This year Botswana officials announced that sport hunting would end in the country after the 2013 season. The decision was an emotional (not scientifically-based) one made by President Ian Khama, who stated: "The shooting of wild game purely for sport and trophies is no longer compatible with our commitment to preserve local fauna as a national treasure, which should be treated as such."

This decision was met with much criticism as the country has no formal wildlife protection plan. Some experts say the move will hurt wildlife (with some estimating that certain species will decline by 75%) thanks to the ever growing threat of ivory poaching and poaching for meat. Both types of poaching are currently being curtailed by hunter dollars. Wanting to see what the closure of sport hunting would mean first-hand, I stayed in Botswana for three weeks last month and was fortunate enough to tag along on elephant hunts for two of those weeks with Ivan Carter of Johan Calitz Safaris.

For more than a century, Africa has been the dream destination for many hunters, including such notables as Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. A young Frederic Courtenay Selous was so enthralled by the idea of hunting Africa that when the director at his boarding school in England found the boy asleep on the floor of his room and asked why he wasn’t in bed Selous retorted, “I’m toughening my back to sleep on the dirt of Africa!”

The idea of venturing into remote lands in search of exotic and dangerous game has intrigued hunters worldwide since the days of flintlocks and Pith helmets, and even today thousands of hunters are compelled to explore the far-flung corners of the continent just as Selous did in the late 1800’s. As Peter Hathaway Capstick once said, “more of Africa gets into your blood than just malaria.”

This photo of Daniel Barto and his 372-inch bull was posted on the Boone & Crockett Trophy Watch site late last month. If the score is certified by B&C, this bull will go down as the top typical elk in the state.

A monster elk coming out of the Keystone State shouldn't surprise you. According to B&C, Pennsylvania is now the 5th state in non-typical record book elk entries and 14th for typical elk entries. It seems a new state-record bull is taken there every few years (see the story behind the Pennsylvania nontypical record elk).

While this is a mammoth bull, it won't crack the overall top 20. The world-record typical elk scores 442 5/8 inches and was taken in 1968.

With the trend in camouflage in recent years skewing digital, I figured it was just a matter of time before one of the two old stick-and-leaf pattern masters, Realtree or Mossy Oak, came out with their own digital version. So you can imagine my surprise when a release for the new Realtree Xtra (left) and Xtra Green (right) patterns just showed up in my inbox.