The four of us scratched out a handful of sharptails, but between the drought-withered cover and strafing west winds that put distant birds on edge and then on the wing, Nebraska’s Sandhills were a graduate degree in upland hunting last fall.

Happily, we had waterfowl licenses and marsh gear, and on a remote Sandhills pothole surprisingly full of water, we soothed the sting of twitchy sharptails and prairie chickens with limits of teal and wigeon that blitzed our handful of decoys at double-speed.

As we plucked teal back and sipped rye at our wall-tent camp, a mini village of canvas under the twisting limbs of prairie cottonwoods, my hunting buddies and I talked about the specific gift of double limits. Each of us had our nominations for those places that can produce a fulsome morning of waterfowling followed by an afternoon of upland hunting.

It should be noted that as we talked, each of us shot frequent commiserating glances at our dogs, muddy, tired, stung with sand burrs, and twitching in their respective beds. Maybe these two-timing spots are places for a young dog, one of us offered. Or a young hunter, another said, rubbing a sore thigh. Maybe both, I said, as the owner of a wide-running Lab, steering the conversation toward the idea of versatility. Who among us hasn’t wondered what our dogs, and our own capabilities, might achieve with abundant birds, decent access, and good friends—all the ingredients of a legendary day. Here are a half-dozen spots where you really can have it all.

Hunting Prairie Grouse, Teal, and Pheasants in Nebraska’s Sandhills

I’ll start this roster with the familiar: The 2 million acres of tallgrass prairie and sand-bunker ponds that define a full quarter of the Cornhusker State. The bejeweled center of this empire of grass and sky is the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge, a 71,000-acre wetlands complex in north-central Nebraska. This is a wonderful spot to base your waterfowl journey, and upland hunting possibility radiates out from this hub.

Grasslands managed by the U.S. Forest Service are scattered to the south of the Valentine NWR, and thousands of private acres are enrolled in Nebraska Game & Parks’ walk-in hunting program, which includes 1.2 million acres of high-quality wildlife habitat across the state. The agency administers an excellent interactive Public Access Atlas that can help plan a trip to this delightfully remote, productive bird-hunting byway.

Both sharptails and greater prairie chickens are the upland headliners. The two species apparently segregate themselves, even in similar habitats. Generally, you’ll find sharptails west of a midline in Cherry County (by far, Nebraska’s largest, just south of Valentine) through Grant and Arthur counties. East of that line, you’ll encounter both prairie grouse and sharptails. And in riparian zones all the way south to Interstate 80, you’ll find plenty of pheasants. You may even encounter bonus wild turkeys near patches of prairie timber.

Waterfowl are largely where you find them but note that this is an early season game. The Sandhills lakes and potholes are generally shallow, and they’ll freeze up by early November. Plan a trip here in late September or early October, when the local ducks—a mix of greenwing and bluewing teal plus wigeon, mallards, and shovelers—roost on predictable waters. If you’re lucky, and you hunt here during a cold front of early November, these ponds and shallow lakes can fill overnight with migrating northern birds, mainly mallards and Canada geese. And in those glorious moments, you won’t care if the grouse cooperated, or not.

Pheasants and Late-Season Honkers in Montana

If you miss the waterfowl migration through Nebraska, you can travel northwest to intercept birds that will short-stop on the Missouri and Yellowstone river systems in eastern Montana. These big waters have enough ice-free habitat to convince birds from moving south even when the winter turns tough. The caveat is that a heavy snow that covers riverside grain fields can push birds on, but the usual combination of light snowfall and abundant grain makes the northeast corner of Montana a great double-dipping destination long after the early season grouse hordes have moved on.

The center of the action is on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, a 2-million-acre homeland of the Sioux and Assiniboine people. Much of the reservation land is leased to non-tribal farmers, and the wheat that grows on benches north of the Missouri River will provide enough remnant grain to sustain geese through November—a fact that is doubly or triply true in falls following July and August hailstorms that ruin the crops to the extent that farmers leave the shattered grain in the field. Honkers are quick to find this waste grain, and will often feed in the same fields for weeks. Consequently, field hunting is effective here, but for strong-swimming Lab owners, the Missouri River downstream of Fort Peck Dam can provide great action from mid-morning through late afternoon, as birds return to the water to loaf.

Riverside alfalfa and grain fields are full of ringnecked pheasants. Access is generally very good—one of the benefits of hunting the reservation is that because commercial outfitting is prohibited, there’s very little leasing—and bird numbers are excellent in thermal cover like cattails and Russian olive stands.

You’ll need a separate tribal hunting license for upland and waterfowl hunting. Costs for 2023 are $180 for upland birds, another $180 for pheasant, and $90 for waterfowl. Montana residents pay about half that amount.

Ruffed Grouse, Woodcock, and Wood Ducks in Minnesota

This mention could just as easily extend east to Wisconsin, but “The Chip,” as locals call Minnesota’s largest national forest, has both the consistency of opportunity and magnitude of land required to make it a first-order double-dipping destination.

Let’s look at ruffed grouse action first. The national forest manages nearly 300 miles of non-motorized trails that bisect some of the Northwoods’ best grouse cover. The most popular of these routes—around Leech, Winnibigoshish, and Moccasin lakes—get hit hard, but check out the Forest Service’s map and scout for remote or brambly looking portage routes. Those will produce mixed bags of ruffies and woodcocks.

The flowages will produce wood ducks, and hunting the remote hardwoods can be so productive that smart double dippers will pack a canoe, floating the flowages in the afternoon and jumping woodies that will depart this cold country by early November.

Hunting the Texas Panhandle for Sandhill Cranes and Bobwhite Quail

The Dust Bowl berg of Quanah, Texas is an unassuming Panhandle crossroads. The county-seat town of about 2,000 wind-bitten souls serves a great steak at the Old Bank Saloon, and you can catch some excellent Texas 2A football on Friday nights at Indian Stadium.

But just north of Quanah, on the Red River that defines the border with Oklahoma, nearly every migrating sandhill crane on the continent gathers in squawking multitudes, making Quanah the seat of an empire of bird hunting. Islands in the river or in accessible fields in either state can produce limits of tasty cranes. For river hunters who care to hunt the myriad islands in the braided river—watch for quicksand and gators—a mix of mallards, pintails, gadwall, and giant honkers will spice things up.

Public hunting opportunities in Texas are notoriously slim, but the Oklahoma side of the river has some decent options for both bobwhite quail and a few scaled quail. The large tracts of Sooner State public land are well-known and well-used.

Valley Quail, Chukar, Ducks, and Lesser Canadas in Washington

These are called the Scablands, these volcanic flats and arid scarps that rise away from the Columbia River in eastern Washington. They’re desolate of people, but surprisingly full of winged life. Riparian ribbons hold valley quail and the occasional rooster, and the rocky uplands hold quantities of chukar that can rival those of Hells Canyon and the Asotin Hills to the south.

Upland hunting is largely managed through Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s walk-in hunting program and can produce good quail, Hungarian partridge, and chukar action in river-breaks habitat away from high-traffic areas.

There’s decent waterfowling on the wildlife areas, purchased to offset wildlife habitat losses associated with the construction and operation of the Columbia River’s big hydroelectric dams. The better duck and goose hunting is on the big river and winter wheat fields just off the Snake and Columbia rivers. Swarms of cacklers, or lesser Canadas, will descend on the Scablands ahead of cold fronts that move them south from interior British Columbia. If you time a hunt for early November, you can intercept Pacific Flyway birds—the number of mallards has been especially high in the last few years—that will settle on small impoundments and open stretches of the Yakima River. Jump-shooting, small-pond decoying, and pass shooting can all produce steady shooting, depending on conditions.

Hunting Ducks and Woodcock in Louisiana

This last mention will stretch the definition of a single destination, but the variety of duck hunting along Louisiana’s wild coastline will probably keep you in waders. Still, if you want to stretch your legs and your shooting, there’s decent hunting for woodcock in the cane breaks off the coast. These little birds, affectionately called timberdoodles or scolopax (it means “little lover of swamps and bogs”) by locals, can change up your action after the hot shooting and heavy straps of coastal wetlands.

The Atchafalaya Delta Wildlife Management Area is a good place to start both pursuits. With a limited access area at its heart, where internal combustion engines are prohibited, the Atchafalaya is a swampy wilderness where pirogue-paddling hunters can scratch out canvasbacks, red- heads, and scaup in big water and decoy mallards, gadwall, pintails, and teal in the protected shallows.

Other WMAs to consider are Pass a Loutre at the mouth of the Mississippi River, Point-aux-Chenes WMA southeast of Houma, and Biloxi WMA in St. Bernard Parish. Each of these big public areas can produce woodcock as well as mixed bags of ducks. For the former, walk closed roads that thread through a mix of honey locust, sweet pecan, and hackberry trees, and pay special attention to those areas with trumpet creeper, the climbing vine that makes these low woods look slightly gothic. Woodcock like openings near cover, but they require soft soils for rooting out worms, so if you’re in rocky or shell-shoal areas, move to spots with spongy, almost soggy footing.