Bear Grease - Ep. 512: Backwoods University - Alabama’s Wildlife Conservation History

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

What's better than a story of triumph? I'll tell ya, A story of triumph involving wildlife conservation. The state of Alabama, much like the rest of the country in the early 1900s, was sitting on the brink Of complete natural resource destruction. We are going to take a deep dive into their wildlife conservation history and learn about the people involved, the ideas, and the actions carried out that not only saved Alabama’s wildlife and wild places from being permanently lost or degraded, but rather restored them all but completely and created a whole new generation of conservation minded hunters and anglers along the way. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Gunfighters, starting on September 15th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. And today, we are traveling back in time in the state of Alabama to learn about two of the most important figures and their conservation history.

Y'all may have heard me say this before, but I love hearing old school conservation stories. I like to learn about the foundations and the building blocks of wildlife management that guide us where we are today. And I like learning about the individuals who had the decisiveness, the creativity, and drive to make things happen at crucial times. It's time that we all learned about the wildlife conservation history

of the entire state of Alabama and the lasting impacts of two men named John Wallace and IT Quinn. You may not be familiar with any of these topics yet, but I promise you, by the end of this episode, you won't forget them. Let's get into it. Now, let's say by chance this is your first time listening to this show, or maybe you need a recap.

So allow me to set the stage a little bit as I drive from Mississippi to eastern Alabama to meet the man that we're going to be talking to this morning about IT Quinn, John Wallace, and the entire state of Alabama. You see, historical wildlife conservation stories and figures is not exactly a new premise for this show. Far from it, honestly. We can all go back to the beginning of this entire show about early Bob White Quail Conservation, or, the episode about Fannie Cook that y'all hear me bring up all the time, or the interview with Benny Herring just this past spring about some of the first wild turkey restoration projects. The way that I see it, the more all of us can learn and understand about our history

with our wildlife and our wildlife habitat, the better off all of us will be going forward. The trick is some of these folks, subjects, or stories aren't exactly the easiest thing in the world to research, which has been a bit of a conundrum to me because some of the folks that have been the most difficult for me to learn about or track down interviews for have made some truly incredible contributions to our wildlife and our landscape. Nonetheless, these stories deserve to be shared and put out there for all of us to appreciate. So I set off on my five-hour and 21-minute drive to meet with a man named Corky Pugh. I knew after one small email exchange with this man that he was exactly who we needed to talk to

today. When this interview picks up, I'm sitting in the living room of Mr. Corky Pugh's house. When I initially walked in the front door, I was greeted by him and a very excited but well-mannered golden retriever. The distance from the front door to the living room was not far, but in those few short steps, I felt like I learned a lot about the man that I was about to talk to. There were several pictures that hung on the wall as well as sitting in frames on the tables in the living room. Pictures of fishing trips with his wife, hunting trips with him, and people that I perceived to be his friends or his family, and an impressive assortment of old fishing gear, old flies, old fly reels, and other types of lures, turkey fans hanging on the walls.

This man was clearly an outdoorsman, an outdoorsman with a story to tell. You ready to get started? Yes, sir. Okay. Let's start out, let's start out this way. Tell me your personal background in Alabama wildlife. Well, I worked for 35 years in state government. and most of that time was at the conservation department,

the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. And there I was assistant commissioner for a period of four years, left there for a while against my will and came back, and I was assistant game and fish director for seven years or so. And my boss was a man named Charles Kelly. Charles was the longest tenured game and fish director in the history of the nation. still is. He's passed, but nobody's topped that. And working for him, I felt like a bird dog in training. I mean like a bird dog puppy. And he was a tough, grizzled old veteran, brigadier general

in the National Air Guard, very militaristic in the way he ran things, very chain of command oriented, stern, great mentor. And having the opportunity to work for Charles was, I mean, it was just unbelievable. I'd pinch myself every day on the way to work. Am I really getting to do this? Really? Yeah. And worked for him for seven years, and then I was able to move into his job when he retired. Did that for almost 13 years before I retired from state government. Yeah. So you, you. have quite a history in working for Alabama and wildlife yourself? Well, you know, it was a very unbling experience to me to be able to do that.

And having the opportunity to lead people who are passionate about what they do was incredible. I mean, we had 326 employees, game wardens, fisheries, biologists, wildlife biologists, and very small percentage of administrative folks. I mean, our total administrative people like me and our accountant and, you know, folks like that, clerical folks, only comprised about 10% of that 326 employees. So most of them were field folks. Yeah. And Lake, they were so incredible.

And they all loved what they did. Motivation was never a problem. They were all self-motivated. And, you know, I literally would pay. I'd bench myself on the way to work. And it was like a dream come true to me. I love the subject matter. Sure.

But the opportunity to lead people like that doesn't come around very often. My reasoning for choosing to interview Mr. Corky Pugh for this episode is twofold. For one, he himself spent years working in a leadership role within the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which is a very strong parallel with what IT Quinn and John Wallace did for the state of Alabama that we're going to be learning about real soon. I think this gives his perspective a whole lot of value. And number two, the man just has a heck of a lot of appreciation. Appreciation for his state, its natural resources,

appreciation for the people that he worked with, and a lot of appreciation for the job that he got to do. I'm showing some of my own biases here, but I love to talk to and hear from folks that genuinely enjoy what they do or used to do for a living. It's an infectious quality to me. But anyway, it's time that we begin to learn this story. It's interesting because some of the more popular episodes that we've done on this show,

the first one being about a woman named Fannie Cook from Mississippi. And what I referred to her in the episode that we did on her, as I called her the woman that saved Mississippi's natural resources, because she established the game agency, which led to, you know, the restocking effort. of the deer and the turkeys and just a pile of other stuff. But the episodes that have been really popular is where we talk about a lot, wildlife and wild places.

We also talk about human influence on wildlife. And there's no way around it. There's a lot of places where humans have a negative influence on wildlife. But there's also a lot of places where we have positive impact. and I like to make sure I tell those stories. And so finding the Fannie Cook story about Mississippi got me to kicking around to where, you know, maybe there's other figures like this that, you know,

in past wildlife history and other states that had these equally or maybe even greater impact on a state's wildlife. And in doing that little bit of research and just digging and reading around, that's when I came across the name IT Quinn. And I didn't read very far until I said, I got to find out more about this guy. And that's essentially how we ended up having this conversation was the name IT Quinn. Quinn was a visionary and had a huge impact, not just in Alabama, but nationally on wildlife conservation.

And when you talk about great people like IT Quinn, you really can't separate them from who came before them. So in my mind, to talk about IT Quinn, you've got to first talk about John Wallace. Okay. And Wallace was the first conservation commissioner. Then it was called commissioner of, you know, gaming fisheries in Alabama. He had been a state senator in Huntsville past the first conservation laws of any substance in the state that established seasons and limits. In the next session of the Alabama legislature, every county except John Wallace's home county of Madison was exempted from those laws. He had an uphill battle.

Man. Well, a man named Henry Stigall, Henry B. Stigall from Barber County, who was in the legislature, passed, I think it was a senator, passed a bill that created the Department of, Alabama Department of Game and Fisheries, and Wallace became the first commissioner of that department. Well, you have to think about the era that all this happened in. So if you will, turn the pages back in time to 1907. That's how many years ago. Next year, it would be... 100 years ago, essentially.

Two lifetimes ago for some people. Well, it's hard for us now to even imagine the scarcity of wildlife then. We've grown up and enjoyed an abundance of fish and wildlife. And because we do such a poor job teaching all this, folks don't realize how lucky we are and where we came from. I've often thought that history should be taught in our. reverse. I won't burden you with me trying to do that right now. But if you turn back those pages of time, if you will, the abundance that we now enjoy hadn't been that way very long.

In the 1970s, not that long ago, you know what the most popular game animal in Alabama was? Small games? Squirrel. Squirrel. There were no deer or turkeys as recently as the 19th. in most places in Alabama, at least not huntable populations. When someone shares with this information like Korky just shared there, I always like to take a second and pause just to make sure we didn't miss any of it, because those are some pretty staggering facts and points that he just made. For one, Alabama in the year 1907 sounds real similar to what Mississippi looked like in 1929.

1929 is where we were at when we did the Fannie Cook episode, and Outa Leopold came down and pretty much documented the destruction of the natural resources that he saw in the state. Also, the story about John Wallace passing the first seasons and bag limits as an Alabama state senator and then pretty much getting immediate pushback from a lot of folks in the public. There's some strong similarities there with the Fannie Cook episode, and ironically, also with the Mississippi Deer History episode that we just recently did, William McKinley. I'm telling you, I don't plan it. It may seem like I do, but I don't plan.

these episodes always intertwining so well. It just kind of happens that way. And also, back to the point, the staggering fact that in the year 1970, think about this, in the year 1970, that's just 56 years ago, the most popular game animal in the entire state of Alabama was squirrels. Now, this is not a jab at squirrel hunters. Far from it. I love squirrel hunting. I know a lot of folks out there do. I'm just saying this is highlighting how different things were back then. The most popular game back then with squirrels simply because that's mostly all that was available. We are talking about a different world just 50 years ago. That's wild.

And we're going to learn a lot more about that different world. Keep turning those pages back real fast, if you will, to 1907. And let's talk about what it looked like then. There were practically no wild creatures out there. The creeks had been dynamited. or poisoned or illegally netted. Well, it wasn't against the law then. Or, you know.

Quail were trapped in box traps by the covey. Year-round, turkeys were, you know, either caught with a trotland baited with corn or a person would go out and dig a trench and put corn in it and build a blind at one end. And in June or July or August, sitting that blind and wait until the turkeys came to fit. it on the corn in that trench and with one shell kill them all.

It was not against the law. Yeah. There had been jacklighted. They did it in the early days with pine torches. Night. They didn't have cubaids. No kidding. Pine torch.

Yeah. It was that light or not. Yeah. So there's no wonder that there was not anything left. Yeah. And people were distributed pretty much evenly across the landscape. Alabama, like most states, was still largely rural. So you had a household living on pretty much every 40 acres.

There were starving sharecroppers everywhere. And the way they put meat on their table was hunting and fishing. They were living off the land. And subsistence hunting went on year-round with no seasons, no limits. And I'm not against subsistence hunting. I'm a subsistence hunter. My wife and I eat a lot of gaming fish. Yeah.

But the resource base can't endure unregulated hunting year-round. There were no restrictions on methods. There were no restrictions on how many of something you could take. And no restrictions on when you hunt it. And you had starving people all over the landscape. So there's no wonder there was nothing left. Yeah. So in 1907, there was practically no wildlife anywhere.

and it was not unique to Alabama. It was that way across the country. Well, poor old John Wallace, bless his heart, the first commissioner of conservation in Alabama, hunting fishing licenses didn't exist. He had no money to run that Department of State Government. He had a secretary. I think her name was Sophia Watts,

and he and Ms. Watts were it. Well, Wallace spent his almost entire body, budget on educating people about wildlife conservation. He was smart enough to realize that he had to change people's mindset about the resource if he was going to save anything. Sure. And there were no game wardens. Biology didn't even exist as a profession then. Well, Wallace, through a partnership with the state superintendent of education, had one day out of every school year in grade. schools designated as Bird Day. And why did he do that?

Because the only thing left was songbirds and crows and stuff. Oh, my goodness. So he spent almost all of his money on printing the Alabama Bird Day book and provided it to school teachers all over the state with a course of instruction to teach school kids about wildlife conservation. There's a quote from Wallace, and I'll mangle it up. But he basically said that if we're going to save the resource, we have to inculcate into the minds and hearts of the people a conservation ethic. I had to look up the word inculcate.

Yeah. What he's talking about? The word inculcate. And if y'all happen to catch the video version of this episode, you may notice that Corky laughs a little bit right after he says that word. And that's because of the face I made after hearing him say it, because I had never heard that word before. for in my life and I was trying to figure out what it meant. But anyway, inculcate means to instill an idea, attitude, habit, or value in someone through repeated instruction or persistent repetition. It basically implies that a lesson is learned over multiple repetitions over time

rather than just picked up casually. So the Alabama Bird Day book was part of John Wallace's plan to quote, inculcate a conservation ethic into the Alabama public. This right here, is a perfect example of the type of creativity and initiative that I think is just so awesome and commonly found in a lot of wildlife conservation history. I mean, let's just think about what that guy was up against. He had little to no funding. He had barely any public support. And he comes up with an idea to get a book and a day instilled in the Alabama public schools.

Let me tell you, that idea would turn out to be genius. Encalate. You know what? That's y'all's homework for the following week. Figure out a way to work the word inculcate into a casual conversation and then report back on the response you get. Indoctrinate, repetitively teach. Well, think about schools in 1907, if you will.

I mean, kids were being taught the three arts, reading, writing, arithmetic. So one day out of that school year, to do something else was a, treat. Sure. And the books that Wallace provided, those bird day books actually had color lithographs, pictures of birds like blue jays and cardinals and rins and, you know, glued in the books. Yeah. They didn't have digital printing there.

In fact, I've got a bird day book that I'm going to get out of that bookcase. I may have to take a look at that. Yeah. Can I do that? Absolutely. Yeah. You can take that headset off if the cord won't go long enough, but I would love to see that. Yeah.

I was going to ask you. I was like, man, I got to ask if there's any copies of that still around. Korky made his way over to his bookcase, and he grabbed a dense, dark blue book. He walked back over and handed it to me. It felt like I was holding a piece of wildlife history, and I guess I was. So the first thing that I was wrong about is I was picturing like a small, you know, like a quick flip-through book. like this is a like a substantial book and it's got lesson plans and Alabama Bird Day book what a cool piece of history oh my goodness gracious yeah glued in there now that took

some effort probably miss Sophia watts what that is a cool piece of history right there it really is and tragically um in the fish and wildlife realm history history history gets lost pretty quickly. Yeah. And I've never been able to figure out why. There aren't that many people in the Fish and Wildlife profession who really treasure this kind of thing. But anyway, back to Quinn.

That's really cool. He had the foresight to know that he had to somehow get ahead of the curve. Now, think about 1907. Video did not exist. that I know about. Yeah. And television hadn't been invented yet. I'm not sure did radio.

Probably radio would have been around in the early 1900s, but I don't know to what degree. Yeah, I don't either. Newspapers were the way people got their information. So Wallace had started really interacting with newspaper editors and providing them conservation content for newspapers. That's how people got their information. But he was smart enough to know that in order to get ahead of the curve,

he had to start to inculcate in the minds and hearts of children. Yeah. A conservation ethic. So that one decision alone was something that enabled him to get ahead of the curve. Yeah. And he made great strides. He died in office. No kidding.

Yeah. And IT Quinn came along as commissioner. Now, Quinn was from Florence, also in North Alabama. But I don't know if Quinn and Wallace knew one another well. They probably did. There's probably something in the recorded history about that. But IT Quinn had been an educator. He was the first principal of a high school in Auburn

and went on to work for the state executive. Extension Service. Okay. And educated farmers primarily about good land use practices. Huh. Which that's another thing that went on in that era that led to the decimation of wildlife. It was not only the subsistence hunting year-round unregulated, but the land itself was largely barren. Yeah.

I mean, nobody knew about reforestation then planting trees where. you cut, fire was used so extensively, and fire is the best wildlife management tool available. There is nothing more cost effective for managing for wildlife than prescribed burning. But they were burning every year. Yeah. Hot fires in long-leaf pines, even to the point that those long-leaf pines, which are naturally fire-dependent were being killed. And part of that's because they were also doing turpentineing.

Oh, yeah. And you had these big turpentine faces on the side of long-leaf pine trees that were oozing turpentine, and they caught on fire and burned up. Just went, yeah. So the landscape was largely barren. Yeah. Farming practices, they didn't know anything about building, you know, structures in fields to prevent runoff. So all these gullies that we see now are a result of farming practices 100 years ago.

I get tickled at folks sometimes talking about old growth forest or virgin forest. There is no such thing. It was all cut. Yeah. And I mean, I remember working at DC and R some folks really getting, well, I mean, bless your hearts, they were tree hoggers. They were just really upset with us about timber being cut in the Mobile Delta. Yeah. And started raving about virgin forests.

And we took them out in the Delta and showed them old cotton rows in that forest. No kidding. It had been a cotton field. Yeah. Before it was a forest. Yeah. So that was an impact. You had market hunting.

Yeah. Which in that era was unregulated. And there were box car loads of quail. Quail. That went to northern states. I've heard of box car. Carloads of deer. I've never sold in the restaurant truck.

Wow. I've never heard of box carloads of quail. That's a lot of quail. Wow. Well, see, the quail were abundant then because you had all those starving sharecroppers with little patch farms. And agriculture then was not big road-to-road fields. It was little patch farms with brushy fence roads. Sure.

Ideal quail habitat. Right. So, anyway, it was just, you know, there's a little. There's no wonder there was nothing left. Two hundred meters turn left toward the Philippines. Got it. Hello? Philippines?

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for a fully guided muzzleloader white-tail hunt at running water hunting, hosted by outfitter Jordan Budd. This is a five-day, four-night December hunt during the muzzleloader season, one of the most exciting times to be in a white-tail stand. Lodging in meals are fully included. And the more you spend during the giveaway at first light,

the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire. prize package. Getting entered is easy. Just head over to the First Light contest page at firstlight.com. Fill out the entry form and you're in. Remember, for every $25 spent, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the entire prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends Monday, October 12th, 2026 at 1159 p.m. Can I interject real quick? Please do. One thing that's been very interesting, hearing you kind of set the stage for all this is the parallels that I see between Alabama and Mississippi on a different timeline. Mississippi this didn't have like our throwing the brakes on and

establishing some some structure and agency and education didn't happen until 1929, early 1930s. But very similar story as far as unregulated hunting, market hunting, assistance farming, and even the land use, to the point where what you were saying about old growth forest, there's a lot of, I don't know if all of them, I shouldn't say all, because I don't know for sure, but a lot of our public land in Mississippi was ag land that the state bought for cheap and is now forested. And a lot of folks don't know that. You hear that, I hear that term all the time, virgin forest, old growth forest. But it's very interesting to me, the parallels between the story of Mississippi and the story of Alabama.

And just piecing that together, you know, you'll hear, you'll hear a kid today say SMZ, you know, stream management zone. Right. Right. And it's just I like to, I always like to go back to that because it's like, man, we've got it really good right now, you know. But that's, I wanted to interject for it went any further because I just found that very fascinating.

Glad you did. And folks. really don't understand anymore that Alabama was a leader, if not they leader nationally, in wildlife conservation because it was people like John Wallace and then IT Quinn building on what Wallace had done. And see, Quinn carried on this, this birthday book thing for decades. Wow. Getting ahead of the curve with young people. And Quinn emerged as a leader nationally in wildlife conservation. He was very instrumental in the formation of what's now the National Wildlife Federation, which then was comprised of hunters primarily, but other wildlife enthusiasts at the

national level, and that helped drive public policy that resulted in the passage of the Pittman-Robertson Act in 1937, which takes 11% of the money that's generated. on ammunition and guns, and it's an excise tax that's collected at the manufacturers level, and that money is apportioned to all 50 states as a three-to-one match on hunting license dollars. Yeah. Well, Quinn was one of the visionaries who helped. I mean, I don't know how he got to Washington, D.C., and they were telegraphing back and forth or writing each other letters.

Yeah. You know, for a long time. Yeah. Getting on a train, I guess, and going to D.C. Yeah. So Quinn was, his impact was way beyond just Alabama. National. Yeah, and people looked at Alabama in that era for, okay, how do you do this?

It was because of Wallace and then Quinn. Wow. Quinn's involvement in the National Wildlife Federation and the Pittman-Robertson Act would not be his only impacts that hit national level. He was also instrumental in passing the Migratory Bird Conservation Act in 1929 and the 1934 Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, better known as the Duck Stamp Act. Yeah, that's right, the Duck Stamp, one of the best conservation funding mechanisms in all of history. And Quinn was involved in it. Crazy, right? Quinn was an educator.

That was his background. It was the lens he saw the world through, thankfully. So that really gave him the ability to teach people. And he did it through multiple channels. If podcast had existed then, I'll guarantee you Quinn would have been doing one. I promise you he would have been doing one. Yeah. But he just, I don't know how the man did as much as he did.

He must have been incredibly energetic. he set Alabama on a good course and then he left Alabama and went to Virginia to help form their wildlife organization at the state level. I think they call theirs Virginia DNR maybe. Kamaneland Fisheries or something like that.

But Quinn worked there for a number of years as commissioner and put their program all together and then he finally retired back to Grove Hill in Jackson or Jackson. and somewhere in Clark County in southwest Alabama. How in the world did he end up in Virginia? Did someone reach out to him because they saw what he did in Alabama? They probably recruited him.

Gotcha. And I always take great pride in telling people from other places. Just because we talk slow, don't mean we're stupid. Yeah. No, it's incredible, man. And I had no idea that Alabama was kind of looked at as like this leading example. I know Mississippi was. was dead last. We were, we were at the time that, there wasn't all the, there was some states

sent for it, but like out of all the states that were in place, Mississippi was the last one standing that didn't have any game laws. Wow. So we were, so Alabama was way ahead of us. And all that separated us was a river. Yeah. And that's a, or a pencil line on a map. Yeah. I just, I guess we were more hardheaded, hardheaded over there and didn't want to listen. Well, you can't separate wildlife management from politics. Yeah. And it's tragic that colleges and universities are still cranking out folks in the wildlife profession, fisheries profession, who don't have a full understanding, bless their hearts,

of the fact that they're managing fish and wildlife in a political environment. And they don't want to hear that. They don't want to talk about that. And it's not a new concept. I mean, Gifford Pinchot, who's the father of modern forestry, he taught his fledgling foresters at the first school of forestry in Asheville, North Carolina. If you're going to manage the forest, you must engage the people. That's a direct quote from Gifford Pinchot, one of the earliest conservationist.

Aldo Leopo, the father of wildlife management, modern wildlife management, one of the things that he said was the deer or the easy part, the people are the difficult part. What he was teaching his students was you have to engage the people. And it's because the people own the land. And it's also because the people are the hunters and anglers and other people who enjoy wildlife. And that's just an exponential impact that you have because it's not just in terms of teaching people that you can't kill them all. or catch them all, there has to be some reproductive stock there. Yeah.

And you have to take care of the habitat. But people drive public policy through their votes. And what's happened in Alabama and Mississippi and everywhere else in the country is through reapportionment combined with people moving from rural areas to suburbia. That's where most people live now. Well, there are more votes in suburbia. because there are more people who live there. So you hear all this stuff about reapportionment

and redrawing congressional district lines and legislative district lines. That's what that's about. So those people through their votes, and when they pick up the phone and call their senator or representative and fuss about something, they're driving public policy. Yeah.

So engaging the people is critical. Yeah. And very often you manage. you manage the resource through people, not just habitat. And there's some great examples of that. Oh, yeah. And deer, you know, there was a time when state wildlife agencies

because they were still restoring deer populations through restocking efforts that were funded through Pittman-Robertson. They were teaching people, don't you shoot a dough. Yeah. Whatever you do, don't shoot a dough. Yeah. And it was against a lot of shoe to do. Well, they did such a good,

job of teaching people that when the deer populations exploded and the right thing to do was take some does we had a heck of a time getting people to kill those and most people were like I ain't going to do that yeah yeah what is so funny and and you wouldn't have known this because this hasn't even come out yet but we're currently on backwoods university what we were doing it's it's actually kind of a kind of an offshoot of the fanny cook podcast as I was I'm doing a story just on the history of white-tailed deer in Mississippi. And we talked about, you know, no dough harvest whatsoever. And then going from dough days and then to now when our wildlife department is asking hunters to shoot more deer.

But we talked about there's still, there's some people that I know to this day that they don't want to shoot a dough. No. They still think it's bad for the bad for deer to shoot a dough. I'd just soon kill a trophy dough as a big old buck. And, I mean, I bone out a lot of the venison we eat. We like roast. Oh, yeah. And I bone out, you know, several does every year.

And we eat on that meat for the rest of the year. We had deer roast at my house this week, Tuesday night. Can't beat it. No, it's very healthy. Yeah. Another thing that, so, and again, I'm going back to these parallels between Mississippi and Alabama, because I just find it fascinating. But Lupold came down to Mississippi leading up to the game in Fish Age to being established and he made this report upon the status of the game and then just kind of like some suggestive stuff. And in that report, to your point, two of the things he brought up was that he said fact finding and public education is badly needed.

He knew, he's like, you've got to inform the public. It's not just the status of the game itself. And the other thing that was interesting, both of these involved involving people, is he made a remark or he made very clear in there that there was a high amount of people that had interest in conserving wild game. And he said, if this is going to be successful, there's got to be some sort of cooperative effort. between both the agency and those people. Otherwise, it won't work.

That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the things that both Wallace and Quinn were, and I keep saying Wallace and Quinn because what they did was inseparable. Yeah. I mean, you think about what happens too often when there's a transition in leadership is the organization gets organizational whiplash.

you're going in one direction and you've got a new leader and all of a sudden you're going this way sure well it's very counterproductive and Quinn was smart enough to build on what Wallace had started and I wish I could go back and listen to conversations the two of them must have had that would be fascinating but there will never be and there certainly weren't then there will never be enough game wardens to look over every hunter and fisherman's Nor should there be. The goal of a good conservation enforcement program is voluntary compliance. And it goes back to that conservation ethic being in the minds and the hearts of those hunters. And you'll never have enough game wardens to look over everybody's shoulder. Plus hunting and fishing occurs on such a decentralized basis. You've got people down every little dirt road.

Some of them along every paved road. Yeah. And you'll never have enough people to, enough game wardens to deal with that. It's got to be something voluntary. Yeah. And you get to that through education. So Alabama and other places are really fortunate that John Wallace and I.T. Quinn had the vision, the insight, to recognize that and to focus on conservation education. Yeah.

Corky and I went on talking about the incredible work of Wallace and Quinn for a good long while after that. And he went on to tell me very enthusiastically about some of the youth, new hunter, and angler programs that they put into action while he was working at the department. And that's how we're going to wrap this show up on a real good, solid high note, hearing about one of his experiences, taking a kid hunting. It seems fitting with the theme of this episode. I took kids to those youth dove hunts, and I would call and make a reservation like everybody else, and I'd find a kid who, you know, needed to learn to hunt. One little boy named Will was a backdoor neighbor to my in-laws, and Will had a baby gun. And my father-in-law was, you know, he and Will got to be really close across the fence.

He's buying BBs for Will. And so I made arrangements through my father-in-law to take Will on a youth dove hunt, took him to E.V. Smith, which is a big agricultural experiment station, not too far from Montgomery, about halfway between here and Montgomery. Bill brought, or Will brought his BB gun. And we go to a stand like, you know, they had specific stands. They put people on, you know, to ensure it was safe, and people were far enough apart, and gave a safety lecture at the beginning of it.

Don't shoot low birds. You know, here's basic gun safety, you know, all that. Sure. Well, I'm a horrible wing shot. And I can dust quail because you can poke and shoot. Yeah. But anyway, we're Will and I are on this youth dove hunt, and he's shooting at doves with his baby gun.

Well, contrary to my usual misses, I dusted a dove and well at the same time was shooting at it with his BB gun. And he jumped up down and said, I got him, I got him. You couldn't have paid me a million dollars to tell that kid he didn't kill that dove with a BB gun. That's great. You know what I love about that is you've got this great history of wildlife in this state, you know, going back from this destitute of it almost being wiped out and the land being in terrible shape and basically the foundation of being able to bring that out, bring it back from destruction

was this education that was started with that Bird Day book, was started with kids almost 100 years ago and you fast forward to now and you're still finding that kind of success by investing in a different way. It's not a bird book per se, but it is invest. investing in kids with education, getting them out there, letting them see it, smell it, put their hands on it. And I just think that it's really cool. A lot of things have changed in a hundred years time, obviously, but some of those principles, some of those ethics remain the same. Probably the most powerful thing that remains the same is that primal aspect of eating what you kill. Yeah, definitely. Nothing more powerful. No. I'm sure you have. I'm sure you have.

I've been around some people that get to experience that for the first time, and that's a pretty incredible experience, too, to see someone get to do that or realize that they provided for themselves. I'm a nine-year-old trapped in a 72-year-old body, and I still enjoy it. I hope all of you enjoyed getting to meet and hear from Mr. Corky Pugh as much as I did. If his obvious enthusiasm and gratitude for his life's work in the history of Alabama Wildlife, came through the speakers and screen even half as much as it came through sitting in the same room with a man, then I'm sure what he had to say will stick with you.

I love learning about this stuff. I really do. It's not just something that I say. It's just so fascinating to me to start accumulating a bunch of these different stories from different areas in the country and find similarities in attitudes. Case in point, there's some serious attitude similarities you can find between Fannie Cook, IT Quinn, and Benny Herring. But also finding some differences, like differences in the specific things they did to reach their goals. Fannie Cook had a movie truck that she would show up at to different state fairs. John Wallace and IT Quinn had the Bird Day book, but both recognized how important it was to start educating conservation ethics early.

It's just fascinating to me. I love it. I love it. And I thought that it was really cool to see that the education theme being carried out even to this very day. Awesome stuff. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece in this country life. I say this every week, but I hope you know it means a whole lot to all of us over here. If you like this episode, share it with somebody this week and stick around because I can promise you there's a whole lot more on the way.

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