The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 251: Buckman Juice on the Back 40

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Clay Newcomb and Mark Kenyon.Topics discussed: Clay's sleep-to-hunt equation; Steve's distrust of men-only clubs; The One Shot Antelope Hunt catches up to reality; does Steve qualify as a ringer?; the saga of Bruno the bear; the homing instinct; loving Paul Revere, whether he road or not; requests for radio collar data; the survival of outliers; the bounty of the Back 40 plus 24 bonus acres; all the things you do to renew life on the land; turning sameness into a bunch of differentness; Doug's lack of tolerance for backward hats; Buckman Juice; naming your kids after chewing tobacco products; naming all the bucks and the drop tine Spencer Buck; expanding your idea leaving selfish hunting behind; The MeatEater Podcast episode with the QDMA; donating the land; watch "The Back40" here; 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.

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Alright, we're joined... I hate to say this, people. I hate to say it, but we're joined. I hate to say this, people. I hate to say it, but we're joined remotely. It's like the COVID. We're joined remotely by Clay Newcomb. Hey, Steve. And Mark, Back 40 Kenyon. Howdy.

Clay, how you doing, man? I'm doing good. Doing very good. Mark, are you well rested right now? Finally, for the first time in about a month, I do feel rested. It's been a busy spell here, so the last two days I got to sleep in and really enjoyed that. Like you being like a, you know, kind of like a whitetail rut fanatical kind of guy. There's still raging around though.

So why are you resting now? Yeah. So it's kind of just i'm not completely resting i'm gonna start hunting again tomorrow but i needed to take a couple days because the last 30 i've hunted 28 of the last 30 days so starting october 18th that was when it all got crazy so gotta see my wife and kids a little bit get a little sleep and then uh and then yeah i'll get back after it i need a good job like a job like you got mark i'm work i'm still getting the regular working too don't worry it's just after dark it's amazing what one day of sleeping

in will do for you after you've been pounding the daylight hunting. I've got an equation. I think one morning of sleeping in makes up for 10 days of hunting. It's amazing what one little break can do. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that's true. You can come back pretty ragged and recover pretty quick, and it almost makes you think like you could build a system out of it. And it's worth it.

I used to think that I would feel really guilty if I wasn't hunting every single possible moment I could, but I think that you get that eventual point of diminishing returns where you go 10 days straight and you've just lost focus and you've lost some edge. If you get that one morning, it's totally worth sacrificing four hours of hunting to get the much, you know, much more effective seven more days after that i think uh the thing that messes with me about it is all the there there's a lot of really compelling research um that sleeping is uh real real good for you and that there's possible links and i usually hate when people say there's possible links between you know this and that but um early onset dimension stuff man from not sleeping enough like you need to do it and i used to not do it much and when i did i was mostly kind of like sleeping like like a lot of times they kind of hung over and whatnot now i try to really prioritize getting enough sleep do you know what your magic number is a lot of people kind of feel like they find that sweet spot of how much they need every night.

Yeah, but I'm embarrassed to say. It's eight hours, dude. You don't need to be embarrassed about that. Yeah, eight hours. Hey, did you guys catch this news item out of Wyoming? In Wyoming, they have... Are you guys familiar with the one-shot antelope hunt? Yeah, I know that.

I'm an alumni, an alum of the one-shot. So for 80 years in Lander, Wyoming, the governor of... So for 80 years in a row, I think it's been like, what, 16 governors or something have been involved in this? They host this antelope hunt and you have these, like,

it's very, uh, in, in describing it, it can sound a little compromised, but it's like this, uh, you have these teams,

right? And the governor hosts it. It raises money for some habitat improvement work. Um, the governor hosts it and all these groups come out, and you make these little teams. And the teams go out to hunt antelope. And they even get special game commission antelope tags, right? The teams come out to hunt antelope,

and you can only shoot once. If you shoot more than once, you're disqualified. So everybody has to shoot one time and get an antelope. And so if your group of three people can go out and fire three shots, one shot for each of you and get an antelope, basically throughout the whole day. There's like a timing element to it, but basically if you can accomplish that and all three people get one with one shot,

you have a very good chance of winning. And they do it in conjunction with a local tribe. And there's all these like banquets and everything. I did this a couple of years ago where I was invited by Colorado's governor. And I went with a former special forces soldier who's on our team. He said he likes to get ringers. So it was me, a special forces guy, and him. And we went out and did this thing now at that time there was starting to

be a lot of like heat a lot of heat on the one shot antelope hunt club because it was dudes only bros only and had been dudes only for 80 years and like usually i do all kinds of things with just guys that just happens to be just guys but i usually uh would shy away from anything meant to be just guys like the minute someone says it's just guys all of a sudden it gives me a creepy feeling like anything like just for men or like a men's club or a men's group i'm like home yeah why you mean like if i wanted to bring my super good buddy who's a woman she can't come it's against the rule it just strikes me so weird right yeah i'm surprised that was still the case. Well, with a lot of old stuff that's been going on a long time,

like, I honestly, honestly didn't put too much thought into it. Because there's so much, like, culturally, there's so many old institutions that are dudes only that it's almost like, it's not like it's, it's beginning to stand out. But for a long time, it's not like it's stand it's beginning to stand out but for a long time it didn't like stand out because my old man uh like growing up my old man belonged to but he's big he liked to go drink at the vfw after he ice fished and that wasn't men only but at that time it was men only and then he belonged to a thing called the Wise Men, like a philanthropic group that raised money for the Y.

And you had to be a dude to be a wise man. And then his church group was for dudes only. Like his particular group within the church was a dude only group. Like if a woman wanted to go they would like not let her go so it was very it's like very to me right or wrong very normal appearing normal feeling to have like these gender exclusive things i didn't pay much attention to it, but when I went, I was just the, the buzz, uh, there was buzz around two issues.

There was buzz around that. These people that participated got these dedicated tags, which chapped the asses of a lot of people around town who are like, I have to draw the permit. But like, if people go to this, they like get permits. And that, that was irritating to some. Yeah. And was this like a unit that was tough to draw the permit, but, like, if people go to this, they, like, get permits. And that was irritating to some.

Yeah, and was this, like, a unit that was tough to draw otherwise? Yes. Okay. Not tough, but a good unit. A good unit. And it would have been invitation only, I assume. You have to apply. But I was there.

Like, I was invited. So, the governor of Wyoming always has a team. The governor of Colorado always has a team. This has always been the thing. The new governor of Colorado, apparently the first guy in forever. The new

governor of Colorado, his... I gather that his husband is big anti-hunter. So this dude isn't going. And he broke the whole tradition of it being like the governor of Wyoming and the governor of Colorado hunting together. I was there.

I had met Wyoming's. This gets a little complicated i was at a concert i was at an event one time where wyoming's governor matt mead and colorado's governor john hick and looper who are who are friendly and they're on other sides of the political spectrum but they're friendly and respect you know respectful to one another i met them both like we had a cocktail one time at an event where they were being honored for their collaborative work around sage grouse habitat okay so they were being honored as this like democrat and republican who set their differences aside and came together around sage grouse work and habitat work.

So I shot the shit with both of them. And afterward, I was invited to go down and do this deal. So here I get one of these tags and I don't do shit to get it. I just get it. Okay. So someone could look and say, that's not fair but then the wyoming game commission um they put like apparently they put value on this sort of like collaborative conservation thing that has been going on for 80 years and fuels a lot of economic activity in the area

and brings different politicians and figures together to in this like collaborative mood of doing habitat work so right like everything like everything there's two sides of the story but the the women thing was just becoming an issue and they started like somehow they got other commission tags to start like a woman's antelope hunt so now you've created now they had like two of these things at this point now this new story just came out that now for the first time since 1940 women will be allowed to compete in the 2021 lander one-shot antelope hunt. So they combined them. They didn't.

I don't know if they officially combined them or if they got competitive. You know, you remember like when, uh, I don't know if it's like a situation where, uh, remember how the, um, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts gotten a little pissing match because the Boy Scouts were going to let girls into the Boy Scouts and that pissed off the Girl Scouts. Yeah. I don't know enough about what went on. But a lot of people are applauding this, even people who are participating. Another buddy of mine sent this article to me and he

had done the one shot and had a good time there. He was also a governor. He was like on a governor team. He had done the one shot and thought this is a step in the right direction. So it seems like a simpler solution. All women, like you can have all women be on a team or you can have, you know, men, women groups. And the way this thing works is you apply.

So when I was there, there was, I think, a group of firefighters had applied to come down, and they were accepted into it. And like I said, a lot of banquets and elbow rubbing. What's the prize? What do you get if you win this thing? Oh, I think the governor's... I know between the two governors, there's this statue,

this little shitting statue of an antelope, and it lives at the governor's mansion, and it swaps back and forth. And there's a lot of spirited... There's a lot of spirited... You know, rivalry around who did it so when i was on it it went to it it it flew home with the colorado governor so and there's rumors not have it say it again i just said is colorado just not not have a team then this year?

I heard that the governor of Colorado, Hickenlooper always took a lot of heat. You know, could potentially take a lot of heat and took some heat. Hickenlooper had gotten involved in some things that Hickenlooper had gotten involved in some gun control measures that were very unpopular with hunters and gun owners. And when I was there with him, that was an issue. And I thought it was bold of him to go. Right. But he went and took it and tried to, you know, and like that collaborative spirit, even though people being on different sides of the aisle on such an important issue.

Yeah. But yeah, now apparently theado's governor won't go well don't they say that uh some women tend to be better long-range shooters than men when it comes to like sitting on a bench you know if you were to like train man and a woman the same a lot of times that woman would be a better shot. Have you heard that? I mean, I don't know why that wouldn't be true. But no, I don't know that. But I mean,

it wouldn't even kind of surprise me. I've heard that from a guy that had a long-range shooting school. He told me that. I want Danielle Pruitt range shooting school he told me that yeah i want uh danielle pruitt who man her uh have you guys made danielle's um have you guys made danielle's uh whiskey butter sauce heart recipe. Just looking at it, but I haven't tried it yet.

Holy shit, man. Anyhow, she did the, I think she did the woman's one shot. I'm going to ask Danielle. I should have, I'm going to see if Danielle and Corinne are producer. I feel like they should apply and go down, apply for the old boys one. Get a little team going and go on down there yeah shoot the place up can you are you

allowed to ever go back again Steve or is it a once in a lifetime opportunity no I was allowed weirdly yeah you are and there's all. Weirdly, yeah, you are. And there's all these stipulations to it, but you are. And it works in various ways, but just for scheduling and other reasons, I was not able to go. Someone tried.

There was a, because Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper's in Colorado. you know, he's kind of a centrist. So he won the, he went from, he termed out as a governor in Colorado and just took a Senate seat. He's a centrist Democrat, right? So he gets a lot of heat from the left and he gets a lot of heat from the right. Someone had done a, there was a little bit of a hit piece out on hick and looper for have for um a hit piece out on him for having participated in the one shot well did he do you know if he killed an antelope with one shot

i mean that's the main thing i think think. Well, here's the thing. No, he did not. He did not. And I heard, I don't know. See, that makes you lean back the other direction. If you miss. Yeah, I had heard people say there was like grumblings. I should ask him about this.

There was grumblings. Some people either, like, I don't, the guy doesn't do it. Like, I don't think he's like an avid hunter. There's grumblings some people either like i don't the guy doesn't do it like i don't think he's like an avid hunter there's grumblings that he throws his shots yeah yeah that's where i was going it's like i went but i missed so the reason but the reason he got to return with the statue with the the to bring it back to his i think he had had the thing in the first place it was like he has it in his office quite a lot or had it in his office quite a lot i think the reason he got to do it is because like i said he brought in some ringers you know and um so i did i got mine very i got one early in the morning.

And this former Green Beret, he got one early in the morning. And then Hickenlooper did not get one. But then Governor Meade, the way it worked was like, he can't't fill he can't get all ringers like he gets assigned there's some weird tradition where he gets assigned someone like an like like some person who's been involved for a long time gets assigned to him and i think he can only get one ringer you tracking me it's not strange institution oh listen listen you don't i yes i had quite a good time i had quite a good time but yeah um and they uh you know they're evolving with the times yeah do you think, is this thing pretty well received by the people in Colorado and Wyoming?

I mean, because it does kind of make people uncomfortable sometimes. Even governor tags. And I understand governor tags in Ligon. Yeah, it's controversial. It's controversial for sure. I didn't, like, I didn't't I'm guilty of having not known what it was until I was until I was

invited and I didn't give it I didn't spend too much time on it when I got invited I called Rourke Denver because Rourke Denver who's a former SEAL Rourke Denver had been brought down there by

governor mead as as a ringer on that side and he got you you were recruited as a ringer though is that true well are you are you questioning the lot are you saying that that wasn't are you are you trying to be insulting to me? No. I think he is. No, no, no, no, no. Just, I mean, you know. You're like making a little dig. I mean, I guess I'm just kind of like an NBA draft. It's like first-round draft picks.

That dude's a ringer. You get into the second round, and it's like, you know, he's good enough to play in the nba but he's not these these nba references these nba references are going to fall flat on steve he's not following yeah i know i know i know no that's not true because i just watched um the last dance oh yeah good one fascinating dude I now know everything about basketball. I know all about the field they play on. Listen. Yeah.

That was a little dig, Clay. And all I can say is let's just take a look at the facts. At daybreak, I got a buck. Yeah. Can't argue with that. The cold gray light of dawn yeah i'm with you how far was the shot how far was the shot two okay 176 176 maybe if i remember digging back in the old memory bank. Hmm. What? Like what?

Dude, Phil, can you cut him off? Yeah. Clay's getting a little bold for, yeah, it's like team. Oh, it's like,

no, no, man. For, for all the listeners out there, I'm over here like half quarantined and then I got to have like, all right. So Clay.

That's a great, that's a great shot, man. Too late, buddy. It's too late. Yeah. This is, this is, this is coming from a guy who lives in a state. You can't see more than 50 yards in any direction. Yeah. Like a long shot for me is like a you know

22 yard traditional archery shot so i uh i for the first time in quite a while missed a big game animal with a rifle this year and now i'm not saying that all my hits are great hits because that's definitely not true but just to like flat out um to flat out miss really shook me up man you know i thought you guys did uh your description of all the factors that went into that miss was pretty compelling though i mean you know the the the length of the hair you know the you know there were a couple there were two factors i think that were causing you to maybe shoot a little bit high that had to do with the with the gun itself and so anyway i i appreciated the in-depth look into the miss and i didn't want to i didn't really want to bring that

up but you know you're uh clay's referring to a previous episode called the miss. I didn't really want to bring that up, but you know. Clay's referring to a previous episode called The Miss and the Return. Clay, what is the name of the now super famous bear that has roamed into your home

state there? Yeah, Bruno. It's a bear named Bruno. You're familiar with the legacy of Petals the Bear, right? Yes. Yeah, up in New Jersey, the bear that was missing a front leg would walk on two legs all over the place, yeah. He had a real penchant for eating bird seed. I'm talking about Petals.

Clay's going to tell us the saga of Bruno the bear in a minute here. It was like now and then a bear really makes the news. Yeah. And right now, Bruno is in the spotlight. But pedals, the bear had some sort of deformity where it would walk around a fair bit on its hind legs. Yeah. You know, we had a,

to put a pause on pedals for a minute, when we were floating a river up in Alaska this year, looking for moose, we had a sow grizzly who was irritated with us stand up on her back feet and just swinging her paws wildly in agitation. But 100 yards away. You ever seen that? I never have.

Yeah, like shadow boxing, like shadow, like swiping her paws, like just all worked up and stood there for a remarkably long time. And then later, kind of around the next bend, kind of like half charged a raft, all worked up. So Pebbles would get around on his back feet and he got real famous around new jersey um and was very popular with like new jersey cat ladies and whatnot so then some dude new jersey had a bear hunting season and some dude knowingly or unknowingly, I don't know what, shoots petals. New Jersey has this kind of awful practice. The governor of New Jersey, if you live there,

don't vote for that dude ever again. The governor of New Jersey sort of ran on an anti-bear hunting platform. A plank in his platform was to be anti-bear hunting. Just a joke of a position.

Contradicting his own state fish and game agency. They had this unsavory practice where you had to go to these check stations when you're bear hunting and they would allow open, like open to the public. So people could go down and like get riled up about. So if a hunter goes out and legally kills a bear and is trying to, you know,

follow the letter of the law and bring the bear into a check station, you got to go in there and deal with hecklers. You know, it'd be like if Planned Parenthood you could come into the lobby if you didn't like what they had going on in there and how would that go over with people just ask them for trouble

so yeah pedals everybody had a shit fit there was even a newspaper that ran an obituary on pedals and um i read that he was assassinated wow you know there's there's some new stuff with that steve you probably you may have seen it we we ran an article in it about it. But he's – so the guy's name is Phil Murphy, and he is – Who's the guy named Phil Murphy?

Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you meant the hunter. Yeah, the governor. Sorry. Yeah, governor of New Jersey. His name is Phil Murphy, and he has vowed that in 2021, there will be no bear season in New Jersey.

And to give a little context – Well, they already context it on state land right that's right but you can still hunt on private land which quite a bit of bear hunting in new jersey does take place on private land so it hasn't totally shut it down but you know obviously all the game officials are trying to find ways to manage this large population of bears, which is, it's a super dense population of bears and people. So, I mean, it just,

you know, I mean, we're preaching to the choir talking about it here, but I mean, it just makes common sense. It just makes rational sense from every single perspective that, that hunters would manage that bear population. But,

uh, yeah, it's a, it's a sticky situation. Do you guys know, someone could even look real quick, does New Jersey have the, have they gotten the right to hunt and fish constitutional amendment?

I don't know that one. We'll find that out in a second. So start telling us about Bruno the the bear who's now like the latest internet darling yeah so kind of here here's the timeline steve and here here is what we believe has happened some of some of this is like very documentable some of it is speculation but so bruno the bear they believe came out of Northern Wisconsin. And I've talked to multiple people about this that are in the know. I've talked to the Arkansas bear biologist, Missouri bear biologist, and another guy named Daryl Ratajak, who's a biologist who's kind of covered

the whole story of Bruno the bear. But basically, as I understand it, northern Wisconsin would be where most of the bear density, high bear density areas are. Southern Wisconsin would be like farm ground. And in southern Wisconsin, they started noticing this bear traveling through urban areas and agricultural areas. And it was enough of an oddity that people in southern Wisconsin wisconsin started saying hey there's a bear in a odd place okay that bear gained some recognition on social media he's wearing a collar a tracking collar oh he's not wearing a tracking collar no the bear to this day has no tracking collar oh the the bear really yep okay he does not okay the bear let me just give you the general overview and then we can talk about the details the bear traveled from what they believe northern

wisconsin into southern wisconsin into iowa crossed swam the mississippi river into illinois stayed in illinois for some time swam the Mississippi River again. All this is very, I mean, people videoed him doing this, came back into Iowa, and then in early July, ended up in Missouri, traveled south in Missouri, basically got himself cornered into a very populated area north of St. Louis, where the bear had no way out other than to cross major interstate highways. The Missouri Department of Conservation sends their bear team in. They capture the bear, sedate the bear, and take the bear to southern Missouri where they have

a population of bears and good bear habitat so they you know the Missouri Department of Conservation they handle this bear just like they would of any other nuisance bear can you pause a minute

I'm trying to take the perspective of the listener here as a listener to this story uh what is it without a distinguishing markings i just assumed it had a collar on because how in the hell else would they know yes okay like what is it doing that people are like, oh, there he is. That's him. Okay. I asked the exact same question to Daryl Ratajack. And he said that the bear has an uncanny desire to walk down roads, to walk through crop fields, and basically to stay extremely visible and to be undeterred by humans. Man, I'm serious. There are videos with 40, 50 people standing relatively close to this bear following it.

And it's a four to five-year-old male, they think. So it's a good-sized male. It's not a young male, which is odd because usually a dispersing male would be a young one. That's what's so odd about this is this is an adult male. The only time it's been marked was when the Missouri guys got it. They put in, they put ear tags in it that are distinguishable. Oh,

okay. Can I, can I add, can I add another thing in here to that? That has to do with this, the Wisconsin component of this real quick. Yeah. We've had uh dr carl

malcolm on the show many times uh when carl's a bear researcher came early in his career he was a bear researcher and did a lot of work on looking at these bears that were coming out of northern Wisconsin into southern Wisconsin and how successful they were. He had this thing about this animal he named the Wisconsin Super Sow that put off and raised

to 100 pounds two litters of five cubs in such a mild climate in Southern Wisconsin that when she went to hibernate, she would just lay down under a tree. And if you look at bear, I think in helping with this story, if you look at like bear populations, and Clay, you know this way better than me, you can speak to this for people. That it's like, it's like bear, black bear populations in the country aren't like intuitive. And it's patchy. You know, if you look at like moose, right, you'd look and be like, okay, there's a bunch of moose across the north or whatever, right?

With bears, there's like, they're here and they're there. There's holes in between, and it might not make immediate sense to someone, right? Like, how could you have, why do you have bears in Arkansas and Missouri, but then there could be holes in their distribution to the north, east, south, and west? Right. So if you don't mind speaking to that a little bit to help explain this bear moving around. would have been from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, from the Boreal Forest all the

way down into Mexico with a small, a sizable hole in the Great Plains. But all these populations would have been connected pre-European settlement. And so now just with urbanization, fragmentation of wilderness, just that has happened with civilization, we now just have these pockets of really quality bear habitat. And it's relatively big. I mean, there's surprisingly for such a large carnivore, there's a lot of black bears and black bears are thriving. But what it does create is what they'd call in the biology world, allopatric populations, meaning like isolated populations. Like for instance, like the Arkansas, Oklahoma, Southern Missouri bear population, they would have said was an allopatric population.

That population is not breeding with bears from East Tennessee. That population is not breeding with bears from Northern Wisconsin. But that that population is not breeding with bears from northern wisconsin but that's what's so crazy about this is that now we're seeing like a connection between these really vastly separated populations of bears and so this bear ends up in arkansas i mean to to fit to kind of give the whole macro view the bear started in northern wisconsin and is today in arkansas and how many miles just linear i'll take a look i think it's around a thousand miles and so here's the most interesting thing steve is that there's with talking to all these biologists i just asked them them, like, what do you, why do you think this bear did this? And there were some interesting responses. Like, a bear disperses for two reasons, to find new territory because he's being pushed out of his territory, or to find mate, find a mate, or to find a food source. And essentially, Daryl said, if this bear was looking for a mate, he wouldn't

have had to go all the way to Arkansas. He could have stopped in southern Missouri. He passed through lots of pretty good bear areas. So he clearly wasn't looking for a mate. He wasn't looking for food because he passed through all kinds of great food sources. And he's an older male, so he wasn't dispersing just to find new territory, or he would have just found new territory in southern Wisconsin. The only thing that makes any sense from a biological perspective is what they call the homing instinct on these bears, which they relocate these bears all the time when they get in nuisance trouble. So a bear will be getting in trouble, digging into somebody's trash can. They'll capture that bear.

They'll drive it 30, 40 miles away, turn it loose. And the next day the bear will be there eating out of that trash can. Again, there's so many incredible stories up to, you know, guys taking bears 150 miles away and that bear ending up back. This bear acted like he was coming home. That's, that's the only like biological driver the way he was just headed due south yeah there was nothing i'm looking at it now like if you remove any zigzagging around he covered between seven and eight hundred miles as the crow flies yeah

yeah hey and in that whole time steve he never got into any nuisance trouble. That's shocking. That thing walked on roads. It chose populated areas rather than walking in river drainages. So to Myron Means, the Arkansas bear coordinator, he told me that to his knowledge, the bear never got a single nuisance call. it didn't go on people's porches it ate natural food it kept its nose out of the out of the you know out of the bad stuff it's incredible 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 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 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. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Okay, now here's the coolest part.

So if the bear was coming home, how did he get up there? And there's a theory, and you're gonna like this theory steve it's it's it's it's crazy there is a theory that this bear got trapped in a grain barge on the mississippi river in arkansas and he was transported up the Mississippi River, got out into Wisconsin, and has been on a journey back home. I love that story. That's great.

I'm sticking with it. Well, you know what? There's a story. You guys grew up reading about Paul Revere, right? Yeah. One by land, two by sea. The British are coming. Yeah.

Yeah. you know the british are coming yeah yeah later historians really started to poke some holes into the story of paul revere and i don't know the details of it but it seems though there's this this idea that it was a little more little more fiction than fact right or like an embellished legend and some politician i can't remember who it was said um i love paul revere whether he wrote or not yeah so that i like that theory true or not i'm sticking with that shit man that's that's what i'm buying that's what i'm buying hell of a story hey this uh so here's the the social odd thing about this is that this is the first time that something like this has been documented on social media there's a facebook page with 230 000 followers that's called keep bruno safe i'm pretty sure that's the name of yeah keep bruno

safe and so myron means arkansas bear coordinator large carnivore coordinator received the arkansas game and fish commission when they found that bear was here received an incredible amount of pressure to collar that bear so that he would then be protected by law in Arkansas because you cannot shoot a collared bear in Arkansas. But back, back up. Hold on a second here. Bruno is coming from a state that has bear seasons. Yes. His journey began in a bear season state, right?

Yeah. But then he spent some time in a couple states with no bear season and got famous. Correct? That's right. People start falling in love with him.

And then now in his southern journey, he has now re-entered a bear hunting state.'s right and now people are like i don't care about all the bears that live where he used to live and i didn't care about him when he lived there and i don't care about the bears that live in arkansas normally anyway i don't want anyone to hurt that bear because i know about that one that's right okay so go on well i i was proud of the game and fish's response here is myron myron said that bear is no different than any other bear that we have in this

state and we're not going to call her i mean they just they just said we're not going to call her And that bear is no different than any other bear that we have in this state. And we're not going to collar him. I mean, they just, they just said, we're not going to call her that bear because they don't call her male bears. The only reason they call her bears and expend resources is to do sow studies, den studies and whatnot. And so the bear right now, they think they know where it's at. Supposedly a hunter took a photo of this bear in a den cavity

tree and it is just outside of one of the bear zones um in arkansas but uh but it's a deer hunter yeah deer hunters yeah yeah so it's not it's not even in a bear zone it right now where the bear is at it is not in a bear zone as i understand it but bear is at, it is not in a bear zone, as I understand it. But hey, you'll like this, Steve. So all this happened in the summer and then the bear came into Arkansas in September, okay? The Arkansas bear season opens in September. My mother, my sweet mother,

calls me on the phone and says, Clay, don't kill Bruno. My mom's like my PR manager and she's like whatever you do don't kill

Bruno. And I said okay mom got it. I won't do it. Because she doesn't want you to take the heat or she doesn't want

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She could foresee you know me killing this famous bear

which yeah. There is a thing though man where there's She could foresee me killing this famous bear. There is a thing, though, man, where there are dudes out there who would be like, I want that bear. And there are dudes out there, which I would imagine most people I hang out with, would be like, I don't want anything to do with that bear. That seems like trouble. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, here's what happened too is that,

so they were posting all over social media, like these daily updates on this bear. Like you could attract, you could have known where this bear was any given day of the year. Some day, like when the bear came into arkansas somebody got online a hunter and made a comment and said wow i've got 200 000 guides telling me exactly where a bear is you see and so after that the thing shut down on the daily updates of exactly where. That's what I heard. That's what one of the biologists told me.

I mean, they kind of went quiet. They were like, oh, wow, we're giving out too much information. There is a bird. I'm not going to name the species. There is a non-native, there is a very small population of a non-native bird that lives in one state in America.

And they live in one specific mountain range in one state in America, and you're allowed to hunt for this bird. Non-native. It is exceedingly difficult to get one. They live in very inhospitable, very high elevation, cliffy terrain, and they're hard to find. And we took a, a interest in seeing about going and, and checking this whole situation out.

And I realized that when birders see the bird, they, they log it's where they saw it. And I remember thinking that that was not that great of an idea to do that. A little over the line. In a similar situation, something we've covered in the past is in the state of Montana, the state has gotten I can't remember in what timeline

24 requests for radio collar data off game animals. And they have little choice but to comply. Requests coming from who? Hunters. You can just get that information? Apparently, they don't. It has through whatever legal structure they work under, it's public information because it's a state project. So if the state puts a collar on an elk,

a bull elk, apparently someone can come and say, I would like to see the collar data off that elk. And I think they don't have a way in which they can say, screw you. That's surprising. Yeah. I was in Fairbanks one time during moose season,

and I was talking to a biologist, and she was telling me she's got collars on a handful of bulls that live right around the edges of fairbanks and she could at any minute tell you where those bulls are standing and doesn't want to do that now maybe they have different rules up there but it was an interesting conundrum you got to be pretty like you got to be pretty pathetic if that's your hunt plan hey this was this was public knowledge so i'm not like divulging a secret i saw it on social media but our buddy mike chamberlain the turkey doc yeah he uh you know he's radio caller and all these uh gobblers and oh yeah places i think think in Alabama. He at one time gave information to... He tells the story on this podcast.

Okay, got it. No need for me to... They couldn't kill it even when they had the information. They were studying how he was... I can't remember the name of that episode. Mike, guess Mike Chamberlain. They were studying how turkeys respond to various stimuli and how turkeys

respond to hunting pressure. They had this bird. No one could kill. And he would tell people where it is just to watch what it would do. And then, but here's, they had this one bird. No one could get.

And some dude gets in a fight with his wife and storms off gets in his car and drives down and the second he enters the um the second he enters like the game management area wildlife management area of some sort pulls over like at the entrance gate walks over a hill sits down against a tree does a hen clock and kills the turkey the name of that episode was gobble your ass off if anyone wants to listen to it gobble your ass off yeah so he sent all these stone cold killers after this turkey you couldn't get him and then some guy gets in a fight with his wife and storms off in a huff and gets it i remember you asked mike if he knew what the fight was about between the husband and wife so so where does it stand right now bruno he's alive he's alive he's he's denning in arkansas and uh he's he's all okay so that we had hoped i'd hope that they had pulled

a hair sample off this bear if they had a hair sample they could tell from dna where the spare came from and they didn't do that they they didn't do it and i'm it was unclear it just wasn't protocol to pull a hair sample off a nuisance bear. Oh, they don't want to do anything special. Yeah. But that would have told us because we have all this DNA data here in Arkansas. They got it in Wisconsin. But here's kind of my last thought on this, Steve, is that all the biologists said like this is really unusual but bears are notorious and large carnivores are notorious notorious for these wild like travels i mean there's there's

stories of mountain lions that started in the dakotas getting hit by a car in connecticut uh there have been there have been gray wolves in northern miss. There was a lynx that was seen or killed in Missouri. These animals do these big wild migrations. And the question I asked in North America right now, probably. You know, probably less than 500 are radio collared that we can actually track. And we never would have tracked this except for social media. If this bear had just been a little bit different, we would know nothing about this bear. There'd just be a bear in Northern Arkansas that we just thought was an Arkansas bear. Yeah. You know, like this was just such an, the reason the bear, we know this is because of how visible he was, but maybe this happens more often than not and we don't know it.

I'd put my money on that. Yeah. I think biologically in doing quite a bit of just looking at research projects and stuff, I think biology favors the odd bear that does something crazy. Because you have these populations that pretty much all do the same thing, but there's always these outliers. think over like long long periods of time sometimes that outlier is the one that survives because of maybe some catastrophe in the home range do you understand what i'm saying so like inside the mechanism of bear populations there's the crazy uncle wild hair you know bear that just leaves and does something crazy maybe he's not biologically successful, but maybe he is.

And he is what passes on genes to the next generation. When all those back home got killed in some catastrophe, you know? So anyway, kind of like a broad view of bear biology. There seems to be a reward for doing crazy stuff. Sometimes, not all the time.

I think about that often. An interesting example is how we love the fact that and celebrate the fact that salmon have fidelity to their natal spawning stream, right? It's kind of amazing that like a salmon can be born in some little stream and go out as a little fish the length of your finger, length of your pinky. Spend a few years out on the ocean, traveling around, probably leave U.S. international waters, right? And come back 20 pounds and go up and lay an egg right right where that son of bitches was born but some don't some like screw up and go to the wrong stream and think about the ramifications of that like Like you always have. If everybody was spot on, you would never be able to, as climates change and habitat changes and forest fires burn and fill rivers full of soot.

Right. You'd never have the possibility of like expanding your range. But here you always have these freak outliers probing new spots to see, right? And that's got to be how things shift around. Another example I think about is the way the Polynesians, seafaring Polynesians were able to colonize these insane places to find the Hawaiian islands. People had to have just gone off and died

and gone off and died, but for whatever reason, people would make a boat and head off towards shit that you had no concrete idea. Maybe from birds or cloud formations or whatever. Maybe you had a suspicion there was land but all of a sudden bam like you just found hawaii your family is loving so yeah uh that ability to strike off is um it's probably richly rewarded

yeah or it's probably richly rewarded. Yeah. Or it's quickly cut off. Yeah. Or you're, or you're just like one of the ones that get screwed. How many Polynesians didn't make it to Hawaii? I would, you know,

that's one of the questions I would most like to know is, uh, just probably just the awful heartbreaking stories of people that just didn't find land, man. Yeah. All land, man. Yeah. All right, Mark,

what do you think about that whole bear story, Mark? I love it. And it's actually, I've been following a somewhat similar bear story over there in Wyoming and the Tetons, you know, about bear three 99.

Yep. That whole thing. That's, that's a saw with four cubs. It's been there for 24 years, photographed all the time. And just recently, she's been leaving the park and going into the suburbs around Jackson, and so there's all sorts of news around that, worrying that she's going to get into trouble and this famous bear is going to have issues. So, yeah.

Is she just struggling with age, maybe? I don't know. It's a weird thing from everything I've seen and read. Like, she's healthy. She's been happily in the park. And then just recently, she's got into some human food sources for the first time. So, I don't know. Mark, update everybody.

Give people a quick crash course in the Back 40 project. The Back Forty is a little piece of property that we picked up about a year and a half ago. And the idea was to try to find a representative piece of private land that has been farmed and worked over the years. And to see if we could take that and transform it into a wildlife paradise. Can we bring this thing back to life for all sorts of critters? Like farm the guts out of critters and farm the guts out of it not farm the guts no it had been oh yeah historically it had been yes so can we take something like that that's kind of been burned to the ground and turn it into a wildlife paradise for not just deer which sometimes folks like me are tempted to focus on just the big bucks,

but could we do something that's, that's, that's good for deer, good for turkeys and everything else though, to birds and bees and squirrels and all that kind of stuff and still have the good hunting. So that was the, the question we set off to, to try to at least get the beginnings of an answer in two years. So yeah, we started last last summer, and we're wrapping it up this winter. So that's what we've been doing. And the Back 40 is 64 acres. Yes. I get a lot of comments about that.

Why didn't y'all name it the Back 64? I mean. Because it just sounds like something sexual or something, man. But, like, the back 40, it feels landish. It feels landish. Like the back 40 is that kind of ubiquitous term that people use to refer like, yeah, that's my piece. You got 24

bonus acres, man. Yeah, you'd be like, I don't know, shot it on the back 40 there. Whatever. This is supposed to be kind of that stand-in for everyone's little back 40 when you people can follow like the we we chronicle we chronicle the back 40 story through a series yep available on youtube called the back 40 back 40 and mark does a phenomenal job of bringing viewers along, bringing viewers along on the journey of trying to do this.

It's a really compelling story about land management. Because, I mean, people that like to hunt and fish, it's everybody's dream that you're gonna buy this little chunk of land and have your own you know this little paradise like i think about it all the time uh and and so it's like what goes into that what are the heartbreaks and work that goes into that and you know and eventually we're gonna hand uh hand off the keys to the gate this isn't something that that you know here at medi, we're not going to keep it. We're going to give it away. But

when Mark first started out, when I came out there the first summer, Mark was kind of depressed because you thought how daunting it was going to be because you couldn't find mature bucks on it. you thought like like how daunting it was going to be because you couldn't find like you couldn't find deer like mature bucks on it but then you got like a sweet buck the first year

and then this year it's like even better yeah yeah i mean then how much do you think is a freak like like how many so here's this place how many big boxes you had like big like big like mature deer how many mature deer do you see running around there now we've had pictures of relatively consistent pictures of probably eight or nine different bucks that are you know three four or older than that up from zero we had like there was one that was there a lot last year is that the one you shot the one i shot yeah what do you think the age was that deer you shot mark that deer i shot last year was definitely four or older he was really fully mature yeah he's yeah crazy looking old. Yep. Do you think it's a freak?

Is it a freak that it worked? Or do you think something happened that made it that all of a sudden these deer start showing up? You know, I think it's a combination of factors. I think I'm confident that the changes we have made have absolutely helped. No doubt about it. They've helped. But I don't want to claim that it's 100% me, right? Because there could have been these random things going on. We only have a two-year sample size to look at. So it's just not enough to draw really, really hard conclusions. But last year could have been an outlier potentially, right? Maybe for some reason

that I can't put a finger on, last year was just really bad, but the previous five years before that maybe had been pretty good, and we just happened to start on the worst year. Or the flip side, maybe last year was normal, and this year our stuff helped, but then there was some randomness outside of our control that helped. It's some combination of that. I still believe, though, that the things we have done have made noticeable positive differences. You can't deny that. Just the way that we're seeing these deer use the property, and all sorts of wildlife use the property. So that has been really encouraging. I probably couldn't have written it any better.

If I had control of the world and I could say, all right, this is how it's going to pan out. I probably would have told you it'd be great if year one was pretty tough. And then we see this wonderful transformation in year two, it looks dramatically different and deer popping out all over the place and we kill a bunch. That's how I would have written it. And maybe we got a little lucky. It turned out kind of close to that like explain to people what kind of what are the main things that you did yeah so like here's a chunk of land you want to fix it up yeah walk people through like you know the the sort of x y and Z of how to sort of rehabilitate

a chunk of ground. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways to go about something like this, but we had the somewhat unique circumstance of, of just having a couple of years to try to do something. So we did have a shorter timeframe in which we were looking at how can we identify kind of quick turnaround possible projects that can make a noticeable difference quickly. Knowing, though, that there's still the long-term game that could and should and hopefully will be worked on by whomever takes it on next. So that said, the way I would look at this and the way we did look at this is try to identify like what are the missing pieces of the puzzle and on any piece of ground, whether it's public land somewhere or your own piece that you're buying, you can look and see like, what are the basic things that wildlife need to thrive here? And, you know, for, for most species deer, especially, right.

They need high quality food. They need high quality cover. So they feel secure and they can bed and live safely. And then they need water. And if you look at any piece of property and look at how your piece fits into the larger picture, you can start to identify, look, what's the missing piece here? Where's the water seeping out of the bucket and then try to plug that hole. That's a great place to start. So in the case of the back 40, you know, we had essentially the property has a big, what am I trying to say here? There's two very different habitat types in the property. There's these old fields that are old farm fields that have now kind of been left for two years to

grow into whatever was there. So you have these old open fields and have now kind of been left for two years to grow into whatever was there. So you have these old open fields, and then you have this big swamp and some timber in the middle. And what we quickly identified was that deer and critters love that swamp. There's tons of security cover. There's a lot of places they feel safe. There's natural browse in there. But these old fields, which are 50% of the farm left a lot to be desired. So 50% of our farm was hardly being used by deer, hardly being used by turkeys, except for, you know, a little bit of starting around first thing in the morning, that kind of deal.

There wasn't a lot going on for birds and all these other things because it was mostly just an invasive monoculture of something called mare's tail. So you had 32 acres of like a bean pole. Like if you were to look at a soybean field after the soybeans dried down, anyone that lives in farm country, I think you can follow me here. Imagine a bean field that's dried down with no leaves, with no beans on it, just those bean stalks. That's kind of what all these fields looked like. there was no reason that birds or bugs would want to hang out in there deer didn't feel safe in there

squirrels didn't want to be in there so a lot of what we tried to do was transform those old fields uh we did that in a couple different ways steve we did that by one trying to improve the cover out there and the diversity out there. So I didn't want this great big dried down bean field of no food, no cover. So we did a few things. We planted switchgrass, which is a warm season grass that provides a lot of cover for deer, great polting habitat for turkeys, great for all sorts of different game birds. So grassy cover provides a year-round

visible high cover animals are gonna feel safe out there now we planted a blend of different pollinators so wildflowers certain grasses and forbs that our bees are gonna like that our butterflies are gonna like we planted some milkweed out there and they're great stuff for for butterflies and all these different bugs and small birds that help pollinate everything else. That's important for everything, all the plant life. So we wanted to help out there. Something else we did was plant strips of sorghum, which is essentially a tall grass, a really tall grass that looks kind of like corn but it was just a way to quickly this this goes back to the quick turnaround in our case i needed to quickly find a way to take these big

wide open 10 acre fields and make them feel much smaller more compartmentalized again most critters don't like to walk out into wide open you know wide open spaces they'd much rather be feeling tight to cover tight to edgeer and turkeys and most of these animals really like to be near edges where they can go from a place where they can feed to quickly feeling like they're safe again. We didn't have a lot of that to start. So by planting these big strips and half circles of this thick cover, all of a sudden you had that. We planted trees is another thing we did. Doug old doug duran came out to help me out and we put 50 some trees in the ground this summer um that's more of a long-term play it's

going to be a while till those are you know as big and as substantial as they could be of course but right there we're again adding these different pockets of structure. So really, we're just trying to take this big, wide open sameness and turn it into a bunch of secure differentness. That's what animals want. And so that was a lot of what we did with the fields. And you could right away see this fall how much more comfortable, you know, in the case of deer season we're focusing on deer how much more comfortable these deer were coming out and moving and feeding in these pockets where they where they never would have last year um so that was step one um don't just keep rolling through them yeah hey can i say my favorite part of the back 40 so far just real quick yeah when uh doug duran and you were planting trees and the new guy came

to help you doug duran tells the guy to turn his hat around forward yeah i was do you remember that i liked that i thought that was a good scene and it really um he did it a very surprisingly forceful yet loving way and then the next describes doug well the very the very next scene the dude has his hat on backwards again doug told him he couldn't work with his hat on backwards and he fixed it but then later there he is with his hat backwards old habits die hard do you believe i know this is true so i don't really care what you say but do you believe that doug's urine really is especially it's called buckman juice that it really is especially attractive to deer that there's something about doug's urine you know i used to i actually i'm going to contradict you here steve because i used to believe that and then i had him out last october and we had him spritz some around for us and it did not

help for shit so oh really yeah because i don't know he's too far from home that could be it maybe the michigan deers aren't trained up on it like wisconsin deer probably food source different food source he was off he was eating different stuff and everything so did he leave you the bottle of buckman juice no i should have asked for some you've seen the evidence all right i have the trail cam evidence oh yeah oh yeah i and i you know i can't remember if we talked about it here somewhere before but studies have shown that human urine is just as effective as an attractant in scrapes as actual deer urine that's proven.

We've had a lot of guys write in that deer come and inspect their chew spit piles. When they're spitting chew off the tree stand. That stresses me out. That they come in and they like that. Yeah, that's funny. One of our cameramen does a little chewing and I kind of gave him the talking to us that, hey man, I don't think we should be chewing in the tree stand,

spitting this all over the place. So if he had, uh, if he'd seen this, uh, research you found or whatever, these stories where he might've been able to prove me wrong is okay. You know,

the deer biologist, uh, well, general biologist, but does a lot of deer work. Jim Heffelfinger used to chew Levi Garrett and named his kids Levi and Garrett. And deer like, I have it on good authority

that deer love Levi Garrett. All right, so continue on. The trees came from Doug Durant. Some of them did, yeah. Some white pines. He brought some pines. And yeah, so that was cool. There's a little bit of the Doug Durant legacy

on the back 40 which you know is a nice is a nice little bit of of history to put on the place there's so many little memories and stories now attached to this piece of ground that it's nice to have doug add his to that so yeah we put some white pines in we put some cedars we put some sp pines in, we put some cedars, we put some spruce, again, different kinds of, you know, coniferous trees that are going to provide structure and cover out there, right? Deer are going to eventually bed around these. Turkeys are going to hang out around there. Birds are going to nest in them. And the way the trees, the way we looked at it was that by playing these pockets of trees out in the wide open, you're going to have

kind of the effect like you might see in a lake where you drop a Christmas tree in the middle of a lake or a sunk tree and all of a sudden fish congregate around it. Largemouth bass love that structure or cover inside of a water source. It's the same deal with deer and other animals.

What do you guys call crappies, Clay? Man, crappie. I thought you guys had some stupid word for it. Yeah, crappies too. They want that. What do you guys call crappies, Clay? Man, crappie. Oh, okay. I thought you guys had some stupid word for it. No, man. That's when I, yeah. Okay. I heard that, about that.

Go on. So anyways, Christmas tree out in the lake. Yeah, so we've planted these pockets of Christmas trees or evergreen trees all around these old fields to, again, give animals a reason to come out into these fields, travel around. And, you know, if you could imagine, if you've ever been flying across the country and they have the TV screen in the back of the chair in front of you, and you can hit that and it'll show a map of all the different flight paths from the various cities. That's the effect we wanted to create on a property like this.

So instead of having just Detroit, Texas, and Washington, D.C., I would rather have 18 different airports on our property that these deer want to travel in between and across from oh that's super interesting man that's an interesting way of looking at it you make little shit that he needs to go look at exactly so we're gonna see that every year as these pockets mature and the fields mature you're going to see that happen more and more often already this year we've seen deer hitting visiting those trees and and rubbing on them scrape underneath them so they're already starting to use it in that way once those trees fill out we're going to start to see does bedding in these pockets and then all of a sudden bucks are need to check these pockets

for does that may be ready to breed so in a few years it's it's going to be that airport effect for sure this year we just started to see a little of it i like that i i don't i like that look do you cover that and uh you cover that in back 40 yeah we talk about it i don't think i use that airport analogy in the actual video yeah i don't need that i don't necessarily need that exact analogy. But it's like when you go away for a week and you come home, you kind of make the rounds to see

who did annoying stuff to your stuff while you were gone. Before I walk, if it's summertime, before I even go near my house, I go into my garden. Right? And you look. And you go look. And then eventually, like an hour later i'm seeing if they put the pans back where i like the pans and that my my my uh tongs are in the top drawer

next to the stove you know like i just check everything i got my little circuit i love that idea with like habitat that a buck he's like i'm gonna go see what's going on with the ladies that he's just got a lot of little spots he's got to check out. Instead of just one little brush patch, and then he's off on the neighbor's property. Exactly. 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 on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Hey, Mark, can I ask you a question? Just an observation. So the aerial video, like the drone shots of the back 40, I was struck by how there didn't seem to be any real big blocks of timber that the 64 acres was connected to did i miss some of that or or is that common i mean it's kind of like being from the kind of whitetail habitat i'm used to

like central kansas seems like it would be void of deer, but they're bedding in grass and there's hardly any trees there. So it may be that effect happening on me, but it seems like there's not any big timber close to that property. So I guess it's all relative when you say big. There are some substantial blocks of timber that our property connects into north and south of us. So basically we're in the middle of a little bit of a watershed and there's that swamp that runs through the middle of our property and then farm fields on the east and west. And that same pattern follows as you go north or south to the neighbors, but they still have those big chunks of timber in the middle that kind of coincide with those wet spots. And you see that a lot down here in ag land where if it's good, dry,

relatively flat land, it's going to be farmed. But the plot, the spots you do still have timber and good cover, that's just because you couldn't farm it. And, and so there's a, there's a pretty good amount of that around here. So that's not a limiting factor though. Cause I mean, a lot of, with a small property, you know, you're always trying to evaluate the properties around it because those properties are like for sure going to affect your property. So on the back 40, you feel pretty good about the surrounding habitat? Yeah. So it's relative to a lot of places around here. It's really good. Okay. We have a lot more cover than most people do. A lot more timber than most other places around

here do. And that was a big part of why I picked this spot. I was really careful to think about exactly what you described, the neighborhood. Because when you have a small piece, you don't control everything. You don't influence everything. These animals are all over the place. So you really want to pick a spot within a high quality general area because you're going to be sharing, you know, because you're going to be sharing, you know,

those wildlife are going to be passing through all of your places. So it's great to be in the middle of really good stuff. And so that's, that's what we have. We have a good neighborhood, a high quality, relatively high quality habitat around us. And,

and we're just able to kind of plug a gap in it and make it extra good in this, in this part of it. So talk about the the buck you found this year you um the way you hunt deer where you hunt them which is kind of like a little bit different than wilderness type hunting is is you often are very specific in particular where you're not hunting like deer. You're hunting a deer. Yep.

And that's usually out of necessity. No. Because, well. Out of necessity because you got, you got a, you'll have a bunch of deer around, but you got one on your mind and you tailor your activities for that one. Yeah. But, but usually that's because I'm hunting, in this case, one small property. In the other places I hunt in Michigan, they're also pretty small properties.

And I usually only have like one mature buck. Oh, I see what you're saying. I got you. Yeah, yeah. So he ends up being the one deer I really want to take. I got you. Because he's the only one that meets that age criteria that for me is what I want. I'm with you.

So you don't have 10 to choose from. Yeah. So it was a little different on the back 40 this year in that we had a bunch of relatively mature deer. So we had, like I said, eight or nine different bucks that are probably three and a half or older. And you always like to name them all. I do.

Just some practicality. What were their names? We have a buck we named here at my house called Old Limpy old limpy yep we got uh and i thought one eye uh old limpy last year had a bad front leg and old limpy this year has a bad back leg but we seemed to you no no it's not. With my kids, it's Olympian. It's just Olympia. The limp moved,

the limp move, but it's him. Yes. We've got an old one. I, we've got a one-eyed buck out there. Um, he's a buck that was around last year too.

He's the only one that for sure I can identify from last year to this year. So that was cool to see a holdover. There was Lil Droppy, just a little, he's got a little drop tine. And when I first saw him, I was like, ah, he's got a little droppy tine. And so that just stuck. His name stuck. There was, usually these names are just kind of just labeling a characteristic. So there's the sticker eight, there's a tight eight pointer.

It has some stickers off of his base on one side. Um, there's a heavy eight, just a really heavy solid eight pointer. Yeah. Sometimes you're very, you're very clever. Right. Like last year, last year there was a buck called the wide eight. And guess what that buck looked like? Man, it's, it's, I used to, I used to do the whole naming thing.

It used to be a thing. Like, I think when I, when I was getting into hunting to this degree, I saw these other people doing it and I was like, oh, that's like, that's the cool thing to do. And I, and I started doing it from that perspective and that kind of faded for me yeah and now it's simply just it's a practical thing to do because i see these deer over and over and over and i have to talk about these deer over and over and over it's really difficult it would be very difficult for me to be on a podcast and say i saw that one eight pointer that's on the 64 acre property it's got a patch on his neck and a G4 that's not quite this tall. So, so now I keep it pretty simple.

Um, so yeah, there's the sticker eight, the good, uh, Oh God, I need to ask you why you can't get that one, uh,

Tron buck, but go on. Don't, don't bring that up. So stick to the back 40 for a minute. So you got all these books. What other names? Uh, yes. I'm got all these books. What are their names? Yes, I'm trying to think what haven't I covered yet.

There was the Heavy 8. There was the Sticker 8. There was Droppy. There was Old One Eye. There was a funky-sided buck that Tony Peterson, one of our media contributors, he was out there with me this summer. And we were looking at trail camera pictures, and there was a buck that has one really nice four-point side and then the other side is a really funky strange couple forks and daggers coming off so if you look at him from one side he's real straight and normal but if you were to get to know him a little bit more you see he's

very strange and a little bit unique and so tony thought that was it'd be fitting to call him spencer after our mutual friend spencer new hearth that's good so uh so there's spencer um and i'm trying to think who i'm forgetting here those those are the bucks i can remember off the top of my head and when you were but when you're hunting and and you had a you know you had a with you, so you're filming the hunt when you're hunting and you can see the hunt on the back, like, cause it's like a cool, successful hunt. But were you tailoring it? Were you like trying to generalize it or were you tailoring your activities for one of these or for all of these? So in some places it would be for one of these. In this case, it was kind of for any one of these. We had to see which one of these deer or which of these deer would spend the most time during hunting season, during the periods we would actually be hunting there.

So as you know, coming into the season, I saw all these deer were there. I was looking at pictures of all these different deer using the property and we can only hunt certain windows, right? Because that's when we're going to be there hunting it and filming and everything like that. So it was a little bit of a waiting game and seeing, okay, these bucks are there right now. Which of these bucks will be around here when we can start hunting them?

And what can I learn about that? And so as the season started progressing, you would see there was, you know, this buck is spending a lot of time in this corner and these two bucks are hanging out in this bottom section. And so you start to have a little bit of a pattern related to one or two of these bucks. But once we started hunting, you had to, given the fact it's so small, you simply don't have a lot of options. There's a few good spots that are probably going to be where it's going to happen yeah it's not like you're like driving off to this end of the place it's just like you can walk it all mark how many trail cameras do you have up on that 64 acres

you know i think we had 10 10 we had a bunch it's like a convenience it's like a convenience store it's it seems to me like on a property that small, it would be hard to answer or to add to the question Steve's asking. On that 64 acres, though, there wasn't a section that you were like, that buck is always there. That buck is always there. You were hunting travel areas that any one of those bucks could have come through. Now, at any given time, it might have been a trend for one of those bucks to be showing up there. Is that about right? That's exactly right.

And so, you know, what happened is that eventually as we started hunting, I noticed that that drop time buck was our most frequent visitor to the southern half of the farm. That's where he was spending a lot more time based on pictures and sightings of any deer that we saw. I saw him the most and he was spending a lot of time down there. So he became the deer I thought was most likely that we'd have a chance at. And I saw him the first time we hunted the farm all year. I saw him come out down there. And then the first night of my rut hunt out there in early November, I saw him and almost got a shot. Had him come in chasing a doe into one of those fields, one of our little food plots there. And he came running around and several times stopped at about 55 yards.

I just didn't want, wasn't going to take that kind of shot. And, uh, so after that I said, okay, this buck, the drop time buck is hanging out in and around this bedding area. We call it the honey hole. He's in here a lot. And if I spend enough time around this bedding area and make sure that the wind's right. So I'm not spooking deer. If I, if I'm in this area with the right winds for enough days during the rut he's gonna come through and and i'll be in the game at least so to oversimplify things that was was my strategy when i actually started hunting which was during the rut um and you know and eventually it kind of came together i don't know if we want to get into that yeah tell me what happened out yeah so two days after that encounter with him, this was on November 9th, I think, or 8th, 9th, I guess. I went and sat in that honey hole spot.

So this is this patch of native prairie that we found last year. It's really unique. It's rare. There are not many spots that native prairie ecosystems still exist in southern Michigan. No, that place is cool. And I like how you recognize it right off michigan that place is cool and i like how you recognize it right off and knew that it was going to be like a producer yeah that was what sold me on the farm when i walked at the very first time that was i i walked it from a clockwise

in a clockwise direction so i started up in the panhandle at kind of 11 o'clock and then walked the outside edge all the way down to about eight o'clock, eight or nine o'clock is when you get to the honey hole. And when I got there, I said, Oh, this, this has something special going on here with the grasses and the cedars, uh, just tremendous bedding habitat for all, all types of animals, but deer especially. Um, so this is actually the spot, the first tree i prepped to hunt last summer uh ended up being the tree we killed that buck from this year and we did a prescribed fire in there this summer to improve it and that started out summer in the spring so we actually went in there and lit the

place on fire which is a cool thing i'd never done that before um it's amazing the power that fire has to naturally revive and restore an ecosystem. Basically, it burns all the extra detritus and leaf cover and dead material on top of the soil and opens it all up for new growth, adds new nutrients to the soil. That's what happens out on public lands out west when a fire comes through. It restores a lot of vitality to that, to that area. And so that's what we try to do here. We had a special little rare prairie. Let's, let's boost it. Let's help it along. Let's help it grow. So we removed some of these invasive autumn olives and buckthorn trees in there too. So all that to say is that we, we,

it was neat to make some change to this already pretty neat spot, see that come together, hunt the first tree I ever thought we should hunt from on my last hunting trip on the back 40 and have it come together where, you know, that morning I got in there on the edge of this and oh, an hour after daylight spotted a buck way down the swamp beneath me and pulled up my binos. And it was that Spencer buck. It was the funky side of and pulled up my binos and it was that spencer buck it was the funky side of deer and you could just see he was cruising across the swamp he wasn't with a doe but he was he was searching for a doe just you could see the way he was moving on a mission across the swamp so that got me excited and maybe 10 minutes later i saw another flash of white down

there i pull up my binoculars and i see a doe running across and then a big set of white tines behind her and run soon after i could see the drop tines i could see it was now it was the drop buck that i'd seen a few days before so i'm watching watching i see the doe squirt out and maybe 15 minutes later here she comes again and here comes the drop time buck again so i was excited by that but it was pretty far away this is 500 yards away maybe and on the neighbors you you know, off in the distance. You could just see them through the binoculars. So I knew they were in my world, but I did not necessarily think they'd be on top of me anytime soon.

So fast forward 45 minutes when I saw a flash of movement right underneath me about 60, 70 yards away passing through the cedars. I wasn't expecting it necessarily to be one of those bucks but I saw a nice set a nice kind of profile view of antlers passing through the cedars just like a flash really quick I knew it was a buck that I wanted to get another look at at least though

so I grabbed my grunt tube let out a couple just deep grunts and 5 seconds later this deer comes popping back out from behind the cedar and instantly saw it was the drop time buck and it's it's beautiful it's so neat that we have it captured on film and i can relive that moment because just a really cool deer and he came into the grunt walked underneath one of these cedars just ripped up a scrape oh really dirt and leaves

like kicking 20 feet behind him you can just see it thrown way back there like all riled up yeah he was fired up and made that scrape and then kind of walked across behind a big oak tree that's in there and i couldn't get a shot and it was there was a moment of significant tension where he was if he continued on that route he was going to hit where my wind was blowing it was blowing right up the edge and he was headed right for it and so in my head i'm thinking all right if he steps out from behind that oak tree he's gonna be right he's gonna be right in my wind and it's gonna be either i'm gonna have a quick moment to get that shot or he's gonna blow out of there so i was mentally preparing myself for that and then just out of pure luck he stopped turned around and started to go back the way he

came but angled even closer to me so he came back came around the oak tree and walked right to the most perfect place for a shot how far how many yards uh 15 20 yards somewhere like that perfect archer yeah he And he stopped? I stopped him with just a little sound. Stopped him. That's a pretty good grunt, Mark. When you went, did he peg you?

Or did he just stop? He stopped and looked right in our direction, yeah. But not up? You know, I guess I don't remember if he looked up or towards us. Yeah, but not up. You know, I don't, I guess I don't remember if he looked up or towards us, I'd have to go look at the video again. I don't remember,

but either way, whatever you do for long. Yeah. I was a full draw and he had an arrow on him seconds later. So, and he ran like he ran maybe 50, 60 yards and was down. Um,

so that was, it was super cool. I mean cool between that like between that wide eight which is so cool ash yeah that's great man it was it was it was awesome i mean it's been a project that's been a ton of work and a lot of a lot of last year felt like we were just beating our head against the wall and i was surprised by how little progress we were seeing. To see it change this year in a pretty dramatic fashion, just really encouraging to me and what you can do. And it wasn't like we did anything really crazy with an insane budget. We didn't sink tons and tons and tons of money into the changes we made. We used small equipment. We rented something for a day to plant the trees. Um, you know, this is something that,

that I could have done, you know, on my own, maybe, um, what I'm trying to say here is, is not outside of the possibility for anyone else to do something similar. Um, how, how bad do you wish, like, like if you had had that place if all of a sudden we said like i know you wouldn't want to back out on the plan but if all of a sudden it was just yours for whatever reason would that be like a favorite hunting spot of yours last week while we were hunting i thought about this a lot and even one of the cameramen i joked that maybe we should save up some money and whenever the new owners want to get rid of it we'll buy it from them because yeah is this place pretty far from where you live mark it's close relatively close it's within you know

i could hunt it if i wanted um on a frequent basis there's so much potential like to see the difference we were able to to make in one one year, I could sit here for two hours talking to you about all the other projects I'd like to do if we had this for 10 years and just how awesome it could be. I think what we proved here was that you can make progress towards a goal like we had. And I think I can, I can confidently say, like we made positive steps in the right direction in two years, basically a year and a half.

But there's lots more we could tackle if we had the time. And hopefully, you know, someday somebody will. Yeah, well, one of the beautiful things about the project is that you're starting to, you starting to help and create a blueprint. Not that we're inventing anything here. It's like a thing that people do. We're just doing a version of it. We're creating a blueprint for how to come in and maximize wildlife habitat and like,

you know, restore a piece of property that has been, you know, the, the, the priority for that land was different. The priority for that land wasn't wildlife habitat. Priority of that land was making food for people to eat,

which is like noble and great. But what can be done when you can take a little piece of ground and bring some environmental stewardship and good conservation practices and kind of watch that impact? And if you could do that, or people can do that in a lot of places all across the country and create like this extensive patchwork of pieces of ground like that with some protections on them into the future. It's good for everybody. Yeah. Yeah, that's the truth. Are you ready to talk about what's going to happen with that place or should we hold off?

Yeah, yeah. I can talk about that, but I want to give a little prelude to that in that this project not only opened my eyes from a habitat perspective, but it also opened my eyes from the perspective whitetail hunting world, to look at a property. If you were to have access to a property, whether you own it or have a lease or it's a hunt club or whatever, there's often a tendency to be hypersensitive to keeping it all to yourself or keeping it all to just, you know, no extra impact, no extra people, because especially if you're trying to target mature deer or big deer or whatever, one of the overarching principles for being able to have deer like that around and to be able to get a shot at deer like that is to keep those deer unaware of the fact that there's a bunch of hunters trying to kill them. So keep pressure low. So for a lot of years, I have obsessed over the idea of, you know, nobody else out on these property. If you can control it, you know, nobody else out there. I'm only going to go in there a few times when everything's just right. And I don't want to mess it up because if I do, that buck's going to be out of here. Um, and, and so that was a little bit of a, uh, that was like a lens that I looked at habitat management and hunting through for, for many of my years leading up to this.

But taking on this project, we decided that, Hey, this isn't going to be a place that just Mark hunts. And this isn't going to be about just Mark trying to kill a big buck. This is also going to be about sharing it with other people. So last year we invited, um, uh, we invited a researcher out. We invited Doug during a come out and hunt. We invited my dad to come out and hunt. We invented a Cal and a new hunter last winter to come out and hunt this year. We brought my dad back again. Uh, we brought the hunt winner out last week to come and spend some time out there. We brought another new hunter out there.

And what I learned was twofold. Number one, I learned that even on a small property like this, even in a state like Michigan, where there are a lot of other hunters, there's a lot of pressure on these deer. You can still share and have other people out there doing these kinds of things and having a good time and still have quality hunting. We had way more people hunting this property than I ever would have thought we could have got away with and still killed some nice bucks. So from that standpoint, that was eye-opening and encouraging to me but most importantly i also was just reminded of how much more enjoyable hunting can be when you share it with people a lot of my whitetail hunting and a lot of other like really serious whitetail hunters you sometimes can get stuck in the

solitary nature of it and it's just like me trying to achieve my goal in my spot in my way. And it's, it's me waking up at three 30 in the morning and going out and hunting all day. And I'm very mission focused or whatever you want to say. Um, there's a lot of folks like that. And it was a great reminder to me and getting to share this place with other people and hunt with other people and see them enjoy this place of just, and this is a simple thing and it's obvious, but sometimes you got to get smacked over the head with it. Like how great that is. It was great to be able to take a new hunter out there and see him get a shot at his first buck and the highs and lows and the excitement. It was, it was amazing to get to take my dad out there. And I got the opportunity to spend time with my dad on the

property last fall. And this year come back again, we changed a bunch of things to try to take my dad out there. And I got the opportunity to spend time with my dad on the property last fall. And this year, come back again, we changed a bunch of things to try to make it a better situation for him. And he actually got to kill his first deer with archer equipment ever, his biggest buck ever. Getting to see all that, the joy I got out of spending time on the property with my dad and with Dan and with Dane, the hunt winner. And last year, those are the people that is what I will probably remember even more than those nice bucks I shot. And, and so I think if I take anything away from this personally, that is actually been my greatest lesson from the back 40. Um, you can transform a property, not only in habitat and wildlife use, but also in how we as humans

enjoy it and enjoy it together. And that was the moral of the story for me. I like all that. That's good. Super good. So tell us real quick what's going to happen, unless you don't want to get into it. Oh, no. Yeah. So that was my

long wind-up to answering your it. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, that was my long wind up to answering your question. Um, so as I just described, I think that we have both, I personally, and we as a company obviously see the value in sharing places like this and, and using it as a tool as an, as a, as a place where we can help others experience something like that. One of the things that came about this year is that I invited a new hunter, Dan Jadjo, out to the property to hunt with us. And I had met him last year at a QDMA field to fork event. Steve, I know you had those guys on the podcast.

I think it was last summer we were all out here together. Basically, it's a mentorship program that has kind of been scaled across the country to help bring new hunters out there into the field, partner them with a mentor, and spend a weekend teaching them how to do everything from shoot a crossbow to find deer and find deer sign, and then actually how to gut a deer, process a deer, cook a deer, all these different things. So I met Dan at a program like that last year that I was mentoring at. And I noticed in him that he, you know, was really passionate, was excited about learning, but had really struggled without

a mentor. And we invited him back out this year. We had him come join us on the farm with Doug and help plant trees and plant food plots and help to teach him along with all these different things. And coming out of that, we just saw that, man, this place, the Back Forty, it's a perfect place to facilitate that kind of learning experience, both in the off season and then actually in the season. He came out and hunted and had a really awesome experience. And so we've been looking at ways to find, how can we scale that? How can we keep that kind of learning experience happening here? How can the Back 40 not just be a terrific launching pad for Dan, but could it be something like that for other people too? And what we have settled on and what

we're going to do is we are going to give away the back 40 to the organization formerly known as the quality deer management association now it is the national deer association we're going to donate it to the national deer association so that they can continue using this place as a um as a as a learning tool a place that they can bring folks out and show them things like the habitat management we've done and show them how to set up a tree stand and how to find deer sign and how to improve native grasses and why deer like to use these pockets of evergreens and then eventually take them out there for these hunts and have a great high quality place to have a first deer hunt.

I know from working with some friends that have that work for the Quality Deer Management Association and set up these mentored hunts that oftentimes finding a place to bring these new hunters is your greatest challenge. A lot of times private landowners, they don't necessarily want to open up their ground to a bunch of new hunters in the middle of October. So that has been a struggle. And we thought, Hey, let's, let's help as much as we can there by providing a great place to do that in a great, um, essentially a living museum of, of, of learning opportunities here. That's what the back 40 can be. And we're, what we're hoping it will be. So the NDA will be taking on the property and using it to help other folks and teach other folks and hopefully mentor a lot of people into the future. And that's at a high level. That's our plan. Okay. Tell people to close out, tell people how to go check out and engage with Back 40. Yeah. So the best place is go to the MeatEater YouTube channel and watch the show there. Season one came out last fall. Season two is being released right now. Every Sunday, I believe, um, I can't remember what time, but every Sunday, a new episode is dropping

through December. Um, so check that out. You're going to get to see all the preseason work I've been talking about. You'll get to see my dad's hunt. You'll get to see my hunt for the drop time buck. Uh, you'll even get to see the hunt where we take Dan, the new hunter out and Dane, the sweepstakes winner. Um, and then we're, we're going to be putting together some content, also documenting what's going to happen next year. These mentorship opportunities, we're going to, we're going to create some stuff around that as well. So you'll be able to see all that at the meat eater.com. We'll be sharing articles and podcasts about it as well. How many episodes of the back 40 in season two?

Are there going to be, there's six regular episodes. So there's, there's two up. Well, by the time this comes out, they'll be, there'll be more.

Yeah. But yeah, six, six episodes of the regular series and then some bonus content to come next year. Right. Right on. All right. Thanks a lot,

Mark. Thank you guys. Clay. Newcomb. Newcomb. Thanks for joining. Thanks for the X and clay. Thanks for the excellent,

um, book report. You did on Bruno, the bear. Bruno. We're going to be Bruno. Pretty fascinating story. We're going to give you a lot more assignments in the near future. You did original research.

Sounds good. Like a hard-hitting journalist. Yeah. It's like watching 60 minutes watching you work. Man, you should have seen me on the phone, man. I was giving them left and rights. Bam, bam. Had those biologists back in the corner good

stuff man thanks a lot all right guys thank you everybody go check out bag 40 it's a great story we're super proud of it enjoy 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 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.

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