When Danielle Prewett and I talked, Instagram was down. There had been some sort of internal meltdown at Meta, and Instagram and Facebook were suddenly inaccessible. The outage was a minor inconvenience for most casual Instagram users, who use the app primarily as a way to distract themselves between meetings, to online shop, or to see what their ex has been up to. But what was it like for Prewett, a cook, blogger, hunter, and influencer (she doesn’t love that word, but we’ll get to that later) who has amassed a significant following on the platform and owes much of her success to it?“What a r ..read more

North and East TexasWood Ducks and MallardsThe male wood duck, with its head of iridescent green and its dappled chestnut breast, is stunning to behold: a wildlife painting come to life, gliding gracefully through the forest. Wood ducks reside near streams and lakes in North and East Texas, which is also where you’ll find the much larger but similarly hued mallards, the nation’s most common duck. For hunters who covet these birds, Gus Engeling Wildlife Management Area, northwest of Palestine, is a good bet. The public reserve boasts thousands of acres of bottomland forests and wetlands, all tr ..read more

Of  all the red-tailed hawks that have ever soared on a Texas breeze, only one gets to live in Charlie Alvis’s house, at least during the winter hunting season. “My bird has its own bedroom,” said Alvis, a falconer who’s based in the unincorporated community of Porter, just beyond the northern outskirts of Houston. “When I come home at night, that bird comes in the living room with me. We socialize for hours at a time.”The 43-year-old Alvis, who’s temporarily living in Brownwood, in Central Texas, for work, is long and lean and sports a gray beard. His five-year-old hawk has a golden chest, da ..read more

From the Big Bend to East Texas, the Panhandle to the Rio Grande Valley, Texas ranches have been transformed in recent decades by the proliferation of exotic game animals, many of them rare and endangered in their native habitats. With the rise of “Texotics” has come an army of hunters, eager to take aim at aoudads, axis, bongos, nilgai, and even zebras. But you don’t have to be a hunter to enjoy these wondrous critters. Here are ten ranches open to the public for hunting or viewing. Map of exotic hunting locations in Texas. Illustration by Claire McCracken1. Ox Ranch, UvaldeDrive real mi ..read more

Ann Thomasson-Wilson was a two-time world bass champion in the 1980s. Before she retired from competition, she bought a struggling bait shop in the East Texas town of Jasper. More than 35 years later, Ann’s Tackle Shop is still going strong, and anglers flock from all over to consult Thomasson-Wilson’s expertise. The post More Than 35 Years Later, the World Champ Owner of Ann’s Tackle Shop Has Still Got It appeared first on Texas Monthly ..read more

Even in our carefully ordered world, there remain avenues for chaos to thrive in its purest form: the wild pig. Groups of them, called sounders, cavort across golf courses at night like drunken teenagers. Security cameras catch them careering through suburban neighborhoods, where they dig up gardens and lawns. They create shambolic crop circles in fields—Texas’s agriculture industry alone suffers $118.8 million in damages annually. The most recent estimates suggest that tens of thousands of them are involved in car accidents each year. They affront us even in death, vandalizing graves as they ..read more

On a Wednesday morning in mid-December, Cari Ray drives her dark green Toyota Tundra into the parking lot of Lazy L&L Campground in New Braunfels. There’s a hockey puck–size Zen Fly Fishing sticker on the outside of the truck. Inside, each nook and cranny is jammed with rods, waders, and gear. “My truck looks like a fly shop exploded in it,” Ray says as she hops out. From her home in Granite Shoals near the shores of Lake LBJ, she owns School of Zen Fly Fishing, a school and guide business. Ray is also a member of the Texas Women Fly Fishers (TWFF), a 22-year-old club that organizes t ..read more

Common carp are nearly ubiquitous in Texas fresh water, from the clear streams of the Hill Country to the muddy bayous of Houston. They can be caught in ponds, lakes, rivers, and, yes, even ditches. Here are a few of the best spots to try your luck at fly-fishing for this species.Central TexasPedernales RiverThe popular Pedernales Falls State Park, west of Austin, provides a blissful setting—and some of the best carp fly-fishing in Texas. Seat yourself on the knobby knees of a cypress tree and wait for the fish to come to you, or traverse the shallow waters in search of feeding carp. Pro tip ..read more

I was walking along the banks of a remote stretch of the Pecos River when I spotted something at the water’s edge: a blue plastic box, the size of a small book, out of place in this unpeopled land of rock and cactus. Inside lay a colorful assortment of fishing flies. It was May 2020, and I had been trying to teach myself to fly-fish on the Pecos, where some friends and I own a patch of riverside desert near Langtry, in southwest Texas. I had learned just enough to know that the lures were mostly hand tied, a personal collection curated by an expert. Some angler out there, I thought, must be pr ..read more

Larry Weishuhn, a.k.a. Mr. Whitetail, is a wildlife biologist and outdoors writer and TV host. He has been deer hunting since he was in diapers, when his father would strap him on his back and head for the woods.The average deer has grown tremendously compared to what it was. Before the early seventies, we had screwworms all over Texas. I grew up in Colorado County, and until we got control of the screwworm flies, our deer population was very, very low. The same thing pretty much happened all over the state. But the flies were eradicated, and the influence on white-tailed deer was huge. Then t ..read more