Ep. 670: The Secrets of Blacktail Deer

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to
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(00:31):
out at first light dot com. F I R S
T l I t e dot com. Joined today by
Jim Beach Tool, who doesn't shoot shit unless you can
shoot it with a muzzleoader.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
I know how to use your rifle, I just choose
not to.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
When did you?

Speaker 1 (00:49):
When did you quit?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Nineteen eighty six? What happened? I decided I want to
get close with a single shot, but.

Speaker 4 (00:57):
You still get closer to singing. You wanted to force
yourself to get closer to the setter shot. Would you
shoot prior to shooting a mussloader?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I got my dad's thirty at six seven twenty one
that he bought in nineteen fifty Premington seven twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
One nows you're gone.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
I still have it. I still hunt with it. I
take my dad with me every year we go out
and do a hunt together, and then I put him
away and I take the muzzle litter.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Out, so you you house his gun for him.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
My father's passed away, and so my oh I I
made a promise to him the day died him, and
I'd go hunting together every year.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
So you take it out, I take it.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Out, and we go hunting together every year.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
All right, works, But another than that, all musload all
the time.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
I try to. Sometimes I falter some days. It's really
wet up in Southeast Alaskaay makes it really hard to
do flintlocks and percussion and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 (01:52):
Yeah, because you live in the worst place to be
a mussloader hunter in the world pretty much.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
But you know, I figure all those the people that
came before us, the English and the Russian trappers and
the natives who got muzzleloaders for strade items and stuff
like that, they figured it out. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
And so I use a wool bag. I placed my
firearm in a wool bag, and the wool swells up,
keeps some moisture from getting in there. And I think
I've had one or two times in thirty five years
of being up there that that cap hasn't gone off.
No kid.

Speaker 5 (02:31):
Yeah, Now it's our friend in common. Jim Heffelfinger said,
if you look at the Alaska muzzleoder records, it reads
like a beach Tel phone book. That's a great line.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
That's a great line. And they're all named Jim.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
H.

Speaker 4 (02:50):
So you submit how these state records you have quite
a few. Well, well, just brag up for minute, I
asked you. So you're not bragging. I'm just asking a question.
I have over thirty deer.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
I have the world record SIIC of black tail for
a muzzloader and number two somebody's got number three. And
then I have four, eight, nine, ten and a bunch more.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
That's incredible, man.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
And you shoot flintlock or cap cap, but I'm experimenting
now with flintlock. That's where we've been talking back and forth.
And so because I worked for Alaska Department of Fishing
Game for so many years, the gentleman that was the
wildlife biologist, Dave Person, was a master gun builder and
as a thank you for all the years of darting

(03:34):
deer and following deer and stuff, he built me a beautiful,
beautiful flintlock. And I've taken probably eight or nine deer
with that flintlock, and I've got a couple of smooth
bore flintlocks that i've I've killed a black bear and
caribou and stuff like that with him.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
So do you have a fouling piece?

Speaker 2 (03:59):
I do?

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Do you shoot ducks with it?

Speaker 2 (04:01):
I have killed four turkeys and it doesn't have a choke,
and so the best pattern I get is about fifteen yards,
So I set twenty yards is my maximum. I won't
shoot beyond twenty yards when I call those birds, it
got it got to be close, really close.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah, there is a fouling piece what you call a
gun shotgun.

Speaker 5 (04:22):
Yeah, specific to just birds. But one of the during
my back and forth with Gym, and it makes absolute
common sense. So it's not like a big epiphany, but
like the the reason that the round ball and smooth
bore stuck around for so long, even when technology was

(04:42):
readily available and far surpassed it is folks just could
only have one firearm. So they'd take a smooth bore
fifty eight caliber hawking or whatever it got bored out to,
and they use that for small game birds, like.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Whether you're pouring shot down or you're jamming a lead
down it.

Speaker 5 (05:04):
Or yep, exactly. So using it for with one piece
of shot for big game, the big, big solid ball,
or pouring a bunch of small shot down there.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
I mean, Gus, you have a tremendous versatility. I've hunted
moose with a smooth bore, flint locked interior, and it's
a sixty two caliber French fusel fin. So if we
would have been French voyagers, we had have been issued
this gun. M M. And you take the round ball
and I stitched the patch on and I set it
down and urn in the morning I would go and
hunt moose. And then I reached down and I pulled

(05:36):
the round ball out and put shot down, and I
went down along the river and shot a brace of
grouse down along the river, and put my round bawl
back on and hunted moose all the way back up
to camp. Got it. So I was like, super super
super flexible.

Speaker 5 (05:49):
Yeah, there's nothing more efficient than that.

Speaker 4 (05:52):
No, when we were doing all of our research for
our Mountain Man audiobook, we'd read these guys at night
would take in a at night, they would put five
buck shot in their gun and then they'd cap it

(06:13):
with a or maybe vice versa. They'd take their rifles
and put five buck shot in them, and then they'd
cap it with a ball their nighttime home defense home
to fetch thing home defense system.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
I'll tell you what they had. Must have been pulling
that ball then come morning, because you and years and
years ago, I was in the interior and I was
hunting ptarmigan and I came over a ledge and there
was a beautiful bull caribou twenty yards away, and I
backed off, and I had an ounce and a quarter
of shot, number five shot, and I just set a

(06:52):
round bawl down on top of that, and belly crawled
forward and shot that caribou. And I figured out later
about tore my shoulder off, because that was like seven hundred.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
Grads what you did.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
I didn't think about the equal and opposite reaction thing
to recoil. It killed the caribou, you did, yeah, actually,
And I had like four or five pieces of shot
in the heart too. It penetrated deep enough I could
have killed him with the shots blowed. He was really close. Uh.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
You always worked as a geologist.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Where'd you grow up?

Speaker 2 (07:26):
I grew up around Mount Saint Helen's Country, southwest Washington.
We had a small farm there and by we had
about one hundred and twenty acres of timber. That's where
I disappeared into once my chores were done.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
Houdge get in geology.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
I was a kid. My folks decided we needed to
have some kind of a family hobby, and they picked
rock counting or lapidary, where you go out and dig
up petrified wood and agates and jaspers and opals and
obsidian and other stuff and fossils and somewhere I don't know.
Eleven twelve years old, I got to think, and this

(08:05):
can't be random. We're finding this aggat here because of
a process, and we're finding this thunderregg here because of
a process in the petrified wood. And basically that's geology.
And so I always knew what I wanted to be.
I'm still looking for those answers.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
How'd you come to be doing it in Alaska?

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Luck? Yeah, I grew up listening to my grandfather. My
grandfather on my father's side was in Alaska in nineteen nineteen,
nineteen twenty and twenty one, and then he was back
again in thirty seven through forty two, and I heard
all the stories of Alaska.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
What was he doing here was a trapper.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
He soloed all the way down from basically the Yukon.
He sold it all the way down the Yukon Drainage
in nineteen nineteen and nine nineteen twenty and ended up
in Katsubu and the winter of nineteen twenty trapping along
the Yukon River that at a kadoo and was by

(09:09):
himself going down there. And I grew up listening to
all those stories and had a huge fascination. And so
in nineteen ninety there was a position opened up with
the Tongas National Forest to be a geologist there, and
I applied for it and luckily got it. Most Force
service people kind of come for three or four years
and move off on some other kind of thing. And

(09:29):
I fell in love with Southeast Alaska and realized that
very little was known about the geology. They had mapped
around the shoreline, but they'd never really mapped to the
interior of the islands. And then I got into the
whole cave and kars management thing up there, that there's
thousands of caves across vast areas of the rainforest, and

(09:54):
there was a thing called a Federal Cave Protection Act
and so you were supposed to protect caves on federal lands,
and the more developed the cave areas were, the bigger
the trees were, so they were direct conflict with timber
management going on. So I was tasked with going out
and finding those caves and mitigating the impacts of any

(10:15):
proposed activity. So I got to explore all those woods
all over Southeast Alaska, and I just just fell in
love with it, just fell in love with the place
and the unknown things of geology, the things that you
could map, the glacial history, the uplift history, the kind
of geoarchaeology side of things like wording with people on

(10:36):
the landscape and how could I help define that?

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Why is that important to map that sort of stuff?

Speaker 2 (10:42):
If you have an idea of the geology, it's kind
of like a soils map. It's a productivity thing. Where's
the vegetation, what plants are there? Why are those plants there?
How did the glaciers interact with the landscape. Why does
landscape look like it does? And that's all controlled by
the bedrock geology, and Southeast Alaska is bits and pieces
of continents. It's been added on, so it's like this

(11:04):
little pile up of pieces. I think we'd call it
a terrain wreck. It's terrains are what this was in there,
and so the geology is super varied. As you kind
of move northeast southwest across the island, or it's similar

(11:25):
you move northeast southeast, but as you move towards the
east across there, you're just going from terrain terrain terrain
terrain with They all have their blocks of rock that
have a similar geologic history and how they were added
on to the continent. So it's a fascinating geology that. Again,
the original mapping was around the shorelines and wherever there

(11:46):
were mineral deposits found, but kind of the rest of
that had not been worked on very much. So I
partnered with the US Geological Survey, a woman my name
is su Carl, and I for twenty five years have
been trying to fill in some of those holes in
the GEOLO maps and get that information out there.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
You meet running around and I remember you showing me
about how the trees grow extra big over the cave networks,
but I can't remember why you took what it was
you told me that.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Well, there's two in southeast Alaska, there's two incredibly productive
forest areas. What is alluvial fan or riparian spruce riparian
area down along a stream of gravels, well drained gravels
but nutrient rich and the other ones on the carbonates.
And so the fractures of the limestone are open down

(12:40):
maybe fifty feet, little teeny hairline fractures, and the roots
can get down into that and they access the non
acidic waters then because the limestone has buffered the rain
water and the organic water that's very acidic. So you
have nutrient rich water that's basic and a well drained

(13:01):
landscape much like a gravel pile as well drained fluctuates
with rivers and streams, and so this is another type
of productive landscape. And the other thing is most of
our big trees are big spruce and stuff like that.
In southeast Alaska have a very shallow root system on
top of glacial till. You've seen that and they fall

(13:23):
what they fall over, You've got a thirty foot diameter
root mass that's like eighteen inches deep.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
That always blows my mind when you see that and
they tip and you're like, what in the hell is
the hole? Non too? Anyways, but just keels away and
you're look and there's a rock sitting there and it's
got like a never ending disc of shit. That was
a hand deep, hand deep.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
You wonder how it ever stood there anyways.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
And the limestone, it can get down in those fractures,
grab on and it's holding on. And so you'll see
instead of a rootball tip over, frequently you'll see it
snapped off forty feet up. When the and that sail
in the top of the tree gets big enough that
it can't take the wind pressure of our storms, it'll
snap off instead of turning over the roots because it's

(14:09):
still holding so tight. So a lot of the trees
grew older and larger. So a lot of the original
timber harvest in southeast Alaska was focused on the limestone areas,
which makes total sense.

Speaker 1 (14:22):
It's a big trees.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
I explored those areas, locating the caves and the rivers
going underground, the streams going underground, and the vertical pits
and that kind of thing. But then I also put
together expeditions of folks who would come and explore those caves,
and we had paleontologists and that, and we basically started

(14:45):
when I got to southeast Alaska. Any published document that
you read said we were a blanket of ice to
the edge of the continental margin until ten thousand years ago,
and nothing lived there. And the first thing we did
was find a cave full of bones that were ten eleven,
twelve thousand years old, and started challenging that. We kept
pushing that back, and so we changed that paradigm through

(15:06):
time on when did the ice pull back? And what
was the environments like, and who's living there and stuff
like that.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
What was the old ass deerbone? You found.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Hekata Island in a cave called Nautilus Cave, and what
used to be a vertical pit. Coming into that cave
that had filled with sediment and a little alcove, I
found tree. It was leg bones and those were basically
nine two hundred, nine thousand, five hundred years old. Somewhere
in that vicinity right there.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Blacktailed deer we now know they're black tailed deer.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
We did know what it was then because we'd actually
found a bunch of caribou bones in the caves. So
there were caribou on Prince of Well's Island until ten thousand,
five hundred years ago. But recently working with Charlotte Linquest
and her students back in Buffalo. They did the paleogenetics

(16:01):
and it is a sick of black tailed deer. Apardon me,
it is a black tailed deer. So they all the
first deer to show up. So we have three bones.
We have one out of that cave, one out of
Xena Cave that's seven eight hundred years old, and a
bone out of a shell midden left by natives at

(16:22):
a campsite. They're waste. Basically, there was a deer leg
bone in there that turned out I mean a bone
that had been identified as a caribou bone, but what
we did the genetics, it came out as a black
tail bone. Those three blacktail are definitely sit of blacktail,

(16:43):
but they contain a little bit of mule deer mitochondrial DNA,
which should be different than now. Yeah, and so then
we have hundreds and hundreds of deer bones in cave.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Can you talk about how those bones get caught in
the caves? I mean you may have the opportunity to
go look just for people listen.

Speaker 4 (17:08):
When we're filming our show Hunting History, we spent a
day with Jim in caves.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
So Jim was able to show me how they function.
But can you tell people how the caves trap shit?

Speaker 5 (17:22):
And also just a it'll come out in your thought process,
I'm sure. But like when you find a bone in
a cave versus like the shell midden bone, there's probably
some conclusions that you jump to from one or the other.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
When you find a bone in a cave, you absolutely
don't know how old it is. They usually turn slightly
brown from the tannins and the organic waters of southeast.
You've seen that many times around your place there. But
the bone itself, twenty thousand year old bone look like

(18:00):
a one hundred year old bone. You cannot tell by
picking up the bone all right and just looking at it.
And mostly what happens is either a predator was in
a dry portion of a cave and brought part of
its meal in. Or and a lot of times we

(18:22):
have bones in the In one particular cave that had
so many bones, it was Arctic fox bringing bones in
from a large predator and depositing in the caves. Or
they're a vertical trap. So remember as we came around
from the flooded sank Holder, there was that vertical pit

(18:46):
right off of.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
It the shit out of me.

Speaker 4 (18:48):
I mean, we were safe looking at it, but I
was like, man, I didn't know there's shit like that
around here.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
We were on that boardwalk, you remember, looking down that hole.
So that was a hole that was roughly the size
of this room. That the entrance was about three feet across,
and that was an organic mat. So if we would
walk on that, you'd go right through. Well, that's what
the deer.

Speaker 4 (19:10):
You would never know how on some of that stuff
you would never if you were just about dicking around,
you would one hundred percent walk down in air. And
just god, how many dudes must be laying in those
holes we have.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
We've actually had a few vertical pits that have a
little pile of bones deer and bear and stuff right
where they one I can think of one hundred and
fifty feet deep. We called Bear's plunge because the entrance
is about the size of this table, but at the
bottom it's one hundred feet in diameter and it just
bells out. So when you repel into that, you're like

(19:45):
a spider coming down off of a web. And here
was this mound of bones at the bottom that had
accumulated over several.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Thousand years What all was in that pile?

Speaker 2 (19:56):
That was mainly black bear and deer, but there was
a few small rodents and stuff like that. No people, no,
no people in that. So yeah, it's uh so either
a vertical trap or somebody brings it into the cave.
They can wash into the cave hang it, but it's

(20:18):
really hard to the bones usually then get washed on
through the cave if they get into a stream course
or something like that. Uh.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
I want to jump out of this a little bit
to get to something with them. After you retired from
geology after thirty years, right, yes, and instead of just
kicking it and hunting with your muzzle loader and everything,
you got involved on a volunteer basis with meald your foundation.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
I'm actually a contractor for the meal here, okay, but
there's also some and there's there, there's I am kind
of going out and getting other things, and so I'm
not always working for him, but I'm still working for him.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yep. God it.

Speaker 4 (21:00):
And in particular you became like particularly focused on blacktail deer.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
So Miles BURRITI was the CEO for years and working
and had I had started going down in two thousand
and six and I manned a booth at the Hunt
Expo in Salt Lake City about Siica blacktail on the
Tagus National Forest, which is kind of funny. I was
a geologist representing the Tongus National Forest talking about sick

(21:27):
of black tail deer. They weren't sending they weren't sending
biologists down there. I went down and so I kept saying,
you know, like in your mission, Sameman, it says buel
deer and blacktail deer in their habitat, that's what your
focus is on the conservation of that. And I said,
what can we do for blacktail? And so I was

(21:47):
pretty relentless with that for years and years and years.
And then Joel took over CEO three four years ago now,
and he goes, what are we doing for black tail deer?
And about that time, Steve Belinda, a good friend of mine,
called and said it's time to pony up. He do.

(22:10):
I just retired, and I said, what's going on? And
he goes, we want to start creating a focus on
blacktail deer. And I said, I was really enjoying retirement.
And I said, but I meant one hundred percent, because
this is where we've always wanted to get to and
so we went to Leopold put and the Bielder Foundation

(22:33):
put on a blacktail summit that all of the agencies
and a lot of the forests sent people to and
it was held at Leopold's headquarters in twenty two. In
April of twenty two, we really realized that the conservation
of blacktail it's pretty much the same issues from northern

(22:53):
California to Alaska as related to habitat and how man
has changed the landscape through timber management. There's different challenges,
there's different things, different predation schemes and stuff like that,
but the challenges were the same, and so we started
putting a much larger focus in that and trying to

(23:14):
get more chapter we could get get chapters established. There
was no Meal Deer Foundation chapters up there. And one
of the biggest problems I had in Alaska was going
into a community and setting down with a group of
people and the first question was like, well, why does
the Milder Foundation want to help us with blacktail? So

(23:35):
I'd spend most of my time talking about that and
finally get around to substantive things that we could do
on the landscape.

Speaker 4 (23:45):
Let's back up to that question though, why do people
think of meal deer and black like talk about the
taxonomy of a blacktail. Ah, right, I mean it's like, uh,
they're like not brothers, but cousins, meal deer cousins cousins.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
And so it was Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger who
we talked about, had did a genetic paper that showed
that starting about at the beginning of the last series
of ice age, the Great Last Ice Ages two and
a half million years ago, probably because of snow levels
and glaciers in the Cascade coastal mountain range there of Washington, Oregon,

(24:24):
Idaho down to California, it separated whatever was a proto
deer from what we now know as a mule deer,
and in coastal refugia or coastal areas, blacktail developed separated
from those mule deer, and.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
So they got separated by ice.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
They got separated by ice in time, and they also
was a slight divergence as you moved north through Oregon
and Washington away from California. So if I remember that
paperwrite that the Californian blacktail are a little closer to deer,
are distinguishable, but there's still Columbia blacktail, so that's one

(25:06):
of the separate subspecies. And then Sica blacktail exists only
from halfway up the British Columbia Coast through Prince Rupert
and then into the islands of southeast Alaska. And then
they'd been translocated in nineteen twenty four up to Kodiak
and several places around southeast Alaska. And so there weren't

(25:26):
any on Kodiak before.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
But they're native to Prince William Sound. No, they were
natives to Prince Williams.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
They were translocated to Prince William Sound, they were translocated
to Yakitat. They were all the whole Prince William Sound area,
and there were several other places they tried to plant
or Sica blacktail that didn't take.

Speaker 4 (25:49):
So what was the northernmost if you go back on
I don't know what the hell two hundred years whatever,
some time stamp two hundred years ago, what was the
northernmost sick of blacktail deer?

Speaker 2 (26:00):
It was probably in the Juno areas.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
So people I've been telling people the wrong thing.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, So Gus Davis, the front range of Glacier Bay
National Park around maybe up towards Skagway and Haynes a
little bit up in there. I'm not sure how far
they the historic range was. I know they were on Admiraltreet,
Chichikov and Baranof Islands and around they were there naturally,
naturally around there.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
Why do they look like? So? Why do they have
such a vibe like they kind of got to look
like a little white tail deer.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
Kind of thu'se are badass?

Speaker 1 (26:39):
No, But what is it like? Why are they Why
are the sick of black tails look different? Why do
they because they you look at them and you look
like that they look like they got some kind of
like a white tail deer influence. But that's not true.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
You're comparing them to a Colombian.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
Yeah, they just like their antler configuration.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
I think it's environmental. I think it was that tight
coast range force that they all did. And so overall
body weights, they're not much different than Colombia and some
of the other stuff. So, like, I did a study
with Alaska Department of Vision game where I waged stuff
with the state over a two year period, and it

(27:17):
was nothing to have a sick of black tail come
in field dressed at one forty five to one sixty five,
and there were a few big outliers, so I mean
substantial deer. They're just a lot shorter in bulk ears.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Oh, a little squatty little suckers man.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
And their tail is not ropey at all. It is
more white veed with a black top and that white
and they'll use it the flag, just like a white
table flag. Of course it's not quite as dramatic because
it's not as long, and they're just there. I think
they're the perfect rainforest animal because their antlers are probably
more close in because of that vegetation and stuff they

(27:55):
evolved in.

Speaker 4 (27:57):
Yeah, so it's not because a white tail deer love
make and it's just like it's convert it's convergent evolution, right,
rather than divert or whatever.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, there was a val geist years ago suggested that
the blacktail were a function of real deer and white
tail breeding or something like that.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, and now let me tell you the whole idea
that he had. It was that do you remember this?

Speaker 3 (28:24):
You just offered this up, not me. I don't remember that.
I don't remember that.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Like there was some period in time he proposed this.

Speaker 4 (28:35):
So Yan Yanni's a big val Geist disciple because Yanni
likes his shirker buck theory.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
Val Guys proposed this idea is he's still live.

Speaker 4 (28:45):
He passed away that white tails of white tail deer
have been down in like the southeast for millions of years,
southeast US, and that sometimes climatic conditions were such that
white tailed deers spread all the way across the continent.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Okay, and then uh, the middle dried out, and then
you developed mule deer in white tails.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
Then something happened and all of a sudden, these white
tails came back out, made love with these mule deer,
and somehow maybe I'm screwing it up, and that produced
like a black tail.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
It was elaborate. Yeah, it was elaborate.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
You're not far off. I actually had beers with Bell
one time, and he and he and in later years
he chew genetic anals. He said, yeah, I had that wrong.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Oh he did.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Okay, do you know what his shirker buck theory is, Yan,
you'll tell.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
You no, you don't know.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
No.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
I think he said he applied it to any uh servid,
but that that a buck. There are certain bucks that
he deemed as shirkers because they would shirk the responsibility
of mating or running. Uh with the plan with the
long term goal that if they shirked for three, four

(30:10):
five years, that the year that they decided to enter
in their body mass and health and antlers would be
so much bigger than any of the competition that they
could then dominate the breed breeding period and thus spread
their genes across the whole pool.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
He's like, I'm gonna lay low for a couple of
years and I come down.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
I'm coming down, that's right, and I'm gonna be bigger
and badder than everybody.

Speaker 4 (30:35):
It'd be like if you never went to the bar
and you just worked out and did drinking, just did
like skin treatments and worked out and worked on your
hairstyle until you were read.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
A lot of books and you were ready. Yeah, and
then one night you go to the.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Bar just witty witty and pumped.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
It. Just lay waste.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
No, he didn't share that with me.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
It's insulting to hef a finger.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
I know it is. I could see. I could see
it too. I asked him how to pronounce cus or cows?

Speaker 3 (31:11):
Oh, real quick on heffel finger, I said, we were somebody,
somebody in our somebody in our camp was using a app
to predict deer movement. Sure, and uh was saying that
this app was so good that it could be within
minutes that when when it said excellent time for movement,

(31:33):
you just look at the watch and just start looking
across the hillside and here they come. I didn't see
it proved to be so good. But I asked Hefflefinger.
I said, because he was talking about these pages of
information that he produces about myths around wildlife. I said,
I said, do you have anything about moon or lunar

(31:54):
tables affecting deer movement? Do you have a page on that?
He goes, No, because that would be real short. It
just be word No.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
That's one of my favorites.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
I mean, I joke about the one that that red
squirrels bite nuts off big squirrels.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
But the moon thing is just never. You're never going
to convince people. Otherwise, if Mark Kenyon, you present all
the evidence to Mark Kenyon, like Mark Kenyon's I don't
know if he is now Mark Kenyon tradition was a
big moon guy. And you present all the evidence to Kenyon.

Speaker 4 (32:29):
Radio collar data from deer that don't change their groove
because the moon. Deer car collision data that doesn't show
differences because the moon.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
Like on harvest data, like on and on and on
and on and then Kenyon, he one day says to me, well,
if it affects it by a minute, science like I'm paraphrasing.
He's like, science might not be able to capture.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Or the capture but they but to me, that minute
matters lot because it could be the last minute of daylight.

Speaker 5 (33:04):
There's also the what question are you asking or or
solving four? Because Jim went on to say, he's like,
now if the moon's bright enough, deer may bed in
a more open area or feed in a open area
at night because there's increased light. He's like, but that's

(33:25):
not the moon phase so much as it is a
photo of all taic.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
Is what he was saying.

Speaker 5 (33:36):
It's like, if it's brighter, they're more active.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
I'm like, well, we should do in the whole damn
water up.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
We need to get back to gym here, but we
should do a podcast carenn on and bring in Mississippi
Deer Lab. They just recently processed a bunch of collar
data speaking speaking to, you know, because so many people
like these believers, we're just continually emailing in and just
being like, yeah, but you guys aren't asking the right questions.

(34:07):
You guys aren't you know, you're looking at your data,
but you're not aligning the red moon with the blue
moon and the wind and the underfoot and the barometric pressure,
and you need to look at that specific point. They're like,
all right, why don't you guys all tell us we'll
do a big survey and tell us exactly what we
should look for in our data, and then we'll do
it and we'll look for it. And they did it,

(34:27):
and of course the conclusion is that it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Can you guess produce this segment.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Segment?

Speaker 3 (34:34):
We should do a whole podcast.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
We guest produced the whole episode.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
Uh sure, okay, I'll help kore In with it. I
don't think she wants to be a take over.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
It be liked be like an internship.

Speaker 4 (34:46):
You'd be interning at your old job. All right, call
it back in the saddle and then it'll be the episode.
All right, back to black Tail, dere.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Our black tail, he got black tail deer don't even
know there's a moon.

Speaker 4 (35:05):
One last thought on the moon thing. For a while,
what I thought was this. For a while, I thought,
when it's bright out, you see a bunch of deer
because it's bright out, And maybe that's where it came from,
meaning when it's pitch black, you can't see shit.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
When it's moonlit, you're like, oh, look at that deer
right like picture walking out when you're snow on the
ground in a full moon and you're walking out, you're
also aware of all kinds of stuff you didn't know
what was going on.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Yeah, there's no such thing as end up shooting light.

Speaker 1 (35:32):
All right. Back to black tail deer. So, uh, Columbia blacktail.

Speaker 4 (35:39):
Let me ask you this question about black tail deer
because this is something we've mused about a fair bit.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
I shot.

Speaker 4 (35:44):
I've shot one Columbia black tail deer in California. Dude,
I mean it looks like a meal deer. And I've
often talked about just went and talking about the sort
of arbitrary nature of certain classifications of wildlife. I've talked
about how, according to the Boone and Cocker Club, if
a if a deer is standing on the west side

(36:07):
of I five in California, he's a blacktail. If he
were to run across I five, he's now a mule deer.
But we have to be able to do a better
job than that nowadays, right, like, like, what is a
Columbia blacktail?

Speaker 1 (36:25):
What is a mule deer?

Speaker 2 (36:26):
Actually? Vooted Crockett is offering genetic tests that you can
send in your deer and get that answer.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
To get the real answer.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
And Jim and Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger came up
with a percentile graph looking at at at deer samples
that they had, and they cut it off at zero
point nine percent. In other words, if it's over ten
percent mule deer, they're not calling it a Columbia blacktail.

Speaker 4 (36:56):
So are they going to go in and start kicking
all kinds of mule? You're out of the Columbia blacktail
record book?

Speaker 2 (37:02):
No, because it depends on location. So the record book
is a line that comes down. It doesn't always follow
I five. It takes off on one meridian and it comes
down two through Medford, Oregon and down in there.

Speaker 4 (37:17):
But there has to be a bunch of meal deer
in the clumb Like, there's got to be the top end. Yeah,
there's got to be some fakes.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
There's got to be people that have records with Columbia
blacktails that they just shot a meal deer that had
to be on the wrong side of the road.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, and we as when I grew up in Washington,
we used to purposely go up and we called them
bench leg mulees. They they were these We would shoot
them in the field dress at like two twenty five
to two forty. They were these beautiful black tails, little
tinty racks and stuff like that, with huge bodies, and
we went up into the cascades and targeted them. I

(37:52):
mean that's where we headed because they were much larger deer.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
And you're saying that those were blacktails, that they were.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
They were cross Okay, I'm kind of across in there,
got it.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
But then a Sika blacktail is like much more distinct.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Right, Cica blacktails.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
They don't have any exposure like siic of blacktails, don't
bump up against any other kind of deer. Yes they do,
Oh they do. Okay.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Uh, there's mule deer moving into Skagway. And in nineteen
ninety one I took a photograph of a mule deer
dough with a fawn inside of of Alaska up by Hyder,
and so there is the possibility of some contact. There's

(38:37):
mulder just outside of Prince Rupert, so they could come
down with a Skina river in there and come out
of the interior. And so I think that's probably the
first batcheteer that made it out to Prince of Wales Island.
Probably it had some kind of a contact like that,
an interbreeding between mule deer and that isolated population that

(38:59):
became sick a black tail. That's why they identified mulder
in that genome. When they in those three oldest bucks
that we have, you gotta realize they have a really
small sample size and that the researchers say that it's
you know, we're we're basing this on just a handful
of samples, but that all of the older ones were
very distinct that they had a little bit of Muldier
in them.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
So is it fair like I know, we're talking about
valgeis theory is sort of like pre genetics theory, But
is it right that that at a time you just
had these little pockets of deer that were bound in
by glaciers and they survived along the Pacific coast.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
That's what the idea is that that was kind of
a what they referred to, kind of like a chain
of pearls of habitat that wasn't overridden by ice, that
if it wasn't so severe, if the winner's so severe,
that they and they could have existed there. Got to
realize too, we had much lower sea levels. Our sea

(39:59):
levels were four hundred feet less than they are today.
So there was a lot of land between seventeen thousand
and about thirteen thousand that was exposed on the shelf
out there. So and you know, and so we have
land ice interactions with the weight of the ice pushing
down on the land and the land rebounding back up,

(40:20):
and so there were some of that stuff going on.

Speaker 5 (40:22):
And that's what which means that these deer could have
existed in a landscape that we basically can't see at all, Like, yeah,
those could have changed dramatically and they could have evolved
to be like their high alpine tundra environment could be
closer to what they evolved in as in flat brushy

(40:47):
in areas versus any any of the stuff that we
hunt them on in the slopes like the rocky, mossy,
dark timber terrain.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Absolutely in fact on it looks like this according to
the I've did a lot of coreing with pallinologists and
links and looking at also at the Speliothim's and the
caves hold a record a climate that somewhere at about
eleven to ten thousand years ago, a very dry spruce

(41:18):
and hemlock forest started to appear on the landscape, replacing
a herb dominated tundra that had willows and alders around
stream courses and stuff and in disturbance areas. And you
start seeing that, and that fires were on the landscape
in southeast Alaska till about seven eight hundred years ago,

(41:41):
and then it got Then you start seeing cedar and
scunt cabbage and sphagnum and stuff dominate the pollen record,
and the wetter climate plants starts showing up. So the
rainforest that we all know and love today and hunted
up there as oldly maybe about six thousand years old.
That's relatively young. Those those great big red cedars are

(42:03):
your place there. They may be the fifth generation on
the landscape kind of thing when you think about that.
So it's it's been a really dynamic vegetation change over
a relatively short period of geo logic time and the
topography those humps that we fish halib it off the

(42:24):
coast on were alpine ridgetops when the sea level was lower.
I love that stuff.

Speaker 5 (42:32):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So what does that mean like
the overall picture of black tail to your conservation? Right, so,
just just as an example, we this would be months ago, right,
we talked about Arizona offering moose lottery draws to hunt moose,

(42:55):
and part of their reasoning is, like moose, aren't they're
a remnant of a population in Arizona. They're they're here
right now, but long term, they're they're not going to
be here more than likely, is one of the arguments

(43:15):
in regards to blacktail deer. When they're in a such
a you know, geologically speaking, like a very rapidly changing ecosystem,
are they adapting well to that ecosystem? Is there anything
that says there were a hell of a lot more
blacktail in when a different environment was more prolific? Kind

(43:37):
of where are we at.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
The biggest thing that controls sick of blacktail populations? In
my not that predation doesn't, but it's bad winters, a
bad weather can do more to wipe out a population
two thousand and six and seven on Admiralty Island and
by whuno we lost like eighty five or ninety percent
of the deer. I was working with doctor Sophie Gilbert

(44:02):
on her PhD and we had a bad winter on
Prince of Well's Island in twenty eleven. At control like
junction right there were you split either go to Thornbay
or go north. There was five feet of snow made first.
It was horrible. I followed those fawns that year. She
went into the year that went into the winter with

(44:23):
fifty faunds on the collar. We came out with three.
So we basically lost a whole cohort of age class
because of that bad winter. So I think about the
Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age ended, what three
hundred years ago, there might not as been as many
deer on the landscape. There's maybe more deer now than

(44:46):
there was three hundred years ago. And what was the
winners like coming out of glacier glaciation and as glaciers
were more prominent and stuff. Even though we were in
a wetter climate from six thousand to the present, those
first five thousand years the sick of blacktail may not
have been prolific on the landscape as they are today.

(45:10):
So and I think that timber management, when it was
super active and there was still a lot of good
habitat left, was creating all that forage. Of course, that
forage wasn't available in a bad winter when those sick
clearcuts get buried. So I have seen in just the

(45:35):
thirty some odd years I've been on Prince of Wales,
I believe the population of sick of blacktail on Prince
of Wales Island is half of what it was when
I got there nineteen ninety. And that's not a result
of predation, in my opinion, it's a result of now
all those older clearcuts have grown up and there's no forage.

(45:57):
It's what we call stem exclusion, that there's no light
gets to the forest floor, it grows mosses and lichens
and mushrooms.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
That was going to be a question of mine earlier.
You mentioned you know timber management is generally is it
good for blacktails.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
As long as long as you maintain what they need
to survive in a bad winter they need to so
they're an animal of the edge, like all deer and
they'll they bet at their little knobs and stuff like that,
and when it starts getting snowy and stuff, they they
need to be able to access food. So they might
be even on a steep slope with a modest forest

(46:38):
on there, you still got a lot of canopy interception
because of the angle of the way the trees interlock,
and they're getting around fine when the snow depth gets
higher than their briskets. So basically, on a sick of
black tail that's hired in about eighteen inches, they need
to be able to get to someplace to eat. So
you have to have corridors for them to move, either

(46:59):
latterly or vertically, and you have to have something for
them to go to that's got thermal cover and food.
So the mosaic has been created by pass forcet. The
challenge is going into that habitat and where should we
be doing improvements and stuff like that. And that's what

(47:22):
we're hoping to focus on is where are those where
should we put those improvements on the landscape to do
the biggest bang for the buck, as it was sure
for the deer.

Speaker 4 (47:33):
So can you walk through what just as part of
a broader conversation about timber management in harvest. Can you
walk through the sort of life span of a clear
cut only like in terms of deer, because for it,
I've watched them where I've watched them where they're fresh,

(47:57):
nothing's really going on a couple of years into it,
they are getting loaded up with deer. And I've been
fortunate now to see one get to the point where
it's there's nothing living in it. So layout like like
what it does as it grows, because a lot of
guys think the answer to more deer is more clearcuts,
and and where does that get complicated?

Speaker 2 (48:20):
The food that's produced is incredible. The amount of forage
that's in those clearcuts at about year three, three and
four and five, crazy nuts like the blueberry. So the
primary theory the thing that the deer eats are the vaccinium.
So there your huckleberries and your blueberries, and especially the
red huckleberry. They love the red huckleberry.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
And some of the eating the leaves and twigs and stuff.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
Right right at the very end of the new growth.
And you've seen that stuff in the clearcuts up there
where it's browsed back to where it's a brush you
can hardly push your legs through. So you start out
we don't have any of that for about two years,
and then that finally starts really taking over. And then
so you got from year let's say year three to

(49:05):
about year ten or twelve. It's doing pretty good, and
now your trees are getting up to the point that
they're starting to shade out more patches and stuff, but
there's still a lot of forage in between that continues
to close in. So the bigger the trees are, they get,

(49:28):
the less forage there is, and that vegetation so and
you start getting maybe a little more salmonberry and stuff
in there, and depend on depends on the site. It
depends how much alders in there. There's a lot of variables,
but we'll kind of do generalities. Forest Service historically has

(49:48):
gone into the stands. So i'd say by year fifteen
it's starting to get pretty closed in. You're starting to
lose your forage. But of course a clear cut is
not ubiquit. Some of it regenerates really well and some
of it regenerates more poorly, so there's places to eat
out in there. Then a four service goes in. Excuse me,

(50:11):
let's down somewhere between year sixteen and year twenty and
pre commercially thins. So there's so many stems per acre
come back under natural regeneration that they need to drop
that down to a certain spacing because of over competition

(50:31):
by the trees that are growing back. And you've seen this.
They go in and they follow those trees, and your
slash load is enormous. It can be ten twelve feet deep.
It releases, sunlight gets to that and the vegetation responds.
But the deer can't access that under that slash.

Speaker 5 (50:50):
And if you're wondering listener, neither can a hunter. It's
not fun to walk through.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
You can't go through that with a D eight cat.
Oh brutal. It is amazing stuff. And besides effect, because
that was commercially thin, you've got all of the usually
about twelve to twenty four inches high, the bases of
the trees that they cut like pungee sticks sticking up
through that stuff. So you fall through that. If you're
up walking on that mess and you fall down, you
gotta watch where you land anyhow, But deer deer don't

(51:18):
access that. The Forest Service has identified certain trails and
left unthin strips through some clearcuts to allow for deer
movement vertically, in which they use sometimes were if they
were well placed spots the deer continue to use if
they were using them in the original clearcut, they use

(51:40):
them post post commercial thinning. Then thirty years in that's
grown back shut again, and then that continues to get
less and less and less light to the forest. Four
that slash starts to rot and break down, and you've
got all of the then it's then it's usually like

(52:03):
a maybe eighteen inches thick with just the bowls of
the trees that were originally fell in there. That might
still but they won't support your weight, but they're they're
up and there. But by that time there's no forage.
And tell that stand gets up one hundred years old
or something like that and starts to naturally select, and

(52:23):
wind starts punching holes through it, and you start to
get some light filtering down in around the sides. You
get light coming in. Maybe that's doing pretty good, but
there's a there's at least a period there of you know,
between thirty and one hundred, one hundred and fifty years
that there's just not a lot of forage for deer

(52:46):
in that piece unless it's managed, unless you go in
and open that up.

Speaker 4 (52:50):
Oh, that doesn't speak well for the deer hunting around
my little spot. No, So I got an eighty ninety
year dry spell coming up.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Was actually actually what happened what I did years ago
as I saw this coming. It was the wave of
green that was going to be there, and I stopped
hunting any managed areas and I started moving out into
the unharvested areas and learning how to hunt that. Yep,

(53:20):
because I knew this was coming. I mean it was.
And so what's happened?

Speaker 4 (53:24):
What you wanted to step outside of the clear cut system, right?

Speaker 2 (53:29):
And good lord, I have killed hundreds of deer in
harvested areas when when they're productive, and it's crazy. We
used to go into clearcuts in the early nineties and
you'd blow on a deer call and forty deer stand up.
It was. It was totally different than you have today.
And it was there was you virtually went out and

(53:52):
selected what size of buck you wanted kind of a thing.
It was totally diveryent thing. Yeah, alpine areas you were
talking about when we were first doing that in the eighties,
or nineties. It was nothing to crawl up onto a
ledge and stop in glass sixty deer and like half

(54:15):
of those would be bucks. Wow, it was an amazing.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
With so much of the island that hasn't been logged
or just not not even that island that you happen
to live on, but all through blacktail deer range.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
Okay, yep, a.

Speaker 4 (54:29):
Lot of it hasn't been logged, big wilderness areas. So
why are blacktail numbers down?

Speaker 2 (54:34):
No, they're down in Unit two. They're down where you,
ok and I both have explored.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
And you think that is because all those old clearcuts
have entered the shitty period.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
That's right. But Unit four, so Admiralty Chichikov barandof Island,
they're doing really good. They haven't had a bad winter
since twenty eleven that the deer population is going nuts
and they're starting to get age class on bucks. I'm
seeing four points being shot out of Sitka, which I
never saw before. So they're doing good. Unit three, which

(55:05):
is qu Mitkalf and coopernof Island nineteen seventy two was
a killing winner. There was six feet of snow on
the beach June first, in nineteen seventy two they stopped
the hunts in Unit three for years and years and
years decades and started it back up for a one

(55:26):
week and then a two week period where you were
allowed to take one buck. Those deer now are really rebounding,
and there's a camera trap thing going on right now
out of Petersburg and wrangle maybe not wrangle, maybe wrangle
that's being conducted by the state. And the deer numbers
are really up in Unit three. Ketchikan is responding in

(55:49):
all of that area around Ketchikan is responding really well
with deer numbers. So the only place that the deer
numbers are down really is Unit two on Prince of
Weell's Island, and that's not ubiquitous as you move south.
So if you get down south at Craig and you
move down island and stuff in some of those reboter areas,
that's warmer and they have less effects of snow down

(56:11):
there and stuff, And so there's areas that are doing
a little bit better. Then there's pockets up in the
I kind of hunt mainly the north into Prince of
Wales and Central to North actually hunt a lot in
Central and there's pockets in there that have higher deer numbers,
and so it's not all been cut and it's not
all gloom and doom, but it's definitely different. Just in

(56:33):
my experiential time being on the island, it's definitely different.
And it has been partially due to the State of
Alaska having to walk a very fine line there for
a number of years why the wolf was being suggested
to be listed and limiting the amount of trapping that
could go on for wolves. But the bottom line is,

(56:55):
I believe that we all agree here that if you
have great habitat and your habitat's fun saying really well,
it can take the pressure of predation. And right now
we have a compromised habitat because of past management. Act
not so much as past management, it's just right now
we have not transitioned at all to a second growth

(57:16):
harvest economy in the forest.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
Tell me what that means.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
We are and we're not cutting second growth. We're not cutting,
we're not going into those stands commercially thinning those stands
or doing patchwork of small clearcuts, or we're just not
cutting those trees. Yet some of them are ready to harvest.
Now there's rules on how you can harvest, but most

(57:45):
of it's going to reach critical mass in like twenty
thirty and twenty thirty three that there's going to be
a bunch of stuff that could be ready to harvest.
The problem is there's not the infrastructure to do manufacture
of the wood on the island right now. The one
large mill that's there really doesn't want to do anything
with second growth. He's tooled for old growth, and you

(58:06):
have to have different saws and different processes and stuff
like that to be Karen, my wife works on biomass.
Nobody is there's only one place doing bio bricks on
the island. You could be taking all of the slash
and the non merchantable trees and grinding that up and
making biofuels out of it BioBrick, biopucks, some kind of

(58:28):
log or something like that, or wood pellets. That that
infrastructure is not in place. So the only market is
the export to Asia for the little shit for this
young growth that could be harvested, and there's been a
couple of young growth sales, but mostly it all was

(58:48):
exported to Asia.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
What's the situation, like, go way down to California, what's
the landscape look like right now. I mean, where do
black tail deer stand down there?

Speaker 2 (58:59):
I am by far no expert in the Columbia blacktail
in Washington, Oregon, in California. I will tell you from
what we learned from that summit in Oregon, and I'm
going to I won't do California because I don't have
enough knowledge. But what I picked up from the wonderful
folks at the Oregon Department of Fish and Game and
they took us out on field trips is a lot

(59:19):
of that as a checkerboard of ownership and Southern Oregon,
Central Oregon, and stuff within the blacktail home range. And
so you have timber industry blocks next to state blocks
or BLM blocks, and if they want to do a
habitat enhancement project or something on those, the block next

(59:42):
to it is being intensely managed to produce second growth
wood for lumber. And so the challenges are in the
land ownership makeup of the Pacific Northwest, and I'm going
to venture to guess that that slops over into northern California.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
Like it makes it hard to have a cohesive plan plan.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
It also makes it hard when they're trying to get
of course they say, I guess this is across everything
is how do you do population estimates of a rainforest deer?
You can't fly over they don't have winter ranges where
they congregate and stuff like that. So doing population estimates
on the landscape. Down in Oregon, they were using deer

(01:00:24):
pellet DNA and dogs to locate the piles of turds
out in the clearcuts, and so they had a contractor
out there picking up samples, using the dog to find
for the deer pooped, why it was feeding out there,
and then doing the population estimate. In southeast Alaska, Todd
Brickman developed this. He's a professor at University of at

(01:00:48):
Fairbanks up there, University of Alaska, and he developed a
way of doing DNA. So he did transects. He did
twelve hundred meters one meter either side. He went and
removed all hoop from that, and then he started running
that transsect and picking up fresh pellets and from that
you can get individuals and sex off of that. And

(01:01:11):
after you do that time and time and time again
through seasons, you can start to get an idea of
how many deer on the landscape, what the demography is
whether how many males per female one hundred females and
stuff like that, and that's the only way we've been
able to do population estimates. They've they're trying some right now.

(01:01:31):
The one I was talking about, I think it's a Petersburg.
They're trying to use both deer pellet transsects and trail
cameras to see if they can come up with a
population estimate on the landscape. So it's really hard to
estimate just how many deer are out there.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
What might be what might be blacktails per square mile
in southeast Alaska.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
I've heard things of twelve to twenty.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
And that's figured man says.

Speaker 5 (01:01:57):
That seems positive.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Because holy can go a long time and not see one.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
They're sneaky little guys. Yeah, I you know that. And
to twenty might be winter range where they get a
little more oppressed and stuff. So there's definitely areas that
it's not twelve to twenty.

Speaker 5 (01:02:23):
Oh yeah, like those areas where within one hundred yards
you're crawling as flat as you can on your belly
to get under a tree, and then you're also fifteen
feet above other trees that are tipped over those areas.
It might be a little hard for deer to travel.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Hard for us to travel. It is what it is
probably the most challenging landscape that I have ever traveled.
I have a particular place that I like to hunt
that's super hard to get to. And when you get
off on the beach to gain twelve hundred feet in

(01:02:59):
elevation a mile and a quarter from the beach, I've
never done it in under six hours.

Speaker 5 (01:03:04):
Oh oh, that's misery. So what's optimal or is there
an optimal considering? Just like the huge variance of optimal
habitat density.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
I think you're probably in that twelve to fifteen range
like that. But they get, I mean they get when
you get into even yet today, when you get into
really good alpine habitat, you may have twenty five deer
per square mile, but that's just a seasonal thing. And

(01:03:40):
then then they then they as the snow comes and
fills that up, they start moving down that slope, they
get into those crumb Holtz trees where you can never
find them, just below the the beautiful vegetation in the alpine.
And so I've got I've got a theory that every
piece of alpine across the land and every piece of

(01:04:02):
sub outpine, because alpine has kind of defined it's that's
that's those true highest peaks. But all those little buskegg
ridges have the highest point on that ridge that's got
the best forbes and stuff that's around. And I think
that the best buck of those watersheds goes to the

(01:04:25):
best forage every year, and that's where you're going to
find them. That every ridge has that spot.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
The best buck is on the best.

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
Spot, just like the best bearer goes to the best
fishing hole. You know that that best buck knows where
that best stuff is. And I that's that's the theory
that I apply. And I in fact, I'm not hunting
traditional alpine much anymore. I'm kind of hunting those lower
ridges and stuff and finding those little pockets that's going

(01:04:53):
to hold two or three really good crackerjack bucks.

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):
I want to get back to conservation work. But real quick,
what percentage of the bucks you killed you call in
and what percent do.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
You creep up on.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Fifty?

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
And how you creeping up on them?

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Just creeping alpied mostly or dumb luck.

Speaker 4 (01:05:17):
No, I'm talking those those low nasty, those low nasty
muskeg ridges.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
How do you hunt.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Them, hi cup, put a head up because if it's
if it's nice weather, because we're not generally up there
when it's really lousy weather. By seven o'clock in the morning,
those deer in the timber, you've got between four thirty
in the morning and seven o'clock in the morning, that's
your window to get success. If you're not there, it's

(01:05:43):
not gonna If you're starting out at the truck at
four thirty, you're not going to be there at seven.
You've got to be there when they get.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Up at four thirty.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
So they're already out feeding, yep. And what I usually
I usually find them they're either bedded right on the
edge of the timber, kind of chewing their cut and
thinking about the great night they had out there forging
on those forbes and are just taking those last few
things before the sun gets too warm, and then they
drift back into the timber. And so I usually hunt
those edges at bedding areas that I know around those

(01:06:15):
upper level muskeg you know, like twenty three to twenty
six hundred foot elevation ridges.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
Do you get an evening period of movement as well?

Speaker 2 (01:06:27):
If you have an overcast day yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
Full moon.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
Yeah, no, full moon, which we'd never see, no, because
I go up with my tent and I stay there
and I glass, and I don't see anything before I
go to bed. Interesting and bed then at those times,
so our season opens up the twenty fourth of July.
So from the twenty fourth of July through August that there,
I'm up in those things and hell, it's light till

(01:06:54):
eleven eleven thirty or something like that, and I'm not
seeing those deer, and I'm not seeing those deer, and
I wait up in the morning and they'll be in
the meadows.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
Interesting because knowing that most of these deer get up
every four to six hours, right yep, to do some
sort of feeding, moving around, they must be then doing
that down in the timber where you've got to be him.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Yeah, yeah, you just I always take something good to read,
because you're going to have long days up there. You're
just not gonna have There's some places I've found patches
of snow and stuff like that where they'll go out
and dig holes and they'll bed in the patches of snow.
If you've got a snow that persists. But the last
few years, since twenty eleven. We haven't had snow in

(01:07:38):
those so it just hasn't been there.

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
Earlier, you talked about starting the black Tail Deer Foundation, right,
that's what it's called.

Speaker 2 (01:07:51):
Yeah, So actually we actually hadn't got to that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
Well, we were going towards that, is that what we'll
get to it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:07:59):
But you'd mentioned it, and you'd said that the Meld
Deer Foundation had looked for a long time and they
hadn't been doing black tail deer conservation work.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
If I had to take a guess, like a stab
at why I would picture that if you came to
me and said, what can we do to improve muld
your habitat and meld your numbers? I feel like you'd
have a you'd really quickly generate a list of projects, meaning, well,

(01:08:28):
this place, we have a huge amount of highway deer collisions.
This place. They like to move from this mountain range
down into this sage flat, but there's a bunch of
fences and developments that are impeding the movement. So we
can do some.

Speaker 4 (01:08:45):
Micro work to help the deer in that area or
in this little basin. Some well timed predator control would
help in May when they're dropping Faunds right, and you
can kind of go and do these little distinct projects
that improve meldeer in these funnel points or these focal

(01:09:08):
areas of activity. But then you go and you look
at this just seemingly never ending sea of timber that's
very hard to access, very hard to tell what's going on.
And someone says, will generate me like a chore list
for how to help blacktails.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
I feel like you it'd be like out I pray
for weather?

Speaker 3 (01:09:32):
Do you?

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
I mean, like, like what do you like? Where would
you even put money? If you had it right?

Speaker 4 (01:09:36):
That would be my explanation of why no one's doing
anything on blacktails, because like what do you?

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
How do you?

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
Where do you begin?

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
I think that there was a lot of truth to that.
I think you'd hit the nail on the head and
you know, and you've got to look at it is
absolutely quality of habitat driven if there if there is
a lot of places out there, we don't need to
do anything. Habitat is just fine. But because of past
timber management and in Washington Oregon land ownership changes and stuff.

(01:10:05):
But I'm thinking I'm very southeast specific. We have native
lands or a lot of timber harvest on native lands
and Forest Service lands with a lot of harvest on there,
and all of that has grown back into a dense
forest with no forage under it. I think we have
unlimited opportunity, but where to do it on that? So

(01:10:26):
you have this great canvas, like a paiter stepping up
to a blank canvas. You want to pick the best
place to do that habitat work that's going to get
the best return to those deer. So anything you do
in opening it up and creating forage, deer probably going
to find it and use it. But there's better places

(01:10:48):
on the landscape to do it. And right now we're
in the process of looking at that whole thing called
Southeast Alaska past timber harvest of x age and where
should we focus the TAGUS National Forces going through a
forest plan revision, we're looking at where should we focus
our efforts if we only have a small amount of

(01:11:11):
money coming in and we only are going to be
able to do so much per year, where should we
go first and why? And so that those are the
challenges that we're looking at right We actually there's a
contract existing out there right now where we've got a
gis biology or exercise to take a look at that landscape,

(01:11:34):
taking in light, our taking in slope, aspect, conductivity, with
existing habitats that's out there, planned projects, where roads, where
can we access now. One of the things that at
least the Black Tailed Deer Foundation has looked at too,
is if we do a treatment out there, if we
create forage for deer and deer get back on landscape,

(01:11:57):
are those deer going to be accessible for hunters? Can
are they going to be proximbal to a road or
can they walk in easily into that? If you're going
to put deer on the landscape, it'd be nice to
know that they would also create additional opportunity to put
meat in your freezer. The people on the island and
I live Prince of Wales, they rely on deer in

(01:12:19):
their freezer. And this is the first time in the
last couple of years I'm hearing people that haven't been
finding the deer they normally would have to put meat
in the freezers. So this is serious stuff, especially as
prices go up.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
So what would be a thing you would do if
you identify is this part of the project you're working
out where you're running all those cameras.

Speaker 3 (01:12:41):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
The camera thing started out with Sophie Gilverrett and I
had an idea. So the Forest Service would go in
in the past and they would log most of a drainage,
but they would leave where you'd have a huge bunch
of creeks coming down in alluvial fans. They would leave
those as a leaf strip and between clearcuts. Then they
come back and they fell that they did the pre

(01:13:06):
commercial thinning and created the slash that was ten twelve
feet deep, and so the only vertical movement that could
go on was in those leave strips in between the clearcuts.
So the deer were squeezed into narrow slots. So we
had control areas and so we had twenty control area
cameras and twenty leave strip cameras and we started that

(01:13:30):
and then they went in and they wanted to harvest
and there so we had to move. So I moved
over to where I'm at now. And so at that time,
Sophie doctor Sophi Gilbert was working for the University of
Idaho in conjunction with Todd Brinkman up at Fairbanks at
the University of Alaska, and we were trying to look
at deer movement, and I had an idea and the
concept in my brain. My working thesis was as it

(01:13:52):
greened up in the spring, the deer were down in
the lower elevations and they slowly moved up as it
greened up, and they finally got up to the alpine
when the ford came out, and they foraged up there,
and then as it started to snow, they moved back
down on the landscape. And I started monitoring these cameras
twenty eighteen, so I've got twenty six cameras out there

(01:14:12):
right now. That's anything but the truth. The does and
fonds above the lower elevation valley floor bed five hundred
eight hundred feet above the valley floor, and they come
down to feed daily in the dark, usually almost always
docturnally and not always for the dose, and they move

(01:14:34):
back up as the sun comes up in the morning.
I do see the bucks in velvet as they're developing.
Antlers will be milling around down feeding in the bottom,
and then they go up, which I'm assuming they go
up into that better forage up in the higher elevation,
because I don't see them for a long time until
rut so I didn't know there was a daily vertical

(01:14:56):
movement of deer on the landscape.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
They're climbing five eight hundred feet every time.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
Want to eat, yes, sir, And you could almost set
your clock by it. They're so nocturnally driven. And then
as it comes into October about on where I have
my cameras, this changes. So as you move north in
the Tungus Petersbergen wrangle, they run twelve fourteen days before

(01:15:23):
Prince of Wales, so that the load and more higher latitude,
little colder stuff rat run a little bit soon by moonface. Anyhow,
all of a sudden you start seeing much more fork
and horns and spikes, and they're starting to move vertically
daily right before right as soon as it's dark, ten

(01:15:46):
minutes after dark, they're coming down. Ten minutes before daylight,
they're going back up and now.

Speaker 1 (01:15:51):
Down into what the bottoms.

Speaker 2 (01:15:55):
The females are feeding down in the thut completely in
the valley floor, but in the lower elevations in the valley,
and those bucks are coming down that they don't know
why they're doing it. They're too young to probably do
much of the breeding. I also have found sick of
blacktail do not make scrapes, but they have marking trees.
They have hemlock overhanging hemlock branches that they mouth and

(01:16:18):
they push this their preorbital gland in there, and there
are secretions between their antlers and they urinate under those things.
And I have twelve or fourteen bucks coming to the
same marking tree this day after day after day. And
that progresses until about the twenty fifth or sixth of October,

(01:16:39):
and then the big bucks starts showing up. Bigger bucks
starts showing up, the more older age clash bucks come up,
and they start showing up down in there. There's a
frenzy between about October twenty fifth and about the sixth
or seventh of November, waiting for that first dough to

(01:17:01):
come into estras and I have I'll have bucks all
over the cameras, I mean, and they start showed up
in the day, and I mean, it's just a progression
of I've got this all plotted up because I really
ateal and weird about this stuff. And boom, the big
bucks disappear. Nobody comes to the marking trees anymore. So

(01:17:23):
the first doze have come into heat and they're autumn,
and that persists until about the seventeenth or eighteenth of November,
and then they bucks start coming back and marking that
thing again. And then magic happens. What's that These bucks

(01:17:44):
that you have never seen, these oh by god bucks
show up about the seventeenth or eighteenth and November, and
they persist on the landscape till about the twenty fifth
or twenty sixth, maybe through Thanksgiving, and then they just peer,
they vanish and you've hardly seen any of those other bucks.

(01:18:06):
When those that's the guy that has been pumping iron
for four years and shows up. Bet, it's just like,
whoa where have you been?

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Okay? Walk walk me through all that. I like it,
walk me through all. So so you're saying that there's about.

Speaker 2 (01:18:24):
Three year, three days of the year that you should
be in the woods.

Speaker 4 (01:18:28):
So they're running all around. Okay, you got dose on
your cameras. Then a sudden you start seeing bucks showing
up because the rut's coming.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Then you see all this buck movement and.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
The first bucks that show up or the spikes in
the forking darts.

Speaker 1 (01:18:41):
Then you start then you see a bunch of buck
movement that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:44):
You have that you see the next age class.

Speaker 1 (01:18:46):
You say the two to four years old, their timing
is a little better.

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
Yeah, they're closer to Estris. They have they're not putting
that much energy into chasing because they pretty much know
when the first doe is going to come into heat
cause of the moon fase mm hmm. That we never
see and then bang they disappear and they're lockdown.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
That means they're on a dough.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
They're actively on a dough. Un Tell she's receptive.

Speaker 1 (01:19:12):
That's when I must be always hunting lockdown.

Speaker 2 (01:19:16):
And at that at that moment, so that's the key
thing for me. At that moment, her head is not
switched from save the faun, save the fun. If you're
doing a fun and bleat call, he wants to chase
her and you call her in, and he's going to
come in behind her because he thinks she's just running

(01:19:38):
away from him, or you will have bucks coming to
the call. There's no doubt about that. But at that moment,
that just before the.

Speaker 1 (01:19:49):
Estris date, what date, you know, the.

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh of November. Okay, these are days
I'm never not in the woods. You got to realize
this is Jim Bachtel's.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
Belief system understood. Well, you're here, but you're here for
a reason.

Speaker 2 (01:20:11):
I'm telling you there are certain days that you don't
you're there because magic can happen.

Speaker 4 (01:20:19):
Then tell me the next thing that happens. Now, explain
to me why happen. Alson all these big bucks.

Speaker 1 (01:20:23):
Are running around again for three days.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
So you have really good two to four year old
bucks to the initial breeding, and I think there's up
at the higher elevation there's also a population of deer
that don't come down, and I think the really big, huge,
dominant four year old and better bucks are up there

(01:20:47):
taking care of that. And as soon as they've taken
care of everything on the rest of the landscape, they
come down to see what was not taken care of
at the lower elevations. And that tends to be the seventeenth, eighteenth,
nine nineteenth of November through Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
And you're in the woods man.

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
And I don't, I don't hardly ever care anything because
I am I am absolutely locked into I know that
the possibility of me and they actually become less nocturnal
and a little more reliable that they're going to be
out sometime during the day.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
Kay, I like it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
I have this tattooed on my arm.

Speaker 6 (01:21:32):
No, no, it's uh and it's but that transition time
between estris no estress right in there, that shifts seasonally.

Speaker 2 (01:21:45):
It might be slightly earlier. It might be third, fourth, fifth,
sixth of November. It might be eighth, ninet, tenth, eleventh
of November. I think I've killed more deer on the
eleventh of November than the other day.

Speaker 4 (01:21:57):
Kay, Now get back to hyde fixed black tail deer problem.

Speaker 2 (01:22:04):
Right for real?

Speaker 1 (01:22:04):
When you got huge thousands of square miles, you know
what I mean, like, what are you gonna do? Really?

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
So, just roughly on Prince of wale A Ballpark, I think,
just on the for service, there's like three hundred and
sixty thousand acres of young growth that's at or approaching
steam exclusion phase. If you do the math with twelve
to twenty deer per spare mile, that's somewhere between six
and eight thousand deer that ain't there. Pretty simple math.

Speaker 1 (01:22:30):
It won't be for eighty years or yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:33):
And tell something is done with that second growth. And
so we need this is my perfect world. We need
a active young growth management industry, and that industry has
to be good enough. There there's gonna be some clear
cuts made, and they're going to go in and do
some industrial real larger scale logging and stuff. But we
will have identified where we should I where the stands

(01:22:56):
are that should be approached to a habit that point
of view, and make the decisions why those are important
for habitat and those won't be intensely managed by clear
cutting and stuff like that. We'll go in and do commercial,
commercial thinning of those stands, opening that stand up and
getting daylight down in there and there, and there would

(01:23:17):
be an industry that would locally manufacture that stuff that
the biomass would be used that comes off of it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
I don't know how you're going to create, like if
it's rare when you say, like for the conservation of
a species and proliferation of a species, we need to
develop a timber industry.

Speaker 5 (01:23:34):
I mean how do like, yeah, how do you incentivize
and industry? And what specific like is it the heating
fuel would pellet camp chef trigger industry?

Speaker 2 (01:23:48):
Right? Like?

Speaker 5 (01:23:49):
What what is the market for that growth that that
is currently like being ignored waiting for maturation or further maturation.

Speaker 4 (01:23:59):
Oh, call, I got share something with you. There's two
things that have thwarted Dirt's dad that he cannot make himself. Well,
he can make anything himself, making his.

Speaker 1 (01:24:09):
Own dip, growing his own dip, making his own dip,
and then making his own pellet grilled pellets.

Speaker 2 (01:24:19):
There it is.

Speaker 5 (01:24:20):
So there's your opportunity.

Speaker 1 (01:24:22):
He just can't figure it out. It's killing him.

Speaker 2 (01:24:25):
We actually, because my wife works in biomess and I
love it. We hate all of our house with wood pellets.
But I'm shipping them up from Idaho with all that
red alder. I do the red older firewood stuff. So
we also have a fire wood stove, and so I
cut red alder. In fact, I'll probably be cutting it

(01:24:46):
ip if I can get out in the woods when
I get back from this. Okay, but you got a pellet, yeah, yeah,
So we have a timber history that's an old growth
timber history, and that industry needs to shift it's And
we have several small that are actively milling and kill
driving lumber, and you can buy second growth lumber on

(01:25:08):
Prince of Will's Island. They just can't take the volume
that would be needed to make a difference in deer's lives.

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):
And the free market economy is not going to take
care of this.

Speaker 2 (01:25:21):
I personally think if the if the management strategy shifted
from the old growth strategy that occurred is on federal
lands to a restoration economy based on we're going to
do better for the deer and water and streams and

(01:25:43):
stuff like that, but we're going to also support some
large scale timber management. And this is what we're going
to be putting up. We're not going to be doing
old growth anymore. We're going to be cutting second growth.
That would allow people to know that there was a
supply of second growth there that would be coming, and

(01:26:03):
then they could look for the capital to incidifize developing
the plants to handle that. They that would be both
biomass and wood. I mean, there's no you go to
home depot, you're not buying old growth doug for two
by fours. Those are all second growth. And that's what
we have. We just we're still on the initial harvest

(01:26:28):
of trees in southeast Alaska and we have it transitioned
over to young growth.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
God, but that initial harvest is winding down.

Speaker 2 (01:26:37):
Man, it is winding down. And do you think they.

Speaker 1 (01:26:42):
Ought to quit all together?

Speaker 2 (01:26:45):
I hope not. I hope I hope not, because there's
a lot of specialty mills that they don't need very
much wood a year to produce an incredible product. So,
you know, small old growth timbers sales. I hope they continue,
and I think sustainably they could, but on large scale

(01:27:06):
timber management that could be steered very focused towards improving
deer habitat. We need to change to a young growth industry.

Speaker 1 (01:27:17):
And they can do all that young growth on old infrastructure.

Speaker 2 (01:27:22):
Yes, there, but so very selfishly. I don't want to
take any habitat ear mark dollars and rebuild roads and
bridges and log transfer sites at saltwater and stuff like that.
I would like to see a viable timber history that
keep those roads and bridges and stuff in good working

(01:27:42):
order that we can benefit from for deer. And that's
why I think they need to be there together.

Speaker 1 (01:27:50):
Is any of the stuff we're seeing, Is any of
the stuff we're seeing with the incoming administration and like
the tariff wars and all this stuff that might be
starting in on Is any of that going to have
a positive or negative impact on getting the industry you
want established established? Or is this stuff play out too slowly?

Speaker 2 (01:28:11):
I think it's going to play out too slowly, and
I actually don't know what's going to come out of
this because the agencies and funding and people and all
that is in flux right now, and we've got to
kind of let the dust settle here for a few
months to find out where we're at before we could
pick back up.

Speaker 1 (01:28:29):
Yeah, but some well placed tariff isn't going to all
of a sudden spur the industry in the next few years.

Speaker 2 (01:28:35):
I don't know. I don't know what those answers are.
I know what I'd like to do on the ground
if I had the if I was king, tell me
what I would do. I mean, that's habitat work, focused,
habitat work in the right places. That there was a
a bunch of folks that have put a lot of
thought into why we want to improve that place for

(01:28:57):
deer and what would we do there?

Speaker 4 (01:29:03):
Do you feel that you're going to be able to
start doing this? Like, what does it take to start
doing the work we actually.

Speaker 2 (01:29:09):
Have right now? We don't know. The Black Tail Deer
Foundation and Meal Deer Foundation does not know the status
of the funding dollars that we had agreements in place
for right now because of the changes that's happened in
the last couple of weeks. So we have to let
that settle and the people that we were working with

(01:29:30):
withinside the agencies, we hope that we are solid in
the agreements that we have and so we actually have
four projects in southeast Alaska that will impact close to
two thousand acres of wildlife habitat improvements. So we've already

(01:29:51):
started down that road. We were going to do the
layout this summer and award the contracts this fall for
work in twenty twenty six.

Speaker 1 (01:30:02):
But to make a that money might not be there.

Speaker 2 (01:30:07):
We don't know. To make a meaningful impact on three
hundred and sixty thousand acres of young growth that are
sitting there ready that is going to steam exclusion phase,
we're going to have to do several thousand acres a
year to start making a difference on the deer population.

Speaker 5 (01:30:31):
It's a lot of work, it's a lot of cash.

Speaker 2 (01:30:34):
A lot of cash, a lot of work. But it
can also it can be if the philosophy of management
of the forest was such that it was focused on
making those changes, we wouldn't be relying on habitat enhancements.
Dollars to make that that would be normal timber management

(01:30:54):
practices and focus change in the way they're doing work
on the landscape. Yep.

Speaker 5 (01:30:59):
And then they just have to sign on to adhering
to some areas of exclusion or kind of like they
did with like stream bank setbacks and that sort of
stuff like that, right.

Speaker 2 (01:31:08):
And a lot of that's a lot of the early
management virtually again not passing judgment, walked right up the
bottom of the streams with cats and removed all the
large woody debris. So as we're doing this young growth
management strategy, we could provide the logs that the stream
actually trout and limited and a few other folks with
the forced earth where they're putting them back into streams

(01:31:29):
to get those pools and the riffles and the stuff
back in there for salmon habitat and stuff. So we
can we can work to do repariod management thinning for deer,
but providing the wood for the in stream restoration projects
at the same time.

Speaker 5 (01:31:45):
And then we got to tack all what about the
Washington and Oregon folks.

Speaker 2 (01:31:51):
Yeah, so we've got a group of folks.

Speaker 5 (01:31:53):
In California, I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
Yeah, So we got work. We have a group of
folks that are working for the Black del Deer Foundation
and Meal Deier Foundations there. I just and I know
that there's some grants and some funding coming along. I
just don't know what opportunities exist. I don't have a
breath of experience and know enough what's going on there.
And that would be working with Oregon Department of Fishing Game,
Washington Department Fishing Game and stuff, and state and BLM

(01:32:19):
and forest. Yeah, there is forests that are on that
side of the highway in the Black Tail world, on
the coast range stuff. So I'm sure, I'm more than
sure that these same kind of conversations and these same
opportunity exists on those landscapes there. It's just again taking
a look at where and why, Because there are places

(01:32:42):
that are they're working great. We don't need to go
in there and muck it up. There's stands on Prince
of Wales Island that have regenerated with a spacing of
tree is wide enough that there is forage underneath there
and it's not in that sklim exclusion phase. We don't
need to be dumping money into that.

Speaker 1 (01:33:00):
M Do you feel that all the money do you
feel that the habitat is the way to go, or
do you think that the all the energy that people
spend talking about predation, do.

Speaker 2 (01:33:13):
You think it's a waste of energy. No, no, no, no, no,
no no. There's a balance between those two. And I
totally understand the predation aspects of this, and I've one
of the things I've learned from my trail cameras. Yeah,
it's when wolves moves into that valley, the deers shut down.
The deer don't come down to the lower elevations for

(01:33:35):
two days. When the wolves go through. There is a
definite impact on the wolves and the landscape. So there's
a lot of people saying, all I go out deer hunting,
I don't find any deer and I see all these
wolves side. If you think about it, so if we
went out hunting together at the time that the deer
wolves are in there, the deer are all compressed and

(01:33:55):
these smaller habitat blocks because of all of this older
second growth out here, where do we go. We go
to where the deer compressed to because we know that's
the best place is to hunt, and we go there
and we find all these wolf sign Let's say it snowed,
and we see all the tracks and everything like that,
we don't see any deer.

Speaker 5 (01:34:14):
Yeah, I mean, no different than seeing a bunch of
human boot tracks.

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:19):
So our conclusion that we draw is there's nothing but
predators on the landscape and there's no deer there, when
in fact, there's probably quite a few deer there. They
just for that time period of slowly changed where they're
at on the landscape. So there's a definite impact. I mean,
I've got the graft. The rut was in full swing.

(01:34:41):
I had wolves move into the camera area for a
two day period and when I finished plot in my rut.
Usually the rut is a big bell curve of activity.
It starts up here, it goes crazy nuts. I have
fifty bucks a day past my twenty six cameras and
it drops off to nothing. There's a little tiny bit
for a second run. In the beginning of December, that

(01:35:03):
rent rut split into two bell curves around that time
that the wolves were there. It was a dramatic, uh
departure from the normal rut activity. It doesn't mean the
rut was stopping, but it was stopping where my cameras were.
They were still going on up hire. I'm quite sure
they just weren't coming down and checking on and the

(01:35:25):
dose weren't coming down and stuff like that. In the
lower elevation, they're like, ooh, I'm.

Speaker 5 (01:35:29):
Not here, but I imagine there's like a more effective
time of year for predator harvest wolf and you guys
are So they're right, mountain lions are starting to creep
in and.

Speaker 2 (01:35:42):
I'll tell you one of the So, yeah, So I've
been I've been involved in three studies with telemetry callers
where we monitored fawns right at birth through the first
two weeks of their lives, and the last one that
that Sophie did and it basically agreed not quite fifty percent,

(01:36:06):
but like forty eight percent of all sick of blacktail
fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their
life by black bear. And what we didn't know is
if a fond don't has forty eight percent of all
blacktail fawns are taken in the first two weeks of
their life by black bear. So okay, that is a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
So one half of the deer by black bear in
two weeks two weeks were gone.

Speaker 2 (01:36:37):
And what we found out was which we had no
knowledge of, because then we got doze on collar that
had twins that were on collars. She would take a
geomorphic some kind of a structure like a ridge or
a hill or a river or a road or something,
and she would put one fawn over here two to
three hundred yards away, and one fawn over here two

(01:36:58):
to three hundred yards away, and she would live in
between that and nurse both of those for that two weeks.

Speaker 5 (01:37:04):
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:37:05):
So if she lost one, she lost only one instead
of losing both of them. And so there's a natural
So there's always been black bear there. The deer have
grown up with black bear on the landscape. The deer
have changed their habits to reflect the predation that the
black bear put on those deer. And when and when
there was a lot of black bear before two thousand
and four, when we were doing deer darting, there wasn't

(01:37:28):
a day when I was calling to bring doze in
to shoot them, to put radio callers on them that
I didn't have one to two black bears smoke into me.
And I've got it. I've had them get closer than
you and I are and had them look past me
to see where the fawn was. They were so locked
into that sound. They knew I wasn't the faun, and

(01:37:49):
they didn't care about me. They just want to know
where that fall. I always thought what it would it
be like if you set a fawn decoy out, we'd
be would be gone. Oh wow, they just bowl over it.
So they're they're super focused on that fond distress call
and most of the fonds. What we find is the
black bear's feeding. The female has left them. The black

(01:38:12):
bear may not be actively hunting, but it's feeding and
digging up skunk cabbage in the spring. You've seen all
that stuff and all of a sudden it must get
a set or that fad. Here's movement thinks it's moms
and lets out one little bleat and you see this
acceleration and it's food that's gone.

Speaker 5 (01:38:29):
Yeah. So more effective from your based off of your research,
more effective to target black bears in the ahead of time,
right early spring.

Speaker 2 (01:38:41):
Well, so this is what why I get back to
the habitat, and that the fact that we have a
habitat challenge. Again, this is Jim Bitchetool's world. I moved
there in nineteen ninety. We had tons of clearcuts, tons
of food, young clearcuts of that two to fifteen year age.

(01:39:04):
We still had all kinds of old growth and we
had good conductivity even though the landscape was fractured, lots
of deer, unbelievable number of bears. I can't even fathom
to tell you how many bears were there. And wolves
were numerous. I saw wolves weekly, I saw black I
would see my third day in the woods. I still

(01:39:27):
have my journal entry. I saw twenty seven black bears
working in the woods the first the third day I
was on the Prince of Wales Island. I mean, that's
the kind of numbers you used to see. It became
really popular to hunt black bear, and if you look
at the graph, it went from seventy bears per year
to almost five hundred bears per year coming out of

(01:39:48):
Unit two.

Speaker 5 (01:39:49):
Harvested bears.

Speaker 2 (01:39:50):
Harvested bears. Wow, that was like the nod residents could
take too.

Speaker 1 (01:39:55):
Yeah, the whole air of like bringing in truckloads of
dog food and hunting stations off the road system, and
that crashed in.

Speaker 2 (01:40:03):
Two thousand and five and the state started managing it,
first with a registration and now with a draw and
they're actually, I think they're doing an incredible job. I'm
starting to see those older age class bears. So the
first thing we lost was the big bores. Then we
lost the older females. And when we started to losing
the older females, you start losing the knowledge of where

(01:40:24):
to dead, how to did, where to fish, and all
that kind of stuff, And so there was an impact.
Wolves I think has stayed relatively constant in that three
hundred to three hundred and fifty estimate population in there.
We've had another twenty timber sales since I got there
on federal lands, and this young young growth that was

(01:40:48):
all this forage has grown up to be nothing. So
now we have hardly any bears, but we're starting to
see them come back. We still have wolves on the landscape.
Why aren't we And we haven't had a killing winter
since twenty eleven. Why aren't we seeing tons of deer?
And I think the reason is is because we're losing
the habitat on the other end. And that's my take

(01:41:08):
on the landscape there that you know that the wolves
are still taken about the same number of deer that
they always did, and the bears are too, But there's
less bears, but the deer used to be able to
When there was tons of bears, the deer could still absorb,
losing fifty percent back. So we see a reduced deer number,

(01:41:32):
not so much because of predation, because the predation is
probably roughly the same as just a lower number, But
it's the fact that we just lost those deer that
aren't in those older stands of timber anymore where they
used to be. It doesn't bode well for us and
Prince of Welles for the next few years. I don't know.

(01:41:52):
I don't know how to tell you that me the
next eighty years, I'll be gone. You might still, but
it's it's you know. So I moved to southeast Alaska,
and I grew up hunting Columbia blacktail in Washington State,
and I moved up there, and I just fell in
love with these deer, and I realized that nobody knows

(01:42:13):
anything about these deer like they were. There's you know,
there's tons of stuff written on white tail, and there's
quite a bit of stuff written on mule deer and stuff,
but like nobody knows anything about that. And it was
one of the reasons why in two thousand and nine,
I bought the urlsic of blacktail dot org and in
about twenty fifth thirteen, Sophie and I and Todd created

(01:42:36):
that web page Sick of black Tail dot org the
Sick of Blacktail Deer Coalition. I wanted a place somebody
could go find out information about sick of blacktail. So
it's got all the stuff on translocations, it's got all
the stuff in there about all all of the written things,
both peer reviewed publications and not peer reviewed publications, and

(01:42:57):
stuff has been written. It's a place you could go
find out about sick of blacktail. And I'm excited to
see this the emphasis on blacktail throughout their region, both
Columbia and stuff through the Blacktail Deer Foundation.

Speaker 4 (01:43:12):
Are you going to roll sick of Blacktail dot org
into black Tail Deer Foundation.

Speaker 1 (01:43:19):
What you're looking for?

Speaker 2 (01:43:22):
Wait, no, we might put it up on the page.
But if you look at the Blacktail Deer on the
Blacktails Foundation thing, that's what Sophie and I have on
our webpage.

Speaker 3 (01:43:34):
Okay, we said they were the same photo.

Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
Now that know that drawing the characterization right up there.
That that right there, that's on our web page. They
needed something and Sophie and I agreed that that was
a good thing to allow them to use that so.

Speaker 1 (01:43:50):
Well, the black Tail Deer Foundation sits separate outside of
Meal Deer Foundation, or is it just like a wing
of the Meal Deer Foundation.

Speaker 2 (01:43:56):
It's with them, kind of like the difference between Peasants
Forever and Quail Forever kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:44:03):
And so who's the director?

Speaker 2 (01:44:06):
Greg Shean came on as director. I don't know if
you know Greg. He's awesome. He wasn't there very long.
And Steve Belinda called me one morning and said, you
need to get on a call. Steve's got an idea.
And Steve says, what do you think if we created
the Blacktail Deer Foundation? And I said, I said three
years ago. I told Steve I would give him two

(01:44:26):
and a half to three years on the emphasis that
the Meal Deer Foundation was putting on Blacktail. And I
was kind of getting ready to retire again, and I said,
I'll give you three more years. I'm all in, I
want to see this thing be successful.

Speaker 1 (01:44:38):
So what will your role with black Tail Deer Foundation be?

Speaker 2 (01:44:41):
To try to be an advocate for deer in Alaska?
Dear habitat work in Alaska and the work that we
could do. We have a full time wildlife biology trained
employee for the black Tail Deer Foundation, Lizard Judis Cu
Leonora Scott's awesome. Scott has been working up with the

(01:45:03):
Laska Department Efficient Game to do the modeling thing to
answer the where so they're doing across all of the
Tongas native and non native lands? Where where where should
we if we get dollars to do things, or if
the agencies and the other landowners focus on a habitat
restoration and a second growth industry, where should we be

(01:45:24):
putting our efforts in work? And so they're working on
that right now. And so I'm helping to develop chapters
and be a spokesperson basically for the Black Tail Deer
Foundation and to educate people on what why why why
do we care? I love these dear. I just every
day I go to the woods, I try to go

(01:45:46):
out and learn some and I think every day I
get schooled.

Speaker 5 (01:45:52):
Which keeps you learning?

Speaker 3 (01:45:53):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
No, it is you know, like I like wow, I
wouldn't have thought that, you know. And every once in
a while I the licking branch thing. There's not a
lot of I went out in the snow to start
gpsing trails because if you go out there, there's a
hundred trails, hundreds of trails. You go out in the
snow and.

Speaker 1 (01:46:13):
I found you put a camera on one of those
trails and there's a trail there, But it doesn't necessarily
mean something's going to come down that trail.

Speaker 2 (01:46:19):
But go out in the snow and GPS the one
or two trails that are really ran and go to
and you'll see they go like this, and they'll come
to a node. Put your camera at that node. That's
where three or four of the really used trails come together.

Speaker 1 (01:46:38):
They come together in the high spots.

Speaker 2 (01:46:40):
No, they come together. They they just across the landscape.
The deer trails will kind of mingle and sometimes they intersect.
Oh and when they.

Speaker 4 (01:46:49):
You're not saying they intersect at a particular type of feature.

Speaker 2 (01:46:52):
Just where they intersect, and at that intersect, I'll almost
guarantee you there's a licking branch somewhere.

Speaker 5 (01:46:58):
Right there, saying it really surprises me.

Speaker 1 (01:47:01):
Sorry, did you ever sit the licking branch?

Speaker 2 (01:47:04):
Huh?

Speaker 1 (01:47:04):
Do you ever? Do you ever set up and just
sit on the licking branch? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:47:07):
Yeah, if you go to I got a YouTube channel
and if you go there, I have tons of videos
I've put together of licking branch as. You can watch
buck after buck after buck come to these things.

Speaker 5 (01:47:22):
Have you done like mock scrapes and mock licking branch.
Have you set up a totally synthetic one yet?

Speaker 2 (01:47:28):
No, I've thought about it. Well. First off, it would
have to be a synthetic lure because all natural lures
are forbidden in Alaska. That's been outlawed because they're so
worried about CWD getting there, and uh so they're they're
gonna have to. It'll have to be something a deer attracted.

(01:47:49):
I know several people that choosed. Uh. I can't remember
the name of the company that does the rope hemp
rope and you you soak it in some kind of
a lure and I can't remember it. Yew, they put
that up and our bucks just beat the pee out
of there. The problem is is we have so much
rain you've got to put looo around it about every
two days.

Speaker 4 (01:48:08):
Do you ever hear of a thing called buckman juice? No,
the urine from a man named Doug Durren. No, it
might be worth checking out. I could try to get
you a bottle of buck Man juice.

Speaker 2 (01:48:21):
I can tell you that I twenty by thirteen. I
had a really beautiful four by four with eyeguards coming
through one muskeg between two and four for three days
and I hung a tree stand. And I'm not a
patient man. I hate being sitting there. But I went
in and hung a tree stand. And I got out

(01:48:43):
of that tree stand because I had to backpack it
in three quarters of a mile and it got cold.
I got cold because I sweated and went After I
hung it, I got down out of there, and the
next day my trail camera eighteen minutes after I got down,
he pushed three do's right by by stand. So the
next day I got it there and I sat from
seven thirty in the morning until two thirty in the afternoon,
and this dough came out. Well. I had peede out

(01:49:05):
of the sand, and she came over and she smelled
every place I had peed, and I had dropped the
little rope that I had pulled the muzzle atter up by,
and she moothed that and stuff, and then she just
slowly walked. She followed my tracks and smelled me and
the cross I could see. She was exactly following my tracks.
We don't have any predators that come from above, so

(01:49:28):
she never looked up. I was only twelve feet above her,
but she never looked up. And she took off, and
I cocked the gun and swung over to the opening.
She come out, and he comes smoking into that opening,
and I got that buck.

Speaker 1 (01:49:40):
Whoa all right?

Speaker 2 (01:49:41):
In fact, I'm not this good. It was an accident.
But my camera was set on a three shot burst
and he ran by the camera and it set it off.
My mouth growned him to a stop, and I didn't know.
You could actually see me in the tree stand. And
next thing you see is a big puff of smoke.
He's dying on the edge of the picture. It happened

(01:50:02):
that fast, that.

Speaker 5 (01:50:04):
Fast, unreal.

Speaker 2 (01:50:06):
Now, we were told that she did not she was
not wigged out by where I had peeded it all.
Just absolutely did not care. She was curious, really curious,
but had not She wasn't wigged out by that at all. Jim.

Speaker 5 (01:50:21):
We were told that you end up shooting a lot
of bucks head on in the chest, and then you
what's your aiming.

Speaker 2 (01:50:28):
Spot, the bottom center, the bottom throat patch, and you
recovered the round ball against the rear leg bone. Hopefully
you'll find this out someday.

Speaker 3 (01:50:42):
I hope so too. I hope so too.

Speaker 5 (01:50:45):
But why how does it end up head on so frequently?

Speaker 2 (01:50:49):
Because they're coming to the call?

Speaker 5 (01:50:50):
Oh god, yeah, they're coming to the call.

Speaker 2 (01:50:54):
The other thing is I try to set up and
blind call all the time, and if he's sneaking in,
what I do is I tried set up so if
there's a ridge over here or a travel way that
I think they might be using, I set up here
knowing that the wind is blowing across me this way
with an opening on this side, so that he's going
to come and he's going to try to circle behind me.

Speaker 1 (01:51:15):
You catch him crossing that opening, and I catch.

Speaker 2 (01:51:17):
Him crossing that opening, And that's a lot of times.
They'll still turn and look at you. But you can
get them broadside if you're just don't man. You like
when I start calling, I don't move because they're locked on.
They know the minute you blow that call from five, six,
seven hundred yards away, they know they know the stump
you're sitting by, that that that I've watched them across

(01:51:41):
large open fast BUSKEG systems come at full tilt run
across there to that spot. I'm quite sure because I'm
What I'm trying to do now is be a little
more patient. I find that big bucks come in between
thirty and forty five minutes. What and I'm not that patient?

(01:52:05):
I called for ten or fifteen, and I want to
go over there. I might do something different. I'm sure
that there has been hundreds of bucks come to where
I had just called it. I'm no longer there, I'm
off hunting something else. Or what I'll do is I frequently.

Speaker 1 (01:52:19):
When you set up to call, how long you sitting there?

Speaker 2 (01:52:22):
You should be there between thirty five and forty minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:52:27):
God give you a little bit of math that Mercer
Laing is a man named Mercer Lawing gave me but
so similar situation. Call him Bobcats, Predator, call him Bobcats.
Bobcats will sometimes show up like forty minutes later. So
most guys that call Kyle still sip for fifteen minutes.
That's kind of the rule of thumb, right, fifteen minutes,

(01:52:47):
everybody gets bored and you want to leave. But a
Bobcat might show up at forty minutes. And I was
talking to my friend mercer who calls tons of bobcats
and used to do it professionally. He's like, yeah, but
I can hunt twice as many spots at twenty. Sure,
some will show up at forty. Most show up before,

(01:53:08):
like most show up before. So I'd rather hit twice
as many spots than wait around for the one that
might show up at forty, like a calculated loss.

Speaker 4 (01:53:18):
So you're saying, when you run it, you don't sit
there forty minutes, but you should.

Speaker 2 (01:53:22):
I should. You can if I time myself and make
it happen. I have tended to kill better bucks at
the thirty to forty five minute period. That is a
long which means Steve, I look around, be like, man,
and you and I both know sometimes you call in

(01:53:42):
there poop.

Speaker 1 (01:53:43):
That's what I'm looking for. The one that just is
all of a sudden in your face.

Speaker 2 (01:53:46):
Yeah, and we love that. That's exhilarating. Man, my god,
you're talking to an animal and all of a sudden,
it's like smack in your face, like at five feet
it's like crazy stuff. Later, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (01:53:59):
You're calling it, what like how often you call him?

Speaker 2 (01:54:02):
I usually start out with a really aggressive uh call sequence.
I'm much louder, and I've been told that I'm too loud.
Oh no, that's half the volume. I really crack cut it.

Speaker 3 (01:54:15):
But this is all the classic black tail deer whistle
that's sold in Alaska. That's what you're using. No, Oh no,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:54:22):
Can I use brand name? Sure?

Speaker 5 (01:54:23):
Oh, you don't have to give away any secrets.

Speaker 2 (01:54:25):
No, there's no secrets. You know the cow talk that
came out of years ago, the first cow call that
ever was made. Oh yeah, rubber band, the plastic thing.
That's what I've killed all my deer off of. I
tighten that rubber band and it's got you use it
like the thoro axe in the back and could change
my pitch. I start out really quiet, just make.

Speaker 1 (01:54:43):
The noise of your mouth.

Speaker 2 (01:54:44):
Okay, I cut it. I started out really really quiet,
and then I crescendoed the louder and louder and louder.
I'm reaching out for I.

Speaker 1 (01:54:54):
Know what you just used crescendo right, I've always I've
used it wrong my whole life. It's like I thought
the crescendo was the top.

Speaker 5 (01:55:02):
No, it's the build.

Speaker 1 (01:55:03):
The build. Someone told me that one time, and my
whole life I said when it reached a crescendo, meaning
the cap the apex like, no, the crescendos is the climb.
Good jobject.

Speaker 2 (01:55:14):
It's like throwing a pebble into a pond. Your your
sound waves go out. You never know what's going to
how it's going to come back to you. And so
I I imagine that. I know in my mind every
time I call some deer hears it. They may not
choose to come, but they are hearing it. And so

(01:55:35):
I start with a really loud bang. I try to
get them to stand up okay and start Now. They
may not complete it, but I try to get them
to do that, and so I start that. Then I
go back down and I build and build. And then
if I'm doing a rattling sequence, I start out super
loud and a roar grunt that they're are deer are

(01:55:58):
when they're aggravating and they do the roar gud. You'll
hear that from two hundred yards away. It is nuts
how loud they are.

Speaker 3 (01:56:06):
This is getting me excited for a huh yeah for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:56:10):
Yeah go on. Anyhow, Now that rattling stuff is interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:56:16):
The other part of that is when if a buck
responds to a rattling sequence and you decide not to
shoot him, keep it going. Numerable times, I've had a
smaller buck come in first and mister Holy Jesus walk
in later, like, oh my god. It's just like five
minutes later. You'll see these really big antler chips out

(01:56:39):
in the brush moved around, and a lot of people
will bang kill that buck and go over and deal that.
And they didn't realize that there was a smoker buck
coming in.

Speaker 1 (01:56:49):
Hmmm.

Speaker 2 (01:56:51):
I had. I had Sophie with another biologist there and
I called it a beautiful three point and Sophie took
that three point and she jumped up. I said no, no, no, no,
let's keep calling. And they were like, no, let's take
pictures and they ran out across the muskeke and I'd
like to shoot. So I went over there and I
I stepped away from my gun, took my backpack off,

(01:57:12):
and I laid my muzzloader down and I went over
and I grabbed their camera and I hear snort and
I turned around and there's this four by four with
h guards twenty yards away, steam just rolling off it.
And I looked at my gun, which was about ten
feet away in that buck and he took off and
he ran down the edge of the muskeke, and I
grabbed my mutherloader and I rolled out into the muskeke,

(01:57:34):
and he went down sixty yards and went in and stopped.
But he stopped with the sweet spot between two trees.
And he ought not to have done that. But I mean,
there was a classic example of him. He was hot
and he was looking for a fight, and he came
in just virtually smoking.

Speaker 3 (01:57:53):
A little off topic. But sixty yards blacktail broadside. Is
that an offhand shot for you? Or do you look
for a rest in that situation.

Speaker 2 (01:58:01):
I almost always try to take a knee. I tried.
I don't care if they're five yards, I try to.
I can do it. I've done it. I mean seventy yards,
eighty yards. Last two years ago, I killed a bucket
they olpine. I had none of the rest on it.
I was like, suck it up, buttercup, and I aimed
and just did a perfect shot out him. But I

(01:58:23):
am small abisball. I tell you you already got one shot.
You're not going to reload, and any kind of lifetime
of that deer running off or anything else, you've got
to make that one shot. That's the challenge. That's why
I went to Muslim and eventually it's just to challenge
myself to make that one child.

Speaker 1 (01:58:40):
You've been married to hell a long time, haven't you?

Speaker 2 (01:58:43):
Twenty six years? On the fourteenth.

Speaker 1 (01:58:46):
I think I asked you, like your marriage advice. I
can't remember what you told me. I did ask your
marriage advice. Did you tell me that you always treat
your wife like a princess?

Speaker 2 (01:58:56):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:58:56):
No, no, that.

Speaker 3 (01:58:58):
Was Randy, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:59:03):
But I did ask you in that parking lot on
the island.

Speaker 2 (01:59:07):
We did.

Speaker 1 (01:59:07):
Yeah, what would you tell me? Your plan was?

Speaker 2 (01:59:11):
Oh, I went through the whole thing about why we
got buried in February. The fact that you know, like
trappid and bear season started in March and through April,
the trapping fell off, but then there was field season,
and then it was hunting season for deer all the
way down through into November, and then trapping season picked
up again. And usually things were froze up in February
and that was a good time. But it happened to
be a three day weekend that year with Valentine's Day

(01:59:34):
on it, so we got married on Valentine's Day.

Speaker 1 (01:59:36):
That's cute.

Speaker 2 (01:59:37):
So i'd be home on anniversaries.

Speaker 1 (01:59:39):
So have you have you guys got all those years
of marriages because good luck? Or do you got like
a strategy?

Speaker 2 (01:59:46):
I think she's tolerable than me.

Speaker 1 (01:59:50):
You just got lucky.

Speaker 2 (01:59:51):
I got lucky. We got together and gardens. I said,
I hunt. She says, oh, I've known guys that hunt
before it. I said, no, you don't understand. She does.
Now we get a lot good. She allows helping processing.
She's got a few hunts with me and stuff like that.
But bainly I go out and hut by myself and

(02:00:13):
she does all the helps, all the cutting up and
stuff when I break it home.

Speaker 1 (02:00:16):
Okay, had she shot a deer?

Speaker 2 (02:00:18):
Nope, not even interested. So he's watched me kill a bunch.

Speaker 4 (02:00:23):
But other than that, what she say when you get one?
She get excited. Oh yeah, she doesn't feel bad for
the deer.

Speaker 2 (02:00:30):
If she'll point out every once in a while, like
we don't have any elk in the freezer.

Speaker 1 (02:00:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:00:35):
I love those kind of statements like go forth and
kill elk?

Speaker 1 (02:00:37):
You know, like, hey, what's up with uh? You know
how you're allowed to kill a elk? On Prince Wales
if you run into one, as long as you have
a deer tag or something like that.

Speaker 5 (02:00:45):
I've seen tracks and I found you haven't.

Speaker 1 (02:00:47):
Laid eyes on one.

Speaker 2 (02:00:48):
No, I know.

Speaker 1 (02:00:50):
I had a guy who was feeding me a lot
of intel about where it was somewhere, but I never
looked into it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:54):
I can honestly tell you. In about ear two thousand,
Karen saw a cow and a calf in the middle
of the road just before you get to Goose Creek
Thorn Bay intersection there coming to Thorn Bay. She came
home and said, I just saw something, a deer that
I don't know what it was. She had never seen
a winter calf with the kind of that brushy mane,

(02:01:16):
and I think I went to a bugle magazine and
I held up so it looked like that. She said yes.
I said, let's get in the truck, and we drove
back out there and their tracks were there. I mean
I tracked it for eight hundred yards and I never
caught up to him.

Speaker 1 (02:01:29):
So they swam over.

Speaker 2 (02:01:31):
They were because Brushy and Shrubby's not very far from Jarembo,
and so they went from Atland to Zarembo and then
they can come straight across brushy and shrubby across snow
Pass there and down to Prince of Wales. So there
was dozens of sightings there. So they first planted Roosevelt
elcover on Atland Island and then they came back with

(02:01:53):
rockies and the rockies went off, I don't like this.

Speaker 1 (02:01:55):
Stuff, and they went so that's what was happening. They
banded and there was the rockies would strike off swimming.

Speaker 2 (02:02:04):
There was a three year period where we had a
lot of elk sidings on Prince of Well's Island, and
I know three times during that period that I crossed
trail tracks and I tracked them. But those those are
the years that we were doing the deer darting, and
we were free ranging darting uh and and getting off
the road system and calling deer in and processing deer

(02:02:26):
and stuff and and that during those years were the
same expansion years of elk And I definitely saw elk
tracks at remote areas on Prince of Wales.

Speaker 1 (02:02:36):
So do you think right now there's none on Prince
of Wale's Island.

Speaker 2 (02:02:39):
I don't think so. I think they've got to settle
down and they have a population on jer Inbo now
and they've all erbred and they're not striking off. I
don't think they're striking off. I'm sure some young male
thinks that there's a whole island over there that might
be full of cows that I don't know about, so
they might come over.

Speaker 4 (02:02:58):
But you know, buddy mine, he one time, this is
the same body was telling me about where to go
look for help.

Speaker 1 (02:03:06):
But he one time found two. He pulled two blacktail fawns.

Speaker 4 (02:03:10):
Out of the water, couldn't find their mom andy where
little fawns they had swim they were swimming.

Speaker 1 (02:03:16):
He got both in his boat. One died right away.

Speaker 4 (02:03:19):
He got one wrapped in a space blanket, got it
all warm back up again, brought it up to the
beach and it ran off. So some number of those
things die like that.

Speaker 2 (02:03:32):
That and also when they're walking on the beach, a
bald eagle will take them and they'll grab them and
sometimes they let them go, but they've punctured their insides
with their I've found several that has the talon marks.
But I've also had like twelve mile alarm the back

(02:03:54):
road down towards your place down there. I've I've saw
where e was swimming across. You know how they'll get
a salmon and they can't take off. Yep. Well, when
it came out, it had a fun and it's challenged.

Speaker 1 (02:04:07):
No ship, there's a grabbing about in the water and
drowning them.

Speaker 2 (02:04:10):
So there was there was quite a there's quite a
We don't know what percentage of funds get taken by eagles,
but it is a predator of funds, especially when there
those first two or three day wobbly leg kind of things.
There's definitely a definitely a thing.

Speaker 1 (02:04:27):
You know what you get like you get sort of
this idea.

Speaker 4 (02:04:31):
You know, think about turkey hunt if your turkey hunter
not but people you're calling turkeys and people like, oh,
you know, he's not gonna want to cross the he's
not gonna want to cross the ditch, or you know,
you're trying to call him through the fence.

Speaker 1 (02:04:42):
You won't want to try to cross the fence.

Speaker 4 (02:04:44):
And people talking about stuff like that, like these little
perceived obstacles. You know, when you're trying to call something
in when you get up there there's so much water
and you think of like you think of a bear
deer coming down to the water and he's gonna like
kind of psych himself up, get ready.

Speaker 1 (02:05:01):
You know, and then go for it. When you're watching them,
it's like they don't even think, man.

Speaker 2 (02:05:06):
If you're a rutting buck on, they just like just
like in the water, swim, wow, don't.

Speaker 4 (02:05:11):
They're not like, you know, not like who I gotta
build myself up for the swim. It's like they don't
even they seem as comfortable swimming as they do walking.

Speaker 2 (02:05:18):
I've had wolves swimming in front of my boat and
get out on the beach and just shake off, sit
down and whatever.

Speaker 4 (02:05:25):
It's wild to watch deer like come down and bop
into the salt.

Speaker 1 (02:05:29):
Water and just fast.

Speaker 2 (02:05:31):
They're fast. You can't catch them in a canoe, have
little webby things or nothing. It seems like they really go.

Speaker 1 (02:05:37):
Well yeah, it's just they don't give a ship.

Speaker 2 (02:05:39):
They just go.

Speaker 1 (02:05:41):
They just swim. You see him on these dinky little
islands now, and then you're like, what the hell are
you doing.

Speaker 2 (02:05:45):
On the island. Actually, I think a lot of times
right about the end of May, the dose go to
those little islands. They have funds because there's less predators
out there.

Speaker 4 (02:05:54):
Well, I've seen that time of year you see black
bears striking out for little Teeney Island.

Speaker 2 (02:06:00):
You know, yep, I absolutely agree with that.

Speaker 1 (02:06:07):
Well, how do people get involved with Blacktail? To your foundation?

Speaker 2 (02:06:12):
Go to the web paite black Tail Deer got org.

Speaker 1 (02:06:16):
Yeah, black you guys are gonna start chapters. People can
start chapters.

Speaker 2 (02:06:20):
We've got chapters. Uh, I think we we had a
lot of the meal Deer chapters. We went to them
and said, do you want to become a black a
dedicated black Tail chapter? And I think most of them
said yes, Some of them in California that have meal
deer close or in Washington, Oregon that that also care
about meal deer in eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and stuff

(02:06:42):
like that. They were they were trying to figure out
how to go both ways on that stuff, which is
totally cool. At Alaska, it's a no brainer.

Speaker 1 (02:06:49):
Well, is there going to be a chapter in Craig?

Speaker 2 (02:06:51):
Yep, there he is really I'm the Tripperson.

Speaker 1 (02:06:55):
Oh can you join if you're just opposer from out
of town, Yeah, we'd like you.

Speaker 2 (02:06:59):
Okay, Yeah, So you could go to the website. There's
the and that's the easiest way. There's several options on
on what how many years you do it and what
level of chapter and whether you're a sponsoring and and
we'll eventually have a deal on their for life memberships
and stuff like that. We've already done some chapter awards

(02:07:20):
stuff on Kodiak. We have a really functioning, really good
chapter on Kodiak, and uh, we're not going to do
anything on Kodiak for habitat and habitat is fine on Kodiak.
But what we're doing is helping the research that the Laska
Department of Ficient Game is doing on Kodiak on sick
of Blacktail Deer. And that was the decision of the
chapter up there that they wanted to help the area

(02:07:44):
biologist and his assistant of their work on the projects
that they're doing. And there's a bunch of camera traps
going on and they're actually going to have the Black
Tailed Deer Foundation members run the running the line of
cameras and helping change out cars and batteries and stuff,
which will save money for day.

Speaker 1 (02:08:00):
Well that's cool, Yeah, that would be some good volunteer
and we're gonna.

Speaker 2 (02:08:04):
We're gonna be doing that in other areas. So we've
got we're gonna have a chapter in Judo. We've got
a chapter in Cisca, Prince of Wales catch a can
uh palmer withscilla. We want one in Fairbanks, we got
one in Anchorage. I'm trying to think I might be
missing one. And of course those guys don't have deer,

(02:08:25):
but they go to Kodiak or they care, you know,
And that's what I tell people. We all have we
all have organizations that we support and we think about
and it's your choice to put your money where you
best fit. And I the folks that really care about
blacktail deer across the West and then Alaska, I hope

(02:08:47):
they seriously consider a black tail deer foundation. I know.

Speaker 4 (02:08:50):
I got a lot of buddies that are in the
interior that that's a part of their annual cycle is
because things wind down, right, and so guys go to
Kodiak Prince William Sound Southeast as part of the annual
deal is to get like another hunting you know, every year,
which for them hunting November, it is very late season.

Speaker 2 (02:09:09):
Right, but they're also out of that by that time
the weather's deteriorating up an interior, it's really cold and
come down and be warm.

Speaker 1 (02:09:16):
Yeah, yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (02:09:20):
Yeah, it's a I'm really excited to see the emphasis
that Greg and the board on the Fielder Foundation Board
and stuff, and Steve and his conservation group is putting
on this because it's to me, it's where I wanted
to get to starting in about two thousand and six,

(02:09:41):
and I think it's exciting. It's just for me. It's
really exciting to see this focus on a deer that
really had nobody focusing on him in the past. And
I don't know what strides could be made. I don't
know what landscape management policies can be changed or what,
but I hope to be part of it.

Speaker 4 (02:09:59):
Well, think that if you are able to promote like
you can definitely promote research, you can promote awareness of
issues right, and you can unify groups of people who
love the animals to you know, look out for their
the best interests of the hunting even outside of the

(02:10:22):
habitat work that you want to do. I think that
doing those things and making a sort of like political body,
so to speak of like of blacktail fans who are
educated and aware, I think that in and of itself
is valuable.

Speaker 2 (02:10:37):
One of the questions that come to us all the time.
But you would be supportive intensity management programs on predators,
and we focus on habitat. I want to be very
clear about that. We don't take a stance on there
unless some management would come down that would greatly negatively
affect the deer population. But mainly we're looking at habitat

(02:11:02):
and what can we do is there is there truly
something to be done for habitat? And say, I think
there really truly is something that can be done for habitat.
It's not going to be planting sagebrush, taken down fence,
it's not going to be working on migration corridors and stuff.
It's going to be working on conductivity of that animal
on the landscape and where's it going to get his
next meal? And can we do better in creating those

(02:11:26):
salad rules out there for those things to go forwarge.

Speaker 1 (02:11:28):
On and give them a way to get to the
salad bowl.

Speaker 2 (02:11:31):
And I want people to be able to have access
to the areas that we create those opportunities for deer
so that they also can hunt those areas. I don't
want to leave I don't want to leave that rural
resident or non residence or anybody else out of that equation.

Speaker 1 (02:11:52):
Okay, thanks for coming on man.

Speaker 2 (02:11:55):
And you've got to do it with a flintlocker.

Speaker 1 (02:11:58):
That's the new rule. Don't let that rumor get out there.

Speaker 5 (02:12:02):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (02:12:03):
No, So I called for my best flintlock story that
I called for an entire hour. I had trees like
this that were being rubbed in this area, and I
called for a whole hour. It was cold. It was
like fifteen degrees that morning, so you're about.

Speaker 5 (02:12:18):
Thirty five minutes past your usual tolerance.

Speaker 2 (02:12:20):
I tied myself for an hour, and at an hour
I was starting to get really cold. I stood up
and I kind of brush around, and I put my
backpack on and I reached down. I picked up my flintlock,
and I come around my tree and there's this huge
five point walking down the trail right at me. He's
about eighty five yards out again, steam rolling off of him.

(02:12:40):
I remember the steam out of his nostrils that morning.
He was so beautiful. He was all vivid, vivid alder
rubbed orange antlers. And he turns around, he goes back
up the hill. I wasn't going to. All I would
have had was an eighty five yard shot with a
flintlock offhand. I'm not going to take that out a
sick of black. They'll look it straight at me. Turned

(02:13:01):
her out, walks back over the hill. I run up
the hill and I look and his tracks go off
and he goes into this timber. And I had a can,
one of the little long cans, and I reached out
on that loud and I reached out and I flipped
that can and he flew up out of the timber
and came broadside at fifty yards, turned broadside with the

(02:13:25):
mourning sun sitting against him steaming, reached back and scratched
his butt with his antlers, and I dropped to go
to one knee, and I couldn't see him over the curve,
and I said, stand up. You do this at the
range all the time. Focus, focus, focus, And I when
I when I shoot a flintlock, I try to imagine
that round ball going clear through the target before I

(02:13:46):
come out of my hold. And I reached up and
I booh, And when I got the smoke cleared, he
was gone, just like he had never been there. And
I walked over and here's a chunkle lung laying on
the spagn and moss. And I'm like, all right, you're
on the right track. But there I would have boarded.

(02:14:08):
It was I wish I could play in my brain
the sun on his body and the steam rising off
his body there at about fifty yards. That was. That
was a special moment.

Speaker 5 (02:14:17):
Heck, yeah, I'm fired out. Sign me up for the
Blacktail here Foundation as well.

Speaker 4 (02:14:25):
All right, thank you, guys man, thanks so much for
coming out with Jim Blacktail.

Speaker 5 (02:14:29):
Dear dot org.

Speaker 1 (02:14:31):
That's right, that's easy to remember, dud org. Start a chapter,
join a chapter, and go.

Speaker 2 (02:14:38):
Check out sick a Blacktail dot org. That's Sophie and
Toddenmind's web page.

Speaker 1 (02:14:43):
Learn about some researches. Yep, thanks dude.

Speaker 2 (02:14:46):
All right,

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