Upland bird hunting has inspired literature blending natural history, personal meditation, and celebration of tradition. Within the pages of these books, thickets become small theaters, bird dogs take on central characters, and the flush of wings becomes poetry.
Taken together, these books trace the twentieth century’s upland imagination and continue to define how we think about bird hunting and the places it endures.
Nash Buckingham: The Voice of Southern Tradition
They said Nash Buckingham could make a story rise like a flushed covey. His first volumes were published by the prestigious Derrydale Press - De Shootin’est Gent’man (1934), Mark Right! (1936), Ole Miss’ (1937), and Blood Lines (1938), brim with humor and Southern cadence, capturing the fellowship and timeless rituals of the bird field. Later titles were published by various other publishers.
Buckingham’s love for waterfowling is often highlighted, but his upland tales are no less compelling. His writing captures the essence of hunting quail in the Southern piney woods, complete with vivid depictions of old plantation landscapes and classic doubles. However, it was his custom barreled Fox shotgun, "Bo Whoop," a duck and goose gun, that was most famous. Bo Whoop was lost in 1948 and vanished from sight for half a century before resurfacing at a James D. Julia firearms auction in 2010.
Reading Buckingham today, however, means confronting the language of his time. He often wrote the speech of Black characters in dialect. What once aimed at realism now feels coarse, born of a time shadowed by prejudice. At times the dialogue is so tangled in phonetic spelling that I find myself reading passages aloud, sometimes twice, to follow his meaning.
I won’t excuse it as merely “of its time,” nor separate the craft from the bias it bears. Yet I also won’t look away. The language offends, but it reveals. True history can be ugly, and Buckingham’s writing is no exception. Still, his sporting scenes and sense of fellowship hold value as artifacts of a complicated age—reminders of how far we’ve come, and how far remains.
Despite his flaws, Buckingham’s voice carried beyond literature. He was an ardent conservationist, lending his influence to campaigns for game laws, federal refuges, and waterfowl protections. He served as a charter member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America when it was founded in 1927, standing alongside other pioneering communicators who shaped the public conscience toward the field and stream.
Buckingham’s conservation ethic comes through in “Amid Whirring Wings,” a quail-hunting story first published in Field & Stream (October 1930). It later appeared in the Derrydale edition of Mark Right! and in the 1961 collection De Shootin’est Gent’man and Other Hunting Tales. Buck warned about easily accessed ground: “Once discovered, fruitful but unprotected quail country is soon made barren of birds. Bevies are hunted to the last bob. Along such ranges, decent sportsmen may enjoy a season’s trappings, but unthinkable irresponsibles and quail bootleggers know no honor or bag limits.”
William Harnden Foster: Chronicler of Grouse and Tradition
Trained at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, William Harnden Foster first made his name as an illustrator, even painting locomotives of America’s railroads with vivid realism. Yet it was the grouse woods of New England that claimed his imagination. A field trial judge and one of the early architects of skeet shooting, Foster was immersed in the sporting culture of his era. His landmark book, New England Grouse Shooting (1942), captures the bird, the dogs, and the old farm coverts of New England with authority and grace. It was later republished in 1970, 1983, and again as a 75th anniversary re-issue in 2017.
In its pages, Foster balanced practical advice on guns and dogs with a reverence for the bird itself. His writing is exact, rooted in the rhythms of grouse country—the stone walls, alder runs, and the sudden thunder of wings. In the chapter “Your Grouse of Today,” Foster lays out a paradox at the heart of New England bird country at that time: “we have already found that the ruffed grouse prospers best in abandoned farming country. There is more of this today in rural New England than there ever was before.” Yet he also names the cost of “progress,” the losses hunters still recognize: the grouse man “returns to one of his inherited covers to find some favorite corner developed into a modern hen farm, or a trunk highway staked out through the very best part of another.”
Foster died of a heart attack at a field trial, gone at fifty-four. He didn’t live to see the publication of New England Grouse Shooting the next year. It endures as one of the defining works of upland literature, carrying the traditions of sport and the spirit that still draws hunters to the thickets—and for me, it remains a book to revisit on the darkest winter nights, a small ritual of the season.
Burt Spiller: The Poet of the Coverts
Burt Spiller brought a lyrical simplicity to the literature of grouse hunting. His first books were under Derrydale Press, including Grouse Feathers (1935), Thoroughbred
Spiller’s gift was to capture the fleeting moments of the hunt with intimacy and restraint: the crunch of frosted leaves, the stillness of a bird dog, the sudden rise of a grouse breaking cover. His dogs were never mere instruments but companions, their instincts and training woven into the very fabric of his tales. Spiller’s work reminds us that the pursuit of game is as much about the journey as the quarry.
Spiller came to be known as “the poet laureate of grouse hunting.” He hunted with a loyal band of friends, who appeared as characters in his stories. Spiller also went afield with other writers, including William Harden Foster and H.G. “Tap” Tapply, a popular outdoors writer of the day as well as Tap’s son, William, who also penned many outdoors stories, including two fine compilations of upland hunting stories.
Writing from the grouse coverts near his Maine home, Spiller was steeped in the northern New England grouse woods, as in this line from his first book, Grouse Feathers: “One gets to know the birdy-looking place sonly by experience and close observations of conditions.”
George Bird Evans: The Upland Shooting Life
Where Spiller’s coverts were New England’s, George Bird Evans found his muse in the Alleghenies — bringing a contemplative, literary sensibility to upland hunting, treating it as an art form shaped by the interplay of man, dog, and nature. Beginning in the 1950s with magazine essays, he went on to publish works including his first upland hunting title, The Upland Shooting Life (1971). Evans opens by inviting readers to sit by his hearth, Belton setters at his feet, before leading them into the fields and woodlots of the Allegheny ridges. His own spare sketches accompany the text, capturing in simple lines both a dog on point and the atmosphere of a day afield. He writes “My lids droop and embers become grapevines etched against the sky where that last grouse went out high from Briar’s point. This is the mellow moment when I lick the wounds of my day’s misses, which don’t seem nearly so important now.”
Working closely with his wife, Kay, Evans built a body of work that still defines the upland imagination. Loyal to editors like Dave Meisner at Gun Dog and later The Pointing Dog Journal, he cultivated an equally devoted readership—myself among them. After publishing eight upland titles with major presses, the Evanses launched their own imprint, Old Hemlock, in 1982 with An Affair with Grouse, a title Kay called “the most George” of any of his titles. The press, Old Hemlock, followed with another 12 upland hunting titles, as well as From My Covers, including selections from their mystery and sporting books.
Starting in New York City early in George’s career as an illustrator, Kay wrote “Back then we made-do with the trees of Central Park, and gazed south at the Manhattan skyline and vowed that those skyscrapers would give us our hemlocks in our mountains.” In time the Evanses purchased a Federal Period West Virginia home they dubbed Old Hemlock, a name that became their brand. The Evanses bred their line of setters to embody the ideal bird dog. George’s prose about them is lyrical, interwoven with reflections on ethics, conservation, and the preservation of wild places. Evans and I shared a philosophy on how to treat a gun dog – he wrote of one of his favorites in An Affair With Grouse within the chapter, “Briar”: “Briar lived as I do, for grouse and woodcock gunning, but like a civilized shooting man, he viewed sport as within a framework of genteel living. He knew the joy of possession of Old Hemlock House, sitting at gaze on the living room window seat, lying on his rugs, his sofas, on the cool stones of the screened porch floor in summertime,…”.
Havilah Babcock: The Professor of Quail
For Havilah Babcock, long a professor of English at the University of South Carolina, the quail fields were as much a classroom as his lecture halls. His collections—My Health Is Better in November (1947), Tales of Quail and Such (1951), I Don’t Want to Shoot an Elephant (1958), and Jaybirds Go to Hell on Friday (1965)—delivered wit, charm, and a lightness of touch that masked a deep affection for the birds and dogs of the South.
Collectors take note, although the official release of Jaybirds Go to Hell on Friday was January 1965, there are a handful of rarer than rare, autographed copies that Babcock signed just before he passed on December 10, 1964.
Babcock’s essays sparkle with humor, but beneath the jokes runs the steady current of a teacher’s wisdom. He celebrated the fellowship of hunters, the quirks and brilliance of bird dogs, and the anticipation of a covey rise. In blending humor and warmth, he gave Southern quail hunting a voice that remains as inviting as a fire after the hunt. As with Buckingham, reading him today, however, means facing the language of his time: he sometimes wrote Black characters’ dialogue in dialect, and his use of it is at best dated—and at times downright offensive.
That said, there are well-written, entertaining stories where upland bird hunters will recognize themselves. Among my favorites of Babcock is the title story of his first book, My Health is Better in November. The piece is light on ego, heavy on charm and as a serious bird hunter, I feel the same way. His voice is genial and self-deprecating, a professor confessing his own bird fever with a grin: “The fact that improvement in my health coincides with the advent of quail season doesn’t mean that my ills during the rest of the year are imaginary. For outdoor pursuits have a recognized therapeutic value. Especially quail hunting.”
Rare Gems
Beyond the well-known classics, the world of upland hunting literature includes rarer works less widely recognized but highly sought by collectors.
Partridge Shortenin’ (1949), by Gorham Cross (Grampa Grouse) was self-published with just 100 copies. Its charm lies in an unpretentious style and the authenticity of its observations. More than a collection of stories, it captures the vernacular of bird hunting as spoken among Cross and his companions, including Burt Spiller and Tap Tapply.
Other rarities include Partridge Rambles (1937) and, later, Partridge Adventures (1951) by William Claflin Jr., each privately published in a very limited run. Together with Partridge Shortenin’, these slim volumes form a rare shelf of voices that breath with the scent of frost, gun oil, and alder.
Word counts keep me from widening the shelf, but you won’t go wrong with the stories of Robert Jones, Guy de la Valdene, and Mike Gaddis; books that keep the seasons alive long after closing day.
About the Author: Glenn Zinkus is an outdoor writer and photographer from Corvallis, Oregon. When not engaged in piscatorial pursuits or shooting outdoor photos, he may be finding upland birds behind his Brittanies; or attending to other business that often has him traveling.