Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcasts and Blasts

Hal is traveling the Wasatch Front, snarled in traffic beneath the spectacular snow-covered peaks, still trying to understand Utah politics. How can a state legislature pass a law that makes it illegal for the its residents (as well as visitors) to fish or wade or swim in more than 90 percent of their own rivers and streams? What is going on here? We go "once more unto the breach" (to quote Henry...

The American outdoor recreation industry is the largest industry on the planet – to the tune of $887 billion dollars annually – that until recently has not demanded political representation for its interests. And what are those interests? Clean water, public lands, public access, wildlife habitat, trails, sustainably managed lands and waters – the same elements that make for a strong, healthy and...

Meet BHA Capital Region Co-Chair Samantha Flowers, BHA Pennsylvania board member Don Rank and BHA Regional Manager (and Pennsylvanian) Chris Hennessey, who are fighting the good fight to end Sunday hunting bans all across the Eastern United States.   

Calling all American public land owners! The time for action is upon us. In wildland firefighting, a backburn is setting a fire to stop a fire … burning fuels ahead of a conflagration that must be stopped. This episode of BHA's Podcast & Blast, featuring Hunt Talk's Randy Newberg and BHA President and CEO Land Tawney along with host Hal Herring, is our version of a backburn. We are setting a fire...

When you are shooting a classic Beretta over and under shotgun at the trap range or in the field, you are handling a finely made weapon built by the same company that made the arquebus barrels used to quell the Ottoman Turks at the ferocious Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Heck, Beretta Arms was already almost 50 years old by then! The Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta, with its headquarters in Brescia, I...

The decline in the numbers of American hunters and anglers is not just bad news for our connections to the natural world and for our heritage. Because the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is based on the robust sale of hunting and fishing licenses, the decline is hitting us all right where it hurts most: in funding for habitat projects, public lands management, restoration,  scientifi...

Ashley and Jesse Kurtenbach are board members of the South Dakota Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. Join them as they sit down with Hal Herring on the heels of a snow goose hunt to explore a life of hunting and fishing on public lands and waters. 

As the 116 th Congress builds momentum, Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico traveled to Boise, Idaho, for BHA's 8 th Annual North American Rendezvous. One of the most enthusiastic sportsmen on Capitol Hill, he is also an indefatigable champion of public lands. During the ruckus of Rendezvous, Sen. Heinrich took time to sit down with Hal and talk desert ecotones, maverick tarantulas, migration corri...

Corey is the perfect match for the world's leading hunting gear company (and Podcast & Blast sponsor): a hunter with both bow and rifle, angler with whatever gear is at hand, obsessed rock and ice climber, ski mountaineer and wanderer of the high places from the Adirondacks of New York state to the wildest and most windswept of the wild Rockies. Corey talks about how surviving in Montana led him t...

Chef Eduardo Garcia and Hal Herring sat down at the 8thAnnual North American Rendezvous to talk about wild landscapes, their outdoor pursuits and seizing the opportunities that life affords you.

Hunter, writer, thinker, scientist and wildlife expert, Shane Mahoney of Newfoundland is the foremost and most powerful voice of our time for hunting-based conservation and the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Come and sit in on a conversation between two die-hard and lifelong hunter-conservationists for whom hunting and a life outdoors is as natural, and as necessary, as breathing.

Hal catches up with Drew and his Llewellin setter, Penny, on the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, and they set out on a long hunt for ruffed grouse. The second half of this epic conversation is all about a lifelong pursuit of ruffed grouse and woodcock and the good dogs that make the chase a million times better.      

Epic floods due to the filling and draining of wetlands, duck numbers falling, fisheries collapsing, federal flood insurance $25 billion in debt, water pollution at levels not seen since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 – and all this before the recent floods in the Midwest. The common denominator is our failure to protect U.S. wetlands and rivers and streams. Yet the administration is c...

Anthony Licata and Colin Kearns stand at the helm of the most iconic magazine titles in the outdoor industry. Anthony is the editorial director of Outdoor Life and Field & Stream where Colin serves as its editor-in-chief. In this episode Hal catches up with them in the midst of Shot Show, the day after the gang celebrated our public lands at the BHA bonfire in the Nevada desert. Join the trio as t...

Back by popular demand: Ron Mills, an outfitter, hunting guide and packer in the Bob Marshall Wilderness since 1959, returns for Round Two in the BHA Podcast & Blast! Ron has authored a new book called Under the Biggest Sky of All, 75 Years on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, a raucous and astoundingly funny account of his adventures as a guide, horseman and packer, farrier and ranch hand in some o...

Hal goes south to meet up with old friend and former U.S. Navy SEAL Madison Parker in the hurricane-battered backcountry of north Florida and talk about survival, spears and slingshots, pit bulls, blacksmithing, baskets, knives and traps, and that place where function becomes inseparable from art.

How does a 2013 graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism find herself pulling a pulk (gear sled) on an ice fishing expedition into the frozen wilderness of the Boundary Waters of Minnesota? How does a cutting-edge multimedia journalist make a living these days while pursuing the stories and the adventures of which most of us can only dream? We ask Natalie Krebs, senior edi...

Come with us to Birmingham, Alabama, to meet Nelson Brooke, the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, whose life is spent on the vast arterial network of some of central Alabama's most beautiful – and imperiled – rivers and streams.

Hal comes down to Missoula to talk with BHA's Ty Stubblefield (who hosts his own podcast, Shoot'n the Bull ), about his roots in Oregon's Umpqua Valley and his life there as a millhand, logging contractor, bowhunter and conservationist in the Coast Range. Now based in Florence, Montana, in the northern Bitterroot Valley, Ty is living the hard balance of family, work and a lifelong obsession with h...

Hal meets up with Tom McGuane in McLeod, Montana, on the Boulder River. They begin with an eye-widening discussion of how McGuane's "The Heart of the Game" (widely recognized as one of the greatest-ever essays on hunting) came to be written and published in Sports Illustrated in the early 1970s. The stories – as well as the funny and thought-provoking observations – continue from there. The poet J...

BHA's Jason Meekhof of Michigan, Chris Hennessey of Pennsylvania and Josh Kaywood of Tennessee talk Eastern hunting and fishing, the explosive growth of BHA west of the Mississippi River, and the many challenges, threats and issues facing sportsmen in the eastern United States, including loss of access, dwindling numbers of hunters speaking out for wild places, and the role of public lands and wat...

In St. Paul, Minnesota, with bird dogs whining in the hall outside, Hal visits the headquarters of Pheasants Forever to interview a trifecta of America's most committed and passionate upland bird hunters and habitat and public access advocates. Bob St. Pierre, PF vice president of marketing and communications, tells it like it is: "We're in trouble. Habitat is being plowed under and wetlands drain...

Join Hal on a camping and hunting trip for Mearns quail deep into the Chihuahua Grasslands smack-dab on the Mexican border. With him is BHA member Ray Trejo, the huntin'est conservationist in New Mexico; Gabe Vasquez, the youngest member of the Las Cruces' City Council and a New Mexico conservation leader; and Fernando Clemente, a self-employed wildlife biologist and habitat specialist who works o...

A native son of the Palouse country in Idaho and a contributing writer to Outdoor Life, Ben Long is a founding board member of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a former newspaperman and one of America's leading conservation voices and strategists. 

Steve Piragis, of Piragis Northwoods Company , is an institution in Ely, Minnesota: the grand old man of Boundary Waters outfitting and perhaps the most eloquent and knowledgeable spokesman for the region's public lands wilderness since the legendary Sigurd F. Olson. Piragis and Hal meet in Ely to discuss all matters related to the Boundary Waters, including why anybody would want a Chilean compan...