The MeatEater

This week, Tony explains what most gun hunters do wrong on their quest for a whitetail buck, and how you can go a different route to fill your tag when others won't.

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My introduction to shotgun suppressors was more than a decade ago, just after SilencerCo debuted the Salvo 12 by taking a group of gun writers on an Eastern Shore Canada goose hunt to test and promote its new cans. A colleague was on the hunt and told me about the suppressor. Soon after, I had the opportunity to shoot skeet and pattern the Salvo. It mitigated felt recoil, tempered muzzle rise, and the sound reduction was noticeable. But at 12 inches long, which extended a standard 28” barrel to 40”, the Salvo wasn’t ideal if you were hunting from a duck blind.

Recently, Silencer Central, another suppressor manufacturer, unveiled the Banish 12, a 17.6-ounce titanium shotgun suppressor designed for bird hunters and clay shooters. It looks much different than the rectangular Salvo, featuring two cuts on the top side of the suppressor with a rounded underbelly. The shape is unique, offering a clear line of sight to the target.

The length of suppressors has long been an issue for hunters, but modern cans are becoming increasingly shorter, thus less cumbersome. The Salvo 12 is now available in multiple sizes, including a 6” option, and the Banish 12 measures under 9”. JK Armament’s VersaX suppressor can be configured as short as 3.75”.

Still, suppressors can be pricey, costing as much or more than a shotgun. Plus, they are not yet legal in every state, and there is a process you must go through to be approved to purchase a suppressor. However, as suppressor technology progresses, hunters and shooters may find a can to be a worthwhile investment.

A 12-gauge shotgun produces around 160 decibels of sound when fired, though that varies depending on the load you’re shooting. Suppressors reduce sound levels by 15 to 25 decibels. Again, there is a variance with ammunition and the performance of the can itself. Hearing loss can occur when you’re exposed to sustained noise levels of 80 to 90 decibels (lawnmowers fall in this range) and above, so hearing protection is still required when shooting a suppressor.

That doesn’t mean shotgun suppressors aren’t beneficial. They still reduce your overall exposure to elevated noise levels (the same applies to your gun dog, if you hunt with one). Additionally, any amount of noise reduction will help alleviate hunting pressure. For those who can legally hunt near residential areas or commercial buildings, the people who live and work in those urban settings should be less likely to log a complaint about shotgun reports.

Gun weight and the shotshell you’re shooting determine free recoil, which can be calculated using this mathematical formula. Felt recoil is subjective. It differs depending on who is behind the gun. For instance, a 12-year-old is likely to feel more recoil than their father if they are both shooting the same gun with the same load because the kid is smaller than their dad. The bigger you are, the more recoil you soak up.

Because they shoot multiple times during a hunt, most wingshooters only notice the aftereffects of felt recoil—a sore shoulder. But turkey and deer slug gun hunters (hopefully) only take one shot. If you have hunted either species, you know that the felt recoil produced by turkey loads and slugs is significant, plus you have more time to anticipate the recoil as a tom or buck walks into gun range, which could cause you to flinch and pull the shot. Clay shooters also experience issues with flinching. When you shoot at volume, recoil from dozens to hundreds of shotshells will result in a bruised shoulder. That may cause an anticipation of recoil, the result of which is flinching.

Suppressors help tame felt recoil (and muzzle rise) because their internal baffles capture the expanding gases produced by the powder that ignites the shotshell. Suppressors also allow gases to cool and expand slowly instead of pushing the gas rearward into your shoulder. It’s similar to how gas-driven shotguns typically produce less felt recoil than inertia shotguns. The gas guns use the gas produced by the propellant to run the bolt and then bleed off any excess. When the firing pin strikes the primer of an inertia gun, the gas is sent directly towards your shoulder and the shot towards the muzzle.

Suppressors screw into the muzzle of your shotgun the same way a choke does. So, a Beretta with an Optima HP choke system needs the same mount to affix the suppressor. Most shotgun cans now come with their own chokes as well, so you can swap them in and out depending on the kind of shooting or hunting you’re doing.

There can be a change in the point of impact when a suppressor is used versus a non-suppressed shotgun. You can expect to see varied pattern densities with a suppressor at the pattern board as well. Different stock and aftermarket chokes perform better and worse with different types of shotshells. The same holds true for suppressors.

Shotgun suppressors remain a niche product, but there may come a day when more hunters find them useful. If manufacturers can advance suppressors to the point where they lower sound levels to a level where hunters can safely shoot without the need for hearing protection, there will be a place for cans in pheasant fields, duck blinds, the turkey woods, and on clay ranges for those who shoot autoloaders or pump-action guns.

Suppressors do add length to your shotgun barrel, but if the game changes and cans dampen shotgun reports to safe levels, expect to see shotgun manufacturers designing shorter barrels for sporting shotguns.

If suppressors continue to evolve, they will not only save our hearing but also minimize pressure on wild game, especially waterfowl, which are extremely averse to the blast from a 12-gauge. Public-land hunters will be able to keep their secret spots secret. And fewer non-hunters will be apt to complain about the noise of shotgun fodder… because there won’t be any.

Feature image of Banish 12 Suppressor via Silencer Central.

The Bureau of Land Management has a new potential leader: former New Mexico congressman, Steve Pearce. Earlier this month, President Trump appointed Pearce to be the agency director, a role in which he will be responsible for managing the BLM’s 245 million surface acres, and 700-million-acre subsurface mineral estate.

The selection has raised concern among conservation and hunter groups, given Pearce’s track record on public-land-related decisions. Though a decorated war veteran, a successful oil executive, and a two-term congressman, his voting record and other actions have demonstrated a distaste for public lands and a soft spot for extractive resource development. It’s an interesting juxtaposition for someone tasked with running the largest public land management agency in the country.

Prior to entering the realm of politics, Pearce served in the U.S. Air Force as a C-130 pilot, flying 518 hours of combat flight in the Vietnam War. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals—some of the highest achievements attainable in the Air Force—and seven additional medals.

Following his military service, Pearce moved back home to New Mexico and built an oilfield service company called Lea Fishing Tools (“fishing” in the oil industry refers to the retrieval of equipment lost down well holes). From there, he ventured into local politics and was elected to the New Mexico House of Representatives, where he served from 1996 to 2000.

Then, in 2003, he shifted to federal politics when he was elected as a Republican representative for New Mexico. Shortly after, he sold his oilfield company for $12 million. At the time, he was serving on both the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, and on a newly-formed Affordable Natural Gas Task Force. The sale raised some questions, given the fact that the buyer (Key Energy) had testified before the task force six weeks before the deal was penned; however, the House ethics committee found that Pearce had operated in compliance with all rules.

Pearce served in the House from 2003 to 2009, and again from 2011 to 2019. Over that time, he racked up a mixed record of both supporting sportsmen’s initiatives, but also western oil and gas expansion.

On the sportsmen’s side, Pearce voted for the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2017, which created an “open until closed” policy for federal lands, essentially mandating that lands be open to hunting, fishing, and recreation unless otherwise noted. (Interestingly, the act also permanently exempted hunting and fishing tackle from EPA regulations on lead content, arguing that “no reasonable alternatives” to the traditional ammo and tackle exist).

However, Pearce swung the opposite direction numerous times, repeatedly supporting or voting for measures to downsize federal public lands. Backcountry Hunters & Anglers reports that Pearce penned a letter to House Speaker John Boehner in 2012, suggesting public-land sales as a means of closing the federal deficit. “Strategically transferring ownership of [BLM & Forest Service lands] where it makes sense would reduce duplicative land management costs, boost revenues through the resultant economic activity of more productive and local land management, and is consistent with the principles of federalism our founding fathers envisioned,” Pearce wrote. At the time, he was chairman of the Western Congressional Caucus—a powerful voice in Washington.

Meanwhile, Pearce also co-sponsored the Hunting, Education, and Recreational Development Act, which would have authorized the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture to sell public lands to states or to private entities, with 15% of proceeds going toward education initiatives. Ultimately, the bill was never pushed through.

Still, Peace continued to advocate for reducing federally-held lands—with a particularly keen eye for national monuments. In 2017, he supported a bill that would have limited the president’s ability to create new national monuments (but would’ve still allowed the president to shrink them). At a congressional hearing that year, Pearce advocated for cutting the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico from 500,000 acres to 60,000 acres. The bill was also unsuccessful, but in his new role with the BLM, Pearce will likely resume where he left off in fighting against national monuments and other conservation designations in the name of energy development.

However, the director position is complex and comes with a host of other responsibilities beyond managing oil and gas permitting. In addition to energy development, the BLM also administers nearly 18,000 grazing leases, a wildland firefighting program with several thousand employees (the largest in the Department of Interior), and a plethora of conservation and rangeland-improvement projects. As a result, the BLM was without a permanent, appointed director from 2017 to 2021. Recently, Tracy Stone-Manning served in the position from 2021 to early 2025, but the role has been vacant for nearly a year now.

If the Senate confirms his appointment, Pearce will step in at a critical juncture for the agency. The BLM is currently working to rescind the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which enshrined a multiple-use mandate on all BLM lands. A public comment period on the initiative ended on November 10, and a decision is expected to be made soon. Its outcome could set the tone for Pearce’s time at the helm.

Feature image of Steve Pearce via Wikicommons.

This has a real shot at being the most unique wildlife conservation stories that we have in North American history. The ring-necked pheasant, a commonly hunted and celebrated bird, a bird that has it's own conservation organization, and a bird that is not native to the Americas. In most instance, when we hear or see the term "nonnative wildlife" it's tied to a negative outcome. However, pheasants have not only forged a path to being fully adopted into our wild landscapes with open arms, but they have also led the charge to several other positive outcomes for wildlife and wild habitats. They are without a doubt our most beloved exotic game bird.

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Steven Rinella talks with James Campbell, Randall Williams, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. 

Topics discussed: James' latest book, "Heart of The Jaguar"; how much Steve loves our newest true crime-in-the-woods podcast, Blood Trails by our colleague Jordan Sillars; the historic and preset-day ranges of jaguars; jaguar behavior, El Hefe; the latest jaguar sightings; reintroduction efforts; and more. 

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This week, Cal covers the worst duck call, a cheating "kayak" angler, gator poachers, Colorado bison, and so much more.

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As a Minnesota-based writer, I spent quite a few years covering news related to wolves. In fact, two topics that I really can’t stand to discuss anymore are wolves and CWD. It’s not that I’m not interested or concerned about either, but at some point, it’s like eating the same meal over and over. You just lose your appetite for it.

That only gets exacerbated by the feeling that, as an individual, you can’t really do anything about either topic except fight with strangers online about it, which is about as healthy as eating gravel for breakfast. Neither issue is going away, and for many of us, the apex predator roaming the big woods in packs of deer-chomping alphas and betas has changed the landscape of modern deer hunting.

Not for the better, either, I might add. All that negativity aside, the thing about hunting in wolf country is that it can suck, but it isn’t a lost cause. Wolves and deer have found a way to coexist for a long time. Figuring out how the local deer avoid being on a canine’s menu is really the key to the whole thing, and it starts with a heavy dose of reality.

The up-north, hunting-shack tradition is withering on the camo vine. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one that’s commonly cited is that wolves took over and the deer moved out. I feel for folks who don’t have the hunting they once did, but I’m also always a little suspicious when I hear this sentiment.

You usually don’t have to dig too deep to find out that there is almost no effort to hunt the deer differently in any way. A common theme is that once productive stands and blinds become inactive, then the dead zone is sort of set in stone due to the wolves’ presence. Pair this with dead trail cameras and a real or perceived lack of deer sign, and the whole thing can look pretty bleak.

I get it, but I’ve also tried hard to view deer hunting not through a totally negative lens. We have a lot of advantages, and if we use them correctly, we can find the deer in wolf country. It just takes a willingness to switch up your strategies and go looking.

In late-October, I sat on the ground next to my 13-year-old daughter as we waited on a big woods forky to wander past. He didn’t, and at sunset, we heard a whole pack of wolves light up. The area of Wisconsin where we were hunting is on the fringe of real wolf territory. They are always around, but that was the first big pack I’d ever heard.

Trail camera images, tracks in the snow, and occasional sightings over the years have definitely clued us into their presence, but it always felt like we hadn’t hit the tipping point. This year, it felt very much like we did.

My camera intel dried up, and I could barely see a deer. Most days, I wouldn’t, and most long-weekend trips would end with at most a deer or two showing itself. I knew this when I drove back over there in mid-November to try one last time to meet up with a good one.

What I had going for me was one camera, on a crossing between two wetlands, that not only showed occasional daylight buck movement, but a weird amount of daylight coyote activity. What I did when I got there was to run into the swamp, and hang a few cameras. Then, on a whim, I hung a camera over a small scrape close to a two-lane highway in a spot I never hunt.

The swamp cams showed almost nothing, but the other camera showed a little bit of activity. That haunted me while I sat in the swamp for three days and saw nothing, so on the afternoon of my fourth day, I carried a stand, some sticks, and a doe decoy out to a tree close to the scrape cam. It was a desperation move, but my thought was that maybe the deer and the coyotes had moved out closer to the road, closer to civilization, to avoid the wolves.

I was so not confident in the setup that I didn’t even bring a deer call, or my pack. I figured I might lay eyes on something, or have a buck lay eyes on my decoy. But I didn’t think my odds were great.

An hour before dark, when I heard something running, it took me a second to realize there was a deer close. He was all of 140 inches, which is huge for up there, and was chasing a doe hard. The patch of cover they came out of would be a good place to hunt rabbits for 10 minutes, and not much more.

They ran out of my life, and almost instantly, I spotted a solid two-year-old type of buck on the edge of another patch of rabbit cover. I tried to call him in with my mouth as hard as I’ve tried to call in any deer, and it was frustrating. Then, I looked to my left and saw a third buck, which was a really nice eight-pointer.

It took a lot of home-grown snort-wheezes, grunts, and bleats to talk him in, but he did come in and swing downwind of the decoy. When he piled up not 50 yards from my bow stand, I was shaking from adrenaline. It was one of the coolest hunts I’ve ever had.

Throughout a lot of years of hunting public land and just generally pressured ground, I have come to believe that pressure is pressure. If something is trying to kill the deer, human or otherwise, the deer will react. How they do, will usually involve reducing their overall movements, relocating, or a combination of both.

When wolves move in, this happens. But the deer still produce sign, you can still see them if you go looking, and they are still out there waiting to be found. The key is to try to factor in where they’d feel most secure, and then scout.

But there is a catch. To avoid us, deer are far more likely to move into areas where we just don’t want to go. Like tamarack swamps, and just generally nasty, hard-to-travel areas. Wolves and other predators often do just fine in those places because they are also avoiding us. Now the deer have to avoid the wolves and us, so they’ll choose option three. Try to envision where that might be if you hunt wolf country, and then use your cameras and a little sweat equity to figure things out.

If you do, you just might have an amazing hunt in an unlikely spot.

The lengths parents will go for their children is immeasurable. It's even more impactful when it puts them completely out of their element. Oh this episode, Brent's sharing a listener story about a deer hunter's mother that's sure to put a smile on your face. Then, he's finally talking about his new office and promising a tour of its contents in future episodes. It's not hard to believe there's some really cool items in there. Get cozy! It's time for MeatEater's This Country Life podcast.

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Hosts Randall Williams, Seth Morris, and Cory Calkins interview Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks biologist Franz Ingelfinger about his work monitoring elk in rural Montana, put on the inaugural performance of MeatTheater, talk with hunter Derek Demun about a particularly explosive hunt he experienced, and pit two listeners head-to-head in a Hot Tip Off.

Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel.

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