The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 172: Wrath of the Birders

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Pat Durkin, Spencer Neuharth, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Steve's death at the mic; why, exactly, do deer lose their antlers; buying ice fishing bait at 2AM; Rick "Radio" Krueger; finding dead people with sonar and psychics; Isle Royale’s inbred wolves; how hunters remember the deceased; Pat's love of a good obituary; wrathful birders; Gordon Lightfoot, live; 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, underwear-less. We hunt with the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, Giannis, I want to do a war game exercise.

War game? Yeah, where we act like I die, like I'm dead, and you got to carry on the show. All right. But my dying words are, I know that Spencer wanted to mention something, and Pat had a lot of things to talk about. That's my dying words.

Okay. And then all of a sudden you jump in. Uh-huh. And start out and you jump in. Here you are. You now have to start the show. Just start the show. Let me see.

I just want to see what happens. All right. I'm dead. Damn, guys. Can you believe that? He seemed a pretty healthy fella. See, but you're going to start the show by small talking? You're not going to

come in like... Small talking? You just died. I can't just pass that by. Okay. Don't you think? Yeah. But you haven't brought listeners up to speed. If I keeled over, wouldn't you mention it? Not if it would interfere with the flow.

No. I think they'd be interested. What do you think killed Steve? At his age, probably a heart attack. Come on. That's not going to be what it is. I guess that is the number one killer now. Guys in the 40s drop dead sometimes with heart attacks.

Oh, yeah. Saw that yesterday. Traumatized my kids. Yeah, on the sidewalk. This guy. We were out running errands. Had to go to the hardware store. All these ambulances.

Some dude laying off in the grass along the sidewalk. Looked deader than dead. Pat, maybe you'll, since you're a writer maybe you'll write his uh obituary for us that's a good pivot wait hold on i'm not done yet you're hosting okay but before you uh get to thinking about that and since you're here because you had a whole bunch of stuff to talk about we also have with us spencer newhart who had one in type topic in particular that he wanted to bring up what was that it is a callback to the wolf episode you guys did a few weeks ago where it was kind of brought up in passing but discussing why deer

shed their antlers like we know it's photoperiod and testosterone but the bigger reason as to like why evolutionary they did that okay Okay, so why evolutionary, for evolutionary reasons, do deer lose their antlers? Can I point out here that we can't know? Yes. I was going to bring that up. Oh, good. Go ahead.

So there's like three trains of thought. None of them can be proven. None of them are widely accepted, really. Oh, really? They're just all kind of kicked around. So the big big why why in the world wouldn't you just want them all the time right like like if you look at a bison or a sheep why don't why didn't deer end up doing the same thing just keeping those all the time their headgear all the time now the first two reasons are pretty simple and they're probably the most widely accepted but the first reason

would be uh the energy cost it is to keep those things if you're like a big moose and you got giant paddles on your head or a big white tail and the purpose of those antlers is for breeding why do you need them in january february, April, the rest of the time of year? There's no breeding being done, so you don't need those antlers. So they just shed them. I don't know about that. Yeah, I'm just throwing them out there. So that's the first one.

And I would guess that that is the most widely accepted one. It's just pretty simple. But then it doesn't really explain like why bison and sheep and animals like that do keep their head gear. Yeah. So do you have any thoughts on that one? Well, if they kept it, it would have to be living.

Right. Right. Cause the antlers like living and then like kind of dies. Right. If they kept it, it had to be living cause it's going to need to dies if they kept it it would have to be living because it's going to need to continue to grow so there's going to be blood flowing there

and I could see it being an enormous heat loss they think that a sheep loses a lot of heat really? through its uninsulated horn core I could see it being a lot of heat loss if that was alive the energy thing though in and of itself

I mean how much energy does it take to keep growing the sons of bitches I'd be like I can't maintain my house so I just burn it down and rebuild it every year so yeah go on so that kind of brings me to point to you.

Another theory is that they shed their antlers, so they always have a fresh set for the next fall. So during the rut, we can be as specific as a whitetail. In October, November, they're battling it out with other bucks. You'll see it as dramatic as losing like an entire main beam where come the end of November you'll see bucks walking around with

broken off tines, broken brow tines, entire main beams lost, that kind of thing so they adjusted to that by having these broken antlers every fall to just dropping them and growing new ones yeah is there any is there any aquatic by having these broken antlers every fall to just dropping them and growing new ones.

Yeah, is there any aquatic, is there any fish or anything that grows a weapon and drops the weapon? Nothing I'm aware of. It's so weird. When you think about it like that, it's so weird. Maybe. There's a thing that, like, grows a weapon and then drops the weapon, drops it.

Maybe this is helpful, like, for thinking about this, too, is that it's believed deer grew antlers in place of tusks. Yep. Like, the most primitive deer have tusks. Rather than that, they got antlers in place of tusks. Yep. Like the most primitive deer have tusks rather than that. They got antlers instead. So maybe that like helps form your opinion of why they do this. Yep. Um,

there's another one still. There's another one. And this, I'm going to save mine cause I don't want to do, and mine's like totally unfounded, but I'm going to save mine. Uh, so this is my favorite one, but it's probably like the least widely accepted.

This is like if you typed in the truth about antlers. What's that? Oh, nothing. Just running it. This is the inside joke. How inside of a joke is that? This is like a deep, dark web answer is what he's asking. We had a guy we used

to work with a guy that always had these wild explanations for everything and conspiracy theories and we felt that when he does internet searches that he must always write the truth about in order to get the kind of like he had the kind of information that seems like it would be that would come up if he wrote the truth about, you know. Imagine if you were studying capitalism, and then you wrote in the truth about capitalism. Do you feel that you would get the same search results as if you wrote in, what is capitalism? Probably not. No.

You're making me think of these magazine blurbs I used to write. The truth about the rut. Oh, exactly. Yeah. How can I make this sound? The truth about hunting scrapes. Okay. Number three.

So, and this is kind of like. This is the deep web now. Right. This is like when you talked about how mule deer came to be that time and you're like it's just a little bit too uh like cute and tidy to actually almost be that believable yeah being that deer got separated by the glaciers glaciers were gone and then black tails and white tails came together and made mule deer right it's kind of like that and i think your hybridization event yes and your comment about that was like it's just a little bit too tidy and cute so the third theory is that um bucks drop their antlers in the winter so they can then mimic a doe because otherwise predators like wolves mountain lions bears coyotes once snow is on the

ground and it is post-rut they would recognize those bucks as being malnourished individuals and they would seek them out and kill more bucks than they would otherwise so to combat that deer then started losing their antlers to look more like does and not have these very obvious signs saying, I am a weakened animal. Get me. Yeah. Okay. I don't know. Are you familiar with Stephen Jay Gould?

He wrote a lot about genetics. No. Is the turkey named after him? No. No. He has a thing where he's like, why is bark brown? Right? Right.

Is bark brown because it's advantageous to have brown bark? Or is bark brown because it just happens to be brown? Maybe it's advantageous to have brown bark or is bark brown because it just happens to be brown maybe it's advantageous to have bark it's advantageous to have a protective cover and it just so happens that protective covers such as bark tend to be brown and there's nothing driving the brownness but we'd look and be like hmm why is it brown and brown? And we'd be like, ah, I think it's brown because it's camouflage. Or I think it's brown. But it's just maybe there are advantages to being brown,

but that's not the one pressure. Does this make any sense, Yanni? Yeah, totally. So I don't know. I don't know. So you're saying. I accept all. These are all great things. I just don't know enough So you're saying. I accept all. These are all great things.

I just don't know enough about like the early forms, you know, like the early, like, like what was the first thing that started to have a thing that shed? What did it look like? What are the circumstances that it lived under? Did it live? Did the first cervid that was, that began shedding an antler, the first thing that emerged as a cervid and it began shedding an antler was it dealing with wolves what were what was it dealing with in predation terms what was like like yeah so when there's a man that knows there's a man that would have a really good sense yeah we're gonna have him on him on here in an upcoming episode. There's a man named Doug Emlin. You're welcome to come.

Listen, I like everything you're throwing. I like them all. Yeah. But it's just difficult for me. That third one's a lot of fun. Doug Emlin specializes in animal weapons. And this is

on topic with that. One of the things that you could be like nope number three doesn't work is because in yellowstone after wolves were introduced again um they noticed and there was a scientific study done on this a few years ago that uh the wolves weren't killing that many males or were not killing that many bull elk besides in the winter. And the elk that they were killing were ones that still had their antlers. And then, no, am I getting this wrong? So they were saying that in the winter, when bull elk would start shedding their antlers,

the ones that shed sooner got a head start on growing their antlers for the next year. Okay. And they were healthier. The ones that shed sooner were healthier and predators would know this, that those ones were healthier. So they would seek out and kill the ones with antlers. That makes a little bit of sense because I know that the wolf researcher, Diane Boyd, was saying how elk don't really use their antlers against wolves and that you are packing around a lot of extra weight.

And it is a signifier that you are entering the winter in a depleted state. That you could pick up, like, you know what? The ones with the things on top of their heads seem to be in not the best shape. They seem to be a little worn down. I might've butchered that story. Oh. Come back to me on that.

You want to check it out? I want to check that out. Well, that's what I said about whitetails too. If the fawns go first, bucks next, and does last. You know, winter starvation and predation that thevation and predation that they're getting preyed upon. Like Diane was saying about hitting the young and the ones that give them the opportunity. And quite often these bucks come into winter worn down and they're sitting way out in the fringe of these yards sometimes. The wolves pick them off.

They know they're run down. They don't have the stamina, the strength they had a month earlier. You know, so those predators, I thought it was fascinating too. Yoss's comment on your chickens and backyard stuff, how when they start showing a sign of weakness, somehow they disappear. Yep. And there's things that these predators pick up on that we have no, at least in the modern humans, don't have that awareness. they disappear. Yep. And there's things that these, these predators pick up on that we have no,

at least in the modern humans don't have that awareness. So funny. You mentioned, yeah, it's chickens. Cause chicken, uh, egg sales have,

we, we touched on this and egg sales have really dropped off. He came in all hot with a couple dozen eggs and then it just really tapered off. Um, Pat, where do you, Spencer's going to do a little research. Mm-hmm. hot with a couple dozen eggs and then it just really tapered off. Pat, where do you, Spencer's going to do a little research. I want you to talk about the guy that found the dead people with his sonar machine a long time ago.

Yeah. But there's a bunch of other stuff we want to talk about. Okay. Which do you care about talking about first? Let's talk about Rick. The guy's name is Rick Kruger. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Yeah.

And just a quick aside about Rick, how we came together, and this is one of the things I like about the kind of work we do, how you bump into people sometimes and meet acquaintances. I screwed up a story one time about a fishing exposition. Who were the speakers at a fishing exposition?

I mentioned this guy, Rick Kruger, and I gave all his details, and guy, Rick Kruger, and I gave all his details. And the third Rick Kruger writes to me and says, it's very nice, but you got it all wrong. That guy's a fishing guide. And what I do is I run sonar in the Madison Lakes and I look for structure, cars, anything that's been thrown in the bottom of the lake,

basically, or ended up in the bottom of the lake. Hold on, back up a minute. Yeah. You're writing about a fishing exposition, a convention or whatever, or a trade show. Okay. And you see that there's a guy, Rick Kruger, going to talk. Yep. And you mix up, and you think it's a fishing guy, but in fact, it's supposed to be a sonar

guy. Yeah. Okay. So the sonar guy gets ahold of you and says, wrong Rick. And I said to him, well, I owe you you know i screwed it up i i do apologize because now some people who wanted to hear him talk you know anyway i can't remember which one i screwed up anymore but anyway so i met this guy is that kruger like freddy kruger yeah he spells it k-r-u-e-g-e-r and he's um he it turns out you know it was one of the best mistakes I've ever made in my career. Because it ended up being the most fascinating day I spent with a guy in recent memory where you get out in the boat and he was showing me around Lake Monona in Madison.

And he started telling me all these different historical stuff about the lakes based on stuff he had found on the bottom of the lake. And, you know, like a hundred years ago when people would get toward fall, if they had a work barge out in the lake, rather than go to trouble bringing that barge in and hauling it out of there, they'd just sink it out there in the lake. And he finds all this kind of stuff out there and just sunken boats. And the most fascinating. With a regular fishing device. Yeah, they're high end. He has two of them. At least he had two of them the day I was with him.

He had one over here on the side and one up on the screen. And then they can see off the sides. They can see down the, straight down. He had them looking at all angles. And these screens he's monitoring, he kept pointing stuff out to me on these screens and basically telling me, you know, what he's monitoring, he kept pointing stuff out to me on these screens and basically telling me, you know, what he's looking at. Because, you know, my untrained eye couldn't

really figure out, even with a good sonar screen, what he's looking at sometimes. But then once he showed it to me, then I could understand. But he said, you're typically looking at it like a shadow, I guess, off those sonar units. But as we're talking and he's telling me some of the unique things he's found, I kind of said, well, what's the coolest thing you ever found? What's the thing you're most proud of? Because this is stuff sometimes going down 70 feet into the water. Because what he does is he finds a thing, tries to identify as best he can with the sonar, but that's still not an actual picture. So then he takes his underwater camera and lowers it down,

tries to get a better look at it, and then brings it up. And if it's something he wants to really get a good look at, he'll either go home and look at it on the computer screen and see it in better detail, or else he'll just dive down. And so the story he started telling me was about a car he'd found over on another massive lake about 10, 15 miles away called Lake Wabisa. How big are these lakes?

These are, the Madison Lakes, there's four of them and Monona is the second biggest one. I'm not sure in terms of acres, but I guess I think Monona is probably about three or four miles across, kind of a circular type shape. Oh, so big lakes. It's good, it's good sized lakes. They're called Madison Lakes?

Yeah, the Madison Chain of Lakes are basically a generic thing, so big lakes. It's good, it's good sized lakes. They're called Madison lakes? Yeah, the Mass and Chain of Lakes are basically, you know, a generic thing, but if you're in a Mass area, they're real famous lakes, Mendota, Monona, Wabisa, Wingra, and their, Wingra's the smallest one. Mendota's the biggest one, the deepest one. Monona, I'm not sure the maximum depth, maybe 60 feet, 70 feet, someplace in that.

Another Rick Kruger story before we go on, the most famous thing that ever happened on Lake Monona, that's where Otis Redding, the famous singer died. He was like 27 years old, plane crashed. Otis Redding died at 27 years of age. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Sitting on the dock of the bay. I didn't know that. Yeah. And then he died. He died in that, he died crashing in the Lake Monona in the winter. No shit. Yeah. No shit.

Yeah, no shit. Really? And Rick to this day. He's the guy that wrote Sitting on the Dock in the Bay. Yeah, and recorded it back in the way. It's fitting that he would then die in the water.

Yeah. Spooky stuff. Yeah. He was wishing he was on the dock. Didn't quite make it to the dock, yeah. Huh. Yeah. That's where Otis Redding died.

That's great. Yeah. I mean, too bad for him, but. Yeah. I didn't know that. I didn't mean it's great. You know what I Redding died. That's great. Yeah. I mean, too bad for him, but I didn't know that. Yeah. I didn't mean it's great. You know what I meant.

It's cool. It's an interesting factoid that a lot of people don't know about Madison, Wisconsin. That's where Otis Redding died and he died going into a lake. You know, for some reason, Buddy Holly, everyone knows he died in a crash in a cornfield in the middle of winter or whatever. Was it April or whatever? Yeah. But for some reason, people don't make that connection with Otis Redding and how he died at such a young age.

This band, and I think it was like six, seven people in that plane that went down. John Denver. John Denver, too. What, did he run out of gas or something? Died in the airplane. Yeah. Rocky Mountain High.

And Jim Trusche. Yeah, you probably like that song because you lived in Colorado a long time. Rocky Mountain High. Oh, Jim Trusche, too. So, yeah, get back to- Freddy Kr, uh, get back to Rick Kruger. Get back to Rick Kruger. Rick Kruger.

So, um. Shout out to a bunch of people up. So, so. Hey, when you get to a really suspenseful spot in the story. Yeah. And this is a good story. Yeah. Stop.

Okay. And we're going to check back in with Spencer about his, uh, about the, about the antler problem. I think I know a good spot to stop. You got like a suspenseful spot? Yeah. Well, I think I'd do anyway. So there you guys are.

Okay. You say to him, hey man, what's the weirdest thing you found out in these lakes? Yeah. Yeah. And he didn't even hesitate.

He started talking about, he was over on Lake Wabisa. And he told me about, he's telling me the story where he said, you know, two guys years ago went out ice fishing like two o'clock in the morning.

And this is- Not sober. Probably not sober. They've been out partying most of the night. The guy's name is Ron Wick and Carl Stoltz. Rick was, Rick, Ron Wick was 20 years old and Stoltz was 23 years old. And they were out partying. They even had a girl with them for a while.

And they asked her if she wanted to go out there walleye fishing with them. And she, fortunately for her, turned them down. Instead of the old, like, do you want to come back and see my aquarium? Right. They're like, do you want to go with me and my buddy here out ice fishing? Yeah. So. And she.

And she said no. She declined. She'd had enough for one night with those guys. So. I like these guys. They got their priorities very straight. Admirable guys. And they, so they, after they dropped this young

lady off, they knew of a bait shop in town that had one of those all night things. You press, you know, this is 1961, by the way. 1961, this story starts. February 21st of 61. They go to a bait shop, ring the doorbell. A woman answers, comes in and she, they want a walleye bait minnows.

And they're talking to her. Hold on a minute. Okay. I was picturing for a minute that you meant a vending machine. Nope. Because that was a thing for like Hold on a minute. Okay. I was picturing for a minute that you meant a vending machine. Nope. Because that was a thing for like some period of time. Right.

But you mean a 24-hour, like a 24-hour, like ringing the bell at a motel in the middle of the night. Exactly, yeah. And you could summon someone to sell you bait at two in the morning. Yeah. I bet that place is not in business. Not in business anymore. No, those kind of places are long gone. But, you know, I remember those kind of places when I was a kid.

I was, in 61, I was five years old. But I, so this all comes back to me at some point. Oh, yeah, yeah. So they go to this bait shop

and while they're in the bait shop getting their minnows, this woman is probably thinking this is a little bit weird that they're here at two o'clock in the morning but the guy says to her,

yeah, don't you think you're a little crazy to be going out fishing in the middle of the night like this, two o'clock in the morning? And I don't know what she said, but that wasn't a newspaper story. But anyway, these guys go off and leave her while she ended up being the last person I ever saw them. And well, Rick knew they're gone.

And back in the 60s when this was happening this these guys disappeared it was uh it was a local story that went on for years they were gone and there's theories like they actually went out to out west somewhere and started their life over but one of the guys was married but wife never heard from him again mother never heard from them again all these kind of things. And I remember- And they like bought the bait. They bought the bait and commented on it in order to like create a false narrative.

Yeah. They had, you know, there's all sorts of stories going around telling about what happened to these guys. And- Were they ne'er-do-wells? No, I think, I think there had been working till like 10 o'clock that night, whatever job they had. They got off work, went partying for a little bit, and then went to the bait shop and on their way out.

Well, the one thing you should know about the Mass and Lakes, and this goes back to that era, they had outlawed driving on the lakes with a car decades ago at the time these guys were doing this. These guys knew it was against the law to go out in the lakes driving a car in a lake, but they apparently knew of a spot on Lake Wabisa. I think a guy is either a relative or someone they knew had an access road that went out on this lake. And they'd been going out there at night fishing.

And so this wasn't the first time they'd done this. And so they knew of this spot. Tell what they're driving. And they're wasn't the first time they'd done this. And so they knew of this spot. Tell what they were driving. And they were driving a 1950 Ford Coupe. And so it was an 11-year-old car. And Rick had done enough research on these guys, so he kind of had some knowledge of what the different theories were.

So now we're kind of going back and forth between eras here. Rick didn't find their car. They went down on February 21st, 1961. They sat in the bottom of Lake Wabisa for 45 years until Rick Kruger found them. Now, so Rick's operating theory was that, you know, there's different theories on where these guys went down.

Some people thought it was Lake Monona because they found oil popping up in weird places once in a while. They even had a psychic come in and try to figure out where they, where they were. What did the psychic think? Psychic thought Lake Monona, which was, you know, where Rick made.

Based off what? Psychic, who knows? He's a psychic, Steve. You know, he stood on the shore and got whatever vibes he thought he was getting from. Who's a psychic, Steve. He stood on the shore and got whatever vibes he thought he was getting from it. Who brought a psychic in? I don't know if it was a family or who brought him in. I have no idea.

That'd be an interesting guy to get a hold of. He's probably long gone by now. Some of the stuff that psychics do, once in a while there's some weird things they do. So he just stands on the beach, he's like, home. I think one of the stuff that psychics do, and once in a while, there's some weird things they do. So he just stands on the beach. He's like, home. But I think one of the stories,

this is going to be a long story. No, no, this story is not long enough. But one of the things that a psychic, I think they actually went out and searched one of the sites he was getting some vibe off of. And I think they found- You know that vibe that dead people throw off at the bottom of a lake? He was getting some vibe off of. And I think they found that. That vibe that dead people throw off at the bottom of a lake.

He was getting that vibe. Yeah. I'm not an expert on psychics. But I think they actually did do a search based on something that he sensed. And I think they found like a steel beam out there or something. There was something out there, but it was just not the car, obviously. So, Rick. Pat.

I'm sorry. No, I appreciate you bringing it up. Stuff like this makes me so, gets me so agitated. Yeah. I'm with you. Because psychics and that kind of stuff, I just always go. And then they found a beam.

Yeah. So you dive around the bottom of the lake and lo and behold, there's a beam. Yeah. And the psychic says, oh, you know,

I knew it was something. I thought it was a car with two young gentlemen in it, but it turns out it was a beam. My bad. I'm guessing it's like a lot of things.

When you screw up, you just kind of quietly disappear and hope no one brings it up again. Okay. So the psychic. That just shows the mystery and desperation. Yeah. And that's another whole aspect of finding people after the long gone that Rick talked about.

It was pretty interesting. But so like psychic's not the picture. Rick always went back to this idea that he thinks they went on Wabisa based on the fact, initially, the police, when they were, because these guys were gone for a couple days before anyone really realized, hey, what happened to Carl and Ron?

And then once the police got going, they went out and they found some tracks coming off of this one access road. Okay. So they did find tire tracks. But what had happened in the days, a couple of days that went by before they actually realized, oh God, these guys are gone. What happened to them? And then they finally started backtracking them and they got, and I think that bait woman notified the police of something. Hey, I had two guys in here that were night, matched that description, might have been them.

And so Rick, that's one tangible thing Rick had to operate on with these tire tracks. But what had happened was after they realized they were missing, they start launching a search. Well, by that time, there had been a warming spell going on. So the lake had been getting softer. The ice was getting softer since, like I said, late February. And by the time they put airplanes up to go look for holes in the ice, that kind of thing, there was so much water on top of the ice, and people who live in the north know how that happened in spring, you know, late winter, that they couldn't see anything noticeable down there.

And so that just petered out. They had no knowledge of where these guys went to. They went off on Wabisa or they died on Lake Monona, but they're pretty sure they're probably out there somewhere. Were both guys married? No, just the one. I think the older guy, Carl Stoltz, the 23-year-old, I think he was married.

So it was the younger guy. Was the younger guy, was he courting the the 23-year-old. I think he was married. So it was the younger guy. Was the younger guy with, was he courting the woman? Now Rick brought that up. And then that's where there was some controversy there that never, it got kind of interesting was that there was some speculation that this Carl, the 23-year-old guy was maybe not the best husband. You know, that there was some.

Maybe he was courting her. Yeah, that basically he was hitting best husband, you know, that there was some. Maybe he was courted. Yeah, that basically he was hit on her, basically. I think that was the story. And again, this is not, you know, here I feel like I'm in the National Enquirer because typically as a reporter. You're not comfortable with this line of pursuit. I'm not comfortable with this line of pursuit.

Because this is all stuff that is kind of hearsay. You know, I never got this from anyone besides just filtering down through the years another quick question yeah um and i didn't catch this when you and i discussed this over breakfast one day rick kruger the sonar enthusiast yeah i didn't catch that he was aware i didn't catch that this is a personal mission of his. Right. Yeah. What, was he, did he remember it from childhood? He has a long history in the Madison area of looking, looking for stuff in the bottom of the lake. So this story of the two guys disappearing, that was, even I knew about it. And the reason I really connected on this story with Rick, you know, I didn't know he, I didn't know he was the guy that found it

until we were out in the boat that day. But you knew that it had been found. Yeah, I knew it had been found. And I also have a vivid memory. Like I think I said to you in my email the other day, it haunts the shit out of me. Because I remember when I was eight years old, fishing on, there's these four big stacks

on the Isthmus in Madison between the two lakes. And we were fishing bluegills out there. And my dad was telling my uncle about these two guys that disappeared. And my dad was a firefighter, so he was on these rescue or those ambulances in those days. So he knew all these stories that were going on. And probably some of the stories I'm telling here are stuff I remember from dad talking about it. Because he was involved in the search and stuff trying to find these guys and

what happened to them. So I remember hearing this story while we're fishing bluegills about these two guys that disappeared, fallen through the lake in their car and they're illegally out in the lake and they fell through. And so this was always in my head that what a hell of a way to go.

You know, as a guy who ice fishes a lot, driving across lakes, I always have that in the back of my mind, these two guys that when you go. You know, as a guy who ice fishes a lot, driving across lakes, I always have that in the back of my mind, these two guys that when you go down that fast, you're not getting out. It's horrifying. I thought you were going to talk about being afraid of snagging into them.

No, no, that never really crossed my mind. When I was in high school, a dude I went to high school with got drunk and stole a boat and crashed it into a buoy and they couldn't find his body. And then my other buddy, Craig's uncle was out fishing and was just working find his body. And then my other buddy Craig's uncle was out fishing and was just working the shoreline and saw an ankle.

You could see like an ankle and a shoe, and the rest of the body was all obscured by weeds. Yeah. Yeah, he didn't like that one bit. 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, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love

in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Spencer. I now have my story straight on this research project.

Do you care to rate your earlier performance? I don't even remember what I said now. I got so caught up in Pat's story. We'll just ignore what I said before. Okay. This kind of contradicts that third theory what I said now. I got so caught up in Pat's story. We'll just ignore what I said before. This kind of contradicts that third theory saying that bucks would

shed their antlers to blend in with does and not stick out like malnourished critters to these predators. This was published last year by researchers from the University of Montana. And it was in Nature, Ecology, and Evolution.

And this showed the evolutionary tie between wolves and when elk shed their antlers. Okay. Okay. So they discovered, and they noticed this, that in Yellowstone National Park, since wolves were reintroduced, that wolves hunted bulls who had already shed their antlers over those that still had them during late winter. No kidding. So this suggested to them that the antlers were a great deterrent to wolves, that they used these as weapons to keep away the wolves. And so, which is like a little, that's intuitive that you imagine your, like how effectively the elk wields them or not. Like, how is that a, how is there an upside to attacking something with 12 daggers sticking out the top of its head?

Right. sticking out the top of its head right and but i i think this explained to them like um you know oh we thought that they grew antlers to court females but this shows no there's actually like great uh benefit to deterring predators one of the quotes is we believe elk evolved to keep their antlers longer than any other north american deer because they use their antlers as an effective deterrent against wolf predation. Yeah. You know, another interesting thing about elk, um, is the window in which they drop is a very wide window.

You know, you can be out spring bear hunting and see bulls carrying their antlers from the year before in April. Yeah. Yep. And so this kind of goes against that third theory. If you believe that this doesn't really work for that. And so these elk are kind of, like since the introduction of wolves, there's pros and cons.

So if you keep your antlers longer, you can deter wolves, but you don't get a head start on growing. If you drop your antlers sooner, you get a head start on growing and courtship in the fall, but you're more likely to get killed by wolves. And so they think this could maybe play out long-term, change some things that elk in Yellowstone noticeably keep their antlers longer than maybe the areas just outside of there that don't have wolves. Yeah, yeah. That's good stuff. Yeah.

Interesting to track over time real interesting and and that uh like i had written an article a few years ago on you know talking about the evolutionary reasons of why deer would shed their antlers not just the photo period and testosterone thing and uh i was always real cool with that third theory unless something came out that went against it because like you said before this is really hard to be like yep that's why or even to you know think that we're ever going to know and this pretty much goes against that third theory yeah yeah it's it's what you're looking at um things that in would influence timing size right things that would like reinforce that or not reinforce that. A thing that,

a thing that I think about with, with the antlers is, um, they're a reflection of, um, like proportionally they get so much bigger, right? Proportionally to the deer's body size, they get so much bigger right proportionally to the deer's body size they get so much bigger each time by growing new ones all the time i'm like never mind so it's it's so fun it's so puzzling like when you said earlier that maybe bark is brown just because it's brown yeah like there's no reason i i feel like this is so unique to cervids that there has to be like reasons behind it this wasn't just accidental that uh oh their antlers dropped off this winter you know it seems like huge family this huge family of animals all has the same strategy and it's so specific to them

like you said before like you can't think of aquatic creatures that do something like this and then you get into the weird one we're to get back to these drown fellers in a minute. You get to the weird one, which is how a female caribou will grow a set of antlers and that they're not synchronized with the males. She has her own time of year she grows and her own time of year that she sheds. And it's not in alignment with when males grow and shed and so if it's all sexual display right it's not meant to time out it doesn't time out with rut and she keeps them for a different time period and that's how that story starts to make some gravy yeah yeah when's the antler expert going to be here? Soon, hopefully. Let me know.

Love to bug him. Folks that want to prepare for the animal expert being on, his new book, his name's Doug Emlin. His new book is called Animal Weapons. And guess what it's about? Yanni, take a stab. Antlers and teeth and claws. Yeah, good job, Yanni. All right. So, good job, young.

Alright. So Rick. Okay. Rick is curious. Freddy Krueger's cousin, Rick, is curious about what happened to the missing ice anglers who may or may not have been fooling around. Depends. We'd have to get the woman

on the show to find out who she was flirting with, if anyone, if anyone. That just goes to show us how our minds work, that we assume there was a flirtation happening in that car, in that 1950 coupe. But it could have been that they were just buddies. Why isn't that possible, Pat?

Why does it have to be that they were flirting? Well. The time, time of day? Men flirt. why does it have to be that they were flirting? Well, the time, you don't time a day. Men flirt. I'd like to get around the show. Yeah. Uh,

so, so where'd you leave us off? Okay. So can I stop you during my research? I think I missed an important detail as to, you said that they were out there illegally. Oh, you were not tracking because you were reading. Right.

So I feel like I have parts in. Yeah. But what was the illegal part? The illegal part is that to this day, you cannot drive a car on the Madison Lakes. You can go out there if you have flotation stuff rigged on your ATV. No one rigs a car with flotation. Because it's a refuge or why? No, because.

Because you could fall through the ice and drown. I think they did have probably enough accidents where people are going through the ice back in the 40s or the 30s someplace back in the era because as long as I've been alive, you cannot drive in the Madison Lakes. And like these days, most people have floatation devices for their ATVs or something

and they limit it to that. But yeah, I don't think it was. There is one area of Lake Monona where it's open year-round because the power company has an outlet there, but it's on all four of the lakes. Gotcha. So you can't do it. So these guys, you know, they're missing.

Now they've been missing forever, and it's basically a local legend. And by the time Rick is investigating it in the early 2000s. And Rick, up to this time, one thing we were starting to talk about, I think, was he was connected with the Madison Police Department, the Sheriff's Department. Because he was always with all his great expertise in sonar and underwater stuff and all the different technologies, he's a radio tech guy, so he's always into all the stuff for electronics for fishing. But as time went on with his fishing, his electronics,

he started to have more fun finding stuff on the bottom of the lakes and investigating stuff, and he's a diver, so that kind of stuff would intrigue him. He's at the point now where he spends much more time still sleuthing on the Madison Lakes for, for hidden stuff. And he's found like, oh gosh, just, I have a whole list of stuff in this article I wrote about it.

But so if we get back to the idea that what's the most intriguing thing, he told me, started telling me that story. And right away that I'm, he's telling me the story in the boat and I'm, I'm, you're the guy that followed those two guys? Because I was shocked. I had no idea who I was sitting in the boat with.

And now he's my hero because I thought, what a hell of a thing to solve a 45-year-old mystery. So we're talking about it. He says, yeah, he knew where they went in that lake, figured that's still the best possibility out there. But still, even when you have tire tracks going out off a landing, who knows where they went in that lake, figured that's still the best possibility out there, but still, even when you have tire tracks going out off a landing, who knows where they went from there. Yeah, and psychics be damned.

He thinks it's that lake. So Rick's pretty sure it's on Wabisa, because that's the only physical evidence there was, was those tire tracks. So he starts, he's methodical. He just started laying tracks with his boat. And this is like, this is now like, I think it was July 22nd of 2006.

So 45 and a half years after the fact. He comes along on one of his passes and this is just blind. He's just out there blindly searching a quadrant out there. Just made a grid. Yeah. He's just, you know, doing his best.

And he's got all that GPS stuff too. So he's probably pretty well locked on knowing not to recover ground because that's, he's doing this whole, all over the Madison Lakes. He's out there on these grids all the time. So he's back in that corner of this, this big end of Lake Wabisa and he comes across on a screen, he sees something big on the bottom at a 45

degree angle. And he's looking at it and thinking, what the hell would that be? And he's only thinking thick as he said it had enough of a shape where it looked like could be a car upside down on the bottom of the lake. Upside down. Upside down, yeah. Because it was car upside down on the bottom of the lake. Upside down. Upside down, yeah.

Because it was, you know, the bottom of the car is flat and he saw this 45 degree angle thing. Oh, I got you now. Yeah. And so he, so he, he got, I think, I think when he dives, I think he always gets his wife with him. So I don't know if his wife was with him at the

time or he went back and got her, but he, he dove down, it was 35 feet down, went down there and he of course went straight to the license plate. And I think he said he wasn't supposed to bring up the license plate because basically it's, you're not supposed to be tamping your stuff from the lake bottom, but he thought, well, this is pretty exceptional. So he brought the license plate up and he got the numbers off.

But in contact with the guy, one of the detectives he knew in the Mass. and Police Department, or Sheriff's Department, I can't remember which department it was now. But the guy ran the numbers out, you know, from back in the 60s to figure out that was the car. Sure enough, it was, I think it was, I think it was the guy, Rick, it was Ronald, Ronald Wick's car, I think, the 20 year old guy. So then they know they have, they have the car now. And so of course, being the morbid guy I am, I

asked Rick, well, when you're down there poking around in that car, could you see skeletons inside the car? Yeah. And he said, no. He said it was just so much silt down there and so much silt had filtered into the car. He couldn't see anything in the car. So it's not like he did try to look in there and figure out what he could see. But he said it was just a gooey, mucky mess by that point, you know, 45 years in the bottom of a lake.

So then that was like the 21st of July, I believe. And it took them about two weeks to get back out there with a salvage barge now with a crane and everything. And I sent you a picture this morning on email. It's a great picture. Yeah. This old rusty coop, the windshield cracked, but they had it all in harnesses.

And I think they used, they might use some flotation devices too to lift it off the bottom. Now I'm pretty sure I got this right where they didn't find the remains until they got the car up on the surface and then to do it. At that point it becomes an investigation.

So they, but they found, they found the two skeletons in there and the one guy's hand was, you know, stuck in the door like you've been trying to get it open. Oh. Yeah. And, and so that's, that's the story. That's how Ron Wick and, um, Carl Stoltz met

their end, you know, while I fishing. Wow. At three o'clock in the morning and then they're on the bottom of the lake for 45 years and all the legends about them disappearing to start a new life is all evaporated. But for me, it was just a great story of a guy with a hobby who the police used him a lot, his help a lot over the years

to find drowned victims. And he even did, for a while, diving, helped him dive and find drowning victims. And he said it was really hard emotionally because he said at first when he was doing this, he never wanted to be on the site when the relatives would come out and identify the body because he just didn't want to deal with the emotions of that. And he said one year though, a woman wrote to him after the fact and thanked him for giving her closure that she now knew what happened to her son with certainty.

And Ron, I mean, Rick said when he got that letter from that point on, he was no longer, he always would hang around them and try to do the aid and comfort routine with these people. Because he realized, you know, it was hard for him to pull a body out of there because it has to be hard to be down in the water like that. And it's not exactly clear water usually. And all of a sudden you're face to face with a body. Oh, yeah.

You know, that's gotta be hard. But, but Rick was doing that for a number of years, but then like a lot of things, you know, he's now in his sixties and, um, when the police were using him the most and the sheriff's department was using him the most was the Sheriff's Department was using him the most was back in an era 20 years ago where the, you know, all these different police agencies

weren't, weren't at that stage in the development of technology where they were as good at, good using that stuff as he was. So they really used him as a tool. You know, they, they call him Radio Rick. He's always out there looking at this stuff and, and it's, it's a cool story too because to this day he's still doing it. You know, he's always, he's been trying to get nailed down with some certainty,

Otis Redding's, you know, flight path going into the lake and what's still out there. And he's still wondering if there's other pieces of the plane that haven't been found yet. And then he's also got, he sells fishermen his waypoints. Like he has all his waypoints. He's got like, I think over 400, 4,000 waypoints of things like underwater rock piles that no one knows about. People building in the old days, illegal fish cribs and dropped them into the lakes for their own.

And he sells that information. Yeah. He says basically gas money for 20 bucks. You know, you want my way points. I'll tell you what, what they represent and what's, what's at that, at that spot. Is he a good fisherman? I think he is, but now he says he does soon go

out and look for stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about something, talking about his reluctance to be around the victim's families. We discussed something on this show one time that prompted a first responder to write in. It's a really touching, dark story about him finding a nine-year-old boy who drowned. Finding that boy and getting him up on the bank of the river and sitting with the boy's body for a long time,

waiting for someone to come. It was just like a life-altering experience. Just the way it seemed like the boy could have just sat up. Yeah. The only time, people have asked me a number of times for some reason about my dad when he was a firefighter. They'll make these assumptions that dad had a lot of traumatic things to deal with as a firefighter. I said, you know, he might have.

But the only one I remember was one when he was on an ambulance crew and had to pull an entire family out of a head-on collision in a station wagon. They kind of redrove, and he had six kids. That seemed to haunt him. you know, with her in a station wagon, like the kind we drove and he had six kids and that seemed to haunt him. I remember him just kind of, you know, talking to my mom about it. You tell it really shook him up, you know, pulling his little kids out of the car.

Oh, I'm sure, man. That's just hard stuff. You know, I can't imagine doing that. Okay. So what should we jump into next? Isle Royale? Isle Royale. Isle Royale.

Yeah. Yeah. I have to say. What do you think, Yanni? I like it. Wolves. See, yeah. I have to say. What do you think, Yanni? I like it. Wolves. See, we kind of jumped off the early introduction of Steve's death. Steve was right back in the game pretty quickly.

Oh, yeah, but I was just curious about this. He just wanted the intro. I just wanted to game out. And then he did so good, once he got rolling, I got jealous. I came back in hard. So I was like, but you admit your frailties. I always admire that. I was like, man, he's kicking ass.

I'm going to get back in here. Well, I have to say the Isle Royale story that you guys, Spencer and I talked about back in February. One thing I have to say, Steve, is I like working on the articles I'm working on for Mediator. It's kind of stuff that, you know, it's got some stuff, it's got some depth to it, you

know, where you get people on the phone, you watch and read different things that have been written about these things. And the Isle Royale one is one of the more complex things I've worked on where you, you should probably back up a little bit and it's basically, I think. of the more complex things I've worked on where you, you should probably back up a little bit. And it's basically, I think. Set the table, so to speak.

I'll try to not, I really struggle. How do you even start writing this story? But the way I talked about getting into the story was back in October, the park service trapped four wolves, dropped them on Isle Royale. And then in January, we got a polar vortex. And Isle Royale, for people who can't picture this, it's up in the very top of Lake Superior, kind of the northwestern corner. I'm using my hands here in the studio until you can't see it. Closer to Canada, but owned by Michigan. Yep. Yeah. It's like 45, 50 miles from north of Houghton County, Michigan, and only about 13, 15 miles,

depending on where you look at it, off of Ontario and a corner of Minnesota up there. And so it's- And it's a national park. And it's a national park since 1940. And it's been a national wilderness area since, I think, since the Wilderness Act was passed, I think, 64.

So it's a really remote, a remote island and it's about, I think it's about 221, 222 square miles. Or, yeah. And I think it's like about nine miles long, four and a half miles wide, something like that. And for a comparison, size-wise, I think this is up, it's the same size as Zion National Park, and it's twice the size of Arches National Park.

So maybe that helps for reference as Pat tells the story. Okay. And the best we know from history is that wolves were never on this island until about 1948. And the moose were out there, they think, in the 1910s, early 1900s, that first decade of the 1900s. And the moose, pretty much for like 50 years, just went up and down in the crashes, the over browsing, all those kind of things.

And the wolves came out there and the wolves peaked at about, I think it was in 1980, I believe. Is that 50 wolves? I think it was. And they're crossing on the ice. The wolves and the moose during severe winters are finding them. That's the theory, that they crossed on the ice. And, you know, because we had much more consistent winters,

you know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago than we were having these days. These days, we're not getting those consistent land, become essential ice bridges between Isle Royale and the Ontario and Minnesota region. And. To help you out here, Pat, the wolf population peaked in 1980 at 50 wolves. Yeah. The moose population peaked in 1995 at 2,450.

God, there's that many of them out there? At one time. Yeah. Population's not that anymore. And I think right now they're back up to 2,200, 2,400. They're up there pretty high again right now. The most recent census I read about their day up there.

And one of the fascinating things I thought about this was that you know this one guy made a great point that we don't know for certain how the moose got out there this he's I think he's a National

Park archaeologist type guy there's lots of stories that back in the early 1900s that Minnesota was moving moose all over the place and so who knows for certain that they

didn't put some moose out in the island you And so who knows for certain that they didn't put some moose out in the island. You know, people were doing that kind of thing. Got you. A hundred years ago. But was it that, is it well known in, is it well known that in the historic record, there was a period when they were not there?

When wolves were not there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they have no record as far as I, from the reading I did and the interviews I did, there was no record of wolves being on that island until 1948. No, I'm sorry, moose. And moose too.

Okay. So we know that it was absent moose. Yeah. And what the island was famous for until basically 1900s was lynx and caribou. And the caribou disappeared around 1925 and the lynx, as they always say, blinked out in the 1930s for God. But I happen to be doing a story about six months ago on the Apostle Islands and some of the research

I've been doing there on the little predators that populate the Apostle Islands. And it's not uncommon for these islands. They just have such small ecosystems. The stuff comes and goes. They get out there and they overrun their habitat or they just realize they can't sustain themselves for the isolated population and

they go out. There was even a wolf on an island called Stockton Island on the Apostles that was there and people saw it a few times and then they found its body one day. They figured that's probably the only wolf that was out there. How it got out there, no one, no one really knows.

Yeah. So, so this, this kind of, those weird things in nature happen. In the, you know, in, in the area around Puget Sound, in the time that I, that I lived out there in the Pacific Northwest, you'd have just think like, oh, a bear showed up on an island that historically doesn't have them.

And it kind of runs around and gets in trouble, vanishes. Elk show up on the island that they didn't, hasn't historically happened. Like it swam out, you know, and it'll be in the news. Like, oh my God, no one's seen the elk here in 75 years. But then the elk swims off, gets hit by a car, which is constantly happening. Where like small little populations of things or single animals will, will find these places. So you can imagine the right situation.

Yeah. Just two. Yeah. As long as you get two. Yeah. Show up out there at the same time, you could create some highly volatile, you know, little population of animals in a, in a weird spot.

Yeah. So they, so they, they had these, um, I, I think one of the things I found kind of fun about the story was that right now, here we have a real scientific debate going on over whether to reestablish this wolf population on an island that really had no record of wolves 60, 70 years before. And yet humans have a much longer history on the island

than wolves do and that moose do. You know, they have these archaeological findings of people making copper tools, you know, thousands of years ago out there in the copper veins in those islands. No kidding. Yeah, that kind of interesting stuff like that. And plus the voyagers all came through there.

And there's been mining in more until became a park there's all sorts of cool stuff going out there as far as logging you name it people out there you know exploiting it somehow and whereas i think the big question is you know it kept coming up a lot in these different debates is you know if wolves and moose are meant to be out there why did it take until basically modern times to cross on those ice bridges? Why weren't they out there earlier? And I never heard that theory

that when Minnesota was moving moose around and doing various introductions, reintroductions, that there was the idea that maybe someone turned something out. Yeah, it's unprovable. It might be a wives' tale. I think you and I and all of us in this room some out. Yeah, it's unprovable. It might be a wives' tale. I mean, that's, you know, I think you and I and all

of us in this room have been, have tried tracking down the wives' tales. It's just, you know, they're plausible given

the era of what people are doing. I mean, I was thinking of Anacostia Island off of Quebec where the guy had this big

turned into a deer sanctuary basically. And now, I don't know if they still, I'm sure they're still hunting deer out

there, but they're moving fish around, you know, dropping fish out of airplanes in the mountain lakes, doing all sorts of stuff a hundred years ago that, you know, these days we just wouldn't do. Yeah. Unless we let know, have a pretty good scientific, what we think is a good scientific

justification for it. So, and they, so they peaked, the wolves peaked on it in 1980. And then they, I think they're tapering downhill pretty steadily. And then about 1998, a male wolf showed up apparently and did just a good job breeding the wolves that were remaining out there. Apparently his genes got every wolf that was out there. Old gray guy was his name. Well, thank you. Old gray guy? Old gray guy was his name. Well, thank you.

Old gray guy? Old gray guy. It's great having this expert here. Shows up and just starts breeding his ass off. He was responsible at one point for 56% of the wolves on the island. Those were his offspring. Man, tearing it up. Yeah.

There was some stat like he had he was responsible for like 45 pups and then his 45 pups were responsible for like 40 pups or something like that so wow good details old gray guy good yeah and by um by last fall though i think they had i think diane said this and um she talked about how it came down to uh a male and a female offspring of his, I think was the only thing that was left. But in the meantime, as this was going on over the last 20 some years, the wolves did as said, these things are inbred. They're turning up with being born blind, webbed feet, messed up spines,

and some of the congenital stuff and the hereditary stuff like in the spinal problems. I think Dave Meach, this famous wolf biologist said, when it comes to parvovirus and some of the other things they were trying to say might have caused the wolf population to come down. I said, well, that goes on the mainland too, but it doesn't wipe them out the way we're thinking out here on the island. So they're not quite sure how all these things happen, but the final conclusion was that they were inbred. There's nothing that a population couldn't be saved.

They show up, they first show up in 1948. The population peaks 36 years later at what number? 50. 50. 50 wolves. And then dives off till recently when it was down to just two. Yeah.

Yeah. And they don't know the founding event. They don't know how many wolves moved out there for the founding event. It goes to two individuals or. I couldn't find anything that actually put a number on that, you know, and that's, which is, you know, that's now that, now they have these

four out there like last, you know, so now they have these four out there last winter. And then there's all this discussion about, well, we don't have the ice bridges anymore to get new wolves coming in. And so, you know, should man step in and intervene here and reestablish that wolf population? And it's been a debate going on for probably close to this whole decade. People fighting about this, you know, in scientific this in scientific circles, the whole philosophy of it. Should man be out there tinkering with Mother Nature now? Because chances are we'd not put them out there. So should we now go in-

And supplement them. And supplement them and reestablish something that naturally was, was that naturally was coming down, going down. Backing up a little bit. I don't remember if it was you that presented this or if it was someplace else I read it, but they said that after the war, a bunch of trappers came back. I reported that. It was,

it was, uh, from a, it was like, really people want to go online and read, watch a really good seminar. There was a seminar done in 2013 where they had these guys, um, Dave Meach and Ralph

Peterson and some other, the anthropologist guy, the historian, really a good thing. They had a thing they did in Minneapolis. You can go online and search it and it's worth a two-hour sit to watch that. So where was I here? After the war. Yeah. So, so one of the stories is that they think, you know, it's, it seems plausible that during the war, when all the Canadians and Americans were over. You're talking whiskey, whiskey too. World War II.

World War II. Yes. You know, thanks Steve. During World War II, you know, every able-bodied man was over in Europe, basically. We were out in the Pacific fighting the war. And so I think a lot of these guys that would have been trapping wolves in that region were all off at war.

Well, in their absence, they think, you know, one of the theories is that, well, in their absence, these wolves probably started coming back up in numbers and started dispersing. And if there's always consistent ice bridges, well, probably some got out there from that region of Ontario and Minnesota and got this population rolling out there. Okay. So that's kind of what the theory is. But again, it's one of those stories that it's

plausible, but no one really, we had no way to really track that kind of stuff. Yeah. So it's kind of speculation. But so when these wolves are transplanted then from, I can't remember where they came from, the first four they brought out there, if it was Mishapiketan Island off to the east or wherever they got them. One of them, after all this debate about ice bridges not being happening anymore, we're not getting consistent ice bridges anymore.

Well, as soon as they put some wolves out there to supplement, to start bringing, reestablishing things, one of them takes off across an ice bridge. Runs home? Runs home. Yeah, because he was, that one, I think they were, I think they may have been from that part of Ontario. And so he basically runs home. Another one tried to get home,

but I think it encountered prior to that time was breaking up again and just came back to the island. But I thought the irony of it all, you know, you're trying to reestablish it. But man, you're dropping them into the happy hunting grounds, man. Yeah. Yeah.

But again, the homing in streak, and I think, I think Dave meets up when you, when you try to transplant wolves from that close to their home range, you know, that they're not, they've. They got it. Yeah. So that's another trend of, they've been going out and, you know, farther away and picking them

off other places. I think they've to, they've been going out and, you know, farther away and picking them off other places. I think they've been, they've been talking about the next group to try to get probably from the UP of Michigan to bring them up there. And so you get that diversity from around the whole region, not just from a couple of people, a couple of wolves that came onto the island.

Yeah, the first ones they pulled, they pulled them from an island that's owned by, or, you know, an island in Ontario. Yeah. Are you asking me? Yeah, I think that's correct, right? They pulled four. Well, I think the first four, I think, I don't

know where they, I don't know where all four came from for certain. I'd be, I'd be just pulling it on my ass if I tried to say that. I don't remember offhand. Maybe Spencer can look that up, but I know at least one of them was that one that went back to Ontario.

Yeah. But that was only about a 15 mile jaunt across the ice there. And then its home range is probably farther inland. Yeah. But apparently that's where it was last headed, you know, when they were tracking it. They didn't think it was going back. And then once it got back in its home range,

it started doing what wolves do, just, you know, doing their hunting. And so that one's gone. But then I think right now they're at 15 wolves. The most recent count, they brought more in. They brought some in from this, I can never pronounce the island's name, but it's Mishapikatin or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. It's off the east. And that's a whole other story. But so now they got it back at 15. And now it's going to be, it's basically an experiment, you know, cause now you have, you're getting any wolves from these different regions. Well, how will they get along now? Will they form packs with different strange wolves from different areas? expected to be a little bit hands-off or that you're trying to mitigate human, like, like the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction, right?

As you're saying, well, we know that they were extirpated from human activities. So we're putting them back as a way of, of rebuilding from our own impacts. Right. But this is, um But this is not that. Right. And some people are trying to make the argument that, well,

humans are causing the climate change that's causing us not to have the ice bridges. They're trying to make that argument that it's still human caused. And the point Dave Meech brings up is, okay, tell me how that lack of ice bridges is actually hurting that island though. Can you really make that argument? What exactly is being heard out there? One thing they're looking into, I think it'd be part of this whole interesting development here as we watch this unfold is, well, the moose on Isle Royale are doing very well compared to the moose just a few miles to the west in northern Minnesota.

And places where you have white-tailed deer carrying brain worm typically cause problems for moose. Well, the moose aren't having brain worms out on Isle Royale because the deer can't get out there. If they wanted to cross on the ice bridge, well, there's been no ice bridges. So that absence of an ice bridge might be benefiting the moose by nothing coming out there across the ice that could kill them. So you make that argument.

So it's really hard. Yeah, like the moose population benefits there. Yeah. So maybe someday it'll be a great source herd for moose. Could be. But, you know, so you have a hard time making the argument that's human caused and that we're now fixing a human caused situation. Well, as being a guy who grew up in Michigan, we took like a lot of pride. It really informed the Michigan mystique, knowing that we had this island that had a bunch of wolves and moose on it

like you you grow up very aware of that yeah and there's a little element of look how wild and cool our state is yeah because we got like the up and we got this crazy island it's got these wolves and moose on it isn't it cool yeah so i could see that losing that would make people sad, that it would feel end of nature-ish. Yeah. And that that would wind up motivating you to find all kinds of justifications to maintain just the spectacle of it. And there's been, I think Mead started this research back in the 60s. You're studying the wolf-moose interactions and how those things fluctuate.

So they have a good, long-running research going on up there at Michigan Tech University. So it's a lot of cool stuff that's come off the island. But then you get back in the whole philosophical discussions of, well, is this a wilderness area or not? And should man be in there? You always get that great quote about land should be untrammeled by man. No interference, basically, from man.

Let nature run its course out there. Why we always have it thrown at us all the time. We should let nature take its course. Well, when it comes to wolves, a lot, a lot of people don't, they want, they want that wolf out there. There's something about wolves that people really are intrigued by them. They protect them.

It gets to be a little bit like zookeeping though. Yeah, exactly. Like. That's where I feel. It's like, but it, and it harkens back to all these, to the, we always talk about it, how a hundred years ago, like the Maryland sick of beer, right?

Like back in the day, that was just a thing people thing people did yeah shipped animals all over the world and introduced species um your favorite my favorite quote of yours pat is that deer make people stupid sort of dude yeah wolves make people crazy yeah i've always in my years of reporting on the outdoors i've always thought the two jobs i would least like would be a wolf biologist and be a deer biologist. Because everyone who doesn't agree with you, there's just too much emotion wrapped up in that stuff. um the u.s fish and wildlife service just put out a jaguar recovery plan which you know runs from like central america all the way up into arizona and they had in identifying like habitat usable habitat or historic habitat they'd put this cutoff marker where when looking in the united states um places that were that they know as like jaguar habitat they put a cutoff at 1962 so it's like from 1962 on

we'll acknowledge where jaguars have been but anything prior to that is dismissed. Okay. Because it winds up being this very small sliver of Arizona for suitable jaguar habitat in the U.S. And if you extend it pre-62, it gets much bigger. And you had jaguars up into central Arizona, west Texas, New Mexico. And so they're kind of like proposing a very limited version of, a very limited scope of what jaguar recovery might look like in the U S and now they're effectively extinct. Like now, and then there's one, possibly two up in Arizona, but typically like at this particular second, maybe zero or in Arizona. Um, but it brought up this conversation about when we start to apply dates,, here's what nature should look like. It should look like 1962.

And that's what we'll strive toward. You get into this funny space, especially with the Isle Royale thing, where here we are really striving hard to create 1980-er. We're trying hard to recreate the splendor of 1980,

which doesn't resemble 1880. If we were chasing 1880, it sounds like we'd be trying to put lynx and caribou on Isle Royale. Definitely, yeah. But we're chasing something that occurred in my lifetime. Archaeological records show that caribou and lynx were there for the last 3,500 years.

So, compared that to wolves, moves to the last 100 years, quite a bit different. It's just because it's wolves, man. If it was something else... Yeah, the caribou get no love. No.

We just let the last caribou herd in the United States blink out largely unnoticed. No one cares. You can't get people to care about it. The Purcell Mountains, they used to drift down into Idaho Panhandle. They're gone. People are like, eh. But then there were helicopter and wolves all the damn place.

I really liked this comment that Tom Heberlein made that, you know, there'll never be a headline in the New York Times that says, let wolves die for science. You know, we just don't do that. You know, we don't let wolves die for science. And I think it would be fascinating to see and track and research what really happens on an Iowa royal if you just leave the moose alone and see how they go up and down.

I mean, if the trees get over-browsed, they get over-browsed. And they've done it before, they'll do it again. At some point, they'll probably eat themselves out of the house at home. Well, then the island will self-correct

and there'll probably be a new era. But yeah, I guess you make it, I think my favorite point is that why would we always want to make it look like what we have right now? But that's what we do. Can't answer it. And if you let the wolves die and be gone,

maybe lynx will come back. There was one lynx documented that showed up there in 1980 across the ice from Canada, but that's been the only time. One lynx. One lynx. There was one sighted out there.

And so maybe if the wolves are gone, we see lynx come back. And I should, to be, to get the other point of view though, one thing that is different now is that, you know, they think the wolves that came out there originally came from basically one source area. We're now to bring them into these different areas and assuming they can form packs, get along, learn how to work together, that there will be enough genetic diversity to sustain them for a while.

And then, like when I asked the biologists up there, well, what if 20 years from now, these guys start going downhill, we're going to try another transfusion, basically. Where's it all going to end? And he said, well, we'll discuss that when we get to that point. But to me, it's plausible that maybe with these new different gene strains coming in, they can sustain themselves longer out there. But yeah, I have to agree that if it weren't for the factor wolves, we won't be doing there. But yeah, I have to agree that for the factor wolves, we won't be doing this. But even that isn't like natural,

like trying to create a diverse population because I think I read somewhere that every wolf on that island descended from one female that was out there. Oh, okay. And like 56% came from old gray guy. And so by creating this island population that has wolves from like Canada, Minnesota, and the UP, that's not even what it was like during this era we're discussing trying to replicate. No, they want to make damn sure they stick this time. Okay, Pat, let's jump gears.

Change gears. You don't jump gears. Grind gears sometimes dude i'm looking to get the picture of the car getting hoisted out of that late show it to me oh my god it's haunting man that's wild that'd be sweet to refurbish that car pat we should point this out he wrote that article on the isle royal wolves back on april 12th we publish it i told him at the time it's one of the best things we ever ran so if you want more on this go to the meat eater.com uh type in isle royal you'll find pat's piece there give it a read it's a great piece of writing. Really informative and entertaining.

Thank you. Did you get any feedback? People mad at you? No. No, I really didn't. I heard from Ed Bangs, the wolf biologist who did the Rocky Mountain wolf reintroduction. I tried to get a hold of Ed for the story to get his perspectives. I thought, he's always a thoughtful guy and but he was down fishing in costa rica or someplace and didn't get back to me till after the fact and and his comment

to me was he he kind of agreed with heberlein that let's see what happens and he says he said now he said i'd like he said now i'm at a point where i i think the wolves might surprise us again if you just left them alone. Yeah. And that's what made it, I guess that's what makes it kind of magical is that you had this island with a bunch of moose and these wolves found it. Yeah. Right. And they kind of ran their whatever, their little courses. And now you're like, oh yeah, they're out there because we stuck them out there.

Yeah. Seems a little artificial for a national park for holding this area. And if you'd asked the wolves if they wanted to be moved i'm guessing they're gonna tell you they'll pass okay you're you're you admire you're you're a uh obituary a hunting obituary enthusiast oh yeah yeah um like hunter obituaries one of the, I don't know what it is, Steve, but all my career as a writer, I was at the newspaper back in the 80s. If somebody important died in town, the newspaper would come over to my desk and say, Pat, could you do a feature,

do a feature obituary on this guy? I became this kind of this obituary writer of the, for famous people, you know. How do you approach an obituary? Boy, phone calls. You know, I start, when my dad died, I had a guy call me from a newspaper and interview me about my dad.

And of course, then when the thing came out, it wasn't, these days in newspapers, you can't get in the depth that we used to be able to get into when I was writing newspapers back in the 80s. But I like to think I'm an empathetic person. And I'll read about, I go in what they call the morgue, and I'd find the morgue in our newspaper for these guys, read as much as I could about them a try to get a good feel for them and then call like a son or a daughter or a wife who might be in just interview them for a half hour an hour but they're still fresh dead and you're calling their relatives yeah yeah but but if you do it sympathetically and you express your condolences and

that you know tell them you want to you're working on a piece you want to just man a final final honor woman a final honor, that people are pretty good at talking to it. And you realize you're not calling there to, you know, throw dirt on the guy before he's, you know, while he's being lured in. So I find that kind of stuff fascinating. But when I was mentioning to you,

there was this guy over in, I don't have him in front of me now. It was a cool thing about a guy that died while he's hunting out there. And people so often, I get this at Deer Enduring Magazine a lot. People would die and then the son would be talking to his dad on the deathbed. Is this what you're talking about, Steve? People come into the man's room and he's dying in the hospital and asking him, hey, next fall when I'm out hunting, could you send

a big buck past me? Oh. Is that what you're talking about? Or are you talking about the Sweden guy with the, where he had a heart attack out in the woods and it was otherwise, an otherwise good hunt? I like all this, but I'm thinking primarily heart attack out in the woods and it was that otherwise was an otherwise good hunt this is what I know I like all this but

I'm thinking primarily about the other people that described it as an otherwise successful could you read that line because I don't have it from me oh you don't have in front of you no okay hold on a minute um it was about a geez you're right remember I said that you said if I died you said it'd be a heart attack

yeah okay 44 years old 44 here's the it was about a, geez, you're right. Remember I said that you said if I died, you said it'd be a heart attack? Yeah. Okay. 44 years old. 44. There was an article about a 44-year-old hunter who died in the woods. And it says on November 11th last year, his heart suddenly stopped

during an otherwise successful hunt with his friends. And that made me think about all these different things that during my career that I've stumbled onto of people on the deathbed wishes and the other story that came up today, I shared with you that I'm sorry, that I shared with you that I thought was just a great commentary. And I made me think when we started talking earlier about you dropping dead

on the set here, what would we do? Well, back in, I think this is probably like in the 1940s. No, no, it had to be about the 1960s. Because an outdoor writer in Wisconsin named Don Johnson, he died probably about 10, 15 years ago now. But Don was a great storyteller, great writer. But he told a story of, he was out covering opening week, opening day of duck season in Wisconsin back,

it must've been in the 60s. And he went to this boat landing and he has duck hunters would come in from the day of hunting because they had a noon opener. I'm not sure we have a noon opener anymore in Wisconsin, but back then it was a noon opener. So late not sure we have a noon opener anymore in Wisconsin, but back then it was a noon opener. So late in the day, this duck boat comes in, and he's starting to interview the guys,

asking how the hunt went, that kind of stuff. And, well, here's a dead hunter lying in the bottom of the other boat. With a bunch of ducks piled all over him. And they're having this conversation about, well, you know, what do we do now? Should we call it, do we have to call

the sheriff's department? We got to call the morgue? What are you supposed to do? And Don's, you know, pretty baffled by all this. It's a dead man in your boat. Yeah. And well,

apparently the guy died that morning while they're putting out decoys, setting up the blindness stuff. And they knew he's gone. So they just put him in the bottom of the boat and they had a little discussion and they agreed that, well, I can't remember the guy's name. Well, Fred would have wanted to keep going. So we did. We kept hunting. And when they got

their limits or they got done hunting, they came in with this the whole time, like probably four or five hours, those guys lying dead in the bottom of the duck boat. And I thought that was just a classic story that, you know, what would you do? Of all these days we up, we would just feel, you know, like obligated to, you know, probably come in and do it because you'd probably be,

you know, looked down upon by everyone in your town for a week. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, you'd just be like, how callous can you be? But then on the other side of it, I think, well, I think it's kind of cool. You know, if that happened to me, I wouldn't take offense. You immediately agree with that you would feel like

sort of guilted into immediately doing something about it. Yeah. Or would it be more like a legal issue? No, if I was out hunting, if I was out duck hunting, and all of a sudden someone that I'm hunting with dies, I would, you know, I can't really say, haven't been in that situation. I feel like I would wrap her up. I feel like I'd wrap her up, and I'd say, guys, we're going to wrap her up and take our dead friend here back into town and notify his family. I'd go so far

as to say that I wouldn't even pull the decoys because I'd also be wondering how did they know he wasn't? Did they administer CPR? You know what I'm saying? He must have been just stoned. Let's say you let him off and he's in his

blind and you come back and he's just so dead that he's chilly yeah but like if if you were to fall over and seem pretty dead yeah how would i rule out that there wasn't a thing that could be done after i administered cpr on you bringing me that I wouldn't run back to see if perhaps they'd shock you back to life. So that's where it also gets tricky. Yeah. But if it was B that you're like, hey, I'm going to go take a whiz or whatever. And then an hour later I go in there, you are cold and stiff.

And I'd be like, there's no chance of resurrecting them. I would still wrap her up. That would be my gut reaction, but then I think if Pat or Spencer were like, but you know, Yanni, Steve really liked to hunt. It's the opener. Look at all the ducks flying.

I think I could be pretty easily persuaded. Let me put it let's say this. Let's say I was in the autumn of my life. Persuaded is what I meant Let's say I was in the autumn of my life. Persuaded is what I meant to say. I'm in the autumn of my life. And we all know I've already had three open heart surgeries. I'm like, Yanni, if I could just get out one last time.

That was a hypothetical. Steve hasn't had open heart surgery. No, but listen. Yeah. I'm an old, old, old, old guy. And everybody can't believe i'm still alive and i'm like if you could just get me out in the marsh one more time yeah you know it could that it calm my soul and and that's how i dream of passing you probably want

to preface the haunt at breakfast being like hey and by the way if i keel over while you guys are shooting just keep shooting and i i could, even if I didn't say that, I could picture that there I sat and I'm like, oh, Yanni, just to be back out. Like, I don't ever want to go home. And all of a sudden I go into the eternal slumber, right? I could see how you guys might, you know, shoot a few volleys, work a couple flocks in a largely symbolic sort of way before boating me back into town. I could see that. Well, now here's another factor. Taking Steve's advice and getting off the lake, knowing that if you didn't, he has a wife back home that would just hate you the rest of her life for not immediately pulling that body off the lake.

You're not probably going to talk to her that much more anyway. It's like, you know what I mean? It depends on how much you planned on hanging out with her after your buddy died. Good point. Yeah, this seems like irrational confidence from these duck hunters that were probably made up of like a banker, a welder, and an insurance salesman. They were like, yep, he's gone. Nothing we can do.

Nothing we can do about now. I'm not pulling decoys. It's opening day. That wasn't how Don Johnson described him, but it's plausible. Okay. You had another final observation about your time exploring obituaries is that you find that people will hope when sending off a loved one yeah yeah into death that they'll hope that the person does what in the afterlife send Send a big buck their way.

I'd never heard that. I tell you, if I... I mean, he wrote about it. No, now I have. That was one of the... Well, you know, Steve's favorite quote of mine is, you know, do you make people stupid?

And that was one of the things that used to just amaze me how many times I got queries and manuscripts over the transom out of the things that used to just amaze me how many times I got, got queries and manuscripts over the transom out of the blue from people with that kind of storyline where the, you know, dad's on the deathbed and, you know, juniors in there, you know, knowing this, this is it. And, and, Hey dad, you know, if you had a chance, send a big buck man way this fall. And like I always think,

yeah, shit, that was my last chance to ask for a favor that once he's on the inside like that. That's why I think it might be a little bit more in jest than. No, no, no. The stories I got, Giannis, the stories that were written and sent to me that I never published, these were those guys' heartfelt sentiments.

They were pitching you this while you read Deer and Deer Hunting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And some stories you can get from deer hunters along those kind of themes really are touching. Some of them were really well-written, and maybe somebody can pull that one off

and make it a well-written request, but the guys I heard from, I never, I just never could quite buy it. Yeah. But you know, it can't be like, you know, have him send world peace my way. Right. Right. It's not going to be like, you can't have it be like a huge thing.

And you remember the hunting times together. Yeah. It's not going to cost, you know, it's not a, it's not a humongous miracle. Yeah. It's not going to cost, you know, it's not a, it's not a humongous miracle. Yeah. It's like a, in the scheme of miracles, it's pretty mild. Yeah. To be like, you know, I don't want to over ask here. I don't want to be like a prima donna.

You know, I'm not like asking for wealth, great wealth and, and, and fame. Just if you could, you know, just a nice buck, like a nice buck. I mean, how bad, like, you know, how bad could that be? You only got these queries if dad followed through and sent them a big buck, right? Like it was never that son of a bitch, like no big buck came by me this fall. I don't think we ever, you know,

I don't recall that anyone actually had the big ultimate buck come by. Oh. You know, these are typically just wishes and stuff, I think. I don't recall ever being a guy, I don't recall anyone ever attributing a big buck they got to that, to the deathbed wish. That's helpful. I thought you were getting like a follow-up. No, no, these are just, I think they just kind of tend to be a sentimental story.

And I thought it's the kind of story that, let's see, now, if Steve Rinella were to write that kind of story, I think I'd probably buy the story because I thought it'd the kind of story that's kind of let's say now if steve ranella were to write that kind of story i think i'd probably buy the story because i thought it'd probably be pretty well written but typically the stories i got you know they weren't they weren't that they weren't convincing so i never never bought any of them i was listening to a elk calling instructional tape i just switched so now when i drive around i have an elk call my mouth step turkey call my mouth um and there was a peculiar passage that the narrator. Wow, I'm impressed, man. That I'm getting into it this early?

Yeah, turkey season's not even over. Yeah, but I'm moving on in my mind, man. Moving on in my mind. That's what I got right. Are you frustrated by the turkey calling? Not at all. No? No, I just was like.

You're just ready. It's May, man. I mean. Yeah. You know? Before we know it. Yeah, you know, before we know it. Yeah. It was like, before we know it. Um, in this instructional thing I'm listening to, there's a, there's a, there's a thing that the man, there's a audio, uh, recording of a, of an actual hunt.

And you hear a guy kills a bull elk with a bow and you hear him talk about how, and he names the, the bow, the bow manufacturer. Okay. Names the bow manufacturer by name and talks about the, the, the lightning speed with which the bull died. And he says, I couldn't have asked the lord to help me kill it any quicker which i thought was like a uh just a strange observation that you would that like that that would be a ask yeah that you know like i could even if i had like if i had asked the Lord to kill it faster, he couldn't have helped me. This bow killed it so effectively that even divine intervention couldn't have added anything to this bow's power. I don't know if that's how he meant it to come across, but it just struck me as a...

That's how it could be read. I remember it's like, I appreciated the acknowledgement, but then the more I thought about it, I'm like, that is a weird commentary on your perception of the Lord's power. That like this bow is a very swift killer. That person did not think it that far through. Didn't think it that far through. Didn't think of that far through. But I think that's one of the fun things of writing and editing is when people write something like that, when you realize it can be read in a way that might not make you look like you want to be viewed,

you know, and so, yeah, but I think that makes it into print. Now, Pat, there's one last thing we wanted to talk about. Okay. If you're into it. Oh, I'm into it. The wrath of bird watchers.

Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part

of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can

get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all.

Yeah. As an audience, when you write about wildlife. One of the fun things of writing an outdoor column all these years is that, you know, you start figuring out there's certain different groups of people that are reading you. And I learned a long time ago that bird watchers, they can write about a cool thing about birds you've observed. They appreciate it because I think they don't, they probably see a whole lot of things written about different birds. So one thing I've always liked doing over the years is just writing basically backyard observations about birds I see

and then getting into how woodpeckers are able to hammer away all day and not have their brains get rattled and look into this kind of stuff. And so any time I write about birds, I always get really nice feedback from bird watchers. You'll throw a little nod to the bird world. hammer away all day and not have their brains get rattled and look into this kind of stuff and so anytime i write about birds i always get really nice feedback from bird watchers you'll throw a little nod to the bird world oh definitely yeah probably every couple months typically i'll write something about birds that's good as an outdoor columnist because another observation i like your your quote about how deer make people stupid but yet another observation about being a naturalist, being a hunter and being a naturalist. And you were observing how in this day and age,

you can have great hunters who are horrible naturalists. Oh, definitely. And you're saying that some of the best deer hunters you know couldn't tell you what kind of tree their deer stand is hanging in. Oh, definitely. I can name names, but I can't do that, you know. So to mitigate that or to counteract that, you'll now and then write a piece about birds now and then.

That's the only reason to write about it. I don't want to be like one of those guys. Because like, you got your game birds and you got your Tweety birds. Steve Rinella sees right through the bullshit. No, actually, growing up, I had a grandmother who lived with us who was into birds. And so I learned, I could identify a lot of birds at a young age, but then I kind of peaked out. And so anyway, I learned over the years, writing my column, that anything to you write about birds and the natural stuff about birds, the bird watchers adore you. I get these nice emails and letters from different women that, older women typically, and other bird watchers love me.

But then along the way, because I'm a hunter, a number of times I've written about three things that I learned piss off bird watchers. Really piss them off. Go on. The first one is to suggest something like, why aren't you guys paying your way on the conservation front? Why don't you tell those binocular companies

that they should be getting federal excise tax on all their binoculars that they sell for bird watching? Why don't you put an excise tax on bird feed? These kind of things like the hunters have done and the gun owners have done to try to build into the conservation fund. Boy, they don't like that. They really come after you.

And what is their, what is their, why do they find that so distasteful? Because they aren't, typically what they'll say is they, they don't think they're harming anything out there. So why should they be paying extra for it? They're not consumptive. They're not consumptive. They're not consumptive.

They don't use that term, but they look at themselves as being, we're just observers of nature and you guys are takers of nature. So you should be paying something for it. Okay. You know, that's been,

you know, I'm sure there's other gut things that just bug them about the idea. A lot of it too is just, I don't want to pay any more taxes. No, I could, yeah, I could, I could, I could counter that argument, but that's, that's a fair argument to throw out there.

So that, so that's what, so that's one thing that pisses off bird watchers. The other thing that pisses off bird watchers is, is Wisconsin until the year 2000, thereabouts, did not have a hunting season on morning doves. And so we had a big fight, and eventually we passed a morning dove season.

And because I'm a hunter, and I wrote about why I thought it was very biologically easy to have a bird season, a hunting season on morning doves, but why not? You know, we hunt. The thing I always would point out is that name one thing we hunt. The thing I always would point out is that name one thing we hunt that isn't pretty.

Cause they always say, well, it's such a pretty bird. It has a beautiful call. I think, well, what, what do we hunt that, um, isn't pretty? And are you saying that we should only kill ugly things? That's kind of elitist.

You know, you might just kill the ugly stuff. That sounds pretty rotten. Yeah. And so I never, never bought that argument. So anyway, they didn't like me for that, and I get a lot of hate mail about that. And the one that's still going to this day in Wisconsin and parts of the country is, you know,

anytime you talk about having a hunting season on sandhill cranes. Oh, yeah. Oh, vicious stuff that comes in. You know, just the kind of stuff that I thought, man, I thought these people loved me. And now they're calling me names and just beating the crap out of me. And the thing is, as an outdoor columnist,

I'm kind of used to people taking shots at me, so it wasn't that big a deal. But I thought it was really interesting how the same people who will love me for writing about birds will turn so quickly and just really come after me. And, you know, I'd say just as viciously as, as the most crappy deer hunter, you know, that came to real venom. morning dove and say because on the morning dove and sandhill crane issue why you get a lot of resistance is it tends to be very difficult for people to accept um the onset of hunting for something that you weren't hunting previously no matter how short the window that you weren't hunting it so sandhill cranes were once abundant. Hunting was widespread. Due to unregulated hunting and other habitat issues, we had like a great diminishment in Sandhill cranes.

And now we're coming along and recovering them pretty effectively. Yeah. But it was that period when you couldn't, that just gets fixed in people's minds. So when you point, there's a perceived scarcity. So when you point out that like, you know, now we have as many and we're going to add it to the list of dozens of things dozens of species of game animals and fur bears that you're allowed to

hunt we're going to add it to this big giant list that you probably couldn't even make it's so many of you wouldn't be able to list them all we're going to add it to that big list people get real upset yeah like morning doves in my home state they still don't have a morning dove season yeah because like it's like it's just this thing where you know you don't and even states where that they take up there's like a a gap in hunting you might hunt black bears for a long time numbers get down they end the hunting season numbers come back up they go to reinstate it's very difficult to overcome that. More so than people that wanted to take things that can presently be hunted and make them not able to hunt.

It's just hard to get things up and running and hunting. You've heard people talk about it with the elk reintroductions in the east. It's a thing that they want to make very clear, even in the onset of the reintroductions, is that we're going to do this. And when numbers get high, we're going to hunt. Because they've had resistance where all of a sudden there's this new animal on the landscape,

put there with the intention of that it would be hunted. And then later people are like, oh, what? Right? They weren't involved in the reintroduction. They didn't spend any money on it. But now that it happened, they're kind of like, what? It's like, no, no. We spent the money to put them there with the intention that we would hunt the elk that we put there.

Yeah. Well, you know, when it comes to our situation with San Diego cranes, I'm never expecting it to pass in my lifetime. But I think when I can have a good conversation with some bird watchers who oppose the hunt, I asked them, well, really, have you seen anything different in the morning dove situation in the last 20 years since you started hunting morning doves? Have you ever even seen anybody hunting morning doves? Because typically, you know, hunting is not a real, if it weren't for Blaze Orange,

most people wouldn't even know that there's a hunter out there during deer season. Because it's just, you know, I mean, yeah, our guns make a lot of noise, but how many people really notice? And so I just that's my point to them is that you know if you had a sandhill crane season you wouldn't notice it it'd just be it'd be so well regulated you're not going to endanger the species it'd just be you know people like me could go out and enjoy a good meal from a sandhill crane enjoy a new kind of hunting experience.

And, you know, so what's the harm, you know, really? Yeah. Most people do not, most people do not realize that the morning dove is the most harvested game bird, most harvested anything in this country. I think that American hunters kill around 10 million morning doves. Is that right?

A year. Yeah. But here's the thing. The numbers, I don't want to say that the numbers are artificially inflated but we have a lot of mourning does because of human activities yeah like our agriculture like our agricultural crop systems have mean that we have far more mourning doves than we would have in the absence of people it's one of those species that really wins it really wins around human manipulations on the landscape so we create a giant amount of that recently on some of the hunts we've been on where where were we maybe in texas

recently and what else we hunted turkeys recently montana where you just see like a pair here yeah pair there you know and they're sort of just like part of everything else but if you go to like a place that was like known for it and where the birds are really working the sunflower crops you know you're talking about thousands you know that really that really makes that example true when we were kids we would hunt them you weren't allowed to hunt them but we'd hunt them on power lines because you could look down the power line and see morning doves way down you'd kind of mark how many posts you had to go this was the pellet guns yeah you'd mark how many

posts you had to go then you'd go in the woods and parallel the power lines counting down the posts and then you'd belly crawl into the edge of the cut hoping to get within pellet rifle range of a dove on the wire did you get many that way no yeah no but then my brother-in-law had a real souped up pellet rifle that was very hard it was a 10 pump and by the time you got to the 10th pump, dude, it was hard to pump. And that offered like enough, a little bit of a range over our plastic stocked ones. And so that was a little bit helpful, but no, it's not a very effective way to hunt morning doves. But we were raised to believe that it was a great injustice that Michigan had no morning dove season.

And so that was almost an act of civil disobedience. My father viewed it as like, you know, yeah, civil disobedience. Yeah. That you would pursue some doves. My dad had a real problem with the American robin. You know, it's our state bird in Wisconsin, but dad always hated the robin because it would breed a strawberry patches more than any other bird.

You know, because it's such a big fruit eater and he, and he, I don't, you know, I don't recall him ever shooting because he shot a lot of birds off his strawberry patches, but I don't recall him ever shooting a robin, but he did not like them. Oh, it was, man, we would have gotten killed if we touched a robin.

Yeah. But my father had a lot of uh wrath for blue jays which he identified as being robin killers was that yeah because they take so in honor of the our state bird as well was the robin and in defense of the robin which he liked a lot it was in his mind there was a perpetual war against blue jays which were robin which he liked a lot it was in his mind there was a perpetual war against blue jays which were robin killers really he felt that the ruthlessness ruthlessness with which a blue jay would go in and eat baby robins not does eggs but kill and eat the baby robins that um no punishment was too great yeah for a blue jay and he would devote a lot of his winter to um

ridding our yard of blue jays and they would melt out of the snow in the spring i now i just like i don't let my kid i don't let my kid get involved in any kind of stuff like that yeah i think there's a famous um autobahn painting of a blue jay raiding a nest it almost looks like one of those dark war scenes where there's a evil person killing the babies you know and that kind of what's that imagery you know oh yeah you know everybody gets excited you watch a robin setting up shop and it's like the eggs and then one day there's one in there ripping them apart yeah but you know where i realized a few years ago where I was not meant to be a wildlife photographer was there was a low hanging Orioles nest over my driveway. And I went out there with my nice camera one day to get a picture of the bird's nest because it's a beautiful Orioles nest hanging down only about 15 feet up. While I'm focusing on the basket of that Orioles nest, I notice a blue jay hop onto the branch about 10 feet away.

And I'm kind of thinking, what's this blue jay doing up by that nest? Just stupid not thinking it through. The blue jay hops down and my camera is up. My camera's focused. Blue jay reaches into the I, like my camera is up. My camera's focused. Blue jay reaches into the nest, pulls out an egg. And I, instead of snapping the picture like a photographer would do, I lower the camera slightly to look at it in awe and go,

what the hell did it just do? And then when I finally realized it was going out, it was too late, it was gone. So I have a picture of this blue jay out on, you know, a focus off on the side as he's hopping out. And then when he actually grabs the thing and my finger should be pressing the button, I'm too busy looking at him to try to figure out what he's up to. Do you remember in the old days people would have, you know,

like roadside attractions where you had animals? It's kind of more common than like, remember going to a place where a guy had a couple bears for some reason yeah yeah definitely definitely he had a couple bears in a fence and you just when you're on a road trip driving around he'd like he'd have a sign like come see the bears yeah i remember being at one of those places and i remember there's because he my dad had pictures of it he liked it so much. There's a big don't feed the bears sign. But he reached in and gave a bear a Tootsie Roll. And the bear got the Tootsie Roll stuck on its teeth.

And my dad took a bunch of pictures of this bear trying to dislodge a Tootsie Roll on the fence. It just tickled him endlessly. But what he saw when he looked at animals was just different than what i see when i look at animals in some way yeah you know like i just don't feel that impulse when i see it's like don't feed the bears i'm the kind of guy's like oh you know must be good reason yeah but he'd be like well why not maybe if i feed it i'll find out why you're not supposed to I've probably told you before but I've told you and I've told Randy Newberg

how much I like when you talk about your fathers and the stories of your you know the observations they would make and the things you'd hear as a kid because I think I have those with my dad where I think what the hell is he thinking but it's fun stuff because it's different eras and different ways of looking at life.

I enjoy that story. Oh, man, I sit around wondering all the time. I'll say stuff to my kids now and then, or we'll do something now and then, where I'm like, someday you'll say, you know what's so weird? One time my dad, right, they'll tell those. They already have some.

Well, definitely. As I say, my sons-in-law already have Pat Durkin stories, things that they, I have a little sign at the end of my driveway. It says, deer hunters point to some kind of sign that we picked up somewhere. And then underneath is just the Durkens, you know. And so my son-in-law, Matthew, refers to Deer Hunter's Point as DHP. And every time something comes up where there's a little, maybe a disagreement in the family,

he'll kind of look at one of my other sons-in-law, like James, and say, that's not how we do things here at DHP. I'm the patriarch of the family now, you know. Yeah. With 32 stuffed deer in your house. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, and an elk and a couple of pronghorns.

Pat, you mentioned earlier, like, uh, how you get feedback from birders or fishermen or hunters. I would fall out of my chair if someone sent me like a handwritten letter on something that I wrote for the meat eater or wherever. I imagine that's not the case with you though. Like, do you get a lot of handwritten letters? I still do.

They're always really old people, you know, in their eighties. Like how frequently? Yeah. people in their 80s. Like how frequently? Well, you know, when my newspaper column was at mass circulation, I'd get them pretty regularly. Yeah. And I never knew what to expect when I had an envelope come in with that, you know, when they're getting really old and their hands aren't shaking now, and you never know what's going to be inside. But the thing I can say that's true now is that it was true back when I started writing, you know,

40 years ago, 35 years ago, is that you get more good feedback than bad. You know, you get some real- Overall or through handwritten notes? I've never gotten a negative handwritten note. I've gotten some really nasty handwritten ones. I think some of my nasties were back in the 90s. So, you know, that's one thing I've noticed. I don't want to turn this into a writing workshop,

but one thing I've noticed in my writing career is as I've gotten older, I've gotten less of the vehement, hateful stuff, except from birders. The birders just don't, they don't care how old you are. The deer hunters. They know no restraint.

Yeah, the deer hunters around Wisconsin, I think the ones who read my stuff kind of know where I stand on stuff. And I think I've kind of stood the test of time where I'm still writing after all these years. So I think they might just kind of say, well, I don't agree with him, but I read them.

But you can find threads, a lot of those, especially like bull hunting sites that are just basically bashing me on various issues in in Wisconsin forums you know and I used to have I would say I thought you were my friend people send me links to that to that stuff as if I want to read all these people bashing on me I have friends that do that yeah they'll send me nice screenshots of people like shit talking to me. I'm always like, thanks, bro. Yeah.

It's good to know. Made my day. I'll sleep better tonight. Yeah. I'll sleep better tonight knowing that's out there. Yeah, my wife won't read, won't open my, see like. She won't open your mail because someone's going to put some anthrax or rice. That could be too. Yeah, if she sees a letter come in without a return

address label, she'll never open it. Because those are the ones that usually are the worst. There's got to be a level of passion involved. Yeah. To like sit down and write you a letter. Yeah. About something you wrote.

Yeah. But it's, I can't predict when I, I really can't. I have a big envelope where I used to put, because you used to get a lot more of it. can't. I have a big envelope where I used to put, cause you used to get a lot more of it. Yeah. And I had a big envelope where I would stick letters into it, but that's kind of slowing down. Yeah.

Slowing way down. Yeah. Cause now you can just like, there's so many ways to just really quickly tell someone how much you don't like them. Yeah. People are like, people are excited to tell you that they don't like you. They don't want to wait. They don't want to imagine you being sad days from now when they

could make you sad right now they're like dude i'm i want like lightning vengeance man i'm not gonna i might not even be mad in a week when he gets the letter but i can just feel now that i can lash out well and that's that's the thing was i think it's always intriguing about that is that yeah you know most people when they get when they're really ticked off about something, they'll write it down. Then at least for me, when I start getting that way, by the time I got, got, got down to where I could be sending it, I go back and I delete everything.

Why would I, why would I want us to just keep this thing going, you know? And, and plus there's plus there's a guiding thought and I really at times drive it into myself where I don't forget it is that this, I quote it all the time, Samuel Johnson in the 1700s, great philosopher writer wrote, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. So when you take time out of your schedule

when you're a freelance writer to write someone some stupid response this long to something that he sent you, you're killing yourself. You're taking money out of your pocket. You should be putting that time into something that pays your bills. Why are you trying to change this guy's mind? And so I was thinking, no, you're a writer. Don't waste your writing on this guy or this woman it just doesn't make any sense okay

got any final thoughts that was a good one right there that's but you're telling Pat that that isn't concluding no I'm telling you that that was a good

concluding thought I liked it that's it we'll come back around to you Spencer uh quick concluder

if you like Pat's contributions on the podcast i like this man this is great like the connections you're drawing you're gonna like him even better on the website go to the media.com click on contributors pat writes an article every two weeks for us it's some of the best stuff that we've put out thanks spencer check out his work there uh you'll be entertained you will not be disappointed thank you, good research-based stuff, man. Thank you. You guys make a lot of good phone calls.

And you have an ear for the counterintuitive. I've never been told that before. Thank you. I think you kind of like things where everybody sort of makes an assumption about, oh, that's got to be what it is. And then you'll be like, you know what? Oh, yeah. I know that it sure seems like that's what it is, but the truth is a little different than what you think, than what you've come to an immediate conclusion.

You know, what's fun about when you go into research type stuff and watch researchers present their stuff and read about their thought process. So often, these are typically smart people, but so often they get into the research and realize their assumptions were all wrong. And they've proven it themselves now that that didn't turn out the way I did it. I can just think of, I keep going back to Tom Heberlein, but he wrote a whole book basically about his research as a rural sociologist, different things, different assumptions he had about different topics. So there's wolves up in the UP or flooding victims out in Western states, how they would be responding to different things. And so often his hypothesis was the, by the actual results.

Yeah. And I think that's, that's where like, you know, I don't care who it is. You're talking about people and people's motivations. You get into people's motivations and why they did something. Like, man, you're playing a fire there. You don't know. Most of us can't explain our own motivations, why we do certain things. So when you start making those assumptions about people out in the public eye or, you know, whether

they're scientists or people saying you're pushing an agenda, think, oh heck, most of us, we don't know. If we have an agenda, we don't know what it is. You know, we just, we kind of operate the way we do and who knows where that shit comes from. You think people are, make assumptions about people who are in the public eye?

All the time, yeah. People like a good story about what an asshole some famous person actually is. They like that better than what a good guy. You could tell someone, I could tell you a story about a celebrity who turns out they're a pretty good guy. Or I could tell you a story about a celebrity who turns out they're a pretty good guy, or I could tell you a story about a celebrity who's actually an asshole. Nine out of 10 people are going to take the ladder. And people can't wait to tell you that shitty story. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, I don't know what it is, but I look at all these, well, all these different people in history. I don't care if you're talking about presidents or obscure senators. You look at it and you're like, yeah, but they're, and the net result is they're pretty cool people. They might've had their problems here and there, but I look at my own father that way a lot, where I grew up really just puzzled and scared of him at times,

just really wondering what the hell's his problem? But then as time goes on, you look back on his life and you give a eulogy like I did when he died and you realize, I think this is a philosopher, is it Pascal? I think it is. P-A-S-C-A-L. I don't know if I'm- There is a philosopher named Pascal. I think he said, I think it's him.

I might be misquoting, getting the wrong guy saying this, but he said, a man does not show his greatness by being at one extreme. He shows greatness by being at both extremes at the same time. I like that. And I think that's my dad. You know, that you could be this just borderline physically abusive. And then an hour later, track you down and have a real heartfelt conversation with you. Where later in life, I figured out, you know, he lost his temper. He realized he lost his temper, but he cares

enough about how, what he just did to you to come out and track you down and try to smooth things over a little bit. I hope my kids remember that, like the three times I did that this weekend. That's why I always tell my kids throughout the day, I'm like, take note of the expert parenting I'm doing right now.

Someday you'll like to talk about this. Definitely. One time, this is my concluder. I had just moved. We had moved my family and I was in a, we weren't in a house yet. We're just in a hotel. And I'm there with my, just me and My wife's not there. And I'm just

there with my three kids. And we're leaving on a long trip for work. So I wake up and my kids are all sleeping in the hotel room. Like one of them's on the floor and two are in the bed. And it was very sad for me. Like we just moved. They're kind of in all this this they're in this uncertain space and i need to like slip out to go to the airport and our babysitter is like waiting at the door so that at four in the morning i can walk out and she can come in and my wife still hasn't gotten to town yet and i'm like feeling very conflicted about leaving my children right just like that we had invited this chaos and how they might perceive this. And Yanni and I go to the airport. It's early, five, six in the morning.

And we run into a buddy of ours whose friend has just fallen to his death in the mountains. And a guy comes up and he wants to take a picture. He's like a fan of the show. We do the picture and then it's not an hour later, get a letter,

get an email about what an asshole I am, how really let him down and seemed like I was distracted. But the Yanni was cool. Yeah. like I was distracted. But the Yanni was cool. Dude, you know, you're walking in on a life in progress at six in the morning. You don't know the context. Right.

I'm sorry that I let you down. I have a friend. I'm sorry that I was distracted. I have a friend. By things about the loss of money. You know what I mean? It's like. I have a friend that knows I like Gordon Lightfoot's music,

not just the famous songs. I've seen him live twice. Yeah. And I like his stuff. And, but one. Dude, if you don't. Of course you do. Are you telling me there's a person out there who could have a problem with

the record of the Edmund Fitzgerald? I'm about ready to tell you a guy who has a problem with Gordon Lightfoot. I'll kick his ass. I will kick his ass. Go ahead. Yeah. My friend Tom, well, actually, my friend, that Tom is now deceased, but Tom, one time when he heard how much I liked Lightfoot, he says, I'll tell you something. Sundown. Can I sing while you talk? Sundown. Okay, I'll tell you. Sundown. Can I sing while you talk? Go ahead.

Sundown. Okay, I'll keep talking. While Tom was on this pier in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and a lot of people come sailing off the Great Lakes in the Sturgeon Bay. Oh, yeah. Well, one time Tom's on this pier in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and who comes walking down the pier toward him but Gordon Lightfoot.

Nice. He had, you know, he was a sailor. And Tom's friend who works at the marina knew Lightfoot enough to where he could introduce him. And as he's coming close, this guy starts talking to Lightfoot, wanting to introduce him to Tom. And Lightfoot just walks right by him

without even acknowledging him. And Tom, to his dying day, didn't like the guy because of that. And I said, I said to him, well, Tom, for all you know, he was just in the bar and this is back in the days of pay phone. And I said, maybe somebody's called and someone died in his life.

Maybe his wife got caught cheating on him or who knows what. Maybe he's in the middle of an aneurysm. Yeah. I mean, who knows? You know, I said, why would you think he would, why you take that so personally? You know what I mean?

The guy had something on his mind. Son? Yeah. When I saw Gord, both times I saw him, he knows that like a lot of people are there for the rack, especially in Michigan. That's big shit, right? Definitely.

Yeah. That's big. That like every Michigander. Powerful stuff. especially in Michigan that's big shit right definitely that's big that like every Michigander powerful stuff every Michigander who has a any kind of right to call themselves

as such carries a has a weight in their heart yeah about the record of Evan Fitzgerald yeah

and Gord knows when he's playing Michigan well I saw him in Sioux Ontario which is the sister city to Sioux Michigan

and then I saw him in Traverse City, Michigan. And he knows that everyone's there to watch him do the rec. And a lot of them are going to split afterward. But he's come to peace with that. And he puts that in an appropriate place. He doesn't wait until the bitter end. He doesn't wait for an encore.

He doesn't want to lead his audience on. He doesn't hit it with them too early where they're not ready. And he knows where to put it in the act. And he also knows how to sell people on it. So like when I saw him in Sioux, Ontario, he's up there doing his deal, doing all of it. He's got a lot of hits, right? But he's up there doing his deal.

And we're in a big hockey stadium. And all of a sudden he says, I can't remember what number, what year it was, but all of a sudden he gets up and he goes, it was 20 years ago this November, whatever. Some cryptic thing like that. And people just come out of their seats. Yeah. Yeah. People come out of their seats.

Yeah. Yeah. Whoa! You know, everybody's so excited. He does the wreck of the Evan Fitzgerald, takes him out 11 minutes. And then people just kind of split, man. I've never seen that happen. I've seen him... I'm not kidding you. I've seen

Gordon Light for at least 10 times, and I've never seen people split up after he sings that song. Really? Yeah, I never have. But maybe I'm not paying attention. It's a great jukebox song. Yeah, you get your money's worth. That and American Pie Pie back to back.

20 minutes. Yeah, dude. 50 cents, you get three hours of listening. You know, the Dandy Warhols do a cover of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It's not very good. Yanni, got any concluders? Oh, man.

It's going to be hard to come on the heels of all this good stuff. I heard this quote. That's a great song. Pat talking about writing to, you know, wasting your time writing a bad response to somebody. That hits home. And it got me to thinking about how my father-in-law recently,

he was telling my daughter how he just doesn't fight with anybody anymore and doesn't get angry because it's just a waste of time you know and he's over it he's at that point in life yeah where it's like freaking you know you just like time just gets shorter and shorter and there's less and less of it and you just like i'm not gonna spend time um doing that anymore but then I think it might've been on NPR over the weekend. I heard this quote and I really liked it. I think I should share it. It's a Sam Clements quote. You know that guy? Some folks call him Mark Twain. Yeah. There isn't time so brief as life for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, an instant, so to speak, for that.

That's not Mark Twain. Is it? That doesn't sound like something he'd say. But all Mark Twain did is bicker and call people to account. That's all the Jews did. When did he die? This is 1886. He devoted his entire life to calling people to account.

Maybe this was late in life. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Plus, you can also have a quote that contradicts sort of what you've done in life. Definitely. Yeah. You can picture Mike Tyson being like, you know, you should never punch another person.

Right? And you'd be like, oh, yes. Right? Yeah, sure. How about that? That sounds like, I mean, so often these days when people quote Mark Twain at my antenna go up because I think, oh, Mark Twain's been given

all sorts of quotes that he never said. You know, that one actually sounds like his, the way he spaced it and stuff. I think that probably is a Mark Twain. But there are some. You know, Twain hated Roosevelt. Yeah. Didn't like theain. But Darcy. You know, Twain hated Roosevelt. Yeah. Didn't like the Roosevelt.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, what Twain wrote, I think one of the great, um, criticism of turkey hunting ever written. What? Yeah. God, really?

Don't even tell me. I don't even want to know. I need to read that. He, he thought it was just the, the height, the height of, um, I can't remember what term he used, mean spiritedness to take the wing bone from a turkey and craft it into a call and then fool that bird with its own bone, basically.

And it's an interesting story, but it's really good. I'd like to- I would say, yeah, if you caught a turkey in a live trap and cut its bone out of it, cut its wing off, cut it loose, made a call, called it back in and killed it, yes. But a different turkey's bone, no. I'm going to say we agree with him. Yeah.

Yeah. Can I tell one more from my concluder? Yeah, because you still got a concluder. Yanni tried to rob you of it, but I'm going to let you have it. Is Yanni done? I'm done. Okay. I'm going to rob you of it, but I'm going to let you have it. Is Yanni done? I'm done. Okay. I'm going to tell another.

Unless you find the turkey quote. It's actually a whole short story. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. It's worth reading though. I'm going to tell you another cool Rick Krueger story I thought about.

This is the sonar enthusiast. The sonar enthusiast. Yeah. I thought about this when, I think, is it Ben Long wrote the piece this last week or so on trout sniffing dogs? Yes. The fact that you get to train dogs to sniff out trout and the species of trout even while they're in the water. Well, Rick Kruger, I never knew this until I talked to him.

He was telling me that these cadaver dogs, I always thought cadaver dogs basically were operated on land and that, you know, that was the only place they could be of any use. But he says he had a case, this is only about five, 10 years ago now, a young man from Kaukauna, Wisconsin was down in Madison in December, early, mid-December for a conference. And he went out drinking. And people who know the Lake Mendota structure, there's a hotel on the southwestern end of Lake Menona.

You can see it from across different parts of the lake. Well, this guy was out drinking, got drunk, and he banged on some woman's window. He's a 26-year-old guy and wanted help basically. I don't know if he didn't know where he was, but the woman kind of freaked out and didn't know what he wanted, so she didn't answer him. But then she saw him kind of shuffling off toward the lake. And they think what happened was he tried taking a short cut across the lake on the ice to the hotel where he was staying.

Never made it there. He was missing. And the lakes were partially frozen. So they're pretty sure he tried going across the lake. That's the direction this woman saw him going. Well, they went out there and they had these cadaver dogs. And in like 33 feet of water, these cadaver dogs, I guess when they smell what they're out there, you know, trying to find, they'll sit down. I guess they just sit.

And here they are in the spot and they sat. No. Yeah. 33 feet of water. And that's when I said, really? I didn't know this. And he goes, yeah. And so the police marked that GPS unit unit and they could not because of weather

and because of conditions they couldn't go down and check it out and so they so rick got those coordinates of where they were those cadaver dogs marked that spot in lake monona and that was like in december come april the lakes are free of ice rick got his boat ready to go, got it all fired up and got verified the GPS coordinates, went out there. The very first pass finds what he thinks is a curled up body in the bottom of the lake right there. And so he pulls his camera down as his procedures. He brought his camera down and he thinks he could see

in that little camera viewfinder what looked like a boot or a shoe or something. And he wasn't quite certain though. So he went home, put it on his computer, blew it up. Definitely that guy. And they went out there and went down and got him. Wow. Yeah. But then.

But you can't rule out. Okay. That dog was a psychic You just I mean This is why your We assume This is why your podcast Is so good

We assume That he smelled it But I think he might have Picked up on that That unmistakable Juju That comes off of a Well Then My So my footnote To that one though that unmistakable juju that comes off of a.

Well, then my, so my footnote to that one though, when I, when I questioned Rick on this, these dogs have that ability to be able to pick out a scent 33 feet down in the bottom of the lake. He said, well, if you want, if you think that's impressive, he said over on Lake Mondota, not too far away from there, there's these, up behind the UW, University of Wisconsin campus, there's this nice, cool ridge along the lake. And up there are some old Indian mounds. And they were out there with the cadaver dogs for some reason doing some, probably looking for someone else.

And these dogs kept sitting at a certain spot out there. And the only thing they could come to conclude was that somehow whatever scent is coming off those mounds up there. Oh. These dogs are picking it up. There's something up there that they could pick up.

And that's why they kept sitting right there. That's interesting. Yeah. And, but they might have been psychic about that too. So who knows? Well, Pat Durkin, it's always a pleasure to have you on.

Thank you. I like how you always come. You got like the things we need to cover. Makes our job easy. Most enjoyable, Steve. Thanks for having me. Hey, OnXH 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.