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On this episode Tyler Jones And K.C. Smith talk about a recent fishing trip they took with the crew to target Crappie and Sand Bass. They talk some of their favorite tricks and tactics for targeting sand bass.They also talk some newly learned lessons from the trip including how they found their exact honey hole. Thanks for listening, for the best gear made with the serious hunter in mind, get you some First Lite Gear
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Casey, I'm Tyler, and you're listening to the Element Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
What is happening in all the woods people? I hope
y'all are having a great day. I hope you're excited,
and I hope you got some turkey hunting in the
plans in the works, and maybe you have been out
in the woods. I know some of these southern states
are open. This is the Element Podcast, brought to you
by First like year, and we have been doing a
little hunting ourselves.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
He Tyler, Yeah, don't say it like that. Eric's not here.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
How many H's are in Tyler zero? You know I
went to high school with you.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I had an H in his really, Tyler, Yeah, he
probably was raised by Yankee parents.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Actually not at all, but yeah, I don't know kind
of strength.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Are named at least. So yeah, we've been doing some
some turkey hunting. I'm actually been on a uh I
guess you could call it a quest. I'm not like
a crazy fanatic turkey hunter or anything, but I like
turkey hunting something fun to do in the spring. And
I happened to shoot a Merriam's turkey in New Mexico
last year. If you watched it on you might have
(01:14):
watched it on the Media YouTube channel. And at that
point I started to realize, well, I got one more
before I get the Slam, the US Slam. I think
it's called the US Slam, right, it's the four subspecies
of turkeys, which is Rio, Eastern Merriams, and Astiola. So,
just by a happenstance, I come across a guy by
(01:36):
the name of Matt Cats and he happens to have
a lot of as yello's around on a property to
do some hunting on. And so we've got Matt actually
here with us and we're just we've been hunting with
them just for a few days. While we're in Florida.
We've been bouncing around all over the state doing all
sorts of different activities. Southern Florida or Florida in general,
(01:59):
is just like a It's a lot like Texas, where
there's it's a unique place and there's a lot of
different culture there. There's a lot of different things to do,
a lot of different critics to chase.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
The fish, the fishing side of things is just you know, pristine.
So anyway, that's kind of in the middle of all
this stuff. We've been doing. We were able to hook
up with Matt here and this morning are we spilling
the beans?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Well, let's just keep the beans at Bayfer.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Okay, does that sounds okay?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I got an idea, Matt. We had a big debate
on the way here because I haven't seen your name spelled.
Do you spell your name the German way or the
English way?
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It's M A T T.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I figured out, Okay, so C A T E is
Kate's all right? Yeah, so I thought it might be
like the K A E T z or whatever. No, Matt,
K C A T And you grew up here that
we're in central Florida. What was a lot growing up
in central Florida?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Man, it's changed a lot. This place is getting developed,
especially our coastlines, a lot of a lot of construction.
They're they're building that up pretty good. But the interior
of Florida's kind of still the same. It's a lot
of ranch land, groves.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
What's a grove?
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Orange grove? Citrus? Got youah, a lot of citrus in Florida.
So there's still a lot of that. Like I said,
our coastlines are what's getting developed so much. But yeah,
we've always had been involved with cattle ranching and working
in some groves, and then started doing a little I
guess you could call a maintenance on ranches, just keeping
(03:30):
the hog populations down. And there's you know, there's a
need for it here pretty heavy. So yeah, I kind
of fell into that little niche of things and just
stuck with the hunting. It was always my passion. And
through uh, through the angles I was working with the
landowners trying to keep the hog populations down. It just
turned into more forests and started a hunting operation and
(03:51):
next thing, you know, it's pretty wide open.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Was there a bunch of pigs here? When you were young?
Speaker 3 (03:55):
There was there was.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
That you're not a striking young man, but I say
his a teenager.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I'm a little weathered, but uh but yeah, there there's
always been hogs here, and yeah, so I can I
can tell you that I've I started keeping tracks several
years ago and I average about thirteen hundred hogs a
year and it doesn't look like we've even hunted them,
man so and it's not like I'm the only one
doing it. It's a popular activity here, So you know about.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That, I do? You know? I worked. I've been telling
you some of the trapping experience and stuff, and we
did air operations quite a bit, you know, at least
once a year.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And uh, you're actually probably one of the few people
I've met that to killed more pigs than me, right,
you know, it's uh, it's interesting how pigs work. And uh,
I guess a little side note. We did some iguana
stuff earlier in the week elsewhere beans are spilling, and
uh they are? Is that the beans?
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I thought the beans. There's lots a lot of beans
going on, all kinds of hell.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That's right. Wait, yeah, but iguana's kind of proliferate kind
of similarly where it's just at this point in time
with the pigs, you're just trying to maintain.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, we're just trying to keep them under control. I mean,
as you can see riding through these pastures, the beat
your brains out riding across them three.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Months, three weeks and three days as gestation is on
a hog and sALS ready to breed at nine months old.
Start doing math on that real quick, and man, it's
it's kind of wild. It's it's almost like we we
better off if we could just stabilize and naturalize. Yeah,
like if you just get to a point where finally
they stop expanding and then you can kind of understand
(05:34):
what to do with them.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, like you're not gonna beat them, right, so you
just got to keep them under control. You're never gonna
get rid of them. It's not gonna happen, especially in Florida.
Was as thick as woods as we have. It's just
it's it's not feasible. But to definitely keep them intact,
that's not you know, that's that's our goal is just
to keep them manageable, which could be first gater. I
(05:56):
killed my first gator when I was probably I think
I'm six or seven years old.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I'm fifty two now, so there's been a few in between.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
So they the hogs can actually they're pretty tasty.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
But gators eat them too. Huh yeah, yeah, yep, they do.
I've a they'll they get a few. They get a
few every year. They're a gators. Main diet down here
where we're at is fish and turtles.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah. It's man, it's surprising to me that they eat
fish like the live fish huh yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
And that's that's the majority of their diets.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Really, So they sit there with their mouth open underwater.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
What they what they usually do is they go get
in a place where fish congregate and they'll just lay there.
And if they lay there, eventually, you know, fish are
gonna bump into them, especially if there's flowing water, the
water's running culvert pipes, stuff like that. A lot of
places when they pump water in and out, the covert
pipes will empty out into a canal, cause a deep spot. Well,
when those canals get low, that spot holds all the fish.
(06:51):
Them gators will get in those holes right there, Man,
they will just gorge themselves.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
You're saying, don't do a backflip off of the covert.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Better better check before.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
You get spot.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
See this morning and you're like, hey, just walk down
this road right here and you'll get to your spot
and then you probably know. But there's a little low
spot there that I tried to shine my flashlight into
and I couldn't see the bottle. We took our kind
of round about around it.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Well, you guys, remember what we rode by yesterday. I
was up.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
You've got this cool. I mean it's just like a
can am, you know, like like a high rack. Yeah,
it's gotta you know, it's what we call a high
ride down in South Texas pretty much. But it makes
your vehicle like a eight seater pretty much in the
top one back there. I was sitting in it yesterday
evening and what my head high back there is probably
eleven foot or something I imagine roughly yep. And uh, you
(07:37):
knew the gator was there, but nobody else really did.
But we went through this. You know, the water's real clear.
It's tanning around here, but it's real clear of where
you go through. And I looked down and there was
like a nine footer in the water, like we almost
ran over his tail.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Yeah, if we would have been a little bit to
the right there, we would have bumped.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
He didn't move or do nothing.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
And it's it's weird. I don't know what that like,
that response is. I guess they just under the water
and they're like, well, I'm better off not letting anything
to him here.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Well, it's just like deer and coyotes and everything. Right,
if I'm in if I'm out in the dark, they
don't see me. Gator feels like that underwater. Well, if
I just go underwater, there's no way they see me,
I'm safe.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So would he have so would he let you run
him over?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, he would have let me bump him, Yeah, and
then then he would have shot out of that Yeah,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
No, it's amazing what power they can generate.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
It's yeah, when we kill these big gators man. And
you know, sometimes things get a little western when we're
hunting them. If a hunter doesn't make a good shot
or something and we have to get hands on with them,
it'll it'll make you rethink how strong you think you are?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Ye?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
So they I've been bitten, not not nothing too extreme.
My son got bit. He had about a ten and
a half grab him by the hand. One day. We're
dealing with one and that got pretty ugly. But luckily
he didn't lose anything. But I do have three friends
that have lost limbs off of gaters.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Oh my goodness. That's that's from dealing with them. It's
not like accidental, No, that's from dealing with them.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah. Yeah. One guy lost his hand, well, the one,
the one buddy of mine, he had his arm wrung
off at his shoulder. He was just swimming at night
with some friends out at a little spot party and
they went for a swim and gator grabbed his arm,
took him down to the bottom. And it's only reason
he's alive today is that gator started death rolling with
him and wrung his arm off. If he wouldn't have
(09:21):
wrung his arm off, he would have drowned him and
killed him.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Ah Ye, it's a little much.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yeah, it is terrible.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
That's rough. I bet you that. There's a lot of
aspects to that too, Like infection side of that is
probably pretty rough because this water around here.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Is the water, and then just it being done by
a gator because the gators have so much bacteria on him.
They live in warm, stagnant water. Everything they eats basically rotten,
you know. Besides, like if they catch a fish, if
they catch anything that has any size to it, they
have to let it rot before they eat it because
they don't want to fight to try to tear pieces off.
They let it rot get soft. It's just much easier.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
So it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
If a gator grabbed you and took you to the
bottom of a lake or what would you do.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
I'd probably make peace with everything or they ever needed
to do.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
No way you get out of it.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
You know, there's a couple of things you can do.
For sure, are you going to have that train of
thought when it's going down. Probably not, you're gonna go
in panic mode, going to shock. But the probably the
best thing you could do, which I don't know if
anybody would actually have the mindset to do this, will
be to reach in he's if he's had, If he
has you, his mouth is not shut. So if you
(10:29):
could reach in to that little flap in their throat
and just disengage that a little bit. So he started
taking in water, He's probably gonna turn you loose if you,
you know, poked at the eyes, I would say maybe,
but probably not. He's probably not gonna turn Yeah, it's
just I've seen him bite down on things when we're
(10:50):
trying to get him in, and you know, we try
to get him loose or get him to let go
of something, and you can do about whatever you want
to him. He's not letting it go.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, you think that, you know, in the shark attack world,
it's almost exclusively misidentification on the animal's part, right, That's
at least that's what's you know, hypothesized. Do you think
it's how these are gaters too? A lot of times.
I don't you think they're trying to eat you.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
I don't know that they're trying to really like so
much eat you. Some of them, yes, but all of
them know. For instance, we had a seventy some year
old lady was killed earlier this year. Here, she was
walking her dog. It's all caught on her own home
security camera. She's walking her dog in her backyard. Had
a reclaimed water retention pond for like irrigation and stuff.
(11:33):
And the gator. You can see him coming all the
way across the pond. He's swimming so fast, he's got
a wake behind him. He's coming after the dog. And
I don't know why, but a dog is a dinner
bell to an alligator, so he's coming to get the dog.
The lady's elderly, she's not aware of what's going on.
She finally looks up, sees the gator. She's not doing
(11:54):
anything quick. She's got the least wrapped around her wrist.
She turns to walk back up the bank. The gator
catches the dog. She could have just slid the leash
off her wrist and she would have been fine. She's
seventy some year old. She's fighting this alligator for her dog.
The gator shakes his head a couple of times and
snatches her down on top of him. He reaches over
(12:16):
bites her and you can watch it all on the video.
Slides right back in the water. Drowns are creepy.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Man.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, man, that's rough.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
This morning. When I was walking around, that little slew
right there.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
At one point we kind of turned back to the road,
I think is when we made the loop around it. Yeah,
we came back to the road. I had shined my
flashlight to make sure as we went through the ditch
there wasn't a gator there, just on my phone, and
like ten yards I see eyes and there was a
bobcat just sitting there staring at us. They eat bob
kits water right.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, they'll eat anything. I have gutted a few of
them just to see what's at them, just because it's
you know, I deal with gators every day and it's
interesting to me. I find a lot of possum. Raccoon
is more of what cause you know, they kind of
especially the raccoons, they kind of hang out around the
water areas and they walk that edge and that gator
will pick them off. But he's mostly eating fish and turtles,
(13:11):
but if an opportunity arises, he is gonna take it.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
So we watch a African documentary of crocodiles. Those crocodiles
are lunging out of the water and grabbing stuff. Gaters
do that a lot or they.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
I don't say a lot, but they if they do it,
they do do it.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
And they and so do you think that the like
bigger mammals around here know that there's gats around and
that absolutely so. I mean it's not like a oh
I'm surprised at something. They know there's things in there
trying to eat them.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, but they won't really mess with like these all
the cows. You see all these water holes, every one
of them's got a gator in it. And you'll see
cows in there like just and they're cooling off with
the gats. A little A gator is not going to
mess with a big cow. I mean, if it did,
it had to be a massive gator.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
What's a massive gator?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
I mean it would be something well over ten foot
to unless he's just extremely aggressive to mess with a cow,
a full grown one. They will catch a calf occasionally,
and a lot of times in these water holes. I've
drove up to the hole just looking to see what
gators are in there. Maybe I see buzzards and I
go check it out, and there'll be five or six
calves and they're floating dead. That gator was not killing
(14:20):
them to eat them. He was killing them because he
didn't want anything in his water hole. It was just territorial.
So he's just killing everything that comes up there that
he can catch. He's not gonna do that to a
big cow, you know, a big cow would just walk
out of the water with him. With those little calves
and stuff, they can they can handle them and drown
them pretty.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
So when a deer goes to a water hole, it's
like on edge.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
It's subject to get caught. Yeah, we have found a
buck in one of these water holes here on this
place that a gator had caught and killed.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Huh man, that's crazy. It seemed like it would almost
be hard to get them to age class you know
that way. But I guess there's just a bunch of
the landscape holds a lot of animals.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Yeah, we've got a lot of deer, a lot of
turkeys hogged. This is a pretty game rich environment.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
I guarantee you. So what's the old gator?
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Oh man, when you start killing them twelve and thirteen
foot gators, they're going to be in that seventy plus.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Are they really that old?
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (15:13):
They that's wild.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
I don't know if you guys saw the story here.
A couple of years back, they killed one in Mississippi.
He's like their new state record or right there at
he was right at fourteen feet. They took him to
a processor, just like we do to have them process
for our clients. Processor skinning him out, he finds musket
balls in his back.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
No way.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
They send the musket balls at the University of Mississippi
to get tested, and they dated them back to two
hundred years that's wild. Undred years old year.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I need that story up. Yeah, that'd be if we
can find that, we'll link it in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And so somebody ate a two hundred year old piece
of meat off.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Well, think about this too. They probably weren't shooting at
a little baby alleygator with muskets. Yeah, so they were
probably shooting at a fairly grown alligator back at that time.
So that alligator realistically was probably two twenty two hundred
and fifty years old.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
That's goodness, that's awesome. That is cool. What so when
you say they're strong, because their arms just don't look
that strong, is it? Is it more like abdomen tail
working together.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
It's that body movement. Now that tail is that tail
is incredibly strong. Yeah. I had a when I was younger.
We were out riding in some airboats around here, like
we do all the time, and a buddy of mine
thought he was gonna be mister uh, mister tough guy
and jump off on one. And he jumped off on
about a ten footer and tried to catch it a live.
(16:35):
It smacked him in his thigh and it broke his femur.
He had to ride forty five minute ride in on
an airboat with a broken femur.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Oh my good about that.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yeah. Yeah, they're not to mess with. So that yall
power is unreal.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
So you were telling me a little bit about the
girth of the tail at the base of it. Can
you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah? So just to give people always use as an example.
You know, people say, well, how big your gators? I
tell him, you know, on a trophy hunt, we're gonna
kill something in an eleven foot range is average, and
they always want to know, well, what's he weigh That
alligator is going to weigh somewhere between five hundred and
six hundred and fifty pounds somewhere in that range on
the big trophies. A couple of gators that we have
(17:12):
killed recently, their tails were abnormally large, like girth wise,
So we just run a tape on them to kind
of have some measurements and see because it's interesting. And
we've killed some here lately. At the base of their
tail right behind their legs, they're forty six to forty
eight inches.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
So that's a lot bigger around than me. Well around
that used.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
To think about how big your waist is. Yeah, and
we're just talking about the base of his tail. Yeah,
it is bigger than your Torso is.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
That all musclers? He storm fans back there.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
That's every bit muscle, really, every bit.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Do they have much fat on them?
Speaker 3 (18:04):
No? No, old ones don't really, No, they'll have little
layers of fat in like their tail. There's a tenderloin
tube that runs through the bottom. The tail is kind
of shaped almost like a like a star or like
a plus sign. There's two solid strips of meat on
the top of that, and then on the bottom there's
two strips of meat. But inside the two strips on
the bottom there's like inside tender loins like you'd get
(18:26):
on an elk or a deer. In the bottom section
of the tail tender. Yeah, that's the one that's about
the tender.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
You treat that differently than you do the rest of
the tail.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, you treat that differently. And the jaw meat, Like
a lot of people looks at a big gator when
he's laying there and they see those big fat jaws.
That's all solid white meat.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
How about that?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, So the jaw meat in that inside tenderline, that's
like your prime cuts on it.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
What do you what would you do with that when
you cooked it?
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Most people do old school with gator man. They just
cut it up into pieces, run it through a tender riser,
and fry it. Yeah, like the Gator bytes gator nuggets
type thing.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Ye got you. And so, say a five hundred pound gator,
would you say it's like an average gator for you
something like that or no.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
No, if he's five hundred, he's a big trophy's.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Big, big five hundred is a easy number to work with.
A guess is why I'm using that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
No, that was telling me that a lot of people
like think that they weigh more than they are because
of maybe some TV shows and different things along the
way that have you know, maybe elaborated a little bit on.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
That, and they're probably long for their weight.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
That's exactly right, So they're they're you know, eleven foot,
but it's still like like you said the Giles and yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
How many pounds of meat would you get off of
a five hundred pound gator?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
On that you're probably gonna get one hundred pounds eighty
to one hundred pounds. Bad, No, it's not a bad
long there's a lot of meat.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
And then most people have leather made out.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Of their gators, or a lot a lot of have.
They'll get the head mounted, send the hides off for
for leather or you know, less they're doing a half
body or full body mount. Yeah. Well, well, some people
get some rugs done, some people get some like the
bearskin rug style. Yea, yeah, but you would actually be
shocked to how many people get the full body mounted.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Really.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, it's a it's a fairly large percentage on a
full body gator Mountain six seven thousand on a big one.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh oh my goodness, how about that?
Speaker 2 (20:10):
But think about the pranks you could pull. Oh, for sure,
all it would be worth it, I think.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
I mean you go to Dallasafari Club, like the croc
up front, full body mounted is like the thing you know,
that's every kid wants to see.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
So, so, what's a gator hunt?
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Like?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I probably I would like to do one at some
point in my life. But it's not something that's like
a butt for me, but a lot of people it is. Yeah, yeah,
are ye? So is there a you know, is it
more like a wattail hunt and more like a thermal
hog hunt?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
H we're spotting and stalking. Yeah, we're doing a lot
of spotting and stalking. We're riding on swamp buggies. We
have these big platforms swamp buggies on big tractor tires.
We ride around on them. Sometimes we do it off
the cannon. Just depends on what ranch were on and
how far we're going, So we basically ride. I've been
judging gators my whole entire life, from the the gator's
(21:01):
nose to his eye. However many inches that is will
relate to how many feet he is.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
You said that earlier. This we've heard that is that
is that nostrils? Yeah, so not not like the tip
of his notes.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
I just go from the nostril to the corner of
the eye. Got and that's and we're not talking exactly right. Sure,
but if you run a tape on and it's eight inches,
he's gonna roughly be eight foot roughly.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Is it easier for you now to look at that
distance or to look at a full gator.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
I can look at his head and tell you within
a couple of inches how big really. But I've been
doing it for forty years, so yeah, you know, and
then also doing it for a living, so I know
exactly because I'll guess him, we'll kill him, and we'll
pull him out and measure him so we know that
we're not just saying, oh he's seven foot and just
that's science. Yeah, we've got him killed and we've got
(21:49):
a tape on him.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So then once you once you're you're riding around and
you see these things and you're like, oh, that's the
one because you have you don't Not everyone is a
trophy hunt, right.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
No, we do management hunts. And then some people will
just want a small one because say dad's doing a
trophy hunt, he's got junior along. He doesn't want to
spend that on a on little man. But hey, you
know that lesser gator right there, she's the.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
First gator boy.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yeah, so we have two or three categories of size
ranges for people to hunt to fit pretty much every budget.
And so, yeah, they're neat and a weird little thing
about alligators. They're actually kind of built like a chicken
as far as meat structure wise, the entire thing is
white meat except for his legs. His legs are dark meat. Really,
(22:33):
what do you do to a gator?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
League?
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Some people, do you know? Some people cook them, cut
them up for fry meat. There's actually a guy in
town now has been taking them, smoking them and chipping
it up and making like a fish dip with gator meat.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Sounds interesting.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
It's actually pretty decent.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
There many people grinding them like deer meat or something.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
So I'm getting ready to try some myself. I'm going
to take a restaurant or a friend of mine took
some from me. He wanted to try it out for
some special clients he had, and they took alligator meat,
sixteen pounds of gator meat, ground four pounds of maple
bacon in with it and patted it like a hamburger
and put it on a bun with like a roummelaide sauce.
(23:14):
And he said, everybody, just bad, absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, it does sound all right?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Does so good?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Now I'm getting little I like gator. I'm actually very hungry.
So we kind of distracted you though, from what a
gator hunt is like.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
So yeah, no, you're fine. So like just we're just
riding around, spotting and stalking. I already know what size
gator you're looking forward to fitt your budget, So we
just ride until we find that gator, and you're not
obligated to take the first gator we shoot. We're going
to see plenty on my ranch. We can ride around
and see roughly one hundred and fifty alligators a day
of all sizes.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
So it's a safari experience outside.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Of just that. Yeah, and it's not a man I
really you know how you know you want a backcountry
elk hunt or something. It's man, I hope we get something,
or I hope we see something you're absolutely going to
see and you're absolutely gonna get. So it's a it's
all free range fair chase. It's not high fens. They're
not bought and brought in. There's none of that going on.
It's free range fair chase. But it's as good as
(24:09):
any high fence hunting ever because we just have such
an abundance of them.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
So, yeah, how does that work? Are you having to
rotate ranches or do you have like a cap on
what you'll take so that you can replenish, because it
probably takes I don't you know the number, but to
get to a gate or two is that's the size
that someone cares to shoot, it takes a few years.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
It takes a long time. Yeah. Yeah, So what we
do on our ranches how we get our tags is
a biologist comes out in January. He does a survey
with us on the ranch. He'll do physical count water temperature,
air temperature, renewable outside resource. He'll crunch all these numbers
compared to like amount of acreage of water on the
acreage of land, and he'll tell us, okay, mat you're
(24:50):
allowed to kill one hundred and fifty on this ranch.
We might go over and do a survey on another
ranch and he might tell me I'm allowed twenty on
that one. So we have several different ranches we hunt,
keep the rotation so we don't wear out any one
piece of property.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
So American alligators used to be on the Nangered Species List.
What year do you know what year they came off?
Speaker 3 (25:10):
I don't remember. I don't know if I think, I'm
gonna say about twenty five thirty years ago they started
allowing us to huntle.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So just a huge success and it's probably the greatest
American conservation success story I think. I mean a lot
of people with turkey, gators, eagles, those are all going
to be kind of in that range. But like I mean, alligators,
I mean apparently they you know, there's a lot of
them around that.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
You know, you look at a turkey and a three
year old turkeys an old turkey, Well, it takes a
thirty year old gator to be an old gator probably
right when.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Yeah, if he's an old gator, our average old gator
that we are, our average trophy gators probably fifty plus.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah, gotcha, that's the crazy man. That's I mean, that's
a that's a big deal. We just got to get
the grizzly bearries. Yeah, yeah, no doubt on that. So
the so essentially what kind of weaponry is it going
to take to make this happen?
Speaker 3 (26:08):
So with a alligator hunt, on let's say a management hunt,
we're going to try to kill a gator somewhere in
that six seven eight foot range, I like something like
a two twenty three twenty two hornet. You know, there's
some little wildcat rounds, the smaller rounds like that little
work fine, reason being, we don't want to do too
much damage to the head because majority of people are
(26:29):
gonna want to mount the head on those big gators
I like three oh eight or bigger, because we're really
trying to get them dead where we shoot them, because
we don't want them to Some of these places where
hunter have big reservoirs four hundred five hundred acre reservoir,
so if you wound one, he's gonna be pretty difficult
to track in five hundred acre reservoir. So we like
(26:51):
to when we shoot him, we like to kill him
right where they lay.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
So are you trying to kill those animals by concussion
or are you severing the brain stem? Or like, what's
the what's the goal with the round?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Uh? An alligator's head. I kind of relate it to
a concrete block if you if you shoot a gator
in the head, it'll actually crack his whole entire head.
We're just trying to do a lot of damage and
get that alligator killed. We don't want anything getting away,
we don't want anything wounded. So we like that higher
power on those big gators because you know, again we're
(27:25):
shooting a gator that's going to be four to six
hundred pounds. Yeah, we need to stop him right there
because then also we have to go get him. So
now we got to deal with an alligator that's going
to be highly upset if he's not dispatched.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So so how do you how do you end up getting.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Some It depends on where they're at. Sometimes we just
wade out there and get them. Sometimes we'll throw a
fishing pole and put a snag hook on him and
drag them over to the bank where we can get
our hands on them. Sometimes, if they're way out, we'll
take an airboat and go out and get them. But
most of the time it's just hands on. We just
get in the water and get them and what they're
still alive, it gets western.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Or if you're a brave dude, the gators still.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It gets it gets Western things get a little crazy.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
I got our fact checkers over here said showed me
that the and they went on dangerous species lists in
sixty seven and eighty seven is when they came off,
so twenty years and went to you know, back to
good conservations. About that though, that's cool, pretty interesting. I mean,
apparently they are prolific. How many eggs did they lay?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Probably so a nest will have anywhere from twenty to
forty eggs.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Now, this is something that I noticed living in gator
country down in South Texas. It seemed like either they'd
have multiple broods a year or gators are breeding. It
ain't just like a one event, like.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
They'll be like I remember one year in Florida here,
but I.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Would see babies in like March or April, and then
i'd see babies in October.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
When you're seeing those babies that are this long, that
was from last year, okay, yeah, but so it's like, uh,
the eight inches a new born six eight inches ye yep, So.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
In a year they grow another eight inches.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Maybe probably not even that much really, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
And would that be like throughout their lifespan eight inches
of year.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
So they're gonna they're gonna grow. They're gonna grow at
a higher rate until they get to that six seven
foot range, and then they're gonna start to slow down.
And those really big gators, man, they grow like a
quarter inch a year or less. They just don't have that,
and then all depends on food source and everything else.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
But yeah, well you start talking about that volume of animal,
a quarter inch around the whole critter, you're in fifteen
pounds that year, so you know, I don't know what
it is, but yeah, like they still.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
At what point do they become predator exclusively and not
pray anymore? If that makes sense?
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah, so they can. They're subject to get eating at
any time, unless you know, once they get up around
that ten foot mark, you start to I think they
don't have to worry as much about the bigger gators,
the ones that are a little bit bigger than them,
but we will. It's almost every gator we kill, he'll
be chewed up. He'll be missing a foot, missing a
(30:08):
leg we've killed him that they don't have. They're missing
their tail, it's been bit in half, bite marks all
over them, they're an extremely aggressive animal.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
He told us a story about that. It just happened yesterday.
I went on the on the rig. But y'all saw
one dude like that, right.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, Well that was one of the cowboys here on
the ranch. Saw he rode by a waterhole, a seven
footer jumped over a nine footer to get in the water,
and the nine footer grabbed him, took him in the
water and was rolling with him.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
So and they were just buddies, like five seconds before.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
That, they were just out there, son and together.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
A rough world man.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
So I had a guy here on an archery hunt
and on the other ranch archery hunting for gators, and
they uh, one of the ranch hands called and said, hey,
there's a big gator crossing the road up here. He's
got something in his mouth. He's going to be in
the in the ditch. And he told me what block
he was in. So we go over there. What he
had in his mouth was an eight foot gater. They
did have bitten clean in half, and we ended up
(31:04):
getting him killed with a bow, and he was eleven foot.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
So when you shoot him with a bow, what does
that set up look like?
Speaker 3 (31:10):
So we're trying to shoot him in the head if
he's in the water with the only option we have
is to shoot him in the head. I know a
lot of people think, well, you don't really, you're not
going to get any penetration. You don't need much, you
need an inch or two. You just got to break
that bone. Their brain is right there. If he's laying
up on the bank sunning, we're going to shoot him
right behind, right in that armpit, heart lung. He is
(31:32):
going to get in the water, But then that hole
is going to start taking in water, is basically going
to start drowning. Nine times out of ten the alligator
will actually come get out of the water, or at
least he'll get out of the water enough to get
the hole out of the water.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Do you ever have to use like a sane net
to get him out?
Speaker 2 (31:48):
No?
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Find him in upon.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
You were talking about fishing poles the other day, though,
what is that deal?
Speaker 3 (31:52):
So we'll take a fishing pole with a big weighted
snag hook and we'll throw it out there and snag him,
just to drag him over to the bank to where
we can get our hands on him to get him
pulled out.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
But sometimes he's alive.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Whenever that happens, sometimes he's still alive. And then sometimes
you get some guys that want to be a little
more hands on and before we ever even shoot him,
they want to snag him with a fishing pole, fight
him in and then getting killed.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
That sounds cool.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
See, I don't like that. I would rather just I
would rather do the spot and stock shoot thing. Because
there's some there's some hunts in Texas that you can
draw all and stuff, and I think a lot of
them are hooking line, yeah, because.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Those are public land, they're not private lands. Yeah, that's
where ours are here.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Have you ever like chunked the hunk of meat in
front of the gator and hooked him that way?
Speaker 3 (32:35):
Like a lot of times we'll use well, I'll save
some lungs out of the hogs, and we use lungs
because they float, So we throw that lung out there.
It floats on top of the water. He can smell
it and he'll come to it, and a lot of
times he's awesome. So then I'll take and I'll just
kind of like bump it a little bit and he'll
see that movement and he'll usually come right to it.
(32:58):
They'll bite it, and they'll chomp it a few times,
and they lift their heads straight up in the air
and they're actually like tossing it back to the throat,
swallow it, let it settle for a second, and then
you got him hooked. But we had the reason we
do it that hooked to a fishing pole because if
a gator approaches that bait, that's not something that we want.
We can get it away from it. We can reel
it in. How fast you think they can swim, Michael
(33:21):
Phelps cannot swim.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yeah, I believe it had.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Fast the other fast.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
It's insane to see. We saw one the other day
doing and I've seen him before. But like, you know,
you be in to marsh in a boat and like
there'll be a gator in ten inches of water and
all of a sudden he takes off and there ain't
any water lift in the in the marsh, you know,
like they just throw water everywhere there.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
They're a special animal, man. There's really something else. We've
I've killed some big gators and water so shallow they
couldn't get under the water. Ten eleven twelve foot gaters.
They're just they can't even hide. And it's weird, Like
they'll get their head underwater and they just think they're underwater.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
It's kind of like a buck bit in a wheat
stuble field.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, like, hey, I can see your antlers.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
So you do a lot of other hunts too, I
mean hog hunting, and we've been here, uh doing a
little turkey hunting, just just kind of hanging out and
seeing the property.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
And uh, it's pretty awesome here. I've never been to this.
I've never been Florida until we came this trip. It's
always something I wanted to do. You know. Texas has
so many cool things too.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
It's kind of hard to absolutely on a while.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
But uh, the Ossiola turkey has been speaking the sweet
music out there.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Don't be trying to make me spill the bean.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
We Uh they're neat.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
A couple of reasons I noticed about them. They Uh,
For one, they sound different on the roost. The hens
have a lot more whistle to that instead of the
raspy thing.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
And then.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
They don't talk as much in general on the on
the ground.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
So far, Yeah, we we had that. We didn't encounter rate.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
We had tiny sample size.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yeah, but I noticed the gobbles seem a little bit like, uh,
not necessarily higher pitch, but like throatier, not as like I.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Feel like the jets together too, like quicker like a chipmunk.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yes, exactly, kind of.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
I think it's like you go and listen to Rio,
it's blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, and these.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Are, you know, right, very fast. Yeah, I think so. Yeah,
it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
And they absolutely are way darker than any turkey I've
ever seen.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Yeah, they appear black, like when you see when you're
just riding across the pasture and you'll see the hens.
They're kind of that brown gray when you see a
black bird, he's a gobbler. Yeah, they're they're almost jet
black in at distance, they appear jet black. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Do you do you happen to know what they weigh
on average?
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah? On average are probably going to go about eighteen
pounds twenty pounds on a pretty tom. Yeah. They appear leggy,
They appear tall, and that's what I hear a lot
of people say. You know, they just they have that
teenager look. They look a little thinner, a little taller. Yeah,
versus like your Rios and especially your Easterns and those
or a little bit heavier.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, and it's not much though, Like it doesn't I
was expecting when I saw one, like when I when
I saw you know how a lot of people have
ground shrink gets you when they shoot a deer, you know,
like when I saw one on the ground, I expected
it to be small, So I was trying to set
myself up for that, and they weren't really that way.
I mean they look like when you shoot them, you're like,
(36:22):
that's a turkey, like on the ground. I've seen a few.
You shot one, right, Uh, well we might. We've we've
started this new brand called Double Up Outs. No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
We have done that a decent amount.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
It's what I was feeling that earlier. Is like, for
whatever reason, we tend to shoot things on the same
like evening or morning.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Or it's seven days later, yeah apart.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
It's not like a back to back days or anything
for whatever reason. But yeah, we had uh we had
a good morning. And well we can talk more about
it now or later, it doesn't matter to me. But well,
this is there will be some videos from this stuff.
It's gonna be really.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, essentially, we had a good morning Turkey hunting I
would say it was pretty pristine.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, yeah, it was.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
It was a fun time. But Matt, thanks for letting
us come down and hang out.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Oh, no worries, man, no worries. I'm glad they turned
on for you guys. Today. We had a we didn't
have a bad day yesterday, but we had a slower
day and we had a lot of rain, a lot
of wind, and that kind of gave us a little
bit of a window this morning that cleared up on us.
And you guys can tell the turkeys did a lot
better today than they did yesterday. And the same birds. Yeah,
they cooperating and yeah, you guys probably tagged out within
(37:32):
what thirty minutes to each other hour.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, he sent me make sure that shell.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yeah, and I was like, I got one hot too, Yeah,
and uh sure enough. Yeah, it didn't take very long.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Yeah. So if somebody wanted to come on a Gator Hunt,
Triple M Triple M Outfitters, Okay, yep, yeah, yep, Triple
Them Outfitters, you can look me up on social media website.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Hold on Yards.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
It seems like you got a lot of people that
respect what you do and you and just appreciate you
being just a real dude, man. Yeah, easy going.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
So Paul Bay right where.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
You're based out of Florida. Yeah, we're an hour from Orlando.
Orlando is the easiest to fly into a quick hour
trip to the east over here at the coastline and
we can be on the beach and doing whatever and
then we can be over here in the ranch in
fifteen minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, sounds like a pretty good It's a good spot
to be in it.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well, so if anybody's interested, we'll try to link in
the show notes and then and I hope that we
do that. I can't can one hundred percent guarantee that,
but we will also be posting some pictures from this trip, yeah, yep,
and we'll be tagging Matt in that. So yeah, if
you're interested in coming on a gator hunt, man, that's uh,
it's something that I will do at some point.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
The Unique Place by the way, in case anybody cares,
I added about three new birds to my life, really,
which one woods work was one of the ones, for sure.
I got two others I need to look up and
make sure and confirm what they are.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
But I saw a bird yesterday. I couldn't tell you
what it was, but it was different than one I'd seen,
anyone I'd.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Seen, so that is just it wasn't that care carriers.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
No, we have cares at home. We had actually I
think it was a Hurricane Katrina, like there was a
huge influx of care cares really at that point. Really yeah,
And I don't know if we I mean we probably
had them before it was probably it's probably in the
range or whatever. But like I just know that like
a lot of birds got pushed up because when that happened.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
What we're thinking. But it's just a unique and plentiful
ecosystem around here.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
Absolutely, it's a target rich environment for sure.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, I enjoy I.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Enjoyed hanging out.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Man. Absolutely. Have to get you guys back down. I'm
sure some of the other ranches and I'll show you
some different things.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
I want to ride on them big buggies, man.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Yeah, I've got a couple of them. They're a good time.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Thanks. Now, take care of that
I'm Casey, I'm Tyler, and you're listening to the Element Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
What is happening in all the woods people? I hope
y'all are having a great day. I hope you're excited,
and I hope you got some turkey hunting in the
plans in the works, and maybe you have been out
in the woods. I know some of these southern states
are open. This is the Element Podcast, brought to you
by First like year, and we have been doing a
little hunting ourselves.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
He Tyler, Yeah, don't say it like that. Eric's not here.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
How many H's are in Tyler zero? You know I
went to high school with you.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I had an H in his really, Tyler, Yeah, he
probably was raised by Yankee parents.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Actually not at all, but yeah, I don't know kind
of strength.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Are named at least. So yeah, we've been doing some
some turkey hunting. I'm actually been on a uh I
guess you could call it a quest. I'm not like
a crazy fanatic turkey hunter or anything, but I like
turkey hunting something fun to do in the spring. And
I happened to shoot a Merriam's turkey in New Mexico
last year. If you watched it on you might have
(01:14):
watched it on the Media YouTube channel. And at that
point I started to realize, well, I got one more
before I get the Slam, the US Slam. I think
it's called the US Slam, right, it's the four subspecies
of turkeys, which is Rio, Eastern Merriams, and Astiola. So,
just by a happenstance, I come across a guy by
(01:36):
the name of Matt Cats and he happens to have
a lot of as yello's around on a property to
do some hunting on. And so we've got Matt actually
here with us and we're just we've been hunting with
them just for a few days. While we're in Florida.
We've been bouncing around all over the state doing all
sorts of different activities. Southern Florida or Florida in general,
(01:59):
is just like a It's a lot like Texas, where
there's it's a unique place and there's a lot of
different culture there. There's a lot of different things to do,
a lot of different critics to chase.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
The fish, the fishing side of things is just you know, pristine.
So anyway, that's kind of in the middle of all
this stuff. We've been doing. We were able to hook
up with Matt here and this morning are we spilling
the beans?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Well, let's just keep the beans at Bayfer.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Okay, does that sounds okay?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I got an idea, Matt. We had a big debate
on the way here because I haven't seen your name spelled.
Do you spell your name the German way or the
English way?
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It's M A T T.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I figured out, Okay, so C A T E is
Kate's all right? Yeah, so I thought it might be
like the K A E T z or whatever. No, Matt,
K C A T And you grew up here that
we're in central Florida. What was a lot growing up
in central Florida?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Man, it's changed a lot. This place is getting developed,
especially our coastlines, a lot of a lot of construction.
They're they're building that up pretty good. But the interior
of Florida's kind of still the same. It's a lot
of ranch land, groves.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
What's a grove?
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Orange grove? Citrus? Got youah, a lot of citrus in Florida.
So there's still a lot of that. Like I said,
our coastlines are what's getting developed so much. But yeah,
we've always had been involved with cattle ranching and working
in some groves, and then started doing a little I
guess you could call a maintenance on ranches, just keeping
(03:30):
the hog populations down. And there's you know, there's a
need for it here pretty heavy. So yeah, I kind
of fell into that little niche of things and just
stuck with the hunting. It was always my passion. And
through uh, through the angles I was working with the
landowners trying to keep the hog populations down. It just
turned into more forests and started a hunting operation and
(03:51):
next thing, you know, it's pretty wide open.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Was there a bunch of pigs here? When you were young?
Speaker 3 (03:55):
There was there was.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
That you're not a striking young man, but I say
his a teenager.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I'm a little weathered, but uh but yeah, there there's
always been hogs here, and yeah, so I can I
can tell you that I've I started keeping tracks several
years ago and I average about thirteen hundred hogs a
year and it doesn't look like we've even hunted them,
man so and it's not like I'm the only one
doing it. It's a popular activity here, So you know about.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That, I do? You know? I worked. I've been telling
you some of the trapping experience and stuff, and we
did air operations quite a bit, you know, at least
once a year.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
And uh, you're actually probably one of the few people
I've met that to killed more pigs than me, right,
you know, it's uh, it's interesting how pigs work. And uh,
I guess a little side note. We did some iguana
stuff earlier in the week elsewhere beans are spilling, and
uh they are? Is that the beans?
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I thought the beans. There's lots a lot of beans
going on, all kinds of hell.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
That's right. Wait, yeah, but iguana's kind of proliferate kind
of similarly where it's just at this point in time
with the pigs, you're just trying to maintain.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, we're just trying to keep them under control. I mean,
as you can see riding through these pastures, the beat
your brains out riding across them three.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Months, three weeks and three days as gestation is on
a hog and sALS ready to breed at nine months old.
Start doing math on that real quick, and man, it's
it's kind of wild. It's it's almost like we we
better off if we could just stabilize and naturalize. Yeah,
like if you just get to a point where finally
they stop expanding and then you can kind of understand
(05:34):
what to do with them.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, like you're not gonna beat them, right, so you
just got to keep them under control. You're never gonna
get rid of them. It's not gonna happen, especially in Florida.
Was as thick as woods as we have. It's just
it's it's not feasible. But to definitely keep them intact,
that's not you know, that's that's our goal is just
to keep them manageable, which could be first gater. I
(05:56):
killed my first gator when I was probably I think
I'm six or seven years old.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I'm fifty two now, so there's been a few in between.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
So they the hogs can actually they're pretty tasty.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
But gators eat them too. Huh yeah, yeah, yep, they do.
I've a they'll they get a few. They get a
few every year. They're a gators. Main diet down here
where we're at is fish and turtles.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah. It's man, it's surprising to me that they eat
fish like the live fish huh yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
And that's that's the majority of their diets.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Really, So they sit there with their mouth open underwater.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
What they what they usually do is they go get
in a place where fish congregate and they'll just lay there.
And if they lay there, eventually, you know, fish are
gonna bump into them, especially if there's flowing water, the
water's running culvert pipes, stuff like that. A lot of
places when they pump water in and out, the covert
pipes will empty out into a canal, cause a deep spot. Well,
when those canals get low, that spot holds all the fish.
(06:51):
Them gators will get in those holes right there, Man,
they will just gorge themselves.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
You're saying, don't do a backflip off of the covert.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Better better check before.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
You get spot.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
See this morning and you're like, hey, just walk down
this road right here and you'll get to your spot
and then you probably know. But there's a little low
spot there that I tried to shine my flashlight into
and I couldn't see the bottle. We took our kind
of round about around it.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Well, you guys, remember what we rode by yesterday. I
was up.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
You've got this cool. I mean it's just like a
can am, you know, like like a high rack. Yeah,
it's gotta you know, it's what we call a high
ride down in South Texas pretty much. But it makes
your vehicle like a eight seater pretty much in the
top one back there. I was sitting in it yesterday
evening and what my head high back there is probably
eleven foot or something I imagine roughly yep. And uh, you
(07:37):
knew the gator was there, but nobody else really did.
But we went through this. You know, the water's real clear.
It's tanning around here, but it's real clear of where
you go through. And I looked down and there was
like a nine footer in the water, like we almost
ran over his tail.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Yeah, if we would have been a little bit to
the right there, we would have bumped.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
He didn't move or do nothing.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
And it's it's weird. I don't know what that like,
that response is. I guess they just under the water
and they're like, well, I'm better off not letting anything
to him here.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Well, it's just like deer and coyotes and everything. Right,
if I'm in if I'm out in the dark, they
don't see me. Gator feels like that underwater. Well, if
I just go underwater, there's no way they see me,
I'm safe.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
So would he have so would he let you run
him over?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, he would have let me bump him, Yeah, and
then then he would have shot out of that Yeah,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
No, it's amazing what power they can generate.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
It's yeah, when we kill these big gators man. And
you know, sometimes things get a little western when we're
hunting them. If a hunter doesn't make a good shot
or something and we have to get hands on with them,
it'll it'll make you rethink how strong you think you are?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Ye?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
So they I've been bitten, not not nothing too extreme.
My son got bit. He had about a ten and
a half grab him by the hand. One day. We're
dealing with one and that got pretty ugly. But luckily
he didn't lose anything. But I do have three friends
that have lost limbs off of gaters.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Oh my goodness. That's that's from dealing with them. It's
not like accidental, No, that's from dealing with them.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah. Yeah. One guy lost his hand, well, the one,
the one buddy of mine, he had his arm wrung
off at his shoulder. He was just swimming at night
with some friends out at a little spot party and
they went for a swim and gator grabbed his arm,
took him down to the bottom. And it's only reason
he's alive today is that gator started death rolling with
him and wrung his arm off. If he wouldn't have
(09:21):
wrung his arm off, he would have drowned him and
killed him.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Ah Ye, it's a little much.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yeah, it is terrible.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
That's rough. I bet you that. There's a lot of
aspects to that too, Like infection side of that is
probably pretty rough because this water around here.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Is the water, and then just it being done by
a gator because the gators have so much bacteria on him.
They live in warm, stagnant water. Everything they eats basically rotten,
you know. Besides, like if they catch a fish, if
they catch anything that has any size to it, they
have to let it rot before they eat it because
they don't want to fight to try to tear pieces off.
They let it rot get soft. It's just much easier.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
So it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
If a gator grabbed you and took you to the
bottom of a lake or what would you do.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
I'd probably make peace with everything or they ever needed
to do.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
No way you get out of it.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
You know, there's a couple of things you can do.
For sure, are you going to have that train of
thought when it's going down. Probably not, you're gonna go
in panic mode, going to shock. But the probably the
best thing you could do, which I don't know if
anybody would actually have the mindset to do this, will
be to reach in he's if he's had, If he
has you, his mouth is not shut. So if you
(10:29):
could reach in to that little flap in their throat
and just disengage that a little bit. So he started
taking in water, He's probably gonna turn you loose if you,
you know, poked at the eyes, I would say maybe,
but probably not. He's probably not gonna turn Yeah, it's
just I've seen him bite down on things when we're
(10:50):
trying to get him in, and you know, we try
to get him loose or get him to let go
of something, and you can do about whatever you want
to him. He's not letting it go.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, you think that, you know, in the shark attack world,
it's almost exclusively misidentification on the animal's part, right, That's
at least that's what's you know, hypothesized. Do you think
it's how these are gaters too? A lot of times.
I don't you think they're trying to eat you.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
I don't know that they're trying to really like so
much eat you. Some of them, yes, but all of
them know. For instance, we had a seventy some year
old lady was killed earlier this year. Here, she was
walking her dog. It's all caught on her own home
security camera. She's walking her dog in her backyard. Had
a reclaimed water retention pond for like irrigation and stuff.
(11:33):
And the gator. You can see him coming all the
way across the pond. He's swimming so fast, he's got
a wake behind him. He's coming after the dog. And
I don't know why, but a dog is a dinner
bell to an alligator, so he's coming to get the dog.
The lady's elderly, she's not aware of what's going on.
She finally looks up, sees the gator. She's not doing
(11:54):
anything quick. She's got the least wrapped around her wrist.
She turns to walk back up the bank. The gator
catches the dog. She could have just slid the leash
off her wrist and she would have been fine. She's
seventy some year old. She's fighting this alligator for her dog.
The gator shakes his head a couple of times and
snatches her down on top of him. He reaches over
(12:16):
bites her and you can watch it all on the video.
Slides right back in the water. Drowns are creepy.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Man.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, man, that's rough.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
This morning. When I was walking around, that little slew
right there.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
At one point we kind of turned back to the road,
I think is when we made the loop around it. Yeah,
we came back to the road. I had shined my
flashlight to make sure as we went through the ditch
there wasn't a gator there, just on my phone, and
like ten yards I see eyes and there was a
bobcat just sitting there staring at us. They eat bob
kits water right.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, they'll eat anything. I have gutted a few of
them just to see what's at them, just because it's
you know, I deal with gators every day and it's
interesting to me. I find a lot of possum. Raccoon
is more of what cause you know, they kind of
especially the raccoons, they kind of hang out around the
water areas and they walk that edge and that gator
will pick them off. But he's mostly eating fish and turtles,
(13:11):
but if an opportunity arises, he is gonna take it.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
So we watch a African documentary of crocodiles. Those crocodiles
are lunging out of the water and grabbing stuff. Gaters
do that a lot or they.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
I don't say a lot, but they if they do it,
they do do it.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
And they and so do you think that the like
bigger mammals around here know that there's gats around and
that absolutely so. I mean it's not like a oh
I'm surprised at something. They know there's things in there
trying to eat them.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, but they won't really mess with like these all
the cows. You see all these water holes, every one
of them's got a gator in it. And you'll see
cows in there like just and they're cooling off with
the gats. A little A gator is not going to
mess with a big cow. I mean, if it did,
it had to be a massive gator.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
What's a massive gator?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
I mean it would be something well over ten foot
to unless he's just extremely aggressive to mess with a cow,
a full grown one. They will catch a calf occasionally,
and a lot of times in these water holes. I've
drove up to the hole just looking to see what
gators are in there. Maybe I see buzzards and I
go check it out, and there'll be five or six
calves and they're floating dead. That gator was not killing
(14:20):
them to eat them. He was killing them because he
didn't want anything in his water hole. It was just territorial.
So he's just killing everything that comes up there that
he can catch. He's not gonna do that to a
big cow, you know, a big cow would just walk
out of the water with him. With those little calves
and stuff, they can they can handle them and drown
them pretty.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
So when a deer goes to a water hole, it's
like on edge.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
It's subject to get caught. Yeah, we have found a
buck in one of these water holes here on this
place that a gator had caught and killed.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Huh man, that's crazy. It seemed like it would almost
be hard to get them to age class you know
that way. But I guess there's just a bunch of
the landscape holds a lot of animals.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Yeah, we've got a lot of deer, a lot of
turkeys hogged. This is a pretty game rich environment.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
I guarantee you. So what's the old gator?
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Oh man, when you start killing them twelve and thirteen
foot gators, they're going to be in that seventy plus.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Are they really that old?
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (15:13):
They that's wild.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
I don't know if you guys saw the story here.
A couple of years back, they killed one in Mississippi.
He's like their new state record or right there at
he was right at fourteen feet. They took him to
a processor, just like we do to have them process
for our clients. Processor skinning him out, he finds musket
balls in his back.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
No way.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
They send the musket balls at the University of Mississippi
to get tested, and they dated them back to two
hundred years that's wild. Undred years old year.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I need that story up. Yeah, that'd be if we
can find that, we'll link it in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And so somebody ate a two hundred year old piece
of meat off.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Well, think about this too. They probably weren't shooting at
a little baby alleygator with muskets. Yeah, so they were
probably shooting at a fairly grown alligator back at that time.
So that alligator realistically was probably two twenty two hundred
and fifty years old.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
That's goodness, that's awesome. That is cool. What so when
you say they're strong, because their arms just don't look
that strong, is it? Is it more like abdomen tail
working together.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
It's that body movement. Now that tail is that tail
is incredibly strong. Yeah. I had a when I was younger.
We were out riding in some airboats around here, like
we do all the time, and a buddy of mine
thought he was gonna be mister uh, mister tough guy
and jump off on one. And he jumped off on
about a ten footer and tried to catch it a live.
(16:35):
It smacked him in his thigh and it broke his femur.
He had to ride forty five minute ride in on
an airboat with a broken femur.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Oh my good about that.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yeah. Yeah, they're not to mess with. So that yall
power is unreal.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
So you were telling me a little bit about the
girth of the tail at the base of it. Can
you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah? So just to give people always use as an example.
You know, people say, well, how big your gators? I
tell him, you know, on a trophy hunt, we're gonna
kill something in an eleven foot range is average, and
they always want to know, well, what's he weigh That
alligator is going to weigh somewhere between five hundred and
six hundred and fifty pounds somewhere in that range on
the big trophies. A couple of gators that we have
(17:12):
killed recently, their tails were abnormally large, like girth wise,
So we just run a tape on them to kind
of have some measurements and see because it's interesting. And
we've killed some here lately. At the base of their
tail right behind their legs, they're forty six to forty
eight inches.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
So that's a lot bigger around than me. Well around
that used.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
To think about how big your waist is. Yeah, and
we're just talking about the base of his tail. Yeah,
it is bigger than your Torso is.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
That all musclers? He storm fans back there.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
That's every bit muscle, really, every bit.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Do they have much fat on them?
Speaker 3 (18:04):
No? No, old ones don't really, No, they'll have little
layers of fat in like their tail. There's a tenderloin
tube that runs through the bottom. The tail is kind
of shaped almost like a like a star or like
a plus sign. There's two solid strips of meat on
the top of that, and then on the bottom there's
two strips of meat. But inside the two strips on
the bottom there's like inside tender loins like you'd get
(18:26):
on an elk or a deer. In the bottom section
of the tail tender. Yeah, that's the one that's about
the tender.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
You treat that differently than you do the rest of
the tail.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, you treat that differently. And the jaw meat, Like
a lot of people looks at a big gator when
he's laying there and they see those big fat jaws.
That's all solid white meat.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
How about that?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, So the jaw meat in that inside tenderline, that's
like your prime cuts on it.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
What do you what would you do with that when
you cooked it?
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Most people do old school with gator man. They just
cut it up into pieces, run it through a tender riser,
and fry it. Yeah, like the Gator bytes gator nuggets
type thing.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Ye got you. And so, say a five hundred pound gator,
would you say it's like an average gator for you
something like that or no.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
No, if he's five hundred, he's a big trophy's.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Big, big five hundred is a easy number to work with.
A guess is why I'm using that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
No, that was telling me that a lot of people
like think that they weigh more than they are because
of maybe some TV shows and different things along the
way that have you know, maybe elaborated a little bit on.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
That, and they're probably long for their weight.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
That's exactly right, So they're they're you know, eleven foot,
but it's still like like you said the Giles and yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
How many pounds of meat would you get off of
a five hundred pound gator?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
On that you're probably gonna get one hundred pounds eighty
to one hundred pounds. Bad, No, it's not a bad
long there's a lot of meat.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
And then most people have leather made out.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Of their gators, or a lot a lot of have.
They'll get the head mounted, send the hides off for
for leather or you know, less they're doing a half
body or full body mount. Yeah. Well, well, some people
get some rugs done, some people get some like the
bearskin rug style. Yea, yeah, but you would actually be
shocked to how many people get the full body mounted.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Really.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, it's a it's a fairly large percentage on a
full body gator Mountain six seven thousand on a big one.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Oh oh my goodness, how about that?
Speaker 2 (20:10):
But think about the pranks you could pull. Oh, for sure,
all it would be worth it, I think.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
I mean you go to Dallasafari Club, like the croc
up front, full body mounted is like the thing you know,
that's every kid wants to see.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
So, so, what's a gator hunt?
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Like?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
I probably I would like to do one at some
point in my life. But it's not something that's like
a butt for me, but a lot of people it is. Yeah, yeah,
are ye? So is there a you know, is it
more like a wattail hunt and more like a thermal
hog hunt?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
H we're spotting and stalking. Yeah, we're doing a lot
of spotting and stalking. We're riding on swamp buggies. We
have these big platforms swamp buggies on big tractor tires.
We ride around on them. Sometimes we do it off
the cannon. Just depends on what ranch were on and
how far we're going, So we basically ride. I've been
judging gators my whole entire life, from the the gator's
(21:01):
nose to his eye. However many inches that is will
relate to how many feet he is.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
You said that earlier. This we've heard that is that
is that nostrils? Yeah, so not not like the tip
of his notes.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
I just go from the nostril to the corner of
the eye. Got and that's and we're not talking exactly right. Sure,
but if you run a tape on and it's eight inches,
he's gonna roughly be eight foot roughly.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Is it easier for you now to look at that
distance or to look at a full gator.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
I can look at his head and tell you within
a couple of inches how big really. But I've been
doing it for forty years, so yeah, you know, and
then also doing it for a living, so I know
exactly because I'll guess him, we'll kill him, and we'll
pull him out and measure him so we know that
we're not just saying, oh he's seven foot and just
that's science. Yeah, we've got him killed and we've got
(21:49):
a tape on him.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So then once you once you're you're riding around and
you see these things and you're like, oh, that's the
one because you have you don't Not everyone is a
trophy hunt, right.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
No, we do management hunts. And then some people will
just want a small one because say dad's doing a
trophy hunt, he's got junior along. He doesn't want to
spend that on a on little man. But hey, you
know that lesser gator right there, she's the.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
First gator boy.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yeah, so we have two or three categories of size
ranges for people to hunt to fit pretty much every budget.
And so, yeah, they're neat and a weird little thing
about alligators. They're actually kind of built like a chicken
as far as meat structure wise, the entire thing is
white meat except for his legs. His legs are dark meat. Really,
(22:33):
what do you do to a gator?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
League?
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Some people, do you know? Some people cook them, cut
them up for fry meat. There's actually a guy in
town now has been taking them, smoking them and chipping
it up and making like a fish dip with gator meat.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Sounds interesting.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
It's actually pretty decent.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
There many people grinding them like deer meat or something.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
So I'm getting ready to try some myself. I'm going
to take a restaurant or a friend of mine took
some from me. He wanted to try it out for
some special clients he had, and they took alligator meat,
sixteen pounds of gator meat, ground four pounds of maple
bacon in with it and patted it like a hamburger
and put it on a bun with like a roummelaide sauce.
(23:14):
And he said, everybody, just bad, absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, it does sound all right?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Does so good?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Now I'm getting little I like gator. I'm actually very hungry.
So we kind of distracted you though, from what a
gator hunt is like.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
So yeah, no, you're fine. So like just we're just
riding around, spotting and stalking. I already know what size
gator you're looking forward to fitt your budget, So we
just ride until we find that gator, and you're not
obligated to take the first gator we shoot. We're going
to see plenty on my ranch. We can ride around
and see roughly one hundred and fifty alligators a day
of all sizes.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
So it's a safari experience outside.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Of just that. Yeah, and it's not a man I
really you know how you know you want a backcountry
elk hunt or something. It's man, I hope we get something,
or I hope we see something you're absolutely going to
see and you're absolutely gonna get. So it's a it's
all free range fair chase. It's not high fens. They're
not bought and brought in. There's none of that going on.
It's free range fair chase. But it's as good as
(24:09):
any high fence hunting ever because we just have such
an abundance of them.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
So, yeah, how does that work? Are you having to
rotate ranches or do you have like a cap on
what you'll take so that you can replenish, because it
probably takes I don't you know the number, but to
get to a gate or two is that's the size
that someone cares to shoot, it takes a few years.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
It takes a long time. Yeah. Yeah, So what we
do on our ranches how we get our tags is
a biologist comes out in January. He does a survey
with us on the ranch. He'll do physical count water temperature,
air temperature, renewable outside resource. He'll crunch all these numbers
compared to like amount of acreage of water on the
acreage of land, and he'll tell us, okay, mat you're
(24:50):
allowed to kill one hundred and fifty on this ranch.
We might go over and do a survey on another
ranch and he might tell me I'm allowed twenty on
that one. So we have several different ranches we hunt,
keep the rotation so we don't wear out any one
piece of property.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
So American alligators used to be on the Nangered Species List.
What year do you know what year they came off?
Speaker 3 (25:10):
I don't remember. I don't know if I think, I'm
gonna say about twenty five thirty years ago they started
allowing us to huntle.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So just a huge success and it's probably the greatest
American conservation success story I think. I mean a lot
of people with turkey, gators, eagles, those are all going
to be kind of in that range. But like I mean, alligators,
I mean apparently they you know, there's a lot of
them around that.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
You know, you look at a turkey and a three
year old turkeys an old turkey, Well, it takes a
thirty year old gator to be an old gator probably
right when.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Yeah, if he's an old gator, our average old gator
that we are, our average trophy gators probably fifty plus.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah, gotcha, that's the crazy man. That's I mean, that's
a that's a big deal. We just got to get
the grizzly bearries. Yeah, yeah, no doubt on that. So
the so essentially what kind of weaponry is it going
to take to make this happen?
Speaker 3 (26:08):
So with a alligator hunt, on let's say a management hunt,
we're going to try to kill a gator somewhere in
that six seven eight foot range, I like something like
a two twenty three twenty two hornet. You know, there's
some little wildcat rounds, the smaller rounds like that little
work fine, reason being, we don't want to do too
much damage to the head because majority of people are
(26:29):
gonna want to mount the head on those big gators
I like three oh eight or bigger, because we're really
trying to get them dead where we shoot them, because
we don't want them to Some of these places where
hunter have big reservoirs four hundred five hundred acre reservoir,
so if you wound one, he's gonna be pretty difficult
to track in five hundred acre reservoir. So we like
(26:51):
to when we shoot him, we like to kill him
right where they lay.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
So are you trying to kill those animals by concussion
or are you severing the brain stem? Or like, what's
the what's the goal with the round?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Uh? An alligator's head. I kind of relate it to
a concrete block if you if you shoot a gator
in the head, it'll actually crack his whole entire head.
We're just trying to do a lot of damage and
get that alligator killed. We don't want anything getting away,
we don't want anything wounded. So we like that higher
power on those big gators because you know, again we're
(27:25):
shooting a gator that's going to be four to six
hundred pounds. Yeah, we need to stop him right there
because then also we have to go get him. So
now we got to deal with an alligator that's going
to be highly upset if he's not dispatched.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
So so how do you how do you end up getting.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Some It depends on where they're at. Sometimes we just
wade out there and get them. Sometimes we'll throw a
fishing pole and put a snag hook on him and
drag them over to the bank where we can get
our hands on them. Sometimes, if they're way out, we'll
take an airboat and go out and get them. But
most of the time it's just hands on. We just
get in the water and get them and what they're
still alive, it gets western.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Or if you're a brave dude, the gators still.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It gets it gets Western things get a little crazy.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
I got our fact checkers over here said showed me
that the and they went on dangerous species lists in
sixty seven and eighty seven is when they came off,
so twenty years and went to you know, back to
good conservations. About that though, that's cool, pretty interesting. I mean,
apparently they are prolific. How many eggs did they lay?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Probably so a nest will have anywhere from twenty to
forty eggs.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Now, this is something that I noticed living in gator
country down in South Texas. It seemed like either they'd
have multiple broods a year or gators are breeding. It
ain't just like a one event, like.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
They'll be like I remember one year in Florida here,
but I.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Would see babies in like March or April, and then
i'd see babies in October.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
When you're seeing those babies that are this long, that
was from last year, okay, yeah, but so it's like, uh,
the eight inches a new born six eight inches ye yep, So.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
In a year they grow another eight inches.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Maybe probably not even that much really, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
And would that be like throughout their lifespan eight inches
of year.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
So they're gonna they're gonna grow. They're gonna grow at
a higher rate until they get to that six seven
foot range, and then they're gonna start to slow down.
And those really big gators, man, they grow like a
quarter inch a year or less. They just don't have that,
and then all depends on food source and everything else.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
But yeah, well you start talking about that volume of animal,
a quarter inch around the whole critter, you're in fifteen
pounds that year, so you know, I don't know what
it is, but yeah, like they still.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
At what point do they become predator exclusively and not
pray anymore? If that makes sense?
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah, so they can. They're subject to get eating at
any time, unless you know, once they get up around
that ten foot mark, you start to I think they
don't have to worry as much about the bigger gators,
the ones that are a little bit bigger than them,
but we will. It's almost every gator we kill, he'll
be chewed up. He'll be missing a foot, missing a
(30:08):
leg we've killed him that they don't have. They're missing
their tail, it's been bit in half, bite marks all
over them, they're an extremely aggressive animal.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
He told us a story about that. It just happened yesterday.
I went on the on the rig. But y'all saw
one dude like that, right.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, Well that was one of the cowboys here on
the ranch. Saw he rode by a waterhole, a seven
footer jumped over a nine footer to get in the water,
and the nine footer grabbed him, took him in the
water and was rolling with him.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
So and they were just buddies, like five seconds before.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
That, they were just out there, son and together.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
A rough world man.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
So I had a guy here on an archery hunt
and on the other ranch archery hunting for gators, and
they uh, one of the ranch hands called and said, hey,
there's a big gator crossing the road up here. He's
got something in his mouth. He's going to be in
the in the ditch. And he told me what block
he was in. So we go over there. What he
had in his mouth was an eight foot gater. They
did have bitten clean in half, and we ended up
(31:04):
getting him killed with a bow, and he was eleven foot.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
So when you shoot him with a bow, what does
that set up look like?
Speaker 3 (31:10):
So we're trying to shoot him in the head if
he's in the water with the only option we have
is to shoot him in the head. I know a
lot of people think, well, you don't really, you're not
going to get any penetration. You don't need much, you
need an inch or two. You just got to break
that bone. Their brain is right there. If he's laying
up on the bank sunning, we're going to shoot him
right behind, right in that armpit, heart lung. He is
(31:32):
going to get in the water, But then that hole
is going to start taking in water, is basically going
to start drowning. Nine times out of ten the alligator
will actually come get out of the water, or at
least he'll get out of the water enough to get
the hole out of the water.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Do you ever have to use like a sane net
to get him out?
Speaker 2 (31:48):
No?
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Find him in upon.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
You were talking about fishing poles the other day, though,
what is that deal?
Speaker 3 (31:52):
So we'll take a fishing pole with a big weighted
snag hook and we'll throw it out there and snag him,
just to drag him over to the bank to where
we can get our hands on him to get him
pulled out.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
But sometimes he's alive.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Whenever that happens, sometimes he's still alive. And then sometimes
you get some guys that want to be a little
more hands on and before we ever even shoot him,
they want to snag him with a fishing pole, fight
him in and then getting killed.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
That sounds cool.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
See, I don't like that. I would rather just I
would rather do the spot and stock shoot thing. Because
there's some there's some hunts in Texas that you can
draw all and stuff, and I think a lot of
them are hooking line, yeah, because.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
Those are public land, they're not private lands. Yeah, that's
where ours are here.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Have you ever like chunked the hunk of meat in
front of the gator and hooked him that way?
Speaker 3 (32:35):
Like a lot of times we'll use well, I'll save
some lungs out of the hogs, and we use lungs
because they float, So we throw that lung out there.
It floats on top of the water. He can smell
it and he'll come to it, and a lot of
times he's awesome. So then I'll take and I'll just
kind of like bump it a little bit and he'll
see that movement and he'll usually come right to it.
(32:58):
They'll bite it, and they'll chomp it a few times,
and they lift their heads straight up in the air
and they're actually like tossing it back to the throat,
swallow it, let it settle for a second, and then
you got him hooked. But we had the reason we
do it that hooked to a fishing pole because if
a gator approaches that bait, that's not something that we want.
We can get it away from it. We can reel
it in. How fast you think they can swim, Michael
(33:21):
Phelps cannot swim.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yeah, I believe it had.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Fast the other fast.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
It's insane to see. We saw one the other day
doing and I've seen him before. But like, you know,
you be in to marsh in a boat and like
there'll be a gator in ten inches of water and
all of a sudden he takes off and there ain't
any water lift in the in the marsh, you know,
like they just throw water everywhere there.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
They're a special animal, man. There's really something else. We've
I've killed some big gators and water so shallow they
couldn't get under the water. Ten eleven twelve foot gaters.
They're just they can't even hide. And it's weird, Like
they'll get their head underwater and they just think they're underwater.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
It's kind of like a buck bit in a wheat
stuble field.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, like, hey, I can see your antlers.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
So you do a lot of other hunts too, I
mean hog hunting, and we've been here, uh doing a
little turkey hunting, just just kind of hanging out and
seeing the property.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
And uh, it's pretty awesome here. I've never been to this.
I've never been Florida until we came this trip. It's
always something I wanted to do. You know. Texas has
so many cool things too.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
It's kind of hard to absolutely on a while.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
But uh, the Ossiola turkey has been speaking the sweet
music out there.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Don't be trying to make me spill the bean.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
We Uh they're neat.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
A couple of reasons I noticed about them. They Uh,
For one, they sound different on the roost. The hens
have a lot more whistle to that instead of the
raspy thing.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
And then.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
They don't talk as much in general on the on
the ground.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
So far, Yeah, we we had that. We didn't encounter rate.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
We had tiny sample size.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yeah, but I noticed the gobbles seem a little bit like, uh,
not necessarily higher pitch, but like throatier, not as like I.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Feel like the jets together too, like quicker like a chipmunk.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yes, exactly, kind of.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
I think it's like you go and listen to Rio,
it's blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, and these.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Are, you know, right, very fast. Yeah, I think so. Yeah,
it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
And they absolutely are way darker than any turkey I've
ever seen.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
Yeah, they appear black, like when you see when you're
just riding across the pasture and you'll see the hens.
They're kind of that brown gray when you see a
black bird, he's a gobbler. Yeah, they're they're almost jet
black in at distance, they appear jet black. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Do you do you happen to know what they weigh
on average?
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah? On average are probably going to go about eighteen
pounds twenty pounds on a pretty tom. Yeah. They appear leggy,
They appear tall, and that's what I hear a lot
of people say. You know, they just they have that
teenager look. They look a little thinner, a little taller. Yeah,
versus like your Rios and especially your Easterns and those
or a little bit heavier.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, and it's not much though, Like it doesn't I
was expecting when I saw one, like when I when
I saw you know how a lot of people have
ground shrink gets you when they shoot a deer, you know,
like when I saw one on the ground, I expected
it to be small, So I was trying to set
myself up for that, and they weren't really that way.
I mean they look like when you shoot them, you're like,
(36:22):
that's a turkey, like on the ground. I've seen a few.
You shot one, right, Uh, well we might. We've we've
started this new brand called Double Up Outs. No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
We have done that a decent amount.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
It's what I was feeling that earlier. Is like, for
whatever reason, we tend to shoot things on the same
like evening or morning.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Or it's seven days later, yeah apart.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
It's not like a back to back days or anything
for whatever reason. But yeah, we had uh we had
a good morning. And well we can talk more about
it now or later, it doesn't matter to me. But well,
this is there will be some videos from this stuff.
It's gonna be really.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, essentially, we had a good morning Turkey hunting I
would say it was pretty pristine.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, yeah, it was.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
It was a fun time. But Matt, thanks for letting
us come down and hang out.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Oh, no worries, man, no worries. I'm glad they turned
on for you guys. Today. We had a we didn't
have a bad day yesterday, but we had a slower
day and we had a lot of rain, a lot
of wind, and that kind of gave us a little
bit of a window this morning that cleared up on us.
And you guys can tell the turkeys did a lot
better today than they did yesterday. And the same birds. Yeah,
they cooperating and yeah, you guys probably tagged out within
(37:32):
what thirty minutes to each other hour.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, he sent me make sure that shell.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yeah, and I was like, I got one hot too, Yeah,
and uh sure enough. Yeah, it didn't take very long.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Yeah. So if somebody wanted to come on a Gator Hunt,
Triple M Triple M Outfitters, Okay, yep, yeah, yep, Triple
Them Outfitters, you can look me up on social media website.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Hold on Yards.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
It seems like you got a lot of people that
respect what you do and you and just appreciate you
being just a real dude, man. Yeah, easy going.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
So Paul Bay right where.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
You're based out of Florida. Yeah, we're an hour from Orlando.
Orlando is the easiest to fly into a quick hour
trip to the east over here at the coastline and
we can be on the beach and doing whatever and
then we can be over here in the ranch in
fifteen minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, sounds like a pretty good It's a good spot
to be in it.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Well, so if anybody's interested, we'll try to link in
the show notes and then and I hope that we
do that. I can't can one hundred percent guarantee that,
but we will also be posting some pictures from this trip, yeah, yep,
and we'll be tagging Matt in that. So yeah, if
you're interested in coming on a gator hunt, man, that's uh,
it's something that I will do at some point.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
The Unique Place by the way, in case anybody cares,
I added about three new birds to my life, really,
which one woods work was one of the ones, for sure.
I got two others I need to look up and
make sure and confirm what they are.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
But I saw a bird yesterday. I couldn't tell you
what it was, but it was different than one I'd seen,
anyone I'd.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Seen, so that is just it wasn't that care carriers.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
No, we have cares at home. We had actually I
think it was a Hurricane Katrina, like there was a
huge influx of care cares really at that point. Really yeah,
And I don't know if we I mean we probably
had them before it was probably it's probably in the
range or whatever. But like I just know that like
a lot of birds got pushed up because when that happened.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
What we're thinking. But it's just a unique and plentiful
ecosystem around here.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
Absolutely, it's a target rich environment for sure.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, I enjoy I.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Enjoyed hanging out.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
Man. Absolutely. Have to get you guys back down. I'm
sure some of the other ranches and I'll show you
some different things.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
I want to ride on them big buggies, man.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Yeah, I've got a couple of them. They're a good time.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Thanks. Now, take care of that
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