Field & Stream: Hunting, Fishing, and Outdoor Expertise Since 1871

First buck off your own ground, and it’s got tines for days. Congrats, Riley!

@rileyduckman arrowed an Alabama whitetail with long beams, tall tines, and enough bone on his head to make us look twice. But there’s a story in the dirt he came off.

Green started with 141 acres of family ground near Jacksonville, Alabama, that his granddad called the “rabbit farm.” He’s since bought up neighboring parcels, cleared fields, and the place now covers roughly 1,780 contiguous acres. That’s a lot of ground to look after, a lot of work that never really ends, and one heck of a first buck to take off the place.

The comments have already turned to backstraps, as they should. Hot cast iron, plenty of butter, and don’t you dare overcook them. ...

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With $1.25 million on the line, neither tried to push the other out.

World Bass Enterprises’ inaugural The Champions tournament has brought together 30 anglers from the Bassmaster Elite Series and 30 from Major League Fishing’s Bass Pro Tour on Tennessee’s Old Hickory Lake.

The three-day competition carries a $3.25 million purse, including $1.25 million for first place, the largest winner’s payout in professional bass fishing history. Only 15 anglers advance to Saturday’s championship round, when their weights reset to zero.

Kentucky’s Matt Robertson took the opening-day lead with 20 pounds of smallmouth caught below Old Hickory Dam. By 9 a.m. on Day 2, he’d caught three more quality fish and was in position to advance. Rather than continue fishing, he stopped to preserve the spot for the final.

Major League Fishing pro Ron Nelson had found the same stretch of the Cumberland River, and the two were fishing within a few casts of each other. Nelson stayed clear of the water where Robertson had caught his fish, while Robertson encouraged Nelson to catch another keeper and secure his own place in the final. Nelson finished with a 17-pound limit of smallmouth. The two then pulled their boats alongside each other, laid down their rods, and spent the remainder of the day guarding the water. As Field & Stream contributor Shaye Baker reported, their dealings were “nothing short of professional.”

With seven figures at stake, neither angler tried to interfere with the other’s chances. Stay tuned for more coverage by @shayebaker. ...

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Avid bowhunter Clint Casper turned heads in Ohio earlier this month when he killed a massive whitetail he’s been targeting since last season.

Casper tells Field & Stream that he shot the giant buck on the evening of October 2 on his own farm during a lunar cycle that some deer hunters refer to as a “red moon.”

Casper and his father grain farm together in Ohio and have about 600 acres on the farm where they live. He first spotted the buck on that home farm last year and judged him as a 3-and-half year old. “He was probably in the mid-160s, but I knew if he had another year, he could absolutely blow up,” he says. “I rolled the dice and decided to let him walk.”

Full story by @travishallmedia feat. @casperclint powered by @moultrieproducts ...

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There’s no easy way to get a dead moose out of a river.

Nine days into a remote fly-in hunt in the Yukon, Casey Donovan, founder of @yukonunguided, and his crew finally got their bull. Trouble was, the moose ended up in the river, and getting it out of the swamp was a job of its own. They floated the bull to workable ground, field dressed it, and began breaking down the animal for the long haul back to camp.

After a tough season the year before, this bull meant more than a successful hunt. It meant a freezer full of meat for the year ahead. That’s a lot of good eating, but surely they’re starving after packing out several hundred pounds of moose.

Hunt, video, and story by @yukonunguided & @case2jones | Photo of Casey by @jordantuck_ ...

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A million-dollar question. The man behind the mullet has always wanted more dirt.

Before World Bass Enterprises’ inaugural The Champions tournament got underway, The Bass University asked anglers at Nashville Palace what they’d do with the $1.25 million first-place prize. The answers were about what you’d expect from a room full of pro anglers, “bigger boat,” landed in the chat.

Team Stars’ Seth Feider wants to buy his neighbor’s farm. And this isn’t news. Back in 2021, the Minnesota bass pro was already dreaming of 40 acres, a barn, duck sloughs, and enough wildlife to keep him occupied.

Team Stripes’ Ott DeFoe wants a big-block Chevy. Caleb Hudson would pay off his student loans and buy a bigger boat. Dustin Crowell has his wife in mind. All perfectly reasonable plans, depending on your definition of reasonable.

With $3.25 million on the line, somebody’s going home considerably richer. First, of course, they’ll have to catch the fish. What would you buy with $1.25 million?

Q&A by @thebassuniversity 📍 @worldbassenterprises ...

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Before the White House, Theodore Roosevelt was already in the pages of Field & Stream.

In January 1899, while Roosevelt was governor of New York, Field & Stream published “Hunting the Grisly,” an account drawn from his 1893 book The Wilderness Hunter. The story followed Roosevelt into Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains in pursuit of a grizzly bear. Just over two years later, he would become America’s 26th president, bringing with him a lifelong interest in hunting, wildlife, and the conservation of wild places.

Roosevelt’s connection to our pages didn’t end there. In 1904, during his presidency, he appeared in Field & Stream advocating wilderness conservation. And in March 1981, we brought his grizzly story back for our 85th-anniversary edition, alongside the writing of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark, Zane Grey, and Nash Buckingham. Today, on the 168th anniversary of his birth, we’re revisiting a small piece of that history from the Field & Stream archives. ...

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These two visualizations show what a Mallard’s year looks like.

The first one comes from Five Oaks @_fiveoaks_, a research nonprofit based in Humphrey, Arkansas. It shows a drake mallard banded at Five Oaks in November 2024. The bird then travels south to the Tensas Basin before its spring migration north. On the way it stops at wetland complexes in Illinois and Minnesota before summering in the Prairie Pothole region of Canada. The following October, the duck moves south to the area where it was originally banded.

The second one shows a similar visualization of a year in the life of a mallard, except this one was tracked by the Cohen Wildlife Lab @cohenwildlab, which is based in Tennessee. “As we get ready for our first push of mallards, we look back to this drake that traveled over 3,500 miles in one year and was harvested in the same area it spent the previous winter,” wrote the lab.

Drop a “FLIGHT” comment & we’ll DM you the full story by @sagemwrites featuring @_fiveoaks_ & @cohenwildlab. Photography by @ryanaskren. ...

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Bass fishing has never seen a payday like this.

Two reigning Anglers of the Year, two rival circuits, and $3.25 million on the line. This week, Trey McKinney of the Bassmaster Elite Series and Zack Birge of the MLF Bass Pro Tour will captain opposing teams at the inaugural World Bass Enterprises The Champions tournament on Old Hickory Lake outside Nashville. Sixty-two anglers will compete over three days, October 29–31, for the largest purse in bass fishing history, with $1.25 million going to the winner. No entry fees, guaranteed payouts for every competitor, and two amateur fishermen getting the same shot at the money as the pros.

As McKinney told Field & Stream’s Shaye Baker, with the regular season over, no points to protect, and expenses covered, the anglers can go into this one “just honestly swinging for the fence.” It’s a rare meeting of the sport’s best fishermen, with a record payday and a year’s worth of bragging rights up for grabs.

Follow @fieldandstream for more @worldbassenterprises reporting and coverage from The Champions coming soon by @shayebaker. ...

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A rare piece of hunting history, made all the better by the fact that it began with an ordinary afternoon after work.

On October 29, 1965, Mel Johnson finished his shift at a Caterpillar plant and headed for a soybean field in Peoria County, Illinois. He’d spotted an enormous buck there before, so he passed up his usual treestand and threw together a brush blind along the field’s edge. The buck appeared about 300 yards out and eventually wandered within 10 yards, so close that Johnson couldn’t draw without giving himself away. He waited until the deer passed, stood up, and sent an arrow from his 72-pound recurve through both lungs. The buck reportedly field-dressed at 270 pounds. Even the record books needed a second look. The first official scoring overlooked a measurement, and Johnson caught the mistake. The corrected score came to 204 4/8 inches, establishing a Pope & Young world record that has stood.

Sixty-one years later, on this Old School Sunday, Johnson’s beanfield buck remains the Pope & Young world record typical whitetail. ...

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She has 31 miles between her and another championship.

Every October, nearly 1,000 paddlers gather on the Tennessee River for the Chattajack 31, a race through 27 miles of gorge country bordered by some of the finest public hunting ground in the state. The neighboring 24,000-acre Prentice-Cooper Wildlife Management Area has produced 170-inch-class whitetails, while the river itself is a hotspot for bass and catfish anglers.

Among the racers is Whitney Stephenson, a Miami based personal trainer who won the stand-up paddleboard division last year by sprinting the final five miles without stopping. She’s back this weekend to defend her title, which means another early morning surrounded by hundreds of paddlers and, if things go as they have before, the sound of deer rifles carrying across the river.

The Chattajack also supports the Tennessee River Gorge Trust, which works to protect the country that makes the race possible. Stephenson figures hunters, anglers, and paddlers have more in common than they might think, and it’s hard to argue with her. We all need clean water, healthy habitat, and somewhere worth going.

Field & Stream’s Travis Hall caught up with the returning champion to talk about the grueling race, the strategy behind winning it, and why protecting the gorge matters to everyone who uses it.

Drop a “31” comment and we’ll DM you the full @travishallmedia story featuring @stephensonwhit. ...

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“Nothing could have prepared me for the grandeur of those waters.”

Tom Skerritt spent more than six decades in film and television, with memorable roles in “MAS*H,” “Alien,” “Top Gun,” and “Picket Fences.” But for many anglers, he’ll be remembered as Reverend John Maclean in Robert Redford’s 1992 film “A River Runs Through It.”

Skerritt, who died Wednesday at 93, developed a lasting appreciation for the Montana rivers where the film was made. Thirty years later, he returned to the Gallatin for “Reflections of the River,” a documentary project directed by Joe Thomas.

Skerritt served on the board of American Rivers and supported Montana’s 2023 Wildlands Festival, which raised $513,473 for American Rivers and the Gallatin River Task Force. His participation helped draw attention to conservation efforts along the waterways that had captivated him decades earlier. “Few things are as majestic or pulsing with life as a river, and we are as much its stewards as its beneficiaries,” he said. ...

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