Spring in the Southern Appalachians is truly awe-inspiring. Looking out over the Southern Appalachian landscape from the Blue Ridge Parkway, one sees a beautiful landscape of rolling hills and vibrant green forests as far as the eye can see. The lush, closed canopy forests that dominate the region’s public lands are no doubt aesthetically beautiful, but they lack diverse forest habitat that many forest wildlife depend upon. In December 2020, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ ...

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 ...

Montana officials approved plans to temporarily expand emergency haying and grazing on various wildlife management areas in support of livestock producers affected by drought. The decision freed up 15 new emergency haying and grazing leases at sites in 14 wildlife management areas. Three of the affected areas — the Canyon Ferry, Fleecer Mountain and Blacktail wildlife management areas — lie in southwest Montana in Broadwater, Silver Bow, Deer Lodge, Beaverhead and Madison counties. Read ...

Photo by Erich Dutchover The vast, open sagebrush country of Nevada is often overlooked by travelers passing through. Even long-time residents take this drab, grey-green desert shrub for granted. The once ubiquitous sagebrush is vanishing in plain site, yet it rarely gets the attention of other imperiled landscapes. About half of the 500,000 square miles of sagebrush that once covered large expanses of North America still remains. Nevada loses an average of 200,000 acres of sagebrush every ...

On August 10, the Idaho Department of Lands (“IDL”) notified Trident Holdings, LLC that the Trident proposal to exchange just over 20,000 acres of timberland in northern Idaho for a similar amount of acreage of state endowment land around Payette Lake had been rejected. Idaho BHA has been involved in efforts to develop conservation solutions as alternatives to development on endowment lands around Payette Lake, and background on this work can be found here, as well as in an update post ...