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

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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A proposed 211-mile road could change the future of Alaska’s Brooks Range.

This visualization maps the proposed Ambler Road and the infrastructure that would come with it, including thousands of water crossings, access roads, and gravel mines. It offers a closer look at the scale of the project and what’s at stake for one of Alaska’s wildest landscapes.

Visualization and photo credit: @MoreThanJustParks.

Story by @travishallmedia

Drop an “AMBLER” comment & we’ll DM you the public comment portal. ...

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The rut waits for no one.

And few know it better than Larry Weishuhn. For nearly 40 years, Weishuhn has been known as “Mr. Whitetail.”Spend a little time with him, and you’ll understand why. He’s spent a lifetime studying the biology, behavior, and breeding patterns of one of America’s most treasured big game animals.

With the rut on every deer hunter’s mind, our newest Field & Stream Story follows Weishuhn into the deer woods as he breaks down the science behind breeding season, what triggers the rut, and why even decades of experience can’t make a whitetail entirely predictable.

Watch the full Field & Stream story powered by @moultrieproducts featuring @larryweishuhn on F&S YT. ...

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Feezer’s full but fans have other ideas.

What started as a group of friends ripping moto bikes wide-open in Minnesota has grown into CboysTV, a motorsports media business with millions of viewers.

Co-founder Ben Roth and the crew have built their Cboy community on dirt bikes, sleds, trucks, and a talent for taking mechanical ideas well past the drawing board. From miniature trucks and a Lightning McQueen-inspired Porsche to wildly modified Subarus… their builds fully deliver in the imagination department and then some.

Why this update is pertinent programming: Roth recently posted photos from an elk hunt with a simple recap, a two-word caption: “Freezer Filler.”

Despite the brevity, and no shame for a TLDR photo dump but one comment asking for more Cboys hunting videos drew over 800 likes in the first hour. Others subsequently called for an entire outdoors channel.

Could hunting be the next chapter for a crew that’s already turned its own horse-powered interests into a media business? The comments suggest there’s an audience for it but drop your knee-jerk hot takes before you overthink it. Better yet, what would you want to see from a @cboystv outdoor channel and if your answer is “who the hell are Cboys,” fair enough. ...

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She just hit the century mark.

In 1960, Joan Wulff sent a fly 161 feet using a bamboo rod, a silk shooting head, and monofilament running line. One backcast, one forward cast, and enough line in the air to make a modern graphite rod feel inadequate. She’d already won 17 national casting titles, including a 1951 distance championship against an all-male field. The woman knew a thing or two about turning over a loop.

Born Joan Salvato in 1926, Wulff picked up her father’s fly rod at 10 and won her first national title at 16. She later founded the Wulff School of Fly Fishing with her husband, Lee, in the Catskills, where generations of anglers learned that a good cast has considerably more to do with timing than brute strength.

Joan Wulff turned 100 this October. ...

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A Ford dealer’s buck of a lifetime.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt Luckey ran a Ford dealership and garage in western New York. Every fall, he traveled across the state to hunt the Adirondacks with his buddies. When a short deer season finally opened closer to home in Allegany County, Luckey gathered his brother and a few friends for a deer drive.

One November afternoon in 1939, a giant whitetail came bounding through the timber in 20 foot leaps. Luckey waited for an opening, and the buck disappeared into the woods. The hunting party followed its trail and eventually recovered a 195 pound dressed whitetail carrying 14 points.

The antlers spent years hanging in Luckey’s Ford dealership before being officially measured in 1955. At 198 3/8 inches, the rack became the world record typical whitetail, with main beams stretching nearly 30 inches apiece despite an inside spread of just 18 1/8 inches.

The story took another turn in 1978 when a pair of sheds believed to belong to the same buck disappeared from a fairground exhibit. Sixteen years later, an anonymous tip led conservation officers to the missing antlers.

Luckey’s buck eventually lost its world record title, but 87 years later, New York’s typical whitetail record still belongs to the Ford dealer from Allegany County on this Old School Sunday. ...

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Worth the wait.

Graham Smith first spotted this North Carolina whitetail in 2022. After passing on opportunities and coming up empty on previous encounters, he finally got his chance on the second day of the 2026 season.

At 9.5 years old, the 23-point non-typical grossed 203 3/8 inches on the Buckmasters Trophy Records scale, making it the No. 2 bow-killed irregular whitetail ever scored by Buckmasters in North Carolina.

Full story by Josh Honeycutt ...

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