The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 089: Ghost of the Marsh

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

The Delmarva Peninsula, MD- Steven Rinella talks with Marcia Pradines of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge; Maryland Deer Biologist Brian Eyler; avid Sika hunter Steve Kendrot; and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: The pronunciation and origins of Sika deer; scoutin' in a bag; the health of Sika deer; the Delmarva peninsula; the good ol' days of Sika deer hunting; the millinery trade; bag limits, regulations, baiting, and their compatibility with wildlife conservation; woodsmanship, fair chase, and other personal ethics; controlling Phragmites and marsh migration; the little-shittin antlers on a Sika deer; the Delmarva fox squirrel as a bad mofo (redux); EHD and Blue Tongue; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, the first order of business is I need to do a correction.

We were talking the other day for a long time, long, long time, on this program about ursus arctos okay or the brown bear and i was uh talking about all kinds of stuff i don't know the truth about and a um dr jarco wrote in to clarify something to me he was like i was saying how i i don't know where I got this in my head, that the old name for grizzlies was Ursus horribilis, like horrible bear. But this guy called in and clarified that, in fact, that's like an example of trinomial nomenclature, where it's Ursus arctos horribilis ursus arctos horribilis was and is a name for interior brown bears so like the grizzly bear would be ursus arctos horribilis i thought that they dropped

the horribilis because it was like bad pr for the bears but he says that is not correct he said no he had a couple other little gripes with things i kind of don't really agree with oh yeah he clarified something i also said that i used as an example of trinomial nomenclature would be ursus arctos arctos he says that's perfectly value valid but i should have pointed out that it that is ursus arctos arctos is the Eurasian grizzly, not found in North America. And he had a third gripe where he said that, and this is what I kind of disagree with him about. I was talking about binomial nomenclature,

which is like the Linnaean system where you have, for instance, Ursus Arctos, which would be like northern bear. He was saying that the second word in that so if you like homo sapiens okay i i use the second word like it was like genus and species but he said the second part of the epithet so in homo sapien the second part of the epithet refer is just called that's just the species it's not fair to say that the second part is the species because the two things make up the thing so they're dr jarcoe i'm saying your name right now second thing uh do you guys go with seeker sicka because i hear it both ways sicka you like sicka i've been

corrected i i used to when i first came here a year ago, I called him Sika. And I was corrected by some of the locals. Well, I think the locals are the only... But I think they're... I don't know if they're right or not. It causes a lot of confusion with the Sitka, the Sitka black-tailed deer. Yep. But I have a hunting video that Yana shared with me called, by an outfit called Chesapeake Pursuits or something like that.

And those are the first boys I'd ever heard say Sika, not Sika. You got an opinion about it? The locals, I think, say Sika. I say Sika. You do, and you're the damn biologist. So I'm probably wrong. I'll ask the locals. I think so, because I say Sika, too.

You do? All right, let's do intros as though dealing poker. There's me, and then... There's Giannis. Giannis. Marsha. No, do a big, long intro. Oh, big, long intro?

All right. I just don't have to, just because... Yeah, he's... Gotcha. No one cares anymore. We know who you are no one cares anymore i'm marcia pradings and i'm the project leader for chesapeake marshlands national wildlife refuge complex which includes blackwater national wildlife refuge eastern neck martin and susquehanna we're a significant percentage of all

are we gonna go sika right now i'm going sika the whole show i'm with sika you can stick with sika i'm gonna stick with sika yeah cool all right we're talking about the same thing exactly we're not talking about sika black tails yes all right you know what i'm going with sika i can't decide all right which is where a significant percentage of all i still can't decide if i want to go with seeker sicka what do you recommend sicka really i'm going i'm going sick i live here so i'm gonna go with the locals i'm running i'm running sick of the whole program yeah you run seeker just out of fairness just this would be like it's like this will keep it bipartisan so that refuge complex is where a significant percentage of all the Sika deer living in the United States of America live.

That's correct. You probably can't venture a guess, though, as to what percentage. Almost 100%. Between the refuge and the state land, that represents a pretty big percentage of the public of the public land there are there are a lot of deer on private land too um but yeah the refuge system definitely holds a huge part of the population of the of the total population yeah um anything else you want to add about your you want to clarify what um what what falls under your jurisdiction there, under your job title? Sure. Well, I'm the refuge manager here at Blackwater, so I oversee basically everything that goes on on the refuge,

including our biological program, our visitor services, our maintenance, everything from taking care of the almost 200,000 visitors that come visit Blackwater each year to taking care of all of our roads and you name it so we met 200 000 count hunters because you run the hunt you so you oversee the hunting program yes yes correct and that what do you have a number on hunters that visit your yeah we have about 1800 individual hunters that apply for permits each year and they apply for over 6500 permits different types of hunts. Gotcha. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So there's more permits than hunters. Yeah, that's correct. If you look at how our hunting season runs, you can apply for quota hunts, non-quota hunts, different days and so forth. So that's why. And so one hunter might have multiple permits.

That's correct. Right. So that's why I distinguish. We've got about 1,800 deer hunters, I should say, because we also have waterfowl hunting and turkey hunting on the refuge, too. To a lesser degree. So even though you run a permit, we'll get into more of this in greater detail, but even though you run a permit system there, you don't turn away hunters. Like, anyone that wants to hunt can get a crack at it?

Well, we do have, it depends. We have quota hunts where we only allow so many hunters per unit. So they'll be limited in that respect. And our muzzleloader hunts and our shotgun hunts get pretty full. But archery stays. Archery's open. Yep.

And that goes from September 8th, the state opener, until it ends at the end of January. So archery's been unlimited. All right. So jumping along in our intro, Steve. Steve Kendrott. I'm a wildlife biologist with the USDA, but today I'm joining you just as an avid Sika hunter. You're running Sika too now. I'll run Sika today.

Really? But if we're going to do that, we also have to talk about... He has a house in Dorchester County. Yeah, you're like a resident here. You're local. Yeah, sort of. I don't think the locals ever consider anybody a whole you're like a resident here you're local yeah sort of i don't think the locals ever consider anybody that ain't born here no resident but uh but yeah i've been here for since 2002 i've been pursuing the elusive cicadere or cicadere i bounce back

and forth we're gonna start talking about turtles in have to say turtles and bull minnows. Oh, okay. That's what the locals talk about, minnows and turtles. I see. There's a whole lexicon of interesting names for critters down this way. I'm with you. And then finally, Brian. I am deer biologist for Maryland Department of Natural Resources. So you're the head chief.

You probably don't like these words, you're the main deer biologist. Sure, but Maryland's a small state. So yeah, there's two deer biologists that work for the state, myself and George Temko does urban, suburban. We have a lot of urban, suburban areas in the state. So we have a biologist dedicated

to trying to deal with whitetail deer and and those areas so but i mainly set i mainly you know um analyze harvest data oversee collection of harvest data biological data any of the research we're doing uh you know we've done numerous studies on on sick of deer down here um and uh so yeah so are you um how long have you been doing that for um i have been with dnr for 16 years and i was involved with deer research um before that through penn state university um so i've been i've been dealing with deer for 20 plus years what got you wanting to do uh was it deer hunting that got you wanting to become a deer biologist? Yeah, I grew up, and I'm a Pennsylvania kid, so I grew up deer hunting.

And then, is it true that you kind of got away from it a little bit now that that's all you work on? Yeah, I got away from it. I escaped from deer for a brief period when I was with Fish and Wildlife Service, and then I got sucked back in. I actually did my master's down here on Sika and Whitetail,

and then I started with a stage shortly after. Do you still hunt deer? Yeah. Oh, you do? Oh, yeah, definitely. Not as much as I used to because I'm kind of working when everybody else is hunting, but yeah. Here's a quick question for you, then we'll get into the main matter. Are you ever like, man, I wouldn't have got that buck if it weren't for all my schooling?

No. Or is it totally different like being a deer biologist and being a dude shooting deer is like two different things two different toolkits different things yeah yeah when you're you know when you work with a deer for 40 hours a week it's you know it's it changes things a little bit so i mean definitely the knowledge helps no question the knowledge you know that you pick up helps um yeah so so you feel that uh like you feel that being a your experiences as i guess because yeah you must look at so much like deer sign all the time and just like well like learn to recognize areas that hold a lot of animals and not yeah yeah i mean you have that insight, but then also just the access to data. I mean, just the data end of things. It's probably available, though.

Sure. Yeah. But you just know how to mine it. Yeah. Well, I don't. I mean, you could, yeah. You could mine it and use it. But, yeah.

All right. Now, I want to go back to the beginning. Okay. Why are the deer here like just to clarify this deer species sika sika deer aren't if you've never heard of them it's because they're not even they're not a native they're not native wildlife right they're non-natives exotic how well do you know the i know that it's not totally knowable because there's some mystery about their their their where they came from and how they got here. But can you sketch that out?

Like, why is it that a little corner of Maryland has a huntable population of a deer that no one's ever heard of before? Yeah, it's kind of an interesting story. The subspecies we have, so you were talking about deer, brown bears, and nomenclature. So the subspecies we have is Cervus nippon yukushimae. And that's a Japanese subspecies. Yukushimae. Yukushimae. And they came from Yukushima Island off the southern tip of Japan.

Back in the early 1800s, they were apparently imported from Yukushima Island into Ireland. Not sure what the connection there was or anything. But so the deer we have here didn't come straight from Japan. They were imported into Ireland. From Ireland, they were gifted to various individuals, probably pretty important people. And they ended up in Britain, et cetera. And then at some point in the late 1800s or actually early 1900s, apparently there were half dozen maybe

that were gifted to an individual here in Cambridge, Maryland. So Theodore Roosevelt has nothing to do with this story. Not this story, no. Someone didn't give him some of these or something like that. Not Theodore Roosevelt. No, he's not involved in this story that I'm aware of.

So Clement Henry was the gentleman's name. I feel like yanni yeah told me that did you tell me that i might have that dude i feel like every every non-native uh story from back then is like yeah someone gave teddy six of these or teddy took six elk and shipped them to new zealand right right now not not in this story that I'm aware of. And who was the guy again? Clement Henry was the gentleman here in Cambridge that had them. And was he thinking like, was he like, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these deer and I'm going to cut them loose out in the marsh?

No, he had them in captivity. And I don't think the story is real clear whether as he got too many in captivity, he would release them, or if he just all at once said, hey, I'm getting rid of my deer, and I'm going to stick them out here on James Island, which is the mouth of the little chop tank. I see. So he thought maybe they'd stay on the island. Yeah, I think that was probably the thought, you know, put them out on the island.

Of course, they didn't. You know, over the last 100 years, the last hundred years, basically, there's been a slow expansion across Southern Dorchester. And is it true that he may be cut loose as to as few as two? So, well, he, not, it could have went further back than that. But yeah, so we had the Smithsonian Institute look at some genetics work, and this was back 15 years ago. But their genetics work, and then even some more recent genetics work

from the University of Delaware, shows that there is basically no variation in these animals. And so, yeah, they probably, our population probably started from two individuals, and those individuals may even have been siblings, is the way they have told, explained it to me. Right, really? Yeah. But no... These animals are doing great. and those individuals may even have been siblings is the way they have told explained right really yeah so but no uh these animals are doing great so like a tremendous bottleneck but then they don't have a problem with nothing no if you either over the years different there's been

different studies they've looked at parasite loads and just you know general health and actually they are cleaner and healthier than our native whitetail deer. Does that original island still have some? No. That island at that time was... No, the island in Japan. Oh, Yakushima. Yeah. Actually, they still do have that subspecies.

But the interesting thing is we probably have more. I'm sure we do. We have more here than what they have over there. Has anyone ever taken one from that island in Japan and one from here and just stood them next to each other to see if there's some visible? Because when you just start a population with a small amount, you could have some freaks, right? You could have some unusual animals and then have and create sort of like a. If you look at pictures on the Internet, they're identical. You would say if you looked at one for a picture of one from

yucushima island you'd think you were looking at a dorchester county sicka so when they first when they first dropped them in were people trying to regulate them no you can just kill them if you saw early on yeah early on there weren't seasons and bag limits for them and they weren't very popular to be honest with you you know for as far as a hundred species go um regulations really started in uh probably in the 80s i guess was when with when uh we started really got aggressive you know started recognizing hey they may be an issue they could be a problem um and they started to be regulated in that manner to try to not not to get rid of them you know we never they kind of found a niche down here they're not like an invasive species like nutria um so we've never

approached it that way with the philosophy that we were going to eradicate them like nutria because they have kind of found a niche and they're they're popular um but at the same time we don't want a whole delmarva peninsula full of sick of deer either so you do not want that no no we want to try to keep them here in dorchester and but they've they've expanded they're like expanding now slowly yeah they have expanded uh you know they're in delaware now um we've had delaware has had a couple what's their take on harvested uh they would prefer to keep them out so is it is it is there a line around the known? Like, Steve, you were saying this.

If you look at, what do you call the peninsula? I know we're on the Delmarva Peninsula. Explain that just for people to understand. Well, it's that big chunk of land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean comprised of all of the state of Delaware, the portion of Maryland that's on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and then the Virginia portion. So Delmarva is how the peninsula gets its name.

And what's the peninsula that has all the deer? If you look at them, does that have a name as a peninsula, or is that just Dorchester County? Yeah, Dorchester County sits between the Choptank and the Nanticoke River. So it sort of forms a peninsula i guess but it's not recognized as one yeah and if you're looking at a map and you find if you go to maryland and then you find dorchester county you'll see there's a highway sort of at that that county sort of sits on a peninsula and there's a highway that kind of cuts the base of the peninsula diagonally, 50, Highway 50, right? And most of these deer live south and west of that highway.

Is that correct? Correct. That's correct. And it's about how many? Well, our modeling would put it somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000. That's probably minimum. We harvest 3,000 a year. So, you know, I mean, if you look at a percentage,

if you're harvesting 25% of your animals or so, that would put you in that ballpark, somewhere between 10 and 15,000 probably. And is there like a, has anyone gone and drawn a band? Like if you say that they're welcome here because they're not, they're occupying, one, they're welcome here because they're not they're occupying one they're very popular with hunters and they're occupying uh a landscape where they're not really

coming into direct contact with they use the area differently than whitetails right they like to hang out in places that whitetails don't like to hang out right but has anyone ever drawn a line and said like we will have zero tolerance for these deer across this line. No, no, we don't approach it from that, from that, you know, to that black and white of a degree. It's just, you know, like I said, we, we would like to keep them in, in Southern Dorchester. You know, they're in, they're in Wicomico, they're in Somerset, a few of them in Somerset. Generally, they're expanding up our rivers, you know,

whether it's the Chop Tank or the Nanticoke, the Marshy Hope off the Nanticoke. That's how, like, they're finding their way into Caroline in some of these areas. So, you know, we'll just tweak seasons and bag limits to try to keep that population here, you know, contained in Dorchester as much as we can. But, no, there's never been really a hard line drawn i mean and do you feel like you guys can uh can you like open and close the valve pretty reliably by by tweaking hunting seasons no we can't um you know we can do our best um but we don't have enough hunters and a lot of the locals down here would disagree with that uh but in all honesty we don't have enough hunters and enough hunting pressure

to really regulate this species or white tails for that matter um our hunters are saturated so you know i mean what do you mean your hunters are saturated as far as seasons at bag limits i mean we're very we're very mean, we're very liberal. Yeah, we have it very, we're in the good old days of deer hunting. You know, when you can hunt from September to the end of January, and we have, if you're archery hunting white tails down here, you can, there's no limit. You can antlerless, you can harvest as many antlerless white tails with archery equipment as you want in a year.

So, you know, our average hunter takes, I think it's just 2.0 deer now. It was 1.9 deer for a lot of years, but our average hunter takes 2.0 deer a year because that's what they can use and that's, you know, they're not going to waste deer and expend more effort. So, you know, and our hunter numbers are fairly stable. They've been stable over the last 10 years or so, but we have half as many hunters as what we had when we peaked back in the 70s. And that's not just a Maryland phenomena. I mean, if you look in the east, not so bad in the Midwest or the west,

but in the east, I mean, hunter numbers are really seriously declining. So as a deer manager, it kind of concerns you so so hold on there's how many like okay if you've if you have half like half the participation you had in the 70s a generation ago yeah how many what's the do you know like how many how many more or less deer do you have now than the 70s oh my gosh we have 10 times as many deer so there's way more deer per person yeah so what were they doing back then well you know a lot of them weren't deer hunters back then i should i should clarify that you know i mean i mean that when i'm saying when i'm saying half as many hunters that's all hunters so that's

small game i see that's waterfowl that's deer etc because and we didn't have as many deer hunters back then because there weren't as many deer obviously um so you know we may have we probably have more deer hunters now than what we had in the 70s um but it's just because of that shift from small game you know we don't have pheasants anymore yeah you probably don't know that history that's for another talk well yeah you know well back in back in the 60s 70s pheasants were really popular you know small game species and they still are in the mid you know in the midwest um but a lot of our hunters when when when pheasants went away they shift some of them shifted to deer some of them probably stopped hunting or just kept hunting waterfowl um so

you know we total numbers we don't have near the the hunter effort that we that we used to have um and and and deer hunting days actual number of deer hunting days peaked in the 90s actually um at about 100 and i think we had probably 175 000 days of deer deer hunting effort um and now we have i think my last estimate was about 80 000 so again about about half half as many hunter days half as many hunter days going towards deer but they're killing probably twice as many deer for that half effort yeah so are there more sick of deer now than at any time in sick of deer history our models would say yeah so the last now it bounces around but but just and just say the last five years yes there's more over the last five years there's there's more sick of deer sick

of deer than than any time in history their population is increasing yeah i'm going back to yeah population increasing so uh there is the consensus that they're harder that it's harder to hunt them because here's the thing i was reading in your report harder to hunt them than what harder than hunting whitetails because they live so much longer than whitetails right they do which leads you to believe that it's like one of them has a that might not mean they're harder to hunt it's just there's like less chance that they're going to die from something yeah like 10 year olds are common right yeah yeah i don't know if i'd say common but we've had i we've probably had a half a dozen that i know are over 20 um that i've had my hands on that were tagged back in like the late 80s early 90s so you know that you're not going by tooth analysis you're going we have someone knows the

year they hung a tag on that thing so it was already alive when it got tagged yeah or and some of those were by tooth analysis but um but yeah you know i mean we've had we've had them over 20 again they're not falling out of trees but but yeah it's not uncommon they're definitely longer lived than whitetails do you think they're longer lived than whitetails because you probably can't you probably can't know this absolutely are they longer lived than whitetails just because they're just they live longer just or is it because because predation is different on them? The other ones can chime in, but I would say predation is different. As in their natural habits just make them a little harder to hunt.

They're a little more nocturnal. The habitat they're in is harder to hunt. You always hear, oh, they're smarter than whitetails. I don't think they're smarter than whitetails no they just live in they live in 12 foot tall they live in 12 foot tall right the security cover is right just provides them an opportunity to escape hunting pressure and they'll turn nocturnal like that um yeah they use they use the ground like how like a cottontail uses a briar patch yeah yeah and uh. And a lot of people in Maryland use bait as well, and I believe that bait tends to favor nocturnal behaviors as well.

Definitely. Despite the fact that I think it enhances their hunting success, I actually think it contributes to less success. It concentrates the deer. They don't have to move as much. They're not exposed to hunters as they move across the landscape as they would if they had to forage for natural foods.

So I think it helps to sort of keep them small home ranges and that helps to minimize the pressure on an individual deer so you do get some that live a lot longer. I got a question. Marsh is baiting allowed on the refuge no baiting is not allowed oh any of the refuges none and and no public land either oh yeah that's correct no baiting on public land baiting to private land only but it's really heavily used on private land right unfortunately it is and we're like uh it's like a patchwork quilt of land ownership.

So you've got Blackwater. It's a lot of contiguous land. We've got about almost 30,000 acres. But you've got these private landowners, a lot of SICA clubs in particular, pockmarking the whole refuge as well. And cranking out corn. Yep. So it certainly impacts everything.

So how is it, from the refuge side of things how is it determined by a national wildlife refuge to allow or not allow bait i mean is that something that would just is that something that would a decision that would be made in dc that would just apply to all refuges is that an individual decision that a refuge can make for itself well that's a great question everything that we do as a national wildlife as a national wildlife refuge all depends on is it going to harm uh or or improve wildlife conservation so that's the first question we have and we allow what we call the big six which are six priority uses hunting fishing, fishing, wildlife photography, wildlife observation,

environmental education, and interpretation. These things are actually in a law called the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act of 1997 that says we're here for wildlife. That's the purpose. That's why we're dedicated and we're on the ground. And each refuge will have a little bit different purpose. So, for instance, Blackwater was formed in 1933 for waterfowl primarily okay so that's our primary reason why we're here and that was kind of in response to the great decimation of waterfowl

right like when when the refuge system started to spring up it was part of a national effort to recover waterfowl yeah in market uh the millinery trade was going on as well so market hunting in general for waterfowl for other types of birds can you explain the millinery trade yeah the millinery trade back in the early 1900s or people would kill egrets and even hummingbirds and so forth to put them in their hats literally yeah we're talking about roosevelt either if you read back to roosevelt yeah you read his earlier writings i mean he just rails against that industry yes and because used to be able to go out i mean people would just go out and hunt any bird yeah you just go out shoot shorebirds herons anything you get your hands on

right to sell feathers right exactly it's kind of like people are so familiar with that story about shooting buffalo for hides, right? Shooting passenger pigeons for meat. But people don't realize the decimation of non-game birds and also waterfowl for market hunting for meat, but also just the decimation of shorebirds for guys for tricking out people's hats. Yeah, they'd have these egret plumage in their hats, all sorts of really fancy hats. And it was pretty good money. Yeah. You read about guys making like small fortunes on it. plumage in their hats all sorts of really fancy hats and it was pretty good money yeah you read

about guys making like small fortunes on it yeah and teddy the very first refuge that was ever formed was in 1903 by teddy roosevelt by executive order was pelican island off of florida that's right i was reading about that yeah because people would just be they were just decimating the egrets and the pelicans and other types of anything out there for feathers in particular yeah i tried to look down on those guys that were doing that too much because i would have been if i if i was alive at that time i would have been totally involved in that business not a doubt my mind because i don't know that they're really aware i think people have a hard time conceptualizing like uh finiteness yeah right so it's always the visionaries right like the guy that was complaining then would be the same guy that's

complaining about something now and people are brushing him off is that we're not like done making mistakes no not at all you know we all act like oh you know it's so silly like my dad always liked to joke that um they would put cigarettes into the c rations during world war two so like every meal you got had three cigarettes in it and then we laugh about it now but right now we're making right now we're doing something as equally stupid that our children will laugh about that we didn't realize how stupid it was like we're not you know right we never there's an inexhaustible supply of mistakes people make and then later get hindsight so at the time i think roosevelt was like criticized for how much he griped about it yeah putting the end of the good times yep we got a year full yesterday about a guy um we got a year full

yesterday by a guy who's uh uh sounds like very upset about any form of bag limits or regulations ruining people's livelihoods hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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Yeah, so everything we do on the refuge we look at, is it going to be compatible with wildlife conservation? Is it going to hurt biodiversity? Is it going to hurt the purposes of the refuge in particular? And when you look at baiting, there's a lot of impacts that come from baiting. Besides the fact you're, like all the things we just talked about, you're impacting those species. You're also going to be, what do people do to get their corn out there? They take quads.

All sorts of, yeah, they end up ruining the ground. And it's a big impact on the land. Yeah, from a state perspective i mean too i mean just it's it's you got the biological issue of baiting and you know and the disease issues that go along with that but then on public land you got that whole social issue i mean somebody puts bait out and then the next hunter gets there before the guy that put the bait out and sets up over oh you can imagine yeah i mean you can imagine imagine how that would go over yeah when i was growing up though you were allowed not compatible yeah it's not a good idea

when i was growing up um it was funny because you could at the time it was bait was wide open like when i grew up in michigan for deer right there was later they started putting later because of the disease issues and other things they started putting limits on time when you put it out there but we used to go down and you could buy this i'm not joking we go to grant michigan and you could fill a pickup truck up with reject carrots misshapen carrots with like that look like weird anatomical features you name it like carrots that were not like when you go buy a bag of carrots and they're all just like these beautiful straight carrots that's that's like one in three right yeah the rest go for juice and pulp and animal

fodder but you could you could fill a truck for five bucks yeah and then you'd go dump it out in the woods and we even griped about it but it was like we griped about it because we were aware that it really changed the way deer act oh yeah yeah pushing them toward being nocturnal changing their travel patterns but it was like if you can't beat them join them and that's the philosophy in change the way deer act oh yeah yeah pushing them toward being nocturnal changing their travel patterns but it was like if you can't beat them join them and that's the philosophy in maryland today so we would be like yeah it sucks that you can bait let's go put the bait out right if i had to do childhood all over again i would take a different approach and i would just not do it because i feel like you're not um i would not do it out of some moral thing i just

feel like i would learn so much more about animals had you looked at had you been able to go look at like well where are they naturally right instead of like where can i make them go it's just a much more interesting lesson like you can learn like yes i learned the really interesting thing that deer love carrots or you could have learned like what are deer doing when they're not eating on the carrots that you stuck out in the woods i call it scouting in a bag yeah it replaces woodsmanship in my mind but yeah well yeah and this is coming from a guy that engaged like i'm not like i said i can hardly condemn it because it was something i was heavily engaged in from the time i was well legally bowhunting at 12 i was running bait from the time i was 12 to

the time i was 18 yeah and i mean it does have its it does have its usefulness i mean you know like i said we struggle with urban and suburban deer issues all the time and there's cases where it does give you access to deer that you otherwise may not you know if you you have a refuge of deer not not national wild refuge but just an actual you know a natural refuge where you can't get to deer to hunt them you know you might be able to bait and pull some of those deer over to an area where you can hunt so so it does have some usefulness but but you know i wish our hunters like you said i mean we need to get back to some more woodsmanship this year is a great example it's a really good acorn year in Maryland this year. There's acorns everywhere.

Deer are going to be on acorns. They're not going to go to corn. Our hunters are going to continue to sit on corn, not see any deer because the deer are at the nearest white oak or red oak or black oak or whatever. So success is going to go down. You think so? Yeah, no doubt.

I mean, any state in the appalachian can show you data that when we have a good mast year deer kill goes down and that that's why because there's deer on acorns and you know they're not they don't have to move as much for food some dude sitting over corn is well or even the states that don't have that don't allow baiting still show that drop oh i see i say even those states show that drop in in the harvest because i feel like it's there's more dispersed yeah the hunters are not adapting or is that it that the the deer are actually harder to hunt well they're they're harder to hunt in a way because yeah they are more scattered and more you know you can't pattern them as well um but you just have you know i think we have a generation of hunters that don't think about natural behavior and natural food sources and where to spend your time trying to get to those animals.

I think there's a lot of biological evidence out there that says we shouldn't be, that there's a lot of reasons not to bait. I mean, chronic wasting disease is a big one. I mean, we have chronic wasting disease in the region, you know, in Maryland. So, no, I think there's plenty of biological reasons. That being said, like I said, there are areas where baiting is useful. And we have always been a baiting state like Michigan. And it's not going to go away. You don't think so?

No, no, it's not. I think in 50 years it will. Well, maybe in 50 years it might. We won't have any hunters in 50 years. We've got bigger problems. Yeah. Oh, there's going to be people cranking away at it. I hope.

What were you going to say, Steve? It'd be tough to enforce because it's private land. And how many game wardens would you need to patrol all the private land that we have here? Yeah, but on unenforceable stuff, you just wind up getting a lot of, I mean, sure, you're going to have some number of people who aren't going to follow the rules, but a lot of people just follow the rules because of the rule. Yeah, that's true. I don't think it's always like because you've got a club hanging over your head.

Yeah, I agree. We can't, and we've always had that philosophy. You can't set regs for the dishonest guy or gal. Because they're going to find a way around the system to break the law regardless. So, you know, I mean, the vast majority of our hunters will, you know, they'll obey whatever we put out there. Yeah, like this morning walking out, we could have shot a deer in the dark with flashlights. Yeah. Once we got in the swamp.

But it wasn't like, you know, you're not thinking to yourself like, how are they? They'll never catch us. Right. Because we're bow hunting, you know. Well, even, you know, just personal ethics. A lot of us won't shoot a deer in a certain circumstance just because it doesn't match what we think is either fair chase or an ethical harvest or what you came here for. Yeah, it'd be easy to walk two steps down from the parking lot and have a deer pop up and shoot it, but that's not kind of why I'm out there.

I'm going to have to work for it and learn from it. You want it to happen in a way that you laid out. Yeah. You know, an interesting thing that steve's friend we're gonna get back to what we're talking about bear with me but your friend had an interesting observation uh steve's friend matt was saying that his uh wife has some like she likes the only wild but she, he was joking that there's like a rule that she prefers it if it hadn't looked at him because it was unaware of his presence, you know, talking about like having like a strict code of how you want things to play out.

There's like this idea. But when he said that, it resonated with me because I always like, when I'm telling the hunting story, I always like to point out, as do many other hunters, I'm like, and it never knew I was there, which you think is sort of like a positive, right? When you're hunting, you're like, it's a positive if you, I feel like if you get an animal that didn't know you were present because it suggests some level of like sneakiness right or some level of that you were in its space that it's being unaware of your space but that puts together this other idea that it's like um there was never a uh relationship between you and the animal where

you'd lock eyes so it might be like how that might be kind of partially what i feel when i feel that it's so important or so positive to get an animal that didn't know you were there is because we never established a rapport i had an experience once i had perfect stalking conditions saw a doe bed down in some golden rod and i managed to stalk within 10 yards of that deer and she never knew i was there i had to wait and wait and wait for her to stand up and offer me a shot and this whole time i could watch her chewing her cud and just completely oblivious to my presence and when the moment came and she stood up i pulled back and i flubbed probably one of the easiest shots right over her back and to this this day, I think it was in my head.

I just, I couldn't kill that deer after that, having that experience with it, you know. It'd become like your pet. I've had that happen staring through binoculars where you watch a buck bed down at nine o'clock in the morning and then you get set up for the shot and you wait, it's 3 p.m. until the buck finally stands up and you've watched it change position in its bed you know groom itself chew its cud fall over you know watch his antlers hit the ground while he's sleeping get back up you know watch all that and then by the time they're like shooting times you know it's coming you're kind of like oh maybe he'll get away you know now that never happens

when i'm on the trigger but if i'm like looking for someone else i'm kind of like yeah maybe he'll get away especially they do something cute else, I'm kind of like, ah, maybe they'll get away. Especially if they do something cute, like turn around and kind of nibble or groom. No, I don't have that. So back to the refuge. So hunters that come out to hunt, on the refuge, is it primarily,

that's like people hunting sick of deer. Yes, for big game. Yeah, that's the big game species yeah there's whitetail too but like last year we did uh what 350 we harvested 350 sicka and only 77 whitetail so there are some whitetails out there do people complain about do people complain about the the lack of baiting I haven't heard that yet. I think because it's been that way for a long time, it's just accepted. It's just accepted this way it goes.

Yeah, that it's not, that's just not feasible on public lands for all the reasons that we talked about. And it gives you a different type of hunting experience too. If you want to go out there and look for sign and look for wallows and try and find a good trail try and figure out where are they coming from the marsh to the woods at what time you know it's a great experience yeah that you won't get elsewhere do you have you ever like figured out um success like have you guys looked at have either of you any kind of idea of success rates for the refuge like like like deer per hunter hour or any deer per hunter day or anything like that no we haven't done that we haven't done that yet but you killed how tell me how many you killed

like last year or not how many yeah me for now uh 350 sicka and 77 whitetail and how many individual do you have a guess of how many individual hunters rolled through the refuge yeah i think we had 1,700 permits sold. For deer? For deer. Or is that called waterfowl too? No, that's just deer. That's just deer.

Now, do some people buy permits and not show up that year? Yeah. Do some people show up and hunt a whole ton? Yeah. And so this past year, we asked on the permit application for the first time, how many days on average did you hunt last year? Because we're trying to get a feel for exactly that. What's your sense of it? Is it kind of like everything where you feel that there's some people that put in the time and they do real well and some people that don't and

they don't? Oh, yeah. Is it kind of like a meritocracy? Yeah. I mean, yeah. The folks that are willing to get out there, put in the time, deal with the mosquitoes. I mean, I was out there on opening day, September 8th, and it was pretty brutal that first, well, actually the whole month when it comes to heat and mosquitoes and things like that. A lot of people aren't out there putting that time in. So if you're willing to put on the chest waders and get out into the marsh and try and go where other people don't go and figure it out, you'll be successful. So what's access like there? So we've got a number

of different units. We've got parking lots and roads back there. So it depends. Some of the units are easier to access than others. Some you can park and you can go out into open woods and never need to put on waders. Others, you could be walking quite a bit out in marsh that's really falling apart. So you take one, two steps and then you fall through a hole and what about using uh canoes and kayaks do people do that yeah for the uh this year is the second year that we've allowed boat access to certain units okay yep so and that's been a little bit controversial as well because the people who are able to walk back to those kind of really good secret spots now all of a sudden they put in an hour walk. And they're mad that some dude shows up in a boat.

Yeah, and I was with a friend on one of the units, and I spent 45 minutes walking back there. And, you know, I'm kind of short, and it doesn't take much to get into a marsh up to my waist. And, you know, I get into a tripod stand and sit there, and right at light, you know, you see a boat coming up and accessing a different part of the marsh, but that's kind of the game. So it's an interesting conundrum because we want

to offer access for people, you know, for older people who can't do that. What about taking kids? What about taking other folks? If I didn't have my friend helping me get back to that spot, I probably couldn't have gotten back there either. but you said there are a lot of places that are easy that's correct there are so the boat access is limited to a few areas we're trying it again this year and we'll see oh so yeah you have the luxury of being able to see if if it creates too much yeah tension between hunters or yeah and actually the bigger trouble that we've been having is people putting in if if you've driven around this area, there's a lot of ditches with water. Especially, it's been kind of dry, very dry until recently. But you could put your kayak or canoe in a ditch almost anywhere and get to one of these waterways.

So that's been an issue with trespassing and parking. Trespassing? Yeah, yeah. People not putting in where they're supposed to for the refuge, but putting their boat in a ditch, literally, and then going in. So that can cause access issues. Because you guys have rules about how you want, where you want people to park. Yeah, yeah.

But the bigger issue is with private landowners. So some folks don't know, and they'll just put in and trespass on other people's property. You can get to the refuge through our ramps, but you can also get to the refuge through public, I mean, private areas as well, if you have permission. I see. So we don't want to cause problems for other people either.

Yeah, I got you. And then back to like, what are the hallmarks? Like, so what are the things that the people who are successful at it, like, what do they do? Do you know what I mean? Is there a way you could kind of describe the person who finds success trying to? Yeah. Steve's asking because we've been hunting for two days.

We don't have any success yet. So we're just trying to pull out some little tidbits. I know. I myself, like I said, I've been gun hunting for a long time, but I've just started bow hunting. And I myself have been trying to get my first Sika as well with my bow. So the thing that I've talked to the people who've really been successful and they like to help other people be successful too, is they put the time. I mean, they're looking at aerial maps.

They're trying to figure out, okay, this guy's going to go in the marsh here and in the woods there. There's crops there. So they're looking at the landscape. And then they're going out there and scouting and putting the time in to see where's the sign and so forth now when it comes to public lands it's always a little bit of a crapshoot because when everybody else goes out there they're going to move the the deer patterns are going to move because of the people moving in the woods that's why early archery is so fun to me anyways and i think to a lot of people because it's so miserable that no one's out there yeah that's right in some regards yeah because that first gunshot hasn't gone off so when muzzleloader

opens tomorrow we're going to see a lot more hunters in the woods they're going to hear the shots the deer are going to go a lot more nocturnal and they're not going to act as natural as they had been so i'm going out tonight and hoping i can get my and do you feel that um do you feel from what you've seen that that people who are willing to to walk and wade out to hard to access areas that that that's good that works for people yeah it works for people but i've also heard their same exact people be very close to a parking lot and get to your deer as well i think it comes down to experience you can't nothing can replace just getting out there and doing it yourself and learning those hard lessons and right seeing it nothing can replace that and that's what i've seen amongst the hunters that i respect and know around here

they are just a lot tougher because you can't even even when they're not disturbed by a muzzleloader season or a firearm season you can't pattern them like a whitetail they just they're a little bit more random you know whitetails you can pretty much guarantee they're going to be on that bean field every night or whatever you know whereas sickas are a little harder to pattern you just you know you got to put yourself in that high percentage area but you got to do it a whole bunch so that's i know it'll pay off hunting with steve for the last couple days is i came down like trying to like you know i was asking a lot of questions about like very specific landscape like like oh trail intersections or and just kind of explain your idea about them like like how you go about stand selection yeah it's it's like brian said i look i've been disappointed many times

sitting over a trail that looks like a cow path and you think oh they've got to come here regularly it's just a matter of time and it probably is just a matter of time but a lot of that activity is at night and so i've found that sitting on trails per se is not a very productive uh technique for shooting deer but and if you look from an aerial photograph you'll see this there's a network of trails through the marsh and into the woods you can see it from google yeah and so it's like a crapshoot whether they're going to take this trail or that trail so what i try to do is like brian just said find high percentage areas where deer activity gets funneled down and hopefully that means one's going to come within range you know with me

shooting traditional archery equipment it's like 15 20 yards so i look for thicker and tighter and heavier cover than probably most people that would be able to shoot a little further because you don't care about the 40 yard yeah i mean i love to the deer. It's fun to watch them and stuff, but it's way out of my range. It might as well be 400 if it's 40. But, you know, looking for those patches where maybe the Phragmites pokes a little further in towards the woods or it necks down into a narrower strip and they'll follow the edges of those things.

They love that switchgrass kind of marshy, wet stuff. They like to have their feet wet. They go on the uplands, but they spend most of their time with their feet wet. Wading around. Yeah. I heard that. The first ones I saw, I heard them before I saw them,

and it just sounded like stuff running through the water yeah that's normal that's just out there that's a lot of people's first experience can you uh steve explain the fragmites stuff oh fragmites is a non-native ornamental plant that was introduced i don't even know when probably early 1900s if not sooner uh and it's you know escaped to become feral it establishes very dense monotypic stands that crowds out other native plants is it is it a grass or i think it is yes yeah it's a reed and uh but mine got like 12 feet high 12 feet high it's actually quite beautiful but does it like a dozen or more stalks per square foot i'd have to say oh yeah it uh almost impenetrable certainly you can't get through it without a whole lot of

effort but they just like run around they're like little muskrats man oh yeah the deer do that's great cover for them they uh and that's probably why some of them live to be 20 years old yes i was laughing today you have like a non-native species utilizing a non-native vegetation to great effect. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and on the refuge, we try and control Phragmites in certain areas, which is always interesting because some of the hunters would rather us not. They like it there?

Yeah, but we can't control it all. What do you try to do to get rid of it? We use Rodeo glyphosate, and we spray that. And we have a machine called a Marshmaster, which is a pretty cool thing that just goes out, and we spray it. When we had a slug of funding from an outside source, we were able to do some aerial spraying of it a number of years ago, but we can't keep that up. So we control about 500 acres of Phragmites,

which there's a lot more out there. So there's plenty for Sika and for hunting. So you got a spot of 500 acres where you try to keep it native vegetation? Yeah, we have areas that equate to 500 acres. Like our impoundments that we create for waterfowl, we want to keep the Phragmites out of there so that the waterfowl can utilize it over the winter. And then whenever the marsh, we this uh marsh migration that's going on if you go out on the refuge or anywhere around here you'll see dying trees you know kind of

transitioning to living trees and that's where the sea level is rising and the marsh is literally migrating upslope we're so flat here the marsh can do that and if it doesn't run into development it's going to migrate yeah like the highest place in this county is 11 feet or something like that? Something like that. Probably, yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. And then Steve was saying that just in the time you spent hunting here, you've watched that tree line.

Yeah, dramatic changes in the tree lines. And some of the places that you saw today, when I first started hunting them 12, 15 years ago, those had big trees you could put tree stands in and more than half of those trees have died and the ones that are left are just kind of stunted and whatnot. So another 10 years from now, they'll all be dead laying on the ground and that'll just be open marsh you're looking at. Saltwater intrusion.

Yeah. Blackwater's lost 5,000 acres of marsh to open water since 1933. How many acres? 5,000. Really? Yeah. And we're still losing it today. And everybody who goes out, the muskrat trappers, the hunters, everybody who goes out there, they can see the changes right before your eyes. 5,000 acres from marsh to open water.

Yeah. So that's what we have to deal with. And we're trying to help. We want to keep that marsh. We want to keep that high marsh that used to be there, marsh in general. And so as the Phragmites comes in and moves into a lot of these areas where it would have been different species before. So there's certain areas that we target for the Phragmites control and the other places we just, we let it go.

Can you explain high marsh? Yeah, well, high marsh yeah well high marsh well back in the 1930s when the refuge was established uh i saw pictures over this weekend of someone who did a history of the refuge where you it used to be the marsh was high enough above the water level you'd have different species of uh of the the cord grass the salt marsh hay etc and the cattle could actually graze it well Well, you would never imagine doing that now because as the marsh has actually, the sea level has risen, water levels have risen,

therefore there's a different, it's a low marsh instead. And as more water gets higher and higher, it becomes more broken up. If you look around, you'll see marsh that's just all grass, but if you look in middle, you'll start to see like potholes of water, open that's the marsh just just uh degrading falling apart and that's not you know what we want to see but that's indeed what's happening so we have to deal with it things change what species come out as the winner on that uh well fish yeah just more fish, we've got more fish now, yeah. Snake heads.

Yeah, carp and snake heads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're losing, but you could argue that sicca and phragmites are winners in this because as this marsh is migrating up into the woods, the dying woods, it's a different species. Before phragmites and sicca, it was different species of the cord grasses and so forth. Three square, things like that. So it's different. Here's probably a harder question for you about managing a refuge and then having a species like Cicadaria that have a tremendous hunter interest like i would think if you look at the the mandate for the refuge system would not be

to provide habitat to a non-native that's correct ungulate so do people float the idea of trying to do an eradication or is it i mean is there or is there just no negative to them uh certainly we have folks um that question, oh, wait, especially with our deer hunting program, you're managing for Sika? That's a non-native invasive species that some would argue compete with whitetail, whether or not that's true or not.

And we argue that, well, like Brian explained, we are managing a resource for hunters that we don't think is having a detrimental effect to the refuge in and of itself. However, we are trying to focus our efforts of harvest on certain areas where they are causing problems. For instance, we plant crops for waterfowl so that when they get here, when the geek, which have started arriving, the migrants, that's there, that's supposed to be there for the waterfowl over the winter. And the Sika in particular, well, all the deer are really hitting those crops hard. So we try and open up wildlife drive and some of those areas that are

closed to hunting specifically so that hunters can go in and hopefully hit those deer harder so that we can have that resource there for waterfowl so it's a balancing act um so with the with the can you break down the difference between the refuge and the what's the other thing the the the state wildlife management areas yeah but what river is it not the savage but you know fishing bay that's that's what i'm back for yeah fishing bay wildlife management area yeah so break like break down for me what those two things are sure i'll talk about so national wildlife refuges are we're federally owned by the u.s fish and wildlife service and so that was the first refuge like i mentioned was pelican island back in 1903 and we're the only lands federally loan owned lands set aside specifically for wildlife and wildlife dependent recreation for people. So like the hunting and fishing that we talked about.

We've got 566 around the country and Blackwater is one of those. We were established back in 1933, primarily for waterfowl, but also for other species of wildlife as well. And yeah, so we follow federal mandates of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which includes allowing visitors and those types of activities that are compatible for wildlife conservation. And the Blackwater Refuge actually shares a border with Fishing Bay. Fishing Bay, correct. And Fishing Bay is state.

That's a state wildlife management area. Most of those were purchased with Pittman-Robertson funds. A lot of, I mean, that's pretty, you know, wildlife management areas are pretty common across the country. So Fish and Bay, I think that's our largest. Our largest one is 50 or however, 25 plus thousand acres or whatever it is. And they form one contiguous piece of marsh though. More or less.

More or less. Yeah. And how many acres total of, it's like, how many acres total of public land are there in this area uh a good bit i don't know the percentage wise we're we're a little over 29 000 acres now that includes martin the island and some of our other smaller refuges but certainly most of it's at blackwater. And Fishing Bay is about 25. And Taylor's Island. There's WMA at Taylor's Island. So, I mean, there's a lot of public land in the area.

I mean, you know, 50,000 plus acres easily. Not all contiguous, but yeah, I mean, there's a lot of... So, 50,000 acres of Sika deer habitat. A lot of it. Yeah. So, it's like water. So, it's not a lot of it. Yeah. A good percentage of it right here. A a lot of it yeah so it's like water so it's not a lot of it yeah a good percentage of it right here percentage of it yep yep yep and how and there's how many deer 10 to 15 000 do you guys feel that uh do you guys feel that

that it's the thing that people don't really know about? I think the sicker they know about, they seem to... But I'll tell you what... I mean nationally. Oh, nationally, no. I went my whole life without knowing about it. I happened to come down here one time. A friend of mine was at some fundraiser auction for Ducks Unlimited. Somehow or another wound up with a snow goose hunt.

Invited me to come along on it for like a day. And I remember this guy talking about like these like marsh deer ah yeah sick of deer marsh deer and it was kind of in one ear and out the other but i was i remember that was like the first time i ever had any idea yeah we've been planning this trip for two years and i've yet to tell somebody yeah we're going to maryland to hunt seek a deer and have someone go, oh, yeah. Yeah, I think Remy Warren was the only one. He's got his finger to the pulse.

And I do know that all the locals want to keep it kind of their own little secret. I can imagine. Yeah. They're feeling the cat is out of the bag. Their perception is that we're overrun with non-residents and come here is looking to hunt seeker deer and but the numbers don't bear that out no not really they don't i mean it's definitely they are well known in the mid-atlantic so you know you see a lot of delaware hunters you see a lot of pennsylvania hunters you see a fair number of new jersey hunters virginia hunters

you do coming down yes yeah so you know so it's more it's a local mid-atlantic they're well known among the deer hunting community um but once you get outside of that range and there's been quite a few celebrities that have been here hunting them and have done shows on them um i've done you know i don't know i can't even count four or five six half a dozen different you know over the years different interviews with different hunters that have come so it has attracted national you know at that at that level but but it's definitely more still a local more local type phenomena so one of the things i could imagine limits it a little bit is they have dinky little antlers so it's like it's like you gotta have but i'm not hacking that i don't really care really care. But I mean, it's like you got to have like a connoisseur's eye to appreciate.

You got to recognize, yeah, they're not an elk. I mean, if it happened to have some freakish giant antlers, it's just a fact that more people would be interested. It's sad to say, but you're right. Have you tried one? Have you eaten one yet? No. They are so good. That's what I heard.

They are much tastier. I heard people almost universally like them better than... Yeah, they do. I would say that's true. Steve had a word to describe whitetail meat where you called it kind of minerally. Yeah, I've heard that term before. It's a slight metallic or livery taste is what I associate it with. And you prefer these?

I prefer the Sika deer, yeah. I mean, I love whitetail too, but there's something that Sika backstrap is just... I've never talked to anybody that would prefer whitetail ever. So it is like widely... It is. It's pretty much universal. Yeah, you talk to anybody. It's good.

Not just the flavor and then the texture too. Like I say, most of the time, they're more tender than whitetail. Oh, man, it's killing me that I haven't got one. So yeah i don't i want to get back to the antlers because i want to be hacking on them but i mean you got some ones that are that are were described to me steve you've killed some that were described to me by not just you by being as like trophy class seeker deer yeah the three I showed you, just about anybody would get mounted as

a trophy. Yeah, and it's like they're like... I'm not dogging at them. It's like three times per antler. And then the main beam is 16 inches long maybe. For a huge one, 16. 16 is a really big one.

16 is a really big one. And you're saying that like more, like an 8-point is virtually unheard of. Very rare. A true 8-point is extremely rare. But it's an elkish kind of little antler. Yeah, they're really cool. Nice eye guards. And you do get some different configurations sometimes,

whether it's generated by injuries or either to the antler when it's growing or to the deer, their body when they're growing antlers. But that, you know, three-by-three configuration is your typical mature stag. And you'll get a lot of, I call them glorified spikes, these little six-pointers that are just little nubbins for eye guards and the top points, the splits,

we call them. I saw one of those today. Yeah. Yearlings are always spikes. I've never seen a branched antler yearling. And then at two and a half, they'll be what you just described, one of those little, you know, weak you might be able to call them a six point,

but maybe a four point or whatever. And then it takes two and a half or it takes three and a half and up to start getting into maturity and true six points. And then these guys don't have twin fawns either, right? No, just single calf yeah that i've ever seen um and that's in the literature always suggested only they only ever have a single calf i've had different reports over the years people said no she had twins or whatever but um i've only ever seen yeah single single calf now marshy i overheard you

earlier before we got started. You were saying you haven't got one with your bull, but you've passed up shots? I've passed up several spikes. Why? That's just me. I just want to let the little guys grow. Let me talk about the other week.

Was it last week or the week before? It was one of those really hot days, and I had a spike under, and I had a shot. But it was last week or the week before, it was one of those really hot days, and I had a spike under, and I had a shot. But it was also really hot with the rut. So I kept thinking another, a mature stag was going to possibly come in, or a hind. I'd rather take a hind or a mature stag. I was going to let the little guy go. That was just me at that time.

Now, if it had been late January, I think I probably would have just taken him. But because it was early in the season and the rut was on, that's what I chose to do. How did it come to pass that it was under your tree? Like what happened? Oh, I was hunting a friend that was actually under, I was actually hunting bait that time. You were? I was. I've hunted bait and I've not hunted bait.

And my preference is to not hunt bait. My properties that I lease, i'm not baiting this year i did last year to try it out it's a lot of i'm just not going to do it i don't just not my preference however trying to get my first sicka and my first bow kill i'm all if a friend's gonna ask me i'm also not gonna pass it up so have you been out have you been out hunting on the refuge too yes i have yeah yes yes you spread it out and tomorrow is going to pass it up. So have you been out hunting on the refuge too? Yes, I have. Yes, yes, I have. So you spread it out.

And tomorrow is going to be, I've never hunted muzzleloader before. Tomorrow is my first day muzzleloader hunting ever, and I'm going on the refuge. Yeah. So you're going to do the opening day of muzzleloader. I am. And it's the quota day.

I'm in the unit that everybody complains about has too many people on it because as a staff person, just treat me like someone else. In fact, worse you know so i'm going out there and gonna so you're gonna go out with your bow tonight i'm going out with my bow tonight onto my my private lease which is not baited and there's whitetail and sicka there um however there's there's some nice whitetails there too so i'm going there tonight hope you know see if i can finally make that happen and then tomorrow i'm going muzzleloader and do you already have do you already have your stand like like you already have your stand set up on the refuge no i'm using my

climbing stand so i went and scouted i picked a spot and since i'm hunting by myself tomorrow and i'm kind of i'm not very big you know height wise or anything i've got to be able to take care of that deer myself so i didn't go out into the marsh and like if i if i was hunting with buddies i didn't go to where i would normally go i had to be smart about it where can i go and take care of a deer myself if i get it yeah well i think tomorrow you're definitely gonna have to shoot a spike because if you shoot some giant like that as the refuge manager i know you're gonna catch a lot of flags i know i know i know so do you have to take a vacation day oh yeah you bet you can't just act like you're out there doing something

else with a muzzleloader no no nope i will be hunting um so you gotta put in for you gotta put in for vacation and i gotta put in for the quota and get selected too which you know yeah i'm in the unit that's still open so just to avoid just to avoid any feel of uh yeah of privilege that's right that's right and i was hunting a unit with my with my bow the very first day, and I'll be hunting back there again, too. Oh, so you've already hunted the refuge with your bow this year? Yes, yes. On the opening day.

You bounce around a lot. Yes. And you'll keep hunting until January? Yes. I did last year. Yeah. And that was down at my lease that I was, yeah, just whitetail down there. And then a friend would take me once in a while for sicker around here,

and so I would do that. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts

this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

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to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. If you could tolerate the cold, January is a great time to honor. Is it? There's not many people out.

Yeah, I enjoyed it. I ended up keep buying more and more stuff because I kept getting colder and colder. is a great time to hunt. Is it? Yeah. There's not many people out. No. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I had to, I ended up keep buying more and more stuff because I kept getting colder and colder. So the little inserts, the foot,

you got to turn them on for your boots. Yeah, yeah, I got those. Fewer mosquitoes. You'll still have mosquitoes in January. You will. You will.

If it works. Man. So I never heard of the thermosel until I came here and started hunting. Those are nice. And that's like the, you have to have that here. You have to have that. So I never heard of the thermosel until I came here and started hunting. Those are nice. And that's like the, you have to have that here.

You have to have that. So I'm trying. I'm putting my time in. I think it's going to happen for you. Yeah. So did you not start hunting until as a grown up? Yeah, until about 23, 24, something like that. That was the first time I actually hunted something.

Gotcha. Yeah. Started off with bird hunting and then moved to deer white tails yeah white tails because i'm from western pennsylvania so that's all white tails yeah and now you're working in on the local uh the seeker deer yeah yeah and i never thought i'd be able to bow hunt i just didn't think i could pull enough weight back and just you know it's a lot of pressure but I really love it you've been at it two years now this is my second season bow hunting oh so you're not no no it's not a problem you haven't gotten one yet no no I'm all right I don't know if I should start feeling sorry for you but it sounds like you're right on track no I've gun hunted second season of bow

hunting yes you'll kill something this year yeah and last year like I said I did pass up uh well at the least down in somerset county we those of us in it we have this we don't shoot anything less than an eight point so when i had some smaller bucks kind of under my stand i didn't take it because that was kind of the informal rules for seekers no for whitetail oh i'm sorry for whitetail like so yeah i heard you're not you'll be waiting a long time. High standard. White tails only. So that's us.

So myself, I'll take a hind or any sort of mature stag. But you ask me again a little bit later, and yeah, maybe I will take a spike. With my bow. I got one last question. Last night when you guys were talking, another thing I overheard, were you saying that, like, I'm holding a stag here that steve killed that's missing a time are you saying that someone found that time yeah so in another deer yep a fellow hunter that uh hunted the same property that i do shot a six point that was about the same caliber as that uh that seven point there and uh two you know very mature stags

and he got his mounted and he took his taxidermist as they were caping it out the uh taxidermist found a length of bone that matched up perfectly with what was missing off the tip of that one antler there where is it now uh he's got it. He didn't give it to you? No. Really? Did you ask him? No. No, it's kind of his trophy, so I didn't want to take it.

You like this guy? Yeah, he's a good guy. I don't know about that. What do you think about that? They are extremely aggressive. Well, he's a fan of your program, so when he hears this, he'll send it to me. I don't want to say anything bad. I don't want to say anything bad about the brother. Obviously, he's a fan of your program, so when he hears this, he'll send it to me. I don't want to say anything bad.

I don't want to say anything bad about the brother. Obviously, he's got impeccable taste. But that just, all right. Brian, have you gotten to witness them fighting?

Yeah. So, it's brutal. Really? Yeah, they're impressive. And like, you can't see the skull that we're holding, but this would all be fat.

So, they have over an inch of fat on that skull to help protect against those points and all. But they are just brutal. There's no question there's a lot that die every year just from injuries. Do you find sheds? You probably can't find the sheds because of the habitat type, right? Or do you know and then find them? Every once in a while. Yeah, you do. Yeah, you can find them? You probably can't find the sheds because of the habitat type, right? Or do you now and then find them? Every once in a while. Yeah, you do.

Yeah, you can find them. Yeah, you can find them. Not in the marsh, you're not going to find them. Yeah, it just seems like if they drop out in that frag stuff, you're not going to. I did find one in frag once, though. I was tracking a deer that I'd hit. Oh, really? Blood trailing them?

Yeah. I looked down, and here's this beautiful three-point antler sitting there they are little elk so they do have oh look at that or oh they got ivory ivory ship so they're being a being a little elk they are little vestigial tusks yep so yeah that's cool yeah brian is it roar or bugle, the sound they make? I've always just heard bugle. They bugle. Kiwis will talk about the roar.

Yeah. But I think it just kind of spill over from the red deer roar. And anything that ruts, they just call it roar. But here it's bugling. Yeah, I think we just equate it with elk. It's a bugling, yeah. It's a weird, like, I don't know if I could exactly explain it. It's, to me, it's more of like a whistle. Multi-pitch whistle, yeah, in stages.

Yeah. And if you hear from a distance, you only hear the whistle. But if you're closer, which we've gotten to be close of a couple times, you also hear that there's a little bit of grr at the beginning, and then just a little bit at the end.

And then there's another call. What'd you call it when you're real close? The Kiwis call it a hee-haw. It starts out with a real high-pitched kind of ee sound, and then it drags off into this aww sound. So it's like a ee-eah. Really nothing else sounds like it's kind of crazy yeah and what tripped us up is i think it was the first day that we were hunting with you

i think and we we thought we had heard him it was the wind was kind of blowing so it's tough to hear anything at all but both steve and i come get together and we're like man we i think we heard a bugle but it was like it must have been a guy because it was like three in a row like who would be doing that right we go to steve he's like oh yeah every time they bugle it's you know and i've heard now twos threes and even fours it seems like yeah um do you have that recording yeah yeah this is one i videoed uh last season on blackwater and uh called it in with a cow call came across the marsh about 200 yards and wandered well didn't wandered it came pretty directly to me and uh got within 20 yards didn't find this challenger that had had called at him and uh so he let out the cow well

i actually had bugled earlier and then uh he came out of the woods about 200 250 yards away and i watched him and he's clearly riled up he made about four or five wallows on the back side of this this marsh they roll around in the mud and get their antlers all dug into the marsh and pee on themselves and just and the wallows to break off from the sound real quick it's uh it's small probably what maybe two square feet yeah probably something like that and it they look to me every time i've seen one it's it's not like it was they continue to use the same one right they look like they could just like randomly stop anywhere and be like oh making a new wallow right yeah they will reuse them also but most of

the ones i think you see are just one-offs that's what it seems like yeah which is why i don't bother hunting them you know i mean it's nice to have a bunch around because you know there's a stag there but i don't set up with my tree stand over a wallow because it's just you can wait forever for him to show up right once in a while you'll find one that looks like it's probably sort of communal sort of wallow and it'll be 10 feet wide and just shoot up and whatnot but most of them are just sort of frustration being taken out i think but now marcia you're telling me you set your stand up over oh and i just look for wallows yeah look for a sign okay yeah a scrape you called it were you talking about a wallow when you told me well uh i said look for sign like trails and wallows and scrapes like for

whitetail and things like that but not necessarily that you would set up on there just try and determine where are they moving through oh but i'm stuck but yeah but you told me in a i thought it was in the email you said something about a scrape oh that was that was great was that for whitetails that was for white that was my uh my hunt last last week yeah yeah i didn't know that i i was looking for signs um at my lease which has whitetails and sicka and the buck that had come in had a scrape i didn't realize it but when i watched him actually work the scrape then i realized it yeah yeah it happened to be near a pond and there was a lot of sign going in and out like um it was really it's been really dry so there was like a lot of dried mud on the vegetation so i was hoping you know okay the sick are going to come from the woods

to the pond in the evening because it's hot and it's my best chance i didn't know that there was also a white tail that was making a pretty nice scrape there right until i saw excellent stand placement yeah yeah yeah exactly all right let's hear that if it's not real close to you just hear the high pitch whistle part but most of the commercially available calls that are out there don't really capture that and you know i don't think that it's necessary for the deer to respond to it um but for my own sort of personal confidence in the call i'm blowing i just like to to be as authentic as possible you know right and uh so the one call i've found that actually captures that part is the nordic sika and that uh it's manufactured in sweden

and uh it's a pretty neat call uh it's a one trick pony uh it really only does the the uh the bugle and you could probably do the hee-haw kind of sound with it too if you really practiced at it. So I always carry standard elk calls too so I can make the myriad of sounds. But it's pretty exciting when they respond to it. Yeah, I'm hoping. I'm going to blow mine 100 times tonight

to see if I can get a response. Brian, have you guys done ever any research on the vocalizations? No, we have not. But if you read the literature, what I've read is that Sika are the most vocal of the server day. So if you spend a lot of time out there, there are, I mean, there's six, seven different vocalizations you can pick up. Not just the stags, but the hinds with the calves and just, yeah. And if you had to describe the hind-calf call? Like a mew, they almost.

Elk-like mew? Yeah, yeah, very similar. Yeah, very similar. And the other one too, I'm not sure if you've probably heard yet, but they do this really low guttural growl, and it almost sounds like they're hocking a loogie or something, and there's no pitch to it. It's just this.

When you hear that, you know, it's usually from what I've seen, it's challenges to another stag. No, he's quite close. Yeah, you don't hear that unless they're within probably 50, 75 yards, unless it's a real still day and just perfect. Which is a mile in Phragmites. 50, 75 yards. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

But the thing about us being new here and in that marsh, you're hearing so many other noises. I mean, the herons squawking. You could easily confuse a weird heron squawk for something that the Sika deer is making. Yeah, the great blues. Yeah. And then who else is out there making just some really odd?

I mean, we've heard barred owls. Owls, screech owls, owls, you know. Screech owls. They go all over the place with their noises. There's clapper rails. They don't really sound like Sika, but, you know, if you're new to it and you've never heard it before, I remember the first year I hunted them, I heard that they made this, you know, bugle sound, but I had no idea what it sounded like. So everything I heard out there when I was sitting in a tree stand,

was, is that one? Is that one? No? Is that one? And flickers will make a very similar sound to their alarm calls and their muse sometimes. I was just going to say, my first couple years of Alcontin, I put at least a dozen stalks on the Western flicker

before my mind learned to dial in that mute. Then I remember the first time a stag bugled close to me and the hair on my neck stood up. I was like, ah, that's what it sounds like. Yeah. If we still had Nutria, you'd be listening to, sitting out there and listening to Nutria all the time. That was another Marsh sound. We'll have to cover that when we do the Nutria podcast.

Yeah. Cool. Anything else to add, Brian, about the vocalization? I don't think so. I would just say that you know, you gotta give it a fair shot. Don't expect something your first time or

your second or maybe even your 10th time but sooner or later they'll respond to it and look every direction they'll circle behind you they'll sneak in on you sometimes they'll run you over like a bulldozer it's uh it can be pretty exciting imagine you know calling in a 70 pound turkey with antlers right yeah we're three hunts in now meaning we've hunted two mornings one evening and twice now i've heard the footsteps and i believe it to be probably less than 60 yards if i can hear that and i've yet to see one yeah well either i've seen them in the distance but i've yet to see the two that make that in range yeah yeah but i think it's

because i'm a bad tree stand hunter because i i haven't like remembered all my old skills about how you had to stand there like a statue i think i'm out there stretching out all right cool all right yanni you got any final uh things you want to add i like that the wire job you did on this for hanging i was noticing that dude that is nice. That is fancy. Did you invent that? Probably can't really invent that much when it comes to wires and skulls. Well, it was just something I came up with.

I was too cheap to buy anything to do it. And I just like a simple, you know, taxidermy. I'm going to take a picture of this wiring job and we're going to put it up. We're going to put it up in the show notes. You're going to... This picture is being taken right now. And if you want to see a sweet way to wire up a Euro mount, go to our... Oh, it turned out real nice.

Go to our show notes. It gives you that fly-against-the-wall hang, too, as opposed to a screw, which will pop them out a little bit. I just like to pick them up and hold them look at them remember the hunt can't do that with a big mount on the wall you know no i like souls a lot better something tactile about being able to touch it and it makes moving easier yes it does moving to be like daunting if you had taxidermy everywhere uh-huh like where am i gonna put my full draft yep you can haul that around with your helicopter

the delmarva squirrels oh yeah oh i've seen i've seen what say it it's the delmarva fox squirrel it's a fox squirrel and yanni says it lumbers through the forest it lumbers down i saw my i saw my second one today the first one i saw just coming down a tree and these um what kind of pine is it another damn non-native right loblaws are not native yeah geez that's what is that what abernathy's trying to get rid of that's what abernathy's whole big gripe is is uh you know they cut down all the long leaf um for pitch and like masting all kinds of things and then lob lolly came up in its place but it doesn't have it doesn't support it doesn't support that understory of that grassland ecosystem underneath it.

Yeah. It's led to all kinds of trouble with the quail and whatnot. Yeah. This is all planted in loblolly plantations. We need to have Abernathy on to talk about loblollies and longleafs. Hopefully, we'll be seeing them this spring. Anyhow. Yeah.

Well, the bark flakes. When you're climbing it, there's just bark coming off everywhere. Well, this squirrel, I mean, it was like an avalanche of bark as this dude's climbing down the tree. You know, I'm like, holy cow. I've never seen that. But the one I saw today, I got to watch him under the stand on the ground. You know how most squirrels like this sort of hop? Well, they're always hopping, know like two three times this dude

was walking like a cat yeah like he's got a gate to him you know like a bear yeah yeah so my question is is what's it what are the chances that we're gonna get to come here and hunt them someday well they had esa protection until recently they were recently downlisted yeah they're they're not a listed species and how come that didn't make the news? It did. It just depended on what news you were watching. It's not the national news. But you know, only 2% of species that get ESA listing have ever made it off, get delisted

because of recovery. They get delisted because it was a mistake and there was a taxonomical error. Or they get delisted because there's a population people weren't aware of. But I think it's like a taxonomical error or they get delisted because there's a population people weren't aware of. But I think it's like 1.7% of things that get on come off because of recovery. Like American alligator got it.

Yeah, so usually it's like a big story, right? Like the bald eagle, now wolves in some areas, grizzly bears in some areas. You should like hear about a delisting. Yeah. But this was a quiet delisting. Yeah, Delmarva was excited about it. Yeah.

And then, I don't think there's any plans to hunt them. No, there's not. There's too much habitat loss. It's too small of a subspecies population. But it's a fox squirrel. Just a big fox squirrel yes

not just you could come here and just hunt gray squirrels and fox squirrels and have the uh enjoyment of getting to see a delmarva i guess they seem like pretty small gray squirrels from what i've been seeing oh really i mean not the big giant delmarva fox where i'm saying your your general joe blow gray squirrel is not like a... Small squirrel, huh? I haven't been looking at them. Not that I wouldn't hunt them happily, but they seem to run a little small, which would be part of Bergman's rule, right?

Bergman's principle. You're at the southern... The closer you get to the equator, the smaller they get. Yeah, you're at the southern. You're getting toward your more southerly portion of their range, so they're going to tend toward a the smaller they get. You're at the southern, you're getting toward your more southerly portion of their range. So they're going to tend toward

a more diminutive form. And I would say squirrel hunting is probably not as culturally big around this area as it is in some other parts of the country. You don't hear about people. People aren't as sophisticated down here. I don't know. It's shifted.

Deer is king down here. People don't want squirrel hunters messing up their deer word. Yeah. Unfortunately, I've heard that's the thing is the squirrel hunters become, it's such a shame. The squirrel hunters become such a second class citizen. I have had guys come to me and say that I've had two things happen. I've had friends come and say that they feel bad hunting squirrels during deer season.

And I've had squirrel hunters come to me and say this happened to Murphy, Kevin Murphy, who a guy has gotten down out of his tree stand on public land in the Manistee National Forest in my home state of Michigan. A guy got down out of his tree stand to accost my friend for having the audacity to be out hunting squirrels during our tree deer season.

Oh, wow. I would have punched that guy in the face. That's a little much. We do. I would have felt as though I was going to do that. We have to. We have a really long deer season in Maryland from September to the end of January. So someone's going to be hunting deer when you're out in the woods.

Well, it makes it tough. I mean, for small game hunters, squirrel hunters and all, because everything, a lot of it is leased up for deer hunting and all. And so that's one of the reasons why we don't have squirrel hunters or small game hunters is because it's all taken up by deer, you know. And there's been different times where we've been asked to extend deer season even longer into February. And it's like, you know, that just takes more even more time away from you know these folks that want to that want to do you know these other these other hunts you know there's there's a challenge yeah there's validity to that because you know we used to hunt squirrels

because squirrel season well it archery deer opened october one squirrel opened september 15th yeah so you'd pour the coals to the squirrels for two weeks and then you'd pick them back up again when deer season ended so you'd be hunting them you know after christmas you'd hit them hard until the end of season yeah and that's like kind of like when you hunted squirrels yeah so but here you know you have the first you know you have the first week of september basically because because deer season comes into friday after labor day so you have the first week of september in general and then, like I said, you might have a couple weeks in February. And otherwise, if you're a squirrel hunter or a small game hunter,

you've got to share the woods with deer hunters. It's not always real fun. So if you're a deer hunter down here, you're hunting deer five months out of the year. You start the Friday after Labor Day and go to January 31st. Yeah. Man. I'm going to move down here. And then if you want to hunt some of the urban managed hunts,

some of those do go into February. So you could be hunting in February. It's usually deer season. Yeah. And then you can wait for spring and turkey hunt. Yeah. I got my first turkey this year. Did you?

That was like the greatest thing ever. That was a ton of fun. Telling you what, man. That was fun. That's even more exciting than squirrel hunting. Well, yeah, for sure. So did you have any final thoughts, Marsha? Myself?

Yeah. No, just say, come on over to Blackwater, check it out. Come hunt, come visit. You're going to get all kinds of the hunters mad at you for saying that. Oh, I know. But that's okay. Yeah, they might bump into you out in the woods. We're a public resource.

We're there. Yeah. We got to get more hunters engaged. And we've got to get people who haven't hunted before get excited about it. And the only way we're going to do that is if we're welcoming to new hunters. So can people personally call you up and ask you what's up? People do. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I encourage that. We have public meetings. I talk to folks. We get ideas and comments. Does it mean I can do everything that people suggest? No. No, I mean, if some guy's like, hey, man, I'm going to come down and check out this Seek a Deer thing. There's resources for him or her to figure it out.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. No, I think it's really important that we get more people to see the benefits of hunting and just getting outdoors in general. I noticed too you guys have... But we've got to be welcoming to do it.

I noticed too that you guys have made the hunt unit maps available on Google Earth and just download so you can look at it on your smartphone. Through Avenza. google earth and download so you can look at it on your smartphone through avenza that's probably the biggest uh impedance to new seeker hunters is it's an intimidating landscape oh yeah you get out there and it's uh especially blackwater and that's like the nastiest of the nasty stuff on fishing bay and blackwater and that's where most new seeker hunters go to. And you can get lost out there easy. And it turns a lot of people off. A lot of people come down, try it once, and it's like, oh, no more of that for me.

To give you a sense, I was watching a video where a guy was hunting Sika deer out of his boat. Just to give you an example to give you a sense of the landscape. And he was talking about the importance of raising, when he leaves his boat, of raising a flagpole. He must not be a big GPS guy. Of raising a flagpole with a blaze orange flag on it. You can lose your boat. So he can locate his boat. Yep.

But don't let that scare you off. I mean, it's a great it's a great air you said earlier i mean it's a fish and wildlife mecca yeah you know you can hunt multiple species you can go fishing i mean you can pack so much into a week's trip or a weekend trip or whatever i mean it's really an awesome yeah we haven't even touched on blue crabs and snakeheads. Exactly. Yeah, that's a whole nother podcast. So, Brian, you got any concluding thoughts you want to add?

Things you didn't get a chance to? No, just there are great species. There are unique species. And it's the only place in the country or probably maybe in the world that you can hunt these guys. And they're probably one of the purer strains around of cica deer a lot of cica deer have been hybridized and also it's really a unique opportunity um so yeah have um this is my concluder it's a question have i know you guys have some cwd in maryland yes have cwd positive white tails interf. Here's what I'm getting at.

Any idea about whether CWD is going to make the jump? Can? So, no, I mean, in Maryland, from a geography standpoint, they're nowhere close, and we got the whole Chesapeake Bay separating. So CWD is in Western Maryland. I see. So I wouldn't expect necessarily our CKD to be exposed to cwd from that standpoint um it's very plausible that that that cica deer you know are susceptible to cwd no one stuck them together in a pen yet to

see what happened to see if they transmits no well they've done it with monkeys yeah oh yeah they've done a lot of you know they've done a lot of testing like that. Just recently? Yeah. Yeah, the research out of Canada shows that, yeah, macaques, that they were able to infect macaques with CWD. Kind of like implanting it. Yeah. Well, they didn't implant it, but it was really at aggressive higher loads than what you would expect,

like you or I sitting down and eating venison tonight for dinner so but that you know that's still you know you have to look at that and and take that into consideration and the CDC that is you know they they looked at it and they actually changed their wording for you know for for hunters that are hunting in CWD areas and they're a little bit more um strongly they've more strongly worded it now that you should really consider getting your deer tested if you're, if you're hunting in a CWD area. That's what I've done the last couple of years, man, when I've hunted CWD areas. It's

just, it's, it's, the problem is it's hard because there's not a lot of areas to get that testing done. Um, so we need to make some improvements there, um for hunters you know to be able to do that um but back to your original question there you know our sick of deer are little elk um they're in the server you know service family so i'm sure they're probably susceptible to cwd i wouldn't see why they why they wouldn't yeah you know elk are deer are white tail deer mule deer elk moose you know fowler deer are about the only ones that come to mind that i don't think you know elk are deer are whitetail deer mule deer elk moose you know fowler deer are about the only ones that come to mind that i don't think you know they've been able to to get cwd into fowler deer really yeah so but um so that's an interesting question you asked though steve because it made me think of something that i have a question for you brian recently you

know this is the time of year where ehHD and blue tongue starts hitting the air. And people are finding a lot of dead white tails this time of year. And increasingly, I'm seeing guys on the Internet forums referring to, oh, it's either CWD or EHD. And they're talking about Eastern Shore populations. And people are starting to sling the term around like it's commonplace and whatnot. And I wonder if the department's doing any outreach to sort of combat that perception. Yeah, we, you know, hemorrhagic disease, blue tongue. Oh, yeah.

I'm sure you know that, right? Well, we're in the midst of a pretty good outbreak right here in Dorchester and Caroline and Talbot. Yeah, but it's kind of like, I mean, I don't mean to, but that's not as scary. No, no, no, it's not. You're right. Because there's not a human concern. Yeah, there's like a thing that happens. But a lot of our hunters, I don't think.

Use them interchangeably. Yeah, use them interchangeably and don't realize that they're two separate diseases. So, yeah, I mean, we've done press releases about HD. Yeah, but that'd be like saying to your buddy, like, oh, no, he's got the flu or cancer. Yeah. It's just like they're two different things. It is. It's completely different.

You know, I mean mean completely different magnitude um a lot of hunters probably feel hd is more of a threat than cwd because screws up the hunt yeah screws up the hunt in a hurry yeah uh you know i mean we probably you know we we've got there's a couple areas over here where we've we've probably had good, you know, hit on the deer population. Now, they'll bounce back in a year or two. That's the thing, man. Five years, you'll be back to having big bucks. Not even five years.

No, I'm saying you'll be back to having big bucks around everywhere. Yeah, so, but, yeah, so it's a concern from that standpoint. But from a human standpoint, CWD is definitely, you know, the one we have to watch and be more concerned about. So, stuff keeps me up at night. What's a big hit for ehd like what percentage a really big hit would be 50 of the population oh that's a big hit and that can i thought a big hit was 70 or something like that well you know what if you're in a if you're in a naive state like a deer population that's never seen it before you probably could get you know over 50 but here in the east where we've had you know we've had hd since the 70s i think or now it's probably might

even been before that they found it in new jersey in 55 we identified it or identified it yeah in 55 in new jersey described it scientifically it might have always it could have been there before that right but um not too much longer there because we were reintroducing deer in the 30s and 40s so it wouldn't have been too too much before that well anyways long story short 50 is a big hit around here yeah 50 would be a big hit and that's a term naive state would be a state where you naive the first time a population a population that hasn't had it before. Yeah. Like Ontario this year. That's a good word. Because I've been to some naive states. Yeah. But not for HD.

But like Ontario had their first HD case this year. Connecticut, they're in the news right now. They have HD right now. So it's... There's light at the end of the tunnel. It's slowly moving. Have we gone over HD before? We've never done an episode about it.

Is it possible just to give us like a two to five minute breakdown? Yeah, HD or EHD, epizootic hemorrhagic. Can you include how people call it blue tongue? And blue tongue. Well, they're two separate. They're two different things. Oh, they are? Yeah, they're two different strains.

Yeah, there's actually. I thought they were synonyms. Yeah, no, no. They're actually different. There's different strains of HD hemorrhagic disease and some of them are ehd and some of them are blue tongue oh and then within within those there's different different strains so like here in maryland we're in an outbreak right now so we'll try to get our hands on samples we send them to georgia to the southeast cooperative Disease Study. They do the testing for us.

And we have EHD2 and EHD6. We're working on our deer right now. And it's a virus, right? It's a virus. It's spread by noceums, gnats, midges, whatever you want to call them, coquilides. And nothing you can do about it. It's no threat to humans. But when it gets into a deer population, I mean, you know, it can kill a significant number of the animals.

And like we were just talking about, if it's a population that's been exposed to HD over the years, they're more resistant. So you won't see as significant of an impact. But as this disease or virus moves north and gets into these populations that have never been exposed, it can hit them pretty hard, you know, 50% and up mortality. And that's why you see it in the news. Michigan, a couple years ago, it was big news in Michigan for when it got there. Where my brother Matt lives in eastern Montana, they got swept. I can't remember. It was a number of years ago now.

Yeah, yeah. So it's starting to, you know, it's really starting to radiate out um you know here in the east we haven't seen any detrimental long-term issue you know issues with it i mean what's the spacing on epidemics about it seems like every five to seven years we get a big outbreak now we'll have deaths every year you know it'll spring up every year, you know, it'll spring up every year. Um, but it seems like every five, six, seven years, we get a pretty big out. Does it correlate with a big population? Well, that would be part of it, you know, because there's that certain, there's that certain proportion of the population that is resistant

and that proportion that's not resistant, as it builds up, it gets up to a certain point and then you'll see a bigger outbreak. So that plays into it. There's also theories that weather plays into it. It seems like possibly if it's a drought, if it's a mild winter and a drought summer or a dry summer, the thought is that you have reduced areas with water.

Okay. And also probably increased breeding maybe areas for these gnats. Might congregate deer more around the water that's available. So you might have a worse year for HD. There are some theories out there that maybe we're starting to see it further north based on maybe some changes in wind patterns. Maybe some of these gnats

are actually physically being transported to new areas, you know, where they haven't been before. So there's a lot we still don't know. And there's a lot of research going on. But it's been around, like I said, I mean, it was identified in new jersey in 55 i think 1955 i think so it's nothing to you know really get worked up about but but it happened you know it happens every year so what are the symptoms and how does it kill a deer so i want to ask like what's death look like so it is pretty vicious

i mean it's very fast acting um if it's a deer that that's not resistant to it um it literally breaks down cells and breaks down blood vessels um and the deer hemorrhages to death um or you know or you know causes fluid on the lungs and basically drowns um causes a real high fever so a lot of times we'll get a you know we'll we'll get a call, hey, there's three deer floating in my pond. Or, you know, somebody may be fishing on an anticoke and found two or three. Yeah, it drives them to water. So, but it acts real, it's a, you know, it's a hemorrhagic disease. So, I mean, it acts on them real quick.

There is a certain proportion that survives, you know, if they get it. And an easy way to tell if it's a deer that that that had hd and survived is you know if you're hunting then you kill a deer if the hooves are all sloughing off um because it arrests hoof growth i guess and then if they survive it then when the hooves start growing again um it sloughs off so their their hooves will look pretty pretty rough okay yeah so you know the water thing explains something that happened to me once years ago when the lower yellowstone had an outbreak i was at the taxidermist there in mile city and his shop was just full of bucks that he was doing

euro mounts on giants yeah and i was like what the hell are these bucks doing here and he's like man these are all things farmers are pulling out of the river is that right yeah and no one knew the bucks like this like i didn't know i mean you know i spent a lot of time knocking around there like a whole class of bucks he just didn't know existed over there down in those willow you know down like the willow choke bottoms and stuff but yeah he said he said every farmer in town's bringing them all these bucks. Is that right? Buckheads dragging them out of the river, these giants, you know.

Yeah. A lot of times, you know, we'll hear, oh, it hits bucks harder. But I don't, I think if you looked into the data, you're just, you just see that buck first. You know, and I think that's what your mind perceives. But I think it's an equal opportunity virus. think probably you know it's probably hitting any of them but this this area as well gets uh this part of the river gets bad ice dams it had an ice dam so bad in the 40s that they had to take a like a full-on bomber they took an air force bomber and drop ordinance to break up an ice dam that was going to flood miles city yeah they then

levied some parts of the town off to protect it from overflow from ice dams but a couple years ago a big ice dam formed up and flooded all the lowlands and eventually the ice dam breaks up and we were down in there uh fishing catfish and wandering around looking for turkeys and whatnot in the spring and there's fish hundreds of yards away from the river. Is that right? Just like laying out in fields and out in like cottonwood groves, just fish everywhere. My brother says, yeah, they get up in there when the ice dam forms,

and they're swimming all over hell. And then that thing, when it busts, it drains out so fast, it just leaves the fish. So it'd be like catfish and carp and suckers scattered. That's crazy. Yeah, all over in the woods everywhere. That's crazy. Yeah, it looks like it was like rain and fish.

So death in Miles City. The last thing was blue tongue. Do we get to why it's called blue? Yeah, well, it causes a blood flow issue and oxygen deprivation. So a lot of times the tongue will turn blue. But only the one form causes, or do they both cause blue tongue? both far as i know they both can cause yeah the blue tongue

issue a lot you'll see sores in the mouth um that's another sign that it was a deer that had hd is it in life or death that it gets a blue tongue um i think it's right it happens so fast i think it's right there at that you you know, the deer could still be alive. So, but it, like I said, it, it acts pretty quick on them. Then 24,

probably hours, 48 hours, they go from probably alive to dead. It's that fast? Do you guys, so do you guys even bother going in and euthanizing sick deer? Or does it just happen so quick? It happens so quick that very,

most of the times when we get a report, it's a deer that's already dead, or the landowner says, yeah, I was watching it. It was sick, and now it's dead. So it happens pretty quick. They're not clinical for a long time. CWD, chronic wasting disease, they can carry that. Yeah, very slow acting.

But HD, it hits them pretty quick. Man, it sounds like if you are going to catch one, I'll acting, but HD, it hits them pretty quick. So, yeah. Man, it sounds like if you are going to catch one, I'll go with the HD. Yeah. Sick of deer, just a little note on that. As far as we know, sick of deer do not get HD. Really? Or a blue tongue now.

Back when I was doing my graduate work, I had a bunch of deer radio collared not too far from here, and we had an HD outbreak. It killed, I forget what percentage, but it killed quite a few of my radio collared whitetails and never touched one of my sick of deer that had collars. Really? Not saying it's impossible, but just based on what we've seen, we've never had a report of one. We've never been able to test one. And like I said, none of my radio collared animals ever got it. Wow, man.

Yeah. Maybe someday my kid will be like, what's a whitetail? I don't think you have to worry about that. I just know about sickles. Let's hope not. All right, guys. Well, thanks so much, man, for coming on. Thank you.

It's exciting. I think people will be real interested in this. And people from here will be real mad when we talk about this at such length. Yep. Thank you very much. Yeah. I really appreciate it. Thank you. you hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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