I remember my introduction to wing-shooting like it happened yesterday – occurring in my South Deerfield hometown, mostly along the base of North Sugarloaf between Graves Street and Hillside Road.

My late father was a sportsman of sorts, but not a hunter or fisherman. He loved team sports and was quite accomplished in football, basketball, and baseball – especially football, which carried him to the Boston American newspaper’s New England Unsung College Football Player of the Year award a year or two before my 1953 birth. He was a fleet, elusive halfback and a teammate of future NFL Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli at Arnold College in Milford, Connecticut.

Older local folks will remember the restaurant Robustelli owned on Barton’s Cove, a popular ’50s-’60s hangout. I remember meeting him and other New York Giants players at their preseason summer camp in Bridgeport. It was a big deal. I recognized their names from Sunday afternoon telecasts in the days of rooftop antennas and grainy black-and-white TV.

Never in my lifetime did my dad own a fishing rod or gun, but my mother’s brother Bob did, and he had introduced me as a young boy to fishing during summer Cape Cod and Nova Scotian vacations, and to skeet and trap shooting at a Minnesota sportsmen’s club. Prior to that I had honed my shooting skills with friends’ BB and pellet guns, then relied as a teen on some of their fathers’ beat-up shotguns and .22 caliber field guns, the use of which were accompanied by stern gun-safety rules. That laidback scenario wouldn’t fly in today’s world. Then it was tradition.

My wing-shooting adventures began most often in the company of my boyhood friends “Fast Eddie” Urkiel, who took his own life in recent years, and “The Count,” who’s alive and well as a 40-year veteran high-wire lineman at Utah’s Snowbird Ski Resort. We all had nicknames back then, and still use them today when we get together.

The Count lived on Eastern Avenue, a stone’s throw from a narrow secondary powerline we favored over all other partridge-hunting sites. At the time, old Yankee pasture along the forest’s edge was being overtaken by young growth with many seeds and berries. Perfect habitat for partridge, official name ruffed grouse.

The Count called grouse “grey ghosts” because of his dad’s admiration for their speed and escapability. If you walked our old hunting paths today, you wouldn’t get a single flush from mature forest.

The same holds true for woodcock. Back in the day, we’d flush occasional resident woodcock on summer days, then small flocks of flight birds in the fall. The Count called them “timberdoodles.” Their numbers, too, have dwindled greatly. Without a dog as kids, we flushed far fewer woodcock than partridge. Timberdoodles are small and tend to hold tighter when danger looms.

In the ideal 60’s habitat, partridge would regularly burst out of the undergrowth, providing quick, challenging shots before disappearing behind branchy obstructions. When they eluded us on the way in, we’d remember the location, and move in slowly on the way back. The strategy worked now and again, but less frequently than a similar back-and-forth trout-fishing routine on upland brooks and streams.

In later years, with better shotguns and more experience, I learned to bring partridge down with surprising success through naked apples, alder, poplars and tall, tangled wild roses. It’s a skill that takes a lot of convincing and time to master, aided by light, fast-pointing, side-by-side double-barrels with open chokes.

For my taste, the wide sight plane of my pre-World War II French 16-gauge double-barrel that shot 2½-inch shells produced far better results than my 12-gauge Browning Citori over-and-under with its 2¾-inch loads and modern removable choke tubes. The wider sight plane is faster and deadlier. Similar to other difficult challenges, efficiency is directly related to confidence. I always believed wing shooting and hitting a baseball shared many transferable skills.

These days, with the local partridge and woodcock population in noticeable decline, I choose not to kill them. Too much respect. Don’t need the meat.

That old childhood powerline along the base of North Sugarloaf isn’t the only covert where the decline is obvious. All my favorite grouse coverts are today barren. On the rare occasions when I flush one, my trusty shotgun still reflexively flinches upward, but I just don’t follow through. Instead, I tip my cap and let the bird escape, hoping it’ll establish a spring nest and brood.

In the old days, hunting without a dog, we’d hunt in small groups of two or three, and alternate walking five or 10 slow, alert steps before stopping to spook partridge into flight. In many cases I think that approach could sometimes be more productive than hunting with a dog, which produces more wild flushes.

A pointing dog can remedy that problem, but I never chose to own one. Personal preference, I guess. The big difference is that in the flush-and-retrieve game the hunter must read the dog and anticipate sudden flushes, while those hunting over pointers move in to flush birds themselves after their dog has locked on point. Give me the frenzied flush-and-retrieve game any day of the week. Gentlemanly shooting over pointers is, to me, too much like killing.

After I graduated high school, another friend who’s no longer with us introduced me to his personal style of pheasant hunting. The method was similar to my aforementioned partridge-hunting routine, except the pace was faster and busier. We’d get into heavy cover and walk three abreast, stopping often in unison to listen for fleeing footsteps in the undergrowth and watch for wiggling golden rod and other brush.

I must hand it to my late buddy. His was a highly productive game. We shot many pheasants, preferably flying, but often on the run like rabbit hunting. Myself, I always preferred a flush, but can’t say the same for my partners. I was a developing wing-shooter, and they were filling freezers.

Which brings us to another late friend, whose family owned a Whately produce farm liberally stocked with pheasants each year during the six-week season. The family owned a tagalong black Lab farm dog named Smokey, who loved the excitement of cackling ringneck-rooster flushes. Father and son encouraged me to “Take him anytime you want. Smokey loves to flush pheasants, and won’t run off.”

That was a year or two before I got married in 1979, and I took them up on the offer, hunting not only their vast acreage but many other bottomland coverts not far of. Those were the days when most pheasants were stocked on private land, spreading birds and hunting pressure thin. Today, most birds are stocked on state Wildlife Management Areas, which can be chaotic and potentially dangerous, with a lot of hunters and gun dogs working the same space.

When my South Deerfield grandfather died less than a year into my marriage, I bought his home, and within weeks purchased my first gun dog – a versatile black Lab named Sugarloaf Saro Jane, call name Sara. She had national-champion River Oaks Corky in her background and was a dynamo in the field.

As Sara aged out, a softball teammate and field-trialer introduced me to well-bred English springer spaniels, which I switched to in the early 90’s. Springers are smaller and an overall better dog for the type of bird-hunting I love. Sara was a better family pet.

Inevitably, it’s now me that’s aging out, and for the first time since I was a kid I’m without a dog. Meanwhile, the put-and-take pheasant-hunting game has changed dramatically – along with fall weather. I must say I find bird-hunting far less inviting when it involves sweating through tick-infested 60- and 70-degree November marshland.

Then again, if the day is right and the urge is there, I still have access to my friend’s experienced springers. But even that convenient arrangement won’t last forever. He recently put the demanding field-trial circuit in the rearview and will soon, more than likely, bury his last gun dog.

I have no concerns or regrets. Had my day. Many of them. And have now discovered new pursuits that fulfill my hunting instincts and keep me engaged.

I chase information.