Bear Grease - Ep. 49: Bear Grease [Render] - One Thousand Bandaids, Mr. Leon, and Turkeys

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

On this Render we've got the gang back together. Brent, Josh, Misty, and Gary circle back to Jerry Clower before moving on to that heart breaker, the turkey. Brent tells a couple stories about his turkey mentor, Mr. Leon, navigating the nuances of matrimony and Arkansas back roads, and Clay finishes it off with maybe the greatest FALL turkey story ever told.     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 and 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. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called the Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual Bear Grease podcast. 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 had people contact me and they're like, did you guys quit?

Singing? Singing. Yeah. So there's probably a group of people that are glad we haven't sang in several months. Yes. And then some just like think that like our spirits just shut down. They're like, are y'all quitting the Berger's podcast? You hadn't sang recently.

It's like a rubric of whether the podcast is working. Yeah. And we're like, I think it has some validity inside the idea. idea because where there is energy and spirit and life happening, what happens? Music. Music is written. People are inspired. For millennia.

So my wife, Misty Newcomb was here on my left. If she'd gotten here just a little bit earlier, I would have said, we're going to play. Okay. But this is what I'm going to guarantee. Next, Bear Greece, render. Keeps coming up. That we're here. Okay.

We're going to play. Okay. I had a song request. I can't remember what it was, but the guy sent me a video, and it was a bunch of otters singing about barbecue. That'll work. Oh, man, it's fabulous. I love more than a bunch of singing otters.

This is a fantastic afternoon. And it has been a long time since we've had a Berger's Surrender here at the Meat Eat Eat Eat or South World Headquarters here in Arkansas. I got a question. Is it sanctioned? Is it sanctioned for you to, I mean, like, you call it Mediter South? Is that, I mean, has there been a formal approval process? I mean.

Papers filed? Of course. It's been declared. Yeah, there's been a declaration. So it's been a while since we've all been here. And we always have these with the kind of the standard crew in my office. I wish I could show everybody in my office. This is like.

It's great. It's a great place to hang out. It is. I love this office It's a visual smorgas board I like to peel for It reminded me a Will Primo's office Yeah

Hey I tell you what Will Primos had an incredible office It's hard to describe He's got I believe it's walnut wood lined walls It's kind of dark It looks like a boardroom Yeah kind of filled

I was going to say I saw pictures on Oh he had a huge Original painting of a spring turkey scene With lights on it just like super classy and then he had a bunch of freedom mounts you know European mounts of white tails that you know he killed there like most of them in Mississippi and he had his collection of like hand-carved decoys it was like a museum you could just walk around he had a wall that was full of the original prints

from the negatives of the photographer who shot still photos. Stay with me. Wow. On the Jeremiah Johnson film set. Oh, wow. Will Primos. Will Primos is like, Lake Pickle told me.

And he told it for truth. He said, Clay, Will Primos has watched Jeremiah Johnson over 5,000 times. And I said, and I laughed and I said, oh, man, that's cool. And I said, how many times do you really think he's watched it? And he said, no, I'm being serious. Like, he's calculated. He believes he's watched it five thousand. I thought I liked it.

Wow. What do they say about 10,000 hours makes you an expert? And if the movie's two hours long, he's an expert. He's an expert. He has a Ph.D., basically. I don't know where I never quizzed him on it, but Mr. Will told me that on his farm, there were different roads on the farm, and they named him after the characters in Jeremiah Johnson. Oh, that's cool.

And he had, oh, he was saying stuff. I didn't even know what he's talking. about the movie. Like memorabilia that he had. So yeah, really neat guy. Does he have Robert Redford on Speedo? He probably does.

Yeah, so we're back in my office, which I think my office would be maybe noteworthy for all the bear hides and the bear chaps. Bear chaps. I do have a, let me give you just a quick audio tour. Okay.

Right behind my dad, Gary here. I've got Oscar Newcomb's shotgun, James Lawrence's Hawkins rifle. And a cane that Adam Dean gave me from Europe that he made me. I've got a picture of a Bob White Quill that hung in my home where I was raised, Gary's home, for years. That was a picture of Bob White Quill. That picture of that dog is a dog that dad owned a bird dog named Snipper. I painted that when I was in high school, gave it to my grandfather that hung in his office until he died.

You swing slightly to the right and I have all my stone points, most of those I found on my property. On the windowsill. Mm-hmm. On the windowsill. This is where I got my computers here. That's where the magic tablet is. I'm just kind of swinging around. And then I have my whitetail wall.

I've got, you know, I kind of quit a mountain deer, but I've got maybe six white tails mounted and then probably, you know, 12 racks. But this is the, this is the coolest part to me. This is the legacy section. And there are three photos up here. There are 16 by 20, like high-quality photos with lights all. bottom. And the far left image is James Lawrence in the late 1970s. Is that with that rifle? It's that rifle. Is it? Yes. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a hawk and muzzleloader, as I understand it.

And James Lawrence is somebody that I've just always really looked up to, and I consider him a mentor and somebody that's kind of like family to me. So there's a big picture of James. And then that rack right there beside it is a deer that James killed on public land in the 1960s. And man, it's not a huge rack. I mean, it's a beautiful rack with big old brown tines. But when I go to James's house, I was there two days ago, and I see his wall full of white-tail antlers, I am mesmerized when I think about the hours and time that he spent hunting to kill those deer back in that time where he did in National Forest in Arkansas. So there's James. The middle picture is my father-in-law, Steve Schultz, who has been one of the most influential ever in my life. He really is. Steve is also the pastor of our church. Steve was a falconer. And that

picture was taken when Steve was, I think, in 1980. So basically the same time period as James. He's holding a falcon. He's holding a red tail with a mallard hen duck. And it's just a super cool photo. And it's real neat for me to see these guys when they were like my age. You know, so there's Steve Schultz. And then the picture to the Right. Many people have said that this man looks like Elvis Presley. Have you heard that? I have. I see it. And it's the coolest picture.

It's the coolest picture of Gary Newcomb. And it was the first deer that dad ever killed. And he's got this buck in the back of the truck. He's got his old bow. What kind of bow is that, dad? A bear. A bear bow. And he's moustachioed.

He's got a nice mustache. And then that deer is right there. I've got a mounted deer right beside that photo and that deer is a deer that dad killed. What do Brent and I have to do to get our pictures up there? Man, look like you could have been in the almond brothers. Bring one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It looked like Creed Breton now.

What do you remember about that deer, Dad? Well, you know, I wouldn't tell people about it, but I'm telling you for months I'd be in a room with a group of guys and I'd just say, I wish somebody would just ask me if I killed a deer this year, and no one ever would. But I tell you, it meant so much to me because, you know, it was a bow kill. And back then that was kind of different. What year was that?

77. Yeah, that was way different. Yeah. In South Arkansas, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there weren't a lot of people killing deer with a bow very consistently. Yeah, you know, and I was pretty lucky on that deer. trailing a dough and I was on the ground. Oh, you killed it from the ground? I killed it on the ground,

not in a stand. That's even better. Quite the deer. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the tour of the office. And then I've got bear hides hanging from hooks. An old rock slide. Yeah, some big bear skulls. Yeah. And then I have one big mounted bear in the office, which is, it's not the biggest bear I've ever killed, but probably the most valuable bear to me personally I've ever killed. Killed on National Forest, public land, last day of the season, shot the bear in the head, snuck up on it while I was asleep. Not a joke. Pretty incredible deal. But anyway, a couple of things. We're going to talk about, we're going to talk about this turkey podcast. But I also want to give you guys an opportunity to talk about the Clower podcast. Because Britt was the special guest. The Pretty Boy.

Yeah. I still ain't got a picture up in here. Pretty Boy, Britt. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about Clower. We're going to talk about turkey hunting. We've covered a lot of ground. What did y'all think of the last render crew?

They did okay? B team. Yeah. I gave them a B plus. I get my B plus because they recognized all of us on here. They got funny accents. Josh, you're from Michigan. Your people are from Michigan.

Well, my people are. I've spent way more time in the same. Hey, I was pretty happy that Steve Ronella knew who Clower was. And he didn't just know who Clower was. That was surprised. Oh, he was, he was passionate about Clower. Yeah. Which I was impressed with.

I actually thought they did, I thought they did a good job. I thought it was a very entertaining podcast. They did a great job. I was a little hurt when Brint got the call out and Josh and I got the shaft. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That is the price you pay for fame. I was just a feeling of a microcelebrity.

When you run in this circle. Micro celebrity. When you run in this circle, you got to be fair for that kind of stuff. Hey, talking about micro celebrity. Did you guys know that Misty Newcomb works for Wild and Hole, which is a brand inside of meat eater? What? We've never... True story.

We've never officially said this on the podcast. Yeah. So Wild and Whole is like a sector inside of meat eater that... How would you describe Wild and Whole? Wild and Hole focuses on... In the sense that meat eater focuses on hunting, is primarily focused on hunting. while and hole is more focused on preparation of food and sourcing of food. And so they look at farming, homesteading, foraging, gardening.

Gardening. Yeah. Yeah. And so Misty, she works for them and she does a lot of stuff about her garden, about cooking. Yeah, just about feeding our family. Yeah. Holsom. So you can follow Misty at Hals of Food.

At Newcomb Farm. At Newcomb Farm. I do. That also reminds me of one of my favorite George Bush Jr.ism when he was talking about, he was giving this speech. He said, we got people out there working hard to put food on their family. Wild and whole, putting food on your family. Put a cheeseburger on me.

Yeah, so that's great. Speaking of food, while we were out, just before this, Brent was telling me a story about his turkey hunting mentor, Mr. Leon. Oh, yeah. And now, so Brent's going to tell a story, and let me just say, you're just going to have to hold your horses until you come to. too many judgments about the direction this story's going. Okay. Okay. It's great caveat.

Tell him about Mr. Leon. Well, let me tell him first. Okay. Why we were talking about that? I was telling Brent about Tecumpsa. Okay. This is potentially some foreshadowing, but I'm doing a little research on a Native American leader named Tecumse.

Wink, wink. Who was arguably one of the most prominent, skilled, indigenous leaders of at least modern history that we can record of Native American stuff. Tacomsa was kind of a peculiar guy. He broke his leg when he was like 16 years old, riding a horse shooting a buffalo, and he walked with a limp. And he was always real weird with taking on a wife. And he had three wives, different ones,

but he never stayed with him. And he was always just kind of like take a wife and it'd be like, And his second wife, Mamita, one time he had killed a wild turkey. And this is why this is relevant to this podcast. It's April. Whether it was a goblin turkey, I don't know. He killed a wild turkey, and he took it back to Mamita to take care of. And she plucked the turkey, which is interesting that she plucked it.

She didn't breast it. And she served it to Tacumsa and the family. This isn't a joke. This is a real story. When it was served, there was still some pin feathers on the plucked And it embarrassed and made Tecumse's so mad that when dinner was over, he got up and he said, you're going to have to leave. He said, we're done.

He said, you've brought shame on me and I cannot tolerate this. And he essentially divorced her. What was wrong with that? With his actions? Clay sent me this. Let's just say that Judy would know better. Oh, yeah, I could actually read it. Go ahead, Misty.

Clay is reading this book somewhere and he clips that part out, takes a picture of it, and sends it to me. I read this whole story and I get to the bottom and see that he's sending her away for, you know, not proficiently plucking a turkey. And I wrote back and I said, hey, Clay, is this a threat? Listen, listen, here's the exact section. It says, Tecumse had discovered a few small feathers still stuck to it. After his friends left, he handed his wife her clothing and told her to leave. The astonished woman asked DeCumse why he was banishing her because of the turkey feathers, he replied. Her entreaties to stay met with a cold rebuke.

No, you must go. I'm ashamed of you. We may separate forever. Needrober out. How dare you? It's crazy, huh? So after I told Brent that story, Brent tells me this story. But before you go, if you like stop the podcast and you go, these misogynistic, you know, people don't think that.

But just listen to Brent's story. This was in 19, this happened in 1946. It could. It was either 45, late 45 or 46 when Mr. Leon got home. home from the war. This was the guy Brent worked with. I worked with. He was a turkey hunter, and you know, Will said something about calling turkeys with a

briar leaf or a green leaf. Mr. Leon could do that. He used to, he used a green briar leaf. He sounded just like a turkey. Anyway, he told me that one time, well, right after he got married, so they spent, they had a one-night honeymoon. They went to the house that they lived in. This would have been in 1988, eight or eight or nine when he told me this story.

And they've been living there since they got married. And he said the first morning after their honeymoon went with the first night they spent there. He got up and she was in the kitchen cooking breakfast. She said, what do you want for breakfast? And he was walking outside to bust some wood up. He said, I want two eggs over easy. I want some grits. I want some ham.

And the eggs, I don't want no pepper on them. And in a cup of coffee. And out the door he went. He went out and he starts busting wood. She calls him, Leon, your breakfast is ready. He comes back in the house and sits down at the table, pours yourself a cup of coffee. And she sets the plate down in front of him. And it's got everything he wanted, except it had pepper on the eggs.

And he said, I thought to myself, if I should say something about the pepper. But then he said, no, I'm just going to, I'm going to start this off right. I'm not going to let her get away with this. And I picked that plate up. I held it at arm's length and just slowly dumped it out in the floor. He said, she was standing behind him. And he handed her the plate. And he said, my intention was to tell her, I said, don't put any pepper on my eggs.

He said, I think I got to like the first pee in pepper when I assumed she turned that plate up edgeways and hit me in the top of the head with it. He said, because the scar when I woke up matched like the edge of a plate. He said, in the morning had gone. It was up midday. And I had laid there, knocked out, unconscious in the floor for so long that the yellow on them eggs had stuck to his face and dried. And he said it sounded like duct tape when he raised his face up off the floor. He said, I stumbled around in the house and I looked and all her clothes were gone. He said, we didn't have one car and it was there.

But we did have a phone, but her mom and daddy didn't have one. And they lived in town. He said, I assumed that's where she went. He said, so I got in the car when I could see and I drove to town. And sure enough, that's where she was at. And her daddy told me, said, she ain't coming right now. But she said she'll be home when she gets ready. He says, a couple days go by and she comes home.

when it's right before supper, time to start cooking supper. She'd come in, didn't say a word. They cooked supper. They went on like nothing that happened. Went to bed, got up the next morning, same routine played out. He started to go outside to do his chores. And she asked him what he wanted for breakfast, and he told her the exact same thing. Grits, ham, eggs, no pepper.

He said, I went outside, done my chores. She called me back in to eat breakfast. I sat down and poured a cup of coffee. She sat down in front of me. And he said, it looked like a can of pepper poured on top of them two eggs. And I had known, Mr. Leon was not an easy, I loved him, absolutely loved him. He was not an easy guy to get along with it. So I know this story where this is going.

He's fixing to dump this in the floor again. And I said, well, what did you do? He said, I've been eating pepper on my eggs ever since. Oh, me. So the lesson there, I mean, there's lots of lessons in that story. but adapt and overcome, I think, would be. Hey, and I like that. He told you that story in 1982.

No, that would have been like 88 to 89. Okay. And he was still married to the swan. 40 years ago. Absolutely. You know, apparently they worked through it. Oh, yeah, they agreed. He looked it out.

Tell me about the way Leon about his entry and exit routes. He, we worked in the woods. We managed timber for Georgia Pacific. and our office was in Fort Isles, Arkansas, at the mill where the mill was at. And we'd go in every morning, we'd get our orders from the forester, or which tracked to go either Mark for cutting or whatever we were doing. We had to leave and go out in the woods to do it. And every time we would come back in, if we went out one direction,

he would make us come back another way. We never took the same route back to the office, even if it was the quickest way. And this went on for, I was just a young fellow now, And he was, like I said, a World War II vet, so he was the older. And he just, he put the orders out there. And I said, yes, sir, and we did them. But this particular day, it was in August, and it was so hot. And we've been out marking timber all day.

And there was no air conditioning in the truck. We got through with work, and he said, all right, let's go home. We got in the truck, and we started home. And I said, I'm almost going to go straight down the highway like we come up here. It would be quicker. Go back home. He said, no, when you get down here, take her ride on such and such road, we're going to go the back way.

I said, Mr. Leon, I'm hot. I'm tired. I smell. It's hot in this truck. I want to go home. He said, no, take that road up there. So I took the road. And I was taking the road, I asked him, I said,

we have been doing this every day. Not one time it would come back the same way, even when it would be quicker. Why are we coming back a different way than we went out? And he reached in his pocket. And I'm driving. I'm watching him over there. He never even looked at me.

He reached you in his pocket and he took out a cool menthol cigarette and he lit it. He took a puff off of it and he's staring out the window. He said, son, have you ever been ambushed? And I thought ambushed. No, sir. He said, well, I have and we ain't going back the same way we came out. So that was a habit he got into in the South Pacific fight in World War II. Mr. Leon.

It served him well. We never got ambushed the whole time. Never go back the same way you came. The science is good. That's pretty incredible. Well, hey, it's, we're recording this in early April. The Arkansas Youth Turkey Hunt and season is this coming weekend. And so the people I have here are Misty Newcomb, to my left, Brent Reeves, Josh Lambridge, spillmaker.

Good to see you, Josh. Good to be here. Gary Newcomb. So we're 20 minutes in, I'm just not introducing you. but I wanted to so me and Josh we have been youth turkey hunting

with our kids for long time I mean last year was the first year that I think you didn't go because you kind of

had kids that kind of my kids have crested crested out of it but me and Josh had some pretty incredible years of youth turkey hunting and I wanted to tell

one of my favorite stories we where we're hunting it's pretty cool because During the youth hunt, you can find birds. Because when birds are not thick, which in Arkansas, you know, if you listen to the last

podcast, you heard us say that 60% of our birds are gone. So back in the heyday, we had a lot of birds. They're easy to find. But what happens across the landscape when birds die out is that there'll be pockets of them that they're fairly thick. So that's why it's kind of confusing to some people because you might be in a pocket, a good turkey hunting and be like, what's the big deal? We still kill turkeys.

And it's like, well, but every other place doesn't. Well, on public land, everybody knows where these little pockets of turkeys are. And during the youth season, you can usually slip in there. They're not there. Especially if you camp there, you can go in there. So me and Josh and the kids did that for years and had great turkey hunting. I mean, we could just walk out from our camp and expect to hear a turkey and killed a few. But the best story, well, there's two stories.

There's actually three. The best one was the kids were, I want to say Willow and Mallory, our oldest daughters, were probably like... Mallory was probably 11, 12, maybe? 11 or 12. So Willow would have been 10? 10. Yeah. And we had two little girls, and I think David was with us and me and Josh.

So there's five of us. And we hear turkey gobble. It's like late in the morning. Riv was also on this one. Rivers. There's six of us. Six of us. Four kids, two adults.

And, well, who had the gun? Willow. It was Willow's year. Nope. No? David had the gun. David had the gun. There were seven of us.

We were all there. David, Mallory, Willow, River, Clay, Josh. Okay, six of us. Yeah. Six of us. Anyway, nine o'clock in the morning, late in the morning. I yelp. I hear a turkey gobble.

We've got the kids all camoed up on the, you know, face paint, and we're just ready to go. And our kids were pretty good at being still and quiet. Yeah, we'd trained them pretty good. And this turkey gobble is so close that I'm just like, get down, everybody. And we're giving orders like, you two sit here, you two sit here. And the person with a shotgun maybe was right with me. Yeah, and you were sitting back behind me. Yeah, David was right with me.

Well, man, directly, here comes two big long beardedoblers. I see him from 60, 70 yards, and they're kind of walking up to our legs. and I've got Mallory and Willow at a tree like arms reached for me, David the gunman in between my legs right here. These birds are coming up like this. And we had told the kids, you know, over the campfire all these years, we'd say stuff that dad used to tell me, which turns out was probably a lie. He would say, these turkeys can see the whites of your eyes.

I mean, a dad that when he's trying to inform his kid about turkey hunting, you're trying to scare them into bin still. Yeah. And, you know, these turkeys can see the whites of your eyes. We told the girls that. And David. Well, these turkeys come in and they, they gobble out in front of us. And they never strutted, but they were just beautiful coming up the ridge.

The turkeys come in, and David was just a little kid. And I couldn't get him on the turkeys. And they stayed out at maybe 30 yards. And they were kind of at a weird, at a weird angle, too, if I remember right. It was just one of those deals. I just couldn't get him on him, but the birds were really in range and close, and they milled around. They circled back around the tree. Almost, I remember it was, I mean, they weren't 10, 15 feet, but the way they were at,

we couldn't get a shot on them. Yeah. And so the bird finally goes off. And, I mean, he's gobbled and we've seen him and the kids are just like, oh, that's a great. And so we, after they leave, we're all standing up. And I say, man, wasn't that beautiful? I mean, I'm trying to interpret for them. This is like a magnificent thing that's just happened.

We didn't get him, but that's okay. And Mallory, Josh's oldest daughter, goes, oh, man. And I said, Mallory, what did you think? Did you see those turkeys? And she said, no, I never saw them. And she said, you told me to keep my eyes closed. And when she heard those turkeys coming, she shut her eyes tight, man. And she never opened them.

A sacrifice for the shooter. Oh, bless her door. She never opened her. Her eyes to scare off. One thing you can't say about that. I mean, she is straight like a narrow. Oh, she's going to do right. Black or white.

No gray area. It was so funny because she was dead serious. I mean, she was like, I didn't even see him. And she's so happy knowing Mallory. She's so happy. And then as the kids got older the next year, David was again the shooter. We heard birds, but we had a different strategy. Me and David went in kind of like 50, 60 yards a half.

head and all the kids set back. And so we called in a gobbler, and David had a single shot 410. Break open. Break open single shot 410. And we call him a big gobbler. And man, he comes in to shooting range. And I'm just like, shoot him, David. He's probably 25 yards, which is, you know, but he wasn't coming any closer.

He would not. I mean, he was there for 20 minutes probably. He would not come any closer. Well, but when he finally came in, David gets on him. And, you know, David's probably 10. 10 years old. Boom! Shoots, and that turkey

just kind of like jumps up in the air and hits the ground, and I start calling. Mind you, this is a single shot. And I think the hunt's over. Sure. But when I call, that turkey just kind of looks at me and starts kind of

just doesn't run off. And so I say, David, load up another shell. And so I'm trying to break this gun over and David's scrambling for a bullet. And he puts another bullet in and I say, shoot him again. And so he pulls up that four-tim, boom, shoots. The turkey kind of jumps up and I,

how many times did he shoot? Four times. He shot at the turkey. I mean, a long-beard gobbler. Four times. And that four times just didn't have enough to reach out there. And so all the other kids, Josh and the little girls, are all back there. And they hear him shoot.

And they're like, yes, David got one. And then. And then we're here. Boom. They hear him shoot again. And they go, oh, I wonder if we got it. And then boom, they're him shoot again. He must have killed too.

And then the fourth time, you guys had to have been like, something is a lot. They're having to shoot out. Is the turkey shooting back? And all, man, we walked up. I remember David and I walked back to him, you know, and we're just like, head tongue, love. We're just like, man. Yeah, exactly.

Anybody got an extra box of shells? He's still waiting for us out there. And he shot at another turkey that same day. Yep. Do you remember that? Good night, nurse. We were in them thick, man. I mean, you didn't think that hunting might not be David's game.

You know, when he was 16, he killed a big. When he was 16, some of the most beautiful pictures that I have, remember when we had turkey camp? We had a backcountry turkey camp where we went back in, took a mule, and took all the boys and David. and man, we walked up on top of the mountain daylight, opening a day, wind howling. Yep. Hadn't been in there to scout, just kind of thought there might be one in there.

And, I mean, no more than sat down and called up two big goblers. And so, you know, the youth hunt's the way to go. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. Why didn't you take me youth hunting? I didn't like you. No, it's funny. Back in the day, like, I don't know, we just didn't have, maybe we didn't have a youth turkey season.

show any interest in turkey hunting. I mean, a lot of stuff I did, you know, you're like going, I'm too cool for that. But the whole time you were absorbing all these little stories I was telling. And as you got a little older, you know, you were going like, yeah, man, I want to do some of this stuff. Yeah. Do you remember that year when you first took me hunting down Polk County and went out hunting, we found out, you know, when I was listening to this podcast, do you remember us finding that nest

Yes. With eggs in it. Mm-hmm. And then we proceeded to get lost for hours and hours and walking miles and miles back. Yes. This is before. Smart phones. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty fun. You know, I've seen a nest just right out in the middle of the woods. I'm sure everybody that's probably turkey hunting a lot has run into that.

But I'd only encountered it one time. I mean, I'm just thinking I think I would have put it over around some brush or something. Oh, it was just like not. Yeah, just on the side of a hill and right there. I mean, you could see it. How many turkey nests you think you found? One. Just one.

One. I mean, I've seen where I just knew there was a nest because I could tell the way the hen was acting and I'd go in and I never could find it. It's like they kind of hide them. Yeah. This bird was. I think some statistical group of hen turkeys will do that. I mean, they might just put it right out in the old.

open and then some others are real clever with the way they hide them you know but uh i think i found two turkey nests how many turkey nests have you found brent well i worked in the woods so i was in the woods every day i have a bunch a bunch yeah yeah yeah a bunch of them what did you find kind of in the brush or out the open or what it would be mainly in like woodlots you know you'd get a group of uh or a stand a timber or an edge of a edge of a like a pasture i mean it wouldn't really be hidden. I mean, a lot of them I would find only because I got so close to the hen. She jumped up. When she jumped up and flew. Or if she'd stayed set, I'd probably never seen it.

What does it make any sense to me from a biological perspective is why those eggs are so bright? Would it not make sense for those things to be just brown camouflage? I don't know. Maybe it's something for the turkeys to identify, to find them back. I don't know, but I've thought about that too. Yeah. You know, like different colors of eggs. Like, you know, some chickens laid brown eggs and birds have blue eggs. If I were president of the turkeys, I'd suggest that.

We need different color eggs. I think that's prime minister. Maybe that would be a way that we could help the turkey populations. We're a parliamentarian system. We could have different colored turkey eggs. Misty, have you ever seen turkey eggs? I have not. I've gone turkey ant.

What, Dr. Mike Chamberlain, Wild Turkey Doc on Instagram. Oh, he is. He has a pretty interesting, well, he has a real interesting story. He works for the University of Georgia and is a turkey researcher. And he went on the Meteor podcast a couple of years ago. And all of a sudden just rose to national prominence in a lot of circles. Now, in the academic circles, he was always kind of where he was at. And there's lots of other incredible turkey biologists that are around the country.

that are his peers. But he kind of was in a unique situation and that he kind of rose to like some, have some influence in kind of the mainstream culture world, which is kind of interesting because usually academia has a hard time reaching kind of pop culture. And that's what Dr. Chamberlain has kind of done and he did it through being on the Meteor podcast.

He'll tell you that. I asked him while I was there. And he was like, oh, being on the Meteor podcast is what. you know, got us this. But he is a very articulate, passionate, very knowledgeable, neat guy. And he's the one that introduced to many of us. You know, lots of people would have known this, but I knew a fair bit about turkeys

and I would not have known the details of the predation stories on these turkeys. But, I mean, turkeys are just designed to die. Yeah, to fail. They are born to die. Yep. And to hear him talk about that, he tells a story of this great horned owl. And I didn't go into all the detail. But he did a research project where he had collars on a whole bunch of small game animals in a certain woodlot.

I believe he did this while he was in college. So he had like possums collared, a pair of raccoons collard. He had. Is that like a banded mallard? He had some kind of. birds that he was measuring, and he was trying to measure how these animals interacted in this kind of wild space. And he said that a male and female great horned owl moved into that area.

And so they would get a dead signal when one of their animals died. You know, if it didn't move for four hours or something, it would send a signal. And he said that a male and female great horned owl killed every single one of his research animals. Really? You're kidding. I'm not kidding. Killed them all dead. I mean, it wiped out his research project.

He said it actually made him happy because it was like a two-hour drive to get over there. And he had to go over there like four times a week to do his radio work or whatever. And they're voracious predators. Really? 40 miles an hour. They fly 40 miles per hour. They weigh three pounds, but they kill turkeys. They kill goblin turkeys.

I mean, you come in. at 40 miles an hour. Just bam! Yeah. Hit him. A buddy had a, had a, a coon squalor snatched out of his hand one time. Really? No way.

Yeah, by a Hudale. Are you serious? Yeah. And he got, it was on a leather. It actually wasn't a coon squalor. It was a predator call. And he and my brother were standing on the end of, on, at the front of the truck. And they were trying to get a coat to run up in.

It was right at dusk, trying to call a coyote. up into the road where they could shoot it. And so he was sitting out there blowing that predator call, blowing, blow, and blowing, old Johnny Stewart call. He said, and the next thing he knew, my brother was at the back of the truck watching that way and said he could hear flopping and Joe Tyree sitting up for the cussing and having a fit and scared and hollering. He looked and he said, and it was an owl trying to drag him and that predator call out

out the deal. Holy cow. Yeah, he had big old cuts on his hand from them talons. Wow. So it heard... So it comes right to that sound? It heard something in distress and thought that it was a dying rabbit. I guess so.

Wow. Wow. That's crazy. I believe it. I believe it. Baracious predators, man. They, uh, and these turkeys are just born to die. 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 way. 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. What was so interesting to me about the whole story of this podcast, because I interviewed you know, Mr. Will Primos, who's just a legend. And I can't say enough cool things about being around Will.

He's one of those people that you meet and you kind of will never forget him, just kind of the way he is. And he impacts everybody's around. He's around just by how disciplined, how focused. And I wouldn't have seen that. You wouldn't have seen that with him out in the turkey woods. But when you're sitting with him in a room for a couple hours and you kind of get to know him, is very focused, very disciplined, very passionate, passionate, very teaching-oriented.

Everything he does, like, he'll tell you about it, you know, he'll be like, he'll, like with his eating. I'd met him for like 45 minutes and already knew what he ate for breakfast and why it was so healthy, and he does it every day. You know, he's really passionate about everything he does. And it's hard not to be impacted by people like that because you see the intentionality with which they live. that sound bite that you played on there with the guy who's killing the turkey was that him? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, it said, Josh, in a voiceover, it said, this is Mr. Will Primos. Okay. Somehow I missed that. Pay attention, okay? Got a little bit tense in here. Sometimes my brain doesn't work. You're going to get canceled.

Well, I had a good run. It was a bad podcast. You can see yourself out. So I interviewed Mr. Will, and as I go into some of these stories, I don't really know exactly the direction it's going to take. It's not like I had this totally scripted out in my mind. I knew he was a turkey expert. I knew that Dr. Chamberlain was a turkey expert, and I knew I wanted to bring them together, not physically, but to have them in the same podcast. And as I'm talking to Mr. Will, it becomes crystal clear that his, you know, part of a component of his, you know, part of a component of his.

success in the game call industry and the video industry came because of the resurgence and these very good populations of turkeys and the innovation and all that that spawned and it's like it kind of all came clear and then hearing Mike chamberlain talking about and he didn't know about the conversation that had with will you know I was just talking to him about turkeys and he was like man, our turkeys in the southeast populations peaked in mid-90s and 2000s. It was very correlated, wasn't it? It was. And then it became clear to me that my ideas and the foundations of the way that I think

turkey hunting ought to be came about during that time when I learned a turkey hunt back in the 90s. And you remember me, you heard me say that that place that you heard 10 or 12 birds in the same morning. You knew where I was talking about. No. You didn't? Well, kind of. Where I killed my first turkey. Oh, yeah. Holy smoke. See, the reason I went in there was because, like, the Saturday before you came out of there and you said, man, I bet I heard 10 or 12 turkeys just throughout the whole morning.

And so you have these ideas of what Turkey-Eton should be like. And then when it's not like that, everybody's upset about it. I mean, everybody in this part of the world is just like, oh, man. Yeah, you know, just they're, they're upset about it. They're blaming agencies and all this. Yeah. It kind of helped me to see that there's a, there's a bigger thing going on that's, that is, it is inside of our control, but the control is going to be kind of, it's going to be harder to wrangle the control than it would have been 30 years ago. Yeah.

I mean, partly due to, there are vastly more people on the landscape today than there was 30 years ago. It's kind of hard. It's kind of like a slow burn. but I mean think about anywhere think about where you're from dad think about this little community we live in here I mean there's a dollar general there and there used to be a woodlot there's five different landowners where it used to be one big farm and those five different new pieces of property all have new houses built on them and they cut their grass with lawnmower and they do this and they do that timber companies in national you know timber harvest and national forest here is different than it used to be And then this is the main takeaway that I would say to people is that, and Dr. Chamberlain said it,

but predator communities are so different than they used to be. And the rise of the meso predator, the meso predator, which is a mid-sized predator, misty, skunks, possums, coons, foxes, coyotes. Of my existence. The meso predator. And in the big, the giant picture, the reason there's so many members, PASO predators here is because most of the apex predators are gone. Right. The Black Panthers are gone.

The wolves. Not all of them. Not all of them. Now the bears are back. And I know a bear will eat a turkey nest around here. But really, it's like there's so much space for predators inside of the ecosystem. And if one of them leaves, other ones rise up. And man, I mean, we just didn't have coyotes 30 years ago like we have today.

and they're just wearing the turkeys out. And my chickens. Man, tell them about your chickens. I mean, it's kind of an emotional topic. This fits perfectly into me never trusting a ground nest and bird, even a chicken. Tell them. I mean, we lost 19 in one night this winter. Did they eat them or did they just kill them?

So there's two stories here, Josh. We lock up our coop like it has an actual lock. And I had some young chickens in there. and it was icy, and it was icy for four days. And I put some grain in there. I usually just let them, you know, roam around. But because I knew the predators were out, because whenever you get really low temperatures like that,

nice for days, they come out. And so I put the grain in the coop. And then I put a wood box in front of the door so that if we won't say who, but Izzy the mule, decided she wanted that grain and went over and... Izzy can unlock the chicken coop. Izzy can unlock the chicken coop with her nose.

she can undo the lock. So Izzy went and that's what she did. She unlocked the coop. And then those predators came and pulled, because Izzy can't move the box. You know, like she just... How did they move the box? I think there's one of the predators.

No. You think Izzy moved the box. Coyotes, they lack opposable thumbs. I don't think they can move the box. I think with their body, you can see it scraped. My coop was scraped around the edges. Point being. It's point being.

We lost 19 chickens. In one night. Most of their whole bodies were gone. Really? Most of their whole, I mean, they were gone. All we had was feathers. It was a whole pack. So the only reason we know what it was, I was gone at that time.

My neighbor has a cell camera kind of on the edge of our property, on his property. And I told him, I said, man, something's after my chickens. Well, the reason he knew something was after my chickens is because one night I turned loose my dogs on it right after it happened. Like I went out. That was actually a different time. It was a rough way. I've got story after story after story. Multiple chicken kills.

And one night I went out there and it had happened and I knew it had happened since dark. And I turned Fernloose, who is a top-notch coon dog that won't bark at anything but a coon. And I turned her loose on a coyote and turns out she'll bark on a coyote if I encourage her to. And she and Tim trailed that coyote and they made a big loop out in front of the house, circled her out. Well, I already told this story of this podcast. Yeah. I text my neighbor and he says, I'll, you know, I'll be on the. porch with the AR-15.

And anyway, he got a picture of a coyote. That was a long way to say that. Let me also say this. I had, I got 15 more baby chickens. And I was super proud of them because they made it, you know, it was a rough winter. And these chickens made it a long time. And I was out there looking at them one day. And Clay, and you guys all went scrawling.

And Clay decided to take Tim with them. Yep. And the day y'all left, I said, look, that's 15, eight-week-old. chickens right there. That means none of them. I ordered 15. I got 15. The coyotes refer to that as a honey hole. Yeah, 15 were alive. Not the coyotes, Josh, the hawks. Oh, really? Every day that Tim was gone. Every single day, I would go in at night, and I count them. Every day I had one less than the day before, and it stopped when he came back. So I think that Tim keeps the hawks away. He does. Tim will tree buzzards and hawks that land out

in the trees. He'll see him from in the house. and stand up on the windowsill and we'll let him out and he'll just take off running and he'll go tree underneath that tree and you know the hawk they'll fly and he'll chase them off our property and he's kind of like a cartoon

you know how they run in place like for a second before he gets so excited he just runs in place and just like screams yeah it's really fun on our hardware for it well what did you guys think of the podcast awesome tell me give me your takeaways

Brent I loved it it was you'll kill my first turkey in 1985 That would have been when, you know, Will was talking about when he started, when it started going up. I saw those, that video. The late fees I paid to the video store on his tates would fill up a car with gas at today's prices. Primos and the Southern boys or whatever. I saw them all.

And they sold his calls in a little store there, Savage. Carl's one stop. Mr. Carl Savage had a bait shop in a sporting good store. store there and Warren and his calls were in there when they were going out those tapes, you know, were in there, the cassette tapes. And it was a, you know, it was a big deal to watch that. And I started turkey hunting when turkeys started,

and it got better and better every year. Yeah. I saw what Dr. Chamberlain was talking about in the growth in the turkeys. I'm sure Gary did too. And when it started falling off, it was, you know, it was pretty quick. Yeah.

And Will said something about the older he gets and sacrificing and backing up on killing turkeys now. So kids in the future kid, I got a three-year-old grandson. I would hate to him miss out on what Will talked about and the recording that you played. I would hate for him not to have the opportunity to experience that and what you talked about, David, seeing, on y'all's trip. So, man, if it's going to hurt right now to back up off of that. You know, how good is it? As we say that, and as I said that on the podcast about sacrifice, and that's kind of what I ended with.

You know, I wanted to functionalize that. Because, I mean, like, what does it mean for me to sacrifice for turkey hunting? I mean, it's kind of an abstract statement that sounds good to say. But I tried to say it's going to mean something different for everybody. It may mean burning and managing just the small acreage that you have. And Dr. Chamberlain, I just wasn't able to include it on the podcast because it just was, it just didn't fit right. But he, I asked him, I said, what do we need to do? And, you know, part of his answer was just everybody needs to do what they can.

You know, if you have turkeys, make your habitat as good as possible. Even if it's just one or two things that you do to your property that helps that that's going to be meaningful. It could be as simple as not shooting a Jake turkey when you can, when it's legal. you know, maybe you back it off. And there's lots of guys that won't shoot Jakes, but there's lots of guys that will. And there's nothing wrong with it if it's legal, I mean, but maybe that's a choice that we would make.

And then I've gotten to the age where I can see that we're now talking to a generation of kids that is one day going to be the leaders, conservation leaders and stuff. And, you know, maybe there's kids that are listening or that are influenced by this time period that will be leaders of conservation groups that have to make wise decisions.

So it's kind of like, what can you do and do it where you can? And then there are people that have big, huge properties that could really make a den and something with habitat. I think that's the importance of taking kids out hunting. Because, you know, we've got four kids and one of those girls that you took really loved hunting

and one didn't, though we've got pictures of Willa with a turkey. But I think that all of our kids have a real appreciation for it. And when you think about, like I think about hearing Gary say that Clay wasn't really into turkey hunting. Which is a lie. Well, it's a lie now. But I think that sometimes we gauge what we do with our kids based off of what they show emotional interest in. And it's like, oh, well, they like this or they don't like this. I was going to say kids like go-karting, but maybe they don't anymore.

Maybe that's like maybe I'm aging myself there. Is it 1994? And they like playing video games or whatever. So those are like easy. So we put the video game in their hand because that's the thing they like. But sometimes you got to get your kids involved in things they don't necessarily just love. Because I think about the experiences that Clay had kind of caught up with them later on. Like he was exposed to turkey hunting.

He was exposed to all these things. They might not have been super fun for Clay at the time or emotionally rewarding. But Clay Baby as an adult is a turkey hunt. Dad telling us that if you dropped a chain in the back of your truck, you can get one in the shock gobble. Yeah, I still believe that. Hey, let me just tell the group how Clay got started turkey hunting. I mean, he was a basketball player. He was, you know, just a normal kid running around, coon hunting.

I'm going, what, coon hunting? And, you know, he just had so many hobbies and so many activities, and I'm out turkey hunting. And, of course, he was hearing these stories, you know. but he would never act like he was too interested. It was just being a cool guy. And so he was really one of the better basketball players in Mina, but when he got in high school, one of Zach Newcomb's very best friends

just whip Clay's fanny every day. Even my buddies would say Clay Newcomb's going to be the best point guard come through Mina in a long time. Well, Clay kind of believed that. He got in high school in the fastest, guy, I believe I've ever seen, would just pick his pocket intentionally, because I think he heard all this stuff here. You know, Clay Newcomb's going to come in. He's going to take over this thing, man.

This guy whooped him every day. Clay came home one day and he goes, Dad, I know I'm not going to play college ball, but I'm going to stay with the team and I'm going to go to practices and I'm going to just monkey around. But I want to be the best hunter in Polk County. And I said, if not right then, I said it within a few days, you got to learn out of Turkey Hunt. And so we went out and it was just blind luck. Of course, I really knew there was turkeys in there, but the first place we stopped, and you probably remember where it was, and we got out. You remember if we called or hooted out?

We just out at him, I think. Okay. And all of a sudden, just, you know, two gobblers right there. And I mean, he was hooked. And within about two weeks, I felt like he was a better hunter than I was. I mean, you know, I mean, he could call. He had a good ear for it. But showed no interest in turkey hunting.

I mean, he was interested in basketball, being a cool guy at school, having a nice truck, all this stuff, you know, telling me that his truck had a hole in the, or that his truck leaked, water would come in the bottom of his truck. And then one day I find this disclosed picture. I'm going through some stuff. And he's going through a mud hole. You can't even see the truck. This may be one green spot. And it did have a hole in the floor. I remember water got in there.

But anyway, that's how I was, I was 16 when I killed my first turkey. And so we started turkey hunting probably the year before. I mean, I had been with you when I was a kid. I mean, I vividly remember going with you, but I wouldn't have taken it serious until. But that's also about the time that we started really feeling like we had a lot of turkeys too. You know, mid-90s. And then, yeah, and then I ended up killing one of us. 16.

And we had a, we had a little pocket of turkeys that they were just as thick as thieves, man. And real good turkey hunters would be, you know, a mile or two away or even one guy was three, four hundred yards down the road. And I mean,

they're having a tough time killing them. And we'd go in here. I mean, it was just like walking in a turkey zoo. No, it's hard to keep a kid interested in something, too, because,

I mean, how many times you've been turkey hunting that you hadn't seen the turkey? Yeah. A bunch. And it's hard to introduce somebody to that, especially at a young age, that there's not a lot of action. You know, it's not happening every time you go out. And so it's a challenge. Dad, what stood out to you about the podcast?

Do you learn anything? You probably wouldn't have been up too much on turkey biology. Yeah, you know, I thought about that on the way up here. There's not really one thing I enjoyed every bit of it because I could relate. to everything he said. Now, I learned quite a bit, especially from Dr. Chamberlain. You know, when he started going through those five things.

Yeah. But, you know, Primos was a big deal. But I go back, he's talking 83. I go back to 76, 77, and I was getting little custom tapes from guys around Polk County that were good hunters,

and they'd pass. them out and yeah you probably remember me going around the house all time calling oh yeah and uh you know i was one of those guys kind of stupid but i didn't want someone to take me out and show me how to turkey i just wanted to learn it on my own and i went a long time and i'd get them in close and you know i know one day i was bored and i tore my mouth call up had too many reeds and i was just just going just making noises. You know, this 10, 11 o'clock in the morning, Hunt was over, I thought,

and they got the gobbling at that. So, but, but I tell you, Will is such a tremendous individual. I mean, I didn't realize that at the time. You had all these little, I don't want to say heroes, but they were the leaders of the sport.

Yeah. Ben Lee and, you know, you just go on and on. Yeah. And, uh, not hell. but he is such a quality guy. There's so much to learn from him. It's just incredible. You know, you just take, what was his three,

passion, focus, discipline. I mean, he runs his whole life on that. Yeah. I mean, if someone just listened to that podcast and had any desire to be successful at life, that's, I mean, he hit on everything. And, you know, he makes it sound like, Well, he doesn't necessarily make it sound like it.

But a lot of these guys just, you know, I got lucky. You know, the time was right. There were a lot of birds. A buddy of mine wanted me to make a call. Well, guess what? He was passionate. He was focused. He was disciplined.

Yeah. You know, he was going to be successful at picking up trash. It doesn't matter what he did. Yeah. He, and you could tell that probably his family had five restaurants. You know, I mean, they're, they're smart people. They're disciplined. They're focused.

He could see it. He had a, he had mentors in his family. I mean, they didn't wake up and try to be successful. That was in their DNA. It, in passion.

You know, that's one reason I think these podcasts are pretty successful is, I mean, there's a lot of passion that goes into them. So I have really enjoyed that about Will, finding out what a quality guy he is. Yeah. And then Chamberlain,

I mean, 25 years of research on Turkey's, holy cow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And when I drove up here, I saw this hardwood forest, and I thought, this kind of just shoots a hole. Not really follow me through. I mean, we got all this hardwood, I mean, 40 miles of hardwood.

Yeah. Okay, so rule that out. It's not hardwood here. That they need. Huh? Are you saying it's not hardwood they need? Yeah. I mean, you know, he's saying the hardwood's gone.

Well, I'm driving. Oh, right. And I'm looking around going, what? You know, there's hardwood everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see. So, so it's, you know, here in this area, it's got to be predators. It's got to be disease. It's got to be weather.

And so, like where we are, we got a lot of clear cuts. You know, they've taken, they've taken that tank. Yeah, they've taken it away from us. But it looks to me like up here. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all while this incredible turkey woods. Yeah. And it's got to be predators, I'd say. Well, it's a combination of a bunch of stuff.

I could nerd out on it, but what you're right. What you said is right. And what Dr. Chamberlain said in a part that I couldn't include was that every almost like micro region is different. So the difference between here and 80 miles away where you live, Dad, it's really could be vastly different. Even though the average person would drive between here and there and think it's the same kind of country. But it's actually fairly different. So it's, man, these dang ground nests and birds. I'm telling you, if turkeys would just build a nest like a normal bird in a tree,

we wouldn't have all these problems. You remember when we went to Folsom? Mm-hmm. We got into Folsom at like 10 o'clock at night. Fulson, New Mexico. When we went to do the podcast, the next morning we stayed in this little Airbnb that Matt's mother had. and we got up the next morning, we're driving along, and all of a sudden, we looked through town,

and mind you, this is a town of 50 people. Yeah. The entire town is covered in wild turkeys. I bet we saw at least 100. Yeah. Yeah, there's some big flocks, man. Yeah. That also is an interesting component of talking about turkeys in decline,

because out west all people see is turkeys increasing. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's a good thing. but they're in places that they've never been before. So the same thing that happened here.

Happened here is kind of, and now we always had turkeys in the east, but the reintroductions of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s kind of put them into these landscapes that essentially had a vacant spot for turkeys. Yeah. And so out west, they've introduced them and like the predators haven't caught up to them yet. The habitat is still really good. And maybe they'll thrive out there for the next 3,000.

thousand years, who knows. Well, I just want to say one thing about having people change their desires and interest and all. I think it's got to be regulated myself. I mean, I just don't think your average person, I mean, you've got a nest guy. Yeah. I mean, you know, heck, I'm not going to do anything different. I mean, because I'm not hunting them right now.

But, I mean, if I'm a kid, I could care less what you think. I mean, it might have some impact. but 90% of those kids could care less. If they can kill a bird and go to school and tell their buddies, that's all they care about. Sure, sure. So, you know, you've got to cut it back to one bird. You've got to cut the seasons down. I mean, I would think.

I mean, you've got to do something. Well, and that's happening. And part of what we, I can't remember if that's in this podcast or the one y'all hadn't heard yet, but I talk about how we've got to give room for state agencies to do what they need to do. Because people love to dog on state game agencies and blame everything on them. And man, it's just 90% of what goes on in state agencies, I believe, is from a good heart. Absolutely. I mean, way more than that.

But point is that if we all kind of were on the same team and we cut it back to one, we'd just be like, great. We can just kill one turkey in Arkansas this year. That's great. And not throw a fit about it. You know what I mean? Yeah. And education is so important, and what you're doing here is part of that. But, you know, they could expand their budget, go to schools.

And, you know, if you're interested in the game fish, you know, talking about turkey hunting, come in and, you know, explain what's going on. I mean, education is so much, so important. Yeah. And, you know, kids would listen to that, I think. Yeah. Well, there's also a lot of people that are, I think, in this modern era of wildlife management and what's even happening inside

outdoor media. Like back in the 90s, we were watching Will Primos and the juries and night in hell and all these guys, you know, kill 20 turkeys and 20 minutes, you know, on a VHS tape. Anymore, if you watch a lot of the media, it's a lot more education focused,

conservation focus, and it's still entertaining and it's got to be and, you know, we like seeing turkeys get killed. Yeah. But there are people that are like, yeah, to be a sportsman is to be a conservationist and a biologist and understand what's going on. And the landscape is shifting where people want to be. Like, it's cool to be in the know.

It's cool to know what's going on. It's cool to see the macro picture. I think that's a good thing. And I think that's happening. And so there are private land owners. And what's interesting, too, when you talk about what you can do, which can't be regulated, is private land stuff. Yeah.

I think 90% of the state of Arkansas is, it's, private land and that's that's fairly good i think less than one percent of the state of texas is is is uh public land i mean there's having 10 percent of your state being public land is decent some of the western states are a lot more point being most turkeys in arkansas live on private land yeah and if uh if you can do things for them you know selective timber cut burns um the way you manage your grasslands how do burns help the turkey population Oh, man. Burns are like almost a miracle cure for a whole lot of stuff, kills a lot of the saplings and invasive plants that want to grow up and crowd out sunlight for hitting the forest floor. It regenerates a lot of different plants that are fire-induced for them to germinate.

It also fertilizes soil with different things that happen when it burns. Turkeys love a burn. Well, see, all the guys that I hung around at turkey hunting, I mean, we go, why are they burning right now? I mean, they're nesting. I mean, see, they could educate us. They could put a little clip in the, you know, in the little folder we get that first, you know, the honey deal and go, look, hey, hey, boys, we're burning for these five reasons. Man, the burning is so interesting because growing up in an area with a lot of national forest, every year just before turkey season, they'd burn the woods. and, you know, smoke would come into town.

And it was just kind of common knowledge that turkey hunters would be like, that's what we don't have any turkeys. They're burning the woods down, burning up all the turkey eggs. And that sounds really reasonable. It does. And it is absolutely false. But see, why don't they tell us? And they probably do, and we just don't hear it.

That's it. It's just like, they, the mechon, it's just not a perfect world. I mean, in a perfect world, we would have access to every single hunter, and they would actually listen to us without hating a lot of that burden falls on us to educate yourself yeah instead of waiting on somebody to tell you about it you got to get out there and find the answer because i was the same way you are gary why is this going on now why is this happening and then when i found out when somebody actually told me i thought you know it's it makes sense yeah and a biologists could talk to you about the burns and the timing of them but oh man

The burns dramatically increase poultry revival. It's the best thing you could possibly do at that time. And yeah, there's a minuscule amount of nests that might get burned, but it's so minuscule. It doesn't even matter. I mean, it's just statistically insignificant. But the positives of a burn are just through the roof helping these birds. Almost for every animal, really, you know what?

Yeah. Bear Greas Render Educating America. That's the new tagline. There you go. It's catching. Misty Hickham, any thoughts? Just quick thoughts. How do we do?

I thought you did pretty good. I felt like the turkey podcast was lacking one specific story. That I think is the greatest turkey story of all time. Just to be real honest. That turkey story isn't a... It's more of a visual story. But it's not a spring turkey story. That's not a spring turkey story?

It's not a spring turkey story. Well, it's one of the greatest turkey hunting stories of all time. it is about 15% of the reason I married you. A solid 15% Am I going to have to tell the story? Hey, I want to tell you guys something. The next, I'll give you, I won't foreshadow. I will tell you.

You've already told it, hadn't you? I will shadow you. He didn't tell the story. No, no. The next bear grease after this one is full. It's a storytelling podcast. I have eight storytellers, one after another. Bam, bam, bam, bam.

big names in the outdoor industry. Big names in the Clay Newcomb Backwoodsman Real Deal book, too. Yeah, it's going to be incredible. Yeah, next podcast, all about turkeys. Is this story on that? No, it's not. Okay, I'll tell the story. It's a good one.

We'll end with this one, okay? Yeah, so. Let me just say this. I don't know if everyone knows this. The night before I met Clay, this is a true story. I don't know why we were even having the conversation. I was too young to be talking about getting married or anything. and I said the one

the one like absolutely no factor on marriage would be a hunter. Did y'all know that? I would not marry a hunter. This is a true story. The next day I met Clay Newcomb and I remember when he told me, I mean the first like conversation we ever had

hunting came up and I remember looking at him going oh you're a hunter and it was like really sad to me because it was a thought this was meant to be. This is like I'm sorry I thought you were a nice guy. And he won me over with the stories.

I mean, like, I remember, I remember I'm telling stories, and I was like, this can't be all that bad. That's how he got me in joy. He won you over with the stories? Do you remember this story? Well, I think so. I think I do. And Clay came to my house right after this happened and told the story, and it has been a Newcomb family thriller at bedtime for. What were you going to say, Dad?

Well, I go ahead and tell that story. Well, so, okay, it was the fall of, I was 21 years old. So whatever fall that was, late in 90s. And I was going bow hunting on top of a big mountain over there on public land, going bow hunting. And I remember I got off work. I'd been welding for Mac McDonald, building a house made a metal. And I was a welding for it.

You told us you built that house. I was driving to go. I was driving to go deer hunting in this place that dad had a stand. And on the way there, I was driving on an old, basically a two-track logging road, an unmaintained road that at the time this would have been like, okay. I see a deer jump the road. I get out of the truck, and I'm going deer hunting, and I grab my bow, and this deer is just kind of standing out there.

Long story short, I get out of the truck, walk off the side of the road, and I shoot this deer. with a bow. And the deer takes off running. I just tin-ringed it. And I don't wait for it to die. You know, usually you wait 30, 40 minutes, but I had to go hunting. So I just fell in right behind it. And about the time it hit the ground, I grabbed its back hooves, drug it to the

truck, put it in the truck. And I go deer hunting. I get up to the top of the mountain, park the truck, walk to the stand. It was dad's old ambusher, I believe, ambushed tree stand, climbing the tree stand. I kill the deer out of the ambush. And you can see that there's. a big draw that comes up

right in front of me. Well, Logibau. Was it a logibau? Okay. Loggybibaut. And the big draw coming up here

and I've been sitting there an hour maybe and I see a big swinging beard gobbler turkey walking up the other side of the draw from me.

And at the time there was a fall turkey season in Arkansas. And so he's walking and he's going to be 25 yards. So I draw back and when he comes

into an opening 25 yards, torch off an arrow. The era sails right under his beard and hits the side of the bank opposite of him. So he hears something to his right, you know, hit the bank. I'm to his left. Right. He jumps straight up in the air, about two wing flaps, you know, and just jump straight about 12 feet up in there, lands on the ground, and start to trot right towards me. So I grab another era and he's just coming right towards me. And he gets about 10 yards and I just nail him. I see the air. I pass all the way through him, sticking the ground. The turkey, I'm kind of on a ridge that kind of slopes off.

And I can kind of see a bigger kind of holler over here. And that turkey turns and just just takes two big wing flaps and just puts his wings out and just sails. Lift the area code. Just sails off the side of that mountain. And I go, oh, dang. I just remember seeing his silhouette up against the other mountain over there. And so I go, oh, wow, it's going to be hard to find that turkey. So I sit there for a little while and it's starting to get dark and I think, man, I better go find that turkey. And I've already got a deer in the truck, you know. And so I get down and I just start making loops off the side of the mountain. I just knew the direction it went, you know, start making just big horseshoes, you know, off down there and make a big circle and it's just almost dark.

And there's no way I'm going to find this turkey. The leaves were real warm. wet it was wet it had been raining i i end up making it back to the truck and i put my bow in the truck and i'm going to leave and i think man there's one little section i didn't look in i'm just going to walk back up there so i decide i didn't take my bow which was a key component of this story and i i start walking up the road well i don't get probably a hundred yards from my truck walking on a road just lined with pine needles you know and like gravel road so i'm walking real quiet. And I come around like a little thicket and just walking and I come around and I can see something new area and bam, I see a turkey laying on the ground like a hen with its head up

and it is probably eight or nine feet for me like from here to that bucket. And it is laying there and it doesn't see me. It has its eyes closed and I just freeze. And I go, what do I do? And I knew... Everybody doesn't know he looks like the husband trope. Yeah. Make it this pose. And I knew that that was the turkey I'd shot and that it was laying there. Yeah.

And I actually wanted to go back to the truck and get my bow and come back and shoot it again. Well, about the time that I started to do something, the decision was made for me what was going to happen. Yeah. When I saw that turkey's eyes, bing! Pop open. And I could, I mean, I just saw his eyes pop wide open. He sees me, and he jumps up and proceeds to run as fast as a turkey can run down the mountain. That's fine.

Well, I was wearing my big lacrosse green boots that all the bow hunters wore back during that time. Oh, yeah. And, man, I had one option, and that was to chase him. And so I just take out after him. And I remember just crashing through briars and brush and limbs, and I'm running as fast as a 21-year-old Clay Newcomb can run in the rain with all his hunting gear, chasing this turkey down the hill and man he is losing me i'm running as fast as i can he's getting further and further away and i just remember thinking no i cannot lose this turkey and we get to the bottom of the hill and one day i'm going to go back up there and see how far it is it probably wasn't

that far it felt like i ran a quarter of a mile i'm sure i didn't if we get to the bottom of the hill and he goes down through it and he starts to pull up the ridge on the other side. Well, I fall in just right behind him, except he's now pretty good ways out in front of me. We start going up the hill. And, man, I start gaining on him. Oh, now.

I start gaining on him. And all that does is fuel me, you know, adrenaline, adrenaline. And I know that I'm about to just run out steam. I don't have much left. But I'm gaining on him, gaining on him, gaining on him, gaining on him, gaining. And I remember thinking, I'm going to catch that sucker. I mean, that was the words that were formed in my head. I'm going to catch that sucker.

And man, I got up about five feet from him, and I just dove on that sucker and just just wrapped him up. And we, boom, hit the ground. And we were both so out of breath that I just laid there breathing. And I remember seeing his head pop up, and I remember his eyes looking at me just like this right here. And finally, when I caught my breath, I guess he caught his too. I don't know.

I reached over and just wrung his neck. carried him out of there, threw him in the back of the truck with the nubbing buck I just killed and went to Misty Shreve's house. True story. And the rest is history. That's right, that's right.

Told me the story. I took it to your house. No, I remember. It wasn't just the story. Yeah, you took it to the house. You had the S-Din. I remember your beautiful blonde, swaying shaggy hair.

It was the late 90s. Yeah, I remember. Hair was blonde. So that story didn't qualify for a spring turkey story. Okay. Well, so I don't care. It's a good story.

Great render, guys. Josh, closing thoughts. Closing comment. I just remember one of the first times I went hunting with you all. Do you remember we're sitting around the campfire? Clay is telling that story. You've probably heard that story 20 times. I love it every time, though.

It's one of my favorite story. I think it's the part where he and the turkey are looking at each other, breathing real hard. That's the best part of it. But we're sitting around the campfire. You probably remember this. and these two guys pull up in this in this actually it was a little earlier than the campfire I think we'd just gotten done our hunting for the day this guy comes walking out and he goes is a dark hair and we're like yeah one of Gary's close friends is a doctor and he said

I just got shot some guy had shot him in the woods saw the white of his hair and just instinctively he just shot and peppered his back with shotgun. Wow. Yeah. And then it was, John Mesco was with us. Yeah. Well,

we might have blended two stories together, but that exactly what you said happened. Yeah. And this guy knew that I hunted with Mesco or in a, we'd went out and every place I had picked out, somebody was there. And we just went back to camp and drank coffee. And this guy pulls up.

And he goes, man hey gary you got that doc with you and i go yeah he's here and he came down and took his shirt off his whole back 17 he had 17 pellets and mesco pulled out his knife and he like licked it and ran it under his arms and he started he started poking him on the back and he goes hey you'll be okay man don't do anything i don't even go to the doctor they'll work yourself out what kind of pattern was pretty tight it was pretty wide you know it wasn't it wasn't he probably had 20 pellets and his back. Improved cylinder.

Wow. Anyway. So you were there for that. Yeah. I think I was hunting. You must have been. For some reason, I don't remember. You know.

Were y'all hunting in Beirut? Yeah. Bayruth, Arkansas. Wow. But anyway. I appreciate the podcast because I think the way you left it was good just for people to think and do what they can. You know, I felt a little sad thinking about generations that may not have

the turkey hunting that we've had. And it was such good times and good memories for me, especially with our kids, that I want people to be able to have that experience in the future too. Yeah. The death by 1,000 cuts, that was very accurate. So we can just do the opposite. We put a thousand Band-Aids on it.

Maybe it'll get better. Podcast is over. Mic drop. A thousand Band-Aids. and his thousand band-aids. His thousand band-aids conservation thing.

Wow. We're starting a foundation. Look out Taddy Roosevelt. Is that a hashtag? The thousand Brent Reeves and his

thousand band-aids. They'll probably make a bronze monument of him in his overalls one day with holding a gobbler turkey. And a band-aid and a Johnson and Johnson

band-bandage. A tin can. That's right. Oh, thank you guys. Hey, there are some Bear grease hats on the website, a tan bearerries hat. Oh.

They're for sale. Tan bear grease hat. They look pretty good. I mean, so you can check that out. And we should have Bear Greas hats in May starting pretty quick. And there'll be a lot of them. But they'll still probably sellouts you buy, you should buy them as quick as you can. And anyway, thanks guys and gals.

Is that what it sounds like? Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record.

If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to live. win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts

at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Hart

Podcasts. Guaranteed human.