Craig Springer
Santa Fe
As seen in:
Albuquerque Journal,
The Outdoor Wire,
Texas Co-op Power,
Fishing Tackle Retailer,
Sporting Classics Daily,
Field Ethos Journal,
Shooting Industry Magazine,
Ohio Cooperative Living
Covers:
Outdoors, nature, conservation, fishing, hunting, history, Americana, general interests.
Articles by Craig Springer
Don’t Fence Me In
A helicopter gains on a herd of pronghorn bounding over western Oklahoma grasslands. A net gunner visible on the starboard side of the aircraft will corral the speedsters so that researchers can fit them with radios and collect other biological data. Credit Dr. Levi Heffelfinger Texas A&M - Kingsville. A state highway that reels off into the distance looks like a sun-scorched gray-black ribbon laid over tawny grassy hills.
Wild Turkey Restoration and Management
Image courtesy Craig Springer Regulated hunting has never caused the local extinction of any wildlife species. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Hunting regulations informed by science, created under the aegis of the firearms and archery industries through the reliable and steady funding under Pittman-Robertson, are responsible for the unparalleled restoration of birds and mammals in America from a nadir a century ago. Ample examples exist, but case in point here, let’s consider the wild turkey.
Sharing the Wild Harvest
Via Pittman-Robertson dollars a West Virginia wildlife biologist prepared vaccine for a bull elk. Image courtesy Elena Cambell USFWS My freezer has a generous portion of a back strap from a Kansas whitetail in the meat drawer. It’s wrapped in white butcher paper, rather nondescript save for the black ink that tells what is swaddled within. The venison was a gift, a gesture of goodwill from a dear neighbor who had the good fortune to harvest a nice buck with his child.
Drones and Whitetails - Shooting Industry Magazine
A pair of hunters reap the rewards of wildlife management Kerr WMA. Image courtesy TPWD. Interested people are interesting. It’s cliché, but true: enthusiasm is infectious. Spend time talking to wildlife and fisheries professionals and you will find that their occupation is not just a job. So it is with Deanna Pfeffer, a wildlife biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, whose enthusiasm for conservation is readily apparent.
Big-Game Hunting Is A Healthy Flywheel In An Economic Engine - Shooting Industry Magazine
Editor’s Note: The following is courtesy of Craig Springer, USFWS – Office of Conservation Investment. Fishing, boating, birding and hunting in the U.S., each by themselves, are an economic powerhouse for the American people. All these outdoor pursuits are enjoyed by millions over a broad range of household incomes and ages and other demographic characteristics.
Pittman-Robertson & The Ohio Connection - Shooting Industry Magazine
Editor’s Note: The following article is courtesy of Craig Springer, USFWS – Office of Conservation Investment. Ohioan Joseph List may have lived his adult life without ever seeing a white-tailed deer. This first-generation American born in 1860, experienced the spring of life during the Civil War. This son of German immigrants was Everyman from Anytown, USA — and he was a hunter.
Enduring Patterns — Migrations & Hunter Harvests - Shooting Industry Magazine
Editor’s Note: The following is courtesy of Biologist Craig Springer, USFWS – Office of Conservation Investment. We live in rhythms, circadian and seasonal, granular and in grandeur. Animal migrations are among the most fascinating of rhythmic natural phenomena — some of it well studied. We as participants and observers of the natural world likewise respond accordingly as we have for millennia.
Pittman-Robertson, Trapping & Furbearer Conservation - Shooting Industry Magazine
(Editor’s Note: The following is courtesy of Craig Springer, USFWS – Office of Conservation Investment) You descend from a long line of trappers. Virtually all your ancestors at some point down the line have snared or trapped animals for food, clothing, tools or trade. Furbearing animals, a category of wildlife under state and federal law, today still provide a litany of opportunity and products. Moreover, trapping is a useful service to wildlife management and public health.
Pittman-Robertson, Trapping, and Furbearer Conservation
By Craig Springer, USFWS – Office of Conservation Investment Trapping is among our oldest skillsets—opportunities abound for newcomers You descend from a long line of trappers. Virtually all your ancestors at some point down the line have snared or trapped animals for food, for clothing, or for tools or trade. Furbearing animals, a category of wildlife under state and federal law, today still provide a litany of opportunity and products.
Plato, Madonna & National Hunting and Fishing Day - Shooting Industry Magazine
(Editor’s Note: This article is courtesy of Craig Springer of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – Office of Conservation Investment.) September 28 marks the 52nd National Hunting and Fishing Day, an annual event first proclaimed by President Nixon in 1972. Hunting, fishing and target shooting were then — and remain — lifestyle choices enjoyed by millions of Americans from all walks of life on every rung of the economic ladder.
Plato, Madonna, and National Hunting and Fishing Day
September 28 marks the 52nd National Hunting and Fishing Day, an annual event first proclaimed by President Nixon in 1972. Hunting and fishing and target shooting were then, and remain, lifestyle choices enjoyed by millions of Americans from all walks of life on every rung of the economic ladder. The reasons for fishing and hunting and target shooting vary, but irreducibly, a spiritual matter lies at the kernel.
From A Coupon To Olympic Gold - Shooting Industry Magazine
“It started with a coupon,” Darrell Pace told me via a telephone interview from his home in Hamilton, Ohio. “It was a buy an hour, get one-hour free teaser to shoot a bow. I had BB guns and liked to target-shoot, so I thought I would try it out.” The gold and silver Olympic medalist in Archery even remembers the date and time: “May 2, 1970, at 9:30 A.M.,” he said.
Stepping Into the Same Stream Twice
Texas USA The Greek philosopher Heraclitus reasoned 2,500 years ago that everything flows and nothing remains, so no man ever steps into the same river twice. But we can try. Among those trying is Jeff Bennett, a physical scientist at Big Bend National Park who specializes in hydrology, the science of how water moves on and under land. He’s working with Mike Montagne, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Texas Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office in San Marcos.
Keeping Counsel with a Creek
So long as I have a mind that thinks and a heart that loves, I will remember my brother Gary and the little creek valley that bore our footprints for a brief time when we were young. We were transients moving from one epoch in life to another, but the little stream and the woods and fields it drained live larger than one can imagine. Through the vapors of memory, the mystic chords that tug at me from a period so long ago beckon our time spent in the out-of-doors.
Jim Thorpe, Hunting Dogs, and the Half-time Show
Green Bay, New York, Chicago, San Fran and LaRue, Ohio: what do they have in common? NFL franchises. But it was the rural Ohio team that was perhaps the most unusual. Its legacy lives on in the halftime show—a show rooted in marketing hunting dogs. LaRue native Walter Lingo paid $100 for his NFL franchise in June 1922. Lingo had a fascination with Native American lore and a talent for breeding hunting dogs, a vocation he took on at an early age.
Generations Of Sheep Hunting
Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in far southwestern Arizona is remote beyond compare, yet afforded one family a most uncommon sheep hunting experience. Autumn is for remembering. The last light of summer yields to the first beautiful days of fall. This time of year is a communion between what was and what might be. Fall brings with it hunting seasons—and naturally, memories of seasons past.
National Wildlife Refuge Yields Quality Deer Hunting
Zayne Wagner has a whole lot going for him. The grade-school boy loves the outdoors, fishing and hunting, and is often a shadow to his dad and grandpa along the waters and in the woods and fields of eastern Oklahoma. And he lives not too far from Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge on the southwest edge of the Ozark Highlands.
National Wildlife Refuges Prove a Stronghold for Rare Sonoran Pronghorn
If sound had color, what fills your ears on a Sonoran summer day would be a matte monochrome. The flat, nasally shrill of insects that go sight unseen rises to a crescendo and falls away to a lull, like water swelling and falling in a slow, rhythmic lapping on a sandy shoal. It’s sandy here to be sure, but there’s little natural water. It’s locked up in the pulp of cactus or the waxy leaves of sparse green plants.
Jurassic Pork | Sporting Classics Daily
Paddlefish have been around since about the time coal was being made. Fossil records say so. Now paddlefish contribute to anglers’ creels, particularly in the spring as the big fishes follow their instincts to migrate upstream to spawn. They grow like pigs, and by some accounts smoked paddlefish is better than pork cutlets. These Jurassic survivors are living through another age, one pocked by reservoirs behind lofty dams that block migrations.
Tishomingo Turtles
As crickets sing sunshine to sleep, it’s a wake-up call for alligator snapping turtles. They make a living by the dark of the night in big creeks, rivers, and marshes in the southern U.S. But in Oklahoma, where they form a special part of the state’s natural heritage, they’re not quite as abundant as they used to be. They once occupied much of the eastern third of the state, but habitat loss and over-harvest reduced this animal to living in only a few select sites.
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