They room together, go to school together and fish together. And Bethel University brought them together as the first students in America to receive an athletic scholarship for competitive bass fishing. This week, these boys of summer will make room on their boat for another team member, Lauren Stamps, the first woman in the United States to receive a scholarship for bass fishing and one of a handful of women to compete on the nearly all-male college circuit.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

1. Denial: "My shooting is a little off today, but did you see how fast that duck was moving?"

2. Anger and Blame: "Aargh! Why am I missing? I can't believe I bought this piece-of-junk shotgun."

3. Bargaining "Just let me hit a duck, any duck, please ... just one duck. Is that a coot over there?"

4. Depression: "I'm such a loser. I'm never going to hit anything. My shooting is so poor a mallard drake threw his loose change into my duck blind."

5. Acceptance: "I've got to get some help. Practice more. Deal with my shooting so I can get back in the game."

Chances are most waterfowlers have been through this process at some point in their hunting career and can easily fall back into denial, blame games, and the rankled dejection from missing familiar shots. If missing is like a chronic disease, then it's prudent to practice some preventive medicine and see if you have any of the following symptoms that might be bringing your shooting down ... and not the ducks.

Read the rest at Ducks Unlimited Magazine.

The National Championship for Field Trialing Bird Dogs, first held here in western Tennessee in 1896, determines the continent’s most elite canine athlete. On Tuesday, In the Shadow, an English pointer owned by Carl Bowman of Louisville, Ky., and handled by Robin Gates, was named the 111th champion after an event lasting two weeks in which he competed on the third day.

Field trialing is an expensive and obsessive sport, and a unique American subculture. Dog owners spend thousands on food, lodging, veterinarian bills and gasoline, all in pursuit of a $20,000 prize and the glory that goes with it.

To make it to Ames, the dogs must win at least two of the approximately 75 qualifying field trials held in the United States and Canada. Four of this year’s competitors were returning champions. The dogs are mostly pointers, with three English setters, a breed that has not won since 1970.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy.

The Illinois River and other waterways flowing into the Mississippi have become infested with invasive Asian fish species, commonly called silver carp, which can turn a leisurely ride on a johnboat into the aquatic version of the running of the bulls. The carp jump out of the water by the hundreds, sometimes soaring 10 feet in the air and often landing in the boat. They have loosened fishermen’s teeth, broken their jaws and left them scarred.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

The Korean peninsula was once called geum-su-gang-san, “a land of embroidered rivers and mountains.” Before South Korea industrialized in the postwar years, the rivers were wild-running freestone streams barreling down the mountains and turning into sandy shallow rivers edged by wetlands as they reached the sea. In her 1898 book Korea and Her Neighbors, 19th-century travel writer Isabella Bird described the upper Namhan River as “where pure emerald water laps gently upon crags festooned with roses and honeysuckle, or in fairy bays on pebbly beaches and white sand.”

That world is long gone now, as the Namhan and nearly every other South Korean river has been dammed, forced into concrete channels, or otherwise re-engineered by successive governments that have funneled billions of dollars to the powerful construction industry to fund countless public works projects designed to tame the country’s rivers. Today, besides a handful of creeks deep in the mountains or protected in national parks, only one major river, the Dong, exists in a natural meandering and un-dammed state.

Read the rest at Yale Environment 360.

If “Blade Runner” were turned into a fishing program, this would be the filming location.

On a side street, a building entrance leads to a basement, and the blackened door opens to Gold Indoor Fishing Spot, a dark room with a black ceiling. Centered in the room is a rectangular pool with murky, thigh-deep water.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

But in less than an hour, I've crossed the bridge over Asan Bay and arrived someplace: the Taean Peninsula, a jagged nub jutting into the Yellow Sea that is a mix of farm country, craggy mountains and sandy beaches. The migrating Baikal teal winter in the Seosan wetlands here. Each day the ducks rise by the thousands at sunset, putting on a spectacular sky dance. I leave the expressway at the Seosan interchange, in the center of the peninsula, and take Highway 32 west, the main road leading to the peninsula's beaches.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.

Tay approached me as I was making my first few casts at the government-approved fishing spot on Bedok Reservoir. Fishing is permitted from only one place, a long wooden dock. The water was as clear as the Tiger Beer I had been drinking all week, and two boys were already tossing out hooks baited with shrimp on a cheap spinning rod.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Four years after being at the center of the biggest scientific fraud in history, disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk is back in the business of cloning. This time, though, his focus is on reconstituting dogs for grief-stricken pet owners.

Hwang first made international headlines in 2005 when it was revealed that he had fabricated research on human-embryo stem cells and published his fakery in the journal Science.

Before his fall from grace, a cult of personality had emerged around the veterinary professor. A celebrity darling on the campus of Seoul National University (SNU), the country's premier institution of higher learning, he was even waited upon by government-provided bodyguards.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy

While teaching English in Seoul in 1994, Cullen Thomas made a plan to visit a remote mountain village in Luzon, buy bricks of hash on the cheap, mail them to himself in Seoul, and to sell them to the expat crowd. The first brick arrived safely, and he was a 23-year-old cosmopolitan outlaw: “Like many of the other foreigners, I fooled myself into thinking that I could operate alongside Korean society and yet not have to answer to it.” He signed for the second brick poste restante, and was quickly surrounded by drug agents.

Read the rest at InTheFray Magazine.

The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which governs the annual catch, met as environmentalist activists circled them with a plan, for instance, to publicize the inaction by stuffing a large fake bigeye tuna into a coffin and marching it around outside the posh Lotte Hotel in downtown Busan where the commission was holding its annual conference behind closed doors and away from the prying eyes of the press and the environmentalists.

The environmental activists – Greenpeace members from across the world and the Korea Federation for Environmental movement, the country’s largest environmental group, intended to dress in traditional Korean hemp funeral garb in a publicity stunt designed to bring attention to scientific evidence that the Pacific stocks are in deadly decline.

The Busan police had different thoughts on the idea.

Read the rest at Asia Sentinel.

View the online slideshow and read the story at Field and Stream.

The hum of the single-engine Cessna fills your ears as you ascend above the Peruvian high desert. Below you, flat expanses of dry, brown earth extend in every direction, punctuated only by twisting dry riverbeds…a lifeless landscape. Then the plane banks, and over the intercom the pilot directs you to look at what appear to be just another set of curving, squiggly lines. But then, as you watch, the lines start to come to life, to form a definitive shape…with a spread-finned tail at one end, a gaping mouth at the other, and an eye in the middle, staring up at you: it’s a giant line drawing of a whale, carved right into the landscape.

Read the rest at Travel + Leisure

This travel story can be read in full in the August/September 2008 issue of Outside's Go.