The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 104: Turks!

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Las Vegas, NV- Steven Rinella talks with Becky Humphries of the National Wild Turkey Federation, First Lite's Ryan Callaghan, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: The National Wild Turkey Federation; defining turkey habitat; the Lacey Act of 1900 and playing by the rules; the captive wildlife industry; the re-introduction of wild turkeys to the landscape; America's Big 6 habitats; timber sales as conservation stewardship; threats to habitat; making painful compromises; hunters and hunter's dollars and how they impact habitat work; why are dudes with hunting shows always hunting turkeys?; 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

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Go farther, stay longer. All right, Becky Humphries, thanks for coming on and talking to us. My pleasure. Can you, in a super quick fashion, take as long as you want. Explain to people what the National Wild Turkey Federation is. And also, you can also throw in there how you are. Is it still fair to say new? I hope so. The new new? I hope so.

The new CEO? I hope so. Yeah. The new CEO? It's less than a year. So, I mean, I started in April. Gotcha. Yeah.

Yeah. So I talk about the, I talk about the NWTF people all the time. Um, and people listen to the show. I've heard about it a fair bit, but just, yeah, give, give sort of you like your standard breakdown. Okay. Well, the National Wild Turkey Federation was formed back in 1973. It was formed to restore the wild turkey and has grown to conserve our hunting heritage.

So we are a nationwide nonprofit conservation organization with volunteers and chapters in every state. And we work real hard on making sure there's really good active habitat management across the country. And also that we are bringing in the next generation of hunter, that we're maintaining that continuity in our hunting public and growing the hunting sport. So for this last 10 years, well, last five years on a 10-year initiative, we've been working on Save the Habitat, Save the Hunt, where we put together some pretty lofty goals of restoring and conserving 4 million acres of habitat, creating a million and a half hunters, and opening up a half million acres to hunting access. Opening up a half million acres to hunting access, so something that's not public access now would become public access. That's right.

According to the goal. Yep, that's correct. access now would become public access. That's right. According to the goal. Yep, that's correct. I want to get into that. But first back, like, are you from Michigan? I am from Michigan. Okay, where? Well, I lived all over the lower peninsula. Spent a lot of time in the UP also, but I still have a home north of Grand Rapids.

Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, I was born in Muskegon County. Yep, so just a little further north than where I am. I went to regular college in Grand Valley, but lived in Grand Rapids for a while. Yeah. Well, it's not very far. My home is north of Lowell, Michigan on the Flat River.

Yeah. And I still have a home there, and I get back there on a regular basis. And I have some of my kids that still live there. And you were, I think in the years that I was traipsing around Michigan, you were involved in Michigan's Department of Natural Resources or the Michigan Fish and Game equivalent, right? I was, I was. I had a 32-year career there. I started off as a field biologist, worked my way up, was Wildlife Division Chief and retired as the Director of both the DNR and DEQ, the

environmental regulation, as well as the natural resources agency. So that's a long journey. It was. When you started out as a field biologist, what was the first thing you were doing? I was managing waterfall areas. I managed Shiawassee, Maple River, and Gratiot-Saginaw in the center part of the state. So I was very much about active management on those managed wetland areas. And Grashett-Saginaw was the headwaters,

you know, to the Saginaw River and also down looking glass into the Grand River. And so it was doing grouse management, timber management on those lands, writing management plans, working with private landowners, setting hunting regulations. And I like challenge. So I worked out of Grand Rapids as a district supervisor, including Muskegon County for 10 years. I had no idea how much you were influencing my life. Yeah, there you go. And so I was out of Grand Rapids off and on for 10 years. They kept pulling me into Lansing, trying to get me to run statewide programs and I kept pushing back out and going out in the field because I really like the connection with the landowners and the sporting public out there. What was the biggest challenge about all that? About working

at the state level? Because we were joking about this last night that you hear somebody like ill-informed criticisms all the time of state agencies. In fact, it's like growing up in Michigan, the only thing you would hear about them was crazy theories and criticisms. Oh, yeah. You've got to get it nonstop, right? Oh, yeah.

The conspiracy theory. When I started, i remember hearing people swear they saw green vans unloading coyotes in southern michigan i mean they would swear up and down that we would drive in at night and unload coyotes yeah that's the kind of stuff we're talking about and you'd be like no you guys you know it's it's these animals are adaptable and they're moving back in just like we're seeing changes and having black bear move down into southern Michigan and more bobcat down there. It's related to habitat change, and animals are adaptable.

They move back in, but people don't want to hear it. If they haven't seen it, they suspect that we have helped create it. Sometimes we have. I mean, the wild turkey is a great example. I worked on live-trapping wild turkey. But were you dumping them out of green vans? No, we weren't dumping them out of green vans. In the middle of the night.

No, they were cardboard boxes. They had National Wild Turkey Federation on the side. And we did them with press. We invited the press out there and we invited the public out to do it. No secrecy whatsoever. No, no. In fact, we tried real hard not to have it be secret. So, you know, but you had that. You had everything from that to overabundance issues. You know, at the time when I was wildlife division chief. You mean getting criticism about overabundance.

Mm-hmm. Where we had, you know, we had deer, you know, throughout Noago County, you know that area. Tremendous pine plantation. But there's not a, you know, there's not anything for deer to eat. And a lot of that, that red pine plantation that used to be in Nuego County, and a deer had to pack a lunch and bring it with them. But with real high deer numbers, and with the prevalence of baiting that was going on there, people could have a little 10-acre track and a red pine plantation, and throw out some

sugar beets and carrots carrots and have a reasonable chance of seeing some deer. And as we had more and more car deer accidents, it was costing insurance companies and people with insurance a lot more money. We started to have disease issues with bovine tuberculosis in the deer herd. We started to bring that population down to what we thought was sustainable on the landscape. And that was tough for folks. Tough that had gotten used to really high deer numbers. When, I don't want to,

I don't want to indulge it, but I just want to know now, because you brought it up and I'm curious about it. People like when people feel that, okay, someone is dumping like predators out. Did you ever get like what, what, what the idea is that they're after? Like what the perceived motivation for it was?

No. I think they just thought it was government trying to mess with their life, to be honest with you. Yeah, it's just an inconvenience. Yeah, an inconvenience. They clearly didn't like those predators and the landscape, and they had to blame somebody for it and not just that they would just drift in on their own that's right

yeah that's right so when you were like when you were with michigan um with the department of natural resources of michigan you were probably aware of national wild turkey federation's oh yeah because you you would have been through all the turkey. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember Dr. James Earl Kinnemer came to Michigan to talk to us about bringing in wild stock from other states. We had populations at that time down in Allegan, up in Baldwin, a few birds up in the Alpena area that came from Pennsylvania game farm stock. And they were, they were a little focused populations. They weren't growing. We hunted them, but they, you know, they're a little focused populations. They weren't growing. We hunted them, but they,

you know, they weren't doing much to be honest with you. Those are the ones that the Baldwin ones are the ones that I remember. And it was that, you know, you could apply for tags. I remember one year, my brother like drew one of those tags and went up with his body and they

kind of messed around and. And never got a bird. Caught some brown trout, never got a bird. That's right brown trout, never got a bird. That's right. But then all of a sudden it was just like, I left the state and moved out west. Then all of a sudden it was just like someone threw the light switch, man. And my dad was hunting turkeys a mile from our house, killing turkeys every year.

And it seemed to happen just like overnight. It did. It happened very quickly. We brought in birds from Iowa and a few other states. We released those in some areas that we thought had really good turkey habitat in it. They took off. They just went gangbusters. And then we would go in and trap some of those birds after they were established and relocate them to other areas and then continue to do that

across historical turkey range in michigan and then started opening it up to turkey hunting and then we continue to do trap and transfer as we opened it up to hunting to get people used to the concept that you don't you know you can hunt them especially you can hunt in the spring where you're hunting those males and um and still restore that population into remaining habitat. You can do it simultaneously. Mm-hmm. How do you, like, when you say identified turkey habitat, how do you guys define turkey

habitat? Well, you know, in the early days, I remember we thought you needed to have much more extensive blocks of wooded habitat because in Michigan, a lot of the pre-settlement observations, you know, as early settlers came in and talked about the abundant turkey populations, it was in the big woods. And I think that really those observations came because in that mixed agricultural land of southern Michigan, people had hunted them out, you know, or poached them out or whatever was going on at the time they weren't regulated. And so because of that, people thought they probably took much more extensive

wooded habitat than they do take. And so when we first started on it, we asked that same question to Dr. James Earl Kinnemer, and his comment was, you know, this looks like habitat where we find birds in the southern United States. Put them out here and try it. And we found that they were highly adaptable, but they did better in some of those areas where you had open glades and you had not real thick young forest.

They would use some of the habitat at times, but where we could open it up. And southern Michigan used to have what we call a lot of oak savanna. It's much like pine savanna that you find in the south where it was a low stocking of oaks and then a lot of grasses and forbs on the forest floor not a lot of like early successional shrubs and heavy cover where a bird can't see or it gets enough daylight you get a lot of insect life you get a lot of variety in there you get those early forbs that come up in the springtime. They love that. And so as we got birds and learned more about what they were using, we actually went into some of the game areas that were really heavily stocked forest management areas.

Heavily stocked, what do you mean? Real dense forests. Okay. So by stock, I mean just a stocking of trees. Yeah, I got you. And we opened some of those up. We thinned them out. We put fire on that landscape where in the spring, usually during the beginning of the growing season, we'd run cool fires, low fires through that forest floor. So it would take out a lot of the old, you know, the snags

and the dead vegetation, put nutrients back in the soil and really increase that grassy forb cover that was on the forest floor. And they loved it. I mean, they just took off. Some of those areas are just prime hunting at this point. Yeah, everything loves it, right? Yeah.

I mean, deer did really well in it. Turkeys have done well in it. I mean, it just is. And even their insects. I mean, we have some of the carna blue and Mitchell's cedar butterflies that are really heavily dependent on lupine nectar sources, and that lupine seed bank was out there. It was just being, because we were not providing enough daylight

and running fire through the system, we really had not reestablished what had been native vegetation there. So it's pretty cool. Kind of a what's good for the bird scenario. Yeah. And to me, there's no more beautiful landscape out there than those savannas. I love big cottonwood savannas. Oh, me too.

And yeah, those big oak savannas where you can see a ways. You can see them. I was going to say, that's a nice part of it. You can really get some visibility. You can see they're very aesthetic. And we've lost a lot of those. So it's been nice that not only in Michigan, but throughout the South, we're restoring a lot of the pine savannas down there and getting those historical longleaf savannas out on the landscape and running fire

through them. And they're very um they're very special places yeah you might be familiar with the crow tan in north carolina yeah my in-laws live not far from there so we go when we're there we go for walks and it's a gorgeous area just gorgeous do you understand the history i'm sure you do of how early on when people were trying to re-establish turkeys they would use domestic birds not domestic birds but they'd use like uh you know wild birds raised in captivity yeah but it wouldn't it wasn't very effective no you breed you know it doesn't take very long in a breeding program that you breed out a lot of the characteristics that make wild birds successful. Meaning paranoia. Yeah, paranoia and flightiness in the pens. Birds that tend to do well in captivity and have the genetic makeup, their calm and behavior and the rest of it,

they just don't do that well in the wild. So what would be the things that would happen when you'd cut them loose? They just wouldn't reproduce. The population, you'd have young, but you just didn't get above that critical threshold where the population was filling the capacity of the landscape. So they'd be there and you'd have them, but they just didn't ever get the kind of brood size you wanted. They didn't have the survival. And they didn't ever expand their range. So initially they did. They're so lazy. Yeah. I guess I wouldn't call it lazy.

They just were not competitive against other species that were out there. And so as a result of that, they got picked off by a number of predators. They just didn't have the survival capability bred in them to really do really well. So how did the breakthrough play out where people realized if you go and just capture wild birds and then very quickly move them to a location that those birds do good well there's a there was technology that made that available and the pure wild birds if you try and live trap wild birds, using a drop net or some of the other early methods of trapping, you're unsuccessful. I mean, your ability to catch those birds is, they are so wary.

Trying to have them walk under a net is impossible. You know? Oh, is that right? Oh, it's just really, really tough. They just spend a net six feet off. Oh, yeah, yeah. They're just like, no way. And so.

They recognize it's being not right. So as we got to the point where we started using some rocket net techniques early on to capture, actually, they were first developed to do some of the waterfall trapping. And when we brought that on land, concealed the net, used rocket net propellants to shoot a net over top of those birds, that's when we were able to start going in and really capturing some of those pure wild stock that were still found in remnant populations throughout the southeastern and central part of the United States. And so that technology allowed us then to go in and capture those birds and begin that relocation program. Before that, I mean, you couldn't get enough birds captured to really jumpstart those

populations and then move them around. So that's what really kicked it into high gear, bringing the turkey back. That's right. And so, and we had to train all of our folks, you know, on how to use those explosive devices. We had to get, you know, certified. We had to have placards. In the early days, we were doing it all, you know all unregulated. There really weren't regulations for wildlife biologists to use explosives and the rest of it. Like anything in society, after you do it for a while, we have more and more regulations. So now how we store those explosives, how we carry them on placard vehicles, getting people certified, all the rest of it is part of the daily life of a wildlife biologist. It was kind of the Wild West at first. Well, yep, it was.

Or the good old days. The good old days. I mean, it wasn't, you were pretty careful with it. I mean, when you're dealing with explosives like that, you've got to be pretty careful, and you want to work with people that were also careful, so that as you're setting up those nets, that you're not inadvertently in front of that net,

because those nets have weights on the front of them and that's what they shoot that weight out and you can i mean you can hurt somebody pretty badly or kill them if they're out front of it and you don't want to be around anybody had an itchy trigger finger because you get a few birds in under the net you're waiting for the rest of the flock to come in if you set it off too soon or too late you're going to have an empty net or one or two birds underneath of it so is there like pretty high mortality

on the birds when you're shooting the rocket nets not if you do it right I mean occasionally you'll have some mortality but typically it's when a bird picks up and tries to fly and the net the front of it the weight catches it most of the time if you can time it right and those birds are in there and you've baited long enough, I mean, typically we do the trapping

in the winter months when those birds are pretty stressed. We put out bait. We get them to the point where they're comfortable coming into bait and they start to relax a little bit and then go ahead and trap them but if you get itchy or you know a little trigger itchy or a little um hurried in the whole proposition you're most likely going to be unsuccessful or not as successful as you would have liked so when they when you fire that thing what's a good catch like how what like what's it like it depends on how many birds you have in there um you know there there are times that you might just get four or five birds.

There are other times you might get, um, 15, 16 birds in there. Um, rarely do you get more than two dozen birds in there, but you know, a dozen or less, um, is more typical. And so it's about where those birds are. They typically, um, it depends on parts of the country too. In some areas, birds really flock up in bigger groups. In other places, you don't get big flocks in the winter months, really. You can tailor this to experiences you had in Michigan or wherever else that makes sense. You kind of know the timeline.

But if you go into an area that has no turkey so so when when the national turkey federation was involved in in um in bringing birds into new locations where there were no turkeys on the ground at all and you bring in a population and establish a population what's the timeline before you can start tapping that population to expand in other directions we usually by the second year we were in there, we were trapping a few birds out of it. And some of those areas, depending on how, in the early years, I'm trying to remember how many years it was before we opened up hunting, but really it was within the first five years.

That you could be hunting within five years? Yeah, it was pretty amazing. But we had pretty extensive trapping going on to relocate, try and fill all the available habitat. We continued to bring in some additional birds from out of state. So we were doing pretty extensive management with that. And right alongside it, at that time, we grew the sport of turkey hunting too. I mean, there were always a few folks that went because we had turkeys in Michigan, they would go hunting. But we didn't have anywhere near the number of turkey hunters at that point in time as we do today.

The turkey hunting is one of the entry points for hunters in many parts of the country, including Michigan. Deer and turkey are the two entry points where it used to be small game. Through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was usually pheasant hunting, squirrel, and rabbit. Now it's moved over to deer and turkey are the points of entry. Yeah. I feel like the turkey, even though it's a spring activity, I feel like it's siphoned off a lot of small game interest somehow. Like traditional small game. I feel like growing up pre-turkey, there was so much squirrel and rabbit hunting.

But then the deer hunting just got better and better and better and better too. So all of a sudden these big things like turkeys are around everywhere. Deer hunting got really good. I think it was also the demographic changes. We're now three generations off the farm or ranch. And I think people that lived on the farm did small game hunting on a more regular activity. They'd go out back to the woodlot and kill a few squirrel and use it for food. They go rabbit hunting through the winter months and use it for food. And now people have to make it, most

people do not live on the land where they hunt. And so you have to be pretty directed. And also with their time involved with it, they tend to go out for the big seasons and shorter windows of time. And with it, I think there has been a decline in small game hunting, which is too bad because I think it still is a wonderful way. I think turkey hunting is a wonderful way to start hunting. But I also think small game hunting is an awesome way to start. Yeah, I found that turkey hunting is a great way to introduce people oh yeah it's because it's just like fun well it's fun and you can you know you can sit right behind them or right near them um it's it doesn't require them trying to wing shoot

a bird you know while they're walking through cover and the rest of it so trying to get that coordination together and some of the skill sets as as early shooters do, is nice for it. There's some anticipation, which I think is absolutely awesome. I mean, we've all been there where you're calling a bird and you can hear it coming in and you're waiting and waiting. And by the time that bird comes in, your heart's pounding between your ears and you're so excited to have it come in. And I think that hooks people. Yeah, being out, it's all warm. Oh, it's wonderful. You're covered excited, you know, to have it come in. And I think that hooks people. Yeah. Being out, it's all warm. Oh, it's wonderful.

Covered in ticks. Yeah, that's not the fun part of it, but. I got two questions. One, I just want to lay out there because I don't want to forget it. And the other one, it's going to take a little bit of time. But so I'm saying both now because I'm afraid I'm going to forget it. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Now I remember the other one. Someone once told me. I want to check if this is true to your understanding. Someone once told me they're talking about just like the attrition of turkeys right and they're saying that that if a turkey lays eggs on the ground right 75 of the eggs will 75 of the eggs that hit the ground roughly 75

never hatch of the eggs that hit the ground are they talking about all their predation and everything else predation and everything else and they they're kind of like, and then they extended out and they said, of the ones that hatch, this is a turkey biologist told me this, of the ones that hatch, about 75% won't make it to their first year. Well, that second figure is definitely true. The first figure, we do have a lot of nest mortality and the rest of it. You have young birds that are not putting their nests in the best locations sometimes, and you're a marginal habitat. I'd have to look at the overall figures.

That's probably a little high, but not too far off. But they'll drop multiple rounds of eggs, though. Yeah, they will. If they're unsuccessful, they'll go back in and re-nest. And so here's another question. I'm going to get on to of the sort of the work the foundation does. But when you, if you, that female only lays one egg a day. Mm-hmm. Correct?

Mm-hmm. So does she need to breed for every egg? No. She can hold some of that breeding in. Okay. So she can be inseminated by one male, but then lay a dozen eggs 12 days in a row. That's right.

But she's going to probably breed within that time period also. Oh, I see. Okay. So she'll continue to go out and court a male, but then keep laying these eggs. And then if this is, I think this is right. She'll get the whole nest down

and she doesn't incubate until all the eggs are down. That's right. Because she wants to synchronize when they hatch. That's correct. And those eggs remain viable, just like they do for chickens, anybody that raises chickens and stuff. So the first egg that hits the ground is sitting there potentially 10, 11 days. That's right, before she starts incubating. Before she sits it.

And it can be dropping down below freezing at night. Yeah, I mean, but still it remains viable. Most of the times at that point it's not below freezing. And those eggs are covered and they usually have insulation underneath them. But they are vulnerable because she's out there doing breeding and feeding and all the rest of it. She's not on that nest really incubating those eggs. So there's higher risk. That's why you're seeing that loss.

I one time was calling a turkey and had a black bear sneak up right behind me to where I could hear it exhale. And I'm convinced that that bear hunts bird nests. Could have. Yeah. Like everything has to eat the eggs. They're tasty. Everything from snakes on to.

Yeah. It's not a kind life. Being a turkey is not a kind life. I'm having a hard time kind of reading Becky's demeanor right now. Like when she's, when you brought up the black bear, kind of, she kind of changed a little bit. Like. Have you had a lot of those guys?

Have you had weird animals show up when you're calling turkeys? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I've called in bears, bobcats, and coyotes. Yeah. This past season I was out with my grandson and we called in two coyotes and I thought he was going to, he was just so excited. I could see him just kind of start to quiver, you know, because those coyotes snuck up on the decoy.

Yeah. And we're sure that it was a turkey. And one of them pounced right by it. And then you could see the reaction like, oh, my goodness, that's not really a turkey. Yeah. And the coyote jumped up and then went down and then kicked up this young buck that was bedded down even further. And it was just one of these, you know, it was just kind of a mess. It was a circus out there.

And I started laughing because it was, you know, you couldn't help but laugh at all this activity going on with these animals that were just being spooked and tricked, I guess the best way to describe it. So it's fun though. But when you, I did change my behavior. When you said you could feel the the bear exhale or hear it hear it exhale that's when i became aware that's when i was like okay i've been there where you have an animal like right behind you like if you turn around you could practically hit it and it's like you know sometimes it's amazing to me when you're

out hunting how some things just crash through the woods and then they vanish you know we always had property in northern michigan at elk were one of those species where there were times when it sounded like a flight freight train coming through the woods and then the next thing you know that animal's gone and you never heard it go you didn't see it go and it's like oh my goodness yeah they turn it on and off yeah yeah when they want to go they can make more noise than you'd ever be able to make and then they can be quieter than you that when they want to go. They can make more noise than you'd ever be able to make, and then they can be quieter than you'd ever be able to be quiet. That's right.

You can check my facts on this, too, but I think this is correct. That at the time of European contact, there were turkeys in maybe 39 states. That's about right. And that shrunk. A lot of states lost them outright. They did. So when groups, so state agencies are just focused on their own state,

but eventually the National Wild Turkey Foundation comes in and they're going to kind of like oversee and implement these reintroduction efforts. Yeah, we coordinated it. And it is federation, not foundation. Oh, okay. So that's all right. So, and that's why we have these chapters in all the states, but we really coordinated that.

The states were, one, they needed, we stepped in and helped broker deals so that states would give up their birds to start populations in other states. And then it came with the expectation, for instance, in Michigan, we took birds from Missouri and Iowa and other states, and then when we restored our populations, we live-trapped birds and moved them to other states. So we helped broker those deals. And under the Lacey Act, you cannot pay money for wildlife,

for live wildlife between the states. So all kinds of deals were brokered. Was that why it's done like that? Why the barter, the sort of barter system came about? Yeah, we wanted to stay within the federal law system and yet provide that equity so that states could help barter various wildlife species. So, I mean, in my tenure, we wound up trading otters.

We wound up trading elk at times, rough grouse that we trapped for some of the other states, turkeys, pheasants. We had Szechuan pheasants we brought over from China. We trapped those. So the Turkey Federation helped also become the bartering agent between the states where we would help allow that trade system to go on and make sure that states didn't get themselves in trouble

with federal law in terms of farming. Can you explain the Lacey Act? That comes up a lot when it comes to wildlife because it winds up being the tool you often use to really go after hardcore poachers and wildlife traffickers. Yeah, the Lacey Act was really the act that was put in place that shut down market hunting. Up until that time, states wound up passing individual state laws

that precluded market hunting. But what would happen is they would move that product right across the state lines, and then they'd sneak it out. And then because of that, they couldn't catch them in another state. So for instance, to use Michigan again as an example, at one time they'd take saddles of venison. During the lumbering era, they'd go out and they'd shoot deer and take those saddles of venison down.

It's in the saddles of venison. And they'd move it across and take it down to Chicago to feed people in the restaurants down there. And they might be taking more than the limit. They might be taking them out of season, whatever the market hunters were doing in that particular area. Or maybe it was just it was closed altogether. They would ship them out. And once they got across that state line, there was nothing that could be done about it.

So the Lacey Act was a federal act that made it illegal to move that if it was against the law in that state it made it legal illegal if you moved it across state lines also so it really interconnected the state authorities through federal authority because then a federal enforcement agency would come after you that's right but it's funny when like the motivation of that right is to curtail the eradication of American wildlife. Yep. But then to later have it be a hindrance to wildlife recovery by prohibiting someone from buying turkeys from someone who had more than they needed. Well, it really goes to the North American model of wildlife conservation.

In our country, wildlife belong to the people. So it's about a premise that those species are not private commodity that you can move and breed. Now, we have some private wildlife and some of its native wildlife, but it's still pretty contentious. It's about keeping that pure wild stock so that it belongs to the people and it's treated as belonging to the people and that we are not putting a price on it and selling it between states or then can move into private ownership, that it stays a wildlife resource. So that's why the barter system was put in place and like i say

it you know it's about playing by the rules also yeah yeah and it's not like i'm sure that anyone who ever wanted to get turkeys probably found a way to get turkeys they probably did i mean that was one of our biggest problems when we were restoring the wild turkey in michigan is um people wanted to even sporting clubs really want to jump on the bandwagon and help out. And they'd go out and buy bronze broad-breasted turkeys that looked much like the eastern wild turkey. They'd raise them and they'd put them out there. Oh, yeah.

And they'd be like, no, no, no, no. We're going to all this effort to bring in wild stock. We want great genetic variability with these animals. We want animals that are truly wild. Do not dilute the genetic pool by throwing out domesticated birds that look like wild birds that'll interbreed with wild birds. And it's going to reduce the genetic viability of that wild stock out there. I got to ask you way far afield question. You don't need to answer. Maybe you can tell me how I'd find the answer. Since you now have, I hesitate to even ask.

No, I'll ask. So since you now have deer, like whitetail deer that are privately owned, how was the initial moment of someone taking possession of one of those deer? However it began, how was the initial moment of that legal some states actually sold deer to private individuals so that's how some of that because i always look back like to the day one eden moment someone had to have taken a wild deer and made it but there used to be a mechanism in place for that to happen yeah and and um my state unfortunately michigan was one of those states that did that.

We used to, individuals that wanted to fence their property to have a captive herd, which is still legal in Michigan, we would require them to try and drive those deer off the property. But if they were unsuccessful and they still had deer on the property, we would have them write a check for those remaining deer that they were fencing. You're kidding me, really? Wow. Yep. And the intent was we didn't want them fencing the state's deer with no restitution to the hunters of the state, the public of the state for those animals.

So, I mean, it was the best of intentions, but it essentially took pure wild stock and made it under private ownership. And I mean, the captive industry has grown considerably. And they're considered livestock under federal authority and many state authorities now. Do you remember what a deer was worth? I don't. I do know after we had done it for a while, they were about $1,000 a piece. But we tried to make it comparable to what restitution would be for somebody that took a deer out of state or out of season. Gotcha.

Now, back up to the gradual recovery of the bird. Once it got to be that, for instance, now earlier I said so so you agree that there sounds a reasonable number that there are wild turkeys maybe about 39 states um the ones that didn't would be like the sort of the north the states in the northwest quadrant of the country primarily yeah in the western part of the united states but the southwest had birds they They had some birds. Really, the holdout for a lot of the populations, though, were in really remote areas. So in the eastern United States, you wound up having places in Tennessee, Kentucky, and some of those really in Appalachian, some of those hilly areas, where you had some really good remnant populations where those birds held out. And those really became the breeding stock that moved out for the eastern birds throughout. Same thing is true of some of the western populations. In some of those really remote areas, you wound up having birds where you had pretty isolated populations

because there was vast areas of not good habitat and really just no birds. So they kept pretty isolated. So what was, like, how did the thinking go to be that reintroduction of turkeys would phase into introduction? That turkeys would be brought into states where they historically had no turkeys. So Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, all these places now have thriving turkey populations. That had to have been a very different conversation

than what reintroduction was. Yeah, but don't forget, along with this, there was quite a bit of research done to look at what had happened just because we didn't see it in early documentation. If you look back through in some of the aboriginal populations, the native populations that were there, we found turkeys in many areas that folks didn't find it when European settlers were here, but they were there prior to that. Whether they were extirpated because of humans or whether it was habitatdens and whatever, like archaeological sites or just in general, that didn't match up necessarily to where people documented seeing the actual live birds. That's right.

Can I ask just what is the ability for a wild turkey to travel and establish a new group? Well, I mean, it depends on the habitat, to be honest with you. It varies greatly. So bird, in terms of bird movements and all the rest of it, you know, it might just be depending on how much that flock is expanding. If it's an expansion for relocation, those birds might just move a few miles. In other areas, they might move, you know, eight or ten miles. And do they disperse because of pecking order situation?

Primarily breeding habitat, nesting habitat of those hens. To really get really good nesting habitat and having nesting territory and a breeding territory there, just about all your wildlife will set up some territories and that really goes to expansion. And a lot of times it's the younger hens that put their territory immediately adjoining where their hen, their mom's territory was. And you see the same thing with deer. So with that, you see this expansion that goes out with the female part of the population expanding out through that breeding. The males will travel further because they want to breed where there are females. Okay.

And they're much more mobile. What's the furthest you've ever seen a female and or a male turkey travel from where you know its home range was? Well, at the time we were doing a lot of trap and transfer, we were not doing a lot of transmitter work. Okay. It just was not one of those studies that we were investing our time and efforts in trying to reestablish and get those populations. So I can't give you good information like I can some of the other species

on the maximum amount of travel. Now we have collared birds down on our facility down in Edgefield, South Carolina, our headquarters facility, and we've done movement patterns and we know daily travels are, you know, several miles as far as how those birds move. We've actually put transmitters on birds and we've put transmitters on hunters. And then we've watched the dance, as we call it. And it's pretty amazing, you know, where hunters will go into a piece of property and they either don't think there are turkeys there or they don't see turkeys. And there's actually pretty good turkey populations. And those birds are masters at avoiding human detection. And you can see it in real time as the hunter comes in. And most hunters hunt fairly close to the roads.

That's the other part of it is you get a chance to look at transmitter activity of hunters, you realize that sometimes some of us that get back in are the anomaly. A lot of folks are within a couple hundred yards of a roadway and they never get back in very far. And those birds just move back into more remote areas. And they, they dance as the hunter moves in, bird moves further back in. And as they come back out, it comes back out. Yep. Avoidance technique.

That is so cool. All without the person knowing what's going on. That's right. They'll come back. They might hear a bird and stuff, but they don't see a bird. Yeah. Have you identified any other tactics that they use to avoid that or create that space other than just sort of being bumped farther?

Help us kill them, Becky. Well, I think we've all seen this. I mean, birds will go quiet if there's a lot of activity. I mean, we've all been there towards the end of the season where birds are getting pushed pretty hard in areas, and they just aren't calling. They'll come in. You might get a gobble off the roost.

You might, you know, if a bird gets kicked up, you might have, you know, a hen that pulls back in. After they've nested, you'll hear some activity, but they'll go silent on you and there are times when you wonder if they're really turkeys in the woods and then the next thing you know you you know you kick up a bird when you're walking back out to the vehicle and it's like oh my god you know I sat there all morning and I just wasn't able to pull anything in and if they're moving around I didn't see it so they're i mean that they have incredible vision and they detect us and they know what's going on they they live in that territory

and they know what's what's happening i feel that people give them a lot of credit uh kind of like too much credit probably not enough credit for just how paranoid they are but too much credit for that they sort of build up a database of like experiences that they're drawing on. Oh, I think that's true. I think birds have, um, well, they're feathered reptiles, you know, they're, they're not, um, highly advanced. Um, so I agree with you. There's not the reasoning, but they have really strong instincts, and you can see it in some of their behavior. And, you know, when they key in on a bird that's fanning, you know, when a male is displaying and another male comes in,

it's an emotional response that that bird is really keyed in on. And even if there's danger in that area area they're going to key in on that and the same is true of other instincts that those animals have those birds have so i agree it's not a reasoning process it's it's instinctual yeah and the ones that are uh most wary are the ones that as they get older there's like fewer and fewer and you're dealing with you're like trying to call in the one who's presumably like the least gullible yeah or the most wary because the ones that didn't have that that that constant sense of you know impending doom they get killed off that's true you don't agree with that no i agree i agree i think and you'll see that both throughout the

season but you'll also see it in terms of populations hunted populations versus non-hunted populations in terms of weariness what what happens um like like how do you view this view it sort of culturally when you wind up with these like problem turkey populations in suburban and urban areas. Do you guys look at that as being like something that you need to be involved in or does that wind up being just like a municipal issue? It usually belongs to the state and the municipality to deal with. You wind up having, Turkey Federation doesn't step in and try and help some of those problem situations.

We really do not have the authority to handle live birds. That belongs to the state agency. So we'll assist where we can, but when you get into nuisance situations, you usually have human behaviors going on there that are prompting it. One, you might have domestic birds that are out running around and people think they're wild birds and they're not there oh that happens oh

that happens yeah you'll have that the other thing is you might have birds that just get very habituated people wind up having you know food out at their bird feeders and they wind up living in a subdivision feeding off that or even a more urban environment they get territorial at certain times and cause problems with it they'll roost over people's vehicles I mean they're it's a situation usually of overabundance of those problem birds and in areas where they're not hunted. So you're not actively out there trying to sort of help smooth those relationships or kind of like mitigate that harm? That's not something that we typically do in the National Wild Turkey Federation, no.

It seems like you hear more and more stories about places like that. Yeah, well, I think with social media, we see some of those more frequently because they get picked up. I got you. They've been there. And whenever the public's attention is on wild turkeys, then you'll tend to hear more of those stories where there are problems with it also. Got you. Got you.

A fun example, my buddy Zach, another Michigander, he's on the list for depredation tags in Idaho and got a call just three weeks ago. Um, go up to Chalice, Idaho, which that unit is actually a draw unit. If you want to hunt turkeys and, uh, for a turkey and a depredation turkey hunt, a depredation turkey hunt. And, um, I can't remember who, remember who what the title of a is of the person that called him um but i want to be real clear with you you're going to show up to this lady's house and you're going to be shooting a turkey underneath her swing set it was a legit wild turkey though he just like taken He just took up residence in her yard. Yes.

Yeah. Is it a fall hunt there? I don't even know if Idaho has a fall. Yes, Idaho does have fall hunts. This was basically like a nuisance bird. Yeah, okay. Yes. And every state treats it a little differently.

Up in my home state, we had a fall hunt in areas where we had some of those depredation problems or overabundance issues. We would have a fall hunt. You could take either sex. The spring hunt was male only, and it was a limited entry system. Can you talk about what is the – because growing up in Montana, you could kill hens. In the fall with rifles? Yes. Now, how does that affect your population?

Well, usually it's done to reduce the population. So your fall hunts are put in places, they're usually just in areas where you want to maintain a population level that you think is a growing population. You want to contain that population. So you put in an either sex hunt to do just that. So it just usually falls in geographic areas where you tend to have increasing populations where you really don't feel like you have any more room or social tolerance to increase the population even higher. So that's a lowering device. Mm-hmm.

Because spring hunts for males only probably doesn't have any real, I mean, you're kind of like mechanically removing some birds, but it probably doesn't have a real wholesale impact. No, that's why we could have hunting seasons, spring hunting seasons, as we are trapping and moving birds and growing that population. Because all those females are still going to live, and they're still going to get fertilized. That's right. They're going to get bred and that's usually not the limitation. I'd like you to talk about

the big six habitats. This is something that you do a better job explaining you do a better job explaining to listeners than i would but this is a creation this this is an nwtf notion right and then it is it is although it was done in concert with our partners as state and federal agency partners um we we realized we really in order to be effective on the landscape we needed to really focus our our habitat work and our conservation work on those habitats that were going to make the biggest difference to the wild

turkey across the country. So we sat down with our state and federal agency partners and we mapped out where we thought those most important habitats were in each of the states. And then we built those into focal landscapes and we combined them under America's Big Six. And America's Big Six is really just a combination of those focal landscapes over six broad areas of the country where we thought they had commonality. Commonality in some of the issues that we're facing those landscapes. It might be a lack of forest management. It might be riparian zones where you have invasive species, salt cedar they're moving in in the southwestern United States. It might be a lack of early successional habitat up in the northeastern part of the country. But we group those as America's

big six. Which I feel like is confusing because people know the African big five. part of the country, but we grouped those as America's Big Six. Which I feel like is confusing because people know the African Big Five. That's true. That's true. Although quite often we're not dealing with the same hunter out there, but we did name it America's Big Six because we really wanted to try and tie people to that landscape and some of the issues that we were seeing on that landscape so that as we bring in our donors and our members to raise money around helping us fund really good restoration and active management on that landscape they would know why we were doing it so for instance um can you walk us through the six i can we have we We have America's colonial forest that is up in the northeastern United States.

In the Great Lakes region in upper Midwest, we have America's crossroads. We have America's mid-south rebirth, which are really down in Appalachia and kind of that oak, that southern Appalachian oak habitat that gets into it. We have American's Piney Woods, southern Piney Woods, which really goes on the historic longleaf that went along the coastal zones and all the rest of it. How many is that, four? We have America's Big or Great Open Spaces. We played with these names so much for great open spaces.

It goes to the breadbasket of the United States. And then America's Western Frontier. So that really is a large one that will probably break down. It's over much of the western United States. So those were the focal landscapes. And we tried to tie in some of the cultural parts of those parts of the country also into the names so that people really resonated. So when you talk about America's colonial forest, they really think about that forest land that was found up in the upper New England states. It was there during

colonial times. You know, we have, at one time we supported a huge lumber era up in that area, and we went through having tremendous pulp mills and lumbering that took place and real active forest management. We've lost a lot of that in that part of the country these days. Lost to what? Well, we've lost it in the fact that we don't have the mills up there to cut the timber anymore. So we don't have as much open management or active management. And really our real critical feature are young forests. A lot of that area where we used to have tremendous grouse and woodcock populations has really declined.

And it hurts areas where turkeys would go into those early successional areas. You know, those are great areas for brood cover to go in and feed. And we just don't have much of that right now. So in a case like that, I think that's hard for people to understand, people who look at this whole thing from the outside, would be the idea that forest management, which sometimes serves as a euphemism for logging, the logging was in those areas beneficial to wildlife. It was. I mean, it created tremendous early successional habitat

across a lot of that area. And a lot of the species that we like to hunt live in those early successional forests, those young forests. And we're just really recreating through logging what had occurred through natural, you know, you had wind throw. In the Great Lakes, we have wind shear and wind throw

that comes in and where the wind races across the Great Lakes. And you can actually see it on satellite imagery where it'll blow down big swaths of timber up in the upper peninsula and the northern part of the lower peninsula along the shoreline. Well, that wind throw exposes root mass and all the rest of it. You have, where you have aspen or other species, that's where you'll get sunlight coming into the forest floor. You'll have disruption of that soil type, and that'll create that young forest coming back in.

And then you also had the issue that we've largely kind of gotten rid of in a lot of parts of the country is you had wildfire. That's right. You had wildfire that moved in and would, you know, it would kill off trees. It wasn't, they weren't cool fires that ran to just a forest floor. They would actually top out, crown out, and those fires would race across parts of the state. And so with that, you wind up having that forest set back and start as a young forest again

and grow up older and older and older until you had another disturbance in place. So it would give you a mixed habitat. Yep. And you'd find that, I mean, we'd also see it with beaver ponds along river systems where they would, you know, they'll go in and cut down aspen, dam up a stream, kill off that timber, maybe back through an upper valley area from that dammed water. And then as that dam winds up blowing out,

then you're going to have that dead timber that has a lot of forest, a lot of light down to what becomes the forest floor again, and it'll create a new young forest there. So let's say you take the colonial forest there, and you look at a system that once existed yet presumably like a wildfire system and other things that would allow you to have like a mixed habitat and then logging um you know we we began like fire suppression for human safety reasons and whatever but logging still drove that now you can't be proposing like i don't imagine the solution is that we would somehow get the logging industry back up and running.

What would be a plausible solution? Well, in some of those areas, we still do have remnant populations of a logging industry in those areas. But it's not as easy to get the timber cut as it once was. The Turkey Federation is actually the largest partner of the U.S. Forest Service to come in and do stewardship contracting, which is a tool where we can come in, we can actually buy out a timber sale that they can't seem to market or sell otherwise, use the proceeds of that sale then to resolve whatever issue needs to be done on the land for the Forest Service. So,

for instance, maybe there's an invasive species there. We'll cut the timber that needs to be cut as far as the Forest Management Plan, and the Forest Service still does all the forest planning, all the NEPA, the Environmental Compliance Review. Then we'll come in and we'll cut that, do that forest treatment as far as the cutting. We'll apply the proceeds to remove the invasive species, close off the roads, seed them down, make them walking trails so that people can access it, but not have it be all torn up that causes soil erosion. And then move into another forest stewardship contractual arrangement. And because of that, I mean, Turkey Federation is a pretty big nonprofit, but to give you an idea, we do so much work. We're usually one of the top 10 timber buyers in the country for the U.S. Forest Service. Is that right?

Yeah. So I'll tell you how much we really do across the landscape with that. And then we partner with a lot of state agencies also to make sure that we have helped them get really good active forest management, as well as other habitat management on the landscape that they need to get done. So over years, the model of conservation work being done strictly by agencies has broadened out and we've been able to bring in hunters and through their membership dollars and our fundraising efforts and donor dollars, we can use that money and make agency money go much further in order to get some of that habitat management on the ground. Walk us through another one of the six habitat types.

Sort of like a challenge and solution situation in another one. I'll do two. You know, I talked about the Midwest. We're seeing tremendous stress on oak. I mean, we've had a lot of mass-producing trees, and we know mass-producing trees are prime wildlife food. I mean, acorns or hickory nuts or chestnuts, when we had those, you know, they provide a lot of food energy to a wealth of wildlife species out there.

And we lost our chestnuts. And we have lost. To disease. To disease. And now we're seeing some real problems with oak, with oak wilt disease and a number of other diseases. And also our oak populations, because of the way we cleared our forest during the logging era and then the hardwood regeneration that came up, we are not seeing the kind of oak regeneration that we had seen 50 years ago. So our forests are converting over to beach maple

and some other forest types that are more mature but not as abundant as far as mass crop. So in those areas, we are going in and working with land managers to make sure that we have really good regeneration of some of those mass crop species that are so important to the Midwestern part of the country. Another area would be down in Oklahoma and parts of Texas where we have river systems, riverine systems where salt cedar has moved in and grown up along those river corridors. It sucks up the moisture, it draws down the water table, but it, you know, it's really, really thick. It's not used by a lot of native wildlife and it really changes the hydrology of that system. So in those situations, we're going in and manually and

using mechanical equipment, removing that salt cedar, getting it cleared out of there so that we can get cottonwoods and some of the trees that are much more, well, they're native to that area, but they don't have the negative impacts on hydrology. And they're really also important for roost trees for wild turkeys and those habitat types. But I'm sure you can always go and tie all this to turkeys, but it winds up going way beyond turkeys. Oh, way beyond, way beyond. It's a whole system out there. And we try and focus on the habitats that we think are the most important for turkeys,

but it has huge benefits when you look at some of the other species. So in the East United States, the golden wing warbler is a species that uses those young forests. As we do a lot of work on young forests to benefit turkeys, the golden-winged warbler has been the real recipient of a lot of that benefit. In the southern piney woods, you know, the gopher tortoise and indigo snakes and, you know, the woodpeckers that thrive in those environments or other beneficiaries that might be there. In the Midwest, you might have deer populations that are really beneficial

and bear populations on those mass trees where they use that as a tremendous food source and really thrive in those types of environments. So it does. It benefits a lot more than the wild turkey. So how do you wind up explaining that to people? Because I think they look at the name of the organization, they look at the work, right? And I think that they probably not really understand sort of the broader magnitude of the kind of habitat work you're engaged in. Well, I think it's a constant challenge for us to make sure people realize how much great work we really do and all the benefits of it.

We came together and formed over the restoration of the wild turkey. But today, it's about save the habitat, save the hunt. And it's about making sure that we're not only conserving the wild turkey and the host of other species that live in those habitat types, but also that we're passing on the hunting heritage to the next generation so that we have folks that go out and use and recreate and enjoy, but also value that resource and really know it and understand it takes change in these habitat systems. You can't let them just grow up continuously and get over-aged. That change is good and that we need to actively manage those to have good habitat for people and good habitat for wildlife.

When we were emailing with some of your team, a figure that came my way was that in this country, we're losing about 6,000 acres of habitat a day. Yep. To what? To any number of things. It can be to urban sprawl and suburban sprawl. It could be to golf courses. In some cases, it can be to industrialized farming, you know, where we're clearing out farm fence rows.

The agricultural community is usually a great partner with us but agriculture today is far more intensive and extensive in some parts of the country than it once was so it's a whole range of things we and all you got to do is go to space and look at pictures at nighttime to see how it has changed across this country and i think that probably is is one of the most visual ways to really think about how much more landscape that we as people are tying up in parking lots and strip malls and the things that we use every day. Yeah, I understand economic growth

and I understand all that. But when I do, when I see someone making a parking lot, I often just think like, that'll never again be habitat. It's tough. It really is tough. It's a painful world to live in. Well, it is. I mean, in Michigan, I've had that house now for 25 years,

and you'll drive by someplace, and I'll hear my daughter say, that's where I shot my first pheasant. And, you know, it was heartbreaking to her when she saw the house that was built there. Now there's a subdivision there. And it's like, oh, my goodness, you know. And she's in her mid-20s now. But it's pretty quickly that it's happening.

It's just tremendous growth that we can still have really good habitat and good wildlife populations for a lot of species in those those suburban environments it's about recognizing that we have to have working landscapes though hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Define that. For me personally, I view it as a working landscape is one where we make room for wildlife within the area that's there. So in other words, we think about ways that we treat our watersheds. In a lot of our urban environments, we've put hardscaping in along riversides, you know, where we have

cement retaining walls, we don't have the soft shorelines, where we, a lot of our sewer systems in Michigan are underground pipe and drain cistern systems, as opposed to putting it up on the surface and having it filtrated through and using it as an actual wetland with surrounding areas for grassy cover and trees. And so it's about thinking about ways that we can incorporate natural features into our landscape to still clean our wastewater, to filtrate that water, to handle our waste, and to make sure that as we put in parking lots and facilities that we're not unnecessarily eliminating all the cover around it. Yeah. The turkey winds up being a good emblem for that, I feel like, because the birds do so well

along sort of the human-wild interface. They do. I mean, in some areas, they really do really well. And the other part of it is it's a bird that people can get out and hunt in some of those suburban, urban, wild interfaces. And that is remarkable that you can go out there and have a tremendous hunt, you know, right with people's homes, not very far away. If we haven't, I know it's hard to put a figure to it, but when the National Wild Turkey Federation was founded, there was maybe a million and a half turkeys.

Yeah. What were early figures? 1.3 million. 1.3 million. There's somewhere around 7 million now. Yeah. Do you feel that we're like, do you feel that we could have a false sense of security about the well-being of the bird right now?

Oh, I think so. You know, we've had a lot of talks about that within the National Wild Turkey Federation. In fact, the organization went through some periods where when we fulfilled our last trap and transfer, I mean, we still do some work with some states in terms of restoring populations and do some trapping. But the question was, what comes next? And then we started to see some decline in bird numbers in some parts of the country.

And we invested in research to better understand that. And then we started looking at some of the habitat changes that were going on and recognized now because we restored the birds, we can't just rest on our laurels. We need to make sure that we maintain those really good habitats that we can out on the landscape and make sure it's there so that we have birds now

and in the future. Yeah, so you don't think it could be taken for granted. That's right, we can't. We absolutely have to make sure that we have birds now and in the future. Yeah, so you don't think it could be taken for granted. That's right. We can't. We absolutely have to make sure that we have great habitat. You do a lot of work with government now, like with government agencies, trying to move legislation or to influence legislation in a way that would be beneficial to habitat that's right um

give me an example of that well um the resilient forest act that's been trying to move through congress now um that's one that really is trying to tackle how we do active forest management in our national forest lands so national forest lands across the country. We have gotten to the point where with the regulation and the processes in place that we were spending the majority of our time and effort doing the planning process, but then we'd have these big forest fires and we'd borrow all the money from management in order to fight the fires, you'd never get the active management. And as a result, then we're cutting less, we're having fuel loads build up, and then we're having even more massive fires.

So we've been working real hard with Congress to try and do some forest reform so that we can do more active management and use that product, that fiber supply off the forest, and then also address the forest fire funding issue because right now the forest service gets past a budget and they have to do both components of it and they've had because of the increasing fires they are staffing up having to staff up and fire suppression staff and and reduce their staff for foresters they're doing active management on the ground, which is compounding the problem.

So it's a really complex problem. And with it, there have been some other components of it, putting in some pilot projects so that we look at ways to do arbitration and partnerships rather than getting into legal battles. There are individuals and groups out there who really don't like timber cutting, and they think it's ruining the forest. And every citizen in this country has the right to challenge some of those decisions and then actually challenge it in through the court system. And we, through the Equal Opportunity Justice Act, then wind up paying through government funds if they're successful in some of their court challenges. Well, when you do that,

sometimes we're spending more money than is really necessary to get good decision-making on what we want on the ground. We strongly support really good comprehensive planning and developing good environmental assessments of those plans. But once the decision is made to cut, then let's go in and cut and get the treatment done let's not spend all of our money bickering about it in court let's let's make sure that we're using the funding that's intended to have to have healthy forests do you find yourself making painful compromises now and then where you just you realize you push something as far as you can get it and you just got to move on yeah i mean that's part of the game with any sort of policy work public policy work is

we live in a democracy and there are people with different views and and members of congress have to represent their constituents and have their respective opinions on it so while we might want to see something maybe we can only get a baby step to get there this year. You take the baby step, you participate in the pilot projects that are out there, you be the good partner to the agencies, and then you come back down the road and try and make the additional changes that you need to get done in the future. So I imagine you probably found a way because you spent, like coming up, you spent so much time in state government and probably dealt with the federal government a long time. You probably, you must develop sort of a way to not sabotage relationships, but still try to get a little bit of what you want out of them.

Well, yeah, I think it's, I think, first of all, it's the philosophy coming into it. I think most of our, if not all our lawmakers run for office because they really want to make a difference in this country. And so it's about sharing your experience and your insights on what can be done to make that difference out there and why we think there are changes that need to be done. And it's about showing them. You know, sometimes I found that you can sit in someone's office and try and explain something and they don't get it. But if you go out on the ground and you point to it and you kick the dirt and then they can see what's really happening, it's about getting out on the ground sometimes

and showing them what we're seeing as we go out and do our work and that the light bulb goes on and the aha moment occurs and they go, okay, I don't agree with the solution, but I think we can come up with another solution that will still achieve this. And then that's where you get compromised and you get the ability to talk through what are work that has gone on and that your organization is involved in and others? How impactful has that been compared to other sources of revenue that would be allocated at the state and federal level to doing similar habitat work? Well, I'd have to say that Hunter's Dollars and the excise tax that it matches is really the lion's share of the money for all the state agencies. And, you know, there are federal agencies that do fine habitat work on our national forests and our wildlife refuges and BLM lands and the rest of it, but the lion's share of the state efforts,

and they are the agency that's responsible for all the native wildlife in their state, except for those that fall under Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Threatened Endangered Species Act, those efforts are all funded through Hunter dollars and through licensed money and the matching excise tax. Can you, when you say excise tax, are you talking like LWCF or Pittman-Robertson, Dingell-Johnson?

I'm talking about Pittman-Robertson, Dingell-Johnson, Wallop-Brow dollars primarily. Okay. Now, there are some other funding sources out there also, but the majority of that comes back to the States in a formula that's based on the land base of that state and the number of licensed hunters individual hunters in that state so for instance in michigan we wound up taking federal pitman robertson dollars and dingle johnson from fishing pitman robertson is a wildlife restoration component of

it so that's for wildlife and the fishery. I just want to interrupt real quick. We've explained this to listeners a handful of times just in case someone hasn't caught it. What we're talking about is that Pittman-Robertson money, when people talk about Pittman-Robertson funds, there's an excise tax on guns and ammunition. So when you go down to buy a firearm, it doesn't matter if it's someone buying a handgun to carry around in their purse for self-defense. Like anything like that winds up being rolled into Pittman-Robertson Fund. There's a 13 or 14% excise tax on that item. So that's what funds the Pittman-Robertson Fund, which was established through the Wildlife Restoration Act back in the 30s.

1937. And then Dingell-Johnson came afterward, and it's a little bit more far-reaching in the items it includes. That's correct. Because Pippin Robertson's very specific to archery, to bows. Guns, ammunition. Guns, ammunition. On fishing, Dingle Johnson, even boat gas.

That's right. So fuel sold at marinas. It's a little bit more, it reaches a little bit broader to try to establish its funds. But those all go into federal funds that are then moved along to states to do wildlife work and habitat work. That's correct. And that forms the backbone of most of the funding for the state agencies. So everything from wildlife research to trap and transfer efforts to habitat habitat management, to funding their biologists or conservation officers. There's some money that goes into hunter safety coursework and ranges out

there. So all of that is funded through those funding sources. There is very little general fund or taxpayer support in most states. Now there are a few states that have earmark funding, Missouri, Arkansas are a few of that have earmark funding, Missouri, Arkansas, a few of those, Minnesota has that, but the majority of other states really do not have taxpayer dollars that support their conservation efforts. Do you find, like, in your dealings with government officials, do you find that people who, that there are people who are coming into government through elected politics who don't have haven't had a lot of exposure to issues around wildlife and habitat and wildlife

management absolutely who are just like who are kind of unaware of the funding structure absolutely and we used to see this michigan had term limits minutes much of the country doesn't does at this point but we're seeing more and more local elected officials that are moving up to being state officials and that money isn't um isn't part of the funding mix you know cities and townships and county level so it isn't until they get at the state level they really realize where the funding is coming from and and there has to be eye-opening for them in a way that would be really satisfying for me. Yeah.

For them to see how this happens. It is. The hard part of it is sometimes they don't recognize some of the protections that are in place. Every state that gets wildlife restoration funds or PR dollars has to have what they call a SENT legislation passed in their state. And that says that that funding source is going to stay with the agency that's charged with managing that wildlife. And it can't go to building bridges or highways. It can't go to pay the general fund shortfall.

So you'll get elected officials that'll come in and they'll see, you know, a couple million bucks that are going into conservation work and times are tight. We're just going to take that money and we're going to use it somewhere else. Well, they put all their federal dollars at risk when they do that. And so it's always an interesting opportunity to educate new legislators on it. And we're really fortunate because the Congressional Sportsman's Caucus is a large caucus. They're forming sportsman's caucuses at the state level around the country. And as we do that, we're finding more and more legislators are becoming informed earlier in their careers and really valuing that and building those partnerships.

And they're bipartisan, bicameral. So you have, you know, in those caucuses, you'll have both people from the House and the Senate, the state level, both Republicans and Democrats. And that's pretty good. Is it, I think it probably is fair to say that the majority of people in this country who enjoy turkey hunting, the majority of them are not NWTF members. That is true. That is true and what would you like to say to those people i'd like to say step it up folks step it up come join us um yeah it's like if you'd like turkey hunting you already got to buy a license anyway like you got to buy a license you got to buy gear you're gonna buy a shotgun it's like just add into the list of stuff you

need to buy you need to get a membership that's. And we'd love to have them come join us because we're doing so much great work. And, you know, the thing is that it's relatively inexpensive. Our membership is $35, but so many of our members give, you know, countless hours of their time. And they'll take new hunters on mentored hunts. They'll wind up doing all kinds of events for individuals who wouldn't normally get a chance to go out and go turkey hunting or learn their hunter safety courses. They'll put that funding towards great habitat projects and working with federal and state agencies to have good habitat out there. It's about piloting new projects to try new things for both habitat and hunting heritage and um and quite

frankly it's a great group of people and so quite often we say that people come because of the mission but they stay because of the people because you form tremendous relationships and that that social network of other people that share your values they enjoy going out doing the same things you do it is a fun group of people to hang with too. Is that the normal pathway for a hunter who's finding his way into the NWTF is just like getting a membership and then kind of staying up to speed on things? Yeah, it could be. I mean, we're finding with our R3 efforts, and R3 stands for recruitment, retention, and reactivation of hunters, we're trying to branch out and go after segments of the population

that might not have exposure to hunting otherwise. Traditionally, a lot of those, what we would call one-and-done programs in the past where we'd take youth out hunting and we'd have a hunting day and the rest of it, we're finding that it really takes more than that one touch. In order for someone to go through the stages and learn how to be an accomplished hunter and be comfortable to go out and do it on their own, they need to have several opportunities to be with other hunters, to learn the skills and techniques, to build the confidence up.

And eventually we want them to be mentors to new hunters, other new hunters out there. And so as we've reached into that, we've tried to be mentors to new hunters, other new hunters out there. And so as we've reached into that, we've tried to reach into markets where we might not have been before. People who might buy their food at a food co-op and be really, really interested in going out and harvesting their own food with a low carbon footprint, close to home, know it's raised in a natural environment. And they want to try hunting, but they didn't in a in a natural environment and they want to try hunting but they didn't grow up in a family that hunted they don't have any friends that hunts hunt and so it's about getting those people to come in and be comfortable um where they don't have that social network around them yeah those are the and i find because we talked to a lot of

those people i find that they feel that this that the barriers to entry are very high. They are. And also, it's the place to go. Because I feel like if you could take any one of those people and give them a 300-acre farm and have exclusive access, they would hunt all the time. Well, that's it. I mean, it's about learning how to get access to that land, learning where there is public land already available for you, finding someone that helps teach them the basic skills to get out there, and then doing it so they feel comfortable and confident that they can do it and they can do it on their own.

That's where I feel that your organization's access work is extremely important. Oh, it really is. Because I think that just from my own findings and communications, I feel it's just like that access part of it. One, be it education about how to learn about what's already available, but also increasing the availability of places for people to go. I don't think you can really overstate the importance of that well it's interesting with some of our learn to hunt programs more and more we're doing a lot of those on public lands and having them camp on public lands so that it's stuff that they can

go out and do the next weekend on their own they can get access to the very same lands they can they can go to that campground and do it It's one of those situations where they don't need to go and go into private lands in a lease situation with a guide. It's one of those situations where it's about taking them out and learning about what resources are available to them. They're actually available to them right now. That's right, that they can go out and recreate and do. That's a good way of looking at it.

Yeah, I never thought about that because my brother-in-law works in Tennessee with the Tennessee Wildlife Federation. And most of their, I think, learn to hunt programs with the kids. They're going to private ranches. They're not ranches, but farms and whatnot. And so, yeah, because once you're out of that program, right, you don't have that access. That's right. You don't have it.

And we're creating unrealistic expectations that they can't go and recreate it later on. The other thing we're doing is trying to do more family-based activities. Okay. With two-income families, on time off on their weekends and the rest of it, a lot of times they want to do things as a family. Where we once might have our WIDO program, our Women in the Outdoors, where it was all women that got together. Now we're doing it where it's women and their children.

Same thing with father and son or father and daughter, but families that can come out, and we're finding where kids want to get out and hunt and the parents don't want to hunt, it's about making sure that the parents enjoy it also and know enough about it that they're comfortable that they can do it as a family activity. So it's changing in terms of, because we've lost a couple generations in getting involved in the out-of-doors.

And if we're going to be successful, we're going to have to reach beyond folks that are just in our family and social circles. Yeah, people who are in just like the natural lineup of the classic father-to-son progression of hunting down. And we found by following back on some of our past programming, a lot of our youth programs were really all of our youth. There were kids that would have gotten involved in hunting otherwise, some exposure. So we're taking far more care to get out there and expose youth and young adults who haven't been exposed before. We have a program, we have several universities down at our headquarters facility. We have learned to hunt curriculum with actually programs that we work with students, for instance, from Clemson University, where you'll have students, some of

them are even in wildlife profession, that have never hunted, that really want to learn how to hunt, but they don't know how to get started in it. So we'll bring them down, we'll give them hunter safety, we'll teach them the fundamentals, we'll get them out on a dove hunt, then we'll go out and do a turkey hunt, we might do a deer hunt in the fall. We'll partner with Ducks Unlimited, try and get them out hunting with those folks or with pheasant and quail forever and get out one of their hunts. But it takes those multiple touches to make them feel comfortable that they know what they're doing and they can partake in hunting down the road. Do you have any final things you want to add that I haven't asked you about that you were dying to you know wedge in there no we have our national convention coming up here in uh mid-february in nashville

tennessee i've been to that and it is it is that's pretty wild yeah it's a great time it's a great time for us to bring in a lot of our volunteers and success celebrate their success and what all they do for the organization and for turkeys and conservation around the country. We bring in a lot of our agency partners. We usually have about 30 people from the U.S. Forest Service there, people from BLM, a lot of the agencies have people. And the Turkey Federation formed a technical advisory committee long before, even before Dr. James Earl Kinnamer was the head conservationist

at the Turkey Federation, where those folks that were the technical experts amongst all the states come together and sit around a table, and they share the latest and greatest in turkey research and talk about the concerns and problems they're having and the opportunities and come together and make recommendations to us as well as helping each other maintain that population and good habitat out there.

And the convention is open to the public. It is open to the public. And what are the dates again? It's February 14th, 15th, 16th through the 18th, right? In Nashville. In Nashville. Yep. Come on in.

And people can wander in off the streets. That's right. We'll have you, we'll sell you a membership. We'll give you entrance to it. There's a great trade show if you are interested in turkey calling, if you're interested in seeing people that make decorative calls, that do calling demonstrations as well as contests. I mean, there's taxidermy to take a look at.

There's all kinds of cool stuff. The turkey calling competitions are pretty interesting. They are. They are. So it's fun. And then in the evenings, we have celebrations just about every night where we get a chance to honor people that donate money to us, that give their time and energy to raise money,

that do partnerships and events. So it's really, really a good time. John, you got any final comments? What's the easiest way for someone to become a member if they're not going to the... Just go to the NWTF website. We have that right on the website front page. You can sign up to be a member.

It'll take your credit card and issue a member number. And we'd love to have you join us. And then also... And if you hunt turkeys, man, you really ought to be doing it. Oh, you do. And then there's also events listed there by your area that you can take a look at. If you want to go to a banquet, you can also buy a membership as your banquet ticket. And Steve and I have talked about a lot, a great benefit of being a member is you get

to read, is it Turkey Country? That's right. Yeah. We get a magazine out to you. I really appreciate it because there is a lot of science in there. And I like reading the science-y stuff that goes on in there. We try and do a good mix of

telling people what they need to know about the latest and greatest everything from great products to use to the best science available out there. We need a longer podcast on this. I have many, many questions for you, Becky.

Yeah, you're not like a super huge turkey hunter. Well, growing up in Montana. Have you ever killed a turkey? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and now I approach it much differently, but we've talked about this. Growing up in Montana, we were always like,

why is every hunting TV show turkeys? Like what is the deal? Because it's fun. Yeah. It's exciting. And we took our cow elk diaphragms and we'd smirk, smirk, smirk, smirk. And call in turkey.

And if that didn't work out, we'd run around the hill and shoot them. You know, and it just took a while. And then all of a sudden we're like, oh, this hunting in the springtime it is great it is um but yeah i i we don't have enough time but i absolutely agree with you like we as hunters do a really poor job of uh being honest with ourselves on how intimidating this sport is. And we put up more barriers to entry than we even think about. Yeah.

Because we want to feel like we're cool too. Yeah. And yeah, I feel like you're a good egg. And I wish we had more biologists in your position with a lot more nonprofits because I had, yeah, I had still a few things I got to ask you, but yeah, I really enjoyed the time. Thank you for letting me be here and listening. Well, thank you.

All right. It's been fun. And I'm going to the National Wild Turkey Federation. I know. That's awesome. We'll look for you down there. Are you going to a banquet?

No, I'm going to the National Convention. I already booked my flights yeah really yep there you go so if you go down there look up uh look for uh callahan say hi to him all right becky thank you very much for joining us thank you my pleasure 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.

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