The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 011

Episode Date: June 12, 2015

Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Steven Rinella and Janis Putelis join Doug Duren at his family farm. Subjects discussed: the leveling of Wisconsin by glaciers, and how Wisconsin's Driftless Area was spared; why Latvians love the Driftless; managing for whitetail deer on private land; generational differences in hunting deer; earn-a-buck programs as a way of changing public attitudes about harvesting does; animism; letting bucks walk past unscathed; Doug's giant famous buck; perspectives on whitetail overpopulation; Doug's penchant for fact-checking people's claims right in front of them; red oaks vs. black oaks; agricultural land management as it relates to wildlife management; magical antlers; the demonization of trophy hunters; the joys of hearing a John Deere tractor; and the only kind of giant buck Steve is interested in shooting. Guests in Episode #11: Doug Duren Watch Hunts on the Duren Farm in Volume 2 (Big Bucks and Small Game: Whitetail Deer) and Volume 6 (Opening Day: Wisconsin Whitetail (Parts 1 + 2) Janis Putelis Hunt to Eat Enjoying the podcast? Please take a minute and subscribe to us on iTunes (best for iOS devices) and on Stitcher (best for Android devices). Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. This is the Meat Eater Podcast. We're recording just outside of Cazenovia, Wisconsin, in the Driftless area of Wisconsin. Moments ago, I was asking my friend here, who's joining us today along

with Giannis Poutelis. That was a confusing sentence. I'm joined right now by Giannis Poutelis and Doug Dern and moments ago I was asking Doug Dern if he had heard the term driftless area of Wisconsin as a child or if it was just some kind of new marketing scam.

And the answer is yes, but it really has become more prevalent in the last 10 to 15 years. Yeah, so where that term comes from is during the Ice Ages, glaciers leveled the Midwest. That's why it looks the way it does, flat and homogenous. But the glaciers missed this spot. They spread apart and split apart. They saw Doug standing there

in all of his hugeness and the glaciers just didn't want to tangle with him and went around the driftless area and left it much topography. We're pissing distance from a brook trout stream. Oh yeah. Beautiful brookout Stream.

We're 1,000 yards, if, from where we just killed a turkey this morning. Oh, I would say we're 500 yards from there. From where we killed a turkey this morning. This morning, yeah. We're way closer to where Doug has downed a lot of nice bucks. Well, yeah. In fact, one I downed that's hanging on the wall over there which probably doesn't work on a podcast but uh uh it actually died right down here by the barn is that right i know

that story yeah so yeah we're we're in doug like doug duran's family for several generations has had this farm here um way back. 115 years. 115 years in this farm. We're recording in this old farmhouse. They call it the Buck Shack now because it's full of giant bucks. We're going to talk a bunch about that. Oh, I was going to tell you about the Driftless area, though. Yeah, yeah.

I was up on Lake Superior, Ashland, Wisconsin? Sure. And the guy up there has got a sugar shack. This guy named Bill Hart. Hell of a nice guy. He's got a sugar shack up there. And he, in response to the Driftless area and all of its coolness,

he has on his bottles of maple syrup, he writes from the famed drifted area of Wisconsin. Well, that's a great thing when you get something, some kind of label or marketing thing going. They try to take you down. Yeah, that's right. They try to take you down. But yeah, this part of Wisconsin doesn't look like the normal middle. I mean, there's a ton of topography around here, rock outcroppings. This used to be like Indians used to hide out here when they were trying to hide from the army.

It's a great area. And Giannis, if you tell us, the Latvian lover and hunter, you guys got a Latvian camp not far from here. Talk about that. Why do the Latvians like this place? As far as I know, they settled here when they all came over during the Second... Well, some of them came over before the Second World War, but most of them emigrated during the Second World War. But it was very similar to Latvia's topography and landscape.

So it felt like home. Yeah. There's only, what, 3 million Latvians alive today? Something like that. 1 million in Latvia? 2 million in the U.S. is that right I think two in Latvia and then a million worldwide so explain that place you hunt on you don't need to give like the GPS coordinates but no it's very similar topography to here you know beautiful oak ridges, oak flats, a lot of little bowls that just kind of peel off the main ridge. And there's no ag.

A lot of the neighbors have ag around us. But the country that we hunt, it's all just basically big oak forest. Yeah, it's a bunch of Latvian mugs who all bought property by each other to be by each other. And there's a Latvian pet. It was all owned once by maybe like one main Latvian guy. And then over the years it got divided up, but it stayed

in the Latvian community. And there's a Latvian pagan church camp. Yep. Spent a lot of time there growing up. Is there a lot of instruction involved with turning someone into a pagan? No, not much at all, really.

You just kind of go with what seems very natural. They teach you a lot about nature? Yes. What's the word I'm looking for? I think we were talking about this word the other day. Yeah, it's definitely... Do you find God in nature? Yeah.

What's the word for it? Not polytheism, multi-gods. There's like a word for finding God in the land. Yeah, so there's... Evidence of God in the land. There's like the wind mother and there's, you know,

the... Like the God that takes care of farm animals. And then there's like the God that watches over wild animals. And there's just kind of gods that do their own little thing all about you in life. I think animism might be the word I'm looking for. I can't believe Doug the fact checker Dern isn't fact checking right now.

He just told me not to do that. So, yeah, Yanni hunts turkeys near here, totally coincidentally. We came out. The way Wisconsin runs their turkey seasons is, and some dudes were complaining about this last night. I gave a talk at the university last night, and afterward, instead of waiting in line to meet me and shake my hand, Yannis went to a bar and got to yapping with some guys in a bar

and they were complaining about the way Wisconsin runs their turkey seasons. But Wisconsin doesn't have a long turkey season, but has many short turkey seasons that make up a long stretch of time. Yeah, I think there's six. So you guys got like A, B, C, D, F, and G season. I think there's an E in there also. And a youth season. How did he miss that?

I don't know. You said six. I counted to six. A, B, C. But you didn't say E. Oh. Yeah, you just went F to G. Really?

I think it's number seven. It does go F to G, the alphabet. You went D to F. D to, yeah. You skipped E. Minor issue. Yeah, I'm confident in my ability to say the alphabet. So when you put in, when you apply to hunt for turkeys in Wisconsin,

you've got to pick a zone. How many zones is the state? I think there's only three or four now. I'd have to look at the map. You're zone one. Yeah, we're zone one, and that's pretty much the whole southwest corner. I don't remember what the – And if you're a non-resident and you don't have any bonus points saved up

and you put in for zone one season A, you will not draw the tag, as I now understand. Like, I didn't draw it. You might have a chance to draw it. Yeah. But I didn't get it. That's to get the first crack. But you don't just get the first crack because there's a youth season the weekend before. That's who gets the first crack. But you don't just get the first crack because there's a youth season the weekend before.

That's who gets the first crack. But that's almost like too early of a first crack. They're not like hot. Well, yeah, I guess. But I know people have pretty good success in it. And certainly the birds have been active the last two or three weeks. There's not a leaf on the trees, right? I mean, there's like buds.

They'll be probably, in two weeks, it'll look leafed out. No, no, no. No? We're two weeks probably from, well, some of it will be like the softwoods, the willows and red maples will be getting there, but we're still waiting for that mouse ear size leaf on the oak when the morels will be up. So that's a couple weeks off yet.

We went out this morning, just walked out of Doug's farmhouse, walked up the main valley here to the end of the field, heard one freaking gobbler. And that was a long ways off, and I wasn't even sure it was a gobbler when I first heard it. No, it was so far away, but I mean, it certainly was. But he didn't do anything. By fly down time, he had shut up. Yeah. And we hunted our tuchuses off. That's a technical term.

Yeah. Hunted our asses. I can't say we hunted our asses off. We listened around a fair bit. And eventually called in two times and didn't make a peep. We got one half gobble out of one of them. After we were staring at him for 20 minutes. Yeah, yeah.

I was sitting there trying to get comfortable and take a nap. It was like getting that time of day, 9 in the morning. And I was like, couldn't get my head quite how I wanted it, you know, to sleep. And all of a sudden I noticed like the top of a tail fan, maybe 70 yards, 80 yards away. And there's two gobblers out there strutting that just never made a sound. the top of a tail fan, maybe 70 yards, 80 yards away. And there's two gobblers out there strutting that just never made a sound. We had a decoy out, and we had to set it a little crossroad, what you guys call the big woods, right?

Yep. Had to set a little crossroad, and those toms come in, saw the hand muscle, and just set to strutting. And then we kind of toyed around with them for a long time and eventually they came in. Oh, it was a great... And they were convinced, man. Oh, they were. He was ready to make love to that decoy. Yeah, he was ready to make love to the decoy, him and his buddy. That was just a great

20 minutes or half an hour of observing turkeys and watching them do what they want to do. And I kept thinking, can they see that decoy? And from where we were, we thought, well, maybe they couldn't see the decoy. So after we killed the one, I walked up where

they had been. Well, they could clearly see the decoy. Yeah. And they just, they just had, they just waited. They were waiting for her to come and, and giving full credit to Steve Rinella on the calling job. He was so subtle and so quiet.

That's how I talk to a lady, even though I was talking to her. Smooth like butter. And then he stopped because they didn't move for 20 minutes. They just were in full strut. Because I over call. I over call. I over call. My specialty is getting turkeys' attention. And then once I got it, I feel like I'm like the puppeteer, man.

It's so hard to shut up. Well, if they had been gobbling, it would have been impossible to shut up. It would have been fun. He's like, watch this. I'm going to make them gobble again. And it was just one short. It wasn't even a full gobble. No.

And then you shut up. If you were out in the woods listening, you'd have heard that and been like, I don't know. What was that? Yeah, yeah. It was just like a half-assed gobble. But they were mature birds, you know. Yeah. Oh, fantastic.

Yachty, give a recap on your morning, man. I played hard to get on our second setup this morning, and it did not work. It did not pan out. I was very confident because it's hard to get work for me about four days ago in California. And he kind of cruised on the opposite side of the ridge that we were set up on. I heard him gobble four or five times as he went by us. So he's just ripping up there. Well, we called him.

We never heard. I would have thought we could hear your birds, but never heard any of that. Yeah. There's a little bit of wind. I think it was actually blowing from you guys to us, so that would make sense. Oh, it was quiet. If there would have been birds gobbling, we would have heard them. Well, that's not true because they were gobbling.

Gobbling by us. Within a half a mile of us. But anyways, he gobbles. I've been calling every 10 or 15 minutes, just one little set of yelps. I can hear him gobble by us. He kind of goes away, and I'm thinking, man, we'll give him one more call. If we can't turn him, we're going to have to go chase him. The next time he gobbles, he's come up on top of the ridge.

Then he gobbles again. He's a little bit closer. You're probably thinking you're going to kill the bird. Oh, yeah. At that point, I'm like, I'm going to give him one more soft little call and I'm going to set the call down. And the next thing that's going to happen is, you know, Ty's going to pull the trigger. And I set that call down and 30 minutes later, it was as quiet as it had been at that moment. And so it didn't work, you know, and I don't know if I, if I had called more,

had I pulled him in an hour later, I think we ended up spooking that bird with either another gobbler or with a hand. Maybe he had two hands. I don't know. We spooked three birds not far from where we last heard him. Did you see the bird? That bird? Not when I was working him. I saw him an hour later when we spooked him.

But when you quit calling, you didn't see him? No. But when he gobbled, I was like, he is at 100 or less, and he's closing the distance. Leave him alone. I'm just going to set the call down. It's nice when a gobbler has the courtesy

to gobble a lot when he loses interest. Let you know. Because then you can gauge like, that son of a bitch is going the other way. And then you know just to like, no holds barred. What's to lose now? I'll just make insane noise. I'll do just make insane noise. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I'll be like, I'll do my hen dying noise, you know, like anything, because, but when they just shut up, you're thinking he shut up because he's coming to you.

Like, you don't hear him for 15 minutes, like, it's got to be because he's walking over here. Yeah. You know, but then like,

you know, when nothing happens, you stand up and he's just gone. The other thing that happens, turkey hunting, we were talking about this the other day,

is we used to, hunting out west, you can sneak up on turkeys, you stand up and he's just gone. The other thing that happens turkey hunting, we were talking about this the other day, is we used to, hunting out west, you can sneak up on turkeys, you know. We used to get where you knew they were on the other side of the ridge. You call and call and call and nothing happens. You're like, oh, they must have wandered off. And you stand up, they're still standing there. It'd be like, you just suck at calling, is the problem.

They just don't care. Before we get on to farther turkey stories, let's just take a quick break to our sponsors. Very smooth. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all my other morning setup I just got very lucky we heard birds gobbling on a classic like

point off of a field they were up above us you had like a season's worth of turkey hunt this morning and we got had a lot of good turkey hunt this morning and we got in right underneath them at the bottom i think they flew down into the field kind of away from us. And we had time to drop a decoy in, sit against a tree. And I looked back up on the horizon. I could see, you know, them moving. And I made one little scratch and they were walking down the hill and it just happened to be that they were going to come right down that. Well, how do you know that? I don't, but it just seemed like, you know, they were very confidently coming down that hill. They couldn't see the decoy at that point.

You just never know. You never know. That's the problem, too, with hunting. I've hunted a lot of stuff, but hunting turkeys is like, you're always doing stuff you don't know. Like, today I could say, well, once those two that were, I don't want to say they were hung up. Because they weren't, like, suspicious. They were just strutting out of range. Once I started being like, okay, I i'm just gonna scratch the leaves and purr

right and eventually they came in so now do you sit and go like oh the trick the trick is to scratch leaves and purr or was it just that they came in even though i was doing that you know it's so hard to you got to see things happen again and again and again and again and again before you start formulating an idea but i'm coming to see that shutting up, when you got a bird that's just, he's responding, he likes what he hears, it's in your best, as fun as it is just to get him, to keep him talking, it's just give it 10 minutes, give it 15 minutes now and then, and see if that doesn't move that bird way in your direction and that 10 minutes when we sat there was both really short and really long it just seemed like and i did without having

to watch you can't tell yeah you can't tell how long is this going on yeah but it was you know just to watch him i mean that was the visual on that was, you know, it kept your interest in the numbness of my leg and shoulder and my neck up against the tree. It all went away. Just checking those birds out, man. Yeah, I was saying after that was over, if you don't like hunting turkeys, man. Yeah.

I can't tell you what I said. I said, if you don't like turkeys, you can. Expletive deleted. Exactly. You can. Exactly. You can... Yeah. So, yeah, Duren's Farm. Now, tell these guys, tell listeners about, like, when you were a kid,

about the deer situation out here. I remember... This is a way ass interesting story. Wow. That's a lot. I'm laying serious pressure on Doug Dern. It was a big deal when I was a kid. You saw a deer out in the field.

I mean, you got in the car and drove. I mean, somebody said, hey, there were some deer out on McGlynn's Ridge or Cunningham Ridge or something like that. You drove out there and checked it out. The deer in this area were over in the Baraboo Bluffs, the Baraboo Hills. Prior to that, I remember my brother David did a speech, a conservation speech when he was in seventh or eighth grade about the management

of the white-tailed deer. Was he an expert? No, but he was doing one of those competitions at school or whatever. And he did a great job of it, as I recall, under some very difficult circumstances. Should I tell you what that was? He got kicked in the groin and was all swollen up. And the night that he gave that speech was in incredible pain. Is that right?

Yeah, and he did a great job of it. I think he got second place. I'm sure he'd have won it had he not been. Had he not taken a blow to the throat. A blow to the, yeah. But through the management program of the Department of Natural Resources, when I was a kid, you'd have to, if you wanted to shoot a doe, you'd have to get four guys together like months ahead of time and sent in for a party permit.

So one guy, or you would get one doe tag for four guys. So your deer tag was a buck tag. Um, and then there would be this one tag for four guys to be able to shoot a doe. Let me interrupt you because I realize I'm doing a bad job of hosting right now. Cause just for people who live in other areas or who don't follow this kind of thing. This area right now is the good old days on deer. Or maybe a couple years ago was the good old days. No, no.

I would say right. It's just this place produces tons of deer, and it's famous for gigantic bucks. And we should be able to produce more of them. And I don't know how up on a soapbox I want to get about deer management. We have too many deer, in my opinion, and where I hunt. Yeah, because you guys are in the, this area is also part of the cwd the chronic wasting disease we're on the northern edge of it chronic wasting disease goes hand in hand with shit loads of deer i mean you don't get cwd in an area that doesn't have a lot of deer that's right

high deer density it makes a big difference and and then to control the disease is you want fewer deer and um there are a lot of reasons to to have fewer deer in this area. And again, I, you know, I don't know what other guys' experiences are in various parts of the state and all that. I just know around here and on the land that I'm hunting, which is our farm and a little bit, uh, and the area around it, I'm not hunting that, but seeing it, we have way more deer than, than what we should have. And, uh. From a forestry perspective. From a, well, right. I mean, it depends. If what you want to see is a ton of deer, I guess

you should be happy as a clam. But, um, uh, if you want to have deer in the future, then we should have fewer deer now. We're going to, I mean, it's possible that we'd have a crash of the deer herd here because our habitat will be depleted. I'm sure there are guys who are going to, you know, from around here go, Oh, people shoot each other over this discussion.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a heated discussion. And I still think, see, I'm old enough. I'm 56 years old, and I'm old enough that there are guys in my generation who won't shoot a doe. And, you know, it's just that way you don't do that. Oh, I know tons of old guys like that. Because they come from the day when there weren't any deer around.

Well, right. But the mentality, I mean, you have to shift that mentality. A lot has changed about deer hunting, and one of the things is the numbers. But I want to back up. Yeah, yeah, I know. I was just trying to set the stage that right now there's a ton of deer, giant bucks. For this area right

now is the good old days of deer hunting. Yeah. Look around. I was, yeah, I mean, look at this. I wish you could see this room we're in. Like, I'm staring eye to eye right now with a buck known as the standard. I don't know. I want to talk about the standard. Because that's, that to me in the story of this area,

like the standard for you too, like that deer sort of like is this like a... Sort of the epitome. Yeah, it's like this really important moment in this area. So Doug was growing up. It'd be a big deal to cut a deer track. You now live, like your family lives in, I mean, if you were going to sit down and list like top 10 whitetail locations in the U.S., you'd probably one of them would be around here.

And your old man always drove north of here. Yeah. Dad always went up north. He hunted, there's still guys from this area that go up there for the tradition of it. He went up and hunted up in Phillips. They lived in a tent for, you know, a week or 10 days. And then when I was a kid, 12 years old we uh hunted up in that area and then we hunted by red granite um and because dad wanted us to have that north woods you know experience and all that

hunt like pulpwood yeah yeah and alder swamps and that kind of stuff and cedar swamps. And I think the first three years that I deer hunted, I saw three deer. And then I started playing high school basketball. Yeah, Doug's a big, tall bastard. Anyway, so I started playing high school basketball. And so you had to be here. And so then we started hunting the farm. And I'm on out opening day shot first buck you know 14 years old bang there's a buck after driving after driving

20 hours what the hell are we going up there for um and i you know and as i say i appreciated that that experience and everything but you know in terms of just really getting to hunt deer this is the place to do it and that but that was like a little surprising then. You weren't like, oh, wow, there was deer here all along. It was like coming. It was all happening at the same time. I was getting to the age. Like what year was that? 70, mid-70s, early 70s, 73.

I'd been 14 in 73. But there weren't mature bucks running around. No, no. It had a horn on it. You shot it. But it was still the party tag thing. So all you could shoot were bucks because, you know, unless you had the party tag.

And, you know, I got involved with that with some other guys. And if those guys are listening right now, they're chuckling about it. But so anything with an antler on it, you shot. And really that was the mentality here for a long time. And in the eighties, when the deer herd really started to explode and I didn't live here from 1985 until, uh, 1990. So there was, I lived in new England for a few years and, and actually didn't deer hunt for five years. Uh, so then, um, came back in the nineties and, you know, um, a, you know, two and a half year old, uh, six pointer or eight pointer, maybe it was a year and a half old buck.

Uh, probably couldn't have been, but that was a, you know, 110 inches or something like that. For those of you know what, how big that is, that was a big deal. That's at that same time, late eighties, early nineties. Like when I started hunting, I guess I killed my first deer when I was 13. You shot, this is West Michigan, so just across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee. If you saw a buck, you shot that thing.

Oh, yeah, and that was the mentality here, too. My old man killed a two-and-a-half-year-old buck, like a nice eight-point, two-and-a-half years old. That deer was in the newspaper. It's like you did not – bucks just didn't live. I think that the year-and-a-half-old bucks were breeding all the does. Yeah. Because there weren't – it's just you just shot – you would sit it all. We're breeding all the does. Yeah. Because there weren't. It's just, you just shot.

You would sit there and you'd see does come out at dusk. You'd sit there just like hallucinating spike antlers on them. Behind the ears. Like it's got to be a spike. Might have been a horn stuck in there behind that ear. Yeah, because it's like you just shot bucks. And I understand. I'm not even down on it, man.

I understand it's like super complicated but if you saw a buck if you killed a forky you had a fantastic year first buck I shot had one antler and I was on cloud nine

that was the buck you shot when you started basketball yeah yeah where'd you start hunting Yanni? just 40 miles north of here oh that was your deer hunting too?

well we hunted southwest Michigan and over here I think in Michigan we you start hunting? Just 40 miles north of here. Oh, that was your deer hunting too? Well, we hunted in southwest Michigan and over here. I think in Michigan we could start hunting at 12, and here it was 14. No, no. It was 14 with a gun, 12 with a bow. Michigan too. Michigan was 14 with a gun. What was the age here? 12 with a gun here.

Oh, so I had it mixed up. Because I killed my first deer with a gun before I was supposed to. I was 13. Statue of limitations has run out on that violation. I hope. Plus, they changed the rules now. It wasn't my fault. At that age, you're sort of an instrument

of your father. Oh, yeah. I think the Bible says when you're old enough to not butter bread, but at what age are you capable of reason? I don't know. Anyhow, if I had murdered someone, then I'd be out of jail a long time ago by now.

So when you're 13, you're just not held responsible. Were you guys just shooting teeny bucks then? You know, I was going to say it was interesting because that time period too, so I started hunting probably around like late 80s, early 90s too. Must have been 78, so 82, 80, 82. I think I killed like a little crotch one my first year. But those early years and the five years before I actually started carrying a gun,

just coming out here with my dad, I remember those memories fondly of driving in. We'd always come in. It would be late. It would be 9, 10 p.m. And every big field within the last five miles of getting to camp, we would swing the headlights onto the field and just start counting. That was like I look forward to that. That was so exciting.

And we'd count. Oftentimes you'd hit over 20 on one field, just start counting. That was like, I look forward to that. That was so exciting. And we'd count, oftentimes you'd hit over 20 on one field, just deer everywhere. And as the years went on, it got to be less and less and less and less. And right now, I mean, I haven't been back in probably four or five years. The last couple of times I've gone back, I had one hunt where I went back and hunted three and a half days hard and did not see a deer. Nowadays.

Not a deer. Yeah, like five years ago. And they're having tough hunting right now, up there right now. And a lot of them are blaming it on the, you know, being in that T-zone. They've had some tough weather too. And again, these guys only hunt the opening weekend. I want to say last year. If you hunted only opening weekend last year, you didn't see any deer.

Right. It was foggy the whole time. It was. Yeah. I remember I was texting you. Rain. Rain, fog, snow. And I mean, driving snow.

The first three days on this farm, you know how many deer there are around here. I'm sitting up there comfortably in a box blind, comfortably sunrise to sunset. And I saw six deer in the first three days and I didn't think anything of it. Like they're just not out. It's not happening. Uh, after, uh, Thanksgiving day, killed a doe on Thanksgiving day, killed two bucks on the next day. We saw tons of deer.

And then when we hunted hunted i had a bunch of friends uh come out over the uh holiday hunt all famous people all famous people from casanova uh certainly the my favorite some of my favorite people not all of my favorite people from casanova but but certainly some of them and their kids. And in the course of three hours, no joke, 75 or 80 deer. Is that right? Yeah. We killed only two, but that amount of deer. So, you know, you're just talking about, well, how has deer hunting changed and,

you know, and all that. So the numbers are different, but the other part of it is you can hunt in a lot of different places. And I control this land. You know, I mean, I've had, last year I had over 30 people deer hunt out here over the course of the seasons. Is that right? Yeah. You know, different, various, you know. God, that's nice.

That's really nice. And they weren't all famous. Doug got accused of only letting famous people. We filmed out here and had some famous people out hunting here. And Doug got accused of only letting famous people hunt his land. And then the guy down the bar stool commented that just the other day, Doug had 10 people out there, and he sure as hell ain't famous. So now you got me.

No, I'm glad I got you because I want to change the subject. No, I don't want to change the subject. I have a quick question, though, for you, Doug. Do you feel like just 40 miles north of here, it could be a big difference of what is going on here? Yes. Because you are kind of micromanaging. I don't think it's me micromanaging this spot.

So, yes, I feel like that could happen, especially when you say, well, there's ag around. I don't know what's going on up there. Yeah. I think there's been some good changes to deer management. I think some of the bad changes have been, you know, they took away the urnibuck from the biologists to, you know, to help manage the herd. Yeah, I want to explain the earn a buck. All right. To encourage people, to encourage hunters to shoot does, right,

if you're trying to reduce the population. And also take pressure off of bucks, you know. Wildlife managers use a tool called earn a buck where um you can't shoot a buck unless you shoot a doe first that's right so if you just think about i don't want to dwell on this subject too long but deer are born basically like like humans a one-to-one sex ratio okay for every doe that drops or every doe fawn that drops out of a doe a buck fawn is going to drop out of one it's 51% or 50-50

humans are 51% female deer is somewhere right in there and when you're sitting out there and you see 25 does and one buck you're looking at you're looking at,

you're not seeing a natural population dynamic. If what you're seeing is actually representative of what's there, you're not seeing a natural dynamic. There would be a healthy, most people who understand white-tailed deer would say that a healthy population of deer,

the racial's not that skewed. A high buck-to-doe ratio. It's never going to be one-to-one because they just have an easier time dying and they don't live as long. Bucks don't. But it should be substantial. I just want to explain. Earn a buck, people are going to be like, what the hell does that mean? So anyways.

Yeah, yeah. They got rid of earn a buck. So, and I understand why they did, because there's places like Johnny was talking about that, where that was what maybe the blame was placed on. Right. Why there are fewer deer. I, even though I've hunted with some DNR guys, I've never seen a DNR guy kill a deer. Hunters kill deer. Uh, I, even though I've hunted with some DNR guys, I've never seen a DNR guy kill a deer, hunters kill deer. So at the end of the day, it's always the hunters who are going to be managing the deer. Yeah. And that's, you know, it's, and that's the mentality that I have here. I do what I think is right for our property, um, based on the guidelines or based on the seasons and the

structure that, that those, uh, the structure that the deer managers have. I thought earning a buck was a good thing. We still have it here. I mean, we shoot more does than we shoot bucks here. And the liberal, I mean, liberal, lots of doe tags certainly could be a reason for it. Weather's a reason for it. Um, but that's, you know, management within a particular area, I guess, is the way I feel that, you know, the hunters are way more in control of that.

And I think some of the changes that have happened in the, in deer management have been good, but, um, I, I still have an awful lot of faith in, in, uh, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, big game managers and how they put, you know, season structures together. I like the fact that we've shrunk. It used to be really big zone, sort of like it is with Turkey with much bigger zones. Now it's going much more on a county to county basis. And I think that's going to take into account more of that. You know, you get an area like where you're hunting up there where there are fewer deer.

Well, why is that? Well, I'm not exactly sure because I don't, I don don't hop there but you guys should have a better feeling for that that's the thing these eastern states like what state i grew up in zone one two three so all in michigan right you got the whole state 83 counties they would break it up into three units basically divide the lower peninsula in half and make the up its own unit you go go out west, they draw units by watersheds. You look at a state and be like, there's 300 units in this state. Because you're fine-tuning your management plan in a way that allows you to account for all these little micro things.

You take the area you're honest to talk about and be like, well, you know what? That spot doesn't have any deer. It's a great management tool if you and be like, well, you know what? That spot doesn't have any deer. It's a great management tool if you can be like, okay, so let's talk about that spot and not talk about this whole half of the damn state. Yeah. You know? Because it just really allows you to get into it. There's a guy, I think it was Frederick Jackson Turner, there was some environmental historian, who he went back and argued, if we really wanted, this is way off topic, but he went and argued, if we really wanted to govern the country in a better way, we'd get rid of the state lines we have now

and draw our states according to watersheds. Talk about government that way. And give people a sense, rather than having these arbitrary straight lines cutting through things that shouldn't be cut through. You live in a, and it wasn't always watersheds, but you live in a specific geo-region. Yeah.

Well, think about it. The back of our farm, where my cabin is and the pond up there, that's in a different county. That's in a different deer management zone now. Yeah, the pond is essentially, that runs north-south. That's the Richland-Sauk County line. So that's in a different management zone now. Well, there's always going to be some art. Well, that's exactly right.

You're always going to draw a line. Like when you draw that line, it's going to cut through a damn deer. Yeah, right. Like half the deer is going to be – there's probably deer right now. Half of them is in one management. But if you took your premise and said the watershed, well, hell, we're talking about the same little valley there. Yeah, no, I'm with you.

I'm with you. That's where they draw a lot of management. But, again, I'm trying to pry a narrative out of Doug here and I keep teasing it out and then stomping on it when he gets into it. I want to get into the whole better

Nice Buck Next Year. Nice Buck Next Year sounds very interesting and to keep these podcasts coming to you for free, we're going to take 30 seconds to listen to our – 60 seconds. 60 seconds? Yeah.

Some info from our supporters. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS

with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. All right, so back in time, there weren't shit for deer around here. Then there started to be getting a lot of deer here in the Driftless area.

And everyone shot every buck they saw on sight. Right, and then we went to this. Doug's late brother. Matthew. Matthew. Oh then we went to... Doug's late brother... Matthew. Matthew. Oh, really? Yeah. My new son's named Matthew. Yes, he is.

How did they make that connection? Doug's late brother says what, Doug? So, out at the milk barn. So, yeah, this deer that I was telling you that I killed within a stone's throw, it died, I should say, within a stone's throw of the house here was a, you can't see it, but it's that one with the black velvet up there. And that was the biggest buck that I had killed to date at that point by a long shot. It's a nice little palmated eight point, like, you know. That's got to be a two-year-old deer.

Like a sweet looking buck. Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of guys, I mean, it's like a cool buck. But anyhow. I shot it across the road. It jumps the crick, lung shot, jumps the crick, goes through the gate that we walked through this morning.

There was no gate at the bottom of the hill then. Crosses the road, comes up through these pines. Matthew is sleeping upstairs because he already got his buck. And he looks out the window, thinks I'm like messing with him because where I shot it over, anyway, it ran down through here and he thinks I'm messing with him. Your bullet went through the bedroom, didn't it? No, it did not. There was some very quick but correct decisions made about the shots that were taken. And he looked out the window of the upstairs bedroom and saw that deer coming up through the pine trees outside here. Comes down the stairs, grabs his deer rifle. In his long handles.

And he's got his long johns on, grabs his deer rifle and his orange jacket. So he's got his long johns on, grabs his deer rifle and his orange jacket. So he's legal. Comes out the door. That hole that's in that porch door out there was from that day, which is 20 years ago, 21 years ago. That deer goes over, goes in between the silos over there, lays down. But it's still alive. It wasn't heart shot. It was lung shot.

So we go around and, you know, safety conscious as we were, we're trying to finish it off, and my dad is walking across the top of the hill, and he wonders what the hell is going on. Comes down the hill. Matt and I are trying to get the deer out of there, and it gets up, and it goes down by the milk house and kind of collapses again. We're thinking, well, we should slit its throat. We got to be safe here. My dad walks up to it, bam, shoots it through the neck. Stuff's getting, you know, thinking, well, we were doing the right thing. He says, for God's sakes, you know?

So anyway, there was quite a lot of excitement and boy, you know, so we're all congratulating each other and talking about how this whole thing went down and grabbing the deer. And I'm looking at it and I'm going, man, what a great buck. And buck and i'm you know dad's like well that's terrific and matt who was the quietest of all of us kind of looks at it and goes yeah but that'd be a nice buck next year and that really that conversation that came from that ended up being really where we started doing bigger buck management here. Just letting them slide. Well, what I started thinking then was, well, okay, that's the biggest buck I've shot to date. The next one's going to be bigger than that.

And we started talking about it. Unfortunately, he died three months later in a car accident just right down here on the highway. But we started talking about that was what we had been planning that whole winter. It was more of our management at that point. And, uh, in 2003, after, um, some changes in the group that hunted here, uh, after I'd instituted some rules, um, everything that you see in here has been shot, other than that buck, has been shot since 2003, plus four or five others. And I know you go, well, sorry, I guess I'm not describing it very well, but you can see the progression sort of.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, to give you an idea, the one with the black velvet that Doug shot there 21 years ago out in the backyard here, he might be 100 inches. Yeah, might be 100. Most people call a basket rack, although he's a little bit wider than your average basket rack. But, yeah, in our camp in Michigan, we would have been tickled to shoot a buck like that. I never shot a buck like that in Michigan. Yeah?

No. You're good at numbers. Go around the room and just shout out numbers. There's a couple others that are in that 120 type class, but not many. Everything else jumps significantly up into the 130s, 140s, right? I mean, there might be a couple of 120s hanging out. These are like the upper row over there is like mid-130s. Yeah.

And then there's just some Gigantor 140, 150 bucks. And then, of course, the Standard. Are we ready to talk about him yet? No, we'll talk about Standard in a minute. But I want to point out here, because this is an important fact to point out. All this talk about big bucks and age structure, demographics,

I almost forget to bring this up, but it really needs to be stressed. The poundage of venison, the poundage of meat coming off the property, is increasing through all this. Absolutely. It's not like you're going like, oh, we, you know, we used to shoot deer and eat some

venison, but then we decided to piss on that. And now we just shoot a giant buck down it. You're still talking about like all the deer meat you want because you're shooting does. More than, more than we've had. I mean, I have friends, non-hunting friends who are like, Hey, if you get an extra deer, if you have, you know, I'd like to get some venison. I said, well, I, you know, I'll drop it. I'll drop one off at the, at the, uh, the butcher

for you. Yeah. I'll gut it out or drag it down there. And, and, and so I do that. Um, like I said, in the late season, I had, you know, friends out here. Uh, I w I told those guys that day, let's shoot six or eight does. And we only got two, but that wasn't because there wasn't some other shooting done.

And those left. I mean, yeah, I have all the venison I want all the time. That's what I'm saying. In simplified terms, you might look at it. When I was growing up, you'd sit there and see a bazillion does praying that you'd see a buck. Any buck anyone saw, they'd kill. Another way of looking at it, I mean to the point where you'd have

20 does for every buck running around. Another way of looking at it would be shoot does, let a lot of those small bucks walk. You're still filling your freezer. After a couple years, I mean, this is grossly simplified, but after a couple years, you might be that you're still shooting does

and putting meat in the freezer. And now and then, bam, you shoot a buck that's like the old days. A buck that just got old. That was allowed to reach maturity. A three or four year old dominant buck. Yeah, and the interesting thing to me is that

the buck that I shot on Friday of last year that measures a nine pointer, measures about 150 inches was aged by an expert at two and a half years. And when I looked at the teeth and knowing what I know about it, I said, yeah, I can't disagree with you.

So what's happening there? Well, maybe genetic selection, but also, well, I think that's a part of it, but I think there's a herd health component. I meant to tell you this earlier that I talked with Keith Warnicke, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, who's one of the big game managers. In fact, I think he's the head of it for DNR.

And we were talking, I was talking with him about that. And he was explaining to me that statistics show that especially in southwest Wisconsin, that the average size of the buck increases, bucks taken increases dramatically with the number of does taken in the same area. Yeah. It makes sense to me. We had a bit of an infamous character i don't like to speak ill of the dead but a bit of an infamous character who was uh uh lives south of us here

that's the only people i like to speak ill of is the dead because you don't got to worry all right well don't worry about him coming back at you yeah well anyway yeah his name is randy hanko and the guy that i grew up with and And as I said, he was a bit of an infamous character. But he owned the farm just to the south of us here and got a bunch of egg tags. And he shot 21. Crop damage tags. Crop damage tags, yeah, egg tags. Thank you.

He shot 21 deer, antlerless deer, one winter. And the next year is when that top row over there, which is the 135, 140 inch deer started showing up. And I told that to Keith last night and he goes, that's what we're seeing. And I believe, I mean, so he has the, the, the data, the scientific data that shows that I'm telling you, I've got the anecdotal stories that that's what happened here too. So, you know, I believe that. And I believe that in my situation in this surrounding area, there's a road on the backside of the farm.

It's about three miles long. You can take a, it's a town road, and you can take that drive in the late winter or the early spring in the evening and see 100 deer. And that's just too many deer. And those aren't all living on my farm. I mean, they're living all over the place, you know. But too many, like define what you mean too many.

Because here's the thing I often catch myself saying. Not catch myself saying. Here's the thing I purposefully say now and then. Someone talks about like, oh, deer are overpopulated i'd like from whose perspective car insurance companies sure overpopulated agricultural interests sure overpopulated car insurance they don't want to pay out premiums to people who are getting deer yeah busting their car up on deer ag interest because they're losing crop damage or insurers who are insuring crops. Someone's paying.

So I'd be like, from my perspective, how can I say deer overpopulate? In fact, there is a thing, from a hunter's perspective, there is such a thing as overpopulation. We touched on this earlier. But it just has to do with forest quality.

It has to do with other species right you know like explain a little bit that like and i want to get to talk about the state we got too much to talk about i want to talk with the standard but talk a little bit about like your work trying to bring back certain native trees on your property and how that ties into like rough grouse how that ties into forest health sure white tails turkeys all that bs so uh our woods here is predominantly uh the hardwoods but our predominant species are red and red and white oak and you have seen the popple stands out there as well or aspen stands uh their shag bark hickory and a few others but in the driftless area the biggest component of the woods that we are in danger of losing is the red and white oak because we don't have the fires and

some of the things that brought that on years ago so as a part of our management plan of our woods we're cutting in a shelter what's called a shelterwood harvest it's a particular method of of managing the woods. Up in our big woods, we're cutting the trees that were little trees when my great-grandfather bought this place. I want to interrupt and say, Doug, besides doing land management on your own land, as a profession, Doug does land management. That's right. So this isn't just, he says anecdotal, but I just want you, the audience, to realize that Doug is a very studied, a professional land manager.

So take, as he's talking, keep that in mind. This isn't just some dude. Making that shit up. He's talking about what he's seen on his 100 acres. He's downselling, he's downselling what his role in this and his background in this well but i've also i rely greatly on um foresters and uh ecologists and and you know i i think the thing that i know more than anything is is to be able to take information from different people and understand it but anyway yeah red oak's going to shit red oak's going yeah we're losing red oak well so deer hunters and turkey hunters know that that uh deer love white oak

acorns and they love to browse on red oak seedlings so uh we did a planting up on a 14 acres up here behind the buildings where we planted and it was a crp planting every other row red red oak white pine and the idea was that the white pine would train, red oak, white pine. And the idea was that the white pine would train the red oak to grow tall and straight and become quality hardwood. Well, what happened... For competition for sunlight. Yeah, for competition for sunlight.

And it would, you know, train them. And so what ended up happening is we created almost the perfect scenario for white-tailed deer. We've got... They bed and feed in the same spot. And the oak trees are in a row that they're just walking down like oh there's a lollipop there's a lollipop there's a lollipop and and and so we had these little bushes up there so it failed we planted uh 600 oaks to the acre i think and 600 or maybe it was a thousand oaks the acre and a thousand pines to the acre um up where we're doing that cut up on

top, up in the big woods, the shelterwood harvest, which is a natural regeneration, reseeding. And there's some techniques involved with that. We have places up there that we have 10,000 seedlings per acre. I mean, it's a carpet of them in the fall up there. So, you know, the premise there is that, well, even with deer population and all of that, enough of them are going to survive to get up to that point where they're going to be above the browse line of the deer. But along with that is that we need to shoot a lot of deer to, you know, to discourage them or to keep monitor, which is a part of why I bring other people in, and I'm always encouraging people to shoot does or young bucks. Yeah. When I, like I was out here on a couple of years ago and you had kind of a number in your head of what you were hoping to see just trail cam images and other things, what you're

hoping to see come off in does. Yeah. I said it doesn't. Specifically for trying to get some red oaks to get big enough to grow up. And, uh, we were, everything was, uh, all our cropland was in, uh, production at that time. So, um, it's now in CRP. Um, and so, you know, it's a really, it's, you know, sort of a constant balance of, uh, science and feel and art. Um, but that, you know, that's a big part of what's driving me. So from a, from a deer hunting perspective, of course I want good hunting. And of course I want

to see a certain amount of deer, but I also want to balance that ecosystem and balance the, you know, I want to grow those oaks a hundred years from now, this family, this farm is going to be in my family. And a hundred years from now, those oaks that are up there now that we're cutting are going to be replaced if we do this correctly by the seedlings that are 10,000 to the acre up there. And a hundred years from now, there'll be deer and turkeys eating acorns. Deer and turkeys and there'll be 50 or 60 of those trees left, the best ones. Yeah. And so that's a part of my management strategy. So when I say there are too many deer, that's what my perspective is on it.

I know hunters and I know, I have a couple of clients that all they want is more deer. And you know, the truth is they don't have the deer that we have. I mean, yeah, I go with, I understand their feeling that, yeah, I want to see more deer. Well, it's because they don't see that many. You know, maybe like Giannis is talking about where he's at up there. And so we do things that we can, you know, to encourage that. But the cool thing to me about good forest management and good woodland management, I like to call it woods rather than forest,

is that it really is compatible with good wildlife habitat. Turkey hunting. I mean, it's just beautiful up there. Squirrel hunting is still great up there. When you, you know, you open up those clear cuts and there's a lot of brush, there's rabbits in there. You clear cut those aspen stands and we didn't i hadn't seen a rough grouse or heard a rough grouse here for years and in 2001 when we did the first couple of clear cuts that we did of aspen two years later we heard the john deere tractor up there you know

that rough grouse man i love that noise yeah i always think there's some guy trying to get his lawnmower started oh nope it's a grouse Well, so the interesting thing to me, I was having a conversation with one of the wildlife biology students last night. You know, the Wild Turkey Federation, Pheasants Forever, Trout Unlimited. Those are the three that I can think of. What's the number one thing all of those organizations do? Habitat. Habitat. Habitat. White tails live anywhere.

Yeah. Those other species have to have habitat, a specific kind of habitat. And, you know, Pheasants Forever says, build it and they will come. Yeah. And I don't care that much about pheasants. I would, if there was a way to, I wish I could stock grouse.

I mean, it's just not, you know, rough grouse, it's not possible. So the thing that I can do is to try to do things about the, in the habitat. And it's good forest management. And quite honestly, it's good economic forest management too. We took that popple off at, you know, 50 or 60 years and we were getting nice pulpwood out of it.

We were getting nice bolt logs out of it. And, oh, and woodcock is the other thing, of course, that we have go through here. And I'm working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on a plan for our bottom in there to make that less mature because the woodcock like that better. Woodcock and grouse kind of like the same habitat. So whitetails, on the other hand, hell, they'll live in your backyard.

You know? So, and so that seems to be one of the differences that was pointed out to me. I learned, not only from you last night that I learned a few things, but from talking with those folks, the wildlife biology student and then the big game manager. So those are the kinds of things that are in my mind when I'm working on this property and thinking about how we want to manage this property, but also when I'm working with my clients. Properties are unique, but the driftless area is still the driftless and most of my clients are in the driftless area so yeah all right so tell me talk about the standard for a minute so 2005 my wife and i just built that cabin up there and i just popped that little road that

comes down through that you guys walk down. And we had seen this deer. In fact, I'm pretty sure I actually shot that deer the year before. Shot him and hit him? Yeah, hit him, nicked him in the back leg. With what? With a rifle. Standard. Yeah, yeah.

I'm almost sure that he did. You know how it's easy to tell a story about the deer you killed but the ones that bother you are the ones that that you missed or that got away I know exactly what you're talking about and I'm almost sure it was that deer it was certainly that gene

big, wide, heavy it's not super tall but it's you know when it was green it was two feet inside, you know, 16 points, lots of stuff on it. And I had seen, that deer was aged at four years old. Okay. So, you know, he got there pretty quick.

He dodged a lot of bullets, man. And he got there pretty damn quick. Yeah. Anyway, that, the year before I nicked this buck that in my mind looked an awful lot like and it hit him in the in the back leg really just a horrible situation one of those shots you know i think i talked about this before um if you can put the bullet back in the gun man i would just i rarely i don't regret any shot that i didn't take but that was one of those shots that i regretted taking.

Because I should have killed him with the first shot, and then, you know, each shot after that gets more and more desperate, and I shot at that deer four times, and I should have killed him with the first shot because I had him. And then just. And I just got, I ran up over a hill. I know how stuff goes, man. So the next year, my wife and I are driving down on that little road

in this little beater Jeep that I had, and this deer gets up out of this brush alongside that road and just lumbers into the woods. And I went, and my wife, who doesn't get excited about deer, she goes, oh, my God. Look at the size of that thing. And she's all excited about it. And, you know, I'm like, I mean, I'm just like,

I couldn't even talk because it's going away. Maybe a two foot wide white tail going away from you looks like a moose, you know? And it's going away from me going down this hill. We get down to the buildings and down here to the farm and we're doing a couple of things. And I kind of came up with this idea that, well, you know, I think that's where he lives. That's where he beds. So I got the old tractor

out and put the brush hog on and took a ladder stand and a hanger, put that back there and I just drove back in the valley. Nothing happening here. Just a guy out doing a little brush hogging. You know, so I took a little sweep through the brush and the stuff that was back there, clearing the little trail, got near this tree that's, oh, 40 yards from where that bedding area was, left the brush hog running, left the tractor running, put it in neutral, got out, strapped that thing to this elm tree that is, you know, maybe 18 inches in diameter, strapped that thing to it. And I'm kind of a big guy. It was probably not it's not a big enough tree. Got that, uh, hanger up there in the tree, got back down, got back in the tractor and

drove like nothing happened in here. We're just, you know, brush hogging. Two weeks later, uh, we had an early, uh, earn a buck, uh, hunt, but you could kill a buck if you had a doe tag, which I did have. And sure enough, I get up in that stand, and I'm holding on to a limb, got my rifle in my other hand, I'm holding on to a limb. I'm in that stand 15 minutes. Doe comes up out of the bottom, and I hear, and this brush comes around the corner and this is antlers. He walked up and this is the end of October and he walks up out of that bottom, 35 yards, brings his head up, shot him right in the chest, went over backwards.

I mean, just like I planned it, it happened and- You patterned him. It was just, it was crazy. So my dad was still hunting at the time and and so that was 2005 10 years ago and my nephew sam who uh hunts with us and and great kid great hunter very good hunter um on the radio goes uncle duck yeah Did you shoot? Yeah. Because they're off a ways. And so I can, he's relaying that to my father who doesn't hear very well. Relay all this information. He goes, grandpa wants to know how big it is. Cause he knew I wouldn't have pulled the trigger unless, and I just told him, Sam,

he isn't going to believe it. And I mean, that was, I mean, it was, and the jump went from 135 inches to, you know, 192 inches. And that's a, that's a leap. There's not a buck hunter in this country, in the world, that wouldn't want to have that deer on his wall. So talk about, we're running out of time. We're running out into our self-imposed time limit but talk about um the what happened with the taxidermist and stuff like that so

my dad has this little white chevy s10 pickup that he still has and uh so this is the end of october it's kind of a warm day we hang the thing up the, so I didn't get a whole lot of pictures of it. You see the one there was hanging up in the shed and I call it, I never had a deer mounted before. So I call this taxidermist over in Bear Valley and I kind of described, he says, well, how big is it? And I was like, well, I didn't measure it or anything. I said, I have a size 13 shoe

and I can put two of them inside the horns. He goes, so you're going to want to get that thing over here because it's warm and the skin will start to, I don't know, he's telling me all this stuff. I'm like, okay. So we dropped that thing in the back of dad's S10 pickup. Now it looks like, you know, it's a big deer, but now it looks like a moose laying in there. By the time we get over to Bear Valley, we got cars behind us, you know, the lights on it. We pull in and this guy mounts a lot of deer. And we pull in, I walk up to Bill and I said, so, hey, I'm the guy who called about the, he goes, oh, well, let's go and take a look at it.

And there's trucks lined up, you know, guys are going to back in and they're going to unload them and they, they're, because they're working on, you know, he's got a whole assembly line. They're getting the skin off them and everything. He down there takes one look at it turns around says get all these other trucks the hell out of the way we're backing that one up in here right now so we back it up in there and of course they've got a a rig that they use to pull the skin off to the head and uh a guy old guy there stands there and looks at me and says, you know, if I killed that deer, I'd get that whole damn thing mounted. And I got a place to put it. So, so they, you know, they, they get it scun and, and take it in.

The guy starts working on the head. And so a bunch of dudes standing around, you know, and I don't, I only know a couple of these guys, but everybody starts shouting out numbers and throwing, and there are guys writing it down and throwing five bucks into a hat, guessing how many inches it is. Guys are like, 175. Oh, you're full of shit. That's way bigger than 175. And the other one writes it down. Nobody guessed 200.

And I said, okay, I'll say 200. Dude was right on the, the green scored it at 192. Dude hit it right on the head. Oh, did he? Yeah. I don't know what he won, but it was a pile of money. But that was quite a night. It was quite a show.

Nice buck next year. Yeah. He might have been a dead buck next year. Well, he was a dead buck next year. No, but I mean, he's old. He was getting up there. Yeah, he was a four-year-old deerold deer. What would he have been like at five? Well, I don't know. These five-year-old deer, they start getting kind of rare.

He would have kept getting bigger, right? Yeah, I certainly think so. We were wondering that before. How old could a deer get around here if it didn't get hit by a car or shot or whatever? Eight or nine, I think, is probably the limit of it. Oh, go ahead. Personally, once that happened, that's when I said, well, okay, so the rule about the next buck having to be bigger than the one you shot this year, that changes now. So, you know, so otherwise I would have never shot,

probably shoot another deer in the rest of my life on this place. You want to know what a good podcast host I am? I don't even give a shit about big white tails. I know you don't. I want to kill a big, the only thing I want to kill a big giant one of is mule deer. Well, I find it remarkable. Did you know I might have just shot a boon or muskox? I didn't know that.

I'm not sure yet, but I might have got a boon or muskox. Huh. The coveted boon and crocket muskox. No, but here's the thing. Doug and I have argued. I want to wrap her up. All right. I want to do my concluding thoughts. Doug and I have argued. I want to wrap her up. All right. I want to do my concluding thoughts.

Doug and I have argued about this endlessly because I've had the fortune, the good fortune of, I've never shot anything on this place, I don't think. You haven't. I haven't even shot a turkey out here. No, you have not. I don't shoot anything on Doug's property. But Doug. You haven't even shot a rabbit on this property. Yes, I have. No, you have not. I don't shoot anything on Doug's property. But Doug... You haven't even shot a rabbit on this property. Yes, I have. No.

Those rabbits were up on the Schmitt's place. What about those mallards? That was on my cousin's place. Yeah, every guy within 30 miles of here is a durin. Doug hasn't even met a lot of his cousins. So, it was on a durin place, right? Where the mallards were. Yeah, and the Schmitt place was lot of his cousins. So it was on a Durant place, right? Where the Mallards were.

Yeah. Yeah. And the Schmidt place was that big rabbit place. So, but I had where I took a couple first, not first, second time hunters out on Doug's place. And Doug has this thing like when people come out to Hunter's place, Doug shows you the top shelf deer. And Doug says, if you're going to shoot a buck on my property, have it be that he'll

fit in. He would fit in with those bucks. So it's not like he doesn't tell you like, oh, it's got to be blank inches or it's got to be out of the ears he says it should have its home in this in this collection of bucks is what we're trying to do here however you're gracious enough where you say that people who are making their first visit to the farm if you see a buck and you're excited about getting that buck and that for you is like your benchmark, like that's what you want, go ahead.

The second time you come out, screw you. Yeah. You got to shoot off the top shelf. As I told the neighbor kid the other day, or last year, I should say, I'm sorry. No. But I'll say, we have, like, I've played devil's advocate with you a lot about the thing about, like, meat hunting or just shooting bucks, like, not caring about the antlers. Yeah.

And I would say that over the years that I've been friends with you, you have enlightened me and moved me in the direction of when it comes to whitetails that, like we were talking about Aldo Leopold said last night. Yeah. That a hunter is like a forester. When you pick a tree and strike it with your axe, you're making your mark on the landscape. Right? And I've come to see through you about managing white tails that

they're not contradictory ideas that managing for opportunity and meat harvest is not incompatible with managing for mature bucks but we have thought about this a lot and seeing what's happening out here and sort of the good times and fun that happened out here for mature bucks. But we have thought about this a lot.

And seeing what's happened out here and sort of the good times and fun that happened out here has been educational for me. And I've taken that and explained that to a lot of other people. Because I just haven't really been... I moved out west, you know, as soon as I could. And I got out of the world of whitetails a little bit. And it's just been an interesting, sort of my lens back into whitetail culture

has been here and it's been very informative. That's my concluding thought. But I've kicked and screamed through these discussions. But I do see what you're doing and I see what you're after. And I think that people need to make sense of it. And people who are just getting into hunting

because they want to harvest their own food and stuff, they might be like, oh yeah, trophy hunters, blah, blah, blah. I think you need to take some time and read up on this stuff because it's not as simple as you might think it is. Deer. Long-term deer management, quality hunting now, quality hunting for your kids, quality hunting for your grandkids without those 10 year, 20 year gaps where it sucks isn't just

it just doesn't happen on its own. Thought, science, and restraint play into that stuff. That's my concluding thoughts. Yanni? Big antlers are magical. And it's so easy to demonize them. And oftentimes I think the whole trophy hunter thing is demonized now. People want to do that and make it a bad thing but like getting all those

the community together around your truck to look at those antlers there's community going on there and it's special you know it's a good thing to have that to have everybody come around and talk about it and being excited about it and i don't know whatever turned me on to being excited about big antlers obviously media has something to do with it but helen show a recent uh meat eater turned you know our our associate is now a hunter killed her first elk um she was asking me about antlers didn't really get it wasn't really excited about it shot her elk was at my house we're butchering up her elk and we happen to be out in the garage and there's an elk head on one wall and a mule deer on another wall. She got to looking at them, asked up a couple questions.

I answered them an hour later. She's like, can we take one of those down, you know, so I can hold it and feel it and look at it. And she kind of admires it and whatever. And by the time she left that evening, she's like, I kind of want to shoot a buck, you know? Like there's something special about that.

What is it? I don't know, but they're magical. Can I have a second concluding thought? That's my concluding thought. I want a second one. The bucks we're talking about and the standard and stuff, we're not talking about some bucks that are raised behind a fence and they bring in some jar of semen and inseminate a bunch

of does and then you go down and buy them at a deer sale. These are real bucks. They sure are. They get run over by cars, shot at, surviving. They're real damn deer. Like genuine real

wild bucks. They're gorgeous. They really are. And I'll tell you something, and I'll try to make it part of my concluding thought. It's got to be a concluding thought. I get two just because it's my podcast. All right.

The standard within a one-mile radius of here since 2005, there have been at least three bucks bigger than that one killed here within a mile of this place. Is that right? One-mile radius, yeah. Wow. Yeah. I mean, bigger horns.

There are more inches of horns, maybe not as massive or whatever, but more inches in the way they score them. Thanks once again for putting into words in a way that I struggle with. That's one of my favorite things about Steve Rinello. It is, you know, deer hunting is a part of what we're trying to do with our property. And I think it should be a part of, uh, the overall view of an area. I think it's a big part of the future. It's been a part of the past and it's certainly part of the present. It's going to be a big part of the future of this area hunting in general. And it's really economically, I think is going to be a big part of this area. And I love the Driftless area.

I love the Cazenovia area, Westford Township, Richland County, Baraboo River, Willow Creek. And I just really appreciate that we've been able to bring some attention to it and have a lot of fun while we're doing that. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. And Doug's cohort's got a turkey tag still. So tomorrow,

gonna be up bright and early. Now, you guys, I think, had to sleep in. I didn't get to kill this morning, so I get to go out again with Ty. Well, I'm gonna go out and sit against a tree up in the brush. You are? Yeah.

I'm not even gonna bring a call. I was just Googling. Oh, I'm going to go out and sit against a tree up in the brush. I'm not even going to bring a call. I'm just observing. Alright, thanks for tuning in to the Meteor Podcast. Oh, a couple things. Go to Yanni's t-shirt website. Hunt2Eat.com, buy a Hunt2Eat t-shirt.

If you're single, that'll solve your problems when you got one of those t-shirts on. Because the ladies are going to look at you and they're going to be like, that man fills the freezer. That man brings home the bacon. 24 bucks. He's always out of stock, but he's stocking up, right? Yep. Tell them the website.

www.hunt2eat.com Not numeral. Hunt T-O H-U-N-T-T-O-E-A-T Yep. Buy one of Yanni's t-shirts. Very important. Doug Duren, Lone Oak Interests. That's right. If you got a chunk of ground and you want to talk to someone,

he doesn't bill you on the initial phone call call Doug Dern talk about land, what not you'll be shooting giant bucks pretty soon Meat Eater the TV show not free well it is free if you got TV if you don't have TV

meateater.vhx.tv download and stream Meat Eater all night and all day. Thanks for joining us. Take care.