PATRICK DURKIN OUTDOORS

As we work deeper into January, I’m reminded of past deer hunts this time of year in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.    Photos and keepsakes from those hunts remind me how much the South’s culture differs from my own. Southerners seem more fascinated with death, superstitions and the afterlife than do most folks of the Upper Great Lakes.    For example, when I arrived at the Long family’s camp in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Bayou in 2012, Mr. Raymond Long said I couldn’t hunt

Vern Hacker has been dead since March 1989, but I recall his smiling face and respect for rough fish whenever someone makes news for catching a huge gar, burbot, sheepshead or another piscatorial pariah.    That’s because Hacker was the Don Quixote of fisheries biologists during his career with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Hacker always encouraged people to eat rough fish instead of burying them to fertilize their gardens or flowers. And he especially despis

Of all the many whitetails roaming and browsing Wisconsin’s forests, farmlands and lowlands, which deer do hunters most cherish and protect?    Some would say it’s the mature adult doe, the species’ noble matriarch. Some gentle-souled hunters still consider it an act of sainthood to never shoot and eat “Mama Doe.” But if they sin, they’ll claim they fired only after verifying the doe was traveling alone, with no fawns depending on her for guidance and nourishment.    Some hun

We didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to identify the feathered victim.    Neither did we need John James Audubon to list the possible killers when finding blood and feathers scattered beneath our bird feeders in late November.    The feathers’ dark undersides were more rosy red than rusty, with streaky orange above the quill’s bare base. Inches away, fluffy tufts of afterfeathers fluttered atop the snow, weighted just enough by bloody tissue to mark where a cardinal, probably a mal