The MeatEater

From a deer stand on his farm in Ellendale, North Dakota, 81-year-old Gary Krapu told a story.

In 1978, the now-retired waterfowl biologist took the witness stand as the lone expert for the Department of the Interior in a series of lawsuits opposing a critical habitat designation on the Platte River in central Nebraska. The species in question? Whooping cranes. The last wild migratory flock of them in the world, in fact — and a recipient of federal protection in 1967 under the Endangered Species Preservation Act.

For eight months, the lawsuits raged on. A lineup of plaintiffs — irrigation districts, hydropower companies, the city of Denver — were pissed about the designation, mainly for the red tape it would bring. They hired the best lawyers money could buy, Krapu recalled, ones that hurled question after question at him in attempts to trip him up. A crack in the armor of the DOI’s determination — that this particular stretch of the Platte mattered greatly to the future of the rarest crane in the world — could have toppled everything. But Krapu stayed strong, enduring sleep deprivation and PTSD as a result.

(Later in his career, Krapu would face interrogation by the KGB in northern Russia, an experience he describes as significantly less stressful.)

At the time of the lawsuit, Krapu was a waterfowl biologist at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota. His testimony would ultimately stand up to legal scrutiny, and the critical habitat designation remains in place today. Such is the caliber of work the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center has contributed to waterfowl conservation in North America since its founding in 1965. Data from the center informs season-setting, bag limits, wildlife refuge management, wetland protections, and a laundry list of other examples where science and duck hunting collide.

Originally run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Northern Prairie fell under the purview of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in the 1990s. The Jamestown campus is just one of a handful of science centers around the country producing applied wildlife research that informs management decisions made by both state agencies like the North Dakota Game and Fish Department and federal agencies like the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In fact, the federal resource management agencies are legally required to use the best available science to inform their decision-making. The USGS is their primary supplier.

But today, Krapu and others across the USGS network fret over the contents of a different lawsuit that landed the DOI and other federal agencies in the hot seat in October — not for a critical habitat designation, but for a reduction-in-force (RIF) proposal that would have eliminated all but a few of Northern Prairie’s current staff, along with over 14,200 other federal jobs across 89 “competitive areas.” Over 4,800 of those jobs are protected by federal workers’ unions like the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (both plaintiffs in the lawsuit), among others.

“This would, in effect, close the Center if [the federal government] went ahead with their plan,” Krapu says.

On October 15, Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order against the RIF, preventing layoffs for the duration of the shutdown. She also ordered the Office of Management and Budget to produce documentation of the positions on the chopping block. According to one such document produced by DOI chief human capital officer Rachel Borra, the RIF proposal in question would have eliminated 28 of Northern Prairie’s 40 positions, along with 108 of 137 positions at the Great Lakes Science Center, 39 of 69 positions at the Fort Collins Science Center, 56 of 75 positions in both national and regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers, and others.

But after probationary layoffs and offers of delayed resignation from earlier in the year, the number of employees actually working at Northern Prairie is lower than 40, according to Krapu and other sources employed by and familiar with the Center who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. In fact, according to the employee directory at the time of publication, only 29 people are listed as employees.

When people think of the USGS, they tend to think of earthquakes, volcanoes, and stream gauges. But the RIF is focused on the Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA) of the USGS, what the agency itself refers to as the “biological research arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior.” The USGS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the potential reduction in force.

The Trump administration targeted the EMA for defunding earlier this year, a policy goal that follows a directive in Chapter 16 of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to “abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey and obtain necessary scientific research about species of concern from universities via competitive requests for proposals.”

Now that the shutdown is over, it remains unclear what the Trump administration’s next attempt to dissolve the EMA will look like. But in Jamestown, a community of just under 16,000 people where Trump won over 70% of the vote in November 2024, those familiar with Northern Prairie’s contributions to some of their favorite outdoor pastimes are left with questions. Namely, what would happen to the future of waterfowl conservation and hunting opportunities if the facility conducting some of the most widely touted migratory waterfowl research on the continent closed up shop?

“This is a really important place,” Krapu says. “If Northern Prairie is closed, it will leave a major hole in the information needed to manage migratory birds.”

In the case of migratory waterfowl, the management burden falls on both federal agencies and state agencies like the North Dakota Game and Fish Department (NDGF). Without the research and analytical prowess of the staff at Northern Prairie, NDGF’s job in helping to administer its waterfowl seasons becomes much harder, NDGF migratory game bird management supervisor John Palarski tells MeatEater.

“We have ongoing projects with Northern Prairie,” Palarski says. “They have a lot of really bright scientists with the skills to analyze really large datasets that we collect in conjunction with them. It would be a huge hit if they were to face a significant reduction in workforce or go away…I’ve been surprised this issue has seemed to go so under the radar.”

Palarski references a joint pintail duck telemetry study NDGF conducted with Northern Prairie as an example of successful collaboration between the two agencies, referring to the USGS’ handling of the analytical component of the study as “seamless.”

“We’re fortunate to have these new techniques, like putting GPS transmitters on birds, that we didn’t have previously, so being able to track how these birds are responding to these changing landscapes is a really important component,” he says. “A lot of changes have happened over the last twenty years.”

The argument to dissolve the EMA branch of the USGS follows a similar line of logic as the argument to transfer federal public lands to state ownership; that state, local, and private entities can handle the job just as well without drawing on federal tax dollars to do so. But many in the research field feel strongly that this is not the case. They highlight the differences between the more generic research coming from university labs, where many of the participants are students still learning how to do basic field work, and the applied research compiled from long-term projects conducted by multi-decade USGS veterans and partnering agencies.

“A lot of data is being collected in the Prairie Pothole region, and to have such a phenomenal group of folks in Jamestown, to have that kind of knowledge of the region right here, you can’t replace that institutional knowledge with a bunch of university [researchers],” Palarski says.

Kate Kendall, a retired grizzly bear biologist from the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman, Montana, echoes this sentiment.

“Universities aren’t doing long-term research or long-term monitoring,” Kendall tells MeatEater. “The USGS was providing a unique function that universities don’t do, and that agencies themselves don’t do, because they’re focused on on-the-ground resource management.”

In Kendall’s case, the research she conducted with the USGS informed federal management of an endangered species on federal public lands, rather than joint management of a game species like migratory waterfowl in a state that is over 90% private land. This distinction proves the wide applicability of wildlife research projects coming from the USGS, where most U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service wildlife biologists were sent in the 1990s to create an unbiased wildlife research arm for the Department of the Interior.

“The thought was to separate the research from policy, to make the science completely objective and isolate it from any potential management influence,” Kendall explains of this switch. “At the time, the USGS [already did this] for geology, mapping, and water. The Ecosystems Missions Area was just another biological component. All of that was in support of what the various DOI agencies need to responsibly manage their resources.”

In the grand scheme of federal agencies, the USGS is small, Kendall says. That presents a problem in getting the importance of the agency on peoples’ radars, and on the whole, few people seem to grasp what purposes the EMA actually serves. Kendall rattled off a list of focal points just from her former workplace.

“The Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center is doing research on CWD, brucellosis, whirling disease, aquatic invasives, non-aquatic invasives, wildlife highway crossings, migration patterns…of course, large-scale migrations of elk, mule deer, and antelope all cross jurisdictional boundaries…genetic health of wildlife populations, population declines of mountain goats, bighorn sheep, black bears, grizzly bears, native pollinators, avian influenza…” Kendall trailed off.

“But the average person has absolutely no clue about most of this research, why it’s important, how it is used to guide resource management and conservation decisions.”

Dave Brandt, another retired waterfowl biologist and former employee of Krapu’s, had plans for his weekend that mirrored those of his old boss. Fresh from a stretch of elk and deer hunting in Idaho and Wyoming, he called from an afternoon of scouting ducks for an upcoming trip. After retiring from Northern Prairie in June 2024, Brandt considers guiding waterfowl hunts in eastern North Dakota as something of a second chapter.

“Anybody who has spent any time hunting up here can not help but notice the huge changes and pressures this land is under,” he says. “We know that habitat fragmentation causes higher nest loss. But we need new information to know how to move forward with waterfowl management, regulation setting, and population monitoring. Most duck hunters don’t seem to get that linkage, that things don’t stay static in wildlife management and biology, especially on a landscape that is undergoing huge changes.”

Brandt cites the rapid loss of waterfowl habitat to agriculture as one such change, arguably the most severe one for the area. He describes the mass deployment of Roundup Ready soybeans, which allow for monoculture producers to spray whole sections of native prairie with the herbicide before planting and growing the genetically modified crop. Monsanto first released the Roundup Ready soybean in 1996, and some estimates peg the current percentage of U.S. soybean farms using herbicide-tolerant varietals at 96%.

But the changes don’t stop there. Accordingly, neither does the demand for dynamic research on what has long been considered both the duck factory and the pollinator factory of North America.

“Over three million acres of land were enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program in the nineties, and we’re now down to under a million acres of CRP,” Brandt says. “We drain wetlands, we’ve got energy development on the landscape, we’re getting punched from every side. That changes things.”

The same holds true for all the other USGS research centers across the country, he continues. Science, as he says, is not about finding answers, but about the pursuit of further questions — and now is not the time to stop asking them.

“I don’t really know if the data we’ve relied on for the last three to four decades is one hundred percent relevant anymore.”

I’m old enough to remember shooting photos with film. In fact, one of the duties I had for my first editing gig at a bowhunting magazine was to scour slides for perfect cover and lead images. Every photo you took back then had to have some intention behind it, because you knew you had limited film, and every shutter click was going to cost you.

Today, it’s a different story. It’s estimated that 2.1 trillion photos will be taken in 2025, and that US citizens take an average of 20 pictures a day. That’s bonkers, but such is the nature of high-end cameras in our pockets at all times, which is actually good news for any whitetail hunter looking to capture their after-kill moments so that they can share them in their hunting group chat or post them to the ‘gram.

And yes, you can point and shoot and get something that shows you and your deer, but if you want a really nice memory, there are some tricks you can use. The first is one that photographers have been using since long before the digital camera revolution.

If you have a way to photograph your deer early or late in the day, do it. Golden light, as the sun starts to rise or set, has been the ticket for a hell of a lot of good photography over the years. The softer the light, the better the photo, generally.

This is an easy one that will help your photos pop, but it’s also important to think about the setting. When I first started hunting, if my dad or I arrowed a deer, we took a picture either with it lying in the front yard or hanging in the garage. Today, we take photos where they died. Or at least, in a setting that looks like where you’d hunt deer.

The fall woods, provided you have even light, are always a nice setting. Wood edges, too. Grassy fields are great as well. The more habitat you can see behind the deer, the better, usually. I like to take my grip-and-grins as close to where I recover my deer as possible, but simply thinking through the actual setting is a good idea.

When you position your deer, prop it up so that you can see as much of its side as possible. Clean any gratuitous blood off, snip any brush or grass in the way, and then consider it a work in progress. The great thing about cell phones is that you can review your photos in real time. If you see that there is a distracting vine or a leaf stuck to your buck’s nose, fix it. Shoot photos, review them, make changes, and shoot some more.

Then, try to learn your camera’s features a little to enhance your grip-and-grins even more.

If you have to take nighttime photos, use the flash but no other lights. A flashlight shining on your buck’s noggin might seem like a good idea to help you focus, but it’ll change the photos (and not for the better). Learning how to use your auto-flash is generally a good idea anyway, because it’s also nice for certain daytime photos, like when the sun is high enough overhead to produce real shadows.

Scroll through your camera settings some time, and you’ll likely see several options. While plain old “photo” mode will get the job done, I often use “portrait” mode. This setting provides an interesting depth of field effect, which really puts the subject in focus. Again, since you have an unlimited amount of photos you can shoot, try different things with different settings.

And remember to get close and low. Whether that means propping your phone up on a cooler like I had to recently to photograph a buck I killed solo, or you have someone else helping you out. A lot of people stand straight up and shoot down, which never looks very good. You want the camera to maybe be eye level with your buck, or even lower.

Then, shoot straight broadside, angled from the front of your deer, and from behind. After each session, check your work. Find the angle that makes you and your deer pop, and then keep going. After you’re satisfied you have it, you might want to do a little touch-up work.

Stored in my computer and a couple of backup hard drives are close to 80,000 high-res images, all taken with a high-end DSLR camera. While I’m technically a writer by trade, I’m definitely a photographer by default. This is a long-winded way of saying that editing photos is an absolute chore for me, because I’ve done it so much.

With a cell phone, this is a different story. You can adjust exposure, contrast, brightness, vibrance, sharpness, and a whole lot more very simply. And the good part is, you really don’t need to know what you’re doing, you just have to look at how your image changes as you toggle through the settings. You can also add a vignette, either light or dark, to really make your photos pop.

This is all really pretty easy and is just a great way to capture your hard-earned kills so you always have something to look at that, well, looks really good.

Have a good hunting pic you want to share with the world wide web? Submit your best outdoor images to our photo contest right here and enter for a chance to win a $50 or $500 gift card to First Lite.

Deer hunting is a way of life in central Minnesota, but on November 7th, 2016, the shot that echoed through the forest didn’t mark the end of a deer hunt—it marked the beginning of a mystery that still haunts a family and their community. Terry Brisk, a devoted father of four and lifelong outdoorsman, set out to check his stands—and never returned. His teenage son found him lying in the leaves, shot at close range with his own rifle. What followed was a nightmare of unanswered questions, fractured family bonds, and a community haunted by suspicion. Was Terry killed by a trespasser caught on his land? Or was the threat closer—inside the circle of people he trusted most? In this episode of Blood Trails, host Jordan Sillars tackles these questions and more as nearly a decade later, rumors, grief, and fear still hang over Morrison County like fog. These days, in these woods, the silence speaks louder than the gunfire that killed Terry Brisk.

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This week on the show I'm joined by Tony Peterson and Dan Johnson to break down their 2025 rutcation hunts and their greatest lessons learned.

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Join Rich Froning for a powerful conversation with John Welbourn, a former NFL lineman who forged a decade-long career battling the toughest competitors in the sport. John shares how he stumbled into the early days of CrossFit, competed at the Games with only a week of preparation, and eventually helped shape CrossFit Football after years of learning under some of the most influential strength coaches in the world. He opens up about the shift from life as a pro athlete to finding purpose in coaching, teaching, and raising a family. His stories move from the chaos of NFL trenches to the challenge of jiu-jitsu, the pull of addictive habits, and the comfort he’s found through training and structure. Rich and John talk honestly about identity, fatherhood, and the struggle to adjust when a chapter of life closes.

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The huntable acreage enrolled in public-private access agreements continues to slip in some western states, new numbers show. As hunters see increased crowding on public lands, they’re turning to alternative avenues for access, including private rangeland and agricultural lands enrolled in state-administered programs like Access Yes in Wyoming or Block Management in Montana. However, there could be fewer of these lands to go around in years to come.

To understand the headwinds facing these access programs, MeatEater spoke with coordinators in Wyoming and Montana—just two of the many states nationwide with access programs in place. Despite operating in different states and under different structures, the land managers’ insights were nearly identical, and painted a picture of a landscape that might continue to pinch down huntable lands for the foreseeable future.

“As a lot of old-time ranches are changing hands, access areas are going away,” said Troy Tobiasson, Sheridan Access Coordinator with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “Sometimes the new owners just don’t seem to want to keep the land enrolled. They want to administer it themselves, or they have an outfitter, or they bought it for the wildlife. Some of that is the new folks just don’t like dealing with the public; then other times it’s purely financial.”

In Montana, the primary issue is the same. “We’ve had a lot of ranches sell,” said Travis Muscha, the Region 7 Access Coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (the region with the largest acreage change in recent years). “And then another big contributor is the generational changes—ranches being turned over or given down to the next generation, and they just have a different idea about access and how they want to manage it.”

Long term, the total enrolled acreage in both Montana and Wyoming is down from historical highs. In Montana, the peak was 8.8 million acres in 2002. This year, the total is 6.8 million. Numbers aren’t yet available for Wyoming this year, but Tobiasson expects them to be on par with last year’s at just over 1.7 million deeded acres, providing hunting access to 2.5 million total acres, including otherwise inaccessible private lands. (Wyoming’s peak acreage is unknown, since multiple different programs have merged to become “Access Yes,” but the last decade generally saw higher enrollment.)

The numbers, however, can be deceiving. In Wyoming, a driver of the long-term “decline” is that some properties have been converted into long-term access easements and subsequently removed from the Access Yes acreage totals. Similarly, in Montana, the state has been working recently to refine its maps by removing public parcels from their Block Management accounting (for instance, a state section buried in an enrolled ranch).

Also hidden in the data is the fact that net landowner patriation is relatively steady in both states. On an annual basis, properties are both added and lost; however, large properties are being lost faster than they can be replenished, resulting in a net acreage loss. This year alone, for instance, Muscha reports losing 20,000 and 10,000-acre properties in his region alone.

Regardless of the numerical swings, both Tobiasson and Muscha are in the field daily, chatting with landowners and resolving problems. Together, they report seeing an overall change of the tide with regard to public access in recent years, especially as lands change hands. When previously enrolled properties in Wyoming sell, for instance, Tobiasson reports that about 50% of them relinquish public access.

In those circumstances, the state doesn’t hold much in the way of bargaining chips to retain access. In Wyoming, the payment cap is $13,000 per area, per year for a landowner enrolled in Access Yes. In Montana, Block Management pays a $1,000 sign-on rate plus $17 per hunter-day, with a cap of $50,000. In both states, most landowners are only making several hundred to several thousand dollars per year from the programs. On the scale of ranch finances, that’s not much money—at least, not enough to incentivize participation.

Rather, most ranchers enroll to support the western hunting traditions. “A lot of these folks just believe in hunting heritage, and they want people to come out and hunt and keep the lifestyle alive. They like to see people out and being successful, and so they’re just doing it because to their core it’s just part of life for them,” Tobiasson said.

Muscha echoed the sentiment. “Money is a factor, but it isn’t the make-or-break decision-maker for enrollment. Most of the landowners in our region want to open their land and have it available so the public has a place to go. Access is getting harder, as you know, and they feel that if they can provide a place, that’s what they want to do.”

In terms of reversing the downward trends, there’s no clear path forward. Legislatively, it’s unlikely that payment caps in Montana and Wyoming will ever increase to a rate that’s competitive with outfitter leases or other private leases, of varying forms. That means hunters will be ever more reliant on hunting heritage traditions and willing ranchers to keep access agreements alive in the coming years.

“The best thing the public can do is be respectful to landowners,” Tobiasson concluded. “Choose to do the right thing, work a little harder at times, treat these people with respect, and just be courteous.” With any hope, word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied ranchers can help grow the access programs in years to come.

A Golden State man was recently sentenced after being busted for lying about where he killed an unusual buck with wonky drop tines. According to a California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) post, game wardens were routinely monitoring a taxidermy shop in Madera County in 2023 when they noticed the rack of a deer that looked familiar.

“They recognized the antlers from a buck previously photographed alive in Yosemite Lakes Park, a residential golf course community in Coarsegold,” explained a CDFW spokesperson.

However, the deer had been tagged with an A19 Archery/X10 tag, which indicated the deer would’ve had to have been shot in Inyo County near Mount Whitney, over 100 miles away. Meanwhile, the wardens were able to turn up online photos showing the deer still in Yosemite Lakes Park just days before it was tagged.

The discrepancy allowed CDFW wardens to execute a search warrant on the suspected poacher’s house. There, they found photos showing the deer alive behind the poacher’s house on the same day that it had been killed.

This September, the individual, whose identity has not been released, was sentenced for his wrongdoings. He pleaded guilty to “violating California Fish and Game Code sections 1054(a) involving the falsification of documents submitted to CDFW and 2000(a) involving the unlawful taking of a mammal.”

The person received a three-year hunting ban, a year of probation, court fees, and 80 hours of community service. He must also forfeit the rack and re-complete hunter education. The incident is not the only recent high-profile case involving falsified hunting documents; earlier this fall, Wyoming busted an outfitting operation that involved the systematic use of fraudulent residency statements.

“Poaching undermines wildlife conservation and fair chase hunting,” wrote a CDFW spokesperson. “Holding violators accountable protects California’s wildlife for everyone.”

Images via CDFW.

For the last Deer Stories episode of 2025, host Clay Newcomb dishes out a mix of stories that’ll keep you leaning in. Expect tree stand chaos, brothers throwing down over a fresh deer, personal-best bucks, and details of a fresh hunt from Bear Grease Hall of Famer James Lawrence.

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This week, Tony explains how all dogs slip a little in their skills when they go from training to hunting, but that's not just a reality we have to accept - it's a teachable moment for us as handlers.

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