The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 082: Whitetail Freaks

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

Tok, Alaska- Steven Rinella talks with Mark Kenyon of Wired to Hunt, Doug Duren, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: Whitetail guys and big game generalists; the seasonality of deer hunting; Steve's dad's impressively large hands; big 4-finger buck tracks; the motivations behind shed hunting; farmers' cousins, and the troubles they bring to hunters; Mark's buck of interest; a deer's home range; the Boone and Crockett scoring system; Mark's advice to folks wanting to enter the outdoor media industry; the earth as an organism; 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.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, so I'm wearing my underwear and all my clothes, but I'm in bed.

And you remember the old sitcoms and they couldn't show couples in bed i do so they had to show that couples always had like two little beds like two little beds with a nightstand between them and that was like how a couple slept in old sitcoms and tv shows yeah that's how me and mark kenyon are right. We're in a hotel room and we're in little beds, laying in little beds. And Doug, Duren, and the Eagle are in little chairs

facing us. But we're in chairs. Mark Kenyon, now, you like, I think you've even said this before, that you use the term like you're a whitetail guy. Yeah, true.

I understand what it means. I want you to explain for people what it means to be a whitetail guy. Because I always say that I'm a big game generalist, which isn't really a category. No one types in big game generalists into search engines. The truth about big game generalists. The truth about big game generalists. How do your small game exploits fit into being a big game generalist?

Well, I'm a hunting generalist. But in terms of talking about big game, yeah. In terms of big game, I'm a big game generalist, but I'm a hunting generalist with an emphasis on big game generalistness but what is a whitetail guy mark for me a whitetail guy means that that's what i grew up on so that was almost all i hunted growing up was whitetails and now it still comprises probably 90 of my hunting and then most of my year otherwise i mean i'm doing whitetail related stuff almost the entire year from january through december whether it's hunting or scouting or preparing

spots or all sorts of different things so when i say i'm a whitetail guy i mean that is like my number one passion it's also how i make my living and then i have you know as my ability to travel and do different things has grown um you know i've been dabbling in new things which which i've really come to enjoy i've been able to go hunting elk now for the last four years you know learned how to turkey hunt like six seven eight nine years ago so i love doing that now and you know i putzed around with small game when i was a kid too but but whitetails were what got me with a meat hook in the heart i'd say yeah um is your foot touching the ground that's interesting because i think that when tv evolved to allow couples to be in bed in one bed i think one of the it wasn't i think that one of the people in the couple had to have a foot on the

floor there were crazy rules yeah i think that once they could have the people in the couple had to have a foot on the floor. There were crazy rules. Yeah, I think that once they could have the same bed, the foot had to be on the floor. So those were like SEC rules? Yeah, I think that Mark's fixing to come over into my bed with that foot on the floor. It's been a really good trip, Steve. But I got to tell you, what's funny is one of my wife's biggest pet peeves about visiting my family is that as soon as I started dating Kylie, my parents in my bedroom where I grew up, they took out my regular full-size bed and replaced it with two little teeny beds. In case she slept over.

Yeah, so now even we're still married and we sleep in separate beds in there. No, wait, really? Like a regular Ozzie and Harriet. She's like, why do we still do this? But your parents did it for that reason because no no they're they explained that it was because yes the old bed was bad and they had company coming over to spend a weekend and they happen to know someone who had these almost new beds and yeah they didn't want their son defiling the family home yeah that that

might be what's actually happening uh how comfortable are you like how comfortable are you saying when you say you make your living doing it like like spell off what that means yeah because a lot like most not yeah most dudes in the world if you said hey do you want to make your living hunting not Not most dudes in the world. Most dudes who might be inclined to be listening to this right now would be like, sure. So what does it look like? What does it mean to be like a professional whitetail guy? So what that means for me,

it's not actually the hunting that makes my living necessarily. It's content that I create based on those experiences. So I run wiredhunt.com, which is a deer hunting website, and the wired hunt.com, which is a deer hunting website and the wired hunt podcast, which is a deer hunting podcast. So I make probably 75% of my income from advertising and things related to that. And then I write for most of the big deer hunting magazines. I've written for outdoor life,

feeling stream, et cetera. Um, so do some freelance writing. Um, and then a little bit of like merchandise sales and some digital e-books and kind of things like that. But basically content related to whitetail hunting. And my core audience and really where I started was like that.

The tagline of what I was deer hunting for the next generation. So it's been really focused on that really, really serious whitetail guy that's thinking whitetails all year round and um you know producing content around that that lifestyle well that that's something i think that you said something to doug and then doug said it to me um so i want to circle back around and ask you about it. Where there's like a seasonality to hunting, okay? And in the business of hunting, so when I say the business of hunting, I mean that's like content, right?

Like stuff that people watch for enjoyment, stuff that people watch and read in order to learn, equipment that people purchase, just like activity around hunting is like strongly seasonal where after labor day um people start like there's like a creeping interest in hunting and then it lingers past hunting season kind of through the holidays as people are still thinking about like it's still fresh in their head, stuff they wanted to get, stuff they wanted to do.

They're still excited about it. They're kind of sharing memories about their fall. And then it sort of peters off and goes away. And Doug was recapping a conversation he had with you. And you were saying that it's kind of like in the Whitetail world, it's almost not that way anymore. I'd agree with that, yeah.

What? Why? Because there's always something to be doing. So, I mean, okay, let's just start at the beginning of the year. In January and February, it's postseason scouting. So you can scout and see signs and so many different things a lot better during that time frame. Tracks in the snow. As the snow starts to melt in early march or depending where you're at then you can really see related signs so rubs and

scrapes and stuff left over from the year before so there's a lot of that going on january through march and then you know late february through march that is shed hunting and that's huge in the whitetail community these days so i mean tons of interest related to shed hunting and then once you get later into the spring then everyone's worked on their habitat projects so then all april may june you're talking food plots or timber stand improvements or creating bedding cover whatever might be and then you get into summer and then everybody's talking about hanging my tree stands getting out your trail cameras to see what kind of bucks are in the area scouting bean fields getting all your final prep arch archery practice, rifle practice,

whatever it is you're doing all the way, and then all of a sudden it's September and you're hunting again in some states, October 1st and others, and it's spread out. But, yeah, I mean, every single day of my year, something white-tail related is going on, except for the last, like, seven. Yeah, because you've been hunting caribou. Been hunting caribou. When you say you're going out in January to check tracks,

what exactly are you doing? So in that kind of situation, you might be walking the edges of a cut cornfield and see if you can cut a big track. And if you cut a big track, you might know, okay, there's a mature buck potential here, and if the season's done, that's a great opportunity to follow that track back and determine where that buck's bedding.

And no risk there. If I bump him, yeah but you learn and then you know he lived and the strong likelihood he's going to be alive next hunting season yeah and these these mature bucks at least in the places where i hunt you know like michigan or other heavily pressured states so there's a lot of hunters these bucks they bed places for a reason like nothing's happening willy-n. If a buck, if a mature buck is bedded in an area, it's because he knows he's got, you know, safety. He's not got a lot of humans going in there. He's got some way to get out of there quickly. He can observe or smell what's happening throughout the day. So when you find those

kinds of areas, not only is that mature buck that's alive right now, probably going to continue to use that, but that's probably going to be used in the future by future bucks so if that buck if you kill that deer someone else is going to come in there and pick it up so if you can identify those buck bedding areas you're in a good situation moving forward so you spend a lot of time backtracking deer sometimes yeah what when you look for a big track like what is the i mean everybody likes to you know everybody likes to think they know a big track, okay? Where you got the dew claws are splayed out, like the animal gets to a certain weight.

Talk through some of that stuff, some of the fallacies and truths about what does a big old buck track look like? I can't say I'm an expert on this, but what I always look for is a four-finger track, so something that wide across there. It doesn't look like it's a running track if it's a walking track. A walking four-finger wide track.

Now consider that my hands are extremely powerful. That is a big hand. Yeah. So it's very subjective. I know that. Yeah. It's a very subjective way. So a walking track four fingers wide. That's big.

On a grown male. Yeah. Have you heard that, Doug? That's something I've been told a lot. Yeah. And the key is the walking track also because because any deer or any bucks track looks big if it's yes a running or moving track so i i agree with that i mean yeah i mean imagine a four-finger track from me and it's one of my cattle got out you know have we ever done a handoff

like where you take your i don't know i press them together to see who's the most powerful yeah that'd be an interesting one. I do want to point out that I did have you on the handoff length at least. Yeah, but when you factor in height, proportion. No, I've told this story before. My old man met John Wayne, and John Wayne commented on my old man's hand. That's something to be proud of yes what was the comment i've never shook a hand bigger than mine and my old man should have said and you never fought in the war and i didn't

he sat it out he sat it out his name was not john wayne his name is marion yeah and he sat the war out yeah wow uh i don't know if my dad rubbed his nose in it the director john ford rubbed john wayne's nose in that because ford uh was in the service and did propaganda films and put his life at tremendous risk many times and later on went on to make all these great westerns with John Wayne. And Ford would embarrass and ridicule Wayne about his lack of service. Interesting. Your knowledge about films has surprised me on this. Dude, I like movies a lot, man. I did not realize you had that catalog in the mind there.

Interesting. Big buck tracks. Does a big, huge huge buck track as he gets older does it does it round off on the tip i think it varies it's very individual i think you see this isn't something i've gone as far to do but i know some guys and i probably should try to do this more so they will actually go about trying to identify individual bucks by their tracks and so there will be some leading toward that's what i'm leading towards if you want to jump into that jump into that yeah so there's i haven't done this yet but there are some guys i know that can look at certain tracks think they can or can they say

they can i can't verify that but they tell me they can identify like a little chink in it or a rounded edge on one side or something a chink i would believe a chink yeah something like that and then so here's something some people do to to make this a little bit easier make track catchers so let's say you have got a food source and maybe there's a handful of trails that lead into that food source let's just say it's a cornfield and there's a handful of trails leading to that cornfield and you want to know how is buck x coming into this area what some guys will do is they will go in there and they will rake out back up i'm sorry yeah i mean that you're out with your with your knockers and you see a big old buck standing in a field and you're like

and you're you're wondering like what what route is he using to get here? How can I head him off? Because once he's in it, I'm not going to. Correct. So in that case, then you're curious, back in the woods, what is he doing before he arrives here? Yeah. Okay.

And so there's several ways to determine that. One, you could observe. If you can find an observation stand or something where you can watch that and see the timber. Number two, you could observe. If you can find an observation stand or something where you can watch that and see the timber. Number two, you could use trail cameras. So actually put a camera on trails and stuff and monitor that way. Or a third way is making these track catchers where you essentially will clear out an area on that trail really clean and flat without leaves and make it a nice even dirt area. And then come back in the next day and see which one of those trails has that big buck track.

Or maybe you saw the buck come off trail X, and you know to go check that track catcher because you know he walked through there. And then you can see that print cleanly pressed in there and say, okay, he came through here. This is what his track looks like. Take a picture of it or something. Then in the future, you've got one more tool in your chest that you can use to try to pattern that deer.

Are you familiar with, not familiar with, but lion hunters in the desert, guys that are hunting lions in the absence of snow, will carry around little whisk brooms, sometimes full-on brooms, to dust out, just to wipe it clean on any kind of little crossing spots or like dry creek beds just to try to see exactly same concept yeah we used to do that as elk hunting guides like certain bigger trails that we walked a lot and you'd get to certain sections that were just like soft and sandy or you knew that it was some sort of like a just a crossing or whatnot it would often have elk tracks and so we would clean them out.

And that way, next time you walk through, you'd be like, oh, somebody was here in the last 24 hours. You know, there's elk in the area. When fur trapping, you know, in fur trapping, we trap muskrat and mink and raccoon and beaver and stuff. You pay a lot of attention to undercut banks. Like a lot of animals like to do to move along streams they'll always use undercut banks because it gives you overhead protection you know you're

not like if you're a little mink working you're just not exposed to avian predators and whatever else and there's a lot of food under there because all the other shit that's trying not to get eaten is also living under the undercut bank and i would just go along like go along my hip boots and anytime you had an undercut bank where there's would just go along, like go along my hip boots. And anytime you had an undercut bank where there's a little bit of sand or mud on the bottom, you just, without even thinking about it, kick water up in there to slick it. So the next time you came by, you'd see,

you'd like slick it out to see if there's a mink work in it or whatever. So yeah, it's like a technique that probably has, it's probably been invented many times. Yeah. Well, it makes it a simple but probably has, it's probably been invented many times. You know? Yeah. Well, it makes it a simple but effective.

Oh yeah. But I feel like, I don't know, like the first time someone did it and showed it to me, I was like, oh, I've been like walking this trail for three years, you know, and how come I didn't think about that, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that's like the January kind of activity. Now, shed hunting. Yeah.

Are people, like, are dudes hunting sheds because they're trying to learn what kind of bucks they're about? Or are they just hunting sheds because they want to find them because they like to have them? I think it's the latter. I think it's a combination of both. For me, it's both. And most of the guys I hang out with, it's both. I mean, right, antlers are cool. I love having an antler in my hand and getting a

look at it and yeah turn it around and give them to people well in your house i usually i'm giving people you stand you with them oh yeah all right they're few and far between in michigan dogs loose with them skulls and whatnot yeah yeah he's an older guy yeah you you've he's thinking about the end oh man well it is funny that you say that though, because when you, uh, Mark was saying, uh, deer hunting, what was it for the next generation? That was one of the conversations that we had up there on the mountain was that I'm twice his age. And I am, I, it's, it's a bittersweet, a bittersweet thing though to realize my god you're the old guy you know

they've become less and less important to me i think i used to very much just like hoard them never wanted to give them away and then eventually i was just like really why why are these important to me i think there's a threshold maybe like i feel like I'm just starting to get to that point where I haven't. At first, I had two and then 10 and then 12. It's such a special thing. Once you get to a certain number, yeah, it's easier to part with them. But if it's on your property, it's nice to know. I mean, I've found both sides on a couple of different occasions.

That's super cool. I want to kill this deer. Or if I kill this deer, it's going to be cool to have his sheds. Yeah, but this is the... All right. So to recap, now I got myself all messed up. I get it.

But I want to get back to the primary question. So with all the trail cameras and watching and looking and scouting and all that kind of shit, you're telling me now and then you'll find a shed antler now i want to back up for the real neophytes here um deer i'm going way backing up deer lose their antlers every year some people don't really realize this they sure do a deer drops his antler and regenerates it every year so when people talk about horns and antlers and sometimes people will say like oh that deer's horns and yeah okay that's fine but it's not a

horn it's an antler a horn an animal keeps his whole life mountain goats big horn sheep all the crazy african animals they got horns and you retain your horns with one exception the pronghorn the american pronghorn or antelope um is it is the only horned animal that sheds its horn and grows it new every year and horns are like basically made out of hair antlers are like bone um so when we say a shed we mean like the annual shed and a buckle with some exceptions but generally a buck every year is going to grow bigger and bigger antlers if he's fortunate enough to live so long and hits what age mark six seven eight older than that they start they start to go back downhill yeah but typically yeah but one in a one in a thousand bucks lives that

old yeah they just don't live that long. Too much shit happens to them. So you're telling me that you have, in all the thinking and scouting and looking and trail camming that you're up to, that you'll now and then find a shed antler and be like, I didn't know that this buck existed. Well, it depends. If it's a property that you hunt hunt that i've been doing all those things yeah that still happens sometimes really so he lived this whole damn year but shed his antler and evaded your attention lots of times though these deer have different ranges so like the

bucks that i'm seeing in the summer and the hunting season but those those might be very different than a buck that shows up in march and sheds his antler for example there's a deer i've been hunting and watching for a couple years now that he shows up on this property like the first week of september right when when the velvet comes off he relocates that fall range no uh define property what do you mean like like you give it an acreage like what you're talking about so there's a property in mid michigan that i hunt that is a 90 acre farm that i have permission to hunt on so small relatively small like small farm yeah yeah i mean i mean it's all relative right yeah um but yeah i mean like a like a big like in in michigan when i lived in michigan and we were hunting we

hunted a lot of like working family farms that were big enough to support you know a family there was a lot of farms in the range of three to four hundred acres in the area i grew up man by us at least everything's getting fractured smaller and smaller and smaller properties i mean it's all 40s and 80s these days almost is what i see um so i feel somewhat um fortunate to have 90 acres to hunt on there um it gives me enough to work with half of its open field so you can't do much with that but then the other half has some cover and stuff oh dude i'm not dogging on having 90 acres that's fantastic yeah i'm just yeah i'm just trying to clarify

for people who don't really like deal in acreages in their head you know what we're talking about you pointed that out a couple days ago that's so funny to hear me talk about properties when hunting out west that's something you guys don't think about at all but yeah i think that's everyone that i hunt with and around that's how you work i've got permission on two properties or i've got this property that property that you can hunt and you have to um cherish those because they're fleeting getting permission they can you can lose it quick you can get kicked off a property like we joked about yeah um they sell it out from under here some little some little cousin having to pay yeah and that happens yeah cousins are the bane of hunters man because every dude that owns property

it's just it's inevitable they got some damn cousin who eventually is going to come around wanting to tap into his birthright and boot you off the property but you got a 90 acre property and then you have freedom to roam there but in all the surrounding properties you might not be able to whatever happens there is someone else's business yeah yeah i try to get permission on as many places as i can you know to increase your flexibility and your options and stuff so in some places i have permission on multiple properties some places just a tiny little piece here or there but in this case yeah i've got permission on a 90 surrounded by other landowners um and there's a buck of interest buck of interest and and yeah he he shows up in september he hangs out till

january and then he disappears but i don't understand what you mean like shows up from where like how far away could it possibly be not a mile or two i've i've heard and seen examples of a mile or two yeah it could be it could be just on the other side of your 640 acre block um yeah so i know like in some cases like in this case i know a neighbor a sort of distant neighbor that i keep in communication with has gotten summer trail cameras of this buck but i've never seen him or gotten pictures in the summer but then he sees him almost never during the fall i see him all the time during the fall do you think he's moving there because of because of something going on with agricultural timing or do you think it has something to do with him prepping coming in because he's fixing

the mates and does i can't necessarily put my finger on because you know the crops are rotating every year so it's not like he's only going over there on years when it's a soybean year and then he comes over on mine when it's a soybean year on my on the property i can hunt there so it's not necessarily related to that um you know a lot of a lot of times bucks will prefer to summer in areas with more mature cover and stuff because when they've got those big velvet antlers they're not necessarily wanting to get in the thick nasty stuff that they nest that they would in the later in the fall so a lot of times you're going to see mature bucks in the summer and like habitat like where i'm at they might bed and hang out in areas of big mature timber stands that are close to like

a soybean field or something good summer nutrition then once you get into september testosterone is rising velvet comes off they start relocating to these fall ranges where number one there's better fall cover because once those leaves come down they require different cover and then number two they want to go where there's going to be more does because of course that time period is coming up the rut but they want to establish their own space from other bucks and they they need space how old's this deer that you're looking at this buck should be five and a half this year oh yeah which in michigan doesn't happen oh yeah no doubt i have found that the older the deer gets the older the buck gets the less he moves a tighter core range yeah yeah i've

seen and heard the same what do you feel is the deer's core range like how much um i should say what you feel because it's known now because the tracking data it's like it's not like intuition anymore like how much space does a whitetail deer use so i am going to get the specific numbers wrong here but there's a home range and a core range kind of the terminology that's thrown around the home range is something like where that buck spends about 75 let me take it back yeah about 75 of his movements are going to be within that home range and that can be like 300 to 6 to a thousand acres something like that like a relatively large area where he might at some point in time turn up

yeah but then there's that core range whereas he's spending the very most like that's the most concentrated amount of his movement and that can be 40 60 80 acres so much tighter area where he's bedded most of the time where he's going to be feeding most of the time but then there are those these forays like it's well proven especially during the rut that bucks and even does will take these extended forays randomly a mile two out of their core range seemingly at random possibly following a doe or different things like that and then they'll return back to that core you you know, a week later or something. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

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i need to always kind of add something it's interesting to add, to sort of compare it to what the Arizona guys see with their white tails because it's so much more open, right? And they get to sort of experience what you're talking about through their binoculars at two miles away. We talked to some guys at Kill Box that they've seen like sleeping underneath the same cactus or same oak tree, you know, dozens of days, you know, like, and just, they don't move sometimes, you know, these bucks just live in one little bitty Canyon, you know, and sleep under the same tree. There's a story we heard about a desert whitetail. You might remember the details, Yanni. Someone, someone in our circle of associates had found a desert wh-tailed or a coos deer under a tree.

And it was a big, nice buck, and it wasn't seasoned. And it had distinctive antlers. And then they looked for it and looked for it and looked for it over the next several years. Is this right? I think. Could never find it and then one day they found it again laying under the tree just was there probably like maybe it was just in that little pocket the whole time but yeah but what they talk about these guys that hunt koozie a lot because you because you're

looking at it it's like like in the midwest all white tail activity is like hidden from view you know and you have to do all the stuff but like out there where it's open yeah you can get back and just observe the whole thing what they talk about is glassing up a big buck finding his like identifying his little zone and then just finding a little sniper's perch somewhere like in the vicinity of his zone. And then you just lay there for a couple of days waiting for him to do his thing. And you're just like peeking in on it, you know,

which isn't the luxury you have in flat, flat, timbered, brushy country. Yeah. I will point out though, to your point, Yana,

sort of that those core and home ranges and the amount of movement, a whitetail in the midwest or northeast that is very habitat dependent too so i mean if you're in an area where they have to travel much farther distances to get between decent food and good security cover it can be much larger but i think in an area where it's evenly dispersed cover food water etc i think those numbers tend to be in that range so the buck you're talking about the those numbers tend to be in that range. So the buck you're talking about, the buck that got to be five and a half years old, how did he get to be five and a half years old? How has he avoided getting shot four times?

So? When just every buck gets shot. Yeah. Or not every buck. Yeah, every buck eventually gets hit by a car, killed by coyotes, shot by a gun, or just whatever other accidents befall him, tangled up in a woven wire fence like I've seen quite a number of times over the years. Just stuff happens to him. Yeah. So I think a lot of it's luck, right?

I mean, because all those things you listed up, fences, cars, coyotes, none of that stuff has happened yet. But outside of luck, I think two things. Number one, he has a very tight core range like he i've never had a buck that i've hunted and observed that is so habitual in a small area that he uses like i during the hunting season because of how this property lays out there's a big hill up towards the front of it that i can sit on and i can look down over i can actually see a decent ways into this area some fields and you can actually see into this brushy like

multiflora rose type stuff that i know that stuff yeah great cover and tall grass but from high i can see down into it you guys ever chase cottontails down that multiflora rose no because that's on a neighboring property oh but i can see it um and that buck during the hunting season is there almost every day i mean he stakes stays in a very small area. So I know he's possibly going to come feed on the property. I can hunt. He's going to bed just over the edge into this thick stuff. And then if I hunt,

you know, one or these one or two stands where I can see that area, I can almost, almost guarantee I'm going to see him. Are dudes hunting that property too? Not often. So that's the thing that we've got going is that there's a hunter there that doesn't go in very often so he has kind of a sanctuary there on that property most of the year

and then on the property i can hunt i'm very very careful about how i hunt it and when i hunt it so he's got kind of a two property section there that's almost hunter hunting pressure free that he can roam around it so he's got that going for him are you friendly with the other guy yes does he is he aware of this buck also um yes now he doesn't know we haven't talked about it to the degree i'm obsessed with this buck yeah he might be aware like oh i heard there's a big buck back there that's what a lot of people think of it but they don't think of it like what is it actually up to yeah yeah so so. But yeah, we've had drinks together, and I mentioned, oh, there's this nice buck that I see every once in a while.

So he's on board with the idea of let's let deer get bigger and stuff. Yes, ish, yes. I think he's not quite as serious about it as I am, but we've talked about it in the past, and it sounds like he's not interested in shooting year-and-a-half-old bucks and stuff. So there's a couple different people. I've tried to meet everyone I can in the area and most of

them want to see bucks get a little bit of age on them. So that's a good thing in the general area. There's a handful of properties where they don't do that, a couple of properties where they do. But then the second or the third thing I guess that has allowed this buck to get to that point, and maybe I'm going to take too much credit for myself, but I've

chosen not to kill him. So the very first year I saw him, I saw him the night before the night before opening day of bow season in Michigan. And he was a nice three and a half year old buck. It was the best looking buck I'd seen on the property that year. And at that point I was, I was interested in shooting a three and a half year old deer in Michigan because that's still hard to find too. So he was a buck that I would shoot, but opening night came and a different buck came and i killed that deer and so i decided i'm not going to kill this other deer now because i've already taken one off this property so i was just going to shoot does the rest of the season so he got he got a free pass the rest of that year i had him within bow range later in the

season and chose not to shoot him last year um he'd be a four-year-old and again i was seeing him a lot he learned a lot about him from the past year so i definitely wanted to shoot him last year had i saw him with my own eyes 27 times during the season last year um had him yeah crazy right yeah um had a shot at him at 40 yards one evening but it was like right at last light and i just didn't feel comfortable taking a shot in those conditions oh but you would have shot him last year. I would have shot him last year. How many inches of antler does he have? So last year he probably would have been like a 130, 8-pointer.

As a 4-year-old? As a 4-year-old. Which is a really good Michigan buck. Yeah, wow. But I had all these encounters earlier in the season. Gun season comes. I was like, you know, I couldn't pull it off he's probably gonna get killed during gun season you know i made you know made peace with that reality like i had an awesome experience with this deer he's probably gone but lo and behold december shows up he's still alive and something like

clicked in my mind in like early december when I realized he'd made it through all of October. He'd made it through all of November and the rut and gun season. And I kind of realized, wow, this deer could actually make it another year. And I'd already killed two bucks last year and several does. And I realized I don't need to fill another tag. I don't need to kill this buck. He probably could make it to next year. And I've just come, like, it's been a very unique thing

to be able to watch a deer over two years. I've become, you know, so invested in, like, this experience and this interaction with this deer that I kind of got to the point where I was like, you know what, I'd like to see if he'll be around next year. Yeah, but as a writer at this point, as a writer, you almost can't kill the son of a bitch. At this point, you got to be like, the story would be, and there he was, and I had this chance.

You ever see the movie The Golden Seal? No. There he was. I had a chance. And it just like, you ever see Deer Hunter? No. What? Oh, my goodness.

No, I know. I should have seen it. He's only 29 years old, 30 years old. Oh, shit. I saw the Deer Hunter five times by the? Oh, my goodness. No, I know. I should have seen it. He's only 29 years old, 30 years old. Oh, shit. I saw the Deer Hunter five times by the time I was 30 years old. It's a Vietnam movie. You don't know, like... I've heard of it.

I just haven't seen it yet. It's boys from Pennsylvania. Grew up in the mining world. Every year they hunt. They go up and hunt the mountains every year. And they go off to Vietnam. One of them's in the Green Beretsets they wind up in a prison camp two of them wind up in the prison camp together the vc use them to make bets on russian roulette they get deeply damaged come home robert de niro uh goes up back hunting with his friends.

For some weird reason, a red stag comes out. In movies, they always find, in American movies, they always got red stags in them. They make that mistake in Last of the Mohicans. You know, who made the movie definitely is not a wildlife. So a stag comes out, but De Niro doesn't shoot it. Instead, he starts, you know, he's like, it's over. It's over. And doesn't shoot.

The golden seal is a very valuable seal. When you say seal, are we talking what kind of seal? Seal, I don't know. Like an animal? Ring seal. I can't remember. It was when I was a kid. So it's an animal.

Dude finally gets a crack at it. Yeah, dude finally gets a crack at it and decides not to take the shot okay he's like no i can't do it so i think now this buck when you get the chance you got to be like let him walk off into the sunset man because don't you think you know him too well now to shoot him well i mean it's definitely getting that i've gotten a point where your dog no i wouldn't shoot my dog i would shoot i would shoot this deer how is this deer after all of these years of interactions how are you gonna then go jab an arrow into him i know it's a really weird paradox um dude because because you're 100 right and i picture the movie and in the end he's like bam look at his face he's to pull back and shoot that deer.

What happened to your socks, Doug? I'm wearing my comfy shoes without socks. Dude, post-hunt, let them air out. Just airing them toes out, huh? So now I'm interested in this buck. Doug's going to get permission. Where exactly is this? All my friends threaten to do that too.

Yeah. Uh, so he continues to be an eight or is he starting to get some junk or so up to this point? Really? So I have, that's fine. That's fine. I'm trying to get in some heavy shit here,

right? About him. Finally, he's got his stickers. Well, so, so he is a, he is a tight and tall eight-pointer. He has been that the last two years. He's just gotten heavier every year. But I don't know what he looks like this year because I haven't seen him.

Because he's on the mystery place. He's in the mystery place. Yeah, he just comes over. So I saw him. So how do you know he's going to show up? You don't? I don't. So right about now is when he usually shows up.

Oh, so there's still a lot of, this is not a done deal yet. Oh, no, not a done deal. But you know in December. He made it through the hunting season. He made it all the way through March. I saw him in March still carrying his arrows. So you don't know? I don't know.

He's not walking under your tree stand every night right now. Not yet. But well, starting right about now, he usually starts to. Have you found his shed? Never found his shed. What have you named him? What's his name? Don't tell me he doesn't have a name.

He has a name. He has a name. That's what those whitetail guys do. No, you saw me name a carrot with you. Yeah, you named him Snow Angel. That's what I'm selling. So I won't be ashamed at all. Well, I named him Snow King, Snow Angel, Snow White, Snow Flake.

He picked up a lot of names. All sort of based off a snow theme. He did. What is his name? You don't want to tell me? I will tell you. And I know it does sound ridiculous to some people from an outside perspective. No, it doesn't sound ridiculous.

But – No, it's an efficiency thing. It is. It's an efficiency. That's all it is. Oh, yeah, because we often name stuff El Seis, El Ocho, El Siete, whatever. Fabio. Fabio.

We do it with a hint of sarcasm. Sarcasm. But I think everyone at this point does it with a hint of sarcasm. Almost everyone does it with a hint of sarcasm because there's some outlandish names out there. Yeah. But, I mean, what am I going to do for three years? Oh, you know that one eight-pointer that i've seen 27 times exactly well i did try to i did try to dub a caribou we were looking at that one caribou way over there yes you did but it just was cumbersome and so that

didn't stick we settled on snow angel so this buck i refer to as holy field because he's got a chunk missing out of his ear so it was a natural fit and uh and yeah hopefully he'll be there when i get back dude i'm gonna think so much less of you if you jab an arrow into this deer after all of this time together but on balance i'd be really disappointed if you didn't get really disappointed if you get the opportunity. But you know what, though? Here's another way of looking at it. He's walking dead. What do you mean?

He's going to get killed. Yeah, he's at the end of his time on earth. Five and a half. By someone or something, yes. It was interesting, though. Last year, so I have a podcast, so I talk about all these things with my own audience a lot. And so the story of Holyfield has become this long-running thing that all these people are following.

And so last year when I decided I don't want to shoot him this year, and I had a really lengthy conversation going through my thought process and why I decided I didn't want to do that, there was a an incredibly passionate response from a lot of people a lot of people were like i totally get it and then a lot of people i can't believe you're not going to shoot it you're letting us down like kill that damn buck what we want this like someone else is going to kill they wanted a resolution yeah they want a resolution to the story um but you said it was pretty equal though you had other people that

were like yeah oh i'd say it was it was it was 90% totally get what you're saying, but then there was a very loud and passionate 10% that wants that deer dead. Just to see. Yeah, like you said, resolution. They like to have their story wrapped up. Yeah, there's a lot of people that feel like they're living vicariously through this experience

because it's been such a consistent thing we talked about. And some people are probably just so sick and tired of me talking about it they just want to move on to something new you know what's refreshing about you i like about you one of the things is that the the there's sort of these national standards in big bucks right where people sort of like what is an acceptable big giant buck is set by like very specific regions that just for a multitude of reasons are able to produce genuine big, huge, giant bucks. Right. Like big, huge, giant bucks used to like for a while was like Alberta. Right. That's where big bucks came from.

And then it wound up being that certain places like certain places in Illinois and Iowa started like cranking out big bucks came from and then it wound up being that certain places like certain places in illinois and iowa started like cranking out big bucks and they would set sort of the national standard yeah of what's a big buck so if you're going to put a buck on like the cover of a magazine bucks on the covers of magazines are oftentimes not even real bucks yeah you'll have there are magazines in existence that who have an editorial stance against the captive servant industry. So they have an editorial stance against pen-raised deer and canned hunts. Yet, they adorn their own covers with pen-raised bucks. And it creates the same way that you hear, and I'm attuned to this now that I have a daughter, the same way that you hear that there's a standard of beauty

put forth by the fashion industry and by the media that is unachievable by most women who don't have the time and money to devote to their appearance, where we've created a beauty standard. I'm aware this doesn't keep me up at night, but it's the thing people talk about. The same thing happens with bucks, right?

But you have like, you, for whatever reason, don't feel that you're able to look and be like, well, what is like good for the area? Like, what is a big buck kind of for a normal guy hunting normal kind of little 90 acre parcels of land in a heavily hunted area and celebrate those deer without feeling that you need to go down and and you go down to texas to a high fence place to enter into the real whitetail guy world yeah oh yeah i think that one of the um one thing that has come out of the deer hunting media world has been just the setting of unrealistic expectations for people because if you watch tv all you see are these gigantic

bucks being killed so easily it seems every single time you watch a show but they're in iowa or illinois or kansas and they're hunting tightly managed thousand acre chunks of ground it's just something that 95 of people can't relate to. But then you get people, especially maybe newer hunters, that watch that stuff. That's their only way of establishing a context for what is good or what I'm supposed to do. So then they start hunting and they're thinking, why can't I shoot a buck like that? And they get disappointed and frustrated. They hang it up.

And then they act like apologetic about their deer all the time. That's the really painful part to me is when people send send you pictures like yeah it's just a little one you know but i'm like dude don't be like so disrespectful to the animals man you know i think any animal you kill i mean should be celebrated and respected and that is awesome i think everybody needs to set their own goals for what that experience for what experience they want so for me me, I like to target mature bucks because I want a certain experience out of that hunting season. If I were to shoot the first deer I saw, my hunting season would be done. It would be an evening event.

So out of my hunting experience, I, of course, want meat. I also want a lengthy experience. I want to be out there for a long period of time. I want to be learning and observing and interacting with these animals. I want a challenge. And, you know, hunting a mature buck allows that whole thing to happen. And I enjoy that chess match. I enjoy whether it be a situation like this where I hunt one single property and learn a specific buck.

Like that is a really interesting, unique way to engage with like a with an animal and then i also enjoy the challenge of like going to a brand new place i don't know anything there and i just enjoy the challenge of trying to learn that property and learn what's happening here how can i interact with how can i set up and kill a deer here there's something really cool about all those different things but that buck this buck you've been watching for these three years. Is that right? For three years? Yeah. You've been aware of him for three years?

This buck you've been watching for three years and you know so intimately and he's kind of in the autumn of his life. Whether you get him or not, he's in the autumn of his life. All that, that son of a bitch still wouldn't make the cover of a magazine. No. No, you're right. Not even close. Not even close. Like, why is that?

Okay, I don't mean that socially. Which is, let's explore it socially it won't make the cover of the magazine because it doesn't meet sort of the national thing sort of the the national somewhat false notion of what a big buck is supposed to look correct that's a social aspect yep but why is it that that deer can be five and a half years old and be that big, but a deer from Buffalo County, Wisconsin that's five and a half years old, you're going to be able to fit that deer's antlers inside that Buffalo County deer's antlers? So there's two high-level things going on there. One would be habitat nutrition, and one would be genetics.

So this buck just doesn't have the genetics to develop into a gigantic deer. He just is what he is. Gigantic antler deer are very rare. I mean, even in places like Buffalo County, they're still relatively rare compared to average. So most mature bucks, probably even in the best places in the country, are still going to be a five-, six-year-old buck with great habitat, So most mature bucks, probably even in the best places in the country, are still going to be a five-, six-year-old buck with great habitat and nutrition.

Maybe it would only be 140 inches. Really? So in those places, all old bucks aren't huge bucks? Not all. It's always a bell curve, right? So there's always going to be that average. Most of your bucks maybe at five or six might be 140, 150. Yeah. Most of your bucks maybe at 5 or 6 might be 140, 150. Remember when we were in Texas and the amount of coal bucks that that manager was shooting? They were in that range.

They were 140, 150-inch bucks. But he was shooting them for a couple of reasons. One, they weren't going to get big but by taking them all out along with hundreds of does he was leaving more habitat more nutrition for you know the ones that they're really trying to and an interesting thing that that dude brought up is talk about the stress right just less competition yeah with other deer he felt that by and and this guy manages an extremely large property for some fairly wealthy individuals. And his mandate is to produce – to have this giant property more than 10 times the size of the property you're talking about, I believe. He's supposed to produce every year two gigantic bucks that's his mandate and he's a full-time manager on this place to create two gigantic bucks

in his efforts to create two gigantic gigantic bucks once he identifies some candidates they go in and start and systematically remove the competitors of those candidates to give those competitors less stress. Yeah. Because stress inhibits antler growth. I would concur. I think that falls into, yeah, habitat and or just herd dynamics. So this buck feels like he's just lucky,

but meanwhile he's just being watched and coddled. But you would think, until you talk to the guy, but then he talks about this. That even with all of that, there are Bucks that vanish, and there are Bucks that you see them once and never see them again. The mystery, there's still a tremendous amount of mystery. As much as he's like just actively doing this if they one day one shows up on a camera and you never see him again but and that's some thick thick country i mean you want to talk about michigan being thick i mean this is the country that there's places where you just don't even go into it because it's so thorny and nasty yeah

everything's like 12 feet high once you get up on a ladder it's like holy shit you can see in long ways but you get down on the ground yeah it's just you can't see anything but uh so so the the genetics deal and then the nutrition yeah i think and and then you made a good point good soil poor soil yeah soil and then what what kind of available food sources and everything so of course deer that live in agricultural country are going to have terrific amounts of food and protein and things they need to grow big antlers. And then soil does make a big difference, too. So that's why you see such tremendous production of big antler deer along the Mississippi River Corridor and all that stuff going on there by you doug um so those types of things do lead to these genetic um or these i don't know if you want to call them freaks but these huge antler deer that you're just not going to see as often in other places so how i'm back on your deer again so how big of a deer how big of a

how big of a body is this deer he's a tanker big old body just a huge girthy chest his neck like seamlessly goes right into his shoulders and chest and when he walks around he's got those curls on his neck gotta turn him yeah yeah foot on the floor over there yeah and he's got the sagging belly um so i mean yeah i mean i love just a big-bodied, mature buck. I mean, we're talking a lot about inches and antlers and stuff, and I just want to make sure antlers are cool, right? I mean, we enjoy big antler deer. They're neat to see.

They're rare. They're special because, like we just talked about, large antler deer are not the average thing you're going to see. So they're to be, in to see so they're to be in my opinion they're to be appreciated and valued and it's neat to hunt but that's not all there is like i there's such an antler craze in the whitetail world so many people are fixated on that well it's been around for forever yeah forever but i i just always want to be careful to make sure that even though i might talk about a in a conversation like that

that's not all there is there's so much more to it like so i'm glad you brought body size and different things like that or or history and experience of the deer or a set of circumstances i mean all those things make that hunt that deer uh special yeah i'm glad you brought that up go ahead well i was just going to say you you know, you folks talk about trophy country and trophy hunts and that sort of stuff. And I think it's the same thing with whitetails. My favorite hunts are the ones that we've had these great stories about. You know, a group of people hunting together. You know, we get this deer or like your story where you've watched him for a period of time.

And, you know, rather than, and he came out and I, well, I never saw him before and I shot him. It's not much of a story. It's not that it's not a great deer or anything like that, but I think the story really makes the, and maybe the suffering or sort of like we just did. We could have shot a caribou 100 yards from our camp, but we went out and went through a full experience i mean each one of us did you know some more than others but i don't think that uh i want to get

back to like the the ant the the the scoring system and what people mean when they say 140 inches of antler but i'll point out that is a good story if all of a sudden a deer you didn't know about pops out because the the the woods there's supposed to be an element. Not supposed to be. It's nice when there's an element of the unknown and an element of surprise and an element of mystery. Yeah. I don't think it needs to be that in order for it to be legit, it needs to have this agricultural overtone where you're raising this deer up and taking care of him. I think there's lots of different ways it can be neat.

I mean, like my experience I'm having with this deer, I think is unique and like super valuable and I'm really enjoying it. But I think to your point too, showing up in a new place and seeing that deer for the first time, that moment when you first see this deer and the shock, like, oh my gosh, this is going to happen. Like that can be really special too. But I think, you know, it's be really special too um but i think you know

it's just different i like the surprise you know um one of the on our farm i used to do a lot more trail camera stuff and i still do a lot of it on client properties but i've i don't i haven't had trail cameras out at all this year and you know very very few even at the end of the year last year on our property whereas i had them on on other people's property because there, that's what I'm supposed to be doing on mine. It's sort of like, I don't know, kind of like that element of surprise also. You hear about this popping up more and more in the Whitetail community,

that exact notion being that kind of just like some of us, we get overloaded on our cell phones, so you need to purge it for a while and you just take off your Facebook app or whatever so you're not on there all the time. It's just too much. I know a lot of people that feel the same way about trail cameras or you know what lost the mystery of it you know every single no 90 of the deer that

you're ever going to see so i could i can totally understand i enjoy using trail cameras but at the same time i do like the idea of of that mystery that surprise that excitement so i know guys that are starting to get rid of them yeah the trail i like trail cams like there's a few things i like about them one it just you want to be coming more educated right you like no more you have more information you know more about animals and how they move and how they interact with their environment it's a valuable asset to a lot of trail cam images have like a surreal beauty to them that it's just like that just the sort of the without the hand of man really there at the second just like these like motion sensor activated images sometimes are just incredible like it clicks at a time when a person wouldn't click and the result is sometimes like stunningly beautiful of animals in their environment completely unaware of any kind of intrusion

there's a beauty to it absolutely now when earlier mark i want to step back and talk about this you're talking about 140 inches of antler i think a lot of people don't really understand this so what mark's referring to is a number that comes from the boone and crockett club now the boone and crockett club and or pope and young and or pope and young let's talk about boone and crockett for a minute but boone and crockett um originated it right and the crockett started it and they predate they predate pope and young by 50 years and it's essentially the same measuring system it's just one's bow one's firearm right in the late 1800s early 1900s when wildlife populations in america were collapsing and near collapse and some of them gone um theodore roosevelt and other number of influential conservationist hunters

started a group called the Boone and Crockett Club. And their initial mandate, their initial reason for existence was to establish and push for the enforcement of game laws. And Yellowstone was one of the first places. So they had this idea that let's have it be that instead of the unregulated commercial slaughter of wildlife we will establish bag limits and seasons and parameters under which people hunt and that was how the boone and crockett club that was their initial thing they were starting from the ground up there was nothing in place the The system of scoring that eventually came out of this

was a way to catalog animal populations. And at the time, you know, you didn't have genetic stuff. You didn't have sophisticated aging data. They didn't understand, like, tooth analysis and all this other kind of shit. A thing that's just very obvious is the antlers on the males or in in bears is the general skull sizes so they found a way to say like how can we objectively measure an animal's antlers in a way that is replicable where any two individuals could

look at it and apply the same metrics to it. And they came up with a scoring system. The thinking being that if you were to score these things and then track these populations over time, since antlers are a product of age and habitat, age and environment, you would be able to see long-term and short-term trends and antler growth and tell about the stability of a population if you have a population let's say you just the other day we're in conversation talking about this let's say in colorado you have that every

year colorado produces 10 bucks that have that score a 200 on this measuring system 10 mule deer bucks score a 200 or better on this measuring system and then you realize a decade goes by and not a single buck comes out of colorado scoring a 200 on this measuring system you would look and think something is amiss in colorado something is not there that was there once but now not but now in addition to that people also well let me add another thing to this years ago on an island where i have a a hunting and fishing shack years ago a non-resident was allowed two bears on that island every year then it became like a bear then it became that you have to draw a permit and there's only about a 50 chance of being able to get a bear on the island.

That was because they had noticed a very slight but gradual decline in the average bear skull coming off of that island, and that hinted to them to the idea of the potential for overharvest, that the bears were shrinking and they felt they were probably shrinking due to selective harvest of large animals so here's where that like that information that metric ability influenced management policy um but people also just use it and talk about it in a very fluid way, being like a 140-inch buck. When you say that, that's what you're saying.

And it's like a handful of measurements you take. You measure each. You measure the main beam and all this other shit. And the scoring system is so pervasive that people don't even talk about tines anymore. They talk about G2s and all this shit because when you fill out the form, there's measurements like, what do the measurements look like? Yeah, to know by heart g1 2 3 4 those are your main times yeah then you got your main beam lengths and your inside spread so some dude will be like his g2

his right g2 is this and that's just because when you fill out the form that line of the form is for the g2 yeah it was funny when we were looking at our caribou i was like trying to refer to a point i didn't know can i call this is this like the g16 on this yeah yeah i haven't looked at how you score okay i don't know but that's what mark's getting at with with the score thing but a big like i think that when i was talking about in the national sense like big huge giant white tail bucks aren't really guarded as big huge bucks until they get to like have 180 inches of antler that's like the like with mule deer it's like if i could only kill a 200 inch buck with elk if i could only kill a 400 inch bull with whitetails it's what i think 170 because that's boon that's a booner

boon and crocker buck and make the boon and crocker record buck record books i mean but again it's all relative like a guy in new hampshire if he sees 115 or 125 inch buck he should be stoked that's an amazing buck in that area or in michigan if you've got a so if you 125 inch buck is a pope and young buck um gross well net but um 125 inch buck in michigan is like a pretty nice deer 150 inches a giant deer in michigan um in wisconsin i'm sure 150 inch buck where you're at is like that's a nice buck i would guess um in wisconsin i'm sure 150 inch buck where you're at is like that's a nice buck i would guess but oh i don't know i 150 inch buck uh gets shot yeah there's everybody will shoot that deer but i'm guessing like if that buck but it's more common

right you pull up with that in the back of the pickup truck and people like oh nice buck yeah if you pull up with that buck at the buck pole on opening day gun season there's a 200 people swarmed around it taking pictures and looking at it. To what degree, because of your career, do you feel like you have to go shoot big bucks in order to maintain your career? Would your career exist if you never shot a big buck? Early on, I thought so. I had this pressure the first few years when I was trying to build this website and this brand and everything. I thought, I've got to kill big bucks.

I stressed about it every year and stuff. You won't be a businessman. You won't be a whitetail guy. I think now I don't worry about that nearly as much because I have not staked my reputation or what I'm doing in any sense trying to claim I'm the best deer hunter out there or I'm an expert on all that stuff. How I communicate and what I do,

the service I think I provide is I am a just voracious learner. I love to learn. I want to consume as much as possible. I want to talk to as many different people as possible. So I'm trying to take in every different input I possibly can. And then I try to share what I learn. And then I share my experiences, lots of failures of mistakes occasional successes and I share that real experience with my listeners readers etc and I think that's much more relatable than the guy that kills 180 inch buck every single year doing it one specific way um so now I don't necessarily worry of course like I need to have some credibility you know like you'd like to see that the things i'm learning and trying and doing are you know paying off and that you know okay he tried x he talked about x resulted in y so that content is i think just more relevant to a larger

yeah you know group of the you know your listeners right and i think that's where your credibility is talking with you about white tails i i really enjoyed the conversations and it's your experiences and the stuff the way you're looking at it all is the credibility is really there and i think you know and the other thing i've done is that i'm not embarrassed to share like everything and so i've i've shared all sorts of failures and mistakes i've made and that's pretty rare within the whiteitetail world too. And so like someone at one point said like, oh, I just love your stuff. And he's like, and I think it's because you've cornered the market on failure.

You've done a great job of sharing all the mistakes you've made. But you know what? We all make mistakes. We all fail sometimes. It's just most people don't want to talk about it. And I'm okay putting it out there and hopefully getting better as we go along every year.

Some people have the idea that other people don't want to hear about the failures. I probably get more feedback when I like, yeah, when something bad happens or I screw something up, like more emails and messages and stuff like, Oh, that happened to me too.

Or I had this same issue, but I thought I was the only one or I didn't ever, never talked about how to deal with it you know and so we've worked through all sorts of different challenges that we all experience but very rarely do you get to follow along with with someone else on that experience and you could do everything right nothing especially with white tails you can do everything right and for whatever reason that deer turns and goes away and all of that and it's like you sit there and go what did i do wrong? They're wild animals. Yeah.

Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there,

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Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. I think people who are trying to establish some notoriety or establish some claim in hunting in order to feed a career like a media type career in hunting uh you hear so many examples like there's a couple every year

that come up of where they wind up crossing some pretty serious legal and ethical lines yeah in order to achieve it for sure how much do you know the story about the guy we were talking about the other day from Michigan? The guy from Michigan? Oropala? Yeah. How well do you know it? I couldn't give you all the details.

Give a sketch of it, though. The super high-level story was back in the 90s. This guy killed this gigantic buck up in northern Michigan. It was just incredibly wide wide like 30 inches wide or 26 in a place where bucks don't get big in place yeah in a place where you just would not see a buck like that and it was at the time i i don't remember if it was the biggest buck killed in the state at the time where they believed it was but i got a lot of notoriety i was telling you guys i remember i don't know how old i was eight or ten or something like that at the time

but i even at that age saw this picture in the newspaper and cut out the picture of this buck I remember, I don't know how old I was, eight or ten or something like that at the time, but I, even at that age, saw this picture in the newspaper and cut out the picture of this buck in the newspaper and put it up on my little board. Everybody saw it. I remember because my dad was a scorer. My dad scored for Pope and Young. He was a certified scorer for Pope and Young,

Boone and Crockett, MUCC, all that shit. So bucks flooded into our house to be scored. And I remember just the buzz yeah it was the real paula buck yeah or whatever the hell it was called and it's an impressive looking deer i mean even still today when you see the pictures whoa but eventually it came out that this was actually not a free ranging deer. This is possibly had been raised in a pen or different, you know, um, questionable activities had been, uh,

involved with the, with the killing of that deer. So it wasn't legit. It was proved, you know, he didn't, wasn't able to enter it officially in the record books. And he was kind of ostracized because of that,

you know, for good reason. Um, some people still today say he, that he was actually a really good, legit hunter. And he'd killed many bucks in legitimate fashion. But for whatever reason, whether it be ego or a desire for notoriety or something, to your point, he crossed that line in a significant way.

And it's like there are – I mean, if we sat around, we could generate a list as long as your arm, man, of dozens of cases where that happens. Oh, yeah yeah like what is the do you understand the pressure like have you ever been like man um wired to hunt would get a would get a shot to the arm if if i just could or are you immune to it i'm immune to it because that's just like not me like that's not my thing um but like i said i did feel that pressure like i should be killing like mature bucks like you need to you need to have some kind of credibility yeah um but i've never been like the type that's trying like oh i have to kill 180 inch or 190 inch buck or something i'm not trying to be on the cover

of a magazine or something with that i just want to do something i I love, share what I'm learning, and help people, hopefully. So I've never been in a position where I thought that was going to skyrocket. I'm not doing TV or anything, but I know lots and lots of people that are. And I think it comes down to the why behind it. And so I think for some people, the why behind wanting a tv show or wanting whatever

it is because they want fame and fortune and attention all that kind of stuff um my why has just been different and so i just haven't worried about that what do you say uh do you ever give advice to people who wish they had a job in the in the like in hunting like in hunting or fishing or whatever like you got to have people come and ask you hundreds and hundreds yeah what do you tell people is there an answer yeah i mean yeah a couple things um you you know i can speak to like content related careers because that's what i do like the media type stuff um so I would say, number one, like figure out what your, whatever medium or type of thing it is that you can do.

Like either you have a natural skill set or experience in it or a passion for it. So are you going to write? Are you going to film? Are you going to photograph? Are you going to whatever it might be? So what's like, okay, once you figure that out. And then number two, just do it, like create stuff, like get out there, have experiences and put it out there. So for me, when I started a blog, a website, um, yeah, I, I had no reason that people should have

been reading what I had to say. I had no one knew who this Mark Kenyon guy was. Um, but I just created, so I was just constantly writing, constantly producing content. And so my advice is, number one, pick what you're passionate about and what you want to do. Number two, do it. Create it. And by doing it, you get better. You can fine-tune that craft the more you do it. But if you sit around thinking, well, someday I'm going to be a photographer,

but I want to wait until I've got the $7,000 camera, and I'm going to wait until this thing and that thing. No, you just got to get out there with what you have, do it, fine tune your craft and then share it. And if you do that enough and you continue to grow and continue to get better. And by sharing that, I mean like whether it be through social media or networking in person, you establish relationships, connections. If you do all those things and if you get better at all those things, opportunities come about. So for me with my website, I just started writing.

When I decided I was going to do Wired to Hunt, I started the website. And then every single day, without fail, I was working on it every single day. Every day of the week, I had a new article. Weekends, I'd stay up late at night working on it. I'd work before the day job. I'd work on it after the day job. And I just was like, I'm a new article. Weekends, I'd stay up late at night working on it. I work before the day job. I work on it after the day job. And I just was like, I'm going to keep doing it. And then I share it on forums. I connected with everybody I possibly could on Facebook and Twitter and eventually Instagram. No, any one of these single one things was the reason why I was

able to do what I'm doing now. But the relentless, um, chipping away on all those different things I think led to it. So those are the three things that I recommend to most people, very high level. It's not like some secret that I'm sharing. Um, but that's, that's what's worked for me. Um, and then one other piece of advice, I guess, when it comes to content is, um, fine. You can't be a generalist when you're starting out is my, my thought. So if you want to be a, if you want to start a podcast or a website these days, if you start a general hunting podcast, it's hard to stand out because you can't necessarily create content that's perfect for the audience. If you're just doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that. The way I thought about things early on was I wanted to be very niche because if I was

very niche, I could say, okay, this is my audience. This is a very tight slice of people that are my audience. So it was super serious, passionate, relatively young people. And if I know who that audience is, if I'm very clear on who that audience is, it makes my work as a content creator very easy because I know exactly what's going to resonate with that audience. So then because of that, I'm putting out stuff that just, oh man, that's exactly what I've always wanted to see because I'm creating content for like one guy or girl versus trying to create everything for everybody. So once you can do that, then you have an ability to connect, grow from there. And so since I an ability to connect grow from there and so since

i've been able to grow from there now i can expand and do different things and generalize a touch but i think that that is a helpful um process to go through early on that's interesting man that that that part of the other shit's all pretty obvious but uh that's an interesting perspective on it i don't know that i entirely agree with it, but I like it. Fair enough. What did you first start writing about then? I mean, obviously it was Whitetails, but when you were saying,

I'm trying to connect specifically with a small group of people, what was the... So yeah, when I started the website, I was like 21. And at that point, I was just switching to like trying to target mature bucks and stuff. So I was writing about my own experience at that point, I was just switching to trying to target mature bucks and stuff.

So I was writing about my own experiences at that point. I was writing about things I read. I was writing about – I was trying to interview different people and people that were establishing new stuff. I was trying to get them on the phone and pick their brains and share some of those experiences. I was doing gear reviews, just anything. I mean like we were talking about earlier, I was doing something whitetail-related every day almost. But the niche was whitetail. That's as niche-y as it got.

Sorry, let me clarify. So yes, the niche was whitetail, and it was the 365 days a year whitetail guy. And then again, everything was with a little bit of an angle towards that younger generation. So the things that my generation was interested in, and then also the way i was communicating those things so i was communicating with youtube and facebook and twitter and you know whatever it might be at the time and then also different technologies and stuff we talked a lot about so apps that help out with deer hunting or

you know trail cameras or different things related to that. I mean, originally that wired to hunt idea in the very beginning was like the intersection of technology with hunting and all that. And it's kind of changed from there. But early on, those are the things I was tackling. So what's the future of being a whitetail guy? The future of being? Let me ask you this. When you look at deer hunting, whitetail guy. The future of being. Let me ask you this. What are the, like, uh, when you look at deer hunting, um,

whitetail deer hunting, what's like, what's the, what do you, when you look into a crystal ball, what do you see? For just the average. Yeah.

50 years, whatever, like just some new number in the future. Do you imagine it like would kind of, you know, be recognizable. Do you think there's kind of be recognizable? Do you think there's going to be seismic changes? When I think about stuff, I'm like,

it's really hard for me to picture the future right now with the prospects of stuff like CWD. Yeah. So I think the last decade or so, we've kind of been like the glory days of whitetail hunting in a lot of places. Herds have grown tremendously since the 60s and 70s. Most places, average age of bucks has been rising tremendously as more and more people are letting young bucks grow they're

paying attention to things like herd dynamics they're trying to improve habitat or you know think about conservation and kind of what they're doing so all those things have been happening for for a while so we're in a generally good place like reaping the benefits of place. Like reaping the benefits of those activities. Generally reaping the benefits of those activities. So I think all those things, most people would recognize as a positive trend, I think. But to your point, there are concerning things like CWD,

which is one of those deals that is such a long-term issue. The impacts in the short term for most people right now, it's beyond what they're looking at. When we say CWD, we're talking about chronic wasting chronic wasting disease and we did a a very exhaustive conversation with a cwd expert a few podcasts ago so you can go find that if you want to catch up on what we're talking about i don't want to recap it all now but yeah so like a disease wildlife disease issue yeah so those the issue though with that and why i

think a lot of people struggle with like looking at head-on and why i do something about it is because it doesn't necessarily have like population level impacts right now that you can see and feel um versus something like ehg which is a disease a virus excuse me that in one year you can lose 60 of your deer herd and that's something like holy crap all right that you can lose 60% of your deer herd. And that's something like, holy crap, all right, that you can feel that and wrap your head around that. But with CWD, you might not necessarily see and feel that. But as I understand it, over the course of decades, population level impacts do start showing up.

So in Wyoming and Colorado, where CWD has been around for a long time, they are seeing that a significant proportion of bucks or deer in a herd are dying every year from cw so i think it's quite possible that 50 years from now we will be seeing that in a lot of states what i when i ask that question that that's i like your perspective on it but when i ask that question when i look at it what i'm seeing is the way the relationship people have with deer um the the more social kind of spiritual relationship that people have with deer would change if it winds up that we begin to look at deer as disease vectors that would be a scary situation if it were to happen like a thing that i really the thing that i'm most afraid of i'm not most afraid of of like like a disease like ehd let's say it's going to come carry away 60 or 70 percent of your deer i mean that happens all the time you

recover from it like it's a it's a pretty like a natural part of our system that happens it's like you get these like too many deer disease comes in it wipes them out they recover you get back up and running in a few years things go on with chronic wasting wasting disease a thing i worry about and it hasn't thankfully it hasn't happened yet would be that you'd have some cases where there's irrefutable proof that a person, that it would make the jump, that a person would contract a fatal disease from consuming deer meat. Just how that would shift public perceptions of the value of deer. And if there's a thing that you can learn, if you look at global politics, global wildlife issues, wildlife thrives in places where it has a cultural value.

If it does not have cultural value, it does not thrive. The reason we have wildlife in America and the abundance we do is because we've affixed a tremendous amount of cultural value. It is not here by mistake and as and if it becomes that that we look at deer with suspicion um i think it's i think it could really have like a really alter things and and like you being a whitetail guy and you're talking about like pursuing whitetail guys and that's your audience that's's smart because 90% of big game hunters hunt whitetails. So we're talking about a major thing here.

Huge. So that's something that worries me a little bit. For sure. I 100% agree. I hope that in the interim, in the next 20, 30, 40 years, whatever it might be, or whatever the timeline is, I hope we find some types of solutions because that is a a grim situation to imagine if you're worried about if you can't eat deer anymore because not only does that impact us as hunters but then also if if if you want to continue hunting so let's say okay cwd is prevalent and we've all decided that there's possibilities of

it transferring humans. So people aren't going to eat deer anymore, but hunters continue hunting them from the outside. Looking in now, now one of the most understandable and relatable elements of, of why people hunt being looked at from the outside, all of a sudden that's gone. So now non hunters look at what we're doing and saying,

so you're just going to kill these deer and you're going to toss it out. That wouldn't even waste my time with it. Same reason I don't waste my time shooting shitloads of carp and stuff. It's like it just would cease to be of any – I'd hunt other stuff. Yeah, I think you'd see it would be both an issue of what we're able to do and a credibility issue to the outside world. Yeah. It became another conversation that we had um with

someone that i know um in our area their biggest not their one and only concern but their biggest interest in hunting deer is the antlers didn't have the same concern about cwd that i did and it really that's really upsetting to me because of that. Well, some of it's the public perception, but some of it's just a personal thing. I'm just like, what do you mean? But what they don't realize is when they're looking at, when they say that all they care about is antlers,

what they're looking at is they're not really thinking about where that value came from. They didn't create that value. They inherited that value. When they look at antlers, it's because those antlers represent something and stand for something right a dude if you had a dude from mars come down and land on earth he wouldn't see a buck come out and be like son of a bitch them antlers are awesome he just wouldn't it's like they value it because they were brought up in a social context that

puts a value on that and the bigness like the bigness of them is alluring to you because it's a rarity like like planes the the equestrian planes aboriginal bison hunters like the black feet the crow they really valued a white buffalo it was an anomaly right it was like because you had to look at 10 000 to find one and it had an extreme value so when people say like i just like the antlers dude it's like yeah okay you do because of how you where you were brought up how you were brought up what the value system of it came in because it was a rarity because it was an achievement to have one get to be old anyways if you start to chip away at if you start to chip away at like the legacy of deer the broader cultural meanings of deer you will see a diminishment in

that interest like that interest is is there's a tremendous foundation there that they might not be able to articulate and they might not know the history of but it's like they didn't come out of a vacuum thinking big antlers are cool yeah it's a learned it's a learned thing little kids don't have it they pick it up um so i think that if you know there are ways in which the even that value over time would just cease to be that big of a deal this is me being my most pessimistic now the other way to look at it would be that like how shit generally kind of continues along right so um yeah if i really had to like go and put money on it i would say in 50 years we're still gonna be excited about deer

hunting we're still gonna be excited about big bucks yeah but but when you sort of put on this like theoretical what could possibly happen it winds up being a little more entertaining to to to to think about the dark side of things and it just does the reality that my maternal grandfather liked to hunt deer my paternal grandfather liked to hunt deer my father liked to hunt deer i like to hunt deer my My father liked to hunt deer. I like to hunt deer. My kid's already excited about hunting deer. I feel that there's like a pretty good momentum there that my kids' kids' kids will be all fired up about deer hunting. So I don't mean to sound like a big old naysayer.

No, I think as long as we as hunters do our part in making sure that's going to be possible in the future, make sure there's places to do it and healthy wildlife to pursue. I agree. It's probably what's going to happen. America will probably continue to be a really great country for a long time, but there's some shit I got my eye out for.

Yeah, that's true. There's a couple things I'm watching. So, yeah. Yanni, got anything you want to add to add in wedge in there in the end man i got a couple things i wanted to talk or ask mark about or comment on um i feel like with the antlers and the inches it's sort of like this there's a there's it's a little bit of a negative byproduct right of that scoring system that it's allowed some maybe like uber competitive people to sort of make hunting into a contest

and i really don't like that the golf yeah the golfic the golf if occasion how did you say that word the golf occasion of of hunting yeah where it's like it's just not it's just like this personal experience journey like you were explaining a good deal today we're hunting to use just sort of this lifelong thing that you're involved in you know and you know i've mentioned this before i have friends that have quit scoring animals because they realized how much it affected the way they felt about it like they would harvest this animal. It was a great trip. Everything was awesome about it.

And they got home, put the tape on it, and it changed it somehow. And that's like it's a bad byproduct. It started with, I think, such good intentions. And I just want to be clear, again to like the martian or the outsider looking in when we talk about marching yeah when we talk about like seeing the 140 inch deer yes we're using that as in another efficient way to talk about what we know is a great big buck um but it's um it's again because it is that rarity an anomaly it's like going to see a you know 500 foot waterfall somewhere or seeing like the triple rainbow or a bearded lady yeah

i get an interesting example yeah sure oh but i 100 agree with you honest yeah but it's just like it's not a contest and i feel like yeah we need to just you know monitor ourselves on that and uh yeah always remember that there's more to that but my question to you mark was you talked a lot about um like picking your times to hunt not hunting certain properties a lot right we talked about this the other day yeah and you mentioned that i think in the last hour as well right like you're just like real selective you know about when you're gonna go hunt this buck and it might only be three or four days in a season right so does that limit your hunting to the point where because i'm kind of like listening i'm like man i'd want to get out and hunt more or do you have other properties

where you're still getting you're like i'm not lacking hunting time because i'm sitting there waiting for the time to strike yeah so, so the way I do it. Mark, can I interrupt real quick because I'm feeling awful about something. You know people used to pay to see bearded ladies in old circuses? I was making a joke about how people used to pay money in the old Barnum and Bailey days.

You'd pay money to go see a bearded lady. Oh, I didn't know that. I had heard of that. I've not seen. It's a freak show. It was like a part of the circus. So anyways. Anyways anyways to your question because i thought that could potentially feel a little out of left field but i was making an old circus joke it just didn't land i don't know if it landed quite right but

so to yanni's question um so yes it would be the latter so i have i try to have as many different places i can hunt as possible so I can spread that hunting pressure across a number of different areas. So in this case with this buck, I know there's certain times of the year based on my analysis over the years that he's more vulnerable. So I'll be looking for certain factors such as temperature and wind direction, etc., etc. If those things look right the first couple days of the season, that's one of my best opportunities for a shot at him. So I'm going to hunt the first day or two of the season if the conditions are right.

After that, I'm going to stay out because he just does not move in daylight on a property I can hunt from the the, from the first week of October through around like the 23rd, 24th. For whatever reason, he, he's a little more careful during that timeframe. And lots of times what people have found and what I've seen too, is that deer have relatively consistent annual patterns. So where you can see that a buck is going to be using a certain area or he becomes more daylight active in a certain area year after year around

the same general time frame so this buck around the 24th 25th 26th he all of a sudden a light switch for him in particular switches so i had a shot of him on the 24th in 2015 and i had a shot him on the 25th and 2016 in the exact same place and i started picking more trail camera pictures in the exact same place at that same time frame. So for that two and a half week period, I'll be hunting some public land. I'll be hunting in Ohio. I'll be hunting my family's little property

up in northern Michigan. So yeah, I think in a perfect world, you'd like to have permission or public access to keep hunting a lot. But just any one particular place is going to have a smaller number of hunts um it's just picking picking the right times and then you know trying to have a concise kind of surgical strike when you go in there yeah but you're getting enough hunting day hunting days in to keep yourself happy because you know you're going to apply a certain amount of pressure so you

need places to apply that apply that pressure so you just in that case you have you're going to apply a certain amount of pressure, so you need places to apply that pressure. So just in that case, you have to be willing to knock on a lot of doors or figure out how to hunt public land. Or if you've got the funds to access land some other way, do that. But yeah, we get that question a lot. Like, I want to hunt more. I wouldn't want to hunt this way. And you don't need to hunt that way at all. I mean, that's just if you're hunting in a situation like i am where it's heavily pressured and if you're targeting mature bucks those types of tactics are most often the

best way to go about it but if you're just trying to you know shoot any deer to fill a freezer go ahead and hunt your heart out um because you can you can shoot does and yearling bucks doing that kind of thing um i want to hit my concluders because it's a good place to wedge them in one when you're talking about a light switches and that buck starts coming out on october 23rd it's that's kind of literal because that has shit has a lot to do with like the photo period length of day you're absolutely right um yeah i yeah i'm not like i don't mean to present it as i'm telling you something you don't know but um it's just interesting if people are just beginning to think about animals in a detailed way it's so much of animal activity is really triggered by if you see consistency like to the calendar day consistency with animals what's

what you're seeing is effects of changing day length yeah which triggers many things yeah change like photo periods create windows of time and then within those windows of time there are many other factors that contribute um so that's a nice thing to keep your eye on when you start to when you really want to get detailed about learning about wildlife but the thing you kind of touched on this a minute ago but it struck me the other day as we were having this like age-old argument where someone would be like oh man you're like the best time to hunt is when you can and i was presenting that because i was talking about we're talking about people who don't who think that moon phase affects deer movements and they won't hunt if the moon's not right and we were discussing the counter argument

would be like if you can be out in the woods be out in the woods and mark was like well no not really and just reiterate again why why maybe not when you can be out in the woods be out in the woods yeah so again if you're trying to kill an old buck these bucks are very savvy to human intrusion so every time you go into a property you increase the odds of that buck learning about your presence. So you're educating that buck and or the larger deer herd. Every time you step foot in there,

whether it's to tinker with a tree stand or move a trail camera or to hunt, every time you go in there, you are educating deer. So you're leaving scent, creating visual disturbance, et cetera, et cetera. So your odds for success in the future

decrease some percentage points every time you go in there. So my thought process is if I'm trying to kill a mature buck, I want the odds of reward to be as high as possible because I know that there's going to be some level of risk every time. So I want to find the lowest risk and the highest reward days, strike on those days minimize the number of intrusions so that i don't educate more deer because you can educate that buck or if you educate the doe herd and you know let's say in a situation where a mature doe or handful mature doe starts picking up on the fact that i'm rolling into this little corner of the property every

couple days then she doesn't come around anymore or when she comes in she looks right at the tree stand if that happens and the buck happened buck i'm after happens to be 100 yards behind and sees her spook or maybe that buck would have followed her in towards the tree stand on november 1st but because now those does know not to move in there during daylight now he won't follow her in there i always need to be thinking about the impacts of hunting pressure human intrusion and then yeah i mean it's just it's an odds thing i'm constantly looking at the scale every single hunt i go into i just have these two hands i look okay what are the things in favor reward so what do i have going for me maybe it's the time of year maybe it's the conditions maybe it's an op maybe i saw him in daylight recently moving maybe i know that a certain food source is going to be particularly palatable starting now.

So those are all the things that will tell me how high or low that chance of reward will be. And then I'll look at the chances of risk. So what things could lead to me being spotted or what could lead to me blowing my cover. So maybe it's wind. Maybe it's how many times I've been in there. Maybe it's the time of year. Maybe it's how the neighbors are hunting or doing something like that. So all those things factor into every single hunt, for me at least.

You talked about whitetail guys will invent moves that kind of are reminiscent of professional wrestling moves. You talked about the bump and dump. The bump and dump. If I was you, I would think of a move called the canyon. So what's the canyon? It would be that you sneak on to all the neighboring properties after dark and just make life hell for those deer. Thinking that, they will naturally congregate on the property where you have permission.

Weren't we just talking about that whole deal crossing the line? The canyon. So every night you're just going through core feeding and bedding areas, just like raising holy hell. Now here's, okay. This is, that made me think of. I'm joking because that's what Mark does and it is called the canyon.

That's definitely not what I do. I'm joking. Let's be clear. I'm totally joking. But one thing I do do i i kind of call it like my gun season sanctuary strategy so i think about like if there's a property that i have sole access to so again this if we keep referring to this 90 acres this is like the one place i have that nobody else hunts so i have the opportunity to do things there that otherwise you know if

other guys were coming in and out i wouldn't so my thought process is that november 15th as you know in michigan the orange army comes out hundreds and hundreds of thousands of deer hunters are in the woods it's a dramatic increase in hunting pressure most of the deer in michigan killed during the first day of gun season and then over the course of the next couple weeks i choose not to hunt this property at all during gun season because my thoughts are that i create a sanctuary it vacuums vacuums and deer from all the surrounding properties during that time period so dozens and dozens of hunters are all around they're all hunting with their guns all these deer are looking for somewhere there's not hunters that so happens to be this property all these deer flood in there this achieves two things for me number one it pulls in deer in the short term so if there is a mature buck that i'm after it's more likely that he'll survive through gun season

then i can continue to target him in the late season or into the future and then number two in the long term a lot of year and a half old bucks come pouring in or two and a half year old bucks bucks i'd like to see make it to an older age class. I'd like to see a more balanced age structure. So I think I can have a disproportionate impact on the deer herd in a general area. Even though I'm only hunting a little piece of it, I can have a disproportionate impact because I create a safe place during the most dangerous time. More deer can make it through. And I can't quantify the impact that's had but anecdotally i do believe it has made a positive impact i've seen mature bucks that i don't think would have

made it if i was in there mucking around all the time yeah i would call that the crowd-sourced canyon do you uh do you monitor that property then during the gun season so that the guy next door the guy on the other side because that small property like that dude just walks on the edge of a 40 acre you know it's only you're only talking about something a quarter mile wide in wisconsin you wait till the packers are playing and then go hunt the neighbors legs you know damn sure he's not out in the woods yeah so so yeah i mean there's always that risk right but i've tried to establish positive relationships with the neighbors so i i'm i'm trusting number two i do have trail cameras all over the place that are monitoring edges and

stuff and i think i try to make that known there's posted signs all around it that explicitly say that there are you know trail cameras monitoring this property really wow um so that if you if you were to come on there you know there's a good risk that um you're gonna get spotted and prosecuted so i try to manage that as much as possible and i'll even i try to i try to uh i try to be nearby as often as i can too and um i go through that you gotta make your presence known yeah i throttle a guy in the bar every once in a while just in case he's not in your hand well i just walks in randomly beats up a guy in the bar every once in a while. Just in case he's not in your hand. Doug just walks in randomly, beats up a guy,

and announces to everyone that he has a picture of him on his property. I don't disbelieve that because today we walk into a restaurant and Doug's afraid to sit down with his back towards the group because he's worried someone might come up and clock him. Yeah, he's got gunfighters. Doug, you got any concluders? Yes, but one of them we would go on for a long time so i guess skip that one skip that one well but it is something i'd like to talk to you about in the future and that is about how you gain access to properties yeah that's a big one good

i got a lot to say a lot to say about yeah yeah i got a lot to share and what they and i want to do a whole episode called permissions will you come back on for that? Absolutely. I'd love to talk about it. I think that's really, you know, and of course, in my place, if you're a famous guy, you get to come and hunt. You know Fiddler on the Roof, that song, Traditions? Yeah. Traditions.

We'll do Permissions. So, okay. I never knew how much you guys sing either. That was something I learned on this trip. Oh, dude, we sing a lot, man. Especially when we all know the song. Oh, okay. I never knew how much you guys sing either. That was something I learned on this trip. Oh, dude, we sing a lot, man. Especially when we all know the song. Oh, man. So, yeah, so that's something for another time.

I guess the other thing that I would say is that the most interesting part and enjoyable part of all this for me is um and i know why you two guys are getting along so well and yanni too with is that there's um the the passion that you have for um what it is that you do uh i mean it's almost as if you came to this um in in both of your uh where you're making your living, because first you were passionate about hunting and animals and conservation and all of that, and then the rest of it followed, as opposed to, I'm going to be a TV guy or I'm going to be a podcast guy or whatever,

and so then go, what am I going to do it about? And I just don't think that you can create that authenticity without that passion and sincerity and i think that's really um i think that's really important and and uh the thing that that ties it all together i learned that yeah i learned that in 10th grade from my teacher robert heaton who said what many writing teachers say and others should say is i'm right what you know yeah well that's cool i mean it's it's it's and i always said good because i don't know about shakespeare so that was that in shakespeare so that excuses me from that assignment um you already did my concluder you good on yours doug i'm good too

that's good i like that yeah thanks um and i do like your suggestion for the way ass bigger one we'll just permissions yeah um mark concluders you got your wedding ring off yeah i fiddled with this thing slowly he lost his shoes now he lost his wedding ring i hope your wife's not listening yeah watch out we're laying in bed um real quick you're like a ring fiddler oh i'm a ring fiddler big time i've i've lost it in like car seat cushion or like you know down in the cracks and stuff many times i would be but my fingers have changed they've become more powerful to where i can't get mine off i'll tell you a story though you know it's your turn for a concluder when i was a kid we were butchering a snapping turtle and my old man somehow in the process lost his

wedding ring and my mother was devastated he was all upset and searched and searched and eventually he got to where he remembered that he had rinsed all the turtle meat in this big tub and then pulled the turtle meat out and then later took the tub and had dumped it in the garden just to like water and went out and was looking around the garden and found the wedding ring wow where. Where he dumped the – after running it through in his head, like what could have possibly happened to that ring? It eventually occurred to him and there it was in the garden. How long was that time frame? I don't remember.

I was little. We found a few in gut piles. We'd be back at camp and the guy would all of a sudden go, oh, oh no. A few? Twice it happened that I can remember. So you go back and it's in the gut problem. Yeah, we go back and, you know, because it gets, that blood can be slick, you know, and if you don't have those, you know, ever-powerful fingers that continue to grow and, you know.

My father lost his delivering baby pigs. Is that right? Yeah. Found it in the pig? No, I never found it, but that's where it is. Found it in some bacon years later. One time I was out, we were floating, fishing, and saw where a bunch of ravens were dicking around in the trees off the river. And we started going over there, and it's just bear trails,

like new bear trails leading this area, and someone had butchered a moose. And so it's an area the size of this hotel room that's just matted down grass you know when they're just in there really heavy like feeding on the carcass is totally gone and laying in the middle of this room-sized piece of matted ground is a leather man that looks licked clean just like glistening in the sun laying there and you can tell that some dude like lost it butchering his moose and eventually all the shit that was obscuring it from his view has been mopped up and then cleaned to the point this thing looked like off the factory floor laying in there i still have that thing wow i still have that was

over a decade ago i keep it in kind of a special place not it's not in my medicine box but it's in a place where it could someday make its way to it. It hasn't been upgraded to the medicine box, but it's close. Mark, your concluder. After a few delays there, I'm sorry. That's okay. Well, I guess first I just want to thank you so much for having me here for this trip and this experience. And being on here on the podcast, it's been an unbelievable experience.

I think me and Doug have just said it over and over and over again to each other. We just look at each other and we, wow, just amazing. Oh, you're welcome. So thank you. And I guess I was just trying to think here about things we've talked about and things we haven't yet talked about. And something that is worth noting, I think it's maybe more so it's kind kind of a whitetail guy thing is that i'm generalizing here but i think very often we whitetail guys get something that i kind of refer

to as conservation tunnel vision where we start looking at just our back 40 or our little place or our property and we're very focused on just what's happening there. I just want to make sure, I mean, these are good things, maybe doing some habitat work or, you know, killing does because that's going to help your herd or whatever it might be. You care about that little slice and that's important and good. But what I worry sometimes within my little community is that sometimes we'd fail to pay attention or care about the bigger picture things as much, like public land issues or clean air, clean water, or whatever it might be.

So one of the things I always try to remind my whitetail brotherhood is that all these bigger picture issues, they impact all of us too. So try to listen and hear about all these different issues educate yourself care about your back 40 but also look at these bigger picture things that impact your hunting rights or the ability for us to have you know vibrant wildlife populations across the country yeah like it or not your back 40 is part of the earth yeah yeah exactly so i think you know that's all i that's all i'd add to is that we are a part of a very large connected world and um let's take care of it have you ever heard the idea it's a theoretical concept that okay like like think of your own body like you're

an organism right and at being an organism you have you're made up of many organs that have all these functions so you have circulatory system right you're like taking in liquids pulling things expelling things and you're this part and then you also have more cells that aren't you than that are you when you think of all the microorganisms that comprise your gut and that live on you as parasites or in symbiotic relationships with yourself, there's this theoretical concept that you would think of the earth as an organism.

And at first it seems kind of trippy and like a little bit out there, but once you start thinking about, if you imagine the earth as an organism and it has a circulatory system, and it breathes, and it has blood, and it has microorganisms within it, it's just like something when you lay in bed at night, it's fun to start imagining that. You are one of those microbes, the same that you have millions and millions of microbes in you. You are one of those microbes that is part of this organism, the earth. And your concept of your world, if you imagine if those microbes in your gut had consciousness, their consciousness would lead them to think that they are the thing. They are the thing that matters.

And this body that gives them life and that they exist in is just this broader other that they don't really get because they are the point of existence. And expand that outward and outward and outward, and it becomes an interesting mental exercise. Yeah. And I think if we all looked at things a little bit more that way it could lead to some positive things all right man thanks tuning in hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada you might not be able to join

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