Bear Grease - Ep. 138: Mississippi River - Big Fish (Part 4)

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

On this episode of Bear Grease, Clay Newcomb will explore life in the Mississippi Delta as well as the health of the ecosystem. We’ll hear from commercial fisherman Bill Lancaster, Dr. Jack Killgore of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and author Hank Burdine. You’ll learn about commercial fishing on the Mississippi River - the equipment they use and the species they target. You’ll also learn about the health of not only the fishery but also the whole ecosystem and how timber companies as well as recreational hunting made it economically sustainable to keep that wilderness intact. We really doubt you’re gonna want to miss this one. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. We have a natural floodpulse at firstlight.com. We have a natural flood pulse of the lower mess, where you don't have it in the upper miss, you don't have it in the Ohio, you don't have it in the Arkansas.

It's all damned all the way up. So that's a unique nature of it. And the fact that it joins the Missouri and goes another 1,200 miles, makes it the longest free-flowing stretch of river. We've traveled a good ways down the Mississippi River in the last three episodes to understand its power and size, its ancient connection to man, the settlement of the Delta in some of the

world's richest soil, the great engineering feat of taming the river and the great flood of 1927. We've covered a lot of ground. All of this for the purpose of trying to understand how the Mississippi River has impacted America. On this episode, though, we're getting into the nitty-gritty of river life and the fisheries' health and status. And I think you might be surprised by what you learn. I was. Dr. Jack Kilgore, who's a fisheries biologist for the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, will tell us about the great beasts of this river, the giant catfish, paddlefish, gars, and turtles.

We'll also hear about finding giant ground sloth claws, bison skulls, and dead bodies. We'll get to meet a man who's spent the last 50 years commercial fishing on the river and hear his wildest stories. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. I hear that a lot. Ooh, you know, look how muddy it is and it's got to be polluted. I've heard it's not. I tell people it's not.

In fact, you know, I would catch a fish out of the Mississippi way before and eat it before I would eat a fish out of my lake there in the subdivision. Is that right? Oh, yeah. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans

who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. How you doing? Oh man, doing pretty good. How about you? Clay Newcomb. Yep.

Bill, that cast. Good to meet you. Yep. This is my colleague and partner Brent Reeves. Brent Reeves. Yes, sir. All right. All right.

Yeah, pretty good. Yeah. You've been on the river this morning? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went out and got those hookin' that. Brent and I just crossed the big river from Arkansas onto the Mississippi side, in a truck on a bridge. And that's some uptown living. We didn't have to ferry across it or build a raft.

If you remember, old James Buchanan Eads was the first guy to be. build a bridge on the bigger sections of the Mississippi in 1874. It's in St. Louis. Where we get out of the truck, the air is thick and muggy. It's incredibly flat compared to where I came from. And if you're not looking at a crop field, the vegetation is as thick as a cane break. Welcome to the Mississippi Delta. Bill Lancaster is a commercial fisherman and he's just come off the water. He's wearing a ball cap, t-shirts, shorts, and white rubber boots. He kind of reminds me of the country singer Tracy Lawrence, but a lot grittier. So how long have you been fishing on the Mississippi River?

Probably, I probably started actually fishing in 1969. Yeah, that's the year I bought my first hook net. Graduated from high school, my dad belonged to a hunting club on the Mississippi. A good friend of mine that was in the same grade that I was, We moved over there that summer and commercial fished on the river in the fall of 69. And then went off to the Army. So you got that winter. Yeah.

So we fished all summer over there and sold fish, you know, to a local guy that was on the river at that time from Arkansas. And you were just like, hey, I can make a live and doing this. You know, we were, you know, 18, 17, 18 years old at that time, you know, and we were up for pretty much. anything but we you know both grew up hunting and fishing you know and we enjoyed you know being on the river and we thought you know that'd be a great thing to do it'd be fish this summer you know and try to make a little money just something to do before we went off to the in the service that was over 50 years ago yeah yeah yeah 69 so yeah every year since then you've fished fished off and on for a number of years and then started fishing full time probably around

1985, 86. The year round. Yeah, year round. Yeah, 12 months out of the year. You know, it doesn't matter how cold it is, how hot it is. You know, we fished. Wow. Yeah.

You spent a lot of time on the river. Oh, I wish, you know, I wish I knew exactly how much time I had spent out there. Yeah, unbelievable. Mr. Bill is 71 years old and has spent over 50 years on the water. With all this talk from Mark Twain about the treacherous river and its incredible power, one of my first questions which struck at the heart of my curiosity and had nothing to do with fish but had to do with close calls. I asked him if he'd had any and you better believe that he had. Eventually we're going to talk to him about fishing, but not yet.

Yeah, I've had a couple of experiences out there. I was running a small 16-foot boat with a 50-horse motor on it. And earlier that week, I had broken the trim tab off of it. And when you do that, the motor will torque hard to the right. That trim tab is what keeps that motor running in a straight line, even if you let off the tiller handle. So I broke that trim tab off, and I was running hook nets, and I had gotten through running the hooknets.

I was headed back upriver with about a half a load of fish, and there was water in the boat, and I was going to reach back and pull the plug out. and let it drain the water while I was running back to the boat ramp. Well, I pulled the plug out, had one hand on the, on the tiller handle, and I was running about half throttle, not wide open. And somehow, when I pulled that plug out and started to turn around, my hand slipped off that tiller handle.

And when it did, it made a hard 90 to the right, and it sent me out of that boat just in an instant. I mean, I didn't even realize what had happened. First thing I knew, I was under the water, and when I came out of that, came to the surface, I could see the boat going off away from. It's still in gear. It had idle itself down to idle speed, and it was going off, you know. But when it did that hard right turn, it threw all the fish over to the left side of the boat.

You know, everything in the boat went over to the left side when it made that hard right turn. And when it did that, it sent the boat into a turn, and it was running at half speed with the plug-out, coming around and making a circle. Well, I was in the river, had my rain gear on, had boots on, had blue jeans under the rain gear, you know, and it was heavy. I kicked the boots off, you know, to light myself up, you know, and I was just dog paddling and tried to stay afloat. And the boat, I could see it, you know, coming around.

It was going to make a circle. And, you know, it looked like it might come back by me, you know. So it started that turn. And I said, well, if I can catch it when it comes around, I can make it. So we're floating down the current, in the current, you know, floating down river, and it's coming around,

just at aisle to speak, tic-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tac-cum. When it did, it was just out of reach. I was trying to get to it, but it was just out of reach, and my hands just barely missed the gullul on that boat. I was going to just grab a hold to the side of the boat, you know, and hold on.

Well, I missed it. You know, it wasn't quite close enough. So as it went around again, it made a wider circle. It was widened itself out. It was coming at a wide, make it a wider turn every time it went around. Second time it went around it, I was lined up with it pretty good.

And when it passed me, I just locked my arms over the gunwale of the boat and just held on until I got my strength up and got my wits about me. You know, I just hung on and let it pull me. It was dragging me through the water. And I just rolled myself over the, in the boat, with just brute strength, just rolled myself over it. roll myself over in the boat and laid in the bottom of the boat for a second, you know. Then I reached back there and I got the plug back in and I got control of it, you know.

But if that boat hadn't come around and pick me up, I probably would have been gone. Yeah. Really? You think you would have, you were out in the middle of the river. Yeah. Well, I wasn't in the middle, but I was out. So you don't think you could have made it to the bank? I don't think I could.

It was cold? The water wasn't that cold in October, you know. but it was just the current and the weight, the sheer weight of those, that wet clothing and that rain gear, and I had no life jacket on, nothing. It just sapped my strength almost immediately. It was all I could do to hold myself up. Yeah. Just keep my head above water. You know, that was one of the closer calls.

And so you just got back in the boat? Got back in the boat. Probably said, thank you, Lord. Yeah, gained my composure and went on to the boat ramp and carried on that day. Yeah. Sold a fish, you know, did it all. What did your wife say when you told her that story? Well, she was, and everybody else I've told it to, you know, they just say, you know, you just, it wasn't your time, you know, just lucky, you know.

You know, Davy Crockett had a boat wreck on the Mississippi River, and he said if you're born to be hung, you'll never drown. It wasn't his time to drown. That's right. How old were you when that happened? That was probably in 2008, eight, eight, nine. 71 now. Yeah, I was in probably what, 60s. So you were in your 60s? Wow. Yeah. That's incredible.

Boat wrecks on the Mississippi are common. As a matter of fact, the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history happened on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865 near Memphis, Tennessee. A 260-foot-long steamboat called the Sultana was carrying Union prisoners. Just two weeks after the Civil War ended, who had been released. from a Confederate prison camp at Vicksburg. They were headed to St. Louis to go home to their families. The boat had a carrying capacity of 376 passengers,

but they'd packed on 2,137 people aboard. At 2 a.m. on that April morning, a boiler explosion sunk the ship in a fiery ball of chaos. 1169 people died. most Union soldiers. Despite the size of the disaster, the shipwreck didn't get much press because Lincoln had just been assassinated. The war had been raging for years and had just ended,

and the country was tired of bad news. And there was a possible government cover-up because of the overcrowded ship on a U.S. sanctioned transport. Today, there is a Sultanate Disaster Museum in Marion, Arkansas. The boat was missing for over 100 years. It sank in the river, but in 1982, over two miles off the current river, the sultana was located in an Arkansas soybean field. The riverbed had shifted that far, and the boat is still there. Soon we're going to talk about some fun stuff like the charismatic fish of the Mississippi River with Dr. Jack Kilgore with two else.

And I think you'll be surprised to hear how well they're doing. But I had to ask Mr. Bill another question. Kind of a dark question. And if you're listening with kids, we're about to talk about D-E-A-D people. Stand by. Don't judge me. I'm just asking the questions that everybody's thinking. But it's an interesting lifestyle. You know, you see a lot of different things, you know.

You ever found a dead body on the river? Yep. Found a couple of those over the years. Have you really? Yeah. Found two, actually. What was the story? Yeah, found one.

just several years ago. She was right down here south of town. Yeah. And I was going upstream. You know, I was done running gear. You know, it was in March. It was cold. I was running upstream.

And I was just looking, you know, out across the river, you know, just paying attention to where I was going. And I saw something, you know, floating downstream, you know, it looked a little bit different, you know. I said, well, that's probably a deer, you know. You see bucks, you know, somebody's shot. upstream or whatever coming down. I passed by it. And I picked up big deer before, you know, I mean big deer. And I said, I'm going to go back and I'm going to see exactly what that was.

And when I turned around and I got a little bit closer to it, I could tell. I said, oh, my Lord, here we go. Mr. Bill reported these incidents to the authorities and worked with law enforcement to help them recover the bodies. But it's clear the Mississippi. is no stranger to the dead. In the first episode, we learned that Hernando de Soto,

credited as the first European to see the river in 1541, had a water burial not far from where the Sultana sank. My intent is not to be morbid, but rather to present a slick scientific segue into the next section of the

podcast, but I'd say there's a high probability that DeSoto's body was eaten by an alligator snapping turtle. If you know wild places you know that organic matter and water does not go to waste. I now want to talk with Dr. Kilgore about the health of the Mississippi River. This first segment is a bit of a review, but it will quickly get into the new stuff. All the other great rivers of the word, the Congo, the Nile, the Yance Sea, all of those, they have dams near the mouth of the river, whereas

the Mississippi, the first dam you encounter. up in St. Louis, which is 1,200 miles up. However, a fish can take a left on the Missouri and go another 1,200 miles to the Gavin's Point Dam on the Missouri. So, and I tell people this, that if you put all of that together, there's almost 2,400 miles of free-flowing Mississippi-Missory River. There's nothing else like that in the world except for the Amazon.

All the other great rivers have been dammed, which influences sediment transport, water quality, migratory fish. You know, it has all those negative impacts. And that's one reason, in particular the lower mist, because it has an intact floodplain. It has a natural flood pulse. There have been no extirpations or extinction of species in modern time. Really, even with all the manipulation. That's right.

Despite all that river engineering, we still have a very robust, diverse aquatic assemblage in this river. That's incredible. And that's what we're trying to understand and protect and conserve. Because it really has never been evaluated in a, you know, in a very holistic, quantitative way until the last 20 years or so. It's essential to understand. The river is what it is because of its intact floodplain, the batcher, as it's called, or the space inside the levees. Here's why a healthy floodplain is important for fish. What happens then is every spring, you know, the river comes up and it floods and the fish

and other aquatic organisms, they follow that flood pulse up into the floodplain. And what they encounter are tens of thousands of acres of lakes, scatters, breaks, slews, just perfect habitat for spawning and rearing and feeding. And then when the river begins to contract and go back down, a lot of these recently spawned fish will follow the retreating flood down into the river, and they repopulate the river. So they sustain the numbers, the biodiversity year after year, because we have a natural flood pulse of the lower mess, whereas you don't have it in the upper miss, you don't have it in the Ohio, you don't have it in the Arkansas, it's all damned all the way up.

So that's the unique nature of it. And the fact that it joins the Missouri and goes another 1,200 miles, makes it really one of the longest, other than the, I think it is the longest free-flowing stretch of river. The flood pulse, the movement of the river up and down in its floodplain, feeds the fish of the river and can be important for their breeding cycles. It's just that simple. Dr. Kilgore will now talk about why having extended stretches of free-flowing, non-dammed rivers are good for fish, and this might even bolster the tattoo idea from episode one. don't do it, but it's a good idea.

And so we do telemetry studies and we tag fish. And we've had multiple examples of fish moving upstream a thousand miles, moving downstream a thousand miles. What kind of fish are doing that? Sturgeon, paddlefish, the invasive carp. We've had buffalo. They make long migratory runs as well. Why are those fish doing that?

What's biologically advantageous about going that far? Well, I think one reason is that they're spreading out their progeny. Some of them, we believe we don't know for sure, have certain homing instincts, just like salmon, that they'll actually go back to their natal spawning area or in that general area. Some fish may move from the Missouri down into the Mississippi, but they spawn in the Missouri. They go back to the Missouri to spawn. Okay. So it's a homing behavior. It's a behavior we don't fully understand.

Really? But we do know that there's a lot of movement, both upstream and downstream, the fish. Dr. Kilgore is an expert on fish, and as usual, I was delighted when he talked about all the things they don't know. Mysteries remain, brothers, and he and his teams have done some seminal work on the river and still are. But let's talk catfish. But the catfish, we have three species of giant catfish. the new state record in Mississippi, a blue cat was broken last year, a 130-pound blue cat. We regularly catch 50, 60-pound flatheads and blue cats out there.

The catfish population is unexploited. I mean, there are so many catfish in this river, and there's so few fishermen. Really? And there's so much habitat. And the further you go down, the bigger the catfish tend to be. too, based upon a study we did. You know, in some ways, because this river fluctuates 50 feet a year and you've got these huge floods,

you know, we haven't even reached the carrying capacity of some of these fish. They can continue on, and that's what's happened, unfortunately, with invasive carp. They found the lower Mississippi River to be very hospitable, unfortunately. Now, the catfish, I'm interested in catfish. I would have thought that commercial fishermen were hitting the Mississippi really hard, but they're not?

Yes, they are. But the numbers of commercial fishermen have dwindled over the years. Is that a market thing? Or like are they farm-raising catfish? That was part of the decline. God forbid people aren't eating as much catfish as they used to. Is that true? I think we know.

There's more store-bought catfish. The farm-raised catfish certainly took a hit on commercial fishing. However, I worked with a commercial fisherman for years, Bill Lancaster. We've already met Mr. Bill. He and Dr. Kilgore are old bros. In fact, I'll diverge for a minute and tell the story about Bill. We were coming in, and we've been out there sampling. We came into our boat ramp, and here comes Bill and his boat. And his boat was full of fish.

He was a commercial fisherman, of course, just full of catfish and buffalo. And we started talking to him, and we told him, him that we're interested in catching sturgeon on the Mississippi River. And he goes, did you have any suggestions? He goes, I catch sturgeon all the time on my trot lines. Go, really? Well, would you like to go out with us and show us? And he did. One January, 1999, a cold January morning. We went out with Bill. He had set trot lines on the Mississippi River. And one of the first hooks that came up, he had a 10-pound pallid sturgeon, which is the endangered species of sturgeon. And so, okay, hey, Bill, would you like to work with us on contract? And so for 20 years,

we worked with Bill, and we put out over 10,000 trot lines. And we trot lined all the way from the mouth of the Mississippi River up to the chain of rocks in St. Us. And that's how we figured out the status of the sturgeon population. Wow, he could catch him on trot lines. 10,000 trot lines. I'd say these guys. know the river as good as anybody I want to go back to mr. Bill I've got a question about his fishing what are you mainly fishing for when you're on the river what's your target species two two main species of those a buffalo fish and the catfish you know all species of catfish channel cat

blue cat and in flathead cat to the market everybody it doesn't matter what kind of catfish it really doesn't pace the same they prefer they prefer the blue cat and the channel cat over the flathead. Really? Yeah. That would be opposite out and just on the street, wouldn't it? Right. Yeah.

A lot of people like the flathead for it's eating, but it's harder to dress. Yeah. It's more waste probably to the flathead. Okay. So for the commercial market where people are, where they're processing a lot of fish, they want channels and blue. Yeah, channels and blue cat, you know, and preferably smaller fish, you know, they don't, they don't really care about the big fish, you know, over 30 or 40 pounds, you know.

They will take one or two or three. but they don't want a boatload of them. Really? Yeah. So you're not targeting big fish? No, not at all. Yeah. Anything sellable, you know, from two pounds up to, you know, 15, 20 pounds, that's about the range.

That's what you're after. That's what I'd be looking for. What are you doing with the buffalo? Oh, the buffalo were sold, you know, sold straight to the market as they is, you know. There's a big demand here for buffalo. I mean, a huge demand. Probably sell more buffalo than catfish. Really?

Buffalo ribs? Is that what people are eating? Yeah. they'll take the ribs, you know. Of course, when they dress a buffalo, they take the ribs out, and then they have the loin, you know, which they cut up. What's your favorite fish to catch? What do you get excited about when you see a net?

Flatheads, probably. Really? Yeah, flatheads. Even though that's not as marketable. Yeah, yeah, but I can still sell them all that I catch. So, you know, it doesn't matter. Yeah. But I like to see, you know, a net full of flatheads when they come up.

Why? Because you can feel them before you ever, before you ever, raise the net, you can tell what's in there just by the way they're hitting that net, you know, where they feel. And when you pull it to the surface, it just erupts into a massive ball, you know, and you can see them, you know. He's not targeting the big catfish. That's interesting. And he sells more buffalo than catfish. That's interesting. But he loves catching flathead. That is not Surprising. Buffalo fish, the genus Icteobus, is a large sucker fish that's not gained as much popularity as a game fish, like catfish, because they're hard to catch on rod and reel and are

bony, but they're very good to eat. Any fish restaurant in the South Worth is watermelon salt is going to be serving fried, wild caught buffalo ribs. It's a hunky piece of white meat on a single bone. You eat them like chicken wings. I've got to be a fried wild caught buffalo ribs. I've another question and if I'd left Mississippi without asking him this I'd be forced to resign from my position at meat eater. You're not targeting big fish for the commercial market. Yeah. But just in your 50 years on the river what's the biggest fish you've seen come out of the Mississippi River? I caught a 100 pound blue cat in 2017. That's the biggest biggest fish I've caught. Yeah. Caught a lot of fish in the 70s.

down, you know, 60, 70, 50, 60, 70 pound range. But that 100-pounder was the biggest that I've landed. I caught him on Trotline, too. Using a, I was using a two-a-alt stainless steel hook. A two-aut is not very big, you know, if you know anything about hooks, you know. But it was, it was, I think March when I caught that fish, the water was super cold. And, you know, he was, he just came up to the surface. and I got the dip net under his tail

and, of course, I knew he was big, you know, I got the dip net under his tail and got him about halfway in that dip net because it was too big to get in. Well, I guess with the adrenaline I had pumping, you know, I just rolled him over into the boat. And then I looked at him, I said, wow, this is a big fish here.

How long you think he was? Five foot? He was as tall as I was almost when he was hanging, when we hung him up to weigh. You're not, you're tall. You're over six. Six to. a 100-pound blue cat is giant.

You're glad I asked, aren't you? In April 2023, the Rod and Reel, Mississippi State Record Blue Cat was caught in the river near Vicksburg and it weighed 131 pounds. Just for reference, the world-record blue cat weighed 143 pounds and was caught in a North Carolina lake. The world-record flathead catfish weighed 123 pounds and was caught in a lot of Lake in Kansas. The world record channel cat came from South Carolina and weighed 58 pounds. And that's a pretty good blueprint for the size of these cats. So the blue cats get the biggest,

flathead second, and then channels. But most people prefer to eat flathead. And it would be a miss if I didn't learn something about the gear commercial fishermen are using on the river. Here's Mr. Bill. What kind of equipment is a commercial fisherman on the Mississippi River using? Well, people use different kind of equipment. Some people will fish maybe all gill net, gill webbing, and then, you know, you people that do mostly hoop net. Then you have some that just trot line. Then like myself, I do it a little of all of it,

depending on what time of year it is and what kind of fish I'm looking for. A gill net is simply a net stretched across a section of water that catches fish traveling up and down the river. A hoop net is shaped like a barrel, often baited but not always and the fish enter into a wide opening that necks down and they can't get out. A trot line is a long string

with baited hooks dropped off every few feet. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to get back with Dr. Kilgore about his experience on the river. He's going to talk about the general health of the fishery and some of his river sampling projects and will bring up an interesting idea.

The river as wilderness. What he said was very surprising to me. Of course, you know, you're sampling the bottom of the Mississippi River, so you're not just getting sturgeon. You're getting these giant catfish we're talking about. You're getting gar, buffalo, drum, goo, gasper goo, all of those fish. And over time, you know, you start getting this appreciation. that there's hardly any limit to the number of fish that you can catch out of this river. People are afraid to get on it.

They're afraid to fish for a good reason. Really? You have to really know what you're doing initially, but once you understand the things you've got to watch out for, it is a wonderful experience. That's one of my passions. I mean, you go out there and it's just, I can look one way, and that's exactly the way Mark Twain saw the river. when he was a cub pilot.

And then you look another way, and you'll see dykes and revetment. You know, that's modern-day Mississippi. But my point is that you can still see a lot of natural features in this river that still exist and haven't changed over the eons. You know, it's kind of,

I like to think a lot about wilderness, and I really value wilderness with a capital W in that, just a place untouched by man. You wouldn't really think of a, I wouldn't, think of a river system as a wilderness and it's not the perfect analogy but what I'm hearing you say is that you can be on that river and

you're dealing with something ancient Yes. You're dealing with something very old and intact which is rare Rarely would you go into a natural terrestrial system today and be able to we have places like this but where you would say this thing is a lot like it would have been pre-European yeah and you're telling me in the

river with the fish, the endangered species, other than the invasives, it's doing pretty well, which is kind of surprising to me. It's doing very well, in fact. Really? Even with the pollution and all the stuff? See, the pollution, I mean, yes, we had, before the Clean Water Act, there were certainly polluted waters throughout our nation, including the Mississippi River. But the legacy pesticides, like the DDT and the toxopine, they are not detected in fish tissue

anymore. Okay. And you hear about, oh, that the Mississippi River is polluting the Gulf of Mexico with all that nitrogen. Well, that's true, you know, because it does drain all the agriculture, almost all the agricultural land in the United States. So there is fairly high nitrogen and phosphorus, but mainly nitrogen, but it's not a form of pollution for the Mississippi. It might be a form of pollution for creating a Gulf hypoxia. Right, a dead spot. But it's not, but it's not, but actually a lot of this nitrogen is being sequestered in the flood plain as it as a flood spreads out and that's what's helping you know the plants and the soil to grow and be nutritious and support the the aquatic life there too so yes it is a wilderness a

colleague of mine Paul Hartfield he worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service for years he called it an engineered wilderness because you get the levees you know you have the dikes you have the revetment so it is an engineered system, but it still did not diminish or eliminate the natural features of this flood pulse type river that we have. I hear that a lot. You know, look how muddy it is and it's got to be polluted. I've heard it's not. I tell people it's not. In fact, you know, I would catch a fish out of the Mississippi way before and eat it before I would eat a fish out of my lake there in the subdivision. Is that right? Oh, yeah. That is kind of shocking.

to me. I love it. It's kind of surprising to me. And Bill, Lancaster, the commercial fisherman, he has plenty of customers that buy his catfish in Buffalo. Like I said, commercial fishing and the commercial fisherman, unfortunately, is a dying breed. They're just not being recruited. I see. And it's probably the economics of it. Well, me and me and Brent Reeves are going to become commercial fisherman, a friend of ours. I've got, I got big dreams. Big dream. Okay, there you go. Big dreams, folks.

Big American dreams. If the bottom falls out of the podcast market, I have a diverse financial plan to make a living as number one, stand-up comedian. Number two, a commercial fisherman with Brent Reeves with our sea art catfish boat, Laura, named after the Lauren Tide Ice Sheet. Number three, I'll work remotely as a Nashville singer-songwriter. and those things will obviously be a supplement to me already being a major player in the high-end mule market. I don't know if I want to tell my plan or not.

Somebody might steal it. Cut that out. Seriously, though, we've got to get back to what Dr. Kilgore was talking about. We're treading in some complicated water regarding the health of the river. I was completely expecting Kilgore to say the big muddy was America's sewer, manipulated by man so much that it was a dainty relic of its past, but that's not what he said at all. From a fish perspective, the river is healthy.

I've also got to mention two things that were just not getting into in this series. Number one, the dead zone in the Gulf. Number two, coastal erosion in Louisiana. There's a zone of hypoxia with very little aquatic life in it in the range of 7,500 square miles along the Gulf. Gulf Coast. This dead zone is the result of excess nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture fertilizer runoff, from lawns, and just human existence that pools in the non-moving water of the Gulf, creating algal blooms that suck up the oxygen in the water. However,

nutrients in a moving current have less impact. These nutrients aren't in and of themselves harmful, but in excess, they cause big problems. This drainage basin definitely has problems, but the natural fishery of the river isn't suffering from this. I'd say that's a pretty incredible report considering a lot of the environmental news that we hear on a day-to-day basis. And the hero of this fishery is that intact natural floodplain inside the levees of the river. Don't forget it. The other thing that we're just not getting into, which is a major issue, is the coastal erosion in South Lurbanes. Louisiana, where they've lost over 2,000 square miles of land in the last 50 years as a result of sea

level rise and less sediment moving down the Mississippi River. It's incredibly complicated and serious. However, this next section is wild, and we're going back to talk to our friend and old boat captain Hank Berdine about a significant factor influencing river health. It has to do with the monetary and cultural value of hunting. Stand by. Within the, what we call the batch of between the levees, the land between the levees, that

flood, you can't build a house and that unless you build it 15, 16, 20 feet up all the ground. So, the majority of that whole area down the river is in hunting grams. It used to be timber companies, but the timber companies

realized that there was an inherent value in those lands recreationally for hunting. And it was about in the 70s and 80s that Anderson Cully, Chicago Mill, all these huge timber companies that owned hundreds of thousands of acres of land between the levees. Said, look, and we can have our cake and eat it too. We leasing this land out to these hunting clothes for nothing, really. Why don't we sell them the land, keep the timber rights 15 or 20 years?

they sell the land at top dollar for recreational purposes. They keep the tumble for 20 years. They got doubled up money. So the majority of all this land now along the river is in private hunting camps, wild clubs. So really, in a way, and that's wild. The hunting, the value of hunting and the money that honey brought in is helping preserve

the wildness of the Mississippi River. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And when you talk about hunting club, you're talking about catfish points, 12,000-necked a hunt club. You know, Huntington Point, 10,000. I mean, from Memphis all the way down to New Orleans, along the Mississippi River, inside the levees, is hunting camps. From Memphis, I would say, all the way on down toward getting close to Baton Rouge.

Okay. Yeah, it's hunting camps. Hunting camps. From levee to levy. They don't want those trees cleared. If they do, it's select cutting. I mean, the timber companies are out of it now, but, you're not. But they've got a managed program where they go in,

select cut the trees, leave this, leave that, have their food blocks, all like that. And that's powerful for the health of the whole system. A whole system. As these natural floodplains inside the levees, which are man-made, but are remained timbered and managed, managed for wildlife. And I mean, it's a wildlife mecca. It's a wildlife mecca. Water systems are a product of their riparian zones.

The value of hunting camps inside the levees of the river being managed for wildlife, which is primarily whitetail, turkeys, and ducks, is creating a healthy, natural floodplain unique to the world. At one time, the value is in timber, but that is changing. I can't express what an incredible conservation story this is. Once again, hunters of the good guys saving habitat and wild places at a time in Earth's history when it couldn't be more important.

That's the muddy, boggy truth. I now want to talk to the dock about the big fish other than catfish of the Mississippi River. Yes, there are several different species of fish that I categorize as iconic megafauna. The first is what we've been discussing are sturgeon. There are two species of sturgeon

that live their entire lives in the Mississippi River, the pallid and the shovel-nose sturgeon. The pallid is the federally endangered species, whereas the shovel-nose is not. But they only get here in the lower mist maybe 10 or 15 pounds. They're not like the giant sturgeon that you see along the coast.

And the reason, of course, that the demise of sturgeon was due to the building dams and the caviar market. But today, sturgeon are thriving and you can almost walk on their hacklebacks, you know. They're so... Really?

The two most abundant bottom-oriented fish are blue cats and shelveno sturgeon. More than the other catfish? More than flathead, more than channel catfish. Blue cats are by far number one of the bigger fish. Sturgeon come in number two based upon our trot line catches. Wow. The largest North American fish, alligator gar. Now, alligator gar really got a bad,

rap. What happened to them is that people misunderstood them. I mean, they get to 300 pounds plus, and they're ugly and they're mean looking. I can understand that. But they misunderstood them thinking that alligator gar are eating their sport fish, their bass, their bluegill, they're croppy. And so they put a bounty on their head, considering them a rough fish. And they just about wiped them out. And then they started doing scientific studies and found out, well, they ate shat. They're not eating, you know, our sport fish. And plus, they're an apex predator of the Mississippi River. We do not want to eliminate an apex predator and they may also be a bio-control for some of the invasive carp. And so once we hated them and now we love them and there's hatchery programs

introducing them back into the Mississippi River and we're slowly seeing them come back. How big, you said 300 pounds, how long would that fish be? About 10 feet. 10 foot long. Yeah. The other. The other iconic megafauna, which is even more interesting than all the other fish are the paddlefish, spoonbill catfish. And they're very abundant here, although they also have the black eggs. And so now they're being targeted for the caviar because all the sturgeon are now protected. So all the states are really watching harvest of paddlefish. But the paddlefish, they can get over 100 pounds.

they're gentle giants, just an amazing, you know, and they're unique. You call it a Spoonbill Catfish. Yes. Is it a catfish? No. Okay, that's just the kind of colloquial term. That's right. It's a colloquial name.

The sturgeon and the paddlefish are very primitive. They were around during the age of the dinosaurs. That's how long they have lived. Same with the alligator gar. They're very primitive fish. What does it mean biologically? Like, what does it say biologically when a species, is so stable for millions of years.

They have overcome the evolutionary challenges of adaptation. They have adapted to that environment to be perfect. But these fish are uniquely adapted to this flowing water, fluvial environment. And if you take away that flow and you take away that flood pulse, then you eliminate those species. And that's what's happened in the upper mist. You don't see a lot of paddle fish and sturgeon things up there because of the dams. Would they be considered an indicator species? Yes, for a free-flowing natural river system.

Hmm. I like the idea of that, that a fish that old would indicate that he kind of has met his optimum design. Yes. To exploit the environment that he's got. And then we could deduce that if he's still here, the conditions are like they were a long time ago. Well, and the main channel of the Mississippi River, provides the same sort of habitat quality that it did pre-European. So that's why we have had no extinctions or extirpations.

That's amazing to me. What other natural system can we say exists in relative similarity to pre-European arrival? The only places that could compare would be our wildernesses with the capital W, the federally protected terrestrial wilderness. That's some wild stuff, and I'd love to see a 300-pound alligator gar, wouldn't you? Now, let's hear Dr. Kilgore talk about something a lot smaller that lives in this river. This surprised me. The river shrimp are prior to, you know, the exploitation of white shrimp and brown shrimp along the coast,

which is where we get most of our shrimp now. The river people and the Indians, indigenous people, would eat the rice. river shrimp because there are billions of them out there. We'll put a trawl through there and it, the trawl sometimes is so full of river shrimp, we can't even get it on board. And you can imagine how important those river shrimp are to the forage base of how would they have caught, how would have Native Americans caught river shrimp? They could put traps in there where you can like a weir or something and because what

they do is they swim and walk along the bottom of the Mississippi River. all the way up to the Ohio. They can go over dams. They can go up to the Missouri. But in order to complete their life cycle, they have to go back down to salt water. So those little shrimp have to walk all the way back down a thousand miles to get to the Gulf

to complete their life cycle. Who knew? Now, though, I want to talk about turtles in the big picture of fish in the river. Yeah, tell me about the turtles. Along the river into the swamp areas, you get these alligator snapping turtles that can get over 100 pounds. I mean, actually several hundred pounds. And, you know, they're another primitive species as relatively unchanged over the years.

And they have that specialized appendage on their tongue. They could remain underwater for hours and hours. And they open their mouth and they stick out their tongue and they have this little red appendage that flips back and forth. And that attracts the unwary fish close to their mouth and bang, you know, they'll snap shut. They've got a little bait. They're attracting their bait to them. Wow. And this is the alligator snapping turtle.

That's right, the alligator snapping turtle. Like I said, there's about 100 species of fish that maintain reproductive populations in the lower mess. If you include the tributaries, then there's probably about 250 species of fish that are associated. How does that compare with the other rivers of the world? That's quite biodiverse. Yes, it is, but it's nothing compared to the Amazon, which has probably over 2,000 species of fish. Wow.

I mean, I know. I mean, Amazon is such an anomaly, you know. Amazon's the NBA, and we're playing, like, in high school 1A basketball down there. That's right, yeah. I mean, you can't compare any river of the world to the Amazon. It's in a class by itself. The outflow of the Amazon is, up to 20 million cubic feet per second.

At a major floods on the Mississippi, we only get 2.5 million cubic feet per second. So it's 10 times higher. And it's longer, the drainage basin is wider, and there's no dams. No dams on the main stem Amazon. Whereas all the other great rivers of the word, the Congo, the Nile, the Yancey, all of those,

they have dams near the mouth of the river. The Amazon is a beast. I waited until the end of this series to mention it because it makes our beloved Mississippi look like a creek. The Amazon is the river all rivers are compared to. Dr. Kilgore has spent a lot of time on the big muddy, and I want to hear him talk about the perils of navigating the river. You said that people are afraid to get on the river

because of how dangerous it is. Anybody in American history that has been on the Mississippi River has some boat wreck story. Our boy, Davy Crockett, crashed a boat just south of Memphis and nearly died on the Mississippi River. And then, you know, all of Mark Twain's writing, talked about the dangers of the Mississippi River. And today it's still dangerous, even though it's been tamed from those days. Right. What do you, you said there were some safe, some things that you would look for. You can be safe.

What would those be? Well, I mean, for me, number one is I watch the wind because there's nothing worse being on the Mississippi River when you have a south wind pushing against a northern moving river. And the waves are like this. So in small boats that we're in, you know, we're just, we can't, you know, you can't get on plane. You know, you're getting inundated by all this water. It could be very dangerous out there in high wind. The most dangerous thing out there are the stone dikes. There's no doubt about it.

We've had some tragic stories about folks leaving Vicksburg and never being seen again, other than their boat turned over because of a dike. You have to, first of all, know kind of where the dikes are, what the tell-tale signs of these dikes, because they may be underwater, but they're still not deep enough, and you can still hit your lower unit on it and flip the boat. So you have to know and have navigation charts is good,

but I don't, I mean, I'm familiar with this river, around here I know where all the dikes are but if you don't you better be real careful and stay along the buoy line because the Coast Guard generally not all the time but they'll adjust the buoys according to the flood height and then the other thing you've got to watch out for are the towboats because towboats can't stop on a dime so you don't want to get in front of them but when they're pushing upstream they're creating these really big wakes and and that's going to slow you down too So you have to be able to take these wakes slowly and get out of it. You don't want to hit them hard because it'll flip your boat too if you're not careful.

So it's the wind, the stone dikes, and the towboats. But once you have a feeling and understanding, you know, it's just, like I said, it's a wilderness out there. Usually the only people, only thing you see out there are the towboats. You don't see a whole lot of recreational boats out there. Yeah. Now during the summer, if it's a nice day, that sandbar across from Vicksburg, It's got boats up and down that thing. People are just laying out on the beaches.

That's another thing about the Mississippi River. It's got these giant point bars. There is more sand beaches along the lower Mississippi River than all along the Gulf Coast. Is that right? Yes. Do y'all remember when Hank Burdine called the Mississippi America's Fourth Coast? I like that. I'm doing some cleanup work with Dr. Kilgore.

I wanted to ask him about shipwrecks. And turns out he was a whole whole thing. holding out a great story on us this whole time. So you think, are there a lot of shipwrecks in the Mississippi River? Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds. And some of them may be in an ag field because the Mississippi River has changed course as it meanders.

Remember that meander belt? A guy named Henry Fisk, he did this geomorphic study, and he mapped out all the meander belts on the Mississippi River over the last 10,000 years. And it's beautiful. I mean, you just can't believe all these meander bins that have cut off. So you may be 25 miles from the current Mississippi River today and find, I mean, the channel could have been there. She could have a shipwreck from 400 years ago on your place. That's right.

We discovered one on the old White River, right where the White River comes into the Arkansas, the old White River mouth is kind of a meandering shoot. We were there during low water, and we looked up there, and there was this long wooden boat that had been exposed by the bank sloughing off. and we reported it to the Arkansas folks and they had heard about it but they came out and excavated some of it. It was an 1800s version of it. I don't know.

Isaac, can you believe he wasn't going to tell me this story? He's holding out on us. What other interesting things have you found in the river? I haven't found them, but I've been with folks who have found him. A giant ground sloth claw. Wow. How big is that? Yeah, it's probably eight or nine inches long, curved, black, unbelievable.

And I've seen all kinds of teeth and Indian artifacts like old bottles. You'll find old bottles. You'll find pieces of pottery. You'll find old whiskey jugs, pieces of the old whiskey jugs. And find China that used to be on the boats that sank out there. You'll find chips of them. Do you ever see the bison skulls? Yes.

In fact, Bradley, another guy down there. We were walking on one and all of a sudden his foot hit something. and he starts digging around, and he picks up an entire intact bison skull. Wow. That was preserved out there. You should have pushed him out of the way and touched it first. I saw it first. Yeah, yeah, when we say, okay, let's take a break on this gravel bar, and we all just spread out, you know, where everyone's looking.

Some people are running, you know, for big stuff and others are just going real slow looking at the little stuff. The river just constantly is revealing new stuff. It does. When Brent and I start commercial fishing and we find our first shipwreck, trust your first shipwreck, Trust me, that will be the first thing we bring up in conversation for the rest of our lives. Hopefully, it's not Laura. Misty would get burned out quick on a shipwreck story if I found one, or was in one. Undoubtedly, the Mississippi River is one of America's most extravagant natural systems

rivaling the Rocky Mountain Range, the Appalachians, our great deserts, our giant inland lakes, our majestic coastlines. This river, its size and its location, has been a fun. component of what makes America, America, both functionally and culturally. I want to end by asking Mr. Bill about why he's dedicated his life to working on the river. You love fishing the river. Yeah. Why, what is it that you love about fishing the Mississippi River?

Oh, just the solidarity of it. Yeah, just being out there. If you're out there, you know, before the sun comes up and you see the sun come up or you You see the sun go down. It's just almost a spiritual experience. You know, when there's nobody, you know, there's nobody to talk to, there's nobody around. You don't see anybody. You're just out there in the wilderness, you know, almost like, like, you know, you're the only person on earth.

Yeah. In episode one of this series, we learned about the river's incomprehensible power and size along with man's ancient connection to it. The first Europeans saw it in 1541 and we'll never know when the first Native America, the first humans saw it. Time has forgotten. In episode two, we talked about how the Mississippi Delta was one of America's last frontiers that kept civilization at bay because of constant flooding until the advent of levees long after most of America was settled. We talked about the plantation, slavery, sharecropping. We talked with Mr. Earl Jasper about growing up in the... the Delta and the sharecropping family.

That was big. We talked about the art and literature of the Delta and how prior to the Civil War, this region was one of the richest places in America, fueled by some of the richest alluvial soil in the world. On episode three, we talked with author John Barry about the engineering feats that defined a century as daring men sought to tame the river

and how human nature and ego helped formulate the circumstances for America's most costly natural disaster, which changed America forever, the flood of 1927. On this fourth episode, we've talked about the health of the fishery of the Mississippi River, and I am highly encouraged to learn that the river is thriving, and much of it has to do with an intact floodplain preserved by the value of hunting camps inside the levees. We've just begun to scratch the surface of really understanding this river. Like I've said so many times, there's so many directions this story could have gone, and I just had to choose some directions to go.

But I believe every American ought to know about the Mississippi River. I started off with a knowledge gap that plagued me in a desire to understand this river as a natural system and how it's impacted America. And I think we've taken a pretty big swing in understanding the Mississippi River. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Gris. Hey, be sure to check out the Phelps Acorn, inhale, exhale, grunt and bleep call for deer hunting. It's made a fine white oak wood, and we only made 500 of these calls, and they've even got my dadgum signature on them. For real, I stand by these calls as incredible deer calls. Nothing else on the market like it.

Have a great week, and I look forward to talking. with the folks on the render next week. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.