To help you take more coyotes this winter we're giving away a free scope from Nikon. All you have to do is enter our photo contest to win.
Upload a photo of your best coyote hunting shot and then make sure to vote. Whichever reader gets the most votes will win the contest. It runs until February 28th, so if you don't have any good shots there's still time to get in the field and take some.
Minnesota has joined the roster of states where chronic wasting disease has been found in wild, free-ranging deer, and what happens next will tell us a lot about the state’s approach to either containing or living with the fatal disease.
The announcement was made yesterday by the state’s Department of Natural Resources after a whitetail shot by a bowhunter in the southeastern corner of Minnesota was found to be infected by the brain-wasting disease.
The news is alarming—CWD is nearly always fatal to the deer and elk it infects—but it shouldn’t be considered especially surprising. After all, CWD is endemic in the entire southwest quarter of Wisconsin, just 30 miles from where the deer was killed in Pine Island, Minn.
In a strange turn of events, a group of coyote hunters stumbled upon a mountain lion in Missouri and shot it out of self defense.
The group was coyote hunting outside of La Plata, Missouri when a 130-pound lion appeared just 20 yards away. Startled by the cougar, one of the hunters shot it and one of his partners also shot as the animal ran off.
Mountain lions are uncommon in the state and attacks are almost unheard of there. It's illegal to kill mountain lions in Missouri unless they are eating livestock or threatening a human life and the Missouri Department of Conservation ruled that this shooting was indeed self defense. No charges are being pressed.
As a fourth generation Texan and weekend glutton, I eat a ton of Tex-Mex food. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this cuisine, Tex-Mex is basically Mexican food with more heat, cheese, and grease. Mmmmmm, grease. The main meat staples are beef, chicken, and pork. Sometimes a little fish or shrimp is thrown in the mix and every now and again a chef will garner wild reviews for serving lobster tacos at some fru fru restaurant but that’s generally about as exotic as it gets.
Until now. Because now, Tex-Mex restaurateur Bryan Mazon is serving up lion tacos.
In the past, Mazon’s Tucson Tex-Mex restaurant Boca Tacos y Tequila has served tacos filled with such exotic meats as python, turtle, rattlesnake, kangaroo and alligator but plans on serving lion in February if he has enough pre-orders.
Gear Editor John Taranto reviews Gerber's new Metolius Exchange-a-blade. Gerber gives you one knife with three different blades: a standard drop-point blade, a saw blade and a gut hook blade.
The blades all exchange easily with the one handle and come with a convenient carrying case.
According to the World Wildlife Fund authorities in Gabon, Africa arrested five people after they were found to be in possession of twelve chimpanzee heads, one gorilla head, and 30 chimp hands. While officials weren’t exactly sure what the primate parts were for, WWF communications manager Natalia Reiter offered, "Heads and hands, for example, are sometimes used for ritual ceremonies.
Some people believe it would bring them luck and some just keep it as souvenirs. Hands are believed to bring more power or are used as trophies." Others speculated that the parts were to be sold as “bush meat.”
Perhaps the saddest part of this story is the fact that if convicted the suspects in question would only have to serve six months in prison. Six months for poaching endangered species?
We sportsmen have become pretty connected over the last few years. I get photos on my phone of my buddies’ deer even before the carcasses are cool. In the fall, my email fairly crackles with messages about record-breaking bulls and crazy-gnarly bucks.
But as tethered as we are, how well does our exchange of information protect what really matters, the wild animals we love, the sacred places where we pursue them, and even our fundamental rights to hunt and fish?
The fact is that we use our electronic connections pretty superficially. The U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance wants to change that. The USSA—the biggest, hardest working and most effective voice hunters and anglers have in state legislatures, courts and popular media around the country—wants to help you become a better defender of hunting rights and opportunities.
This week the internet is abuzz with orange alligator fever after a photo of an orange-colored Alligator taken by 74-year-old Venice, Florida resident Sylvia Mythen was released.
The citrus-colored reptile has drawn web surfers to theorize that the animal is painted, a mutant, a dirty albino, or tattooed. Come on people! How do you tattoo an alligator?
Some of these theories were corroborated by Florida Fish and Wildlife. Speaking for the agency, Gary Morse stated “The official opinion from our alligator experts is that this is alligator is not naturally orange. We believe it’s orange from paint, stain, iron oxide or some other element in the environment that has left a coating on the animal, making it appear orange.”
This just in: A full quarter of the elk in Yellowstone National Park are unaccounted for.
But park officials are looking at every possibility, short of peeking under the vintage rugs at Old Faithful Lodge, for the disappearance of 1,400 wapiti since this time last year.
They could instead acknowledge what most other watchers of the park have already concluded: that predation by wolves and bears has pushed the legendary elk herd past the tipping point.
The stalk was flawless. For once, the wind was right, the sun was at my back and I didn’t break a single twig or flush a nuisance pheasant.
The buck never knew I was there, never knew I was watching him through my scope for 10 minutes inside of 100 yards. Finally, I pushed off the safety and slipped a bullet just behind his elbow. He kicked once, then slumped over and lay still.
The buck’s death wasn’t the highlight of the hunt. The stalk was. But I also took a great deal of satisfaction in my ability to kill an animal that never knew I was there, dealing death only a baseball throw away.
