May 30, 2012
by One of America’s most underappreciated hunting destinations is the big island of Hawaii.
High on the shoulders of its towering volcanoes, hunters can pursue a dizzying variety of upland birds, wild turkeys and big game in the form of wild goats, feral sheep and wild pigs.
For those of us who have expended our modest means just getting to Hawaii, the remarkable thing about hunting here is that, at least on the Big Island, much of the huntable game exists on public land. You don’t need a guide, or an outfitter. You just rent a car, drive to the higher elevations, and start hunting.
[ Read Full Post ]August 15, 2011
by 
Hot weather and standing water is a proving to be a fatal combination for whitetails in Montana's Milk River Valley.
Last week, between haying and mowing irrigation ditches, I found five recently deceased whitetails, so freshly dead that they hadn't started to decompose. Neighbors all around me are reporting the same thing: dead and dying whitetails.
Mature bucks are dead. Does are dead. Yearlings are dead. Today I diagnosed why one of my irrigation turnouts wasn't flowing as it should. It was blocked by the carcass of a fawn so young it still carried its spots.
We haven't heard an official diagnosis from Fish, Wildlife & Parks, but it has all the makings of an epidemic of epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or EHD. Sometimes mistakenly called blue-tongue, the disease strikes whitetails later in the summer in years like this when the temperature spikes, and the biting black midge that carries the disease has plenty of wet habitat in which to breed.
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