The forces of privatization are very definitely on the march. From hunting access and opportunity to the age-old conflict over who has the right to fish or swim or boat on our waterways, privatization is arguably the defining debate in the United States right now. Join us for the story of an 80-year Colorado fly fisherman who is attempting to halt this slide toward privatizing stream and river access in his state, maybe once and for all.  Law professor, attorney and public lands and water ...

The Montana chapter of BHA works hard to uphold the gold standard in public hunting opportunities, with one of the longest elk and mule deer hunting seasons in the U.S., a wealth of public land, and one of the most innovative private land access programs ever devised. But the winds of change are howling. MT BHA fought back this legislative session against efforts to commercialize and privatize our public wildlife. BHA members testified before committees, published op-eds and mobilized more ...

Tony Latham is a retired game warden with 25 years’ experience working undercover on some of Idaho’s wildest public lands and in pursuit of some of the West’s nastiest wildlife criminals. Undercover work is a total immersion in a subculture: of cheap alcohol and casual violence, dive bars and broken people, slaughtered fish and wildlife, and coldly professional violators. The job exacts its own price, and nobody could ever say they do it for the pay. It’s only for the truly committed, those ...

Everybody knows that wildlife in the United States is owned by all of us. Elk, deer and other species are held in the public trust, period. But what happens when publicly owned big game is commercialized – and when hunting opportunity for public wildlife is sold to the highest bidder? What happens when so-called “private land” licenses can be used on public land? Some Western states are grappling with those questions now, but New Mexico public land elk hunters have been living under these ...

Dan O’Brien ranches buffalo over 26,000 acres of deeded and public lands 30 miles outside of Hermosa, South Dakota. He has been a writer of fiction and nonfiction, a dog trainer and falconer for almost 60 years. Dan is the founder of Wild Idea, a company that brings together the respectful production of some of the world’s best meat with a new vision for our rural economy, along with the restoration, on a grand scale, of mixed-grass prairie and its wildlife, native plants and birds. Join us ...

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), a hunter, angler, longtime conservation champion and BHA member, has introduced legislation known as the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (S. 2372). This bipartisan bill would dedicate nearly $1.4 billion annually to fund projects by state and tribal fish and wildlife agencies that benefit both game and non-game species. In partnership with a broad coalition of organizations, businesses and fish and wildlife management agencies that make up the Alliance for ...

Ed Arnett is the hunting-est, bird-doggingest biologist in America, chief scientist for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership as well as host of the national conservation TV series This American Land. Hal and Ed have been friends and hunted together for more than a decade. In this interview they sit down to talk sage grouse, fire, public lands and the future of sagebrush ecosystems, which also means the future of the myriad species – from pronghorn and mule deer to pygmy rabbits ...

Meredith and Tory Taylor have been outfitters, guides and conservation leaders in the wild heart of Wyoming’s Greater Yellowstone for almost 50 years. Over those decades, they have explored places few others have ever seen, shown generations of Americans the wonders of hunting and fishing and wilderness, horses, wolves, storms and stars, wildflower meadows and summer snowbanks, tumbling whitewater creeks and towering black-rock peaks. Theirs is a marriage and an adventure partnership, based ...

  “I never found a place I belong, so I’m making one.” Jonathan Wilkins is the founder of Black Duck Revival, a hunting and fishing guide service and simple lodge – built by his own two hands from an old church building in Brinkley, Arkansas. Jonathan is also a father and husband, a next-level forager and cook, a writer and working man. As he wrote in an essay for Outdoor Life last winter, “I am a Black man. Actually, I am biracial, but I live in a place where that nuance of truth is, most ...

The remote Red Desert is a place of dreams, albeit dreams sometimes replete with choking alkali dust, freezing winds, gumbo mud, and the scattered, bleached bones of the unlucky or unfit of all species. But it’s a place of elk, toad mule deer, herds of pronghorn and the thunder of flushing sage hens, too – all of which have to be able to move long distances to range and water and shelter from the mighty elements, in the age-old way of desert dwellers, if they are to survive. Join us with ...