Podcasts are one of the dominant forms of storytelling today, but it's something we can forget in the hurly burly of our daily lives: Stories are meant for telling, and we crave to listen to them. With Hal Herring, host of BHA's Podcast & Blast, those stories get aired every two weeks as Hal dives into tales of conservation, hunting and fishing - and the people who make that world tick and bugle and who huff up the hills of this changing place we call home. Here are 10 great stories from ...

Will we act now to save America’s iconic grasslands? The southern population of the lesser prairie chicken has been listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as endangered, a listing that will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the fate of this gamebird and its habitat on the southern Great Plains. But this conversation with Ted Koch, a former endangered species biologist, executive director of the North American Grouse Partnership, and chair of BHA’s North American ...

Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, oral historian, National Geographic Fellow and author of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods. Join Hal and Lyndsie as they explore the many paths that led to her book on the booming trade in stolen timber and other forest products from America’s public and private lands. You will never look at a beautiful violin or guitar quite the same (“music wood’ is among the most poached and the most valuable), and you will be left pondering a very ...

Dr. Susan Leopold is an ethnobotanist who spent the early years of her career in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon and Central America. An epiphany led her home, to Virginia and to the American heartland of the Ohio River, to study native plants, medicinal herbs and the natural and human history of this wild, diverse and beleaguered corner of our world. Leopold is the executive director of the United Plant Savers, a group dedicated to protecting imperiled native plants like ginseng and ...

More than 82,000 feral horses roam U.S. public lands, about four times as many as the land and water can sustain. Almost all of them live in Nevada, the most arid state in the union, where their impacts are almost unimaginable: desertification and massive loss of wildlife, ranging from pollinators and other insects to sage grouse, elk, mule deer and pronghorn. The Bureau of Land Management is doing what it can to address this crisis, but the agency finds itself in an impossible position ...

Ashley Peters grew up in rural Iowa, in a landscape of cornfields and monoculture agriculture. Looking for a wilder and wider life, she found her way to U.S. Forest Service trail jobs in the Minnesota Boundary Waters and in Alaska, to a degree in communications, and to conservation work ranging from the gator-bellowing swamps of Louisiana to the woodcock and grouse popple of the upper Midwest. Hal and Ashley talk the deep engagement and beginners' mindset of adult-onset hunting and fishing, ...

A flamboyant Western politician, yelling hatred for the federal government, accusing anyone who questioned him of being a “communist,” secretly planning a takeover and selloff of 230 million acres of public land to his cronies. Sounds like today, yes? Well, it was 1947, and it almost worked. Montana-born, New York City-seasoned reporter and writer Nate Schweber uncovers the whole sordid, instructive history in his wild ride of a book, This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the ...

Simon Gawesworth is a second-generation master flycasting instructor and world casting champion, author of three books on Spey casting, and currently works as the education and engagement manager for Far Bank. A native Brit, he has been working in the flyfishing industry in the U.S. for the past 25 years and fishing the fresh and saltwater globe from Tierra del Fuego to Montana to Christmas Island. Hal and Simon range far on this interview: through Simon’s work with Far Bank (which includes ...

Kyle Lybarger, a 29-year-old consulting forester, father, deer-hunter, small creek addict and self-proclaimed “native plant nerd” of Hartselle, Alabama, is a major part of a new and wonderful current sweeping America. Kyle’s Native Habitat Project videos – simple, one-minute vignettes of obscure native plants, remnant grasslands and wildlife-vibrant native plant landscapes – have been downloaded millions of times. The Native Habitat Project is bizarre insects and forgotten plants, science ...