As four-to-eight-year-old kids, dad would not let us fillet our fish. He said it wasted too much meat. He’d give us kids a spoon and we’d use the spoon to scrape the scales off our fish. He’d then use a knife to gut them and cut the heads off. In fact, I never saw anyone fillet a fish until after graduating from college when we hired a striper guide on Lake Texoma and he filleted our catch. After seeing how easy it was to fillet fish, my brother and I were all in!
Cleaning Fish/Birds in the Old Days
On cleaning birds, dad was just as particular. Dad made us save and eat the whole bird. In Junior High, I remember we had progressed to using scissors. That was space-age technology in my world. Mr. Teague introduced us to using a pair of the old orange handle scissors to clip off the legs, wings, neck, and rear end and make a cut up each side of the backbone and pull it off and pull out the guts.
I was raised in Texas, so we shot boatloads of doves as kids. Scissors sped up the cleaning process immensely. In those days, we fried doves whole. By the time I got out of college, we had progressed to BBQing them. Even though you only got one tiny nibble of super tough meat off of the leg, I dutifully continued cleaning/cooking doves like this.
Then somewhere about 10-15 years ago, I learned about turning them into dove poppers. That is the ultimate way to cook doves. I have never turned back since tasting my first dove popper. In fact, that’s how I cook all of my doves, pigeons, and ducks anymore. While duck hunting with Charles Allan, the owner of Knives of Alaska at his lodge up in Alaska his chef Jayme Jones turned our ducks into poppers and taught me how she made them, which is when I started making dove poppers.
What Knife is Best to Breast Out Your Birds?
But now I had a new dilemma. What was the best knife to breast out my doves, ducks, pigeons, etc.? My Knives of Alaska 6-inch professional Boning knife is a bit of an overkill. I soon decided that the KOA Cub Bear caping knife was the best option, and have been using it for the last 6-years.
I was fat, dumb, and happy using a caping knife to breast out my birds until a few weeks ago when I discovered the new KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip folder. Unlike most knives that have a semi-straight spine and a drop point edge, the KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip is somewhat the opposite. The cutting edge is as straight as a string, and the spine drops down to the point.
Unique design. Here are the KOA website comments regarding this design:
“The Wharncliffe style blade is an excellent choice for making precise cuts, as in field-dressing birds and trout-sized fish”.
Charles Allan is an outdoorsman, and his knives are designed and tested in the field, whether on his ranch or at his lodge up in Alaska. They all have functional designs and are not drawn up by some outcast Star Wars producer that has never hunted. So with that said, I trust Charles’s knowledge/experience more than any other knife maker but I have to admit, I hesitantly tested out his new Bird/Trout Suregrip Knife to see how it would perform.
What to Perform My Test on
The problem is, I had just been snowed in, in South Dakota for 5-days. I flew home just in time for Christmas. A couple of days after Christmas I fly out again and then am off for the Dallas Safari Club Conv. & Expo to conduct three seminars. I had a Texas Sandhill crane/dove hunt lined up in which I was going to test the knife out on the week before Christmas but due to being snowed in for 5-days I missed the hunt. I didn’t have time to line up another hunt before I flew out again.
I Found a Victim – the Christmas Turkey
How was I going to test it out in a real-life scenario? Suddenly it hit me. Tomorrow morning is Christmas. I usually smoke my own turkeys but the last few years mom has sent me a smoked turkey from Greenberg’s in Texas (They are the best smoked turkeys in the world). That’s it! Instead of using some machete sized turkey carving knife I’d use my KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip knife to breast and bone-out my Greenberg turkey. If it worked on that, then it’d work on any bird.
Features
The knife has a long oval-shaped hole, which aids your thumb in opening the blade. The KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip utilizes a liner lock to lock the blade open. On many liner lock folders that I’ve tested the liner lock only partially extends behind the hilt of the blade to lock it open. On those, I use a pair of pliers to move the lock over more into the proper position. That was not necessary on this knife. It came from the factory properly adjusted to extend out to the desired position.
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The handle is a full-sized handle and has an aggressive, coarse sandpaper-feeling texture that affords a good grip when your hands get bloody and slippery. It also has a slight finger groove.
To further enhance your gripping stability, midway down the spine are some thumb grooves, so you have a stable grip when you choke down on the blade to breast out your smaller birds. I wish it also had a set of thumb grooves on the spine at the very hilt of the blade for use when breasting out larger birds like turkeys, geese, and sandhill cranes.
I like that the back of the handle is open. This is a hunter/fisherman knife, so it will get bloody, and the open-backed handle allows for easy cleaning.
Cleaning Fish
In my fishing world, here is how I plan on using the KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip folder. I will use it when backpacking/flyfishing in the backcountry. It has a 3.0-inch blade so I can only imagine that it would be an awesome knife to fillet out little Brookies to fry up for dinner (And on up to 16-inch trout). The MSRP on the KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip is $89.99 and as is usual, we will close with the specs:
Specifications Knives of Alaska KOA Bird/Trout Suregrip Folding Knife :
- Category Bird Trout
- Blade Steel D2
- Bevel 18-20 Degrees
- Blade Length 3.0
- Item Number 00904fg
- Rockwell Hardness 59-61
- Knife Length 7.50
About Tom Claycomb
Tom Claycomb has been an avid hunter/fisherman throughout his life as well as an outdoors writer with outdoor columns in the magazine Hunt Alaska, Bass Pro Shops, Bowhunter.net, and freelances for numerous magazines and newspapers. “To properly skin your animal, you will need a sharp knife. I have an e-article on Amazon Kindle titled Knife Sharpening for $.99 if you’re having trouble.”
