Bear Grease - Ep. 97: Bear Grease [Render] - Live at the Black Bear Bonanza

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

On this episode of the Bear Grease Render, Clay Newcomb is coming at you live for the second time from the Black Bear Bonanza in Northwest Arkansas. This time Clay is joined by render regulars Misty Newcomb, Josh "Landbridge" Spielmaker, and of course Brent Reaves, as well as Arkansas BHA Chapter Chair James Brandenburg and the state of Arkansas's Large Carnivore Biologist, Myron Means. The crew discusses hunting black bears in Arkansas, misconceptions about hunting bears over bait, and the importance of shooting mature boars to ensure the earlier season remains. Maybe most importantly, however, the gang premieres a brand new song, written by Clay about Bear Grease Hall of Famer James Lawrence, featuring Josh on Mandolin and Myron on Banjo. If you're a real Bear Greaser, you're not gonna wanna miss this one... Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. 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. having a bear grease podcast and such is that you guys have no choice if you show up of what i get to

say and do and i am not a talented musician like that is not a secret but i love to play and sing and so misty says that the only reason i do this is because i make someone sit and listen to it You've been trapped But I do have something pretty cool We're gonna play only two songs And then we're gonna jump into the podcast But the first song we're gonna play Has never been played publicly before

It's a song that I wrote And it's called The Ballad of a Backwoodsman And yeah Yeah, yeah And For those of you that follow along You know that we have a We have the Hall of Fame in the Bear Greece world.

You all know the Bear Greece Hall of Fame? It's for real, man. It's not a joke. And the first inductee to the Bear Grease Hall of Fame was a man by the name of James Lawrence. I say was. He is a man by the name of James Lawrence. James Lawrence lives in Meena, Arkansas.

Dear, dear friend of mine. James Lawrence is a... He's an incredible mountain, deer hunter. He spent his whole life down in the Washtasas and was killing deer when other people weren't killing deer when there weren't deer. And James has always carried in my mind an intangible quality of the mountain people of Arkansas. Humble, earnest, hardworking, independent. And what I loved about James is nobody ever told him he was cool until maybe me and his wife

and James was going to be here today because the song is about James Lawrence he doesn't know there's been a song written about him he's never heard it before so he was going to be here today but he was not able to come and so we're going to introduce this song

okay that's stage one stage two of stuff I got to say is that you got to know a little bit about what this song is about because it's it's quite specific there's there's several reference points that are going to help you understand it first of all there's a reference of the Casa Tott River you all know where the cost of river is would down in southwest Arkansas okay James Lawrence was born at the

headwaters of the Costa Tate River there is you will hear the the term shock pouching in this song you all know you all know what a shock pouch is. That's a, that's when, that's an old mountain way that James Lawrence's grandmother taught him how to do to carry a deer out of the woods on your back by

cutting different parts of his legs off and tying the deer's legs in knots and using it like a backpack strap. James Lawrence hunted deep, and still does, hunts deep in the mountains and shock pouch many deer. You're going to hear that phrase. You're going to hear reference to the sawdust pipe.

James hunted a particular area and they always camped at what they called the sawdust pile, which was deep in the mountains. You couldn't drive there. You had to walk there. And it was the remnants of an old sawmill where the the sawdust stayed there for like 75 years. I mean, they pulled the logging equipment out of there forever and there's still remnants of that sawdust pile. So they camped at the sawdust pile. Okay? It's a complex song. Okay. We're complex people, right? So, and then there's, there's reference to bucking horses and motorcycle wrecks. When you talk to James, he's 75, and he's doing great for 75, but he's pretty banged up. And he always says, man, it was those bucking horses and motorcyclores and motorcycle wrecks that did me in.

So that's in the song. So I hope you enjoy it. We're going to give it a go. Welcome to the live Bear Grecireender podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you guys so much for coming. It means a lot to me and Misty, and I know all the Bear Gries people,

for everybody to come out. I know a lot of people travel the long ways to get here, all the way across the country. Have we done the whole, like, who traveled the furthest thing yet? Has that happened? We did a little bit of that earlier this morning. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So we got tickets from North Dakota. South Carolina. South Carolina, Texas, down in the tip of Florida, out west, Montana. Yeah. Young lady from Minnesota. Yep, Minnesota's here. Yeah, so it means a lot to me that everybody would drive that far to come to a black bear event

in Arkansas. So that's awesome. And I don't do this kind of stuff very often. I feel like my community has supported us, you guys, and wider people, not from Arkansas, but really Northwest Arkansas has been really good to me. And so I wanted to do an event where, you know, we just came together and had a good time. and so I'm thrilled that everybody's here and everybody knows who's here

this is Brent Reeves Brent's from down in the swamps Brent does not like being called a hillbilly No I mean he's like well I'm not a hillbilly I literally live in like flat ground So and on the next Bear Grease podcast You're going to learn why He doesn't want to be called the hillbilly

Like the deep the deep anthropological science of why being from the flatlands delta of Arkansas, he is opposed to being called that. You're going to learn something about yourself. Here I'm fitting to teach you something. The superficial reason is because if a cat had kittens in the oven, you wouldn't call them biscuits. One time I called Brent a hillbilly and he said,

don't call me a hillbilly. We had hillbillies mowing our grass. This is my wife, Misty Newcomb. Proud Hill. You know, Misty? Man, I think it's pretty cool that I can have my wife with me on my podcast. Misty, do you know anybody else that puts their wife on their podcast? I use this to my advantage.

It's not like I'm asking to be on the podcast. Yeah, she didn't want to be. But no, it's so great to have Missy. And then everybody has met, Myron Means. He's been up here earlier. Myron and I have been, really, we've known each other for a lot of years now. And I mean, when you first got the job as the bear coordinator, which you were the bear coordinator of the state, correct? Yes.

That changed. But I think I talked to you within a month of you having that job. About 15 years. Yeah, probably so. Too long. Too long. Yeah. But, no, it's great to have Meyer in here, for real.

James Brandenberg. James is, he's a big wig here in Arkansas for Arkansas BHA. James would, and his team are responsible for this. I don't really have anything to do with this other than just show up. And so James is one doing all the work and in his team of guys. Thank you. Great event. It's the guys.

It's the, everybody else is due. doing all the work. And Josh Landbridge filmmaker. And it's like, what's he doing up there? Yeah. Josh has been one of my best friends for a long, long time.

And his mustache inspired me in 2006 to learn about the Bering Landbridge. So that's a different story. But no. You're welcome, America. Yeah, yeah.

We have, I think we live in an incredible, We live in an incredible state. Did you guys hear the podcast that just came out about the bear state and the Arkansas, the big bear of Arkansas, that story? Man, what's so wild about this place that we live? Not this place being Arkansas, but this world that we live in, is that humans are only here for just like a really short period of time. So we typically gather information that seems pertinent to our best interest.

in the moment and we can lose the bigger picture of why stuff is the way that it is and there's life is so complex stories are so complex and I love it when you can almost any single thing that you wanted to mine down into like why is Arkansas why were we called the bear state why did we move away from that man there's like deep stories inside of it deep deep stories and it's so interesting because we now get to script who we are, what our identity is, and we look back at history and see how things happened. It's like you can begin to say, okay, we are active partakers in something that's happening right now that we get to build on purpose.

And I don't know why, and I think everybody up here would agree, and admire for sure someone who's dedicated a big part of his life to bears from the first time that I killed a bear in Arkansas in 2001. It was the first year that it was legal to bait in Arkansas. And I've said it before, I think I said it last year. I claim to have killed the first legal bear in the state of Arkansas over bait.

Because October 1st, 2001, at the crack of dawn, me and Gary Newcomb were, where's dad at? Is he over there? where's dad at he's somewhere me and my dad were hunting and killed a bear I mean I'm serious like it was

hardly daylight and killed a bear hardly daylight it was it was bare it was legal it was right after the daylight it was legal it was legal

barren statutes of limitations and and it was perfectly legal and at that time I was 21 years old and I had hunted

a fair bit I mean, I killed deer and turkeys and had been involved in honey my whole life. And when I walked up to this bear that I had just killed, I realized that I knew nothing about it. Like, nothing. I didn't know what it ate. I didn't know where it wanted to bed. I didn't know when it dined. I didn't know about its reproduction cycle.

And it felt hollow. At 21 years old, I was like, man this is this is a great beast and i know nothing about it and something that was happening inside of me that i couldn't have calculated i wouldn't have it was just unconscious but really what was being said and demonstrated is that the hunt and partaking inside of taking wildlife is so much bigger than just taking an animal there's there is a powerful component of connection that we have with hunting. And from that point,

I was going to the U of A at that time. I was living in Fayetteville, and I started going to the University of Arkansas Library and found these old dusty books of all the research that had been done in Arkansas at that time by Clark, and who else was it? Clark, Kimberly Smith, Joe Clark, Dan Clap, Stephen Hayes, they kind of did all the,

you know, a lot of the research we based our management on for 30 years. Yeah. They did that work back in the mid to late 80s. Right. And so I started reading that stuff. And that's where, that was the first time that I read that Arkansas was formerly known as the Bear State. And to be honest, there's been a couple of times in my life when I was upset at all the people around me because they didn't teach me something. and that was a moment when I was like,

why didn't they tell me? Why didn't they tell me that this was the bear state? And I was just fascinated by that and began to just study about bears and continued to hunt bears. And we, I'll tell you another thing, when I first started getting, do y'all mind if I just have my own little podcast?

Yeah, we got a nice monologue. You guys keep it down. I can hear y'all bring up. I can hear y'all breathing. No, when I first started getting interested in bears and media as well, I had some pretty legitimate people who had my best interest in mind advise me not to get into bears. Like there's a lot of different things I could have done. I started in the whitetail world writing articles for North American whitetail and different things.

And that's what me and dad did. That's what my dad mainly, we did growing up. We whiteto-hunted public land in Arkansas. It's just what we did. And then 21 killed a bear. And then, you know, a lot of stuff was going on, but I started tiptoeing into outdoor media and started just like leaning into this bear stuff.

And I remember one guy, a good friend of mine, he was like, what are you doing, man? Why are you focusing on bears? He's like, you've got to focus on deer. Bears ain't cool. it's exactly what he said and and and and I just I just said I don't know man I just I just like them and I kept going that direction and it ended up being the the best thing that I ever did for a lot of different reasons but I but I felt like and I wasn't the only one doing this but

I mean I can just talk from what I experienced I felt like I started to mine into stuff that people hadn't talked about or thought about or brought to the surface in a long time. Because bear hunting was pretty much stamped out of our culture for about 80 years, almost entirely. When you go to the Appalachian Mountains, you go to East Tennessee and North Carolina. They never lost their bears, and they maintained a bear hunting culture all through that time. Arkansas, our bears were extirpated like Myron told us about earlier in the early, by the turn of the 20th century, 1900, well, 1940, pretty much our bears were gone. People forgot about bears. They did. They forgot how to use them. They forgot about bear grease. They forgot that bear meat was an incredibly good tasting meat. They forgot how to hunt bears. Literally, dads didn't teach their sons how to hunt bears because there weren't bears here. And then, in 1980 was our first bear hunt?

First modern day, yeah. Our first modern day bear hunt was in 1980, and the bear population just continued to climb, continued to climb, continued to climb, continued to climb, and then 2001 is when the game and fish made the decision, the management decision that we were going to manage our bears using primarily using bow hunters on private land over bait

which is genius never if you're from Arkansas and you've ever looked to be in the eye never ever talk bad about baiting a bear it is it is God's gift to us to be able to bait a bear because I can tell you something they're hard to find out in the mountains by themselves

when I bait bears for a month in Arkansas saw, it is, I call it my month with the bears, because you see stuff that you never see any other time of year. And it's a fantastic management tool that allows us to be selective, allows us to shoot older age males, all kind of stuff. Are y'all like in my monologue? Yeah, it's great, man. You'll just keep being quiet, guys. Preach. Hey, y'all, this is what nighttime at the Newcom's looks like. He'll be taking up an offer later. I love it when I get people cornered. We may play some more music.

We may play some more music. No, I'm trying to set the context for opening this up for my room. No, because it's bigger. It's bigger than just all we can hunt bears. No, and there's there is no doubt. There's no doubt a trend in our society today. And it's not ever going to come to Arkansas. Never. Never is it going to come to Arkansas?

Because we're not going to let it, right? Where people would say, you shouldn't be hunting predators. You shouldn't be, you shouldn't be using bait. You shouldn't be telling, like someone who doesn't know, telling us what we should do. And it's a fantastic and incredible opportunity that we have, but when they opened up bear season, it opened up the floodgates for Arkansas bear hunters to be able to partake of something that had been culturally forgotten for generations, for real. And now we're 23 years into having a bear baiting season, and we're now like 50 years into having a bear season, 53 years into

1980, 43, 43 to have a bear season. And, I mean, there's a revival of the bear state. That's what I want to proclaim to the world. And it's, and it's, it's, it's not just in Arkansas, man. Whatever is happening ecologically in this, in North America, whatever it is, there's, they're, There are drastic weather pattern changes that have been going on for the last 15, 20 years. A lot of wild stuff is happening. For whatever reason, it has been highly beneficial to the generalist omnivores, and specifically the black bear. You will not hear about a population of bears anywhere in the country that isn't expanding.

And that's massive inside of a country with as much urban sprawl, habitat loss, civilization spread, all kind of habitat fragmentation for us to be able to stand up and say, man, the icon of North American wilderness, the black bear is coming back, you know, and it's it's it's coming back all over the country. You know, our our our game and fish brought in these bears in the 1950s and 60s, 254 bears and transplanted them here in Arkansas, three different places. and now we got a hunting season in Oklahoma. There's a hunting season in Missouri. There are bears in northern Louisiana.

There are bears in East Texas. There are bears on the other side of the Mississippi River in Mississippi. Not a lot, but they're there. And you look at this one little place, this is one little dot on the map, and that range is growing like this. And while I have you, this is so important from a social perspective because bear numbers are increasing all over the country people that didn't know we had bears have them in their backyard urban people maybe people

who don't have a connection to rural America and hunting they don't understand how someone would want to kill an animal and with the increase of bears across the country there's never a more opportune time for the bear hunters of America to become educated, to become passionate, to know how to utilize the resource at the highest level when it comes to utilization of the commodities that a bear gives us. There's never been a better time for us to learn how to talk about predator hunting in a way that dominant. Somebody wants to talk to me about bear hunting and challenge me, and I'd be nice to them probably. Would you let them talk?

I wouldn't. I've just got one self-help item for you. You need to work on the passion part of it. Yeah. I need to pop it down a little. Most passionate man I know about bear hunting. Well, what I'm saying is that this is not an argument of right and wrong, and we're trying to decide.

we're right and but we're not we're not in a battle against people we're in a battle against ignorance at the most at the high at the very definition of the word

ignorance not not the derogatory thing but that's what we can do is educate people and learn how to us really value respect and love the bear like in that big bear of Arkansas story the story

This short story written in 1841. He said the fictitious character, Jim Doggett, okay? If you listened, you'll know. If you didn't, you should have. You should have known coming here. You should have listened to Last Bear Grays podcast. This fictitious character, he's an Arkansas bear hunter, and he says, he sees a bear being bade by hounds walking across a hill.

And he said, oh, wasn't he a beauty? I loved him like a brother. and man, that's the North American hunter, what we do inside of the North American model of wildlife conservation is a functionalization of a love for wildlife and a love for wild places. That's what it is. And we have a track record in this country of where we messed up pretty bad for a while. Like the market hunting era and just rampant exploitation of wildlife. Like, yep, that did happen. And we knew, we saw we messed up.

But then we rebounded and have escorted onto planet Earth the most robust endeavor for wildlife husbandry ever in the history of the planet. For real. What's happened in North America, not just with bears, but with deer, the wild turkey, the elk, the sheep, everything. It's incredible. And man, we can't, we can't lose that inside of our culture. Like, the very definition of being an American should have, not everybody needs to be a hunter. Not everybody needs to be. But the very definition of American, at one time, there was a sector of that that was, that had hunting as a primary.

component of American identity. And we can't lose that. And the way we don't lose it is we do stuff like this. And you take time out of your life to come and support something and join organizations and hunt by a hunting license, be an active participant inside of what we're needing from the broader sports. It's like the Gaming Fish did a big survey this year, Bear Hunter survey. That's right.

And I mean, you guys learned a lot. Tell me about that survey. I did learn a lot. You know, a lot of the survey went out to people that have successfully harvested a bear in the last three years. And they got a pretty good response rate, I believe it was something like 48% of the people that they sent it out to returned a response on it. And it was a lot of, it wasn't necessarily geared toward well-do-you-hunt bear of what zone you honey. and it was more geared toward people's associations with bear hunting. How long have you bear hunted?

You know, have you bear hunted zero to two years or 15 years? Or, you know, how did you learn to bear a hunt? Like Dr. Ballard was saying, you know, did you learn it through podcasts? Did you learn it through agency employees? Did you learn it through newspaper articles or magazine articles? So a lot of it was geared toward trying to quantify or put on paper what the attitudes are towards bear hunting across the state. And, you know, social science isn't just new to gaming fish.

It's new to a lot of natural resource agencies around. But it's becoming an ever more important part of our management goals or strategies is to incorporate social science attitudes of the public, into that. We had a targeted audience, successful bear hunters. You know, hopefully in the future, we could expand that to what I would like to see

is if and when we ever have a license system in place where I'm able to determine how many bear hunters we have in the state. I'd like to send that survey out to, you know, not successful and unsuccessful bear hunters. Yeah. So it's a lot of it's geared, aimed at determining attitudes more than it is like someone's success rate and things like that. Is there anything you can point to that you learned from that? Oh yeah, there's a lot of stuff I learned.

There's a lot bigger culture out there about utilization of bare parts other than meat. And you know, I kind of suspected it, but you know, you don't know if you hear about people rendering down fat or, you know, doing things making soap like one of the gentlemen here gave me some. So you hear about people doing that, but you think, well, you don't know if, you know, those are outliers and the general consensus of how people utilize bears. Why they want to hunt bears? Do they want to hunt it for all things included or just the meat or just a trophy? But actually, like 65% or more of the people that responded and utilize several parts of the bear,

not just the meat. And so that's really good to know. It helps me as a manager understand, you know, how people want to utilize bears, which is important. You know, it's not just all about people harvesting bears. As I said, there's a lot of... Let me say something about that. Oftentimes, in talking to people just about hunting in general,

you'll talk to somebody and say, yeah, a bear hunt. And they'll go, I don't know if I'd want to kill a bear. I don't know if I'd want to eat it or not. And there are parts of the country that have, that for years managed bears in a depredation way. Like some of that states out west, like you don't legally have to take the meat. That's just old school way that they did things, okay?

Can't understand that. So, yeah, that's an old mentality. What we're doing now and what Daniel Boone did and Jim Doggett did and, you know, is we're utilizing more of a black bear. then 99.99% of people use of a white tail, of an elk, of a quail, of a turkey. I mean, most bears that are killed are, the hide is going to be tanned. I mean, most people that kill a bear, I've never killed a bear that I didn't tan the hide.

We're rendering the fat, and we're using the meat. I mean, you know, when's the last, how many deer have you killed in your life? How many tanned hides have you got at your house? know, not many. So that is a powerful tool to be like, man, we absolutely utilize these animals that were taken. And I think that's really cool. And that's, again, just another, another mechanism that helps people understand bear hunting. Really? Oh, yeah, man, we use everything. So that's good. You know, and one of the other questions was geared at, you know, how did you learn to bear hunt? You know, did you learn through podcast or social media this day and age, or do you have friends that bear hunt?

Did you learn from friends? Did you learn from family members? You know, so it kind of speaks to the, whether or not there is a, quote, tradition of bear hunting in the bear state. So it's, you know, it's aimed at determining a lot of things like that, that, you know, I can sit here and speculate all day long, you know, how what I get, what the feedback I get is a biologist, but that doesn't necessarily put it on paper, you know. Yeah. So, yeah, it's very, very good information.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Who's got the best bear story up here from last year? Josh, you didn't hunt. James, you hunted. Yeah. You saw a bear, didn't you? Yeah, I walked one up.

I'm not going to say where it was. Don't tell him, man. but I was I was hunting on public land and walking along. I about, I was deer hunting actually, and I stopped in a spot, set my pack down, hung out for a while, got hungry. Like, I'm going to get my pack and get a snack out. I turned around. I had about set my pack down in a pile of bearscat. Didn't realize it at the time, and it was fresh.

So then all of a sudden I was kind of on a bear hunt. and a deer hunt. And I kept on throughout the day, and I moved a little farther along and got down below this bluff line. It got warm, and I stopped, and taken some layers off, and I turned around behind me.

There's a bear just staring at me. There's like a couple of rocks like this. How far? 30 yards. Probably no more than 30 yards. Late season, too. November. Yeah.

Yeah. So looked at him, and it was legal. I could have shot him. put the gun up and look out and it was muzzleloader hunting and this was on a permit hunt that's why I was muzzleloader hunting in November

Myron because you know this was this was a special permit for that and looked at him put my gun down looked at him with my two eyes I'm like well heck yeah put the gun back up and he was gone like the black mist over the fence

He disappeared. Disappeared. I mean, I looked for, stood there for five minutes with my binoculars, looking all over the hillside, everything. I have no idea where he went. But I climbed up there and, I mean, there's a pile of scat up there as big around as my hat. Nice big spot was all worn out where he just been hanging out. Just waiting for winter. Wow.

And I went back in hunting him a couple more times, but I never got on him. That's pretty good for two. James killed a bear on public land the year before, right? Yep. Yeah. So that's a good encouragement for people. You heard me speak highly of baiting bears, which we can on private land, but we've got a lot of public land in Arkansas. And you can kill them on public land.

It's much harder. It's much harder. It takes a lot more work. And it's my favorite hunt on planet Earth. for real like I the moose I got I killed a moose in Alaska last year man I'd throw that moose in the river

to kill a big black bear on public land in Arkansas you better not tell your boss that you stole that shot remember yeah I did they didn't show all that I'll tell the story about that sometime no I'm exaggerating a little bit not much but hunting bear on public land in Arkansas is, you know, you're going to big, to simplify it, and we've talked about it extensively.

Actually, the best thing, if you really want to know, I had a couple of guys today ask me about public land bear hunting in Arkansas. On the Bear Hunting magazine podcast, which is still up, there is, we spent episodes talking, like, talking as much as we knew how to talk about killing bear on public land, that's still on there. remember the names any of those episodes? Bear hunting, bear hunting for dummies. Yeah.

I was the dummy. Yeah, yeah. Look what it did for you. I know. I'm still the dummy. No, there's a lot, there's a lot to be said for that kind of stuff. Hey, we've got a lot of moms and wives and children in here. Raise your hand if you are here as a supportive person, but you yourself are not a bear hunter, big, big hand raise.

Hey, that's awesome. That is awesome. Kudos for you guys. I just want to say when Clay talked about killing his first bear, he was 21. And we had just found out that I was pregnant with our first, our oldest daughter, she's not here. Two of our boys are here, Bear and Shep are over there. But our girls, we had just found out I was pregnant with Willow. And like a lot of women, we found out that I was anemic.

And so one of the things that you got to do is pump up your iron levels. And it turned out that wild meat was a great way to do that. And so that's kind of how I got into eating wild game because bear meat tasted so much better than deer meat. Those gamey wild bucks. As far more protein than deer meat, too. It does. And so that's how we started eating bear meat. And we were like broke.

I mean, we were college students and pregnant with our first kid. And he had this 250 pounds of bear meat that he brought in. And I had to learn how to cook it. And, you know, you got to learn how to cook it because it's not, you know, it's not like grocery. grocery the stuff you buy at the grocery store but oh yeah over the years as our kids grew up they all started bear hunting and i got to sit with shepp on his first bear because you know you you have to have an adult sit with you and so i got to sit with ship on his first bear it was ship and me and james lawrence who clay just sang that song about i called james he had a walkie-talkie and i had a walkie-talkie

and clay and bear and river our other daughter they were out too far to help us and james and shep and i went and found that bear, Shep accidentally sprayed the woods with bear spray, so that was fun for James and I, mainly Chef and I. And then last year, I think a lot of you've heard bear's story about going out and hunting. And as a, you know, just being sent out to public land for three days, and we kind of hung around for that. Last year, Clay was, you know, bear is named bear. I mean, that's how much this guy loves bears. He named a son, son bear. And bears, kind of kind of grown-up hunting, and it's been really cool to watch his migration from just, like, the guy that took pictures whenever we got the big bear to the guy who's out there taking

care of business. And he, he, last year, Clay was out, he was out a lot, traveling to different places. And so bear took on the mantle of, yeah. Bear right over there. Labor everybody, Bear. With that gorgeous mullet. Kentucky Waterball. It's pronounced muley.

But bear went on and bated the bear all by himself to get it ready. for Clay when he came back home. And him went ahead and started, he took out the mules and Caleb, who's over there. I think I saw Caleb come in as well. Yeah, Caleb Ashburn was. Yeah, Caleb was. And those guys would go hook up. Colby helped.

Yeah. Those guys would go hook up the mule trailer, drag the mules two and a half, however many hours away from our house and hike up into the wherever they were. And it was pretty impressive. I wasn't 100% sure that I was comfortable with Bear. you know, taking a trailer hours at a time. And anyway, Bear got his own big, gigantic, bear, how big was your bear this year?

400 pounds. Oh, my gosh. And he, yeah, let's get Barrett. Bringing home the meat for the family. And he had to load that thing up, him, James Lawrence, Papa, Gary. Gary was there. Brent came in, and they loaded it up. And Bear had to do a whole lot of it by himself and travel through the night.

And I was watching them, you know, thank goodness for cell phones, because I was watching them. And it was, he got home at 5 in the morning, like having to carry that thing out, out of the woods. He didn't have, he was way out there, so he didn't have, like, you know, an easy way to get it out of the woods. And so he got home at 5 in the morning, had the mules in the back of the trailer with them and the bear. And it was, as a mom, the support that we provide these guys actually is something that gives back to us. It's been really cool to see bear hunting has kind of been woven in our family. family, it really was the only way I could eat wild meat because it was better and it was palatable.

We've since learned how to make the other stuff good as well. But it's been something that's been a part of our family culture and a really special tradition from just putting our little babies, you know, on a bear hide for a picture to watching them grow up and become a hunters themselves. And it's just part of our family culture. So kudos to you guys who are here supporting whoever it is you're supporting that's a hunter it gives back it gives back in a lot of different ways and and it's part of our culture as our kansans and as americans as clay says and and it's a part of all of our culture even those of us who don't actually get out there and and do the hunting itself that was good monologue i think mine was better i tell you what it was pretty succinct

certainly shorter it was a shorter fishing trip yeah Brent, you got a bear hunting story for us? Yeah, last year I killed this many bears. So if anybody needs some help or advice on how to kill no bears, come see me. I'll be right over here. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to 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 Phelps Game Calls.com. you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

How many were at the Warner Glen film premiere last night? Did you all enjoy the film? Yes. Yes. Yeah. That was fun. I was supposed to tell who paid for all that. Who sponsored it? and presented it.

And I didn't. I didn't. Any guesses who sponsored that event? All that. Everybody knows? That's right. Yeah, for real, man. These guys, they got wind.

I didn't ask them. They got wind of that we were thinking about doing a film premiere, and they said, how much money do you need? And I told them, and he said, well, how about we give you more than that? And they allowed us to rent that facility. The guys, the on-X are incredible. And if you, go ahead. They're also presenting sponsors of this event today as well.

And as a chapter, we're very thankful for that support as well. So they're helping us out a ton to keep access, to open up access to public land. So, no, seriously, though, on-X has been very good to us. I know a lot of you all have been up to do that stuff today, and we appreciate their support. How many people have on X on their phone? All right. Drop me a pin where the bears are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, they were, they're incredible. You also forgot to say who did all the work behind the scenes. Oh, yeah, Isaac Neal did all the work. Raise your hand, Isaac. See the guy with big earrings. Yeah. Isaac helps me with Bear Grease. He's the assistant to the regional producer of Bear Grease, which is me.

Myron, let's talk about bears a little bit more. So we now have a hunt in the Gulf coastal plain. We do. And how many bears did they kill this year? Yeah, that's a big deal. That is a big deal. That's a big deal. How many bears were killed down there this year?

They harvested 28 bears. Of course, there was a quote of 25. The season ran from December 10th to December 6th. or when the quota was met, whichever came first. The quota was met Monday evening, roughly 5 or 6 o'clock. Oh, wow. It wasn't close until Monday, three days into it. And which there's a little bit of information, but I consider it great information.

I consider the fact that the season ran through the weekend. I considered that a great success. Tell me what you mean by that. It was short or it was long? Well, it was long enough to at least get through the weekend. Okay. Okay. So what I really didn't want to happen was us set the season at such a time frame in the fall

that you open season on Saturday and by noon Saturday they had already checked enough bears in the season closest and you got a lot of spillover and everything else like that. But I also didn't want the season set so late that a lot of bears weren't on the landscape. Remember what I talked about, the denning chronology of males and females. We want to set it late enough to where the females, some of them, or at least in the den to where they're protected. They're in a den cycle making the males. We want to bias the harvest toward males. So it ended up being 14 and 14, which isn't great. But at least it didn't close in the first half day of the season. It was long enough, the quota was large in,

enough that, you know, the way I took that is most people were able to hunt through the weekend that wanted to bear hunt. And so, you know, it was a success. I felt like it was a great success on where we placed the quota based on the best research information we had, how, when we started the season, I think there could be some fine-tuning on the season. But, you know, really just the fact that we had a bear hunt in the Gulf Coastal Plain of Arkansas, and we have a bearer season in roughly four-fifths of the state now, which is something that, I mean, I just don't think people would have envisioned that 43 years ago. Would you have thought it inside of your career? I was really skeptical at one point if it was going to happen. I mean, I knew we had research

ongoing and depending on what that research said, but we kept having, you know, historic flood events, you know, 100-year flood events, two out of five years. I mean, you know, so that affected our research. So the research kept getting put off and put off and put off and everything like that. So I was beginning to wonder if it was going to happen in my career. But it did. And, man, I feel really proud that I got to see it in my career. Yeah, that's big. The first time that I went on a den study with Myron years ago probably it was at least 10 years ago

I was uh I remember I had never never been to a bear den and we walked way back in to an area and Myron kind of snuck up to where he

believed this bear to be and first of all I was shocked that this tiny little hole I was expecting a bigger hole you know, for a bear to be able to fit in. Yeah. But they're like a squirrel.

You know, if you got a hole that big and a tree, a gray squirrel that's about that big can fit in it. Bears are the same way. Exactly. And he walks up to this little bitty hole that couldn't have been more than about that big. And you wouldn't remember, you've been to hundreds of dens, so you probably don't remember which one it was. But I could take you to that den today.

Like I'd remember where it's at. I'm trying to remember, and I'm just, I'm drawn a blank. I'll tell you later. It was on the side of a ridge. And the hole, though, was like in the ground, like an armadillo hole. Like, it wasn't like a cave. And Myron, he stuck his head down there and crawled in. And it's like his rear end and his legs are the only thing sticking out.

And he stays down there for a minute. And he comes back out and he hands me his flash out. And he says, stick your head in there. And I said, I said, how, how? How close is that bear? And he said, oh, it's just like right there. And I said, like, how close? And he was like, oh, like, from like me to you?

And I said, is it awake? And he said, yeah. Get your head in that hole, you idiot? This is counterintuitive. Answer your own questions. I said, does I have cubs? And he's like, yeah. And now I remember leaning upside down into this hole and turn it on this flashlight.

and from like me to Brent, for real. There's Brenda. It was Brenda. Okay. Like a, she was big. Mm-hmm. Just sitting, it's glowing eyes. Just like, from me to Brent.

Just looking. And I'm hanging upside down in this whole shine. And you hear the cubs chuckling and feeding. And I'll never forget doing that with you. And then I've been several times since then. Yeah. Pretty incredible. What have you learned?

about bear denning in the Gulf coastal plain that's different than in the mountains. Has there been some different stuff? Well, I've learned that I don't know near as much about bears as I thought I knew. I mean, I really have. This has been, man, they're just different down there. It is a different world. Their behavior is so different than mountain bears. You know, I mean, I knew that the den in chronology was later in the year.

You know, the cycle starts for pregnant females later, you know. But, man, it's just, I've just learned a lot in the past six months about their behavior, what their preferences are. You know, they're kind of nomadic down in that part of the world, which makes them incredibly hard to trap. and I did learn one thing that that corn is the acorn of the south. Is it? Yes.

It most definitely is. Tell them what you mean by that. Well, I mean, they're just not interested in anything else you have to offer. Trying to bait, even in the summer months, you know, when we were trying to bait, I've literally stuffed snare sets full of pastry donuts. I mean, how can a bear pass? up of, you know, a nice Krisri-cream donut.

I was stopping at the mini-marts and buying extra glazed honey buns because I'm thinking this is it. Now, they just walked by, turn their nose up at it and go over and eat, you know, a pile of corn. You know, so it's just different behavior. You think they get acclimated to that because of all the deer hunting down there over the year?

Well, I think they've become acclimated to that food choice because that's what has been available to them. You know, maybe not 30 years ago, but certainly in the last 20 years. I mean, if you got bears that were 20 years old, you know, what did their mom teach them when they were cubs? You know, where to find the food in the fall. So I learned that, you know, bear populations in the Gulf Coastal Plain aren't homogeneous

across the entire Gulf Coastal plane. They're kind of patchy. You know, there aren't bears everywhere in the Gulf Coastal Plain, even though it's a big zone, 11-county zone. bear zone, but you know, like Southern Bradley County has a lot of bears. Eastern Union County,

Western Ashley County has a lot of bears. Dallas County has a lot of bears. Warshall County doesn't have that many bears, even though it has the Warshaw River running right down the side of it. So, and bears use those river systems and brakes as travel routes.

If you look on the display we had out here, showing some of the movement patterns of some of bears. I mean, you can watch them over time. You know, they're running around, running up these SMZs or stream management zones in between these corporate timber products or running through these river systems and stuff like that, the corridor is the repairing zones. I mean, that's what those bears do, just run around in between that to get from point A to point B. A lot of times it's not necessarily straight

across a 10-year-old, you know, production. That's where they did. So, yeah, it seems like every bear in the Gulf Coastal plane wants to find the perfect geographic center of the thickest, thicket you could ever imagine. And that's where they want to have cuts. Where are they dinning? Are they digging holes and root balls? Not really. Most of them are ground nesters in the Gulf Coastal plain in areas that don't flood. I'm talking about timber production land in Dallas County, Warshaw County, Drew County, Bradley. they'll just make a ground nest, but it will be in a thicket.

You could be walking through the woods and see, just see a bear laying on the ground and he's dending. Right. That's pretty incredible. You know, we run across it in the Ozarks and the Warshataw's ground nesters. Typically they're going to be in thickets.

Warshall dens are typically dugouts under root balls. Ozark dens are typically crevice-type dens. but the Gulf Coastal plain if they're now if they're in a flooding regime they're going to be up in a tree last I believe it was last two Wednesday we were down there

and trying to find one particular female named Memphis and you know we found her and she was in a flooded break not far off the Warshita River but it was flooded and she was 80 feet up a cypress tree and that's where she's been in the last three months

you know and there's a cavity up there she just happened to be out sunning that day. But there's a cavity up there and based on the GPS locations we had over and everything like that, more than likely she has cubs up there. She just happened to be out sunning that day. Y'all didn't bring the helicopters in to repel down there. There was a time back when I was a young man, I used to climb trees and do tree work, but not so much anymore. That's why we have game cameras for it. You guys may have heard me talk with Myron about this but so your your job title used to be bear coordinator the state of Arkansas and then

three years ago it changed long longer than that it was about yeah about 12 years ago well no no no no no the title changed you became bear coordinator that long ago the name change though that's what i'm talking about 16 years ago name change came about 10 or 12 large carnivore yeah okay well you're Maybe 10. Maybe 10. I thought it was... Maybe 10. Breaking news.

Y'all stand by. This was... But why did they change your name? That's the important thing here. So you were the bear coordinator, you became the large carnivore coordinator. Right. Why did they change your name? Well, you know, mountain lines started showing up that we were documenting.

I'm going to put... Mountain lines started showing up that we were documenting. And, you know, in order to, I guess... monitor what's happening with mountain lines statewide and everything that had to really kind of assign a program coordinator to it well the most likely candidate was well you know mountain lines are large carnivores bears are large omnivore so hey you know and I mean honestly still to this day 99% of the work I do is bear related right You know, I do some reports on mountain lines, but that's basically just an occurrence type map, you know, once a year or put together information for a foyer or something like that.

But it's pretty cool that there are documented mountain lines. Oh, yeah. Do you think there's a mountain line in Arkansas today? Probably good possibility of it. What color is it? Yeah. Good question. That's what we all want to know.

What color is that? That's scary. I got to come up. I knew it. Can you tell by a mountain lion scream what color it is? No. Depends on what county it's in. Where is my dad?

Gary knows. How can you tell by their scream whether they're black or just the regular ones? Secret. Secret. No, I'm real interested in Mountain Lions. And Myron said that the majority of... Myron said. I should just follow Myron around and be like,

Myron says. Infamous, Myron said. No, you said that you get a lot of reports of mountain lines coming in. We do. We get about 100, I'm going to say 100 to 120 sightings a year. Okay. And then of those that are a mistake, what are they usually? What are people seeing?

House cats and bobcats. House cats and bobcats. Yeah. It's a big house. How many people here have claimed to have seen a mountain line on Arkansas? I'm just saying. Raise your hand. Jessica Llewellyn?

Come on. I know every one of you have told someone you've seen a mountain line before. How many his grandmowers have seen them? Yeah. No, one of the first podcasts we ever did was called the Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion. And I had Myron on there. and we talked about how everybody in the south, except for these fine people,

have seen mountain lines, have 100% seen them. We do have a lot of people here from not Arkansas. Remember, all that geographic distribution we talked about, so we can forgive them. We'll forgive them. A little bit. It's a funny social, it's interesting to look into because mountain lines were here.

They were like bears. they were here in great number documented big time. I mean, the mountain lion had a range from the Atlantic to the Pacific, massive geographic range. They were here. They were in our lore. They were in our writing. They were in our hunting culture.

Dads told their sons and daughters about mountain lions. And then they were extirpated, but dads kept telling their kids about mountain lions. And then it's so funny to me. I love it because. We don't have that many mountain lines in the state. Maybe one or two at any given time. Maybe. Maybe 10 or 12.

I mean, it's just we don't, I mean, there's no way to track them. We just don't know. All I can say is I get about one verification a year. So he gets 150 people saying, I saw one. And one of those, they're able to verify and say 100%. It doesn't mean that somebody didn't see one. That's right. It's not able to be right.

You seen a mountain lion in the state? No. Have you seen evidence of a mountain lion in the state? Yes. There you go. Yeah. So I got to share one story, mountain line story. I was in Oklahoma deer hunting in November.

And it was one of these real cool nights, bright moon. It was very still. And me and another guy were walking out of the woods. And you could just hear so good. It was just cold and no wind and just bright night. And man, I hear just a scream. Just like, I don't even want to replicate it, but it was a loud. Could you please?

I think we'd all enjoy it. Yeah. I can't do it. I heard a loud. What, it was so loud that I ignored it for three times. Me and this guy are walking together in the dark. And I finally go, are you hearing that? And he's like, yeah, what is that?

And I said, I have no idea what that is. But it was loud, so loud, it was just, whiz. And I knew I was like, half of the people I know would right now say, that's a mountain line screaming. How many of you heard a mountain line scream? Raise your hand. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Big numbers. So, anyway, I hear, it's like a, and I said, I told Dave, I said, man I would swear that was a cat I just would swear it was a cat we got back to the truck and I had my coon light with me and that thing was was was screaming so consistently that and we were in a big open field that I just said let's just go over there and so we turned our light off and we kind of just started trotting across this field super rational thing to do and uh it quit it quit making the noise but as soon as we got over there where I said it had to have been right in here I'd turn

my light and just light up the world with this big light and there's a bobcat in a tree. Oh yeah. Bobcat was making an incredibly loud. And I've read about, I've heard people call it yowlin, Y-O-W-L. But it was so loud, you could have heard it from, I mean, three, four hundred yards. Just whew! And I think that's what all you heard when you thought you heard of mountain line. I think you heard a bobcat.

He said it, not me. We have a lot of bobcats. Mayor, now you can say Clay said. Yeah, he said. Clay said. I should work for the game and fish and fill those calls. Ma'am, you didn't see a bobcat or you didn't see him outline. Nope, your daddy lied to you.

You'd be surprised at how many house cat pictures I get in a year. You know, someone sends a picture to AGFC. Ask AGFC. Yeah. You'd be surprised at how many house cats. Yeah. And some of them are in. even tony-colored house cuts, you know.

Just people think they're gray with slats stripes or, yeah. Those puppy ones. Hey, I want to, I want to end. We've been going for about an hour here. We're going to wrap things up. Thank you guys so much for coming. And for wanting to be here.

So we're going to have, we're going to do a couple more things. We're going to have the Al Houton contest in just a little bit. It's going to be a lot of fun. and yeah, we're going to be here rest of the afternoon. So thanks a lot, guys. 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 Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good. good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.