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Speaker 1: you everyone. Just the meat Eater Podcast were recording in
Speaker 1: the warm and sunny Juno, Alaska, the only state capital
Speaker 1: not joined to the International Highway System. But you can't
Speaker 1: drive out of Juneo. How many people live here? Oh?
Speaker 1: Was it thirty five thousands? No idea, It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Not many people live here. For a state capital, um
Speaker 1: surrounding us as Tongas National Forest, And we've been here
Speaker 1: in Juno for four days of action packed sooty grouse hunting,
Speaker 1: which is something you probably haven't heard of before. Honestly,
Speaker 1: lay some quick groundworld. Well, no, no, The first thing
Speaker 1: I want to talk about who's here? Um, we have
Speaker 1: our representative from the famous Hunt to Eat T shirt company.
Speaker 1: Honest tell us he's wearing his Hunt to Eat shirt.
Speaker 1: Garrett Smith, he's wearing a Hunt to Eat shirt. Did
Speaker 1: you buy that or get that free? Gurt? I can't say.
Speaker 1: You can say I was giving it so the people
Speaker 1: in this room get a free Hunt Eat shirt. But
Speaker 1: but really, if you wanna, um, we've got we've got
Speaker 1: shirts in stock. Janice long Tong, Yanni, Yanni Chamani whatever
Speaker 1: you want to call him, has T shirts in stock
Speaker 1: now at Hunt to Eat. And I want to point
Speaker 1: out I have nothing to gain a Steve the host.
Speaker 1: I have nothing to gain from you buying, um y
Speaker 1: honest the T shirts. Besides many thank you you know.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'll point out I have something to lose
Speaker 1: because if you get rich and famous from selling T shirts,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna work here anymore. That's not true. You
Speaker 1: don't know that. You might just do it like oh
Speaker 1: the goodness of your heart. So yeah, I like my job,
Speaker 1: you know, so I can only lose from telling you
Speaker 1: to go buy Onni Yanni's hunt eat T shirts. He's
Speaker 1: got him in dock. Why don't you sell him for
Speaker 1: un But wasn't there a special deal where people could
Speaker 1: put in a thing and get some cheap T shirts?
Speaker 1: There was? But this is tough because we're recording this now.
Speaker 1: It's uh may, who knows when this is gonna air,
Speaker 1: So it's tough. Anyways, check the website. Yeah, maybe I
Speaker 1: have a special goal full price man Um Garrett Smith Garrett, Uh,
Speaker 1: you weren't born in Miles City, Montana, Great Falls, Montana.
Speaker 1: Born in Great Falls, Montana. He's working with right now
Speaker 1: because his old man. In a roundabout way, not not
Speaker 1: to diminish your talents, but in a roundabout way, because
Speaker 1: you're old man's friends of my brother. Talk about nepotism,
Speaker 1: Yanni's friends of my wife. Full circle. Mike washed Leskie's here.
Speaker 1: He's not friends of anybody. He Mike got his Mike
Speaker 1: got his job the honest way. Man, How did you
Speaker 1: get How did you come to work here? Mike? Uh? Since?
Speaker 1: And he email to sence to me yeah, did you
Speaker 1: think about sending me one? No, I didn't have it.
Speaker 1: I watched an episode on television like a year ago
Speaker 1: or actually a little bit more year ago, and was
Speaker 1: very moved by the production and and this it was
Speaker 1: whenever you didn't pull the trigger on that bear at
Speaker 1: your cabin, and I thought, well, what did you think
Speaker 1: about the hosting? I thought it was excellent? Excellent? Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it was. It spoke a lot the fact that you
Speaker 1: didn't take the bar. I was it's like, well, first
Speaker 1: of all, you know, not to diminish other hunting shows,
Speaker 1: but there was something that really stood out. The first
Speaker 1: episode I saw I was with Rogan. I was like,
Speaker 1: what the hell am I watching? Like, why is Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan on hunting show? And then I watched another one
Speaker 1: because it was like a marathon or something like that,
Speaker 1: and it was the episode where it was just you
Speaker 1: out hunting that bar and you didn't pull the trigger.
Speaker 1: And I was like, that says something because you know
Speaker 1: most hunting shows like you gotta put it down. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the whole point where here is going to kill
Speaker 1: the animals like that. Then you came out to work
Speaker 1: shot yeah, sure to Yeah, And it you know, and
Speaker 1: no it got revenge on us man. Yeah, Mike's uh
Speaker 1: that was your first trip, that was my first trip. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This young kid, um, Mike washed Leski is out of Austin,
Speaker 1: Texas and he's up here right now. Because as everyone knows,
Speaker 1: Operation Jade Helm, the U. S. Military is in Texas.
Speaker 1: Um much fear in Texas that it's actually they're gonna
Speaker 1: they're overthrowing the government in Texas. Is that right? The U. S.
Speaker 1: Military is imposing martial law in Texas, take everyone's guns.
Speaker 1: That's fair. Yeah, So they sent uh, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Army into Texas and there it's a big movement. They're
Speaker 1: a big operation to declare martial law in Texas and
Speaker 1: disarmed Texas. That's what That's what people think is happening.
Speaker 1: That was gonna happen until the Texas governor very boldly
Speaker 1: said that he's gonna have the NA National Guard keep
Speaker 1: an eye on the U. S. Army while they're there.
Speaker 1: He's going to defend us from from the from the U. S. Army, Yes,
Speaker 1: and special forces. He's like, not only that, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: send some more cops out too. So but Mike' up
Speaker 1: Juno to all this blows over man because he doesn't
Speaker 1: want to have Marshal lawful duck out. Yeah I did
Speaker 1: duck out man. It was getting too crazy. Um also
Speaker 1: joined by Corey kaz Merrick Yes or cutch Mark or
Speaker 1: cutch Mark what nationality is that? Polish? Yeah, he didn't
Speaker 1: really get his job honestly because you came on recommendation
Speaker 1: from a guy. Yeah, well a small town zpc West
Speaker 1: moved to Bozeman, and I live in Bozeman, Montana. So
Speaker 1: that's an honest way to get a Job's on a
Speaker 1: good recommendation. That's true. It is, Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: like the way Mike did it. Send an email? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but come on, everyone's gonna send an email. But to
Speaker 1: come on recommend more I think about it. To come
Speaker 1: on recommendation now that it's something we'll see here. Who
Speaker 1: does here, Mike? So? But to get on the may
Speaker 1: they want to talk about blue grouse. Now, I as
Speaker 1: a hunter, I'm a fan of uh. I like hunts
Speaker 1: that that are underutilized, right, I like consider overutilized. You
Speaker 1: know what, there's like too many people trying to do it,
Speaker 1: which I would say that generally like hunting, you know,
Speaker 1: ducks right. It's like ducks high competition hunting typically you
Speaker 1: know publicly, and white tails high competition, turkeys, high competition.
Speaker 1: I like all that stuff, but I also like stuff
Speaker 1: that just no one does because I don't know why.
Speaker 1: It's just not something people know about, you know, I
Speaker 1: would say squirrel on people know about, they just don't
Speaker 1: do it. Or there's a way more squirrels and way
Speaker 1: more squirrel hunting land than are people interested in hunting squirrels.
Speaker 1: But one of the most underutilized hunts in the world
Speaker 1: is the blue grouse. Now a blue grouse, people used
Speaker 1: to call them blue grouse. And then some years ago,
Speaker 1: like seven years ago, I think oh six two six, Okay,
Speaker 1: figure ou how many years ago? That was nine? Yeah? Right?
Speaker 1: Net ballpark? Right, net ballpark thanks to the um right
Speaker 1: ned ballpark. The Ornithological Society declared or not declared, but
Speaker 1: suggested that it be split in. The blue grouse, which
Speaker 1: is a bird from the western uf so split into
Speaker 1: two populations dusky grouse, city grouse. Duskies live in the
Speaker 1: interior mountain range of the Rockies. Cities live on the
Speaker 1: coastal ranges. Now, people who run into and and and
Speaker 1: and inadvertently now and then. Sure, do not not, like,
Speaker 1: as an incidental take kill a blue grouse now and
Speaker 1: then because the birds are just kind of there and
Speaker 1: they don't really know to run away people. They're one
Speaker 1: of many birds that people call a fool's hen, which
Speaker 1: is like a disparaging term for a bird. And what
Speaker 1: they're getting at is that they would say, it's not
Speaker 1: that smart. The blue grouse isn't that smart, because yeah,
Speaker 1: I subscribe what happens when you walk up on a
Speaker 1: blue rouse. You were talking about this earlier, oh in
Speaker 1: the inner Mountain Rockies interior. But yeah, so what what
Speaker 1: is now since two thousand and six now? Dusky grouse? Well,
Speaker 1: often I've run into him archery, l hunting, and I
Speaker 1: used to I used to always have an arrow maybe
Speaker 1: sometimes too marked, you know, grouse on my fledgings. You'd
Speaker 1: actually write it on there. Oh yeah, because it'd be
Speaker 1: like a you know, slightly crooked arrow or you know,
Speaker 1: something to be wrong with it. But so you could
Speaker 1: wouldn't feel bad shooting at the grouse. But yeah, you're
Speaker 1: just cruising along and like you look over and you know,
Speaker 1: ten fifteen feet away there he is just chilling feeding
Speaker 1: sometimes just kind of like they see you, but they're
Speaker 1: not flushing, they're not running, they're just kind of slowly
Speaker 1: walking away, and enough time to take oftentimes multiple shots
Speaker 1: with bow and arrow. I've killed more now Dusky's blue
Speaker 1: grouse with my bow and arrow than I have with
Speaker 1: a shotgun. At one time, hunting in the Interior Ranges,
Speaker 1: shot a blue grouse with my bow and then grabbed
Speaker 1: a rock and killed the second one. The point I'm
Speaker 1: getting at is people look at the blue grouse, and
Speaker 1: you know, they live in the high country. Typically they
Speaker 1: look at a blue grouse, they're like, oh, there's a
Speaker 1: dumb bird. But that's that's that's a dumb way of
Speaker 1: thinking about it. A blue grouse, like blue growls. Generally,
Speaker 1: human predation is not something they're generally dealing with, right
Speaker 1: They live in areas where they have other stuff that
Speaker 1: they're worried about. And I think it's unfair to birds
Speaker 1: and fish and animals when humans declare them dumb, because
Speaker 1: their response upon seeing a human isn't to run away.
Speaker 1: You know, people be like, oh, those two are dumb.
Speaker 1: They didn't run away. But you might say, well, maybe
Speaker 1: he's really smart because he doesn't run from everything he
Speaker 1: sees and waste calories and put himself into risk from
Speaker 1: other kinds of predation that he might not know about
Speaker 1: when he inadvertently runs into other things, and so he
Speaker 1: knows the hold tight and assess whether it really is
Speaker 1: danger or not. And it's dumb to fly away and
Speaker 1: run away from stuff that means you no harm. That
Speaker 1: could be one way of looking at it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like a an ignorant person's way of like it's personification,
Speaker 1: Like you're putting like human emotions and feelings to an
Speaker 1: animal and and saying like, in that situation, if a
Speaker 1: human did that, you would say it's dumb, you know,
Speaker 1: but humans humans like humans walk up on them. No,
Speaker 1: I know, but that's I walked up on a ton
Speaker 1: of people in that restaurant we ate at tonight. I
Speaker 1: saw running Actually, yeah, yours ran over some guys with
Speaker 1: your fan. So yeah. The word anthropomorphism giving it's kind
Speaker 1: of different than anthropomorphism is what people What people do
Speaker 1: with their dogs usually like act like their dogs are
Speaker 1: capable of emotions, you know. I'm like, you're like projecting
Speaker 1: human tendencies or human attributes onto animals, which most dog
Speaker 1: owners are guilty of you know, Ronnie being not Ronnie
Speaker 1: ban but most dogs look and those those those humans
Speaker 1: that are saying that you're saying, I just I just
Speaker 1: walked up to some people. But that bird had people
Speaker 1: sneaking up to it in camouflage with rifles. So if
Speaker 1: you had done that in that restaurant tonight, maybe not
Speaker 1: everybody would have been so dumb and just been hanging out.
Speaker 1: Some of them might have fled, so especially if you
Speaker 1: walk through the door where the rifle and camouflage. But
Speaker 1: we have so much ground to cover blue I want
Speaker 1: to I want to move the blue grouse storyline, like
Speaker 1: everyone's being real boring. So blue grouse are hunted in
Speaker 1: the fall now. Years ago, in probably in the late
Speaker 1: nineties and early two thousand's, I was out hunting black
Speaker 1: bears in the spring and the way one of the
Speaker 1: Montana the way we eventually started hunting black bears once
Speaker 1: we got good at it. As we would hunt uh
Speaker 1: southerly south facing, east facing, southeast facing exposures in really
Speaker 1: steep country where you had avalanche slides or snow slides
Speaker 1: would clear away snow on big hillsides so that you
Speaker 1: climb up into a high area in the Moun Mountains,
Speaker 1: and everything's covered in snow except avalanche shoots where the
Speaker 1: snow slid off, and then the sun warmed the hill up,
Speaker 1: and because the snow was gone, those hills greened up.
Speaker 1: Those strips would green up faster than all the surrounding topography,
Speaker 1: and you'd get skunk cabbage and glacier lily and all
Speaker 1: kinds of grasses would grow on these snow shoots. And
Speaker 1: a bear, a black bear who might dan you know,
Speaker 1: eight thousand, nine thousand feet above sea level. He comes
Speaker 1: out of his den around me earlier or later, but
Speaker 1: generally May six. Some people say May seven. I think
Speaker 1: my brother Danny thinks that's May eleven. But there's a
Speaker 1: day every year. And also like bam, all the bears
Speaker 1: come out. Some bears trickle out all the time. But
Speaker 1: like bears come out, Um, we s on these avalanche
Speaker 1: slides and now on then we'd be sitting at the
Speaker 1: foot of an avalanche slide and you would hear a noise.
Speaker 1: It would sound like it's who whose things they can
Speaker 1: do it best, not that's I'm gonna do. I'll do
Speaker 1: mine then, but someone else has to do there's next.
Speaker 1: Would hear this noise? Okay, picture it's April May, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, m m was that six seven notes?
Speaker 1: Almet m m m m M. You try yours. M
Speaker 1: that's one far away. Yeah, that's why. That's when we's
Speaker 1: all that's might might do the far away grouse? Who
Speaker 1: else wants to take a stab at? You're getting the
Speaker 1: point the bar set too high. I don't get it.
Speaker 1: Do one let one rip? Oh oh that was good.
Speaker 1: Yeah that sounds good. Here's this noise. Now, we were
Speaker 1: for a couple of years baffled by what this noise
Speaker 1: was because I grew up in Michigan, right we moved
Speaker 1: out west get into the hunting fishing action. We would
Speaker 1: hear this noise. Turns out that the blue growls, which
Speaker 1: is just kinda I was gonna call him blue grouse
Speaker 1: like everyone knows now right, dusky grouse, city grouse, blue grouse.
Speaker 1: Learned that it's it's it's a blue grouse, and that's
Speaker 1: his noise in the spring to call in ladies um
Speaker 1: and eventually figured that out and then learned that there's
Speaker 1: a thing in southeast Alaska where you can hunt blue
Speaker 1: grouse in the spring, and the Molaska they calm hooters
Speaker 1: spring hooters because you can hunt them in the spring.
Speaker 1: The hunting method is you go out into the mountains
Speaker 1: in the spring and try to listen for that hoot
Speaker 1: noise and then try to locate the bird. Now, three
Speaker 1: years ago, we were finishing up bear hunt and we
Speaker 1: had passed through the town to ketch A Can. Yanni
Speaker 1: was there. We had some time to kill and we're
Speaker 1: going to take some pictures and we drove up on
Speaker 1: the road system out of Ketchikan on revel A Gegado
Speaker 1: Island or Ravilla Island or Revy Island. We drove way
Speaker 1: to up the road till we got the snow got
Speaker 1: too deep, and then we walked for a ways and
Speaker 1: got to this high road and it sounded to me
Speaker 1: like from everywhere, from everywhere was Mike, what do the
Speaker 1: far away everywhere? You remember that you honest, I do
Speaker 1: describe your impressions. Yannest was so moved he started a
Speaker 1: T shirt company. Yeah, it was one of those things
Speaker 1: where it because we weren't focused enough, Like we weren't
Speaker 1: hunting him. So we're just like cruising around doing our thing.
Speaker 1: We're taking some pictures and no, because if you remember,
Speaker 1: I proposed we draw back into town and buy a
Speaker 1: twenty two, then drove back up there to hunt for
Speaker 1: an hour for our plane. I forgot about that. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we heard a lot of hooters. It did sound like
Speaker 1: they were everywhere. It haunted me as haunting as a
Speaker 1: noise as it haunted me A year after that, well,
Speaker 1: so that year I started researching how to hunt spring
Speaker 1: hooters because like I had a spot. I got onto
Speaker 1: this idea where I was gonna um kill him, like
Speaker 1: how you killed turkeys. So I found this catalog online.
Speaker 1: There's like, here's one right here. I'm looking at the
Speaker 1: Macaulay Bird Sound Library. Here the libraries full of all
Speaker 1: the library things. Start this way. I'm gonna play one
Speaker 1: thing real quick. Four or five two. That dude says that,
Speaker 1: then you're here. That's a female. Okay, that's a female
Speaker 1: tending her chicks, HEARDing her chicks. So I started trying
Speaker 1: to find ways that you would mimic these noises, and
Speaker 1: I would send the noises to friends of mine who
Speaker 1: were musicians, first asking them like, if you had to
Speaker 1: figure out how to make that noise, how would you
Speaker 1: make it? I sent them both the female and the
Speaker 1: male sound. Now, everyone said that a blowing out a
Speaker 1: beer bottle would make the male noise, which you don't.
Speaker 1: And everyone said, there's some kind of Australian instrument. Did
Speaker 1: you re do? Yeah? Do you do? You like this?
Speaker 1: Do you no? That's a that's a that's something yeah,
Speaker 1: with the like thing on the end. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it is. I think it's like I roped up. You
Speaker 1: spend the rope real fast at that. What's it called?
Speaker 1: I have no IDEA boomerang? Bro, Remember they had a
Speaker 1: ghost caller toy growing up. It's like a tube you
Speaker 1: do that? Yes, yeah, that's the word. I mean it
Speaker 1: made that sound, yeah, know that. I think about it.
Speaker 1: Whenever I was out there, I pictured, like in like
Speaker 1: an old guy with the moonshine jug with like triple
Speaker 1: axes on it, just like softly blowing on it. Yeah, Mike, Mike.
Speaker 1: First thing, Mike said, we got in the moms like,
Speaker 1: she's just a lot old mood shiners out here, the
Speaker 1: all things mood shiners. Are you think we've find it still? So? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like an old dude blown on a moonshine jug. Anyways,
Speaker 1: I sent these sounds that everyone eventually sent uh the
Speaker 1: sound to the guys that down in dirty game calls,
Speaker 1: and they made me a box call and an open
Speaker 1: read call that I could use to try to mimic
Speaker 1: a hand and it's kazoo like that was the other
Speaker 1: musicians kept saying, like, you might be able to do
Speaker 1: it with the kazoo, but I couldn't figure out how
Speaker 1: to do it with the kazoo. But I got this
Speaker 1: open read call that sounds damn good, and it's like
Speaker 1: it's like, uh, is that right? Yeah, sounds like that.
Speaker 1: And I put out a thing on social media asking
Speaker 1: anyone if anyone had a dead female blue grouse laying around.
Speaker 1: This dude name who had become kind of like email
Speaker 1: buddies with this guy named Shad Brunson out of Utah.
Speaker 1: Runs out, He's like, hey, I'm going hunting them anyways,
Speaker 1: runs out, shoots me one I have it, go to
Speaker 1: a taxidermist that I know in Montana who stuffs that
Speaker 1: female and armed with a hand call and my decoy.
Speaker 1: I go out back one year later with Yanni and
Speaker 1: do where he was with us back out to Ravilla
Speaker 1: Island and spend four days trying to get under the
Speaker 1: tree of a blue grouse in order to call to
Speaker 1: it and present it with this decoy, thinking that I
Speaker 1: would pull the bird down out of his tree where
Speaker 1: they're hiding up in the tree, pull him down, he'd
Speaker 1: come down and strutt and I shoot him. And we
Speaker 1: got killed on that trip. Talk about why we got
Speaker 1: killed for what I know now know from what you
Speaker 1: knew then what I knew them. There weren't as many birds,
Speaker 1: we felt like, and we hunted the same. We didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of room in room. We're kind of
Speaker 1: hunting the road system out of catch can. We had
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe three five miles of road we
Speaker 1: could hunt that was National four something like that, and
Speaker 1: they're just I felt like we were working the same
Speaker 1: four or five birds. We named them all, Yeah, we
Speaker 1: had them all named It's a roast bird, lost Bird, Randy,
Speaker 1: new Bird, Houdini, Houdini. Yeah. Yeah, We're like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: like we knew about these birds and we try to
Speaker 1: find them. You could not find them. Yeah. We kept
Speaker 1: getting cliffed out. We got cliffed out numerous times where
Speaker 1: we just could not we felt like we couldn't continue,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, moving on these birds. What these
Speaker 1: sons of bitches will do is they'll get up in
Speaker 1: a high spot like picture, you're at the head of
Speaker 1: a canyon, and they, like the walls of a canny
Speaker 1: kind of come together and peter out at the head
Speaker 1: of a canyon or the head of like a draw,
Speaker 1: you know, on a mountain slope, and there's some big,
Speaker 1: badass spruce tree rising up and towering over the head
Speaker 1: of the draw. A blue grouse will go up into
Speaker 1: that high spruce tree and start making is weird hit
Speaker 1: it like noise, and you it sounds like it comes
Speaker 1: from everywhere. Like you know, if you're out in the
Speaker 1: woods and you hear a sound and you'd say to
Speaker 1: your body'd like point your finger at the sound. Well,
Speaker 1: I noticed people do when a blue growlse calls. They
Speaker 1: don't point their finger. They sort of like gesture with
Speaker 1: their hand like uh, like, oh, it's over, like in
Speaker 1: this vague sort of direction. Yeah, what we started doing
Speaker 1: now is like it's like a two handed like pie
Speaker 1: kind of you hear a blue grouse, sometimes your pie
Speaker 1: thing describes degrees right, or sometimes you might a very
Speaker 1: narrow pie wedge would be a yeah, a very narrow
Speaker 1: pie edge is a lie. But I would say a
Speaker 1: narrow pie wedge is a fifteen to twenty degree pie wedge. Right.
Speaker 1: If you see someone get what if you hear annoy,
Speaker 1: you hear a grouse, a blue grouse off like you know,
Speaker 1: he's a mile away whatever he is, um and you
Speaker 1: drew a pie wedge more narrow than fifteen degrees, you
Speaker 1: the person's over excited, you know. To put it this way.
Speaker 1: One time, while we're trying to hunt spring hooters in Alaska,
Speaker 1: we had a grouse's location in our minds. Pinpointed to
Speaker 1: two trees, one of which I climbed. Hours later. We
Speaker 1: were probably about a mile away from there, trying to
Speaker 1: ascertain which mountain the bird was on. He never stopped hooting.
Speaker 1: I think we finally said he's probably up on that ridge.
Speaker 1: And we said we said we couldn't. We couldn't go
Speaker 1: on the ridge though even that's what it was, wrong, wrong,
Speaker 1: wrong landownership. For four days, we would just be like,
Speaker 1: we'd go we get burned by let's say it was
Speaker 1: Randy Newbird. We get burned by Randy Newbird one day.
Speaker 1: The next day would get exasperated, we'd go back up
Speaker 1: to try again. On Randy new bird, and we'd sit
Speaker 1: and just listen to him, being like, what portion of
Speaker 1: the mountain ranges that bird calling from? I got sober funneled,
Speaker 1: and it was so miserable that Uh. I called some
Speaker 1: buddies of mine, and I happen to have a buddy
Speaker 1: of mine named Matt Carlson, who's a he's a um,
Speaker 1: he doesn't he's a biologist, but he does a lot
Speaker 1: of ornithology, and he grew up in southeast Alaska. And
Speaker 1: I called him because I knew he'd hunted a spring hooter. Now, man,
Speaker 1: he said, like, you know, to be honestly, I never
Speaker 1: did it enough. Um, it's tough to find him. Let
Speaker 1: me ask around. He calls around and finds a dude
Speaker 1: who another biologist from Juno who knew a retired woman
Speaker 1: named Barbe who is a blue grouse master. And one
Speaker 1: day all piste off while we're hunting blue grouse. I
Speaker 1: called Barbe and asked her how to find him, and
Speaker 1: she gave me some tips that just explaining over the
Speaker 1: phone did me no good, and then we just got
Speaker 1: We continued. We had one more day hunted, the last
Speaker 1: day of the season, and didn't find any birds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: A year goes by and we email with and become
Speaker 1: friends with Barb and Fanagal and invitation up to come
Speaker 1: and hunt Blue grows with Barbed for four days which
Speaker 1: just ended, and we fucking slay them, slate them. We really,
Speaker 1: we really worked bar We just we kind of gave
Speaker 1: her the one to punch we could like we really
Speaker 1: A couple of phone calls, really had our tails tupe
Speaker 1: between our legs, were like, we have a good time
Speaker 1: to even hold this one on her. Um, you do
Speaker 1: you do what you pulled on her? But your daughter,
Speaker 1: my daughter, No, you're not your dog daughters. Yeah, y'alln't
Speaker 1: even got y'alln't even took it to this to to
Speaker 1: try to finagle an invitation on the bar. You went
Speaker 1: as far as to well, because it's not everybody that
Speaker 1: wants to jump on TV. There's a lot of people
Speaker 1: that do want to be on TV. Some people could
Speaker 1: give a ship, don't need, don't need anything to do
Speaker 1: with TV. There's people who want to come on a
Speaker 1: TV show because they they could be fun. They want
Speaker 1: to hang out, go on a free trip, it'd be fun.
Speaker 1: They've always curious about how TV shows get made okay.
Speaker 1: There's people who want to come on t VO because
Speaker 1: they gotta sell. They want to sell something like, oh,
Speaker 1: Yanni comes on the podcast, sells t shirts, like they
Speaker 1: got a thing. They're gonna get a specific, concrete thing
Speaker 1: they're going to get out of it. That's hunts Eat
Speaker 1: dot com. And then you got what were the other
Speaker 1: kinds were identified? And I tried to have it be three,
Speaker 1: but we identified five kinds of people that want to
Speaker 1: be on TV. They wanna be a guest on TV show.
Speaker 1: There's people who would just do it. They don't want
Speaker 1: to do it, but your buddies with them and they'll
Speaker 1: just do it, which is pretty much what happens as
Speaker 1: a bar. But anyways, the card I pulled on her
Speaker 1: as I said, look, I've got two daughters, and there
Speaker 1: are no great female hunting role models out there, let
Speaker 1: alone with blue grouse hunting, right, Please show them how
Speaker 1: it's done. And so Barbe has been hunting blue grouse
Speaker 1: twenty five years. She hits it hard. Yeah, And what
Speaker 1: was interesting that I realized about her this evening at
Speaker 1: dinner is that, um, she's got a very deep hunting resume.
Speaker 1: She passed around her a little portfolio of pictures, and
Speaker 1: Barb's kills just about everything in the state of Alaska
Speaker 1: and moves doll sheet her family daughter when she's a
Speaker 1: very little girl, which makes me like her even more
Speaker 1: because she's just into going hunt blue grouse. Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: un all the big game, but she is like a
Speaker 1: blue grouse hunter, and she took us out and taught
Speaker 1: us how to find those things. And I can't even
Speaker 1: I'm trying, I'm searching. I don't know what the method is.
Speaker 1: Corey today commented, the blue grows signing is good for
Speaker 1: It's like good for anyone who has good hearing, is
Speaker 1: in good shape. Did you quit it to golf a
Speaker 1: little bit? No? No, I well, I said the opposite's
Speaker 1: it's just I guess it's a you know, it's a
Speaker 1: hunt that's probably not meant for deaf people and people
Speaker 1: out of shape. That's how I put it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I meant barbed. The first day we got here,
Speaker 1: we flew in, I mean, Yanni, We're talking to her
Speaker 1: in the hotel and I was like thinking to myself, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is this is gonna be a breeze. You know,
Speaker 1: barns probably in her fifties, I would say, mid fifties,
Speaker 1: and uh, we're just gonna walk around in these nice parks,
Speaker 1: forest parks and look for these birds. And first day
Speaker 1: we're sweating, you know, within fifteen minutes because everything is
Speaker 1: straight up and down here cover to moss, sofer moss.
Speaker 1: Thank god it wasn't raining. And she crushed us. I mean,
Speaker 1: she pretty much left us in the dust. Really, I couldn't. Like,
Speaker 1: I still don't understand how she was doing it. Just
Speaker 1: a climbing fool. Yeah, she smoked us and maintaining. Day
Speaker 1: one she made one of our cameraman quit. It. Shouldn't
Speaker 1: even have pink accents on her gun. Nope, smiling, no paint,
Speaker 1: no paint needed. Yeah, did it without mascara. Just out
Speaker 1: there hammering the mountain and on point. She was always
Speaker 1: knowing what she was doing and looking forward. Yes, so
Speaker 1: barbed hunts, buy herself like that. Here's how she hunts.
Speaker 1: Her husband doesn't have blue grouse anymore, and he'll come out.
Speaker 1: They'll go out on their boat and sometimes they'll just
Speaker 1: go out and cut the engine on a calm day
Speaker 1: and drift off the you know, out in the ocean,
Speaker 1: listening up on the surrounding mountains to hear some hooters
Speaker 1: going off. Then Barbe's husband, well bring her up and
Speaker 1: beat or they got a flat bottom boat, like a
Speaker 1: big boat. They can sleep on the thing, you know,
Speaker 1: and carry his already act around on it. But he'll
Speaker 1: go up and beach around the beach, and then she'll
Speaker 1: go hunt all day um while he trolls for salmon.
Speaker 1: And then she carries a orange banner with her so
Speaker 1: she don't need to pay any attention to where she
Speaker 1: winds up. She usually belines it and I'm talking temperate rainforest,
Speaker 1: I mean rainforest. She blines it up to you know,
Speaker 1: hundred feet hunts, comes down, hits the ocean shore, hangs
Speaker 1: up her blaze orange banner so that her husband, while
Speaker 1: he's trolling up and down the shoreline will notice the
Speaker 1: banner and not to come get her all spring. She
Speaker 1: says that they don't start fishing hall but until spring
Speaker 1: hooter season is over. There is probably no other person
Speaker 1: who's that committed. If they if they are, please email me.
Speaker 1: You're honest, stop but tell us at zero point zero
Speaker 1: dot com. I would love to talk to you, because
Speaker 1: every I've read a handful, the only place that publishes
Speaker 1: blue grouse hunting articles. Is like uh Laska Department of
Speaker 1: Fishing fishing game because they try to promote it to
Speaker 1: new hunters and stuff like that, you know, And so
Speaker 1: they'll they're always every year they'll round up some dude
Speaker 1: who's gonna write like a blue grouse article, and the
Speaker 1: blue grouse article will be like, oh, there's this zany thing. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm usually into something else, but so every now and
Speaker 1: then I'll go do this anything. And the birds are
Speaker 1: like and no one can write an article without using
Speaker 1: the word ventriloquist. They're like a ventriloquist. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's just silly kind of anything. That's like what it
Speaker 1: brings out in people. I don't know why people are
Speaker 1: down on it, except that I think it might be
Speaker 1: that when you find the bird, you shoot it. Out
Speaker 1: of truth the twenty two. It's not wing shooting, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not win shooting. Except that the article that we
Speaker 1: read that was publishing the Juno newspaper wasn't he afforded
Speaker 1: to me before we came here. But this guy wrote
Speaker 1: an article about it, how he was so into it,
Speaker 1: and he said that I thought he wasn't into it.
Speaker 1: I thought. He's saying, I'm not a big hunting guy
Speaker 1: now and then I'll go do this. Well, my point
Speaker 1: is that all the effort that he put into finding
Speaker 1: these birds, he wasn't gonna shoot him with twenty two.
Speaker 1: He just took his dead. Guy smoked him out with
Speaker 1: truth with the twelve gage, which I don't know most
Speaker 1: of the birds we found, you were gonna kill the
Speaker 1: twelve gage too far away? Yeah, I was gonna say, man,
Speaker 1: they were high because bullet drop is an effect but
Speaker 1: affected by vertical distance. But shotgun spread is he's saying
Speaker 1: he's shooting, he's mostly walking away from a lot of birds,
Speaker 1: or he's not find him because he's not gonna be
Speaker 1: shooting him with a twelve gages seventy yards in the
Speaker 1: size of a softball the body unless he's go up
Speaker 1: there with with a bunch of heavy shot up super
Speaker 1: turkey choking a bunch of heavy shot. Maybe yeah, talk
Speaker 1: to that guy. Anyways, he did make a thing. He
Speaker 1: likes shooming a scatter gun. They don't jump, So that's
Speaker 1: the thing, is like, like, who do you guys ever,
Speaker 1: you guys ever hold ducks off the water with a shotgun.
Speaker 1: He's Texas. Did you not do it because because you
Speaker 1: don't hunt ducks, or you not do because you think
Speaker 1: it's unsportsman, Like I said, don't ut ducks? All right? Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's something I we go duck hunting, and we'd always
Speaker 1: I guess the etiquette was to let him get off
Speaker 1: the water first. Yeah, it's weird, man, because you're saying
Speaker 1: I see both sides of it. You know. When you're saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want this thing to be dead and I and
Speaker 1: I wanna give it a chance, we'd also be saying
Speaker 1: I'm also giving it more of a chance that it's
Speaker 1: gonna that I'm gonna hit it with a bb and
Speaker 1: not kill. It's like you want it, dad, but you
Speaker 1: can make it dead, you know, shoot it. But it
Speaker 1: is unsportsman. It's generally regardless unsportsman, like the hose a
Speaker 1: duck off the water. That's how market hunters used to
Speaker 1: do it too. But is that the same as like
Speaker 1: shooting a deer bedded to listen, man, I will fight
Speaker 1: that to the dead dye. It is not no listen.
Speaker 1: It's way different. I think that to shoot a betted
Speaker 1: animal is a sign of good hunting, not bad hunting.
Speaker 1: It's like you've done your work right. There has no
Speaker 1: idea there, like you put on you put such a
Speaker 1: good stock on that you found the thing laying. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't like drive up on a bedded animal. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: People might be confusing betted animal with like animals asleep
Speaker 1: and like you're fathering along after Thanksgiving dinner was passed
Speaker 1: out on the couch. Like that's not the animal you
Speaker 1: sneak up to. These animals aren't just snoring with their
Speaker 1: head and on the ground. You just having having stands
Speaker 1: across him and then get to boom them. No, betted
Speaker 1: animals like it's on full alert, you know, in its
Speaker 1: bed in a safe spot where you can see all
Speaker 1: around it. He's got the wind coming in the right direction,
Speaker 1: he's got covered behind him. And like you're saying, if
Speaker 1: you sneak in there, you've done something special. Now, if
Speaker 1: you opposed shooting bedded animals because the shot placement problems,
Speaker 1: I understand where you're coming from. The shot places was
Speaker 1: difficult on bettered animal. But we filmed the thing. We
Speaker 1: we filmed the animal uphunt. I belly crawled, I mean
Speaker 1: I spent a long time belly crawling up on an antelope,
Speaker 1: very hot, very uncomfortable, belly crawled on an antilope, got
Speaker 1: close to it in his bed, had a perfect shot,
Speaker 1: killed it, and never even stood up. Blamn dead. Some
Speaker 1: guy writes an email like I've hunted all six continents
Speaker 1: and that that that I never see anybody shoot a
Speaker 1: betted animal. I'm I don't know. You must be not looking,
Speaker 1: you know. He was like, morally outrage, not about shot placement,
Speaker 1: but just the coward you know, how cowardly it wasn't
Speaker 1: shooting better animal. So it's like, so is it cowardly
Speaker 1: to shoot an animal running away from you? Shooting him
Speaker 1: in the back? I think his bs. But the whole
Speaker 1: shooting birds out of trees thing, I think that that
Speaker 1: might be a thing is because guys and hunt birds
Speaker 1: like wing shooting, and it's not wing shooting. Garrett, you
Speaker 1: don't need to raise your hand, dude. Well, I was
Speaker 1: thinking with you talking about the better down animals and
Speaker 1: getting a good hunt on him. It takes that skill
Speaker 1: and effort. And it seems like with the grouse, the
Speaker 1: Souti grouse in particular, I mean to get up in
Speaker 1: that country to find out where that sounds coming from
Speaker 1: to find him in the tree to get a shot
Speaker 1: at him. That effort is there, so yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 1: takes work. Yeah, it's worse. So you earn or I
Speaker 1: mean you don't earn. But if it's an etiquette thing
Speaker 1: or a fairness thing, a sportsman's thing, the sportsman's things
Speaker 1: there with the Sudi grass not needing them to like
Speaker 1: if you got all you you go to South Dakota,
Speaker 1: right and you you go up and you get out
Speaker 1: of your truck, you have some coffee, eat a couple
Speaker 1: of doughnuts, walk down and do ditch row and start
Speaker 1: spitting pheasants out every which way, and you're shooting with
Speaker 1: your shotgun and you act proud of yourself on that.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, if you're gonna measure effort, that is
Speaker 1: nothing compared to what it takes the final it's hard, man.
Speaker 1: It might be it's less than five percent. It's nothing. Nothing. No,
Speaker 1: I think it's like an excuse. I think they know
Speaker 1: what it takes to go up there and to like
Speaker 1: get a limit. We've been at it four days and
Speaker 1: had some great hunting, did not get a limit any day,
Speaker 1: and we're like trying to figure out what it would
Speaker 1: take to get a limit here and not get a limit.
Speaker 1: But he's hearing hoots, always hearing hoots. I think maybe
Speaker 1: people know what they have in store for him. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're talking about what do we hike for elevation, gaining
Speaker 1: loss in our bigger days? Yesterday? All right, that was,
Speaker 1: but that was just days. But I think you keep
Speaker 1: pointing out were talking about in rainforest. It's not like
Speaker 1: hiking that trail. It's off you get landed on the beach.
Speaker 1: We we'd go out and get landed on a beach
Speaker 1: with a boat. Boat pulls up. Everybody jumps off the
Speaker 1: bout and you're at tideline and you don't start hearing
Speaker 1: hoots till you're six seven ft up, typically straight up.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's really I mean, it's a physically very
Speaker 1: challenging hunt. And there's no other hunt that I can
Speaker 1: think of, and I've been trying to think of it.
Speaker 1: Turkey hunt involves listen for gobbles, but there's no other
Speaker 1: hunt that just comes down to listen ning locating the
Speaker 1: source of the noise. But that's only half of it,
Speaker 1: because once you find where you got it narrowed down,
Speaker 1: you know what three trees in and neither. Trees that
Speaker 1: are a couple hundred feet tall, several hundred feet tall sometimes,
Speaker 1: Now that's why hundred tall before you get into optics
Speaker 1: of city grass something. Let's say a quick break. All right,
Speaker 1: welcome back. Uh, there's a couple we're gonna get back
Speaker 1: into blue grouse on. We're gonna start talking about like
Speaker 1: finding them by noise and finding them by sight. But
Speaker 1: a couple of things came up. One I meant to
Speaker 1: talk about this rout off the bat. Does anyone here
Speaker 1: if we're talking, we never quit. We're talking about before
Speaker 1: we started recording, we're talking about big Foot. No one
Speaker 1: here believes in Bigfoot? Right? Do you believe in big Foot? No?
Speaker 1: I believe that there's a some sort of archetype about
Speaker 1: someone larger than us humans. You know, yeah, I agree
Speaker 1: with that, Like a lot of cultures have a version. Yeah, yeah, Mike,
Speaker 1: not tell us he for I'm I'm undecided. What do
Speaker 1: you mean your own decided? Well, there was I saw,
Speaker 1: you know, with all the internet videos, there was an
Speaker 1: Asian bear that walks on its hind legs for longer periods.
Speaker 1: It can walk up to like, you know, like a
Speaker 1: quarter mile or something. I can believe that. And it
Speaker 1: looks like, does that mean I have the the well
Speaker 1: the big foot thing, Like yeah, I don't know. No,
Speaker 1: do you believe that there's a giant hominid? No? Actually no, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right. No, No that's good. Not that. Take't care.
Speaker 1: So the other came up. We want to touch on that.
Speaker 1: What's something else we're just about touching on. Oh, the
Speaker 1: painting in the hotel room. It's like this painting from
Speaker 1: it must be some prominent saddle around. It's a big
Speaker 1: grizzly up on the on the mountains above Juno. He
Speaker 1: looks like he's headed down into town to go drinking.
Speaker 1: It's like he's coming. He just must have come. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of snow. He just come out of hibernation.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, he's like headed down to get drunk,
Speaker 1: like what is going on? Or eat a few people
Speaker 1: he doesn't have, like a man he doesn't have. If
Speaker 1: I was the painter and I wanted to make it
Speaker 1: that he was headed down to to kill people, how
Speaker 1: to have him look mean, I don't know. This guy's
Speaker 1: mouth open. He's like he's like the version of the
Speaker 1: lone wolf, you know, with the wolf in the village
Speaker 1: below was going down to get drunk or something. Yeah, back,
Speaker 1: so the trick. Now, there are parallels in this world
Speaker 1: the sound thing. Okay, listening for bugle and elk up,
Speaker 1: like you're you're listening to locate listening to a turkey,
Speaker 1: you listen to locate, but in but in those things squirrels,
Speaker 1: I'm always listening for squirrels barking. I'm heading their direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a big audio component too, Is that? Is that
Speaker 1: the right word? Big audio component to a lot of honey,
Speaker 1: auditory component to a lot of hunting, but nothing like
Speaker 1: where you're trying to track down such a difficult sound.
Speaker 1: And even when you get like what kind of happened?
Speaker 1: Is that, you'll be out hunting your your hero hoot right,
Speaker 1: and you'll argue about what direction it was, and you're
Speaker 1: going that direction and then you won't hear anymore, and
Speaker 1: then you'll crest like a slight ridge and it will
Speaker 1: sound farther away than it did before you started walking
Speaker 1: that way. But you know you're walking in the right
Speaker 1: direction because it's still you still agree on the direction,
Speaker 1: but just as less loud. Now then you walk in
Speaker 1: the sound goes away. Then you walk a little more
Speaker 1: into sounds louder than you've heard it at all. And
Speaker 1: then you walk a little more and it's really faint.
Speaker 1: You can't tell what's going on. And then you climb
Speaker 1: up the next ridge and it's booming loud, at which
Speaker 1: point you're like, oh, he's in this clump of trees,
Speaker 1: and then it might take on the way. Though, I
Speaker 1: gotta add, you're constantly, at least maybe today I wasn't,
Speaker 1: but up until saying walk, yeah, as as which is
Speaker 1: the wrong word, Oh that's right, Yeah, climbing, climb four
Speaker 1: points of contact through the rainforest, steep rainforest, your hands.
Speaker 1: The point I want to make is that you're constantly,
Speaker 1: like I said, up until today, kind of second guessing yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like wondering like am I going the right way?
Speaker 1: Did the bird I'm chasing quit hooting? Am I not
Speaker 1: chasing a different bird? Are we on the wrong ridge?
Speaker 1: Like it just goes on and on and on, it
Speaker 1: never quits. Well, that was the cool things, like you
Speaker 1: have three options. You here here, you know, you hear
Speaker 1: who It's like, okay, he either right, he's either center,
Speaker 1: he's left, and you have to just choose the direction
Speaker 1: and then and then you're or there's the other one
Speaker 1: where he's behind you. Well that's any thing too, is
Speaker 1: that like the topography really changes like the sound of
Speaker 1: the bird, you know, And that's why you have to
Speaker 1: get up, because like if you're gonna get on the
Speaker 1: beach and just like say, I'm gonna go hunt city
Speaker 1: grouse or you know, blue grouse or whatever, and just
Speaker 1: go up, you know, a hundred feet from the beach,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna get anything. I mean, you have to
Speaker 1: go up to get above them in order to like
Speaker 1: hear anything at all. And like and especially like this
Speaker 1: one thing you know, but that I learned, you know,
Speaker 1: in the short time I was here, is that like
Speaker 1: if you're down by a stream or if you're inside
Speaker 1: like you know, a sat or ravine. Because I've never
Speaker 1: you know, I've never been elk hunting, so I don't
Speaker 1: know how that bugle carries and like how that like
Speaker 1: the way the hell better than the hoop, right, So
Speaker 1: it's just like, okay, you got these like little thing.
Speaker 1: But even then if you're down by a stream, like
Speaker 1: the streams were crossing and the bulls bugling up on
Speaker 1: the ridge above it, you probably won't hear him. That's
Speaker 1: stream will drown it. Okay. So it's like, yeah, so
Speaker 1: you have to get up and and and get into
Speaker 1: essentially like where they're podcasting from, like on that same
Speaker 1: kind of level, because that's what they do. They're picking
Speaker 1: the big tree just to like you know, finding mate,
Speaker 1: you know, and just like then that and that's where
Speaker 1: we found him. Was all these big trees are not
Speaker 1: like you know, on a bush, yeah, exactly. And it
Speaker 1: might be that you hear him now and then like
Speaker 1: we've had it where we heard him all day. We
Speaker 1: other thing happened today where we heard a hoot chamber
Speaker 1: our something. We heard her who We're like, well, let's
Speaker 1: just going that way a little bit and see what
Speaker 1: happens next. And we go down and and Corey, you
Speaker 1: proposed to go up on a little knob to listen
Speaker 1: from a knob, and I was like, well, no sense
Speaker 1: and all being on the knob. So I was down
Speaker 1: off the knob, but we're close enough for we can communicate.
Speaker 1: I'm hearing that something going loud, loud and clear, and
Speaker 1: you guys couldn't hear him. He was only away. I'm like,
Speaker 1: there is they're like they kept giving me like they
Speaker 1: don't they don't hear anything. I'm like, no, dude's right,
Speaker 1: So we want to finding that bird, and that want
Speaker 1: to be in the bird that we spent close to
Speaker 1: two hours looking for it. I think it was after
Speaker 1: we identified his clump of trees. Um, we spent an
Speaker 1: hour and forty five minutes trying to find the burden
Speaker 1: in the trees. Thrown off by this fact, we found
Speaker 1: fifteen a total of found, not killed, but found a
Speaker 1: total of something like fifteen blue grouse and spruce trees,
Speaker 1: to the point where I was like, oh, they're in
Speaker 1: spruce trees. And this when we couldn't find was an
Speaker 1: a hamblock. So you get to an area and I
Speaker 1: started in my head, I would get to an area,
Speaker 1: clump of trees, you gotta low. He's like, he's got
Speaker 1: to be one of these five six trees. I mean
Speaker 1: we're talking about big gass old growth timber, right, he's
Speaker 1: one of these five six trees. And I would usually
Speaker 1: go like, where's the spruce, you know, and there will
Speaker 1: always be a spruce in the some bitch of always
Speaker 1: be in the spruce way up high, like how many
Speaker 1: feet up are they hunter feet up? Yeah, I'd say
Speaker 1: eighty foots. I mean the roots systems are twelve inch
Speaker 1: round roots coming out of each tree on those big trees.
Speaker 1: I mean they're old growth trees and they got the
Speaker 1: birds sit on top of big limbs that usually if
Speaker 1: you find a bird you can see from below. What
Speaker 1: you usually see is beak in his tail, and if
Speaker 1: you move a foot or two either way, you want
Speaker 1: to see him. And it's a dense forest and so
Speaker 1: you got all you got covered from other trees. So
Speaker 1: it's not like there's just like the one lone giant towering,
Speaker 1: you know thing that's like just like you know with
Speaker 1: blue skies behind it. I mean it is, there's dense
Speaker 1: frisbee size. Yeah yeah, yeah, No. Coming back to parallels
Speaker 1: glass in these suckers office right out there with like
Speaker 1: glassing up a bedacus here, but instead of looking a
Speaker 1: mile away, you're looking fifty yards away, right. You know
Speaker 1: what I noticed Barb is running eight and I was.
Speaker 1: I know for a fact, if I ever come back
Speaker 1: to grass, I'm gonna have some etes on me. I'm not.
Speaker 1: You're not you gonna stick with the tents? What? What?
Speaker 1: What do you what? Are you gonna get out having eats?
Speaker 1: Just less shake it. I don't need, I don't need
Speaker 1: thefation you have less shake and just I mean you're
Speaker 1: looking yards for birds. It's actually making noise perched up there,
Speaker 1: even moving while he's making noise, and they are tough
Speaker 1: to glass. Although he had ten, what your binals are ten?
Speaker 1: And your scalpe was listen this story. So today I
Speaker 1: had ten binals in a seven power scope with my
Speaker 1: double juice. Okay, I found a patch of the bird?
Speaker 1: Did We spent an hour and forty five minutes trying
Speaker 1: to locate I found a patch of that bird in
Speaker 1: my tempore knockers couldn't see that patch in my seven
Speaker 1: power scope. So I eventually had to look through my
Speaker 1: binoculars and study the cones on a hemlock, the configuration
Speaker 1: of cones on a hemlock, and then look through my
Speaker 1: rifle scope and try to identify those hemlock cones. Go
Speaker 1: back to my binoculars and study some more like, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's a black patch of limb. Then I see those
Speaker 1: four cones. There's just one little stick coming down and
Speaker 1: he's there. Go back to my rifle scope and find
Speaker 1: all that stuff never made would identify that. I was
Speaker 1: seeing the wing patch on the bird. Wow, Corey was
Speaker 1: holding a hat up to block the sun because I
Speaker 1: was staring into the sun while doing this. So seventh
Speaker 1: isn't good. Mm hmm. I'll have you know. I want
Speaker 1: to on that bird. After two hours and a couple
Speaker 1: shots and shots, I didn't have any binoculars. Had eyeball him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I gotta give my credit. He found our first bird.
Speaker 1: We put thirty minutes into it. Mikey naked eyebald him.
Speaker 1: He's doing like the hound circle around the tree. Once
Speaker 1: we isolated, like, Okay, it's got to be it's his tree,
Speaker 1: it's history because like that's the That's the cool thing
Speaker 1: about it too, is it's like, okay, I think it's
Speaker 1: these three cheeries in this general area because that that
Speaker 1: sound really just kind of like kind of rolls around,
Speaker 1: you know, and and so like and that's a nice
Speaker 1: thing doing it with two people because then that person
Speaker 1: can go down and like hear it from different directions,
Speaker 1: like you kind of triangulate, you know what. Okay, it's
Speaker 1: gotta be this tree. It's the tree. So I'm looking
Speaker 1: right in here and so and that's a nice that's
Speaker 1: that's a cool thing about it. But I didn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if I was gonna give one tip to a new
Speaker 1: city gross hunter, I would say, Dude, once you're in
Speaker 1: the area where you're like, okay, I think this bird
Speaker 1: is here, do some circles and get a hoot from
Speaker 1: you know, all sides of where you think he is.
Speaker 1: And I feel like after you do one circle, you're
Speaker 1: about ninety plus percent sure of what tree he's in,
Speaker 1: and that gives that much more confidence of where to
Speaker 1: glass as opposed to just kind of hanging back and
Speaker 1: looking up there and going, Okay, he's in one of
Speaker 1: those four You're not glassing four trees. This sounds weird.
Speaker 1: You know, people are gonna be like, what you're glassing
Speaker 1: into four trees? What four trees is a lot more
Speaker 1: country than you want to cover. And they're not like
Speaker 1: flapping their wings and like you know, like displaying and
Speaker 1: like strutting around on the limb. They're not like, you know,
Speaker 1: right at the tip of the limb like all silhouette
Speaker 1: and stuff. I mean, they're like close to the trunk
Speaker 1: and they're just there the seam. They're always sitting at
Speaker 1: the seam of a big gass limb in the trunk
Speaker 1: and they're just like very very slightly but these are big.
Speaker 1: I mean they're big birds, but not as big as
Speaker 1: a pheasant, but close. But they're hunter feet in the
Speaker 1: air in dense you know, uh, you know, the canopy
Speaker 1: is just dead, and so it's just like you have
Speaker 1: to isolate that tree and just like you have to
Speaker 1: narrow down otherwise you're just looking at limbs and shadows
Speaker 1: and moss. Like I saw it, like, I was like,
Speaker 1: it's like Joanni. I was like, there's a bird sit
Speaker 1: on top of that tree right there, and he's like, no,
Speaker 1: that's just like part of the tree. I was like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, it's like you're serious. It's like that looks
Speaker 1: like a's like, no, I agree with you, but that's
Speaker 1: not a bird. No, no, no, this was like it well,
Speaker 1: and then he described because I hadn't seen anything because
Speaker 1: I'm filming you guys, and so I hadn't actually, you know,
Speaker 1: seen a burden a tree, so I don't know what
Speaker 1: I'm looking for. And he's like, so he describes like
Speaker 1: whenever he hoots, the tail just kind of bumps a
Speaker 1: little bit. I was like Okay, well, then that's something
Speaker 1: for me look for. Whenever I hear the sound, I'm
Speaker 1: looking for this one particular emotion. And so I like,
Speaker 1: I was like, okay, well, I think he's in the
Speaker 1: general area. And then as soon as you told me that,
Speaker 1: it's like I saw the tail, you know, kind of float.
Speaker 1: I was like, there he is. It's like boom. My
Speaker 1: piece of advice. If I wasn'ting someone a soudy girls
Speaker 1: hunting too, the whole sound thing like finding them, there's
Speaker 1: nothing I can say. There's just you have to just
Speaker 1: trial and error, um, or go with someone to watch
Speaker 1: someone do it. It was helping to watch I couldn't believe.
Speaker 1: Trust yourself, don't second guess yourself, trust yourself. If you
Speaker 1: pick a direction, keep going that direction, trust yourself, and
Speaker 1: know that he's probably always a little bit farther than
Speaker 1: he thought he was in the beginning. That first day
Speaker 1: we went out with barbed we hiked up and we
Speaker 1: most have hit probably like I think we hit six
Speaker 1: d feet and we heard her who and um. Based
Speaker 1: on my experience from the year before, I'm like, if
Speaker 1: you know who cares about that, like, you'll never find
Speaker 1: that bird because he's just one of those like he's
Speaker 1: one of those like thirty degree certainty birds, you know,
Speaker 1: like one arm out here, in one arm out here,
Speaker 1: you're trying to like draw the pie wedge, like a
Speaker 1: pie wedge bigger than anybody would want to every eat
Speaker 1: a piece of pie. So I'm like, well, clearly that's
Speaker 1: not gonna matter. And Barbe says, no, we'll get under
Speaker 1: his tree, and we did. You just start going. You
Speaker 1: gotta be a hound dog man, just got it. And
Speaker 1: what would mess me up the year before is I
Speaker 1: could never get my head around the idea that you'd
Speaker 1: hear a noise and get closer to it, but it
Speaker 1: would get fainter. So I would think that I was
Speaker 1: doing something wrong all the time, Like I couldn't accept
Speaker 1: that the noise will get fainter as I get closer,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden it will get loud
Speaker 1: again and all that. So I'd go and get painted. Well,
Speaker 1: that must not be right, and I turn and go
Speaker 1: the other direction, thinking that that I had misread it's direction.
Speaker 1: But the tip I was gonna give is these things
Speaker 1: live on such a steep pitch core. You know pitches,
Speaker 1: what are those pitch what are the hillsides? How would
Speaker 1: you describe the hillsides? It's probably like five seven climbing standards,
Speaker 1: which is maybe at some point we were fifty degrees.
Speaker 1: The fifty degree pitch not a little plus maybe even
Speaker 1: you're just grabbing a root, grabbing another root, grabbing a tree,
Speaker 1: you know, and you're just sticking your feet in this moss.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I tend to like wear you know, big
Speaker 1: heavy angled boots and just kick my toes in. Yeah. Yeah, Look,
Speaker 1: if you're climbing with crampo ons, most like kick my
Speaker 1: tone and the moss now, and then just climb up
Speaker 1: like that when my heels out, like in the mid air,
Speaker 1: you know. But my my suggestion when you're looking at
Speaker 1: when you get where you think you were, maybe you
Speaker 1: don't know which trees, but you gotta my my strategy
Speaker 1: became to pick a tree and work that treat and
Speaker 1: rule the sun bitch out right, be like, I'll rule
Speaker 1: that's like the hour and forty five minute bird. We
Speaker 1: ruled out the three spruces, and then I started looking
Speaker 1: at the hemlock, and that's why it took so long.
Speaker 1: So but at one point I was like, this is
Speaker 1: this is for the birds. Man, I was ready to go.
Speaker 1: I proposed leaving. I proposed leaving, going looking for another hooter. Well,
Speaker 1: like he said, Steve too, like when they shift the
Speaker 1: direction that they are actually projecting the sound, it changes
Speaker 1: where it's like when you throw your voice. You know,
Speaker 1: So they got three dimensionals. Yeah, that's a good way
Speaker 1: of putting it. You know, Yeah, it does because you'll
Speaker 1: be sitting there and it'll like be like the birds
Speaker 1: moving from tree to tree. But just because but then
Speaker 1: when you do see one, he is always doing that.
Speaker 1: He who's on one side of tree. You'll step over
Speaker 1: in our limb face the other way and who in
Speaker 1: our direction? And it sounds like you kept Garrett, you
Speaker 1: kept proposing that there's two or three of them up
Speaker 1: in the tree. That's what it sounded like, there's two.
Speaker 1: That's why it's so important to do the circle around
Speaker 1: like the base I keep getting what my suggestion is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but on top of yours, the going around, go up
Speaker 1: hill and get eye level because the pitch is so
Speaker 1: severe that you can do this, go up hill and
Speaker 1: get eye level with the canopy. So you might wind
Speaker 1: up being I remember today, I wasn't even close to
Speaker 1: eye level with the top of a tree. I remember
Speaker 1: ranging the tree trunk. I was thirty seven yards from
Speaker 1: the tree trunk. I'll pill behind it, looking into its canopy,
Speaker 1: kind of looking into its canopy. And then so you
Speaker 1: kind of read, like, what direction should I go uphill
Speaker 1: where it's not going to be obscured by a bunch
Speaker 1: of twigs and ship from another tree? And if you
Speaker 1: can find a little gap and then climb up there
Speaker 1: and look into the tree rather than looking up. We
Speaker 1: found I think one bird from looking up. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: because you got all the branches below it, and they're
Speaker 1: at the top. I mean they're not halfway up, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean at least from what I saw. I mean
Speaker 1: they're they're so looking straight up. The tree is just
Speaker 1: like you know, it's garbage. I mean, you gotta like
Speaker 1: do concentric circles out find those little pockets. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: brings me to to the kind of a final not
Speaker 1: not the final thing, but you know an important part
Speaker 1: of this. You go up, up, up, and you're getting
Speaker 1: away from the trunk tree looking in when you find it,
Speaker 1: you invariably wind up in tricky shooting situations, you are
Speaker 1: not gonna shoot a blue grouse by lying down prone
Speaker 1: in the angle. The shooting angles are usually much too
Speaker 1: severe to shoot over your knee. You're shooting up. I
Speaker 1: shot one lying down on my back. You know. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like your contortion is trying to get in
Speaker 1: the shooting position on him. But it's the most rewarding
Speaker 1: shooting I've ever been involved in. It's not like it's
Speaker 1: in its own way. I would say it's as difficult
Speaker 1: as wing shooting. Oh definitely. It's very demanding. Especially you're
Speaker 1: not gonna blow the breasts out of him. If you're
Speaker 1: trying to hit him in the neck and head. It's
Speaker 1: very demanding. It requires. Yeah, it's a great attention to
Speaker 1: the heads, you know, so you head shooting squirrels not
Speaker 1: easy to do. I love hunting blue grouse. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's gonna catch on. Yeah, that's tough man, which
Speaker 1: is part of the peel too. Doesn't get sad and
Speaker 1: it's just not I mean, you gotta come like like
Speaker 1: dudes aren't dudes from down Dude from Lord forty eight
Speaker 1: aren't gonna when they do their big Alask trip if
Speaker 1: they're up here spring bear hunting, they just tack onto
Speaker 1: you because no one's gonna be like clearing it up
Speaker 1: with your wife and shipped to like come up to
Speaker 1: hunt blue grouse, getting time off work, you know, buying
Speaker 1: a bunch of garbage on Lyon for hunting gear and
Speaker 1: then come up and shoot birds. I don't know why,
Speaker 1: but if I wasntna last after their first time, if
Speaker 1: I was a sheep hunter experience, yeah, then they'll do it.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what, you do this all spring and
Speaker 1: I don't know how whatever you'd have to do for
Speaker 1: June and July to retain that shape. But if you
Speaker 1: did this all studio cross season, you would be ready
Speaker 1: to smoke the brooks range and look for dolls. So
Speaker 1: this is so this is the the the the primer,
Speaker 1: the your your work out getting ready for that. So
Speaker 1: this is a good Like this is CrossFit, Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this is your you know, your rainforest cross fit
Speaker 1: prior to it's better CrossFit because like my brother criticized
Speaker 1: the CrossFit all texts crossfits the only thing it does
Speaker 1: it makes you good a CrossFit. What I'm saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: like we're I'm gonna go hunt with someone, like if
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take someone on a hunting trip, I usually
Speaker 1: tell him, like you're sitting there thinking about what's sleeping
Speaker 1: bag you need, right, what gun you're gonna bring, whether
Speaker 1: you got to this kind of scope or that kind
Speaker 1: of scope. Is like, here's the thing that's gonna that's
Speaker 1: gonna make your hunt. Here's the thing that's gonna make
Speaker 1: it that you're happy and successful or miserable not successful,
Speaker 1: Your ability to your ability to climb hills, whether or
Speaker 1: not your feet are gonna hold up. Yes, I mean,
Speaker 1: well this is a good pise. It's like the only
Speaker 1: thing if you're gonna go on a mountain hunt, you're
Speaker 1: going on a sheep hunt, elk hunt, mule to your hunt.
Speaker 1: All the garb would you think you need to worry about,
Speaker 1: Like who do I want this kind of pants or
Speaker 1: that kind of pants? That is largely bullshit. It's like,
Speaker 1: can you walk a long ways up and down hills
Speaker 1: and have your feet stay in good shape and that
Speaker 1: you can keep doing that day after day after day
Speaker 1: after day on your face with a smile on your face,
Speaker 1: because the minute you don't want to go to that
Speaker 1: next ridge, you're done. All right, everyone, I know you're
Speaker 1: enjoying the Meat Eater podcast and you're especially enjoying it
Speaker 1: because it's free, and to keep it that way, we
Speaker 1: got to take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
Speaker 1: The minute you start finding reasons to not go to
Speaker 1: that next ridge, it's over for you. I was kind
Speaker 1: of curious, what do you guys think about whenever you're
Speaker 1: looking at just straight up, like, what is it? What
Speaker 1: you're talking about? These fifties degrees? Okay, I gotta get
Speaker 1: up there. Whenever you're just you're having to grind to
Speaker 1: get up to the top. What do you guys think
Speaker 1: about whenever you're doing that and it's just your legs
Speaker 1: are screaming. I don't know if your legs are screaming
Speaker 1: and stuff like physically what you're going through, But what
Speaker 1: what's going through y'all's mind in those situations to get
Speaker 1: you to the top of that. Me lying there, dying
Speaker 1: on my deathbed as an old man, Yeah, that keeps
Speaker 1: you grind. Yeah, because I always think about this when
Speaker 1: I'm dying. Okay, I will not be like man, I
Speaker 1: sug glad I didn't climb that hill. This is no way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way. Today we got up on a ridge.
Speaker 1: Remember we're on the ridge top yeah, okay, and there
Speaker 1: was a hooter down below. I'm like, man, I don't
Speaker 1: want to go the ridge top because we're up on
Speaker 1: the rooftop. Then we have to go down there to
Speaker 1: kill him or try to kill him, and then climb
Speaker 1: back up the bridgetop. Then I'm like, why in the
Speaker 1: world are you thinking this way? Go down there and
Speaker 1: climb back up, because it's I mean, there's a mental
Speaker 1: component of day four for Yeah. I mean I have
Speaker 1: a lot of curiosity too. I'm always curious about stuff,
Speaker 1: like they're I was gonna find something weird laying on
Speaker 1: the ground or I don't know, right, there's a rewarded,
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's like I'm always like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll find something weird laying there, or he's all
Speaker 1: benched out, you know, there there are bench as. It
Speaker 1: wasn't inconsistent. I mean it's something you're just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe like two bucks, maybe two bucks got tangled
Speaker 1: up and died with their antlers locked. Yeah, and also
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stumble across that, or I'll find a dead
Speaker 1: guys did actually get to the treasure. I always look
Speaker 1: in the holes under the trees and thinking there's something
Speaker 1: in there. I was sparked to something to jump out.
Speaker 1: Wolverines coming at you. Yeah, so there's that. There's like
Speaker 1: do I will I ever, that's what you're thinking of,
Speaker 1: Like I need to get to the next bitch so
Speaker 1: I can look underneath that tree from I'm always like,
Speaker 1: where's barb right now? Way out there? I think about this.
Speaker 1: There's a direct correlation. There's an undeniable direct correlation between
Speaker 1: how much weird ship you see in the woods and
Speaker 1: how much time you spend in the woods. M sure
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Guy spends a lot of
Speaker 1: time in the woods, has a lot of things, like
Speaker 1: stories that begin with I'll tell you what you know
Speaker 1: what I mean like that, or he's got sh it
Speaker 1: on his shelves. He's like you see that. You know
Speaker 1: you learned a lot about porcupines. Yeah, well about you
Speaker 1: a lot, Like what do you what's going on in
Speaker 1: your head? Whenever? It's just like it's it's flipp in
Speaker 1: front of flip in front of foot to get to
Speaker 1: the top the grind, the grind in the grind, Yeah,
Speaker 1: depend depends on how long the grind is. But just going,
Speaker 1: I mean like I try to like to go just
Speaker 1: in my head and like try to push myself to
Speaker 1: the plateau without stopping like that. That's it. There's nothing
Speaker 1: else in that that time that that if it's the longer,
Speaker 1: if it's a longer like we're talking trying to go
Speaker 1: two thousand feet, same consistency now on the pitch, then
Speaker 1: you can get in more of a rhythm. But this
Speaker 1: was kind of like steep bench. Listen, stop, that's the
Speaker 1: point you raised because Core used to be a competitive
Speaker 1: like a professional snowboarder, and you you gotta walk up
Speaker 1: a lot of those hills. Yeah, but you're, like you
Speaker 1: said today, like but doing that every step is the same. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like the same step. It's like the same
Speaker 1: step over and over again. Goes but here every step
Speaker 1: is different. Okay, yeah, every step you're twisting an ankle,
Speaker 1: different degrees every step. You know, we're thinking or of
Speaker 1: turknees and holes that were covered by you know, moss stuff,
Speaker 1: and every step, every step is different. Crawling over logs,
Speaker 1: under logs, trees, grabbing a dead tree, knocking over the
Speaker 1: whole tree. You know, like out of the sound, I
Speaker 1: got a different But I think to your question is
Speaker 1: just so you guys are all. I think what you're
Speaker 1: trying to ask is really like what is like there's
Speaker 1: a motivating kind of a factor, not just like what
Speaker 1: happens in your head, but like you're in you're in
Speaker 1: the grind, and like what do you say to yourself
Speaker 1: to be like, yeah, I'm fired up to get to
Speaker 1: the top. Just what I just said. No, I know
Speaker 1: you answered it right. I just just wanted to make
Speaker 1: do you want to be the kind of guy that
Speaker 1: goes up the hill or not? No, No, you're still
Speaker 1: gonna get to the top. You're still gonna get to
Speaker 1: the top. But that time before you get up there,
Speaker 1: I mean your brain is you know, what are you
Speaker 1: thinking about your taxes? Or you oh think about like that?
Speaker 1: Like what yeah, like what is going on in your
Speaker 1: mind during that that that grind and trying to Blue
Speaker 1: Rose the whole time? The hell are you thinking about?
Speaker 1: I started playing? So you answered it right the first time.
Speaker 1: You said. No, he's not asking that. He's not saying
Speaker 1: what motivates you. He's wondering what the star point? There
Speaker 1: might be some pain involved, well the pain you're thinking
Speaker 1: about stuff besides what we're doing while we're out there,
Speaker 1: whenever I'm climbing, whenever we're going straight up and like
Speaker 1: we have to get up there, and it's like we're
Speaker 1: not like okay, we hear the sound. We gotta go
Speaker 1: up right and it hurts and it's painful and stuff,
Speaker 1: and so there's nothing going no mash you what should
Speaker 1: call my mom or often, well, your mind doesn't wander
Speaker 1: whenever you're like in that, whenever you do that, just
Speaker 1: mean this question packing meat or something like that, it does.
Speaker 1: But I'll doing this. I'm just hoping to find right,
Speaker 1: he's just getting out there, yeah, like a drudgery. Like
Speaker 1: if you're just like, oh yeah, we got a nine
Speaker 1: a mile walk, we're all done. It's like just hiking out.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'm thinking about crazy ship man. Right, that's
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. That's that was a question. And
Speaker 1: I'm trying to learn how to think about something like
Speaker 1: I'm trying to be like, because you know, I write
Speaker 1: a lot, right, so I'll be like, why don't I
Speaker 1: take this time and actually write something in my head
Speaker 1: word for word for word, memorize it. And then I
Speaker 1: got home, I said to type out what I wrote
Speaker 1: in my head. Your body is gonna I can't do
Speaker 1: that because then I'd be like, man, I should really
Speaker 1: call my mom. Or often I'm like, oh, I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to be writing my article, but then I can't, you know.
Speaker 1: But I mean I'm onne of some other thing, like man,
Speaker 1: I gotta remember that, you know, like I gets some
Speaker 1: new finger paint for my kids. You know it's uncontrolled.
Speaker 1: But Blue Rail's hunting, I'm thinking, Mike, I am constantly
Speaker 1: training for the next hunt. Every time I get into
Speaker 1: that position where it's the grind and it heard to
Speaker 1: my legs or like please stop, please stop, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: shut up, legs, And in ahead, I think the six
Speaker 1: point bull that I've been looking for for twenty years
Speaker 1: is at the top of the next bench. Who does
Speaker 1: the top six um killed a lot of cows, calculate machine.
Speaker 1: But no, I'm just like constantly thinking, like this is
Speaker 1: good for me. That's how I make it good for me,
Speaker 1: and so I like enjoy it because I think in
Speaker 1: this fall, this higher that I'm doing right now next
Speaker 1: fall is gonna help me hopefully be successful in whatever.
Speaker 1: But doesn't that wind up being real circular, because yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, because yeah it's helpful, right now, do I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm helping myself right now in order to help myself
Speaker 1: in the future. It's kind of people who like, you
Speaker 1: get dumped by a girl and people like, yeah, it'll
Speaker 1: only make you stronger. It's like, well, for next time
Speaker 1: I get dumped, I'm I'm with you, guys. Yeah, Absolutely's
Speaker 1: like this is like this is gonna pay off, Like
Speaker 1: this is the effort involved is you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna find a dead guy or two. Think Mike, because
Speaker 1: Michael Ridge was asking of like how like you make
Speaker 1: it okay in your head to like deal with the
Speaker 1: pain of like keep keep pushing, don't take a break
Speaker 1: right now, keep pushing. Yeah, there's a hooter at the
Speaker 1: end of the road, but you said it. You're like,
Speaker 1: when I'm on my deathbed I'm dying, I would be like,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, but you guys talking about motivations, like
Speaker 1: you got that motivation to get up there, like where
Speaker 1: does your mind go? And this I may be off
Speaker 1: off here, but when I'm like I'm maxed out, I'm thinking, man,
Speaker 1: I need to stop, and I know I need to go,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna keep going. I actually go to really
Speaker 1: calm water, like sitting on a lake with a beer
Speaker 1: and that's where my mind is. Okay, So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: not be worried about whether the fishure button. I'd be like,
Speaker 1: I've better walked down the beach. I mean, because it's
Speaker 1: about keeping your heart, you know, keeping your heart, Oh,
Speaker 1: I got you know what I'm saying, Like your body
Speaker 1: is gonna do I mean, you're sucking wind, your legs
Speaker 1: are screaming to keep that heart rate down. So you
Speaker 1: go to a place of you can climb like you
Speaker 1: do technical climbing. Yeah, like ice climbing, technical clim and
Speaker 1: it's all about that, Like your body's maxing out, but
Speaker 1: you can go way beyond as long as you keep
Speaker 1: your your heart right down. It's being able to separate
Speaker 1: your mind from all the physical pan of your feeling.
Speaker 1: Right Like you guys say, you gotta stay focused. Your
Speaker 1: motivation is going to take you there, but to get there,
Speaker 1: you know, and even further, you know you're gonna get there.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get there. I mean, there's no doubt that
Speaker 1: you're going to the top of place. But it's just
Speaker 1: like you know, it's just dealing with that like internal
Speaker 1: turmoil at least for me, And I was just like,
Speaker 1: go to fucking hurts, go to that lake. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like if I want to call myself um all sometimes
Speaker 1: just focused on breathing in and breathing out. Or I'll
Speaker 1: picture a really old dog on a really hot day
Speaker 1: down south on a porch. That will change your Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would change your and that makes me feel sleepy.
Speaker 1: But your body is still like and sue for supermode
Speaker 1: and you just carry a picture of yourself taking a nap.
Speaker 1: Just look at that. Well that's what a beer on
Speaker 1: the beach is pretty much. You know. I earlier mention
Speaker 1: getting dump How many you guys did all you guys
Speaker 1: get dump way ass hard in your twenties? Yeah, funnies, No, no,
Speaker 1: really dumping down the dumping. I got married, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I got married young because I was observing that long ago.
Speaker 1: How like, you get dumped in your twenties by someone
Speaker 1: for me, with someone named Maris, and it killed something
Speaker 1: in me that never grew back. He didn't need that anyway,
Speaker 1: So that you know what I'm saying. I'll saying about
Speaker 1: when people say, oh, yeah, I only make stronger, It's
Speaker 1: like that made me stronger. It killed something in me
Speaker 1: that never grew back, something agree with you. But that
Speaker 1: happened to me. I feel like when I was like,
Speaker 1: it was like, yeah, I had an exhaustible supply of
Speaker 1: disappointment that was killed. It was replaced by awareness of that.
Speaker 1: And that's for that's and I've been trying to fill
Speaker 1: that spot in me with It's the heart meat. That's
Speaker 1: what the Sudi Groundse call mimics. It's a yeah, it's relationships,
Speaker 1: isn't The city grouns is just like, hey, babes, I
Speaker 1: kept the top of the hill while we were hunting studies.
Speaker 1: I kept trying think what's the fun part and a
Speaker 1: very stided that thought all the fun part shooting them,
Speaker 1: you know, like picking your shot. Then I thought the
Speaker 1: fun part, you know, like bounced around, like what's the
Speaker 1: fun part, the fun part, the funnest part. Like if
Speaker 1: you could make a drug, if you could, you know,
Speaker 1: go to Bristol Myron and make it up a little No,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't really that kind of drugs. Who does that
Speaker 1: kind of Who's like? Who makes like drug? Drugs? Fighting?
Speaker 1: If I was gonna go to fires and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I want to drug to me makes me feel like
Speaker 1: X but not X to see But I mean like why,
Speaker 1: I want to drive me to feel like why? Why
Speaker 1: would be the moment when you think I will find
Speaker 1: this bird's cluster of trees? Yeah, it's that. For me,
Speaker 1: it was like, Okay, this is the tree. Let's let's
Speaker 1: figure out what what branches on. Yeah, it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: that was the happy part. We isolated it. That was
Speaker 1: the fun part. The fun part was once we figured
Speaker 1: out what tree it was and we started doing the
Speaker 1: circles and like looking around and stuff. That I enjoyed
Speaker 1: that because it was you know, it was a detective work.
Speaker 1: Now you're wrong. It's when you it's when you realize, Yeah,
Speaker 1: any was your fun part, Like if you could get
Speaker 1: any in capsule form, buck a pill somewhere right in there.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's the cluster of trees or
Speaker 1: isolating the tree, but right in that moment where you're like,
Speaker 1: you know you're underneath him, but you haven't found him.
Speaker 1: So that's the funniest part you just said it was,
Speaker 1: there's the same thing. For you. It's one I know
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna find the cluster trees. Oh so you're
Speaker 1: still a couple of hundred yards out, but you're like
Speaker 1: this something's gonna get found. It like gets loud. We
Speaker 1: talked about this earlier today about how now we've got
Speaker 1: seven or eight days of city across hunting under our belts,
Speaker 1: and now as you hike, climb, trudge towards the bird,
Speaker 1: and there's a there's a long time where it's so faint.
Speaker 1: It's the you have to stop to hear the sound.
Speaker 1: You have to stop every now and then and go, okay,
Speaker 1: there's my straight right left. You keep going, You keep going,
Speaker 1: and then the next time you stop, it'scott just a
Speaker 1: little bit more of a and you're like, okay, we're
Speaker 1: kind of bearing in that. You keep walking, You keep walking,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, there's a point where
Speaker 1: you hear the bird over the sound that you're making,
Speaker 1: whether it's your your boots or scratching through the brush
Speaker 1: or whatever. And at that point now it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: we're in that. We're probably within two yards, and you're
Speaker 1: probably gonna we're gonna find this tree, we're gonna finds,
Speaker 1: we're gonna find his cluster. When the needle starts doing
Speaker 1: this instead of like doing this, it goes like that.
Speaker 1: But I felt like last year all that honey, we did.
Speaker 1: We didn't have that dialed in only one time. One time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know what was happening. And yeah, what
Speaker 1: was the bird that was right off? Like when we
Speaker 1: hiked up the trail got to the snow and then
Speaker 1: he was off. That was Lost Bird. We were under
Speaker 1: Lost Bird Street, we were in his cluster. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: could go back, and I've played that back a hundred times.
Speaker 1: He's a year older. I know right where he is.
Speaker 1: I got I got him, I gotta weight, I got
Speaker 1: a GPS way point on him. Yeah, he's looking back,
Speaker 1: and I was like that lost Bird. I not realized.
Speaker 1: After multiple visits to Lost Birds area, I now know
Speaker 1: that we were actually standing beneath the Lost Birds tree,
Speaker 1: walking in circles, because I thought it would be that
Speaker 1: you look in the tree and there he is, right
Speaker 1: So I'm like, oh, no, he's not that tree. Almost
Speaker 1: be insane. And then we just start going down these
Speaker 1: bridges and trying to like go down these little cliffs
Speaker 1: and trying to get the angles. Like no, I realized, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're standing and even if someone tells you no, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to glass up into the trees. It's the
Speaker 1: classic story of like the first time Cruiser Hunter when
Speaker 1: like our buddy Jayscon says, yeah, going to that ridge
Speaker 1: and that ridge acrossing you going glass it And you
Speaker 1: come back twenty minutes later and you're like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: glass it. He's like, no, no, you didn't glass it
Speaker 1: because you picked up your bloculars, didn't put him on
Speaker 1: a tripod, looked over the hill and then left. And
Speaker 1: it's the same thing here. Like first thing Barb does
Speaker 1: pretty much does the circle, narrows down the tree, and
Speaker 1: then lays down, takes off her backpacks, that's her rifle down,
Speaker 1: bust out of binoculars because she's not gonna eat him
Speaker 1: until then, and then lays down and gets comfortable and
Speaker 1: starts glassing straight up in the air. I remember Chris
Speaker 1: Denham uh the poblish your Western Hunter and Elcounter magazine.
Speaker 1: I was talking to him about hunting couis deer and
Speaker 1: I said something him along the lines of how long
Speaker 1: do you sit in no spot? You know, how how
Speaker 1: long do you glass one area? And I remember him
Speaker 1: saying sometimes all day, I mean like without moving, hes
Speaker 1: like without moving I was sitting once all day. I
Speaker 1: didn't really, I couldn't even really comprehend what he was
Speaker 1: talking about. Now I understand what he's talking about, but yeah,
Speaker 1: what I made that original called barb she said. I'll
Speaker 1: usually look for the bird for an hour. If I
Speaker 1: can't find it, I'll sometimes move on and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and then one thing after another, all right, yeah,
Speaker 1: honest closing thoughts, go if you if you're up here
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, cruise ships, bring bear hunt whatever, take
Speaker 1: a couple of days and go city gross hunt. It's
Speaker 1: a blast. That's it. That's the best you can do.
Speaker 1: That's my closing thoughts. Yeah, I'm trying to sell I mean, Derek,
Speaker 1: I would say in response to the fun moment, that
Speaker 1: scenery like just oh that's touching. Well, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing I wanted to get out of,
Speaker 1: you know, when I break out of that lakeside, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to calm my heart. Right, you look around here
Speaker 1: and it's just I mean that moss and like the light.
Speaker 1: I mean it's beautiful. Whales, yeah, whales, and the way
Speaker 1: when you hit one with it, hit a grouse with
Speaker 1: twenty two ft No, no, not that the feathers. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: when the sun's right, and dozens of feathers are filing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: falling from a hundred feet up in a tree, and
Speaker 1: it's just like they're it's just as nice. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a nice juxtaposition. There's like death and life in the affirmation.
Speaker 1: You know. I had a thought today that when I
Speaker 1: didn't feel bad shooting the burden, but I felt bad
Speaker 1: as he fell out eight feet up and he hit
Speaker 1: the ground so hard. But no, he didn't do any
Speaker 1: of that. It was one of those where there was
Speaker 1: like it wasn't a single limb, so he's like gaining speed.
Speaker 1: He was almost hitting terminal velocity, you know, and I
Speaker 1: couldn't even see where he landed. But I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's that juxtaposition of like I don't feel bad killing you,
Speaker 1: but after you're dead, I don't want you to slam
Speaker 1: the ground from a hundred feet up. I feel bad
Speaker 1: shooting a lot of stuff, particularly bears. Like whenever I
Speaker 1: shoot a bear, I feel pretty bad. Not that I
Speaker 1: stopped doing it, but um man, just not a trace
Speaker 1: with blue grouse. I think because you're shooting primary, you
Speaker 1: know your goal. You're shooting males. You know, females are
Speaker 1: gonna get bread you're shooting males and then something like that.
Speaker 1: You think, like every year seventy five percent of the
Speaker 1: birds alive or dime. A four year old blue grouse
Speaker 1: is ancient. I don't feel bad shooting him. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like they're they're like they have like pretty high for
Speaker 1: country is super high mortality. You know, they're just dying
Speaker 1: all over damn place and that just you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. It's like if I didn't get him something,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Song's gonna get them now Bears.
Speaker 1: I killed a bear one time. They with the tooth
Speaker 1: dental analysis was seventeen years old. I was in my
Speaker 1: early monies. Well he's about die old age anyways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm saying I can't be like, oh, if I
Speaker 1: didn't kill you something, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 1: if you killed blue gross like you blue gus So's
Speaker 1: gonna kill them anyway. Now bear, you might shoot him
Speaker 1: and I can't say that you might live in our
Speaker 1: ten years. I don't know what is the blue gross
Speaker 1: as a predator or what predator feeds off the blue grass.
Speaker 1: Pine Martins kill a lot of them. Weasels, long tailed weasels.
Speaker 1: Ermine's kill a lot of them. Rafters kill them, and
Speaker 1: then you got all the nest predators because they nest
Speaker 1: on the ground. Even pine squirrels will steal the eggs.
Speaker 1: We found a big gass egg today way up the hill,
Speaker 1: did you guys really some yeah, seabird like a like
Speaker 1: a like a ducker, the duck hagers big robbin's robin
Speaker 1: egg blue but the size of a chicken egg way
Speaker 1: up in the woods, like in the nest. Something carried
Speaker 1: it up there. Look okay, oh you know what happened
Speaker 1: there day? Man? We had a robin building nest maybe
Speaker 1: weight big their egg and be like that, yeah, like
Speaker 1: a you know a quarter. Uh. Robin built a nest
Speaker 1: up in my out the out our kitchen window, and
Speaker 1: me and my boy were out in the yard, and uh,
Speaker 1: I see the nest fell out the tree. So I'm like, oh, Jimmy,
Speaker 1: look you know the nest fell out of the tree.
Speaker 1: And walk over. We're looking at the nest, and I
Speaker 1: realized all that the babies had gotten pretty developed inside
Speaker 1: the egg and all the eggs. When the nest fell
Speaker 1: the tree, all the eggs broke. So he's four. He
Speaker 1: didn't like that a bit. Little baby birds laying every
Speaker 1: which way. He talked about that for a few days,
Speaker 1: concluding dos Mike Hunt dot com. Um, I enjoyed the
Speaker 1: the I enjoyed the hunt. It was, you know, another
Speaker 1: new experience. And then in an adventurer and it was
Speaker 1: it was awesome, and you know it was it was
Speaker 1: a it was an adventure. I liked it. I liked
Speaker 1: it a lot. And what I think about whenever I'm
Speaker 1: grinding and going to the top as I get a songs,
Speaker 1: it just keeps going over and over and over, and
Speaker 1: for the past few days has been Fleetwood Mac and
Speaker 1: I can't get which which one? Can't get it up? No,
Speaker 1: I can't get out of my head, No, out of
Speaker 1: my personal head. Well Fleetwood Mac. If it's silver springs,
Speaker 1: I'm with you there, man. Yeah, I don't know why.
Speaker 1: It's silver springs in your head. Man, that's a good tune.
Speaker 1: It's like, uh, lady singing to a man and the
Speaker 1: man she loved the man, the man didn't love her.
Speaker 1: And she says she's telling them that, you know, my
Speaker 1: voice is gonna haunt you for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: So like these guys in there twenties, Yeah, fun time,
Speaker 1: you know her voice is gonna follow him down and
Speaker 1: haunt him. Um Corey concluding thoughts. Closing thoughts, How's one
Speaker 1: of those hunts where I think anyone could maybe not anyone,
Speaker 1: but those who want to pursue soudi grouse can you
Speaker 1: probably have quite a few encounters if you gave it,
Speaker 1: you're all. You know, it's one of those where you're
Speaker 1: probably gonna have a good opportunity to see what you're chasing.
Speaker 1: And you know, especially if you if you've got a
Speaker 1: pair of ears on, you'd like to walk around the woods.
Speaker 1: It's perfect hunt for you. Bring your kid out. You
Speaker 1: can't be a little kid though. My kid couldn't climb mean,
Speaker 1: my five ye old, he's five now, he if you
Speaker 1: made a goal to find one a day, if you're like,
Speaker 1: I could take my boy out and be like, our
Speaker 1: goal is to find one and we're gonna bring a
Speaker 1: ton of snacks and looking a lot of holes under
Speaker 1: trees and have a general good time and maybe you know,
Speaker 1: but yeah, you're not gonna have it downhill though. Man,
Speaker 1: it's well, I'd wind up carrying it. I'd wind up
Speaker 1: carrying it. Yeah, it's hard. You can't really carry someone
Speaker 1: not gonna carry anyone down that. Yeah, I got he's
Speaker 1: gonna get a little older. Is that your concluding thought? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And then uh yeah, besides this Devil's Club. You know
Speaker 1: what my comcluding thought already planned out my concluding thought,
Speaker 1: which is freaking Devil's Club. Yeah. God, that stuff it's terrible.
Speaker 1: There wasn't too much. There was a little bit. There
Speaker 1: was more in the Alaska Range whenever we were there
Speaker 1: with Rourke that we were going through that was thick.
Speaker 1: But man, that stuff is just it's terrible. I like
Speaker 1: it better than poison oak. Absolutely a lot better than
Speaker 1: poison oak for two reasons. One, where you get it
Speaker 1: is where you get it right. It doesn't spread, there's
Speaker 1: no surprises, and it doesn't get on your packer unless
Speaker 1: I mean unless you're like, unless you pee different than
Speaker 1: I do, because it doesn't get on your packers. So
Speaker 1: it's like, when you come out of the wood, you're like,
Speaker 1: I have Devil's Club in these places, right, it's not
Speaker 1: like poison Like a week later it's like, oh no,
Speaker 1: I have Devil's Club. You know. It's like, did I
Speaker 1: really touch myself there while that was going on? You
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Um, did you grab, did you?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know you did. You talked about it,
Speaker 1: but like you know, you're grabbing for vines and stuff
Speaker 1: when you're going up and you grab a line of
Speaker 1: spikes to put yourself up, and just the main the
Speaker 1: main I got bit slapped where I was. I moved
Speaker 1: one out of the way with my foot, you know,
Speaker 1: bent it out of the oil of my foot, and
Speaker 1: it slipped from out of my toe and came up
Speaker 1: and just door nailed me. So that like my most
Speaker 1: Devil's Club action is from that one thing. But also
Speaker 1: one time I caught one on the leg and thought
Speaker 1: that my pants, but that didn't happen. I thought my
Speaker 1: pants would stop it, but I got like a thigh
Speaker 1: full of Devil's Club. Do you my packers clean? I
Speaker 1: bring this up only because Yanni's Yanni permanently, permanently deformed
Speaker 1: his packer with poison outen. He told me it was
Speaker 1: so bad that if he was to meet I mean,
Speaker 1: he's happily married, stay married rest his life, but if
Speaker 1: he was not, somehow, in a hypothetical situation, was not
Speaker 1: and had to meet a new gal. The new gal
Speaker 1: would wonder what was going on? Right exactly it was
Speaker 1: only one way to etch it. Um all right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess Michael cleaning thought was Yanni's uh little thing either. Um,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining. Oh a couple of things, a couple
Speaker 1: of yeah by one on his t shirts. Also check
Speaker 1: out the show meat Eater UH Sportsman channel Thursdays at
Speaker 1: eight when around the air. UH. If you don't do that,
Speaker 1: go to meat Eater dot v a x dot TV.
Speaker 1: You can download and stream all kinds of meat Eater.
Speaker 1: We just finished our best episode ever. I'm not sure yet.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out a way. I'm gonna put
Speaker 1: some episodes up for free on vhex man Um, but
Speaker 1: don't wait for that. Just go buy one for now
Speaker 1: and then, and and and and buy one his t shirts,
Speaker 1: but don't buy so many of the quits. That's job,
Speaker 1: all right? Is that it? That's it? Good night? Hey
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