Speaker 1: This is a me eater podcast, coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening uncast,
Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by first Light, creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear.
Speaker 1: For every hunt, first Light, Go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody,
Speaker 1: We're coming coming at you from Florida, where I'm where
Speaker 1: I've basically become an honorary resident. I've been down here
Speaker 1: sadamn long. It's like I've met everybody in the state
Speaker 1: back to back, heard all the problems I've been like,
Speaker 1: I've been on a man, I've gotten an earful. It's
Speaker 1: like two weeks, I've gotten an earful for what. Oh,
Speaker 1: just all the like all the issues in Florida. Oh,
Speaker 1: you've heard all the issues in Florida. Yeah. I've been
Speaker 1: on a whirlwind tour, talking to talking to many different sportsmen.
Speaker 1: The most surprising thing to me down here is how unpopular,
Speaker 1: how unpopular among the folk I've met, How unpopular the
Speaker 1: panthers are in one way, okay, like people think they're
Speaker 1: gonna get their dogs and just from hunts. From a
Speaker 1: hunting standpoint, it's remarkably similar. It's like it's such a parallel. John,
Speaker 1: Am I boring you? No, not at all. Just gotta
Speaker 1: just taking care of a little loose ender right here
Speaker 1: seems to be important. Listen it uh okay, the parallels,
Speaker 1: the parallels between what the parallels between the wolf debate
Speaker 1: in the Northern Rockies soon to be in the Southern
Speaker 1: the debate that's being relocated to the Southern Rockies. But
Speaker 1: the wolf debate in the Northern Rockies and the panther
Speaker 1: issue in Florida, even though we're talking about far fewer
Speaker 1: numbers of the actual animals on the ground, is remarkably
Speaker 1: si similar. Down to the point. Now I listen, I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm gonna what I'm doing right now. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: trying to be like a journalist right now. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying what this This is not me saying what I
Speaker 1: think is. Oh, I'm gonna preface. This is saying something
Speaker 1: joined today by Richard Martinez. Hey, Steve, most interesting job
Speaker 1: on the planet. Can you tell people what you do
Speaker 1: for work? I'm an art handler, That's my profession. I
Speaker 1: help manage an art handling company in West Pond Beach
Speaker 1: and Uh yeah, I handle fine art, any kind of
Speaker 1: fine art, logistics, moving, packing, shipping, installation, protection of fine arts, storage,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. Me and Ridge ponder, we think we
Speaker 1: found in this very house the original Live Love Laugh sign.
Speaker 1: And we were thinking, well, we were thinking about stealing
Speaker 1: it and hiring you to move it back up to
Speaker 1: where we live. This is a this is live Love
Speaker 1: laugh A long how a long first one was like
Speaker 1: this one. But what does it look like? Nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three role played how we thought it came about. We
Speaker 1: thought it came about where there's a guy saying there,
Speaker 1: you know, he's like, and I thought to myself, what
Speaker 1: do I really care about? Laugh? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: I like to be alive, because you know, if you
Speaker 1: ain't alive, you're dead. And he thought, what else do
Speaker 1: I like? I like the laugh? Yeah, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1: And then his wife walked in. I like my wife.
Speaker 1: He had named her yet, and he got guilty feeling.
Speaker 1: He's like, and yeah, I love my wife. That's what's
Speaker 1: important to me. Check laugh check. And that's where that
Speaker 1: came from, and it spread like wildfire until today we
Speaker 1: found yesterday we found the original. It's a little plaque.
Speaker 1: What was I saying, oh, well, before you go on,
Speaker 1: mine would be live laugh turkeys, not no, no turkeys, yeah,
Speaker 1: live love turkeys. Careful there. So, uh, We're down here
Speaker 1: hunting with Richard Martinez and that's just one of the
Speaker 1: main things I've done in Florida. But the minute I
Speaker 1: got here, Chester's also here and Seth Morris, so I'm
Speaker 1: not too that Garrett Smith and thanks so just for
Speaker 1: my dad. Stay tuned for that part, folks. The minute
Speaker 1: I met Richard, we well, no, because we met at
Speaker 1: a live show. We did a live show in Boise, Yes,
Speaker 1: and you said, you guys should apply for a turkey
Speaker 1: tag at one of the apply for a turkey tag
Speaker 1: at one of the wildlife management areas in Florida. And
Speaker 1: and how many years did it take? Four took a
Speaker 1: while to draw. Yeah, four years, because we're like non
Speaker 1: resins with no points or whatever. We've been starting from scratch,
Speaker 1: starting from scratch. Is it easier for resident to draw that?
Speaker 1: You'd have to fact check me. But what I've been
Speaker 1: told is that there's a ten percent cap for non
Speaker 1: residents on the quota. Gotcha, That's why it took me
Speaker 1: and Yana's so long to draw. So the minute I
Speaker 1: met Richard for the second time. So I met him
Speaker 1: the first time, I had a live show. And do
Speaker 1: you remember why we liked him? I can't remember why
Speaker 1: I liked him. I mean, I like him all over again,
Speaker 1: but can't remember why I originally like, he's we got
Speaker 1: a lot of people offer us a calm, cool and collective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well something structure. My first impressions. First thing when I
Speaker 1: met him, he tells me about his friend who hates me,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, what do you mean he hates me?
Speaker 1: And he's talking about his friend hates me. This is
Speaker 1: the perils of of doing journalism like I'm about ready
Speaker 1: to do on the panther issue, because the reason he
Speaker 1: hates me is we had a We had a a
Speaker 1: us GS biology so you will United States Geological Service
Speaker 1: biologist on talking about the Burmese python and this biologist
Speaker 1: who's working on the Burmese python problem, he's talking about
Speaker 1: his friend hates me for something. The biologist said, who's
Speaker 1: working on the Burmese python problem? And I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: so he loves pythons. Oh no, no, he hates pythons too,
Speaker 1: but he didn't like a thing that the individual said
Speaker 1: about pythons, right, is this your snake biologist, buddy? No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: So he didn't like that. The guy said that numerically,
Speaker 1: python hunters aren't having a meaningful impact on pythons. That
Speaker 1: was this guy's take. Can I ask the side question
Speaker 1: to Richard on that, Yeah, if you really want to
Speaker 1: get into it. But I'm trying to get somewhere else.
Speaker 1: But go ahead, Yeah, but just watch in my head, Um,
Speaker 1: what's the chances of one of those big pythons being
Speaker 1: on the property we were, we're hunting some more probably low.
Speaker 1: I think they're more prolific as you move further southeast.
Speaker 1: So we saw what seemed to be a snake track
Speaker 1: going across the road. Well, we've got a lot of
Speaker 1: snakes here, but it looked big. Didn't didn't look big. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it was like python, big gator. No,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a snake. When you say, well,
Speaker 1: I yeah, I asked some other dudes and they said no.
Speaker 1: They said they'd heard of it, but they haven't seen
Speaker 1: one that That snake track struck me as a big snake,
Speaker 1: like a chester or eating size. Anyway, go ahead, So
Speaker 1: that's been weighing on my mind, and it's weighing on
Speaker 1: my mind as I waded into this, because I realized,
Speaker 1: you know, that's saying uh uh you know in the
Speaker 1: West waters for drinking no whiskeys, for drinking waters, for
Speaker 1: fighting about water rights issues. I've been thinking about what
Speaker 1: since I've been here, I've been thinking, Florida's for fighting
Speaker 1: well made up mostly of water, Florida's for fighting. We're
Speaker 1: fighting over water, yeah, every every and these are like
Speaker 1: honest like these are like hard work and honest to
Speaker 1: goodness out outdoors people and man. Just a lot of
Speaker 1: contentious issues in Florida around pythons, panthers, three peas by pans,
Speaker 1: panthers and people people. Oh that is a three piece pythons, panthers,
Speaker 1: people in water, which is a w and man like
Speaker 1: a contentious environment. Absolutely, But the point I was getting
Speaker 1: as how contentious the panthers are, and it has parallels
Speaker 1: to the wolf issue in the Northern Rockies, right down
Speaker 1: to the idea that the panther here now isn't the
Speaker 1: panther that was here before, to the point that I'll
Speaker 1: meet hunters. I've met hunters who say deer numbers have collapsed.
Speaker 1: Now I'm just reporting what people I've been getting yearful
Speaker 1: from everybody on different things. Deer numbers have collapsed in
Speaker 1: many of these areas. Okay, they've collapsed because of the
Speaker 1: introduction of panthers. And I'll say, but when you say introduction,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make sense because it was not even a reintroduction,
Speaker 1: like the Florida panther was always on the landscape. Admittedly,
Speaker 1: it got down to very few, it got down to
Speaker 1: less than fifty. At the point that it was left
Speaker 1: less than fifty, they brought in seven or eight females
Speaker 1: from Texas to supplement the population because they were seeing
Speaker 1: some inbreeding issues, so they brought in some females from Texas, which,
Speaker 1: in and of itself, even among panther people, people got
Speaker 1: to fight about that because they had fallen in love
Speaker 1: with the Some folks had fallen in love with the
Speaker 1: idea that the Florida panther was not like everybody else's panther. Yea,
Speaker 1: Now it's all puma con color. It's all the same species.
Speaker 1: So whether you're talking about a cougar in California, mountain
Speaker 1: lion in Montana, someone hits one on the road in Connecticut.
Speaker 1: You're in southwest Florida. Okay, it's all the same species.
Speaker 1: A lot of people think panther, and they think black panther. Yep,
Speaker 1: it's the beast of many names, um mountain, lion, cougar, painter, catamount,
Speaker 1: there's more. All the same crater, all the same crater,
Speaker 1: and the Florida panther. Like Florida made the same steak
Speaker 1: with their black bears, which we'll get to in a
Speaker 1: minute here, and we've got some more stuff to cover off,
Speaker 1: made the same mistake with their black bears by declaring
Speaker 1: that it's the Florida black bear and not just like
Speaker 1: the same like the black bear that used to exist
Speaker 1: everywhere from the from California to New York, from Yukon
Speaker 1: to South Florida, like the black bear, the panther versus
Speaker 1: American versus American the black The panther was at a
Speaker 1: time the most wide like of any It had the
Speaker 1: most widespread distribution of any large mammal in the New World. WHOA,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Meaning they've turned up in the
Speaker 1: Mackenzie Delta. Okay, so where the Mackenzie River flows into
Speaker 1: the Arctic Ocean. They've turned up from the Mackenzie Delta too.
Speaker 1: Was it Tierra del Fuego, Chile to the southern tip
Speaker 1: of Chili, Chile to the southern tip of Patagonia. That's
Speaker 1: how widespread coast to coast, top to bottom in the
Speaker 1: Western hemisphere. Two continents, two continents. That's cool. Well, it
Speaker 1: got eliminated through poisoning and other things, and it would
Speaker 1: have been patches. So at some point Florida is like
Speaker 1: it's the Florida panther. Not like that. It's just a
Speaker 1: little stronghold of the regular old cougar, mountain, lion, painter,
Speaker 1: catamount panther that exists all across the continent. Numbers got
Speaker 1: down and they brought in some from Texas, and the
Speaker 1: way I've been like the people, the folk I've just
Speaker 1: been talking to, like various hunters are like that. Now
Speaker 1: it's a super cougar that lives in Florida. The same
Speaker 1: way when you're in the northern Rockies. They talk about
Speaker 1: the reintroduction. It was a ninety six or ninety seven six,
Speaker 1: I believe, when they did the wolf reintroduction. There's a
Speaker 1: widespread belief they brought down the meanest, nastiest super wolves
Speaker 1: like the meanest. We even heard a guy. We even
Speaker 1: met a guy one time in British Columbia who's saying that.
Speaker 1: He was like, oh, yeah, my buddy worked on getting
Speaker 1: those wolves and they'd poke them all with the stick
Speaker 1: and get the meanest, nastiest one. Yeah, they had thirty
Speaker 1: or forty of them in a big old pen, and
Speaker 1: then they they weeded out the ones that had growling
Speaker 1: the most. He said, they'd poke them with a stick
Speaker 1: and whatever wolves got most riled up there like sena, Yes,
Speaker 1: stupid Americans, here you go super wolves, and there's the
Speaker 1: idea that by bringing in these seven or eight can
Speaker 1: you do you mind looking up how many females they
Speaker 1: brought in? Check me on app from and look up
Speaker 1: where in Texas they came from. That's the first time
Speaker 1: they'd introduced they supplemented or supplemented the native they supplemented,
Speaker 1: so they had probably less than fifty okay, less than
Speaker 1: fifty Florida panthers and Osman getting to something a minute ago.
Speaker 1: Why were people mad about that? They were mad about
Speaker 1: that because they felt that the panther, and the Florida
Speaker 1: panther was like special and unique, and people were like
Speaker 1: oh no, if you bring in these Texas panthers, you're
Speaker 1: gonna like mess up the Florida panther. And most conservation
Speaker 1: biologists were like, listen, man, you can have a you're
Speaker 1: gonna have no panthers, or you can have a hybridized panther.
Speaker 1: But the way you're going right now, it's choosing between
Speaker 1: those two things. They're either gonna blip out or you're
Speaker 1: gonna you're gonna supplement with genetics from Texas. And it
Speaker 1: really wasn't going to be a hybridized one because pumicon color. Yeah. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: they did this and it was very effective. That a
Speaker 1: bunch of their protections. It was very effective. And now
Speaker 1: with they got less than three hundred. Yeah, that's debatable.
Speaker 1: Debatable depends on who you ask. The same thing. I'm
Speaker 1: same thing with wolves. Yeah, same thing with wolves in
Speaker 1: the northern Rockies and so y ask yeah, right, But
Speaker 1: it's it's it is from It is a widely held
Speaker 1: belief under the among the deer hunters. I've spoken to
Speaker 1: that um that that has caused a impact cratering of
Speaker 1: deer populations in southwest Florida, which, like you're saying, up north,
Speaker 1: people would say, well, some people would say wolves are
Speaker 1: doing that, yeah, which is like, that's it's not a
Speaker 1: debate that it's an objective reality. It's objective. It's not
Speaker 1: a debt point. It's an objective reality that bringing wolves,
Speaker 1: like introducing wolves, reintroducing wolves on a landscape has a
Speaker 1: profound immediate impact on ELK numbers, Like you can't that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that that doesn't need to mean to everybody
Speaker 1: that they're bad. But it is nonsense. It is nonsense
Speaker 1: to sit and act like that's not true. It's it's
Speaker 1: like infuriating when people want to act like introducing wolves
Speaker 1: to a landscape doesn't have a dramatic impact on ELK numbers.
Speaker 1: It just does. Yeh, take it or leave it like
Speaker 1: applause it or not, but it does, right, And acting
Speaker 1: like they like eat nuts and berries is ridiculous. And
Speaker 1: it's not just that it's not just like them physically
Speaker 1: eating things. Is it causes a dramatic shift in behavior.
Speaker 1: And it's like they, I'm out of it. But when
Speaker 1: it hits, when it hits, like when if they do
Speaker 1: it in Florida or sorry, when they reintroduce wolves into
Speaker 1: Colorado and the numbers they're talking about they are going
Speaker 1: to see a massive decline milk numbers in those places.
Speaker 1: It'll it'll crater and it'll creep back up. It won't
Speaker 1: get as high as it was. It like, it'll it'll
Speaker 1: drop fast, it'll climb up. This is my prediction. This
Speaker 1: is my l crystal ball. It'll drop fast, it'll slowly
Speaker 1: climb up, and it won't get as high as it was,
Speaker 1: because how could it. Yeah, there's predators. It's like you're
Speaker 1: you're putting up. You're like, take there's a there's a
Speaker 1: there's a niche that isn't currently occupied and it'll be
Speaker 1: occupied and they eat seven pounds of me today. It's like,
Speaker 1: you can't get around this. UM. I had. I had
Speaker 1: no idea the way I had no idea that that
Speaker 1: the that that increase of from sub fifty to two
Speaker 1: fifty three hundred more than three hundred panthers is a
Speaker 1: treat to a point where I was taw a new
Speaker 1: guy and he was talking about the absence UM. Not
Speaker 1: for Turkey hundred, but in part of my wanderings, we
Speaker 1: were down by the Everglades National Park and he's talking
Speaker 1: about an absence of UM midsize mammals. Okay, so that
Speaker 1: raccoons basically, you know, raccoon's basically gone, grinner's possums basically gone.
Speaker 1: Armadillo's basically gone no, no no. And I said, oh, man,
Speaker 1: I thought that was uh. I thought that was the
Speaker 1: whole deal with the whole pythons. Like, I thought that
Speaker 1: was attributed to the pythons. He's like, he thinks that
Speaker 1: the pythons are like a scapegoat. This is just a dude.
Speaker 1: But listen, this is a dude. This is like, this
Speaker 1: is a guy that has spent his whole life out
Speaker 1: on the land, his father, his grandfather. That's like all
Speaker 1: they've done. Yeah right, they're like self identified gladesman. That's
Speaker 1: all they've done. And he's not a pessimist. He still
Speaker 1: gets very excited about turkey hunting, very excited about squirrel hunting.
Speaker 1: But and he's you know, he's not like a conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 1: He's like, man, that's an impact. In my view, it's
Speaker 1: like a scapegoat because you can go to the dry
Speaker 1: areas that just aren't even suitable habitat, and instead of
Speaker 1: those dry areas that aren't suitable habitat becoming like a
Speaker 1: refugia for all this stuff fleeing the pythons. They're still
Speaker 1: in pash it's not there, yea. But our experience today
Speaker 1: would would say that those are the refugia because we
Speaker 1: were in country that U don't doesn't suppose he doesn't
Speaker 1: have or hasn't been has pythons haven't been seen, and
Speaker 1: we saw all those critters. That's a good point in
Speaker 1: a short period of time. Yep. Today we went over
Speaker 1: on to a like. Ah, so we hunted two days
Speaker 1: on the WMA, which, holy cow, is just a beautiful man.
Speaker 1: I got the hand it to like the like and
Speaker 1: talk about all the contention in Florida. Um, the state
Speaker 1: does a beautiful job on those WMAs. Man. I thought
Speaker 1: it just gorgeous, gorgeous and very diverse. Just yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like gorgeous. Yeah, a big country to walk around in,
Speaker 1: which is not something I expect when I leave the West.
Speaker 1: Right you can go where your where are your feet
Speaker 1: out if you want? Yep, And like a pretty good
Speaker 1: and I found too, like a pretty good blend of
Speaker 1: walking hunting. But still some road, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: We never ran across another hunter, now that we're talking,
Speaker 1: we definitely did, but we didn't. I mean in the field,
Speaker 1: we saw other people on the road. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not in the woods, not in no woods. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I really liked it, So hats off on that. Oh
Speaker 1: would you find Chester? So in nineteen eighty six, three
Speaker 1: females from Texas, I couldn't find it exactly where they're from.
Speaker 1: We're brought to Florida. In nineteen eighty eight, seven wild
Speaker 1: caught mountain lions captured in West Texas. We're released in
Speaker 1: Florida super super cougars and m let's see. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, nineteen mountain lions, eleven females and eight sterile males,
Speaker 1: both captive raised as well as wild caught, are introduced
Speaker 1: into the local panther population. Really and then why sterile males?
Speaker 1: I don't know. And then in probably just for study purposes,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety five, eight wild caught females. Oh, we're
Speaker 1: are captured and released in effort. Yeah, so what's the source?
Speaker 1: So a total of how many I had some Okay,
Speaker 1: see you get for just listening to people. I had
Speaker 1: someone there to day telling me all about where they
Speaker 1: came from. And it was like seven females and that
Speaker 1: was like the extent of it. Okay, those were thirty seven.
Speaker 1: Those were the most recent that really caused that spike.
Speaker 1: So it was like, prior to that it wasn't happening.
Speaker 1: It could have been where the success began. Was that
Speaker 1: last and this source is the Mountain Lion Foundation. Okay,
Speaker 1: so West Texas super cougars and people are pissed. Man Like,
Speaker 1: I thought it was like widely. I didn't know there
Speaker 1: was the same I didn't know there's the same element.
Speaker 1: But what surprised me. What surprised me is the idea
Speaker 1: that it wasn't like a saving existing population, that the
Speaker 1: perception it wasn't like saving the Florida panther. It was
Speaker 1: sort of like they made they created a predator and
Speaker 1: let it loose upon the landscape. Yeah, something needed to
Speaker 1: occupy that space of what the Florida panther was occupying
Speaker 1: for various different reasons, and the degree to which not
Speaker 1: happy no, and also that some people are like they
Speaker 1: just don't want them. It's like my whole tape like
Speaker 1: in the Northern Rockets. I think like generally with the
Speaker 1: wolf issue, generally among my peer group, which is broad,
Speaker 1: I was gonna make a consensus. The consensus would be
Speaker 1: people welcome wolves on the landscape, but they want to
Speaker 1: see them managed right heavily. Yeah. Well, but but it's
Speaker 1: not like if you went to most people, like like
Speaker 1: you went to most people you hang out with and said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you a magic wand if you wave
Speaker 1: the magic wand wolves are gone from the lower forty eight. Uh,
Speaker 1: the vast, vast majority of people hang out with would
Speaker 1: not touch that Wand there's a happy medium. Do you
Speaker 1: know what? Maybe people that would wave the Wand one
Speaker 1: guy's pretty tight with us wood, is that right? Oh?
Speaker 1: But does he have does he have like mixed up?
Speaker 1: Because I know, I don't know what because he's got
Speaker 1: lion hounds? Oh no, oh, just speaking of the good
Speaker 1: old days of elk hunting. Oh, I got it. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's all I hear about that. Like, we know it's
Speaker 1: good the way you have it right now, and you're
Speaker 1: enjoying your elk hunting. But if you had been here
Speaker 1: to see how great it was before those wolves showed up,
Speaker 1: you would want them gone too. Yeah. I gotta say.
Speaker 1: I started hunting in Montana the year the wolves showed up, right,
Speaker 1: which was the good old day. It was good. Well,
Speaker 1: it could be a pressure issue too. There's different factors. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I mean like most those population I want to talk
Speaker 1: about Florida. I want to talk about things besides Florida.
Speaker 1: But mos those I mean you saw like generally you
Speaker 1: see two thirds declines. I got a question with the
Speaker 1: Florida with the Florida impact of the panther boost to
Speaker 1: the population. Was that aligned with because during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: Florida's population boomed, right, a lot of people moved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that is definitely a factor to this dear population.
Speaker 1: Now this gold before you. Yeah, I just carefu. I
Speaker 1: had a um, I had a girlier day telling me
Speaker 1: that I like that this is hard to measure. She said,
Speaker 1: Florida is the free estate. Oh, I was like pretty
Speaker 1: freezing free Ever, the first time I was ever like
Speaker 1: rated like freedom level. This isn't a fact. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: freedom levels that's pretty in Arizona, They're like damn it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I would think that there'd be some Texans. Yeah, Texas.
Speaker 1: She's like Florida's free estate. How big is the Florida
Speaker 1: panther range in Florida? Uh, well that's debatable. You ask Yeah,
Speaker 1: people when you ask questions, so easily learned by just
Speaker 1: looking it up. Looked that up Chester from Yeah, all
Speaker 1: you listeners out there, just look it up. No Chester
Speaker 1: Chesters of Today's researcher Man. That's a fast chat. That's contentious,
Speaker 1: meaning there's well I don't believe it is because like
Speaker 1: with I mean, lord, Florida's got a lot of trail
Speaker 1: cams in it, Holy smokes. I just feel like there's
Speaker 1: not many panthers and aren't getting photographed. Yeah. Well, there's
Speaker 1: also been a question of are they roving mails that
Speaker 1: are going north or are their actual breeding population moving north?
Speaker 1: So I think there may be sightings or there may
Speaker 1: be people who feel like they have them in certain
Speaker 1: places and that some people attribute that to a roving
Speaker 1: mail or other people's attribute that to an establish population.
Speaker 1: But how would anyone expect anything else to happen than
Speaker 1: that they would move north. You have an expanding population,
Speaker 1: you have unexploited prey base to the north, panther populated
Speaker 1: like mountain, lion, cougar, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1: Their populations are expanding all across the country. Why would
Speaker 1: they not move north? Especially as the population girls it's
Speaker 1: an animal that doesn't like to be crowded. No, ship,
Speaker 1: they're not gonna go south. Nope, there's more. It's it's
Speaker 1: denser population north though, right, there's more urban in pockets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's That's another thing I appreciate about Florida is
Speaker 1: that there is somewhat of a corridor that's still intact.
Speaker 1: So they're travel yeah, yeah, I mean rarely do they
Speaker 1: get farther north of Orlando, Like, there's barely any it's
Speaker 1: a picture. Oh yeah, halfway up. Man, we're in the
Speaker 1: pocket right now though, dude, Yeah that map. Have you
Speaker 1: seen panthers out hunting? Yeah? Me and Clay caught two
Speaker 1: tracks here to day really, um okay, I gotta put
Speaker 1: that on hold from it. Oh, Chester's got big news,
Speaker 1: but no, it's it's news has no relevance to anybody.
Speaker 1: What are you looking at me? Like? He's excited for
Speaker 1: the two musicians. Musicians worldwide need to pay attention to. Wrong,
Speaker 1: I say, because I found the pathway to riches for musicians.
Speaker 1: Chester's gonna open for trample by turtles. Yeah, check this
Speaker 1: out again. Yeah, he's gonna open for tramp by turtles.
Speaker 1: And you know what the date that they got Chester
Speaker 1: booked for is booked up, sold out out. Chester's show
Speaker 1: sold out. The other shows haven't sold out. So if
Speaker 1: you're a musician and you want to sell out some shows,
Speaker 1: good old Chester, you need to get Chester because that's
Speaker 1: how you sell tickets. Nice damn Chester show. We get
Speaker 1: on a list maybe for like France. How do we
Speaker 1: get it? I don't even know Chesters show has sold out?
Speaker 1: What's going? What's the past sold out? When's the tour? Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not a tour, it's just when when you Florida? Ya, dude,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Man, One step at a time, you know?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, man? Were they were talking about what Chester's
Speaker 1: all strung out on? Heroin? Your career has kind of
Speaker 1: been like one giant leap at a time. Oh yeah, man,
Speaker 1: oh yeah. I kind of wish it were not wish
Speaker 1: but I'm very happy and excited and I'm learning very quickly.
Speaker 1: But sometimes I wish it were just maybe a scoch slower.
Speaker 1: What do you mean, man? You got you got like
Speaker 1: a big show coming up now now you're trying to dance. Well,
Speaker 1: guess it's already sold out, so it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: you say. There's a lot of pressure though, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I just mean like I feel. Nah, I don't know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. I'm I'm excited, yeah, super excited. But
Speaker 1: I wish I were a little better at my guitar. Mhmm.
Speaker 1: You got an angel of it? I'm working on it
Speaker 1: or voice of an angel though too good originals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I wouldn't do a service announcement and say that
Speaker 1: buy tickets now to see Chester open for trample by
Speaker 1: Turtles but sold out. Maybe find a scalper at some
Speaker 1: resale at the door. Yeah, and and other musicians. If
Speaker 1: you want to get serious about making money and selling tickets,
Speaker 1: book Chester. Yeah, Luke Cole, sure you and I gotta
Speaker 1: do a show? Yeah we do Yeah, yeah, yeah, wonderful
Speaker 1: Luke's listening. I think he sells the shows out. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, if that star stopped burning so bright, I
Speaker 1: know how what he can do to fix things up?
Speaker 1: Old chaticoll Here here's a good to already put this
Speaker 1: on Instagram. So a guy a guy writes in from
Speaker 1: Michigan and uh, a couple of years back he had
Speaker 1: to move to another So he's from Michigan, but he
Speaker 1: had to move to another state for job opportunity. He's
Speaker 1: living in a hotel and living in a hotel where
Speaker 1: he's at where he's moving to. He's trying to buy
Speaker 1: a house, but he has to come back to Michigan
Speaker 1: to gather up his stuff out of his house, his
Speaker 1: old house. He all of a sudden remembers he had
Speaker 1: He had a tree stand he left out on state
Speaker 1: land down the road, so he's like, shoot, he runs
Speaker 1: out to get his tree stand. He says, when I
Speaker 1: got to the stand, I noticed a piece of paper
Speaker 1: at the base, but didn't pay any mind until I
Speaker 1: climbed the stand and was eye level. Was something I
Speaker 1: didn't expect, A fresh pair of deer nuts sitting in
Speaker 1: the seat of my stand. Sends a picture of it.
Speaker 1: I got a picture of the note and the buck nuts.
Speaker 1: He wonders about this, climbs down and goes and finds
Speaker 1: the scrap of paper, and the scrap of paper says,
Speaker 1: this creep he tore it. It's like a scrap of
Speaker 1: paper written by a Bye bye A presuma be a gentleman.
Speaker 1: Creeping on other people's stands. I'm sorry, creeping on other
Speaker 1: people's trees stand is immoral and how you end up
Speaker 1: with nutsacks on your stand. Creeping on other people's tree
Speaker 1: stand is immoral? And how you end up with nutsacks
Speaker 1: on your stand, I bet you never shot deer. Dang hmm. Wow,
Speaker 1: it's getting out of control, creeping on other people's trees stands.
Speaker 1: What's really funny is that, well one I'm trying to
Speaker 1: there's a guy we're trying to get on the show
Speaker 1: that as a like, instead of just reading about it,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a story of a of a public
Speaker 1: land tree stand spot dispute that spuns so wildly out
Speaker 1: of control. I'm trying to get the guy to come
Speaker 1: on the podcast just as a guest, to be on
Speaker 1: the show for the whole show, to tell the story.
Speaker 1: Not hairsy, but it'll curl your hair. I had a
Speaker 1: guy recently. I saw an email the guy standing recently
Speaker 1: and he he blames so we covered We've been covering
Speaker 1: a lot of these like public land debates, people stand
Speaker 1: my spot. He says it's all a result of this
Speaker 1: public landowner movement because he sees the public landowner t
Speaker 1: shirts and he's like, it's these people that think they
Speaker 1: own the land. Hey got a side note, A Michigan
Speaker 1: factul it please. The dog with the longest tongue ever
Speaker 1: was a Michigan dog. It was like eighteen inches long.
Speaker 1: How do you know? How do you know? I heard
Speaker 1: it on the radio station back home. Wow, if I
Speaker 1: don't got my phone check, could you check that the
Speaker 1: longest tongue of a dog, it's a Michigan dog. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's here's a news alert. Chess will fact check that.
Speaker 1: Here's a news alert. Um, this is this is. I
Speaker 1: wish I understood Michigan or Wisconsin law a little bit better,
Speaker 1: like how laws get made. So how many years of
Speaker 1: me and Yanni you've been applying for our sturgeon spearing
Speaker 1: permit in Skannie? I don't know, but I feel like
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't put in the last year or two.
Speaker 1: I don't just know way you wouldn't have put it in.
Speaker 1: I've only got two points. How many are you up to?
Speaker 1: I thought you took care of it. Did we fall
Speaker 1: off the board on spearing permit? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: checked my points the other day and I was like, what, Well,
Speaker 1: if you've been putting, if we got you should only
Speaker 1: have to Okay, Well, maybe that's right, though, three either way.
Speaker 1: Lay that out for people. Okay, Um, in Wisconsin and
Speaker 1: Lake Winnebago, it's kind of like a big party fest
Speaker 1: and people go in party party. It's a party burning sturgeon,
Speaker 1: drinking festa. Party. You don't have to drink, you don't
Speaker 1: have to party. You can just spear lake sturgeon through
Speaker 1: the ice. And uh, you go out there. You caught
Speaker 1: a big hole in the ice with a chainsaw. You
Speaker 1: back your ice shanny up over the top of it,
Speaker 1: throw a decoy down if you want, and wait and
Speaker 1: wait and wait for a sturgeon to swim under the hole. However,
Speaker 1: there's these upper lakes in the Winnebago system and you
Speaker 1: have to put in. Tell people about this because I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're putting in. There's just a better chance for you
Speaker 1: to spear sturgeon. No, I just wanted you to explain
Speaker 1: as much as you explained. Now, explain to me this.
Speaker 1: How could it be that you can spear sturgeon through
Speaker 1: the ice but you can't spear a northy through the ice, well,
Speaker 1: because it's illegal. Um, it blows my I could when
Speaker 1: I read this theory. Could there's a thing I'm getting
Speaker 1: to a news blip. Yeah, I know about that. How
Speaker 1: when the hell I had no idea. Who couldn't spear
Speaker 1: northern through the ice and Wisconsin? No, but I've wanted
Speaker 1: to for a long time. It seems like it would
Speaker 1: be like the this target speed because there's a spearing
Speaker 1: culture there. Yep. Shocked me. Maybe they just think too
Speaker 1: many people will do it. Yeah, they're like Wisconsin people
Speaker 1: are too apt to do it. You know, how to
Speaker 1: practice for sturgeon spearing? Down to your local gas station
Speaker 1: and you get a six pack of light beer. Then
Speaker 1: you come home and you open up the closet, bring
Speaker 1: a chair in there with you, shut the lights off,
Speaker 1: and shut the door, and you can't come out of
Speaker 1: the closet until all six of those light beers are
Speaker 1: So there's a citizens resolution. Well, okay. During the past year,
Speaker 1: we've progressed our citizen resolution through multiple Wisconsin DNR committees,
Speaker 1: and it will finally now be up for a statewide
Speaker 1: vote online during our spring hearings April tenth to thirteenth,
Speaker 1: in order to legalize the spearing of northeast oh Nice,
Speaker 1: by which I mean Northern Pike. I wonder how that's polling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I think it would be pulling good,
Speaker 1: but like you know, pro spearing, but I don't know
Speaker 1: for sure, man, I really really My recommendation to people
Speaker 1: that live in Scanning, Wisconsin is to go how I
Speaker 1: don't understand this though, Like you can vote online. I
Speaker 1: wish I understood this better. So on April tenth to
Speaker 1: April thirteenth, if you live in Wisconsin, apparently you can
Speaker 1: go online and vote to give you guys a Northern
Speaker 1: pike spearing season. I know what I'd be doing between
Speaker 1: the tenth and think. There's a lot of fishermen, regular
Speaker 1: old roden reelers that don't like the idea of throwing
Speaker 1: spears at fish. If God didn't want you to spear pike,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't made pike spears. You know. The funny thing is, though,
Speaker 1: like people in Wisconsin they keep fish man and they
Speaker 1: fry him up. M so yeah, but they like to
Speaker 1: keep them when they catch them on their rod and
Speaker 1: real they're not spear and steelhead, they're not spearing wally dogs.
Speaker 1: It's like, here's spearing northern Here's my advice to people
Speaker 1: that are spirit I think we should have a spearing season,
Speaker 1: and I think there should be maybe kind of doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be. No, we don't have to have a
Speaker 1: slot limit, but just use your best judgment and not
Speaker 1: be killing If you want Northeast in your lake, don't
Speaker 1: be killing those big, big females. Yeah, but you can't expect.
Speaker 1: Let's just say you got to write the law. Because
Speaker 1: you can't expect. You can't make a law. You know.
Speaker 1: The reason they put specificity to fishing regulations is because
Speaker 1: you can't just like make general recommendations to people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know if you can on a podcast when a
Speaker 1: bunch of people are are listening. No, you can't. But
Speaker 1: I'm saying, like I would like if it comes down
Speaker 1: to that, you have no pike spearing, yes, and you're like, well,
Speaker 1: we can't have If we allow people to spear pike,
Speaker 1: they'll spear all the pike. Okay, then why don't you
Speaker 1: make it that they won't spear all the pike by
Speaker 1: having a Okay, I don't know if you're that scared
Speaker 1: of it that you're allowed. You know, what was the
Speaker 1: daily bang lim But on northern in Wisconsin, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I think it's lake dependent. Okay. What would be a
Speaker 1: what would be a reasonable number five. Yeah, probably Okay,
Speaker 1: So right now a guy with tipops can kill five.
Speaker 1: Make it that the spear guy. I'm not recommending this,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying, make it that the pike spear
Speaker 1: has a little bit fewer bag limit, different season structure.
Speaker 1: Now I'm playing Devil's advocate from what I heard when
Speaker 1: I did my little ice fish and tour there and
Speaker 1: chat out with people about spear and stuff, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people feel like you're gonna spear not non
Speaker 1: target species bike kitch and then and then you know
Speaker 1: you're any musky waters. The biggest thing is I think muski,
Speaker 1: you know, because you can tell the difference between a
Speaker 1: largemouth bass and a pike. But I wouldn't leave it
Speaker 1: to people to tell a musky from a northern No,
Speaker 1: so musky waters, don't don't let them. You can't spear
Speaker 1: in musky waters. Why couldn't you use an example of
Speaker 1: like a state like Montana where you can spear pike
Speaker 1: and you can't spear in wait. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's true in Montana, but I know in North was
Speaker 1: it North Dakota or South Dakota? North Dakota you cannot
Speaker 1: spear in musky waters. But okay, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: if you're talking about in Wisconsin spearing and like, first off,
Speaker 1: I would be that I would limit it to like
Speaker 1: native musky waters and not these experimental populations of hybrid
Speaker 1: hybridized muskies like takers. Yeah, like native musky waters. I
Speaker 1: could see some legitimacy and saying you can't spear, that
Speaker 1: you can't spear northerns. I haven't sorted it all out
Speaker 1: in my head, but I can tell you what I
Speaker 1: have sorted out. You should be a lot of spear
Speaker 1: pike in Wisconsin. Yeah, it's a blast. I don't care
Speaker 1: what Jhanna says. Uh, yeah you do. Note from a
Speaker 1: listener and our recent episode, oh snot. Okay, So we
Speaker 1: recently had an episode called Snarge and the episode was
Speaker 1: about a the profession of keeping animals off runways. Hope
Speaker 1: you guys saw it afterward? Did you see that picture
Speaker 1: I had on Instagram? Dude, that's where the actions as
Speaker 1: I did hitting that dude as Stephen Ronella. One of
Speaker 1: the pictures was I don't shy away from the gruesome.
Speaker 1: But since I'm older, I don't do like multiple pictures
Speaker 1: and stuff on there. I don't set it to music right,
Speaker 1: just clean old style on Instagram, you know, pictures worth
Speaker 1: a thousand words. Yeah, I don't put like the media
Speaker 1: it says up top like you know ac DC. I
Speaker 1: don't do any of that. Just a clean picture. Um.
Speaker 1: After that show, a guy rode in also from Michigan
Speaker 1: where he wrote in where his old man ran over
Speaker 1: a deer on a runway with a plane, and he
Speaker 1: said it cut the deer in three equal pieces, which
Speaker 1: I didn't get based on that post because I know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. I'll say I had a deer
Speaker 1: the wade ninety pounds, yeah, and I cut it into
Speaker 1: three thirty pound pieces. You'd say that I cut it
Speaker 1: into three equal pieces. No, but why did the airplane
Speaker 1: do that? Like it got three circulations? Probably right? Or
Speaker 1: did it when it hit it with the tire tire
Speaker 1: in the wing left side? Yeah, yeah, I have a
Speaker 1: picture of how it was a raid, but I didn't
Speaker 1: put it on there, not because I was chicken. I
Speaker 1: just put I thought the plane picture was another plane
Speaker 1: was cool, bloodied up airplane? Yeah. Um. Anyway, on that
Speaker 1: thing I was saying, I was talking about if you
Speaker 1: go to control, so so just if people didn't listen
Speaker 1: to the episode, remember what the miracle on the Hudson Suley. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: he hit his plane hit a fox strike. Okay. And
Speaker 1: part of the work of like mitigate or trying to
Speaker 1: reduce airline strikes against wildlife is you'll need to go
Speaker 1: Obviously it's a bigger footprint than just the airport. And
Speaker 1: they've been talked about they've had people that where people
Speaker 1: are like feeding grained ducks nearby, and they've had to
Speaker 1: be like, try to approach them about curtailing those activities
Speaker 1: that are creating potential hazards for airplanes. Okay. And I
Speaker 1: was saying, I wonder at what points and most airplane
Speaker 1: collisions with wildlife happened below a thousand feet And I
Speaker 1: was saying, well, how like how fire around. You gotta
Speaker 1: get to get that in a pilot road And he said,
Speaker 1: on my flight today, I tested this theory. What airport's
Speaker 1: agl oh above ground level? Uh? Is that right? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we learned that. Yeah. Uh it's less than a quarter
Speaker 1: mile in year thousand feet you know, so fairly small space. Yeah. Tight. Well,
Speaker 1: being in Florida, they got they gotta do some of
Speaker 1: that management for the rockets. I bet imagine a rocket
Speaker 1: smoking a bird. Yeah, um, vaporize. On another episode we
Speaker 1: recently covered uh. We covered a guy that was out
Speaker 1: shed hunting looking for antlers and found uh, um found
Speaker 1: a skull, human skull older like hair on you still old? Oh?
Speaker 1: And uh and then our our frequent guesting contributor um
Speaker 1: half a finger since then found one. No kidding this
Speaker 1: spring jammed in. What are you doing that situation? He
Speaker 1: didn't even touch it? Yeah? Wow, what was the story
Speaker 1: you know, hunting hunting halflin with his old man? Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the story on the person doesn't know. He didn't
Speaker 1: just call it in. He didn't want He said that,
Speaker 1: he didn't even roll it over. He went, I'm called in.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to get involved and haven't been that
Speaker 1: he messed with it or right any idea of the age.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I haven't followed up with him. He
Speaker 1: was like, he didn't want to, you know, He's like, well,
Speaker 1: it seem to me that there's a high likelihood that
Speaker 1: I'm at a crime scene and I don't want to
Speaker 1: move anything around. What was he like down in New
Speaker 1: Mexico in some remote area border country Arizona, So it
Speaker 1: could have been someone it's coming across the border. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's think about no country for old man. If you
Speaker 1: came across buttload of money and at school, might put
Speaker 1: all that money walk away little suitcase. Uh you got
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've heard about this. So they
Speaker 1: just coming out of the perma frost. There's pictures of it.
Speaker 1: Um in Siberia. A three thousand and five hundred year
Speaker 1: old brown bear just melted out of the perma frost.
Speaker 1: Astonishingly good condition, nice fully furred, still had his brain tissue,
Speaker 1: still has his brain in it. You know, he'd eaten,
Speaker 1: he'd eaten. His stomach was packed full of bird feathers
Speaker 1: and uh, bird feathers and plant matter. What kind of
Speaker 1: what kind of critter? Brown bear? It's like one of
Speaker 1: the first thous and five. I mean, that's not that old,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, wouldn't be any different than today's
Speaker 1: brown bear. But it's cool. Yeah, it's cool. Three thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred year old brown bear out of the perm rust.
Speaker 1: One of the first times they've been able to like
Speaker 1: test some brain tissue of something that old too. See
Speaker 1: what he was thinking, how's a beard smoke A get
Speaker 1: a bird that would that would seem pretty tricky ground
Speaker 1: nesters probably or just dead. Oh yeah, crap, you left
Speaker 1: laying around or picking up ground nesting birds wouldn't surprise me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean one of my favorite stories, alec tell is
Speaker 1: when I was calling turkeys and called in a black
Speaker 1: bear that was like, oh yeah, breathing behind me. I
Speaker 1: mean he was coming to get a bird. Uh, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: He had still had You can still see the yellow
Speaker 1: fat when they dissected it. Well, it had a spinal injury.
Speaker 1: I have a lanche to breathe or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That would be my island. Nope, um callahan. And recently,
Speaker 1: speaking of stuff and stuff, stomach callahan, they recently cut
Speaker 1: open uh cougar cut open up Texas mountain lion. See
Speaker 1: that Texas mountain lion. Think about him where he's got
Speaker 1: me pissed because he's a man. I could have been
Speaker 1: brought down in Florida. Oh hot, kinds of lonely women
Speaker 1: down there. They got shot in Texas. They opened his
Speaker 1: gut up, and he's cal sent me a picture had
Speaker 1: eight pounds that chewed up cal Sas mule deer meat.
Speaker 1: How does he know? Oh? That's good. Maybe it was
Speaker 1: a bunch of mule deer hair. And with Colombo down here,
Speaker 1: that's probably that's probably right man. Yeah, eight pounds of
Speaker 1: muled your meat. Wow, it looked like I told cal
Speaker 1: to save it because looked like something I could put
Speaker 1: right under my tron Like I could put it right
Speaker 1: under my trompo, no problem, just like minced up remarrinated,
Speaker 1: minced up meat. Um Karn, who's not with us today,
Speaker 1: she's been, uh really spend a lot of time reading
Speaker 1: about how the news covers turkeys. Turkey attacks, um, turkeys
Speaker 1: driving people out of their homes, like like very aggressive turkeys,
Speaker 1: mailmen right attack and mailmenil mailmen carrying pistols and pepper
Speaker 1: sprayed to pepper sprayed turkeys. Oh yeah, like turkeys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a turkey hundred things and turkeys one way and
Speaker 1: suburban nights thick of turkeys another way. There's an Instagram
Speaker 1: account that Seth pointed me on too, and some of
Speaker 1: those turkeys were carrying like swords and a little shield. Well,
Speaker 1: like you said, young, with that oustio, the birds you got,
Speaker 1: those are some sharp spurs down here. Oh yeah, listen
Speaker 1: to what his neighborhood. Okay, listen to what this woman
Speaker 1: went through. This is I think this is reported in
Speaker 1: the Washington Post. The line is a turkey settled near
Speaker 1: her Minnesota home. Now she carries weapons. This is this
Speaker 1: is unbelievable. I'd read that story. She lives in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Around two twenty one summer twenty twenty one, a turkey
Speaker 1: drip from her roofs and forced her to the ground.
Speaker 1: The turkey ripped her jacket, scattered her bag of eggs, coffee,
Speaker 1: and other Groser's on her front lawn. Downright. Assaulted by
Speaker 1: a turkey from above. Build the eggs. Damn it. Okay.
Speaker 1: She calls and says that she calls her fishing game
Speaker 1: agency and says she wants the turkey relocated. They say
Speaker 1: they don't do that. You'll relocate turkeys. Good for them. Gross.
Speaker 1: This is the woman's name. Her last name is Gross.
Speaker 1: Gross forty one said the turkey has placed her in
Speaker 1: her neighbors lives and turmoil. She now wears safety goggles
Speaker 1: when she stepped outside, and carries a broom, a golf club,
Speaker 1: and a water bottle for self defense. I'm pretty stressed
Speaker 1: out and pretty anxious all the time. Gross told the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, I can't even have peace. The turkey appeared
Speaker 1: at a Rolla home park with seven others in the
Speaker 1: summer twenty twenty one. Girls said when the pack departed
Speaker 1: a few weeks later, this turkey remained. Okay, I'm paraphrasing
Speaker 1: and reading. The turkey became attached to Gross, following her
Speaker 1: on drives to Chipotle where she worked. No, following her
Speaker 1: on drives when she went to get food at Chipotle.
Speaker 1: Now might be wise follower, Yeah, I wonder how far
Speaker 1: Chipotle is from her house, I don't know. And following
Speaker 1: her and she works at a nursing home and the
Speaker 1: turkey and follower there. Bad journalism here, it's here twenty
Speaker 1: four seven. Okay, because did the journalist ever ask are
Speaker 1: you feeding? Or did you ever feed? The turkey? Hear
Speaker 1: me out? This is it's gonna emerge, okay. Gross said
Speaker 1: she called emergency services and Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources.
Speaker 1: Experts advise her to remove bird feeders across the neighborhood
Speaker 1: because the turkey would flee without a food supply, It
Speaker 1: would flee. They can't help themselves, man, journalists, journalists ready
Speaker 1: about wild life can't help themselfs the turkey would fleet
Speaker 1: if it didn't have food, but Gross said she sees
Speaker 1: corn strewn around the mobile home park where she lives.
Speaker 1: She believes someone's feeding the turkey. Soon after the first attack,
Speaker 1: Gross said the turkey pecked at her feet and left
Speaker 1: a scar. Around that same time, the turkey attacked another resident.
Speaker 1: Since the turkey settled near her home, Gros said neighbors
Speaker 1: have blamed her for entering their neighborhood. The turkey sleeps
Speaker 1: on her roof or on a tree outside her home.
Speaker 1: The turkey gobbles through out the night. When she opens
Speaker 1: the blinds on her kitchen window in the morning, the
Speaker 1: turkey glares at her. No way, listen, man, This is
Speaker 1: a true story. Gross at first named the turkey Gladys,
Speaker 1: but as it grew, she came to believe it was
Speaker 1: Mail changed its name to Reggie. There's a picture of it.
Speaker 1: It very definitely is. Though she hasn't confirmed the tight,
Speaker 1: the turkey's gender or age. Gross says she has applied
Speaker 1: every precaution from wildlife experts, doesn't keep any food outside
Speaker 1: of her home, doesn't play loud music of the fear
Speaker 1: it would attract the turkey hasn't grilled outside in two years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she would not be able to buy our new outdoor
Speaker 1: cooking cookbook. Would be irrelevant in her life. She bought
Speaker 1: a horn to scare of the turkey, but it just
Speaker 1: provoked the bird. She got shot gobbles out of it.
Speaker 1: She sprayed water on it and that scared the turkey
Speaker 1: away for two weeks. October twenty one, Okay, the whole
Speaker 1: neighborhood canceled the Halloween trick or treating because of the turkey.
Speaker 1: She now has to walk neighborhood children to the bus
Speaker 1: stop to protect them. Where's this kid? Sticks Minnesota? She says.
Speaker 1: The turkey so aggressively attacks her cars tires that she
Speaker 1: has to refill the tires with air weekly, speaking scapegoat.
Speaker 1: When family members come to visit, they can't because they're
Speaker 1: scared to enter to approach her home. I'm so exhausted,
Speaker 1: she said. I hope this gets a solution and someone
Speaker 1: comes to help Yanni. She wants to have a peaceful
Speaker 1: summer with her kids and grandkids and actually have a
Speaker 1: barbecue and just be able to relax. Now, why don't
Speaker 1: they relocate it? When a turkey's rounded up after wounding people.
Speaker 1: That turkey is youthanized and served as food to someone
Speaker 1: who needs it. That's what the article says. And this
Speaker 1: woman doesn't mount the turkey to be hurt. Oh jeez, man,
Speaker 1: it's probably driving down the property value around there. She
Speaker 1: recently walked out of her house and jumped when a
Speaker 1: bird flew because she thought it was a turkey coming
Speaker 1: for it. Oh, Reggie causing them all sorts of trouble.
Speaker 1: The other day when he was talking to it, she
Speaker 1: was talking new journalists and she said, quote, he's out
Speaker 1: there pecking at my tires, uh, quicking on her head
Speaker 1: on Turkey News, which is really interesting. So this is
Speaker 1: an old study from the nineteen sixties where they were
Speaker 1: trying to find out sexual arousal in turkeys, okay, And
Speaker 1: they began taking a male turkey and trying to find
Speaker 1: out what on a female turkey is the male turkey
Speaker 1: attracted to. Okay. So they start out with a turkey
Speaker 1: model and they start removing parts from it to see
Speaker 1: at what point the turkey wants to stop These are domestics,
Speaker 1: at what point the turkey wants to stop breeding it.
Speaker 1: This is a government survey or like university researchers. This
Speaker 1: is like a decoy that they're putting out in like
Speaker 1: a farm um doctor Pennsylvania State, if Seth, you'll appreciate
Speaker 1: this penn State who. They began with a taxidermically preferred
Speaker 1: female turkey model and a penn of active males in
Speaker 1: order to learn what specifically gets the turkey visually interested
Speaker 1: in making more turkeys aka making love. The two that's
Speaker 1: my input. The two men slowly removed parts of the
Speaker 1: turkey model. One by one. They detached the feet, the wings,
Speaker 1: and eventually the entire body the taxidermy turkey until the
Speaker 1: stick mounted head and neck held like a puppet remained.
Speaker 1: The paper is called stimuli eliciting sexual behavior. Mail Turkeys
Speaker 1: presented a body without the head, okay, follow me, Maile
Speaker 1: Turkeys presented a body with no head would display, but
Speaker 1: they wouldn't mount it. If you presented the head alone
Speaker 1: and held it upright, they would go try to copulate
Speaker 1: the air behind the head. Can we mention what your
Speaker 1: theory about what happened yesterday? Say we have a side
Speaker 1: note story about turkey sexual arousal Okay, I finished this
Speaker 1: real quick. Yeah, that's what I was going to get
Speaker 1: through afterwards. They're thinking. This is academic thinking. They're thinking,
Speaker 1: is I don't want to get into how they all
Speaker 1: did it, but like why would that matter? They're thinking,
Speaker 1: is that one turkey? Okay, picture your male turkey when
Speaker 1: you're um, you know, right aroused a little bit, when
Speaker 1: you're when you're making love with a female turkey. They're saying, well,
Speaker 1: he can't see nothing but her head neck anyway, that's
Speaker 1: what she says. It is paper. Oh my gosh, this
Speaker 1: is contemporary. That's what the sixties. Oh okay, it goes
Speaker 1: on and on. Well it is from the sixties, you said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that goes on and on. People just thought different back then.
Speaker 1: I mean, I could read this for days and I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be done one last thing. So I'm gonna bring
Speaker 1: it back and so check and see how this has flowed. Okay,
Speaker 1: we got into turkeys with Florida. We got into turkeys.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna get into Florida turkeys tracking huge. Just
Speaker 1: the other day, a couple of days ago, Florida's Fishing
Speaker 1: Wildlife Commission. Have you heard about this giant turkey poaching bust. No,
Speaker 1: they just released just a couple days ago. Huh No,
Speaker 1: I have not charges filed against a feller by the
Speaker 1: name of them Sydney brent Hurst born in eighty five
Speaker 1: thirty seven mm hmm good math um charge with the
Speaker 1: following taking over the season bag limited Turkey's taking over
Speaker 1: the season season bag limited, deer, scheming to defraud, arm trust, pass,
Speaker 1: unuseful use, unlawful use of two way communication device, and cheating.
Speaker 1: So this is this is an interesting thing about I
Speaker 1: might spend more time with us. Did you guys listen
Speaker 1: to Clay's Did you guys listen to Beargrease podcast episode
Speaker 1: about the serial Turkey poachers in Ohio, oh? Where it
Speaker 1: was like part of the I think so, yes, it's Clays.
Speaker 1: I want to Clay his masterpiece. Yeah, yeah, I do
Speaker 1: remember that hiding the guns right, No, no no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no different one like he's got to. Clay has two
Speaker 1: Bear Grease podcasts, two masterpieces. There's a series on the
Speaker 1: original Outlaws that's the one I'm taking out. And then
Speaker 1: he's got a series on the undercover Game Warden. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1: In this series on the Undercover Game, Warden focuses very
Speaker 1: heavily on a Turkey on him inserting himself in an
Speaker 1: undercover sense, like moving to their town, becoming friends with
Speaker 1: spending years undercover with turkey poachers yea, And reading it
Speaker 1: you might think to yourself, how is that? Like, how
Speaker 1: does the juice warrant the squeeze all that effort? This
Speaker 1: guy a paid undercover No, no discredit to the guy,
Speaker 1: He's doing his job. You send in a paid undercover
Speaker 1: guy to like move into a town, assume a false identity,
Speaker 1: and live for years to get some turkey poachers, to
Speaker 1: bust some turkey poachers, it just seems like it seems
Speaker 1: it strikes me as weirdly asymmetrical. Oh, it shows how
Speaker 1: much value we put on in a wildlife. Sure it does.
Speaker 1: But in the end, like normally, when you picture someone
Speaker 1: an undercover agent spending years with someone, you picture that
Speaker 1: people are going away to jail for a long long time,
Speaker 1: like organized crime or something. You don't picture someone's gonna
Speaker 1: do like thirty days in the local slammer and have
Speaker 1: a revocation of hunting privileges for five years. It's just
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, It's like you think of
Speaker 1: like it's like, oh, they must be trafficking and narcotics
Speaker 1: and murdering people. I don't know, you know, Like I said,
Speaker 1: like I don't mean to discredit, but like the thing
Speaker 1: that I enjoyed it thoroughly. I get the work. I
Speaker 1: support the work. It just felt asymmetrical, like the effort
Speaker 1: from the agency, the effort and in the way I mean,
Speaker 1: like change these people's lives right for the relatively light
Speaker 1: the relatively light punishment that goes that that that goes
Speaker 1: to those offenses. Um, maybe the punishment should be worse.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but here's what's crazy. So they they
Speaker 1: started investigating this guy in twenty twenty. Okay, no, no
Speaker 1: undercover guys. But they start investigating this guy in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and it just started with so Florida fish and wildlife.
Speaker 1: It starts when they get a guy where they realize
Speaker 1: that a guy and his young son had both taken
Speaker 1: over the season bagged them into wild turkeys, which is
Speaker 1: two two okay, And they start looking into him. They
Speaker 1: realize this guy killed between fifteen to twenty wild turkeys
Speaker 1: in a season spring twenty Spring twenty twenty, fifteen to
Speaker 1: twenty wild turkeys. Okay, I'm reading from this piece right here,
Speaker 1: my FWC. Okay, so as reported by the state. Given
Speaker 1: the extent of the violations uncovered during the twenty twenty season,
Speaker 1: and the necessity to ensure hersh would be held accountable
Speaker 1: for all his actions, the decision was made to extend
Speaker 1: and widen the investigation to gather any and all information
Speaker 1: regarding his poaching activities. So here you got a guy
Speaker 1: he already know he killed fifty to twenty birds. Maybe
Speaker 1: they didn't have good admissible evidence, right whatever, and they're like,
Speaker 1: let's let him keep at it for another season and
Speaker 1: see what he does in the next season. During spring
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, did a bunch more so, what did
Speaker 1: he do in the twenty twenty one twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: spring season? Thirty? Yeah, now the criminal trestpass thing, armed
Speaker 1: criminal trestpasses. He's trespassing on four different properties with a
Speaker 1: gun and killing birds. Off trespassing to kill birds, thirty
Speaker 1: turkeys during the spring season. I guess how many bucks
Speaker 1: he killed during twenty the two twenty two twenty one
Speaker 1: general gun season fourteen shot twenty bucks. Jesus, what's he
Speaker 1: doing is he's selling like mounts and stuff into it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't get into it because remember that they then
Speaker 1: here's here's this is where I'd like I'd like talk
Speaker 1: to I'm going involved in this investigation, So Krian, when
Speaker 1: you you should find someone to talk about this, just
Speaker 1: to help explain it. From from Florida fishing game. They
Speaker 1: then extend the investigation into the spring twenty two season,
Speaker 1: killed fifteen turkeys that season, numbers dropped. Eventually they go
Speaker 1: and do a search warrant. Oh yeah, when they searched
Speaker 1: his place, they executed a search warrant one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty six pairs of turkey spurs, one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: five turkey beards, twenty one buck antlers, buck racks. He's
Speaker 1: a collector, cheez man, got a screw loose. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: a lot of turkeys. Man. I wonder how he did it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It doesn't get into that. So those
Speaker 1: are all, you know, call ins or shooting him with rifles. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm saying, because like, on one hand, you're like,
Speaker 1: if he's calling that me birds in, he'd be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean like the guy, but I just got a
Speaker 1: feeling that ain't the case. Yeah, yeah, maybe, I mean
Speaker 1: if he is to help, I mean, like whatever, if
Speaker 1: that's like, you know, two things can be true at once, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like horrible person, hell of a turkey hunter. Yeah, woman,
Speaker 1: if they were all males gobblers spurs, Well, they confiscated
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty five stats of spurs. You remember, Steve,
Speaker 1: there was that big poacher and the seely swan. M hm,
Speaker 1: he got some serious prison time. Yeah. I don't know
Speaker 1: what they do down here, but that was like, that
Speaker 1: was when I was I was at a I was
Speaker 1: at a thing one time. I was at an event
Speaker 1: one time, and I met we we should get this
Speaker 1: guy on the show too. There was a warden presenting
Speaker 1: out a thing about super poachers. Yeah, and his take
Speaker 1: is that you have that that ten percent you know,
Speaker 1: they old like ten percent of the the blank you know,
Speaker 1: ten percent of the fisherman catch ninety percent of the fish,
Speaker 1: ten percent of the poachers poach ninety percent of the game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he was he was a specialist in psychological profiles
Speaker 1: of super poachers, and um he was kind of like
Speaker 1: the gist of his deal was that fishing game agents
Speaker 1: would be better suited to learn to recognize the patterns
Speaker 1: of super poachers and focus on super poachers. UM put
Speaker 1: more energy into recognizing when that's what you're dealing with
Speaker 1: and catching those individuals who will poach massive amounts of
Speaker 1: stuff over an entire lifetime. Yeah, Um, he didn't. I
Speaker 1: don't think he meant like instead of but like in
Speaker 1: addition to the normal patrolling you do on a day
Speaker 1: to day basis, like ah, you didn't buy your license,
Speaker 1: you know, it'd be like this is a thing to
Speaker 1: be taken seriously, like these these chronic superpoachers. And in
Speaker 1: the work he did on super poachers, he's like, they
Speaker 1: are they're sociopaths. Yeah, they're like the same level of
Speaker 1: sociopath that that you might be a sociopath and become
Speaker 1: a murder. There's a form of sociopath sociopathy that becomes that.
Speaker 1: But he felt that it's driven by these same things
Speaker 1: that it is. It's like sociopathic behavior and it's and
Speaker 1: that's what you are. But for whatever reason, some sociopaths
Speaker 1: go in in that direction to become like habitual chronic
Speaker 1: illegal killers of wildlife. This dude seems like Florida dude
Speaker 1: definitely keeping all that. And there is a collection, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a collection aspect and what he got into
Speaker 1: is like a thing that drives them is that they're
Speaker 1: smarter than everybody else. They're getting away with it. They're
Speaker 1: smarter than everybody else, and that's like a common that's
Speaker 1: common in that behavior type. What the like you're proving
Speaker 1: how smart you are? Yeah, you know what. The Florida
Speaker 1: guy get sentenced if they found all that shit. I'm
Speaker 1: sure he's been charged, right or no that they haven't
Speaker 1: sorted all that out yet. Judicial proceedings are pending. Sociopath
Speaker 1: m okay, Yannie, what do you think about hunting aasi
Speaker 1: old the turkeys? Hmmm, he only got one, I got thirty?
Speaker 1: Well what did What did you want to say about
Speaker 1: the intererest thing about the well by the turkeys having
Speaker 1: mating and having sex. Yeah, well we saw some interesting
Speaker 1: mating activity during my turkey hunt. Yeah, which we'll get to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll hit on it when it comes out. Top level.
Speaker 1: What I find interesting about them, um, very fickle turkeys
Speaker 1: around when they want a gobble silent bobs. Man, it's
Speaker 1: not just a high pressure low pressure thing, which seems
Speaker 1: to be most places we hunt. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: mean an atmospheric pressure. Yeah, Oh, I'm sorry when you
Speaker 1: say pressure. Oh yeah, obviously hunting pressure messes with them too.
Speaker 1: But you know, it seems like most places we hunt,
Speaker 1: if it's high pressure, you feel like you're gonna hear
Speaker 1: more gobbles, and low pressure you'll hear hear less. But
Speaker 1: here the clouds and the fog and how much sun
Speaker 1: they can see in the morning really seem to affect them.
Speaker 1: First morning we're out, you know, amazing gobbling, amazing scout.
Speaker 1: We're scouting, scouting the day before season, right right, sunny morning.
Speaker 1: Sound like a gunfight out there. I kept talking. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's directly related to how many Skeeter bites you get.
Speaker 1: That was the worst Skeeter morning. Yeah, the worst Skeeter morning.
Speaker 1: It was unbelievable. The mosquitoes are bad, the goblin's good.
Speaker 1: And that was a scout day. It was not a
Speaker 1: hunt day. No one hunted those birds in the next day.
Speaker 1: Silent Bob, that was that a no? That was his
Speaker 1: beak zipping shot, not a go on. Honest, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I was already a super slam holder. You were,
Speaker 1: so there's no sense me. You know everybody knows. Everybody knows. Uh, yes,
Speaker 1: I'm some kind of slam holder. Now that I got
Speaker 1: my asciol of I don't know which one Grand Slam,
Speaker 1: Grand Slam, Super Slam was. When I go get my golds, right,
Speaker 1: they're da. I became a two times Super Slam Older's
Speaker 1: first I've heard of this two times Superlam holder, right,
Speaker 1: which I could easily catch up to you if tomorrow morning, No,
Speaker 1: you'd become a two time Grand Slam holder. Well, I know,
Speaker 1: but then in a year's time when I go to Mexico,
Speaker 1: Mexico is two bird kind of a hunt. It might
Speaker 1: all be dead by that. I don't know. Well, how
Speaker 1: about this, Yanni, this is your opportunity to be the
Speaker 1: first one to be a single Slam, single season Slam holder.
Speaker 1: Oh that's right. I could hold that over Steve for
Speaker 1: a long time. Steve's expressions he doesn't like there's a
Speaker 1: prospect of this interview the old turkey. I'm not here
Speaker 1: to have a big old, not here to have a
Speaker 1: big old. You started it measuring mead measuring contest here man,
Speaker 1: big snood swinging contest. I'm gonna face Steve up my
Speaker 1: feet right on killee. Look how big those feet are.
Speaker 1: I'll also remind you, Steve that on this trip Yanni
Speaker 1: had the bird with the biggest beard, m m M.
Speaker 1: Steve's bird. We went to put it into the check
Speaker 1: station and the guy that checked the burden, he said masculated.
Speaker 1: He said, uh, just a little guy. It was a
Speaker 1: long beard. Thought listen. I didn't shoot when when he
Speaker 1: was coming, I was like, it was too early in
Speaker 1: the hunt for Jake. I got nothing against shooting Jake's
Speaker 1: and shooting Jake's legal in Florida. I saw his head
Speaker 1: coming through the grass and I was like, I want
Speaker 1: if that's a long beard. You said legal, right, it's no.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, it's permissible to shoot at Jake in Florida.
Speaker 1: I am not above shooting Jake's. I'll shoot Jake's um
Speaker 1: like a last day Jake. Great by me. Are you
Speaker 1: are you posed to Uh? It's complicated, Okay. My first
Speaker 1: bird was a Jake, So I wouldn't I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: I'm completely opposed to it. But I feel like, once
Speaker 1: you're into turkeys, I don't know why you'd shoot a Jake.
Speaker 1: You everything about trimming your beard down, so it's just
Speaker 1: so it's just a big turkey long beard. If you
Speaker 1: take about three quarters of that beard got a Jake
Speaker 1: going on. Now, so you did it once, someone't do
Speaker 1: it again. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just like, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: here's the check of the box. But but let me
Speaker 1: bring that back. That's at home, right, Like maybe if
Speaker 1: I was out traveling and I had like a trip,
Speaker 1: that's like, oh I got three days, I got four days.
Speaker 1: On the fourth day of turkeys in front of me, things,
Speaker 1: might I might think differently. Yeah, so I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: Jake's at home. Well, here's a weird thing people do. Like,
Speaker 1: this is a weird logic thing people do. People that
Speaker 1: are opposed to killing Jake's for you listeners at home,
Speaker 1: they don't have an idy what we're talking about. We're
Speaker 1: talking about an adolescent or one year old turkey. So
Speaker 1: you hunt turkey's in the spring. Jake is a male
Speaker 1: bird that was born the spring before he's one year old.
Speaker 1: He'll have a beard, you know, one two three inches long, um,
Speaker 1: and he don't have any spurs. He's got little nubb ands.
Speaker 1: He's got a little warts where his spurs will eventually develop.
Speaker 1: People that don't like it, don't the people that are
Speaker 1: opposed to shooting Jake's so like, well, you're shooting the
Speaker 1: bird that will become a long beard spike. Okay. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, you know, a really good way of
Speaker 1: getting rid of a long beard is to kill him.
Speaker 1: It's like to be like, oh no, in another year,
Speaker 1: if it's still alive, it will have turned into a
Speaker 1: long beard. It's like, well, the long beard is a
Speaker 1: long beard right now. If you want more long beards,
Speaker 1: don't shoot the long beard. That's a great way to
Speaker 1: have more long beards. There's also the argument that like
Speaker 1: a jake's stupid, right, or stupider than the gobbler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's easy. I don't have listened. I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm all for if I if I had my pick,
Speaker 1: like I said, I said, I remember, I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm not above it, but I wasn't ready yet. I
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure it had a beard. I saw
Speaker 1: I had a long beard. But tomorrow see what happens.
Speaker 1: We got we have two turkey takes. We have a
Speaker 1: turkey tag that's good for we have like a turkey
Speaker 1: tag that was good for a wildlife a state wildlife
Speaker 1: management area. It's like a public land turkey tag. And
Speaker 1: then we have a turkey take that's good for a
Speaker 1: private land turkey. Take if tomorrow I was presented with
Speaker 1: an opportunity on a jake, I would take the jake
Speaker 1: because I like eating turkeys. I got a question. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't give you a hard time. Jake can breed, right, Yeah. Anyways,
Speaker 1: I shot a long beard. He had bigne spurs, and
Speaker 1: we checked it in. The person tried to emasculate me
Speaker 1: and said it was little. It's fine, it's fine if
Speaker 1: you're one er. The osti Ola turkey ranges, like the
Speaker 1: biggest one the WMA checked in was twenty point five pounds,
Speaker 1: which was an exceptional burden because you had Will looked
Speaker 1: to me like a very respectable burden. He was, what eighteen? Right?
Speaker 1: Did you the low end? Was there anything? Steves? He
Speaker 1: definitely thought mine was on the low end at thirteen.
Speaker 1: Yours only was at thirteen? Was it fifteen or thirteen thirteen? Yeah? Wow,
Speaker 1: that's quite interesting that there's a five pound difference, and
Speaker 1: that was with the guts in it. Yeah, mine was
Speaker 1: on gutted to eighteen and a half five No, no,
Speaker 1: mine was sixteen. Let me take that back, but still
Speaker 1: five pounds range. You know, it's interesting. And this bird
Speaker 1: had developed sharp spurs. Inches. No, he no, richards were inch.
Speaker 1: Remember he measured inch yeah, um, I think he said
Speaker 1: three quarter inch when he measured mine. I can't remember.
Speaker 1: Well John's one was inch, one was three quarter Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well he had a weird one of his spurs was weird.
Speaker 1: It looked like a head broke at some point or something.
Speaker 1: It was like kind of even turned. So their fickle
Speaker 1: on the fickle on goblin smaller than mid like midwestern
Speaker 1: eastern and uh man, you know people are gonna say,
Speaker 1: oh no, it's just whatever. You might even disagree here,
Speaker 1: but the gobble is definitely different. In between that, the
Speaker 1: the humidity i'd like and the weather, not only what
Speaker 1: they sound like, but what my own calls sound like
Speaker 1: and how far they travel avel and it took me.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm still figuring out, Like it's hard to say
Speaker 1: exactly how far those birds were. Now I'm thinking the
Speaker 1: first morning, I think I overran one because I was
Speaker 1: looking back to my listening spots where I ended up,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I'm twelve hundred yards awake. There's no
Speaker 1: way I was here in this Turkey m You got
Speaker 1: a good point about that. Vegetation has a huge impact
Speaker 1: on that here, Yeah, because you could be like a
Speaker 1: bird could be inside a hammock and you could be
Speaker 1: three hundred yards away and not here. Tell people what
Speaker 1: a hammock is, Richard, hammock is, it's basically an ecology
Speaker 1: of higher elevation that like supports oak trees, cabbage palms.
Speaker 1: It's just a drier environment where basically it's it's dry
Speaker 1: all year round. So it changes depending on like the
Speaker 1: hydro periods, Like what kind of ecology pine island a
Speaker 1: hammock or a prairie or whatnot. So hammock is basically
Speaker 1: like our so vegetation comes very dense, a lot of
Speaker 1: tree cover and squirrels. Squirrels, yep, and it does. It's
Speaker 1: not like necessary hill it could. It's like it's that
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's sort of like what defines uh,
Speaker 1: Southern Florida is just like it's not a you know,
Speaker 1: ecology doesn't change in thousands of feet, it changes in inches,
Speaker 1: like complete change. You can't see the elevation change anyway,
Speaker 1: you know, it's there is different. Sure, look at the
Speaker 1: different plants and like, yeah, that's a foot lower. So
Speaker 1: so if he's if he's out overlooking a prairie or
Speaker 1: in some thin pines, you could hear him from a
Speaker 1: mile away, especially if he's like on the edge of
Speaker 1: a big prairie. That whole prairie just works like an
Speaker 1: echo chamber and it just projects that gobble. But like
Speaker 1: I said, inside a hammock, I mean, you could be
Speaker 1: standing right outside that and you're like that go was
Speaker 1: like I mean I and the cypress domes as well.
Speaker 1: They kind of act in the same manner. Eats the gobble. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it eats the gobble up unless he's on the edge
Speaker 1: of it over the water. But if he's inside that dome,
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, I've had I've had one bird
Speaker 1: that I hear that guy. I'm like, man, that's far away,
Speaker 1: and I call him again, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the next guy was I'm like, oh no, like sit down,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's just eats up that sound. So
Speaker 1: it's it's very like you have to like kind of
Speaker 1: gauge not only distance, but like what they're in, Like
Speaker 1: what are you looking out across, you know, and you
Speaker 1: can say, like there's this hammock there, and like we
Speaker 1: had that one situation where we heard that bird way off,
Speaker 1: and from where we were at, we're like, man, is
Speaker 1: that across the prairie or on our side? Like you
Speaker 1: couldn't even tell till you got around the island we
Speaker 1: were on, Like once we had the island behind us,
Speaker 1: then we were like, oh, it's all the way across
Speaker 1: the prairie, which then we tried to cross the prairie
Speaker 1: and yeah, that's a good point. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: times listening to critters, I feel like it's that way.
Speaker 1: You had to get close enough to then source it
Speaker 1: m to go, oh yeah, okay, now I know no,
Speaker 1: but that's not always the case here because, like like
Speaker 1: I said, with like those thin pines, if if if
Speaker 1: what everything in front of you is those thin pines,
Speaker 1: you can also gauge that differently, Like I've I've put
Speaker 1: pins on birds that I've heard from way off and
Speaker 1: it's three quarter of a mile and I get there
Speaker 1: and he's right there at three quarter of a mile.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just like it just changes relative to
Speaker 1: the to the habitat and ecology. So and it must.
Speaker 1: I mean I think that the humidity in the air
Speaker 1: and how far and the wind right right wind's going
Speaker 1: at your back be harder to hear them, because that's
Speaker 1: one of the things I think we might have missed
Speaker 1: out on. Like yesterday morning, we didn't we didn't really
Speaker 1: look at which direction the wind was going in, and
Speaker 1: like where we had set up was basically not in
Speaker 1: favor of where the birds were, So there could have
Speaker 1: been more that we weren't hearing because the wind at
Speaker 1: our back behind us. I haven't been hearing any birds
Speaker 1: roosted in air. Everything was in front of us, so
Speaker 1: and you know, I didn't even think that morning to
Speaker 1: take a look at that. So but it has an impact.
Speaker 1: You guys did good, Yeah, I mean, oh, Richard put
Speaker 1: us on him. You guys did really good. I've been
Speaker 1: out here the last five weekends before season, and three
Speaker 1: of which I camped. So I was here, you know, Saturday,
Speaker 1: Friday through Sunday. So how hard would you if if
Speaker 1: if you weren't hosting US, you just still scouted. Would
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have scouted? Camped? Yeah? I probably just do
Speaker 1: like one day a weekend, So I probably would have
Speaker 1: just hit it on a Saturday day and then hit
Speaker 1: a different area on a Sunday. But I basically, you know,
Speaker 1: Saturday and Sunday, I called took us off. Man, Well,
Speaker 1: I wasn't scouting for one person, scouting for three people.
Speaker 1: So I called him up before we did this, and
Speaker 1: I said, it's like, how are you feeling about it?
Speaker 1: What are the chances? You know we're gonna get some birds?
Speaker 1: And he was like, well, I basically kill a turkey
Speaker 1: every opening weekend. But I'm worried about four people, you know,
Speaker 1: the film. He was real worried about having four people
Speaker 1: in there with with us fallen. You know, I told
Speaker 1: me the quiet, professionals is it's I mean, as you
Speaker 1: guys found out, you know, very thick vegetation, a lot
Speaker 1: of noise, like a lot of things can make too
Speaker 1: much noise, especially you multiply that times four. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: uh yeah yeah, but it wasn't a different than what
Speaker 1: we've encountered. Yeah, fast No. And I after having spent
Speaker 1: this week with all you guys, like I realized that
Speaker 1: you know, you guys all knew, like you're all aware
Speaker 1: of that, and my fears and my anxiety that I'd
Speaker 1: spoken to you about before. It's just my I've never
Speaker 1: filmed a hunt, right, I've I've taken people out who
Speaker 1: are like new to hunting or you know, they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm trying to figure this out, like yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go scout whatever. And you know, I take them
Speaker 1: out and it's through the water and crack stepping on
Speaker 1: palm trees, you know. And so that's just in my
Speaker 1: head of like my experience of you know, being with people,
Speaker 1: because I spend most of my time alone out there.
Speaker 1: So but it was, you know, it was really nice
Speaker 1: to hunt, you know, to be with you guys, to
Speaker 1: be with guys who like are that conscious or like
Speaker 1: that present of like sound and like movement and like,
Speaker 1: you know, all of that, because I'm usually the guy
Speaker 1: like stop, you know, and it was it was nice
Speaker 1: to be in that company. Well you still had to
Speaker 1: give us some tips on how to walk through the water.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it really helped tip. Coincidentally or not coincidentally,
Speaker 1: we're approaching a bird, getting closer. We had been calling
Speaker 1: at him at probably four hundred yards. He was answering.
Speaker 1: We decided he was on the other side of a slew.
Speaker 1: We were like, well, let's get closer anyways, and just
Speaker 1: you know, get on top of him. As closer we
Speaker 1: can't see what we can make happen. And we got
Speaker 1: to that whatever it was one hundred and fifty yards
Speaker 1: and had to go through some water to get there,
Speaker 1: and he never gobbled again, like big old gator coming. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's the tip if we're all your foot Yeah, don't
Speaker 1: don't like any kind of foot slapping noise on the water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you step down on the water, you're just gonna
Speaker 1: clap it, you know, just clap, clap as your foot's
Speaker 1: coming down on the water. So when you're walking through
Speaker 1: the water, you gotta you know, hit with the heel
Speaker 1: and just roll and even like I'll even go as
Speaker 1: far as like do it on an angle, so my
Speaker 1: foot my feet will almost be like turned in and
Speaker 1: just kind of like you know, walking like that and
Speaker 1: like you know, yeah, yeah. The loudest noise is then
Speaker 1: the water coming off your boot and hitting back down
Speaker 1: on the water, which is probably as close as you're
Speaker 1: gonna get to a deer walking through the water. So
Speaker 1: and we could hear the turkeys walking through water as
Speaker 1: a big indicator, which we would be way louder than that.
Speaker 1: You guys heard turkeys walking through the water. First morning,
Speaker 1: we had a hand go through the puddle that was
Speaker 1: on the road that we'd set up on we could hear,
Speaker 1: so go on with to tell to everybody about what happened. Uh,
Speaker 1: just my whole hunting story here, because yours is better
Speaker 1: than ours. We just we killed a couple of silent bobs.
Speaker 1: M No, my honest silent bob too. You get to
Speaker 1: watch them do all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and what's really cool about it? You got you saw
Speaker 1: some love making. Well yeah, and I think probably the
Speaker 1: most the coolest part about it is that I was
Speaker 1: able to use some turkey woodsman ship. And even though
Speaker 1: I knew, you know, Richard had given me the scouting
Speaker 1: morning we had heard a bird in this area, didn't
Speaker 1: go after him, didn't get any closer, just had heard
Speaker 1: him gobble a few times. And then the first morning
Speaker 1: a hunting we ended up just doing a loop out
Speaker 1: into this zone. And we get out into the Giant prairie.
Speaker 1: It's late in the day. It's like eleven eleven thirty
Speaker 1: Giant prairie. We're walking down a road on the edge
Speaker 1: of the prairie and it's hot, I mean, coming on,
Speaker 1: it's eighty plus. We're thinking about hitting the pool. We're
Speaker 1: enjoying the breeze that's now in the opening. After we
Speaker 1: just had walked through a hammock for a quarter mile
Speaker 1: or a half mile or whatever, and I'm looking at
Speaker 1: the ground like man, bunch of turkey tracks. You know,
Speaker 1: I wasn't a good enough woodsman at that moment to
Speaker 1: be like slow dawn and start looking for turkeys. And
Speaker 1: we took five more steps and like, don't get down,
Speaker 1: and we didn't bump them hard. But when I peeked
Speaker 1: back up over the grass, I didn't like I could
Speaker 1: see him mosey and off. You know, they saw it
Speaker 1: just enough to mosey them off. But mark the location.
Speaker 1: Mark at the time of day, and I said, okay,
Speaker 1: well tomorrow, if it's eleven thirty, now I'll be here
Speaker 1: by ten. And now I'm just gonna be hanging out
Speaker 1: waiting if you guys like to do this thing daily.
Speaker 1: And the other thing I liked about that spot was
Speaker 1: we hadn't seen boot tracks. We'd seen boot tracks of
Speaker 1: other places, but that place no boot tracks, no trail cameras,
Speaker 1: so it seemed like it was a little untouched. Next
Speaker 1: day we have kind of what I just described. We
Speaker 1: chased some birds in the morning. They gobbled all right,
Speaker 1: but they were across the slow couldn't get on them.
Speaker 1: And then we make the move over there we get
Speaker 1: to where I want to set up. And Richard didn't
Speaker 1: quite like it. In this gap was too sunny, didn't
Speaker 1: really have a lot of shade to hide. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was that's a hot tip of his. He don't like
Speaker 1: that tracks he wants because here he got so much
Speaker 1: good stuff to hide him. Yeah, you don't want to
Speaker 1: get picked off. Get into the dank, you know, like
Speaker 1: you have fabrics of your clothes will just shine. That's
Speaker 1: anywhere you always want to set up in the shape.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying, I know, but here you really can
Speaker 1: hunker in. Yeah, I mean, like you know, if you're
Speaker 1: hunting grasslands studded with ponderosa pines. Yeah, there's no place
Speaker 1: to hide out there. You know. It's like it's just
Speaker 1: different than here. I mean, you can you can nestle in,
Speaker 1: you know, you can. You can nestle in too much,
Speaker 1: you can't see anything. And you can always just cut
Speaker 1: one maybe two of those salt palmetto branches, I don't
Speaker 1: know what you call them, salt palmettos. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: just they're perfect. They gotta if you cut it at
Speaker 1: an angle a little state. Yeah, it just right, and
Speaker 1: I mean boom. You got ground blinds somewhat like a
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like a palm frond frond. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that. We can make a quick little blind out
Speaker 1: of palm fronds. Yeah. And uh so you kind of
Speaker 1: move around a corner. It's a smaller prairie that's connected
Speaker 1: to a bigger, bigger prairie by the thirty yard gap
Speaker 1: of hammocky trees. And then there's kind of a road
Speaker 1: parallel in the both of them. So we come in
Speaker 1: on the side road and finally we find one spot.
Speaker 1: It's two covered up in poison ivy. So we moved
Speaker 1: down the road a little bit, find another spot again.
Speaker 1: Getting late in the day, everybody's kind of losing their edge,
Speaker 1: and we get in there, break some branches, do some
Speaker 1: things set up. We got Seth and Garrett with us
Speaker 1: and snack bar time, have some snacks, some water. I
Speaker 1: kept telling Garrett, just like, let me know when you're
Speaker 1: all tucked in and ready, because we're gonna give a
Speaker 1: couple of calls and we gotta be like ready to
Speaker 1: not move when it's go time. You know, we're gonna
Speaker 1: give it an hour here and see what happens. And
Speaker 1: he says he's ready. Seth's ready. We're all set up.
Speaker 1: And I don't even get through the first set of
Speaker 1: clucks and a hand starts clucking back at me. Close
Speaker 1: and what pot call are using right now? That was
Speaker 1: the uh I was using that new Morgan Stern green
Speaker 1: slate over teak? Is that what it's called green slate
Speaker 1: over teak? Something like that? Phelps made, Oh know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about? Yeah, sounds good. And uh Immediately she's
Speaker 1: uh clucking back at me, and I'm like, Garret, he's here,
Speaker 1: and he's just like, yeah, they're coming down the road.
Speaker 1: I'm like, holy shit, you know, I mean we must
Speaker 1: have just snuck in ahead of him. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: bicecke like a little bit later. You just spooked him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Or had we not just decided to sit there and
Speaker 1: gone fifty more yards down that road, you know, we
Speaker 1: probably would have bumped into him. So here come the
Speaker 1: first couple of hands. One hand kind of eyeballs us.
Speaker 1: We're not that far off the road, ten fifteen yards
Speaker 1: at the closest five yards. She makes it by us,
Speaker 1: and as soon as one makes it bias. The day
Speaker 1: four I had seen, Oh so when I when we
Speaker 1: bumped that group, it was a strutter and six or so,
Speaker 1: I thought, six to eight hands. Maybe she makes it
Speaker 1: by us, and I'm thinking perfect. As long as the
Speaker 1: lead hands by us, everybody else is eventually gonna follow
Speaker 1: her and filter by. So it takes a while here
Speaker 1: come more, but it doesn't take too long. And we
Speaker 1: can hear somewhere off in the jungle. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: more like, oh man, you can hear it. You could
Speaker 1: hear it so well too. Yeah, it doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a wet fart, just like I just like that. So
Speaker 1: so you're spitting a stream at tobacco yet and uh
Speaker 1: so we know there's a strutter in the bunch and
Speaker 1: it's just a matter of time. We just gotta sit
Speaker 1: still in on which years Richard, that was a good one.
Speaker 1: That was good A well, I don't know where to
Speaker 1: speed up the story a little bit. There's multiple hands,
Speaker 1: a lost count, but it was probably getting upwards of
Speaker 1: double digits, and really so giant pilot yea all around us.
Speaker 1: We have hands going behind us in the hammock, and
Speaker 1: before we've even seen the gobbler I think now set
Speaker 1: to Garrett were on my left. They saw him long before.
Speaker 1: Had I been in Garrett's sitting spot, I would have
Speaker 1: shot the turkey at least twenty minutes before I did,
Speaker 1: maybe thirty. They got to sit there and watch the
Speaker 1: show forever. I could just see a you know, tip
Speaker 1: of the fan and the flash of the white head
Speaker 1: here and there they got the show, which is ed
Speaker 1: him out with the butt of my shotgun and boom
Speaker 1: he goes down out of my waye. Yeah, that time,
Speaker 1: probably would have just sat there and been like, whoa's
Speaker 1: that poor guy? People are fighting, one's unconscious, and uh,
Speaker 1: we have a hand behind us. They all out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: She jumps up and flies and almost I mean I
Speaker 1: only she actually cleared, went over the tree that we
Speaker 1: were on, but right next to the cabbage palm that
Speaker 1: we're sitting on. Just flies and then lands five six
Speaker 1: seven yards to do like a micro adjustment. Yeah, She's like,
Speaker 1: I'm done feeding here, I'm just gonna pop back out
Speaker 1: to the road over us. Just chopped us, and uh
Speaker 1: that was cool. But she landed so close and I
Speaker 1: was looking left, I didn't I couldn't even look right,
Speaker 1: you know, I just had to stay up your head.
Speaker 1: So all this is going on, Sath and uh and
Speaker 1: uh Garret are getting the show. By the show, I
Speaker 1: mean gobblers in their strut his tail off. At one point,
Speaker 1: I think, boy, if I just kind of lean out,
Speaker 1: I had some small salt palmettos on my left. I thought,
Speaker 1: if I just lean out around those, you know, I
Speaker 1: get on him, I can probably take the shot. But
Speaker 1: he still had a couple of hands around him. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like I'm gonna push it. There was a
Speaker 1: Jake in that group too, and at one point that
Speaker 1: Jake popped into full strut and that's what brought him
Speaker 1: the closest he came. Because that Jake popped into full
Speaker 1: strut and it pissed him off. He like went racing
Speaker 1: over towards about that. Yeah, that's what brought that turkey
Speaker 1: the furthest towards us, towards us that he got. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what also happened, Well, we could hear but couldn't see.
Speaker 1: This is Richard and I listening. Is we could hear
Speaker 1: every now and then like a like a wing flap.
Speaker 1: I could hear him but Seth and Garrett could watch
Speaker 1: him masturbating. They had never seen it, I guess. But
Speaker 1: all we could hear was, I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: hearing that, it'd be like a clap or two. I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: it sounds like there might be like a turkey beating
Speaker 1: another turkey with his wings or something. And then later
Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, we saw him there and it looked
Speaker 1: like Seth actually thought you thought it was mating. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when I first saw it, I could only see
Speaker 1: he was like kind of behind a tree, and I
Speaker 1: could only see like the right side. He was facing
Speaker 1: directly away from me. I could only see like the
Speaker 1: right side of his body, and I could see him
Speaker 1: doing like the little wing flap thing. You know when
Speaker 1: they when they mount a hen and breeder. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: do that little like wing flap thing. I could see
Speaker 1: him doing that, and I could hear him doing it,
Speaker 1: and I actually leaned over to Garrett and I said,
Speaker 1: he's breeding a hen. Was Garrett was Garrett like, turkey,
Speaker 1: you're fighting, but he wasn't on top of a but
Speaker 1: and then he did it again in the wide open
Speaker 1: in front of me, and he was not on a hand.
Speaker 1: He was just doing it for funzies or was he
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean Jake and the Gobbler did it
Speaker 1: at the same did Jake started doing it and the
Speaker 1: gobblers started doing it? Right, He's like like this and
Speaker 1: the Hans didn't want anything to do with the strutter.
Speaker 1: He was trying, but they weren't. Yeah, they were like
Speaker 1: they were like gross. Yeah, they were ready, I guess. Yeah. Anyways,
Speaker 1: the last two birds I think are the I never
Speaker 1: even saw where the jake went because we never got
Speaker 1: pushed back. Yeah, so when that jake went into full
Speaker 1: strut he came around That's when he came the furthest
Speaker 1: um to from our left to right and then work
Speaker 1: that jake back around the prairie there to where he
Speaker 1: eventually disappeared. So yeah, hen to me, it almost looks
Speaker 1: like she spooks and goes back down the road and
Speaker 1: the gobbler follows her. I'm like, oh, that's it, it's over.
Speaker 1: But then we could keep hearing them drumming and spitting,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, seth, what they do? He said they
Speaker 1: went out into the prairie, and we're talking this prairie
Speaker 1: is it's a wet spot, but no big trees on it.
Speaker 1: It's about a hundred yards. It's like a big dish wide. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not. It does it's not holding water though, maybe
Speaker 1: right in the middle clarify, Yeah, the middle of it
Speaker 1: gets a little deep. So the vegetation right in the
Speaker 1: middle is really tall, so it's not like something like
Speaker 1: you could see across, so that that center of it
Speaker 1: is blocking our view from the turkey. So it's like
Speaker 1: a reverse you know, like almost like a donut. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we can just hear him, and he keeps drumming and spinning,
Speaker 1: drumming and spinning, and finally, Richard, it's like, man, I
Speaker 1: think he might pop out right here in front of us,
Speaker 1: but at a distance, because he's going around the long
Speaker 1: the backside of this prairie, and uh, all of sudden
Speaker 1: Richard sees him. I can see him. I can't see him,
Speaker 1: but then there's there's his fan, and I'm like, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm on him. He's and he's I think he's actually
Speaker 1: coming to us at that point, just a little bit,
Speaker 1: maybe a little on an angle. The first thing I
Speaker 1: saw was the white head through the grass. And as
Speaker 1: soon as I saw that flash of white just kind
Speaker 1: of bobbing through the grass. I was like, I see him,
Speaker 1: and I think you said something like where or where
Speaker 1: or where? And then his fan went up and you're like,
Speaker 1: oh there, because you were calling intermittently as well, No,
Speaker 1: we had I didn't. I didn't call until he was
Speaker 1: he was in this gap and we were about to
Speaker 1: lose sight of him again, and he was about midway
Speaker 1: through the gap, and I did, I ask you should
Speaker 1: I call him? Like heck yo? So I hit him
Speaker 1: with the you know what what what? What? In his head?
Speaker 1: Just yeah, he did the periscope of a periscopes. I
Speaker 1: mean you could barely see his head on the tops
Speaker 1: of that vegetation when he periscoped. I mean it looked
Speaker 1: like there was a solid foot he was on the
Speaker 1: head and neck. Yeah. Yeah, maybe he did stretch up
Speaker 1: his legs. He was all the way up. But then
Speaker 1: you said shoot him and I'm looking at him. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I think he's out of range. And then Richard said
Speaker 1: something like, well, you pattern that gun, didn't you. And
Speaker 1: I took that to mean like, dude, shoot him and
Speaker 1: it was a poke he's or did we even did
Speaker 1: we talk about how far the distance was? Yeah, before
Speaker 1: I shot. Yeah, I said, I feel like it's the fifties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like, sounds good to me. So I touched off
Speaker 1: and roll him. But I took off after him, and
Speaker 1: he even though he was flopping, he had that kind
Speaker 1: of flop that wasn't crazy erratic. It was when you
Speaker 1: got near him, he was trying to inch away from you.
Speaker 1: So even though he doesn't even have his neck with
Speaker 1: him anymore, he's got something enough in his head where
Speaker 1: he's like, I'm trying to get away from that big thing.
Speaker 1: It's towering over me right now. Man. So those number
Speaker 1: nine's at sixty did some work. Rolled him hard. I
Speaker 1: mean I still had to, you know, choke him out,
Speaker 1: but more of that breast can be full of the pellets.
Speaker 1: We're gonna know here, surely. But yeah, yeah, we arranged
Speaker 1: it from where I finally stopped. When I got on
Speaker 1: his neck. It was sixty six back to the cabbage palm.
Speaker 1: But I think he had flopped solid five six yards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he almost chased it a little bit. That's a little poke,
Speaker 1: and it's a megapoke, mega poke. But I don't know.
Speaker 1: We probably could have let him eat. He's out of
Speaker 1: that prairie. We knew where he was going, and then
Speaker 1: we probably could have made another approach, but we would
Speaker 1: have gone full bushwhack style after that. We would have
Speaker 1: been barely crawling in on him. Yeah, him and him
Speaker 1: and his I felt good though. It was like that periscope,
Speaker 1: the way his head was like so high up like that,
Speaker 1: there was like just so much neck there, right, That's
Speaker 1: why I felt like I felt confident about that, you know,
Speaker 1: And you've got that red dot on there, like it
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know, I didn't in that moment.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't see you a question in it. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I had patterned it at fifty and it had patterned great. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Had I arranged him and it was at sixty, I
Speaker 1: probably would let him go. But you know, it's hard
Speaker 1: to tell fifty additions between fifty and sixty is super
Speaker 1: hard to tell. So totally anyways, dead bird. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: in the fridge. That's the end of my assie old
Speaker 1: And at that moment I became a grand slam turkey holder.
Speaker 1: You know what quote I heard the other day? Nope,
Speaker 1: roost it ain't roasted. Nope, No, not your first time
Speaker 1: here in that one? Had you heard that before many
Speaker 1: a time. I like that. You didn't you've never heard,
Speaker 1: you know. I just wrote a quote earlier today. I
Speaker 1: like this. It's called I was criticizing these boys fishing
Speaker 1: in the river down here. I said, you're fishing the
Speaker 1: way you wish the world was, not the way it is,
Speaker 1: which means we're targeting large mount bash and not throwing
Speaker 1: crawls and not sinking chicken legs down there for a
Speaker 1: big catfish. Yeah, I see, ye're in Florida. You gotta
Speaker 1: you gotta try and catch it down there, trying to
Speaker 1: catch a trent ten pound northern on and these like
Speaker 1: ten inch large mount as, not norther sorry, large mouth,
Speaker 1: fullmouth bass, bucket mouth, trying to catch a big bucket
Speaker 1: mouth and they come back with nothing. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: I tell you one thing, if I was down on
Speaker 1: that dock, I'd catch a fish because I'd put a
Speaker 1: crawl arounder a bob or and I'd find out just
Speaker 1: what was living there. And he motivated that to happen.
Speaker 1: Chris went down there and caught it himself a couple
Speaker 1: to lappy while we've been state record baby, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: thinks he has a state record, which great so I
Speaker 1: went to Lapia. We're gonna end the show, but I'll
Speaker 1: end on this. Um. I went to Lapia. Bow fish
Speaker 1: in the yard night Nokchobe and they dig a bed.
Speaker 1: You've seen it, Yanny, because you meet bow fish before.
Speaker 1: They'd dig a bed the lakes of which I have
Speaker 1: never seen. It's amazing. I mean it looks like a
Speaker 1: bomb went off under water. Not only is it the
Speaker 1: side like you know what someone says, the size of
Speaker 1: a bushel basket you want when I when my kids
Speaker 1: get older, i'd tell something being like a bushel basket.
Speaker 1: They're probably can know what I'm talking about. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not off. It's barely relevant now to most people I know,
Speaker 1: But I grew up, man, you'd go buy tomatoes, you'd
Speaker 1: buy like a pack, a bushel basket or a pack.
Speaker 1: You know. So yeah, it's barely relevant now. But for
Speaker 1: you old timers who grew up going with your mom
Speaker 1: down and picking ship picking pay produce places, it's a
Speaker 1: bushel basket in diameter, and they dig that sun bitch
Speaker 1: half a bushel basket deep for their eggs or oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and they clean it out. Are they trying to get
Speaker 1: through the muck? To get some. They clean it down
Speaker 1: and they clean it out, and even at night when
Speaker 1: you're going along, it's like they just stand out and
Speaker 1: you might look at the night we are out, you
Speaker 1: might look at eight or nine empty ones. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of those the fish already skidded out because
Speaker 1: it's just surrounded by dense vegetation. So when they slide out,
Speaker 1: they like slide out. You might you might catch a
Speaker 1: little movement where he's hitting the weeds, you know, but
Speaker 1: he's gone. But every whatever, eight nine, ten of those beds,
Speaker 1: he's just sitting on there. And if you're not right
Speaker 1: over the top of them with your bow, it's fun.
Speaker 1: Man is the tlopia? What's it related to? It's a
Speaker 1: cyclid cicklid? Is that right? Oh? Man Chester, looked that up.
Speaker 1: My phone's over there. I got you, I got you.
Speaker 1: It's a cyclid. I think it's a sicklid ci ci
Speaker 1: c h l I D. They are native I know
Speaker 1: this is their native to the Middle East and North Africa.
Speaker 1: They've been exported all over the world as an aquaculture species.
Speaker 1: One of the things they do with them, and I
Speaker 1: saw this in the Philippines for rotational farming in rice patties.
Speaker 1: You'll like get a crop or whatever number of crops
Speaker 1: of rice, have a rice patty. You'll then flood that patty,
Speaker 1: put tilappi in it, harvest the tlappie out. But then
Speaker 1: it also like they you know, they fertilize, so you
Speaker 1: run a cycle of tlappie in there, raise those up
Speaker 1: to eating size, eat the tilapia, and then put the
Speaker 1: rice patty back into rotation. So I saw that a
Speaker 1: long time ago. But they've escaped all over and here
Speaker 1: the big ones are the blue telapia. Incredible abundance of them.
Speaker 1: Non native. It's illegal to have a live one in
Speaker 1: your possession really, you know, because they take the other water.
Speaker 1: Can't like throw them in a bucket and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm just bringing them home fresh. If you when he's
Speaker 1: in your possession, he's gotta be dead. And we went
Speaker 1: out both fishing. We were not We were just kind
Speaker 1: of a fly by night deal. We're just fly by
Speaker 1: night and it we didn't have the right lights and everything.
Speaker 1: We're just shooting off headlamps. But tell you what, man,
Speaker 1: if you're fishing, if you want to go gate or
Speaker 1: hunting or fishing in Okachobee or he does a lot
Speaker 1: of bass fishing, a lot of bass guiding, bass fishing.
Speaker 1: Captain Bobby Stafford. Hell of a nice guy. We we
Speaker 1: we were doing a different I don't want to get
Speaker 1: into what we were actually doing. We're doing a whole
Speaker 1: different project. But it got to go both fishing with
Speaker 1: that guy for a night. Yeah, Craig, if you're in
Speaker 1: this area and you want to have a hell of
Speaker 1: a good time and and go gator hunting. He does
Speaker 1: gator trips for trophy gators, like trophy gators being ten
Speaker 1: plus gators. Large mouth, does a lot of that. When
Speaker 1: I was with him, he booked a client for large mouth.
Speaker 1: Um does a lot of large mouth fishing. And I
Speaker 1: don't know what. I don't even know what all the
Speaker 1: hell he does. He's got regular boats, does croppie fishing,
Speaker 1: he's got regular boats, he's got airboats. Um, if you
Speaker 1: ask him real nice, maybe he'll take you out for Tilapia.
Speaker 1: It's not a normal deal. We just happened to go
Speaker 1: for Telapia. Captain Bobby Stafford, Bob Stafford. Everybody calls him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Bob Stafford, you were right. It is a cyclid cicklid
Speaker 1: delicious grilled. Listen, man, I thought it pretty good. It
Speaker 1: was all right, but not as good as it would
Speaker 1: have been if you'd have fried it. And if you
Speaker 1: get it to lapping, you want to eat it. Get
Speaker 1: the blue, get the red muscle off it, trim it nice,
Speaker 1: and fry that sucker until there's no bubbles coming out
Speaker 1: of your almost so there's no bubbles coming out of
Speaker 1: your deep fryer m heavy fry, and that heavy fry
Speaker 1: firms it up, firms it up, and it gets rid
Speaker 1: of that ever so slight muddy taste. And apparently I
Speaker 1: was reading. When I was reading up on these your dad,
Speaker 1: I gave hi an extensive read up. I don't know how.
Speaker 1: When in the aqua culture facilities, Oh, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: a little fact, they'll lit'll you won't little surprise you'll
Speaker 1: you'll you'll you won't be wondering why you listen to
Speaker 1: this show after you hear this, because you learn all this.
Speaker 1: The fourth most consumed fish by pounds consumed per person
Speaker 1: in the United States of America. However, they do a
Speaker 1: broad grouping shrimp as part of that shrimp's number one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and lord knows how many species of shrimp, but there's
Speaker 1: multiple species of tilapia. So like shrimp, tuna, salmon, tilapia
Speaker 1: pounds consume per person per year in the US of A.
Speaker 1: That'd be a good trivia question. Oh dude, I know
Speaker 1: I blew it. Maybe you can still use it, all right, Everyboddy.
Speaker 1: If you're listening to game on Sockers and that comes up,
Speaker 1: you'll know where that came from. Hey, wait, I did
Speaker 1: I have one follow up? That dog's tongue was seventeen
Speaker 1: inches long? But Gene Simmons was it Jean Simmons dog?
Speaker 1: What state? Was it from? Michigan? That's what I thought
Speaker 1: you'd be interested. There's a boxer seventeen inches long, Richard.
Speaker 1: Anything we missed that you want to add about your
Speaker 1: beautiful little part of the United State? It's of America.
Speaker 1: You got down here? Well, I heard once, Steve you
Speaker 1: said on a podcast that was you were reflecting on
Speaker 1: your your last experience hunting down here turkeys, and you
Speaker 1: had been I believed private land like pasture type land,
Speaker 1: and that that property boarded up to WMA, and you
Speaker 1: had said that side of the fence it was a
Speaker 1: lot different than the side of the fence we were
Speaker 1: on and you wanted to know what was that on
Speaker 1: that side? That wasn't a WMA. That was aha. It
Speaker 1: was like some kind of like not a refuge system refuge.
Speaker 1: It was some kind of like locally administered waiting bird refuge. Okay, ye,
Speaker 1: not a WMA, so not cattle grazed. I'm glad I
Speaker 1: got to take you over the side. Yeah, you took
Speaker 1: me to their side of the fence. Yeah, I like
Speaker 1: the better cool. That was great, man, awesome. I love
Speaker 1: tons of wildlife, tons of birds, super well managed. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of clothes, Like I like
Speaker 1: all those closed roads you gotta walk around. Like when
Speaker 1: you think about wild places and it's it's easy to
Speaker 1: look at something like the Grand Canyon and like the
Speaker 1: scale of that and like, you know, be impressed, right
Speaker 1: this grand, big, big stuff and like here everything we
Speaker 1: have is on a micro level, and it's like spending
Speaker 1: two three days you start to zoom in and see
Speaker 1: all those little things and kind of see like how
Speaker 1: many layers there are. I'm like how compounded the wildlife
Speaker 1: here is and that scale it's completely different. Like once
Speaker 1: you tap into that, you're like wow, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but pounds of life per unit of space is high
Speaker 1: in the water especially, Oh yeah, very high. We didn't
Speaker 1: even get it all, you know, my whole thing, like
Speaker 1: Florida's for fighting, dude, we didn't even get into all
Speaker 1: the fighting. That's yeah, that's like another two hours. I
Speaker 1: want to do a preview of the Do you ever
Speaker 1: see that movie Warriors? This movie from the side of
Speaker 1: the late seventies or early eighties, and it's about these
Speaker 1: all these gangs in New York, like and one of
Speaker 1: them is like the Clown Gang, one of them the Warriors.
Speaker 1: They all have like have these different themes, right, and
Speaker 1: the Warrior Gang they get into some trouble and and
Speaker 1: they got to make it back and it's just like
Speaker 1: you know this, how do they get back to Coney Island?
Speaker 1: Like just kind of like all these different gangs like
Speaker 1: all after each other and all that, And that's like
Speaker 1: kind of like where we're at. Oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's little like I find I could be wrong. I
Speaker 1: found there like very like like in my brief experience
Speaker 1: talking to people in a wide variety of places, a
Speaker 1: wide variety of people in Southwest Florida, I was surprised
Speaker 1: by the factionalism, surprised by the factualism, even right down
Speaker 1: to like you have like people who are trying to
Speaker 1: do stuff to clean up the estuaries and improve the fisheries.
Speaker 1: But then the people that live inland are mad at
Speaker 1: those people because their prescription of how the water should
Speaker 1: be handled is not good for deer hunting. And so
Speaker 1: you know, I hate them, and I hate them, I
Speaker 1: hate The problem is the system is so fractured that
Speaker 1: putting it back together is not simple. And also putting
Speaker 1: it back together also means that you can't you can't
Speaker 1: put it back to the way it was, Like it's
Speaker 1: not it's not ever going to go back to the
Speaker 1: way it was. So what it's going to be in
Speaker 1: the future is something different, something resembling what it was,
Speaker 1: but like a completely new thing. Like what I think
Speaker 1: about is like post wilderness. So the problem with that
Speaker 1: is that that also involves like a vision of like
Speaker 1: what that thing is, and there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: folks like fighting for their version of that vision, you know,
Speaker 1: And I think that's what makes it so hard, because
Speaker 1: in honest, most of those folks, each one of them
Speaker 1: care for various reasons, each for each one of those
Speaker 1: their their intentions are because of their passion or their
Speaker 1: love for a place right, But like those values conflict
Speaker 1: sometimes and there's no like there's not a good place
Speaker 1: where they all kind of like can come together. And
Speaker 1: like it's a shame because there was a time, you know,
Speaker 1: back in the seventies where we almost lost like a
Speaker 1: very large part of this place. And it was only
Speaker 1: because those types of groups, groups that wouldn't normally get along,
Speaker 1: had to because if they didn't, there'd be, you know,
Speaker 1: there'd be no toys for anybody to play with, you know,
Speaker 1: that whole thing that like, well, if you guys are arguing,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take your toy, both your toys away, you know,
Speaker 1: and like how can we get back there? You know,
Speaker 1: how do we get back there? When I first was
Speaker 1: trying to describe the fact the factionalism that I had
Speaker 1: been hearing about, I told Richard it was like when
Speaker 1: the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and all the warlords
Speaker 1: head a jockey. Yeah, and it's it's politicals who has money,
Speaker 1: who has influenced conservation groups shit talking other conservation groups
Speaker 1: values of like what the land should be used for
Speaker 1: is big if we had more time and I and
Speaker 1: I wasn't wrapping her up. You know what I don't
Speaker 1: want to talk about too. How you guys are gonna
Speaker 1: get your bear season back? Yeah, well you only had one.
Speaker 1: It's how you're going to get a bear concluded. It's
Speaker 1: included in the management plan. The only problem is quote
Speaker 1: of zero. So it just has to be voted back
Speaker 1: into in some way or another. I know I was
Speaker 1: gonna wrap it up. But Florida did a bear hunt
Speaker 1: and they really underestimated hunter efficacy. They had a quota
Speaker 1: that was two hundred somewhere on there. Yeah I think
Speaker 1: so too. But they issued five thousand tags and they
Speaker 1: had a forty eight hours shut off. I think they
Speaker 1: shut it off once they hit the quota and that
Speaker 1: was two days. But so they were looking to do
Speaker 1: two hundred. People were already all the animal rights people
Speaker 1: on New Jersey, cat ladies were already all they were
Speaker 1: already pissed. They were at the check stations already. They
Speaker 1: turned at hunt on and they got too many, had
Speaker 1: too many tags and that they couldn't fit. They this
Speaker 1: wildly underestimated hunter efficacy, and man, they opened it up.
Speaker 1: They couldn't shut it off fast enough. They blew up
Speaker 1: to three thirty or something like that before they could
Speaker 1: turn it off day and then that little blunder, basically,
Speaker 1: that little blunder basically like eliminated any prospect for that.
Speaker 1: I would have said, like, wow, next time, we should
Speaker 1: let fewer tags out, but the Florida public said, wow, Hanna,
Speaker 1: Well that's also Yeah, it also had a huge impact.
Speaker 1: That two was just who showed up to those commissioned meetings,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately they showed up more than the hunters did.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get into it too much, but
Speaker 1: I'm met a person who I was very surprised that
Speaker 1: he was opposed. I've met a person of influence. I
Speaker 1: was very surprised to learning he opposed that bear hunt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was heartbreaking. It was very painful for a lot
Speaker 1: of sportsmen down here. They had. He had a perspective
Speaker 1: that was interesting. He's like, man, we can hunt everything
Speaker 1: in Florida. No one messes with us. You do this,
Speaker 1: they're gonna mess with you right now. No one messes
Speaker 1: with us. We do whatever we want. But you mess
Speaker 1: with that animal and you're gonna invite a lot of attention.
Speaker 1: I told him, I said, I said, I don't agree
Speaker 1: with that. All right, y'all, thanks for joining Richard, thank you, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, thank you man. Noah, it's a long time coming.
Speaker 1: You did, You did real well by us though. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Let's go out in good guiding now, it's fun. We'll
Speaker 1: about jump in the pool. Yeah, I gotch go catching fish.
Speaker 1: Yeah all right, thanks everybody. Oh see you Graan Sean
Speaker 1: like silvering the sun, right right on, right right on
Speaker 1: a ride on, sweetheart. We're done, beat this damn horse
Speaker 1: to death, to take it the new one and ride
Speaker 1: We're done, beat this damn horse to death, So take
Speaker 1: your new one and ride on.