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Speaker 1: Jim Beach Tool, who doesn't shoot shit unless you can
Speaker 1: shoot it with a muzzleoader.
Speaker 2: I know how to use your rifle, I just choose
Speaker 2: not to.
Speaker 3: When did you?
Speaker 1: When did you quit?
Speaker 2: Nineteen eighty six? What happened? I decided I want to
Speaker 2: get close with a single shot, but.
Speaker 4: You still get closer to singing. You wanted to force
Speaker 4: yourself to get closer to the setter shot. Would you
Speaker 4: shoot prior to shooting a mussloader?
Speaker 2: I got my dad's thirty at six seven twenty one
Speaker 2: that he bought in nineteen fifty Premington seven twenty.
Speaker 1: One nows you're gone.
Speaker 2: I still have it. I still hunt with it. I
Speaker 2: take my dad with me every year we go out
Speaker 2: and do a hunt together, and then I put him
Speaker 2: away and I take the muzzle litter.
Speaker 1: Out, so you you house his gun for him.
Speaker 2: My father's passed away, and so my oh I I
Speaker 2: made a promise to him the day died him, and
Speaker 2: I'd go hunting together every year.
Speaker 1: So you take it out, I take it.
Speaker 2: Out, and we go hunting together every year.
Speaker 1: All right, works, But another than that, all musload all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: I try to. Sometimes I falter some days. It's really
Speaker 2: wet up in Southeast Alaskaay makes it really hard to
Speaker 2: do flintlocks and percussion and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because you live in the worst place to be
Speaker 4: a mussloader hunter in the world pretty much.
Speaker 2: But you know, I figure all those the people that
Speaker 2: came before us, the English and the Russian trappers and
Speaker 2: the natives who got muzzleloaders for strade items and stuff
Speaker 2: like that, they figured it out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so I use a wool bag. I placed my
Speaker 2: firearm in a wool bag, and the wool swells up,
Speaker 2: keeps some moisture from getting in there. And I think
Speaker 2: I've had one or two times in thirty five years
Speaker 2: of being up there that that cap hasn't gone off.
Speaker 2: No kid.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Now it's our friend in common. Jim Heffelfinger said,
Speaker 5: if you look at the Alaska muzzleoder records, it reads
Speaker 5: like a beach Tel phone book. That's a great line.
Speaker 3: That's a great line. And they're all named Jim.
Speaker 1: H.
Speaker 4: So you submit how these state records you have quite
Speaker 4: a few. Well, well, just brag up for minute, I
Speaker 4: asked you. So you're not bragging. I'm just asking a question.
Speaker 4: I have over thirty deer.
Speaker 2: I have the world record SIIC of black tail for
Speaker 2: a muzzloader and number two somebody's got number three. And
Speaker 2: then I have four, eight, nine, ten and a bunch more.
Speaker 1: That's incredible, man.
Speaker 2: And you shoot flintlock or cap cap, but I'm experimenting
Speaker 2: now with flintlock. That's where we've been talking back and forth.
Speaker 2: And so because I worked for Alaska Department of Fishing
Speaker 2: Game for so many years, the gentleman that was the
Speaker 2: wildlife biologist, Dave Person, was a master gun builder and
Speaker 2: as a thank you for all the years of darting
Speaker 2: deer and following deer and stuff, he built me a beautiful,
Speaker 2: beautiful flintlock. And I've taken probably eight or nine deer
Speaker 2: with that flintlock, and I've got a couple of smooth
Speaker 2: bore flintlocks that i've I've killed a black bear and
Speaker 2: caribou and stuff like that with him.
Speaker 1: So do you have a fouling piece?
Speaker 2: I do?
Speaker 1: Do you shoot ducks with it?
Speaker 2: I have killed four turkeys and it doesn't have a choke,
Speaker 2: and so the best pattern I get is about fifteen yards,
Speaker 2: So I set twenty yards is my maximum. I won't
Speaker 2: shoot beyond twenty yards when I call those birds, it
Speaker 2: got it got to be close, really close.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is a fouling piece what you call a
Speaker 3: gun shotgun.
Speaker 5: Yeah, specific to just birds. But one of the during
Speaker 5: my back and forth with Gym, and it makes absolute
Speaker 5: common sense. So it's not like a big epiphany, but
Speaker 5: like the the reason that the round ball and smooth
Speaker 5: bore stuck around for so long, even when technology was
Speaker 5: readily available and far surpassed it is folks just could
Speaker 5: only have one firearm. So they'd take a smooth bore
Speaker 5: fifty eight caliber hawking or whatever it got bored out to,
Speaker 5: and they use that for small game birds, like.
Speaker 1: Whether you're pouring shot down or you're jamming a lead
Speaker 1: down it.
Speaker 5: Or yep, exactly. So using it for with one piece
Speaker 5: of shot for big game, the big, big solid ball,
Speaker 5: or pouring a bunch of small shot down there.
Speaker 2: I mean, Gus, you have a tremendous versatility. I've hunted
Speaker 2: moose with a smooth bore, flint locked interior, and it's
Speaker 2: a sixty two caliber French fusel fin. So if we
Speaker 2: would have been French voyagers, we had have been issued
Speaker 2: this gun. M M. And you take the round ball
Speaker 2: and I stitched the patch on and I set it
Speaker 2: down and urn in the morning I would go and
Speaker 2: hunt moose. And then I reached down and I pulled
Speaker 2: the round ball out and put shot down, and I
Speaker 2: went down along the river and shot a brace of
Speaker 2: grouse down along the river, and put my round bawl
Speaker 2: back on and hunted moose all the way back up
Speaker 2: to camp. Got it. So I was like, super super
Speaker 2: super flexible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's nothing more efficient than that.
Speaker 4: No, when we were doing all of our research for
Speaker 4: our Mountain Man audiobook, we'd read these guys at night
Speaker 4: would take in a at night, they would put five
Speaker 4: buck shot in their gun and then they'd cap it
Speaker 4: with a or maybe vice versa. They'd take their rifles
Speaker 4: and put five buck shot in them, and then they'd
Speaker 4: cap it with a ball their nighttime home defense home
Speaker 4: to fetch thing home defense system.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what they had. Must have been pulling
Speaker 2: that ball then come morning, because you and years and
Speaker 2: years ago, I was in the interior and I was
Speaker 2: hunting ptarmigan and I came over a ledge and there
Speaker 2: was a beautiful bull caribou twenty yards away, and I
Speaker 2: backed off, and I had an ounce and a quarter
Speaker 2: of shot, number five shot, and I just set a
Speaker 2: round bawl down on top of that, and belly crawled
Speaker 2: forward and shot that caribou. And I figured out later
Speaker 2: about tore my shoulder off, because that was like seven hundred.
Speaker 3: Grads what you did.
Speaker 2: I didn't think about the equal and opposite reaction thing
Speaker 2: to recoil. It killed the caribou, you did, yeah, actually,
Speaker 2: And I had like four or five pieces of shot
Speaker 2: in the heart too. It penetrated deep enough I could
Speaker 2: have killed him with the shots blowed. He was really close. Uh.
Speaker 1: You always worked as a geologist.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Where'd you grow up?
Speaker 2: I grew up around Mount Saint Helen's Country, southwest Washington.
Speaker 2: We had a small farm there and by we had
Speaker 2: about one hundred and twenty acres of timber. That's where
Speaker 2: I disappeared into once my chores were done.
Speaker 1: Houdge get in geology.
Speaker 2: I was a kid. My folks decided we needed to
Speaker 2: have some kind of a family hobby, and they picked
Speaker 2: rock counting or lapidary, where you go out and dig
Speaker 2: up petrified wood and agates and jaspers and opals and
Speaker 2: obsidian and other stuff and fossils and somewhere I don't know.
Speaker 2: Eleven twelve years old, I got to think, and this
Speaker 2: can't be random. We're finding this aggat here because of
Speaker 2: a process, and we're finding this thunderregg here because of
Speaker 2: a process in the petrified wood. And basically that's geology.
Speaker 2: And so I always knew what I wanted to be.
Speaker 2: I'm still looking for those answers.
Speaker 1: How'd you come to be doing it in Alaska?
Speaker 2: Luck? Yeah, I grew up listening to my grandfather. My
Speaker 2: grandfather on my father's side was in Alaska in nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty and twenty one, and then he was back
Speaker 2: again in thirty seven through forty two, and I heard
Speaker 2: all the stories of Alaska.
Speaker 1: What was he doing here was a trapper.
Speaker 2: He soloed all the way down from basically the Yukon.
Speaker 2: He sold it all the way down the Yukon Drainage
Speaker 2: in nineteen nineteen and nine nineteen twenty and ended up
Speaker 2: in Katsubu and the winter of nineteen twenty trapping along
Speaker 2: the Yukon River that at a kadoo and was by
Speaker 2: himself going down there. And I grew up listening to
Speaker 2: all those stories and had a huge fascination. And so
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety there was a position opened up with
Speaker 2: the Tongas National Forest to be a geologist there, and
Speaker 2: I applied for it and luckily got it. Most Force
Speaker 2: service people kind of come for three or four years
Speaker 2: and move off on some other kind of thing. And
Speaker 2: I fell in love with Southeast Alaska and realized that
Speaker 2: very little was known about the geology. They had mapped
Speaker 2: around the shoreline, but they'd never really mapped to the
Speaker 2: interior of the islands. And then I got into the
Speaker 2: whole cave and kars management thing up there, that there's
Speaker 2: thousands of caves across vast areas of the rainforest, and
Speaker 2: there was a thing called a Federal Cave Protection Act
Speaker 2: and so you were supposed to protect caves on federal lands,
Speaker 2: and the more developed the cave areas were, the bigger
Speaker 2: the trees were, so they were direct conflict with timber
Speaker 2: management going on. So I was tasked with going out
Speaker 2: and finding those caves and mitigating the impacts of any
Speaker 2: proposed activity. So I got to explore all those woods
Speaker 2: all over Southeast Alaska, and I just just fell in
Speaker 2: love with it, just fell in love with the place
Speaker 2: and the unknown things of geology, the things that you
Speaker 2: could map, the glacial history, the uplift history, the kind
Speaker 2: of geoarchaeology side of things like wording with people on
Speaker 2: the landscape and how could I help define that?
Speaker 3: Why is that important to map that sort of stuff?
Speaker 2: If you have an idea of the geology, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like a soils map. It's a productivity thing. Where's
Speaker 2: the vegetation, what plants are there? Why are those plants there?
Speaker 2: How did the glaciers interact with the landscape. Why does
Speaker 2: landscape look like it does? And that's all controlled by
Speaker 2: the bedrock geology, and Southeast Alaska is bits and pieces
Speaker 2: of continents. It's been added on, so it's like this
Speaker 2: little pile up of pieces. I think we'd call it
Speaker 2: a terrain wreck. It's terrains are what this was in there,
Speaker 2: and so the geology is super varied. As you kind
Speaker 2: of move northeast southwest across the island, or it's similar
Speaker 2: you move northeast southeast, but as you move towards the
Speaker 2: east across there, you're just going from terrain terrain terrain
Speaker 2: terrain with They all have their blocks of rock that
Speaker 2: have a similar geologic history and how they were added
Speaker 2: on to the continent. So it's a fascinating geology that. Again,
Speaker 2: the original mapping was around the shorelines and wherever there
Speaker 2: were mineral deposits found, but kind of the rest of
Speaker 2: that had not been worked on very much. So I
Speaker 2: partnered with the US Geological Survey, a woman my name
Speaker 2: is su Carl, and I for twenty five years have
Speaker 2: been trying to fill in some of those holes in
Speaker 2: the GEOLO maps and get that information out there.
Speaker 1: You meet running around and I remember you showing me
Speaker 1: about how the trees grow extra big over the cave networks,
Speaker 1: but I can't remember why you took what it was
Speaker 1: you told me that.
Speaker 2: Well, there's two in southeast Alaska, there's two incredibly productive
Speaker 2: forest areas. What is alluvial fan or riparian spruce riparian
Speaker 2: area down along a stream of gravels, well drained gravels
Speaker 2: but nutrient rich and the other ones on the carbonates.
Speaker 2: And so the fractures of the limestone are open down
Speaker 2: maybe fifty feet, little teeny hairline fractures, and the roots
Speaker 2: can get down into that and they access the non
Speaker 2: acidic waters then because the limestone has buffered the rain
Speaker 2: water and the organic water that's very acidic. So you
Speaker 2: have nutrient rich water that's basic and a well drained
Speaker 2: landscape much like a gravel pile as well drained fluctuates
Speaker 2: with rivers and streams, and so this is another type
Speaker 2: of productive landscape. And the other thing is most of
Speaker 2: our big trees are big spruce and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: In southeast Alaska have a very shallow root system on
Speaker 2: top of glacial till. You've seen that and they fall
Speaker 2: what they fall over, You've got a thirty foot diameter
Speaker 2: root mass that's like eighteen inches deep.
Speaker 1: That always blows my mind when you see that and
Speaker 1: they tip and you're like, what in the hell is
Speaker 1: the hole? Non too? Anyways, but just keels away and
Speaker 1: you're look and there's a rock sitting there and it's
Speaker 1: got like a never ending disc of shit. That was
Speaker 1: a hand deep, hand deep.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: You wonder how it ever stood there anyways.
Speaker 2: And the limestone, it can get down in those fractures,
Speaker 2: grab on and it's holding on. And so you'll see
Speaker 2: instead of a rootball tip over, frequently you'll see it
Speaker 2: snapped off forty feet up. When the and that sail
Speaker 2: in the top of the tree gets big enough that
Speaker 2: it can't take the wind pressure of our storms, it'll
Speaker 2: snap off instead of turning over the roots because it's
Speaker 2: still holding so tight. So a lot of the trees
Speaker 2: grew older and larger. So a lot of the original
Speaker 2: timber harvest in southeast Alaska was focused on the limestone areas,
Speaker 2: which makes total sense.
Speaker 1: It's a big trees.
Speaker 2: I explored those areas, locating the caves and the rivers
Speaker 2: going underground, the streams going underground, and the vertical pits
Speaker 2: and that kind of thing. But then I also put
Speaker 2: together expeditions of folks who would come and explore those caves,
Speaker 2: and we had paleontologists and that, and we basically started
Speaker 2: when I got to southeast Alaska. Any published document that
Speaker 2: you read said we were a blanket of ice to
Speaker 2: the edge of the continental margin until ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 2: and nothing lived there. And the first thing we did
Speaker 2: was find a cave full of bones that were ten eleven,
Speaker 2: twelve thousand years old, and started challenging that. We kept
Speaker 2: pushing that back, and so we changed that paradigm through
Speaker 2: time on when did the ice pull back? And what
Speaker 2: was the environments like, and who's living there and stuff
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 1: What was the old ass deerbone? You found.
Speaker 2: Hekata Island in a cave called Nautilus Cave, and what
Speaker 2: used to be a vertical pit. Coming into that cave
Speaker 2: that had filled with sediment and a little alcove, I
Speaker 2: found tree. It was leg bones and those were basically
Speaker 2: nine two hundred, nine thousand, five hundred years old. Somewhere
Speaker 2: in that vicinity right there.
Speaker 1: Blacktailed deer we now know they're black tailed deer.
Speaker 2: We did know what it was then because we'd actually
Speaker 2: found a bunch of caribou bones in the caves. So
Speaker 2: there were caribou on Prince of Well's Island until ten thousand,
Speaker 2: five hundred years ago. But recently working with Charlotte Linquest
Speaker 2: and her students back in Buffalo. They did the paleogenetics
Speaker 2: and it is a sick of black tailed deer. Apardon me,
Speaker 2: it is a black tailed deer. So they all the
Speaker 2: first deer to show up. So we have three bones.
Speaker 2: We have one out of that cave, one out of
Speaker 2: Xena Cave that's seven eight hundred years old, and a
Speaker 2: bone out of a shell midden left by natives at
Speaker 2: a campsite. They're waste. Basically, there was a deer leg
Speaker 2: bone in there that turned out I mean a bone
Speaker 2: that had been identified as a caribou bone, but what
Speaker 2: we did the genetics, it came out as a black
Speaker 2: tail bone. Those three blacktail are definitely sit of blacktail,
Speaker 2: but they contain a little bit of mule deer mitochondrial DNA,
Speaker 2: which should be different than now. Yeah, and so then
Speaker 2: we have hundreds and hundreds of deer bones in cave.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about how those bones get caught in
Speaker 1: the caves? I mean you may have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: go look just for people listen.
Speaker 4: When we're filming our show Hunting History, we spent a
Speaker 4: day with Jim in caves.
Speaker 1: So Jim was able to show me how they function.
Speaker 1: But can you tell people how the caves trap shit?
Speaker 5: And also just a it'll come out in your thought process,
Speaker 5: I'm sure. But like when you find a bone in
Speaker 5: a cave versus like the shell midden bone, there's probably
Speaker 5: some conclusions that you jump to from one or the other.
Speaker 2: When you find a bone in a cave, you absolutely
Speaker 2: don't know how old it is. They usually turn slightly
Speaker 2: brown from the tannins and the organic waters of southeast.
Speaker 2: You've seen that many times around your place there. But
Speaker 2: the bone itself, twenty thousand year old bone look like
Speaker 2: a one hundred year old bone. You cannot tell by
Speaker 2: picking up the bone all right and just looking at it.
Speaker 2: And mostly what happens is either a predator was in
Speaker 2: a dry portion of a cave and brought part of
Speaker 2: its meal in. Or and a lot of times we
Speaker 2: have bones in the In one particular cave that had
Speaker 2: so many bones, it was Arctic fox bringing bones in
Speaker 2: from a large predator and depositing in the caves. Or
Speaker 2: they're a vertical trap. So remember as we came around
Speaker 2: from the flooded sank Holder, there was that vertical pit
Speaker 2: right off of.
Speaker 1: It the shit out of me.
Speaker 4: I mean, we were safe looking at it, but I
Speaker 4: was like, man, I didn't know there's shit like that
Speaker 4: around here.
Speaker 2: We were on that boardwalk, you remember, looking down that hole.
Speaker 2: So that was a hole that was roughly the size
Speaker 2: of this room. That the entrance was about three feet across,
Speaker 2: and that was an organic mat. So if we would
Speaker 2: walk on that, you'd go right through. Well, that's what
Speaker 2: the deer.
Speaker 4: You would never know how on some of that stuff
Speaker 4: you would never if you were just about dicking around,
Speaker 4: you would one hundred percent walk down in air. And
Speaker 4: just god, how many dudes must be laying in those
Speaker 4: holes we have.
Speaker 2: We've actually had a few vertical pits that have a
Speaker 2: little pile of bones deer and bear and stuff right
Speaker 2: where they one I can think of one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty feet deep. We called Bear's plunge because the entrance
Speaker 2: is about the size of this table, but at the
Speaker 2: bottom it's one hundred feet in diameter and it just
Speaker 2: bells out. So when you repel into that, you're like
Speaker 2: a spider coming down off of a web. And here
Speaker 2: was this mound of bones at the bottom that had
Speaker 2: accumulated over several.
Speaker 1: Thousand years What all was in that pile?
Speaker 2: That was mainly black bear and deer, but there was
Speaker 2: a few small rodents and stuff like that. No people, no,
Speaker 2: no people in that. So yeah, it's uh so either
Speaker 2: a vertical trap or somebody brings it into the cave.
Speaker 2: They can wash into the cave hang it, but it's
Speaker 2: really hard to the bones usually then get washed on
Speaker 2: through the cave if they get into a stream course
Speaker 2: or something like that. Uh.
Speaker 4: I want to jump out of this a little bit
Speaker 4: to get to something with them. After you retired from
Speaker 4: geology after thirty years, right, yes, and instead of just
Speaker 4: kicking it and hunting with your muzzle loader and everything,
Speaker 4: you got involved on a volunteer basis with meald your foundation.
Speaker 2: I'm actually a contractor for the meal here, okay, but
Speaker 2: there's also some and there's there, there's I am kind
Speaker 2: of going out and getting other things, and so I'm
Speaker 2: not always working for him, but I'm still working for him.
Speaker 1: Yep. God it.
Speaker 4: And in particular you became like particularly focused on blacktail deer.
Speaker 2: So Miles BURRITI was the CEO for years and working
Speaker 2: and had I had started going down in two thousand
Speaker 2: and six and I manned a booth at the Hunt
Speaker 2: Expo in Salt Lake City about Siica blacktail on the
Speaker 2: Tagus National Forest, which is kind of funny. I was
Speaker 2: a geologist representing the Tongus National Forest talking about sick
Speaker 2: of black tail deer. They weren't sending they weren't sending
Speaker 2: biologists down there. I went down and so I kept saying,
Speaker 2: you know, like in your mission, Sameman, it says buel
Speaker 2: deer and blacktail deer in their habitat, that's what your
Speaker 2: focus is on the conservation of that. And I said,
Speaker 2: what can we do for blacktail? And so I was
Speaker 2: pretty relentless with that for years and years and years.
Speaker 2: And then Joel took over CEO three four years ago now,
Speaker 2: and he goes, what are we doing for black tail deer?
Speaker 2: And about that time, Steve Belinda, a good friend of mine,
Speaker 2: called and said it's time to pony up. He do.
Speaker 2: I just retired, and I said, what's going on? And
Speaker 2: he goes, we want to start creating a focus on
Speaker 2: blacktail deer. And I said, I was really enjoying retirement.
Speaker 2: And I said, but I meant one hundred percent, because
Speaker 2: this is where we've always wanted to get to and
Speaker 2: so we went to Leopold put and the Bielder Foundation
Speaker 2: put on a blacktail summit that all of the agencies
Speaker 2: and a lot of the forests sent people to and
Speaker 2: it was held at Leopold's headquarters in twenty two. In
Speaker 2: April of twenty two, we really realized that the conservation
Speaker 2: of blacktail it's pretty much the same issues from northern
Speaker 2: California to Alaska as related to habitat and how man
Speaker 2: has changed the landscape through timber management. There's different challenges,
Speaker 2: there's different things, different predation schemes and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: but the challenges were the same, and so we started
Speaker 2: putting a much larger focus in that and trying to
Speaker 2: get more chapter we could get get chapters established. There
Speaker 2: was no Meal Deer Foundation chapters up there. And one
Speaker 2: of the biggest problems I had in Alaska was going
Speaker 2: into a community and setting down with a group of
Speaker 2: people and the first question was like, well, why does
Speaker 2: the Milder Foundation want to help us with blacktail? So
Speaker 2: I'd spend most of my time talking about that and
Speaker 2: finally get around to substantive things that we could do
Speaker 2: on the landscape.
Speaker 4: Let's back up to that question though, why do people
Speaker 4: think of meal deer and black like talk about the
Speaker 4: taxonomy of a blacktail. Ah, right, I mean it's like, uh,
Speaker 4: they're like not brothers, but cousins, meal deer cousins cousins.
Speaker 2: And so it was Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger who
Speaker 2: we talked about, had did a genetic paper that showed
Speaker 2: that starting about at the beginning of the last series
Speaker 2: of ice age, the Great Last Ice Ages two and
Speaker 2: a half million years ago, probably because of snow levels
Speaker 2: and glaciers in the Cascade coastal mountain range there of Washington, Oregon,
Speaker 2: Idaho down to California, it separated whatever was a proto
Speaker 2: deer from what we now know as a mule deer,
Speaker 2: and in coastal refugia or coastal areas, blacktail developed separated
Speaker 2: from those mule deer, and.
Speaker 1: So they got separated by ice.
Speaker 2: They got separated by ice in time, and they also
Speaker 2: was a slight divergence as you moved north through Oregon
Speaker 2: and Washington away from California. So if I remember that
Speaker 2: paperwrite that the Californian blacktail are a little closer to deer,
Speaker 2: are distinguishable, but there's still Columbia blacktail, so that's one
Speaker 2: of the separate subspecies. And then Sica blacktail exists only
Speaker 2: from halfway up the British Columbia Coast through Prince Rupert
Speaker 2: and then into the islands of southeast Alaska. And then
Speaker 2: they'd been translocated in nineteen twenty four up to Kodiak
Speaker 2: and several places around southeast Alaska. And so there weren't
Speaker 2: any on Kodiak before.
Speaker 1: But they're native to Prince William Sound. No, they were
Speaker 1: natives to Prince Williams.
Speaker 2: They were translocated to Prince William Sound, they were translocated
Speaker 2: to Yakitat. They were all the whole Prince William Sound area,
Speaker 2: and there were several other places they tried to plant
Speaker 2: or Sica blacktail that didn't take.
Speaker 4: So what was the northernmost if you go back on
Speaker 4: I don't know what the hell two hundred years whatever,
Speaker 4: some time stamp two hundred years ago, what was the
Speaker 4: northernmost sick of blacktail deer?
Speaker 2: It was probably in the Juno areas.
Speaker 1: So people I've been telling people the wrong thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Gus Davis, the front range of Glacier Bay
Speaker 2: National Park around maybe up towards Skagway and Haynes a
Speaker 2: little bit up in there. I'm not sure how far
Speaker 2: they the historic range was. I know they were on Admiraltreet,
Speaker 2: Chichikov and Baranof Islands and around they were there naturally,
Speaker 2: naturally around there.
Speaker 1: Why do they look like? So? Why do they have
Speaker 1: such a vibe like they kind of got to look
Speaker 1: like a little white tail deer.
Speaker 2: Kind of thu'se are badass?
Speaker 1: No, But what is it like? Why are they Why
Speaker 1: are the sick of black tails look different? Why do
Speaker 1: they because they you look at them and you look
Speaker 1: like that they look like they got some kind of
Speaker 1: like a white tail deer influence. But that's not true.
Speaker 3: You're comparing them to a Colombian.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they just like their antler configuration.
Speaker 2: I think it's environmental. I think it was that tight
Speaker 2: coast range force that they all did. And so overall
Speaker 2: body weights, they're not much different than Colombia and some
Speaker 2: of the other stuff. So, like, I did a study
Speaker 2: with Alaska Department of Vision game where I waged stuff
Speaker 2: with the state over a two year period, and it
Speaker 2: was nothing to have a sick of black tail come
Speaker 2: in field dressed at one forty five to one sixty five,
Speaker 2: and there were a few big outliers, so I mean
Speaker 2: substantial deer. They're just a lot shorter in bulk ears.
Speaker 1: Oh, a little squatty little suckers man.
Speaker 2: And their tail is not ropey at all. It is
Speaker 2: more white veed with a black top and that white
Speaker 2: and they'll use it the flag, just like a white
Speaker 2: table flag. Of course it's not quite as dramatic because
Speaker 2: it's not as long, and they're just there. I think
Speaker 2: they're the perfect rainforest animal because their antlers are probably
Speaker 2: more close in because of that vegetation and stuff they
Speaker 2: evolved in.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it's not because a white tail deer love
Speaker 4: make and it's just like it's convert it's convergent evolution, right,
Speaker 4: rather than divert or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a val geist years ago suggested that
Speaker 2: the blacktail were a function of real deer and white
Speaker 2: tail breeding or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and now let me tell you the whole idea
Speaker 1: that he had. It was that do you remember this?
Speaker 3: You just offered this up, not me. I don't remember that.
Speaker 3: I don't remember that.
Speaker 1: Like there was some period in time he proposed this.
Speaker 4: So Yan Yanni's a big val Geist disciple because Yanni
Speaker 4: likes his shirker buck theory.
Speaker 1: Val Guys proposed this idea is he's still live.
Speaker 4: He passed away that white tails of white tail deer
Speaker 4: have been down in like the southeast for millions of years,
Speaker 4: southeast US, and that sometimes climatic conditions were such that
Speaker 4: white tailed deers spread all the way across the continent.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then uh, the middle dried out, and then
Speaker 1: you developed mule deer in white tails.
Speaker 4: Then something happened and all of a sudden, these white
Speaker 4: tails came back out, made love with these mule deer,
Speaker 4: and somehow maybe I'm screwing it up, and that produced
Speaker 4: like a black tail.
Speaker 1: It was elaborate. Yeah, it was elaborate.
Speaker 2: You're not far off. I actually had beers with Bell
Speaker 2: one time, and he and he and in later years
Speaker 2: he chew genetic anals. He said, yeah, I had that wrong.
Speaker 1: Oh he did.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you know what his shirker buck theory is, Yan,
Speaker 1: you'll tell.
Speaker 3: You no, you don't know.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: I think he said he applied it to any uh servid,
Speaker 3: but that that a buck. There are certain bucks that
Speaker 3: he deemed as shirkers because they would shirk the responsibility
Speaker 3: of mating or running. Uh with the plan with the
Speaker 3: long term goal that if they shirked for three, four
Speaker 3: five years, that the year that they decided to enter
Speaker 3: in their body mass and health and antlers would be
Speaker 3: so much bigger than any of the competition that they
Speaker 3: could then dominate the breed breeding period and thus spread
Speaker 3: their genes across the whole pool.
Speaker 1: He's like, I'm gonna lay low for a couple of
Speaker 1: years and I come down.
Speaker 2: I'm coming down, that's right, and I'm gonna be bigger
Speaker 2: and badder than everybody.
Speaker 4: It'd be like if you never went to the bar
Speaker 4: and you just worked out and did drinking, just did
Speaker 4: like skin treatments and worked out and worked on your
Speaker 4: hairstyle until you were read.
Speaker 1: A lot of books and you were ready. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then one night you go to the.
Speaker 3: Bar just witty witty and pumped.
Speaker 1: It. Just lay waste.
Speaker 2: No, he didn't share that with me.
Speaker 1: It's insulting to hef a finger.
Speaker 2: I know it is. I could see. I could see
Speaker 2: it too. I asked him how to pronounce cus or cows?
Speaker 3: Oh, real quick on heffel finger, I said, we were somebody,
Speaker 3: somebody in our somebody in our camp was using a app
Speaker 3: to predict deer movement. Sure, and uh was saying that
Speaker 3: this app was so good that it could be within
Speaker 3: minutes that when when it said excellent time for movement,
Speaker 3: you just look at the watch and just start looking
Speaker 3: across the hillside and here they come. I didn't see
Speaker 3: it proved to be so good. But I asked Hefflefinger.
Speaker 3: I said, because he was talking about these pages of
Speaker 3: information that he produces about myths around wildlife. I said,
Speaker 3: I said, do you have anything about moon or lunar
Speaker 3: tables affecting deer movement? Do you have a page on that?
Speaker 3: He goes, No, because that would be real short. It
Speaker 3: just be word No.
Speaker 1: That's one of my favorites.
Speaker 4: I mean, I joke about the one that that red
Speaker 4: squirrels bite nuts off big squirrels.
Speaker 1: But the moon thing is just never. You're never going
Speaker 1: to convince people. Otherwise, if Mark Kenyon, you present all
Speaker 1: the evidence to Mark Kenyon, like Mark Kenyon's I don't
Speaker 1: know if he is now Mark Kenyon tradition was a
Speaker 1: big moon guy. And you present all the evidence to Kenyon.
Speaker 4: Radio collar data from deer that don't change their groove
Speaker 4: because the moon. Deer car collision data that doesn't show
Speaker 4: differences because the moon.
Speaker 1: Like on harvest data, like on and on and on
Speaker 1: and on and then Kenyon, he one day says to me, well,
Speaker 1: if it affects it by a minute, science like I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 1: He's like, science might not be able to capture.
Speaker 3: Or the capture but they but to me, that minute
Speaker 3: matters lot because it could be the last minute of daylight.
Speaker 5: There's also the what question are you asking or or
Speaker 5: solving four? Because Jim went on to say, he's like,
Speaker 5: now if the moon's bright enough, deer may bed in
Speaker 5: a more open area or feed in a open area
Speaker 5: at night because there's increased light. He's like, but that's
Speaker 5: not the moon phase so much as it is a
Speaker 5: photo of all taic.
Speaker 3: Is what he was saying.
Speaker 5: It's like, if it's brighter, they're more active.
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, we should do in the whole damn
Speaker 1: water up.
Speaker 3: We need to get back to gym here, but we
Speaker 3: should do a podcast carenn on and bring in Mississippi
Speaker 3: Deer Lab. They just recently processed a bunch of collar
Speaker 3: data speaking speaking to, you know, because so many people
Speaker 3: like these believers, we're just continually emailing in and just
Speaker 3: being like, yeah, but you guys aren't asking the right questions.
Speaker 3: You guys aren't you know, you're looking at your data,
Speaker 3: but you're not aligning the red moon with the blue
Speaker 3: moon and the wind and the underfoot and the barometric pressure,
Speaker 3: and you need to look at that specific point. They're like,
Speaker 3: all right, why don't you guys all tell us we'll
Speaker 3: do a big survey and tell us exactly what we
Speaker 3: should look for in our data, and then we'll do
Speaker 3: it and we'll look for it. And they did it,
Speaker 3: and of course the conclusion is that it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Can you guess produce this segment.
Speaker 2: Segment?
Speaker 3: We should do a whole podcast.
Speaker 1: We guest produced the whole episode.
Speaker 3: Uh sure, okay, I'll help kore In with it. I
Speaker 3: don't think she wants to be a take over.
Speaker 1: It be liked be like an internship.
Speaker 4: You'd be interning at your old job. All right, call
Speaker 4: it back in the saddle and then it'll be the episode.
Speaker 4: All right, back to black Tail, dere.
Speaker 2: Our black tail, he got black tail deer don't even
Speaker 2: know there's a moon.
Speaker 4: One last thought on the moon thing. For a while,
Speaker 4: what I thought was this. For a while, I thought,
Speaker 4: when it's bright out, you see a bunch of deer
Speaker 4: because it's bright out, And maybe that's where it came from,
Speaker 4: meaning when it's pitch black, you can't see shit.
Speaker 1: When it's moonlit, you're like, oh, look at that deer
Speaker 1: right like picture walking out when you're snow on the
Speaker 1: ground in a full moon and you're walking out, you're
Speaker 1: also aware of all kinds of stuff you didn't know
Speaker 1: what was going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no such thing as end up shooting light.
Speaker 1: All right. Back to black tail deer. So, uh, Columbia blacktail.
Speaker 4: Let me ask you this question about black tail deer
Speaker 4: because this is something we've mused about a fair bit.
Speaker 1: I shot.
Speaker 4: I've shot one Columbia black tail deer in California. Dude,
Speaker 4: I mean it looks like a meal deer. And I've
Speaker 4: often talked about just went and talking about the sort
Speaker 4: of arbitrary nature of certain classifications of wildlife. I've talked
Speaker 4: about how, according to the Boone and Cocker Club, if
Speaker 4: a if a deer is standing on the west side
Speaker 4: of I five in California, he's a blacktail. If he
Speaker 4: were to run across I five, he's now a mule deer.
Speaker 4: But we have to be able to do a better
Speaker 4: job than that nowadays, right, like, like, what is a
Speaker 4: Columbia blacktail?
Speaker 1: What is a mule deer?
Speaker 2: Actually? Vooted Crockett is offering genetic tests that you can
Speaker 2: send in your deer and get that answer.
Speaker 1: To get the real answer.
Speaker 2: And Jim and Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger came up
Speaker 2: with a percentile graph looking at at at deer samples
Speaker 2: that they had, and they cut it off at zero
Speaker 2: point nine percent. In other words, if it's over ten
Speaker 2: percent mule deer, they're not calling it a Columbia blacktail.
Speaker 4: So are they going to go in and start kicking
Speaker 4: all kinds of mule? You're out of the Columbia blacktail
Speaker 4: record book?
Speaker 2: No, because it depends on location. So the record book
Speaker 2: is a line that comes down. It doesn't always follow
Speaker 2: I five. It takes off on one meridian and it comes
Speaker 2: down two through Medford, Oregon and down in there.
Speaker 4: But there has to be a bunch of meal deer
Speaker 4: in the clumb Like, there's got to be the top end. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's got to be some fakes.
Speaker 1: There's got to be people that have records with Columbia
Speaker 1: blacktails that they just shot a meal deer that had
Speaker 1: to be on the wrong side of the road.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we as when I grew up in Washington,
Speaker 2: we used to purposely go up and we called them
Speaker 2: bench leg mulees. They they were these We would shoot
Speaker 2: them in the field dress at like two twenty five
Speaker 2: to two forty. They were these beautiful black tails, little
Speaker 2: tinty racks and stuff like that, with huge bodies, and
Speaker 2: we went up into the cascades and targeted them. I
Speaker 2: mean that's where we headed because they were much larger deer.
Speaker 1: And you're saying that those were blacktails, that they were.
Speaker 2: They were cross Okay, I'm kind of across in there,
Speaker 2: got it.
Speaker 1: But then a Sika blacktail is like much more distinct.
Speaker 2: Right, Cica blacktails.
Speaker 1: They don't have any exposure like siic of blacktails, don't
Speaker 1: bump up against any other kind of deer. Yes they do,
Speaker 1: Oh they do. Okay.
Speaker 2: Uh, there's mule deer moving into Skagway. And in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one I took a photograph of a mule deer
Speaker 2: dough with a fawn inside of of Alaska up by Hyder,
Speaker 2: and so there is the possibility of some contact. There's
Speaker 2: mulder just outside of Prince Rupert, so they could come
Speaker 2: down with a Skina river in there and come out
Speaker 2: of the interior. And so I think that's probably the
Speaker 2: first batcheteer that made it out to Prince of Wales Island.
Speaker 2: Probably it had some kind of a contact like that,
Speaker 2: an interbreeding between mule deer and that isolated population that
Speaker 2: became sick a black tail. That's why they identified mulder
Speaker 2: in that genome. When they in those three oldest bucks
Speaker 2: that we have, you gotta realize they have a really
Speaker 2: small sample size and that the researchers say that it's
Speaker 2: you know, we're we're basing this on just a handful
Speaker 2: of samples, but that all of the older ones were
Speaker 2: very distinct that they had a little bit of Muldier
Speaker 2: in them.
Speaker 1: So is it fair like I know, we're talking about
Speaker 1: valgeis theory is sort of like pre genetics theory, But
Speaker 1: is it right that that at a time you just
Speaker 1: had these little pockets of deer that were bound in
Speaker 1: by glaciers and they survived along the Pacific coast.
Speaker 2: That's what the idea is that that was kind of
Speaker 2: a what they referred to, kind of like a chain
Speaker 2: of pearls of habitat that wasn't overridden by ice, that
Speaker 2: if it wasn't so severe, if the winner's so severe,
Speaker 2: that they and they could have existed there. Got to
Speaker 2: realize too, we had much lower sea levels. Our sea
Speaker 2: levels were four hundred feet less than they are today.
Speaker 2: So there was a lot of land between seventeen thousand
Speaker 2: and about thirteen thousand that was exposed on the shelf
Speaker 2: out there. So and you know, and so we have
Speaker 2: land ice interactions with the weight of the ice pushing
Speaker 2: down on the land and the land rebounding back up,
Speaker 2: and so there were some of that stuff going on.
Speaker 5: And that's what which means that these deer could have
Speaker 5: existed in a landscape that we basically can't see at all, Like, yeah,
Speaker 5: those could have changed dramatically and they could have evolved
Speaker 5: to be like their high alpine tundra environment could be
Speaker 5: closer to what they evolved in as in flat brushy
Speaker 5: in areas versus any any of the stuff that we
Speaker 5: hunt them on in the slopes like the rocky, mossy,
Speaker 5: dark timber terrain.
Speaker 2: Absolutely in fact on it looks like this according to
Speaker 2: the I've did a lot of coreing with pallinologists and
Speaker 2: links and looking at also at the Speliothim's and the
Speaker 2: caves hold a record a climate that somewhere at about
Speaker 2: eleven to ten thousand years ago, a very dry spruce
Speaker 2: and hemlock forest started to appear on the landscape, replacing
Speaker 2: a herb dominated tundra that had willows and alders around
Speaker 2: stream courses and stuff and in disturbance areas. And you
Speaker 2: start seeing that, and that fires were on the landscape
Speaker 2: in southeast Alaska till about seven eight hundred years ago,
Speaker 2: and then it got Then you start seeing cedar and
Speaker 2: scunt cabbage and sphagnum and stuff dominate the pollen record,
Speaker 2: and the wetter climate plants starts showing up. So the
Speaker 2: rainforest that we all know and love today and hunted
Speaker 2: up there as oldly maybe about six thousand years old.
Speaker 2: That's relatively young. Those those great big red cedars are
Speaker 2: your place there. They may be the fifth generation on
Speaker 2: the landscape kind of thing when you think about that.
Speaker 2: So it's it's been a really dynamic vegetation change over
Speaker 2: a relatively short period of geo logic time and the
Speaker 2: topography those humps that we fish halib it off the
Speaker 2: coast on were alpine ridgetops when the sea level was lower.
Speaker 2: I love that stuff.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, oh yeah. So what does that mean like
Speaker 5: the overall picture of black tail to your conservation? Right, so,
Speaker 5: just just as an example, we this would be months ago, right,
Speaker 5: we talked about Arizona offering moose lottery draws to hunt moose,
Speaker 5: and part of their reasoning is, like moose, aren't they're
Speaker 5: a remnant of a population in Arizona. They're they're here
Speaker 5: right now, but long term, they're they're not going to
Speaker 5: be here more than likely, is one of the arguments
Speaker 5: in regards to blacktail deer. When they're in a such
Speaker 5: a you know, geologically speaking, like a very rapidly changing ecosystem,
Speaker 5: are they adapting well to that ecosystem? Is there anything
Speaker 5: that says there were a hell of a lot more
Speaker 5: blacktail in when a different environment was more prolific? Kind
Speaker 5: of where are we at.
Speaker 2: The biggest thing that controls sick of blacktail populations? In
Speaker 2: my not that predation doesn't, but it's bad winters, a
Speaker 2: bad weather can do more to wipe out a population
Speaker 2: two thousand and six and seven on Admiralty Island and
Speaker 2: by whuno we lost like eighty five or ninety percent
Speaker 2: of the deer. I was working with doctor Sophie Gilbert
Speaker 2: on her PhD and we had a bad winter on
Speaker 2: Prince of Well's Island in twenty eleven. At control like
Speaker 2: junction right there were you split either go to Thornbay
Speaker 2: or go north. There was five feet of snow made first.
Speaker 2: It was horrible. I followed those fawns that year. She
Speaker 2: went into the year that went into the winter with
Speaker 2: fifty faunds on the collar. We came out with three.
Speaker 2: So we basically lost a whole cohort of age class
Speaker 2: because of that bad winter. So I think about the
Speaker 2: Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age ended, what three
Speaker 2: hundred years ago, there might not as been as many
Speaker 2: deer on the landscape. There's maybe more deer now than
Speaker 2: there was three hundred years ago. And what was the
Speaker 2: winners like coming out of glacier glaciation and as glaciers
Speaker 2: were more prominent and stuff. Even though we were in
Speaker 2: a wetter climate from six thousand to the present, those
Speaker 2: first five thousand years the sick of blacktail may not
Speaker 2: have been prolific on the landscape as they are today.
Speaker 2: So and I think that timber management, when it was
Speaker 2: super active and there was still a lot of good
Speaker 2: habitat left, was creating all that forage. Of course, that
Speaker 2: forage wasn't available in a bad winter when those sick
Speaker 2: clearcuts get buried. So I have seen in just the
Speaker 2: thirty some odd years I've been on Prince of Wales,
Speaker 2: I believe the population of sick of blacktail on Prince
Speaker 2: of Wales Island is half of what it was when
Speaker 2: I got there nineteen ninety. And that's not a result
Speaker 2: of predation, in my opinion, it's a result of now
Speaker 2: all those older clearcuts have grown up and there's no forage.
Speaker 2: It's what we call stem exclusion, that there's no light
Speaker 2: gets to the forest floor, it grows mosses and lichens
Speaker 2: and mushrooms.
Speaker 3: That was going to be a question of mine earlier.
Speaker 3: You mentioned you know timber management is generally is it
Speaker 3: good for blacktails.
Speaker 2: As long as long as you maintain what they need
Speaker 2: to survive in a bad winter they need to so
Speaker 2: they're an animal of the edge, like all deer and
Speaker 2: they'll they bet at their little knobs and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: and when it starts getting snowy and stuff, they they
Speaker 2: need to be able to access food. So they might
Speaker 2: be even on a steep slope with a modest forest
Speaker 2: on there, you still got a lot of canopy interception
Speaker 2: because of the angle of the way the trees interlock,
Speaker 2: and they're getting around fine when the snow depth gets
Speaker 2: higher than their briskets. So basically, on a sick of
Speaker 2: black tail that's hired in about eighteen inches, they need
Speaker 2: to be able to get to someplace to eat. So
Speaker 2: you have to have corridors for them to move, either
Speaker 2: latterly or vertically, and you have to have something for
Speaker 2: them to go to that's got thermal cover and food.
Speaker 2: So the mosaic has been created by pass forcet. The
Speaker 2: challenge is going into that habitat and where should we
Speaker 2: be doing improvements and stuff like that. And that's what
Speaker 2: we're hoping to focus on is where are those where
Speaker 2: should we put those improvements on the landscape to do
Speaker 2: the biggest bang for the buck, as it was sure
Speaker 2: for the deer.
Speaker 4: So can you walk through what just as part of
Speaker 4: a broader conversation about timber management in harvest. Can you
Speaker 4: walk through the sort of life span of a clear
Speaker 4: cut only like in terms of deer, because for it,
Speaker 4: I've watched them where I've watched them where they're fresh,
Speaker 4: nothing's really going on a couple of years into it,
Speaker 4: they are getting loaded up with deer. And I've been
Speaker 4: fortunate now to see one get to the point where
Speaker 4: it's there's nothing living in it. So layout like like
Speaker 4: what it does as it grows, because a lot of
Speaker 4: guys think the answer to more deer is more clearcuts,
Speaker 4: and and where does that get complicated?
Speaker 2: The food that's produced is incredible. The amount of forage
Speaker 2: that's in those clearcuts at about year three, three and
Speaker 2: four and five, crazy nuts like the blueberry. So the
Speaker 2: primary theory the thing that the deer eats are the vaccinium.
Speaker 2: So there your huckleberries and your blueberries, and especially the
Speaker 2: red huckleberry. They love the red huckleberry.
Speaker 1: And some of the eating the leaves and twigs and stuff.
Speaker 2: Right right at the very end of the new growth.
Speaker 2: And you've seen that stuff in the clearcuts up there
Speaker 2: where it's browsed back to where it's a brush you
Speaker 2: can hardly push your legs through. So you start out
Speaker 2: we don't have any of that for about two years,
Speaker 2: and then that finally starts really taking over. And then
Speaker 2: so you got from year let's say year three to
Speaker 2: about year ten or twelve. It's doing pretty good, and
Speaker 2: now your trees are getting up to the point that
Speaker 2: they're starting to shade out more patches and stuff, but
Speaker 2: there's still a lot of forage in between that continues
Speaker 2: to close in. So the bigger the trees are, they get,
Speaker 2: the less forage there is, and that vegetation so and
Speaker 2: you start getting maybe a little more salmonberry and stuff
Speaker 2: in there, and depend on depends on the site. It
Speaker 2: depends how much alders in there. There's a lot of variables,
Speaker 2: but we'll kind of do generalities. Forest Service historically has
Speaker 2: gone into the stands. So i'd say by year fifteen
Speaker 2: it's starting to get pretty closed in. You're starting to
Speaker 2: lose your forage. But of course a clear cut is
Speaker 2: not ubiquit. Some of it regenerates really well and some
Speaker 2: of it regenerates more poorly, so there's places to eat
Speaker 2: out in there. Then a four service goes in. Excuse me,
Speaker 2: let's down somewhere between year sixteen and year twenty and
Speaker 2: pre commercially thins. So there's so many stems per acre
Speaker 2: come back under natural regeneration that they need to drop
Speaker 2: that down to a certain spacing because of over competition
Speaker 2: by the trees that are growing back. And you've seen this.
Speaker 2: They go in and they follow those trees, and your
Speaker 2: slash load is enormous. It can be ten twelve feet deep.
Speaker 2: It releases, sunlight gets to that and the vegetation responds.
Speaker 2: But the deer can't access that under that slash.
Speaker 5: And if you're wondering listener, neither can a hunter. It's
Speaker 5: not fun to walk through.
Speaker 2: You can't go through that with a D eight cat.
Speaker 2: Oh brutal. It is amazing stuff. And besides effect, because
Speaker 2: that was commercially thin, you've got all of the usually
Speaker 2: about twelve to twenty four inches high, the bases of
Speaker 2: the trees that they cut like pungee sticks sticking up
Speaker 2: through that stuff. So you fall through that. If you're
Speaker 2: up walking on that mess and you fall down, you
Speaker 2: gotta watch where you land anyhow, But deer deer don't
Speaker 2: access that. The Forest Service has identified certain trails and
Speaker 2: left unthin strips through some clearcuts to allow for deer
Speaker 2: movement vertically, in which they use sometimes were if they
Speaker 2: were well placed spots the deer continue to use if
Speaker 2: they were using them in the original clearcut, they use
Speaker 2: them post post commercial thinning. Then thirty years in that's
Speaker 2: grown back shut again, and then that continues to get
Speaker 2: less and less and less light to the forest. Four
Speaker 2: that slash starts to rot and break down, and you've
Speaker 2: got all of the then it's then it's usually like
Speaker 2: a maybe eighteen inches thick with just the bowls of
Speaker 2: the trees that were originally fell in there. That might
Speaker 2: still but they won't support your weight, but they're they're
Speaker 2: up and there. But by that time there's no forage.
Speaker 2: And tell that stand gets up one hundred years old
Speaker 2: or something like that and starts to naturally select, and
Speaker 2: wind starts punching holes through it, and you start to
Speaker 2: get some light filtering down in around the sides. You
Speaker 2: get light coming in. Maybe that's doing pretty good, but
Speaker 2: there's a there's at least a period there of you know,
Speaker 2: between thirty and one hundred, one hundred and fifty years
Speaker 2: that there's just not a lot of forage for deer
Speaker 2: in that piece unless it's managed, unless you go in
Speaker 2: and open that up.
Speaker 4: Oh, that doesn't speak well for the deer hunting around
Speaker 4: my little spot. No, So I got an eighty ninety
Speaker 4: year dry spell coming up.
Speaker 2: Was actually actually what happened what I did years ago
Speaker 2: as I saw this coming. It was the wave of
Speaker 2: green that was going to be there, and I stopped
Speaker 2: hunting any managed areas and I started moving out into
Speaker 2: the unharvested areas and learning how to hunt that. Yep,
Speaker 2: because I knew this was coming. I mean it was.
Speaker 2: And so what's happened?
Speaker 4: What you wanted to step outside of the clear cut system, right?
Speaker 2: And good lord, I have killed hundreds of deer in
Speaker 2: harvested areas when when they're productive, and it's crazy. We
Speaker 2: used to go into clearcuts in the early nineties and
Speaker 2: you'd blow on a deer call and forty deer stand up.
Speaker 2: It was. It was totally different than you have today.
Speaker 2: And it was there was you virtually went out and
Speaker 2: selected what size of buck you wanted kind of a thing.
Speaker 2: It was totally diveryent thing. Yeah, alpine areas you were
Speaker 2: talking about when we were first doing that in the eighties,
Speaker 2: or nineties. It was nothing to crawl up onto a
Speaker 2: ledge and stop in glass sixty deer and like half
Speaker 2: of those would be bucks. Wow, it was an amazing.
Speaker 1: With so much of the island that hasn't been logged
Speaker 1: or just not not even that island that you happen
Speaker 1: to live on, but all through blacktail deer range.
Speaker 2: Okay, yep, a.
Speaker 4: Lot of it hasn't been logged, big wilderness areas. So
Speaker 4: why are blacktail numbers down?
Speaker 2: No, they're down in Unit two. They're down where you,
Speaker 2: ok and I both have explored.
Speaker 1: And you think that is because all those old clearcuts
Speaker 1: have entered the shitty period.
Speaker 2: That's right. But Unit four, so Admiralty Chichikov barandof Island,
Speaker 2: they're doing really good. They haven't had a bad winter
Speaker 2: since twenty eleven that the deer population is going nuts
Speaker 2: and they're starting to get age class on bucks. I'm
Speaker 2: seeing four points being shot out of Sitka, which I
Speaker 2: never saw before. So they're doing good. Unit three, which
Speaker 2: is qu Mitkalf and coopernof Island nineteen seventy two was
Speaker 2: a killing winner. There was six feet of snow on
Speaker 2: the beach June first, in nineteen seventy two they stopped
Speaker 2: the hunts in Unit three for years and years and
Speaker 2: years decades and started it back up for a one
Speaker 2: week and then a two week period where you were
Speaker 2: allowed to take one buck. Those deer now are really rebounding,
Speaker 2: and there's a camera trap thing going on right now
Speaker 2: out of Petersburg and wrangle maybe not wrangle, maybe wrangle
Speaker 2: that's being conducted by the state. And the deer numbers
Speaker 2: are really up in Unit three. Ketchikan is responding in
Speaker 2: all of that area around Ketchikan is responding really well
Speaker 2: with deer numbers. So the only place that the deer
Speaker 2: numbers are down really is Unit two on Prince of
Speaker 2: Weell's Island, and that's not ubiquitous as you move south.
Speaker 2: So if you get down south at Craig and you
Speaker 2: move down island and stuff in some of those reboter areas,
Speaker 2: that's warmer and they have less effects of snow down
Speaker 2: there and stuff, And so there's areas that are doing
Speaker 2: a little bit better. Then there's pockets up in the
Speaker 2: I kind of hunt mainly the north into Prince of
Speaker 2: Wales and Central to North actually hunt a lot in
Speaker 2: Central and there's pockets in there that have higher deer numbers,
Speaker 2: and so it's not all been cut and it's not
Speaker 2: all gloom and doom, but it's definitely different. Just in
Speaker 2: my experiential time being on the island, it's definitely different.
Speaker 2: And it has been partially due to the State of
Speaker 2: Alaska having to walk a very fine line there for
Speaker 2: a number of years why the wolf was being suggested
Speaker 2: to be listed and limiting the amount of trapping that
Speaker 2: could go on for wolves. But the bottom line is,
Speaker 2: I believe that we all agree here that if you
Speaker 2: have great habitat and your habitat's fun saying really well,
Speaker 2: it can take the pressure of predation. And right now
Speaker 2: we have a compromised habitat because of past management. Act
Speaker 2: not so much as past management, it's just right now
Speaker 2: we have not transitioned at all to a second growth
Speaker 2: harvest economy in the forest.
Speaker 1: Tell me what that means.
Speaker 2: We are and we're not cutting second growth. We're not cutting,
Speaker 2: we're not going into those stands commercially thinning those stands
Speaker 2: or doing patchwork of small clearcuts, or we're just not
Speaker 2: cutting those trees. Yet some of them are ready to harvest.
Speaker 2: Now there's rules on how you can harvest, but most
Speaker 2: of it's going to reach critical mass in like twenty
Speaker 2: thirty and twenty thirty three that there's going to be
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff that could be ready to harvest.
Speaker 2: The problem is there's not the infrastructure to do manufacture
Speaker 2: of the wood on the island right now. The one
Speaker 2: large mill that's there really doesn't want to do anything
Speaker 2: with second growth. He's tooled for old growth, and you
Speaker 2: have to have different saws and different processes and stuff
Speaker 2: like that to be Karen, my wife works on biomass.
Speaker 2: Nobody is there's only one place doing bio bricks on
Speaker 2: the island. You could be taking all of the slash
Speaker 2: and the non merchantable trees and grinding that up and
Speaker 2: making biofuels out of it BioBrick, biopucks, some kind of
Speaker 2: log or something like that, or wood pellets. That that
Speaker 2: infrastructure is not in place. So the only market is
Speaker 2: the export to Asia for the little shit for this
Speaker 2: young growth that could be harvested, and there's been a
Speaker 2: couple of young growth sales, but mostly it all was
Speaker 2: exported to Asia.
Speaker 1: What's the situation, like, go way down to California, what's
Speaker 1: the landscape look like right now. I mean, where do
Speaker 1: black tail deer stand down there?
Speaker 2: I am by far no expert in the Columbia blacktail
Speaker 2: in Washington, Oregon, in California. I will tell you from
Speaker 2: what we learned from that summit in Oregon, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to I won't do California because I don't have
Speaker 2: enough knowledge. But what I picked up from the wonderful
Speaker 2: folks at the Oregon Department of Fish and Game and
Speaker 2: they took us out on field trips is a lot
Speaker 2: of that as a checkerboard of ownership and Southern Oregon,
Speaker 2: Central Oregon, and stuff within the blacktail home range. And
Speaker 2: so you have timber industry blocks next to state blocks
Speaker 2: or BLM blocks, and if they want to do a
Speaker 2: habitat enhancement project or something on those, the block next
Speaker 2: to it is being intensely managed to produce second growth
Speaker 2: wood for lumber. And so the challenges are in the
Speaker 2: land ownership makeup of the Pacific Northwest, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to venture to guess that that slops over into northern California.
Speaker 1: Like it makes it hard to have a cohesive plan plan.
Speaker 2: It also makes it hard when they're trying to get
Speaker 2: of course they say, I guess this is across everything
Speaker 2: is how do you do population estimates of a rainforest deer?
Speaker 2: You can't fly over they don't have winter ranges where
Speaker 2: they congregate and stuff like that. So doing population estimates
Speaker 2: on the landscape. Down in Oregon, they were using deer
Speaker 2: pellet DNA and dogs to locate the piles of turds
Speaker 2: out in the clearcuts, and so they had a contractor
Speaker 2: out there picking up samples, using the dog to find
Speaker 2: for the deer pooped, why it was feeding out there,
Speaker 2: and then doing the population estimate. In southeast Alaska, Todd
Speaker 2: Brickman developed this. He's a professor at University of at
Speaker 2: Fairbanks up there, University of Alaska, and he developed a
Speaker 2: way of doing DNA. So he did transects. He did
Speaker 2: twelve hundred meters one meter either side. He went and
Speaker 2: removed all hoop from that, and then he started running
Speaker 2: that transsect and picking up fresh pellets and from that
Speaker 2: you can get individuals and sex off of that. And
Speaker 2: after you do that time and time and time again
Speaker 2: through seasons, you can start to get an idea of
Speaker 2: how many deer on the landscape, what the demography is
Speaker 2: whether how many males per female one hundred females and
Speaker 2: stuff like that, and that's the only way we've been
Speaker 2: able to do population estimates. They've they're trying some right now.
Speaker 2: The one I was talking about, I think it's a Petersburg.
Speaker 2: They're trying to use both deer pellet transsects and trail
Speaker 2: cameras to see if they can come up with a
Speaker 2: population estimate on the landscape. So it's really hard to
Speaker 2: estimate just how many deer are out there.
Speaker 1: What might be what might be blacktails per square mile
Speaker 1: in southeast Alaska.
Speaker 2: I've heard things of twelve to twenty.
Speaker 1: And that's figured man says.
Speaker 5: That seems positive.
Speaker 1: Because holy can go a long time and not see one.
Speaker 2: They're sneaky little guys. Yeah, I you know that. And
Speaker 2: to twenty might be winter range where they get a
Speaker 2: little more oppressed and stuff. So there's definitely areas that
Speaker 2: it's not twelve to twenty.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, like those areas where within one hundred yards
Speaker 5: you're crawling as flat as you can on your belly
Speaker 5: to get under a tree, and then you're also fifteen
Speaker 5: feet above other trees that are tipped over those areas.
Speaker 5: It might be a little hard for deer to travel.
Speaker 2: Hard for us to travel. It is what it is
Speaker 2: probably the most challenging landscape that I have ever traveled.
Speaker 2: I have a particular place that I like to hunt
Speaker 2: that's super hard to get to. And when you get
Speaker 2: off on the beach to gain twelve hundred feet in
Speaker 2: elevation a mile and a quarter from the beach, I've
Speaker 2: never done it in under six hours.
Speaker 5: Oh oh, that's misery. So what's optimal or is there
Speaker 5: an optimal considering? Just like the huge variance of optimal
Speaker 5: habitat density.
Speaker 2: I think you're probably in that twelve to fifteen range
Speaker 2: like that. But they get, I mean they get when
Speaker 2: you get into even yet today, when you get into
Speaker 2: really good alpine habitat, you may have twenty five deer
Speaker 2: per square mile, but that's just a seasonal thing. And
Speaker 2: then then they then they as the snow comes and
Speaker 2: fills that up, they start moving down that slope, they
Speaker 2: get into those crumb Holtz trees where you can never
Speaker 2: find them, just below the the beautiful vegetation in the alpine.
Speaker 2: And so I've got I've got a theory that every
Speaker 2: piece of alpine across the land and every piece of
Speaker 2: sub outpine, because alpine has kind of defined it's that's
Speaker 2: that's those true highest peaks. But all those little buskegg
Speaker 2: ridges have the highest point on that ridge that's got
Speaker 2: the best forbes and stuff that's around. And I think
Speaker 2: that the best buck of those watersheds goes to the
Speaker 2: best forage every year, and that's where you're going to
Speaker 2: find them. That every ridge has that spot.
Speaker 1: The best buck is on the best.
Speaker 2: Spot, just like the best bearer goes to the best
Speaker 2: fishing hole. You know that that best buck knows where
Speaker 2: that best stuff is. And I that's that's the theory
Speaker 2: that I apply. And I in fact, I'm not hunting
Speaker 2: traditional alpine much anymore. I'm kind of hunting those lower
Speaker 2: ridges and stuff and finding those little pockets that's going
Speaker 2: to hold two or three really good crackerjack bucks.
Speaker 4: I want to get back to conservation work. But real quick,
Speaker 4: what percentage of the bucks you killed you call in
Speaker 4: and what percent do.
Speaker 1: You creep up on.
Speaker 2: Fifty?
Speaker 1: And how you creeping up on them?
Speaker 2: Just creeping alpied mostly or dumb luck.
Speaker 4: No, I'm talking those those low nasty, those low nasty
Speaker 4: muskeg ridges.
Speaker 1: How do you hunt.
Speaker 2: Them, hi cup, put a head up because if it's
Speaker 2: if it's nice weather, because we're not generally up there
Speaker 2: when it's really lousy weather. By seven o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 2: those deer in the timber, you've got between four thirty
Speaker 2: in the morning and seven o'clock in the morning, that's
Speaker 2: your window to get success. If you're not there, it's
Speaker 2: not gonna If you're starting out at the truck at
Speaker 2: four thirty, you're not going to be there at seven.
Speaker 2: You've got to be there when they get.
Speaker 1: Up at four thirty.
Speaker 2: So they're already out feeding, yep. And what I usually
Speaker 2: I usually find them they're either bedded right on the
Speaker 2: edge of the timber, kind of chewing their cut and
Speaker 2: thinking about the great night they had out there forging
Speaker 2: on those forbes and are just taking those last few
Speaker 2: things before the sun gets too warm, and then they
Speaker 2: drift back into the timber. And so I usually hunt
Speaker 2: those edges at bedding areas that I know around those
Speaker 2: upper level muskeg you know, like twenty three to twenty
Speaker 2: six hundred foot elevation ridges.
Speaker 3: Do you get an evening period of movement as well?
Speaker 2: If you have an overcast day yeah.
Speaker 1: Full moon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, full moon, which we'd never see, no, because
Speaker 2: I go up with my tent and I stay there
Speaker 2: and I glass, and I don't see anything before I
Speaker 2: go to bed. Interesting and bed then at those times,
Speaker 2: so our season opens up the twenty fourth of July.
Speaker 2: So from the twenty fourth of July through August that there,
Speaker 2: I'm up in those things and hell, it's light till
Speaker 2: eleven eleven thirty or something like that, and I'm not
Speaker 2: seeing those deer, and I'm not seeing those deer, and
Speaker 2: I wait up in the morning and they'll be in
Speaker 2: the meadows.
Speaker 3: Interesting because knowing that most of these deer get up
Speaker 3: every four to six hours, right yep, to do some
Speaker 3: sort of feeding, moving around, they must be then doing
Speaker 3: that down in the timber where you've got to be him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you just I always take something good to read,
Speaker 2: because you're going to have long days up there. You're
Speaker 2: just not gonna have There's some places I've found patches
Speaker 2: of snow and stuff like that where they'll go out
Speaker 2: and dig holes and they'll bed in the patches of snow.
Speaker 2: If you've got a snow that persists. But the last
Speaker 2: few years, since twenty eleven. We haven't had snow in
Speaker 2: those so it just hasn't been there.
Speaker 1: Earlier, you talked about starting the black Tail Deer Foundation, right,
Speaker 1: that's what it's called.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So actually we actually hadn't got to that.
Speaker 1: Well, we were going towards that, is that what we'll
Speaker 1: get to it.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: But you'd mentioned it, and you'd said that the Meld
Speaker 4: Deer Foundation had looked for a long time and they
Speaker 4: hadn't been doing black tail deer conservation work.
Speaker 1: If I had to take a guess, like a stab
Speaker 1: at why I would picture that if you came to
Speaker 1: me and said, what can we do to improve muld
Speaker 1: your habitat and meld your numbers? I feel like you'd
Speaker 1: have a you'd really quickly generate a list of projects, meaning, well,
Speaker 1: this place, we have a huge amount of highway deer collisions.
Speaker 1: This place. They like to move from this mountain range
Speaker 1: down into this sage flat, but there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: fences and developments that are impeding the movement. So we
Speaker 1: can do some.
Speaker 4: Micro work to help the deer in that area or
Speaker 4: in this little basin. Some well timed predator control would
Speaker 4: help in May when they're dropping Faunds right, and you
Speaker 4: can kind of go and do these little distinct projects
Speaker 4: that improve meldeer in these funnel points or these focal
Speaker 4: areas of activity. But then you go and you look
Speaker 4: at this just seemingly never ending sea of timber that's
Speaker 4: very hard to access, very hard to tell what's going on.
Speaker 4: And someone says, will generate me like a chore list
Speaker 4: for how to help blacktails.
Speaker 1: I feel like you it'd be like out I pray
Speaker 1: for weather?
Speaker 3: Do you?
Speaker 1: I mean, like, like what do you like? Where would
Speaker 1: you even put money? If you had it right?
Speaker 4: That would be my explanation of why no one's doing
Speaker 4: anything on blacktails, because like what do you?
Speaker 2: How do you?
Speaker 1: Where do you begin?
Speaker 2: I think that there was a lot of truth to that.
Speaker 2: I think you'd hit the nail on the head and
Speaker 2: you know, and you've got to look at it is
Speaker 2: absolutely quality of habitat driven if there if there is
Speaker 2: a lot of places out there, we don't need to
Speaker 2: do anything. Habitat is just fine. But because of past
Speaker 2: timber management and in Washington Oregon land ownership changes and stuff.
Speaker 2: But I'm thinking I'm very southeast specific. We have native
Speaker 2: lands or a lot of timber harvest on native lands
Speaker 2: and Forest Service lands with a lot of harvest on there,
Speaker 2: and all of that has grown back into a dense
Speaker 2: forest with no forage under it. I think we have
Speaker 2: unlimited opportunity, but where to do it on that? So
Speaker 2: you have this great canvas, like a paiter stepping up
Speaker 2: to a blank canvas. You want to pick the best
Speaker 2: place to do that habitat work that's going to get
Speaker 2: the best return to those deer. So anything you do
Speaker 2: in opening it up and creating forage, deer probably going
Speaker 2: to find it and use it. But there's better places
Speaker 2: on the landscape to do it. And right now we're
Speaker 2: in the process of looking at that whole thing called
Speaker 2: Southeast Alaska past timber harvest of x age and where
Speaker 2: should we focus the TAGUS National Forces going through a
Speaker 2: forest plan revision, we're looking at where should we focus
Speaker 2: our efforts if we only have a small amount of
Speaker 2: money coming in and we only are going to be
Speaker 2: able to do so much per year, where should we
Speaker 2: go first and why? And so that those are the
Speaker 2: challenges that we're looking at right We actually there's a
Speaker 2: contract existing out there right now where we've got a
Speaker 2: gis biology or exercise to take a look at that landscape,
Speaker 2: taking in light, our taking in slope, aspect, conductivity, with
Speaker 2: existing habitats that's out there, planned projects, where roads, where
Speaker 2: can we access now. One of the things that at
Speaker 2: least the Black Tailed Deer Foundation has looked at too,
Speaker 2: is if we do a treatment out there, if we
Speaker 2: create forage for deer and deer get back on landscape,
Speaker 2: are those deer going to be accessible for hunters? Can
Speaker 2: are they going to be proximbal to a road or
Speaker 2: can they walk in easily into that? If you're going
Speaker 2: to put deer on the landscape, it'd be nice to
Speaker 2: know that they would also create additional opportunity to put
Speaker 2: meat in your freezer. The people on the island and
Speaker 2: I live Prince of Wales, they rely on deer in
Speaker 2: their freezer. And this is the first time in the
Speaker 2: last couple of years I'm hearing people that haven't been
Speaker 2: finding the deer they normally would have to put meat
Speaker 2: in the freezers. So this is serious stuff, especially as
Speaker 2: prices go up.
Speaker 1: So what would be a thing you would do if
Speaker 1: you identify is this part of the project you're working
Speaker 1: out where you're running all those cameras.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: The camera thing started out with Sophie Gilverrett and I
Speaker 2: had an idea. So the Forest Service would go in
Speaker 2: in the past and they would log most of a drainage,
Speaker 2: but they would leave where you'd have a huge bunch
Speaker 2: of creeks coming down in alluvial fans. They would leave
Speaker 2: those as a leaf strip and between clearcuts. Then they
Speaker 2: come back and they fell that they did the pre
Speaker 2: commercial thinning and created the slash that was ten twelve
Speaker 2: feet deep, and so the only vertical movement that could
Speaker 2: go on was in those leave strips in between the clearcuts.
Speaker 2: So the deer were squeezed into narrow slots. So we
Speaker 2: had control areas and so we had twenty control area
Speaker 2: cameras and twenty leave strip cameras and we started that
Speaker 2: and then they went in and they wanted to harvest
Speaker 2: and there so we had to move. So I moved
Speaker 2: over to where I'm at now. And so at that time,
Speaker 2: Sophie doctor Sophi Gilbert was working for the University of
Speaker 2: Idaho in conjunction with Todd Brinkman up at Fairbanks at
Speaker 2: the University of Alaska, and we were trying to look
Speaker 2: at deer movement, and I had an idea and the
Speaker 2: concept in my brain. My working thesis was as it
Speaker 2: greened up in the spring, the deer were down in
Speaker 2: the lower elevations and they slowly moved up as it
Speaker 2: greened up, and they finally got up to the alpine
Speaker 2: when the ford came out, and they foraged up there,
Speaker 2: and then as it started to snow, they moved back
Speaker 2: down on the landscape. And I started monitoring these cameras
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, so I've got twenty six cameras out there
Speaker 2: right now. That's anything but the truth. The does and
Speaker 2: fonds above the lower elevation valley floor bed five hundred
Speaker 2: eight hundred feet above the valley floor, and they come
Speaker 2: down to feed daily in the dark, usually almost always
Speaker 2: docturnally and not always for the dose, and they move
Speaker 2: back up as the sun comes up in the morning.
Speaker 2: I do see the bucks in velvet as they're developing.
Speaker 2: Antlers will be milling around down feeding in the bottom,
Speaker 2: and then they go up, which I'm assuming they go
Speaker 2: up into that better forage up in the higher elevation,
Speaker 2: because I don't see them for a long time until
Speaker 2: rut so I didn't know there was a daily vertical
Speaker 2: movement of deer on the landscape.
Speaker 1: They're climbing five eight hundred feet every time.
Speaker 2: Want to eat, yes, sir, And you could almost set
Speaker 2: your clock by it. They're so nocturnally driven. And then
Speaker 2: as it comes into October about on where I have
Speaker 2: my cameras, this changes. So as you move north in
Speaker 2: the Tungus Petersbergen wrangle, they run twelve fourteen days before
Speaker 2: Prince of Wales, so that the load and more higher latitude,
Speaker 2: little colder stuff rat run a little bit soon by moonface. Anyhow,
Speaker 2: all of a sudden you start seeing much more fork
Speaker 2: and horns and spikes, and they're starting to move vertically
Speaker 2: daily right before right as soon as it's dark, ten
Speaker 2: minutes after dark, they're coming down. Ten minutes before daylight,
Speaker 2: they're going back up and now.
Speaker 1: Down into what the bottoms.
Speaker 2: The females are feeding down in the thut completely in
Speaker 2: the valley floor, but in the lower elevations in the valley,
Speaker 2: and those bucks are coming down that they don't know
Speaker 2: why they're doing it. They're too young to probably do
Speaker 2: much of the breeding. I also have found sick of
Speaker 2: blacktail do not make scrapes, but they have marking trees.
Speaker 2: They have hemlock overhanging hemlock branches that they mouth and
Speaker 2: they push this their preorbital gland in there, and there
Speaker 2: are secretions between their antlers and they urinate under those things.
Speaker 2: And I have twelve or fourteen bucks coming to the
Speaker 2: same marking tree this day after day after day. And
Speaker 2: that progresses until about the twenty fifth or sixth of October,
Speaker 2: and then the big bucks starts showing up. Bigger bucks
Speaker 2: starts showing up, the more older age clash bucks come up,
Speaker 2: and they start showing up down in there. There's a
Speaker 2: frenzy between about October twenty fifth and about the sixth
Speaker 2: or seventh of November, waiting for that first dough to
Speaker 2: come into estras and I have I'll have bucks all
Speaker 2: over the cameras, I mean, and they start showed up
Speaker 2: in the day, and I mean, it's just a progression
Speaker 2: of I've got this all plotted up because I really
Speaker 2: ateal and weird about this stuff. And boom, the big
Speaker 2: bucks disappear. Nobody comes to the marking trees anymore. So
Speaker 2: the first doze have come into heat and they're autumn,
Speaker 2: and that persists until about the seventeenth or eighteenth of November,
Speaker 2: and then they bucks start coming back and marking that
Speaker 2: thing again. And then magic happens. What's that These bucks
Speaker 2: that you have never seen, these oh by god bucks
Speaker 2: show up about the seventeenth or eighteenth and November, and
Speaker 2: they persist on the landscape till about the twenty fifth
Speaker 2: or twenty sixth, maybe through Thanksgiving, and then they just peer,
Speaker 2: they vanish and you've hardly seen any of those other bucks.
Speaker 2: When those that's the guy that has been pumping iron
Speaker 2: for four years and shows up. Bet, it's just like,
Speaker 2: whoa where have you been?
Speaker 1: Okay? Walk walk me through all that. I like it,
Speaker 1: walk me through all. So so you're saying that there's about.
Speaker 2: Three year, three days of the year that you should
Speaker 2: be in the woods.
Speaker 4: So they're running all around. Okay, you got dose on
Speaker 4: your cameras. Then a sudden you start seeing bucks showing
Speaker 4: up because the rut's coming.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Then you see all this buck movement and.
Speaker 2: The first bucks that show up or the spikes in
Speaker 2: the forking darts.
Speaker 1: Then you start then you see a bunch of buck
Speaker 1: movement that.
Speaker 2: You have that you see the next age class.
Speaker 1: You say the two to four years old, their timing
Speaker 1: is a little better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're closer to Estris. They have they're not putting
Speaker 2: that much energy into chasing because they pretty much know
Speaker 2: when the first doe is going to come into heat
Speaker 2: cause of the moon fase mm hmm. That we never
Speaker 2: see and then bang they disappear and they're lockdown.
Speaker 1: That means they're on a dough.
Speaker 2: They're actively on a dough. Un Tell she's receptive.
Speaker 1: That's when I must be always hunting lockdown.
Speaker 2: And at that at that moment, so that's the key
Speaker 2: thing for me. At that moment, her head is not
Speaker 2: switched from save the faun, save the fun. If you're
Speaker 2: doing a fun and bleat call, he wants to chase
Speaker 2: her and you call her in, and he's going to
Speaker 2: come in behind her because he thinks she's just running
Speaker 2: away from him, or you will have bucks coming to
Speaker 2: the call. There's no doubt about that. But at that moment,
Speaker 2: that just before the.
Speaker 1: Estris date, what date, you know, the.
Speaker 2: Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh of November. Okay, these are days
Speaker 2: I'm never not in the woods. You got to realize
Speaker 2: this is Jim Bachtel's.
Speaker 1: Belief system understood. Well, you're here, but you're here for
Speaker 1: a reason.
Speaker 2: I'm telling you there are certain days that you don't
Speaker 2: you're there because magic can happen.
Speaker 4: Then tell me the next thing that happens. Now, explain
Speaker 4: to me why happen. Alson all these big bucks.
Speaker 1: Are running around again for three days.
Speaker 2: So you have really good two to four year old
Speaker 2: bucks to the initial breeding, and I think there's up
Speaker 2: at the higher elevation there's also a population of deer
Speaker 2: that don't come down, and I think the really big, huge,
Speaker 2: dominant four year old and better bucks are up there
Speaker 2: taking care of that. And as soon as they've taken
Speaker 2: care of everything on the rest of the landscape, they
Speaker 2: come down to see what was not taken care of
Speaker 2: at the lower elevations. And that tends to be the seventeenth, eighteenth,
Speaker 2: nine nineteenth of November through Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: And you're in the woods man.
Speaker 2: And I don't, I don't hardly ever care anything because
Speaker 2: I am I am absolutely locked into I know that
Speaker 2: the possibility of me and they actually become less nocturnal
Speaker 2: and a little more reliable that they're going to be
Speaker 2: out sometime during the day.
Speaker 1: Kay, I like it.
Speaker 2: I have this tattooed on my arm.
Speaker 6: No, no, it's uh and it's but that transition time
Speaker 6: between estris no estress right in there, that shifts seasonally.
Speaker 2: It might be slightly earlier. It might be third, fourth, fifth,
Speaker 2: sixth of November. It might be eighth, ninet, tenth, eleventh
Speaker 2: of November. I think I've killed more deer on the
Speaker 2: eleventh of November than the other day.
Speaker 4: Kay, Now get back to hyde fixed black tail deer problem.
Speaker 2: Right for real?
Speaker 1: When you got huge thousands of square miles, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, like, what are you gonna do? Really?
Speaker 2: So, just roughly on Prince of wale A Ballpark, I think,
Speaker 2: just on the for service, there's like three hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty thousand acres of young growth that's at or approaching
Speaker 2: steam exclusion phase. If you do the math with twelve
Speaker 2: to twenty deer per spare mile, that's somewhere between six
Speaker 2: and eight thousand deer that ain't there. Pretty simple math.
Speaker 1: It won't be for eighty years or yeah.
Speaker 2: And tell something is done with that second growth. And
Speaker 2: so we need this is my perfect world. We need
Speaker 2: a active young growth management industry, and that industry has
Speaker 2: to be good enough. There there's gonna be some clear
Speaker 2: cuts made, and they're going to go in and do
Speaker 2: some industrial real larger scale logging and stuff. But we
Speaker 2: will have identified where we should I where the stands
Speaker 2: are that should be approached to a habit that point
Speaker 2: of view, and make the decisions why those are important
Speaker 2: for habitat and those won't be intensely managed by clear
Speaker 2: cutting and stuff like that. We'll go in and do commercial,
Speaker 2: commercial thinning of those stands, opening that stand up and
Speaker 2: getting daylight down in there and there, and there would
Speaker 2: be an industry that would locally manufacture that stuff that
Speaker 2: the biomass would be used that comes off of it.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you're going to create, like if
Speaker 1: it's rare when you say, like for the conservation of
Speaker 1: a species and proliferation of a species, we need to
Speaker 1: develop a timber industry.
Speaker 5: I mean how do like, yeah, how do you incentivize
Speaker 5: and industry? And what specific like is it the heating
Speaker 5: fuel would pellet camp chef trigger industry?
Speaker 2: Right? Like?
Speaker 5: What what is the market for that growth that that
Speaker 5: is currently like being ignored waiting for maturation or further maturation.
Speaker 4: Oh, call, I got share something with you. There's two
Speaker 4: things that have thwarted Dirt's dad that he cannot make himself. Well,
Speaker 4: he can make anything himself, making his.
Speaker 1: Own dip, growing his own dip, making his own dip,
Speaker 1: and then making his own pellet grilled pellets.
Speaker 2: There it is.
Speaker 5: So there's your opportunity.
Speaker 1: He just can't figure it out. It's killing him.
Speaker 2: We actually, because my wife works in biomess and I
Speaker 2: love it. We hate all of our house with wood pellets.
Speaker 2: But I'm shipping them up from Idaho with all that
Speaker 2: red alder. I do the red older firewood stuff. So
Speaker 2: we also have a fire wood stove, and so I
Speaker 2: cut red alder. In fact, I'll probably be cutting it
Speaker 2: ip if I can get out in the woods when
Speaker 2: I get back from this. Okay, but you got a pellet, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So we have a timber history that's an old growth
Speaker 2: timber history, and that industry needs to shift it's And
Speaker 2: we have several small that are actively milling and kill
Speaker 2: driving lumber, and you can buy second growth lumber on
Speaker 2: Prince of Will's Island. They just can't take the volume
Speaker 2: that would be needed to make a difference in deer's lives.
Speaker 1: And the free market economy is not going to take
Speaker 1: care of this.
Speaker 2: I personally think if the if the management strategy shifted
Speaker 2: from the old growth strategy that occurred is on federal
Speaker 2: lands to a restoration economy based on we're going to
Speaker 2: do better for the deer and water and streams and
Speaker 2: stuff like that, but we're going to also support some
Speaker 2: large scale timber management. And this is what we're going
Speaker 2: to be putting up. We're not going to be doing
Speaker 2: old growth anymore. We're going to be cutting second growth.
Speaker 2: That would allow people to know that there was a
Speaker 2: supply of second growth there that would be coming, and
Speaker 2: then they could look for the capital to incidifize developing
Speaker 2: the plants to handle that. They that would be both
Speaker 2: biomass and wood. I mean, there's no you go to
Speaker 2: home depot, you're not buying old growth doug for two
Speaker 2: by fours. Those are all second growth. And that's what
Speaker 2: we have. We just we're still on the initial harvest
Speaker 2: of trees in southeast Alaska and we have it transitioned
Speaker 2: over to young growth.
Speaker 1: God, but that initial harvest is winding down.
Speaker 2: Man, it is winding down. And do you think they.
Speaker 1: Ought to quit all together?
Speaker 2: I hope not. I hope I hope not, because there's
Speaker 2: a lot of specialty mills that they don't need very
Speaker 2: much wood a year to produce an incredible product. So,
Speaker 2: you know, small old growth timbers sales. I hope they continue,
Speaker 2: and I think sustainably they could, but on large scale
Speaker 2: timber management that could be steered very focused towards improving
Speaker 2: deer habitat. We need to change to a young growth industry.
Speaker 1: And they can do all that young growth on old infrastructure.
Speaker 2: Yes, there, but so very selfishly. I don't want to
Speaker 2: take any habitat ear mark dollars and rebuild roads and
Speaker 2: bridges and log transfer sites at saltwater and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: I would like to see a viable timber history that
Speaker 2: keep those roads and bridges and stuff in good working
Speaker 2: order that we can benefit from for deer. And that's
Speaker 2: why I think they need to be there together.
Speaker 1: Is any of the stuff we're seeing, Is any of
Speaker 1: the stuff we're seeing with the incoming administration and like
Speaker 1: the tariff wars and all this stuff that might be
Speaker 1: starting in on Is any of that going to have
Speaker 1: a positive or negative impact on getting the industry you
Speaker 1: want established established? Or is this stuff play out too slowly?
Speaker 2: I think it's going to play out too slowly, and
Speaker 2: I actually don't know what's going to come out of
Speaker 2: this because the agencies and funding and people and all
Speaker 2: that is in flux right now, and we've got to
Speaker 2: kind of let the dust settle here for a few
Speaker 2: months to find out where we're at before we could
Speaker 2: pick back up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but some well placed tariff isn't going to all
Speaker 1: of a sudden spur the industry in the next few years.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know what those answers are.
Speaker 2: I know what I'd like to do on the ground
Speaker 2: if I had the if I was king, tell me
Speaker 2: what I would do. I mean, that's habitat work, focused,
Speaker 2: habitat work in the right places. That there was a
Speaker 2: a bunch of folks that have put a lot of
Speaker 2: thought into why we want to improve that place for
Speaker 2: deer and what would we do there?
Speaker 4: Do you feel that you're going to be able to
Speaker 4: start doing this? Like, what does it take to start
Speaker 4: doing the work we actually.
Speaker 2: Have right now? We don't know. The Black Tail Deer
Speaker 2: Foundation and Meal Deer Foundation does not know the status
Speaker 2: of the funding dollars that we had agreements in place
Speaker 2: for right now because of the changes that's happened in
Speaker 2: the last couple of weeks. So we have to let
Speaker 2: that settle and the people that we were working with
Speaker 2: withinside the agencies, we hope that we are solid in
Speaker 2: the agreements that we have and so we actually have
Speaker 2: four projects in southeast Alaska that will impact close to
Speaker 2: two thousand acres of wildlife habitat improvements. So we've already
Speaker 2: started down that road. We were going to do the
Speaker 2: layout this summer and award the contracts this fall for
Speaker 2: work in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: But to make a that money might not be there.
Speaker 2: We don't know. To make a meaningful impact on three
Speaker 2: hundred and sixty thousand acres of young growth that are
Speaker 2: sitting there ready that is going to steam exclusion phase,
Speaker 2: we're going to have to do several thousand acres a
Speaker 2: year to start making a difference on the deer population.
Speaker 5: It's a lot of work, it's a lot of cash.
Speaker 2: A lot of cash, a lot of work. But it
Speaker 2: can also it can be if the philosophy of management
Speaker 2: of the forest was such that it was focused on
Speaker 2: making those changes, we wouldn't be relying on habitat enhancements.
Speaker 2: Dollars to make that that would be normal timber management
Speaker 2: practices and focus change in the way they're doing work
Speaker 2: on the landscape. Yep.
Speaker 5: And then they just have to sign on to adhering
Speaker 5: to some areas of exclusion or kind of like they
Speaker 5: did with like stream bank setbacks and that sort of
Speaker 5: stuff like that, right.
Speaker 2: And a lot of that's a lot of the early
Speaker 2: management virtually again not passing judgment, walked right up the
Speaker 2: bottom of the streams with cats and removed all the
Speaker 2: large woody debris. So as we're doing this young growth
Speaker 2: management strategy, we could provide the logs that the stream
Speaker 2: actually trout and limited and a few other folks with
Speaker 2: the forced earth where they're putting them back into streams
Speaker 2: to get those pools and the riffles and the stuff
Speaker 2: back in there for salmon habitat and stuff. So we
Speaker 2: can we can work to do repariod management thinning for deer,
Speaker 2: but providing the wood for the in stream restoration projects
Speaker 2: at the same time.
Speaker 5: And then we got to tack all what about the
Speaker 5: Washington and Oregon folks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we've got a group of folks.
Speaker 5: In California, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we got work. We have a group of
Speaker 2: folks that are working for the Black del Deer Foundation
Speaker 2: and Meal Deier Foundations there. I just and I know
Speaker 2: that there's some grants and some funding coming along. I
Speaker 2: just don't know what opportunities exist. I don't have a
Speaker 2: breath of experience and know enough what's going on there.
Speaker 2: And that would be working with Oregon Department of Fishing Game,
Speaker 2: Washington Department Fishing Game and stuff, and state and BLM
Speaker 2: and forest. Yeah, there is forests that are on that
Speaker 2: side of the highway in the Black Tail world, on
Speaker 2: the coast range stuff. So I'm sure, I'm more than
Speaker 2: sure that these same kind of conversations and these same
Speaker 2: opportunity exists on those landscapes there. It's just again taking
Speaker 2: a look at where and why, Because there are places
Speaker 2: that are they're working great. We don't need to go
Speaker 2: in there and muck it up. There's stands on Prince
Speaker 2: of Wales Island that have regenerated with a spacing of
Speaker 2: tree is wide enough that there is forage underneath there
Speaker 2: and it's not in that sklim exclusion phase. We don't
Speaker 2: need to be dumping money into that.
Speaker 1: M Do you feel that all the money do you
Speaker 1: feel that the habitat is the way to go, or
Speaker 1: do you think that the all the energy that people
Speaker 1: spend talking about predation, do.
Speaker 2: You think it's a waste of energy. No, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: no no. There's a balance between those two. And I
Speaker 2: totally understand the predation aspects of this, and I've one
Speaker 2: of the things I've learned from my trail cameras. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's when wolves moves into that valley, the deers shut down.
Speaker 2: The deer don't come down to the lower elevations for
Speaker 2: two days. When the wolves go through. There is a
Speaker 2: definite impact on the wolves and the landscape. So there's
Speaker 2: a lot of people saying, all I go out deer hunting,
Speaker 2: I don't find any deer and I see all these
Speaker 2: wolves side. If you think about it, so if we
Speaker 2: went out hunting together at the time that the deer
Speaker 2: wolves are in there, the deer are all compressed and
Speaker 2: these smaller habitat blocks because of all of this older
Speaker 2: second growth out here, where do we go. We go
Speaker 2: to where the deer compressed to because we know that's
Speaker 2: the best place is to hunt, and we go there
Speaker 2: and we find all these wolf sign Let's say it snowed,
Speaker 2: and we see all the tracks and everything like that,
Speaker 2: we don't see any deer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, no different than seeing a bunch of
Speaker 5: human boot tracks.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So our conclusion that we draw is there's nothing but
Speaker 2: predators on the landscape and there's no deer there, when
Speaker 2: in fact, there's probably quite a few deer there. They
Speaker 2: just for that time period of slowly changed where they're
Speaker 2: at on the landscape. So there's a definite impact. I mean,
Speaker 2: I've got the graft. The rut was in full swing.
Speaker 2: I had wolves move into the camera area for a
Speaker 2: two day period and when I finished plot in my rut.
Speaker 2: Usually the rut is a big bell curve of activity.
Speaker 2: It starts up here, it goes crazy nuts. I have
Speaker 2: fifty bucks a day past my twenty six cameras and
Speaker 2: it drops off to nothing. There's a little tiny bit
Speaker 2: for a second run. In the beginning of December, that
Speaker 2: rent rut split into two bell curves around that time
Speaker 2: that the wolves were there. It was a dramatic, uh
Speaker 2: departure from the normal rut activity. It doesn't mean the
Speaker 2: rut was stopping, but it was stopping where my cameras were.
Speaker 2: They were still going on up hire. I'm quite sure
Speaker 2: they just weren't coming down and checking on and the
Speaker 2: dose weren't coming down and stuff like that. In the
Speaker 2: lower elevation, they're like, ooh, I'm.
Speaker 5: Not here, but I imagine there's like a more effective
Speaker 5: time of year for predator harvest wolf and you guys
Speaker 5: are So they're right, mountain lions are starting to creep
Speaker 5: in and.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you one of the So, yeah, So I've
Speaker 2: been I've been involved in three studies with telemetry callers
Speaker 2: where we monitored fawns right at birth through the first
Speaker 2: two weeks of their lives, and the last one that
Speaker 2: that Sophie did and it basically agreed not quite fifty percent,
Speaker 2: but like forty eight percent of all sick of blacktail
Speaker 2: fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their
Speaker 2: life by black bear. And what we didn't know is
Speaker 2: if a fond don't has forty eight percent of all
Speaker 2: blacktail fawns are taken in the first two weeks of
Speaker 2: their life by black bear. So okay, that is a lot.
Speaker 1: So one half of the deer by black bear in
Speaker 1: two weeks two weeks were gone.
Speaker 2: And what we found out was which we had no
Speaker 2: knowledge of, because then we got doze on collar that
Speaker 2: had twins that were on collars. She would take a
Speaker 2: geomorphic some kind of a structure like a ridge or
Speaker 2: a hill or a river or a road or something,
Speaker 2: and she would put one fawn over here two to
Speaker 2: three hundred yards away, and one fawn over here two
Speaker 2: to three hundred yards away, and she would live in
Speaker 2: between that and nurse both of those for that two weeks.
Speaker 5: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: So if she lost one, she lost only one instead
Speaker 2: of losing both of them. And so there's a natural
Speaker 2: So there's always been black bear there. The deer have
Speaker 2: grown up with black bear on the landscape. The deer
Speaker 2: have changed their habits to reflect the predation that the
Speaker 2: black bear put on those deer. And when and when
Speaker 2: there was a lot of black bear before two thousand
Speaker 2: and four, when we were doing deer darting, there wasn't
Speaker 2: a day when I was calling to bring doze in
Speaker 2: to shoot them, to put radio callers on them that
Speaker 2: I didn't have one to two black bears smoke into me.
Speaker 2: And I've got it. I've had them get closer than
Speaker 2: you and I are and had them look past me
Speaker 2: to see where the fawn was. They were so locked
Speaker 2: into that sound. They knew I wasn't the faun, and
Speaker 2: they didn't care about me. They just want to know
Speaker 2: where that fall. I always thought what it would it
Speaker 2: be like if you set a fawn decoy out, we'd
Speaker 2: be would be gone. Oh wow, they just bowl over it.
Speaker 2: So they're they're super focused on that fond distress call
Speaker 2: and most of the fonds. What we find is the
Speaker 2: black bear's feeding. The female has left them. The black
Speaker 2: bear may not be actively hunting, but it's feeding and
Speaker 2: digging up skunk cabbage in the spring. You've seen all
Speaker 2: that stuff and all of a sudden it must get
Speaker 2: a set or that fad. Here's movement thinks it's moms
Speaker 2: and lets out one little bleat and you see this
Speaker 2: acceleration and it's food that's gone.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So more effective from your based off of your research,
Speaker 5: more effective to target black bears in the ahead of time,
Speaker 5: right early spring.
Speaker 2: Well, so this is what why I get back to
Speaker 2: the habitat, and that the fact that we have a
Speaker 2: habitat challenge. Again, this is Jim Bitchetool's world. I moved
Speaker 2: there in nineteen ninety. We had tons of clearcuts, tons
Speaker 2: of food, young clearcuts of that two to fifteen year age.
Speaker 2: We still had all kinds of old growth and we
Speaker 2: had good conductivity even though the landscape was fractured, lots
Speaker 2: of deer, unbelievable number of bears. I can't even fathom
Speaker 2: to tell you how many bears were there. And wolves
Speaker 2: were numerous. I saw wolves weekly, I saw black I
Speaker 2: would see my third day in the woods. I still
Speaker 2: have my journal entry. I saw twenty seven black bears
Speaker 2: working in the woods the first the third day I
Speaker 2: was on the Prince of Wales Island. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: the kind of numbers you used to see. It became
Speaker 2: really popular to hunt black bear, and if you look
Speaker 2: at the graph, it went from seventy bears per year
Speaker 2: to almost five hundred bears per year coming out of
Speaker 2: Unit two.
Speaker 5: Harvested bears.
Speaker 2: Harvested bears. Wow, that was like the nod residents could
Speaker 2: take too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole air of like bringing in truckloads of
Speaker 1: dog food and hunting stations off the road system, and
Speaker 1: that crashed in.
Speaker 2: Two thousand and five and the state started managing it,
Speaker 2: first with a registration and now with a draw and
Speaker 2: they're actually, I think they're doing an incredible job. I'm
Speaker 2: starting to see those older age class bears. So the
Speaker 2: first thing we lost was the big bores. Then we
Speaker 2: lost the older females. And when we started to losing
Speaker 2: the older females, you start losing the knowledge of where
Speaker 2: to dead, how to did, where to fish, and all
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff, And so there was an impact.
Speaker 2: Wolves I think has stayed relatively constant in that three
Speaker 2: hundred to three hundred and fifty estimate population in there.
Speaker 2: We've had another twenty timber sales since I got there
Speaker 2: on federal lands, and this young young growth that was
Speaker 2: all this forage has grown up to be nothing. So
Speaker 2: now we have hardly any bears, but we're starting to
Speaker 2: see them come back. We still have wolves on the landscape.
Speaker 2: Why aren't we And we haven't had a killing winter
Speaker 2: since twenty eleven. Why aren't we seeing tons of deer?
Speaker 2: And I think the reason is is because we're losing
Speaker 2: the habitat on the other end. And that's my take
Speaker 2: on the landscape there that you know that the wolves
Speaker 2: are still taken about the same number of deer that
Speaker 2: they always did, and the bears are too, But there's
Speaker 2: less bears, but the deer used to be able to
Speaker 2: When there was tons of bears, the deer could still absorb,
Speaker 2: losing fifty percent back. So we see a reduced deer number,
Speaker 2: not so much because of predation, because the predation is
Speaker 2: probably roughly the same as just a lower number, But
Speaker 2: it's the fact that we just lost those deer that
Speaker 2: aren't in those older stands of timber anymore where they
Speaker 2: used to be. It doesn't bode well for us and
Speaker 2: Prince of Welles for the next few years. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know how to tell you that me the
Speaker 2: next eighty years, I'll be gone. You might still, but
Speaker 2: it's it's you know. So I moved to southeast Alaska,
Speaker 2: and I grew up hunting Columbia blacktail in Washington State,
Speaker 2: and I moved up there, and I just fell in
Speaker 2: love with these deer, and I realized that nobody knows
Speaker 2: anything about these deer like they were. There's you know,
Speaker 2: there's tons of stuff written on white tail, and there's
Speaker 2: quite a bit of stuff written on mule deer and stuff,
Speaker 2: but like nobody knows anything about that. And it was
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 2: I bought the urlsic of blacktail dot org and in
Speaker 2: about twenty fifth thirteen, Sophie and I and Todd created
Speaker 2: that web page Sick of black Tail dot org the
Speaker 2: Sick of Blacktail Deer Coalition. I wanted a place somebody
Speaker 2: could go find out information about sick of blacktail. So
Speaker 2: it's got all the stuff on translocations, it's got all
Speaker 2: the stuff in there about all all of the written things,
Speaker 2: both peer reviewed publications and not peer reviewed publications, and
Speaker 2: stuff has been written. It's a place you could go
Speaker 2: find out about sick of blacktail. And I'm excited to
Speaker 2: see this the emphasis on blacktail throughout their region, both
Speaker 2: Columbia and stuff through the Blacktail Deer Foundation.
Speaker 4: Are you going to roll sick of Blacktail dot org
Speaker 4: into black Tail Deer Foundation.
Speaker 1: What you're looking for?
Speaker 2: Wait, no, we might put it up on the page.
Speaker 2: But if you look at the Blacktail Deer on the
Speaker 2: Blacktails Foundation thing, that's what Sophie and I have on
Speaker 2: our webpage.
Speaker 3: Okay, we said they were the same photo.
Speaker 2: Now that know that drawing the characterization right up there.
Speaker 2: That that right there, that's on our web page. They
Speaker 2: needed something and Sophie and I agreed that that was
Speaker 2: a good thing to allow them to use that so.
Speaker 1: Well, the black Tail Deer Foundation sits separate outside of
Speaker 1: Meal Deer Foundation, or is it just like a wing
Speaker 1: of the Meal Deer Foundation.
Speaker 2: It's with them, kind of like the difference between Peasants
Speaker 2: Forever and Quail Forever kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And so who's the director?
Speaker 2: Greg Shean came on as director. I don't know if
Speaker 2: you know Greg. He's awesome. He wasn't there very long.
Speaker 2: And Steve Belinda called me one morning and said, you
Speaker 2: need to get on a call. Steve's got an idea.
Speaker 2: And Steve says, what do you think if we created
Speaker 2: the Blacktail Deer Foundation? And I said, I said three
Speaker 2: years ago. I told Steve I would give him two
Speaker 2: and a half to three years on the emphasis that
Speaker 2: the Meal Deer Foundation was putting on Blacktail. And I
Speaker 2: was kind of getting ready to retire again, and I said,
Speaker 2: I'll give you three more years. I'm all in, I
Speaker 2: want to see this thing be successful.
Speaker 1: So what will your role with black Tail Deer Foundation be?
Speaker 2: To try to be an advocate for deer in Alaska?
Speaker 2: Dear habitat work in Alaska and the work that we
Speaker 2: could do. We have a full time wildlife biology trained
Speaker 2: employee for the black Tail Deer Foundation, Lizard Judis Cu
Speaker 2: Leonora Scott's awesome. Scott has been working up with the
Speaker 2: Laska Department Efficient Game to do the modeling thing to
Speaker 2: answer the where so they're doing across all of the
Speaker 2: Tongas native and non native lands? Where where where should
Speaker 2: we if we get dollars to do things, or if
Speaker 2: the agencies and the other landowners focus on a habitat
Speaker 2: restoration and a second growth industry, where should we be
Speaker 2: putting our efforts in work? And so they're working on
Speaker 2: that right now. And so I'm helping to develop chapters
Speaker 2: and be a spokesperson basically for the Black Tail Deer
Speaker 2: Foundation and to educate people on what why why why
Speaker 2: do we care? I love these dear. I just every
Speaker 2: day I go to the woods, I try to go
Speaker 2: out and learn some and I think every day I
Speaker 2: get schooled.
Speaker 5: Which keeps you learning?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: No, it is you know, like I like wow, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't have thought that, you know. And every once in
Speaker 2: a while I the licking branch thing. There's not a
Speaker 2: lot of I went out in the snow to start
Speaker 2: gpsing trails because if you go out there, there's a
Speaker 2: hundred trails, hundreds of trails. You go out in the
Speaker 2: snow and.
Speaker 1: I found you put a camera on one of those
Speaker 1: trails and there's a trail there, But it doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean something's going to come down that trail.
Speaker 2: But go out in the snow and GPS the one
Speaker 2: or two trails that are really ran and go to
Speaker 2: and you'll see they go like this, and they'll come
Speaker 2: to a node. Put your camera at that node. That's
Speaker 2: where three or four of the really used trails come together.
Speaker 1: They come together in the high spots.
Speaker 2: No, they come together. They they just across the landscape.
Speaker 2: The deer trails will kind of mingle and sometimes they intersect.
Speaker 2: Oh and when they.
Speaker 4: You're not saying they intersect at a particular type of feature.
Speaker 2: Just where they intersect, and at that intersect, I'll almost
Speaker 2: guarantee you there's a licking branch somewhere.
Speaker 5: Right there, saying it really surprises me.
Speaker 1: Sorry, did you ever sit the licking branch?
Speaker 2: Huh?
Speaker 1: Do you ever? Do you ever set up and just
Speaker 1: sit on the licking branch? Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you go to I got a YouTube channel
Speaker 2: and if you go there, I have tons of videos
Speaker 2: I've put together of licking branch as. You can watch
Speaker 2: buck after buck after buck come to these things.
Speaker 5: Have you done like mock scrapes and mock licking branch.
Speaker 5: Have you set up a totally synthetic one yet?
Speaker 2: No, I've thought about it. Well. First off, it would
Speaker 2: have to be a synthetic lure because all natural lures
Speaker 2: are forbidden in Alaska. That's been outlawed because they're so
Speaker 2: worried about CWD getting there, and uh so they're they're
Speaker 2: gonna have to. It'll have to be something a deer attracted.
Speaker 2: I know several people that choosed. Uh. I can't remember
Speaker 2: the name of the company that does the rope hemp
Speaker 2: rope and you you soak it in some kind of
Speaker 2: a lure and I can't remember it. Yew, they put
Speaker 2: that up and our bucks just beat the pee out
Speaker 2: of there. The problem is is we have so much
Speaker 2: rain you've got to put looo around it about every
Speaker 2: two days.
Speaker 4: Do you ever hear of a thing called buckman juice? No,
Speaker 4: the urine from a man named Doug Durren. No, it
Speaker 4: might be worth checking out. I could try to get
Speaker 4: you a bottle of buck Man juice.
Speaker 2: I can tell you that I twenty by thirteen. I
Speaker 2: had a really beautiful four by four with eyeguards coming
Speaker 2: through one muskeg between two and four for three days
Speaker 2: and I hung a tree stand. And I'm not a
Speaker 2: patient man. I hate being sitting there. But I went
Speaker 2: in and hung a tree stand. And I got out
Speaker 2: of that tree stand because I had to backpack it
Speaker 2: in three quarters of a mile and it got cold.
Speaker 2: I got cold because I sweated and went After I
Speaker 2: hung it, I got down out of there, and the
Speaker 2: next day my trail camera eighteen minutes after I got down,
Speaker 2: he pushed three do's right by by stand. So the
Speaker 2: next day I got it there and I sat from
Speaker 2: seven thirty in the morning until two thirty in the afternoon,
Speaker 2: and this dough came out. Well. I had peede out
Speaker 2: of the sand, and she came over and she smelled
Speaker 2: every place I had peed, and I had dropped the
Speaker 2: little rope that I had pulled the muzzle atter up by,
Speaker 2: and she moothed that and stuff, and then she just
Speaker 2: slowly walked. She followed my tracks and smelled me and
Speaker 2: the cross I could see. She was exactly following my tracks.
Speaker 2: We don't have any predators that come from above, so
Speaker 2: she never looked up. I was only twelve feet above her,
Speaker 2: but she never looked up. And she took off, and
Speaker 2: I cocked the gun and swung over to the opening.
Speaker 2: She come out, and he comes smoking into that opening,
Speaker 2: and I got that buck.
Speaker 1: Whoa all right?
Speaker 2: In fact, I'm not this good. It was an accident.
Speaker 2: But my camera was set on a three shot burst
Speaker 2: and he ran by the camera and it set it off.
Speaker 2: My mouth growned him to a stop, and I didn't know.
Speaker 2: You could actually see me in the tree stand. And
Speaker 2: next thing you see is a big puff of smoke.
Speaker 2: He's dying on the edge of the picture. It happened
Speaker 2: that fast, that.
Speaker 5: Fast, unreal.
Speaker 2: Now, we were told that she did not she was
Speaker 2: not wigged out by where I had peeded it all.
Speaker 2: Just absolutely did not care. She was curious, really curious,
Speaker 2: but had not She wasn't wigged out by that at all. Jim.
Speaker 5: We were told that you end up shooting a lot
Speaker 5: of bucks head on in the chest, and then you
Speaker 5: what's your aiming.
Speaker 2: Spot, the bottom center, the bottom throat patch, and you
Speaker 2: recovered the round ball against the rear leg bone. Hopefully
Speaker 2: you'll find this out someday.
Speaker 3: I hope so too. I hope so too.
Speaker 5: But why how does it end up head on so frequently?
Speaker 2: Because they're coming to the call?
Speaker 5: Oh god, yeah, they're coming to the call.
Speaker 2: The other thing is I try to set up and
Speaker 2: blind call all the time, and if he's sneaking in,
Speaker 2: what I do is I tried set up so if
Speaker 2: there's a ridge over here or a travel way that
Speaker 2: I think they might be using, I set up here
Speaker 2: knowing that the wind is blowing across me this way
Speaker 2: with an opening on this side, so that he's going
Speaker 2: to come and he's going to try to circle behind me.
Speaker 1: You catch him crossing that opening, and I catch.
Speaker 2: Him crossing that opening, And that's a lot of times.
Speaker 2: They'll still turn and look at you. But you can
Speaker 2: get them broadside if you're just don't man. You like
Speaker 2: when I start calling, I don't move because they're locked on.
Speaker 2: They know the minute you blow that call from five, six,
Speaker 2: seven hundred yards away, they know they know the stump
Speaker 2: you're sitting by, that that that I've watched them across
Speaker 2: large open fast BUSKEG systems come at full tilt run
Speaker 2: across there to that spot. I'm quite sure because I'm
Speaker 2: What I'm trying to do now is be a little
Speaker 2: more patient. I find that big bucks come in between
Speaker 2: thirty and forty five minutes. What and I'm not that patient?
Speaker 2: I called for ten or fifteen, and I want to
Speaker 2: go over there. I might do something different. I'm sure
Speaker 2: that there has been hundreds of bucks come to where
Speaker 2: I had just called it. I'm no longer there, I'm
Speaker 2: off hunting something else. Or what I'll do is I frequently.
Speaker 1: When you set up to call, how long you sitting there?
Speaker 2: You should be there between thirty five and forty minutes.
Speaker 1: God give you a little bit of math that Mercer
Speaker 1: Laing is a man named Mercer Lawing gave me but
Speaker 1: so similar situation. Call him Bobcats, Predator, call him Bobcats.
Speaker 1: Bobcats will sometimes show up like forty minutes later. So
Speaker 1: most guys that call Kyle still sip for fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the rule of thumb, right, fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: everybody gets bored and you want to leave. But a
Speaker 1: Bobcat might show up at forty minutes. And I was
Speaker 1: talking to my friend mercer who calls tons of bobcats
Speaker 1: and used to do it professionally. He's like, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I can hunt twice as many spots at twenty. Sure,
Speaker 1: some will show up at forty. Most show up before,
Speaker 1: like most show up before. So I'd rather hit twice
Speaker 1: as many spots than wait around for the one that
Speaker 1: might show up at forty, like a calculated loss.
Speaker 4: So you're saying, when you run it, you don't sit
Speaker 4: there forty minutes, but you should.
Speaker 2: I should. You can if I time myself and make
Speaker 2: it happen. I have tended to kill better bucks at
Speaker 2: the thirty to forty five minute period. That is a
Speaker 2: long which means Steve, I look around, be like, man,
Speaker 2: and you and I both know sometimes you call in
Speaker 2: there poop.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm looking for. The one that just is
Speaker 1: all of a sudden in your face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we love that. That's exhilarating. Man, my god,
Speaker 2: you're talking to an animal and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: it's like smack in your face, like at five feet
Speaker 2: it's like crazy stuff. Later, yeah, and.
Speaker 1: You're calling it, what like how often you call him?
Speaker 2: I usually start out with a really aggressive uh call sequence.
Speaker 2: I'm much louder, and I've been told that I'm too loud.
Speaker 2: Oh no, that's half the volume. I really crack cut it.
Speaker 3: But this is all the classic black tail deer whistle
Speaker 3: that's sold in Alaska. That's what you're using. No, Oh no,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Can I use brand name? Sure?
Speaker 5: Oh, you don't have to give away any secrets.
Speaker 2: No, there's no secrets. You know the cow talk that
Speaker 2: came out of years ago, the first cow call that
Speaker 2: ever was made. Oh yeah, rubber band, the plastic thing.
Speaker 2: That's what I've killed all my deer off of. I
Speaker 2: tighten that rubber band and it's got you use it
Speaker 2: like the thoro axe in the back and could change
Speaker 2: my pitch. I start out really quiet, just make.
Speaker 1: The noise of your mouth.
Speaker 2: Okay, I cut it. I started out really really quiet,
Speaker 2: and then I crescendoed the louder and louder and louder.
Speaker 2: I'm reaching out for I.
Speaker 1: Know what you just used crescendo right, I've always I've
Speaker 1: used it wrong my whole life. It's like I thought
Speaker 1: the crescendo was the top.
Speaker 5: No, it's the build.
Speaker 1: The build. Someone told me that one time, and my
Speaker 1: whole life I said when it reached a crescendo, meaning
Speaker 1: the cap the apex like, no, the crescendos is the climb.
Speaker 1: Good jobject.
Speaker 2: It's like throwing a pebble into a pond. Your your
Speaker 2: sound waves go out. You never know what's going to
Speaker 2: how it's going to come back to you. And so
Speaker 2: I I imagine that. I know in my mind every
Speaker 2: time I call some deer hears it. They may not
Speaker 2: choose to come, but they are hearing it. And so
Speaker 2: I start with a really loud bang. I try to
Speaker 2: get them to stand up okay and start Now. They
Speaker 2: may not complete it, but I try to get them
Speaker 2: to do that, and so I start that. Then I
Speaker 2: go back down and I build and build. And then
Speaker 2: if I'm doing a rattling sequence, I start out super
Speaker 2: loud and a roar grunt that they're are deer are
Speaker 2: when they're aggravating and they do the roar gud. You'll
Speaker 2: hear that from two hundred yards away. It is nuts
Speaker 2: how loud they are.
Speaker 3: This is getting me excited for a huh yeah for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah go on. Anyhow, Now that rattling stuff is interesting.
Speaker 2: The other part of that is when if a buck
Speaker 2: responds to a rattling sequence and you decide not to
Speaker 2: shoot him, keep it going. Numerable times, I've had a
Speaker 2: smaller buck come in first and mister Holy Jesus walk
Speaker 2: in later, like, oh my god. It's just like five
Speaker 2: minutes later. You'll see these really big antler chips out
Speaker 2: in the brush moved around, and a lot of people
Speaker 2: will bang kill that buck and go over and deal that.
Speaker 2: And they didn't realize that there was a smoker buck
Speaker 2: coming in.
Speaker 1: Hmmm.
Speaker 2: I had. I had Sophie with another biologist there and
Speaker 2: I called it a beautiful three point and Sophie took
Speaker 2: that three point and she jumped up. I said no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: let's keep calling. And they were like, no, let's take
Speaker 2: pictures and they ran out across the muskeke and I'd
Speaker 2: like to shoot. So I went over there and I
Speaker 2: I stepped away from my gun, took my backpack off,
Speaker 2: and I laid my muzzloader down and I went over
Speaker 2: and I grabbed their camera and I hear snort and
Speaker 2: I turned around and there's this four by four with
Speaker 2: h guards twenty yards away, steam just rolling off it.
Speaker 2: And I looked at my gun, which was about ten
Speaker 2: feet away in that buck and he took off and
Speaker 2: he ran down the edge of the muskeke, and I
Speaker 2: grabbed my mutherloader and I rolled out into the muskeke,
Speaker 2: and he went down sixty yards and went in and stopped.
Speaker 2: But he stopped with the sweet spot between two trees.
Speaker 2: And he ought not to have done that. But I mean,
Speaker 2: there was a classic example of him. He was hot
Speaker 2: and he was looking for a fight, and he came
Speaker 2: in just virtually smoking.
Speaker 3: A little off topic. But sixty yards blacktail broadside. Is
Speaker 3: that an offhand shot for you? Or do you look
Speaker 3: for a rest in that situation.
Speaker 2: I almost always try to take a knee. I tried.
Speaker 2: I don't care if they're five yards, I try to.
Speaker 2: I can do it. I've done it. I mean seventy yards,
Speaker 2: eighty yards. Last two years ago, I killed a bucket
Speaker 2: they olpine. I had none of the rest on it.
Speaker 2: I was like, suck it up, buttercup, and I aimed
Speaker 2: and just did a perfect shot out him. But I
Speaker 2: am small abisball. I tell you you already got one shot.
Speaker 2: You're not going to reload, and any kind of lifetime
Speaker 2: of that deer running off or anything else, you've got
Speaker 2: to make that one shot. That's the challenge. That's why
Speaker 2: I went to Muslim and eventually it's just to challenge
Speaker 2: myself to make that one child.
Speaker 1: You've been married to hell a long time, haven't you?
Speaker 2: Twenty six years? On the fourteenth.
Speaker 1: I think I asked you, like your marriage advice. I
Speaker 1: can't remember what you told me. I did ask your
Speaker 1: marriage advice. Did you tell me that you always treat
Speaker 1: your wife like a princess?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: No, no, that.
Speaker 3: Was Randy, that's right.
Speaker 1: But I did ask you in that parking lot on
Speaker 1: the island.
Speaker 2: We did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what would you tell me? Your plan was?
Speaker 2: Oh, I went through the whole thing about why we
Speaker 2: got buried in February. The fact that you know, like
Speaker 2: trappid and bear season started in March and through April,
Speaker 2: the trapping fell off, but then there was field season,
Speaker 2: and then it was hunting season for deer all the
Speaker 2: way down through into November, and then trapping season picked
Speaker 2: up again. And usually things were froze up in February
Speaker 2: and that was a good time. But it happened to
Speaker 2: be a three day weekend that year with Valentine's Day
Speaker 2: on it, so we got married on Valentine's Day.
Speaker 1: That's cute.
Speaker 2: So i'd be home on anniversaries.
Speaker 1: So have you have you guys got all those years
Speaker 1: of marriages because good luck? Or do you got like
Speaker 1: a strategy?
Speaker 2: I think she's tolerable than me.
Speaker 1: You just got lucky.
Speaker 2: I got lucky. We got together and gardens. I said,
Speaker 2: I hunt. She says, oh, I've known guys that hunt
Speaker 2: before it. I said, no, you don't understand. She does.
Speaker 2: Now we get a lot good. She allows helping processing.
Speaker 2: She's got a few hunts with me and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But bainly I go out and hut by myself and
Speaker 2: she does all the helps, all the cutting up and
Speaker 2: stuff when I break it home.
Speaker 1: Okay, had she shot a deer?
Speaker 2: Nope, not even interested. So he's watched me kill a bunch.
Speaker 4: But other than that, what she say when you get one?
Speaker 4: She get excited. Oh yeah, she doesn't feel bad for
Speaker 4: the deer.
Speaker 2: If she'll point out every once in a while, like
Speaker 2: we don't have any elk in the freezer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love those kind of statements like go forth and
Speaker 2: kill elk?
Speaker 1: You know, like, hey, what's up with uh? You know
Speaker 1: how you're allowed to kill a elk? On Prince Wales
Speaker 1: if you run into one, as long as you have
Speaker 1: a deer tag or something like that.
Speaker 5: I've seen tracks and I found you haven't.
Speaker 1: Laid eyes on one.
Speaker 2: No, I know.
Speaker 1: I had a guy who was feeding me a lot
Speaker 1: of intel about where it was somewhere, but I never
Speaker 1: looked into it.
Speaker 2: I can honestly tell you. In about ear two thousand,
Speaker 2: Karen saw a cow and a calf in the middle
Speaker 2: of the road just before you get to Goose Creek
Speaker 2: Thorn Bay intersection there coming to Thorn Bay. She came
Speaker 2: home and said, I just saw something, a deer that
Speaker 2: I don't know what it was. She had never seen
Speaker 2: a winter calf with the kind of that brushy mane,
Speaker 2: and I think I went to a bugle magazine and
Speaker 2: I held up so it looked like that. She said yes.
Speaker 2: I said, let's get in the truck, and we drove
Speaker 2: back out there and their tracks were there. I mean
Speaker 2: I tracked it for eight hundred yards and I never
Speaker 2: caught up to him.
Speaker 1: So they swam over.
Speaker 2: They were because Brushy and Shrubby's not very far from Jarembo,
Speaker 2: and so they went from Atland to Zarembo and then
Speaker 2: they can come straight across brushy and shrubby across snow
Speaker 2: Pass there and down to Prince of Wales. So there
Speaker 2: was dozens of sightings there. So they first planted Roosevelt
Speaker 2: elcover on Atland Island and then they came back with
Speaker 2: rockies and the rockies went off, I don't like this.
Speaker 1: Stuff, and they went so that's what was happening. They
Speaker 1: banded and there was the rockies would strike off swimming.
Speaker 2: There was a three year period where we had a
Speaker 2: lot of elk sidings on Prince of Well's Island, and
Speaker 2: I know three times during that period that I crossed
Speaker 2: trail tracks and I tracked them. But those those are
Speaker 2: the years that we were doing the deer darting, and
Speaker 2: we were free ranging darting uh and and getting off
Speaker 2: the road system and calling deer in and processing deer
Speaker 2: and stuff and and that during those years were the
Speaker 2: same expansion years of elk And I definitely saw elk
Speaker 2: tracks at remote areas on Prince of Wales.
Speaker 1: So do you think right now there's none on Prince
Speaker 1: of Wale's Island.
Speaker 2: I don't think so. I think they've got to settle
Speaker 2: down and they have a population on jer Inbo now
Speaker 2: and they've all erbred and they're not striking off. I
Speaker 2: don't think they're striking off. I'm sure some young male
Speaker 2: thinks that there's a whole island over there that might
Speaker 2: be full of cows that I don't know about, so
Speaker 2: they might come over.
Speaker 4: But you know, buddy mine, he one time, this is
Speaker 4: the same body was telling me about where to go
Speaker 4: look for help.
Speaker 1: But he one time found two. He pulled two blacktail fawns.
Speaker 4: Out of the water, couldn't find their mom andy where
Speaker 4: little fawns they had swim they were swimming.
Speaker 1: He got both in his boat. One died right away.
Speaker 4: He got one wrapped in a space blanket, got it
Speaker 4: all warm back up again, brought it up to the
Speaker 4: beach and it ran off. So some number of those
Speaker 4: things die like that.
Speaker 2: That and also when they're walking on the beach, a
Speaker 2: bald eagle will take them and they'll grab them and
Speaker 2: sometimes they let them go, but they've punctured their insides
Speaker 2: with their I've found several that has the talon marks.
Speaker 2: But I've also had like twelve mile alarm the back
Speaker 2: road down towards your place down there. I've I've saw
Speaker 2: where e was swimming across. You know how they'll get
Speaker 2: a salmon and they can't take off. Yep. Well, when
Speaker 2: it came out, it had a fun and it's challenged.
Speaker 1: No ship, there's a grabbing about in the water and
Speaker 1: drowning them.
Speaker 2: So there was there was quite a there's quite a
Speaker 2: We don't know what percentage of funds get taken by eagles,
Speaker 2: but it is a predator of funds, especially when there
Speaker 2: those first two or three day wobbly leg kind of things.
Speaker 2: There's definitely a definitely a thing.
Speaker 1: You know what you get like you get sort of
Speaker 1: this idea.
Speaker 4: You know, think about turkey hunt if your turkey hunter
Speaker 4: not but people you're calling turkeys and people like, oh,
Speaker 4: you know, he's not gonna want to cross the he's
Speaker 4: not gonna want to cross the ditch, or you know,
Speaker 4: you're trying to call him through the fence.
Speaker 1: You won't want to try to cross the fence.
Speaker 4: And people talking about stuff like that, like these little
Speaker 4: perceived obstacles. You know, when you're trying to call something
Speaker 4: in when you get up there there's so much water
Speaker 4: and you think of like you think of a bear
Speaker 4: deer coming down to the water and he's gonna like
Speaker 4: kind of psych himself up, get ready.
Speaker 1: You know, and then go for it. When you're watching them,
Speaker 1: it's like they don't even think, man.
Speaker 2: If you're a rutting buck on, they just like just
Speaker 2: like in the water, swim, wow, don't.
Speaker 4: They're not like, you know, not like who I gotta
Speaker 4: build myself up for the swim. It's like they don't
Speaker 4: even they seem as comfortable swimming as they do walking.
Speaker 2: I've had wolves swimming in front of my boat and
Speaker 2: get out on the beach and just shake off, sit
Speaker 2: down and whatever.
Speaker 4: It's wild to watch deer like come down and bop
Speaker 4: into the salt.
Speaker 1: Water and just fast.
Speaker 2: They're fast. You can't catch them in a canoe, have
Speaker 2: little webby things or nothing. It seems like they really go.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, it's just they don't give a ship.
Speaker 2: They just go.
Speaker 1: They just swim. You see him on these dinky little
Speaker 1: islands now, and then you're like, what the hell are
Speaker 1: you doing.
Speaker 2: On the island. Actually, I think a lot of times
Speaker 2: right about the end of May, the dose go to
Speaker 2: those little islands. They have funds because there's less predators
Speaker 2: out there.
Speaker 4: Well, I've seen that time of year you see black
Speaker 4: bears striking out for little Teeney Island.
Speaker 2: You know, yep, I absolutely agree with that.
Speaker 1: Well, how do people get involved with Blacktail? To your foundation?
Speaker 2: Go to the web paite black Tail Deer got org.
Speaker 1: Yeah, black you guys are gonna start chapters. People can
Speaker 1: start chapters.
Speaker 2: We've got chapters. Uh, I think we we had a
Speaker 2: lot of the meal Deer chapters. We went to them
Speaker 2: and said, do you want to become a black a
Speaker 2: dedicated black Tail chapter? And I think most of them
Speaker 2: said yes, Some of them in California that have meal
Speaker 2: deer close or in Washington, Oregon that that also care
Speaker 2: about meal deer in eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and stuff
Speaker 2: like that. They were they were trying to figure out
Speaker 2: how to go both ways on that stuff, which is
Speaker 2: totally cool. At Alaska, it's a no brainer.
Speaker 1: Well, is there going to be a chapter in Craig?
Speaker 2: Yep, there he is really I'm the Tripperson.
Speaker 1: Oh can you join if you're just opposer from out
Speaker 1: of town, Yeah, we'd like you.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, So you could go to the website. There's
Speaker 2: the and that's the easiest way. There's several options on
Speaker 2: on what how many years you do it and what
Speaker 2: level of chapter and whether you're a sponsoring and and
Speaker 2: we'll eventually have a deal on their for life memberships
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. We've already done some chapter awards
Speaker 2: stuff on Kodiak. We have a really functioning, really good
Speaker 2: chapter on Kodiak, and uh, we're not going to do
Speaker 2: anything on Kodiak for habitat and habitat is fine on Kodiak.
Speaker 2: But what we're doing is helping the research that the Laska
Speaker 2: Department of Ficient Game is doing on Kodiak on sick
Speaker 2: of Blacktail Deer. And that was the decision of the
Speaker 2: chapter up there that they wanted to help the area
Speaker 2: biologist and his assistant of their work on the projects
Speaker 2: that they're doing. And there's a bunch of camera traps
Speaker 2: going on and they're actually going to have the Black
Speaker 2: Tailed Deer Foundation members run the running the line of
Speaker 2: cameras and helping change out cars and batteries and stuff,
Speaker 2: which will save money for day.
Speaker 1: Well that's cool, Yeah, that would be some good volunteer
Speaker 1: and we're gonna.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be doing that in other areas. So we've
Speaker 2: got we're gonna have a chapter in Judo. We've got
Speaker 2: a chapter in Cisca, Prince of Wales catch a can
Speaker 2: uh palmer withscilla. We want one in Fairbanks, we got
Speaker 2: one in Anchorage. I'm trying to think I might be
Speaker 2: missing one. And of course those guys don't have deer,
Speaker 2: but they go to Kodiak or they care, you know,
Speaker 2: And that's what I tell people. We all have we
Speaker 2: all have organizations that we support and we think about
Speaker 2: and it's your choice to put your money where you
Speaker 2: best fit. And I the folks that really care about
Speaker 2: blacktail deer across the West and then Alaska, I hope
Speaker 2: they seriously consider a black tail deer foundation. I know.
Speaker 4: I got a lot of buddies that are in the
Speaker 4: interior that that's a part of their annual cycle is
Speaker 4: because things wind down, right, and so guys go to
Speaker 4: Kodiak Prince William Sound Southeast as part of the annual
Speaker 4: deal is to get like another hunting you know, every year,
Speaker 4: which for them hunting November, it is very late season.
Speaker 2: Right, but they're also out of that by that time
Speaker 2: the weather's deteriorating up an interior, it's really cold and
Speaker 2: come down and be warm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a I'm really excited to see the emphasis
Speaker 2: that Greg and the board on the Fielder Foundation Board
Speaker 2: and stuff, and Steve and his conservation group is putting
Speaker 2: on this because it's to me, it's where I wanted
Speaker 2: to get to starting in about two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: and I think it's exciting. It's just for me. It's
Speaker 2: really exciting to see this focus on a deer that
Speaker 2: really had nobody focusing on him in the past. And
Speaker 2: I don't know what strides could be made. I don't
Speaker 2: know what landscape management policies can be changed or what,
Speaker 2: but I hope to be part of it.
Speaker 4: Well, think that if you are able to promote like
Speaker 4: you can definitely promote research, you can promote awareness of
Speaker 4: issues right, and you can unify groups of people who
Speaker 4: love the animals to you know, look out for their
Speaker 4: the best interests of the hunting even outside of the
Speaker 4: habitat work that you want to do. I think that
Speaker 4: doing those things and making a sort of like political body,
Speaker 4: so to speak of like of blacktail fans who are
Speaker 4: educated and aware, I think that in and of itself
Speaker 4: is valuable.
Speaker 2: One of the questions that come to us all the time.
Speaker 2: But you would be supportive intensity management programs on predators,
Speaker 2: and we focus on habitat. I want to be very
Speaker 2: clear about that. We don't take a stance on there
Speaker 2: unless some management would come down that would greatly negatively
Speaker 2: affect the deer population. But mainly we're looking at habitat
Speaker 2: and what can we do is there is there truly
Speaker 2: something to be done for habitat? And say, I think
Speaker 2: there really truly is something that can be done for habitat.
Speaker 2: It's not going to be planting sagebrush, taken down fence,
Speaker 2: it's not going to be working on migration corridors and stuff.
Speaker 2: It's going to be working on conductivity of that animal
Speaker 2: on the landscape and where's it going to get his
Speaker 2: next meal? And can we do better in creating those
Speaker 2: salad rules out there for those things to go forwarge.
Speaker 1: On and give them a way to get to the
Speaker 1: salad bowl.
Speaker 2: And I want people to be able to have access
Speaker 2: to the areas that we create those opportunities for deer
Speaker 2: so that they also can hunt those areas. I don't
Speaker 2: want to leave I don't want to leave that rural
Speaker 2: resident or non residence or anybody else out of that equation.
Speaker 1: Okay, thanks for coming on man.
Speaker 2: And you've got to do it with a flintlocker.
Speaker 1: That's the new rule. Don't let that rumor get out there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: No, So I called for my best flintlock story that
Speaker 2: I called for an entire hour. I had trees like
Speaker 2: this that were being rubbed in this area, and I
Speaker 2: called for a whole hour. It was cold. It was
Speaker 2: like fifteen degrees that morning, so you're about.
Speaker 5: Thirty five minutes past your usual tolerance.
Speaker 2: I tied myself for an hour, and at an hour
Speaker 2: I was starting to get really cold. I stood up
Speaker 2: and I kind of brush around, and I put my
Speaker 2: backpack on and I reached down. I picked up my flintlock,
Speaker 2: and I come around my tree and there's this huge
Speaker 2: five point walking down the trail right at me. He's
Speaker 2: about eighty five yards out again, steam rolling off of him.
Speaker 2: I remember the steam out of his nostrils that morning.
Speaker 2: He was so beautiful. He was all vivid, vivid alder
Speaker 2: rubbed orange antlers. And he turns around, he goes back
Speaker 2: up the hill. I wasn't going to. All I would
Speaker 2: have had was an eighty five yard shot with a
Speaker 2: flintlock offhand. I'm not going to take that out a
Speaker 2: sick of black. They'll look it straight at me. Turned
Speaker 2: her out, walks back over the hill. I run up
Speaker 2: the hill and I look and his tracks go off
Speaker 2: and he goes into this timber. And I had a can,
Speaker 2: one of the little long cans, and I reached out
Speaker 2: on that loud and I reached out and I flipped
Speaker 2: that can and he flew up out of the timber
Speaker 2: and came broadside at fifty yards, turned broadside with the
Speaker 2: mourning sun sitting against him steaming, reached back and scratched
Speaker 2: his butt with his antlers, and I dropped to go
Speaker 2: to one knee, and I couldn't see him over the curve,
Speaker 2: and I said, stand up. You do this at the
Speaker 2: range all the time. Focus, focus, focus, And I when
Speaker 2: I when I shoot a flintlock, I try to imagine
Speaker 2: that round ball going clear through the target before I
Speaker 2: come out of my hold. And I reached up and
Speaker 2: I booh, And when I got the smoke cleared, he
Speaker 2: was gone, just like he had never been there. And
Speaker 2: I walked over and here's a chunkle lung laying on
Speaker 2: the spagn and moss. And I'm like, all right, you're
Speaker 2: on the right track. But there I would have boarded.
Speaker 2: It was I wish I could play in my brain
Speaker 2: the sun on his body and the steam rising off
Speaker 2: his body there at about fifty yards. That was. That
Speaker 2: was a special moment.
Speaker 5: Heck, yeah, I'm fired out. Sign me up for the
Speaker 5: Blacktail here Foundation as well.
Speaker 4: All right, thank you, guys man, thanks so much for
Speaker 4: coming out with Jim Blacktail.
Speaker 5: Dear dot org.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's easy to remember, dud org. Start a chapter,
Speaker 1: join a chapter, and go.
Speaker 2: Check out sick a Blacktail dot org. That's Sophie and
Speaker 2: Toddenmind's web page.
Speaker 1: Learn about some researches. Yep, thanks dude.
Speaker 2: All right,