PATRICK DURKIN OUTDOORS

Some lucky deer hunter will eventually shoot a whitetail with antlers bigger than those atop the buck that Milo Hanson killed Nov. 23, 1993, near his Saskatchewan farm.    With a certified score of 213-5/8 inches, Hanson’s 14-point buck became the world-record “typical” whitetail during the Boone and Crockett Club’s 1995 awards ceremony. It bumped a 10-point Wisconsin buck from the top spot it held since 1971. That buck scored 206-1/8 inches, and was shot by Jim Jordan in 201

If a red fox tunnels under your toolshed or burrows beneath putting greens on nearby golf courses, you won’t guarantee it a long, healthy life by hiring a trapper to move it to a suburban woodlot or even a rural wetland.    That’s what researcher David Drake concluded in a talk Feb. 12 at the annual winter meeting of Wisconsin’s Wildlife Society in Stevens Point. Drake, a professor at UW-Madison, put it bluntly in the conference’s three-day seminar schedule: “Urban red fox tr

Wisconsin lawmakers have bickered about funding the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program since 1989, when Rep. Spencer Black, a Democrat, crafted it and Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, signed it into law.    Until recently, state lawmakers always wore each other down for conservation. Eventually, they’d always pause, tug up their mom- or dad-pants, and settle on budgets neither loved but could stomach. That’s just how they did the hard things inside Wisconsin’s capitol, give

In his 1948 foreword to “A Sand County Almanac,” Aldo Leopold observed that some people can live without wild things and some cannot.    And then he defined the contents of his book: “These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”    Roughly 15 years earlier, those credentials qualified Leopold to create and lead the nation’s first wildlife-management program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. No one else could match Leopold’s ability to wield the pen j