If you are an upland bird hunter with a yen for great writing and vividly lived experiences, you have probably been reading the Mouthful of Feathers crew -- Tom Reed, Marissa Jensen and Greg McReynolds -- on the internet since 2009. Whether you have or have not, you are in for a treat.

Join us for a celebration of wild birds and wild dogs and their first publication, in a book that you can hold in your hands, of the best of the best of the Mouthful of Feathers short essays and stories.

The book is the perfect off-season reading: 20 writers from all walks of life and all over North America. It's old friends and old and young dogs, venerable old double barrels and pawnshop pump shotguns with stocks cracked from a tumble down the chukar's steepest basalt. It's bobwhites and sharptails, Huns and timberdoodles and Mearn's, from the southern longleaf to the rain-soaked poplars of Michigan, the Sandhills to the Madrean Sky Islands.

And the conversation in epidode 169 of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers' Podcast & Blast is one hell of a good time.