From ballot initiatives that mandate wolf-reintroduction or banning the hunting of mountain lions and bobcats, wildlife management decisions are increasingly being made by voters instead of biologists.

It is called “ballot biology” and it is a result of some highly motivated anti-hunting and animal rights groups reaching out to a ballooning demographic of non-hunting, often urban, voters who may be well-intentioned (“protect mountain lions and bobcats from being slaughtered!”) but who don’t know how wildlife is managed, how it was restored from near-extinction, or who pays for habitat and biologists and all the moving parts of the world’s most successful wildlife model. Only about 6 out of every 100 Colorado residents buys a hunting license- if it becomes a contest of us against them, a hot culture war decided by votes, we will lose. The wildlife will lose with us.

There is trouble ahead, and a new and formidable challenge for all of us who love hunting and wildlife. Join us for an interview with Gaspar Perricone, who is on the frontlines of this battle in Colorado, and has a plan to win it.    

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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

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Join Hal and Florida archeologist Jeffrey Shanks for a lost tale of British Marines and Jamaican privateers, American maroons, Creek Indian warriors, rogue Choctaws, religious prophets, and the bloody and tenacious struggle for freedom.

The Apalachicola National Forest in Florida’s Panhandle holds some of the most remote swampland wilderness in the US, forbidding blackwater mazes of cypress and black gum and tupelo, whining with biting and stinging insects, the natural home of alligator and cottonmouth, redbreast bream and bass.  It also holds some of the most fascinating and complex history in America.

On the far western edge of north Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest, there is a place called Prospect Bluff, a slight rise in the land that overlooks a channel of the mighty Apalachicola River itself. It’s the site of Fort Gadsden, a modest construction that played a small role during the First Seminole War, and then was abandoned during the American Civil War. 

In 2018, Hurricane Micheal, a Category Five storm, wreaked havoc on the Panhandle and on the Apalachicola National Forest. On Prospect Bluff, massive oak trees, three hundred years old and more, were uprooted. Forest Service and National Park Service archeologists surveying the damage to the site found curious artifacts in the excavations left by the roots of the toppled trees. At some point, lots of human beings had lived here, and they had built a powerful fortification. They had farmed and traded and been well-prepared for war, which did indeed come to them. The story that came to light is one of the most complicated and fascinating episodes in American history, with echoes and ripples out as far as the Bahamas, Trinidad, Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia, where the descendants of the men and women who fought and died at Prospect Bluff are living right now.

Tom Reed, of Harrison, Montana, is a founding board member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and a true son of the Western plains and Rocky Mountain wilderness. Born in Colorado, Tom worked as a horse and mule packer and a small-town reporter in Wyoming, edited a bass fishing magazine in Arizona, spent years with Wyoming Fish and Game as writer and editor. Throughout his life, he’s pursued the foundational passions that drove him as a youngster- horses, hunting and fishing, wilderness, dogs, good guns, family. And he’s written beautifully about it all, in books like Great Wyoming Bear Stories, Blue Lines, and Give Me Mountains for My Horses, and in hundreds of columns and stories for Trout magazine, Wyoming Wildlife, Mouthful of Feathers and many other publications. Join us in a conversation with one of the American West’s most powerful voices for conservation and public lands, recorded in Tom’s writing cabin on the backside of the Tobacco Root Mountains.

In April of 2022, Libby Tobey, Hailey Thompson and Brooke Hess skied into Marsh Creek in Idaho’s Sawtooth Range, towing their kayaks and a sled full of camping gear. The goal: trace the route of anadromous fish from the source of the Salmon River to the Pacific Ocean and advocate removing the four dams on the Lower Snake River that block that migration and are killing that river system.

78 days and 1000 miles away down the tiniest tributaries to the massive whitewater of the main rivers, through soul-killing paddling slogs in dead impoundments, portages amid highways and traffic, wind and sun, joy and tribulation, they found themselves on a spit of sand and mud at the mouth of the Columbia, drinking champagne amid wind-driven waves of salt water. Hal caught up with Libby Tobey in Idaho and with Hailey Thompson in Alaska for an account of the adventure, and a discussion of what is at stake in the debate over the fate of the lower Snake River dams.

Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and Representative Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) are co-sponsoring The ‘Public Lands in Public Hands Act” which would ban the sale or transfer of most public lands managed by the Department of the Interior or the Department of Agriculture (which includes the vast majority of federal public lands – Bureau of Land Management is under Interior and the National Forests are under Agriculture).

The bill also requires Congressional approval for disposals of publicly accessible federal land tracts over 300 acres and for public land tracts over five acres if accessible via a public waterway.

Are we witnessing the beginning of a bipartisan consensus on the value of our federal public lands? What motivated these two Western Congressmen to draft and sponsor this bill? Does it have a chance to become law?  Join us for the answers to these questions and a lot more.

Read the bill here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Z21FJ6XLZwyma9qaDajehFH1luY2xxa/view

Read the press release from New Mexico Representative Gabe Vasquez: https://vasquez.house.gov/media/press-releases/vasquez-introduces-bipartisan-public-lands-public-hands-act

Read the press release from Montana Rep. Zinke: https://zinke.house.gov/media/press-releases/zinke-introduces-bipartisan-public-lands-public-hands-act

Jim Heffelfinger, Arizona Game and Fish Wildlife Science Co-ordinator, Chairman of the Mule Deer Working Group, wildlife conservation professional, author of Deer of the Southwest.

Coming at you live from the 2024 Mule Deer Expo in Salt Lake City, Hal catches up with one of America’s rockstars of wildlife conservation and research, Arizona’s Jim Heffelfinger. The conversation roams and wanders, from mule deer and blacktails, habitat and CWD, to Mexican wolves and hunting javelina, with a side trip into the mystique and glory of the Colt 1911. If you have half as much fun listening to it as Jim and Hal had recording it, this episode will rank among the best ever.

Also, this episode celebrates the publication of the comprehensive textbook, Ecology and Management of Blacktailed and Mule Deer of North America, which Jim co-edited. Hal and Jim forgot to talk about the book, but it is a crucial resource for anyone interested in the current state and likely future of our mule deer and blacktails.

Journalist Jimmy Tobias started out working on backcountry trails for the US Forest Service and Montana Conservation Corps. Since then, he has become one of America’s hardest-hitting investigative reporters specializing in public lands, conservation, and the outdoors. Tobias’ story about the link between ecosystem disruption and tick-borne illnesses, “How Lyme Disease Became Unstoppable,” was published in June 2022 in The Nation. That story was the original inspiration for this interview, but Hal and Jimmy range far afield, from ticks to endangered species protection and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which promises to dismantle federal public lands and their management once and for all.  Join us.

Join Hal and BHA North American Board Member and CEO of the Orianne Society Dr. Chris Jenkins for a fascinating conversation about everything from public lands and local hunting and food to Dr. Jenkins' specialty: venomous snakes. 

An episode you don't want to miss!

The largest public lands conservation opportunity in our lifetime is at hand.

The Bureau of Land Management is finalizing plans for the long-term management of an expanse of public lands in Alaska that is larger than the state of Ohio.  There are 28 million acres at stake, an unfathomable wealth of wildlife, big game, fisheries, waterfowl, and the headwaters of rivers like the Kuskokwim and the Yukon. These are known as the D1 Lands, protected from mining and energy development by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

In 2020, the management of these lands was thrown into limbo. Now, the BLM is asking for the American people to determine the future of these lands.

Join us to learn more, as Hal interviews Alaskan Rachel James, of Salmon State.  

And then be sure to comment through BHA's Action Alert.

Learn more about what goes on in the halls of Congress as Hal sits down with BHA Government Relations Manager Kaden McArthur to discuss the 2023 wins BHA played a role in achieving for the conservation of our public lands and waters. 

Douglas Tallamy, Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, University of Delaware

Any hunter, angler and/or student of the natural world is bound to be more than a little gobsmacked by the rate of development and growth that we see all around us: Bozeman, Atlanta, Boise, Moab, Salt Lake City, Huntsville, Austin, the Gulf Coast, Phoenix, Chattanooga, Asheville and beyond.

Is there any hope for the wild places and the world we love?

Hell, yes there is. And it will be done by each and every one of us – yard by yard, deck by deck, square foot by square foot. The possibilities are endless.

Doug Tallamy, of the Homegrown National Park  movement is the author of Nature’s Best Hope (with a companion volume for younger readers and Bringing Nature Home.

Doug has a plan to create 22 million acres of native plant communities that will restore whole kingdoms of birds, insects, reptiles and other wildlife, at almost no cost, and with no need to beseech the government or beg alms of the powers that be.

 Join us, for a damn good time, and learn about a work that anyone can love and a movement that everybody can be part of.

If you hang around to the end, you’ll get outlandish insect tales, for no extra investment. And because this interview was so much fun, we’ve got another one scheduled with Doug to talk about his new book on Oak trees – all 600 species of them – and his obsession with the mysterious universe of gall wasps. Your mind will be blown. 

Join Hal Herring and Mississippi State University environmental history professor and author of My Work is that of Conservation, An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver Mark Hersey for a fantastic American conservation story that has never been more relevant than it is right now. 

If you finished seventh grade in an American public school, you learned about George Washington Carver, who was born into slavery in Missouri and grew up to be one of America’s leading scientists and agronomists, working from his laboratory at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Carver was a friend and advisor to U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, and sought out as counsel by some of the best minds in agriculture across the world.    

Carver was also one of America’s pioneers of the science of ecology and a cutting-edge conservationist who advocated for the restoration of whitetail deer, quail and fisheries, long before such ideas became mainstream. His conservation vision was forged in the fire of his own history and in his life’s work in Alabama’s post-slavery Black Belt and along the Fall Line, known then as “the most destroyed land in all of the South” -- a place where poverty, injustice and hunger were closely tied to the abuse and collapse of the systems of the earth.

Don't miss Hal's fascinating conversation with Mark Hersey.

Woniya Dawn Thibeault, winner of Alone: Frozen, author of Never Alone: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey  

In 2019, primitive skills instructor and master hide-tanner Woniya Dawn Thibeault was selected for the Alone Season Six challenge. She and nine other contestants were dropped off along the East Arm of the Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, in late fall, with the arctic winter closing in. It was a grim and unforgiving landscape unlike anything she’d ever encountered or even imagined. Her life there became a slow-moving race with starvation and brutal cold, fishing, eating grubs and running snares, perfecting her shelter and learning, learning, to listen to the earth for whatever it might offer her. Thibeault survived 73 days, becoming the second-to-last contestant, drawing on every reserve of tenacity and skill to meet the challenges of each day. Gaunt, near physical collapse and fifty pounds lighter, she tapped out and returned home to California. Her convalescence took months, and she re-entered her life an entirely changed person.

And then she did it again.   

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Listeners to the BHA Podcast & Blast will likely know Erin Block from her brilliant short essays at MidCurrent, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Field & Stream, and TROUT magazine, where she is an editor-at-large. Some might know her books on the the art of making bamboo fly rods (The View from Coal Creek), or By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying. Some might follow her Instagram, a powerfully understated immersion in foraging, wildlife and birds, hunting and fishing and gardening. Erin’s writing comes directly from the well-spring of her life, and like the chronicle of any real life, it is always about more than meets the eye.   

Hal talks with Erin from her cabin in the Colorado Rockies, about her new book of poetry  https://www.middlecreekpublishing.com/how-you-walk-alone-in-the-dark ,  the ancient art of ekphrasis, which may be finding its truest heights right now, a special old Savage shotgun and a whole lot more. 

Grab a cup of coffee and join us.   

If you are an upland bird hunter with a yen for great writing and vividly lived experiences, you have probably been reading the Mouthful of Feathers crew -- Tom Reed, Marissa Jensen and Greg McReynolds -- on the internet since 2009. Whether you have or have not, you are in for a treat.

Join us for a celebration of wild birds and wild dogs and their first publication, in a book that you can hold in your hands, of the best of the best of the Mouthful of Feathers short essays and stories.

The book is the perfect off-season reading: 20 writers from all walks of life and all over North America. It’s old friends and old and young dogs, venerable old double barrels and pawnshop pump shotguns with stocks cracked from a tumble down the chukar’s steepest basalt. It’s bobwhites and sharptails, Huns and timberdoodles and Mearn’s, from the southern longleaf to the rain-soaked poplars of Michigan, the Sandhills to the Madrean Sky Islands.

And the conversation in epidode 169 of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ Podcast & Blast is one hell of a good time.

The proposed Ambler Road is a proposed 211-mile industrial corridor through public lands along the southern flanks of the Brooks Range and one of the last and largest protected roadless areas on earth. The road would be built from the Dalton Highway to the Ambler Mining District on the Ambler River, passing through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, bisecting the migration route of the embattled Western Arctic caribou herd and crossing nearly 3,000 streams and 11 major rivers including the Kobuk and Koyukon. Tune in to learn about this proposed project from three deeply concerned Alaskans while there is still time for hunters and anglers like you to make your voices heard.

Public Lands, Wild Game Cooking, Hunting, Angling and Conservation – Live from the Texas Hill Country with Chuck Naiser, Jesse Griffiths and Riverhorse Nakadate

The Podcast and Blast has gone to Texas!

Host Hal Herring takes the Podcast & Blast on the road to the sunbaked Texas Hill Country to record a live episode at Star Hill Ranch in Bee Cave. It’s a packed house at the Texas BHA gathering for a conservation conversation fueled by extraordinary food, ice cold beer and a rip-roaring good time.

Riverhorse Nakadate is a writer, poet and musician telling the story of public lands, flyfishing and conservation from the Texas Gulf Coast to the Boundary Waters. Jessie Griffiths is a visionary wild game chef, forager, hunter and angler, restaurateur and author. Chuck Naiser is president and founder of Flatsworthy, a coalition of sometimes conflicting stakeholders committed to solving the major challenges of a booming Gulf Coast and has been a renowned fishing guide and a successful battler for conservation on the Texas coast since he took a leading and often dangerous role in the “Redfish Wars” of the late 70s. He’s as plain-spoken and passionate as ever, at a time when his wisdom and experience are needed more than ever.

Join us for a conversation with the three recent Texas BHA Public Lands and Public Waters Leadership Award recipients.

Listeners of the podcast will remember a number of dam-focused episodes over the past few years, Free the Ocklawaha (Florida) and Snake River Dams (Idaho, Columbia River basin) to name just two. But the issue of dams – the blocking of the arterial systems of the earth – is not about just a few high-profile cases. More than 800,000 dams across the planet have destroyed river systems, extirpated vast runs of native fish, displaced millions of human beings and drowned priceless farmlands, forests, prairies and wetlands. The delusion that we can plug living river systems and somehow turn them into money has perverted politics and economies and stolen the wealth of nations, hoarding it into the hands of the privileged and well-connected few. The story of dams – an incredible tale of careless hubris, blatant corruption and tragically bad ideas – is one [stevenhawleyauthor.com]Steven Hawley has been chronicling its unfolding for decades now, long enough to see a new clarity rising, and with it a growing movement to remove old dams and restore the free-flowing energies and arterial systems of our planet. Hawley’s new book, Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World, chronicles this history and future. Each success (and there are many of them) brings into stark focus the path forward, restoring rivers and fish runs and floodplains, reawakening the deep relationship between humankind and the waters that sustain us. Join Hal and Steven for a spirited exploration of one of the most critical issues of our time.  

Coho salmon habitat, wetlands conservation, the removal of abandoned fences that kill hundreds of migrating mule deer, pronghorn and elk every year. Marine Corps helicopters and bighorn sheep, fish counts, bowfishing for alligator gar, restoring native plants on burned-over public lands. A ton of good work is getting done on our public lands and waters, and people are having a blast doing it. This is the reality of BHA’s hands-on conservation: projects done by real people; sweat, dust, sunshine and rain; like-minded folks coming together, seeing new country and leaving it quantifiably better than we found it. Hal joins Britt Parker, BHA’s habitat stewardship coordinator in Colorado, and Devon O’Dea, BHA California coordinator, to talk about the latest projects, check out the big future, and learn how you can get involved. 

Dave Simonett of Trampled by Turtles is a Minnesota fisherman, hunter and dog man, a former roofer, and one of America’s most profound songwriters and hardest-touring musicians. Hal and Dave spent a morning fishing Montana’s Big Blackfoot this summer, throwing spruce moth bugs for cuttbows and browns, and then caught up in the afternoon for a conversation at the KettleHouse Amphitheater in Bonner, Montana. Dave was getting ready to rock a sold-out crowd in the beautiful summer gloaming, with the river running fast and cold in the near distance. Sometimes, it just all works out. Join us.  

The longhunters of the 18th century knew it well. The Native nations of the Southeast knew it better yet, lived upon its bounty of bison and elk, and maintained it with fire and the deliberate cultivation of hundreds of species of plants. It was the Southeastern Grasslands Complex, known now only from the oldest maps. But remnants exist, of the most vibrant American ecosystem ever recorded, and Dwayne Estes and Jeremy French from the Southeastern Grasslands Institute are here to talk about the current successful efforts to understand it…and bring it back.  

There is a dire misconception these days that hunting and angling are somehow the birthright of Americans – and that these life pursuits and passions of ours belong to us by dint of benevolent magic or extraordinary good luck. American hunting and fishing do not exist because of magic or luck. We have what we have because our forebears raised relentless hell to restore our wildlife and protect our lands, waters and air. Ben Long, hardcore hunter, angler, conservationist, writer and longtime BHA leader, has produced The Hunter & Angler Field Guide to Raising Hell to re-awaken that spirit right now…when the need has never been greater. In the tradition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the epic of compression that launched the American Revolution, Ben’s Field Guide is a concise user’s guide to the institutions – from federal agencies to the courts – that help us protect that which we refuse to relinquish, and that which we will pass on to the generations that follow us. To whom much has been given, much is expected. Join us, in the fight, and for this conversation.   

Texas hunter and fisherman Jesse Griffiths is the author of Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish and The Hog Book, the definitive text – artwork is closer to the reality  - on hunting, butchering and cooking feral hogs. The Hog Book won the prestigious James Beard Award in 2022, a fitting tribute to a man on the cutting edge of wild game and fish cookery. Jesse is co-owner of the Austin, Texas, New School of Traditional Cookery and the restaurant Dai Due, whose name is drawn from the Italian proverb, Dai due regni di natura, piglia il cibo con misura: “From the two kingdoms of nature, choose food with care.” Join us for a conversation with one of the most visionary chefs in North America, talking hogs, turkeys, panfish, hunting and fishing and foraging for food, and a life defined by the earth and her seasons.

The Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964, and has protected over 109 million acres of American public lands (53% of them in Alaska) since then. But the idea was born in 1924, with the vision of none other than Aldo Leopold, who was then the Supervisor of the Carson National Forest, and had spent almost fifteen years working on and exploring the wild public lands of New Mexico. Leopold argued that among the resources the Forest Service was mandated to safeguard for the American people were open spaces for hunting, fishing and real adventure. He argued, eloquently, that these values existed in abundance on the unpeopled lands of the Gila National Forest, that they were becoming more and more rare across America, and that the US Forest Service could choose to protect them for future generations.

This year, we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Gila Wilderness. The Gila was America’s first public lands’ wilderness, and the ideas and arguments that created it provided the template for all that we understand as federally designated wilderness today.  How did this come to be? Join us- Hal, Karl Malcolm, US Forest Service ecologist, hunter and wanderer of the Gila, and Curt Meine, conservation biologist and author of Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, and Senior Fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.  

A wilderness area, Leopold wrote, was “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

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Mitch Reid is a native son of the Alabama Wiregrass, where he grew up fishing and hunting his home country in the headwaters of the Choctawhatchee River. After a military career with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne, he came home to raise his family and continue to serve his nation by working with The Nature Conservancy to protect and restore the lands and waters of the place he loves the most in the world. Alabama is No. 1 in aquatic species diversity, with more than 4,000 known species. It is also No. 2 in the nation for species extinction. The time for action is right now. Huge projects are underway in Alabama, from restoration of coastal estuaries and marshes to protecting some of the most diverse hardwood forests and most biologically rich and intact rivers left on Earth. One of the most important watershed restorations in the U.S. is underway right here – reconnecting the mighty Alabama River and its thousands of miles of tributaries to the Gulf of Mexico – Gulf walleye, sturgeon, vast runs of mullet and other catadromous fish … they were all here, all the way up the Cahaba, the Coosa, the Tallapoosa. And they can be again.     

Arizona game warden and author Sam Lawry is retiring from his second career as the executive director of the Teller Wildlife Refuge on the Bitterroot River of Montana. This BHA podcast is being released to honor Sam and in appreciation of his life as one of America’s premier conservation leaders. Sam served 23 years as a game warden in Arizona (the subject of his excellent and funny book, Stories of the Past: An Arizona Game Ranger Remembering the Outlaws), was chairman of staff for the North American Wetlands Conservation Council and the Pacific Flyway Council, western director of Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever, and has devoted most of his life to teaching young people about wildlife and conservation. Join Hal and Sam as they talk about outlaws, waterfowl hunting, Arizona, the Bitterroot, active habitat restoration, and a life spent completely immersed in hunting and fishing. If you have not heard of Sam’s Warden Wisdom on Instagram, now is the time to check it out.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 158: Hunting at American Prairie

American Prairie is 455,840 sprawling acres of Montana grasslands and breaks that represents one of the largest expansions of publicly accessible hunting opportunities in the West— and one of America’s largest public/private land conservation projects. A longer story deserves to be told about American Prairie – how their work began and also what their plans for the future hold. This discussion features AP’s Director of Public Access & Recreation Mike Quist Kautz and Director of Bison Restoration Scott Heidebrink, who are here to talk history, bison, cattle, grasslands, watersheds, and hunting and the logistics of getting 1000 pounds of meat and 150 pounds of hide out of the field. Listeners who want to apply for a bison permit on AP lands, or who might be interested in the Block Management Program hunting access opportunities on AP lands, won’t want to miss this conversation, recorded at AP headquarters in Montana.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 157: Kevin Garrad, Founder of Wild Response

Growing up in rural England, Kevin Garrad was a child of the wild moors, a ferreter and a trainer of lurchers, a hunter of invasive minks, and destined to be a soldier. Fast forward to an early-in to the U.S. military just out of high school and eight deployments in 18 years, including a decade in the U.S. Army Special Forces during America’s longest wars. Now “retired” to the bush in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Kevin is the point man for Wild Response, an organization that equips and trains the roaming, high-risk game rangers who are protecting the bitterly imperiled wildlife of these last iconic wild landscapes, often at the risk of their own lives. Internationally recognized man-tracker, soldier, medic, teacher and passionate conservationist of wildlife and wild places, Kevin has an utterly unique tale to tell. Join us!

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 156: Florida Backcountry Lawman Bob Lee

You may remember Bob Lee from Free the Ocklawaha River!, where he and Hal first met. Bob is one of the leading voices for the removal of Rodman Dam and the reconnection of the Ocklawaha River to the St. Johns and the Atlantic Ocean. He knows of what he speaks: Bob Lee was the game warden for this part of the American backcountry – the oldest of Old Florida – for over 30 years. He wrote about his adventures in his excellent first book Backcountry Lawman and expanded on that success by gathering other Florida warden tales in Bad Guys, Bullets, and Boat Chases. Artifact hunter, historian, fisherman and hunter of both man and beast, Bob Lee is a master storyteller with a lifetime of rollicking adventures to draw from. Join us for the ride.    

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 155: Montana Fishing Guide and Writer Chris Dombrowski

Chris Dombrowski is a professional fishing guide of over two decades on the rivers of Montana, an acclaimed poet and the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Alluring Fish, which is about, among many other things, the pursuit of bonefish in the Bahamas. Chris’ latest book is The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water, which manages to be a deeply honest memoir, a celebration of the joys and terrors of family, and a love letter to the landscape and rivers of the American West, all at the same time. Join Hal and Chris for an intense conversation about fishing, life and literature, recorded live at the 2023 BHA North American Rendezvous.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 154: The Legal Fight Over Corner Crossing Comes to a Head

The future of public access to public lands access is being decided in Wyoming with the ongoing saga of the corner-crossing hunters and their legal travails. We all have a dog in this fight – and never more so than right now, given the accelerating trend of huge expanses of private land being consolidated, with public lands enclosed or access blocked to members of the hunting and angling public. Join us at the 2023 BHA North American Rendezvous as Hal discusses the implications of the Wyoming battle with Eric Hanson, an attorney who has assisted BHA in its support of the four hunters, and Sawyer Connelly, a former BHA staffer and legal scholar: Learn the latest on the legal case and also, for the hardworking optimists, a possible solution from Sawyer to the dilemma of access to the checkerboarded public lands in the West. You heard it here first!

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 153: The MT Legislature, The Weed Tax, and The Conservationists

Montana's legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, but the amount of work that goes into a single abbreviated session is mind-blowing. In just a few short months during its 2023 session, more than 200 bills dealing with fish and wildlife management, public access, conservation funding, and fair chase hunting and fishing opportunities will have been introduced and considered in Helena. On this week's Podcast & Blast, we sit down with Jake Schwaller and John Sullivan of the Montana BHA board and Kevin Farron, BHA regional policy manager, to discuss a few of these bills, how best to make your voice heard, and why BHA members from across the country need to stay vigilant and engaged when the sausage is being made in their own state. Join us as we explore what Costco has to do with Montana's new pheasant stocking program, how nonresidents who own land in Montana will be given up to five deer and elk tags, and how recreational marijuana is funding - or was funding - the state's best conservation tool: Habitat Montana.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 152: Murder of the Grand Kankakee Marsh

“I have never yet found a place that equaled the Kankakee swamps for the variety of game to be found there.” – J. Lorenzo Werich, 1920.

Few know the history now. None who experienced it are still alive to tell us the tale. But it was once known as The Everglades of the North, a million acres of marsh and swamp in Indiana and Illinois, with thousands of people living on the wealth of its fish and game, flocks of waterfowl darkening the skies, passenger pigeons, deer and black bear, beaver and muskrat and otter. For decades it was the so-called “pantry of Chicago,” providing wild game to markets and restaurants, furs to the garment and hat industries, tons of cut reeds for packing materials, and millions of board feet for lumber for houses, including fueling reconstruction after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Then the huge steam-powered dredges came, and the murder of the Grand Kankakee Marsh began. Can we ever put to rights what we once so thoughtlessly sundered? Join us for a conversation with Hal and two of Indiana’s finest storytellers and conservationists: Jeff Manes, a former steelworker turned columnist for the Chicago Tribune who grew up fishing and hunting the swamp, and Jim Sweeney, of the Porter County Chapter of the Izaak Walton League and Friends of the Kankakee.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 151: Bill Avey, 40 Years in the Forest Service

Retired Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest Supervisor Bill Avey is here to give us a clear view into the workings of the U.S. Forest Service – and what is arguably, for a public lands hunter or angler, the most important agency in America. Hal and Bill became friends on a snow survey ski trip through the Bob Marshall Wilderness in 2015, lost touch, then met again on a jury duty call-up last summer. It was a lucky meeting for Hal and for this podcast: Bill Avey has given his life to America’s public forests, and he knows the strengths and weaknesses, the joys and tribulations, of his agency and the work it does, from the roots to the crown.

The bitter tide of privatizing public lands and waters is rising fast across America. Only the actions of quietly heroic citizens can stop it.

Nobody who hunted and fished the Cutoff wanted to tell the world about it. The Cutoff is also known as Creslenn Lake, a twelve-mile stretch of what used to be the Trinity River (it was “cut off” by a long-ago flood control project) between Navarro and Henderson Counties about an hour and half south of Dallas, Texas. The Cutoff has been a locals’ top destination for crappie fishing, duck hunting, jug lining and just enjoying this wild corner of Texas, through multiple generations (check out the Save the Cutoff Facebook page for the comments).  Nobody dreamed that one day, a local landowner would simply declare the miles of public water his own fiefdom, hiring guards, closing roads, building illegal fences and excavating -- also illegally -- thousands of yards of dirt to block any hope of access. This is a David versus Goliath story, a battle fought on behalf of us all, by a very small band of hardworking rural Texans who simply will not lay down and take it.

Learn more:

https://www.backcountryhunters.org/local_outdoorsmen_rally_to_save_the_cutoff

https://www.facebook.com/p/Save-the-cut-off-100078227846990/

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/east-texas-cutoff-trinity-river-land-dispute/

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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

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Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

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BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 150: Free the Ocklawaha River!

Almost 60 years ago, the U.S. government, blinded by hubris, began work on the Cross Florida Barge Canal. Never heard of it? That’s because President Richard Nixon, seeing it for the financial and ecological monstrosity that it was, halted the project in 1971 before it was halfway completed. All that remains of the bad idea is Rodman Dam, completed in 1968 to raise water levels enough to make the canal usable. The Rodman Dam blocked the free flow of the incredible Ocklawaha River, inundated 20 mighty freshwater springs, flooded miles of timber and bottomland wildlife habitat and, most importantly, cut the Ocklawaha and its tributaries off from the St. Johns River and the Atlantic Ocean, causing a cascade of losses to wildlife, water, fisheries and human beings. Now the time has come to remove Rodman Dam and restore these connections. Hal talks about the dam – its history and potential future – with Lisa Rinaman of the St. Johns’ Riverkeeper and retired game warden and author Bob Lee, who has spent his professional life protecting the game and fish of the Ocklawaha. Join us to consider one of the major restoration projects of our time. 

Podcast & Blast: Episode 149, Conservation in the 118th Congress with the BHA Policy Crew

As a wise man once said, You may not be interested in war, but when the times comes, war will certainly be interested in you. The same can be said about Congress. This week's episode with BHA's John Gale and Kaden McArthur takes us to Washington, D.C., with an exploration of the 118th Congress, where the hottest issues pertaining to our hunting and fishing and the conservation that makes it possible will be on the floor, in the offices, buried in reams of obscure paperwork and clouded by political shenanigans….John and Kaden clear the smoke, slash the fat, and let us all know what is going on, what is at stake, and who the players are as we make our way through 2023. We Americans consent to be governed, and this is a must-listen conversation about what we are consenting to, what we support and what we must resist.  

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 148: Drew Phipps and the Restoration of the Candy Darter

America’s Midwestern rivers – the Elk, the Kanawha, the Ohio and all their vast systems of arterial tributaries – are home to a mind-boggling array of some of the most bizarre creatures on this planet. Among them, the candy darter, a tiny fish of such astounding beauty that its very existence begs questions about human perception, evolution and aesthetics: Why would a fish look like this? Why is it so beautiful? Join us for the return of one of the Podcast & Blast’s most popular guests, Drew Phipps of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Fish Hatchery in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where a successful program to restore the candy darter to its original riverine habitats is bearing fruit. Listen to the end for a bonus tale of a junk store “swan gun” brought back to life and into the turkey woods…a mammoth 10-gauge black powder market hunting relic, best test fired with duct-tape, prayers and a 20-foot piece of paracord while hiding behind a block wall. Do not try this at home or anywhere else.

Learn more about Backcountry Hunters and Anglers: www.backcountryhunters.org/

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 147: Ted Koch on the Lesser Prairie Chicken and Grasslands Conservation

Will we act now to save America’s iconic grasslands? The southern population of the lesser prairie chicken has been listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as endangered, a listing that will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the fate of this gamebird and its habitat on the southern Great Plains. But this conversation with Ted Koch, a former endangered species biologist, executive director of the North American Grouse Partnership, and chair of BHA’s North American board of directors, is not just about lesser prairie chickens; it is about a resounding failure in conservation and an opportunity to forge a new path to honor and protect America’s grasslands and all their attendant species. As goes the lesser prairie chicken so goes the American grassland ecosystem, and there is absolutely no reason to accept the loss of either one.

Learn more about Backcountry Hunters and Anglers: www.backcountryhunters.org/

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 146: Lyndsie Bourgon, Author of Tree Thieves

Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, oral historian, National Geographic Fellow and author of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods. Join Hal and Lyndsie as they explore the many paths that led to her book on the booming trade in stolen timber and other forest products from America’s public and private lands. You will never look at a beautiful violin or guitar quite the same (“music wood’ is among the most poached and the most valuable), and you will be left pondering a very unsettling question: What is outlawry, really? From Robin Hood and Little John poaching the king’s deer in Sherwood Forest to a lone man illegally cutting shakes in shadowy Northern California redwood groves, through roadside burl merchants in dying towns surrounded by mountains laid bare by clearcutting for an insatiable global market, how exactly does one define a natural resources crime? Tree Thieves is not a simple true crime book with simple villains. It’s an exploration of humankind’s relationship to the natural world that sustains us.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 145: Ethnobotanist Dr. Susan Leopold

Dr. Susan Leopold is an ethnobotanist who spent the early years of her career in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon and Central America. An epiphany led her home, to Virginia and to the American heartland of the Ohio River, to study native plants, medicinal herbs and the natural and human history of this wild, diverse and beleaguered corner of our world. Leopold is the executive director of the United Plant Savers, a group dedicated to protecting imperiled native plants like ginseng and goldenseal – and to establishing new and sustainable economies where these and other plants can bolster rural economies and make peoples’ lives healthier and more prosperous. Come with us to meet and learn from a leader in herbalism, native plant restoration, forest farming, and, maybe, a new way of living in the heartland: one that draws its strength from the land itself.      

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 144: Author and Historian Douglas Brinkley

Douglas Brinkley is the preeminent scholar and writer on the history of America’s public lands and conservation movement. Among his seven bestselling books of history are Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2010) and Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (2016). His new book in this series, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening, will be available before Dec. 1, 2022. Brinkley, who is a professor at Rice University in Texas, is also the author of numerous books on the American presidency, the editor of Ronald Reagan’s papers, a Jack Kerouac scholar, and the literary executor for gonzo journalist and writer Hunter F. Thompson. Listen and enjoy as Hal takes a deep dive with Mr. Brinkley as together they consider the past, present and future of “the public estate of the American people.”

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 143: Feral Horses on Public Lands in Nevada

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. The Bureau of Land Management is doing what it can to address this crisis, but the agency finds itself in an impossible position with an entirely misguided but powerful feral horse advocacy movement. However, 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. 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.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 142: Ashley Peters, communications director, Ruffed Grouse Society and American Woodcock Society

Ashley Peters grew up in rural Iowa, in a landscape of cornfields and monoculture agriculture. Looking for a wilder and wider life, she found her way to U.S. Forest Service trail jobs in the Minnesota Boundary Waters and in Alaska, to a degree in communications, and to conservation work ranging from the gator-bellowing swamps of Louisiana to the woodcock and grouse popple of the upper Midwest. Hal and Ashley talk the deep engagement and beginners' mindset of adult-onset hunting and fishing, the challenges of finding one's way to one's passions, and the swiftly-changing world of conservation, climate, wildlife diversity, and the business of somehow communicating it all clearly to a sometimes skeptical and indifferent public.

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 141: Public Lands Journalist Nate Schweber

A flamboyant Western politician, yelling hatred for the federal government, accusing anyone who questioned him of being a “communist,” secretly planning a takeover and selloff of 230 million acres of public land to his cronies. Sounds like today, yes? Well, it was 1947, and it almost worked. Montana-born, New York City-seasoned reporter and writer Nate Schweber uncovers the whole sordid, instructive history in his wild ride of a book, This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild, a chronicle of the life of one man, DeVoto, the greatest Western historian who ever lived, and his wife, Avis,  genius editor, publisher, devoted friend and promoter of the chef Julia Child, who stood up against some of the most powerful and corrupt forces of their time. And, with the help of the American people, they won. 

Tony Jones, host of the Reverend Hunter podcast, and author of The God of Wild Places: Rediscovering the Divine in the Untamed Outdoors and eleven other books, outdoor writer, hunting mentor, guide in the Boundary Waters, father of three, hunter, fisherman, seeker.

When Tony Jones was growing up, all he ever wanted was to know and preach the Gospel, and to one day have his own church and congregation. He accomplished that goal, beyond his wildest dreams. He was a star in the pulpit, and as a scholar, with degrees from Dartmouth, from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from Princeton’s Theological Seminary. He wrote influential books (including The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life) and lived an orderly life of service, study, scholarship and meditation, in a quiet home with his wife and children. But life is not orderly. As Tony writes in his blistering and thought-provoking journey The God of Wild Places, we are nature, and nature is unruly, unpredictable and beautiful in its ruthlessness. Join us, for an interview and a conversation about losing faith, and finding it again, in the whirlwind of the natural world. 

More about Tony: https://reverendhunter.com/

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 140: Far Bank’s Simon Gawesworth on public access to public waters…worldwide

Simon Gawesworth is a second-generation master flycasting instructor and world casting champion, author of three books on Spey casting, and currently works as the education and engagement manager for Far Bank. A native Brit, he has been working in the flyfishing industry in the U.S. for the past 25 years and fishing the fresh and saltwater globe from Tierra del Fuego to Montana to Christmas Island. Hal and Simon range far on this interview: through Simon’s work with Far Bank (which includes Sage, RIO, Redington and other brands dedicated to flyfishing education and conservation) to the near-total lack of public access to waters in Europe and Argentina. The talk is fly tackle for small streams in the southern U.S., leaders for topwater bass fishing, the highly specialized culture of competitive “coarse fishing” in the United Kingdom, and the fact that American anglers, whether they are wading the Madison for big browns, Spey casting for Oregon steelhead or rollcasting a 2-weight switch rod on a Mississippi creek for shellcrackers, seem utterly unaware of how good we have it, and how quickly it could all go…Euro on us. Join us.    

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 139: Kyle Lybarger, Native Habitat Project

Kyle Lybarger, a 29-year-old consulting forester, father, deer-hunter, small creek addict and self-proclaimed “native plant nerd” of Hartselle, Alabama, is a major part of a new and wonderful current sweeping America. Kyle’s Native Habitat Project videos – simple, one-minute vignettes of obscure native plants, remnant grasslands and wildlife-vibrant native plant landscapes – have been downloaded millions of times. The Native Habitat Project is bizarre insects and forgotten plants, science from the heart and soul, love of place, sense of wonder, mostly right under our noses (some of Kyle’s most intact ancient grassland remnants were discovered by the local Dollar Store). For a nation exhausted by abstraction and thirsting for the irrefutably real, Kyle Lybarger’s life work is a tin cup of cold water from a deeper well. 

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 138: Mississippi forester Alex Harvey

Come with Hal to southern Mississippi to talk with Alex Harvey, a registered professional forester in Mississippi and Alabama and a land management consultant, wildlife biologist and multi-generational conservationist, hunter and fisherman. Harvey is carrying on the outdoor traditions passed on to him from generations of his family, ranging from herbalism and foraging to rabbit, squirrel and deer hunting, cattle ranching, gardening, cooking and living a full and thriving life in the Southern outdoors. Alex is also the founder of Legacy Land Management, “forestry from the ground up,” helping private landowners, many of them Black, make the most of their properties for wildlife, timber and ecological resilience. 

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 137: Marine Veteran and Storyteller Russell Worth Parker

Russell Worth Parker, known as Worth, is a retired Marine and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. After 27 years in the Corps, he is home in Wilmington, North Carolina, hunting and fishing and being a husband and father – and has, as he puts it, “fallen backwards into a writing career.” Parker’s work has been published in The New York Times, Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, Backcountry Journal, Shooting Sportsman, Salt Magazine and military websites such as SOFLETE.com. Join us for a full-tilt conversation that ranges from BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative to the Drive-by Truckers, Cormac McCarthy, veterans hunting Texas turkeys, traumatic brain injury and war. We also discuss the 80s classic film Red Dawn.