The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 141: Squirrel Brains, Stags, and the Fourth Wall

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

Delmarva Peninsula - Steven Rinella talks with Steve Kendrot, Ryan Callaghan, Loren Moulton, Brody Henderson, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: eating squirrel brains; what, exactly, is Southern Literature?; the Fourth Wall or why we didn't talk about the Meat Tree Incident in season 7 of MeatEater; 47,000 ticks on a dead moose; the controversy of aerial wolf gunning; Steve's heartfelt apology; sika deer and their preference for great people; the similarities between sika deer and elk; big mambo jambo blues, dungeys, and peeler crabs; rippin' a Kendrot combo; the bullyish nature of sika deer; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Lots of dudes. Brody, take a stab at how many dudes have written in to tell us about the guy eating squirrel brains. Dozens. Why do people like that story so much i don't know it's not even i mean obviously it's a thing eating them but people get such a little chub off it's like people love it wildlife related disease death yeah and it's like oh it's an unconventional meal and he got his comeuppance yeah he got what he had coming we knew it was

gonna happen eventually but you're also steven ranella the meat eater the guy who eats all sorts crazy stuff so they think they're just assuming that you're out there munching out on squirrel brains i don't like brains man do you know you know that uh what's that what's that place in missoula that has the brain dish yeah the brains the Ox. Brains and eggs. Yeah, you go to the Ox for brains and eggs. And it's like a big thing when you live there and you get all drunk at night and the bar is closed and you go to the Ox and you try to get your buddy from out of town to buy brains and eggs. And their thing is if you order them, their slogan is if you order them,

you need them. I've never liked, it's like, I do not enjoy eating the brains of anything. I've eaten cow, I've eaten a handful of different, I don't like it. Don't like it, don't eat it. Kevin Murphy, world's greatest small game hunter, doesn't go near squirrel brains because he grew up eating them. Did he eat them when we were around? His dog damn sure eats him his dog likes him um he doesn't eat them and he doesn't eat them because it doesn't if

there is a risk it doesn't warrant it so it it turns out here's the story that everybody's all hot and bothered about turns out that a guy um some time, not like recently, years ago, a guy in Rochester, New York, gets the human variant of mad cow disease, which is pronounced, our guest Steve Kendrott will pronounce it for us. I've forgotten already. Creutzfeldt-Jakob? Yes. Right? Something like that. Creutzfeldtuzfeld jakob disease

yeah um which is like i said the human variant of mad cow disease and it turns out that in his history um he you know he'd been a squirrel hunter and in his history he had enjoyed eating some squirrel brains so it becomes this sort of like internet sensation how he absolutely died from eating squirrel brains. But now people are pointing out that every year in New York, 20 people die from variations of this disease. On average, I think it's about one in one million people die from variations of this disease and

there's no direct reason to believe that that's what caused the thing it was just a it was a habit he had and he happened to die from it but now doctors at that worked on this case are clarifying that there's no evidence that the man died as a result of anything he ate. But it just sounds cool. And I'm not saying to run out and eat squirrel brains. It's just funny the way people

kind of fall in love with the narrative. Correlation versus causation. Yeah. People fall in love with the narrative. And holy shit did people email in about that. Giving like a heads up. Heads up, man. Guy wrote in. Anybody got anything to say about that?

Why aren't you guys interested in this? Because I don't need squirrel brains. Dying of squirrel brains ain't interesting. No. It's like I'm not going to come in contact with them unless I myself make that situation happen. That's just not something. Yeah.

Steve might serve them to you. Hey, I recently had my genetic test. You may. I got a freebie where you get your genetic lineage test, and I can't bring myself to open up the part about the diseases I'm probably going to get. Oh, yeah. You have to watch a... I was surprised by some stuff, man.

I was dead sure that I was 25% Italian, like 25% Sicilian, and it turned out that there's also... that I have some North African ancestry, which probably no doubt came from, because that's a short little boat ride, no doubt came from the Sicilian end. But anyways, I did this thing.

That was surprising to me. The other part that was surprising to me is that there's like a thing where it's like, here's the problems you might have, because you're genetics, right? But you got to watch a counseling video before you can open the file. And I don't have it in me to do it it just says hey this is not a predetermined thing don't get hung up i might have this is something to watch out for

and i don't even want to know i want to all be a surprise so why 23 and me aren't there like a bunch of those services like is one more credible is one more credible than the other don't know don't know yeah wouldn't the uh thing i'll find out you're gonna die from like i mean everyone's got looking at the same things right yeah what if they i don't know i gotta look they might have found something out no they don't do a medical test. I can't bring myself to open it. Yanni, are you cool on squirrel brains? I'm not feeling interest. Not really.

Why don't you put your mic up to your top lip? Guy wrote in. We were talking about whether Missouri is in the south. And I'm saying, I keep talking about this. Has anyone here familiar with the thing that was written some years ago called Equine Gothic? And it has to do with this very difficult, like the scholars of the American South who discuss Southern literature

have often had a very difficult time just defining like what is Southern literature? What is the literature of the american south and why are some writers from the south not considered southern writers like truman capote um from the deep born in the deep south but is not regarded as a southern writer his work isn't regarded as southern literature but then you look at um someone like william faulkner obviously a southern writer larry brown obviously a southern writer and the scholar did this thing called equine gothic and he found that the real test isn't like is the person from the south do they have a masculine voice do they identify with southern issues do they

have a reverence for history is their literature is their literature body like imbued with religious thinking and all these other markers of southern literature he came out and said like if the writer's work features dead mules it's southern literature and goes in and every person that we regard as being a southern writer um has a lot of dead mules and so his thing is like is there a dead mule in it if there is it's southern literature and cormac carthy who's kind of you know south but then also southwest has so many dead mules and carmen mccarthy's work is so littered with dead mules that he should be regarded as a southern writer but we're talking about the south and i was saying in my mind the south is it like does it have an armadillo and so i thought

missouri in my view is the south because there's a lot of snakes there's a lot of stuff that bites you and i got scared by an armadillo while in missouri and the guy wrote it and he said um missouri is a midwest state here's how i know missourians refer to coke as pop if missouri was in the south they would say coke to refer to all forms of carbonated beverages except beer i was born in the south and lived in missouri for a while so i'm an expert so he wanted to put that to bed another thing a lot of people wrote in about that i want to clarify people are like people who watch the new uh meteor season on netflix watched our fog knack island episodes and they're like, whoa, why does this not include the material?

Why does this not include the bear attack that became the Meat Tree 1 and 2 podcast episodes? The answer is we didn't film it. And the mantra is if it didn't happen on camera,

it didn't happen. There's no filming of it. we try to get different ways to like work it in but it just isn't like substantiated you know it doesn't work to like talk in the episode it doesn't work to like talk about how it happened because it just seems bullshitty it's not a story you could have told quickly either no we even talked about bringing in having someone animate it Bullshitty. It's not a story you could have told quickly either. No. We even talked about bringing in, having someone animate it. Talked about it. Kicked it around.

But it just winds up being there's just different ways to tell different stories. And also it involved the crew. In TV land, did you study, Lauren, did you study you study tv making camera making what do you guys call it when i went to school's radio television production do they talk about the fourth wall did you learn about i didn't learn about the fourth wall until much much later okay that's interesting that you didn't they didn't teach you that in school. I don't recall that conversation. TV and film is a concept of the fourth wall. Let's say you're watching

a sitcom. Are you guys having a private conversation right now? I missed that day in class. We were just finishing up. You were interrupting. You guys seemed like you were going into a private deal. Go ahead and share with everyone. We're done now. It just seemed like such an elemental thing oh you're expressing disbelief he doesn't know what the fourth wall is i was thinking well he might have just been kayaking

that day when they just when they covered that oh yeah because you were a big school skipper i would like to kayak bailed on class. The fourth wall. Let's say you're watching a sitcom and you, the viewer at home, are watching a sitcom. You're watching, you're seeing three rooms of the, you're seeing three walls, right,

of the home because the fourth wall. Of a room, yeah. Imagine like the living room and then they walk into the kitchen, and you never see the wall that the viewer is looking from. Yeah, that wall is missing because that wall is cameras and crew and a director and lights, right?

So in TV, there's this thing like breaking the fourth wall. Breaking the fourth wall would be revealing the fact that there's a thing being made like you know exposing the making of something we on occasion on the show i don't think we have any cases in season seven of breaking the fourth wall we do it very judiciously. Right? Yeah. Only when it really, really, it would be a great part of the story. The story needs it to keep moving forward. Yep. The first time the Latvian Eagle

ever stepped foot, no, the second time. Second shoot. You ever stepped foot into the woods with us, you broke the fourth wall by spotting up a grizzly bear that was coming into camp. So that's like the breaking of the fourth wall. If someone had happened to be rolling a camera

when we got attacked by the bear, that would have been a wonderful opportunity to break the fourth wall and have it be part of the show. Even if we had had audio of it. But it just didn't, it wasn't there, didn't work. Seems to me that breaking the fourth wall happens in hunting production quite a bit. Oftentimes, there's no fourth wall.

Right. Or the fourth wall, there's part of it. They disregard it. Yeah, a lot of productions just disregard the rule about the fourth wall, and the camera person even becomes a character. Yeah, I don't like that. It's about, it's like, it winds up being really postmodern, where it's like a lot of and i'm not

saying this in a negative way a lot of hunting shows are very post-modern in that it's a hunting show about making a hunting show right yep which has post-modern which in school we learned to call it pomo which has post-modern uh elements what do you think about that cal i mean i just think of all those brave pioneers in the hunting production world out there that are set out to do that that are pomo without knowing it yep like i said i don't have a problem with it man but it's just like a way like a decision that we made about like a certain reverence for the fourth wall. I think that was in their pitch to outdoor sportsman's group. That they're doing a pomo show?

Yep. Now grasp this. It's circular. Can I, can you guys care if I keep going on some of these clarifications? Please do. Western Nebraska. A lunch guy. Like a lunch lady who's not a lunch lady he's a lunch man the guy

in charge of a lunch program at a school fixes up some ground meat and it's beef but he cuts in some kangaroo meat that he bought from his regular purveyor at cisco like the giant cisco truck when i used to wash dishes at a summer camp near my home when i was 13 that summer camp's food all came from cisco cisco sells kangaroo meat kangaroo meat it's inspected kangaroo meat he buys some cuts it in with beef and makes some ground meat word gets out around school he's been cutting in kangaroo meat with beef his explanation is it's a good lean cut why not um so people say like oh that kangaroo meat made me sick which people think is not which is not true there isn't like the idea of it and the guy gets fired from buying kangaroo

meat from the damn supplier that i'm sure he didn'm sure it's not even his choice who he uses. No, you can buy anything from Cisco. I mean, they distribute alligator. They distribute all sorts of crazy stuff, or stuff that most folks would consider crazy. And this guy was just picking from a catalog, basically. Yeah, and he said, sure, send me some kangaroomy. I'll grind it up and feed it to the kids. Probably sticking within his budget and being responsible with it i'd love to have him on the

show meanwhile the basketball team has been screaming dunking from the free throw line these kids are good where these kids learn to jump i'd like to taste kangaroo i've had it i can't remember what happened sometimes sometimes something i was doing through work and someone sent me a big box not a big box but a sampler box it had like um yak meat kangaroo meat all domestic stuff though you know i don't know the kangaroo i don't know how they i'm aware and how i don't i don't remember what i had ostrich in it do they raise know where in the house. I don't remember. What did it taste like? It had ostrich in it. Do they raise kangaroo in the States? No.

I don't think so. They can ship it in. I guess they bring in red deer. It'd be smart for us to find out more about stuff like this before we talk about it. We usually don't make that bad of a mistake. I shouldn't have brought it up. I just thought it was interesting. I mean, we could just pull up the Cisco menu online.

I mean, Cisco trucks deliver to everywhere. You know, some episodes ago, Giannis, we were in the middle of a conversation, and I tasked you with finding some real zingers from Twain, and you never came through on it. Oh, no, I had them pulled up. We just never had a chance to come back through. Well, I'm going to give you another chance here. Please.

Can you find out where the kangaroo meat comes from real quick? Yeah. chance here please can you find out where the kangaroo meat comes from real quick yeah um but i want to know that if i was in his position and i've been serving probably chicken and beef for as long as i've had that job and i kind of i would call it a wild hair to be like it's a real dude i'm not trying to normalize it it's a wild hair look at that doesn't care okay look and i'm totally cool cutting it in but i think i would have been like hey dmi heads up what do you guys think yeah full disclosure it's a deviation from the norm certainly and i And I don't know the guy. That's why I'd like to, if he was my neighbor and I had a better grip on him,

I might be like, like for instance, let's say my brother ran a hot lunch program. And it turns out that he's cutting in kangaroo with the beef. I would think he's not being clever. He's not being tricky. He's not being cutesy, resentfulful it's just in his head he looked it's like wow i can get that for that price and i'm just i think that he would have done it and it wouldn't occur to him to tell anybody about it this is a guy who microwaves deer trim in tupperware containers and puts salt on it and eats it oh i mean think of the attitude. I'm not calling this cafeteria fellow a chef,

but think of the attitudes of most chefs, right? They're like, this is my space. I control this. I control what's going on. I orchestrate what's going on here. It may not have even occurred to this guy in any way to have to ask anybody about anything. That's his domain, right?

Yeah, or, since we don't know him, maybe he's a total smartass, and he's real on the edge, kind of wants to quit. Yeah, smoking heaters behind school right next to the no tobacco on school property sign. Yeah, don't know. Don't know anything about him. And if that was the case i'd be like

dude you did it because you thought it'd be funny yes um okay you know what yanni why don't you why don't you just to just to come full circle on it why don't you bring up a couple zingers from mark twain sam clements um moving on down a couple things a friend of mine shared with me an interesting uh academic piece about some linguists who are you guys familiar with the maori i'm like mutilating the name a little bit maori no you got it from new zealand so the indigenous people of new zealand um and they were looking at so they drove like when the indigenous New Zealanders, the Maori, arrived in New Zealand, they drove, I think it was like a family of birds, but these things called moas, these giant flightless birds. They drove, they overhunted them and drove them to extinction and lingus are looking at the maori language in art and other things and we're looking at like did they what was their comprehension of the extinction that they were causing and the language is littered with references to the vanishing and then gone moa it was a cognizant

so they saw it coming it was a cognizant thing and then later when europeans arrived and introduced disease and exploitation warfare and started really killing them off, the Maori would say, we will be gone like the Moa. So that, yeah, so it was like, because you wonder like when the, you know, all these, you know, woolly mammoths going extinct, giant ground sloths going extinct, contemporaneous with the arrival

of the first Americans who came across the Bering Land Bridge. And you wonder, what was their thought process? Like, how did they look at what was happening were they aware of it or did it eventually be like you know what i haven't seen in a long time but there was people who saw some at some point and then never saw never saw him again yeah so what was their awareness of it but you don't even have to go that far i mean just think of the buffalo hunters that we talk about all the time right there were definitely people who were like we are driving these animals to extinction we're watching it firsthand and then there's the dudes in mile

city being like just waiting on that northern herd to come down yeah hornaday talked about haven't seen it in 25 years but it's coming yeah when Hornaday came out to try to collect one of the last couple living ones for the Smithsonian, he talked about there's people in Miles City who are still just biding their time, waiting for the next big push to come

from the north, which never showed up. So yeah, it's interesting. A couple more little tidbits. Some researchers in New Hampshire and Maine were looking at moose are dying from tick-borne diseases. They looked at a dead moose.

How many ticks are on it? 47,000 ticks. Which is a cute story, but it's got nothing to do with it it's the wolves that are killing them steve no i know it's a big bad wolves that aren't even there the ticks just slow them down a little bit uh 47 000 ticks man that was bitching about an estimated 250 or so chigger bites that i had 47 000 ticks the bear meat that uh got that made us sick that gave us trichinosis

when they tested it at a lab in in atlanta georgia it had i think 868 or something like that trichinella larva per gram and it wound up coming out to that that meat has close to a half million. I can't remember the exact number, but I remember this when I did the math on it. Close to a half million larva per pound of bear meat. If you're eating an infected piece of bear meat, that's how much is in there. Moving on. A guy wrote in, and this is kind of an interesting point another this is another comment because we just put our like it's our seats uh the seventh season of meat eaters up as a netflix original right now and so we've been getting a lot of email people writing in and the guy rolled in and he's like i kind of get it you probably didn't have time to get into this but

it warrants talking about what the 40-mile caribou herd. And the 40-mile, we have a couple episodes that focus on the 40-mile, a herd of caribou in Alaska called the 40-mile herd. And he feels like we did a real disservice to the discussion by not bringing up the degree to which aerial wolf control led to the recovery of that caribou herd

and how kicking ass the 40-mile herd is today. And it's interesting, because this is just another thing about show business. We talked about that a whole bunch. Just didn't make the cut. You got 22 minutes. We didn't see or hear a wolf on that. No, and I wanted to point out to him,

we were actually in a spot that they can't aerial gun. And still you said how many thousand get nailed by wolves out of that herd, like 4,000 of them get eaten by wolves. Yeah, brown bears kill a bunch wolves kill a bunch they kill way more than people kill but when the 40 mile herd was really whittled back like in the lowest of the low time um it was aerial wolf gunning that it alleviated a lot of pressure on that herd gave him a chance to come back yeah because what happened otherwise but he just felt that it was like a missed opportunity to

clarify a point because you remember when um uh it just comes up now and then like aerial wolf gunning is like controversial anything and people felt that like sarah palin's like literally like that she was literally up shooting wolves out of helicopters. It was kind of like a just like now and then the popular culture kind of grabs on to these little tidbits that they don't really understand well and run with them. Lastly, before we get into what we're here to talk about, Steve, you got your calls ready? Because when I come out, I'm going to talk about something else. And then I come out of this, I want you to be ready to rip some calls some seeker calls sure do you want to do the bureau i can it's not going to blow your listeners ears out no we'll stand by because we're not ready

yet all right i just want to tease people with what's coming um yeah like this is like an apology to a bunch of people about something i messed up and I feel really shitty about it. We usually never talk in great detail about locations of anything. And I did a hunt in Southeast Washington and we talked in great detail about locations and it was a really bad judgment call on my part. And I want to apologize to anyone who's offended by it. And it was like a shitty thing of me to do. I don't want to, I'm going to tell you why I did it and i don't want you to think that i don't want people to think that i'm justifying what i did i'm saying that it was wrong and i really regret it and it's not a mistake i will ever make again it was wrong but i want to just

clear like to tell you where my head was i think it's like helpful to understand where it's coming from not offered as a justification. I felt that I was hunting on a tag that's very difficult to draw. Even to get an archery permit here takes six to ten years. Thinking there, I'm thinking it doesn't really become someone's spot. It's not like you go there every year and do something. It's like now and then, you're given a person might expect to once or twice in a lifetime get to go here and hunt. And also, the number of people that can draw the tag is limited. It's tightly limited, 10 to 14 people.

So whether or not people know about it or not isn't going to have any bearing on the competition load because the competition load is dictated by the number of tags now that gets a little bit more complicated and i'll explain where i'm wrong on that too but that was in my mind and my mind was it's limited by the availability of tags only 10 to 14 people can hunt it anyway so you don't need to worry about sending a bunch of people to a place that's over the counter which i would really never do and you can only draw it every like you know you draw it every 10 years so um it's not like it's your like annual honey hole and so for those reasons um because we never talk about specificity of a spot for those reasons i kind of had in my head that it was okay to talk about it another thing that influenced my thinking is it's a pretty small unit most of the unit or

the bulk of the unit majority of the unit is privately held the publicly held piece is basically like just a single drainage or you know kind of a drainage with a fork in it um there's a most there's a lot of places you can stand and look at the whole entire unit from one spot. It's basically 40 square miles of country that you can look over one spot. It's very easily understood. And I just thought that it wasn't really having any real bearing on things. The herd moves around a lot in there. It just didn't seem to matter.

You know where I'm going with this, Yanni? Prepare to prepare your thoughts please yeah i'm preparing a counter thought okay and kyle i'd like you to prepare your thoughts brody if you have thoughts on this you can prepare them as well that was my thinking what i didn't consider is this i didn't consider the fact that there are people who apply for the unit and they've come to enjoy a certain percentage chance of getting it and that by talking about it and promoting it you would dilute their chances so that makes it wrong um and it was just wrong because friends of friends and people i encountered were generous enough to tell me about it and maybe they won't draw the tag next year but maybe their buddy will draw the tag next year and i screwed their buddy over by talking about it it was just

wrong i feel like shit about it i think about it every day johnny it's real interesting because that unit falls in a spot where it's popular enough to have a low percentage of drawing it. It's not popular enough that everybody just knows it to be the unit Washington. Because if you drew a unit 10 or 9 in Arizona, and we went down there for an archery elk hunt, we sure as hell would have pretty much the same experience, talk to people on the ground that hunt it and get info. But it's so popular already that, like, I don't think us talking about it are going to decrease the odds farther, right?

Yep. Like, we just wouldn't have that effect. So I don't know. I can't say if that's actually going to happen. People might feel that that's going to happen that all of a sudden there's going to be this influx of you know applications to that unit maybe but so i don't know if you should actually feel that bad really yeah do you feel bad no why do people get mad at me and not you i don't know because you do most of the talking cal yeah i mean when we first talked about this i thought it was more of like a once in a lifetime

unit according to some guys that i talked to they do feel it's a once in a lifetime unit um like with just the creep of odds like like you're just not going to draw the thing twice. In that case, like Bridget Noonan in our office right now, she has a true once-in-a-lifetime tag, a moose tag in Idaho. You literally cannot draw it again. If you're successful, you cannot draw it again. Yeah. Well, that's interesting.

So if you, the same thing for all those chauvin species if you draw a bighorn and don't not your tag you get to keep going correct i disagree with that oh that's interesting um well i that's a good i'd love to have that argument with you because i think that would fall in a grouping of regulations that could possibly force folks into making poor decisions out in the field but to the immediate question she has a once a lifetime tag and people are crawling out of the woodwork to help her her phone's ringing off the hook with hey i just saw a moose over here hey i just saw a moose over here how does that not fall into electronic communications this is this is a thing we got that's very interesting how that is

legal in idaho though oh electronic two-way communications are legal it is yeah convey the whereabouts which i despise but should be not um how much help do you need out there like at what point are you just not hunting? I feel like good woodsmanship skills are falling off the table every day. But there's a good point of like, hey, it's a once-in-a-lifetime tag. Other people who have been successful in the same unit are free-flowing with information. It's all dated information, of course, but they're like,

yes, this time, this spot went up here, glass from here, called from here, drove this road every single day, all that stuff. And it's based off the fact that they're never going to hunt it again.

So in those situations, man, help people out. It's not going not gonna hurt you at all but you know what it's not like um i feel it's wrong even if i knew that i didn't harm someone like if harm someone's chance it's just like it was like and it wasn't even something i thought about it just happened very fast and it's just a really it was one of my it's one of my biggest like uh it's one of my biggest like professional regrets yeah doing that because we have a policy of not doing it and for some reason i've made a snap decision and i don't think that anyone is mad at me about it is going to stop being mad at me about it because i'm apologizing no absolutely not they're just going to dig in deeper yeah i sure would but you know

if on the other hand too like if you feel like giving out really solid information could somehow deprive somebody of their experience with this golden ticket in their hand, that might be a way of looking at it. It's not really the way I look at it, but. I think you just made yourself a scapegoat is all because there's a way to check it. See how many applications they get for that unit in the coming years following the podcast yeah but or the video yeah but how do you know that everything else remained constant points are constantly going up and i like i sympathize with some of these people because like i'm a big game hunter and i'm aware of like certain units and certain regions in western states that are known for certain species.

I didn't know anything about that unit beforehand. I'd never heard about it. If you go to a service like Hunting Fool to do non-resident tag applications, they recommend against and don't even do Washington applications

for non-residents. Washington is so hostile to non-residents washington so hostile and washington so hostile non-res i'm just saying you know that you gotta sympathize with the guy who's like i have i am sympathizing with him i'm telling them i'm saying that i messed up and i'm deeply sorry and i really regret it it's a stupid thing to do and it was a shitty thing to do do you guys think this is something i've thought do you guys think it would so on the pure meat harvesting side of things i think that the rule of don't drive past one to get one is a really good rule and i know my first year in idaho i was like i am gonna hunt within

15 minutes of the office because i know there's elk within 15 minutes of the office. Just gave away a spot. Yeah. For the greater good, I hope. So do you, I've often thought, should residents of a county have a better chance, like written into the system of drawing within that unit. Dude, you're so far away from what we're talking about right now.

I don't think so. Because we're talking about opportunity. No, I don't think it should be by county. No. No? No. Alaska does a lot of stuff like that. Really?

Well, there's certain zip codes that are regarded as rural subsistence and you have different regulations, but it's a different system up there. But no, I don't think it should be that you have to factor in a person's zip code to figure out what chances they have of drawing a tag in a certain state. Look at Brody. I think it would be ripe for exploitation. It would be.

And I think it would be just like add regulatory complexities and they just do it at the state level steve so there's a contingent of folks in maryland here who share similar sentiments about you spot burning not just you but outdoor life recently uh published a little thing on exotic game and where you can hunt so they put sikadir and delmarva there so there's this concern that the but that i care less about that i don't care about that i'll never apologize about that apologize about telling americans about a wild game resource that's available absolutely i support that 100 that you're allowed nine of a year no there's arguments about that too about

whether it's too liberal or whatnot but you know the state has a goal of sort of containing the population within its current sort of distribution they would have liked to have seen it contained within southern dorchester but it's since expanded into uh western wicomico County across the Nanticoke River. And it's creeping outward slowly. The Sika deer. That was a great transition, by the way. Real good transition. Would you mind ripping a Sika stag call? liking it there you go and that sound right now is permeating the air hereabouts ringing through the marshy silence yes it's an awesome sound to hear yeah walk us

through real quick um the real quick and you've done it before but walk us through the real quick history of how how sika sika or psycha what what's the like a sicka sika psycha sicka sika deer came to be living hereabouts well best of knowledge, there was a gentleman that owned an island off the mouth of the Choptank River. I visited the island the other day. Yeah. Which is kind of gone. Yeah. A lot of the Chesapeake Bay Islands are disappearing before our very eyes.

But they were introduced there, and they escaped the island, made the mainland, and that established a population that's grown since. He had a half dozen of them. Yep. And there's now an estimated... I think the DNR estimates the herd between 10,000 and 15,000. It's pretty hard to sense this because the cover they live in is just ridiculously thick, as you've seen this week.

Imagine trying to count those buggers so you know they do very well in the especially in the marshy and sort of backwater habitats of southern dorchester county which is home to the blackwater national wildlife refuge, fishing bay, wildlife management area, tens of thousands of acres of sort of brackish water to saltwater marshes interspersed with mostly pine but some hardwood mixed in upland habitats. They do really well in that habitat, which is, you know, kind of marginal habitat for whitetail deer as far as forage quality and that sort of thing. So they've kind of supplanted white-tails as the dominant herbivore or ungulate in southern Dorchester County. As you move northern, into the more northern parts of the county where you get more agriculture, you'll get

mixed species herds, but with both white tails and sika but uh yeah southern dorchester locals refer to it as sikaville and they're like people like really like to draw the distinction around here between east side of chesapeake bay and the west side of chesapeake bay like the west side of chesapeake bay is all assholes east side of chesapeake bay is like salt of the earth salt of the earth great people yeah give you the shirt off their back and the sika deer only live with the great people correct they do not live with the assholes right correct they're only on the east shore yeah eastern shore if you want to be technical about it yeah got you. And this all occurred over the last 100 years. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And I think their popularity really has only taken off in probably the last 10 to 20 years where sort of, you know, the word has gotten out and they're good eating, they're abundant, they're fun to hunt. So it's really, it's driven lease prices. It's driven sort of public use of our public lands here in the eastern shore of Maryland. It's become quite popular. And so there's a contingent of people that think that it's going to overwhelm the resource. It's too limited. It's too unique. It should be protected and valued more by restricting the number of tags that are given out,

by introducing some form of competition for non-residents to obtain those permits. I'm fine with all that. Well, it's a non-native, though. Right. And the minute, yeah, it's always really tricky with to what degree do you coddle. Do you coddle and encourage the expansion of a non-native species that almost certainly has to come at some cost to native fauna yeah any overabundant ungula even our native whitetails can have deleterious ecological impacts when they hit numbers that are you know

look at any suburban area where hunting doesn't effectively suppress that population, you'll see massive destruction of undergrowth and that sort of thing. And take the deer and know different, you know, they just happen not to be native. So, you know, that's not thought to be as damaging as like a nutria were or, know zebra mussels that have these you know catastrophic changes to the environment but certainly if you look hard enough i'm sure you can find the negative impacts that at least an overabundant population but they certainly seem at home here and they've really taken to it and they've become ingrained in the local culture and considered by most sort of a naturalized citizen of the eastern shore yeah did you know that there was a plan um a long time ago 100

over 100 years ago now to introduce hippopotamuses into louisiana no they thought they wanted to introduce them as a meat source and to control water hyacinth that'd be cool had they done it had they done it you now wouldn't think it was weird by now you wouldn't think it was weird to see a hippo in louisiana in the bayou country and i feel now it's like these deer seem just un-weird and at home. Yeah. I have to admit. They seem like it wouldn't surprise you. It's not like zebras running around. If someone told me, oh, no, it's just this native species deer,

I'd be like, oh, that makes sense. Hippos kill a lot of people, though. That'd be like introducing a grizzly bear. No, they're way worse than grizzlies and wolves. Into the deep south, right? Hundreds of people a year die from hippos. Seriously. Well, yeah.

So I think it would be a little different. I think the weirdness would still be like, why did we introduce this aquatic killer? Yeah. It's not apples and apples. It's not apples and apples. But I'm saying like over time, they become like the the

sika deer that they call now folks around here call them sick of deer but it just it's too confusing to me because we already have a sitka blacktail sitka blacktail and so a sick of deer i just say sika so i so i can keep my head straight and the head straight with those around me um but yeah i feel that it like uh it doesn't take long for the animal to become woven into the cultural fabric guys drive around here with decals on their window that say marsh ghost snake heads too there there's like a snake head culture here too yep that's established in five years yeah snake head fishing culture snakehead guys snakehead contest snakehead tackle you guys really grab on um asian stuff they like asian species exactly and yet our one

all you can eat buffet in cambridge closed a couple years ago is that right i said to see that go can you zap us with the call behind now uh sure yeah a lot everybody knows the word stag but i feel like some a good percentage people probably don't realize that the gender opposite term the gender opposite term for stag is hind correct same way bull cow buck doe yep what other ones are there hind there's other ones and it's hind with a d on the word sow boar sow stag hind bucket or buck uh already said that buck doe you can always tell new sika hunters because they call them sitka deer and they call them hinds h-i-n-e-s a hind yeah which they are not they're are hinds with a D.

And the stag and hind thing probably came from British culture, yeah. Yeah, because they've been introduced there as well. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all okay rip out a rip out a hind call the similarities between these sons of bitches and um elk antler structure kind of the the the the main on the stags the breeding behavior their demeanor demeanor when they stand out there they look yeah mean yeah impressive the bugling the cow calling all the crazy vocalizations the fact that they come to the calls. Very elk-like.

Very fun. Nothing like hunting elk, but they're elk-like little critters. The stag's got little ivories like bull elk. Yeah, you were checking that out. Little tiny things. Yeah, you don't want to get on the ground with these things. Giannis and I found out. Giannis knew.

He let me find out for myself. Like in marsh because they'll charge you you get too close or they'll just vanish no you just can't see the things yeah like three and a half feet tall what is the hind what does the hind weigh the average probably dresses at 45 pounds somewhere in there you might get a monster hind that dresses 60 less than a bull elk's hind quarter yeah sure he weighs less than a bull yeah definitely weighs less than a bull elk's hind quarter stags i've seen she weighs less than a bull elk's hind quarter i've seen stags as big as 110 115

dress come in through the check station at blackwater uh when i used to work down there but uh it uh it's the average is generally around 85 maybe 90 pounds for a mature stag it's a true monster that hits plus 100 yeah dinky well you know what man you want to talk about you having a good segue you want to talk about a real bad segue is this I forgot to talk about the blue crabbing real quick right and the reason i want to talk about the blue crab real quick is that we talked about before we did it before we hunted deer right so fact check me on this i'm gonna have you fact check me on some on some other stuff about sika deer but if you're a resident here you can go out and get a license a separate license to run a blue crab trot line.

Correct? Yep. It's called a recreational crabbing license. Okay. And what it allows you to do is take a 1,200-foot trot line. And there's no hooks. It's like there's 1,200 feet of line, and you just tie little slip knot loops all along it and put in two two and a half inches of chicken neck in each loop so you have this 1200 foot thing

right the length of four football fields and every five feet is a two inch chunk of chicken neck tied onto the line and you go out to a likely spot and we went out to a submerged creek channel so the surrounding stuff's like one or two feet deep but then there's this this submerged creek channel that's six feet deep and on one end of this 1200 foot line you got a weight like an anchor and coming up as a buoy to mark the anchor and so you set it you the anchor, and then you lay out this 1,200 feet of chicken necks and pull the line tight and set that anchor. And you wait a couple minutes and go down to the other end where you began setting. And you grab the line that has the chicken necks on it.

And the boat has, you just like hook a little arm out on the side of your boat so just imagine like imagine that you hung your arm out over the gunnel of the boat and you drape the trot line up over your arm and then slowly motor along so that it's anchored on each end but you're lifting apart part up to the water's surface and just cruising along. Can I ask you a question? Go ahead. So there's no soak time.

It's like by the time you get the line laid out, you're turning around and going. It's time to check. They're already on. You don't let it soak. It's time to check it the minute you get laid out. Just go back to where you started, drape it up over the arm,

and then motor that 1,200 feet. And you're going along slowly, and it's just raising it up. And the chicken necks are coming up going, thunk, thunk, thunk, over your arm. And the blue crabs hang on so tenaciously that they're going to hang on to that chicken neck. Most of them hang on to that chicken neck,

and they're going to hang on to it until they get to the air. The last second. Yep. If it's sunny out, they're more likely to drop off. On a cloudy day out they're more likely to drop off on a cloudy day they're more likely to hang on so you got your guy driving the boat and then you got your guy with a wire mesh net the same kind of wire mesh used for smelt dipping where you can really grease it through the water quick there's no drag you know it's like chicken wire basket on a net on a net and you stand there and as you see the crabs rise up you get your net down and you stand there, and as you see the crabs rise up, you get your net down, and you get the line,

because the crab's hanging off the bait. So your net needs to come in and kind of grab the line at the top of the net, and then you basically use the net to knock the crab off the line into the net, and you whip them up and put them into a bushel basket and it took us seven passes one two three four five six seven like no wait time just down back down back down back it took us seven passes to fill up a bushel basket with blue crabs how many in a bushel do you think it varies a lot man yeah based on size and they say because this

is big blue crab country and there's a commercial industry and everything for blue crabs that there's like it's a unit of measure so bag limit is volume bag limit it's like shrimp right in alaska volume bag limit not number bag limit and it could be it could vary greatly but it should be that i think if you have a bushel basket, there's 40 pounds. I think it needs to be right. At least 40 pounds are in that bushel basket. Something like that.

I'm not entirely sure. There's a weight component. It's a volume thing, but industry standard is that. My understanding is the industry standard is it should include a certain weight. And a live blue crab, I'd guess, would weigh half a pound, right? Something like that. Not even close. No?

Yeah, less than that. Quarter pound? Yeah, probably. So there's well over 100 of them. And the thing about these blue crabs are, as it was explained to me, the population demographics fluctuate a lot according to salinity. So there are areas you can go

that have far fewer blue crabs, but tend to be bigger. And there's areas you can go that have hordes of them that tend to be dinks. And the guy we were with was explaining that this is a salinity level and location that he feels kind of hits that sweet spot between good size and abundance.

Yeah, in North Carolina, when we go down to Jennifer's family's camp on Topsail Island, that camp is a lot closer to the inlet. It's higher salinity, and we feel like we get bigger blue crabs than the ones we get at her parents' house, which is farther away from the two inlets. Big mambo jambos. Yeah. Another thing I learned is that soft-shell crab,

like during the summer, like blue crabs grow fast, and during the summer they molt every month. I don't know if every crab molts every month or if they have to hit a certain size, but there's always an age class that's molting. Yeah, and females have a terminal molt. Right. Females will do, at some point, they stop molting.

Yep. And a male will continue to molt, correct? Mm-hmm. When you see soft-shell crabs on the menu, here's the part that I didn't realize. When you see soft-shell crabs on the menu, here's the part that I didn't realize. When you see soft-shell crabs on the menu, it's not that a dude's out crabbing and catches a soft-shell and throws him in a separate bucket.

You take crabs and retain them and keep checking them. What they're looking for is peelers, crabs that have started the process you can tell there's a different coloration in the back fin so you can hold that up to the light and you can see this little sort of pinkish ring he's a peeler and that's a peeler that's a crab that's approaching the molt and they'll take those and they'll put them in these shedding houses and they'll keep them in these big troughs with with uh sort of flowing water going over and they'll put them in these shedding houses, and they'll keep them in these big troughs with sort of flowing water going over, and they'll check them hourly through the night because it usually takes place at night

and usually the vast majority during the full moon. And so it's an all-night thing. They're checking them all night long, and as soon as they shed out, they get them out of the water. You have to get them out of the water immediately because as soon as they shed out, they get them out of the water. You have to get them out of the water immediately because as soon as they shed, what they do is they puff up with water to expand that new shell, and it gets bigger than their current body size, and then they grow into that. So very quickly, that soft as baby's bottom skin crab will turn into what they call a paper

crab where it gets kind of crinkly. It's still softish, but it's kind of crinkly. And we had one of those, the, one of those, like the, the top of it was when they fried it was like lifted off the ground.

Yeah. Yeah. So when they're pulling them out of traps or off of a trot line, are they looking at them and saying pot, peeler, regular crab, regular crab, regular crab, peeler? You know, I think they might be doing some sorting. So most of the commercial guys are not doing, they're not handling each crab individually like Steve was with a net.

They've got like a big basket that that line runs up through. But someone at some point is looking someone's got a sword yeah and if you know what you're looking for it's it's plain as day i've always had a little bit of trouble trying to figure out what's the difference between a peeler and a regular hard shell crab but you can't yeah a recreational guy can't retain females correct and on a dungy i have to look at the bottom carapace to tell a male from a female. But on these, the females have red claw tips.

And I don't want a gender stereotype, but people say, you see that red thing and it's females have their nail polish on. And I'd get so good in my little jaunt that I learned not to even net those ones and just to kind of brush them off the line and let them go. But the commercial guys are allowed to keep females.

They can keep females. It's interesting. You can keep them in North Carolina, but we choose not to. Because you guys are conservationists. Thinking that they're going to make more jimmies. Yeah, that's another good thing to bring up. A male crab is a jimmy. And a female is a what?

A sook. S-O-O-K. Isn't there multiple kinds of sooks? There's, what do they call them? A sally is an immature female. Yeah, that's right. So they have more of a triangular-shaped apron. And once they hit maturity, the sook has a big sort of rounded apron.

It was good to learn about the molting thing, because that was the thing I was always curious about when we trapped Dungeness crabs, is now and then you get one who's still got a softest shell. Not like he's on the way out, but it's his new shell. And we'll throw those back, because you open them, and there's like no meat in there. Right. And I now realize it's because he just got a bigger shell that he hasn't filled out yet.

Right. So now I've learned instead of bringing them home and go open it up and it's full of like watery emaciated stuff, we just ditch them. But I never knew like quite what I was looking at. Yeah. Like why it was that way. He had like gotten himself. It's like when you're buying shoes for your kid.

You're like, well, I'm not going to buy you shoes that fit dead on nuts because tomorrow they won't fit anymore. I'm going to make you struggle through the big ones for a few months. Then you'll fit them and then move on. Okay, fact check. Anything else on crabs? I thought we covered it pretty good.

Oh, soft shell crab. There's a way to clean it. You kind of open it up and get the gills out, get the guts out, put it kind of back together again, and then fry it. Did you realize that, Cal? No, I thought they just fried the whole thing. No, no. Cut the face off, cut the apron off, and then you lift up the points,

and you clear those dead man's fingers, they call them, the lungs out on each side. Some people go as far as to clean out the mustard and the guts and fat. See, I like the mustard. Yeah, I think it adds a particular flavor. I'm not a big mustard guy, personally. Okay, one question, though, is when they're harvesting these things out of the malt house. The sloughing house? The sloughing house.

The sloughing house. Okay. Are they just throwing them in the freezer? They're selling them. Yeah, it depends on what their market is. But they do freeze some, but some get sold fresh right away to local markets. But they just keep them out of the water to stop the molting process. Yeah, they'll put them on ice.

When we were eating those crab balls yesterday, that place had soft shells for sale. Yeah. Did you cash the price? Nope, didn't ask. I'm jealous of the crab balls. Dude, crab balls are good. You buy a half dozen or a dozen. Me and Steve each threw down on a half dozen.

And Steve said hereabouts. Not all of those made it back to the house here. Yeah, no, we ate them. Steve said that hereabouts in crab country, you can't get away with pulling that long John Silver's bullshit of putting in all the fillers. He says a crab ball is crab. A crab cake is crab.

People are intolerant of you making little crab-flavored hush puppies and whatnot. The crab cakes in the Rocky Mountain States are a little lacking a lot of times. It's a soft breadcrumb. Yeah, with a little nugget in there. No, these crab balls are crab. They're not cutting it with kangaroo or anything? No, they don't cut any roo meat in there, man.

Crab with a cake. Cisco roo meat. Cal, let me hit you with one other thing. I don't know if you caught because you weren't out with us. Don't those crabs have two packers oh yep yep you knew that yeah keith i like that or i'm sorry trevor uh pointed that one out kind of as a uh you know don't you wish type of thing yeah it's a little bit disturbing i don't wish that i had to. As your son says. At some level, it's intriguing to me, and I considered it, but in the end, no. Because I feel that it would be one of those things that you might view as being initially advantageous, only to find that it doesn't, in fact.

What in the world? Sorry, that's me. Hit your mute button. Tell the Matthew story, because I think that pertains to this very well. Yeah. So, like, I feel that it'd be one of those things that you might initially think was a great advantage. But there's a thing called sexual selection in this world where there are, like, attributes. Like, people think, let me give you an

example people think that antlers okay the antlers on an elk are are not like driven by like natural selection of a competitive advantage but are a thing of sexual selection meaning that a bull let's say a deer puts on a huge set of antlers it comes at a cost right because he needs to put nutrients into producing those antlers it's extra weight he needs to carry around the extra weight he's carrying around he needs to take in more calories to tote it around he can't slick through the brush is nice all these kind of things but the sexual advantage is that females view those antlers as a sign of fitness. And you might think, oh, he needs these big antlers to fight. But the more important component might be that a female associates good antler growth with health.

And she wants to have sex with that buck. Yeah, you'll hear people say antlers are for fighting off wolves and things like that. It's all to get the lady. It's a sexual display. Well, no, that's not true. Let me finish my point, please, if you don't mind. Then I'm going to open it up to you, but I haven't even gotten to where I'm going with this. Okay.

What was I saying? Oh, yeah, a turkey on a strutting tom. It's all sexual display. There's no advantage to him to do that. It's just he's going to lure in ladies. It comes at a cost. Point being, you might think that having dual peckers

is awesome, but it could be that it is not a good sexual display and in fact pushes possible mates away. They just can't get on board with it. Having one causes enough problems. Yeah. Go ahead, Giannis.

I'm opening the floor up to Giannis now. That was all. I just wanted to arrive at that point. Please. Oh, just saying that the antlers aren't – there was just that paper that was published. I thought we all passed around about how they were talking about the antlers on the bull elk and Yellowstone

and that having those big antlers came at a cost because it took more energy to produce such big antlers so it might have produced it might have brought in more ladies but the bigger antlers weren't necessarily better in defending themselves from the wolves so there there's actually some uh what's that called like uh nature deciding which way it's going to go selection selection towards smaller antlers because it didn't cost so much energy and made them better more agile to fight off the wolves yeah but you agree that people think deer have antlers just for fighting they don't often realize that there's things in the animal world about sexual display and definitely things in the human world about sexual display yeah it's probably

but i wonder too about what do we really know the thought process that a female deer is going through when she decides to who she's going to allow to breed her we definitely know because you know you hear all the time about while the herd bulls off defending his harem all the satellite bulls are kind of slipping in and breeding cows behind him. So if they're allowing that to happen, that kind of blows that whole theory out of whack. Just released a study last year that says almost the same thing, where it's like if that forked horn is at the right place in the right time, it will absolutely breed that doe.

She'll allow it. Yeah, just because it's a timing thing. But to jump back to the two-pecker thing. Go ahead. Right, so when you're busting up these crabs, you rip, like for Yanni, you were saying that a lot of times you guys will pre-clean and then steam um so you rip the carapace off and you you're looking at a ideally a perfectly symmetrical

animal right there right so you got a knuckle consisting of how many legs five legs on each side and so is the female set up the exact same way or there's a reproductive organ on each side oh that's a good question i don't know if she's symmetrical in her reproductive organs yeah because that makes sense right yeah i just just had that thought when we were uh checking out the two peckers i can't answer that if they have dual like what their ovary structure is and whatnot and if they have what their cloaca or vent is if they have two or one yes and one well so i think on each side i think no expert on blue crabs but a female that's bred they call her sponge crab and she houses she releases all those eggs onto these little filaments under her apron and her apron will sort of bulge out and there will be this cloud of eggs i love all these

turns in there yeah and i think that's that the fertilization is external i don't think they're like breeding there i think the the males are inserting their peni into that cloud of eggs just like a fish yeah i think so gotcha that's how my kid found out about uh human love making is we're looking at we're cleaning perch and we're looking over cleaning salmon and i'm showing them the eggs and the sperm and i'm explaining how the female lets the eggs out and the in the red and the male puts a seed in there and fertilizes the eggs, and it happens externally. And he got to wondering, since a mommy person has the baby inside of her,

how in the world do you deliver the sperm? And he later was explaining to his nanny we overheard him say, and my mommy did that three times. Yanni, can you zap us with the Mark Twain quote now? Yeah. Well, I got a bunch of them. Here's what's your favorite. The one I always remember,

just so I can get it just right, that I like, and I try to... It wants to come back to you? No. And I try to do this myself. Not so much that I want you to abide by this quote, but I try to keep it in my mind. It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. That's my favorite. Here's another one.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of majority, it is time to pause and reflect. Here's another one. It is not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the fight the dog. Can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of

focus. Wow, that's a good hunting one, actually. It is a good one. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. Mark Twain. I think that cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus may relate to your bow hunting conundrum and it relates to anyone who's ever thinks they saw a bigfoot

fact check me on this steve back to see cadere the way maryland manages is see cadere and all deer i think is this that you have bag limits that relate to the weapon restriction i'm not saying that very well that you have you the the state recognizes three weapons distinctions correct archery which includes crossbows correct muzzleloader and general firearms general firearm some counties are shotgun only some allow centerfire rifles you're in an area that allows centerfire rifles we are so you're allowed three ccadir per weapon right each season has its own bag limit two or a total of three no more than one stag correct so you could shoot three hinds or one stag and two hinds and we came down for the final days of the archery season

early archery final days of early archery and gave it our all for three days i was the only one that loosed an arrow ineffectively but that loosed an arrow. Ineffectively, but I loosed an arrow. And you guys were trying to hunt with traditional. I kind of like take offense at calling it traditional archery because there's really non-traditional elements in it. What do you guys call it? My bow would not be.

It's like a carbon fiber longbow yeah there's carbon fiber sandwiched in between real wood and carbon fiber air and carbon fiber arrows yeah nothing real traditional about it yeah but it's like a modern longbow and you have a modern no you kind of have an old-timey recurve bow yeah it's it's I mean, it's got fiberglass. It's a bare production bow. From the olden days, though, if it's a vintage bow, I think that bow's probably. Harkens back to the old times.

This is my dad with a bare recurve for a long time. And back then, he didn't buy a new bow every year. He's had the same damn bow for forever until compounds came out. Yeah, I shoot them until they break when I get a new one. one yeah yeah oddly enough you do not need a new bow every year i once heard a guy explaining to a first time i want want to be first time archer that if you call yourself a serious bow hunter you buy a brand new bow every year. And I thought to myself, my God, the power of marketing. Absolutely.

I'll talk quickly. I'm going to touch on my closest close encounter with my bow, and I'd like you guys to quickly touch on your closest close encounter. My closest close encounter. I see one of these little Sika deer coming across the open

marsh there's a lot of like stuff here it's just impenetrable 10 foot high phragmites grass and there's like some areas that are other kinds of impenetrable lower plants then you get lucky now and then here and there and it's just like an ankle high marsh and then you can see what the hell is going on and i see this lone stag crossing a big stretch of ankle high marsh and his line of travel is going to like bring him to where his closest point would be like 150 yards i decided to call at it and use what like steve had called in one this is going to be i'm going to steal part of your story sure You had called in one, I think it was the day before, using a combination of hind calls and a stag bugle.

So I zapped him with the Kendrot combo, which we'll call it, and he sure enough, much to my surprise, turns and starts heading in my direction and then vanishes into the frag mighties. And I'm like sitting there wondering i'm standing up ready and you have no idea what's going on because you can't see anything and then you hear like the water his feet coming through the marsh and all of a sudden he pops out in the one in the worst possible area to pop out where it's just all these little dead pine trees. Like little dead lob lollies? Yeah, probably.

Like big around, like thick as your thigh, a bunch of dead ones. And he just comes right out in there and he's like, there's no possible shot opportunity. I already got my bow back. And he's like, his ribcage is blocked by a tree. His ribcage is blocked by a tree. His ribcage is blocked by a bush. And I'm thinking, man, this is never going to happen. ribcage is blocked by a bush and i'm thinking man

this is never gonna happen i can't hold my bow back forever and he's just gonna pass underneath me and be gone and all of a sudden he like stops in the opening and there's his ribcage exposed at 18 yards and i'd like i had fallen out of my like what you need to do to make this happen and i'd fallen into my i can't believe this is happening. I can't believe this isn't going to work out. In there, I forgot about the part about aiming and everything. I'd just slip it over

his back. You aimed where you were thinking until you stopped thinking. I had a tree. I had ranged a bunch of trees. I had i had my like 30 yard tree and he popped out at the 30 yard tree and in my head was like 30 yard pin and i'm analyzing and i'm running so processing so many other little bits of information during this time i never

adjust so i'm already a little high so he's now at 18 yards and i got my i'm still looking at my 30 yard red pin. And then the other thing is in reviewing, like I have the great luxury of being able to review footage to see what happened. And Ridge Ponder was on the deer, and you can go frame to frame. And there's a frame where you catch the fletching of the arrow crossing a tree trunk, and that deer has already dropped four or five inches. Ducking the arrow. He's not ducking. Well, I mean yes you know what i'm saying reacting to the sound he's loading up to spring away so people say he ducked the arrow he's not like oh arrow coming right he's loading up to go if you watch a deer take off in slow motion they go down down down and then they're like he's already

doing is like i'm getting out of town and cal brought up a good point is like and this is something you'll never know if i hadn't stag called and i had just hind called would he have come in with a different attitude and not so high strong? I don't know. I don't know either, but from a lot of time in the elk woods, I would say yes. It'd be like if, let's say you're walking down the road. But had he even turned. He might not have come in at all.

He may not have come in at all. But let's say you're walking down the road, and you hear someone scream out, a woman scream out, help, help. You're coming in with one attitude. If she says, help, help, there's a madman with a gun in here, you're coming in with a different attitude. Or you're not going in. You're still coming.

Right. Well, yeah, some people would. But you're still coming. You're just coming in with a different attitude. Yes. So for me being like, mew, mew, mew, rah, rah, rah, he's like, man, I'm coming, but got my head on a swivel i'm coming in hot i'm coming in nervous so i don't know just missed them you know missed them and then all the like

trouble just the mental problems yes which i'm still struggling with i'm more than made up for it i'll point out later but um uh yeah it's really like difficult man you practice and practice and practice but it's hard to um when you're practicing it's like it just is different than the things that happen in real life the things happen in real life all these other things enter in yeah that's there's no no substitute for experience in the woods right yeah it's almost like you need to go out in your yard when you're out in your yard shooting your bow at targets you almost need to have to hire people just to come and do weird stuff yeah like i'm gonna shoot my bow and at some point during the shooting session i want you to sneak up and slap me with a stick and learn how to shoot knowing that at any minute something like

like to learn how to shoot knowing there's unexpected things like when you're shooting in the yard you're like you arrange it it's not you know you can't it's hard to replicate you could even replicate a target that keeps moving behind stuff somehow like when we were little kids we strung a wire between two trees and would hang rabbit targets on loops that you'd mount to the wire and then one guy's job was to stand off to the side and pull the rope real fast and so we'd stand on our porch and shoot long bows and recurves and everything else at the rabbit as it zinged across the yard that's awesome but you got to know the trajectory and it wasn't you weren't nervous you weren't lustful for the rabbit yeah you gotta Then you got to factor in the lustfulness.

How badly you want the damn deer. But see, it takes me a few days of frustration to build up that lustfulness, to have that desire to complete the job. When I heard his footsteps coming through the water, I wasn't at all jacked up. I wasn't jacked up. Matter of fact, I was like, wow, I'm so nonchalant right now. I'm probably going to kill this thing.

It was my first thought. And I had my mantra in my head. Visions of grandeur. No, not like that. Not cockiness. That sounded pretty cocky. No, I was aware of my mantra, my shooting mantra. I was like, you have your shooting mantra. This is not a

big deal. He's coming. You're going to get him. Then he popped out. I'm like, why did you have to pop out there? Everything fell apart and I lost track of my mantra. But you still wanted him real bad. Wanted him bad. Mark Kenyon was just introducing me to his mantra, which he

does his mantra, which he does his mantra every time he shoots his bow. He doesn't have a hunting mantra. He has a shooting mantra, which he will not shoot an arrow without doing the mantra because he's building it into his shot cycle that he verbalizes every part of it every time and cannot shoot without

verbalizing it you can't have like i gotta switch because my current system is my hunting mantra which i don't do every time i shoot my bow he's like i want to get my head to where i cannot shoot that bow without completing my thing almost like reverse target panic you know like you can't let the arrow go until you've accomplished those stepwise progressions his thing panic like you can't let the arrow go until you've accomplished those step wise progressions I don't remember the exact words but his thing is basically like hover

like hover the pin then there's like this sort of thing like you're on it and then there's this thing here we go and every time he shoots his bow, he does it to train himself. And the here we go is that he begins tightening his shoulder blades. And if you get a snapshot window and you don't have time to get through it,

you don't take the shot. You don't just go, ah, let the arrow go because there's your opportunity. I shot with a very highly regarded pistol instructor one day, and his mantra is slack out. He takes the slack out of the trigger, sight. He needs to get a trigger job done on his gun. Squeeze. You can't talk to this guy about anything because he's like shooting rocks out of the air and stuff but he uh he swears and he's like

type of shooter and he swears that is going through his head every single time his finger engages that trigger he's got a slack out sight squeeze slack out sight, squeeze. I'm doing it, man. I was on the phone with Mark Kenney for a long time talking about this, and I'm going to start trying to do it. Was it here late at night after you missed that buck? Midday after I missed the buck. I think the next day. Wow.

I'm going to do it, man. I'm going to start. I'm going to change my ways. Well, you need to embrace the fact that archery is a fun thing that allows you to start hunting earlier doesn't need to be the love of your life but like for me when muzzleloader season came around here and i was like man i do not like the fact that i did not finish the job with the bow. Yeah.

But I'm willing to pick up the muzzleloader because at the end of the day, I want to take this meat home because it's awesome. Yeah. You got your weapon goal and you got your trip goal. Trip goal is bring some meat home. Yeah. Because I was relieved that Steve managed to do well

so that I could borrow his muzzleloader for a short time. Not that I did anything with it. Just know he had it. Extend the range. So much can go wrong when you're bowhunting. No matter how big a stag is that I might shoot with a rifle or a muzzleloader, there's always this less sense of fulfillment that like, God dang, I wish I could have gotten that one with my bow.

Talk about the one you almost got, or not you, you almost get it. Talk about your close encounter you had with your bow. Yeah, so we were frankly just kind of scouting out a spot that I wanted to see if it was ready for for muzzleloader season what kind of activity there was so we we popped out to this little island yeah which is an island i like that though yeah island of trees yeah so an island of trees out in the marsh is just you hear about you guys it's called an island yeah and so suspected that there is some activity there.

There's sort of two little islands of trees, one of which is mostly dead timber. Rinella Island and the Eagle's Nest. Yep, exactly. And so I gave a couple calls. I think I hit the stag call, didn't I, Lauren? And then I hit some cow calls. And just within a couple minutes of blowing the stag call uh i see some movement uh and we'd already seen a couple does i think hadn't we

there was movement out there yeah and so here comes this stag out of the brush on eagle island which is about 130 yards away from us at that point and you're on the foot on the brush on Eagle Island, which is about 130 yards away from us at that point. And you're on the foot on the ground. On the foot, on the ground, sort of hunkered up against a couple dead trees. And I switched to the cow call, and I just started doing a couple mews so he could sort of hone in on us.

And sure enough, he started making his way, and he picked his way on a route of higher marsh. And it's always exciting to see them come and getting closer and closer and those antlers just sometimes it's all you can see is the antlers sticking above the vegetation splashing through the water yeah you hear hear him coming and boy he keeps coming he's looking in our direction and he keeps coming and i've had plenty of sort of aborted approaches to not get too excited until they hit that sort of 50-yard line. And then all of a sudden it starts feeling real, you know. And sure enough, he keeps coming in and coming in.

He finally enters into the little island of trees we're at, and he's amidst all the dead timber, probably 30, 40 yards away from us. And then he begins this game of sort of zigzagging, and I'm pinned up against these dead trees, and depending on which way he goes, I might have to get my arrow up and around one of the trunks that I'm standing way too close to. And first he zigs left, then he zigs right, and back and forth. And finally he decides he's going to commit to going into the

sort of interior of this little island of trees and it just got way too brushy but i think at one point he was he was within my comfort zone 20 yards or so i would have flung an arrow if he'd stepped clear for sure but uh it just wasn't meant to be when he got in there he knew there was supposed to be a deer there he's looking around And when they get there, once they make their mind up that, okay, there's not a deer here, there's no amount of call that's going to bring them back, they just sort of turn around and go. And he marched off back to Eagle Nest Island, and he was out of our lives. Yeah, I called the one that came to 43 yards

and then stood there waving his nose in the air. Being like, I hear her, but she's just not here. Yeah. Because if she was here, I would smell her. I feel like decoys would work well with these things. I think decoys would do. But I'm just too lazy to lug something around out there and place it and whatnot. Calling with a decoy, I think, would be really deadly. Yeah. deadly yeah i got that yeah i got a strong yes on that for sure you'd be laying by

some rolls yeah it's a small decoy to hide behind though especially for me i can't believe no one someone probably is on to that but i'm surprised no one's on to that if they're not yeah there's i actually have a decoy it's you know made of this plastic corrugated cardboard kind of stuff. It's cut out of a spike, and it folds up into three pieces. But it's just another thing to carry out there, and I haven't been real motivated to really test it out, but I probably should try it one of these times. Well, we got a friend who thinks they're immoral.

Oh, yeah? Decoys in general. Not duck decoys. Turkey decoys. What did he say? Turkey. He says he doesn't want to go to hell, so he won't use one? Yeah.

Well, a friend of mine's wife thinks that it's immoral to use trickery to lure an animal into range. And people have been doing that since the dawn of time. Trickery. So calling would be out yeah yeah the only archery opportunity i had um was the very first morning we're sitting over uh acorns on the ground. We were in, what type of tree were we in? Were we in an oak tree, Yanni? I think so. I think you were, yeah. And Yannis and I are both looking one direction.

And then Yannis goes, oh, cow. Other side of the tree. Two o'clock there's dough turn around and kill it and I'm like oh and I turn around and this

dough that was just like shockingly small to me it was still a little bit of gray light in my memory anyway um and she's severely quartered away kind of through this gap and she was just there for a blink of an eye and and gone and that was the only did you get your bow back no not even close no i had an arrow knocked just because i started out that way um but that was it however if you know it's a new totally new species you had a leg up on me because you've been here once before but had i like i feel if i had the knowledge just that i

gained in this one week at the beginning of the week the archery game would have been a different story you feel like it would have been helpful knowing what you now know yes yeah yeah so i mean but i have absolutely no regrets from this trip this was phenomenal i had like similar my previous experience hunting here was very similar i did two days the last two days of early archery kind of got my feet wet and then um came in with a muzzleloader and it just there's a certain cockiness to having that muzzleloader tell me about it it's just different man it is for sure it's just different, man. It is, for sure. It's just different. You made it more difficult with your muzzleloader. Because you didn't bring a scope?

Yeah, that was not... Believe me, if I... Going forward... I mean, it didn't end up hurting you at all. I would have a... I'm not sure if I'd have scope, but I would definitely have different iron sights. And I would have my own muzzleloader

that I have gotten myself more familiar with. More accustomed to. Yeah, purely for shot placement. Yeah, and confidence. Yeah. Yeah, man. Opening day of muzzleloader season, I'm right back in the same tree

where I'd missed my shot. You mean Steve's Island? I'm in Steve's Island. Steve's tree on Steve's Island. Steve's tree on Ronella Island. And early morning, I let a hind walk through because I was hoping there'd be a stag behind her.

There's no stag behind her. Then a while later, here comes a hind greasing across from the eagle's nest, headed straight toward me. She gets like 50 yards in front of me. behind her and a while later here comes a hind greasing across from the eagle's nest headed straight toward me she gets like 50 yards in front of me i yell hey and get her just lands right in the trail stone dead then sit there sitting along the way now see if a stag shows up and about eight nine minutes later sure enough here comes one nose to the ground following her down.

He gets to the same spot. I say, hey. And he lands four feet off her tail, still on the trail. There's two of them. Then you need to get out of my seat. It's amazing. There's a certain cockiness that comes with muscle. I will tell you, standing or sitting in that tripod blind, like totally man-made blind, sticking out of the marsh,

there was a certain feeling of laziness to it. You look lazy. I can see with my binoculars. It was just like I couldn't, there was no, like I just had this like almost a feeling of like sitting on the toilet. Like just was like, nah.

And Giannis and I were definitely like crammed in there, you know, but then getting in the climbing stand or just being in any of the other stands, I felt like I was way more of an active participant yeah you looked like compromised up in that thing yeah and i was just like man i feel i think i told you i was like man i feel like a sore dick sticking out here no i know what you're talking about yeah yeah that spoke to me sticking out like so you had done the work of probably played the hard

work that took to place that stand you'd have a different feeling yeah yeah show up and climb up in some other dude's tripod stand right it's the only thing out there you know it's it's a good view out there though it's a heck of a view yeah no it's a gorgeous spot great way to learn about the critter yes it's just the observation man we haven't even talked about oh the wide array of vocalizations. Unbelievable. Because the first time I sat out, because I had been sitting in the woods where you can't see anything beyond archery range. Like you're in the thickets, you know. And you're not seeing all the stuff that doesn't matter.

Anything you see like matters right now, right? Because they're close when you're in the woods or in the brush. But then you get out in the open marsh and you're seeing a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter with your bow. It matters with your muzzleloader. But you get to just observe their movements. And some of the things that struck me most is, one, how aggressive the stags are to the hinds.

Like, mean. Gangpiling them. Three of them on one. Because the ratios are like, there's a really high stag-to-hind ratio. And they get on some of them on one like because the ratios are like there's a really high stag to hind ratio and they get on some of them and just chase them chase them chase them three of them on them relentless yeah and how much they mess with each other they're like little bullies man they're like the dudes and like little guys like the dudes in high school that run the wrestling

team man so they remind me of like always like messing with each other and fighting and punching each other and zapping each other's nuts and stuff it's just like you know like those kind of dudes like high school wrestler guys man oh when we opened them up there's a lot of sores on those yeah steve stag had some slightly infected wounds same with the wrestling guys in high school yep they're always just like just in each other's business and headlocking each other and giving each other noogies and just whatever man just like messing with each other pulling each other's underwear just like you know ringworm and cauliflower rug burn yeah just that's what these little stags remind me of man because they're like

they're just these little i think that's of, man. Because they're just these little... I think that's pretty appropriate. Little shit and things that are just so jacked up and mean to the ladies and mean to each other. It's funny. It's total anthropomorphism. Oh, yeah. I have no problem shooting a stag. Bastards deserve this in some way.

And I feel a little guilty every time I shoot a hind. I mean, if I'm really looking for the meat, I'll take one. But nine times out of ten, I'll just let them walk. They just look so peaceful out there. Yes, I know. And I had a female come through, a hind come through with a fawn. What do you say for fawn? Do you say fawn when you're talking about stags and hinds?

Yeah, we usually do. I'm not sure if there's a more appropriate that's in line with stag and hind, but we just say fawn when you're talking about stags and hinds? Yeah, we usually do. I'm not sure if there's a more appropriate that's in line with stag and hind, but we just say fawn. Either way, I'll sit there with my bow and have some of those come through close. And like on a whitetails, I wouldn't hesitate to break up the pairing. And I'd be like, oh, you know like it's proven that if you shoot the doe you know the fawn's weaned it's old enough to survive or vice versa right and there's like management objectives and whatever all that garbage doesn't bother me watching the hind

and her fawn come across the marsh at first i was like oh man she's gonna come right through and after a couple minutes i'm like yeah i'm not gonna do that i'm just gonna hope that a stag a lot of them get a pass from me because yeah i'm gonna hope that a stag comes and those spawns are small they are i've seen them come through the check station at blackwater and they'll dress out some of them 13 15 pounds and at that point it's like is it worth killing an animal for the five pounds of animal meat you might get out of it? Man, do you put that thing up in the roaster oven? I don't know. You kill ducks all the time.

Yeah, but that's like the biggest they get, you know? No, I'm with you. I didn't want to do it. Once I saw it, I didn't want to do it. I definitely had real reservations. 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

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when they're bugling and they rip three in a row like do you feel that's a more that's a stag that's like really worked up as opposed to one that just rings off one randomly 90 of them are three packs or that's my estimation single they do some singles i think 90 are three packs or more i don't know you know and i think all the stags bugle to an extent it's not just the dominant ones yeah i always like envisioned you know oh it's a big six if it's really ripping out bugles it's got to be a big mature stag and i had one uh that i called in actually got it on on video on my phone i killed a nice one the night before and i didn't want to like i was hunting on the refuge and the previous one had been on public state land so separate bag limits were then applied.

So I could have taken this one, but it was not real big. It was a spike, a tall spike, and I just didn't want to use my Blackwater tag on a young stag, so I just grabbed the phone and filmed him to keep the bow from leaping into my hand. And he comes all the way across the marsh. I'd called him in. He got within 20 yards of my stand

and was just milling around and all of a sudden he ripped out a bugle that was like blood curdling yeah and i had it all on video i've been trying to catch that on either audio or video for the years i've been hunting him i always just get like the last two or one and a half of that three pack but this guy just went off and he sounded as big and bad as any stag i've ever heard and you know he was a fairly young young stag so i think they all call like that but uh you can't judge a stag by his bugle and they make a sound yeah it starts as a real high pitch kind of and turns into this sort of groany moaning kind of sound the kiwis calling it the hee-haw

which if you kind of stretch that out it sounds kind of like that and that seems to be, I usually, when I see that happening or imagine it happening, it seems like it's a doe who's tending a stag. Stag is tending a doe. Yeah. It's like a, I don't know, a frustration sort of sound. And then you'll hear also just a groan. Right. Right. And then you'll sometimes hear them just growl, like.

And that's when they lay their antlers on their back. Yeah. And that's usually when they're encountering another stag and tell them, like, get out, buddy. This is my spot. We watched one come up to two that were fighting. And I couldn't hear them because it was too far away, but I was watching them through my nocks. Two were fighting, and he was doing that posture where he tips his head back and lays his antlers across his back and kind of waves his head. Which is kind of a crazy-looking movement.

Would you clarify the antler configuration and what a six point is our back sweeping they're like little elk antlers kind of miniature elk antlers they're like more similar to elk antler they got the forward brow tines that hook and then your typical one your typical one has forward brow tines that hook and then like straight back main beams that will have a fork on them right so that if he's like doing his normal normal walking posture like head forward normal walking posture his antlers are kind of like his main beams are kind of like aimed back at almost like a 45 degree angle yeah probably yeah like brushed back and then you'll

see some that have you know they'll have like short brows and a little slight split and as they get nicer they get like a hooked brow tie and a deep fork but then you can also get them like you killed a seven point yeah very rarely you'll get one that either on one or both sides it'll have a little sticker point off the back of the main beam, and it'll be a 7 or an 8-point. Those are rarely more than an inch or so long, but I would say maybe one or two 8-pointers get killed a year, if that. It's funny how much you see those antlers coming through the brush.

Oh, man, they stick out. It's like two chopsticks coming through the brush. Yeah, because the total height is only, what, 12 inches average? Big ones, 12 to 14, 15 inches. True monster trophies might get 16 inches tall. And, of course, you'll hear guys oh i saw like 22 inches yeah right show me that stag and i'll believe it but otherwise um you know a lot of the spikes that the sort of bigger spikes will be nine ten inch spikes

but god they look big when you see them out there you know oh they look like the hartford buck man or whatever that thing is like when you see one out there. Oh, they look like the Hartford Buck, man, or whatever that thing is. When you see one out in the open marsh where there's nothing next to it to compare it to, it looks like a man-eater. Because they're so, like I said, like high school wrestlers, man. It's like, there! Got their neck skin. It seems like half their body weight is in their neck.

We're going to get a bunch of wrestlers right then. Dude, some of my dearest friends are high school wrestlers. Craig Christensen, John Merchant. I had some great wrestler friends, too. Malcolm. Yeah, man, all kinds of wrestlers. They're dark, John Merchant. I had some great wrestler friends, too. Malcolm. Yeah, man. All kinds of wrestlers. They're dark.

They're pretty easy to spot on the marsh, which I realized. Last year, I hunted the woods a lot more, and they blend in on that pine. The dark ones. We should talk about the color difference between the stags. The stags are chocolate. Dark chocolate. They look black. And the hinds got that reddish color but they all it's the

only deer that keeps its spots its whole life and they're faint but right down either side of their either side of their spine and then a little bit on their rump they keep their spots they get pretty faint but it's cool really cool pretty stags will sort of disappear when they're really running because they're rolling around and making wallows and the pelt gets all nasty dirty it'll stain them up yeah so you can't really see the spots on some of the stags uh but later in the season when they've stopped rutting and they're not making the wallows as much their spots will start to be a little more apparent as well and man do those things get a ruddy smell the meat's great they

don't get like a ruddy taste no we last night took a um we last night took a bag ham off a stag and just i cut a bunch of holes in it and fill it full of garlic and put a rub on it and we just cooked the thing in a drag or pellet grill for a few hours. It's just like no at all taste of that. But man, you smell that little bugger. And it smells like if you pissed in a jar and capped that jar up nice and tight and put it out in the sun for a few days. There's a little mud in there.

And then poured that piss on you. That's what it smells like. Like after carrying them over my shoulders out of the marsh, it smelled like I had pissed myself. Yeah, you forgot to put your rain jacket on. Like I had pissed myself a couple days ago. Yeah, I was kind of regretting giving you a ride back to the house.

No, it was bad, man. It was bad. It was real bad. You guys were talking about how old these deer get. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. What's's the deal what's the age class steve can speak to it he knows them yeah they've done a lot of tagging studies over the years and in the blackwater region and they've documented hinds over 20 years old you know hinds that were tagged as adults and recovered you know a decade or more later are the stags is it kind of like a typical you know mate like a six seven year old stags ancient

like they don't last this long uh i think certainly their lifespan is shorter but because i don't because the hunt because of hunting and because the of just the aggression they show towards each other. Oh, yeah. I should mention the one I killed last year had just lost his eye. I'm not talking like a little bit. His eyeball was completely demolished and punctured recently by an antler tine. And then tell the story about the one, the guy that you killed that was missing a tine. Yeah.

So I killed that seven point that i killed uh i noticed was missing probably close to an inch inch and a half of the tip of one antler and i shortly after i killed that one one of my friends on the club uh killed a real nice mature six pointer and when he took it to the taxidermist, they were caping it out, and they found a piece of bone about an inch and a half long, antler, stuck in its neck, like right behind the skull. And so he kept it and brought it over, and we matched it up, and it was a perfect match to the antlers from the one I'd shot. Did you glue it back on there?

No, he kept it. He kept it? He kept it, yeah. What? This is a trophy. Dirty dog. Really? He didn't give it to you? Did you ask him for it? What's his it? He kept it, yeah. What? This is a trophy. Dirty dog. Really? He didn't give it to you?

Did you ask him for it? What's his name? Let's call him out. I'm not going to call him out. Come on, man. He's a big fan, actually. You know who you are. You owe that.

That is Steve Kendroth's antler point, man. Really? You should wear that as a little necklace, man. Or place it someplace independently. Or make your wife an earring. You need a clubhouse. Does your wife wear two earrings or one earring? Two.

Generally two? Too bad, because she ran one. You could make her a sweet earring. I made my wife turkey spur earrings that she wears. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Huh. You know when you set that little mount that you set a crystal in?

People who are into crystals, they'll have a little mount, and you put a crystal up in there and pinch the mount yeah i had a jeweler take those type of mounts and i sawed off turkey spurs big nice pointy turkey spurs sawed them off and had them set the spurs in those mounts cool and now and then when the occasion's right she will wear her turkey spur earrings interesting which i like a whole bunch um no one the only people that know what that is are people who you'd figure would know what that is you know yeah it's an insider thing right something else just popped in my head i can't think of what i was gonna mention we covered the vocalizations which are many yeah i'd like to give a shout out to the guy that makes that bugle call because it's uh

he can't sell many yeah i've got mixed feelings on helping to market them because i don't want everyone and their brother to have one of these things but yeah you don't want to turn in one of those calls where everybody has the same call and it stops working. The hoochie mama of Sika calls. It is hands down the best. Yeah. Just a little reminder. It catches that sort of low growly sound that it starts and ends with, and it's real subtle. Yeah.

It's real subtle, but to me, it's part of the authenticity of the call and you know i've listened to many of your podcasts where you talk about turkeys and do game animals really need it to sound perfect to to trigger the sort of response you're looking for and probably not but for me uh just the confidence of coming as close to the real thing as i can is is part of what i personally need to feel comfortable calling to feel comfortable blowing it. Yeah, and this call, I think, just nails it. It's called the Nordic Sika, and it's made by a guy I met out of Sweden. Oh. He's got a whole line of predator calls and stuff like that.

So it definitely, I don't go in the woods in October without it around my neck. Without your Nordic Sika. Yeah. When does the rut start, and how long does it does it last is basically the whole month of october or i would say you know if i were to pick two weeks to hunt out of the entire season it would be starting with columbus day for the next two weeks uh that sort of middle two weeks second and third weeks of october probably that will encompass the peak of the rut but they'll start late september early october uh but they don't really get cranked up until about columbus day it seems and it's over by halloween yeah

generally you'll get little pulses of activity and i've i've seen stags chasing hinds in november and and even into december but do you use calls in those later seasons i do they don't seem to be as responsive to them though especially the stag calls the cow calls you know you you can stop one with it or what can you tell the story about the flood and the secret box that were tied together yeah back in 2002 we had hurricane isabel came through and there was a tremendous storm surge that flooded out most of southern dorchester county and it pushed a bunch of flotsam just debris all kinds of stuff way up into the woods and marshes and whatnot. And I'd taken a friend of mine on this property that I lived on in southern Dorchester, in Crapo, Maryland.

And I had to go, I had to leave him on his own for a couple hours midday. And when I came back, he said, hey, man, I found two dead stags that someone tied together. I was like, what? I said, well, that's weird. He said, show me. So we went and we walked over to where he'd found them. And indeed, it was two real nice, mature six-point stags that had gotten tangled up in a length of crab buoy line.

Probably, I don't know, if you stretched it all out, it's probably 50 or 60 feet of line. Oh, a bunch of line. Yeah. And the one stag that had, you know, and when they wallow and they spar and, you know, make little rubs on trees, they just whip their heads all around. And he must have looped this rope up somehow. And then the weight of the buoy, it just kind of kept swinging around. And it just, perfect, like figure eight around.

So this big wad of rope hanging around his antlers at the base of it and then a long loop had formed at one point and he he got in a tussle with this other stag and that loop got around the other stags antler and twisted up to the point where it couldn't free itself and you could see it also like tangled up in greenbrier and all kinds of stuff. It had been a big struggle. Also, you feel they were still laying where they had met their death. Oh, yeah.

No one had touched them. They were still like tied up with the brush and stuff. Yeah. I had to cut away all the green briar that was twisted up in the rope and everything. So, yeah, it was completely just a freak of nature kind of thing. The only thing humans had to do with it was the fact that we were the originator of the rope and buoy. So this one stag had a crab buoy hanging right on his forehead and another dead stag with about a three-foot loop. And you kept those skulls and kept them tied up?

Yeah, I boiled them out, cleaned them up just as they were. I haven't separated them or anything. Wow. And when you get your antler point back from that dude, you can make just a little display, man, of like the buoy one, his body that he's tied up to, the little point. Yeah. The other stag, it'll be like a nice little,

you'll be able to have people come over, and you'll catch them looking at that little display, and you'll be like, see that? Stag wars. See that? Let me tell you. But right now, can't tell that story. Nope.

Because that guy stole your thing. I don't begrudge him. It was in his deer. No, I think if the police came out, the police would say, it doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the other guy who's stuck in his deer. That's what the police would say. Now, if you call the ethicist, there you go. You might get a different answer.

Yeah, but where do you stand on folks that they shoot a bull or a buck and it's missing a know a prominent tine okay and then they have well the taxidermist recreated that for me i'm like that's not right oh i think that that is that's not the same thing at all how is it not the same thing it's not because it's just not the same it's just not the same thing we're not asking him to put it back on his buck and then display it as in like here is my grand seven point. We're asking him to display it because it's an interesting story. Like next to the buck.

Because you'd be able to say, see that? Right? If it was mine, I believe that I would tie it off with a little piece of string hanging there. And people would be like, what happened here? And he'd be like, well, funny you ask. And then I'd tell him the story. Yeah, but the buddy is telling the same story, though. No one's going to ask him why he's got a little hunk of antler.

What if it's hanging from a string off his buck? People are like, why would you hang this chunk of antler off that buck? He's like, well, let me tell you. See that? My good friend Steve Kendrott, I screwed him over. If you had a regular buck and you hung off a little chunk of antler off him and people were analyzing them, they couldn't see a broken tine, they might be like, hey, what gives over here on the display shelf?

At which point you'd be able to say, well, let me tell you. Yeah, and you'd have to tell them the whole story, Ryan. And then at the end they'd be like, dude, what's wrong with you? You should give him that antler point back. You want to give him that antler point, bro? And then maybe he's got a follow-up story about steve i heard a story i heard a story about some guys this is out at the uh this is some dudes who were hunting out at that ranch we've talked about before called the

high lonesome yeah which is like a controversial ranch because of some public land issues but uh they had had a client out who was pursuing this this bull elk they had this giant club formation okay the bulls carrying the club when the client hits it with an arrow by the time they blood trail it and recover it, the club's not there anymore. And this guy, I guess, was very, very interested in them finding that club. Could never find it. I wonder if he had one built. That's another thing, man. I was just at the Wild Sheep Foundation,

and they got the world, like there's a new world record bighorn. In my opinion, opinion shouldn't count i had a hard time with that a little kid in montana just shot a giant that they say might be a new world record really i think so breaks can you check that in 680 oh shouldn't say 680 people are gonna find out that that's a famous bighorn unit that's a joke all the big bighorns come out of 680 unless it was like a youth world record but a young there's such a i don't know but a kid in montana just shot one that i think might be a new world record really but i'm interested what you have to say here wasn't

my kid was it no oh what i'm gonna say okay yeah so two problems there's the problem i meant to address but i'm going to address a problem that comes up in the in the addressing of that problem the problem i want to address was the replica okay which is fine but here's the main thing there's a new world record bighorn because there's there's this big there's this big ass lake flathead lakes 20 it's a natural lake 20 miles long some miles wide big ass lake out in the middle of this big lake is a thing called wild horse island and at one point in time it was supposed to be a utopia like a guy owned wild horse island and he was going to have like an economist a sociologist like he's going to bring out all these experts and create this utopia where they would solve all the world's problems on this little island as utopias are want to do it failed and just became

like regular people's have places out there but there's also some public property out there and some old orchards and all this kind of stuff and at some point in time a bunch of bighorns got put out there and it's been pretty valuable over the years because they have used bighorns from wild horse island to help do repopulations of of other areas to bring in genetic diversity so you grab one from bighorn and at times they've taken bighorns from other locations and brought them out and put them on wild horse island to help the genetic diversity on wild horse island so it's just like important little part of bighornness but there's no predation to speak of there's absolutely no hunting and it's

kind of like because it's out on the island it kind of functions, in my mind, as a sort of zoo. Yeah. I've been out there, and you can pretty much walk up and grab the bighorns. They're kind of like, they're tame. Yeah, because there's a lot of recreation on that island. There's a lot of hikers. Yeah. I remember standing out there on Wild Horse Island one time, and I was counting how many times one was going to hit a ponderosa pine. I remember, I think he hit it 72 times in a row or something.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Unbelievable. My God. Yeah, and he hit it that many times in a row and you can tell he did it a lot because he kind of like caused this big indent on this ponderosa yeah he's getting his hundred in for the day so yeah he's in the hundo club so it's kind of like bow hunting for sika deer yeah it's banging your head against something so uh one of these dies, and it's the New World Record. And it feels to me like saying the New World Record came out of the Cincinnati Zoo. Yeah, it's an odd way to track record book animals. Well, you guys know that the argument is that those records are set up for the animal, right?

Yeah. I know, I know, but I don't like it. I don't like it. I hope the kid, I hope this kid has a new world record. From a native habitat, right? It's like native habitat, wild, living out there, getting chewed on by wild animals. I just hope this rumor is correct.

But again, you're looking at like what can happen like what is the greatest size one of these can achieve and i accept that it's the biggest one but it's a bummer to me that came from like a little zoo island yeah and now you know i'm being a little bit i'm trivializing it and being a little bit reductive but that's just my initial take on it right because you're right it is important because that is a herd of bighorns that hasn't been subjected to any disease yeah so what were you talking about replicas as far as oh well i walk in and there it is and holy shit is that thing big man it's like you know i've looked at i'm not like a bighorn expert but

i've looked at a fair number of bighorns over the years this thing is like you look at it and you're like my god i have never seen anything like that it is just gargantuan but and it's a replica not the same body and they cast those horns and that's like a big thing in the sheep world like our friend jay who's a sheep guide when he gets a client on a big ram he he guides like governor's auction governor's tag type dudes dudes. When they get a big ram, he'll get a replica made to have a replica of the horns. Like they cast the horns and make a replica. It's a common thing for the client to do as a part of the tip or the thank you for the guide. He's already got $300,000 into it.

Did you find anything on it? Yeah, so it was actually killed last fall, October 20, 2017. It still has to go through some more scoring by BNC. It has to go through a couple panels to be certified or not. But anyways, it's eight inches shy of that big one from – Oh, eight inches? You're not going to make that up. No, you're not going to make that up. No, you're not going to make that up.

But what it is is that it ties the world record hunter killed sheep. There you go. It's like a 12-year-old kid, right? Young kid? 20. Oh. No, not even a kid. I don't know.

Brody? I just heard it in passing, man. You know what? To your credit, you did ask him to look it up. Yeah. As my kids say, type it in passing, man. You know what? To your credit, you did ask him to look it up. Yeah. As my kids say, type it up. Fact-checking. Trust but verify.

Boys, it's time to do some closing statements. I'm sorry, but it's come to that time. We have to leave in an hour for the airport. I don't have any. I'm good. No, I got one. My boy the other day was looking at, speaking of Packers, my boy, I just heard about this, was looking at a horse. He says, man, that horse has a poop that just won't come out.

Someone pointed out to him that that's, in fact, not a poop that won't come out. This is a reproductive organ. He was saying, I'm glad I don't need to carry one around like that. I'm glad I got a small one. It's good to have that perspective. just be thankful for what you got that's my closing thought be thankful for what you got ladies and gentlemen two one whatever lauren thanks again for having me i didn't have a lot of contribution there but uh it sure was fun coming out here and shooting sick of deer not only from

the tree stand but to get to experience it from the ground and it was awesome you know i think your concluding thoughts should be you should say hi to the dude in new zealand yeah hey to ben brown uh thanks for being a fan and listening and that's pretty cool that he he heard us all the way from Montana. High country cameraman, Lauren. Hey, Ben. In the spirit of Steve's apology for the Washington elk hunt, I'd issue a semi-fair warning. No, if you're thinking about coming out here to hunt these things, which you should do, just know that it's not a slam dunk.

It's going to be a way different hunt than what I think a lot of people are expecting. They're going to be hard to find and hard to scout. Yeah, you probably have to come do, but you might need to come do it a few times to get it dialed. Yeah. Fully agree. Since we've kind of talked about where they live,

if you're going to come come here just be prepared yeah it's not like showing up somewhere to go squirrel hunting or something you have to like figure it out a little bit but i want to come and do it for sure you're fired up yeah man they're cool oh so cool i wish they were native man i mean yeah we gotta have that discussion like what we're talking cal and i were talking about that a little bit like when uh is there a point at which something becomes an honorary native yeah yeah honorary native if there is i feel that they've achieved it because like i said they've woven themselves into the cultural fabric of the east shore yeah with humans all you have to do is be born there i know well not even i mean you could be do is be born there. I know. Well, not even. I mean, you could be born there, but...

Naturalized. Yeah, naturalized. That's right. Good stuff, Brody. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, Brody Henderson. Take it easy. Steven.

Just grateful for the opportunity to work with you guys this week. It was exciting to see how the sausage is made, so to speak, for a meat-eater episode. You ever read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle? No. About how the sausage is made? I think I was supposed to. One of the books I skipped in high school that I was supposed to read, or don't remember at least.

No, it was great to work with you guys. And frankly, it was fun to see a couple real experienced consummate hunters put back on the early stages of the learning curve. The enthusiasm I saw in you guys coming back, seeing something new and trying to suss out how these animals work and what makes them tick and how to be successful. It was cool for me to see that because I think a lot of folks assume that you guys are so good at what you do that it becomes sort of blasé after a while. And I got to see firsthand that sort of enthusiasm and appreciation for the resource

and respect for the animals that you guys have. And I think that's what makes Meat Eater so special is it really shines through in the products, the podcast, the show that you guys have and i think that's what makes meat eater so special uh is that really shines through and the the products the podcast the the show that you do and you know working with the guys behind the scene my shadow for the week here lauren was was a lot of fun um i was not successful in taking a deer but well yeah but here's the thing though you you you put yourself in the position where you're sucking high in tit the whole time giving us the cherry spots. There's a little bit of that.

You let us go to all the hot spots and you go up and just figure something out to not get in our way. If I was you, I'd be like, boys, I've just found it. They really like it right here by the truck. I'll go back into the marsh.

Don't forget the bug spray. No, I definitely wanted to see you be successful. And I think you got some great footage and be looking forward to whenever it comes out and airs. And then my final, final concluder is to my friend, Johan, who has the other piece of the antler. You don't need to send it back to me, you've got my blessing to keep it um but i know he's a pretty avid listener so you'll hear about it he'll probably be mad that i didn't contact him and tell him to come down and meet you while you're here so uh okay thanks a ton we've been talking about this for a long long time and and i gotta say it just exceeded expectations how'd you guys meet anyway i was working literally i was three months

in three four months into working at first light 2012 doing sales marketing customer service a little bit of product um and uh steve had gotten a hold of me and truthfully i called the bitch about ripping my knobs yeah and he did me right and you guys struck up a little friendship yeah that's cute and he's like yeah seek deer and a longbow and bet you don't even know what that is and so and then the more i got into it i was like oh my god you can call them like you can you know you can use calls which is something i love um doesn't matter if it's ducks or elk or whatever um turkeys and just something that i hadn't heard of tons of public ground public ground. They taste really good. And I just, as we've discussed, I just finished Chesapeake, Michener's Chesapeake, like the year before. And I feel like he does a great job in this area because the story of the Chesapeake Bay is just this constant change because of, well,

now like saltwater encroachment, um, and you know, it's, it's, um, erosion, right? Yeah. And I think that's one of the coolest things that I kind of came to. And this really is my concluder is, um, you have so many things that have kind of came to and this really is my concluder is you have so many things that have changed in this area and gone away. All these islands that have fallen into the water

and eroded away. Got subsumed by water. They didn't fall into the water. I want to make that clarify that. I'm going to disagree. They blew away right right, Steve? What's that? The islands.

Washed away. They got covered by water. At some point. Yeah, when the new trees were here. Eroded. The trees. Anyway. Houses too?

Go on, Cal. Yeah. I'm following you. And then you have this species although it is an invasive species which i'm totally on the other side of on every other argument that is now like finding new life and growth in an area where a lot of things are going away in a compromised ecosystem yeah which I was just blown away by. Man, it seems like a really good thing.

And I'm really interested to see what biologists kind of pop out after listening to this as to what the other side is because I know there's another side out there. They have to be competing against something. There's a television show my kids were watching, which I despise, called Animal Mechanicals. It's like this,

I view it as this dystopian universe where it's a post-wildlife world where the animals are mechanical. All the trees and plants, everything's artificial and mechanical but it's meant to be cool and they do cool things but when you watch it it's like this that yeah it's a dystopian post-wildlife world and so as you have this ecosystem here where there's it's the dominant plants it's a non-native grass an invasive non-native grass trees that were planted

rising ocean levels that are encroaching on and destroying vegetation a non-native deer that is thriving in this environment it winds up being like on the surface you'd come and be like wow this is amazing but on the other hand you look and and it's emblematic of a lot of problems that we have, a lot of wildlife problems that we have. Yeah, and it's going to be, I'm sure is right now, a major, major conversation. The homogenizing effect of non-native wildlife, non-native flora and fauna.

And it's got a culture around it and an economy around it. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's fascinating stuff. We're adaptive in our tastes. You got to wonder how many white tails we would have seen in there in a week. If there were no Sika deer there. More than we did. Way more than we did. Not that I'm anti.

Right. I'm just posing a question. Janice, Janice Poodles. Great time this week. steve again appreciate you hosting us we stay in steve's uh you want me to plug your uh airbnb sure come down here church creek and uh stay in steve's spot what's a sweet little spot man we're gonna want to come down and and Steve's going to be like, oh, I can't because I'm all booked up.

He's going to be like, who's this man? Just let me know when you're coming. I'll block it off. I'm rolling my eyes now. If you can't hear me, my eyes are rolling in my head. I was going to give you some tips. No, no, no. Plug your Airbnb, Steve.

No, I make sure to protect some days for when I'm planning a hunt and if I know you guys are coming, they'll be unavailable. There's a long season. Yeah, but there's a long season that opens up September 6th that runs through the end of January. We've got this house that I used to live here Monday through Friday

when I worked on the Nutria project. Now that I'm over on the western shore and one of those people, right? Now that you're a chicken necker, as they say. My wife and I decided to put the house up on Airbnb after we were unsuccessful in selling it. And lo and behold, it's been pretty popular through the summer months. We try to keep the price reasonable. And for a group of guys that come in, it's much much cheaper than a hotel and you've got all the amenities at home

and and uh you know it's it doesn't get the use during the hunting season that it does uh you know it starts to taper off in september october november december january but uh did have an interesting case where we got an inquiry about a booking from someone in upstate New York turned out to live in the community right next to where I grew up and uh they come down in January for seven they booked for a 10-day hunt this year coming up so but yeah it's available it's called the Church Creek Getaway if you go on Airbnb and look at Cambridge, Maryland area. Oh, man.

Church Creek Getaway. Too much information, man. Just like that elk. Next thing we're going to be talking about, where to buy them crab balls. I was going to give you a hot tip, though, to get yourself prepared for the moment of truth with your bow as a way to practice for that go ahead a couple things i've done is you can uh enter tournaments and if you're in a competition sort

of a setting there's you know stress or that you induce you know that setting induces on you yeah i understand but i don't think that's a good idea i just don't think it's the same thing but go ahead no it's not the same thing at all, but you get it. There's a stress that when you're at home just flinging arrows that you can't replicate, right? When you've got a bunch of mugs being like, nah, like that kind of stuff. Yeah, that helps a little bit. What you can do at home with a bunch of mugs is put some wagers on the line, put some money on the line. Yeah, but that's not – I appreciate the effort man but i don't think

this is like this is the same you don't have to tell me if i'm right or wrong i'm giving you a hot tip as a way to get better at your shooting in that moment of truth to sort of deal with stress if you there's a large sum of money you are going to force yourself to focus and to block out everything else and you're not going to allow yourself to go from oh i got this thing into because you're like no there's a hundred dollars sitting there riding on this arrow and i need to take a second longer exhale and squeeze yeah that's true because even when we have rock throwing contests i pay a lot more attention once we got money on a rock throwing contest totally no i can see it but it's Yeah, it's just really hard to replicate, man. Yeah, there's no way to replicate it.

It's just things that we can do to... It's better than nothing. Better than nothing. Better than nothing. Okay, I think that's everything. Good night, folks. Thank you. 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.

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