By Bob Marshall

The Senate has done its job for fish, wildlife and sportsmen—now it’s time for the House to step up.

Monday the Senate passed a new Farm Bill that includes two key provisions considered critical by conservation groups:

– Sod Saver, which safeguards the nation’s dwindling base of native grasslands from agricultural development.
– Making landowner compliance to conservation programs a prerequisite for taxpayer-funded crop insurance subsidies.

“The Senate has produced a bill that makes constructive changes to conservation programs, and it ensures that the shift to crop insurance premium support as the primary component of the farm safety net carries with it protection for wetlands, highly erodible lands and native prairie,” said Steve Kline, TRCP director of government relations.

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Congratulations to users Ty Heitschmidt, nelsojon, and Willy4003. They each get a Bushenll Trophy Cam HD for their Round 2 photos below. We'll be contacting you soon.

Our contest is far from over. Enter your trail cam shots in Round 3 now for your chance at a Trophy Cam HD and to get in the running for a Bushnell prize pack valued at more than $1,200!

Photo submitted by Ty Heitschmidt

User Description: Got this yearling fawn taking cover under its mom... from a hawk whose eyes were bigger than his stomach.

Photo submitted by nelsojon

User Description: Coyotes and a bobcat fighting over a deer carcass in the Paulina area of Central Oregon.

Photo submitted by Willy4003

User Description: Taken 5/13/13 at 2:09am in Northern Minnesota.

Photo submitted by Gary Devine

User Description: I set up three motion trail cameras last month in bear country. Each camera was in a different area. One was near a beaver pond, one was on a mountain top and one was above a ravine near a thicket of rhododendrons. The camera near the thicket was the only one with photos of cubs.... [ Read Full Post ]

By Scott Bestul

Here is the second buck in our latest scoring contest. If you’ve been busy planting food plots, refreshing mineral sites, and getting your cameras ready for the summer, you may have missed the announcement that you could win a Bowtech Experience, the company’s flagship bow for 2013. All you have to do is score some bucks. [ Read Full Post ]

By David Draper

The recent news coming out of Turkey has me reminiscing about my trip there last summer. After a few days spent in Antalya visiting with the innovator behind the UTS-15 shotgun, I kicked around Istanbul for a week just experiencing an amazing city. The apartment I rented was just off Taksim Square, the center of the ongoing protests, and a lot of my favorite meals from Turkey came from the spider web of streets branching from İstiklâl Caddesi, the avenue leading to Taksim that’s been the sight of some of the worst of the clashes between protestors and police. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

Once a year I shoot my sporting clays gun—a Miroku Charles Daly with 32-inch barrels—on a two-day charity preserve pheasant hunt. The stock is fitted to me and the long, heavy barrels move inevitably to the birds. It’s almost impossible to miss with it.   

Longer barrels are easier to shoot with, especially on any kind of crossing bird. Most of my hunting guns now have 28-inch barrels, which seems like a good compromise length. Of course, barrel wall thickness varies and two guns with 28-inch barrels can have very different balance, but in general they have a little bit of weight forward that makes them easier to shoot. In fact, chances are I will shoot a gun pretty well if I pick it up and it feels too heavy in the muzzle. [ Read Full Post ]

By Hal Herring

There is nothing like a good anti-federal-government advertising campaign to rally support for, well, almost anything. In this time of Internal Revenue Service scandals and accusations that the Environmental Protection Agency has charged so-called “conservative” groups for Freedom of Information Act requests that they handed over to environmental groups for free, the time was ripe for a smart advertising professional to tap in to the zeitgeist and try, yet again, to sell a highly skeptical American public on the Pebble Project—a huge gold and copper mine proposed by two foreign mining corporations to be built on public lands in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

On June 4, Northern Dynasty Minerals, Limited, a Vancouver, Canada-based corporation that owns 50 percent of the Pebble Project, ran an ad in the Washington Post and on various political websites that demands an end to what it calls EPA’s “black box bias” against the mine. The ad also claims that the EPA is manipulating public opinion and denying science in response to the results of the EPA’s 14 month-long comprehensive Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA). The EPA's assessment shows that the Pebble Project does indeed threaten the greatest salmon fishery on earth (a $500 million industry annually) and the estimated 14,000 jobs that depend upon it, and will industrialize one of America’s wildest and most pristine expanses of public land, which would forever changing the culture and economy of the 7,500 people, mostly Native Americans, who now call it home.

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