The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 096: Permissions!

Episode Date: December 25, 2017

Seattle, WA- Steven Rinella talks with Mark Kenyon, Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: Hubris, pride and Greek tragedy; how to gain hunting access permissions; hunting in Texas; novice deer hunter help; rattlin'; the last man to be legally hanged in Wyoming; cynical acts of flattery; how to keep your access permissions; the saga of Holyfield continued; where appliances go to die; the focus factor; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Permissions.

First, Callahan. Yes, sir. Do a, act like I all of a sudden died. Okay, like I'm just, like I all of a sudden fall over dead. And here we are. And you realize you need to pick up the show. Okay. Like you're in the driver's seat.

And you know that the first thing that needs to happen is you need to do a thing where you insult the listener and tell them that they need to go and make sure they're subscribed to the podcast, not just downloading individual episodes. And then maybe insult them a little more and then tell them how they need to also give it a good rating. I'm just like, ugh, dead. oh my god ryan steve's down

all right listen up folks as you know we've recently lost steve but let's be honest he probably pissed off half of you anyway so what i'm gonna need you to do is go on to iTunes, subscribe, hit the furthest right star so we can keep this ball rolling. That's good. Mark, you try it. That was very good. I don't think I can speak to that at all. Mark, you can't do any better than that. No, and I'm a podcaster myself, and I feel like I got showed up.

Yeah, that was good. That makes me feel good. Before I did it where I was going to die and Yanni had to take over and just did not do like he just, I think because it wasn't convincing. Like I didn't really seem dead enough to him. But I thought he had a very authentic little chime in there when he said, oh my gosh, Steve's down. That was good contribution.

Well, that was like the dish to Ryan that really set him up. It did. Yeah. It made him feel like we were there. I was kind of thinking about the halibut rods and stuff. Oh, absolutely. Sweet. Mark Canyon, got a quick question for you

from a dude that wrote in named Danny. All right. Not my brother. Not my brother Danny. I've been saving this one for you because this is like right up in your, this is in your little whitetail deer world. Ready?

I'm ready. Then we'll get into Permissions. I can't believe you never listened to that song. I know. I promised myself I was like, I'm going to listen to that before I go out there again. Yeah, well, I'm singing Permissions to the tune of Traditions. Right, Traditions.

Fiddler on the Roof. You know what we were just talking about over lunch is, Yanni, we were talking about hubris and Greek tragedy. Yes. Yeah, hubris is uh excessive pride and in greek tragedy that's it's usually like what gets you in trouble is excessive pride that was an animated cartoon too like hercules yeah something like that so but you know i think about that like i've ever learned that

that in that hubris is like the trouble of greek tragedy but then i think of the one at like oedipus oedipus doesn't know that he's like it's the story begins where he's adopted but doesn't know he's adopted. And he goes to like a seer, like basically a fortune teller. And the fortune teller says like, oh, I see your future bright and clear. You're going to murder your dad and have sex with your ma. But he doesn't know he's adopted.

So he splits town. Purposely to avoid that, right? To avoid his fate i remember he runs away and stumbles into a new town where he kills a feller and has sex with a lady and guess who they were yep his mom pa but i just don't see i gotta go like re-look at that and find out where that fits in with the hubris. Because that just seems like bad luck.

Yeah, I didn't know that the overconfidence bit was every Greek tragedy. I remember Sharon Whitehill, when I was in college, I took a class on Greek tragedy with Professor Sharon Whitehill, whose husband was a beekeeper, and I did a little day laboring for him moving the bees around. So, Mark, here's your question. Is this related to no not at all great tragedies no danny says i was just thinking about our conversation at lunch and i keep running around in my head like the only greek tragedy i remember doesn't seem to have a hubris element but that's where in that same story about oedipus the oedipal complex right

that you want to have you want to make love to your ma. In that same story is where he comes to that city and the monster tells a riddle. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs during the day, and three legs in the evening? And if you don't get it, like it kills you. But he gets it it's man that you crawl in the morning of your life and then you walk on two legs and then in the end you use a cane i like it and

that's how he gets into the town to to you know do the unmentionable, the unspeakable. All right. This guy says, Hey, I've been bow hunting for whitetails over the last month on public land in Texas. You following? Follow. In the Sam Houston National Forest. You know where Sam Houston was killed, Mark? Oh, man. No. Come on.

The Elmo? That was my best guess. You know uh there's like a school of thought that davy crockett didn't actually that davy crockett surrendered there's a theory based on some like uh personal accounts that came out of the mexican army that davy crockett didn't fall at the alamo heroically that he surrendered and was executed I read some stuff I think it was the lines of the west was a book I read by the Robert Morgan I think oh yeah and I think they talked a little bit about how some of the mythology around Crockett isn't quite everything that it was uh chalked up to be yeah it's a real shame that people think of Davy Crockett

and Daniel Boone not the same kind of guy. So the reason I bring that up, he's hunting the Sam Houston National Forest, public lands for whitetails. And he says, I've been sitting in a tree stand under a few oak trees where I see plenty of sign but no actual animals. The last day I went out, I started to wander around a bit, figuring if they won't come to me, I'll go to them. You picturing it so far?

I'm picturing it. Brush country, Texas, somewhere like that. I jumped a few does, but never got a good look for a shot. On my way back to the truck, I took the dirt road as the understory of the forest can be thick. That's when I see the most deer, and it's them crossing the road, noticing me, and then bounding right back into the thick stuff,

never to be seen again. Any suggestions on how I can get in front of these animals? I want to continue to hunt with a bow right through gun season, which starts November 4th. Well, we're a little late. Well, I know, but I've been saving it to talk to you about it. Yeah. My feeling is he should not be,

he needs to stay up in a tree. So it's, yeah, does he walk around or does he stay in a tree? If he's just hunting with a bow, yeah. It's pretty tough in a situation like that to stock up on one in flat country in a thick area like that. I mean, it's one.

Very difficult. Yeah, it's one thing if you're up in, you know, some badlands type habitat or like i don't know eastern montana where there's some rolling grassy hills and you can get up on one top look over the edge and make a sneak on one but it's really hard to do and even like the midwest in the flat areas let alone as thick and nasty as i imagine a lot of texas could be at least from the things i've seen but there's definitely guys that do it, but I feel like it's inefficient and you're doing it more just because you want to go through the exercise

of still hunting and possibly cross some paths with that deer at 10. You're doing it as a thing, like a goal you set out for yourself just to do that. Nothing wrong with that. No, not at all. I think that's not what he's getting at. No, he's just trying to kill a deer what i might say though is did he say he's been hunting a month already month straight let me check let me check um well let's just assume he said he's been hunting for the last month okay he's hunting over the last month he sees him on the road and so it sounds like maybe he's um relatively novice we'll just make that assumption

if that's the case i feel like a lot of people newer hunters newer whitetail hunters they find a spot that looks good like an oak tree and they're like all right this is what i've heard is good this is where i should be and they hunt it today and then tomorrow and then the next day and they hunt it over and over and over and over And I think a lot of newcomers end up trying that and then not seeing many deer. Maybe the first day they saw five does or something like, all right, this is it, great. And the next day they say three.

And a week later they say two. And so my first recommendation, knowing very little about the situation, I would say, okay, let's assume maybe he's been hunting this one oak tree many, many, many times. I would say first tip right off's assume maybe he's been hunting this one oak tree many, many, many times. I would say first tip right off the bat is switch it up. Hunt totally different places than where you have been going.

Because he got you pegged. Simply because of that. You got to make sure that you are not educating the deer. He has most likely. Try new areas simply because you can catch them off guard. That's a good starting point. If you can find other oak trees away from where he's been, that might be another place to start.

Or water, other things that might draw on those deer. But we don't know a whole lot about his situation. No, we'd have to go down there and check it out. Want to? I would like to. Bedding area too. I think he should maybe walk around and look for that. I feel like in Texas it's so...

I've never hunted in Texas, so I don't know. But from guys I've talked to downxas it's so i've never hunted in texas so i don't know but from guys i've talked to down there it's just very very different than a lot of the very defined habitat types like i encounter where i hunt in the midwest or even in some places in the the rocky mountain west where i've whitetail hunted where you can easily determine okay this is a bedding area this is a feeding area this is likely where they move through in some of these kind of brushy texas areas and i know there's very diverse habitat types in texas so this might not be what he's dealing with at all um but in a lot of these it's just a brushy thorny dry jungle that's you know a

homogenous habitat type that's really tough to figure out where those focus points are yeah which is why guys hunting that country on private land are all they're all running bait uh you know another gives you something to it gives you some point to focus on yeah another thing that a lot of guys do in texas more so than more so than where i hunt at least is rattling now it might be different in public land if it's really heavily hunted down there i don't know what it's like there. But if it's not too bad, rattling seems to work at a disproportionately high rate in Texas,

like off the charts compared to anywhere else. Our buddy in South Carolina, Robert Abernathy, they have fantastic luck rattling up bucks in the swamps in South Carolina. Callahan may or may not have rattled up a mule deer this year that's true I think indicators would be that yes like there's too many odd like the deer which shouldn't have done what he did so I feel like the the rattling is what ultimately led to his demise but you definitely don't hear about rattling mule deer you don't people that don't know what we're talking about uh rattling rattling is when you

take a pair of antlers or something that sounds like antlers and make the simulate the noise of two bucks sparring or fighting and other bucks will just and they their they're interested in you know herd dynamics and who's doing what and who's big man around town they'll come running up out of curiosity right mark more than an itch to join the fight i think it depends on the deer sometimes you'll see a lot of the younger bucks that come running in it's curiosity but then you do get those at least on the whitetail side of things you get these big mature bucks if you have one in the area, that will come in looking to kick some ass. Really?

Like he comes in like in, in, and not just trying to look from way off. Yeah, like fired up to the tree. It's crazy how sometimes these deer can pinpoint and literally be right underneath your tree looking around. Where's he at? I'm ready. And that's why I feel like that. The deer that I saw that morning, they were moving,

hard to make it in the picture, but they're right to left down this ridge. I'm on a spur ridge down low where I can see this ridge. And rattled for probably 20 minutes, you know, short sequences and moved 10 yards straight up my spur ridge. And here's this set of legs on my ridge pointing downward straight to me. And I can see through the brush that, you know, here's this old uh heavy horned deer of some unknown size just staring my direction i was like oh maybe i shouldn't have moved and you wound up blouching him though i did he actually so he ultimately did take off and follow the direction of the deer that I'd seen earlier in the day. And I moved to get a better vantage point of that area.

And Doug, the funny part about this to me anyway, is they're Giannis' packerack rack Ratlin. Yeah. Oh, when I told him this story, the first thing he said was, I wonder if that's my packer rack. It is. In fact,

Giannis is when you guys are arguing about this. I thought you were arguing about a pack raft. No, pack rack. Oh, I thought you had his pack raft. No,

sorry. Which is an $800 contraptionption which made me wonder why he was being so like like oh that's cool yeah laissez-faire about oh pack rat yeah uh so doug yannis's pack man my whole morning is making so much more sense now man and i mean had my rifle set up on my bag, cracked that thing like one, two, three, and looked up, and he had marched seven yards out of the timber for no reason. I mean, he was free and easy. So, and boom, yeah. Yeah, so.

And we've had some kind of similar scenarios where we don't know definitively with the muleys, but all signs point to yes. They definitely fight all the time. Why would it not be interesting to them? Yeah. But the thing is, you could be like, oh, I don't know. I'm going to go see if rattling whitetails works. If you don't know what you're doing.

And you just went up and sat in a tree. You can sit up in a tree 30 times clacking antlers together and nothing's going to show up. And you'd be like, it doesn't work. So it might just be that people don't do it with those because it hasn't been done. Now, Yanni, have you ever, I don't want to spend too much time talking about this,

but have you ever heard of someone someone clacking elk antlers together? Like rattling for elk? Because people thrash brush for elk. Sure. I've heard it. I've heard people doing it by accident because they found a set of sheds and then a bull comes screaming by. So they obviously rattled them in.

But I've never heard of someone packing elk antlers you just beat the heavy load you don't need it just pack the little pack the pack rack yeah a pack rack looks like a um but a pack rack's not gonna sound like two six-point bulls going at it you've ever heard that in the woods man it's not as like it's not as different cadence and deep yeah and then the hoof sounds that you hear with it and just the thrashing i mean i don't even know of one man alone you'd be lathered in a sweat if you were actually trying to like replicate that sound like it might just be impossible to make it i would like to let everybody know that yannis can't expect a nice little Christmas present.

With a little juice in there because I've had the pack rack for so long. You know, hopefully before Christmas. Yeah, because we're going to Mexico in January for Coos Deer, and I'd like to have it with me there. Because you are not getting yours back. I'm keeping those. You guys can pick this up later. koozie and i'd like to have it with me there because you are not getting yours back yeah i'm keeping you guys pick this up later uh um you know real quick i do not wonder if maybe the story of oedipus isn't greek tragedy well i just don't think you the assumption is hubris

is everything wouldn't like the i guess it doesn't maybe the the that story doesn't count as greek tragedy maybe it's just mythology and not greek tragedy but the point is um i think that the biggest i think the biggest hurdle people have when they want to the biggest hurdle that people who are wanting to get into hunting or who've been introduced to hunting and want to continue to do it the biggest hurdle they have is a spot to hunt. Absolutely. People are like, oh, kids these days, they just want to play video games.

Yeah, a lot of them do. But I think that the people that I have met who've been introduced to hunting, later when you go like, hey man, what's up? You been getting out? Their thing is usually like usually like no i still have a place to go right people that don't live in places where you have a ton of access to public land it's a pain in the ass to get permissions it's the number one threat to new hunter recruitment yeah and and fishermen and the world's changed um the advent of pay to play on private land has really changed things where a lot of people used to just let guys come hunt now want to charge money to come hunt. A dear, dear friend of mine recently went

to that model. So for some of the year, I'll point out, he'll be mad that I brought that up. For some of the year, he went to that model. That has restricted use. I think that there's a thing where we live in, I don't know if we live in a more litiginous society, but there's at least the perception that we do. And so there's a reluctance on the part of landowners to allow people to come on their land because they feel like they're going to get sued when the guy twists his ankle. That's a thing that has changed. What else has changed, Mark? I mean, if you look at the bare bones bone it's just a supply and demand issue right to your point it's harder and harder to find places to hunt and now landowners to what you just said

there they're finding that um there is value to their land that they may not be using otherwise so we're we're seeing some people that in the past just let guys go hunt whatever and all of a sudden they find out oh bob down the street got five grand a year to let so-and-so hunt their place so so you do have that pay-to-play model increasing and then another thing going on is that i think i think it's fair to say that the level of intensity maybe or fervor that the hunt that some segment of the hunting population has now has increased pretty substantially over the last decade or two. That most serious, if we're talking whitetails,

those most serious whitetail guys. So they're investing in things related to hunting. A huge part of that is land ownership. So I saw that since 1991, 2011, private land ownership for hunting has gone up 75%. So more and more people want to own land so that then for the purpose of just for the purpose of hunting so then that leaves all the other people that don't own land well then now they've lost even more potential places where they could go

um urban sprawl uh changing um thoughts on hunting so areas where the population used to be fine with guys hunting behind their house maybe these people just don't want anyone out there with a gun or they're not okay with hunting. So that kind of thing is happening in some urban areas. So there's a lot of different pressures, I think, that are just making it tougher for the average guy or gal to get a spot to go, especially if they're not out west. Midwest and the east, I think it's something 90% in private land ownership. So there's just not a whole lot of public land or places to go these days. And I realize it might even be like a matter of perception too.

That it just seems like it's different now when it's actually not. And it might just be that people who, I would kind of bet this, that the people who it's important to and really work at it and are smart about it still can go out and have the same level of success in getting permissions of places to hunt on private land they can still have the same success that everyone had before but it might just be that when you're getting into it and you don't realize how much work it is it seems like more daunting or less realistic than it is well i think it's i think it's the work aspect i think it's harder work to be able to get that access in those places i think it can still be done the people that take it seriously

and are willing to put in the work absolutely they can have lots of places but for the average person who's either just getting started or who's kind of lukewarm on it who wants to hunt but they don't really want to devote a whole lot of their time in a given year to finding places that's the segment i think that suffers a lot well in working for permissions the good friend of mine he is i mean he's changing irrigation pipe he's you know neighbor calls he's like hey we got to move cattle we you know we're building new fence and he's you know almost 60 and retired but it's his full-time job like maintaining his bird hunting permissions and his trespassing access and things like that but he's not necessarily paying for it he's putting in

sweat equity right i was trying to get i wanted to have jimmy doran um of belltown pizza down here and he said he can't because he's traveling right now and i was saying yeah i was like oh it's a bummer jimmy doran can't come but he's not really gonna have that much to add anyways because he hunts a buddy's place who hangs out at his bar and he hunts a guy's place who he harvests wheat for. And Yanni's like, yeah, exactly. Meaning that's permissions. I feel it's sort of like in large measure, it comes down to working your connections.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. More than cold rolling. I want to lay out when I was a kid, the permissions that we had. We hunted on, we had a lot of public land around us, but we also hunted on some private farms. And we hunted on private farms

of farmers that went to church with my parents. So there's a very strong community connection where you see these people every week and they're in your social circle but i had trapping i maintained trapping permissions on about 20 to 25 farms in muskegon county nuago countygo County, Manistee County. What's the county Big Rapids is in? I don't know.

Mecosta County. That's what it is. Sounds right. And permissions all over the place. And I would make, I would go on a plat book. This is pre like on X and whatnot. I'd go on a plat map and just find every place

I wanted to have a permission on and I'd write it down in a yellow legal pad and my old man would just tirelessly work the phones calling calling calling until he could find a personal connection to those people through a mutual friend or somehow would develop an in so you felt your odds increased so greatly if you could find that connection i know so and so so my old man would like oh i know a guy up there an insurance salesman up in mccosta and he'd call him and be like hey you know my son's looking at these places he's

trying to get on right he would work it work it and he would score he had a very high success rate on scoring permissions i remember at the same time i went and ran an ad in a newspaper mecosta county because i was just trapping beaver and a lot of people hate beavers because beavers plug up your creeks and dams and ditches and whatnot and so some people love them some people hate them i ran an an ad in the Macasa newspaper saying, free beaver control, free problem beaver removal. Never got a hit off that ad. But my old man would tear it up by trying to build personal connections.

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and yeah you think about when we were hunting sandhill cranes on the panhandle how long would it take that dude to get a permission on land anyone within a hundred miles depended i don't think any of them were too, too fast, but it didn't take more than half a day. He would work it. He'd work it. And he wasn't from there. This is a grad student.

This is like a grad student who moved to do a PhD program in the Texas Panhandle. He was from the Midwest or something. Nasty panassy. Yeah. Yeah, he had his pitch dialed. You was from the Midwest or something. Nasty Panassy. Yeah. Yeah, he had his pitch dialed. He had his in sort of just to get the conversation rolling, and then he explained everything.

Yeah, and he wasn't working family, but he just sort of had some in, had good relationships with some farmers, was able to build on that and be like, oh, I hunt on so-and-so's place. That's always a good thing. You call him up, he'll give you the word. He had to work extra hard when we were there

because not only did he have to get permission, but when we're there filming, you got to also get the landowner to sign the location release so that we can film there. Another thing that he thought was very effective is what school is he at? Texas A&M, right? What school is in Lubbock, Texas? Not Texas Tech?

Will you look it up? Oedipus is Greek mythology, by the way. I looked that up for you. It's Greek mythology, not Greek trash. Does it count? Was it a play? Who was the famous playwright back then?

Pericles? Anyhow, nasty panassy. Mike was doing a PhD program at the local university. And the local university is an ag school. Like a land-grant ag school. Much like the ag school that you live nearby, Mark. Where I went. Michigan State University.

Yes, sir. And the people in the community respect the school because they have a strong ag program. So farmers know it. Relatives went there. And Mike knew this, knows this. And would come and

say, hey, I'm from the... Texas Tech. I'm from Texas Tech. I'm from Texas Tech. I got all these connections. I feel like we're giving away Mike's secrets right now. Did he tell us his own secrets? Well, the flip side of that is growing up in Missoula,

the surrounding areas, if somebody was like, hey, where are you from? When you were knocking on doors, I never said Missoula. No. They're not going to say yeah. No. It'd be like if you were from Madison and you went out and started banging on doors out in rural Wisconsin

thinking it's going to get you somewhere that you're from Madison. If you're doing that, though, I feel like you have to have some throwback to the air. So when I'm trying to get permission out in Iowa or something, but I'm from Michigan, you encounter that same worry. Okay, please. So as soon as you knock on that door, they're on that door they're gonna say oh where are you from and you know if i say i'm from michigan most likely you get one of two reactions you get one where they get cold and they don't want the out-of-towners there or they get the curious like you came all the way from michigan to hunt deer here really

like oh yeah and then you get a conversation going there but what i would try to do for the people who you could sense you know weren't too into the out-of-towners, I would always say, well, so-and-so and so-and-so are my friends. They hunt in the area. They live here. They hunt over on Bob and Jerry's down there, so on and so forth. If you have any kind of throwback to touch into the community, I feel like that helps. And then another one of my little things that's led to a lot of the permission I've gotten

is that even when they're like, no, we already have someone hunting or no, we don't want you to hunt, whatever it might be, I always try to end that conversation. I keep that conversation going as long as I possibly can because you never know. I've had people change their mind after talking to you for a while. If you just end up talking about something random and then 15 minutes later after they see you're a half-decent person that ends up all of a sudden, well, you know, Larry doesn't hunt here that often. I guess you could come. But if that doesn't happen, I'll always end the conversation, you know, is there anyone else you happen to know that I should, you know, maybe would be worth talking to in the area? And lots of times they'll hem and haw, and then they'll say, well, go talk to so-and-so down there. And then when you talk to so-and-so, you can say, hey, Bob from X Street

told me to come down and stop by. And then you're in. And then you can just keep pointing back to the last one. Bob was telling me he would never in a million years allow me access on his land. But he thought that I should run down

and talk to you. You don't phrase it that way. My old man had certain things that I still stand by today. When it just comes to banging on doors, so cold calling, is pick your time well. And the time to do it,

I feel like we're not having this conversation with the proper amount of structure. Trying to find a way to impose structure on it. Never mind. I do want to get around to talking about the small game in so we want to talk about the small game in let's focus for a minute on the do's and don'ts of cold rolling

cold rolling being is not a dude from your mom and dad's church you're just like just completely a dude coming in with no kind of, I'm friends with Doug sorts of things. Right? My old man, and these are things I learned from him that I know to be true, was very particular about the time that you do this.

And you don't do it during a farmer's busiest seasons, which tend to not be during hunting season. You don't do it when they're sitting down to dinner. He felt the window between midday, he thought was appropriate. And he thought that the window between dinner and like winding down getting ready for bed was a good time to approach someone about it and he felt that you do not do it during hunting season because it's like they've been getting inundated with dudes banging on their door. Picture this like you're in an area and you're trying to hunt geese. There's some big grain fields and there's geese plowing into the grain fields. Every guy out there is seeing this.

And he's going up to the house nearby and banging on the door to see if he can do it. The thing is that you want to approach this guy not when he's getting hit up all the time, but also not when it's so far away that it seems like he doesn't want to commit to something that far out. So like this window of time when you're kind of the first guy to show up, but you're talking about something in the foreseeable future that you'd like to be doing was he felt that you'd like to be doing. He felt that was the time to be making these calls. And then as far as the in thing, you're not going to go up to a guy.

Probably not. Going to go up and just be like, hey, man, can I come hunt big giant white tail bucks on your place? That's not going to be the end. You don't think so? I think a better end is, gee mister, come February,

would it be possible that I might come out and hunt squirrels on your place? Because then he's not doing something that's going to be pissing off the cousin who comes out every year to hunt deer. And you wiggle your way in. I had a permission one time from a guy where there was no way he had, oh, there's no way, you know, not going to happen on deer and turkeys.

I eventually got squirrel permission on his place. And I would go hunt squirrels in the winter. And then I would text message him pictures of the squirrels that I cooked. Being like, thanks so much. Look at what we made with our squirrels. Which just tickled him endlessly. Eventually he's like,

you know what, if you want to come out and hunt deer and turkeys, go ahead. Yeah. We do the same thing, but with shed hunting. Oh. Because that gets you in the door. We'll do it in February, March is a great time to do this, I think. Because no one's banged on his door for four months.

No one's banging on his door. And you can say the same kind of thing. Hey, you know, same thing. I'm in Iowa. We're in the area. We've been looking for shed antlers. We're curious. Maybe that might be okay.

Behind, we noticed we've got a couple hundred acres or something. You drove from Michigan just to come out here and look for antlers. We're curious. Maybe that might be okay. Behind, we noticed we've got a couple hundred acres or something. You drove from Michigan just to come out here and look for antlers? Deer lose their antlers? Yeah. And then you get to tell them a little interesting story about biology. And then, yeah, lots of times. Because that seems harmless. It seems harmless.

And a lot of farmers view shed antlers as a nuisance because they're popping tractor tires. Oh. So you can say, hey, you ever had a tractor tire popped? And then maybe you'll get lucky and say, well, actually, that did happen. Yeah, they're like, I'm not so much interested in finding shed antlers as I am in preventing tire pops. I've got a deal for you.

I can help you today. Yep. So if you get shed hunting permission permission then you've got a great reason to come back you know so i really appreciate it establish rapport exactly whether it's small game hunting or shed hunting or whatever it might be it's an easy in they feel more comfortable establish rapport and then yeah from there you can see where it goes um plus the nice thing about doing any one of those things is it allows you to walk that property gives an excuse to better learn that property to decide if it really is you know worth

your time to try to deer hunt there whatever it might be you know if you're driving out from Michigan to Iowa most places are worth hunting but you want to make sure that if you're going to spend a ton of time and money that you have a spot that seems half decent so so mark out of your sort of portfolio places you hunt what um how many permissions do you have that aren't like aren't like leases just like flat out some dude out of a act of kindness lets you hunt this place um i probably have six or seven different spots that are just actually more than that probably eight or nine i guess that are across scattered states that i have permission to hunt that it wasn't through a connection it was just from knocking on doors or random randomly meeting someone.

I'm always thinking about permission. So if I meet someone while I'm out in Montana or Iowa or Ohio or somewhere and I happen to think they might own land, I will try to navigate the conversation there in any way possible. That makes you seem so conniving. I don't know. I don't really got away with it. This farm you speak of.

But, yeah, if you hear about something like that, I'm not going to avoid that conversation. I'm getting in there. Oh, this is the first thing that comes to mind. Yeah. And it's amazing how many times, not most of the time, but some of the time, I guess, you'll come to find out that maybe they don't have somebody hunting. Or maybe they do. But again, you never know who they

might know who they might know so i mean it's one of those things that you just have to always be thinking about it always be working for it because it's so easy to lose permission first off um so that's a big part of this conversation i think too is just as important as getting it is you really need to learn how to keep it um but there's a lot of things that happen that are out of your control so yeah and you lose it for various reasons. You can lose it because you screw up, and then you deserve to lose it. Like not leaving gates the way you found them, driving on wet fields.

Because there could be things that if you've grown up around ag land and kind of grow up around working properties there's things you like know you don't do that someone who's not familiar with that world might do without realizing it's a real problem like you might notice that there's tire tracks skirting around the edge of an alfalfa field and be like oh i'm gonna drive, not really realizing that the only time you would ever do that is if it was just dry, dry, dry. And then you go out and leave a big couple ruts in the guy's field, you're going to lose your permission, likely. Or he gives you permission. Here's a story that happened to me one time.

Me and my brother had turkey hunting permission on a place. And he had given me and my brother permission. And one day we had our other brother and a buddy of ours to go hunting. Now, we were not going to hunt without securing extra permissions for two more people we go to the guy's house he's not there so our first stop was to go down his driveway but he's not there we then set off to go look for him and we come across him and this guy never even gave us a chance to explain ourselves. Was out of his truck beating on our hood because the one thing he said was, I'm giving two of you permission.

Never even got a chance, honestly, never got a chance to explain to him that we were coming out to find him to inquire about two other individuals. In his mind, it was the conversation was over when he said two. So that was a permission I lost out of being a kind of a dumbass, kind of assuming that there was some flexibility it's a bummer yeah and to be just like screamed at by someone yeah it's difficult for sure i had a friend who got older you get the harder it gets i had a friend who had permission who got permission you know by way of just knocking on doors. And he went to go, this was a handful of years ago, and I'm trying to remember his story. But as I remember it, he had gotten permission and then came back there, I don't know, a week later or something

with his wife to do some scouting. And this guy lived down this little two-track road way back in the middle of nowhere. So he decided to go down the road, park his car, and then his wife was going to stay in the car while he went off and did some scouting or whatever he was doing um he hadn't told the landowner this and so he goes off does his walking but his wife is sitting in this car pulled off the side of the road and this guy's farming this guy comes up from behind the landowner

ends up seeing this car it wasn't the same vehicle that this friend had used before so he sees a random car with a lady sitting in the front seat and he was so mad about somebody trespassing he went running up with a shotgun screaming at her through the window and uh just because of a you know lack of communication that spot didn't work out no nope that didn't work out too well for any of them she got a real scare my number one rule is no gray area there are no assumptions i'm like this is exactly the hey just so you know i have this crappy old white chevy with a gray topper yeah that's me and it's and then if friends are it's also like the timing conversation and figuring out like what would be kind of valuable to these people.

Like, hey, like, you know, gates, you knock it all out up front. And then if somebody's like, hey, I know you got permission on that place. Can I come too? I'm always like, you know, I'll talk to him this winter and we'll see about next year. Because I already got permission this year, and I'm not going to push my luck this year. It's such a tenuous thing, I think. Yeah, because then you always got like every farmer's got a cousin or something.

Oh, yeah. So you lose them too, not because you did something bad, but because he's like, ah, you know, my cousin. He wants to come out with his cousins. I can't say no to them so this year's just gonna be too crowded out here that's a big way that people lose so you kind of have to take advantage while you have it oh yeah but yeah it is this you got to walk that like this line that is not truly even there uh because you never know when those properties are going to go away forever.

And typically when they're gone, they're gone. But at the same time, you can't push your luck either. We used to do a lot of gift giving and then offers of work. Like I remember the main farm we hunted as kids, we hunted two main farms as kids. I remember the farmer broke his arm. And for weeks, my old man had me and my brothers, we were just little kids,

for weeks we were out there shoveling manure while the farmer's arm was broken. Because my old man would use us. That's something Davy Crockett's dad did. People don't realize this. Davy Crockett, his father hired him out as an indentured servant to satisfy his own debts.

Wow. I think from the time he turned nine, Davy Crockett's father would give his labor to his debtors. So my old man would do a similar thing. For hunt permissions, we would go out and shovel manure for Harold Zeldinrust. That's such a West Michigan name. Yeah. Yeah.

The other family, these are great families. My mom's still friends with these families, but the Zeldinrusts and the Zerlots. So I grew up thinking everybody had a Z. Last name started with a Z. No, but great. Yeah. So we did that and went out and shoveled nur. I used to throw hay bales for Tom Wiersma, a farmer.

I would throw hay bales for him in the summertime. Small price to pay because you only throw hay bales for like a day or two. Yeah. But there's so few people that are willing to do that. It was understanding because we would hunt his place for small game hunted his place one time for geese and then i would trap yeah he had a handful of properties and he would call you to throw bales and you went through bales yeah and you better drop what you're doing and go yeah it wasn't like a spoken thing it wasn't like oh i'll give you permission on the you know on the condition that you satisfy x demands it was just sort of uh there was like this sort of

reciprocity it was like this built-in understanding of i'm doing something for you you will do something for me i once saw a uh have you guys seen the um poison dispensers for gopher holes or prairie dog holes that you can mount on the front of a four-wheeler yeah i know what you're talking about right so you drive over the top of the hole hit the button it drops a little a certain amount of uh poison pellets into the gopher hole uh buddy of mine and i showed up it was hunting season but it and it was cold right the the farmer rancher was like nah i don't have time for this and my buddy's like uh you mind if we just we were asking for archery permission to hunt mule deer on his place. And he's like, what if we just shoot gophers?

And it was like this, oh, with bows and arrows, you're going to shoot gophers. And this is not an exaggeration at all. And this is not like an archery trick shot at all. But a gopher is standing up on the edge of this guy's yard. And the guy's like, can you hit that one? And this is like a 15-yard shot with a compound bow, right? It's not crazy. My buddy Kyler shoots the thing, and the guy's like,

all right, stay on the roads. That's awesome. That I think is a thing that people, yeah, because like when people are going to go do a farmer or a property owner favors, they tend to want to do the enjoyable favors. Yeah. So you get a lot of guys who,

because farmers do need to do a lot of guys who because farmers do need to do a lot of in some areas need to do a lot of prairie dog work like controlling prairie dog colonies or ground squirrel colonies which destroy can destroy cropland or destroy pasture land so people are like oh it doesn't sound half bad and if that's something this guy really needs to get done and actually pays to have done i'll volunteer for that but it's less people who are like hey man do you need help stringing fence fixing fence moving pipe whatever yeah i think that that stuff goes a long way and there's a lot of guys that aren't going to take you up on it because like in the time it would teach you what to do and show you all the ins and outs, you could have had it done.

But they're impressed that you offered. Yes. And to be clear, I think very much this particular rancher was just, like, kind of had to eat his own words. Yeah. Because he's like, there's no way in hell you're going to hit that prairie dog. And he's like, oh, yeah, just go for it type of thing. And then he's less worried about having deer running around with arrows coming out of weird parts of them.

Yeah, yeah. What else, Mark? Well, to this point of we're talking keeping permission, we're kind of fast-forwarding a little bit from getting it. No, I think, yeah, we can stay on it. I want to stay on keeping. So not only, though, does doing... Did we get into gift giving yet you mentioned it gift which gift giving yeah i've done christmas cards i've done veggies in the garden i do venison all that kind

of stuff but another thing that seems simple uh but some people really value it especially if it's someone who's older maybe a little more lonely. There's a gentleman I hunt on his property that I know this guy just wants a friend. Like he just wants someone to talk to. You bring him a friend? Myself. Oh. So I mean, whatever.

I got a friend in the truck. Have at him. So whenever I'm there, though, you make time to just sit in there you just plan on 45 minutes that we're going to talk and we're going to talk about world war ii and we're going to talk about the the dust bowl and we're going to talk about the book you wrote and we're going to talk about how we used to love to go dancing and we'll talk about the same stories every time and i love it and i appreciate the guy so much and i say yes to coffee everything and we talk politics and i

disagree with 99% of what he says but i nod my head i'm like you're absolutely right yeah and um and it's great i mean it's it's it's i know that he appreciates that so much and i appreciate you know the opportunity to hunt um i think there's people out there like that and it is appreciation too i know a lot of ranchers where it's like even if you do everything right but you're not you don't show them that you truly appreciate the work that they've done how they've maintained their place kind of the sweat and tears that they've put into it they're just gonna be like yeah i feel it'll take an advantage of so yeah it is the the true interest in the in what's going on out there like oh boy i see you did this and that's

everything's looking so good this year and that that's a big deal my brother makes venison summer sausages and then puts together gift bags for people that he for people who he has hunting permission and makes venison summer sausages and puts other things in the gift bag and brings that around where especially you could be like hey i shot this deer on your place then i made this here's this summer sausage people eat that up eat it up metaphorically and literally they may turn around and give it away but it's a big deal that you drove the 90 miles or whatever to deliver the stuff we used to hunt on a guy's place you know the last man to be legally hanged in wyoming was tom horn there's a movie about tom horn um he was a stock detective and he was kind of like

caught up and he had old-fashioned ways of dealing with cattle rustlers that were falling out of favor in his time like it was just getting the he was into the early 1900s and you couldn't just ride out and start shooting people who were stealing cattle anymore and it wound up getting him on the wrong end of a rope and he was hanged and shared in wyoming the last man to be legally hanged tom horn so we had to use the hunter guy's land named tom horn so i brought tom horn a book about Tom Horn. That's pretty good. Which he appreciated. Now, we would also hunt rabbits on this place a lot.

And one day I brought him a carrot cake that was decorated with rabbits. And I felt like it really, like he didn't. Didn't get that? He didn't get it. And we're like standing there like, ha, ha, look at this. Right? And I remember being like, just looking at like, what in the world these boys bring me a cake for? What are boys doing decorating a cake? It's got rabbits on there, you know.

Now that we hunt rabbits out here. So there's rabbits in the cake? I remember that fell a little flat. But he really liked the tom horn book and so there was like a thought like trying to be like a thoughtful gift to say hey thank you so much for allowing us access to your property and people are pragmatic and i think people especially in the agricultural world are extremely pragmatic relative to other segments of the population and i think that to be like

you know how you let us come out and hunt your place well here's all the stuff we cooked with the things we got on your place like we put it to use and now we're here's something for you that makes them feel like because when you like love a piece of land and work a piece of land you'd like to see the land provide the fruits of your labor yeah and so to have some joe schmo you know from town come out and harvest something off the the place and you see that he's using it and sharing it with you it makes them feel like how they like good about the property's ability to provide i think that's a good thing. And you see it too. For people to remember is, you know, these farmers and ranchers, they're not folks that really have downtime. Like they can work every minute, every day in perpetuity.

And so you're already starting out your foot in a little bit of a hole. So they're like, oh oh boys have some free time huh that's got to be nice yeah yeah so like the last thing that he would ever be doing would be driving around trying to find a place to recreate oh yeah or you guys choose to sleep outside we've gotten that so many times. Like, your day's off. You want to go out and be cold again. We used to have, where I grew up, there was a lot of, not Amish, but they were like, they were Mennonites.

They had the same or they kept the same rigid Sabbath. And their deal, like they had like last thing, like Yoder and various things like that. And their deal was that you do not hunt. I think they kept a Saturday Sabbath, no Saturday hunting. And in fact, when I would trap land, Mennonite land, and I had a lot of permissions with these guys. Cause once I knew some of the people in that community, you could get permissions anywhere

in the community. You pulled your traps like at by dusk on Friday. Yeah. Kind of, they were not even on the land working. You pulled them and then re put them back out again. And it was just like a thing. Like I can't even begin to understand where you're coming from,

but it's your place. Okay. Yes. If that's the rule seemingly not it definitely doesn't seem arbitrary but it's just like a different thing you were invited into but no i mean goes that's a unilateral right it's uh universal rather the you may be on one place that the guy's like oh yeah drive wherever don't assume the next property is going to be the same way you're like what do you mean i i your buddy down the road lets me drive through the field that's not going to go over well yeah

guys that are touchy about driving we would also offer like we'll just park at the house and never even touch the car just walk from the house if you're worried about gates and driving and all that we won't even drive and some people are like that sounds good great yeah i've always thought that's important just to make sure you know where do you want it parked where should i drive like that always seems to be one of those sticking points it's good to have laid out ahead of time. Like you said earlier, get as many things on the table up front as possible. No question marks if you can.

Mark Kenyon, you're an organized guy. We handled, we touched on getting kicked off once you've had it. We touched on maintaining maintaining. off once you've had it we touched on maintaining a little bit about getting should we talk about getting or yeah let's talk about getting definitely

need to talk a little more about getting dude can i share my process oh please because i'm pretty now i already mentioned like i'm always thinking about permission so if if random opportunities pop up i always try to take it. So once I was driving around in Montana looking for places to hunt and ran across a guy that had a flat tire. So I stopped to help him out as I'm helping with his tires. Before I get out and start fixing this, you don't have no land, do you? Know anybody that does?

No. Because I just might have a jack. And a bow but any type of happenstance like that you know sometimes good things come of that but when you don't have a situation like that when i'm simply i know what happened there i was i was joking but what did happen there yeah so i got out to permission yeah on like 1500 acres because i helped him out and gave him a drive back home and we were just chit-chatting he's like well what are you doing out here I was like oh I'm just trying to find a place to deer hunt and I knew he's like well you know we have all this land over here and gosh it was real nice you to help us out and everything I was like I'm happy to do it and then he brought me over for a

beer we're having a beer and then we keep talking he's like so you really like to hunt huh and I was telling more and more about it and by the end of you know like an hour drinking beer and helping out i had access so there you go yeah that's good old american elbow grease access getting right there man yeah yeah but it doesn't always come that warms my heart yeah it doesn't come falling out of the sky like that all the time so i kind of have like a process that i go through when it comes to to the to your point about being organized this is where that comes out i guess for me because i think the biggest thing when it comes to getting hunting permission at least around where i'm at which is you know south central michigan um where there's lots and lots and lots

and lots of hunters like 750 000 deer hunters in the state now somewhere around there um and then the vast majority of that vast majority of that's crammed in the bottom third in the state now somewhere around there um and then the vast majority of that vast majority of that's crammed in the bottom third of the state so there's tons of pressure that's where the people are yeah yeah so everyone's trying to get permission to hunt so it's a numbers game and whether that's you know down by me or almost anywhere it comes down to being a numbers game like you just need to go into it in my opinion knowing that you're going to get a lot of no's so you need to ask a lot of people to get that one yes. So what I do is I say.

What's the ratio? I would say out of 15 to 20 asks, I'll get one to two yeses. So we'll say one to 10. Man. A lot of rejection. A lot of rejection. So I plan for that. And I hate cold knocking on doors.

Like I'm nervous. I'm uncomfortable about it. I don't like to have uncomfortable conversations with people I don't know at all. So I know that about myself. So I force myself into a process to get past that. So I go and I look at plat maps or whatever digital online GIS maps are out there or whatever. Look at aerial maps and pick out. I always try to get a list of at least 10 to 20 properties

that I would like to get permission on. I make a list, and I find the landowner information, so I know the names and the addresses for every one of those 10 to 15 places, we'll say. So, for example, I did this in Iowa, and a lot of people think that to hunt in Iowa, at least in the whitetail world, that's like the mecca of the whitetail world. Everyone thinks that's where the biggest deer are. That's the best deer hunting in the country.

So people assume you need to pay an outfitter $5,000 or pay $10,000 a year for a lease or something to go and hunt there. I wanted to hunt there for free. So I did this. I put together a list between looking at all these different things. And then I also had a couple of friends in the area who said area who said hey you know this property looks like one you should look at i've seen a big buck in that field so i put together the list i have 15 properties and then all in the same area general region within like uh 15 and maybe 10 miles um so i don't like knocking on doors and cold knocking so because of that what i do by that

you mean just walking up like a door-to-door salesman banging on the door and saying hey my name's mark can i go hunt yeah that's that's an uncomfortable thing but sometimes that's what you have to do so what i make myself do is i'm gonna do that and i'm gonna do all of it in one day i'm gonna knock on 15 doors in one day i I'm going to have a list. I don't have a plan. And that first door you go up to is, oh, I don't want to do this. I should just go back to Michigan. But you get through that door knocking it. It goes okay. You didn't get yelled at. You didn't get shot. It was okay. The next one feels a little bit better. The next one's even better. And then by four, five, six, seven, it's a snowball effect. And by 12, 13, 14, 15, it's a piece of cake.

Nothing to it. So I can get through so many door knocking opportunities. So that's your, but that is still your initial point of contact. Well, so. Is like bang, bang, bang on the door. This is if I've exercised all their options. So this is if, you know, I've went through my whole personal network and there's nothing. This is if I've tried to strike up conversation in a hardware store or at the bar or whatever.

I mean, any way you can get a connection is the best. This is if I have zero, if I have nothing else to work with. If I'm completely in the dark, from ground zero you get the list you try if you know anything i mean i'm trying to think of a good example um but any little bit of tidbit of information about the people or the area local sports teams yes anything like that like i'll slap a hawkeye sticker on my truck when i pull up not really but uh high school teams yeah that'd be good it's a big deal in montana um but but yeah i you can do it i got permission on over a thousand of eight over a thousand acres in iowa for zero dollars um out of state dude and then and it came came down to things that i said earlier where, so I think you got to present yourself, you know, as a non-dangerous,

somewhat respectable person. You don't want to go up there in like a suit and tie and seem like all hoity-toity, but I don't think you also want to show up like you've been shoveling manure for the last 17 days and you're someone who looks a little sketchy. I think there's like a middle ground. So present yourself in a respectable way, have a decent thing planned about how you want to start a conversation. And then I always try to let that conversation go anywhere it wants for as long as it wants. Even if they come out and say, no, you can't hunt here. I'll keep chatting them up for as long as they want to chat because I don't want to be disrespectful and bother them. If they want to be out of the conversation, I'll be out of your hair. Sorry to bother you. But many times people just want to be disrespectful and bother them. Like if they want to be out of the conversation, you know, I'll be out of your hair.

Sorry to bother you. But many times people just want to chat sometimes, especially, I feel like some of these, you know, a slightly older gentleman, maybe it's on a farm in Iowa or whatever it might be, rural Ohio,

where to my point earlier, sometimes they just want to chat. And many times those lead to different opportunities. And then you leverage that last one. So you say, oh, Bob sent me and then Bill sent me and then as you keep going, those things, they kind of all, they all work together. I think another important thing,

and I want to stay with your process, but I just want to interject on a couple of points. When doing cold door knocking, go by yourself. Unless you can go with your wife or better, a four-year-old, the best thing that could happen is you go with your kid. I cannot wait for my future son. You're going to tear it up. That's one of the things I'm most excited about this.

You'll be tearing permissions a new one when you can go up with kids. You're probably doing it with the baby Bjorn just strapped right to your chest. Planning on it. You're going to walk right up. Because, one, you're just playing on like a basic innate human thing where you sort of like appreciate seeing like a father like interacting with children in a way where you're trying to like introduce them to the outdoors

and be outside with them. And the kids come up to them and look them in the eye and shake their hands. It just resonates with people. Don't go up there with three dudes. Because you can wind up making someone uneasy with a bunch of people. It's like, go up by yourself. Or if you can, go up with your spouse or go up with your children. 100% agree.

Don't people off there's also like four guys standing outside the door yeah and i think the way you dress thing is important too because if you're like if you're in a suit people be wondering like what you either door-to-door proselytizing or sellings it's just it's just weird and off yeah but clean cut put together look them in the eye state your purpose i i've you know seen where people come up and they like beat around the bush so much it sort of creates a tension where the person's like why are you at my door yeah so make your intentions known fairly quickly there's like this one school of thought

that you're supposed to go up and start complimenting them on the place. But unless you're able to pull that off in a very authentic way, I think it can be off-putting. Yeah. Geez, beautiful property. Couldn't help but notice your beautiful property here.

Like people are like, come on, bro. It's got to be a $650,000 harvester. Yeah, come on. Like polite,'s got to be a $650,000 harvester. Yeah, come on. Polite, but unless you can really pull it off, don't come up and do just sort of cynical acts of flattery as a way to establish. If I get a knock on the door and I come up, and some guy's like, beautiful house you have here,

I'm like, oh my God, where's this going? going oh boy this is going somewhere i don't want to go to the point of making your intentions known quickly relatively quickly i also think clearly because sometimes if you just generically say hey can i get permission to hunt here that's like a lot to consider if you make it very clear maybe you i'm just looking for somewhere to bow hunt for one week this year if you're only going to be in that area for a week or whatever it might be specify what weapon specify how long or how often or anything like that because many times that will a make them feel more comfortable or b your specific request might fit into their you know setup when a general request wouldn't that's another permission i lost i one time got a permission to trap muskrats on a large marsh and it was like a difficult

marsh to get access to and i got access to the marsh through a guy who won't be in a theater teacher and he very politely after a while said like i didn't realize that it was something that that needs to be done every day. So in the future, I didn't lose it, kind of lost. He was like, in the future,

let's work on picking out like a handful of days because he didn't know that you might trap three months. And in a giant place, you might be like using that point of access. It's just like in his mind, he just pictured something that would happen a few times.

But I do, also to your point, starting out where you're talking about like a finite period of time, this weekend, would it be okay if we hunted this thing? Because you can always do it successfully, stick to your word, everyone's happy, you go back again, and then it might turn into the, you know what, you know the place, you know the rules.

Help yourself. That happens all the time, that you get in and eventually a guy's just like yeah you guys are you guys know what's up out here never any problem with you guys go ahead and eliminate that vagary right it's like i want hunting permission that that's so much like place like iowa that's upland birds and turkeys and uh sometimes mule deer and whitetails right i don't think there's muleys oh no oh you gotta get into western nebraska it's like yeah well my kids really like to hunt pheasants you know so knock that stuff out of the gate before they have a chance to say no to it be real specific finite amount of days will be out of your hair before you even know

it i used to have information where we could hunt everything but rabbits. And rabbits is usually the way to get in. But this guy had a kid who had rabbit dogs. Yeah. So he was like, sure, anything but. The thing that you probably think I would most readily let you go do is off limits. Yeah, we had a great permission outside of um uh actually kind of outside of red lodge and uh guys like yeah you guys can hunt here's like how the place lays out uh have a great time

but just uh you can kill all the uh turkeys you see and you can kill all the elk you see but don't shoot anything else because you know they're coming back from some disease or something yeah so of course all we see are like white tails and pheasants you know it was like just bizarro world out there you know yeah yeah that's not a point you want to argue with someone. No. It's just like, okay. Yeah. That needs to be your attitude. Copy.

Yeah, you can't explain it either. You can't be like, well, okay, statistically, and talk to the biologist, and just so you know, here's this. And it's like, oh, so you know my place better than I do? All right, Mark, keep walking us through the process. Well, I mean, I think we've kind of covered the the all the bases of my process you start by looking at all the maps and and even before that something i do is if i'm going into let's say i want to hunt a state i haven't hunted before we're gonna go back a little bit farther in time here i want to hunt a new state let's say i want to hunt in illinois for white tails this year one and if i'm

going into that goal of hey i want to be able to shoot a mature buck maybe for free like i want to have a free permission um so first i'm gonna be looking at the map like an aerial map of the state and then you can start laying over things like um pope and young record book data or something like that which can tell you know, it's a rough estimate. Okay. Pope and Young bucks probably mature or whatever might, whatever your goal might be. That's one way to say, okay, it looks like this, this corner of Illinois looks like there's some disproportionately high quality hunting, this little corner here. So then I can look at those specific counties. I'll pick a county. Okay. I like the looks of, you know,

what this area might be. And then I'll zoom in, look at aerials and try to find properties on aerials that look like the right type of cover and habitat that could be high quality. And then you lay over the property ownership stuff and then pick out your specific places. But then after you get the doors knocking, then it goes to everything I just said. Every conversation as far as it goes, utilize past connections, keep on going through the list, and then you'll hopefully out of 15 or something, you hopefully will get one.

And then from there, do everything we just talked about when it comes to keeping permission and then keep building that rapport, keep that relationship up. I always then happen to say, even if I get permission, I'm down there a few weeks or a few months later anyone else around here you think i should chat with you know always trying to find another little couple spots and just keep on branching from there i always try to get in in some states you don't need to do this but in some states you need permission to go and track a

wounded deer so i'll try to some you can't cross cross over onto land just to blow can you do that anywhere yes there are places where you can go on the land you do not have permission for to retrieve game right of retrieval yeah so really i know i know iowa has that i know ohio and michigan do not so in ohio so i hunt i didn't know that any place all i ever hear about is how you can't i never heard about how you can okay i think if i if i remember the iowa law correctly off the top of my head i think you're just not supposed to have your weapon with you you need to leave it there across the line or something oh you know what now that i think about it you're right i remember being somewhere where someone told me that that you can go over hunt they're talking about hunting

waterfowl you can go over to get it but you can't bring a shotgun with you and you can go over, they're talking about hunting waterfowl. You can go over to get it, but you can't bring a shotgun with you. And you can't bring a dog. Yeah, so sometimes I should do better at this. Sometimes I preemptively do it. Sometimes it's post, but either way, if you preemptively go and talk to your neighbors and get permission, that's a great way to, again, just get a foot in the door, build a relationship. Because then you're not even doing a big ask.

Hey, just in case I happen to hunt Tom's place, just want to let you know I'm going to be there and wanted to just make sure if I happen to hit a deer that comes over here, would that be okay if I come and retrieve? I'd be happy to let you know if I'm going to be coming over. That is such a good foot in the door attitude. That is a great trick. And lots of times, like, yeah, yeah, sure. And then you can offer, hey, I'll be sure to let you know

or I'll stop by before I do it or something like that. So it gives you another excuse to stop and chit-chat. Then you start hunting the edge of his property. Well, don't do that. Just hoping one runs over so he can go have another chat. Put the tree stand right on the fence line. But there's one particular property in mind that um i'm just i've been working for like six years and someday i'm gonna get permission on this property i

permission to shed hunt it i have permission to retrieve deer on it um and a really nice really nice people that live there um and you know if it doesn't work out that's fine but maybe someday you know this will open up another opportunity to hunt so just keep on keep on trying to get to know more and more people um and you might get permission you might just make a new friend which is great too um and then i think it comes down to then just the work of it i know so many people who to what we were talking about earlier so many people complain about not having enough places to hunt or not having anywhere to hunt and i think it does come down to just work like you just need to do these kinds of things a lot i even wish i did them more than i do them because i still feel like i don't have enough places a lot of time

so like going into 2018 already like just like last week i was sitting in my you know where it was i don't know where it was but i was sitting there like telling myself you got to do better job getting more places next year like next year you are going to have like 10 new spots you got to do it you got to put in the work you know just it's so easy to get lazy or to just be like i'm okay with these two spots it's fine i think we've got we all have a lot of things going on or maybe you just it's uncomfortable trying to find places or have these conversations um but if you want it bad enough you got to work for it i used to know a guy he was a professional trapper and he was explaining how he how he like applies all of his permission getting efforts when you look and he used a lot of aerial

photography so this is i was talking to him before Google Earth was real, you know, commonly used for this, but he would use aerial photography and he had access to a ton of it somehow. And a big part of his life and time was just like permissions, right? gas lines, so gas line right-of-ways. Because he's in this area where it was mixed suburban, rural interface, and kind of like suburban communities up against ag land communities. But he identified power lines and gas line right-of-ways as being these strips of brushy habitat that he felt animals used as travel corridors.

And also in his area was a big riparian area, so he had a big river valley. And the river valley was low-bottom lands that weren't developed. And it was mostly timbered and brushy along the river bottoms. So he had a couple power lines, a gas line right away, and a riparian area, and he just systematically worked every piece of property that butted up against those things that he identified

as being like travel corridors. He hunted a lot of deer and had a lot of deer hunting products that he marketed, but also fox and coyote. He knew traveled those things. They were funnels or channels for wildlife, and that was just how he devoted his time. His goal was to be that he would just own

both sides of everything like that to focus his activities. I guess smart. Yanni, you had a good turkey permission this spring. Yeah, there's nothing real exciting about it. No, it was just like classic clean. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and it was almost too good to be true because we saw strutters in a field. And then we were like, yeah, let's go ask, you know. And we just drove another quarter mile down the road, pulled in. She's like, oh, yeah, have at it, you know. So we went back out and muffed the first setup, spooked them up into the trees. But then we chased them and caught up to them like an hour later, and we killed one. And went back.

And we were hoping to just go back and say thanks and build on the relationship and maybe get sort of like an all-access pass. So we were like, yeah, next time. She's like, yeah, just stop by anytime. Please ask before you go. But that was kind of like the thing that supposedly doesn't happen anymore though yeah it's cold you know and i was saying in the beginning how the good old days are over everything's different now but now that i come to think of it last winter i just want to

take my kids small game hunting around where i grew up and i called my mom to like check around for me right it was just people and it was just there we just had places to go no i heard a story while i was in wisconsin it's uh like i think the guy he just he started talking he stopped in somewhere started talking to the to the wife I think and she's like nope nope nope nope husband doesn't let anybody hunt here doesn't let anybody hunt here no no no he's like well you know could I please just you know she's like yeah come back at five or whatever so he comes back he's like no I really don't let anybody hunt here I think it was the same thing he had like someone else hunting there but he's like you know i just kept talking to the guy and sure enough he's like well that guy doesn't really hunt here that much i think you could hunt like this little corner over here there's like the 15 acres and he just and it was basically all just

from a little bit of persistence and then just from having a long conversation it was only one the long no it's two because he came back in the evening you know but he's been he says he's been hunting the place for years now when you say he came back in the evening what do you mean to talk to the husband because oh i got you yeah he wasn't there at the moment this summer i was uh trying to scout some public land in southern michigan and on my little land ownership map i had there was one access point to the backside of this big chunk of public that looked like very far away from everywhere else. And you could get into some pretty gnarly stuff. So I thought, I really want to try to scope that place out.

So I go follow this map and I turn onto the road. What looks to be a public road on this map that leads to a little parking lot. It's just a little two track and it looks, it goes up next to this guy's yard. And I was just like, man, I don don't know but the map says it's good so i'm like all right i'm gonna drive back there so i drive and i'm driving down the road and i get maybe half mile down the road and i see no trespassing signs on either side of the road and then you get another like quarter mile down the road and then you see like skull and crossbones on the trees and then you get a little farther down and there's a skeleton, like a fake skeleton holding a fake AR rifle. And then it says, if you can read this, you're in my

scope. And I'm like, all right, this definitely seems like this must not be the right place. So as I'm seeing all this, I'm like, okay, I need to find somewhere to turn around. And then right when I see this and I realize, okay, I got to get out of here, a golf cart comes flying down the road right at me. I'm like, oh geez, here we go. So the guy pulls up and I bring down my window. And at first he's like fiery and like, what the hell are you doing down here? And I was like, you know, I'm looking at my map. I was looking for this piece of public land access. It looked like this took me right to it. And I'm so sorry. Is this you know a private road it's like yeah a lot he's real fiery at first but i just try to be polite and explain my situation so i'll get out of here

right away i'm so sorry um and then we got like a little bit of like momentum he's like well i can understand though why you came in here it used to be a public road but there are so many guys coming down here and leaving crap and someone left a dead deer on the side of the road and all this kind of stuff i got the you know state to shut it down or something so now it's private you can't you can't come down this road you can't access from here anymore but we just started talking and we just talked and talked and talked and talked and finally he's he's talking about how there used to be people that hunted here and i was thinking in my head okay maybe i could get just permission to drive down the road and park in the old parking lot and be able to access the back of the public

land um maybe the conversation will take us there in the back of my mind and we're chatting about things and then he's talking about back in like the 70s when he used to hunt and he's talking about his old blinds and then somehow we get to the chores he's doing these days and then we're talking about how things are with his wife and how he wishes it was warmer in their house. It was a long time. We went everywhere with it. And I was just kind of listening.

And I don't want to sound like I'm always conniving to try to get permission. I was just going to bring that up. I was just going to bring it up. Not in a bad way, but here you are. Yeah, you're like a manipulator. No, I'm not. Not you.

Everyone. Here's a guy. You want something from him. He doesn't want anything from you. That's part of the reason you don't want to go out and bang on the door. If you were showing up, if you're like, I'm going to go bang on that guy's door and give him $1,000,

you'd be so excited to go do it. But you're like, I'm going to go bang on his door and bother him to ask him for something and i don't like asking people for stuff so it makes it uncomfortable yeah and i think i think the i think if you see an opportunity or if you're if you're having a conversation with somebody and it seems natural to if an opportunity arises i don't think there's any harm in letting the conversation go there or ask or just you know sometimes nothing comes of it sometimes like you said no right off the bat you still sit and talk to them yeah because then it's a it's the polite thing to do in many cases b sometimes just interesting conversation and then c like in this case we talked all over from every different side of the world every different possible thing we could have

talked about and somehow got to the point that he's not feeling so good about cutting wood anymore and i hear him say i was like man i'm i like cutting wood would you would that be something if i ever helped out you know cutting wood um you know i'd be happy to help you out that maybe i could just drive down here and park at the parking lot here and maybe hunt him a couple times. He's like, now we're talking. Yes, we are. And then come to find out he's not hunting his property anymore.

He's like, you can hunt my property too. So I just have countless examples of that kind of thing where if you're willing to help out. And now you got it in there? Yeah. And he didn't shoot me and all that good stuff stuff it went down pretty well you've been cutting stove wood not yet it's gonna be after hunting season i'm gonna cut some wood so there you go yeah so you just gotta let those things go where they may um and then keep after every year i'm doing

something like that trying to find more spots yeah gift given expressions of gratitude yeah i'd like to bring out though like the what like non-traditional methods and they're not really methods but i just think like uh what's the saying about you got to be on the dance floor right no i don't know that one ryan help me out you gotta be on the dance floor yeah it's kind of like when opportunity knocks you gotta make hay when the sun shines

or whatever you gotta dance when the music's playing maybe make hay when the sun shines no it's definitely not

strike while the iron's hot can't kill him on the couch but if you're not like aware of the situation it's not gonna come to you right if you're not aware of the situation, it's not going to come to you. If you're not thinking about it or in woo-woo terms, put it out to the universe that you're looking for hunting permissions. I just feel like after a couple years in Bozeman,

I'm new to Bozeman, and I haven't banged on any doors i haven't really like made it like a point i haven't done all these things that mark's talking about but just sort of through you know talking to people and chatting them up and my kids making friends with other kids and then i meet their parents and the next thing we got it in the beginning was social connections yeah but yeah i felt like we needed to retouch on that and just make sure that people are we got to touch on the dude with the letter yeah i got his letter pulled up oh um so get done with what you're doing and walk us through that appreciation i think it's like people get to know you over the course of a few years and they're like do you know janice Patelis and his wife, after they put their kids to bed, will sit up and butcher deer

until they do it all themselves. And that's almost all they eat. Isn't that amazing? Oh, to have him come out and hunt my place. Yeah, that's the type of person that I would let hunt my place, if I let people hunt my place. Because they appreciate it.

I want to point out that my brother... Is that what you to point out that my brother has a sign on his property, which isn't big because it's 10 acres, and his sign says, what's it say? I think it says, trespassers welcome. It's great. No, not, I mean, yeah, I mean, appreciation is good, but I just think just keeping your, just being open, I mean, yeah, I mean, appreciation is good, but I just think just keeping your, just being open, you know, in all situations to like something like that coming your way.

Yeah, but you're kind of talking about like Latvian pagan stuff though. No. About putting it out there to the atmosphere and stuff like that. To the universe. Putting it out there to the universe. Well, it's like the it's just have it

always in the back of your mind and if you happen to have an opportunity to rise you kind of go there but some people might see someone with a flat tire and strike up a conversation with them help them out and never think to mention that you're looking for a place to deer hunt but i am always thinking about that kind of thing so i I just kind of offhand mention it, and it led to that happening. Is that kind of what you mean? Like just kind of allow networking and the karma of the universe allowed to happen, but also kind of seek it. We don't have to get all woo-woo with it.

I just think that it's like you don't have to go beat on doors to get a hunting permission. Like you were so surprised the other day. I remember I was telling you about how my dad is a bow hunter. Yeah. I was telling him, well, yeah. He doesn't strike me as a bow hunter. Yeah. Well, he is still a home inspector.

And through his trade, he's gotten all kinds of hunting permissions. You know? Because he's like... But I mean, sure. Then that's sort of like almost like built. It's like the perfect way. Like you're in someone's house looking out at the back 40. That's not putting it out to the universe. You're out there interacting with homeowners.

I know, but again, it's a little bit non-traditional. I just think that whatever thing you do as a living or out there daily, there's probably a way that you could network or get hunting permission. In your home area. I got a handful of friends that are chiropractors there's probably a way that you could network or get hunting permission you know i got in your

home area i got a handful of friends that are chiropractors and they talk full of them yeah how do you have more than one chiropractor friend because i actually have a good explanation for this a group of guys all met each other going to chiropractor school a school in iowa um and they're all really into hunting and i then became friends with one of them who then introduced me to the others so there's a group of three of them that are all chiropractors because of school and now they're some of my best hunting buddies well they see 40 50 people a day and they chat with them for 15 20 minutes and every day they talk to every one of those people about hunting in some way if they happen to be no there's a connection there permissions yeah

and they have all sorts of different permission because of those types of things so whether you're a doctor or i don't know whatever sometimes you take advantage of that yeah if you were a guy if you were a tractor salesman or a grain buyer oh yeah home inspector i have the i have the worst job for it because I just sit in my home office all by myself every day. Yeah. Never talk to anyone. I red flagged your foundation here.

You see this crack? You know what that's from? That whitetail buck over there. That's from having too many bucks on your property. Let me tell you how to. All right, yeah, talk about the letter. Because this is unconventional. I just think it's just next level.

It's next level, but this is like really, this is, this is just, this guy had, we got a letter after we talked about how we're going to,

we talked about how we're going to talk about getting permissions and had a lot of, a handful of enthusiastic emails come in from people encouraging us to have the conversation and one guy shared with us his strategy and his strategy is not like anything that we've touched on here and it seems on one hand a bit much on other hand, it just seems like a really great way for those places where you just can't get it in.

You can't figure out a good in. Yeah, and he wanted us to share this to help folks out. His name is Zarek. He's from the southeast. Zarek. Yeah. Should we just read the letter? Do you want to kind of give it a little synopsis? Read what he wrote. southeast. Zarek. Yeah. Should we just read the letter?

Do you want to kind of give it a little synopsis? Read what he wrote. Read how he teed it up and then walk us through the letter. I really like this guy's approach. Oh, yeah. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my

goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes 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. 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 MeatEater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. to the to the on x club y'all uh new hunter yeah relatively new hunter he says and this is just his email to us just sort of uh just saying hey what's up um Listen to what I got. He says, I'm a relatively new hunter, 42 years old,

but I have access to over 100 acres of family land within an hour of my home. To expand my hunting locations to within minutes of my home, I developed a boilerplate letter that I customized for attempts to gain access to properties that I scout through online county tax maps that may produce hunting opportunities. When he's talking about an online county tax map, he's talking about what used to be known as a plat book or a plat map where it's public information who's paying taxes on what so you can go down to at the township level in in

the east where you have township level politics you You go to your township, your county, and just request a map that'll have all the land parceled out. And this reminds me of something we need to talk about. Not quite, oh man, just so much stuff you can get out of these. You can use these to find places you don't need permissions. But they aren't like actually public land.

It's hard for me to explain yeah really quick just to happen places are they're not like part like they're not like state forest national forest but just like weird little hidey holes that are that are places you could go hunt but that would never be recognized as such off plat maps by looking at who's paying the taxes on it but go ahead mark just want to interject the plat maps you can get them from your township hall or whatever but you can also get digital versions very often if you just google the name of your county and then gis map so kent county gis map and most counties have an online version of that plat map

where you can see the aerial and the property lines and then click on a property and get all their information too. So go on, Yanni. So that's what he's talking about. Yeah. And it's close to what you can get on Onyx, right? I mean, you probably get a little bit more info. I don't know if you actually get phone numbers. I don't think you get any more info.

You don't get phone number. You can get home address, name. You can get some property information. It's a great tool, man. I used to live on those things. Oh, here's the quote I was trying to remember. Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor. That was good.

I liked it. All right. All right, so here's this guy. He gets on some plat maps around his area. I've been complimented by the, oh, I'm not reading the letter. This is still what he wrote to us. He's been complimented by the professionalism of the letter by landowners and managers that receive it and always get a response because of how it is laid out and what it offers.

Nice. I was even contacted by one owner that said that even though he could not permit other hunters on the property because his brother hunts it, he wanted to call me and say that through the years he has received several requests from people to hunt the property and that he had never received a letter so well written concerning that subject.

Man! This dude's a writer and he can pitch himself. This guy is on to something. Are you paying attention, Mark Kenyon? I am. I'm going to copy and paste this thing ASAP. You want to talk about being wired to hunt. He goes on to say, I'm in no means arrogantly promoting my writing abilities. I'm more of a technical writer than a storyteller,

but in this case, I think what I've developed gets the job done or at least gets the owner's attention. Listeners are pissing themselves with anticipation. My letter highlights my intentions, what I'm offering in return a little about me and does it in a way that visually conveys my intentions, what I'm offering in return, a little about me and does it in a way

that visually conveys my message and shows I'm an individual that cares for the environment and is a responsible hunter. Not terribly long, but I believe it's not too much that the reader is overloaded and not too short,

but it would appear that it was hastily typed out just to gain access to as much property as possible. And he goes on to say they just want to share the letter to help us help you guys out and get more permissions. Then he also includes a, uh, the, uh, so we're not even into the letter.

He's from North Carolina and the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission, um, has a permission slip that they have on their website that you can just print out that is basically a release. Release, hold harmless, and indemnification produced by the NRA. So he attaches that in there too to be like, hey, I'll sign this, you sign it, and then, you know. Because we live in a litiginous world, he's giving them a, yeah, he's like a liability release. Yeah.

Because, yeah, especially people that don't know much about hunting. And this guy's, I thought we got out of this that he, yeah, he was like looking for stuff closer to home. I think he was like looking at the map. You can tell he's looking at spots sometimes that are small. They're kind of. Hidey holes. Yeah, closer to, you know urban zones and uh so people might not be you know talking about hunting much yeah they might not be getting inundated with requests

he's because he's looking at just little chunks man like little you know i got the sense you know like he wouldn't be overlooking some little 20 or 30 acre wedge land somewhere. Which is another good point. That's another good way to find spots. Sometimes those are the most likely places you can get permission. Don't get overzealous and try to get the 300 acre spot. Take the 10 and the 20. Yeah.

All right. Go on, Yanni. That's about all he had to say. So I'll go to read his letter. I feel the letter starts out almost kind of a little creepy. Because he's sort of saying like, man, have I been watching you? Yeah, a little bit. But it obviously works.

If you're not familiar, because I think there's plenty of people that probably buy a piece of property or you buy a house that sits on, even if it's a quarter acre lot, and maybe besides when you flip through like the signing all the papers at the mortgage house, that was like the only time you looked at the plat map that came in that package.

A lot of people maybe have never really looked at like an aerial view of their property right so he includes it in there and and it has an outline of his property so is it too much to kind of say what he says for you to tell us what he says no oh okay let. He says, hello, my name is Eric. I'm contacting you concerning a property you own on XYZ Road, south of XYZ City in XYZ County, North Carolina. Specifically, parcel number 1234567. And then there's a little map and the little parcels outlined. And then he even has like a, what do you call like a little bubble this you know a little arrow pointing yes this is your property this is the one i'm asking about

all right i take it back that's that creepy does strike you as creepy mark no that's not creepy diligent yeah yeah fine line between creepy and diligent and like we've been talking about he's eliminating the gray area right you know they're like, what of my places? Very likely could be. You want to talk about eliminating gray. This dude gets that done. This 47.87 acre parcel appears to be a mix of pine and hardwood stands and may hold habitat for wild turkey, deer, and small game.

I would like to inquire about the possibility to scout and legally hunt this parcel. In return for the opportunity to access this parcel to both scout and legally hunt i'm offering a few items to help preserve the property first would be marking the property per the nc wildlife standards with purple paint along the public roadways to indicate that the property is private and that no unauthorized entry or hunting is allowed. Talk about servicing yourself and acting as though you're servicing someone else. He's saying, and not only that, but I will go and let other guys know, buzz off. This is now my hunt spot. And then he explains the purple paint law, how it came to be.

And there's even a little diagram of where the purple paint needs to be on the tree, how high off the ground. Yeah, and this is good because a lot of people are like, man, again. I had no idea. I keep half-dogging on the guy, but I like it all because here's a guy. He might not even realize that that's what you're supposed to do to mark it off limits. So now all of a sudden he's like, oh, I guess I better do that. I didn't know I needed to do that.

And now here's this fine young gentleman offering to do it for me. He continues to explain that the marking per the Landowner Protection Act will give wildlife officers the ability to directly address and cite anyone on the property without written permission to access or hunt the property. Nice. He's educating. Second, this parcel is large and could have unauthorized entry on the property and unwanted illegal dumping. Should we explain that? Most people know what that is, right? Yeah, people like trying to get rid of an old couch

and a broken washing machine. Yeah. Which isn't entirely bad because I've killed a lot of rabbits out of that stuff rabbits like that stuff for some reason they can't come up with five and a half bucks to take it to the city dump yeah yeah yeah the washing machine's like all right it's good rabbit habitat when you just see like 10 white garbage bags that eventually gonna be ripped apart you know oh it's when i recently took my wife on uh last holiday season i took my wife on

sort of a tour of all my former hunting spots and just driving around in a vehicle being like oh yeah one time we and another time and you wouldn't believe that what happened here and after a couple hours my wife was like i just cannot believe all the appliances that are out in these woods welcome to west michigan man it's where appliances go to die yeah and that time of year they're very visible yeah because there's no full all the leaves are down it all just looks like it's like couches and appliances i'm like after a while you honestly don't see it anymore it just feels like the woods um so so that's a safe assumption that's a safe assumption that there are there is garbage some illegal dumping during scouting trips i would gather garbage that i can hand carry in

bags and report any unauthorized activity on the property the goal would be to leave the property cleaner than it was found and help prevent any future costly cleanup when development agricultural use or future sales occur as for me so then he uh basically introduces himself his wife like a little bio material what he does there's a picture of he and his wife what's he do i forgot him and his wife. He is a code enforcement officer. Yeah, good guy to know. Yeah, because if he was a guy that helps people who've been injured on other people's property get big settlements, that would not work well for him.

I wouldn't include that in my letter. But a code enforcer? If I'm going to let someone on my land, it my letter. But a code enforcer? If I'm going to let someone on my land, it's going to be a code enforcer, man. Now he continues with the education, which I like. He says, this property is not within city limits and therefore discharging a firearm is legal, but due to nearby

residential properties, rifle hunting would only occur on sections of property that would be far away from homes where responsible shots would be made if a clear safe shot is presented. I am both a rifle hunter and a bow hunter and carry all items out with me that I take into a property during a hunt. This means that no deer stands or blinds or any other item would be left on the property. I also am recognizing there may be a question of liability for harm or injury to anyone on the property, either participating in scouting or hunting. As a hunter, I recognize that harm or injuries may occur on any property that may hold natural or unnatural obstacles or dangers.

I also use tethered safety harnesses when I use climber tree stands. If granted permission, I would sign a waiver removing any owner's liability to injuries or harm to myself and others you permit to be with me while on the property and then he goes on to talk about the uh the uh letter provided by the courtesy of the nra that we talked about earlier um some of my requests i'm offering to mark the property as private for the landowner protection act become eyes for reporting issues that may be of concern for you. The landowner and clean up the property as manageable debris is found in exchange for access to the property for scouting and legal hunting.

And he basically signs off, says thank you for the opportunity. Permissions. That's good. I like that guy. One thing that makes me want to add, I think I'm running out of things I wanted to add. I've talked about this a bunch of times. Maybe I haven't told you about it, Mark.

There's a guy down in the Carolinas, a guy by the name of Joe, who has a group. Have I ever told you about Backyard Bow Pro? Is this, I think I may have heard of it. These guys, there's a lot of small parcel suburban rural interface type properties in their area. And they got together a group where they have, the group has a proficiency test. The group conducts background checks on members and they have

a bunch of rules. And they're very active in food bank donations. And they're also very active in getting permissions from a person and then assuring that that person gets a butchered and wrapped deer from their own property delivered back to them so when you can go and seek permission and be like all of the bow hunters in our group have all done background checks we have a lot they have a liability waiver system we've all passed proficiency tests we have like a seal of approval from our organization backyard bow pro and we provide x services of the community and we will offer x services to you if you're interested in having venison from your own property and and that is

how they and they have tremendous success do they cap like the number of people allowed on the property i don't know that time or i the property? I don't know that. I don't know enough about it. And I haven't talked to them in a while, but it was a thing that they were having great success with. It's cool. So just go look them up. If they're not around anymore, they won't be around anymore, but I feel that they're around still.

Yeah, Backyard Bow Pro. Interesting idea. But maybe, like you were saying you could just use it sort of as like as as part of your resume you're over there talking to them you're kind of getting close and you're like oh yeah belong to this group it's sort of certified me to be a oh yeah for sure good guy like you can go online and check it out and see what kind of standards we have and and find out you know and you got this sort of seal of approval from and granted it's almost like self-serving but it was just like an interesting way to sort of because there's no there's no like state or federal version of it it's just something that like private people have to come up with the

sort of come and be like that that a person who might and their specialty is dealing with people who are otherwise would otherwise be very uneasy with hunting that works well for them any final things you want to add cal um i got one one thing that i disagreed with with what mark said. Mark Kenyon. Mark Kenyon. Really good. Take Mark to task. That's right. Oh, boy. So you wanted to hunt Iowa. Yeah. And people are under the assumption that coming from out of state,

you got to pay $5,000, but you wanted to hunt Iowa for free. None of what we were talking about is hunting for free. True. You're not paying cash money, but all of this stuff is, you know, you're in some cases providing a service. For some cases, you're just letting them know that there's some good folks out there and you're willing to sit down and have a cup of coffee.

But, you know, you're going on somebody's nothing's for free right um yeah and it's if you go i don't really understand what you're saying if you go up and knock on a door to a place where somebody is working their butts off to make some sort of living on a on a farm or farmer ranch and your attitude is i'm gonna get something for absolutely nothing oh from you that's not gonna work out well but in all fairness the distinction not that i need to speak for mark the distinction mark was drawn was like doing entering into a lease agreement or not yeah no you're not you're not doing that, but it's also, it truly is, I think, in most scenarios, there's some sort of an exchange. It's not, just don't go knocking on somebody's door looking for something for nothing. Yeah. Got that, Mark? I got that. Did you have a rebuttal? I think I would say, I mean, I agree with you.

I think it was just a poorly worded maybe explanation of the fact that simply that don't look at as costs being prohibitive to you being able to hunt places. Because sometimes you can still get access that doesn't require monetary payment now of course you need to provide you got to give them whether it be conversation or simply uh respect for their property all those different things um yes definitely you don't want to be going in there the thing is you are people some people do carry around this kind of ludicrous idea that they're somehow doing a great service to the land owner. Just by shooting the deer? Just by being out there deer hunting. It's like most guys, if they really are, like, most guys are like, man, I got all these deer and I just can't find anyone who's willing,

and I have looked high and low, who's willing to come out and shoot these great big giant bucks on my place. It's like not really a problem. And even we get a lot of letters from people who are saying, I keep hearing about all the wild pig problems in Texas. You'd think they'd be paying me to come hunt pigs, but I can't get a pig permission because the guy that owns the land, the only thing I hate more than pigs is letting dudes I don't know come around

and run around my property with guns it's like that's even more of a nuisance than pigs so i do think you have to go into that you are as graciously as possible um and without being a suck up you are coming in and saying i'm asking a favor of you yeah you're inconveniencing them yeah and i like i am open to ways in which i could offset that through just politeness gratitude offers of help but at the core here i am not please understand i'm not looking at this any other way than i am saying to you may i please yeah absolutely yeah because if not you got the balance all mixed up yeah especially the case of a coveted animal like

a deer yeah or whatever you know people love watching big old roosters strut across their lawns too you know if we're talking about jackrabbits back during the Dust Bowl, maybe. You'd be doing the guy a favor. But generally, it's like the guy is like, okay, buddy, I'll do you a good turn and allow you access to my property. And I would expect some human decency back from you. Yeah. Yanni?

Got nothing on that. You're spot on. Folks couldn't see see it but yanni had a nod he was nodding like he liked he was agreeing with that yeah he was thinking about dancing being on the floor mark um mark canyon you want can you want plug wired to hunt podcast people are interested in like the the d the nitty gritties the nitty gritties of deer hunting yep wired on podcast nice to get it and not all this crazy flying around and airplanes out in remote wilderness landscapes but like the nitty gritty sitting on the back 40 chasing whitetails 365 days a year that is what we talk about the saga of holyfield we didn't get to that didn't even talk about holyfield no i do we're gonna talk about it do you feel that like how many years you've been trying to get this deer

well i've been watching him three years the first year i passed on him so i didn't want on the first year so two years i've been actively trying to kill oh um and now you didn't do it again i still got time are you are you feeling any uh we've talked about this before because you're like a you know your guy that makes his living talking about deer hunting are you feeling any sort of like uh like like professional like are you feeling any sort of like, man, I didn't get the deer. Do I still have my claim to legitimacy? I'm not worried about my claim to legitimacy. Because like we talked about last year, I never based my claim to legitimacy based on whether or not I was going to kill more deer than anyone else or whatever it might be. But I do feel pressure, both internal and external.

The internal pressure. Because someone else is going to get them. Quite likely. Or he'll get hit by a car. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, the internal pressure is I have put so much time and energy into it. Like any thing, whether it be all the time and energy you put into writing a book or a project you're working on or anything,

if you invest a ton of time and energy, there's a lot of pressure to get whatever outcome you're getting or hoping for. And so I have, this season has been a little bit of, has caused me to reflect a little bit on getting back to the enjoyment of it and not being so focused on the outcome because I've gotten a little bit too deep into that and have lost the fun in a little bit of it. I got just so frustrated with a lot of things that were going on. Um, so I have to maintain that balance cause I'm very achievement oriented. I'm very,

very goal oriented. I can get obsessed with things like that. So I need to constantly like relax, get back to what, why you do this, the love of what you're doing. Don't focus so much on whether or not you can kill this one single deer. But that has been my season. I have put 99.9% of all my time the last three months or whatever it's been to trying to kill this one deer. You've been seeing him? Yeah. How many times have you seen him?

I've had 11 encounters with him, I think. What's the closest he's been? This is embarrassing. I've told this story i've told this story on on my podcast but more people will hear it on yours um november 7th i had him at 20 to 25 yards at 11 o'clock in the morning um late in the morning yeah late in the morning what was he doing uh he was just i think he was cruising checking bedding areas for bedded does in the morning what was he doing uh he was just i think he was just cruising checking bedding areas for bedded does in the middle of the day but i hadn't seen anything for a couple hours so i had become a little bit distracted and i was facing this direction and i was holding my phone

paging through the phone and looking up every you know looking up every three seconds and look down the phone and i hear a little crunch behind my back i turn like that and he's 20 yards away spinning and running away so i had him within shooting range and i muffed it because i was on my phone no he's paranoid oh but the next no three days later i went back in close to that area and i had him within shooting range but he was behind brush um later that day 1 30 in the afternoon that day he came chasing the doe out of the bedding area 60 yards um but running through there um then i've had him many more times at like 80 90 um that kind of thing so i've seen him a lot had the close calls but it'll be like he'll be here and then I'll sit here

and then the next day I'll be sitting there and he'll be there and then the next day I'll be there and then you see that I'm always one day behind him or one day ahead of him like he'll be where I was yesterday sometimes so we've been playing cat and mouse and hasn't worked out yet but last year I saw he got a good look at you though. Oh, he definitely. That was the one time he's ever seen me that I know of. Of course, he might have seen me when I don't know. But that's the one time in the three years I've hunted him.

Even with your phone. Yeah. So I had a mental breakdown after that. Wired to hunt. Yeah, wired to hunt. Right. That's like the irony of that. So I was in a bad place after that that for that next hour i was in a

real bad place but i mean mentally mentally i was just so upset with myself that i all this i mean so much talk to you around and something happened you're upset but you didn't want to tell me what it was that might have been but but to to what i mentioned earlier, so that happened. I was really pissed off at myself, frustrated. All my buddies, we usually go out and hunt Ohio, some property we got down there together, and we spent like a week or so in there. So they went down a few days ahead of time, but I kept pushing it back. I was like, I got to focus on Holyfield. I can't go.

I kept pushing it back, pushing it back, pushing it back. I hadn't gone earlier in the season like we usually do, so I was missing out on this camaraderie aspect of my hunting season that I usually have. But I had to kill Holyfield. So I got to stay here. I got to focus on him. Well, this thing happened and I was really frustrated. That night I moved.

No, I didn't see him that night. But after that evening's hunt, and this was over the course of a 27-day period, I hunted 26 days for him. And 15 of those were 15- sits or 14 hour sits i was there give me the rundown 26 out of 27 days i hunted um so from october 24th november 19th i hunted every day but one and then 15 of those days were all day sits where i would get in the i'd head out to the tree stand two hours before daylight and i wouldn't come in until you know after dark um so i you pissing

in a bottle up there no i pissed right out of the tree yeah that's what i like to do um because bucks come up smell that yeah especially you should get doug duran you should try to hire doug duran to piss below your tree because it's buckman juice does it work oh well maybe he's got the vote he's got photo evidence to buckman juice the trick I need. I shot a buck once right after finishing peeing. Moments. The point of my story being

that that day I'd been very frustrated with things and then I went from the low place of being really upset at myself to starting to think, why am I getting so upset about this? I'm hunting. I love so many things about this why am i letting myself get so caught up in this to finally by the end of that night realizing you know i just need to step away from it for a little bit so i'm going to go down to ohio with my friends spend a little

time with them um you know get back to some of the things that really matter here versus just killing one specific deer that i arbitrarily have chosen to be the only thing that will make me happy this season for some stupid reason so i go down to Ohio and the second day I'm down there my best friend kills the first buck he's killed in like four years and I got to be there with him help him recover I actually saw the whole thing happen from across the valley and got to help him drag it out got him do all that kind of stuff with him um it was it was the best moment my whole hunting season getting to share that moment with my buddy and be a part of that and help out and it just kind of reminded me you know in the end those are the things that really matter most so i'm really i'm really glad i made that decision it was a great just uh reminder to

focus on the important stuff and you know hopefully holyfield's still alive i haven't i haven't hunted there in the last like eight days eight or nine days general firearm yeah i tend i usually stay out i hunted opening day i usually don't but i hunt an opening day there no i took a gun out actually um and you're gonna shoot holyfield if you got the chance yeah that was another thing i ended up deciding i'm gonna shoot him with whatever's legal um i'm not a purist i like bow hunting i love bow shoot him with whatever's legal um i'm not a purist i like bow hunting i love bow hunting i do that the most but i'm not fundamentally opposed to shooting him with a gun but you passed on him another time with a gun last year well that was because he knew that he would at that point he knew that it would live i thought i hoped that he would make

it to this year so last year i chose not to try to kill him with any weapon and i could have killed him with a muzzle or 60 yards last year um but chose at that point in the season because there's only like you know 12 days left of the season or whatever to see if he could make it to this year so but that that is like another pressure so there's like the internal pressures and then like there's a lot of people that have been following along with this story and like want to see what happens and so i have felt some of that external pressure but i'm trying to say that doesn't matter just hunt your hunt and enjoy it and learn from it and share what happens along the way and that's that's what i'm trying to do so what was the last you know but you would

probably have caught wind if someone got him right because you know the guys in your area i think i would know there's a there's a couple people that i don't know so if one of them killed i wouldn't have found out and what was the last day you knew that he was still in the living? I had him at 80 yards twice the night before firearm season. Okay. So.

And how old is it? He's five and a half, I believe. So he's getting in the autumn of his life, man. Yeah. There's not many bucks that old around my neck of the woods. And I've hunted this property six or seven years and this is the first buck that i know that's made the first first five and

a half year old five and a half year old deer that's there there's just three year olds would be usually be the oldest deer in the area so um he's an anomaly so it's been really cool to have that opportunity to see a deer so many times i mean last year i saw him 27 times this year it's been 11 so far um and you got how long now because rifle's gonna end and you got how long to bow hunt them uh well muzzleloader season now opens the day after fire season and you'll get in on that yeah and then uh and that's done the 17th and after that's bow dude i'm gonna take that letter yanni was reading and send that letter to everyone surrounding that property and just lock that place up with just me permissions uh well i'll get that

buck better and hopefully someone oh i know i'm like you know i somebody i wanted i wanted to be you because because because it means so much to you you know maybe that's silly that it matters so much to me i don't know i'm sure i'm gonna learn something from this because that's that's you're at and the thing that you're interested in you're in the you're in in the deepest way possible yeah to just be that you like would go. Most people walk around the woods. They don't know what's going on. If you go out and sort of identify this specific animal and know his entire history, and then focus on him and try to get him,

rather than just sort of the blind, random luck that happens. But I've also pointed out that it's going to be sad, too, with how well you know him. It's like shooting your brother. No doubt about it. We were talking at lunch today eating your brother yeah we were talking at lunch today about how um about hubris um about being overconfident or like you know putting the deer on the wall before you shoot him and stuff and as you guys were talking about i was thinking in my head how i've envisioned what it would be like to shoot him like i I've thought about that moment, like walking up on him.

And I felt moments of like that already. Like I don't remember when this was, but I actively remember thinking about shooting him and walking up and like holding his head and like feeling an immense amount of like sadness about that moment. You've had a mind movie about it. Yeah, yeah. And so I know I will feel that way. I've hunted other deer in multiple years and had like many encounters i've had a shallower version of this in the past and even those times you know you feel any deer i kill there's a sense of of

i don't know if remorse sadness immense respect a whole slew of different types of emotions i know that that will happen again with if i'm fortunate enough to kill this deer i'm sure i will feel that but maybe in a in a different way than before too when we touched on this before i remember yanni saying he's got the feeling that way about a deer just in the afternoon yeah just watch the deer bed watching a buck all day watch wait for him to stand up you know uh being like, oh, you little bugger. But 27 times. I mean, that's

every different scenario, right? So that adds a little more depth to the character. I've never, ever, ever had anything like this happen before to this degree. I mean, the year before was probably four or five times. Last year, 27. 11 this time. I mean, that's pretty astronomical. So, last question for you. If you get him or someone times last year, 27, 11 this time. I mean, that's pretty astronomical.

So last question for you. If you get them or someone else gets them, have you already picked out what buck is next, what buck you're going to start obsessing over next? Is there a contender? There's a contender. You got one that you might decide to obsess over? Yeah.

Well, just because it's a small property. It's a single small property in a heavily hunted area. So there's almost only ever one shooter buck any given year, like a mature buck. And in that area, three years old sometimes is the oldest buck there'll be. But there's a three-year-old this year that's a nice three-year-old who I would love to see make it to next year. I'm really, really hoping he makes it. He's just a nice, wideyear-old who I would love to see make it to next year. I'm really, really hoping he makes it. He's just a nice wide eight-pointer. And as we whitetail guys do, I named him.

The wide eight. No. Wide load. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy is what my hope will be. I'm naming him Survivor. He's the buck I really want to survive this year. So that buck. Are you going to change his name when you start wanting to kill him? Right. Next year, he's the buck i really want to survive this year so that buck are you gonna change his name when you start wanting to kill right next year he's gonna switch it up to dead so for now you're just like helping him along yeah and his survival i've seen

him a lot this year too he's cool deer and and most likely all these deer won't even be around when i get back to hunting in a couple days but you gotta hope and because I'll have been picked up by other hunters probably you never know I mean I do what I can to try to have an environment where they might be able to make it through you know like we talked about last year or last podcast um so hopefully there'll be a few bucks to make it through but something you never know and some do they always do I just want to say I just I really understand about like getting on the phone at 11 a.m and I was so lucky this I was in Wisconsin hunting gun deer this year and sitting in tree stands and I forgot my phone opening day it was like the best thing that ever happened to me like I was kind of stressed like we like drove for maybe five minutes and

then to walk back into the property not like in the car i'm like gosh i run back and get it you know pictures but i knew really in the back of my head no like midday you're gonna be like emailing and freaking doing work man yeah flipping instagram you know and uh but that first day i was the worst tree stand sitter i've been and again i just haven't been doing it a lot in the last 20 years, but man, you just forget. And I had a pretty open setup. Like they had cut all around this tree stand as someone else had put it up there years ago. But I think what you used to have pretty good cover. I mean, I was now just like playing to the, to the world. So I had to be an extra good sitter, you know, and by like got light at seven and by like eight i'm just like you're being way too fidgety on it you're being way too fidgety you know and the first like six deer i see i'm just

seeing flags because they're seeing me a long time before you know really yeah i feel like that's why like you got like a chest like a breast pocket if you're like dying of guilt about stuff you're supposed to be doing but you're sitting out in the woods instead and you're trying to like, even if you're trying to maintain the appearance that you are at work, right? You haven't shared with you. This is like a tip I'm giving people. I like my work structure isn't that I need to act like I'm not hunting,

but if I was in one, if you get like a breast pocket and you just ease her out like a like a poker player close to the chest i'm doing it right now ease her out do what you got to do ease her back and you're not spooking deer no no i'm not saying that necessarily a phone was um but you are taking yourself out of the game oh yeah so one that you should know about coming and you should be like getting against the tree and positioning yourself for when he's coming. You don't know he's coming and he's just, yeah. But just speaking to the idea of being a good tree stand hunter

and a good, you know, eastern whitetail hunter, it just requires you to freaking sit still, move your head slowly. You know, don't jerk your whole body around when you're looking over your shoulder behind the tree. I just remember on Sunday morning when I got into the tree and midday, I was like, all right, I've done a really good job the last four hours. I've just been sitting here, not moving, not dicking around, not going in for more snickers and more snacks and another cup of coffee Halloween candies all the Halloween candy you confiscated yeah maintaining that focus though is it's tough yeah when you're doing day after day after day all day and you're

sitting in the same place yeah people think it's easy oh you're sitting on a tree all day no no I know it's compared now compared to you know Rocky Mountain elk hunting or whatever it's not the same kind of physical wear and tear it's like a different kind of heart it is a different kind of dude we got a friend jeff lander who guides this is bow only area up outside of edmonton alberta yep the bow zone and by the time rut comes there they're dealing in like negative zero weather to hunt in november up there and to hear his stories about what it takes to tree stand hunt in november in alberta is like it's like some harrowing tales of endurance and just like the clothes and just to try to manage everything.

Because you got to have, you got to be at some point be able to whip out bare fingers and shoot the damn deer. And like to be able to be warm enough to pull all that off in a way that makes sense. That's no joke man i believe in the the focus factor is so much larger than anybody has put you can't put enough words on paper on it it's like you have got in the tree stand which i admittedly have done at this point let's just call it zero compared to everybody else in the room and then but the mule deer rifle elk whatever man it the second you let your head go out of okay do or die this is it this is my opportunity and the second you wander away from that mentally you make mistakes yeah i mean you just do absolutely man mental focus yeah i want to touch on one thing i keep wanting to come back to in in big time whitetail

guy world thinking it is okay to snake her out and just whiz off the edge of the tree stand yeah snake her out that's the general practice that is the general practice i've read study there's been studies done to test the uh reaction of deer to human urine uh a placebo deer urine etc etc handful different things and there's no noticeable impact so buckman juice is just may not be particular to doug i think he's just seeing a universal effect i've had it happen three times i've got a joke with my buddies that when i'm not seeing deer i'll be like well you were throwing about yeah i thought i had buck juice so i would be like well it's time to try to bring them in so i've had big buck encounters three times while doing that yeah because that's what i do but i

always feel a little bit like i'm like i bet you that the big time whitetail guys are like truckers. With a bottle. With a bottle that they then throw off a highway overpass. There might be some out there, but most I hear in what I do. What do you think about the sound though? Because I got a story about that. That brings in bucks, don't tell me.

On opening day, some does I can't see. I think they're does, but they're, what do you call it when they just like, they blow at you? I said blow.

They're blowing at you. Can't see them. They're a couple hundred. I'll do the noise. People who don't know the noise we're talking about. Yeah. It's pretty good, huh?

That's the worst noise in the world. Do it once. And do the world. Yeah, do it once. And do the elk. Cal, do the elk version. Yanni, you can do a good elk version. There it is. There it is.

That was it. Here's an antelope. Here's what an antelope does. So it's... And... There it is. that's a good one that's really good yeah i've heard it a lot i heard a lot there's nothing that makes your heart could be coincidental because they blew at me once and 30 minutes goes by so i'm thinking they just went the other direction well along the same ridge that they're on, 30 minutes later,

I need to take a leak. So I just moved a little bit and make a bunch of movement. And as soon as I start, my pee starts hitting the leaves down below. And I'm like, God, that's awfully loud, you know? I'm like, damn it, you know? And it's on the same ridge. So I don't know,'t know coincidence might have been the same deer and they were aware of me already and so they were just like ah you down there again

or but here's the thing i don't really do it that way i aim it back so it arches out and kind of hits the tree broadcast which is quiet I was going to say my recommended trajectory is to hit a tree trunk close to you. That makes it much quieter. Yeah, you don't make like a little leaf pile down there and go on it. Well, like I said, I was in the middle of a clear cut, okay? No, your own tree. I know. I should have just, yeah.

I had, it was one of these all day sits I was doing. Because you can throw a long distance because when you're 14 feet up, you can lander, not Jeff lander, but lander, you can lander way out yonder or to whatever. And yeah, I don't like to go on leaves

because this is real loud. If you're in close, you got to be conscious of everything. I've had some very painful, prolonged peas in close on on mule deer archery what do you mean where you're like every sound matters oh you've basically stripped down to nakedness because you think everything's making too much then you gotta go yeah yeah but it can be part of your calling game for elk too.

You've heard elk pee in the woods. Yeah. Well, that's what I go back to though is when a deer pees in the woods. Oh, the story about the noise. Yeah. Yeah. There's some kind of leaf liquid noise there. So all day sit and it's like lunchtime. So I've reached in for an apple.

I take a bite out of an apple. And just as I do that, I see something off to my left. I'm in some thick bedding cover, and there's a buck like 20 yards away. It would have been like a kind of wet-ish day. Had already been there. He had been walking through and just kind of come into an opening. And I'm like mid-bite of my apple. Jeez, there's a deer right there.

So I'm thinking he saw me, but he didn't. So I watch him. He just is kind of fiddling around it was like a bunch of down maple tree leaves i remember seeing there and so he was there for like 10 minutes 11 minutes 12 minutes and i'm watching him and he's just fiddling around and he won't leave and now he's at like 12 yards 11 yards and this whole time i'm i have to pee i gotta pee i gotta pee i gotta pee in'm like, the stupid buck won't get out of here. I got to pee. And I'm like, you know what? Let's see what happens. So I just took a pee off the tree while watching a buck 12 yards away.

See what happened. And, and I went in the leaves. I couldn't reach a tree it couldn't reach a tree couldn't reach a tree trunk so i was peeing off the stand into leaves with about 12 yards away and he he looked up looked in the area of that sound for like five seconds as i was going and then he just kept hearing it and he's like munching on the leaves or whatever and then just head back down eating his stuff and didn't care one bit i wouldn't recommend that ever i would never i would never recommend doing that you're just starting they've been doing where they have been playing disembodied human voices to animals out in the woods to get their response they don't like it i believe that they don't like it so they have cameras set up so they know when they're there and they can play a disembodied human voice and no what's the message though well they've been

using the most abrasive voices they can find so they use pundits from the extreme left and extreme right as part of the study well nobody's gonna like that i think they're using like rachel maddow and bill o'reilly or something like that like the voices that they have like these sort of like voices that tend to make some segment of the population extremely angry it's a prolonged debate over three months yeah they're not controlling for enough variables here i remember that being a part of it they're they're they're uh the part i variables here. I remember that being a part of it. The part I read, they were looking at lions, how mountain lions would respond to human voice,

and they're not big fans. All right. Mark Kenyon, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. It's been fun. Callahan again. Again. Thank you.

No, that was awesome, Mark. Thanks. And you can find these guys. You can find Callahan at olcal406. Right? That is correct. O-L-C-A-L-406. Never thought it'd go on this long. That's your Instagram handle.

Yeah. Olcal406. And Mark Kenney, Wired2Hunt. You run under Wired2Hunt? Across it all. Yep. Instagram, Kenny, Wired2Hunt. You run under Wired2Hunt? Across it all. Yep. Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. All right.

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