BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 137: Marine Veteran and Storyteller Russell Worth Parker Russell Worth Parker, known as Worth, is a retired Marine and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. After 27 years in the Corps, he is home in Wilmington, North Carolina, hunting and fishing and being a husband and father – and has, as he puts it, “fallen backwards into a writing career.” Parker’s work has been published in The New York Times, Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, Backcountry Journal, Shooting Sportsman, Salt Magazine and military websites such as SOFLETE.com. Join us for a full-tilt conversation that ranges from BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative to the Drive-by Truckers, Cormac McCarthy, veterans hunting Texas turkeys, traumatic brain injury and war. We also discuss the 80s classic film Red Dawn.

Russell Worth Parker - Marine Veteran and Storyteller

Striped bass are arguably the most important fish – culturally and economically – on the Atlantic seaboard. And right now, anglers are spearheading a push to conserve and rebuild striper populations, which have suffered in recent decades because of overfishing and poor habitat. What’s the future of this iconic Eastern species, and what opportunities can we create to ensure our continued ability to fish for striped bass? Hal talks with Mike Woods, chair of BHA’s New England chapter, recipient of BHA’s Jim Posewitz award and resident of Rhode Island, and Chris Borgatti, BHA’s New York and New England chapter coordinator who hails from Massachusetts, about the past, present and achievable future of striped bass fisheries in the eastern United States. As Chris says, “New England might not have as much public land as in the West, but what’s there is vital to the huge population centers in the East. And it makes the fight for conservation, habitat, access and opportunity even more important.” Join them for a far-reaching conversation that hits on all aspects of the outdoor lifestyle along the New England coast.

Saving the Striped Bass with Mike Woods and Chris Borgatti

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 135: Rue Mapp, founder and CEO, Outdoor Afro   Rue Mapp transformed her kitchen table blog into a national nature business and movement. Today, Mapp is founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has continued to celebrate and inspire Black connections and leadership in nature across the United States. Mapp also is an award-winning and inspirational leader, speaker, public lands champion and author. Her first national book, Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors, will be released in the fall. Mapp is a National Geographic 2019 fellow, Heinz Awards honoree and National Wildlife Federation communication award recipient as well. Her work has earned international media attention from Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times, Good Morning America, NPR, NBC’s TODAY, Forbes and MeatEater. Be inspired by her wide-ranging conversation with Hal Herring, and follow her adventures @RueMapp.

Rue Mapp - Founder and CEO, Outdoor Afro

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 134: Snake River Dams We are teetering on the brink of what could be the greatest conservation success story of the past 50 years. The removal of four outdated and failing dams on the lower Snake River will restore the passage of millions of salmon and steelhead upstream into 5500 square miles of the most intact, coldwater spawning and rearing habitat in North America (almost all of it public land). If the dams are left in place, these same salmon and steelhead face inevitable extinction. It is a simple choice between vibrant, resilient life abounding, with all that entails – a resurrection of fisheries, economics, and the health of forests and wildlife that evolved with these fish – or a descent into the darkness of extinction and collapse. Which will we choose? Join Hal as he meets with Eric Crawford, North Idaho field coordinator for Trout Unlimited; Sam Mace, a fisheries expert who has worked with Save Our Wild Salmon; and Josh Mills, BHA development coordinator and board member of the Wild Steelhead Coalition, in this podcast recorded live at the BHA North American Rendezvous in May 2022. If you live in Idaho, Oregon or Washington, take action now! Urge your elected leaders to support a science-based approach to conserving fisheries and supporting the economic health of communities that depend on them.

Snake River Dams

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 133: BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning For Americans who live or venture west of the Mississippi River or north to Alaska, no public lands are more important, more abundant or more accessible than those managed by the Bureau of Land Management. We are talking about 247.3 million acres of public land (70 million of them in Alaska). In the Lower 48, this means elk hunting in the Missouri Breaks of Montana, Wyoming’s best pronghorn and mule deer country, quail hunting in the borderlands of New Mexico, and black bear or even bison hunting in the high desert mountains of Utah. The BLM manages the National Conservation Lands system, which includes millions of acres of America’s finest hiking, camping, wandering, canyoneering, rafting and access to rivers. The agency administers 18,000 grazing permits and is responsible for 700 million subsurface acres of publicly owned minerals. If it seems like an impossible task…well, sometimes it is. Today on the podcast we talk with BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning about the present and future of these lands – and how we can create a future in which politics is no longer the major obstacle to keeping these irreplaceable lands in public hands.    

BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 132, Corner Crossing in Wyoming with Ryan Callaghan, Liz Lynch and Jared Oakleaf Most of us have been following the case: four hunters from Missouri who used a homemade ladder to cross from one section of public land to the next without setting foot on private land…and the hard-fought court cases that ensued in Carbon County, Wyoming. It’s a case that may define public access to public lands for decades to come. Yet it is more than that. It’s about the resurgence of privatization of public assets in America, a harsh echo from the Gilded Age. It’s a reminder that plutocracy never sleeps, that the public trust is never truly safe and that, as Frederick Douglass said best, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Come listen to this discussion, recorded live at BHA’s 11th annual North American Rendezvous with MeatEater’s Ryan Callaghan and Liz Lynch and Jared Oakleaf of the Wyoming chapter of BHA: It’s a deep dive into the Wyoming corner crossing case, 200 years in the making. It’s a story of old range wars, land giveaways and ancient doctrines of law. Explore with us the possibilities that “bruising someone’s airspace with the points of one’s hips or shoulders” can be an offense worthy of full-bore prosecution…at least in the eyes of some folks.

Corner Crossing in Wyoming with Ryan Callaghan, Liz Lynch and Jared Oakleaf

BHA Podcast & Blast, Bonus Ep. 131, Sen. Jon Tester and the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act To those outside of Montana, the Blackfoot River is the “Big Blackfoot” featured in Norman Maclean’s lyrical and tragic novel A River Runs Through It. For Montanans and generations of visitors, the Blackfoot is a state of being all its own, a big rowdy river of native cutthroats and bull trout, its waters born of both high-altitude wilderness snows and the tannin-stained, unfathomably rich chain of wetlands and lakes of the Clearwater drainage. It is a huge, complex and vibrant watershed, and as healthy as it is now, it was not always this way. Join us for an interview with Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester on why he is a die-hard supporter of the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act, supported by three-quarters of Montanans – hunters, anglers, bikers, loggers, ranchers and others – and which will guide the management and ensure the long-term health of this irreplaceable part of our public lands and waters legacy. Learn more and take action in support of the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act right now. 

Sen. Jon Tester and the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 130: BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative: Honoring and serving those who serve. “Public lands are probably not the reason you would list for joining the Army or the Marines, but they’re the key piece of what makes America the greatest country out there,” says Trevor Hubbs, BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative coordinator. BHA recognizes that military members are a key constituency when it comes to the defense of our wild public lands and waters. The Armed Forces Initiative, or AFI, is booming. From Ft. Bragg to Camp Pendleton and everywhere in between, active duty military members and veterans are working together with local BHA chapters to get our fighting men and women out onto public lands and waters, teach hunting and fieldcraft skills, and hunt and fish, acknowledging that nobody gets service members like others who have served. Join us as Hal interviews Hubbs, along with AFI Liaison Leader Ryan Burkert and AFI Installation Leader Andy Ruszkiewicz. Learn about the mission, challenges and successes the AFI has seen during its first year-plus of existence and hear stories from the individuals who are playing a new and critical role in engaging military members in the conservation of our shared lands and waters.

BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative

The Bankhead National Forest in Alabama is a place of shadowed canyons and rushing coldwater creeks, crystalline waterfalls and bluff shelters blackened by the smoke from campfires over thousands of years. It’s an island of rare plants and wildlife and old growth trees in a state where coalmining and industrial forestry and now the sprawl of cities have radically altered the landscape. Come with us to Moulton, Alabama, and meet native son Joseph Jenkins, a biologist and herpetologist, hunter and angler, who is working to save two of the most imperiled and least known creatures in the forest: the flattened musk turtle and the Black Warrior waterdog. What is it like to spend one’s life working to save two species that almost no one would miss if they disappeared? What did Aldo Leopold mean when he said, “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts”? How did the fine chisel of evolution result in these two highly specialized creatures living only here, in this last piece of public lands wild country, in a region facing total transmogrification at the hands of humankind?   

Joseph Jenkins - Biologist, Herpetologist, Alabama Wanderer

BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 128: Alabama Herpetologist Jimmy Stiles The Conecuh National Forest in south Alabama is known as the Heart of the Longleaf, a landscape of tall pine and wiregrass, restoration and recovery, humming with life and comprising a wild diversity of plants and wildlife found nowhere else. Field biologist, herpetologist, student of deep time, and full-time hunter and fisherman Jimmy Stiles lives and works in the Conecuh, leading efforts to recover the endangered indigo snake (North America’s largest and arguably most impressive snake species) and restore the longleaf forests that were once the southern U.S.-dominant ecosystem – all while having a rollicking good time way out there in the farthest reaches of the wild, hot, buggy and snaky Deep South. Hal caught up with Jimmy on Oak Mountain in Alabama this spring at the BHA Southeast Chapter Backcountry Jubilee.    

Jimmy Stiles - Alabama Herpetologist

Jack Rudloe is one of the orneriest watermen on the Florida Gulf Coast, a time- and sun-honed fighter for clean water, intact forests and wetlands, and the myriad salt and freshwater life that depends upon it all. He is a world-renowned scientist and researcher, a commercial harvester of sea life, an unparalleled educator and the author of nine books and hundreds of articles. He and his wife Anne founded Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in the fishing town of Panacea in 1980. Hal and Jack talk about what it is like to have a inhabitant’s perspective on the saltwater that spans over 60 years, the connections between the blackwater swamps, rivers and ephemeral wetlands of the inlands to the health of the Gulf, alligators eating dogs, and what it costs a man and his wife and family and business to stand tall and speak out against the towering wall of powers that want to dismantle the Gulf Coast and the natural systems that make it one of the richest fisheries in the world.

Jack Rudloe - Florida Gulf Coast Writer, Naturalist and Advocate 

We hunters and anglers are often lost, these days, in a thicket of questions about public land and private land, loss of access, too much access, conservation priorities, conflicting desires and goals. One person who is forging a path through this thicket is Doug Duren, hunter-conservationist, multi-generational Driftless Area landowner in southern Wisconsin, and somewhat unlikely conservation and hunting media star. Join us for a deeply inspiring conversation about something overwhelmingly positive that is happening right now – when it matters – because, as Doug reminds us, when it comes to land, water and wildlife, “It’s not ours, it’s just our turn.”   Join Us: Backcountry Hunters and Anglers

Doug Duren - Hunter, Farmer, Land Manager, Conservationist

The forces of privatization are very definitely on the march. From hunting access and opportunity to the age-old conflict over who has the right to fish or swim or boat on our waterways, privatization is arguably the defining debate in the United States right now. Join us for the story of an 80-year Colorado fly fisherman who is attempting to halt this slide toward privatizing stream and river access in his state, maybe once and for all.  Law professor, attorney and public lands and water legal scholar Mark Squillace of the University of Colorado Law School guides us through a fascinating legal case that has ramifications for stream access and other public trust conflicts across the U.S.

Mark Squillace - Attorney, Legal Scholar, Public Access Expert

The Montana chapter of BHA works hard to uphold the gold standard in public hunting opportunities, with one of the longest elk and mule deer hunting seasons in the U.S., a wealth of public land, and one of the most innovative private land access programs ever devised. But the winds of change are howling. MT BHA fought back this legislative session against efforts to commercialize and privatize our public wildlife. BHA members testified before committees, published op-eds and mobilized more than 2,500 resident sportsmen and women to the tune of 57,942 letters sent to Montana's elected officials. Yet the war is far from over. Many of the same bad ideas are back in front of Montana's Fish & Wildlife Commission. Elk numbers are booming, hunting pressure on public lands is skyrocketing, and landownership patterns are changing, with fewer small-scale ranches and more vast “amenity ranches” – many of them purchased specifically for hunting and outfitting that emphatically excludes the public hunter. What is happening? Where are we going? What does this mean, not just for Montana but for the future of hunting in the fast-growing and fast-changing West? Andrew McKean and Randy Newberg join us for a spirited and sobering look at the place where politics and privatization meet the future of our hunting – and how we might affect that future if we have the knowledge and the courage to act. 

Randy Newberg and Andrew McKean - Elk Madness in Montana

Eduardo Garcia, one of the greatest wild game chefs of our time and the co-founder of Montana Mex, returns to the Podcast & Blast to talk, as always, about life – family, work, cooking, hunting, gardening, foraging, the discipline of awareness and the glories and struggles of the every day. On Feb. 10, Chef Garcia will be leading a Field to Table Experience with BHA. His new TV series, Zest for Life, is available now. Listen to Hal’s 2019 interview with Eduardo if you don’t know his story and then listen to this one, a conversation with a man who was struck down by an unimaginable accident while hunting and who worked his way forward: from the edge of death and the reality of loss, to a life more abundant.   

Chef Eduardo Garcia - Co-Founder of Montana Mex

Ep. 122: Allen Morris Jones - Western Storyteller 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important treatises on hunting ever written. Allen Morris Jones’ book A Quiet Place of Violence: Hunting and Ethics in the Missouri River Breaks was once best known among a kind of chosen few outdoorsmen and women, those who relished the history of their pursuit and the philosophy of immersion into landscape, wildlife, blood and meat, and finality – and who wanted to ponder the deep why of what drove them. It was a book found in bloodstained packs, on sun-cracked truck dashboards, on cabin bookshelves beside great works of the distant past: Ortega y Gasset, Teddy Roosevelt, Grancel Fitz. In the past 15 years, A Quiet Place of Violence has found a vastly larger audience among a younger generation, hunters who are coming to the pursuit on their own, without the traditions and the answers of the past. Join us for an in-depth conversation with Allen Jones, on his work and his life, on hunting, writing, philosophy, and on the (possible) banishment of abstraction.     

Allen Morris Jones - Western Storyteller

Ep. 121: Melanie Vining - Executive Director, Idaho Trails Association For a measure of sweat equity, an entire world of adventure awaits anyone who wants to work on American public lands. In today’s podcast, Hal catches up with Melanie Vining, an Idaho elk hunter, mom and mule packer who is the ramrod for the Idaho Trails Association, one of the major outfits bringing together volunteers with the tools, knowledge and support to get the work done on our BLM and national forest backcountry trails. This is a conversation about one of the most successful public land volunteer groups anywhere. It’s about how the work gets done, why we do it, and the fun and friendships that are the essence of the experience.   

Melanie Vining - Executive Director, Idaho Trails Association

Ep. 120: Australian Outdoorsman Dave Byrnes   Join us for a journey Down Under with Dave Byrnes, host and founder of Australia’s best hunting and shooting podcast, The Hunting Arete. Byrnes, of Newcastle, New South Wales, is a tradesman, father, aficionado of fine guns and wanderer of the wildest bush country of the strangest continent. We talk hunting tahr above the glaciers of New Zealand (ice axes required!), Sambar in the mountains of New South Wales, rusa, chital, fallow, hog deer, water buffalo, free range donkeys and run-amok feral camels. It’s wild ride of a conversation. Bring your translator if you don’t speak Aussie, and marvel at a whole ’nother world of hunting and conservation and public lands fights, right here on planet Earth.

Dave Byrnes - Australian Outdoorsman

Jessie Shallow, of Salmon, Idaho, is the partner biologist for the Mule Deer Foundation, working with state and federal agencies to restore mule deer winter range and other habitat in the wake of the last- decades’ massive range fires. Her family and personal roots are deep in the southern Idaho farmlands and wild country from the Owyhee to the Bitterroots. Jessie and Hal discuss the work they’ve done together over the past two years: This season MDF crews planted a record 196,000 sagebrush and bitterbrush seedlings on burned-over mule deer winter range and core sage grouse habitat. Join us to learn what is at stake here, what is being done, and what the future holds for this crucial conservation work.   Connect with Backcountry Hunters and Anglers BHA's Action Map Website Instagram   Connect with Mule Deer Foundation Website Instagram

Jessie Shallow - Mule Deer Foundation Biologist

Host of BHA’s Backcountry College YouTube series, Clay Hayes is a traditional bowhunter, wildlife biologist, wilderness skills instructor, master bowyer, filmmaker and family man who splits his time between a homestead in the mountains of Idaho and the piney woods and swamp country of the Florida Panhandle where he was born and raised. Clay is also the winner of Alone Season 8, the reality TV survival series, where he survived for 74 days along the shoreline of Chilko Lake in British Columbia using a small selection of tools, his bow, the teachings of the great Stoic philosophers, and a combination of a little luck and lot of pure will.  

BHA Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

BHA Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

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