By Chad Love

The shooting of a grizzly bear in Grand Teton National Park by hunters participating in a special elk reduction hunt has sparked calls from opponents to end the hunt.

From this story in the Jackson Hole News and Guide:
A hunter who was yards away when others killed a grizzly in Grand Teton National Park on Thanksgiving Day described a volley of shots and then shocked men retreating from the woods. Charles Peet, of Jackson, said Monday that he was hunting “75 to 100 yards” from where 48-year-old David Trembly, of Dubois, and Trembly’s 20- and 17-year-old sons gunned down the adult male bear....Park officials investigating the incident haven’t said whether the three hunters deployed bear spray before the shooting. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

Now here’s an original concept—a single book dedicated to safaris in one African country, rather than a book filled with chapters on different countries that leaves you saying “Yes, but…” when you get to the end. Diana Rupp, who is Editor of Sports Afield and an experienced Namibia hand, has interviewed a dozen PHs from that country on the ins and outs of safaris there, and set down what they had to say between these covers.

I know a number of otherwise experienced hunters who have never been to Africa, and the reasons they offers are unstable, corrupt governments, odd incomprehensible regulations, strange diseases, outrageous costs, and the difficulty of getting there and back. While this is a pretty fair description of the United States, none of it applies to Namibia. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

Thanks to Deadeye Dick for this idea, but before we get to scopes, here are two more handloading tips that I want to get down before I forget them.

Before I resize my cases, I clean the carbon off the necks with a metal polish called Simichrome. Then I wipe off the black ugh and throw them in the case tumbler with the fired primers still in place. This saves you having to poke pieces of ground-up corncob out of the flasholes.

If you want to do a really thorough job of degreasing, soak the re-sized shells in acetone for 15 minutes. You do this outdoors, or in the garage with the doors open. They dry off very quickly, and if you want to speed up the process even more, turn a fan on them.

OK, scopes. Because long-range shooting is now all the rage, some scope designers have made their reticles things of unholy complexity, packed with dots, lines, very small lines, squiggles and, in some cases, runes. This is due to the belief that a) the more complex it is, the better it is, and b) the people who design hunting optics have apparently done precious little hunting and intend to sell these things to people who are likewise unqualified. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

“The only time I ever got my s**t together, I couldn’t pick it up.”—Roger Miller

Packing successfully for a hunting trip is far more important than making out a will which will hold up. If you die and your will is successfully contested, what do you care? You’re dead. If, however, you bring only longjohn bottoms on a hunt and leave the tops at home, you’ll regret it bitterly for a week or more.

Because I’m at the age when I have trouble remembering who I am, much less all the stuff that I have to take along, I’ve developed a system that’s worked pretty well. First, take out all the hunting gear you own. I mean everything, even if it has no place where you’re going.

Second, assemble what you need, and don’t do this by simply slinging it into a duffle bag. Don’t assume that you have patches and gun oil in your cleaning kit. You may have taken them out on the last trip because the TSA doesn’t allow gun oil. Are all your batteries fresh? Have you gained so much weight since last season that, when you button your heavy pants, little purple veins erupt on your nose?
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By Chad Love

One of the standard scenes in many of Gary Larson's brilliant, and lamentably no more, one-frame The Far Side cartoons is of a group of lions and/or vultures gathered around a carcass, feeding, with some hilarious caption underneath. One wonders what Larson may have come up with after watching this amazing footage of a group of Montana mountain lions feeding on an elk carcass.

From this story in the Missoulian: 

A Darby couple has captured some amazing video footage of several mountain lions feeding on an elk carcass in their pasture. Ben Ricciardi, who lives with his wife Betty on the West Fork Road near the Nez Perce cutoff, noticed that something had killed an elk in his pasture about a week ago. He set up a motion-detecting camera pointed at the carcass out of curiosity, and the footage he got was incredible.

In two separate 10-second clips, a group of mountain lions can be seen hanging around the carcass at night. One lion can be seen chewing on the carcass and dragging it a little ways. “I’ve never seen nothing like it,” Ricciardi said. “That carcass is only 75 or 80 feet from my house. They devoured that whole elk in three days. Hide, bones, everything. They really did.” 
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By David Draper

You picked it. I ate it. Last month, I asked Wild Chef readers to vote on how I should prepare the heart from my Nebraska antelope. For awhile, pickling was well in the lead and, truth be told, I was kind of looking forward to trying that. At the end, frying won out, which I was okay with too. So here it is, chicken-fried antelope heart with mashed potatoes and white gravy. As a side, I also had some fried heart fingers with a friend’s homemade spicy barbecue sauce.

I trimmed the heart of all the sinew and fat, then butterflied it open. We had a hippie friend over and neither she nor my girlfriend, T. Rebel, were up for a full steak, which is why I sliced a bunch of fingers to fry. I did leave one slice steak sized for me. All of it got marinated in condensed milk for an hour or so while our friend regaled us with tales from her recent trip to French Guiana. This meal probably wouldn’t compete with some of the French food she had there, but she’s no stranger to good down-home country cooking either and was game to try the heart. 
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