For many Americans, summer offers a chance to get away and recreate outside. That was the case for me at the beginning of August, and off my wife and I went in search of cooler temperatures. We found what we were looking for in a little 100-year-old cabin, loaned to us by friends. It lies […]
Photo: Relocating via helicopter in Texas, these pronghorn get a new perspective on life I am fascinated by pronghorn antelopes. I don’t remember the first time I saw one, but the first time I had an opportunity to look at them closely and purposefully was last year while elk hunting in the Sangre de Cristo […]
To me, September 1st means the beginning of the end of summer. It’s the opening day of dove season, and the beginning of the hunting season more broadly construed. It marks the time when I begin to focus less on rod and more on gun. This year on September 1st, I was in a sunflower […]
Photo: Peche’s shrimp I love fishing. I also love seafood. As a recreational fisherman, I almost invariably release what I catch. Which, incidentally, belies the rhetoric of some of my fellow recreational anglers who advocate for fuzzier science, looser regulations, longer seasons, more allocation, and larger limits. “We want to catch more fish! We need […]
On April 17, Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, announced the approval of exempted fishing permits (EFPs) for the recreational red snapper fisheries in both state and federal waters of the five Gulf of Mexico states – Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Thus the entire red snapper fishery in the Gulf will be managed under […]
A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to assist with a desert bighorn sheep (ovis canadensis nelson) recovery and translocation project in the Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas. We captured 82 bighorns by helicopter, carried them to a processing station where we collected blood samples, hair samples, nasal swabs and the like; GPS […]
In his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry identified two poles running through America’s engagement with its natural resources. These two poles he calls exploitation and nurture. “The exploiter is a specialist,” says Berry, “the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The […]
A thought that saturates my consciousness with respect to conservation in general is what I have come to think of as the psychological problem of urbanization. Since the high middle ages, in the West, people have been increasingly, gradually, aggregating in cities. And this aggregation is speeding up. A threshold was crossed in the American […]
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