By Land Tawney

The sky was blue, sun was hot, and water was clear.  I could see the rainbow colored Rapala lure working to perfection five feet below the surface of the water and then it happen.  A big juicy trout gave chase and in an instant attacked with veracity.  The line went taught and the fight began, the mighty fish was played to perfection, reeled to the dock and deftly guided into the net.  Cidney had caught her first fish!  When I asked her if she wanted to “keep it or put it back,” she exclaimed beaming with pride, “eat it Dad!” 

Colin and Cidney with a big Montana fish

As a young kid, I remember yearly, week long sojourns to the Bighole River in southwest Montana, timed to perfection at the peak of the salmon fly hatch...

Bridget with her first duck (a Black Duck!) at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey.

You might say my story is an unlikely one. 

I grew up in suburban Connecticut, where many of my peers’ interests centered around video games or the mall.  Yet I was always happiest exploring the neighborhood woodlot
and nearby marshes.  In college I studied biology at a liberal arts school in Massachusetts that specialized in producing future physicians.  Instead, I chose a career in wildlife conservation.  I took up hunting about six years ago, but going by demographics alone (as a young, suburban, college-educated woman from the northeast) – it’s reasonable to predict that I might have instead held some anti-hunting views.   

I confess I laughed out loud at part of Jodi Stemler’s rec...

Since the late 1930s, hunters, target shooters and the firearms industry have been the nation’s largest contributors to conservation, paying for programs that benefit America’s wildlife and all who love the outdoors.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Interior just announced that firearms and ammunition manufacturers contributed a record $760.9 million in excise taxes in 2013 through the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Program.

NSSF has created a new infographic, “How Wildlife is Thriving Because of Guns and Hunting ,” to illustrate how we as an industry and as sportsmen are the greatest contributors to wildlife conservation in America, providing nearly $9 billion over the past 76 years.

Explore more visuals like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Vis...

By Dan Wrinn

Clayton & Molly Wrinn

I consider myself a pretty hard core hunter.  If you look inside one of my three freezers, as well as the freezer in my office, they are overwhelmingly full of things I’ve harvested.  Ground venison outweighs ground beef, and ducks and geese outnumber chicken nuggets by at least ten times.  As far as fish, well, I can’t really remember the last time I actually went to a store and bought fish.  I can honestly say that me and my wife and two kids eat more wild game than store bought food.  No doubt. 

And now that my kids are getting older, I’ve started thinking about what I hope will be a long, personal relationship with their natural world that they will develop with the mentoring of me, my wife and my inner circle of hunting and fishing buddies...

My First Bird, Leslie Dunne Ketner

Leslie Ketner

The first time I ever shot a bird it was a dove.

I was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the early ’90s. It was opening day, and I sat excitedly on a bucket in a field of sunflowers.  My husband and our yellow lab, Berkeley, were in another row of sunflowers. 

As the birds started flying, I looked around to track my fellow hunters, showing caution on my first attempt to shoot something other than an orange clay. All of a sudden a dove was flying a nice left to right pattern.  It was pretty far off, but I mounted my side-by-side 12 gauge and  boom, it dropped in another row of  dried flowers.  Being new to this, I wasn’t sure of the protocol on when to pick up my bird...