Bear Grease - Ep. 51: Bear Grease [Render] - Mustaches, Bear Collars, and Wild Turkey Biologist, Jeremy Wood

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

On this episode Clay is joined by Misty, Josh, Kobly Morehead and Arkansas Game and Fish wild turkey biologist, Jeremy Wood. The crew notes that Misty is the only person without a mustache so Josh brought her a stick-on-stache. Kolby Morehead talks about the Bear Hunting Magazine team in the campaign to raise money for a bear collaring study in Arkansas. Clay jumps on his soap box of picking up stone points on his own land, they discuss some new art he got of Warner Glenn, and a gift from Kolby. They all tell their favorite turkey story from the last Bear Grease Podcast. Then they jump into the issues surrounding wild turkeys in Arkansas with Jeremy. It's an action and information packed episode.  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. Speaking of big mustaches, if you notice in this room,

somebody is missing a mustache, and I think we should do something about that. You get to take your pick, Missy. So, yeah, Misty is usually, and today, the only one in the room without a mustache. It's true. If it would make you feel better. Not if you would make it make you feel better.

I purchased these months ago. to make you feel welcome and so you should feel obligated. So there's the Foo Manchu, the Dolly, the Disco Brave, the lawn art, con artist, Roland Roli, rich uncle, nickel bags. Yeah. Chew, give me nickel bags. I'm not sure that Fumann Chew, I don't think I have a long enough chin for that. Yeah, I think you'd look good in a number of those.

So you get to take your pick. So this is a gift so that I, uh, yeah. All right. Yeah, yeah. You know, I've always been kind of grateful to not have a mustache. I've got some ancestors. Welcome to the Bear Grease Render podcast. We have a very special guest today, for real, like a real special guest.

But before we introduced him, I'm going to, I got a few things I want to show you guys. Okay, while Misty's picking out her mustache. So Josh has bought her, Josh went to like a dollar general or something. I ordered these on a. Oh, wow. On an online retailer, which we will mention. This is her official. Okay, so Misty's putting on her stash so she'll feel good.

Misty, I feel like you've made an excellent choice here. Okay, good. Is it on straight? Yeah, now, okay. This is going to be pure chaos. Oh, yeah. You look amazing. You've never looked better, Misty.

As her husband. This is approved for this setting. That's her husband. How do you feel about your wife's mustache? It might be like a waxing deal, you know, like the ladies do where they rip it off. That would be awesome. That would be awesome. So I've got a few things I'd like to share with you before I introduce our guest.

Now, guests, you feel free to chime in at any time. If they hear your voice, they'll just wonder who you are. I was out on the phone today. Do you know much about airheads, Jeremy? A little bit. Stone points. I was out today talking on the phone, walking through the mule passion. And anytime we get a big rain, I'm telling you, anytime we get a big rain, if you want to walk out there, you'll find Flint points.

I actually found two, but this is a broken, it's half a point. And I really believe that was probably an actual era head. Most of the points you find that are slightly bigger are addle-addle or spear points. You look good. It's really hard to take you serious with that. This is, so this is, what I have is the haft and the two corner notches. but that's a pretty... That's a really nice-looking...

Yeah. And man, I tell you what, when I saw this, do you know what I did? I picked it up and took it back to my office with me. Yeah, I'm kind of on a little bit of a tangent about people saying, don't pick up stone points. If you're on public land, you can't.

It's a law, and that's 100% like you can't pick it up. That's okay. If you're on private land... You can or can't. You cannot. You cannot pick up artifacts or really anything off of private land. public land. That's okay. But I've had some kind of people say that you shouldn't pick up a stone

point. And I, I just, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Because if this were, if this were the fulsome site. Right. If like, if people, if archaeologists hear that I'm finding stone points in my front yard and they want to come to my house and do a full excavation, come on, man, we'll make coffee. We'll have you on the podcast. Like if you all want to do an archaeological dig in my front yard you're welcome to. I don't think that's going to happen because there's about 30,000 other places that are more likely for this to happen. Are you with me? I'm totally with you and I don't see what would be the point of leaving, no pun intended, what would be the point of leaving it there? Well, so the only point, and I agree with this is that by taking something out of, you know,

they call it in C2, when it's found a point or artifact found just like it lay. there's a lot of value inside of that for archaeologists. If you mess around with it, then a lot of the story is lost. But if that stone point is sitting on the surface and the next rain it's going to be in the creek. Exactly. What's the point of leaving it there? Right. And the legality of it.

Now, if I was on somebody else's land and I didn't have express permission to take a stone point, I wouldn't. And every stone point I've ever found on someone else's land, I have gone and asked them if I could keep it. And that is the truth. But anyway, I have quite the collection up here, Jeremy, of stone points.

Most of them came from my front yard down here. Do you feel like there's an inordinate number of stone points in that field right there? I think there's a couple of factors right here that are important. There's a big year-round spring about 100 yards from right here where we sit. There's also, it's the intersection of two creeks on a little low spot down here. I think this valley had a fair bit of Native American camping activity. So just the fact that it's a valley probably means that it had some maybe a little bit more than normal but like the next valley over i mean there's nothing special about this one your neighbor found

a pretty good size stone point did he show you that which one oh yes he did yeah far away from here yeah yeah yeah yeah not far away from here he felt nope he found it the place oh yeah he didn't found it back in here um but no i feel like the most respectful thing that i could do for the human that made that was to pick that up and ponder about it yeah absolutely and show it to people yeah so i i just what do you think misty Well, I think it's... Sometimes Misty thinks I pick fights just for no reason. I mean, I just think I don't love that when he gets all snippy like that. It's not snippy.

It's a soapbox. And everybody's entitled to have their soapbox. He's got more than one. You know, everyone's entitled to have it there as in, you know. And anybody can start a podcast. I did get on to my daughter the other day about being opinionated. Okay. We'll move on.

We'll move on. past and I just want to say I deeply respect the archaeological community and I do not intend to disturb any kind of major sites but I mean like I put up stone points and people pick on me for picking it up and I'm like let me just say this too I think one of the cool things our guest here has been has been thrust into I think one of the cool things that Clay does with those points though I will just say this since our kids were little he would like show him to him and he'd be he would tell and the last guy that you're laughing because of my mustache. It's going to be difficult.

Also at itches. But he said he would always like hold up the, he'd always hold up the points to him and be like the last guy that held this was, you know, sharpening this for his dinner and he'd like make a little story for him about. And I feel like that always gave our kids some appreciation for the people who came before. And I think that's a value. Yeah. It makes you feel like a part of the whole story when you do that.

It's a bizarre human experience to not get your food from the killing of an animal with a stone point. For real. You know, there's been, it's estimated that like 108 billion humans have ever lived on planet Earth. Right now there's about 7.7 something billion people on Earth. So there have been about 100 billion people that are no longer alive that have been on the Earth. We've only been experimenting with this whole agriculture thing for about 10,000. thousand years. For real, it's a, it's a, it could be argued, but it would be a legitimate statement to say the people who live in modern times are absolutely, absolutely experimenting with the way humans should

live. Most humans that have ever lived were killing their animals with stone points. Great question. Follow up. Is the experiment working? Oh, wow. You have to turn into wild and hold for that. We have to ask our guests later. Yeah. Okay. So I hold in my hand. beautiful watercolor painting. That's watercolor? Water color?

I didn't know it was watercolor. Well, I don't know what it is. You think I was there when she painted this? I mean, come on, man.

Just go with it, okay? I held in my hand a beautiful watercolor. A beautiful watercolor painting of Warner Glen with the Jaguar. So,

a well-known artist by the last name of DeMoss. Okay. And I purchased this online. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so if you type in Warner Glen Jaguarine painting, you can get a reprint of this.

And I'm going to hang this up in the office. And so this image of this Jaguar is the actual photo. I mean, that's what Warner Glenn's photo looked like when he took the picture of the Jaguar. But he wasn't in the box. But he wasn't. So the author took some liberty to put Warner Glenn. coming up there with his white Walker dogs. But Jeremy, so we've interviewed and spent quite a bit of time with this old man named Warner Glenn.

He's 86 years old. He lives in southeast Arizona. And he was the first person in modern times to document a live jaguar in the United States. So these jaguars... Does Arkansas have a jaguar biologist? If it was, it'd be Myron Means. Yeah, it would be. Yeah.

Myron Means is our Jaguar Biologist. He's my Jaguar Biologist. Not my Jaguar, but I was just... So Warner has the original painting of this hanging in his house. And it's huge. It is huge. I mean, it's like six foot by probably five foot, maybe big, maybe eight, it's huge. But we were right in this country back in early March when we went to Warner Glens.

We made a film. I mean, I'll go ahead and tell you, there's going to be a film come out about Warner Glend. from meat eater. No, I really don't. But it's going to be incredible. He's 86 years old, Jeremy, and still rides a mule 2,500 miles a year, just a bad to the bone, dry ground, lion hunter. Living legend.

He really is. The living legend. Warner Glenn. That being said, Kelly Glenn Kimbrough, his daughter sent me an email yesterday, and Warner Glenn's oldest, best dog named Hook, died, passed away. That's so. Hook was 12 years old. So we hunted with Hook.

Yeah, he talked about him. Yeah. Yeah. He did. He did. And Hook bade a lion in a bluff on, let's see, on like in early April, he bade a lion in a bluff. And the lion jumped off a big cliff. And Hook, he didn't jump, but Hook went down after the lion.

The only dog in the pack. as I understood it, that went down. And the rock around that area is just incredible. I mean, you could get in a bind and a hurry. And this lion went off and hooked, 12 years old, went off with the lion and got down there and was baying the lion. They end up killing the lion. And then it took hook 45 minutes of just scratching up the rock bluff

to get back up. And then later they had, he was fine after that. but later he just he had some comp not complications for that but they had to put him down but anyway old hook but i wanted to show you all that what a way to go what a way to go what did warner glen say on the podcast he said this might be his last well he said he said this might be hooks last year and it might be mine is what he said yeah yeah he said me and old hook might go at the same time so i i don't think that's going to happen though um yeah i wanted to show you all that and then look at this.

Colby made this for me. I've actually seen that before. Colby made this for me. So this is a, what is that? Watercolor on leather. It is paint on leather. Colby had this made. So you guys remember the podcast I did about white tell secrets?

And I talked about this big deer that I've been hunting for several years that we believe is dead. And we named him Jody. And I didn't tell why we named him Jody. There's a song by D. David Allen Coe called Jody Like a Melody. In the song, I wish we could sing it. I wish we could sing it. We don't need to do it today, but we can sing that song.

Yeah, we can. Jody like Melody. Yeah, there's like, if you listen to the song with the thoughts of a white-tailed deer that just comes in and out of your life, Jody like a melody you play inside my head. Tell the thought of you is more than I can stand. You know, this is my husband

I lie awake and wait for you to come On my tactic cam And when you don't, you know, I almost lose my mind Jody like a melody you warm it So we name this dear Jody So Colby had this made Like a white buffalo Something of legend

Or me. Yeah, all right, enough Foolishness We have a very distinguished guest with us today Jeremy Wood from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Welcome. Welcome, Jeremy. I told you we were going to cut up a little bit before we got serious.

hashtag AGFC. Yeah, yeah. So Jeremy is the wild turkey biologist for the state of Arkansas, which is a big deal. So we're going to, I just wanted to introduce him. Do we get to question him later? Oh, we're going to grill him. This is the most hated man in Arkansas. What did you do with our turkeys?

Oh, we're going to, he doesn't know he's walked into a trap. No, no, no, no. I want to hear what you have to say. Before that, let me introduce all my guests. Misty Newcomb. Misty Mustache Newcomb. No, let's not do it. No, no, no.

Great to have you, Misty. Good to be here. Did y'all know that, I don't know if I can say this or not. I'm going to be on the live podcast and the live media podcast. It's next week in Bozeman, Montana. And I'm going to have a special guest with me on the live podcast. I won't say who. But anyway, that's going to be a big deal.

That was the worst foreshadowing ever. To Misty's left, Josh Lambridge Billmaker. Great to see you, Josh. And if that special guest can't go, I'd be happy to go with you. Okay. Okay. All right, good to see you, Josh. Thanks.

To your left, a guest who's been on here before, but it's been a while. It's been a while. Colby Moorhead. Good to see you, man. Good to see you. The Bear Tech. It's going to be back. So Colby, for anybody who wouldn't know Colby from my world,

Colby runs Bear Honey Magazine. Facts. Don't talk to me about Bear Honey Magazine. Talk to Colby. Yeah. I spend most of my life directing people to Colby. Yeah. Bear Honey Magazine, for those who wouldn't know much about it,

Bear Honey Magazine's been in print for 22 years. Yes. Wow. Since 2000. Yeah. Since 2000. The only print Bear Honey Magazine in the world? Facts.

Yep. Just the facts. Just take it or leave it. And the magazine, describe the magazine. What do we? we have in there? Well, you know, it's just a beautiful collection of stories and information. That's not a kind of polished. No, it's

just a collection of just people's stories. We take submissions. We have freelance writers. And they just, there'll be tips and tactics and just stories. And you really never know what to expect, except that it's going to be very well produced and laid out. And then we always try to tell the story visually as well,

you know, as just through the written words. So if you're someone that likes to just flip through a magazine, look at the pretty pictures, that's cool. If you want to dive in and just read it cover to cover, that's cool. If you're just into hounds and just want to read that content and look at everything else, like it really is something that if you're interested in bear hunting or just like to know more about that. Yeah. You know, there's people that get it and never have intentions of bear hunting. Yeah.

So it's just a good, just a good interface. And I would say that as a subscriber, it is some fantastic tactile bathroom reading. I don't think we want to know what that means. You can put two and two together. So I always tell people if you want to get into any kind of bear hunting. So Bear hunting magazine, we've always tried to give the full gamut of North American bear hunting, which is interesting because a lot of times a species will be so isolated to one region. Like if you're hunting elk, I mean, you're pretty much going to talk about the Rocky Mountain West.

if you're, I mean, there's other species that are widespread, but the bear is the most naturally, widely distributed big game mammal other than the mountain lion in North America. Chew on that, just chew on it.

Then think about it. So pre-European settlement, the most widely distributed mammal in North America, big game mammal, was the mountain lion. They were just almost coast to coast, from Canada to Mexico. That is new information for me.

Second, second was the black bear. So I say that to say, we hunt black bear in the east in all these different methods. A lot of hounds, a lot of big woods, eastern deciduous forest, spot and stock stuff, driving, you know, doing drives in Pennsylvania. But then you get into the west

and you have this big spot and stock type hunting. You also have hounds. Up in Canada in the boreal forest, It's so thick. Typically, it's, you're hunting bears over bait. You can go to Alaska and have all kind of different hunting. Come to Arkansas, you know, you hunt them over bait, spot and stock, whatever. There's a lot of different ways to do it.

So the magazine tries to reflect out. That's all I wanted to say. But, Colby, so what we're trying to do, there's a thing that Robbie Kroger at Blood Origins. Yeah. At blood origins. Tell us about what he's doing.

Yeah, so there's a project. He's wanting to help support the Arkansas fishing game, especially, was specifically inside of the Black Bear Research. And so they're looking to expand and really seeing how that's going to affect things. They're just wanting to learn more about the population of Black Bear's. And it's particularly with the southeastern United States

where they're, United States, Southeast Arkansas, where they, well, the Gulf Coastal Plain of Arkansas, which is like the southern one-third, where they are now opening up a season. Yeah, yeah, furthering out the previous drawn zones. And anyways, they're starting a fundraiser. They're trying to raise $70,000 to give to this project. And so they're having people open up their own fundraising and help, you know, commit to trying to reach that goal. And so what we're going to do is bear hunting magazine is going to start a fundraiser

inside under blood origins that we're going to be giving away two different hunts to people. One is going to go to the top donor. They're going to be able to pick between the two hunts. And then we're also anyone who donates even a dollar or whatever the minimum would be will be thrown into a hat to get the remaining hunt. And so one hunt is going to be a coon hunt in Arkansas. And the other hunt is going to be a hog hunt in East Texas, and that hunt's going to be a lot of fun. We're riding around side by sides with thermals and doing some night hunting. Could do some day hunting, too, but to just get into just some fun, different activities that won't get in the way of your personal hunting season. So we're going to be very flexible on dates and we'll be around,

you know, we're going to be really going around your schedule. Yeah. And so are you going to tell who the Coon Hunt's with? The Coon Hunt is with, Miss. your Velvety Smooth voice, Brent Reeves. Oh. Yeah. That needed a drum roll. Yeah. And then...

And Whalen. And Whalen. And Whalen. Yeah. And I'll be at that hunt. And so will David McDaniels. He's East Texas Cammo on Instagram. He's going to be hosting the hunt with, I think it's Foul Boar Outfitters in East Texas.

So basically what he's saying is that you go to the Blood Origins website and you click on the Black Bear Fund, Arkansas Black Bear Fund. And you go in there and you'll see a bunch of teams. Yeah. And you basically pick which team you want to donate money to. And so Colby's saying, Bear Honey Magazine, the highest donor. So, you know, you could give $10 or $100 or $1,000 or if you were Elon Musk and, you know, maybe give a $44 billion. Yeah.

You could buy, I'm going to make an offer to Elon Musk right now. Yeah. Okay. Meat Eater and Me will sell him the Bear Gries podcast for $1 billion. That's a good deal. I'm going to even just go above my pay grade. Yeah. I'm not sure you're authorized to cut this deal.

I know I'm not, but I think they would be okay with this. Yeah. So, okay, back on track here. So the person... Does it have to be Elon Musk? That's only for Elon Musk. Okay. So no one else with a billion dollars.

Nope. Could step in. No, because think of what they would do with it. It could be... Anything. I'd trust Elon. Yeah. So the person that donates the most

gets to pick whether they go in a hog hunt or a coon hunt with Brent Reeves. Yes. Yeah. And then the second person just entered into a draw, or anybody is entered into a draw. Really, they're raising $70,000, which is a pretty noble cause to give to the game fish to buy tracking collars to study

Arkansas black bears, understand what's going on. Big deal. I love it. That's pretty cool. Hats off to them for working hard for that. Hey, before we go much further, I want to talk about the last Bear Greece podcast. So it was quite different than anything we've ever done. We've never had just a compilation of stories. I think we had eight turkey stories on there.

And I've really enjoyed gathering the stories. I mean, it was fun talking about those guys. They were great stories. Yeah. So all of you, most of you listen to the podcast. Josh, what was your favorite? What was your favorite one? Okay, so I have a favorite story and a favorite part of a story.

Okay, that's fair. That's fair. My favorite story was Janice's story. Really? Yeah, because I just love, I love that idea of his wife. First of all, I love it when a dad takes care of his kid so his wife can go do something. That's an honorable thing. Yeah.

And I found it interesting that Janice's wife was gone for like nine hours, and he was just like, I'm going to go to bed. She'll be fine. It's fine. But I love the fact that she got so excited about it, and she was able to detail to him where the turkey was and then him go in and kill it. What a cool thing. I mean, that's a great, great story of partnership.

But I, I love. Hold on before you go to that one. Can I comment on Janus's story? Yes. I had somebody go, man, what a chauvinistic move to go kill your wife's turkey. He never made any mention of that. But apparently, you know, they had some agreement or something that, you know, he was the one that was going to hunt the next morning.

And since that was recorded, oh, yeah, well, since that was recorded, Janice and his wife went out on their annual turkey hunt, and they both killed turkeys. Oh, that's awesome. Like last week. So, yeah, I thought that was a good one. Okay. And then the other... The favorite part of another turkey story...

Now, the favorite part of the other turkey story, was Andy Brown telling that story about the guy with the turkey on the other side of the log. And my favorite part of it is when he said, and I just wrenched up under the log. What a redneck term. Riched. I reached up underneath the, I love it. That was awesome. Doc Ryburn.

Yeah, I could tell when he started telling that story that he didn't tell me what it was about. He just said, he said, I got one more I'd like to tell you. And he had spoken in his like normal voice the whole time. And he said, there was an old boy. And he kind of like dove into kind of this character, you know, and, and started telling that story. I wrecked up under that law. That reminded me of, there's a term.

It's used in the Ozarks, probably used in the Appalachians too, where words are sometimes like the plural of the word is, was warped like ORI Province. When I interviewed ORI Province, this old mountain man out here, he said he clum a tree. Clum. Yeah, the past tense.

Like, wretched is past tense of reach. Yeah. Yeah, past tense, not plural. Past tense. Yeah, they're applying standard English rules to words that we don't. Okay, is that what they're doing? Yeah. Yeah, that's what they're, because think about it. Reach, rich.

Drug. Climb. What did Ory Province say? I clumb. Clum. I clum the tree. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, that was, I like that story.

Doc Robber in Louisiana. That was a great story. Maybe actually they're applying irregular applications. Misty, the character. Hey, that brings up something I've been wanting to talk about, and we're not because we're going to go right to Colby. But Jerry Clower, we did an episode on Jerry Clower, and they constantly use the word that what for that?

Which our daughter did. They would say... Until she was like seven. I mean, she was pretty old and she inately did that. They would say, like, rather than saying, we're going to take the car that we used to drive on Sunday, but we're not, they'd say, we're going to take the car what we used to drive on Sunday,

but now we don't anymore. Like, constantly, he used the word what, where we would say that. Okay, Colby, moving right along. Favorite turkey story. I'll have language sounds normal to me. I was like, what are we talking about? What are we talking about?

Man, I like the general theme is it always involved someone else, and there was a lot of perseverance inside. Like, I thought that was really cool. But my hat tip would probably go to Mr. Will. You know, just I could put myself in that story of just like I could visualize that whole thing. It was like I was just there with him inside of it. Was it the way he told it? It was the way he told it.

it was the relationship he had with the landowner. And then it was also like overcoming like, man, nobody's been able to get this one for years. And he's just going there. He's like, you know, I wonder if he just wasn't thinking, what have I gotten myself into? They don't name this bird and I can't get to him. And so he's like, man, I'm going to have to work hard. What do I do? You know, and then just overcoming an obstacle and just, you know,

I just like the whole kind of climatic way. that he told that story. Yeah. And, you know, of all the turkey's wills killed, which he's killed hundreds probably. And you could just hear his humility inside of it. You know, I thought that was cool, too. Yeah. He seemed like a really humble guy.

Cool. Jeremy, what was your favorite story? So I've got two, but it both basically kind of boils down to one point. You know, I was listening to one of yours and one of Steve's, you know, talking about taking the kids out, hunting and thinking about, you know, how literal, you know, kids take a lot of things. So I don't remember if it's your daughter or me. that you know you know taking out and don't open your eyes like did you see it no I heard all this unfolding but I was just like I couldn't do it and then Steve's you know

thinking about his daughter and like you know shooting in the head and I can't see the head and he's telling me to shoot well I can't talk and I can't talk so I got to shoot here and so I was like just trying to like just soak all that in thinking you know six seven years down the line or more you know whenever we feel comfortable enough with our own son to be like okay, you know, maybe we can try to get out here and try to take one, like, okay, you know, how do you learn from those kind of mistakes? Keep your eyes open. Yeah, yeah, you can take literal cues from those stories of what, not to, or to walk him through.

Well, and then Andy Brown talked about his son, Scott, who didn't shoot a walking turkey. You remember that? Yeah. And that was, that was the exact, I hadn't even put all those three together, but those three stories. Oh, yeah. from Steve's story of his daughter shooting a turkey when she didn't have a good shot because he had told her not to talk.

So she couldn't tell him that she shouldn't shoot, but he said shoot. So she's just like, okay, boom. And then to Mallory, close her eyes, and we told her, Turkey, you'll see the whites of your eyes. So she's like, it'll solve that problem. Close her eyes. Turkey's come strutting in.

And then to Andy Brown telling Scott, don't shoot it a walk in turkey. And so this turkey just... Right down the girl. I mean, just walks right in front. Anyway, go ahead, Jeremy. I've never connected those three. That's good.

Yeah, but no, that was really it. You know, just like taking those lessons, you know, to heart and like just thinking about it. I mean, they're all fun stories to listen to, obviously. And then, but yeah, just thinking that into my own personal, you know, just bank. Like, okay, how do I, how do I word this, you know, down the line when I'm trying to go through those same lessons, you know, be like, okay, you need to shoot it in the head, but don't just focus.

Like, you know, just make sure you focus and you shoot it on the head. But don't, if I tell you to shoot, you know, tell me if you can't shoot or something like that. Misty, what's the developmental thing that's going on there with kids when they take you literally? They're concrete thinkers. They haven't developed abstract thought yet. So if you say, don't shoot a turkey walking, your dad really didn't mean that entirely. He just means if you have a choice and the turkey's like, you know. Yeah, they're taking it concretely.

They don't, they're not picturing, like they're just applying literal. concrete rules to this. And that's pretty much the way a kid should take what their parents say during that period of their life. Exactly what I say. Don't take any liberty of yourself to think on your own.

Sort of. Sort of. Okay. My favorite story, I think, and all of them had a lot of unique dynamics. But I liked Mo's story. Oh, yeah.

And part of it, so there's, when I just petitioned these guys to tell me their favorite turkey story. In my mind, a turkey story was good because of some dynamic hunting component or something like really exciting that was said, but, or

exciting that happened like a turkey did something really wild. It was interesting for me to hear all the reasons why, because I didn't try to coach him of like what why something would be good or bad. And Yonis and Steve both said, hey, our stories are, like, they

kind of were like, I hope this is what you're looking for. And I was like, no, you get to decide what your favorite turkey hunt story is. And so it's interesting for Janus, because he's killed a lot of turkeys and had a lot of really exciting hunts. And he tells this one story about his wife, you know. And then Steve has killed a lot of turkeys, had a lot of exciting turkey hunts. And he tells the story about his daughter.

I thought Mo's was interesting. I liked that his dad woke him up. And this is when Mo was an adult. His dad woke him up and said, you might as well go and that was a theme i know from talking to mo that that was the theme of his dad always used to say can't kill him when you're on the couch like that was just just go just go yeah and that's a good if you want to be a successful hunter you just got to go yeah you can't wait for conditions to always be right i like how he's that he said his dad said well you thought you heard one

that's better than all the ones you didn't yeah yeah yeah and it basically two mornings exact same scenario very unlikely i mean killing a bird and pouring down rain off the roost i mean i would say is a highly unlikely scenario two mornings a row same spot same story i mean that that would never line up that would line up once in a lifetime for something like that to have i decided it's pretty cool one of my favorite quotes from from uh one of the stories was will primos when he said he said uh it may not have worked any other day but it worked that day exactly that was good That was good. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

in 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 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. All right, I hold on my right hand here, the 2022 Arkansas Turkey Hunting Guidebook. And so we're going to talk here to Mr. Jeremy.

We're going to see if you have this memorized. Yeah. Okay. Just open up to page 37. I once knew a guy. This is a true story. I once knew a guy. And I can't say his name.

He's still alive. I mean, he's not even that old. And he once handed us a book, me and my dad. about ornithology. What? Ornithology. Birds, study of birds. And he said, he just handed it to it.

He was trying to show us that he knew a lot. And he said, pick out any page on there and ask me any question. And I was standing there. Dad just picks it up, opens it up, and says, all right, page 133. You know, the speckled belly winged Tarminger. And he read verbatim. like what it said about that. Really?

The guy just like a freak genius. And he said, I've memorized that book. Wow. And he had, he at least convinced us yet. Unless it was a magician. Unless he had it rigged where you opened it up and your finger went to like the same spot. Long story.

Okay, so Jeremy, back to Jeremy. Man, you are, you're not from Arkansas. No, no, no. But tell me a little bit about your career in wildlife biology. Like where have you been and how did you get here? Okay, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, transplant, not from Arkansas, from Massachusetts originally. Okay.

Went to University of Maine for my undergraduate degree in wildlife ecology and trying to figure out what I wanted to do in this world. You know, I hadn't figured my place by the time I finished my undergraduate degree. So I jumped around the country. I lived in Wyoming, Louisiana, Florida, you know, working with different state agencies, different federal agencies, universities, really trying to figure out my place in the world and got into working with wild turkeys under Mike Chamberl in there at University of Georgia. Early on, one of his grad students took a chance on me. I hadn't had any experience with Gamebirds to that point.

And, you know, I basically got hooked to that point with turkeys and did that position, jumped the next year, worked with another graduate student before I ended up getting my own graduate project under Mike back in 2014. So I did that for a few years. graduated with my master's from the University of Georgia and then moved down to Florida, got with their turkey program. I was their assistant wild turkey program coordinator

for about a year when this opportunity came up here in Arkansas and I took a chance and the agency took a chance on me. For sure, man. So what year did you become the wild turkey battle? Just here. Late summer, 2018. So it's my fourth season,

fourth turkey season here in Arkansas. Just out of curiosity, when you were in Massachusetts, what got you interested in wildlife? It was, you know, honestly, I grew up fishing. My grandfather hunted his whole life. I shot a little bit when I was growing up with him, never got into hunting. And I went to undergraduate thinking, you know, I'm going to go on the wildlife side of things. You know, I like to fish too much. I'm not going to do that, you know, go for fisheries degree or anything like that. I'm going to go for wildlife because fishing's what I love to do. I don't want to ruin that by going to work and wildlife. And the next thing you know, got into hunting outside of my undergraduate. it, you know, early 20s. Once I graduated, I got into hunting and it's, you know, been a love affair basically ever since. What was your thesis on with Mike? So with Mike, so I looked at the reproductive ecology of female wild turkeys. So looking at nesting, broodry in relation to small scale prescribed fires during the nesting season. You know, obviously a lot of concern.

That's exactly what I wanted to talk to about. So what did you learn? That honestly, you know, very few nest or actually lost the fire, you know, there's at least in that system where I was at in southwest Georgia, I mean, they're managing it more for quail. So they're talking about a lot of smaller burns, frequent fires, and so they're burning on a two to three year fire returnable, sometimes sooner, depending on the objectives and what they needed to do than that stand. But you're talking about acreages that may range from, you know, 50 acres to a couple hundred acres in size on a typical burn. And they may be doing two, three units. a day if the conditions were right. We're working in longleaf pine savanna so really open kind of flat

communities that you know you let a match and you could get them to to roll across that fairly quickly but you know in general most of the stands of those birds were targeted the nest you know were about a year or two post fire and they weren't they were still a year or more out from from having another burn rolled through there so you know we didn't lose a single nest in the study to fire. When were they burning. They were burning anywhere from January all the way up into June. Really? Yeah. Okay. Give us a rundown of the Arkansas turkey situation. Because, so two podcasts ago, you know, we talked with Mike Chamberlain and we always hear how

Arkansas is like the poster child for the southeast turkey decline. And so give us kind of a timeline of history of the Arkansas turkey population to the best of your knowledge, bringing it up until today. So, you know, from my understanding, basically, you know, if we go back about 100 years or so, you know, early 1900s, populations in the state were, you know, hitting there about lowest points by 1930s, 1940s. They're estimated to be only about 7,000 wild turkeys left in the state. Wow. Game Fish Commission was created around 1915 and, you know, late teens, early 20s, they're already starting to think about, you know, what they needed to do with wild turkeys,

started setting seasons, just in bag limits, though, they're still incredibly liberal to what you see today. But they also started considering restocking with captive-raised wild turkeys, you know, game-farm birds. And they put those out for many years and wasn't really successful at all. Those birds didn't have the natural instincts, you know, to actually survive in the wild. They weren't used to predators, anything like that. And it wasn't until rocket nets were really picked up in popularity and that technique was developed in the late 40s, early 50s. early 50s that, you know, catching wild, wild birds and moving them. So, Misty, that's when they would put out bait for turkeys.

Big flock of turkeys would come in and they had rocket propelled nets that would shoot out and catch a whole flock of turkeys. And then they'd take those turkeys, transport them somewhere else. So that was in the 1940s. Yep, yep. And so they were able, and they were bringing turkeys in from other states or just other places where we had turkeys. Some other states, you know, we had some bar.

coming in from places like Missouri. I think we did get some birds from Pennsylvania at points, both captive-reared ones and actual wild stock birds. But the majority of birds in the state actually came from Brandywine Islands, and island over, I think it's Mississippi County in the middle of Mississippi River.

Really good turkey populations over there, and so they caught a lot of birds there and moved them to different kind of refuges around the state where they were stocked. You know, early on they let hunting still go and realize that some of those situations wasn't working that well, so they got to got to the point where they started closing those areas for a period of years to allow those

birds to naturally repopulate the area and expand. You know, I think they're estimating that they expand somewhere 10 to 20 miles over several years and kind of fill those those habitats at the time. And so most of that restocking was finished by the early to mid-90s, though there were still- Really, so for 50 years they're restocking turkeys. Yep. And the majority of those, you know, they kind of focused in and around the National Forests. lands large public lands because you know early on the the idea was that you know wild turkeys were uh you know they needed thick forest not or not necessarily thick forest but large expanses of forest because that those are the areas that turkeys were left you know all these places they were harder to exploit they hadn't really

been harassed to the point that they were extirpated from the area like they were in a lot of other areas where there's there was more people and it was easier access so you know those early efforts focused there first and then built upon it. It wasn't until you started getting to the 70s and 80s, maybe the 90s, where they started looking at what they considered these more marginal habitats where you had this more of a combination, interspersion of kind of open land and forested habitats and realized that that's actually more of an ideal turkey habitat. And that's what populations really exploded.

The big forest, yeah. And so the Arkansas turkey populations by the late 70s and 80s just, skyrocketed. Yeah, they started to jump. I mean, I think there were some periods, you know, even back in the 70s and 80s that you saw these fluctuations where we had good numbers and then there were some bad years, you know, following poor weather events, poor hatches. But in general, that trend was continuing to increase all through time. And we hit about the early 2000s, and that's when things peaked, you know, the late 90s, early 2000s. You know, we ended up, the highest harvest year we had was 2003, the state we harvested.

just under 20,000 turkeys that year. Okay. And then there was... We refer to that time period as the good old days. Yes, yes, that's what I hear often. So 20,000 was our biggest number of birds taken. Yes, yes, just under that. Now, that's always been an interesting number to me because, like, Missouri, they might kill 50,000

turkeys. Is that about right? Yeah, I mean, in recent years it's been a lot less, but I think at their peak, which was in and around that same time, they killed about 60,000 turkeys up there. That's a lot. And I know you can't, it's not comparing apples to apples to compare two states. I mean, they have a lot of ag land or maybe more ag land than us. I don't know.

What about Mississippi? What would have there been their peak harvest numbers? I can't remember exactly what their peaks were, but, you know, I think typically you see nowadays that they estimate somewhere of the 25 to 30,000 range. It was probably somewhat higher. It was notably higher than Arkansas, though. Yeah, yeah. And I can't remember what those figures were exactly, but it was probably. you know 35 40,000 something along those lines. And now would Oklahoma not have had more birds than us

even historically at our peak? Oklahoma gets difficult because you start moving into Rio Grande wild turkeys and the majority of the state, you know, basically your southeastern corner of the states where you have true easterns and then they you know they talk about this sort of hybrid zone between the two but the majority of that kind of central western portion of the state's Rio so it starts getting a little different you know it gets to that apples to orange. oranges comparison to truly say what's going on. I honestly couldn't tell you what their harvests look like through time. Yeah.

Well, it's kind of, it's interesting to me when we talk about the turkey situation here in Arkansas because really it's a pretty, I mean, 20 years isn't that long when you're looking at wildlife management and looking at like a broad scale of animal populations going up and down. And humans, including myself and Josh, are pretty finicky when. it comes to turkey numbers. I mean, you can go from a three-year period and people might think, oh, man, there's no turkeys anymore. And, you know, three years before they were wearing them out, you know.

Right. But just to get, just so, so I can be clear on this, what you're describing is an enormous amount of effort to get 20,000 turkeys, which was still lower than what the surrounding states had. At our peak, we were still smaller. Yeah. Yeah. And did the other states put forth the effort that we did? It's hard as far as restocking them. Yeah. So, I mean, mostly.

Yep, yep. All these are, this was happening across the country during this entire period. You know, north, south, Louisiana, to Wisconsin, east, you know, to Maine and Florida, you know, all those states were experiencing these same declines, you know, in the early 1900s. And then through time, through the middle 1900s, really started ramping up that, those efforts. in restock and I think Mississippi was one of those states that was was fairly early in there where they considered things to be successful and kind of complete we were right there probably within a few years of what they would assume and so you can't really like me comparing Arkansas to Missouri it's really not fair I mean Missouri might be bigger I don't know it just has different habitats so that's not really relevant but I just kind of was trying to get like

a bigger picture of because that was my understanding is that Missouri's always killed a bunch more than us. Mississippi's always killed a bunch more than us. What's interested is, you know, a lot of people look at those border and states, but I very rarely hear folks look south of the border. You know, they don't talk about Louisiana often. And, you know, that's one of the things that I've tried to do since I got here was kind of take a look at that landscape context. What are we looking at here in Arkansas? Because, you know, people talk about that 20,000 birds and, you know, there's some interesting things, you know, in regards to what our regulations were like at that time to where we're at now that make it even harder to compare harvest to now to back then.

But when you just look at the landscape context, you know, most of Arkansas, a larger proportion of Arkansas looks a lot like Louisiana. They typically harvest, you know, about three to five thousand birds or so on average. That's all? Yeah, between their, you know, game check and then their estimates, you know, on hunter surveys, they're estimating right in that ballpark. So we're just a little bit above that. And then you move into Missouri and, you know, obviously they're killing a ton of different birds.

But, you know, Arkansas is this unique mix of these different regional landscapes all coming together. I mean, essentially. Yeah, I mean, you've got the Ozarks on the kind of the northern quarter of the state. You move in down south below the river valley, you know, that's a whole unique area. Then you get into the Washington Mountains below that. You got that large portion of the states, the Gulf Coastal Plain, you know, primarily pine, managed timber. And then you move over in the entire eastern, about quarter to third of the states. This really developed agricultural land, bottom land,

playing around all these major river corridors. So, you know, really the only remaining habitat out there is the bottom land tracks along the White, Cache River, the Mississippi River, Crowley's Ridge, that formation. But outside of that, you know, it's essentially non-habitat. So, you know, that really restricts the amount of available habitat for wildlife. Yeah, so over in the eastern state. The eastern third of the state at least is like pretty limited turkey habitat. I mean, what he's saying is just along the rivers and stuff.

There's places for them. Okay, I want to ask you about three things. I want to talk about burning, big national forest, and specifically the timing of it. I want to talk to you about bag limits. And I want to talk to you about just kind of like your personal opinion. of what's going on because I think there's a lot of it. So I'm declaring that so all y'all can help me stay on track, okay? Oh, we'll help you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so, man, I understand, like, anybody that's paying attention to wild turkey management has heard this statement and can grab onto it pretty easily, is that burning helps turkeys more than it helps them. Yeah, maybe a fire would burn up a nest as possible, but turkeys can have another nest in the same spring. I'm just giving you the simple version. But what happens when you burn is that's one spring,

and then the habitat has improved so much the next, however many years, that anything you lost during that one spring has gained so much more in previous years. Because, Misty Newcomb, everybody where I grew up, everybody, this week I heard it from a guy. He said, man, we used to have turkeys in the national forest, boy started burning all the timber in April, burning up a turkey nest. That actually sounds like his accent, too. Can you imagine. And I didn't even want to get into it with him.

But that was that guy. And then I heard another guy who I deeply respect, who has a wildlife biology degree, who gave a little rant the other day. And he said, I know all the benefits of burns. You don't have to tell me about the benefits of burns. how it helps turkey habitat. But he says we're burning so late that we're inevitably burning up nests and inevitably putting birds at in a vulnerable place by having them to lay eggs again and make a second

clutch. And basically he was like, yeah, I've heard all that stuff about good habitat, but we're still burning up nests and really compromising the hens ability to nest. Do you understand what I'm talking about, Misty? I do. What I don't understand is why I'm the fall guy for the person. who doesn't know much about trickies in this particular podcast. Because these guys are turkey experts.

I'm looking at Josh and I'm saying. Yeah, right. No, no, I just want to make sure you're following. So do you understand what I'm saying? So what's the truth, man? So, I mean, you know, no two fires are created equal. That, you know, that's the reality. And, you know, a lot of people that look at the national forests and, you know,

what's going on there. And, you know, you got to remember that that's only a tiny segment of this entire state. So the idea that, you know, we're burning up all the nests, and that's what's causing population declines in this entire state, you know, is probably a little bit near-sighted. I mean, there's 90% more of the state is. Let me stop you right there before you even get going, because that's a good point. It's like, it's not just on national forests that turkeys are scrambling. Yep, yep, exactly.

So that's kind of your point. It's like, well, then it must not be the fire. Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, there still is, you know, obviously issues. You know, most of the research that's out there these days suggest that there is really minimal loss due to fire. It's not saying that there's not potentially loss. happening but you know it in the grand scheme of things with all the other factors that are out there it's it's relatively small fish you know and most people you know I put this out in a lot of

the presentations that I do you know you walk up on a turkey nest that's in one of those burns you see it you know it's it's either got a bunch of crushed eggs or it's got a bunch of whole eggs you don't know the whole story beyond what what's actually happened there so you know I look back to my master's degree and we were looking specifically at these burns specifically this time a year. Granted, these are a lot smaller scale than what we're talking about here, you know, on National Forest that may be thousands of acres, but you'd walk up on a nest and you say, okay, well, that that burned, but well, now I know that this one's had a GPS transmitter on it. I can go back and I can look and see, see what happened and realize, you know, she abandoned

the nest two days before this fire ever showed up. Nothing to taking those eggs. You walk in there, you know, it's been burned. The eggs are clearly visible. You assume, you know, if you don't have that information that that that nest was was burned up and so that that kind of further negate some of those it's a simple story to say that the fires what what did it but but you don't know that whole back story and and so there's more things to go into it why wouldn't they just not burn in april yeah the reality you know here national forest land i mean you have so many thousands of acres that you're millions of acres that you're attempting to manage for and they're managing for for multiple uses it's not just turkey population I wish, you know, as a turkey biologist, that we could manage every, you know, acre in the state for wild turkeys.

But that's, you know, not the reality there. They're burning for, you know, fuels mitigation, you know, to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, all these different things. And you've got to kind of get those burns in when you can. Have there been catastrophic wildfires in Arkansas? I'm sure there have been at some point. I know in recent years, you know, you look east of us in Tennessee, you know, you had those big fires that occurred. I think it was around Gatlinburg. and in that area.

I mean, so there is the potential in the East, particularly with some of the fuel loads we have. You think about how overstocked a lot of our timber is these days and the fuel loads that are in there because they haven't burned. I mean, historically, a lot of Arkansas would have been kind of woodlands, savanna-type habitats, particularly in your uplands, you know, the top of these hills and stuff like that, that, you know, fires would have moved through frequently and it would reduce some of that naturally.

But now we have so much, you know, overstock timber, a lot of just dead decane fuel because we spent years and years and years trying to keep those fires at bay you know if we did have a wildfire pop up you try to you know knock it out stomp it out as quick as you could so it didn't burn a lot of acres in reality that probably would have been been better if you could have just let it let it kind of burn so that time period is just kind of when they can burn yeah it's the best time period for burning there so so what you're saying is if we were managing solely for wild turkeys we wouldn't burn during that time yeah not necessarily. I mean, and I tell managers this all the time, you know, when we look at game

of fish-owned properties in particular, you know, you've got to look holistically at what you're talking about, what the habitat's telling you. You know, ideally, you know, we burn in the dormant season, you know, and this is, you know, a little bit arbitrary, but, you know, January into mid-March or something like that, try to finish it up. And then, you know, now we're starting to shift what we consider growing season fires, which could be anywhere from mid-late March, early April, all the way and through, you know, October. November, you know, while those trees are still actively sending nutrients up and down. We can still get a lot of the same benefits burning, you know, April and May, if the conditions

were there. We can get those same benefits burning, you know, August, September, October, if we can get those same weather variables in line so we can run the fire at that point. So generally, we try to avoid that nesting season as an agency, but, you know, if it comes up, if, you know, you've got a stand that's, you know, towards the end of its rotation, it needs to be burned, you know, and we're talking about it's already missed, you know, one window and you're saying, well, you know, it's turkey season, you know, we can't burn. If you keep doing that, you know, you'd never get anything accomplished because you have so many different seasons throughout the year. You're pro burn. I am. I am. You know, I tell folks all the time, you know, if,

if the conditions allow, you know, and you've got the burn weather, because, you know, not every day is equal when it comes to the weather for burning, you've got to have certain, certain variables all have to line up. So if you hit one of those days, you better take advantage of it because the idea that if you don't burn that and then, you know, you hit later in the fall, you may not be able to burn it then. And now we're talking a year, two years post when you could have burned. And now we're, we're outside of the usable space, you know, for a turkey. Now it's so thick that they don't want to touch it. And it may end up costing you a lot more money to go in there with herbicide or, you know, bringing in something to masticate, you know, mulch that, that timber to get it

back to a point where you could roll a fire through it and that's going to be a lot more expensive and it may take years in the budget to be able to afford to do that and have it set aside so you know all of a sudden you went from having something that yeah you may have lost one nest this year but now you've instead of burning it now you have no nests in it for the next handful of years or the predation rate on those ones is so much higher that by getting it done you lose that nest yeah this year but hopefully you've benefited all the ones around it same block of woods every single year right i mean there so that's the other thing to think about it's like yeah maybe the south side of that mountain this year gets burned so yeah maybe maybe a turkey loses her

nest and maybe she's unsuccessful nesting later worst case scenario but they're not going to burn it for another how many years what's the cycle on some of those you know depending here you know it could be two to three years down in a lot of it's particularly like the gulf coastal flame and and maybe in some of the wash taws and the pine blue stem you know you get up here in the ozarks you're probably talking three four or five years you can spread out a little bit further four years of greatly improved habitat for them to have great potential nesting with no fires at all right yeah okay since i'm the fault guy for people who who who are unaware have a fire extinguisher here if you need it all right so well i guess how long does it take for a turkey to settle into a place like is four years enough time

for a turkey to say oh i like that i'm going to lay That is help. It's almost immediate. I mean, those birds, I mean, they typically, their home range isn't probably going to get changed all that much of a fire. They're just going to move out. They'll move out. But honestly, they move right back in. I mean, a lot of the research that Mike and a lot of other folks have done in the southeast in recent years, I mean, those birds are moving back in there.

I think it's something like 50% of the birds that we've had Mark moved back into a burned area within 48 hours. And by, you know, the end of a week, it's like 90%. I'm surprised you didn't know that. Yeah. Do other states. And I know we can't compare. It's not apples to apples. I'm just curious, mainly because I'd like to figure out the turkey situation

because it is the end of April. It is. It's the end of April. We don't have a turkey and the Newcomb's. Misty wakes up all during turkey season and is like, are you going to go kill a turkey today? And I usually say no and it really bothers her. Is that why I'm having to provide your family of rainbow trout?

It's true. It's true. It's true. It's true. It's true. Do other states, are other states see in a decline like we are? For sure, for sure. And are they burning? Yes. Yes. I mean, a lot of those states, you know. By the end of this, Missy's going to have it all figured out. And she's going to tell us like something that Mike Chamberlain and Jeremy never thought of. She's going to be like, well, why don't you just, we don't even know what that X is. Yeah. Didn't you listen to the podcast with Mike Chamberlain? You didn't, did you? That was two podcasts ago, wasn't it? You weren't on the render. Yeah. So we talked all about the southeast decline.

of turkey. Isaac, take that out. Okay, that's great. Burns, got it, got it. Yeah, my, so that's good. Number two. Bag limits. Bag limits.

Is it just a social issue that we don't just say one turkey? By social, you mean like political? I mean, is it, like, people will rebel? Yes. People will revolt. I think there's a lot of people that look at bag limits like they're the end-all be all like if we we do this you know here in arkansas we've got a relatively conservative bag limit already we have you know it's a two turkey bag limit in the state you got other states

in the southeast that have made some changes recently but a lot of them have had three four even five yeah i'll ever until recently i think just in the last i think just this year they moved from five down to four but it's still you know relatively high number and you know when you start getting up three four five birds in your bag limit you know you can have potentially a disproportionate amount of your harvest come come from those folks that are harvesting much more than two but you know here in arkansas we've had you know two bird bag limits for for many years even three you know going back into the 70s 80s early 90s you know around there and portions of the state particularly like along the Mississippi River some areas in the waschatas and you know the reality is you know that

was all occurring while populations were rebounding you know being actively stocked so we had a higher bag limit earlier when there were a lot less turkey hunters on the landscape but when those turkeys were you know just basically becoming kind of whole you know coming back around um you know i look at it now 90% of our harvest in arkansas comes from folks filling just that first tag okay that's a great okay that's that's the kind of reasoning i needed to hear that makes sense so it's like not a ton of people are killing two turkeys yeah not at all i mean in general i mean we're talking And with the recent years where our harvest has been in the 7,000, 8,000 kind of range, we're looking at 700, 800 turkeys, you know, out of the entire harvest,

being somebody's second bird. Really? Okay. You know, there's been. Interesting. Yeah, there's been times in the past, you know, in the 90s, particularly the Washatahs. I looked at this just recently because we do have a proposal out there right now to move to a one bird limit.

It wasn't something that the turkey program put out there, but it was something that came from some public comment and the agency decided to put it out for public comment during in a recent reg survey. So what I did was I looked back at these seven or so counties in the in the Washtaws where they went from a three bird bag limit to a two bird bag limit to a one bird bag limit and then back to a two bird bag limit, which we have still through today.

And what you see is, you know, populations were declining a bit. You know, reproduction had been kind of poor in general terms. I mean, you look back now, you know, the reproduction compared to now to back then, it usually, yeah, pretty good. But, you know, it was declined. You saw harvest decline. So they instituted a two-bird bag limit. Population continued to decline or the harvest continued to decline, but you moved to a one-bird bag limit.

There really wasn't any difference between those two-year, two-bird limit years and that one bird-limit year. Because, again, there's not that many more birds getting shot because somebody's killing a second one. And in most cases, you're probably just seeing other people fill that tag. You know, if you were restricted to one, you didn't get to go, but, you know, you took your son out. You took your wife out. Yeah, okay. Man, that's, yeah, that's a great, that's a great analogy. Now, I can see if you had a five-bird bag limit and guys really had some, you know,

their spots dialed in and had the time and were really good turkey hunters, like you could really hurt something. But with a two-bird, I see how that the possibilities are less for hurting. And, man, I like that. I don't know, you know, I put on that survey that I would be fine with a one-bird bag limit. Like, it just wouldn't be a problem. Just thinking, you know, we've got to sacrifice some for the resource. But I'm one of those guys that, I mean, to be honest with you, it's been a long time since I've killed two turkeys in Arkansas.

And so, you know, maybe to me that's not a big deal. Yeah. I mean, you think about the opportunity that's lost at that point. You go from two to one, you know, like for me, I was successful this year. When I opened a day, I was lucky enough, I got a bird. I was gaining fish guys. Yeah. Yeah.

They got him on a string. Yeah, I have one tied up there for me so I can get it, make sure I got a bird this year. Probably had a live hen decoy. But I mean, now, you know, obviously we've kind of limited that harvest in the front end of the season. So when we consider, you know, some of that harvest could be more impactful to that breeding chronology. We tried to limit that, push some of that back a little bit to later in the season when it may be less impactful. So, you know, got that bird. I'm out of the woods for seven days.

So there's a new regulation, Misty, where if you kill. kill a turkey you can't kill another one if you kill one the first week anytime within the first seven days you can't go until basically the eighth day of the season so this morning if i had killed one the first day which i wasn't even in the country i couldn't have hunted until later in the week because that that kind of takes away a little bit of the opportunity for a second bird but you could take somebody else hunting like if i had some birds dialed in i mean that second day i could have taken my son or taken colby or me or john or josh or Misty.

Josh is just sitting over there. You can't go turkey on you. I have a stick on it. Breaks up your outline. Turkey's recognized human faces. That's right. If you have a big line across your face. Natural camo, man.

It doesn't work. It doesn't have to put much of, you know, extra covering on the face. Okay, so that clears it up with me on bag limits. It's like the whole thing is sort of like all the problems in life right now. We assume the simplest,

you want to make it a really simple it's because of this but in reality everything's a lot more complex it's a you know like chamberlain said like everybody said it's death by a thousand cuts and like i always go back to you can't trust a ground nest and bird because they're they're going to create problems for you there's just so many reasons why ground nest and birds have trouble but also can do really great but okay let me ask you this and this is uh like why are our turkeys declining like okay off the record. I'm going to turn this off, okay? Wink, wink.

What is happening? I mean, we already know everything that like everybody said, you know, it's just like death by thousand cuts. It can be bag limits. It can be predation. It's the forest regime. You know, I don't know. Why is... What's the real reason? Yeah, what's the, what are you hiding from us, Jerry? I wish it was as easy to just pulling something out of the bag of tricks and saying,

yeah, this is it, you know, that smoking gun, that silver bullet that would fix everything. I mean, I think there's a lot of stuff that's going into what's going on here in the state in Arkansas. You know, coming in from that outside perspective, not being from here, you know, I'm thankful that I didn't experience turkey populations in the early 2000s. I was alive, but I wasn't hunting turkeys at that point. I wasn't hunting turkeys in the south in particular. So, you know, I started hunting turkeys in my mid-20s, 23, 24, somewhere in that ballpark. And I've never had a bad turkey hunt. And I've never had a bad turkey season since I started hunting.

I hunt mostly public land. But I never had that experience, you know, I hear from most folks that I used to go out to this spot and I'd hear 12 birds gobbling on the ridge. I've never had that. I mean, I've had some spots where I've heard three, four, five, something like that. But that's still all in these recent years. And, you know, I'd kill some. I don't kill some and other chances. but I've heard birds gobbling it's great experience but if some of it you're dealing with

that expectation that you know you've got folks that that started turkey hunting right there when things were were perfect those populations were at their highest point but it may not have been you know sustainable that may not have been the reality and particularly what I look at here in the state is you know thinking about the number of turkey hunters that were on the landscape you know you think about you know if you're around you were hunting in the 80s maybe even the early 90s You know, a lot of folks that I talked to, they can count on one hand the number of their turkey hunters. They even knew, you know, they were hunting in the area that they hunted. And, you know, you get into the late 90s, you know, you were talking with Will and the previous podcast

and thinking about the truth and, you know, all of that kind of blowing up and people just eating all that information up. Yeah, an explosion of turkey hunting knowledge and people wanting to become turkey hunters. Yeah, it's kind of like what they talk about in the waterfowl world, like this duck dynasty bump, you know, and hunter numbers. and I think we saw that at that time when things were peaking. And then, you know, when you look back in time, you know, I think Mike brought this up where, you know, it was kind of right there under our fingers, but we didn't really recognize what was happened at the time

because a couple of bad years in a row wasn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things at that time. But now 20 years later, you know, we can look back and see how long that actually, you know, continue to occur and reproduction kept declining. And, you know, here in the state, you know, you saw the agency look at how good populations were doing, look at the interests. They started adding more days to the season.

So you went from, you know, the mid-80s through the early 2000s. You were looking, I think we had about 23, 24-day long season, about what we're at now with the youth hunt. And all of a sudden, you started going up into 30, 35 days, 39 days by 2003, 2004. And that's an incredible amount of pressure to put on that population in a short period of time. So there's a lot of birds, but there's a lot more turkey hunters coming into the fold at that time. So people were really being successful. But I think what we did was the overshot, you know, at that period of time. It's not likely that, you know, I think we look out there and we say, okay, you know,

harvest is estimated at roughly 10% of your population. And so you extrapolate out from that number of what you anticipate your population was. And we would have said, okay, we were nearly 200,000 turkeys back around that time. But if we were over-harvesting them at that period of time, it's unlikely that we were ever truly that that high of a population. We had a better population than we do now, but it's hard to go back and look at that and then compare it to now and say, okay, did we drop 60 to 65 percent? You know, like a lot of people say when you're just looking at those harvest numbers, because, you know, you're looking at the harvest number, and that's one static number, but you're

not looking at all the things that go into that, so you're not looking at those season length fluctuations. You're not looking at bag limits like, you know, Arkansas, Mississippi, the only two states out there that restrict Jake harvest. Prior to 2000, nearly 40% of our harvest was made up with jakes here in the state. It's credible numbers. And then you get from 2000 to 2010, we restricted that to one jake for every hunter. That dropped that percentage from 40 down to about 25%. And then in 2011, we instituted the no-jake rule.

So only youth hunters had that exception that could kill one jake. That's dropped that number even further. Now we're down to 4% of our harvest each. year is made up of jakes been that way for 10 years it has now no jake policy has been successful and at least protecting jakes well the unfortunate reality is we don't know early on what those survival rates look like we recently finished up some research here in the last few years that looked at the impact of that regulation we're looking at survival of adult and juvenile males and we're seeing about 90 percent survival of those jakes you know very few if and

were actually even shot during the season. Most of them were just dying a natural mortality, which isn't much. They have pretty good survival in the absence of hunting pressure once they get about four weeks older. So, I mean, you get past that first month, and, you know, they're fairly golden. But what we're seeing now is that, you know,

our two-year-olds and stuff, we're hammering about 30% survival once they hit year two. So now that we took the pressure off the Jakes, it's all going to the two-year-olds. The two-year-olds. And then you start getting the three, four-plus-year-old. birds and you jump back up about 50% and you think about it those birds are they've been through the game a time or two at that point they're the smarter ones out there they're you know they don't

just come running into your calling like you know a two-year-old would do you know they're hard gobbling you know the hunts that you get really really excited about and because because they just come in that they act the way you know most people think the the birds should and but what we don't know is back prior you know back when we could kill two of those birds you know what those survival rates look like. You know, did we, instead of 90% survival of Jake, did we see 60, 70% survival of Jake, but what about those two-year-olds that that then increased that two-year-old survival? Because somebody shot a Jake and they couldn't kill another one today. So the long beard that may have been in there with them, you know, survived another day or maybe the season.

And so maybe their survival actually went up a little bit. And, you know, is that biologically significant to see those fluctuations? But we don't know what those numbers were like. So it's hard say it's in the one hand that that regulation has has worked it's generated the idea that we're seeing more of those jakes survived that first year but we don't know you know how it truly compares to what our earlier regulations were like and whether or not that that's a problem or not so do you think that are we ever going to get our turkeys back i mean like so if this is part of a cycle and also part of you know part of it is just there's not as many places for turkeys to be, but that doesn't fully make sense for like, like if you just took national forest,

like we have the same amount of national forest. And there's some interior sections of national forests that probably aren't really affected by the encroachment of civilization. I'm kind of thinking about this idea that habitat is being lost. But in a lot of places, habitat necessarily wouldn't be lost. It's not being lost, you know, outright. You know, like there's still forested landscape, but the condition of that forested landscape is, is different than potentially it has been in years past.

It's not as desirable from a turkey standpoint. You know, we were talking about overstock timber. I mean, just driving up, I was driving the pig trail, you know, on my way up here. And, you know, you're driving through the National Forest through there. And there's some spots here there that look a little more woodland-type condition. You can see a little bit of understory, but most of the area you're driving through there, whether it's pine, hardwood, you're looking at a lot of leaf litter, a lot of pine straw, very little understory vegetation.

So, you know, a turkey can still nest in there, but there's not really, it's not quality nesting habitat. It's still going to be a little more vulnerable to predators. It's easier for them to see her potentially. But then on top of that, there's not really good brooder here in habitat. There's not that low-growing, lush green vegetation that's, you know, just low enough off the ground that it can hide a pole. The hand can see over it. And there's not a lot of that out there. And, you know, you see that across the, a lot of the forms.

We had that 20 years ago. I'm guessing. You know, I mean, that's me not being here in the state, but I think 20, 30, 40 years ago, you saw different management, you know, in some of those areas. You know, I look nowadays at how a lot of agencies operate and we've seen a lot of reductions in field staff and things like that where, you know, even particular here, you look at a lot of our national forest lands. We've got a lot of conglomerates of ranger districts, you know, in areas that used to have

three separate ranger districts with three separate staff that all had, you know, responsibilities for a much smaller acres. Now you've got all of those in one single district with about a third of the staff that they once had, but now they're responsible for three times the acreage that they used to be. And, you know, I think that all starts putting challenges on things. That's part of it that I just don't understand is like, how is the habitat so much different now than it was at the peak? you know of turkey populations

that then and I'm not I mean I think you answered it is that there's just a thousand different things I mean the forests are 20 years older there's there is differences in management of stuff and it may not be that significant

from from that time period but you think we were kind of leading up to it so a lot of the stuff that produced the birds that were on the landscape 20 years ago would have been just a few more years before that so you know over time You might be talking about a 40 or 50-year time span. Because, yeah, maybe what happened 40 years ago produced the birds that we had 20 years ago,

but then that faded away. Misty, have you figured this out yet? Well, I do have a question. I know I'm a little bit more familiar with bear and how that studied by the game in fish. And they go in and they, like, they can tell you how many babies they're having. Do you all have, do you met, is there any way that you can figure out if turkeys are laying eggs or less eggs? So I mean not specifically the number of eggs. We occasionally we do research projects and they have over time you know back in the 90s and in the early to mid

20 teens we had some other research going on where they actually went out caught birds put transmitters on them followed them around and you know they track the nesting effort and so they go to nest whether they're successful or not they can count the eggs get all that information. To my knowledge the the number of eggs things like that hasn't changed. I'm sure the hatch rate hasn't really changed all that much. I think we're still seeing of the ones that are successful, you know, the number of eggs that hatch is usually relatively high.

But what we do do, you know, on a regular basis and it's been going on since the early 80s, is we do a population survey or a lot of folks call it a brood survey. So that's historically from the 80s until just a few years ago when I came on board. That was completed by agency personnel, law enforcement officers within the agency,

US Forest Service personnel, other, you know, agency partners, fish and wildlife service, folks like that. And what they do is during the summer months, June through August, they'd record all the turkeys that they saw. It didn't matter if it was just a group of goblers. It was a hen with a group of poults, a few hens altogether alone. And what we do is we compile all that information, and we calculate out what's known as a pulp per hen ratio.

And so we look at the number of pults that are observed versus the number of adult females that are observed, and we get that ratio, and you're able to look at the reproductive, Right. So basically it's just people's observations. So turkeys are pretty hard to gauge in terms of study like that. You probably would have known that if you listened to Mike Chamberlain. We talked extensively about this.

Cut that out, Isaac. Now, can you imagine if the Game and Fish did a turkey pole trip like they do with the bears? You remember the pictures of everybody holding the little bears? What if we did? We were with Jeremy. See Jeremy smiling? just this big cheeky grin. Holding a little turkey eggs, little photos.

That's probably what y'all should do. I think you would help. I don't know about that. I get real worried when you start bumping hands off in this and doing stuff like that. Tranquilize, man. Just like the bearers. Sneak up on it. Tranquilize the hand.

You hold the hen up by the leg. Rocket nets, baby. Rocket nets. Maybe we should bring the rocket nets back. Rocket necks. Yeah, okay. So is this just like, are we just always going to have turkey numbers like we do right now? or do you think we're at a low point and we're probably going to bounce back up just a little bit and kind of equalize that?

There's one right answer here. I think we have been at a low point. I mean, you look back through time, you know, just prior to my getting here, 2015 to 2019, we're the four or the five lowest reproductive years on record. He said right before he got here. I see, we didn't start. Jeremy, we're just the previous file. He just threw under the butt.

but I mean a lot of this is you know just obviously you know something that's out of our control a lot of times weather and things like that are impacting those a lot more than everything else I mean obviously habitat all those influence too but overarching weather patterns have been pretty poor that that period of time above average wet wet cold so I mean you know pultz you know in that first couple weeks of life they can't thermo regulate so if they're getting their cold they're getting wet they're dying a hypothermia things like that and you're losing a ton of birds really really quick whereas when you get to some drier spring weather like we've actually had the last couple years I was a little worried in the last couple that you know it was too wet at the wrong time but it must have hit just right within a lot of our hatching because we've had a decent hatch in 2020 and 2021 and so what I look at is that our populations are probably coming up a little bit we've kind of hit that low point you know 2020 didn't help things because you know everybody was off work so we kind of hammered them in that year we we had a higher harvest but that was probably

inflated. You know, we probably should have been going down that year, but we spiked up. So then last year we ended up dropping, you know, pretty good amount with our harvest. We probably overshot what kind of surplus we had from the year before, which wouldn't have been a whole heck of a lot of birds. Whereas now, you know, we went from those four to five poor years, had a good year. You know, they suggest in a good year reproduction, you can about double your population. You know, you think about two pults per hand, you know, she's replacing herself and another bird. be just a couple of years away from numbers being pretty high. Yeah, it really doesn't take much. I mean, a lot of the old literature talks about populations, you know, fluctuating upwards of 50%,

you know, above and below the long term, you know, kind of average because you have those years where you miss a hedge. See, I've never thought about that. When you have an animal that has the potential to have like seven or eight, you know, maybe, you know, a hen, real successful hen might raise a whole clutch of poles and you've just like doubled your population immediately. I like the hope inside of that. I think I'm going to be a turkey biologist now. See like bear populations, man, you want to spike up a bear population? Get ready to sit there and twiddle your thumbs for about 20 years.

Because a bear doesn't reach sexual maturity until it's about four years old, only has cubs every other year. Jeremy's in the right business. Yeah. Because you could double your population. Right place, right time, Jeremy. Yep. Right place, right time, Jeremy.

Yep. And we're counting on you to double our turkey population. You, we're, this, it's all on you, man. I'm wanting the five bird bag limit. Isn't that funny how it's like, Jeremy's here. He's in charge of it. And we're like, it's all you, man. Make turkey hunting great again, man.

Do you feel, do you feel the pressure? I mean, like, really, is there, is there social pressure on you about turkeys? Oh, for you're giving you a hard time here. We realize you're just doing your job. Yeah. No, I mean, for sure. I mean, you know, I get constant contacts from folks all the time about, have you thought about doing this?

Have you thought about doing that? We need to do what this state's doing and that state's doing. And, you know, I take a lot of this stuff personally, especially when I start hearing stuff, you know, about me or what we're doing, you know, all we're thinking about the dollar bills. It's hard not to take it personally. It's hard not to. I mean, I'm passionate about turkeys.

I just, me and my wife just had a little boy back in the fall. And, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, him six, seven years down the road when he's able to hunt. You know, I'm trying to manage for him and everybody else's kids that are out there, you know, thinking about the future and not necessarily thinking about, you know, today and just tomorrow, you know, what we're hunting. You know, we've got to think about what, what do we need to do now that we can set, you know, the future up for success.

And, you know, that may take some reduction in what we're able to do now for that long-term benefit. And so I've been pretty happy and pretty excited that our agency is. has been willing to, you know, take that kind of leap of faith at this point in time and move in that direction and kind of try to put the resource first and foremost, still trying to maintain, you know, some quality opportunity there for folks. So you still have that, you know, go out and experience and participate in turkey hunting. But that hopefully that sets us up for success, you know, here down the line to where we get to a point where we can maintain

some sort of, you know, kind of stable regulations. We don't, I don't think we want to get to a point We're chasing populations. Things are great. You know, now let's keep just like dialing up the pressure now. We're going to add bag limits. We're going to add time. Like I think what you need to do is maintain those consistent regulations. Be a little bit conservative to make up for those potential poor years that you have down the road.

And it balances out. You know, you'll have some good years. You'll have some bad years. But that way you don't have some really, really, really bad years. And, you know, you're trying to pull yourself up out of a hole. So what do we, what do you, what would you say the major, like, one or two things that you guys are doing right now that is going to help us get a handle on it. So from the regulatory standpoint, you know, obviously, you know, that's one of the major things

that we can control. So, you know, pushing the season back to where we did right in around April 19th, and that's going to vary based on calendar creep because we put it as the third Monday in April to limit some of that early pressure because, you know, you set it up on Saturday. Everybody can go. you end up having a lot more issues, safety issues, hunter interference issues, you know, it's greater conflict. So we keep it on a Monday to try to spread some of that pressure out throughout the week. So it's not all just a free for all on the opening day because then a lot of folks just aren't happy with that. And we've had a lot of, you know, complaints over the years when they did that and moving it back to Monday. But by pushing us back to that kind of April 19th

time frame, we're allowing more of those hens to be bred. Most of the, information I had to work with some of our research projects with those population surveys, we could actually, you know, we take age estimates on the pulse so we can backdate how old we anticipate those. And I usually go pretty conservative. You know, if somebody says they're two weeks old, okay, I'm saying they're 14 days. You know, at that point, I go back from that 14 days. That's when they hatched. I can go back 26, 28 days. They usually go 28, just go on the far, far side of things when they're hatching and say, okay, this is when they first started incubating that nest and then go back even further to when they started laying that about 14 days before that.

So that's what we're talking about in that April 19th time frame is that's the peak nest initiation or egg laying time period in the state. So there's a bunch of birds. So most of the breedings being done in March? Some of the breedings being done in March, most of it's probably ramping up right there in the middle of April. You know, typically some of the old research, and this is looking at captive birds, but basically suggest that, you know, those birds are getting bred and going to delay that that, that start that laying process probably within 48 to 72 hours of when they were bred. So, and it's not to say that some of those hens aren't getting bred early.

I mean, I get reports every year, you know, here's trail camera picture. There's a bird, you know, breeding a hen first of March, 7th of March, something like that. Well, that's all occurring. And some of those birds aren't ready to actually lay that nest, so they continue to to breed with more tombs right up until the time that they're ready to start that process. that most of that occurs right around now this previous week or so. And so, you know, where we had had seasons timed about the 10th or so of April, that fell right within probably that peak breeding period in the state.

So that's when most of those times didn't have to gobble as much. You know, they're sitting up there on the limb. They might gobble a few times, but a lot of those hens are right there, roosted around them because they're going to come down. They're going to breed with them early, and then they're going to move off and potentially start that laying sequence pretty shortly thereafter. And so that obviously reduces, you know, a lot of the satisfaction with hunting, you know, goblins going down, you're not hearing as much.

You know, this week, you know, this first week here, the season wasn't the best, but, you know, some of that's been influenced probably more by weather. Spring green up this year was actually probably a little bit delayed from what has been. So, you know, we may actually be hitting more of that kind of low period right now and some of that may really start to ramp up here in the latter, you know, two-thirds of the season over the next few days. So if you had a message for people about turkey hunting, what would you say? Like just in terms of you being a part of the agency, like what would you ask of people? I would ask folks to have some patience.

I mean, obviously we didn't get to the point that we're at right now overnight, and we're not going to change that overnight. Wait a minute, I thought you were going to double the turkey puppy. Did you say that? Didn't he say that? In two weeks. I thought he said that one year he could double the turkey puppy. I wish it worked that way. I wish it was that easy.

But my hope is that, you know, over time here that we can hit some of those good springs. Like we've had two pretty good hatches. If we get another really good hatch this year, I mean, you think about it, you might have doubled your population two years ago, but you were at a real low point. So then last year, you know, if we about doubled it again, you know, now we're even better and we're really starting to see it. Now if we get a third year back to back to back, now we really really. see it you know in these future years because you're gonna have a lot more young birds running around and then maybe potentially your your goblin activity is going to increase but but the likelihood is we'll have a poor year

you know there's no guarantee that we're gonna get that back to back to back because yeah we just don't know what that weather's gonna do so I would just say to have patience you know take take some time you know maybe kind of recalibrate those expectations don't don't look back to the early 2000s and say okay we killed 20,000 birds we need to kill kill 20,000 again because it's unlikely that we're ever going to see our harvest numbers get that high again because of the new regulations that we have in place. You know, everything that's changed from back then to now,

it's not going to allow those numbers to quite get to that point. You know, I look back to when we had a later season just a handful of years ago, 2012 to 16 time period, we killed about 10 to 11,000 or so birds in the state. That was, we were one of the states of that time. We actually saw we had declined a whole bunch, and then we started coming up. we actually made this increase during those years, which is kind of out of the norm for a lot of the other states. Most people were either just kind of staying steady or still declining.

We saw this nice spike. We don't know if that was the regulations. We know we had good reproduction on the front end of that 2012 and 13, but we didn't kind of follow through for it with the remaining years. So we don't know would we have just continued to go down? Will we have leveled out, you know, anything about that, which is unfortunate. And the hope will be that, you know, we can keep the regulations we have. have in place now for some time to watch those trends and actually get trend data. Because going back the last 30, 40 years, we've made so many regulation changes as an agency.

And it's actually, you know, a lot of folks look at, you know, what is the agency done? And they've actually done a lot compared to a lot of other agencies. We've made so many regs changes. But it makes it impossible to, you know, determine any sort of trend data because of all those different kind of interwoven regs changes that, you know, each one has its own. different impact on what that harvest is going to be. So it makes trying to compare from one year to the next, you know, almost impossible. So hopefully we can kind of maintain some and see it out.

And then if we do need to make a change, we make one change at a time and say, okay, how is this, this impacted and maybe study that and see, okay, we went to this. We didn't see any change. Okay, maybe we can return that and we move one of these other factors. And, you know, hopefully in time we'll get to a point where we can actually say, you know, how many, how many turkey hunters do we have? in the state. I don't know how many we have. And, you know, some of our estimates. I was going to ask, do we, we don't have any idea how many. We don't. We have some estimates based on some kind of deer and turkey hunter opinion surveys that were done in 14, 16 and 18 that say, okay, maybe about 40% of our license holders hunt turkeys. Well, depending on which number you use and the exact, you know,

license holders that, you know, that could be anywhere from 70 to 100 and something thousand turkey hunters in the state. So, you know, when I look at a year where we have, say, Say we have 70,000. Last year we killed 7,000 turkeys. Well, okay, that says, okay, maybe you have about 10% success. But, you know, when I look at some of my counterparts, talk to like Georgia, they estimate they've got 50,000 to 60,000 turkey hunters. They're much larger state than us.

They've got more birds than us. I'd be kind of hard pressed to expect we have more turkey hunters here in Arkansas than there. So, you know, say we have half as much. Say we have 35, 40,000 turkey hunters. Well, now all of a sudden your success rates 20%, and that's actually maybe more in line with a lot of these other states throughout the country. Maybe that's more normal and we're kind of in the ballpark of where we should be. And you know, you're just going to see those fluctuations depending on what that hatch looks like.

And it's going to be every other year because we don't harvest Jake. So you don't see those trends, you know, wherever you see a spike in reproduction. You don't see that spike in harvest, you know, come for two years instead of in a lot of states where, since you're able to harvest jakes, you know, it happens that following year. So like if this summer, you know, you had a good year in a lot of states, you'd see that spike in harvest next spring. Whereas here, we'd see it a little two years later. Yeah. Well, well, fascinating stuff.

Yeah. That's great. Well, man, thanks a ton for coming up here. Really appreciate it. And we'll give you a couple more years, Jeremy. We'll be patient with you. But, you know, by about two years from now, I need like five bird bag limit. No, man.

And if you need anything, let us know. we'll get Austin to get it for you. That's right. Isaac, cut that. That's right. That's right. No, no. Leave it in there.

No, man. We appreciate what you're doing for real. We know it's not an easy chair to sit in and golly, man. It's a dynamic and complex system that's constantly changing. I mean, with the landscape and the human involvement and weather changing, you know, weather patterns are undoubtedly changing. It's like such a complex. system. I mean, all we can do is give it our best. And I know, I mean, I have full faith. You know, there's some, I mean, I have a lot of faith in game agencies just doing the absolute best they can.

It's in their best interest. I mean, every state agency wants engagement from people. They know to get that engagement. They've got to have wildlife. I mean, we're all kind of on the same team in terms of these things. And these are the guys that are, that have the data, have the research, are doing the best that we know how inside of the bounds of science and human relations to make all this stuff work. We appreciate the hard work and considering the habitat, the wildlife, and the hunters. And I think you guys do a great job balancing that out. Right on. 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. sleeping back, and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't.

This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th.

Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast Guaranteed Human