VAN DYNE, Wis. — The translucent ice on Lake Winnebago absorbed the harsh sunlight, which glowed from two rectangular spearing holes in a fishing shack’s black painted walls. Tim and Trevor Michels, father and son, stared into the holes, their spears hooked to the ceiling and the pitchfork-like heads submerged to avoid a noisy splash if they stabbed at an unsuspecting sturgeon.

For two and a half hours, they saw only a few perch. Suddenly, a sturgeon glided into view, and Tim Michels plunged his spear into the fish’s midsection.

“It went straight down to the bottom, I nailed it so hard,” he said.

“That’s the perfect present, Dad,” Trevor Michels, 23, said. It was his father’s 50th birthday.

In 17 years, Tim Michels said, he speared only two other sturgeons: one last year and one seven years ago. Trevor Michels, who started spearing at 14, the minimum age for securing a license, said he had taken two.

Read the rest at the The New York Times

Photo Slide Show by Jeff Haller

GAUTIER, Miss. — It was around midnight when Jeremy and JoAnna Mitchell’s spotlight caught the reflective eyes of the alligator. Judging from its head, Whac-a-Mole-like on the surface of the water, it was a large animal, maybe a 10-footer.

Alligators aren’t easy to find and are harder to catch — they can anchor themselves in a river bottom — but the annual hunts for them in Mississippi have become popular. More Photos »

As the gator disappeared under the murky water, the Mitchells cast their lines. They felt the barbs of the weighted snag hooks dig into something heavy. JoAnna’s fishing rod bent into an arc. Jeremy, her husband, heaved his upward, trying to purchase a few inches of line.

Watching from the other boat, Jerry Cline, 63, a trapper and woodsman from Hazlehurst, Miss., explained that a big gator would go to the bottom and lock up.

Read the rest at The New York Times.

1. They were once sold in hardware stores. The first commercially successful product was patented by MIT grad Hiram Percy Maxim in 1909. Marketed as a gentlemanly way to shoot, silencers were widely used in the 1920s and ’30s. One ad portrayed a well-dressed marksman firing at a target in his living room fireplace while a dog lounged at his feet.

Read the rest at Wired magazine.

MEMPHIS — A year after the body of the veteran N.B.A. player Lorenzen Wright was discovered in a wooded area in this city’s southeast suburbs, family and friends gathered Thursday for a candlelight vigil outside the FedEx Forum to draw attention to the still-unsolved killing.

Wright, a 34-year-old father of six who played high school, college and professional basketball here, died of multiple gunshot wounds. His badly decomposed body was found July 28, 2010, 10 days after he was last seen alive.

Since the murder, the police have not made any arrests, named any suspects or persons of interest, or revealed to the public the existence of any noteworthy evidence. A search warrant was served at the home of Wright’s former wife to look for firearms and a cellphone, but none were found.

Read the rest at The New York Times.

PIGGOTT, Ark. — During his periodic stays in this small town in the Arkansas delta, Ernest Hemingway was looked upon by the locals as something of a proto-hippy with his shabby clothes, unshaven face and artistic disposition. He was once mistaken for a hobo. Children taunted him and pelted him with rocks. Obliged to visit his in-laws’ home in Piggott, Hemingway made the most of it and became a bird-hunting bum.

Pauline Pfeiffer became Hemingway’s second wife in 1927 and her brother Karl became his quail hunting partner.

“Of course he came because Pauline would come back to see her parents, but the one thing he liked was the quail hunting here,” said Don Roeder, who grew up going to church with the Pfeiffer family and is a trustee of the Matilda and Karl Pfeiffer Foundation.

“One of the stories that Mr. Pfeiffer would tell me was if he killed more quail than Ernest had, they had to stay out there until Ernest had killed as many as Karl had.”

Then, spreading his arms wide, Roeder said, “Hemingway had an ego like this.”

Roeder said that during the time when Hemingway visited, quail were just about everywhere, but that began to change.

“When I first came back here out of the service, I could go out here hunting with friends and we could shoot quail, but they were going away then, and now you rarely hear a quail,” he said.

The mating call of the bobwhite quail provides the bird its name, a ringing three-count whistle: bob-bob-white. It is a sound many baby boomers have heard while growing up and one their children might have heard. But it is one their grandchildren may never hear. In many parts of their range — from New England to the Dakotas to Texas — bobwhites have disappeared and the sport of quail hunting has fallen on hard times.

Read the rest at The New York Times.

DeVALLS BLUFF, Ark. — Muddy children stood in a human chain, passing sandbags to others who were two, three or four times their age. One volunteer was an exchange student from the Czech Republic. One man was in his 70s. Coolers of food, drinks and ice appeared, and no one knew where they had come from.

Floods were drowning huge parts of the Midwest and the South, but the residents of Prairie County had decided that Russell Petty’s house, at least, would stay dry — even if they needed flat-bottom boats to get to it.

They fortified a moat and a levee, protective rings around the three-acre property that, once the nearby White River had crested, left Mr. Petty’s house out of harm’s way, like a castle in the English countryside. It stands as a symbol of one minor victory over the elements in a region suffering widespread hardships from tornadoes and floods.

“I don’t think he wanted to put other people in the position of having to help him that way,” said William Saul, a friend of Mr. Petty’s. “He just didn’t have a choice.”

The White River begins in northwest Arkansas, passes through eight dams and picks up tributaries from the Ozarks and the Arkansas Delta, a part of the state battered by storms this spring. As the river reaches DeValls Bluff, population 783, it enters the Grand Prairie, an ecosystem that was once an expansive tallgrass prairie but has been replaced with rice fields that require networks of ditches, canals and irrigation pumps. It is a place where humans decide where water should flow over the land.

The effort to save the three-bedroom house began late last month when Mr. Petty, an auto mechanic with no flood insurance, hired an excavator to dig a moat and pile the earth on the outside rim to form a levee.

Read the rest at The New York Times.

Sometimes I find myself daydreaming about living in a rustic cabin on the edge of a marsh that looks like a scene out of a Terry Redlin painting.

But like most waterfowlers, I live in a big city. It’s where my job is. And contrary to the stereotypical notion that large urban areas are lacking in sporting opportunities, it’s not too far from some damn good duck hunting.

I live in Memphis, home to DU’s national headquarters and within a two-hour drive from some of the best waterfowling this country has to offer. Just across the Mississippi River is eastern Arkansas, renowned for its world-class flooded timber and rice fields, which attract mallards—and duck hunters—like magnets. To the north is Tennessee’s storied Reelfoot Lake, where the duck hunting is almost as epic as the earthquake that formed this eerily beautiful body of water. And south into the Mississippi Delta are vast bottomland hardwood forests that each season host thousands of migrating and wintering waterfowl.

But the Bluff City is not alone; many other metropolitan areas are within reasonable driving distances from incredible waterfowling opportunities. Don’t be surprised if you find your metropolis among the 10 profiled here (in no particular order) for the great diversity of ducks and geese flying just outside the city limits.

Read the rest at Ducks Unlimited.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — On the brown dirt floor of Tennessee Miller Coliseum, Dale Lively covered the eyes of his mustang by wrapping a cloth around its head, then rode it toward a small wooden bridge.

Named El Cuatro, the sorrel gelding was born three years ago on the high plains of Stewart Creek, Wyo. El Cuatro grew up wild, avoiding mountain lions and bears. Until 100 days earlier, the only human contact he had was being rounded up by rangers from the Bureau of Land Management.

El Cuatro stepped onto the bridge, trusting Lively’s guidance at the reins. Lively halted. He pulled out a revolver and blasted three shots in the air, but the horse did not flinch.

The performance was part of the Extreme Mustang Makeover, a national competition in which horse trainers have about 100 days to turn a wild mustang into a well-behaved steed.

The bureau manages mustang herds in 10 Western states to prevent overpopulation. Because of the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, horses cannot be culled. Instead, they are rounded up and the bureau tries to find them a good home.

In 2007, the bureau teamed with the nonprofit Mustang Heritage Foundation to increase adoption of wild horses. The executive director of the foundation, Patti Colbert, conceived the mustang makeover after watching reality shows on TV.

“I knew that in the horse industry, you have to show people, you can’t tell them,” Colbert said. “I could tell you all day long how easy it is to gentle a wild horse, but you need to see it to believe it.

“People would love to have a mustang, but they don’t have the time or effort to bring a wild horse around, so the trainers become the middlemen. If we can help them train these horses in a timely fashion and get them quiet and gentle enough, we can put them in the hands of folks that can take it from there.”

Read the rest at The New York Times.

When Fred Zink and Joe Robinson came of age during the 1980s, one of North America’s greatest wildlife comebacks was well under way. Canada goose numbers were exploding, especially in the Midwest, where transplanted flocks of resident geese were experiencing exponential growth. As teenagers, Zink and Robinson became skilled hunters of these increasingly abundant waterfowl, and over time their lives became intertwined with Canada geese. Now, decades later as grown men with children of their own, they are lying in a harvested cornfield between Toledo and Detroit and staring at the gray winter sky, watching for geese.

We are in layout blinds covered with cornstalks, which not only provide us with camouflage but also insulation against the subzero wind chill. In the distance are faint Vs of geese that are too far away to call or flag. Sunset and the end of shooting time draw near.

And suddenly it happens. A large formation of geese appears silently over the treetops of a nearby shelterbelt, returning to feed from their day roost on Lake Erie. Robinson waves his black-and-white T-flag up and down, sounding like an umbrella ripping apart in a hurricane. Zink brings his goose call to his lips and makes only a few soft clucks. Less is more when calling late-season geese. The flock turns toward us and Joe slips back into his layout blind.

Closing the distance across the field, the geese glide on cupped wings, their large black webbed feet stretched out before them, appearing as if they may land on our chests.

“Take ‘em,” Zink barks.

Eight geese are intercepted by heavy charges of steel shot and tumble to earth. As gun smoke wafts in the frigid air, more geese appear over the tree line.

Read the rest at Ducks Unlimited.

LAND BETWEEN THE LAKES, Ky. — The deer hunters returned to the tournament checkpoint tired and hungry, their camouflage clothing soaked with sweat. All were empty-handed — no big bucks for bragging rights, no fat does for venison. But that was the plan all along.

Armed with bolt-action 20-gauge shotguns mounted with digital scopes developed for military training, each hunter was given five blank shells a day. Each night, he returned the empty shells and firearm to tournament officials, who removed a memory card from the $1,200 scope. The 10-second video clips on the card were used to determine the most skillful hunter.

The tournament, held here in September by the American Whitetail Authority, was the first in the Whitetail Pro Series, the only hunting competition in which deer are stalked but not killed. After four qualifying events, what is being billed as the A.W.A. World Championship will be held this month in Mississippi.

The main goal of the series, according to Greg Koch, the founder of the group, is to reward hunters who consistently take clean shots on mature deer.

Read the rest at The New York Times.