Michael Adams

1 month ago | themeateater.com | Christopher Bancroft |Sam Lungren |Michael Adams |Jordan Sillars

Alaskan native fishing guide Brandon Ware remarked, “Our sea lions out here have a pretty infamous history.” When asked about the harbor in Petersburg, Alaska, he recalled a particularly notorious sea lion. “When I was a kid, there was one problem sea lion that ended up getting taken care of,” he said. The massive animal, weighing as much as a bull moose, attacked a man on the public dock. According to Ware, the victim required 77 stitches and suffered a severe hip injury.

Oct 29, 2024 | themeateater.com | Eli Fournier |Travis Hall |Michael Adams

On October 15, Brian Melvin arrowed a massive 770-pound black bear in New Jersey. It was just the third hunting season since the bear hunt was restored in the state (the hunt was canceled by Governor Phil Murphy in 2018 but reinstated in 2022 after the Fish and Game Council declared an “emergency” with human-bear interaction on the rise). Melvin’s story of the hunt was widely publicized in outdoor media, but it resulted in some unusually heated backlash.

May 24, 2024 | themeateater.com | Jordan Sillars |Eli Fournier |Michael Adams

The U.S. House of Representatives is considering a bill that would ban so-called “wildlife killing contests” on all federal public land in all 50 states. Authored by Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen, the “Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act” is based on the claim that hunting contests serve no legitimate wildlife management purpose and are incompatible with the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.

Apr 24, 2024 | themeateater.com | Eli Fournier |Michael Adams |Maggie Hudlow |Travis Hall

At a meeting on April 9th, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission voted to adopt a black bear hunting season in the state—the first since the Louisiana black bear was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1992. The Commission approved a 16-day season, set to run December 7 to 22 this year. Only ten tags will be administered this year through the state’s lottery system, and hunting will be limited to a single unit in the northeast corner of the state.

Jan 30, 2024 | themeateater.com | Lakhan Clark |Eli Fournier |Michael Adams |Kubie Brown

The Pleistocene was an epoch filled with charismatic megafauna, from the likes of the giant mammoths and mastodons to the iconic saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears. But little attention is drawn to the diverse assemblage of extinct cervids that roamed alongside these prehistoric giants. They’re just as weird and wonderful as their more well-known counterparts, and their extinctions tell an important story about how to preserve their modern relatives.