#feathrusday

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A Thanksgiving Feathursday: Talking Turkey!

Can we talk turkey, here? Are you having a tough time tracking down a good turkey for Thanksgiving this coronavirus season? Then we suggest going Shotgunning in the Uplands with Ray P Holland. This publication, published in New York by A. S. Barnes and Company in 1944 with reproductions of paintings and line drawings by American wildlife artist Lynn Bogue Hunt, is replete with down-home advice for bagging your bird. As Holland observes:

This grand bird is hunted in many different ways in different parts of the country. . . When you are in a strange land and the subject is turkey, just take the native hunter’s say-so, and you will get along better. The chances are that he knows what he is talking about. . . .

An acquaintance of mine from Alabama . . . says: . . .“Now you see him. He steps out in the open. Every feather is pressed tight to his body. . . . Now he ruffles his feathers, his great tail spreads, and he pulls his head ‘way back and struts his stuff. Look out now! Of a sudden he throws his head forward and the woods shake with that gobble. Right then is when I raise my rifle. He don’t see the movement when he’s gobblin’. . . . Right then is the time, sah. Put the cross-hairs on his old head and squeeze her easy, boy -- squeeze her easy!”

. . . . No matter how you like your turkey hunting, he is a grand game bird--the largest upland game bird in America--and he deserves every break.

Sage advice for your holiday hunting!

Our copy of Shotgunning in the Uplands is a 1945 second printing and was a gift of Helen Best, from the collection of her husband, noted Milwaukee attorney, conservationist, skilled dog breeder, book collector, and avid bird hunter John S. Best.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

View other posts from Ray Holland’s Shotgunning series.

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We acknowledge that in Milwaukee that we live and work on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present.

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It’s #Feathursday, and the Morris boys holding fluffy chicks are ramping up the cute factor at the Morris beach house in Sea Girt, New Jersey. 

Morris, Marriott Canby, 1863-1948, photographer. [Two boys holding birds, Sea Girt] [Elliston Perot Morris Jr., Marriott Canby Morris Jr.] Summer 1907. 1 photograph: film negative; 3 x 4.5 in.   

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A Sagacious Corvid Feathursday

It’s autumn and the neighborhood crows have taken to gathering on the roof top just below our windows and along the pinnacles of the pitched roofs across the way. They all look like they’re waiting for someone, so we thought this illustration by Harrison Weir from The Children's Picture-Book of the Sagacity of Animals, published by George Routledge and Sons sometime in the 1870s with sixty illustrations by Weir, was particularly appropriate for this #Feathursday.

The story goes that the top-hatted fellow depicted here reared a crow and took care of it for a time, but somehow it became lost. A year passed, and while the man was out walking, a company of crows flew overhead. One crow left the others and landed on the man’s shoulder. Each recognized the other as old friends. However, the crow “had learnt the value of liberty,” and soon took wing and was never heard from again. Oh, the sagacity!

The illustrator, Harrison Weir (1824-1906), was a noted English artist who illustrated several publications on nature and animals. Cats, however, were his particular favorites, and he became known as “The Father of Cat Fancy,”  organizing the first English cat show at London’s Crystal Palace in 1871.

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