The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 038: Maverick County, Texas. Steven Rinella talks with ranch manager and hog trapper Ben Binnion, along with Chris Gill and Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew

Episode Date: June 23, 2016

Maverick County, Texas. Steven Rinella talks with ranch manager and hog trapper Ben Binnion, along with Chris Gill and Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed: the music of Shearwater; why Steve won't plug Janis's t-shirt company anymore; the importance of trail cams; whitetail antler potential; high-fence vs unfenced whitetail properties in Texas; buck identification; how to age a deer; the question of carrying capacity; helicopter surveys; how Texas allocates deer permits; trashy does and fecund bucks; the Founder Effect; why deer are like people; managing vs farming game; and the biodiversity of Texas whitetail country. 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 meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. you want to talk about uh bug bitten i'm referring of course when i say you want to talk about referring to our brand you know we

haven't addressed the brand spickety new. Anyone curious about that music in the brand Spickity New Intro? That's by a band. You're going to see some good hosting right now because I'm going to make this work. That piece of music within that intro when the tree falling down and your tree falling and and there's a intro song that's a band called sheer water that's that song is from the album jet plane and oxbow i'm friends with that musician he's very undecided about hunting i've taken him fishing and he enjoyed being out there, but he said, I just don't view fishing things the way you do. But he's a wonderful musician.

And here's where the good hosting comes in because for a long time, that musician was based out of Austin and we're in Texas right now. See how seamless that was? We're in Maverick county which is is it fair to say that this is like this is ground zero this is like the base this is the heart and soul of like the whole texas whitetail big buck world.

Is that fair to say? Yes. Yeah, for giant whitetails. That was the voice of El Ocho, Ben Binion. Binion? Binion. So it's the same sound as your first name. Yeah, it sounds like you stutter a little bit. Ben Binion.

Yeah. That was the voice of ben benyon we're gonna get to him in a minute also here's uh chris gill chris um chris already warned us he doesn't have much to say he's just sitting in and listening um and yannis pretellis at this point in the show i'd normally plug y Giannis' t-shirt company, but I'm not anymore because he won't make me my perch flies. Oh.

I asked Giannis. He's going to get them one way or another. I asked Giannis probably about 18 months ago. I think it was SHOT Show 2015. To make me a couple perch flies i'm talking about flies used for yellow perch um you take a little bit of you take a hook take a little

bit of bucktail you take a little bit of thread i'd make it myself but i gave my damn what's the the bobbin bobbin yeah i gave my bobbin to a buddy of mine and and uh because i used to tie a couple flies down and i just got enough things i like to do and that got low on the list of things i like to do and i just gave it all away and then asked yanni to make me some and he won't make them for me can you explain to people why you won't make them over 18 months there's no real reason other than all my shit, my fire tying shit's packed away. It must be pretty packed away. Like when you ask me to reload

some ammo, you usually get to that pretty quickly because that bench is operational right now. But the tying bench is not operational. No man, it's under half an inch of dust. That dust is heavy. Also, Yanni's in the process of buying himself a new home. Yeah.

Maybe I'll set up a bench when I get there. So, Ben, I can't even begin. There's so many things I want to ask you about or have you talk about that you've already told me about that I can't even think of where to start. Give me the Ben Benyon bio. Well, I started- Let me interrupt. Okay.

I'm not doing a good job. Ben is, what do you call what you do? A land manager? I consider myself a wildlife biologist. All right. Ben's a wildlife biologist. That's a good way of putting it. Ben's a wildlife biologist working in the private sector and you run the

wildlife program on a large ranch large property in south texas correct okay now get into the whole where you came from what what kind of education you sought out and what your uh what your dictate is your uh you know your mandate not dictate that reminds me of an out and what your dictate is, your mandate, not dictate. That reminds me of an old joke. What your mandate is. Yeah. Well, I started out kind of whenever I was younger. When my parents split up and my stepdad, my mom remarried,

and my stepdad took care of a piece of property not too far from here. In Maverick County? No, but it was far from here. In Maverick County? No, but it was right on the border of Maverick County. So some of the big bucks strayed over into that county? Pretty much, yeah. It was top five counties for big bucks. And he took care of that place for, I guess, pretty much from about 10 years old on. And I saw what was going on there, from about 10 years old on. And, uh, and I saw what was going

on there and I wanted to do it. And, uh, I was trying to figure out how to go about it. And, uh, so, so basically what I did is, is, uh, after high school, I went to college to, uh, pursue a degree in range and wildlife science at, uh,as a&m kingsville which uh at the time was the number one uh college in the nation for wildlife program and uh and i believe the aggies no it's not it's part of that system yeah but uh like texas a&m college station which is the which you see the aggies on tv no uh this is a uh what do you call it a uh like a branch of that satellite campus satellite campus yeah we had our own football team and our own mascot and uh but and we were way or we were much higher on the on the as far

as ranked in a wildlife program than the main campus because of the uh is mainly because of the uh experience experience level that you could get while in class um on it firsthand experience firsthand and every day we were every class every every uh junior senior level class you know plant uh plant id and those kind of classes were in the field and uh our exams in the field. Our exams were verbal. I mean, walking through walking through brush cactus, everything that we've been walking through this week. But so I went there and while I was working on the ranch, my stepdad took care of and I was kind of. I guess you could say just more of a ranch hand than anything, just did odds and ends, fixing fences and everything. But I developed a passion for deer.

I always loved to hunt, but I really, really wanted to figure out, you know, what made deer big and why were they big in this area. And we're southwest Texas, I guess you can say. And so I started kind of paying attention to everything while I was in college and getting the degree. And were they teaching you about whitetail deer in college? Yeah, or yes and no. It was more they were giving us the tools to learn, and they didn't focus on any one species they didn't focus on quail or whitetails they kind of they did a little you know they they touched on it but uh everything that they taught us you can apply to any species yeah i'm with you and then uh and so what i did is i

just i took all that all the everything i learned and applied it to Whitetails while we were going through the courses, through college. And so whenever I graduated, I graduated in 2008. I graduated high school in 2004, college in 2008 in spring. And it actually, the owner of the property offered me a job, which was kind of the place I grew up on, which is kind of the end-all plan was my stepdad was going to retire and I was going to take over his position. Well, I graduated in May, and in April of 2008, my stepdad had an accident, and he fell out of a deer stand. He fell 14 feet to the ground on a rocky hill. So it was a hard, hard hill.

And he broke both of his wrists, compound fractures, broke almost all of his ribs, lacerated a kidney, lungs filled up with fluid, created an induced trauma heart attack. They airlifted him to San Antonio. He was in ICU for 30 days. This happened on April 14th. I graduated May 10th. So I didn't walk the stage on graduation because I didn't have any family that would be there to watch me because they were all at the hospital with him in in the icu so uh so what i was doing while i was that last month in college is i was coming back to the ranch because i knew every we had seven employees i kept the ranch running while he was in the hospital and just to back up here the ranch

this is a cattle operation cattle it was a it's a cattle operation with a side note of hunting. So a heavy emphasis on wildlife. Right, a heavy emphasis on wildlife. The family was the main people that hunted it. It was not a commercial operation. It wasn't fenced. It was just a fun place for the family and friends and guests and some business associates of the owner and uh so basically what i was uh kind of thrown head first when my stepdad was in the hospital i was i graduated and took the job

and took over his position so i i was never i never i never was i was started from the ground level whenever i was in college as soon as i graduated i started i went straight to the top yeah because i was forced into it more than anything and uh and i changed a few things on the wildlife side and we were we were that ranch there that property was was under pretty intense management for i don't know 15, maybe 18 years before, before I took over. And we had, we had really nice whitetails and the whitetails were, you know, there were, there was big, big antlered deer everywhere. And, uh, but I, I never really intended to make them bigger. I was just trying to kind of fill in. And, uh, that was about the time that trail cameras

started getting real popular as far as infrared and uh you know start started getting uh uh i guess user-friendly and and cheap enough and so i started running trail cameras and we started we started noticing what deer would do from uh from year to year as far as antler development um you know movement uh rutting habits uh you know forage habits uh bedding bedding areas everything everything you could you could figure out with the trail cams and uh so i started that really uh do you feel that really rewrote people's understandings i think i think a trail camera is the you know probably the best thing that's happened to hunting and to managing wildlife in my opinion uh in in my lifetime you know a biologist in new york just put out a book

about the significance of what they call a camera trap to the field. He published sort of what he thinks of as, I think, the 300 or 600 very influential trail cam images or camera trap images and talked about the implications that tool had for understanding distribution and range of wildlife, travel patterns of wildlife. I want you to continue that, but I was at this thing a few years ago in North Carolina, and it was a deer, like a wildlife expo. A guy there was telling me this story about someone, have we talked about this on the podcast? The Kentucky, Tennessee

bucks, did I ever tell you about this? You've told me about it, I don't know if we've mentioned it on the podcast. Alright, so, Kentucky and Tennessee have different season structures, hunting season structures, and they obviously share a pretty long border. So, a guy comes forth with some

big buck that he claims they have shot one or the other. For discussion's sake, let's say he comes forth with this big buck and says, I shot it in Kentucky. It was probably vice versa because I think Tennessee has the liberal allotments. So

comes forward and says, I shot this big giant buck in Tennessee. Why is it being like some state record for the year buck? He gets a bunch of publicity. The buck tours around at a couple of these shows. I'm talking about these wildlife expos. Eventually, a guy from Kentucky sees the big famous Tennessee buck and says, I know that buck. I'll show you a trail cam picture of that buck hundreds of miles away from where this man claims that he shot it.

And the buck had such a distinctive rack. They successfully prosecuted the man and seized the head. Yeah. Because of this guy's trail cam pictures of where that buck was on what day it was there and he had just shot it out of season and to make it legal came back across the border right you know yeah there's trail cam story for you yeah yeah they use uh the wardens the word that one chris you like one, don't you? Chris is still nodding. Yeah, the wardens here use a similar deal where if a deer of interest comes about and is shot by a hunter and it's poached,

the landowner knows it's missing and it shows up somewhere. He sees a picture of it somewhere and he says that you know that deer came off of my property and he's surrounded by several other private properties yeah like he didn't travel 100 miles that day or whatever right right and they they prosecuted several people now uh on this exact same situation it's probably it wasn't you know not nothing that high profile but but yeah same deal yeah but yeah yeah so this guy's got a book coming out about just how much that changed our understanding of all different kinds of wildlife. Yeah. Yeah.

I saw some trail cam images that came out of Afghanistan one time where it was some really rare sheep. You can see it going through a pass. And the next images are a couple of dudes with the Afghanistan. They were all so familiar with now. The hats, you know, from the Afghan war. You see people wearing long robes and a couple of Kalashnikovs going through the pass right behind it. Going chasing after it. So anyhow, there you are.

All of a sudden you're managing that place. And you start using trail cams. Yeah, we started using trail cams, and I started noticing changes in antler development that from year to year that were bizarre to me because these jumps or these increases in antler size on deer that we thought we would recognize from year to year, from season to season because their home ranges and tell me if I'm getting off point. No, no, no. The home ranges

on our mature bucks are about 4,000 to 8,000 acres. So you always on a piece of property you have What do you guys figure? Put that into a square mile. Be like 10 to 12. 10 to 12 square miles. That 6 Put that into square mile. It'd be like 10 to 12, I think, 10 to 12 square miles. Okay.

That 640 is a square mile. So, you know, a buck's home range is 10 to 12 square miles. And, of course, you have tons of overlap. And our density was about a deer per 25 acres, a deer. And we had a one-to-one buck-dough ratio, so we had a buck per 50 acres. So square miles, that would be, what, 10 bucks per square mile. So a total of maybe 20 deer per square mile. Yeah, 15 bucks per square mile maybe.

You know, all different age classes. But anyway, what I started noticing is these bucks that we thought we knew well oh let me let me back up we were shooting we were harvesting the family was harvesting trophy bucks every year that were exceptional but sometimes we did not know what that deer had been he just showed up and uh so and we we harvest them and we look at their teeth based off of the all the studies that have been done on age by tooth wear and replacement which you know some people say it's it's you know it's the only thing we have to go off of uh is we have is by the teeth it's not very accurate but it's the only thing we have yeah Yeah. But the teeth would be sharp, indicating that they were a young buck. So what I started doing is I started documenting these deer with trail cameras

to find out why we're shooting these deer that looked old, but they had sharp teeth, and we'd never seen them before. Because let me just fill in a little bit. What you're suggesting is you guys felt that you could look at a deer's antlers and then immediately recognize him again the next year because he'd just be a little bit bigger version. Right. But then all of a sudden here's this deer who, like, where'd he come from? Because I didn't see a slightly smaller version of him last year. That's exactly correct.

Okay. That's exactly correct okay that's exactly correct so uh what what i was uh i started documenting deer based off of their locations and their home ranges and and would save pictures from year to year to see uh see which ones look similar and i started noticing that there was there was bucks making huge huge jumps and uh i mean they would go from 120 inch deer to 160 or 170 inch deer in one one growing season and usually that was a uh you know what we were guessing to be a three or four year old deer to a four or five year old deer that that age group was usually the big jumps so we started doing is documenting those deer as far as based

off of trail cams and uh i started doing that and we started letting deer go no matter how big they were they'd be 170 inch deer that we would typically shoot we said well we'll uh we'll let him go and see what happens because of of his age. Because of his age. We wanted to see, we were trying to figure out when was the peak. That's what everybody in the whitetail industry tries to figure out is what's the peak age, when do they peak out. And we think, in Texas down here, we think it's a little older than everywhere else, but we're different. And whitetails are really site-specific animals. I mean, it changes 20 miles, changes completely as far as deer to deer. So anyway, what...

But what is the age? Well, what we found, or what my personal research and what uh other research uh institutes are finding it depends on the ranch it depends on the property it depends on the location it depends on the deer they're all individual but in my opinion our deer in maverick county and that county was uh were were maximizing their antler potential at seven and eight years old, not five and six like previously thought. And all of that was just an estimation before at five and six. And some of those deer, people were estimating them,

and they were actually younger. So with the trail cams, we can get a better idea of their age based off of, he's not in, you know, okay, if we have three years of pictures and he wasn't two years old in the first picture, he's at least five or six. Does that make sense? Yeah. And so that's kind of what we went off of. And we started letting these deer grow to be seven and eight years old and nine years old before we harvest them. And we can see these deer, we're feeding and they're coming out every day and they're not, uh, not every day, but I'm seeing them in the trail cams every day. And they're, they're really, they're still hard to hunt. They're nocturnal. Um, even though we're, we're feeding. And, uh, so I just started,

we started, uh, letting these deer grow to, to a lot older age class than anybody else was and we started noticing that hey we just stepped up our game you know we went from killing a a couple of 160 class deer and a 170 here and there to killing 180s every year with an occasional 200 in a three or four year period and then it no year six we were killing multiple 190s with a coat with a 200 almost every year and uh and this was solely due from knowing the individual deer through trail camera yeah and uh and the you can't you can't always tell antlers year to year but what we were doing is is we knew where the deer was, his home range. He did the same thing each year.

You know, in October, he'd be here. In November, he'd be here. Then the next year, a deer that looked similar to him but bigger would do the same thing. So we assumed it was the same deer. We weren't always right. I say we. It was me more than anything. I wasn't always right on that but most part we were and we stepped

up our game big time as far as uh growing growing big deer and uh so i guess about year seven uh these these current landowners that were on this property we're at now in maverick county approached me through a mutual friend and uh uh, asked, I, I, I guess I met him a year six and they approached me to try to find a, uh, a, they just purchased this, this property and they, they approached me to find a, uh, a ranch foreman and wildlife biologist to run this property for them. And they wanted nothing else other than to grow giant white tails. That's all they wanted to do or let them grow.

No cattle. No cattle. And so I, and they all, they asked me, he said, would you be willing to leave your current position? I said, no, I grew up here and I'm happy and I don't want to do it. Well, that went on and I looked for a couple of people for them, but I could never find anybody that I thought I could recommend and put my name on. But a year later, they made me an offer to come over here that I couldn't turn down.

So I came and started applying the same basic knowledge that I was doing there with the trail cameras and the inventory of the deer here and uh and it's a it's a five to six year deal before you can really start seeing consistent results on uh growing growing these big whitetail but your job like you're a salary individual yep and your job is to take a sizable chunk of land here. Yep. And the end goal that you're pursuing is to increase the number and size of big giant whitetail bucks. Exactly. Yep. Before, on the old property, I was doing that almost as a side note. Because we had cattle and a little bit of agriculture crop, and the hunting was a side note.

Yeah. And now, you know, and that's the part that I enjoyed the most. That's the part that I developed a passion for. Now you're just strictly wildlife. Just strictly wildlife. And we don't do, I mean, that's 100% of what we're after is improving the wildlife. All right, let me ask some real basic stuff. What are, and Yanni, jump in whenever you need to.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. This place is not a fence place. Correct. Are there fence places here? Why are some places in Texas, we always hear about the fence properties. What do you gain and lose? Why did you not come in and be like, first thing we're going to do, boys, is build a big damn fence? Yeah, because the fences in Texas are, man, it's a touchy subject.

Yeah, but you don't even need to weigh in. Just tell me the thinking, right? Okay, well, the main thinking and the reason fences were originally, you know, set up for deer in Texas. You told us earlier, in what year did you say they became popular? I think the first one, first official one was in the late 60s, was when the first one that was made with railroad ties and some sheep and goat net fence. And what kind of acreage? That one was 8 000 acres oh and so big we're talking about like 400 acre no they started out as large properties

and what they started out as is to keep their neighbors from killing their deer or for harvesting their deer premature because they're like we're running a management program practicing some restraint and then inevitably the big bucks that we're producing by providing good habitat and all that are getting shot by some hoser on the next property. Right. It's done what he's done his whole life, and there's nothing wrong with it. He's just hunting, but he's not as intense.

That's the way the fences started out, and that was a great, great tool. But it's- That was the motivation. That was the motivation. Yeah. And that was a great, great tool. But it's- That was the motivation. That was the motivation. So what happened was, in my opinion, is people just got greedy. And they started fencing smaller properties and figuring out that they could have a quick fix. It's just like, that's just people.

They want to get it fast. What do you mean a quick fix? As far as growing trophy whitetails. They started realizing that you could take a, you know, that's the pen industry or the raising, farming wildlife really started up in, I guess, about the 90s, which is it took from the first high fence in the 60s, there was almost nobody doing it for that, you know, almost 30 years. Was that first place a private facility, or was it like a outfit, outfitting establishment?

It was a private research. It was a private property, and the university did it as a research project to start and found out that it worked. And they started publishing their research, and that's kind of just escalated from there. And so basically people just started, they started fencing in smaller and smaller properties, and all of a sudden the pen developed kind of almost accidentally,

just fencing off small pieces of property and seeing what they could, they could concentrate growing these, you know, Frankenstein type deer. And that's what it's evolved in. And that's what people see on TV, on the, on the pen stuff with all these freakishly big deer that are, they can barely hold up their head. Um, but in my opinion, I don't, I mean, that's, that's kind of where it started and where we are now. And it puts a bad taste in people's mouth for, for the fences. Um, so it is not, is not having a fence. Like you've worked at two places that are not fenced.

Are they not fenced for aesthetic reasons or are they not fenced for long-term? They're, they're not fenced. Well, the other one is, I guess you could say it's not completely fenced. It is partially fenced on one side, but that's... That one was... We got along with our neighbors, and they practiced the same management practices that we did. This place is uh the owners of this property are super anti uh pendier super anti high fence um they like boone and crockett club and they they really want to be able to enter deer

that we harvest here in the in the boone and crockett Club, and they really want to be able to enter deer that we harvest here in the Boone and Crockett system. Which means natural reproduction. Which is natural reproduction, no human contact, no direct human contact. And that's pretty much, that's the whole reason. In Maverick County, I forgot what magazine did the deal, but they rated the top 50 counties in the nation for whitetail entries since 2004. I can't remember if it was one of the more common long-term magazines, but they rated the top 50 counties in the nation for Boone and Crockett whitetail entries since 2004.

Maverick County was number one, typical, and number two, non-typical entries. And I believe that was, it was the only Texas county in the top 10. It might have been the only Texas, I think it might have been the only Texas county in the top 50. But we were, that's why, that's why they chose to buy a piece of property in Maverick County. And they came to me and they said, can we grow big deer without a fence?

And I said, absolutely. All you have to do is let them grow. And, but you have to get a property big enough where your neighbors aren't going to be shooting every single one. So if you're on a smaller property, during the rut, the deer are going to go across the fence. And anybody in their right mind, deer that looks old, mature, and has a big rag, they're going to blast it. Yeah, they're not going to care if it's like, you know, if you let it go two more years, they're probably not going to see it anyway. Right, right. They're not going to care if it's like that, you know, if you let it go two more years, they're not probably not going to see it anyway. Right, right. They're not. They don't.

Yeah, they're there for that weekend or that day to hunt, and they see a big deer, they're going to shoot it. It's a completely different dynamic than what most people consider hunting. We're not farming them, but we're watching them grow, I guess. Um, it's similar to some guys that have, uh, good mule deer and elk country out West that name their bulls to, so that way they can keep up with locating them the following year. Yeah.

Um, you know, just on public ground even. It's real similar to that. We're just doing it in the private sector. So how many bucks are you keeping an eye on? I think I have on my inventory list right now, I might have 300 or 400, I guess. That you have photo documentation of? How much time do you spend besides the trail cameras how much time do you spend out what observing and photographing deer just to get to know who's all out there uh see october october 1st through february 15th um i'm in the in the field uh at least six days a week, most of the time seven days a week for morning and evening, two or three hours in the morning, two or three hours in the evening, almost every day.

In a stand observing deer? In a stand observing deer with the camera. I use a big lens out of the stand to supplement the trail cameras. And I'm running about 35 to 40 trail cameras from August 15th to February or March and 40,000 pictures roughly a week. And that's my Monday, Tuesday. And that's just to try to get to know who's here. Yep. Just getting to know them.

That's all I'm doing. And within that, how often does a deer pop up it depends on his personality how often does a deer pop up that you had no idea was here even though you're doing all that time looking like how much mystery is left the around the the perimeters when we get influx from the neighbors during december during the rut there is uh i'll run into a new deer probably you know whenever i say new deer everything that i'm noticing is usually three years old and older because i can't it's hard to distinguish the ones twos and three-year-olds year to year but once they once they hit three and four they're

easier to distinguish year to year and you're not distinguishing them off the antlers well it's helpful but there's other things tell me like because you explained to me some of the things you're actually looking for yeah which allow you to tell it one deer from the other yeah so so explain the posture of the photographs too that's interesting yeah um so so my my field photos with my camera from the stand, I try to get the bucks broadside looking in my direction with their ears perked and their hocks offset. And I do that because you can tell age based off the hocks. You can't tell an exact age, but it helps you narrow down the age. And then the broadside, of course, lets you look at all the different traits, such as the chest, the brisket, you know, the swaying belly or flat belly

or flat back or swaying back. Which is age, right? Which is all for age purposes only, but usually if I've been watching them, I'm not worried about aging them on those pictures. I'm worried about an identifier, what I call an identifier. And what I consider an identifier is something like a split ear. Like, you know, I'm talking like a quarter-inch nick on the tip of the right ear. Or, you know, on the bottom side of the ear there's

you know a quarter of the way up there's a there's a black spot and they'll carry these characteristics year to year and uh or a dark forehead or a or a double throat patch double white throat patch or a bobtail um or any kind of distinguishing scar or you know there's a there's a ton of them when you start when you start really studying and looking there's there's a ton of different characteristics that you can look at that are not associated with antlers because antlers change so much you never know you can usually recognize them year to year once they get older but uh, uh, but the, the ear splits and the tails and stuff like that, that little stuff that you can pick up on.

And, uh, and I can't remember it all. That's why we're documenting it with, uh, we're, we document it with the, or the, uh, infield photos from the stand. And that's why I try to get them in that posture, that position to, that way, I may not know that deer this year because I didn't notice something, but I take a picture of a deer in that same area next year that looks kind of similar. And I put the two together. Then the third year, I take another picture of that same deer in that same deal. So then I create a catalog of inventory of deer from year to year, and it helps me understand their age better. And I can let them.

We can, therefore, decide if we want to harvest them or not. And some people. And you're making that decision. I'm making that decision, yeah. And some people think that's a little bit too far into far into it i guess or thinking too much about it and it's taking some of the hunting part away but uh my bosses don't know that i know that deer or they know i know that deer but they don't know that deer they haven't they've never seen him before. So it's still hunting to the right people. But there's several of these bucks that I'm getting pictures of.

I'll have 30 to 35 hunts looking for him and never see him. Meaning you'll identify a buck and you'll be like, if you're going to get them, this is the year to do it. Right. But he's not going uphill from here. Right. And then no, and he never turns up.

Right. Right. Well, even to the point where, what I, what I'm, what I meant by that was, uh,

where my statement was, uh, if I have a deer on trail camera, this trail camera is just, they just give me something to go look at more than anything. You can tell a lot, but you can't tell everything.

So what I'll do is I'll use a trail cameras to find a deer of interest. You know, say he's a 150 type. A DOI. Yeah, yeah. And so I'll find a 150 class, whatever, something or other that I don't know. I'll go sit on that deer with my big lens to find an identifier, you know, to find a split ear.

Because you can't always notice those little spot on the ears, different characteristic on the body. You can't always notice those in trail cams the first time you see one. So you have to see them in person. And then I get a, what i'll do is i'll get them get a picture of them broadside print it out in an 8x10 put it in a folder and then next year uh do the same thing then i can put those pictures right next to each other and see who's who uh but but usually when we do green light a buck a trophy trophy buck to shoot we shot one two years ago that was uh i think it took him 30 or 35 sits before he killed him we had because what what was happening

it's nocturnal it is nocturnal and will not show up in the daylight even with all the feed in the world that you want to put out they get uh we are we we practice uh we we do a lot of uh selective harvest for population control and what we're trying to do is is we reduce the stress by reducing the population and uh creating more feed but that yeah you know that's one of the things i want to ask you about let me back up a minute i want to ask about another thing you guys like a couple bad dates you have any like nothing it's all coming out nothing your little brain nothing is going like oh i wish i knew a little more about that it's all coming out you're asking the good questions man really so like you'll have something on the tip of your tongue and then I'll say it? Yep. Well, or you

just keep talking and then I'll think about something else and then it just keeps going. It makes you more and it keeps drifting away. I'm starting to think that something's wrong with you guys. No, man. I'm just fascinated. Learning about whitetail. Okay. I'm going to jump you around a little bit.

Now, I can't remember. I interrupted you before you got into something I wanted to ask you about what were you just going to get into i don't know i'm not the one paying attention about bringing the population down oh yeah about the importance of not having too many deer right but as a kid and yanni can back me up on this as a kid growing up in whitetail country in michigan and i was like our big game animal, our only big game animals, whitetails. It was like, you age deer, at least in your head,

you age deer by what their antlers looked like. So everyone knew that a spike or fork was a year and a half old. If he was a Michigan six or a Michigan eight or Western three, let's just make a deal. You guys use Eastern count? Yeah. Five on one side, five on the other side is a 10 point? Right.

Count the brow times? Right. Okay. We started calling them Michigan sixes because everybody in the damn country has a different way of counting them. We're only speaking Eastern. So a six or an eight was two.

That was just accepted wisdom. The other piece of accepted wisdom was a spike wasn't going to become big because he's already small. Now, speak to that stuff.

What can you actually tell with age by looking at the antlers on a deer uh that's that's a tough one because i mean i've seen i've seen uh antlers are i guess in in a way they're they they're an indication of age. If you look at mass, but as far as number of points and spread, none of that seems to matter on age. Yeah, because you were just showing me an eight-point that was a year and a half old. Yeah, we had an 11-point this year that was a year and a half old. I had a six-pointer with a drop time that was a year and a half old uh i had i had a uh six pointer with a drop time it was a year and a half old this year so his first rack first rack he had a drop time yeah and then we have we have you know seven and eight year old deer that have eight points barely do you ever get do you ever get a deer older than,

than one who's a Forky? Yeah. Yeah. I shot one. I shot one a few years ago. That was a, he was a two by two, four point. And he was,

he was five and a half by his tooth wear, which he could have been older. So he just never, it just, all right. Yeah. He was a heavy two-point. Oh, he was a big two-point.

Oh, he was? Yeah. Oh, so you looked at him and knew he wasn't. Oh, yeah. He was probably 18 inches wide inside with like eight or nine-inch G2s. But that's all he had. Yeah. He had nothing else.

He was just two big forks. Like it looked like a mule deer. Yeah. Now I'm going to do something else. I'm going to distract you in another way. Just throw this out. I just want to throw this out. Tell me the number of wild pigs that you have handled by trapping and whatnot.

How many wild pigs have you handled here in South Texas? 47.95 as of this morning. 4,795 wild pigs have passed through your hands. Since I started counting. And tell me, how old were you when you welded up your first pig trap? 14. All right. So, deer.

That's just a little teaser for later. That's a little teaser for late that's a little teaser so deer now you're saying and you told you talking about this too that too many like if you have too many deer running around they're not going to get as big it uh okay get into that a little bit. Okay. It all boils down to population dynamics. As far as Mother Nature's way is grow, grow, grow, grow, and then have a big die off. And then grow, grow, grow. And once it surpasses carrying capacity, once the land surpasses the carrying capacity, it has a die off. And it's, so basically you have these big spikes on the graph up and down

up and don't some species just hit carrying capacity and then level off um i'm sure they do the ones that i'm studying don't or that i'm dealing with um quail and deer for instance um they hit carrying capacity and they keep reproducing. And then all of a sudden there's too many, less and less food, more competition, and they start getting the first thing. The species people look at when they're kind of talking about that phenomenon is people like to look at snowshoe hares. Yeah. Where it's so cyclical that it falls in the line of, what, seven years? Yeah. I mean, it's like dialed in.

Right. And then you look at, they did this study where they looked at snowshoe hare patterns, and they went back through all the Hudson Bay Company records on lynx. How many hides, lynx hides, were getting handled and it was offset but lynx who their primary prey species is snowshoe rabbits they looked at hudson bay company lynx hide receipts and realized that lynx hide lynx seemed to bounce along in a seven-year span offset from the snowshoe hare seven-year span right yeah like just respond to that a direct response yeah yeah that makes sense well and see whitetails whitetails do it it's more gradual and now that now that

people there's there's such a high profile animal and game animal that people are never going to let them die off but they will let them overpopulate and the first thing the first thing that they but they won't ever let them reach that that uh point where they just they start dying off but what happens is is is people get greedy and they they want to let as many survive as possible thinking that even big buck guys even the big as many as possible thinking that someone's going to turn up who's real big. Right. With all these damn deer. They think that giant deer are an anomaly.

And they're not. They're a low percentage. They're not. I mean, there's a certain percentage of whitetails that are going to be big. And it's just a straight up bell curve. And the middle range down here is about 130 inches. And so what we do or what I do to lower the population, we cull animals to lower the population to reduce stress. And white tails, in my opinion, are completely stress-oriented.

Rather, it's food, water, bedding cover, everything is stress-related. So if you have too many, it may not look like the habitat is suffering, but they're competing directly with food. And same thing with bedding cover. And so the first thing to go on a whitetail is when it's trying to survive is antler growth. It's a luxury. Yeah, pure luxury. And we do feed here.

So certain people in Texas feed to offset. They think they can offset that stress level of competition in natural habitat. We feed as a supplement to help them out through drought conditions. So you don't have those spikes in the graph like we were talking about. We try to level it out as much as we can because that reduces the stress. Anything, any of the, I guess the spike up or the spike down are all creating stress on individual animals. Yeah.

So culling is the practice of going out and killing deer. Yeah. Both to reduce numbers and to make some kind of selection about who's going to be on the property and who's not, right? Correct. Correct. And just to explain this, because Texas runs wildlife so differently than some places in the U.S., the state will come out to a big chunk of ground in Texas and make an assessment about how many deer you guys are supposed to kill. Because the state's trying to encourage you to not let them get overrun.

The state is 100% worried about habitat. They want the habitat to be healthy. They don't care about, or they do. They do care about the animals, but they realize that if you have great habitat, you're going to have healthy animals. Okay. And that's their number one focus. So their number one focus is that you're not going to allow your habitat to become degraded, to have long-term degradation in the name of short-term bunch of deer running around. Right, right.

Or cattle. Or cattle, yeah. have long-term degradation in the name of short-term bunch of deer running around right right or cattle or cattle yeah but in those but in those are on private land see this it's mostly private land and that's all uh uh the uh the state those are recommendations by the state the state's not forcing you yeah you know uh and uh but the people that that want to be good land stewards and want to grow better deer and have better long-term wildlife programs and cattle grazing programs

request the state's assistance to come out and tell them what they should or shouldn't do. And they'll come out and say, it doesn't have to be specific to this place, but they'll come out to a property like this and they'll come out and say you boys would be wise to kill 400 deer this year here are your tags here are your certificates for those 400 deer yeah yeah and uh they they base that on

several different uh they do browse surveys so they look at the whatever the deer eating and if if the plant if the plants look stressed out then they'll then they'll uh i guess uh give you more more tags or less tags versus based off of what they notice on the plants um they do surveys population surveys to see what that particular piece of ground is capable of handling. And the best way to count deer here is helicopter, right? Helicopter here. You can use spotlights too, but it's too thick here. So we use predominantly, what I do is I try to use a helicopter survey

in tandem with the cameras. And I try to get an individual buck count on the cameras and then get your buck doe ratio from the helicopter and your fawn survival from your helicopter yeah so you take your individual buck count from the from the camera and uh apply that to the buck doe ratio and then you get your number of does and then you apply your fawn crop to that and get your total number of deer and when they come out and give you is 300 like a decent number for a big chunk of land 300 400 right yeah are you raising your hand i am holy cow yanni yannis woke

up yannis woke up and has a thought i have a question too after yanni thank god i want to interrupt man with like a dumb question you guys got such good questions i don't want to be like hey what's this you know what chris is being so polite right now i'll tell you what the deal is there's so much talking that goes on that it's hard to even slip in the conversation sometimes i'll break in right now okay you start talking say say something hey hey hey uh so here's what i'm wondering just like it's just like as simple as that. Tell me about when you do a helicopter survey, kind of just like, give me the breakdown of how that happens. Like the main steps, like skip the, you know, before I got in, I took a pee, but once you

get in there, you take off, deer start flushing. And what are you actually looking for? And what are you recording and writing down? Well, the way I do it, sir, everybody does it different, but the way i do it sir everybody does it different but the way i do it uh is it what you what you do is you you you separate the property and do like a grid or transects line transects and those could be depending on visibility if the vegetation is high or the vegetation is low that depends on that makes uh decides what your transects are going to be you know rather they're going to be a 100 yards apart where you're running down,

you know, running down, turning around, coming back, running down, turning back, or if they're going to be 400 yards apart. And based off of the density of the brush or the density of vegetation and what you can see, that's how you estimate how much of the property you can cover with the helicopter how much you're surveying say it's 80 percent in this sort of thick ass country what is the transect it's usually about 200 yards because you can see with 200 yards you can usually see 100 yards out both sides so you'll move over uh how many how many feet how are you flying uh i don't it's

it varies depending on the vegetation, but it's not. I guess it'd be probably 50, 50 or 50. Oh, you're just skimming. It's nothing like an airplane. No, the skids are touching the tops of the trees sometimes. Oh, man. It's pretty low. And depending on the wind, too, if it's real windy, we'll get higher just so we don't crash.

But so what we'll do is we'll try we'll fly these transects and i guess they'd be 400 yard transects if you can see 100 yards either way uh is what it would boil down to and uh so what you're looking for is when a deer flushes you usually can't see them if they stand still but so you usually want to get them to flush so you don't want to fly on a windy day or a hot day where they're going to be bedded or not hear you you want to fly on a calm cool day usually cloudy works so that way they're moving as soon as they hear you and what we'll do is we'll count uh bucks does and fawns is pretty much what your count and you can tell the difference between the does and the fawns pretty well we usually fly in October, so the fawns are pretty small.

And then the bucks break into subcategories, and I break them into young bucks, middle-aged bucks, and old bucks. And like I said, that gives you your sex ratio and your ratio of young versus middle-aged versus old bucks. And then it also gives you your fawn survival for that summer. And you take those ratios and apply them to your individual buck count from your cameras. I'm tracking, kind of. And through all that, the state will take those numbers and say...

And they accept your numbers. Well, they accept mine. They don't accept everybody. Sometimes they have to have a state employee in the helicopter with you. Okay. But if you're trained in it, you can get to a point where they'll accept your numbers. Yeah, if you're trained in it and they trust you and they know you're not going to screw up, then they'll take your numbers.

And I've been doing it for 10 or 12 or almost 14 years, I guess now. What's your level of accuracy? Like, do you plus and minus? No, you're not. Well, see, with the helicopter ratios, you're not trying to get a number. You're just trying to get the ratio. Oh, right, okay.

So with the individual buck counts, so say you have a one-to-one ratio and you see 300 bucks on the trail camera, so you have 300 does you know one-to-one ratio and you see 300 bucks on the on the trail camera so you have 300 does on a one-to-one ratio so you have 600 deer but then you have a 50 percent fawn survival and what 50 percent fawn survival means you have 300 does you have 150 fawns that's 50 so in that situation you have 750 total deer on the property. And you can't really, a lot of people do the helicopter survey, you know, and that's how many deer they think they have. But what you just mentioned, your level of accuracy is changes from property to property, depending on who's flying, depending on weather. There's too many variables.

It gives you a good idea and better than nothing. Exactly. What was your other question? Because that question was prompted by something that was spoken after you expressed interest in asking the question. No, that was it. No, it was. Yeah, yeah. Honestly?

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Now, they gave you these tags. There's a penalty if you go over. There's no penalty for going under they frown upon going under they do yeah so when they come out and say son we're thinking that you need to do some deer shooting out here they're not happy if you just don't do any deer shooting no i mean they if you're if you're if you go through the process of getting the permits and it's a long process oh so you can there's you can just well

never bring any of this up and never get any permits and and do whatever you wanted to the to what your your license allows which is which is your over-the-counter when you buy a deer tag right and the way people get around that is they just bring in more guests. You know, more guests to shoot deer. So then they can overshoot deer that way. So this is a thing you kind of, a thing you enroll in and a plan you enroll in. Yeah, it's a long-term, several-year system just to get started in the program. And when they give you the tags, it doesn't matter who's pulling the trigger.

Okay, there's three levels of these permits. And I believe the first level, I don't remember. I haven't been in the first and second level in 10 years, so I don't remember. And Scott would know if we get him on here later. But the level three, anybody can shoot as many deer so if you get 100 tags one person could shoot 100 deer legally and they could they could use all the tags or you could have a hundred different people shoot one deer uh it makes no difference and uh on the on the highest level so someone hunting on that property needs to have a hunting license. They have to have a hunting license. Yes. And there's a stack of tags. Yeah. And when

a deer is killed on that property, one of those tags goes onto that deer. One of the state issued permits goes on that deer. One of your license, your tag off of your over the counter license does not go on that deer if your property is enrolled in that permit system so when you go buy a tag and it comes with five deer tags but you're only hunting on your property and you have state issued tags in your property you never touch your tags correct i have not used a a white tail tag off of my license in six or seven years because you're just doing i'm only hunting here or or on properties that uh that have the same permitting system. Same permitting system.

Okay. Now, earlier you were talking about that a buck, you're telling me that when a doe has twin fawns, 80% of the time, those twin fawns have different fathers. The last study that I read was in this southwest Texas. This information is somewhat specific to this area. Yeah, everything is site-specific with whitetails. They change so much from area to area. But yeah, because we have such tight sex ratios, one-to-one most of the time, or even higher bucks than does. Yeah, and I'll point out that they're born one-to-one. Yeah, right, right.

A little heavier on the bucks. A little heavier on the bucks. Yeah. So when you're sitting, like when I was growing up, you'd be sitting in there in the the woods and you'd see about 90 does for every buck you saw right or in in Michigan yeah yeah because that was like I moved away from Michigan but I was born you know I'm 42 years old so I started hunting when I was you know 11 12 years old and back then people don't want to shoot does everybody shot every buck they saw right and you'd sit up there and be like I remember sitting there one time in a cornfield and i remember it was like a late season hunt so rifle season ended i was hunting the december

season with my boat i remember counting 90 some whitetail doles without a buck holy cow yeah i wonder if that was uh it was that uh i wonder if that was a good indication of the sex ratio or was it a uh indication of hunting pressure for the buck? I don't know. But my feeling was growing up, and it was a long time ago and I didn't have a, I wasn't taking a scientific approach to it. My feeling was back then in those days that the ratios were as ridiculous. They got to be as ridiculous as like, you'd hear thrown around, you'd have 20 does for every buck. Yeah. There's places in texas like that

that are neglected or not uh uh not neglected but not not managed and only they only shoot the bucks same same deal like you're talking about that that happened right now yeah today but yeah so it's interesting in that they're born one-to-one but of course one thing that skews it is i'm sure the dole's gonna have a much longer life expectancy yeah is that true um in in unmanaged places i would believe so yes in managed places i don't i don't think so all right yeah so let's just say all people died right now okay humans cease to exist and we jump into the future 100 years based on your understanding of white tails would white tails exist then at a one-to-one ratio and it just i guess it depends on their location but i kind of i would believe yes you believe they'd find a way toward that i believe especially in this area they they gravitate to one-one.

Okay. So, the twin fawn thing. That a doe is getting bred by a bunch of different bucks. Yeah. I watched a doe with a rep train one time. It had seven bucks. Seven bucks with one doe that was hot. And she was in a field.

I watched six of those bucks breed her a couple of them multiple times weren't you telling me all but the big one the only one that never bred her was the big one while you watched yeah well yeah well because he was so paranoid about trying to beat all the other ones off he chased one 100 yards the other way and another one would run in and breed her mount her breed her and then he'd turn around and see that one breeding her turn around and chase him off, and then another one would come in from the other side. There was a couple of those bucks that bred her multiple times, and he never bred her. What's the time frame that that's even like biologically

possible to be bred by two different bucks? Is it like same day? Yeah, I think their estrus is 24 to 48 or something like that. So she forms two embryos, and just because she's in there being so trashy, it winds up carrying in her the children of two different bucks. Right. It works with dogs. If you breed three male dogs to the same female, they can have puppies from all three sires. Mixed litters.

Yeah. Is it, like, here's another thing we used to say when we were kids. A buck bred a big buck. Once he got to be the big man, like the biggest buck around, he'd breed 10 to 20 doves. That's possible. It doesn't happen. On what I notice here with a one-to-one ratio,

I think every buck is pretty well equal from my observations. Yearling bucks in this area, in this area of Texas, I mean, this is a small, minute little spot, but in my observations, yearling bucks breed as much as older bucks. All age classes are pretty well consistent. Huh. Depending on the individual. Depending on the individual.

It's just like people. You get the real horny ones, and you get the ones that are just laid back and all they do is want to eat yeah it's the same deal with deer and uh i mean some bucks may not breed any any does their whole life or one or two just they just happen to stop and squat in front of them what's that valerius geist theory i think we were talking to you about under effect huh founder effect? Huh? I was going to bring up the founder effect earlier. Is that the one where the buck takes himself out of the breeding process? Oh, was that Val Geist? I think so.

I never really believed that theory. Yeah. Is that something he put forward? I got to Google it. Do it, because I'll tell you another Val Geist thing. I think it was Valerius Geist. There's a very famous mammologist in Calgary at a university there. He's still living.

I've never met him. Named Valerius Geist. And he's a big ideas guy about animals. And he wrote about, he might even have come up, coined the term the founder effect. Basically about when animals come into a new area, when they discover new range, or having a range expansion from something like retreating glaciers at the end of the ice age or whatever, the tendency toward gigantism that happens with animals moving into a new piece of habitat. And we see it with introductions, wildlife introductions, explosions, right? Giant

specimens, a whole bunch of them. And then you have like a collapse and then you kind of find a norm. But that was a Val Geist thing. Yeah, I was going to dig it up. Yeah, I heard this theory like that bucks, it just, I don't even need to look the damn thing up. It was this idea that I think you were talking about, Giannis, that a buck will be like, hey man, I got an idea.

I'm going to pull myself out of the genetic pool and go off and hide out for several years and get real big and bad. And then I'm going to come down and pour the coals to every doe I can find. I'm going to come out of like hiding, like I'm in a Hollywood movie and pour the coals to every doe that I can find. Yeah. I was going to ask you if you'd ever seen that.

If you'd seen ball except for like four or five years, it had been just real mellow, weren't very aggressive. And because of that, you know, had put on weight and gotten big. And then all of a sudden one year they just turned it on and kind of started kicking butt. It's like a version of the old like, hey, let's run down and breed one of those cows. And the old one's like, let's walk down and breed them all. It's kind of like an extreme version of that. yeah i haven't i haven't noticed that here um it seems you haven't

noticed a big buck hiding somewhere for many years and then all of a sudden coming out and just pillaging the women i'll say what i've noticed is when they're horny at one, they're horny their whole life. When all they want to do is eat and they don't really look at the girls, they're like that their whole life. You know, as far as fighting and breaking tines, there's bucks that never break even a tip for eight or nine years of their life. Then there's other bucks that are have every time on their head broken by november he's just gonna fight he's just that's i knew guys like that exactly it's they're just like people and they're so individual that that's what makes it fun and that's what makes it hard and that's what also makes it so so interesting to me because nobody's ever right and nobody's ever wrong.

Your theories and everything that you do, it has an application somewhere. You're not shooting all the giant bucks. You don't shoot the 200-inch bucks. I know you get paid to do it, but you could probably get paid to do all kinds of stuff. What do you get out of it? It's a passion. It's just something that I've developed over the years, and now it's more of an addiction.

It started out as a passion, and now it's more of an addiction. I couldn't turn my back to it now if I wanted to. Just watching. Just watching. We talked about this word earlier. Watching like a system yeah just just a wildlife system right just learning as much as i possibly can about you know that animal how much do you feel that you're manipulating it to the point where you're you're farming deer

and how much do you feel you're just making room for things, you're making room to allow things that would happen, happen? I feel very strongly that as far as I feel like we're trying to let things occur that would naturally occur and maybe putting them on a fast track without with an indirect approach meaning in real like again in this scenario this hypothetical scenario where all humans die you would all humans are dead you would see that some deer were growing to nine years old and dying of old age yeah which is not happening in Muskegon County, Michigan, where I grew up, even kind of.

Is there hunting? Yeah. So if there wasn't people. No, there is no old buck. Right. We about shit our pants when you're in my dad's shot of buck that looking back must have been a two and a half year old buck. It was a giant.

Yeah. Yeah. He even got in the newspaper. It was 120 inch giant. Yeah. He even got in the newspaper. It was a 120-inch buck. Yeah. No, man, I don't know. They all revert back. It goes back to those spikes in the populations.

What I'm trying to do is avoid the spikes. If people disappeared in 100 years from now, it would be the up and down population. Wildly cyclical. Yes. And there would be years or points in that process or that system of ups and downs that would be mirror to what we're trying to do here. But it wouldn't be consistent. You know what I'm saying? You you know it'd be up and down but while it was going up it would be what we're trying to hit yeah here um and that's all we're

trying to do is we're just trying to slow that down yeah how will you like right now if you had to sit right now and say, in my career, I would measure success by what? What would it be? Not only do you say your career, because you're young. What would be the ideal thing that you would see happen on a property you were managing? What would be the 10-year goal? Well, like a 10- 10 year i don't know i don't know if i could fathom what i really want to happen uh but you don't know what it would look like no it there's that's that's i don't have any idea what it would look like because see the situation you're in i remember earlier you were

mentioning that um you weren't putting this as a life goal but you were just saying like a thing that would happen perhaps is that ever you'd get it to be where you had a a handful two three four truly like outstanding whitetails right come off your property but one would point out you could do that right now right by going online going online and buying like, you know, big Thunderfuck semen. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Right. And putting them in a pen and giving them a bunch of stuff. Right.

So it's like you want to get there, but you want to get there in a route that is acceptable to you or a route that's interesting to you and not through a route that's not interesting to you. Be like, I want to have a million dollars. I can make it crooked. I'm not saying me, but so it'd be like, I want a million dollars. I want to make it through running like a great company that treats its employees really well and has like stable growth patterns and a good environmental record.

Or I want to make a million dollars and I don't care. I have to kill you to do it. Right. That's exactly, I mean, exactly, exactly right. My problem is as far as seeing into the future my goals would be yeah to have a couple of gigantic whitetail bucks at a harvestable age each year uh however nobody's doing what what we're trying to do here or has done what we're trying to do here to the intensity that we're doing it so you can't really predict what's going to happen yeah uh it's not like if you follow this recipe x will right nobody yeah and it's so different you know from site to site and that's

why that's why that question is difficult for me to answer yeah um because i don't really know something might happen that we don't see because nobody's done this. It's not like, like you said, you follow a recipe and this is what you're going to end up with. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Mother Nature has an awesome way of saying, screw you and throwing a wrench into things

when you try to start messing with her. That's another fun part for me yeah you mentioned earlier like an unintended consequences when we were talking about quail and you were saying you can think you're helping out quail yeah by putting out quail feeders but what you might be doing is helping out bobcats and coyotes by giving them a great place to kill quail exactly that's exactly right that's exactly right like intuitively be like oh yeah put some food out dude you have tons of quail yeah that's how that's how there's a lot of things that got screwed up in in the u.s that are started out as good intentions and the byproducts were completely disastrous. Yanni?

Speaking of unintended consequences, that's what's cool about this place. You guys are trying to do all native flora. You come down here, and you've got the whole high fence thing in your head, and you're thinking about exotics, and there's going to be zebras running around, this, that, and the other. Let's list off the cool stuff that we've seen this week. Four species of snakes. A horny toad. Texas tortoise. Texas tortoise.

A grinner. About 300 jack rabbits. 500 cottontail rabbits. Unbelievable Mexican black-bellied whistling ducks unbelievable varieties of birds yeah i haven't seen this one kudu roll through yet my that's kind of why i want to have this discussion is because my impression like the first time i ever came down here to like the famous texas whitetail country was when i came down with ben o'brien to come down here and just look at quail and i remember walking around being like this is just not what i imagined you know it is uh huge it is vast expanses of i don't want to say pristine

the hand of man has felt like we instance, talked about the implications of fire suppression. Right. Right. Right. You and I were having, Ben and I, Ben in here, we were discussing like, wow, what would you have paid to road a horse through here 200 years ago? And he feels that it would have been more mixed grasslands. Yeah.

From making mosaics of burned areas and unburned areas. And the animal, the wildlife is a little different uh buffalo or bison ranged down in this area which suggests more open country and a little profound down here which suggests more open country so there's the hand of man is felt right you know through that same way interrupting systems fire systems and things. However, vast expanses of what, by a relative standard of what goes on in the U.S., would be undisturbed environment. Privately owned, but vast expanses of undisturbed landscape. Wildlife habitat. Yeah.

And a pretty stunning array of native wildlife. You know. Yeah. It's some tremendous wildlife viewing. Yeah. Here. And unusual things. We saw a snake I had never heard of. The blue...

What's it called? Blue indigo. The blue indigo. Yeah. Saw a souped up frigging rattlesnake. It's been interesting.