Cal In the Field

This week, Cal heads to a waterfowl mecca – California’s Sacramento Valley. He’s joining his friend Sean Doherty and local guide Scott Feist for a mixed bag hunt in the heart of the nation’s largest agricultural area. The rice fields they’ll be hunting provide habitat for migrating waterfowl outside of the planting season. The conservation efforts involved have allowed native ducks, geese, and shorebirds to return to the area without removing the need to grow food and make a living. Questions remain for the imperiled salmon that once swam the Sacramento floodplain, but the same water that grows food and brings in birds could very well bring back the native fishery too.

This week, Cal goes deep spearfishing for White Sea Bass. He’s joining Joel Oelnik and Ryan Moore in Southern California's kelp forests. A once depleted fishery, white sea bass are back on the rise due to 70+ years of mixed conservation efforts and fishery regulations. Join Cal as he follows white sea bass from the egg to the kelp forests off Southern California's coast.

This week, Cal is back in California’s Sacramento Valley. This time he’s dropping below the surface of the Sacramento. At first it may look obvious that Salmon are at odds with stripers, but could that just be what’s on the surface? Join Ryan Callaghan as he fishes for Salmon and Striper while diving in deep on the water issues that have plagued this area for decades.

This week, Cal is at Doug Duren’s farm outside of Cazenovia, Wisconsin hunting deer and talking Chronic Wasting Disease. Home to our good friend, Cazenovia is also ground zero for CWD, a 100% fatal and highly transmissible prion based disease. Join Cal as he hunts with Doug to see first hand how CWD is changing Wisconsin whitetail deer hunting traditions.

MeatEater's Ryan "Cal" Callaghan joins Idaho Fish and Game in an exclusive and extremely rare behind the scenes look at the science of grizzly population dynamics. As Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho optimistically ready themselves to assume full management of the species, Cal sets out to learn how trapping, collaring, and handling a mature boar grizzly might give us the insight we need to make a difference. There's no better time for all of us to truly understand how to live with (and avoid) these bears.

Cal joins Idaho Fish and Game as they tag rainbow and cutthroat trout on the South Fork of the Snake River as part of an effort to give native Yellowstone Cutthroat trout a fin up on the biomass ladder. Catch a rainbow, earn a $1,000!

Cal joins Captain Gjuro Bruer to take part in a little citizen science by catching and tagging Atlantic tripletail. He then rolls inward to meet up with Jared Serigne to hunt hogs and "cajun pheasant" while getting a locals' look at the effects of land loss and saltwater intrusion.

Cal heads out to Maine to check up on Shiloh Pond and see what "access" means in Maine. He hunts grouse and woodcock in the nasty, thick regenerative growth of Maine's Northwoods with Brent West of the High Peaks Alliance.

On this episode of Cal’s Week in Review: In the Field, MeatEater’s Director of Conservation Ryan Callaghan heads to the Zumwalt Preserve, which is 37,000 acres of bunch grass prairie that look like heaven at first glance. Owned and operated by the Nature Conservancy, bow and rifle hunting are used as tools in the elk management plan. Hunters move elk around the prairie to prevent overgrazing and mitigate the presence of invasive weeds. Although Cal is the only hunter on the preserve with a bull tag—open terrain and large wary herds make hunting these elk more like hell. In the end he puts the pieces together and earns it the hard way.

In this episode of Cal’s Week in Review: In the Field, MeatEater’s Director of Conservation, Ryan Callaghan heads to Tennessee to see how the recent addition of invasive Asian carp to the ecosystem is affecting fishing, recreation, and the environment. With the help of the TWRA, he meets with biologists, commercial processors, outfitters, and even tries his hand at noodling for flathead catfish. When it’s all said and done, they put this invasive newcomer up against two southern favorites—crappie and flathead—tune in to find out which fish wins the taste test.

In this episode of Cal’s Week in Review: In the Field, MeatEater’s Director of Conservation, Ryan Callaghan and Eric Siegfried of onX navigate around the crowds and into a hard to access piece of public land in Montana for a mule deer rifle hunt. Eric uses his E-scouting expertise alongside Cal’s river savvy to get to a spot that would be unknown and possibly forgotten without the public land data provided by onX—also a canoe, they’ll need a canoe.