The MeatEater Podcast - Ep 138: The Life and Times of a Squirrel Man

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

Steven Rinella talks with Parker Hall, Chris "Ridge Pounder" Gill, Seth Morris, Michael Lindemuth, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: half breasts, whole breasts, and lobes; the problematic nature of the Herrera case; Mark Twain's dooziest quotes; the repetitive and deafening nature of squirrel dogs; big mambo jambo Flatheads; the Soylent Green of the fish world; invasive exotics; Parker's contentious catfish species preference; the lo-cull factor; and more. For more on the ideas and materials referenced in this episode, check out the show notes here. 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. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. We're looking out the window right now, and there's a green heron.

Fishing. When we just looked at that a second ago, and I wanted to mention it, my old man had a, you know like the drum inside of a washing machine? Like in the old days, they just had like these big steel perforated drums inside a top- washing machine we use one of those for a live well off of some industrial size washing machine right because it's already perforated so you just set it out in the lake throw some rocks in there some bricks in there and then you could put all your bluegills and perch in there right and wait till you had enough

where it warranted cleaning them so we just go down and catch a few and throw them in there and then when you had this whole thing full we'd go down and scale them and flam but there was this heron that lived on our lake or spent a lot of time hunting our lake and he would never get in his head that they were captive. So he would land way the hell down the beach and stalk this thing, like just painstakingly sneak up on this thing, and then bam, grab a bluegill out of there, and never just got comfortable with the idea. He was like a dude that hunts high fence, right?

Where they still go through all the, like, they get like the camo on, you know, and they, you know, they go through all the rigmarole, but then he would just come up and, uh, yeah, never got in his head that he could just land there and start eating bluegills. Um, Parker, it's really, i'm really glad you're here do you mind if we touch on a few things before we start talking to you please do okay uh another point to raise yannis you know how you think that you know how you think that it's stupid that i think that there is confusion around what constitutes a half or whole breast. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're burning precious time. I'm worried about that.

Check this out. A guy wrote in, he was at the grocery store this weekend and there was a woman fixing to buy chicken breasts, which were on sale. And she was having a disagreement with the meat purveyor about, are you talking about a whole breast or half a breast? He says that at one point in time, she even groped on her body, what she thought amounted to a breast. And in the end. Hold on. So she was right. And the butcher was saying no that's not

a whole breast she's like what do you mean i gather that she felt it meant that she should get two or whatever but she registered confusion point being this is not just the thing that comes down to turkey hunters parker you know i'm Parker, you know what I'm talking about? I know what you're talking about. What do you think about that? I think a whole breast is two halves. So if I say I'm going to smoke up a turkey breast, what do you think I'm smoking?

I think you're smoking a half, but I think it's sling. I think it's sling for, if I say I'm getting a turkey breast, that means half. But if you're smoking a turkey breast, that means whole. Man, I don't know. No, he's still saying half. But what he's saying is it's slang.

But you're saying on a bird. If you were like, I shot him in the breast, you'd be talking about his whole chest. Correct. A guy wrote in and said, this doesn't even need to be a problem if we would adopt things from the poultry industry

where they call them lobes. Because you don't talk about it. You talk about lobes. And then all confusion falls away. I don't know if that word's that appetizing, though. Smoking up a lobe? I would think it was like he was smoking a joint it was some slang term for a type of joint some guy says yeah i'm smoking up a big old lobe this weekend

oh really uh moving on just clearing up a couple of housekeeping issues here uh we just did a podcast about all the the nine million acres of landlocked land in the west and the guy wrote in he says i'm not like taking this as a slam on the East because you weren't talking about the East. But he says he spent some time on OnX. He lives in North Carolina because he knows about a lot of landlocked land around his house in North Carolina.

So he spent some time on OnX and within a 20 minute drive of his home in North Carolina, there are 847 acres of landlocked land around him one chunk he says kind of because it's river accessible but there's no boat launch anywhere there's no public boat launch anywhere near there so it would be hours on the water oh sounds like a really good i know that sounds like a freaking honey hole, man. He doesn't give any details about where it is. A lot of national forests, but there's landlocked land within the national forest, so he said this is a problem

that plagues us as well out here. I believe that they said that they're going to be working on more states. Those 13 western states is just where they decided to start. Yeah, I think they should. Another question. Podcast episode 134 steve mentioned their bush pilot was dismayed at something they wanted to bring back to town and i was supposed to talk about it later but never did

what the pilot was dismayed about is that so we had a generator to charge camera batteries. And the idea was insulting to him that you would move gas back to town. I think a lot of his career has been spent getting gas out to people in weird places who need gas. And he was insulted by the idea that one would bring a two gallon can of gas back to town where as he explained us there are gas stations all over the place and wanted us to go find at least go find a quad runner and pour that gas into it he also had the personality that like that's it that was his shtick was to be just dismayed at everything. He was grumpy. That wasn't the only thing that got his feathers ruffled up.

We all were packing out trash, and he gave us a hard time about that. Didn't like the trash. He especially didn't like that we had camera equipment. No one likes that. No one likes Pelican cases. No person in aviation likes a Pelican case. So upon seeing the Pelican cases and asking what's in there and hearing that it was camera

equipment. Except for our buddy John Varco. He didn't give a shit. No, but that dude's cool. He's next level. That dude's cool. He's a pro. This guy, upon learning what was in our Pelican case, says, fuck. One last thing this is something that's been brewing for a long time

I think people are going to need to start paying a little bit of attention to it there's two last things this is one of them this could have major ramifications it's just something that people need to watch it's going to go to the Supreme Court Lord knows we've been hearing a lot about the Supreme Court lately meaning who's who is going to perhaps

be sitting on it in the near future. But this has something to do with this. There's a thing that's probably going to be heard in the Supreme Court soon that'll have a big major ramifications for big game. It's called the Herrera case. It started in 2014

when a member of the Crow tribe in Montana was out hunting with two other tribal members. And they went on to national forest land off of the Crow reservation out of season with no licenses. They go on to National Forest land off of the Crow Reservation.

Out of season with no licenses. They go on to the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming. So they push across the state line into Wyoming. And they shoot four trophy-sized bull elk. No season, no licenses. Okay. A game warden hears about this, does an investigation, and comes to issue citations to the tribal members. Two of the guys pled to their crime

and presumably paid their fine or whatever happened to them. But one of them, Herrera, makes a claim that an 1868 treaty between the United States and the Crow tribe allowed him to hunt unoccupied, this is a quote from the treaty, quote, unoccupied lands of the United States without any sort of state or federal regulation. So he's convicted and his appeals with the Wyoming state court system is denied, but they keep pushing it and they push it up to have it heard by the Supreme Court because

this is something that's been waiting to be finally settled for a long time. Some people think it is settled. They think that Bureau of Land Management land, National Forest land is in fact not unclaimed. It's claimed or you know it's not unoccupied or it's not open and unclaimed but it's occupied and claimed and so if it's heard by the supreme court um it might change our definition of this stuff and if wyoming loses the case so it's like herrera v wyoming. If Wyoming loses this case, Wyoming and 10 other states, as well as the federal government,

will lose the ability to enforce hunting and fishing laws on any tribal members pursuing wildlife off reservation. Because there are a handful of treaties that use similar language. You could theoretically, depending on how this goes, tribal members could theoretically hunt within Yellowstone National Park. So a lot of state game managers are watching this very carefully and trying to understand what the implications of this could be ridge you cool i'm cool man i did have a thought about breasts lobes no the the tribal thing okay i'm not a subject matter expert but lay it on me it's more like a

like a racism sort of issue because i remember in michigan go on there was always like uh growing up the um tribe in like manistee i think it's the ottawa but they could fish salmon out of season i remember like a bunch of dudes growing up that we fished which were always like goddamn indians can fish and blah blah blah oh yeah i remember hearing that because because tribal members in the sioux can snag yeah and then it led to like they didn't just focus on that they then like expanded and then just like became racist against native americans yeah so like i think i i'm hearing that stuff i'm always just like thinking about like where that'll go socially like where management ends and racism begins yeah because i think i mean you gotta you do have to think about the animals if that's the

the main issue but then like you know the random person who's like oh goddamn india now gets to come in and shoot this elk out of season or whatever it's like then then it becomes less about like the issue and more about something that isn't really related but kind of related i understand what you're saying you know and even in um like i look at that so i look at the herrera case and i damn sure know how i hope the if it gets heard in the supreme court i damn sure know what I hope the, if it gets heard in the Supreme Court, I damn sure know what I hope the court says. Yeah. But in the back of my head, I do wonder, am I tipping that? What are my motivations for tipping the way I'm tipping?

Yeah. Is it an us versus them? Yeah. Right? yeah is it an us versus them yeah right or is it strictly that i'm viewing is what would be the implications for wildlife management i feel and everyone feels this way about themselves i feel as though um i'm not tipping that way out of some latent bigotry i feel as though i'm tipping that way but it's in the back of my head that is that a thing that's going on in my head and us them yeah we they yeah

i think keeping that in check is important at least if you're thinking about it then i don't think it's an issue if you're not thinking about it, then you can get into the weeds on it. But if you're conscious of like, oh, is this an us-them over wildlife? If you're already thinking that, I think you can make an objective decision. What's your take on it, Yanni? Nothing?

Well, I'm with you. I certainly hope it's going to, they'll decide that it is occupied land Well, I'm with you. You know, I certainly hope it's going to, you know, they'll decide that it is occupied land and throw it out. What would be helpful for me too, and no one could answer this because we just don't know where things are going down the line. What would be helpful for me too is to understand the scale of exploitation that we would be talking about. If we knew there was just like very minimal exploitation of the resource, I would feel differently.

But you just don't know where things are going to go. And now and then we make rulings and things. We make rulings. Like look at the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act, right? We make a ruling and then wind up down the road being like, my goodness, I had no idea that it would cause this level. At the time, I couldn't foresee the level of trouble. We would be like the Pandora's box

that would be opened. Well, yeah, and in this case, it could be one individual that if they decided to exercise that right and think about it, if you went away from elk and went to bighorn sheep you go in and take out every possible you know regular hunter's opportunity in one unit with a with a couple pulls of the trigger yeah yeah you could someone could do a relocation of a handful of bighorns and spend you know a few hundred thousand dollars on it and someone could decide well

sweet yeah thanks thanks bro yeah no yeah no oversight no game regulation oversight hearing that yeah it does sound like you need to adjust treaties from the 1800s to now because well that's a the landscape was very different you know sure that's like one of rogan's jokes one of his latest jokes would be like thomas jefferson coming back and being like hold hold a minute you guys haven't changed any part of this you guys just left it like this uh where to begin where to begin i was thinking about that this morning oh Oh, how to begin? Yeah. Do we go complete linear or do we choose a...

Set the stage. Choose a species. Set the stage, Giannis. We're in Missouri visiting our new friend, Parker Hall. Who's been on the show before. Yep, the podcast program we decided to come back to make a television program and to uh try to catch big giant catfish can i can i interrupt you man sure speaking of programs 16 brand new episodes are up on netflix right now yeah go watch them and tell all your friends to watch them and tell your family to watch them my grandmother grandmother, bless her heart, when she was alive,

she liked watching Meat Eater. She's not really into watching hunting or hunting. Didn't let me tell hunting stories. So tell everybody to watch it. It's good shit. Go on now. Yeah, so we were trying to catch a big catfish by a method called bank pulling.

And then go and shoot a few squirrels behind Parker's dog. That's correct. Those are our main activities while we're here. And yeah, I was just having a hard time deciding whether I wanted to talk squirrels first or catfish first. Let's set the table like this. I got a good way to set the table. Parker, explain why. Explain why it's good right now

to go for flatheads and shitty right now to go for squirrels. Well, in short order. Winter's coming to Missouri, although it doesn't seem like it this week. No. Chiggers are out. Chiggers are out.

90 degrees. But this time of year, those flatheads, I think, really put on the feed sack, getting ready for that slow time where they're inactive. They're laying on the bottom, and they're just trying to wait for spring to get through winter. So they really get active this time of year, and it makes for good fishing, good bank polling. The reason it's bad for squirrel hunting with a dog, it's good squirrel hunting without a dog right now. You think, like, good? Yeah, this is the time.

This is the mast is out, the squirrels are in the trees, cutting nuts and getting ready. Same thing, winter's coming, you know, the real active, a lot of white oak acorns. So this is a time you could slip around, and we talked about it before, you know, slipping through the trees and seeing them and listening and hearing them, and you can kill them. With a dog, it's bad for that same reason. With a dog, the squirrel has to come down out of the tree, get on the ground, mess around. The dog uses its nose to chase a squirrel back up a tree.

The squirrel then hides, and you find it. Well, with leaves all over the canopy so dense and thick, it's almost impossible to find the squirrel then hides and you find it well with leaves all over the canopy so dense and thick it's almost impossible to find the squirrels almost during the winter months january february there's no leaves the squirrels are much easier to find and much more um able to be harvested yeah and then it's bad for creeping through the woods. It can almost get real bad for creeping through the woods.

Almost impossible. They're so paranoid. They're so paranoid because they're so exposed. I think to avian predators, when there's no leaves, they're just paranoid. They can see you coming

from a mile away. Yeah. the forest floor this time of year is year-old leaves that have been rained on and decayed and just inherently it's quieter uh when this fall when all the leaves come down their new brittle man it's crunch crunch crunch they can hear you see from great distance that's a good point man i mean i've known that but never thought about it you're right right now it's the quiet like this time before the leaves start to fall is the quietest the woods will get because the leaves are the most decayed right makes for good slipping yeah yeah because even that's a great point even in the spring you know you would think that through the winter and, you know, but remember how crunchy it was when we were down here in Missouri turkey hunting?

Yeah, very crunchy. It was loud. It's really frustrating to hunt squirrels right as the leaves come down. You remember like we were hunting Doug's place for squirrels. Just like with the leaves down and new leaves on the ground, you had to just go out and sit. Get into a likely spot before dark and just sit. And just lean against a tree and wait for one to come into your zone. But then when you blouch, it's like, you know, everybody knows then.

And it starts over. It's like really hard to have a great day we used to hunt them around christmas time and man it was tough hunting if you got a squirrel you'd be doing good around that time of year and you've done it before this time of year particularly when they're cutting hickories you can shoot several out of one tree shoot them with a 22 or whatever And the others don't even hardly check up eating. Just shoot another one.

You know, sometimes you can kill three or four out of one tree. Not like that in the winter. No. What next, Yannis? Have you thought about how you want to dig in?

Let's talk flatheads. Linear. That's how I vote. You vote linear? Mm-hmm. Can you introduce yourself? You've never been on the show before? Michael Lindemuth, cameraman.

First time on the show. First time filming the show. And you're taking a cameraman's show business sensibility to this discussion. You want linear. Yeah. Okay. That would mean that we start out with a really,

I don't want to call it a bad, but a disappointing squirrel hunt. Absolutely. And that's going to open up one of the big questions I have is, what in the hell happened between that morning and last night? Is there like an explanation? Well, there's infinite explanations that you go through in your head i don't know one of them's correct weather changed we'll get to that yeah but let's start out with that day so we're down in we're down in missouri and we go to mark twain you don't mind like you're really oh because you're moving anyways yeah man you're moving anyways. Yeah, man. You're moving anyways. Plus, Mark Twain's a big-ass forest.

Yes, huge. Mark Twain National Forest. Now, anyone who's had the pleasure, the joy of reading Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and then all Mark Twain's beautifully written accounts, nonfiction accounts of working on the riverboats on the Missouri and Mississippi, know that Mark Twain should know that Mark Twain was born in Hannibal, raised in Hannibal, Missouri,

was a river man. His name was Samuel Clements. His pen name was Mark Twain. And his pen name came from when you're running river boats on the river. In the old days, the river channel would just change constantly. It still does. It still shifts, but I mean, it would shift wildly. Like the river was nothing like it is today because this is prior to when they channelized it and levied it and everything. It would just move. It was a meandering channel.

And running the river was very difficult in paddle wheel boats. They'd run aground all the time. And there'd be a guy whose job it was to stand up in front of the boat, and he had a weighted line. He's got a rope with markings with knots tied in it and a weight on it. And as you're going through a treacherous spot he's up there hucking that weight out ahead of the boat the weight hits the bottom and he counts the marks on the line to tell depth and if i'm not mistaken yanni could check into

this for us just a fact check me if i'm not mistaken they knotted the rope at three foot increments. Safe passage was six feet of water. And I believe that as he's up there yelling out the marks, the river, the guy who's doing the depth soundings, Mark Twain was two marks, which meant safe passage. And so drawing upon that, drawing upon his heritage and time spent upon the river, Samuel Clemens took the pen name Mark Twain. So the Mark Twain National Forest became that.

What do you think about that, Parker? I thought it just occurred to me. Go ahead. And maybe we'll get to it later. Pounder over there, similar to the depth checking. Oh, man. We'll definitely touch on Ridge Pounder's attempt at taking a depth sounding. There's not a case of what happens on the river stays on the river sort of thing.

So we go to Mark Twain National Forest. And you, because you being a squirrel man and a river man, and you took, you grew up in Georgia. Yeah. And it was real common to have. Can I make a correction? Oh, really? Yeah.

You were just off. Bad? No, just a little bit. But it's not three feet. It's six for a fathom. And so actually safe passage was 12. Well, how the hell are you going to get anywhere at 12 feet? Really?

Must not have been John Boats. No, they're talking safe depth for the steamboat. 12 feet of water. Yep. So there's fathom sound water. Yep. So there's fathom soundings. Yep. And the second mark is mark number two, Mark Twain.

Sing it out. Mark Twain. Here it says half Twain, quarter Twain, Mark Twain. No shit. Fathom soundings. I had no idea those boats drew that much water. Huh. Now you know.

Do me another favor, man. I'm going to keep talking to Parker about being from Georgia and everybody has squirrel hounds and whatnot. Pull up two or three of Twain's dooziest quotes, please. Can do that. So there you are in Georgia. Everybody's got a squirrel dog. I don't know that I would go as far as to say everybody, but more common than the other places I've lived.

If you want to know how legitimate Parker Hall is as a houndsman, he used to hunt coons with a man named Festus. If that doesn't establish some legitimacy, that's like out of a Jerry Clower story, hunting coons with a man named Festus. Yeah, I've never met a Festus. I've never heard of a Festus. Yeah, also out of Jerry Clower is Festus wore overalls

with no shirt beneath it. And you know what? You said another thing. Didn't you tell me that? Yeah. And another thing you told me that was funny, because we're about the same age. Yeah. You're in your early 40s?

Mm-hmm. I guess I'm approaching mid now, 44. But you mentioned when those mag lights came out yeah there were like baseball bats now people thought they were so we thought it was like uh like it was it it was like a revolutionized being out at night right when those big you'd put those three or four big d cell batteries into a mag light and you thought you were invincible man now you can have a flashlight the size of your index finger that throws a bigger beam than that but remember like the one thing that everybody wanted it was like for five years in a row only thing anyone got

for christmas was a d-cell mag light yeah they just got longer and longer man you didn't install the little holster in your car yep oh. Oh, I had that holster. Yeah, you could screw it into your dashboard truck, a thing that held your light there. And they had that rubber ring that you could put on your waist belt. Oh, yeah. And it got longer to the point where they were like baseball bats

and policemen carried them around. Mag light was tearing it up. And then they got, like something happened to them. I don't know, man. They weighed like 16 pounds and yeah load everything up and hey you got the mag oh yeah oh got the mag like running traps that like everything was different when mag light came on the scene yeah big and you'd get in your

stocking like you'd get that light and your stocking you'd just be full of d cell batteries that's like a whole era man god people got excited about those so um yeah and tell the kind of dog you got a little bit about the dog's lineage not that particular dog's lineage but the breed you know and what occur in a feist and all that is so there's two main i mean there's a lot of different dogs that are tree squirrels i mean i've seen black labs tree squirrels but reliably no not reliably you know they're not bred to do that but you get one every once in a while that'll that'll tree a squirrel but mostly the the tree dogs are the you know a blue any of the in any of the coon hounds with tree squirrels and some guys so walker blue tick red bone yeah

they'll all tree squirrels why don't squirrel men use them because they're a lot rangier and they want to run and trail on the ground and put something

up a tree now a lot of squirrel men do use some of those hounds some of those bigger hounds it just depends on what when you say ranger

you mean they're running out too far yeah they want to run far you know the squirrel dogs generally stay a little closer check check back in with you. You know, the curs and the feists go out, run a little circle. They use their eyes as well as their nose a little bit more than a hound will. A hound is just nose to the ground kind of trail, up a tree, bark tree.

So these dogs are bred for small game hunting and chase. And the one I have is a cur, called a tree and cur. And it's because of the size, this particular dog. The feist dogs are a little bit smaller. Like you hear a lot of people like Jack Russell's tree and squirrels. I think people have tried those. That's kind of like a feist dogs are a little bit smaller. You hear a lot of people like Jack Russell's treeing squirrels. I think people have tried those. That's kind of like a feist size. These curs can get pretty big.

And it's a measurement at the shoulder. Measurement at the shoulder. To distinguish a feist from a cur. Right. Feist being the smallest in years is like one size up from a feist. Right, right. So mine would be a small cur. And if someone goes to get one of these,

how do you go about getting one and how much does it cost to get one? The gentleman that I got my squirrel dog from charges $200. And he always has, and I think he probably always will, just because it's squirrel man honor code. He's not in it to make money he's in it to produce

high quality squirrel dogs and give them to squirrel hunters and you know this is life's passion that's what he does he likes and you were you were actually mentioning to me that you heard of somebody selling the squirrel dog for like 20 grand or something i heard that a squirrel dog has fetched 20 grand. Man, I would like to meet. But this is a competition squirrel dog. Ah. And I didn't verify this, but I heard it from a very reliable source that there has been a case of a single squirrel dog

selling for that but i think it's an anomaly right it would have to be it'd be like saying hey how much does a car cost and then you talk about how much a car costs you're like oh you can get you know most sedans with this and then some guys like oh at one time a car sold for it right yeah that isn't like it's not really. I kind of want to meet the man who paid $20,000 for a squirrel dog, because that must be a heck of a good squirrel man. I got a feeling he's doing something besides squirrel hunting. Yeah, I agree. I think he came into some money somewhere along the way.

So $200, and this dude doesn't't want you're saying too that this guy he won't like if you said i just like the looks of that dog i just want it for a house dog he's not interested he's not really interested in that no he wants them in the hands of squirrel hunters absolutely he produces high quality squirrel dogs not saying i have a great dog but he he's had some good dogs with great lineage and he's known in that part of the country for having really good squirrel dogs. And his breed comes out, if you're saying kind of comes out of Alabama, or his type of dog? Yeah, Alabama.

Right. That's where he is. And, you know, I don't want to speak to the man's lineage of where he got all of his dogs. But I know some of it's out of that, you know, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Smoky Mountain area. And he has his own line of squirrel dogs that he's worked hard to develop. Growing up, how old were you when you got your first squirrel dog? I wasn't too young.

I was maybe in high school, ninth, tenth grade, ninth grade, maybe. To get your own. Tenth grade, maybe. Did your dad have one? No, it was kind of a, it was, you know, we knew guys that had squirrel dogs. We'd been hunting with them before, but we had a, somebody gave us a dog that was half cur, half feist. And we didn't do anything. We actually had him as a hog dog.

What's that mean? To chase hogs. Or run hogs. Right. It was kind of just a mixed up, old, nasty looking dog. And we'd take him hog hunting and turn him loose. And he'd run off and tree squirrels. And all the other dogs, he's like, he wasn't interested in hogs.

He wanted to tree squirrels. He's a squirrel man. And my brother and I were like, hey, man, we're into something. We'd always squirrel hunted. From the time we were little bitty kids, we'd always squirrel hunted hard. But it was early season hickories and slipping around this time of year. But we got into the squirrel dog, and then, man, it took off. We've had one ever since.

Did you have to train your dog, or is it like out of the box, ready to go? Somebody else was asking me this question, and the different dog breeds are kind of bred to want to do their thing. Like a retriever, if you get a tennis ball in the yard and throw it and throw it and throw it. It wants to bring it back.

It wants to bring it back. It wants to bring it back. Now, the difference between a yard dog that'll fetch a tennis ball and a good duck dog, you know, day and night. So you work with them a little bit, but the instinct to do that activity is in them. When a squirrel dog goes out and trees a squirrel, you think that he normally needs that that squirrel has come down and hit the ground right unless he just catches a glimpse of it or hears it or whatever but typically he's nose of the ground and he finds where a squirrel has hit the ground is he like a rabbit beagle

where he can run that trail back and forth and tell which direction the squirrel went? Yes. And you can see when the dog's working, sometimes it'll go up a tree, look up at maybe stay, maybe go off and check all the trees around and then come back and tree on that tree.

Um, and then identify that, that, that the squirrels in there now we had several run and you could tell um i was telling y'all i said the squirrel's on the ground and the dog you could see that that high yipping kind of like a beagle and then up the tree the squirrel goes and then you hear that tree bark that repetitive and then you know it's in the tree. And then there's a sound he makes when you know that he's seen the squirrel.

Yeah, that's the squeal. You know, just I cannot contain myself noise, and it's different every time. And I can tell that the dog has seen the squirrel. It's the squeal bark. Oh, my God, I can't take it noise. Yeah, it's funny because all the noises he makes, you know the noise that he makes for he doesn't know what's going on, right? It's she, Ruby. Yeah.

Man, since hunting with that dog, I've got that song stuck in my head, that old Kenny Rogers song. Ruby. Don't take your love to town. Yeah. Where it's a guy that went off and got sent off to vietnam and got paralyzed and came home and can't satisfy all of his woman's needs and he understands the wants and needs of a woman her age but she goes into town at night and he's imploring her to not take her love into town

i remember and he says if i could move i'd get my gun and i'd put her in the ground just a hurtful song man had that song stuck in my head since hunting with that dog ruby where was i going with that i don't know oh yeah so you're out hunting the dog's making all these noises and it makes some noises where you just think that it's just it's just something it senses something's going on there's something that goes on and you're listening and i'm watching you listen and you're saying it's chasing one there's sort of a non-committal kind of hey this might be the tree right there's a this is the tree There's a, this is the tree. And then there's, this is the tree. And not only that, but I have seen it in the tree.

I have seen the squirrel hurry, come now. Yeah. Yeah. And that's when you run through the woods. Right. And then, okay, this is the hard thing. You don't really know what's in the dog's head. But how can it tell?

Like if you picture, picture you're sitting in the woods watching squirrels and a squirrel comes along, comes down a tree, spirals down a tree, hits the ground, runs 50 yards and spirals up another tree. It surprises me that the dog can tell

that the scent on one end of that is older than the scent on the other end of it. But unless, help might help answer it is what is the time stamp on a scent that will interest that dog in the evening is it running a morning scent no so it's deal it deals in fresh it deals in. Fresher than like a hound would. A hound, some of those hounds can take very old tracks. The squirrel dogs work on fresher.

Yeah. Yeah. Within, you know, I think within minutes. I got you. Right. Because a lion hound, he'll go out and work an eight-hour-old track. But a lion hound can't tell you what way the line went yeah it's dealing with just faint residual odor and can't make a and can't say like relative to 50 yards over there this scent is newer here and so when

a lion hound's running a line he might be running the wrong direction you got to find a track to verify the line of travel well it makes sense because you know squirrels home range is i don't know the actual answer to that but i'm gonna guess you know a couple hundred square yards right and a lion's going you know 10 miles oh yeah i bet in its day in day out activities squirrel uses an acre ground what would you think yeah i think so that's fair probably moves according to seat like seasonal movements of course yeah of course i always it's really interesting you mentioned that because given the opportunity i would want to be able to have the sense of smell that a dog has just to see what that's like like wow a deer ran through here and i know what that is or a squirrel ran up this tree or you know the sensory overload must be amazing for a dog to be able to pick that out yeah just step into a dog's head running through

the woods right for a minute to be like oh so this is what it's experiencing yep you can't no because like you know we'll go out you'll go out and you'll get a whiff you beg oh it's smell something rotten somewhere or i smell elk like elk have been here but really you're just not you know we got we got our eyes and we got our ears right and then you think that that his nose is more important to him than those two things it's really hard to picture seeing the world that way yeah it is and if you watch anybody's dog if you watch your dog it could be youth what you think asleep and watch its nose work i mean it senses things with his nose i think a dog's nose or maybe many animals is their number one sense. Ours would be our eyes. I think it's olfactory for animals. And your dog does use its ears because it knows the word squirrel.

It does. And you need to be careful to not say squirrel around that dog. Or let it see a squirrel when driving down the road. Yeah, we were driving to the hunt spot and a squirrel ran out on the road and you quickly reached back and blindfolded the dog with your hand for fear that it would see that squirrel. What happens when she sees one? If you will look at the dashboard of my truck, you will see the claw marks and the nose slobber on the windshield from the inside. And she barks loud.

You hear her outside, but inside the car it's a deafening sound and it's repetitive and fast yeah i can't make her be quiet it's something i think that even i've only been on three or four dog squirrel hunts but like it takes some getting used to you know you like i could see my dad being annoyed and me having to be like look it's just like after a while three four days four days, it's just normal, right? That dog's just going there and it's like a part of it. But at first, it's a little jarring to be in the woods with something that loud. Except at home.

When I'm at home and there's a yard squirrel and she goes to barking and treeing at it, I know that's what she wants to do. And I have her, but it annoys me to the nth degree. It really does. It's like barking dogs. Be quiet. So when we struck out from the little parking area there on Mark Twain National Forest. Hold on.

I got another question. Go ahead. So at home, because I'm thinking about going squirrel dog hound for our first family dog. But you live two hours away from squirrel hunting. I know, but just now because I was reading up about some cur stuff, and there's a bunch of different cur type dogs, and a lot of them are very versatile.

They can run cougar tracks and squirrels. They can defend your family from cougars, bears. You need that? Dude, you've been to my house lately. You know, little kids running around. Man, if they're 100 yards away from the house. Oh, yeah, like notify you. Sure, or yeah, give my kids a chance to freaking not get eaten.

It is a slight possibility in my house. I called in the bull moose on Yanni's property. Yeah. Almost got your kids trampled. Or your kids thought they were going to get trampled. Dude, my kids did not like that, man. That bull came in hot. And he'd seen video of me getting charged by a moose,

and that's what was running through his head. Yeah, he got nervous, man. All right, so here's my deal my deal yeah i'm two hours away from good squirrel hunting but i've got a pile of pine squirrels right like 30 yards from my house right have you ever tried that yeah am i gonna be able to train my dog to say don't worry about those squirrels we want fox squirrels or gray squirrels. It's a delicate balance. When the dog first starts treeing,

you're going to have to shoot those things down. You can't tell it not to do that. You can eat them. They're not bad. They're edible. They're not great like a gray squirrel or fox squirrel. You're saying they're super small. It's just small. It's like they're bigger than a chipmunk. They sit right between a chipmunk and a gray squirrel or fox squirrel you're saying they're super small it's just small it's like they're you know yeah bigger than a chipmunk smaller they sit right between a chipmunk and

a gray squirrel and people say they taste like turpentine or piney it's just a squirrel meat so it's i'm gonna put a couple into the crock pot in the next week or two i'm gonna bring back some um i'll give you some notes dude you braise them down like what i've done with those things i've just put them in a crock pot braise them down pick the meat season the meat put it on a taco put it on a tortilla delicious it's just as meat yeah right could be people cat could be anything in there when you do it like that just tastes like meat yeah it's just a taco yeah no one in the world would come over you serve that to them they're gonna be like pine squirrel it just isn't you know you could just take up pine squirrel hunting yeah why not that's you would be the first guy i think to be like a tree pine squirrel but here's

the thing though here's the problem with that is it's not that helpful and pine where pine squirrels live in the kind of trees they live in knowing Knowing what tree he is in isn't very helpful. Unless the dog could pressure him into a tree that he didn't want to be in. Because if he goes to his preferred tree, the density of these trees, he goes up some big mature fir or whatever. Evergreens. he goes up some big mature fir or whatever evergreen the density the the the home trees are so big and so dense and they go so high that's like it's not that helpful yeah that's a good point to know where he is up there you need binoc Yeah, you need a chainsaw. Or like Jerry Clower, one of Jerry Clower's stories,

the guy that has the monkey that he hunts with, and he sends the monkey up in trees with a flashlight and a pistol. Maglite. If you had a monkey like that, you'd be in business. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking that's right you were always talking about. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet on X maps.com slash meet. Welcome to the, to the on X club.

Y'all. Um, you good on that? Yeah. Well, you know, here's another quick question. As long as we're on the subject, cause my kids sorely want a dog and I sorely don't want them to have a dog, but if I do one for them i want to serve my purposes as well what are the chances that you'd have an ace squirrel slash cottontail dog very high oh the litter mate to ruby is a really good cottontail and squirrel dog so much something's got to sacrifice though right there's like there's no way it's great at both is a really good cottontail and squirrel dog. Something's got to sacrifice, though, right?

There's no way it's great at both. Or is this dog great at both? The gentleman who has this dog is a retired gentleman who hunts every day. And those dogs, like Giannis was saying, are really versatile. And any dog, you get them in the field day after day after day, and they pick up what you're going after. I don't know. It's a good dog, both.

I'd take it either way. But you know how a beagle runs a rabbit? Not that he runs a rabbit. It's like a rabbit runs a loop. Yep. When a rabbit's spooked, he's going to run a loop, go out, and he's going to come back to his safe spot, his home spot. And that's how you hunt with a beagle is the beagle starts a trail, and you just get to somewhere on the circumference of the loop and wait

because he's just going to do his loop and come by. Now, will a squirrel dog run that loop with him, or does he just kind of function as a flushing dog? From what I've seen, the squirrel dog is running around, and when it jumps a rabbit, it'll run it. It'll run the loop. And it runs it a lot faster than a Beagle wheel. And I think it may be head up just getting the scent behind the rack.

Yeah, they're slow-ass dogs. Short legs. Right. They don't do anything quick. Yeah. With the Kerr or Feist dog, it's generally a pretty quick loop. Yeah. You know, we used to have a lab that we used our waterfowl dog,

and it was very good i mean this dog would pull ducks out at 18 inches of water all the time man pick up the scent on the surface and stick its head down there and find that thing it'd bring you ducks the other guys killed you'd go out in the swamp you wouldn't even have fired a shot yet the dog be standing there with a duck yeah so it was a great dog but we would take a cottontail hunt and she would just be a good flusher yeah because she knew the story she knew what was going on and would go into likely patches of cover that you didn't want to go into and she hunted close and would just kick up rabbits it would have never in a million years occurred to that dog chase it to chase it just flushed

and one time the one time i think that it saw a rabbit and chased it, my buddy shot the rabbit. And later in the day, I was wondering why my dog was bleeding out of her nose, and I pinched her nose and squirted a shotgun pellet out of her nose, but no one would fess up. So she was chasing it close enough at some point in time where she caught a stray pellet.

Yeah. But that's an interesting thing, man. If I could get one, the guy you know that has the one that does both, what would he sell that dog for? Man, I don't know that he'd sell it. How old is it? It's Ruby's litter mate, three years. Oh, and how many years can you get out of one? On the squirrel dogs, they can get old.

Man, you can hunt them for, heck, 12, 13, 14 years. Seriously? Yeah, they start slowing down. No, any dog when it gets that age, slow down. But it'll tree them. Yeah. So you can, like, your dog's three and it's already a crack hound. It's coming along.

Dude, the dog. She's coming along. When we're out in the woods, the dog spends more time barking up a tree than it does anything else. It finds squirrel after squirrel after squirrel after squirrel. Some days. So we strike off from the parking spot. My first question to you was, so who is in charge? Right.

So the dog, we're somewhat in charge. the dog's hunting for us we're not hunting for it um so we can direct it in a direction but i generally try to hunt into the wind because the dog naturally wants to work into the wind um so i kind of think about that and you might even park your truck accordingly or i do yeah and just because she'll naturally drift that way and so if you think about that it makes for a little easier hunt then you can call her and unlike a hound those those smaller curves and fights they'll respond to you calling them off you know like a big hound sometimes you put them on a track and man they're gone you the stopping point is who knows where oh then you got like gps collars

and shit on them and they're in some other county and you're driving around all night trying to find them right so those dogs will stay within earshot and and they're bred to come check back in with you every once in a while yeah your dog is very responsive to your whistle right where you can call it off a tree yeah and and that's that's because oftentimes when you stay with the dog enough and you whistle to it it knows you want it and you're going to put it on something to do something oh you know what i mean like uh we well i guess we'll get to it but uh a squirrel to hit the ground and you go over there and it's not there you need to call the dog over to trail the squirrel up to see where it went.

And once it figures that out, it'll come to you. So what was going on that first morning we hunted? Because your dog must have treed a dozen times. Yeah. So part of it was the squirrel gods. It must have treed a dozen times or more. And we got one. Yeah, but some a dozen times or more. And we got one. Yeah, but some of that was a roll of the dice, too, because several of them were giving us a slip.

We saw some more. We couldn't get shots at. I missed one. Yeah, you missed one. And so, I don't know. Had we killed what we saw, we'd have had four or five. What did we end up with? One the first day.

First morning. We got one. And then last night, we go out for a third of the time and get nine right yeah do we have any getaway last night the first very first one got away oh that's right went into a hole after we watched them for 20 minutes yeah down the tree right into a hole and i told you like when they hit the ground running, they are going to a spot. They're not blindly running. That squirrel beeline, he knows his turf. Right.

He knows his turf. We had a bear biologist in one time who was talking about doing some research. What state was he doing that black bear research in? North Carolina. And he finds that black bears are- Tennessee, was it? Tennessee, that's right. Yeah.

In this particular area where he was doing his work, black bears den 20 feet up in trees, in hollow trees, which raises the question, how many trees have a black bear-sized cavity 20 feet up? Not many. cavity 20 feet up, not many, and how they ever get to where, right? How they ever get to knowing those cavities. And I think, was he saying that it was typically in chestnuts? It was a mast.

I can't remember what. I had to go read this through. It was a mast. They typically dend in a mast producing tree. And the only thing you can think is that they're going up there. They're climbing into these things to harvest mast crops. And they're taking no, oh, wow, there's a large cavity that I will come back to months from now

and utilize as a denning site. Because how would you ever have that level of spatial awareness it's like they're not operating on just like stupidly going through the woods climbing trees yeah you're right when a squirrel beelines off on the ground he's like i know a place that i can fit into and this annoying ass thing behind me. Cannot get. Can't fit into it. Right.

And then he goes into a hole with a two and a half inch, four inch diameter orifice. That's not a word you get to use very much in a way like in this kind of conversation. Orifice. No. It's a nice word. Yeah. I haven't used it in days. so he goes into the orifice um a lot of the squirrels we lost on our first day out would be that the dogs treeing do you guys use bade or is that just

something more for hounds we use the word tree and if it's up a tree bade would indicate to me on the ground oh more so than in a tree okay so there he is treed and you go and right away you look and 15 feet up the tree whatever there's just like a squirrel gnawed hole and then you know where that squirrel went you say they sometimes will pass the hole by sometimes they will and you go wow let's go oh no there he is 15 feet above it in a crotch trying to hide like he passed it up he passed it up but you know what i've seen in the past hunting deer i've seen a squirrel try to go in a hole and then another squirrel come out and kick his ass right not his hole yeah and i've seen a mink fight a squirrel through the squirrel's hole wow yep the mink was trying to go in the hole to raid the young

and the squirrel is at the entrance to the hole fighting so voraciously that the mink is you ever hear a mink screech yeah the mink is screeching and they're dueling it out at the hole so it could be that he goes in gets his ass kicked and then has to shoot up and be in a less than yeah optimum position yeah the other squirrel's like no room at the end bro right i wonder if that's the offspring of the squirrel that's in that hole. Oh. Like, that squirrel knows that hole's there, but... He's not welcome. Not welcome anymore. It'd be like, you see your kid's car coming down the driveway

with cops behind him. Right. He has locked doors. He's locked doors. So that happens. And then there's another thing that happens is, you guys call it treed out jerry clower calls it tap in the tree tap in the tree but it'd be that the squirrel dog is on the ground

and he's like a squirrel cross through here he was going this way to this way and he went up this tree but the dog unless he saw it or heard it he has no way to know what the squirrel did after he went back into his arboreal environment. Exactly. Therein lies the problem. Therein lies a big problem. Because I noticed. You know how Yanni's really good at spotting squirrels?

Well, let me tell you why. It's not that he's good at it. It's not that he's good at it. Here's what I figured out. Here's what I figured out. Here's what I figured out. In his role as a producer, he understands his role as a producer, and he's there observing,

and he's got camera guys doing their job. A squirrel bays up. The tree dog trees. Squirrel dog trees. Ridge Pounder's with his camera with me. Michael's with his camera with you. Not bleeding. Not bleeding because he's not pushing through briars hard.

Right. Seth, have you said anything yet, Seth? Yeah, early. Real early. You did say something earlier? About how Idaho's too steep to get built out. Oh, that's right. Yeah, your theory about how Idaho's these haunts.

That's fine, man. You can steer everybody you want to Idaho. I don't care. So Seth's got a camera. He's trying to look up in the treetops to find the squirrel. I look at what you're doing and I watch your line of approach and I'm trying to do 180 off your line of approach. So if you imagine

there's the tree and then you have a circle around the tree, you want one guy on each side of the tree. Right. Because if you're both standing on one side of the tree, the squirrel's just going to squirt around and paste his body up against the other side of the tree and hide. And so you've got to get one guy on each side to try to make it move. And then if he moves, everybody's got a chance to see him.

So we're doing that. And I move into shotgun range and I get on my side and you're on your side and we got the camera guys and Yanni can't crowd the action, right? He needs to stay clear of the action. So in one, in one, like, how is he spotting so many damn squirrels getting away it's because he's getting back enough right where he's not looking in the one tree that the dog smelled the squirrel going to he's looking in the three or four trees in the cluster that the squirrel's actually in because the squirrel probably tapped the tree the tree so i later yesterday after wondering like why he was so

on fire and feeling and feeling inflamed with jealousy thinking about maybe she would given him a dick chaney in them right just not because i'm so annoyed right i'm like you know what i'm gonna stand back like this too and take in the big view because the dog knows the tree but these trees the spacing on him isn't great and i think a lot of times yeah he went up up and very smoothly just hid in the next tree and so you can't just look in his tree no it's the grouping of trees the periphery yeah and that's how you pick off squirrels don't run into the crop don't run into the stump looking up right stand back and get the view right because another thing that would happen is and you brought this up the squirrel eventually get overwhelmed with anxiety yeah have to move like

can't take it anymore it could be six seven minutes into staring up there like you're standing up there and you do not see the squirrel he's gone and you're ready to wander off. And all of a sudden, Janice is hooting her and hollering about, there he goes. Because the anxiety got to him. And he panicked. Yeah, although I might be observing more of the periphery and I might have less blinders on.

You're still the eagle. No, no, no. Still the laughing eagle. I think that, you know know we killed nine be careful not to be fooled by coincidence because remember there's like more than two sides to a tree if you two are covering two angles i'm gonna go to the angle that you guys can't see and the coincidence was that all of a sudden you know he popped up on that side and you know i saw him i don't know, man.

You were spotting a lot of damn squirrels, man. If there was 100, and I had pulled 90 of them, then okay, we'd have to say a shirt. I don't know. I think it was a market difference. He spotted a lot of squirrels. Seth spotted some, too. And he spotted a lot of squirrels not in the tree we were looking in.

Right. I learned a real lesson there, man. It's different this time of year because you're dealing with the canopy so much. You know, you can scan that periphery of trees when there is no canopy and the leaves are down. Pretty easy. And you get to know where they are. And the difference is there's just because there's leaves they go to the same spots i noticed i'm like what is it different but no they go to the same spots in the tree but you just can't pick them out well no because they they use different trees different ways a hickory

seth explain what they do in a hickory. Because we saw it twice last night when we had to find them with binoculars. They were going all the way up to the tops. Tippy, tippy tops. Tippy tops. Because the leaves are so thick on a hickory. They'd climb that hickory until they're on the final twig and lay up there in the thick, thick leaves. In an oak, it wouldn't work because you'd pick them off. That one tree we're about to give up on.

Remember I said, I think he's in that hickory, and then you pulled out your glass and found him? Yep. He was all the way in the top. Yeah, I'd like you to speak on that a little bit. Can you speak about your transformation? And I always thought it was like a Western big game hunter elitist thing. To have binoculars.

Got my binocs on my special strap on my chest. And I think in my mind, like, I'll never do that, man. But hunting yesterday, you said, we're binoculars. I'm like, I'm not binoculars. You even, I'll point out that you mocked me for having mine. Well, you'll notice that the first day we went out, Seth and I both, you didn't bring them the first day, right? Nope.

You were the only one, Steve, that brought them. And man, I was like, yeah, there's going to be too many leaves. Everything we're going to see is going to be up close. There's no reason for them. And man, it wasn't two squirrels into it. I was kicking myself. Like, that was stupid. I was kicking myself at the parking lot.

I wanted to wear them, but Parker, the way he was talking, I was like, yeah, I was like, well, I don't want to disappoint this fella. He's like a playground bully. I know. Like, you get a new coat and the playground bully mocks you so bad you want to leave it in your locker and go out cold. Yeah. And suffer on the playground. See, for me, this is this is my favorite time to like still hunt squirrels

and you see them go up a tree and you got your binoculars the fun part for me is finding them i feel i really feel like y'all are kicking me when i'm down right now i'm about to admit i'm about to admit i'm gonna use bin use binoculars. Do you own some? No. Can I send you some? Sure. Are you going to get the strap? I was running.

I don't know about the strap. You got to do the harness, man. You got to. Like the front strap. Where are you going to keep them? Your pocket? I don't know. You're going to have to give me a lesson on what to do.

But I will know. We'd come up to a tree, and I'm surrounded looking. I'll see it, and there's surrounded, looking, looking, don't see it. And there's an army of dudes with binoculars. And somebody goes, got them. I'm going, what? You got them? Yeah.

And so I was thinking about it last night. We killed nine last night. And I know, I think four of those were found with binoculars. The tail. Like a squirrel doesn't realize he has a tail. Right. So I think four of those were found with binoculars. The tail. Like a squirrel doesn't realize he has a tail. Right. They don't do a good job.

Concealing. They don't do enough to hide their tail. Or it's just a hard thing to hide. Oftentimes, I pick out the tail hairs with the light behind it. The light coming to fuzz. It's off. It's off. Yeah, because he can pace his body against a thing,

and like a gray squirrel particularly, on most tree bark, oak, hickory, whatever. Same. When he welds his body to that bark, it's a hard thing to see, but the light will always filter through that tail's a hard thing to see. But the light will always filter through that tail in a very distinguishable fashion. Evolution never cleared that up

for the squirrel? I don't know what. They need it for balance. The tail's really important for balance. Think about how they just run tree to tree 100 feet up. Jumping. I'd like to talk to a physiologist about what all a squirrel gets out of the tail and i imagine also there's something going on with um signaling perhaps if

you ever watch a squirrel pissed in a tree yeah they move their tail a lot when they're barking at you which heavily hunted squirrels seem to not bark at you you go out like opening day squirrels will bark at you in the woods later in the year when all those squirrels are gone the ones that are alive don't bark no but when he's barking he's doing that he gets that position where he's like using his tail as like an alert thing and i think he's cluing other squirrels in i heard a theory about like why does the white tail do your flag why does he put his flag up when he's running and we'll never know these are the kind of questions you like you can't test and know but but i

a person has a theory about it that when a white tail runs away and he lifts that big brush up you follow it like it's almost like you got it you know so you're runs away and he lifts that big brush up, you follow it like, it's almost like you got it. So you're like, why would he do that? Because it's so easy to see where it's going. But when he runs and stops and lays it down, the thing that you were paying attention to, like what you eye adjusted to, all of a sudden vanishes. And it helps the deer perhaps slip away helps the deer switch

away like you see that thing and then that thing goes away and you're focused on that and not that i think what you can wind up saying about it isn't that that's why he does it but that's definitely a thing that if you pay attention to it and watch it that's a thing that happens that would be advantageous to the deer but it could also be that it, that's a thing that happens that would be advantageous to the deer. But it could also be that it's a display for other deer. Other deer see that and they know that there's trouble. There's an altruistic quality to it. I'd buy that.

So what else happened between how we went out, tree the same number of squirrels, roughly the same number of squirrels, roughly the same number of squirrels, but got one versus nine? Is it an evening-morning thing? Well, I generally like to hunt them in the evening, and I think it helps with scent. I think when that cooler air starts coming down from the night, it helps with scent a little bit better.

The morning, and this is just all squirrel man theory. I don't know if this is right or wrong. This is just what I've observed. This time of year, they don't come out of the trees. They don't really need to. They're up there and eating white oaks and whatever mass they can. And so if they do come down, it's for very short periods of time and then right back up.

In the evening, they have their fill. Then they're going to burying and getting ready for the wintertime. And they're down on the ground getting a drink of water, cashing nuts, digging. And I think they're on the forest floor a little bit a little bit more in the afternoon the morning hunts always seem to be hinky you know just like that's weird or you got a runner or we're covering a great distance and we're not putting many many squirrels up it's over time it's just i'd rather hunt the evening no matter the time of year no matter the time of

year right no matter the time of year now the first the time of year. Right. No matter the time of year. Now, the first day we went squirrel hunting, it was 90 degrees. The dog's having a hard time. Scent probably is not as fresh as when we went yesterday. And it was damp. It had rained the night before. There's a lot more humidity in the air. It was in the evening. I think the squirrels were down and the dog could smell them's a lot more humidity in the air. It was in the evening.

I think the squirrels were down and the dog could smell them probably a little bit better. I don't know why they hailed or we found them. Maybe it's because of the binoculars. A lot of knockers, man. Yeah.

A lot of knockers. And we did have a couple multi-squirrel trees, which helps. Yeah, we shot three out of one tree. Right. That helps. That adds numbers. It does help, too, that Mike and Chris,

they're staring through their cameras, really working. But Seth and I definitely, I mean, we doubled up basically eyes. You guys each have an extra pair of eyes to find these squirrels. That helps a lot. Yeah, but you were there in the morning. Oh, yeah. I was making a general statement. Okay, one last squirrel question for you.

Okay. What are your favorite ways to prepare the squirrels you get? You're saying you eat about 200 a year. Your family eats about 200 a year. Yeah. How do you guys like to do them, and how did you like to do them when you eat about 200 a year. Your family eats about 200 a year. Yeah. How do you guys like to do them, and how did you like to do them when you were a kid, and has it changed over time? So when I was a kid, it was squirrel and gravy over rice

and squirrel and gravy over mashed potatoes or fried squirrel. Very little deviation when I was a kid. We barbecued some on the grill and those sorts of things. Can you take us through a brief recipe of squirrel gravy, how that's made? My mom made squirrel gravy. And I know this is, I'm going to just talk about something else. One time I remember going deer hunting and my dad got me, I don't know if it was an old timer thing, but my dad would make me get up at like three or four in the morning, sit in the tree for like an hour before it got

light, you know, like get in there before the deer. And I think it was low deer numbers back then. And deer were just starting to come on and those guys thought you had to be there way before light. And I remember getting up at like three in the morning and my dad made some week old warmed up some week old squirrel and gravy and put it over grits which was a southern food and remember had a little hair in it and i just it i mean i'll never forget that my brother and i are like 3 30 in the morning week old squirrel gravy gravy and grits. I'm like, ugh. Man, what about a Pop-Tart or something? But we ate that.

But no, it's just like any other gravy you would cook. How do you cook the squirrel before it gets into the gravy? So if you fry a squirrel or you can crock pot squirrel either way and just use the little bit of grease drippings or whatever from that and make your gravy. And then you can put it back on it oftentimes in a cast iron skillet and that'll go in there. So you're picking the meat or not picking the meat? At this point in my squirrel eating career as a kid, it was not picking the meat. It was quarters. You know, dipped out quarters on rice.

With gravy? With gravy. And then you had to pick it up and then you picked it up and spit out the spit out the shot out the bone and the hair spit out shot bone and hair all of it and you pick it now i pick it now i swore to myself i will not do this to my children not that i didn't like it it, but I still eat it. It's a nice squirrel dish, man. My mouth waters for it. It's, to me, one of the best meats in the woods. And so now I do a variety of things. I messed up. The first time I was trying to impress my wife, I killed a squirrel and I gutted it

and just had it splayed out like a squirrel would be on a spit. Yeah, like a whole thing. Like down in Argentina when they mount them on those side. Yeah, I did that. Crucifixes they mount them on, man. I made that for my wife. And I presented her in very professional fashion in my opinion as a squirrel man a splayed delectable squirrel i picked a young one too i

didn't give her a great big old this is when you were is this when you were courting that's when i was courting her yeah it was a prize she's not a squirrel man no Nah. Is she a river man? Nah. No, okay. Nah. She's none of the above. So I present her with this squirrel, and man, that went over like a turd in a punch bowl. It was not good. It was just too much. It was too much. I mean, just the look on her face was such that it went into my mind, I'm going to have to change this up a little bit.

And for years, she wouldn't eat it. And just because of, not because of the flavor of the squirrel or that it was a squirrel, just the presentation went into her mind. Like, you just served me a rat. But now I change it up up and it's mostly picked. And the way that I've been doing it lately, and I was telling Giannis about it, the way I'm so proud of is I've been crockpotting it

with some spices, garlic, picking it, and rolling it up in a croissant with either cream cheese or cheddar cheese or peppers onions jalapenos which whatever little fixings i want to clarify too though the crock pot you're saying like not completely covered in liquid in the crock pot i put no liquid in the squirrels um that i cooked last time well you can't just put a squirrel in a crock pot and turn the crock pot on. That's what I was saying. Sure you can. He said otherwise it's boiling it.

I put a little bit, I hit it with a little bit of oil in there and that's it. So there's enough moisture in the squirrel. It'll cook down. In the squirrel. Yeah, and it'll, so those,

I threw those nine squirrels in there and there was two inches of moisture this morning and I just pulled the bones right out. You got onions in there and there was two inches of moisture and this morning and i just pulled the bones right out you got onions in there um yeah onions you throw in onions in there and those sorts of things doesn't burn otherwise it's boiling it you know if you put liquid in there that's a good point man but wow it's just you know we would fry them my mom would do, she would often times, this is one of the ways I like it the most. Sometimes we'd put them in a deep fryer.

But also my mom would brown them in oil, dust them in a seasoned flour, brown them in oil, then put them on a sheet pan and put them in the oven at 300 degrees oh and that makes like it's like we would call it and it's different because other people use different things we would call it chicken fried squirrel even though like chicken fried steak because that's how my mom would if my mom went out and bought chicken chicken thighs she would brown them in oil and finish them in the oven. So she would just do squirrels the same way. Man, sometimes it was just like perfect.

On the bone, browned real nice, and then baked at that low heat to tenderize them a little bit. It was pretty good. But when you say you roll it, I want to get back to this croissant thing. You roll it. What do you mean roll it in a croissant? And then bake the croissant?

Right. Just like you're baking croissants. Oh, do you mean you buy those little triangle croissants? Right. Exactly. Oh, and roll it in there. Yeah. I spread the triangle, and then I put all my fix in like a taco, right?

Everything that I want. I've been putting some thyme in there lately, like a sprig of thyme, which I really like. I roll that thing up, fold it up nice, a pouch of squirrel meat with everything else, bake it, and then the croissant bakes into itself, and all that's in there. It's a little hot pot. It's like a thinking man's hot pot. I knew I was onto this when my kids started fighting each other over those things. The last one, like, no, give it to me. And my wife's eating them and going, that's good. And old squirrel man's going, oh, I'm on to something here. Yeah, but it's hard to burn through 200 squirrels shoving them inside croissants

because you're just not getting a lot of bulk in there. No. We gumbo, etouffee. We fry them. You make etouffee and gumbo? Yeah, we make all that stuff you know and it's just the meat we use as opposed to chicken for us it's squirrel and your wife likes to cook with game obviously she does the one conversation i had with your

wife when i met her she was going home to make uh fish stew coconut curry fish stew and i asked her what kind of fish, and she said catfish. Was there any other kind? No. And I asked her if she was going to put it in cooked or put it in raw. She said, I put it in raw and cook it in the soup broth. Yeah. And she said that you don't like it spicy.

I love it spicy. And she said that she only keeps you around because you're cute. That's not true. Do you have a name for this recipe yet no i don't we'll have to come up with one yeah squirrel croissant squirrel sign squirrel sign squirrel sign squirrel pocket you haven't had good luck how do you freeze your squirrels i freeze freeze them with the old milk jug water. And then, most importantly, after you cut the top off the milk jug, fill it up with water, freeze it. And being scolded from a child by my dad,

you have to then go back and make sure that there's none exposed on the top of the ice. Man, that stuff freezer burns bad. Right. And so you have to hit it with another layer of water. Yep. And so that's how I freeze them. But you know what I think you ought to reconsider is

just for freezer management and capacity issues, squirrels vacuum, they vacuum bag beautifully. With the bones. Yeah, man. Man, you're busting me about having cheap bags maybe that's my thing i got sorry bags because i can't do it listen i used to not like back when everybody was running those um right when vacuum sealers came out and it was like infomercial era and shit for like homeowner vacuum sealers they came out with a lot of bad vacuum sealers and bad bags.

I'm sure there's a variety of good ones out there, but I have one of these things. It's big, but it's like the Westin Pro Series 2300. It's big. I mean, you could put a Nerf football and vac the air out of a Nerf football with one of these things. They make it look like a flat pancake.

But I have that, and I use their bags, which is like a heavier gauge bag. And you can put them in there, lay them out in there, suck it out, and nothing bad happens to them. And squirrel freezer burns bad. Yeah.

Like a squirrel in a Ziploc bag is a disaster. Doesn't last long. It's a lot of surface area. It's a lot of surface area per volume. When you cut them, though, you know how I was getting on you about how i think your cut's too high when you cut his legs off yeah that's one thing that can puncture the bags if you have jaggedy bones but if you cut at the joint so you have nice rounded bones you can put a whole bunch of quarters in there or splay them out like you're talking about with your presentation with your wife you can pack them in there i've even packed them in there or splay them out like you're talking about with your presentation with your wife you can pack them in there i've even packed them in there where they're all spooning like the squirrels

are spooned out yeah four or five wide hole and vac them in there and it's like a page in a book like a nice flat package full of squirrels and you could stack a thousand of them in your freezer because i used to do that jug of water thing and man you just wind up with a freezer full of jugs they do so when you're and look I finish yeah selling on this you put that thing in cold water you

take the vac bag out of your freezer and pour a mixing bowl of cold tap water and lay that vac bag in there, and that shit is ready to eat in 45 minutes. Ready to cook. Ready to cook. Yeah, sorry. It's thawed.

You got to get a blowtorch out when you want to get them out of a milk jug the day before or that morning to thaw. Or you burn through gallons of water by setting it under the thing and turning the water on to run over it i'm telling you man it's like just like you got to get on binoculars and i'm not coming at you like like you've got you're a better outdoorsman than me no way but you're wrong about knockers and you're wrong about you've adjusted on but you're wrong about back bags i really like the idea of back bags for flat heads for anything you need to invest in a real vac sealer and some good damn bags that's my problem i got the whatever when they first came out but i want to

talk a little bit about the joint cut on the squirrel please Please. So you're taking the time, when you have 10 squirrels lined up on the back of a tailgate and you have your cutters out, you're taking the time to find that little joint with your fingers and then game shearing it off?

Or are you skinning and then visibly cutting there? Because you have to hit it exactly right. No, you don't. You need to move your cut 3 16ths of an inch toward the toenails and i'm going to hit it every time you're going to hit it where you wind up with a nice rounded product picture that you went down and bought a chicken drumstick with a jaggedy ass bone sticking out the end of it. It's a nice joint.

Nice round joint. I get the idea. I just don't know about speed. But you know what? Your cuts are nice, but you got really nice cutters. That's important. I notice that you don't use game shears because your cutters are better than game shears.

I do not use game shears. I use tin snips. Yeah, man. That's the way to go. Why do they even make game shears? I don't know. I don't own a pair. Your tin snips. Yeah, man. That's the way to go. Yeah. Why do they even make game shears? I don't know. I don't own a pair. Your 10 snips.

Yeah, my game shears, it's like they kind of crack. You got to then get in there and knife. Your things are nice. That's a hot tip. You want to talk about hot tips? 10 snips. 10 snips. You had some Irwins.

Is that what they were? I have several different ones. I go in the Home Depot or Lowe's or the hardware store, hit me with the 10 snips. That's what you want in your stock. That's right. Okay, so you need some binos and a VAX sealer. No, I'm going to work on it for you.

I'm going to work on it for you, man. I'm going to work on it for you. I owe you one, so I'm going to work on it. Everybody cool I'm going to work on it for you, man. I'm going to work on it for you. I owe you one, so I'm going to work on it. Everybody cool on squirrels? Ready to move on? Ridge? Yeah, unless we want to talk about the byproducts that we're dealing with from our squirrel.

Oh, I would like to speak on that. You're from the South-South. You're from Georgia. Correct. You keep calling this the Midwest. Right. We all feel like we're in the south-south. You're from Georgia. You keep calling this the Midwest. We all feel like we're in the south. If you get out of a boat and get scared by an armadillo, you're in the south. They're relatively new to this part of the country.

That's what Seth was saying. Seth was saying armadillos are headed north and they're taking the south with them. I feel like we're in everything about it including the the the i was saying i had 300 sugar bites but i kind of did like a little count i have 200 sugar bites around my waistline and my groin my groinal area you had to do like a fisheries count where you'd count like one sector that's what i did and then multiply that out because you have so many i count bait that way and i count sugar

bites that way where i like look at a sample size area right like you make like a six-packy thing with your abdomen and count how many make a little like lean over and clench count how many. Make a little plot. Like lean over and clench. Count how many bites are on one of the beer cans on a six pack. And then go like, okay, there's 12 there. And then start moving around your crotch and groin and scroll area and add them all up. And I feel like I have two hundo. Yanni's probably got a good 150. Chiggers.

So I don't think, I don't really, I could speak on this, but I don't really want to because listening to you guys talk about this has just been a great experience for me. Like just our bafflement. Yeah. Yeah. And on the Google and researching, and man, I've learned a lot about chiggers that I didn't know. Like some of the wives tales that I heard that aren't true. And you guys are researching, God, what are these things all over me?

It's been interesting. I mean, I don't know that I've seen worse cases of chiggers. Well, I think we made some real rookie mistakes man like not i was just it was a hot day so i had just a loose t-shirt no tuck in no bug spray around my midriff and wading around in that tall grass right yeah it was like when i first moved to a area that had a lot of deer ticks and a lot of lyme disease i didn't do any of the things that everybody that lives there is like, they know what to do. Tuck your pants into your socks, use deep. I didn't do any of that junk. I didn't do tick checks. Right. And I paid the price. Right. So here it just happened to be that my one, if I had gotten a dozen bites, I'd be like,

huh, you know, next time. But just to get so overwhelmed by them. And I've been in areas that obviously have them before, but I've never, I've really never experienced just a real hard hit from chiggers. I'll fess up. I'll fess up to the listeners. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't concentrate and I had to go down and I went down to a med stop and got around to steroids. Is that bad? It's bad. You guys got it bad.

It's luck of the draw, too, because you just walk through them, man. But I did spray, and I remember offering you guys some spray. I went around and hit everybody's ankles. I just put a little squirt in my ankles. We were thinking about seed ticks. We weren't thinking chiggers. Man, I use it like breath freshener. All over. So off does

prevent chiggers. Yeah. Says so on the can. What we deal with a lot with in the northern states in the summer is no-seams, gnats, white socks. For that stuff, I just carry a little teeny bottle of 100% DEET or 50% DEET. And you get behind your ears in a couple places they like to hit. But it's not like...

When I went out last night, I had so much of that junk on me, my clothes were wet. Yeah, good. I hosed down. You didn't pick up any more chicken. Oh, man. Good on squirrels? Itchy. Yeah, what's interesting is that Mike, Seth, Park.

Well, Parker sprayed down properly. We didn't spray down the first morning. Yeah, I went around and hit your ankles. I didn't notice. You didn't notice. But it might be that they don't but you know how like some people are more susceptible to mosquitoes and stuff it might be that i'm just like there's something about i was thinking about it because like i was i was on like behind

yannis the whole time i was wearing that pack with a hip belt i didn't have my shirt tucked in but i had that hip belt tight around my waistline. Yeah. The whole time, which might've helped. It's an, it's a micro, not,

it's not microscopic, but you're not going to notice it readily. They're very, very small. Yeah. And it's an, it's an, it's a larval stage of some arachnid.

And, uh, they're, they hang out in clusters and you pass through a cluster and get them on there and they them on there. And they latch on. They'll latch on for four hours. They have an enzyme.

They secrete an enzyme onto you, which liquefies your skin cells, and they lap that stuff up. And the residue from that little activity causes intense itching and inflammation huh sons of bitches man little devil but you started itching the night of i was feeling it when we were rigging flathead tackle i kept being like looking lifting my shirt up and probably causing more trouble for myself lifting my shirt up trying to be like why do I feel like something's on me? At first, everyone thought it was poison ivy because we had hit that field that was just a sea of poison ivy. And Mike threw his headphones down in it. And that's when you told me.

Yeah, you walked by and said, I would watch your headphones are laying in poison ivy. Yeah. So I'm waiting for that. It'd be here by now. Yeah, I think so. It'd be here by now yeah i think so it'd be here by now if we i think it's dying it's dying down and it's not oily right now but it took two days

for the triggers for you yeah but if you look online different people it could take it could be hours or a day or two days later for the trigger bites to emerge poison ivy has a really nasty like it's that's what's so kind of uh that's what's so kind of um nasty about poison ivy is that that delay where you like you just have like this don't know you get hit by a horsefly fuck you know it poison ivy gets you man it's like secretive how long like if you go walking through poison ivy and it's on your boots and like the cuff of your pants how long is it like if you're like untie your boots that day and then the next morning put your boots back on and tie like should you be washing your hands again the next day yeah that's that's when you get like but there's

different kinds of poison ivy infections when you get like you get back from somewhere and all of a sudden you get some poison ivy bubble stripes on your knuckles and stuff i think you're dealing with that kind of junk but i don't think like the direct exposure of when you're getting like plant to skin plant to skin leaves these marks where you can just almost see the the the impact of it but i do think that you do get it on your boots then later and if you get into it real bad and you're real set where you're supposed to take rubbing alcohol and wipe down your wipe down your stuff wash your clothes in hot water but i've had a lot of that where like you get it around your knuckles and inside your arm then like a

week later you get a couple more spots and i think that you're getting some residual oil transfer but it's nothing like like senior skip day when i was in high school it's a tradition in my high school to everyone skip school on senior skip day and you go uh canoe the white river um i was telling this story the other day uh senior skip day i shimmied up a tree because you climb trees and also jump into the river I shimmied up a tree that had poison ivy vines on it and I wound up going to

I wound up having to go to the doctor about that that was bad that and burning it burning it in a brush pile can make you really sick because you're inhaling it oh that hurts we good on squirrels we're good hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes, and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Flatheads. Explain poke pulling, which you call bank pulling. It's just like limb lining, if you know what limb lining is. Hell, explain limb lining. We find a limb overhanging a likely place where catfish would be that's somewhat limber enough to hang a line off of

and that hangs in the water with a bait on it the catfish grabs it and then that limb acts like a fishing rod with some resistance. When it pulls down, it pulls back against the fish and holds it on the hook. Bank poling is similar to that in as much as you use a 10- or 12-foot fiberglass rod poked or stuck into the bank of the side of the river with your line then on it and that big fiberglass rod acts like a fishing rod or gives that resistance the difference between the two is the fiberglass rods you can put where you want to where a likely place a fish would be unlike limb lining you're just you're kind of at the mercy of where a limb would be. And so these, we try to pick the best likely spots,

stick them in with a bait, a live bait when you're targeting flatheads, and, man, go from there. Talk about the bait a little bit first. The bait's the issue. The bait's always the issue. So we ran, oh oh 80 or so hooks and to go for flathead catfish like we were going big baits are better um and so you need 80 big baits and a big bait a big nice bait would be like a hand size bluegill or a carp minnow or something you know four to six to eight or ten

even 12 inches long you need 80 of those to be successful to be successful and you're allowed to run 33 hooks per person per person 33 hooks so we were running three of us were running 80 or so we weren't quite there but you know you get bait and after you have 150 baits you think man you have bait for days but you don't and you got to come back and go for bait and i'm indiscriminate bait collector and will collect bait in any way shape or form that i can and And we ran into that problem where we ran out of bait. And you cast net for bait. I cast net for bait. Man, you can get it any way you can.

You could seine it. You could catch it on a hook and bobber. However you can get it. And you guys use hoop traps for bait too, right? Hoop nets, no. Yeah, little ones in the creek or something like that. Going for carp. Shad, bluefish.

We haven't had any luck with the little hoops though, actually. Would you ever set them in the current channels and they don't swim up in there? No. But you try it that way. Yeah, little fish traps. We've just had very little luck. What's the diameter on your hoop traps?

We only have one that we tried, and it's a, I bet it's an 18-incher. Yeah. My brother has hoop traps. He lives in an area where he allowed a hoop net for rough fish. And they used to bait their hoop nets. But then he thinks that the bait doesn't matter. He just puts them in lines of travel. Like if you got like a, let's say you got like a little gravel let's say you got a stream it's got the shallow end then you got like a little gravel trough up against the up with a deep cut bank and

a little gravel trough down there he'll lay that hoop trap obviously opening up toward the downstream side and he pulls up some hauls of suckers in that thing yeah i don't have it figured just catching them on their path but he's got but these are huge right no these are the one i have a little bit these are like 30 inch hoops i think yeah it's mostly cast netting yeah yeah so you go and cast that a bunch but you can't use a large mouth as bait cannot use game fish as bait no but you like shad carp i like shad but they're tough to keep alive um if we can keep them aerated i like those they're they're a good size big shad hand size shad carp which are super tough bluegill which i think personally everything in the river likes a bluegill.

I think it's like flathead candy, but they're not as tough as like a cartman. And now explain a likely place for flatheads. This is a great debate, but generally behind a blowdown or some sort of cover in the river you know a blow down a wing wall or dike rocks those places where fast water goes to slow water like an eddy yeah big an ambush um spot you know it would be like in a any other stream or creek where the fish would be, you

would think in those eddies and pools, the flatheads would frequent those areas. And that's what's good about the bank pole because there's not a whole lot of limbs that hang over like the Missouri River where we were. I mean, it's like trees falling down, but there's no big limbs that hang over those places that would be. I mean, a few, but not enough to be able to do what you want to do, particularly when we're going for – we like to catch big flatheads, and that's kind of our little thing, you know. Catching giants. Yeah, big ones.

At what point in your mind is a flathead big? 30 pounds or above. That's a nice flathead, 30-plus pounds. Now, I like all of them i mean i think the best eating fish in the in the river is probably a three pound flathead but i just like those big ones man oh it's impressive they are i mean we call it some doozies yeah we call some nice ones so you go up and down the river and you got all your, I imagine the old days, like when I was introduced to bank pulling and it was described to me as poke pulling on the Ohio River. These guys were using hand cut limbs.

Basically, you'd go out like with a machete and cut like what I would think of as muskrat trap and stakes, like big long stakes and run those into the bank. And I'm sure that that's probably what people used to use i'm sure but the fiberglass rods are pretty damn nice yeah because you could fit just like laid up along the gunnel in the boat you know you got 30 40 of them in a very nice little package what's the diameter on that uh we have five eights and 11 16th too now we do have um half inch poles but we've discarded the half inch poles and the reason we have is we never caught anything over like 25 pounds on a half inch pole oh and i don't know the reason other than we think that the fish can't hook itself or i i don't know it's not rigid enough it's just not rigid enough it's it's like the 25 pound cut off

and then ridge pounder threw your last half inch or into the river that's the benefit of cutting your poles those will float yes fiberglass does that's a good point and the ridge pounder even even yell mark twain or anything no i don't know what happened man let's just get to it i asked we were making a set we were making a set and i just asked ridge i kindly asked ridge hey can you take that pole and see how deep it is here easy task i thought he just just kind of lowered the pole into the water and then just let it drop dude it just literally came out of my hand i was like oh i got this and then it just this i just watched it like disappear it was the weirdest it was one of the strangest things i've seen neither of them said anything either they just just he just sort of was like releasing it that

just happened a 10 foot fiberglass pole that wasn't a good morning for me either because then i threw a bait overboard. That was right before the... It was right after he discarded a bait. Yeah. So you have it rigged where it's a 10-foot pole and you run 10 foot of twine. Not twine.

It's not cotton. Nylon. Braided nylon. What was it you called? In the Pacific Northwest northwest they call it ganyan ganyan line ganyan have to remember that you know it'd be again it's ganyan like you're that material used in that for that purpose would be ganyan so you have roughly it's 10 foot pole and you have 10 feet of eight feet of leader right or not if you leader eight feet of main line yeah main line and then you put a plumb sinker on it was like a one ounce plum one ounce lead right or whatever else we can

find on the riverbank yep yeah one ounce lead then you put a then you tie to a barrel swivel big barrel swivel then off that barrel swivel you got another two feet of leader right and then you use a big ass halibut hook big circle hook circle hook and on that circle hook you like to tail hook or lip hook depending on the velocity of current correct speak to that there are tail men and there are head men okay i'm a head man as a general rule and because this is the reason when you're fishing current it's coming down i like to hook them in the nose or in somewhere in the in the lips so the current is the fish is oriented facing the current and it's like it would be a natural swimming type of motion for them if you hook them in the tail they're facing backwards in that swift current

and i mean in actuality they drown yeah um the the water is going backwards over their gills and they don't stay alive and they die in a very unnatural shape. At a 90. Like they're all at a 90. You're right. Yeah, they look like shit. Yeah, they look terrible. And their scales are all fluffed out. Yeah.

But if in a, the argument for tails has got to be the longevity in no current that he's going to have more action and have action for longer. I think they stay on the hook better. Oh. A tail hooker. With the tail hook. Oh, yeah.

Because you're deep in the meat and it stays on. So in an eddy or slow water, I like to hook them in the tail if there's no current. Because the smaller fish can't pick it off or those sorts of things. They do stay on the hook better. Yeah, I'll point out that bait loss is a big problem. Giant. So I want to walk through a couple other points. I explained the rig.

You get a whole boatload of these rigs. You go down, launch your boat, and you just start punching in poles all over and you're not it's not that easy just to punch in a bunch of poles no it's hard to punch in poles and they make a little thing where you wear a rubber palmed a tight fit and rubber palmed glove so you can get a good grip on the fiberglass stake and you guys make a little which which I don't know why he didn't turn me on to these or let me know about these. I had like kind of discovered on my own.

Yeah. After a lot of polls. No, Keith runs those. That they have a little block of wood. Parker's buddy has a little block of wood that he took a half or five-eighths drill bit, like a five-eighths auger bit drill

and made a little circular cut, bored a little circle into the block of wood that fits the end of the fiberglass pole. You stick this block of wood under your tight-fitting rubber-palmed glove so that it's like, well, that joke where, you know, those little things use those buzzers you put in your hand to shock people when you shake their hand it fits in your hand like that you because what i was doing to sink the poles prior to my discovery of the wood block

was i would get it started and then put the end of the pole right up against my heart because i had a pfd on a personal flotation device on, with good padding. And I would put it against the padding of my life jacket and use the force of my body to drive it in. And this is all about the boats swirling around the current and the motors running, and it's tricky. And you need to drive it in enough to hold a 60-pound flathead, which is shocking that it works. It is shocking.

But then I discovered that block of wood. And you put that block of wood, fit the hole over the end of the thing and then you can just drive that son of a bitch in and it's so satisfying man you're just like yeah in got him 45 degree angle and you're not driving it into the dry bank so much oftentimes you're driving it into two three feet of water right where it's hanging out at a 45 degree angle over deeper water right and you'd like to put all your poles in because we're going to touch on bait loss you don't like to bait until dusk right so you go through and make all your sets get all your poles in ready to go then hang out factory and how much time it's going to take to where you're getting done just at the moment you need to start using your headlamp. And then go back through and bait all your hooks.

Because big mambo-jambo flatheads come out at dusk or at night, and you don't want all the turtles and gar destroying all your bait. Right. You want to have the bait hit the water at all your bait. Right. You want to have the bait hit the water at the magic moment. Right. But still, you come back in the morning. It's gone. 90, easily 90% of that bait's gone in the morning.

Easily. Yeah, that's a fair assessment. I'd like to know what gets the largest percentage of it. I don't know. I don't know if you're missing fish. I don't know if it's turtles, gars, combination of everything. Don't know. I feel as though you have to lose a lot to turtles, and you have to lose a lot to gars.

The reason I say the gars is because I've seen it happen in limb lining where with the bright sun, this is baiting in the bright sun we can see what's going on in the water hang that bait down and all of a sudden there's three or four guards nosed up against it that fast they just know right they're down there anyway that's why we don't do it a whole lot in the middle of summer when the guards these were short these were short nose guards yeah but just like pecking at it you you know? So that's an issue. But it's amazing to me how many baits, especially those carp minnows and then the bluegills,

that would survive the whole night. Hard workers. We'd be there at 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning, and you could fish that bait another day, just fresh. And then it's the big debate oh does does this spot suck you know you know it's like well it's a great big good bait and it hasn't been touched in 24 hours should i move it or just let him run you know yeah parker's saying he likes to let those baits go and reward those baits i do just like a hard-working bait like man, man, you got caught. You were put in the bait bucket.

We drove a big hook through your mouth. You're on there for two days. We're pulling our poles. I take that hook out as gingerly as I can. And it's like a brook trout fisherman. I let him just slide into the water and go free. Takes a little picture of it. Yeah.

Keep wet. Hashtag keep it wet. Thank you, sir. You did a great job. You did not get eaten by a flathead. When you go out and check them, you like to start checking right at daybreak. Yeah. What's the thinking on that?

The thinking on that is it's very visible to see you know those big poles bouncing guys running the river it's titillating the passersby it is people running the river yeah be a big pole bouncing looking around going hey uh there's a big old flathead over there that i could get so you kind of want to get out before all the people start running the river and also you know the longer anything's on a set line like that the more chance it has to escape we could offer work a big hole so try to get there early as we can and you go down the river and you can tell you know a big flathead the way he works a pole you can tell it's as exciting as it's as exciting as like i like in my mind i keep going to muskrat trapping on the whole thing yeah it's

just exciting to go out and check it is it's like christmas go out and check the line and talk about the way a big flathead is on that pole so if you visualize the pole sticking out at a 45 degree angle and a fish on the line of it a smaller fish it will be more of a bouncing bobbing type of action you know there's a fish on it but you don't really know how big it is but a big flathead just with the weight that pole just goes down slow or it'll be bent or stay you know kind of at a 20 degree angle or then slowly go under the water and disappear um and then ease back up you know it's just sheer poundage that's doing that that 50 pound-pounder sucked that pole, slowly sucked that pole underwater, and held it underwater long enough that we thought he pulled the pole.

We thought it was gone. I was worried that it pulled the pole. I was too. I was thinking he pulled it. We spooked him and he pulled it. But it eased back up. Dude, it's so fun, man. And sometimes they're on there they don't bark no and you kept saying that i didn't believe it we eventually saw it yeah as you can't approach every pole if it's not moving particularly those bigger fish they'll just lay on the bottom

and what what you don't want to do is have the pole come up to the pole and a fish take off and that pole go down and hit the gunnel or side of the boat because on those large fish they snap that stop or break or the ring off you gotta let them have that action so same way you wouldn't grab the tip of someone's rod when he's fighting the fish exactly exactly the same premise so you come up and uh with a pole particularly one that ridge pounder threw in the bottom of the drink you use that to fill the line before you get there and if there's resistance to it you know there's a fish on it even if the pole's not moving and i was telling you that you kind of get lackadaisical because

you're running poles nothing nothing nothing and then you pull up the one that's not moving bam you know you got a 35 pound blue cat on the end of it yeah that's a good transition there's the trifecta is the catfish trifecta which we pulled every day yep we checked for two days and pulled trifectas on two days though i lost one oh yeah i think it was an incomplete trifecta the first day because i i tried to horse him up into the boat and didn't use a landing net and he came unbuttoned and i was actually glad that that one got away because that was our first pole and that's the ominous sign although we didn't do well if you catch one on your first pole man because it's like that's bad juju yeah i can see that yeah you go oh we're gonna we're gonna

unless unless if it was a 50 pounder on your first pole yeah then you're good but to catch a little channel on your first pole is not good luck no the thing about catching a 50 pound flathead is like the trips made even if it's on your first pole there's no way you things can go bad no because you're just you're peacocking around like just your fan is fully exposed up and down the river yeah you're hoping that it run into some passers-by that's right see what i got yeah you were saying this is one of the internet more interesting things you tell me about this is that you go through like your family eats five deer in a year right and you're saying uh that you don't even

really care for deer hunting and if someone came and just dropped off five gutted out deer in your driveway you'd be just as fine with that man would i i would and when you moved up here the flathead fishing was so good that you dropped down to three deer a year and are eating two deer worth of flatheads two deer worth flatheads it's a good trade it's a good trade so that's probably roughly 100 pounds flathead probably two deer processed meat right 100 pounds of flathead filets yep how many times a year do you need to go up and do how many times a year do you go on limb line or bank pull i do it two like you do two sessions two sessions a year and it depends on the amount of biomass that i accumulate i look in my freezer and i go i have enough or and it's good that it's two times a year

because it's spring and then if you look in the fall and you open and you go man i'm low on flat head then you hit it hard in the fall or i still have some from the spring so i don't need to hit it too hard yeah and you when you get all set up it's a lot of work to get set up do you usually do two or three checks or one yeah i i generally run them two or three nights for sure and and we watch the river levels and generally you get them better on a rise of the river so we watch the river live there's on a steep drop we won't go and when the conditions are right and we feel like we're going to have good good luck then we'll go um back to the catfish trifecta channels blues and flats can you speak to the the edibility and mystique and rank them out in a hierarchy i can give my opinion no that's all that's all i'm asking okay because this will

be met with resistance i I know, among each. Every catfish man has different thoughts. So, for me, I like flatheads. But that's universal, though, I feel like. People that have access to flatheads like flatheads. Yeah, they do scavenge, but not as much as the other two species. They prefer live. They're predators, man. Yeah, they're predators. They're not scavengers but not as as much as the other two species they they prefer live they're predators

man yeah they're predators not scavengers yeah hence the giant mouth you know so um they don't have as much fat on them uh the meat to me is better tasting it's it's a little firmer it's not a real flaky meat um yeah catfish fat we should point out tastes like shit yes it does and it's it's a little firmer it's not a real flaky meat um yeah catfish fat we should point out tastes like shit yes it does and it's not so much when you when you go to cleaning a catfish it's not so much the red meat that you're seeing now i trim that but it's the it's the light colored fat it's like a gelatinous like you skin if take a, when you were skinning those blue cats with a pair of skinning pliers and you pull the hide on a blue cat, a big one, underneath it is just a full on gelatinous fat that when you touch it, your hands are too greasy to hold your knife. Right. That stuff tastes like hell.

It's bad. So, and now don't get me wrong. cats are really good to eat but you have to trim that off if you leave it on it's it can be that's why i think a lot of people don't trim that and they eat it and go god this is horrible muddy this is muddy this tastes bad it's just it's not the it's not the meat it's the fat oh and we talked about this the other day i think we've mentioned on the podcast before, but we bought that catfish. For that shoot, for that film?

Yeah, a little film shoot we had going on to do a recipe with catfish. And we just assumed that it's in the store. It's going to be trimmed out properly. And it was disgusting. It was farm-raised catfish. They hadn't defatted it. And I just assumed they did. And we just cut it up and threw it in the fryer to take a picture

of a fried catfish filet. But we eat all that stuff, you know? Oh, yeah, but it tastes like dog shit, though. It was bad. So you could see how the world over, you know, at least in first world country, where they're buying meat in a store, you get turned off on catfish if that's what they're selling.

In the Midwestwest i know you think that we're in it now but the the real let's say the in the up in the upper great lakes um because they have yellow perch walleye small mouth people don't target catfish, and catfish has a reputation as just being a muddy-tasting fish. And I grew up thinking that, and we would catch them and fry them, and it's just not widely known. It is down here, for sure,

among people who target them. It's not widely known that you need to trim your fillets because people up there are used to eating fillets that need no trimming. Right. your fillets because people up there are used to eating fillets that need no trimming right so the so there you are you're ranking them out the other argument is and i think one that's more highly debatable i think like you said flatheads are are tops top shelf in the catfish shelving world the blues and the channels

are where a great debate happens um i prefer channels a little bit more than than blue cats because of the fat contact and i i do i want to point out that we caught a maybe a seven or eight pound channel you said that's a channel i was going man i think that's a blue cat um because they're they're similar and you were right um we asked one of our fisheries buddies and it's the it's the shape of the was it the anal ray anal ray and a channel that's the best that's the best tip i've ever heard because they both have a fork tail right like some people call channels forks because they have a fork tail and the blue has a fork tail but the anal ray that's a good tip that's a hot tip that he had that's a good one and and so the anal ray on a channel catfish so if you go to the fin that sits on the bottom side the bottom side that fits between the

between the vent and the tail and the caudal fin or tail there's an anal ray and it's you go ahead yeah um on a channel it's it's curved like like the bottom of a channel would be. And that's the way he remembers it in his mind. So it's like a D shape or a curved canoe shape. Yeah, it describes like an arc. Right, an arc. On the blue cat, that fin is flat, like a straight line. Yeah, there's like a radius, a long straight line, and another radius that comes back up into

the fish i'm not going to forget that no i'll never forget that and i've struggled with it a lot and i've had people send me pictures being like hey it's a blue cat and i'm like man i feel like it's a channel cat and you go no i think it's a blue cat right but it's just a final done deal done because there's a little bit of color variation but them damn the blue cats are gorgeous yeah they're blue man and they look like a it looks like a it looks like a they got skin Done deal. Done. Because there's a little bit of color variation. But them damn, the blue cats are gorgeous. Yeah, they're blue, man. And they look like a, it looks like a, they got skin like a mako shark, man. That kind of color, you know.

And then channels have that, like a yellowish grayish. And then the flats, in the Great Lakes, the flats are a deeper, almost chocolatey brown. But here, some people even call them yellows, right? Yellow cats, right, yeah. And you get some color variation. For sure. In those. Even here.

Yeah, there'll be some dark brown. That 50-pounder had like a ghostly yellow to it. Yeah. Those big ones are like that. You see that big old yellow head come up on a bank pole. It's exciting, man. He doesn't see the sun much it's one of the biggest freshwater fish you're gonna monkey with yeah other than sturgeon i think so yeah but widely available well managed right right sustainable yield type thing i mean sturgeon are big but they're hurting right

all over they're hurt sure like no one's i shouldn't say no one you know there's places right there's places where you can do some freezer filling on sturgeon in a tightly regulated fashion but like flatheads are like you know and as they as they phase out some of the commercial fisheries because they're still this is the kind of little known thing that you know there's very few freshwater commercial fisheries in the U.S., particularly for native fish. When you rule out, there's some commercial fisheries for non-natives, but when you rule out the non-native commercial fisheries,

there's very few freshwater native species commercial fishing that goes on in this country. Then you've got salmon in Alaska. species commercial fishing that goes on in this country. You know, and you got like salmon in Alaska. People debate like, are salmon saltwater or freshwater? My brother's a fisheries biologist. He points out that they begin their life and end their life in freshwater.

There are, they spend a lot of time out in saltwater, but there are some that never even touch salt water. And he says, he's like, it's arguable that a salmon is a freshwater species. So there's a commercial fishery for those up there, right? But here there's very little.

And I think there's, you know, there's not like an increased, there's not an increasing commercial exploitation of catfish. It's a decrease in commercial exploitation of catfish it's a decrease in commercial exploitation of catfish absolutely catfish are being uh you know even if even with aquaculture or growing catfish the catfish farmers have really been hurting you know past few years because that's the species is just not looked at as that grade of a food fish as it what has it has been in the past and i don't know i don't know why you know some of these other things are becoming more more popular at other species and easy to

grow and you know tilapia kind of overtaking catfish and man you couldn't get me to eat a tilapia for anything those yeah they market under different names to nile well nile perch is because they're you know that's one of their native ranges right you don't like tilapia or you just don't like the idea i don't like the idea of it i don't you know the i think i heard um in florida in Everglades, like half the biomass of fish, tilapia, invasive. And they're like a carp. They're a vegetative eating. I don't know, man.

They grow them in cesspools on like a catfish. I don't know. I don't know. I was in the Philippines, and they have rice terraces. These are like communities where you can't, not even road accessible. You have to like hike into these areas in the Philippines.

And there's people that have that thousand-year-old rice terraces, and they do a rice harvest. So they'll grow a crop of rice, harvest it, and then as a way of fertilizing and regenerating the capabilities of the soil, they'll put in a harvest of tilapia and let the tilapia live in there and the fish defecate, right? And then you harvest the tilapia, and then replant rice. In that system, tilapia seemed cool to me

because it seemed like this very harmonious kind of system that they developed. And in that way, eating tilapia was cool. So I thought it was just a cool way they had to go about it. In that particular situation, I looked at tilapia as being like a badass fish. But them as a non-native becomes not as appealing.

Them as a non-native in the U.S., they somehow lose a little bit of that. A friend of mine calls them the soy green of what was that movie? Soylent Green. We're eating people. It's people. Yeah, he calls it the Soylent green of the fish world

but you know a rainbow trout is equally as synthetic yeah it's a man-made fish farm raised or just in general if you look at like what we've done with the rainbow trout propagated all around the world moved in barrels everywhere the stocking right so it's it's like a you know outside of the pacific rim um it's a man-made fish because rainbows aren't native to like midwest or any of that brown trout in this country it's a man-made fish brown trout too yeah they're eurasian man it's an invasive exotic. Brooks are native. Brook trout are native in the east. Cutthroat, native in the west.

Native in the west. That's, yeah. Yeah, when you're on some pristine river casting dries at a brown, it's a barrel fish, dude. Came over in a barrel. Give me the muddy river in a big flat, man. Well, you're a river man, though. So you like, explain the other side, the the flip side of this because you like a channel better than a blue explain well but you're saying

it's contentious it is contentious the good thing about a blue catfish is they get great big and so there's a sheer amount of meat argument that you could use for fish and blues. The channels don't get near as big. So there's that aspect of it, but man, I don't know. Some of the guys just really prefer one over the other. And I don't know. I'm a channel man.

If given the opportunity. Now I like channels because out in my neck of the woods, that's the one we have greatest access to. So the lower Yellowstone River, like we fish channels. And that's what you find there. I've heard rumors. They're unsubstantiated. Yeah, I don't know.

I've heard rumors about how far up that system blues make it. And sometimes they push the, that they've been found way above their known westward terminus. I don't know. But we go after channels. But after this, hanging out, doing this, I'm definitely like, I agree with you. There's a mystique to those flatheads.

Like, I'm with you. If I lived in a place that had flatheads, I would be a flathead guy. I like to fish yellow. I would probably abandon a lot of my activities in favor of fishing flatheads. They're cool. They're super cool. And I know that they're so cool, in fact, that a lot of people now are sort of

trouting them, trout-izingizing them where it's becoming taboo like some people want to take like the bat the largemouth bass aesthetic and apply it to flats

hmm where they become like this untouchable you're not supposed to eat them hey man I'm good with that as long as people could

keep putting flatheads back in the river that's fine with me it's more for me to catch yeah you got a good point can you explain your point on or I could do it for you on what your back in the river. That's fine with me. It's more for me to catch. Yeah. You had a good point.

Can you explain your point on, or I could do it for you, on what your thoughts on heavy metal contamination? Yeah. I like to think in my mind is every time somebody asks me, well, what about the heavy metals? And it goes through my my head like the flesh

contaminant like the contamination of flesh from industrial pollutants aren't you worried about mercury or whatever and i think in my mind man if i can fish catch clean cook fry up and eat so many flathead catfish that i get sick and die and die i will have one at life like look at parker he's he's 90 but uh the mercury finally got him right he's gray right yeah that dude caught a bunch of flats yeah he must have some good spots it's the same argument when you go with deep like our is that deep good for it's like I don't know man maybe you catch cancer in like 60 years but do you want Lyme disease or acute you know spinal

swelling from some other disease or chiggers spray it on man yeah I'm with you I use deep yeah and I like I was explaining to you I saw deep warp

the back of my phone case off and destroy my phone but I still put it on my body now and then because I've also had

Lyme disease yeah and I've also had chigger infestations yeah so I've also had Lyme disease. And I've also had chigger infestations. So we good on cats? Anybody got anything? Any final thoughts on cats?

Call us some biggins. They're cool fish. Just a giant. They look like dinosaurs. Tenacious. Yeah, we were looking at... After Parker finished cleaning the big one, we like... Me and Seth

were looking at it hanging on the tree, and there was... You can look up through its gill plate into its mouth. It's just such a simple thing. You can just look up, and you're like, oh. And then that's the inside of it. And it's like... You're looking into that gaping maw?

Yeah. And it's just so, yeah, man. I like that they don't know like teeth. I mean, they have like sandpaper. Yeah. A really, their mouth, their bottom and top lip are coated with a really grippy sandpaper. And then they have these crushers in the back of their throat that are coated with sandpaper. Like when he gets a hold of something, that something's not going anywhere,

but he doesn't have, it's nice. It's a nice fish when you can just reach in there, a 50 pounder and reach in there and just grab his lip and not ribbing your hand. That's nice. Cause this is satisfying to pick up those cats by that bottom lip, man. I think I don't like about how long they live in the bottom of the boat. My sister-in-law, when we fish with our sister-in-law, Juanita, she makes us promptly kill every fish. And it's time-consuming when you're into them real good.

She will not be in a boat with a live fish in that boat. This is getting me in trouble right now, just so you know. My wife's the same exact thing. Yeah. She'll sometimes not even, she'll stop fishing just to be the person who dispatches all the fish. Kill the fish. Because me and my brother, ah, we'll get them later. But she treats it like, yeah, that you need to promptly dispatch the fish.

She would not like bank pulling. She'd have to bring a shotgun. It's not easy to dispatch a 50-pound fish in a boat. No, you'd have to use a gun. You'd have to bring a snake charmer out with you and hang them over the side of the boat and hit them with a snake charmer like castaways drawing lots, man.

You ever read that book, In the Heart of the Sea? I don't know. I don't think so. Goodness. Um, anything else? No one. I have one thing that I thought about on the way over here. Please. I want to go back to what happened at the end of the squirrel hunt.

Oh, we're back to squirrel hunt. Yesterday. And I was thinking the reason. Me missing that rabbit. The reason people don't use slings that are jump shooting rabbits or quail or jump shooting just in general is because of what happened yesterday. I think. Because that's a real. That that was an issue i use my sling on my shotgun turkey hunting and i use my sling on my shotgun squirrel hunting where you're doing a lot of walking around and with squirrel hunting because i need to use my binoculars i need to be able to put my shotgun on my shoulder or whatever to look for my binoculars

same i use binoculars turkey hunting i use binoculars all the time turkey hunting. So if I was out quail hunting or cottontail hunting, I wouldn't have the sling on it. But it saved that rabbit's life. It did. It was apparent. A rabbit kicked up right at the end of the hunt, close to the truck, and ran a beautiful J route to you.

I got my attention. Yeah, the here I come, you know, like going around a greyhound ring. You know, like here I come, and then ran directly away from you for like until it disappeared, like 60 or 70 yards. Yeah, at a trajectory where you need to do no aiming. Right. Just point in that general direction. And I fling my shotgun up,

and the sling is somehow tangled around it. You can't see. But gave her a good blouch anyways, but just like off in that direction. Yeah. Looking through a sling. Yeah. I was dumbfounded.

You said the slings and I couldn't see. I was like, ah. Because it wasn't a thin sling that when you have- Oh, no. It's like a padded shoulder. It's called a- Folks should know this. It's called a-

What do they call those? Quakes? Yeah. Quake sling. Those are some nice freaking slings, man. What I do on them though the hardware on them is no good when you buy them what's that company that makes oh uh grove tech i take the quake sling and cut the hard one end you can just undo the hardware

because it comes like uncle mike's on it so on one end or something i can't remember what hardware they use but anyways on one end i undo you can just undo it and put a Grove Tech mount on it. Grove Tech hardware on the other end. The other end, you actually got to cut through the stitching, put a Grove Tech on there. You just order the Grove Techs online. Put a Grove Tech on there, put it back, and then then i gotta get dental floss and my big ass needle and redo all the stitching and then you got a sling and then you got live rabbits yeah this should be should be in your bag well that was embarrassing

what a treat that would have been that little added rabbit i know man that was embarrassing dude from a camera perspective like me and mike were like right there you guys were just talking and it just happened like for You guys were just talking. For the camera, it just happened so naturally. It would have been so cool. It was like the rabbit. I just see everything. Mike's on park.

It's just like the scene was... I mean, it still was a fun scene, but yeah, if that rabbit got hit. Did you capture that? Oh, the whole thing, man. Yeah. Yeah, we were right there. He really wanted you. Really? Yeah.

I was like, this isn't happening. Was it over the shoulder? Over the shoulder, man. Everything. It was like the perfect setup. Can we dig out that footage so i can use that footage as a man oh for sure yeah warning to people yeah yeah that was embarrassing i don't think you should be embarrassed it was an issue it's a sling issue you couldn't see i would have made fun of you if you'd have just missed that one but that that was nice to have that little crutch that wasn't your little thing that that wasn't your fault oh man anything else well i got a concluder um

after a lot like our merch store it's been lackluster for a long time we're getting a really hardcore back up and running and we just got in stock a whole bunch of meat eater podcast t-shirts including our blouch shirt so if you go on to the to the meat eater.com and go into the store you'll be able to get yourself a meat eater podcast t-shirt and i was saying in the description that even if you don't know what it means it's just a cool shirt with a weird word on it right keeps people guessing. You can go to the ladies in the bar and be like, check this out. What do you think that means?

I recently heard about a guy who goes to the bar and brings a... I almost don't even want to bring this up. He for some reason puts Tic Tacs. He carries a thing of Tic Tacs around in his pocket. And he reaches, when he's talking to a womanic-tacs he carries the thing of tic-tacs around in his pocket and he reaches when he's talking to a woman in the bar he reaches into his pocket and shakes that

tic-tac thing goes i hear rattlesnake there's a rattlesnake in my pants or something i remember just thinking that like the quality of person that that's to dredge up. I'd always use it as a filter of who I didn't want. I feel like the quality matches quality. Like, if you're the type of dude to go into a bar and do that, the person that you're going to get is probably the person that you're looking for. The person that that trick is going to net. Yeah. Perfect match, man.

Yeah, there's a rattlesnake in my pants. Yeah. That's what he says. That's known as the low cull factor. Yeah. I don't cull many i don't high grade i don't high grade at the bar uh you know i actually got a double concluder because here's the deal uh i go fish channel catfish every year on the lower Yellowstone. And we have, over the years, go out there with my kids.

And over the years, we have developed, we have perfected, between me and my bro, the perfect fried catfish sandwich. And we have a link to a video about how you can go. No, not a link. Just go watch the damn video. If you go to themeateater.com or you can go to the show notes and find a link in the show notes and you can see our video about how to make the perfect. It's not, it's like a, I like it because we make the sandwich with catfish, but it's good for anything. And in fact, I don't know, man, you can make the sandwich with any kind of fried fish, rockfish, catfish, it's good for anything and in fact i don't know man you can make this sandwich with any kind of fried fish rockfish catfish smallmouth bass walleye i don't care but um we break it all

down in this video and you go check it out again go to themeateater.com and you'll find the perfect catfish sandwich recipe or like i said link in the show notes. And here's the deal, is it's also captured in our forthcoming The Meteor Fishing Game cookbook. So you can find it there as well. Any more concluders, anyone? Ridge? Don't make one up for no reason. No, I'm not making one up.

Just reflecting on the life of a river man and a squirrel man, and that it's a good one. It's just a good, rewarding life, man. You could see it. I could. Yeah, I could. In a different life, I could be a part of it. Fully.

Yeah. That was on your fortune cookie last night. It was, yeah. Business opportunity. Trapping pigs. Or just living on last night. It was, yeah. Business opportunity. Trapping pigs. We're just living on a river, trying to avoid meth. You think that'd be tough for you? Stick to flatheads, man.

Seth, any final thoughts? Just cool hanging out with you, Parker. Learned a lot. It was fun. It was a good time. It was fun. Yeah, and you grew up chasing the wily squirrel. Yeah, grew up chasing squirrels, but my first flathead experience.

Good. No flatheads in Pennsylvania? I don't even know. We never, there's something we just never pursued. No, you know what? Man, we caught a big flat one time out of, I think non-native there. We caught a big flat one time out of, I think not native there. We caught a big flat one time out of the Delaware. Did you?

Between Pennsylvania, where it flows between Pennsylvania and New York. Yeah. I need to go back and look at a picture of that catfish, man. It was a long time ago, but I feel like I can't, yeah, I feel we caught a big flat out of the Delaware.

Knowing what I know now, if, you know, if I was back in Pennsylvania and I knew they had flats, I'd be all over them. Well, they're not like these ones. I don't think there's that many places

you can go out and get them like this. No. I speargunned a big flat out of Lake Michigan because sometimes in the late summer, the lakes get so hot. You know the break walls they have? Are you familiar with the Great Lakes at all? No.

Are you familiar with what a break wall is? In the Great Lakes, if you go on the western side of lake michigan you have all the river systems that are flowing west toward lake michigan and the river system is usually passed through like a large you know you like like a large estuary which would be like the lake so white lake muskegon lake are the river mouths And so the rivers will spill out, and they'll form these big lakes that form against the sand dunes that form the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Gotcha. And then they'll hold back these big bodies of water,

and then there'll be a channel that drains that lake out into Lake Michigan. And the channels used to migrate. But they eventually came in and channelized them with big channel walls. So they built channel walls for shipping so that ships could come off the Great Lakes, through the channels, into the big lakes. And the cities are built around the big lakes. And you had mills and coal-fired generators and all the stuff that needed to get coal in lumber out all that um to protect those channel mouths the channelized channel mouths you'd build these break walls to bust up the surf and so they would just take riprap giant slabs of concrete and shit and build these big protective arms that sort of stretch out and come back in almost like a diamond shape with the points cut off it to protect the channel from waves.

And when the lakes get super warm, if it's a really hot late summer, the big flatheads would come out of there and go out and then live in those rock piles. Because it also gets so hot that a lot of suckers and stuff will come out, or they're coming up from the depths in late michigan i don't know but they'll come out and yellow perch will come in and all be living in those rocks where the water is nice much cooler than inside and the big flat has to come out and land there and you can uh there you're allowed to spear gun

there's only certain things you can spear gun or shoot with a bow, but catfish are among them. And I went out one time when we were diving down spearing red horse suckers, but I ran into and speared a giant flathead out in Lake Michigan. So in that way, I'm among a very small, small minority of the American population who spearheaded a flathead out of Lake Michigan. Yeah. Two or three dudes are going to write in and be, I did it too, but it's a small subset of the American population. Yeah. That has speared a flat at Lake Michigan. Yanni, have you?

No. See? Told you. That's my conclusion. Michael? told you that's my concluder Michael I had a great time you enjoyed it yeah following you guys and by the way I did bleed good a few times

more the first day but yeah that was a fun first time filming you guys been watching the show for a while so it was kind of weird to be following you but it's helpful of weird to be following you. But it's helpful because you probably knew how it goes.

Yeah. What it looks like. Yeah. It did help. And I'm excited to eat some catfish and squirrel. Yanni? Me too, man. My clean thought is we need to shut it down

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