Hunting

Friday

J. Shane Townsend

The killer in your backyard

A perch some 20 feet up a backyard tree offers a peek into every manner of activity in the neighborhood. One guy in a uniform sets down his running leaf-blower, backs into a bush, squats and relieves himself. Another guy wearing pastel and khaki rides tight circles on his mower; his facial contortions suggest he’s singing his ass off. A woman washes dishes at her kitchen sink. A man grills on his deck and searches for me in the treeline. This is urban hunting. And it sucks. All the way around. But here’s the truth: it’s necessary – for hunters, for homeowners, for the community and our economy. New York City infamously invested $6 million in taxpayer funds to give bucks vasectomies As a hunter, the suck starts when you pull into a stranger’s driveway.

hunting killing

Sunday

Ben Clerkin

Muzzleloader season

Climbing into the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia with a muzzleloader slung over my shoulder was a journey back in time. This was the gun that the colony's first settlers used when they too trod the same ground 400 years ago to hunt deer and bear. It helped tame the state and then the entire country. As I pushed my way through undergrowth at the base of the mountain range by the light of the moon at 5 a.m. on a bitingly cold and bitter January morning, unseen branches and briars clawed at my face in the dark. This was the last day of the hunting season that had been extended – as hunting seasons across the US often are – for muzzleloaders. To keep this heritage weapon alive and to give the animals a sporting chance.

muzzleloader

Tuesday

J. Shane Townsend

Confessions of a bear hunter

Southwest Virginia, October. Gravel groaned under my creek-numbed feet. I looked up at a mountain laid out like a fist and I climbed toward the most violent knuckle. But before I got there, the world turned on its side. I don’t know for sure why I collapsed. Maybe it was food poisoning, maybe a heart attack. I felt my face resting on cold stone and gripped the dark walnut of my rifle stock as I passed out. Eleven hours later, a new day started. A distant pickup truck with glass-pack mufflers fired up, then idled in a deep rumble. I stood – before the sun came up – and did squats for warmth, surprised I felt as good as I did, but I had a decision to make: walk off the mountain or hunt my way out. May as well hunt.

bear

Saturday

Shane Mahoney

Franken-Wildlife: will cloned game destroy hunting?

In October 2024, a Montana rancher was sentenced to federal prison time and charged a hefty fine for illegally cloning a giant hybrid sheep, afterwards referred to as the “Montana Mountain King.” Using testicles and other tissues illegally imported to the United States from an argali Marco Polo (Ovis ammon polii) sheep hunted in Kyrgyzstan, the rancher contracted a laboratory to create cloned embryos which he then implanted to ewes on his ranch, eventually resulting in an impressive male specimen tailored for the captive trophy hunting industry. He then worked with co-conspirators to use semen from the cloned animal to impregnate various other sheep and create hybrid specimens of large body and horn size for illegal sale to captive hunting facilities in various other states.

Cloning

Saturday

J. Shane Townsend

I tensed my bow as the bull elk stared at me

Some 500 lbs of testosterone and pissed-off muscle and bone busted through the fog and the aspens. I drew my bow. The beast stopped broadside not twenty yards away. Perfect. I moved to settle my sights. There was his head and his rump. But a copse of three aspens covered everything vital. Not perfect. The bull stared at me. And I begged and willed and made unholy promises to God almighty if that bull would just take one fecking step forward. This was the first daybreak on a five-day guided public land archery hunt. Before this moment, I had been on two elk hunts. Each a weeklong. Each do-it-yourself. Each elkless. And neither had taught me a thing about how to hunt elk. A Western elk hunt costs us what we have: time and money. And, I had just about determined it wasn’t worth either.

Bow hunting

Saturday

Amber Duke

Hunters laugh off the Harris-Walz campaign effort to win their vote

Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election. “Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator. Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.

hunters Embroidered campaign hats of US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Sunday

Geoff Hill

How game ranching protects endangered species

Game ranching in Africa is big business, farming wild animals that unlike regular livestock have evolved there and don’t need much care. What they do need is space. South Africa’s most famous reserve, Kruger National Park, is an 8,000-square-mile chunk of wilderness on the border with Mozambique, but private land stocked with wildlife covers almost ten times that area. Ranchers stock their property at game auctions where animals are sold to ranchers who either want to introduce a species or add a new bloodline. In 2019, American cattle breeders were delighted when an Angus bull sold in North Dakota for a record $1.51 million. But in 2016, the winning bid for a stud buffalo in South Africa was close to $10 million.

game
goose
Amber Duke

My first family goose hunt

It's a slow Sunday in Paducah, Kentucky, the day before our snow goose hunt. Morning Mass down the road, where the priest quizzingly asked where we were from. Brunch with my husband’s family at a cozy café. Chocolate cake with that crackly boiled icing and fresh coffee in the late afternoon at his aunt and uncle’s house. It isn’t until close to dinnertime that we pack up our bags and hit the road for the bootheel of Missouri, where we will hope to catch a few hours of sleep at our hotel before we meet our local hunting guide. About halfway through our drive, the phone rings with bad news. Our guide, Scooter, spent the day scouting and could find no signs of geese at his usual spots.

hogs
Teresa Mull

How serious is the feral pig problem?

Let’s play a guessing game: I’m a dangerous force threatening Americans’ health, safety and way of life. We largely rely on government agencies to monitor and manage me. What to do about me is still a matter of debate, as is the severity of the menace I actually create. The media is likely sensationalizing the threat. A new study suggests I’m “not as bad as originally thought,” that reports of the devastation I’m causing were “premature,” and that if you’re outside a specific subset of people I disproportionately affect, you wouldn’t know I exist. Still, there are interactive maps to track my movement, and I’m reported to be related to a new, “hard-to-eradicate, super” strain invading from a foreign country. What am I? Yep, you guessed it.

Wednesday

Ashley Colby

Stop ignoring the real environmentalists

What does throwing soup on a piece of art have to do with the environment? When we hear the word environmentalist, what comes to mind is something like an Extinction Rebellion or JustStopOil activist: young, urban, progressive, with an expressly political agenda. But what if there are other categories of environmentalists that are expressly ignored, that may have the insights we need to solve the very real environmental problems we face? In my PhD research, I spoke with people who produced a significant amount of food for their own consumption in and around Chicago. Many of them were were disaffected by the focus on climate change and the obsession with consumption as activism.

environmentalists

Sunday

Bill McMorris

Hunting deer in the DC suburbs

I was driving along in my 2018 Honda minivan when I received a call from a member of the National Symphony Orchestra who has been on leave since March 2020: “Just bagged a doe. If you’re up for it, I’m going to gut this thing.” I regretted taking the call through the van’s speakerphone. A text message followed; thankfully the image did not project onto the dash display. I spent the rest of the drive to school explaining to my four daughters how Daddy had to dissect Bambi for work. My father took me hunting once in high school. He shook me awake at six in the morning, loaded me into the family car, a 1998 Chevy minivan, then drove it straight into a deer. I can still picture the white-spotted fawn’s body cascading across the asphalt. “Thank God it was just a baby.

deer

Monday

Benjamin Riley

Hog wild in Indiantown

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. My old college roommate and I were sitting on a 180-pound wild male boar. Neither of us were habitual hoggers. It was our first rodeo. Florida Route 710, the Beeline Highway from Palm Beach to Indiantown, is a two-lane straight shot out of the tropics and into the scrub near Lake Okeechobee. In the Twenties, a Baltimore banker, S. Davies Warfield, built a railroad into central Florida from Palm Beach. Up went Indiantown’s gridded streets and houses, and the Mission Revival-style Seminole Inn, where Warfield’s niece Wallis Simpson stayed both before and after marrying Edward VIII. But Warfield’s plans were scuppered by two hurricanes and the Depression.

hog

Thursday

Rod Liddle

In New Hampshire, smoking saved my life

I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the hunter saw this hunched, awkward, shambling black beast, stumbling over sodden logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his eye and cocked the trigger. One thing, and one thing only, saved me. The armed cracker, looking through his telescopic lens, thought to himself: ‘Hey, it’s a bear — but it’s… smoking a cigarette?’ And so, at the last second, refrained from pulling the trigger. I had this brush with death related to me, with great glee, by the people who ran the bed and breakfast where I was staying. I’d been quite oblivious.

bear new hampshire smoking