Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcasts and Blasts

In this episode, we delve into the fascinating field of Human Dimensions in wildlife and natural resources management. Discover how this discipline is shaping informed decision-making among state and federal agencies, as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Whether you're already familiar with the Human Dimensions or hearing about it for the first time, you'll learn how it's helping to address some of our most pressing conservation challenges.

Guests Include

Josh Morse, PhD. University of Vermont

Jody Simoes, Ph.D. Human Dimensions Project Coordinator. Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife

Shelby Perry...

In this episode of the Backcountry Report, Chris dives into the latest conservation news and boots-on-the-ground action from across the BHA community. We explore a surprising connection between air pollution and wildlife behavior, looking at how pollutants are degrading the natural "smellscape" that animals rely on to survive. Then, we break down urgent policy updates, including a critical public comment period on wetland drain tile setbacks and a major review of Wilderness Study Area management. Finally, we highlight inspiring volunteer efforts from Minnesota to California, featuring a partnership with the U.S. Marine Corps to deliver water to endangered...

In this first installment of our new Backcountry Conversations podcast series, we sit down with BHA Director of Development Trey Curtiss for a follow-up to Trey's popular April 2025 episode with Hal Herring — the one where he described killing an over-the-counter bull elk eleven years running on public land. A year later, the obvious question: did he find number twelve? Or did we jinx him with that episode? 

Trey walks through a general Montana season from archery to rifle. Along the way he gets into the things that actually make the difference back there — glassing timber, deciding where other hun...

Summer is in full swing, but fall is on the horizon. In this episode, we dive into major headlines impacting our public lands, from the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to a new lease sales in Ohio's only national forest. We break down what these policy shifts really mean for habitat, access, and long-term stewardship. Then, we share some hard-won conservation victories, preview upcoming BHA events, and hear from volunteers doing the essential on-the-ground work.

Show Notes:

Wayne National Forest Oil/Gas Leases: https://eplanning.blm.gov/Project-Home/?id=798d6bf4...

In Part II of our look at brook trout we are going to hear from fisheries managers and state officials from around the Northeast and learn how climate change is influencing brook trout management and fishing regulations.

Guests Include

Adam Kautza. Coldwater Fishery Resource Project Leader. MassWildlife.

John MaGee. Program Supervisor for the Inland Fisheries Division. NH Fish & Game

Mason Trumble. Deputy Commissioner - Environmental Conservation. CT Department of Energy & Environmental Protection

Brian Eltz. Senior Fisheries Biologist. CT Department of Energy & Environmental Protection

Fred Henson. Cold Water...

A major CWD study reveals new transmission risks. The Forest Service proposes a rule that weakens public input. We track urgent conservation funding in Congress, new grazing directives, and state-level fights in PA, OR, and CO—where the Roan Plateau is under threat. Plus, boots-on-the-ground updates from Idaho and New Mexico.

Show Notes:

Forest Service Directive Overhaul: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/01/2026-13281/organization-functions-and-procedures-public-notice-and-comment-for-standards-criteria-and-guidance

CWD Study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7613

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part...

In this launch episode of the Backcountry Report, BHA introduces its new Podcasts & Blasts feed, covers major conservation headlines — from a federal order loosening motorized access and attacks on the Roadless Rule to wetlands funding, the America the Beautiful/Legacy Restoration Fund, Potential for Sunday hunting in Massachusetts, California MPA petitions, and a Montana corner‑crossing lawsuit — highlights grassroots stewardship wins and upcoming BHA events, and more. 

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists.

BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PU...

Today, we're diving into the world of brook trout -- how they're being affected by our changing climate, and what that means for the future. We are also going to take some time to appreciate this incredible species. Ongoing research here in the Northeast is revealing some amazing insights into the resilience and adaptability of these beloved fish.

Guests Include:

Adam Kautza. Coldwater Fishery Resource Project Leader. MassWildlife.

Stephen Jane, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Research Fellow. University of Notre Dame

Benjamin Letcher, Ph.D. Ecologist. USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center.

...

It's MEMBER APPRECIATION WEEK at Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. And for our podcast listeners who aren't already  members, we're giving you a special chance to become one. For the month of June, use discount code BLAST10 at checkout for 10% off all Individual & Family Memberships*. Join today, fuel BHA's conservation work and enjoy the many other perks of being part of our community. Thanks for being a BHA member! 

*does not apply to Gift Memberships

Today's episode:

In this episode of the Conservation Cooperative, we're looking at how roads impact wildlife and the role that wi...

Inside a new economic assessment of federal public lands

For a lot of us, public lands are deeply personal. They're where we learned to hunt, where we camp with our families, where we go to breathe a little easier and remember what matters. But increasingly, the future of those lands is being debated in terms of economics, efficiency and ownership — and those conversations are getting louder across the West.

On this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast, we sit down with BHA's Regional Stewardship and Habitat Connectivity Manager, Dre Arman, to unpack a new ec...

Today, the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast is sharing the second episode of the Conservation Collective, where they're talking striped bass, the most sought after fish on the eastern seaboard. Often described as "everyman's fish" it's pursued by an extraordinarily wide range of anglers. Those anglers could be shorebound, or they could be on a million dollar center console. A lot of people also fish for stripers, NOAA estimates over 20 million trips a season, and so, the fishery has a significant cultural and economic impact up and down the coast. Once hailed as a conservation success story, now, the future...

While BHA's Podcast & Blast takes a moment to plan its next steps, we're sharing the first episode of our Conservation Cooperative podcast (recorded previously), which looks at a scenario playing out across North America -- one that the New England Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (BHA) has been grappling with for a few years: the rapid development of recreation trails and their encroachment on wild places. We'll explore some of the factors that are driving trail development in the state of Vermont and how it impacts the conservation of our wildlands and wildlife. While we explore the issue in...

While BHA's Podcast & Blast takes a moment to plan its next steps, we're sharing the first episode of our Conservation Cooperative podcast (recorded previously), which looks at a scenario playing out across North America -- one that the New England Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (BHA) has been grappling with for a few years: the rapid development of recreation trails and their encroachment on wild places. We'll explore some of the factors that are driving trail development in the state of Vermont and how it impacts the conservation of our wildlands and wildlife. While we explore the issue in...

After nearly a decade behind the mic and more than 225 episodes digging into the people, places and fights that define our public lands and waters, Hal Herring is stepping away from BHA's Podcast & Blast and onto his next adventure.

For this final episode, we turn the microphone around. Hal joins former BHA Vice President of Communications and longtime Podcast & Blast producer Katie McKalip, along with BHA Brand and Editorial Manager Zack Williams, for a conversation about how the show came together, what made it matter and a few of the moments they'll carry forward. What emerges is...

In this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast, host Hal Herring speaks with investigative journalist Andrew Becker about the complex and increasingly contentious issue of stream access in Utah. Centered around Becker's deep-dive reporting for The Drake, the conversation explores how a state that is roughly 75% public land can still have most of its fishable water flowing through private property.

Becker traces the issue back to Western settlement, including the belief that water is a shared public resource. From the Equal Footing Doctrine and questions of navigability to Utah's modern walk-in access program, the episode unpacks...

On this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast, Hal Herring sits down at his home in Augusta, Montana, with singer-songwriter and wilderness mule packer Jackson Holte.

Jackson talks about how long days in the wilderness shape his music, how silence and hard work inform art, and why public lands and access matter so deeply to who we are and how we live. From packing strings in the Bob Marshall to writing songs that carry that landscape forward, this is a conversation about craft, heritage, and the freedom worth sustaining.

https://www.i...

BREAKING: Since this interview was recorded, a new attempt to permit a copper-nickel mine upstream of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is underway. On Monday, Jan. 12, Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn) introduced HJ Res. 140, which would lift the federal moratorium on mining in the Rainy River Watershed, just upstream from the wilderness border. Tell your elected officials to vote NO on HJ Res. 140 and any similar actions taken in the Senate, and call your elected officials directly on the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a 1.1-million-acre expanse of lakes, rivers, and boreal forest—ac...

It was the late spring of 1932 when Idaho outfitter Jim Renshaw first saw the upper Selway River from the back of a horse. The packstring was led by his father, Alvin, who had been working for the U.S. Forest Service since he was 13 and had bought the Pettibone Ranch, deep in the wilderness, where Bear Creek drops into the Selway River.

Jim Renshaw was two months old at that time. For the next 16 years, he, his mother and father, and two sisters lived at the Pettibone Ranch, guiding hunters in the fall and fishermen and wilderness...

On this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast and Blast, host Hal Herring sits down with Josh Jackson, author of The Enduring Wild and founder of The Forgotten Lands Project. Jackson's journey into California's Bureau of Land Management landscapes reveals the forgotten backbone of conservation — the so-called leftover lands that belong to all of us, yet are loved by too few. Through photography, storytelling and hard-earned curiosity, this conversation explores why these places matter, why they're vulnerable, and why building a broader coalition of people who know and care about them may be one of the most important co...

Hunters and anglers across the country may never set foot on Alaska's Dalton Highway—but what's unfolding there affects every American who cares about public land. In this episode, Hal Herring sits down with fisheries ecologist and writer Dr. Kevin Fraley to unpack a sweeping threat to some of the most accessible caribou and fishing country in the entire state. A new push in Congress aims to throw out the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan—a plan built over a decade with input from hunters, anglers and local stakeholders—and potentially reopen millions of acres around the Dalton to indust...

BHA's new President & CEO Ryan Callaghan probably needs doesn't need an introduction. But you may be wondering what he and BHA are planning for the future, why now is such a critical moment in the history of public lands and waters, and how and why you should get involved with BHA. 

Here's your chance to learn the answers to those questions and a whole lot more as Cal sits down with Podcast & Blast host Hal Herring for a conversation you don't want to miss. 

During the 2025 fight against the mass sell-off of America's public lands, Utah-born cowboy, big game guide, and U.S. Army veteran Braxton McCoy seemed to be everywhere, from his barrage of fiery commentary on X to the Tucker Carlson and Shawn Ryan podcasts, to addressing public meetings across the West. He was the most powerful and tenacious conservative voice of the pro-public lands movement.

He hasn't let up, and he never will.

Join us for the story of a true American original, a soldier who suffered catastrophic injuries in a suicide bomb attack in Ramadi...

A controversy over public lands' management in Indiana's 204,000-acre Hoosier National Forest turns out to be a microcosm of a burning (pun intended) national debate over using fire and targeted logging operations to create habitat for wildlife and a healthier, more diverse and more resilient forest.

From the 1960s to 80s, The U.S. Forest Service, in the grip of the so-called "timber beast" style of management, clear-cut millions of acres of publicly owned forestland, leading to widespread loss of wildlife, sediment-filled streams, and a furious backlash from conservationists. A barrage of successful lawsuits from environmental and...

The American pronghorn is North America's most unique big game animal, a Great Plains living relic from the end of the Ice Age—a creature of speed, agility and beauty that once shared the landscape with the American cheetah, lions, dire wolves, steppe bison. The pronghorn has outlasted them all to become an icon of the wide open spaces and a species honored and beloved (if sometimes cursed in frustration) by anyone who has ever hunted them.

But now, the pronghorn, like the American Great Plains ecosystem, needs our help. Beset by the disruption of migration corridors, th...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking public comments on the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which affects 45 million acres of our national forests. Why is this such a big deal? Why are we throwing this baby out with the bathwater? 

Join Hal and Trout Unlimited President and CEO Chris Wood, who knows this subject inside and out and was working for the U.S. Forest Service in the late 1990s--when the Roadless Rule was created after decades of study, conflict, watershed failures, and the quest for both balance and fiscal responsibility in public lands' m...

BHA's Podcast and Blast is proud to be sponsored by Silencer Central, the nation's largest clearinghouse for silencers. Motto: "Silencers Made Simple since 2005."

This episode features Brandon Maddox of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who founded Silencer Central 20 years ago from his home. He saw both the growing demand for silencers and the difficulty of navigating federal regulations. Today, Silencer Central handles it all—from expert guidance on the right fit to a step-by-step process (simple enough for even Hal, a self-proclaimed Luddite) that delivers a silencer directly to your door.

Brandon is a long-range precision ri...

Join us for a conversation with Carmen Vanbianchi, Research Director and Co-founder of Home Range Wildlife Research, based in Winthrop, Washington, in the Methow Valley. Home Range's mission is "to advance wildlife conservation by conducting high-quality research, educating aspiring biologists, and engaging local communities."  Carmen is a field biologist dedicated to the study of lynx and other carnivores, living a life as a tracker, skier, deep observer, and a student of winter weather and tough terrain. Part of her personal mission is to make sure that more people like herself, who love wildlife and wild places, can find their w...

The Northeast is the most densely populated part of our country, and is rich in opportunities for hunting, fishing, hiking and camping, due to an extensive network of public lands and the massively successful wildlife restorations and legislation to clean up rivers and reclaim the industrial and mining mishaps of the past.

None of our outdoor pursuits exist here by accident or by luck. The hunting and fishing, the habitat, the access that they depend upon, is the result of work inspired by a passion for making sure that something wonderful can go on and on, in...

Kyle Lybarger, a native of Hartselle, Alabama, is a botanist and restoration ecologist and the founder of the Native Habitat Project. He's also a father, a conservationist, a lifelong whitetail and turkey hunter, sauger and bass fisherman.

Kyle is a man on a mission: to save or restore as much of the South's native plants, grasslands, savannahs, limestone glades and open woodlands as he possibly can, and to start a movement of motivated Southerners to do the same, anywhere possible and on any scale, from a tiny corner in a suburban front yard or replacing the sterile...

Come with us to Arab, Alabama, to meet Phyllis Light, herbalist, responsible forager, native plant conservation advocate, founder of the Appalachian Center for Natural Health, and author of Southern Folk Medicine: Healing Traditions from the Appalachian Fields and Forests.

Phyliss Light was born on Brindlee Mountain, in this southwest extension of the Appalachian Mountains, into a family with Creek and Cherokee Indian roots. She learned herbalism from her grandmother, and spent long days of her childhood "gleaning" – harvesting wild foods and medicines, fishing and hunting, with her father. "It was a very practical kind of herbalism," Phyliss ex...

Chris Jordan has some unwelcome news for the watershed and fisheries restoration movement. Restoring robust populations of salmonids and other fish species in degraded rivers and wetlands is much more complex than we could have ever imagined, and we've been doing it wrong for decades. Most of us, even those of us who view our fishing and our rivers as a kind of religion, don't even know what a truly healthy river looks like.

But Chris also has some welcome news, though, and it's the subject of today's podcast: we know how to restore functioning watersheds for...

The news keeps getting worse: over 250 million acres of our public lands potentially up for sale and 3 million or more likely carved out.  While this has been a goal, and a dream, of many radical politicians for the past fifty years, until now it has only been whispered, dog-whistled, lied about, and obscured. Now, their plan is out in the open.

The line is drawn in the sand. The gauntlet has been thrown down. The land grabbers have made their play.

How will we respond? How do we, the Americans who know and love and d...

"At first the Euroamerican settlers could not fathom the tallgrass prairie.
Stepping into it from cropland-speckled woodlands to the east, they entered
a land of sky and horizon, wind and light, flower and scent, a surging sea of
grasses that staggered the imagination. The prairie grasslands seemed to
stretch on forever, a landscape that promised no enclosure, only intensity
and exposure…"

So writes Cornelia (Connie) Mutel in her book, The Emerald Horizon: The
History of Nature in Iowa, a modern classic of natural history. Mutel has spent
her life ch...

Everything you will ever need to know to win any argument about the future of our American public lands--special and crucial episode with Walt Dabney.

Understanding the background and history of our public lands is critical to safeguarding them for the future.

Texas-born Walt Dabney started his National Park Service career in Yellowstone in 1969, worked as a ranger from the Everglades to Alaska, and was the Superintendent of the National Parks in Southeast Utah from 1991-99, completing a 30-year Parks Service career. Then he served as the Director of State Parks for the Texas Parks...

"[David Joy]is a man who sees his homeplace clearly and who writes like his hand was touched by God." — The New York Times

Novelist and essayist David Joy is a tall, lean and red-bearded denizen of the hollers, mountain tops and ridges of Jackson County, North Carolina. He is an obsessive turkey, deer and squirrel hunter, a fisherman who wrote his first published book on fly fishing but who is equally at home running live baits for big flathead catfish on Piedmont rivers. He is on the very short list of great American fiction writers and es...

Public lands and waters have risen to the forefront of hunter-angler issues in 2025, from Utah's attempted steal of 18.5 million acres of land owned by us all and managed by the Bureau of Land Management to divestment and sale of public lands being floated in Congress and the shrinking of the Federal workforce charged with overseeing the health of our shared resources. The daily flow of information has been a constant -- one that's hard to keep up with. In this special episode of the Podcast & Blast, Hal sits down with BHA President and CEO Patrick Berry and Director of...

When Mandela Leola Van Eeden was a child roaming the South African outback, her father would run a flag up a tall pole above their cabin so that she and her dog would be able to find their way back home. Her mother is from Valier, on Montana's Hi-Line, and Mandela grew up mostly in Billings, steeped as much in the Montana outdoors culture as she was in her father's native South African farming and ranching world. She is a hunter and an angler, an international whitewater rafting guide and explorer,  musician, Ashtanga yoga teacher, and host and producer o...

Trey Curtiss, a native son of Montana, is BHA's Strategic Partnerships and Conservation Programs Manager. Trey is also among a very small group of public lands' elk hunters who have successfully filled a bull tag now for over ten years in a row. Ponder that, for a moment: for any of us who have hunted bulls in the backcountry and think we know exactly what that entails. Do we know, really? What are we missing? What does it take, really, in time, gear, commitment, preparation? Join us for one of the most in-depth talks on public lands elk hunting...

Come with us to Houston, Texas, to talk saltwater fishing, conservation, philosophy and life with Pat Murray, former light tackle fishing guide and President of the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA). Pat is the author of Pat Murray's No-Nonsense Guide to Coastal Fishing and the just-published It's More than Fishing, from Texas A&M University Press. He's also the publisher of TIDES magazine, and an award-winning outdoor writer and reporter.

CCA was founded in 1977 to address the drastic commercial overfishing of redfish and speckled trout along the Texas Gulf Coast. The battles were fought on the water, in...

RA Beattie was the man behind the camera for many of the most influential fly-fishing films of the past several decades. It's no exaggeration to say his work changed the culture of fly fishing.

Beattie's work has always told the story behind the story – transcending just a sport about catching fish, and allowing us to connect with the why.

From giant Arctic char to dorado in the Bolivian jungle, to steelhead on the Deschutes and milkfish in Dubai, RA has set the standard for fly-fishing films and inspired countless others to expand their work beyond "fi...