The MeatEater

This week on the show I’m running Ted Zangerle, of The Hunting Public, through our What Would You Do gauntlet, giving us insight into exactly how he'd handle some of the most challenging deer hunting scenarios I could throw at him.

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Nothing says summer like spending a long day on the water and then bringing home a mess of fish for the pan. For many anglers, a summer fish fry is part of the season and every bit as iconic as watching baseball, launching fireworks, having picnics, and cannonballing into the local pool or swimming hole. Yet, at the same time, many an angler’s fishy dinner plans are immediately dashed as soon as they open the cooler and have the smell of rotting, sun-spoiled fish hit their nose like a reeking truck.

When you’re spending a hot day on the water, it’s surprising how fast the fish you’re trying to bring home can go bad, especially if you’re fishing in warmer water. In average temperatures, unchilled or unpreserved fish meat can spoil within 2 hours of the fish being caught and in as little as 1 hour on a 90-degree or hotter day or when it’s kept in 75-degree water or warmer.

Since most of us fish for longer than an hour or two during the summer, knowing how to preserve fish meat for an entire day is vital for ensuring you’re bringing home the freshest fish possible for you and your family and friends.

Keeping fish alive is the first and most obvious way to ensure your fish remain fresh for the dinner table. Yet, this is often easier said than done. In the heat of the summer, fish that are improperly kept can die surprisingly quickly and, as previously mentioned, spoil even faster. And, while there are several ways to keep your fish alive for the duration of the fishing day, the fact is that some methods work better than others.

Stringers are the easiest and most efficient way to keep the fish you intend to bring home alive and well while you try to catch your limit. However, some stringer designs work better than others, with bad design actually killing the fish while they’re on the line. To prevent this, you’ll want to select a stringer for your fish that makes sure they keep on kicking.

For me, the best stringers are chain stringers designed with individual snaps for each fish. These clips keep the fish separate from one another, preventing overcrowding and giving them plenty of room to swim and breathe. One trick to ensure the fish on a chain stringer live longer is to punch the point of each clip through the thin skin on the fish’s lower jaw before snapping it together, rather than threading the clip through the fish’s gills. This will prevent the clip from obstructing the fish’s breathing and ensure they get plenty of air throughout the day.

Other ways to keep fish alive include a bucket, fish basket, or live well. All three of these fish storage devices can keep your fish alive, but a fish basket usually works best. Keeping fish in a fish basket that you then lower into the water will ensure a constant supply of oxygen from the lake or river will flow into the captive fish’s gills. In buckets and live wells filled with water, the air can and will eventually run out and cause your fish to suffocate. You can prevent this by either refreshing the water every couple of hours or by adding an electric or battery-powered aerator to the water to keep the fish lively.

Putting fish on ice in a cooler is probably the simplest and most common way to ensure that your fish stay fresh for the entire day. However, storing fish on ice can be a tricky thing. If you don’t handle both the fish and the ice in your cooler properly throughout the entire day, things are almost certain to go bad.

When storing fish on ice, the first and most important thing you need to consider is your cooler. Generally, you’re going to want to store fish in a higher-end insulated cooler with a lid that can be completely sealed. This will prevent your ice from melting too quickly and keep you from having to clean that gross, slimy ooze of water and fish goo out of the bottom of your cooler at the end of the day.

In addition to the cooler quality, you’ll also want to make sure you add enough ice so that you can pack the fish beneath a layer of frozen water on both sides. I recommend lining the bottom of the cooler with a layer of frozen water bottles or cold packs and then pouring a five- to six-inch layer of ice on top. This will help keep the temperature unanimously chilled throughout the entire cooler and give you plenty of room to add both more ice and more fish to your pile.

Consider how big a cooler you’ll need for what you’re targeting as well. If you’re after a pile of panfish, a 20-quart cooler should do. Think about a backpack cooler if you’re hiking to catch brookies in small mountain streams. If you’re going out for multiple days or targeting bigger fish like pike or lake trout, you’re going to want a cooler that can handle more weight. An 80-quart cooler (with wheels) will make it easier on your back when you’re hauling your harvest home.

Before putting a fish on ice, you’ll want to make sure it’s properly prepared by killing, bleeding, and gutting it, especially when you’re fishing in warmer water. This will prevent bacteria from building up in the fish’s flesh and entrails, which can spoil the meat. To do this, you’ll want to give the fish a sharp tap on the head with a priest club or even the handle of a fillet knife. Then make a quick cut across the fish’s throat and into its gills while holding the fish in the water so that it can bleed out.

Once no more blood is coming from the fish, slit the fish from the vent up to the cut you made in the throat and remove the fish’s entrails and gills, rinsing as you go until the fish’s cavity is completely clean. When this is done, lay the fish on ice in the cooler and pack the now-empty body cavity with more ice until the fish is completely covered. Fish packed in ice like this will stay fresh for days, even in the hottest weather, making it easy to fillet or even cook them whole when you get home.

Packing fish fillets in salt is a traditional and simple way to preserve your fish meat that ancient cultures have been practicing for years. It’s a great alternative method for keeping fish fresh when you’re in the backcountry. However, as simple as it seems, you want to make sure you’re both handling the meat and packing it in salt properly to ensure your fish won’t rot.

The first thing you need to do when keeping fish in salt is to clean them. A whole, gutted fish generally has too much surface area to salt down properly, so you’ll want to both scale and fillet your fish before storage. When I salt down fish, I generally leave the scaled skin on my fillets to prevent the meat from drying out too much in its salty covering.

Once you’ve filleted and scaled your fish, set it aside and then pour or shake a thick layer of salt in the bottom of a watertight container. Add your fillets to the salty layer, flipping them a couple of times to ensure they’re completely covered, and then pour another layer of salt over the top of them before sealing them inside. The salt will both inhibit the growth of bacteria around your fish and leech any excess moisture from the fillets, just like it does in cured meats, allowing them to stay fresh even in warm temperatures.

Before you eat the salted fish, rinse it thoroughly in freshwater. This will both return moisture to the fillet, making it juicy and flakey as you cook it, and of course prevent the flesh from tasting like you just gargled with a mouthful of the Red Sea.

Few summer activities are more rewarding or delicious than coming home from a day floating around the lake or hiking along the river and cooking up some freshly caught fish.

Whether it’s a mess of fried catfish, a fancy baked trout, or just a couple of panfish tossed on the grill, there’s just something innately satisfying about catching, cleaning, and cooking fish on a warm summer night. It’s the type of activity that speaks to both the rugged outdoor provider and the happy inner child within us all, reminding us of our place in the world and the simple pleasures that can come from a hook and line. And when you know how to keep fish fresh in the heat, it’s a simple pleasure you can feel all summer long.

In November 2022, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission voted to permanently eliminate the state’s spring black-bear hunt by a 5-4 margin. Now, the Sportsmen’s Alliance is seeking to remove four of the five commissioners who voted against the hunt, claiming that they “demonstrated incompetence, misconduct, and malfeasance” in the events leading up to the vote.

On May 16 of this year, the Sportsmen’s Alliance filed a petition with Governor Bob Ferguson, asking him to remove four commissioners: Barbara Baker, Lorna Smith, Melanie Rowland, and John Lehmkuhl. The fifth member who voted against the hunt, Tim Ragen, is no longer on the board. According to the petition, the named commissioners used a daisy-chain communication technique to shore up the necessary support to cancel the bear hunt before the public meeting in 2022 even began, thereby circumventing state law governing how public boards must operate.

The request, in its current form, is a plea to the Governor asking him to remove the members. Despite the petition’s lack of legal standing, it presents claims that appear to be substantive beyond the usual antics of a lobby group. The request is backed by “evidence” obtained via a public-records request submitted to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) by the Sportsmen’s Alliance on September 10, 2023.

Following the public-records request, WDFW’s records analyst identified 471,000 documents pertaining to the bear-hunt vote and communications leading up to it. Over the course of nearly a year and a half, however, the department produced only 119 of the documents. On January 28, 2025—a total of 500 days after the request—the Sportsmen’s Alliance sued WDFW, claiming that “anyone with a modicum of knowledge of human history would have good reason to believe that the state of Washington will cease to exist as a political entity long before Department of Fish and Wildlife completes its production.”

In the small number of documents they did manage to procure, though, the Sportsmen’s Alliance claims there is ample evidence that the five commissioners privately colluded to can the bear hunt.

According to the petition, the commissioners would meet in groups of three or four, then send one or two representatives to lobby other commissioners, effectively creating a wall of support while skirting Washington’s legal requirement that a majority of members be present to constitute a “meeting.”

The petition reads, “This is the very definition of a political cabal flouting the public’s strong interest in transparent government. When you read these thousands of pages, as we have, it is beyond obvious that this practice was a well-honed routine among Baker, Lehmkuhl, Rowland, Smith, and former commissioner Regan. We see often, ‘Don’t reply here’ and other devices deployed to encourage daisy-chaining as the preferred method to avoid the Open Public Meetings Act. The result, unfortunately, is that the actual commission meetings are clearly nothing more than a sham, with a preordained decision well in hand before the public is invited or allowed to participate in any meaningful way.”

MeatEater reached out to Commissioner Lehmkuhl (one of the four named in the petition) for comment. “I’ve fished and hunted all my life and worked in the profession for 50 years, so I’m a bit unsettled that a hunter organization, and its members in Washington, would attack me this way,” he said in an email. “I’ve always made myself available to hunters to discuss the issues, just as I do with all interest groups, because it’s my job. The Sportsmen’s Alliance has never contacted me, nor according to our records have they commented publicly on hunting issues before the Commission in the last several years since records have been kept. I guess I don’t understand hunters these days.”

He also noted that, “allegations of me breaking the law should be litigated in the courts, not on Facebook or in internet forums where the burden of proof is non-existent.”

Indeed, the Sportsman’s Alliance has been making videos with the evidence they’ve been turning up in public records—likely as a tactic to increase pressure on Governor Ferguson. The videos, for the most part, are voice-over screen captures of text message and email exchanges between commissioners. And though the narrator frequently interjects with his own opinions, the videos serve as a valuable window into how the commission functions outside of official meetings. The board—to nobody’s surprise—appears to have a serious transparency issue.

“Going through the information and emails, it just feels like someone unfogged the glass for the past few years, but there wasn't a surprise in the clarity,” Washington BHA Co-Chair Mandy Wittmier said. “While there is a lot of smoke from information that has surfaced, and it is concerning, distressful, and distasteful, it’s still hard to find the real fire—if there is something in there that is legally enforceable or something that rises to the governor’s desk to take decisive action. The commission has yet another opportunity to fix itself, but it has to have the desire and leadership to do so.”

Wittmier also mentioned that several commissioners, including Lehmkuhl, are reluctant to engage at all with BHA and other sportsmen’s groups, despite their legal mandate to cooperate with groups and individuals.

Bigger picture, it’s clear that the Washington commission has some work to do. An external review conducted last year—though mostly devoid of details—repeatedly highlights the lack of transparency and accountability, and notes that some people think the commission is unreasonably biased toward special interests, specifically animal rights groups.

The question now is: will the Governor step in, per the Sportsmen’s Alliance request, or will the same problems continue to plague the commission? Will the commissioners step up to the plate and take accountability, or will they disappear back into the fog? Either way, the next few months could be telling as the Governor’s office weighs the options.

Janis Putelis returns to Latvia, this time to hunt roe deer and wild hogs. With Linda and Kaspars as his guides, success is imminent. Presented by Ollin

You’ve got the sign, the bedding, the movement, and the spot - but getting in clean feels impossible. In this episode, Jake Hofer asks Steve Hanson, Don Higgins, Skip Sligh, Mark Kenyon, Jeff Sturgis, Bobby Kendall, and Bill Winke how they approach high-value spots with tough access. Can you still hunt it without blowing it up? Or are you better off leaving it alone? The panel shares their real-world tactics, how they evaluate risk vs reward, and what it takes to turn a tricky spot into a killing setup. If you’ve ever had a stand that looks perfect on the map but feels impossible to hunt, this is one you won’t want to miss.

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Spencer Neuharth hosts MeatEater Trivia with Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Max Barta, Roman Schnobrich, Alex Plachta, Logan Dove, and Jon Montresor.

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On this episode of the Bear grease render, Joe Wilson joins host Clay Newcomb along with Bear Newcomb, and Josh “Landbridge” Spielmaker as he shares about his adventure cooking a whole moose in Alaska, and preparations for the annual World Champion Squirrel Cook Off which will be held at the Ozark Highlands Nature Center in Springdale, Arkansas on September 13, 2025. If you’d like to participate as a cooking team, you can reach out to Joe Wilson on the World Champion Squirrel Cook Off Facebook page.

If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [email protected]

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I can already see the skepticism in your scrunched face as you read this byline. It’s the same look I get when I tell anyone that I write poetry. Unless you read it in your spare time or pursued a degree in English literature, you probably have preconceived (and incorrect) notions about what exactly poetry is.

Most folks immediately think of Shakespeare, hard end rhymes, and unrequited love, or the clichéd Pinterest poems that everyone from your grandmother to your melodramatic teenage sister shares online. But like music, poetry has many genres, themes, and subject matters—and that includes hunting. Some of it’s good, a lot of it’s bad. The best transcends time and culture.

If you enjoy reading articles and non-fiction pieces about hunting, angling, and conservation, then I encourage you to give poetry a try. You might not know where to start, so I’ve included a list of poetry collections with poets who tend to write about hunting, angling, or the natural world. No, this is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it’s a good starting place.

You have to keep in mind that poetry, unlike prose, operates under different rules. Will it read like a traditional narrative? Maybe, maybe not. Will you “get it” by the end? That depends on how you read it or what you expect to gain. Even if you just want another creative way to think about hunting, the natural world, and conservation, then I’d say it’s well worth it.

Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo, Richard Hugo

Born in Seattle (1923), Richard Hugo should be on the reading lists of all Westerners, especially all Montanans. Although he’s not traditionally considered a nature poet, Hugo wrote a lot about the American West. He taught for 18 years at the University of Montana, and much of his work addresses rural life, vast landscapes, and a heavy dosage of trout.

Prior to teaching at UM, Hugo served as a bombardier in WWII, where he flew several missions over the Mediterranean. Later, after working as a technical writer at Boeing, Hugo, along with his wife at the time, quit their jobs and expatriated to Italy. While there, Hugo revisited the places where he dropped bombs during his time in the war and wrote about those experiences in his collection Good Luck in Cracked Italian.

While you won’t find traditional hard end rhymes in Hugo’s work, his poems have a rhythmic quality and plenty of end, slant, or internal rhyme throughout them. I haven’t found a Hugo poem that I don’t like, but here are a few of my favorites.

Notable Poems: “Bass,” “Approaching the Castle,” “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg”

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, David Bottoms

Anyone unfamiliar with poetry should find David Bottoms’ first collection both moving and accessible. Bottoms paints clear narratives, often from the point of view of a speaker who finds themselves in bars, backroads, baseball games, or the winding and transcendent rivers of the South.

If you think poetry is reserved for high culture, the title alone should convince you otherwise. While Bottoms’ work often evokes rural southern life, it transcends regional boundaries. Whether you live near the big woods of Maine or a mountain town in Wyoming, you should recognize “the darkness we’re headed for” in the book’s titular poem.

Like Hugo, Bottoms' work doesn’t scream nature writer, but his poems are inextricably connected to the natural world. In fact, this collection opens through the lens of the “Drunk Hunter” who stumbles into the “deeper woods” and eventually becomes part of it, albeit in death.

Notable Poems: “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump,” “The Catfish,” “Hunting on Sweetwater Creek”

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry

I could have dedicated an entire article to Wendell Berry alone. The poet, essayist, novelist, and conservationist wrote about buying local and homesteading long before droves of crunchy moms decided it was cool. Berry might not write as much about hunting and fishing, at least not from a traditional sense, but his agrarian values and longstanding advocacy for flourishing, tight-knit communities remain more relevant now than ever.

His emphasis on local life, community, and farming, as opposed to large-scale, corporate agriculture, should appeal to all landowners interested in wildlife management, regardless of size. Berry captures these ideologies in perhaps his most famous collection of essays, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, which I’d encourage you to also read.

Berry is the author of more than 50 books of poetry, so it’s hard to pin a single collection. That’s why I recommend The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, which offers a survey of his work, handpicked by the author himself. Anyone who claims to love conservation should have an appreciation for Berry’s vast collection of poems.

Notable Poems: “The Fearfulness of Hands That Have Learned Killing,” “Before Dark,” “The Peace of Wild Things”

Trophic Cascade, Camille Dungy

Camille Dungy’s poems embody the reality that nothing is separate from nature. Her 2017 collection Trophic Cascade captures this through poems that use imagery of the natural world to depict everything from motherhood to death, painting sometimes grim yet honest depictions of the world as she sees it—a world where we are inseparable from nature.

Her work is accessible and visceral. Dungy’s poem “After Birth” not only turns a great pun on its head but captures the “animalistic” qualities of motherhood, ripe with “mouths to feed and flanks to warm” with “…winter coming on.” She depicts life “after birth” as the inherent, natural struggle of motherhood. If that’s not badass, I don’t know what you call it.

Notable Poems: “After Birth,” “Trophic Cascade,” “Glacial Erratics”

Echolocation, Sage Marshall

Contributor for MeatEater and author Sage Marshall tackles the inherent and inescapable brutality of life in his debut collection Echolocation. These revelations unfold through many of his hunting poems (“Hunting Scene” 1-5) but also in poems about family, hockey, gardening, and a variety of landscapes.

While Marshall’s poems contain narrative threads, they’re often presented through truncated sentences without regular punctuation. These fragmented images read and unfold quickly, much like the act of echolocating (as the title suggests). If you’ve appreciated Marshall’s work here at MeatEater or other outlets, then I highly recommend this collection.

Notable Poems: “Thursday in May,” “Aversion Training,” “Hunting Scene 1,”

A Canadian man who played fast and loose with wildlife laws for well over a decade just received his latest punishment—and it’s a severe one. On July 25, British Columbia Supreme Court judge David Crerar sentenced Scott Steer of Gabriola Island to six years of jail time and over $1 million Canadian dollars in fines for Fisheries Act violations.

The recent sentencing has to do with, among other violations, the illegal harvesting and selling of more than $1 million worth of sea cucumbers in 2019 and 2020; he reportedly continued to do so as his trial remained ongoing. In total, Steer and his shell “corporation,” were prosecuted for eight charges, including fishing without a license and fishing during a closed time.

Because of history, which Crerar characterized as a "remarkably long record of violations” in his written ruling, Steer had already been prohibited from possessing fishing vessels, which he broke as part of his recent illegal activity.

The severity of the sentencing stems from Steer’s lengthy record of wildlife violations, which date back to before 2008 and includes the illegal take of crabs from Vancouver Harbor, defrauding a boat owner, and other violations, mostly related to illicit commercial fishing activities.

“The Crown understands Mr. Steer’s record to be the longest record of Fisheries Act violations in Canadian history,” wrote Crerar. Past “warnings, fines, prohibitions, and multiple incarceration sentences of various lengths have all failed to deter or reform Mr. Steer.”

In a separate sentence delivered in 2021 by a British Columbia judge, Steer received a lifetime fishing ban—the first doled out in the Canadian Pacific region in over a decade.

“He shows contempt for the fishermen who follow the rules.  He shows contempt for the efforts of past courts to steer him towards an honest path through less severe sanctions that rely on his honesty and compliance,” wrote Crerar in the latest ruling.

“The only way to stop Mr Steer from ravaging the ocean and flouting the law and court orders is to move him far from the sea for a long period of time,” he added. “A significant period of incarceration is not only proportionate and just, but necessary.”

Feature image of sea cucumber meat via Adobe Stock.

This week Reid and Dan host guitar slangin' and soul sanging phenom Marcus King, out in God's Country. The episode kicks off with Marcus ripping into his latest song "Honkytonk Hell" and the guys giving a standing ovation to GCP's greatest performance yet. The three of them discuss what it was like growing up southern and how the tough guy narrative has been a struggle to maintain at times. Marcus shares the inspiration behind his latest album, how meeting his wife saved his life, and how he thinks he is the most honest he's ever been with his new album "Darling Blue". Marcus shares a never before heard song with the listeners and ends with a REO Speedwagon gravorite.

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