Thanks to Midwest Whitetails @thwackem for posting this beautiful picture: Donny Kay with his rare melanistic buck. Killed near Boone, IA. This is just the second black-phase buck shot by a hunter that I have posted in all my years of blogging (here’s the other one). I did some research and found that a deer w/melanism-- their bodies produce too much of the hair, skin and retina pigment known as melanin – are definitely the rarest of the rare whitetails. A black deer is certainly more uncommon than a brown-and-white piebald, and even rarer than the odd albino. Biologists say that a melanic buck is usually not solid black. There are gray and brown/black color phases with white bellies and [...]

From ScienceNordic: One late August day in 2011 Tord Bretten and his sister Line B. Aukrust came home from an extraordinarily successful hunting trip in Dovrefjell, a mountainous area in central Norway. In addition to a reindeer buck, they had three arrows and two bows that had melted out of a glacier. One of the arrows turned out to be from another reindeer hunt, but the hunt had taken place 5,400 years ago. This is the oldest archaeological find from mountain snowfields in Scandinavia. To think about people with the heart and soul of the hunter like you and me bowhunting deer 5,000 years ago very much like we do today is mind-blowing! This gives me an idea for an [...]

Kinessa Johnson served for 4 years in Afghanistan to protect our country. This week she arrived in Tanzania to fight a different enemy. Her new mission is, as she puts it, “We’re going over there to do some anti-poaching, kill some bad guys, and do some good.” In life after the US Army, Kinessa serves as an anti-poaching advisor with Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (VETPAW), a not-for-profit organization that employs US Veterans to help protect African wildlife from being poached and captured illegally. Kinessa and her cohorts are doing important work. According to VETPAW, nearly 100 African elephants are slaughtered every day for their tusks. Without action, this fabulous species, and others, will be gone from the wild within a decade. The poaching crisis affects [...]