The MeatEater

My birthday falls at the beginning of September, which just so happens to coincide with the dove season opener in North Carolina. As a kid, I assumed dove season was just part of celebrating my birthday. As an adult, I have fully embraced the start of hunting season as a pretty good way to celebrate making another trip around the sun.

There’s something special about dove season (even if your birthday doesn’t happen to fall in September). In most areas, it’s the first real hunting day on the calendar after a long summer and an even longer off-season. Deer season is weeks away, and waterfowl season still feels more like a rumor. Dove season gives you a reason to pull out the shotgun, sit in a field with your buddies, and get back to doing what you love.

Unless you plant your own dove fields, you probably don’t think about preparing for dove season like you do for other wild game. But unless you want to be that hunter who just shows up and blanks, you’ll need to put in a little effort.

If you’re anything like me, your shotgun has probably been taking a vacation since the end of turkey season. If so, don’t wait until opening morning to dust it off. Now is a good time to give it a cleaning and make sure everything works as it should.

If your turkey gun will be pulling double duty during dove season, make sure you remember to swap your turkey choke for a modified or improved cylinder choke. Otherwise, you’ll either miss or obliterate your target. Just make sure you pattern your shotgun with your choke of choice before opening day.

For dove hunting, that means checking your pattern to see how the pellets distribute and where the center of that pattern relates to your point of aim. That way, you know where you need to aim when you’re leading a dove. If you’re using a double barrel, you’ll want to pattern both barrels, especially if they have two different chokes.

Once you’re satisfied with the way a load patterns with your choke, stock up on that load so you don’t run out during a hunt. Dove hunting is a high-volume sport, so carry more than you think you’ll need. Luckily, dove loads are relatively inexpensive.

Doves are fast-moving, acrobatic fliers capable of some impressive in-flight maneuvers. They are unforgiving targets, so you’ll want to knock the rust off your wing-shooting skills. It’s a good idea to spend some time with a clay thrower before opening day. You don’t have to burn through a hundred clays before September, but you should feel comfortable with your shotgun. Think of practice as a way to get reacquainted with it.

When it’s feasible, practice with the same shotgun, choke, and load combo you plan to use in the dove field. Focus on smoothing your mount, keeping your eyes on the target, and moving your gun with the clay instead of snatching your shot. Crossing and quartering clay shots are your money shots. They mimic the types of scenarios you’re most likely to see in a dove field.

While you can just sit in a random cornfield on opening morning and still see birds, you’ll increase your chances of success with a little pre-season scouting. A field full of food is a no-brainer, so if you live in ag country, you’re in luck. But doves don’t treat all fields with equal favor. Sunflowers are a mourning dove’s delight. The high fat content makes them one of the bird’s favorite meals. Millet, wheat, corn, and sorghum also draw plenty of birds.

Federal law prohibits hunting doves and other migratory birds over bait. Hunting over legitimate agricultural fields is legal, but there are specific rules about when that field might be considered bait. Don’t assume hunting over a field is legal just because it’s a crop field. Make sure you check current federal and state regulations before hunting season.

Some crops work better than others based on timing. For example, doves love soybeans, but those crops are usually harvested in October or later, so they don’t do much for hunters trying to find birds in September.

Doves don’t do much scratching or digging with their feet to get at buried grains, so crops that have recently been mowed or drop grains naturally on bare soil tend to attract more birds. You should also pay attention to nearby water sources and roosting areas that might hold or draw doves from nearby.

Once you find a promising field, spend some time watching it before you pick a spot to post up. Note where the birds enter, where they head, and which flight patterns they prefer. That way, you can sit in a place that offers a solid shot line-up when the birds fly by. The goal is to find a position that puts you in the birds’ path, not just a random spot.

Check the rules before you load all your gear in the truck and head for the dove field. Season dates, shooting hours, bag limits, and license requirements vary from state to state and change from year to year. Don’t rely on what you remember from three seasons ago.

If you’re hunting public land or a managed dove field, you should also check for any additional rules that apply to that particular property.

Dove hunting regs don’t typically require blaze orange, so pay attention to the location of other hunters and work out safe shooting angles before the hunt. The birds don’t respect carefully planned shooting lanes, and they’re liable to fly in unpredictable directions, especially when pellets start flying. Don’t let the excitement override good judgment.

Dove season can be a low-stakes affair to scratch that itch before other hunting seasons open up. You don’t have to dedicate a whole off-season’s worth of chores to prepping it for it, but a few intentional days at the range can set you up for some fun dove hunts. And I can’t think of a better way to kick off the fall.

What if you could only follow five deer hunting rules for the rest of your life? In this episode, Adam Keith, Aaron Warbritton, Bill Winke, and Jeff Sturgis each break down the five rules they believe matter most for consistently killing mature whitetails. We cover everything from wind and access to pressure, bedding, timing, scouting, and knowing when to make an aggressive move. With decades of experience and very different hunting styles represented, the answers aren't always the same and that's what makes this conversation so valuable. If you stripped deer hunting down to the handful of principles that actually move the needle, these are the rules worth remembering.

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On August 18, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has filed a proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The announcement claims the rescission is due to the fact that the rule “exacerbates rising wildfire risk.”

Using wildfire as reason to rescind the Roadless Rule is more likely a thinly veiled excuse to allow logging and mineral extraction in these areas. Multiple studies have proven that wildfires are both more likely to start near roads and are also able to be managed just as effectively in roadless areas.

In this 2020 study conducted by the USDA, researchers determined that over two decades of monitoring forest areas with and without roads, there is no correlation of roads in maintaining forest health. “Agency management records show that a lack of roads has not stopped fire prevention measures; fuel management activities in roadless areas have actually been more numerous on a per-square-kilometer basis than elsewhere in the National Forest System,” the study states.

According to this January 2026 study published in Fire Ecology, the lower wildfire-ignition density across USFS regions was in designated wilderness areas, closely followed by roadless areas. Comparatively, the highest wildfire-ignition density was in lands within 50 meters of a road where fires are four times more likely to start. “Our results suggest that building roads into roadless areas is likely to result in more fires,” the study concludes.

And in this letter addressed to Secretary Rollins and Chief Schultz from 30 of the country's top forest science researchers, they refute the recent claims of the USDA that rescinding the rule will aid in fire mitigation. “A careful examination of the available research appears to strongly suggest two key relevant points: 1) building more roads in currently unroaded areas is likely to result in more human-caused wildfire starts on national forest lands, and 2) that current roadless rule limitations are not hindering hazardous fuel reduction projects,” the letter states.

Currently, the USFS manages roughly 370,000 miles of roads and is approximately $10.8 billion in the hole for deferred maintenance. If you’ll remember not long ago, DOGE ripped through funding dollars and the federal workforce with an electric chainsaw. The USFS is understaffed and underfunded. New roads—both permanent and temporary—take money to build and maintain.

Yet, the drafted EIS fails to include any accountability for the cost of road maintenance or building in the proposed draft. It does, however, offer that “budget, conservation objectives, and physical resource limits are expected to constrain new permanent road construction.”

The EIS also states that "any near-term permanent road additions would be anticipated to occur on lands where current land management plans allow them (but where the 2001 Roadless Rule currently prohibits them)—totaling about 18.2 million acres, or 45.5 percent of the potentially affected environment. Temporary roads, if proposed, are more likely to occur on lands within 0.5 miles of existing roads—totaling about 11.3 million acres, or 28.3 percent of the potentially affected environment.”

That means up to 74% or 29.5 million acres of current roadless areas could potentially have permanent or temporary roads through them.

Multiple resources have been published recently on what roadless areas provide. Check out this interactive map and report from onX that shows where roadless areas could be impacted near you. Looking to better understand the impacts of the Roadless Rule on hunters, anglers, wildlife, and habitat? Check out this report compiled by Trout Unlimited.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news on the Roadless Rule, you know this isn’t the first attempt at getting rid of it recently.

Last August, the USDA opened a public comment period to gain input while creating an environmental impact statement (EIS) for rescinding the rule. Over 625,000 comments were submitted, and about 99% opposed it. But that didn’t stop the USDA from drafting the new proposed EIS (which is what the public comment period open now is regarding).

Additionally, this year in January, Rep. Harriet Hageman proposed bill H.R.7695 to rescind the rule, which did not progress past the House. And in June, Mike Lee’s last-minute amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act of 2025 to nullify the roadless rule ultimately failed. These are two examples of attempting to expedite the process of rescinding the rule, but their defeats are a good indication that the American people do not actually want the Roadless Rule rescinded.

Importantly, if Congress passed a bill to rescind the rule, there would be no judicial review. Whereas rescinding the rule through the USDA is likely to result in years of litigation.

Following the public comment period, the comments will have to be reviewed, responded to, and a final EIS will be published. How the next few years unfold is uncertain, but it’s likely that a recession would take years to actually be implemented.

The public comment period just opened today, August 20, and is only open until September 21. If you’re starting to feel like Sisyphus making your voice heard on issues regarding our public lands, you’re not alone.

Writing public comments might seem like screaming into a void at times, but they are actually useful in more ways than you may realize. First of all, public comments build an administrative record for any potential future litigation, and if you (or an organization) want to legally challenge the outcome, you must be engaged in the process (i.e., leave a comment). If the public doesn’t weigh in on this issue, then elected officials who do represent the will of the public have nothing to base their claims on.

Additionally, the government has to reply to all public comments, so there is value in providing a unique perspective that they have to individually respond to. The more comments there are, the more it shows how and how much people care about an issue. It’s also important to consider that future administrations might take your comments into consideration and have different priorities. Your comments won’t just disappear.

Finally, this is your last opportunity to comment on the Roadless Rule. So stay strong, keep pushing that metaphorical rock, and leave a comment now.

This is the second installment of a three-part elk hunting story by FHF founder, Paul Lewis. Stay tuned for the last segment or read the first here.

On the morning of September 13th, I slipped into the river bottom, only to bump the herd and listen to them splash across the river. I stumbled across an empty treestand that belongs to a local rifle hunter and decided to take the hint. So, I sat in the same area that evening. I am not a patient hunter; sitting motionless waiting for something to happen feels like a mental prison.

With only ten minutes of shooting light left, my patience broke. I'd only seen a few deer, and while I still had some light, I wanted to search for an arrow I'd dropped on a failed stalk earlier that day.

As I walked out into the open stubble field, a bugle erupted behind me. I spun around to see six cows and the big herd bull running into the timber I'd just left, their noses catching my scent on the wind. Had I stayed in my location for 10 more minutes, that bull would have walked directly in my shooting lane. I'd been defeated, not by the elk, but by my own impatience.

This setup led directly to the heartbreak of September 21st and the high shot on the satellite bull, the long sleepless night, and the gut-wrenching search through the river-bottom brush the following morning.

Yet, in the strange, circular way of the mountains, my failure paved the way for Chris's success. Another friend of mine, Jim, a Bozeman realtor I'd met years back through a mutual friend, had been planning to lead me into a familiar basin miles to the north that day. He'd drawn the same tag himself a few seasons before, and though we never managed to hunt together that year, I'd shown up to help him pack out the bull he rifled solo.

Jim is an easygoing, always smiling go-getter who never seems to run out of reasons to celebrate the day. He was excited to take me to a few places he discovered during his hunt; instead, he immediately volunteered to help me search the river bottom. While we combed the thick brush for any sign of my wounded bull, we lost contact with Chris. Hours later, a single bar of cell service delivered his text: "Shot bull, headed to get my pack."

We shifted from a search party to a recovery crew, processing and hauling Chris's biggest archery bull to date out of the tangled cottonwood swamp. It was a shared victory that helped heal the sting of my own mistake and reinforced the bond we already had.

Five days after that high hit, I was finally able to quiet the guilt I'd been carrying. While glassing a timbered ridge above the same river bottom, I caught a flash of tan moving up the hill and found two bulls following the herd to bed. The one in the middle was the bull I’d shot. He was on his feet, moving with the same aggressive, arrogant stride, bugling like nothing had happened, the red streak on his side already scabbed over into what looked like a superficial flesh wound.

In hunting, carrying the weight of a wounded animal causes sleepless nights and relentless self-doubt. Seeing him alive, vigorous, and seemingly unbothered by my mistake lifted a weight off my chest. It didn't erase the shame of my rushed shot, but it gave me the ethical permission I needed to reset and continue the hunt with a clean slate.

With Chris's bull hanging and the river bottom quieting down, Jim and I finally made good on our original plan and pushed north into that high basin. The road to get there is horrendous. It’s six miles that take the better part of an hour to climb.

We hadn't even unloaded the side-by-side, before a shirtless kid with a southern accent pulled up and told us where he'd just killed a bull, and where not to go: "Don't go in the trees. Wait for them to come out." We found his gut pile within the hour, crows and magpies already working it, and made camp a little further up the basin near the trailhead to a well-known park about a mile up the ridge.

That afternoon, a bull screamed his way toward us off a ridge above camp while Jim and I sat drinking coffee in the shade. I grabbed my bow and slipped into the trees to meet him. Based on his bugles, he'd closed to within eighty yards and was still coming until the only other UTV we saw all weekend drove straight through the clearing between us, causing the whole basin to go quiet.

That evening we made a quick hike into that same park, an area known to stack elk, but it was dead silent. All night long a bull screamed and chuckled within 400 yards of our tent, making restful sleep impossible. As the sun came up, the screaming bull moved off, and we listened to howling wolves from the ridge above while we ate. We quickly realized why the park had been so quiet the previous night.

For the rest of the morning, we worked a group of elk following fresh bugles up and over the top of a timbered knob above the basin. It was there that I drew on one of the biggest bulls I saw that season; a heavy, symmetrical six-point walked to 21 yards and stopped in a lane where I could not shoot unless I gained another six to eight inches of elevation I didn't have.

One slow step to find it was all it took to give myself away. It was the kind of country that makes you earn every inch.

By late October, the screaming chaos of the rut had evaporated. The river bottoms grew quiet, and the elk retreated into the timbered ridges and steep pocket meadows of the high country. The fair-weather hunters had gone home, leaving the mountains to those willing to face the cold and silence.

On the evening of October 28th, Chris and I worked our way up the hill behind camp for a quick evening hunt. As we crested a ridge into a familiar waterhole, I picked out a bull feeding through the timber on our side of the draw, his tines flashing just enough through the brush to make my pulse jump. I never got a clean look at him, but a step to my left to find a shooting lane put a twig under my boot, and the snap sent him out of the country before I ever got him in the scope. We pulled the card at the waterhole on our way out and found the answer waiting in the stored footage: The bull we'd nicknamed Crooked Guy had passed through the afternoon before with a smaller six point. Wide Guy hadn't been with them, and it stung less, knowing that.

On the morning of November 1st, I left camp an hour before first light, steering my Can-Am up a high mountain pass. At 7,500 feet, this range was a highway for people who hunted with stone. Down on the eastern foothills, archaeologists have uncovered camps proving humans used these mountains for more than 11,000 years. Clovis and Folsom points have been unearthed lying alongside the bones of Ice Age bison and smaller game. Those ancient hunters, and the Crow and Blackfeet who followed them, likely used low, unnamed gaps in the range as seasonal corridors between the high timber and the wintering grounds below. They surely walked the same creek bottoms, observed game from the same rocky knobs, and camped in the same meadows my family owns today.

I passed a Jeep Wrangler at the entrance to a side drainage, its occupants deflating their tires for the rocky crawl ahead. They had bull tags and planned to work the high ridges, but assured me they wouldn't cross the pass where I was headed. I wished them luck and continued into the head of a nameless drainage beyond the pass, signing in at a Block Management box on the off chance my hunt spilled onto the private ranch land below.

The morning was spent glassing a massive, seventy-acre meadow, a spot where I'd found success back in 2009. I watched a small herd of mule deer, a young fork-horn buck shadowing a group of does until they slipped into the timber around nine. Later, crossing a saddle to the south, I bumped a spike bull and a nice four-point mule deer buck feeding in a hidden sagebrush depression.

I set up my bipod at two hundred yards. He was a borderline shooter, but the fear of spooking any elk bedding nearby stayed my finger. I tucked the bipod away and made my way back to camp by early afternoon.

I tried to nap in the camper, but the ticking clock of the season wouldn't let me rest. Chris had sent word he might come up to glass that evening, so by 2 p.m. I was hiking the steep, timbered ridges directly above our property, headed for the same small waterhole in the upper reaches of the creek above camp.

During our summer scouting, we'd noted consistent use here; the smaller six-point we called Crooked Guy, and a few younger raghorns, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb. Wide Guy hadn't shown up on the local cameras in nearly a month, but this waterhole remained the most active trail above camp.

I'd sat this spot several times before, and the wind had always betrayed me. This time I changed tactics, crossing the drainage to climb the opposite, sun-facing slope, betting on the rising thermals to hold steady through a long sit, and on the afternoon sun to help keep me warm.

I found a vantage with a clear view of the waterhole and the trails winding down the opposite ridge. I gathered deadfall and built a makeshift blind behind a fallen pine. The sun beat down so hard I had to pull my hood up and tuck my hat low. I draped my jacket over my rifle's stainless barrel like a sniper's shroud to minimize glare. By 5:45, the sun slipped behind the western crest, the temperature dropped instantly, and the warm air gave way to a biting cross-slope draft. As six o'clock approached, the familiar demons of impatience began to whisper. I had my inReach out, ready to message Chris and call the evening a bust, when a sharp clack echoed from the timber across the draw, the unmistakable sound of an antler brushing a dry pine branch.

There’s good news for the conservation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness—but will it last?

Earlier this week, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order to enhance the protection of the Boundary Waters. The order is particularly concerned with mining leases and permitting in the Rainy River Headwaters Watershed, where a potential copper sulfide mine has long raised alarms among the conservation community because of potential downstream impacts on the otherwise pristine Boundary Waters.

Walz’s executive is the latest in a years-long back and forth over the mining project. In January 2023, the Department of the Interior under the Biden-Harris administration issued a 20-year mineral withdrawal in the area that blocked it. This spring, however, the Congress made an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the mineral withdrawal in a narrow, partisan vote. The move was widely seen as a step toward reinstating leases for a mine that had previously been proposed by Twin Metals, a subsidiary Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta.

Now, Walz’s executive order stands to delay and potentially interminably block this mine and any other potential new operations in the Rainy River Headwaters Watershed (RRHW) by directing the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to not undertake any environmental review or permitting work associated with proposals for nonferrous mineral mining pending the resolution of an ongoing lawsuit, cooperate with a federal agency on the environmental review of a nonferrous mining project, or offer new state mineral or surface leases.

It also orders the “review of existing state nonferrous mineral leases located within the RRHW and strictly enforces compliance with the terms of those leases” and prohibits the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency from environmental permitting and review work in the area.

Additionally, the executive order directs the Minnesota DNR to draft legislation permanently “prohibiting nonferrous mining in the RRHW for consideration as part of the agency’s budget and policy development process.”

“I’m using my executive authority to put an end to the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the sanctity of the Boundary Waters,” said Walz. “The Boundary Waters represent a treasure we share—not just with each other, but with future generations of Minnesotans who will come here to be at peace with nature.”

Conservation advocates are celebrating the move. “This is a monumental step forward at the state level,” says Lukas Leaf, executive director at Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters. “It's something we've been working towards for a long time.”

While Governor Walz’s executive order is an important step toward conserving the Boundary Waters, it is not a definitive result. For one, the executive order could easily be rescinded or contradicted by the state’s next governor; Walz is considered a “lame duck” as he is not running for reelection.

According to MPR News, Republican candidate Lisa Demuth panned Walz’s order, calling it part of Democrats’ continued “hostility toward Minnesota mining, taking job growth opportunities off the table before they can even go through the regulatory review process.”

On the Democratic side, gubernatorial candidate Amy Klobuchar said that she had not yet had time to review the order and that though she had significant concerns about mining in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters, “there is other mining going on across the Range, including Mesabi Metallics iron ore mine about to open up, and some other proposed mining projects that don’t endanger the Boundary Waters, that I think it is important to continue to allow pending environmental reviews to go forward.”

Leaf says it’s important to consider the candidates’ stances on the issue come November, and he also plans to work with other advocates to lobby for the passage of the legislation that the Minnesota DNR is directed to draft as part of Walz’s order.

As for the legal durability of the order, there are likely a couple of factors at play, according to Mark Squillace, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. Squillace says a Supreme Court case known as California Coastal Commission vs. Granite Rock established that states have the right to regulate mining activities on federal land as long as they are not interfering or overturning federal law.

As previous leases for the mine were revoked and have not yet been reissued, it’s not clear exactly on what types of land that any revived mining operation plan would be on, though the last mine plan involved a mix of 36% federal land, 3% private, and 61% state land. According to Squillace, the state of Minnesota has greater authority on state and private land than federal, but it could still hinder the development of a mine on federal public lands within the state.

“[The order] makes clear that the state has authority to regulate mining operations in significant ways,” he says. “And those regulations could be onerous…they can’t block [a mine on federal land] entirely, but they can impose significant regulations that could be enough to force a mining company to decide it’s not worth it.”

Another potential wrench in the issue is the as-yet unresolved question of the legality of using the CRA to revoke a mining withdrawal; the CRA gives Congress the opportunity to review “rules” that federal agencies issue, but this is the first time a mineral withdrawal has been considered such and been revoked under the law. Squillace says that this may lead to a legal challenge on this front, though no conservation groups have yet filed litigation. If successful, such litigation would have the potential to make Walz’s recent order a moot point when it comes to the Twin Metals Mine.

As for Leaf, he considers Walz’s executive order a win—but one that requires further effort. “Our next steps are to fight against the federal mineral leases being reissued to Twin Metals and to work hard to get the state legislature to pass permanent protection that the DNR will now draft,” he says. “Minnesota knows the value of our precious wild places, and we're going to keep fighting tooth and nail to keep them that way.”

This week on Future Wild Mark's joined by diehard angler, advocate, and author Riverhorse Nakadate to discuss how he's built a life that revolves around water and wildness, the challenges and joys of becoming an advocate for wild things, and the lessons he’s learned writing and filmmaking in defense of the Boundary Waters and other similar water-filled and wild paradises.

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Clay Newcomb along with Bear Newcomb and Josh “Landbridge” Spielmaker are joined by John Donovan, one of the guests featured on the “Struck by Lightning” episode of the Beat Grease Podcast. John elaborates on his experience being struck by lightning while descending from his tree stand just 9 months earlier. It’s an amazing story of a potentially catastrophic moment and how he was able to make a full recovery.

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