Indholdsfortegnelse for June - July 2016 i Outdoor Life

MENHADEN THEY’RE SMALL. THEY STINK. THEY’RE UNREMARKABLE LOOKING. YOU WOULDN’T EVER INTENTIONALLY EAT ONE, ALTHOUGH YOU’VE UNDOUBTEDLY CONSUMED ONE OR USED A PRODUCT THAT CONTAINS MENHADEN. SO WHILE YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD OF IT, THIS SMALL BAITFISH FROM THE HERRING FAMILY IS POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT FISH THAT SWIMS IN THE OCEAN 1.15 BILLION Number of pounds of menhaden taken in commercial landings on the Gulf and Atlantic in 2014. 15 inches LENGTH OF A MATURE MENHADEN. NATIVE AMERICANS CALLED THEM MUNNAWHATTEUG—WHICH MEANS “THAT WHICH FERTILIZES”—AND USED MENHADEN TO ENRICH THE SOIL. 7 NUMBER OF GALLONS OF WATER FILTERED BY AN ADULT MENHADEN EVERY MINUTE. A CHOICE BAIT FOR BASS STRIPERS CAN’T RESIST THE OILY SCENT OF MENHADEN. USE A FISH FINDER RIG AND A FRESH HEAD. CHANGE YOUR…

First things first: Muskie camps are not a thing. As far as I know, my friends and I run the only one in existence. I’m not even sure that “camp” is the right word. There’s no wooden plaque with a hand-carved rainbow that would welcome you to a trout camp, only a crush of reeds where we pull the boats up through the brambles and out of sight. Nor is it a deer camp. There’s no wood shack with a wood stove and an 8-pointer on the porch, though we share an indifference to hygiene. No, our muskie retreat is a tent-and-tarp, public-land sort of affair, our only residential luxury the waxed canvas A-frame our spiritual leader—an enthusiast of 18th-century voyageur culture—packs along from time to time. By day, we…

There are hundreds of reasons to love a gun. You might prize it because it’s taken more game than any other in your safe. Perhaps it saved your skin— and on more than one occasion. Maybe you love it so dearly you don’t even shoot it anymore: It’s earned its retirement, and you slip it from its soft case every now and then to admire it and wipe it down, even though it doesn’t need it . Yet the stories that poured in from readers this year share a common theme. All of the favorite guns you will read about here call to mind the loved ones in your life who have shaped your love for your gun. The bond is formed less around what you hunted with your rifle…

In a pasture near Roy, Tex., last January, I flushed a plague of quail. According to biologist Dale Rollins, bobwhite numbers hadn’t just doubled over the previous year; they’d increased fivefold. Scaled quail numbers were up eight times. It was a classic irruption year. Mearns quail exploded like that in southern Arizona two years ago. After years of low numbers, they were suddenly everywhere. I’ve seen Gambel’s quail do that in the Sonoran desert. Absent one year; like locusts the next. In the 1960s, Idaho was covered up with mountain quail. Today, a remnant population barely hangs on, but introduced valley quail are doing okay. Down in Missouri, Illinois, Mississippi, and surrounding states—once bobwhite strongholds— the quail seem almost to be missing in action. What’s going on? Habitat, and the…

SHOOTERS HAVE long dreamed of a combined scope-rangefinder that actually works. However, to date, most versions of scope-rangefinder units left a lot to be desired. They tended to be expensive, big, and clumsy, and they really didn’t perform better than separate scope and rangefinder units. Then I heard about the Burris Eliminator III. Although it was initially designed for hunting, I wondered if such a scope would work for two-man team tactical matches. I imagined my partner/carbine shooter blazing away at his targets (sans my help), giving me the autonomy to focus on my targets. We could cut our time at shooting positions by 20 percent. Brilliant! I floated the idea to one of my friends, a fellow competitor. “Are you serious?” he said. “First, it’s a scoperangefinder. Second, it’s…

NEW PHOTOS In addition to fresh writing, you’ll also get to see more than 100 neverbefore-published photographs. Who says picture books are just for kids? During nearly four decades as the Shooting Editor of Outdoor Life, Jim Carmichel wielded tremendous influence through his writing, both on his audience and on the shooting industry at large. He was known to entertain, infuriate, enlighten, and incite—sometimes all within a single column. He also hunted the world and wrote about his adventures at the historical apex of international big-game hunting. As such, he recognized and embraced a unique opportunity to regale his readers with some of the most rich and compelling material a gun writer could ever hope for. Yet the published versions of many of Carmichel’s columns and features—as captivating and acclaimed…

RIFLES OUTDOOR LIFE’S gun test is serious business. It is a lot of fun as well, there’s no denying that. But beyond the smell of powder, the piles of hot brass, the sore shoulders, the ringing of steel, and the smiles on the faces of the shooters lurks a solemn task. That is, to gather fair and objective data about which of 2016’s new guns are worth you spending your money on. This year, gunmakers have developed rifles for a broad array of tasks and budgets. Among them, we have a bargain-priced magnum from Ruger, a stylish and accurate varmint rifle from Montana Rifle Company, a high-tech .308 from Christensen Arms, and an affordable scope-rifle combo kit from Howa that is built on a new “mini” sized action. One windfall…

HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA ILION, NEW YORK MY YANKEE DAD told me he didn’t fully understand my Dixie mother until, years into their marriage, he visited her childhood home in Georgia. There, among the magnolia trees, porch swings, and syrup-thick accents, he recognized the origin of her love of gardens, Sunday dinners, and Coca-Cola. I had a similar rediscovery as I walked the creaking wooden floors of Remington’s factory in Upstate New York last winter. My first rifle, a Model 510 TargetMaster single-shot .22, was born in this sprawling facility, and every whiff of solvent-heavy air and glimpse of rough-cut stock blanks reminded me of the burnished metal and oiled walnut of my rimfire, which for the second decade of my life was my only beloved gun. When I returned home from…

The secret to killing big deer in areas where few of them exist isn’t much of a secret at all, but it’s something that few people are willing to do: Leave them alone. Living in hunter-dense southern Michigan, I like to think that I’ve earned my Ph.D. in pressured whitetails. Michiganders kill a healthy percentage of yearling bucks each season, and do a pretty fair job of polishing off the survivors as 2-year-olds the following season. The ages of the last five bucks taken here by me and my son are 4, 5, 7, 3, and 5. The common thread in all of those bucks: sanctuary. To kill mature deer in pressured areas, you have to have some mature deer around. That is far and away the most difficult (and…

OUTDOOR LIFE: Tell us about your big win. ANNABELLE STANEC: I competed in the NRA 3-Position Air Gun Championship in Albuquerque last year. I took first place out of 100 individual qualifiers from across the country. Our team, the Ashland Eagles Junior Rifle Club, also took first place. OL: How long have you been shooting? AS: I started shooting when I was 9. My grandpa was a precision shooter when he was young, and in college. He passed that tradition to my older sister. She was going to all these cool matches, and I got interested too. I started practicing on my own, and by the time I was 12, I was scoring high enough that they added me to the team. OL: What do you shoot? AS: I use…

It’s a darn panfish, for gosh sake. How hard can it really be to catch one—or 20? When it’s the right place at the right time, the answer is: Not that hard at all. However, if you’re serious about your crappie fishing, and the spawn is over, filling a bucket with slabs becomes a bit more difficult and a tad more technical. When crappies are scattered, or if they’re tightly clustered on specific areas, dialing in the sweet spots means covering water, noting bite details, and developing replicable patterns. Confronted with multiple factors of depth, distance, and different bait actions, crappie pro Dan Dannenmueller dissects the complex challenge with a plain—make that “planer”—solution. Borrowing a page from the walleye angler’s playbook, Dannenmueller deploys a spread of jigs, crankbaits, and Roadrunners,…

It’s around 4 p.m. on Tillei Lake in the southern Yukon, and DJ Tudino is reading the fish finder mounted to the stern of his 14-foot Lund fishing boat. “There’s a steep underwater wall here that drops 40 feet,” says DJ, a 25-year-old guide with Inconnu Lodge, a top-notch fishing outfit that’s been putting guests on top of the biggest lake trout and northern pike in the Yukon Territory for longer than DJ’s been alive. It’s the reason I’ve crossed Canada from Toronto—a distance of nearly 3,000 miles—to spend five magnificent days in country that’s as rough and dangerous today as when American author Jack London visited during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s—and lost his front teeth to scurvy. Over the last couple of days, I’ve landed quite…

THE GUNSMITH HAS LONG held a revered place in American firearms lore. But the rise of the AR has ignited a fierce debate in gunsmithing circles, with some suggesting that artisanal skills are in decline due to the popularity of the “Lego gun.” Others, like Bob Thacker, director of the Pittsburgh Gunsmith School, say there has been “exponential growth” in the craft of the gunsmith since 9/11. He has a two-year waiting list of potential students, a third of whom are veterans. But who are these artisans bent over benches and vises who make your gun feel so good in the palm of your hand that it’s like greeting a friend, who get your rifle to split the bull’s-eye, or who create a trigger pull so slick it’s like oiled…

BE A BETTER SHOT NO MATTER WHAT YOU SHOOT—A SHOTGUN, PISTOL, RIFLE, OR ALL THREE—THIS BOOK, WRITTEN BY OUTDOOR LIFE SHOOTING EDITOR JOHN B. SNOW, WILL HELP YOU TAKE YOUR SKILLS TO THE NEXT LEVEL. THE ULTIMATE SHOOTING SKILLS MANUAL INCLUDES DETAILED DRILLS AND TIPS TO IMPROVE EVERY FACET OF YOUR SHOOTING. AVAILABLE AT OUTDOORLIFE.COM/SHOOTINGMANUAL. STORYTIME We pay cash for all true adventures published. Only those used will be acknowledged. Send to Outdoor Life, THTM, 2 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016; or THTM@OutdoorLife.com. Please include a daytime phone number.…