by Chad Love

I've previously blogged about the importance of using live birds for training and how it's smart to use a mixture of both pigeons and pen-raised birds. While I try to mix it up between the two, I have to admit that pigeons are what I use the most. Why? In theory, off-season training with live gamebirds sounds great. In practice, however, there are some issues. [ Read Full Post ]

--Chad Love

Are you in possession of a suspected Bigfoot turd? Maybe a giant fingerprint? Perhaps a clump of fur or some other bit of physical or forensic evidence from the time when that group of suspected Sasquatches broke into your cousin Earl's single-wide while he was gone, drank all his Natty Lite, ate everything in the fridge, tore up the place and then left a big, steaming parting gift on his coffee table before disappearing back into the woods?
 
If you (or your cousin Earl) do happen to have evidence of The Hairy One's existence, then Oxford University wants to talk to you...
 
From this story on Wired.co.uk:
Supposed yeti remains are being put under the microscope in a collaboration between Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology. The Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project has been created to try and entice people and institutions with collections of cryptozoological material to submit it for analysis. Anyone with a sample of organic remains can submit details of where and when it was collected, among other data. 

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by Scott Bestul

The first Minnesota timber wolf killed during a regulated hunting season may fall to a deer hunter. According to this story in the Brainerd Dispatch, the DNR is taking public comment on a proposed two-part wolf season, with the first hunt coinciding with the deer opener on Nov. 3. The second season—which will include both hunting and trapping—will take reopen in late November and close in mid-January, unless a quota of 400 wolves is reached earlier.

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--Chad Love

California is one step closer to banning hunting bears and bobcats with dogs after this bill passed the state senate yesterday. 

From this story on sfgate.com:
The state Senate voted Monday to ban the use of dogs to hunt bears and bobcats, a practice the bill's author compared with shooting animals in a zoo. State Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, introduced the legislation after a California fish and game commissioner posed for photos with a mountain lion he killed during a legal hound hunt in Idaho.

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by Chad Love

We all know that dogs have been hanging around the campfire for a long, long time, and that as a result they have become quite distinct from their wolf ancestors. But now some researchers are positing that the human/dog connection goes way deeper than we ever beleived. In fact, dogs may have been an important clue in one of the biggest evolutionary mysteries in science: how and why did early humans thrive even as the Neanderthals disappeared?

From this story in the Atlantic: 
One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along. They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away. What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals -- and what went so right for us humans? 
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--Chad Love

Are too many deer in the woods hurting biodiversity? That's the thought-provoking argument set out in this New York Times op/ed piece, which argues there are so many deer in the United States today that they are literally eating critical migratory bird habitat into oblivion.

From this story in the New York Times:
"...But one of the biggest contributors to the decline in migratory bird populations has gone largely unnoticed: white-tailed deer. By 1900, deforestation and unregulated hunting had reduced deer populations in the Eastern United States to tiny remnant clusters surviving in remote sanctuaries. But subsequent protective laws and aggressive habitat management allowed deer to bounce back. To this day, wildlife managers slice intact forests into sunny woodlots that maximize the number of deer and the frequency of encounters between deer and hunters. Private landowners are encouraged by wildlife agencies to crisscross their forest acreage with tasty plantings of clover and wheat in support of what is now a burgeoning population of perhaps 50 million white-tailed deer — in some places as many as 75 deer per square mile. 

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