Innehållsförteckning för February/March 2017 från Outdoor Life

Pine Falls, Manitoba / Feb. 14 / 11:01 a.m. Octogenarian Harry DeWille has always been a bit of a practical joker, and he didn’t miss an opportunity to kid around when a pair of guests dropped in on his icy Valentine’s Day. Photographer Tom Fowlks says his uncle, a local who was showing him around the area, walked up to DeWille’s fi shing hole and—before he got a good look at the pike on the ice—asked the man, “What are you catching today?” Without missing a beat, DeWille shot back, “Mermaids.”…

The caliber and configuration make sense when you see the rugged landscape Corbett hunted early in the last century, the terrain I toured with the Rigby rifle last spring and write about beginning on p. 58. India’s big cats lived (and still live) in tangly jungle and steep mountains. A heavy double-gun would have been unwieldy. Corbett’s rifle looks old-fashioned now, but at the time it was presented to him in 1907 (for killing a tiger responsible for 436 deaths), the rifle represented cutting-edge technology: a hot new caliber capable of delivering modern bullets that were plenty lethal for tigers weighing 500 pounds, a fast action for quick followup shots, and a magazine that held four shells. A century later, technology looks different. Today, when game wardens in India are…

T The smartphone has become as vital a piece of gear for most hunters as our guns and bows. These little devices are good for texting buddies from the stand, playing games to stave off boredom, taking those annoying camocentric selfies, and—yes— actually helping us to kill more critters . As cell service has become more reliable and devices more sophisticated, the phones we carry in our pockets can do far more than make calls and snap photos. Most feature built-in GPS and available satellite imagery, and mapping detail is better than ever. Battery life continues to improve, and portable chargers make it possible to employ a smartphone for hours on end while afield. The missing link has been applications made to harness all that technology. The world of huntingfocused…

T he day late-winter brown trout fi shing fi rst made sense to me, I was fi shing a tough beat of technical water on Michigan’s Manistee River with litt le expectation of success. With snow piled high on the banks and the river shallow and low, I aimed for one of the few available sanctuaries—an undercut bank. I overcast my target and landed my fl y in the snow, and when I pulled it into the water, there came a splashy rise that I took for an optical illusion. No way a wild freestone brown in 32.8-degree water would whack a streamer on touch down . On the next cast I dropped my streamer on slack line right at the head of the cutbank, gave it a single twitch,…

HORNADY 108-GRAIN ELD MATCH BC G1: .536 BC G7: .270 Price: $45 PER 100 Contact:HORNADY.COM One of the newest additions to Hornady’s ELD (Extremely Low Drag) series, this bullet effectively replaces the older 105-grain A-Max, which has been a mainstay of the Hornady line for decades. Expect to see real-world pricing of about $33 per 100. WHY IT’S HOT The big news with this bullet is the tip. Hornady calls the polymer tip a “heat shield” that it says will not melt or deform in flight. During Hornady’s development of the ELD series they discovered erratic flight characteristics with many standard polymer-tipped bullets with high BCs (.500 and up) because the tips would begin to melt. Hornady also says the polymer tips give the projectile a consistent meplat, meaning less…

GRAY MATTER: This brain came from a CWD-free whitetail. FIVE DECADES HAVE PASSED SINCE CHRONIC wasting disease reared its ugly, mysterious head. For the fi rst forty years, the disease seemed to be little more than an oddity, a strange affl iction that aff ected a handful of mule deer, elk, and whitetails out West. It was an annoyance, not an epidemic. Then, in 2002, it was discovered in wild whitetails in Wisconsin, and things got real. Suddenly, CWD acquired a new level of focus and potential devastation that has taken on an outsize role among those who value whitetails. But should it? A little more than a decade later, let’s consider what we know: Chronic wasting disease was fi rst noted in 1967 by researchers studying a captive mule…

GOLD STANDARD ▶ I’ve been reading Outdoor Life for 66 years, and the December/January 2017 double issue was one of the best. I commend you for the excellent article and photos on Southern rabbit hunting [“A Vanishing Legacy”]. That article brings back great memories in a day when kids cut their hunting teeth on deer, and when deer dominate outdoor media. Old geezers like me learned to hunt by chasing cottontails and swampers with beagles, and still-hunting squirrels on foot and by canoe in “Swampeast” Missouri. I was grown before our deer herd recovered enough to sustain good hunting. Since then, I’ve taken several dozen Ozarks whitetails (including a 13-point 5 ½-yearold buck this season). Kudos to you also for writing about tracking and taking northwoods bucks in the…

We respond to snow, ice, and wind like clockwork. Winterize the boat, break out the ice gear, and fi sh the hardwater. While icefi shermen will claim their share of walleyes, there are still open-water fi sheries available at this time of year. You just need to know where to look . Excluding periods of extended below-zero conditions, most rivers—especially the tailwater stretches below locks and dams—will remain open, and that’s where walleyes will congregate for the next couple of months. According to Minnesota guide Denver McKinnon, walleye fishing remains excellent in the tailwater stretches beginning in January and lasting until the snow starts to melt in March. Most tailwaters also feature nearby boat access sites. This, along with the combination of open water, concentrated walleyes, and boat access, makes…

IT STARTED AS the mere spark of an idea back in 2007. I wanted to write an article about how one goes about developing a wildcat cartridge. As a fan of long-range shooting, and in order to give the story an editorial hook with some sex appeal, I decided a cartridge capable of accurate 1,000-yard shots that had moderate recoil was the way to go. My ambitions for this wildcat extended no further than getting a good feature out of it, and using it to hunt coyotes and deer. The 6.5 Creedmoor had been introduced earlier that year and it seemed like a good candidate for a parent cartridge. I spoke with my friends at Hornady and they agreed to help out. Necking the 6.5 down for 6mm bullets was…

THE HUMAN EYE is a wondrous instrument, but its observational powers are limited to the narrow band of radiation that, not surprisingly, we call visible light. This represents just a fraction of the bandwidth of electromagnetic energy that exists in our universe. And our inability to peer into this vast space with the unaided eye leaves us, both literally and metaphorically, in the dark . At one end of the visible spectrum is blue and violet. At the other end is orange and red. Once we move beyond red light, we’re in the realm of infrared radiation, which is invisible to our eyes but which we still can detect through the sensation of heat on our skin. It is this energy that thermal imagers pick up and then translate into…

MODERN-DAY FISHING LINE may seem like a marvel of material science, but the category actually remains in its infancy developmentally. There are many mind-boggling advances on the horizon. BRAIDED LINE As the head of research and development for Spider Wire and Power Pro, Konrad Krauland pioneered the superline revolution. According to Krauland, “Today’s braided lines, which are fundamentally made of polyethylene (PE), have yet to reach their maximum strength.” Power Pro’s new Maxcuatro line, made with Spectra HT, for example, is currently the strongest braid on the market. Yet its strength is still only at 50 percent of theoretical maximum. “Further advancements in the manufacturing of PE will allow us to create a clear, woven superline that will also be transparent to fish,” says Krauland. Great promise lies in a…

WILD TURKEYS TIP It may be frosty where you live, but in Florida, the mosquitoes are probably out and biting. Bring a Thermacell or serious bug dope. While the rest of the country is frosty and cold, turkey hunters in Florida are chasing strutters among the palmett os and Spanish moss. If a Sunshine State gobbler is on your bucket list, here’s how to go about checking it off . The pinnacle experience for thousands of turkey hunters is the completion of a Grand Slam, killing at least one each of the four subspecies of wild turkeys in the United States. Based on considerations of distribution and abundance—if not behavior—the hardest of the bunch to kill is the Osceola, found only in the peninsular portion of Florida. With its striking…

MAUREEN PHILHOWER, 52 Lafayette, NJ Despite getting my ACL replaced one week earlier, I had to hunt the rut. My husband helped me to the blind, and at 8 a.m. I shot this buck with my crossbow. By the time I crutched to where the deer had fallen, I was exhausted. And it shows: My husband took this photo without my knowing. RJ SCHUPLER, 14 Long Island, NY After more than a year of practicing with my bow in the backyard, I got a chance to take my first deer with a compound on the north shore of Long Island. I drew on this button buck at 7 a.m. during the rut, skinned it myself, and cooked baconwrapped venison for our family dinner that night. CALYN YOUNG, 25 New Cordell,…

Fifteen or more years ago, such days were unheard of. No one targeted sails out of such small boats using such rudimentary tactics, and certainly no one consistently caught sailfish off Florida in the summer. Whether El Nino or global warming has influenced the sailfish migration is not clear. What is known is that a new ICCAT (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas) sailfish assessment supports the claims of abundance echoed by veteran captains along the southeastern coast. Fisheries biologists have also learned that sailfish aren’t nearly the longitudinal migrators they were once thought to be—their south-to-north travel patterns seem to fluctuate. Wherever they roam, from Key West to canyons off New Jersey, they seek out a narrow range of food-rich warm water, between about 73 and 82…

T he most reliable and potentially productive structure in every reservoir is the point—an irregular ridge that originates far above the waterline and runs down into the depths of a fi shery. Not all points are created equal, however. A variety of factors, ranging from configuration to location and depth, make some points far better than others. Additionally, external and ever-changing influences like temperature, wind, and sunlight will also affect strike potential. But there are some ingredients that can tip the scales in your favor. The quickest way to catch more fish on your next trip is to forget the monotony of the bank. Get to the point and stay on it, because a little knowledge will go a long way when you’re targeting fish. 1. EDGES ▶ The most…

ANGLERS DON’T SPEAK in terms of how many megabytes they used to catch a fish, but they could. Technology has deeply penetrated the venerable sport of fishing. Luckily, lure manufacturers are operating with an unlimited data plan and are willing to use the collective science developed in aerospace design, the food industry, and Silicon Valley to enhance the traditionally primitive art of tricking a fish into biting an artificial bait. Long gone are the days of whittling wooden crankbaits and carving worm shapes into wax for molding. The lure matrix is now computerized, and each byte used toward the goal of artificial bait production results in more bites for anglers. 1 THE ROBOBAIT “The technology that goes into Livingston Lures is cutting edge,” says Erick Arnoldson, national sales director for…

IN THE PAST decades, we’ve seen compact roof prisms replace the bulky porro prisms in our binoculars. Every year, our riflescopes have grown heavier, fatter, and more capable of placing bullets with precision at long distances. And specialized extra-lowdispersion glass has made sporting optics in every category brighter and clearer than their predecessors. But starting next year, those evolved optics will seem as primitive as rotary telephones appear to anyone under the age of 40. The most disruptive technology in optics in our lifetime—the use of specially engineered polymers that will replace glass lenses—will make our binoculars, spotting scopes, and riflescopes much lighter and more powerful than ever. The polymers go by the ungraceful name of gradient refractive index (GRIN) optics, but most people conversant with the technology used to…

MOUNTAIN HUNTER I have done all right for a hillbilly from West Virginia,” Melvin Forbes told me recently over the phone. Uh-huh. I wasn’t buying it for a minute. I knew that Melvin’s “aw-shucks” persona contains one of the most brilliant minds of modern fi rearms design, and I wasn’t about to let him sweet-talk his way out of divulging his secrets. If it sounds like I’m being a litt le harsh on Melvin, I guess I’m taking some liberties because he is sort of like family at Outdoor Life. And you can say things about your family that strangers can’t. That shared history starts with the fi rst meeting between my predecessor as shooting editor, Jim Carmichel, and Melvin at the 1985 SHOT Show, which was Melvin’s maiden voyage…