Speaker 1: Yeah, my name is Clay Nukeleman. This is a production
Speaker 1: of the bear Grease podcast called The bear Grease Render,
Speaker 1: where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the
Speaker 1: scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f
Speaker 1: HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear
Speaker 1: that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore.
Speaker 1: Speaking of big mustaches, if you notice in this room
Speaker 1: somebody is missing a mustache, and I think we should
Speaker 1: do something about that. You get to take your pick,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah, Misty. Misty is usually and today the
Speaker 1: only one in the room without a mustache. If you
Speaker 1: would who would make you feel better? If you would
Speaker 1: make it make you feel better. I've purchased months ago
Speaker 1: to make you feel welcome, and so you should feel
Speaker 1: So there's the food Man Chew, the Dolly, the Disco Brave,
Speaker 1: the lawn art con artist Roland Rowly, Rich Uncle Nickel bags. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Nickel bags. I'm not sure that food man Chew. I
Speaker 1: don't think I have a long enough chin. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you looked good in a number of those. So
Speaker 1: you get to take your pick. So this is a gift,
Speaker 1: so that I yeah, all right, you know I've always
Speaker 1: been kind of grateful to to not have ancestors. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the Beargrease Render Podcast. We have we have a
Speaker 1: very special guest today for real, like a real special guest.
Speaker 1: But before we introduced him, I'm going to Uh, I
Speaker 1: got a few things I want to show you, guys. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: Missy's picking out her mustache. So Josh has bought her.
Speaker 1: Josh went to like a Dollar General or something and
Speaker 1: online retailer which we will is there official? Okay, so
Speaker 1: Misty's Uh, Misty's putting on her her stash so she'll
Speaker 1: feel see. I feel like you've made an excellent choice here. Okay, good, yeah, now, okay,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be pure chaos. Oh yeah, you look.
Speaker 1: You look amazing. You've never looked better. Misty as her
Speaker 1: as her husband. This is approved for this setting you
Speaker 1: feel about it might be like a waxing deal, you know,
Speaker 1: like the ladies do where they rip it off. That
Speaker 1: would be awesome. That would be awesome. So I've got
Speaker 1: a few things I'd like to I'd like to share
Speaker 1: with you before I introduce our guests. Now, guests, you
Speaker 1: feel free to chime in at any time. They're just
Speaker 1: if they hear your voice, they'll they'll just wonder who
Speaker 1: you are. I was out on the phone today. Do
Speaker 1: you know much about air heads, jeremy little bit stone points?
Speaker 1: I was. I was out today talking on the phone,
Speaker 1: walking through the mule pasture, and any time we get
Speaker 1: a big rain, I'm telling you, any time we get
Speaker 1: a big rain, if you want to walk out there,
Speaker 1: you'll find flint points. I found actually found two. But
Speaker 1: this is a broken it's it's half a point. And
Speaker 1: I really believe that was probably an actual erahead. Most
Speaker 1: of the points you find that are slightly bigger are
Speaker 1: adladdle or spirit points. Look good, it's really hard to
Speaker 1: take you serious. This is uh so, this is what
Speaker 1: what I have is the is the half and the
Speaker 1: two corner notches. But that's pretty that's a that's a
Speaker 1: really nice yeah. And man, I'll tell you what. When
Speaker 1: I saw this, you know what I did. I picked
Speaker 1: it up and took it back to my office with me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of on a little bit of a tangent
Speaker 1: about people saying don't pick up stone points if you're
Speaker 1: on public land. You can't. It's a law. And that's like,
Speaker 1: you can't pick it up. That's okay. If you're on
Speaker 1: private land or can cannot, cannot pick up artifacts or
Speaker 1: really anything off of private on publicly, that's okay. But
Speaker 1: I've had some kind of people say that you shouldn't
Speaker 1: pick up a stone point, and I I just it
Speaker 1: just doesn't make any sense to me, because if this were,
Speaker 1: if this were the fulsome site, if like, if people,
Speaker 1: if archaeologists here that I'm finding stone points in my
Speaker 1: front yard and they want to come to my house
Speaker 1: and do a full excavation, come on, man, we'll make coffee.
Speaker 1: We'll have you on the podcast. Like, if y'all want
Speaker 1: to do an archaeological dig in my front yard, you're
Speaker 1: welcome to. I don't think that's gonna happen because there's
Speaker 1: about thirty thousand other places that are more likely for
Speaker 1: this to happen. Are you with me? I'm totally with you,
Speaker 1: And I don't see the what would be the point
Speaker 1: of leaving what would be the point of leaving it there? Well,
Speaker 1: so the only point, and I agree with this, is
Speaker 1: that by taking something out of you know, they call
Speaker 1: it n C two when it's found at a point
Speaker 1: or artifact found just like it lays there's a lot
Speaker 1: of value inside of that for archaeologist. If you mess
Speaker 1: around with it, then a lot of the story is lost.
Speaker 1: But if that stone point is sitting on the surface
Speaker 1: and the next rain that's going to be in the creek,
Speaker 1: exactly what's the point of right and the legality of it? Now,
Speaker 1: if I was on somebody else's land and I didn't
Speaker 1: have express permission to take a stone point, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: In every stone point I've ever found on someone else's land,
Speaker 1: I have gone and asked them if I could keep it,
Speaker 1: and that is the truth. Um. But anyway, I have
Speaker 1: quite the collection up here, Jeremy of stone points. Most
Speaker 1: of them came from my front yard down here. Do
Speaker 1: you feel like there's an inordinate number of stone points
Speaker 1: in that field? I think there's a couple of factors
Speaker 1: right here that are important. There's a big year round
Speaker 1: spring about a hundred yards from right here where we sit. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's also it's the intersection of two creeks on a
Speaker 1: little low spot down here. I think this valley had
Speaker 1: a fair bit of Native American camping activity. Um So,
Speaker 1: just the fact that it's a valley probably means that
Speaker 1: it had some maybe a little bit more than normal.
Speaker 1: But like the next valley over, I mean, there's nothing
Speaker 1: special about this one. Your neighbor found a pretty good
Speaker 1: sized stump point. Did he show you that which one? Oh?
Speaker 1: Yes he did? Yeah? Far away from here? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: not far away from here he found note he founded
Speaker 1: the place. He didn't found it back in here. Um.
Speaker 1: But no, I feel like the most respectful thing that
Speaker 1: I could do for the human that made that was
Speaker 1: to pick that up and ponder about it. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and show it to people. Yeah. So I just what
Speaker 1: do you think, Misty? Well, I think sometimes Misty thinks
Speaker 1: about pick fights. I mean, I just think I don't
Speaker 1: I don't love that when he gets all snippy like that.
Speaker 1: It's a soapbox, and everybody have their soapbox. He's got
Speaker 1: more than one. You know, everyone's entitled there as in
Speaker 1: you know, anybody can start a podcast. I did get
Speaker 1: on I did get onto my daughter the other day
Speaker 1: about being opinionated. Okay, we'll move on past. And I
Speaker 1: just want to say I I deeply respect the archaeological community,
Speaker 1: and I do not intend to disturb any kind of
Speaker 1: major sites. But I mean, like I put up stone
Speaker 1: points and people pick on me for picking it up,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, let me just say this. I think
Speaker 1: one of the Jeremy o our guest here has been
Speaker 1: has been thrust into I think one of the cool
Speaker 1: things that Clay does with those points. Though. I will
Speaker 1: just say this, since our kids were little, he would
Speaker 1: like show him to him and he would be he
Speaker 1: would tell him and the last guy that you're laughing
Speaker 1: because I'm on my stage. It's going to be difficult.
Speaker 1: Also it is um but he said he would always
Speaker 1: like hold up the he'd always hold up the points.
Speaker 1: Who made me like the last guy that held this
Speaker 1: was you know, sharpen In this for his dinner and
Speaker 1: he'd like make a little story for him about And
Speaker 1: I feel like that always gave our kids some appreciation
Speaker 1: for for the people who came before, and I think
Speaker 1: that's a value. It makes you feel like a part
Speaker 1: of the whole story when you do that, because it's
Speaker 1: a bizarre human experience to not get your food from
Speaker 1: the killing of an animal with a stone point. For real.
Speaker 1: You know, there's been it's estimated that like a hundred
Speaker 1: and eight billion humans have ever lived on planet Earth. Okay,
Speaker 1: right now, there's about seven point seven something billion people
Speaker 1: on Earth, So there have been about a hundred billion
Speaker 1: people that are no longer alive that have been on
Speaker 1: the earth. We've only been experimenting with this whole agriculture
Speaker 1: thing for about ten thousand years. For real. It's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a It could be argued, but it would
Speaker 1: be a legitimate statement to say the people who live
Speaker 1: in modern times are absolutely, absolutely experimenting with the way
Speaker 1: humans should live. Most humans that have ever lived, we're
Speaker 1: killing their animals with stone points. Great question, follow up,
Speaker 1: is the experiment working? You have to that's got yeah? Okay.
Speaker 1: So I hold in my hand a beautiful watercolor painting
Speaker 1: that's water color. I didn't know it was watercolor. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. She painted this, I mean,
Speaker 1: come on, just go with it, Okay. I hold my
Speaker 1: beautiful water beautiful watercolor painting of Warner Glenn with the
Speaker 1: with the jaguar. So a well known artist by the
Speaker 1: last name of DeMoss. And I purchased this online. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so if you type in uh Warner Glenn jaguar painting,
Speaker 1: you can get a reprint of this. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to hang this up in the office and so this
Speaker 1: image of this jaguar is the actual photo. I mean
Speaker 1: that that's what the jack, That's what Warner Glenn's photo
Speaker 1: looked like when he took the picture of the jaguar.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't but he wasn't, So the the author
Speaker 1: took some liberty to put Warner Glenn coming up there
Speaker 1: with his white Walker dogs. But Jeremy, so we we've
Speaker 1: interviewed and spent quite a bit of time with this
Speaker 1: old man named Warner Glenn. He's eighties six years old.
Speaker 1: He lives in southeast Arizona, and he was the first
Speaker 1: person in modern times to document a live jaguar in
Speaker 1: the United States. So he these jaguars. Does Arkansas have
Speaker 1: a jaguar biologist? If it was to be Myron means
Speaker 1: my Iron means is our jaguar biologist. He's my jaguar biologist.
Speaker 1: Um not my biologist. Uh So Warner has the original
Speaker 1: painting of this hanging in his house. Is huge. It
Speaker 1: is huge. I mean it's like six foot by probably
Speaker 1: five ft maybe bigger, maybe eight it's huge. But we
Speaker 1: were right in this country back in early March when
Speaker 1: we went to Warner Glenn's we made a film. And
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll go ahead and tell you there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a film come out about Warner Glenn. No, I
Speaker 1: really don't, but just gonna be incredible. He's eighty six
Speaker 1: years old, Jeremy and still rides a mule miles a year,
Speaker 1: just a bad to the bone, dry ground lion hunter.
Speaker 1: He really is living legend, Warner Glenn. That being said
Speaker 1: Kelly Glenn Kimbro his daughter. Uh sent me an email
Speaker 1: yesterday and Warner Glenn's oldest best dog named Hook died
Speaker 1: passed away. Hook was twelve years old. So we hunted
Speaker 1: with Hook. Yeah, yeah, he did, he did. And uh,
Speaker 1: Hook bade a lion in a bluff on let's see
Speaker 1: on like in early April, he bade a lion in
Speaker 1: a bluff and the lion jumped off a big cliff
Speaker 1: and Hook he didn't jump, but Hook went down after
Speaker 1: thee and the only dog in the pack. As I
Speaker 1: understood it, that went down in the in the end,
Speaker 1: the rock around that area is just incredible. I mean,
Speaker 1: like you could get in a bind in a hurry,
Speaker 1: and this line went off and Hooked twelve years old,
Speaker 1: went off with the lion and got down there and
Speaker 1: was baying the lion. They end up killing the lion
Speaker 1: and then it took Hook forty five minutes of just
Speaker 1: scratching up the rock bluff to get back up, and
Speaker 1: then later they had he was fine after that, but
Speaker 1: but later he just he had some not complications for that,
Speaker 1: but they had to put him down. But anyway, Old Hook,
Speaker 1: but I wanted to show you all that. What say
Speaker 1: on the podcast he said this might be his last
Speaker 1: well he said, he said this might be Hooks last year,
Speaker 1: and it might be mine, is what he said. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said, me and Old Hook might go at the
Speaker 1: same time. So I don't think that's gonna happen though.
Speaker 1: Um hey, I wanted to show you all that. And
Speaker 1: then look at this. Colby made this for me. Before
Speaker 1: Colby made this for me, So this is a what
Speaker 1: is that watercolor? It is paint on painting. Cooby had dismayed.
Speaker 1: So you guys remember the podcast I did about white
Speaker 1: Tail Secrets, and I talked about this big deer that
Speaker 1: I've been hunting for several years that we believe is dead. Um,
Speaker 1: and we named him Jody, And I didn't tell why
Speaker 1: we named him Jody. There's a song by David Allen
Speaker 1: Co called Jody like a melody in the song, Oh,
Speaker 1: I wish we could sing it. I wish we could
Speaker 1: sing it. We don't need to do it today. But
Speaker 1: we can't sing that song. Yeah, we can't. But if
Speaker 1: they like melody, yeah, it's there's like if you listen
Speaker 1: to the song with the thoughts of a white tailed
Speaker 1: deer that just comes in and out of your life. Jody,
Speaker 1: like a melody you play inside my head fill the
Speaker 1: thought of you is more than I can stand awake
Speaker 1: and wait for you to come on my technicam and
Speaker 1: when you tell you know, almost lose my mind. Jodi,
Speaker 1: like a melody you want. So we named this Dear
Speaker 1: Jody so Kobe had been out like a white buffalo.
Speaker 1: It's something that legend. Yeah, all right, enough enough foolishness.
Speaker 1: We have a very distinguished guest with us today, Jeremy
Speaker 1: would from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Welcome Jeremy.
Speaker 1: I told you we were going to cut up a
Speaker 1: little bit before before we got serious. Yeah. So Jeremy
Speaker 1: is the wild turkey biologist for State of Arkansas, which
Speaker 1: is a big deal. Um, so we're gonna I just
Speaker 1: wanted to introduce him. Do we get to question him later?
Speaker 1: This is the most this is the most hated man
Speaker 1: in Arkansas. What did you do? We're gonna he didn't
Speaker 1: know he's walked into a trap. No, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we all got great. I mean I want to hear
Speaker 1: what have to say before that? Let me introduce all
Speaker 1: my guests. Misty n Newcomb, Misty Mustache Nukem No. Great
Speaker 1: to have you. Miss y'all know that. But I don't
Speaker 1: know if I can say this or not. Uh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be on the live podcast and in the Live
Speaker 1: Mediator podcast. It's next week in Bozeman, Montana, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have a special guest with me on the live podcast.
Speaker 1: I won't say who, but anyway, that's gonna be a
Speaker 1: big deal. Um so if it words for shadowing left,
Speaker 1: Josh Lambridge filmmaker. Great to see you, Josh. And if
Speaker 1: that special guest can't go, I'd be happy to go
Speaker 1: with you. All right. Good to see you, Josh. Here
Speaker 1: to your left a guest who's been on here before,
Speaker 1: but it's been a while. Colby Moorhead, Good to see you.
Speaker 1: Mane the bear Tex gonna be back so so Colby
Speaker 1: For anybody who wouldn't know Colby from my from my world,
Speaker 1: Colby runs Bear Honey Magazine. Facts. Don't talk to me
Speaker 1: about Bear Honey Magazine. Talked to Kolby. Yeah, I spend
Speaker 1: most of my life directing people to Kolbe. Yeah. Bear
Speaker 1: Honey Magazine For those who wouldn't know much about it.
Speaker 1: Baronni Magazine has been in print for twenty two years
Speaker 1: two thousand. Yeah, since two thousand, the only print Bear
Speaker 1: Hunting magazine in the world. Facts, yep, just the facts.
Speaker 1: Just take it or leave it. And um, the magazine
Speaker 1: described the magazine, what what do we have in there? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just a beautiful collection of stories and information.
Speaker 1: If that's not a kind of polished no, it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's just a collection of just people's stories. We take
Speaker 1: some missions we have freelance writers and they just uh,
Speaker 1: they'll be tips and tactics and just stories and you
Speaker 1: really never know what to expect except that it's going
Speaker 1: to be very well produced and laid out. And then
Speaker 1: we'll we always try to tell the story visually as well,
Speaker 1: you know, as just do the written words. So if
Speaker 1: you're someone that likes to just flip through a magazine,
Speaker 1: look at the pretty pictures. That's cool. If you want
Speaker 1: to dive in and just read it cover to cover,
Speaker 1: that's cool. If you're just into hounds and just want
Speaker 1: to read that content and look at everything else, like,
Speaker 1: it really is something that if you're interested in bear
Speaker 1: hunting or just like to know more about that. You know,
Speaker 1: there's people that get it and never have intentions of
Speaker 1: bear hunting. So it's just a good just a good interface.
Speaker 1: But I would say that as a subscriber, it is
Speaker 1: some fantastic tactile bathroom reading m good. I don't think
Speaker 1: we want to know what that means. You can put
Speaker 1: two and two together. So I always tell people if
Speaker 1: you want to get into any kind of bear hunting,
Speaker 1: so Bear Hunting Magazine we've always tried to give the
Speaker 1: full gamut of North American bear hunting, which is interesting
Speaker 1: because a lot of times a species will be so
Speaker 1: isolated to one region, Like if you're hunting elk, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're pretty much gonna talk about the Rocky Mountain West
Speaker 1: if you're I mean, there's other species that are widespread,
Speaker 1: but the bear is the most widely, naturally widely distributed,
Speaker 1: big game mammal other than the mountain lion in North America.
Speaker 1: Chew on that, just chew on it. Then think about it.
Speaker 1: So pre European settlement, the most wide, widely distributed mammal
Speaker 1: in North America big game mammal was the mountain lion.
Speaker 1: They were just almost coast to coast from Canada to Mexico.
Speaker 1: Second second was the black bear. So I say that
Speaker 1: to say, we hunt black bear in the East and
Speaker 1: all these different methods, a lot of hounds, a lot
Speaker 1: of big woods, eastern deciduous forests, spotting stock stuff, driving dry,
Speaker 1: you know, doing drives in Pennsylvania. But then you get
Speaker 1: into the West and you have this big spot in
Speaker 1: stock type hunting. You also have hounds up in Canada
Speaker 1: in the boreal forest. There's it's so thick. Typically it's uh,
Speaker 1: you're you're hunting bears over bay. You can go to
Speaker 1: Alaska and have all kinds of different hunting. Come to Arkansas,
Speaker 1: you know, you hunt them over bait, spot and stock whatever.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of different ways to do it. So
Speaker 1: the magazine tries to reflect that. That's all I wanted
Speaker 1: to say. But Kalbi, so what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1: We're there's a there's a thing that Robbi Kroeger at
Speaker 1: Blood Origins, Yeah, at at Blood Origins tell us about
Speaker 1: what he's doing. Yeah. So there's a project he's wanting
Speaker 1: to help support the Arkansas fishing game. Especially it was
Speaker 1: specifically inside of the black bear research and so they're
Speaker 1: looking to expand and and really seeing how that's going
Speaker 1: to affect things. They're just wanting to learn more about
Speaker 1: the population of black bears in the and it's particularly
Speaker 1: with the southeastern United States where they United States, Southeast
Speaker 1: Arkansas where they well, southern the Gulf Coastal Plain of
Speaker 1: Arkansas was like the southern one third where they are
Speaker 1: now opening up a season yeah, yeah, further furthering out
Speaker 1: the previous drawn zones. And uh. Anyways, they're starting a fundraiser.
Speaker 1: They're trying to raise seventy thou dollars to to give
Speaker 1: to this project, and so they're having people open up
Speaker 1: their own fundraising and and help, you know, commit to
Speaker 1: to trying to reach that goal. And so what we're
Speaker 1: gonna do is Bare Hunting Magazine is gonna start a
Speaker 1: fundraising runner inside under Blood Origins that we're gonna be
Speaker 1: given away two different hunts to people. One is gonna
Speaker 1: go to the top donor they're gonna be able to
Speaker 1: pick between the two hunts. And then we're also anyone
Speaker 1: who donates even a dollar or whatever the minimum would
Speaker 1: be will be thrown into a hat to uh to
Speaker 1: get the remaining hunt. And so one hunt is gonna
Speaker 1: be a coon hunt in Arkansas and the other hunt
Speaker 1: is going to be a hog hunt in East Texas,
Speaker 1: and uh, that hunt's gonna be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Were riding around side by side with thermals and and
Speaker 1: doing some night hunting, could do some day hunting to
Speaker 1: but just get into uh, just some fun different activities
Speaker 1: that won't get in the way of your personal hunting season.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna be very flexible on on dates and
Speaker 1: we'll we'll be around you know, we're gonna be really
Speaker 1: uh going around your schedules. And so are you gonna
Speaker 1: tell who the coon hunts with? The coon hunt is
Speaker 1: with Mr Velty Smooth voice print reefs Yeah yeah, and
Speaker 1: then uh yeah, and I'll be at that hunt and
Speaker 1: so will the uh. David McDaniels, he's East Texas cam
Speaker 1: on on Instagram. He's going to be hosting the hunt
Speaker 1: with I think it's Foul Bore Outfitters and in East Texas.
Speaker 1: So basically what he's saying is that you go to
Speaker 1: the Blood Origins website and you click on the the
Speaker 1: Black Bear Fund Arkansas Black Bear Fund, and you're going
Speaker 1: there and you'll see a bunch of teams and you
Speaker 1: basically pick which team you want to donate money too.
Speaker 1: And so Colby saying, magazine Bear Hunting Magazine the the
Speaker 1: highest donors. So you know you could give ten bucks
Speaker 1: or a hundred bucks, or a thousand bucks or if
Speaker 1: you're Elon Musk and you know, billions, um you could buy.
Speaker 1: I tell you, I'm gonna make it offer Elon Musk
Speaker 1: right now, Okay, Meat Eater and me will sell him
Speaker 1: the Bear Greache podcast for one billion dollars. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: even just go above my pay grade. On sure you're
Speaker 1: authorized to. I know I'm not, but I think they
Speaker 1: would be okay with this. So okay, back on track here,
Speaker 1: So the pers that's only for Elon Musk, so no
Speaker 1: one else with a billion dollars. Good step, because think
Speaker 1: of what they would do with it. It could be anything.
Speaker 1: I'd trust Elon ye so so the person that donates
Speaker 1: the most gets to pick whether they on a hog
Speaker 1: hunt or a coon hunt with Brent Reeves. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then the second person just entered into or anybody is
Speaker 1: entered into a draw. Really, they're they're they're raising seventy dollars,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty noble cause to give to the
Speaker 1: game and fish to buy tracking collars, to study Arkansas
Speaker 1: black Bears understand what's going on. Big deal. I love it.
Speaker 1: That's that's pretty cool. Hats off to them for working
Speaker 1: hard for that. Hey, before we go much further, I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the last Bargaras podcast. So it
Speaker 1: was it was quite different than anything we've ever done.
Speaker 1: We've never had just a compilation of stories. I think
Speaker 1: we had eight turkey stories on there, and U I've
Speaker 1: really enjoyed gathering the stories. I mean it was fun talk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so all of you, most of you listen to the podcast, Josh,
Speaker 1: what was your favorite? What was your favorite one? Okay,
Speaker 1: so I I have a favorite story and a favorite
Speaker 1: part of the story. That's my favorite story was honest story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I just love I love that that idea of
Speaker 1: his wife. First of all, I love it when a
Speaker 1: dad takes care of his kids, so his wife can
Speaker 1: go do something. That's an honorable thing. And I found
Speaker 1: it interesting that the honest wife was gone for like
Speaker 1: nine hours and he was just like, I want to
Speaker 1: go to bed, She'll be fine. But but I love
Speaker 1: the fact that she got so excited about it and
Speaker 1: she was able to detail to him where the turkey
Speaker 1: was and then him going and kill it. What a
Speaker 1: cool thing. I mean, that's a great, great, great story
Speaker 1: of partnership. But I before before you go to can
Speaker 1: I can I comment on honest stories. I had somebody go, man,
Speaker 1: what a chauvinistic move to go kill your wife's turkey.
Speaker 1: He never made any mention of that, but apparently, you know,
Speaker 1: they had some agreement or something that you know, he
Speaker 1: was the one that was gonna hunt the next morning.
Speaker 1: And since that was recorded, Oh yeah, well, since that
Speaker 1: was recorded, Janice and his wife went out on their
Speaker 1: annual turkey hunt and they both killed turkeys like last week.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I thought that was a good one, okay.
Speaker 1: And then the favorite part of another Turkey Now, the
Speaker 1: favorite part of the other Turkey story was Andy Brown
Speaker 1: telling the story about the guy with the turkey on
Speaker 1: the other side of the log. And my favorite part
Speaker 1: of it is when he said, and I just Rich,
Speaker 1: what a redneck terri stuff underneath? I love it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could tell when he started telling that story. That's
Speaker 1: something I didn't He didn't tell me what it was about.
Speaker 1: He just said, he said, I got one more I'd
Speaker 1: like to tell you. And he had spoken in his
Speaker 1: like normal voice the whole time, and he said, there
Speaker 1: was an old boy and you know, he kind of
Speaker 1: like dove into kind of this character, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: and started telling that story. And that reminded me of
Speaker 1: there's a there's a term it's using the Ozark's probably
Speaker 1: used in the Appalachians too, um, where words are sometimes
Speaker 1: uh like the plural of the word is is was
Speaker 1: warped like Ori Province when I when I interviewed Ori Province,
Speaker 1: this old mountain man out here, he said he'd clumb
Speaker 1: a tree, clumb past tense like wretched is past tense
Speaker 1: of reach. Yeah, past tense, not plural past tense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're applying standard English rules towards that we don't okay,
Speaker 1: is that what they're doing, Yeah, that's what they're because
Speaker 1: think about it, reach, Rich drug, what did what did
Speaker 1: Ori Province say, I clumb clumb clumb, I clumb the tree.
Speaker 1: Yeah anyway, Yeah, that that was I like that story
Speaker 1: Doc Robern about in Louisiana. Maybe actually they're they're applying
Speaker 1: irregular applications. Misty, Hey, that brings up, that brings up
Speaker 1: something I've been wanting to talk about. And we're not
Speaker 1: because we're gonna go right to Kobe. Um. But Jerry
Speaker 1: Clower we did an episode on Jerry Cloud and they
Speaker 1: constantly used the word that. What they were that which
Speaker 1: are daughter? They would say until she was like seven,
Speaker 1: I mean she was pretty old and and she inate Lea.
Speaker 1: They would say like, rather than saying, um, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take the car that we used to on Sunday but
Speaker 1: we're not, they'd say, we're gonna take the car what
Speaker 1: we used to drive on Sunday but now we don't anymore.
Speaker 1: That like constantly he used the word what where We
Speaker 1: would say that. Okay, Kobe moving right along favorite Turkey story,
Speaker 1: which sounds normal to me. I was like, what are
Speaker 1: we talking? What are we talking about? Uh? Man? I
Speaker 1: Like the general theme is it always involved someone else
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of perseverance inside like, I
Speaker 1: thought that was really cool. But my hat tip would
Speaker 1: probably go to Mr. Will. You know, just I could
Speaker 1: put myself in that story of just like I could.
Speaker 1: I could visualize that whole thing. It was like I
Speaker 1: was just there with him inside of it, and uh,
Speaker 1: it was it the way he told it. It was
Speaker 1: the way he told it, It was the relationship he
Speaker 1: had with the landowner. And then it was also like overcoming, like, man,
Speaker 1: nobody has been able to get this one for years
Speaker 1: and he's just going there and he's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I wonder if he just wasn't thinking what if I
Speaker 1: gotten myself into They didn't name this birden, I can't
Speaker 1: get to him, and so I was like, man, I'm
Speaker 1: like to work hard. What do I do? You know?
Speaker 1: And then just overcoming an obstacle and just you know,
Speaker 1: I just like the the whole kind of climatic the
Speaker 1: way that he told the story story. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know of all the Turkey's wills killed, which he's killed hundreds, bro,
Speaker 1: And you could just hear his humility inside of it.
Speaker 1: You know. I thought that was cool too. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: seems like a really humble guy. Cool. Jeremy, what was
Speaker 1: your favorite story so I got I got to and
Speaker 1: then but both basically kind of bowls down to one point.
Speaker 1: You know, I was listening to one of yours and
Speaker 1: one of Steve's, you know, talking about taking the kids
Speaker 1: out hunting and thinking about you know how literal you know,
Speaker 1: kids take a lot of things, so I don't remember
Speaker 1: it's your daughter or niece that you know, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know taking out. I don't open your eyes, and like,
Speaker 1: did you see it? No, I heard all of this unfolding,
Speaker 1: but I was just like I couldn't do it. And
Speaker 1: then Steve's you know, thinking about his daughter and like
Speaker 1: you know, shooting in the head and I can't see
Speaker 1: the hen and he's telling me to shoot well and
Speaker 1: I can't talk, and I can't talk. So I got
Speaker 1: shoot here, and so I was like just trying to
Speaker 1: like just so call that in thinking, you know, six
Speaker 1: seven years down the line or more, you know, whenever
Speaker 1: we feel comfortable enough with our own son and be like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe we can try to get out here
Speaker 1: and try to take one, Like okay, you know, how
Speaker 1: do you learn from those those kind of mistakes? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can take literal cues from those stories of what
Speaker 1: not walking through well? And then Andy Brown talked about
Speaker 1: his son Scott, who who didn't shoot a walk in Turkey?
Speaker 1: Remember that? And that was that was the exact I
Speaker 1: hadn't even put all those three together, but those three
Speaker 1: stories from Steve's story of his daughter shooting a turkey
Speaker 1: when when she didn't have a good shot because he
Speaker 1: had told her not to talk, so she couldn't tell
Speaker 1: him that he she shouldn't shoot, but he said shoot.
Speaker 1: So she's just like okay. And then to Mallory closing
Speaker 1: her eyes and we told her, turkey, you'll see the
Speaker 1: watch of your eyes. So she's like, solve that problem,
Speaker 1: closed her eyes. Turkey's come strutting in. And then too
Speaker 1: Andy Brown telling Scott, don't shoot a walk in Turkey.
Speaker 1: And so this turkey just just walks right and from anyway,
Speaker 1: go ahead, Jeremy, I had never connected those three. That's good, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, that that that was really it, you know,
Speaker 1: just like taking those lessons you know, the heart and
Speaker 1: like just thinking about me. They're all fun stories to
Speaker 1: listen to obviously, and then but yeah, just thinking that
Speaker 1: into my own personal you know, just buying Okay, how
Speaker 1: how do I how do I wordless you know, down
Speaker 1: the line when I'm trying to go through those same lessons,
Speaker 1: you know, be Okay, you need to shoot it in
Speaker 1: the head, but don't don't just focus like you know,
Speaker 1: just make sure you focus and you shoot it out
Speaker 1: the head. But don't if I tell you to shoot,
Speaker 1: you know, tell me if you can't shoot, or something
Speaker 1: like that. You see, what's the developmental thing that's going
Speaker 1: on there with kids when they take you they're concrete thinkers.
Speaker 1: They haven't developed abstract thought yet. So if you say,
Speaker 1: don't shoot a turkey walking, your dad really didn't mean
Speaker 1: that entirely. He just means if you have a choice,
Speaker 1: and the turkeys, like, yeah, they're taking it concretely. They don't.
Speaker 1: They're not picturing like they're just applying literal, concrete rules
Speaker 1: to this. And that's pretty much the way kid should
Speaker 1: take what their parents say during that period of their
Speaker 1: life exactly what I say, don't take any liberty of
Speaker 1: yourself to think on your own sort of Okay, my
Speaker 1: my my favorite story, I think, and and all of
Speaker 1: them had a lot of unique dynamics, but I liked
Speaker 1: most story and part of so there's when I just
Speaker 1: petition these guys to tell me their favorite turkey story.
Speaker 1: In my mind, a turkey story was good because of
Speaker 1: some dynamic hunting component or something like really exciting that
Speaker 1: was said, but or exciting that happened, like a turkey
Speaker 1: did something really wild. It was interesting for me to
Speaker 1: hear all the reasons why because I didn't try to
Speaker 1: coach him of like what why something would be good
Speaker 1: or bad? And Jannat and Steve both said, hey, our
Speaker 1: stories are like they kind of we're like, I hope
Speaker 1: this is what you're looking for. And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: you just you get to decide what your favorite again
Speaker 1: story is. And so it's interesting for Johannese because he's
Speaker 1: killed a lot of turkeys and had a lot of
Speaker 1: real exciting hunts and he tells us one story about
Speaker 1: his wife, you know. And then Steve has killed a
Speaker 1: lot of turkeys, had a lot of exciting turkey hunts
Speaker 1: and he tells the story about his daughter. I thought
Speaker 1: os was interesting. I like that his dad woke him up.
Speaker 1: And this is when Moe was an adult. His dad
Speaker 1: woke him up and said you might as well go.
Speaker 1: And that was a theme I know from talking to
Speaker 1: Mo that that was the theme of his His dad
Speaker 1: always used to say, I can't kill him when you're
Speaker 1: on the couch like that was just just go, let's go.
Speaker 1: And that's a good If you want to be a
Speaker 1: successful hunter, you just gotta go. You can't wait for
Speaker 1: conditions to always be right. His dad said, well, you
Speaker 1: thought you heard one that's better than all the ones. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it basically two mornings, exact same scenario. Very unlikely.
Speaker 1: I mean, killing a bird and pouring down rain off
Speaker 1: the roost. I mean, I would say is a highly
Speaker 1: unlikely scenario to mourners row, same spot, same story. I mean,
Speaker 1: that would never line up, That would line up once
Speaker 1: in a lifetime for something like that to happen. I
Speaker 1: thought it was pretty cool. One of my favorite quotes
Speaker 1: from from one of the stories was Will Premost when
Speaker 1: he said he said it may not have worked any
Speaker 1: other day, but it worked exactly. That was good. That
Speaker 1: was good. All right. I hold him my right hand
Speaker 1: here the Arkansas Turkey Hunting guide Book, and so we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk. We're gonna talk here to Mr Jeremy. We're
Speaker 1: going to see if you have this memorize. I once
Speaker 1: knew a guy This is a true story. I once
Speaker 1: knew a guy and I can't say his name. He's
Speaker 1: still alive. I mean, he's not even that old. And
Speaker 1: he once handed us a book, me and my dad
Speaker 1: about ornithology, ornithology, birds, study of birds and uh. And
Speaker 1: he said he just handed it to it. He was
Speaker 1: trying to show us that he knew a lot. And
Speaker 1: he said, pick out any page on there and ask
Speaker 1: me any question. And Dad, I was standing there, that
Speaker 1: just picks it up, opens it up and says, all right,
Speaker 1: page one thirty three, you know the speckled belly winged
Speaker 1: Tarminger And he and he read verbatim like what it
Speaker 1: said about that. The guy just like a freak genius.
Speaker 1: And he said, I've memorized that book and he had,
Speaker 1: he at least convinced us yeah this was let's unless
Speaker 1: he had it rigged where you opened it up and
Speaker 1: your fer went to like the same spot. Long story. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Jeremy back to Jeremy man you are you're not
Speaker 1: from Arkansas, but tell me a little bit about your
Speaker 1: career and wildlife biology, like where have you been and
Speaker 1: how did you get here? Okay? Yeah, so I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: transplant not not from Arkansas, from Massachusetts. Originally, UM went
Speaker 1: to the University of Maine for my undergraduate and wildlife
Speaker 1: coology and trying to figure out what I want to
Speaker 1: do in this world. You know, I hadn't figured my
Speaker 1: place by the time I finished my undergraduate degree, so
Speaker 1: I jumped around the country. I lived in Wyoming, Louisiana, Florida,
Speaker 1: you know, working with different state agencies, different federal agencies, universities,
Speaker 1: really trying to figure out my place in the world,
Speaker 1: and got into working with wild turkeys under Mike Chamber
Speaker 1: and their university UM. Early on, one of his grad
Speaker 1: students took a chance on me. I hadn't had any
Speaker 1: experience with game birds to that point, and you know,
Speaker 1: I basically got hooked at that point with turkeys and
Speaker 1: did that position. Jumped the next year, worked with another
Speaker 1: graduate student before I ended up getting my own graduate
Speaker 1: project under Mike back in So I did that for
Speaker 1: a few years, graduated with my master's from the University
Speaker 1: of Georgia, and then moved down to Florida, got with
Speaker 1: their turkey program. I was their assistant wild turkey program
Speaker 1: coordinator for about a year. When this opportunity came up
Speaker 1: here in Arkansas, and I took a chance and agency
Speaker 1: to chance. Uh so what year did you become the
Speaker 1: wild turkey? About? Just here here late summer? So it's
Speaker 1: my fourth season, fourth turkey season here in Arkansas, just
Speaker 1: out of curiosity. When you were in Massachusetts, what got
Speaker 1: you interested in wildlife? It was, you know, honestly, I
Speaker 1: grew up fishing. My grandfather hunted his whole life. I
Speaker 1: shot a little bit when I was growing up with him.
Speaker 1: Never got into hunting. And I went to undergraduate thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna go on the wildlife side of things.
Speaker 1: You know, I like to fish too much. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna I'm not gonna do that, you know, and go
Speaker 1: for fisheries degree or anything like that. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: go for wildlife because fishing is what I love to do.
Speaker 1: I don't want to ruin that by going going to
Speaker 1: work in wildlife. And next thing, you know, I got
Speaker 1: into hunting outside of um undergraduate, you know, early twenties.
Speaker 1: Once I graduated, I got into hunting, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: been but I love affair basically ever since what was
Speaker 1: your thesis on with so with Mike? So I looked
Speaker 1: at the reproductive ecology of female wild turkeys. So they're
Speaker 1: looking at nesting broodery and relation to small scale prescribed
Speaker 1: fires during the nesting season. You know, obviously a lot
Speaker 1: of that. Honestly, you know, very few nests are actually
Speaker 1: lost the fire. You know, there's at least in that
Speaker 1: in that system where I was at in southwest Georgia.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're managing it more for quail um, So
Speaker 1: they're talking about a lot of smaller burns, um frequent fires,
Speaker 1: and so they're burning on a two to three year
Speaker 1: fire returnat well, sometimes sooner it depending on the objectives
Speaker 1: and what they needed to do within that stand. But
Speaker 1: you're talking about acreages that may range from you know,
Speaker 1: fifty acres to a couple of hundred acres in size
Speaker 1: and a typical burn and they may be doing to
Speaker 1: three units a day if the conditions were right. We're
Speaker 1: working in long leaf pine savannah, so really open, kind
Speaker 1: of flat communities that you know, you let a match
Speaker 1: and you could get them to roll across that fairly quickly.
Speaker 1: But you know, in general, most of the stands of
Speaker 1: those birds were targeting to nest. You know, we're about
Speaker 1: a year to post fire and they weren't. They were
Speaker 1: still a year or more out from from having another
Speaker 1: burn rolled through there. So you know, we didn't lose
Speaker 1: a single nest in the study to fire. When would
Speaker 1: they burning? They're burning anywhere from January all the way
Speaker 1: up into June. Really give us a give us a
Speaker 1: rundown of the Arkansas turkey situation, because so two podcasts ago,
Speaker 1: you know, we talked with Mike Chamberlain and we always
Speaker 1: hear how Arkansas is like the poster child for the
Speaker 1: Southeast turkey decline. And so give us kind of a
Speaker 1: timeline of history of the Arkansas turkey population to the
Speaker 1: best of your knowledge, bringing it up till today. So
Speaker 1: you know, from from my understanding, basically, you know, if
Speaker 1: if we go back about a hundred years or so,
Speaker 1: you know, early nineteen hundreds, populations in the state were
Speaker 1: you know, hitting there about lowest points. By nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, they're estimated wo be only about seven thousand
Speaker 1: wild turkeys left in the state. Game Fish Commission was
Speaker 1: created in around nineteen fifteen, and you know, late teens,
Speaker 1: early twenties, they're already starting to think about, you know,
Speaker 1: what they needed to do with wild turkeys started setting
Speaker 1: seasons justin bag limits, though still incredibly liberal to what
Speaker 1: you see today. But they also started considering restocking with
Speaker 1: captive raised wild turkeys, you know, game farm birds, and
Speaker 1: they put those out for many years and wasn't really
Speaker 1: successful at all. Those birds didn't have the natural instincts,
Speaker 1: you know, to actually survive in the wild. They weren't
Speaker 1: used to predators anything like that. It wasn't until rocket
Speaker 1: nets were really picked up in popularity and that technique
Speaker 1: was developed in the late forties early fifties that you know,
Speaker 1: catching wild wild birds and moving this. That's when they
Speaker 1: would put out bait for turkeys. Big flock of turkeys
Speaker 1: would come in and they had rocket propelled nets that
Speaker 1: would shoot out and catch a whole flock of turkeys
Speaker 1: and then they take those turkeys transport them somewhere else.
Speaker 1: So that was in the night, so they were able
Speaker 1: and they were bringing turkeys in from other states or
Speaker 1: just other places where we had turkeys some other states.
Speaker 1: You know, we had some birds coming in from places
Speaker 1: like Missouri. I think we did get some birds from
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania at points um both captive reared ones and actual
Speaker 1: wild stock birds. But the majority of birds in the
Speaker 1: state actually came from Brandywine Islands, an island over I
Speaker 1: think it's Mississippi County in the middle of Mississippi River.
Speaker 1: Really good turkey populations over there, and so they caught
Speaker 1: a lot of birds there and moved them too different
Speaker 1: kind of refuges around the state where they were stocked.
Speaker 1: You know, early on, they let hunting still go and
Speaker 1: you know, realized that some of those situations wasn't working
Speaker 1: that well. So they got to the point where they
Speaker 1: started closing those areas for a period of years to
Speaker 1: allow those birds to naturally repopulate the area and expand.
Speaker 1: You know, I think they were estimating that they expand
Speaker 1: somewhere ten to twenty miles over several years um and
Speaker 1: kind of fill those those habitats at the time. And
Speaker 1: so most of that restocking was finished by the the
Speaker 1: early to mid nineties, though there were still so for
Speaker 1: fifty years they were really stocking turkeys. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: majority of those, you know, they kind of focused in
Speaker 1: and around the national forest lands and large public lands
Speaker 1: because you know, early on the idea was that you know,
Speaker 1: wild turkeys were you know, they needed thick forest, not
Speaker 1: necessarily thick forest, but large expanses of forest, because that
Speaker 1: those are the areas that turkeys were left, you know,
Speaker 1: all these places that were harder to exploit. They hadn't
Speaker 1: really been harassed to the point that they were extirpated
Speaker 1: from the area like they were in a lot of
Speaker 1: other areas where there was there was more people and
Speaker 1: it was easier access. So you know, those early efforts
Speaker 1: focused there first and then built upon it. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until you started getting into the seventies and eighties and
Speaker 1: maybe the nineties where they started looking at what they
Speaker 1: considered these more marginal habitats where you had this more
Speaker 1: of a combination interspersion of kind of open land and
Speaker 1: forested habitats and realized that that's actually more of an
Speaker 1: ideal turkey habitats. And that's when populations really exped and
Speaker 1: and so the Arkansas turkey populations by the late seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties just skyrocketed. Yeah, they started to jump. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there were some periods, you know, even back
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties that you saw these fluctuations
Speaker 1: where we had good numbers and then there were some
Speaker 1: bad years, you know, following poor weather events poor hatches,
Speaker 1: but in general that trend was continuing to to increase
Speaker 1: all through time, and we hit about the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: and that's when when things peak, you know, the late
Speaker 1: late nineties, early two thousands. You know, we ended up
Speaker 1: The highest harvest year we had was two thousand and three.
Speaker 1: The state we harvest had just under twenty thousand turkeys
Speaker 1: that year, and then there was we refer to that
Speaker 1: time period as the good old days. Yes, yes, that's
Speaker 1: what I hear off them. So twenty thousand was our
Speaker 1: biggest number of birds taken, Yes, yes, just under that.
Speaker 1: Now that that's always been an interesting number to me,
Speaker 1: because like Missouri, they might kill fifty thousand turkeys, Is
Speaker 1: that about right? Yeah? I mean in recent years has
Speaker 1: been a lot less, but I think at their peak,
Speaker 1: which was in and around that same time, they killed
Speaker 1: about sixty thousand turkeys up there, that's a lot. And
Speaker 1: I know you can't it's not comparing apples to apples,
Speaker 1: to compare to states. I mean, they had a lot
Speaker 1: of agg land, maybe more agg land than us. I
Speaker 1: don't know what about Mississippi. What would have there been
Speaker 1: their peak harvest numbers? I can't remember exactly what their
Speaker 1: peaks were, but you know, I think typically you see
Speaker 1: nowadays that they estimate somewhere in the twenty five to
Speaker 1: thirty thousand range. It was probably somewhat higher and higher
Speaker 1: than Arkansas that yeah, yeah, I can't remember what those
Speaker 1: figures were exactly, but it was probably you know, thirty
Speaker 1: five forty thousand something. Would Oklahoma not have had more
Speaker 1: birds than us even historically at our peak. Oklahoma gets
Speaker 1: difficult because you start moving into Rio Grand wild turkeys
Speaker 1: and the majority of the state and you know, basically
Speaker 1: your southeastern corner of the states where you're you have
Speaker 1: true Easterns and then they you know, they talk about
Speaker 1: this sort of hybrid zone between the two, but the
Speaker 1: majority of the kind of central and western portion of
Speaker 1: the states Rio, So it starts getting a little different
Speaker 1: when you know, it gets to that apples to oranges comparison.
Speaker 1: To truly say what's going on, I honestly can't couldn't
Speaker 1: tell you what their harvests look like through time. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's interesting to me when we talk
Speaker 1: about the turkey situation here in Arkansas, because really it's
Speaker 1: a pretty i mean, twenty years isn't that long when
Speaker 1: you're looking at wildlife management and looking at like a
Speaker 1: broad scale of animal population is going up and down. Um,
Speaker 1: And and humans including myself and Josh are pretty finicky
Speaker 1: when it comes to uh, turkey numbers. Um. I mean
Speaker 1: you can go from a three year period and people
Speaker 1: might say, oh, man, there's no turkeys anymore, and you know,
Speaker 1: three years before they were wearing them out, you know,
Speaker 1: but just to get just so so I can be
Speaker 1: clear on this, what you're describing is an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of effort to get turkeys, which was still lower than
Speaker 1: what are the surrounding states had at our peak. We
Speaker 1: were still smaller. Yeah, and that and the other states
Speaker 1: put forth the effort that we did. It's it's hard
Speaker 1: as far as restocking them. Yeah, so I mean mostly yep, yep,
Speaker 1: all these all these are this was happening across the
Speaker 1: country during this entire period. Um. You know, north south
Speaker 1: Louisiana to Wisconsin east, you know, the Maine in Florida,
Speaker 1: you know, all those states were experiencing these same declines,
Speaker 1: you know, in the early nineteen hundreds and then through
Speaker 1: time through the middle nineteen hundreds really started ramping up
Speaker 1: that um those efforts in restock, and I think Mississippi
Speaker 1: was one of those states that was was fairly early
Speaker 1: in there where they considered things to be successful and
Speaker 1: kind of complete. We we were right there, probably within
Speaker 1: a few years of what they would have assumed. And
Speaker 1: so you can't really, like me, comparing Arkansas Missouri is
Speaker 1: really not fair. I mean, Missouri might be bigger, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it just says a different habitats, so that's
Speaker 1: not really relevant. But I just kind of was trying
Speaker 1: to get like a bigger picture of because that was
Speaker 1: my understanding is that Missouri has always killed a bunch
Speaker 1: more than us. Mississippi is always killed a bunch more
Speaker 1: than us. What's interested is, you know a lot of
Speaker 1: people look at those bordering states, but I very rarely
Speaker 1: hear folks look south of the border. You know that
Speaker 1: they don't talk about Louisiana often. And you know, that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that I've tried to do since
Speaker 1: I got here was kind of take a look at
Speaker 1: that that landscape context. What are we looking at here
Speaker 1: in Arkansas? Because you know, people talk about that that
Speaker 1: twenty thousand birds, and you know there's some some interesting things,
Speaker 1: you know, in regards to what our regulations were like
Speaker 1: at that time to where we're at now. That that
Speaker 1: make it even harder to compare harvest to now to
Speaker 1: back then. But when you just look at the landscape context,
Speaker 1: you know, most of Arkansas are a larger proportion of
Speaker 1: Arkansas looks a lot like Louisiana, and I feel they
Speaker 1: typically harvest you know, about three to five thousand birds
Speaker 1: or so on average their estimates, Yeah, between their you know,
Speaker 1: game check and then their estimates you know on hunter surveys,
Speaker 1: their estimating right in that ballpark. So we're just a
Speaker 1: little bit above that. And then you move into Missouri
Speaker 1: and you know, obviously they're they're killing a ton of
Speaker 1: different birds. But you know, Arkansas is this unique mix
Speaker 1: of these different regional landskates all coming together. I mean essentially, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you've got the Ozarks on the kind of
Speaker 1: the northern quarter of the state. You're moving down south
Speaker 1: below the River Valley. You know, that's a whole unique area.
Speaker 1: Then you get into the Washington Mountains below that, you've
Speaker 1: got that large pro portion of the states, the Gulf
Speaker 1: Coastal Plain, you know, primarily pine managed timber and then
Speaker 1: you move over in the entire eastern about quarter to
Speaker 1: third of the states that's really developed m agricultural land,
Speaker 1: bottom land laying around all these major river corridors. So
Speaker 1: you know that really the only remaining habitat out there
Speaker 1: is the bottom land tracks along the White Cash River,
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River, Crowley's Ridge, that formation. But outside of that,
Speaker 1: you know, it's essentially non habitat. So you know, that
Speaker 1: really restricts the amount of available habitat. And it's like
Speaker 1: the eastern third of the state at least, it's like
Speaker 1: pretty limited turkey habitat. I mean, what he's saying is
Speaker 1: just along the rivers and stuff. There's there's places for him. Um, okay,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to ask you. I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about three things. I want to talk
Speaker 1: about burning big national forests and specifically the timing of it.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about bag limits, and
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about this is kind
Speaker 1: of like your personal opinion of what's what's going on,
Speaker 1: because I think there's a lot. So I'm declaring that.
Speaker 1: So ah, y'all canna help me stay on track, Okay, Oh,
Speaker 1: we'll help you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay. So, man, I
Speaker 1: understand like anybody that's paying attention to wild turkey management
Speaker 1: has heard this statement and can grab onto it pretty easily.
Speaker 1: Is that burning helps turkeys more than it helps them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe if fire would burn up and nests as possible,
Speaker 1: but turkeys can have another nest in the same spring.
Speaker 1: I'm just giving you the simple version. But what happens
Speaker 1: when you burn is that's one spring, and then the
Speaker 1: habitat has improved so much the next however many years
Speaker 1: that anything you lost during that one spring has gained
Speaker 1: so much more in previous years. Because Mr nukelem everybody
Speaker 1: where I grew up, everybody. This week I heard it
Speaker 1: from a guy. He said, Man, we used to have
Speaker 1: turkeys in the National Forest. Boy started burning all the
Speaker 1: timber in in April, burning up at turkey nests. That
Speaker 1: actually sounds like his accent um. And uh. And I
Speaker 1: didn't even I mean, I didn't even want to get
Speaker 1: into it with him. But that was that guy. And
Speaker 1: then I heard another guy who I deeply respect, who
Speaker 1: has a wildlife biology degree, who gave a little ramp
Speaker 1: the other day and he, uh, he said, I know
Speaker 1: all the benefits of burns, like you don't have to
Speaker 1: tell me about the benefits of burns and how it
Speaker 1: helps Turkey habitat. But he says, we're burning so late
Speaker 1: that we're inevitably burning up nests and inevitably putting birds
Speaker 1: at in a vulnerable place by having them to lay
Speaker 1: eggs again and make a second clutch. And basically he
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, I've heard all that stuff about good habitat,
Speaker 1: but we're still burning up nests and really compromising the
Speaker 1: hands ability to nest. Do you understand what I'm talking about, mister?
Speaker 1: I do. I'm What I don't understand is why I'm
Speaker 1: the fall guy for the person who doesn't know much
Speaker 1: in this particular tricky experts. Right, No, No, I don't.
Speaker 1: I just want to make sure you're following. So do
Speaker 1: you understand what I'm saying? So what's the truth? Man? So?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, no to fires are created equal
Speaker 1: that you know that's the reality. And you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people that look at the national forests and
Speaker 1: you know what's going on there, and you know, you
Speaker 1: gotta remember that that's only a signy segment of this
Speaker 1: entire state. So the idea that you know we're burning
Speaker 1: up all the nests and that's what's causing population to
Speaker 1: clients in this entire state, you know, is probably a
Speaker 1: little bit near sided. I mean, they're they're not right there.
Speaker 1: Before you even get on, because that's a good point.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's not just on national forests that turkeys
Speaker 1: are scrambling. Yep, yep, exactly. That's kind of your point.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, then it must not be the fire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not necessarily. I mean there there still is, you know,
Speaker 1: obviously issues. You know, most of the research that's out
Speaker 1: there these days suggest that there is really minimal loss
Speaker 1: due to fire. It's not saying that there's not potentially
Speaker 1: lost happening, but you know it in the grand scheme
Speaker 1: of things, with all the other factors that are out there,
Speaker 1: it's it's relatively small fish, you know, and most people
Speaker 1: you know, I put this out in a lot of
Speaker 1: the presentations that I do. You know, you walk up
Speaker 1: on a turkey nest that's in one of those burns,
Speaker 1: you see it. You know, it's it's either got a
Speaker 1: bunch of crushed eggs or it's got a bunch of
Speaker 1: whole eggs. You don't know the whole story, Ben, what
Speaker 1: what's actually happened there. So you know, I look back
Speaker 1: to my master's degree, and we're looking specifically these burns,
Speaker 1: specifically this time of year. Granted, these are a lot
Speaker 1: smaller scale than what we're talking about here, you know,
Speaker 1: on national forests and maybe thousands of acres. But you'd
Speaker 1: walk up on a nest and you say, okay, well
Speaker 1: that that burned. But well, now I know that this
Speaker 1: one has had a GPS transmitter on it. I can
Speaker 1: go back and I can look and see see what
Speaker 1: happened and realize, you know, she abandoned the nest two
Speaker 1: days before this fire ever showed up. Nothing had taken
Speaker 1: those eggs. You walk in there, you know it's been burned.
Speaker 1: The eggs are clearly visible. You assume, you know, if
Speaker 1: you don't have that information, that that that nest was
Speaker 1: was burned up, and so that that kind of further
Speaker 1: some of those simple story to say that the fires,
Speaker 1: but what did it? But but you don't know that
Speaker 1: whole back story, and and so there's more things to
Speaker 1: go into it. Why wouldn't they just not burn in April? Yeah?
Speaker 1: The reality you know here national forest land, I mean,
Speaker 1: you have so many thousands of acres that you're millions
Speaker 1: acres that you're attempting to manage for, and they're managing
Speaker 1: for for multiple uses. It's not just turkey population. I wish,
Speaker 1: you know, as a as a turkey biologist, that we
Speaker 1: could manage every you know, acre in the state for
Speaker 1: wild turkeys. But that's, you know, not the reality. They're
Speaker 1: they're they're burning for you know, fuels, met again sation,
Speaker 1: you know, to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, all
Speaker 1: of these different things. And you've got to kind of
Speaker 1: get those burns and wildfires in Arkansas. I'm sure there
Speaker 1: have been at some point, I know in recent years.
Speaker 1: You know, you look east of us in Tennessee. You know,
Speaker 1: you had those big fires that occurred. I think it
Speaker 1: was around Gatlinburg and in that area. I mean, so
Speaker 1: there is the potential in the east, particularly with some
Speaker 1: of the fuel loads we have. You think about how
Speaker 1: overstocked a lot of our timber is these days, and
Speaker 1: the fuel loads that are in there because they haven't burned.
Speaker 1: I mean, historically a lot of Arkansas would have been
Speaker 1: kind of woodlands, savannah type habitats particularly and your your uplands,
Speaker 1: you know, the top of these hills and stuff like
Speaker 1: that that you know, fires would have moved through frequently
Speaker 1: and it would have reduced some of that naturally. But
Speaker 1: now we have so much you know, over stocked timber,
Speaker 1: a lot of just dead decame fuel because we spent
Speaker 1: years and years and years trying to keep those fires
Speaker 1: at bay. You know, if we did have a wildfire
Speaker 1: pop up, you try to you know, knock it out,
Speaker 1: stomp it out as quick as you could, so it
Speaker 1: didn't burn a lot of acres. In reality, that probably
Speaker 1: would have been have been better if you could have
Speaker 1: just let it, let it go burn. So that time
Speaker 1: period is just kind of when they can burn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the best time period for burning there. So so
Speaker 1: what you're saying is if we were managing solely for
Speaker 1: wild turkeys, we wouldn't burn during that time. Yeah, not necessarily,
Speaker 1: I mean, and I tell managers this all the time.
Speaker 1: You know, when we look at game fish on properties
Speaker 1: in particular, you know, you've got to look holistically, what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, what the habitats telling you. Um, you know, ideally,
Speaker 1: you know, we burn in the dormant season, you know,
Speaker 1: and this is you know a little bit of arbitrary,
Speaker 1: but you know, January into mid March or something like that,
Speaker 1: try to finish it up and then you know, now
Speaker 1: we're starting to shift what we consider growing season fires,
Speaker 1: which could be anywhere from mid late March, early April
Speaker 1: all the way and through you know, October November. You know,
Speaker 1: while those trees are still actively sending nutrients up and down,
Speaker 1: we can still get a lot of the same benefits
Speaker 1: of burning you know, April and May, if the conditions
Speaker 1: were there. We can get those same benefit fits burning August, September, October,
Speaker 1: if we can get those same weather variables in line,
Speaker 1: so we can run the fire at that point. So
Speaker 1: generally we we try to avoid that nesting season as
Speaker 1: an agency. But you know, if if it comes up,
Speaker 1: if you know, you've got to stand that's you know,
Speaker 1: towards the end of its rotation. It needs to be burned,
Speaker 1: you know. And and we're talking about it's already missed,
Speaker 1: you know, one window, and you're saying, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's turkey season. You know, we we can't burn if
Speaker 1: if you keep doing that, you know, if you never
Speaker 1: get anything accomplished because you have so many different seasons.
Speaker 1: I am, I am, you know, I tell folks all
Speaker 1: the time. You know, if if that conditions allow, you know,
Speaker 1: and you've got the burn weather, because you know, not
Speaker 1: every day is is equal when it comes to the
Speaker 1: weather for burning. You've got to have certain variables I'll
Speaker 1: have to line up. So if you hit one of
Speaker 1: those days, you better take advantage of it, because the
Speaker 1: idea that if you don't burn that and then you know,
Speaker 1: you hit later in the fall, you may not be
Speaker 1: able to burn it then. And now we're talking a year,
Speaker 1: two years post when you could have burned an Now
Speaker 1: we're we're outside of the usable space, you know, for
Speaker 1: a turkey nowt so thick that they don't want to
Speaker 1: touch it, and it may end up costing you a
Speaker 1: lot more money to go in there with herbicide or
Speaker 1: you know, bringing in something to masticate, you know, mulch
Speaker 1: that that timber to get it back to a point
Speaker 1: where you could roll a fire through it. And that's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot more expensive, and it may take
Speaker 1: years in the budget to be able to afford to
Speaker 1: do that and have it have it set aside. So
Speaker 1: you know, all of a sudden, you went from having
Speaker 1: something that yeah, you may have lost one nest this year,
Speaker 1: but now you've instead of burning it, now you have
Speaker 1: no nests in it for the next handful of years.
Speaker 1: Or the predation rate on those ones is so much
Speaker 1: higher that by getting it done, you lose that nest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this year, but hopefully you've benefited the same block of
Speaker 1: woods every single year, right, I mean there, And so
Speaker 1: that's the other thing to think about. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe the south side of that mountain this year gets burned.
Speaker 1: So yeah, maybe maybe a turkey loses her nest and
Speaker 1: maybe she's unsuccessful nest and later worst case scenario, but
Speaker 1: they're not gonna burn it for another how many years?
Speaker 1: What's the cycle on some of those, you know, depending here,
Speaker 1: you know, it could be two to three years down
Speaker 1: and a lot of this, particularly the Gulf coastal flane
Speaker 1: and and maybe in some of the washtaws and the
Speaker 1: pine blue stem. You know, you get up here in
Speaker 1: the Ozarks, you're probably talking three, four or five years.
Speaker 1: You get spread out a little bit for four years
Speaker 1: of greatly improved habitat for them to have great potential
Speaker 1: nesting with no fires at all. Right, Yeah, since I'm
Speaker 1: the fall guy for people who who who are unaware
Speaker 1: of a fire extinguisher here if you need it? All right, So,
Speaker 1: I guess how long does it take for a turkey
Speaker 1: to settle into a place? Like? Is four years enough
Speaker 1: time for a turkey to say? Oh? I like that?
Speaker 1: I mean that is help? What is it's almost immediate?
Speaker 1: I mean those birds, I mean, if they typically their
Speaker 1: home range isn't probably gonna get changed all that much
Speaker 1: as a fire that's going out, they'll move out. But
Speaker 1: I'm honestly that they move right back in. I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of the research that Mike and a lot
Speaker 1: of other folks have done in the southeastern recent years,
Speaker 1: I mean, those birds are moving back in there. You.
Speaker 1: I think it's something like fifty percent of the birds
Speaker 1: that we've had marked move back into a burned area
Speaker 1: within forty eight hours and by you know, the end
Speaker 1: of a week. It's like, I'm surprised you didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Ye do other states, And I know we can't compare
Speaker 1: it to not apples to apples. I'm just curious, mainly
Speaker 1: because I'd like to figure out the turkey situation, because
Speaker 1: it is the real stress is it's the end of
Speaker 1: April and we don't have a Turkey in the Newcomes.
Speaker 1: Miss wakes up all their in Turkey season and it's like,
Speaker 1: are you gonna go kill a Turkey today? And I
Speaker 1: usually he's like no, and it really bothers her. It
Speaker 1: doesn't that why I'm having to provide your family Rainbow Trout.
Speaker 1: It's true. It's true. Do other states? There are other
Speaker 1: states seeing a decline like we are for sure? For sure?
Speaker 1: And are they Burnie, Yes, yes, I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of those states. You know this. Missy's
Speaker 1: gonna have it all figured out. She's gonna tell us
Speaker 1: like something that Mike Chamberlain and Jeremy never thought of.
Speaker 1: She's gonna be like, well, why don't you just we
Speaker 1: don't even know what that X is? Yeah, didn't you
Speaker 1: listen to the podcast with Mike Chamberlain? You didn't? Did
Speaker 1: that was two podcasts you weren't on the render. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we talked all about the southeast decline of Turkey.
Speaker 1: Isaac take that out? Uh um, Okay, that's great, Burns
Speaker 1: got it, got it? Yeah? My, So that's good. Number two,
Speaker 1: bats bag limits. Is it just a social issue that
Speaker 1: we don't just say one Turkey? By social you mean
Speaker 1: like political? I mean, is it. Yes, people, I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people that that look at bag
Speaker 1: limits like they're the the end all be all, like
Speaker 1: if if we we do this. You know, here in Arkansas,
Speaker 1: we've got a relatively conservative bag limit already. We have,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a two turkey bag limit in the state.
Speaker 1: Got other states in the southeast that have made some
Speaker 1: changes recently, but a lot of them have had three, four,
Speaker 1: even five until recently I think just I think just
Speaker 1: this year they moved from five down to four. But
Speaker 1: it's still, you know, relatively high number. And you know,
Speaker 1: when you start getting up three, four or five birds
Speaker 1: and your bag limit, you know, you can have potentially
Speaker 1: a disproportionate amount of your harvest come come from those
Speaker 1: folks that are harvesting much more than two. But you know,
Speaker 1: here in Arkansas we've had you know, two bird bag
Speaker 1: limits for for many years, even three, you know, going
Speaker 1: back into the seventies, eighties, nine, early nineties, you know
Speaker 1: around there in portions of the state, um particularly like
Speaker 1: along the Mississippi River, some areas in the Washingtas and
Speaker 1: you know the reality is, you know, that was all
Speaker 1: occurring while populations were rebounding you know, being actively stocked.
Speaker 1: So we had a higher bag limit earlier when there
Speaker 1: were a lot less turkey hunters on the landscape, but
Speaker 1: when those turkeys were you know, just basically becoming kind
Speaker 1: of whole, you know, coming back around. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: I look at it now, nine percent of our harvest
Speaker 1: in Arkansas comes from folks filling just that first tag. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a great, Okay, that's that's the kind of reasoning
Speaker 1: I needed to hear. That makes sense. That's like, not
Speaker 1: a ton of people are killing two turkeys. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: not at all. I mean in general. I mean we're
Speaker 1: talking with the recent years where our harvest has been
Speaker 1: in the seven eight thousand kind of range. We're looking
Speaker 1: at seven hundred eight hundred turkeys, you know, out of
Speaker 1: the entire harvest being somebody's second bird. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's been interesting. Yeah, there's there's been times in the past,
Speaker 1: you know, the nineties, particularly Washtas. I looked at this
Speaker 1: just recently because we do have a proposal out there
Speaker 1: right now to to move to a one bird limit.
Speaker 1: It wasn't something that the Turkey program put out there,
Speaker 1: but it was something that came from some public comment.
Speaker 1: The agency decided to put it out for public comment
Speaker 1: during a recent REIG survey. So what I did was
Speaker 1: I look back at these seven or so counties in
Speaker 1: the in the Washtas where they went from a three
Speaker 1: bird bag limit to a two bird bag limit, to
Speaker 1: a one bird bag limit and then back to a
Speaker 1: two bird bag of lim whis which we have still
Speaker 1: through today. And what you see is, you know, populations
Speaker 1: were declining a bit. You know, reproduction have been kind
Speaker 1: of poor in general terms. When you look back now,
Speaker 1: you know the reproduction compared to now to back then
Speaker 1: it usually yeah pretty good. Uh, you know it's declining.
Speaker 1: You shall harvest the climb. So the institute a two
Speaker 1: bird bag limit, population continued to decline or the harvest
Speaker 1: continue to climb, but you moved to a one bird
Speaker 1: bag limit. There really wasn't any difference between those two
Speaker 1: year two bird limit ears and that one bird limit
Speaker 1: ear because again there's there's not that many more birds
Speaker 1: getting shot because somebody's killing a second one and in
Speaker 1: most cases you're probably just seeing other people fill that tag.
Speaker 1: You know, if you were restricted to one, you didn't
Speaker 1: get to go, but you know you took your son
Speaker 1: out Okay, man, that's yeah, that's a great, that's a great.
Speaker 1: That's a great analogy. Now I can see if you
Speaker 1: had a five bird bag limit and guys really had
Speaker 1: some you know, their spots dialed in and had the time,
Speaker 1: and we're really good turkey hunters, like you could really
Speaker 1: hurt something. But with a two bird I see how
Speaker 1: that the possibilities are less for for hurting. And man,
Speaker 1: I like that. I don't know, you know, I put
Speaker 1: on that survey that I would be fine with a
Speaker 1: one bird bag limit, like I just wouldn't be a problem,
Speaker 1: just thinking, you know, we've got to sacrifice some for
Speaker 1: the resource. But I'm one of those guys that I mean,
Speaker 1: to be honest with you, it's been a long time
Speaker 1: since I've killed two turkeys in Arkansas, and so you know,
Speaker 1: maybe to me that's not a big deal, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you think about the opportunity that's lost to
Speaker 1: that point you go from two to one, you know,
Speaker 1: Like for me, I was I was successful this year.
Speaker 1: I went an open to day. I was lucky enough
Speaker 1: I got a bird. Guy of Shring tied up there
Speaker 1: for me so I could got to make sure I
Speaker 1: got a bird. This year, I probably had a live
Speaker 1: hand decoy. But I mean, now, you know, obviously we've
Speaker 1: we've kind of limited that harvest in the front end
Speaker 1: of the season. So when we consider, you know, some
Speaker 1: of that harvest could be more impactful to to that
Speaker 1: breeding chronology, we tried to limit that push some of
Speaker 1: that back a little bit too later in the season
Speaker 1: when it may be less impactful. So you know, I've
Speaker 1: got that bird, I'm out of the woods for seven days.
Speaker 1: There's a new there's a new regulation misty where if
Speaker 1: you kill a turkey you can't kill another one. If
Speaker 1: you kill one the first week, any time within the
Speaker 1: first seven days, you can't go until basically the eight
Speaker 1: day of the season. So this morning, if I killed
Speaker 1: one on the first day, which I wasn't even in
Speaker 1: the country, I couldn't hunted until later in the week
Speaker 1: because that that kind of takes away a little bit
Speaker 1: of an opportunity for a second bird. But if you
Speaker 1: could take somebody else hunting, like if I had some
Speaker 1: birds dialed in, I mean that second day, I could
Speaker 1: have taken my son or taken Josh. Josh is just
Speaker 1: sitting nowhere there. You can't go turkey out. You mustache.
Speaker 1: I have a stick on breaks up your outline. Turkeys
Speaker 1: recognized human faith. If you have a big line across
Speaker 1: the it doesn't work. I don't know. Okay, So that
Speaker 1: that that clears it up with me on on bag limits. Um,
Speaker 1: it's like a the whole thing is sort of like
Speaker 1: all the problems in life. Right now, we assume the
Speaker 1: simplest you know, you want to make it a really
Speaker 1: simple it's because of this, but in reality, everything's lot
Speaker 1: more comment it's a you know, like Chamberlain said, like
Speaker 1: everybody said, it's death by a thousand cuts, and and
Speaker 1: like I always go back to, you can't trust the
Speaker 1: ground nesting bird because they're they're going to create problems
Speaker 1: for you. There's just so many reasons why ground nesting
Speaker 1: birds have trouble but also can do really great. But okay,
Speaker 1: let me ask you this, and this is uh, like,
Speaker 1: why are our turkeys declining? Like okay, off the record,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna turn this off. Okay, wink wink.
Speaker 1: Why what do you what's what is I mean? We
Speaker 1: already know everything that like everybody said, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's just like death by thousand cuts. It's can be
Speaker 1: bag limits, it can be predation. It's the the forest regime.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know why. Why, what's the real reason? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the what are you hiding from us? Jerry? I
Speaker 1: wish it was as easy to just pulling something out
Speaker 1: of the bag of tricks. I'm saying, yeah, this is it,
Speaker 1: you know, that that smoking gun, that silver bullet, that
Speaker 1: would fix everything. I mean, I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff that's going into what's what's gone on here
Speaker 1: in the state in Arkansas, UM, you know, coming in
Speaker 1: from that outside perspective, not being from here. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm thankful that I I didn't experience turkey populations in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands. You know, I was alive, but
Speaker 1: I wasn't hunting turkeys at that point. I wasn't hunting
Speaker 1: turkeys in the South in particular. So you know, I
Speaker 1: started hunting turkeys in my mid twenties, twenty three, twenty four,
Speaker 1: somewhere in that ballpark. And I've never had a bad
Speaker 1: turkey hunt. And I've never had a bad turkey season
Speaker 1: since I started hunting, mostly public land, but I never
Speaker 1: had that experience. You know, I hear from most folks
Speaker 1: that I used to go out to the spot and
Speaker 1: I'd hear twelve birds gobl on the ridge that I've
Speaker 1: never had that. I mean, I've had some spots where
Speaker 1: I've heard three, four or five something like that, but
Speaker 1: but still all in these recent years. And you know,
Speaker 1: I kill some, I don't kill some of other chances,
Speaker 1: but I've heard birds goblin. It's it's great experience. But
Speaker 1: if some of it you're dealing with that expectation that
Speaker 1: you know, you've got folks that that started turkey hunting
Speaker 1: right there when things were perfect, those populations were at
Speaker 1: their highest point, but it may not have been you know, sustainable,
Speaker 1: that may not have been the reality. In particularly what
Speaker 1: I look at here in the state is you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about the number of turkey hunters that we were
Speaker 1: on the landscape. You know, you think about you know,
Speaker 1: if you're around you're hunting in the eighties, maybe even
Speaker 1: the early nineties. You know, a lot of folks that
Speaker 1: I talked to the count on one hand, the number
Speaker 1: of other turkey hunters they even knew, you know, they
Speaker 1: were hunting in the area that they hunted, and you know,
Speaker 1: you get into the late nineties, you know, you were
Speaker 1: talking with Will and the previous podcasts and thinking about
Speaker 1: the truth and you know, all of that kind of
Speaker 1: blowing up and people just eating all that information, explosion
Speaker 1: of turkey hunting knowledge and people wanting to become turkey hunters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like what they talked about in the
Speaker 1: waterfowl world, like this duck dynasty bump, you know, and
Speaker 1: hunter numbers. And I think we saw that at that
Speaker 1: time when things were peaking. And then you know, when
Speaker 1: you look back in time, you know, I think Mike
Speaker 1: brought this up where you know, it was kind of
Speaker 1: right there under our fingers, but we didn't really recognize
Speaker 1: what was happening at the time because a couple of
Speaker 1: bad years in a row wasn't wasn't that big of
Speaker 1: a deal in the grand scheme of things at that time.
Speaker 1: But now twenty years later, you know, we can look
Speaker 1: back and see how long that actually, you know, continue
Speaker 1: to occur in reproduction kept declining, and you know here
Speaker 1: in the state, you know, you saw the agency look
Speaker 1: at how good populations were doing, look at the interests.
Speaker 1: They started adding more days to the season. So you
Speaker 1: went from you know, the mid eighties through the early
Speaker 1: two thousands, you were looking I think we had about
Speaker 1: twenty three twenty four day long season about where we're
Speaker 1: at now with the youth hunt, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden you started going up into thirty thirty five days,
Speaker 1: thirty nine days by two thousand three, two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: And that's an incredible amount of pressure to put on
Speaker 1: that that population and in a short period of time.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of birds, but there's a lot
Speaker 1: more turkey hunters coming into the fold at that time,
Speaker 1: so people were really being successful. And but I think
Speaker 1: what we do was the overshot. You know, at that
Speaker 1: period of time, it's not likely that you know, I
Speaker 1: think we we look out there and we say, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, harvest is estimated at roughly ten percent of
Speaker 1: your population, and so you extrapolate out from that number
Speaker 1: what you anticipate your population was. And we would have said, okay,
Speaker 1: we were nearly two hundred thousand turkeys back around that time.
Speaker 1: But if we were over harvesting them at that period
Speaker 1: of time, it's it's unlikely that we were ever truly
Speaker 1: that that hive of population. We had a better population
Speaker 1: than we do now, but it's hard to go back
Speaker 1: and look at that and then compare it to now
Speaker 1: and say, okay, did we drop sixty to sixty five percent?
Speaker 1: You know, like a lot of people say, when you're
Speaker 1: just looking at those harvest numbers, because you know, you're
Speaker 1: you're looking at the harvest number and that's one static number,
Speaker 1: but you're not looking at all the things that go
Speaker 1: go into that, so you're not looking at those seasoned
Speaker 1: length fluctuations. You're not looking at bag limits like you know, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: Mississippi only two states out there that restrict jake harvest.
Speaker 1: Prior to two thousand, nearly forty of our harvest was
Speaker 1: made up of jake's here in the state. UM it's
Speaker 1: credible numbers. And then you get from two thousand to
Speaker 1: two thousand and ten, we restricted that the one jake
Speaker 1: for every hunter. That dropped that percentage from forty down
Speaker 1: to about twenty. And then in two thousand eleven we
Speaker 1: instituted the no jake rule, so only youth hunters had
Speaker 1: that exception. They could kill one jake. That's dropped that
Speaker 1: number even further. Now we're down to four percent of
Speaker 1: our harvest each years made up of jakes. Ten years
Speaker 1: it has now no jake policy has been successful and
Speaker 1: at least protecting Jakes and at least protecting Jake's well.
Speaker 1: The unfortunate reality is we don't know early on what
Speaker 1: those survival rates looked like. We recently finished up some
Speaker 1: research here in the last few years that looked at
Speaker 1: the impact of that regulation. We're looking at survival of
Speaker 1: adult and juvenile males, and we were seeing about nine
Speaker 1: survival of those Jake's. You know, very few, if any,
Speaker 1: were actually even shot during the season. Most of them
Speaker 1: were just dying a natural mortality, which isn't much. You know,
Speaker 1: they have pretty good survival, you know, in the absence
Speaker 1: of hunting pressure, once they get about four weeks older,
Speaker 1: so I mean, you get past that first month and
Speaker 1: you know they're fairly golden. But what we're seeing now
Speaker 1: is that, you know, our two year olds and stuff,
Speaker 1: we're hammering them about thirty percent survival um once they
Speaker 1: hit two. Pressure off the Jake's. It's all going to
Speaker 1: the two years, the two year olds, and then then
Speaker 1: you start getting the three four plus year old birds,
Speaker 1: and you jump back up about fifty and you think
Speaker 1: about it, those birds are they've been through the game
Speaker 1: a time or two at that point, they're the smarter
Speaker 1: ones out there there. You know, they don't just come
Speaker 1: running into your calling like you know a two year
Speaker 1: old would do. You know, they're hard gobble and you
Speaker 1: know the hunts that you get really really excited about,
Speaker 1: and because because I just come in that they act
Speaker 1: the way you know, most people think that the birds
Speaker 1: should um. But what we don't know is back prior,
Speaker 1: you know, back when we could kill two of those birds,
Speaker 1: you know what those survival rates look like. You know,
Speaker 1: did we instead of nine survival of Jake? Did we
Speaker 1: see sixty seventy survival of Jake? But what about those
Speaker 1: two year olds that that then increased that two year
Speaker 1: old survival because somebody, somebody shot at Jake and they
Speaker 1: couldn't kill another one today, So the law young beard
Speaker 1: that may have been in there with them, you know,
Speaker 1: survived another day or maybe the season, and so maybe
Speaker 1: their survival actually went up a little bit. And you know,
Speaker 1: is that biologically significant to see see those fluctuations, But
Speaker 1: but we don't know what those those numbers were like,
Speaker 1: So it's hard to say. It's in the one hand
Speaker 1: that that regulation has has worked. It generated the idea
Speaker 1: that we're seeing more of those Jakes survived that first year,
Speaker 1: but we don't know, you know, how it truly compares
Speaker 1: to what our earlier regulations were like and whether or
Speaker 1: not that that's a problem or not. So do you
Speaker 1: think that, uh, are we ever going to get our
Speaker 1: turkeys back? I mean, like so if this is part
Speaker 1: of a cycle, and also part of you know, part
Speaker 1: of it is just there's not as many places for
Speaker 1: turkeys to be, but that doesn't fully make sense for like,
Speaker 1: like if you just took national forest, like we have
Speaker 1: the same amount of National forest, and there's some interior
Speaker 1: sections of the National forests that probably aren't really affected
Speaker 1: by the encroachment of civilization. I'm kind of thinking about
Speaker 1: this idea that habitat is being lost, but in a
Speaker 1: lot of places, habitat necessarily wouldn't be lost. It's not
Speaker 1: being lost, you know outright. You know, like there's still
Speaker 1: forested landscape, but the condition of that forested landscape is
Speaker 1: is different than potentially it has been in years past.
Speaker 1: That's not as as desirable from a Turkey standpoint. You know,
Speaker 1: we were talking about overstock Tember. I mean just driving up,
Speaker 1: I was driving the pig trail, you know, all my
Speaker 1: way way up here, and you know, you're you're driving
Speaker 1: through National Forest through there, and there's some spots here
Speaker 1: there that look a little more woodland type condition. You
Speaker 1: can see a little bit of understory, but most of
Speaker 1: the area you're driving through there, whether it's pine hardwood,
Speaker 1: you're looking at a lot of leaf litter, a lot
Speaker 1: of pine straw, very little understory vegetation. So you know,
Speaker 1: a turkey can still nest in there, but there's not
Speaker 1: really it's not quality nesting habitats still gonna be a
Speaker 1: little more vulnerable to two predators. It's easier for them
Speaker 1: to see here potentially. But then on top of that,
Speaker 1: there's there's not really good brooderer and habitat. There's not
Speaker 1: that that growing lush green vegetation that's you know, just
Speaker 1: low enough off the ground that it can hide upol
Speaker 1: the hand can see over it. And there's lots of insects.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of that out there. And you know,
Speaker 1: you see that across the lot of and we had
Speaker 1: that years ago, I'm guessing, you know, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: me not being here in the state, but I think
Speaker 1: twenty thirty forty years ago you saw a different management.
Speaker 1: You know in some of those areas. You know, I
Speaker 1: look nowadays at at how a lot of agencies operate,
Speaker 1: and we we've seen a lot of reductions in field
Speaker 1: staff and things like that where you know, even particular
Speaker 1: here you look at a lot of our national forest lands,
Speaker 1: we've got a lot of conglomerates of ranger districts. You know,
Speaker 1: in areas that used to have um, three separate ranger
Speaker 1: districts with three separate staff that all had you know,
Speaker 1: responsibilities for a much smaller acres. Now you've got all
Speaker 1: of those in one single district with about a third
Speaker 1: of the staff that they once had. And there but
Speaker 1: now they're responsible for three times the acreage that they
Speaker 1: used to be. And you know, I think that all
Speaker 1: starts putting challenges on things. That's that's part of that.
Speaker 1: I just don't understand. It's like, how is the habitat
Speaker 1: so much different now than it was at the peak
Speaker 1: you know of Turkey populations that then And I mean
Speaker 1: I think you answered it is that there's just a
Speaker 1: thousand different things. I mean, the forests are twenty years older.
Speaker 1: There's uh, there is differences in management of stuff, and
Speaker 1: it may not be that significant from from that time period,
Speaker 1: but you think we were kind of leading up to it.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the stuff that produced the birds
Speaker 1: that were on the landscape twenty years ago would have
Speaker 1: been just a few more years before that. So you know,
Speaker 1: over time, you know, talking about a forty year fifty
Speaker 1: year time span, because yeah, maybe what happened forty years
Speaker 1: ago produced the birds that we had twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: but then that faded away. Missy if you figured this
Speaker 1: out yet, well, I do have a question. I know,
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit more familiar with bear and and
Speaker 1: how that's by the game in fish and they go
Speaker 1: in and they like they can tell you how many
Speaker 1: how many babies they're having? Do you all have? Do
Speaker 1: you met? Is there any way that you can figure
Speaker 1: out if turkeys are laying more eggs or less eggs?
Speaker 1: So I mean, not specifically the number of eggs. We
Speaker 1: occasionally we do research projects and they have over time.
Speaker 1: You know, back in the nineties and in the early
Speaker 1: to mid you know, twenty teens, we had some other
Speaker 1: research going on where they actually went out cop birds,
Speaker 1: put transmitters on them, follow them around, and you know,
Speaker 1: they track the nesting um effort and so they go
Speaker 1: to nest whether they're successful or not, they can count
Speaker 1: the eggs, get all that information. To my knowledge, the
Speaker 1: number of eggs things like that hasn't changed. I'm sure
Speaker 1: the hat rate hasn't really changed all that much. I
Speaker 1: think we're still seeing of the ones that are successful,
Speaker 1: you know, the the number of eggs that hatch is
Speaker 1: usually relatively high. But what we do do, you know,
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, and it's been going on since
Speaker 1: the early eighties, is we do a population survey or
Speaker 1: a lot of folks called a brood survey. So that's
Speaker 1: historically from the eighties until just a few years ago
Speaker 1: when I came on board. That was completed by agency
Speaker 1: personnel law enforcement officers with an agency um US for
Speaker 1: service personnel, other you know, agency partners, um fish and
Speaker 1: Wildlife service folks like that. And what they do is
Speaker 1: during the summer months June through August, they'd record all
Speaker 1: of the turkeys that they saw. It didn't matter if
Speaker 1: it was just a group of gobblers, it was a
Speaker 1: hand with a group of poults, a few hands all
Speaker 1: together alone. And what we do is we compile all
Speaker 1: that information and we calculate out what's known as a
Speaker 1: pulper hand ratio, and so we look at the number
Speaker 1: of poults that are observed versus the number of adult
Speaker 1: females that are observed, and we get that ratio, and
Speaker 1: you're able to look at the reproductive rate. So basically
Speaker 1: it's just people's observations. So turkeys are pretty hard to
Speaker 1: to gauge in terms of study like that. You probably
Speaker 1: would have known that if you listen to the Mike Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: We talked extensively about that. Yeah, it's a can you
Speaker 1: imagine if the game of fish that uh turkey polt
Speaker 1: trip like they do with the bears, remember the pictures
Speaker 1: of everybody. Yeah, but if we did, we were Jeremy smiling,
Speaker 1: just a big cheeky grin holding a little turkey eggs,
Speaker 1: little photos. That's probably what y'all should do. I don't
Speaker 1: know about that. I get real words when you start
Speaker 1: bumping hands off the nests and doing stuff like sneak
Speaker 1: up on it, tranquil you hold the hand up by
Speaker 1: the legs. Maybe we should bring the rocket nets back rockets. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so is this just like, are we just always gonna
Speaker 1: have turkey numbers like we do right now? Or do
Speaker 1: you think we're at a low a low point and
Speaker 1: we're probably gonna bounce back up just a little bit
Speaker 1: and kind of equalized. I think we have been at
Speaker 1: a low point. I mean, you look back through time.
Speaker 1: You know, just prior to my getting here, nineteen were
Speaker 1: the four of the five lowest reproductive us he said
Speaker 1: before you. But I mean a lot of this is,
Speaker 1: you know, just obviously, you know, something that's out of
Speaker 1: our control. A lot of times, weather and things like
Speaker 1: that are are impacting those a lot more than everything else.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously habitat all those influence too, but overarching
Speaker 1: weather patterns have been pretty poor. Lot that that period
Speaker 1: time wet, cold, so I mean, you know poults, you know,
Speaker 1: in that first couple of weeks of life, they can't thermoregulate,
Speaker 1: so if they're getting their cold, they're getting wet, they're
Speaker 1: dying a hypothermia, things like that, and you're losing a
Speaker 1: ton of birds really really quick. Whereas when you get
Speaker 1: to some dryer spring weather like we've actually had the
Speaker 1: last couple of years. I was a little worried in
Speaker 1: the last couple of that, you know, it was too
Speaker 1: wet at the wrong time. But it must have hit
Speaker 1: just right within a lot of our hatching, because we've
Speaker 1: had a decent hatch in one and so what I
Speaker 1: look at is that our populations are probably coming up
Speaker 1: a little bit. We've kind of hit that low point.
Speaker 1: Twenty didn't help things because you know, everybody was off work,
Speaker 1: so we kind of hammered them in that year. We
Speaker 1: we had a higher harvest, but that was probably inflated.
Speaker 1: You know, we probably should have been going down that year,
Speaker 1: but we spiked up. So then last year we ended
Speaker 1: up dropping you know, pretty good amount with our harvest
Speaker 1: could be probably overshot what kind of surplus we had
Speaker 1: from the year before, which wouldn't have been a whole
Speaker 1: heck of a lot of birds. Whereas now, you know,
Speaker 1: we went from those four to five poor years, had
Speaker 1: a good year. You know, they suggest in a in
Speaker 1: a good year reproduction, you can about double your population.
Speaker 1: You know, you think about two poles per hand. You know,
Speaker 1: she's replacing herself in another bird. You could be just
Speaker 1: a couple of years away from numbers being pretty high. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really doesn't take much. I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: the old literature talks about populations, you know, fluctuating upwards
Speaker 1: of fifty, you know, above and below the long term,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of average because you have those years
Speaker 1: working that when you have an animal that has the
Speaker 1: potential to have like seven or eight you know, maybe
Speaker 1: you know hand, real successful hand might raise a whole
Speaker 1: clutch of pols and you've just like doubled your population immediately.
Speaker 1: I like the I like the hope inside of that.
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to be a turkey biologist. Now.
Speaker 1: See like bear populations, man, you want to spike up
Speaker 1: a bear populations, get ready to sit there and twiddle
Speaker 1: your thumbs about twenty years because a bear doesn't reach
Speaker 1: sexual maturity till it's about four years old, only has
Speaker 1: cubs every other year. Jeremy's in the right business because
Speaker 1: you could double your population, right, Jeremy, do you right place?
Speaker 1: Strike up, Jeremy, yep, we're counting on you to double
Speaker 1: our turkey population. You were. That's it's all on you
Speaker 1: man on the five bird bag limits. Isn't that funny
Speaker 1: how it's like Jeremy's here, he's he's in charge of it,
Speaker 1: and we're like, he saw you man, make turkey hunting
Speaker 1: great again. When do you feel do you feel the pressure.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, really, is there is there social pressure
Speaker 1: on you about turkeys? We're giving you a hard time here.
Speaker 1: We realize you're just doing your job. No, I mean
Speaker 1: for sure. I mean, you know, I get constant contacts
Speaker 1: from folks all the time about have you thought about
Speaker 1: doing this? Have you thought about doing that? We need
Speaker 1: to do what this states do and that states doing.
Speaker 1: And you know, I take a lot of this stuff personally,
Speaker 1: and especially when I start hearing stuff you know about
Speaker 1: me or what we're doing, you know what we're thinking about.
Speaker 1: It's hard not to I mean, I'm passionate about turkeys,
Speaker 1: and I just me and my wife has had a
Speaker 1: little boy back in the fall, and you know, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about you know, him six seven years down the
Speaker 1: road when he's able to hunt. You know, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to manage for him and everybody else's kids that are
Speaker 1: out there, you know, thinking about the future and not
Speaker 1: necessarily thinking about you know, today and just tomorrow. You
Speaker 1: know what what we're hunting. You know, we've got to
Speaker 1: think about what what do we need to do now
Speaker 1: that we can set you know, the future up for
Speaker 1: for success. And you know that may take some some
Speaker 1: reduction and what we're able to do now for that
Speaker 1: long term benefit. And so I've been pretty happy and
Speaker 1: pretty excited that our agency is has been willing to,
Speaker 1: you know, take that kind of leap of faith at
Speaker 1: this point in time and and move in that direction
Speaker 1: and kind of try to put the resource first and foremost,
Speaker 1: still trying to maintain you know, some some quality opportunity
Speaker 1: there for for folks. So you still have that, you know,
Speaker 1: go out and experience and participate in turkey hunting. But
Speaker 1: that hopefully that sets us up for success, you know
Speaker 1: here down the line to where we get to a
Speaker 1: point where we can maintain some sort of you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of stable regulations. We don't I don't think
Speaker 1: we want to get to a point where we're chasing
Speaker 1: populations Like things are great, you know, now let's let's
Speaker 1: keep just like dialing up the pressure. Now we're gonna
Speaker 1: add bag limits, We're gonna add time. Like I think,
Speaker 1: what you need to do is maintain those consistent regulations,
Speaker 1: be be a little bit conservative to make up for
Speaker 1: those potential poor years that you have down the road,
Speaker 1: and it balances out. You know, you'll have some good years,
Speaker 1: you'll have some bad years. But that way you don't
Speaker 1: have some really really really bad years and you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're trying to pull yourself up out of a hole.
Speaker 1: So what do we what do you what would you
Speaker 1: say the major like one or two things that you
Speaker 1: guys are doing right now that is going to help
Speaker 1: us get a handle on it. So from the from
Speaker 1: the regulatory standpoint, you know, obviously you know that's one
Speaker 1: of the major things that we can control. So you know,
Speaker 1: pushing the season back to where we did right in
Speaker 1: and around April nineteenth, and that's gonna vary based on
Speaker 1: calendar creep because we put it as the third Monday
Speaker 1: in April um to limit some of that that early
Speaker 1: pressure because you know, you set it up on Saturday,
Speaker 1: everybody can go, you end up having a lot more issues,
Speaker 1: safety issues, hunter interference issues, you know, it's a greater conflict.
Speaker 1: So we we keep it on a Monday to kind
Speaker 1: of spread some of that pressure out throughout the week
Speaker 1: so it's not all just a free for all on
Speaker 1: the on the opening day because then then a lot
Speaker 1: of folks just aren't happy with that and we've had
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, complaints over the years when
Speaker 1: they did that and moving it back to Monday. But
Speaker 1: by pushing us back to that kind of April nineteenth
Speaker 1: time frame, we're allowing more of those hands to be bred.
Speaker 1: Us to the information I had to work with with
Speaker 1: some of our research projects, with those population surveys, we
Speaker 1: could actually you know, we take age estimates on the
Speaker 1: pulse so we can back date how old we anticipate those,
Speaker 1: and I usually go pretty conservative. You know, if somebody
Speaker 1: says they're two weeks old, okay, I'm saying there fourteen days.
Speaker 1: You know, at that point, I go back from that
Speaker 1: fourteen days that's when they hatched. I can go back
Speaker 1: eight days. They usually go twenty eight. Just go on
Speaker 1: the far far side of things when they're hatching, to say, okay,
Speaker 1: this is when they first started incubating that nest, and
Speaker 1: then go back even further when they started laying that
Speaker 1: about fourteen days before that. So that that's what we're
Speaker 1: talking about in that April nineteenth time frame, is that's
Speaker 1: the peak nest initiation or egg laying time period in
Speaker 1: the state. So there's a bunch of is being done
Speaker 1: in March. Some of the breeding is being done in March.
Speaker 1: Most of it's probably ramping up right there in the
Speaker 1: middle of April. You know, typically some of the old research,
Speaker 1: and this is looking at captive birds, but basically suggests
Speaker 1: that you know, those birds are getting bread and going
Speaker 1: to lay there that start that laying process probably within
Speaker 1: forty seventy two hours of of when they were bred.
Speaker 1: So and it's not to say that some of those
Speaker 1: hands aren't getting bred early. I mean I get reports
Speaker 1: every year. You know, here's trail camera picture and there's
Speaker 1: a bird, you know, breeding a hand first of March,
Speaker 1: seventh of March, something like that. Well, that's that's all occurring,
Speaker 1: and some of those birds aren't ready to actually lay
Speaker 1: that nest, so they continue to breed with more times
Speaker 1: right up until the time that they're they're ready to
Speaker 1: start that process. And most of that occurs right around
Speaker 1: now this previous week or so. And so you know
Speaker 1: where we had had seasons time about the tenth or
Speaker 1: so of April that fell right within probably that peak
Speaker 1: breeding period in the States. So that's when most of
Speaker 1: those times didn't have to gobble as much. You know,
Speaker 1: they're sitting up there on the limb. They might gobble
Speaker 1: a few times, but a lot of those hands are
Speaker 1: right there roosted around them because they're gonna come down,
Speaker 1: they're gonna breed with them early, and then they're gonna
Speaker 1: move off and potentially start that that laying sequence pretty
Speaker 1: shortly thereafter. And so that obviously reduces you know a
Speaker 1: lot of the um satisfaction with with hunting. You know,
Speaker 1: Goblin's going down, You're not hearing as much. You know,
Speaker 1: this week, you know, this first week here, the season
Speaker 1: wasn't the best, but you know, some of that's been
Speaker 1: influenced probably more by weather, um spring green up this
Speaker 1: year was actually probably a little bit delayed for it
Speaker 1: has been UM. So you know, we may actually be
Speaker 1: hitting more of that kind of low period right now
Speaker 1: and some of that may really start to ramp up
Speaker 1: here in the ladder, you know, two thirds of the
Speaker 1: season over the next few days. What so, what if
Speaker 1: you had a message for people about Turkey hunting, what
Speaker 1: would you say, like just in terms of you being
Speaker 1: a part of the agency, Like what would you ask
Speaker 1: of people? I would ask aspects to have have some patience.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, we we didn't get to the point
Speaker 1: that we're at right now overnight, and we're not going
Speaker 1: to change that overnight. Um, you know, I mean I
Speaker 1: thought you were going to double the turkey. Did you
Speaker 1: say that? Didn't he say that in one year he
Speaker 1: could double the turkey. I wish it worked that way.
Speaker 1: I wish it was that easy. But my whole quote, Yeah,
Speaker 1: my hope is that you know, over time here that
Speaker 1: we can get some of those those good springs, Like
Speaker 1: we've had two pretty good hatches. If we get another
Speaker 1: really good hatch this year, I mean, you think about it.
Speaker 1: You might have doubled your population two years ago, but
Speaker 1: you're at a real low point. So then last year,
Speaker 1: you know, if we about doubled it again. You know,
Speaker 1: now we're even better and we're really starting to see it.
Speaker 1: Well now if we get a third year back to
Speaker 1: back to back, now we really see it, you know,
Speaker 1: in these future years, because you're gonna have a lot
Speaker 1: more young birds running around and then maybe potentially you're
Speaker 1: your gobblin activity is gonna increase. But but the likelihood
Speaker 1: is will have a poort year. You know, there's no
Speaker 1: guarantee that we're going to get that back to back
Speaker 1: to back because we just don't know what that weather
Speaker 1: is going to do. So I would just say to
Speaker 1: have patients, you know, to take take some time, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe kind of recalibrate those expectations. Don't don't look back
Speaker 1: to the early two thousands and say, Okay, we killed
Speaker 1: twenty thousand birds. We need to kill kill twenty thousand again,
Speaker 1: because it's it's unlikely that we're ever going to see
Speaker 1: our harvest numbers get that high again. Because of the
Speaker 1: new regulations that we have in place. You know, everything
Speaker 1: that's changed from back then to now, it's not going
Speaker 1: to allow those numbers to quite get to that point.
Speaker 1: You know. I look back to when we had a
Speaker 1: later season, just a handful of years ago, twelve to
Speaker 1: sixteen time period, we killed about ten to eleven thousand
Speaker 1: or so birds in the state that was we were
Speaker 1: one of the states at that time. We actually saw
Speaker 1: we had declined a whole bunch and then we started
Speaker 1: coming up. We actually made this this increase during those years,
Speaker 1: which is kind of out of the norm for a
Speaker 1: lot of the other states. Most people were either just
Speaker 1: kind of staying steady or still declining, and we saw
Speaker 1: this nice spike. We don't know if that was the regulations.
Speaker 1: We we know we had good reproduction on the front
Speaker 1: end of that twelve and thirteen, but we didn't kind
Speaker 1: of follow through for it those remaining years, So we
Speaker 1: don't know would we have just continued to go down
Speaker 1: where we've leveled out, you know, anything about that which
Speaker 1: is unfortunate. And the hope will be that, you know,
Speaker 1: we can keep the regulations we have in place now
Speaker 1: for some time to to watch those those trends and
Speaker 1: actually get trend data because you know, going back the
Speaker 1: last thirty forty years, we've made so many regulation changes
Speaker 1: as an agency and it it's actually you know a
Speaker 1: lot of folks look at you know, what what is
Speaker 1: the agency done, and well, they've actually done a lot
Speaker 1: compared to a lot of other agencies. We've made so
Speaker 1: many raggs changes. But it makes it impossible to you know,
Speaker 1: de termineate a sort of trend data because of all
Speaker 1: those those different kind of interwoven REGs changes that you know,
Speaker 1: each one has its own different impact on what that
Speaker 1: harvest is going to be, So it makes trying to
Speaker 1: compare from one year to the next, you know, almost impossible. Um,
Speaker 1: So hopefully we can kind of maintain some and see
Speaker 1: it out and then if we do need to make
Speaker 1: a change. We make one change at a time and say, okay,
Speaker 1: how how is this this impact it? Maybe study that
Speaker 1: and see, okay, we went to this, we didn't see
Speaker 1: any change. Okay, maybe we can return that and we
Speaker 1: move one of these other factors, and you know, hopefully
Speaker 1: in time we'll get to a point where we can
Speaker 1: actually say, you know, how many how many turkey hunters
Speaker 1: do we have in the state. I don't know how
Speaker 1: many we have, and you know, some of our estimates,
Speaker 1: as do we We don't have any idea how many
Speaker 1: we don't we We have some estimates based on some
Speaker 1: kind of deer and key hunter opinion surveys that we're
Speaker 1: done in fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen that say, okay, maybe
Speaker 1: about forty percent of our license holders hunt turkeys. Well,
Speaker 1: depending on which number you use and the exact you know,
Speaker 1: license holders that you know, I could be anywhere from
Speaker 1: seven to a hundred and something thousand turkey hunters in
Speaker 1: the state. So you know, when I look at a
Speaker 1: year where we have say, say we have seventy thousand
Speaker 1: we last year we killed seven thousand turkeys. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: that says, okay, maybe you have about ten percent success.
Speaker 1: But you know, when I look at some of my
Speaker 1: counterparts talk to like Georgia, that they estimate they've got
Speaker 1: fifty to sixty thousand turkey hunters. They're much larger state
Speaker 1: than us, They've got more birds than us. I'd be
Speaker 1: kind of hard pressed to expect we have more turkey
Speaker 1: hunters here in Arkansas than there. So you know, say
Speaker 1: we have half as much, say we have thirty five
Speaker 1: forty thousand turkey hunters. Well, now all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: your success rates and that's actually maybe more in line
Speaker 1: with a lot of these other states throughout the country.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's more normal, and we're kind of in the
Speaker 1: ballpark where we should be. And you know, you're just
Speaker 1: gonna see those fluctuations depending on what that hatch looks like.
Speaker 1: And it's gonna be every other year because we don't
Speaker 1: harvest jake. So you don't see those trends. You know,
Speaker 1: wherever you see a spike in reproduction, you don't see
Speaker 1: that spiking harvest, you know, come for two years instead
Speaker 1: of in a lot of states where since you're able
Speaker 1: to harvest jakes, you know, it happens that following years,
Speaker 1: like if this summer, you know you had a good year.
Speaker 1: In a lot of states, you'd see that spike and
Speaker 1: harvest next spring, whereas here we'd see it a little
Speaker 1: two years later. Yeah, well, fascinating stuff. Yeah, that's great man,
Speaker 1: thanks a ton for coming up here. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: And uh, we'll be We'll give you a couple more years, Jeremy,
Speaker 1: we'll be patient with you. But you know, by about
Speaker 1: two years from now, I need like five bird bag limit. No, man,
Speaker 1: let us know. We'll get Austin to get it for you.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right. No, no, no, man,
Speaker 1: we appreciate what you're doing for real. We we know
Speaker 1: it's not an easy chair to sit in. And uh
Speaker 1: and Gili man, it's a it's a dynamic and complex
Speaker 1: system that's constantly changing. I mean with the landscape and
Speaker 1: the human involvement and weather changing. You know, weather patterns
Speaker 1: are undoubtedly changing. It's like such a complex system. I mean,
Speaker 1: all we can do is give it our best and
Speaker 1: and I know, I mean I have full faith. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some I mean I have a lot of faith
Speaker 1: in game agencies just doing the absolute best they can.
Speaker 1: It's in their best interests. I mean, every state agency
Speaker 1: wants engagement from people they know. To get that engagement,
Speaker 1: they've got to have wildlife. I mean, we're all kind
Speaker 1: of on the same team in terms of these things,
Speaker 1: and these are the guys that are that have the
Speaker 1: day to have the research are doing the best that
Speaker 1: we know how inside of the bounds of science and
Speaker 1: human relations to make all this stuff work. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we appreciate the hard work and the you know, considering
Speaker 1: the habitat of wildlife and the hunters, and I think
Speaker 1: because do a great job balancing that out right on
Speaker 1: mm hm