Bear Grease - Ep. 48: The Trouble with Lovin’ Gobblin’ Turkeys with Will Primos and Dr. Mike Chamberlain

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

On this episode, we’re contrasting two eras of turkey hunting with Will Primos and Dr. Mike Chamberlain of the University of Georgia. Turkey populations peaked in modern times in the late 1990s, and with it, the innovation of call makers and outdoor media groups skyrocketed, forging the turkey hunting culture of the nation. Mr. Will Primos stood on the forefront of that innovation and he taught us how to call and hunt. However, recent decades have yielded dramatically decreasing turkey populations in much of the Southeastern United States. Dr. Chamberlain will detail the five biggest culprits of the decline and make some projections for the future. 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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. You're hearing turkeys, you're chasing turkeys. They're responsive. I'd kill birds every spring. Fast forward to when my son was born, by the time he got to be the age of, I'm going to become a fanatical turkey hunter like my dad.

There just weren't that many turkeys. And there had been 10 years before. On this episode, we're going from the creek bottoms to the ridgetops to contrast two areas. of turkey hunting. We'll look at goblin turkeys through the lens of legendary turkey hunter Will Primos. I'm interested in examining his passion for spring turkeys which shaped his life and how the timing of their resurgence gave him a limb to roost on. But the energy will swing hard when we talk with University of Georgia Turkey biologist Dr. Mike Chamberlain and hear his message which has been brought to the forefront of the turkey world.

We're exploring the fascination and excitement of spring turkey hunting, the passion that drives innovation, and the challenges the wild turkey is facing and what the plan is to help them. We'll even hear from my friend and callmaker Jason Phelps. These are all incredible folks, and I doubt you're going to want to miss this one. This is what books are written about. This is what forms companies.

This is what makes friendships. This is what God gave us to have the intensity of what he wanted us to have in life. That's a turkey right there now. That's right. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Greece 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. I've always loved turkey hunting. The emerging energy of spring bringing the hardwood timber back to life is euphoric for the micro windows you're immersed into it. I love the charismatic flowering trees like red buds and dogwoods and the intricate early-growing plants like crested iris and may apple. All indicators of the wild.

one thing. As a kid watching VHS videos in the 1990s, I remember old Harold Knight saying, When the oak leaves are as big as a squirrel's ear, the turkeys will be goblin. And therein lies the crown jewel of the spring. The reason we love it. Goblin turkeys. I love the audio sensation created by unseen gobbles, which enlivens the imagination. The act of turkey hunting is is implanting yourself into the ancient and natural system of a spring morning. And maybe what I love most of all is the amount of roving across the landscape you've got to do to find one. This is Dr. Mike Chamberlain at the University of Georgia. His passion has ignited a widespread interest in wild turkey biology as he and others have sounded the alarm of concern,

specifically for turkeys in the southeastern United States. let me know if you agree with my sentiment here. Have you ever been heartbroken? Dr. Chamberlain, I have a life philosophy that I would like to share with you. It goes way back in Newcomb lineage, and it's that you cannot trust a ground nesting bird. Okay? If you put your heart into a ground nesting bird, you're going to get burned, okay? My grandfather, Lewin Newcomb, he died in 2014.

He was 94 years old. He was a bird hunting. just the epitome of a southern bird dog trainer. You know, I was born in 1979, which would have been about the time that quail demise came. Sure. And I spent my whole life bird hunting with him, and he lamented the loss of quail.

My grandfather had this love of this animal and this thing that he did and he bested his life in. And the last 35 years of his life, the bird just wasn't there. And then I grew up and love turkey. hunting and when I was in high school in Arkansas we had good turkey hunting I learned to love it killed turkeys and then all that just kind of dissipated and that's when my philosophy came do you think this is reasonable if you're from Arkansas yes those same challenges that Arkansas

has faced there are many many agencies facing throughout the species range not just in the southeast but in other parts of the country as well I've heard it said it's kind of death by a thousand cuts in some ways. That's exactly right. There's no smoking gun. It is death by a thousand cuts, literally. I'm from Arkansas and our turkey populations are currently down 60% from our population peaks in the early 2000s, so it's easy for me to see our problem. But it has wider implications than just unfilled tags. I'm interested in how wildlife affects the trajectory of people's lives. And this goes way back, even to the very beginning.

The Clovis hunters likely built their culture around populations of megafauna like woolly mammoths. Folsom hunters around bison and tiquis. The plains Indians tribes arose with the buffalo herds. Daniel Boone made a living off bear, deer, and fur bears. My grandfather lived in the heyday of southern quail hunting, and the flutter of quail wings dominated his vacant thoughts. Wildlife can have big implications for people who live close to the land. Things beyond our control shape our lives all the time.

And in that statement, I want to make a big picture connection, so stay with me. I am a product of the 1990s. I came into that decade age 10 and left that decade at age 20, which is an important period. What I didn't know is that I built my foundational expectations on the peak turkey numbers of the modern era that some argue weren't sustainable. I wonder if the Clovis hunters felt the same way as woolly mammoths slipped through their fingers. Would they have had enough cultural memory to recognize the decline? I don't know. Interestingly, though, we do. And it's in large part due to outdoor media. In the 1990s, that was television. During that time, I was influenced by a man named Wilbur Primos for Mississippi.

He lived about 105 miles slightly northeast of East Fork, Mississippi, where Jerry Clower lived. Interestingly, Jerry's outdoor experience focused on coons and possums, not game animals like deer and turkey. Why, you might ask? Because they didn't have big game animals or very many of them back in Jerry's early years. However, the Turkey reintroduction efforts of the 1970s, produced the 1990s, and you can almost hear the turkey eggs hatching. It was an incredible time to be a turkey hunter. This is Mr. Will Primos. All of a sudden, we had loads of turkeys. We had an explosion of turkey call makers being successful in people rising to the top

through outdoor media brands. One of those people was an energetic, black, black, black-headed man with a tightly trimmed beard named Will Primos. So when did you start turkey hunting? You grew up with your family, your dad, turkey hunted? No, my uncles and all the family around me started turkey hunting. And so I would watch them as a young man. I grew up quail hunting with my uncle Gus. But then the turkey started just coming everywhere.

They weren't, they were only on the river way back in the Mississippi River. Okay. Inside the levied. Okay. And that's where most of the people turkey hunting. So finally, I got out of college, things rolling. But I was, you know, the first turkeys you killed, you were deer hunting. Probably weren't even supposed to shoot them.

Yeah. You know, but really springtime turkey hunting, that started sometime in my early 20s, late teens. Yeah. And just lit a fire under me, you know, just absolutely loved it. Okay. Would you tell me if this statement would you agree with this statement that by the late 60s, early 70s or, you know, some period of time in that time. World War II had happened. Baby boomers were in their prime.

They had money. They had free time. I mean, that's when a lot of the American hunting heritage, it didn't start then. But a lot of the things that kind of we've lived off of began then. I mean, just kind of with a revolution and widespread pop culture, nature of knowledge about turkey hunting. I definitely think it was after the end of World War II. World War II almost decimated the wild turkey.

And it did so because everybody was gone to war. And depression was owned in the 20s. The depression was hard on the turkey, too. Humans killing them. Humans killing them. Filling up a trough with corn and getting on one end of it. And when enough turkey's got the heads in that thing, raking them with a shotgun. And feeding the family.

I see. So, you know, until game loss came into being and seasons came into being, you know, they really didn't have a chance. You know, we were over-harvesting them. We were over-killing them. Yeah. And because people were trying to survive. It's important to grasp that we haven't always had a lot of turkeys.

Humans show up on planet Earth and think things are normal, and frankly, we just don't live that long. But a lot of stuff happened before we got here. We can assume that pre-European settlement turkeys were thick in the eastern half of North America. Boone and his bros talked about incredible flocks of turkeys in Kentucky, but the gobblers took a dive in the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. But then in the 70s, 80s, and 1990s, they resurged in the East and Midwest. Interestingly, today, the Wild Turkey is now thriving in much of the Western United States in places that historically never had turkeys.

They're pretty much an invasive species. But many believe that the peak of modern Turkey numbers in the East was in the 1990s and early 2000s, but now we're seeing a decline in many areas. It's not extremely clear why other than there are a lot of reasons. Here's Dr. Chamberlain. What about this idea that populations just flux up and down a lot? Is there any merit to just this is a natural thing that we're seeing? Oh, yeah.

In fact, that's a point of open discussion amongst researchers and managers is we know that when we restored turkeys, we probably overshot the point at which they were going to sustain themselves. In other words, populations were just exploding when we were moving turkeys all over the place and releasing them. And like the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, even into the 90s. Okay, got it. You were putting turkeys into vacant habitats. There were no turkeys there. Predator communities were different then.

Habitat was better then. There weren't as many human beings then. All these things that affect this bird. So populations just skyrocketed. And there were literally turkeys everywhere. We're now in what I call a new normal. We are never going to go back. back to where we were in 1995, which is not going to.

The peak of my turkey hunting career, 1995. I distinctly remember, you know, when I was in grad school in the early and mid-90s, I thought that was the best thing ever. There were turkeys everywhere. Everywhere I hunted, it was just amazing. Everywhere I went in every state, and I was so poor, I couldn't go, I hunted in Mississippi, but every public land I went to, there are turkeys everywhere. Yeah.

And now I can go back to those same places, and they're not there. It's not that they are just in lower abundance. There are places on those properties. They're not there. And that is a social problem, a human problem, because I, till the day I die, we'll talk about how good that was. And that was something unnatural. And that is like almost impossible for me to extinguish from my brain. You know, I mean, when you think about that we're these people that had this connection to a wild animal that we love to hunt, unnatural big populations of it,

We build this culture around it. We build norms around it. We build stories around it. I mean, I remember my dad talking about, man, I've heard 12 goblers from that one spot. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget where he was. And then that all of a sudden is the bar. Exactly.

That's what I tell my kids about it. I'm like, man, I remember when your grandpa used to sit on that ridge and hear 12 turkeys. Now we may be here one every couple years. That's kind of confusing. It's a concern for me, too. frankly, because when I was recruited into the spring turkey hunting ranks, there were turkeys everywhere. And I was successful. I could hear birds every morning. And that caused me to become addicted to it. It's like a candy or something. It's a drug, man. You're hearing turkeys. You're

chasing turkeys. They're responsive. I'd kill birds every spring. And I was just infatuated with it. And I fast forward to when my son was born and there were still a lot of turkeys around. But by the time he got to be the age of, I'm going to become a fanatical turkey hunter like my dad. Where we live, there just weren't that many turkeys. And there had been 10 years before. And as it turned out, Austin was not a fanatical turkey hunter like I am. He'd do it and he enjoyed it. But he didn't have the opportunities that you and I had to experience that. Yeah. And so he could not reflect back on a day when you heard 10 birds standing in one spot. Right. So what he was. He was, he, you could not reflect back on a day. He said, But he grew up knowing was that turkey hunting was a lot of times you wouldn't hear anything.

Yeah. And so his competing interest were deer hunts where he would see deer every time he went. He was successful. Duck hunting, goose hunting where he was successful. Yeah. And it pulled his interest away from turkey hunting. That's a great point. One thing is for sure.

Humans gravitate towards success. This has kept us alive as a species. Hunting turkey is most fun when accompanied by reasonable odds of success, which produces engagement and excitement, which helps produce something else. Passion, which then produces something else. Innovation. I'm certain this is an ancient chain of events. The resurgence of the wild turkey was an exciting time to be a hunter. Give me a minute. You got my own 20 double.

Hey, that's a man right there. Let me tell you what. This is what, this passion, this intensity, this is what books are written about. This is what forms companies. This is what makes friendships. This is what God gave us to have the intensity of what he wanted us to have in life.

That's a turkey right there now. That's an Alabama, Mississippi, state-line swamped turkey. That's right. And that would have been the time frame, you know, late 60s, early 70s, when spring turkey hunting being a sport, a thing that people mastered and perfected and called these birds, not just bushwhacked birds. That's kind of when it came alive with calls. Would you agree with that?

It came alive a lot, but there are some old-timers. The first box call was patented. 1897. Okay. By a guy named Gibson from Arkansas. Okay. And a lady gave me an actual original Gibson, which I donated to the Natural Wildlife Turkey Federation Museum.

Designed about like our box calls? There's a whole lot of similarities, but it's a very primitive piece. Tinkers from 1897 forward learned so much. Change the wood, put a spring under the lid around the screw to balance the lid. But there was a lot. You're saying about these people that really, it took fire, people sitting down, putting they're back against a tree and calling up a turkey in the late 60s 70s 70s 70s. There was a lot of that, but there was a lot of it in the 1900s, 1910, 20 about old codgers in the Ozarks,

people who understood it, people who learned to yelp on a piece of a leaf, a green leaf. In Alabama, they were experimenting with mouth calls. The story that best I could figure out, a guy from Alabama from Andalusia, Alabama, was in New Orleans, and he was walking by a guy who was selling trinkets on a corner. And one of the trinkets was a teeny tiny bird call. It was a teeny tiny diaphragm as big as your thumbnail. And the little guy would put it in his mouth and make a little bird sounds. And that guy stopped and heard that and he goes, I think I can make that thing.

Yep. So he bought some and started experimenting with it. And later, that's supposedly where some of the beginnings of the mouth call really came about. Hands free. Passion fuels innovation. Whether making a new style of Stone Point or developing projectile slinging weaponry like Adeladles and Bowes, The primary success of the human species has been using natural materials as tools. As humans had access to more tools, materials, and time,

people started figuring out ways to replicate the sound of a hen turkey, which is the siren call, the Achilles Hill of the greatest of game birds. The gobbler turkey. Jason Phelps is the chief callmaker and founder of Phelps game calls. I want to hear him. nerd out on the development of the box call and the innovation therein. On record, to the earliest that we know, Henry Gibson had the Gibson box call patented back in 1897. I believe he held half of the patent. And then there was a fellow

named John Bodie, who many speculator, he was maybe the financial backer as they kind of took this endeavor on. Henry Gibson patented the idea, but he didn't patent any of the specifications or any of like the important details. And so while he patented the idea, it really let everybody else go and make calls. It's pretty crazy when you look at the original patent drawings of the Henry Gibson call, it looks identical to what you would find today in today's box call. It has been improved upon, but it's very, very similar to what you see as a box call today is what they were producing back in, you know, the late 1800s. I can understand how a diaphragm. a mouth diaphragm call with a piece of latex on it can replicate the sound of a turkey as you push air through the soft tissues of your tongue and mouth over this latex reed and it, you know, it sounds like a turkey.

What's kind of bizarre when you think about humans just having this natural material trying to imitate a turkey that you would ever dream that you could take two pieces of wood and make it sound like the soft flesh of a turkey. How do we get the sound out of a box call that sounds so good? Yeah, and I always kind of wondered the same thing. You know, who was the first person? And how did they come across this? And if these things were never invented, would I be able to, like, think of it or hear that sound? And wood on wood makes a little bit of sense because we're, you know, in our day-to-day lives,

you know, whether it's a wood drawer, a cabinet, or framing for a house, you know, wood out in nature. I imagine somebody had taken fairly dry wood of different sizes. and it replicated the sounds of a turkey, or it was similar or close enough, where maybe they went back and refined it, but you advance today, kind of what we're doing is it's all acoustical.

We're taking very specific woods, typically a harder, heavier wood for your paddle, and then you've got maybe a lighter, slightly less dense wood for your base. And by hollowing out the center and creating your two walls, what we're doing is we run that paddle across one of the walls, we are forcing it to vibrate. And that's why the chalk is used.

We need those two calls, you know, that coefficient of friction to kind of go up. We want those two materials to kind of bite against each other. The reason all of these paddles, you know, all the way from Gibson's paddle, all the way to what we're using now, have a radius on them. And what that does is you're swiping that paddle across one of the walls of the bottom of the box. At one point, you imagine you're riding up on the wall. And then once you're over halfway, you're starting to ride down the backside of the wall. And that idea gives us our high note going in.

And then as you start to break down the backside, you get that breakover and you get the second part of a hen yell. Jason, I don't know if this is the right platform to tell them about the call that you and I are working on together, the Gary Newcomb Black Panther scream call that we're making. Now, my dad swears that he can tell the difference in a Black Panther and a regular panther by just the way they scream in the dark. Okay, so there's a difference. He has ears that can dissect the difference. Yep, he can differentiate between the two colors. I'm going to move that to the top of the priority list on calls that need to be designed.

When you think of humans as natural predators on the landscape, which we've been in North America for a minimum of 15,000 years, probably longer, our participation in the ancient hunt is no less legitimate than a bobcat. However, the spark of consciousness, our ability for self-reflection as reason. predators. Our ability to make tools has fueled creative strategies like squeaking chalked wood together to make a turkey sound, which is pretty bizarre. The only predator that impresses me more in the innovation department is the great horned owl. Dr. Chamberlain exposed this story to many of us. Weighing in at around three pounds, these gritty little suckers target goblin turkeys on the limb in the

pre-dawn darkness and hit them flying at speeds up to 40 miles per hour, knocking them out of trees and breaking their necks. Dadgummit, those great horned owls are some good turkey hunters. Here is Mr. Will talking about that predatory innovation. I was born into a restaurant family. Okay. We had five restaurants. So I had to keep doing that as I figured out how to grow an outdoor hunting primaries.

primarily a game call and later many other products, how to do that. There was no money, so I couldn't sell enough calls to pay me and somebody else to help run the place or make the calls or whatever. So I didn't quit my work until 1988. I started the company in 1976. So I didn't quit having a full-time job until 1990. So how old would you have been in 1976? In 1976, I would have been, what, 24 years old? So you started making target calls when you're 24 years old?

I started selling them. selling them. Yeah. I made them for me, for others, for friends. So a friend of mine, Buck Deerman, he challenged me to make a mouth call because he loved these mouth calls, but they would fall apart on him. And so I said, I don't know to make a turkey call. And so he says, yes, you do here. And so I just took it apart and looked at it. This is a diaphragm call? Yeah, it was a staggered reed, had the reeds that totally were separated by about a 16th of an inch. Okay. They didn't touch, which created a lot of rasp and had some different pluses to them that other calls that weren't stacked did. And that was back before anybody ever did that.

I mean, some people in Clarksdale were doing it, a lady by the name of Eleanor Wrestler, and another guy named Brassie Danton were doing it. They were handmaking them with lead, usually, had a lead frame. That's what they used back then, and they were malleable, and you could take a, we called them rubbers back then. I think they call them condoms and prophylactics today, but we called them rubbers and you couldn't buy them over the counter you couldn't go up to a drugstore and buy them you primarily had to buy them from a coin operated machine at the service station i'll be darn so you buy them and we'd slice them up and try to if some if they were lubricated you had to wash them off and figure it out and drill them dry and then how to slice them and we finally figured out how to

slice them and that's done with a paper cutter was much more efficient anyway i took the call apart for for buck and took some shears and cut some back then beer cans were made from 10 they weren't aluminum and you cut the de-gum thing up and you tried to make a horseshoe out of it and try to how to put it together and that kind of thing. And I figured a way to finally use aluminum sheets of aluminum and I had a sledgehammer and I had a machinist to make me a die that could punch out the center of it and then the next step was the outside of it. And I'd sit in my carport on the concrete floor and put the aluminum strip in there and take a sledgehammer and hit it. We still have that tool at the office. At a real.

original tool that I would now so people were doing a similar thing like you oh yeah yeah so primarily quaggle boy was just getting going ben lee i'm not sure he'd even started back when i was handmaking them a penswood was already around and old was a big call company at the time primarily duck calls but i was just oblivious to most of that i just i didn't know anybody you weren't thinking i'm going to build a company yeah no and i wasn't thinking i was going to build a company and i wasn't in that world. National Turkey Federation didn't start until 75, I think it was. It wasn't a way to have like-minded people come together and trade ideas and whatever.

So it's kind of a cottage industry in different places. But anyway, I finally figured out how to make this call for Buck. And he loved it. And I perfected a double read. And one year I made them all summer long. And I took them to a show that spring. And I sold out. So I said, holy crush.

I went to the little sporting goods store. And I had them all in a glass jar. People come in, pick one out and pay for it, and I'd get my money. What did you get for a turkey call back in those days? $8. It's not much different than that now, isn't it? $7.99. Well, later on, my double went to 1999.

Okay. They were handmade, and I wanted to stop the demand, but it seemed like the demand just grew. But one day a guy came in there and grabbed a call in the sporting goods store here in town and put it in his mouth. He helped on it, didn't like it, and threw it back in the jar. And the guy called me, said, you got to come get all these. We don't know which one was in his mouth. Here's Jason Phelps talking about Mr. Will.

Jason, you're a callmaker and have been for a good portion of your life. You know, when you talk about these kind of legendary callmakers throughout the years, I mean, it feels like Will Primos would fit inside of that. And I know that callmakers build off each other. Even when Mr. Will tells his story, like he didn't do this on his own. You know, I mean, there were people before him. Yeah. I think you would fit into that lineage of great callmakers.

What do you have to say about somebody like Will? Growing up, I started out in a rifle hunting family, you know, and so using calls was never really something that we were into. We didn't need it to, you know, kill game out here and fill the freezers. And so as I got more into it and wanted to continue to challenge myself, you know, the Truth Series and Will was really kind of was everything there. You know, I couldn't wait for the new Truth. series to come out. And then as soon as the Elk series went out, you know, I would go out and grab it.

And, you know, it was really kind of looking up the Will and everything he was doing and then kind of the class act that he was. I don't idolize a whole lot of guys, but he was definitely one of those guys I looked up to because, you know, he seemed to be at the top of the game, as innovative as it is it got. And then just, you know, super good guy. So, yeah, growing up, way before I ever started making calls, you know, I would say, you know, Will was one of those guys I looked up to and, you know, still do. 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 where 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 backwards. 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. Here's Mr. Will with more of his story and how it coincided with a vast change in turkey hunting strategy. When I started trying to market my calls, I had a dealer here, a guy from Pennsylvania came down here hunting, bought some calls, took them back, told a dealer in Pennsylvania.

So I had a dealer in Pennsylvania and I had a dealer down here as my first two dealers. So when I'd get time off from the restaurants, I'd travel the state of Mississippi and got called on different sporting goods stores. So I went to Greenville, Mississippi, which is in the Delta, on the Mississippi River, north of here. And Clyde McGee, I went in there and introduced myself to him, great guy, told him what I was trying to do, showed him my calls. And I said, here, listen to this. This was actually during turkey season. And I just killed a turkey and had a little recorder. And these aren't, these aren't digital.

This is a cassette tape recorder. And I just put it on the ground, called the turkey up. I think if I remember correctly, I cackled at the turkey 11 times and finally got the turkey up there and didn't take long and killed him. I was just hammering him. I was just hammered. Just hammered. Yeah.

Shot the turkey. This old man was sitting there in the store. I got through him, cloud. I said, man, that was an unbelievable hunt. And that man said, you called too much and you called too loud. And looked at that man. I said, sir, the turkey's dead. So, you know, the aggressiveness.

cutting and running is what it became known as, started during that time. Yeah, it was kind of a new age of turkey. See, and I'm younger than you, but I very much so know what you mean by the old-timer way of yelping on a box call and sitting there. The really, really good turkey hunters know how to involve both. Right. And the best turkey callers are those that have good ears and can hear what they're saying, just like a musician that has good ears and can hear all the notes and it doesn't miss anything. a lot of high notes now. I'll be 70 in three weeks. But those that are the best, I can hear what he's doing. And he can change what he's doing in his mouth to give you the

sound that he wants. But back to the two styles, you've got to be able to do both. To know when the appropriate time. Or when you think you know, you never know. You just think you know. You think this might be a good opportunity to be quiet, to not yelp in for 10 minutes or 30 minutes, whatever. Last year, we y' up to the turkey. one time and he gobbled and he showed up two hours later we never said another word guy missed him but you know and he didn't gobble one more time yeah but that was an afternoon and you've got to feel like you can play the game you're living in their world yeah they don't have to go anywhere they don't have to go to the dentist they don't have to do anything they have no

appointments they're making a living staying alive and they stay alive with their eyes and their ears sometimes i think they can smell me Success is an interesting and complex phenomena. It favors the hardworking, the disciplined, those with passion, the focused, but it also favors those who come along at the right time. It's interesting and not hard to see that the resurgence of the wild turkey was the fodder of innovation in turkey hunting. I would say I would describe you as a connoisseur of turkey hunting. Guys like you and some others interpreted the world for, and I'm going to say us, through your media, through your work, through your connection to the hunting industry. And, you know, there's some people that just came along at the right time.

And that's a awesome thing to have happened. And you came along at the right time and had a whole lot of things going for you. But I would describe your passion, your ability to articulate what's going on. And mainly just the passion that comes through, just through watching videos. You've interpreted turkey hunting for me for sure, just like this has value. And I know the store-bought answer of why turkey hunting, why we love it so much, but I want to hear you tell me what it is about turkey hunting that is so special because it is. Well, you've said a lot of things that I want to go back and talk about.

First off, I appreciate what you're saying. In no way, shape, or form that myself or any of the team set out to create what we did. I didn't realize the effect we were having on so many people. We were a part of their living room, and we were clean about it. We didn't cuss. We love the Lord. I'm a Christian, and I want to portray that, and I want to live that life, and I want to make him proud.

I want to make my mom and my daddy proud. My daddy is a World War II vet who's still living. He was a navigator in the Pacific Theater. Wow. So those things you said about connecting with those people like yourself, so many people have expressed that. And you're right, timing is huge. And I challenge everybody to figure out what might be affecting them that's timing related.

There's a book called Outliers, written by Malcolm Gladwell. He's a famous author. And he goes into the depth of why somebody can be an outlier. I was described by this person as being an outlier. So he gave me the book. Rockefeller, not for monetary reasons, but when he was born, he was able to do what he did. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, different people born at a certain time that if they had been born at any other time, would not have been able to do what they did. So because of when I was born, when Buck inspired me to make the turkey calls, there were things available to me that hadn't been available to somebody years past or that were going to be gone.

A perfect example is the audio cassette tape. We rode around in our car, it's an audio cassette tape. So in 1982, no, spring of 83, I hired a guy. guy to follow me around in the woods with a big Swedish nagler recorder two big wheels he had to open it up and set the big wheels on there and had a parabolic mic and he recorded me calling up a turkey killing the turkey and running to turkey wow is that what you showed the guys at the no the store i did that one on a little you did that on a little walkman or something yeah yeah yeah exactly so i did that and produced a tape well that was unbelievable that was available to me and i fought it up to

make the cassette tape and then to teach people how to use circuit call yeah very organized i can teach that's a gift. So I took it and organized it. I wrote it and I taught everybody how to begin to make, how to put a mouth calling our mouth, how to begin to make a sound. Yeah. How to begin to put it all together.

It's all very easy. But at any rate, that tape was a huge success. I couldn't keep them in stock. What year was that? That was 83. 83. Yeah. And so then we keep going along and all of a sudden about 85 or 86 or so.

You could go to Walmart and for over $1,000, you could buy a video camera and go and video your kids out in the backyard playing and wash it immediately. It was no longer sending it off to have it developed and all that kind of stuff with an 8mm camera or whatever. And that was incredible. It was incredible. It was incredible. Here I am trying to figure out how to market premos. And I believe the year was 1985 because that was the year the National Wild Turkey Federation had their convention in New Orleans.

So I drove to New Orleans, had a booth. And the guy next to me, and was Marvin Killing's work. He was an architect from Alabama. And he loved a turkey on him. And he loved a turkey. And he yelped up a turkey at a loading site where they had logging woods and had a loading site. And he was backed up against some of them piled up trash logs. And he helped up this turkey and killed him on tape.

And he was playing that on his TV. And the line was hundreds deep. They couldn't get to me if they really wanted to. But yet I had a built-in crowd when he'd have a break. I'd be able to talk about my stuff. And so I went, holy cry. I'm going to get me a video camera. I know how to market Primos.

About the same time, I read a book called Radical Marketing. Unbelievable. Stories about The Grateful Dead, about Harley Davidson, and how they radically marketed. They couldn't just go buy print ads because they didn't have any money. How did they do it? So got the video cameras, had Boyd Burr, who worked for me at the time. We produced the first tape in 1986. And it was called Spring Turkey Hunting with Primos and the Southern Boys.

What a name. horrible. And we had two hunts on it and had some decent success. It was VHS. We sold them to sporting goods stores for $44.99. And they rented them like Blockbuster. Oh, I see. That's the way it was done. Oh, be done. The next year, I had met Ronnie Cus Strickland. He was working in Rex, Sporting Goods, in Natchez, down south. And he had sent me a recording of some stuff he had done, not video-wise, but otherwise. I drove down there and went and sold him some more calls. He was buying them already and talked to him and said you need to come to work for me next thing i know he quit rex i bought him a truck and i said look i'm in the restaurant business i can't afford this

game call company i'm going to keep working in the restaurant business i might can go hunting i might not can go but i want you to take anybody that'll go friends family anybody that let you hunt on land public land doesn't matter just go hunt i was able to make a couple of hunts because recorded 12 incredible hunts me on some island one spring in one spring this original video was the beginning of a massive success on many levels. It taught a lot of us how to hunt goblers. It brought the excitement of turkey hunting into our houses. And our lead interpreter of the experience was Mr. Will Primos.

His passion, excitement, intelligence, and authenticity were hard to resist in the rest is history. This golden era of wild turkey hunting put a new cultural value on hunting turkeys. And as we know, that value creates an incentive for people to protect. Turkey's. Never forget this equation. Hunting creates incentive, which creates protection. It was also during this time that the National Wild Turkey Federation came to maturity. It was started in 1973, but the 1990s produced vast expansion of the organization, which is designed to protect turkeys in habitat, and they've done an incredible job. As great as it's been, talking about the glory days, let's talk about modern times, because the last 20 years have seen downturns

and turkey populations in many places. And this isn't all gloom and doom, because we've still got a lot of turkeys, and we've still got way more than we had in some other periods of this country. But the hunting community is now on red alert. Here's Dr. Chamberlain breaking it down. Describe for me from the research that you have about the decline of turkeys and the southeast. How do we quantitatively know that? Okay, so basically state agencies in the south, not all, but most of them use poults observe per hen in the summer, pultz being young turkeys, as a proxy for production. For many decades, we've always thought that three pults per hen, on average, would be a population that's increasing. Two pults per hen would be a population that

can just sustain itself and anything less than two pults per hen is a declining population. And this is them raising that pult to maturity. Yeah, until they're large, you know, half the size of the adults in the summer. You know what I'm talking about. You see a brood flock, if you will, where you've got like four or five hens and 20 young turkeys that were hatched that summer. Now they're twice a size with Bannam rooster or something. So at that point, their survival is very high.

And so a hen turkey would have a clutch of 10, 10, 12, yeah. So, I mean, that's even calculating her to losing 70% of her clutch. Yes. And that's good. We thought it was sustainable. And what you've seen over the past 20 years, we've seen declining productivity as measured by Pultz Observe per hen across the southeast, not in one state, all the states. Can I ask you something about Pultz Observe, just before we go any further?

How do we know that's not anecdotal? Is it just the best we can do, I guess? In some ways, yes, it is the best we can do. And it's fraught with biases. It's the same people observing birds in the same places every year. It's not distributed broadly across states in the way it should be. But it's about the best we have at the scale at which agencies manage turkeys, which is a state level, you know, or a physiographic region within a state. So what we've seen are these long-term precipitous declines in production, slow enough to where if you looked from one year to the next, it's not that big of a deal.

but when you look across 20 years, it's a linear trend downward. Boy, those are the tough ones, aren't they? Yes, and it was right under our nose. And I say we, because I take partial blame for this. I've been in this game a long time. I've studied this bird 25 years, and I wasn't paying attention to those trends as they were unfolding because when you just looked across three or four or five years, it wasn't that big of a deal. You know, you see noise and data up and down, up and down, up and down.

But the trend is down. And then all of a sudden, around 2010, myself and my students presented some data to the agencies using what they had provided us, and it showed these dramatic declines in production. At the same time, you've seen either increasing harvest, stable harvest, or decreasing harvest, depending on the state. So in other words, in some cases, we were seeing declines in production and increases in harvest. Well, the basic math doesn't add up, you know. At some point, that bubble has to pop. Of course, when us turkey hunters hear fewer birds, see fewer birds, and kill fewer birds, we're concerned.

And that's where you are right now with much of the southeast, and it has agencies trying to identify what's going on and then how to address it. Sometimes all the talk about turkey decline, which is being talked about a lot, can be confusing. I hoped to get Dr. Chamberlain to narrow it down to the top five culprits of turkey decline. in the southeast. Here's what he said. Number one is habitat. If you look across the species range, you can find situations where there's been not only a loss of habitat,

it's just gone. Habitat that's capable of supporting turkeys. A farm turning into a Walmart. Yes. So you've got loss, or it's just disappeared. You have conversion of habitat. So, for instance, the loss of hardwood forest

and it being replaced with pine-dominated forest. Okay. Turkeys in the east are inextricably linked to hardwood forest. We've also seen declines in habitat quality. So to your point, this field used to be grazed and kept it in what's considered good brood habitat. And that farm was sold and it was planted to pine trees or it was converted to a fruit orchard or whatever.

You can come up with a scenario. So if you look at the landscape from a 30,000 foot view, you see that in the past few decades, there's less habitat, there's poor quality habitat, and there's conversion of habitat. Okay. And none of that has benefited the bird. And you can go to other areas. You can go out to Rio Country. You can go to Merriam's country.

You can find this anywhere you go. If you go to South Florida, you see it magnified to the nth degree with Osceola's because Florida is such a destination state for everything. So habitat would be that number one. Habitat fragmentation too. Fragmentation, a good point. By fragmenting habitats with roads and power lines and rights of way, we've made habitat that's better for predators than turkeys. And that very likely is influencing the increased predation rates that we've seen.

Number two is confounded by habitat, and that's predation. Okay. We have seen, if you look across the United States and North America in general, we've seen obvious changes in the distribution and abundance of predators that would affect turkeys, the smaller carnivores. You know, you're a raccoon hunter. I can take you to properties here locally that you would run your dogs to death trying to tree all the raccoons on these properties. To a coon hunter, that sounds pretty good. Yeah. To a turkey hunter, it sounds terrible.

Yeah. Species like coyotes that were not even historically present in the southeast now are super abundant. There's no fur trade, as you know. So species like bobcats and raccoons, there's no market for them anymore. There are not trappers being recruited into the trapping ranks. So all of that points to these changes in predator abundance and density. And then if you look at many species that have increased in abundance and we know it, such as raptors, owls, hawks that affect turkeys as well, species that are prominent nest predators like rat snakes that benefit from a thicker, brushy or understory in the forest. Yeah.

All of these things, fragmentation, species like rat snakes, for instance, that come along edges and they're extremely effective. along edges. They're not as effective in the interior of a stand. You put all that together, and the habitat confounds the predation issue. And so what we've seen is we are not producing as many turkeys because the predation rate on the nest is higher than it was historically. 20 years ago, nests that hatched had a better survival rate than they do now. Even the few that hatched in our study populations, most of them fail before they're a month old. So the predation and Habitat go hand in hand. Any idea what number three is?

It's another predator issue, but undoubtedly the most sneaky predator of all time. Number one is habitat-related issues. Number two is predation, which is connected to habitat. What's number three? Harvest. We've got a bird that we hunt primarily during their breeding season, and we've known for years decades that harvest matters. It matters when you kill the birds, and it matters the rate at which you harvest.

them. Research decades ago suggested that you need to harvest your birds starting at a certain time, that being about when nesting starts, and you need to kill a conservative, say, 30% or less of your tombs in a population. The problem with all of that is those recommendations were predicated on what was happening in the 1980s. And we've already talked about, since 1980s, we've seen a dramatic decline in production. We're not making as many birds. So the paradigm that has got a guided harvest for this bird is outdated. And science is showing that we are killing a lot of males in some of our populations. We're killing well over 30%.

Okay. If that's the case, then it's not sustainable, given the production, again, predicated under where we know we are as a new normal, the harvest thinking, if you will, the mindset that we've used historically is just not going to work anymore. Yeah. And that's why... So these liberal turkey bag limits, like some places you can kill... five. I remember there was a time in Arkansas

you can kill three, now you can kill two. I mean, we're going to have to dial that back in. Yeah, and you see a lot of agencies that are already doing that. Yeah. Because I'm not trying to advocate for the agencies, but the bottom line is as a turkey hunter, you need to understand that agencies can only control harvest

at a spatial scale that's commensurate with the bird. In other words, they can manage their state lands any way they want, and it still only impacts a tiny percentage of the turkeys on the landscape. I understood. But when they change harvest frameworks and they change the number of birds that are being killed, they can change that at a state level. And that's what they're charged with managing. So that's, unfortunately, harvest is often what

agencies look at. What's the biggest lever we've got? Exactly. I mean, if we're talking about we want more turkeys on the landscape and we're killing turkeys, the way that we can have for sure more turkeys on the landscape is for us to kill less. Kill less. Yeah. I'm dying to know what number four is. What's number four? I see disease being problematic. The problem. The problem. with diseases, we don't understand the complexity of disease issues on the landscape because a sick bird dies and gets eaten and we don't know they're there. But what you're seeing, yeah, what you're seeing now is some emerging disease issues in parts of the country where we have these viruses and we have things that are affecting turkeys and we don't understand how we just know the birds are sick or that

they're carrying the virus. Some of these viruses do have potential to affect reproduction. We just don't understand the magnitude of that effect and it's such a hard question to get at at a broad scale. And what we're seeing through disease testing is you may have a high prevalence of a particular virus in certain areas and not in other areas. So it's not like a uniform problem, but it could be really problematic in a local area. What would be number five? This is your last one. I could almost pick about four or five different things, but I'll use a little bit different. different take than I think most people would expect. It is us. Us is turkey hunters. Our mindset, our perspectives, our expectations, our willingness to take versus give. We are going

to be the future of this bird. If we prioritize the fact that we want, that we're willing to give more than we take, then there's hope for this bird because we are the ones that are going to carry the torch. Who else is going to prioritize turkey other than turkey hunters? Nobody else. Exactly. We get caught up in our mindset as we've talked about is often about, well, this is what I expect. I want to kill three birds or two birds, whatever it is. And we get caught up in what we've experienced in the past, how we grew up. This is how we've always done it. Guys, gals, you got to forget that. Yeah. We have to work innovatively and creatively

together and recognize that if we don't prioritize the bird and we don't work collaboratively with agencies and landowners, nobody else is. We are the ones that are going to have to prioritize a bird. If we don't do that, it's not

going to happen. So I look at number five as being us. I like the question Dr. Chamberlain asked and answered. Who is going to protect turkeys? The only people are the hunters. Here's a look at the big picture of North American conservation. I'm not entirely sure what this means,

but I know it's right and it's going to be worth it. I think about, okay, am I going to be satisfied with one? If I go to this state and I only harvest one, will I be satisfied? And the older I've gotten, the more I realize the answer is yes. A 25-year-old turkey hunter has a very different mindset than I do. I think what we're seeing and what we have to prepare for in the next 50 years of conservation in this country is sacrifice. Sportsman sacrificing for the resource because there is nothing that's getting easier about wildlife management in this country. I mean, primarily due to increase of human population and decrease of literal forest, swamps, habitat.

grasslands. I mean, and that ain't stopping anytime soon either. I mean, we will not be able to regulate humans surviving. And what is clear is that as sportsmen, if we really value this resource, if we really value this lifestyle that we have as an American sportsman, we're going to have to suck it up in a lot of places. I mean, I just spent a lot of time researching and interviewing about the green tree reservoir issues in Arkansas with the duck hunting. And I mean, that's pretty much where we're at with that. It's like, uh, yep, this is, this kind of stinks for a lot of people, but we have to do this to save the resource.

So really, it's kind of like just, this is the new normal. Exactly. But that's okay. I mean, and I'm like exactly middle age. I'm 42 years old. So I'm kind of on, I teeter on youthful lust of like wanting to kill a bunch of turkeys, but also the wisdom that might come with age. And I'm like, I see both sides of it.

Yeah. situations like this are going to be the norm moving forward. I agree. When I go hunting, I want to bring home game. Otherwise, we'd call it hiking. But here we'll see the reason why Mr. Will hunts. It's kind of a cliche idea, but the answer is so compelling. And we all know it gets truer and truer the older we get.

So of all the things you hunt, and I know that your experience in North America is vast. Where does turkey rank inside of that? Somebody asked me that the other day, and I wrote it down. Oh, man, he's got this written down. He's reached over his desk. I'm going to read it to you. In answer to what do I like to hunt the most? Turkeys or elk or big mature deer, wild covey's on the rise, big bass on top water,

or is it green heads when cucked to the decoys? All can be exceptional, but day in or day out, it is the sunrises and sunsets I cherish most. So, if I had to give them all up, turkey hunting is not going to be giving up. And then second for me, after turkey, is going to be elk. Okay. So turkey and elk, that's what I'm hearing you say. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, I just had a dug hunt that I'd go on tomorrow and then. And big white tails? Oh, I have loved to be a big one. It's a trap question to ask. I know. I mean, if you ask me the same thing, I would stumble around and be like, it's a trap. It's a trap. It just matters what time of years.

But every one of those. days has sunrises and sunsets. That's right. In closing, here's Mr. Will talking about two things that have been most important in his success, and I think we can incorporate these into our approach of protecting wild turkeys. Passion don't ever underestimate anybody with passion. Never. And another thing, realize what discipline is.

Discipline is giving up what you want today for what you really want most tomorrow. Be at weight loss, you got to not eat that or you got to exercise. You got to be disciplined about it to get what you really want. But remember, discipline is so important in every step of your life. In every step of your life, from the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning, you've given up what you want today for what you really want. most tomorrow. After hanging out with Mr. Will, it's clear that passion and discipline are two dominant features

of his life. I was personally impacted by being around him. And since recording this podcast, I was able to hunt three days with him in Mississippi, and I can tell you the highlight clips of his turkey hunting videos don't portray how incredibly disciplined Mr. Will is in every area of his life. His eating, his exercise, his finance, his reading, his spirituality, his relationships. And I've rarely met someone with such incredible focus. Being around people like him is personally challenging. He seems to be a student of life, never ceasing in pursuit of forward momentum,

but able to enjoy the ride. I think in modern times of turkey conservation, we can take a play for Mr. Will, just like we did back in the 1990s. We're going to need passion and lots of it. to fuel our energy and love of wild places and beasts. I've made it a spiritual discipline to never take for granted seeing a wild turkey or a covey a quail or a black bear. If my heart doesn't jump, I tell it to jump.

And it asked how high. And secondly, we'll need discipline as we move into a new era of conservation. That discipline will take on different forms for all of us. It could be improving the habitat on your 15-acre track of land, led into Jake Turkey walk, taking a neighbor kid hunting, or it might be that in the future, you are the leader of a powerful conservation group in charge of millions of dollars,

and you'll need to do the right thing for the resource. In closing, the gobble and red head of the wild turkey has altered the course of my life. His iridescent feathers and swing and beard, have imprinted me beyond reclamation. And it is my honest prayer that will be backed up with action like Billy Coleman's prayer was, that goblin turkeys will continue to thrive in America.

Thanks so much for listening to Bear Greas. I've got two favors I'd like to ask of you this week. Number one, share our podcast this week with the worst and best turkey hunters you know and be sure to tell them which one they are. And number two, take an action step and join, become a paying member of the National Wild Turkey Federation. Have a great week, and we'll talk on the render next week with some of the crew. 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 dark. 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.