Nearly 1,000 Illegal Bass, Antlers and Bear Meat Seized in California Poaching Raid 👮

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:

THIS GUY GOT AFTER IT
NEARLY 1,000 ILLEGAL BASS, SIX SETS OF ANTLERS AND BEAR MEAT SEIZED IN CALIFORNIA POACHING CASE

It was late last month when California wildlife officers caught up with and booked a suspect into the Kern County jail after serving a warrant at a Bakersfield residence. Announcing the arrest last week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife later detailed their findings which included 931 illegally taken black bass, six sets of deer antlers and packages of suspected deer and bear meat.

So far the suspect has remained unnamed, but booked allegations include unlawful take of deer, unlawful possession of deer, hunting without a license, taking fish and wildlife at more than three times the daily bag limit, and taking fish and wildlife for profit…

💪 Idaho Father Wrestles Yearling Bear Out of the House After it Came in the Back Door. We touched on this story earlier in the week, but now a few days following the incident, more details have emerged, including how the man of the house tackled the trespassing bruin and wrestled him out of his family home.

While details were scant on Tuesday, we’ve since learned that the bear used a cooler to try and gain access to the home through a 14-year-olds bedroom window. According to updated reports, it was around 3 a.m. on Friday when the young girl woke her parents, Brian and Kim Heidemann, with news of the intruder. While the bear was unable to spring himself through the window, he later managed to gain entry to the family’s Salmon, Idaho home through the back door. Without giving it any thought, Brian launched himself at the bear, pushing the bear back through the doorway and into the great outdoors that is the Sunset Heights neighborhood.

The family’s pit bull–boxer mix, Lulu, who couldn’t resist the action any more than Brian could, got loose, was attacked, and ended up helping to drive the bear off. Only then did the family realize a sow and a second juvenile were also hanging around the house, as a neighbor fired toward the porch to clear the remaining bears from the scene. Brian was later life-flighted to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center with a bone-deep cut on his arm and deep wounds to his head and torso, and underwent surgery. He is expected to make a full recovery. Kim and the dog were also injured and treated.

After the attack, a houndsman tracked the sow and killed her, while state officials later trapped and dispatched the two juveniles.

🐺 Feds Kill Nine Wisconsin Wolves After Repeated Threats Near Rural Homes. Working quietly through August and September, federal wildlife teams ended up trapping and killing nine gray wolves in northern Wisconsin after repeated threats to human safety. All nine of the wolves are believed to be from the same pack, who had been documented menacing the good people of Price County since last summer. The sh*t hit the fan in mid-August after three incidents were reported in a single week, forcing the hand of the USDA, who worked alongside the Wisconsin DNR and consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before taking out the wolves.

In an effort to please the pro-wolf crowd, officials first attempted various non-lethal measures that included auditory harassment, hazing, lighting, attractant removal, and increased human activity, all of which reportedly only seemed to make the problem worse. Despite the harassment, the feds say that the wolves ended up growing less responsive to their efforts and become even more habituated to human presence.

Reports classified an August 12th incident as a Level 3 threat and the incidents that followed on August 17th and 19th as Level 2 threats. No wolf attack on a human has been documented in Wisconsin in modern history and this was the first official killing of wolves in the state since a February 2022 federal court ruling restored Endangered Species Act protections and blocked hunting and lethal management, outside of direct threat to human life.

🦆 Louisiana Guide Cited After Telling Clients to Shoot Out-Of-Season Ducks and Ditch Them in the Canal. A Cameron, Louisiana hunting guide was handed a citation after calling the shot on a misidentified flock during early teal season that resulted in four wood ducks being dumped in a nearby canal.

Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries agents were tipped off on September 27th about wood ducks being killed out of season in Vermilion Parish while teal season was open. When they arrived on scene to investigate that day, they found Matthew Morgan, 33, of Cameron, guiding a party. Morgan eventually came clean and told agents he gave the hunters the call to shoot before he realized the birds were wood ducks, then threw the four ducks into the canal behind the blind. He was cited for taking wood ducks out of season and wanton waste of migratory game birds. Each charge carries a $400 to $950 fine and up to 120 days in jail. He also faces $204 in civil restitution for the illegal take.

🇯🇵 If you don’t think Japan’s bears are absolutely wildin’ out, check out this dash cam footage. Recorded from a vehicle in Hokkaido, Japan, the footage shows a protective mother taking absolutely no sh*t from an approaching vehicle.

Who’s down for a Japanese bear hunt?

🛫 The Fly-Fishing Coca Trail Mule: Juan rode a fine line between a legitimate role in the fly-fishing travel industry and making the real money as a … courier of sorts. Whenever those in his realm of contacts needed something passed across borders outside the purview of various governments, they reached out to Juan. Pending the time of year and his particular mood at any given moment, he could be found anywhere in the Western Hemisphere; preferring to spend his summers with his lover in Montana and his winters in Bolivia, Columbia, and Peru. But if someone needed a large sum of money transferred from the States to, say, Cuba … Juan could find a way to do it under the radar. Read the full story.

🦃 Thoughts from the Colonel:  About 80 years ago I was with some people in Mississippi, including a friend named Pete Kennedy. I heard a turkey gobble for the first time. In fact, I thought it was an owl. Kennedy had to tell me what it was. And we fooled around with it and fooled around with it, and eventually we lucked up and killed it. And I realized then that [turkey hunting] was something that I would really like to do and do a [heck] of a lot of.

Around that time, I bet you there weren’t 1,000 turkey hunters in the United States, and every one of them thought that we were just about to lose turkeys — they were getting fewer and fewer. Read the full story.

📚 Perfection Revisted: Beginning with my sojourn in high school, which was never yesterday, as Robert Ruark would say, scholars of literature have put forth two candidates for the title of “the perfect short story.”  One is The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, by Ernest Hemingway; the other, To Build a Fire, by Jack London.

Hemingway is written about endlessly by both hunting and fishing writers, revered as a great writer who was also a great outdoorsman, and placed wild things and wild places in the top tier of literature, in place of effete salons and angst-ridden urbanites.  He needs no introduction.

Jack London, on the other hand, has long-since fallen out of favor with literateurs because of his perceived Nazi sympathies, mainly expressed in The Sea-Wolf and various “racist” tracts extolling the idea of übermenschen.  An odd thing, though—which he shares with Hemingway—is that he is claimed as one of their own by both the far left and the far right.  Read the full story.

Oh, and one more thing…