Advocates to ban mountain lion hunting in Colorado filed a notice to put on next year’s ballot a measure that would outlaw mountain lion and bobcat hunting in the state.The ballot proposal, which was filed yesterday, requires backers to gather signatures in order to qualify for next year’s general election. It has been filed under the title “Prohibit Trophy Hunting.” The draft was accepted by the state’s legislative council staff at about noon on Friday. Draft language indicates that the ballot measure will declare that “any trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats, or lynx is inhumane, serves no socially acceptable or ecologically beneficial purpose, and fails to further public safety.”
Backers further note in the draft that “trophy hunting is practiced primarily for the display of an animal’s head, fur, or other body parts, rather than the utilization of the meat.”
Colorado’s big-game regulations require mountain lion hunters to utilize meat from harvested lions. Regulations further allow for the use of hounds to both pursue lions.
The proposed ballot initiative would ban hound hunting for lions and bobcats. The draft language states that lion hunting is “almost always conducted by unsporting means, including, but not limited to, using packs of dogs with electronic devices to pursue and entrap affected animals in places from which they cannot escape in order to achieve the kill.”
In the 2023-24 season, Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife division authorized about 500 lion tags for seasons that run from the end of November through the end of March and again for the month of April in some hunting units. The state estimates the lion population of Colorado between 3,000 and 7,000 animals.
“I think what we’re seeing is the proverbial death by a thousand cuts,” said one Colorado hunting advocate who asked to speak off the record. “Mountain lion hunting is an easy target. There aren’t that many lion hunters, relatively speaking, and it’s easy to dismiss the activity as somehow out of the mainstream. But it’s an activity that’s heavily regulated. Quotas are conservatively managed, and we have a long history of successfully managing the species. I think opponents have to explain how a ban might affect depredating lions, especially in human communities.”
Once the Colorado Secretary of State approves the petition form, petitions may be circulated throughout the state to obtain the required number of signatures, which in 2024 is 124,238 qualified signatures.
You can read the entire text of the mountain lion hunting ban here.
When the blacktail doe 13-year-old Addisyn Olson arrowed on Sept. 14 took off into the woods on her family’s land in Centralia, Washington, she was pretty bummed out. After six years of rifle hunting and finally drawing an archery elk tag, she was extra excited for this season. Addisyn had hunted for five days prior, and when she finally got a chance on a deer, she felt good about the shot. But now a search for the doe would likely take the family late into the night.There was an hour of shooting light left, so she stayed in the ground blind with her mother Tonya and her two younger siblings. Her 9-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister watched a movie through headphones silently on the ground while Addisyn and Tonya scanned the field edge in front of them. Addisyn, after all, still had an elk tag.
After just a few minutes, three elk emerged from the woods—a spike, a cow, and a calf. While the spike was technically a legal bull per Washington’s regulations, she didn’t want to take a shot on it. So the mother-daughter duo sat patiently, and eventually some bugling emerged from the brush. An older legal bull crept out into the open.
Addisyn and Tonya couldn’t believe it. The bull was facing them, but focused on the cow instead.
“He walked out about 20 yards away and stood there head-on,” Addisyn says. “Then another bull starts bugling, and it turns into this bugle-fest. But the other bull was still in the woods.”
Two more cows emerged, putting the count at six elk plus a seventh still hidden in the trees. The first bull was still positioned head-on, leaving Addisyn without a shot.
Eventually, the second bull stepped out of the woods. The two bulls bugled at each other back and forth, and the second bull started chasing one of the cows around. Addisyn accidentally clinked her arrow against the window frame on the blind. The noise caused the second bull to stop perfectly broadside, staring at them.
“He looked right at us, and my mom says ‘Take him.’ So I let go and my arrow went directly through the heart,” Addisyn says. “He walked about 25 feet away, stood there, wobbled a little bit, then stood straight up into a vertical stance and then he dropped right there.”
Addisyn’s broadhead sliced through the bull’s heart. Tonya Olson
Addisyn couldn’t believe what had just happened.
“I literally started crying and my mom was screaming, and my siblings were like ‘What just happened?’ They were so confused,” she says. “But then my little brother started hugging me and crying at the same time.”
Addisyn wasn’t the only one who felt overwhelmed. Tonya also couldn’t believe what she had just witnessed.
“It was a crazy hunt,” she says. “First of all, she hits this deer that runs into the woods, and we’re like alright, we’re going to have to go chase that deer later. But it was prime time, an hour before shooting hours were over, so I was like ‘Let’s just stay here, you never know what’s going to walk out.’ And then sure enough this whole thing unfolds.”
Tonya’s husband had been hunting a different blind on the property. He came by and helped Addisyn as she skinned and field dressed the bull herself.
“It was a super cool experience for the four of us to have all together, even though the littles were oblivious for a little while,” Tonya laughs.
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The bull ended up being a very unique 6×7, thanks to a drop eyeguard and a few small kickers around the pedicles. Addisyn’s good fortune wasn’t over, either. As the family walked a narrow dirt road on their land searching for the doe that had jetted into the woods an hour prior, they saw something in the middle of the path.
“We turned the corner, and my little brother was like ‘Uh, there are eyes right there,’” Addisyn says. “She [the doe] was just laying there.”
“Yeah,” Tonya adds, laughing at her daughter’s seemingly unlimited luck. “That never happens.”
Jamarcus Bullard witnessed a scene out of a horror movie Saturday when he spotted an alligator swimming with an adult human body in its mouth. It happened in a canal of an unincorporated area of Largo, near Tampa on Florida’s southwest coast.Bullard contacted authorities, then began using his phone to record the scene he couldn’t believe he was watching.
“I threw a rock at the gator just to see if it was really a gator and like it pulled the body, like it was holding on to the lower part of the torso, and pulled it under the water,” Bullard told Tampa’s WFLA News Channel 8. “It [the alligator] lifted up out of the water with the body, like it was just clamped onto it, and it like swam backwards, like, under to the bottom of the canal to the other side. I just couldn’t believe it was real.”
State authorities soon showed at the scene, and Bullard watched events unfold as Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worked to capture the gator.
“They put a rope around its neck [the gator] and put it on a pully of a truck,” says Bullard. “They were reeling it in, but it started to pull the truck in the water so the guy was like ‘we just got to get it out a different way.’
“They got this long stick thing, pulled the head (of the gator) out of the water, then they shot it and once they reeled it all the way out, they stretched it out and measured it 13 feet, 8.5-inches long and they shot it again.”
Naturally, area residents are stunned by news.
“My kids walk by there all the time,” Jennifer Dean told WFLA. “So it’s really scary.”
Bullard walks the area regularly, but now has a different view of his neighborhood.
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“I walk this way for work, there and back, and I’ll always look both ways just in case like an alligator or something like that,” he says. “I never thought I’d see one out here. I thought it would be in the swamps and all that, but it was a big gator out here in our water.”
Dawson Durham got a late start on the afternoon of Sept. 14, and didn’t settle into his climbing stand until just after 5 p.m. He was nearly 40 feet up the tree on a steep ridge, and hoping to shoot some of the coyotes he’d been seeing around his North Carolina deer property.“It was a little breezy that afternoon, about 80 degrees,” the self-employed businessman told Outdoor Life. “I had trail cameras out, but I had no good bucks on camera, just a bunch of coyotes that I wanted gone. That’s why I climbed so high [in the tree], the wind, and coyotes are notoriously difficult to take with a bow as they see almost every movement.”
Durham, 24, was hunting the top of ridge where white and red acorns were falling. His spot overlooked a grassy lane that dropped off sharply behind his tree and into a creek bottom. After half an hour, he spotted a doe and a yearling feeding along the lane.
They browsed for about 30 minutes, coming to within 20 yards of his stand. Around 6 p.m. they disappeared, and that’s when Durham heard something behind his stand, making its way up the ridge from the creek.
“It was just a light-sounding walk, and I thought for sure it was a coyote,” he says. “I didn’t want to move fast and scare the coyote, or the doe and yearling if they were still around.”
Durham with his buck. The low exit wound helps illustrate the extreme angle of the shot he pulled off. Courtesy of Dawson Durham
“It was coming straight up the hill to the lane in front of me, and I saw it had a tall and wide rack,” he says. “I stood up very slowly, and the buck sensed something wasn’t right and spun around to head back down to the creek.
“He was directly below me, and I had to shoot fast or I was sure he’d bolt and be gone.”
Durham drew his bow, anchored, aimed, and let his arrow fly. The extreme angle wasn’t Durham’s idea of a perfect shot. The buck charged downhill and disappeared into the tangled brush of the creek far below.
“I was in shock, really,” says the veteran bowhunter, who says he has seven Pope and Young whitetails to his credit in the last three years. “I had no idea a buck like that was anywhere around that area. I’d never gotten a trail camera picture of it—just coyotes and small deer.”
Durham didn’t hear or see anything for 30 minutes. Then he climbed down to look for blood. Almost immediately he recovered his arrow, and saw blood on the ground.
“I had no real idea where I hit the buck, because he was so close and it happened so fast,” he says. “So, I just sat at the base of my tree until it got dark, about 7:30 p.m. Then I started to follow the buck’s blood trail.”
The trail was easy to follow, and Durham shortly found his buck at the bottom of the hill, laying near the creek. He’d hit the buck perfectly, with the arrow entering the top of the buck’s back, passing completely through the chest, and exiting low to bury in the ground.
He had an ATV parked not too far from where he shot the buck, but driving it down and back up the steep hill would have been impossible, he says. So he snapped some photos, then skinned, boned, and caped his buck where it fell. Next he packed it all uphill and out to his ATV.
When he got the buck home, Durham put it in a freezer, delivering the cape and skull to a taxidermist the next day. Durham estimates the buck weighed over 200 pounds, with a typical main frame rack totaling 15 points. When pressed for a rough score, he estimates the buck will gross about 160 inches, but he didn’t measure it.
“The buck has 15 points, but two are short and won’t count for P&Y,” he says. “I don’t really care that much about the score. It’s just a big, beautiful buck—my best.”
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The young bowman is pumped going into his autumn deer season, with upcoming hunts planned in a few more states.
“I’ve doubled down on my bowhunting since taking the 15-pointer,” he says. “I’m knocking on landowner doors looking for access, finding new areas, and hunting every chance I get.”
Joseph Scaglione of Jupiter, Florida received multiple vaccines and other treatment after a rabid 3-year-old river otter attacked his arms, legs, and hands on Sept. 20, the Miami Herald reports. Scaglione, 74, was feeding ducks in a pond near his home at the time. The otter also attacked a neighbor’s dog, although the neighbor remains unidentified.Scaglione had made a routine of walking to the pond to feed the ducks. He turned around to go home in the late morning but heard all the ducks flush from the pond. When he turned back to see why, he noticed the otter walking along the bank of the pond.He slowly backed up, still facing the otter, until he made it to the gate in the fence. As he tried to go through the gate, the otter attacked him, first biting and scratching his legs, then eventually his arms and hands. The attack went on for several minutes, leaving Scaglione with 41 wounds.“I started to push it away, and it started to bite my hands,” Scaglione told WPTV. “One of the bites I have is on my pinkie and it ripped the nail off the pinkie. [It] looks like the tooth went completely through my finger.”
The otter redirected its attention from Scaglione to a neighborhood dog. The Jupiter Police Department eventually trapped the otter under a recycling bin before Palm Beach Animal Care and Control arrived to capture it in a cage. Officials took it to the Florida Department of Health for rabies testing, which required the otter be euthanized. The otter tested positive. The dog was taken to a veterinarian for treatment.
Scaglione received the necessary vaccinations to ward off a rabies infection, which is almost always fatal for humans once signs of infection emerge, according to the World Health Organization. But due to the viral disease’s highly treatable and preventable nature, only two to three humans contract it nationwide each year, the Florida Department of Health reports. Scaglione’s next step is a visit with a hand surgeon to address his most severe wounds.
This attack happened seven weeks to the day after a river otter violently attacked three women floating down Montana’s Jefferson River outside of Bozeman. One victim’s injuries were so severe that she was life-flighted to a hospital in Bozeman for treatment. Photos of her injuries, which surfaced in the days that followed the attack, show just how much damage river otters can do.
Eric Hinderliter, 37, of New Harmony, Indiana, is a dedicated father, husband, and hunter. Lately he’s been walking on air after his twin nine-year-old daughters, Kara and Avery, each shot their first big bucks during Indiana’s youth hunt last weekend.Avery was hunting with her dad Saturday afternoon on their southern Indiana property. Kara—the younger of the twin girls by one minute—was hunting with her mother, Krystal Hinderliter.Each team of Hinderliters was hunting from elevated box blinds overlooking planted food plots in CRP fields. The terrain is ideal deer habitat: flat and fertile lowlands that flood regularly.
Avery’s Buck
“We got into the blind about 4:30 p.m., and it was 80-degrees, muggy and buggy,” Hinderliter told Outdoor Life. “Our blind was overlooking a food plot where I had trail cameras set up and I’d been watching a good buck on the spot since April. We’d planned and waited for the chance to get him that opening day of Indiana’s youth deer hunting season.”
Avery waits behind her crossbow in the blind. Eric Hinderliter
“We weren’t in our blind long and a doe with three fawns stepped out of the CRP to feed in the food plot,” Eric says. “They were close, and the doe was edgy in the small half-acre plot.”
The father and daughter were careful in their movements and silent as they watched the deer feeding nearby. Then another doe stepped out, followed by two sets of does and fawns.
Avery was ready with a Ravin R29 crossbow, fitted with a carbon bolt and a two-inch expandable broadhead, resting on a portable tripod in their box blind.
“She shoots that Ravin well, consistently hitting soda cans out to 80 yards,” Eric says.
They watched the does, and at 6:15 the 10-point mature buck that had been appearing on trail cam since April stepped into the field.
“Avery spotted it first, and when I looked up, the buck was turned toward us at just 20 yards,” Eric says. “I knew the deer was going to go behind us. So we had to quietly move the tripod and bow so she could shoot out a different window.”
Avery with her first buck. Eric Hinderliter
They pulled off the maneuver without spooking the buck. Then the deer turned sideways and Eric whistled softly to stop it so Avery could shoot. She did, making what looked like a perfect hit behind its shoulder. The buck took off into a thicket bordering the food plot.
At dark they checked the spot where the buck had stood, and Eric thought the deer would be down within 200 yards. But it wasn’t, and the blood trail was light and difficult to follow.
So he returned to their cabin, where they met with Krystal and Kara, and their 5-year-old son, Ty. Kara and Krystal had been hunting in another box blind overlooking a different food plot on their land. They saw deer, but Kara passed them waiting for the right buck to show.
Eric has a well-trained Catahoula tracking hound that is long experienced in trailing deer. He uses the dog to help hunters track hit whitetails in Indiana and two nearby states. He says Moose helped recover 70 whitetails last year.
“We went back to where Avery shot her deer long after dark, and I had Moose on a leash and we started trailing it,” Eric says. “The woods were thick with underbrush, and almost no blood from the buck. But Moose kept on the trail, and about 500 yards into the timber he found the deer dead.”
The arrow hit the buck farther back in the chest than Eric believed, so it went far without much blood into the brush. “Thank goodness for Moose,” Eric says.
From left: Eric, Avery, Ty, Krystal with Avery’s buck, which Moose helped recover. Courtesy of Eric Hinderliter
The family was able to drive an ATV close to the buck, which Eric estimates weighed about 230 pounds. Then they loaded the deer and headed back to their cabin for the night, putting the buck in a walk-in cooler at camp.
Avery’s first buck is a main-frame 10 point with an additional kicker. Eric guesses it’ll score 150 inches or more.
Kara’s Buck
Kara with her 9-point Indiana buck. Eric Hinderliter
The next afternoon, Kara and her mother, Krystal, climbed into a box blind overlooking the food plot where they hunted previously. They started seeing does and fawns within an hour. Krystal kept a running phone-text commentary with Eric through their afternoon and evening hunt.
“The spike and doe are back from yesterday,” she texted. “Kara is going to shoot the doe if it comes in front of us. Got another spike in front of us. Eight does in all.”
But just a few minutes later a huge buck stepped out. Kara shot it perfectly behind the shoulder. She was hunting with a custom AR-style youth rifle that Eric had built. It’s chambered in .350 Legend, shooting a 180-grain hollow-point bullet.
“Kara got really lucky that her buck stepped out when it did, because she was going to shoot a doe,” Eric says of his daughter’s first deer. “Her buck only went 100 yards. The bullet did its job fast, and we drove my truck right to the deer, loaded it and went back to our cabin where we all celebrated.”
Kara with her mom, Krystal, after their hunt together. Eric Hinderliter
The buck weighed well over 200 pounds, and its estimated score is over 140 inches, Eric says. Both deer will be mounted by a taxidermist, and Eric is trying to decide how they should be posed, and where to display them for all the family to enjoy in years to come.
“We have a spot in my man cave where they’d look great on a wall,” says Eric, chuckling. “But I guess we’d have to change the name of the spot to ‘Family Cave.’”
Middle-school student Ryker Copp will probably never top the massive bull elk he shot Sunday during a special-draw hunt with his dad in northwest Minnesota, and that’s just fine.Ryker and his dad, Jerred, were hunting in Kittson County near the Canadian border, an area that’s known for producing trophy bulls, reports the Grand Forks Herald. Elk tags are available through a competitive once-in-a-lifetime lottery in Minnesota, and Ryker was one of only two hunters drawn for the either-sex hunt in the area (Zone 30, Season H) during the Sept. 23-to-Oct. 1 season.Although they had spotted a massive 8×10 bull before the season opened, the Copps were disappointed on opening day when they couldn’t find the bull.
“I kind of kept an eye on him during the week when I could sneak up there, and he was around,” Jerred told the Herald. “Saturday morning there was no elk there. I was really trying to figure out where they went, and I guess they moved north a couple of miles.”
An unfavorable wind made their Sunday hunt difficult, so the Copps kept their distance in a ground blind until about 6 p.m. They were watching several cows and smaller bulls when the big bull finally showed.
“All of a sudden, we heard some bugling,” Jerred said. “And I said, ‘There he is, Ryker.’”
“My biggest job was to get him calmed down to make the shot,” Jerred said. “I had to keep cool so Ryker would be cool. I just kept telling him, ‘You can do this, you can do this. Take some deep breaths, calm down, it will be fine.’”
When the bull was about as close at Jerred guessed he would come—359 yards—Ryker clicked off his safety and squeezed the trigger.
“We were high-fiving, jumping up and down in the ground blind,” Jerred told KVLY. “I think it bounced 10 feet in the air.”
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The bull rough-scored 390 inches and weighed an estimated 950 pounds dressed; it will get scored officially after the mandatory 60-day drying period. Jerred, who has hunted elk out West, says his son’s bull tops them all.
“I told [Ryker] he could probably hunt the rest of his life in the Western states, and he’s going to have to get really lucky to beat [that bull].”
Alaska’s Bering Sea and Aleutian Island groundfish trawl fisheries this year caught 10 killer whales in their massive nets. Nine of them died.NOAA Fisheries is “analyzing collected data to determine the cause of injury or death and determine which stocks these whales belong to through a review of genetic information,” the agency said in a press release.Killer whales are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which requires boat operators to report injuries or death. Each Bering Sea trawler carries two NOAA Fisheries Observers aboard to document bycatch, but when trawlers drag nets in other places off Alaska’s coast they lack 100 percent observer coverage.
Trawler Troubles in Alaska
A pollack catch on the deck of factory trawler. Natalie Fobes
A large number of Alaska’s trawlers are homeported in Seattle. They fish for pollock and other fish, which get turned into products like fish sticks and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches.
In other places in Alaska, trawling is both happening and being labeled sustainable by Marine Stewardship Council, despite the fact that it has been documented to destroy coral and other important habitat essential for the ocean ecosystem.
Over the past decade, trawlers in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska have bycaught more than a billion pounds of marine life. That bycatch includes king and chum salmon, crab, halibut, and other species. Much of the bycatch is thrown overboard dead. Trawlers are allowed to catch an unlimited number of chum salmon.
Meanwhile, king and chum salmon runs in Western Alaska have collapsed in recent years. Salmon is the lifeblood of dozens of Alaska Native villages along the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, and subsistence fishery closures have enormous impacts. While climate change plays a role in the declines, many Alaskans see a clear link to trawl bycatch.
Critics also point to the fact that observers can only document bycatch that makes its way to the surface—and the massive, loaded nets of some trawlers have been documented as dragging the bottom up to 100 percent of the time, potentially pulverizing habitat, crabs, and other bottom-dwelling species.
“If what they are doing underwater with trawl nets was happening on land where the public could see it, it would be shut down tomorrow,” said David Bayes, owner of Homer-based DeepStrike Sportfishing.
Higher Than Normal Killer Whale Bycatch
Groundfish Forum, a Seattle-based association that operates 19 trawlers responsible for “a number” of the whale deaths, said that the level of killer whale trawl bycatch documented in 2023 is unusual. Groundfish Forum’s captains noticed an “increase in the number of killer whales present near our vessels, where they appear to be feeding in front of the nets while fishing.” The majority of dead whales were found inside nets.
“We are committed to working with NOAA and fishery managers to find solutions,” their statement continued.
Hannah Myers, a University of Fairbanks marine biology student who spent a week aboard a groundfish trawler studying killer whale interactions with the vessel, told the Anchorage Daily News she’s concerned by what’s going on deeper in the ocean. It is likely that killer whales are feeding on fish from the net’s entrance, or using the dragging net as a fishing aid, she said. The whales may be following trawlers in part because their normal prey is depleted.
Tensions ran high at a public hearing held by the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks on Sept. 21 when a lawmaker threatened to retaliate against the agency for a potential ban on wildlife baiting intended to slow the spread of CWD. Rep. Lewis Bloom, a Republican and farmer in Clay County, warned wildlife commissioners that the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the agency’s budget and of which Bloom is a member, would gut the agency of $1 million before going through each line item and cutting further funding if the agency “considers … banning baiting.”Bloom spoke for himself and Rep. Ken Corbet, also a Republican and the chair of the committee, when he made the threats. Corbet owns the Ravenwood Lodge, a hunting lodge outside Topeka where deer hunts run $1,000 per person per day, with a three-day minimum and additional trophy fees.“We have the votes to do this,” Bloom warned in the hearing. “If you consider banning baiting … we’re going to take $1 million off the top of your budget immediately, and then we will go through every line item bit by bit and take off everything we can possibly find.”
Those who favor the baiting ban as a method for protecting Kansas’ wild deer argue this political move raises ethical concerns over Corbet’s position as committee chair, KCUR reports. The hearing was just one in a series of public meetings held by KDWP intended to explore the pros and cons of a bait ban in Kansas and get public input. The agency first announced it was considering a bait ban on July 3. (Read more on the announcement and Kansas’ history with CWD here.)
“This isn’t just about baiting deer. This is about losing our freedom,” Bloom said. “We’re tired of it, our constituents are tired of it…We don’t want this rammed down our constituents’ throats, we don’t want to be told what to do on private ground when we’re paying to feed the deer. It’s not costing you one thing to feed the deer.”
At the core of the baiting-ban debate is the widely-supported scientific theory that the likelihood of the transmission of CWD (among other diseases) increases significantly when deer congregate around corn piles.
Baiting wildlife is already banned on public land in Kansas; since 97 percent of Kansas is under private ownership, the future of the state’s CWD response is reliant on landowner cooperation. Bloom argues that the ground KPDW takes care of “is a disaster … full of cedars, hedge, locusts, and weeds” and KDWP is “in no position to tell anybody how to take care of habitat, deer or any other kind.” Of course, cutting the agency’s budget likely won’t improve its ability to properly manage wildlife and habitat any time soon.
Opponents of a bait ban and other CWD restriction measures have long pointed out that it’s impossible to fully protect free-roaming deer from swapping spit. Even if KDWP were to enact a bait ban, Kansas deer would still share licking branches, eat from the same patches of crops, and otherwise huddle in close proximity. CWD prions live in soils for at least two years, which means infected areas can stay that way even if an attractant has been removed. And when the attractant in question is not only the landowner’s primary source of income but also the state’s second-biggest export, that complicates things.
“As a farmer, I see 60 or 70 deer on top of each other eating beans and corn,” Bloom says. “You can’t control that.”
But a ban on intentionally leaving piles of dried corn or mineral licks on the ground in a shooting lane or in front of a trail camera could control the unnatural congregation of deer around that concentrated food source. That’s the reasoning behind Wisconsin’s county-wide baiting and feeding bans whenever a deer tests positive for CWD. (Wisconsin’s Washburn, Rusk, Sawyer, and Barron counties will start baiting and feeding bans on Oct. 5 after a captive deer tested positive in Washburn County in August.)
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A formal proposal for a Kansas bait ban has yet to emerge, but KDWP will continue to consider the idea. KDWP did not immediately reply to request for comment. Bloom did not immediately offer comment, either. It remains unclear whether Bloom intends to punish the agency for enacting a ban or just considering one. Nor did he offer comment regarding the fact that wild deer are treated as a public resource even when on private land in the U.S.
“We have an obligation and an established standard of managing our state’s natural resources utilizing the best available scientific data,” KDWP secretary Brad Loveless told KCUR. “[We] will always do our best to achieve an acceptable balance between what’s best for wildlife and what’s best for users.”
This summer 23-year-old Daniel Delph was captaining a charter trip out of the Florida Keys to the Tortugas area near Key West. It was a long, 75-mile run one way, even for DelphFishing’s well-rigged 41-foot Sea Hunter catamaran.At the Tortugas on July 31, Capt. Daniel and his party of four anglers set up for bottom fishing, and it wasn’t long before one of his anglers hooked a heavy fish at about 300 feet.“He had just hooked the fish, and sharks got it immediately, right away,” Capt. Billy Delph, Daniel’s father, tells Outdoor Life. (Daniel Delph was running a charter and was not available for an interview.) “All that came up was a massive red head. The other half of that beautiful record red snapper fed the ravenous sharks that are impossible to avoid today … We catch lots of snapper [and] see big ones all the time. Our best guess was that fish whole and intact was about 55 pounds. It likely would have been an IGFA All-Tackle record for the species.”
The current world-record red snapper on the IGFA books is just over 50 pounds. While the July incident was disheartening for both the angler and the Delphs, Billy says it’s an example of a much larger issue that’s devastating to marine fisheries.
More fish mutilated by sharks before they were boated. Courtesy of Billy Delph
“Every year [becomes] the worst year we’ve ever experienced with sharks mutilating and taking our hooked fish,” Billy explains. “And that’s been going on for a decade. Every year [is] worse than the last because sharks are overpopulated and chomp about 80 percent of the fish we hook.”
Much the same problem exists with abundant sharks throughout the coastal South—from the Carolinas south to Florida, around the Florida peninsula, through Florida Bay and into the Gulf of Mexico to Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana recently increased its commercial shark limits to account for the rising shark numbers.
“Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we had trouble with sharks taking fish occasionally,” says Billy, 43. “But today it’s 200 percent worse than it ever was. It’s devastating to our marine fisheries. It’s just so frustrating.”
The Delphs say the shark problem has worsened every year over the last decade. Courtesy of Billy Delph
Laws protecting sharks from harvest have been enacted throughout much of their range, especially in U.S. waters where federal and state laws carefully regulate most species. Many anglers believe such strict shark harvest regulations have surpassed their usefulness at conserving sharks and moved from scientific management to protection ideology.
“So many people think sharks are endangered and that’s not the case,” Billy continues. “We work hard to avoid sharks. We never anchor, and we never fish more than 10 to 15 minutes in one spot—we must move around to avoid sharks. But it doesn’t matter where you fish, sharks are everywhere.”
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Billy says sharks have even altered his fishing business operation.
“The biggest threats to our angling and guiding business are the economy, fishery closures by federal agencies, and sharks … At times shark depredation on our hooked fish is so consistently devastating that we’ve quit fishing for snapper or grouper and changed angling areas and tactics for other species like swordfish. … It makes no sense to hook snapper or grouper just to feed them to sharks.”
