Spring 2023 Backcountry Journal

BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL

Access Takes Center Stage

Can we do it? Yes, we can!

Public access to public lands and waters continues to be the top priority I hear about from BHA members and constituents all across North America.

In a recent trip to Pennsylvania, I had a great discussion with the PA Game Commission director and his staff about adding to the game lands they manage, as well as a permanent river access to a Lake Erie tributary. At Pheasant Fest in Minnesota, access topics took center stage in a BHA-led panel discussion, and our sponsorship money for the annual PF/QF event is supporting the purchase of new public lands. (At the same time, in the state capitol in St. Paul, we are fighting legislation that would mandate a “no net gain” of public lands by the state.) On a visit to Arkansas, I learned more about our chapter’s work with BHA corporate partner onX to identify critical acquisitions that could open access to hard-to-reach public lands … more on that to come.

In New Mexico, the access wins continue, with the U.S. Supreme Court recently declining to consider arguments brought by landowners that would have challenged public access to public waters in the Land of Enchantment. In Illinois, chapter members are also working to expand access to the state’s navigable waterways (read more in the previous Winter 2023 issue). Our members in British Columbia and West Virginia face a different kind of access issue when it comes to unfettered off-road vehicle use. Beach access remains an issue confronted by our chapter leaders in both New England and Texas. And here in Montana chapter leaders continue to lead the charge in the legal battle for public access to the Crazy Mountains.

No other organization is stepping up to fight for access like BHA. Why? Our members understand one simple truth: Without access to our public lands and waters, conservationists – and conservation – would be lost.

In this issue we look at many of our boots-on-the-ground efforts to maintain – and expand – public access. Supporting the efforts of Sen. Martin Heinrich in Washington, D.C. Continuing to advance the stream access battle in Colorado, where our Colorado chapter just filed an amicus brief in support of the public’s right to wade and float navigable rivers in the state. Working north of the border

in Alberta on inaccessible Crown Lands. Opening public access to private lands in Iowa. Advancing access-positive legislation in Wyoming (see this issue, page 49). The challenges continue, but so do the wins. At the heart of these wins are you, the people! Dive deep into this issue and be inspired by BHA members’ and volunteers’ work.

Access is the gateway to a lifelong engagement in grassroots conservation activism. Our participation here is essential. For if we the people cannot be connected to the places that provide us solace, companionship, adventure, challenge and sustenance, we won’t be as invested in their protection.

Thankfully, those who came before us set us up for success. Unfortunately, our work is never done. But would we have it any other way? I’d argue that access – both the opportunities and the challenges – engage us like nothing else. Access issues are tangible, things we can touch and feel. And they can help us build our grassroots army. Once we’re in the tent, most of us not only want access to places we love; we also want to make sure these places have quality fish and wildlife habitat.

I continue to be overwhelmed with pride in the work our chapter leaders, volunteers and members do every single day – laboring to make sure we all have quality places to hunt and fish no matter who our parents are, what political party we belong to or how much money we have in our bank accounts.

The role you all are playing – contributing time, talent and treasure to the things you love – is empowering others. And I know we are just getting started. I can’t wait to celebrate the victories to come!

Onward and upward,

Land Tawney President and CEO

This photo brought to you by Montana’s fine stream access law.

Photo: Kyle Dale

THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE

NORTH AMERICAN BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Ted Koch (Idaho) Chairman

J.R. Young (California) Vice Chairman

Jeffrey Jones (Alabama) Treasurer

T. Edward Nickens (North Carolina) Secretary

STAFF

Land Tawney, President and CEO

John Gale, Vice President of Policy and Government Relations

Frankie McBurney Olson, Vice President of Operations

Dr. Keenan Adams (Puerto Rico) Ryan Callaghan (Montana) Bill Hanlon (British Columbia) Jim Harrington (Michigan)

Hilary Hutcheson (Montana)

Dr. Christopher L. Jenkins (Georgia)

Katie Morrison (Alberta)

Michael Beagle (Oregon) President Emeritus

Chris Hennessey, Eastern Regional Manager

Jameson Hibbs, Chapter Coordinator (MI, IN, OH, KY, WV)

Trevor Hubbs, Armed Forces Initiative Coordinator

Katie McKalip, Vice President of External Affairs and Communications

Chris Borgatti, New York and New England Chapter Coordinator

Travis Bradford, Video Production and Graphic Design Coordinator

Tim Brass, Director of State Policy and Stewardship

Veronica Corbett, Montana Chapter Coordinator

Trey Curtiss, R3 Coordinator

Katie DeLorenzo, Western Regional Manager and Southwest Chapter Coordinator

Kevin Farron, Regional Policy Manager (MT, ND, SD)

Britney Fregerio, Director of Finance

Brady Fryberger, Office Manager and Executive Assistant to the President and CEO

Chris Hager, Washington and Oregon Chapter Coordinator

Andrew Hahne, Merchandise and Operations

Aaron Hebeisen, Chapter Coordinator (MN, WI, IA, IL, MO)

Contributors in this Issue

On the Cover: Corner crossing continues to take center stage in the battle for access to our public lands and waters. Read an update on the work of BHA’s Wyoming chapter on page 49.

Photo: Zack Williams

Above Image: Roland Taylor, 2022 Public Lands and Waters Photo Contest

Aaron Agosto, Alex Bauch, Ethan Bauer, Charlie Booher, Stephen Bodio, Travis Bradford, Trey Curtiss, Patt Dorsey, Tirel Gowans, Caleb Harding, Tim Harris, Sen. Martin Heinrich, Don Holmstrom, Lewis Johnson, Sabrina King, Jordan Lefler, Liz Lynch, Julie Mackiewicz, Joshua P. Martin, Mike Matz, Steve Nikirk, Jared Oakleaf, Perrin Pring, Dave Quinn, Michelle Ratzlaff, Wendi Rank, Kylie Schumacher, John Skarie, Larry Stone, Brad Trumbo, Peter White

Journal Submissions: williams@backcountryhunters.org

Advertising and Partnership Inquiries: mills@backcountryhunters.org

Gloria Goñi Mcateer, Digital Media Coordinator

James Majetich, Alaska Chapter Coordinator

Kate Mayfield, Operations Coordinator

Kaden McArthur, Goverment Relations Manager

Josh Mills, Conservation Partnership Coordinator

Devin O’Dea, California Chapter Coordinator

Brittany Parker, Habitat Stewardship Coordinator

Thomas Plank, Communications Coordinator

Kylie Schumacher, Collegiate Program Coordinator

Zack Williams, Backcountry Journal Editor

Interns: Sarah Garner, Peter Helman, Casey Kroening, Tanner Liermann, Jenna McCrorie, Faith Wells

BHA HEADQUARTERS

P.O. Box 9257, Missoula, MT 59807

www.backcountryhunters.org

admin@backcountryhunters.org

(406) 926-1908

Backcountry Journal is the quarterly membership publication of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a North American conservation nonprofit 501(c)(3) with chapters in 48 states and the District of Columbia, two Canadian provinces and one Canadian territory. Become part of the voice for our wild public lands, waters and wildlife. Join us at backcountryhunters.org

All rights reserved. Content may not be reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher.

Published Mar. 2023. Volume XVIII, Issue II

General Inquiries: admin@backcountryhunters.org JOIN

“Our public lands – whether a national park or monument, wildlife refuge, forest or prairie – make each one of us land-rich.”

-Terry Tempest Williams

PHOTO: 2022 PUBLIC LANDS & WATERS

PHOTO CONTEST - FISHING CATEGORY

PLACE - JOSH SUGGS

Defending Access and Opportunity in Congress

BY SEN. MARTIN HEINRICH

If you’re like me, fall is your favorite season of the year. And if you read Backcountry Journal, there’s a pretty good chance that you feel most alive when the elk begin to bugle and the aspen leaves turn golden.

Last autumn, I was lucky enough to draw a bull elk tag in one of the premier public land units in my home state of New Mexico. This unit is part of the Gila National Forest, where Aldo Leopold formed many of the ideas that guide the modern conservation ethic. It’s a stunning landscape of rugged mountains, ponderosa forest and open grassy parks.

There is one mountain in particular that I knew held some mighty old bulls. My friends and I climbed that mountain, slept on the ground near its summit, and then glassed up exactly the kind of bull I was hoping for. He had eight points on one side and was broken off above the fourth point on the other side – and he was massive. Some people measure their bulls in inches, but I knew that, more importantly, this guy was a freezer filler. After a long stalk and a well-placed 291-yard shot, he tumbled over and the real work of packing him off the mountain began.

A lot goes into a successful backcountry adventure. There is the luck of drawing a tag in the first place, followed by the skills of scouting, glassing and successfully stalking a wary old king like mine. But whether your adventure involves hunting or fishing, it probably rests on top of a foundation made up of public land, public waters and the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation –which is the envy of the world.

Through my work in the United States Senate, I have been proud to stand alongside a powerful coalition of sportsmen and women from New Mexico and all across our country – including the members of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers – to pass federal investments in the conservation of critical wildlife habitat and unlock more recreational access on our treasured public lands.

In recent years, hunters and anglers have played a vital role in passing monumental, bipartisan legislation including the Great American Outdoors Act, which fully and permanently funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund and invested in the restoration of visitor infrastructure at our national parks, national forests and wildlife refuges. Your letters, emails and phone calls are the reason that Republicans and Democrats can come together and make outdoors bills a unifying force in an often divided Congress.

But we cannot take any of this for granted. Improving and maintaining public access to our public lands is vital to protecting our ability to hunt and fish. That’s why I have been hard at work unlock-

ing public access to remarkable new public lands.

Thanks in large part to federal dollars from the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act, the public will soon be able to access the single greatest addition to public land in New Mexico in a generation. This 54,000 acres of elk and turkey habitat dramatically expands New Mexico’s Marquez Wildlife Area.

It was only a few years ago that the public could not access any of the rimrock canyons in northeastern New Mexico’s Sabinoso Wilderness – because it was entirely surrounded by private lands. But after years of effort, and a generous acquisition by the Trust for Public Land, New Mexicans recently welcomed the largest wilderness land donation in U.S. history, which will unlock greater public access and nearly double the size of the wilderness area.

Unfortunately, threats to limit or prevent public access to public lands and waters are not limited to any state. In recent years, hunters and anglers in states like Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and even Missouri have all faced down threats to public access. That includes a dangerous lawsuit a wealthy private landholder in Wyoming brought against hunters who “corner-crossed” a checkerboard of public and private lands to access public lands without even setting foot on their private property.

We have to show up to every battle if we are going to defeat the big money, private interests who are eager as ever to post “No Trespassing” signs around our favorite places to hunt and fish or even sell off our public lands off to the highest bidder.

Photo courtesy Sen. Martin Heinrich

In New Mexico, I have been especially focused on preserving the public’s right to access our public streams. The New Mexico Constitution expressly provides that rivers, streams and lakes in our state belong to the public, including waters that flow through private lands. In 2017, our State Game Commission passed an erroneous rule that allowed private landowners to prohibit public access to waters flowing on their lands if the waters are “non-navigable” –which was contrary to the state constitution. It impacted the vast majority of New Mexico’s streams, which – whether they flow all the time, intermittently or just in response to rain events – are not “navigable.”

The rule upended anglers’, boaters’ and other recreationists’ right to access our public streams, putting a halt to activities that have long been enjoyed by New Mexicans throughout the state and that drew visitors from both near and far to contribute to our outdoor recreation economy. That’s why I joined former Sen. Tom Udall to file an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief before the New Mexico Supreme Court to defend New Mexicans’ right under the state constitution to access public surface waters.

Last September, in a landmark ruling, the New Mexico Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional rights of all New Mexicans to our public waters. This was an enormous victory for people who care about our history, our culture and our natural resources. Public waters will remain public. Many New Mexicans worked hard to make this victory happen, but it would not have been possible without the engagement of sportsmen and women.

Last year, I also welcomed the passage of the Modernizing Access to our Public Land (MAPLand) Act, which will require that public lands be mapped in a standardized, digitized format across all four public lands agencies in a significant degree of detail.

The way that public lands, buildings and other assets are currently catalogued by federal agencies is a confusing, over-complicated

mess. Creating a one-stop shop for outfitters and sportsmen and women to navigate mapping records and other data will greatly aid outdoor recreation and improve hunting and fishing access in the places that we all own.

I would also encourage you to utilize a new internet-based portal created by the Bureau of Land Management to more easily and efficiently nominate public lands that are currently inaccessible but could provide valuable opportunities for hunting, fishing and other recreational activities. This new portal is the direct result of the HUNT Act, a bipartisan law that I helped to pass in 2019, which requires federal agencies to seek the public’s input on identifying lands where there is no legal public access or where access is significantly restricted, in order to help create a list of parcels where access can be improved.

As we begin a new Congress, I will continue working with Republicans and Democrats to pass my bipartisan wildlife and habitat conservation bill, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. RAWA will invest in proactive, on-the-ground conservation work led by state and Tribal wildlife agencies to support the long-term health of fish and wildlife and their habitat. The habitat restoration supported by RAWA will ensure the future of abundant American wildlife, from bumblebees and bison to sandhill cranes and cutthroat trout.

I am enormously proud of all that sportsmen and women have accomplished together. If we keep working together and raise our voices, we can ensure that many years from now, our grandkids, and their grandkids, will learn the very traditions that have enriched our lives. And they will enjoy the same public lands and wildlife that bring our lives meaning and contentment.

Martin Heinrich is a U.S. senator representing the state of New Mexico.

Photo courtesy Sen. Martin Heinrich

If we keep working together and raise our voices, we can ensure that many years from now, our grandkids, and their grandkids, will learn the very traditions that have enriched our lives.

Photo: Lewis Johnson, 2022 Public

by

BHA CELEBRATES MOMENTOUS WINS FOR A TRIO OF OUR MOST TREASURED WILD PLACES!

BRISTOL BAY

A massive industrial mine proposed for the fish- and wildlife-rich region of Bristol Bay, Alaska, has been blocked by the Environmental Protection Agency, which announced it is proactively rescinding an industry fill and dredge permit under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act that will prevent development of the Pebble Mine.

The EPA determined that mine waste, including dredged or fill material, would have “unacceptable adverse effects” on Bristol Bay’s renowned wild salmon fishery, the largest remaining in the world, including the permanent loss of 8.5 miles of streams. This determination would necessarily preclude development of the Pebble Mine – thereby preventing more than 10.2 billion tons of waste from being disposed of in the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska. For more than a decade, BHA has been fighting to conserve Bristol Bay, joining a diverse consortium of hunters, anglers, commercial fishermen, Tribal members, business owners and others in advocating for the region. Bristol Bay supports robust recreational, subsistence and commercial salmon fisheries as well as undisturbed habitat for a wide range of wildlife.

TONGASS ROADLESS RULE PROTECTIONS RESTORED

The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule guides management of 58.5 million acres of backcountry national forests. However in 2018 the USDA formally undertook a rulemaking process to develop an Alaska-specific version of the national roadless rule following a request by the state of Alaska, which wanted to facilitate increased development of and industrial access to roadless lands in the state. In 2020 the Forest Service repealed roadless protections for the Tongass National Forest in its entirety, opening the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest to harmful development. In late January, BHA and partners celebrated the decision to restore those Roadless Rule protections.

“Of the 1.6 million comments submitted by Alaskans and others during the original roadless rulemaking process, 95 percent supported strong roadless area protections,” said John Gale, BHA vice president of policy and government relations. “We thank the administration for taking action to uphold the integrity of this cherished backcountry landscape by ensuring the long-term conservation of roadless lands in the Tongass.”

BOUNDARY WATERS

BHA lauded the Biden administration’s decision in late January to establish a 20-year moratorium on mining in the Boundary Waters following the environmental analysis of the potential effects of copper-nickel mining in this pristine watershed. The administration’s withdrawal prohibits the development of any new mineral leases on approximately 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest lands within the watershed of the Boundary Waters. However, only Congress can institute a permanent mineral withdrawal.

Hot on the heels, BHA welcomed the reintroduction of the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act, legislation sponsored by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) that would protect the area with a permanent withdrawal of sulfide-ore mining in the Superior National Forest upstream of the Boundary Waters.

“Backcountry Hunters & Anglers has fought for the permanent protection of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and its surrounding watershed since the formation of the Minnesota Chapter in 2010,” said Aaron Hebeisen, chapter coordinator for Minnesota. “It was one of our founding principles and continues to be a keystone issue to our members. We recognize the importance of mining to Northern Minnesota and that this bill would allow for traditional mining practices to take place, should iron-ore and taconite mining deposits be found here and could continue to be extracted in a responsible manner. While we celebrate the administrative mineral withdrawal recently announced by the U.S. departments of the Interior and Agriculture, we support the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act as the only solution to permanently protect this truly unique and remarkable area.”

FERAL HORSES ON THE PODCAST & BLAST BHA MEMBER MATEEN HESSAMI WINS PRESTIGOUS AWARD

More than 82,000 feral horses roam U.S. public lands, about four times as many as the land and water can sustain. Almost all of them live in Nevada, the most arid state in the union, where their impacts are almost unimaginable: desertification and massive loss of wildlife, ranging from pollinators and other insects to sage grouse, elk, mule deer and pronghorn.

A growing coalition of biologists and natural resource scientists, hunters and anglers, wildlife advocates and people who love the Nevada public lands (and the horses) are in a desperate race to solve this problem in a humane way – before it’s too late. For episode 143, Hal traveled to Nevada to talk with some of these experts: Mike Cox, state bighorn sheep and mountain goat biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife; Tina Bundy Nappe, an Eastern Sierra landowner and public lands advocate; Jim Sedinger, sage grouse biologist and retired University of Nevada wildlife ecology professor; and Bryce Pollock, a conservationist and hunter with the Nevada chapter of BHA.

Listen to this and all the latest episodes of the Podcast & Blast wherever you get your podcasts.

IN MEMORY OF TOM CHAMBERS

It is with great sadness that the Wyoming chapter’s leadership team shares with us that our steadfast supporter, field representative, BHA life member and one-of-a-kind Tom Chambers passed away, December 2022.

The greatest lesson we learned from Tom – besides never buying a Nissan X-Terra – was that in conservation, there is incredible power in simply showing up out of sheer dedication to the cause.

Whether cleaning up trash in Jackson in July or meeting with elected officials in Cheyenne in January, Tom always could be counted on, even if a slightly curmudgeonly (mis) adventure was inevitable. Tom didn’t embody the “typical” BHA member, yet his loyalty to BHA’s mission is exactly what made him a rare gem we treasured.

Your BHA friends will miss you, Tom. Happy trails!

Mateen Hessami, a leader in BHA’s collegiate club program, was awarded a Mitacs Award for his work supporting Indigenous-led efforts to restore endangered woodland caribou populations in British Columbia.

Hessami, who was president of BHA’s University of Montana collegiate club during his undergraduate studies and then a founder and vice president of the University of British Columbia–Okanagan club during his master’s studies, was also the recipient of BHA’s 2022 Rachel Carson Emerging Leaders Award.

KIDS COLORING CONTEST WINNERS

Eight-year-old Iris Heddy took home the prize as the winner of our Kids Coloring Contest featured in the winter 2023 issue.

Runner-ups were Brooke Little (10), Stella Schneck (8) and Heaven Schneck (10). Thanks to everyone who participated!

Photo: Hessami with his 2022 BHA award. Aaron Agosto.

Photo: Iris Heddy’s winning entry.

BRADY FRYBERGER OFFICE MANAGER

Brady Fryberger grew up in a small town in Western Montana. He fell in love with the woods during his many trips into the Bob Marshall Wilderness on horseback with his dad and grandfather. Brady is an avid big game hunter, but finds himself shed hunting more and more each year.

Brady is a recent graduate of the University of Montana and is always ready for a Griz game day. When not outside or at work, Brady spends time with his girlfriend and his dog, Walter. Working for BHA has allowed Brady to give back to the wild places that have given him so much.

JIM HARRINGTON NORTH AMERICAN BOARD

Jim Harrington was born and raised in Michigan and lives 30 minutes outside of Detroit in Northville with his wife and three kids.

He loves to share and teach the outdoors with his children. Whether he is with them hunting turkey, squirrels or whitetail on his West Michigan farm, fly fishing in Montana or shore fishing in Florida he is never happier than when he is experiencing these adventures with his children.

For over 20 years, Jim has fought in courtrooms across the country as a trial lawyer winning numerous jury verdicts for the individuals and families who have suffered tremendous losses.

JAMES MAJETICH ALASKA CHAPTER COORDINATOR

James Majetich grew up in Florida, spent summers in the Boundary Waters and tried his luck in New York City before enlisting in the Marine Corps. He spent five years in the service before returning home to Florida. Shortly thereafter, James sold nearly everything he owned then loaded his dog, some clothes, and what fishing

gear he had in an old $1,800 hatchback and hit the road for Alaska. These days, James spends his summers fishing and backpacking with his wife, son, and of course, the dog. Through the fall he hunts moose and caribou, and in winter he can often be found in the backcountry on his trapline.

GLORIA GOÑI MCATEER DIGITAL MEDIA COORDINATOR

Gloria Goñi grew up in Northern Spain and the Pacific Northwest. Bouncing between these two cultures and continents, Gloria quickly recognized North America’s unique and unmatched public lands.

Her pursuit of food has become a way of life – finding joy and satisfaction in fishing, hunting and foraging.

Despite her Spanish roots and insatiable travel bug, Gloria finally settled in Montana with her trusty Aussie-doodle, Berto. Together they fish, hunt and photograph their adventures one river or mountain at a time.

KATIE MORRISON NORTH AMERICAN BOARD

Growing up, Katie spent much of her time outdoors with her family camping, horseback riding, canoeing and fishing. She feels lucky to now live in southern Alberta, Treaty 7 territory, in the heart of world-class fly fishing. When she’s not hunting or fishing, you can find her digging up yet another section of her yard to accommodate her ever-expanding garden or drying, freezing, preserving and cooking the abundance of foods harvested from the backcountry and the backyard.

Katie’s early connection to the natural world motivated her to obtain a B.Sc. in environmental and conservation sciences from the University of Alberta and a master’s degree in environmental design from the University of Calgary, combining her love of both natural and social sciences. Katie has worked in biology and conservation for more than 20 years and now spends her days working on the protection and management of Southern Alberta’s wild lands and waters.

BECAUSE THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE

WITH

INTRODUCING THE NEW GORE-TEX BOUNDARY WADER COLLECTION

MADE

WHY ARE YOU BHA MEMBERS?

Liz: Because I love drinking pints of beer and wearing flannel! Kidding, kidding. I learned to hunt when I lived in Missoula in my mid-20s. I didn’t feel a strong, immediate affinity to a particular “hook and bullet” nonprofit when I was just starting out. Every stereotype of who hunters were and what hunting was told me that it wasn’t “for” me, but when I started hearing about BHA’s work, I was immediately drawn in by the org’s dedication to the same things I’ve loved, studied and supported my whole life: wild beings and wild places.

Jared: Mark Heckert and other members standing up for public lands during the Malheur occupation lit my flame for BHA. I will never forget them tearing down the bogus sign that the invaders used to cover up the actual refuge sign. Later, Ryan Busse (then chairman of the North American board) defended our 640-millionacre public land birthright as the “most egalitarian experiment ever” during a meeting in Whitefish, Montana, hosted by the same cast that perpetrated the occupation. Finally, Land Tawney’s ever-infectious energy for the cause continues to fan my flame. These three people stoked my fire, but the passion that the entire BHA community brings keeps my fire roaring.

YOU’VE BOTH DEDICATED AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF YOUR TIME TO BHA AND OTHER CONSERVATION ORGANIZATIONS. WHY DO YOU DO THIS? WHAT DRIVES YOU?

Liz: To quote Marcus Aurelius: “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” And to quote Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them.” Hunting – the act itself, the animals we pursue, the habitat we share, the people we share food and stories with – has given me so much. Putting my resources into conservation work is an act of reciprocal love and gratitude, and it’s simply the right thing to do.

Jared: I wish I had more in my tank to give. Daily I am humbled by what the membership and leadership of BHA do for public land, waters and wildlife. Humility among peers is the greatest motivator.

Photo courtesy Liz Lynch, Jared Oakleaf

DO YOU THINK THIS ISSUE IS SO

TO HUNTERS AND ANGLERS ACROSS NORTH AMERICA?

Liz: We’re in an era of talking (and acting, ideally) more about environmental justice, equity and equality, and diversity and inclusion within outdoor recreation and natural resources. And yet, here we are, dealing with a centuries-old issue that still pits “haves” against “have-nots.” Inaccessible public lands run so fundamentally counter to those aforementioned values and against the very deeply American raison d’etre of public lands –they’re for the public’s benefit and can’t just be sold off en masse to the highest bidder. Even if you’re not a hunter, that injustice should get you fired up.

Jared: In my personal opinion, corner crossing by foot is simply moving from one piece of public land to the other. The baggage attached to it lies in a cultural assumption that the private landowner takes priority in the shared airspace above the corner thus also affording them control of the public land beyond the corner. Lest we forget, the corner crossing case began with a private landowner and a county attorney persecuting four hunters based on this assumption and not a violation of a specific law. Last time I looked, the American legal system does not prosecute people based solely on assumptions.

The hunters – with the financial and moral support of a legion of hunters, led by BHA and MeatEater – pushed back against this misuse of the justice system. The story that captivated the masses isn’t just at the corner; it is in the way that the hunting community turned out to support one of our own. Corner crossing remains both legally and now culturally uncertain. That uncertainty is ripe for conflicts, lost hunting opportunities and wasted time during precious hunts. I think we all hope for a conclusion, but the reality is that this issue is far from mature. In the meantime, my personal advice is (for so many reasons) to take time to build relationships with landowners in your hunting area. In doing so we just might find more in common than some airspace at the corner.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES THAT THE HUNTING COMMUNITY SHOULD BE FOCUSING ON AND WHY?

Liz: Habitat. Winter range, migration corridors, threatened and endangered plants, watersheds, soils, nongame species –all of it. It’s Leopold’s “Land.” The best available science shows that healthy habitat is key for both the quality and quantity of all species we pursue. Hunters know better than most just how impactful humans can be on wildlife and wild places, for better or for worse, and that there’s no such thing as “non-consumptive” use of public (or private) lands. We need to position ourselves as mentors to other public lands and waters users and as advocates for conserving resources beyond our own immediate benefit.

Building social bridges outside the demographic average of hunters is critical to success. We don’t necessarily need everyone to be a hunter, because it’s just not going to be everyone’s thing – but we do absolutely want as many people as possible to think and act like conservationists. Hunters have to proactively be good stewards and ambassadors for the resource and a conservation ethos.

Jared: A wise Wyoming BHA life member and mentor once taught me the chant: “I don’t care about this or that…habitat is where it’s at.”

I just don’t see a scenario where we are going to look back in our history and proclaim: “Damn! I sure wish we would have consumed more functional wildlife habitat.”

That said, we need to reprogram our nation’s conservation conscience. Resource consumption is inevitable, but we still have the ability to choose thrift over glut.

An unsung hero of the American conservation movement is Stewart Udall. I desperately wish his book (written while he served as secretary of Interior), “A Quiet Crisis,” was required reading for all Americans, especially hunters and anglers. In it he says:

“Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice, or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs. We can misuse the land and diminish the usefulness of resources, or we can create a world in which physical affluence and affluence of the spirit go hand in hand.”

WYOMING’S CORNER CROSSING ISSUE HAS DRAWN A LOT OF NATIONAL ATTENTION. WHY

IMPORTANT

Hunter: Luke Ramirez, BHA member | Species: turkey

State: Colorado

Method: shotgun

Distance from nearest road: nine miles

Transportation: foot

Hunter: Kennadi Iten, BHA member

Species: whitetail | State: Montana | Method: rifle

Distance from nearest road: one mile

Transportation: foot

Hunters: Tim Schindel, BHA life member and Bill Hanlon, BHA board member, life member | Species: stone sheep

Province: British Columbia | Method: rifle

Distance from nearest road: 30 kilometers

Transportation: foot

Angler: Brett Fauskee, BHA member

Species: cutthroat | State: Wyoming

Method: fly

Distance from nearest road: four miles

Transportation: horseback

Hunter: Grant Bentz, BHA member

Species: whitetail | State: Virginia

Method: rifle

Distance from nearest road: one mile

Transportation: foot

Hunter: Ethan Swanson, BHA member

| Species: whitetail (first deer) State: Iowa | Method: rifle

Distance from nearest road: two miles | Transportation: foot

Email your Backcountry Bounty submissions to williams@backcountryhunters.org or share your photos with us by using #backcountryhuntersandanglers on social media! Emailed bounty submissions may also appear on social media.

Hunter: James Fey, BHA member

Species: Columbia blacktail | State: California | Method: rifle

Distance from nearest road: four miles | Transportation: foot

Hunters: Shannon Krikorian, Caroline Yielding, BHA members

Species: ptarmigan State: Colorado Method: shotgun | Distance from nearest road: three miles | Transportation: foot

If You Were an Animal and Lived in Montana ...

BY MICHELLE RATZLAFF

Papa, if you were an animal and lived in Montana

Where would you live? What would you be?

I’d live on a tall mountain with lots of trees

And be a big BIG BIG BIG brown grizzly!

Mimi, if you were an animal and lived in Montana

Where would you live? What would you be?

I’d live in the grassy plains and be an antelope No animal would be faster than me!

Daddy, if you were an animal and lived in Montana

Where would you live? What would you be?

I’d live anywhere in the state and be a big bull elk With giant antlers for all to see!

Momma, if you were an animal and lived in Montana

Where would you live? What would you be?

I’d be a wolf in the forest and howl at the moon

I’d howl all night and then sleep till noon.

OOOoooooOOOOOoo

Well, child, if you were an animal and lived in Montana

Where would YOU live? And what would YOU be?

I’d be a bighorn sheep on a mountain peak and be proud as can be! Or I’d be a trout in sparkling rivers with pretty spots for all to see! Or I’d be a sharp-tailed grouse that lives in the big wild prairie! Or I’d be a bald eagle soaring high in the sky wild and free! Or I’d be a shiny black bear that could climb a tree!

I love Montana with its rivers and mountains so high I love its prairies and tons of big sky. But really, wherever I’d live and whatever I’d be

I know I’d be HAPPY because I am Meeeeeeee!

BHA member Michelle Ratzlaff is passionate about the outdoors and the wonders nature can bring into our lives. She has introduced hundreds of people, young and old, to the great outdoors. She is an author, retired CPA, hunter, angler, backpacker and paddler in search of blue-sky days, perfect sunsets and star-filled nights.

Photo: istock.com/ GrayEgg

A Colorado Victory for Public Stream Access Now Goes to the State Supreme Court

BY DON HOLMSTROM

In early 2022, the Colorado Court of Appeals decision in Hill v. Warsewa delivered a stinging rebuke to powerful interests and the state attorney general by paving the way for public access to Colorado streams flowing through private land that were navigable at the time of statehood. Now that decision is headed to the Colorado Supreme Court. A win there will allow Mr. Hill to go back to a trial court to establish navigability and consequently the ownership of the streambed by Colorado.

Roger Hill, the plaintiff in the case, is a Colorado fly fishing legend. He wrote the first guidebook for fishing the famed “Gold Medal” waters of the South Platte River. Hill wants to go back to his favorite fishing hole on the Arkansas River, but he doesn’t because he’s afraid that a private landowner will attack him again and threaten to sue him for trespass as he did several years ago. To secure his right, he sued the landowner and argued that segment of the Arkansas has been navigable since the time Colorado joined the Union in 1861.

Colorado has the worst stream access laws of any Western state. Despite its reputation for outdoor recreational opportunities, the state has failed to implement the well-established federal legal doctrine of “navigability for title.” This test – well-recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court – establishes rivers that were commercially navigable or susceptible to navigability at the time of statehood must be held in trust for the use and enjoyment of the public. This includes essential fishing activities such as floating and wading. Nearly all Western states, including Arizona and Utah, have applied greater public access under this doctrine.

But the failures of Colorado stream access go beyond the fight for access to federally defined navigable waters. Colorado courts have denied access to non-navigable streams as well, despite explicit language in the state constitution. Notably, the Colorado Constitution provides “the water of every natural stream, not heretofore appropriated, within the state of Colorado, is hereby declared to be the property of the public, and the same is dedicated to the use of the people of the state, subject to appropriation.”

However, relying on legal concepts originating in 12th century feudal jurisprudence, the Colorado Supreme Court in the 1979

decision People v. Emmert denied public access for recreational use when the public water flowed through private property. The sweeping decision in Emmert addressed all recreational uses: “We hold that the public has no right to the use of waters overlying private lands for recreational purposes without the consent of the owner.” The fact that floating over private land does regularly occur in Colorado reflects the stalemate of political and economic interests rather than an established legal right.

The Colorado chapter of BHA has taken action to support the Public Waters Access Campaign and Hill’s legal fight from early in the litigation. A large part of Colorado’s outdoor economy depends on recreation related to public waters. Expanding access creates significant economic opportunities. Improved access to public waters also is one of the best outdoor pathways for communities where recreational opportunities historically have been challenging.

Public sentiment and recent legal decision-making have been clearly moving in the direction of greater public water access. The recent victory in the New Mexico Supreme Court for stream access reflects this trend.

The Colorado chapter will be participating in an Amicus brief in support of Mr. Hill. We have been actively coordinating with the lawyers representing Hill and have worked hard to help bring needed additional attention to the case and arguments made in defense of the public trust. We will continue to urge the Colorado attorney general to reverse his participation in the litigation opposing the expansion of public water recreational opportunities.

We stand ready to work towards legal and legislative solutions that will guarantee hunters’, anglers’ and other recreationists’ rights to fish, float and wade Colorado’s streams. The rich heritage of rivers and streams in Colorado should be enjoyed by all.

Don Holmstrom, a BHA life member, is co-chair of the Colorado chapter and coordinates the Habitat Watch Volunteer program. Don has had a career as a lawyer and technical advisor related to chemical safety and environmental issues. He retired from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board as the director of the Western Regional Office in Denver. Floating and fishing Colorado streams since the 1970s, Don has been a longtime advocate for stream access and habitat protection issues.

Arkansas River, Colorado. Photo: istock.com/ Jesse Stephens

Access Denied

BY PETER WHITE

There are a number of public land access issues in the spotlight within North America, and Alberta is no exception. The province boasts approximately 100 million acres of public (aka Crown) land. Unlike in the United States, the vast majority of Canadian public lands are controlled by individual provinces and territories – so there is no federal agency on the scale of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, for example.

Alberta’s public lands are managed by various levels of government and through a variety of lease agreements that generally require leaseholders to provide reasonable access. One of the more widespread agreements that controls access to Alberta’s hunters and anglers is agricultural provincial grazing leases, which are governed under the Recreational Access Regulation. RAR was created in 2003 with the intent to provide leaseholders with the ability to protect and care for the land and livestock, while also allowing recreational access to the land. It outlines leaseholder rights and responsibilities, as well as defines what constitutes reasonable access to their grazing leases.

Currently, there are about 5,700 grazing leases, which encompass an estimated 5.2 million acres of public land. Although leaseholders are obligated to allow reasonable access to the land, they are able to apply conditions for access and deny requests if those conditions are not met. Provincial and local fire bans and livestock at large are two of the common and approved reasons for restricting access. While many leaseholders are responsive to access requests and are happy to facilitate access by hunters, this is not always the case.

As respondents to a recent survey on public land access conducted by the Alberta chapter of BHA indicated, requests to access leased land sometimes go unanswered or are denied for reasons outside the regulation or specified conditions. While there is a mechanism in place to support disputes between recreational users and agricultural leaseholders, resolutions are seldom in the user’s favor, and the process takes a minimum of seven days – often too long after access was required and well-planned trips have come to an end. In some cases indicated on the survey, the process is often drawn out long after the hunting season has finished.

A unique but not uncommon access problem across the province

includes areas of public land that do not require permission to access (e.g., huntable public parks, public land use zones and grazing permits) bordered by public land that does require permission, as in the case of agricultural lease lands. In situations where these lease access requests go unanswered or are denied, hunters and anglers find themselves in the awkward position of having public land impede their access to public land – leaving them to take lengthy alternative routes or, in more extreme cases, unable to access the desired area at all.

The Land & Water Access Committee within the Alberta chapter is using our membership’s experiences and input to inform our stance on the issue and develop ideas and solutions, which are being proposed to the Alberta government as they begin reviewing the Recreational Access Regulation. Our recommendations include eliminating permission requirements for pass-through foot access, either by redefining “recreation” in the Recreation Access Plan (e.g., does not include walking through) or implementing easements down all fence lines to provide provisional pass-through access to adjacent public land.

According to a recent hunter access survey by the Alberta Conservation Association, only 8% of private landowners in Alberta have a willingness to grant hunting permission to the general public; fair and easy access to quality public land is critical for hunters and anglers alike. While Alberta has a significant amount of public land available, and the province has some of the greatest hunting and fishing in North America, these opportunities will always be at risk without the hard work of dedicated hunters and anglers passionate about protecting our outdoor heritage.

BHA member Peter White sits on the Alberta chapter board and is the chair of a committee looking at Alberta’s conservation and land access issues. With the help of numerous other volunteers, he is driven to find solutions to improve access regulations and grow hunting and fishing opportunities in the province.

Editor’s note: This article was authored collaboratively with Tirel Gowans, Joshua P. Martin and the Alberta chapter’s Land and Water Access Committee.

Photo courtesy BHA’s Alberta Chapter Land and Water Access Committee

In Alberta, public land access is sometimes being blocked by ... public land.

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A Big Win for Little Mountain

BY STEVE NIKIRK

Little Mountain is situated 1.5 miles southwest of Parksville, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. This location was once a small island. Millions of years later, it is a perfect example of a monadnock, or in geology, a single remnant of a former highland, which rises as an isolated rock mass above a plain.

Present day, Little Mountain is a beautiful lookout point, standing above the Oceanside area with views of the Pacific Ocean, Mount Arrowsmith and the surrounding area. The first road was put in during the 1930s to facilitate construction of a government fire tower. Though it’s impossible to pinpoint when the problem began, the new road increased accessibility to the area, and it unfortunately became a popular spot for illegal dumping.

At one point, you could back a pickup truck right up to the cliff edge and kick out whatever you wanted. Items would then freefall for approximately 150 feet before hitting the steep mountain slope and ricocheting down through the forest below. Unfortunately, people would deliberately visit Little Mountain because they found some sort of perverse enjoyment in launching items over the embankment just to hear them crash from such a great height. Discarded items included a significant number of washing machines, dishwashers, television sets, living room furniture, mattresses and box springs, a large safe that had already been cracked, three vehicles that were

mostly intact, several cars that were cut apart, bicycles, lawnmowers, community newspaper boxes and a hot tub – only a brief overview. Words cannot express the extent of the debris. There were layers upon layers of discarded items strewn across a half mile of steep mountain slope.

After decades of prolific illegal dumping, a local Little Mountain resident, Dr. Jeff Grognet, approached the Rotary Club of Parksville about starting a cleanup effort. As a result, the Rotary Club initiated a coordinated cleanup with Kestrel Helicopters, which provided an aircraft and volunteered their time to support this cause. Rotary members organized to fill large industrial fertilizer bags and tethered together other large debris for removal. The first helicopter lift day was May 5, 2019.

Discarded items included a significant number of washing machines, dishwashers, television sets, living room furniture items, mattresses and box springs, a large safe that had already been cracked, three vehicles that were mostly intact, several cars that were cut apart, bicycles, lawnmowers, community newspaper boxes and a hot tub ...

Around this same time, I had a chance encounter with my former high school principal. This individual happened to be Bill Rawlins, who was president of the Parksville Rotary Club at that time. I had recently reached out to BHA through a social media post and discovered that there was no local regional table of BHA’s British Columbia chapter on Vancouver Island. I told Bill that if I was able to get a regional table up and running on the island, BHA would help to support further cleanup efforts at Little Mountain.

Region 1 BCBHA was formed shortly after, on May 11, 2019, and the Little Mountain cleanup was Region 1’s first initiative and first community collaboration aimed at restoring and protecting

Kestrel Helicopters providing the heavy lifting for the Little Mountain cleanup.

Photo: Caleb Harding

the local area’s wild spaces. Bill was ecstatic to have such youthful energy and enthusiasm from a group of hunters and anglers excited to wrestle dishwashers across steep mountain slopes, as in his own words, “The average Rotarian is getting a little long in the tooth.”

This monumental task included multiple days of prep work. The debris field was only accessible by a 20-minute hike in to the base of the mountain. The volunteers then collected and piled large, heavy debris, which was loaded into cargo nets and/or tethered together in long strings for airlift. Smaller items were loaded into large, industrial fertilizer bags, donated by local farms. Approximately 10-15 volunteers would work for three to four hours during each prep day, and multiple prep days were required to prepare for each helicopter lift day.

On lift days, volunteers would gather at the trailhead, where the helicopter would come and drop its loads. Volunteers would sort the debris, separating metal and garbage, as well as vehicle tires, which numbered in the hundreds.

None of this could have been possible without the hard work of volunteers, who also included many other community members and service clubs. Of special note, Bedard and Sons Excavating provided a skid steer, an excavator and a dump truck to offer much needed assistance on fly days. OK Tires recycled all discarded tires free of charge, and the Regional District of Nanaimo waived all dumping fees. Our chapter also provided a ground crew for the helicopter, where volunteers would scramble from site to site to hook up the helicopter’s payload.

After the initial lift day in May of 2019, a subsequent lift day was scheduled for November. Other lift days would be delayed due to covid, with the last lift taking place on Nov. 21, 2021. On each lift day, the helicopter would remove 50-60 bags as well as approximately 30-40 strings or cargo nets of items. The total waste removed over the three-year process was 49,500 lbs.

Instead of paying Kestrel directly, the Rotary Club donated funds in Kestrel’s name to the Polio Plus Foundation, providing another positive outcome. Subsequently, approximately 1,000 children were vaccinated against polio. The chapter followed this same path in support of the second lift day – matching the previous donation made by the Rotary Club to the Polio Plus Foundation.

Little Mountain now has the opportunity to become a pristine site once again as long as present and future generations act as responsible environmental stewards. Vancouver Island has also gained a group of dedicated BHA volunteers supporting its wild spaces and strong community partnerships with likeminded organizations. BCBHA is proud to partner with the Parksville Rotary Club and has since completed another backcountry cleanup. No helicopter was used this time, but another 13 tons of illegally dumped waste were removed.

Steve Nikirk lives on Vancouver Island with his wife and three children. He is the Region 1 chair, Armed Forces Initiative liaison and board member for the British Columbia chapter of BHA.

Above: British Columbia chapter volunteers Josh Laughland and Corey Wilson hook up the payload, while Steve Nikirk signals the helicopter pilot.

Photos: Caleb Harding

Chapter News & Updates

ALASKA

• It’s pint night season in Alaska. The chapter’s had several gatherings from Juneau to Fairbanks with presentations on topics ranging from Sitka black-tailed deer to trapping history and pike fishing through the ice.

• The chapter also took a handful of guys from the Armed Forces Initiative out on a backcountry snowmachine ride and day of pike fishing.

• It’s been a welcome break from the myriad policy challenges that face us here in the Last Frontier.

ALBERTA

• The Alberta Chapter Rendezvous is officially scheduled for June 2-4, 2023, at Alford Lake Conservation Centre. Ticket sales information coming soon.

• The chapter board is recruiting several new members and has introduced a targeted approach in order to ensure we have a diverse board, which represents groups that are often marginalized in public outdoors spaces. Please reach out if you are interested in volunteering with the chapter in some capacity.

ARIZONA

• The chapter held a family squirrel hunting camp in the Flagstaff area.

• The chapter also hosted a Hunting for Sustainability event in partnership with BHA’s Northern Arizona University collegiate club.

• We are slightly restructuring the chapter to enter 2023. More details to come.

ARKANSAS

• Our chapter board retreat and 2023 planning is well underway. We’ve got a motivated group ready to define the goals and objectives for the year, building off of the momentum from 2022.

• The second annual Black Bear Bonanza returned on March 4! This year featured some amazing sponsors and activities for the entire family. Returning to offer his support was Arkansas native Clay Newcomb!

• Our land access initiative with onX and various state agencies continues to take shape as we work together to identify landlocked parcels or easement opportunities.

ARMED FORCES INITIATIVE

• The AFI program hosted 22 veterans on a learn to upland hunt seminar in South Dakota with our partners at Pheasants Forever.

• The program hosted 15 volunteer leaders from the south-central U.S. at a snow goose event in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

• The AFI program hosted 15 volunteer leaders from the Northeast at a saltwater marsh hunt in Massachusetts.

BRITISH COLUMBIA

• Chapter representatives participated in the inaugural BC Wild Sheep Summit in Prince George. A diverse group collaborated to develop strategies that will improve conditions for wild sheep in the province and grow populations.

• Regional tables are working to gain positions on regional harvest committees across the province, as well as hosting informational speaker presentations on a variety of conservation topics.

• Volunteers collected dried lichen for an endangered wild mountain caribou maternity pen in the West Kootenay.

CALIFORNIA

• Volunteers from the California and Nevada chapters planted 1,000 bitterbrush plants in critical mule deer and antelope winter range with CDFW.

• The California chapter led a coalition letter seeking clarification from the director of CDFW regarding access to navigable waters along the Truckee River after two anglers were confronted by a warden threatening trespass. The chapter presented legal precedent affirming the right to access and fish the Truckee, and it looks forward to a response from the department.

• The chapter hosted an informative and hands-on Explore Hunting workshop in San Francisco in collaboration with Hunters of Color.

• One of the chapter’s board members drafted and submitted an amicus brief on behalf of BHA in the Wyoming corner crossing case.

COLORADO

• Colorado Public Lands Day is May 20, 2023. Our Gunnison Chapter Leadership Team is organizing a fence removal project and more. Join us for the Barbs, Beers and Bands celebration in Gunnison.

• Our 14th annual Colorado Chapter Rendezvous will be held June 9-11, 2023, at the Soap Creek Corral/Coal Mesa Horse Camp, west of Gunnison.

• The BHA Armed Forces Initiative has a Colorado Club. Check out their Instagram page @colorado_bha_afi.

FLORIDA

• The Florida chapter welcomes Matt Henderson onto the board as our new secretary.

• On Jan. 14, the chapter organized an invasive plant cleanup at Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge in coordination with refuge staff.

• The chapter hosted its fourth annual series of small game hunts across the state. This year we had multiple folks attend who hunted for their very first time, along with a few guests who hunted public land for their first time.

GEORGIA

• The Georgia chapter rallied members to attend Bartow County planning, zoning and county commission meetings to help save Pine Log WMA.

• Members also attended regional DNR hunting regulation meetings to voice concerns regarding public access issues.

IDAHO

• The chapter voted to contribute funds needed to meet Project Aspen’s 2022 goals, with thanks to the generous support of the Idaho BHA members.

• Two new leaders were added to the chapter: Taylor Bradish as North

Idaho co-chair, and Pat McCurry as the Salmon Region representative.

• Chapter leaders set in motion an expansion of the successful Learn to Hunt program to other parts of the state.

ILLINOIS

• After lots of hard work by BHA staff, board and members, along with many others, House Bill 5844 looks to expand public access to Illinois waterways. Support HB5844!

• The BHA Lake Shelbyville 3-D archery trail building events are underway. If you or a business would like to sponsor a target please reach out to Illinois@backcountryhunters.org

• Come check out BHA at the Illinois Deer Classic, March 31-April 2, in Peoria.

INDIANA

• The Indiana chapter is hosting and attending several big events to kick off 2023, including a pint night at the Archery Trade Association Show, a booth at the Indianapolis Deer, Turkey, & Waterfowl Expo and our first Field to Table Conservation Night!

• Several chapter members attended Conservation Day at the Indiana Statehouse on Jan. 24, where they collaborated with various conservation organizations and pushed for Indiana conservation funding.

• The chapter board has accrued some great committee members to assist with the overall scope of work performed by the board. These fine folks will help move the chapter forward and make a lasting impact on Indiana conservation.

IOWA

• The chapter recently raised $3,015 to help fund the potential purchase of the Smith Wildlife Area in Ida County.

• The chapter is preparing for the spring 2023 Iowa Deer Classic in Des Moines.

KANSAS

• On Jan. 7, the Kansas chapter worked with the KDWP on a habitat management project at Leavenworth State Fishing Lake near Tonganoxie. The project involved clearing trees around the lake and creating fish habitat within the lake.

• On Jan. 21-22 the Kansas chapter board held a two-day strategic planning session at Eldorado Lake State Park. During this time, legislative priorities, goals for 2023 and a variety of other topics related to BHA’s mission were discussed by the chapter board.

• On Feb. 2, the Kansas chapter hosted a pint night at Black Stag Brewery in Lawrence, Kansas.

KENTUCKY

• In October, the chapter had its annual trout stocking event at the Red River Gorge, in Campton, with Kentucky Dept. of Fish and Wildlife.

• In December, the chapter held another annual event, our Kentucky Conservation Christmas in Lexington, with the National Wild Turkey Federation, Ducks Unlimited, Wildlife Women, Kentucky Fish & Wildlife Foundation, Kentucky Back Country Horsemen, City of Lexington Parks Department and Trout Unlimited.

• The chapter ended the year with our first successful chapter fundraiser showing of the Public Lands Film Festival in Maysville. A shout-out goes to all for helping with this event, and especially Mike Abell and Katelyn Bailey for making it happen.

MICHIGAN

• The chapter stood in opposition of the Camp Grayling expansion based on concerns of loss of access and opportunity.

• The chapter held a fun pint night at CONFLUXCITY Brewing.

• The chapter hosted a virtual pint night focused on whitetails and whitetail hunting in Michigan, with guest speakers Chad Stewart, an ungulate management specialist for the MI DNR, and Jared Duquette, wildlife division chief for the MI DNR.

MINNESOTA

• We successfully held the first annual North Country Icebreaker event, with ice fishing, spearing, and winter camping demos and over 100 people in attendance.

• We operated a booth at Pheasant Fest, held this year in Minneapolis.

• We held our annual board retreat and outlined our plans for 2023.

MISSOURI

• The chapter welcomed members Josh Ragland and Carter Harris to its board of directors.

• The chapter partnered with wildHERness and the Missouri Department of Conservation to host a women’s whitetail deer camp.

• The chapter released its 2023 calendar of events. You can find this information and more on the Missouri BHA Facebook group page and on Instagram.

MONTANA

• Hired two part-time lobbyists for Montana’s 90-day, every-other-year legislative session to help defend sound wildlife management, public access, conservation funding and fair chase hunting and fishing opportunities. Support our efforts! Please buy a 1-in-300 Adipose drift boat raffle ticket!

• Opposed an ill-conceived Crazy Mountains land swap; submitted comments on grizzly bear management, a timber project and a proposal to change elk hunting opportunities near Yellowstone; and contributed to a statewide campaign improving landowner-hunter relations.

• Co-hosted a CWD sampling clinic while also advocating for the CWD Research and Management Act, now law!

NEBRASKA

• The chapter board met in Broken Bow in February to make plans for social and work events for the chapter in 2023.

• Chapter board members were in attendance at the Nebraska Bowhunters Association Banquet to support the NBA and share what BHA has going on in the state.

• Keep an eye out for emails and social media posts with information on help needed for work events coming this summer and fall.

NEVADA

• The chapter participated in BHA Podcast & Blast (Ep. 143) discussion about feral horses and burros.

• The Nevada chapter has created a scholarship at the University of Nevada, Reno.

• Held annual meeting/pint night in conjunction with our booth at Sheep Show 2023.

NEW ENGLAND

• The Armed Forces Initiative is gaining traction in Vermont, with an ice fishing trip on Lake Champlain, a pint night held on Feb. 18 at 1st Republic Brewing Company and a potluck on Mar. 25.

• On Mar. 4, BHA members participated in an apple tree release project on Boyer State Forest in Berlin, Vermont.

• The Rhode Island BHA state team helped plan and execute a legislative workshop to educate representatives and senators interested in supporting shoreline access bills.

NEW JERSEY

• The New Jersey chapter was featured in an Outdoor Life article about the controversial New Jersey black bear hunt. Members of the chapter board were accompanied by a photographer to document a typical bear hunt.

• The chapter hosted a virtual town hall with New Jersey Fish and Wildlife’s chief of wildlife management regarding the future of black bear hunting in the state.

• Following the New Jersey Fish and Wildlife council’s public hearing in Trenton regarding the Black Bear Management Plan for 2023, the

chapter will host a pint night for those who have travelled to Trenton to testify.

NEW MEXICO

• The chapter teamed up with New Mexico Game and Fish during two separate archery deer hunts in the Sandia Mountains right outside of Albuquerque. The purpose of this public outreach event was to mitigate conflict between hunters and the non-hunting public. Nearly 650 individuals were contacted, and NMGF did not receive any negative calls regarding the bowhunts. Materials distributed to the public included a venison recipe sheet, BHA stickers and journals and venison jerky.

NEW YORK

• The chapter gave hunters and anglers a voice in the New York Department of Conservation East of Hudson Management Plan, with an analysis of the plan and an action alert.

• The chapter partnered with New York Hunters of Color and The Nature Conservancy for the second annual mentored crossbow hunt to take out 10 new hunters. The new hunters also learned deer biology from Matt Ross of the National Deer Association and Stacy Preusser of DEC.

• The chapter, in partnership with the National Deer Association, Slate River Farms and the Cornell Cooperative extension of Saratoga County, presented a demonstration of processing a deer, from skinning to prepping various delicious cuts for the table.

OHIO

• In a brazen attempt to pull a fast one on the people of Ohio, our state legislature sent “The Chicken Bill” (HB 507) to Gov. DeWine’s desk. This bill was originally intended to decrease the lot size of chick sales to make it easier for 4H kids to sell chicks at their events, but it was loaded up with language eliminating the ability of state agencies to comment or oppose fracking leases on their lands. The chapter opposes this misuse of the legislative process and continues to apply pressure to Governor DeWine to veto this bill.

• In the upcoming months, the chapter looks forward to our annual planning meeting, a pint night in Columbus, followed by an appearance at the Ohio Wildlife Management Association Conference, and our first joint event with the Armed Forces Initiative.

• Within a few short days of this writing, the winners of our muzzleloader hunt raffle will hit the woods! They will certainly have a good time with chapter board member, graphic artist and guide Kyle Iwaniki. Thanks to Whitetail Ridge Outfitters for donating the opportunity!

OKLAHOMA

• The Oklahoma chapter hosted its first duck camp event on Dec. 9, 2022, in collaboration with G&H Decoys.

• There are lots of big things happening for 2023 in Oklahoma: The chapter has plans to host a public land turkey camp, volunteer for the Do-Wacka-Do Trail Race at Sandy Sanders WMA and participate in several conservation projects around the state.

• 2023 will also bring multiple pint nights to the Oklahoma City and Tulsa areas. Updates and news can be found on the chapter’s Facebook and Instagram.

OREGON

• The chapter continues to work closely with the sportsman’s coalition to find alternative funding for fish and wildlife through creative means. This effort comes out of the state still needing increased funding efforts for management of various species. Most notably, Oregon’s mule deer populations, which continue to steadily decline in eastern Oregon.

• The chapter held its annual planning meeting at the beginning of January in Central Oregon. Priorities for 2023 were discussed and reviewed by the entire board. An anticipated discussion of increased in-person events is on the docket and should garner a lot of attention in 2023.

PENNSYLVANIA

• As part of the chapter’s Take 2 mentoring program, board members took a group of new hunters on an opening day pheasant hunt on state game lands.

• The chapter represented hunting and fishing interests in the newly formed Growing Outdoor Recreation in Pennsylvania program. BHA and other representatives in the outdoor sector will help shape the direction of the state’s Office of Outdoor Recreation.

• The chapter helped pass SB431, which modernizes the antlerless license system.

SOUTH CAROLINA

• The chapter intends on fighting, based on environmental and cultural zoning guidelines, a new proposal to develop a golf course on Pine Island. This development would negatively impact wildlife in the area.

• Sunday hunting on public land remains the top priority for our chapter. Our efforts to push this legislation through will begin again this spring.

• The chapter plans to incorporate new leaders with fresh ideas into the organization as long-standing leaders retire from the board.

SOUTH DAKOTA

• In partnership with Pheasants Forever, the South Dakota chapter made a significant contribution to permanently protect 560 acres of grassland habitat in Stanley County through Pheasants Forever’s Build a Wildlife Area program.

SOUTHEAST

• We hosted a Louisiana small game hunt at Richard Yancy WMA on Feb. 25.

• We are establishing an AFI chapter in the Southeast. If you are active or retired military, please contact chapter leadership for more information.

• Leaders needed: If you are interested in a leadership role, or just want to get more involved, let us know at southeast@backcountryhunters. org!

TENNESSEE

• The Tennessee chapter continues to have successful pint nights at New Heights Brewery in Nashville, generously sponsored by onX.

• On Jan. 21, the chapter sponsored a cleanup at Percy Priest WMA.

• The chapter’s biggest news is that we have been invited by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency to a series of stakeholder input study groups to help craft policy for deer and turkey management in Tennessee.

TEXAS

• Kailee Bedunah, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department intern, funded by the Texas BHA chapter, started in early November and has contributed significantly by assisting with a variety of public hunting opportunities on east Texas Wildlife Managament Areas, assisting with outreach events and working on an interpretive trail.

• We would like to welcome the Armed Forces Initiative in Texas and look forward to working with Dell Bennett in 2023 and beyond.

• Welcome to Kyle Mobley, our chapter communications leader, as well as Ryan Buege, our new policy leader, Logan Hope, Region 3 representative, and Reagan Evans, Region 2 representative.

UTAH

• The Utah chapter secured a grant to support a trailhead restoration volunteer project in the Book Cliffs, planned to occur in May.

• In partnership with the Division of Wildlife Resources, the Utah chapter is conducting the Hunting for Sustainability series again this Spring.

• New board members have been selected for terms starting in 2023 under a newly adopted board structure consisting of more specific roles.

WASHINGTON

• The chapter held two Backcountry Bash events this past January – in the eastern and western parts of the state. These events were intended to celebrate the efforts of the chapter over 2022 and look forward to priorities for 2023.

• Chapter Leader Dan Wilson and Northwest Chapter Coordinator Chris Hager were featured on Randy Newberg’s podcast, Hunt Talk, and spoke about the efforts surrounding spring bear hunting in the state. The episode brought light to the many efforts of the chapter and the shortcomings of the WDFW commission. The episode is called “Hunters No Longer Needed” (episode #201). Listen to get up to speed on what’s happening with hunting in Washington.

WEST VIRGINIA

• We had over 170 attendees at our Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies pint night in Charleston last fall.

• Stay tuned to our e-newsletter and social channels for 2023 chapter events.

• The 2023 West Virginia legislative session is coming to a close. Make sure to check our social media channels for updates on bills that concern West Virginia hunters and anglers.

WISCONSIN

• The Wisconsin chapter board gathered for the annual state leadership weekend to prepare and plan for 2023. The board is excited for more engagement with membership in 2023. Stay tuned for an event near you.

• The chapter again funded a carcass dumpster at its adopted wildlife area, Goose Lake, to help stop the spread of CWD. This year 7.78 tons of deer carcass waste were safely disposed of at Goose Lake Wildlife Area.

• The chapter collaborated with other conservation organizations to select two conservation projects funded with Cherish Wisconsin grant funds. This year, funds will support habitat restoration projects at the Cranberry Creek Mound Group State Natural Area in Juneau County and Pierce County Islands Wildlife Area in Pierce County.

WYOMING

• The Wyoming chapter is gearing up for the 2023 state legislative session. The board has been working closely with our contracted lobbyist ahead of the session to engage our Wyoming members and contact Wyoming legislators to discuss our priority issues.

• The Wyoming chapter will be closely monitoring bills introduced in the 2023 session, and we encourage members to regularly check our chapter page on the BHA website for updates and links to action alerts.

• The Wyoming chapter is developing funding and engagement strategies to grow our engagement at the state legislature in the coming years. Please keep an eye out for raffles and fundraising campaign to this end, and know that your contribution will be vital to sustaining our efforts in Wyoming.

Find a more detailed writeup of your chapter’s news along with events and updates by regularly visiting www.backcountryhunters.org/chapters or contacting them at [your state/province/territory/region]@backcountryhunters.org (e.g. newengland@backcountryhunters.org)

FORGING NEW PATHS: Building Community, Broadening Conservation and Celebrating Wild Food

BY TREY CURTISS AND KYLIE SCHUMACHER

BHA has often touted the “backcountry” portion of our name as not only synonymous with wilderness but also as representing a state of mind. Whether your backcountry is a secluded portion of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Montana or a woodlot sectioned off by busy roadways outside Atlanta, BHA defines backcountry by simple guidelines: a place to find solace and derive a deeper connection to the natural world.

As a public lands advocacy organization, we know that to move the needle on important conservation issues, we must have the will of the people. But, before they care, we must show them why. To understand the importance of advocating for public land access, wildlife habitat, clean water and clean air, we must first help those people connect with the same places and experiences we all know and love.

In 2022, BHA brought two programs to new audiences: our core education program, Hunting for Sustainability, and a test program, Explore Hunting.

Hunting for Sustainability Recap

Hunting for Sustainability started in 2015 as a way to create new, conservation-minded hunters, but it has since grown in practice

and purpose. H4S, as we call it here, has evolved to include less traditional but arguably more important components of hunting such as ethics, cooking and advocacy.

These workshops create connections to the outdoors through hunting experiences with the intent of building a coalition of new conservationists to protect the places and wildlife on which they’ve come to depend. In short, it’s hard to advocate for something with which you have no connection. H4S is about creating a louder, diverse and more impactful voice for lands, waters and wildlife.

BHA hosted six H4S workshops in 2022, aimed at students and young adults in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Montana and Arizona. Workshops varied in format and species, ranging from turkey and small game to big game and waterfowl. Of the 200 applicants, 75 were chosen to participate in the three-day workshops. Motivations included the search for self-sufficiency, the desire to be closer to their food or the chance to contribute to wildlife management.

Around campfires and fireplaces, attendees discussed the nuances of hunting ethics. Around stovetops and grills, attendees ate wild game and learned how to use the whole animal. Through rain, snow and sunshine, attendees experienced their public lands and the wildlife that call them home. By staying on-site in cabins, campgrounds and old homesteads, attendees were afforded the unique opportunity to forge friendships with wardens, game and

Photo: Kylie Schumacher

These workshops create connections to the outdoors through hunting experiences with the intent of building a coalition of new conservationists to protect the places and wildlife on which they’ve come to depend. In short, it’s hard to advocate for something with which you have no connection. H4S is about creating a louder, diverse and more impactful voice for lands, waters and wildlife.

fish personnel, chapter leaders and peers. In the end, 75 people made new connections to the outdoors and to places that may one day need their help; with the addition of sessions on conversation advocacy, we sought to give them the voice they’ll need to do so.

Explore Hunting

To reach new and underrepresented urban audiences, we trialed our Explore Hunting workshops in five cities in 2022: Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Portland, New York City and San Francisco. The workshops were designed to build community, broaden conservation and celebrate wild food. In short, we wanted to introduce urban audiences to hunting and conservation and relay the importance of supporting them. We partnered with organizations Hunters of Color and Minority Outdoor Alliance, along with state fish and wildlife agencies, and leaned on the expertise of BHA chapters and chapter leaders. The program was broken into two parts at locations that were easily accessible by public transit. First, we hosted a community night. Like a pint night, well-known as one of BHA’s marquee events, we offered a space for novice and seasoned hunters alike, as well as those just interested in learning more about hunting and conservation, to join in a social setting to meet conservation leaders and members, agency personnel and others.

Like the community night, the second portion of the workshops was free, open to the public and easily accessible. The program was broken into four different “campfire sessions.” We started the day off with a panel discussion, hosting a diversity of speakers to discuss motivations for hunting, how hunting ties to conservation and the ethics of hunting. On ethics, we detailed ethical dilemmas in the field, as well as the ethical dilemmas of sourcing your own protein from wild sources. We followed that discussion with a presentation on

basic skills and gear to hunt safely and more effectively. Participants were able to see all the gear needed and ask questions about the different varieties. After basic skills and gear, we were joined by a conservation officer to discuss rules and regulations that surround hunting, with an emphasis on how to learn more. We ended the day with a butchering and processing demonstration. Working with each agency and BHA members, we were able to obtain wild game, from squirrels to pheasants, ducks, geese, deer and more. In many cases, participants had the ability to practice hands-on butchering themselves. Where possible, we cooked and taste-tested the wild game and, in all cases, showed participants how to properly wrap and store the game for later consumption with a strong emphasis on using as much of the animal as possible.

We wanted this to be a 30,000-foot view of hunting and

Top: Travis Bradford, Right: Chris Borgatti

conservation to help garner support for continued or future advocacy. With the help of BHA chapters, state agencies and our partner organizations, we were able to engage over 250 new people on BHA’s mission and values.

Impacts

The primary goal of both Hunting for Sustainability and Explore Hunting has always been to create hunting supporters and conservation advocates. While we will continue to provide avenues, opportunities and communities for these new hunters to get afield, our biggest achievement is teaching people to see hunting through a conservation lens.

Many students who participated in our Hunting for Sustainability workshops are going into wildlife or natural resources professions. For the folks in urban areas, our Explore Hunting workshops met current and potential advocates where they are. For people who grew up around hunting and angling, there’s a lot of information taken for granted: the fact that hunting is highly regulated with tags, laws and limits; that license fees and taxes on hunting equipment go directly to wildlife and their habitats; and the fact that most of us hunt and fish by a set of ethics and values that demonstrate the utmost respect for the places and wildlife we pursue. But, for many participants, these were brand new lessons learned.

A secondary outcome of these workshops was being able to showcase hunting in a more positive light. Like it or not, the fate of our hunting pastime depends largely on how non-hunters view the sport. “I never really looked into hunting before, and any previous thoughts leaned towards the negative side.” said Desmond Drakes. “This was my first opportunity to learn about the sport, and it was a great first impression.”

By highlighting topics like ethics, cooking and advocacy, we are not only showing participants that hunters are more than killers in camo; we are also creating a new cohort of hunters who start their hunting journeys with these values front and center.

We will spend the next year engaging these new BHA members in our advocacy work as part of our community. While we will continue to offer a community and opportunities to expand their hunting knowledge, skills and time outdoors, whether or not they become avid hunters is up to them. However, we are stoked when hunting and angling strikes a chord and lights a spark to get out on public lands, for the only way to advocate effectively for something is to experience it for yourself.

Trey Curtiss is BHA’s R3 coordinator. Kylie Schumacher is BHA’s collegiate club coordinator.

BHA would like to thank the following partners for their help with H4S and Explore Hunting: Opportunity Outdoors, Modern Carnivore, National Wild Turkey Foundation, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, G&H Decoys, Boss Shotshells, OnX Maps, Agate Lake Resort, Bill Cook Chapter of the Izaak Walton League, Wisconsin DNR , Timber to Table, Teller Wildlife Refuge, Arizona Wildlife Federation, Southern Arizona Quail Forever, Filson, Finex Cast Iron Cookware, Hunters of Color, Minority Outdoor Alliance, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Pennsylvania Game Commission, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Patagonia Atlanta and Metropolitan Rod & Gun Club, along with the Arizona, California, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania BHA chapters.

Photo: Travis Bradford

Patterning spring TUrkeys

BY BRAD TRUMBO

Not 10 minutes into my sit, I spied a lone tom’s head emerge above a rise several hundred yards up-ridge. He was working the timber edge down to an old logging road. That’s my bird, I thought. When he hit the road, I gently pressed the dowel of my call against my left leg. A series of high-pitched hen yelps turned his head and prompted a half-dozen other toms to erupt in the timber beyond.

Moments later, the entire flock appeared on the road. Seven toms and that many more hens were headed my way, but that first tom was well ahead of them and moving with purpose. My 12-gauge roared as he approached the decoy, securing the most beautiful Rio Grande tom I had ever seen.

“I’m going to pretend that bird came to my calling,” I mentioned to my buddy who had filmed the hunt. We knew the flock’s routine from scouting, and had I not called at all, it’s a safe bet that the entire flock would have eventually found their way into our laps.

Not every situation requires striking calls and setting up on lovesick toms that are patrolling the timber. In patchwork landscapes of grasslands, croplands, brushy draws and creek bottoms, patterning turkeys provides for an eventful hunt and increases the odds of success.

Patterning turkeys requires attention to four basic elements:

• Habitat

• Vigilance

• Strategic Setup

• Careful Calling

Habitat

Every animal requires food, water and cover, and when undisturbed, they will use the same travel routes among these necessities – even turkeys. Varied covers of open grasslands and grain fields separated by timbered draws and brushy creek bottoms provide turkeys everything they need in close proximity.

Travel corridors are an important consideration for patterning game. Wildlife use easy travel routes to conserve energy, and old logging roads are a prime example. In the hunt described previously, the road the turkeys traveled every day paralleled a brushed-in stream running through sparse timber. The road abutted an open grassy slope, lush in bloom with canary biscuitroot and balsamroot, just a few years post-wildfire. The turkeys had no reason to wander. They were fat, happy birds in a prime brood-rearing area with the logging road connecting every essential habitat feature.

Vigilance

With the right habitat identified, try to find a distant vantage point where you can comfortably glass a flock and take notes. Cross-canyon points and adjacent ridge spines often provide a good glimpse of where and how turkeys are using habitat features. They may be traveling the same stretch of road or game trail or roosting and flying down into the same berry patch or grainfield corner each morning.

With a flock singled out, patiently watching can be difficult. Making a play and calling birds is the primary draw for many turkey hunters, and when multiple toms are gobbling and fighting,

Photos: Brad Trumbo

passively taking in the show can be downright painful. But the life and times of the wild turkey is a spectacle to behold and there is much to be gained from observing a flock. When hunting public lands, there is always risk of another hunter moving in on the birds, but the risk can be worth the reward of the experience alone, not to mention the strategy one can develop with a little intel on a flock.

Strategic Setup

A turkey’s eyesight is extremely keen, and remaining hidden when birds are nearby is critical. Positioning yourself in a location where turkeys are traveling to or will travel past greatly increases the odds of being in the right place for a bird’s approach.

The two situations that I have found most successful are 1) being in place when the birds leave the roost in the morning, and 2) being near their evening food source as they fill their crops before returning to roost. Setting up at least 30 yards from their approximate destination and positioning to watch their approach reduces the likelihood of having birds appear right on top of you with little notice.

When turkeys use a consistent roost area, they often fly down into and move from the same general location each day. For example, one of my best turkey spots is a pine stand bordering a wheat field in eastern Washington. Turkeys routinely roost in the pines and fly down into the wheat field, walk through the same opening in a fencerow, and feed back into the pines. Setting a decoy in line with the fence opening and then blending into the brush down the fencerow allows me to watch the turkeys and the decoy and keeps their eyes off of me as they move toward the pines within easy shotgun range.

On the hunt described previously, I knew the birds were using the logging road and approximately what time they would be at a certain location. At the road’s end, I set my decoy in plain sight

for the flock’s approach and jumped behind a brush pile 35 yards adjacent. The tom I killed spotted the decoy from about 100 yards and walked straight to it. When it was clear he had seen the decoy, I dropped my call, readied my shotgun, and waited for him to present a perfect shot. I was not visible to the bird until he reached the decoy, which held his attention perfectly.

Careful Calling

I prefer to use calls sparingly when setting up on turkeys in the middle of their daily routine. An initial attention-grabber and occasionally letting birds know that I am still around as they do their thing is the extent to which I call. This keeps birds from focusing too intently on the caller’s location and minimizes the potential for calling mistakes. Additionally, minimal calling is often recommended for pressured public land birds who might bolt at the slightest hint of something being “off” about a simple hen yelp.

Whether you are new to hunting and calling turkeys or could host a clinic on the subject, learning turkey patterns before the hunt can set you up for success and an unforgettable experience. Being in the right place to observe natural flock dynamics, toms battling for dominance and breeding rights and absorbing the varied calls and individual voices of America’s largest game bird is rewarding and educational. Bagging a cagey long-beard because you had his number is simply icing on the cake.

BHA member Brad Trumbo is a biologist and freelance writer, author of Wingshooting the Palouse, and an active member of Pheasants Forever, the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association and BHA. Residing in southeast Washington, his passions include chasing high-tailed setters across the grasslands, casting flies to mountain trout and penning tales of public land adventures.

Great American Outdoors Act Brings Opportunities, Uncovers New Issues

BY CHARLIE BOOHER

Punctuated equilibrium defines our history, and natural resource policy is no exception. Looking back at the history of public land management in this country, we’ve frequently experienced long periods of small or stepwise changes in laws, rules or regulations, separated by a short period of rapid activity that promulgates decades of results. We are lucky to have so recently experienced a punctuation in the 116th Congress.

In 2020, conservation, hunting and outdoor recreation organizations worked together to pass the Great American Outdoors Act – a piece of generational legislation that guarantees dedicated annual funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and created a program to address the deferred maintenance backlog on our public lands, called the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund. Thousands of BHA members made phone calls, sent emails and contacted their members of Congress to get this over the finish line. Everybody loves a big win, but this one was absolutely huge. Because of this effort, LWCF receives $900 million annually in perpetuity, and the Legacy Restoration Fund has been authorized at $1.9 billion through fiscal year 2025.

LWCF was established back in 1964 and uses royalties from

offshore oil and gas development to “safeguard natural areas, water resources and cultural heritage, and to provide recreation opportunities to all Americans.” These funds can be used to buy lands, improve public access or install important infrastructure for outdoor recreation. Money from LWCF has been spent in all 3,143 counties, parishes and boroughs in the United States. It is our greatest tool for conserving unique places and opening access to landlocked public lands across the country. But, despite being authorized at $900 million during the LBJ administration, the fund had only been appropriated that amount by Congress twice in the program’s history.

Concurrently, our national parks and public lands had racked up nearly $19 billion in deferred maintenance costs. The dedicated funds allotted in the Great American Outdoors Act’s Legacy Restoration Fund are divided among our federal land management agencies, with the National Park Service receiving 70% of the funds, the Forest Service receiving 15% and the other three agencies (BLM, BIA, and USFWS) each receiving 5%.

At the time, BHA President and CEO Land Tawney had this to say: “Dedicating full funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund as well as addressing the maintenance backlogs of our public lands and waters is a promise years in the making through bipartisan

Photo: John Skarie, 2022 Public Lands and Waters Photo Contest

Money from LWCF has been spent in all 3,143 counties, parishes and boroughs in the United States. It is our greatest tool for conserving unique places and opening access to landlocked public lands across the country.

leadership and stakeholder collaboration. Passage of the Great American Outdoors Act will lead to enhanced hunting and fishing opportunities on our public lands and waters. …Our country needs a win like this more than ever.”

For several years before this bill became law, we heard a common refrain that money was the sole limiting factor for federal agencies carrying out active management prescriptions and increasing capacity to meet growing resource needs in general. However, after the Great American Outdoors Act, a few rounds of covid relief, the Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, money is no longer the only limiting factor. Process is. And implementation issues are hindering our ability to ensure these funds are invested in the right places – like opening landlocked public lands, building new shooting ranges and acquiring special places that enhance hunting and fishing opportunities, protect water resources and safeguard fish and wildlife habitats.

When resources are limited, process faults and inefficiencies are easy to dismiss, even though they are ever-present. However, when funding abounds, issues of process come into sharper light that can’t be ignored. It likely won’t surprise anyone to hear that navigating federal grants programs can be frustrating, as can procuring contracts and services from within a federal agency to enlist the help of NGOs and external partners. Existing hiring authorities across all federal management bureaus need to be reconsidered, streamlined and made more efficient. All of these obstacles are time consuming, stressful and create pinch points that restrict forward progress. Unfortunately, it’s just as frustrating for our hardworking federal agency leaders and frontline staff who want to move quickly and do good work – it’s also about as boring and wonky as public land policy gets.

The good news is that our community can help make a real difference. Several nonprofit organizations that deal in land acquisitions and purchasing easements, like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, use these funds to achieve their mission and are well situated to help improve processes specific to those areas.

“The Great American Outdoor Act provides permanent and dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which ensures public access to outdoor recreation resources,” said Ryan Bronson, director of government affairs for the Rocky

Mountain Elk Foundation. “However, some of the existing bureaucracy rules have led to problems with appraisals that have scuttled significant projects. Getting these resources into the ground requires dedication and some further reforms.”

Now, we hear that the agencies lack sufficient contract and grant personnel, or that the National Environmental Policy Act process is holding them up. We hear of problematic land valuation issues, appraiser deserts, where there aren’t sufficient federally approved appraisal professionals to help facilitate land transactions, and of procurement issues, too.

As we look to the future, reforms to these critical areas will likely be surgical, and there may not be an action alert about them, but there is a strong team of dedicated wildlife and public land advocates working to ensure that funding continues to be put to good use, applied in the areas of greatest need, and so that all of us who worked hard to secure these investments in the first place can be proud of what we’ve accomplished together as a country. It’s also imperative that we build a proven track record of success that will inform future resource needs and encourage new investments by the generations of public lands stewards that follow us.

We’re already beginning to see success stories from this generational investment. Just weeks before this magazine went to print, more than 5,300 acres of industrial timberland less than a mile from my home were added to our local national forest using these funds. Deferred maintenance on roads and bridges in my county are being rebuilt and resurfaced with these funds. Hunters and anglers like you and I are benefitting from these projects. And it’s only the beginning. However, it’s up to us to make sure this money is invested wisely and to create a new equilibrium that supports, defends and conserves our public lands and waters.

BHA member Charlie Booher is a conservation lobbyist at Watershed Results LLC and holds degrees in wildlife management, public policy, and natural resource conflict resolution from Michigan State University and the University of Montana. Outside of the office, you can find him hiking the mountains of Western Montana and relearning how to hunt and fish in the Northern Rockies.

Photo: Jordan Lefler, 2022 Public Lands and Waters Photo Contest

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BUILT TO FISH

On the Farm

BY LARRY STONE

One family’s love of birds, cattle, and conservation has led to partnerships that protect more than 1,000 acres of prime fish and wildlife habitat for public use in the blufflands of northeast Iowa.

In 1971, Phil Specht and three brothers bought 1,004 acres in the watershed of Bloody Run Creek, a trout stream that joins the Mississippi River.

The land was “as good as it gets” for the wildlife enthusiasts. But as much as they loved the site, they also recognized the need to preserve open spaces and wildlife habitat. In a series of sales over decades, they sold about 700 acres to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. That became the core of the 1,100-acre Bloody Run Wildlife Management Area, which protects the premier trout stream and is a popular public hunting area for whitetail deer, turkeys and small game.

The wild property also lies within a National Audubon Society Globally Important Bird Area, as well as the Effigy Mounds-Yellow River Forest Bird Conservation Area, designated by the IDNR.

Although not public land, the remaining Specht farm complements the complex of habitat. Phil Specht, his wife Sharon and their son Jon have partnered with the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation and the Natural Resources Conservation Service to protect 244 acres with a permanent conservation easement. The NRCS Agricultural Land Easement pays the landowner to “protect croplands and grasslands on working farms and ranches by limiting non-agricultural uses.”

and public access

The farm qualified partly because of the family’s past management, which encouraged a variety of bird species, native plants and even the endangered rusty patched bumble bee.

Until an injury forced his retirement in 2020, Phil maintained a grass-fed Holstein dairy herd. The intensive management that grazing requires – Phil moved his cows among some of 51 grass paddocks every three or four days – led Phil to understand the diversity and complexity of his farm. He observed, for example, that bobolinks thrived with his grazing regime.

He credits his late brother, Dan, who managed a grass-fed beef herd, with first making that connection. “If you’ve got bobolinks, you’ve got a working grassland ecosystem,” Dan observed.

Phil and his family also donated a second conservation easement to INHF, spelling out additional protections, including no permanent structures, no mineral exploitation, no subdividing the property and no animal confinements. Phil reserves the right to hunt, control public access, sustainably manage timber, enhance wetlands and limit use of motorized vehicles.

With a lifetime of observing interactions between livestock and wildlife, Phil stipulated that cattle be part of his conservation easement. Grazing tops the list of permitted uses, while tillage and row-cropping are expressly prohibited.

“Always cattle; never row crops,” is Phil’s mantra. “And the birds will come,” he might add. And wildflowers and insects and amphibians and reptiles and other wildlife that are his “pasture buddies.”

Although his leg injury has curtailed his walking, Phil regularly

An Iowa family farm provides crucial wildlife habitat

Photo: Larry Stone

manages cattle movements from his pickup, camera ready to capture images of birds and wildflowers that he posts on Facebook.

A third part of Phil’s “Grassland Bird Sanctuary” is about 20 acres he sold to the IDNR for a walk-in access to the Bloody Run Wildlife Management Area. “It is a way for the public to view the grassland birds in the new sanctuary . . . without worrying about hot-wire gates or bulls in the cow herd,” he said. From this strip of public land, hikers may see bobolinks, meadowlarks, other grassland birds, prairie wildflowers, monarch butterflies and rusty patched bumble bees on the Spechts’ adjacent private land.

The access corridor leads to a blufftop Specht dubbed Cerulean Point, where ornithologists discovered populations of rare cerulean warblers in mature trees along the Bloody Run Creek valley.

Phil’s sustainable farming practices led to a research collaboration with an entomologist from Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. That 1995 study, of “in-field” refuges for beneficial predator insects to reduce the need for insecticides, began Phil’s use of small areas of fields as refuges of native plants, birds and insects. This turned into other scientific collaborations going beyond simple observations. He has collected data on bobolinks, botany and soil testing with several researchers, especially restoration ecologist Dr. Mary Damm. He’s also worked with scientists from Upper Iowa University and Northeast Iowa Bird Conservancy and plans a project with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Phil is also doing citizen science on bumble bee tracking with the Xerces Society.

Managed grazing also helped provide the “layers” of habitat so critical to biological diversity, starting in the soil with fungi and invertebrates, Phil stressed. “There is as much going on down there as there is up here.”

Above ground, the community is a mix of grazed and ungrazed grasses and forbs, insects, birds attracted by insects, scattered trees in fencerows, mature woodlands in the Bloody Run Creek corridor and small ponds. The farm is a biological cornucopia. Phil, who’s an avid deer hunter, said the walk-in public birding access also will allow energetic hunters to reach the state-owned wildlife area.

While Iowa has relatively little public land, the Specht farm demonstrates that creative cooperation can boost public access.

After a 25-year career as outdoor writer/photographer with the Des Moines Register, BHA member Larry Stone has continued as a freelance writer, photographer and speaker on conservation issues.

He and his wife, Margaret, live in the Turkey River blufflands of northeast Iowa’s Driftless Area.

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CORNERS in the Crosshairs

BY SABRINA KING

Corner crossing is an incredibly important issue to hunters for good reason: Millions of acres of public land across the western United States is checkerboarded or otherwise only accessible by stepping across a corner. More broadly, according to recent reports by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and onX, over 9 million acres of federal land and over 6 million acres of state land are landlocked and inaccessible.

Pressure on easily accessible public lands is increasing, not only from hunters and anglers but from a broad array of user groups. At the same time, more people are moving to the Mountain West, changing accessibility patterns and often decreasing the amount of access to public land available in those states.

All these dynamics came to a head in 2021 when four Missouri hunters corner crossed in rural Carbon County, Wyoming, were charged with criminal trespass at the bidding of a landowner and were subsequently found not guilty by a six-member jury of Carbon County residents of criminal trespass for accessing their public lands. While a civil case continues in federal court, the effects of the 2021 crossing and 2022 exoneration continue to be felt in Wyoming – and the potential implications for our trespass and public access laws are immense.

In Wyoming, access programs like Access Yes are running into staffing problems and decreasing participation from private property owners; the number of acres opened up by our Access Yes program peaked back in 2012. And despite sportsmen and women advocating in 2021 for a $9 increase in the cost of a Conservation Stamp, earmarked to expand access to “private, federal and state lands that are difficult to access or inaccessible by the public for hunting and fishing purposes,” money from that fund has only gone toward one land purchase.

While hunters are feeling the pressure of decreasing access in the field, Wyoming legislators have introduced over a dozen trespassrelated bills over the past two years. All of this – frustration over decreasing access, the Missouri hunters being charged for criminal trespass and the perception that legislators are coming for hunters

through trespass laws – has resulted in alarm among hunters and a near stalemate at the state level when it comes to addressing the core issues surrounding corner crossing and public land access as a whole.

How did we get here? Background on corner crossing and trespass in Wyoming

To understand how Wyoming got to this point, it is important to understand that corner crossing has been in contention in Wyoming going on 20 years. Back in 2003, a hunter from Douglas was cited for hunting trespass by Game and Fish for corner crossing, something the agency long believed was illegal under the state’s hunting trespass law. The hunter challenged the citation, and Game and Fish requested an opinion by the attorney general as to whether or not the law applied in such instances. In 2004, the AG published his opinion and made it clear that corner crossing was not illegal under the state’s hunter trespass laws.

However, that same opinion noted that hunters could be cited for criminal trespass for corner crossing – a seeming contradiction stemming from the convoluted way Wyoming’s laws address trespass in general.

Wyoming is not unique in having hunter-specific trespass laws, but it is somewhat unique in how the state’s laws are enforced. Wyoming’s “hunter trespass” law, WS § 23-3-305(b), allows game wardens to cite hunters for trespass if they hunt or intend to hunt on private land without permission. Under this statute, hunters are responsible for knowing whether or not they are on private land, which is known as a “strict liability” law.

Wyoming also has a more standard “criminal trespass” law, WS § 6-3-303. Here, the burden is on the property owner to notify people that they are trespassing, whether through signs, fences or gates, or verbally. So mere incidental trespass doesn’t rise to the level of a crime, until the trespasser is notified they’re on private land, told to leave, and they decline to do so.

Game wardens cannot enforce criminal trespass. But that doesn’t

Photo: Zack Williams

BHA’S WYOMING CHAPTER LEADS THE WAY ON ILLEGAL POSTING BILL

HB 147 came out of a survey BHA did of our Wyoming membership, asking what issues hunters and anglers were encountering in the field. Illegal posting of public lands was a top issue. The chapter’s lobbyist, Sabrina King, began working with allied organizations and legislators to introduce language to Wyoming’s hunter harassment statute to fix this. Over the course of the session, the chapter and their lobbyist were able to secure unanimous support in both the House and Senate committees, and with only a handful of no votes in the entire legislature, passed the bill on February 13. Wyoming’s hunters and anglers will now have a clear line of communication to game wardens when they see illegal trespass signs blocking access to public land.

mean hunters can’t be charged with criminal trespass – they can, and the Missouri hunters were charged with criminal, not hunting, trespass. So in reality, hunters are subject to two separate trespass laws and depending on the circumstance could be charged with either.

But what is really coming into play with corner crossing and trespass is the idea of “airspace” trespass, a contentious and still disputed notion with no clear answer in state law.

Ownership of airspace in Wyoming is governed by W.S. § 10-4302, which reads: “The ownership of the space above the lands and waters of this state is declared to be vested in the several owners of the surface beneath subject to the right of flight described in W.S. § 10-4-303.” W.S. § 104-303 provides regulations for flight; overall, Chapter 10 is written to regulate aeronautics, not physical human travel through airspace right above the ground. That said, landowner groups have long argued that Chapter 10, and W.S. § 10-4-302 in particular, gives landowners private rights to the airspace above their land – and that it makes corner crossing illegal criminal trespass.

Wyo. LEXIS 579). In this case, the court determined that in passing W.S. § 10-4-302 in 1931, the state declared the “right of public passage through the navigable airspace.” Furthermore, the case notes “both the federal government and the State of Wyoming have declared a general right of free public passage through the air.”

The Cheyenne case, as with Chapter 10 in general, deals with “navigable” airspace travel and can be interpreted to apply only to airspace above 500 feet and in flight paths necessary to ensure airspace travel. So, while it may not be the case that collective ownership of airspace makes corner crossing explicitly legal, it is absolutely the case that Wyoming’s state law does not grant exclusive private airspace rights to the state’s landowners.

What is really coming into play with corner crossing and trespass is the idea of “airspace” trespass, a contentious and still disputed notion with no clear answer in state law.

This interpretation is incorrect. The statute reads to give airspace ownership to the several owners of the land underneath the air, somewhat akin to the collective ownership of subsurface minerals, especially in pooled ownership areas. That the airspace above the land is collectively owned is affirmed by a 1985 Wyoming Supreme Court case, Cheyenne Airport Bd. v. Rogers (707 P.2d 717, 1985

What the law, and the courts, have granted landowners is a clear nexus between the enjoyment and surface use of their land and the right to preserve that enjoyment, even as their airspace is used by the government and broader public. Without getting too deeply into the legal weeds, in the Cheyenne case the Court notes that “flights over private land are not deemed a taking [by the government] unless so low and so frequent as to be a direct and substantial interference with the use and enjoyment of land.”

This standard is, in part, what is being disputed in the federal civil case. But it has come up in Wyoming’s 2023 legislative session as well, as has corner crossing in general.

Photo: onX

Where are we now? Updates to trespass laws and the pervasive undercurrent of corner crossing

Over the past two months, Wyoming’s legislature has introduced eight trespass-related bills, seven of which would directly or indirectly impact hunters and anglers. Only two of those, HB 147 (see sidebar), illegal posting of public land, and SF 56, prohibiting travel across private land for hunting purposes, have clearly positive changes for hunters and anglers in the field.

Airspace trespass was discussed in legislation updating both Wyoming’s hunting and criminal trespass laws. One of these, Senate File 24, was designed to regulate drones but would have set a standard for what counts in Wyoming as airspace trespass. The bill would have codified that an incursion into airspace over private land is trespass only if there is substantial interference with the use and enjoyment of the land – language lifted directly from the Cheyenne case. But strong pushback from drone users that the language was vague killed the bill in the House.

Senate File 56 updated the state’s hunting trespass law to clarify that “traveling through” private property to hunt is illegal. The bill defines traveling through as “physically touching the surface of the land,” essentially codifying the 2004 AG’s opinion and ensuring that incidental travel through airspace will never be considered hunting trespass, nor enforced against corner crossers by game wardens. SF 56 passed the Legislature on February 24.

And finally, a bill was introduced by a few legislators addressing corner crossing specifically. Senate File 108 would have exempted corner crossing from both hunting and criminal trespass laws. But the Wyoming chapter didn’t support the bill, in no small part because, as has been outlined, neither hunting nor criminal trespass really applies to corner crossing in the first place.

The reality is, no Wyoming hunter has ever been found guilty

of trespass for corner crossing. An issue as monumental as corner crossing – and access to public lands in general – deserves a proactive, comprehensive solution, not merely decriminalization, which might actually create more problems than it solves by generating confusion about airspace ownership rights. Hunters don’t just want an exemption from criminal laws that already don’t apply.

What’s next?

Looking forward, corner crossing and public land access need to be addressed and solved outside the narrow lens of “trespass.” Trespass is inherently about criminal acts, and accessing public land, land that is the birthright of every American, should not be criminalized. Here in Wyoming, we are instead looking toward promoting policies that protect and enhance public access, as well as protect private property rights. We are looking toward policies that will build mutual transparency, respect and trust among hunters and anglers, landowners and the agencies charged with enforcing the state’s laws.

The Wyoming chapter of BHA, along with allied groups advocating for sportsmen and women across the state, is working with legislators to do a full examination of public land access in Wyoming, including looking at corner crossing and how to finally solve the questions of legality and access corner crossing presents. It’s been 20 years; hunters are ready for answers and solutions, and 2023 may be the year we can make that happen.

BHA member Sabrina King has been a lobbyist and advocate for 14 years, advocating across the West for laws and policies that benefit the Mountain Region’s land and people. She is based in the southern Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, where she lives in a van with her dog.

Photo: Zack Williams

STILL AT WORK An Access Story

BY AARON AGOSTO

Blood like this always makes me nervous. Bright and sparse, the tale of my folly was painted on the leaves and grass. I knelt down to touch it, to make sure it isn’t just the rust of fall baked into the leaves from the long summer sun. But it was blood. Blood two years in the making.

It’s not hard to find meaningful experiences and forge connections with landscapes when you live in a place like northwest Montana. One place in particular has really managed to sink its claws into me. A place where a river runs its entire course without touching a single town. A river that is home to native westslope cutthroat and bull trout, as well as healthy populations of large and feisty rainbows and browns.

This was, and is, northwest Montana logging country, thickly timbered, steep and rugged. Up until recently, most of the land surrounding the river was held by Plum Creek Timber, who kept a handshake agreement allowing public access. Plum Creek sold to timber giant Weyerhaeuser Lumber, who thankfully continued public access through their Open Lands Policy, and enrolled in

a 142,000-acre conservation easement, permanently protecting access to the entire stretch of river, as well as some of the mountains that flank it. I, like many others, found myself continually drawn to explore. At first it was just to fish, but it wasn’t long before before I finally broke my focus from the riffles and runs, stoneflies and drakes, and the trout that were just so damned eager to eat them. My gaze had drawn toward the hills and mountains. Mountains that elk and mule deer call home. Mountains where wolves roam and mountain lions lurk, maybe in hope of killing one of the bighorn sheep or Shiras moose that live in the cliffs and hills and valleys. Mountains where black bear and grouse feed on kinnikinnick, and the grizzly bear flirts with its expanding range.

It was on a spring fishing trip when the gobble of a distant tom cut through the morning silence. I hadn’t planned on hunting turkeys, but he gobbled again, and I shifted my focus and left the river and headed into the mountains. I sat and called and waited. He never materialized, but it didn’t matter. I was too distracted by all the elk sign I had found. Beds, old rubs, tracks and scat were everywhere. Having never hunted elk before, they were (and still are) an almost mystical species to me. And I had found their home. I spent the day exploring and scheming for the fall instead.

Walking up a gated logging road on a dark and early September morning, my friend DJ and I were stopped in our tracks by the unmistakable barnyard-like smell. Elk were close. With wind in our

Photo: Aaron Agosto

faces, we stepped off the gravel and followed a well-worn game trail into the woods. We crested a small rise at sunup and were greeted by the flick of an ear and the dark fur mane of a lone cow elk nervously watching to see what was coming up the hill behind her. Before I could say a word, she was gone into the thick timber. As we stopped to consider our options a not-too-far off bull bugled, and our plan was in motion. We spent that day chasing bugles, having a few encounters that all ended in spooked elk crashing away through logging slash and brush.

I hunted that area by myself most weekends the rest of that season – exploring old roads, connecting ridges and saddles – finding elk most days, then quickly scaring them off. Occasionally I’d get into long back and forth arguments with a reticent bull who was too wise to close the gap or walk fully into view. Through early fall archery and into the cold and wet of rifle season, I walked and tracked and broadened my familiarity with this place. I ended that season without notching a tag or firing a shot. But sometimes success isn’t measured by the amount of meat in the freezer. Having had encounters on most days, I ended that season feeling confident that I could at least find elk.

land along the river. At first much wasn’t known about the sale, other than the future of public access to 400,000 acres was up in the air. Southern Pine Plantations, a Georgia-based timber and development company, broke their silence after a few months as the new owners. Having once sold former holdings in Idaho to the Wilks brothers, SPP was known in some circles for purchasing and “flipping” timber lands to private developers. My initial reaction to the announcement of the new owners was one of concern. Would SPP do the same with this land here in northwest Montana? While they did sell off some portions to another timber company, Green Diamond Resources, as well as to Robyn and Mark Jones, a wealthy couple from Texas, those concerns were quickly put to rest. A spokesman for SPP announced that they would continue the current block management agreement, allowing hunters, anglers and recreational users access, and that they planned to re-enter the program once the current agreement expired. Green Diamond and the Jones family also put large portions of their new holdings into conservation easements or enrolled in the block management program.

The news broke suddenly, catching much of the community off guard. In December of 2019 with the goal of liquidating their Montana holdings, Weyerhaeuser announced the sale of their

The thing about conservation easements is, they work. And as long as landowners have the option to do what is in their best interest with their land, they will still work. By selling certain development rights to federal, state or nonprofit organizations, many landowners can afford to keep a generational farm in the family or manage currently unproductive timber lands with the goal of future harvests. Here in Montana, state-owned conservation easements mandate public access and preclude certain usages like

Photos: Aaron Agosto

subdivision, while maintaining sustainable logging operations and farming. And right here, in this place, on this river and in these mountains, thanks to a series of large easement projects, a landscape that could have been fractured remains whole.

bedded down for the day, I decided to wait it out.

After nine months of waiting and dreaming, I was back. Eager to build on the successes and lessons from last year, I went hard into my second season. But it was two weeks before I had my first encounter, and that ended like so many from last year. A close quarter screaming match was cut quiet by the swirling mid-afternoon wind betraying my true identity.

After two more weeks of trying and coming up empty, I was back hiking in the late summer heat following last year’s sign. Another day spent wondering if I would even see at least fresh scat or a rub. Another day of silence in the woods and wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Defeated, I hiked back to my truck in the late morning. On the drive out I decided to stop and call in a spot I had seen some elk last year. I let out a last desperate bugle and was met with more silence. Head hung low, I turned to get back in my truck when I heard it: a far off and almost lazy bugle. Just two notes, but it was enough.

I parked my truck and instantly was hit in the face by the reassuring musk that I hadn’t smelled since the previous season. I followed fresh tracks and scat up a draw to the top of the ridge near where I thought the bull was. He stayed quiet as I hiked, and so did I, determined to learn from my past mistakes. A short time after I reached the top, he bugled again. This time close enough for me to pinpoint his location. “It’s working,” I thought to myself as I moved in a bit closer. It was mid-morning at this point, and the prevailing wind was in my favor, but it was unstable, gusting and swirling, and all too eager to give me up if I were too close. Thinking he was

Napping under a tree I was woken up every hour or so by an anxious bugle. Reassured that he was still there and that my plan was working I stayed put. As the day lingered on, the bull become more excited and started to respond to some of my calls. With the wind becoming more and more consistent, I decided to make my move. Upwind and uphill of him by about 1000 yards, I started my stalk in. There hadn’t been a good rain in months, and the sky was choked with the orange-brown haze from nearby fires.

Quiet wasn’t entirely possible in the dry, late September leaves, so I disguised my approach with a sparse cow call as I stepped over particularly noisy terrain. Each time it was met with another bugle, and each time I reminded myself, “it’s still working.” I moved from tree to tree, with just a small hill separating us, and called again after I stepped on a branch. This time it was met with a frenetic response from a cow that must have been bedded with him. I was close now; I could smell them.

I snuck over the last hill and into the small draw where I thought they were and hid myself against a patch of young fir trees as the bull let out a bugle – so close I could feel it. I mimicked the emotion and cadence of his call. The rustle of dried leaves and cracking sticks intensified as he charged in. Timber-dark legs carried him toward me through the brush. “It’s still working.” I drew my bow as he moved past me in a steady uphill trot, hoping to catch the wind of the bull he thought had come to challenge him.

“It’s still working,” I thought while I stepped out from my cover as he stared down at me. Elbow back and up at full draw I sidestepped, one foot over the other as he sized me up from 15 yards away. Fully out in the open now, our eyes locked on each other, and my heart jumped out of my chest. I found my moment. “It’s still working,” again I told myself, as I tensed my shoulders and watched my fletching disappear into his hazel brown fur.

He turned and ran, and I heard a crash in the distance. I waited and paced and worried. First blood was not reassuring. I’d seen this

blood before – on a deer I didn’t recover.

But just as before with my fear of losing this place, it wasn’t long before my worry gave way to hope as the pin-size drops gave way to streaks and splashes. Frothy and crimson red, the blood stood out stark against the leaves and grass, like the vibrance of his bugle breaking the morning silence. I followed the bloody trail toward a clearing where he lay, the sun glistening on his tines and the last of his vigor and strength sprayed out on the hill behind him. Not quite 200 yards downhill from where I shot, he was dead. It worked.

“Bull down.” I texted DJ and my wife Annica, who both grabbed packs and boots and drove to meet me. Butchering, I raced the flies and wasps, who swarmed in the heat, eager to get their fill. I hung quarters in trees and sat grateful for this place and this elk. Grateful for the landowners and agency staff who saw more value in this landscape as habitat than as 30-acre ranchettes and quick profit. Grateful for programs like the Forest Legacy Program and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which allow the community and landowners to be partners in a future together. Because when elk lose habitat, they don’t just cease to be there anymore, they often cease to be. And when we lose public access, we don’t often get it back.

The old, gated road hasn’t seen a logging truck in some time. Our meat-laden packs were doing the only bit of hauling that had happened here in a while. These roads will carry logging trucks and

timber again one day, but for now the roads are quiet as the forest regenerates. It’s an investment in the future that pays immediate dividends – elk and deer moving in to feed on grasses and shrubs and seek cover in the young thickets of fresh new growth.

The road carried us to my truck, thirsty and tired and only halfway done as the sun was setting. Packs emptied and ready for round two, we followed our headlamps through the dark on a shortcut to the rest of the meat. Talking and joking loudly, half because we were happy, half to avoid walking into a bear in the dark. We got to the cache, still in awe of the weight of it all. Loaded with the rest of the meat, we strapped on our straining packs under the Milky Way. I smiled and knew: It was still working.

BHA member Aaron Agosto is a freelance photographer out of Bigfork, Montana. His work has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, Big Sky Journal and Backcountry Journal, and he has provided imagery for Patagonia, Yeti and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, where he also sits on the board of the Montana chapter as the Flathead Valley leader.

Photo: Aaron Agosto

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JUST HUNTING

BY ETHAN BAUER

One-thirty in the morning – we had left Friday night after a long week of work and were eight hours into our drive. I leaned in towards the steering wheel to avoid any hint of comfort, my focus split between keeping my eyes open and determining if the shapes I saw darting across the road were real or figments of my over-tired imagination. The lack of insurance claim following the drive proved them to be the latter.

At the next sign of Keith shifting in his seat, I said, “Hey man, can you drive?” But it wasn’t a question.

wrapped up for the year and with the end of small game season in sight. I was reading one of those clickbait listicles rattling off everything that you can hunt when most seasons are closed, when hogs caught my eye. After a little more research, I shot Keith a text, and it was settled: Come the end of February, we were headed to Georgia.

Did we put much planning into the trip? Hardly. We had never hunted any big game apart from whitetail, and only in our home state of Pennsylvania, but how hard could it be?

As the trip approached, we realized we should iron out some of the details.

“What are we going to eat?”

“I like PB&J.”

“Do we need bug spray?”

“It couldn’t hurt to have.”

The trip began with the itch that sets in after deer season has

“What does a license cost?”

Photo: Ethan Bauer

“Right around 50 bucks.”

“Where are we going again?”

“Georgia”

“Yeah, but where?”

We turned off the highway. I flicked on the high beams to cut through the inky black. The white sand road was barely wider than the truck, with ominous masses of vegetation hanging over its edge. We were wading into an alien world. Though neither admitted it, we both felt we were in way over our heads.

Not even a quarter mile in, flooding across the road halted our progress. I pulled on my knee boots to go investigate. Water soon lapped at my boot tops with the majority of the stream left ahead. A wispy fog rolled across the surface as we debated our options. Cutting our losses, we pulled into a roadside clearing and waited the half hour until the silver sky betrayed the coming dawn – time to get hunting.

Our plan was to loop out from the truck and circle past our prospective campsite on the return. We mostly wanted to acquaint ourselves with the extent of flooding, but we also hoped to find some sign along the way. We had questions about a set of tracks at one point but wrote them off as belonging to a whitetail, mostly to absolve ourselves of the sin of a missed opportunity. Our morning stroll went by with not a hog to be seen.

Absorbing the landscape surrounding us, we strolled back toward the truck. A mix of verdant green grasses, mosses and sedges sprang from the sand in sporadic clumps. Tangled shrubs intertwined with the spear tips of the palmettos to form an impenetrable, chest-high wall. Strange, stunted oaks reached barely overhead. But the tall, slender loblolly pines were predominant. In the wetter areas, cypress stood, their limbs dripping with Spanish moss like confetti for the world’s most sordid birthday party. It all drove home the fact that

we weren’t in Pennsylvania anymore.

Our packs had just hit the tailgate as the camo clad Rick Andrews dismounted from his truck. Rick was Southern Hospitality incarnate as he emphatically welcomed us to his great state. His son was more apprehensive, eyeing us carefully from his perch atop the hood. When the conversation finally came back around to us getting after some hogs, Rick didn’t hesitate to list every hot spot within a half-hour drive. His son even broke his own apparent code of silence, suggesting we hunt another WMA just down the river, but Rick was quick to remind him that we would need a boat to do that any time soon, dashing our hopes of the flood receding.

We needed to regroup. Over lunch, we hatched a new plan and found a fresh sense of excitement. To escape the flooding, we decided we would head an hour south to new ground. Our new location had two primary types of habitat – swamp and upland pine forest. The pines were the most accessible terrain but did not seem to offer much in the way of cover or food that would hold hogs. On the other hand, the swamp offered its own challenges. Islands dotted the expanse, but without chest waders and a machete, good luck getting in there. That left us stuck in between – soggy ground, covered in some of the thickest brush in Georgia.

We patrolled the grid of logging roads, hoping to spot hogs or at least fresh sign. This amounted to long stretches of crawling along with the passenger’s head stuck out of the window, like a golden retriever with a strange fixation on the sand five feet in front of the truck. A set of tracks caught our eye. It wasn’t much, but it was the only lead we had as the day faded to night.

That next morning felt hopeful. We went back to follow the tracks, willing them to lead us to a point of convergence with their creator. Instead, they led us to something that we had only read about – a rooting area. We were sure that the hogs would feel a

Photos: Ethan Bauer

return visit was in order.

Our optimism waned as we watched the clearing from the pines that evening. Admittedly, more time was spent questioning the creation of a creature as miserable as the mosquito than watching the rooting area. We took turns checking if we could still see the clearing through our scopes, secretly hoping for the moment we couldn’t. Day two was in the books.

As we crossed the midpoint of our hunt, we could not have felt further from the possibility of success. It seemed like the whole concept of there even being hogs to hunt was some sick joke devised to have us come sweat our Yankee asses off in a Georgia swamp. Maybe our nonchalant arrogance to the difficulty of the whole endeavor was to blame, but we were having a rough go. That being said, a few bowls of chili and a cold beer or two helped lift the air of dejection, and we resolved to get back after it.

Our breaths hung in the brisk morning air as we sloshed down the flooded two-track. We paused as Keith tapped his finger to his ear and then pointed to our right. Not a second later, we heard three violent snorts and brush crashing, heading away from us. We circled back to a parallel road, hoping to cut the hog off. It was tight quarters, but we thought we had the track. We followed, scanning for movement, until the trail disappeared into a tunnel through the brush.

I’m tempted to try to build the same anticipation we felt as we horse traded over who would belly crawl through that hole, but I’ll cut to the chase – the pig gave us the slip. On the stroll back to the truck we decided we’d be back that evening. The day was spent killing time more than actually hunting. We were exhausted, but as the evening hunt drew near we began to change our tune. Slowly, we shook off our apathy and, by time we set off down the path, we were hunting like we were going to kill a hog.

As we turned south, we moved at a pace that would back up traffic on a sidewalk. The slosh of our boots through the water and the light smack and muttered curse at a mosquito were the only sounds. The air was crisp and had just begun to cool; it was supposed to rain that night. We felt the potential, and that was enough.

The winding road made it difficult to see more than 60 yards ahead. About a mile from the truck, the heavy cover thinned – the area had caught our eyes during the morning’s ramble. From the far side of the road, I had the first view of the clearing. As we moved along, I noticed a shadow behind a lonely pine sapling. But shadows aren’t jet black with ears.

I hastily shouldered my rifle and whispered, “Keith, there’s a hog.” Time slowed to a crawl.

All but the top third of the pig was obscured as it moved through the brush. I shuffled toward Keith, searching for a window that would give access to its vitals. I found one, but it was too small to offer a good shot. I came off my scope only to see Keith’s rifle going through a slow, smooth swing.

Excited, he asked, “Should I shoot?”

Not hearing my whisper, he made up his own mind as he touched off a round.

As the report of Keith’s rifle hit my ears, the hog was already barreling towards us. It tore across the path, disappearing into the

tangled thicket to our rear. The crashing in the brush in front of us only intensified as one hog turned into a dozen, the rest previously concealed. Then the swamp started to get a little western.

Over the next 15 seconds, hogs took turns barreling out of that brush on either side of us, hot on the tail of the first. Startled, we ended up shoulder to shoulder. Keith pivoted to the left and raised his rifle all in one motion, firing at a hog crossing the path – he missed. At the same time, I noticed a hog hanging up at the edge of the path to our right. As the hog broke from cover, I took aim, but the adrenaline got the better of me, and I whiffed.

Gathering ourselves, we made our way to where that first pig had crossed the path to find clear, heavy spurts of bright red blood on the grass – it was a good hit. We looked into the shadows of the tangle before us, where the trail entered. As we contemplated, a hog squealed in the distance. Night was approaching quickly.

We began to pick our way into the heavy cover. What looked like blasts from a red spray can painted the brush every five feet or so. My pulse raced and my mind struggled to focus.

We moved slowly. I jumped at twigs snapping under my own feet. Shortly, the trail became less clear and the heading unapparent. We split up, working in short arcs about 10 yards apart from each other. Seeing nothing where I was, I looked over towards Keith just as he called out, “I found it!”

“Found what?” I asked.

I made my way to him and saw “it” just as he said, “The pig.” I could only stare in disbelief. Sure enough, there it lay, no more than 50 yards from where it was shot. A dead hog. Our hog.

I looked over to Keith and punched his arm as we both broke out in our widest school boy grins. Against all odds, we had pulled it off. We dropped ourselves into an unknown landscape to hunt an animal that neither of us had even seen in the wild. Despite all that, we had a hog on the ground.

Back on the path, we inspected our kill – a sow, guessed at a decent bit over 100 pounds. The shot placement was textbook, later found to be directly through the center of the heart. You can’t ask for better than that.

It all sank in as we drove back to camp: How when we pulled in

It seemed like the whole concept of there even being hogs to hunt was some sick joke devised to have us come sweat our Yankee asses off in a Georgia swamp.

that first morning, we both wondered what the hell we were doing down here. The dull but constant anxiety that at any second a boar would come charging out of the brush straight at you. And how that evening, when we had stepped out of the truck to begin our hunt, neither one of us believed that we were actually going to kill a hog, despite what we said. Thankfully, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

Mechanically speaking, the drive back home was no different than the drive down, but it couldn’t have felt more different. Dreams of trophy boar had been replaced by anticipation of overloaded Outlook inboxes and thoughts of jumping back onto the tracks of daily life. We hardly spoke at all. Maybe there was nothing left worth talking about. I was lost in the reflection of the hunt we’d had and what it all meant. Somehow, we’d had success in a game stacked against us, with only a few hot tips and our own determination to thank. It made me feel like I could accomplish anything. In some ways, it still does. There was also disappointment – not with the outcome but in the fact that it was all over. In the fact that not every day could be lived as those four days had – boots on the ground, eyes on the brush, focused solely on the problems before you. No ambient noise of career, family, money, relationships – just hunting.

BHA member Ethan Bauer lives and works in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, designing floodplain restorations. He grew up hunting and fishing with his father, just a few counties over, but now hunts wherever he can get a tag.

Photo: Ethan Bauer

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NEW FRAMES

MADE FROM

THE ARTIST’S SON

BY STEPHEN BODIO

At around the age of 30, an observation by Elizabeth Katherine Huntington that I was “an artist with nice guns” struck me with unexpected force. I realized that I had become a man my father always wanted to be. And that he hated it. I was an artist only in the broadest sense, a sportsman with a madness that has a little to do with ability and a lot to do with obsession, successful only in the smallest of subcultures, but had my very successful father ever wanted to be anything else?

blinkered horses. I had found a dead mouse in the bedside water glass, a dead pigeon in the yard covered by live ants and my cousin’s dead cat, Snoozy, smashed in front of my house on Templeton Street. It might be human nature, or something genetic in the artist’s boy, or a little of both, but I found them far more interesting than my little metal plane with the rotating blue propellers or my toy trucks. Maybe an undiagnosed case of biophilia, not yet invented by Ed Wilson but already hinted at by Aldo Leopold: “The man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal. He is supercivilized, and I for one do not know how to deal with him. Babies do not tremble when they are shown a golfball, but I should not like to own the boy whose head does not lift his hat with he sees his first deer.”

See: in the early 1950s, a very young man in a three-story Dorchester walk-up, a first generation American born to immigrants from the Swiss border, fueled by passion and talent, married to a pretty young woman of a different class and ethnic background, had nothing to show but those passions. At that time, he really was an artist – a painter, a sketcher, a sometime sculptor – and a man with a passion for animals, fish, birds, mammals, their shapes and sizes and feathers and movements. All my early memories are of animals, alive and dead, dirt-common and exotic.

Against this faded dream: a flash of the most intense blue I have ever seen, edged as for emphasis with black and white. It is the shimmering speculum of a “black mallard” – Yankee for American black duck – which he takes from the pouch in the back of his coat one morning, followed by three more. I am mildly confused because it is NOT black, but a rich, chocolaty brown. I already know my colors. At 4, how would the artist’s son not know? My father works as an “engineer,” which I don’t understand because in my mind an engineer drives trains. But not long ago, Dad was a “scholarship student at the Museum School.” And Mum was a commercial artist, drawing models in furs for Kakas Furs on Newbury Street. The relic of which is another fascinating animal, a full-length ocelot coat.

But the ducks – like other beings soon to come, the ruffed grouse, the flounders, the stripers, the brookies, the hornpout, the yellow perch, the mackerel, and soon, the tuna and the whitetailed deer –they were all I could focus on as long as they were visibly themselves. And then they became holy relics. I kept those feathers for a decade.

My father let me carry it to the table. That it was dead did not bother me. The only live animals I knew were English sparrows, pigeons high overhead, as remote as angels, and the ragman’s

So: dead, heavy, limp, wet feathers shimmering like watered silk when I stroked against the grain, deep and thick and soft against it. I could have handled them for hours, but Dad had something else in mind.

He set them gently on the table, or rather on the newspapers my mother had provided, set one on its back and stripped off a couple of big chunks of feathers against the grain. He smoothed them out in his palm to reveal a single feather, crossbarred with light pencil lines.

“I’ll teach you how to tie flies”, he said. “These are the feathers that make wings for flies.” Perhaps he saw the incomprehension in my eyes because he grinned. “Flies – to catch fish. Trout.” He went out, put the feathers down, and came back with a shiny silver box. When he opened it, it was full of feathered creations, sleek wets on the left, fluffy dries on the right. When he pointed out the wings, I could see they were the same as the ones we’d taken from the dead bird. Do artists, or artists’ kids, imprint like birds? Sixty-some years later I’m still dazzled by the treasure he revealed in that box. And I still have it, and a few flies I’ll never fish.

The next event in our lives brought us much closer to fish and birds and nature and game. In 1954, we moved to what my mother considered wilderness. These days, with Easton a crowded bedroom community located rather less than 20 miles south of downtown Boston, this would seem ludicrous. But in those days, my urban, maritime mother wasn’t far off. Easton still had dirt roads, and its population of Yankees, rich and poor, and ethnic Portuguese looked

When he opened it, it was full of feathered creations, sleek wets on the left, fluffy dries on the right. When he pointed out the wings, I could see they were the same as the ones we’d taken from the dead bird.

not to Boston but to New Bedford and Taunton to the south, to cranberry bogs and whaling towns. Not a few of the oldsters there had never been to Boston and had no intention of going. To me the raw subdivision hacked into the fringes of a boggy seasonal swamp was a paradise for a novice hunter-gatherer. For our first two years, our basement had six inches of water and three species of calling frogs in it. To me, in today’s vernacular it was a feature, not a bug; not the result of a cynical ploy to fleece the World War II generation, but a habitat.

Dad eventually put in a pump and got rid of the frogs, but I don’t think he was bothered by them. He ramped up his leisure time activity, even as I filled my jars with frog spawn, and often took me with him. It was around this time that I caught my first trout in his company, in what was then known as the Blue Hill River. In 1955 it still contained native brook trout. My father had been fishing a cast of wet flies, something that he did so often then that a part of my brain still considers it the only way to go. After a while he sat down on a rock and asked me if I would like to catch a trout. He was always a fisherman whose artistic purity fought his dogged north Italian pragmatism, but right now neither seemed relevant. He took a coffee can out of his box and hooked a squiggly worm on to, if I remember, one of the flies. “They like these better.” He rolled the line lightly upstream and put the rod in my hands, stripped line for me, and then raised the rod tip, which began to dance. “You’ve got him! Reel him in.” He actually grabbed my little hand and whirled it around the reel as he backed up until it skittered onto the bank. “You’ve got him!”

I did have him. He was probably five inches long, but the red and white in his fins and the mottled vermiculations of his back glow in my memory as the most beautiful fish I have ever seen. That night we ate him fried in butter. Need I say that I still do that?

Today, I’m not sure the Blue Hill River exists. Last I checked, it was a trickling culvert under what was then Route 128, now a part of I-95, neither of which were built when I caught my trout. But such tiny natives were always an almost invisible reward for those who shunned more popular quarry. They may be gone from the Blue Hills, but I have a friend and contemporary, a retired teacher, who still catches, releases and occasionally eats my trout’s close relatives in the bogs of Plymouth County.

The next fish I remember remains at the opposite end of the scale. I did not see it caught, off Chatham, in my father’s deep-sea saltwater phase, but discovered it beached in the shingle, waiting to be cleaned. For no reason an adult can fathom, my first impulse was to take off my shoes and walk on it. Not as odd as it seems, for though these fish were “school tuna,” not the size of the monsters

that fueled the tuna boom of the late 70s and 80s, it was still big enough for a 5- or 6-year-old to take a couple of steps each way. My younger brother Mark followed suit, and we walked up and down on it until my father came up shaking his head.

We knew his uncertain temper, but this time I think he was suppressing a laugh. Or maybe he was just happy he had caught a fish big enough for his sons to walk on. It was just after this time that he had his picture on the cover of Saltwater Sportsman with old Bill Drury and a slightly smaller tuna. The cover photo is one of a series, and I still have many of them. They strike me as both ageless and utterly of their time. My father’s crewcut and the omnipresent cigarette are of the 50s, but he also looks like some postmodern hipster. In other photos, especially trout fishing ones, there is not a doubt about their provenance, and he stands in his waders wearing his leather flight jacket from the Army Air Corps as he cups his hands to light a cigarette in the wind.

Need I say that I wanted to be him? Those years look idyllic in retrospect. He took me out often, especially fishing, and showed rather than told me what to do. In those days Knapp’s Pond was less than a mile from our house, though now eutrophication has filled in and erased it as thoroughly as new Ashmont Station obliterated the street where I was born. Then it held sunfish, hornpout, and chain pickerel as well as the amphibians and pond turtles and snakes that I liked just as much. On weekends or summer evenings I would go there, first with Dad and later alone, with spinning rods and reels and my own tackle box. Back then, my father had a light rod with the most beautiful spinning reel I’ve seen before or since: an Alcedo Micron. It was the color of pewter and had a kingfisher in raised relief on the side. I coveted it as I have come to covet all too many kinds of fine tackle. Perhaps a writer’s appetite for words started with the names of equipment, the “lyricism of shoptalk,” as Thomas McGuane had it. Names to say, names to covet: Alcedo, Penn, Browning, Winchester, Pfleuger, Hardy, Orvis, Leonard.

On Knapp’s Pond we would take our separate perches, usually on opposite sides of the little dam that emptied beneath the road, and make our own choices of bait or lure. At that time, Dad would only make suggestions if the fishing seemed slow. He favored sunfish and hornpouts, both quite edible, even acceptable to my mother. I liked the hornpout because they could hurt you with their sharp spines in their pectoral fins, and my father had showed me how not to get hurt. Mastery of even a simple skill encourages you to learn more. But really, I preferred pickerel, which we didn’t eat.

“Too Goddamn bony!” I didn’t care. When one came in, slashing its snaky body across the lily pads, with its golden chain pattern and barracuda teeth, I was in ecstasy. I didn’t even mind cutting it

loose, and in those days, like most kids, I wanted to keep everything. My response was a combination of adrenaline and esthetics. Ted Hughes was soon to write his poem “Pike,” about the pickerel’s bigger relative:

Pike, three inches long, perfect.

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold. Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

They dance on the surface among the flies.

The last form of fishing I was exposed to in the 50s has been a lasting source of fascination for me, though I never was able to combine the time, the place and the culture to hit it just right. The mid-50s were, I think, the first period of serious surfcasting for stripers and blues. The photos make me ache with nostalgia: ancient woodies with rod holders on their front bumpers rolling down the beach at Chatham or Duxbury with waves crashing beside them; all those World War II veterans with big casting rods and casting reels like the Penn Squidder. The preferred lure was the “tin squid.” I haven’t seen one in decades, but its soft luster and texture, its heft, its ability to take a shine when you rubbed it in the fine sand, was like nothing else I have touched before or since, like a nobler form of lead. The other thing I remember my father using was the eelskin rig. On my last stab at seaside life, in the 70s, I did try this, but those years were in the lull between the two great explosions of big stripers, and I never caught much.

As I was learning all this from my father, I was also learning it from Field & Stream and all the other old-fashioned sporting magazines. And books. My mother’s contribution to making me a worthless layabout was teaching me how to read – family legend says at 3. This is more than possible. My mother was reading Kipling aloud to me, as well as everything about animals in every publication in the house and sounding out the words for me. As I tested out at an eighth-grade level reading before my 6th birthday, doing stunts like reciting the scientific names in Peterson’s bird guide to a nun with a Ph.D. in psychology, this timeline is likely true. What I read about was live things – natural history, field guides, tackle articles, the “Old Man and the Boy” from Field & Stream, William Beebe’s books about tropical reefs, Adrian Conan Doyle’s tales of manta rays and killer sharks. They were all fodder for my imagination. I’m just as bad today.

Meanwhile, something was happening to my father; something in retrospect, sad, though I found it disturbing. He wasn’t spending much time doing interesting things. He was never serene, but his temper was getting shorter and shorter. I wanted to hunt as well as fish but, after a few sessions with him bird hunting, I retreated. When I learned to fish, I watched him and received advice when I asked for it. Bird hunting was different. First, we had no dog. His big-going Texas English pointer Joe, who could be the subject for another article, was unsuitable for New England hunting and had

died of old age. Dad’s method now was to march around grumpily in grouse cover with his sweet 16 gauge Belgian Browning, while I carried a rather heavy single shot .410 choked tighter than a gnat’s butt.

He insisted I shoot first, and when I did, and missed, he would slap me on the back of the head and refuse to allow me to reload, saying “watch what I do.” He would then either shoot a grouse, after which we would go home, or not shoot one and be in a bad mood that I had blown our opportunity. He employed the same methods to teach everything from fly tying to driving a stick shift, and I learned to teach myself.

As he rose in his company and worked more and more, he did less fishing and hunting – even as I became obsessed with it. On the occasions that he did, all its fruits went to my grandparents in Milton.

My mother was overwhelmed by much of this, though grateful that they took the game off our hands. More disturbingly, my father – or Joe – as we kids were coming to call him as he distanced himself from what he loved and, I think, from us, had no time for the food of his roots either. Just a few years before he was the only man besides my grandfather who cooked.

The pattern was set: Joe worked; I became ever more obsessed with fishing, hunting, nature, animals and books. Though a scholarship student all through my grammar and prep school years, my grades were indifferent. When I wanted to use one of the rods or guns, I had to undergo a grilling. “Why are you wasting your Goddamn time?” was a constant refrain. He sold the best gun he

Joe Bodio, in 1954, with a black drake and his Winchester Model 21.

Perhaps a writer’s appetite for words started with the names of equipment, the “lyricism of shoptalk,” as Thomas McGuane had it. Names to say, names to covet: Alcedo, Penn, Browning, Winchester, Pfleuger, Hardy, Orvis, Leonard.

ever had, an early Model 21 Winchester with two triggers; his better cane rod and the Alcedo and the Hardy disappeared; even the racing pigeons, which he imported from France, bred and studied and raced – another bit of biophilia I came to inherit – were first ignored and then abandoned. Looking back, I think they were a last attempt at having some contact with nature without having to take up any time traveling. When I left home prematurely at 17, blown along by the raging winds of the 60s, we were barely talking.

And so it remained for a decade; no, I am whitewashing; it got worse. During these years, whether in an apartment in Cambridge, a fishing shack in Canton, an 18th century farmhouse in Shutesbury or a relative’s rental in Marshfield, I devoted my life to fishing and hunting and writing and nothing else of practicality. When in 1970 he told me to take my wife and my dog, in that order, and get off of his property, I didn’t talk to him for two years. When a few years later, slightly reconciled, I brought a 28-gauge AyA sidelock to his office, brimming with pride at my brilliant taste, he turned to his lackey and said, “Look at this, John. My asshole son just bought a rich man’s gun.” That he had recently sold a Winchester worth five times as much was not something I felt able to say. I just walked out and didn’t talk to him again for another two years.

The genuinely funny part of all this is that our period of greatest estrangement was when I approached the ideal of the life he had taught me. My years in Green Harbor, just yards from Duxbury Marsh, were the high point of my fishing-hunting-eating career. No place in New Mexico or the Rocky Mountains could sustain such a prolonged feast. In those days, my friends and I fished and gathered year-round and hunted whenever we could.

We threw clam baits to cod in the winter surf, fished for stripers and blues on the jetties and off Duxbury bridge, where we also caught flounder and eels and freedived for lobsters before that was considered attempted theft; we gathered quahogs and steamers and sometimes razor clams; we ate blue mussels steamed in game broth or wine before the restaurants discovered them. “You eat those blue things?”

In the fall, black ducks and brant were among the commonest quarries on the marsh, still two of the best eating birds I know; woodcock and grouse were not far away in remnant patches of forest; I even learned how to cook the scoters and eiders that fell to my 10 gauge when I anchored my battered boat in the winter surf: if you cube the meat and put it in buttermilk overnight, you can make a hearty chowder that everyone loves. Just a little further afield, in

the tiny streams of the south Cape, we discovered salters, native searun brookies, seemingly unknown to anyone but us and our close friends. A few of these streams still had clean oysters.

But I still wasn’t talking to Joe. When I moved out to western Massachusetts to polish my skills as a writer, we had a rather tentative rapprochement. When I heard he was attending a business conference in the valley, I invited him and my mother to dinner at my house. Was it perversity that made me serve them a Brunswick stew made from road-kill squirrel? Which, miraculously, Joe loved, though my mother took some persuading. Still, we remained wary. He looked around at the old wood-heated house and said, “You really think you can make a living from this?”

Several years later, I was doing just that with the steadfast encouragement of Elizabeth Catharine Huntington, a partner who believed in the life that I lived. She had a legendary background, had money when she was young, blew it, put herself through BU Journalism School by waitressing and never complained. She had been everywhere and had done everything and was startlingly frank. Improbably, she hit it off with Joe, the first of my partners ever to do so. It was all the funnier because he, whose precarious prosperity was earned by a typical first-generation ethic of hard labor, tended to call Yankees with broad vowels “Inbred Overbites.”

To which Betsy would amiably agree. “That’s all right, Joe. The Huntingtons and Trumbulls are just Connecticut Valley farmers who said ‘ain’t’ until the 1950s.”

And she cracked a mystery. One night she asked him flat-out why he had given up art, and fishing and hunting, and, seemingly, fun.

“I did it all for security and, you know, I did it wrong. I’ve harassed this Goddamn kid for 30 years, and you know what? He made the right choice. There is no Goddamn security.”

The author, circa 1979 or so, with an old Parker 16 bore and a woodcock in Easton, Massachusetts – his childhood coverts, less than half a mile from where he grew up. Despite his move to New Mexico, he returned to hunt them as recently as 2004.

We were on our third or fourth Jack Daniel’s. He said:

“Betsy, when I came back from the war, it was a little early because I had flown 34 missions. I had big ideas. I’d done my flight training in Roswell, New Mexico, and hunted with a rancher there who had promised me a dog. He sent me the dog on the train. I had bought an antique Cadillac roadster and rode off to Roxbury to show my old man what a swell guy I was.

I drove up and knocked on the door, and Rico came out and looked at me and said ‘Get your Goddamn rich man’s dog and your Goddamn rich man’s car off my lawn.’

I didn’t care. I had survived the war; I was a scholarship student, and I had talent. In England, as a first lieutenant, I was an officer and a gentleman. I rented a studio with the two most talented artists I knew. One was a veteran, and one day they carted him off, screaming. He had what they called ‘battle fatigue’ in those days.

I was doing some good work, but I didn’t know how to sell it and my money was running out. All of a sudden I got scared. I sold all my stuff and applied to Carnegie Mellon, and the rest is history. I started in a company and ended up owning it, and as you know I lost a good bit of it in the last crash.

I did it all for security and, you know, I did it wrong. I’ve harassed this Goddamn kid for 30 years, and you know what? He made the right choice. There is no Goddamn security.”

And he looked me in the eye and clinked his glass on mine.

I never had an argument with him again. He came to New Mexico. We took him to rodeos; we went birding; we fed him wild things. He called Betsy in the hospital in her last week, and I managed to see him just before his. He might not have attained security, but he had some measure of serenity.

I have very little of his equipment, having sold or bartered it away. My sentiment is rooted more in memory and a little bit of his art. The last of his tackle I possess is an odd assortment: the aluminum fly box and moth-eaten flies, some older than me, that will never see the water; a leather and fleece wallet for streamers, which I still use; and, most ridiculous here in the high mountain desert of New Mexico, the Penn Squidder, still loaded with braided linen Cuttyhunk line.

A photo of him stands on my desk, a portrait in profile, obviously on a sailboat, the wind ruffling his white hair, sunglasses shading his hair. He is in the place he loved best, off St. Croix in the islands. I often think of it as the Old Man, or the Old Man of the Sea. He is four years younger than I am now.

Stephen Bodio is a nature, travel and sporting writer. He was born and schooled in Boston and has lived in New Mexico for a good part of his adult life. His interests include falconry, ornithology and old books, longdogs and fine firearms. He has written or edited 15 books and plans to do a couple more, despite the irritations of long term Parkinson’s.

For some of us, fishing isn’t just about how many or how big— and it’s not about nailing the photo. It’s about the the struggle, the work, those hard and hilarious moments that fuel our tailgate tales. It’s about the adventure. NRS Fishing helps you catch it with rugged, functional equipment and apparel built for fishing the waters less traveled.

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Proud partner of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers

MOOSE IN THE KITCHEN

BY WENDI RANK

“I need a small games license.”

This was Don – my husband. He’s the reason I joined BHA.

Well, one of them. You guys are extremely friendly. You’re like 50,000 Ferris Buellers – righteous dudes persuading us Camerons of the world to join you.

And – like Cameron – it winds up being good for us. Although we’re reluctant to admit it.

“Do you need a tag for small game? Like, squirrels and rabbits and stuff?” I asked Don. I don’t hunt, but I ask a lot of questions about it.

Don said the small games license was for a lottery. For BHA.

“Oh,” I said. “Are you having a small game event with BHA?”

“I’m not talking about small game,” Don said. “You need a license in Pennsylvania for small games.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I’m asking. Do you need a license for small game? Is it a tag?”

You know what? Don wasn’t talking about small game, like squirrels and rabbits.

He was talking about small games. Plural. Like lotteries and raffles. To run games of chance in Pennsylvania, the state issues –wait for it – a small games license.

“So,” I said. “Do you need a specific license to hunt small game in Pennsylvania?”

Don looked at me with exasperation. “I know you’re talking about actual games,” I said, enunciating the “s” in “games” with valley girl emphasis, so it sounded like a “z.”

“But I’m still curious about the licensing for small game,” I continued.

Don just stared.

But listen.

You can’t spend years of a girl’s life lining her garage with increasingly larger freezers filled with all kinds of woodland critters and not expect her to think you’re talking about rabbits when you start talking about small games.

I mean, let’s talk about the moose. The moose is a great example. Because I used to get facials on Saturdays, but now I make bone broth and sometimes get pheasant processing tutorials from my father-in-law.

Don and a few friends went moose hunting. I had never seen a moose in real life, and now I was staring down the possibility of having one in the garage freezer.

Sorry. In a garage freezer.

You guys know what happened, right?

Yeah. Our kitchen became a moose processing station.

Hunks of meat as big as me filled coolers and the folding table now occupying our kitchen. There was a tarp. There were bags. A Sharpie. Knives.

And I thought – I thought about that day I first saw Don. Had I known I’d trade sugar scrubs for debates on the best method to deglove a squirrel, I would have walked the other way.

And, I mean, look at all I would have missed.

Also, the right answer is shirt and pants.

I also thought about what was coming. There’s a line in Under the Tuscan Sun. “You have to live spherically – in many directions.”

This is how Don butchers. Spherically and in many directions.

I’ve never sat and watched him butcher, so I don’t know where all those bits and liquids come from. But I do know that when he has proclaimed the job done and kitchen clean, he’s super wrong.

Oh, and you’re welcome, BHA. This publication was overdue for an Under the Tuscan Sun reference.

Anyway. I watched Don with his knives and tarp and enormous slabs of meat.

I asked if he had a spare knife because I do not butcher spherically and in many directions. I butcher linearly and in one direction so there’s no mess.

The way, I imagine, Cameron would butcher. If Ferris Bueller took him hunting.

Now, I’ve butchered before. But that was mostly squirrels.

It was a big step, transitioning from Rocky to Bullwinkle. But Ferris Bueller held Cameron’s hand as he went from subservient son to kicking his dad’s car through a second-floor window.

I have 50,000 Ferris Buellers holding my hand.

Don handed me a knife. We cracked some beers and –

Wait. I’m just realizing that processing game myself means beer and a clean kitchen.

OK. I probably should have become the resident butcher at my house years ago.

Months later, I said something to Don about the moose. I’ll be honest – I don’t remember what it was. I say a lot of words.

“What moose?” Don asked absently.

Had he not been listening? Was he – was he tired of my questions?

Well. That’s OK. I don’t need him. I have you guys.

Fifty thousand Ferris Buellers.

And I have almost as many questions.

BHA life member Wendi Rank is an indoors enthusiast from Pennsylvania. She spends her free time patiently waiting for her husband to return from hunting. Her writing has been published in Nursing and the Journal of Neuroscience Nursing, and she’s a columnist for American Community Journals.

Photo: Wendi Rank

More Than Meets The Eye

BY PERRIN PRING

Falling asleep isn’t easy for me, except for one time of year – morel season.

Once, I went to EMDR therapy. It’s a kind of therapy that uses eye movement to help confront trauma without an emotional response. Supposedly, the woman who invented it came up with the idea after hiking. She noticed when her eyes swept back and forth across the trail, she was calmer. When you participate in EMDR therapy, your eyes follow a wand your therapist waves – back and forth, back and forth.

And when I go to sleep during morel season, my mind’s eye is sweeping back and forth across the forest floor. I drift into unconsciousness, my imagination scanning the mosaic of downed trees, leaves, sticks and earth for my favorite quarry.

There is something about searching for those wibbly-wobbly fungi, their masterfully camouflaged blooms, the attention to the aberrant detail, the time spent crisscrossing parts of the forest other people would just hurry through, that is, for me, absolute nirvana.

I first fell in love with morel gathering while living in Yosemite Valley. The Valley, as the locals call it, is what I consider a sacrificial lamb. It’s no longer wilderness, yet Yosemite Valley is where unlikely public land advocates are born. It is a place where anyone can come – the family from the inner city, the college kid from an East Coast suburb, the just separated military vet on a motorcycle journey to find himself, the retired couple in a beater RV – and all can interact with nature in a way that is comfortable for them.

There are three hotels in the Valley, one that runs upwards of $1,000/night, three swimming pools, three bars, an ice rink, depending on the season, four public campgrounds, a variety of tent cabin options for those wanting something between a hotel room and a tent, and countless opportunities to buy ice cream, firewood and bear shaped trinkets.

If you are the kind of person who has never hiked, if you are the kind of person who saw a tent in a movie once, if you are the kind of person who heard black bears love the taste of human flesh, you should go to Yosemite Valley. It is stunning. You cannot understand the scale of El Cap from a photo. You need to drive into the Valley, Bridal Veil Falls on your right, El Cap before you, and you need to pull your car over before you crash, so you can take in the wonder you never knew existed.

The kind of “non-outdoorsy” people who come to the Valley are the kind of people who don’t backpack, hunt, rock climb or meditate in meadows – yet. They are the people who have never had the chance to connect with nature. They are the people who, when they leave, make a trip to REI. They are the kind of people who, after watching the climbers, join a rock gym. They are the kind of people who have soul altering moments on the most crowded of trails. They are the kind of people who never thought they could hike to the top of a waterfall, but then do. They are the kind of people who unlock a missing part of themselves in an area that the hardened public land advocates avoid – too many people, too much concrete, too touristy. They are the kind of people who, after exposure to nature at a graduated pace, start to vote to conserve it.

I love Yosemite Valley for what it does for a movement I consider important. It gives those without access or exposure nature a chance to discover it, and then pursue it beyond the Valley walls. I rarely recreate in the Valley, except in the spring. Because in the spring, there are morels, if you know where to look.

Of course, I’m not going to tell you where they are. And the morels aren’t confined to just the Valley. They’re all over the Sierra. But for me, when I worked the late shift, I would start my day by heading to my spot, plugging in my earbuds, and listening to an audiobook while I zigzagged across a seemingly unspectacular part of the Valley floor. I’d hit a limit and then go home and get ready to work.

Photo: Perrin Pring

It is very possible that the park unit closest to you has legal gathering limits and perhaps even legal hunting opportunities.

National parks aren’t known for their hunting/gathering opportunities. With the National Park Service mission focused on conservation and preservation as opposed to multi-use management, most people wouldn’t consider that mushroom picking could be a legal pursuit in a place like Yosemite.

But it is. Each national park has what is called a superintendent’s compendium, which are laws enacted by each park’s superintendent, specific to that park. Many parks, Yosemite included, allow certain types of gathering. When I lived in Yosemite, it was legal to gather one pint of mushrooms a day, for personal use only.

It is very possible that the park unit closest to you has legal gathering limits and perhaps even legal hunting opportunities. While most parks don’t allow hunting, the National Park Service administers recreation areas and preserves, which often do allow hunting. The first Gambel’s quail I ever shot was taken from a forgotten canyon in the Mojave National Preserve. Learning about the gathering and hunting limits in your local national park unit is as easy as going to the NPS.gov website, navigating to the park’s page in which you’re interested and typing “Superintendent’s Compendium” into the search bar.

I became a gatherer while living in Yosemite. I learned to hunt while living in Yosemite, although I obviously did that hunting

outside of its boundaries. Some of the most calming mornings of my life were spent staring at the valley floor. Millions of people a year visit that mile wide space, and I never once ran into another person while looking for morels. Even in that pit of chaos, I found solitude while morel gathering.

Now I live in a different part of California, and if I want to morel gather in the Valley, it’s a nine-hour drive, one way. I miss it, but more importantly, I love that I got to do it while I was there. I love that I discovered the joys of gathering, the solace in spending time with myself, the chance to explore a part of my public land that is so often overlooked.

For everything that Yosemite Valley is, and can be, for me, it is most alive in the spring – the waterfalls crashing, the dogwoods blooming and the morels, right there and hiding in plain sight, if you know where to look.

BHA member Perrin Pring is an master of fine arts candidate at the University of California, Riverside Palm Desert. When not writing, she enjoys bird hunting, dehydrating food and reading horror novels.

SHED HUNTS in a Free Car

BY DAVE QUINN

The soaring price of fuel really should be no surprise. While cheap gas might be nice for drivers, the wild spaces in Texas or North Dakota, or northern British Columbia and Alberta that produce that fuel pay dearly. Tens of thousands of miles of linear exploration roads allow both furry and motorized hunters to cover more ground and see infinitely farther than in an unbroken wilderness, and the local moose, elk, deer and caribou all pay the price. As do the waterways and coastlines that bear the brunt of the inevitable, although thankfully rare pipeline or tanker spills.

Cheap gas also encourages everyone to just drive more, even though climate change keeps providing increasingly painful reminders of the delayed, unseen costs of uncontrolled fuel burning. Droughts and wildfire in the West, flooding and superstorms in the East, atmospheric rivers dumping months’ worth of rain in a day up North, washing away highways and flooding towns. Cheap gas sucks for the things we all love, but we all still have a compelling need to get out into these wild places that fill our souls.

Not exploring is not an option for me, so my solution was to buy in early to the electric vehicle transition. The math alone convinced

me, and the quiet, supercharged ride with a fuel source I controlled was just a bonus. Roughly 110,000 miles of driving should save me the cost of the vehicle, roughly $45,000 (Canadian) in fuel, oil changes, transmission flushes and brake maintenance, and that was back when fuel cost $4/gallon. (BC fuel prices peaked in Sept. 2022 at nearly $7.15/gallon, so the math is even better now.) At nearly 44,000 miles, I have used the brakes only a handful of times, usually to avoid hitting elk and deer; the rest of the time the engine turns generator to slow or stop the car, adding range at the same time. Scheduled EV maintenance is a $90 per inspection, every 7,500 miles, just to check the cabin air filter and make sure the unused physical brakes still function. Electricity costs are roughly $3 for a 250-mile charge at home, or $12 at a DC supercharge station.

After a long road trip, I don’t feel like I’ve been hit by the car instead of driving it – after stopping for a short walk and a coffee every few hours while the car charges, instead of sitting flat-assed for six hours straight. But, while it has been nothing short of awesome for my families’ highway miles, my EV is not what you would call a bush vehicle.

My 2WD Hyundai Kona EV has the clearance of a baseball, and no crawl mode to pick through mud or packed snow, so road options

Photo: Dave Quinn

are limited. I have reservations for the new Ford Lightning and the Chevy Silverado EV, but our local dealership has 70 Lightnings on order, and only received four this year. The next largest dealership, in Kelowna, has over 300 Lightning orders but only got 11. At over $100,000 (Canadian), the Rivian R1T may be the dream EV truck, but is a severe economic stretch for us Canadians (even for what will end up being a free truck) and is not yet available up here at the time of writing. Tesla’s Cybertruck is butt-ugly but intriguingly utilitarian, also priced north of $100,000 for the long-range model, and also unavailable in Canada.

So instead of hitting all my productive, secret shed stashes way out in the high-clearance, alder-bash backcountry, I’ve been hitting the wild hiding in plain sight, rather than blasting past all this great habitat on my way to find … great habitat.

local elk herd, a few wild turkeys and played tag with a huge lone grizzly. His tracks crisscrossed my boot tracks in the snow a few times, getting fresher every time until I decided maybe it was time to head the other direction. A perfect, fuel-free day, burning $3 in electricity, instead of $75 in gas.

So instead of hitting all my productive, secret shed stashes way out in the high-clearance, alder-bash backcountry, I’ve been hitting the wild hiding in plain sight, rather than blasting past all this great habitat on my way to find … great habitat. While there will always be truth to the idea that the more remote, the better, when it comes to wild, it turns out there is a lot of untracked and ignored wild country close to valley-bottom pavement.

Every time I go out, I pick apart another chunk of an unexplored roadside patch, and every walk produces something cool.

I have had my best shed day (eight elk sheds), and my biggest local elk shed (a crazy whaleback massy six) and found most of my sideby-side whitetail sets all EV hiking from pavement. One memorable EV adventure last spring I also hauled my e-bike along and rattled from the highway a few painful miles down a rail line. I got skunked for sheds other than a couple old chalky chunks, but I found the

My kids and I have been EV fishing and grouse hunting, and I have even been out in the deer woods a few times from the EV, wondering how a quartered whitetail would fit in the ski box. (Blood and hair in the car would not buy me any favors with my wife.) I have a friend who has stuffed several giant bull elk in his Toyota Matrix over the years, but I think if it came to that, I might just call for reinforcements with a truck. After all, being right near the highway, I actually have cell service and can call in the cavalry if need be, at least until Toyota or Nissan get their act together and finally comes up with an affordable Tacoma or Frontier EV. Here’s to hoping. …

BHA member Dave Quinn is a biologist, writer, outdoor educator and wilderness guide based in Kimberley, British Columbia. He is driven by a firm belief that we need large, intact, quiet wilderness as much as our wild neighbors do, and his work centers on connecting younger generations to the wild to help ensure generations of stewardship.

A Streamlined Design For The Run-And-Gun Turkey Hunter

EQUINOX TURKEY VEST

The Best Pheasant Hunting in South Dakota

“The one absolute, unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world – the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous – is his dog.”

-George Graham Vent, 1870

BY MIKE MATZ

It hardly gets any better than roosters on the wing in South Dakota. The hunting isn’t about limiting out, as it was when we were younger. Sure, we get excited seeing birds and enjoy having chances. Cleaning a few at the end of the day while swapping stories is nice. The opportunity to share the experiences – dads and sons –with others who have the same appreciation for the plains country and its upland quarry is a big plus. But most special is the chance to walk pheasant country while watching the dogs.

We hunt over two Epagneul Bretons, an American Brittany, and a black Labrador. Well trained, they bounce energetically through the cover with bells tinkling or collars beeping. Both dogs and owners take pride in how Reeva and Sedin, Molly and McGruff perform.

Opportunities have become more challenging over the last four decades I’ve hunted with my high-school friends and our dogs. Gaining access has become a problem. Used to be we’d see a weedy cornfield or promising thicket, and we’d ask at the nearest farmhouse. The farmer might well say, “Sure,” or at least give directions to where the actual owner lived. More and more, farmers started saying, “Nah, my Wisconsin hunters are in. Come back next week, and for $100 per gun per day, I’ll let you on.” I don’t begrudge

them the extra income, but I can’t fork out that kind of money.

A second discouraging trend is the steady proliferation of private reserves. Clients at swanky lodges, paying up to $5,000 for a few days of gunning, are often driven in converted school buses to fields stripped for easy hunting of released pheasants. The difference between a pen-raised and a wild rooster can be spotted a half-mile away: slow to perceive a threat; when they finally do, they often run rather than fly. Gunners are all but guaranteed to bag their limit, and by noon they can be back at the clubhouse swilling a Scotch.

Were it not for the Conservation Reserve Program and Walkin Areas, hunting on private lands might be only for the wealthy. Game Production Areas and Waterfowl Production Areas have added public lands to the mix of options, fortunately. To aid hunters like us in finding these spots, the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department publishes a free public hunting atlas with easyto-read maps.

GPAs are administered by Game, Fish and Parks for wildlife production and public hunting. We found one with a large field of milo, which pheasants love, and several bunches held tight. South Dakota has 280,000 acres tucked away in 726 GPAs, and you’re good to jump onto any of them.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages WPAs for migratory waterfowl, but these spots can also offer prime habitat for pheasants. Non-lead is required in GPAs and WPAs, yet the real hitch for both is that your party isn’t guaranteed to be the first to walk the cover – unless you’re there when legal shooting begins at ten. If you wait until later, other hunters may have already flushed the birds.

South Dakota is 80% privately owned. Access to that land is vital. WIAs are fields on working farms leased by the state to provide access for hunters. Revenue for this program comes from sales of hunting licenses and taxes on hunting supplies. When marked with Walk-In Area signs, you don’t have to ask for additional permission.

The same is true with CRP fields, a joint state-federal initiative to control soil erosion, protect water quality, enhance wildlife habitat and take marginal land out of production, which was first established in 1985. More than 22 million acres have been enrolled nationally, with congressional appropriations covering rental payments to farmers. Continued funding for the program is crucial to the future of hunting upland game.

We hew to our tradition of seeking wild populations on this

Photo: Mike Matz

combination of private and public areas, and by getting to know farmers, like Jacqui and Jerry, who live west of Redfield and whose land we’ve hunted for years, and Paula and Scott, on their farm-and-cattle operation northeast of Miller, who just this year finished building a cabin our crew rented. On their alfalfa fields, cattail sloughs, corn stubble, long draws, or tree lines, our dogs point and flush birds.

On the final day of hunting, before turning south and west for home, I thumbed first through the atlas to locate a CRP field. Thick grass blanketed the quarter-section, too much for me to cover, even with Molly. But, along a mowed swath, we could work the edge. Two-thirds of the way around, we jumped two roosters. I swung my ancient Winchester 1300 pump, and one tumbled from the blue sky. Rather than take a bead on the second, I got a fix on where the rooster I hoped to have in hand went down. “Dead bird, Molly,” I said, though she knew the drill.

I heard her snuffling and saw tall stalks swaying back and forth ahead. A man’s absolute, unselfish friend found it. I offered effusive praise, utterly thrilled with our last foray and very much looking forward to our next excursion together.

BHA member Mike Matz lives south of the San Juan Mountains in Durango, Colorado, where he hunts elk, grouse and ducks. He flyfishes nearby on the Animas River, to the north on Cascade, Hermosa and Lime Creeks, and to the south on the San Juan River.

Photo: Mike Matz

All purpose. With purpose.

Our shared lands, our responsibility. We are working to diversify our funding sources to ensure that BHA will always be working on behalf of our wild public lands, waters and wildlife – for generations to come – by establishing a $1 million endowment. This investment will grow and become a perpet ual funding stream that exists to support the future needs of our organization, regardless of any unpredictable challenges beyond our influence. Give today to form the root structure that will sustain BHA for many years to come.

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Including Backcountry Hunters & Anglers in your plans for the future will create a long-lasting impact for our wild public lands, waters and wildlife. Your commitment to BHA will allow the next generation of conservation leaders to continue our work as part of your legacy. Including BHA in your will, trust, retirement account or life insurance policy is one of the easiest and quickest ways to support the future.

This is our workhorse, the ideal do-it-all option for most hunters. With each design decision, we sought the perfect balance: a shell that provides rugged protection without sacrificing flexibility; a true stealth fleece that’s still lightweight and breathable; all the technical details you want without the extras you don’t. Available as a jacket, vest, hoodie, and pants.

You can choose to make one donation at a time or become a sustaining donor and make monthly donations. All donations are fully tax-deductible and go toward securing the future of hunting and angling – ensuring that you have access to public lands and waters and healthy fish and wildlife habitat

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Does Motivation Matter?

BY PATT DORSEY

A hunter shoots and wounds a three-point mule deer. It is probably a two-year old. The meat should be excellent. He has been actively tracking his buck for about an hour, finding only small drops of blood, about five to 10 yards apart. He is certain he made a good shot and told himself he would search for his deer the rest of the day. (The law requires that “a hunter must make a reasonable attempt to recover” a wounded animal.) As he follows the blood over the ridge, he breaks out into a clearing, where the biggest buck he has ever seen is standing. He has a personal goal of making the record book and estimates this buck would score 190+. His license is still valid.

What do you think? Would you take the shot?

Is one hour of tracking a “reasonable attempt”?

Would he be tempted to shoot if the deer in the clearing was a fork-horned buck?

He promised himself he’d search the rest of the day. Does he still think he made a good shot or is he changing his belief to justify taking a “wall hanger”?

Is it acceptable to have a personal goal of making the record book? Is that goal driving his decision to shoot (or not)?

Do any of these questions matter?

Legally, only one of the questions above is relevant. Wildlife laws are fairly simple. Often, they are “strict liability,” meaning that hunters and anglers are liable for their actions. It doesn’t matter whether or not they “intend” to break a law, nor does it matter why they break a law. For example: You have to buy a fishing license to fish. If you fish without a license you break the law. It doesn’t matter if you forgot, didn’t have enough money or decided not to buy a license. Right is right and wrong is wrong, no matter the reason.

Under the law, your actions determine the consequences. Neat and tidy, black and white.

From an ethical perspective, all of the questions above have relevancy. Ethics isn’t just about actions and consequences. They are messy and run the spectrum of grays.

We have personal ethics and we are judged against the ethical standards of the hunting and angling community and by “the public.” In some cases, other hunters and anglers scrutinize our actions more than the public. Other times the reverse is true. Who weighs in when someone shoots a turkey off the roost, or fishes redds? Hunters? Anglers? Or the non-hunting and non-angling public? What about when someone posts a “grip-and-grin” photo with their bear?

Hunters and anglers have different ethical standards than the public. That fact is well known. How our motivations (or perceived motivations) affect judgements about our actions is less well known.

In the ethical arena, it is possible to do the right thing for the wrong reason. For example: Abe, Paula and Fred all believe in the mission of a conservation organization. They also believe it is im-

portant to make an annual donation. Abe donated $500 anonymously because he believed it was the right thing to do. Paula donated $500, then bragged about a $1,000 donation on Instagram. Fred waited to donate until the org started a fundraising campaign that included a $500 flyrod with a $1,000 donation. Unlike Abe, Paula and Fred, Dave doesn’t care about the org’s mission. He wants a date with Paula, but she keeps turning him down. He donates $1,000 and posts it on his Instagram, #Paula, in hopes that she’ll finally say yes.

Which donation is the “most good?” Anonymous Abe’s? Posting Paula’s? Flyfishing Fred’s? Or Desperate Dave?

Quantitatively, Dave’s $1,000 donation was “most good.” Qualitatively, Abe made me feel the “most good.”

Motivation can make three equal donations unequal. Motivation can make the highest donation seem bad. Motivation matters. Can it matter too much?

Ghandi once said: “The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted.”

People are emotional beings. We relate to others who desire to do good. We decide whether or not others are dishonest or acting contrary to their values, and judge whether or not those actions are “good” or “bad” based on what we think motivates them and also based on how we feel about them.

Back to our blood tracking hunter. There is nothing inherently bad about wanting to take a trophy deer. In fact, that desire may inspire us to get farther into the backcountry, master the wind and sharpen our aim. Taking a trophy deer at the expense of following the law or following up on what we committed to do is less than OK.

If we want our peers and the public to see us as people who care about wildlife and wild places our motives must match our actions. When they do, it is easy for people to conclude that what we do is good. When our actions and our motives seem mismatched, they struggle to understand and judge who we are and what we do as less good, even bad.

Quantitatively our actions are indisputable. Our collective actions have produced positive results: the best wildlife management system in the world. We fund state wildlife agencies, add to the economy, preserve habitat, help manage wildlife populations, create jobs, add organic protein to our food supply and . . .

Qualitatively there is something better about a world where people do the right things for the right reasons. Mismatched motivations may sway how our actions are judged.

Predicting how our peers and the public might view our actions is impossible. Our best strategy to maintain public acceptance of hunting and angling is by being honest and motivated to show that our individual actions add value. Can we act in a way that shows we care about all wildlife from chickadees to chukars? Can we show that we value and all wild places from someone else’s urban park to our favorite hunting spots?

BHA life member Patt Dorsey lives in Southwest Colorado, where she enjoys all that the San Juans have to offer from woodpeckers to wapiti and wild trout.

This department is brought to you by Orion - The Hunter’s Institute, a nonprofit and BHA partner dedicated to advancing hunting ethics and wildlife conservation.

LIRA’S MEAL

BY TIM HARRIS

My dog Lira always wants a job to do. If she isn’t out looking for pheasant, chukar or grouse, she’s pointing at rabbits, treeing squirrels, wading rivers intently watching the end of my line while I fly fish or just carrying big sticks around on the trails. Lira is a 6-yearold Australian labradoodle who somehow points birds and has grown up as a true backcountry dog, spending time outdoors every day hunting, fishing or hiking with me.

Last fall my wife and I watched The Truffle Hunters movie, and I thought, “Now, this would be a good job for Lira.” I loved watching old guys and their dogs in passionate pursuit of the elusive truffle.

A few weeks after watching the movie, my wife was talking to a friend, who told her that they went truffle hunting very close to our home, with a group out of Seattle, and actually found truffles. Until then, I had no idea we had truffles nearly in our backyard. But, indeed, we have four types of truffles here on the wet side of the Pacific Northwest.

I spent the fall pheasant season alternating between hunting birds and training Lira how to hunt truffles with the help of The Truffle Dog Company in Seattle. Getting Lira tuned into truffle scent turned out to be easy, and she was quickly finding targets first in the house and later in the yard. The more challenging part was getting her to dig, since she’d never shown any inclination, but soon she was digging 2-4 inches deep and going after planted frozen truffles.

While training, I was also reading about truffles and truffle hunting. I learned that in Italy the upper class historically dined on pheasant with truffles. That clinched it for me – we needed to find some truffles and make this dish.

About the time bird season was coming to an end in late January,

we began truffle hunting for real as part of her advanced classes. We were warned that most dogs would not find wild truffles on their own in the first year and especially this year, which was one of the worst seasons anyone could remember. Lira, however, found truffles on her first outing, with an assist from an experienced truffle dog, and was soon finding wild black and white truffles on her own, both in class and by herself. We did one last bird hunt of the season, where we got a rooster, and a few days later, she got a couple of nice Oregon black truffles.

I could finally make the meal Lira provided: Roast Pheasant with Truffles.

RECIPE

• 1 pheasant, plucked and gutted

• 1 sprig of rosemary and thyme

• Wedge of about 1/4 apple

• Butter, ghee or olive oil

• Salt and pepper

• 1/2 oz truffle (Oregon black, Oregon white or Perigord)

Wine Reduction:

• 1 tbsp butter, ghee or olive oil

• 1/4 cup minced shallots

• 1/4 cup minced celery

• 1 cup carrots

• Red wine

• 1 cup pheasant or chicken stock

• 1 sprig of rosemary and thyme

• Salt and pepper

Photos: Tim Harris

ROAST PHEASANT WITH TRUFFLES COOKING

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Prepare pheasant for roasting by inserting the rosemary, thyme and apple in the body cavity. Rub the body with butter, ghee or olive oil. Salt and pepper the bird.

Roast pheasant for about 45 minutes or until it reaches about 155 degrees.

Transfer to cutting board and tent with foil to rest.

In the meantime, start making the wine reduction. Melt the butter, ghee or oil, and sauté the shallots, celery and carrots until slightly browned, about three minutes. Add the wine and increase heat to high, then simmer until it is reduced, about 10 minutes. Add in the stock and herbs and simmer until reduced by about half, around 5-10 minutes. Strain the sauce and return to the pan. Simmer until it is reduced to a thin glaze, then season with salt and pepper.

To serve, carve off the pheasant breasts. Spoon sauce around the breast and shave the truffle over top.

Tim Harris is a BHA life member and an avid hiker, hunter, fly fisher and, now, truffle hunter. Lira is also a BHA dog life member, and you can follow her truffling, hunting, fishing and stick carrying adventures on Instagram @LiraDoodle.

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The bridge crossed the river near an old dam site, and during the spring steelhead run, the muddy shoulder of the road would fill with cars for hundreds of yards in each direction. Below the bridge, anglers lined the banks, sometimes shoulder to shoulder, hoping to intersect the bright lake-run rainbows surging up the coffee-stained water.

Fisheries like this one, near urban centers, have the obvious tendency toward being crowded. Not many afford such a quality opportunity for kids like us to escape as this one. Dropped off by our parents, my friends and I wandered downriver for miles, returning to the bridge only at dark for our ride home.

The crowds thinned quickly after the first half mile, and the river felt wild. There was a small island downriver that became home. We stashed our backpacks there. Built fires. Roasted hotdogs for lunch. And rotated fishing the island hole and the surrounding water. Here I cut my teeth on the fish – and fishing – that would later define the direction of my life.

I’m not sure who owned the land back then. All I know is that we weren’t bothered. If we’d come to one of the few homes along the riverbank while we were fishing, we’d simply cross to the other side and carry on.

If I close my eyes I can still see it all: The path winding downriver from the bridge. The towering oaks mixed with maple and beech. The scrub brush tattered from the previous fall’s buck rubs. The

rope swing, 25 feet or more up the sandy bluff that we’d launch off during summer. The individual pools that most frequently held silver fish. I can even see the submerged rocks they hid behind. But those images are just memories now.

Several years ago, I returned to Michigan and visited the old bridge. A 10-foot-tall fence now paralleled the road and stretched beyond the riverbank – no trespassing signs sprouted every 10 feet. “No Parking” signs lined the shoulder. A subdivision crowded to the banks we used to build fires on. You could still get in the water and wade downriver – if only you could find a place to park. And if the water was high, you were out of luck to walk the bank.

In other words: It was all gone. Not just the fishing but the childhood I had.

As a parent now, I can’t think of any better gift to my daughter than the freedom to explore wild places. More wild than a lawn I mean. The chance to wander that riverbank is not something I can pass on to my child or any other. But not every riverbank has been traded for homes, not every pull-off fenced in. There are still precious places to protect and pass on into perpetuity. We at BHA have the chance to protect them – and maybe even open new opportunities, through corner-locked public lands or otherwise. Will you join us?

-Zack Williams, editor

Photo: Zack Williams

OMEN STORMSHELTER