Speaker 1: This is Me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt podcast, you
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor
Speaker 1: where you stand with on X alright, chatter. We're gonna
Speaker 1: start right out with the with A with A with
Speaker 1: A segment, aren't you gonna say? I trust that Phil
Speaker 1: is going to put in the the jingle, the jingle
Speaker 1: the Continuing Adventures of Chester the Investor comes. That's it,
Speaker 1: Come on, and there's a there's a there's not an
Speaker 1: inside joke. There's a very obscure joke built into the
Speaker 1: intro for Chester the Investor. Yeah. I think that if you,
Speaker 1: if you, if you know what we're talking about, you
Speaker 1: should write in and explain what the joke is once
Speaker 1: you listen to it. Not you Chester? Yeah? All right?
Speaker 1: So yeah, where are we at? There is there a wall?
Speaker 1: Do you do you own a walleyeboat? Now? I do
Speaker 1: not own a Walleye boat. Um, Slowly but surely it
Speaker 1: is looking good. Eventually, eventually will be fishing. Steve and
Speaker 1: cracking a few cold ones. So since we last spoke,
Speaker 1: how is your how is your bitcoin investment? So Bitcoin
Speaker 1: right now is volatile, as my brother would say, it's
Speaker 1: you know, up and down. A lot of people are
Speaker 1: selling and buying and selling and buying, and it was down.
Speaker 1: They have weak constitutions, Yeah, they're they're not strong. You
Speaker 1: gotta stay strong in the bitcoin game. Um. But uh,
Speaker 1: it was down a while. Um kind of February, like
Speaker 1: late February bitcoin was down a little, but um, as
Speaker 1: of yesterday kind of rallied again and uh, and it's
Speaker 1: starting to go up. So earlier I was asking Chester
Speaker 1: about his thinking on this. Uh, if he as he
Speaker 1: does this thing to get the walleye boat, as he earns,
Speaker 1: the manipulates his bitcoin, not manipulates invests in bitcoin in
Speaker 1: order to get a walleye boat. I was asking him,
Speaker 1: does the initial investment get thrown in toward the boat. Yes,
Speaker 1: so so that money is committed to the walleye boat. Yes,
Speaker 1: But again, like I said, when I get there, I
Speaker 1: still will probably consult with you, you being included in that, um,
Speaker 1: just to make sure I'm at the right time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel that if it's shot up and you got
Speaker 1: to a basic walleye boat. You might drag your feet
Speaker 1: and think you're going to get a sweeter walleye boat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean over the long term of bitcoin, that would
Speaker 1: happen like you would wind up with like a walleye yacht. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean you look at the percentages, it's like return
Speaker 1: that anyone that's like, you know, if you've invested seven
Speaker 1: years ago or something like that in bitcoin, it's pretty
Speaker 1: darn Yeah. But do you want to wait seven years
Speaker 1: for that wallet boat? Yeah, dude, wal I might not
Speaker 1: even get around anymore. We got a fish. Now. They
Speaker 1: are saying that it may triple. Well, I read that
Speaker 1: to you this morning off CNN. Yeah, they're saying somebody's
Speaker 1: saying it. Now listen, let me tell you something here
Speaker 1: for uh. Sean Weaver wrote in a friend of ours
Speaker 1: he was listening to He was listening to a previous
Speaker 1: edition of Chester The Investor, and he wrote in to
Speaker 1: say this. An Econ professor of mine in college talked
Speaker 1: about the role of sentiment in markets and how it's
Speaker 1: an important part of a market trying to find equilibrium.
Speaker 1: There's an investing there's an investing strategy based around it
Speaker 1: around being a contrarian. The basic logic is the time
Speaker 1: to buy is when everyone thinks it's a horrible investment,
Speaker 1: and the time to sell is when everyone thinks it's great.
Speaker 1: Now here's when he has like a kind of weird
Speaker 1: dig on this show, like he takes a pop shot
Speaker 1: at like insults this show. Huh yeah, he says. He says,
Speaker 1: I got a good chuckle today because I can't help
Speaker 1: but think the Meat Eater podcast talking about bitcoin is
Speaker 1: a good signal to sell for contrarian investors, which is
Speaker 1: like us dig meaning like, if we know about it, it
Speaker 1: it must to be that the cats out of the bag. No,
Speaker 1: that's well, yes, that's what he means, but I would
Speaker 1: say that's not the case at all. I'm the only
Speaker 1: one sitting here who's invested in bitcoin. But I got
Speaker 1: jealous this morning and texted my wife to see if
Speaker 1: I could buy some bitcoin, and she said that ship
Speaker 1: is sailed. No, I don't think it has. I do
Speaker 1: not think it has, because, like I said, none of
Speaker 1: you guys in this room, as I'm aware of, are
Speaker 1: invested in bitcoin. So many people are skeptical, which is
Speaker 1: understandable because it's a lot of this stuff is right
Speaker 1: over my head and I don't even understand it. But
Speaker 1: luckily I have somebody to consult with that, you know,
Speaker 1: keeps me calm and keeps me in the game. Brother
Speaker 1: and uh, we just had a long conversation with him
Speaker 1: on the on the ride here about it, and uh,
Speaker 1: guy knows the stuff you can. You can ask him
Speaker 1: about anything, and you're you're saving up for a Lund.
Speaker 1: Doesn't have to be a Lund. But I like them both.
Speaker 1: They are nice boats. I like them. That eighteen footer
Speaker 1: that you run in Alaska. Get a little simple outboard
Speaker 1: tiller fish finder right next to mee just over seven
Speaker 1: thousand dollars for that whole with trailer, I think, so yeah, wow,
Speaker 1: I'm I was, I'm getting there. I was looking at
Speaker 1: him my line until until I found my boat. What's
Speaker 1: your child like? So we're gonna keep the segment going
Speaker 1: until you get the damn boat with the segment could
Speaker 1: last year's this show. Could let this segment and that
Speaker 1: fills jingle and everything. We might get years of material
Speaker 1: out of this investment. You know, if it triples this year,
Speaker 1: maybe uh maybe I can still keep some stuff in
Speaker 1: bitcoin and still get the boat. And then we'll change
Speaker 1: the segment and it will be a segment about your
Speaker 1: Walleye adventures. He'll come try that, can you? Can you
Speaker 1: put on the continuing Walleye Adventures of Chester into the
Speaker 1: into the We'll see homes. Yeah, continuing the continuing the
Speaker 1: continuing Walleye Adventures of Chester. The investor Mike and I
Speaker 1: have the first first idea for it. I'm coming down
Speaker 1: to New Mexico and we're gonna chase some New Mexico wall. Yeah, Mike,
Speaker 1: you were saying, this is the southernmost wall. I here
Speaker 1: in New Mexico, southernmost and in uh North America, as
Speaker 1: far as I know. What's your title again? What's my title?
Speaker 1: Can you tell us? You gotta keep secret. Let's just
Speaker 1: say I work in fisheries. He's a fisheries big wig,
Speaker 1: fisheries big wig that makes some more and bigger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Michael's explaining that. Let's say one was in fisheries. You
Speaker 1: will find that the common feedback from the public is
Speaker 1: that they would what they would like more bigger fish.
Speaker 1: It's very it's really very simple. Here's anything to touch
Speaker 1: on quick before we get into everything else. We're supposed
Speaker 1: to be doing uh, first light, it's new Foundry bridges.
Speaker 1: The Foundry pants are out there, these sons of bitch
Speaker 1: and pants that it's been. But you're probably looking on jealously,
Speaker 1: very jealously. This I'm not joking. I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: out how to say that that people recognize. I'm telling
Speaker 1: the truth. It is the Foundry pants with the knee
Speaker 1: pads built into them, are I'm not shooting you, like,
Speaker 1: are the best hunting pants that I have ever ever
Speaker 1: had on my body. Ever, they haven't a kneepad in them.
Speaker 1: It's like a very lightweight, well integrated knepad. You can
Speaker 1: take it out to wash them, but it's in there
Speaker 1: so well. It's like it doesn't bother you hiking around
Speaker 1: you do not know what's there. But when you get
Speaker 1: out of your tent on your knees and the gravel
Speaker 1: or you're on your knees glass and or you're crawling
Speaker 1: up on something is such a game changer. And they
Speaker 1: got very like like a very durable blend of fabrics.
Speaker 1: But I've got I don't know, man, I've been wearing
Speaker 1: I'm wearing like a pair of all fall I've got
Speaker 1: well over sixty days into them. Um God, they're comfortable
Speaker 1: and they have side zippers. So if you get first
Speaker 1: lights zip on long John's and you've got the side
Speaker 1: zip around these pants, you can undo the side zip
Speaker 1: around the pants and through that little hole unzip your
Speaker 1: long John's and actually pull your long John's off like
Speaker 1: a magic trick. Have you seen me do this? You
Speaker 1: never have to drop your drawers. You don't even drop Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't even drop your drawers. You unzip a zipper,
Speaker 1: reach in there and unzip another zipper like it's like
Speaker 1: a magic trick. Also, and you're standing here hold in
Speaker 1: your Long John's. Damn good pants like the just in
Speaker 1: terms of durability, comfort, pocket configuration, knee pads, side zipper fit,
Speaker 1: even the right amount of belt loops in the right places,
Speaker 1: like the best pants I have ever worn. Now, quick
Speaker 1: word about vass leaning dampons. A woman from Ashley, No,
Speaker 1: she's from. Her name is Ashley, She's from Austin. She
Speaker 1: wrote in to say it to have this to share
Speaker 1: about the Meteor Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, which
Speaker 1: is available now at Amazon dot com. In there, we
Speaker 1: make a very spirited argument for using as your firestarter.
Speaker 1: You go find a friend who dips and get one
Speaker 1: of their used dip tins right chew ten and then
Speaker 1: you take cotton balls and rub vassilene into those cotton
Speaker 1: balls and pack that chew tin old the cotton full
Speaker 1: of vast Lane infused cotton balls. Because they make wonderful
Speaker 1: fire starters. It doubles as vast lane if you need,
Speaker 1: like you get chapped lips, a braided skin, um and
Speaker 1: t s A guys don't steal it from you because
Speaker 1: when you're toting around any kind of accelerant, like all
Speaker 1: those sort of fire starters from the sporting goods store,
Speaker 1: the t s A guys will take them from you
Speaker 1: and potentially find you. We gotta fine seven not not
Speaker 1: for a fire starter, but we had a seven thousand
Speaker 1: dollar fine from is a beutane fuel canstor my body
Speaker 1: that showed up in the security line with a loaded
Speaker 1: pistol that he didn't know he had in his bag
Speaker 1: had less of a fine than a jet bowl canister,
Speaker 1: which our lawyer got it knocked down to half. That
Speaker 1: how do you know you have a pistol in your
Speaker 1: bag that's loaded? I told, This is the feedback I
Speaker 1: provided for him. I said, I think the fine for
Speaker 1: having of trying to get on a plane with a
Speaker 1: loaded pistol you didn't know you had should be that
Speaker 1: you get shot with the pistol. Sounds right somewhere you
Speaker 1: can pick where, you pick where, but that's the fine
Speaker 1: as you get shot by it. And wasn't your fuel
Speaker 1: and check luggage like not? Yeah? So, uh, we're flying
Speaker 1: home from a trip and one of the one of
Speaker 1: you know, we just like checked all the gear and
Speaker 1: also one of our guys they paid them to come
Speaker 1: down security. So it goes down to security to the
Speaker 1: t s A dudes and they're like, hey, we found
Speaker 1: this fuel can in your bag and he's like, oh sorry, man,
Speaker 1: you know, just go ahead and throw it out, you know,
Speaker 1: definitely don't need it. Cool. And then some period of
Speaker 1: time goes by and all of a sudden, here's this
Speaker 1: big stack of paperwork with that fine. Right. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: my buddy that tried to bring his pistols loaded pistol
Speaker 1: line to the airplane, I think it was all said,
Speaker 1: and don't old a thousand dollars, right, and that was
Speaker 1: gonna go like in the cabin with him. He didn't
Speaker 1: lose his pistol and we lost our field can injustice Anyways,
Speaker 1: Astley from Austin writes in what got me on that?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah why you carry? Why? Why like bassline if
Speaker 1: you're traveling person. She was saying that, uh, she had
Speaker 1: this is interesting piece of feedback. She didn't have cotton balls,
Speaker 1: but she had tampons and vassilen and to start a fire.
Speaker 1: Took that tampon material kind of like crumpled it up,
Speaker 1: put vassilan on there, and she says it's a phenomenal
Speaker 1: fire starter. Think of that. Whatever works. Uh. We talked
Speaker 1: recently on the episode where a guy was saying that
Speaker 1: see a long time ago to talking about how people
Speaker 1: how cabella is a bass Pro shop, which is the
Speaker 1: same thing now and it is bought Sports's warehouse right, No, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't hear that. I heard at Yeah they did,
Speaker 1: that's it. Yeah, So like bass Pro bought Cabela's and
Speaker 1: that entity bought sports in his warehouse. So if you're
Speaker 1: like walking into a sporting good stores probably all by
Speaker 1: the same mugs. Um. We got to talk about when
Speaker 1: people sell like where's all that taxi durn you come from?
Speaker 1: Like you know you're going to a bass Pro or whatever.
Speaker 1: They sometimes had these massive dioramas of you know, he's
Speaker 1: sort of like stuffed menagerie's. And we're talking about the
Speaker 1: market of of when you get like an exceptional specimen
Speaker 1: of an animal, the market of selling it to to
Speaker 1: wind up in these things. How people can make that
Speaker 1: might be if if bitcoin doesn't work out for you, Chester,
Speaker 1: you might get that Walleye boat by shooting giant stuff
Speaker 1: and selling the sporting good stores. Well, I'll have to
Speaker 1: get out hunting and actually kill something I set in
Speaker 1: my game off. So this guy was saying that one
Speaker 1: of these the Cabella's offered his old man seventy grand
Speaker 1: for an l buino porcupine, And uh, I think that
Speaker 1: someone expressed even the idea that they weren't even buying it,
Speaker 1: even the existence of the porcupine, and he sent in
Speaker 1: and it's damn sure it looks like an albino porcupine
Speaker 1: to me. Or do you think Kevin Murphy cutest little
Speaker 1: porcupine I've ever seen? I've seen a few porcupins, my
Speaker 1: dogs have tangled and laws for the porkeypins. You ever
Speaker 1: seen an al buyo porcupine? Never heard of one cutest
Speaker 1: damn animal on the planet. Never heard that little guy.
Speaker 1: He's pretty cute, super cute. Here he is chewing on
Speaker 1: an antler. Now Seth is gonna report on this, which
Speaker 1: is this is an insane This is one of the
Speaker 1: most upsetting things I've looked at and forever. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's like, I hate looking at it. I think
Speaker 1: that someone you know, what, do you want to put
Speaker 1: it on your Instagram so the people can go see
Speaker 1: for themselves? Yeah? Okay, so so you gotta you gotta,
Speaker 1: you gotta realize you're making the commitment here and you're
Speaker 1: gonna let people down. What do you mean if you
Speaker 1: don't do it? Yeah, I'll put it on my highlights
Speaker 1: where I put all the stuff. Put it on the
Speaker 1: main thing or not at all? Can't you do both?
Speaker 1: You should put it on yours because more people will
Speaker 1: see it, Okay, And I I have a certain certain
Speaker 1: aesthetic I keep with my Instagram. They explain that to me. Well,
Speaker 1: if you look at my Instagram, explain it's all high
Speaker 1: quality photos that are it's all fine art. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't want to put some hairy asked eyeball, dear, No,
Speaker 1: not unless I took a picture of it and fine
Speaker 1: art style. I'll put it on mind. Go ahead and
Speaker 1: tell everybody what's going on. It's it's one of the
Speaker 1: more upsetting things. I will have it. I guarant d
Speaker 1: amn t. I'm sending a note about this right now.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, everybody about It's a deer that has I
Speaker 1: believe it's pronounced corneal Dermoid's like yeah, So there was
Speaker 1: an individual that, uh or there was someone that saw
Speaker 1: this deer and reported that it was like the deer
Speaker 1: was circling, it was make going in circles. It had
Speaker 1: visible bleeding, lacked awareness of people around it, and had
Speaker 1: something on its eyes. It turned out to be this
Speaker 1: corneal dermoid. And what it is, it's like a abnormal
Speaker 1: growth of skin and hair follicles on areas where skin
Speaker 1: and hair follicles don't grow and just happened to grow
Speaker 1: over its cornea to gradually. Have you seen this mike
Speaker 1: to gradually where if you look at this picture, it's
Speaker 1: a buck and where you'd expect his eyeball to be
Speaker 1: like not as eye, but what's the part in the
Speaker 1: middle of your eyeball, your corna, that's the part that
Speaker 1: you say, like you have blue eyes. Whatever that's we're
Speaker 1: talking about, I think so, yeah, is hair, Yeah, gradually, gradually,
Speaker 1: gradually it grew into where he eventually became blind and
Speaker 1: he has a hairy Harry eyeball, a harry eyeball developmental
Speaker 1: glitch where the corny a tissue fails to form and
Speaker 1: it defaults the skin. If you get it, because the
Speaker 1: mug get it. Yeah, limbal dermoiden hair shafts over your eyeball.
Speaker 1: You people out there, Yeah, yeah, Oh, I wonder how
Speaker 1: like I wonder how often that happens or has happened before. Well,
Speaker 1: Karin included. Karin included, if you go down, there's a
Speaker 1: dude's eyeball who's got hair growing out. That book looks
Speaker 1: pretty young? Was that book? Born with included a fair
Speaker 1: a bunch of ex dreamly disturbing photos. Doesn't say if
Speaker 1: it was born with it or not. I'm interested in that, right,
Speaker 1: like if it if it's onset, wants the animals got
Speaker 1: some age to it, or if it's born with I
Speaker 1: would think it it's onset because there's no way a deer.
Speaker 1: I mean this. You can tell in this photo that
Speaker 1: the buck has antler growth, so it's probably least a
Speaker 1: year old. I don't think a deer that's a year
Speaker 1: could survive in the wild a whole year being blind.
Speaker 1: But that's just one eye, I said both eyes. I
Speaker 1: think the other thing it said it was both eyes.
Speaker 1: Didn't say it was both eyes yet. Yeah, even a
Speaker 1: blind horrible fund every now and then, that's true. You guts.
Speaker 1: Check out this deal with the person in the feeding
Speaker 1: the grizzly Barris, you know the story in Grand Seaton. Nope,
Speaker 1: So a bunch of people sent this into us. Some
Speaker 1: more like there's a neighborhoods, there's a there's a subdivision
Speaker 1: and it's called the Solitude Subdivision a Grand Tetown, Wyoming, Okay,
Speaker 1: And some neighbors report this lady for feeding grizzly bears.
Speaker 1: And you know that famous like there's that famous grizzly.
Speaker 1: A little bit, it's problematic that we have a famous grizzly,
Speaker 1: but like there's like like this three grizzly grizzly number
Speaker 1: three nine nine. She's like spend her whole life out
Speaker 1: now she hangs out in town and everybody's all worked up.
Speaker 1: This bear has all this offspring, and these offspring are
Speaker 1: all eaten in this lady's backyard. So they got to
Speaker 1: talk to her, be like, you're feeding bears. She's very
Speaker 1: excited about the fact that the bears are here. She
Speaker 1: explains that she has an aura that allows her to
Speaker 1: communicate with bears and that prevents her from being hurt
Speaker 1: by bears. And she's feeding many grizzlies in her yard
Speaker 1: grain soaked and molasses. But you are allowed to feed moose,
Speaker 1: so all she has to they're not prosecuting her because
Speaker 1: she says, I'm feeding moose. It's not my fault that
Speaker 1: all these grizzlies are in my yard. And while they're
Speaker 1: standing there, the agents that come visitor, they're staying there.
Speaker 1: There's five grizzlies eating off her back porch. But they're saying,
Speaker 1: that's not we gonna do because she's feeding moose. Difficult
Speaker 1: time prosecutor sounds like, sounds like they need to go ahead.
Speaker 1: Yet it sounds like that one guy who got killed
Speaker 1: in Alaska kind of um he wasn't feeding him, was
Speaker 1: a badass though Timothy treadwell, yeah, he don't camp anyone
Speaker 1: in this room. Why do they need to change the rule.
Speaker 1: They you shouldn't be allowed to feed anything yell, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's the whole thing. In a a while, like what
Speaker 1: they're feeding their elk, feeding elk and deer feeding stations.
Speaker 1: I mean, they've created this weird problem. And I know
Speaker 1: cal has talked about this quite a bit. Is they
Speaker 1: At a time, you know, hunters wanted more game right
Speaker 1: in Wylming, like people wanted a big, healthy elk hirt
Speaker 1: and me too, write so people wanted a lot of elk,
Speaker 1: and having a lot of elk and wyloming as elsewhere
Speaker 1: would cause the enormous amount of strife with agricultural interests,
Speaker 1: right because where they gonna all go, So they live
Speaker 1: up in the mountains in the winter or in the summer,
Speaker 1: winter comes, they come down in the big riparian areas
Speaker 1: and there on cattle grazing lands. They're ingrained, they're they're
Speaker 1: on crop lands doing all kinds of damage. So at
Speaker 1: a time, people did this, you know calculus in their
Speaker 1: heads that were if we're gonna have herds of tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of elk in these areas, um, and we
Speaker 1: don't want to be a huge problem for landowners. We
Speaker 1: need to find something to do. And so they fell
Speaker 1: into the habit of feeding, making feeding grounds and to
Speaker 1: to support what some people claim is like a artificially
Speaker 1: high number of elk. They feed ungulates through the winter.
Speaker 1: The surrounding states don't, but they do, and they're staying
Speaker 1: true to it. What's finally drawing it into question now
Speaker 1: is like c w D transmission, where you got from
Speaker 1: hundreds of square miles. You have a magnet that sucks
Speaker 1: all those deer and elkin, and so they stand around
Speaker 1: in groups of thousands for the whole winter eating feed.
Speaker 1: So it's legal defeat. It's legal to feed. And this
Speaker 1: woman here is is taking advantage up with grizzlies, which
Speaker 1: is really weird. And then when they pointed out to
Speaker 1: whether it's dangerous, she accused the agents of being quote whimps.
Speaker 1: They cloned a blackfooted ferret, the first US and Dangers species,
Speaker 1: black footed ferret. They had a specimen um that died
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, and people are just getting into you know,
Speaker 1: people are starting to realize the potential around genetics, and
Speaker 1: they froze this ferret and the US So the US
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service is raising a black footed ferret
Speaker 1: in Fort Collins, Colorado that is a genetic copy of
Speaker 1: a ferret named Willa who died. Think of that. I
Speaker 1: think I like the name. I think Will is a
Speaker 1: cool name. But they'd be good name for a daughter.
Speaker 1: Actually was one of our plans if we had a girl. Ye,
Speaker 1: we're having a boy instead. What do you name that boy?
Speaker 1: I don't know yet. Cody Hunter. I don't think either
Speaker 1: of those. You're not gonna name a Cody or Hunter. Dude,
Speaker 1: everybody names their kids Cody and Hunter. No, but I
Speaker 1: think it's amazing to use, you know, technology like that
Speaker 1: to clone an animal that's that's gone, to try to
Speaker 1: bring some genetics back into the existing population. Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 1: but we we had a we had a if you
Speaker 1: go way back in our library, we had an episode
Speaker 1: called Cloning Mammoths. I think, Yeah, I remember with a
Speaker 1: with the ancient genetics you know, DNA specialists, and she
Speaker 1: kind of explained what they're really getting at, um some
Speaker 1: of the some of like the the ethical and practical limitations,
Speaker 1: because the real I think the thing everybody's aiming for
Speaker 1: is that you would, um that we would bring back
Speaker 1: the passenger pigeon, right ah, And people point out that
Speaker 1: what makes the animal okay? So pastor pigres are the
Speaker 1: things that were in flocks of millions, you know, and
Speaker 1: if you made one and had one, you could like
Speaker 1: put it in a cage and be like, that's a
Speaker 1: past your pigeons, Like is it do? I mean, like,
Speaker 1: is it really you know, does it qualify as a
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon? Like would you ever be able to bring
Speaker 1: that back? Right? But but I think in this situation
Speaker 1: with ferrets, what you're talking about is an existing population
Speaker 1: of endangered ferrets that there's active conservation work going on
Speaker 1: to try to bring them back on the landscape. Right.
Speaker 1: And then you have are you know, a ferret from
Speaker 1: not all that long ago, but that is very likely
Speaker 1: different or hold some genetic diversity that no longer exists
Speaker 1: in ferrets. And I don't know this for certain, but
Speaker 1: I could demand. I'm guessing it has to do with diversity.
Speaker 1: And and so you're not you're not really trying to
Speaker 1: you're not trying to take that one ferret and repopulate
Speaker 1: North America, you know, the planes with ferrets, you're trying
Speaker 1: to capture something that was essentially lost that could potentially
Speaker 1: ring genetic diversity back into those populations. Yeah, we've talked,
Speaker 1: we've we've covered this a little bit. For the blackfooted
Speaker 1: ferrets are what's called Lazarus or what's known as a
Speaker 1: Lazarus species, like Lazarus from was Lazarus in the Old
Speaker 1: Testament the New Testament I think, oh Man. Anyways, in
Speaker 1: the Bible, there's a fellow named Lazarus who comes back
Speaker 1: from the dead, and the blackfooted ferret is a Lazarus species.
Speaker 1: People thought at a time that we had we humans
Speaker 1: had wiped them off the face of the earth. And
Speaker 1: as the story goes, uh, one day a rancher and
Speaker 1: Matitzi Wyoming sees his dog carrying something unusual, and it
Speaker 1: was a black footed ferret, and they found the prairie
Speaker 1: dog colony that was supporting this black footed ferret and
Speaker 1: that in fact, they were not on right. And so
Speaker 1: from that, though right, you can imagine how narrow the
Speaker 1: potentially the genetic diversity of that species could have gotten.
Speaker 1: And you know, again I don't I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about faret conservation, but I can imagine from other things
Speaker 1: I know more about that being able to go back
Speaker 1: in time and and grab some genetic material from an
Speaker 1: individual that was you know, it's been gone for a
Speaker 1: long time now, and bringing that forward in order to
Speaker 1: incorporate you know, in the captive bringing or you know,
Speaker 1: even into the wild could really be of a lot
Speaker 1: of value. Yeah. Did I sound like I'm down on this? No,
Speaker 1: I'm super into it. Just that it's not just it's
Speaker 1: very different than saying like, oh, we're gonna bring back
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons, right, yeah, they're gone. If you know, if
Speaker 1: you had millions of specimens with you know, well preserved DNA,
Speaker 1: would you potentially clone each individual that you have out
Speaker 1: there and end up with millions of paste your pigeons
Speaker 1: and somehow maybe I'm right, not likely, but different than
Speaker 1: something that they're actively working on. Uh. When we talked
Speaker 1: about the passenger pigeon thing, it's interesting to get into
Speaker 1: this idea of what is the public's appetite. Like, let's say,
Speaker 1: because the last passenger pigeon to die I think died
Speaker 1: in or something. I know his name is Martha. I
Speaker 1: know it died in the Cincinnati Zoo, it would be weird,
Speaker 1: Like it's funny to think about that there was um
Speaker 1: that people knew it was the last one. This is it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could go to this zoo and they'd be like
Speaker 1: that right, there is the last passenger pigeon. When she dies,
Speaker 1: that species comes to an end. Maybe she died in
Speaker 1: one when you boys figure that out. So they're just
Speaker 1: sitting there. I just google the lazar a New Testament,
Speaker 1: New Testament, Thank you. Um. Anyways, they blink out right,
Speaker 1: and let's say you could uh, let's say you you
Speaker 1: were able to get them, make new ones, okay, and
Speaker 1: propagate them, and you had some plan where we're gonna
Speaker 1: be like no, no, no, we're gonna reintroduce and there
Speaker 1: will be flocks of millions of passenger pigeons that will
Speaker 1: descend onto your crop field. How does everybody feel about this? Fourteen?
Speaker 1: What did I say? Not that one? I was thinking
Speaker 1: like passed away September one, nine fourteen. Good job. Um.
Speaker 1: That would be an interesting test of public will because
Speaker 1: people don't be inconvenienced by wildlife generally. You know, it
Speaker 1: would be a hard sell for people. Some people. Some
Speaker 1: people will be like, I would like it from a
Speaker 1: hunting perspective, but I think you would probably encounter a
Speaker 1: fair bit of resistance if you were really going to
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, and you may encounter some ecological drivers
Speaker 1: that would be hurdles. To it as well. I mean
Speaker 1: it's you know, the landscape things have probably changed quite
Speaker 1: a bit since they were really at their peak. And
Speaker 1: I you know, I've often heard over hunting cited as
Speaker 1: a reason for their demise, but you know that it
Speaker 1: was a different world and right the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: when they were really starting to client. So who who
Speaker 1: knows if the ecological conditions still exists too, you know,
Speaker 1: would still exist to recover. I think the last big
Speaker 1: shoot I've read this sponge. I think the last big
Speaker 1: slaughter was around Alpina, Michigan. Interesting, was one of the
Speaker 1: last places where they really got on and shot, you know, right,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands or millions of them was in Michigan.
Speaker 1: And they would descend when trees were when mass producing
Speaker 1: trees were coming in. They would just descend and strip
Speaker 1: the trees. And people discussed, like so many landing on
Speaker 1: branches of trees at the trees, branches would be snapping. Geez,
Speaker 1: it's crazy. And I've also read that it was Some
Speaker 1: people point out that it was probably that those huge
Speaker 1: numbers were probably not hadn't always been that way, but
Speaker 1: it was like some perfect storm of decimation of other
Speaker 1: wildlife agricultural practices at the time, and maybe it made
Speaker 1: this sort of image that that's what it's like, or
Speaker 1: like that that's what it's supposed to be like, but
Speaker 1: in fact was a complete anomaly to have those explosive
Speaker 1: numbers of those Well, yeah, and that's part of what
Speaker 1: I mean, right it is think about eastern four you
Speaker 1: know that the timber harvests that happened through the ninete hundreds,
Speaker 1: like in Pennsylvania, you know, completely change those forests from
Speaker 1: was it white pine dominated seth anyway from from you know,
Speaker 1: coniferous forests. Oh, Kevin, that's really messing up the sound.
Speaker 1: No change those forests changed from coniferous forests the deciduous forest,
Speaker 1: just based on timber harvests that happened all across Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: And then also consider what's you know, like what happened
Speaker 1: with chestnut, right, chestnut blake came in Chessnut were predominant
Speaker 1: species all up and down the East coast, and chestnut
Speaker 1: blake completely wiped him out. And so again I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about the ecology or natural history of passing
Speaker 1: your pinions, but you could imagine a situation where those
Speaker 1: you know, they played something like that that has complete
Speaker 1: change now played some key role in their ecology and
Speaker 1: it just wouldn't be around anymore. Yeah, that's why I
Speaker 1: think that the I think that the blackfooted ferret is
Speaker 1: a prime specimen for rehabilitation because you have we still
Speaker 1: have massive pray dog colonies that people spend a lot
Speaker 1: of money trying to control, but they control it with poison.
Speaker 1: Still it's weird, like as much as we hear about
Speaker 1: and the old that that that you know, during like
Speaker 1: the periods of predator annihilation in the late eighteen hunters
Speaker 1: and early that they were you know, indiscriminately poisoning carcasses
Speaker 1: to kill foxes, coyoes, wolves, whatever, mountain lions, bears to
Speaker 1: sort of like depopulate predators. Was all through poisoning campaigns.
Speaker 1: Um it's still used pray dogs. Like you go out
Speaker 1: and seed prairie dog colonies with poison pellets, and that's
Speaker 1: what's credited with killing off black footed ferrets is they're
Speaker 1: getting there they're eating poisoned prairie dogs. But it's interesting
Speaker 1: to think, like here, you have this surplus of food
Speaker 1: that's available if you can get these things on there,
Speaker 1: and then somehow prevent them from but then not use
Speaker 1: poison control which were then turned around and kill the
Speaker 1: black footed ferret. But I don't know if black footed
Speaker 1: farets ever are effective enough to like actually control pray
Speaker 1: dog populations, because when you read historical accounts like the
Speaker 1: entire great planes of the praye dog colony, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not like they were killing them off. Yeah, to be clear,
Speaker 1: way out of my depth. Oh no, you don't. You
Speaker 1: don't need to test, you don't need to be given
Speaker 1: expert testimony. But I'll tell you this that you guys
Speaker 1: brought up Pennsylvania. This is a good thing from Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: We had an arborist. We had this squirrel guy on
Speaker 1: the episode was called the squirrel Doctors in he's a
Speaker 1: squirrel doctor um, like a PhD in squirrels um. And
Speaker 1: he talked a lot about how they're so good at
Speaker 1: not dying when they fall from trees. And an arborist
Speaker 1: wrote in Western Pennsylvania Arborist, he was saying he has
Speaker 1: seen realistically fifty squirrels jump out of trees over seventy high,
Speaker 1: some out of a hundred foot trees. He said that
Speaker 1: three out of four that he's seen this is when
Speaker 1: he's ascending a tree to prune it and bust squirrel out.
Speaker 1: Squirrel can't come down because he's in it. He said.
Speaker 1: Three out of four of them hit the grass, bounce
Speaker 1: three ft in the air and land running. He had
Speaker 1: a fox squirrel one time jump eighty ft and he
Speaker 1: said there was a two inch or two ft diameter
Speaker 1: puddle of water. A fox squirrel jumped eighty feet and
Speaker 1: hit that water pool like it was He said it
Speaker 1: was like it was aiming for it. But he says
Speaker 1: an hard time. He was not in a tree. He
Speaker 1: was just sitting in a driveway mine in his own
Speaker 1: business in a car, and he sees a fox squirrel
Speaker 1: fall out of a tree and hit a phone line
Speaker 1: ten ft from the ground, died right before his eyes.
Speaker 1: He then another squirrel came down, full grown squirrel, halfed
Speaker 1: it up his dead friend and carried him back up
Speaker 1: into the tree. What I witness account? That's crazy. It's
Speaker 1: good friend. I see him for just I've been walking
Speaker 1: through the woods and just squirrel hits the ground like
Speaker 1: it must have just fell out, just hits the ground,
Speaker 1: takes off round. No, yeah, I've definitely seen where they
Speaker 1: just come out and in uh iguanas or inexplicably fall
Speaker 1: from trees when it now when it gets to you
Speaker 1: know what if you see this like now when they
Speaker 1: get it gets super cold, you know they got the
Speaker 1: invasive iguanas in Florida during that big cold snap that
Speaker 1: just happened, they had to put out warnings about falling iguanas.
Speaker 1: No ship. Yeah, yeah, imagine you mess you up. But
Speaker 1: when just in Arkansas we found I told about we
Speaker 1: canna tell you about this mic rule and we're just
Speaker 1: an Arkansas. We found a lot of birds that it
Speaker 1: froze to death during that cold snap. One day, we
Speaker 1: found three froze to death woodpeckers in one day, just
Speaker 1: not a mark on them. It looked like a live woodpecker,
Speaker 1: but it was dead laying on the forest floor. Mike,
Speaker 1: we had a big bird guy off here in your Mexico.
Speaker 1: Do you recall what that was it was from? Was
Speaker 1: it the cold spell? Was it trout? My understanding was
Speaker 1: that it was it was mostly cold. Was that I
Speaker 1: think it was that October It was a cold snap
Speaker 1: earlier this year. Those birds didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: fat on him, I think was what I heard. And uh,
Speaker 1: they died of exposure. They had a way to go
Speaker 1: for a bird. So we're recording right now in um
Speaker 1: how how it doesn't matter. We're indemning New Mexico and
Speaker 1: we're down here because I had a stellar year on
Speaker 1: my permit draw, to say the least. Now, listen, here's
Speaker 1: the thing. A lot of people are like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they give you special treatment because like you have a
Speaker 1: TV show, so you get all these permit draws. Listen,
Speaker 1: I apply for everything in every state, Okay. I apply
Speaker 1: for everything in every state, and every year like you
Speaker 1: get something, but I'm applying for everything in every state.
Speaker 1: You know, like this year in Alaska drew nothing. Last
Speaker 1: year in Alaska drew nothing. Okay, but I just so
Speaker 1: happened to hit not even know if it's statics. You
Speaker 1: guys can tell me how extraordinary it is. I happened
Speaker 1: to in one year in New Mexico draw and what's
Speaker 1: called an off range orics tag and drew a female
Speaker 1: or immature billy ibex tag all in one fell swoop
Speaker 1: one year draw. The New Mexico doesn't do bonus points,
Speaker 1: and and we've explained hundreds thousand times, but bonus points
Speaker 1: are like if you apply for a permit and don't
Speaker 1: get it, they sort of reward you as a repeat
Speaker 1: customer by giving you like a point, and then your
Speaker 1: name goes into the hat basically like your name goes
Speaker 1: into had an additional time the next year, and it's
Speaker 1: like it kind of like baits you in to keep
Speaker 1: you active. New Mexico doesn't engage in that. So I
Speaker 1: could be applying for an ORCS tag for fifty years
Speaker 1: and some whipper snapper comes in and applies for his
Speaker 1: first time, and the fifty year veteran and the whipper
Speaker 1: snapper have the exact same odds of drawn the ORCS tag.
Speaker 1: But I had put in for quite a few years
Speaker 1: for an ORCS tag, but drew the ORCS tag off range.
Speaker 1: And we talked about this in the past, and it's
Speaker 1: it's that on range means White Sands missile range, and
Speaker 1: off range means the rest of the damn state. The
Speaker 1: IBEX tag that I drew is for the Florida, not
Speaker 1: Florida with the Florida mountains, and which you New Mexicans
Speaker 1: wants to talk through, Uh, how this came to be,
Speaker 1: Why this is a thing, Why IBEX hunting is a thing,
Speaker 1: like how like how who? Well, Jeremy, can you say
Speaker 1: where you work or you have to not you have
Speaker 1: to tell Yeah, I work for the National Wildlife Federation
Speaker 1: on the Regional Connectivity Coordinator. See that, Mike, It just
Speaker 1: comes right out and says it. Try to act like
Speaker 1: he's in the CIA. I know af you but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, going back to but but you
Speaker 1: know what before you do that, tell people more about
Speaker 1: what you're about your work? Well, UM, I work mostly
Speaker 1: on on landscape wildlife connectivity issues across the West, So
Speaker 1: looking at landscapes and how well connected they are UM
Speaker 1: most folks, you know, one of the best ways to
Speaker 1: describe that and put that in a perspective is through
Speaker 1: the lens of migration corridors, so ungulate migration corridors, you know,
Speaker 1: looking at that landscape and how well connected it is.
Speaker 1: One of the first measures you can do to look
Speaker 1: at how well a landscape connect is connected is by
Speaker 1: looking at the barriers right, so roads, fences, urban development,
Speaker 1: things that can impede and service barriers to to movement
Speaker 1: of wildlife and ensuring that landscapes UM stay connected. So
Speaker 1: a lot of my work is working with UM multiple stakeholders. Right,
Speaker 1: wildlife no no boundaries for the most part. So when
Speaker 1: wildlife are migrating across jurisdictional boundaries, it's important to work
Speaker 1: with those both those multiple engaged stakeholders, from tribes to
Speaker 1: private land owners to UH federal agents, land management agencies,
Speaker 1: state wildlife agencies. You know, it's it's important for folks
Speaker 1: to be on the same page and to manage cordinally
Speaker 1: for those species, because we want to make sure they're
Speaker 1: they're around right. We don't want them be having these
Speaker 1: conversations about al camilder that we're having about black for
Speaker 1: the ferrets and passenger pist You know, we're close after
Speaker 1: the border. You can see the surveillance blimp. Right do
Speaker 1: you work when you're doing connectivity stuff? Are you working
Speaker 1: with Mexico as well? So I'm I'm not as far
Speaker 1: south in New Mexico. UM, so I don't really work
Speaker 1: with Mexico, but I do have colleagues who do, and
Speaker 1: they do things like a black bear, um cougar, also birds.
Speaker 1: They do a lot of avian species of migration. I know.
Speaker 1: I think montezoomc quail is is a is a species
Speaker 1: of hot topic there at the border. But for the
Speaker 1: most part, I have not been focusing most of my
Speaker 1: work on on wildlife boarder issues. I do the people
Speaker 1: that do work on the um connectivity issues across the border,
Speaker 1: they've probably been spending their recent years like focused on
Speaker 1: one thing, which is the border wall. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean,
Speaker 1: as I was mentioning, right, like barriers, barriers to movement,
Speaker 1: there's no bigger barrier than a border wall. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: was funny about that too. Is most of barriers you
Speaker 1: talk about and you talk about wildlife migrations are things
Speaker 1: that are sort of like accidentally a barrier, Like no
Speaker 1: one like it is like, let's put it in a highway.
Speaker 1: That would be a good barrier. It's like, let's put
Speaker 1: it in a highway because it's sweet because you can
Speaker 1: drive around real good. And then someone later is like, oh, ship,
Speaker 1: it's a big barrier. But there you're like, let's make
Speaker 1: a barrier. It's very purpose built. It's it's well distinguished. Um,
Speaker 1: there's there's purpose behind it. Um. You know. During the
Speaker 1: construction of the border wall, I think there was a
Speaker 1: lot of controversy to those exact issues on what they
Speaker 1: would do to the ecological state of that landscape and
Speaker 1: providing for a well connected landscape for various species, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and the arguments still out there, I
Speaker 1: think I think it's safe to say that it was.
Speaker 1: The border wall has been pretty invasive in those landscapes
Speaker 1: where where they have been constructing it, And so I
Speaker 1: would go as far as saying that, you know, when
Speaker 1: you do something of that magnitude, there is going to
Speaker 1: be consequences that there are going to be repercussions in
Speaker 1: some way, shape or forman um. You know, sometimes the
Speaker 1: wildlife are the ones who are are the recipients of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I know that. Like I'm I'm talking about
Speaker 1: I'm talking. This is me talking right now. This is
Speaker 1: not Jeremy talking like I'm I'm going to talk now.
Speaker 1: And I don't want you to be guilty, guilty by association.
Speaker 1: But the thing that it's so funny I found with
Speaker 1: people and talk about the border wall is people that
Speaker 1: support that want a wall are very uneasy if you
Speaker 1: bring up, if you even point out a problem with it,
Speaker 1: they want to act like that doesn't exist. You could
Speaker 1: still look and be like no, no, I like all
Speaker 1: things considered, all things factored in, I'd still like the wall,
Speaker 1: but they get I rate, if you suggest what the
Speaker 1: implications would be for wildlife, it's like they get mad
Speaker 1: that you bring it up instead, like I would imagine
Speaker 1: you would take the approach of, oh, yes, totally, I
Speaker 1: understand this is a big problem for wildlife, but my
Speaker 1: I'm giving priority to the human issues, to the economic issues,
Speaker 1: and even though it's not ideal for wildlife, I'm still
Speaker 1: deciding to support it. But people aren't, like they don't
Speaker 1: look at it that way, like if you bring it up,
Speaker 1: you're a bad person to bring it up, which is
Speaker 1: sort of emblematic of a general reluctance to sort of
Speaker 1: general reluctance these days to just to like discuss and
Speaker 1: debate things and consider them in their totality. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's been really like I've had people get so if
Speaker 1: we run articles or post articles about wildlife issues in
Speaker 1: the border wall, people just get piste, Well, it's a
Speaker 1: political issue too, right, Um. There's there's a lot to
Speaker 1: that argument, and I would I would think about it
Speaker 1: as as the new border wall that's been constructed. There
Speaker 1: was a border wall there before or right, um, and
Speaker 1: that didn't prevent a lot of things from happening, and
Speaker 1: even with the new border wall, things are still happening, right, Um,
Speaker 1: I think I just I just read an article the
Speaker 1: other day about a suv carrying I think it was
Speaker 1: twenty passengers that wrecked on the highway and they got
Speaker 1: through a hole in the border wall. So to what
Speaker 1: level is creating a border wall? Uh, actually solving the issue? Um?
Speaker 1: And with that comes all those arguments, right yeah? Um?
Speaker 1: And I think, like I do think it's we're talking about.
Speaker 1: But if let's say you point out let's say you're
Speaker 1: planning a family vacation. Okay, you're like, oh, I think
Speaker 1: we should go on family vacation, and someone says, um,
Speaker 1: you know, if we go on family vacation, we will
Speaker 1: have less money because we'll have spent money on our vacation.
Speaker 1: No one gets mad at that person. Instead, you'd be like, yes, correct,
Speaker 1: we will have less money, but the vacation is important.
Speaker 1: We're still going to go on the vacation. Like, you
Speaker 1: don't get pissed at people for bringing up the considerations
Speaker 1: except this, then it's you're you're a bad person to
Speaker 1: bring up It's just it's kind of I know, this
Speaker 1: is like a side pet Peeve, and I do want
Speaker 1: to return to Ibex, but just it remains in my
Speaker 1: mind and anytime I'm down here looking at the border,
Speaker 1: I start thinking about it again. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: real time here, you know. I mean the border wall
Speaker 1: or is a day to day issue that everyone here
Speaker 1: has to interact with for the most part. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: winds up not being like um, like up in the North,
Speaker 1: you're like, you know, southern border. I mean there's I
Speaker 1: mean there's places on our border where there's not a
Speaker 1: border wall. There hasn't ever been a border wall. All right.
Speaker 1: Back to the Ibex. Well, you know, the Ibex. Ibex
Speaker 1: were introduced in New Mexico and the Florida Mountain Range
Speaker 1: back in the seventies with the whole exotic push that
Speaker 1: our state took, you know, utilizing some of these barren
Speaker 1: landscapes to have hunting opportunity. And in doing so, they
Speaker 1: saw one of the game commissioners at the time, through
Speaker 1: his travels across the world, saw these various species and
Speaker 1: as I as I mentioned on previous Orex talk, um
Speaker 1: he saw um the opportunity to introduce some of these
Speaker 1: exotic species into New Mexico. Right, So, Stevie had the
Speaker 1: opportunity to hunting orix. That was one of the species.
Speaker 1: One of the other ones they tried to introduce was
Speaker 1: also the kudu that that never took um. And then
Speaker 1: they also introduced ibex. Two species of ibex. In fact,
Speaker 1: one was the Siberian ibex that was introduced into the
Speaker 1: Canadian River drainage. Uh folks probably know that as the
Speaker 1: sabiosa wilderness um. And then they also introduced the Persian ibex.
Speaker 1: People also call that the Bazaar ibex, and that was
Speaker 1: introduced into the Florida Mountain range. Was this was this
Speaker 1: coming from one individual? Is there like a person who's
Speaker 1: kind of like Johnny apple Seed of exotics was? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't recall his name, but he was a state
Speaker 1: game commissioner at the time, and he just saw this opportunity.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, my my home landscape doesn't hold animals,
Speaker 1: and I want to be able to have the same
Speaker 1: opportunities of hunting these exotic animals that I was overseas
Speaker 1: and from what I got from my researches. He worked
Speaker 1: with the other game commissioners to propose the idea. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, there's there's obviously. Uh, I think an economic
Speaker 1: driver behind it. You know, if you want to create
Speaker 1: hunting opportunities, and in doing so, they they assess the
Speaker 1: landscape for those species that would seem more appropriate and
Speaker 1: they seem to find them, you know, in New and
Speaker 1: sorry not New Mexico. In New Zealand, there was actually
Speaker 1: committees of people that the focus of the committee was
Speaker 1: to make the fauna similar to Europe's. Interesting it was
Speaker 1: to make it familiar and bring in like red deer
Speaker 1: and you know, all that kind of stuff. So it's
Speaker 1: like it's definitely not um uh, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: like exclusively in New Mexico thing, but it's interesting that
Speaker 1: three things took so well, oh yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: or x X and other and various other exotic species
Speaker 1: are are not in uton North America, right. You look
Speaker 1: at Texas, there's high fence ranches that have worrix other
Speaker 1: types of ris as well other exotic species. But New
Speaker 1: Mexico is a unique place where we have free ranging
Speaker 1: exotic animals right that are largely on public land, all
Speaker 1: predominantly on public land. The only ones that aren't on
Speaker 1: public land for the most part. You know, you've got
Speaker 1: barbary running around private land, but you also have orris
Speaker 1: on Department of Defense land on the missile range. Other
Speaker 1: than that, most of those most of those exotic species
Speaker 1: are calling public land home. Yeah, Jeremy's coming off of
Speaker 1: an exotic trifecta in one week. One week, I was
Speaker 1: fortunate enough to harvest a barbary sheep, and then a
Speaker 1: colleague of ours wife had a once in a lifetime
Speaker 1: RIX hunt on range, and so, uh, last Sunday, Saturday,
Speaker 1: I helped out and was fortunate enough to be a
Speaker 1: part of that little excursion where she where my buddy's
Speaker 1: wife harvested her once in a lifetime orix. And then
Speaker 1: I hustled down here to meet you to finish the
Speaker 1: trifecta for Jason Persian ibex. Uh, get into a little
Speaker 1: bit about how many of those, like how many ibex
Speaker 1: came to be in this mountain range, and what conversations
Speaker 1: had to come out about, you know where where other
Speaker 1: interested parties started have an opinion about this, because it's
Speaker 1: it's like an interesting thing that you see time and
Speaker 1: again with with wildlife politics. And yeah, yeah, so let's
Speaker 1: let's take it back to kind of the initial reintroduction.
Speaker 1: So New Mexico is a state where you cannot introduce
Speaker 1: animals from outside of the state onto the public land right,
Speaker 1: So in order for the state too introduce Persian ibex
Speaker 1: or x Siberian ibex, they had to do they had
Speaker 1: to reintroduce their or introduce their progeny. So a lot
Speaker 1: of these animals when they were brought to New Mexico,
Speaker 1: they were held in holding facilities long enough to have progeny.
Speaker 1: Once that progeny was old enough, then they introduced them
Speaker 1: into these different landscapes. So for ibex, for example, UM,
Speaker 1: I think the total number was give or take forty
Speaker 1: ibex that were introduced on onto the Florida Mountains. And
Speaker 1: since then that population rapidly expanded. Um I think within
Speaker 1: I think it was within four years of the initial
Speaker 1: introduction they were offering hunting opportunities on the Florida. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to give people some idea that when we
Speaker 1: talk about the Florida Mountains, um, when you go to
Speaker 1: download a map on on X, people are famliar with
Speaker 1: on actual note that when you go to download a
Speaker 1: map for offline use, you can download a map ten
Speaker 1: miles wide, Okay, and it's taller than it is. Why
Speaker 1: it's ten miles wide, and normal you're going to hang
Speaker 1: out somewhere, you wind up. I usually wind up taking
Speaker 1: the center of my activities, and I'll download four and
Speaker 1: I'll use that as like the center point, and I'll
Speaker 1: do like a square, a square, square, and a square,
Speaker 1: and they all meet at that middle point, and that's
Speaker 1: what I'll do to get the area I'm gonna be in. Well,
Speaker 1: I thought it was just to give a sense of
Speaker 1: scale here. When I went to download a map for
Speaker 1: this hunting trip, I put the center of the Florida
Speaker 1: Mountains on the center of the ten mile square map
Speaker 1: and it fits very elegantly top the bottom, side to side.
Speaker 1: It was like, and I had a good buffer of
Speaker 1: flat desert, but it's like a stunning pile of cliffs
Speaker 1: that just rise up out of the desert. Man, I mean,
Speaker 1: like the jaggedy It's like it's like a weird, sort
Speaker 1: of crazy castle constructed out in the middle of the desert. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think I think we figured when we were sitting
Speaker 1: on the top of that mountain that we were gaining
Speaker 1: somewhere of three thousand feet in elevation as we were
Speaker 1: climbing going about a mile, going about a mile, give
Speaker 1: or take incredibly steve mostly rock five five five miles
Speaker 1: wide on that Onyx map and three thousand feet tall.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just it's it's like it came out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, and that mountain range is just straight up
Speaker 1: like you said, it's it's an unforgiving it's basically a
Speaker 1: granite face with sheer cliffs. Everything there cuts and tears
Speaker 1: up your boots, pokes you, stabs you, cuts you. It's
Speaker 1: just a unforgiving landscape that Ibex just looked right at home, right,
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's funny because there's no one, there's no
Speaker 1: North American animals that would do it quite like they
Speaker 1: do it. In terms of living on cliff face. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's an order basically eating gravel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically eating gravel. And I mean I've seen I've seen
Speaker 1: Ibex on a two hundred foot cliff eating just the
Speaker 1: tiniest little bush possible. And you're wondering, you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're asking yourself looking two d feet below where all
Speaker 1: the vegetation is. What I that animals standing two hundred
Speaker 1: feet up the cliff just well, that's what ibex do
Speaker 1: that they walk around the cliff face, like to walk
Speaker 1: on vertical cliff faces. And then when uh so, perfect
Speaker 1: kind of little spot for them and they don't men there,
Speaker 1: and what happens They put forty in and it just
Speaker 1: blows up. So they put forty in. It blew up.
Speaker 1: As I was saying, you know, within I think four
Speaker 1: years they were offering hunting opportunities. And then you know,
Speaker 1: when it comes to how many years, I think it
Speaker 1: was within four years of the population being introduced, they
Speaker 1: were they were already opening up hunts. And that's a
Speaker 1: pretty impressive growth, it is, I mean, And to put
Speaker 1: that in a perspective when ibex, when ibex have kids, right,
Speaker 1: Billy's nanni's kids are called kids. It's common for nannies
Speaker 1: to have twins and sometimes triplets. So you can imagine
Speaker 1: how quick that population, if it's not being if it's
Speaker 1: not being managed through through hunting opportunities, how quick it
Speaker 1: can can explode. And the topography isn't really conducive for
Speaker 1: anything outside of a mountain lion. Yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: lions and ibex, anything anything you need to run down
Speaker 1: its prey isn't gonna kill anything, right, No, I mean
Speaker 1: occasionally we'd see the old cotton tail ground squirrel up there,
Speaker 1: but other than that, you know, lions and ibex seemed
Speaker 1: to feel right at home there, and it blew so.
Speaker 1: At a point though, someone points out that like the
Speaker 1: land management agents and points out that, man, you've got
Speaker 1: too many these damn things running. Yeah, yeah, the the
Speaker 1: you know, the BLM, and I'm sure with coordination with
Speaker 1: the game and Fish determined that the carrying capacity for
Speaker 1: that mountain is about needs to be around four hundred
Speaker 1: and so, realizing through through various surveys that that numbers
Speaker 1: was well above the carrying capacity of four animals, they
Speaker 1: started to increase the hunting opportunities to control that population.
Speaker 1: And so um previous to the top the tag that
Speaker 1: you draw drew the immature male female tag, there were
Speaker 1: hunting opportunities, population management hunts where folks could come in
Speaker 1: and harvest too, nannies, um and it and might correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong that that was probably over a
Speaker 1: five seven year, seven year span. And I got another
Speaker 1: question from Mike the real quide yet Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know that Mike would have any exposure into this, but
Speaker 1: do you have a sense Mike, how they count the ibex. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know how to count the I know some people
Speaker 1: who well, well, before before the bound you sleep with
Speaker 1: one of them. So counting and quantifying the number of
Speaker 1: ibex on the landscape was has been described. Yea, this
Speaker 1: is a good quote that's been described. I was watching
Speaker 1: a talk about these exotic species and the big game
Speaker 1: biologists for the new Mexican Apartment game, and Fish does
Speaker 1: a great job. She said. The best way to explain
Speaker 1: to folks on how to count ibex is by taking
Speaker 1: a large barrel of ping pong balls and throwing it
Speaker 1: off a cliff and trying to count every one of
Speaker 1: those ping pong balls is they're bouncing, flying all over
Speaker 1: the place. Damn near impossible. So with that they do
Speaker 1: both aerial surveys with helicopters and ground surveys with lots
Speaker 1: of observers around the mountain range. Huh, So they knew
Speaker 1: the aerial part. So you send a bunch of people
Speaker 1: up with vinyls that just try to count ibex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just like imagine the glassing spots that we use
Speaker 1: this year basically on you know, for a day or
Speaker 1: two surround the mountain with lots of folks who are
Speaker 1: experienced set at glassing those things up, and it seems
Speaker 1: imperfect because how the skills, like the skill set required
Speaker 1: of glassing up ibex, observer bias, just observer skills that. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean it's all survey isn't perfect, right, I mean
Speaker 1: there's no, it's it's you don't get perfect numbers um.
Speaker 1: But what you do build up over time, of course,
Speaker 1: is is count data that as long as things are
Speaker 1: being done in the same way, you get what relative pictures,
Speaker 1: what folks would call an index of abundance. Right, And Mike,
Speaker 1: I think when I when I was watching that talk,
Speaker 1: they had explained that the aerial surveys were good at
Speaker 1: getting an idea of numbers, right, quantifying the amount um.
Speaker 1: The ground surveys were giving a better perspective of sex
Speaker 1: and age. So yeah, I believe that got you. It's
Speaker 1: easier to count running than it is to count IBEX
Speaker 1: running and determine what sex it is, right, and then
Speaker 1: when when, when it got to be there's so many
Speaker 1: ibex they really got serious about trying to kill them off.
Speaker 1: I think that they found that, like the difference in
Speaker 1: a male ibex. But there's difference in a billy and
Speaker 1: a nanny stunning because the billy will throw a up
Speaker 1: to like fifty inch horn and beats considerably larger. When
Speaker 1: those billies get mature, they get the old fashioned billy goat, gruff, goatee.
Speaker 1: They get these big, sweeping, you know, up to fifty
Speaker 1: inch horns, and the head they change a completely different color.
Speaker 1: Those those mature billies they get a lot wider. They
Speaker 1: get this big prominent black cross around their chest, in
Speaker 1: their back. And when you see a mature billy there
Speaker 1: on the mountain, you know it's a mature billy. They're
Speaker 1: distinguishably different than the rest. It's got a skull on
Speaker 1: any person would want to put on their book show
Speaker 1: to take a hell of a bookshelf. But I mean
Speaker 1: like an insane looking animal. But then the nanny's are Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you know, they said no one wants to
Speaker 1: shoot them, so they had to like incentivize people to
Speaker 1: start shooting ibex well, I meaning that like the little
Speaker 1: tag draw thing. Yeah, I don't know if they were
Speaker 1: I don't know if they were offering nanny hunts prior
Speaker 1: to focusing on managing the population but in doing so
Speaker 1: to manage the population, they focused on nanny's and immature
Speaker 1: males um and they've I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: that they've been pretty effective at knocking down the population
Speaker 1: to that carrying compassity because when they were when there
Speaker 1: was a ton of them, they were blowing out into
Speaker 1: other mountain ranges. Oh yeah, absolutely. When when there was that,
Speaker 1: when there was that high level of density of IBEX,
Speaker 1: they were looking for other areas. And so you know,
Speaker 1: when I was when I was in college, I saw
Speaker 1: two billies forty miles from the from their range and
Speaker 1: it's not so that's interesting, right, So billy ibex on range,
Speaker 1: those are drawing only hunts. Now, being that they want
Speaker 1: that population centralized on the Florida Mountains, they offer an
Speaker 1: unlimited IBEX tag for off range anywhere outside of the
Speaker 1: Florida Mountains. So when I did see those billies, I
Speaker 1: made a bee line back into town and go get
Speaker 1: an off range IBEX tag. Came right back out the
Speaker 1: next day and never found him. How long did you
Speaker 1: look for him? Probably two and a half weeks. I
Speaker 1: never could find them, never, never could find them. I
Speaker 1: your guess is as good as mine. The area I
Speaker 1: was was just the fact that I even saw them
Speaker 1: there was unbelievable. It was, you know, flatland country with
Speaker 1: just this single lava rock mind mound, and on the
Speaker 1: top there they were. And you know, it's not uncommon
Speaker 1: for for hunters or individuals to see ibex around some
Speaker 1: of these surrounding mountain ranges right. Um. Every now and
Speaker 1: then you'll get a hunter who kills a billiard in
Speaker 1: Annie off the Florida's um and that's that's a feat.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's an accomplishment, right Those they're smaller, hard
Speaker 1: to find, and so you know, I think two years
Speaker 1: ago when I did draw the archery tag, um, I
Speaker 1: feel like there were a lot more ibex just two
Speaker 1: years ago, two years go. And mind you you know,
Speaker 1: the archery tag and the rifle tag are different. Archery
Speaker 1: is is a little at the beginning, so they're not
Speaker 1: as pressured, so they're probably more spread you know, they're
Speaker 1: not as spread out as they are um. But from
Speaker 1: from my experience, I felt like there were a lot
Speaker 1: more ibex than than this hunt we were on, which
Speaker 1: which is you know, a testament to the management approach
Speaker 1: that the Game Department has taken and increasing the the
Speaker 1: number of tags offered, and hunters have been successful in
Speaker 1: bringing the you know, the population down. But it's a
Speaker 1: big mountain, right, I mean four animals like we were
Speaker 1: talking about on a on a mountain like that. Mind you.
Speaker 1: You know the on x map high resolution map doesn't
Speaker 1: put it in a perspective. It covers that whole mountain range,
Speaker 1: but once you're on that mountain there are crooks and
Speaker 1: crannies and thick vegetation that could hide a lot of
Speaker 1: IBEX going into it. I was not inspired by the
Speaker 1: count number. Once I saw the mountain range and knowing
Speaker 1: that they're running around in groups, I was like, that's
Speaker 1: not that. Like if you had four of them, four
Speaker 1: of them and you told him he's to stay in
Speaker 1: his own little spot, you know, it would be one thing.
Speaker 1: But the fact that in groups, I was like, man,
Speaker 1: that's not that. There's a lot of places that don't
Speaker 1: have an IBEX. Yeah. I have friends who you know,
Speaker 1: with probably within the last five years, have seen groups
Speaker 1: of ibex. Well, you know, fifty to one hundred and
Speaker 1: one in one group. When you look at it from
Speaker 1: that perspective to where we're at now, that's it's quarter
Speaker 1: of the population and one big group. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's large groups like that at the moment,
Speaker 1: but but there were, and and it's a it's it's
Speaker 1: a big mountain. I think there's of a lot of
Speaker 1: places for ibex too to hide. Jeremy layout the season
Speaker 1: because there's like a bunch of different seasons for these
Speaker 1: right yeah, so there when can you start unting on? When?
Speaker 1: And when does like the last season end? So this
Speaker 1: hunt right now is the last. I believe it's in
Speaker 1: the last hunt, and it's an immature male female female hunt.
Speaker 1: Now before that, you have opportunities for archery for billy
Speaker 1: or either sex archery tags or either sex tags. And
Speaker 1: that's that's the club you belong called. I belong to
Speaker 1: the percent club because people who draw that archery tag
Speaker 1: do not fill it and do not get a billy
Speaker 1: or or an IBEX for that matter. So I am
Speaker 1: a proud member of the club. And that starts in October.
Speaker 1: That starts in October, so you have archery hunts for
Speaker 1: October and January UM and then in between there you
Speaker 1: have a multitude of one in the lifetime billy rifle
Speaker 1: hunts for those who are lucky enough to draw it.
Speaker 1: You have youth muzzle loader hunts, rifle hunts. I believe, um,
Speaker 1: but it kind of just, you know, varies like that,
Speaker 1: and then it goes into more of what we want
Speaker 1: to call population management, which is immature immature male female,
Speaker 1: And in order to kill an immature male it has
Speaker 1: to be less than fifteen inches um. Ibex are small.
Speaker 1: Judge in a fifteen inch ibex can be difficult. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was surprised how spooky they were, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: But then Jerry brought up that they've been people have
Speaker 1: been hunting these things since October. It's March and they've
Speaker 1: been getting on in since October. Yeah, but to touch
Speaker 1: on that that they are exceptionally spooky, but ibex are
Speaker 1: few things I've seen. I have seen few things. Is
Speaker 1: touchy as they are touching and they're like that in
Speaker 1: in October. I mean, you know, there might be a
Speaker 1: lot more ibex that you have plays at because they're
Speaker 1: not as pressured, but they are all on edge. They
Speaker 1: are still just as sketched out KG. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the same show you those animals when
Speaker 1: they want to get up and go and run to
Speaker 1: the top of the mountain for no reason. They do it.
Speaker 1: They hear a rockfall, they hear a backpack slide, they
Speaker 1: for instance, for instance, they don't like it. They don't
Speaker 1: like it. It's it's really incredible. And then they have that.
Speaker 1: They have that mountain goat the thing too, where you know,
Speaker 1: a white tail hides like a white tail hide kind
Speaker 1: of where they can see, but they're also comfortable hide
Speaker 1: and where they can't see much but nothing can see
Speaker 1: them at times, you know, But they these things have
Speaker 1: a real knack for picking some spots to hang out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they pick That makes it that I have a cliff
Speaker 1: behind me that's vertical, so if you're on top of it,
Speaker 1: you can't look down and see You're not gonna look
Speaker 1: down and see me down here, and then I see
Speaker 1: everything in front of me. And if you're on the bottom,
Speaker 1: you know, chances are they're gonna be so high up
Speaker 1: there you can't even look up and see them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're good at like pick them their spots. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: for that archery hunt. There was a lot of times
Speaker 1: where I was underneath cliffs on billies, you know, and
Speaker 1: you're looking straight up like I can hear them up there.
Speaker 1: They're overhanging the cliffs coming over you, and there's just
Speaker 1: no way you're able to get a shot. We had
Speaker 1: times of crawling up, Like a lot of times, you
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time going up toward a ridge
Speaker 1: or saddle or something that's gonna give you a view
Speaker 1: a new country. And one day we had a few
Speaker 1: times when you get to the crest and you're like,
Speaker 1: you're prepared for the fact that you're gonna be looking
Speaker 1: at some new ground. And it's intense sun, so you
Speaker 1: got a lot of shadows, there's a lot of brush,
Speaker 1: and you'd be like, here's the perfect place to pop up.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna crawl up under this juniper and use the
Speaker 1: juniper as shade cover. And there's a rock and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna like belly slide in and do everything perfect. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna slowly raise my binoculars and you do that
Speaker 1: and you meet eye to eye. Some ibex is four
Speaker 1: yards away, like very aware that you're there. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we were talking about it. I feel, you know,
Speaker 1: those ibex they're they're so smart and they're so cag
Speaker 1: that I feel like they they bed or reside in
Speaker 1: areas where they know they can see danger, whether that's
Speaker 1: from prior history or interactions, or that's just the natural
Speaker 1: wiliness ability of these ibex to position themselves in areas
Speaker 1: where they can feel vulnerable. And that's exactly it. Every
Speaker 1: time we came into a saddle where we thought we
Speaker 1: were gonna have a great opportunity, ibricks were looking at us.
Speaker 1: I mean they had us pinned down. You know it's
Speaker 1: funny too, is we found uh, we found a deadhead,
Speaker 1: read the remain like a portion of dat. We found
Speaker 1: two horns. Um, the skull was gone, but we found
Speaker 1: two horns under a cliff. Well we kind of like
Speaker 1: there wasn't even that big, but we kind of seven
Speaker 1: growth rings. Seven growth rings. You start hunting. Ibex season
Speaker 1: start in October, they run into March. He's been alive
Speaker 1: seven years, That isn't that's a lot of data to
Speaker 1: pull from for that animal. He probably lays there. He's like,
Speaker 1: you know what, when I'm here, I always watched that
Speaker 1: spot because that's for some asshole always climbs over and
Speaker 1: like they probably get a very detailed sense of like
Speaker 1: where right, like how things move. Yeah, I think because
Speaker 1: that mountain has what the what the? Because it's very
Speaker 1: there's not many ways to get around, right, it's either
Speaker 1: cliffs or finding these little trails and cuts to get
Speaker 1: two saddles, you know, find those little grooves in between
Speaker 1: the cliffs to make your way. And I think those
Speaker 1: animals know that. I think they know most most predators
Speaker 1: or others other species aren't gonna be on the cliffs.
Speaker 1: So where are you gonna be looking off the cliffs
Speaker 1: these little It's like most of places, not a lot
Speaker 1: of the places up there that you can access on foot,
Speaker 1: there's one way to get there in one way to leave.
Speaker 1: There's not there's not like through. There probably are somewhere,
Speaker 1: but it's it's not like a place there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like through hunting. It's like you gotta kind of
Speaker 1: go up and fronaggle your way through, and then when
Speaker 1: you go to leave, it would be like the only
Speaker 1: way you're gonna leave is to do exactly that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't make sense to to try to
Speaker 1: find an alternate way out right. You want to go
Speaker 1: that mountain is so dangerous, especially when you're burning light.
Speaker 1: You want to be able to get off that mountain
Speaker 1: safely and if you're trying to bush whack and find
Speaker 1: a potential way to get off that mountain that you
Speaker 1: haven't previously taken, there's a good chance that you're gonna
Speaker 1: get cliffed out. You're gonna get put in a tough spot,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna run out of light, and you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to make the choice of either hunk or and
Speaker 1: down continuing your path, are going back the way you came,
Speaker 1: which you know is a safe route, and that's always
Speaker 1: something a factory. And when you're up on that mountain, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are numerous times where we probably could
Speaker 1: have kept going. We probably could have threaded the needle
Speaker 1: and pushed it to pushed it to nighttime and walked
Speaker 1: off that mountain on the dark, in the dark. But
Speaker 1: even even at that at night, everything looks different, even
Speaker 1: if you have your track going up that mountain, everything
Speaker 1: looks different. And so it's a it's safe to say
Speaker 1: you want to get off that mountain with ample light
Speaker 1: to be safe about it, because the last thing you
Speaker 1: want to be doing is getting stuck in a spot
Speaker 1: where you have to make the decision am I going
Speaker 1: to stay here? Am I gonna walk back? The way
Speaker 1: I came. Because it's gonna be a lot farther. You're
Speaker 1: gonna be doing it at night. Ard I do I
Speaker 1: push forward and hope that this path I took leads
Speaker 1: leads to an exit. So I looked at the harvest
Speaker 1: data that's available through the Mexico Department of Game and Fish,
Speaker 1: and there were according to that, there were no ibex
Speaker 1: harvested outside of the Florida's on the statewide over the
Speaker 1: countertag last license here, and there were two billies harvested
Speaker 1: the license here before that. So it's not a rich
Speaker 1: hunting opportunity, right. So like Jeremy saying, if you find
Speaker 1: some off range, you know that's not something that happens
Speaker 1: all the time, don't tell anyone to get out of
Speaker 1: That would be to me one of the cooler things
Speaker 1: to do. Man, if you could find one and get
Speaker 1: it like that, that's badass. Uh let him let me
Speaker 1: hear with the crystal ball question. And then we're talking
Speaker 1: to Kevin Murphy about rabbits um take mountain goats. We're
Speaker 1: talking about montain goats for a minute. Here's a native
Speaker 1: animal native to the continent. Right, So mountain goats are
Speaker 1: native to coastal Alaska, some of the interior ranges in
Speaker 1: south central Alaska all down through BC Okay, native to
Speaker 1: portions of Washington, portions of Oregon, native to western Montana.
Speaker 1: There's some other areas that are debated native to the I.
Speaker 1: They were historic populations in the Idahoe Handhandle, Okay, so
Speaker 1: like it's at least from the continent. Over time, motivated
Speaker 1: by the same factors as they did to introduce IBEX
Speaker 1: to increase hunting opportunity, they put mountain goats um a
Speaker 1: neighboring mountain ranges like sometimes really that meaning that put
Speaker 1: them for for whatever you can't understand why, like why
Speaker 1: are they in this mountain range but not this mountain range?
Speaker 1: And people would just help him out by bumping them
Speaker 1: over a mountain range, Okay. And and now in grant
Speaker 1: Tee Town National Park, Olympic National Park, they're taking steps
Speaker 1: to bring in using public hunters, using government sharpshooters, all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. They're bringing efforts to eradicate mountain goats
Speaker 1: off of some of these mountain ranges where they weren't
Speaker 1: historically even though they were a hundred miles off in
Speaker 1: some other direction. UM that makes it seem like in
Speaker 1: my mind that made like things don't bode well for
Speaker 1: the old IBEX because you can't even make that argument
Speaker 1: for him there from another continent. Man like I feel
Speaker 1: like there's more some people a ride like your buddy
Speaker 1: KR Malcolm, love him to death, but he's always, Oh,
Speaker 1: we need more voices in the room, more stakeholder. You know,
Speaker 1: those people are not gonna be too sympathetic to the IBEX.
Speaker 1: They're not gonna be like, well, you know those guys
Speaker 1: like the hunt Ums, let's keep them around. It's just
Speaker 1: not going to be what their view is on it.
Speaker 1: You could picture in a year or two, or in
Speaker 1: a decade or two, someone saying they gotta go. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's happening right now, but are they what
Speaker 1: are they hurting? Desert big horns big carn't habitat. So
Speaker 1: there there are big horns in the Florida, not in
Speaker 1: the Floridas. And I'll be the first to say that
Speaker 1: I am stepping out of my zone right now, and
Speaker 1: so the conflict would be native big horn sheep habitat
Speaker 1: right similar and correct me if I'm wrong to to
Speaker 1: the Mountain gold right that in Grand Tea ton so
Speaker 1: An Olympic National Park. I think it's like a vegetation
Speaker 1: they're using. It's a vegetation issue in Grand Teaton. It
Speaker 1: is Rocky Mountain Big Horn conflict. But one might look
Speaker 1: and feel that those are proxy arguments and it's more
Speaker 1: of an argument about the the kind of audacity of
Speaker 1: moving non native species in and then you that is
Speaker 1: offensive to someone and they'll look and be like, well,
Speaker 1: what's the big deal, And then you go like, oh,
Speaker 1: well this, yeah, I mean, and and it's it's like
Speaker 1: a proxy fight. My my personal thought is is you know,
Speaker 1: back in the seventies when they were having that that discussion,
Speaker 1: there was you know, that was the time too to really,
Speaker 1: you know, have the talk about is this the right
Speaker 1: thing to do or should we be focusing our resources
Speaker 1: and attention into reintroducing native native faunt into the landscape. Right,
Speaker 1: so let's get big horn sheep back in there. But
Speaker 1: that wasn't the case. We got We got to deal
Speaker 1: with what we got to deal with now, right, And
Speaker 1: the fact is that Persian ibex are on that mountain
Speaker 1: and according to from what I know from our uh
Speaker 1: you know, biologists and listening to the Department is the
Speaker 1: IBEX and the big Horn sheep. There are no there's
Speaker 1: there aren't any potential issues there as far as you know,
Speaker 1: disease transmission, as far as UH complicating reintroduction efforts of
Speaker 1: big horn sheep. There's been considerable efforts to reintroduce desert
Speaker 1: big horn sheep and some of the surrounding mountain ranges
Speaker 1: and they've been very successful. And in doing so, the
Speaker 1: Game and Phish Agency has has and and and the
Speaker 1: public as well have have warmed up and accepted the
Speaker 1: IBEX per se to call that mountain range home. Um.
Speaker 1: I personally like IBEX. I personally like the opportunity to
Speaker 1: go chase IBEX. Now, if you put me in the
Speaker 1: room back in the seventies, I would have advocated for
Speaker 1: big horn sheep to be on that mountain And they
Speaker 1: were there, they were, they were there before. I don't
Speaker 1: know that. I think like it wasn't everything here desert
Speaker 1: big horn Well, you would think, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: would say that's probably a safe assumption. But I don't
Speaker 1: know entirely if if the Florida Mountain Range was was
Speaker 1: home to the desert big horn sheep. When we we
Speaker 1: were having a very similar conversation about nil Gui and
Speaker 1: uh that live in South Texas, and I used someone's
Speaker 1: quote where someone described them as being an honorary native,
Speaker 1: And boy did I get a lot of feedback from
Speaker 1: biologists about calling them an honorary native, including me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's enough of that. One of my favorite stories out
Speaker 1: about you because I said I said whatever I said
Speaker 1: about using that term honorary native, and then somebody said like, basically,
Speaker 1: you're in a hole. Steve Ronella would never want to
Speaker 1: hang out with you. Um, yeah, I guess, I guess.
Speaker 1: Before we move on move on to the rabbit piece,
Speaker 1: the last thing I would say about hunting Ibex is,
Speaker 1: you know, next to making sure you're careful and getting
Speaker 1: up that mountain safely and back down safely, is it's
Speaker 1: it's frustrating, right to say the least Ibex hunting is frustrating.
Speaker 1: And the reason I say that is you you bust
Speaker 1: your tail every day you're climbing thousand you know, plus
Speaker 1: vertical feet. Damn, you're straight up hands feet are always
Speaker 1: usually on a rock, if not on a rock or
Speaker 1: getting poked by a cactus. And it is just a
Speaker 1: difficult mountain to hunt. And so when you have an
Speaker 1: opportunity to lay your cross hairs on an ibex, draw
Speaker 1: your bow back and lay that hundred yard pin on
Speaker 1: an ibex, you have to you have to factor in
Speaker 1: other factors that you usually don't in other hunts, right,
Speaker 1: and the biggest one is am I going to be
Speaker 1: able to recover that animal? You know? These animals are
Speaker 1: standing on cliffs there in sketchy places, and you know
Speaker 1: it's it happens more times than not where hunters see
Speaker 1: that opportunity as oh, here's an animal, I can harvest it,
Speaker 1: and they take that shot only to find out that
Speaker 1: they cannot recover that animal. Yeah, we had an opportunity
Speaker 1: you almost like an opera. Yeah, yeah, we we had
Speaker 1: situations whereas we're looking at animals, um that one could
Speaker 1: have shot at for sure, and being like, you're just
Speaker 1: not gonna get to it, despite Dirtmith guaranteeing I can
Speaker 1: get there. You would get there with a rope and
Speaker 1: a harness guaranteeing. Personally looking at Garrett like, yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's unless you got a helicop. Unless you're putting a
Speaker 1: helicopter in the mix, I don't buy it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: watch it from here is Jeremy, you were pointing out
Speaker 1: spots on the mountain where they were still ropes hanging
Speaker 1: from cliffs. Absolutely. So you know, folks like I mentioned,
Speaker 1: hit ibex. They go die in these precarious areas on
Speaker 1: the top of a cliff, and hunters will actually hire
Speaker 1: rock climbers, you know, to go up there and climb
Speaker 1: up to the top and repel their their goat down
Speaker 1: for them. And you know, sometimes they bring their ropes down,
Speaker 1: sometimes they don't. And so it's not uncommon to as
Speaker 1: your glass in these you know, nasty cliffs, see these
Speaker 1: ropes tethered and just hanging down to the bottom. Um
Speaker 1: you just know someone scaled up there to to lower
Speaker 1: an ibex down. Yeah. Rick Smith read an article about
Speaker 1: some guy that killed a billy thirty yards and then
Speaker 1: hired climbers to go find into for him. That that's
Speaker 1: the problem, right, is like that's I'm just not interested
Speaker 1: in the working part, I mean, And that's like that's
Speaker 1: a hard conversation to have, right when you're when you're
Speaker 1: a glass and an ibex and it's well within shooting
Speaker 1: distance and you say, I don't think you should take
Speaker 1: that shot. I don't. I don't think we can recover
Speaker 1: that animal. That's that's a hard concept to grasp. And
Speaker 1: you just busted your tail to get up to that
Speaker 1: that saddle to have that opportunity, just to come to
Speaker 1: find out that sure you can shoot that animal and
Speaker 1: it's gonna fallot to the bottom. Is that even worth it?
Speaker 1: I mean that animal is gonna be so beat up,
Speaker 1: there's not even any meat to recover. Yeah, the one
Speaker 1: we fellah if that scrambled its guts real good, but
Speaker 1: the meat unscathed. But I mean it's like stomach contents
Speaker 1: were it was pretty beat up, like like it's ards
Speaker 1: had been homogenized. You couldn't tell. Yeah, it was just everything,
Speaker 1: everything was everything and that and you know that that billy,
Speaker 1: that billy fell like you said, maybe thirty ft landed
Speaker 1: and vegetation, which was fortunate, and that landed right on
Speaker 1: a yuka, right on a yuka, a little bit of
Speaker 1: a cushion and worked out perfectly. You know, we saw
Speaker 1: right where it went in. We and to the point
Speaker 1: where I'm saying is you know, making sure you can
Speaker 1: recover an ibex is we were looking at that, but
Speaker 1: you know where's that when when you take that shot,
Speaker 1: where's the likelihood of that animal gonna go? And we
Speaker 1: were certain that if you took that shot, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be able to recover that animal. The two yeah, two
Speaker 1: instances where like to just to give people an idea
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. There's one instance where there was
Speaker 1: a shoot that we could pretty much picture get into
Speaker 1: the shoot, and it was in the shoot, but if
Speaker 1: you file the shoot up, it was like, man, you
Speaker 1: could probably could pick your way up that shoot, but
Speaker 1: there's a big Raiders of the lost Are boulder. Then
Speaker 1: it at some point in time falling off the mountain,
Speaker 1: ran down the shooting and got wedged in the shoot.
Speaker 1: I mean it's bulls like ft high crammed in there.
Speaker 1: And I was like, man, you could if you can,
Speaker 1: and it seems like you can. I'm not sure get
Speaker 1: up the shoot, You're sure ship not getting past that
Speaker 1: boulder guaranteed to guaranteed with like with a harness, his
Speaker 1: harness and his sadd he guaranteed he would be able
Speaker 1: to retrieve it. And the more we looked at that
Speaker 1: from more angles, I was really wished we could have
Speaker 1: taken him up on his back. The other one, we're
Speaker 1: looking at a we're looking at ibex and you couldn't
Speaker 1: really picture where it would quit falling, but you like,
Speaker 1: how far go, but it would wind up in the shoot,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, shoot, you can definitely go
Speaker 1: up that shoot. But then I raised myself up to
Speaker 1: follow the shoot down more and realized that the shoot
Speaker 1: just ends at a cliff. But had I not done
Speaker 1: that In my head, I was like the easiest thing
Speaker 1: in the world, And there's no way to come in
Speaker 1: from the sides into that shoot. I shouldn't say no way,
Speaker 1: but you weren't. And then it was far enough away
Speaker 1: that once you shot and it fell from it's cliff,
Speaker 1: it was gonna vanish into the brush, and so you'd
Speaker 1: have to finagle your way over there, which would have
Speaker 1: been an hour's long job, and then be like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's somewhere in the five yard expanse from
Speaker 1: that cliff down to here in this brushy ass SHOOTE.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna blood trail it. You might find like
Speaker 1: tufts of hair stuck on stuff here and there, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like, like, how do you in there? The
Speaker 1: size of a labrador? Yeah, I mean so small that
Speaker 1: when we went to we wanted, you know, like when
Speaker 1: you retrieve a body carcass, you want to move it
Speaker 1: somewhere nice to gut it. I grabbed its back foot
Speaker 1: in my hand and then bent it up and grabbed
Speaker 1: its horn in the same hand and lifted it up
Speaker 1: and carried it down and said it where I wanted it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was. It was like just passing, passing
Speaker 1: the billy down to our tour spot where we can
Speaker 1: I mean, and even packing it out was was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, if there's if there's a if there's an
Speaker 1: animal to pack out whole and leave it fully intact,
Speaker 1: it'd be an ibex. We put the whole thing. The
Speaker 1: whole thing fit in my backpack and game bag, like
Speaker 1: not not a large game bag that you would fit
Speaker 1: an out quarter in a small game bag like deer
Speaker 1: quarter game bag. We split a whole ibex into it,
Speaker 1: took the hooves up to the head and just man, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was fun. It was. It was brutal. Uh, I
Speaker 1: need to add their mike, No, mike was my glass
Speaker 1: and buddy. Meanwhile we are down at the bottom pouring
Speaker 1: coal to it, which which is important, right, like to
Speaker 1: say it again, it or to add to the whole experience.
Speaker 1: It's like having a team and having people that can
Speaker 1: have eyes on the mountain for you and say, you know,
Speaker 1: Ibex or the Ibex are still there as you're hiking
Speaker 1: up and down these hills and through these crooks and crannies.
Speaker 1: It's it helps in it. It's really beneficial to have
Speaker 1: someone with some eyes on on the mountain, just to
Speaker 1: have people, I mean just even in the morning, just
Speaker 1: to try to find something I had heard from a
Speaker 1: guy that was saying in the earlier season there was
Speaker 1: a lot of people not finding any at all, which
Speaker 1: I could very easily picture, yeah, easily, but I got fortunate.
Speaker 1: All right, Kevin Murphy, you ready, I'm ready. I'm ready.
Speaker 1: When we were this is this is called the Saga
Speaker 1: of Kevin Murphy, the Saga of Kevin Murphy's Beagles. When
Speaker 1: we were on orcs Is, June and Jeremy and Mike
Speaker 1: were there. Um, I was kind of flabber gassed by
Speaker 1: the number of rabbits running around, and we talked a
Speaker 1: bunch about why don't people have beagles, beagles oh the desert,
Speaker 1: and how many rabbits you'd kill with your beagles because
Speaker 1: they're all over the down place, and I started getting
Speaker 1: Kevin interested in how he ought to come out and
Speaker 1: bring his high test rabbits, his high test beagles out
Speaker 1: here and run rabbits. How'd that go, Kevin? Well, it
Speaker 1: was an experience, you know. When you you asked me
Speaker 1: about that, it says, well, I don't know for sure,
Speaker 1: I said. We did take a trip two years ago
Speaker 1: down to North Carolina to hunt some marsh rabbits with
Speaker 1: two of my friends that are bagle manias, that's what
Speaker 1: they live. Forward getting on chat groups talking about rabbit hunting,
Speaker 1: and we packed up and went to what's your guy's
Speaker 1: favorite chat group in the rabbit hunt community. He now,
Speaker 1: I don't stay connected like that, so I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'll find out for you. So I don't know. But um,
Speaker 1: we loaded up, went to North Carolina and Sandy Soul
Speaker 1: but moist down there, and so we would get after
Speaker 1: some rabbits and I was running like four of my
Speaker 1: dogs and they had probably before. So I had twelve
Speaker 1: beagles out there trying to run some rabbits and we
Speaker 1: ended up killing just a few. And then like in
Speaker 1: the third day, was sitting around the couch just kind
Speaker 1: of like we are now talking, and they said, well,
Speaker 1: else is You know, we read a lot about this,
Speaker 1: that dogs coming from up north and going down there
Speaker 1: to run. We had lots of issues and lots of
Speaker 1: problems running the rabbits. You know, typically you jump a
Speaker 1: rabbit up and it's gonna if you just post up there,
Speaker 1: be quiet, look at the landscape in the terrain, he's
Speaker 1: gonna make a circle around a huge circle. Yes, some
Speaker 1: some I mean this. When I was with you hunting
Speaker 1: swamp rabbits, I mean they'd go so far you can't
Speaker 1: you hear the damn dogs anymore. Now, swamp will go
Speaker 1: further than a regular cotton tail. But sometimes initially they
Speaker 1: will go out and they'll come back in just one time.
Speaker 1: And then the next time they go out of the
Speaker 1: country I mean out of hearing, out of here. And
Speaker 1: then when they start coming back. And I didn't learn
Speaker 1: this too, uh, I got a garment astro, they'll start
Speaker 1: they won't make us just a continuous circle. It's a spiral,
Speaker 1: little short circles in there. And you remember when we're
Speaker 1: down on the band hunting, I was looking at my
Speaker 1: GPS and the dogs are running and running and running.
Speaker 1: But never running back to us. And I told you
Speaker 1: since we're gonna have to go after that one. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you remember that or not, because I said,
Speaker 1: this is what he's doing, and I had learned that
Speaker 1: hunting him before that. They start making these small spiral
Speaker 1: circles and you just have to go in there and
Speaker 1: try to figure out. Now, when we hunt rabbits snowshoe
Speaker 1: hair on Drummond Island, Uh, to kill one snowshoe hair,
Speaker 1: you to lead the dogs have to run four to
Speaker 1: six miles. So and that's the like it's it's not
Speaker 1: that the dogs are running the rabbit in a circle intentionally,
Speaker 1: It's like the rabbit is going in a circle. He
Speaker 1: doesn't want to leave his familiar territory. Yes, correct, that's
Speaker 1: what I think. So when we go to Drummond a
Speaker 1: hunt up there to look at the GPS and figure so, well,
Speaker 1: that's rabbit has crossed like three times because a snowshoe
Speaker 1: he'll run in the shade in the dark. And I
Speaker 1: didn't realize that. The first time I hunted those was
Speaker 1: up around Benedicta, Maine. And we get out there in
Speaker 1: that fur forest and try to look for him and like, man,
Speaker 1: I can't you know, you just got to get right
Speaker 1: on top of him, so your shooting lane is reduced
Speaker 1: very small. Um, I didn't really know what I was
Speaker 1: doing up there. We hired a guide, and um we
Speaker 1: ended up killing seven or eight. A little bit different
Speaker 1: condition than than Drummond. You said you've been on Drummond
Speaker 1: for it's a glaciated We used to hunt, know whats
Speaker 1: your hair is? They're just uh still hunting them. Which, man,
Speaker 1: you can spend a lot of time. You can spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time on great Sign and not kill ship.
Speaker 1: But you look at your GPS and you say, well,
Speaker 1: this this hair has come through this little trail out
Speaker 1: here like three times, maybe four. I'm gonna go down
Speaker 1: there and get set up and maybe just have a
Speaker 1: yard shot. No further than that is a long ways
Speaker 1: when you're in that forest like that, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden he crosses fifty yards down there, he
Speaker 1: heard you or saw you. You weren't you weren't still enough.
Speaker 1: But you know, you can completely run a dog down
Speaker 1: if you're not careful. I know the second morning that
Speaker 1: we were there, I've got a faster dog. Lucy, the
Speaker 1: little tricolor blue tich beak when she's getting some age
Speaker 1: on her now. So I turned her loose that that
Speaker 1: morning and we had the best races of the day.
Speaker 1: But by one o'clock she had shut down and we
Speaker 1: carried her out in the back of our game bag.
Speaker 1: That thing completely recovered, but that, yeah, she was of stuff.
Speaker 1: She just ran and that's what a beagle to do.
Speaker 1: They just run and run and run until they got
Speaker 1: nothing left in them. So we we came up here.
Speaker 1: You know, we had the discussion. I says, I don't
Speaker 1: know how my dogs are gonna do in this dried
Speaker 1: desert terrain. And I said, I'm a little bit concerned
Speaker 1: about what do you think, Like, give me the North
Speaker 1: Carolina example, what do you think the problem was for
Speaker 1: the beagle? You know, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's the soul down there, that sandy saul because
Speaker 1: it was damp. You know, we're hunting these marsh rabbits,
Speaker 1: which were very similar to the swamp rabbit, but a
Speaker 1: little bit smaller, not near as big. They would leave
Speaker 1: their sign latrine stumps and logs. So we saw that
Speaker 1: sign in there, But I do not know what the
Speaker 1: trouble was down there. I don't know why the beagles could.
Speaker 1: They had remarked that people, yes, from the rabbit dog
Speaker 1: chat groups, remark that they had taken their dogs in
Speaker 1: there and they had trouble in the rabbits in that
Speaker 1: moist sandy. But are there dudes down in North Carolina,
Speaker 1: the half beagles that do good? I'm sure there is.
Speaker 1: You know, Um, I went uh black bear hunting down
Speaker 1: there one year with the with the bear guys, and
Speaker 1: their dogs could just pound those bears. But I mean
Speaker 1: they all lived down there and they were acclimated to them. Yes,
Speaker 1: so you know, and it sometimes it is hard to
Speaker 1: to pack a dog up and like we did. We
Speaker 1: we drove two days twelve miles to get here and
Speaker 1: then open up the dog box and say, go run
Speaker 1: me a rabbit. You know, even myself. After four or
Speaker 1: five days, I feel better. I see more out there.
Speaker 1: I learned more, you know, what these rabbits are doing.
Speaker 1: And it just takes a while. Maybe if I spent
Speaker 1: two or three weeks here or whatever, maybe they could
Speaker 1: pick it up. I don't know. It is so dry.
Speaker 1: I mean, this this air here is like some kind
Speaker 1: of ozone generator. I mean, I cannot believe just smelling fresh.
Speaker 1: You know, the rabbits have no smell to them. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just a different landscape and and you know, uh atmosphere.
Speaker 1: What is the if you're in a layout, the best
Speaker 1: ground conditions for a beagle to smell a rabbit, it
Speaker 1: would be what snow grass uh on a melting snow,
Speaker 1: melting snow out For my days of running bobcats with dogs,
Speaker 1: not a falling snow or a frozen snow, but a
Speaker 1: melting snow. It seems that is the ideal conditions sticky
Speaker 1: for us. Yeah, yeah, that it's releasing something or whatever.
Speaker 1: But they can really run on a melted snowe or
Speaker 1: damp and wet not to to to uh wet. But
Speaker 1: you know a lot of us dog people there, when
Speaker 1: you let the dogs out in the morning, they go
Speaker 1: over there and take a crap and you smell that.
Speaker 1: It's like read in your face, tight, that's gonna be
Speaker 1: a good morning to hunt. I don't know if that
Speaker 1: scent is just laying you know, low on the ground
Speaker 1: and not not rising up. But so you're saying, if
Speaker 1: your dog goes out and takes a growl in the yard,
Speaker 1: and you could smell it real good, which just like
Speaker 1: it smells right in your face. Yes, that's good. You
Speaker 1: know it's a good huh, because the smell is gonna
Speaker 1: be sticking around. That's the only thing that you know
Speaker 1: he's up for me. That's good. That's that's an astute observation.
Speaker 1: Like you know, I will be sixty two in September.
Speaker 1: So I have been following dogs probably since I was
Speaker 1: you know, seven eight years out and trying to put
Speaker 1: you know, what I see together. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, but just smells like crap, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: a good day when the winds from the south blows. Debait.
Speaker 1: You gotta make up one of those things, man, I'll
Speaker 1: be working on that. I'll be working on that. So
Speaker 1: here it's like very definitely not melting snow. It's dry,
Speaker 1: dry gravel and with a lot of rabbits, lots of
Speaker 1: rabbits and just trimmendous amount of rabbit sign you know,
Speaker 1: everywhere you look, you see because nothing decomposes here man, Right,
Speaker 1: it's like you're looking at three year old rabbit sh
Speaker 1: like like what what would happen? Do it? It's like
Speaker 1: you lay it out on the ground, zero moisture, laying
Speaker 1: on gravel. It's like every rabbit turd that's ever hit
Speaker 1: the ground here is still laying here. Probably, I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm not gonna argue with Yeah, I noticed that.
Speaker 1: I don't think anything happens to it like that. But
Speaker 1: some of that rabbit ship we're looking at could have
Speaker 1: been two years old. We need to I wish you
Speaker 1: could radio carbon date and it wasn't as expensive. We
Speaker 1: can find out how, but it doesn't the reasons that
Speaker 1: wouldn't work, But something like that would be interesting. I
Speaker 1: think that you're looking at a you're looking at a
Speaker 1: great history of rabbit droppings. You know, a rabbit is
Speaker 1: a critter, if I get the scientific term for that,
Speaker 1: could eat its own waste. And you'll see that sometimes
Speaker 1: it's a capri fab Okay, Mike rule capage, you know
Speaker 1: where he's in the wildlife business or something like that.
Speaker 1: Is that what he's saying. You can picture Capropagi eats poop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they like poop. You know, you say something that
Speaker 1: are really green, and then you see something back home
Speaker 1: this way it goes. You know, you see something really
Speaker 1: green and then some that are very light color and
Speaker 1: just the same. Well, that is one he's probably eating
Speaker 1: because everything broughts back home. You know, we've got fifty
Speaker 1: inches of rain per year. I looked up here and
Speaker 1: instead of landing, and then y'all said, that's kind of high.
Speaker 1: You know what it is where my fish check is.
Speaker 1: Probably she're up there like sixty hundred and sixty nine
Speaker 1: thirteen feet of rain. Wait, no place for a clothes long.
Speaker 1: It's like fifteen years worth here. So I'm seeing this
Speaker 1: rabbit peels droppings out there, you know, just everywhere you
Speaker 1: look in some places. And Jeremy gave me a week.
Speaker 1: We arrived here and on Sunday afternoon we went hunt.
Speaker 1: He shared three on X hunt points with me. He says,
Speaker 1: this would be a good location here, here, and here.
Speaker 1: So we hit it out with one and we jumped
Speaker 1: a bunch of rabbits in there, and we had the dogs. Um,
Speaker 1: they were getting the mesquite thorns in them, and and
Speaker 1: they may have like a little mesquite branch, you know,
Speaker 1: three or four inches long. You know, it's sticking out
Speaker 1: on both sides of the po and they keep hobbling
Speaker 1: with it. You know, I've got a bird dog. It
Speaker 1: was raised out west and she gets a thorn in
Speaker 1: her she just stops and pulls it out. You know.
Speaker 1: We had the discussion and I was saying, I don't
Speaker 1: know how my baggers are gonna do around all these
Speaker 1: cactus and thorns. And then you says, people bird hunt
Speaker 1: with their dogs here all the time. I got to
Speaker 1: think him, Bill, he's right about that. But I took
Speaker 1: the beagles out here, and you know, we spent They
Speaker 1: didn't get as many as what I thought they would get,
Speaker 1: but when they got one, they never you had to
Speaker 1: actually pick them up, you know, and pull it out.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it would just be a single thorn, and
Speaker 1: then sometimes it would be like a part of a
Speaker 1: branch they had they hadn't. They wouldn't even look at trying.
Speaker 1: They just kept on, you know, hobbling in trudging through that.
Speaker 1: So we went that afternoon. They would get after a
Speaker 1: rabbit and in the grassy parts where there's some vegetations,
Speaker 1: they could smell it good, and they jumped some and
Speaker 1: they run them till they got to the sand and
Speaker 1: the gravel, and after that they just could not smell
Speaker 1: them in off and you'd go and put their nose
Speaker 1: in where it was I saw one. I saw him
Speaker 1: jump up one and take and go down this shoot there,
Speaker 1: and I called him, I give them my my rabbit.
Speaker 1: Call hell. You know. They all come running over there
Speaker 1: and put them and it's like nothing, not even a
Speaker 1: tail wag or anything. They just could not smell it.
Speaker 1: A buddy mine who's a houndsman, who's a lion hunter.
Speaker 1: I brought this up to him ahead of time. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure you talked to plenty of people too, but um,
Speaker 1: I brought him what we were fixing to do, because
Speaker 1: he used to be a beagle man too, but he's
Speaker 1: now a lion houndsman. Uh. He hunts bobcats and lions,
Speaker 1: and he would he he didn't know, but he was
Speaker 1: more thinking about the acclamation. He wasn't like, did it
Speaker 1: would work or wouldn't work. It was just that what
Speaker 1: are they accustomed to? And what he pointed out was, um,
Speaker 1: if you have lion hounds in the north and you
Speaker 1: run lions in the snow, okay, uh, And then he's
Speaker 1: seen where those dogs have gone down to try to
Speaker 1: hunt dry conditions and they just can't do it. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you have the exact same dogs, like exact same breeds
Speaker 1: and lines um not lions, but the same breeding lines
Speaker 1: of dogs that are beard in those conditions, and they
Speaker 1: excel in them. And so he thinks it's just a
Speaker 1: matter of it's not that it can't be done. It's
Speaker 1: just a matter of like his skill set is is
Speaker 1: not adapted to this, and that over time they would
Speaker 1: start to piece it together. But you're just asking too
Speaker 1: much of them. I agree with you on that. It's
Speaker 1: just like in my country when people come in, they
Speaker 1: may come from the eastern end of the States and
Speaker 1: the one to go swamp rabbit NTY. So take them
Speaker 1: down into the Clark's River bottoms in there a lot
Speaker 1: of little swamps and in water ditches, and the hill
Speaker 1: dogs that come out of eastern Kentucky are not used
Speaker 1: to running in water and swamp rabbit. You put enough
Speaker 1: pressure on them, they'll hit, hit the water, swim across.
Speaker 1: And it's the needest thing in the world to see
Speaker 1: a swamp rabbit swimming because they make no wake. They've
Speaker 1: got these little bitty you know, their feet, they're just
Speaker 1: barely paddling right there and they see this rabbitness like
Speaker 1: you're just gliding out across the water. But they'll bring
Speaker 1: their dogs down that are not accustomed water in they'll
Speaker 1: trail a swamp rabbit to the edge of the water
Speaker 1: and maybe they wait out just a little bit, and
Speaker 1: then they won't go swimming, you know, after those those
Speaker 1: swamp rabbits, And a lot of times the swamp rabbit
Speaker 1: just go out ten twenty ten yards or so and
Speaker 1: just squat down in the water and just just stay there,
Speaker 1: sometimes just with their head just barely barely submerged. I
Speaker 1: have have not seen one, but they will go under water.
Speaker 1: To have talked to people that have seen them do that,
Speaker 1: like a rambo rabbit go under water and then come So.
Speaker 1: I've got a friend of mine, his dad saw one
Speaker 1: do that one time. But I have seen them on
Speaker 1: three or four occasions swim uh through swamps across the
Speaker 1: Clarks River, and some little bitty water hos just go
Speaker 1: in there. And it's the neediest thing in the world
Speaker 1: to see that. But I see people bring their dogs
Speaker 1: down that are not accustomed to the water, and they
Speaker 1: won't follow us swamp rabbit through through the swamps and
Speaker 1: or across the river to the other side. And that
Speaker 1: which my dogs are got lucy out there and when
Speaker 1: she was a puppy. I just would give her out
Speaker 1: there to follow me around and get her swimming into
Speaker 1: the Pond's get him accustomed to the water as soon
Speaker 1: as I can, so they're not afraid to go out
Speaker 1: swimming to no degree. I tell everybody she's half river otter,
Speaker 1: because I've got a real neat picture where Raymond and um, Jason,
Speaker 1: you met Jason and you met Jody, we all boated
Speaker 1: into the k o W. I think it's about three
Speaker 1: or four years ago. The river was coming up and
Speaker 1: Raymond hunted that ever since he was a kid. He
Speaker 1: says Murphy, I'm pretty sure it's gonna probably push a
Speaker 1: bunch of rabbits up into this hill. Down there's all
Speaker 1: flat river bottom land anyway, So we can boat in
Speaker 1: about four or five dred yards and go in there
Speaker 1: and hunt that big areas to be a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred acres, and then that's not flooded out of about
Speaker 1: I think it's about five thousand acres down only, so
Speaker 1: you're concentrating all those rabbits onto that one patch. That
Speaker 1: one patch. So we went down there and we killed
Speaker 1: eight swamp rabbits that on that hunt, and after it
Speaker 1: was all over pretty much after that hunt. Raymond says,
Speaker 1: I thought we might kill one or two down there,
Speaker 1: and that, like you said, they concentrated, pushed them all
Speaker 1: up there, and um, we had a really good hunt. Uh.
Speaker 1: A couple of them hit the water on us and
Speaker 1: got away. Didn't get those. And we're going down through there,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden we see this blue kayak
Speaker 1: coming out across the water, and Raymond looks at me
Speaker 1: and says, who in the hill is down here in
Speaker 1: a blue kite? Must be some birder or something. Well,
Speaker 1: they see us and they start started paddling. Well, it's
Speaker 1: Raymond's brother, Mike. He is down there deer hunting because
Speaker 1: he knows that, like I said, they've hunted this place
Speaker 1: since they were kids. Lady, yeah, he's gonna be the
Speaker 1: deer up there. So we're all sitting sitting around through
Speaker 1: there looking and all of a sudden, Mike said, man,
Speaker 1: there's something swimming way out there. He says, it's a
Speaker 1: swamp rabbit. So Raymond queels around there and shoots. And
Speaker 1: he's only one that wore chess waiters that day. Luckily
Speaker 1: he did that because my boat wouldn't start that morning.
Speaker 1: So Chester beware of used boats. Well, he's gonna tear
Speaker 1: it up. He's gonna wind up with a brand new
Speaker 1: boat on that big Okay. So so Raymond shoots this
Speaker 1: swamp right, I mean he's way out, like fifty yards
Speaker 1: or so. So he goes out and picks up and
Speaker 1: I take a picture of him. He's got an orange
Speaker 1: head on it. It's just a little bit dispec is
Speaker 1: all it is of Raymond out there. So he comes
Speaker 1: into the to the bank with this this swamp rabbits.
Speaker 1: So we got his brother there in the blue kayak,
Speaker 1: got Jason, and then Jodie is all down there. So
Speaker 1: we got the whole gang out out killing swamp rabbits
Speaker 1: that morning. And U I can remember when I was
Speaker 1: worked at the Pire plant and there was a boy
Speaker 1: from LBL before they flooded it, and he said when
Speaker 1: we was kids, the crops wouldn't be in and that's
Speaker 1: the Cumberland River running through there. Says that the grown
Speaker 1: ups would be talking about the river's getting ready to
Speaker 1: get up, and we don't have our crops out. He says,
Speaker 1: all those kids were thinking about. Man, the river gets
Speaker 1: up and the swamp rabbits getting there. We're gonna take
Speaker 1: a tobacco stick in there and going there White Laham.
Speaker 1: So you know, they were all excited that he's gonna
Speaker 1: flood because they could get to go hunting. But you know,
Speaker 1: the adults were concerned, you know, just like adults should be.
Speaker 1: You know, they were gonna lose their corn crop. But
Speaker 1: all the kids were ready to go hunting because they
Speaker 1: pushes that game up. So that we're with these boys,
Speaker 1: these these tribal you know Amerindians in one of these
Speaker 1: areas in South America, and uh, they were telling us
Speaker 1: that that's that's when they hunt, is when everything floods
Speaker 1: and they just go island hopping because the deer and
Speaker 1: these big you know, they hunt these uh, nocturnal rodents
Speaker 1: down there. Like the hell they call those things like
Speaker 1: there's the well there's they call it's a PoCA. But
Speaker 1: guy's got our damn name and a goody. You know
Speaker 1: it's different than the goody either way, you care, what
Speaker 1: the hell? It was very good eat we had it
Speaker 1: a bunch tastes. It's like it's like very pork like. Anyways,
Speaker 1: then they can win it floods and that's in their
Speaker 1: mind when to go hunting because it's so easy. Just
Speaker 1: go check all the little islands and everything that everything
Speaker 1: that needs to breathe there, it's on the same place.
Speaker 1: And they talked about sometimes you can go up and
Speaker 1: just club stuff. That's what it's so star. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: don't just hunt with a stick. One of my friends
Speaker 1: he saw, well, you know that morning that we went
Speaker 1: to a swamp rabbit had the boat. There was three
Speaker 1: quails setting on a log in the backwater. So and
Speaker 1: then a friend of mine, he was out checking on
Speaker 1: his duck line yesterday he sent me a picture of
Speaker 1: a swamp rabbit up on a on a log. I
Speaker 1: think I showed it because yeah, and that was just yesterday.
Speaker 1: Our river system is coming up two ft a day,
Speaker 1: so it's on a really big rise and that's you
Speaker 1: know the river downer where Leon lives. You know, it's
Speaker 1: about two miles wide down there now. So that's a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of water that I live around. I knew
Speaker 1: these guys that lived in an area in Alberta where
Speaker 1: it was legal though you could hunt beavers like well
Speaker 1: normal you can't, but you can hunt beavers for the markets.
Speaker 1: And they would in the spring floods everything. The water
Speaker 1: gets so high that all the bank dens and lodges
Speaker 1: and flood. And they'd go out on a john boat
Speaker 1: with a twenty two. And he was telling me one time.
Speaker 1: I can't remember, I remember he said something they hunted
Speaker 1: two days because like nine beavers or something like that
Speaker 1: with the twenty two. Oh, because they were everything was
Speaker 1: flooded out of its house. It's tremendous amount of skin
Speaker 1: in there if you killed that being two days. Pure misery, man,
Speaker 1: pure misery. Let me ask you this, though, Kevin, do
Speaker 1: you uh do you regret coming out to New Mexico
Speaker 1: with your dogs? Oh? No, No, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: I met Mike and Jeremy, you two new guys. Say
Speaker 1: in Chester and say you again? Now you know we
Speaker 1: met the first time, I think in St. Louis. So
Speaker 1: here we are. I was signing something another at the
Speaker 1: n r A convention. Yeah, and I come up to
Speaker 1: you and started talking to you. Some man. You need
Speaker 1: to get some kids into small game, honey, because I
Speaker 1: can go right out their back door with him. That's
Speaker 1: not what That's not what attracted me to you. What
Speaker 1: attracted me to you? And you know doing it. You're
Speaker 1: talking all kinds of people and after a while, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to keep track. But the reason you
Speaker 1: and I be this is not the reason we became friends,
Speaker 1: but the reason I we began to correspond is you
Speaker 1: were the first person in my life to ever come
Speaker 1: up to me and start making a guess about whether
Speaker 1: the squirrel hunting would be good this year. And you
Speaker 1: were looking forward to the squirrel season because you felt
Speaker 1: that the massed crop was looking pretty strong in your area.
Speaker 1: And in all my years, I've never had someone come
Speaker 1: up and predict to me, um and try to like
Speaker 1: make a guest to me about what the squirrel season
Speaker 1: would look like based on mass crop. And I said,
Speaker 1: that's a special man. It's all about food, not people
Speaker 1: all day long. A lot of good antler growth, which
Speaker 1: is fine, that's great. But I've never had someone come
Speaker 1: up and be like, there's a very strong mass crop
Speaker 1: and I think it's gonna be an exceptional squirrel yar.
Speaker 1: And I said, I want to be friends with that person.
Speaker 1: Here we are. We've hung out in a lot of states. Now, man, Yes,
Speaker 1: Kevin Murphy, you know what the American treasure. You just
Speaker 1: got to get that joint technique down right, Kevin. If
Speaker 1: you spent enough time here with your dogs, do you
Speaker 1: think your dogs would would adapt to the landscape? And second,
Speaker 1: if you took them back to your home, do you
Speaker 1: think they would perform better? Wor that's a good question.
Speaker 1: That like that, that's a great question. Would they be
Speaker 1: like ship? You know we left out? Uh, let's see
Speaker 1: last Saturday, we could go Saturday. It was got up
Speaker 1: as a minus four degrees windshield and I had two
Speaker 1: friends down and was gonna go squirrel hunting. And we
Speaker 1: had I think fourteen days below thirty degrees. It was
Speaker 1: a coach spell for us. I think it was like
Speaker 1: the fourth longest song record from so and so there.
Speaker 1: But it was the sun was warming up and the
Speaker 1: I thought the squirrels would come out. So I told
Speaker 1: my friends, said, let's just wait untill about dinner time.
Speaker 1: So we went out and we we killed some squirrels.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, if I stayed down here for
Speaker 1: a month or so and figured out, I think my
Speaker 1: dogs would get better. I feel if I raised a
Speaker 1: narration of dogs out of those same dogs, they would
Speaker 1: have no trouble down here with some tough one booty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think they'd get tough enough with that. But you know,
Speaker 1: my dogs are used to running in muck and my
Speaker 1: in leaf letter, not abrasive grit and gravel, and used
Speaker 1: to all these sornings. You know, they'll go right through
Speaker 1: BlackBerry bushes, the brambles, no problems at all. You know,
Speaker 1: a little short but these long mesquite Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think so, but I think they would get better. I
Speaker 1: don't think they would be ever be great, but I
Speaker 1: think I could raise or litteral pups down here. Now
Speaker 1: if I took those back home, I think they would
Speaker 1: be lost. Oh yeah, because they're not used to the
Speaker 1: water unless I trained that went to the rivers and
Speaker 1: got them accustomed to swim. And Jesson started Kevin Murphy
Speaker 1: Southwest Division and happy to be that you have a
Speaker 1: division of you that lives here with rabbit dogs. I
Speaker 1: would love to hear from some local rabbit hunter, beagle
Speaker 1: guy or somebody that frequents here. I got known the
Speaker 1: Internet and looked around and tried to find rabbit hunting
Speaker 1: in New Mexico with dogs. There was nothing. That's why
Speaker 1: I was so intrigued by it. When you brought it up,
Speaker 1: I was like, not only yes, but hell yes, because
Speaker 1: I've never heard anybody doing that before. I got another
Speaker 1: I got another follow up question for you, Kevin, Based
Speaker 1: on what you now know with your beagles, what do
Speaker 1: you feel what happened? Would you be more or less
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about bringing out your squirrel dogs for abert squirrels
Speaker 1: or would you be like, I've learned my lesson ain't
Speaker 1: gonna happen. I'm coming because I've got I've got not
Speaker 1: even tell me about it, abert sons of bitches. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the difference. Here's the difference. You didn't get invite.
Speaker 1: We'll plan our own trip. Man, get some real squirrel
Speaker 1: man out here. Bagel is and the way you want
Speaker 1: to bagel nos nos pretty much nine. That's what it uses.
Speaker 1: It's using. And that was where if you've got a
Speaker 1: good squirrel dog, it's using its ears. It's no in
Speaker 1: its eyes. So if we go with those big ponderosa pines,
Speaker 1: they're the squirrel dogs that I have, we'll be able
Speaker 1: to see those and so when they see them, they're
Speaker 1: gonna be able to tree them. They're not gonna have
Speaker 1: to worry about them jump into the next pine tree. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean the landscapes as saying I haven't seen it
Speaker 1: in person, but just looking they're going to be in
Speaker 1: that probably you feel you'd have more luck. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm coming. You know I'm gonna do that, dude.
Speaker 1: I want to go so bad. I can't lef you
Speaker 1: guys and tell me, let's do it. I did tell
Speaker 1: you about you did not be like, oh, I'm planning
Speaker 1: a trip with Kevin for squirrels. Well that's completely different.
Speaker 1: At least was exposed to that place anybody, you know,
Speaker 1: But I was exposed to planning. Wasn't like they just
Speaker 1: sneaking off in the bushes and planning up avert squirrel hunts. Not.
Speaker 1: We'll see how things shake out and we'll call you
Speaker 1: if you know it's room. I think that would be
Speaker 1: an amazing thing to try to do. I bet it
Speaker 1: would really work. I bet it work a lot better
Speaker 1: than beagles. There's gonna be a lot less rocks, cactuses,
Speaker 1: Pokey's yeah, and in the audio the audio visual, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: Now that's a good point. Oh right, man, Kevin, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for coming out. Appreciate that you're you're
Speaker 1: an inspiration to me as an adventuring spirit, you'd like
Speaker 1: to go do stuff. I like to go out and live.
Speaker 1: I'm in the fourth quarter of my life and i
Speaker 1: want to see the world. You know. I find it amazing.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm looking out and seeing things and I'm asking, like,
Speaker 1: Jeremy soon, what kind of plant is this here? What
Speaker 1: is this animal mound? Here? So, I mean, those small
Speaker 1: things intrigued me. And I'm just not about going, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna kill this animal or this one. I want
Speaker 1: to see everything that's out there and try to figure
Speaker 1: it out and try to put it together. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just love the world, how Mother Nature makes things
Speaker 1: all interact, the desert quail. To see those things out there,
Speaker 1: you know, what's it gonna take to make them things fly? Jeremy,
Speaker 1: I mean, are they half a road runner? You know?
Speaker 1: I got into two bunches of them. I soul you guys,
Speaker 1: you know, pushing those down, and they were just like running, running, running.
Speaker 1: And I saw a covey the other day and I
Speaker 1: tried to get on top of them, and I just
Speaker 1: saw them one time and they was gone in a
Speaker 1: little drain area over by the two water tanks. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've enjoyed this very much. And I was telling a
Speaker 1: dirt there day yesterday, and Dirt was saying if I
Speaker 1: asked if I was the kind of person that felt
Speaker 1: things will always just work out. And I explained the
Speaker 1: dirt that that no, think. I was saying, you need
Speaker 1: to wake up every day paranoid. And he said, but
Speaker 1: if you try, they'll always work out. And I said, oh, absolutely, man,
Speaker 1: I think if you uh, I think that we live
Speaker 1: in a land of tremendous opportunity. And I was like,
Speaker 1: if you apply yourself and try hard and focus, things
Speaker 1: will work out for you. But then I brought up that.
Speaker 1: I was like, there's a thing that happens to people
Speaker 1: that doesn't get talked about. Is so many of the
Speaker 1: people I know that eventually fall into uh not it
Speaker 1: not working out for them so often, is uh they
Speaker 1: become piste off and bitter like. No one talks about
Speaker 1: the nothing, no one talks about it. There's a real
Speaker 1: problem with becoming piste off and bitter like. It happens
Speaker 1: to people and then it's just downhill. And the thing
Speaker 1: I like about you is how optimistic you are, like
Speaker 1: you gotta go and you you gotta go in and
Speaker 1: get a whole new damn knee and then get better
Speaker 1: and go get a whole another knee can be fixed
Speaker 1: and you're not even remotely irritated by this because it
Speaker 1: can be fixed. A part of life, I mean, as
Speaker 1: human beings, we have the power to believe in something
Speaker 1: better that's out there and that we have the power
Speaker 1: to go after it. That separates us from the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1: Animal kingdom just does it's just instinct. I've got to
Speaker 1: get some nuts buried up. But we have the power
Speaker 1: to look out there and say, hey, I can build this,
Speaker 1: I can do this. I can go over there aspirational. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we can. We can imagine things that are
Speaker 1: not there. You know. I feel like if my knee failed,
Speaker 1: I would I mean I would battle it out, but
Speaker 1: I would have a problem with turning piste off. It's
Speaker 1: just in my d n A arthritis runs into my family, um,
Speaker 1: and it's just part of life. I mean, I'll be
Speaker 1: sixty two in September, and it's just you know, I've
Speaker 1: got a lot of wear and tear on that knee,
Speaker 1: playing sports, walking being outside. It's just I've used it
Speaker 1: and I can get it fixed. Um, you know, I've
Speaker 1: got it on the healing phase of the moon. So
Speaker 1: every card I can play, I'm gonna play. I've got
Speaker 1: a really good doctor that cares about me. I'm putting
Speaker 1: eighteen inch suer line through his backyard. Just ther No,
Speaker 1: this is part of a project. If we couldn't get
Speaker 1: easy with on some people through there, and they wanted
Speaker 1: me to go, Breck was gonna have to take out
Speaker 1: some treaties or something. So uh, I said, I've got
Speaker 1: to go get an injection. So maybe I'm sitting on
Speaker 1: my schedule my knee surgery so I can maybe get
Speaker 1: to talk to him. In the contract, we wanted me
Speaker 1: to talk to him because I had to get an
Speaker 1: easement from a former mayor that that I used to
Speaker 1: work for, and they wanted me to go in there
Speaker 1: and talk to him. So I got it, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, the world's about politics making deals. Sitting here,
Speaker 1: you're saying what you would need to say. I say
Speaker 1: what I need and we come to a conclusion there
Speaker 1: for good of me and you both and are everybody,
Speaker 1: and that's the way we need to stay. But I
Speaker 1: was going through there, and then one neighbor comes up
Speaker 1: to me and says, let me tell you something about
Speaker 1: Dr Ptel. He's my doctor. I don't mind saying his name.
Speaker 1: He's really I really love him. He says, you know,
Speaker 1: if you've got a doctor, you don't want a doctor
Speaker 1: that's a big duck hunter or a farmer or wants
Speaker 1: to be an artists. You want a doctor that likes
Speaker 1: to make people well. He said, that's what Dr Betel is.
Speaker 1: So I just kind of kept my mouth shutting never
Speaker 1: you know, not until he got the end, because I
Speaker 1: was all ears waiting to see what he had to
Speaker 1: say about Dr Mattel. And then he said that. That
Speaker 1: really made me charge up and say, hey, yeah, I've
Speaker 1: made the right, right decision on the doctor. And like
Speaker 1: I said, a friend of mine, he's eighty one, had
Speaker 1: a heart vowel replacement. They were gonna put in four
Speaker 1: stints in him. He picked out the right healing moonface
Speaker 1: for the heart and went in there and come out
Speaker 1: of the operation with a new heart valve in two
Speaker 1: stints in there. And I'll see him Monday night at
Speaker 1: the LBL Sportsman Club meeting. And he's still guiding at
Speaker 1: eighty one. He's a fish guide. Mike, You might want
Speaker 1: to want him. You'd be better be glad that he
Speaker 1: knows a Kentucky and not New Mexico because he would
Speaker 1: wear your ass out. So um, you know, we all
Speaker 1: have that pire to wake up in the morning and
Speaker 1: go out and do something good, you know, and work,
Speaker 1: whether you volunteer, if you go through your life, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna continue working. That's something I've just seen in the
Speaker 1: last couple of years. I thought, when I retire, I'm
Speaker 1: going to retire and go hunting and fishing and stuff. Well,
Speaker 1: you can only do so much hunting and fishing, really can't.
Speaker 1: And the older you get, the less you got. I mean,
Speaker 1: I see Jeremy out here. I said, how much guess
Speaker 1: you got left? And you tank? You said, it's it's full.
Speaker 1: It's always full. It's off. So you know, I can remember,
Speaker 1: I said, I can remember days like that. But I'm
Speaker 1: not like that anymore. I just want to go out
Speaker 1: and and do my thing and watch other people hunt.
Speaker 1: I don't have to kill something every single time that
Speaker 1: I go out. I don't have to get the limit.
Speaker 1: If I can just get one, I'm completely satisfied. That's
Speaker 1: all I have to do. But yeah, it's good to
Speaker 1: keep a good positive attitude, and that's what I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try to do to the end of my life. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just work. Be out in the dirt, outside, out
Speaker 1: in nature, and just leave it damn straight. I like it.
Speaker 1: Kevin Murphy, thanks so much, Kevin, Thanks everyone for joining.
Speaker 1: See you soon.