Outdoor Life

You’re going to hear a whole lot of this acronym this year — LPVO. It stands for Low-Powered Variable Optic, and it’s the insurgent category of riflescopes from at least a dozen brands. What are you going to hear precious little about? Spotting scopes. Those are two...

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has announced the start of a new moose research project in the Adirondacks. The ambitious, multi-year project aims to gain a better understanding of moose populations in the Adirondacks, and the factors that are currently limiting their growth. Unlike many of the state’s...

To many, the idea of going to the woods, cutting down a tree, crafting a simple longbow, and taking a deer with it is nuts—very cool, but nuts. But for some, the idea is captivating: as it was, and remains, for me since my childhood. I first learned how to make a bow and arrow in 1999 and have made hundreds since. I’ve hunted all over North America with those simple bows and taken over 30 big game animals, from elk and bears to whitetails and hogs. I even used one of my bows to take a deer that helped me I win Season 8 of Alone. These bows are deadly effective and not all that difficult to make.

A weekend duck hunt in Virginia’s Chincoteague Bay turned into a tragic search-and-rescue mission on Jan. 22 when four teenage duck hunters took on a large wave in their 16-foot jon boat. The boat capsized in the rough seas, sending all four hunters into the water. Two were able to stay with the boat and were rescued by another boater. One of the teens died in the water; the fourth is still missing, according to the Virginia Marine Police.

Stu Osthoff of Ely, Minnesota, first hunted the state’s Arrowhead region—an expansive wildland of boreal forests and lakes in the northeastern corner of the state—in 1978 at age 22. He recalls being awed by big antlers nailed to barns and garages wherever he drove. He married locally soon after and raised three kids on a former farm south of town.

When a shotgun has been around for as long as the Remington Model 1100 has been—it was introduced in 1963—there are bound to be some good stories linked to it. One of my favorites is from 1975 when Patricia Malinosky, the wife of a Remington employee, became the first woman to post a perfect score (breaking 100 clay targets) in .410 registered skeet at the Great Eastern Skeet Championships. Her husband, Carl, also posted a perfect 100 with an 1100, and she went on to beat him in a shoot off to win the event.

Unless you’re an industry gadfly or you’re over the age of 45, you’re probably not too familiar with the name Darton. And even if you know the Darton name, you probably haven’t heard much—if anything—about the Darton Spectra E bow. And that’s a shame,...

On Level 1 of the Sands Expo on Las Vegas’s Strip, the booth for Pacific Tool & Gauge was a hive of activity. An employee guided a group of visitors through the process of boring a rifle chamber with the company’s automated reaming machine while others chatted about sales discounts and product-delivery details.

Anti-hunters are squaring off against rabbit hunters in the New Hampshire legislature with a bill that would restrict trainers’ use of snowshoe hares and rabbits. House Bill 1308 would “prohibit the capture, possession and propagation of hares and rabbits for hunting dog training and field trials.” Trainers and beagle club members say the use of capturing wild hares or rabbits for training is common and ethical. Supporters of the bill counter that removal of the hares from home habitat, along with training methods, is harmful and cruel.

Paul Annear shed-hunts on more than 400 acres in Richland County, Wisconsin, which is within the core area of the state’s chronic wasting disease zone. He’s never come across a sick deer, and he doesn’t find an unusual number of dead-heads. Based on anecdotal field data, it might seem like CWD isn’t a problem at all.

Last week, I was running a river with a buddy looking for ducks. We found multiple big groups of mallards rafted within a few hundred yards of each other. It had taken days to find them, and our scouting finally paid off. As we fist-bumped over our good fortune, we saw some Gomer standing on the bank, leaning against the muzzle of his loaded shotgun. He was jump-shooting. As ducks returned, after our disturbance with the boat flushed them off a mid-day loaf, he started shooting. Thousands of birds flared, spooked by the report of his shotgun echoing through the river bottom. What could have been a memorable shoot the next morning was now a total bust. Our group could have hunted those birds for days if we killed our limits quickly and left them to rest in the afternoon. Now, because of one jump shooter, we had to find the ducks again.

A black bear attacked a man on his porch in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Wednesday night. A doorbell camera captured footage of the scuffle that ensued when the bear came through the doorway of his screened-in porch and tried to grab one of his dogs. The man rushed to defend his dogs, and was able to keep them out of harm’s way while he briefly wrestled with the bear and shoved it back outside.

Wildlife officials with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries spent days scrubbing dozens of alligators last week after a diesel spill caused extensive environmental damage to a wetland area near New Orleans. LDWF confirmed that the spill killed approximately 2,300 fish and more than 100 other animals, including snakes, birds, eels, and crabs, according to the Associated Press.

In the past two years, four hurricanes in Louisiana have caused an estimated $579 million in damages to the state’s coastal fisheries, according to findings published this month. The study, which was conducted by the Louisiana Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, found that Hurricanes Laura, Delta, and Zeta were costly by causing 30 percent of that damage in 2020, but that Hurricane Ida in 2021 caused the remaining 70 percent of damage.

Among the new rifles of 2022 we’ll be looking at this year are a number of models that were introduced at some point in 2021. Point is, we’re being a little less rigid when it comes to the definition of “new” since so many of these rifles have yet to make it to dealers’ shelves in meaningful numbers. Hopefully, by the third quarter of this year (yeah, it is probably going to be that long) we’ll start to see things being to return to some semblance of normal with respect to the availability of firearms and ammo.

A flower shop in Pike Road, Alabama, was busy cleaning up yesterday after a deer crashed through one of the shop’s windows at a dead run. The deer was seriously injured in the crash and did not survive; the shop didn’t fare too well either. The business owner said in a Facebook post that the small retail space was badly damaged during the incident and will be closed temporarily as they try to clean up and replace the lost inventory.

Watch the video below with the volume on. If you listen closely, you’ll just barely be able to hear the report of the rifle, but you will hear the steel ringing 200 yards down range. I got to shoot B&T’s SPR300 Pro in subsonic .300 AAC Blackout at the SHOT Show Range Day and was impressed with just how quiet this rifle really is. It sounds a lot like a suppressed .22 rimfire. My buddy, Chris Mudgett, VP of marketing for B&T USA, calls it “Hollywood quiet,” which I’d say is about right.

We’re starting to see straight-pull rifles by American riflemakers of late, most notably Savage’s Impulse that was introduced last year, and its straight-pull precision rifle competition offering for 2022, the Savage Impulse Elite Precision. Now Bushmaster’s BA30 has joined the party with a straight-pull action on an AR-style platform.

Migrating flocks of crows have found a cozy evening roost in the town of Sunnyvale, a northern California suburb south of San Francisco. According to a report from the New York Post, crows have been coming to Sunnyvale for decades. But the recent overabundance of murders (massive flocks of crows) roosting every night is getting out of hand.

Most shotgun enthusiasts think John Moses Browning’s Winchester 1893 was the first pump shotgun. But it was Christopher Miner Spencer, an engineer that also built the Union Army a seven-shot repeating rifle that helped win the Civil War, who built the first pump. Spencer was granted a patent in 1882 for his repeater, which he manufactured in Windsor, Connecticut. It’s an interesting gun that one prominent museum curator called a “Rube Goldberg invention.” (Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist best known for his drawings of convoluted and complicated machines that performed simple tasks.)