Did the recent legislative session do anything that will affect our hunting or fishing? Senate Bill 25 is going to make hunting and/ or fishing a bit more expensive in the future. It basically says that any one 18 years of age or older shall purchase a habitat stamp when applying for a hunting or fishing license. The cost is ten dollars for a resident and twenty-five dollar for a nonresident. The proceeds will go toward enhancing habitat. Among other exemptions, the stamp is not required for one-day licenses, youth licenses, or private shooting preserve licenses. The new fee goes into effect on July 1st. I would like to have seen some additional funds raised at the expense of shooting preserves, but that isn’t a habitat issue.

The Game, Fish, & Parks Commissioners have also been busy. The proposal to add 500 East River Special Buck licenses for nonresidents thankfully went down. I was especially concerned about this. Where would these 500 additional bucks come from, and would it be at the expense of resident hunters? Landowner permission before application would have been required, and no one should know better than the land owner what she/he has for deer. I suspect this would have given birth to some big dollar fee hunting. Some of the residents who would have had hunting permission in the past might be left out in the cold. It was not in the best interest of resident deer hunters.

There was also a proposal on the table to allow West River spring turkey hunters to use rifles. The proposal went down. The vote on this issue was deadlocked at four against four, and so it remains as is. Past experience tells me that this had to do with senior hunters who could no longer climb hills and carry decoys. We’ll probably see this issue come up again.

The Commission also set a limit of one for flathead catfish over 30 inches in length. This was needed to preserve these river monsters, and it might affect James River and Big Sioux River anglers more than the rest of us. These big river flatheads might be South Dakota’s best kept angling secret, and I will admit that the pursuit of these big guys is a personal bucket list item.

Over the past few years, there has been what I will call an ongoing migration of Black Hills elk to our prairies, and a new prairie unit has been established. West River ranchers have been finding more and more elk antler sheds out on the prairie even though they haven’t necessarily seen the elk that dropped them. Let’s hope that this herd prospers.

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For the past three months I have been working on my latest book, The Dakota Nimrod Grows Older, a sequel to my first book, A Dakota Rod and Nimrod. I have borrowed the title from the great Robert Ruark. His classic, The Old Man and the Boy, was followed by the sequel, The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older. If you have never read The Old Man and the Boy, do it. You’ll thank me for recommending it.

I have never worked harder on my writing, and I asked Ron Spomer, Tripp, SD native and the finest outdoor writer in our country today, for his endorsement. I also asked him to be brutal in critiquing the book. He was brutal, but he was also complimentary. He encouraged me to go with less attention to detail and more “meat.” What was it like to fall through the ice? Make the reader feel the recoil. Let the reader experience the strike. Make more use of active voice.

Ron was an immense help, and I’m hoping that my latest work will gain some popularity beyond the regional level. It will be up to me to know where and how much I should invest in advertising. The book will be available soon through mail order. I can’t yet speak of availability in stores because of the virus.

I believe that good photography sells books, and on most of my adventures going back to day one a camera has accompanied me. That first camera was a Kodak that used size 616 film. A number of those old photos can be seen in both of my adventure books, and I see them as a plus. Fortunately in today’s world, a camera is a part of most everyone’s cell phone. I hope you are looking forward to my new book.

See you next week.