This article, produced by Orion, originally appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.
By Corey Ellis
Generally, the hunting community and wildlife managers focus on entire populations of animals and game species. Yet, we as hunters and anglers rarely make decisions that affect entire populations. But ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase the campfire Backcountry Journal
This article, produced by Orion, originally appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.
BY TODD TANNER
I grew up hunting and fishing.
One of my earliest memories is of following my father through the autumn woods, the forest floor littered with a carpet of yellow, scarlet and burnt orange leaves. I walked ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase the campfire Backcountry Journal
This article, produced by Orion, originally appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.
BY JAN DIZARD AND PHIL T. SENG
Few topics create as much furor around the campfire or the hunt club as the use of baiting in hunting. What’s the big deal? It’s not clear exactly when humans began manipulating the ...
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All photos courtesy of Mike McTee, MPG Ranch
This article, produced by Orion, originally appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.
By Jan Dizard and Corey Ellis
For centuries lead has been a preferred material for fishing tackle, balls, shot and bullets. It is also deadly in other ways; scientists have ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase Backcountry Journal
This article, produced by Orion, originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.
By Harley McAllister and Corey Ellis
Under what circumstances is the killing of an animal ethical when the primary motivation is not consumption? This is a tricky issue, and all the more so due to the attention it ...
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By Corey Ellis
One of the greatest impacts of the hunting conservation movement that is our history, all hunters’ history, did not only benefit the game species that hunters pursue. That sage flat that hunters protected not only saved pronghorns and sage grouse; it also saved long-billed curlews and gray flycatchers. A ponderosa glade that was purchased with sportsmen’s dollars and deposited in the bank of public lands not only protected wintering grounds for elk and mule deer; it also ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase Backcountry Journal Winter 2020 orion
Photo by Alex Kim
This article first appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA and get the journal, quarterly, in your mailbox.
By Corey Ellis
While recently rereading Beyond Fair Chase by Jim Posewitz, the founder of Orion and a conservation legend and expert in hunting ethics, I was struck by a section that had not caught my attention before; the section was titled, "Physical Fitness as a Part of Preparation." Although we often think of fitness in preparation ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase the campfire Backcountry Journal orion fall 2019
This article first appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA and get the journal, quarterly, in your mailbox.
By Patt Dorsey
There is a lot we know about chronic wasting disease and there is much to learn. We know that CWD is affecting members of the deer family, including mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk and moose. We also know that CWD is spreading. Biologists have now detected it in 26 U.S. states and in three Canadian provinces.
Scientists know that prions ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase Backcountry Journal featured summer 2019 orion
Above: In 2016 the BHA North American board passed a policy statement in support of policies which aim to prohibit new captive cervid canned hunting operations. As concerns around the spread of CWD from captive cervid operations mount throughout the country, BHA chapters are drawing on this statement to advance policies that put meaningful limits on such operations. Photo by Lynn Bystrom
by Jan Dizard
Orion and BHA share a commitment to face clearly the many ethical and related ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase Backcountry Journal orion Spring 2019
by Tovar Cerulli - Orion: The Hunter's Institute
The image is familiar: A hunter crouches beside a dead deer, grinning into the camera. What do we make of this picture?
We all see the hunter’s smile. We all see the beautiful animal, now dead. And we all recognize some connection between the two. From there, though, interpretations diverge wildly.
Critics of hunting are apt to see mindless brutality. The hunter has killed, appears to have enjoyed killing, and now gloats over a carcass. ...
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Photo by Barry and Cathy Beck
On an October morning a decade or so ago, I was hunting woodcock in an abandoned orchard. A flight had come in and, in less than an hour, I collected my three-bird limit. That evening I got a call from an acquaintance, a deer hunter, who hunts the same orchard. He asked how I did and if I’d seen evidence of deer. How, I asked, had he known I had been hunting there that morning? He said he saw me on the trail camera he’d placed in cover. I was amused.
It’s now ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase the campfire Backcountry Journal
Photo by Daniel Wilde
For roughly two-thirds of the 20th Century, hunters and fishers were the bedrock of conservation. But beginning in the early 1970s, the ground shifted. The accomplishments of the conservation movement, to which hunters contributed mightily, began to pale in the face of new environmental issues and a new environmental movement that had priorities not centered on restoration of game and fish and the habitats on which they depend. Indeed, protection of wildlife and ...
Media Backcountry Journal Fair Chase the campfire Backcountry Journal