If you’ve enjoyed quail or a quail egg in a high-end restaurant, chances are it came from Manchester Farms in Columbia, South Carolina. The family-owned operation got its start when Bill Odom changed from one bird to another–not just once, but twice. In the early 1970s, rather than move to New Jersey to run a chicken farm for his employer, Campbell Soup Company, Odom chose to stay in South Carolina and switch to the bird he’d grown up shooting. “We began raising bobwhites for hunters,” he recalls. “I had a poultry science degree from Clemson and I couldn’t keep the birds alive. I knew if I didn’t find another bird I would go out of business.”

So he switched again, to a bird better suited to large-scale production–Coturnix japonica, also known as Japanese or Pharaoh quail, which has been cultivated since ancient times

The annual Safari Club International show in Las Vegas is set in the convention halls of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. The floor setup is a scene of barely organized chaos—booths featuring stuffed African game animals and photos depicting the African veldt—and surveying it all from a lofty balconied platform is a good-looking, middle-aged man wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt. He sports a large Western belt buckle by Clint Orms and a wrist of silver bracelets depicting tiny skulls, which glint in the harsh electric light. Under a wavy thatch of ash-colored hair, his features are creased into a smile and his eyes sparkle with pleasure. Although he may be Italian from his head to the tips of his polished, pointed shoes, Dr. Franco Beretta is a great Americanophile and he clearly finds the sense of opportunity and possibility at the show intoxicating.

As he looks out from the top floor of his company’s booth, easily the largest and certainly the only multistory structure in the hall, it’s not too much of an imaginative leap to envisage a Renaissance prince surveying his territory from the battlements of one of the fortifi_ed city-states that populated the land we now know as Italy. After all, for all his modernity and approachability, Franco is the 15th generation of a family who have supplied fi_rearms to everyone from the princes of the Renaissance to Cold Warriors (James Bond is a big brand ambassador) to the U.S. Army.

Beretta is not just any old business—it is one of the very oldest there is. When you call the Beretta USA headquarters in Maryland just outside Washington, D.C.—relocating soon to Tennessee, due to company concerns about potential legislative restrictions on firearm manufacturing in Maryland—a computerized voice states the catechistic mantra: “Beretta, _five centuries, one passion.” It is too easy to miss the signifi_cance of this statement; so let us rewind a little—or rather, a lot—to the world as it was in the 1520s.

Brief bits of wisdom, aphorisms, and proverbs are sometimes called pearls because they are precious and valuable. (These are the kinds of pearls you wouldn’t want to give to the swine, would you?) Ben Franklin, the man who invented getting struck by lightning, was a master of using these sayings, many of which he published in Poor Richard’s Almanack.

I am no polymath like Franklin, and I don’t even know if he was a quail hunter. I have hunted the birds for over half a century, so naturally I have amassed a lot of pearls and bits of advice from hands-on experience. The following ones I share with you freely and with affection:

• You can always go back and find the stuff you take off, but you can’t always go back and get the stuff you didn’t wear.

• Never bird hunt in boots that are not broken in or don’t fit.

• Doctor your hemorrhoids before you go hunting.

• Never take your grumbling brother bird hunting.

• It is easier to get forgiveness from your wife than it is to get her approval in advance.

• The next one is like the former: Never anger the cook.

• Never go hunting when you’re hungry or thirsty.