January 19, 2018
As Hunting and Fishing Decline, Will Millenials Step Up?
By Dennis Anderson/Star Tribune
Photo courtesy of CLfT
Most parents of children born between 1946 and 1964 — baby boomers — didn’t worry about whether their kids would hunt or fish. Of course they would. Or, at least, many would. These outdoor traditions dated to the nation’s founding, and had long been embedded in Americans’ aggregate recreational lifestyle.

Yet whether hunting and fishing can catch on in significant numbers with more recent generations of Americans is an open question, particularly with the cohort known as millennials, who are now age 19 to 35, give or take.

The issue is important for a number of reasons.

Foremost is that, while multiple “gateway” activities exist to get people introduced to the outdoors (e.g., hiking, biking, climbing), traditional pastimes such as hunting and fishing have proved to engender long-term, passionate allegiance among participants — and a willingness to support that allegiance with money.
What You Should Know About Proposed Boundary Waters Mine
By Alex Robinson/Outdoor Life
Photo by A. Strakey/flickr
Just before Christmas, the Department of the Interior reversed an Obama administration decision and opened the door for a copper-nickel mine near the  Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness  in the northeast Arrowhead region of Minnesota.

The proposed mine has been a flashpoint between public-land advocates and proponents of the mining industry.

And like so many other hot-button issues, rhetoric has ratcheted up on both sides. To bring a little clarity to the conversation, here’s what you should know about the Boundary Waters mine.
Bird Feeder Fight Club: Meet the Winners
By Alison Haigh/Living Bird
Photo by John Carrel/flickr
There’s something tranquil about watching birds coexist at your backyard feeder, pecking away in their quirky abandon. That is, until the local Blue Jay arrives, flushing all your daintier songbirds out in a raucous flurry. It might seem like just plain bullying, but there’s more going on than meets the eye in the fast-moving (and frankly addicting) world of bird-feeder drama.

Birds at feeders are like members of a not-so-secret fight club. For a chance to eat in the safety of a flock, they must constantly appease, avoid, or consequently get walloped by more dominant birds. Scientists have spent decades working out the dominance hierarchies among just two or three species. But now, with the help of thousands of citizen scientists, a team of researchers has pieced together a hierarchy that ranks the feeder-fight-club performance of 136 North American bird species.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology postdoctoral associate Eliot Miller spearheaded the analysis and now holds the results. 
They Tracked a Buck for 3 Years. Here’s What They Learned.
By Duane Diefenbach/Penn State
Photo by Scott Spaeth/flickr
It was February 25, 2015 when we captured him in a Clover trap in Treaster Valley on the Bald Eagle State Forest in Pennsylvania. He was an “adult” meaning he had already survived at least 2 hunting seasons and would be at least 2.5 years old during the upcoming 2015-2016 deer seasons.

That’s the last we ever saw of him for nearly 3 years. But we were still able to follow his every move. We ended up spying on him in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

He was fitted with a GPS collar that we hoped would collect a location every 7 hours until the opening of archery season when a location was collected every 3 hours. If he survived archery season we would collect a location every 20 minutes during the rifle season. If he survived the rifle season the spying started all over again.
Wyoming to Review Techonological Advances, Uses
in Hunting
By Christine Peterson/Star Tribune
Photo by Andrew Turner/flickr
Hunters who defend crossbows say they’re a way to introduce someone to the sport. Archery purists say crossbows are too similar to killing an animal with a rifle.

Wyoming is one of few states in the West that still allows the two to be used during early archery seasons that generally extend the amount of time a hunter has to find his or her quarry.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission may consider changing that rule.

The discussion is part of a larger one on advances in new technology that commissioners will address at their meeting Thursday in Douglas. It’s not the first time commissioners have limited controversial technology. In 2016, they banned the use of drones as a hunting tool.

Rapid changes in technology along with interest from lawmakers, the commission and the public, prompted the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to compile an extensive report on new hunting tools from trail cameras that track animals in real time to rifles that shoot guided bullets like a jet fighter. The report outlines recommendations to department leadership, who will then make recommendations to the Commission.
"...the best duck blinds are those designed to give us a chance to think, for the periods between flights were meant for musing..."


- Matthew B. Connolly Jr.
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