Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening to podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. Hey, folks,
Speaker 1: Janice patelis from Meat Eater Here. I'm going to Nashville,
Speaker 1: Tennessee here in a couple of weeks, and I need
Speaker 1: your help. I'm going down there to record some turkey stories.
Speaker 1: I need your help to help me find the best
Speaker 1: turkey storytellers that you know. Okay, I'm gonna be down
Speaker 1: there every day of the convention February. We're gonna be
Speaker 1: in Dorsey of Ryman's studio. There's gonna be signage there
Speaker 1: directing you how to get there, so you can take
Speaker 1: your friend or your grandpa or maybe yourself there to
Speaker 1: me and record a turkey story with me. Remember, it
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily have to be about turkey hunting. It could
Speaker 1: be about the relationships that we get from turkey hunting,
Speaker 1: something that happened before our turkey hunt, wherever it might be.
Speaker 1: I just want to get it recorded. I think this
Speaker 1: is a great opportunity for us as hunters to record
Speaker 1: some of our oral history that is such a great
Speaker 1: part of hunting, and uh, get it recorded, so we
Speaker 1: have it forever years down the line will be able
Speaker 1: to look at and go, hey, remember what it was
Speaker 1: like back in so Nashville, Tennessee, February eighth. We have
Speaker 1: room open for walkins. If you want to sign up
Speaker 1: ahead of time, go to the meat eater dot com
Speaker 1: forward slash Turkey story sign up and you can get
Speaker 1: a time slot there so you don't have to try
Speaker 1: to beat the rush when we're all down there hanging
Speaker 1: out at the Turkey Convention. Thanks in advance. Holy smokes,
Speaker 1: we got maybe we got a lot to pack in.
Speaker 1: Right now, we are joined by one want to repeat customer,
Speaker 1: repeat guests, quite possibly the most repeated guests. No, I
Speaker 1: think half the finger wins that. No, No, I don't
Speaker 1: even think it's happening. Carmen. How many times have you
Speaker 1: been on? You've been on four times, twice in Seattle
Speaker 1: and twice here now. Yeah, she's old school. Man. When
Speaker 1: we said podcast in your garage, yeah, man, when we
Speaker 1: used to hang the shipping, those shipping do we have
Speaker 1: the shipping blankets hung up everywhere? I don't remember that.
Speaker 1: I was more distracted by how immaculate your garage that
Speaker 1: ain't change, has not changed. So Carmen van Bianci is back, Um,
Speaker 1: and you got you gotta you have a proposal. You
Speaker 1: have a pitch. Yeah, I got a pitch today. Uh,
Speaker 1: just what I remember, Just so everyone remembers, Carmen is
Speaker 1: a recreational hunter, but a professional wildlife researcher. And her
Speaker 1: pitch to you all, you gotta dig deep. This is
Speaker 1: gonna be like the Jerry Lewis telethon that's dated. Do
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about? Want to say Jerry
Speaker 1: Lewis telethon because we're Jerry's kids. There's a joke behind that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you gotta keep that one in your pocket.
Speaker 1: Um also joined, So we we're gonna get to We're
Speaker 1: gonna get the Carmen's pitch and you guys got there.
Speaker 1: Everybody's got to dig deep in their wallets and help
Speaker 1: her out. And if you happen to own a snowmobile company,
Speaker 1: you'll want to pay particular attention because this wildlife research
Speaker 1: project needs your assistance. Also joined by uh probably the
Speaker 1: pre eminent YouTube stars, the pre eminent YouTubers on YouTube,
Speaker 1: like these are the guys that that like that Mr
Speaker 1: Beest found his inspiration problem your beast and end. No. No,
Speaker 1: he was like, he was like, I'd like to be
Speaker 1: like that, but I'm not. I can't trap beavers like that,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna oddly exploitative stuff exactly. And I too
Speaker 1: oddly exploitative stuff where I act like I'm being magnanimous,
Speaker 1: but I'm kind of a little bit being exploited under
Speaker 1: the guys of charity, I guess, you know, uh um,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, I talking about how a lot
Speaker 1: of like how people that like to hunt are always
Speaker 1: disappointed in Disney movies, you know, because they'd be like
Speaker 1: a hunter in there and he's where he's from the South,
Speaker 1: you know, he's like ignorant. Yeah, uh um. And I
Speaker 1: was saying that that I like to watch Adventure Time
Speaker 1: with my kids because an Adventure Time their house is
Speaker 1: full of taxidermy and they sleep under animal skins. Um.
Speaker 1: It's just it's very like it's it's got all the
Speaker 1: They even have like skinned out ducks and stuff that
Speaker 1: they sleep under, but they sleep under animal hides. And
Speaker 1: I like that show. They kind of did a goof
Speaker 1: on Um. They did a little bit of a goof
Speaker 1: on that genre of YouTube video where they they have
Speaker 1: a large pile of treasure and they take some of
Speaker 1: their treasure and they go to these uh goji berries
Speaker 1: house and use their money to get these goji berries
Speaker 1: to do They go exploit them with their money, and
Speaker 1: the goji berries have a hard time saying no, oh,
Speaker 1: they're personified animated goji berry. I can explain. I'm talking
Speaker 1: of course about Chris and Ken Carlson from both they
Speaker 1: have a duel like uh dual channels both things that
Speaker 1: are very interesting to me. In the woodyard, which chronicles
Speaker 1: their wood chopping exploits and out of the woodyard where
Speaker 1: they're not in the woodyard. You're easily entertained, aren't you, everybody?
Speaker 1: I showed you? Okay, So we have a we have
Speaker 1: a we have a person at uh you know people
Speaker 1: have seen her just been on the show. We have
Speaker 1: an employee, Tracy Um who I'm I want to say
Speaker 1: she could give her rat's ass about wood chopping and
Speaker 1: beaver trapping. Um, but she did go and get realed
Speaker 1: into rock picking and picked all the rocks, like would
Speaker 1: go to a ranchers go to a ranch assuming they
Speaker 1: didn't want rocks right impeding with the growth of their grass.
Speaker 1: Sounds like my wife, and she did. She picks. She
Speaker 1: personally picked enough rocks for a giant chimney and giant
Speaker 1: patio and stuff. So that might so I can't say
Speaker 1: that she wouldn't give a rat's ass about it, but
Speaker 1: I was introduced. I was like, you have to watch
Speaker 1: these guys, okay, and she said it was She said
Speaker 1: the same thing Crincesett where it's like, what's the thing
Speaker 1: where you listen to people playing with beads and ship?
Speaker 1: Yea auto sensory motor stimulation? Is that right? Something you could?
Speaker 1: You could watch these guys for dates. It's unbelievable, Like
Speaker 1: I never thought, like hours of my life and go
Speaker 1: no watching people. Plouse was the I was like, you
Speaker 1: have to watch and so I was like, you just
Speaker 1: check it out, just watch for a second. So she
Speaker 1: starts watching it around the phone and person realized we've
Speaker 1: been on the phone together not saying any of the
Speaker 1: pretends to me. It's like the world, Oh, I need
Speaker 1: to correct myself. A SMRs is autonomous sensory meridian response.
Speaker 1: What did you say it was auto sensory motor response.
Speaker 1: Is there where you get that tingly feeling in your head? Ye,
Speaker 1: you can get it that way. You can get it
Speaker 1: by with Karin's um pheasant foot, Yeah, pheasant foot head tickler.
Speaker 1: You can. It's like slow TV that we've we've talked
Speaker 1: a little bit about on this show. But it's I
Speaker 1: think that's it's kind of the same thing. Sounds A
Speaker 1: lot of people like listening to this. The dueling chainsaws
Speaker 1: go over well, you know, stuff like that, the sound
Speaker 1: of the spud hitting the ice splitter, you know, when
Speaker 1: this when the wood cracks, you know, it's a cool sound.
Speaker 1: My daughter, who wants nothing to do with it, helped
Speaker 1: film one day for me and she said, that's really interesting,
Speaker 1: just listening to the sound of the wood split. And
Speaker 1: she said, I can listen to that all day. Get
Speaker 1: a lot of that from a lot of people. It's weird.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna we're gonna dig in. We're gonna do
Speaker 1: Carmen's big, big push where everyody's gonna dig deep in
Speaker 1: their pockets and there's there's something in it for you.
Speaker 1: I'm talking to the listener adjest to carry it up first.
Speaker 1: We gotta we gotta get into a couple of things, um,
Speaker 1: some feedback issues. Someone had an interesting point. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna spend a ton of time on this guy. I
Speaker 1: feel like they're being a little nitpicky. Jesse Griffiths on
Speaker 1: episode four or five of the podcast, Jesse Griffiths was
Speaker 1: bitching and moaned about the term dry brin um on
Speaker 1: the grounds that it was an inaccurate fad term for
Speaker 1: a process that already had multiple names, including dry rub
Speaker 1: and pre seasoning. His words, but also that's like kind
Speaker 1: of an oxymoron, right, It's like like Brian is liquid.
Speaker 1: So he's like, when you're dry brining, why are you
Speaker 1: not putting a dry rub on it? Why are you
Speaker 1: not preseasoning it? And someone rolled in to say, if
Speaker 1: you're really going to be I'm putting words in this
Speaker 1: individual's mouth owen. He says, if you're really gonna be
Speaker 1: like getting down to the NAT's ass on all this stuff.
Speaker 1: He said that Jesse should consider this pre is generally
Speaker 1: a totally unnecessary prefix. Well, you preheat oven, you're just
Speaker 1: heating it. If you submit a pre proposal for a grant.
Speaker 1: It's a proposal. Preseasoning would fall into the same category.
Speaker 1: You're just seasoning it. That's all good point, unless, of course,
Speaker 1: there's more seasoning that happens later. I could shoot a
Speaker 1: thousand holes in what this guy is saying. I don't
Speaker 1: even agree with this. Then it's like your seasoning, your
Speaker 1: seasoning again, and then you're seasoning again. I don't agree
Speaker 1: with them. I don't agree with them at all. We
Speaker 1: had this conversation today about refried beans, like they're fried
Speaker 1: beans m And I was like, no, because you keep
Speaker 1: reheating them, and that's like reframing, Like that's not what
Speaker 1: they mean. No, they're just fried beans. So I think
Speaker 1: that preheating is that you're it's like you're heating it.
Speaker 1: Pre cook pre seasoning would be most people, Like most
Speaker 1: of my life, you'd have cooked a steak then put
Speaker 1: seasoning on it. But now days you put it on
Speaker 1: there and let's sit there for an hour to integrate.
Speaker 1: So you're like, you know, I get I get, I
Speaker 1: get where he's coming from, but I just want to
Speaker 1: share that another good bit of feedback. Uh, this guy
Speaker 1: was just pointing out a thing that's pretty interesting. I
Speaker 1: recently heard Steve recount a story about a twenty dollar
Speaker 1: squirrel dog by recently. He means he was listening to
Speaker 1: an old episode, but I remember what he's talking about.
Speaker 1: A squirrel dog sold for twenty dollars, and we thought
Speaker 1: that was worth mentioning. Um. He says. It reminded me
Speaker 1: of an FBI sting operation called Operation Get This Big
Speaker 1: Coon Dog. You google it and it checks out Operation
Speaker 1: Big Coon Dog. He says, I used to live in
Speaker 1: a small coal town called Grundy, Virginia. Grundy is basically
Speaker 1: two extremely tight valleys with rivers running through it. It
Speaker 1: would be them due to topography. Grundy floods regularly, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it's biblical. One of these epic flood events happened
Speaker 1: about twenty years ago. FEMA came in and declared the
Speaker 1: area disaster, and the FEDS provided millions of dollars for cleanup. Somehow,
Speaker 1: the local politicians got FEMA to allow elected fish officials
Speaker 1: to divvy up the money to local contractors for the
Speaker 1: clean up. The problem is that the politicians took bribes
Speaker 1: for the contracts. No, the first time that ever happened. Hey,
Speaker 1: that that's a I was, you know, what's funny about
Speaker 1: this is that the thing right now, um Zelenski in
Speaker 1: Ukraine just dismissed a lot of senior officials for playing
Speaker 1: a similar game with all the aid flooding into Ukraine.
Speaker 1: I don't know if they're doing it for coon dogs.
Speaker 1: But so here's how the FBI caught wind of it.
Speaker 1: A guy that didn't normally win coon hunting tournaments starts
Speaker 1: winning a lot of coon hunting tournaments. And he's a politician.
Speaker 1: He's a politician, and he just comes out of the blue,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, he's got some sweet coon dogs
Speaker 1: and starts cleaning up on raccoons. Okay, they reported that
Speaker 1: it was suspicious the timing of him getting these high
Speaker 1: test coon dogs, and it wound up that this individual
Speaker 1: took as a bribe a forty thousand bucks and coon dogs.
Speaker 1: They wound up, the FBI wound up busting him in
Speaker 1: several other individuals for this graft. Then he goes on
Speaker 1: to say Grundy has flooded several times since and FEMA
Speaker 1: has denied them relief based on the local government's antics
Speaker 1: during Operation Big Coon. That doesn't seem fair to the people.
Speaker 1: Some people did prison time for this. Yeah, well I
Speaker 1: don't believe. I don't know that I believe that part. Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think that they would be like you'd have
Speaker 1: a guy commit fraud or you know, take accept the
Speaker 1: bribe so bad that he goes to jail and your
Speaker 1: town floods again, and Feme was like, not this time,
Speaker 1: fool me once, Shame on you. Like I just I
Speaker 1: don't know, I believe everything else, he says. Wikipedia page
Speaker 1: says sixteen people we're convicted of criminal charges. But what's
Speaker 1: messed up is that some of those people that it said, well,
Speaker 1: he says in his letter that after they went to prison,
Speaker 1: they were reelected the most global community at him that
Speaker 1: that feels American. The bribes feel American, just not distinctly American.
Speaker 1: It feels human fem of being like next time you're
Speaker 1: on your own, buddy. I don't know. I don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: this one's interesting. I'm not gonna get into it. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna get into his landowners will cover this
Speaker 1: more because we circle background of this landowners winning a
Speaker 1: suit about trespassing deer dogs. You see where this is going,
Speaker 1: Like guys go hunt with their deer dogs and like
Speaker 1: a strategy, and this, this is always, This is always
Speaker 1: if I was a high if I was a dear
Speaker 1: dog hunter, I would be self policing because this winds
Speaker 1: up being the number one grievance against people who hunt
Speaker 1: deer with dogs where it's legal, is that you're basically
Speaker 1: the a lot. I'm not saying everybody, it's a common
Speaker 1: practice to be well, I know that I can't run
Speaker 1: into that guy's property and chase the deer out, but
Speaker 1: I'll wait on the edge and send my dogs in,
Speaker 1: which is like, you know, that's like the number one
Speaker 1: point of contention about it. They do. My friend dog
Speaker 1: talks about it. Yeah, they're like, well I can't go on,
Speaker 1: I can't go over there, but I mean we'll not
Speaker 1: just we'll stand on the edge and you can well
Speaker 1: oh sorry, it happens. Yeah, unlegally you're allowed to go
Speaker 1: retrieve your dogs once they've gone on to that problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of them gray areas kind of kind of
Speaker 1: abused things. So as we're covering a later episode with
Speaker 1: a lot of detail, um, this these landowners one of
Speaker 1: things saying like yeah, man, you can't you can't use
Speaker 1: your dogs to spook to send them in and spook
Speaker 1: the game off our property. It's kind of like you
Speaker 1: being there. But we'll cover that later. Carmen, you ready, Okay,
Speaker 1: tell people what's going on? Uh? Do you want me
Speaker 1: to back up a little bit and just talk about
Speaker 1: the project all the way up? All? Right? Well? Uh? So?
Speaker 1: Soll what you do for a living, I'm a wildlife biologist.
Speaker 1: I've been UM working in the field for I guess
Speaker 1: or twenty years almost now, UM and about a year
Speaker 1: a little over a year ago, a couple of colleagues
Speaker 1: of my and I started our own wildlife research nonprofit
Speaker 1: and one of our our bigger projects that we're really
Speaker 1: diving into now is looking at links and wildfire in
Speaker 1: the North Cascades of Washington. So in the North Cascades
Speaker 1: of Washington, we've got what's an endangered population of links.
Speaker 1: Listen is threatened elsewhere in the lower forty eight, but
Speaker 1: in Washington they're listed as endangered. And that's in large
Speaker 1: part because of UM, this just blow up of wildfires
Speaker 1: that we've had in the past fifteen to twenty years.
Speaker 1: So during that time, because of about a hundred hundred
Speaker 1: fifty years of fire suppression UM in all over in
Speaker 1: the West, but you know, we're focusing on the North Cascades.
Speaker 1: Has allowed a build up of fuels on the landscape
Speaker 1: basically and what what used to be regulated just by
Speaker 1: nature with uh frequent spotty, really pyro diverse, meaning burns
Speaker 1: that um that burned with a lot of textures. So
Speaker 1: they're they're skipping little places there, burning really hot in
Speaker 1: some places, they're reburning some other places. They're burning at
Speaker 1: a lower intensity in some places, meaning they're leaving behind
Speaker 1: trees with live crown, but they're consuming understory. So these
Speaker 1: these more historic fires that would just sort of uh
Speaker 1: spot off every summer and break up the landscape, we're
Speaker 1: really important for a couple of reasons. One, they created
Speaker 1: this just incredible patchwork of really rich, diverse habitat out
Speaker 1: there in the North Cascades. But they also created a
Speaker 1: sort of a um self feedback loop wherein the fires
Speaker 1: that were happening one year, we're sort of um dampening
Speaker 1: the effects of future subsequent fires because they're sort of
Speaker 1: by fire creating natural fire breaks on the lamps. So
Speaker 1: you had you had more of a mosaic, continuous mosaic
Speaker 1: of fire activity rather than like what exactly. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: the perfect noise to describe it. So so keep that
Speaker 1: in mind. That's the historic fire regime that we used
Speaker 1: to have. That's also the historic landscape, this patchy mosaic
Speaker 1: that links in the North Cascades evolved in Okay. So
Speaker 1: fast forward in time. Now we've got a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: years of fire suppression, so putting out all those fires
Speaker 1: that would have naturally started from lightning and things every summer,
Speaker 1: and you know, doing it with good intention. We're trying
Speaker 1: to save the forest. This sort of thing that allowed
Speaker 1: our forests to basically um even out into a mono
Speaker 1: crop of of trees, and and we lost that um
Speaker 1: not only diversity, um that mosaic of habitats, but we
Speaker 1: lost that self feedback loop. So all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's a continuous swath of tinder ready to go. And
Speaker 1: so that landscape of um high fuels and continuous fuels
Speaker 1: then meets hotter, drier, longer summers, and in the early
Speaker 1: two thousands we start to have what we're calling mega fires,
Speaker 1: which are fires that burn over a hundred thousand acres
Speaker 1: um and we've had fires that are much bigger than that,
Speaker 1: and they're just ripping through those forests, um cooking it
Speaker 1: right down to the dirt, cooking it down to the
Speaker 1: dirt with so trending towards um less pyrodiversity, so higher
Speaker 1: severity overall. And so they're leaving behind these giant burn
Speaker 1: scars of um highly high severity burn. So we're losing
Speaker 1: not only texture because we're not just getting these smaller
Speaker 1: spotty fires all over, but we're losing texture because these
Speaker 1: giant fires that are coming through are doing so and
Speaker 1: it just more evenly high severity. We're losing those little
Speaker 1: fire skips. We're losing the sort of um just the
Speaker 1: richness of a of a patchwork that would be left behind.
Speaker 1: And so where links come into this is that in
Speaker 1: the in the early two thousand's when we were starting
Speaker 1: to learn about links habitat, which just as a little
Speaker 1: sidebar is in a nutshell, links eat snowshoe hairs primarily,
Speaker 1: that's most of their diet, snowshoe hairs. Uh live in
Speaker 1: forests that have a high stem density. And what I
Speaker 1: mean by that is they're they're living in thick forests
Speaker 1: with stems branches that are low to the ground, offering
Speaker 1: them food and shelter from from predators. Yeah, fresh growth
Speaker 1: or or old growth where you've got that sort of
Speaker 1: multilayered forests and big branches that reach down to the ground.
Speaker 1: So when we are learning about links habitat in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, we're doing so against this backdrop of
Speaker 1: what's been a really fire excluded landscape for hud hundred
Speaker 1: fifty years. And so the palette of of links of
Speaker 1: habitat that links have to choose from is mostly unburned,
Speaker 1: a couple of little burns here and there. Now fast forward,
Speaker 1: you know, fifteen years, and we've had these these mega
Speaker 1: fires torching hundreds of thousands of acres a year, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, most of our are are a
Speaker 1: lot of our links habitat, most of our prime link
Speaker 1: links habitat is mostly burned, very little unburned. And so
Speaker 1: we needed to know yesterday, in my opinion, how links
Speaker 1: are reacting to this completely different menu of of habitats
Speaker 1: out there. Um In that's when they were uplisted to
Speaker 1: endangered in the state because of these fires, because sort
Speaker 1: of the rule of the um is that recent large
Speaker 1: burns aren't hair habitat, aren't links habitat um. And so
Speaker 1: with the uptick in these fires, naturally there's a lot
Speaker 1: of concern um. So our research is going to start
Speaker 1: uh picking apart and learning the ins and outs of
Speaker 1: how they're using this this new really burned landscape and
Speaker 1: they are using that. And we know that because we're
Speaker 1: the field biologists and we've been out there for long
Speaker 1: enough to see a change in the landscape and regenerating burns,
Speaker 1: seeing the links go, seeing them come back, and starting
Speaker 1: to notice patterns of um okay within say this, you know,
Speaker 1: fifteen year old burn scar. There are places that they're
Speaker 1: starting to be able to use, places meaning um uh well,
Speaker 1: different different types of regenerating burned habitat because it's regenerating
Speaker 1: uh with some texture that we would hope to see,
Speaker 1: like fire skips and places where whatever the growing conditions
Speaker 1: are allow thicker trees to be coming up. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's really exciting to see. I was out there I
Speaker 1: guess six years ago now in the winter snowmobiling, just
Speaker 1: servying for for tracks with another local biologists, and we
Speaker 1: saw very few snowshoe hair tracks and no links tracks.
Speaker 1: Well last year, well, let's say a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: I started to notice more links tracks in this burnt scar.
Speaker 1: Last year, we went out five times just to do
Speaker 1: some pilot work and we marked i think fifty seven
Speaker 1: sets of links tracks within that same burn that years
Speaker 1: ago only had zero. So I'm not not that that's
Speaker 1: fifty seven links, but that's a that's a lot of activity,
Speaker 1: and including we saw tracks from you know, a female
Speaker 1: with kittens, females with kids, people came to eat exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the grocery store is coming back, and so that's really
Speaker 1: exciting and it tells me that we have this opportunity,
Speaker 1: that really golden opportunity to learn what burned habitats Links
Speaker 1: can use. And that is important for conservation because if
Speaker 1: we know the best of the burned habitats that they
Speaker 1: can use and the sort of the arrangement of those habitats,
Speaker 1: we can start getting in there to do forest treatments
Speaker 1: that will reinstate that historic patchwork, reinstate that negative feedback loop,
Speaker 1: and try to get wrangle in these these mega fires,
Speaker 1: which is a win win for Links because uh, we're
Speaker 1: if we know what the best of the burnt habitats
Speaker 1: they're using are, we can craft these forest treatment plans
Speaker 1: to not only be UM reducing fuels, but also you know,
Speaker 1: leaving the right arrangements and amounts of burned habitat for
Speaker 1: links that are there today, and we're saving habitats so
Speaker 1: that moving forward, we're we're lessening the risk of these
Speaker 1: huge mega fires coming in. I imagine that links aren't
Speaker 1: the only creators that benefit, that's right, That's yeah. That's
Speaker 1: one of the things that really interests me in this
Speaker 1: research is that this isn't links tell a really good story.
Speaker 1: They tell a story for a lot of the other
Speaker 1: um animals that live on that landscape, and they tell
Speaker 1: the story of our local fier ecology. UM. But this
Speaker 1: is more than just you know, trying to save our
Speaker 1: our links habitat and thus our links population, which that's important,
Speaker 1: but it's also just about reining in these these mega
Speaker 1: fires to the benefit of the landscape, to the benefit
Speaker 1: of you know, our community which has just been you know,
Speaker 1: breathing piece soup for smoke in the summers. And so
Speaker 1: it's UM it's more than just trying to UM get
Speaker 1: a handle on links conservation, although that's that's very important,
Speaker 1: it's also just about restoring UM a more balanced fier
Speaker 1: ecology to our area. Yeah, so that's research. Yeah. To
Speaker 1: do all that research takes a lot and and it
Speaker 1: takes a lot of dedicated field work and UM that
Speaker 1: means time every day during our winter field seasons and
Speaker 1: our summer field seasons out in the back country UM
Speaker 1: collecting data so that we can, you know, in a
Speaker 1: in a scientific framework, learn about their habitat selection. And
Speaker 1: so our two main data streams are one, we're ropping
Speaker 1: around on snowmobiles in the back country in the winter,
Speaker 1: deep snow environments, UM looking for tracks. When we find
Speaker 1: tracks from links, we jump off our lets, put on
Speaker 1: our snowshoes, and we start following them. And we're documenting
Speaker 1: not only their behavior whether they're hunting um or making
Speaker 1: a kill a snowcial hair kill, but we're also documenting
Speaker 1: their habitats that they're selecting. Because you guys know cats
Speaker 1: from from hunting and trapping, they're making a really fine
Speaker 1: scale selection. You might see them UM opt to go
Speaker 1: you know, between two trees rather than around them, you know,
Speaker 1: to they like those little covery spots, and so they're
Speaker 1: making these really fine scale habitats selection choices as they're
Speaker 1: moving around to optimize their chance of finding food, and
Speaker 1: so we can buy backtracking them, document that really fine
Speaker 1: scale habitat selection um and start learning like, Okay, they
Speaker 1: like a little fire skip and they like that fire skip,
Speaker 1: especially if it's surrounded by you know, low intensity burn
Speaker 1: and along a you know, a stream court or do
Speaker 1: you guys always backtracking not forward track. We backtracked because
Speaker 1: exactly we don't want to be influencing their behavior because
Speaker 1: they don't Yeah, they don't move all that far during
Speaker 1: the day. Estimates range from like you know, one to
Speaker 1: maybe eight kilometers a day, So it's it's if you're
Speaker 1: on a fresh track, you could easily you know, be
Speaker 1: bumping them. So we always where he wants to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you find one where they've killed a snowsh your
Speaker 1: hair is just a little bit of blood on snow.
Speaker 1: It's typically maybe a little bit of blood a piece
Speaker 1: of the hide from their back and you can often
Speaker 1: see like, um, the hemorrhaging around the puncture wounds there, um,
Speaker 1: and then maybe a foot and some guts. Oh no,
Speaker 1: I mean, have you ever seen like a house cat
Speaker 1: And they'll bring in um guts in the head of
Speaker 1: a mouse or whatever. They'll eat the head though. They'll
Speaker 1: eat the head, yeah, nobody wants that. Like chewed up twigs, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got you. Stomach content, stomach contents yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: anything left on and uh, you used to feed the
Speaker 1: dogs beaver. The only thing they don't eat is the
Speaker 1: contents of the guts. They'll even eat the gut if
Speaker 1: they get really hugger, but just say a ball or
Speaker 1: chewed up sawdas, they don't want to. Yeah, but they'll
Speaker 1: eat everything else. Yeah. Cats are pretty particular about that.
Speaker 1: If you go to a cougar kill or a bobcat kill,
Speaker 1: one of the first things they'll often do is pluck that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the room and contents the room and out
Speaker 1: and sort of set that aside. They don't they don't
Speaker 1: want that, do They go after internal organs right away.
Speaker 1: That's one of the first things. Yeah, yeah, liver, the heart,
Speaker 1: all of that, and that's that's a really nutritious And
Speaker 1: so you can actually sort of age, um, well, if
Speaker 1: you're doing like a kill site investigation, you can tell
Speaker 1: what I don't I don't think there's any official name
Speaker 1: for it, but I call it an early carcass scat,
Speaker 1: And so it's the ship basically from their first feeding
Speaker 1: and when they're eating just pure organs and just a
Speaker 1: little and muscle um, they're scat is like black and
Speaker 1: tari and um. Anyway, so you can tell that was
Speaker 1: an early carcass s cat. So if I'm going to
Speaker 1: a kill site for work and I see an early
Speaker 1: carcass cat, I start to get excited because it means
Speaker 1: there might be a kill there and then a late
Speaker 1: carcass I'm guessing would be a lot more former hair,
Speaker 1: a lot more just bone fragments. Yeah, exactly. And with
Speaker 1: wolves it's pretty cool because the breeder male and female,
Speaker 1: they'll get pick of the carcass, and so they're the
Speaker 1: ones eating those organs, and so you can somewhat tell
Speaker 1: if it's an early carcass scat. You you've got a
Speaker 1: pretty good idea that if the whole pack was there,
Speaker 1: that that was probably one of the breeders. A little
Speaker 1: tracking info, that's great. So heavy with the second day
Speaker 1: to stream, Okay, the second day to stream is catching him,
Speaker 1: that's right, yep. So um, so the backtrack king is
Speaker 1: really great. Um, fine scale habitat selection. You're learning cool
Speaker 1: things about your animal and their behavior. I think it's
Speaker 1: just a great way for biologists to stay grounded and
Speaker 1: what's happening out there in the field. You're learning your animal,
Speaker 1: you're seeing patterns. Um. I just yeah, I believe in
Speaker 1: it from from that stance as well as it just
Speaker 1: being great data. But it's super labor intensive data, um,
Speaker 1: and so you're you're only gathering so much of it.
Speaker 1: So a wonderful way to complement that is with GPS
Speaker 1: caller data. That's that's going to give us, you know,
Speaker 1: provided we can catch cats, that's going to give us
Speaker 1: tons of data and be sort of the meat and
Speaker 1: potatoes um of a lot of our analysis to tell
Speaker 1: what they're doing in the summertime exactly. Yeah. And you're
Speaker 1: just getting thousands of data points. And the way we've
Speaker 1: got our our callers programmed is that they'll be taking
Speaker 1: uh location every thirty minutes, so it it's set in
Speaker 1: itself is pretty fine scale data as well. We're we're
Speaker 1: gonna be able to learn a lot um And so
Speaker 1: getting callers out of course means trapping cats and so um.
Speaker 1: That's that's one of my favorite things to do, is
Speaker 1: is trapping UM. So I'm pretty excited to start doing that.
Speaker 1: Which we'll be opening traps in a couple of days. Here,
Speaker 1: we're just waiting for our callers to arrive. But you
Speaker 1: guys need your nonprofit. You guys need snowmobiles, you need traps.
Speaker 1: We've got traps. We you explain it, Okay. So all
Speaker 1: this work that I'm talking about, the backtracking and the trapping,
Speaker 1: takes place in winter. And so for us to get
Speaker 1: out there, we're Lynx Country is where we are. It's
Speaker 1: high in elevation, it's pretty rugged. In fact, there's areas
Speaker 1: of Lynx Country where we are that's pass or it's
Speaker 1: it's wilderness. We can't we get there in the winter,
Speaker 1: and so it's it's tough to access. It's just tough
Speaker 1: to be out there. And so really the crux and
Speaker 1: the weakest link of our research and getting it done
Speaker 1: is our snowmobiles. We have no way of collecting any
Speaker 1: of this data without snowmobiles. We got old as machines.
Speaker 1: We are writing some old as machines, and I am
Speaker 1: so grateful for these machines. We've had four machines donated
Speaker 1: to us, and that is awesome, and that's made it possible.
Speaker 1: Um three of those machines are about twenty five years old,
Speaker 1: and so with us writing those every single day, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, probably have more people on the sled than
Speaker 1: the sled would like we're towing trailers this sort of thing. Um,
Speaker 1: they have a rough life on top of the twenty
Speaker 1: five years they've already lived. And so um we got
Speaker 1: people at age that work here and they're useless. I
Speaker 1: think he did. It's not even actually true. Funny jokes.
Speaker 1: I trying to buy that one back. He's remember that
Speaker 1: thing about the young people like joking. I'm joking machines
Speaker 1: you hit the limit. Yeah, yeah, they're not gonna last us.
Speaker 1: And even one of them breaking down just puts a huge,
Speaker 1: you know crank in our day. We can't get people
Speaker 1: out there, and so we are trying to hustle really
Speaker 1: hard to raise some money to be able to buy
Speaker 1: one or two. Um used, we used, but hopefully not
Speaker 1: twenty five year old machines. We're hoping we can find
Speaker 1: something in the tender fifteen year old range where you
Speaker 1: break down in the middle of nowhere, someone could literally
Speaker 1: save your life by getting you slide. I like that, man, Yes,
Speaker 1: save our lives. Donate Never hear her again on the podcast. No,
Speaker 1: I my the crew that we've got this year is
Speaker 1: UM an incredible group. They have got a lot of skill.
Speaker 1: They know what to do if they break out or
Speaker 1: if they break down out there, which is either well, okay,
Speaker 1: we've got in reaches so they can contact needs to
Speaker 1: seem very desperate. Here's what it can mean. Uh, if
Speaker 1: you're in reach isn't working, it can mean that you're
Speaker 1: you know, thirty miles out in the back country in
Speaker 1: freezing snowy part you're eating your work partners and eventually issues. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't even want to think about that. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the point is is that this is I've got great people,
Speaker 1: We've got great opportunity for for gathering this data. But
Speaker 1: it all comes back to the snowmobiles. So lay out
Speaker 1: how people can be of help. This is where things
Speaker 1: get interesting. Yeah. So here's what we've schemed up UM. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, we're trying to raise money to get
Speaker 1: snowmobiles so we can do this work. And our plan
Speaker 1: is UM a campaign we're calling trap Cat and if
Speaker 1: folks donate hundred bucks, they're basically sponsoring a trap set.
Speaker 1: So we have UM We've got thirty traps that we've built,
Speaker 1: and we've got another twelve that we're borrowing from another project.
Speaker 1: So we've got forty two traps. And the thing you've
Speaker 1: got to keep in mind is that these traps UM
Speaker 1: will be continuously resetting, UM rearranging, and every time you
Speaker 1: do that, it's a different set. And so if if
Speaker 1: UM folks donate hundred bucks, you get one of those
Speaker 1: sets basically in your name. And how long is it set?
Speaker 1: How long you'll leave a set out? It depend ends
Speaker 1: if it's a good set that we like, could be
Speaker 1: out there all season, which are seasons running now through March,
Speaker 1: or you could have a month long set. You can
Speaker 1: have a months long set, or you make a set
Speaker 1: and then also in some skier or something's dicking with
Speaker 1: it and you gotta move it, and then that sets over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or a skunk is stra orient every day, or a
Speaker 1: gray j or whatever, or we just decide we don't
Speaker 1: like it for whatever reason, then we'll move it and
Speaker 1: so then it becomes a new set. It's just like trapping,
Speaker 1: same thing. Yeah, I mean that's yeah, you got a
Speaker 1: dead when you move it, Yeah, exactly, exact Start catching
Speaker 1: possums you move it. Yep. So, um, so we could
Speaker 1: have countless numbers of sets this season. Yeah, okay, So
Speaker 1: if you donate, first of all, we'll be sending out
Speaker 1: season updates and just pictures and footage of what we're
Speaker 1: doing out there, so you'll get access to that. And
Speaker 1: then if you're set catches the links, then you win.
Speaker 1: You're a winner. You win. That's a winning moment for you.
Speaker 1: And so do they get the name the cat? We
Speaker 1: thought about that. Um, well, this podcast has talked about
Speaker 1: naming animalst quite a bit, and we decided to just
Speaker 1: avoid that. I yeah, so we're gonna give us some number. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it'll get an ear tag and so official
Speaker 1: it'll have a sort of its official ear tag number. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, often internally will have names for cats just
Speaker 1: because who's going to remember the number. And so if
Speaker 1: you've got the one anyway, it just makes it simpler
Speaker 1: to have a name. But the winner is not getting
Speaker 1: naming privileges. The winner is going to get fame and glory. Um,
Speaker 1: so we'll we'll announced you as a winner, and Steve
Speaker 1: has also offered to announce the winner on social media. Well,
Speaker 1: an now the winner on my social media and how
Speaker 1: many winners might there be how cats trying to get well,
Speaker 1: we've got so in our I don't know how many
Speaker 1: cats we've got in our study area. But here's the
Speaker 1: thing about research trapping, and especially for an endangered species,
Speaker 1: there's not that many out there, and it makes the
Speaker 1: trapping really, really tough. Um. It's one thing to be,
Speaker 1: you know, trapping links in the core of their range
Speaker 1: and at a population peak where you've got multiple cats
Speaker 1: passing your traps and doing so very often. That gives
Speaker 1: you a lot of opportunities. We might have an opportunity
Speaker 1: once a week, once every two weeks, just because there's
Speaker 1: the density of cats is so low. There's not that
Speaker 1: many there, So fill but fill in this for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I Carmen van Bianchi, would be disappointed if I got
Speaker 1: collars on less than unless this year. If we got
Speaker 1: less than one, I would be disappointed. I'll be happy
Speaker 1: if we catch one. I'll be ecstatic if we catch four. Okay,
Speaker 1: that was the second thing I was gonna have you like,
Speaker 1: and that would be surprised if we got more than four.
Speaker 1: Working your asses off with the goal of getting the
Speaker 1: collar on maybe one to four. Yea one if one,
Speaker 1: you'd be you'd count yourself like good to get one.
Speaker 1: Four would be great, four would be great. We've got
Speaker 1: um multiple years of this project and as as the
Speaker 1: first year, it's always more, you know, just your figuring
Speaker 1: out logistics. You're you know, you always learn a lot
Speaker 1: in your in your first year. Um. But just to
Speaker 1: give me an idea, I've I have links trapped in
Speaker 1: the North Cascades before it took us two seasons to
Speaker 1: catch five cats, five unique length. Whereas I've trapped in
Speaker 1: in Maine and we caught I think eleven new captures
Speaker 1: in two months. So so much of that just depends
Speaker 1: on your on your density. So this is roughing it
Speaker 1: a slog and you're going to use the money. Sorry,
Speaker 1: sorry ahead, Well, I just gotta float it out there.
Speaker 1: There's trapping. There's another way to catch cats. Yeah, once
Speaker 1: you have once you have Yanni hound dog, Yeah that
Speaker 1: um could be well, a couple of things we know
Speaker 1: how to trap. Um. I don't know of any local
Speaker 1: hound hunters. Give you a lot of reasons why you
Speaker 1: don't want to do this. There's also links are because
Speaker 1: you're gonna have one if the dogs mix it up
Speaker 1: with the links the links that they don't they're not
Speaker 1: as my understanding, and I've never chase links with a dog,
Speaker 1: but I've heard from people they don't want to go
Speaker 1: into the tree. Well we're in a burned area, remember,
Speaker 1: so there's not a whole lot of trees that link
Speaker 1: mingus all of a sudden becomes the you know, he
Speaker 1: makes like the FBI's most wanted lists for having killed
Speaker 1: some links. Yeah, it's just we've got a very high
Speaker 1: bar for for what we're willing to put this endangered
Speaker 1: species through we need. Yeah, and it's been floated, it's
Speaker 1: you know, but it's just um, well just looking at
Speaker 1: you know, versus putting out forty two traps. If you
Speaker 1: cut a track and you put dogs on that one
Speaker 1: track and thing. No, but you're right, I mean it
Speaker 1: would be more efficient. Yeah, keep in mind keeping come out,
Speaker 1: nobody raising money to send Yanni out there. There we go.
Speaker 1: But you're you're going to use the money from the program.
Speaker 1: You're gonna use the sponsorship money to take care of
Speaker 1: the snow bill problem. So someone could either just take
Speaker 1: care of the snow and bill problem and then you
Speaker 1: can use the money for something else. But but so
Speaker 1: do that But the other thing is you gotta do
Speaker 1: the sponsorship. Now, let me tell what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna sponsor a set for
Speaker 1: each of my three children. All right, Okay, that's a
Speaker 1: good way. That's a good thing to do for people
Speaker 1: to have children on a sponsor a set for each
Speaker 1: of my three children. But how will they know when
Speaker 1: their set has been made? And how will they know
Speaker 1: what happened? Yeah, good questions. So we'll send a picture
Speaker 1: of the set. We'll send you a picture of your set,
Speaker 1: and then we'll also because we'll have your email, um,
Speaker 1: and then like I said, we'll be sending updates like
Speaker 1: if you're getting by catch that sort of thing, um,
Speaker 1: and just you know, videos and just footage of us
Speaker 1: out there being trappers. And you have the capacity to
Speaker 1: do all this additional reporting and work barely. But I mean,
Speaker 1: it's all everything that we're doing. We are running ragging.
Speaker 1: We're just Yeah, you got volunteers. So we've got let's see,
Speaker 1: so there's three of us uh staff for Home Range
Speaker 1: Wildlife Research. That's our our nonprofit. I've hired two field
Speaker 1: bios and then we have some really great local trackers
Speaker 1: that are volunteering to help us with the backtracking portion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are you looking for more volunteers? Is that filled up?
Speaker 1: We're filled up. It also takes quite a bit of training,
Speaker 1: so we did a big training all at once a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago. Um, so for this season, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where we need people to just be ready to go. So,
Speaker 1: so how do people go sponsor the trap? Is this
Speaker 1: going on right? Like, you're ready to roll right now?
Speaker 1: So we're opening traps on Friday, that's the day our
Speaker 1: callers are supposed to get there. So right now there's
Speaker 1: a couple of folks out in the field getting traps
Speaker 1: out there. Um. My strategy was, let's get traps out
Speaker 1: there and in place. No bait, no I catch. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'm sort of hoping they're not going to
Speaker 1: be noticed until we open them. I don't want to
Speaker 1: lose much of the element of surprise. We're gonna open
Speaker 1: the doors, We're gonna bait them, We're gonna put out
Speaker 1: feathers and the snow your hair. No, we're just using
Speaker 1: road killed deer. Yeah, and then some loures, some beaver
Speaker 1: caster and things like that. But how do people go
Speaker 1: do it? Website. Yeah, we've got a landing pay age. Yea.
Speaker 1: So it's home range dot org home range dot org yep,
Speaker 1: slash trap a cat and you're ready to take business.
Speaker 1: We're ready as Yeah, when this drops, we will be alright.
Speaker 1: I'll do three of them. Awesome. Thanks, But listeners need
Speaker 1: to jump in and it just send him some just
Speaker 1: send him some snowbills man. Yeah, is there a way
Speaker 1: too that Let's just say you don't you're not even
Speaker 1: interested in setting a set that you can just can
Speaker 1: you just go to the landing page and just send
Speaker 1: a hunter box? Yeah, that's an option there. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean we've got donate but no, you're a trapper. I'm
Speaker 1: a trapper, not a giver. I want my set um.
Speaker 1: But this is all the solved snow bill problem. Yep, exactly.
Speaker 1: I feel like some I feel like there's such a
Speaker 1: good chance it's some snowbill outfit. It's gonna it's gonna
Speaker 1: help you out. I mean, that would be an incredible machine,
Speaker 1: the dream machine, be honest, and I were just talking
Speaker 1: about is it cut that out? Philm machine? You can
Speaker 1: leave in us talking about make it the dream machine?
Speaker 1: Is any machine leave us talking about how we cut it,
Speaker 1: but beep out what she said because she is. It's like,
Speaker 1: don't do that, man, I'm not going to turn down
Speaker 1: an arctic cut. All that be all at out beat
Speaker 1: the words out. Beggars can't be choosers. Exactly. You need
Speaker 1: snow meals. If someone gives Carmen the snowmobiles, I will
Speaker 1: the same way. I'm going to announce the winners. If
Speaker 1: someone gives Carmen it's not because someone gives Home Range
Speaker 1: snow meals, then I'll do the We'll do the social
Speaker 1: media post thanking them for the snowbal There we go. Yeah, okay, beverage. Good.
Speaker 1: Tell the website again. Home range dot org, slash trap
Speaker 1: a cat and dashes trap dash dash cat home Range,
Speaker 1: home Range like an animal's home range dot org ye
Speaker 1: slash trap dash a dash cat not links. Nope, doesn't
Speaker 1: have the same I don't know, probably not. Now listen,
Speaker 1: let's not complicate things necessary, all right. I hope people
Speaker 1: dig in and help. Yeah, I will be announcing the winners. Yep. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh you know what we'll do? Can I kind of
Speaker 1: sweeten the pot? We'll send um, We'll send a I'm
Speaker 1: trying to think what we'll do. We'll send a great
Speaker 1: first light kit to the winners. Oh I don't, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna need to. So if my set traps the links,
Speaker 1: we'll send a great We'll send a great cold weather accessory,
Speaker 1: will send like cold weather, like heavy duty down right,
Speaker 1: because it's wintertime. We'll send a cold weather kit like
Speaker 1: Bibbs jacket, super hat, Mitts. That's better than a lottery,
Speaker 1: So I'll announce it and then we'll send a cold
Speaker 1: weather kit to winters. That's amazing. You're gonna make me
Speaker 1: get my wallet on. Yeah, thank you, And to anybody
Speaker 1: that does donate, thank you. Well we'll stay on it. Man,
Speaker 1: We're gonna get it. I think. I hope we'll get
Speaker 1: to take care of Thank you. That would be great. Um.
Speaker 1: And then I got one last question for you. The collars.
Speaker 1: How long do they work for? Well, that's the thing
Speaker 1: with callers is it's always you're trying to balance the
Speaker 1: battery life, the weight of the caller, and your data collection.
Speaker 1: So the more intensive the data collection, the fact of
Speaker 1: the battery in it out. So we've we've rigged it
Speaker 1: up so that every other month they're collecting this thirty
Speaker 1: minute data. Every three days, and by doing that, we've
Speaker 1: made it so that our colors will last around the
Speaker 1: calendar year from when the call was placed. So you
Speaker 1: get a year and does that thing fall off in
Speaker 1: the end, So there's a couple of different mechanisms you
Speaker 1: can use, but yes it does. We wanted to fall
Speaker 1: off because we don't want to saddle and links with
Speaker 1: you know, a caller for the rest of it. Can
Speaker 1: you find it? Yeah, it's got a little death signal
Speaker 1: or whatever. Yep, it's got a death signal. We cause
Speaker 1: it a mortality signal. But yeah, so if the cat dies,
Speaker 1: we'll know we can go out there and investigate what happens. Man,
Speaker 1: that would be that would be a great giveaway item.
Speaker 1: If you want to dig real into this, let's picture
Speaker 1: this the uh you get a you get a mortality
Speaker 1: signal that someone can come along with you to go
Speaker 1: find out what happened to the thing or just get
Speaker 1: the collar. Yeah, those are always fascinating field. I would
Speaker 1: be so excited if I woke up one day and
Speaker 1: we're going to check out a mortality signal on the lynks,
Speaker 1: I'd be very excited. What kind of price are we
Speaker 1: talking on a collar? It's gotta be not free. No no, um,
Speaker 1: when it's all done well, So the so the let
Speaker 1: me just explain how they fall off because that affects
Speaker 1: the price. But basically, you can get a a cotton
Speaker 1: spacer that will eventually just sort of rot off, um
Speaker 1: and that anyway, there's so that's one option. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then you could also get a collar with a blowoff device.
Speaker 1: And so that's a programmable little piece of equipment that
Speaker 1: exactly a tiny explosion kills the cat. We no, yeah,
Speaker 1: it just makes the bolts separate and so the collar
Speaker 1: falls off. So that's that's nice because you know when
Speaker 1: it's gonna happen, you can plan for it. You know
Speaker 1: it's not going to happen too early before your data
Speaker 1: collection has done. That's that's the expensive option. That's the
Speaker 1: expensive option. Yeah. So if you're getting a drop off,
Speaker 1: um about I want to say, like six hundred people
Speaker 1: could buy those for you. Two couldn't they? Yeah? Oh man,
Speaker 1: the more calls. So we only have four callers right now.
Speaker 1: So that's why i'd be really happy forgot for kids
Speaker 1: like seven cats. You're gonna go now what oh man,
Speaker 1: if some miracle happened and you know in three weeks,
Speaker 1: We've almost you know, caught two or three or something.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be pretty disappointed we don't have more
Speaker 1: but miracle days on the line last year. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm hoping for. That's what I'm hoping for. And I
Speaker 1: also just need to point out that we're really grateful
Speaker 1: to our grand tours, the Paul g Allen Family Foundation. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for coming out and explaining it. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: This is um. Yeah, I told come on any time
Speaker 1: you want talk about what, talk about your needs and wants.
Speaker 1: It's great that all right, you guys ready to dig
Speaker 1: in out of the woodyard. In the woodyard. Happened in
Speaker 1: the woodyard was the start? Yeah, I got a pre
Speaker 1: pre question here, take it away. Did you get that?
Speaker 1: You didn't even giggle at me? Or pre question? How
Speaker 1: did you find out about in the woodyard a beaver trapper?
Speaker 1: So you have an emerging threat to your whole inner propetition. Listen,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you the dude's name. Tell his last name.
Speaker 1: He's even pitched to me. He's even pitched to me.
Speaker 1: Guy named Jared. I can tell his last name is
Speaker 1: in your state. No, he's not or is he. It's
Speaker 1: confusing because he works in one lives in the other.
Speaker 1: Either way, his name is Jared. He turned me on
Speaker 1: you guys a long time ago, a year ago, um,
Speaker 1: and he was recently pitching me on how he is
Speaker 1: going up to work here area a chance. Oh. I
Speaker 1: thought it was just like in the YouTube realm competition.
Speaker 1: I told Chris, I said, you know, you just showed
Speaker 1: the guardrail, you showed the sign. I said, everybody knows
Speaker 1: this spot, you know, like, come on, I gotta be
Speaker 1: a little more where you point that camera. Got I
Speaker 1: got people I know that live within a mile of
Speaker 1: me that they know half of the spots that we go. There.
Speaker 1: You were here, and you were there and you made
Speaker 1: that set. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, he's not like
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to it's I think it's safe
Speaker 1: to say. And I haven't really explored this fully with him.
Speaker 1: I think it's safe to say that he was kind
Speaker 1: of throwing it to me, like coincidentally, it's where the
Speaker 1: guys that he turned me on to go. But that's
Speaker 1: how I found out about you guys. That's what you
Speaker 1: wanted to ask a pre question. So he turned me
Speaker 1: on and I will and I wasn't even aware of
Speaker 1: I was wondering, why the hell is called out of
Speaker 1: the woodyards. I didn't know about in the woodyard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just basically separated them because whenever I would do
Speaker 1: wildlife things on my woodyard channel, YouTube didn't know what
Speaker 1: to do with it because it's not firewood is not chainsaws,
Speaker 1: it's not the same thing, is not the same audience. Well,
Speaker 1: not that. What happens is I would have a video,
Speaker 1: say it gets thirty thousand views in the first twenty
Speaker 1: four hours on a wood something fire would related whatever
Speaker 1: it is. The next day I would have a hunting
Speaker 1: or trapping or fishing, and my views go right down
Speaker 1: to twelve fifteen, seventeen thousand because YouTube doesn't know who
Speaker 1: to show it to. So you your base seventeen thousand.
Speaker 1: Whatever you're getting is your true believers, the coolie drinkers,
Speaker 1: that's what I call them. Yeah, they'll watch anything you
Speaker 1: do and bye bye. Basically separating it, my numbers stay
Speaker 1: more consistent, and YouTube knows my audience and knows what
Speaker 1: to do with it. And there's a bigger audience for
Speaker 1: wood shopping. No, what's the audience I've developed? So they
Speaker 1: know that audience. So yeah, there's there's way more people
Speaker 1: that do firewood and trap. And then especially when you
Speaker 1: narrow it down to beaver trapping, which is even a
Speaker 1: smaller group, niching down your content is is the way
Speaker 1: to success on YouTube or most social media. I think, hmm,
Speaker 1: if you really want to do really well and if
Speaker 1: you generalize, you know there's gonna be things that a
Speaker 1: lot of people won't be interested in. So why aren't
Speaker 1: we through the give me the background the wood shopping? Well,
Speaker 1: I gotta I was in the wood shopping business for
Speaker 1: a while, kind of sort of how do you guys
Speaker 1: get into it? We've always we grew up hitting with wood.
Speaker 1: We've been cutting seven years old, since we could swing
Speaker 1: the mall. I think we couldn't even swing the mall.
Speaker 1: And our dad was a railroad worker. He was an
Speaker 1: engineer spike. He could spike railroad spikes. I mean actually
Speaker 1: the first mall we had, he had a railroad I
Speaker 1: don't know, like that big and it's a big long
Speaker 1: head for driving railroad spikes. And it's only that big,
Speaker 1: and it's that's a hard thing to master. I don't
Speaker 1: freak got it free from work, So spikes with a long,
Speaker 1: skinny mall no, yes, no, yes, well rail road spikes
Speaker 1: or whatever kind of wedge he could find that they're
Speaker 1: still in one piece, because you've got to realize you're
Speaker 1: driving that spike in the next to that track. You
Speaker 1: don't want to hit the track because oh that's why
Speaker 1: that's got to be just a little bit tiny bigger
Speaker 1: than And if you can hit with that, you can hit.
Speaker 1: If you can hit, yeah, if you can, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can master that. You can wait. It's probably a ten
Speaker 1: pound head. Yeah, it was. It was. We were seven
Speaker 1: years old in which is satan would because it doesn't split.
Speaker 1: It's like spliting cable. Yeah, we grew up on the
Speaker 1: worst of the worst. Man. It was all the all
Speaker 1: the is dying from dutching back in them day's back
Speaker 1: in at early seven, you know, so we're eight, nine, eleven,
Speaker 1: twelve years or whatever you pick a year, but pretty
Speaker 1: much free wood because it was free because you're cutting
Speaker 1: it down, because that tree's dying, we're cutting it. It's
Speaker 1: the worst, twisted, nasty there's nothing that we have that
Speaker 1: even comes close to being that miserable dude, would you
Speaker 1: agree that the finest splitting wood ever made by ever
Speaker 1: made by God is beach splits good, which just makes
Speaker 1: you feel like it makes you feel like such a
Speaker 1: pro dude. I'll tell you it looks like planks a
Speaker 1: lump if you want to well, same thing goals for like,
Speaker 1: if you want to split some really gravy, it's like
Speaker 1: vaneer red oak. In the wintertime, that's gray splitting. Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's water dense, so in the wintertime you get
Speaker 1: below zero and if it's clear, it just pot disclodes.
Speaker 1: Hold on, you guys are saying a lot of terms
Speaker 1: I'm not familiar with, so I'm sure most of the
Speaker 1: listeners are heard clear described as clear as not free.
Speaker 1: Clear is no not no, it's not free not freaking
Speaker 1: Yeah you k n O t ye not. And then
Speaker 1: you also said Vaneer grade Vaneer grade lumber. Do you
Speaker 1: know what they make vaneer on of I don't know
Speaker 1: what you've got any ven near here? No no flaws, perfect,
Speaker 1: when the best best Yeah, yeah, it's usually your butt
Speaker 1: cut on a tree, because like, and what they do
Speaker 1: is that you're signed to do you know what vaneer is? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: when you when they make vaneer. They're taking a log
Speaker 1: and basically you're taking not even it's like a guy
Speaker 1: gave me a business card. Guy gave you a business
Speaker 1: card one time, So picture a business card. It felt
Speaker 1: like a normal business card. Thickness that was like three vaneer.
Speaker 1: That was like a laminated piece of three walnut, like
Speaker 1: it was laminated of the vneer veneer, but it's thicker.
Speaker 1: Plywood is vaneer, three walnut vneer laminated together. Was like
Speaker 1: a business card. And they take that thing and they
Speaker 1: just you Basically you're cutting like a like you're flaying
Speaker 1: at something much around and and they cook it. They
Speaker 1: cook it. It's it's steam cooked, so it's soft and
Speaker 1: they peel it like you would apple. But it comes
Speaker 1: off like in sheets of paper. And then they laminated
Speaker 1: into your put it on tops of crappy because so
Speaker 1: the grain of that tree, that wood's got to be
Speaker 1: like perfect. And you could have when I learned this
Speaker 1: when me and Phelps were working on our the line,
Speaker 1: one calls because another thing they do on the walnut.
Speaker 1: You boys might be familiar at this steaming it to
Speaker 1: get the color to spread around. But then people can
Speaker 1: look and tell it's been steamed, but a good veneer
Speaker 1: walnut log. These these dudes are telling us, like, you
Speaker 1: might have one walnut tree that's worth a couple hundred bucks.
Speaker 1: The walnut tree next to it could be a tree. Right.
Speaker 1: There's there's a lot of different grades of aner I
Speaker 1: mean like no big long trunk, no limb, narrow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so, I mean that's that's always the best
Speaker 1: splitting wood on a tree. Yeah yeah, I mean, not
Speaker 1: that you're gonna purposely cut that up, but a lot
Speaker 1: of times I'll get cut off from a sawmill like
Speaker 1: it was a veneer log, okay, and the buyer comes
Speaker 1: in and says, well, let's say it's a number one
Speaker 1: sal log. I mean, so now I'm talking maybe in
Speaker 1: terms you guys don't know, I don't know, but high quality,
Speaker 1: high quality log. It's a number one okay, that's top dollar.
Speaker 1: And it's what it's a twelve foot log. All there's
Speaker 1: one knot on that end. If we cut two ft
Speaker 1: off that log, and then what's a ten footer the
Speaker 1: valley that log just doubled because now it's aner grade,
Speaker 1: not at number one grade. So there's and there's many
Speaker 1: different grades of a near it's not just veneer. There's
Speaker 1: there's over my I can't even tell you all that
Speaker 1: there's different grades. But that's way removed from firewood. But
Speaker 1: I guess when I said vaneer, that just really threw
Speaker 1: another bench. And we're getting educated. I'll tell you the
Speaker 1: things I didn't know. I didn't know you drove a
Speaker 1: railroad spike with a real thin malls because it can't
Speaker 1: be dinging the ship out of the rail. Well, nobody
Speaker 1: does that by hand anymore. To realize, nobody describe some
Speaker 1: pneumatic driver. So another thing that I'm getting I'm catching on.
Speaker 1: You're old man, became so precise with this mall, and
Speaker 1: we did to. We didn't eat. When you're looking at
Speaker 1: a log and you're like, man, if you could hit
Speaker 1: that log right there, that suckered split and you're an
Speaker 1: inch off, you're driving a wedge. You guys use a
Speaker 1: wedge still a small two inches or whatever. I mean,
Speaker 1: Like we got these newer hand mall axes out of
Speaker 1: what you call the X back in the day. Not
Speaker 1: anymore so much, but I mean you can hit the
Speaker 1: same crack every time, every type, and if you do
Speaker 1: a lot, you can develop its practice. Everythinks its strength
Speaker 1: to it's it's technique just like anything else. Like the
Speaker 1: guys that are the big power lifters, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of technique in that. It's not all strength. I mean
Speaker 1: strength is a big part of it, but technique is huge. Well,
Speaker 1: yea tougher than I am, but I could beat him
Speaker 1: in logs splitten. Yeah, big guys try to split logs.
Speaker 1: And remember one, they don't know how to read the wood.
Speaker 1: When you look at it. You have to see where
Speaker 1: the cracks are, where the knots are, what sections you
Speaker 1: want to take off when, and how to work. You
Speaker 1: got to read the world. Can't just do all brute strength.
Speaker 1: And then your technique and your swing and how you
Speaker 1: can accelerate your swing and bending the knees and using
Speaker 1: your upper body to come down. And it's a lot
Speaker 1: of technique. Yeah. And you know you always you always
Speaker 1: cut the fresh cut, not the dry cut. And you
Speaker 1: always want you always want to cut it right away. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: I've seen guys that cut up when they leave it
Speaker 1: in the back yard for a two years ago. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go split that though, Well, that happens. That would
Speaker 1: drive some tight into a molecular We're like, now, what's dry?
Speaker 1: It's like why, why waste your time? But also it
Speaker 1: doesn't get more brittle when you like put the ax
Speaker 1: in and then well, cray wood will still split. But
Speaker 1: if you got any knots in it, it's just well,
Speaker 1: the but the end will dry on you. And also
Speaker 1: as it gets real dry, the whole thing is going
Speaker 1: to shrink and tighten. So moisture is actually a good thing.
Speaker 1: And that's why we're talking about the oak in the
Speaker 1: middle of winter, because if it's below zero, the moisture
Speaker 1: in that round or that log is going to be
Speaker 1: then it just wants to pop. It's already got pressure.
Speaker 1: Split heard trees. I'm thinking, right, he's got some naughty
Speaker 1: as spruce. Maybe spruce. You know, you know a good
Speaker 1: splitting log, You guys aren't probably familiar with it, But
Speaker 1: yellow cedar, that's a hell of splitting log. That makes
Speaker 1: first champ because you know, a picture making cedar shakes
Speaker 1: out of it right right, you feel like you're like
Speaker 1: the greatest man on the planet. Clear cedar splits nice. Yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: so you grew up splitting wood, grew up for home use,
Speaker 1: and then you guys became you guys became market wood choppers.
Speaker 1: Dad actually would hire assault to the neighbors to split
Speaker 1: their wood for them. Yeah, I love it much and
Speaker 1: not tell you what. There was a lot of wood
Speaker 1: split for a very little money. But you know his
Speaker 1: thing was like, this will make you so tough. You
Speaker 1: should will fight to get down the toilet, right. He
Speaker 1: would say, this will make it so tough. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: He would go to a neighbor who had a pile
Speaker 1: of unsplit wood and he'd say, my boys will come
Speaker 1: split it. Yep. Yeah, and then we got rouped in.
Speaker 1: After that, then it was bail and hay from the neighbors. Yeah.
Speaker 1: After we grew up. You if you want to if
Speaker 1: you want to eat, you gotta work, John Smith, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got you. That was that's how we grew up.
Speaker 1: And at some point you started splitting it. You started
Speaker 1: cutting and splitting the cell. Well, he's always done a
Speaker 1: little bit. But then I had a buddy that had
Speaker 1: ninety acres of woods and he had oak wealth, which
Speaker 1: is goes off the red oaks, the black oaks, and
Speaker 1: he wanted it. Catton. I had always burnedood in my fireplace.
Speaker 1: Maybe four or five face chords or two fold chords
Speaker 1: a year or so and he he pause for seven.
Speaker 1: We need a breakdown of that. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: terminog You guys don't know terminology. I know some terminology
Speaker 1: you guys won't know. Why do you guys? Why are
Speaker 1: you guys talking about No one talks about face cords
Speaker 1: like you got Okay, but I wanted to ask this.
Speaker 1: You guys know the term of rick, yeah, v yeah,
Speaker 1: but why does no one know a thing? Okay, where's
Speaker 1: the region? Because in Michigan we have bubblers, water fountains,
Speaker 1: the water phone. Yeah, and you have rix and we
Speaker 1: have face cords there you go face court right, prior
Speaker 1: I knew rick. But are you have any idea where
Speaker 1: like what the etymology of the word rick is and
Speaker 1: how it's spelled. We don't know. R I c K
Speaker 1: is the way I know. See, we always we spell
Speaker 1: R I c Oh. Yes, I've seen it spelled that way.
Speaker 1: I have seen it. And it's a it's it's a
Speaker 1: sixteen inch it's a stack of sixteen inch logs. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: eight ft that's not a log, it's a piece or
Speaker 1: a log? Is the full sixteen inch pieces. So let's
Speaker 1: start from the beginning. Yes, that's a face, same thing
Speaker 1: as a rising. So I can tell you what that
Speaker 1: thing weighs. Well, it depends on species, It depends on
Speaker 1: if it's dry. Actually, can't remember remember someone weighing one
Speaker 1: and telling me though, Well, they tell me what a
Speaker 1: cord of oakways? Was it like five full full court
Speaker 1: of green oakways? Five grand? Yes? Wow? Remember so I
Speaker 1: had I took a three quarter ton truck and added
Speaker 1: enough lee springs to it. Well, I built a box,
Speaker 1: is like that was the right volume. I took a
Speaker 1: three quarter ton truck and added enough lee springs to it.
Speaker 1: It's funny because it like three quarter ton. You used
Speaker 1: to me like it's capacity. But I could put a
Speaker 1: cord of green oak in that truck. Yeah, we didn't
Speaker 1: like it. When you turn the wheel, it was light. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the worked really good. So to go back to the
Speaker 1: cord things, So you start with your tree. You cut
Speaker 1: your trees down. We cut in our era we kind
Speaker 1: of which is eight foot four inches standard because of
Speaker 1: the paper mills. That's what they want from that goes
Speaker 1: back to logging days were I in our area, they
Speaker 1: would float the wood down the river. Okay, that's how
Speaker 1: they got it out in the spring. And so you
Speaker 1: need a trim on the end of that log. If
Speaker 1: it was going to be lumber, you didn't cut it
Speaker 1: eight foot. It wasn't eight foot. You left four inches.
Speaker 1: You've got a couple inches of trim on each end.
Speaker 1: Damage for trim. So meaning that when it was getting floated,
Speaker 1: it would get dinged up. Rocks, Yeah, they get dinged up.
Speaker 1: They would get getting dinged up on you end. You don't.
Speaker 1: Actually they never floated. I don't think hardwood. Hardwood doesn't.
Speaker 1: They were floating basically pine that was back in the
Speaker 1: true They didn't float hardwood. It doesn't doesn't. It's really
Speaker 1: you're not going very far. It's on the bottom, very heavy.
Speaker 1: They always had to be. That always had to be
Speaker 1: like wagoned out in the big lumber boom days. We
Speaker 1: weren't work that. No, that was in the winter with horses.
Speaker 1: They would they would s get it out with horses.
Speaker 1: I never thought about I assumed all that ship went
Speaker 1: down the rivers. No, No, not hard wine. Maybe some
Speaker 1: spruce and balsom. But in our area with the big
Speaker 1: white pine was a big opener care area where I live,
Speaker 1: so eight foot logs, so yeah, a foot logs and
Speaker 1: then they're loaded onto log trucks and they go to
Speaker 1: the paper mills and that's kind of a standard operating
Speaker 1: size and then they get shipped and turned into paper.
Speaker 1: In our area, that's the big thing. And then there's
Speaker 1: amber mills. Um. So in other areas of the country
Speaker 1: you're gonna be on, like the West coast, they do
Speaker 1: whole trees, all the whole tree out at one time,
Speaker 1: not the whole the log from the butt that's the
Speaker 1: bottom of the tree, the butt where the rid flares,
Speaker 1: the butt cut all the way to the top where
Speaker 1: it gets too small where it's not worth anything anymore.
Speaker 1: They all the whole tree out, um. But in our
Speaker 1: area because they want to be able to handle it.
Speaker 1: It's states is set up for for eight foot wood,
Speaker 1: which is hunter wood. Is you know at least they
Speaker 1: do fold trees or sixteen footers, twenty photers. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's whatever the mills were set up to handle that
Speaker 1: would um. We had a mill that I sent would
Speaker 1: to not that many years ago they closed it down though. Uh.
Speaker 1: They used aspen was their big thing, and they had um.
Speaker 1: The way they produced their pulp they had pocket grinders
Speaker 1: and they would manually lift the wood into the pocket grinder.
Speaker 1: It was on a big stone and there was steam
Speaker 1: pressure in there and the wood would go into the
Speaker 1: spinning stone at an angle like this, and that's how
Speaker 1: they got their finest pulp. It was a real fine
Speaker 1: pulp from fine paper. And so they would take the
Speaker 1: eight foot logs and cut him in half. Of course,
Speaker 1: these are all peeled, there's no bark. Was always off
Speaker 1: the bark with the tumbling. Yeah, everything everything's way work mechanized.
Speaker 1: But when I started with a company i retired from,
Speaker 1: they were still using pocket grinders. It was one of
Speaker 1: the last ones left in the country. You already retired.
Speaker 1: I'm from from that thing. I'm back doing we do stuff.
Speaker 1: You're never retired, man, don't you know Guys calling me,
Speaker 1: come on, you can work for me, Come on, work
Speaker 1: for me. I like, well, you know, the snow is
Speaker 1: getting deep. I don't do firewood right now. So I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll come back for a while. We'll see where it goes.
Speaker 1: M hm. So, so we'll go back to the logs,
Speaker 1: your eight foot logs, and if you stack them so
Speaker 1: there are four ft wide, four ft high. That's what's
Speaker 1: considered a pulp chord. That's like full full colog Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it again. It's a full eight ft
Speaker 1: logs four ft high, four ft wide world by four
Speaker 1: pile is a chord. That's a cord cubic feet. And however,
Speaker 1: how we buy it off the truck. But now everything
Speaker 1: is getting converted to tons. Now they're buying tons of
Speaker 1: the paper industry for the paper industry. Yes, but from
Speaker 1: our purpose is what happens then is so you get
Speaker 1: your full log cord. That's the way I refer to it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if everybody else does. When you process
Speaker 1: that would into your sixteen inch pieces, cutting it, splitting it,
Speaker 1: stacking it, you end up with about two and a
Speaker 1: half two point five face cords, or not quite a
Speaker 1: full chord because you're reducing the size any any space
Speaker 1: in there, the roundness of the logs. You're gonna have
Speaker 1: voids in the pile of your logs back up. I'm
Speaker 1: getting it. I'm getting it, but I'm confused. I would
Speaker 1: expect that it would. Yeah, I was expecting, because you're
Speaker 1: never gonna put a log back together. You're also your
Speaker 1: curve is the eighth of an inch and you're cutting.
Speaker 1: That's you, And I get what you're saying. You don't
Speaker 1: have all those you don't have all those spaces between
Speaker 1: the logs reduces in volume. Yeah, you get two point
Speaker 1: five on really big wood. If you're cutting likes and
Speaker 1: stuff like I cut you, you will get yea and
Speaker 1: young Frankenstein, young and young Frankenstein. Gene Wilder, that's young Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: Gene Wilder sends his lackey. What's his name? Igor? He
Speaker 1: sends Egor. He needs a brain, So he sends Igor
Speaker 1: down to to get a brain off off a dead person,
Speaker 1: a new dead person, and he puts the brain in
Speaker 1: his monster, and the monster goes berserk, and he says,
Speaker 1: what was the name on whose brain did you get?
Speaker 1: He says, I think that her name was Abby? And
Speaker 1: then he says what was her last name? And it
Speaker 1: was I think it was Abby normal normal, and you
Speaker 1: had gotten an abnormal. Yeah, that's so that's the wood
Speaker 1: I cut, is the abbey wood, because I could always
Speaker 1: get it for cheap or free. Nobody wants to work
Speaker 1: that freaking hard. We get that, we get that lot
Speaker 1: to make big pieces of wood small. So but I've
Speaker 1: been working hard in my whole life. It's just normal
Speaker 1: for me. We get a lot of people that will
Speaker 1: watch Kenny and I cut some of his big stuff.
Speaker 1: We cult the abbey wood, and they're like, you should
Speaker 1: be turning that into slabs. You should be turned in
Speaker 1: into lumber. That's ridiculous. You're gonna burn it. That's a waste.
Speaker 1: You mean to tell me that. You put a video
Speaker 1: out and someone has a better idea every day. You
Speaker 1: can't do nothing. The reason I'm bringing this up as
Speaker 1: the thing is that would was rejected from the lumber
Speaker 1: mill because we did gotten flaws crooked. We did what
Speaker 1: three loads, well, I did three loads of that, semi loads,
Speaker 1: se truckloads, truck loads, semi loads. So this would so big.
Speaker 1: I bought it from my the last job I had
Speaker 1: they had, I worked for a sawmill, so I mean
Speaker 1: to deal with them. I bought all their reject would
Speaker 1: like a year and a half ago. So all their
Speaker 1: stuff they had they went through the metal detector, had
Speaker 1: nails and spikes and saw blades and whatever in it.
Speaker 1: All that it was actually oversized wood. They could not
Speaker 1: run through their saw mill. It was too big for
Speaker 1: their mill and then people say, well, why did they
Speaker 1: buy it? They buy sales. They might say, okay, they bought,
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred acres sail. We're logging this off
Speaker 1: and the tree is marked by the forester or the
Speaker 1: tree has got to be cut and on the bottom
Speaker 1: cut that's a fifty in butt cut. They can't run it,
Speaker 1: but they're paying their crew to cut it. That crew
Speaker 1: is going to get paid to cut it because they
Speaker 1: got to bring it out. That trees mark. You don't
Speaker 1: leave it late is you're probably deal with. You bought
Speaker 1: the sail. So they end up with all these You know,
Speaker 1: they might only get one or two of those on
Speaker 1: a job, but over a couple of years, now all
Speaker 1: there's truckloads of laying out in the back. We don't
Speaker 1: know what to do with them. So utilizing a resource, um,
Speaker 1: I know, how dummy, he'll buy them. So well, and
Speaker 1: I've been doing this for years, they said, but you
Speaker 1: got to take it all. So I bought like twelve
Speaker 1: or fifteen truckloads last year of this stuff. Well it
Speaker 1: wasn't all. There was three loads of just abby wood. Yes,
Speaker 1: well on one truckload he got how many how many
Speaker 1: logs did you have on one truckload. Normally you'll have
Speaker 1: hundreds five. No, there was that was like one. That's
Speaker 1: that's what is. There's a video, you can watch the videos.
Speaker 1: That's they're out there. But what are you paying? Um?
Speaker 1: What are you willing to pay? Let me start off
Speaker 1: when I sold firewood. Um, I was selling firewood from
Speaker 1: like ninety to nine six. You would get you could
Speaker 1: sell if you wanted to sell, if you were hurting
Speaker 1: for cash, you could sell green split hardwood for about
Speaker 1: sixty or seventy bucks accord green. No, dude, I'm telling
Speaker 1: what it was. Back then, I would I would stack
Speaker 1: mine up and then sell it. This is in those years,
Speaker 1: I would sell mape. It was maple oak beach split
Speaker 1: dried delivered ninety dollars a cord for a full court. Listen,
Speaker 1: I don't yeah. Was it a pick up load or
Speaker 1: like your full measured cubic feet of split dried delivered hardwood. Maybe,
Speaker 1: depending on like the severity of the winner and ship
Speaker 1: and how long you were willing to hold it, you
Speaker 1: could maybe get a hundred. But that was the most advertarge.
Speaker 1: But I knew guys that would that would build. They
Speaker 1: would take a mobile home trailers, those big huge and
Speaker 1: they beef them out and they would drive wood Detroit
Speaker 1: and they would sell it for three Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Where he sells here's woe, and where I sells what is?
Speaker 1: And but what is the give me the economics on it,
Speaker 1: not like what are you willing to pay for an
Speaker 1: un split cord? I would pay from zero to five dollars.
Speaker 1: But I was never like big time about I'll just
Speaker 1: do like something to make money. I'd pay from zero
Speaker 1: to five for the stuff, and I'd sell it for
Speaker 1: what I just said I'd sell it for. I got
Speaker 1: a lot of tree service would for free, which trees
Speaker 1: that are being taken down to neighborhoods that are dead, dying,
Speaker 1: dangerous right now? You got the UH killing all the
Speaker 1: ash and Wisconsin now, so then we're all getting to
Speaker 1: probably got three truck loads semiloads of that this year,
Speaker 1: which is each truckle is going to have folk cords
Speaker 1: on it, getting it free, not only free, they bring
Speaker 1: it to me delivered delivered. And what do you sell?
Speaker 1: What's would selling for right now? Like just general average
Speaker 1: around the country for split hardwood. I'll mention that first. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to go back I'll go back to mention um.
Speaker 1: The wood that I do buy, the better would quality.
Speaker 1: Way you talked about those veneers, like if you buy bolts,
Speaker 1: which is a very good straight log I will pay
Speaker 1: anywhere from four hundred to six d first semi load.
Speaker 1: So I'm paying about a hundred and ten hundred twenty
Speaker 1: dollars per full cord of logs. What beautiful sts by
Speaker 1: it costs. And I have a firewood processor now and
Speaker 1: it likes that kind of would and I can produce,
Speaker 1: I can, I can process that whole load one day,
Speaker 1: God speed everything, time is everything, and then sell that
Speaker 1: for two three plus. It's easy to handle. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you gotta get it, they wanted. Most people want to
Speaker 1: dry so and a machine does most of the work.
Speaker 1: But the machine was donated to me by one of
Speaker 1: my people that kool aid drinkers, No No No runs
Speaker 1: a business. It's East Eastern made. Andrews a smart man.
Speaker 1: It's Eastern made wood processors and splitters. So he wanted
Speaker 1: people to see his ship in action. I asked. I
Speaker 1: asked him, I said, so what do you do for advertising?
Speaker 1: He says, um, yere at So he said, just make videos.
Speaker 1: So you're hauling, asked you so much? Would sold a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff for this guy by having his YouTube
Speaker 1: traveling there over a year behind on selling their machines
Speaker 1: from the time people order to the time they can
Speaker 1: produce it, and they just keep growing. So we've done
Speaker 1: a lot of advertising forms. So anybody gives me stuff,
Speaker 1: They're gonna sell a lot of stuff. It's the way
Speaker 1: it works. You hear that people because I got the eyeballs,
Speaker 1: that's what they want. Oh, you should talk about how
Speaker 1: you need to cup snowbills. I don't need to just
Speaker 1: come on now, I don't need man somebody else, Well,
Speaker 1: you could get it and donated. So that that's in
Speaker 1: the woodyard. That's in the wood And I started and
Speaker 1: when did you start in the woodyard about two years ago.
Speaker 1: And it's because my son, uh is the I T guy,
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, Dad, what you're doing is
Speaker 1: interesting to some people. And because I'm a by trade,
Speaker 1: I'm i'm I've been self employed for forty years. I'm
Speaker 1: a full time professional photographers what I do. So I
Speaker 1: had the skills there, had a skill set I brought
Speaker 1: to the table there. He helped me set it all up.
Speaker 1: I know editing. I know how to do all everything
Speaker 1: needs to be done for it. I'm not afraid of people.
Speaker 1: I'm not afraid to talk. And I mean there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people that freeze up in front of the camera.
Speaker 1: As you know, it's hard to get him to and
Speaker 1: be themselves. I have no problem with it. I give
Speaker 1: you can, I give you can. I give you my
Speaker 1: take on that subject. There's three kinds of people. Not
Speaker 1: not really, but there's three things that happened. Um. I
Speaker 1: found that you can have someone that, like you got
Speaker 1: a friend or whatever, and they have a great personality, okay,
Speaker 1: and you point a camera at him, it just stops,
Speaker 1: it shuts down. You could know someone that has no personality.
Speaker 1: You put a camera on him and they make one
Speaker 1: up and people see through that though, Or you'd have
Speaker 1: a person I'm talking to you, Kevin Murphy, who Kevin
Speaker 1: Murphy dug during Okay, they're the way they are and
Speaker 1: you love them and you put a camera on them.
Speaker 1: Nothing changes, nothing changes. That's gold. That's what you want.
Speaker 1: That's gold. That's Kenny. I'm there's no filter. Actually I'm
Speaker 1: the test dummy. Man. Just keep going the way they
Speaker 1: were going. He makes me do a lot of editing.
Speaker 1: I've been to test dummy my whole life. What do
Speaker 1: you get? What are you getting out of this whole thing?
Speaker 1: He's here last year and invite from one of my
Speaker 1: viewers to go to uh New Mexico. Al Kin, I
Speaker 1: get to go along here, I am to go along.
Speaker 1: It's great, and I give him free stuff. He gets
Speaker 1: a lot of free labor from meeks. I go help
Speaker 1: him out waiting. I was promised that he was going
Speaker 1: to bring a processor up two years ago and process
Speaker 1: my wood for me. It hasn't showed you what you guys,
Speaker 1: but you guys have your wood businesses are different. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Why not combine your wood businesses miles away from me? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It's He's a northern Wisconsin and sounds all the people
Speaker 1: are they want to buy expensive wood to burn in
Speaker 1: their backyard. I supply people that heat their homes, So
Speaker 1: people eating your homes want to save money, right, and
Speaker 1: I saw my wood way cheap, way cheap. My people
Speaker 1: are literally literally burning money. They're sitting by the fireplace,
Speaker 1: drinking bear watching sports. I was at a fundraiser one
Speaker 1: time in New York and a guy told me that
Speaker 1: he had he was in He was in finance, so
Speaker 1: he was in Wall Street finance, but had found a
Speaker 1: side gig that he was really passionate about. He described
Speaker 1: as being in the designer firewood business where they were
Speaker 1: taking orchard like when you would redo apple orchards, big
Speaker 1: money cuts a very uniform peace, and he would kill
Speaker 1: dry the firewood because people wanted to have a stack
Speaker 1: of firewood in their house as an ornament. But they
Speaker 1: want that ship to be that you could bang it
Speaker 1: and no sawdust comes off. So he said it is
Speaker 1: like you don't even need to dust this ship once
Speaker 1: you stack in your house. He said it was a
Speaker 1: designer fire would company. He didn't want to tell me
Speaker 1: what he gets for a stack of that kiln dried,
Speaker 1: all cut the same, and you design in your house
Speaker 1: next to your fireplace a little wood stack. He fills
Speaker 1: that stack with wood that. Oh you know what's funny.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you something there at night. Uh, Phelps, you're
Speaker 1: about Phelps in the scorpion. He sent me a picture
Speaker 1: of a scorpion in a bed. So I think that
Speaker 1: we're burning like we're burning oak down in Sonora, and
Speaker 1: every piece of oak is hollow and it's just a
Speaker 1: huge dump of like oak warming up inside this house,
Speaker 1: next to this fireplace. And Phelps is right by the
Speaker 1: fireplace and right by the oak. And he was the
Speaker 1: guy every night like he's like throwing oak into this
Speaker 1: big fireplace. One night he wakes me up. We're sleeping
Speaker 1: next to each other. He's in his sleeping bag, out
Speaker 1: in my sleep bag. And he wakes up just all
Speaker 1: worked up. And he got a scorpion got him on
Speaker 1: the inside of his left thigh, the inside of his
Speaker 1: right thigh. He put his hand on here, trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what was going on, and got it right
Speaker 1: in the thumb. The I believe he said it felt
Speaker 1: He thought he thought that he was getting in an
Speaker 1: electrical shock from a cactus thorn. That is what he
Speaker 1: said it felt like. And then he was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out if he's gonna wake up dead or not,
Speaker 1: you know, if he goes back to sleep. But he
Speaker 1: was still he was hurting pretty good. Did you have
Speaker 1: any effects? Hurt him bad, but not his his his
Speaker 1: thumb went numb down to the wrist whoa, and his legs.
Speaker 1: If he'd whenever he'd walk, he'd get little just being
Speaker 1: a guy. If it's on either side of his grin.
Speaker 1: It didn't affect anything, not that I've heard of him.
Speaker 1: I called him a smorning to check on him, because
Speaker 1: then he fell back to sleep and I woke him
Speaker 1: up and to see if he was doing all right.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he Uh, did you guys contact to doctor. No.
Speaker 1: But we detained the scorpion. That doesn't seem really helpful
Speaker 1: to Jason. I detained it live if you started, because
Speaker 1: I wanted to be it's still detained because if something
Speaker 1: happens to him, we wanted to be like here it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we had it and then we're trying to move
Speaker 1: how we had it detained and it almost got loose
Speaker 1: in the truck, but it's it's secure that it sits
Speaker 1: right now in a tile on all bottle. Is it
Speaker 1: a big one? The biggest scorpion ever? I'm not are
Speaker 1: the most? Yeah, that's all is it is? He okay?
Speaker 1: Now I tried to call morning. I haven't heard this scorpion.
Speaker 1: This scorpion is the size of your pinky finger, the
Speaker 1: size of my pinky finger. Huge. Back to what was
Speaker 1: I saying, I don't know we're going Sidewayson pricing so
Speaker 1: um and Kenny's Air Job bringing that best great and
Speaker 1: Kenny's Air. You guys should do a podcast. I'll license it,
Speaker 1: front it. Okay, well we can do that. I'll license it,
Speaker 1: We'll put it on our network and I'll license it
Speaker 1: and we'll do a rev share. Is there any money involved?
Speaker 1: Do that? Because I ain't making squawk listen man, not
Speaker 1: if you go on your own. No, not if you
Speaker 1: go on your own. But but but if you were
Speaker 1: to join a network, because there's like, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: get into it right now because if you're doing me
Speaker 1: a disservice to explain it all, I know you're in
Speaker 1: the air, but if you were to join, if you
Speaker 1: were to do this, be in and Out of the
Speaker 1: Woodyard podcast? Can you do the podcast? I license it,
Speaker 1: we do a rev share. You're getting double money getting
Speaker 1: money from getting rev share. People would pay for this.
Speaker 1: I'll be entertained right now that I would be this interesting.
Speaker 1: We have covered like zero point ship per cent yet
Speaker 1: I mean, well, I know we're never going to get you.
Speaker 1: Let's get but the beauty of it is people just
Speaker 1: go watch your stuff. This is a teaser, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I do want I want to get to the current.
Speaker 1: I want I just on a personal curiosity. I just
Speaker 1: want to know where the wood market sits right now.
Speaker 1: Kenny's area work. Like he said, people are burning wood
Speaker 1: to save money, and there's wood everywhere. Yeah, I live
Speaker 1: in a very wood rich area and there's no people
Speaker 1: and their brother has everybody. Every people that are there
Speaker 1: want to save money. They all got chainsaws, they all
Speaker 1: got a brother that's a logger. I mean, I worked
Speaker 1: with loggers and truckers. I've been in the wood business
Speaker 1: my whole life. But they either aren't capable of producing
Speaker 1: more wood because they're getting older, or they run out
Speaker 1: of wood, or they underestimated their needs that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So he will sell wood to people that just don't.
Speaker 1: They like wood heat and they want their wood heat.
Speaker 1: I heat my house with wood, and if I don't
Speaker 1: have a fire going in the furnace, it's like my
Speaker 1: house is cold. It's the thermostat says seventy, but it's
Speaker 1: not seventy, and every score inch at alls it's like
Speaker 1: it's seventy over there, but it's like shixty over here.
Speaker 1: It's like with wood heat, it's everywhere, it's most stared answer.
Speaker 1: So I'm trying to dig it back in his area. Uh,
Speaker 1: seventy to nine dollars per face cord or rick or
Speaker 1: third of a cord, whichever you prefer. In our area,
Speaker 1: it's a face card. Okay, it's a face card. Everybody
Speaker 1: buys in face courts. Yes. So if I'm a normal
Speaker 1: person and I say I need five chords for the winner,
Speaker 1: you have to then go like face cards. I didn't
Speaker 1: say face court. He's going to ask you that. When
Speaker 1: you say that, I'm asking you, I would have said.
Speaker 1: I would have said with the customer, I'm not calling you,
Speaker 1: calling Kenny because I'm in I'm in there, I'm up there,
Speaker 1: and where you're at, I'd like to buy five chords
Speaker 1: for the winner. Okay, So are you talking full cards
Speaker 1: or face cards? What did I say? You said five courts.
Speaker 1: I need to know what is your definition of a
Speaker 1: court because I'm gonna ask you that because I do
Speaker 1: have customers that have cabins. So I see a lot
Speaker 1: of people like cabins. They buy wood for me like
Speaker 1: every other year because they come up to their cabinet
Speaker 1: winner they want to go snowmobiling. Then people actually pay
Speaker 1: pretty good because they you know, they got their half man,
Speaker 1: they want to rick. They got their half million dollar
Speaker 1: you know cabin. You know that they come snowbilling twice
Speaker 1: a year, two and they want they want to have
Speaker 1: nice dry wood there. So I do have some of
Speaker 1: those customers. So I gotta find out if they know
Speaker 1: what a chord is. They're not a court and then okay,
Speaker 1: coming from let's go back to the role play. Okay again,
Speaker 1: here we go sideways like five courts. No, we're gonna
Speaker 1: get there fast, straight, no commentary, straight role play. Hi,
Speaker 1: I would like to buy five chords of hardwood, split
Speaker 1: and dried. And I'm gonna say once again, is it
Speaker 1: a face cord is four ft by eight four eight
Speaker 1: ft long? Sixteen inch? Is that what you call a courd? No, sir,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about a full cord. Three face cords. That's
Speaker 1: you want, fifteen face cards? That's five. That's how you
Speaker 1: need to think about it, sir. Yes, I'd like it
Speaker 1: to be split, dried, hardwood delivered. Okay, So where is
Speaker 1: your Where are you? How far are you from? Next door? Oh?
Speaker 1: Next door, that's easy. That's gonna be two bucks a load.
Speaker 1: That's five loads. Do the math? Oh my god, god,
Speaker 1: the wood business got complicated. Well again five times? What
Speaker 1: did I say? Fifteen times? Whatever you're going Ray, let's
Speaker 1: approach you. I say to you, I'm coming to pick
Speaker 1: up a full chord of split and dry hardwood. How
Speaker 1: much is it Your definition is going to be to forty? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's all I want to know. Your definition it's increased
Speaker 1: by it's increased two points. Cheap wood my area, it's different.
Speaker 1: If you go to Chicago, it's way different. That's why
Speaker 1: I'm gonna explain he's three sixty for that same load. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm at two forty. He's at three sixties, so it's
Speaker 1: three point six. I asked from when I was a kid, right,
Speaker 1: I have more people, fewer trees. I know a guy
Speaker 1: who has one of the biggest firewood businesses in the
Speaker 1: state of Wisconsin. It's called Frank's. He sends two to
Speaker 1: three semi loads every single day to Chicago eight d accord.
Speaker 1: Holy sh it, man, just employees. Well, well, then I
Speaker 1: gotta I mean, there's gas, but trucking and trucking is huge.
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't sell him would for what I
Speaker 1: sell for him to come get it and sell it
Speaker 1: for what he does it's all lost in transportation. You
Speaker 1: can't move whatever. It's free. Okay, let's jump along with
Speaker 1: the field. Have been running five dollars a gallon up
Speaker 1: till recently and it's still over flour by us. Once
Speaker 1: you got out of the wood you're going and sorry,
Speaker 1: once you got in the woodyard going, which is such
Speaker 1: a novel idea. Um are there other? Were there? Other
Speaker 1: people like producing regular content on YouTube that was about
Speaker 1: the wood business, yes, but not as niche as what
Speaker 1: I went with it, and not I could see him
Speaker 1: doing like some fancy pants with stuff. Yeah that that,
Speaker 1: and just a lot of lifestyle type reality show kind
Speaker 1: of things or bringing in their everyday activities along with
Speaker 1: all of it. Like, but I myself, I just went
Speaker 1: with it the way I wanted to do it. I
Speaker 1: wanted to do it where it was focused on one
Speaker 1: top and what it took to do that, and beginning
Speaker 1: to end all the details because the magic is always
Speaker 1: a new details. People want to know the difference between
Speaker 1: a face cord and a full cord every day, it's
Speaker 1: all the time. So um, I just I really wanted
Speaker 1: a niche because I did a lot of studying on
Speaker 1: YouTube by watching people that are experts in the industry
Speaker 1: of education in YouTube telling people how to do it
Speaker 1: right and niching down and getting more specific is better, Um,
Speaker 1: because the audience is going to come to you for
Speaker 1: that particular topic. And if you start talking about your
Speaker 1: trip to them all you're listening, You're not talking to
Speaker 1: m a you will Yeah, I'm talking to yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's it's uh, it's a big difference. Uh. And
Speaker 1: people people are there in that particular audience, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they may have some common interests. A lot of fire
Speaker 1: with people are hunters, they are fishermen, they are outdoors people,
Speaker 1: but not all of them, someone like of them. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Yeah, some of my people that
Speaker 1: watch me, and I've got people from fifty five countries
Speaker 1: that watched that tell me. You know, I do firewood,
Speaker 1: but I'm not a hunter. I'm a vegan and I
Speaker 1: appreciate you doing that and I'm okay with it because
Speaker 1: I like your content. So, but if I start showing
Speaker 1: hunting stuff on there, it's gonna turn them off right now.
Speaker 1: This is not what they came for exactly. Like if
Speaker 1: I had like a thing where I put lego shipped together,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't start splitting firewood on it. My son has
Speaker 1: that change. Yes, he's got he's got a YouTube Lego chanl. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called red Rick Studs. He just started it. How
Speaker 1: old are you guys? I'm sixty and in two months?
Speaker 1: You guys married? Yeah, we're ten, ten months and two
Speaker 1: days apart. How long he has been married? Me? I'm
Speaker 1: in the second round? Twelve years? Second round? Here? How
Speaker 1: much you added up? Thirty seven? That's good. I get
Speaker 1: thirty eight in with one three kids, same as you, boy, girl, boy,
Speaker 1: it's great. I started out twenty five years first round
Speaker 1: and I'm on twelve or so. You hit silver there whatever.
Speaker 1: I pointed out that my father hit silver with two
Speaker 1: different people. It's like a model of loyalty. Right, I
Speaker 1: got seven, We got seven kids, so but they're all
Speaker 1: growing and going, thank God. So tell me, after you
Speaker 1: got the in the woodyard, how did it occur to
Speaker 1: you to start doing out of the woodyard? Well, because
Speaker 1: that was my that was my introduction, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna back up just a little bit so you
Speaker 1: get the context of it. So when I would drop
Speaker 1: these videos that weren't would related, I saw a big
Speaker 1: drop in viewers and you know, per video basis knowing
Speaker 1: that YouTube didn't know what to do with it because
Speaker 1: they didn't know what to do with the content, and
Speaker 1: being that we're outdoors people, I thought, yeah, I'll just
Speaker 1: separated out. My son told me too, was the I
Speaker 1: t guys said yeah, if you keep it more pure,
Speaker 1: the algorithm will know what to do with it. And
Speaker 1: I wanted to do content just to put it somewhere else.
Speaker 1: So I started doing the the trapping and the noodling
Speaker 1: catfish noodling. And you want to go noodling? We know,
Speaker 1: I watched you. I want to go, mentioned me last night.
Speaker 1: Have done it yet? I want to try it. I
Speaker 1: like fishing catfish, but it's a rush. It's a rush. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we separated out, and I haven't done as much
Speaker 1: too it as I wanted to because I've been so busy.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason why I haven't is in
Speaker 1: the last three months, I was basically evicted from where
Speaker 1: my woodyard was. I wasn't evicted, but I got noticed
Speaker 1: that it wasn't up to code and wasn't in covenants
Speaker 1: of what I could do. I'm in a commercial location,
Speaker 1: and I assumed I was okay, but I wasn't you
Speaker 1: knew you were kind of well. The developer was okay
Speaker 1: with it. He didn't have a problem. Nobody else said
Speaker 1: anything for ten years. But it got bigger and bigger,
Speaker 1: and I got the big machinery. And then the neighbor said, um,
Speaker 1: I just put a parking lot and it cost me
Speaker 1: a hundred and eighty grand. He said, I know you're
Speaker 1: not under covenants because you have to hard surface which
Speaker 1: is either black topp or gravel underneyth any materials outside.
Speaker 1: So and he said, and fancying And he said, I
Speaker 1: don't like the way it looks. No. Yeah, man, luckily, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we know what you know. This guy you're talking about,
Speaker 1: he might love his family and be a great American.
Speaker 1: But that's the thing I don't get, man. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't understand. I would rather I like my ship tidy,
Speaker 1: neat and tidy. I would rather all of my neighbors
Speaker 1: had total ship holes. So you look good because if
Speaker 1: I like, they're gonna be less likely to care. If
Speaker 1: if my kids are messing around, I'm more likely to
Speaker 1: find something I might need. Mm hmm. Yeah, there's more
Speaker 1: likely there's gonna be a bunch of cotton tail rabbits
Speaker 1: hanging out and all their junk. It's like there's nothing,
Speaker 1: but like, I would rather everyone around me had a
Speaker 1: junkyard and then my stuff was in the middle. Perfect.
Speaker 1: But I'm guessing that that's not the perspective that your
Speaker 1: neighbor has. No, he's jealous. It's an industrial part. I
Speaker 1: mean it's not. Yeah, I mean he didn't do it
Speaker 1: because he doesn't like the way your yard looks. Come on, well,
Speaker 1: no he did. Really, you don't think he did it
Speaker 1: because he was like, well, if I had to pay,
Speaker 1: he does too. Maybe. No, I think it's kind of
Speaker 1: a combination. He's a it's an electrical engineering place, and
Speaker 1: they bring people in from all over the world for
Speaker 1: what they do, and they have government contracts. It's a
Speaker 1: big deal. And he just did his place must look
Speaker 1: next to your plans. What I always thought he'd be like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can how authentic it is. Welcome to Wisconsin. Yah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody splits water around here, look at this guy. That's
Speaker 1: what most people think. Most people say that. All the
Speaker 1: people watch my channel thought it was like ridiculous, But
Speaker 1: I got a better deal now improved. It's improved. Tremendously
Speaker 1: once again, one more reason. I don't have a processor
Speaker 1: in my place here. Yeah, so that's what slowed me
Speaker 1: down from doing more content on my out of the way.
Speaker 1: You don't back to your original question about out about
Speaker 1: your property. I had to move you how to move?
Speaker 1: You don't realize how much crap you accumulate. Had ten
Speaker 1: years of firewood stuff to get out of. There's a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a lot. So let's slow you down on
Speaker 1: your outdoor content three or four months. Yeah. I put
Speaker 1: me behind a production everything. Yeah. So yeah, and then
Speaker 1: Kenny and I started doing the trapping thing since we
Speaker 1: were kids, and I always thought it would we need
Speaker 1: to have it where we would show people what we do,
Speaker 1: because I mean I trapped when we were younger with Ken.
Speaker 1: Grandpa was a professional trap actually a great camp we're
Speaker 1: fourth generation. He was professional beaver trapper, everything everything, trapper,
Speaker 1: mentals in the summer, Yeah, summer I was reading about that,
Speaker 1: the mental thing because he was a baitman. Yes, I
Speaker 1: did that too. I grew up doing it. We worked
Speaker 1: for him, that's we did. We sold live bait in
Speaker 1: the summer. We worked for him every summer in mentals
Speaker 1: and well he sold mentals. We just help them. What
Speaker 1: did do? Like the leeches, wigglers all out just like
Speaker 1: we pick crawlers. That was our division time at ring,
Speaker 1: and we picked the crawlers. Man, I tell they had
Speaker 1: a broken back when I was so you'd go out
Speaker 1: like in the spring on a rainy night, crawlers until
Speaker 1: you couldn't move no more, until my mom would find
Speaker 1: us and say get them. You got school to school starts.
Speaker 1: We're out their home. Nine we're making we're making buck.
Speaker 1: You know, two cents a nightcrawler, man cents a dozen. Man,
Speaker 1: that's big money. Back then, you don't realize just out
Speaker 1: in the cornfield and the rains, Norman, all of everybody's yard,
Speaker 1: everybody's front yards. You know what, everybody had a yard
Speaker 1: taking out their front yards the right. They come home
Speaker 1: at night, they crawl, They come out the nightcrawlers. Not
Speaker 1: at night. Oh man, you get like May May, early June,
Speaker 1: you can get a real goldie washer. Rains don't come
Speaker 1: at night, come off the breeze. And did it to
Speaker 1: have to twisted simultaneously or can you just any night better?
Speaker 1: One night it brings them out and they start making
Speaker 1: love and twisted up. That's a double man. You can
Speaker 1: grab them and they don't get away as good when
Speaker 1: they're locked up like a couple of dogs. Get them both.
Speaker 1: It's a nightcrawler man. That's a great business. I mean.
Speaker 1: So he was a batman and he contracted with bait stores.
Speaker 1: Well he he, Well, he had a route up actually
Speaker 1: where I live. See, Okay, back in them days, people
Speaker 1: would go up north and they'd stay out a resort. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of resorts on a lake or on
Speaker 1: a river or whatever. Well, the resort owner would have
Speaker 1: cabins and people would come stay there and they're gonna
Speaker 1: go fishing. They'd have rentals, canoe rentals. Well, they don't
Speaker 1: want to have to go someplace and catch bait to
Speaker 1: go fishing, because back then it was all live bait,
Speaker 1: you know. People didn't have all these fancy things, you know,
Speaker 1: so they fished with minimals. He would sell to the
Speaker 1: resort owners. He would make a weekly run every Friday.
Speaker 1: He would drive up north hundred and fifty miles and
Speaker 1: sell hundreds of dozens. Yeah yeah, yeah, gallons by the
Speaker 1: gallon of the Gwadays it's by the gallon whatever. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he had a he had a five hundred gallon tank
Speaker 1: on the back of the truck. And then was he
Speaker 1: just dealing in one? Was he doing like chubs, fat
Speaker 1: shiners all of that. Mud Mintos was the big thing
Speaker 1: because they lived long. Mud I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know what a mud mento was, but they live anywhere
Speaker 1: and they live like a polylog and a mud puddler. Tough.
Speaker 1: You can't hardly kill them. And i'd probably know what
Speaker 1: if I was looking at it, I probably know it.
Speaker 1: An You know what we used to call those, We'd
Speaker 1: call them tiger minns. Yeah, well, them were in high
Speaker 1: demand and where he lived, he caught lots of them,
Speaker 1: and people really want them because they would last. You
Speaker 1: could buy one week and two weeks later still alive,
Speaker 1: So all your shiners, your suckers, your all your fat
Speaker 1: heads and all that. He always called them soft bait
Speaker 1: because they had to be in a tank with an aerator.
Speaker 1: Where's a mud man when you can throw it? The
Speaker 1: pay live a week later, so off bait. You got
Speaker 1: about up half hour things dead. So he was a
Speaker 1: bait trapper and a fur trapper. Yes, he did meddles
Speaker 1: in the summer, trapped in the winter mostly and you
Speaker 1: were brought up around that. Ye. Yeah, So at eight
Speaker 1: years old and he was seven, we started trapping muskrats.
Speaker 1: And you guys got heavy duty in the muskrats. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we did. We went out west da quotas we went
Speaker 1: north Dakota, South da Quota. Man, we slayed him. We
Speaker 1: we hit that, We hit it. I mean when we
Speaker 1: were out there was as I haven't, man, it was
Speaker 1: high water, so high water and high water high population
Speaker 1: populations boomed, and you could almost hop from a rat
Speaker 1: house the rat house. I mean it. I went out
Speaker 1: there one fall or no spring spring, went out there
Speaker 1: in the spring by myself and somebody's They were all
Speaker 1: we were all trapping them together, but separately. You know.
Speaker 1: We're all stayed at the same place and trapped the
Speaker 1: same area. I went out there. Well, for perspective, we
Speaker 1: used to trap in school. We would take our big ocation,
Speaker 1: well not vacation, when trapping season open. Our parents would
Speaker 1: let us take off at school. Cool trapping because back
Speaker 1: in the seventies and them days, a muskrat was like
Speaker 1: eight bucks. My dad, my dad was working in the
Speaker 1: paper mill making two dollars an hour at the same time,
Speaker 1: so we'd go out in a week and catch a
Speaker 1: hundred hundred fifty muskrats. We'd have our money for the
Speaker 1: whole year in that week. So I mean the plus
Speaker 1: we were catching coon for thirty bucks a piece. I
Speaker 1: mean the fur market was high in comparison. There were
Speaker 1: guys buying brand new pickups every year on their trapping money.
Speaker 1: Are weaker, okay, then, son, you've got a big crash
Speaker 1: in the market for many years. So an hour fast
Speaker 1: forward to two thousand and ten, two thousand nine, I
Speaker 1: think it went. That's what the trappers Stu Miller calls
Speaker 1: his generations for Boom to separate it from the late seventies,
Speaker 1: early eight them. So we've got out out into the
Speaker 1: quota as we found out about these rats in this population.
Speaker 1: Boom and I went out there in two weeks and
Speaker 1: I caught two thousand muskrats. Find himself. I just about
Speaker 1: killed me, just about killed me. Was it just all
Speaker 1: like were you just uh running like just wired up
Speaker 1: leg holds on feedbeds, well different different, different style. It springs.
Speaker 1: Everything was flooded. I mean there was I was catching muskrats.
Speaker 1: It had burrowed under the black top. The roads were
Speaker 1: given in. He was driving down roads for like a mile,
Speaker 1: you're driving through water for a mile. The roads are closed,
Speaker 1: but the town guys are like killing muskrats because they're
Speaker 1: undermining the roads, like banks trap. And I set a
Speaker 1: trap for me to you off the road, and hundreds
Speaker 1: of them down right down the ditch for miles and
Speaker 1: miles in the population. I never saw nothing like it.
Speaker 1: It was like an infest. We talked to two kids
Speaker 1: when we were out there, and that went to a
Speaker 1: movie one night. They came out of the movie theater.
Speaker 1: This is in a little time when we're trapping by
Speaker 1: with golf clubs. The two of them killed a hundred
Speaker 1: muskrats on Main Street. Okay, so no here on top
Speaker 1: of this market peaked right then. It was it, and
Speaker 1: we didn't know it because we sent our for auction
Speaker 1: the first time I was out when I had that
Speaker 1: first two thousand, and you put them all up. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I actually I end up selling some in the carcass
Speaker 1: because I could not keep up skinning. I never never
Speaker 1: come home with two hundred muskrats in a day in
Speaker 1: my life, you know, unbelievable. So so what I did
Speaker 1: bring home I put up. We sent them off to auction,
Speaker 1: and we thought we're going to get you know, maybe
Speaker 1: five bucks, maybe six bucks. They went to ten. It
Speaker 1: was like and then after that they went I got
Speaker 1: four a piece. When you're catching hundreds of thousands fast,
Speaker 1: it is real money. That was fun. So then he
Speaker 1: found out he was I'm going with you, So we did.
Speaker 1: We went out that next fall time at it. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what. Before I went out the first time,
Speaker 1: I probably spent three thousand dollars scouting hotels, mileage driving,
Speaker 1: finding the spots, getting permission, permission, not gonna gets I mean,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of research. I didn't just show up,
Speaker 1: you know, but because legally there you got to get
Speaker 1: permission and you have to have written permission. Because we
Speaker 1: got stopped by a couple of boardings and you have
Speaker 1: to have your paperwork, and we had our paperwork. But
Speaker 1: they were like, we don't kill them all. We did
Speaker 1: all that for nothing, you know. But but we were
Speaker 1: all legal, big old And you know, we had a
Speaker 1: guy who stayed on his farm, you know, like yeah,
Speaker 1: camp out, staying the barners a heated quantity and this
Speaker 1: is how good it was. We stayed at a guy's place,
Speaker 1: he let us. Let us. Well, the first guy we stopped,
Speaker 1: he said, yeah, since we got Marsha's all around, are
Speaker 1: you contrapping? And stay right at my place? He said,
Speaker 1: we have duck hunters coming. Stay And you said you
Speaker 1: could use my shed for working. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: how much land do you had? He goes, oh, seven,
Speaker 1: maybe eight? I said, what hundred acres? He said, no, sessions,
Speaker 1: that's a small. My neighbor down the road he's got twenty.
Speaker 1: He said, he'll let you trap two. And then my
Speaker 1: guys down the road the other way. This guy, this guy,
Speaker 1: everybody knew him. And if all we do is say
Speaker 1: his name, kill him. All you guys had a golden ticket.
Speaker 1: We had a golden ticket. We had a population, and
Speaker 1: the price was there all at one time, and that
Speaker 1: never happens, but it did. So then we went back
Speaker 1: the next spring and for three weeks, and my son
Speaker 1: had just gotten out of school. They graduated in the December.
Speaker 1: So we went back out during April. And he's skinned
Speaker 1: for us. That's all he did with skin. No skinning
Speaker 1: the muskrat. You've probably skinned one before. What time do
Speaker 1: you think for the skin one? Just to give you
Speaker 1: a reference. Not fast, I mean not three minutes, but
Speaker 1: not not like the people that are fast at it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we weren't fast either until we went out there,
Speaker 1: and you have to learn to survive. Cut down your movements.
Speaker 1: So I can skin one now in about twenty seconds,
Speaker 1: can't you can get it? Don't about his son anymore?
Speaker 1: Like twelve seconds? Really, are you guys doing that crazy
Speaker 1: over the knee ship. You're not doing it where you're
Speaker 1: hanging it by the tail. I do mind on the
Speaker 1: lap chester. It's it's so fast, it's it's basically taking
Speaker 1: a sock off. It's fast. I mean I don't have
Speaker 1: that speed. You gotta get repetition. I can remember because
Speaker 1: your hands gets so narrowed up from setting traps all day.
Speaker 1: You couldn't you couldn't squeeze the water out of a wester.
Speaker 1: His son was, His son was. So I took twenty
Speaker 1: rats because we would have to skin in the morning
Speaker 1: to get ahead, because we knew we were going to
Speaker 1: come home with a couple hundred more every day. So
Speaker 1: it's like we gotta finish up rest. You know. It
Speaker 1: took me every morning. My hands are limber up so
Speaker 1: I could actually make time. But generally, like at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, we sit down and we go
Speaker 1: there's a hundred left. We go, right, nothing, let's get
Speaker 1: them done. That's for three guys. That's like thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: It's done. But his sons skinned for us because we
Speaker 1: were catching three fifty three sixty three a day. And
Speaker 1: that was when I said I had skinned to pile them.
Speaker 1: I've skinned a pyleum, but meaning I've skinned like a
Speaker 1: few days worth of you guys catch. Well, here's all
Speaker 1: that guys doing this. I mean we were there. We
Speaker 1: weren't the only ones, but I'll tell you what with
Speaker 1: that area we were in, they were all from Wisconsin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Wisconsin trapper. For some reason, I knew how to compete,
Speaker 1: kind of like when we go to South Dakota no
Speaker 1: deer hunting, we see Wisconsin plates everywhere. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know why people from Wisconsin have these certain
Speaker 1: weird stupid skills or I don't know if they're skills
Speaker 1: or desires or I don't training. I don't know that's
Speaker 1: why that is. But they're good rat trappers. Well we
Speaker 1: thought we were good until we want out there, but
Speaker 1: now we're good we're pretty good. No, I mean we
Speaker 1: developed I mean really quick, really quick. The rules are
Speaker 1: a lot more lax there too, as far as what
Speaker 1: you can and can't, Like in Wisconsin, everything that works
Speaker 1: really good is illegal. Oh there it was legals like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we're in heaven man, like a comedy
Speaker 1: traps like me. It's like wow, Like in Wisconsin, comedy
Speaker 1: trap you can set it somewhere where it's in a run,
Speaker 1: but it can't be touching another colony trap. They have
Speaker 1: to be so many feet apart. It can only be
Speaker 1: in a certain area, whereas in the Dakotas and you
Speaker 1: can't move anywhere. We would fill the culverts with colony traps.
Speaker 1: Traps there has to come through and every morning you
Speaker 1: check you have twenty every day. And if you have
Speaker 1: to walk for like for me to you off the road,
Speaker 1: you just pull them out and you shop come out
Speaker 1: in a pile. It's just like well and in there
Speaker 1: so tight. Not another mush crack could get five six
Speaker 1: seven in each trap. You know how you set a
Speaker 1: one ten connover we got one. No, No, it was
Speaker 1: it was a mind blowing It was just and the
Speaker 1: people up there just hated him. Hated them because they're everywhere.
Speaker 1: And this is all that time when like people's half
Speaker 1: through silo was underwater and she was like, yes, trapped
Speaker 1: some farms. We trapped a lot of farms are underwater,
Speaker 1: just abandoned. Yeah, it was it was something. It was.
Speaker 1: So what keeps you guys going now on trapping since
Speaker 1: there is no for market trapping beaver? I live in
Speaker 1: a pretty good spot for beaver right, and we have
Speaker 1: heard that beaver now is coming back up because little
Speaker 1: bit is aig part of it. I had two fur
Speaker 1: buyers called me this week. Guys at that airport in Denver. Yesterday.
Speaker 1: When that fur buyer calls you, he says, I think
Speaker 1: we can make some talking. He says, we're gonna be talking.
Speaker 1: I said, you realize that, he says. He says, I
Speaker 1: know you guys caught over five hundred last spring. I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: we did. Um, I said, didn't guarantee we're gonna do
Speaker 1: that it again, depending on whether and you know, flood
Speaker 1: stage and prezolts and there's ten things that can go wrong.
Speaker 1: I said, well, we're gonna try like hell to match
Speaker 1: that in past years we did. Okay, we're getting any
Speaker 1: we made the money on Caster in the past years,
Speaker 1: the casters where the money was per beaver. We were
Speaker 1: getting six to eight bucks per beaver for Caster the cast.
Speaker 1: That market went down a little bit, right, a little bit,
Speaker 1: a little bit, but all the first coming up, so
Speaker 1: it's probably going to be a wash. I think we
Speaker 1: don't know. We haven't been promised any numbers yet. But
Speaker 1: we got to kill them first. And the thing is
Speaker 1: is a lot of places to be trapped. I mean
Speaker 1: they're flooding roads, whether it's you know, public land, private land.
Speaker 1: We've had people come to us and say, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't get can't get through my driveway because it's
Speaker 1: flooded from beaver. And they're cool animal and everything, but
Speaker 1: it gets to a point where you got to send
Speaker 1: them a little and the market is low, which has
Speaker 1: been for quite a while, the population explodes. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: been great for beavers, I mean the animals themselves. The
Speaker 1: lower market has been phenomenal. But all your problem beaver
Speaker 1: or general, really flooding out any kind of public role,
Speaker 1: they get killed, the government kills him. You're paying for it,
Speaker 1: your federal tax dollars paying for it. They got trappers, ouctor,
Speaker 1: your ound killing them being we do it for free.
Speaker 1: What's your teacher? Say this one? I got this for Christmas.
Speaker 1: That's good. Never underestimate an old man with a chainsaw.
Speaker 1: I got them for Christmas. Nice. Yeah. I got a
Speaker 1: beaver whisper one too, but I couldn't decide what you
Speaker 1: want to wear. My wife got me the beaver Whisperer one.
Speaker 1: Are you guys sticking around for the trivia show? Yeah? Sure, dude,
Speaker 1: I love you channel man. Thanks, Thanks, it's fun. It's
Speaker 1: been a real wild ride. When I first got into it,
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, I can make an extra five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand bucks a month. That was my goal. And
Speaker 1: I know people that were doing you're saying five thousand
Speaker 1: because you know, just for doing some videos or something
Speaker 1: I like to do. Yeah, I'm doing it anyway, but
Speaker 1: as well, So I started recording it and now it's
Speaker 1: turned into basically another job. But it's fun and I
Speaker 1: like it, and it's just growing. Yeah, the trapping and fire,
Speaker 1: which is stuff we've done her whole life. It's not
Speaker 1: a big deal. I always say to everybody, whatever your
Speaker 1: passion is, whatever you're really good at, whatever your talented at,
Speaker 1: start a YouTube channel. But put everything you got into it.
Speaker 1: You always say that to everybody, you know. There was
Speaker 1: a girl on the plane. On the plane, she looked
Speaker 1: me up. She's just as incredible. She's a big baker.
Speaker 1: She's here, she's here, she lives here, she lives here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I told her, I said, started channel. I said, you
Speaker 1: do she does bread stuff like that? Started channel. I
Speaker 1: do have a loaf of bread in my Duffel bag.
Speaker 1: My wife sent for you. She's been making the seller.
Speaker 1: Oh no, ship, I got red flags because I don't
Speaker 1: know why, but she's been doing the seller does stuff
Speaker 1: that's great. Man. So they called an organic mass when
Speaker 1: they pulled you over, Well, it came through the scanner.
Speaker 1: What do you got interested? It's bread? Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: got I one time I had him say that there's
Speaker 1: an organic mass in your bag? Right? What was it?
Speaker 1: Was an elk tongue. Yeah, they can just tell when
Speaker 1: I zapp it that they can tell that. Well, I said,
Speaker 1: number the raisins and the races. I'm not kidding. You
Speaker 1: can see the raisins on the screen there. I told
Speaker 1: my wife, I said, I got pulled over by the
Speaker 1: t s A because that loafur freaking bread. You're gonna
Speaker 1: give it to me. Yeah, she made it for you.
Speaker 1: We got something else for you too. I got something
Speaker 1: else here too. Let's dig in. She said that's no way.
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, I said, t s A got me
Speaker 1: at the airport over your bread. You know I'm getting
Speaker 1: um tonight. I'm taking possession of of a sable hat
Speaker 1: that I had made for my wife. Nice because who
Speaker 1: sold it is Yanni's friend, Um, Yanni's friends Sueme, I justice,
Speaker 1: So is that how it said? So we've got two
Speaker 1: of them, whichever one fits you better. And I know
Speaker 1: you got one, but oh yeah, sorry, I know you
Speaker 1: got bread. That's your bread. You can give it to whoever.
Speaker 1: We got two different sizes. That's the Wisconsin beer. Well
Speaker 1: that's not that Janckie Montana stuff. That's a different style
Speaker 1: than Steve. Yeah, you can only wear it if it's
Speaker 1: ptable old because you will be sweating. That's they're so warm.
Speaker 1: What do you guys call that? That is so different?
Speaker 1: That that's so different Trooper feel the fur on that
Speaker 1: compared out here? Well, I don't. Well, you'll know when
Speaker 1: we've got some of the best beaver in the world
Speaker 1: where we live, where I live that's nice stuff. Incredible, man,
Speaker 1: that's nice boy. That black like that, that's not even black,
Speaker 1: that's just that's just dark. We get them black, We
Speaker 1: do get blacks. Yeah, well that's beautiful man. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't even for snowmobiling. Yeah, that's what I've been using.
Speaker 1: Mind for it. The world's greatest snowbill hat, ice fish
Speaker 1: and hat everybody should have. It's like all you ever
Speaker 1: watched the fur hat? Yes, I have. I saw a
Speaker 1: couple of dude that is like, put that on, and
Speaker 1: that is a warm There's nothing. There's nothing warmer than that.
Speaker 1: Nothing we'll have. Carmen tried it on because she needs
Speaker 1: one for a snowbile. This one might be the one
Speaker 1: for you. That's a big one. That's Carmen. Try that one.
Speaker 1: We allowed it is Carmen allowed to take one first one. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I don't deserve that. That's that's yours. That's it looks good,
Speaker 1: that's yours. I gotta get with the flaps down, you know,
Speaker 1: but you know what your GoGG will stand yours. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you gotta take that one. Take that one. You gotta
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah, Well it's good and means speaking of
Speaker 1: not hearing though when I put my goggles on. You know,
Speaker 1: snowobile is not good for your years, so kind of
Speaker 1: you know, for my kids always riding on the back
Speaker 1: talking about something. I'm like, do you understand I have
Speaker 1: a fur hat on and then I have my snow
Speaker 1: goggles strap over my ears. I don't know, and this
Speaker 1: machine is noisy. I don't know what you're talking. Aware
Speaker 1: that someone's talking. I need to take a picture of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we got to get all. This is a group phote on.
Speaker 1: When you start ripping around and then brand new snowmobiles
Speaker 1: that are coming your way already you go vision and style. No,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you that when we do catch links
Speaker 1: because I'm going to be positive, we're going to h Yeah,
Speaker 1: I need a coat so no, you're standing there in
Speaker 1: the freezing cold for a long time, you start getting
Speaker 1: really cold, So this will be perfect. Do the little
Speaker 1: deally upfront pane? Well, the guy that makes them for me,
Speaker 1: that's the style he makes. I mean they make different,
Speaker 1: but these two are different, aren't they different? Same? Different size?
Speaker 1: That's three and that's the four. You know what I'm
Speaker 1: getting made right now is I'm getting ah I sent
Speaker 1: in some muskrats right now to Don Clifford, and he's
Speaker 1: doing me a muskrat one of these with a leather bill,
Speaker 1: because you know the sons just killing you can get
Speaker 1: those two. I mean, these are just the ones that
Speaker 1: I've always gotten. Everybody in my family's got him. All
Speaker 1: my kids got him, all my kids brings. But you
Speaker 1: put plucked and cheered on the inside. Well, there aren't
Speaker 1: plucked and sheered the that's just on the mittens. You
Speaker 1: put like a plucked and sheered It's just it's just
Speaker 1: a felt was that just felt? You guys all got
Speaker 1: all your fingers? Yeah, that's good. How many times we've
Speaker 1: been caught in a trap all of them? Ever lost
Speaker 1: a finger on your wood splitter or something? Yet I've
Speaker 1: seen guys that have. Yeah, I know a couple of
Speaker 1: people lost tips. Yeah that he looks so good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Carmen looked great. But you'd wear it, wear it right
Speaker 1: in your snowbill though. Oh this is gonna be why
Speaker 1: I wear it for the rest of my life. This
Speaker 1: is incredible. The only bad thing about a fur hat
Speaker 1: is it's unfortunate it came from an animal. I mean,
Speaker 1: it would be nice, but there's nothing like a real
Speaker 1: fur there just isn't. The good thing is they make
Speaker 1: them every day. There's more beaver being made right now.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you a a quick story. I actually wrote
Speaker 1: about this one time. But I had my first muskrat
Speaker 1: hat I had made. I was still grown, and so
Speaker 1: it's just like every year got tighter and tighter and tighter.
Speaker 1: You would like give me headaches, man. And at one
Speaker 1: point in time, at one point time, I lose because
Speaker 1: I'm always taking it off because it's not comfortable, I
Speaker 1: lose my fur hat. I can show you the exact
Speaker 1: spot I lost my fur hat, right where I caught
Speaker 1: my first otter, not the same day I'm going. I
Speaker 1: lose my fur hat and it's just gone. I have
Speaker 1: no idea what happened to it. One day, I'm going
Speaker 1: down the road with my friend ed Barefoot. We're driving
Speaker 1: along in his station wagon, going out to a place
Speaker 1: called Cisco Bayou, and I see melting out of the
Speaker 1: snow bank a road kill muskrat. I'm not shipping you.
Speaker 1: I see a road kill muskrat melting out of the
Speaker 1: snow bank, and I tell him to stop it. Your hat,
Speaker 1: my hat because it was a spot right jump out
Speaker 1: because there was a creek crossing right there and I
Speaker 1: just thought a muskrat got hit by car, but hey, stop,
Speaker 1: go overre pulled out of the bank. It's my damn hat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't know where it's at any right, So
Speaker 1: to put a bowl on the trapping thing? Um right now,
Speaker 1: it's the beaver is going up in price because of
Speaker 1: yellow Stone the show, and because some singers Beyonce just
Speaker 1: did a bunch of videos I guess wearing the stets
Speaker 1: and hats, and stets and hats are made with the
Speaker 1: under fur, the felt apart from the beaver. That's it's
Speaker 1: so madly man like. You can wear a leather and
Speaker 1: everybody's cool with it, right because the fur is gone.
Speaker 1: And then now you can wear a beaver. Like if
Speaker 1: you have a stets and hat, take a look on
Speaker 1: the inside of that something bit and you'll say, up
Speaker 1: like ten x or whatever that is made from a
Speaker 1: beaver's fur. You're supporting trapping, thank you. That's great. As
Speaker 1: long as we're making some money off of it, I
Speaker 1: don't care. You know, we don't get paid very much
Speaker 1: for trapping beaver. It's a pretty low income deal these
Speaker 1: it's it's like getting going hunting and getting paid when
Speaker 1: you get hoomers. You know what a cost of going
Speaker 1: hunting trip. Yeah, well, at the end of our trip
Speaker 1: we made money out. We didn't make a lot, but
Speaker 1: we made some and we had a hell of a
Speaker 1: time doing it. Dude, the quality of this compared to
Speaker 1: the ones we have around here, which are blond and
Speaker 1: blond and skanky, the quality of this is unbelievable. I
Speaker 1: only I can't stop touching. Everybody likes the pet beaver, right,
Speaker 1: this is great man. So yeah, I only keep the
Speaker 1: very best for the hats sell arrest. I mean I
Speaker 1: don't not all of them. I mean I only do
Speaker 1: like twenty a year. I don't do a lot. So no,
Speaker 1: my wife, so my wife as a machine though we're
Speaker 1: trying to figure it out. I'm hoping she can learn
Speaker 1: how home. Right now, we're having them made, but the
Speaker 1: slow part is getting them to the tannery and getting
Speaker 1: the fur back from a tannery sometimes to sixty eight months,
Speaker 1: and then send them the hat maker. There might be
Speaker 1: another sixt eight months, so it's not like they're all
Speaker 1: and then doesn't fit you. You know, we gotta carry three, four,
Speaker 1: five sizes I might have it. We're gonna get into that.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get into the fur hat mitten bis man,
Speaker 1: here you go, because it's so great. It is. It's awesome.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I figure you might like it as nice design. Man,
Speaker 1: good in this thing. You look like you're like going
Speaker 1: down like a like a fashion runway. I've never seen
Speaker 1: that hat on anybody that doesn't look good, and I'm
Speaker 1: not kidding you. The thing that's cool about it is
Speaker 1: I've had three or four different ones that I've sold
Speaker 1: because people I gotta have it. What do you gotta have?
Speaker 1: I know, like guys getting out. Okay, here's what they
Speaker 1: cost you. I'm just reading your lipstick. Got my hat on?
Speaker 1: Gave I had? Anyway? I need another hat? Guess who
Speaker 1: he calls? Yeah, yeah, I'll get that splitter up to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where's that processor? Nothing? Alright, guys, we're gonna wrap it up.
Speaker 1: We do run time. Yeah, we can hopefully wolf down
Speaker 1: some lunch. Appreciate you coming on. Man, you guys are
Speaker 1: staying for the trivia show. Yeah, you know what, I
Speaker 1: don't think that you're gonna win. I can probably not
Speaker 1: because here's the deal. He's gonna throw you one bone.
Speaker 1: If he knows does he know the here he's gonna
Speaker 1: throw you one bone. I think I'm gonna beat you probably.
Speaker 1: I played along on one of them. I watched and
Speaker 1: I got five. Right, So you played along on one?
Speaker 1: Did five? You know what? You'll beat the ship out
Speaker 1: of Christ? Definitely got the I got the one we
Speaker 1: had the red Snapper. I got that because he asked
Speaker 1: me that and I knew it. And the one that
Speaker 1: was what the author what was his name anyway? Henyway
Speaker 1: the sun was awarding or something? Got that goes a
Speaker 1: good guess. Yeah, I think I got fired about that one,
Speaker 1: just so I know, I just want to works. I
Speaker 1: had a guy that plays at home, the blue collar scholar.
Speaker 1: He reached out to me about a problem he's having
Speaker 1: where he's like he had to admit because he plays
Speaker 1: at home and sends me these great scores okay of
Speaker 1: his home score sheet. We fly him into play and
Speaker 1: he bombs he well, he told me, goes well, this
Speaker 1: one thing he was texting me is one thing I
Speaker 1: didn't mention. As I pause, he hits to think because
Speaker 1: it's a high stress environment because you're being heckled, right,
Speaker 1: You're like trying to make sure no one gives a hint,
Speaker 1: and it's high stress, and he can hit pause and
Speaker 1: just contemplate, and I have to deal with a lot
Speaker 1: of stress. Oh and he could come back two hours later.
Speaker 1: He could think about the question for two hours if
Speaker 1: he wanted to know. After a recent game, we had
Speaker 1: a real problem with how a question was worded, I did,
Speaker 1: and and the winner that day Randall had a problem
Speaker 1: how a question was worded, and so he and I
Speaker 1: later texted back and forth about how we felt the
Speaker 1: question should have been worded, and we sent the rewording
Speaker 1: to the host, Spencer new Heart, and then Randall made
Speaker 1: a joke that he says, I like to reword the
Speaker 1: questions until I get to a point where I feel
Speaker 1: as though I would have guessed it. And that's what
Speaker 1: he had done, is just reworded until he felt like
Speaker 1: he would have gotten it. So even that, like the syntax,
Speaker 1: the wording can impact the performance. Very stressful, Steve, I
Speaker 1: gotta say, Brodie's surpassing you and who can be the
Speaker 1: biggest grump complainer in the room so hot if you
Speaker 1: want to reclaim your crown? Brody is grumpy? Do I
Speaker 1: mean like I get grumpy playing tribute, but Brody is grumpy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the victories and that Krinn isn't Krinn. That's Hayden. Hayden.
Speaker 1: Samcau with three You had to Steel Crins lit Area.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, thanks for joining. Everybody good concluder