It’s fun to hear from someone so passionate about an outdoor pursuit that it becomes a major part of their life. For some it’s fly fishing. For others, it’s tracking big bucks, trapping furbearers, calling in turkeys, or sitting in a duck blind. Brad Varney’s passion is bird hunting – more specifically, hunting upland birds with dogs.
Varney has hunted birds in Maine for more than 60 years, and remains as passionate about the sport as the day he started. He teaches wing shooting technique, runs a sporting clay range, and hasn’t missed an opening day of Maine’s upland bird hunting season in more than half a century.
Brad recently published “Maine-ly Bird Hunting”, a followup to his book “Maine-ly Wing Shooting”, which was an instructional book that went deep into Brad’s super instinctive wing shooting method. “Maine-ly Bird Hunting” is a different book, dedicated to sharing bird hunting memories and stories Brad has gathered through his decades in the field.
Nearly 200 pages of stories and pictures highlight a long and storied life as a bird hunter. These include some pretty outstanding experiences, like rare doubles on ruffed grouse, an unlikely triple while duck hunting, and shooting three different species of upland birds in three minutes. As you might imagine, spending a lot of time in the field results in more unique stories to tell, and Brad has plenty of them. He also tells of a woodcock that played dead, a grouse shot down twice, and several instances of grouse ‘towering’.
Over such a long hunting career, Varney has also experienced a lot of changes. Many of his fellow hunting companions have left for the happy hunting grounds, and old covers they used to hunt are disappearing every year. With population growth and sprawl in southern Maine, upland bird habitat is often being replaced with housing developments, shopping centers and ‘No Tresspassing’ signs. Such is life in some places.
There are few bonds as strong as that between a man and his hunting dog, and Brad tells the stories of many good dogs he had the pleasure of hunting with over the years. As he puts it, the one problem with all hunting dogs is that they never live long enough.
I’m not a diehard upland bird hunter, though I have friends who are, and get out with them some. Still, I enjoyed reading Brad Varney’s stories in “Maine-ly Bird Hunting”. His passion for bird hunting shines through in every story. “Maine-ly Bird Hunting” is available on Amazon.com. If there’s one downside to the book, I’d say it could have benefitted greatly from some editing, but despite some choppy writing, the stories are great!
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