The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 029

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

Paducah, Kentucky. Steven Rinella and Janis Putelis talk with Kevin Murphy, a small-game aficionado. Subjects discussed: shotguns vs rimfires for squirrel hunting; chasing swamp rabbits; training up a squirrel dog; a toothpick trick for extracting fur or feathers that were dragged into the meat by a shotgun pellet; Butchey Badtoe, the squirrel head eating cur; coulees, guts, hollows, and other names for drainages; four types of squirrels; rabbit drives and how to pick your shooting lanes; squirrel broth dumplings and other methods of cooking squirrel; and squirrel hunting with Daniel Boone. 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 in Paducah, Kentucky.

How far out of Paducah? About six miles. We're at the homestead of the gentleman who just clarified our distance from Paducah, Kevin Murphy. Lives here not far from what river's down there? The Clarks River.

There's so many rivers around here, you can't keep them all straight. Lives down from the Clarks River. He's got horses, 16 hunting dogs, a garage that I gave an organization grade of. 16 hunting dogs. A garage that I gave an organization grade

of, I believe, a D+. You're very generous, Steve. A D+. He would have gotten an F, but it was at least still standing in there. The dogs Kevin owns are small game dogs.

And we just spent three or four. We just spent four days in and around western Kentucky hunting for a variety of small game with dogs, we hunted squirrels. We hunted eastern cottontails. And today, for the first time ever in my life, we hunted swamp rabbits, which is the largest of the cottontail family, and they are giants. Five pounders? All the rabbits today, there's no doubt they would average over five pounds. And you've weighed a lot of them.

Last year, we weighed 12 rabbits at the same location, and they all averaged above five pounds. The smallest one was four and a half. The larger one topped just a little bit above six pounds with a digital turkey scale. So it wasn't digital turkey scale. So it wasn't a bathroom scale. It wasn't tabletop.

It was a digital turkey scale. You know, my old man always would say that he weighed – Yanni, are we boring you? No, not at all. I'm very interested in this book, though. I thought it might come into play later in the podcast. That's all. I'm just doing a little research. Okay, good. I was just curious why you're reading the book during the thing.

Kevin, I want to talk about squirrels first because that's what we came down here for. Years ago, I was in St. Louis. We were trying to think of the tonight when we were eating dinner probably three years ago. It would be three and a half. It would be four years this coming April. I'm pretty sure. I was in St. Louis at the, I was doing a booth appearance

at the NRA convention. And I think I was there, I think I was there for the network, I think. Sportsman Channel. And I got to talking. And you know, when you're doing that, I meet all kinds of cool people and we talk a lot about stuff.

But Kevin, we met and and got talking about squirrels and i just sensed a tremendous amount of passion for squirrel hunting and not only that but i could tell that you have a that you have a very uh uh almost scientific approach to squirrels. I'm used to seeing that level of detail and appreciation for the history and the management and what's going on seasonally. I'm used to seeing it with turkey guys. I'm used to seeing it with deer guys, elk guys. You get like sheep fanatics but you seldom meet someone who

is a lifetime student of small game there's a few of us around there's there's a brotherhood of us but they're very few yeah well here there's a ton of them there's a lot of local boys that you know we liked our dogs and guns and horses and being outside and whether squirrel you know any kind of small game but the squirrel we kind of some squirrel fanatics here but what was interesting we were talking about all this so you were born and raised here yes just right at the right in the vicinity yes and what was interesting is you said it's cold times to me over the last days we've been hanging out hunting together there was no option but to hunt like when you were a kid there's no option but to hunt small game that was it that was what we you know you join us you couldn't wait till you got your first

you know bb gun started with a bb gun and you were after you know the barn rats the sparrows you know everything nothing was pretty much off limit when you're a kid there yeah and you go you go from bb gun to 22 and the rites of passage was to go out and take a 22 or a shotgun on your first squirrel hunt and get your first squirrel you know that was the the first level of hunting there where you take something with the farm is pretty much a squirrel uh traditionally in kentucky uh squirrel season comes in the third saturday in august and everybody hit the squirrel woods and then they but it was mainly mostly steel hunters and uh still hunting yes still not not hound hunting not hound hunting there not hound hunting and uh i can remember i was probably eight nine ten old. My dad was a big bird hunter.

Even back then, the birds were getting just a little bit thinner, and he decided that he had a cousin that he'd squirrel hunted all the time with when he was a kid growing up, and he took a German 8-millimeter Mauser. I think he gave about $20, $30, $40 for it back then and traded it to his cousin for a crossed up hound squirrel dog and so that pretty much started it was a hound type it would bark on track and go around it's some kind of crossed up hound you know it didn't have any distinguishing marks about it just an old red brown looking hound you know i'm trying to remember from 50 years ago there's not any

pictures of it her Her name was Lady. And we would go out hunting. My dad would be the rifleman, and for some reason, he had me to be the shotgun with a little H&R 20-gauge full choke that shot like a rifle. Yeah. And that's where I started my career. And like I said, I've never looked back and met people all over the southeast, lifelong friends that 25, 30 years I've been hunting with. Yeah, and at the time, there was no deer and no turkeys. They were not like really huntable numbers. You're correct.

Small game was king. People were rabbit hunting. We did have quail in huntable numbers and squirrels. And that's what we all pretty much hunted around here. What's interesting about that is, you know, we've met so many people this week through Kevin, and especially Danny, whose property we hunted on today. You know, he was probably the third person this week that I talked to personally that said, I can remember when I saw my first deer.

Really? You know what I mean? Kevin said he remembers seeing his first turkey track yeah i can take you to a spot in the road right now where i saw my first turkey track yeah and that's like a generational thing that you know people that we our peers like we all just grew up with that stuff really yeah deer turkeys big game hunting opportunities yeah but you think about it, like being born in Michigan. Like I grew up, guys, you could hunt deer. There was turkey around us, but not a meat. Now it's great turkey hunting. Like after I moved away and left home, my dad started killing turkeys in a mile or two of our house every year.

You could hunt bears to the north of us. You could put in for an elk tag to the north of us. All in that state. Now, had you rolled the clock back 50, 60, 70 years, it was a very different picture. But then my old man, they used to hunt small game all the time. They were real serious about hunting cottontail rabbits. But it's just different.

But, you know, you mentioned that thing, like, you having a 22-year-old man having a shotgun. I want to talk about that, like, your take-no-prisoners approach to squirrel hunting. Right. When you go out with a dog, you know, somebody in the party needs to take a shotgun, you know. We try to kill the majority of them with the rifles but if we have one that's timber in there you know we're going to shoot we're not going to go up there i'm you know very rarely will i let anybody shoot a sitting squirrel with a shotgun i mean you're going that's not when you've got a 22 rifle i mean if that's the only means that you have to

take it then that's good to do it that way but there's no sense to it you know we get into to utilizing that game meat we don't want you know a squirrel shot up with a shotgun they're as i've showed you guys the the tail cleaning method of cleaning the squirrel if you've got a nice headshot squirrel it comes right out and the meat is just pristine oh it's beautiful man and uh yeah and i'll point out kevin's like super serious about small game cookery and you've eaten i mean thousands of squirrels yes yes when i got when i got into squirrel hunting squirrel home is a big deal for us it was in michigan september 15th open day of squirrel season so later and you guys got started and we got on to me and our brothers we got on to

shotguns because we wanted to go out and get brothers, we got on to shotguns. Because we wanted to go out and get a bunch of stuff. And when you're hunting, like I always divide squirrel hunting into leaves on, leaves off. Leaves on squirrel hunting when the deciduous trees are still carrying their leaves. It's a listening game as much as anything. Where you're out and you just hear them up in the treetops and we get under them and a lot of times like you can't see them and they can't see you quite as good you get under them and you get them moving through the treetops and we blast them with shotguns and they get full of pellets sometimes pretty bad depending um you know

our dad he would never would shoot squirrels with a shotgun. You know, I remember he would use a.22, and he insisted, like,.22 to the head because of the meat damage thing. And he hated picking shot. He didn't like the way the shot carried fur into the meat. All that junk. A good trick for that, just if you're listening, if you do shoot something, birds, whatever, small game, and you get where the pellet carries fur into the meat or feathers into the

meat take it you ever do that take a toothpick no i've never used man you take a toothpick and poke it into the hole and twist it all the fur all the feathers collect around that toothpick and you pull it out it's just clean yeah remember that it'll look dark like something because the meat on us you know light meat on rabbits and squirrels it'll look dark and you don't realize because that pellet drug a little bit of think fur in there and even if it passes through like if the pellet passes through it'll leave all that fur and feather in there but you take a toothpick stick it in and twirl it pulls right out yeah it's slick it's slick, I now, I think you said the same thing. I would rather have one squirrel shot to the head of the.22 than three squirrels that got shotgunned.

Oh, yes. Because it's so clean and nice that way. I agree with you 100%. You don't have to struggle when you're using the tail cleaning method. You can clean that that one squirrel just in a flash be done with it or if it's shotgun there you it'll pull in two sometimes you got the gut squirting out of the thing yeah and it just it's just you know it just doesn't look that good when you get done with the thing there you gotta go beautiful when it's otherwise so uh how how does like it put it to

me in in from from however you'd like to discuss it how does squirrel hunting with dogs differ i can see that it's way more effective than still hunting for squirrels but just explain the process of squirrel hunting with dogs, what kind of dogs, what the dogs' responsibilities are, kind of how you trained up your dogs and what you expect from your dogs when you're hunting squirrels. Okay. You know, any kind of dog can make a squirrel dog.

And people say, well, I've got a squirrel dog and people say well i've got a squirrel dog but a squirrel dog to me is a dog that can use his nose his ears his eyes to tree a squirrel there's a lot of dogs out there they can only just use their eyes they have to see it before they bark at it and tree it or they have to hear it and then see it before they're there. Or then some of them, maybe the hound variety, can only use their smell to go in there. But if you've got a top-notch, what I classify as a squirrel dog, you know there's dogs that can three squirrels, and you can kill a squirrel with it, and then there's squirrel dogs.

And a squirrel dog has these three. It has scenting ability, hearing ability, and visual location there. Those three things. Let me interrupt you real quick. I'll probably interrupt you a whole bunch, so I'm not going to apologize every time. But when he's saying hearing, squirrels bark. Yes. So there's that noise they'll make.

They'll make like a ch-ch-ch-ch, you know. But then what he's mainly talking about hearing is nails on bark. Nails on bark, scuffling through the leaves. That's a sure sign giveaway that someone can hear that from a long ways. Yeah. So they're not necessarily waiting to hear him do a squirrel noise, but he'll just decipher the sound of one running up a tree, the sound of one going through the woods. And he'll bay that noise. You know, and it may be something else running through the leaves or something. But he goes down there and a good squirrel dog goes in there and says,

well, this was maybe a deer running through the woods or something or some other off game whatever there. And he'll come back. And your dog don't run deer. You know, my terminology of running a deer is when they hit a deer and they run off and they don't come back for an hour or two. Occasionally, you know, we will bounce a deer there. Maybe we got some young dogs, whatever.

But predominantly, we have no, I have no trouble with our dogs running a deer whatsoever. You know, just to jump away from squirrels for a minute, I'll tell you something I saw today. When we were running swamp rabbits, not with your squirrel dogs, but with your rabbit beagles, I saw those dogs trail into a thicket on a rabbit's trail. Trail into a thicket. A bunch of deer went bounding out the other direction. And I thought for sure all those dogs would go off in that direction too. But they didn't.

They didn't care. They stayed right on and came out the other side of the thicket still on the rabbit's trail we couldn't have cared less yeah yeah we you know the electric the e-collar you know some people may refer to as a shock collar you know that is one of the main tools of training dogs and most of them now have electronic buzzer and all you have to do is shock your dog one or two times. When you shock it, they hear the buzzer also. Then after that, pretty much, they hear you can, they've got a tone button on there that you can use, and once you tone those dogs a couple times, you know, they realize that they're not supposed to be running, running the deer. You

know, you may shock them once or twice and then have to tone them, and after that, we pretty much don't have to. Now, if we bring a young dog into the pack something that's around a year old less than two years old year and a half somewhere like that sometimes we have just a little bit of difficulty with them but with the e-collars we take care of that real quick and if you don't you can lose your whole pack of dogs real quick oh it's in the dog's own best interest man i don't think, like, I never understand being apologetic about something like that. A good way for a dog to get killed is to go

chasing deer. Yes. Because deer's going to keep going in a straight line. He's going to go out on roads, and a lot of guys, they see a dog running deer, the first impulse is to shoot the dog because they think it's a feral dog. It's just like dogs that run deer have less chance of getting old.

That's correct. A lot less of a chance of getting old than a dog wearing a shot collar. You know what I mean? So continue on about all that then. So like I said, you've got two types of dogs. A dog that can tree a squirrel and a squirrel dog. You know, the best thing to do when you get a young dog, it could be try, if you're going to go out shopping for a squirrel dog, look at the guy that's got it.

Look at his parents, grandparents, if they're around, whatever. Take that and say, I want to go out with these dogs. Try to get some type of dog that's got a good history of being bred to be a squirrel dog. To me, there's two categories of squirrel dogs. Maybe you could say three there if you really want to get into the hound right there. But you've got the Feist dog, which is Bobby Django. He's a small dog. What's the word you're saying?

Feist, F-I-E-S-T. And to me, that's a dog that's usually word you're saying feist f-i-e-s-t and um you know that to me that's a dog it's usually under 30 pounds there's an organization called the american tree and feist association and they have um rules and standards for dogs uh feist and it's usually like a i think a male now can be weight 30 to 28 pounds don't you know they're about i have to have to look at the regs and then could be so tall at the shoulders well that's where bobby jango is there and uh they're supposed to be dogs that you know have those abilities scenting hearing and um using their eyes and then you have a cur dog which is like butchie badtoe which he's a cur that's mixed in with a porno bird dog.

We like to do that to give the dogs. He's a cur because he's a little bigger. He's a little bigger. Cur dogs are usually above 30 pounds. How did Butchie Badtoe lose his toe? He was that way when I got him as a puppy. When I picked him out, Butchie Badtoe was supposed to be a Barbie Badtoe, supposed to be a girl dog.

I was getting ready to go on a fishing trip to Ontario to fish for some walleye, and I was at a friend of mine's house, and he had this brown and white dog that looked like a clone to Butchie there running around his yard. I said, man, I really like that dog. He said, well, so-and-so's got some more of them that he can probably get you. I said, what do you think he'd let me keep it for two to three weeks until I get back from Canada? He said, I don't know. Let's just call him up.

I said, I'd like to get a female. Because if you have a female, you can breed her to most anybody's stud dog. If you have a male dog, people are real hesitant about taking your male dog and breeding it to their field. Yeah, I can imagine. So that's where I was wanting to get some. People feel like that about their kids, too. Yes. But I went over there and picked out a dog,

and for some reason I thought he was a female, and I get him home, and after like two or three days, and I put him with him out in the yard, all of a sudden I was like, hey, I got a male dog there. You never even thought to check because the guy had handed you a female. Yeah. So, you know, and like I said, he just all of a sudden I was like, hey, I got a male dog there. You never even thought to check because the guy had handed you a female. Yeah. So, you know, like I said, he just all of a sudden looked and he looked like he had a toe that was hung up in a gate or something.

It never has given him any problems. So he just got the butchy bad toe. Instead of Barbie bad toe. Instead of Barbie bad toe. But he's got a real sense of using his nose. You saw the other day a lot of the squirrels he treed had been there probably an hour or two before around the den trees lots lots of heavy scent there and uh um or um bobby jango didn't tree that many that day there he came in after butchie had him

treed and treed with him you know he supported him there but like i said the cur dogs usually use their more more of their nose uh then then a feist and then you go into the hounds and some sometimes people take blue tick hounds or or red ticks or whatever and try to train them on squirrels or get them started on squirrels first but like i said what they'll, they'll hit a track, and they'll start barking immediately. And then they'll run that track to the tree where a feist or a curdaw, predominantly they do not bark any on track.

They might bark on a hot track or when they're chasing after a squirrel, you know, they've got him sight chasing him. They're barking, yapping at that time. But when a hound hits a track, as you've probably seen with bear dogs and lion dogs and stuff, you know, they're barking all the time when they're on the track. We haven't seen any of that with the squirrel dog. So you don't like your dog to bark until he's like, here's the tree. There's a squirrel in this tree.

Yes, that's what the squirrel dog needs to do. There's no need because all he's doing is giving that squirrel, if he's barking on the way to the tree, that's giving him a warning saying, hey, he he's not here yet now's my time to escape if the squirrel dog runs in there and trees the squirrel especially younger juvenile squirrels they'll freeze up a lot of times they'll just stay you know stay there and they wait you know they'll keep it tree till you get there or if he's barking on a track that gives a squirrel warning time to get out and say hey something is coming my way let's let's leave here yep now i'll point out when when like most of squirrel hunting well i'll sit for squirrels and i'll still hunt for squirrels but what i generally do is a combination of the two so the way i would go out with a non-dog hunter would go out for squirrels is

like on a perfect day when everything gets planned out right i would go out with a non-dog hunter would go out for squirrels is like on a perfect day when everything gets planned out right i would go out just before light because the squirrels don't move like you'll see deer before you see squirrels in the morning like deer will be active before squirrels but a lot of times squirrels will be it'll still be kind of gray you know and you'll see squirrels coming around but i'll go out in the woods and the first thing i'd like to do is just go sit somewhere just pick a great spot sit give it 15 20 minutes am i seeing anything around if i'm not um i might move a little ways might be 20 yards might be 100 yards 200 yards kind of sit and watch again move real slow just trying to keep my movement still and just hunt like that.

If I see a squirrel close, but he's just out of range, I'll sometimes wait, or I'll wait for a good opportunity to sneak up and get him. But it's quiet. You know, you don't talk and stuff like that. But hunting squirrels with the dogs, it's just like walking through the woods with your buddies. Oh, it's just a lot of camaraderie that can go on. You can tell stories, talk, whatever. You can yell.

Yeah, pretty much. Blow horns. Blow horns. The only time that you might need to be quiet just a little bit is when you're in the tree and getting ready to shoot. You've seen how the squirrels move around. If somebody's talking, you're over there getting ready to get a shot. If somebody talks right there. All of a sudden, the squirrel, I've got this perfect shot.

Now he's moved over here. And like I said, slight movement, hearing whatever there. That's the only time you have to be quiet is when you're getting ready to put the kill shot on him pretty much. The other day we went out, we met up at this cool area near here, laying between lakes. It was the Tennessee and Cumberland River, right? at this cool area near here, land between lakes, was what's the Tennessee and Cumberland River, right? Tennessee and Cumberland River. So there used to be a big isthmus between

the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. People called it land between the rivers. Like a big, what's about 170,000 acre block where the two rivers come within how many miles of each other i'm just guessing across there five miles or not even not even maybe not even that far so you got two big ass rivers that flow into the ohio and at the time they're flowing north parallel and they got this chunk of land.

Folks used to call it land between the rivers. Or between the rivers. They shortened it. Both ways. Between the rivers. Yeah, between the rivers or land between the rivers. And then for reasons of flood control and hydroelectricity and otherwise just like our great fervor to build a lot of dams in the mid-1900s. They dammed up first.

The Tennessee River. First of Tennessee. After the 30s, we had a tremendous flood here in 1937. I talked to some of the old timers. They said they could remember seeing whole houses floating down the river. I forgot. It rained for like 28 days in a row or something here. A lot of death.

A lot of destruction. Very much. Very much. I was reading this book you had. Just like unidentified children that were never identified. Found in back eddies and just devastation. Yes. Yes. They dammed the river. Yeah yeah so flood control is a big part of it inspired by that by that flood then they dammed the other river and it became instead of land between the lakes or land between

the rivers land between lakes because these are two impoundments and both these rivers are impounded before they flow into the ohio which of course goes on to flow into the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico. They had this big chunk of land. And then the federal government started a long and sometimes contentious process, I gather, of buying out people in this area. Yeah, the residents. Buying out the residents. It was very sparsely populated, but still people there. Many people sold this area. Yeah, the residents. It was very sparsely populated, but still people there.

Many people sold out willingly, were glad to go to areas that offered more opportunity, different kind of jobs, better land. Some people were very much in love with where they lived and didn't want to move. But as it went, it was turned into a wonderful

170,000-acre National Recreation Area administered by National Forest. That's one of the biggest contiguous chunks of public land anywhere in this region. Wide open. 300 miles of shoreline. 300 miles of shoreline on major rivers and reservoirs i mean it's just like a gem i'd always heard about the place but i'd never visited but it's kind of amazing i mean

it's just this giant block of land that you just would take a lifetime to to see it all thoroughly and you've done that 50 years of it so we went out here to hunt squirrels access is easy you know there's a lot of good access a lot of good rolls but there's a lot of nice big chunks of woods that don't have a road running into them but you can it's it's a really well-run spot and well thought out spot but we went out parked trucks like kind of drove down a paved road turned on a new dirt road drove down the dirt road, pulled off, cut the dogs loose. It was a foggy, heavily overcast gray day. Cut the dogs loose, and we were hunting.

You wanted to hunt more thicker stuff. Yes. Yeah, explain that thinking a little bit. Two reasons. One, we had a mass failure this year it takes about 50 pounds per acre of mass to ride the wildlife through the wintertime and we were way below that this year with a bumper crop of squirrels so what that meant was they were going to eat everything up in the woods and when it gets wintertime they're not going to have anything no mass to eat so squirrels mass just because i think mass is uh the acorns uh mainly

out there i don't think they figure the hickory nuts in it at all we had a we had a very limited amount of hickory nuts to give an example here at my house on 14 acres i've got four pecan trees a front yard several hickory trees produced nuts they ripen early first of june august traditionally when the squirrel season comes in the squirrels came in they wiped though the hickory nuts out uh the first the next thing they attacked was my pecan trees they cleaned those and we didn't have that strong a crop of them due to we had two severe winters back to back and my fruit fruit trees i've got to blueberries uh blackberries it killed the blackberry vines all the way back down to the roots. And I had very limited the year before last, I picked 14 gallons of blackberries.

I was lucky to get two gallons this year. So this is a real bad year. Real bad, real bad year for production of, of fruits and nuts for the season. Things that limited nut production in the springtime, a late frost can kill the buds of the trees there that produce the acorns. Red oaks produce acorns every two years. White oaks produce acorns every two years white oaks produce acorns every year so and you know not all the trees are lined up in cycle that doesn't mean that you know you go two years and don't have any any acorns they're all different sinks there but it takes two years

to produce a red oak acorn one year to produce a white oak acorn um getting back to where i was that they ate the hickories first. They ate the pecans. They hit the acorns. And after they hit the acorns, they went into, there was a little pine thicket. As you come down my drive, they start eating the pine cones. So, you know, they wiped out that food source here before the 1st of November. So they've got nothing to eat.

I was just talking to Jody, the squirrel hunter that went with us today he said you know earlier says you know we had all kinds of squirrels at the house we got none now he said my neighbor right down the road killed 25 squirrels out of his pear trees so you know they were out raiding other all the sources there so you know in the woods now there's not any feed so they're going to the to the thickets to get whatever weed seed, mushrooms might be growing there, digging around for grubs. Squirrels take advantage of about any kind of food source that's out there. Yeah, so rather than hunting, that was the thing I learned,

because if I was going out to look for squirrels, I wouldn't be paying, like I wouldn't, until now, I wouldn't think about where those trees were in production my assumption would just be like oh go into the big oaks because of course there's acorns but walking around we didn't see shit for acorns you didn't see if you'll remember steve anywhere where you saw turkey scratching or the deer in there we hit squirrels because it was still just a little bit of feed you know some of the trees did make some some some nut acorns but but the big the big part of the forest there's

there's just not you know we saw one or two little logs there with a another sure sign that we have squirrels in vicinity is they'll pack acorns up to logs and eat them there and you'll see the holes from the acorns we saw saw very, very little of that. Another good point you had about hunting thickets, there's a lot of vines in those thickets, and as you get on and on in the year, you get fewer and fewer squirrels. Yes.

Like squirrels, they don't have a friend in the world. Everybody's out trying to kill them and eat them. You get fewer and fewer squirrels, and you're kind of now getting into the part of the year up until early spring like when they're gonna have more where you got the diehards right now are the ones left in the woods yes and there's more security in those areas where you have some thickets and vines where they can get in there and have protection from avian predators have protection coyotes all the other stuff's trying to kill them yes it's

it's dual purpose there's a little bit of feed in there and plus protection there they feel protected you know they're out in the big woods and they're pretty much open prey for for anything they can the prey can see them from long distance can stalk them that way like i said if they're in the thickets and stuff you know they were kind of little ravines and hidden there, not great big places. So, you know, they had some pretty tight quarters. So it would be hard for, you know, the predators to get in there to see them from a distance. And like you said, the birds of prey, the owls, the hawks and stuff have a little bit more difficulty in those areas in the open forest. Yeah, and we got out and we started hunting up a,

what I would call drainage, like just small drainages. Yes. You guys call hollows. Hollows, yeah. That's a local term. I always heard that and I never knew what the hell it meant.

I thought they somehow meant like a, I don't know what, like a little low pond area. Because like a hollow, I think of like a bowl depression. But you guys call a creek bottom a hollow.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's just local. What if you didn mean you know what that means i mean just that's what you grow up here we're going to go up the hollow here and i i don't know where it came from the term of cooley cooley yes i've heard of that out west and then when i was bear hunting down in north carolina they called them bays i said where's the bay i don't see any water out there so we're going to go up there have you any of you guys ever heard that heard that term well that was the first time i've heard we're going to go over here and hunt this bay you know we call them like we had ravines ravines yeah i mean that's a western term though isn't it no no michigan but we think of it like a little bit steeper but when i went out west i discovered coolies what are you talking about coolies but yeah coolie c-o-u-l-e-e-s would be like a it's a type of all those different names for drainages if anyone's interested in

a draw a draw a draw yeah a gut callahan calls them guts go up that gut anyone interested in landscape terms there's a phenomenal book it belongs on your shelf kevin because you're a great collector of books that have uh you know buried interest arcane information and interesting bits of information that no one knows there's a book called uh by it was it was compiled by bar Lopez called Homeground. Homeland. Look it up on your phone, Yanni. I have it at home.

Homeground. Anyways, it's a glossary. It's a big book. It's a glossary of landscape terminology. But it's all built out of great passages from literature and other stuff. And you can look up any term. I guarantee you look up hollow. It'll probably be like Faulkner and other people talking about what a hollow is.

Cooley, any landscape term. Arctic, anywhere around the world. Anytime someone's saying to you like hard pan or whatever, you're like, what the hell does that mean? It's in this book. It's a good book. I need to get that. Yeah, it would fit right in with your stuff, man. It's beautiful. Do you find it?

I am. Home ground. 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 on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning 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 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 hand-picked by the on x 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. Well, it's neither here nor there. But's but if you do find it that'd be great so uh we pushed up this hollow and the dogs are doing we just had one that more the first morning bobby jango yes. Wind was just. Yeah, I should point out. Wind was howling. That was another reason we were staying down in the hollow is because the wind was howling. And we're trying to find a place where we can get out of the wind a little bit. Squirrels, they don't like real whipping wind. Tree tops moving around.

You can't tell what's going on. And the dogs are cutting out. How far do they cut out and they loop around like that usually if you just got a single uh dog out there bobby jango ranges anywhere from like 100 maybe to maximum 200 yards unless he at that 200 yard point hits a squirrel or something go further but usually he'll go out 100 200 yards and come back in and check on us yeah constantly yeah and you can guide his movements at first i thought we just followed the dog through the woods but the dog even though he's going all over and covering you know many many many times more ground you're covering he's always working in these circles based off your route so you're sort of suggesting to the dog what areas we ought to be hunting yes hurting him

hurting him suggesting whatever we're we're sending him in a general direction that we want to go. And he's cutting giant circles around you all the time, hunting, hunting, hunting. And you kind of forget about that. You don't forget about the dog, but he's out and sometimes you can't see him. But all of a sudden, off in the grayness of the morning, you'll all of a sudden hear him going nuts. And I don't mean nuts like squirrel food i mean nuts like going crazy barking yeah we call it train you know train the dog is train and first time it happened i was incredulous first time it happened, he runs off, starts going crazy. We kind of half jog, half walk over there, get there. He's standing against the tree, staring up into the tree,

and we look up and see there's a squirrel. Just, that's it. It's a little more complicated than that because then you've got to get the squirrel. It can be hard to find the squirrel up there. But you do, like what most squirrel hunters do is if you're working in twos it's great because when you approach the squirrel he's going to get so the trees between you and him you might not notice them do you find it home ground oh yeah um the squirrel's going to go on the back side of the tree so you can't see him.

But with two guys, one guy holds tight, gets a rest for his rifle, holds tight. The other guy goes around making some noise around the tree. The squirrel's going to respond to him by squirting back around to the side of the tree the shooter's on, and that's often the guy that gets the shot. Or the squirrel's just going to stick to where he was, and you circle and circle i use binoculars to look for him i notice you don't use binoculars to look for him you use your rifle scope to look for him right yeah yeah it's just one less thing i have to pack yeah used to i used to go in and pack lots of gear maybe a pistol and in a little hatchet on the side i don't do that anymore you just go in clean just try to go in as

as light as I possibly can. So you look around and find them, and these ones we were finding were all up in the top. Yes. Pretty common on a windy day for them to go high for some reason. I don't know if they feel secure up there or what, but I've seen it happen lots of times. Lots of times. Lots of times. People are amazed of them doing that because one of the sure easy ways to find a squirrel up there, you see their tail blowing in the wind there. It's hard for them.

The windy conditions, even though we don't like the wind, hunting the wind there, sometimes it is to our benefit because it's very difficult for the squirrels to hide their tail blowing in the wind. But they're not up there feeding when they get treated by the dog. They're going up there. They got pushed up there. And for some reason, they feel more secure up in the top of the tree. I don't know that. A squirrel would be smart to never go into limbs.

When they get in trouble is when they push up high into a tree into limbs that are thinner than they are. Yes, yes. They're silhouetted. You get this silhouette of a squirrel up there. It's pretty easy to pick out. If you were going to do squirrels a favor, you would somehow communicate to them,

never hide on a limb smaller than a man's thigh. Because they go up there and they hold still like they're hidden but you can see them from so far away up on the top of the tree now the squirrel that stays down a little bit and gets in the crotch of a tree that's a tough squirrel to find very very difficult very difficult because then you might see the tail but that doesn't do you any good i mean it helps you low keying on the head but you can't shoot the tail but probably you know one place that he can hide his tails in the crotch because he can pull that down in there and it's it's tucked in you know just like you you know they and there's that tail's not winds blowing or whatever it can't

probably blow that tail inside that you know if it's a pretty good size crotch there and crooked you know fork in the tree can't tail won't get out and flop around so but i've had them hide pretty good on me when it's like a not a or a it's a pretty solid limb you know six eight inches in diameter and the wind's not blowing and they're laying on top of it flat as a pancake yeah and they get down you know they're hiding yeah and you know what i've just picked up is just like one arm or leg. They don't have arms. Yeah, I would say that. Arms.

They do. Arms and legs. Yeah. I don't know where you got it. Leg out, front leg. But I had that. I found that on one of the ones this time. I can see two where he's just grabbing around the thing.

I didn't see him do that like I used to see him do it in Michigan of laying flat on the top of a limb. Fox squirrels are notorious for doing that around here. Gray squirrels, some people call them cat squirrels. They're a little bit more cagier than that. But the fox squirrel, I have seen them on the river bottoms just trying and not be too high off the ground. You know, maybe 15, 20 feet off the ground just laying flat on it. You know, you can just see him. He's just trying to get flat as he can on that limb.

But you do not see gray squirrels do that much around here. Now, you brought up fox squirrel and gray squirrel. So, you know, there's's always exceptions a ton of stuff so there's gonna be some guy out there listening and he's gonna be like about how what i'm saying is not true but for tree squirrels in this country in north america tree squirrels in north america i'm gonna give the what i'll call the big four. You have the eastern gray squirrel. That is a lightish gray squirrel. Now, when you see a black squirrel, you're seeing a color phase of the eastern gray squirrel. In some areas, you go in and it seems like 75%

of the gray squirrels are black. It's typically that grays outnumber blacks. In my mom's yard over my life, I've watched, but man, all the squirrels seem black now, and then they're gray back and forth. A gray-phased gray squirrel can give birth to a black-phased gray squirrel. I have heard, I don't know if it's true, that maybe in some areas it's like maybe about 25% are black phase.

Does that ring true to you? Well, you know, we don't have any black phase down here. Gray squirrels. Is that right? None. None. When I went to Wellston and Manistee for the first time and we were driving the road, and I see something solid jet black. I think it looks like a mink.

Well, I thought it was maybe a burn over place, like a stump, you know, a stob. Small tree just sticking up right there. Then I realized that was my first sighting of a black squirrel. But we do not have any black gray squirrels that I have ever seen in this part of western Kentucky. I don't think there's any. I don't know how far north you have to go to see that. But the Manistee was the first place

I had ever seen any. The southern terminus of that national forest was about a mile and a half from where I grew up. I grew up with a lot of black-faced gray squirrels. Now, continuing on to the big four. The fox squirrel.

Doesn't have as big of a range as the gray squirrel. But it extends more westward than the eastern gray squirrel. Both these squirrels are mixed up because they've been introduced to a lot of places accidentally and on purpose. So their native range is different than where they actually exist. When I was going to graduate school out in missoula montana we had squirrels all over town they weren't from there then the western gray squirrel

which is a fairly rare squirrel got rare in recent years and now like around puget sound you have eastern gray squirrels way the hell over in Puget Sound. South there, you have native western gray squirrel range. Then finally, you got your pine squirrel or red squirrel, though some people call fox squirrels red squirrels. Pine or red is a little souped up, oftentimes meat-eating, fired fired up little squirrel that kind of like almost seems like a has like a weasel's intensity and they're a northern animal more northern for tree squirrels that's the main thing now you got different phases of stuff here and there and like down in florida they got with a monkey squirrel something like that a big big-ass fox squirrel, different color?

I think on the fox squirrel there's like 10 subspecies, and of the gray squirrel I think there's six. I don't know what's what there, but when I was hunting on St. Vincent's Island in the panhandle of Florida one time, one of the funniest things I've ever seen is a gray squirrel in a palm tree. Oh, yeah. I just thought that was. He was up there, and they had a bunch of dead palm fronds on it there,

and he was up there playing around, and I was thinking, you know, there's something about that that just doesn't look right. For all my years, I've seen them either in a deciduous oak tree or, you know, deciduous tree of some kind or possibly a fir tree, whatever, but just to see a gray squirrel in a palm tree, that's like, I'm thinking Gilligan's Island with a squirrel on the top. Yeah, it's enough to make a squirrel hunter out of Jimmy Buffett, man. You know what I mean?

So why was I talking about kinds of squirrels? Oh, you're talking about how fox squirrels like to lay up on top of a branch. Now, Daniel Boone, he one time was with a fellow named John Filson. Was an explorer and writer, spent a lot of time hanging around during the frontier years. He claimed to have been out squirrel hunting with Daniel Boone. And he even specified the year. I think he might have said he was squirrel hunting with Boone

later in Boone's life, like after the Revolutionary War. Maybe even as late as in the early 1800s. Was out hunting squirrels with Boone. And described how Boone would find squirrels laid up flat,

treed squirrels laid up flat against a tree. And he would take his rifle, a muzzle-loading rifle, and rather than hitting the squirrel with a lead ball and damaging it severely, he would shoot the tree so that the ball hit the bark right up where the squirrel was plastered, and he would call it barking him. And just a jolt from the hit and the bark flying up would stun the squirrel and send it falling to the ground. The problem with Filson's story is historians later put together

that the year Filson said he was shooting squirrels with Boone, I think he said he saw it happen in Kentucky. Boone never stepped foot in Kentucky that year. So Filson might have been pulling everybody's leg or mixed up when it happened, but he was saying that boom was a big admirer of squirrel meat and that's how he hunted squirrels and when you see a squirrel hiding it's like laying against that tree i think of it every time because i always think now how that would be an exemplary piece of marksmanship to bark a squirrel like that.

It works a lot better to use rimfire cartridges and shoot them in the noggin. Yep, very much. You know, I have seen on several occasions where we have shot squirrels in the head with a.22 rifle

and it never penetrated them. Just put a skid mark on them and come down. Never penetrate the skull. Just kind of ricocheted off and do that. And kill them. And kill them, or put them unconscious. And that's when you, you know, I have heard of people picking them up, put them in their game pouch, and then come back to life and be crawling around in there.

Is that right? Yeah, so, you know, if we ever do that, skin one across the head there, then we'll wipe them on a tree there and make sure that they are dead. But I have seen that on on several occasions he's just hit a squirrel with a 22 just you burn his hair but never break the skin never be any sign of blood i only matter and stun them and be down there yeah you know not trying to do that it just it just happened that happened that way what uh have you ever like you you've never called squirrels you know you've never had tried a squirrel Trying to do that, it just happened that way. You've never called squirrels. I've never tried a squirrel call whatsoever.

I'm the type of individual I cannot sit still pretty much. So I've got to be pretty much on the move. I have done some predator calling and stuff. I could probably do the squirrel calling and get around, but I've never squirrel called. Well, when you squirrel call, you're not really trying to bring the squirrel to you. You're just trying to get one to light up, to bark. To locate. Yeah.

Or to pause him. To pause him. Okay. You'll see one, or you'll see one bouncing around, and you can't get a shot at him or any number of things and you do that and he'll squirt up a tree and position himself trying to figure out what's going on or he'll start barking too and he'll go from kind of running to he'll hear like what it sounds like his buddy doing a warning cry and then he'll get up want to join in and chat or two and let's put him up in a spot where you can get a crack at him.

So it's not like you're sitting there calling turkeys. I don't think anybody really uses it. I hear now and then of guys will do a very loud distress call with a squirrel call, almost like where you're blowing a predator call noise and then shaking the call to get that that that really fast pissed off call and they're saying early in the year when there's a lot of young squirrels around sometimes i've never seen it happen personally but people say sometimes you get it where you're just bringing squirrels down the tree coming down aggressively trying to figure out what's going on but you sure don't need to call squirrels to get the dogs right right right

you just need a good set of eyes how do you how do you train up a squirrel dog well because i'm guessing you don't do like what bird guys do of you know going out buying pen raised birds and getting them all dizzy and setting them out in the field like you're not doing that with squirrels we do something similar you know when they're pups one of the the first things we may do is uh put a squirrel tail on a like a cane fishing pole on the line and get him used to that and trailing around put it up get a squirrel dog to bark that's one of the biggest challenges a lot of dogs will run squirrels up the tree track them up right there but when they get there, they just look up. They won't bark.

And that does you no good. I mean, if he's 200 yards away, where is he? Unless you've got a GPS tracking collar on him, and who wants a silent tree dog? But get a squirrel tail and get them to bark what we call on a hang-up. We'll hang it up somewhere, or we might pick a whole squirrel off the road up, something that somebody's run over in a car, drag it around, hang it up, put it in a bush. A lot of times what I like to do and have done before is put it in a bush,

maybe tie a piece of string to that bush or small tree, and then get back and shake it, act like it's got some movement, get that dog fired up. You start there. Then the next thing you may go and trap a nuisance squirrel that maybe that's raiding somebody's bird feeder or they need to get to his fruit crop or whatever and to get rid of it and bring it show it to the dogs let it loose let it run up a small tree where the dog can see it there and that gets them fired up and gets them started now don't ever do that more than one or two times because after that it seemed like the dogs you don't gain anything either he's going to do it that first or second time if you do it the third or fourth it's kind of like you you know

we were had the discussion over shooting pin raised birds yeah once once you get a dog and in my opinion in a pin raised bird if you really want a true wild bird dog if you do that more than one or two times you're going to get that dog dependent on the the dizzy highly scented birds that come out of these coop situations there where they've got all kinds of unlimited scent on them that a natural bird probably does not have this is just kind of my personal opinion you know it's like he's living i never thought about it like that he's living this chicken coop with all this bird x-men on the floor there you know a wild bird doesn't you know doesn't live that way a quail will you know roost at night leave a quick you know do his droppings right

there then they go on they do not live in it day in and day out yeah i've known i never thought about in that way like how much smell they got but i have noticed that um dogs get like dogs that do that just can't cope with reality they can't they can't cope with what real they crowd real birds you know they think they can get a lot closer to real birds than they can like a rough grouse in the midwest don't hang out for you can't you're not going to get up and point it from six feet away no no no same same way in upper peninsula in maine or whatever you cannot get in there and get close to rouse and then just and you run pointer i want to point out yeah point out that you run pointers too i've got a setter right now.

I used to have a German war-haired pointer. But we just had a recent trip back in October up to Maine. Several of us went up there. There's one guy, a real good hunter there. He had some dogs he'd killed, thousands upon thousands of quail in a pen. He took them up there. They were totally worthless. He put them up but he thought

that he you know because those dogs you go out there turn them loose at that that that quail farm right there and they point lock up hold you know you go around them right there but they didn't have a chance up there against in hunting grouse and quails two different things anyway too so you know so that was you know the dogs didn't have a chance to begin with because they're definitely two game birds. I know I got a good friend that I grew up with that always had bird dogs. I tried to get him to go grouse hunting with us, take his bird dogs. When I say bird dogs, Bob White, quail dogs up there.

And the first thing out of his mouth was he said, Hey, said them grouse will ruin a good quail dog real quick. Why does he think that? Because, you know, where a quail will lock up, stay there, grouse you cannot crowd, and they will not stay. They will run sometime. You have to have that special dog that knows that, hey, I can. I smelled him right now at 10 feet now he's at

20 i can move up another 10 and then then then he moves up again i can move up another 10 that's i'm kind of a novice novice uh a grouse hunter but i try to look at what goes on out there and see and try to improve it there you know i try to gain as much knowledge as i possibly can just like you know but you guys tear it up up there yes well this was our second second year and you know when we did we had a very very successful one day i killed three woodcock and and three grouse over a pointing dog and that's a pretty good accomplishment i was i was trying my best to limit out and get four woodcock and four four grouse over a pointing dog and that would have been a pretty good lifetime accomplishment right there three and three i got three and three but i'm still as happy as can be we saw three woodcock today yeah oh you don't think i want to talk about

too with the dog and running dogs for squirrels early we're talking about all you run up and there's a squirrel that happens probably correct me if i'm wrong but just from my perspective from december hunting that happens 25 of the time that the squirrel is just sitting up there like oh oh, there he is. Because they got a bad habit of disappearing into nests and holes. It's not a given. When I heard that dog bark the first time he ran up and got a squirrel, I'm like, man, we're going to be done doing this in no time. But the other day we showed up and 10 of them treed into den trees.

There's no fault of the dog. The dog did his job. He's like, I can tell you 100% certainty there's no fault the dog's dog did his job he's like i could tell you 100 certainty there's a squirrel in this tree now if he went into a hole 20 feet up that's not my fault i can tell you he's in this tree so he's doing his job right but he's got no way of knowing that there's a two and a half inch diameter hole gnawed into some limb up there and this squirrel is not going to come out of there anytime soon no you know the days varied you know we turned loose you know the first one we was in a pine thicket and with all the pine cones up there it was just you know we gave it a pretty

good look of course 25 yards away another dog had a squirrel trade pretty hot and heavy we thought well you know we give this a quick look over everybody looked out there you know i couldn't see it without a big nest yeah it wasn't there was a nest up there yeah when i was a kid we'd start shooting into the nest thinking that with bb guns and whatnot we'd shoot into the nest thinking that but i mean you got just a good chance of killing the squirrel it never comes out of the nest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We used to think you'd drive them out of the nest by shooting up into there, but that's pretty silly. But on some days, you know, they're on the outside.

But here again, I'm going to go back and I talked to a friend of mine after we had that hunt today to see what he'd been doing up there. And he's been facing some of the same problems. He said the other day we made 12 den trees before we ever killed a squirrel. And I believe due to the low food sources out there, the squirrels are cagey. They're lean and mean. Everything's after them out there the squirrels are cagey they're leaning mean everything's after them out there and a lot of times when we've got lots of mass i don't like the first squirrels that we kill or come straight out of the den they're looking for food they have nothing in their belly they can run

off but you give them 30 minutes 45 minutes whatever they gorge themselves you know you've cleaned some of the squirrels where their stomach, their pouch is just pooching out. I think they get lethargic just like a human does. When we go in there and do a buffet, eat everything we've got, well, I'm just going to get up and get where the guy can't reach me

and not have to go no further. Just stay out here. I truly do believe that. You know what their stomach contents look like? My little daughter, she's three. If you give her, like, cashews and peanuts, she keeps putting them in her mouth, but she doesn't get around to swallowing them. And pretty soon she's walking around, and you can tell, like, she needs some help.

And so she'll spit it all on your hand. It looks exactly like a squirrel's stomach contents. Yeah, just a yellow pasty type deal right there. Yeah, she turns into that, but she can't like – Yeah, whenever she does that, I'm always like, man, it looks like cleaning squirrels. But so they get – you brought up another thing I thought was interesting. There's so little food out there that they're probably burning more energy going out looking for limited food reserves and that's partially keeping them around maybe not even coming out

and not venturing out far because just they're just not out right now they're taking it easy things are times are tough not a lot of grub right going back to the conversation with another fellow squirrel hunter he said yes kevin said you know pretty soon it's going to be where you go out and hunt an hour in the morning an hour and evening you get what you get take your dogs out i mean as the season as the season progresses because they're going to be you know moving less and less and less there yeah as we get it's going to get probably a little bit cooler and stuff you know right now we've still got ideal conditions what was it the day before y'all got here is 72 degrees windy that day probably got up into the what 59 60 there during that day did we get that

high on the first day no it's cold cold that day it was cold but you know we haven't got it honestly cold right like cold fingers now that the first day we hunted we killed six yes saw seven and then probably had i don't know not more than four or five hole up on us not too many that's that's probably correct another day we went out we had a bunch of them hole up and nest up and then bam bam bam killed three in a row. Yes. Three trees in a row. Well, we had a two-pack and a one. Yeah. And then went on to den up probably 10. Every bit of 10.

Yeah. Every bit of 10. Where that dog is bait up on the tree and that dog, like, no doubt in his mind that he knows what's up there, but you look and it's plain as day. Holes. Holes. You know, I think a couple of them, we saw a few little nut shavings where they'd come out and eat. And like I said, I think they just come out from the dens,

pillared around on the ground there a little bit, and come in. One of my buddies, he's got a pet squirrel that he keeps at his house there. And he'll go out and show puppies that is up high he's got a condominium squirrel condominium for it and wire cages like a hamster cage he can run up and down all over right there and that's another way you can start a lot of people in the area start dogs that way just go over and look at him and run around you know i took him a whole big like three gallons of pecans the other day that were left over from my trees from about two years ago that i didn't utilize there and he says he says right now kevin said that squirrel his house is cram pack full of corn and nuts he

said i've never seen one do like that before said it's cram packed up but he packed he packed it in that bird and that's why he like so our conversation we don't know he says i think a lot of the den trees out there that they've got a bunch of nuts and stuff hoarded up in them don't know that you know i said that's just just looking at his pet squirrel that he has that has taken his nuts that he gives them out there you know you know you may put a half a gallon at a time right there and he says you know he the shells are not there says you know they're in that they're in that house right there he's got them packed in there what gender is that squirrel he's got it's a it's a gray squirrel no male or female you know i don't know i do not know i feel like you ought to put

another one in there so they can breed we might think about someone put you in a situation like that you'd want another you know man he really ought to do that uh i had some big thought about this whole thing with uh oh i want to tell you this we were hunting deer in wisconsin not long ago and all of a sudden heard just this loud shrill shriek and a squirrel going nuts too at the same time could hear all this there's a tree maybe 18 20 feet up there's a crotch and tree with a cavity and there's a mink and a squirrel fighting outside the tree the hole the mink goes down in the hole turns around so his head's coming back out of the hole, and he's still fighting the squirrel who's trying to get into the hole. Eventually, the squirrel just says, screw it, and goes off and gets on a limb and starts barking and carrying on. And that mink, we watched up there on and off for two hours.

If he'd have come out, we'd have noticed it never came out of that tree. I think he got in there and uh ate all the ate all the young i'd say i'd say exactly what i would say happened exactly yeah he went in there and ate them probably that was the highest in my life i've ever seen a mink in a tree yeah um going back to predators in a tree i guess it was uh back this last year or two years ago there i've got some mulberry trees out here kentucky used to have what they call the spring mulberry season to hunt squirrels when the mulberry trees become ripe they have a spring squirrel we still have spring squirrel season there but i've got some mulberries here at the house, and I could hear a squirrel giving the shrill shriek sound right there. And I had a young squirrel dog around here.

I thought, well, I'll just take him down there and kind of show him. I said, something's going on there. I said, I don't know if they're breeding or what, but it's making some kind of strange noise. And went down there, and there was a snake that had a squirrel in the top of that probably 25 feet up in the top of that mulberry and was wrapped around him oh is that right putting the constriction to him there first time in my life i'd ever seen that wow that's cool it's pretty pretty neat pretty neat i tried to take a little video with my my phone but it was too far away and couldn't get get any good it looked like to

me uh probably some type of um of a rat snake prairie king snake something of that nature some kind of constrictor there's some kind of black constrictor there probably a king snake yeah 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 guys in the Great White North can 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 hand-picked by the on x 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 x club y'all i want to get into hunting the marsh rabbits swamp rabbits what kind of dog like what's your dog for that well i've got a little uh blue tick beagle beagle and also a little tricolored beagle there. You know, beagle hound. These swamp rabbits, I've always heard about them.

But they live down on, like, they're down in the low, low lands. Yes. We're hunting right on the banks. River bottoms. We're hunting the banks of the mississippi in the bottoms it's like some areas of sand mud a lot of briars and these things go down there and one of the most peculiar things about them is they uh one they're huge like you said five pounds they have latrine logs where they climb up and defecate on elevated stumps whole bunches of it up there now and then you've heard it might have something to do with

the territory territory is what i've heard before to go out and hunt them, it'd be like, I don't even know where to begin because my whole life I've hunted rabbits, we always just drive rabbits, push rabbits. So you guys get lined up, depending on how thick the cover is, 15 yards, 30 yards apart,

and you just push through good rabbit cover and you get a couple guys posted up on the opposite side and you squ push through good rabbit cover and you get a couple guys posted up on the opposite side you squirt the rabbits out and usually the guys posted up get shots as they come going by but this you kind of line up and then you guys send all these packs of beagles in there and once you kick up a rabbit the beagles start trailing it and the rabbit will go on a big loop or multiple loops and keep coming back around because he doesn't want to leave his familiar area and he keeps coming around and as you're listening to these things baying around you eventually try to get where you can head it off and in the case of the swamp rabbit the rabbit's out 100 yards ahead of

the dog all the time yes yeah so when you see the dogs coming, it might be too late. It is too late. The rabbit might already be gone. And listen, some occasions you get a rabbit that goes out there and just kind of squats down there. But I think I might have saw that a time or two today. But the majority of them. I saw it too, but always after they'd already been running it for forever.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the longest trails I saw today is they pushed the rabbit out 400 yards from us. It got out of earshot. Yes, yeah. That was curious because you had that GPS collar on that dog. And I was like, listen to it fading, fading, fading, fading.

And I was wondering like, well, how hell, like in this thick cover, how far does a dog's bark travel and when it faded out of earshot you held up four fingers to me and said like they're 400 yards out and it was a long time yet and pretty sure you hear him coming back coming back coming back we eventually killed that rabbit yes yeah yeah we had we had to push it right back into the area it's amazing to watch by that time we've kind of like almost seemed like we'd we had to move up we'd jockey in a position kind of maybe get like a half moon half circle we came up i think three times on him there before before we got that but he did push him back into the area oh yes but no one got a crack at him yeah and then he went back out and started cutting smaller circles so we had to like move our yeah like imagine he's just going like a big spiral like a traveling spiral like

a circle that moves around on a page and we're always trying to go up and get but you got to be quiet extremely quiet with a swamp rabbit extremely because if he hears it he's just going to avoid you yes yeah yeah that they'll short stop and when i had them there last year i saw that they would get up there and do those short circles and they'd be a group of people back and and i don't know if you had a chance to notice that if some even someone that whispered tried to whisper how that sound would carry that far and uh i had uh chris with me i says you know jason's coming through the weeds there but you know something crashing through there is a natural sound but the briars and a brush hitting his cordura chaps was a man-made sound and when they hear the man-made sound there, they just go other way.

I never will forget that deer hunting one time, or deer shooting. I'm not a deer hunter. I'm a deer shooter. That down at Paul's, climbed up in the tree stand and had some coveralls on. I think it got hot, and I just didn't have room for them up in the stand, and for some reason, I just threw them down on the ground. Well, I had a little pronghorn buck come up to those cover aisles and smell of them there. Oh, yeah?

Then I thought, well, I need some meat for the freezer. I said, like the last day of deer season, I'm just going to go ahead and shoot him. He looks young and timber. And as soon as I clicked, I mean mean he smelt of my coveralls but as soon as i click that i just for some reason i just did the man click on the safety instead of an easy safety but soon as that that gun clicked that deer knew that that was not a sound of the woods and ran off oh yeah and that was one of the neatest things out in the woods you know meanwhile he's snuggling up to your coveralls yeah yeah i mean he's sitting there sniffing of the coveralls i just had on that didn't really bother him but that metallic sound

did i have that conversation all the time with people where i'd be like everybody holds still you know we're gonna wear earth tones. We're going to wear camouflage. Everybody's going to hold real still. People are like, oh, yeah, but I was out one time jogging, and I had a red shirt on, and I ran right past a deer. I'm like, that's great. I'm glad that happened to you. But like I said, we're going to wear camouflage.

We're going to hold still because you just don't know. You don't know what their deal is. Every one of them's different you know the rabbit thing i found that my experience doing rabbit drives and we spent tons of time doing rabbit drives is one thing is getting a sense of how the rabbit's going to travel and then being cognizant of your shooting lanes i found beneficial today very much very much like you're always i like you're always jockeying and you were encouraged me in that direction too you're always jockeying to be like once the first spot i walked into you tell me there's no point yeah being here yeah there's you can't see anything yeah yeah because you need to see you ideally you want

to get where you're seeing 40 yards through a little lane so that when the dogs run that thing through you got a chance to look at it because it's not going to be like a long time you're going to have a narrow narrow window you know and two or three foot elevation makes a big difference you know i actually saw somebody in a deer stand today trying to see what was going on and that really and I killed a rabbit. By the name of Giannis Vitellas. Yeah. And I actually killed a cottontail the other day when Jason and I were hunting there.

I got up 12, 14 feet in the air, saw the rabbit come in there, comes by, and get him there. Everybody else on the ground, and you get advantage. And just sometimes a two or three foot standing on a stump a lot of times will give you a little bit of an edge out there. And you want your field of vision out there. You know, if there's a big tree right there in front, try to maneuver up and get in front of that tree and get a little height advantage there where you can see.

Because if you have no, if it's all thick cover, you have no chance of, you know, getting a shot and seeing what's coming out there. And it doesn't take much to hide those rabbits no no no you're talking in feet not really in yards once they get to that 15 20 foot mark all of a sudden just like the smallest little bit of briar leaf or something they stop and you're like where'd he go where'd he go i was standing next to two not gonna name any names now but two guys where i'm like, there's a rabbit coming. There's a rabbit coming. See him?

Coming right at you at 12 o'clock. And, I mean, he's just hopping along real slow, but the guys just weren't picking him up, you know. Yeah, they're hard. Out of that deer stand, that was interesting because you're right. All of a sudden I got a little elevation. I could see a rabbit at like 200 yards. And imagine you put down your three

middle fingers down on the table and i'm looking down kind of your middle finger which is like this thick but small tree you know brush kind of cover and there's two open lanes being your other two outside fingers and i sent three hunters one of them kind of is close hugging your middle finger and then the the other hunter the other two hunters are each taking those open lanes and just kind of working towards the main forest out away from me where i saw this rabbit they work through there they wait a while the dogs are doing a circle on another you know rabbit somewhere off in the distance they wait wait wait 10-15 minutes goes by no rabbit they don't kick up the rabbit they move on out of sight you know this is 200 yards away from me not 10 minutes later right down my

middle finger coming right at me through that you know rough brush here comes a swamp rabbit maybe not the same rabbit but i mean right where these three hunters had just walked through and here he comes just slipping through yeah they're super sneaky it's one of the more you know i've done all kinds of hunting it's one of the more exciting things is when those dogs get on a track and it's not exciting right away because you know it's gonna be a long ass time till they bring it back around. So when they first take off, you can just sit there BSing. Yeah, yeah.

Because there's nothing to get that excited about. But eventually they'll bark way the hell out. They get a couple hundred yards out. You'll kind of hear them come back. Then everybody will be like, okay, we better get serious. And you fan out and you get where you got a little lane, maybe two lanes where you can actually see what's going on down in the swamp. You hear those dogs coming. You know he's out ahead of them.

It is one of the most exciting hunting moments there is, man. I had a great time. I get excited out there. You hear a pack of those beagles and they go off. Then you look at your UPS and they're starting to come back and you know and then you they get louder as they come as they come hard not to get a smile on your face i spent a lot of time smiling i don't call many things cute in this world but those little buggers have just a smidgen of cuteness and they're just coming through there their tails because i asked jason about this why because they're all those tails are bleeding. Oh, yeah. And I thought, well, man, just dock them.

And he said, oh, no. I got to see those tails wagging. Oh, yeah. You get a dozen of those little dogs. They're having the best time. They're having more fun than anybody. You get a dozen of those little dogs, and they're just like little vacuums, man, and noise they make.

And they're coming through, and they all got blood coming off the end of their tails. And they are just fired up having the time of their life and it's like nothing's gonna escape their notice man it's just amazing to watch i don't know you know how adamant we are to them after we kill the rabbit is to show those dogs that we've got the rabbit because some of them keep going you know they just that's their heart they just what they're made to do is to run a rabbit and if you do not show some of them right there they keep on looking for that that rabbit out there that was another thing i enjoyed quite a bit is they'd run a rabbit and like i said the rabbit's 100 yards out ahead of the dogs you'd shoot the rabbit go over pick the rabbit up talk about the

rabbit for a couple minutes and meanwhile the whole time and eventually they run that rabbit right up to where you're standing and then they're all like hey you got it you know and you show them all the rabbit what was interesting about that is that you know speaking of like your squirrel dogs having that sighting ability those beagles they don't see that dead rabbit until their nose touches it yeah do they no no you know some of them you just kind of gotta tap them on yeah you know they're they're so intent on that track that's sent on the ground there you just gotta really get some of them you know and say hey they're here you know why get let it smack them in there to get them to do it there and then after they they get it you know we had a couple of them that are pretty intent on getting hold of the dead rabbit.

Sometimes some of them, after they see it right there, they don't care. They know it's dead there. But we got two or three in there that are being there, hanging on. You got to watch it or they're going to be stripping all the hide

and stuff off the rabbit. You know, another interesting thing I noticed is you got a dog with a butchy bad toe that when you get a squirrel, You got a dog with a butchy bad toe. When you get a squirrel, a butchy bad toe likes to eat the head right off the squirrel. He'll eat it right off. Just something that he does that he knows. 22 head shot there, and he eats it off.

Usually, nine times out of ten, he stops right there. That's all he wants is the heel. How many does he want? He may eat five or, he stops right there. And that's all he wants is the heel. How many does he want? He may eat five or six of them out there. That's incredible to me. Just chomps the head up, hiding everything. Teeth and all. Chomps it up, he just passes it out,

and he doesn't even make a weird turn when he does it. No. What do you like eating the most out of squirrels and rabbits and like swamp rabbit regular eastern cottontails you know i prefer i personally squirrels yeah the squirrel is the most mildest meat out there you know they eat the nuts all the time in there and to me it is the mildest taste of meat and I think like we've had the conversation earlier, I don't know anybody that I haven't prepared any for that didn't say, hey, this was really, really good meat.

I used to take it to, we had church potluck dinners, take it there. People would snarl the nose, finally kind of shame them into not eating some. And then after they ate it, they said, hey, this is really good. And then the next time we have a meeting or potluck or something we didn't bring, they said, why didn't you fix any squirrel this morning? So we all just didn't have time to do that. But I've converted a lot of people that thought squirrel was just a rodent or whatever out there that was not fit to eat to it's a very good source of protein.

What are some of your favorite ways? If you had to rattle off like a half dozen favorite ways to fix squirrel, what would you say? You know, chicken fried squirrel, baked squirrel in the oven is the easiest way. You know, quarter it up, put it in a cooking pan, put your favorite type of seasoning, whether it tony satchery's lemon pepper i made a whole bunch of lemon pepper one time and put a put a it was like when you know one of these great big aluminum pans to to the a good old boy function there and put lemon pepper over it with a few

tabs of butter in there low and slow in the oven 225 for about two to three hours kind of depends on your oven in the in the amount of squirrel you have about two to three hours, kind of depends on your oven and the amount of squirrel you have. The meat just falls right off the bone. I mean, you can just suck the meat right off the bone there. That is the easiest way. Squirrel and dumplings. That's the one I like.

Just to clarify, though, no liquid in that pan. No liquid. Just seasoning, a couple tablespoons of butter. Season the raw meat, put some butter in there, cover it with foil, throw it in the oven. Throw it in the oven. You're done. 225. 225. Just seasoning. A couple tablespoons of butter. Season the raw meat. Put some butter in there. Cover it with foil. Throw it in the oven. Throw it in the oven. You're done.

Two twenty-five. Two twenty-five. Three hours. Yeah, three hours there. Maybe four if you kill a bunch of two-year-old bucks. Yeah, yeah. Maybe a little bit longer, a little bit less there. Easy.

Easy, easy, easy. My favorite that you've made, and you made squirrel a bunch of ways for us over the last few days, is the dumplings your mom makes. Made, well, she does them in a squirrel broth. Yes. She'll put a – I've taken her several squirrels up there before you guys came and asked her to make me some squirrel and dumplings, which she's famous for there. She makes a broth with the squirrel meat, takes the squirrels out, picks the meat off the bones then takes the

broth makes her dumplings drops her dumplings into the boiling broth that cooks the cooks the dumplings then dumps the squirrel meat back in there oh my god and it's just like almost melts in your mouth no it's ridiculous you make squirrel chowder squirrel chowder is another another very very good uh uh recipe um kentucky burgoo burgoo uh another one of my favorites we did get to do is a squirrel on a open charcoal um really like a a coal fire over over a grill and keep them basted make up a uh a sauce of one gallon vinegar um a pound of lard uh two sticks of butter and a can of like texas peat or glass bottle texas peat or or whatever kind of your uncle frank's hot sauce frank's hot sauce mix that out and keep

those squirrels basted in that and that's oh just baste them yeah to keep them basic keep them from drying out it's a little bit takes a little bit it's a little bit of time to do that but you know you're sitting out with your guys and it's a good good way you don't drink a beer whatever sit out there and cook that and it's that is excellent that is good. I've had good luck grilling squirrel by take the squirrel and cut it into five pieces. It's got four legs in the back. Now these are whole squirrels, so I do that away. You're grilling whole.

A whole squirrel. A whole squirrel. Keep them based down. Big fox squirrel comes out really good that way too. Is that right? Yeah, and that's apple cider vinegar, not white vinegar. And you're cooking them only until they're done. Yes.

Yeah. As soon as it's done pull them off clear juices don't eat them yep you can kind of stick a fork in them and you know when it goes penetrate you know that they're they're done i've done where you take a bunch of uh garlic and thyme leaves and mash it in a mortar and pestle just pulp it then put salt in there and then olive oil and some lemon stir it up and i marinate the squirrel pieces in there but i got ahead of myself before i do that i take the squirrel and put on a cutting board all the pieces and take a meat fork like a sharp tine fork

and poke it a bunch of times all over so the marinade gets in there better then i marinate that eight hours or overnight then i do them on my grill just to done not like trying to slow cook just grill them on medium heat to done and they just get where they start to char a little bit just like if you're grilling chicken like a little bit of char on there it is very good. But you marinate it for the night. I know a friend, he had an elderly gentleman that was a friend of him. I don't know where the recipe came from, but he used to like to take a whole squirrel, he said, and keep the ribs on it, dress it out, and make a dressing and put it into the cavity and then take a needle and thread and sew it back up. Is that right?

I need to go probably see him do that sometime. But he just went wild over that. But he made some kind of dressing. Stuffed squirrel. Yeah, stuffed squirrel. Took a needle and thread, sewed it up in that cavity there, and baked them in the oven. So that sounds something that we probably ought to try sometime. Yeah, that's interesting, man.

It'd have a nice visual appeal. Yanni, concluding thoughts? If you're not hunting squirrels, you are missing out. Yeah, I think you're stupid. I think you're stupid. If you don't hunt squirrels, I think you're messed up in the head. I mean, look, nothing against Wisconsin Whitetail deer hunting, but we took Helen and Brittany out there

a couple weeks ago they had a blast deer hunting they learned a lot but their hooked on squirrel two days of squirrel hunting I mean they wanted more and more and more and more of it yeah they loved it it trains you to be a good woodsman you know when I met you you know what I think one of

my points that I said you know I said you're doing the outdoor shows out there says you know what? I think one of my points that I said, I said, you know, you're doing the outdoor shows out there. Not very many kids can go out and go on elk hunt or something out west there. Quite a few can go on deer hunt. But I said just about every kid can go out his back door and go squirrel hunting with a limited amount of equipment. Yeah, for more months out of the year than you can right right and that's probably one reason why i'm like a squirrel hunter because i can hunt you know i hunt a little bit when the leaves are on with my dogs getting them in shape

training them up it's pretty difficult you might get one out of ten but i'm out there hunting but then i've got december january and february got almost 90 days of squirrel hunting right in most of the midwest well montana there's you know you hunt them there's some places you hunt them year round right in most of midwest you start hunting them in september you can hunt them september october november december january often february some states have a early season and then they open the thing up for six months later on. And then, like we said yesterday, you can tie it into whatever. If you're a big game hunter, bear, deer, whatever is out there,

you can see what's going on with those guys out there that time of year. How many buck scrapes did we find, man? I lost track probably at 30, how many scrapes we found hunting squirrels. Did you see some of those giant rubs that we saw today you see all kinds of junk we saw a couple of the bucks that made it too found two turtle shells found two turtle shells found a drop antler found i don't know how many box scrapes i think we find all kinds of junk out in the woods tracks all over the place what's your concluding thought scrapes. I feel like we find all kinds of junk out in the woods.

Tracks all over the place. What's your concluding thought? Take a kid squirrel hunting. First chance you get. Make a hunter out of him. Or her. That's correct. We had a young lady with us today. Got her first swamp rabbit.

That was congratulations to her. She's packing a pistol in her coveralls packing i thought she shot the rabbit with that pistol then really she shot with a shotgun uh you know another tidbit today when we was hunting we didn't get to see it but the other guys did get to see it is that that a coyote packed in with a with a beagle hounds we we still don't know for sure if the coyote was was chasing the dogs they said he was barking on track or if he was helping them chase the rabbit there that's pretty interesting so that would be another thing to very interesting thing to see when you're out in the woods yeah oh speaking of western gray

squirrels you guys got your you guys got the california hunt to eat shirt coming out yes how long until now it's gonna be after the holidays i would check on the website on january 1st scotty's out yep we got wisconsin pa pennsylvania will also be out first of the year the scotty one's got what on it it's the uh i don't want to it's not old i think it's the uh i don't know it's not old i think it's even it might be actually the retro uh state stamp the official state stamp that we converted into a hunt to eat t-shirt and california's got wild hog on it alaska's got doll sheep pa's got a white-tailed deer man you need to do Kentucky with a small game theme swamp rabbit and a squirrel well I've got a small game themed shirt that's not state affiliated

in the works as well my concluding thought would be I am so glad that when I was young, we had that we could hunt squirrels right out of our house. Because it just learns you to like, it teaches you how to go out in the woods and read sign.

Yes. And you get a lot of shooting and you just learn. One of your, one of those old timers you had out there today, you guys were talking. You were saying, like, go sit in the woods and the world will come to you. Right. That was one of the old-timers that did lots and lots of hunting.

And that's one thing he told me. He said, you just get out there and sit in the woods and the world will come to you. Be patient. Another thing he said about the coyote falling in with that pack of beagles is he says you know you go out in the field long enough it's amazing what you're going to see it's not all about taking game you know there's sometimes out there you just see things that just amaze you and we've all seen that and if all you get out of it is just another ding dong sunrise well it, pretty good, too. Save a chicken, eat a squirrel.

All right, anyone have any last thing to say? Enjoyed our hunting. Yes, sir. It was a pleasure, Kevin. Thanks for having us. All right, signing off. 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 meet.