I began my wing-shooting career as a kid in upstate New York. We didn’t do much public land hunting because there wasn’t much public land. (There weren’t any quail, either.) As residents of a small rural community, my family knew almost every farmer in the county. If the land wasn’t posted, we could hunt it, and even if it was a knock on the door would usually lead us to good grouse and woodcock cover.
Then we moved to Washington State, where we found a lot of public land (and a lot of California quail). Urban residents for the first time in my life, we lacked the personal contacts I’d always enjoyed with landowners, so we hunted a lot of public land and shot a lot of birds there.
After completing my long medical education, I wound up in eastern Montana (not by accident). There were all kinds of gamebirds (but no quail!) and public land, but as a small-town physician I knew farmers and ranchers from all over the area and spent more time on private land than public, at least when I was hunting birds rather than big game. Then it was off to Alaska, where almost all land lies in the public domain. As long as I kept track of Native Corporation boundaries and stayed off the road system, which I did anyway, the whole state was my oyster.