The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 113: I'm Right And You're Wrong

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Boise, ID- Steven Rinella talks with Jason Phelps of Phelps Game Calls, Mark Kenyon of Wired to Hunt, Remi Warren, Ryan Callaghan of First Lite, Mark Boardman of Vortex Optics, along with Brody Henderson and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: low-T turkeys and game calling; feeding wildlife, baiting, and muddying the waters in Alabama; bait haters and food plots; the hierarchy of species and the ethics of fishing for spawning trout; roosting turks; the continued saga of a deer named Holyfield; glassin' turks; private land conservation; and more.You can now listen to ad-free episodes of the MeatEater Podcast on Stitcher Premium. Your subscription allows you to stream and download ad-free episodes and gets you early access to new releases of the MeatEater Podcast.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, so right off the bat, before we even introduce everyone, Jason Phelps.

We're going to create an elaborate, we're going to create a scenario. Okay. Okay. And you're going to respond to the scenario. Like, like how you would suggest people to respond to the scenario. All right. Now, who, who can do like a pretty convincing gobble noise? Oh, Mark.

Yeah. Mark Canyon. Yeah. Do you want me to sample it for you? Yeah. Let me hit it okay so you guys you know how uh you know when when you get a couple gobblers gobbling over each other right all right and then who can be an angry hen i'll go i'll go angry hen what's an

angry you're gonna be you're gonna be you're the boss gobbler marks the um you're already supporting me we haven't even got to duke it out yet okay marks the boss gobbler and remy's like the gobbler that always tries to gobble over the boss gobbler okay and we need a angry hen brody no i can't do it by now can anyone do an angry hen. Brody? No, I can't do it by mouth. Can anyone do an angry hen? Who's doing that? Oh, with no aid of... Yeah, but I want her angry.

Okay. Is that an angry hen? Okay, so here you are. Now I'm going to paint the scenario for you. All right. Okay, it's Jason Phelps. Phelps game calls. You've been making a lot of calls?

I have. Just like, are dudes buying turkey calls right now or did they already buy them? They are still right up to the last day, right up to the last week buying. There's still guys that are like, now that it's opening day tomorrow, I'm going to get a turkey call. The typical response is, hey, if I ordered today, can you get them out tomorrow? And will they be to me by the next day? Can you have them to my campground? Can you have them to my campground? Can you have them to my campsite?

Yeah. No, it's... Okay, so here you are. It's dark. Okay? And you're 150 yards away. And here's what's happening. All right.

Okay. So that's what's going on. Okay. So we're going to do real soft tree helps if they're still on the tree. So this, so, okay. So,

so you're, you're calculating, they're up in the roost. Yeah. And you're going to, this is how you're going to do it. I know. Paul,

it's not going to be a lot, you know, drag those out. Well, these galvas are low T because normal galvas would have been all over that. Yeah. So my calling is that bad that they won't even respond out of the roost

to my tree yelp. So that's your tree yelp? Really quiet four to five yelps. And what are you thinking when you're thinking the tree yelp? I'm just letting them know, ideally I'm still on the tree as a hen. You know,

they're pretty good at pinpointing but I'm trying to let them know there is a, you know, a hen over in that tree. Oh, so when you say tree yelp,

when you say tree yelp, you're saying that not that you're yelping to them in the tree but you're in your tree too. I'm still on my tree. I haven't flown down yet. So I'm trying to paint

that picture. You may, they usually roost next to some other hens they know is a for sure thing but i want to let them know hey there's another hen that's over here okay hit me with the tree help again yeah and so by their instant response i know they just heard that and so i may not get really aggressive i might do that's enough um yeah just to just to acknowledge that because i'm getting to a part point in my life where i feel like uh if i was better at math i would figure if he made no noise

at all what are the odds knowing that it's a 360 degree circle around the gobblers tree what are the odds that he's just gonna walk past you anyway and it changes the farther out you get i feel yep but it would be a good math question because I feel like as much as you think you're going to call gobblers off the roost, it probably works about as many times as what the odds are that he's going to walk through your five-degree band. Yep. I'm going to say I'm pretty good at turkey off the roost math, and it's usually zero times like 472 tries, so it's 0%. That thing, no matter what, I've never still to this day killed a turkey off the roost math and it's usually zero times like 472 tries so zero percent that thing no matter what i've never still to this day killed the turkey off the roost yeah i've been there when

it's happened but many but then i feel like well yeah eventually eventually it makes sense that he'll leave the roost and when he has and he'll pick the spoke of the wheel that i happen to be sitting up yep and that's the time is it but now so who is the angry hen? Oh, sorry. That's a gobbler. Yeah. Okay. So now let me hit you with this scenario. And then I'm going to hit you with another scenario.

So here's this scenario. You're angry henning it. I can do that too, I guess. Okay. So, so Remy, hit your gobble. Hit your tree yelp. And Mark, hit your angry hen. Okay, now what are you thinking?

Has your thought changed? So he... Did he gobble before? He gobbled before I did my tree yelp, so he never acknowledged me yet. I may tree yelp again and see if I can get him to spark off on that yelp. Let's try it.

I just want him to... All right. try it i just want him to all right and then i'll probably be quiet i want him to call even though the angry hen is now angry yeah i mean you don't want to they're typically fairly quiet in the tree so you don't want to like overdo it while you're still in the tree and it's too dark to pitch down so you're just trying to he's acknowledged me now and then i'm going to be quiet until they do heat up the right before they fly down so we may get back in the game at that point yeah because then they hit the ground and then so often never make a peak yeah yep because i mean they made eye contact they know what they're after they they don't need to communicate at that point and so they seem to

kind of they get pretty active right before they pitch down and then kind of go silent there for a little bit and then they'll pick back up now i'm gonna hit you with another scenario and this is the one that gives me a little chub so all this happens and then nothing comes of it and then you kind of wander around the woods all morning and around 10 a.m okay which is when a lot of turkeys get shot yep at least the ones i shoot at around 10 a.m., which is when a lot of turkeys get shot, at least the ones I shoot at. Around 10 a.m., all of a sudden, now what are you thinking? So before I make a sound, I want to get as close as the terrain and the vegetation will allow before I make a peep. He's just giving up his location. I want to be as silent as I can.

I'll get as close as it lets me, And then I'll sit down and I'm going. Cause he's been out love making the hens all morning. They all drift off. And so before that happens, also what's going on in my head is this thing just let off a beagle in the middle of the day by himself. He's probably looking for hens at that point. You know, all the hens went into lay. Um, and so I'm already thinking this is a, you know, not a for sure thing, but my odds are very, very high at that bird. As you mentioned, you're killing them at 10 to noon. Very, very high in that 10 to 2 window when they gobble.

So I'm going to go get set up, and I'm going to go to my 7 to 9 note, yelp. And if I can only bring one call in the woods, it would be this, your typical yelp. So this is what you're hitting middle of the day, hot gobbler. Yep. So we'll go sit down. And so we'll react to that gobbling a little bit. You know, if he gobbles, I'll maybe try to turn the temperature up with yelps. And then if he becomes disinterested, we'll maybe give it five, ten minutes and then go back no i'm not really good at being patient i say five to ten which is probably

like 30 seconds and then i'll call again okay so now here he is and he shuts up but you can hear him who knows how to make a spitting and spitting and drumming. I can do this. It's a... So you're hearing that, and it just drags on. You're like, what could be going on? Then what are you going to hit them with? Then we'll switch to real subtle clucks, purrs, maybe even scratching the ground next to me. A lot of times when I set up, I'll try to bring some brush or some leaves next to me we'll scratch around and that just real subtle noise at that

time to try to get him to pull in that last 20 or 30 yards or whatever it may be because you're trying to sound like a hand scratching yeah that that purr and clucks that real content sound and so you don't necessarily want to blow them out anymore with that that louder yelp or you know excited cackles you're just really trying to get him that last little bit. Or what we did in some instances, a lot of times we'll play this cat and mouse where you change setups and he just won't come closer. We may give a little call and then we just go silent. Yeah. All right.

You know there's a turkey here. It's in your hands now. So hit us with some of those uh more subtle tones tunes that and as i mentioned mark earlier it's purring that that read's not meant to purr it's more of that yelper read but you know if i had the right read in we'd do some purring that that read's not meant to purr it's more of that yelper read but you know if i had the right read and we do some purring just those real light subtle clucks um and just real quiet sounds yeah the first time i ever hunted with a really good turkey collar that he never did you know we were this is in south carolina which is like well known for having wily cagey turkeys and dude he never ripped out like everything he would do was just like just these so subtle little teensy noises you know when you're out in the woods and you hear something

do with a box call right but then the other day i was on youtube and there's a video of a real live hen who full balls out yelps 62 times in a row if you were in the woods and heard that you'd think that is some idiot over there with a box call yep going crazy on a box yeah so yeah real subtle sounds when they're in tight if you can hear spit and drum and can't see the bird yet um quiet yeah not uh last thing on turkeys a couple years ago hunting in california i was doing that calling back and forth to a gobbler gobbling i'm calling gobbling'm calling, and it just drags on. And eventually, I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to go over to a new spot and try to call him to the next ridge.

But in traveling over there, it takes a while, so I don't make any noise for 15 minutes to get to the next ridge. By the time I get to the next ridge, I call, and that son of a bitch is standing right where i left him exactly because he eventually got curious yep there was no noise for so long he's like well what happened to right on we had such a thing going on like what happened to her so then i call and i'm like oh now he's gobbling right from where i was sitting so then i just shut up and a while later sure enough here he's standing there it just got silenced because he enjoys he i think he was enjoying whatever bird version of enjoyment is he was enjoying that little deal the game yeah um so make a big plug for uh make a big plug for phelps game calls man i'm not good at that stuff

but no um so we've got i'll do it let me take a stab at it you me take a stab at it. You go. Let me take a stab at it. An American elbow grease story where a guy pounding away, making high quality calls and making a nice, good business, cranking away in his home, builds a business up and makes like phenomenal calls and insiders know that phelps calls are right how's that i love it now you do something like that like this whole self-promotion thing is just not good with me um no we well you want to plug someone else's call now

no you know i think some people you know listen to your podcast another story um it's just been a lot of passion this whole company has been driven by passion. We wanted to build the better mousetrap, come up with the specific sounds we were looking for. And we're pretty excited. You know, we did very well with the turkey calls. Our elk calls are our bread and butter still. But we're really excited as we move into the next year. We've got a full predator line, waterfowl line, deer call line.

Everything's finally going to be where I kind of envisioned it way back when we started so we're pretty excited to kind of get out of that elk call rut um turkey call sprinkled in but we'll have a full turkey call line and um we'll be kind of a complete um call company at that point so it's actually your fawn call is the best the most effective black bear call I've ever used. And spring black bear is coming up. That's coming from Callahan. And we'll get around to intros in a minute. Website?

www.phelpsgamecalls.com. For everybody that's on social media, we're very easy to get a hold of. Contact, messages, emails, all of that stuff is on the website and on social media, we're very easy to get a hold of, contact, messages, emails. All of that stuff is on the website and on social media. Excellent, man. Thanks for coming out and doing Turkey Primer. Yeah. We're going to rush this episode into being so that people can capitalize on that, on those sweet sounds and sweet notes.

Okay, it's a huge room full of people. As though dealing poker, we'll do intros it's more like a small room full of people yeah small room full of lots of people brody strapping into a set good yeah hit it introduce yourself brody henderson there you go here i am bha rendezvous had to drive 10 hours north to uh to leave winter behind it's all nice up here now beautiful yeah and down in your part of the in your neck of the woods i almost died like five minutes from my house driving yesterday because the snow in colorado yeah it's no noise yeah mark canyon here from Michigan.

Mark Kenyon, Wired to Hunt podcast. Yes, sir. We still have winter at home, too. It's no good. Remy Warren. Remy Warren. Just hanging. From Reno.

From Reno. You're on your honeymoon. I'm on my honeymoon. I actually came from Fiji, so it got colder for me. Ryan Callahan. PHA Rendezvous, podcaster, First Light. And Mark Boardman. Yep, Mark Boardman, worked for Vortex Optics out of good old Wisconsin, and yeah, enjoying the lovely weather we're experiencing in Boise at the BHA Rendezvous.

Okay, we're going to cover a handful of things. But first off, we've got a mega correction. Mega correction. Like, people were kind of irate. Like, this is one of the things that one of the biggest corrections, the biggest wrongs we ever have had is I screwed up and was reading how the house – it's a double-layered screw-up. Can you explain it janice

yeah let me let me why you're doing that i'll sort of set up the screw-up we were already discussing some issues about baiting in alabama where in alabama you'd always been allowed to um do supplemental feeding for, but you couldn't bait for hunting purposes. So they came in and tried to clarify the distinction between supplemental feeding for deer and hunting purposes. And once they spelled it out, it seemed to have, according to some people, invited a level of interpretation where it said, for instance, it has to be 100 yards away from you. If you're hunting, any bait has to be more than 100 yards away from you and has to be out of sight from you from a landscape feature.

And a guy wrote in to say, well, people are exploiting this now and putting a bait behind a big hay bale 100 yards away and saying, well, I can't see it, right? And it was causing this confusion. And that led to this other thing where the house in Alabama, the state house, voted to just outright legalize baiting for deer and pigs. And we talked about how that was a new law in Alabama, but in fact, not even kind of. It never made it to vote in the Senate, right? It's not a law.

Break it down, Yanni. You just broke it down. I don't know what else you want me to add. It didn't make it, so it's illegal to bait, which I'm still weird about the supplemental feeding. I don't really understand that. We should have maybe looked into that. So I guess you can still do that.

You can feed wildlife, right? But you can't bait for the sake of hunting. And so this judge that wrote in was saying that they sort of – Yeah, it was a judge that wrote in. When they wrote this sort of thing to help clarify, they actually muddied the waters in the process by saying like, oh, well, if it's like more than 100 yards away and you can't see it, then it's not really a bait pile. But he said that he and every other judge that has had to rule on baiting cases, which they do, that they pretty much say, look, man, if at all you can see

where that deer or whatever it is that you're hunting is in that zone of that bait pile, we're going to call it baiting. We're going to call it whatever it is that you're hunting is in that zone of that bait pile, we're going to call it baiting. We're going to call it what it is. If it's on the other side of a ridge from you, we're not going to call it baiting. But a hay bale 100 yards away, which is what someone wrote to us to say people do, is clearly illegal.

Yeah. Like not a natural landscape feature. So there's that. And that brings up a quick question for Mark Kenyon. A guy wrote in to ask this, and it makes me think of it right now. Why is in the whitetail world, you're a big whitetail fellow. They call me a whitetail guy. You call me a whitetail guy, I guess.

Yeah, you called yourself a whitetail freak, I think, one time. That might be true. So, Mark, if you don't know it, if you dig on whitetails and just all things whitetails, Mark's Wired to Hunt podcast is what you ought to be listening to because Mark goes way beyond anything we even get close to when it comes to talking about whitetails, which is what, you know it's america's hunting this animal right but a question that i would like you to take on mark a guy wrote in and say why is in some circles why is bait bad food plots are not bad yeah that's something you gotta have been asked a thousand times yeah yeah it's a big thing people talk people that don't like bait

haters like to pose that question a lot because there's a lot big thing people talk people that don't like bait haters like to pose that question a lot because there's a lot of people that don't like bait haters right so there's a lot there's a lot of people that hate on people that use bait and those guys that do bait like to say well you're a hypocrite because you plant food plots so you are changing the landscape or doing something that is attracting deer away from their natural patterns to a new place yeah so where do you stand on this are you a bait hater i'm not a bait hater okay but i'm not a bait user so i don't like to bait but my dad does so whatever more power to you you can do whatever you prefer to do i would rather not but i do plant food plots because for me that is two things number one with a food plot with a habitat

improvement you're putting in a whole there's a whole lot of work and thought and effort going into that so it feels like you're i don't know going through some threshold of like work put into something that i don't feel like you achieve the same was dumping a pile of corn number two you're you're okay that's not gonna resonate resonate. That's not going to do much for people. That's just me. I'm not trying to prove a point here. But you're also improving the habitat. By planting a food plot, you're benefiting entire landscape,

entire ecosystem. You're doing something above and beyond just the sole purpose of shooting something once. You plant a food plot, you're improving the situation for 365 days a year for so many different animals, for so many different things. You might take one life off that etc so that might be another argument for the fact that they're different um but if you want to say that you're changing something to bring deer in and if

that's the only thing you're looking at then yeah you could say that food plots and baiting are the same you're not hunting just a natural completely natural unaltered pattern what i thought you were going to say is that um it's a little bit different because the size well that too well from a disease perspective if that's another thing i want to talk about yeah i thought you hit me with that yeah that's a it's a good point so an issue with baiting that a lot of people talk about is you put something in a very small concentrated area that attracts a lot of deer to that same very small concentrated area there's a higher chance of disease spreading like cwd which is the big thing of course everyone's

talking about so because of that a lot of states have banned baiting to try to reduce the chance of that spread with a food plot some people will say well it's the same thing with food plot you're pulling deer into an area. But it's different. It's a much larger space. You're going to have deer congregate around natural food sources anyways. So there's only so much you can do there. So even if it's a quarter-acre food plot that's still resembling a natural feeding environment versus a one-yard square section where you might have a pile of corn where all these noses touching all the saliva.

Do any states come in? Is there any state that's banned or tried to regulate food plots? No. What's up, Ryan? I feel like Montana addressed that, didn't they? If you plant specifically to harvest animals on, it's based on intent, but I don't think you can do that. Really? I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you can can't there's a lot of regulations with waterfowl

yeah definitely like you couldn't grow corn cut corn and shoot ducks unless you have an agricultural reason to do so yeah we were talking and then we were talking about this not long ago that like you couldn't grow corn pick it scatter it on the ground right yeah and hunt ducks but in in places you can grow corn and leave it unpicked but you can't knock it and it's like you can't knock it down right but it's possible that you could grow it and never harvest it as long as you don't knock it down and weird yeah if it if you planted it solely to attract animals then i don't think it would be legal in montana based on but i could be wrong so i'd never have to research it but it's that's right you said it it's based on the agricultural reason and so like an agricultural

reason could be i'm leaving that stand of corn because corn prices have fallen or the moisture level the moisture content within the ear of corn never got down to a harvestable percentage so there's reasons for again yeah well screw it just leave it standing versus spending a bunch of gas to go out there and cut the stuff down yeah when i will when i will have no return on my investment now mark um can you define a food plot real quick i guess a general definition would be some type of crop planted with the specific purpose of either attracting an animal to it and or supplementing nutrition. So that could be something like clover or kale or rape or soybeans or corn or winter wheat, anything like that.

Are you sensitive when people bring up the comparison of food plots to bait? No, I don't care. I mean, I understand the argument. the the comparison of food plots debate no i don't care i mean i i under i understand the argument um it doesn't hold water for me but i get but even if it did that's all right you can you can choose to see it that way i'll i'll do my thing you do yours i got another white tail deer thing for you i got another answer well brody sketch sketch this deal out. So last fall in Pennsylvania, an archery hunter, he was hunting public land, had a bunch of trail cameras set up, was pretty familiar with. Can you pause one second? Yeah.

Do you already know what we're talking about? I don't. Really? Okay, go on, Brody. You should. should um um it sounds like this guy's a pretty dedicated archery hunter for just from knowing you know what we've read about it but uh he's hunting public land trail cameras he puts an arrow in a pretty gigantic buck especially considering it was shot in pennsylvania which is like a heavily hunted state yeah you could call it a big, huge, giant buck.

Yeah, on public land in Pennsylvania, it's impressive. And Pennsylvania's seeing more big bucks because they went to antler restrictions a while back. But either way, he sticks an arrow in this deer and does not find it. It sounds like it may have been a questionable shot. No one really knows. Either way, he doesn't find the deer. And 41 days goes by.

And he finds, eventually, you know, he kept looking for the buck. Finds the buck 41 days later. Archery season has ended. He may have found it during rifle season. I think he did but but he puts his tag on a desiccated carcass that had been picked over by predators the only thing that's left is the spine the skull and the antlers tags the uh tags the antlers and eventually word gets out the guy gets the buck measured pennsylvania game and fish commission confirms it as the new state record archery kill what do you think about that mark kenyon

that's cool really but there's new state records in states like every year now it seems i can't keep track but that's not the question yeah are you not getting the question no what's the question it is 41 days later is it an archery kill whoa is it a hunter killed record versus a found 41 days later there is a place in the record and i don't know i'd like to have this guy on the show you do i would love to get this guy on the show to talk about this because here's like a meteorite could have fallen from the sky and struck that animal 41 days but then when do you set the where's the line i don't know i don't know eight hours eight hours no okay i mean if it was up was it killed like what killed it infection coyotes right i mean i i've an interesting i have a similar situation that happened to me me too one of the best deer i ever shot it was a poor shot

unfortunately and then i i found it it was what shot poor oh shot um but i thought he's gonna die so i searched and searched and searched and searched and searched never found him until i came back in february to shed hunt and there he is right in his bedroom where he usually was so do you act like you found did you find it or get it so the way I would describe it is that uh I killed him but I always say I found him in February so let's say that buck was a big giant record buck yeah would you turn it in as a record buck Or would you look at it on your wall and be like, damn, I made a bad shot on that buck? So that.

I found his skull and his spine, everything there. Got a salvage tag from the DNR, brought it home. And then a friend of mine had an extra cape. He said, hey, man, this is a buck that, kind of like my Holyfield deal, I'd hunted this buck for two or three years, knew him really well i've been chasing this thing forever um and this whole thing happened my friend's like man you have so much like wrapped emotion wrapped up in that deer you should mount him i want to give you my cape so i thought about it

i was like i don't know but in the end i decided to do it and i put it on my wall so that every time i walk past that thing i always think about never make that mistake again. Never – don't screw up. Practice more. Compose yourself. Every little thing I second-guessed or thought through that I might have did wrong on that evening now, I rethink that. Yeah, it's your totem of self-flag – how's that word? Flagulation?

Self-flagulation,. How's that word? Flaggulation? Self-flaggulation, flaggulation. Whooping yourself. It's a powerful representation of what was a really painful moment. It was like a high when I got that shot at this deer I'd been after, and then the mistake. So let's say a dude walks in, and he's like, hey, you know what? Turns out that's the new state record. Would you say, well, no?

I'd say I don't know. I don't know where that line is. I definitely wouldn't try to promote it as a state record. I wouldn't turn it in to try to get it as a state record. Now, this happened to my old man, too. And it was not, I don't remember, it was enough days where he hit a deer out of his tree. It was a nice buck, especially for that era in Michigan.

He shot a deer right below him. And no exit wound. Weeks later, my brother Danny's walking out the rifle hunting, finds the deer. And it hadn't gone far. It's like it's still, it went into a cornfield, and we must have walked over it a hundred times, walked around it, even to the point where it was so baffling how we could have missed it

that we entertained this idea that he had left, and then days later came back. But then when you look at the placement of the arrow, that just doesn't make sense. We just missed him, right? And I don't know, he found it weeks later. But he entered it in. If you went and looked, his commemorative Bucks of Michigan or whatever,

his name's in there with that buck. And all he did, he took the head off it, had to go find a cape. I remember the winter we were out hunting rabbits, we dropped in to take a look at that buck, and there was a hole bored in the side of it from critters getting in there. And I looked in there and found a possum denned up in there pulled him out by his tail and took i still have a picture of me holding that possum up by his tail so he entered that buck in and now looking at it like when you're a little kid you don't know yeah you don't now look i'm like yeah i don't know man you

like you didn't really get him yeah you found it's like a thing you found you didn't get him it's a really interesting question because you i guess it depends on like the shot like if you know that that shot killed that deer but is is is getting him meaning that the the killing of that deer and the the the recovering of it in a certain time span or is it killing it and i mean and then to your question you don't know when that deer died if it died the next day or if it died then and you just missed it, or if it died a week later, but it was because of the wound. I hate this whole conversation because the idea of wounding a deer and this being a long, drawn-out process is a horrible thing to talk about. Yeah, but it's a thing that happens, so I don't like to act like it doesn't happen. It does happen.

So what we'll do, I want to go, okay, so picture this scenario that you're the commander of the world yeah and as commander of the world it comes to you that you need to say uh we're going to put a time limit on it yeah i would say seven days arbitrarily okay here's my thought can you hear me all right oh yeah i got you um so i have a couple questions just to clarify because it's really going to decide on how he's well if you talk about the deer brody's the resident expert right so this particular deer maybe i missed this but did that guy that shot that deer like say he shot that deer and he killed that deer right but he doesn't i don't know how long the season. Maybe it's too short of a season for this to happen,

but this could happen in Montana, where if you don't recover your deer, it's not illegal to shoot another deer in many states. Yeah. But it's, I would consider it unethical. But if that guy shot another deer in that deer's place, so he gets up in the tree stand, he shoots that buck, he doesn't find it in two days.

He goes, I didn't find it. Right? Another buck walks by. He arrows that buck. Punches his tag and puts it on that deer. Or, now I would say that guy can claim it. If he like, right thing goes, I killed that deer. He cuts his tag.

He goes, I'm going to look until I find that deer. Yeah. You know what I mean? If he was like diligent and goes, I'm going to look until I find that deer. It's like, all right. He made a bad shot. he reconciled it he cut he that's his deer he punched his tag on it now he looks for it and it took him six weeks to do it that really sucks but he put in the effort good on him he knew he killed it that's his but if he's like the next morning oh a little spiker walks by and he shoots it and punches a tag on that and then finds that deer later. I would say it's the exact opposite.

That's not – the former version happened. It was the former version. I don't know if he hunted anymore. I don't know if he kept – I mean, he was out during rifle season when he tagged it, I believe. Hunter looking. Well, who knows? I'd love to have this guy

I mean there's so many details you can't clear up but he you know in order to register this buck for a record he had to put a tag on it and he tagged the skull basically so yeah he went above and beyond legal

and ethical obligations to find the thing but if i was commander of the world it would be like you got to find that thing in order to register it you got to find it in time to use the meat that would be my cutoff but well i i i tend to agree but, let's say you get a hit and you're like, man, not a great hit. I'm going to let it go overnight. It's going to get cool tonight. I'm going to let it go overnight because I think that it's going to give me a better chance of finding it than if I bump it. Right.

And then you go out and coyotes got you. Yeah. So here's a guy. He's got yeah yeah so so there here's a guy he's got like a whole plan he's doing everything right he goes out beyond his control coyotes got it right i would still say i would say to that too i'm like you got it yeah you got the buck it's your buck it's a hundred yards it's unfortunate that that happened you were probably aware that that was a risk it probably rolled through your mind based on everything you had going for you, everything that you were dealing with.

You're bugged. Yeah. I take back my previous declaration as commander of the world. I like Brody's better. I mean, in an idea. I want everyone to just put a time stamp on it. I'm going to say, as commander,

I'm talking about God putting a gun to your head and he says, you have to tell me a time period. 48 hours. I like that. With great reluctance, I would say 48 hours. Because I do think that that meat

aspect fits into that in most cases, barring very warm weather, that kind of stuff. Various snaf yeah but so maybe i'm just unfamiliar with pennsylvania rules or is it because it was a bow because hoping or i mean boone and crockett half the things in there most of world records are pickup schools well that's what i wanted to get into too explain what that explain like the new world record yeah but why is the record bighorn sheep was found on that island out in flathead everybody knew i mean that sheep was pretty much a high fence sheep he's on this little island out in the lake and there's a million pictures of it

and then that sheep dies and then the state of montana has the new world record yeah and i've been on that island yeah oh i've been on it yeah exactly walk around petting those sheep yeah so now and then now and then a bear a black bear will swim out there there's a bunch of fruit trees out there and now and then a black bear will swim out there when the fruit trees are in blossom so imagine they do deal with some level of like the natural stress but you go out there yeah you can go out there and sort of almost walk up and hang out with them. I was like, when I saw that that's the New World record, I'm like, okay, is the Bronx Zoo going to beat that record next? Could.

But that's the whole thing. Is it hunter killed or is it found? And Pennsylvania, like a lot of states, and Boone and Crockett, they have different categories, right? Like hunter killed animals and picked up animals even sheds right right so i think the question everyone's got about this buck is was it hunter killed or was it found so my question my answer to that would be simple when he walked out there did he find it yes he found it there you go who he would the guy he would say that he found it during rifles he didn't recover it he didn't recover it during rifle season he found it you can't yeah you can't recover something months later you find

i mean exactly if uh you were to go missing in the woods right it's uh if i was hit if i was rescue or it's a recovery right if you recovered chopped up carcass okay i'm sorry can you can you uh can you hand phelps your uh deal so just the argument of finding it like we use blood we use tracks we use broken twigs so he didn't recover he found it like remy said there's there's some key ingredients to to finding a buck versus recovering a buck and i would say he he definitely uh found it all right but jason phelps in the whole thing where you had to put an hour, you were forced to put a time limit on it.

Or else you're going to get killed. 48 hours, but you have to look for it in all daylight hours up until that point. There needs to be some effort involved. If you want to make a bad shot, there needs to be some effort involved. So two days, but you better spend those two days looking for it. Yeah. Mark Borbin? Oh, man.

I'm going to back up here a sec because there's a lot of twists and turns to this thing. Yeah, as they say, it starts to make its own gravy. That's exactly. So when he was, so when he, I'm going to say when he found this buck, was he actively searching for it or did he stumble upon it? Don't know. That's why I thought you talked to him. To Jason's point, was he reading that sign?

Was he, you know, going over there in his head like, you know, like, okay, I think he might have bedded here, laid down here. Was he in the act of looking? Was he in the act of looking? Exactly. He had shot the thing. He knew it was potentially dead in the act you know he had shot he had shot the thing he knew it was potentially dead in the area and i think it was a continual process of hoping he would eventually stumble

across those antlers gotcha so he wasn't in his hunter orange during the rifle season i i don't know all the details i you know but yeah i i mean he was continuing to look for it. It's not as if 41 days later he was thinking he was hunting that buck. I don't think. Yeah, and to your point, I mean, odds are, right, that that buck died as a direct relationship to being hit with that arrow. But also, when everybody's talking. It could have been, who knows? Well, there's so many unknowns many unknowns like you said there's so many unknowns that's a lot of time

did somebody else put an arrow in that deer as it watered by his stand and he didn't find it too you know i mean yeah maybe caught a little ehd in the meantime i don't know yeah it's it's it's you know and i'm not trying to take anything away from this guy no man i would like like I said, I would love to chat with him because I'd be curious his perspective on it. His ears are going to be ringing. I'm not like dogging on the guy whatsoever. No way. It just is a really interesting situation. Yeah.

I mean, it's a totally interesting topic. 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

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 Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be 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 hand-picked by the on x 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. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Here's another one. Another perplexing one. And again, Mark, this has to,

this, sorry, I'm sorry, but this comes down to Mark Kenyon. It's okay, because whitetails are the most hunted species in North America.

This isn't whitetails. Of course, the attention should be on us. This isn't whitetails. Can I tell you a story? Someone walked up to me yesterday and they said, so get this, I was at a bar. This is someone telling you this?

Yeah, someone's telling me a story. So I'm speaking as the storyteller. The storyteller walks up to me and says, I was at this bar for a BHA pint night and he saw me wearing this public landowner shirt. The guy walks up to me and he says, I'm confused. Who are you being right now?

I'm the storyteller. You're you? No,'ll be you oh i'm telling a story of a guy telling me a story of a story so it's confusing but you you're me okay yeah i am the person i just talked to yesterday no i understand hey mark go ahead i was at a pint i was at a pint night in the UP, and this guy walked up to me, and he saw me wearing my public landowner shirt. And he says to me, hey, you're wearing that public landowner shirt. It'd be really cool if you could get Mark Kenyon to come up here and talk about that kind of stuff. Or if you can't get him, maybe Steve Rinella. I thought, man, all right, they got the ranking right. Yeah, it wasn't like when Remy got to be the boss gobbler.

I was like, that's the first time that's ever been said. Okay, so, all right, this is out of your comfort zone, but it's just something I heard from Brody that you just said. Really? Yeah, Brody, can you lay the groundwork again, Brody? I don't know what we were talking about last night. I don't. We talked about last, oh, the spawning trout spawning trout this is the most baffling okay the other night brody sends me

an article and it's a guy i don't want to talk about who he is it's a guy griping about all right it's so complicated you can already tell he's got an axe grind because he's griping about social media people gear ambassadors how they ruin everything and they like to take pictures of big huge giant trout and he knows the truth that they catch these big trout

when they're spawning and Brody who's a guides catch release trout fisherman sends it to me annoyed about the perspective on it and brody brings up to me like why is it that the whole world everything they fish everyone's always fishing the spawn people travel great distances to fish steelhead when they're in a river spawning you fish salmon in the river spawning. People plan trips to fish bluegill off the beds. You throw a jig into a bass bed.

Yeah. Everyone fishes spawning fish. But all of a sudden, like, trout purists have gone and said, this whole huge history of people targeting fish when they congregate to spawn is unethical if it's a brown trout. And you agree with that. no i didn't i thought that's what brody told me no no you brody got a fight that was on it was an unethical practice no the way i was saying supposedly because i don't know i'm just i just i'm learning this

so i just taught myself to fly fish over the last few years so i've never really been a big trout fisherman until just recently i was telling the crowd about this article i read and so i was saying they were saying this is supposedly unethical and i was looking at you like right i don't know brody must have been drunk that's not what he told me no no yeah i i got the impression that brody came up to me he's like dad it was unethical i was like i was like is that the case i have no i have no clue so reading that like i would i'm just fishing. I don't know. Like I don't get it. Callahan, please. Go ahead. Everybody's right and everybody's wrong.

Okay. Yeah. And we have certainly built up this hierarchy of species. That's nothing new. But there comes a point where, okay, so there's this river around here. It's called the Lost. Yeah. Tailwater fishery below you know below the dam and there comes a point where you cannot hardly walk in that river wade in that river without standing in a red in a spawning bed okay at the same time the you know the water is 18 inches deep and you can see every single fish i do not find it ethical to then go fish for those fish because you can you can drag them

foul hook you can hook them in the back and drag them off that bed or floss them yeah and then they'll turn around and go right back to that bed and sit on it so what's the problem the problem is it's i mean it does not fishing okay so when when a little kid if there's when a little kid goes down to his mom's not catching when a little kid goes down to his mom's dock and there's a dozen bluegill beds in knee-deep water and not only will they feed but they'll aggressively guard their nest and he lobs a worm into that collection of bluegill beds is he is he being unethical i mean come on so i have a question yeah i mean and this is the nature of this discussion right it's like first of all the stuff that you flatlanders do, I mean, who really cares, right? There's that.

There's that. Right? So like the crappie, the bluegill, the bass, for some reason we have, as a Rocky Mountain West society, have decided that that stuff just doesn't matter as much as our trout do. And maybe that has something to do with like recovering populations. Yeah, but you're talking about non-native rainbows and rounds. First of all, they're not disappearing anytime soon, and they don't technically belong in any of these rivers. They're synthetic fish. No, they don't.

They're synthetic fish. They're purely synthetic fish. Yeah, but so look at the frickin' pike minnow, right? The squaw fish, squawkers. No, those I will not mess with on the bed. Completely native fish. There's a bounty on their heads below the bonneville dam they're eradicated they're endangered you can't like you like you know so it's all i did not know that yeah they're in danger in colorado yeah people are chucking

them on the bank wrote this article that got that we kind of all apparently read or got forwarded around was referring to Browns. Yes, that was in Colorado, right? And imported to Wyoming. This is where it makes more gravy, like Steve says. How it read to me was as much as this guy was concerned with the ethics of ripping spawners off of a bed, he was more concerned with dudes from out of state coming in and screwing up the fishery that he guides on. So it was like, well...

I could have been out on that spot in bed making money. Right. You know, the other thing that I took away from it, though, was just the fact... I thought the point he was making was how people are putting ethics or they're crossing lines to try to get famous like instagram right he was talking about how more and more people are doing these huge photo shoots with every big fish because they want that huge photo

and they want to be on the cover of whatever they want a free pair of sunglasses or something so you see people standing around for two minutes holding that fish out of the water or you see people in this case he said that they were going down a closed stretch of river they knew it was closed but they still went down they had to pass signs that said it was closed i don't remember why it was closed or anything okay that's a different story that's called poaching so that he was making that argument i thought that people were doing things like that to get famous the one particular fishing question was caught i mean this guy did all kinds of illegal stuff but there is like a greater picture of just generally fishing for spawning

trout being like something you should go to hell for see i thought he was using that as the story to illustrate the larger yeah well okay the most masterful writer in the world so i feel that he he's got a few axes to grind he's kind of in a grumpy mood he doesn't like maybe he's i'm sure there's he's gonna hate this there's probably like a fair bit of jealousy involved a little bitterness okay and you put all these ingredients together and you get kind of a rant and just as he's taking he's talking about the influence of social media on fishing an example of that would be that you would be so audacious as to catch a spawning trout to up your social media presence okay as much as he's taking that little isolated example to prove a larger point i'm doing the same thing he did when i'm plucking out one portion of this

is is to say like to declare that you targeting a particular species of imported european fish um during its spawn as being unethical how how does that relate to all of the fish that we all sort of agree you do fish during the spawn and has the gentleman that wrote that article i'm presumably if he's a fishing guide in wyoming he's a pretty seasoned angler presumably he's been up to alaska or bc and fished a king in the river who's there to lay his eggs her eggs so i guess the difference is is let's say you have this catch and release fishery okay you then the fish come up and spawn they're on their beds they get through the spawning process but then they're guarding their beds um and they're not eating but they're doing that aggressive behavior of knocking other fish off the beds or, and, um,

you know, and you're fishing eggs. Sometimes they're trying to knock eggs off their bed, uh, other, other fishes, eggs off their beds. And, um, there is a time of year where there's eight of us in this room. We could walk up that river and all eight of us could catch that exact same fish somehow some way because it's going to go back to that bed and it's going to sit on that bed and it's going to do its job and you know we could stress it out to the point very easily where it's going to die okay so why would that be allowed in this catch and release fishery where the point is to try to release them and let them get caught again but if you're out there fishing presumably not for those spawners it's legal to be out there fishing and you're out

fishing not targeting those particular spawners and you're pointing at the dude who is but you're out there fishing and you're catching pre-spawn fish and you scoop up a female that hasn't spawned yet and she spews a bunch of eggs out in the net who like where do you draw the line like if you don't think you should be fishing for spawning fish then advocate for closing it all together right like nobody should be out there in that case. It doesn't matter if you catch them 10 days before they spawn or when they're on their bed.

I don't think that's wrong. I think you're correct. Why we do not do that, I do not know. You want to know how we used to target spring bullheads? Bullheads like to spawn. Like a catfish? Yeah, they like to spawn in cavities. So busted up seawalls, hollow logs, and then they can get inside,

and they turn around so their head's looking out to defend the nest. We wouldn't even use a rod. You just go around and dingle, wrap some line around your hand, and dingle a little Cleo against his face and have him grab it to the point we'd sometimes dive down snorkel and mask dive down and then dangle it in front of them wow so that's like right now i'm looking and being like man that was so unethical but i just don't i just not feeling it yeah i'm not feeling the guilt i think if you're going to try to eat the thing fine but if not like i i feel like there's should goes back to like there's a reasonable reasonable chance of failure when you eliminate all those

chances of failure by being like okay big fish 10 inches of water i can throw a rock in there it's going to run away but it's going to come right back to that at the exact same spot chances are i can catch this fish like yeah at what point is it still fishing i want to do but maybe for the guy who only gets to fish a few days a year and he's got to get a lot of social media you gotta make it happen i here's oh i gotta jump in here because i grew up like cal did fishing pitching pitchfork and spawning browns i mean you know trout fishing you know bass fishing wasn't a thing and i've maybe it's just regional because you just if i was in a lake right and there's a stream coming into that lake you'll see a hundred fishermen away from that no one will be going

and fishing those those fish off their beds really it's like it's like why don't you just go so if a fish swims upstream why don't you just go pick it up and then like go take a picture with it like is that fishing yeah i mean it's it's too easy it takes out you might as well just go like buy your fish or go like put them in a swimming pool because those trout aren't like i don't know but when i first started bass fishing i would never cast at a fish that was on its bed ever i didn't know that i was like oh you just don't do that we'd go get leeches and lay them on the beds yeah i mean now i do that because i understand that that's how you fish bass but i'm like bass fishermen must just like have they just don't care enough or whatever

it's different they're all so sturdy they're so sturdy yeah you like trout are very fragile. It's like my parents, or I grew up in this small kind of man-made private lake, and we stocked, and you could just see that trout die fast. It's very hard for trout to exist. And especially when you're talking in Montana, you're talking cutthroats or native fish. If you see that fish on the bed, need those fish to have their a fighting chance now fishing other places like pre-spawn most of the fish that are on the bed they're waiting for those eggs that are laid a lot of those eggs have been fertilized right so those they already have

that fertilization they're already ready to hatch they're that further step from the fish that's just out in the deep swimming around. They constantly produce eggs. So for the fish that gets in the net, spews its eggs, and you let it back go, she's going to have just as many eggs tomorrow. Yeah. That's my piece of that. I'm with you.

Have you guys ever read Shadows on the Koyukuk by the anthropologist Richard K. Nelson? No, but I will say salmon, they're going to die, so you can just scoop them out of the river. I don't care. That's another part of this. It's another part of this. I'm going to throw, I feel like I've been living in a gray area with a million different caveats for the last hour.

You're a trout angler. Yeah, I love to fish for trout. I'm going to throw another twist in there that we were talking about last night. So where we live in Wisconsin, we have the tribs that dump into lake michigan which to my knowledge by and large the steelhead that returned to those rivers do not successfully spawn and yet from an ethic standpoint many people say i won't fish those i won't fish to those fish that are on their reds even though it's an artificially supported fishery? Artificially supported fishery, and those fish aren't going to successfully spawn.

You've got those kind of artificial fisheries all over the Great Lakes, where it's like, yeah, man, we pound these salmon and steelhead while they spawn, and then the state stocks little six-inch molts, and it starts all over again. So what do you think of that? I think it's interesting. I'm not really seeing a from a from a resource standpoint like yeah i mean i guess you could harass that fish enough or to remy's point you know if you caught it and stressed it out to a point that it maybe it wouldn't return to the lake then you're you know you're down a

fish right but i mean there's like you know oftentimes there'll be you know three four five six fish waiting in the bucket right behind those spawners that guys are fishing to. And, you know, 10 minutes later, that fish could be pushing up on a red, you know, right near in that same spot. So I just, I don't know, I just feel like it's a super gray area. And then to your point, like, so all of a sudden you're a kid. Well, of course I'll let a kid do that. Well, I mean, just like every little thing changes it you know i've seen it like it gets so bad in some places we would go up and fish the north platte river in april when the rainbows are spawning hard and uh the uh the

local guides there would like if they saw you fishing to spawners, they'd just scream at you. But then those same guys, there'd be like a hundred-yard stretch of beds, and those same guys will float over top of those fish in their drift boat to knock them down into the next hole, and then they'll get out and fish for them. Here's why I – I want to get back to richard k nelson real quick in a minute but here's why i brewed over the subject because um the foundations okay the foundation of fishing is it was a food acquisition activity right everyone accepts that right so it was like it comes out of a it comes out of an interplay of life and death and to watch a segment of to watch a segment of fishing become so civilized and so sort of mechanical where you're fetishizing introduced non-natives you're

establishing this whole other structure of it's like wrong to utilize these resources in a certain way it's it's no longer like the goal of a like with hunting and fishing, the goals used to be that you would study an animal, you would study it and find its vulnerabilities and exploit those vulnerabilities to some extent. And timing issues, like people like to hunt bucks during the rut because they don't act like they do normally. They lose some of their inhibitions. They travel more during the daytime they're more vulnerable and it's like a whole culture is built around exploiting this vulnerability but all of a sudden to also get to the spot where where like this segment of the fishing world becomes so divorced from the foundational reality of what it is that it that it sets up

this whole other bizarre structure i don't think it's wrong i just look at it and i brood over it it's puzzling to me uh in shadows on the koyukart which is about the koyukan people um richard k nelson spent some time with them and they like to their den dig for bears so their bear hunting method is you kind of get a sense, it's handed down generation to generation, all the bear denning locations. And knowing that a den doesn't usually get used twice in a row, you kind of like keep a track of what den might have a bear.

And you go around the late spring and that's how you hunt. You dig bears out. It's unethical to just shoot a bear walking around any person can do that it takes a special man to go in and drag a bear up out of its den and kill it right amen so if you wouldn't ask most people if you if i went out to my buddies that i hunt with it was like oh yeah what i do you know i go down i just kill them right in the den right you'd be skewered as the epitome of unethical behavior so it is it's just like in certain cases it's so arbitrary and there's so much baggage at play no absolutely and i'm just thinking here like how hypocritical i am right because i will not

fish to that fish that i can see that i know is not going to move because like i'm just like well it's a foregone conclusion but when the water is all murky and muddy and i've been telling you for years how much i've been enjoying fishing for these smallmouth bass well the reason they're so susceptible to flies a fly rod is because they've moved up into their spawning area but the difference is is you know i'm fishing in eight feet of water that's murky, and I can't see them. And so for some reason, that's the mental difference for me, is my percentage of being successful is in this reasonable area for me of it's still a game of chance. It still feels mysterious.

Sporting. Everyone has that, though. I mean, Steve, if you could have anything in your tackle box, would dynamite be your number one choice? a game of chance and still feels mysterious sporting everyone has that though i mean steve if you like could have anything in your tackle box would dynamite be your number one choice would you be like every time i go fishing i just throw a stick of jelly in there and blow them out of the water no you wouldn't do that that's correct you know it's because it's guaranteed it's like fishing for a trout on its bed is so guaranteed that it's not even sporting it's like you're sportsman because you do it in a certain way.

Whether it's legal or not, everybody has their own code of ethics. And it's like, okay, what might be acceptable to one person isn't acceptable to another. But also, what's the intent behind it? If your intent was, I just want a picture of a big fish, light dynamite, throw it in there, pull your big fish up, take a picture. You're like, ah, whatever. I'm going to release it. I see what you gonna release it saying man i see what you're saying i'm gonna kill that fish but oh we swam away he's just in shock he'll be all right if i thought the question was that easy

i wouldn't have brought it up yeah it's one of those i don't even really know how i feel about it but it's a good point it's a perfect topic for this time of year i mean i literally got a call on i think on Monday, from a guide buddy of mine in Montana who's like, yeah, man, when are you coming up? Land of Giants. We're going to go out there. He's like, I feel kind of bad fishing them on the Reds,

but everybody else is. Really? Yeah. This is a conversation you just had. Just had. Yeah, I mean, it's that time of year. When I lived in the Great Lakes, we'd fish steelheads starting Thanksgiving, sometimes depending on the water levels because a lot of times you still had to shoot up the rivers when the when the rain the fall rains

came and still had to push up but the whole time the whole time it was all just prelude it was all prelude to the spawn and sitting down there at dawn and it starts to get light enough you can start to see the the reds the cleaning you know the spawning beds you can start to see that golden clean area and all of a sudden that gray shadow pulls across that thing the feeling of like dude yes yes yes yes it is odd right the feeling you'd get no one's there you got the spot and you see that just that little shadow come out on there and move away oh my god to have someone come and tell me that i was wrong i'm not open to it uh okay moving on real quick um everybody's cool on that uh mark again mark canyon another quick thing i'm glad to have you here i'm getting so your famous deer your famous holy field deer isn't dead he's not dead okay so if you listen to wired to hunt um

you'll if you go back in the backlog you hear that mark's got this whole story of chasing this deer around the same deer he sees he's like basically roommates with him and and but it's a mysterious deer and and and and he's had opportunities in the past to get him and didn't get him then you thought he was dead yeah and then what you just found his shed and he's not dead yeah well yeah last time i was doing a podcast with you guys i was talking about how had my missed opportunity at him and everything and then like a month later i think i was talking to you about yeah i heard from a friend of a friend that the neighbor shot a big one. This was the only like quote unquote big buck that I'd seen in the area for like three years.

So it had to be that deer. So I thought, oh, yeah, he's dead. He disappeared off trail camera. I didn't see him. And times a year, I usually see him after that. So, yeah, it kind of moved on. And then randomly. Oh, you mourned his loss i don't know how to mourn his

loss but i came to terms with the fact that this part of my of my life was done and uh and yeah like late february i think it was i just was like i need to go get some fresh air take the dog for a walk so went out to this property just thought i walk just kind of the outside little edge just a nice little spot and snow on the ground wasn't looking for shed antlers or anything and just stumbled onto some that was a nice little stand of pines and i just saw these this crown of tines sticking out of the snow pull it up and lo and behold he's still around there it was i love it it was exciting it was awesome it was a little bit and uh it was a little bit bittersweet because a tiny bit of me was relieved when i'd like come to terms with him being gone because all right i

can move on like haunted i'm gonna go hunt some different places i'm gonna do some different stuff and i found like oh shit i'm back to this again so now your whole next year's all planned out you gotta try to find this buck well you know what i'm telling myself now is that i'm not gonna do what i did last year i'm not going telling myself now is that i'm not gonna do what i did last year i'm not going to like change all my i'm not going to put all my eggs in that basket i would love to finish this four-year journey now i'd love to kill this deer um but i'm not gonna let it like consume my life it's not gonna be the end all be all i'm gonna do a lot of different things yeah i'm gonna hunt smart yeah i'm still gonna try to target that deer and see what happens but like you said some number of months ago maybe the way

it's supposed to end is that i never do end the story and he rides off in the sunset dude if it was a movie if it was a movie and you shot it people would be bummed at the end of the movie people i told you it should be like the movie the Golden Seal. Did I tell you this? We're in the end. And then you got mad. You get a chance. And he comes out. You guys lock eyes. And you can't do it.

You just drop your gun. Or drop your bow and start to weep. And it starts foggy and it's snowing. And the buck looks at you. And he walks off. That's a movie. That is a movie. But in the end, the buck walks up and you kill him?

Dude, no one's going to like that movie. People like conclusions, Steve. They like things tied up in a nice bow. It needs to be like the end of The Deer Hunter. Well, I...

Yeah, you got mad because... Did I mention that too? Yeah, and then you got mad because I hadn't seen it. Have you seen it yet? No. You haven't seen The Deer Hunter?

I still haven't seen The Deer Hunter. But I did see it. Mark Boardman? I saw it pop up somewhere. I was like, I should watch that. You haven't seen The Deer Hunter?

My bad on that one. Please, anyone? Right here. Yeah. Western Pennsylvania. Oh, yeah, you've seen it. But they're hunting. It's red stags.

Yeah, there's so much about that movie. It's a war movie, right? It's about, yeah. You're thinking of the right one? So it's some guys from Pennsylvania, coal country, steel country. The Highlands Scottish stag runs across in the mist. It's a real problem in movies. When you get to knowing too much about wildlife,

movies really start to let you down. The worst movie is The Reverend. Yeah, dude. Velvet bulls running across the river. In a flooded burn. Dude, it was like that. The deer hunter where it winds up. It's like we're in Pennsylvania steel country,

but all of a sudden it's a stag. It's terrible. They leave at night and they show up in the morning. Last of the Mohicans. It's a red deer. Yeah. They just get you every time, man. I thought about just offering my services to movies.

I've legitimately told, yeah, just be a consultant. Anything that has to do with hunting, it'd be a great job. Oh, you know. I'll do it for free, just for my own viewing pleasure. Well, I wouldn't say that. Remy, I'll tell you right now that I have done some of that, and they do not care. They don't listen. They do not care.

Early on in my TV career. They're like, yeah, I get it, but we're not making reality. We're not marketing this to hunters. Early on in my TV career, i was trying to explain to a producer about the whole problem of not knowing what's going to happen next and at one point he grew frustrated and he said well that's what animal wranglers are for so i'm gonna throw out my defense for not seeing that movie though because i do recall now thinking about it back in the day when video stores were like a big thing you know and going to get a video and you're always looking behind the curtain in the back corner

that's a different story just looking for the bagger begging like i'd pass that one it'd be on the shelf and then like that's the one i want to see the deer hunter i know i'm gonna love that movie just you know going off the title. It's deeply disturbing. And then my parents would be like, I don't think that's a movie for you. And then I just never caught back up with it. I never revealed that secret. It's stunning.

I mean, it's a masterpiece. I'm going to check it out. It's guys from Pennsylvania. They go off to fight in Vietnam. It's Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro. from Pennsylvania. They go off to fight in Vietnam. It's Christopher Walken, Robert De Niro. One of them goes into the Green Berets. They meet up in a... Then the whole Russian roulette.

It's just like it's horrible. It is. It's horrible. But there's a reckoning like what Mark will eventually have with Holyfield. There's a reckoning in the end where the deer hunter finds his deer and cannot do it um on a related note mark uh

what's uh what's rolling with you guys like at vortex you got a whole big brand new building yeah yeah i mean that's that's the biggest deal i mean that's been definitely a long a long process and yeah kudos to everybody everybody that worked on that project. So, yeah, we recently got moved in, got settled. So now it's not Middleton, Wisconsin. Not Middleton, yep. So we're close, fairly close. I mean, not too far away in an adjacent community called Barneveld.

And it's a really cool town town smaller town a little bit a little bit more rural so not as many sandwich options not as many sandwich options but uh it's good man i think i think it's actually it's forcing me to eat healthier because you know you bring a good lunch every day so so when we were hanging out there though and we went to where you guys were manufacturing the what's the line of scopes you manufacture that you're manufacturing and then when we went to look so right now it's the razor the razor hd amg what happened all that stuff that stuff moves yeah i moved which is a big process in of itself just you know i mean i mean you hire a company to like take that on and i mean that's what they specialize in is is moving

equipment like that. I wasn't super close to that process, but I know it was a process. Did they give you a humongous office? A giant corner office? I probably have the sweetest cube in the world. You got a cubicle? Yeah.

Did you look out your window recently and tell me you saw some birds or is that someone different? That was you? I'm on the second floor. Actually, the whole building. When you, I mean, you'll see it. I mean, it really is an engineering masterpiece. But yeah, I mean, good windows, good light.

We look out on, I guess, the front of the building or where you would enter the building. Backs up to Nature Conservancy. So, yeah. Do you feel it would be unethical if you shot one of those turkeys out of your second-story office building? I do. Out of the second-story office building, yeah. I'm probably not going to take that shot. But I've been thinking about that, though, lately because, I mean, we've been seeing them.

They've got some regulars that come by, and you get to know them. Not get to know them, but, I mean,'ve been seeing them they're you know they've got some regulars that come by and you get to know them not get to know them but I mean you see them regularly and I'm like man you know like I just don't think and again it goes into those like ethics not ethics but just like those gray areas of if I was just to be turkey hunting in general and I came upon a turkey I'd probably shoot that turkey well I don't know because that that's the thing are you raising your hand I'm right I have to say. Oh, this is like grade school. Remi? There's so many people in here.

It's like you're going to be talking to over 13 people and they'll know what's going on. Okay, this is what I don't get though. Your thing with the trout on their spawning beds, why can't you shoot a turkey in a tree? It's because it's wrong. That's how, if it's legal, I would shoot every turkey in a tree. Here's how you turkey hunt. Forget the calls. You sneak up to the bottom of the tree in the dark as soon as shooting hour

starts you have a little beeper on your watch it goes you pull and when that turkey flies out as a young man as a young man i attempted something like that it not work. My question is, are those turkeys spawning? They are spawning. Why can't you shoot a turkey in the roost? Turkeys are different. I disagree. Turkeys are majestic, noble. No, this is where the whole thing falls apart.

Here's where the whole thing falls apart, because I do believe that there is a right and a wrong way to get a turkey. See, I just can't go back. I just cannot. I will never in my life be talked into that. I used to and a wrong way to get a turkey. See, I just can't go back. I just cannot. I will never in my life be talked into that. I used to be a bushwhacker. I used to bushwhack them. And now I'm like a purist.

Saul? Is it Paul? Who's up on their Bible learning? Who gets blinded on the way to Damascus? Saul or Paul? If not one of on the way to Damascus? Saul or Paul? If not one of you guys knows this. Really? Saul.

Gets blinded on the way. Yeah. So I had my Damascus moment where I stopped bushwhacking turkeys. See, everyone that goes, oh, turkey hunting is so hard. I'm like, hand me the shotgun. I'll show you how hard it is. Listen. Yeah. Jumping ducks? You're dealing with a different grade turkey.

Okay. Jumping ducks versus decoying ducks, right? Yeah, but I like to jump ducks. I like to jump ducks. But it's not as cool as decoying them. And there's so much more stuff and so much more effort to decoying. But you would never shoot a duck on the water or what he's like not true not true i have been in situations where and there's a very

good argument to be made for it where i've been with people who said listen uh i put a lot of time and effort into selecting my spot and camouflaging myself and putting out my decoys and calling and I'm hunting a high pressure area. Right. If I can do everything so right and trick the bird so much, it's supposed to be like, oh, I only kind of tricked him. Where he passed over and I shot him, but I went through all the work to fully trick him to the point where he landed in my spread. And it's like, oh, you're too good. You tricked him too much. You've now forfeited your right to shoot the duck.

So some guys will be like, I'm going to now jump it up. Right. So now you're like, put yourself in the duck's position. Okay. Where I say to you, Brody, I'm going to kill you. Now, I could just shoot you in the head right now. Or I'm going to shoot you in the leg and then run around and chase you and beat you over the hell with a gun what are you going to pick i'll take the quick one okay but that's a perspective shooting them on the water i think

is less effective i've done it plenty of times you know why you can't break their wings exactly they dive it's it's almost more you jump them up so you know you'll kill them because because then you he's yeah yeah no yeah i've seen some you know you'll kill them. Because then he's – yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen some – not that I don't want to say I was on the trigger, but I have seen some real – I have seen some on-the-water gimmies where everybody's kind of like, how in the world did that not work, right? Yeah, you almost have to aim below them.

Yeah, that's a good point. I want to get back to Mark from it, though. What layout for like what's going on with new products and whatnot with you guys so yeah man um earlier i was talking about getting a little chub about turkeys is there anything i should be getting excited about man we got some new binos that are super sweet that'd be good for turkey hunting like how does it fit like what is what you got coming out how does it fit in i mean they're new so we just like like three weeks ago we released our new i guess our new generation of the viper hd binos um so if anybody's familiar with like the original viper hd series this is kind of a next evolution

of those and i mean i guess for me how it works in a turkey hunting is you should always have a set of binoculars whatever you're hunting i. I had to get, you know what? They were in my buddy Tommy Edson. He was like, do you bring binoculars turkey hunting? I'm like, absolutely. Yeah. I bring. Because I like to look at stuff.

Yeah. Bring binoculars to everything hunting. Yeah. I'd be annoyed. I mean, and I have forgot my binoculars before, you know, getting out of the house early in the morning. And it's like forgetting your cell phone. It's like you're, it like the cell phone of hunting equipment,

even though I guess cell phones are kind of part of our hunting equipment now. But you know what I'm saying. You're always checking your pocket. Yeah. I bring them with. Yeah. You have it. Yeah, use it.

Keep it. Keep it all the time. So that's optically their step up. Form factor is awesome. They're a little bit more compact. What are they like when it comes to – are they more – they're less money than the razors?

Yeah. So they'd be kind of like a tier, tier below the razor, but I mean, they're, they're solid by now. They look good. So I'd say that that's the by now that I would suggest even before and now, like a person who has a need for kind of, who uses their optics in a manner where they kind of have that need for top tier optical performance but maybe don't have the budget to take on you know a top tier vinyl like the razor hd you know you can fall back into that viper hd and you're still getting a very

very good optic for your dollar yeah how do you guys when you're picturing all that, man, do people call up and express bafflement about why binoculars and stuff are so expensive? Or is it just kind of like people just accept now that it's a thing that costs money? It was difficult. I always talk about, in one of our guidebooks, I wrote about guys that roll up in fifty thousand dollar pickups with twenty twenty dollar binoculars i'm like you got it all wrong bro you know i mean i think that still happens you know and i think and we've talked about this before but i mean i think it takes somebody having having that optics epiphany you know when they when they really see what it's about you know and maybe they use their buddies you know really good binos or something like that and then you know they're like oh man i need to get a set of those i can

tell you my epiphany do you know my epiphany i think we talked about it before but yeah what was it we're hunting on the uh years ago first time everyone out there were hunting on the north slope of the brooks range and there's a grizzly coming up the other side of the river from our camp and i'm looking at it through my binos. And that looked at my buddy's binos. And he had just, he had just spent a season packing moose on the Alaska Peninsula. And the guy gave him a set of souped up binos.

And what I'm looking at, which is like this amorphous brown blob walking up the riverbank. And I looked through his and I can see that the there's like the winds blowing and it's forming these little cowlicks in the bear's hair and i'm watching this like cowlick kind of move around on its rump with the breeze blowing on it and i'm like i can tell you I'm going to be saving up some money for. It's like actual binos. Yeah. And since then, now I'm just

addicted to looking through them. Well, I think that when you get used to having something like that in the woods, if you haven't been using binos, if you haven't been carrying them, which I think by and large a lot of people do now, but I think maybe it's less common even 15, 20 years ago, whatever. I'm throwing a very non-concrete timeline on that but um

once you do i think you realize like what you've been missing and you just yeah you can't get enough and then you realize how important they are and what you can do with them like you can look at stuff you know and whether you're tree stand hunting in wisconsin or you know coos deer hunting in arizona man i mean that's it's an important piece to have for sure you hang out with uh bubbly doug durin i was hunting with doug one time and we walked up in what he calls the big woods up by the wet spot which are the two great names for bars um and we get by the wet spot and i just like take my binos and scan through the big woods and glass up the tippy tippy top of a turkey fan never in a million years would we'd have walked in and spooked it glassed up that tippy top of a turkey fan and we sat down and killed that bird

maybe an hour later yeah never would have found that turkey. No, I mean, yeah, you wouldn't have killed that bird without those binos. No, I was kind of like, when I saw it, I was shocked by what I was looking at. I think it's like a super important thing. I mean, that's just a good example of one tactic, right? When you're creeping into that field, stay back, glass it before you expose yourself

and blow the whole thing out. And you guys obviously saw something, got an opportunity, and capitalized on it. Remy, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just adjusting myself. Okay, I got one. Sorry. Another thing, speaking of how it's talking about that there should be

a bar called The Wet Spot, which we've discussed before, a guy wrote in to say if there was a bar bar called the bearded hen would you go into it and he also was wondering this is a good question would most states you could kill like most states a legal bird is a bearded bird one in 100 hens is bearded. Roughly. I think it's like it depends on the areas and whatnot. Would you shoot a bearded hen? Ask me that question.

Would you shoot a bearded hen? I've got one mounted on my wall. You shot a bearded hen? Yeah, I shot a bearded hen. And you knew you were shooting a bearded hen? That's a good question. It was fall. It's just like beard, boom. Exactly the same.

Minus the mounting. You shot a bearded hen? Yep. Really? Yep. Well, now that these guys have broke the ice, I know it's a safe space. My name's Mark Fordman.

But yeah, I rolled a bearded hen. The spring. In the spring, but i called this bird in and you know and it's kind of you know doing this turkey stuff and little beard poked out i'm like oh cool so you're like it's a female but it's got a beard so it's legal you know i mean at the time it was happening pretty quick but i saw that beard i let it rip and and i don't know i can't say that i necessarily i mean in the fall i think it's a little bit different because they're you know what i mean but yeah i mean that's that's what happened see i think it's wrong i identified i want to clarify i have never shot a turkey out

of a roost but i also don't think it's wrong just in case i'm backpedaling but i have no you can kill a turkey with a tack hammer in your backyard. It's a barn animal, man. You can do it any way you want. No rules to turkeys. I generally fall under whatever the state defines as the regulations. Yeah, you know what Aldo Leopold said about that? No. Ethics is doing the right thing when no one is watching,

even when doing the wrong thing is legal oh my god i'm not saying it's wrong wrong it's not wrong wrong but if i was hunting and i was hunting spring golf spring turkeys and i and i and a hen came in with a beard on it i would not be able to this is coming from the man who would who would pitchfork browns out of a drainage ditch i would not be able to harm that female turkey i don't believe last day of a long hunt and there's a bearded hen i don't know would you go into a bar named the bearded hen with a level of uncertainty yes would you bring your wife into a bar called the bearded hen? With a level of uncertainty, yes. Would you bring your wife into a bar called the bearded hen?

Absolutely not. That's the only way I would go in. 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.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Um, alright. slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all um all right uh we've got a lot of concluding thoughts lots of concluding thoughts to go through um we'll start with uh brody oh man i'm just excited turkey season's uh i'm not there for the opener but colorado opened today so i'm stoked to get back and go chaseado opened today so i'm i'm stoked to get back and go chase some turkeys and shoot them out of trees with a nail gun that's how you that's how you do it this year what's that what is your what is your actual like uh turkey hunt plan well i got two tags i drew a tag and i got an over-the-counter tag so i'll hunt the draw

tag first and then let all the guys clear out of the over the counter areas and then get after get after a couple weeks later yeah my brother got both his turkeys today i think wow just watch and say yeah he just did a trip and got two turkeys so he doesn't like stretching the hunt out no you know in some places you can't do that on the same day you know what i saw the other day in ark, you're not allowed to shoot jakes in the spring season. What? Yeah. That's wrong. It says got.

That's immoral to make a rule. Talking about bearded hens. You can't shoot a jake. Well, you know, we're going to Missouri tomorrow, and I've been trying to weigh out in my head. I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm going to hold out for a i'm you know i'm like okay yeah i'm gonna hold out for a long beard but at what point do i as my brother says put the jake brakes on one well that's what's nice about having two tags you can you know you can focus on the big boy

and take a jake home they banned shooting jakes in the spring i just stumbled across it you know looking at the like on arkansas website and they'd posted their regs and no jakes uh for you uh listeners a jake is a it would be a one-year-old turkey and he doesn't have spurs yet he's just got little round nubs and his beard is like an inch or two long and i'd have a few more unpunched turkey tags if it was illegal to kill jakes yeah i would never shoot a jake be audacity that's where i draw the line in the roost with his nail gun but he's like yeah i only go see i can only go so low here a bearded hen that's one thing that's just weird but a jake you know he doesn't even have a chance to breed yet. No, they don't. You monsters. His fan's not totally tricked out.

He can't do a real rip and gobble. That's your concluder, Brody? Yeah. Mark Kenyon, been in the hot seat. Yeah. You know, this is my first BHA rendezvous I've been at. We haven't really talked about where we're at here and what's going on, but I think my concluding thought is just what an awesome group of people that's here at this event

i mean the energy has been really impressive the relative youth has been surprising and impressive that's maybe not surprising but i think compared to other events you go to within the hunting and fishing world it's it doesn't look like this um so that was encouraging to see and um stoked about it so you get a lot of excitement in a group like this for the future of what we're doing here in the hunting and fishing and conservation world and the future is bright when you look at this group yeah it's kind of stunning to see pictures of the group and the age demographic defies the norm. I remember not too long ago I read that in Michigan, the average age of a person who buys a trapping license goes up exactly one every year.

Old Ted. Still at it. That was harrowing uh remy can we talk about how you're off the market oh yeah so all those ladies locked what's that ring made out of i don't know if i could woolly mammoth ivory is it really yeah wow it's not legal woolly mammoth ivory yeah yeah yeah i like is there I don't know. Now there's a big thing they want to ban mammoth ivory because it's becoming like replacing elephant ivory apparently. Oh, a lot of it depends on where it was found.

Yeah. Private land, public land. If it's found on private land, it's like, I haven't had it. Yeah. Because, yeah, there's a lot of – Brody, were you just sending me that article? I think you did. You know, are you familiar with the Lacey. Are you familiar with the Lacey Act?

Oh, yeah. So for a listener who isn't, and you're excused if you don't know the Lacey Act, the Lacey Act is one of the things that allowed us to, back in the early 1900s, the Lacey Act is one of the things that allowed us to start putting an end to market hunting, which was decimating wildlife populations, is it makes it a federal offense to move illegally obtained wildlife across state lines. So if states might have lax rules governing wildlife, but the Lacey Act allows you to make federal crimes out of moving

things around and someone was just showing me an article where this is kind of perplexing they're using the lacey act to go after people smuggling dinosaur bones so here you're taking an animal from 65 million years ago who has a fossilized bone and using a contemporary wildlife trafficking law to it's a novel approach man i don't know how well it will hold up in court yeah it's not recognized as wildlife you know when i called alberta first fish and game when i found that buffalo skull they only a couple hundred years old yep he said great buffalo is not a recognized game species okay yeah do whatever you want with it you find some mineralized like when you find a dinosaur fossil it's rock that's right it's just a weird deal man yeah it's a weird deal but what they're looking

for there is where it was applicable is there's a lot of people, like right now everybody goes to Mongolia for dinosaur fossils. It's like the new it'd be like New Mexico in the 1930s, right? It's just like, it's not picked over yet. People used to see it and disregard it the same way people used to not

pick up Indian arrowheads and all of a sudden you get enough time and separating the two events and it starts to become something noteworthy. So there's people like looting all these and there's not much enforcement in Mongolia. So there's people looting all these dinosaur fossils

out of Mongolia and bringing them into the U.S. and they're using the Lacey Act to go after people with it, which I thought was an interesting approach. But Remy, your concluder you're married oh you feel different yeah it feels good i think it should feel different a little bit you know i like it i'm excited about it it's a great wedding and uh it was a lot of fun also uh one of my final thoughts everyone will think that i hate on turkeys mostly it's just for fun

it's fun to hate trout. It's fun to hate trout. It's like one of those things, it's like I can pick the turkey guy that's a fanatic about turkey and just go after him only because I think I've got that turkey hunter distaste from guiding in Montana

or guiding elk hunters so much and these guys coming in going, oh yeah, elk hunting. Oh, I've got got it it's just like turkey hunting i'm like nah sorry i've been turkey hunting it's nothing like elk hunting calling the two they make similarities oh sheep hunting it's a lot like turkey hunting i think what i think of turkey hunting is being like a little mini elk hunt because it's like it does have this right that there's a male and he has this audacious noise he makes and then there's

a female and she has sort of a more a more tempered kind of calm version that she makes and you're using the one to bring in the other and you sit up on a high spot and you're praying to hear a gobble just like you're praying to hear a bugle if i was you know it's like saying elk hunting is a lot like well then turkey hunting is all like pigeon hunting you're like yeah i i would never say it right I think Yanni does say it. The turkey hunt is like, oh, yeah. But I see where they're coming from. I get it. But it's also, in my mind, two completely different things.

And if anybody that has said that to me while I've been guiding them learned within a few minutes that it was not the same. So I'm like, all right, let's go up this mountain over here. Like a statement of saying the hunting of the two is similar, I would say that that's pretty false for obvious reasons to anybody. But I think when you start talking about interacting and calling animals, there aren't any other animals that I've hunted anywhere where you call and interact with like that.

And I've done a little bit of duck hunting now. But that's not gender specific. What? calling ducks isn't the same thing right that's what i'm saying i don't think it's the same thing at all you know even though a lot of people get into that interaction but it's still not like you're not playing the hen or the cow and trying to call in a bull or you could play the gobbler or another bull and call in a bull yeah ducks don't come in with your lipstick terrain similarly to train similarly to bring the animal over a roll to come see you making that call. I mean, you do those same two exact tactics.

I'm feeling it. From now on, Remy, this fall, he's going to be like, you know what, it's a lot like turkey hunting. It's a lot like turkey hunting. I used to disagree, but now I agree. Cal? I don't know. I mean, all good things.

That fish deal, man, we've been over that a million times in similar circles on fishing fish off their reds. And, yeah, it's a real interesting one. Can I add something to that? Yeah, please do. I didn't have my headset on earlier, or I didn't have a headset, but it's kind of like the stocked pond. You can make an analogy with the stocked pond, right?

Like, fish in the reds, all of us probably, that would ethically kind of not do it now for trout, or whether it's ethics or you're just kind of like, whatever, it's too easy, it's fish in a bucket. The first time you went and did it, you were probably holy shit this is fun you know like oh my god you know yeah and then the second or third time it's kind of like going back to this stocked trout pond the second or third yeah yeah all right see that's the thing that's why i feel a little bit of guilt is because i remember um hearing about and really like exploring and trying to find

the mythical brown trout spawn. Yeah. Because this was before it was a bad thing. I remember people, I remember reading in guidebooks good areas to go look for spawning browns.

Yeah. You probably could find guidebooks that told you how to blow know blow up canada geese off dams by packing buckshot around dynamite sticks too you know i mean build yourself a can what you're gonna need uh so that's your concluding thought is you just wanted to touch back on something earlier oh i guess uh i'll just say thanks love these discussions that's good and uh and uh yeah i guess also absolutely blown away at how much this bha rendezvous has grown it's crazy we had those seminars this morning nuts and asked uh i gotta i gotta introduce uh remy for his q a um and uh be the moderator for it.

But I asked out of the gate, how many people is this your first rendezvous? And I mean, it had to have been over 50% of that room. I thought it was even more like 80 plus percent. There's a lot of people in there. Surprised me. Seats 400. And that had to be over three, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. The first one I went to was probably six or seven years ago, and it was at the fairground in Missoula. And I gave a talk to the dinner thing, and maybe 150 people. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's growing like crazy. I mark you're spot on man i mean the youth is so encouraging to see it's the youngest um kind of rod and gun anything i've been around so um pretty neat to see hopefully uh make it, make it some impacts. I think as far as, uh, there's lots of talk today, um, and the last couple of days really about, uh, you know, how we move the needle as far as new hunter recruitment and hunter retaining or retainment. And, um, just like, like Remy said many times this morning it's like we got a every single person is an ambassador for what we love to do and we got to do a hell of a lot better job putting a better face on it so yeah it's been a cool uh cool couple of days so far mr phelps yeah so this

is my first bha rendezvous. It's been awesome. You know, one thing that's kind of opened my eyes is I'm fairly conservative. I come from a logging town, and then you kind of show up with people that maybe you don't see eye to eye with, but we're all here for the one thing that we love. So they're like, less taxes. You're like, more taxes. And I'm going to make a funny joke. You know, like the shiny puffy coats, I kind of make a joke. Like at home, I'm the guy in a fleece because that's old school.

But I'm like, I've never been around so many hunters in a shiny puffy coat before but it's cool because you can take that and and we're all here for the same reason we all love to recreate on public land we all love to hunt and fish on it and for all of us to come together um as a group of people with the one passion and be laser focused on public lands is is awesome um yeah and i do want to do you uh do you feel that this can you check this out no it's got a first it's got a first light you're gonna check it out like parts part of my jacket's a little shiny no no you're good no no i'm just kidding remy's remy's a jerk for shooting turkeys out of a tree you agree with that how about bearded hens so there's two sides like then we didn't you guys didn't even really get into like the genetic mutation side of it like maybe we should get those things out of here

are they bad i don't know if it's bad i've just heard that side of the story like it is a genetic mutation and we should shoot those things but i would say that without genetic mutations um i feel like life would have ended a long time ago. Yeah, I mean, I'm just saying, I wouldn't specifically target one. If one came walking through the setup and I knew it was a bearded hen, I would probably let it go. But it's one of those things where I'm not going to pass my own belief on to somebody.

If you want to shoot it, it's within the state laws. And that kind of gets back to the fishing thing where Cal doesn't want to fish over the reds, but then maybe my kid does, because that's a different experience. And so I don't necessarily say we want to put laws that, you know, cover that or blanket it for everybody. But then, you know, he's out there for the sport and, you know, the uncertainty of hooking up one where like me taking my kid, maybe I don't want to do that, but I want to have the ability to take my kid and hook up to that fish. And so I think there a and you know you got to look at it through that scope of

of who the person is and um you know take take it for what it is when you were talking earlier about uh like political spectrums do you feel that that people right who lean politically right and people lean people who lean politically left do you see like in your community that people coalesce around the idea of supporting public lands or in particular like supporting federal land management agencies and sort of assisting them and and you know giving them verbal support and helping them you know make decisions that that allow access but you know do you feel that there's that people are coming around this idea in your community or do you feel that it's a divisive issue in your community in a logging

in a logging center of warehouser country you know the biggest land manager manager in the state of washington so we don't there's a very select few of us that they have to travel two hours to the east to recreate on you know some federal lands we have some state-owned lands and stuff but so i would around home it's more of interest on like how warehousers managing not necessarily on on the because you guys are recreating on publicly accessible land that's privately owned. Well, now as long as you pay $350, you get a key. Yeah, I bought a $100 pass for walking.

Yeah, so you can do that. I mean, everybody finds it important. Anything that affects them and their recreation, then people are passionate about. So we don't get a big push in my area for public lands besides a few of us that that you know routinely drive two hours east i see what you're saying i got so when you're when you're hunting local you're hunting warehouse yeah warehouser or privately owned industrial that allows which yeah and that's like that too is a significant thing and i think that that's a I think people look at the public lands debate

and groups like BHA that really support public lands, and I think other people kind of have this question, like our friend Doug, who's very involved in private land conservation. And he'll kind of feel like, he doesn't really say this, but I think sometimes he feels like, why all of a sudden all this attention?

Like most land in the country, especially in the East, most land is private land. If we're going to get serious about conservation, we have to pay a lot of attention to private land conservation. That's where some of the most important conservation work. But I would say to him, and I do say to him, but there's not an emptiness there. I think that we have stuff in place to try to do that like farm bills crp programs i mean there's a lot more dollars per acre that go into private land conservation issues but i think he kind of feels that um there's a sort of lack of sexiness around all that just like the work yep of doing good wildlife work on private land yeah and i

think like there's this third area too which is these sort of almost like wilderness type places these big tree farms which are the size of they own land the size of national forests that are you know privately held and there's a conservation question to have there too and also like giving them some giving them the credit of allowing a public access program they're not making tons of money on public access no and i think it comes back and maybe i'm a little off here but it comes back to the reason we're so passionate about public lands is all eight of us in this room can end up at some wilderness in colorado hunting and so we

are um all concerned about the conservation on that piece of public land we're a private land in iowa i have this much interest in it because I'm never going to get a hunt there, even though I do care about the species. So I think it comes back to a little bit of that selfless nature that all of us in this room can take it, not take advantage, but we have the ability to recreate on some of this public land that potentially holds the animals we want to go pursue where that private land back east and it just doesn't hold anything for us even though we all do care about you know the the white tail and you know the stuff that is back there that that i may not you know get to get to hunt that private

property ever you know uh are you talking about doug he's got a funny story i kind of hesitate to tell this i don't get doug in trouble well i'll tell it so doug's in a bar and a guy like a local guy in the bar it's like oh yeah if you want to hunt doug's place you got to be like a celebrity you know doug won't let anybody hunt his place and doug says half the bar picks up goes well i was just hunting doug's place some guy goes maybe you don't hunt dog's place because you're an asshole so there is yeah i think there is that like sure you're doing great work but what's the how's it benefit me um yeah that's a funny thing to bring up that there is some sort of like a little bit of a selfish nature about public land because you're looking out for your own best interest. But I remember saying it before,

that if someone came to me, like with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, if I had to make a deal, oh, we were talking about this with John Geerick. I was like, if I had to make a deal with the devil, and they said, okay, here's the story, Sonny. You're never allowed to step foot back here. In exchange for that, we'll never drill it, but you'll never see it again.

Or you can come here all you want. I would be like, well, I'll take the I don't step foot on it ever again deal. Let's go with that one. So I think that it's not always, but yeah, I think that you wind up having this idea um of that you do have a sense of ownership over and whether you're going to use it or not it feels the same way that's what i think a thing that needs to happen in the conservation world is the sense of um and it happens in other factions other cultural factions where an attack on one is an attack on all but i think that a lot of times outdoorsmen tend to be very sort of myopic and kind of provincial in their view of that they're really

worried about their corner of the world and it's like harder to picture like for me i've never hunted nebraska so maybe a conservation issue in nebraska doesn't feel as immediate to me right but to try to foster this conservation sense where where people do they're like oh there's trouble brewing in nebraska i don't go there probably never will go there don't have any buddies there but i'm going to come in in their defense and help them out on this this wildlife issue just because i'm viewing it like an attack on one is attack on all but i think it's super frustrating it's got it's not can't only be a direct threat it has to be an immediate direct threat for the hunting community to get really fired up from what i've seen hen is off the charts right now,

but I put some thought into it because I was thinking of the scenario. You got to feeling guilty about the bearded hen? Well, yeah, because I felt bad. Well, and actually, I'll say this. I kind of felt bad at the moment, too, but I put some thought into why those rules are in place. And I think it applies to the scenario in which this incident happened, where I called this bird in.

I identified with absolute certainty that it had a beard. Yeah. And I made the decision to pull the trigger based on that. And then upon further discovery, I was like, oh, well, that's a unique thing. Yeah, but you got to have some marker. You can't say male or female because you're going to invite – because people are going to be like, well, I'm going to – what's the best way to indicate male or femaleness? And someone might very reasonably say a beard. Right. people are going to be like well i'm gonna what's the best way to indicate male or femaleness and someone might very reasonably say a beard right because you're not going to tell him look at the

spurs because it's hard to see spurs like it's down on its foot and he's walking through tall grass so you can't have that you can't say like oh you got to wait till he fans out and struts and displays because a lot of times they don't do that yeah or he'll gobble well maybe he comes in quiet so at some point and then there's there's things with the head like a seasoned turkey because a lot of times they don't do that. Or he'll gobble. Well, maybe he comes in quiet. So at some point, and then there's things with the head, like a seasoned turkey hunter will look at a head, especially in the spring, and know what they're looking at, but not always.

So the same way deer, like it doesn't say, well, some states do say like a buck or male, but oftentimes it's an antlered deer, because you've got to go like, what is the identifying feature that we're all going to agree upon? So the fact that one in 100 turkeys is masquerading around with the beard, I don't think it's like a legitimate mistake to make. Right. You're sitting there in the woods and you hear comes a turkey and all of a sudden there's that beard.

It's like game on, most people. Well, yeah, and that's what I'm almost wondering, and I don't know, right? But like you said, it's an identifying identifying feature so that rule is put in place so if something like does like that does happen like that person didn't break the law yeah right because it was the intent was not there like my guess would be that if there was no such thing as a bearded hen they'd be like yeah you can only shoot goblins in the ring. Yeah, females. You know, so, you know, that's my, and then my other concluder.

So it's tearing you up. Have you pitched Fork Brown off his spawning bed lately? Regularly. My other concluder is, yeah, I mean, I'll just echo Mark and Cal's thoughts on the Bha rendezvous cool event awesome like-minded people i think there's a a unique electricity a unique energy and a strong momentum of of groups that maybe that hunt and fish but maybe cross a few other boundaries and uh and i think you know i think that momentum is going to hopefully you know carry through where people

whether you do hunt and fish or you know enjoy public lands for other recreational purposes you know we can all agree on the same thing that about how important they are well said i got two concluders. No, kind of one. Who was here when we were talking about all the different ways they artificially inseminate and extract semen from dogs and whatnot? You were here.

Yeah, I was. No one else was here. It was Ronnie. Ronnie and Doug. Yeah. A guy that listened to that and wrote in how when he was doing animal and physiology studying in a veterinary school, he was talking about their method of horse semen collection. They would have this, he calls it a large wooden contraption that the stallion would do its business to.

And after it did its business, you would use a, they demonstrated how to use it like a little straw. And you just use a little vacuum crate with your own mouth to kind of fill that straw with the semen after he deposited on this and then you just pack the straw away for later use and you say you only you don't you only over suck once and you don't make that you don't make that mistake again. But we have gotten a lot. I'm not going to go through them all. We had a lot of feedback from people about how to extract semen from various creatures that I'll not get into right now. But I wanted to share that one quickly. And the other thing I wanted to say is this is from the bottom of my heart.

Like, dude, it is so nice to have people like all of you guys to talk to. Like, honestly, man. Yeah. to have people like all of you guys to talk to like honestly man um yeah any sense of loneliness one feels in the world like find a group of guys like you that you can like talk about this shit and they understand what you're talking about it uh it makes me feel very happy and alive so thank you very much everyone for joining us thank you thank. Thanks for having 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.

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