MeatEater

Subscribe This week Brent's sharing two stories where the only thing they have in common is that he's telling them in English. Well, his version of English anyway. The first is from a father son scouting trip with his son, Hunter, when Hunter was six. The follow up tale is from one his father shared with him about a man who was difficult to work with back in the 1980s. While he may have had a reason to be difficult, he didn't have an excuse for it. How that worked out is a good lesson for us all.

On June 28, Brittany Clark was fatally attacked by an alligator in Florida. The incident occurred when the 31-year-old woman went for a swim in the Econlockhatchee River with her boyfriend and best friend after hiking in the Little Big Eco State Forest, Grant Eller, a lieutenant with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, reported in a press conference. The group was cooling down, kneeling in about three feet of water when the alligator attacked, biting both her arms.

A lot of poaching investigations seem to end with wrist slaps, but that’s hardly the case for former corrections officer, Christopher Matson (48) of Umatilla, Oregon. After pleading guilty to numerous wildlife and firearm-related felonies, Matson was sentenced to 24 months probation, a lifetime hunting ban, 300 hours of community service, forfeiture of firearms and property seized, and is forced to pay more than $114,000 in fines.

Subscribe This week on In Pursuit, Rich sits down with longtime friend, hunter, endurance athlete, and Leadville local David Curtis. From getting lost on his first elk hunt to completing the legendary Leadman series, David shares what keeps him coming back to hard things. The conversation dives into hunting, fatherhood, endurance racing, raising resilient kids, and why some of life's best lessons are learned in the mountains.

For most of my bowhunting career, I've carried a compound bow. But the very first time I toted a bow to the whitetail woods, I carried a borrowed Bear recurve. No deer were harmed on that first day, but I’ll never forget the feeling of walking into the woods with that lightweight recurve at my side. I appreciate the speed, accuracy, and technology that modern compounds offer. You can make shots on deer with a compound that you wouldn’t dream of doing with traditional equipment.

Subscribe The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most famous laws and contributions to world culture, yet half-a-century after its passage it has become yet another political lightning rod. But if you value having Thoreau’s “entire Earth,” the ESA is one of America’s best ideas. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.

Few things humble a man like public land elk hunting. You can spend all year shooting your bow, studying maps, watching videos, and convincing yourself you've got elk figured out. Then opening morning rolls around, and they make you look completely incompetent. The mountains are steep. Deadfall sucks. The weather changes by the hour, and elk are good at avoiding things that want to kill them. If you look at harvest statistics across the West, the story is pretty clear.

A bill with significant positive implications for hunters, anglers, and other recreational users of public lands is working its way through the Legislative Branch. America the Beautiful Act, or S. 1547, was sponsored by Senator Steve Daines of Montana and Senator Angus King of Maine on May 1. Earlier in June, it took a meaningful step toward being put into law when it unanimously passed out of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Subscribe In this bonus drop of Backwoods University, we have the opportunity to hear from a man named Joshua Lawes, who spent several years in the wild lands of Africa, working in antipoaching teams. As you can imagine, he has some pretty wild and fascinating tales, along with some insight on how conservation works in Africa and how it dippers for North America.

You might be familiar with some of the biggest bucks ever killed, named after hunters that bagged them. The Hanson Buck, the largest typical whitetail that still sits atop the record books. Or the Butcher Buck, the second biggest non-typical ever taken, with a rack that looks more like a geological formation than deer antlers. But, you might be less familiar with Boone and Crockett’s “Picked Up” category, which recognizes some of the world’s biggest dead heads ever found.