Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast, coming at you, shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening uncast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by First Light, creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt, first Light, go farther, stay longer. All right,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna I'm gonna set the scene for you.
Speaker 1: We're in um hotel in Albuquerque, Chester Dirt and Rick
Speaker 1: her own bed together, pretty nice. Carl's in his own bed.
Speaker 1: I gotta bed to myself. It's weird that, like, you
Speaker 1: got your own bed, but then there's three of them
Speaker 1: in that bed. I might still be smelling bad man.
Speaker 1: That could have something to do with it. Seth, Is
Speaker 1: that that that that's car? That's that's a seemed frequent guest,
Speaker 1: Carl Malcolm. Seth is sitting on a little you call
Speaker 1: that thing now ottoman. Yeah, using the bed as a desk.
Speaker 1: And I'm one of those little hotel desks, which I
Speaker 1: can't bring myself to use generally. This is something kind
Speaker 1: of depressing about him. I do it in bed, when
Speaker 1: I got it, when I'm in a hotel, I type
Speaker 1: in bed. She looked like it just looks like your office,
Speaker 1: I know, And I got this little coffee making you're
Speaker 1: breaking a big story. There's a beautiful Uh. I appreciate
Speaker 1: the pinon cone framed art on the wall over there.
Speaker 1: That's a nice touch for the Southwest. No, it is good.
Speaker 1: It's got a Southwest vibe in here. We're coming off
Speaker 1: of a um, wonderful turkey hunt in the Helo Wilderness,
Speaker 1: which we're gonna dive into the significance of that wilderness
Speaker 1: and wilderness is in general. Um, first off, I got
Speaker 1: to talked about a couple of things. Uh, someone Chester
Speaker 1: how many tests my meat submissions came in? I heard
Speaker 1: that just that I checked that morning the podcast came
Speaker 1: out and we had Corey said we had test my
Speaker 1: meat submissions. Is that true? Well, I don't get all
Speaker 1: of them, and I actually haven't had a chance to
Speaker 1: really go through all my emails yet, just because we're
Speaker 1: on the road. Um, but on the trail, on the trail,
Speaker 1: this is the hotel creamer, I'm not I don't know.
Speaker 1: I probably have fifteen, but I don't think Corey sending
Speaker 1: me all of them. Just and then you got, um,
Speaker 1: you got criticized by a Warner. What we're talking about
Speaker 1: is our our metiat or laboratories, which we started out Jesse.
Speaker 1: You don't even know yet, buddy, I got a surprise
Speaker 1: for you. When you see your lab coat. That would
Speaker 1: be a good look for Chester. It is for some reason,
Speaker 1: I'm slightly afraid I went with the most appropriate Chester nickname.
Speaker 1: Oh you're gonna be very very happy. I wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: tell you, but I can't keep bit of secret most appropriate.
Speaker 1: That's good, Chester the Tester me eat your laboratoryes patch
Speaker 1: and chest of the tester embroidered on your life. Couldn't
Speaker 1: I couldn't know. I'm not good. I couldn't keep the
Speaker 1: secret an longer. That's killing me. So we have a
Speaker 1: warm telling telling the machine we have Chester and what
Speaker 1: we've been doing with it. It's a Warner Bratsler sheer
Speaker 1: force machine. We do not have it in the hotel
Speaker 1: with us. Basically, keep it real simple, it is it.
Speaker 1: It's like a scale and it's got a blade, and
Speaker 1: the blade slices the meat or shears the meat, and
Speaker 1: that scale will give you the pounds of force that
Speaker 1: it takes two slice through that. And there's this whole
Speaker 1: scale on tenderness, and we're getting a bunch of submissions
Speaker 1: in for wild game testing out how tender your wild
Speaker 1: game is. Some people are more interesting, how tough it
Speaker 1: is personally? Yeah, yeah, well here's the deal, dirt. It's
Speaker 1: a little tricky. So yeah, I'm gonna get there in
Speaker 1: one second. Like you bide into your buddy comes home
Speaker 1: and he's like, man, that elk I shot was tough. Hell,
Speaker 1: let's role play. You tell me, Um, you do it
Speaker 1: to me, Steve, I shot at elk in New Mexico
Speaker 1: in the wilderness, and I got that thing back, and man,
Speaker 1: was it tough. Sit. It's not like that elk that
Speaker 1: I shot up in Montana. You want to see tough,
Speaker 1: you should taste some of my aw dad. Oh shit,
Speaker 1: If you want to see tough, man, you should test
Speaker 1: that twenty year old bear I shot. Well, you know what,
Speaker 1: let's send it to me either laboratories and find out
Speaker 1: who's is actually tough. Te my meat? What is it
Speaker 1: you send it to send it to? No, Okay, let's
Speaker 1: keep the role play going. I'm gonna I'm gonna retort. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: ship Chester, let's send it. Let's submit our proposal at
Speaker 1: meat eater at the meat eater dot com with the
Speaker 1: subject line all caps test my meat. I bet you
Speaker 1: mine is going to be tougher than yours, and Chester
Speaker 1: the tester will review your submission and decide if you
Speaker 1: should submit your sample or not. Yep, and then we're
Speaker 1: gonna give a prize to the toughest game meat that
Speaker 1: we can get our hands on. It's gonna be a
Speaker 1: heck of a good time. Hopefully I don't. There's I'm
Speaker 1: already getting look at work on that one on the plane.
Speaker 1: Can you think of a better retort? It's gonna be
Speaker 1: a heck of a good time. There's uh, you should
Speaker 1: put that on his lap coat. There's already it's long,
Speaker 1: so down towards the bottom. I could say it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a heck. There's already people writing in like saying
Speaker 1: like we better do this right because there's so many variables.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Jess has already been accused in the in
Speaker 1: keeping with the times, he's already been accused of spreading misinformation.
Speaker 1: But this isn't about COVID. This is about meat testing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, we tested a peep. How serious can it
Speaker 1: really be? But I can guarantee you guys, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do my absolute best to make sure everything is as
Speaker 1: accurate as possible. There's gonna be some bribery sent your
Speaker 1: way there, chet, So what here's what they do. Here's
Speaker 1: the conundrum, dirt. Then we'll move on just because just
Speaker 1: keep you posting. This is a very expensive machine. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we can't just do it once in dropics. That
Speaker 1: would be fiscally irresponsible. So we need to do it
Speaker 1: a whole bunch to justify having bought this damn thing
Speaker 1: very expensive. Um, here's the thing. Here's where you out
Speaker 1: of conundrum. If you're doing it like for real. Um,
Speaker 1: Like you're like breeding cattle and trying to find like
Speaker 1: what cow, what attributes whatever, diet genetics, whatever yields the
Speaker 1: most tender blank t bone. You want great uniformity, So
Speaker 1: they always cook the meat to the same temperature, Let
Speaker 1: it cool overnight, cut the core, test the core, so
Speaker 1: and doing the game meat thing. Do you stick to
Speaker 1: that or do you do a thing where like, well,
Speaker 1: let's do it like how one would best prepare it.
Speaker 1: And then and then to tell people that because these
Speaker 1: are two different interesting lines of inquiry. One is like,
Speaker 1: because this gives a numeric value to toughness. What's like
Speaker 1: super ass tough chester five five is superasst I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: five is tough. Unacceptable. Yeah, in industry terms, it's unacceptable.
Speaker 1: What's acceptable in industry terms? Um, I think around like
Speaker 1: two point five? Like three. It's like, and I've seen
Speaker 1: some bulls that are if five at the top, I've
Speaker 1: seen some sixes. Okay, yeah, so you you you get it,
Speaker 1: and you test all these different game needs and be like, yes,
Speaker 1: cooked to like labs SPACs. It's this. But there's an
Speaker 1: interesting line of inquiry where you let's say someone has
Speaker 1: a the toughest bull in the world or buck in
Speaker 1: the world. Okay, and you're like, let's suevied a steak
Speaker 1: and then reverse syrit and tests that result versus putting
Speaker 1: a cold, wet, half frozen steak on a five degree
Speaker 1: grill and and then be like, right, like what strategies
Speaker 1: does one? Like what what might be the outcome once
Speaker 1: you have a tough ask bowl? Or we do this,
Speaker 1: you take the tough ask bowl. Let's say someone sends
Speaker 1: you around off a really tough bowl. We'll test it
Speaker 1: labs backs. Then we'd have like Kevin glaspie, cook it
Speaker 1: a handful of ways and test those and see, follow me,
Speaker 1: that's a good idea. Yeah that man, that's the worst
Speaker 1: case scenario, best case scenario, and in all these and
Speaker 1: then tell them how you already got in trouble telling
Speaker 1: the guy. Do you want to talk about the guy
Speaker 1: that sent you a mean email? Real quick? Would you
Speaker 1: compare a bear then to an elk or would it
Speaker 1: be elk category? Here's what here's the beauty of the
Speaker 1: thing is. You could then say, yeah, you could take
Speaker 1: what do you gotta do, like, how do you you
Speaker 1: cook it to? What? Acording to labs backs, Well, it
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter. I mean, sure it does, but I
Speaker 1: was cooking it medium rare, so I just did that
Speaker 1: one last time. But I think all of them will
Speaker 1: be cooked to what's medium rare temp typically on like
Speaker 1: a steak. I'm sorry, medium rare or I think over there,
Speaker 1: I think I think what we'll do is like suvit
Speaker 1: um to temp very similar size of meat and then
Speaker 1: quick reverse serum so they'll all be very consistent. And
Speaker 1: then you cut core samples. There's like a little mechanism
Speaker 1: where you cut course samples out. You're supposed to cut
Speaker 1: three cores. And here's the internet of thing we already
Speaker 1: found out. Um, if you if it's rare in the
Speaker 1: middle and you cut a core, you know, have a
Speaker 1: core like imagine you have a cylinder. Let's say you
Speaker 1: have a cylinder. Like let's just imagine it's your finger. Okay,
Speaker 1: your middle knuckle is pink, let's say, and the ends
Speaker 1: are more brown where you sheer, you're getting different scores.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like that more cook shit is scoring to nose.
Speaker 1: So like taking a core sample out of that middle
Speaker 1: parallel with the grain, not perpendicular, because then yeah, there
Speaker 1: you're cutting cross obviously. But yeah, some guy wrote in
Speaker 1: just I don't need to go into it, but he
Speaker 1: was just saying, like, it's very difficult to do accurate
Speaker 1: tests like this. Was he making a play to be
Speaker 1: the person that was he making a play to be
Speaker 1: Chester the Tester? No, he was just basically saying, like information.
Speaker 1: Someone wrote in, Um, this is interesting. He decided to google.
Speaker 1: He googled Chester the Tester, and I'm disappointed to find
Speaker 1: in this will change over time. Disappointed. I'll disappoint to
Speaker 1: find that when you google Chest of the Tester, you
Speaker 1: do not find Chest of the tester. You find a
Speaker 1: ceramic figuring of a rotund, pudgy little chef testing licking
Speaker 1: a spoon that he has dipped into a vat called
Speaker 1: Heavenly Chocolate. The figuring in like a little I got
Speaker 1: to look it into it more. Chester is gonna we
Speaker 1: need to get one of them son's bitches. Chester. Um,
Speaker 1: that's the logo Brandon Butler. Who. So, I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: a Brandon Butler update to remind you guys who Brandon
Speaker 1: Butler is one He's been on the podcast. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I need I have hunted turkeys for him. We would
Speaker 1: call him very much a friend to the show. Sometime back,
Speaker 1: some friends of his were raising money for him because
Speaker 1: he reported some poachers who then burned his cabin down. Whoa,
Speaker 1: the guy that burned his cabin down just went back
Speaker 1: to prison on a five year stint. But not for
Speaker 1: the arson Brandon. This is a This is a this
Speaker 1: is a teaser because brand is gonna come back on
Speaker 1: the show to tell this whole sort of is a
Speaker 1: crazy story. It involves a five ft three pound guy
Speaker 1: named Tiny Round. Now listen, I was gonna give you
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna weet your appetites here for how if
Speaker 1: you're gonna commit a crime, America is the country to
Speaker 1: do it in, man America, Like, like, this is a
Speaker 1: great place to be a criminal. They just don't do
Speaker 1: anything to you here. So can we have murder in
Speaker 1: this country? So none of this guy? This guy burns
Speaker 1: down his place. How do you know that he's not
Speaker 1: sleeping there? Burns down his place. He gets him on
Speaker 1: trail cam burning it down, and he's not even in
Speaker 1: jail for burning it down. Tiny's the arsonist or that
Speaker 1: he'll he'll tell the whole story. I just like that
Speaker 1: little detail. So he also broke into this other dude's cabin,
Speaker 1: was living in the cabin, left his pro left his
Speaker 1: parole papers in the cabin after stealing a four wheeler
Speaker 1: and a generator. Okay, pleads guilty of to that, and
Speaker 1: that constitutes a Class C felon. But he's already fell anyway.
Speaker 1: But that constitutes a Class C felon. Burning Brandon's entire
Speaker 1: house down, on the other hand, is a Class D felony.
Speaker 1: Have they convicted him on both? He get to serve
Speaker 1: those things. Concurrently, great country to commit crimes in, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna go do something bad, do too bad
Speaker 1: things because you just do it concurrently. Anyways, it's ridiculous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read like a pamphlet. You know, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do that book. Um, hunters making the cover for the book.
Speaker 1: The book is called right if we talked about four?
Speaker 1: But he's making the cover for the book. We're starting
Speaker 1: with the cover. It's the books called how could I
Speaker 1: Be Cold but my balls are balls are still sweaty?
Speaker 1: How could I be cold but my balls are still sweaty?
Speaker 1: The Untold Truth about Sleeping Bags? And this is gonna
Speaker 1: be how could I be cold when my balls are sweaty?
Speaker 1: Truth about Sleeping Bags? But I think I should write
Speaker 1: a pamphlet like that, says UM. So you'd like to
Speaker 1: commit some crimes, it would be tips for criminals. Apparently
Speaker 1: if you do two really bad things, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because you only get to go to jail for one
Speaker 1: of them. Oh my god, man, Um, he's gonna come
Speaker 1: in and tell this is this story is great. Oh,
Speaker 1: just to titillate you a little more. Um. They also
Speaker 1: burned down a ranger station like a Forest Service ranger station.
Speaker 1: Burned down a Forest Service ranger station. Same individual. They
Speaker 1: felt like they were being persecuted when they started looking
Speaker 1: into their poaching habitat and the just terrible people. And
Speaker 1: they didn't He didn't get in trouble for that. You know,
Speaker 1: he's in five years. If you back, I'll burning more
Speaker 1: ship down. Gosh, I would think, like destroying federal property,
Speaker 1: great country to commit crimes and it would be a
Speaker 1: bigger deal. What a jerk. Well, you know, we're cleaning
Speaker 1: that turkey the other day and I had blood. I
Speaker 1: was plucking a turkey. I had blood in my hands
Speaker 1: and the feathers kept sticking in my hands. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: got me thinking about getting tired and feathered. Oh it
Speaker 1: would be a good let's bring that ship back. But
Speaker 1: I think cutting appendages and shipped off should come back.
Speaker 1: We talked about this in the car. For theft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like for burning ship down, you should lose your your
Speaker 1: thumb that you strike that you roll the lighter with,
Speaker 1: or maybe get a burn. Yeah, caught your thumbofs. You
Speaker 1: can't work a big light anymore. Burn your other figure tips. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm kind of hard on. I'm
Speaker 1: hard on. Uh, you know, like that kind of like
Speaker 1: potentially fate like burning people's houses. Now it feels bad,
Speaker 1: just old fashioned with on every everyone. Everyone should see
Speaker 1: the same. Everyone should see that the same way you do. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's personal to me too, because Um, he had
Speaker 1: so many cool like hunting and fishing artifacts and stuff
Speaker 1: in there that he lost, like really cool stuff in there.
Speaker 1: He built the place, but he built a place by hand. Man. Um,
Speaker 1: he's coming on top about that. Guy rode into This
Speaker 1: is interesting because I've I've noticed this a bunch, I
Speaker 1: haven't thought about it much. He um recently discovered, Um,
Speaker 1: a raccoon latrine. Uh, I'm sure the group was gonna
Speaker 1: think of a bunch of animals that use communal latrines.
Speaker 1: Uh nil No, nil. Guy used communal latrines that are
Speaker 1: as big as a queen'size bed and actually forms a hill. Yep,
Speaker 1: what's that? Llamas? Yeah, but I was gonna stick to
Speaker 1: hunting animals. Um, Lamas do a communal latrine. Swamp bread,
Speaker 1: let's do a communal latrine, Otters do a communal latrine,
Speaker 1: and raccoons do a communal latrine. Um, what else is
Speaker 1: the communal do you see when you're walking through the woods?
Speaker 1: You'll find a pile of growl ship. M do you
Speaker 1: ever see that? I'd like to have a growlse expert
Speaker 1: answer me that. I don't know if it's a latrine,
Speaker 1: but it's like that thing set there for a while.
Speaker 1: I often thought that it was in a bad snow storm.
Speaker 1: He was sitting there under the snow. Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: you think, Carl? Well, the other place you'll see that
Speaker 1: oftentimes is on the back side of a drumming log
Speaker 1: where a male likes to hang out in the spring,
Speaker 1: strutting his stuff and you know, beating his wings to
Speaker 1: attract a female. They'll pile up a retty significant little
Speaker 1: heap of grouse droppings. Yeah, I've seen it where I
Speaker 1: felt like, I said, because are you ever going out? Um?
Speaker 1: We used to hunt grouse a lot in Michigan. If
Speaker 1: you had a bad snowstorm and you'd go grouse hunting,
Speaker 1: you'd bust grouse where there's no tracks. Yeah, they just
Speaker 1: come busting right out of the snow. Was there when
Speaker 1: it snowed and stayed under the snow. You have out
Speaker 1: of the snow and there's no thing coming in, it's
Speaker 1: just exiting. Yeah, you'll have a hole and then you'll
Speaker 1: have the spot where both wings beat down on the
Speaker 1: side of the snow rocketing out of the snow pile.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of tube with a yeah, but I've
Speaker 1: seen him, like you're saying, with dozens of dozens of pellets,
Speaker 1: well you get like a pile behind a drumming log
Speaker 1: and a quick cool aside. When it comes to trying
Speaker 1: to capture grouse like for research purposes, one of the
Speaker 1: most effective ways to get him is at those drumming
Speaker 1: logs because they're very territorial. This has a nice link
Speaker 1: to talk in turkeys as well, um, because there we're
Speaker 1: going to kind of I know that there's nothing that
Speaker 1: a male grouse hates more than seeing another male grouse
Speaker 1: somewhere near his drumming spot. And so the way you
Speaker 1: capture him is throw a little mirror up in the
Speaker 1: back of a trap where a grouse on the drumming
Speaker 1: log will see his own reflection, and by and large
Speaker 1: you're gonna have that that male grouse attack his reflection
Speaker 1: in the back of that trail off the drumming log.
Speaker 1: We were out hunting bears of clay one time and
Speaker 1: we made a mistake of camping at a drumming log
Speaker 1: and that thing all night long really is walking around
Speaker 1: like through the sleeping bags. I'm that kidney man. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I've ever heard one drumming at night.
Speaker 1: It was going crazy. Then you guys there and remember
Speaker 1: that we were on that. Yeah, so he was going
Speaker 1: on like a little generator. When I was, before I
Speaker 1: was old enough the bowl hunt, I was sitting in
Speaker 1: my brother's tree stand around. My dad would set multiple
Speaker 1: tree stands up so you can sit. I'll send with
Speaker 1: my brother. Before I was on the bow hunting. He's
Speaker 1: bow hunting and I'm hearing and I said to him
Speaker 1: at one point, I always mad, I said, that guy
Speaker 1: can't get that lawnmore started. So you know, we've we've
Speaker 1: been talking a little bit about u the sort of
Speaker 1: emerging turkey hunting opportunity up in the Upper Peninsula, back
Speaker 1: in our native state of Michigan. And this past spring
Speaker 1: um I spent a bunch of times stomping around up
Speaker 1: there looking for looking for gobblers. And one of the
Speaker 1: super cool things about turkey hunting up there is at
Speaker 1: first light, right when it's like time to start hearing
Speaker 1: birds gobbling on the roost the rough grouse are going
Speaker 1: berserk as well, so you're they're listening for gobbles in
Speaker 1: the distance, and meanwhile you've got drumming grouse all around you.
Speaker 1: The geese are starting to head back north. So it's
Speaker 1: just like this embodiment of spring reawakening. And this past
Speaker 1: spring a seriously and this past spring I was hearing
Speaker 1: so many drummers that it, you know, it was a
Speaker 1: great indication for what the fall hunting season was going
Speaker 1: to look like. And that's one of the ways, of course,
Speaker 1: that they evaluate grouse numbers on the landscapes to do
Speaker 1: these spring drumming. But while Turkey hunting, you know, I
Speaker 1: was already starting to text my buddies, like, come mid October,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have some real good grouse hunting based on
Speaker 1: what I'm hearing out here in the Turkey Woods, and
Speaker 1: that that definitely turned out to be the case this
Speaker 1: past fall. I read once that with roughed grouse, a
Speaker 1: limiting factor can be the prevalence or absence of drumming logs.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting because they're so fussy about the height
Speaker 1: and then visibility around it. Yeah, and that you could
Speaker 1: you could mechanically improve your grouse habitat by making appropriate
Speaker 1: drumming logs. If you don't have them, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you believe that or not. I'm so I will
Speaker 1: face my skepticism by saying that I'm not a rough
Speaker 1: grouse expert. But when I think about the things, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of driving reproductive success, typically it's it's limiting factors
Speaker 1: on the female side of the equation more than on
Speaker 1: the male side. Um. Now that being said, one of
Speaker 1: the things I love doing when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: um up in leland Ock County, the northwest Lower Peninsula,
Speaker 1: Michigan in the spring, when i'd be out morale mushroom
Speaker 1: picking and just being in the woods, if i'd hear
Speaker 1: drumming roughies, I'd try to sneak in and see if
Speaker 1: I could see the mail. And so I've looked at
Speaker 1: a lot of drumming logs just out of my own
Speaker 1: curiosity as a as a kid growing up. And there
Speaker 1: is a striking consistency in the characteristics of the places
Speaker 1: that those males like to show off their stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of height, in terms of having good visibility
Speaker 1: around them, and obviously you know, not unlike a gobbling turkey.
Speaker 1: They're making a heck of a lot of noise to
Speaker 1: try to show off for the females. And that's a
Speaker 1: very dangerous thing in a landscape where you've ut example,
Speaker 1: predators who will love nothing more than a plump rough
Speaker 1: grouse to snack on in the spring. Um people, folks
Speaker 1: at home on what we're talking about. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: that was actually a perfect replication, was it? Anyhow? This
Speaker 1: guy raccoon raccoon defecation piles, So he was renovating an
Speaker 1: old cab and and and discovered one. It was blown
Speaker 1: away by the smelling sight of the communal to trine.
Speaker 1: It's got him googling later that night, which led him
Speaker 1: to the CDC page on raccoon roundworm war. Family has
Speaker 1: ever had any experience of raccoon roundworm? Seems to be
Speaker 1: extremely rare occurrence in humans, yet extremely common in our
Speaker 1: Midwest raccoon population. I haven't had, and I've never That's
Speaker 1: one of those many things I just choosing out to
Speaker 1: paying attention to. Like the list of diseases you can
Speaker 1: get from stuff is so we're gonna talk about a
Speaker 1: nerd disease in a a minute is so long that you
Speaker 1: just after a while, it just you know it sounds
Speaker 1: gross though you don't want that ship. But now, I've
Speaker 1: never taken any precautions to avoid raccoon roundworm, and I
Speaker 1: have looked. You know, when you're trapping raccoons, you like.
Speaker 1: A great find is latrine, which usually identifies a den.
Speaker 1: Try ah aving influenzas hitting some wild turkeys in Billings,
Speaker 1: Montana um near our headquarters, not too terribly far away
Speaker 1: from my headquarters, some guy found a I was just
Speaker 1: reading an article about this guy finds a turkey dead
Speaker 1: and things that got hit by a car. Just looking
Speaker 1: around and find six dead turkeys laying around his place.
Speaker 1: And they tested them. They tested three of them, and
Speaker 1: those those three turkeys that died Avian influenza. Jeez. So
Speaker 1: it has at least in that case, UM has moved
Speaker 1: into wild turkey populations as it spreads naturally through our
Speaker 1: bird populations. I texted the wild turkey doc Michael Chamberlain.
Speaker 1: He said they're at University of Georgia. They are testing
Speaker 1: a lot of birds and and he he can speak
Speaker 1: to this if it changes, but this might be dated
Speaker 1: by the time you hear it. But he was saying
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to impact wild turkeys quite like is
Speaker 1: in a and as devastating of a way as it
Speaker 1: seems to hit other bird species. But if covid' is
Speaker 1: any indication, you can probably expect someone to make turkey
Speaker 1: hunting illegal now because you could get avian influenza from it.
Speaker 1: Let's hope that doesn't uh go on? Uh, well we
Speaker 1: have ea chat uh Chester and Seth Key give us
Speaker 1: a Wally tour update please yep um, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: give a cable news that was good. The continuing wally
Speaker 1: had been shows off. Chester. The tester and Seth we
Speaker 1: jet and I went out to St. Peter, Minnesota to
Speaker 1: the Illumincraft headquarters and picked up our boat which is
Speaker 1: from headquarters. Got a tour and everything quick tour um,
Speaker 1: real quick. It's a well can you back up, come
Speaker 1: back up for a second. My comment about them making
Speaker 1: turkey hunting illegal. I want to point out that when
Speaker 1: the pandemic began, the state of Washington, which by and
Speaker 1: large is no friend of the American outdoorsman. Uh, the
Speaker 1: State of Washington banned the practice of fishing as part
Speaker 1: of their COVID response. Just remind people of this. This
Speaker 1: is not a thing to happen a long time ago.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, go ahead, soeth makes a lot of sense. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we went to Alumincraft picked up our competitor F s
Speaker 1: X boat that we're gonna be fishing out for the
Speaker 1: tournament season, and brought it home and Chet and I
Speaker 1: have been working our asses off rigging it. Like, um,
Speaker 1: this is like when you guys get done. I think
Speaker 1: the military is gonna want this boat. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like a spaceship. We got no excuses, um, but
Speaker 1: we're learning a lot on how to Like I have
Speaker 1: no not a ton of experience with like electrical work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Chat and I have never rigged a boat before, and
Speaker 1: it has to be done in a way, a specific
Speaker 1: way so everything doesn't interfere with Yeah, all your electronics
Speaker 1: package for people, Well, we have three helix twelve screens,
Speaker 1: which is you know, kind of the main unit that
Speaker 1: you're looking at. We have a Mancoda Old Treks trolling
Speaker 1: motor that has a built in UM two D. So on,
Speaker 1: are you have that Hummingbird three Mega three sixty hook
Speaker 1: to the trolling motor. We'll have a skimmer in the back.
Speaker 1: We'll have a side imaging down imaging in the back
Speaker 1: and then we'll have a mega live unit on the
Speaker 1: side and they'll all be talking to each other like
Speaker 1: what are they talking about? Dous feel like, I'm all
Speaker 1: for it? But do you feel like you're going to
Speaker 1: be right in line with your with the competition or
Speaker 1: you gonna be like outswinging them with the electronics. No,
Speaker 1: not outswinging them with electronics. Those dudes have that and
Speaker 1: more on their boat. And is there a limit to
Speaker 1: what you can do? What do you mean? I mean? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like infficient, is there a limit to how much uh
Speaker 1: technology you can introduce? Not as of now, I don't
Speaker 1: put which is kind of crazy because you know, as
Speaker 1: to technology gets better and better, especially in tournament fishing.
Speaker 1: Where's the where's the line? Right? Um? But man, it's
Speaker 1: sure fun to use that stuff, you know, like in
Speaker 1: the Olympics, you can't take a lot of drugs, right,
Speaker 1: So I could picture in the wall at tournament they
Speaker 1: might do something down the road about electronics. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't be open up your electronics. Yeah, we have all
Speaker 1: this stuff hooked up to some lithium batteries that at
Speaker 1: last minute we're supposed to get lithium batteries end up
Speaker 1: not getting them, but our friends up at Towns of
Speaker 1: Marine last minute help us out big time. Thanks to
Speaker 1: those guys. Yeah, that was big. The reason why we're
Speaker 1: in such a hurry is because we went on this
Speaker 1: New Mexico trip. We get back, we have a few
Speaker 1: days and then we gotta head out to our first derby,
Speaker 1: first tournament out at Fort Pack. So right before we left,
Speaker 1: this is how we left the boat. And it's sitting
Speaker 1: in sets garage right now. So I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: it all weekends because I've been laying in my sleeping
Speaker 1: bag thinking about hung I plant my garden? Really, what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put where? Yeah? Yeah, that's why you're every
Speaker 1: time chatting and I got like a second together on
Speaker 1: this hunt. We're like, hey, what do you think about?
Speaker 1: What do you think about this distribution panel? Yeah, but
Speaker 1: so we this is how we left the boat. We
Speaker 1: got it the whole front of the boat rigged up
Speaker 1: with the um Helix twelve screen. It was going to
Speaker 1: our battery, then to our distribution panel, then to all
Speaker 1: that stuff up, so it should have worked, should have
Speaker 1: turned on. So like we get it all set up,
Speaker 1: We're excited, you know, like rubbing our hands together, Like
Speaker 1: here we go, We're turning on the first unit, press
Speaker 1: the button. Nothing. You know, when they make a movie
Speaker 1: about this, that scene is gonna be a lot like
Speaker 1: in the Chevy Chase Christmas movie. Oh yeah, yeah, Christmas
Speaker 1: lights and plugs that nothing comes on. That would be
Speaker 1: a great scene. And yeah, after after doing a bunch
Speaker 1: of troubleshooting, I determined that our fuse panel is faulty. Man,
Speaker 1: What does happen to casting and reeling? Man, We're gonna
Speaker 1: be doing a lot of that too. But no, I
Speaker 1: get you. Yeah, I mean you can only you can
Speaker 1: put a shipload electronics on your boat. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, you gotta be a good fishing still
Speaker 1: gotta work the j you gotta be. You gotta work Jay,
Speaker 1: gotta no where fish live, how fish react to stuff?
Speaker 1: How many episodes are you guys gonna make about this
Speaker 1: whole thing? For um only four? Yeah, it's just like
Speaker 1: a little test makes sense because it's like three tournaments
Speaker 1: and then and then yeah, the first one is us
Speaker 1: just kind of more self filming. The next three are
Speaker 1: gonna Chris gill is going to come along with us,
Speaker 1: so it'll be way higher quality great too, because he
Speaker 1: likes to fish. Yea, yeah, and it's it's we're not
Speaker 1: we're not doing the traditional meat eat or like don't
Speaker 1: break the fourth wall deal. So Chris is gonna be
Speaker 1: like a character in it. It won't be fishing, but
Speaker 1: there'll be some banter. Uh, this is great, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be fun. You cannot fish. Just for everyone out there,
Speaker 1: there's people like a little bit like, oh, they're gonna
Speaker 1: have a third person in boat. We're gonna have cameras
Speaker 1: rolling the whole time. So by all means, if you
Speaker 1: want to sit there and look at that little go
Speaker 1: Pro SD card for nine hours and watches watch watch
Speaker 1: Chris film us there you go like where you know?
Speaker 1: So you're so too, because somehow having a third person
Speaker 1: on the boat it might be interpreted as a way
Speaker 1: to cheat, I don't know, like he's got a wall
Speaker 1: hidden in the camera. Competitive and well, you just have
Speaker 1: another person casting, right, That's why I'm gonna take But
Speaker 1: but you're gonna take a go pro position that so
Speaker 1: it's filming the whole boat and then there will be
Speaker 1: no interruption in the footage and you're gonna let it
Speaker 1: run all the way through and should someone ever want
Speaker 1: to say I want to know what happened on that boat,
Speaker 1: you would provide them with the entire day that they
Speaker 1: could analyze to see if there's breaks in the footage.
Speaker 1: They could watch everything that happened on that boat for
Speaker 1: nine hours. You gotta be careful which direction you're peeing
Speaker 1: off that boat. Do you guys have a way you
Speaker 1: guys might want to think about? UM, I don't know
Speaker 1: if it works. You have to get a big satellite
Speaker 1: dish ship on that boat. But imagine if you were
Speaker 1: able to people that could just live stream during the
Speaker 1: whole tournament. That would be great. That would be great.
Speaker 1: There'd be a lot of a lot of electronics, a
Speaker 1: lot more electronics. But yeah, there's no limited right you
Speaker 1: guys like that ship Instagram live? Yeah? Great? Uh. Let
Speaker 1: me have one more question for you guys. I'm real
Speaker 1: excited for you, but are you? UM, how would you
Speaker 1: rate going into the tournament season? How would you rate
Speaker 1: your cockiness? Mind? Mind? Very, I don't want I don't
Speaker 1: want to that's a that's Carl just introduced me to
Speaker 1: a new phrase, which value laden term. I don't want
Speaker 1: to use a valuated term. Um, cockiness, Like no one
Speaker 1: wants to be cocky, Like are you would you? How
Speaker 1: would you like? Okay, let me say this if if
Speaker 1: I came, if I if I was a future seer,
Speaker 1: and in many respects I am. But if I was
Speaker 1: a future seer and I came to you and said,
Speaker 1: turns out Chester, at the end of all this um,
Speaker 1: you will have placed how many people? Roughly it could
Speaker 1: be a hundred. And let's say we knew in my thing,
Speaker 1: I was like I saw the future there were a
Speaker 1: hundred boats you placed forty. Would you be like, damn, dude,
Speaker 1: that's great, better than I thought. Or would you be like, huh,
Speaker 1: I'd be real happy with some top twenties. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think forty would be Like, because I know
Speaker 1: we don't have any experience fishing tournaments. You guys got
Speaker 1: a lot of experiences. We have a lot of experience
Speaker 1: catching while I we know how to catch them and
Speaker 1: we're gonna work. Yeah, we don't. We don't have the
Speaker 1: experience that some of the guys have on these lakes.
Speaker 1: And like, yes, we could go to any of these
Speaker 1: lakes and catch a bag, but some dudes are gonna
Speaker 1: go and catch a bag of high twenties thirty because
Speaker 1: they just have it dialed and you guys are gonna
Speaker 1: roll in with five thirteens Like that could be a
Speaker 1: thing to happen. That could be a thing that happened.
Speaker 1: I think we'll do better than that, but I would.
Speaker 1: I think I think we have potential place in the
Speaker 1: like I think we can place in the top ten
Speaker 1: in one of these three tournaments. That's bold. The other two.
Speaker 1: I know we can do it, but I don't. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's possible for sure. Are you at liberty to say
Speaker 1: where the three locations are? Yeah, it's uh Tiber Fresno
Speaker 1: and four Pecks and Montana. There's a fourth one, Kanyon Ferry.
Speaker 1: But on my wedding day, here's the thing, his home waters.
Speaker 1: He's skipping his home water day to get married. That's
Speaker 1: the stupidest thing in the world, especially when I found
Speaker 1: out that he doesn't need to be at his own wedding.
Speaker 1: How's that because Montana lets your proxy marriage from the boat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he could assigned, he could assigned met him and I
Speaker 1: just stend up there with his girlfriend. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: stay silent on this one so I don't get myself
Speaker 1: support your decision. Just for the record, you would not bail.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you, Let me tell you a story.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you a story one time that that
Speaker 1: I don't want to say. I don't want to use names,
Speaker 1: but a very famous author told me a story. He
Speaker 1: had a kid he was mentoring, okay, and it wound
Speaker 1: up that he got an assignment lined up for the
Speaker 1: kid he was mentoring for a very prestigious publication, and
Speaker 1: he's like, now is your chance. I can't because that's
Speaker 1: my family vacation weekend. That's a little different that mentorship
Speaker 1: ended that second, Oh totally. He's like, you don't want
Speaker 1: this the way you need to want it, And I
Speaker 1: would say, there's nothing more important. I would say, there's
Speaker 1: a difference. There's a giant difference there. Happily ever after
Speaker 1: wallet fish, I love walleye fishing too, but I'm with you.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell the good. So here's a good story. Uh,
Speaker 1: if you hearken back, this is the sect. We don't
Speaker 1: normally do this. I don't like to do this this much,
Speaker 1: but so are our beloved friend Bubbly Doug was. He
Speaker 1: was allowed to do some follow up on on c
Speaker 1: w D after our episode with Ted Nugent. And then
Speaker 1: so we revisited the Nugent episode with Doug doing a
Speaker 1: rebuttal uh. And now we're revisiting our Nugent episode again
Speaker 1: with the the really detail laden story from a guy.
Speaker 1: So when news were talking about how the news used
Speaker 1: to do whiplash bashes and and we had attended some
Speaker 1: whipple did you ever attend whiplash bash? I can't say
Speaker 1: that I have. But you were passed on the highway
Speaker 1: by Ted driving that zebra strike bris straight Bronco. That's
Speaker 1: down by Jackson, Michigan. That's that's as like important as
Speaker 1: a whiplash bash when you're in high school. So guys
Speaker 1: like he was working backstage security for a Nugent concert
Speaker 1: up at the Castle in Charlotte. Boy, it's one of
Speaker 1: the rare occasions when Ted missed a shot on stage.
Speaker 1: Oh no. At the end of the show, Ted was
Speaker 1: as a security guard points out, Ted was so physically
Speaker 1: exhausted he needed help getting back to the dressing room.
Speaker 1: Was spent okay, um, the assistant said, I'm not supposed
Speaker 1: to do this, but I need to leave Ted's bow here.
Speaker 1: While I helped him back to his dressing room. Can
Speaker 1: you keep an eye on it until I come back
Speaker 1: and grab it? Well, of course, I said yes and
Speaker 1: he left. He sare's a lot of activity going on
Speaker 1: as people were leaving and bray can things down the venue,
Speaker 1: so it's very hectic backstage. At one point, a guy
Speaker 1: walks by the table and just nonchalantly grabs nuggets bow.
Speaker 1: Security guard goes up to him and says, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? He said, I'm supposed to bring this back
Speaker 1: to Ted. About that time, Ted's assistant walks up and
Speaker 1: asked what's going on. The security guard said, this guy
Speaker 1: is trying to take Ted's boat, and it was revealed
Speaker 1: that this person is in fact trying to steal Ted's
Speaker 1: bow and has no connection to Ted. The security guard
Speaker 1: summons the police officer, who then escorts the man off property.
Speaker 1: The police officer thanked him for stopping the crime. The
Speaker 1: assistant explains that that boat is never supposed to leave
Speaker 1: Ted's site and they made a mistake. Now she Ted
Speaker 1: gets word of this whole thing, comes out of his
Speaker 1: dressing room and gives him the broken arrow that broke
Speaker 1: upon Ted's miss on stage. He says, Ted walked up,
Speaker 1: shook my hand, said thanks for helping out tonight and
Speaker 1: handed me half of the broken arrow, which he had
Speaker 1: signed he's offered donated to the Land Access Initiative auction
Speaker 1: House of Oodities. I texted Ted to be like, did
Speaker 1: this ring a bell? He said, I remember everything, but
Speaker 1: I don't remember that. Oh, but I'm gonna email him
Speaker 1: the thing and see if it. If it feels legitimate,
Speaker 1: we will UM be adding that to the Auction House
Speaker 1: of Oodities for our land Access initiative. Another thing I
Speaker 1: want to point out about the Land Access Initiative, And
Speaker 1: we've got one more thing to top on the We're
Speaker 1: ben get into the turkeys in the healer UM. We
Speaker 1: recently got a note from the family of a guy
Speaker 1: named John Pennewit. His wife wrote in UM and she said,
Speaker 1: I was just a face in the crowd at one
Speaker 1: of your live shows in Houston, and she was pointing,
Speaker 1: and she gave us the news that I'm not sure
Speaker 1: what happened, but her husband, John Pennewit, who was a
Speaker 1: big fan of the show UM, had passed away young
Speaker 1: with kids, and they had in lieu of any kind
Speaker 1: of flowers or anything they had requested that UM family
Speaker 1: and friends make a donation to our land Access Initiative.
Speaker 1: This is John Pennewit from down in Texas, his family,
Speaker 1: and I had heard that a lot of donations to
Speaker 1: the Land Access Initiative are flooding in on behalf of
Speaker 1: John Pennewit. So I don't know what happened there, man,
Speaker 1: but really, uh um, sorry for the loss and thank
Speaker 1: you for the support. Though it seems like I'm not
Speaker 1: ideal scenario. Um, the corner crossing dudes and whylming we've
Speaker 1: been covering is real. Heavily found not guilty mm hmm.
Speaker 1: But here's the weird part. There's a civil case. You remember,
Speaker 1: like when O j Uh killed his wife and in
Speaker 1: a waiter, Um, he was found not guilty for the
Speaker 1: criminal thing like he didn't do it right, but then
Speaker 1: was found guilty and civil like when the family does
Speaker 1: a civil thing. So apparently the landowner is going after
Speaker 1: these dudes in a civil court case. See how that
Speaker 1: shakes out. Think about that. I'm looking at you, Carl,
Speaker 1: I feel like you'd be interested in this whole thing.
Speaker 1: I am interested in it. And two thoughts that come
Speaker 1: to mind. One is you know you kicked off talking
Speaker 1: about um America being a good place to do a crime,
Speaker 1: and this sort of flies in the face of that, right,
Speaker 1: the idea that you could be tried while so just
Speaker 1: from the standpoint of being um facing a court and
Speaker 1: being tried criminally and then being tried again in a
Speaker 1: civil suit for the same allegations, right, so sort of
Speaker 1: a you know, like the Jews didn't murder them criminally,
Speaker 1: but he murdered them civilly. I will refrain from commenting
Speaker 1: on the o J case. The other thought is, you know,
Speaker 1: the public access the corner crossing thing um. As an
Speaker 1: outdoors man myself who spends a lot of time stomping
Speaker 1: around in public ground, that's an issue that that I
Speaker 1: am very interested in and care a lot about, and
Speaker 1: also one you know, as an employee for a federal
Speaker 1: agency that you know, in a forum like this, my
Speaker 1: opinions and thoughts on it are probably best kept to
Speaker 1: myself because it's something that affects the agency I work for.
Speaker 1: But I can tell you, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of times I've been looking at a chunk of ground
Speaker 1: and thinking to myself, man, would be great to great
Speaker 1: across this, you know, this fence intersection and hunt that
Speaker 1: other stuff, and I've gone so far in New Mexico
Speaker 1: is to call a number of wardens to ask that question,
Speaker 1: to find out and you know, essentially gotten answers that
Speaker 1: were sufficiently um murky that I was uncomfortable doing that.
Speaker 1: And I can be more specific, like one one warden
Speaker 1: here said, from the state game and fish perspective, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't we wouldn't come after you for that, but I
Speaker 1: can't guarantee you that the local sheriff would feel the
Speaker 1: same way about it. Dave Wilms, who's our resident expert
Speaker 1: on this uh situation, notified me about the verdict, but
Speaker 1: then said, please do not think that this somehow overturns
Speaker 1: and you understanding, this doesn't change anything about corner crossing
Speaker 1: writ large. It's like these individuals, this instant, we're found
Speaker 1: not guilty. This is not like a Supreme Court case
Speaker 1: that like throws out or re established a precedent. It's
Speaker 1: just like these people. If someone got found not guilty
Speaker 1: of something, that doesn't mean that what they were charged
Speaker 1: with ceases to be a thing. So folks need to
Speaker 1: know that, all right, Carl, tell me, tell me like
Speaker 1: made me, make me like um, made me like wilderness areas.
Speaker 1: Man make you like wildern I think I just did already. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think you already did love him after it hit me,
Speaker 1: after this week hit me with him about the HeLa. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I spent about ten years getting to know
Speaker 1: the heal of wilderness. And when I you know, when
Speaker 1: when my wife and I made the decision to move
Speaker 1: from the Midwest to the Southwest, one of the things
Speaker 1: that really drew me to this part of the country
Speaker 1: was the history of this landscape, these landscapes and helping
Speaker 1: shape sort of the trajectory of conservation in America and globally.
Speaker 1: And then also the fact that you know today this
Speaker 1: ratio of population to public land in a place like
Speaker 1: New Mexico is so small that ratio, there's so many
Speaker 1: places you can go and get off the beaten path
Speaker 1: and really, you know, be away from the masses, and
Speaker 1: the HeLa is one of those spots where, if you're
Speaker 1: willing to put the miles in, you can get into
Speaker 1: a little corner of the universe where you're very unlikely
Speaker 1: to have a lot of other folks around. And you know,
Speaker 1: I anticipate as we're talking about this particular chunk of
Speaker 1: country people are going to be wondering, like, why, you know,
Speaker 1: why are we advertising how great the hell is um
Speaker 1: and then simultaneously saying it's a great place to find solitude.
Speaker 1: Right if you're if you're throwing out a banner saying
Speaker 1: the hell is an awesome place to visit, doesn't that
Speaker 1: kind of undermine the opportunity to get away from folks?
Speaker 1: And I would point out the heal of wilderness has
Speaker 1: over fifty different trailheads, sixty thousand acres um and all
Speaker 1: the travels by primitive means either walking in there on
Speaker 1: your own legs or pack stock, and so by all means,
Speaker 1: I want people to come around and poke around that
Speaker 1: landscape and get to know it and also understand the
Speaker 1: story of how the HeLa helped really shape the wilderness
Speaker 1: movement globally. Because we're coming up on the hundred the
Speaker 1: anniversary of the administrative designation of the HeLa in as
Speaker 1: the first UM officially recognized wild land anywhere on the planet.
Speaker 1: What do they call wilderness back then when there hadn't
Speaker 1: been the Wilderness Act UM. There's an article that So
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit about Aldo Leopold. I'm sure
Speaker 1: he was one of the you know, he was arguably
Speaker 1: the greatest champion for that that sort of formal recognition
Speaker 1: of wild lands. There were other players as well, a
Speaker 1: guy named Arthur Carr, for example, making a case for
Speaker 1: not developing a lake up in Colorado called Trappers Lake,
Speaker 1: and he and Leopold were going back and forth talking
Speaker 1: about the right balance between developing federal lands, you know,
Speaker 1: bringing in roads and trails and cabins. But then also
Speaker 1: like where's that line where do we where do we say, Okay,
Speaker 1: we've got enough development, Let's set some places aside where
Speaker 1: the highest and best use might be retaining there sort
Speaker 1: of primeval characteristics um a recognition and a sense of
Speaker 1: humility that we're not going to make these places any
Speaker 1: better through through our own management. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: the HeLa Um that was a place that Leopold pointed
Speaker 1: to as sufficiently unique and wild and like a last
Speaker 1: best chance in New Mexico to have a place that
Speaker 1: could be a two week pack string um into the wilderness.
Speaker 1: So the the language that he used in the nineteen
Speaker 1: article for Outdoor Life magazine was a plea for wilderness
Speaker 1: hunting grounds. That was the language as opposed to a
Speaker 1: designated wilderness area. He wrote about a plea for wilderness
Speaker 1: hunting grounds and part of the definition he used was
Speaker 1: a landscape large enough to contain a two week pack
Speaker 1: trip free of rhods. Really, yeah, that's what he's looking at.
Speaker 1: That's what he's looking at. Yep. And he preceded that article, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, Outdoor Life magazine was a great place to
Speaker 1: kind of reach the masses. But I think from a
Speaker 1: professional standpoint, and even more important point in the timeline
Speaker 1: was in ninete he wrote an article for the Journal
Speaker 1: of Forestry in their November issue and the title that
Speaker 1: article was the Wilderness and its Place in forest Recreational Policy,
Speaker 1: which sounds a little bit wonky the titles like, okay,
Speaker 1: but it's really important because what he did in this article,
Speaker 1: he's talking to all of his fellow professional foresters. Right.
Speaker 1: This is like the the pre eminent outlet for the
Speaker 1: forestry profession globally, the Journal of Forestry. And Leopold was
Speaker 1: one of the first students from the Yale School of Forestry,
Speaker 1: which was established by Gifford pin Show, the first chief
Speaker 1: of the Forest Services Forestry as in chopping trees down
Speaker 1: sel Yeah, yeah, this idea of and and you know,
Speaker 1: Gifford pin Show is one of the one of the
Speaker 1: giants of the conservation history of our country as well
Speaker 1: the first chief of the Forest Service. He established the
Speaker 1: Yale School of Forestry. He was a great thinker around conservation,
Speaker 1: and he he had this idea of sustainable use, wise
Speaker 1: use and the language the greatest good for the greatest
Speaker 1: number over the long run. And for a society like
Speaker 1: ours to manage these public resource is in a way
Speaker 1: where we're maximizing their value. And so when we talk
Speaker 1: about multiple use on our public land system, we're trying
Speaker 1: to balance a variety of needs and harvest a variety
Speaker 1: of renewable resources. So we're talking about forest products, we're
Speaker 1: talking about range land, we're talking about water, we're talking
Speaker 1: about recreational opportunity, we're talking about habitat for fish and wildlife,
Speaker 1: all these different uses. And it's not a matter of
Speaker 1: just rollback for something there because when you say forest,
Speaker 1: probably talking about like timber, Yeah, absolutely, um, minerals, yep,
Speaker 1: minerals are part of it as well. So these water
Speaker 1: I mean like pulling water that like like wilderness areas.
Speaker 1: National forest land often is the top of the sort
Speaker 1: of food chain on water like these are headwaters, so water,
Speaker 1: clean water coming off these places that are utilized as
Speaker 1: drinking water for people and utilized to water to eargate. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and in fact, when the when the when the forest
Speaker 1: reserves were initially being established by our country, um that
Speaker 1: recognition that advantageous flows of cleaning abundant water from these forests.
Speaker 1: That was one of the key drivers of the establishment
Speaker 1: of the forest reserves. That in timber production early on,
Speaker 1: those were the things that really were focused on. And
Speaker 1: you know, later on Congress passed the Multiple Use Sustained
Speaker 1: Yield Act, which brought in those five that I gave
Speaker 1: you in total. So we're talking timber, water, recreation, fish
Speaker 1: and wildlife habitat and forage for range, you know, livestock.
Speaker 1: And it put that that act, the Multiple You Sustained
Speaker 1: Yield Act put those five on equal footing. And so
Speaker 1: one of the challenges for a multiplicce agency like the
Speaker 1: Forest Services just balancing all those competing demands. But the
Speaker 1: brilliance of what Leopold did in this article is, you know,
Speaker 1: to his colleague who are all deeply immersed in this
Speaker 1: thinking around the greatest good for the greatest number over
Speaker 1: the long run. He made the case that there's a
Speaker 1: point where additional development starts to compromise that goal, because
Speaker 1: as you think about all these different potential uses of
Speaker 1: the national forests, um having some fraction of that landscape
Speaker 1: managed in a way that it provides the unique kind
Speaker 1: of opportunities that we've experienced this last week, that needs
Speaker 1: to be part of the equation. And so there's a
Speaker 1: point where additional development undermines the ability to deliver the
Speaker 1: greatest good for the greatest number over the long run.
Speaker 1: So he kind of used the logic and the training
Speaker 1: that he had received this Gifford Pinchot mindset to argue
Speaker 1: his case very eloquently for why places like the HeLa.
Speaker 1: You know, we we walked by some timber out there
Speaker 1: that you know, some of these ponderos of pine trees
Speaker 1: that are over a hundred feet tall, a couple hundred
Speaker 1: years old, straight as an arrow. I mean, they'd be
Speaker 1: they'd be beautiful lumber if they were milled. You could,
Speaker 1: you know, you could look at some of those stands
Speaker 1: and calculate a value of the forest products that are
Speaker 1: not being harvested in that landscape. But you're balancing that
Speaker 1: against values that are much more difficult to put a
Speaker 1: price tag on, like what would be the value of
Speaker 1: the experience we had this past week in dollars and cents.
Speaker 1: It gets a lot more difficult to calculate than board
Speaker 1: feet of lumber. Right. But Leopold's point was, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to think about managing these multiple uses, um, it
Speaker 1: makes sense for us while we have the opportunity in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen twenties to start recognizing we're not making
Speaker 1: more of this stuff, and if we if we go
Speaker 1: down the path of develop uping it, it's virtually impossible
Speaker 1: that we're ever going to undevelop it. Right, We're not
Speaker 1: gonna we're not gonna rewild these places if we go
Speaker 1: down that path. So we have this opportunity, we have
Speaker 1: this this this door is open now in the early
Speaker 1: nineties to say a place like the HeLa. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: other values that we could potentially extract there, but the
Speaker 1: highest and best use of this place would be preserving
Speaker 1: it in its primitive condition, not trying to make it better,
Speaker 1: not trying to open it up for extractive uses, retain
Speaker 1: it for its wildness. And that was a very radical
Speaker 1: idea in his professional circles. But he argued it on
Speaker 1: this logic that everyone was steeped in the pin show
Speaker 1: idea of the greatest good for the greatest number over
Speaker 1: the long run. Uh, how could it have been that right, Like,
Speaker 1: it couldn't have been that radical because they got it done.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't be able to get it done. Now I
Speaker 1: think that's true. I think you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: get it done. Wade no um and it one. It
Speaker 1: had like by the time they got around like doing
Speaker 1: the wilderness, like codifying the Wilderness Act and what sixty
Speaker 1: eight was it sixty four, So it was a full
Speaker 1: forty years between the administrative designation of the HeLa and
Speaker 1: then the National Wilderness Act, which was signed by lb
Speaker 1: J in nineteen sixty four, and that was overwhelmingly popular.
Speaker 1: It was overwhelmingly popular. That's right. Just to get people
Speaker 1: sense we're talking about so we we we debated the
Speaker 1: statistic there day two point seven percent of the land
Speaker 1: area in the lower forty eight two point seven percent
Speaker 1: of the land areas designated wilderness. So when people were
Speaker 1: like griping that they can't ride their bikes on designated wilderness,
Speaker 1: it's like you could ride your bikes on the other
Speaker 1: ninety seven point three percent of the country. Is it
Speaker 1: really that big of a deal. Yeah, right, you have
Speaker 1: of the country to ride bikes on. And when you're
Speaker 1: thinking about managing these different recreational opportunities, UM, you know
Speaker 1: there's always going to be those those points of conflict.
Speaker 1: But having some places where you know you don't have
Speaker 1: the mechanical advantage to cover ground, um, you know. I
Speaker 1: think again it comes back to this idea of just
Speaker 1: trying to provide opportunities for the different user groups that
Speaker 1: strike a balance. And it's you know, one thing I've
Speaker 1: come to recognize in my career in natural resources at
Speaker 1: this point is, UM, you're never going to be in
Speaker 1: a place where everybody's just like high five and then
Speaker 1: saying yeah, this is perfect because you know, because people
Speaker 1: don't see eye to eye. But at the core of it,
Speaker 1: you have a lot of different angles of passion coming
Speaker 1: in around this resource that lots and lots of people
Speaker 1: care about the public land system and how we're managing it.
Speaker 1: So when we're getting that that friction around an issue
Speaker 1: like bikes and wilderness, for example, UM, rather than lamenting
Speaker 1: the fact that you're always caught in this tension. As
Speaker 1: a natural resources professional, I like to remind myself the
Speaker 1: reason that tension exists is because so many different people
Speaker 1: care about this shared resource for so many different reasons.
Speaker 1: And I you know that that brings me a lot
Speaker 1: of optimism because people are engaged. And if people weren't engaged,
Speaker 1: if people didn't care, I think that would be, you know,
Speaker 1: a much less fortunate place for us to be. So mentally,
Speaker 1: as a natural source professional, I like to try to
Speaker 1: stand that, stand that in an optimistic place when things
Speaker 1: are really tense and frictions arising, just remember people care,
Speaker 1: people are engaged. That's a good thing, um when you're
Speaker 1: wrestling with like why would you tell people about a
Speaker 1: place like the HeLa right? Another thing to consider, I
Speaker 1: think is that we have so many acres in this
Speaker 1: country that are in limbo as potential future wilderness area mhm.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of land that's like wilderness. What they
Speaker 1: call wilderness are wilderness study areas where it's currently undeveloped.
Speaker 1: There's sort of like temporary restrictions on certain practices, and
Speaker 1: at some point, um there will be decisions that we
Speaker 1: made about how that those areas are gonna roll yep,
Speaker 1: that they're going to sort it out there in limbo
Speaker 1: right now. Some undoubtedly some of these wilderness study areas
Speaker 1: we'll get wilderness designation and some will lose their protections.
Speaker 1: Right and as those debates happen, I think that the
Speaker 1: more wilderness advocates you have are gonna land, are going
Speaker 1: to help more of that stuff land under permanent protection
Speaker 1: rather than temporary protection. Yes, I think there's truth to that.
Speaker 1: And you know, another aspect of this, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of trade off between highlighting how cool a place like
Speaker 1: the HeLa is versus keeping you know, keeping things on
Speaker 1: the d l um. The HeLa is not unique in
Speaker 1: providing opportunities to do the kind of things that we
Speaker 1: were just doing. The Heel is one place of many
Speaker 1: where folks can go out and whether it's turkey hunting
Speaker 1: or you know, looking for spruce grouse or going after
Speaker 1: a mule deer or trying to catch a cutthroat trout. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Heel is one amazing place. And take some time
Speaker 1: to educate yourself about where your local opportunities are. Two,
Speaker 1: work your tail off to get into a place where
Speaker 1: you're leaving a lot of you know, the the other
Speaker 1: folks behind at the trailhead who might not be as
Speaker 1: willing to go as deep as you want to go. Um.
Speaker 1: I mentioned to you this week, Steve, I've hunted wild
Speaker 1: turkeys in wilderness on all five National forests in New Mexico.
Speaker 1: So the Carson, the Santa Fe, the Cbola, the Lincoln,
Speaker 1: the HeLa, they all have wilderness areas with turkeys in them,
Speaker 1: and I've hunted turkeys in all those places. So I
Speaker 1: want to point out real quick that we're not talking
Speaker 1: about turkey hunting where you're like, oh, there's twenty of them. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well yeah, yeah, it's not any many square miles of
Speaker 1: what would be that would strike you as phenomenal turkey
Speaker 1: habitat with no turkeys or with with scattered turkeys. I'm saying,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of square miles. Yeah, that look good.
Speaker 1: There's Okay, you go out. Let me put it this way. Okay,
Speaker 1: you go out to bubbly dogs play, yep. Okay, find
Speaker 1: me a square mile of turkey habitat without a turkey
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, I can't do it, yeah, Okay, but
Speaker 1: I could go out and damn sure if someone went
Speaker 1: out to the HeLa, yeah and made me a square.
Speaker 1: You could you could square mile square. I could find
Speaker 1: place to put that square, and then they could like
Speaker 1: stop time and have people comment and they would be like,
Speaker 1: there is categorically wild turkey. I agree. I agree with
Speaker 1: your assessment on this square mile of turkey. It is
Speaker 1: it is absolutely a conscious decision to go past many,
Speaker 1: many turkeys to get to the edge of the Helo
Speaker 1: wilderness and then opt in on working like physically working
Speaker 1: much much harder to find and hunt Gobbler's physically working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: give some of the mileages, Like, give some of mileages
Speaker 1: you put in this week. I don't want it. I
Speaker 1: don't want to sound like, you know, like a blow harder,
Speaker 1: like I'm making stuff up. But you guys had a
Speaker 1: track function. You had a track function on I did not,
Speaker 1: And I'll be honest, like who had the track functions?
Speaker 1: I think? Yeah, Okay, you guys did You guys did
Speaker 1: in one day. I don't know why everybody's also acting
Speaker 1: like they don't know what I'm talking about. You guys
Speaker 1: in one day, you guys did well. No, you're rounding up,
Speaker 1: wasn't it fourteen point nine two? You did a fourteen
Speaker 1: point nine too mile loop and heard how many gobblers
Speaker 1: three and kill poly two to three? I would say,
Speaker 1: and killed how many zero? Fourteen point nine two? And
Speaker 1: we were joking like this idea of like we're going
Speaker 1: into the secret spot deep in the wilderness. You could
Speaker 1: share every way point tell we could you know, post
Speaker 1: it on mediator dot com, and very few people would
Speaker 1: actually go, I'll tell you, like, like here's a good
Speaker 1: story along these lines. Um. So April, it was like
Speaker 1: right at the right at the peak of you know,
Speaker 1: the pandemic, everybody, you know, the world was in turmoil.
Speaker 1: And I thought to myself, you know this length that
Speaker 1: the language of social distancing was just starting to kind
Speaker 1: of be used. And I've been toying with the idea
Speaker 1: of doing a backpack like a solo HeLa backpack turkey hunt,
Speaker 1: and you know, I was sort of joking with my wife.
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is gonna be social distancing to the
Speaker 1: extreme because the closest person will probably be, you know,
Speaker 1: fifteen miles from me. And I packed back in and
Speaker 1: you know, it's fortunate enough to to shoot two gobblers
Speaker 1: and I plucked them and had them hanging from my backpack,
Speaker 1: and they're both you know, both long beards. So I
Speaker 1: had I had used my shotguns sling over the back
Speaker 1: of my neck, and I had a gobbler hanging from
Speaker 1: each end of my sling by the feet, and then
Speaker 1: I had these plucked birds with their beards dangling, plus
Speaker 1: my my big backpack, and I hiked out, you know,
Speaker 1: in one trip out and I was just getting back
Speaker 1: to the trailhead and I ran into another group of
Speaker 1: guys coming in there like they were they were real
Speaker 1: excited about they were well, I don't know exactly what
Speaker 1: their plans were. They had pretty good packs on um,
Speaker 1: but they were excited to see a successful hunter coming
Speaker 1: out with two long beards. And so, you know, we
Speaker 1: started having a little conversation and I said, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you guys exactly where I was. And I pulled out
Speaker 1: my map and pointed to him on the map where
Speaker 1: I was going. And the looks on their faces because
Speaker 1: they'd come in, you know, I'm like, so we're here,
Speaker 1: and I shot these birds. Is over here, well some
Speaker 1: of them, some of them may not even believe you,
Speaker 1: but believe me when Carl tells you he was like,
Speaker 1: way the heck over there, he was probably there. And
Speaker 1: then he went even farther. So I'm not condoning the
Speaker 1: idea of putting coordinates on on the Mediator website people
Speaker 1: to go out there and if you know, figure it out.
Speaker 1: But um, I think it. Actually, I'm just saying like
Speaker 1: for most part have at it, have had it, and
Speaker 1: those spots that we hunted that we're Yeah, turkey densities
Speaker 1: are not super high, but those are like my best
Speaker 1: spots that I took took this group into. And you
Speaker 1: know that was that was after trying over a dozen
Speaker 1: different trailheads. Um hiking, I'm sure hundreds of miles. I
Speaker 1: mean we we totaled it up. I think somewhere over
Speaker 1: seventy miles this week is what we put on. Well,
Speaker 1: you you did a marathon one day. I did close
Speaker 1: to marathon. Yeah, that's another important thing to point out
Speaker 1: to people. Yeah, that is an important point. Go ahead
Speaker 1: when it's hot. It's during the daytime. So let's say
Speaker 1: you wander eight nine miles into the wilderness and kill
Speaker 1: it turkey. Yeah, I guess what your ass is doing
Speaker 1: going back to the truck to drop the turkey off.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not like red meat, it's not
Speaker 1: like big legs of deer that are pretty durable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's poultry. It's not durable. Um, it doesn't hold up
Speaker 1: and heat. So you then got to turn around. It's
Speaker 1: not like you're gonna have like a butt pole strong
Speaker 1: with turkeys after a week hunting. Once you get when
Speaker 1: you got all of his ass back, like within twenty
Speaker 1: four hours. Yeah, yeah, your timing was fortuitous because you
Speaker 1: got to send your bird back with me. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's another seventeen miles. I think that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that day helped me out with the numbers. You guys
Speaker 1: have a better sense. But that morning Garrett, Garrett and
Speaker 1: Chester and I hunted the morning and you figured that
Speaker 1: was around eight miles. And then we came back to
Speaker 1: our camp. I loaded up with the two birds, eight
Speaker 1: dead batteries because we we've been filming and wanted to
Speaker 1: get a bunch of those batteries out. Batteries sound each,
Speaker 1: So filled up my pack, hiked back to the trailhead.
Speaker 1: We're saying it's six and then back to camp twelve
Speaker 1: plus eight and then we and then we relocated camp
Speaker 1: that night another how far back in four? Three or four? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're thinking four in the bottom so whatever, that is
Speaker 1: eight plus twelve plus four, so twenty four miles that
Speaker 1: day to get the birds out. And you were bummed
Speaker 1: we weren't camped deeper in yea when Yeah, I told
Speaker 1: you guys to know, we gotta be careful about using
Speaker 1: place names. But I told you guys, like, go to this,
Speaker 1: go to this point on the map, and the last
Speaker 1: mile to get there is it's a rugged it's a
Speaker 1: rugged drop down through this canyon. And I've been back
Speaker 1: in there before, so I was getting myself all pumped
Speaker 1: up for that final mile, and you know, I'm just like,
Speaker 1: all right, I only got a mile to go. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna beat the darkness and get back to where these
Speaker 1: guys are. And then I round the bend and there's
Speaker 1: a tent sitting there in this little meadow. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's such a such a left down man, Because I
Speaker 1: was I was all to get that least. But then
Speaker 1: when Steve came back that evening, Yeah, there was really
Speaker 1: good news. Yeah, you almost shout a bad back to
Speaker 1: you give people sense of what it's like hunt here.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of the traveling, not all, but a
Speaker 1: lot of the traveling is down in canyon bottoms. Um,
Speaker 1: and in what year is that big fire? That was
Speaker 1: the white Water Baldy Complex fire. So it obliterated a
Speaker 1: lot of the trail system. And you might be like,
Speaker 1: how does it obliterate the trail system when you get
Speaker 1: a big fire. Bunch of things happened. Uh. One, it's
Speaker 1: all the trees fall over, so the trees are laying
Speaker 1: on everything. And then also a lot of rock moves,
Speaker 1: like a surprising amount of rock moves when trees die,
Speaker 1: so you lose the you lose the vegetation, and then
Speaker 1: all this kind of like glue holding the rocks together,
Speaker 1: so rocks just start falling everywhere, um, and you lose
Speaker 1: a lot soil. Soil comes because everything runs off because
Speaker 1: the vegetation is not protecting it. So in the bottom
Speaker 1: of these canyons there's all this like relatively new rock
Speaker 1: all over the place and trees down and just obliterates
Speaker 1: trail systems. Still, you're traveling in canyon bottoms, and a
Speaker 1: weird thing from a turkey hunting perspective is when you're
Speaker 1: in some of these canyon bottoms, it's like lizards and
Speaker 1: ship running around. You're just getting baked by the sun.
Speaker 1: It's all rock, everything's burnt. You're like, like, this is
Speaker 1: the there's no way a turkey goes back in here.
Speaker 1: But you climb out of these canyons and you have
Speaker 1: these sort of you almost want to think of them
Speaker 1: as like these like islands and this whole network of canyons.
Speaker 1: You have these like islands of pines that were like
Speaker 1: big enough and rugged enough to withstand the fire. And
Speaker 1: you have these little green oases, not in the bottoms
Speaker 1: flat tops, but in the tops. And if you go
Speaker 1: look at enough of these, you'll find one where there's
Speaker 1: maybe like a gobbler, yea who will gobble once in
Speaker 1: a while. We had some cooperatives did, but it was
Speaker 1: like you know, we did we got turkeys. But there's
Speaker 1: also like you could also see that to go explore
Speaker 1: it without years of your own explorations to add on
Speaker 1: to it could be like you have to you'd have
Speaker 1: to like walking and listening. And it's not like a
Speaker 1: going in there and blast no way of turkeys. No,
Speaker 1: this is a This is a form of turkey hunting
Speaker 1: for a fraction of the folks that like to go
Speaker 1: turkey hunting. I think it's not for the faint of heart.
Speaker 1: And you know, again you drive by a lot of
Speaker 1: turkeys just to get to the trailhead where where you'd
Speaker 1: start hiking. I mean, the surrounding hell And National Forest
Speaker 1: is fantastic. Turkey hunt you have to go to the wilderness.
Speaker 1: But if you decide to go to the wilderness, you know,
Speaker 1: you have to be thinking about turkeys as a small
Speaker 1: piece of a much bigger set of experiences. When I
Speaker 1: heard that we were going turkey hunting in New Mexico,
Speaker 1: I knew we were going in the back country, but
Speaker 1: I was not mentally prepped for what we actually did. Like,
Speaker 1: I knew we were going in the back country, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't what I expected. How So, because because of
Speaker 1: the little problem you developed the HeLa monster. That's not
Speaker 1: worry about that. The miles. I mean, I knew there
Speaker 1: probably well, I guess I didn't really know what to
Speaker 1: expect for bird numbers. I think I heard somebody say
Speaker 1: they were you know, you had to they were a
Speaker 1: little more sparse and you had to work for him.
Speaker 1: But I didn't know We're gonna, uh, you know, start
Speaker 1: the day by climbing up an eight hundred ft cliff.
Speaker 1: It was it was closer. In my opinion, it was
Speaker 1: closer to and a backcountry elk hunt than it was
Speaker 1: like a turkey hunt that I'm used to. And I'm
Speaker 1: not comparing turkeys to elk. People get fired up, but
Speaker 1: we just you're packing a lot of shoot on your
Speaker 1: back camp food for multiple days, You're hiking a lot
Speaker 1: of miles and you're yeah, you're hunting out of a backpack,
Speaker 1: deep in the wilderness, and a lot of what you're
Speaker 1: doing is dictated by water availability, which I trying to
Speaker 1: find water that changed dramatically since the last time we
Speaker 1: were in there. Yeah, yeah, you know, we we were
Speaker 1: talking logistics before this trip and I was, you know,
Speaker 1: telling you guys, oh yeah, great water, No, don't worry
Speaker 1: about water at all. And we did fine. But you know,
Speaker 1: like our first camping spot, the last time I hunted
Speaker 1: that in, I was filling up my filtration bag from
Speaker 1: a waterfall, and this year we were like skimming. We
Speaker 1: were skimming rocks, not out of our nalgene bottles, from
Speaker 1: a little puddle. It was it was like a totally
Speaker 1: different canyon. And um, you know, to Steve's point, I
Speaker 1: think you mentioned the water kind of bringing life to
Speaker 1: the landscape, the turkey sign that we saw around those
Speaker 1: limited water sources, the place where you got your second bird,
Speaker 1: that was a beautiful little spring and meadow. UM. And
Speaker 1: we had that really great encounter with the fans of
Speaker 1: the bear family that had been splashing around near our
Speaker 1: one little you know, mud puddle of drinking water that
Speaker 1: we had at our first camp. So you know, those
Speaker 1: little points of water on the landscape become epicenters for
Speaker 1: all manner of wildlife, including the turkeys. I was surprised
Speaker 1: on how many mountain lion and bobcat. Yeah, I've never
Speaker 1: I've never seen so many lion and bobcat tracks as
Speaker 1: we did. And you know, we've been theorizing what might
Speaker 1: have resulted in the lower turkey numbers, because while we
Speaker 1: did find birds, I would say somewhere in like the
Speaker 1: two thirds of what I'm used to seeing range of birds,
Speaker 1: so pretty significant UM declined from past hunts. And it
Speaker 1: could be any number of factors. But there's no shortage
Speaker 1: of predators on that landscape. UM. Lots of mountain lions, UH,
Speaker 1: lots of bobcats obviously, coyotes, UM, Mexican wolves are in
Speaker 1: the area. UM, no shortage of critters, mean, black bears,
Speaker 1: no shortage of critters that would be more than happy
Speaker 1: to to eat a turkey. And I think that might
Speaker 1: have something to do with their you know, they're willingness
Speaker 1: to vocalize as well. Potentially, Yeah, that that was my
Speaker 1: pet theory is that you're just average. You're you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're advertising your location to like a host of things
Speaker 1: that would love to know where you're at. Uh. One
Speaker 1: of the things that was consistent from turkeys everywhere that
Speaker 1: I found is that there conscious to them or not.
Speaker 1: They're like attitude changes so much from one day to
Speaker 1: the next. That would be like if someday, if you
Speaker 1: can imagine like that you die, right and you get
Speaker 1: some glimpse into like all like you get a glimpse
Speaker 1: into the answers of the universe, right, like it's all
Speaker 1: revealed to you. The first thing I'd be like, is, what, like,
Speaker 1: what's the turkeys us? One question? What happens in the
Speaker 1: turkey's brain from Monday to Tuesday. I think of a
Speaker 1: turkey in particular, we get to like a camp spot
Speaker 1: and we go to a known one of Carl's known
Speaker 1: turkey hangouts, and we're just doing a listening post in
Speaker 1: the evening and there's a bird. I wouldn't say he's hammering,
Speaker 1: but he's definitely gobbling at dark. Okay. And if a
Speaker 1: bird gobbles, this is my ratio. If a bird gobbles
Speaker 1: once at dust, he's gonna gobbel ten times in the morning,
Speaker 1: meaning way more apt to gobble in the pre dawn
Speaker 1: moments than the evening. Gobbles his ass off for a
Speaker 1: nighttime gobble. Go back in the morning and some bits
Speaker 1: never gobbles once from the tree, hits the ground we're
Speaker 1: calling to it, hits the ground, gobbles twice, and then
Speaker 1: never gobbles again the rest of the day, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell. We go back that night to
Speaker 1: listen for him to God to find out where he's
Speaker 1: gonna hold up for the night. Never gobbles once that night.
Speaker 1: Zip go back in the morning. He gobbles what a
Speaker 1: hundred times? We kill him? What happened? Like? He gobbles
Speaker 1: a hundred times across a little canyon, flies down, gobls,
Speaker 1: a bunch crosses the canyon, comes up to us, and
Speaker 1: Steve kills gobling his ass off. What was going on today?
Speaker 1: There was not going on yesterday. In your little walnut,
Speaker 1: you can see see a hen with him at all?
Speaker 1: Did we never heard of him? No Jake's either, right,
Speaker 1: Ja Jakes don't exist there. They all get killed by
Speaker 1: bob kids because they're born. They're born long beers. They're
Speaker 1: born long beers, and they drink dirt. I think, I
Speaker 1: think what happened that morning is, you know, this week
Speaker 1: we had Venus and Jupiter really close to a lining,
Speaker 1: and that morning it was those planets, the planetary proximity
Speaker 1: that he just couldn't take it. He had to hammer
Speaker 1: away on the roosts when he saw those planets lined up.
Speaker 1: I would love to understand. And then our last morning hunting, yeah,
Speaker 1: we that was a great morning man. Seth, bionic Seth
Speaker 1: was his purpose in life is here in Gobbls. Seth
Speaker 1: has Seth has great ears. He alerts to here's a gobbler,
Speaker 1: and we decided to go and find that gobbler. And
Speaker 1: a morning and we go up. Gobbles is ass off
Speaker 1: from the tree and I think his body gobbled once
Speaker 1: or twice. We start calling to him, not really replying.
Speaker 1: Hissed the ground and shuts up, or so we think.
Speaker 1: Later the day we track it down. Here he is
Speaker 1: gobbling again and there's two gobblers just kind of wandering around,
Speaker 1: one of them gobbling, no hands, no hands. We're calling
Speaker 1: to them, and it's like it's like zero interested and
Speaker 1: you'd be like, what exactly are you doing in life?
Speaker 1: Just browing out like what like keeping the predators? What
Speaker 1: are you doing keeping the predators? Guessing? Why are you
Speaker 1: gobbling now? And then? But you have zero interests and
Speaker 1: anything like what is your day's plan? When you woke
Speaker 1: up this morning, you thought, what man trying to get
Speaker 1: in ahead of a turkey? Like you don't want to
Speaker 1: do I'm gonna walk around and gobble. It could have
Speaker 1: been if I hear a hand, I'm gonna go the
Speaker 1: other way. They're just sick of that. Well, here here's
Speaker 1: the theory. I mean the day so, the day before,
Speaker 1: the morning before, twenty four hours prior to what you
Speaker 1: just laid out. Ah, you had shot a gobbler in
Speaker 1: that vicinity who made the mistake of coming to the call.
Speaker 1: And I'm you know, I'm certainly not. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to give more or less credit to a turkey's brain
Speaker 1: than a turkey deserves. I just don't know. But there
Speaker 1: was something that happened the day before out of the
Speaker 1: ordinary on that ridge and ways away, but ways away.
Speaker 1: And you know, if a hen really needs some male companionship,
Speaker 1: she's going to be motivated to get over there and
Speaker 1: get to those gobblers. And I think the way that
Speaker 1: we set up as turkey hunters, um, you know, it
Speaker 1: kind of flies in the face of that, Like we
Speaker 1: we are never just like aggressively calling and trying to
Speaker 1: get to that tom the way a hen would be.
Speaker 1: You know, when when she is ready to be bred,
Speaker 1: she is just as motivated to get to that gobbler
Speaker 1: as any gobbler would be to get to a hen. Right,
Speaker 1: She's going to find that tom. And so this idea
Speaker 1: that you know, we're always trying to pull him off,
Speaker 1: like trying to get out in front of him, pull
Speaker 1: him off the ridge, get him to come to us.
Speaker 1: If we were an actual hen needing to be fertilized,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be getting our butts over there. And those
Speaker 1: two gobblers were doing plenty for a hen to meet
Speaker 1: them halfway, shall we say, or even a percent of
Speaker 1: the way. And you know, we spend all this time
Speaker 1: trying to get into the mind of a of a tom, right,
Speaker 1: trying to think about what we can do to convince
Speaker 1: the gobbler to come to us. But it's interesting to
Speaker 1: think from the standpoint of a female turkey, if she
Speaker 1: has that urge, if she's at that point where she
Speaker 1: needs to have her eggs fertilized, I would suppose she
Speaker 1: is very, very motivated to get to that gobbling tom
Speaker 1: mm hmm. Did you guys try a gobble that more in?
Speaker 1: We sure did and no response. Didn't didn't get any
Speaker 1: kind of response from that. Yeah, we're laughing. Did uh?
Speaker 1: He wanted to try the gobble, and I was like,
Speaker 1: if we get shot after doing this, I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: very surprised. Yeah. Man, the heel is one of those
Speaker 1: places where, Yeah, I'm not big on using like gobble
Speaker 1: calls on public ground in the Midwest or places where
Speaker 1: there's high hunting pressure, but yeah, if some dude, if
Speaker 1: some dude came strolling into the sound of my gobbl call,
Speaker 1: I would be absolutely shot. Now that I'm hunting turkeys
Speaker 1: with my kids, I made a you have to like
Speaker 1: make rules, you know, so you avoid all these like
Speaker 1: case by case by case things like in terms of
Speaker 1: social media, just like made rules about our kids in
Speaker 1: social media. Uh, and that way you're not every day
Speaker 1: being like, wow, we you know about this. We just
Speaker 1: like made up rule and then we lived by the rule. Um.
Speaker 1: I said to myself, I will never gobble with my
Speaker 1: kid next to me. I think that's sensible. And even
Speaker 1: yesterday I thought about it. I was like, would I
Speaker 1: violate my no gobble with my kid next to me rule?
Speaker 1: And I was like, no, I wouldn't violate my no gobble.
Speaker 1: It's good to have a rule and stick to it.
Speaker 1: I know you're a fan of the slippery slope arguments. Well,
Speaker 1: if I get peppered with it, that's me. But if,
Speaker 1: oh man, if I gobbled my kid got shot, dude one,
Speaker 1: I'd never hear the end of it from my wife too,
Speaker 1: I feel bad as well. Yeah. Well, we talked about,
Speaker 1: you know, the use of fans a little bit and
Speaker 1: how effective and also how dangerous that strategy is in
Speaker 1: some states. Going go in the direction of outlining it,
Speaker 1: and you use use the verb fanning, which I wasn't
Speaker 1: familiar with, but i'd heard the term reaping. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: seems more like a heavy metal term to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it seems like a heavy metal band. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and reaping do they mean like like like like reaping
Speaker 1: the harvest, reaping the wheat. Maybe there's like a grim
Speaker 1: reaper tie. I don't know, I don't get it what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. Why just get people that don't turkey
Speaker 1: good idea? Um, there's been a sort of arms race
Speaker 1: in decoy quality, and then at some point some brilliant
Speaker 1: person realized that the thing that looks most like a
Speaker 1: turkey is a turkey. So some guys like you want
Speaker 1: to look like a turkey, haven't been a turkey. So
Speaker 1: you take a turkey's fan. Um, and and I've done it,
Speaker 1: and you've done it. You can take a turkey's fan
Speaker 1: and mounting out a handle and dry it so the
Speaker 1: fans open. And when you get a couple of gobblers
Speaker 1: that are out strutting around and all carried away, or
Speaker 1: all gobbler, all strutting around, all carried away, you can
Speaker 1: slink along like a worm, holding the fan out in
Speaker 1: front of you, and then when you're get in range,
Speaker 1: you just slip the shotgun barrel between feathers on the fan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is if they don't just come running from three
Speaker 1: hundred yards away when they see that fan. They't like
Speaker 1: running at you. It's like when they there's something about
Speaker 1: that eradescence of feathers that like, like you know how
Speaker 1: we see whatever, like we see neon colors. There's something
Speaker 1: about the they see it. They just don't they know
Speaker 1: what they're looking at. The like they're looking at a turkey.
Speaker 1: Who's who's your buddy? Who glues on? Down in South Carolina,
Speaker 1: Robert Abernew the buys a shitty bought a shitty foam
Speaker 1: turkey decoy and then took a hot glue gun. I
Speaker 1: made one as well. Took a hot glue gun and
Speaker 1: glued all the feathers from a turkey back onto the
Speaker 1: turkey decoy for that air desk. I lost track when
Speaker 1: it was up in the sixties. He showed, He showed that.
Speaker 1: He said, they're at one time it was in the thirties,
Speaker 1: and it was in the sixties that sixty gobblers had
Speaker 1: laid eyes on that decoy, and it was fifty nine
Speaker 1: came within two of it. Yeah, very effective. But this
Speaker 1: this fanning thing and then he remember these one guys
Speaker 1: and they got annihilated on social media, but they took
Speaker 1: to they took to making little hats for themselves. Dude,
Speaker 1: they took to making little hats. It's a great idea.
Speaker 1: And if you had like a private farm with electrified
Speaker 1: fence around it, I would absolutely do it. Like if
Speaker 1: you could somehow say like no human being could be
Speaker 1: anywhere near here, tire red bandana around your face. So
Speaker 1: they were a little They wear a little hat, a
Speaker 1: turkey fan hat, and they slink through the bushes. Their
Speaker 1: slink up usually crawling across egg fields. That turkey hat
Speaker 1: ain't making turkey sounds. Turkey sounds and then you can
Speaker 1: get right up on turkeys. But here's the thing, man,
Speaker 1: like in in in UH. In some states, like in Wyoming,
Speaker 1: you can hunt spring gobblers with a rifle. It's just
Speaker 1: a recipe for disaster. And here's a turkey fan slinking
Speaker 1: through the slinking through the grass. You see where it's
Speaker 1: gonna lead. So states have uh. I think Michigan, like
Speaker 1: Michigan clarified it. And there's two mallards down in the
Speaker 1: hotel swimming pool. There is If you look at my
Speaker 1: instant story, you'll get a closer look at them. I
Speaker 1: don't need to I can look at the mallards in
Speaker 1: the swim pool. That signs underscore West so, uh was
Speaker 1: it a time about Oh? So Michigan made it the
Speaker 1: You can still use real feather decoys, but they have
Speaker 1: to be out of the however they word it, and
Speaker 1: I took interest in how they worded it, but I forgot.
Speaker 1: They can't be attached to your head. You can't move him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't use it moving. It has to be stationary.
Speaker 1: So you can, like I use a decoy. I use
Speaker 1: a Dave Smith, a d S D. David Smith Decoy's decoy.
Speaker 1: He makes that. It comes with a fan, a fake fan,
Speaker 1: or you just take your own turkey fan and screw
Speaker 1: it on there. And so you can't You can have
Speaker 1: the fan with you and you can place it on
Speaker 1: a decoy, but you can't move the fan around. I
Speaker 1: have even and I've killed turkeys this way. I have
Speaker 1: even been where I'm calling to a tom and he
Speaker 1: won't close the distance or won't come over the hill
Speaker 1: or whatever, and I can just see his top of thing.
Speaker 1: You just take the fan and hold it up in
Speaker 1: the air. If he's fired up enough, take the fan
Speaker 1: and wave it in the air and then lower it down.
Speaker 1: And oftentimes that's enough to get that to come. But
Speaker 1: it's also a good way to get shot. And if
Speaker 1: you revisit the episode we do with Press and Pittman,
Speaker 1: he's been shot twice. That's so crazy from Goblin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: shot twice from gobling. You know what I thinking you
Speaker 1: were talking about. The hands usually will go to the gobbler,
Speaker 1: but the rope draggers that you shot did that was
Speaker 1: a limb hanger or lim hanger lim hanging rope drag
Speaker 1: But he did the same thing, like once he saw
Speaker 1: that the the decoy wasn't coming his way, he just
Speaker 1: kept cruising. Yeah, I think that was a situation where
Speaker 1: the decoy didn't do me any favors, but he was
Speaker 1: like we talked about this a little bit. And and
Speaker 1: then the other one on the last day when we
Speaker 1: were in deep it seemed like that gobler he was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm here, but he just kept moving too. So that
Speaker 1: seems like that holds up. Maybe it look kind of
Speaker 1: like that the bird, the bird that we got, it
Speaker 1: did seem like he kind of cruised through. There's no
Speaker 1: way he'd missed seeing the decoy, Like he came within
Speaker 1: fifty rds of the decoy and just strutted on by,
Speaker 1: like come on, baby, let's let's head on out of here.
Speaker 1: We've been making a lot of noise. Let's uh, let's
Speaker 1: mosey on down to this ridge. So it some love
Speaker 1: quietly quietly down here. But he didn't pause in that area.
Speaker 1: He was just he was strutted by. He's like here,
Speaker 1: I am, let's roll. And you know, I had a
Speaker 1: situation with that bird where um he was. He was
Speaker 1: sort of just above the crest of the hill where
Speaker 1: I could barely see his white head. At that point,
Speaker 1: he had the full on white head going through the
Speaker 1: grass and I had to sit up and I didn't
Speaker 1: have a very good shot. And just before that bird
Speaker 1: was going to be gone with that drive by the decoy, um,
Speaker 1: I thought to myself, I'm gonna give a couple of
Speaker 1: yelps and if he picks his head up, I'm gonna shoot.
Speaker 1: And if he doesn't pick his head up, he's gone.
Speaker 1: Because he he was like two ft from being out
Speaker 1: of sight. And I yelped a couple of times and
Speaker 1: he gobbled and picked his head up, and I was
Speaker 1: able to shoot him at that point just before he
Speaker 1: disappeared out of sight. But and I was the only
Speaker 1: limb hanger you ever saw come out of that area.
Speaker 1: That that is the only like legit limb hanger Miriams
Speaker 1: that I've ever seen in my life in person. I
Speaker 1: mean I've shot a lot of birds that have you know,
Speaker 1: like the triangular spurs of like a two year old gobbler. Um,
Speaker 1: this one had like the just dark black hooks with
Speaker 1: sharp sharp points on the tips. Yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: was That was a sweet gobbler and a lot of
Speaker 1: weight too. You know, I've I've not seen I don't.
Speaker 1: I think that the first bird you got and the
Speaker 1: one I got were two of the heaviest Miriams I've
Speaker 1: ever seen. I mean those were meaty birds and oftentimes
Speaker 1: you know, grown up hunting Easterns in the Midwest. When
Speaker 1: I first got out here and got my hands on
Speaker 1: Miriam's turkeys, I was like, God, these things are like
Speaker 1: half as big. But the two that we got, we're
Speaker 1: just dandies. What's your real quick uh, what's your take
Speaker 1: on turkey hunting with a red dot site? Um, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like wall is a little bit like Walleye
Speaker 1: fishing with fifty million. Yeah, I would say system set up. No, Joe,
Speaker 1: it's not that bad. Just like so so here here,
Speaker 1: here's a couple of here's a couple of things I'll
Speaker 1: say about that. I'd never used one before. Um, Yanni
Speaker 1: was kind enough to set me up with a shotgun
Speaker 1: that he recommended I test out, and so I had
Speaker 1: a loner shotgun for this trip. And I think if
Speaker 1: I had my druthers, I would have just had a
Speaker 1: bead on there. Um not like not like an iron sight, No,
Speaker 1: just a like. So, so the gun I typically shoot
Speaker 1: has a vent rib with a bead on the end
Speaker 1: and then a little bead like halfway down the barrel,
Speaker 1: so you can can line those up, get tight to
Speaker 1: your shoulder, get your cheek down, and I I haven't
Speaker 1: had issues with missing turkeys. Um. Now that being said,
Speaker 1: I've got a twenty gauge pump youth shotgun that my
Speaker 1: wife shoots, and I did put a red dot on
Speaker 1: that because we've had a couple of very close encounters
Speaker 1: where you know, I feel like she's she's at you know,
Speaker 1: she's at an awkward angle or just trying to line
Speaker 1: the shot up. And if you have a bird that's
Speaker 1: super close in your shot pattern is very very tight,
Speaker 1: you know, it's much easier to miss a bird at
Speaker 1: ten yards than it is to miss one at twenty
Speaker 1: five yards. And you know, I think for her, she's
Speaker 1: more comfortable being able to just see that dot at
Speaker 1: whatever angle her head is and not have to worry
Speaker 1: about lining up the beads. So I think there's there's
Speaker 1: an element to it of um, you know, having an advantage.
Speaker 1: But the other thing is just being in the being
Speaker 1: in the hinterlands with another electronic device where you know
Speaker 1: you might break something like I'm I'm I'm pretty hard
Speaker 1: on my year and around the way we are, and
Speaker 1: so it's always kind of weighing in the back of
Speaker 1: my mind, am I gonna scratch this thing up? Am
Speaker 1: I gonna knock it off kilter? Whereas with a with
Speaker 1: a shotgun barrel that's got a couple of beads on,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't seem like there's a heck of a
Speaker 1: lot that could go wrong. So the short answer is
Speaker 1: I see the advantage. Personally, I think I'd prefer the
Speaker 1: lower tech option. What I'd like to do. I can
Speaker 1: see having a one on a quick detached mount. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wonder about how consistently you could like reattach it
Speaker 1: and have it beat Oh, that's what. That's the whole
Speaker 1: point of quick attach. You'd have a you could you
Speaker 1: could have a rifle's zero tards and take on and
Speaker 1: off a quick detatch mount. It goes right back to zero. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess I would just stick by my statement for
Speaker 1: for me personally, give me a bead. He did make
Speaker 1: a good shot with that, though, I appreciate. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it worked out great. No complaints, um lower text
Speaker 1: by me. Let me tell you something. This isn't about
Speaker 1: red dots. Okay. If there's two things I like in life,
Speaker 1: it's about wallet boat. It's just two things I like
Speaker 1: in life. It's federally designated wilderness and turkeys. Okay. If
Speaker 1: there's three, it's my family. I was he's not necessarily
Speaker 1: giving him order turkeys, No, federally designated wilderness, my children.
Speaker 1: That's saying something. So I'm gonna focus on the two
Speaker 1: were here. I'm not I'm not agreeing. I'm not agreeing
Speaker 1: with Steve, but I'll say this, Steve has had an
Speaker 1: appreciation for turkeys and federally designated wilderness longer it predates
Speaker 1: my children. Yeah, it's like a longer romance dates them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's something to say, for years under your belt with
Speaker 1: those first two. So I'm just I'm sticking to my
Speaker 1: guns here predates them and just they don't listen to
Speaker 1: the show. So I can I can get away with
Speaker 1: hell the truth here? What word you it wasn't love?
Speaker 1: What was it? Federally designated wilderness. If there's two things
Speaker 1: I love, two things I love, I love, So what
Speaker 1: about hunting turkeys in federally designated That's what I want
Speaker 1: to say. Okay, I'll feeling the So. Uh, we can
Speaker 1: hunt turkeys and states everywhere but Alaska. In in the
Speaker 1: US at the time of European contact, there were turkeys.
Speaker 1: They were probably turkeys, and what is now thirty nine states. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there are ten states running around out there that
Speaker 1: have turkeys that didn't. I happen to live in one
Speaker 1: of them. Uh, California probably did not have turkeys. Montana
Speaker 1: not have turkeys. I Hadaho did not have turkey is
Speaker 1: Washington did not have turkeys. Hawaii did not have turkeys.
Speaker 1: Oregon did not have turkeys. Okay, but but but the
Speaker 1: Heila damn sure did. Um it's big enough if you
Speaker 1: have like a romance with the wild turkey. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: in the wild turkey hasn't to to some degree, has
Speaker 1: the romance with us. I mean that the turkeys are
Speaker 1: one of the are kind of one of the winners
Speaker 1: of civilization, right, they like crops, Okay, one of the
Speaker 1: things in Montana, like one of the things that allows
Speaker 1: turkeys to exist in Montana's agriculture. Right, Why were there
Speaker 1: not turkeys there? Why did turkeys not spread up from
Speaker 1: areas of like come up from Colorado or come over
Speaker 1: from the eastern Dakota's into Montana. Too severe? Yeah, too severe? Uh,
Speaker 1: not enough food? Too severe? Why are there there now?
Speaker 1: They're there now because agriculture. They they most if you're shooting,
Speaker 1: if you're in southeast Montana, whatever you're shooting at a turkey,
Speaker 1: that turkey probably almost certainly spend its winter picking grain
Speaker 1: out of cow ship. Yeah. I love those turkeys to
Speaker 1: death more than my kids. Uh but right. But but
Speaker 1: to go so to be able to go into a
Speaker 1: wilderness area, yeah, and hunt turkeys that have no reliance on,
Speaker 1: no relationship to folks, gives you kind of a glimpse
Speaker 1: back to I mean, there was you know, gives you
Speaker 1: a glimpse back to a time when so much of
Speaker 1: the landscape hadn't been kind of influenced interrupted manipulated by humans.
Speaker 1: A like you're watching you're you're looking at native turkeys
Speaker 1: living on a native landscape, and you're going, like, so
Speaker 1: that's kind of what they did. Yes, it might even
Speaker 1: be like that's kind of the density in which they
Speaker 1: occur where you know, it's not like, what's so hard
Speaker 1: about hunting turkeys. My grandma's got a hundred in her
Speaker 1: yard right now. She lives next to the cemetery. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, but that's not one of the turkeys
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. I don't love the I like my
Speaker 1: kids mordinals, turkeys, um. But to see that like like
Speaker 1: this is probably what it seemed like. There's scatterings of this,
Speaker 1: their scatterings of that. Here and there there's a turkey.
Speaker 1: It's really the educational and they I think you're painting
Speaker 1: a great picture. And the birds at that at that
Speaker 1: point become in my mind, the embodiment of the landscape.
Speaker 1: It's like an integral part of what makes that landscape
Speaker 1: what it is, and there is no artificiality about it.
Speaker 1: There's no supplemental support. You know, those birds are out
Speaker 1: there existing the way they have for thousands of years. Um,
Speaker 1: they'd be there with or without people doing what they're doing,
Speaker 1: strutting and gobbling and reproducing and eating and go into
Speaker 1: those little water supplies. And you know, I think there's
Speaker 1: places where we're calling birds that have never heard an
Speaker 1: artificial call before you know they're hearing they're hearing a
Speaker 1: man made turkey call for the first time. UM. But
Speaker 1: it gives you a chance to experience the place in
Speaker 1: a very speaking evaluate in terms of very pure sort
Speaker 1: of way. And I love, you know, I of hunting
Speaker 1: turkeys in places where there there is you know, an
Speaker 1: agricultural presence and supplemental calories on the landscape. UM. And
Speaker 1: it's worth pointing out that you know, historically turkey habitat
Speaker 1: it's always been widely variable in terms of the productivity
Speaker 1: of the land. So there would have been more Easterns
Speaker 1: that more Easterns, let's say, in Wisconsin, a higher density
Speaker 1: than there would have been Miriams in New Mexico, just
Speaker 1: given the productivity of the lands. But once you start
Speaker 1: layering on the human presence, UM, it's it's a different
Speaker 1: kind of experience, and it's it's it's it's a different
Speaker 1: kind of connection to a different kind of place. And again,
Speaker 1: the word in my mind that keeps keeps coming around
Speaker 1: is this idea of just a pure representation of a
Speaker 1: wild landscape and an interaction with an animal that embodies
Speaker 1: a very very cool place. And every you know, everybody
Speaker 1: of these turkeys that we're eating, um, those are calories
Speaker 1: that have come in the form of crickets and grasshoppers
Speaker 1: and gamble oak acorns. You know, it's like this litany
Speaker 1: of food resources that are sparsely distributed on the landscape,
Speaker 1: but also embodiments of that place where humans are not
Speaker 1: the predominant factor. It's just the land doing what the
Speaker 1: land has always done. It's good stuff, man, other good stuff.
Speaker 1: I love it too, man. Uh you know how, I
Speaker 1: let's say I got two final things to say about you. Okay,
Speaker 1: when I was going to introduce you, you know how,
Speaker 1: we were talking about a thing yesterday where I was
Speaker 1: saying that that I've been all around the country. Everywhere
Speaker 1: you go. Everywhere you go, Alaska, Florida, New York, California,
Speaker 1: every ago, you'll find two outdoorsman, two types of outdoorsman.
Speaker 1: There's the one where everything's all funked up now, fishing
Speaker 1: game ruined it. There's too many people now, the wolves
Speaker 1: got it all whatever, Right, there's that guy always there,
Speaker 1: lost his spot. Everything's used to be good, right, And
Speaker 1: then there's always the guy that when he wakes up
Speaker 1: in the morning, he can't get to it all because
Speaker 1: he's in Eden. Totally right. We were talking about that,
Speaker 1: and I didn't point out one of the things that
Speaker 1: I respected admire about you is you're the ladder. I've
Speaker 1: known you in a lot of places, and you're the
Speaker 1: guy that's like, you just can't get to it all right,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna carry that with you no matter where
Speaker 1: you go. Thanks man, And that that makes that that
Speaker 1: that makes you like a good outdoorsman. Right. The same
Speaker 1: thing that I was gonna say is like, I U
Speaker 1: having a life working for a federal agency. I don't.
Speaker 1: I hope that someday you don't get UM. I hope
Speaker 1: your enthusiasms hold out. I guarantee they will, UM, because
Speaker 1: just the criticism and stuff could just drag you down. Man,
Speaker 1: well man, to having your work, to having your work
Speaker 1: like misinterpreted, you know what I mean? That ship is
Speaker 1: gonna I hope that doesn't ruin you, it's not going
Speaker 1: to UM. And in part it's because I feel sincerely
Speaker 1: privileged and fortunate to be making a living in a
Speaker 1: line of work where the things that we're the things
Speaker 1: that we're thinking about and talking about and trying to
Speaker 1: work through um go far beyond a job or collecting
Speaker 1: a paycheck. You know, both of us, probably all of
Speaker 1: us here in this room, have had a lot of
Speaker 1: jobs where you're just like, I gotta make some money
Speaker 1: to be able to feed myself and pay my rent.
Speaker 1: But to be in a line of work where every
Speaker 1: single day there's a connection between the things that you're
Speaker 1: working on and places and animals and relationships between people
Speaker 1: and land that matter to you in a deeply personal way.
Speaker 1: What percentage of the global population has the privilege to
Speaker 1: make a living in a way like that, where there
Speaker 1: their personal identity and passion and value set are so
Speaker 1: closely aligned with the way that they get to earn
Speaker 1: their keep. And I give you my word, I will
Speaker 1: never get to a point where I am jaded. You
Speaker 1: will never hear me complain about what I'm doing or
Speaker 1: the challenges of the job, because this work is supremely important.
Speaker 1: We're talking about literally the places and the resources and
Speaker 1: the questions that define our prosperity as human beings in
Speaker 1: this country in my opinion. M hm. And it is
Speaker 1: a privilege to be in that line of work. Thank you, man,
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Next time someone's like those assholes that
Speaker 1: the Forest Service and be like you mean, like Carl, Carl,
Speaker 1: it's not so bad, oy. One other thing I want
Speaker 1: to say, man, you know that that idea of um,
Speaker 1: the two different kinds of outdoors people and the folks
Speaker 1: who like to you know, sort of see the negative,
Speaker 1: and then the folks who there aren't enough hours in
Speaker 1: the day to soak it all up. It um just
Speaker 1: getting a chance to stomp stomp around in the hills
Speaker 1: with this group of friends and colleagues, you know, like
Speaker 1: every single person in this room, and you know, the
Speaker 1: folks who are affiliated with the work that you guys
Speaker 1: all are doing, I think are wise enough to recognize
Speaker 1: that there aren't enough hours in the day, There aren't
Speaker 1: enough days in the week, there aren't enough weeks in
Speaker 1: the year to get to it all. And I don't
Speaker 1: care where you are in the United States. If you
Speaker 1: look around where you live, there is some fantastic and
Speaker 1: likely untapped outdoor opportunity for you to capitalize upon if
Speaker 1: you're creative and open minded about it. Whether you're in
Speaker 1: a big city or whether you're in New Mexico or
Speaker 1: wherever the heck you might be, the opportunity abounds. And
Speaker 1: that is not the case in many other countries around
Speaker 1: the planet today, like the context of America. More broadly,
Speaker 1: we are in the land of plenty. And if you're
Speaker 1: whining about a lack of opportunity, you are missing the boat, man,
Speaker 1: So get out there and enjoy it. Land of milk
Speaker 1: and honey, Grand of milk and honey, gratitude of expectations, gratitude,
Speaker 1: gratitude above expectations. Man, there's a lot, a lot of
Speaker 1: good stuff to do out there, Land of milk and
Speaker 1: walls that might be an electronics, that might be need
Speaker 1: to name that boat. That's even the name of our movie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when we make a movie later on A bought you guys,
Speaker 1: Matt Dame is gonna play Chester. Can you see that, Jester,
Speaker 1: Matt Dame. Look, Matt Damon is not handsome enough. Seth
Speaker 1: would be uh so funny if Josh he retired, is
Speaker 1: Josh Broland was a lot younger at Josh Broland to
Speaker 1: play Seth. Yeah, he needs a haircut, but I was
Speaker 1: just watching the Josh Broland movie where he had long
Speaker 1: hair like Seth American Gangster. I tried to get Steve
Speaker 1: to telling me that he didn't like my hair, and
Speaker 1: he didn't do it, so I think he likes it.
Speaker 1: I like it Seth. A lot of people like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want dog on one dog on a close friend. No,
Speaker 1: I never right, don't do that. Everybody thanks to join
Speaker 1: him