Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i Game & Fish West

I used to be so obsessed with whitetails that when they were in season I would hunt nothing else. Forget about small game and upland birds and turkeys. Waterfowl never even crossed my mind. I’m sure I missed out on some great hunts by remaining confined to my treestand in deer season. Whitetails are still among my favorite game species, but I’ve come to more fully appreciate other hunting opportunities. Although I continue to devote several weeks of the fall to deer, I’m more of a generalist now. Variety is the spice of life, as the saying goes, and it certainly applies to hunting. I’ve found that it is entirely possible to become burned out when hunting one thing for months on end. If you’re looking to add some variety…

For die-hard bowhunters, the end of summer isn’t exactly a dreaded occurrence because it means the greatest season of them all is about to start. Fall is on our doorstep. Are you ready? No? Me either. If you’re like just about every other red-blooded American bowhunter, time is scarce and has a habit of moving faster and faster every year. Fortunately, there’s some time remaining and we can make hay while that summer sun still shines. Here are 10 things you can get rolling right now to make sure the fast-approaching bow season is a great one. 1. GET WHAT YOU NEED One of the things I enjoy as a regular part of my pre-season routine is sorting, organizing and inventorying the essentials I use throughout each fall. The task…

On the first cast, the fly swung hard. When the mouse pattern hit the seam, I started to chug it. A cutthroat almost 2 feet long charged out from under a log, slashed at the mouse and missed badly. The fish momentarily retreated to the log to sulk but then suddenly streaked downstream after my drifting fly, chased the mouse down and smashed it. The fish was on for a moment, churning at the surface, before it threw the hook. We were way up in the mountains, but this was a predator from the prairies below, summering in the sub-alpine. All manner of creepy and crawly things fall into farm creeks and irrigation ditches. Trout that migrate from the prairie to the mountains to spawn get used to eating grasshoppers,…

Our first national park is also among our fishiest. Yellowstone National Park’s location at the very headwaters of America’s empire of wild trout makes nearly any water here worth fishing as long as it’s wide and deep enough to twitch a Woolly Bugger. The diversity of fishing inside the park is on par with its abundance. You can hike to high-mountain lakes where your only company is likely to be bears and ospreys, or you can join the masses on the most popular reaches of the Madison and Firehole rivers that flow along the parks’ busiest travel routes. You can cast big spoons for lake trout in Yellowstone Lake or drift tiny mayfly imitations on shallow beaver-dam ponds for hand-sized cutthroats. The one thing you can’t do here is fish…

What if you could snap your fingers and return the world to a sort of Garden of Eden, a wholesome paradise of natural bounty and ecological health? You’d probably hesitate, knowing from biblical teaching that Eden was troublesome for its clothing-optional human inhabitants. But what if I told you this new Eden contained 10-pound bass and big bucks on public land, and created clean air and water for humans, with none of those bewitched apples? A version of this new Eden is, in essence, what the Biden administration is pitching with its “30 by 30” initiative, committing the United States to conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and coastal waters by 2030. The details were released in late January via an expansive executive order titled “Tackling the Climate…

Crossing a fence in the late afternoon, we approached the water tank, circled it and knelt to take a look at tracks in the mud. One was bigger than the others—well over 3 inches long. A buck in this canyon had likely watered at this tank, but under the light of the moon and not since. He’d had a drink and then bedded down for the day, likely within a mile of there—but where? This was dry country with few trees and fewer water holes, ground given to the farming of dry-land wheat. Glancing at the sun, I guessed we had two hours before darkness fell. Bill, my hunting partner, was on my left. Our plan was to still-hunt, trying to stay 10 yards apart in the bottom of the…

There’s no question that cellular trail cameras bring advantages, most notably allowing hunters to quietly spy on their local woods without leaving behind scent, making noise or spooking a giant buck into the next county. But while many hunters have embraced cell cams, their use is illegal in some places and not always readily accepted in other areas. That includes the hallways of the Boone and Crockett Club (boonecrockett.org) and the Pope and Young Club (pope-young.org), two organizations that hunters often think of when they take an impressive buck or bull that might qualify for the record book. However, the issue of cellular cameras goes beyond big-game records. As Kyle Lehr, assistant director of big-game records for Boone and Crockett, points out, the organizations’ functions include championing the Rules of…

Whenever a new rifle cartridge is introduced, many hunters and shooters will claim we don’t need it. They’ll say things like, “It is an answer to a question no one was asking.” or “No thanks, I’ll stick to my .30-06.” This is a symptom of neophobia, the fear of anything new. The condition is a lack of exploratory drive systematically observed in aging and is thought to be due, neurophysiologically, to the dysfunction of neural pathways connected to the prefrontal cortex. It is also known as grouchy old man syndrome. Back when current grouchy old men were young and not grouchy, the notion of having one rifle a hunter could use for almost everything was popular. However, as the 21st century approached, more rifles started to become specialized. Hunters didn’t…

I detest dinner parties, partly because they never seem to include interesting people. I may have to attend, but I will not be talking about football, golf or the Kardashians. Politics is a subject that just results in a fight. Besides, it annoys my wife when we leave early with a wave of curse words chasing us out the door. The closest I have come to a conversation about hunting with my neighbors is when one lady sarcastically asked, “Is there anything you won’t hunt?” “Nope.” “Really?” “If it’s legal I’ll hunt it.” That concluded the conversation. My attitude toward hunting anything, though, has led to some grand adventures. Here are three “offbeat” hunts on public land that are well worth doing if you want to try something different. ELK…

The shortest, most successful elk season—when a big bull is taken on opening day—is often the culmination of intensive pre-season scouting and tracking of elk movement. By the time the season opens, you want to know where bulls are, what their movements are like and what the dynamics of the cow herds are. Ideally, you’ll have identified multiple places to hunt should you encounter fellow hunters on your prime spot, are forced out of an area by wildfires or simply blow an opportunity at a bull. You can make these preparations for months before opening day, but of all the time you spend preparing for elk season, August is the most crucial month of all. GETTING THINGS STARTED Assuming you are a public-land hunter, start by researching places to hunt…

Based in Inglewood, Calif., Rod Wynn is a regional tournament pro and bass guide on the various reservoirs of southern California. He’s been experimenting with Lowrance’s ActiveTarget Live, a live, forward-facing sonar similar to Garmin’s Panoptix LiveScope. Released in early 2021, ActiveTarget Live has opened up a new understanding of bass behavior for Wynn (310-877-9010 to book a trip; @rodwynnfishing on Instagram). “I was able to get an early look at Lowrance’s technology back in the fall of 2020 and it’s been interesting to just observe bass in their environment,” he says. “I often see fish swimming among flooded treetops in southern California lakes and note how they position in the cover on different days. On Lake Havasu in Arizona, they sank a lot of man-made habitat as bass attractors…

He hit my rubbing posts and the mock scrapes twice yesterday,” said my Nebraska buddy and mega-whitetail mind Terron Bauer. “He came through on the north side of the river about an hour after sunup and then, at some point, crossed the river and came through the south-side funnel about 2 p.m. That makes two days in a row he’s done the same thing. I need to kill him before he finds a hot doe and locks her down.” When I hung up the phone, I was shaking. I was happy for my friend, of course, and felt confident he’d get the job done. What gave me the jitters were the photos of the deer from Terron’s cellular trail cameras, which I scrolled through on my iPhone while my buddy…