CPW Kills Two Yearling Wolves After Repeated Livestock Attacks 🐺

ven•a•tic: fond of or living by hunting

NORTH AMERICA’S MOST-READ OUTDOOR NEWSLETTER

I’m currently at the “it’s Thursday already?” phase of the workweek and am unsure as to whether or not that is a good thing as of yet.

With that in mind, let’s all take a minute to grab a coffee or whiskey (no judgement) and get this Thursday morning dispatch out the door.

Here's what's worth reading about today:

WILL THIS SHIFT BEHAVIOR?
CPW KILLS TWO YEARLING WOLVES AFTER REPEATED LIVESTOCK ATTACKS

While many of us were perfecting the art of burning a brisket on Monday, the folks at Colorado Parks and Wildlife were busy laboring away.

On Labor Day, while many of us were taking something of an additional sabbath, CPW agents were busy tracking and removing a pair of uncollared male yearling wolves after a rash of livestock depredation events.  One of the now deceased wolves hailed from the Copper Creek Pack in Pitkin County, while the other was a member of the Three Creeks Pack in Rio Blanco County. Each animal, the agency says, was tied to four confirmed livestock kills this summer.

🦌 Lost in a Basement for 32 Years: Illinois Typical Confirmed as Largest U.S. Whitetail Ever. A typical whitetail taken in Illinois all the way back in 1991 has been verified as the largest U.S. typical ever entered in the Boone and Crockett records. Sam Aiuppa killed the buck in late November 1991 while pheasant hunting in LaSalle County.

Apparently not thinking much of the kill, he mounted the antlers and stored them in his basement for 32 years where they sat unrecognized until an electrician spotted the extreme dimensions and insane eye guards more than a foot long. Collector James Martin later acquired the rack, and after an official B&C measurement and two independent re-measurements, the score was confirmed at 207 7/8 inches.

That puts the Aiuppa/Martin buck a mere 1 6/8 inches ahead of the long-famous Jordan buck and second worldwide behind Milo Hanson’s 213 5/8-inch world record. Boone and Crockett called it a monumental addition to the records, even if it did take over 30 years to surface.

🐊 Child Hospitalized After Alligator Attack at Weeki Wachee Preserve. Adding to a running tally of gator conflicts this summer, a child was the latest victim after a Labor Day swim nearly turned deadly at Florida’s Weeki Wachee Preserve. According to reports, a child was bitten by an estimated 9- to 12-foot alligator on Monday while swimming with a group of other kids at the Hernando County preserve, about 50 miles north of Tampa. The child was hit on an arm and a leg, and managed to make it out to a sandbar with the rest of the group, but couldn’t get back to shore. Hernando County Fire Rescue pulled them off with an airboat and were able to treat the child’s non-life-threatening injuries later at Bayonet Point Hospital.

Swimming is banned in the preserve’s lakes, which make up more than 11,000 acres that are managed with a posted no-swim rule. A licensed trapper is still after the gator in question and FWC is investigating the swimming violation.

🌊 Two Dead, One Teen Survives Days on Capsized Alaska Skiff. A 15-year-old boy was pulled off an overturned 18-foot fishing skiff in the Bering Sea on Monday after clinging to the hull for days. Two men that were on the boat with him — reported as his brother and cousin — were found dead. The Coast Guard located the teen about four miles off St. Lawrence Island, hypothermic but alive. An HC-130 dropped a raft and gear; the fishing vessel Northwest Explorer took him aboard and recovered the other two.

The skiff left Savoonga on Friday for a halibut trip and was due back about 3 a.m. Sunday. Unfortunately weather had blocked the search Sunday night after Alaska State Troopers reported the boat overdue.

🐻 Black bear in hot pursuit of a tasty whistle pig. Like yesterday’s main story displayed, berries are hard to come by. Thankfully marmots remain plentiful up on Mount Rainier.

Rock chuck, it’s what’s for dinner…

🕊️ Sinaloan Doves are Bastards: We came for doves, four of us, two shotguns each, a cooler of Tecate warming in the truck bed. The truck was Hector’s cousin’s, technically, though the cousin was gone, off to “see about a thing,” and hadn’t come back.

The field was huge and gold and hot. Doves came off the tree line in twos and threes, and Ronald, who’d wanted this trip, who’d used the phrase “real high-volume shooting, none of that limited-bird nonsense” with a straight face, dropped one clean and whooped. I remember thinking, this is nice. I didn’t know yet that the day was going somewhere else. Read the full story.

🧑‍🌾 Forsaking Success:  A young Wendell Berry made a consequential choice to live out his conviction in the spring of 1964. An assistant professor of English at New York University, he had to return home to Kentucky. The day he formally announced his resignation, Berry’s supervisor called him into his office. The senior faculty member must have assumed that the young Berry—not yet thirty—simply did not grasp what he was throwing away. It was one last appeal from the world he was leaving behind, to not throw away the extraordinary success before him for the obscurity—and fidelity—of Kentucky.

His choice, according to Berry, amounted to “intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis” in the eyes of the literary world. His supervisor invoked Thomas Wolfe’s famous line, warning Berry that “you can’t go home again.” The meeting did not move Berry; his face was set like flint toward Kentucky.  Read the full story.

🥶 A place to sit, and watch, and remember why we do this: I forgot my polar bear. The one printed on the blaze orange side of an insulated seat cushion, right above the words ICE FISHING. HUNTING. SNOWMOBILING. The one whose other side is printed with an antiquated woodland camo pattern and whose entirety is snow-proofed by an oyster of thick plastic laminate stiff and yellow with age.

Eight hours will be a long time to sit on an unpadded, upside-down, five-gallon plastic bucket. But hunting with Tony is sufficient incentive to endure it.

The bucket serves as the seat in a ground blind I call the Fort. The blind is walled with logs and roofed with fresh fir branches laid atop dead branches from seasons past. Today it has a stucco of wet snow that shields my orange-jacketed body from the sodden wind and suspicious eyes.

Despite my frostbitten bottom, I’m optimistic. Read the full story.

Oh, and one more thing…