The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 068: Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Steven Rinella talks with the outdoor writer Pat Durkin, "Buckman" Doug Duren, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Subjects Discussed: Are coyotes and wolves really killing all the deer?; habitat as the driving factor for deer populations; is Doug part of the problem or part of the solution?; dirty farming vs. clean farming; newspapers and the death of outdoor columnists; the pen is mightier than the fire hydrant; resident locksmiths on naval vessels; fatherly advice; Deer and Deer Hunting magazine; why you should hunt whenever the Green Bay Packers are playing; expert hunters who can't tell one tree from another; deer make people stupid; the viciousness of deer politics; the scholarly consensus; the most insulting article someone could write if his aim was to piss off deer hunters; blaze pink; the relative merits of various midwesterners; buck movements during the rut; shirkers; stress impacts on antler development; do sanctuaries actually work?; lunar phases and deer movements; is camo a bunch of bullshit?; selling venison; and more. 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.

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Go farther, stay longer. No, Pat Durkin. Are coyotes really killing and eating all the deer? Is it as bad as everyone thinks? No, it's not as bad as everybody thinks. Why does everyone think it's so bad? Is it more fun to think about coyotes killing deer than other shit killing deer? Yeah, I don't know what it is, but there's something about coyotes

and something about wolves that really gets under hunters' skin. You can show them research. It shows, like in Wisconsin, in Northern Wisconsin, about five years ago, they wrapped up this research. And the number one killer of fawns, fawns that basically hit the ground in the first three weeks of life are picked off. Can I guess by? Go ahead. Black bears. Exactly.

Exactly. It's anywhere from 10% to 25% of those fawns that are being picked off by black bears. Exactly. Exactly. It's anywhere from 10 to 25% of those fawns that are being picked off by black bears. And a few guys will complain about it. But for the most part, they'll always default to the coyote. And you look at the numbers on this particular study, and this is probably a pretty representative study because they have all the major predators in this area. It was 6% of the kills were definitely tied to coyotes. 6%. Okay.

And black bears, though, they had at least 10%, but it was more likely close to 25%. Because as soon as you got about a month out of the fawning season, because part of that 25% is these unknown, they weren't quite sure what got it because everything was basically cleaned up. Yeah. Gone. But as soon as they got out of that, out of that first month, this was typically when the

black bears are hitting them, that just dropped right off. Those unidentified dropped right off. Cause they can get them up until they're able to get up. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the black bears, they probably aren't

going to run very far to chase down a fawn. And once that fawn gets motoring, they let it go. Now, have you ever killed a coyote, can I ask? I've only... My guess is no, because you call them coyotes. It could be. I never thought of that. And I've found, in general, I've found that people who have killed them call them coyotes.

Well, mine are... Because I think they don't want it to sound so cute. And people that have not tend to call them coyotes. Huh are because i think they don't want it to sound so cute and people that have not tend to call them coyotes huh i never thought you call them during i call coyotes i i'm more i guess i'm more formal all you know we've but you might but a historian was telling me that i might be right about that killing him? No, no, no. No, he wasn't interested in that theory at all. But he didn't think that was right. Just the history of calling them coyotes and coyotes.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, to answer your question, though, I shot one with a bow and arrow, and I shot one with a shotgun, and didn't get either of them. They both got away from me. Oh. Yeah, so a wounding loss, basically.

Now, why were you shooting at him? That's a good question. Just because man dislikes coyote? In both cases, it's one of those odd things that I can't really explain. I would never do

that to a fox. A coyote, I let the girl go, and i pulled the trigger on the shotgun and my daughter was with me when i shot the one with the shotgun we were turkey hunting and she asked well why'd you do that couldn't give her a good answer predator control no i have i have no illusion about that yeah see i don't you i don't generally like, I have, and the last one I shot at, we ate, but I don't shoot at them. The first time I ever came to meet Doug Duren here, and we're in, right here in what Dirt Myth calls Casanova, Wisconsin. Actually, a couple miles south of Casanova, Wisconsin.

First time I ever came to visit, I got scolded by Doug. Cause some coyotes come peeling through. I was on, we were doing a mooch, a drive and some coyotes peeled through and Doug was a little shocked that I didn't take a poke at him. Huh? Do you remember that Doug? I do remember that. And I, and your reason for not doing it was not some, oh, they're just trying to make a living too or something. Cause I didn't know if deer were coming.

That's right. Right. Right. I don't want to go making, I don't want to go blouching and have the, you know, but no, I don't have, but, but, but I have, I don't touch them anymore. I'm kind of the same. I, I find them kind of interesting and I know

that there are plenty of guys that are hunting them and then I've listened to, uh, you talking with Dan Flores and, uh, and looked into that a little bit more myself and it sounds like you shoot them and they're just, you shoot one that's being replaced by two. Yeah. That's not even why I don't do, my thing

about it is I just don't like if i if i wanted if i had need for a coyote hide right like if i was gonna if i had some if my wife wanted something or i was gonna make something for myself i would definitely in the winter get a nice one for to use the pelt if i needed to have something made. But it's like, you walk over there and I ate one. I can tell you they're not like, I'm not going to get them for that reason. So you walk over there and you're like,

oh, there he is. Yep, got him. Do you know what I mean? I don't think you're really turning the tide on, unless you're doing it in a very concerted way, like in a very systematic concerted way, I don't think you're doing it in a very concerted way, like in a very systematic concerted way, I don't think you're turning the tide on predation. By like

randomly, now and then. You'll never make a dent in them with a rifle. You know, guys... Just through bumping into them. Right. You can go out and call them, go after them aggressively as you want. You're saying actively. You can go out and call them, go after them aggressively as you want. Yeah, he's saying,

you're saying actively, predator, yeah, coyote calling. Doing like, Doug has a scrap pile out here in the woods where he dumps bones and stuff. You could probably put those all in a place and pound every coyote that comes in and still that's not going to make a dent.

The guys that are really serious about coyote control and for deer management reasons, they pretty much are trappers yeah they're they're getting out there in the spring anytime they can get them especially but spring though is a really good time to get them i guess and they'll they'll just trap the coyotes and then the guy says as soon as you lay off and come back in a couple months it it's like you never did. It's like you're never trapped. New ones have moved in. Yeah. They replace themselves. It's just a guy I know named Craig Harper.

He's a professor down at Tennessee. He always refers to it as weed control, trying to pull weeds. You can go out in the garden, pull weeds, pull weeds, get that garden cleaned out. And if you leave it alone for a week, come back, it's right back, everything up again. Yeah. And that's pretty much the way coyotes are but you know what someone here's why i want to get to the well we'll talk about this till we're done talking about it now i saw a new guy who was talking about why you know and we're in the midwest talking about white tails right now but with him i was talking about elk in the West. Why are people pissed about wolves? When they know that lions kill more elk calves than wolves.

Okay. In the area they were, where they were doing work. He said, because lions have always been killing elk calves out here. And we've always had a sense that for every hundred calves, right? We're going to lose 30 to lions and that's just been something that's just been woven into the cultural fabric right when you're on the woods you get this sense of seven out of ten cows right is packing a calf right and we kind of know that that's like the rate and our harvest statistics are built around

that right we just get used to that but then you have some new additive thing which makes a noticeable change from what you've seen in your lifetime in your father's lifetime and it's additive and you focus on that so you're not focusing on the three out of ten let's say the three out of ten that lions are killing you're kind of fixated on the one out of 10, let's say, the three out of 10 that lions are killing, you're kind of fixated on the one out of 10 or two out of 10, the new things killing, because that's this new thing you need to deal with. And so a lot of blame falls to it. And because coyotes, like in my own lifetime,

have come onto the scene in so many states. Like the first coyote I ever laid eyes on in my whole life, I didn't even know there were any around at the time and i caught in a fox trap now it's like the fox are gone in that area it's just coyotes it's like an everyday thing if you're like if you hunt around there you're gonna it's an everyday thing to see coyotes and they were not around so then you have like some mortality right and all these other causes of mortality have always been around, but now there's like this new kid on the block thing,

and it does get a lot of attention. Yeah. I can buy that because I know in Wisconsin, again, and that's my base, people get mad at me when I point this out, but when I first started working in this industry in the newspapers back in the 80s, there really weren't any wolves to speak of in northern Wisconsin. There's a handful of them. It's just like the mid-80s.

And I've been covering the outdoors in Wisconsin all that time. I've never, I mean, I've done other things along the way, but pretty much my beats Wisconsin. And I always remember back in the 80s, you'd go to a public hearing, go to a public meeting about deer, and people up north have always complained about not enough deer up north and back then they always blamed the chippewa the chippewa indian tribes yeah they always because they were on a treaty that allowed them to do unregulated right what we regard as unregulated

they could hunt off their off their reservation territories so they you know blamed every they weren't registering their deer they weren't't doing this, all sorts of accusations. Well, then the wolf builds up in the 90s. And it was great hunting back then, right? Now everybody remembers it kicking ass. Probably so. But I've written a couple of times, and I'm not doing it just to be a jerk, but I'm pointing out to people that, you know, 30 years ago,

you guys always blamed the Chippewa for no deer. Well, now the wolves are up there. Now it's the wolves' fault, you know, so you're letting the Indians off the hook now. I guess they weren't such a big problem after all. Yeah. But then, and I think my area where I hunt in northern Wisconsin is a prime example.

You go up there and the biggest problem with any animal basically is always their habitat. And where I hunt in northern Wisconsin is pretty much mature timber. There's not much in there for deer to really live off of. And so I go up there and I, my common joke around our camp is that that habitat is so poor around us, even the wolves don't hunt deer there because there's just nothing there to hold deer.

Yeah. And, and I'm not, I don't think, you know, I, we. But has it always been bad? Well, yeah. Since the timber got mature. In my, in my friend's camp back in the fifties, when his dad was there with his buddies and forties, it was a pretty good, pretty good place. You know, the forest hadn't been cut over that long before that. Gotcha.

And then by the sixties, and this guy's, uh, he keeps camp journals. Like he makes, when you go to his camp, you got to write in his journal before you you leave and he keeps track of every deer killed that are basically back into the 60s and his area pretty much has been bad you know for a long time since the logging yeah pretty much you know since since i'd say the 70s for sure but um the thing is too though i look i balance that out somewhat because his friends are mainly bird hunters they They deer hunt, but they're mainly bird hunters. Until guys like I came along in the late 90s, early 2000s, where you really go out and just sit all day and hunt deer the way, you know, you almost have to.

They didn't kill a whole lot of deer, so I'm not sure how representative that is. But then I've talked to other guys in the area, and that area we happen to hunt has always been a tough spot because it's lost spruce, which deer don't really make much use of so it it's i don't think it's all that uncommon but then there's other parts of the north you go into and the aspens getting real mature the grouse aren't all that you know basically as you know grouse rough grouse and deer if they're doing fine usually they have good good young forest regeneration going on yeah and if you don't have that those young aspens coming up well especially in an area like that

yeah and then that's northern forest habitat you have to have that young growth you know and but then you get down this area too you can make up for a lot of the shortcomings of that natural habitat with crops and other stuff that can pull them through but there's even research research now in Wisconsin showing that they're even getting winter loss in central Wisconsin, which is farm country, because the woods have been so over-browsed and there's really nothing left in there. And you have clean farming practices with nothing left in the fields. They don't have good hideouts. Yeah, they have no place to hide, no place to eat, basically. And that's another thing, winter starvation in this eastern part of wisconsin south i mean central east central wisconsin central wisconsin and even parts of west central wisconsin

you're seeing some winter loss now which is never something that they worried about you know 20 years ago yeah now doug do you practice clean farm are you part of the problem or part of the solution i would say that i'm part of the solution for two reasons. One, because of our forestry practices and we've got, you know, various age classes of woods. But then our ag land is in CRP. And those CRP fields are planted to clover, alfalfa, orchard grass, and then some of the edges have additional clover and that sort of thing. So that's great cover for not just deer, but for everything. Because you guys have, in this area, a deer overpopulation problem by some definitions.

Absolutely. The definition in your mind, just to put words in your mouth, the definition in your mind would be that you guys may be, it may be like disease transmission issues. There's enough deer where you could have disease transmission issues. Without getting into all that too much, what I was going to suggest, if you're serious about reducing the deer population, you can just make your farm real shitty. But then you're going to lose a lot of other wildlife. Well, yeah, fair enough. Like you could do clean farming and let everything get overgrown and then there wouldn't be so many deer. You know, it's interesting when I, I know a fair number of farmers around here and i know those guys are you know they're it's it's clean farming it really is and uh some will refer to it as a desert not farmers

but other people that's a desert once they've been you know out there but i'm always amazed at the amount of deer that i'll still see in farm fields that it's corn stubble and if there's stubble there there's going to be some something something that they'll eat, just like the cattle eat the fodder from the ears and that sort of thing. Um, uh, apparently, you know, picking through the bean fields and stuff too, but it's a kind of at different times of the year and then what's exposed and, um, you know, they'll work awful

hard at it. You'll see them if we take that, take that right up around the, and look at those farm fields. Well, Joe, the guy who farms it up there, he's a hell of a good farmer. Yet, I mean, there'll be times we'll see 75 deer up there, you know, working on those fields and all there are is grass strips and then it's corn and beans. So I get the, the, the, the clean farm thing, but the clean farming thing, but then I see there that it doesn't seem to be the case.

And I wonder if it's just sort of. But they've also attributed those practices to some of the declines in waterfowl that we saw back in the eighties and things. Hmm. That the people weren't leaving enough, that we had waterfowl populations that had grown used to all the stubble.

Leftovers. Yeah. And that clean farming practices was one of a handful of things that caused a lot of duck species to collapse. I wonder, uh, one of the things I noticed around here and I, I, I have to, I'd have to ask Joe about it.

It's like, he's my farmer reference all the time. They, they do a lot of, uh, uh, spring, um, grinding of the corn fodder and then baling it rather than in the fall. And I'm sure it's probably a matter of time and, you know, and those sorts of things, but, um, he's the kind of guy who would leave it,

uh, because, you know, it's good for the wildlife for, you know, through the winter and then in the spring doing it, but, um, and if it dries out, you know, great. And, and I, and I know there are some rotation as to where they'll do that and where they won't, you know, they won't take the fodder off of each, that field every year in a row, you know, every year

because they want to put some of that organic matter back in. But I also think that up there now, you know, as we start talking about it and thinking about it, that there's a lot of edge there. You know, there's, there's browse, there's some other things there. So, you know, they're probably good working through there and getting a little bit of everything.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah. Now, Pat, you're kind of like a dying breed in that you are a, like a, like a regional, one of your jobs, like a regional outdoor columnist. What happened to them all? They all died?

Yeah, they died in the, well, you know, the biggest, the biggest change is the way the newspapers went downhill. And when I started off, there was um three or four guys in wisconsin were full-time outdoor writers two were at the milwaukee journal one was at the milwaukee sentinel there's one in green bay there's one on wausau there's one on lacrosse there's probably seven of them i think about it i had one growing up the muskegon chronicle had a i can't remember his name bob i think had like a dude now it seems like otherworldly that there'd

be like a dude whose job it was to write about hunting and fishing opportunities local wildlife politics and that was his beat yeah at a newspaper and this guy had like a desk at a newspaper oh yeah that was to cover hey, the perch are in. It's just amazing, man. Like, big yellow bellies. Last week's meeting at the DNRC office. Well, my, I still get grumpy about when I see an outdoor writer at a newspaper not taking that beat seriously. And just writing about fishing roundups and um doing the i think is not doing the hard reporting not doing the hard reporting because you know

yeah but but i my understanding is is it in your well first sketch out like how long have you been um doing like uh how long have you been a what's am i using the right word when i say like a regional outdoor column it's like what do you call it? What do you guys call it? Well, I just call myself an outdoor writer. You're like a syndicated outdoor writer in the state of Wisconsin. In Wisconsin. And you focus. Yeah. The focus of my reporting and column writing is Wisconsin.

And I've basically made my beat a statewide beat as much as I can. I'm centrally located right in the middle of Wisconsin, so I kind of keep an eye on And you try to cover the whole state. I try to cover statewide issues, but I still find there's always those little local guys that do something that will be fascinating that I'll do stories and I'll drive down a mass and sometimes for a story, whatever it might be. But that's only one part of my job now because you can't make a living as a freelance guy in newspapers.

You could, but now you can't? I don't know if you ever could because newspapers had never paid freelancers that much. But as newspapers declined and they started losing revenues, advertising revenues, they just started killing staff like crazy. Oh, I got to imagine that you're the first guy to go. Oh, you would be. You'd be one of the very first. I know right now we're down to one full-time outdoor writer

paid by a newspaper in Wisconsin. That's Paul Smith of the Milwaukee Journal. Is he barely hanging on? I have no idea. I don't know what his situation is. Is he a good writer? Yeah, yeah. Paul's a very good outdoor writer.

But, you know, the problem is. And he doesn't do like chip shop, penny ante. No. Hey, Percheron, he does other stuff too. He does pretty good stuff. I respect his work. And where I've made my niche, you know, in outdoor writing, I think is covering issues as a columnist. Where I like to always think that I give an

opinion but I like to think it's an informed opinion. It's not just off the cuff. Before I give an opinion I've done a lot of interviews, done a lot of reading and I'm always sensitive about the word research because I think I work with guys who do scientific research. I know for them the research word is a real important word to them. They don't like to use it just for basically saying you went on Google and typed in, you know, a Google search. Yeah. And so I'm kind of careful how I use that word

research, but that's, but, but by learning how I do reporting work the way I did, you know, back in the eighties, I started discovering that most outdoor writers working in a national scene on the magazine front and elsewhere, most of those guys don't like doing interviews where you call people up or sit through a long day of seminars and take notes, record interviews, transcribe interviews, all the real nitty gritty work. What those guys do a lot of is they'll do a deal where like some company will host, right? They'll be like be like oh they'll round up like 10 outdoor

writers and they'll be like we're going to texas to test uh these new bullets here on on uh wild pigs right right and then everyone goes down there and they all shoot a wild pig with these new bullets and they all go to their respective publications and they all shoot a wild pig with these new bullets and they all go to their respective publications and they all write an article and you can tell because in there they'd be like i was with i was hunting with you know bob's the the head of marketing and development at bob's bullets and that is a lot of outdoor writing but not i don't know if that's so much anymore i mean it really really it really was back in the 90s. There are the gun writers and the ammo type guys that still do that a lot, but I never fit in with that group.

Yeah, no, I think of it as like gun writers. Yeah, gun writers do. There's probably still enough work there where they get those kind of things that come down. Plus, they know what they're doing. I like to hunt. I've got a lot of different deer rifles. I kind of like deer rifles, but I don't really know the specs on them as far as which one,

the ballistic coefficient stuff. I don't know anything about that. You just know it's old bassy and it shoots straight. It shoots where I point it. That kind of stuff, I like the look of a good wallet stock rifle and I like the old lever action.308 Savage, those kind of things. I find that interesting.

But to go on these, I think most of these companies figure out pretty quickly what your strengths and weaknesses are. Yeah. And they'd probably have me on one of those kind of outings and go, don't ever bring that guy back. He's just not going to, he doesn't get this stuff. Yeah, he was doing research the whole time. Because this wasn't up this stuff. Yeah, he was doing research the whole time. This wasn't, wasn't up my alley. Yeah.

And the magazine, I used to edit Deer and Deerning Magazine. This was back in, I got hired there in 91, left there in 2001. So you were the editor-in-chief there for 10 years.

Oh, 11 years. But back up first because I still don't understand. So what, like what was your first outdoor writing job? Newspaper.

Yeah. Add a specific newspaper. Yeah, but I was- Did you study journalism? Oh, yeah. But you came out of the Navy. Yeah. I was in the Navy. Were you a journalist in the Navy?

No. My dad told me to- Stars and stripes? That's always one of those stories I enjoy talking about. But when I was 19 years old, I decided I was going to go in the Navy. And in those days, I decided I'd follow my father's footsteps. He was a firefighter. In the Navy?

No, no, in Madison, Wisconsin. Oh, I'm sorry. No, that's okay. But dad encouraged me to go in the Navy. So your old man hadn't been in the Navy? No, he was in the Coast Guard. Okay. And in the Army, but he was in the Coast Guard Reserve.

And he knew enough about the military, he knew if you want to get firefighting training, you go in the Coast Guard or the Navy. Because when a ship's on fire, you better get that fire out. Yeah, you want that shit out. You want it out. In a hurry.

So they really- You can't run outside. That's one of the things I really liked about the Navy was how every ship was basically its own little city and it had to have all the services. So my dad, when I went in the Navy, he was telling me, he's looking at all the recruiting stuff. He says, instead of doing this firefighting training, because I was going to be, I was what was called then a hull maintenance technician. They taught you firefighting.

They taught you damage control, welding, all these great skills. My dad looked at all this stuff and he says, you should take this journalism training because they have, they train you to be a journalist. The Navy would? The Navy has. Why would they do that? Well, because they have people, they have, they have press releases on ships and they have little ship newspapers. And especially the bigger ships have regular publications. I don't know if they do now, but it's probably on internet now or wire base type stuff.

But my, but I was 19. I knew everything. So I said, no, I'm going to go off and do this, you know, damage control. Stay true to firefighting. Yeah. Yeah. But then by the time I got out of the Navy,

which was five years, I realized Dad was right. My strength was writing and editing. And I was a lousy welder. I understood damage control, but I realized, ah, God, the skills I have, I'm getting bored doing this stuff, you know. And I ended up being a locksmith for my final three years skills I have, I'm getting bored doing this stuff. I ended up being a locksmith for my final three years in the Navy. I got trained as a locksmith.

And so I was breaking in the safes all the time in these little wardrooms on Navy ships. So the ship has a locksmith. Oh, yeah. Well, it's a little city, right? Yeah. Everybody gets locked out of the boat. Well, I was on what's called a destroyer tender. It's a big repair ship.

Yeah. And so like our job basically, we'd pull into a port, then all these destroyers and cruisers would pull up alongside of us. And you'd pick all the locks. And I'd go over there and do all the locksmith work. People locked all their rooms, locked out. I mean, my biggest job ever was I spent Christmas day in 78 on a submarine all day because the duty officer lost the key ring to the submarine. Every, every key that went around that sub.

So I spent all day replacing all these, these keys, but to get back to your story. So did you say 1978? Yeah. So it was like a war free period. Oh, I, I, I had it perfectly. It was right after Vietnam. And when I was getting. So it was like a war-free period. Oh, I had it perfectly. It was right after Vietnam. And when I was getting out, it was-

You didn't even have to do Grenada. No, I missed- Missed that hotbed. The closest I came to anything interesting was we helped evacuate a bunch of people out of Lebanon. My five years in was from 75 to 80. And when I was getting out, it was during the Rand hostage crisis. And so you had to worry about where that would lead, but eventually it all calmed down. But I never had to do anything interesting.

And so I'm always proud of the fact I served the Navy because I really, I enjoyed it. I didn't want to make a career out of it, but I enjoyed it. Yeah, as our friend Rourke says, you earned your seat at the table. Yeah. The table being America. Yeah. And I believe in that kind of stuff.

I believe in public service, all those kind of things. I encourage my daughter, oldest daughter, when she was heading off to college, she asked me about Navy. And I always told her, I said,

I didn't want to make a career out of this, but I liked it. I liked that sense of community, that sense of service. But she's career now. Yeah, she's career. She's been 10 years now, and she's now a doctor in the Navy, a nurse midwife, basically the equivalent of a doctor. And so I'm real proud of that. But, you know, by the time I got out of the Navy, though, I had so many people tell me they'd read my letters because I actually bought a typewriter in the Navy, a manual typewriter, which I wish I still would have kept. And I typed all my letters because I learned how to type.

And I cranked out letters to anyone that would write to me, I'd write them back. And by the time I got out, I thought. Because you're learning to write. Yeah. Yeah. And when you start having people tell you that, when I read your letters, I feel like I'm right there. And I thought, well, maybe that means something. And when I got out, instead of following my dad's footsteps, I went off to college and got my degree in journalism.

And then I, about in my junior year, I started working for the local newspaper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin as a local sports writer, which was kind of a joke. Like athletics. Yeah, because it was, anyone who knew me knew it was a joke that I was actually covering high school sports because I never had any interest in most of the sports except for the Packers, Green Bay Packers. You still like the Packers. Oh yeah, I covered them for two or three years and it was

miserable because it was, I like being a fan. I don't like being a, you know, working on a beat where you're covering a team that you can't cheer for. Why do you guys like... Not that... Everybody likes their team, but why is it that people in Wisconsin

are so fired up about the Packers? Did they just win the Super Bowl or something? They won it four times, Steve. Did they win recently? No, not since 2010. But they're always competitive. And in the last 20 years, we've been spoiled. We've had an incredible quarterback in the last 20 years.

But to answer your question, Wisconsin people. Doug's yawning. You don't want to get into the Packers, Doug, because you don't give a shit. Not until it gets cold and shitty outside. And then in December, I start watching. Well, no, because you guys are telling me that that's the perfect day when the packers are playing that's the day you can hunt everybody else's farm like if you can't i didn't think we were going to talk about if you've been kind of curious about hunting someone else's property do it while the packers are playing because you damn

sure not gonna run into the guy and then you can go and shoot some deer off his land uh you had a question earlier looked like when you're talking about the navy i gotta move on from all this i don't want you we're in doug's doug's farmhouse i don't want to bore doug in his own damn farmhouse so we're gonna get away from this i've known pat for i don't know a while and uh i don't know 10 or 12 years or something like that and uh we've had we've talked about all kinds of things but i guess i've never really heard the whole navy story before and what i'm really curious about was. You didn't know he was a locksmith in the Navy.

I didn't know he was a locksmith in the Navy. I do about. You didn't know a guy your whole life. But I wondered about your father, you hear you're telling your father that I'm interested in becoming a firefighter and all that, but yet your father's going, so he discouraged you from being a firefighter.

No, he encouraged me to go into firefighting. I should have finished that story, yeah. That's a good point, Doug. What happened when I came to that juncture where I had to choose, Dad's advice was to go into the journalism school the Navy offered because he said to me, and he was right, he said, the Navy teaches everyone firefighting skills because everyone in a fire has to respond.

And dad had been through the Coast Guard's training and he'd probably been to actual Navy firefighting schools because the Coast Guard will help out with the Navy stuff and they'll use the Navy facilities. So dad probably knew all that stuff. But again, because I was 19, I thought I thought I was smart and that, you know, I know what I want to do. I just blew off dad's advice and came to realize, you know, like a couple of years ago, I should have done that. That quote, you know, the pen is mightier than the sword. The pen is mightier than the, uh, you

know, fire hydrant. So I, I, uh, I've never met. I want to move on. Oh, go ahead. Oh, let me please finish. Thanks. Okay. So I've never met Pat's dad, So I, I, uh, I've never met. All right, I want to move on. Oh, go ahead. Oh, let me please finish. Thanks. Okay. So I've never met Pat's dad, but he's a, uh, a famous character in, in Madison.

He was the fire chief and, and a really interesting guy. Oh, so he's like a high level fireman. He was the fire chief in Madison during the 60s. Oh, I gotcha. Okay. I thought he just hated fire and just wanted

fire to be put out. And I thought, you know, in the stories that I've heard about him, he's a bit of a character, you know, and I just kind of thought that maybe he was just saying, sorry, son, it's not for you. No, Dad actually told me, I'm not making this up, Dad actually told me that of his four sons, that he thought I was the one that was most,

personality-wise, most cut out to be a firefighter. And I never quite knew what he meant. Hey, Red, is that true? What is the personality? Okay, I don't want to talk about it. Well, just things like not, not being afraid to go up a ladder and not being afraid to hang on to shit and just, you know. Yeah.

Stick your nose in there. Yeah. Rescuing maidens in distress and whatnot. He thought that. You were that guy.. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Rescuing maidens in distress and whatnot. He thought that. You were that guy. So then you got, okay. Then you became, so then, and I want to skip writing about sports because that's not interesting. I agree.

So you wrote about athletics. Okay. Now, then you became a professional outdoor rider when? Where I could concentrate on it full time wasn't until I got to Deer and Deer Running Magazine. Oh. But at the Oshkosh paper, what I did, because this is a small, you know, like a mid-sized city in Wisconsin, about 50,000 people. And the newspaper couldn't staff a full-time outdoor writer. But they let me basically be a half-time outdoor writer.

And I also ran the week, I was editor of the week on newspapers. I also covered the education beat for a while, you know, the school board, that kind of stuff. But the reason I, I should just say though, real quickly, the reason I went in the sports desk at first was because I knew that was the quickest route to the outdoor page.

Oh, is that right? Yeah, the sports sections almost always have the outdoor page. That legitimizes it in my eyes. That matters to you. Because that was my ulterior motive was to get into that outdoor page. And eventually I got control of the outdoor page. And I really worked that beat.

Because my dream was to use that platform there to get the Milwaukee Journal's eye and go down and become the Milwaukee Journal's outdoor writer. Because you grew up hunting and fishing. Yeah. Yanni, at what point did you become so bored? Making notes? Oh, that's what you're doing? Yeah.

Oh, okay. So, at that point then, because you're, we're going to syndicate. Mm-hmm. Can you explain that? Yeah. My syndication, though, didn't start until I actually started working at Deer and Deer

Hunting Magazine. And Deer and Deer Hunting, I was lucky when I first went there, it was owned, it was a neat magazine because it was started by local guys up in Appleton, Wisconsin. It was two guys. It was? Yeah.

Oh yeah. It was started in Appleton, Wisconsin in 77. By two guys and they started off their magazine. They had this traveling road show basically.

They go to high schools and civic groups and do presentations on white-tailed deer. And they're doing all sorts of crazy stuff.

They put speakers up in trees and blow noise to see how deer would respond to it. So they're like doing their own shoestring in their

own deer research. Exactly. Plus they're like, they're like doing their own, like shoestringing their own deer research. Exactly. That's, and they're, plus they're the first guys to really start actually going and digging out scientific research and putting it to practical use for hunters. And that was their tagline. Is the magazine still published?

Yeah. Yeah. You were there 10 years. Yeah. 11 years. Yeah. And I really enjoyed it. And it gave me opportunities that I never

would have gotten anywhere else. Cause it gave me a, one of the things I really got out of it it gave me opportunities that I never would have gotten anywhere else. Because it gave me a, one of the things I really got out of it, it was a big benefit. It made me realize how much I liked, as boring as it can be, sitting at these different scientific seminars. And waiting for that little nugget to come out of some college kid's research on deer that they could use in a magazine. Because part of your job was just to cover all research pertaining to white-tailed deer. Yeah. Yeah, and especially this stuff, the magazine's tagline was, and it probably still is, practical and comprehensive information for white-tailed deer hunters.

There you go. And that was right up my alley. I like that. See, like, I've always found that I love deer hunting. And that's the number one thing. You walk in my house, you know, this guy's a deer hunter. That's all he does. But I realized early on that as much as I love deer hunting, I'm not a predator to waste.

I've met guys through that magazine that they're predators. They know how to kill deer. They're good. And that's one thing I really love about what I do is I get to meet guys that are hunters or fishermen that if you think you're a good hunter and fisherman, you're jealous of some of these guys you see on TV and wherever it might be. I hope that sometimes I really respect the fact that these guys really are, in many cases, better than you are at deer hunting and better than you are at bass fishing or walleye fishing. Yeah, but that pisses people off this is people because people like i'll always be reading magazines and people will goof on people be like well goof on dudes like me who like like do tv about hunting like oh he's like yeah but not many other people get to go out as much as we go out like if you're in an occupation where you're hunting where you're spending 150 plus days a year

actively out in the woods hunting and fishing you're probably going to see some things and learn some things i mean just you could be the biggest knucklehead in the world but something's going to rub off on you and that amount of exposure and you take that on like a 10-year career doing that at the end of that you have seen a ton of shit happen in the woods. Yeah. And a lot of these guys that got good at, like in my, in my, in my generation, there was guys like, um, oh, he's older than me a little bit, but like Miles Keller was just, I'm not sure how he's doing these days,

but the guy could really go out and find, he'd go out in a new area, look it over, figure out pretty quickly how to hunt deer in that area. Greg Miller would, back in the 60s and 70s, was killing really nice deer in northern Wisconsin and a lot of guys didn't know big bucks existed up there. Yeah. And there's guys like that.

And they, you know, what I always find fascinating about some of these guys I've met over the years I hunted with, they can't tell you a red pine from a white pine from a cedar. Yeah. But they know how to kill deer. They know how to line things up and figure out what's going on. I've heard people, others say that.

Guys say that, like talking about something like whitetail expert and being like, and saying, that son of a bitch didn't know the kind of tree his tree stand was in. He didn't need woodsmanship. He knew how to hunt whitetails. Yeah, and the point I make is, well, wolves don't, they can't tell trees apart either, but they probably figure out habitat.

You don't know how they conceptualize trees. Well, I don't. They probably don't do the Linnaean binomial nomenclature, but they might conceptualize trees in some way. I want to doubt one bit they figure out real quickly when they walk into a, go through, cruise through a section of woods, which ones will bear fruit, which ones won't.

Yeah, productive and not productive. Yeah, they, they, it's like you've mentioned in the past, hunters look at creek bottoms a whole lot differently than somebody else going by in a car. Yeah. You know, it's just, it becomes part of your, you know, they won't live long if they can't walk

into part of a wood real quick and figure out how this thing works. Yeah, when I was trapping, I couldn't go over a culvert without slowing down or backing up. Yeah. I had to inspect every bit of water every time. Yeah. You know. And that's where I, I love meeting those kind of people.

And I learned real quickly to pay them respect for that. That, you know, I might know more about some guy's research project and how it turned out. And I might be able to give them a lot of facts that'll blow off as far as, like we talked about earlier about coyotes. And coyotes are an interesting subject because all this country, they're having different impacts on deer in different levels.

There's areas in Northeastern Minnesota, like you talked before about the idea that they kind of accept a certain amount of predation in some area because they're used to it. Well, you know, you go up to Northern Minnesota and you look at the research going back into the 60s, you know, fawn survival through that

first year, it was like in the 27% range often, regularly, because it's a harsh environment. Winter would kill them off. They come through the summer okay, never make it out of winter. And 27, 30% survival for that first year was not uncommon. What's it around here, Doug?

Something like 1.1 fawns per doe survive because we have so many twins. I got you. I mean, you lose a few. So very good recruitment. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's parts of South Carolina right

now where they have like 0.4, you know, for fawn recruitment. 1.4. No, no 0.4, like 0.4. What's the reason for that? Because right now there's areas of the south in South Carolina, some of these other southeastern states, they've never known coyotes really until recently. The deer really haven't figured them out yet.

Oh, so they haven't figured out. They haven't figured them out yet. This thing's going to kill them. Yeah. They're going to fawn. Well, yeah, when we kicked off as a little teaser, I said, are they really killing all the deer? He said, no. Well, I'm-

Some guy in South Carolina's pulling his hair out. That's kind of why I circled back, Steve. Oh, because you want to get it. But I want to get into it, too, but I need to clear something up just for my own understanding. Okay. Because I honestly don't know this yet. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all I do want to talk

I want to talk about a lot of that but i also understand this i'm just understand i'm still tripped up and i and maybe no one else in the world is on on the the the demise of the outdoor columnist okay and and as a way i want to understand that i think it might be helpful if i understand the survival of an outdoor columnist. Yeah. So when you started doing that, so you went to Deer and Deer Hunting and became the editor-in-chief. Right. And that was a national publication.

Right. Became a national publication. Yeah. But how did it wind up being that you write an article about Wisconsin and it appears in a bunch of different newspapers in Wisconsin? The way I did it, when I went to work for Deer and Deer Ending Magazine, I was lucky because back then I still was independently owned. And the owners, I said to them, you know, I explained to them that I really like newspaper work. I like newspaper columns.

I like writing that weekly column. It's something I really took a lot of pride in. And I asked them, would you mind if I kept writing it? I won't do it at work. I'll do it at my own time on the weekends and at night. Okay. But this is important to me. This is something that I like doing.

And they agreed. And then when the company had bought out the magazine about, I was at Deer and Deer on a year and a half and got bought out. Well, the company that bought us out wanted me to drop the column. They didn't like me. Did the guys that sold it make a lot of money when they sold it?

Yeah, I think they did. They did, yeah. They count pretty good. Good. But, so like along the way though, I started, what I did at first was I had a woman who was trying to launch her own syndication service. You know, she was based in Mass,

and then she asked me if she could pick up my outdoor commas, put it over a package. So she pitched it to a couple of different newspapers, like the Wisconsin State Journal. And back in those days, Racine, the Racine newspaper, picked it up. Oshkosh picked it up. And Waukesha, another town by Milwaukee, picked it up.

And then eventually I had it in Eau Claire and then they dropped it. It's not all sugar and spice either. A lot of them, you know, about two or three of them dropped me. But then over time, though, my net game was right now I'm at 17 newspapers around Wisconsin that carry my column. Right now? Right now.

You're shitting me. Oh. I didn't know there were 17 newspapers in Wisconsin anymore. Now, when Doug, so when I, when Doug, I can't remember if it was after or before I met you. Doug was talking about your work in Wisconsin and how people in Wisconsin are so serious about deer and deer hunting. Do you know this statistic? I can't remember what it is, but that like Texas has four times as many deer. God, I wish I knew how this went.

Texas has four times as many deer, twice as many people, but half as many hunters or some shit like that. I'm not sure how they're, I don't know their numbers in Texas. It was just about how dudes in Wisconsin hunt deer. Well, if you look, I think Wisconsin's population these days is about 7 million, 6, 7 million, someplace in there. Would you like me to fact check that? You could, but it's, it's. I think you've got something to do over there, Doug.

A really neat piece of research, you know, from about 10, no, about 20 years ago. He's now a friend of mine, Tom Heberlein. He made a comment in his, he was a sociologist and he'd study hunting and hunting motivations, these kinds of things. And he always would say of Wisconsin, he said, in Wisconsin, you either are a deer hunter or you sleep with a deer hunter. And he wasn't, and he wasn't exaggerating.

Some do both. Some do both. We multitask, you know. And, but you have, you have, you look at an average Wisconsin household, it's unusual not to have a family with some deer hunter somewhere in that gets like you know people mad enough for you they wouldn't be surprised that they would give you a death threat over whitetail politics oh whitetail politics is vicious and it's it's it's uh i always say deer make people stupid it makes people stupid and mean sometimes dear and especially um if you want to piss off a group of people real fast, it's deer hunters.

They can be very tough. What would be a thing that you found would piss off deer hunters? Basically. Like you write a column about like, obviously wolves is going to piss. Wolves piss them off. Piss deer hunters. Disease pisses deer hunters off.

Disease somewhat, not as much as like baiting. Baiting really is a divisive issue. Is it? Yeah. And people like me. So frame for me an article. Let's say you said, I'm going to go piss off Wisconsin's deer hunters. I will write an article about this subject and frame it this way. What would be like the most divisive thing you could say right now?

I'll say, I'll try to address that question I will say that I've never written a column and I mean this from the bottom of my heart I've never written a column with the intent of pissing someone off that's just not how I work but I will write an opinion

but you had to have done it in anticipation oh definitely you know if you bring this topic up whether it's in polite society or not, some people are going to get mad and write a rotten letter to you. And I just figure, again, this is one of my core beliefs is that I look at my writing from the newspaper as something I do as kind of a public service. I get paid for it. But I really believe in putting information out there. And if they don't want to believe the information, that's up to them.

I can't change their mind because, you know, people have their, once they have an attitude towards something, you're not going to change their mind. But I think it's important to find the information. And I hate to use the word vet because, you know, I don't know what really, how do you go about vetting besides talk to a lot of people and finally get to a point where you think this this makes sense this is factual and put it out there and yeah but that's an interesting point to bring up right now because we're sort of engaged in this big cultural debate about like what you know this whole i mean i i don't want to say it f-a-k-e news okay so we're like really caught up in this well what is right like can anything be factual or listen i think on some things there is on some things you can you can achieve a scholarly

consensus okay on some things a scholarly consensus or an academic consensus could be evasive but there is a way to present a contentious argument in a way that is transparent about what is known like explain what is the where does the scholarly consensus end what direction do you feel based on like a reasonable amount of work things might be going when you get beyond the known facts and not known facts right and be open about the things that might prove you to be wrong. I'm not ready to give up on this idea culturally. Oh, me either. That there's a way to present information. And it's like, because we don't know,

let's just have it be as deceptive and as wrong as possible because we don't know. I really firmly believe, and I still think most people think this way, that they still want facts. I mean, there's a lot of people out there that want to joke around about science not being… An alternate fact. Yeah, and that's BS. There's really smart people out there that you can dig up their stuff, and you can look back in 30, 40 years of research and see it.

This stuff keeps lining up and lining up and lining up. We got this. This is the way it is. You know what would frustrate my old man about issues of what we would call fact? Is he was frustrated with anything that our understanding would evolve. Okay. So if your understanding of something evolves over time, he didn't see it as being a natural process.

He saw it as the minute a position evolved, like our understanding was enhanced. He then thought, well, I'm going to disregard the entire system that even made this. So you could say like, I mean, take it, even if it was a matter of like human evolution. Okay. So you'd have some idea about human evolution. You know, organisms change over time.

Corn used to be the size of your pinky. Corn is now real big. Like an organism changes over time based on certain pressures. But he would get into some issue of like, human evolution is almost too controversial to demonstrate my point. Let's say we're talking about what kills deer fawns. Okay? So we have an understanding that black bears kill deer fawns.

Then someone will come up with a thing that says, well, you know, we never looked at bobcats, and now we're looking at bobcats, we realize that bobcats are a significant killer of deer fawns. He'd be like, but I was told that black bears do it. Now, never mind knowing no shit. Because he hated

the idea that you would have to sort of stay tuned all the time as new things came in, and that when new things came in, it wasn't that we were dismissing the body of knowledge, it's we're engaged in this activity that is not perfect and changes over time, but we're just trying to maintain an understanding of the world that we live in. Yeah. This friend of mine, Heberlein, has a great saying about research and the whole idea of trying to improve our knowledge,

improve our understanding of things. He makes this comment that he said, all research is either trivial or wrong. Either it proves what we already know, which is trivial, or it proves what we'll never believe. And I can think in deer hunting, it's constant. I mean, like we were talking, this research earlier about- Oh yeah, the article you would write, the article that would piss everybody off. Right. And all you got to do in many cases with a certain crowd

is go back and dig up the final results of some recent research, which everyone was clamoring for when it was like this. There was a great study that was done by the Wisconsin DNR from about 2009, 2010 through about 2013, looked at fawn survival, looked at overwinter survival in two different areas, one up in northwestern Wisconsin, one in northeastern Wisconsin, just north of me.

And what was really interesting in the farm country of eastern Wisconsin, right above me, the number one killer of the fawns was 14% were being killed by winter starvation. Okay. You know, and no one thought deer were starving at starvation in those days. I mean, in just recent times, we just thought that wasn't happening. And you look at what else is killing them? Well, road kills are about getting about 4% or 5% of them sometimes. But then all these things were done, all this really good information,

it was all released, people like me wrote about it, and then I got people writing to me saying, this is all bullshit, this is just the DNR, spinning their facts because the thing they didn't like was because in northwestern Wisconsin where there's wolves, wolves were not found to be much of a predator at all for fawns. And it was a cover-up. Yeah, it was a cover-up.

So they have this research. They didn't like the way it turned out, so they disregard it. They did the same thing with, DNR did a really intense sociological research into public attitudes toward wolves. All the people who don't like wolves, which was a lot of them,

were convinced that when they do this research, we're going to find out that Wisconsinites really don't like wolves, especially the ones that knew the people down in southern Wisconsin who don't deal with wolves will like them. Those are the people who like them the most. Right. That's why I say New Jersey cat ladies. The person least likely to like, you know. And that's very true. I'll get to that though. But the thing they found though is even in wolf country, the majority of people still overall supported wolves.

But define like wolves. Well, that's a good question. That's a good point. And basically, it's the fact that— I don't dislike wolves. I love them. I like all wildlife, including—and I have a special place in my heart for the wolf. Does it mean you like them?

What does that mean? If I like them there and I like them to be managed by the state, and I believe, based on a considerable bit of research, that we have a sustainable population in the northern Great Lakes that can be managed as a renewable resource. Does that put me in liking or not liking camp? I'd say it puts you in the liking. That puts me in the liking camp. I'd be in the liking camp too, because I actually drew a wolf tag in 2012 when they first issued them. And I found out real quickly that I didn't know enough about wolf hunting to be very effective at it. But I-

You'd still be counted as a liker. Oh yeah, definitely. Okay, good. But I should say though, I think the way they worded it in this research was basically one of the things was, do you want more wolves right now, as the wolf numbers we have right now, is that adequate?

Is it inadequate? Is it too many? Is it too few? Yeah. And most people, I think it's in the 60% range, things are okay the way they are. They didn't have a problem with the wolf numbers. Whereas a lot of the hunters don't want that many wolves. The hunters would say, the DNR says there's 700 wolves. Well, it's more like 2,000.

So I always ask them, well, where do you get your number? I can tell you how the DNR got their number. I can show you the survey, show you that field work that was done to get that number. So where do you get this 2000 number? Hold on a minute. I know we're getting distracted a lot, but we had a guest right on this year's podcast, Frankcmahon right who runs a the usgs grizzly bear program in the greater yellowstone ecosystem you ask him how many are there he'll give you a number and you'll say but probably more yeah yeah or there's 632 but probably more and like why did you just tell me

632 because that's the model we use. But we know that that model has changed. We haven't updated the model. There's almost certainly more. But I said, but if I put a gun to your head and said, how many are there? What would you say? 632, but probably more. To a wide margin more.

Well, see, that's the thing I'd say. What's this wide margin? Because it depends on how you're modeling them. And sometimes you might have a model, like in this case, and I hate to go way back, but here's what happened in this case. When they modeled out how many they had,

it was based on the home range of females. Knowing that females had some fidelity to their home range of females. Okay. Knowing that females had some fidelity to their home range and were generally intolerant of other breeding age females near them. And that model was drawn up at a time before, that model was drawn up at a time when they hadn't really dispersed across suitable habitat. So what they found over time is that they're more comfortable living closer together. They don't quite know how much though.

So when they model it out, they come up with a number, but all the experts are like, but they're much more comfortable living closer together now. We haven't adjusted the model. So I know there are more, but the answer we have to have, because this is the model that we put forth, tells us this, even though we all know it's probably wrong. So I think that it is.

If you go out and just do a count, let's say you go out and do a survey where you're flying transects out of a helicopter counting wolves. And I can damn sure tell you that there are 700. Probably a lot that we missed. But I can damn sure tell you there's 700. Now you're going to have two things. The non-likers of wolves are going to pay a lot of attention to the probably more.

The likers, in the way you're sketching out, the likers are going to pay a lot of attention to that minimal known number. And that's very important to them because they want to present it as not as numerous because their goal is to keep them listed. Yeah. And the other people's goal, their tendency

is to delist. So they're going to like that bigger number. You find that all the time in this kind of shit. Yeah. And the thing that, where I get sick of that, this whole discussion is that no one really knows for certain.

You can't, you can't, you're like, the point I think we should always make is that you look at our country. We can't, you can't, you know, like the point I think we should always make is that you look at our country. We can't even agree how to count people in this country. We have real, honest to God, important fights over a census for people. So if you can't count noses on humans, we know our addresses. They pretty much can go into our homes and figure out what we got. Even then they're still arguing about it.

But that's the point that some of the real famous wolf biologists make, whether it's Val Geist, he's not specifically a wolf biologist, but he's- He's an ungulate guy. Yeah, he knows his stuff, though. There's a guy, I forget his name, he's over in Italy. He's Europe's most famous wolf researcher. The point this Italian guy makes, and I think

the valid point is, instead of worrying about individual numbers of wolves, be looking at something that matters. And what matters is what kind of damage they're doing. Let's quantify what's the damage. We can quantify that. That's much easier to get a handle on than how many wolves are out there.

Now, if they're out there and they're not killing livestock, they're not killing ungulates, or they're not doing this, who cares how many numbers are out there? Do you really need to have that number to really manage those wolves or do anything? And no, you don't. I think Americans, and this is one thing that the rest of the wildlife biologists around the world really marvel at, is the way we hang up on numbers. Whether it's deer numbers, that seems like it's deer and wolves, especially that people really worry about, you know, what's our number on that in Wisconsin.

We fight about numbers all the time and we don't know what we're talking about. Like how many deer per square mile? Yeah, I mean, it's just, and then you get into arguments, well, is it deer per square mile of habitat and who judges the habitat quality? And you end up in these crazy, you know,

where people get mad type of discussions because it's nothing anyone can all agree on. It's like trying to define trophy hunting. You know, they're asking people, you like trophy hunting? Well, you don't even define what that means. But what- Doug was giving me a number the other day for here.

Okay. 50 deer per square mile of suitable habitat. Oh yeah. You can't even believe that. But then again, and then that moves around to, if you do these aerial surveys, they do it in the winter,

double check it typically, what they find is that those aerial surveys miss a lot too. Even with snow covering the ground, they still miss a lot of deer. So it's always something to argue about. And the other thing that was interesting though about getting back to wolves and you talked about all of the people in new jersey love wolves and that kind of thing the one thing that there's a really cool but much of research done about 15 years ago about wolves and

people public attitudes to wolves and what they found is that the popularity of wolves really hit its zenith back in the mid-1900s when there really weren't many wolves. People really around the world, they went back and they looked at all these different sociological studies on attitudes toward wolves from all over the

world. Europe, Russia, even down into the Middle Eastern countries that, you know, some of the mountainous areas. And they looked at the North American continent and they found that, yeah, that peaked around in the night. That's a low point.

Yeah. And as soon as they started coming back, every place they looked was the more you dealt with the wolves, the less popular they became. Yeah. That's my feeling about the bald eagle. If bald eagles were smart, they would stop reproducing so effectively

because they were extraordinarily popular and they're still pretty popular, but they're getting so numerous, I feel that they're going to feel their popularity wane. It's not that they're a problem animal to anyone, but I still read people like, holy shit, an eagle! But you'd be like, well, yeah, they're everywhere now it's like it's it's gonna come a time when

people are gonna see an eagle they're gonna think about it like they think when they see a a robin yeah well because they got so popular in their absence well and that's fun about the bald eagle is that people a lot of people who romanticize them, they're bummed out, they're disappointed when they see a bald eagle feeding on a carcass. Yeah, even though they're a scavenger. Yeah, I mean, it hurts them. It just blew their, it's like finding out that your mother was cheating on your dad or something.

But you know, when it was put out, the idea that the bald eagle would be the national animal, Franklin criticized it. Ben Franklin. He's also mistakenly credited with putting forth the turkey, which he did not do. Right. But they said, okay, the eagle would be the national animal or national bird. And Ben Franklin thought, why would you have a have, like, a carrion eater, a lowly garbage eater?

And he says, kind of people think he argues this facetiously. I've read what he wrote. And, you know, they had a different style. So you can't, like, read between the lines quite as effectively as you could read between the lines of a contemporary writer and thinker. But he had said, like, you might as well do it with the damn turkey. Because at least he's vain. Right. He's silly and vain. thinker, but he had said like, you might as well do it with the damn turkey because at least he's vain. Right.

He's silly and vain. Yeah. And he made the point in there, I think too, about he's got guts basically because he'll attack that red-coated British guy if he shows up in your garden, you know, that kind of thing. And so, but yeah. Yeah, he didn't like that.

He didn't want some garbage eating, carrying feeder. Well, he even questioned the eagle's courage because little birds attack it and can drive it away from, you know. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, so there's always neat little things that you find about Franklin. He was a ladies' man.

Oh, yeah, definitely was. I don't want to get into that. So you still haven't answered my question. Okay, I'm sorry. If you were going to write the article that was going to be most insulting to Wisconsin deer hunters like Doug here, okay, what would the article be? Right now in the current climate, I one thing I try to do people know I some people

will accuse me of obsessing on an issue oh please yeah and what is it well in this case the thing I recommended

a few years ago people always bashed on me about well you don't like what the dean is doing on how they're managing CWD so what would you do if you were the king

and I said well first thing I'd do is have, instead of earn a buck, I'd have double earn a buck. You don't shoot a buck until you shoot at least two antlerless deer. Okay. And that- Doug thinks that you shouldn't be able to shoot any bucks.

Well, I don't think that- That's not true. I don't think that worked. Doug doesn't really think that. Okay. He was making a- I was trying to make a point at the County Deer Advisory Committee meeting.

And because people just don't like to be forced to do something. I think that's the biggest knock on. That's why we all live in America. Yeah. And it's really, it is part of our character. We just don't like being told what to do. Just do whatever we want.

Until there are none left. So that thing does, every time i write about um those kind of things where we should mandate something and make people do something then people get mad and even the people who are more reasonable get mad at that they don't they don't they don't want to be told what to do but why why was it that you guys and this isn't this is the opposite this is not mandating this is unmandating this is instead of instead of restricting people's choices you were expanding people's choices giving them more opportunity for the exercising of free will do you guys wanted to make it that you could wear pink instead of hunter's orange that's law that passed

do you guys really feel that there were women who were like god man i want to hunt so bad but i am not going into the woods with that blaze orange i think it's it's it's like it's a color that um some women like and some women don't like it. You're patronizing them by saying that women want pink. But a friend of mine who's in the hunting garment industry, he said when they start mixing pink, that hot pink, into their

hunting clothing for Wisconsin, it's basically a Wisconsin market. I don't know if any other state has past blazed pink as an acceptable color, but in Wisconsin it sells. Didn't they do some special session that went to law faster than any other? Well, it's an easy lot of pass. It's like I was talking to Giannis' father today about a current proposal.

I think I was telling you about, too, about the guy wanting to make the wild turkey our state game bird. Yeah. And Giannis' father right away says, well, that's the kind of law politicians like because it doesn't cause any angst. It's easily passed. It goes through usually in one session

and it makes them feel good. And like, and Wisconsin is famous for these kinds of things, designating this thing and that thing as a state, you know, we have a state rock. I don't know what it is, but. Oh, we got one in Michigan. It's the Petoskey Stone, man.

Okay, thank you. You know more than I do. I don't have a problem with that. And yeah, I think we have a state muffin. You know, I think it's like a cranberry muffin. So Doug was telling me, cranberry muffin. Yeah, something like that. Were you telling me that?

No, I was not. Then you were telling me. I probably was. And I always remember Steve. A weed muffin. I was getting back into the. State muffin of Madison. I always remember Charles Kuralt, the old CBS.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He toured around Wisconsin one time on his little TV show that he had. It was a great program. After going around Wisconsin one time, he noticed that every little town would be, Wisconsin, like where I live, Iola, bow hunting capital of the world, Fremont, Wisconsin, walleye capital of the world.

Because you just put that shit up. Yeah. And then you find Charles Corral, one of all these little cities that got their capital of the world type things. And he said, I decided that Wisconsin is the capital of the capital of the world. Yeah. And I think, I decide that Wisconsin is the capital of the capital of the world. Yeah.

And I think Wisconsin, getting back even to your Packard question, there's something Wisconsinites are just very chauvinistic about their state. Yeah, but the Wisconsinites, and this is coming from the guy that grew up in Michigan. So I grew up in Michigan. When we went down to the beach, we were looking across at you guys. Wisconsinites on average are a higher caliber human than michiganites it's not a real high standard i'll tell you why i think that's

the case i think that if you went around michigan and and and polled people but you know what let's limit this okay you go around michigan polling people that hold either a hunting or a fishing license. So you limit your survey to those people. And you ask those people, what watershed do you live in? I think Wisconsinites would beat them three to one. greater environmental and landscape awareness in wisconsin than michigan by a huge margin and it haunts me i can't figure out why it's true i meet people wisconsin people wisconsin can usually tell you like if they were to take a leak on the ground what river that piss would wind up in and how it would make its way.

Interesting. And like just little things like that, or you'd be talking to like a random collection of Wisconsin dudes. More of them would know how to go find a morel than a random collection. I don't know what it is. Do you know what it is, Doug? I can't speak to that. I think it's the people that you talk to in Wisconsin.

You think so? Yeah. Because they all know each other. You hang out with people. Because they all know each other and to in Wisconsin. You think so? Yeah. Because they all know each other. You hang out with people. Because they all know each other and they all like the outdoors a lot. Yeah. I don't know, man. I'd like to do it.

I'd like to do it. Well. I'm going to do that. The researchers would call that, what do they call that? Street lamp science, where you look underneath the street lamp at night and whatever was going on there, you can see it. So you make your, you can draw these conclusions about what's going on underneath that street lamp. Well, outside the street lamp is a much bigger world.

And so what you're seeing underneath that street lamp might not be anything close to what's going on around it. Yeah. And I don't know, but I like to think that you're right. I like to think that Wisconsinites have a, you know. I think they have an enhanced landscape awareness. And I think that the state pride, I think of more like a... I don't know, I could be wrong.

I'm probably pissing off a lot of guys from my home state. I think of like a more robust state patriotism, so to speak. A guy I used to know in the hunting industry, he would look at that though and say, Wisconsin suffers from a whopping inferiority complex. Is that right? Yeah. So maybe you guys have a shit state. No. But you make up for it by

thinking it's a good state and knowing what creeks are what. Maybe. You make up for it by knowing what creeks flow into what creeks that flow into what rivers. You're looking like totally incredulous, Doug. You're not for it by knowing what creeks flow into what creeks that flow into what rivers. You're looking like totally incredulous, Doug. You're not buying it? You damn sure know what creeks you're in. Well, yeah.

And you probably have a wider experience of folks in Wisconsin than I do because I spend a lot of time. The folks that I know, know those kinds of things, no doubt. But you're saying the hunters and fishers. And I have no idea in Michigan what people think. I've been all around both places. I don't want to dwell on it. I want to get back to stuff that I read of Pat's. Where was I reading the article that you wrote?

That's one thing I like about knowing you is I stumble into your articles because you write for all kinds of places. I don't stumble into your columns. I stumble into your articles you write in magazines. Okay. And I believe, at least I've been attributing it to you, did you write a thing

where you were covering some research about what bucks do during rut oh yeah yeah do they where do they actually like do they travel because i keep saying he wrote this right oh yeah i've written that yeah hold on the editor of deer and deer hunting bucks during a rut probably not no no recently oh recently yeah and it was about GPS data. Okay. Yep. On do bucks, it was like, do bucks really travel all over holy hell during the rut?

Yeah. I've written a couple on that. Yeah. Yeah. A number of them. So now that I've told people what I think you said, what did you say in that? Or what were you reporting on? Yeah.

One thing that I liked about some of this recent research they've been doing with bucks during the rut and where they go is now they're using GPS and can actually really get a pretty good handle on where they are at numerous times a day. And in the old days, 30 years ago, they'd do radio telemetry 25 years ago. And they'd only get a reading every couple of days or something whenever they happened to go out and put their antennas up and triangulate them. It was very difficult. But what was interesting was that some of this research from the 90s that was done with the old-fashioned way, they found even back then that these bucks are really individuals.

That when you say bucks always do this during the rut, they really go ranging all the place. Well, some do, but most of them don't, you know, but, but there's still always these exceptions that will, some buck will go off and who knows where, but. Yeah.

Like did an elk in, like did an elk or a lion born in South Dakota gets hit by a car in Connecticut? Yeah. Well, that, that, that, yeah. hit by a car in Connecticut. Yeah. Yeah. Do they all go to Connecticut? No. No?

Because there wouldn't be any lions in South Dakota. Right. And what's fascinating about a lot of this research, when they start kind of figuring what's going on, is that if a buck early in life scores close to home, well, the system works. So he stays close to home for the most part as long as he's alive. You know, he'll always stumble on,

if there's enough does in the area, and he hangs around and he's a plugger and he keeps moving around until he gets one. Get some play. The system works. So he keeps doing it. Well, if a buck, another buck gets, let's say for whatever reason,

gets chased out of that little area and can't can't you know he's just got the hormones going he can't stop himself he starts wandering and encounters a doe well that system works for him so next year he's doing that again so that it's really individual it's probably so many little things that i think it's probably very similar to just how our gun season works around here. Some years, if you're sitting on that same deer stand every single year, and some guy comes in from a different way one day and a buck runs by you, you think, well, this system's working pretty good. But you didn't know that. It's just a fluke that this guy chased a buck past you. But the other thing, too, that's cool about some of this research

is that I look at it and I think, well, you know, based on those GPS data, what Val Geist was saying about mule deer 30, 40 years ago holds up, you know. Which is? Well, like Geist and John Ozoga, who did whitetail research up in the UP of Michigan, they found that some of these really beautiful bucks, the biggest bucks were, I think guys called them shirkers. They would come out and they didn't want to get their ass kicked. So if there was a buck working the doe, rather than engage and try to drive that buck off, he'd shrink back. Now, maybe what happened early in his life was that he got in the middle of, he got between a buck and a doe and the buck gored him, beat the crap out of him. He thought, I don't want to go through that again.

And so he, his system was to stay in a safer area, look for the one that dropped into his lap and nail her. And live longer. And live longer. And then, but then when that big buck gets shot or just disappears from the landscape, all of a sudden he goes, oh man, game on again. He's back out there. Now he's doing a little bit different behavior. And what was really cool about some of the stuff that Zolga did up in Michigan.

What did Geis call that? Shirkers. Shirkers? Yeah, he called them. Sounds like Yiddish. No, shirk, you know, to shirk. What does that mean? Shirk your duties.

Oh. S-H-I-R-K, shirk. No, I don't use that term. You use that term, you honest? I don't. No? Well, but you know the. You use that term, Giannis? I don't. No? But you know the word. Occasionally.

You do? Yeah. Yeah. But I think guys call them shirkers. And Ozoga had a very similar conclusion that there's bucks that don't really engage much. And he checked some of these bucks in a study he found up in the UP. It was like a mile square pen. And one of the things he found in there was that this buck that was not engaging

and not taking part, I think they must have had a way to trap them and check their blood because he did a blood check on this buck. Well, it turns out this buck had a high level of progesterone, the female hormone. Is that right? Yeah. And then when that buck got his chance from the other, the bigger buck that was dominating him, you know, scaring him, when that buck disappeared from, you know, I think he died and

they just moved him out of the pen or something, I think he probably died. Well, as soon as that big buck, that stress inducer was removed, his progesterone levels dropped. No shit, really? No shit. And you think,

this is cool stuff they're doing back in days before GPS. You know what Giannis believes? Giannis believes that, I think it's Giannis that believes this, that there are bucks who will go up and hide. This is the same stuff

that he's talking about, Val Geist work. Yeah, but I just don't, I've read a fair bit of Val Geist work Yeah but I just don't I've read a fair bit of Val Geist Let's leave it to Pat Giannis believes Based on a thing that he believes Originated with Valerius Geist

That there are Bucs Who will play the Very long game And they'll go up and hide up in some Hidey hell hole Their whole life until they're just giants then one day they'll think to themselves you know i'm about as big as i'm gonna get i'm ready and then they'll come down then they'll walk down and get them all

i have a very difficult time with that. I guess I'd side with you. Am I saying it right, Giannis? No, I think you're making the exaggerated Steve version of the shirker that he just explained. Oh. Yeah. In times when times are hard, and it's like, there might be like, you're not feeling that well, there's like a rough winter, or you didn't have a great summer, you didn't put on a lot of fat.

Like, they decide to instead of go in and engage and just go crazy, they're like, I'll shirk this year, maybe a couple years, the system's working for me, and then reenter. Yeah. Did he not? Well, the thing is, I would never say that wouldn't happen because I just gave some examples where it kind of happens.

And the thing that Geist will talk about and deer farmers see the same thing that the bucks that aren't being stressed, they grow big antlers because they can put so much of their energy into those, into their, their growth. You know, these animals that are stressed, they're nervous. much of their energy into their growth. These animals that are stressed, they're nervous, they're always looking over their shoulder. That impacts antler development.

Oh yeah, definitely. Stress. Definitely. Stress is a big influence on antler development. So dudes that are shed hunting and need to eat snow are making next year's sheds not as big. Well, you could probably make that argument, but if you see...

That makes people mad. Because it comes down to you telling someone you can't do something he wants to do. You're trying to get me to write a column about that now, huh? Well, there's a thing, because we had a pretty bad winter in some areas, and people started bringing up, and shed hunting's more and more... It used to be, you'd go out in the woods...

I hate sentences. It used to be. When I was a boy, when I was a boy, you went out in the woods i hate sentences beginning it used to be when i was a boy when i was a boy like you went out in the woods you found a deer and you're like oh there's deer antler right it wasn't like a thing that like was like it just wasn't as much of a thing to find sheds right like you didn't have many people who really like self-identified as shed hunters who do special trips to go hunting sheds it is oh yeah right right so now as it's becoming more and more popular and people are more and more gung-ho to get after them the second they drop to the point where they watch yarded up deer in deep snow come you know march whatever wherever deer in your area drop that

they're watching them yard it up and the minute they start dropping or that they're chasing them to get them to drop right like a deer will drop one and not the other and then they chase after it to try to get it to jostle free the other antler so they can get a matching pair so some people have pointed out this might be something we need to get out ahead of the same way we got out ahead of you can't hunt year round as much as you want. And there's seasons for that. They put forth this idea that we would regulate

this more and that pisses people off. Well, you can't find a more stressful time probably for deer and elk at that time of year. No, that's what Yoni always says. Winter weakens, spring kills. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and that warden that we chatted with in

November in Colorado, he was saying the number one, you know, impact on the deer population is now he believes is, well, maybe it was like even now with habitat, but the summer recreation. And it's just like there's more people that haven't been in the woods in past years. And now there's just hikers and bikers. They've been doing a lot of work looking at methods of conveyance and what it tends to do with dispersal away from trails. And there's like some counterintuitive shit.

Oh yeah. About what freaks them out and what doesn't freak them out. Yeah. Well, if you go into a lot of these game farms, like a deer farm, especially, because deer are really a skittish animal that doesn't do well in confinement. That's why they have all those,

you'll see like black drape type material around the fences. Because if deer see something outside the fence that makes them nervous, you know, they start going nuts. They start running around in circles. It's very stressful. Just keep relaxed.

Yeah. And they try to keep them relaxed as much as they can and keep them, you know, isolated from all that kind of, all those stressors. And, but, you know, like it's, I always find it interesting that the elk farmers will see some of the elk out in the wild in northern wisconsin and up in the clam lake area which isn't very good elk habitat and they're a lot more spindle rack type type bulls that aren't anything real

impressive they aren't like something you see out in arizona or something and then they'll show some the elk they have like well yeah but you're controlling the environment in that in that pen elk got all their they have their food right their form they have. I think, well, yeah, but you're controlling the environment in that pet. And the elk got all their food right there for them. They have all the environments controlled. They're not out there running around, chasing, running away from wolves or worrying about wolves. Yeah.

And anything that's staying constantly alert, that takes its toll on their energy and their overall wellbeing. So I think most people can relate to that. Just something you wanted to add, Doug? Well, you're talking about different bucks and how they acted on that. It just sounded to me like you were talking about guys.

You know, that, well, yeah, I know guys that are more active or more interested in, I've known guys my whole life who are more active, more interested in women, not interested in women. Yeah, you got your shirkers too. Yeah, you got your shirkers. Yeah. My experience.

One guy's like, he's going to go out to the bar. He's going to, you know, pound it at the bar. He's going to put in a long night Thursday, long night Friday, long night Saturday, spend all of his money drinking at the bar. Right? Yeah, well, that's what I'm getting at. Just dying to meet someone.

And then you got some shirker. He's at home on the couch. Yeah, well, that's what I'm getting at. Just dying to meet someone. And then you got some shirker. He's at home on the couch. Yeah, he's got roommates. He's just going to hang tight, see what comes sniffing around two in the morning. Yeah. My experience with deer in a very limited area, you know, in this farm, is the older the deer gets,

the less it moves. That's the way it seems to me. I like that. We saw something this year that we've already talked about a bunch of times but we saw a group of mule deer a shitload of does and a very nice buck in the aspen patch and yanni is looking through his knockers and he says oh some coyotes are coming down to the aspen patch. Coyotes come down and all these freaking does just come out of there like just spraying out of this aspen patch. That buck stands there and these are his, like he's got them collected up. He's working these does he stands up assesses the situation what's going on looks watches the coyotes all of his does are gone and you see him like running that shit in

his head i swear it looked like and he's like you know what i'm just gonna lay back down i'm not gonna go running out out of this ass patch getting shot at by some asshole he's like i'm'm just going to lay down and this will all sort itself. It'll sort itself out later. He lays back down and then over the course of the day, all those doles come trickling back in that aspen patch.

And think about the calories that he saved by not going on that run. And he's like, you all can run around getting all worked up. I think the thing to do is to hold tight. So that's one of the reasons that I try to have a place on the farm that we don't go into. And let them have a place that that's the deer's place. You know, that they can go in there and, you know, that's their sanctuary.

It might be too. Do sanctuaries, do they work based on your experience? Based on what you hear from some of the guys that are really serious about it, they believe in it because- Doug, I'm not disrespecting you, man. I thought I was trying to do you a favor. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I think it's pretty much a lot of folks that follow the quality deer management type ideas and setting up their land. And a lot of them really believe in the sanctuaries.

You know, there's certain areas they'll put off guard and put off limits. It's reached scholarly consensus. Well, I'm not sure if it's, I don't know if it's done that. I really don't. I haven't, I can't say I've seen anything on that. There might be, but I haven't seen it, you know, or else I forgot.

No, I don't mean literally scholarly, but it's reached like professional consensus. Right. I mean, I know a number of guys who are deadly serious about keeping a sanctuary intact. The only time they go in there is to retrieve a dead deer, basically. And they really don't violate their own sanctuary. Right, right.

That I have a hard time believing. What? That you're like, right, you got this farm and all you're really doing is, you know, you got all your responsibilities, but you want to kill a big deer. You like to grow a big deer and you want to kill a big deer. And season's going on and you know there's big big deer and you want to kill a big deer and and season's going on and you know there's big giants around and you look in there and you see them all the time in there and season's winding down you got a day left all the cousins and shit have gone home

and there he is in the sanctuary you're looking in there at him well you're telling me that there are guys out there who would be like, nope, can't do it. Won't do it. I know. Won't do it. It's my sanctuary. Bullshit.

I know some guys like that. I know some guys. Bullshit. Well, but in their defense, Steve, what they're saying probably is that my odds of killing that buck are better by waiting out here in this trail that's leading down to an alfalfa field or whatever it might be, but hanging out here. No, that's leading down to an alfalfa field or whatever it might be,

by hanging out here. No, he's looking at them in the sanctuary. Well, I doubt they can see him. They're probably back in there in that thick cover. No, this sanctuary I'm thinking about, there's a little pocket you can look into. Oh, really? Okay. The one I'm imagining.

Yeah. And he's in that little pocket. No one, no one. Well, if you can see him, no, I agree with you. That's not a sanctuary. You can see him. That's if you can see them, no, I agree with you that. It's not a sanctuary if you can see them. It's a sanctuary. Good point, Doug.

You're walking too close to this thing. If you can see them. He's like, I don't even want to know what's going on. This is your fantasy sanctuary that you can look in there. I'm putting out a hypothetical, but I understand. But I would like to say, i bet you that you will find that most if not all sanctuaries get violated by the sanctuary owner maybe not his buddies but i think sanctuaries are made to be unsanctuaried by their owner. It's a way for him to say, let's take it easy,

see how things play out. There's nothing you cousins and whatnot could do to get in there. I'm going to wait and see. Yeah, but the thing I'm struggling with in all sincerity is, you know how hard it is as an individual hunter

to go in any patch of cover and get a crack at any deer that's in there. And so why would a guy intentionally violate his own sanctuary with very low odds of ever seeing that buck that's in there? Because he goes creeping in there and puts a stand in there.

Yeah. I don't want to dwell on it. Yeah. Okay. Now let me ask you about this. Oh, go ahead. Well, I want to circle back to Yanni's story real quickly.

Another possible explanation for why he didn't run out of there is that there are cases where they've documented this and actually photographed it, where a buck will stand down on a coyote or stand off a wolf just by bracing up, taking it on, and looking at, basically staring the animal down, saying, you want some of this? Yeah. Come try. Well, you know what's funny about that? Now that you want to dig deeper on this, I'll point out that those coyotes had absolutely no interest in those deer. It's not what they were doing. But a couple days later, another big buck,

I later wound up shooting this buck. He's with, I don't know, seven or eight does. A couple coyotes come through, and he's the one that runs away. So they all spill off the back of the hill and then over the next 15 20 minutes they all trickle back into where they were he never comes back huh he spilled off the back of the hill crossed the gully and we later found him bedded up so it might have been like he's like yeah i was kind of thinking about going to have

a nap anyways yeah it's getting late in the day yeah it's like i don't like to be out this time of day because i've learned in my general buckness that it's like you get your morning business taken care of and you go hide so maybe just like i was gonna leave now anyways now i'm just gonna leave yeah try trying trying to figure out why an animal does something god you know good luck you know individual animals sometimes. Yeah. Individual animals. Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes you have no idea. Yeah.

I just glassed up a skunk working Doug's hill in the middle of the day. Right. What was he doing? Right. Doug thinks he smells afterbirth from the calf. Well. Here's what I want to ask you about.

Mm-hmm. Similar thing, and I think I've talked about my, I've talked about what I think you wrote about. What is the latest, what's the, what's the, the, uh, thinking on what the, the lunar phases. Okay. Affect deer, like people are like, ah, I'm not even going to bother hunting full moon. I'm sure that discussion has been going on as long as people have been hunting. One of my guys that I look up to the most as a hunter, Remy Warren. Remy, he is a firm believer.

To the point where he'll book, even for bears, spring spot stock, spring bears, he'll book his clients around lunar cycles. Bless his heart. Yeah, and to me, the one thing I really do believe in is that if you have that kind of confidence in something, chances are it works. Yeah, but don't do the like, what works for you. I understand

all that. Okay. Okay, I won't. Because then you're just saying, like, you're opening up like, if I say, oh, I like, you know, blue, I like this Rapala. And I'll be like, all right, dude, if you got confidence in it and it works for you, but that's a different conversation

than like, what works. You're humoring someone when you say that. Maybe. But the research I've seen out though is that when they've tried to tie in lunar activity to all these different movements, whether it's for breeding purposes, where like Charlie Alshimer always had an interesting theory on what triggers the rut. It's a harvest moon that kind of sets things in motion. Well, when the researchers go in

and actually look at this stuff and backdate, you know, when fawns drop, because they can backdate that stuff pretty accurately. Yeah, they have a known gestation. Right, exactly. So they go back and they look at that stuff

and they do it year after year. And they basically always beat up Charlie's theories on that. And they beat up any other theory you see on lunar cycles. Because what triggers the rut is 10 things. Yeah. You can't untangle them all.

Yeah. Like photo period, all kinds of, right? And see like, I would never try to take on a guy, like in my generation, the guy that we all looked up to is John Wooters, the old deer, he was the deer expert for Peterson's Hunting Magazine back in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And John really believed in the moon. Is that right? Yeah. He really followed the lunar phases and he always talked about, I think his belief was that the full moon was a terrible time to be out there hunting in daylight. And the thinking is, at least it's always articulated to me by people who really abide by lunar cycles, is the thinking is that it's extra light out and deer are getting all their business taken care of at night because deer are like a

crepuscular animal their peak activity is low light so dawn dusk but here they're having like a crepuscular like atmosphere all through the night dark but not dark that they get all their business taken care of and then they're all tired out and they just go to bed when it gets daylight out that's like that's your understanding yeah yeah now uh just to throw just throw a uh you know just to mix it up a little bit down south america where they hunt nocturnal where they hunt like nocturnal animals, they don't like to hunt at night during a full moon because some nocturnal animals have such fidelity to the darkness that they won't come out on a moonlit night. Because their defense mechanism is dark. I think there's that.

So they'll wait until the moon sets and then go hunt certain nocturnal animals that are like that thing. If it's at all light, that sun bitch does not come out. I'm pretty sure they found the same thing with predator studies

in North America. There's certain, certain small mammals that won't come out on a bright moon because they know the owls can see them easier. You're going to bitch slap them, man.

Yeah, they'll be killed. And I guess I'm always somewhat skeptical of the all nightnight activity thing. I think, well, deer have their patterns. They're going to be up on their feet all night long. Anyone that's seen deer at night, a lot of times, I find beds out in my back,

little woods where I live, that I know there's no deer in there in the daylight because that's little open woods. There's never deer in there in the daylight. They might move through at dawn or dusk, but they don't spend daylight in there. It's just too small of a little spot. But before you go back there in the winter,

there's always fresh deer beds from overnight. So they're not on their feet all night. I never buy that, that it's on their feet. He's like, oh, sweet. I can get everything I was going to get taken care of, taken care of. I have sex with all the deer I was going to have sex with, eat all the food I was going to eat.

I'll get all that taken care of, and I don't need to be running around like some moron come daybreak. On the other hand, though, deer, too, also have incredible night vision. Their eyes really are built for that nighttime activity. So I doubt they're walking around stumbling through the dark on moonless nights. Gotcha. Yeah, I just. But I really don't argue that a whole lot if a guy has the data and it

works for him the thing i'd say though to a lot of these guys that say well my observations on my trail cameras i never see any kind of good activity during um certain hours on on certain days the moon i think has that really stood up the scientific rigors though you know really where you have a guy that's a scientifically modeling guy that can put all his data together and really cross-check that stuff. Yeah. Has it stood up to that kind of scientific rigor? I doubt it.

Because most of us aren't trained. So you're doubting it. So if God came down and put a gun to your head and said, do lunar phases matter or not? And you had to say, it has to be yes or no. I'd say no. Really? I just go hunting.

Pat Durkin? I just go hunting. Pat Durkin, putting a... I have to tell you, this is one of Pat's favorite subjects, what phase of the rut we're in. It's an inside joke with him, and I'm pretty weird, because we have a mutual, well, a friend of his, an acquaintance of mine, who just, I can't get on the same joke with him. And I'm pretty here because we have some, a mutual, well, a friend of his acquaintance of mine who just, I can't get on the same page with

these deer and what, what phase of the rut? So in the fall, I'll contact Pat every once in a while and just ask him, what phase of the rut do you think we're in? So moving to, moving to anecdotal, what's your take on, what's your take on lunar phases, Doug? Just like your personal observations. Don't even ignore anything you read.

Just because you like to pay attention to deer. And who's shooting deer when and what and how. You know, I really don't even have an opinion about it because I feel the same way. I see deer, we do a little shining in the fall. I'll see deer lying in fields, you know, when you can shine, you know, before 10 o'clock at night. I always think deer activity is based way more

on what the weather is. I was just going to say the same thing. I mean, I know you asked me a yes or no gun to your head question, but. God with a gun to your head. God with a gun to my, well, God wouldn't need a gun. God would just be. He has it so that you know he's serious.

My big thing when it comes to the rut is the daytime temperature. If the daytime temperature is above 45 degrees, that's when I get bummed out. Like, oh God, the deer probably won't be moving as much in this form to get that heavy coat on. I just think the weather is more of a bigger pet. So you're an air temp man. Much more than lunar, yeah. Okay. Now, let me ask you one last one.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Does camo matter? And I'm not talking, yeah, just like, I just want you to give me sort of a, because you stay up on the research, okay? So not personal experience, but just like from your assessment of the research. What are you seeing? Does camo matter? What's kind of like the current fashionable feeling?

The thing I wrote just recently about camel, basically, and colors, because you get the whole color vision, what can deer see in colors? And the biggest thing by far is movement. It doesn't matter what you're, if you move, make any kind of sudden jerky movement, deer are just so tuned in to

movement. And they have, I think it's like a 310, 300 degree area they can see. They don't see real great above them, which most of us know. But that's why deer that get bowhunted a lot walk around looking in the trees. They do. Because I remember growing up and being like,

how's that son of a bitch going around looking up in the trees? He's been, he's been trained. He's been shot at. Yeah. But, um, that, what the, what we do know about camel is that if you're going to choose a camel, that what I've been reading on this is that deer, deer can see shades of gray. And so the lighter shades of gray and the lighter tans, I think, they seem to be able to discern those

a lot better than they can the darker hues. So the camel that has a lot of light tans, a lot of light grays, I'd avoid those. So like the Kuyu camel that's meant to look like you're laying on a gravel bar, that's a lot of light grays. Yeah. I guess like where I hunt, I'd probably go with

the darker stuff is what I'm saying. But there's environments where I would still say if I was going to give anybody advice, try to match where you are in a common sense. Really? Yeah. And you think that the research bears that out? Well, what the research is showing-

They're not on some whole other trip, right? The deer aren't seeing some whole other- Because there's this stuff that came out about birds. Birds have a lot of iridescence in their feathers. And people are starting to think that when a bird sees a bird's iridescence, it's on this whole other level that you can't even begin to think about. Like what a turkey looks like to a turkey or or what, I think this stuff had to do with green parrots or something,

some of the research. It's like, what he sees when he sees that thing, he's not, he doesn't see anything like what you see. Oh, yeah. It's a completely different experience for him to see that. Well, see, I remember when they first came out with some really good color vision research

back about 1991, I think it was. The first thing this Dr. Carl Miller from the University of Georgia put on the screen was a picture of a buck dressed up as a hunter. He had a little orange hat on, had sunglasses on. And the point he made to start off his talk about what deer see says, until we can somehow tap into that animal's brain and actually see what information is passing through that eye into the brain and how he's perceiving that, we'll never know for certain exactly what they're seeing because, you know, their capabilities are so much different from ours.

You know, like you read about a deer's nose, for example, being like the human nose, I guess I think we have about 5 million scent receptors in our nose. Yeah. That deer has like 300 million, 283 million scent receptors. So scent to us compared to a deer is irrelevant. You know, we can't even begin to comprehend what that deer is picking off out of the air. And I think there's probably things with their vision too that from what we know, you get back to your question about what does research

show about the camel? Well, the research can't, I don't think anyone's really gone into research as far as trying to match up how different camels work in different environments. Because how would you do that? Yeah. The best they can do is, they've done this research, again, at the University of Georgia, where they have this test set up to show the deer colors on, on lighted colors over feed bins. And if they choose the wrong color,

the feed bin won't, feed bill, feed bin shuts. Well, over time they get these deer trained and they can start identifying colors, which, which colors they can identify to know that, well, that's where the food will be. And what they found there was that these lighter, lighter shades of gray and white those kind of you know lighter colors they get some

ability to discern those pretty well but you're saying like if there's like blue and purple next to each other then they can't tell but a deer too their blue ability to see blue again blows ours out of the water we can't begin to comprehend how well they see blue

I've read too where guys are saying like it seems that one thing is certain don't wear blue yeah yeah and and but you know again like back to what you're saying earlier though and this is just this is just anecdotal but it's based off a ton of like a lot of personal experience okay like i said like jackass on tv guy shit but a lot of personal experience that i have had things come up like when you're not moving come up and they just can't they just can't comprehend you or they're looking this is the part that trips me out they're looking they're not putting together that's a threat but they're trips me out they're looking they're not putting it together that it's a threat but they're curious about what they're looking at so they're like not that i see a deer i just see something i don't understand or not that i see a person or a threat i just see

something i don't understand and they're looking at you but not no fear they're just like they see something they haven't seen yeah well and then i think they're like seeing, it's got to be that they're seeing like a collection of colors or a collection of shapes that's unfamiliar. Because even coming toward it, ears perked forward, coming at you, just being like, the hell is that? More curious than. Yeah, the same way deer go up to trail cams. It's like, what the hell is that thing in the tree? Haven't seen one of those before. And they go up to it to be like, what is it? You know? I've seen, I used to hunt Northwestern Ontario

for deer quite often back in the nineties and late nineties, early two thousands. And it's the only place I've ever seen this. I, the biggest, the buck I'm most proud of as a hunter that I killed was up in Ontario in 1995. And that buck was looking at me for the longest time until I think he was looking at me for a long time before I actually saw him.

Because I was on this little precipice looking in this valley below me. There's a recent clear cut, maybe a 10-year-old clear cut. And I looked up into the jack pines across from me about 125 yards away and I saw the haunch of a deer. And I thought, that's got to be a deer. And I looked, it was only the third deer I saw like in seven days.

I got my scope up because I knew it was a deer. I wasn't any doubt about that. And I thought, if that's a buck, I'm going to be ready to shoot. I got, I got, sorry. That was Pat's trigger hand. Yeah, my trigger hand.

But I, make a long story short. Sort of like a shot. I got, I got that scope up. That deer's looking right at me. And it looked like, the way he was looking at me it was like he's probably been watching me for a while. Curious. Curious, like, what the hell is that over there? Because I don't think I've seen many humans in that particular area.

And I killed him. And about two years later, a similar thing happened. My buddy and I, this guy named Bruce Ranta, lives in Kenora, Ontario. We were moving along this old granite face, looked across, and there were one of these big openings up on top, right on a note, just like he rose out of the ground, which he literally did.

This buck stands up and just looks at us. Didn't run off like a typical deer around here would do. Just stood there and looked at us. And I had time where I, well, I didn't, it wasn't like I took my time, but I hit the ground, got my rifle up and shot him off a prone position and nailed him. And he went down. And so I thought, that's twice I've had bucks in these areas that aren't hunted very often.

Just looked me over out of curiosity. But you know what they don't do? They're never curious about what they smell. Exactly. Yeah. They never question their nose, man. That's, I think that you can take that one to the bank. Yep.

Yeah. I don't need no outdoor columnist to tell me that. Well, can you fill out the story? Because I want to know why you're most proud of that. Oh, because. Not just because of that. Shitty conditions. No.

Yeah. It was a real tough hunt. It was, I had eight days to hunt it and I was bound determined not to leave till I put in my full time. And going into that seventh day, I'd only seen one deer at a distance where it was snorting and I had one little buck I passed up the first day,

which I was not going to go all the way to Ontario and shoot a four corn, you know, so I let it go. But I got down to where I knew I was down on my final afternoon. I had one little buck I passed up the first day, which I was not going to go all the way to Ontario and shoot a four corn, you know, so I let it go. But I got down to where I knew I was down on my final afternoon. I had one more morning to go. And I, another reason I was proud of it was because I remember- Was it a big old fatty? It was a big buck.

He weighed 240 dressed out. Oh! And it had a beautiful cathedral type rack. It's a real tight 13 and a half inch spread. Beautiful deer. And what was, what I was really, one of the things I was proud of too not only the fact that I persevered through that kind of tough hunt and I got up in the spot and it was like 2 o'clock in the afternoon. It was actually 1.50 in the afternoon because I looked at my watch

after I killed him. And I was looking around and I thought this is a cool spot. I might come back here tomorrow morning. And I had one of these old GPS units from the original GPS units that Lowrance made. They were about this tall. Yeah, I remember that. And they had these,

you had to put them in a big cargo pocket. I remember locking that spot in. And then as I snapped the little button, I remember that little snap, and I thought, God, that was loud. And I thought, and it was a quiet day like today. And I thought, God, that was loud. And I thought, and it was a quiet day like today.

I thought, before I budge, I better look around real carefully before I budge. And I thought, I looked around and I see that haunch and I kill him. I thought, you know, so often when you do that kind of thing, you let your guard down. Couldn't have got it done without my lower hands. Yeah, and that's's from the beauties, one of the beautiful things about hunting is those kind of little

odd twists like that. Yeah. For all I know, just because I stopped long enough, what I'm thinking happened when I backtracked that buck in the snow is it looks like

he came down off this hill, I bet you about the time I was playing around with that GPS unit, came out in a little spot and I think what stopped him was that, that snap. Yeah, I snapped that. And then he looked across and saw me and I'm,

meanwhile, I'm looking down here, scanning the hillside and there he is and I shoot him. And so, but I always think, all those little things that we always write off as, you know, hunter skills, I think a lot of times it's just you were, you, you got him because you stayed alert, but you also got him because of a fluke, you know, like that.

Yeah. Snapping the button. And I was going to say that deer hadn't seen a, you were speculating that he hadn't seen a human before, and you're on this precipice that might have been a spot that he was familiar with, and he goes, that doesn't belong there. And so since he didn't feel you were a threat,

he's just standing there looking at you going. And I wasn't moving. Yeah. And it's like Steve said. And I wasn't moving. Yeah. And it's like Steve said. So the sound is interesting too. Yeah, no, I've definitely been like fortunate to hang out in areas where you can safely assume they have never encountered a human

and it's just, it's a different experience. You know, the way that high pressure animals react to humans is a learned behavior. Yeah, you know, the, the way that high pressure animals react to humans is a learned behavior. Yeah. You know. The other thing that goes into this too, as far as why it might've been looking at me that long without seeing.

You had pink camo on? You were wearing, you were wearing head to toe hot pink. Well, cause at that distance that I was probably 125 yards away. And from the best guess the researchers can make on deer vision, they figure that deer's vision is probably about the equivalent of our 2100 vision. I don't know what that means.

If you use like 20-20 visions, you know, perfect, really good human vision, they figure the deer is about 2100. That what we see clear at 100, they see... how does that work? Basically, I can't, I'm not gonna explain this stuff, but... Is it worse or better than ours? It's worse. 2100 is far worse than ours. Okay. And so they probably see kind of a blurry image at that range, at 100 yards. They probably can make it out, but it's not real sharp like our a guy with really sharp vision like me wearing glasses at 100 yards I can see, I can make things out

pretty fine detail. And the best research they've done now recently like Carl Miller will say if I get down to camo patterns, you could probably do really well with just a blurry pattern. You don't need all these fine details because deer can't see those fine details anyway.

Gotcha. Yeah. All right. Yanni, you got anything you want to add? Man, I had something I wanted to add. I can't remember what the hell it was. There was, we were going to talk possibly about the movement to legalize sale deer meat.

Oh, yeah. You want to hit on that real quick? Yeah. Yeah. Because I feel like you wrote a thing. Yeah, I did. You wrote a thing kind of like, oh, yeah, you know,

could be cool. Maybe not. What I did was I... I remember being a little bit pissed at you when I read that. I remember you telling me that, yeah. Because Steve sent me that. I remember I was somewhere, i was like out of town

somewhere and i read that and i was like damn pat durkin yeah i remember you writing me and said just something like just so you know i totally disagree with that and i and which i which i don't want to go on that path, but I really like that. I don't mind people disagreeing with me. I was figuring out what this is democracy. No, you probably wrote it in the big heyday when everyone thought that across the country that we were just going to have more and more and more and more deer. Well, that's- Which is like turkeys.

Oh, we got a lot of turkeys. Let's start shooting hens and killing them year round. My interest in it was, what triggered my interest in it in all seriousness was I was visiting my daughter who was stationed then at the Navy Hospital in Naples, Italy. Okay.

And we went up, we spent some time up in Florence. So this is 2013. We went into this really neat restaurant in Florence. And there on the menu, it says for, it says, uh, for, um, is for venison and for pork that these meats

during the hunting season are fresh, fresh from that day and the rest of the season they're frozen. I thought, that's kind of cool. You can actually get, you know, you know, hunter kill that, um, meat. Yeah, it's called the European model of, it's called the European model. And's called the European model. And so I-

I don't need to tell you all about American history. Right. The Brits and Robin Hood. But it got me thinking though that I just come from Sweden. I've been up in Stockholm and up in Stockholm and Sweden, people up there, the thing that they do is they don't, if I want to sell Yanni some meat from last year's deer, I could do that in Stockholm and Sweden.

But a lot of them don't. I mean, they can legally do it, but a lot of them still don't. But a lot of them, they'll take meat and just give it to them as a gift, kind of like what we do. But I guess my point in that article, the thing I got talking about by interviewing some of the Swedish hunters and some of the different people who have worked in both systems, is that

we could probably do this, but it would take a whole lot of rethinking of the American model and how we do things in America. But there are certain circumstances, which I think was what pissed you off, was that there are areas in this country where we really have a hard time knocking deer numbers down. And so if you could give guys financial incentive to knock them down in some of these suburban areas, whatever it might be, may that be a way to deal with this? And I just think in some cases, well, there might be cases where our thinking might have to evolve in that. And I don't know if it's going to happen anytime soon. I doubt it would happen anytime soon. But I guess one thing I liked about the work I did from my work in talking to people in Sweden,

one interesting nugget I found was that 70% of Swedes have eaten or eat wild meat every year, 70% of them. And I've looked around and I found some information for our country, and the best data I could find in our country is that about 42% of Americans in a typical year will eat some kind of wild animal. That's higher than.

I would have guessed way lower than that. Yeah. And so again, you know, this, no research is perfect. You know, as like we talked about earlier, the populations, you never know how accurate all that stuff is. But I found it interesting how much more

those Swedes, and plus if you buy, if you buy hunter killed meat in Sweden, you're paying a real premium price for it. So what that does in their mind is that, man, you want wild game, you're gonna pay a, you're gonna pay a price for it. Yeah. And, but then, but then they put a value on it and that's really valuable to them so that when they can get it free, they think, oh man, I just scored. And so they really have this high appreciation of wild game that I'm not sure a lot of people in our country share, which worries me.

I don't know if that. No, I'm tracking you there, and I agree that that is the issue. So that's an upside. Some things that, when I wrote you that I don't agree with it, it was a couple of things. I don't know, you're not like a couple of things. Um, I don't know. You're not like a real vocal advocate of this.

You were just exploring the idea. Right, exactly. Um, one, I think that like places, I mean, if you just look historically places that now think they have this permanent problem with high deer numbers, probably will not prove to have a permanent problem with high deer numbers. I agree. These things fluctuate wildly so to go and like rewrite uh sort of the the to rewrite the underpinnings of our wildlife conservation success which was the decommodification of wildlife and getting rid of market hunting which saved american wildlife to, to try to address like a temporary problem that by some

estimates isn't even really a problem, um, by radically altering how we perceive and manage wildlife in America. It just seems to me like, like a, a kind of an overshot, right? Like way too much gun. Go ahead, Doug. So I'm in the county deer advisory committee here for Richland County. And one of the things that came up as we've

been talking about reducing the deer population was, well, I only use one deer and you want to give me four tags. What are we going to do with that? And the donation system doesn't seem to be working that well. And I, you know, I have a handful of people that I give, uh, uh, that I give venison to, I'll take it to the locker. I mean, I don't generally cut up deer for other people, so I'll take it to the locker and they'll pay the fee and they'll go and pick it up. And so

at the County Deer Advisory Committee, people were asking about know, asking about, well, how do you, how do you have this list of people? And a young man in his late twenties, I guess, stands up and says, you know what I'll do? I'll put a spreadsheet together of people who are, and we can advertise it on social media or whatever. And we'll address that problem by, here are hunters who, or you can sign up and say, I'd like to have some venison, but I'm not a hunter. And then we can make that connection rather than like, you know, feed the hungry or, you

know, those sorts of things, but given the food pantry or in addition to that. Yeah. Great. So I, and I, so there's the answer sort of to the temporary problem, right? Yeah. I'm all for a little bit of philanthropy. Yeah. Um, another problem I see with it is it brings to the temporary problem. Yeah. To use it. Yeah. I'm all for a little bit of philanthropy. Yeah. Um, another problem I see with it is it brings

in the commodification. Okay. So the commodification of wildlife, and then you're going to also further commodify access. So I usually try to look at things. You know, I'll oftentimes ask myself what's better for hunters and fishermen and wildlife right so when i'm looking at issues and i could just see that if all of a sudden um these deer are we're going back to the 1870s and

80s all over again when we shut off all of our wildlife and sold it to eastern markets that all of a sudden the deer on my place are real valuable i'll be you know there's no way that the neighbor kid that uh mows my lawn and all my cousins and shit are going to come over here and hunt like the old days i'm letting this go on a profit deal and we're going to make some money on these deer and it's just going to be the same thing all over again man so you shouldn't have written that damn article the other thing i I'd say to that, that might prevent what you're describing is that in our country, we're really buttoned down. Our way of doing things compared to the way Sweden does it, where Sweden lets people just walk over and sell something and let it go.

In our country, chances are we'd probably say, before we commercialize this, we've got to get an inspection system, we've got to get this, we've got to do that. We can't just let people start walking up to the KS Bar up here and selling them venison burger. No. That kind of thing. So there'd probably be so many different things.

Because in Sweden and Stockholm, from what I understand, they don't have some big inspection system coming in there and checking that guy's saying, well, that's $25 a pound or whatever it might be in Sweden compared to ground beef, which is a fifth of that or a half of that. I don't think our country would go along with that. I think they'd want that. Our country likes to have everything so safe, everything so

perfect to the point where it drives me nuts. We would never do it in a clean, efficient way anyway. Yeah. So I just don't think, I think we're a long ways from having that happen, but I really agree with you that, I guess my worry as I look at deer these days, I think, well, in my lifetime, deer

went from virtually low numbers. You know, when I started hunting back in the early 70s, there really weren't many deer in Wisconsin at that point. We had many severe winters, really tough hunting statewide. We had 71,000 killed in 1971. Well, we killed more of that with a bow and arrow nowadays. And now we're at this time of super abundance and we have CWD, chronic wasting disease, moving through, you know, this area we're at this time of super abundance and we have CWD, chronic wasting disease, moving through this area we're sitting right now.

I really worry about where we're going to be with the white-tailed deer in a couple more decades. Yeah. You know, the great conservationist and writer Jim Poswitz says that we used to have a lot of crimes that we would commit against wildlife based on its scarcity right he says now we're entering a new new thing where we um we have crimes of abundance meaning that that the greed comes back in you know the greed the commodification the restricting of access you know he, these are all things that we're just learning. Like as a culture, we're learning how to deal with how good we have it.

And sometimes the response is, you know, to just put your arms around it and be like, mine, mine, mine. Daffy Duck. Yeah.

So Yanni, that was your, you got anything else? Nope. That was good. I liked that. That was a good conversation. You glad you. You got anything else? No. No, that was good. I liked that. That was a good conversation. You're glad you brought that up, huh?

No, no. And the whole, the two hours we just had with Matt. Doug? I've got to sit and listen to you guys talk before. In fact, the first time that you and I met. To me and Durkin. Yeah. And the first time that you and I met. To me and Durkin. Yeah. And the first time that Steve and I met, the

first person I called when, when Steve came out here was, was Pat to say, Hey, I had this guy coming, writer. I think you guys would get along and, and have some interesting conversations. And as I recall that, that cold ass hunt that we had that, that first time we did. And so it's, uh, gratifying for me to sit here

and, uh, have the, the folks who follow the podcast and, and, and your show and everything, um, get to be in on one of those conversations because I've been involved with several of these with you guys. Span way back. Yeah. Well.

Going back to 2010 or something like that. Yeah. Pat, you got anything you'd like to add? Yeah. I think I told you in an email the other day, because I listen to your podcast. I think I've listened to every podcast you guys have produced.

63 of them. Because I like them. And so I knew not to get caught off guard by coming in with a half-assed concluding thought. Yeah, you came pre-concluding. Yeah, because you always jump on guys who just say, well, thanks, Steve, for having me on. And the thing I, but the thing I hearken back

to with the time I've known you is that I really like the fact how you are reaching out to the non-hunters of this country the way you operate. It's just straightforward. You don't apologize for being a hunter. You invite people into your world and show them what's why this matters and how this matters. The example you gave me in an article I wrote about seven years ago was that when you invite people into your home, most people come in and they don't know what to make of antlers like what we have in this room right now.

As beautiful as they are. Yeah. Like you and I can look around this room and we see the differences, the nuances of these different antlers. Oh, my wife, even though she's in that hall, she doesn't really get into that stuff. But when they can start realizing that each one of those deer up here has a story each one of those deer up there has provided meat that has been consumed by people in

this room and outside and their families they understand that that's hunting's not so bad because you come across as a likable normal person a thinking intelligent caring person and the story i'll always go back to that always was formative for my understanding of non-hunters is back in the 70s when it was still popular to hitchhike. Everyone hitchhiked when I was first driving. I remember picking up a college girl.

I was maybe 16 years old and I was driving a little beater. When you picked her up, were you kind of thinking like, who knows? No, she was a college girl, so she's older than me. I knew I didn't have a chance beater. When you picked her up, were you kind of thinking like, who knows? No, she was a college girl, so she's older than me. I knew I didn't have a chance to fight. I was shy as hell when I was a teenager,

so I never, I was always scared of girls, basically. But I remember, I picked, she was hitchhiking down on the UW-Masson campus. I picked her up and I'd just come back

from hunting out east of town and I had two dead rabbits on the console between our bucket seats and this old GTO. Yeah, I'm tracking. Yeah. And she looks down and sees these two dead rabbits laying there, you know, between our seats. And she says, did you just shoot those? You know, because she was obviously, you know, she knew something about hunting. I said, yeah, I was out hunting out by some prairie

and got these rabbits. And the first question she asked them was the second question was, are you going to eat them? I said, oh yeah, I love eating rabbits. She said, oh, okay then. And that's really, I think, where most people are. If you make use of that animal you kill,

they're all for it. And that always stuck with me, that woman's question, and then knowing I was being judged by how I answered it. Luckily, I answered it, you know, the way she was hoping I'd answer it. I didn't kill those rabbits for joy, just for the excitement, whatever it might have been.

I went home and I ate them. Our buddy, the historian Randall Williams um i've had this conversation with a number of times where he says that uh he talks about how hunters have a persecution complex yeah he says there are a a small minority of americans hunt A smaller minority of Americans are vehemently opposed to hunting. The vast majority of Americans are just in the middle. Yeah, yeah.

They're not particularly bothered by it. They don't engage in it. The first time I heard you. In your head, but in your average hunter's head, it's like, step against us, man. Oh, yeah, yeah. And that's, I remember the first time I heard you

on the radio, I think it was on Gene Faraka's show on NPR, maybe. Is that, do you remember that? Yeah. And I didn't know who you were, but my wife was listening one day and she says, hey, this guy's going to be talking on hunting at five o'clock.

And my expectation, honestly, was that, you know, I've been around talking about hunting for, as I put on my job for, at that point, probably about 25, almost 30 years already. And I thought, oh, God, some guy's going to get on National Public Radio and talk about, well, if we don't hunt the deer, they'll start starving, they'll get diseases. We need to balance the population. We got to balance the population. We got to balance the population, and all those kind of trite things that people have been saying for years, and I always

would always grime me about that was that, but that's not why you hunt. You don't see yourself as a pest control officer. You don't see yourself as some guy who's doing the world a service by being out there. You hunt because it's fun, and you're getting something out of it that's worthwhile to you personally yeah and i and i and i never feel like i have to explain

to people why i hunt because i think well shit trying to explain to people why i love my wife that's hard you know and you soon start taking all the different things that you love about your wife but before long it sounds almost trivial yeah guys that just use the like the controlling over a bunch like i need to do it because they're overpopulated i'm like if you went out to the farmer's place you hunted on and said hey man me and my buddies we're here to help you out like i'm real concerned about your agricultural practice now i understand you got any number of problems out here, I'm here to help you. Most farmers are not going to be like, son, thing I need most from you

is to go out and hunt them bucks. No, they're going to be like, grab a shovel. I got just the thing for you boys if you're here to help me out. This was just one of those fun things in life that happened once in a while. So I listened to that radio, and your show's done, your interview's done.

And I said to my wife, that guy's pretty smart, I like that. And then I promptly forgot your name. And then about, it couldn't have even been a couple months later, Doug lets me know that you're coming out here. And I finally started to connect. That's the guy I heard on a public radio show that one day. And then I go and I read your books. And I said to my wife, you got to read this guy's books. I said, you'll like this. And my wife, Penny, she's

from New Jersey. Her family, Jewish people, had never met a hunter in their life until I came into their life. And to your observation about people's attitudes, they didn't have an attitude toward hunters because they didn't know any hunters. That was a foreign concept of them. Why would they even think about hunters and hunting? And so when they saw this guy coming into their world and they see pictures of their pregnant daughter out in the garage helping me cut up a deer,

I think they thought that was kind of cool. Yeah, something new going on. Same old boring shit happens every day, then some guy comes and cuts a deer up. It's fun. Yeah, and the fun thing, too, is I think they could relate to it because Penny's mother, good Jewish name like Goldie, she was still in those days going in New York City, going to fish markets, bringing home whole fish like bigger than your

bluegills out here today, gutting them and cleaning them and doing all the things to make them ready because they understood that, you know, this isn't all, not all food in New York comes in wrappers, you know, it's all that you got to yourself. So I, I thought that was for me another eye-opening experience where I got to meet people who didn't

hunt and they didn't, if you go after those people and start acting like it's us against them, well, they're definitely turned off then. You know, they think, what the hell is your attitude? I didn't realize that we were in a fight, but now that you're making me aware that we are, it's kind of pissing me off.

Yeah, exactly. And you can't blame them. If someone comes after them and makes them feel inadequate for not caring about their particular activity or anything, what kind of bullshit's that? Yeah.

So that's my concluding thought. No, that's a good concluder. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now, I often, in my old age i i tell people like uh if you like like generally if you'd like to read someone's work you know you don't want to meet them because they're never gonna like you don't live up right no one lives up to them selves on the page and i and i've been fortunate to read to meet a lot of writers that I really admired and usually walk away from it wishing it hadn't happened.

Wow. But I like knowing you and having known you as long as I did because it's fun to have the experience, which happens to me often, that an article will catch my eye. Okay. And I'll be reading it. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And I'll be reading that I'm like oh that's interesting and I'll be reading it and I'm like guys good right and I'm like fuck it's bad I love that well thank you I love it yeah that's the deer selling thing I didn't put it together right away mm-hmm cuz I like it you know like most yeah you just don't writers get pissed if you don't look at

who wrote something but like when you buy a movie do you go like oh what's produce what studio put this movie out it's like it's like you know most people like don't engage things that way novels are different but like just reading when you're reading like a bunch of magazine articles in a magazine so oftentimes back check like i'll be impressed substance and execution. And I'd be like, who wrote this? Oh, Durkin. Yeah. I'm the same way. Good.

I don't take it personally when someone, like last week I was, I do, I do some running articles too now for the Green Bay newspaper. Do you really? Yeah. Just because he's like running around, running down the road 20 miles.

Yeah. I don't know why, but late in life I've discovered running. But I wrote this article last week about basically the importance of having a strong core, which basically is everything from your crotch up to your neck. You know, if you don't have a good, strong core, good, strong butt, all these kind of things, you can't be much of a runner. You got to get in shape first before you can become a decent runner. Well, I wrote this article. I thought it was pretty good.

Doug, you paying attention? Well, then I... Doug suffered a sprinting injury yesterday. Go ahead, Pat. What was fun about it, though, was that about a week goes by and I'm talking to a guy who's... I was actually getting my running stride analyzed by a real analysis done on it because I was having injury problems.

I thought, I'm going to end this stuff once and for all. I'm going to stop being injured. I'm going to figure out what I'm doing wrong and whatever. And this guy's told me this great article he read the other day that he really liked it, the importance of the core. Is that right? And I said, well, I wrote that. And he goes, God, you're right.

That is you. You know? And he sees my name well, I wrote that. And he goes, God, you're right. That is you. And he sees my name and finally puts it together. That's got to feel good. Yeah, it feels great. And I'd be lying. But imagine if he said, you know, there's just so much misinformation out there, Pat. Matter of fact, just the other day, I was reading some article. I've had that happen.

Some yahoo late in life jogging jackass. Exactly. Goes killing all kinds of innocent deer, which I happen to know. Yeah. And he's saying, yeah. Yeah. So it's good that you liked it. Yeah.

That, more than any other reason, is the reason why you should try to do good work. Yeah. And not shit work. That's one thing I always tell, you know, I get invited to speak to college classes once in a while, and my daughters used to volunteer me for various class projects to come in and talk to people. And the point I always made about writing, because it's a very visible craft,

is that you never know who's reading you. So make everything you write your best effort. Don't just do a half-assed effort. But I think that applies to anyone in any job. You never know who's watching. And so to me, when I sit on a write, I always figure at some point, someone's going to pick up that newspaper,

pick up that magazine, and read it. And a lot of times, too, people don't write. You can't expect people to read bylines. They're going straight into the article. And if you don't catch them in that first couple of paragraphs, they're out. They never look to see who wrote it. But it's usually people like yourself.

I do the same thing. I'll read the article. If it's really good, I'll look at the name. A lot of times you won't recognize it. But if you see that name two or three times, it starts sinking in. And so it has to be not only good one time, but good every time. And then sometimes topics don't interest people and they won't read it.

That's fine. My wife doesn't read everything I write either. Really? Well, worst mistake I ever made in my writing career is about 30 years ago. I asked my wife one time what she thought of a column I wrote. And her honest response was, you've written better. And I've never asked her since then what she, uh, you've written better. Yeah. And I never, I've never asked her since then

what she thought of anything I've written. But, you know, a lot of times she'll tell me, oh, I like that column today, whatever it might be, but. So she'll stumble into it and read it. Yeah. Well, like I, um, that my news, my newspaper column, you know, appears in our local newspaper

now. So she sees it, but. It gets delivered to the door. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Every Saturday morning she sees my, my, my smiling gap tooth- It gets delivered to the door. Yeah. Yeah. Every Saturday morning, she sees my smiling gap tooth.

Yeah, I know that guy. Yeah. All right. Well, Pat, thanks for coming on, man. You bet. Thank you for having me. We'll have to have you back to talk more about what deer do when it's moony out.

Well, see if your opinions have changed. Well, I was going to tell you though, Steve, I really meant what I said about the way you're handling yourself. The final, final thought I'll make in that is that, you know. This is your final concluding thought. 25 years ago, I wrote a column.

Your concluding concluder. I wrote a column 25 years ago. And it was basically the whole idea that we do not have any hunters out there talking on hunting's behalf who are famous for being hunters and i think i look around now and i see guys like you remy warren randy newberg guys who are making their mark out there because they they have gotten to a certain stage in life stage in their careers where they're recognized as smart hunters who are doing something for not just hunting, but overall conservation efforts.

And you guys meet people who, who can communicate to other people outside our little circles of, of hunters. And I look at guys like Joe Rogan and I don't, I don't listen to Joe's podcast as carefully as I listen to yours. It's because they're so long and I'm, I'm always, you know, running from one topic to the next, but I think it's because of those kinds of contacts you establish and you network with and you enjoy.

There's smart people who can reach an audience that we, as I, can't reach. And I think we should appreciate that and thank you guys for doing that. And I really say that with deep sincerity. Thank you, man. That's very kind of you. Oh, you bet.

That's the best concluding thought. Take a pointer from that, Doug. Next bet that's the best concluding thought take a pointer from that doug next time you go to do a concluding thought you didn't like my concluding thought that was good that's why i passed because i knew pat would have to seriously thank you for coming on man well thank you now we're gonna have you back to talk more about all this stuff it's always fun ladies and gentlemen pat dur Durkin. Find his writing. Just look him up on the internet, right? Oh, yeah.

You just type in Pat Durkin Outdoors and you'll find a lot of stuff. Or open your, if you live in Wisconsin and the newspaper comes banging up against your screen door, open it up and see what's in there. Yeah, support local journalism. That's my best wish for people. And if you live in Michigan, go figure out what watershed you live in. All right, take care.