The Eyes Have It!
It was an embarrassing moment to say the least. I, an experienced wildlife biologist, lifelong hunter, had pointed toward three animals on a broad New Mexico plain north of Roswell and proclaimed them to be pronghorn antelope. “I don’t think so,” said my wife. “I...
AI in the hands of fishermen? What could go wrong?
"All fishermen are liars; it's an occupational disease with them like housemaid's knee or editor's ulcers." - Beatrice Gray Cook in her 1949 book Till Fish Us Do Part: The Confessions of a Fisherman’s Wife. Artificial intelligence. The breast implants of the digital...
North Dakota’s Camo Party Has 300,000 Members. Now It Needs a Senator Who Can Count.
Kevin Cramer is threatening to gum up the federal government because compensated wetland easements are still being treated like contracts. The ducks, hunters and arithmetic would like a word. North Dakota is one of those rare places where a political movement could be...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 5 Trailer
Make sure to catch this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey as host Chris Dorsey heads north for an epic adventure to hunt the largest land carnivore on Earth - polar bear. The series airs on Outdoor Channel in prime-time every Thursday at 10pm ET,...
Rogue Male: Ewart Grogan
There is a certain kind of man who can get away with damn near anything. They generally come from a line of charming rebels and often combine good looks with a devil-may-care attitude and a distaste for authority. Standing alone is their superpower, vanity their...
Monarch of the Zselics
The stag understood who he was. He stood next to a tree line in Hungary’s Zselic Mountains where his hinds could admire him and the smaller stags hidden in the forest would know they were trespassing. The stag’s head was crowned with heavy antlers that stretched out...
Rebirth of the Centenarian 270 Winchester
Few things get faster and stronger with age, but the 100-year-old 270 Winchester does. When this little “coyote cartridge,” as Elmer Keith deridingly called it, officially stepped onto the stage, it was driving a 130-grain spire point 3,140 fps, according to its...
Chasing the Caribou
A witless beast could hardly inflict the trials, even perils, visited on caribou hunters. Could it? Had the rain paused more often, I might have looked longer. But the ceiling had a deliberate set, as if the low, lugubrious clouds were screwed in place. Dawn’s veil of...
Hunter’s Guide: Classic American Hammer Shotguns
Some of the finest shotguns ever made in America were hammer shotguns produced in the last decades of the 19th century. However, by the end of World War I, most had been retired to gun cabinets to be only admired, not fired. Their barrels had not been designed for the...
Of Men, Mentors and Muskellunge
Two men wandered into the Ontario Central Airways (OCA) office one afternoon while I was manning the front desk. How strange it was that I could instantly tell that they were used to being in charge. They wore short brown leather jackets and the standard issue khaki...
Joseph Thomson: Mystery Man of Africa
Over the course of the 19th century, phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the opening up of Africa,” hunters and explorers, along with a solid sprinkling of traders, were in the forefront. They pioneered the way into the interior and their tales of grand adventures,...
The Most Important Question at the Bass Pro Checkout Counter
There may be no more elegant conservation program in America than a cashier asking a customer a ridiculously simple question: Would you like to round up for conservation? It takes only a few seconds. The answer might cost 17 cents, 43 cents, or 86 cents. Yet what...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 4 Trailer
Make sure you don't miss this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey, for a gorgeous quail hunt in the South Carolina Lowcountry while supporting American heroes. The series airs on Outdoor Channel on Monday at 12pm, Wednesday at 6am, Thursday at 6pm...
Bones Among the Blazes
How A Wildfire Almost Sent My Ram Tag Up In Flames Only 30 minutes into the first day of the season on a brisk December morning, I am at full draw on an old battle-scarred ram. A slight breeze coming up off the North Fork of the Big Thompson River is trying its best...
Woodcock Shooting on the Upper Mississippi
In few places has there ever been woodcock shooting that for certainty of finding the birds and ease in following them equaled the sport of the bottom lands of the upper Mississippi River 20 years ago. Scarcely any of the resident sportsmen then troubled this charming...
Conservation’s Greatest Weakness Is Not Science. It Is Silence.
Conservation has a communication problem, and pretending otherwise may be one of the greatest threats to its future. We have extraordinary scientists, experienced land managers, passionate philanthropists, dedicated hunters and anglers, conservation organizations,...
The Best Plains-Game Rifle for Africa
The gun has to be capable of dropping everything from ten-pound dik-dik to 2,000-pound eland.
The Strange Saga of Henry Bauman
The place was called Boise City, which was something of a joke to anyone who had actually been there. It wasn’t even a town, much less a city—a few cleared fields around a dirt track where trappers and Indians pitched their teepees and caravans of covered wagons could...
The “Don’t Shoot” Buck
“It was him!” said Charlie as he strode into our Game Trails Kentucky camp kitchen. “He was at least five miles from where you saw him last November. He was with two other bucks near the end of Bell Road close to the river. No doubt it was him! Same antler style, but...
Hunting With a Mission on Kodiak Island
Mark, Richard and I dangle from toes and fingers on a steep slope 2,100 feet above the surf. We’ve finally broken out of the claustrophobic alder thickets, and behind us the view is spectacular—the islands of the Kodiak archipelago rise green and brown and black from...
Big Bucks for Old Ducks
Easton, Maryland – Following their $10 million auction held in April, the St. Michaels, Maryland based auction company Guyette and Deeter, hosted their annual summer auction at the Country School on July 24th and 25th. The two-day decoy and sporting art auction...
Congratulations, New Hunter—Here Is Your 194-Page Criminal-Exposure Manual
America’s wildlife agencies have spent years developing an ambitious program called R3—Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation—designed to persuade more ordinary citizens to hunt and fish. The theory is that agencies should recruit newcomers, retain current sportsmen...
Paul Mauser: The Man Who Repurposed the Door Latch
His rifles armed world powers in titanic wars, and hunters in the greatest game fields on Earth. The spoor, braided at first, was unraveling. “Ready to bed,” John mouthed the words. Short yards ahead, a patch of dried mud came to eye—two feet off the ground....
Dead or Alive: John Wesley Harden and the 44 Schofield
I was once a wanted man, a man on the run with a woman in hot pursuit, one of my exes with a .44. It was for a trifling indiscretion, or so it seemed at the time. All I had was my overdue Visa and a quarter tank, but my Ford was faster than her Volvo. Never assume the...
Chasing Chesapeake Rail
Looking for a different kind of bird hunt this fall? If so, a clapper rail hunt—an interesting hybrid of upland and waterfowl hunting—in the coastal waters of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay may be the answer. Though not as popular as it once was, chasing these shorebirds...
Ruark On Safari: Gin
An excerpt from Ruark Remembered by Alan Ritchie who served as Ruark’s personal secretary for 12 years. During the next few weeks we’ve changed locations many times with a series of fIy camps, sometimes setting up without anything except mosquito nets. The whole...
Patron Power
What better way to celebrate a lifetime achievement than with a British Best gun. There is no one in the world who doesn’t like being rewarded for hard work. Whether it’s a book well written, service to the nation or success in popular entertainment, the good and the...
Argentina Has a Brilliant New Plan to Save Its Game Birds: Make Them Worthless Again
Congratulations are apparently due to Argentina, where politicians have discovered a revolutionary new principle of wildlife conservation: If an animal has economic value, make sure it doesn’t. In 2022, Argentina’s Environment Ministry adopted Resolution 133/2022,...
Tarpon Fishing & Luxury Living in Boca Grande
This magnificent Boca Grande home features 6,207 feet of air-conditioned space and 150 feet of waterfront on Gasparilla Sound. Five high-ceilinged bedrooms and 5 1/2 baths offer luxurious personal space for your family and guests. A Wolf range with double oven,...
Black-Horn Buck
Toward the close of a glorious day in late September, I had gone down to the river from home to roam the wilderness of a neighboring plantation. The noble house that once stood on the bluff overlooking the lower reaches of the Santee was burned more than a century...
Tiger, Tiger, in the Night
Elsewhere, man-eaters were quickly shot. In Corbett’s India, they kept killing. Deeply rutted pads and a cleft across the right forefoot distinguished the prints of the eldest cat. The toes were also exceptionally long. By February 1929, the tigers -— by their sign an...
Shooting Yankee Gunboats on the Natchez to Save Southron Womanhood
Byrnes and I attribute our late-life good looks and prime health to a ceremony we began many years ago when we were only in the male change of life, our 40s. Wednesday afternoons were his time out of the office, a time known to us as Woods Wednesday. A time when we...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 3 Trailer
Make sure you don't miss this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey, as we visit a bucket-list destination for bird hunters for an epic quail hunt at South Carolina’s Almost Heaven Plantation. The series airs on Outdoor Channel on Monday at 12pm,...
A Purpose Fulfilled: Jack O’Connor’s Bear Rifle Goes on One Last Hunt
The dean of American gunwriters was perplexed. His brow was furrowed more than the average 60-year-old to start with, but now the wrinkles had transformed into deep crags reminiscent of the sheep country he loved so much. He rocked back from his well-used desk, and in...
Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The Art Of Mort Künstler
For 70 years, the art of Mort Künstler has delivered us into adventures and mortal dramas. You’ve just humped up a steep knoll trailing a wounded elk, or maybe you have designs on glassing mountain goats. Fatigued, out of breath, a stiff headwind numbing the frontal...
The Tracks
As long as live, I’ll never forget two simple numbers and one letter, 26-B. That was the federal housing number of the home my mom, dad and I lived in during the tumultuous, worldwide war years of the 1940s. The small, country town we and several thousand other...
The Boardman River Revisited: Busman’s Holiday on the Boardman
Twenty-five years had passed since I had gone fishing with the Smith brothers. Thirty years had passed since I had seen the Love Shack. I had never seen Oz. Jake was sleeping in his tent by the river. Chris was sleeping back home with his wife. I was sleeping with Oz...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 2 Trailer
Make sure to catch this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey, a celebration of hunter-funded conservation as three outdoorsmen meet for waterfowl and upland birds in Idaho. The series airs on Outdoor Channel on Monday at 12pm, Wednesday at 6am,...
Roosevelt’s Last Hunt
"The man should have youth and strength who seeks adventure in the wide, waste spaces of the earth, in the marshes, and among the vast mountain masses, in the northern forests, amid the streaming jungles of the tropics, or on the deserts of sand or of snow. He must...
Bear Hunting In Japan
This story originally appeared in the June, 1895 issue of Outing magazine. As we left the port of Yokohama for bear hunting in Japan, dropped slowly down the bay of Yedo, passed through the Uraga channel and crawled lazily southward on our way to Hiogo, no more...
A Day With the Cottontails
This article originally appeared in the October 1897 issue of Outing. “There’s old Don,” said Jake. “Jest you stand here—he’ll fetch ’im ’round all right enough.” From over across the hollow came the deep-toned baying of the hound, rising and falling as the trail led...
Washington Discovers a Wetland Rule That Works—and Immediately Calls for Review
The federal government has once again fired up its most reliable engine of public policy: if it ain't broke, form a working group to figure out whether it can be broken more equitably. This time it's the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has opened a remarkably...
A Terrible Silence: Cape Buffalo in the Zambezi Valley
The author fulfills a life-long dream of hunting Cape buffalo in old Africa. When things do not go as planned, he finds himself following a wounded bull — and reconsiders his reasons for pursuing dangerous game. At the shot, the Cape buffalo bull whirled from his bed...
We Fixed the Predator Problem So Thoroughly That Now We Have a Predator Problem
Somewhere off the coast of Florida right now, a mako is doing to a sailfish what a wood chipper does to a Christmas tree, and someone in the boat is filming it in vertical video for maximum emotional impact. This has become a genre unto itself. Scroll for ten minutes...
The Literary Legacy of W. Robert Foran
A few months back I received an e-mail from a book collector/dealer asking me a question that immediately raised a question of my own. The essence of his inquiry involved a photocopied collection of a series of syndicated columns written by W. Robert Foran under the...
Autumn’s a Comin’
Fall begins in July. That’s when savvy hunters and anglers unlimber their guns and stout fly rods. Though it’s tee-shirt and golf-short weather throughout the lower 48, it’s time to freshen your swing on those crossing shots; forego the bench and practice shooting...
Behind the Badge
“It’s just a game, you play your half and I’ll play my half,” said the deer poacher after our abrupt 2:00 a.m. meeting along the rural dirt road. He was kinda right, and since I already had his rifle seized and secured, we would now wait for the game to continue....
Night Fishing
As a boy learning to fly-fish for trout on the name branded freestone flows and limestone streams of Pennsylvania, fishing hours were strictly entrenched into my sporting ethics. No matter if fish were still sipping spinners, 30 minutes after sunset our flies were...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 1 Trailer
Make sure to catch this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey, featuring an adventure over land, air and sea as Luke and Nate Dorsey pursue elk, pheasant and trout at Colorado's stunning Elk Creek Ranch. The series airs on Outdoor Channel on Monday at...
Why I Support Safari Club International
If someone asked me which conservation organization I would want standing beside hunters when the next political assault arrives, my answer would be immediate: Safari Club International. That isn't because SCI is the largest hunting organization or because it hosts...