MINNEAPOLIS — The hens aren’t coming home to roost, and something’s going to have to change.

Beginning in Minnesota.

The hens in this case are mallards, specifically adult hen mallards, and their absence on the breeding grounds, including in Minnesota, the Dakotas and prairie Canada, means trouble for duck hunters and duck hunting.

It�...Read more

ISLE, Minn. — Two weeks after the state Department of Natural Resources loosened walleye regulations on Mille Lacs Lake to establish a welcomed two-fish bag limit, anglers are struggling to take advantage.

The trick is this: When the bag limit was zero, the fishing was pretty good. Now that it’s legal to catch and keep two of the fish, the ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — News item: Shooting of four children, ages 11 to 13, at 1 a.m. in a stolen car raises familiar alarm in Minneapolis. Police recover 30 shell casings from what they say was a fully automatic weapon.

Nothing about the events described above should be considered normal, Thurman Tucker says. Not now or ever.

Kids who are barely in ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — A Montana company that sells digital navigation apps to hunters, off-roaders and backcountry hikers has turned to Minnesota anglers to help develop apps for both trout streams and freshwater lakes.

OnX Maps, best known for its GPS-driven hunting app, acquired Twin Cities-based TroutRoutes this year at about the same time it ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — The other day Bob Hautman turned on one light, then another, curious whether the change in luminescence affected the mien, or appearance, of the ducks he was painting.

This was at the farm-turned-wildlife mecca west of the Twin Cities that Hautman shares with his wife, the artist Dodie Logue, and Hautman was putting the ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota’s earliest hunting seasons open on a Sunday this year, and the state’s annual harvest of wild game will be subject to an assortment of new regulations.

Spelled out by the Department of Natural Resources in the hunting and trapping rules handbook, here’s a breakdown of notable changes.

On Sept. 1, bear season ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Darren Dorn was 18 years old and driving his pickup to his home just north of Minneapolis when he swerved to avoid hitting a deer.

That was the end of the first part of his life, and the beginning of the second.

Now 40 years old, Dorn, who works in sales for a lumber company, was at Game Fair in Ramsey.

In a wheelchair since ...Read more

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — When longtime environmentalist Chuck O’Neal first bought a wildlife conservation license plate, he thought the extra $25 he paid yearly was going to an organization dedicated to preserving Florida wildlife, especially its dwindling black bear population.

So it seemed like a betrayal to O’Neal when he discovered that ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Long before Gov. Tim Walz was introduced to national audiences as a hunter and outdoorsman, he broke through in Washington as an up-and-coming trap shooter in a small circle of his congressional colleagues who could handle a shotgun.

Former House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson, who represented Minnesota’s Seventh ...Read more

WRANGELL, Alaska — The nation’s largest national forest, the Tongass, blankets 17 million acres of southeast Alaska, in which everything is connected to everything else, with salmon the centerpiece.

This was apparent on a recent day as four of us motored up a bay of Alaska’s Inside Passage, watching bald eagles carve circles in a cobalt ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Secondhand crossbow, anyone? Shotgun and scope? Deer skull on a mount?

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is again putting up for auction firearms, archery bows, fishing gear and other outdoor items confiscated from hunting and fishing scofflaws. The two upcoming auctions are certain to draw masses — 58,500 people ...Read more

PETERSBURG, ALASKA — A few days back, Terry Arnesen throttled up the two outboards that swung from the transom of his boat as he angled his home-away-from-home out of this town’s harbor of mostly commercial fishing boats, many of which had seen better days.

Terry’s watercraft wasn’t a “Deadliest Catch”-size trawler, but a 26-foot ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — If you started a timer now to gauge the days, weeks and months that will pass before the Department of Natural Resources acts to restrict the effects of forward-facing sonar on Minnesota muskie populations, you'll soon have to recalibrate your timepiece to measure in years, and perhaps decades.

Because as history shows, the DNR ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota is planning to notably liberalize the walleye harvest on Mille Lacs Lake starting Aug. 16 under a proposed rule change that would allow a daily bag limit of two fish per licensed angler within a harvest slot of 18 to 20 inches.

State fisheries chief Brad Parsons proposed the move during a meeting Monday of the Mille ...Read more