By Chad Love

I recently blogged about the potential use of aerial drones as scouting/hunting tools, costs involved in building viable home-made models, and the possible decrease in price with advances in technology and miniaturization. I don't want to claim that I'm prescient or anything, because we're not there yet from a commercial product standpoint (of course, SHOT opens next week so who knows what's coming down the pike), but this YouTube video involving a moose and a civilian hobbyist quad-roter drone gives us a peek of our potential future.

By Chad Love

The brilliant cyberpunk novelist William Gibson may, or may not (it's attributed to him, anyway) have once said, "the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed yet." Why, you may ask, am I leading off this ostensibly hunting and/or fishing news blog post with a quote from a semi-obscure cult sci-fi novelist? Because the future of game camera technology is here - it's just not evenly distributed, nor is it quite tailored for hunting...yet.

From this story in the Boston Globe:
They are better known as stealthy killing machines to take out suspected terrorists with pinpoint accuracy. But drones are also being put to more benign use in skies across several continents to track endangered wildlife, spot poachers, and chart forest loss. Although it is still the ‘‘dawn of drone ecology,’’ as one innovator calls it, these unmanned aerial vehicles are skimming over Indonesia’s jungle canopy to photograph orangutans, protect rhinos in Nepal, and study invasive aquatic plants in Florida...Relatively cheap, portable, and earth-hugging, the drones fill a gap between satellite and manned aircraft imagery and on-the-ground observations, said Percival Franklin at the University of Florida, which has been developing such drones for more than a decade.

By Chad Love

Are you a gadgeteer, an early adopter or a fan of the latest, the greatest, the coolest or the newly-improved? Does your garage resemble the bargain cave at a Cabela's store?

Are you constantly buying, trying and then casting aside every new piece of gear or the latest super-duper, high-tech camo pattern that comes down the pike? Then maybe you could learn a thing or two from Bernard Baxter.

From this story in the (Iona County, Mich.) Sentinel-Standard:

Bernard Baxter, 85, has shot almost as many deer as the number of years he has been hunting. This year on Nov. 16, using his trusty Remington 16-gauge, three-shot automatic shotgun, he shot his 55th, a six point buck.

By Chad Love

Here's one from the "Why Didn't I Think Of That?" files...

Everyone knows that punking your hunting buddy's trail cam with fake creature photos is a real time-consuming pain, what with all the getting in and out of fake Bigfoot suits, leprechaun knickers and alien bodies and such. So don't. If you've got even marginal Photoshop skills then don't bother taking the creature to the camera, instead just take the camera to the creature...

From this story on thechive.com: