Ep. 714: Enrolling At Backwoods Uni. with Lake Pickle and 'Old Trapper' Kate

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
you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging
deer stands, or scouting for ELK, First Light has performance
apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it

(00:31):
out at first light dot com. F I R S
T L I t E dot com. Welcome everybody. Joined
today by two super special guests. We got Lake, well three.
It's not like it's like we're just it's like Seth,

(00:52):
we're just regular.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
They're here again.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Seth just hanging out. No one knows what he's doing.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
I don't even know what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Join today by three very special guests. Lake Pickle, the
most memorable name in America. I was at the I'm
gonna get to the r two guests. But when I
was at this big commencement or like a graduation ceremony
last weekend, Yeah, I could tell you why.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
And they're like giving everybody's name.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
You know, they're a doctor in the house.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
They're getting everybody's name.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
And a guy comes up who had I believe changed
his last name to Extravaganza. I was expecting like a
professional wrestler to come across the stage. I was just
a regular dude. Yeah. I was like, oh wow, wrestlers here?

Speaker 2 (01:46):
That is that speech? Was that filmed?

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Is it somewhere? I tried looking for it.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Kylie has it?

Speaker 2 (01:52):
I was I was turkey hunting, so I couldn't make it.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
But Kyles where.

Speaker 5 (01:56):
I think it's going to be put up as a
social post or a YouTube.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, I want to say it.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
It's called there is No Plan b mm hmmm.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
I like that. I think I've heard that before from
you Lake Pickle.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
The most memorable name in America, the hardest name in America,
which is Caitlyn los Banoso, which one can see why
she just calls herself old traffic Kate. Is am I
saying it right? Los Banosa lo Spinosa. Her handle on
one of my like a thing I love looking in

(02:28):
on is her hand on Instagram is old trapper Kate.
It's all about trapping and other kind of outdoors adventures,
which I appreciate. So she's here today, Maggie Huddler's here today,
journalist extraordinary. What are you working on right now is
the most exciting thing.

Speaker 6 (02:45):
Most exciting thing. We've been having dog weeks. I've been
writing dog stuff, which is fun because I love my dogs.
And I just got into training a bird dog. So
I've got a year and a half old.

Speaker 7 (02:57):
Pup, Bill.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
What kind of kind is it?

Speaker 7 (03:00):
He's a Lab German wire hair pointer mix.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Is that intention or did you get like a like
a pound?

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (03:07):
So I really like mutts. We'll talk about this later.

Speaker 6 (03:10):
I just wrote an article about why maybe you should
consider a mutt to be your next hunting dog. And uh,
we got sick wading through the muck and fallen through
the ice to go after our ducks, and we're like,
all right, we can get one more dog. We started
looking and somebody had wire hair lab pups and we're like, well, shit,

(03:32):
I guess.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
We're getting a dog.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
That's interesting man.

Speaker 8 (03:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:34):
The guy he had a bunch of bird dogs. He
had labs and wire hairs and he was like, yeah,
I was always interested to see what they would end
up like mixed. And he's a good dog. He's huge,
he's a big boy. Uh, he's kind of goofy lake saw.

Speaker 9 (03:51):
That's the funniest thing. I've seen all week.

Speaker 6 (03:53):
Lake saw him run full speed into a glass door
the other day, running dog. He's just dog. He's a
little disgruntled. The glass in our house isn't that clean.

Speaker 9 (04:12):
I guess that dog was so embarrassed.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Shame, man, I've been meaning to spend a long time
kind of explaining my buddy Doug Darren's new lab. But
it's just.

Speaker 6 (04:26):
Too Mark dog, Yeah, what do you like?

Speaker 4 (04:33):
Mark?

Speaker 7 (04:33):
Do you not like?

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Listen? Man, I think that that dog can't see it.
Dog can't see it. But I think that dog got
hit on the head. I have never seen a dog
that's so not aware of how dogs are supposed to be,
like any normal Like I've been around fifty years old. Man,

(04:54):
I'm looking at dogs my whole life. We said, have
all kinds of dogs. When I was a kid.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
This dog.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
There's like certain things in the dog playbook, right, Like
if you're driving all around out in the woods and
a dog is in like a can am. You're driving
all around and you get to an interesting spot, everybody
jumps out. Kids are like catching crappies. Whatever. He's like,

(05:19):
he doesn't get.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Out, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Like any dog in the world would be like, well, dude,
I'm gonna get out, yeah and see what everybody's doing.
He goes into a house, he doesn't go check what's
going on around.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Interesting, it might be a good thing.

Speaker 7 (05:37):
He just kind of chills out.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, Doug can't. Doug's like. Doug's like if you said
to someone, if someone had a baby and you said, man,
I don't know the baby's not right, They're not gonna
take that. Well, do you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 4 (05:48):
Do you know what I'm saying? Getting hurt?

Speaker 8 (05:55):
So if he's like if the thing is sitting in
the side by side and he's like, come on.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
You got well keep and Doug won't. Doug won't pull
it out. I'll pull it out. I'll grab it, I
can't handle it, grab by the collar and pull it out.
Doug will come in the house. So there'll be a
household of people. Doug will pull up, Doug come in
the house, He leaves the door open, and you twenty
minutes later, a dog's sitting in there. It's like, it's

(06:23):
like amazing, it's one of the few dogs you could
put it and just it'll be there when you come back.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
Well, it's handy.

Speaker 8 (06:29):
In some situations, they'd be like one of those dogs
you see in Montana's just on the flatbed.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, you like go into a bar or whatever and
like the dogs just out on the flatbed.

Speaker 9 (06:38):
No, this is different, thing different, This is different.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
That's just different obedience.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
I know this is not not obedience because I forgot
to mention Doug is imploring the dog to come out.

Speaker 5 (06:50):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's gone just like comfort.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
Maybe he's gonna be tested.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
I'm saying this man, because like if I just if you,
you know, if you disagree with Doug on something like
CWD or something, He's gonna write you a mean ass email.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
So I can only imagine what he's thinking right now.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
He hacking on his dog in salt a man's dog
fight words.

Speaker 6 (07:12):
You know, you know, my old dog, Shooter made me
believe in reincarnation because, for one, I'm pretty sure this
dog smoked way too many Marlboro Reds in his past life.
He like he's got a real smoker tack and the
vets are like nothing's wrong with him. He also has
favorite songs. He loves the band Cripple Creek. He just

(07:33):
perks right up to that and just yowls.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
Amazing.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
You should introduce him to this dog Mark.

Speaker 6 (07:39):
So so my theory from what I've heard on Mark
is maybe Mark was like a big fat dude that
just likes to ride around in can ams and like
could drink a beer and just sit in the truck. Yeah,
you know, you never know what a dog's ass like.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
No, they might get a nice email from Doug. He's gonna,
he's gonna. They're talking about incarnation, but this is gonna
He's this is gonna speak to Doug. This is gonna
speak Doug.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
Lake.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
I forgot to mention besides having a very memorable name,
Lake is an avid at doorsman. Used to used to
be tangled up in the old days Will Primos, which
is super cool.

Speaker 9 (08:17):
Yeah, I was for about a decade man, and I
love that guy.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Oh man, he's great.

Speaker 9 (08:23):
He was like the way I explained to folks, like
when I grew up in my house, you watched the
Andy Griffith Show and Primos VHS tapes. That's just what
you watched. Like he was especially like living in Mississippi. Yeah,
and you've been around Will. Like if he heard me
talking about him like this, he would dismiss it. Because
he's a pretty down earth dude. But yeah, uh, and
it's it's funny talking about my name. Like part of

(08:46):
the reason I ended up getting tangled up with Will
just a little stuff that happened before. But I saw
Brad Ferriss at a local sporting show at home and
I'd never met him in person, but i'd been emailing
him trying to get a.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
Job, and he remembered your name.

Speaker 9 (09:01):
One thing I've always had going for me. Someone might
forget everything else about me, but they remember the name.
So I go up to him and said, Hey, I'm
Lake Pickle. You're like, you're that kid that's been emailing
me about video and I was like yeah, And I
didn't know it at the time, but like the week
before they had some guys leave the video department.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
Huh.

Speaker 9 (09:18):
So two days later, at my phone rings and it's
Brad and he's like, hey, man, would you consider taking
a semester off school because I got to film my
ELK cut in like two weeks. I was like, yep,
I'm gonna do that and.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Dropped out of school.

Speaker 9 (09:32):
So the funny thing is, yeah, I went to the
Primo's office. I'd never met Will in person, and they
were interviewing me and Will comes in and he says,
I'm not going to hire you if you don't promise
me that you'll finish your education. So yeah, I was
in school for wildlife science and that kind of stuff.
But yeah, that's how it all started. But it all

(09:53):
hinged on Brad being like, oh, yeah, you're the kid
because he my name's so odd.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
He remembered it. That's great. Yeah, so you did wildlife.
Still in the wildlife business. June ninth, you will find
Lake Pickle on the Bear Grease podcast feed where the
new show we're doing called Backwoods University, and we'll talk
a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
We talked about old traffick Kate. We're gonna jump ahead.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
To the news, then we're gonna come back around Krim's
got it's all asked up.

Speaker 5 (10:26):
Oh sorry, no, no, no, I didn't get to talk to
you about this. I wondered if we would change the
order of things this time. But maybe that's all okay,
So that part wasn't.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
Asking No, don't have to remember none, just getting rid
of it.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
I can see just not having any news ever.

Speaker 5 (10:51):
Yep, that that's possible.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
But then how would I find out about the news.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
The website.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
We should have a I wish we could do one
of those polls, like should we not have any news
and then do a vote.

Speaker 7 (11:07):
Oh, we could make something like that.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Oh can you do that?

Speaker 6 (11:12):
They could do it on a newsletter, we could do
it on Instagram.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
It'd be like should the Meat Eater podcast have or
not have listener feedback and news? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (11:25):
I think they'd be sad about not having listener feedback
because then we wouldn't have like stories and jokes that
carry on for a few episodes. But what do I know?
I just think we should separate it, like news is
separate from that.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
I don't think, well, the problem with the news program
here is that we have the same news article we
had before. In the news we already covered the guy
that killed the that's in trouble for hunting the cemetery.
I have additional thoughts.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Doug might like, if you got rid of the news, then.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
Get mad.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
Dog.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Had the main interview be about his dog.

Speaker 5 (12:08):
Updates, we wouldn't touch on c w D as much
as we do.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Know it saved me a lot of dogs ire, But
then how would we goofind his dog Unless we like
focus we had a dog psychologist in to goof on
dog's dog.

Speaker 5 (12:22):
We should get dog psychologists.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
So the guy some merging details, are you are you
going to follow this? Because I'm just interested in this
turkey deal. What I had explained before is like I
feel it's between the guy and the people that are
dead in the cemetery.

Speaker 7 (12:38):
Largely they don't have much to say.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
I was buried in a cemetery and I knew someone
was turkey hunting the cemetery, I would be glad. But
then I learned while he was hunting there there were
visitors in the cemetery, which tips right, Like at a
point you have to, like you gotta when you're sitting
there at night, being like, man, I really want to
hunt the cemetery, and you think to yourself, with the

(13:02):
people in there, you know, with the souls in there,
how would they feel about it? And that's kind of regional.
And then there's how would the people those people? Because
if I was visiting a cemetery and I see a

(13:23):
guy hunting turkeys, I'm gonna be jealous. And what do
jealous people do? They lash out, Yeah, and they don't
lash out about being jealous. They think of another thing,
and then they're going to lash out about public safe.
But the biggest question I have is was he bushwhacking
them because he got dropped off by a late model

(13:46):
black full sized pickup. So did he get dropped off
to the call or did he get dropped off to bushwhack?

Speaker 3 (13:54):
And did he use tombstones like how you might use
round bails.

Speaker 4 (14:01):
Something you almost can't be mad about it.

Speaker 9 (14:05):
I want to know the nature of the visitors, like
was someone getting actively getting buried.

Speaker 4 (14:09):
Like a fresh burial, or was this like a year
anniversary thing we scout.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
Maybe they're a turkey scout.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
Maybe they have none Mother's Day?

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is this like a private cemetery?

Speaker 3 (14:29):
Doesn't say, but it says you're not allowed to hunt cemeteries.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
Hm mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
I said one in public. I'm assuming like.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
Through a cemetery and jumped the fence to get down
to a creek.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
I used to stand next to a turkey and or
stand next to a cemetery and listen for turkeys all
the time.

Speaker 4 (14:52):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Well, Lake was saying, if you see an old church
or a cemetery, there's a turkey around.

Speaker 9 (14:56):
That's a rule to be like abandoned no, I mean,
it is a rule of thumb that I'm telling you
we live and die by. Like if it's an old
church or a cemetery there is a turkey around there,
I've never seen it not be true.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, you know I can see that. Man, the cemetery
I want to get buried in. I think that that's
probably true of that. M m. Yeah, we staunt squirrels
back there. But I was pre turkey, Like there weren't
turkeys when I was growing up with the turkeys.

Speaker 9 (15:23):
Now, you know, Yeah, there's a there's a place where
my grandma and grand grandma and grandpa got buried, and
I got permission to hunt the land right behind it
from them. Yeah they I know it. Yeah, but that
was the first time it happened to me. Like I
pulled up to the cemetery like I was going to
visit their grave, and like as I pull up, there's

(15:45):
a turkey goblin right behind it. I was like, I
got to see if I can get access to that.

Speaker 4 (15:48):
There's a hot tip off you start asking for permission
post mortem, yep.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
Yeah. I talked to them, I know, and be like, hey,
you know, I know, like you're not feeling well.

Speaker 9 (15:59):
Listen.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
It's a crying shame what happened.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
But oh, I could picture dudes now just sitting there
like trying to like make fake tears and stuff, just
listening for dobbs, trying to be like their morning. This
happened on what How the guy got in trouble is
somehow he hits the bird, you know, like the saying
you can't stop the flop, but he desirous to stop

(16:23):
the flop, tackles it and thereby gets himself on camera.
People claim he's wrastling it, but it would have been
more accurate if journalists had explained that he was trying
to stop the flop, which you can't do well, you can't.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
Was it like a bad shot and it was kind
of getting away a bit.

Speaker 4 (16:46):
Or I think he was trying to it was just
like the classics sprint out to it.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
And I don't know.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
My guess is he was.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
It was raising a ruckus, as they do, and he
was trying to stop the flop. And people think he
was trying to wrestle it because there's like visitors, he already.

Speaker 4 (17:02):
Trying to be incognito right launching on the turkey.

Speaker 9 (17:06):
And when they go to flopping it is. I mean
it's a loud.

Speaker 4 (17:09):
Not as loud as the shotgun blast.

Speaker 9 (17:11):
Was the shotgun Do we know.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
This doesn't seem like an archery kind of deal that
I could be wrong.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
Anyone with information on this incident, this is serious, please
contact New Hampshire's Fishing Game Department.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
This is also make an anonymous tip and.

Speaker 6 (17:27):
Just another one of those things where like this guy
chise to post this video what it's always.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Interesting he didn't.

Speaker 5 (17:39):
He posted on don't understand is that there was like
there was a hunter at the cemetery, someone who self
identifies as a hunter. Okay, because this according to New
Hampshire Game and Fish, around ten am on that Sunday,
a hunter observed a male in camouflage apparel shoot a
turkey in this mitary on close road. The poacher was

(18:03):
dropped off by a late model black full.

Speaker 7 (18:05):
Size so that guy was looking for turkeys in the cemetery.

Speaker 4 (18:08):
He was jealousy, jealousy.

Speaker 3 (18:11):
All I think we need to get all.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
If Krinn was like a good producer right now, we'd
have the hunter, we'd have the witness, and we'd have
the family of who was in the closest grave we'd
have descendence.

Speaker 5 (18:36):
I can't believe I didn't think of that about it.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
We'd have the casket that he is standing over.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Here's the interesting This guy's got interesting problem. There's a
guy that's saying that, for whatever reason, he's a he's
a magnet for poachers to come confess to him.

Speaker 4 (18:55):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
I just think that's being alive, Like that's not unusual,
Like I confess old poaching stuff every time I'm talking
to anybody. Really, when we little kids, like we didn't
it wasn't It's just hard to explain you didn't know.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
He just did stuff you didn't know.

Speaker 5 (19:16):
Do people go and do you get a lot of confessions?

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yes, because Okay, when I started deer hunting, I wasn't
old enough to hunt deer. When I killed my first year,
I wasn't old enough. My mom came and put her
tag on it. It was but it was like you
would have told anybody here, but it was like there
was no there was z.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
It was just like I can't explain.

Speaker 5 (19:37):
Some of the examples he uses, though, I'm not. I'm
not sure that these are people just talking about stuff
that they did a really long time ago. I'm just
looking at one of the examples he cites and it's
almost like someone.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
Let me make me feel hit hit the examples. But
I want to make one more point.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
You know how been hip to that Veterans Institute? They
played the interviews with the World War Two veterans guys
are in their eighties and nineties. It's the best thing
on YouTube.

Speaker 3 (20:05):
Well, I like World's Greatest Hockey Goals.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
In slow motion, but look in that next to the
World's Greatest Hockey goals in slow motion.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
The American Veterans.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Institute did this, has this huge series of interviews with
World War Two guys in their eighties and nineties. They're
down watching I think I talked about this. I'm watching
two of these guys together and they're talking about they
would just kill SS. They would line them up and

(20:42):
shoot them. And he said, we weren't supposed to talk
about it was a long time ago. And he's like,
we were told to do that, right, So you get
a lot of like I will because we grew up violating.
But it wasn't like it just it's so hard to explain.

Speaker 4 (21:01):
Man past the statute of limitations. It's like a common
ground kind of thing in the hunting community when I
was growing up.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
The same for you. You just you didn't even know
it was illegal.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
I didn't even know of the like you didn't know
the ration, the severity or the implication anything like something serious.

Speaker 8 (21:20):
When I first got on ex I went and looked
at all the old places where I used to hunt,
and it's all it's all private.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
It's like I thought this was you thought it was
public land.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
I remember like like just being young, you know, like
teens and hunting wood ducks on the roost and it
looking like a Fourth of July display by the time
the wood ducks would come into that root, and you
were sort of like you It's just like, but that's
what all the guys like, the old like your mentors,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
It was just you were so well, yeah, because the
the farther you go back in the timeline hunting, the
like the.

Speaker 9 (21:59):
Gray or all gets yep.

Speaker 6 (22:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Another thing that was just like just another confession here
I'm doing all these confessionals. There's another thing leading up
to the large mouth bass opener. You would put your
live well out on the end of your dock and
you would detain them. Oh no to then flay them
on the opener. But it was like this is like

(22:23):
you were like shit, nodality body.

Speaker 4 (22:24):
Yeah, it was just like this is what we did.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Walk down the damn beach holding the large mouth by
the bottom lip and throw it in the live well.
And like your parents, like our parents, you know what
I mean, people weren't like, don't. It's so hard to explain, man,
it's so hard to explain the Then only later did
I start to put it all together. Yeah, and then
you get like in your twenties and you start whatever,

(22:48):
meeting people reading reading San County Almanac, which like you
start putting it all together, and you're like, oh man,
that's like not like if everybody ran around doing that
with that level of like passion.

Speaker 4 (23:02):
Yeah, you end up with the early nineteen hundreds.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yeah, it's been disasters, but it was just like you
weren't none of this, Like I never, no one ever
ever said the word conservation when I was a kid.

Speaker 5 (23:13):
Yep, well look at the examples. Okay, he says poachers
apparently see my BHA and mediator merchant think quote. And
this is these quotes are so specific, so you know
someone told him this quote. I'm going to tell this
guy about unlice this night hunting in a day hunting
only state for game that's out of season and I

(23:35):
don't have a tag anyway, or quote, let me tell
you how I pulled a fast one by hunting against
regulations on a military base and got away with the
trespassing citation instead of any real consequences. Haha.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
You know what they're trying to do. They're trying to
get on Clay's Bear Grease podcasts that might actually be true,
but they don't realize that they have to have redemption. Yeah,
when I was fifteen, Clay wouldn't have had me on.
He would have had to wait till I was later
had an epiphany and we would have stopped like our
casual violating.

Speaker 5 (24:10):
Well, I mean, this guy is just wondering, like what
would you all do?

Speaker 4 (24:14):
Would you?

Speaker 5 (24:15):
He tries to educate and you know, these are instances
that had happened in the past, and he said that
in case he sniffed that there was any sense of
a crime being about to be committed, he would say something.
But I got another confession asking for advice.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Is this what this podcast?

Speaker 1 (24:40):
It's like, I'm just the more I think about the more.
I'm interested in what are like. I want to go
back and interview our young younger selves. So high school, okay,
like just just give you. For instance, high school with
my late friend Eric Kern, smelt dipping for whatever reason,
like Sam would come in with the smelt during the

(25:01):
spring smelt run. One day, we're standing out there and
we weren't at a river mouth like you generally are
hitting smelt at the river mouths, but we were We
knew about these gravel beds that were way down on
Lake Michigan, and the smelt would come up and spawn
in these little gravel beds that weren't even in the
stream mouth. They're like an anagamous fish, but they would
sometimes spawn in the waves. And we're sitting there and

(25:23):
here comes with salmon chase the smelt, and Eric gets
in his dip in that.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
We're old enough to know that he ought to put.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
That salmon in his waiters and he puts the salmon
down the leg of his waiters to hide it, and
we like finished our smelt dipping, had a big laugh
about how slimy and his pants were, and we're like
old enough to drive, and there's no way I would
let my kid do that, I would wring his neck

(25:55):
just I don't know. I can't explain.

Speaker 4 (25:56):
It's different times.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
No guy wants to know if it's stolen valor to
put to buy taxidermy and decorate your cabin.

Speaker 9 (26:03):
Yes, it's an easy.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
One, hard stop unless it's like a crazy like uh,
unless it's like a specimen.

Speaker 5 (26:13):
Huh, you're killing it's like a jackalope?

Speaker 1 (26:17):
What's that?

Speaker 3 (26:18):
What if it's like a jackalobe, that's not stolen valor.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Taxidermy? Like I think if you bought you know, if
you're like a big deer hunter, and he bought it
like a big you know, and then he kind of
got it there, and you know what it is, do
people coming in think that you got it?

Speaker 4 (26:38):
If someone asked, like do you shoot that?

Speaker 9 (26:41):
So a real good friend of mine, he used to
tell me how comically bad his father was at hunting.
And the first time I went to his father's house,
I walked into his living room this is a true story,
and there was like several shoulder mounted deer and then
there's a shoulder mounted elk in there. And I was like, Jordan,
you said your dad was bad at honting. He said, oh,

(27:02):
he didn't kill any of these.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
About all of them off eBay, You know, it's deeply
nuanced because someday, like my my father's taxidermy is still
in my mother's home. Someday, haven't forbid, I will take
possession of my father's taxidermy and I will put it
somewhere that's different.

Speaker 4 (27:22):
Does count? I don't think.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
That's deeply nuanced. Or if you had something where you're like,
oh yeah, wyat or shot that buck, you know, or whatever,
it'd be like a specimen. But if people come in
and to go like, my god, this guy's gotten some tanks.

Speaker 5 (27:35):
And then you don't say anything.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
You just let that linger.

Speaker 9 (27:39):
So I have a European a skullmounted elk that I
did not kill in my house. It's the first bull
that I filmed Wilbur shoot. And he asked me, he said,
do you want this help? And I was like absolutely.
But everybody that comes in the house, they're like when
I'm like, will shot that out on me?

Speaker 4 (27:57):
Like make a plaque?

Speaker 5 (27:58):
Yeah, but then you tell the true story.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, but Yanni's Yanni has his dad's bull moose hanging
in his living room. Yeah, totally fine. Yeah, that's not
stolen balor.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yeah, Dirt has one of your coups.

Speaker 10 (28:13):
Dear Dirt's like a special guys not stolen balor.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
He was there, he filmed it.

Speaker 4 (28:29):
Yeah, I think we're talking like if you go to
like some kind of thrift shop and they have someone's
random estate sale taxi you.

Speaker 9 (28:38):
I don't know if you can't anymore. You could you
used to, could legitimately go on eBay and buy a tax.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, it's like it's like earlier I said yes, but
I'm realizing how complicated. It just depends on the motive
and what you're trying to get away with. If you're
trying to be like give visitors the impression it's one thing.

Speaker 8 (28:59):
All right, here's the sample. If you just bought a
big mansion in Jackson, Hawaii. You went down to this
shop that has all the taxi every for sale for
thousands of dollars, and you buy a big old elkad
and put it in your big, big house that looks
at the Titans stolen.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
Baller, and you bought a cowboy hat that stolen baller?
What about furs?

Speaker 6 (29:25):
No?

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, no, I don't think so. Showing my bias, he's
been this is different it's different. Guy has a moral bind. Well,
let me give you a good example. I got a friend,
very accomplished huner. Okay, he's got a display of every

(29:46):
male and female of all North American waterfowl that he got.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
But he also has a big collection of many fur
bears from around the continent. Up he would he will
be like, that's from so and so, that's from so
and so. He's got one. He goes, someone left this
because they knew I have a collection, and they remain anonymous.
I don't even know who gave it to me. So

(30:15):
it's just different. It's like it's like a educational display.
Do you follow me? Yeah, where he's like check all
this ouf But he doesn't. None of it's his stuff.
But he's he likes to yeah, you know, he grew
up trapping. He likes to have the stuff there. But
it's nice first.

Speaker 4 (30:31):
Because my main buyers are like the oddities market, and
they just like having them as like a novelty, like
a novelty wallhanger.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
They're like, no, I'm not trying to screw your business.

Speaker 4 (30:40):
Ye like take it easy.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
See here's a guy I haven't read this yet.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
He's in a moral mind. He lives in eastern Wisconsin,
far from dog sounds like avid bowhunter. One of my
close bodies owns a local tree farm and is currently
planting new trees. This is a quote. He recently got
a crop damage tag to take five deer in forty
five days, as the deer are eating his newly planted trees.

(31:08):
At first, I was excited to get the bow out. However,
he has sent me videos of the deer pretty much
walking up to him. The chase in which bow hunting
it's not great sentence.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
I think he means. He means bow hunting is about
the chase.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
Oh no, no it is. It's like a very It's
like bad syntax, but it makes sense.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
The chase.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
In which bow hunting is about is gone. Like a
few commas could have salvage that sentence. I don't feel
like taking five deer will help the problem, and it's
all very likely to take a deer holding fawns. However,
he puts a lot of pride into his farm, and
I have even helped with planning and witness first hand

(31:57):
the hard work that goes into it. Does going forward
with this pretty much give up all the ethics we
believe as hunters. No, of course not, or am I
looking to that was me editorializing, And yes it's not
a rhetorical question. No, it's a serious question. Or am
I looking too much into And ultimately it's just simply
what is protecting his crop?

Speaker 5 (32:17):
I think ethics is not really the right word there
at all.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
No, there's an outlet for the If there's an outlet
for the deer, you want it, your body wants it,
your church wants it. And the guy's got a crop
damage permit and it's white tailed deer, which last I
checked in Wisconsin, are above objective. Don't see it.

Speaker 9 (32:42):
Being an issue.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
One more? Is this the last one? Another news bit?

Speaker 3 (32:51):
So in Alabama.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
This is from Alabama.

Speaker 6 (32:56):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
The bill a l HB fiveh nine past the House
and is moving to the Senate. This bill led by
the captive deer industry. This person writing in claims that
folks high up in the state legislature have family ties
to the captive deer industry. I can't say that's true
or not. He's just saying that's true. They want to

(33:19):
declare high friends. They wanted to declare high fence deer,
so they want to make captive deer private property instead
of public. Okay, some people might be surprised that it's
already this way. Depends on what state you're in. Some states,
if you have captive deer, you can just do whatever
you want. You hunt them around, you do whatever you

(33:41):
want with them. Some states, if you have high fence deer,
you still got to go by deer law. They want
to switch it, and they want their pet deer.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
To be.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Livestock so they can do whatever they want. They don't
want them to be wildlife. Why would they care. You
can think of all kinds of reasons. They care because
now they can hund them whenever they want and do
whatever they want and kills men as they want whatever.
But the main thing is they're trying to get out
from under regulation and inspections that would keep their captive deer,

(34:18):
which I'm not saying, I'm sure they like at CWD
is in Alabama. They want they don't want the state
messing with them about the risk that their captive deer
are going to spread diseases to wild herds. So they're
trying to get free of that and get out of
inspection services. That's what's in the back of their head.

(34:40):
That's all that's It is a tricky one, man, because
I'm just suspicious of captive deer, like in general. But
I also get the argument that if it's in the
fence and it's captive, it's like whatever.

Speaker 7 (34:54):
But they get out of the fences.

Speaker 4 (34:56):
They do frequently.

Speaker 9 (35:00):
It strikes a little close to home because Alabama's right
next to Mississippi.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
Okay, what's your take on it. I don't like it.
I don't like it.

Speaker 9 (35:06):
I don't like it at all.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Tell me more.

Speaker 9 (35:08):
I mean, CWD obviously a problem there.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
I have a problem.

Speaker 9 (35:14):
I mean, like I get the they're they're in the
fence like they're not. I mean, they do get out,
But I hinge on the thing, like even without the
CWD argument, it's like the wildlife are belonging to the
belong to the people, their public resource, like saying that
you can put a fence around that and all of
a sudden, that deer and everything in there becomes your
private property.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
I don't like that at all.

Speaker 9 (35:36):
And then there's just been been a lot of stuff
going on around home with CWD lately. It's not I mean,
it's never good, right, But we had a there was
a case that popped up along the Mississippi River in Louisiana,
but going off CWD management guidelines, it would have put
part of Clavern County, Mississippi in so CWD management. Well,
there's a dude on our Wildlife Commission that was like,

(35:58):
why would uh loise and a deer make this go
into CWD management? The river's right there, disregarding the fact
that those deers swim the river all the time. And
so they had this boat and they were you know,
and next thing, you know, within like a couple of months,
they have a cwdk show up in Clavern County. Just
no dead serious and so and obviously, you know, CW

(36:20):
is a very controversial topic, but it is. And seeing
that and using as like if they pass that, then
they can get around some of the CWD stuff. And
I could just so very easily seeing that hopping over
into Mississippi because there's some high fences there too, and
I just don't like get too close to home.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (36:40):
Well, and there's a lot to learn about CWD so much,
but we certainly know that concentrated areas of animals are
one of the worst things that we can have so
promoting that and making that easier is not helping the
c w.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Case at Yeah, and moving servants has proven to be
uh problematic, but a lot of the servid movements are
down now. You know. An interesting casualty of the c
w D is that you that it really put the
knicks on elk recovery.

Speaker 9 (37:14):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, because as they're like regulating relocating servits, it's ground
down that you're going to take out from source populations
and bring them into new places because people aren't wanting
to transport servants around.

Speaker 6 (37:26):
And now we have CWD on all of our feed
grounds because the elk and feed grounds.

Speaker 7 (37:32):
It's getting messier by the minute.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
There was the late Jim Poswitz who was he was
from Montana, and he wrote these little pamphlets that you
give kids when they're like, if your kid goes through
hunter safety with the state, you might he might wind
up with these Jim these gym positates pamphlets like like
I can't remember what they're called, just a little like
like sort of things about ethics of hunting and stuff.

(37:57):
He was he was coming he was a hunter. He
was like a philosopher about hunting ethics and he was.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
He was always very suspicious of.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Captive the captive servant industry, and was involved with Montana
when it went to a vote Montana and Montana rejected
canned hunting on.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Captive servative facilities overwhelmingly.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
Jimposwitz was very involved in that fight, and he had
this interesting point about it, which is like, if you
look at the captive deer and elk industry, there's there's
a friction because this is just this is just like,
this isn't proposing legislation. This is just like an observation
of his. What gives those captive animals their value is

(38:40):
the social value that the wild version has. Do you
know what I mean? It's like, what excites someone about
growing a big buck is the social value that a
big buck in its wild form has. Meaning if you
went and got a you know, if you went and

(39:01):
got a sheep and you figured out how to make
a little ram, a little domestic ram have like slightly
bigger horns, people are not That's not exciting to people
because there's not a social value attached to wildlife that
you're trying to mimic. Right, You're you're in a way
subverting the thing that has social value to build a

(39:24):
sort of artificial version of the thing that people are
excited about in the first place. So he just questioned
it from from a from a philosophical angle. You know,
it'd be similar to I think of a bunch of

(39:44):
things that'd be similar to this insulting to bring it
up some in there minds.

Speaker 4 (39:49):
Now worse than Doug's dog.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
I was gonna make a I was gonna make an
analogy to what some people refer to as the oldest profession.

Speaker 9 (39:57):
Oh, I got it, we got it.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
Some people argue was hunting.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
I don't know. Uh, central Mississippi. Yeah, grew up Central Mississippi.
What was your how'd you get into how'd you get
into hunting?

Speaker 9 (40:18):
Man? I mean you're kind of you're put into it early,
just because Central Mississippi is just kind of just kind
of the common thing a out there. Everybody hunts her
fishes to some degree. Uh, but my dad is describe
my dad, he hunts a little bit and fishes a lot.
That's where it's where the name lake came from. My
dad's an obsessed fisherman and so named.

Speaker 5 (40:44):
That's fairs really good.

Speaker 9 (40:48):
So uh, like we were, you know, we we fash
fished a lot, like I was telling you earlier about
you know, my dad, it was like mandatory that me
and my brother learned how to throw a bait cap.
You know, we fished a whole lot, and then deer
season would come around, and you know the rifle opener
and maybe other one weeknd a year and then opener
a tough season. That was a big thing down there,

(41:10):
But that was about the extent of it.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
You guys would fish during hunting season.

Speaker 1 (41:14):
Oh yeah, yeah, like like that you shouldn't be allowed
to do that, Like.

Speaker 9 (41:17):
Like fishing is the end all be all like that.
When I was first getting into Turkey and skipping a
little head ahead here, but like I remember one of
the first morning's Turkey Hunton, like trying to hear a
turkey and there's like a little pond down below, and
Dad's like, I wonder if I got a buzz bait
in my truck. I mean, that's all he's thinking about.
So and yeah, Turkey Hunton is a huge down home.

(41:40):
And so I'd heard some buddies like at church and
stuff talking about Turkey un during the springs.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
Like the cradle of Turkey hunting.

Speaker 9 (41:46):
Oh yeah, yeah, and I. But I just didn't get
that early because my dad wasn't a turkey hunter. And
then this is true story. People think I'm being hyperbolic,
but it's true. We were on a we were on
a family like vacation thing over spring break, and we
stopped at a Bass Pro shop and uh, they were
doing these like seminars and there was a Primo's Pro

(42:08):
staff guy wheeled out this TV and I was a kid,
so like, oh, it's on the TV and he plays
a turkey hunt and I was like, holy smokes, that
looks wild. So I start when I'm at church on Sunday,
I start like sourcing out people. I'm like, will you
take me turkey hunting? Because because like my dad was
willing to do it. But my dad was like I
have no idea what I'm doing, you know. Uh, And

(42:29):
thank the good Lord, I found a guy, still close
friends with him to this day, a guy named Keith Polk.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
And Keith was this sounds like a good turkey hunter,
oh man.

Speaker 9 (42:38):
Keith Pole, Yeah yeah, Keith is man. Yeah, I probably.
I know that guy a lot. But he talked to
my parents and were like, hey, you mind if I
take Lake turkey hunt and over Mississippi Youth Weekend and
they were like, please take lake turkey hunting. It's all
the kid talks about. And so, uh, he rolls up
Saturday morning the Youth season takes me turkey ounting, and

(43:00):
uh we end up shooting a bird and I like, literally,
I've not stopped ever since. I still I mean, I
could swim. How were the twelve Yeah I could. I
can close my eye and still picture that turkey strutting
down that ridge. It was just burned into my brain,
like I never and I once I remember thinking like

(43:20):
because I was only it was only twelve. I remember
shooting that turkey and We're carrying them out of the
woods and I'm like, you're telling me I could have
been doing this the whole other eleven years of my life, though,
I just and and that led to everything else. So
I got into bow hunting and really got into turkey hunton,
and yeah, it just it all. Spurn turkey on was

(43:40):
the catalyst of all of it.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
And't that funny that you got turned down a turkey hunt?
And watching the premos video then went on to make
how many premost videos did you work on? Probably dozens
and dozens and dozens.

Speaker 9 (43:51):
I mean I was there for I mean nine years
and some change, just just south of ten years. I
don't know, man, it was yeah, it's all my What
I tell people is like my whole life has been
like just the series of like how in the world
did I even end up here?

Speaker 3 (44:06):
Kind of thing?

Speaker 9 (44:07):
But yeah, I Will Primos, and I remember the first
time I turkey on it with Will was kind of funny,
but I would I would watch Primos videos like like
I was watching game film, you know, trying to trying
to I was like, what did he do? Because I
told Will, like, oh yeah, I told Will one time.
I mean this was years ago, I said Will. I

(44:28):
used to watch those videos and I would listen to
a like calling Cadence, and I would rewind it and
listen to it over and over and over again and
try to mimic it.

Speaker 4 (44:36):
Huh muscle memory.

Speaker 9 (44:38):
Yeah, because I mean, like I just I didn't know
what I was doing. And then even after I got
that first bird with Keith, like, there was still a
whole lot of like you gotta put it together for yourself.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
Kind of thing. But yeah, yeah it was.

Speaker 9 (44:51):
I was like Will Primos was and the whole Promos
crew man. They were like, they might as well hung
the moon for me.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
When you when you're working there and you get your check,
what's to say, Primo's on it? Yeah? It did. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (45:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
The thing I liked I've said is foreign, I said
to his face one of the things I like Will.
Will's very good communicator. Yeah, but to my awareness, I've
never heard him say a negative word.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Man, he's just like about anybody.

Speaker 9 (45:27):
I'll tell you a story about Will, like, uh, he's
so like you used to say, like you hear people
say there's people that want you to succeed, there's people
that don't want you to succeed, like or Will like
goes over and over and beyond, like wanting to people
wanting people to succeed. And uh. I had been at

(45:47):
Primos for three or four years and been hunting with
Will a lot, so we got to know him. And
he came by the office one day in the middle
of the week and I saw him for like a minute,
maybe two minutes, just he was just the in and out.
And that weekend is a Saturday morning, my phone rings,
its Will not uncommon and answer the phone is like, hey,
I need some help. Over at the house. You mind
coming over?

Speaker 1 (46:08):
Not uncommon?

Speaker 9 (46:08):
I'm like, yeah, sure, right up there. He's not usually
if he called me, it was like something out in
his yard, but he w wasn't out his r Like huh.
So go knock on his door and he's like just
standing in casual clothes that come inside, get some coffee
and at this point, like, oh, what did I do?

Speaker 1 (46:21):
Fire you?

Speaker 3 (46:22):
Fire you like a man?

Speaker 1 (46:24):
He says.

Speaker 8 (46:24):
Uh.

Speaker 9 (46:24):
He says, man, get some coffee and go sit in
the office. And so I sit in the office at coffee.
I'm like, what in the world did I do it?
Like my wheels are spinning?

Speaker 1 (46:32):
And uh.

Speaker 9 (46:32):
He comes in there and he sits down and he says, Lake,
and I came in the office this week. I could
tell something was bothering you. I don't know what it was,
but you and me, we're gonna sit here. We're gonna
talk about it till we figure it out because I
don't like seeing you that way.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
M hm.

Speaker 9 (46:46):
That's just kind of duty, is what was it?

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Dude?

Speaker 9 (46:50):
It was like a like a it was like a
breakup or something like that. Something minuscule, but it just
meant the world that he cared that much. You know
you're married, No, Hall been married three years in July. Kids,
no kids, okay, two dogs.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah. That's the thing about Will. There's like a I've
kind of a bunch of people like this. Well, I'm
gonna return to my commencement address I gave the other day,
the no Plan B address.

Speaker 6 (47:22):
Yea.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
What I was talking about was like.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
People trying to pick what the selecting your plan A
for now, pick a plan A and kill the plan
b's because you'll get seduced by your plan B. It'll
just be easier and you'll get it'll seduce you. And
I put it in terms of like cliff jumping and
watching my daughter pick a real high cliff in Hawaii

(47:45):
that she was gonna jump off into the plunge pool
at a waterfall, and then you could see in her
mind just wishing she hadn't a climbed out on that cliff.
But there she is now, And like most people get
on the ledge and they quickly would go down and
find another legend.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
Jump, but she just couldn't.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
She picked it and there she was, and now she
had to cope with the selection and how intimidating it
was being up there. And I was talking about his people.
When you're on your plan a ledge, there's people that
want you to come off that ledge bad, and there's
people that want you to do it and they want
you to break it back when you hit the water.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
Yep, do you follow me?

Speaker 1 (48:25):
And that's the sense I get from him. Another dude
that has that, like he doesn't talk about it, but
he has it like to unbelievable degree is Joe Rogan.
You know, he gets into podcasting early and encourages all

(48:45):
his friends to start a podcast. He opens a comedy
club in Austin. You think that if someone wanted to
open a comedy club down the road on the street,
you'd be like, damn it. He's like awesome. Yeah, it's
just like it's different like ways of viewing the world man.

Speaker 9 (49:04):
And that's one of the biggest things I got from
Will Mann. Well, like so this podcast, you know, like uh,
it all kind of started like I met, like Clay
came down in Turkey on with me and Will for
a few days and then we just kind of kept
going every spring and hunting other stuff, and Will and
Clay became buddies. Clay and I became buddies. But when
all this happened. We were working on like the first
episode of Backwoods University, and it just so worked out.

(49:28):
I was like, Will would actually be a perfect guest
on this. So I call Will. I tell him I
don't you know, I don't just say hey, I need
to interview. I tell him, hey, man, I got this opportunity,
this new podcast going to be on Clay's feed. And
Will is like ecstatic not to be on the interview.
He's just like, man, that's so great, and like just
like cleared out and he's pretty like he stays busy,

(49:48):
that guy, but like cleared out of time for me
to come and make that happen, just because he's that's
just how he is man. He's like, how can I
help push you up the hill?

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Mm hmm, yeah, that's a sense, like I'll watch.

Speaker 9 (50:00):
That's how he is man with everybody, not just me,
Like he's just that kind of guy.

Speaker 11 (50:06):
Talk about the podcast what it's going to be like,
So Backwards University very wildlife biology based, but also like Clay,
we were kind of putting together a list of like
topics and episodes we would do.

Speaker 9 (50:21):
And I was like, Clay, there's not a species of
wildlife because we're doing some episodes just kind of like
an overarching view of a certain species, and then we're
doing some that's like getting more specific and like like
wildlife processes or whatever. And was like, Clay, there's not
any of these that I can talk about where you

(50:42):
can't mention the influence of humans on these animals, positive
or negative.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
Got it.

Speaker 9 (50:48):
But the influence is usually very strong one way or
the other. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not so great.
But that's what it's kind of focusing in on.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
Yeah, nothing has escaped us.

Speaker 9 (50:58):
No, it's it's man. I was talking to the quail
biologist named James Martin and he was talking about some
of the strongholds in the southeast and he was talking
about like he's talking about a particular stronghold. I said, man,
why why was that was a habitat thing?

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Was this that?

Speaker 9 (51:15):
And the others said that's where the railroad stopped?

Speaker 1 (51:17):
Oh you're kidding me.

Speaker 9 (51:18):
Yeah, he's like that. He's like, if the if the
railroad would have kept going, the stronghold would have been
somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
We had an anthropologist on recently and we're talking about
the place the scene extinctions, and he was saying it
was a really good formula for places where megafauna like large.
It's a really good formula for places where large mammals
continue to exist. There's never enough people there to get
them all. And he starts like rattling off cases of

(51:45):
like refugia where things like managed to survive, and it's
like managed to survive because the human populated it couldn't
support a bit.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
No, it was more than that. It wasn't just happened chance.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
It was just places that weren't going to support a
large human population at a certain time.

Speaker 9 (51:59):
It's it's a man like there's an episode that I'm
working on right now that delves into the state of
Mississippi because we were Mississippi is one of the last
states to put in a formal Game and Fish agency,
you know, have established laws. And that's when Loopold made
his trip down there and he wrote and he wrote
a report in nineteen twenty nine where he basically just
goes over the status of all these game animals and

(52:21):
it's astounding, especially like now, the white tailed deer population
in Mississippi now is like one point five million, Like
our game agency is asking, they're imploring hunters like please
shoot more deer. We have too many. When Loopold was
there in nineteen twenty nine, in his report, it was
it was estimated we had twelve hundred deer in the
entire states.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
You've got to be kidding. It was that bad down there.

Speaker 9 (52:44):
Huh wow, it's it's wild and talking like turkey hunting
being the the epicenter of turkey hunt culture, which I
would argue that it is, which I'm biased, but one
of the first, like we established a game in Fish
Agency in nineteen thirty two, one of the first things
they started working on was wild turkeys because loop Hold
wrote in his report he was like, y'all have wiped

(53:05):
out almost all of your turkeys. He said, I can't,
I'll butcher it. But it was like the upland stop.
The turkeys left in the uplands are gone. The only
thing you have left her in the swamps because because
humans couldn't get to them. But it's like going through
it and like how bad. And it wasn't from a
lot of It was during the Great Great Depression and
people weren't uh, they're mainly just this is how I

(53:28):
feed my family. But again, it's just like really trying
to grasp how heavy of an influence we have.

Speaker 1 (53:35):
It's it's wild. What are the first episodes going to be.

Speaker 9 (53:39):
We've got one on bison, but bison in the Eastern
United States. Oh, then we've got that one.

Speaker 3 (53:45):
Did you talk to Ted Franklin Blue I didn't.

Speaker 9 (53:47):
We referenced his book a lot. I actually talked to
a guy named Jeremy French. He worked for Dwayne Estes.
The coolest part of that whole process is, uh, Jeremy
took me to a property a lot of prairie restoration.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
And I didn't know it.

Speaker 9 (54:03):
He said, he said, from the original Cumberland settlements. They
digitized a bunch of these. They had mapped out the
buffalo trails and so there's a place on that property.
I mean, it looks like someone drove a bulldozer through it.
And he said, there's your bison trail. You can still
see it. And we walked down in there, stood in
and it was crazy. But that was a fun episode.

(54:25):
We're doing one on Bob black Quail and then the
one that I was just talking about. I referenced Loophold
a lot. But the subject of the story is actually
a woman named Fanny Cook, which again I'm biased, but
I would argue she's one of the greatest conservationists to
ever live because she was pretty much the first wildlife

(54:45):
biologist in the state of Mississippi, and she fought to
establish the Game and Fish Commission. There's not like hard
evidence of it, but there's reasonable evidence that she's the
one that got Loophold to come down and make the report.
She's a pretty incredible woman.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
Have you Has anybody in Mississippi ever gotten a full
body mossy oak tattoo or real tattoo?

Speaker 9 (55:08):
Yeah, yes, yes there is.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Because it's hot.

Speaker 3 (55:12):
Yeah, y'all run around and that stuff all the time.

Speaker 9 (55:14):
Anyway, somebody one time we were at a local sports
show and like primos used to have these logos, like
they had like these little bit of individual animal logos,
and this dude just runs up to the Primo's booth
that air is like check this out, and he pulls
up a sleeve and he has the Primo's turkey logo
on his.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Arm, but no full body sleeve camo. So you can
just hunt. That'd be a good idea, Just hunt the
way God made you.

Speaker 7 (55:43):
You should start selling temporary tattoos.

Speaker 3 (55:45):
Yeah, so is your is backwards universe.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
You're gonna have like how far north will you allow
yourself to go? Oh, I'm going like, you'll do Yankee stuff.
Oh that's like, uh, it's just been regional right now,
just because it's just Clay's got you know, he's got
like you know, Clail say stuff like, well, you know,
people in the South are very interested in music.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
People in the South, you know, they love their families
every day. He talks to tell you something, I'm like, oh, well,
what about that? You know, music is very important culture.
I'm like, yeah, I never you know a bowtown.

Speaker 9 (56:33):
Yeah no, I've actually, uh, while I've been up here,
I've interviewed some grizzly folks. So yeah, yeah, we're not
so you can talk to Yankees.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (56:40):
Oh yeah, well I'm I'm I'm trying to go continental wide.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Yeah, okay, good not you're talking foreigners, but you will
talk Yankees. Yeah, that's it. He draw the line there,
and then how what what's the frequency you're shooting for
bi weekly? Right now? Okay, good Man?

Speaker 3 (56:59):
One episode, be man.

Speaker 9 (57:01):
I think the first couple of ones anywhere between like
thirty and forty minutes.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
And then you're gonna hear interviews.

Speaker 9 (57:06):
It's basically like we ended up landing on. It's kind
of a bear Grease format, just just condensed. Like the
quail episode has Wilbur in it and then a guy
named doctor Mark McConnell.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
Yeah, because he's a big quail hunter man.

Speaker 9 (57:19):
Again such a I've known Will for over ten years
at this point, and when he was sharing, like, because
what I was going for is I wanted to get
a scope from what happened to Bob White quail from
a biologist perspective. But then like Will, like some of
his first hunting experiences was hunting with his uncle when
he was eight, and so like a real sense of

(57:40):
what the culture was like. So you get kind of
a balance. You get biology, but then you get hunting cultures.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Yeah, for sure. Can I make a episode recommendation please?
I think you should go this. I'm dead serious, Okay,
it'd be a lot of fun. I think you should
go to Wisconsin. Team up with Doug durn but he
can't be all the way in it. But team up
with Doug drn and go around bars in southwest Wisconsin

(58:12):
and interview people. Interview anyone at a bar that can
tell you about what's wrong with deer management.

Speaker 9 (58:21):
That would be interesting.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
It would be a really I think it would be
deeply entertaining and very informative. He would get such a
disparate view of the state of deer man, Like it
doesn't need to be Wisconsin, but it needs to be Like,
it needs to be someplace where there's a lot of
factors at play, you know, like increase predation, where there's

(58:46):
a lot of slot in the soup. Yeah, a lot
of stew, you know, Like like, let's say you went
to an area where you're kind of on the southern
edge of wolf expansion and you got CWD in the
mix and whatever, and do like dear biology according to

(59:07):
dudes and marks sitting Man, you actually biology.

Speaker 4 (59:11):
That's a whole new podcast.

Speaker 9 (59:12):
You're kicking me down a whole line of thought because
you could do the same thing, like again, like Southeast,
if I went around to and was like, hey, man,
what's going on with wild turkeys? You would get such
a wide spectrum of biology. Man, it's the fire ants.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
But I tell people that I quit drinking.

Speaker 9 (59:34):
You would get such a widespread answers.

Speaker 8 (59:36):
Man.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
The only bummer is I don't drink. I'd have to
go in there, like, I'm just gonna sit in there
and drink water, hopefully come in flakes in town that
on the bar, just hang out. I need to get
interviewed for the show.

Speaker 6 (59:50):
Bar biology man toasted that one who must have been
just drinking straight.

Speaker 5 (59:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
I was like, he's so high. I'm like, no, I'm not.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
Yeah, that'd be a good one. And my work is
so good, you could do more, but yeah, just like,
hey man, what's like if you went in and chill.
Don't go on a weekend, don't go way late, don't
go megal late. You want the dudes that are in
there eight pm, post dinner, pre right, the happy Yeah, yeah,
go and chill and be like, hey man, I'm just

(01:00:23):
trying to get I'm just trying to.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
Get everybody's perspectives.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
I'd love to I'm trying to just get Like, I
don't want the agency guys.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
I don't want the government guys. I want to hear
the guys on.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
The ground, the guys in the field.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
The guys in the field.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Leaning in the bar, the guys that were once in
the field, Like, what's going on, man, what's going on
with turkeys? Yeah, bulbs, collar residents, poachers, fishing, game man.

Speaker 4 (01:00:52):
This sounds like my average call with a landowner.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what you
do as a resource tech. But hit me with the
dates and everything. Lake Pickles Backwards University, June sixth, Bear
Grease podcast feed.

Speaker 9 (01:01:12):
Tune in and video on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Learn all kinds of stuff about what uh wildlife. Yeah,
let's starting with the quail, starting with me and Crinn
or in hot Water with the quail community.

Speaker 5 (01:01:23):
I've I've heard I've heard is that the quail community
should listen to your two episodes because.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
We did a thing and we had a guy on.
It was a guy that knows what's wrong with quail
and and there's a.

Speaker 9 (01:01:39):
It's a rich stew I talk I talked to the
biologist about it. Yeah, yeah, it's a yeah. I'm aware.

Speaker 8 (01:01:45):
All the people wrote in from their barstools, ye, to
let us know we had a guy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
There's a just there's a an alarming decline in Bob
White quail numbers which has been going on for a
long time across an enormous geographic area. We had a
person on talking about his feelings about what's happening to
quail in a in a relatively isolated geographic area, and

(01:02:13):
has a solution, has a proposed solution that, in some
people's minds does not adequately address the root cause, and
to hear him out is bad. Right.

Speaker 9 (01:02:29):
Yeah, yeah, pretty much sums it up. Yeah, I did
learn you want the first noted declines that they can
find in the in the North America? You know what
it was? You tell me where you know when? Like
when the first notable declines a bob whait.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
Quail, barroom declines or like declined decline.

Speaker 9 (01:02:51):
It's from the from the biologist, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
What's the question again?

Speaker 9 (01:02:56):
When were the first noted declines? Like yes, just yeah,
nineteen twenty eighteen, ninety wow, industrial revolution. But yeah those
people now if you want to go back to the
barroom side, he's like everyone normally says nineteen sixty six,
but that they started doing brood surveys in the nineteen sixties.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
So that's why we say that.

Speaker 7 (01:03:22):
So where does the data come from?

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
But I don't know, I.

Speaker 9 (01:03:25):
Have to go back and listen to anything, or you
just learned this the other day.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
Yeah, yeah, barstool biology. And they hope we.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Don't get sued by Barstool Sports. No, it's bar bier.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
Yeahool. He's a kind of anti hunter, is he. I've
always wanted to have him on. Dave Portnoy.

Speaker 9 (01:03:41):
Oh, I don't know who he is. I didn't know
his anti hunter what I like Barstool Outdoors and all that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
Well, Portnoy is kind of I guess he like Uh.
I think he's kind of like waffles on the edge
of the Maine society kind of stuff. I look to
him on if you're listening.

Speaker 3 (01:03:56):
Probably not if he was never.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Do Yeah, we'll get like if Dave comes on. If
you come on, I'll buy you. I'll take you around
and get off pizza. Yeah, I'll take you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
Probably isn't pizza reviews and Bozeman.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
No, you can do like a whole dude. Come on.

Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
You know who loves pizza.

Speaker 9 (01:04:15):
People in the South, that Southern folks.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Yeah, they don't need pizza down there.

Speaker 9 (01:04:20):
I don't know about Yankees, but southern Southern, the South, Yeah,
they love it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
You know you guys are on too.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Is boiling and peanuts?

Speaker 9 (01:04:27):
Oh man, I didn't even know that was unique to
us until there was someone from out of town that
was like boiled I was like that, Yeah, I had
no idea.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
I remember going to South Carolina and the guy I
was with pull over and get up hot, sopping, wet,
steamy bag.

Speaker 7 (01:04:44):
They're so good there.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
That's good man.

Speaker 9 (01:04:48):
So there's a fella that used to have he had
a setup and you had to drive right past him
if you're going to the local sport in good store.
He had his old pickup truck. He'd have him a
little pop up ten out there and he'd be boiling
peanuts with how the pinos in him and you pull
up to him, you roll down in the window and
he'd walk up to you and he'd tell you want
a big fat bag or a little fat bag?

Speaker 4 (01:05:08):
An you wear a trench coat?

Speaker 9 (01:05:10):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, old traffer Kate.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
Yeah, thanks for coming on man.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
I appreciate it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:17):
Yeah, thanks for the invite.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
No, well, I just like I said, I just want
to talk to because you like trapping.

Speaker 4 (01:05:21):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
But first tell me what do you do at Kansas State?

Speaker 4 (01:05:24):
Yeah? So I'm a I'm a research technician, so doing
out in the field, doing the down and dirty work
for all the all the research projects. And started on
an ELK survey when I first got into town, moved
over to flying squirrels.

Speaker 1 (01:05:41):
Really, yeah, is that a demotion?

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
You know, it depends who you ask. I think it was.
It was cool. I mean, flying squirrels are cool.

Speaker 3 (01:05:52):
Yeah, tell me something about flying squirrels. I don't really
know much about.

Speaker 4 (01:05:55):
Them, A few people do. But they love suitcakes. So
that's how we would bait them in for the cameras,
peanut butter suit cakes.

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
So they'll eat meat.

Speaker 4 (01:06:08):
Well, I guess that's an interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Well they'll get onto Martin sets.

Speaker 4 (01:06:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, and all I think all squirrels
are kind of opportunistic omnivores in that way. But yeah, suitcakes,
and we would do camera traps to try to survey
him during the summer. And then uh, sort of a
nest box kind of setup to get get colonies in
the winter. And that's when you go in and tag
them because they're all holed up together and nest boxes

(01:06:38):
and so yeah, you just kind of sneak up to
the box cover the entrance. Oh gosh, there could be
like five or six I think, yeah, Oh my gosh.
They are adorable, the big old eyes. But yeah, and
then uh, and then I got moved over to Uh,
the Turkey Project in September of twenty three, so I've

(01:06:59):
been doing that, doing that since then.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
And what's that look at?

Speaker 4 (01:07:02):
Oh gosh, everything. So it's statewide and we're looking at
resource selection just kind of general landscape scale. Where are
they going, what are they like, what does it look
like they're preferentially kind of selecting for roof tree selection?
Oh yeah, which is actually pretty interesting seeing the the

(01:07:24):
difference between like the western side of the state is
kind of across that longitudinal gradient you.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
Mean in what in what types of trees they want
to be in, the.

Speaker 4 (01:07:33):
Height of the tree, the diameter of the tree, the species,
like everything kind of there.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
So we're doing in that area. How apt is a
how apt is a Turkey to use the same tree
two nights in a row?

Speaker 4 (01:07:48):
Oh gosh. It depends on the region, because the farther
west you go, the fewer their options are for like
a suitable side and just anything that's like that can
reasonably hold, So they're more they have more roost fidelity

(01:08:09):
in the west versus the east.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
I could put that's like just observationally, that's been my
finding where I mean it's kind of obvious, but places
there's not any trees yep. And they're down in Sonora, Mexico,
where there's just the only possible roof trees of.

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
Sycamore growth in a canyon bottom.

Speaker 8 (01:08:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
So like no kitten, Yeah, like because within ten miles
there's it's just the sycamore group. And so they're like
a magnet. But we hunted in Colorado this year and
got to kind of wash different groups. I mean they
would be they would be eight hundred yards, nine hundred
yards these different groups every day, like no sense of

(01:08:46):
going back to where it came from. Yeah, but there's tons.

Speaker 4 (01:08:49):
Upon us, so many, so many options. Yeah, so that's
kind of that is kind of what what we're seeing there.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:08:56):
When they have like the when you're when you're in
like the the bigger kind of woodlots or bigger, bigger
creek bottoms, river bottoms in the east, they'll kind of
move around a little bit on a rotation or just
kind of have they'll bust bust off into like different
groups within one flock and kind of end up on
different roots each night.

Speaker 3 (01:09:16):
Do you guys go find out what killed them when
they die?

Speaker 4 (01:09:18):
Oh, that's impossible, it is they get scavenged so hard,
so fast. Huh, it's really hard to tell, like what
exactly got them.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
That's a tough one.

Speaker 4 (01:09:29):
It's so hard. Same with the nests, Like they get
scavenged so fast that trying to pinpoint exactly why a
nest failed or if it was actually predated or if
it was just abandoned and then scavenged afterwards, like unless
you're literally sitting there like twenty four to seven watching
that nest, it's it's almost impossible to tell. You can

(01:09:50):
kind of tell, like what eight the a like if
the egg was eaten, Like if you just find like
eggs shell, you can kind of tell what ate it, Okay,
but whether or not it was like the abandoned it
first and then something else found it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
Yeah, yeah, after she got killed and therefore.

Speaker 4 (01:10:06):
She got killed or she just some we've noticed that
they just sometimes they just walk away because what would.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
Cause me to do that? We're not sure they'll ditch it.

Speaker 4 (01:10:14):
They'll just ditch it. Yeah, but you feel like a
couple eggs and then just ditch it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:18):
Yeah, too stressful or who knows?

Speaker 4 (01:10:21):
Yeah, who knows. Yeah, it's it's interesting, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
I never knew. I didn't realize that the forensics is
tough on turkeys.

Speaker 4 (01:10:28):
It is so tough. I mean, they're like there's such
a nice little snack for just about anything that you know,
if they're out there longer than twenty four hours before
you get there, it's the odds of something finding finding
the body.

Speaker 1 (01:10:43):
Yeah, because you show up some possums sitting there. That
doesn't tell you what happened.

Speaker 4 (01:10:47):
Yeah you don't, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's why, like
a lot of studies people are like wanting to put
cameras on the nest, but just like having that camera
there and the smell of the camera and stuff, is
that that increases the risk of predation because a lot
of predators were actually key in on that little bit
of human scent, Like they'll key in on the scent

(01:11:08):
of like another predator in that like one specific spot,
and they they like actually learned like, okay, there's there's
something there. And so you're increasing the risk of predation
on this nest by putting a camera there. But that's
really the only way to know exactly what happened. So
it's we're kind of stuck in a dead zone there
not really being able to exactly say what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:11:30):
I've talked to guys that work on collaring studies where
they're collaring you know, big game animals with big visible collars. Yeah,
that are probably hard to get used to. Yeah, and
it's i mean a factor in and it's an open question.
But once you do that, how accurate is the mortality study? Yeah,

(01:11:52):
because when something's chasing or whatever, or they recognize like
something's wrong with something different. Yeah, it's like, however they
read that collar.

Speaker 4 (01:12:01):
Yeah. Yeah, So we have on the hens that we're
we're tagging, we have backpack transmitters and they're you know,
they're slick, and they're they're black, Like they're not they're
not obvious. But you have to be careful about like
how it affects the movement of that hen, Like you
have to make sure she has full extension of her wings,

(01:12:21):
Like it's not you only only put them on hens
that are hefty enough, Like it can't be over a
certain percent of their body weight. Otherwise, like it's going
to impact their ability to get up in a roost
and it's just gonna wear on them, like having that
walking around with that weight. But we also we also
ditch all the data from anything that dies within two
weeks of capture, So that like if it's a mortality

(01:12:44):
that could be directly related to either capture stress or
like something to do with the transmitter, like yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:51):
Yeah, yeah, and it starts to dress what I'm getting
at that you could just never get used to it.

Speaker 4 (01:12:55):
Yeah. Yeah, So that's that's typical with any kind of collaring,
any kind of bagging study. Is like, if you have
a mortality within a certain window of time after the capture,
you just omit it from the data because you just
write it off as a capture related mortality.

Speaker 1 (01:13:11):
They freaked it out too bad or yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:13:12):
They can get like capture myopathy just like their their
muscles just melt basically in the stress. Yeah, and they
just kind of they just kind of can't move anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
You know what I'm remembering right now, And I meant
to put it on Instagram, but like I totally forgot
about till you just said it to me is a
guy wrote us, wrote us in and he had been
out hunting and found a turkey nest. Yeah, and put
a camera on it. And man, do you remember did you?
Has everybody seen this video? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
I don't think I have I don't know what.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
It was, like twelve hours later, there's a kyote stander
eating all those yeah right away.

Speaker 4 (01:13:54):
Yeah, yeah, and uh so, uh so part of this
part of the study is a wide scale camera, wide
scale camera survey for predators. And this is like not
related to the turkey location. So we're just based on
the capture locations. We're doing like a broad kind of placement,
random placement of cameras around the capture sites just to

(01:14:17):
kind of see what the predator communities are in those areas. Yeah,
and then we'll try to kind of see if there's
a correlation between what the predator communities look like and
what happened to those tur like what kind of patterns
we saw in the turkeys in those areas. But I
noticed going through I mean, we have six hundred plus
camera sites per survey season and we're on our third now,

(01:14:41):
so there's i mean over five hundred thousand photos at
this point. And I noticed going through those photos that
immediately after the cameras would be deployed, like if there
was gonna be a bobcat on that camera, it was
usually like that night, like what is that they just smell?

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
Why is it not repelling them.

Speaker 4 (01:15:00):
Their cats are cats especially are so curious, like coyotes
are a little more wary. And this is actually a
big thing with trapping, like cat trapping versus coyote trapping.
You can be really flashy with cats and they'll they'll
come in because they they're more prone to just investigate.

Speaker 1 (01:15:15):
Something got on here.

Speaker 4 (01:15:16):
They have a lot more confidence. So when they like
smell that human scent in a random area that they
don't normally smell it, like they come right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:24):
In some association with humans and food.

Speaker 4 (01:15:27):
Yeah, or they're just like like just curious. Yeah. So
I noticed that, like really quickly. I'm like the first
thing on most of these cameras, Like if there's gonna
be if there's a cat on it, it's gonna be
like the first thing that's on there. It's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
Have you ever had the ethical issue of you got
all these turkeys running around? How do you view that
it would influence your hunting activities?

Speaker 4 (01:15:53):
Oh? My god, I I don't pay attention to it
at all, Like I have. I did so much turkey hunting,
but I got on this project that I like already
had spots picked out and stuff on public to where
you know, it's far removed from anywhere we have turkeys tagged,
and I have like no desire to go anywhere near
those tag turkeys. So yeah, I just I hunt the

(01:16:16):
spots that I found, you know, way before I got involved,
no insider trading I got.

Speaker 1 (01:16:20):
I got a friend that worked on he's worked on
some wolf collaring project. He's a pilot. Yeah, he has
no access to the data, but he's a pilot for
the thing.

Speaker 3 (01:16:30):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
But he's also a wolf trapper. Yeah, and he says, Man,
I go the other direction. Yeah, because I don't even
have access, but just what people will say, Yeah, because
I don't anything that happened when I worked on that.
I go the other way because just perception.

Speaker 4 (01:16:44):
Yeah, and just for me, like I wouldn't. I would
be kind of bummed. Like if I shot a tom
and it had a tag on it that I'm like,
I could have tagged that for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:55):
You know what's puzzling is.

Speaker 1 (01:17:00):
I've brought this up a bunch of times over the
years that like, like would you shoot a if you
saw a collared white tail? Would you want to shoot
a collar deer?

Speaker 4 (01:17:09):
Being like where I am now, like actually involved in
the kind of wildlife tagging business. I don't I would
say I don't really have a desire like that would
probably make me less likely don't want to shoot that one,
which I know is you're not supposed to do that
for the science of it. But like I definitely am

(01:17:30):
not more inclined to shoot a tagged animal.

Speaker 1 (01:17:33):
Yeah, which is which people bring up, is like what
it's so coveted to get a tagged duck, yeah, or
tagged goose, but people.

Speaker 3 (01:17:40):
Don't want some collar around a deer.

Speaker 4 (01:17:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
It's like hard to explain, man, because I feel like
the deer has been not corrupted, but he's like he's
lost his Yeah, he's lost his yeah, yeah, his wild juju.

Speaker 4 (01:17:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:17:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:17:56):
You have the image in your head of some someone
like tackling this dear.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
You're yeah, it just feels like you're not You're not
like the first person on the scene. You know, there's
been some other person.

Speaker 4 (01:18:05):
Yeah, monkey with you know, like there's not a lot
of there's at least one bit of mystery in that
deer's life that is like no more like you're like,
I know at least one thing that happened.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Do you guys ever have are with all your collaring
projects or tagging projects, do you ever have get immortality
and then or get whatever and go there and be like,
someone shot this thing, like someone poached the turkey.

Speaker 4 (01:18:32):
You know, I don't think we've had that issue yet.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Like it turns up. I remember talking to a guy
that was in a collar or in a turkey. You
don't call it collaring, what do you call it tagging?
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:18:43):
Well, we use an unscientific term of transmittering.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
His transmittered turkey wound up in the middle of a
woodstack missing. It's missing its breast, missing its breast.

Speaker 4 (01:18:56):
Yeah, there's a clue it probably figure out what happened
to it, and.

Speaker 9 (01:19:05):
They like buried it in their own fans.

Speaker 4 (01:19:08):
Yeah, what killed this guy? I wonder.

Speaker 1 (01:19:12):
I feel like they were telling me that it was
at that time. I feel like they were telling me
it was glued onto it glued into the feathers. Is
it right?

Speaker 4 (01:19:19):
That's not right? If that happened, that was not a
good idea Flah, they.

Speaker 1 (01:19:25):
Were super gluing.

Speaker 3 (01:19:26):
So they were super gluing it into its feathers.

Speaker 4 (01:19:31):
When was this?

Speaker 3 (01:19:33):
When did I have this conversation over ten years ago?

Speaker 4 (01:19:35):
I wonder if he still I don't know if that
was for what it's worth. I want to say that
that was never supposed to be the standard for her
for putting transmitters on you. We do use super glue,
but we used superglue. So we use marine shot cord
to make like the it's it's kind of like a

(01:19:56):
it's almost like a a if a bungee and parrocord
made a baby.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
I got you. Yeah, what do you call it? Marine?

Speaker 4 (01:20:04):
Marine shot cord? Just marine grade so it can stand
up to the weather and everything. So we use that
to make the make like the little backpack straps. And
then when we not it used like a surgical knot
to tie it off. Then we'll put super glue on
that nott, but we put like a piece of cardboard
underneath so that none of the super glue that gets
on the feathers, because you don't want that understood, and

(01:20:24):
you do not want to glue the transmitter to the bird.

Speaker 3 (01:20:29):
Well have been the pioneering days of Turkey.

Speaker 4 (01:20:32):
Maybe yeah, that's why I'm like, you know, I don't know.
Maybe we got to this this strategy because the old
one of super gluing them directly to the bird turned
out to not be a great idea.

Speaker 5 (01:20:43):
But.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
So what's your like, Well, I want to get into
your trap and business, what how does how's your career?
How'd your career path go? And what happens to you next?

Speaker 4 (01:20:55):
Yeah, So I I always knew I was gonna to
go into some kind of science and some kind of
like biological science. I was always super interested in the
outdoors and like insects and birds and all kinds of
things like that was just always my jam, and so
I knew when it came time to think about, Okay,

(01:21:15):
what kind of degree do I want to get, I
was like slam dunk, some kind of wildlife biology, environmental science,
something like that. So I graduated in December of twenty
one with a wildlife biology degree. Immediately went into a
TA job for that program, which was just like a
temporary thing. There's a I went to NC State. There's

(01:21:39):
a mandatory summer program for all of the wildlife biology
folks and it's all it's six weeks in the field.
You go and do like hands on IDs and tagging
and all kinds of stuff. It's super cool. So that
was my first job out of undergrad was that TA job.
And then I moved to Kansas and found my way
into the wild life, the wildlife departments there, and that's

(01:22:04):
when I got into the elk.

Speaker 3 (01:22:05):
The elk, and that's just like a salary job, full
time salary job.

Speaker 4 (01:22:09):
This is hourly. Yeah, most most tech jobs are hourly,
but you know it's it's like always just forty hours.
You just put in forty hours a week.

Speaker 1 (01:22:18):
And that's what you're still doing now, yes, and then
what happens next.

Speaker 4 (01:22:23):
Ideally, I would absolutely love to turn trapping somehow into
a full time business of like trapping for handling tax
ander me at least, like I've tried to dabble in
like actual mounts and stuff. I still have a lot
to learn there. But I had a dermisted colony. I

(01:22:47):
just moved really recently, so I don't have it set
up again yet. But I had a dermistic colony, and
that was like a really good kind of side gig
to run. Was skull cleaning, sure, and for my own
skulls that I got from from tracking and everything. I
sell sell all those so I would just you know,
run them through the beetles and sell them. You don't
have it now, no, I got to get it started

(01:23:08):
back up again. I don't have like a great place
to set up. You know, you know how they smell
the dermistic colonies so like.

Speaker 1 (01:23:15):
Nothing, it's like nothing you've ever smelled. Yeah, yeah, there's
probably like things little tricks you can do.

Speaker 4 (01:23:22):
Yeah, if you have like the right ventilation system, that's
the biggest thing. Like you have to have it really
well ventilated.

Speaker 1 (01:23:28):
They create their own kind of funk man.

Speaker 4 (01:23:30):
Yes, and god forbid you get flies in it somehow.
The like the beetles don't smell that bad if you
haven't ventilated, right, but if maggots get in there, I
don't know what it is about a maggot that's they
just smell so much worse.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
And uh, well they probably come in on people's bringing
in mega that's yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:23:49):
That's the problem. And like you can't really kill a mat,
Like you can freeze the skulls like indefinitely, and it
feels like the second you thought, the maggots still just
pop out, like it just doesn't kill them. So yeah,
you gotta be careful about like not leaving skulls out
where they're gonna get flies on them. And uh and
you got to be careful about the because I I did.
I took in I took in a skull at some

(01:24:11):
point that had been left out where it got maggots
in it, and it just destroyed the colony. I mean,
you just got Yeah, you just got to ditch it
and start it, start fresh.

Speaker 1 (01:24:21):
You have to kill all those thousands of lives.

Speaker 4 (01:24:23):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:24:27):
Let's say I got a hypothetical for you.

Speaker 1 (01:24:29):
Let's say you're a media or trivia and the answer
to the question is domestic mm hmmkay, and and someone
and you're the judge, and someone writes, would you give
it to him?

Speaker 4 (01:24:45):
They'remifted? I probably would.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
Judge.

Speaker 3 (01:24:51):
Then I got to revisit, like what else?

Speaker 4 (01:24:56):
What else could you be going for?

Speaker 6 (01:24:59):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:24:59):
The exactly my point.

Speaker 4 (01:25:01):
Yeah, And.

Speaker 3 (01:25:05):
I did not get it.

Speaker 4 (01:25:06):
You're asking for a friend. I did not get Yeah,
that's I called bullshit on that one, that you're changing
your answer. No, no, no, no, no, I call I'm
not giving.

Speaker 6 (01:25:16):
It to you.

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):
Yeah, So get me to how'd you get into trapping?
So because there's not a lot of young trappers. No,
there's not a lot of female trappers.

Speaker 4 (01:25:28):
Yes, and not a lot of first generation trappers.

Speaker 1 (01:25:31):
I remember it was startling statistic from Michigan. I never
looked to see if it's true, but the guy that
told me would know. He's like, here's telling me that this.
This is some years ago. He said that every year,
the average age of a trapper in Michigan goes up
a year.

Speaker 3 (01:25:52):
Like the more you think about that, dude, it's like stunning.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:25:55):
Yeah, so I I just like ever really hit a
limit with what I want to do in the outdoors.
Like I've taught myself pretty much everything. I'm kind of
in the same boat as lake where. You know, my
dad was like a casual deer hunter and but really

(01:26:17):
into fishing, and my mom as well. So I grew
up fishing a ton and I was just obsessed with it.
And my dad would go out, you know, a couple
of times, a couple of times a season, go walk around.
He literally would just go for a hike with a
gun and just hope he bumped into something. Yeahah, so
he didn't even he didn't get his first his first

(01:26:39):
deer until I was I want to say, I was
like six or something, and my mom like wouldn't let
me go anywhere. She's like, don't look, don't look. I
don't want it, like keep the meat away, like, don't
I don't want her seeing this? Yeah, she she herself
was kind of like I don't like this. But yeah,
the more the more and more I got into fishing,

(01:27:01):
the more I was like I just wanted something else.
And the natural next step was like, oh, you know
what about hunting, And my dad's like, I don't know,
kind of staying with you in the turkey hunting Like,
my Dad's like, I don't know what I'm doing. So
he took me to an outfitter, got my first deer.
He was like super nervous that I was going to
be turned off when I shot my first year, that
I was gonna have like an emotional breakdown or something.

(01:27:23):
But I was so stoked. I shot two in my
first my first hunt the last like afternoon, after sitting
in like cold rain the whole time.

Speaker 3 (01:27:33):
Where did he take it to go on a guy
to deer hunt?

Speaker 4 (01:27:36):
Northeastern North Carolina? Yeah, yeah, so this was so. I
was actually born in New Jersey, lived there until I
was six. So we hunted or we fished a lot
up north, did a lot of fishing up in like
upstate New York and stuff just worm and Bobbery moved
down to North Carolina, and we could not get on
fish to save our lives. Like we could not catch

(01:27:56):
a thing, like.

Speaker 1 (01:27:57):
Your old tricks weren't working.

Speaker 4 (01:27:58):
No, I mean there was no trick like up north.
I mean we would just take any kind of live
bait and chuck it in there and you'd catch like
a nice smolly or yellow perch or something like. There
was just nothing to it. And yeah, I get down
to North Carolina, it's this like muddy ass water or
like sitting there with like minnows and stuff, We're like,
why can't we catch anything? And everybody was kind of

(01:28:19):
giving up, Like my parents were like not interested anymore.
My Dad's like I think I'm gonna sell the boat.
And I was like, this can't happen, Like I just
love it so much. And so I was like I
gotta figure this out. And that's when I got into
bass fishing because I was I was like researching on
what kind of fishing is good around here and largemouth bass.
So then I started learning how to fish artificial, learned

(01:28:40):
how to use a bait caster, and ended up getting
really into that, and then that was what led me
into like when I got super into bass fishing, I
was like, there's got to be something I can do,
you know, in the in the winter, when like bass
fishing is not like super fun And someone might be

(01:29:01):
making a face at that because there are a lot
of people that fish baths in the winter out there
and things.

Speaker 9 (01:29:05):
But.

Speaker 4 (01:29:10):
For me, I was like, I love fishing, like the
weed beds in the summer. That was my thing, and
like I want something to do in the winter, fall
and winter. So it just seemed like if I like
fishing so much, I probably will like hunting. And so
got into hunting. And then when I kind of got
got my feet under myself with hunting, then I started
to find myself being like, okay, but what about what

(01:29:30):
about like after deer season and before Turkey season, Yes exactly,
I was. I'm sitting there like, you know, I can
go shed hunting or just hike around, like it's just
not really scratching that itch for me. And I actually
watched the beaver trapping episode, the Wyoming beaver trapping episode,
and I was like, hmmm, yeah, yeah, I was like

(01:29:53):
I wonder and this this creek bottom that I had
been hunting on public for for deer for several years
is beautiful swamp bottom full of beavers, and I was like,
that seems like a very easy, like first step is
like just trying to snare a beaver in that creek.
I'm like, I know it like the back of my hand,
Like I can get in and get out pretty easily.

(01:30:14):
Snares are like a super straightforward thing to use. They
were legal there only for beaver. But yeah, So I
went in beginning of January and this was in twenty
twenty one. I went in, made all my sets, two
nights later, got my first beaver with a snare with
a snare, and it was it was just like it

(01:30:37):
just clicked. I was like, this is it, Like this
is the thing. It just felt so natural and so
like it was like it was like a kind of
a puzzle that hunting doesn't really give you, and it
was like exactly what I'd been craving. So I went
so hard that season I think I ended up getting

(01:30:57):
eleven beavers out of that little creek. Autumn, I got
a couple of otter, which is awesome, and snares no,
so you're not allowed to use snares for us there.
I started using three thirties after I got kind of
confident with uh, because at first, when I was looking
at a three thirty, I was like, oh, that's terrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:31:12):
Like my arms going off.

Speaker 4 (01:31:13):
Yeah. So once I got a little more comfortable, I
got some three thirties and I put those out, and
so I got a couple of otter and then kind
of towards the end of the season, I started trying
raccoon too, because there's so many raccoons. Any creek bonds full,
I put it. I just skinned them out. I actually
have all of thet I've only gotten three otters because

(01:31:33):
you know that place was stacked with them. Kansas is not.
So I wasn't in North Carolina very long before I
moved to Kansas, and I only got three. And I
just love otters so much. I'm like I couldn't let
go of them. So I have all three of those
pelts up on my wall. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:31:48):
And now you got then you got in like pretty
sophisticated like bobcats and stuff. Yes, like top tier, top
tier trap.

Speaker 4 (01:31:55):
Yes, which is amazing. That was like super expected to me.
I mean I knew everyone always says like, if you
can catch a coyote, you can catch a cat. Like,
cats are just so much more confident and so much
more predictable really.

Speaker 3 (01:32:09):
And so much more not as many of them running around.

Speaker 4 (01:32:12):
Well yeah that is. Yeah, So like I'm always getting
more numbers of coyotes than cats, like if I'm running
a pretty even line, but like if I find a
cat track, it's like I'm gonna get that cat. Hmmm,
Like you can. You can just be so much more
confident if you like, if you have the right.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
Within how many knights you find a cat track in Kansas,
within how many nights, he's gonna you're gonna have them.

Speaker 4 (01:32:33):
That's tough, I would say within a week, because they
do kind of run. They usually run kind of a
loop within their territory. Same with coyotes. So like if
I see like super fresh sign, I'm like, okay, maybe
I'm like a little bit behind here, and it's gonna
take you know, four or five nights before that cat
comes back around.

Speaker 3 (01:32:53):
Yeah, but he's gonna come and walk in that spot.

Speaker 4 (01:32:55):
Yeah, he's gonna come right back through there, and he
is going to clue in on any kind of new
smell anything in there. And yeah, and like you can
put out cats are one of the few things that
you can like just drop a cage right there and
they're just like looks good to me and just walk
right in. And a lot of times, like even when
the cage closes on them, they're like, oh well, and

(01:33:16):
they'll just eat the rest of the baby and they'll
just lay down. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:33:20):
So, were you selling your bodcast this year? So on
the open market or do you everything you sell your
you sell yourself to your own customes.

Speaker 8 (01:33:26):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:33:26):
So if I get like a really really nice cat,
I prefer to sell them frozen hole to taxidermy trade.

Speaker 1 (01:33:34):
And they care about whether it's nice, yes.

Speaker 4 (01:33:37):
They well, they care about the spotting. That's really the
big thing. So it's not it's not really the length
of the fur when you're selling to taxidermy market. It's
the the pattern and the coloration they want.

Speaker 1 (01:33:48):
They want nice, not just the belly, but the body.

Speaker 4 (01:33:50):
The body. Yeah, like you can have a super plain belly,
but if it's got like awesome spots and like the
rosettes and stuff down its sides and its back, like,
that's because they want something that's going to be They're
usually buying these to make competition mounts, and so they
want something that's like really striking, like super eye catching. Yeah,
and even like kittens a lot of times, like kittens

(01:34:11):
are are really hot on the market. What yeah, if
like they'll they'll sell so fast and you can get
a decent chunk of change for them, because it's like
a if you can get a kitten mount like really
really nice, super realistic, it's so good in a competition.

Speaker 1 (01:34:27):
You know, when I was growing up, the worst thing
you could do to an odd is touch it with
a knife.

Speaker 3 (01:34:36):
Yeah, the taxi ermy trade was.

Speaker 1 (01:34:38):
Yeah, hot form.

Speaker 4 (01:34:39):
Yeah it still is.

Speaker 3 (01:34:41):
And it'd be like yeah, it'd be way more money.

Speaker 2 (01:34:44):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:34:45):
Yeah, it wasn't even it was just it was a
completely separate deal. Yeah, did you have that, Like, did
you sell stuff seth to text?

Speaker 8 (01:34:52):
I never did know, but I knew people who did. Like,
every once in a while, someone would catch like a
black coyote or a black red fox. Yep, those typically
went to uh taxa.

Speaker 1 (01:35:03):
Yeah, it's funny you put all that work into Like
you can put all that work into a nod or yep,
flash it, stretch it, yeah, twenty five docks around, freeze
it and bring it to a tax service. Hundred bucks yep.
And that's without calling around. That's just like they don't
even know. I never got.

Speaker 3 (01:35:19):
With the Internet, you could probably getret targeted.

Speaker 4 (01:35:21):
Yeah. Facebook, there's there's really yeah, there's all kinds of
trapper to tax terms. You can start like a bidding
war for like if you get something really awesome and
you put it in one of these like trapper to
taxidermist Facebook groups. Oh really, Like yeah, you could start
a bidding war on some of that stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
So do you sell anything into the trade, like into
the normal market trade?

Speaker 4 (01:35:42):
No, I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:35:43):
I've never the market.

Speaker 4 (01:35:45):
Yeah. I I do my own thing. I get everything
dried sent off to the tannery and I sell it
at my Etsy store.

Speaker 3 (01:35:51):
Well tannery to use Sleepy Creek in Iowa.

Speaker 4 (01:35:54):
They're they're kind of kind of new, but they do
a fantastic job and really good pricing.

Speaker 1 (01:36:01):
Do you ever use oil min containner?

Speaker 4 (01:36:03):
I haven't. I went right to Sleeping Creek because they
have very very competitive pricing and I like that good.
I'm in it for the profit margins.

Speaker 1 (01:36:13):
Yeah. So everything you catch, you you sell Wallhanngers skulls ye.
And you have enough of an outlet where you never
get excess that you got to go dump into the market.

Speaker 4 (01:36:25):
Nope, no, yeah, because I'm I'm trapping all on public.
I'm doing it in my very limited free time outside
of work, so I can only run like a dozen
sets at a time.

Speaker 1 (01:36:37):
That's still fun as hell.

Speaker 4 (01:36:38):
So much fun, Yeah, so much fun. And yeah, so
every catch to me is like it's a big deal
and I don't I don't usually get into If I
get into double digits on any one species, that's like
a really solid year. So it's nothing I can't handle myself.

Speaker 1 (01:36:54):
So even right now, like the way cat prices got
kind of crazy this year, and some people think that
they over I don't know why. For some weird ass reason,
I follow fur markets very closely. I'm never understanding.

Speaker 3 (01:37:09):
It's a hobby.

Speaker 4 (01:37:09):
It's like the stock market.

Speaker 1 (01:37:11):
Well, no, I can see there's like a relevance argument
to the stock market, but for me to follow fair prices,
it's just like it makes zero sense. I'm just into it.

Speaker 3 (01:37:21):
Anyways, there's suspicion that people overbought.

Speaker 1 (01:37:26):
Yeah, I get like overpaid cats, but cats got crazy,
so but even then you can still do better. I
don't want you to give all your trade secrets you
can even with crazy cat prices, you can still do
better not selling in the cat market, I.

Speaker 4 (01:37:40):
Would say if you're not in one of like the
high desert kind of states where they have like that
crazy long for big white belly nice spots like Kansas
cats were like a little too.

Speaker 1 (01:37:53):
Far east, like a middle tier cat.

Speaker 4 (01:37:55):
Yeah, but amazing spots on a lot of them. Like
whenever someone says, oh, the cats here aren't spotted like that,
that's not that that's bullshit, because they're they're out there.
Like it might be different percentages of ones that are
super spotted, but like everywhere has spotted cats in there.

(01:38:17):
And part of the reason why I know that for
certain is running this statewide camera survey. The number of
just like unbelievably spotted cats that I'm seeing on these cameras,
Like it's a pretty even mix of like the really
like sandy kind of plain ones and super spotted ones.
And like almost everyone I talk to, like when I

(01:38:39):
catch a super spotted cat, they're like, oh, man, that's
crazy for around here, like we don't get them like that,
And I'm like, they're there, m yeah, they're there.

Speaker 1 (01:38:48):
Irritated man. Yeah, when I get buried in Twin Lakes Cemetery.
My grave is gonna say he should have been a cat.

Speaker 4 (01:38:57):
It's not too late. They're they're straight forward. If you
can find, you got I've gotten a couple.

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
But I mean, like really just doing it all the time,
all day.

Speaker 4 (01:39:05):
Yeah. Yeah, Oh god, I am pretty jealous of like
the high desert trappers that are just like it hits
that certain day of the season and they get up
in the mountains and they don't come down for like
a month, month and a half ye with like a
whole truckloaded just beautiful like eight hundred dollars cats.

Speaker 1 (01:39:24):
But yeah, for me, like, you've got some nice looking cats,
I know, old traffic caates.

Speaker 4 (01:39:30):
Yeah, I know, I've been. I feel very fortunate to
have gotten the ones that I have. They're beautiful, But
those are those are taxidermy market cats. Those are not
fur market cats. I don't think I've gotten. I haven't
gotten one yet that I was like, Oh that would
do really want the fur market? They just don't have
the belly for it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:46):
So tell people to where how do they go find
your market?

Speaker 8 (01:39:49):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:39:49):
Yeah, so I'm on Etsy. Little Shop of Firs is
my shop name.

Speaker 1 (01:39:54):
So cute old trafficates little shop of firs. There you go,
and you got so you got nothing like no sown.

Speaker 4 (01:40:02):
Goods I do. Sometimes I I've just kind of fallen
behind in that since I started the Turkey project. It's
a lot to keep up with, so I haven't done
quite as much like pillow making and stuff. But I
do have many unfinished pillows that once this survey season,
once the summer season kind of dies down a little bit,

(01:40:23):
I'm gonna get Yeah, and once my furs come back
from this season, because I have a big, a big
shipment that needs to go out. I have two more
beaver pelts to flesh, and I want to send it
out all in one shot.

Speaker 1 (01:40:33):
So I'm waiting, Wait, You're going to do some more
beaver pillows and stuff for sure?

Speaker 4 (01:40:37):
Yeah, and I got. I'm I'm torn because I do
want to make myself a blanket, and so I don't.
I'm not sure how many beavers I want to get
bea blankets I have. I haven't seen. I've seen pictures,
but yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:52):
My most favorite thing I think, Yeah, oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (01:40:55):
Yeah. My wife is like largely indifferent. I mean, when
I'm going on hunt, she doesn't know where I'm at
or what I'm hunting. Four kind of things, you know,
largely indifferent. But the beaver blanket that she's like, that
is badass. Yeah yeah, like all the things anything I've
ever brought home. And I just got her a full
mus muskrat bomber jacket, which she I got her at

(01:41:17):
the end of the season. But she likes it. But
like the beaver.

Speaker 3 (01:41:19):
Blanket, she's like like like work of.

Speaker 1 (01:41:22):
Art, you know, loves it.

Speaker 4 (01:41:23):
Just amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:41:24):
The only I never have to because otherwise she'll take
a lot of times she'll take my stuff like put it.

Speaker 3 (01:41:29):
Somewhere, yeah, scroll it away, but she just squares.

Speaker 1 (01:41:31):
The beaver blanket out and leaves it out. It was
it was good. It was a good call. You know.
It's beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:41:37):
How many we put because we did.

Speaker 1 (01:41:38):
Me and Seth had fifty beavers.

Speaker 4 (01:41:40):
Yeah, oh wow.

Speaker 7 (01:41:41):
Is that one year?

Speaker 1 (01:41:43):
I don't know. It was during COVID man we were
it might have been like a fall and it might
have been like I wish the pandemic was.

Speaker 4 (01:41:58):
Two years of like hunkering down. Yeah, So I was
still in I was still in school at the time,
and all the classes went online and I'm like, I
cannot sit in front of my dude, I would I
would take my phone because I'm like, I have to
just like be in the zoom, Like I can't just
be not there all the time. But i would put
it on on zoom on my phone and tuck my
phone into my waiters and I'd just be out there

(01:42:20):
beaver trapping the whole time on my lectures going, and
they'd like kick us into like little groups to do
some kind of a some kind of like like side assignment.
And I'm like, hey, guys, I'm a little indisposed right now.
You're gonna have to do this by yourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:42:34):
Yeah, all the all the all the bad parts, notwithstanding,
there were aspects of it of like a lot of
camp and a lot of beaver trapping. Yeah, anyways, we
had fifty and we like kept some Primo, we kept
some Premiere ones had those two blankets made it still
a lot left over and those are big now.

Speaker 2 (01:42:53):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know how many went into one.

Speaker 4 (01:42:57):
Oh.

Speaker 9 (01:42:57):
I want to say, my question is beaver amount I
could take.

Speaker 4 (01:43:02):
You on this one blanket obviously. Do you guys have
like throw blankets or is it like the full blank.

Speaker 1 (01:43:08):
No, no, No, they're like there's six feet by six by
five maybe I don't know, pig, yeah, six by six.

Speaker 2 (01:43:16):
And they're like strip it's like strips.

Speaker 1 (01:43:18):
He let them all out. You know what that means.
When you let them out. You caught him. You cut
him so that one beaver makes a big long piece, gotcha.
And then there's like there's literally miles there's miles of thread. Yeah,
that wow, because you have less scenes. No, it's like you, he'd.

Speaker 3 (01:43:41):
Explained it on the phone.

Speaker 1 (01:43:42):
I didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:43:43):
I was doing one of those things that trying not
to do.

Speaker 4 (01:43:45):
Yeah, like you like a spiral. Do you spiral it?

Speaker 2 (01:43:48):
Microphone?

Speaker 5 (01:43:48):
Do you spiral it?

Speaker 1 (01:43:50):
He told me, And I did the thing I don't
like to do where I acted like I understood, not
do that.

Speaker 3 (01:43:59):
You've been doing so well, and I was like, uh huh.

Speaker 1 (01:44:02):
In my mind, I'm like I can't picture it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:05):
It's a common thing in furs.

Speaker 1 (01:44:07):
What it does is you gives you it's very labor intensive,
but you.

Speaker 3 (01:44:12):
Take a wide.

Speaker 1 (01:44:14):
You take a wide fur and it makes it that
you can then sew it together and it gives you
a big long strip. You're making these like you're making
like a type of panels, and the panels are very
long and and homogeneous, so you wind up these long,
homogeneous panels, so then you can line the furs out.

(01:44:36):
And let's say they're not uniform like every animals. You know,
they're all different, but you kind of let you arrange
them where maybe there's like a reddish, you take your
reddish one and the reddish around the edge and it
has a gradual fade to a dark and then it'll
gradually fade the other way if they I think, if

(01:44:56):
they were all exactly the same, Like that's the thing
with ranch mink. Why ranch meet became a thing is
like every mink is huge and every mink's the same,
and you don't have the.

Speaker 3 (01:45:05):
Variability to deal with.

Speaker 1 (01:45:07):
But it's a way to like make big, long panels
that are homogeneously colored.

Speaker 5 (01:45:11):
But those individual panels are stitched quite a bit.

Speaker 1 (01:45:15):
Yeah. Yeah, well he told me, and I'll say, who
did it?

Speaker 3 (01:45:18):
He did a beautiful job. He's not looking for work.

Speaker 1 (01:45:20):
Don't even bother to call them, uh Clifford's critter creations.
Don Clifford not looking for work. You have to beg them,
call him, beg them if you want. He's doing man
I shouldn't have said it. My next thing is I'm
doing I'm doing. I'm doing a raccoon, full raccoon, and
I'm doing so underrated. He wants eighteen Okay, he wants

(01:45:43):
eighteen good ones?

Speaker 4 (01:45:44):
Okay, yeah, oh that would be soy in Kansas. I'm
sure it's well, how's anyway?

Speaker 1 (01:45:53):
The problem is the bottleneck is don sewing three miles
of thread together.

Speaker 2 (01:45:59):
Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 4 (01:46:02):
I don't have a machine. I do it all by hand.
So the the concept of a blanket is intimidating, but
I do really want to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:12):
You know what you should be buddies with? Are you
buddies all with Heather Duville?

Speaker 4 (01:46:16):
No? So I've never actually interacted with her, but super interested,
Like she's like right in my wheelhouse.

Speaker 1 (01:46:23):
She's working with like coastal Northern STU, different craters. But
you guys should talk show.

Speaker 4 (01:46:27):
I'm looking at her power washing set up, like, oh please, I.

Speaker 1 (01:46:31):
Wish you guys should You guys should talk a little shop.

Speaker 4 (01:46:33):
Yeah. I don't think my neighbors would appreciate me blowing
a bunch of a beaver fat out all.

Speaker 1 (01:46:38):
Over the well. She's gotten very sophisticated about so she's
just so needle and thread. Yeah, got with the machines
and like like has gotten sophisticated about the sow.

Speaker 4 (01:46:48):
Yeah, yeah, I need to get I'm definitely I definitely
would not describe myself as a sophisticated uh for handler.

Speaker 1 (01:46:58):
Sophisticated trapper.

Speaker 4 (01:47:00):
Yeah, I mean I got to think about it. I'm like, man,
this was only I only started it in twenty one,
so I'm only four years in of like completely self taught,
and there's there's so much to learn, so much.

Speaker 3 (01:47:12):
Yeah, yeah, the most the most bottomless pitch.

Speaker 4 (01:47:16):
Yeah, arguably, yes, hard.

Speaker 2 (01:47:18):
There's constantly new new techniques coming out.

Speaker 4 (01:47:21):
Yeah, and between like the actual like the tools. Yeah,
between like the actual like trapping and then the fur
handling and the tanning. And I tried to do tanning myself,
and uh that took a little bit too much apparatus
to get everything actually broken the way that it needed
to be.

Speaker 1 (01:47:36):
You can't you can't scratch the surface.

Speaker 4 (01:47:38):
God no. So yeah, so I started sending to a tannery.

Speaker 1 (01:47:42):
So the little fur shops, little shop of furs on
and it is quite dry.

Speaker 4 (01:47:48):
Right now, but low on product, low on product because
I because I don't have my dermstids, and I am waiting.
I sold out pretty much all the first from last
season and I'm waiting on the next round to be
back from the tannery. So I'm gonna get I'm gonna
get to work when I settle down from this summer
Turkey season.

Speaker 1 (01:48:07):
Thanks for coming on, I'm going to do it.

Speaker 4 (01:48:09):
Yeah, thank you, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:48:10):
And hope you when you get your first shot where
you filled it empties back out again.

Speaker 4 (01:48:13):
Yes, I hope.

Speaker 1 (01:48:15):
So, Maggie, what are you working on that people are
going to be most excited about?

Speaker 3 (01:48:20):
For journalism type stuff most excited about?

Speaker 6 (01:48:24):
I think mostly we're just trying to stay on top
of all the crazy policy stuff that's happening. It seems like,
you know, there's a there's a new executive order every
other day.

Speaker 3 (01:48:36):
It's been possible to follow and well hard to follow.

Speaker 6 (01:48:40):
It's difficult, and you know, things are getting snuck into
the budget bills like selling off public lands and Nevada
and Utah and the Dark and Night. There's just shady
shit going on right now, and we're doing our best
to stay on top of it and to get it
out to the audience. So everybody else can stay on
top of it, call their representatives make a fuss, because

(01:49:04):
that's pretty much the only way we're gonna keep our
public land secure and our wildlife protected.

Speaker 7 (01:49:10):
And all that.

Speaker 6 (01:49:11):
So, you know, it might not be the most exciting
stuff to read, but I think it's the most important stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:49:17):
Do you even put a lot of energy into that
just trying to track it? Yeah, if people followed, like
how dizzying it was to follow the tariff situation, just
like how rapidly evolving and continues to be. Like if
you imagine with with with the wildlife world, in the

(01:49:37):
public lands world, it's been as as chaotic as hard
to follow, and pats really rapidly changing environment.

Speaker 6 (01:49:45):
Patri Can just wrote an article about how tariffs are
impacting hunters and anglers, because you know, it's it's impacting
every everyone in every which way.

Speaker 7 (01:49:57):
But yeah, it's to the point you made.

Speaker 6 (01:50:00):
I mean, it's happening so fast, and it's there's so
much happening all at once, Like there's these water monitoring
stations from the USGS that now have to be shut
down this summer all across the country. The USGS doesn't
totally understand, like what's going on with that, how that's

(01:50:22):
going to like affect smaller you know, water monitoring stations
on individual rivers.

Speaker 7 (01:50:28):
It's just there are so.

Speaker 6 (01:50:30):
Many changes that are happening without too much public comment,
too much you know, is this a good idea? They're
just being written in and we're going from there. So
trying to stay informed is really important right now.

Speaker 3 (01:50:47):
Yeah, it is one of the.

Speaker 1 (01:50:51):
One of the things that I've liked least is the
sense that a lot of the management decisions aren't coming
from the agency heads and the people that are familiar
with the policy, and so it has a some of
it winds up having a kind of ham handed machete

(01:51:15):
like quality to it. That and that's why you see
things get.

Speaker 7 (01:51:19):
Reversed, like the federal firings.

Speaker 6 (01:51:22):
That's what happened too high up. There was no good
reason all those people should have been fired.

Speaker 1 (01:51:28):
So and then there's people that are like, dude, if
you made it easier for me to get rid of people,
I got a big list of people get rid of,
but my hands are tied and like, talk to me
about cuts.

Speaker 7 (01:51:39):
Yeah, it's just at the local.

Speaker 1 (01:51:40):
Level because I know, like I know what, I know
where the problems are and you're not hitting the problem right.
That's been frustrating.

Speaker 6 (01:51:48):
And that's happening, you know with Jordan wrote an article
about this. I think it was Jordan, but the the
zero based budd for Environmental Policy. It's it's looking at
all of these things like the Migratory Bird Act, the
Clean Water Act, and it's going through that and saying

(01:52:10):
that we need to look into everything that carries these
acts out and they have to be you know, you
can either keep them going for five years or.

Speaker 7 (01:52:20):
We have to like totally overhaul things.

Speaker 6 (01:52:22):
And it's like, I think it's asking to do too
much at one time, like look at where there's issues,
look at individual agencies, ask them to pinpoint where there
are things that need to be fixed, not just say
here's this whole list of everything. Let's swipe this down
and start from zero. Because a lot of those acts

(01:52:45):
were made for a reason.

Speaker 3 (01:52:49):
It's like what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:52:52):
Wow, Wow, hear.

Speaker 4 (01:52:56):
The end of that.

Speaker 5 (01:53:00):
A lot.

Speaker 1 (01:53:07):
It's like I don't want to be beat a dead horse.
And it's not dead horse, it's a living horse. You
might have a busted leg, like you if you look
at how sort of like expertly, expertly executed things around
the border were and how like quick and sort of
like wow, how did that not happened a long time ago? Right?

(01:53:30):
It's certain other certain other things that have happened with
the administration has been like where it feels like expert,
right and motivated, an expert. I just think a lot
of things around the Land Management Agency just hasn't felt
like it's coming from the most educated perspective and like
really like I wish things were happening at a level

(01:53:51):
where happening at a level where you had reform minded
insiders that were doing things in a in a slower,
more thought out yeah way, because I think there's good
we're gonna do things, and then we're going to realize
that we've made big costly mistakes, especially around a lot
of fisheries management issues and art things where you're going
to do a thing and then a couple of years

(01:54:13):
are going to go by and you've made like a
very expensive mistake. Yeah, and then and then need to
throw money at it because you're because you're killing, because
you're killing in industries, costing jobs.

Speaker 7 (01:54:26):
Mhmay on it, working on it.

Speaker 4 (01:54:35):
I've been getting articles to get sent.

Speaker 7 (01:54:36):
Into me while I'm sitting here.

Speaker 4 (01:54:38):
I actually I got some.

Speaker 6 (01:54:40):
You know, we were talking about the turkey and the
graveyard earlier. I just had a writer send me one in.
This guy got pulled over, had a live turkey in
the back of his car.

Speaker 4 (01:54:51):
It was wounded.

Speaker 6 (01:54:52):
He shot it, but he was driving around with the
live turkey in the trunk of his car.

Speaker 4 (01:54:56):
Did he know what I talked about this, Yes, a person,
because I've seen before where like a deer got hit
by a car and they loaded it up and it
was just like knocked out and then it stands up
in the bed.

Speaker 6 (01:55:15):
No, because this guy got pulled over like the next day.

Speaker 7 (01:55:18):
I think I was just quickly reading this.

Speaker 6 (01:55:21):
Yeah, he kept he had a turkey and a squirrel
in the back and then.

Speaker 7 (01:55:27):
Spread From from my understanding.

Speaker 6 (01:55:30):
The squirrel looks pretty dead in the picture turkey. You
can tell the turkey's live. It's looking at you. And
then so he gets a ticket and then he gets
pulled over like the next day or something, driving a
different truck and he's got two dead turkeys.

Speaker 7 (01:55:45):
Still no license or nothing.

Speaker 4 (01:55:47):
That he shot with the twenty two.

Speaker 6 (01:55:49):
Which it's illegal to hunt turkeys with the twenty two.

Speaker 4 (01:55:51):
In his State.

Speaker 1 (01:55:53):
So the cemetery hunting cemetery I did.

Speaker 6 (01:56:01):
I was reading about the cemetery and it was right
next to an old church.

Speaker 3 (01:56:05):
At the time.

Speaker 9 (01:56:07):
Giving out one of my best tips on here, true
spot burning.

Speaker 3 (01:56:12):
I spot burning the whole.

Speaker 8 (01:56:13):
I recently came across the Instagram accounts this dude he like,
I think he's a fishing guy and up in like
washing or something, but he has a pet turkey.

Speaker 2 (01:56:19):
He takes in the boat with him.

Speaker 8 (01:56:22):
I saw a video he was Halbert fishing and like
he pans over and his turkey's like in the boat gobbling,
and it's like railing up a halbit.

Speaker 2 (01:56:29):
It was like the.

Speaker 1 (01:56:32):
If you go way back in our archive, we have
an episode called The Bronze Back and the Whiffleball Bat,
and it was an expert turkey caller named Guys Up
and he grew up with a turkey and he would
call that turkey in and then he'd wap it with
a whiffleball bat to disincentivize it from coming in, and

(01:56:58):
then he'd call it in and in because he was
like he wanted it to be like getting tricked as bad.

Speaker 4 (01:57:03):
Yeah, yeah, hard, Okay, he just alarmedspaper.

Speaker 1 (01:57:14):
He wanted it to be that like he wanted it
to be not wanting to get do yes. Yeah, And
that's how he learned.

Speaker 4 (01:57:23):
That was his version of the whole He explains the
whole process.

Speaker 1 (01:57:28):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know. In the old days, when
your dog did something bad, you'd give it a little.

Speaker 4 (01:57:33):
Yeah, I'm not trying to hurt it.

Speaker 3 (01:57:36):
But the dogs like, yees, I'm not.

Speaker 1 (01:57:38):
Gonna do that again.

Speaker 4 (01:57:39):
I spaced out.

Speaker 6 (01:57:40):
I thought you made like hunting the turkey with a
whiffle bag.

Speaker 4 (01:57:44):
I was like, that's gonna take a lot. I can't
even be mad about.

Speaker 1 (01:57:49):
He'd hide, call it in, and then scared the hell out,
so that a while later when he called in the
turkeys like like a hunted turkey, he's like, man, I
don't want to I want to go over there. I
mean his turkeys over there.

Speaker 3 (01:58:01):
What I don't want is.

Speaker 1 (01:58:05):
And that's how he became really good at calling turkeys
because he kept fooling that Brown's back who was paranoid.

Speaker 9 (01:58:12):
So he wasn't trying to keep the turkey safe from
other hunters. He was trying to make a challenge for him.

Speaker 1 (01:58:17):
Trying to make a challenge. He's trying to make it
like if I went out, I could go out like
you could probably if you had a handful of corn,
and every time you called, you gave that turkey a
handful of corn. He's gonna become real easy to call in.

Speaker 4 (01:58:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:58:30):
Yeah, But if you hit him with a bat, a
love tap, with a whippleball bat, he's gonna geta.

Speaker 9 (01:58:37):
Like the same scenario of a turkey gets missed a
couple of times in actuality, he's like not this time.

Speaker 1 (01:58:43):
It's like I'm not going over there man like that.
Thanks everybody. Yeah, I appreciate everybody coming on.

Speaker 5 (01:58:52):
Thanks for having me listen to Lake's podcasts podcast Yeah
today because this episode will drop on June nine.

Speaker 4 (01:59:00):
He is going to be the missing link between biology
and policy and human dimensions.

Speaker 1 (01:59:07):
I appreciate a.

Speaker 9 (01:59:08):
Little because you can go on and leave a little
review hype Apple.

Speaker 1 (01:59:14):
Yeah, that's a T shirt

Speaker 3 (01:59:19):
All right, Thanks every boy,

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Steven Rinella

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 714: Enrolling At Backwoods Uni. with Lake Pickle and 'Old Trapper' Kate