker of some renown, told David E. Petzal, the magazine's rifles editor: "After you take about 300 head of big game, you calm down." In his column, Petzel wrote, "That sounds about right." It does sound about right.
3. In addition to a rifles editor, the magazine lists editors for the following pursuits or areas of sporting concern: whitetails, shotguns, fishing, conservation and outdoor skills.
4. Forty states have autumn wild-turkey seasons. And yet food magazines rarely if ever write about the pleasures of a wild-shot bird for Thanksgiving. (I'd smoke one, if I could lie still long enough to shoot one.)
5. The marriage of sporting magazines and the right to carry handguns while hunting animals you generally hunt with rifles and shotguns goes back longer than you might think. The magazine has a "What Year Was It?" feature that highlights a cover from the Field & Stream archives. October's is from 1922. It shows an upland bird hunter lifting his English Pointer dog carefully over a barbed wire fence, his shotgun leaning against a post. And within that issue, the editors note, the magazine asked readers to join in the "Anti Antipistol Fight."
6. Jonathan B. Miles, who writes "The Wild Chef" column for the magazine, is one of the nation's best and most unheralded recipe writers. His venison carbonnade — elk or moose would work just as well, he writes — looks beautiful and seems easy enough to prepare (I like the addition of some brown sugar to the deep punch of the beer he uses as braising liquid). Shoot me a moose, and I'll test the results for you.
7. The magazine offers seven profiles of "Heroes of Conservation" it plans to recognize and reward at a gala in Washington later this year. One of the most interesting is a guy named John Sferazo, of Huntington Station, N.Y. Sferazo is a retired union ironworker who bought an old asphalt-plant site in rural Maine, and he restored its 1,000 acres to land that provides habitat for ducks, deer, woodcock and snowshoe hares. After 9/11, and after months spent working at Ground Zero, Sferazo opened the site to first responders and combat veterans. The outdoors, he told the magazine, "can offer refuge and healing." True enough, but the science behind his restoration of the land itself is pretty amazing.
8. Before you skin a fish fillet, the magazine's "Readers' Tips" section recommends, open a bottle of beer and save the cap. "Place your fillet skin side down and slice ½ inch of skin from the meat at the tail. Press the edge of the bottle cap into the skin with your thumb to keep it taut while you slice the flesh away." Ryan Hart of Cedar Park, Texas, got a Buck knife for sending along the tip. And he totally deserves it.
9. Michael R. Shea, the magazine's online video editor, tanned a deer hide in the bathroom of his fifth-floor walkup in Manhattan, then wrote about it. Cool process. To judge from the photograph, it came out pretty good.
10. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Breeding Survey shows some 48,575,000 breeding ducks in and around the United States this year, up 7 percent from last year. An index of breeding habitat, however, shows a drop of 32 percent for the year. Energy extraction processes in northern breeding grounds, the growth in open land converted to crops in the Dakotas and drought are going to make it tough going for wild ducks in coming years.
11. A single blue jay can lay in as many as 4,000 acorns in a single season — and find them months later using a fairly advanced navigation system in its little brain. The blue jay may be, the magazine says, the most important disperser of seed for the eastern oak tree.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 19, 2012
An earlier version misspelled the surname of Field & Stream's rifles field editor. He is David E. Petzal, not Petzel.
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