Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukeleman. This is a production of
Speaker 1: the bear Grease podcast called The bear Grease Render where
Speaker 1: we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes
Speaker 1: of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f HF Gear,
Speaker 1: American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
Speaker 1: to be as rugged as the place as we explore.
Speaker 1: I love it. If there's one thing I love about
Speaker 1: being having a bear Grease podcast and such is that
Speaker 1: you guys have no choice if you show up of
Speaker 1: what I get to say and do. And I am
Speaker 1: not a talented musician, like that is not a secret,
Speaker 1: but I love to play and sing, and so Misty
Speaker 1: says that the only reason I do this is because
Speaker 1: I make someone sit and listen to play. Well, you've
Speaker 1: been trapped to hear us, But I do have something
Speaker 1: pretty cool. We're gonna we're gonna play only two songs
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna jump into the podcast. But the
Speaker 1: first song we're gonna play has never been played publicly before.
Speaker 1: It's a song that I wrote and it's called the
Speaker 1: Ballot of a Backwoods Then yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And
Speaker 1: for those of you that fall along, you know that
Speaker 1: we have a We have a hall of fame in
Speaker 1: the Bear Grease world. Y'all know the Bear Grease Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame. It's a real man, it's not a joke.
Speaker 1: And the first, the first duct team to the Bear
Speaker 1: Grease Hall of Fame, it was a man by the
Speaker 1: name of James Lawrence says he is a man by
Speaker 1: the name of James Lawrence. James Lawrence lives with Mina, Arkansas. Dear,
Speaker 1: dear friend of mine. James Lawrence is a He's an
Speaker 1: incredible mountain deer hunter. He's spent his whole life out
Speaker 1: at the Washingtons and was killing deer when other people weren't,
Speaker 1: killing deer when there weren't. Dear, and James has always
Speaker 1: carried in my mind an intangible quality of the mountain
Speaker 1: people of Arkansas. Humble, earnest, art working, independent. And what
Speaker 1: I loved about James is nobody ever told him he
Speaker 1: was cool until maybe me and his wife and James
Speaker 1: was gonna be here today because the song is about
Speaker 1: James Lawrence. He doesn't know there's been a song written
Speaker 1: about him. He's never heard it before. So he was
Speaker 1: gonna be here today that he he was not able
Speaker 1: to come and so we're gonna introduce this song. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's stage one. Stage two of stuff I gotta say
Speaker 1: is that you gotta know a little bit about what
Speaker 1: this song is about, because it's it's quite specific. There's
Speaker 1: there's several reference points that are gonna help you understand it.
Speaker 1: First of all, there's a reference of the Constatat River.
Speaker 1: Y'all know where the Constat River is. It's gonna be
Speaker 1: wood down in southwest Arkansas. Okay, James Lawrence was born
Speaker 1: at the headwaters of the Constat River. There is you
Speaker 1: will hear the term shock pouching in this song. Do
Speaker 1: y'all know y'all know what a shock pouch is? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a that's when. That's an old mountain way that
Speaker 1: James Lawrence's grandmother taught him how to do to carry
Speaker 1: a deer out of the woods on your back by
Speaker 1: cutting different parts of his legs off, tieing the deer's
Speaker 1: legs and knots and using it like a backpack. Stroud.
Speaker 1: James Lawrence hunted deep and still does hunts deep in
Speaker 1: the mountains and shock pouched me in the deer. You're
Speaker 1: gonna hear that phrase. You're gonna hear reference to the
Speaker 1: sawdust pile. James hunted a particular area and they always
Speaker 1: camped at what they called the sawdust pile, which was
Speaker 1: deep in the mountains. You couldn't drive there, you had
Speaker 1: to walk there, and it was the remnants of an
Speaker 1: old sawmill where the sawdust stayed there for like seventy
Speaker 1: five years. I mean they pulled the log and equipment
Speaker 1: out of there forever and there's still remnants of that
Speaker 1: sawdust pile. So they camped at the sawdust pole. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's a complex song. Okay, we're complex people, right. So
Speaker 1: and then there's there's reference to bucking horses and motorcycle rex.
Speaker 1: When you talk to James, he's seventy five and he's
Speaker 1: doing great for seventy five, but he's pretty banged up
Speaker 1: and he always says, man, it was those bucking horses
Speaker 1: and motorcycle rex that that did me in. So that's
Speaker 1: in the song. So I hope you enjoyed it. We're
Speaker 1: gonna give it a go. Order the washingbas Market song.
Speaker 1: He loved his Mama, and he loved his call raised
Speaker 1: by his Grandma, The Chase of the Tree, the banks
Speaker 1: of the cost. Time he was free. She taught him
Speaker 1: out of hunting out to shock couch of deer. That's
Speaker 1: Indian trick because you didn't hear very buck on your back.
Speaker 1: Time's legs in the Nanso, you can get in their
Speaker 1: deep and hunt his floods hot. James Florence says a
Speaker 1: backwoods man by a living let his own to half
Speaker 1: didn't work for the man. No serve I go, why
Speaker 1: I tell fuck he loved the land, humbling Earnest, I
Speaker 1: can kill you. I know it first day. I have
Speaker 1: sawdust file. He wouldn't camp us a sign for a pillick.
Speaker 1: He his head getting damp, beach stops gaps. He would
Speaker 1: slip along and find a buck scrapy to be there
Speaker 1: before dawn. He hunt three full days in the same
Speaker 1: Spotty says he'll kill that buck if you sign it's hot.
Speaker 1: When a big old sack will kill a slipping along
Speaker 1: it three away would singing salt food. James Flawn says
Speaker 1: a backwoods man may a living let his hand didn't
Speaker 1: work for the man. No serve I go, why I
Speaker 1: tell fuck he loved the land, humbling Earnest, I can
Speaker 1: tell you I know it first hand. I rarely met
Speaker 1: a man, it's can you wine? He sends his toe
Speaker 1: wrong as a long leave finding the bucking horses hold
Speaker 1: a cycle, recks about Dinny man broke his neck, tell
Speaker 1: me what was? But now he's old, still got fire
Speaker 1: in his books like Time to Gold and when you
Speaker 1: need a friend to be by your side and you
Speaker 1: kill a bird, do help your skin the high Damn
Speaker 1: Lawrence is a backwood fan. He live with his own
Speaker 1: two hands, didn't work with a band. I go and
Speaker 1: tell the buck you love the land, humbling earnest, I
Speaker 1: can tell you I know it first hand. Dame Lawrence
Speaker 1: is a backwoods man. Ain't living with his own two hands,
Speaker 1: didn't work in the fan, No serve, I go, I
Speaker 1: tell Buck you love the lambright Great time guy. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the Live Beargreas Render Podcast. Thank you guys so
Speaker 1: much for coming. It means a lot to me and
Speaker 1: Misty and I know all of Beargrease people for for
Speaker 1: everybody to come out. I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: travel the long ways to get here, all the way
Speaker 1: across the country. Have we done the whole like who
Speaker 1: traveled the furthest thing? Yet? Has that happened? We did
Speaker 1: a little bit of that earlier this morning. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so we got tickets from North Dakota, South Carolina, South Carolina, Texas,
Speaker 1: down in the tip of Florida, out west Montana. Yeah,
Speaker 1: young lady from Minnesota. Yea, Minnesota's here. Yeah. So it
Speaker 1: means a lot to me that everybody would would drive
Speaker 1: that far to come to a black bear event in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: So that's awesome. And I don't I don't do this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff very often. I feel like, I feel
Speaker 1: like my community has supported us, you guys, and and
Speaker 1: and wider people not from Arkansas, but really northwest Arkansas
Speaker 1: has been really good to me. And so I wanted
Speaker 1: to do an event where, you know, we just came
Speaker 1: together and had a good time. And so I'm thrilled
Speaker 1: that everybody's here, and everybody knows who's here. This is
Speaker 1: Brent Reeves. Brent's from down in the swamps. Brent does
Speaker 1: not like being called a hillbilly. I mean, he's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not a hillbilly. I literally live in like flat ground.
Speaker 1: So and on the next Bear Grease podcast you're gonna
Speaker 1: learn why he doesn't want to be called a hillbilly.
Speaker 1: Like the Deep, the Deep anthropological science of why, being
Speaker 1: from the flat lands Delta of Arkansas, he is opposed
Speaker 1: to being called at learn something about yourself here. I'm
Speaker 1: fiting to teach you. So the superficial reason is because
Speaker 1: if a cat had kittens in the oven, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: call him biscuits. One time I called Brenda hillbilly and
Speaker 1: he said, don't call me a hillbilly. We had hillbilly's
Speaker 1: mowing our grass. This is my This is my wife,
Speaker 1: Misty Nucam. Yeah, yeah, man, I think it's pretty cool
Speaker 1: that I can have my wife with me on my podcast.
Speaker 1: Misty do you know anybody else that puts their wife
Speaker 1: on their podcasts. I use this to my advantage, asking
Speaker 1: to be on the podcast. She didn't want to be. No,
Speaker 1: it's it's so great to have Misty. And then everybody
Speaker 1: has met Myron means he's been up here earlier. Myer
Speaker 1: and I, Myron and I have been really we've known
Speaker 1: each other for a lot of years now. And uh,
Speaker 1: I mean when you first got the job as the
Speaker 1: as the bear coordinator, which you were the bear coordinator
Speaker 1: of the state. Correct, Yes, that changed, but I think
Speaker 1: I talked to you within a month of you having
Speaker 1: that job. Yeah, probably so too long, too long, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but now it's great to have Myron here for real.
Speaker 1: James Brandenburg, James is uh, he's he's a big wig
Speaker 1: here in Arkansas with for Arkansas BHA. James would and
Speaker 1: his team are responsible for this and I don't really
Speaker 1: have anything to do with this other than just show up.
Speaker 1: And so James has one doing all the work and
Speaker 1: in his team A got you, thank you. There it's
Speaker 1: the guys, it's the everybody else is doing all the work.
Speaker 1: And Josh Landbridge is still yeah, Josh's Uh. Josh has
Speaker 1: been one of my best friends for a long long
Speaker 1: time and uh and his mustache inspired me in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six to learn about the Bearing Landbridge So
Speaker 1: h that's a different story. But no, you're welcome. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have. I think we live in an incredible We
Speaker 1: live in an incredible state. Did you guys hear the
Speaker 1: podcast that just came out about the Bear State and
Speaker 1: the Arkansas the Big Bear of Arkansas. That story. Man,
Speaker 1: what's so wild about this place that we live not
Speaker 1: this place being Arkansas, but this world that we live
Speaker 1: in is that humans are only here for just like
Speaker 1: a really short period of time, So we typically gather
Speaker 1: information that seems pertinent to our to our best interests
Speaker 1: in the moment, and we can lose the bigger picture
Speaker 1: of why stuff is the way that it is. And
Speaker 1: there's life is so complex, stories are so complex. And
Speaker 1: I love it when you can almost any single thing
Speaker 1: that you wanted to mind down into, like why is Arkansas?
Speaker 1: Why were we called the bear state? Why did we
Speaker 1: move away from that? Man? There's like deep stories inside
Speaker 1: of it, deep deep stories. And it's so interesting because
Speaker 1: because we now get to script who we are, what
Speaker 1: our identity is, and we look back at history and
Speaker 1: see how things happened, it's like you can you can
Speaker 1: you can begin to say, Okay, we are active partakers
Speaker 1: in something that's happening right now that we get to
Speaker 1: build on purpose. And I don't know why, and I
Speaker 1: think everybody up here would agree. Admiring for sure, someone
Speaker 1: who's dedicated a big part of his life to bears.
Speaker 1: From the first time that I killed a bear in
Speaker 1: Arkansas in two thousand and one is the first year
Speaker 1: that it was legal debate in Arkansas. And I've said
Speaker 1: it before, I think I said it last year. I
Speaker 1: claim to have killed the first legal bear in the
Speaker 1: state of Arkansas over bait because October first, two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, at the crack of dawn, me and Gary
Speaker 1: Nucom were, where's dad at? Is he over there? Where's
Speaker 1: Dad at? He's somewhere? Me and my dad were hunting
Speaker 1: and killed a bear. I mean, I'm serious, Like it
Speaker 1: was heartily daylight and killed a bear heartily daylight. It was.
Speaker 1: It was bear legal statutes of limitations, and I was
Speaker 1: perfectly legal. And at that time I was twenty one
Speaker 1: years old, and I it hunted a fair bit, I
Speaker 1: mean I was. I killed deer and turkeys and had
Speaker 1: been involved in honey my whole life. And when I
Speaker 1: walked up to this bear that I had just killed,
Speaker 1: I realized that I knew nothing about it, like nothing.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I didn't know what it ate, I
Speaker 1: didn't know where it wanted to bed, I didn't know
Speaker 1: when it dinned. I didn't know about its reproduction cycle,
Speaker 1: and it it felt hollow. At twenty one years old,
Speaker 1: I was like, man, this is this is a great
Speaker 1: beast and I know nothing about it. And something was
Speaker 1: happening inside of me that I couldn't have calculated. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have it was just unconscious. But really what was
Speaker 1: being said and demonstrated is that the hunt and partaking
Speaker 1: inside of taking wildlife is so much bigger than just
Speaker 1: taking an animals. There is a powerful component of connection
Speaker 1: that we have with hunting and this. And from that point,
Speaker 1: I was going to the u of A. At that time,
Speaker 1: I was living in Faddeville, and I started going to
Speaker 1: the University of Arkansas library and found these old dusty
Speaker 1: books of the of all the research that had been
Speaker 1: done in Arkansas at that time by Clark and who
Speaker 1: else was it Clark, Kimberly Smith, Joe Clark, Dan Clapp,
Speaker 1: Stephen Hayes. They kind of did all the you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of the research we based our managements on
Speaker 1: for thirty years. Yeah, they did that work back in
Speaker 1: the mid to late eighties, right, And so I started
Speaker 1: I started reading that stuff and that's where that was
Speaker 1: the first time that I read that Arkansas was formerly
Speaker 1: known as the Bear State. And to be honest with it,
Speaker 1: there's been a couple of times in my life when
Speaker 1: I was upset at all the people around me because
Speaker 1: they didn't teach me something. And that was a moment
Speaker 1: when I was like, why didn't they tell me? Why
Speaker 1: didn't they tell me that this was the bear state?
Speaker 1: And uh? And I was just fascinated by that and
Speaker 1: began to just study about bears and continue to hunt
Speaker 1: bears and and we I'll tell you another thing. When
Speaker 1: I first started getting y'all mind, if I just have
Speaker 1: my own little podcast, I can hear y'all breathing. Ye. No.
Speaker 1: When I when I first started getting interested in bears
Speaker 1: and in media as well, I had I had some
Speaker 1: pretty legitimate people who had my best interest in mind,
Speaker 1: advised me not to get into bears. Like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different things I could have done. I started
Speaker 1: with in the white tail world, writing articles for North
Speaker 1: American white tail and different things. And that's what me
Speaker 1: and dad did. That's what my dad mainly we did
Speaker 1: grown up. Were we white tail bow hunted public land
Speaker 1: in Arkansas. It's just what we did. And then twenty
Speaker 1: one killed a bear, and then you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff was going on. But I started tiptoeing in
Speaker 1: outdoor media and started just like leaning into this bear stuff.
Speaker 1: And I remember one guy, a good friend of mine,
Speaker 1: he was like, what are you doing? Man? Why are
Speaker 1: you focusing on bears. He's like, you kind of focus
Speaker 1: on deer. Yet it's exactly what he said. And and
Speaker 1: and I just I just said, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: I just I just like him. And I kept going
Speaker 1: that direction and it ended up being the best thing
Speaker 1: that I ever did for a lot of different reasons.
Speaker 1: But I but I felt like and I wasn't the
Speaker 1: only one doing this, But I mean, I can just
Speaker 1: talk from what I experienced. I felt like I started
Speaker 1: to mine into stuff that people hadn't talked about or
Speaker 1: thought about, or brought to the surface in a long time.
Speaker 1: Because bear hunting was pretty much stamped out of our
Speaker 1: culture for about eighty years, almost entirely. When you go
Speaker 1: to the Appalachian Mountains, you go to East Tennessee in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, they never lost their bears and they maintained
Speaker 1: a bear hunting culture all through that time. Arkansas, our
Speaker 1: bears were extirpated, like Myron told us about earlier in
Speaker 1: the early by the turn of the twentieth century nineteen
Speaker 1: hunt well, nineteen forty, pretty much our bears were gone.
Speaker 1: People forgot about bears. They did they forgot how to
Speaker 1: use them, They forgot about bear grease. They forgot that
Speaker 1: bear meat was incredibly good tasting meat. They forgot how
Speaker 1: to hunt bears. Literally, dads didn't teach their sons how
Speaker 1: to hunt bears because there weren't bears here. And then
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty was of our first bear hunt, first
Speaker 1: modern day Our first modern day bear hunt was in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty and the bear population just continued to climb,
Speaker 1: continue to climb, continue to climb, continue to climb. And
Speaker 1: then two thousand and one is when the Game and
Speaker 1: Fish made the decision, the management decision that we were
Speaker 1: going to manage our bears using primarily using bow hunters
Speaker 1: on private land over bait, which is genius. Never if
Speaker 1: you're from Arkansas and you've ever looked to be in
Speaker 1: the eye, never ever talked bad about baiting a bear.
Speaker 1: It is God's gift to us to be able to
Speaker 1: bait a bear, because I can tell you something, they're
Speaker 1: hard to find out in the mountains by themselves. When
Speaker 1: I bait bears for a month in Arkansas, it is
Speaker 1: I call it my month with the bears because you
Speaker 1: see stuff that you never see any other time of year.
Speaker 1: And it's a fantastic management tool that allows us to
Speaker 1: be selective, allows us to shoot older age mails, all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. Are y'all my monologue? Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: it when I get people cornered him. We may play
Speaker 1: some more music. No, I'm trying to set the context
Speaker 1: for opening this up for no, because it's it's it's bigger.
Speaker 1: It's bigger than just all we can hunt bears. No,
Speaker 1: And there's there's there is no doubt, there's no doubt
Speaker 1: a trend in our society today. And it's not ever
Speaker 1: gonna come to Arkansas. Never. Never is it gonna come
Speaker 1: to Arkansas because we're not gonna let it right where
Speaker 1: people would say, you shouldn't be hunting predators, you shouldn't be,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be using bait, you shouldn't be you know,
Speaker 1: telling like someone who doesn't know telling us what we
Speaker 1: should do. Um, And it's it's it's a fantastic and
Speaker 1: incredible opportunity that we have. But when they opened up
Speaker 1: bear season, it opened up the floodgates for Arkansas bear
Speaker 1: hunters to be able to partake of something that had
Speaker 1: been culturally forgotten for generations, for real. And now we're
Speaker 1: twenty three years into having a bear baiting season. And
Speaker 1: we're now like fifty years into having a bear season,
Speaker 1: fifty three years into nineteen three to have a bear season.
Speaker 1: And I mean there's a there's a revival of the
Speaker 1: bear state. That's what I want to proclaim to the world.
Speaker 1: And it's and and it's uh and it's not just
Speaker 1: in Arkansas, man. Whatever is happening ecologically in this in
Speaker 1: North America, whatever it is, there's there. They're drastic weather
Speaker 1: pattern changes that have been going on for the last
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty years. A lot of wild stuff is happening.
Speaker 1: For whatever reason, it has been highly beneficial to the
Speaker 1: generalist omnivores and specifically the black bear. You will not
Speaker 1: here about a population of bears anywhere in the country
Speaker 1: that isn't expanding. And that's massive inside of a country
Speaker 1: with as much urban sprawl, habitat loss, civilizations spread, all
Speaker 1: kind of habitat fragmentation. For us to be able to
Speaker 1: stand up and say, man, the icon of North American wilderness,
Speaker 1: the black bear is coming back, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: it's it's coming back all over the country. You know,
Speaker 1: Our our game and fish brought in these bears in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties and sixties two hundred and fifty four
Speaker 1: bears and transplanted them here in Arkansas, three different places.
Speaker 1: And now we got a hunting season in Oklahoma. There's
Speaker 1: a hunting season in Missouri. There are bears in northern Louisiana.
Speaker 1: There are bears in these Texas. There are bears on
Speaker 1: the other side of the Mississippi River in Mississippi. Not
Speaker 1: a lot, but they're there. And you look at this
Speaker 1: one little place, it's one little dot on the map,
Speaker 1: and it's in that range is growing like this. And
Speaker 1: while I have you, this is so important from a
Speaker 1: social perspective because bear numbers are increasing all over the country.
Speaker 1: People that didn't know we had bears have them in
Speaker 1: their backyard, urban people maybe, people who don't have a
Speaker 1: connection to rural America and hunting. They don't understand how
Speaker 1: someone would want to kill an animal. And with the
Speaker 1: increase of bears across the country, there's never been a
Speaker 1: more opportune time for the bear hunters of America to
Speaker 1: become educated, to become passionate, to know how to utilize
Speaker 1: the resource at the highest level. When it comes to
Speaker 1: utilization of the commodities that a bear gives us, There's
Speaker 1: never been a better time for us to learn how
Speaker 1: to talk about predator hunting in a way that that
Speaker 1: that dominant. Somebody wants to talk to me about bear
Speaker 1: hunting and have and challenge me, and I'd be nice
Speaker 1: to him, Probably I wouldn't. I just don't want one
Speaker 1: self help. Yes for you, Yes, you need to work
Speaker 1: on the passion party. Pop it down a little passionate man.
Speaker 1: I know about him. Well, what I'm saying is is
Speaker 1: that this is not an argument of of of right
Speaker 1: and wrong, and we're trying to decide we're right and uh,
Speaker 1: but we're not. We're not in a battle against people.
Speaker 1: We're we're in a we're in a battle against ignorance
Speaker 1: at the most, at the high, at the at the
Speaker 1: very definition of the word ignorance, not not the derogatory thing.
Speaker 1: But that's what we can do, is educate people and
Speaker 1: learn how to us really value respect and love the bear.
Speaker 1: Like in that Big Bear of Arkansas story, this short
Speaker 1: story written in eighteen forty one, he said, Uh, the
Speaker 1: fictitious character Jim Doggett, Okay, if you listened, you'll know.
Speaker 1: If you didn't, you should have. You should have known
Speaker 1: coming here. You should listen to Last Bearer's podcast. This
Speaker 1: fictitious character. He's an Arkansas bear hunter and he says
Speaker 1: he sees a bear being bade by hounds walking across
Speaker 1: the hill and he said, oh, wasn't he a beauty?
Speaker 1: I loved him like a brother. And man, that's the
Speaker 1: North American hunter. What we do inside of the North
Speaker 1: American model of wildlife conservation is a functionalization of a
Speaker 1: love for wildlife and a love for wild places. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what it is. And we have a
Speaker 1: track record in this country of where we messed up
Speaker 1: pretty bad for a while, like the market hunting here
Speaker 1: era and just rampant exploitation of wildlife. Like yep, that
Speaker 1: did happen, and we knew when we saw we messed up.
Speaker 1: But then we rebounded and have have escorted onto planet
Speaker 1: Earth the most robust endeavor for wildlife husbandry ever in
Speaker 1: the history of the planet. For real, what's happened in
Speaker 1: North America, not just with bears, but with deer, the
Speaker 1: wild turkey, the elk, the sheep, everything. It's incredible. And man,
Speaker 1: we can't we can't lose that inside of our culture.
Speaker 1: Like the very definition of being an American should have.
Speaker 1: Not everybody needs to be a hunter. Not everybody needs
Speaker 1: to be but the very definition of American at one
Speaker 1: time there was a sector of that that was that
Speaker 1: that had hunting as a primary component of American identity.
Speaker 1: And we can't lose that. And the way we don't
Speaker 1: lose it is we do stuff like this and you
Speaker 1: take time out of your life to come and support
Speaker 1: something and joint organizations and and hunt by a hunting license,
Speaker 1: be an active and active participant inside of what what
Speaker 1: What we're needing from the broader sports is like the
Speaker 1: Game of Fish did a big survey this year bear
Speaker 1: hunters surveys and uh, I mean, you guys learned a lot.
Speaker 1: Tell me about that survey. It did learn a lot,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of the Uh. The survey went
Speaker 1: out to people that have successfully harvested a bear in
Speaker 1: the last three years, and uh, they got a pretty
Speaker 1: good response rate. I believe it was something like forty
Speaker 1: eight percent. Wow, of the people that they sent it
Speaker 1: out to returned a response on it. And it was
Speaker 1: a lot of Uh. It wasn't necessarily geared to our
Speaker 1: well do you hunt bear? What zone you honey? And
Speaker 1: it was more geared toward uh people's associations with bear hunting.
Speaker 1: How long have you bear hunted? You know, have you
Speaker 1: bear hunted zero, two years or fifteen years? Or you know,
Speaker 1: how did you learn to bear hunt? Like doctor Ballard
Speaker 1: was saying, you know, did you learn it through podcasts?
Speaker 1: Did you learn it through agency employees? Did you learn
Speaker 1: it through a newspaper articles or magazine articles. So a
Speaker 1: lot of it was geared toward trying to trying to
Speaker 1: quantify or put on paper what the attitudes are towards
Speaker 1: bear hunting across the state. And you know, social science
Speaker 1: isn't just new to game and fish. It's new a
Speaker 1: lot of natural resource agencies around, but it's becoming an
Speaker 1: ever more important part of our management goals or strategies
Speaker 1: is to incorporate social science attitudes of the public into that.
Speaker 1: You know, we had a targeted audience bear hunt successful
Speaker 1: bear hunters. You know, hopefully in the future we could
Speaker 1: expand that to What I would like to see is if, if,
Speaker 1: and when we ever have a licensed system in place
Speaker 1: where I'm able to determine how many bear hunters we
Speaker 1: have in the state, I would like to send that
Speaker 1: survey out to you know, not successful and unsuccessful bear hunters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's a lot of it's geared aimed at
Speaker 1: determining attitudes more than it is like someone's success rating
Speaker 1: things like that. Is there anything you can point to
Speaker 1: that you learned from that? Oh, yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff I learned. Uh, there's a there's a lot
Speaker 1: bigger culture out there about utilization of bare parts other
Speaker 1: than meat. And you know, I kind of suspected it,
Speaker 1: but you know, you don't know if you hear about
Speaker 1: people rendering down fad or you know, doing things making soap,
Speaker 1: like one of the gentlemen here gave me some soap. Uh,
Speaker 1: you hear about people doing that, but you think, well,
Speaker 1: you don't know if you know, those are outliers in
Speaker 1: the general consensus of how people utilize bears. Why they
Speaker 1: want to hunt bears, they want to hunt it for
Speaker 1: all things included, or just the meat or just a trophy.
Speaker 1: But actually, like sixty five percent or more of the
Speaker 1: people that responded in it utilize several parts of the bears,
Speaker 1: not just the meat. Yeah, and so that's really good
Speaker 1: to know. It helps me as a manager understand, you know,
Speaker 1: how people want to utilize bears, which is important. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not just all about people harvesting bears. As I said,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of let me say something about that.
Speaker 1: The oftentimes in talking to people just about hunting in general,
Speaker 1: you'll talk to somebody and say, yeah, a bear hunt,
Speaker 1: and they'll they'll go, I, you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'd want to kill a bear. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'd want to eat it or not. And there
Speaker 1: are parts of the country that have that for years,
Speaker 1: manage bears in a depredation way, like some of that
Speaker 1: states out west, like you don't legally have to take
Speaker 1: the meat. That's just old school way that they did things. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can't understand that. Yeah, that that's an old mentality.
Speaker 1: What what we're doing now and what Daniel Boone did
Speaker 1: and Jim dogg It did and you know, is we're
Speaker 1: utilizing more of a black bear than ninety nine point
Speaker 1: nine nine percent of people use of a white tail,
Speaker 1: of an elk, of a quail, of a turkey. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're most bears that are killed are the hide is
Speaker 1: gonna be tanned. I mean most people that kill a
Speaker 1: But I've never killed a bear that I didn't tan
Speaker 1: the hide. Um, we're rendering the fat and we're using
Speaker 1: the meat. And I mean, you know, when's the last
Speaker 1: How many dear have you killed in your life? How
Speaker 1: many tan hides have you got at your house? You know?
Speaker 1: Not many? So that is a powerful tool to be like, man,
Speaker 1: we absolutely utilize these animals that were taken, and I
Speaker 1: think that's really cool. And again, just another another mechanism
Speaker 1: that helps people understand bear hunting. Really Oh yeah, man,
Speaker 1: we use we use everything. So that's that's good. You know,
Speaker 1: when one of the other questions was geared at, you know,
Speaker 1: how did you learn How did you learn to bear hunt?
Speaker 1: You know, did you learn through podcasts or social media
Speaker 1: this day and age? Or do you have friends that
Speaker 1: bear hunt? Did you learn from friends? Did you learn
Speaker 1: from family members? You know? So it kind of speaks
Speaker 1: to the whether or not there is a quote tradition
Speaker 1: of bear hunting in the Bear state. So it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's aimed at determining a lot of things like
Speaker 1: that that you know, I can sit here and speculate
Speaker 1: all day long, you know, how what I get, what
Speaker 1: the feedback I get is about just but that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily put it on paper, you know. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very very good information. Who's got the best bear
Speaker 1: story up here from last year? Josh, you didn't hunt, James,
Speaker 1: you hunted? Yeah, I saw a bear, didn't you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I walked one up. I'm not gonna say where it was,
Speaker 1: don't tell it, but I was. I was hunting on
Speaker 1: public land and walking along about. I was deer hunting, actually,
Speaker 1: and I stopped in a spot, set my pack down,
Speaker 1: hung out for a while. I got hungry, like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get my pack and get a snack out. I
Speaker 1: turned around. I had about set my pack down in
Speaker 1: a pile of bear scat. Didn't realize it at the time,
Speaker 1: and it was fresh. So then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I's kind of on a bear hunt and a deer hunt.
Speaker 1: And I kept on throughout the day, and I moved
Speaker 1: a little farther along and got down below this bluff
Speaker 1: line and got warm. I stopped and taking some layers off,
Speaker 1: and I turned around behind me. There's this bear just
Speaker 1: staring at me. It's like a couple of rocks like this,
Speaker 1: and thirty yards probably no more in yards. Late season
Speaker 1: two November. Yeah, Yeah, so um, looked at him, and
Speaker 1: it was legal. I could have shot him. Put the
Speaker 1: gun up, look out his muzzleloader hunting. Um and uh
Speaker 1: and this was on a permit hunt. That's why he's
Speaker 1: muzzleloader hunting in November, Myron, because because you know this
Speaker 1: was this was a special permit for that. And uh,
Speaker 1: looked at him, put my gun down, looked at him
Speaker 1: with my two eyes. I'm like, well, heck, yeah, put
Speaker 1: the gun back up, and he was gone, like the
Speaker 1: black mist over the fence. He disappeared, disappeared. I mean
Speaker 1: I looked for stood there for five minutes with my binoculars,
Speaker 1: looking all over the hillside everything. I have no idea
Speaker 1: where he went, but I climbed up there, and I
Speaker 1: mean there's a pile of scat up there as big
Speaker 1: around as my hat. Nice big spot was all worn
Speaker 1: out where he just been hanging out, just waiting for winter.
Speaker 1: And I went back in hunting him a couple more times,
Speaker 1: but I never get never got on him. So that's
Speaker 1: pretty good for two James killed the bear on public
Speaker 1: land the year before, right yep. Yeah, So that that's
Speaker 1: a good encouragement for people. You heard me speak highly
Speaker 1: of baiting bears, which we can on private land, but
Speaker 1: we've got a lot of public land in Arkansas and
Speaker 1: you can you can kill him on public land. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a. It's much harder. It's much harder. It
Speaker 1: takes a lot more work, and it's my favorite hunt
Speaker 1: on planet Earth for real. Like the moose I got.
Speaker 1: I killed a moose in Alaska last year. Man, I
Speaker 1: throw that moose in the river. To kill a big
Speaker 1: black bear on public land in Arkansas. I better not
Speaker 1: tell your boss that you stole that shot, remember I did.
Speaker 1: They didn't show all that. I'll tell the story about
Speaker 1: that sometimes. Um No, I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit,
Speaker 1: not much, but hunting bear on public land in Arkansas
Speaker 1: is um you know you're going to big to simplify it.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about it extensively. Actually the best thing
Speaker 1: if you really want to know. I had a couple
Speaker 1: of guys today ask me about public land bear hunt
Speaker 1: in Arkansas on the Bear Hunting Magazine podcast, which is
Speaker 1: still up there is uh. We spent episodes talking like
Speaker 1: talking as much as we knew how to talk about
Speaker 1: killing bear on public land. That's still on there. Kobe,
Speaker 1: do you remember it in the names any of those
Speaker 1: episodes bear Hunting, bear Hunting for Dummies. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: the dummy. Yeah, and look what it did for you.
Speaker 1: I know. I'm still Yeah, there's a lot. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to be said for that kind of stuff. Hey,
Speaker 1: we've got a lot of moms and wives and children here.
Speaker 1: Raise your hand if you are here as a supportive person,
Speaker 1: but you yourself are not a bear hunter. Big big
Speaker 1: hand raise. Hey, that's awesome as awesome kudos for you guys.
Speaker 1: I just want to say when Clay talked about killing
Speaker 1: his first bear, he was twenty one, and we had
Speaker 1: just found out that I was. I was pregnant with
Speaker 1: our first our oldest daughter. She's not here. Two of
Speaker 1: our our boys are here, Baron shep are over there,
Speaker 1: but our girls. We had just found out I was.
Speaker 1: I was pregnant with Willow, and like a lot of women,
Speaker 1: we found out that I was anemic. And so one
Speaker 1: of the things that you got to do is pump
Speaker 1: up your iron levels, and it turned out that wild
Speaker 1: meat was a great way to do that, and so
Speaker 1: that's kind of how I got into to eating wild game,
Speaker 1: because bear meat tasted so much better than dear meat,
Speaker 1: those game, those gamey wild bucks as for protein than
Speaker 1: it does. And so that's how we started eating bear meat.
Speaker 1: And we were like broke. I mean, we were college
Speaker 1: students and pregnant with our first kid, and he had
Speaker 1: this two hundred fifty pounds of bear meat that he
Speaker 1: brought in and I had to learn how to cook it.
Speaker 1: And you know, you got to learn how to cook
Speaker 1: it because it's not you know, it's not like grocery grocery,
Speaker 1: the stuff you buy the grocery store. But oh yeah,
Speaker 1: over the years, as our kids grew up, they all
Speaker 1: started bear hunting. And I got to sit with Shep
Speaker 1: on his first bear, because you know, you have to
Speaker 1: have an adult sit with you, and so I got
Speaker 1: to sit with Shep on his first bear. It was
Speaker 1: Shep and me and James Lawrence who Clay just sang
Speaker 1: that song about. I called James. He had a walkie
Speaker 1: talkie and I had a waukie talkie and Clay and
Speaker 1: Bear and River, our other daughter. They were out too
Speaker 1: far to help us, and James and Sheff and I
Speaker 1: went and found that bear chef accidentally sprayed the woods
Speaker 1: with bear spray. So that was fun for James and
Speaker 1: I mainly Chef and I and then last year, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of you've heard bear story about going
Speaker 1: out and hunting and as a you know, just being
Speaker 1: sent out to public land for three days and we
Speaker 1: kind of hung around for that. Last year, Clay was
Speaker 1: you know, Bear is named Bear. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: how much this guy loves bears. Be named his son
Speaker 1: Sun Bear, and Bears kind of grown up hunting and
Speaker 1: it's been really cool to watch his his migration from
Speaker 1: just like the guy that took pictures whenever we got
Speaker 1: the big Bear to the guy who's out there taking
Speaker 1: care of business. And he last year Clay was out,
Speaker 1: he was out a lot, traveling to different places. And
Speaker 1: so Bear took on the mantle of that gorgeous the
Speaker 1: Kentucky water pronounced Moulay. But Bear went out and baited
Speaker 1: the bear all by himself to get it ready for
Speaker 1: Clay when he came back home, and and him went
Speaker 1: ahead and started. He took out the mules and Caleb,
Speaker 1: who's over there as I think I saw Caleb come
Speaker 1: in as well. Yeah, yeah, Caleb was. And those guys
Speaker 1: would go hook up. Yeah, those guys would go hook up.
Speaker 1: The mule trailer, dragged the mules two and a half, however,
Speaker 1: many hours away from from our house, and and hike
Speaker 1: up into the wherever they were, and it was it
Speaker 1: was pretty impressive. I wasn't one hundred percent sure that
Speaker 1: I was comfortable with Bear, you know, taking a trailer
Speaker 1: hours at a time. And anyway, Bear got his own big,
Speaker 1: gigantic bear. How big was your bear this year? Four
Speaker 1: hundred pounds Bear? John did that and he, yeah, let's
Speaker 1: get Barrett bringing home the meat for the family. And
Speaker 1: he had to load that thing up him. James Lawrence,
Speaker 1: Papa Gary Gary was there. Brent came in and they
Speaker 1: loaded it up. And Bear had to do a whole
Speaker 1: lot of it by himself and travel through the night.
Speaker 1: And I was watching them, you know, thank goodness for
Speaker 1: cell phones because I was watching them, and it was
Speaker 1: it was. He got home at five in the morning,
Speaker 1: like had having to carry that thing out out off
Speaker 1: the woods. He didn't have He was way out there,
Speaker 1: so he didn't have, like, you know, an easy way
Speaker 1: to get it out of the woods. And so he
Speaker 1: got home at five in the morning, had the mules
Speaker 1: in the back of the trailer with him, and and
Speaker 1: the bear, and it was as a mom. The support
Speaker 1: that we provide these guys actually is something that gives
Speaker 1: back to us. It's been really cool to see bear
Speaker 1: hunting has kind of been woven in our family. It
Speaker 1: really was the only way I could eat wild meat
Speaker 1: because it was it was better and and it was palatable.
Speaker 1: We've since learned how to make the other stuff good
Speaker 1: as well, but but it's it's been something that's been
Speaker 1: a part of our family culture and a really special tradition,
Speaker 1: from just putting our little babies, you know, on a
Speaker 1: on a bear hide for a picture, to watching them
Speaker 1: grow up and become a hunters themselves. And it's just
Speaker 1: part of our family culture. So kudos to you guys
Speaker 1: who are here supporting whoever it is you're supporting that's
Speaker 1: a hunter. It gives back, It gives back in a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways, and it's part of our culture,
Speaker 1: as our Kansas and as Americans, as Clay says, and
Speaker 1: it's a part of all of our culture, even those
Speaker 1: of us who don't actually get out there and do
Speaker 1: the hunting itself. That was good. I think mine was better,
Speaker 1: tell you what, it was pretty succinct, certainly shorter short,
Speaker 1: it was a shorter fishing trip. Brent, you got a
Speaker 1: bear hunting story for us? Yeah, last year I killed
Speaker 1: this many bears. So if anybody needs some help or
Speaker 1: advice on how to kill no bears, come see me
Speaker 1: happy right over here. Yeah. How many were at the
Speaker 1: Warner Glenn film premiere last night? Did y'all enjoyed the film? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 1: yeah that was fun? Um I was. I was supposed
Speaker 1: to tell who paid for all that, who sponsored it
Speaker 1: and presented it? And I didn't. I didn't any guesses
Speaker 1: who sponsored that event? That's right? Yeah, for real, man,
Speaker 1: these guys they got wind. They I didn't ask them.
Speaker 1: They got wind of that we were thinking about doing
Speaker 1: a film premiere and they said how much money do
Speaker 1: you need? And I told him and he said, well
Speaker 1: how about we give you more than that? And they
Speaker 1: allowed us to rent that facility. The guys on X
Speaker 1: are incredible and um, if you go ahead, they're they're
Speaker 1: also presenting sponsors of this event today as well, and
Speaker 1: as a chapter, we're very thankful for that support as well.
Speaker 1: So they're they're helping us out a ton um to
Speaker 1: keep access to open up access to public land. So no, seriously,
Speaker 1: though on X has been very good to us. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of you all have been up to
Speaker 1: do that stuff today and we appreciate their support. How
Speaker 1: many people have on X on their phone? All right?
Speaker 1: Everybody drop? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, they they
Speaker 1: were They're incredible. Um. You also forgot to say who
Speaker 1: did all the work behind the scenes? Oh yeah, Isaac
Speaker 1: Neil did all the work. See the guy with big
Speaker 1: ear rings. Yeah, Isaac. Isaac help with Beargreas. He's the
Speaker 1: he's the assistant to the regional producer of Beargreas, which
Speaker 1: is me. Uh Maran. Let's talk about bears a little
Speaker 1: bit more so. We now have a hunt in the
Speaker 1: Gulf coastal plan we do? And how many bears did
Speaker 1: they kill this year? Yeah that's a big deal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a big deal. How many How many bears did
Speaker 1: were killed? Done? This year? They harvested twenty eight bears,
Speaker 1: of course there was a quote of twenty five. The
Speaker 1: season ran from December tenth to December sixteenth, or when
Speaker 1: the quota was met, whichever came first. The quotas met
Speaker 1: Monday evening roughly five or six o'clock. It wasn't closed
Speaker 1: until Monday three days into it, and which there's, there's,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit of information, but I consider it
Speaker 1: great information. I consider the fact that the season ran
Speaker 1: through the week end. I considered that a great success.
Speaker 1: Tell me what you mean by that, Well, well, it
Speaker 1: was long enough to at least get through the weekend, Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: So what I really didn't want to happen was set
Speaker 1: the season at such a time frame in the fall
Speaker 1: that you open a season on Saturday, and by noon
Speaker 1: Saturday they had already checked enough bears in the season
Speaker 1: closes and you got a lot of spill over and
Speaker 1: everything else like that. So what. But I also didn't
Speaker 1: want the season set so late that a lot of
Speaker 1: bears weren't on the landscape. Remember what I talked about
Speaker 1: the dening chronology of males and females. We want to
Speaker 1: set it late enough to where the females, some of them,
Speaker 1: or at least in the den, to where they're protected.
Speaker 1: They're in a den cycle, making the males. We want
Speaker 1: to buy us the harvest towards males. So it ended
Speaker 1: up being fourteen and fourteen, which isn't great, but at
Speaker 1: least it didn't close in the first half day of
Speaker 1: the season. It was long enough, the quota was large
Speaker 1: enough that you know, the way I took that is,
Speaker 1: most people were able to hunt through the weekend that
Speaker 1: wanted to bear hunt, and so you know, it was
Speaker 1: a success. I felt like it was a great success
Speaker 1: on where we placed the quota based on the best
Speaker 1: research information we had. How when we started the season,
Speaker 1: I think there could be some fine tuning on the season,
Speaker 1: but you know, really just the fact that we had
Speaker 1: a bear hunt in the Gulf coastal plaine of Arkansas
Speaker 1: and we have a bear season and roughly four fifths
Speaker 1: of the state now, which is something that I mean,
Speaker 1: I just don't think people would have envisioned that forty
Speaker 1: three years ago. Would you have thought it? Inside of
Speaker 1: your career. I was really skeptical at one point if
Speaker 1: it was going to happen. I mean, I knew we
Speaker 1: had research on going and depend on what that search said,
Speaker 1: but we kept having you know, historic flood events, you know,
Speaker 1: one hundred year flood events two out of five years,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, so that affected our research. So
Speaker 1: the research kept getting put off and put off and
Speaker 1: put off and everything like that. So I was beginning
Speaker 1: to wonder if it was going to happen in my career,
Speaker 1: but it did, and man, I feel I feel really
Speaker 1: proud that I got to see it in my career. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's big. The first time that I went on a
Speaker 1: den study with Myron years ago, probably it was at
Speaker 1: least ten years ago, I was I remember, I had
Speaker 1: never never been to a bear den, and we walked
Speaker 1: way back in to an area and Myron kind of
Speaker 1: snuck up to where he believed this bear to be.
Speaker 1: And first of all, I was shocked that this tiny
Speaker 1: little hole. I was expecting a bigger hole, you know,
Speaker 1: for a bear to be able to fit in. Ye,
Speaker 1: But they're like a squirrel, you know, if you if
Speaker 1: you got a hole that big in a tree, a
Speaker 1: gray squirrel that's about that big can fit in it.
Speaker 1: Bears are the same way. And he walks up to
Speaker 1: this little bitty hole that couldn't have been more than
Speaker 1: about that big, and you wouldn't. You've been the hundreds
Speaker 1: of den so you probably don't remember which one it was.
Speaker 1: But I could take you to that den today, like
Speaker 1: I remember where it's at. I'm trying to remember, and
Speaker 1: I'm I'll tell you later it was. It was. It
Speaker 1: was kind of a It was on the side of
Speaker 1: a ridge and the hole though, was like in the ground,
Speaker 1: like an armadilla hole, like it wasn't like a cave.
Speaker 1: And Myron he stuck his head down there and crawled
Speaker 1: in and it's like his rear end and his legs
Speaker 1: are the only thing sticking out. And he stays down
Speaker 1: there for a minute and he comes back out and
Speaker 1: he hands me his flashot and he says, stick your
Speaker 1: head in there. And I said, I said, how how
Speaker 1: close is that bear? And he said, oh, it's just
Speaker 1: like right there. And I said, like how close? And
Speaker 1: he was like oh. Like from like me to you,
Speaker 1: I said, is it awake? And he said yeah, And
Speaker 1: question does have cubs? And he's like yeah. And now
Speaker 1: I remember leaning upside down into this hole and turn
Speaker 1: it on this flashlight and from like me to Brent,
Speaker 1: for real, there's Brenda. It was Brenda, like a she
Speaker 1: was big, just setting his glowing eyes just like for
Speaker 1: me to Brent. I was looking and I'm hanging upside
Speaker 1: down this whole shine and you hear the cubs chuckling
Speaker 1: and feeding, and uh, I'll never forget doing that with you.
Speaker 1: And then I've been several times since then. Pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: What have you learned about bear dinning in the Gulf
Speaker 1: coastal plain that's different than in the mountains. Has there
Speaker 1: been some different stuff? Well, I've learned that I don't
Speaker 1: know near as much about bears as I thought. I mean,
Speaker 1: I really have. This has been Uh. Man, They're just
Speaker 1: different down there. Uh. It is a different world. Their
Speaker 1: behavior is so different than mountain bears. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: I mean I knew that the dinning chronology was later
Speaker 1: in the year. You know, the cycle starts for for
Speaker 1: pregnant females later, you know. But man, it's just I've
Speaker 1: just learned a lot in the past six months about
Speaker 1: their behavior, what there, what their preferences are. They're you know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of nomadic down in that part of the world,
Speaker 1: which makes them incredibly hard to trap. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: did learn one thing that that corn is the acron
Speaker 1: of the South, is it? Yes? It most definitely is
Speaker 1: tell them Tell them what you mean by that? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're just not interesting anything else you have
Speaker 1: to offer trying to bait. Even in the summer months,
Speaker 1: you know, when we were trying to bait, I've literally
Speaker 1: stuffed snare sets full of pastry donuts. I mean, how
Speaker 1: can a bear pass up a you know, a nice
Speaker 1: Chrispy cream donut. I was stopping at the Mini Marchs
Speaker 1: and buying extra glazed honey buns because I'm thinking, this
Speaker 1: is it now. They just walked by and turned their
Speaker 1: nose up at it and go over and eat, you know,
Speaker 1: a polo corn. You know. So it's just it's just
Speaker 1: different behavior. You think they get acclimated to that because
Speaker 1: of all the deer hunting down there over the years. Well,
Speaker 1: I think they've become acclimated to that food choice because
Speaker 1: that's what has been available to them. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: not thirty years ago, but certainly in the last twenty years.
Speaker 1: I mean, and if you got bears they are twenty
Speaker 1: years old, you know what did their mom teach them
Speaker 1: when they were cups? You know, where to find the
Speaker 1: food in the fall? So I learned that, you know,
Speaker 1: bear populations in the Gulf Coastal Plain aren't homo genius
Speaker 1: across the entire Gulf Coastal Plaine. They're kind of patchy.
Speaker 1: You know, there aren't bears everywhere in the Gulf Coastal Plaine,
Speaker 1: even though it's a big zone eleven County zone bear zone.
Speaker 1: But you know, like southern Bradley County has a lot
Speaker 1: of bears, Eastern Union County, Western Ashley County has a
Speaker 1: lot of bears. Dallas County has a lot of bears.
Speaker 1: Washtaw County doesn't have that many bears, even though as
Speaker 1: the Washtaw River running right down the side of it,
Speaker 1: so and bears use those river systems and breaks as
Speaker 1: travel routes. If you if you look on the display
Speaker 1: we had out here showing some of the movement patterns
Speaker 1: of some of those bears. I mean you can watch
Speaker 1: them over time. Do you know they're running around running
Speaker 1: uh these smzs or strange stream manage zones in between
Speaker 1: these corporate timber products are running through these through these
Speaker 1: river systems and stuff like that, the corridors, the riparian zones.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's what those bears do, just running
Speaker 1: around in between that to get from point A to
Speaker 1: point B. A lot of times it's not necessarily straight
Speaker 1: across a ten year old you know production that's where
Speaker 1: they din. So yeah, it seems like every bear in
Speaker 1: the Gulf coastal plane wants to find the perfect geographic
Speaker 1: center of the thickest thicket you could ever imagine, and
Speaker 1: that's where they want to have. Where are they denning?
Speaker 1: Are they digging holes and root balls? Uh? Well not really.
Speaker 1: Most of them are ground nesters in the Gulf coastal
Speaker 1: plane in areas that don't flood. I'm talking about timber
Speaker 1: production land in Dallas County, Washtaw County, Drew County, Bradley.
Speaker 1: They'll just din a ground, just make a ground nest,
Speaker 1: but it will be in a thicket. You could be
Speaker 1: walking through the woods and see just see a bear
Speaker 1: laying on the ground and he's he's denning. That's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we run across it in the
Speaker 1: in the Ozarks and the Washingtall's ground nesters. Typically they're
Speaker 1: gonna be in thick it's uh Washtall dens are typically
Speaker 1: dugouts under root balls. Ozark dens are typically crevice type dens.
Speaker 1: But the Gulf Coastal Plain, if they're now, if they're
Speaker 1: in the flooding regime, they're going to be up in
Speaker 1: a tree. Uh. Last I believe it was last two Wednesday,
Speaker 1: we were down there and trying to find one particular
Speaker 1: female named Memphis and uh, you know, we found her
Speaker 1: and she was in a flooded break Uh not far
Speaker 1: off the Washtall River, but it was flooding and she
Speaker 1: was eighty feet up a cypress tree. And that's where
Speaker 1: she's been in the last three months. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a cavity up there. She just happened
Speaker 1: to be out sunning that day. But there's a cavity
Speaker 1: up there. And uh, based on the GPS locations we
Speaker 1: had over and everything last like that, more than likely
Speaker 1: she has cubs up there. She just happened to be
Speaker 1: out sunning that day, y'all and bring the helicopters into No,
Speaker 1: you know, there was a time back when I was
Speaker 1: a young man. I used to climb trees and do
Speaker 1: tree work, but not so much anymore. That's why we
Speaker 1: have game cameras for Yeah, you guys may have heard
Speaker 1: me talk with Myron about this. But so, your your
Speaker 1: job title used to be bear Coordinator the State of Arkansas,
Speaker 1: and then three years ago it was longer than it
Speaker 1: was about yeah, about twelve years ago. Well no, no no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: the title changed. You became bear coordinator that long ago.
Speaker 1: The name change though, that's what I'm talking. Became bear
Speaker 1: coordinator about sixteen years ago. Name change came about ten
Speaker 1: or twelve. Large carnivore. Yeah, okay, well I thought it
Speaker 1: was baking news. This is so. But why did they
Speaker 1: change your name? That's that's the important thing here. So
Speaker 1: you were the bear coordinator, you became the large carnival coordinator.
Speaker 1: Why why did they change your name? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: mountain lions started showing up that we were documenting. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna put mountain lions start showing up that
Speaker 1: we were documenting, and uh you know, in order to
Speaker 1: I guess monitor what's happening with mountain lions statewide and everything,
Speaker 1: that had to really kind of assign a program coordinator
Speaker 1: to it. Well, the most likely candidate was, well, you know,
Speaker 1: mounta lions are large carnivores. Bears are large omnivores. So hey,
Speaker 1: you know, and I mean honestly still to this day,
Speaker 1: uh ninety nine percent of the work I do is
Speaker 1: very related. Uh you know, I do uh some reports
Speaker 1: on while on mountain lions, but that's basically just an
Speaker 1: the current's type. Matt. You know, once a year put
Speaker 1: together information for a foilier or something like that. But
Speaker 1: it's it's it's pretty cool that there are documented mountain lions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think there's a mountain line in Arkansas today?
Speaker 1: Probably good possibility of it. What color is it? Yod question?
Speaker 1: What colored? To come up? I knew it. Can you
Speaker 1: tell a mountain lion scream what color it is? Gary
Speaker 1: depends on what county it's in? Knows How can you
Speaker 1: tell by their scream whether they're black or just the
Speaker 1: regular ones? Secret? Now I'm really interested in uh in
Speaker 1: in mountain lions and uh Myron said that the majority
Speaker 1: of I should just follow Myron around and infamous. Myron said, no,
Speaker 1: you said that you get a lot of reports of
Speaker 1: mountain lions coming in. We do. We get about one
Speaker 1: hundred I'm gonna say a hundred, one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: sightings to you, okay? And then of those that are
Speaker 1: a mistake, what are they usually? What are people seen?
Speaker 1: Housecats and bobcats? Housecats and bobcats. It's a big house.
Speaker 1: How many people here have claimed to have seen a
Speaker 1: mountain lion? Are? Just say, Jessica Llewellen, come on, I
Speaker 1: know every one of you have told someone you've seen
Speaker 1: a mountain lion. How many grandmas have seen them? Yeah. No.
Speaker 1: One of the first podcasts we ever did was it
Speaker 1: was called the Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion, and
Speaker 1: I had Myron on there and we talked about how
Speaker 1: everybody in the South except for these fine people have
Speaker 1: seen mountain lions, have one hundred percent and seen them.
Speaker 1: We do have a lot of people here from not Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Remember all that geographic distribution we talked about, So we
Speaker 1: can forgive them. We'll forgive them a little bit. It's so,
Speaker 1: it's so, it's a funny social it's it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: to look into because mountain lions were here. They were
Speaker 1: like bears. They were here in great number, documented, big time.
Speaker 1: I mean, the mountain lion had a range from the
Speaker 1: Atlantic to the Pacific, massive geographic range. They were here.
Speaker 1: They were in our lore, they were in our writing,
Speaker 1: they were in our hunting culture. Dads told their sons
Speaker 1: and daughters about mountain lions, and then they were extirpated.
Speaker 1: But dads kept telling their kids about mountain lions and uh,
Speaker 1: and then it's so funny to me. I love it
Speaker 1: because we don't have that many mountain lions in the state,
Speaker 1: maybe one or two at any given time, maybe ten
Speaker 1: or twelve. I mean, it's just we don't I mean,
Speaker 1: there's no way to track them. We just don't know.
Speaker 1: All I can say is I get about one verification
Speaker 1: a year. So he gets one hundred and fifty people
Speaker 1: saying I saw one, and one of those they're able
Speaker 1: to verify and say, it doesn't mean that somebody didn't
Speaker 1: see one line in the state. Have you seen evidence
Speaker 1: of a mountain lion in the state, Yes, there you get.
Speaker 1: So I gotta share one one story mountain lion story.
Speaker 1: When I was in Oklahoma deer hunting in November and
Speaker 1: it was one of these real cool nights, bright moon.
Speaker 1: It was very still, and we me and another guy
Speaker 1: were walking out of the woods and you could just
Speaker 1: hear so good. It was just it was cold and
Speaker 1: no wind and just bright night. And man, I hear
Speaker 1: just a scream just like I don't even want to
Speaker 1: replicate it, but it was a loud oka't I can't
Speaker 1: do it loud what It was so loud that I
Speaker 1: ignored it for three times. Me and this guy walked
Speaker 1: together in the dark, and I finally go, are you
Speaker 1: hearing that? And he's like, yeah, what is that? And
Speaker 1: I said, I have no idea what that is. But
Speaker 1: it was loud, so loud, it was just wow. And
Speaker 1: I knew I was like half of the people I
Speaker 1: know would right now say that's a mountain lion screaming.
Speaker 1: How many if you heard a mountain lion scream raise
Speaker 1: your hand? Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. OK So anyway, I
Speaker 1: hear it's like a and I said, I told Dave,
Speaker 1: I said, man, I would swear that was a cat.
Speaker 1: I just would swear it was a cat. We got
Speaker 1: back to the truck and I had my coon light
Speaker 1: with me, and that thing was was was screaming so
Speaker 1: consistently that and we were in a big open field
Speaker 1: that I just said, let's just go over there, and
Speaker 1: so we turned our light off and we kind of
Speaker 1: just started trotting across this field. Superrational thing to do,
Speaker 1: and it quit, it quit making the noise. But as
Speaker 1: soon as we got over there where I said it,
Speaker 1: I had to have been right in here. I turned
Speaker 1: on my light and just light up the world with
Speaker 1: this big light and there's a bobcat in a tree.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, bobcat was making an incredibly loud and I've
Speaker 1: read about I've heard people call it yowling why o
Speaker 1: w L. But it was so loud you could have
Speaker 1: heard it from I mean three four hundred yards just
Speaker 1: wow wow. And I think that's what all you heard.
Speaker 1: When you thought you heard him outline, I think you
Speaker 1: heard a bobcat. He said I should work for the
Speaker 1: game and fishing to build those calls. Ma'am, you didn't.
Speaker 1: You didn't see a bobcat or you didn't see the outline. Nope,
Speaker 1: your daddy live surprised at how many housecat pictures I get. Yeah,
Speaker 1: any year, you know, someone sends a pig to AGFC,
Speaker 1: ask AGFC, Yeah, and it's you'd be surprised at how
Speaker 1: many housecats yea. And then some of them aren't even
Speaker 1: tony coated housecats, you know, they're just people think they're
Speaker 1: great with stripes. Yeah. I wanna, I wanna. I want
Speaker 1: to end. We've been going for about an hour here.
Speaker 1: We're gonna wrap things up. Thank you guys so much
Speaker 1: for coming and for for for wanting to be here.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna have We're gonna do a couple more things.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have the al hooting contest and this is
Speaker 1: a little bit, it's gonna be a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we're gonna be here rest afternoon. So thanks,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot, guys,