I once took a birding class when I was an English major at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. On the first day, my jaw sank when the professor explained that this class would not be a field course as I had hoped. Instead, we would study the skins of dead birds for a semester. You’ll never see a Cassin’s auklet or an Antarctic petrel in Shawano County, but I held their preserved skins in my hand.

Terry Dorschner isn’t exactly sure how many turkeys he’s shot over the years, but he hasn’t shot any since 2015. It’s not that his luck has run out. Quite the contrary. He just gets more fun out of helping others bag a big tom. He’s shot plenty of big gobblers, including one that weighed 30 pounds.

I sat on the comfy padded seat of the UBCO Adventure 2x2 electric motorcycle and listened to Valley Snowmobile and Powersports owner Lon Tesch explain how to ride it. Once a button on the handlebar is pushed, it’s “in gear,” even though it doesn’t have gears.

Have you been shooting your bow or crossbow yet? July slipped away amid a series of rock concerts and a major windstorm. Like Dorothy, I awoke from my dream and discovered I had landed at home, although it was now August. The archery opener is now about six weeks away. I’m a sucker for outdoors magazines, and when picking up a few groceries at Festival Foods, I had to stop at the magazine stand.

Why is something free so much better than the same things for a small cost? If you are having a yard sale, people might ignore your dime and quarter items, but they’ll flock to the free table or box. At my workplace, we have a large table near the employee entrance that is called the Free Table.

Wisconsin’s 576,000 gun-deer hunters participated in one of the safest seasons on record, with just three minor hunting-related injuries reported statewide. This was the third season in a row with no fatalities, a record in the state’s long deer hunting legacy. Hunters bagged 211,430 deer during the nine-day season, up 7 percent from last season, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources reported.