Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Hunting. Angling. Public Lands. That's the meat of what BHA's Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is about, and we cover the gamut. With guests that range from outdoor writers to backcountry hunters to legendary anglers, we seek to uncover the stories, the truths, the controversies, and the epic conversations that our public land heritage provides.
Episodes
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 silence...
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 th...
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 ...
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 moti...
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 wi...
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 Ch...
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 obs...
“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…”
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 Na...
“[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...
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...
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 an...
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, re...
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 TIDE...
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 mi...
During the deluge of Hurricane Helene, over 30 inches of rain fell in the headwaters of the iconic Nolichucky River in North Carolina, falling on ground already saturated from prior rain. The Nolichucky crested nine feet higher than its record flood levels, wiping out almost everything in its path. Although the river experienced scouring and erosion, it was the man-made infrastructure that fared the worst. Among the losses were alm...
Wilderness meets Modern Society -- Seth Kantner Part II
Alaska’s Seth Kantner is back with us, as promised, for part two.
Seth was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River in the 1960s and has been hunting, trapping, fishing, and making a life on the land there ever since. He is the author of the novel Ordinary Wolves, considered one of the most powerful, gritty, and true-to-life Alaska books ever written. His non-fiction books, Shop...
As promised, John Leshy is back on the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast to discuss his recently published and definitive book, Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands.
Our Common Ground is the most comprehensive and incisive history, both legal and political, ever written about the American public lands. I...
Bjorn Dihle has lived his entire life in southeast Alaska, hunting and fishing from the Tongass National Forest to the northern Brooks Range and beyond. He is a family man, a wilderness and wildlife guide, a conservationist, and a contributing editor at Alaska and Hunt Alaska magazines. Bjorn is the author of the books Haunted Inside Passage, Never Cry Halibut, and A Shape in the Dark: Living and Dying with Bro...
“It is astonishing that this law has escaped fundamental change.” John Leshy, author of The Mining Law: A Study in Perpetual Motion
The 1872 Mining Law represents one of the most extraordinary give-a-ways of American assets in the history of our nation. It has been the target of reform and repeal almost from the very moment it was passed. No other nation on earth allows the mining industry to simply extract the public’s wealth with...
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