Author Archives: Gary Sanderson

A South Deerfield, Mass., native, Gary was the longtime sports editor at the Greenfield Recorder, a daily newspaper in Greenfield, Mass., where he retired in June 2018, having worked parts of five decades over 39 years. A senior-active, nearly 40-year member of the New England Outdoor Writers Association and the Outdoor Writers Association of America, his Thursday column "On The Trail" ran for nearly 40 years, ostensibly focusing on fish and wildlife, conservation and issues pertaining to them in the Connecticut Valley, where his roots reach deep into its oldest burial grounds. He and wife Joanne live in a historic Greenfield Meadows tavern today known as Old Tavern Farm, which has a rich history dating back to the mid-18th century. The home, which became a National-Register-of-Historic-Places building on his watch, served as a small, seasonal bed and breakfast from 1999-2015. Gary's other interests include history, anthropology, archaeology, literature, genealogy, Americana, country auctions, and early-American architecture and landscapes, as well as hunting, fishing and especially reading. His primary focus is the Pioneer Valley, its people, places and critters.

Still Antlered?

Early afternoon last week, post-snowstorm … Wednesday, I think. The phone rings. It’s Killer, my buddy. He gets right to the point. “I guess your buck may still have his horns,” he reported, basing this assessment on reliable second-hand information he had received from an old friend and hunter who lives in Bernardston. “Andy saw […]

Cougar Crossing

Noontime Saturday. Sunny. I’m running a fever indoors as the outdoor thermometer is forecast to drop. Sitting on a burgundy leather wing chair near the dining-room woodstove, I’m pulling on tall, green rubber boots with aggressive treads for a trip out back to the dogs under icy conditions. No reason to take another tumble like […]

Foot-Free Winter Thaw

It wasn’t expected. In fact, I was surprised … before I tossed it around and thought it out. Oh yeah. That’s right. I forgot. Animals can’t reason. Hmmmm, really? Well, believe what you will. Myself, I have other views, give animals more credit than that, am convinced they are capable of thinking, understanding and forming […]

Bucking Trends

By the time this column hits the street, the snow will be falling and I’ll probably be suspended in anxiety about throwing another pulley from the snowblower mounted to my John Deere tractor. Just Wednesday, my friend and I replaced the one I found on the ground after the last storm cleanup. With two more […]

Bottomland Buck

The cold, waxing Wolf Moon peered from the low southern sky through the black upper limbs  of my struggling front-yard sugar maple — it long-ago struck  by lightning but still hanging on — spinning my thoughts a half-mile or so down the road to my daily walking path, bordered east by the Green River, known […]

Family A-Fare

What better way to traipse off to my annual December vacation than by telling a Thanksgiving tale – one about a Warwick hunter-gatherer family with a freezerful of healthy game-meat before the first shot of the Massachusetts shotgun deer hunting season is fired? Yes, that long passed Harvest Moon in the midnight sky smiled favorably […]

Gundog Memories

Gundogs are like valued friends, teammates and hunting buddies. You build rapport and trust, learn their strengths and weaknesses, compare and rate them against others. The joy they add to daily life is worth the care. Before I owned a gundog, we used to hunt pheasants without one as teens. It was a coordinated maneuver  […]

Swamp Bustin’

Tan and tattered, they dangle from their shoulder-straps’ bridle-leather diamond-shaped tab on a wooden clothes hanger looped over half of an old, wooden yoke’s bow screwed to the carriage-shed wall as a hook. Who put that creative shed hanger there I do not know, but there are two just like it in the stables, plus […]

This And That And The Other Thing

The stimuli were there: gray, foreboding skies and an autumn chill greeting me for my morning stroll to the mailbox. Then came a call from a friend who, in a roundabout way, recounted a recent purchase of a reasonably priced Belgium Browning Sweet 16. Now, here I sit at my customary Wednesday-morning  station — books […]

October Ain’t What It Used To Be

It was Day 6 of the 36-day pheasant season and I had not hunted or even given it much thought. Too hot. Cooler days ahead. OK, there’s no denying I’m getting old and ain’t what I once was physically. Nonetheless, I still have the enthusiasm and physical (limping) prowess to navigate punishing coverts. That said, […]

Mad Meg theme designed by BrokenCrust for WordPress © | Top