DETROIT — No worm in the foam bait box was safe from 5-year-old JaKari West.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," he said as he dug through the box of soil. He gave each fat wriggling worm a name, like Hulk or Canchy, before volunteer Heather Mayernik sent it off on its journey to be hooked and cast into Belle Isle's Lake Okonoka.

West ...Read more

Anglers are reeling with joy as massive yellowtails showed up just a few miles off the Orange County coast recently, a rare sight close to shore.

Captain Steve Locken, of RockenReel Sportfishing, said large groups of 40-pound yellowtail were seen last Monday and Tuesday three miles in front of the Dana Point Harbor in water just 220 feet deep. ...Read more

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Virtually every Saturday during the fall, Rick Baturin watches dogs rush onto his land from nearby hunting grounds in Colleton County.

The canines leave areas where sportsmen are using them to chase deer and enter his property, an annoyance with potentially dangerous implications that has left Baturin frustrated after years ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — That stink in St. Paul’s Como Park neighborhood last weekend? It wasn’t the blooming corpse flower in the conservatory.

About 10,000 crappies and bluegill sunfish died in Como Lake last week.

The die-off was the result of low oxygen in the water, according to the Capitol Region Watershed District, which oversees water ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — To say the plan to expand the state’s wild elk herd to northeast Minnesota from the northwest where the animals currently reside is a multimillion-dollar debacle might not be entirely fair.

But it’s accurate.

After a year’s delay, the first elk from the northwest were supposed to be transported to the northeast this ...Read more

DENVER — When he was young, Javier Refuerzo and his little brother used to fish through holes in the floor of City Park’s bandshell gazebo. And when his wriggling carp were too large to pull through the 3 to 4-inch openings, he’d cut them loose.

“There were a few kids that were there most weekends,” said the 42-year-old Denverite, who...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — How exactly it happened, Alan Johnston’s death, no one knows. But in the end, on May 13, Johnston’s Golden Retriever, JJ, was in Johnston’s boat alone, and his master was in Lake of the Woods.

An independent sort whose family in the 1800s was among the first white settlers in Warroad, Minn., Johnston, 78, had been a ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Ron Schara was sitting with his back to a tree when he realized he’d shot enough turkeys in his lifetime.

Known best for his role as a host on Minnesota Bound, a television series he started in 1995 to highlight the outdoors and now airs on KSTP, Schara said he watched a small flock of turkeys pass by as he sat last year at ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota anglers say they are catching and keeping more fish than previously believed. A boatload more.

A new federal study published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Fisheries found that Minnesotans are bringing home an estimated 80 million pounds of freshwater fish annually. That’s more than twice the state’s ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Hundreds of thousands of Minnesota hunters and anglers will have the option to use their phones in new ways to buy and display licenses beginning June 9.

On Tuesday, the state Department of Natural Resources announced exact details on what it had telegraphed for months: the launch date of an upgrade to its electronic license ...Read more

BOSTON — A piece of quintessential Cape Cod will be restored this summer, as a local lobsterman resumes a nearly century-old family tradition of selling from his home after being caught in small-town bureaucracy last year.

The Yarmouth Zoning Board of Appeals has approved a special permit for resident Jon Tolley to reopen his shop at his home...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS — Working in a darkened laboratory, Laurel Sacco dips a cup into a large tank of water and scoops up dozens of young walleye. She pours one into a petri dish and examines it under a microscope.

The fry has been harvested from Pine River near the headwaters of the Mississippi River where the Minnesota Department of Natural ...Read more

LAKE VERMILION, Minn. — On this big lake last weekend it was shake and bake, baby, another fishing opener, with walleyes n bacon on the menu.

That’s the way Tom Stuen spells it. Walleyes n bacon. His wife, Mary, spells it that way, too, and together they’ve scripted those words on the pickup camper that is their home away from home when ...Read more

DETROIT — Five fishermen found themselves in hot water after taking more than their legal limit of walleye from the Detroit River, officials said.

The group from northern Michigan was caught Friday after fishing on the river near Milliken State Park, east of downtown on Atwater Street near Orleans, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources...Read more

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan hunters in the Lower Peninsula will only be allowed to kill one buck starting in March 2027, the state commission that sets hunting and fishing rules declared Wednesday.

The change is in service of efforts to control the booming deer population in southern Michigan, where some communities have resorted to culling ...Read more