The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 265: The Rambo Rabbit

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Mike Ruhl, Jeremy Romero, Kevin Murphy, Seth Morris, and Chester Floyd.Topics discussed: Has the Bitcoin boat sailed?; a hot tip on using tampons dipped in vaseline as a fire starter; proof of the albino porcupine; one hairy-assed deer eyeball; feeding grizzly bears (ahem, moose!) in your backyard; cloning black footed ferrets; the death of the last passenger pigeon; that time when a squirrel hefted up his dead buddy into a tree; how ibex hunting came to be a thing; the problems that the border wall creates for wildlife; people's inability to openly debate issues; living on vertical cliff faces and basically eating gravel; being a proud member of the 98% club; opinions about non-native species; the saga of Kevin Murphy's beagles; gauging a good hunting day based on whether the scent sticks around; the great history of eating rabbit turds; Kevin Murphy, an American treasure; 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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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Alright, Chester, we're going to start right out with a segment. Aren't you going to say the... I trust that Phil is going to put in the... The jingle. The jingle.

The continuing adventures of Chester the Investor. Come to Papa Moon. That's it. Come on. It's not an inside joke. There's a very obscure joke built into the intro for Chester the Investor. Yeah. I think that if you know what we're talking about,

you should write in and explain what the joke is once you listen to it. Not you, Chester, because I told you. Yeah. All right. Where are we at? you have is there a wall do you do you own a walleye boat now i do not own a walleye boat um slowly but surely it is looking good eventually eventually we'll be fishing steve and cracking a few cold ones

so since we last spoke how is your how is your bitcoin investment so bitcoin right now is volatile as my brother would say uh it's you know up and down and a lot of people are selling and buying and selling and buying and it was down they have weak constitutions yeah they're not strong you got to stay strong in the Bitcoin game. But it was down a while, kind of February, like late February, Bitcoin was down a little. But as of yesterday, kind of rallied again. And it's starting to go up. And earlier I was asking Chester about his thinking on this.

If he, as he does this thing to get the walleye boat, as he manipulates his Bitcoin, not manipulates, invests in Bitcoin in order to get a walleye boat, I was asking him, does the initial investment get thrown in toward the boat? Yes. So that money is committed to the walleye boat? Yes. But again, like I said, when I get there, I still will probably consult with you being included in that

just to make sure I'm making the right call. Pulling out at the right time. Yeah. I feel that if it shot up and you got to a basic walleye boat, you might drag your feet and think you're going to get a sweeter walleye boat. Yeah. I mean, over the long term of Bitcoin,

that would happen. Like you would wind up with like a walleye yacht. Yeah. I mean, you look at the, the percentages, it's like 200% return that anyone that's like, you know, if you invested seven years ago or something like that in bitcoin it's pretty darn yeah but do you want to wait

seven years for that walleye boat yeah dude walleye might not even get around anymore we gotta fish now they they are saying that it may triple well i read that to you this morning off cnn yeah they're saying. Somebody's saying it. Now, listen. Let me tell you something here. Sean Weaver wrote in, a friend of ours. Hey, Sean. He was listening to a previous edition of Chester the Investor,

and he wrote in to say this. An econ professor of mine in college talked about the role of sentiment in markets and how it's an important part of a market trying to find equilibrium. There's an investing strategy based around it, around being a contrarian. The basic logic is the time to buy is when everyone thinks it's a horrible investment, and the time to sell is when everyone thinks it's a horrible investment and the time to sell is when everyone thinks it's great now here's where he has like kind of a weird dig on this show like he takes a pot shot at like insults this show huh yeah he says he says i got a good chuckle today because i can't help but think the meat eater podcast talking about bitcoin is a good signal to sell for contrarian investors, which is like a dig

meaning like if we know about it, it must be that the cat's out of the bag. No. That's not what he means? Well, yes, that's what he means. But I would say that's not the case at all. I'm the only one sitting here who's invested in Bitcoin. But I got jealous this morning and texted my wife to see if I could buy some Bitcoin. And she said that ship has sailed. No, I don't think it has. I do not think it has because, like I said, none of you guys in this room, as I'm aware of, are invested in Bitcoin. So many people are skeptical, which is because it a lot of this stuff is right over my head and i don't even understand it but luckily i have somebody to consult with that

you know keeps me calm and keeps me in the game your brother my brother and uh we just had a long conversation with him on the on the ride here about it and uh guy knows his stuff you can you can ask him about anything and you're you're saving up for a lund it doesn't have to be a lund but i like them both they are nice boats i like them that 18 footer that you run in alaska get a little simple outboard tiller little fish finder right next to me set Seth cruising right next to me in his. Just over $7,000 for that hole. With trailer?

I think so, yeah. Wow. I'm getting there. I was looking out of my line until I found my boat. So we're going to keep the segment going until you get the damn boat. The segment could last years. This segment and Phil's jingle and everything, we might get years of material out of this investment.

You know, if it triples this year, maybe I can still keep some stuff in Bitcoin and still get the boat. And then we'll change the segment, and it'll be a segment about your walleye adventures. Yep. Can you try that? Can you put the continuing walleye adventures of Chester into the – we'll see how it sounds. Yeah.

The continuing – The continuing walleye adventures of Chester the Investor. We got one! I'm on a boat! I'm on a boat! Mike and I have the first idea for it. I'm on a boat, I'm on a boat North America as far as I know. What's your title again? What's my title? Can you tell us or you got to keep secret? Well, let's just say I work in fisheries. He's a fisheries bigwig.

He's a fisheries bigwig. That makes them more and bigger. That's just my thought. Yeah, Michael's explaining that. Let's say one was in fisheries. Sure. You will find that the common feedback from the public is that they would what they would like more bigger fish it's very it's really very simple yes oh here's another thing to touch on quick before we get into everything else we're supposed to be doing uh first lights

new foundry britches the foundry pants are out. These sons of bitchin' pants. Cespin, you probably been looking on jealously. Oh, very jealously. This, I'm not joking. I'm trying to think of how to say this so people recognize I'm telling the truth. It is the foundry pants with the knee pads built into them are, I'm not shitting you,

are the best hunting pants that I have ever, ever had on my body. Ever. They haven't, a knee pad in them, it's like a very lightweight, well-integrated knee pad. You can take it out to wash them, but it's in there so well it's like it doesn't bother you hiking around you do not know it's there but when you get out of your tent on

your knees in the gravel or you're on your knees glassing or you're crawling up on something it is such a game changer and they got a very like like a very durable blend of fabrics where i've got i don't know man i've been wearing i've worn like a pair of them all fall i've got well over 60 days into them um god they're comfortable and they have side zippers so if you get first light zip on long johns and you got the side zipper on these pants you can undo the side zip around the pants and through that little hole unzip your long johns and actually pull your long johns off like a magic trick have you seen me do this stuff yeah never have to drop your drawers you don't even drop yeah you don't even drop your drawers you unzip a zipper reach in there and

unzip another zipper and like i said it's like a magic trick all of a sudden you're standing there holding your long johns damn good pants like the just in terms of durability comfort pocket configuration knee pads side zipper fit even the right amount of belt loops in the right places like the best pants i have ever worn now quick word about uh vaseline and tampons a woman from ashley no she's from her name is ashley she's from austin she wrote in to say to have this to share about the Meteor Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, which is available now at Amazon.com. In there, I make a very spirited argument for using as your fire starter, you go find a friend who dips and get one of their used dip tins, right? Chew tin. And then you take cotton balls and rub Vaseline into those cotton balls

and pack that chew tin full of Vaseline-infused cotton balls because they make wonderful fire starters. It doubles as Vaseline if you need, like, you get chapped lips or braided skin. And TSA guys don't steal it from you because when you're toting around any kind of accelerant like all those sort of fire starters from the sporting goods store the tsa guys will take them from you and potentially fine you we got fined seven not not for a fire starter but we had a seven thousand dollar fine from a isobutane fuel canister my buddy that showed up in the security line with a loaded pistol that he didn't know he had in his bag had less of a fine than a jetball canister

which our lawyer got it knocked down to half that. How do you know you have a pistol in your bag that's loaded? I told him, this is the feedback I provided for him. I said, I think the fine for having of trying to get on a plane with a loaded pistol you didn't know you had should be that you get shot with the pistol.

Sounds right. Somewhere you can pick where. You can pick where, but that's the fine is you get shot by it and wasn't your fuel and checked luggage like not yeah so uh we were flying home from a trip and one of one of you know we just like checked all the gear and also one of our guys they they page them to come down to security. So he goes down to security, to the TSA dudes. And they're like, hey, we found this fuel can in your bag. And he's like, oh, sorry, man.

Just go ahead and throw it out. Definitely don't need it. Cool. And then some period of time goes by, and all of a sudden, here's this big stack of paperwork with that fine. Right. Yeah. And my buddy that tried to bring his loaded pistol onto the airplane, I think it was all

said and done, owed $1,000. Right, and that was going to go in the cabin with him. He did lose his pistol, but we lost our fuel can. The injustice. Anyways, Ashley from Austin writes in, what got me on that oh yeah why you carry why why like vaseline if you're a traveling person she was saying that uh

she had this is interesting piece of feedback she didn't have cotton balls but she had tampons and vaseline and to start a fire took that tamp material, kind of like crumpled it up, put Vaseline on there, and she says it's a phenomenal fire starter. Look at that. Whatever works. We talked recently on an episode where

a guy was saying that, see, a long time ago we were talking about how Cabela's and Bass Pro Shop shop which is the same thing now and they just bought sportsman's warehouse right no yeah i didn't hear that no i did yeah i heard that yeah they did that's it yeah so like bass pro bought cabela's and that entity bought sportsman's warehouse yep so if you're like walking into a sporting goods store it's probably owned by the same mugs. Yeah.

We got to talking about when people sell, where does all that taxidermy come from? You know when you go into a Bass Pro or whatever, they sometimes have these massive dioramas of these sort of stuffed menageries. And we're talking about the market of when you get an exceptional specimen of an animal, the market of selling it to wind up in these things how people can make.

That might be, if Bitcoin doesn't work out for you, Chester, you might get that walleye boat by shooting giant stuff and selling it to sporty goods stores. Well, I'll have to get out hunting and actually kill something. I got to step my game up so

this guy was saying that one of these the cabela's offered his old man 70 grand for an albino porcupine and uh i think that someone expressed even the idea that they weren't even buying it even the existence of the porcupine. And he sent in, and this damn shirt looks like an albino porcupine to me. What do you think, Kevin Murphy? Cutest little porcupine I've ever seen. I've seen a few porcupines. My dogs have tangled in laws with porcupines.

You ever seen an albino porcupine? No, never heard of one. Cutest damn animal on the planet. Never heard of one. You like that little guy? He's pretty cute. Super cute. Here he is animal on the planet. Never heard of him. You like that little guy? He's pretty cute. Super cute. Here he is chewing on an antler. Now, Seth is

going to report on this, which is an insane... This is one of the most upsetting things I've looked at in forever. Yeah, it's like, I hate looking at it. I think that someone... You know what? Do you want to put it on your Instagram so that people can go see for themselves?

Yeah. Okay. So you got to realize you're making a commitment here and you're going to let people down. What do you mean? Well, if you don't do it. Yeah, I'll put it on my highlights where I put all the stuff. No, put it on the main

thing or not at all. Can't you do both? You should put it on the main thing or not at all. Can't you do both? You should put it on yours because more people will see it. Okay. And I have a certain aesthetic I keep with my Instagram. Explain that to me. Well, if you look at my Instagram, it's all high quality photos that are... It's all fine art.

Yeah. You don't want to put some hairy-ass eyeball deer. No, not unless I took a picture of it. Fine art style. Yeah. I'll put it on mine. Okay. Go ahead and tell everybody what's going on.

It's one of the more upsetting things. I will have it. I guarantee. I'm sending a note about this right now. Go ahead. Tell everybody about this weird thing. It's a deer that has... I believe it's pronounced corneal dermoids. I like it.

Corneal dermoids. Dermoids. So there was an individual that, or there was someone that saw this deer and reported that it was like the deer was circling. It was going in circles. It had visible bleeding, lacked awareness of people around it, and had something on its eyes. It turned out to be this corneal dermoid.

And what it is, it's like an abnormal growth of skin and hair follicles on areas where skin and hair follicles don't grow and just happen to grow over its cornea. To gradually... Have you seen this, Mike? To gradually where... If you look at this picture, it's a buck. And where you'd expect his eyeball to be,

like not his eyeball, what's the part in the middle of your eyeball? Your cornea. Your cornea. That's the part that you'd say like you got blue eyes, whatever, that's what you're talking about? I think so. Yeah.

Is hair. Yeah. Gradually, gradually, gradually, it grew into where he eventually became blind and he has a hairy hairy eyeball a hairy eyeball developmental glitch where the cornea tissue fails to form and it defaults to skin if you get it because a mug can get it yeah limbal dermoid hair shafts over your eyeball you people out there yeah yeah oh i wonder how like i wonder how often that happens or has happened before well corinne included corinne included if you go down there's a dude's eyeball who's got hair growing out of his eyeball. Oh, yeah. So that buck looks pretty young.

Was that buck born with it, or is it on set? Corinne included a bunch of extremely disturbing photos. I need to move on. Doesn't say if it was born with it or not. I'm interested in that, right? Like if it's

on set once the animal's got some age to it, or if it's born with... I would think it's on once the animal's got some age to it or if it's born with. I would think it's onset because there's no way a deer, I mean, you can tell in this photo the buck has antler growth. So it's probably at least a year old. I don't think a deer that's a year, could survive in the wild a whole year being blind. But that's just one eye. Is it both eyes?

I think, yeah, I think it said it was both eyes. Didn't it say it was both eyes, Jet? Yeah, it is. Even a blind squirrel will find a nut every now and then. That's true. Did you guys check out this deal with the person feeding the grizzly bears? Do you know this story? No.

In Grand Teton? Nope. So a bunch of you know this story? No. In Grand Teton? No. So a bunch of people sent this in to us. Some war, like, there's a neighborhood, there's a subdivision, and it's called the Solitude Subdivision in Grand Teton, Wyoming, okay? And some neighbors report this lady

for feeding grizzly bears. And you know that famous, like, there's that famous grizzly bears. You know that famous grizzly? It's problematic that we have a famous grizzly bear. It's like this 399 grizzly. Grizzly number 399. She's spent her whole life out. Now she hangs out in town and everybody's all

worked up. This bear has all this offspring and these offspring are all eaten in this lady's backyard. So they get out to talk to her be like you're feeding bears she's very excited about the fact that the bears are here she explains that she has an aura that allows her to communicate with bears and that prevents her from being hurt by bears and she's feeding many grizzlies in her yard, grain soaked in molasses. But you are allowed to feed moose. So all she has to say, they're not prosecuting her

because she says, I'm feeding moose. It's not my fault that all these grizzlies are in my yard. And while they're standing there, the agents that come visit her, they're staying there. There's five grizzlies eating off her back porch. But they're saying there's nothing we can do because she's feeding moose.

Difficult time prosecuting her. Sounds like... Sounds like they need to yeah go ahead jet sounds like that one guy who got killed in alaska kind of um he wasn't feeding him what's that guy was a badass though timothy treadwell yeah he'd out camp anyone in this room um why they need to change the rule they shouldn't be allowed to feed anything well yeah but that's the whole thing in wyoming like what they're feeding their elk feeding elk and deer feeding stations i mean they've created this weird problem and i know cal's talked about this quite a bit is they at a time you know hunters wanted more game yeah right in wyoming like people wanted a big healthy elk herd and

me too right so people wanted a lot of elk and having a lot of elk in wyoming as elsewhere would cause enormous amount of strife with agricultural interests right because where they're gonna all go so they live up in the mountains in the winter or in the summer winter comes they come down in the big riparian areas, and they're on cattle grazing lands. They're on crop lands doing all kinds of damage. So at a time, people did this calculus in their heads that if we're going to have herds of tens of thousands of elk in these areas and we don't want it to be a huge problem for

landowners we need to find something to do and so they fell into the habit of feeding making feeding grounds and to to support what some people claim is like a artificially high number of elk they feed ungulates yeah through the winter the surrounding states don't but they do and they're staying true to it what's finally drawing it into question now is like cwd transmission yeah where you got from hundreds of square miles you have a magnet that sucks all those deer and elk in and so they stand around in groups of thousands for the whole winter eating feed. So it's illegal to feed. It's legal to feed.

And this woman here is taking advantage of it with grizzlies, which is really weird. And then when they pointed out to her that it's dangerous, she accused the agents of being, quote, wimps. They cloned a black-footed ferret the first u.s endangered species black-footed ferret they had a a specimen um that died 30 years ago and people were just getting into you know people were starting to to realize the potential around genetics. They froze this ferret. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is raising a black-footed ferret in Fort Collins, Colorado, that is a genetic copy of a ferret named Willa,

who died in 1988. Think of that. I think I like the name. I think Willa's a cool name. That'd be a good name for a daughter. Yeah, that actually was one of our plans if we got a girl. Is that right? Yeah, Willie.

We're having a boy instead. We are. What are you going to name that boy? I don't know yet. Cody? Hunter? Willie? No, I don't think either of those you're not gonna name a cody or hunter dude everybody names their kids cody and hunter no no okay but i i think it's amazing to use you know technology like that to clone an animal that's that's gone to try to bring some genetics back into the existing population yeah it's like but we we had a we had a if you

go way back in our library we had a episode called cloning mammoths i think yeah i remember with a with a ancient genetics you know dna specialist and she kind of explained what they're really getting at um some of the some of like the the ethical and practical limitations. Because I think the thing everybody's aiming for is that we would bring back the passenger pigeon. Right? And people point out that what makes the animal. Okay?

So passenger pigeons are the things that were in flocks of millions right you know and if you made one and had one you could like put it in a cage and be like that's a passenger pigeon like is it do you mean like is it really you know does it qualify as a passenger pigeon like would you ever be able to bring that back right but but i think in this situation with ferrets what you're talking about is an existing population of endangered ferrets that there's active conservation work going on to try to bring them back on the landscape right and then you have or you know a ferret from not

all that long ago but that is very likely different or holds some genetic diversity that no longer exists in ferrets and i don't know this for certain but i could imagine i'm guessing it has to do with diversity and and so you're not you're not really trying to you're not trying to take that one ferret and repopulate north america you know the plains with ferrets you're trying to capture something that was essentially lost that could potentially bring genetic diversity back into those populations yeah we've talked we've we've covered this a little before that black-footed ferrets are what's called lazarus or what's known as a lazarus species like lazarus from was lazarus in the old testament the new testament i think oh man anyways in the bible there's a fellow named lazarus who comes back from

the dead and uh the black-footed ferret is a Lazarus species. People thought at a time that we had, we humans, had wiped them off the face of the earth. And as the story goes, one day a rancher in Matitsi, Wyoming, sees his dog carrying something unusual, and it was a black-footed ferret. And they found the prairie dog colony that was supporting this black-footed ferret and they found the prairie dog colony that was supporting this black-footed ferret and that in fact they were not gone right and so from that though right you can imagine how narrow the potentially the genetic diversity of that species

could have gotten and you know i again i don, I don't know anything about ferret conservation, but I can imagine from other things I know more about that being able to go back in time and grab some genetic material from an individual that was, you know, that's been gone for a long time now and bring that forward in order to incorporate, you know, that's been gone for a long time now and bringing that forward in order to incorporate, you know, into captive breeding or, you know, even into the wild could really be of a lot of value. Oh yeah. Did I sound like I'm down on this? No, I'm super into it. Just that it's not just, it's very different than saying like, oh, we're going to bring back

passenger pigeons, right? Yeah. They're gone pigeons right yeah they're gone if you know if you had millions of specimens with you know well-preserved dna could you potentially clone each individual that you have out there and end up with millions of passenger pigeons and somehow maybe on right not likely but different than something that they're actively working on yeah uh when we talk about the passenger pigeon thing it's interesting to get into this idea of uh what is the public's appetite like let's say because the last passenger pigeon to die i think died in 1913 or something i know his name was mar Right. I know it died in the Cincinnati Zoo. But it'd be weird to,

it's funny to think about that there was, that people knew it was the last one. This is it. Yeah, you could go to this zoo and they'd be like, that right there is the last passenger pigeon. When she dies, that species comes to an end maybe she died in 21

one of you boys could figure that out so they're just sitting there i just googled another thing john oh lazarus new testament oh new testament thank you jester um anyways they blink out, right? And let's say you could, let's say you were able to get them, make new ones, okay, and propagate them. And you had some plan where we're going to be like, no, no, no, we're going to reintroduce and there will be flocks of millions

of passenger pigeons that will descend onto your crop field. How does everybody feel about this? 1914. 14? What did I say? Not that. 1920. I guess 13 and 21.

I was thinking like, yeah. Passed away September 1st, 1914. Good job. That would be an interesting test of public will. Because people don't like to be inconvenienced by wildlife. Generally, you know. It'd be a hard sell for people. Some people.

Some people would be like, I would like it from a hunting perspective. Sure. But I think you would probably encounter a fair bit of resistance if you were really going to do that. Yeah. And you may encounter some ecological drivers that would be hurdles to it as well. I mean, it's, you know, the landscape, things have probably changed quite a bit since they were really at their peak. And I, you know, I've often heard over hunting cited as a reason for their demise but you know that it was a different world and yeah right the late 1800s when they were really starting

to decline so who who knows if the ecological conditions still exist to you know would still exist to recover i think the last big shoot i've read this bunch i think the last big slaughter was around alpena michigan interesting was one of the last places where they really got on and shot you know right hundreds of thousands or millions of them was in michigan and they would descend when trees were when mass producing trees were coming in they would just descend and strip the trees and people discussed like so many landing on branches of trees that the trees branches would be snapping jeez that's crazy yeah and i've also read that it was uh some people point out that it was probably that those huge numbers were probably not hadn't always been that way but it was like some perfect storm of decimation of other wildlife

agricultural practices at the time and maybe it made this sort of image that that's what it's like or like that that's what it's supposed to be like, but in fact was a complete anomaly. Right. To have those explosive numbers of those. Well, yeah, and that's part of what I mean, right? Think about eastern forests. You know, the timber harvest that happened through the 1900s, like in Pennsylvania, you know, completely changed those forests from, was it white pine dominated, Seth? Anyway, from, you know, coniferous forests. Oh, Kevin, that's really messing up the sound.

Change those forests, change from coniferous forests to deciduous forests just based on timber harvest that happened all across Pennsylvania. And then also consider what's, you know, like what happened with chestnut, right? Chestnut blight came in. Chestnut were predominant species all up and down the East Coast. And chestnut blight completely wiped them out. And so, again, I don't know anything about the ecology or natural history of passenger pigeons, but you could imagine a situation where those, you know, they played something like that, that has completely changed now, played some key role in their ecology,

and it just wouldn't be around anymore. Yeah. That's why I think that the black-footed ferret is a prime specimen for rehabilitation because you have we still have massive prairie dog colonies that people spend a lot of money trying to control but they control it with poison still it's weird like as much as we hear about in the old that that you know during the like the periods of predator annihilation in the late 1800s and early 1900s that they were you know indiscriminately poisoning carcasses to kill foxes coyotes wolves whatever mountain lions bears to sort of like depopulate predators was all through poisoning campaigns um it's still used for prairie dogs like you go out

and seed prairie dog colonies with poison pellets and that's what's credited with with killing off black-footed ferrets is they're getting they're eating poisoned prairie dogs but it's interesting to think like here you have this surplus of food that's available if you can get these things on there and then somehow prevent them from but then not use poison control which would then turn around and kill the black-footed ferret but i don't know if black-footed ferrets ever are effective enough to like actually control prey dog populations because when you read historical accounts like the entire great plains is a prey dog colony yeah it's not like they were killing them off. Right. Yeah, to be

clear, I'm way out of my depth. Oh, no, you don't need to be given expert testimony. Prairie dogs or parrots. But I'll tell you this, you guys brought up Pennsylvania. This is a good thing from Pennsylvania. We had an arborist. We had this squirrel guy on. The episode was called The Squirrel Doctor is In.

He's a squirrel doctor. Like a PhD called the squirrel doctors in he's a squirrel doctor um like a phd in squirrels um and he talked a lot about how they're so good at not dying when they fall from trees and an arborist wrote in western pennsylvania arborist he was saying he has seen realistically 50 squirrels jump out of trees over 75 feet high some out of 100 foot trees he said that three out of four that he's seen this is when he's ascending a tree to prune it and bust squirrel out squirrel can't come down because he's in it he said three out of four of them hit the grass, bounced three feet in the air, and land running. He had a fox squirrel one time jump 80 feet.

And he said there was a two-foot diameter puddle of water. A fox squirrel jumped 80 feet and hit that water pool. Like it was, he said, it was like it was aiming for it but he says another time he was not in a tree he was just sitting in a driveway minding his own business in a car and he sees a fox squirrel fall out of a tree and hit a phone line 10 feet from the ground died right before his eyes. He then another squirrel came down, full grown squirrel, hefted up his dead friend

and carried him back up into the tree. What? Eyewitness account. That's crazy. It's a good friend. I've seen him just, I've been walking through the woods and just squirrel hits the ground.

Like it must've just fell out. Oh, yeah. Just hits the ground, takes over on it. No, yeah. I've definitely seen where they just come out and then iguanas. Oh, really? Just inexplicably fall from trees. Now when it gets super cold, you know how they got the invasive iguanas in Florida?

Mm-hmm. During that big cold snap that just happened, they had to put out warnings about fallen iguanas. No shit. Yeah. Yeah, I imagine it could mess you up. But when we were just in Arkansas, we found, I don't know if we told you about it, we didn't tell you about this, Mike Rule.

When we were just in Arkansas, we found a lot of birds that had froze to death during that cold snap. Oh, really? One day we found three froze to death woodpeckers in one day. Hmm. Just. Not a mark on them. It looked like a live woodpecker, but it was dead, laying on the forest floor.

Mike, we had a big bird die off here in New Mexico. Do you recall what that was from? Was it the cold spell? Was it drought? My understanding was that it was mostly cold. I think it was that October. It was a cold snap earlier this year. Those birds didn't have a lot of fat on them, I think, was what I heard. And they died of exposure.

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OnX Club, y'all. So we're recording right now in how specific? It doesn't matter we'll be yeah absolutely we're in deming new mexico and we're down here because i had a stellar year on my permit draw to say the least now listen here's the thing a lot of people are like oh yeah they give you special treatment because like you have a TV show. So you get all these permit draws. Listen, I apply for everything in every state.

Okay. I apply for everything in every state. And every year, like you get something. But I'm applying for everything in every state. You know, like this year in Alaska, drew nothing. Last year in Alaska, drew last year in Alaska drew nothing. Okay. But I just so happened to hit, and I didn't know if it's that, I don't know. You guys can tell me how extraordinary it is. I happened to in one year in New Mexico

draw and what's called an off range Oryx tag and drew a female or immature billy ibex tag all in one fell swoop one year draw the new mexico doesn't do bonus points and and uh we've explained a hundred thousand times but bonus points are like if you apply for a permit and don't get it they sort of reward you as a repeat customer by giving you like a point and then your name goes into the hat basically like your name goes into had an additional time the next year and it's like it kind of like baits you in to keep you active new mexico doesn't engage in that so i could be applying for an oryx tag for 50 years and some whippersnapper comes in and applies for his first time and the 50-year veteran and the whippersnapper have the exact same odds of drawing the oryx tag but i had put in for quite a few years for an oryx tag but i drew the oryx tag

off range and we talked about this in the past and it's it's that on range means white sands missile range and off range means the rest of the damn state. The IBEX tag that I drew is for the Florida, not Florida, but the Florida mountains. And which of you New Mexicans wants to talk through how this came to be? Why this is a thing? Why IBEX hunting is a thing? Yeah, like how, who? Well, it all.

Jeremy, can you say where you work? Or do you have to pretend you don't know where you work? Yeah, I work for the National Wildlife Federation. I'm the regional connectivity coordinator. See that, Mike? Yeah. Just comes right out and says it. Rolls right off his tongue.

Doesn't try to act like he's in the CIA. Definitely not in the CIA. But yeah, I mean, you know, going back to... But you know what? Before you do that, tell people more about your work. Well, I work mostly on landscape wildlife connectivity issues across the West. So looking at landscapes and how well connected they are. Most folks, you know, one of the best ways to describe that and put that in a perspective

is through the lens of migration corridors. So ungulate migration corridors, you know, looking at that landscape and how well connected it is. One of the first measures you can do to look at how well a landscape is connected is by looking at the barriers, right? So roads, fences, urban development, things that can impede and serve as barriers to movement of wildlife and ensuring that landscapes stay connected. So a lot of my work is working with multiple stakeholders, right? Wildlife know no boundaries for the most part. boundaries, it's important to work with those, both those multiple engaged stakeholders from tribes to private land owners, to, uh, federal agents, land management agencies, state wildlife agencies. You know, it's, it's important for folks to be on the same page and to manage accordingly for those species. Cause we want to make sure they're, they're around, right?

We don't want to be having these conversations about elk and mule deer that we're having about Blackfoot ferrets and passenger pigeons. You know, we're close enough to the border that you can see the surveillance blimp right do you when you're doing connectivity stuff are you working with mexico as well so i'm i'm not as far south in new mexico um so i don't really work with mexico but i do have colleagues who do um and they do things like a black bear um cougar also uh birds they do a lot of avian species of migration i know uh i think monozuma quail is is a is a species of hot topic there at the border but uh for the most part i i have not been focusing most of my work on on wildlife border issues if do the people that do work on the um connectivity

issues across the border they've probably been spending their recent years like focused on one thing which is the border wall yeah absolutely i mean as i was mentioning right like barriers barriers to movement there's no bigger barrier than a border wall yeah what's funny about that too is most of the barriers you talk about when you talk about wildlife migrations or things that are sort of like accidentally a barrier like no one like is like let's put in a highway that'll be a good barrier yeah it's like let's put it in a highway because it's sweet because you can drive around real good and then someone later is like oh shit it's a big barrier but there you're like let's make a barrier it's very purpose-built yeah no it's it's well distinguished um there's there's

purpose behind it um you know during the construction of the border wall i think there was a lot of controversy to those exact issues on what what it would do to the ecological state of that landscape and providing for a well-connected landscape for various species um you know and the argument's still out there i think i think it's safe to say that uh it was the border wall has been pretty invasive in those landscapes where where they have been constructing it and so uh i i would go as far as saying that you know when you do something of that magnitude there is going to be consequences or there are going to be repercussions in some way shape or form and um you know sometimes

the wildlife are the ones who are the recipients of that yeah i know i know that like i'm talking about i'm talking this is me talking right now this is not jeremy talking like i'm i'm going to talk now and i don't want you to be guilt guilty by association but the thing that it's so funny i found with people and talk about the border wall is people that support that want a wall are very uneasy if you bring up if you even point out a problem with it they want to act like that doesn't exist you could still look and be like no no i like all things considered all things factored in i'd still like the wall but they get irate if you suggest what the implications would be for wildlife it's like they get mad that you bring it up instead like i would imagine you would take

the approach of oh yes totally i understand this is a big problem for wildlife but my i'm giving priority to the human issues to the economic issues and even though it's not ideal for wildlife i'm still deciding to support it but people aren't like they don't look at it that way like if you bring it, you're a bad person to bring it up, which is sort of emblematic of a general reluctance to sort of a general reluctance these days to just to like discuss and debate things and consider them in their totality. Do you know what I mean?

It's been really like, I've had people get so, if we run articles or post articles about wildlife issues and the border wall, people just get pissed. Well, it's a political issue too, right? There's a lot to that argument. And I would think about it as the new border wall that's been constructed. There was a border wall there before, right?

And that didn't prevent a lot of things from happening and even with the new border wall things are still happening right um i think i just i just read an article the other day about a suv carrying i think it was 20 passengers that wrecked on the highway and they got through a hole in the border wall so to what level is creating a border wall uh actually solving the issue um and with that comes all those arguments right yeah um and i think like i do think it's worth talking about but if let's say you point out let's say you're planning a family vacation okay and you're like oh i think we should go on a family vacation. Someone says, you know, if we go on a family vacation, we will have less money because we'll have spent money on our vacation.

No one gets mad at that person. Instead, you'd be like, yes, correct. We will have less money, but the vacation is important, so we're still going to go on the vacation. You don't get pissed at people for bringing up the considerations. Except this. Then you're a bad person to bring up. I know this is like a side pet peeve, and I do want to return to IBEX,

but it just remains in my mind. Anytime I'm down here looking at the border, I start thinking about it again i mean it's it's real time here you know i mean yeah the border wall or is a day-to-day issue that everyone here has to interact with for the most part yeah it winds up not being like um like up in the north you're like you know southern border i mean there's but here you're like oh wow there it southern border i mean there's but here's like oh wow there it is yeah i mean there's places on our border where there's not a border wall there hasn't ever been a border wall yeah all right back to the ibex well you know the ibex ibex were introduced in new mexico in the florida mountain range back in the 70s with the the whole exotic

push that our state took, you know, utilizing some of these barren landscapes to have hunting opportunity. And in doing so, they saw one of the game commissioners at the time, through his travels across the world, saw these various species. And as I mentioned on previous Oryx talk, he saw the opportunity to introduce some of these exotic species into New Mexico, right? So Stevie had the opportunity to hunt an oryx. That was one of the species. One of the other ones they tried to introduce was also the kudu. That never took. And then they also

introduced ibex, two species of ibex, in fact. One was siberian ibex that was introduced into the canadian river drainage folks probably know that as the sabinoso wilderness and then they also introduced the persian ibex people also call that the bazaar ibex and that was introduced into the florida mountain range was this was this coming from one individual is there like a person who's kind of like the johnny apple seed of exotics in New Mexico? He was, yeah. I don't recall his name, but he was a state game commissioner at the time. And he just saw this opportunity. He said, you know, my home landscape doesn't hold animals.

And I want to be able to have the same opportunities of hunting these exotic animals that I was overseas. And from what I got from my research is he worked with the other game commissioners to propose the idea. You know, there's, there's obviously a, I think an economic driver behind it, you know, if you want to create hunting opportunities and in doing so,

they, they assess the landscape for those species that would seem more appropriate and they, they seem to find them. You know, in New Mexico, in, sorry,

not New Mexico, in new zealand there was actually committees of people that that the focus of the committee was to make the fauna similar to europe's interesting it was so just to make it familiar and bring in like red deer and you know all that kind of stuff so it's like it's definitely not um uh you know it's not like exclusively a new mexico thing but it's interesting that three things took so well oh yeah i mean you know oryx oryx and other and various other exotic species are are not new to north america right you look at texas there's high fence ranches that have oryx other types of oryx as well other exotic species but new mexico is a unique place where we have

free-ranging exotic animals right that are largely on public land all predominantly on public land the only ones that aren't on public land for the most part you know you got barbary running around private land but you also have oryx on department of defense land on the missile range other than that most of those most of those exotic species are calling public land home yeah and jeremy's coming off of a an exotic trifecta yeah in one week one week I I was fortunate enough to harvest a Barbary sheep and then a colleague of ours wife had a once-in-a-lifetime oryx hunt on range and so uh last Sunday Saturday I helped out and was fortunate enough to be a part of that little excursion where she where my buddy's wife harvested her once-in-a-lifetime oryx and then I hustled down here

to meet you to finish the trifecta for chasing Persian ibex uh get into a little bit about how many of those like how many ibex came to be in this mountain range and what conversations had to come out about you know where other interested parties started to have an opinion about this because this is it's just like an interesting thing that you see time and again with with wildlife politics and yeah issues yeah so let's let's take it back to kind of the initial reintroduction so new mexico is a state where you cannot introduce animals from outside of the state onto the public land right so in order for the state to introduce persian ibex oryx siberian ibex they had to do they had to reintroduce their progeny.

So a lot of these animals, when they were brought to New Mexico, they were held in holding facilities long enough to have progeny. Once that progeny was old enough, then they introduced them into these different landscapes. So for ibex, for example, I think the total number was give or take 40 ibex that were introduced onto the the florida mountains and since then that population rapidly expanded um i think within i think it was within four years of the initial introduction they were offering hunting opportunities on the florida yeah i want to give people some idea that when we talk about the florida mountains um when you go to

download a map on onyx people are familiar with onyx will know that when you go to download a map on on x people are familiar with on x will know that when you go to download a map for offline use you can download a map it's 10 miles wide okay and it's taller than it is wide but it's 10 miles wide and normally you're going to hang out somewhere you wind up i usually wind up taking like the center of my activities and i'll download four and i'll use that as like the center point and i'll do like a square a square square and a square and they all meet at that middle point and that's what i'll do to get the area i'm going to be in well i thought just to give a sense of scale here when i went to download a map for this hunting trip i put the center of the florida mountains on the center of the 10 mile square map and it fit very

elegantly top to bottom side to side it was like and i had a good buffer of flat desert but it's like a stunning pile of cliffs that just rise up out of the desert, man. I mean, like, the jaggedy. It's like a weird sort of crazy castle constructed out in the middle of the desert. Yeah, I think we figured when we were sitting on the top of that mountain that we were gaining somewhere of 3,000 feet in elevation as we were climbing.

Going about a mile. Going about a mile. Yeah. Yeah, give or take incredibly steep you know mostly rock five five five miles wide on that onyx map and three thousand feet tall i mean it's just it's it's like it came out of nowhere yeah and that mountain range is just straight up like you said it's it's a unforgiving it's a basically a granite face with sheer cliffs everything there cuts and tears up your boots pokes you stabs you cuts you it's just a unforgiving landscape that

ibex just look right at home right and yeah it's funny because there's no there's no north american animal that would do it quite like they do it in terms of living on cliff faces. Yeah, I don't think there's a North American. And basically eating gravel. Yeah, basically eating gravel. I mean, I've seen ibex on a 200-foot cliff eating just the tiniest little bush possible. And you're wondering, you're asking yourself, looking 200 feet below where all the vegetation is. Why is that animal standing 200 feet up the cliff? well it's what ibex do that they walk around on vertical cliff they like to walk on vertical cliff faces and then when uh so perfect kind of

little spot for them and they dump them in there and what happens they put 40 in and it just blows up yeah so they put 40 in it blew up as i was saying you know within i think four years they were offering hunting opportunities and then you know when it comes to how many years you could hunt them i think it was within four years of the population being introduced they were they were already opening up hunts man that's a pretty impressive growth man it is i mean and to put that into perspective when ibex when ibex have kids right billies nannies kids are called kids it's common for nannies to have twins and sometimes triplets so you can imagine how quick that population if it's not being if it's not being managed through through hunting opportunities how quick it can can explode and the topography isn't really

conducive for anything outside of a mountain lion yeah i. I mean, you know, lions and ibex. Anything that needs to run down its prey isn't going to kill anything. Right. No. I mean, occasionally we'd see the old cottontail ground squirrel up there. But other than that, you know, lions and ibex seem to feel right at home there.

Mm-hmm. And it blew, so at a point though, someone points out that, like the land management agency points out that, man, you got too many of these damn things running around now. Yeah, the BLM, and I'm sure with coordination with the Game and Fish, determined above the carrying capacity of 400 animals, they started to increase the hunting opportunities to control that population. And so, previous to the tag that you draw, drew the immature male-female tag, there were hunting opportunities, population management hunts, where folks could come in and harvest two nannies.

And Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, that was probably over a five, seven-year span. I got another question for Mike, though, real quick. Yeah, yeah. I don't know that Mike would have any exposure into this, but do you have a sense, Mike, how they count the ibex? Well, yeah, I know how they count the ibex well yeah i i know how they count the ibex i know some people who

well well before before you don't know what ibex the counter you sleep with one so so counting and quantifying the number of ibex on the landscape has best been described yeah this is a good quote best been described i i was watching a a talk about these exotic species and the big game biologist for the new mexico department of game and fish does a great job she said the best way to explain to folks on how to count ibex is by taking a large barrel of ping pong balls and throwing it off a cliff and trying to count every one of those ping pong balls as they're bouncing flying all over the place damn near impossible yeah so with that they do both aerial surveys with helicopters and ground surveys with lots of observers around the mountain range.

Huh. So they do. I knew the aerial part. So you send a bunch of people up with binos and just try to count Ibex? Yeah, just like imagine the glassing spots that we used this year. Yeah. Basically on, you know, for a day or two, surround the mountain with lots of folks who are experienced at at glassing those things up and that seems imperfect because how the skills like the the skill set required of glassing up ibex

observer bias just observer skills is that yeah no i mean it's all survey is imperfect right i mean there's no it's it's you don't get perfect numbers. But what you do build up over time, of course, is count data that as long as things are being done in the same way, you get what folks would call an index of abundance. Yep. Right. I'll watching that talk, they had explained that the aerial surveys were good at getting an idea of numbers, quantifying the amount.

The ground surveys were giving a better perspective of sex and age. Yeah, I believe that. Gotcha. It's easier to count ibex running than it is to count ibex running and determine what sex it is right and then when when it got to be there's so many ibex they really got serious about trying to kill them off i think that they found that like the difference between a male ibex but there's a difference between a billy and a nanny is stunning because the billy will throw a up to like 50 inch horn yeah and beaks considerably larger when those billies

get matured they get the old-fashioned billy goat gruff goatee they get these big sweeping you know up to 50 inch horns and yeah it looks like a samurai sword coming out of his head they change a completely different color those those mature billies they they get a lot wider they get this big prominent black cross around their chest and their back and when you see a mature billy there on the mountain you you know it's a mature billy they're distinguishably different than the rest oh it's got a skull on it that any person would want to put on their bookshelf it'd take a hell of a bookshelf but i mean like an insane looking animal but then the nannies are 40 50 pounds yeah i think you know they said 90 little dinky horns like no one wants to shoot them so they had to like incentivize people to start shooting ibex

well i meaning that like the little tag draw thing yeah i don't know if they were i don't know if they were offering nanny hunts prior to focusing on managing the population okay but in doing so to manage the population they focused on nannies and immature males um and they've i think it's safe to say that they've been pretty effective at knocking down the population to that carrying capacity. Cause when they were, when there was a ton of them, they were blowing out into other mountain ranges. Oh yeah, absolutely.

When, when there was that, when there was that high level of density of Ibex, they, they were looking for other areas. And so, you know, when I was, when I was in in college i saw two billies 40 miles from the from their range and it's not you were allowed to hunt them you could hunt those year yeah so that's interesting right so billy ibex on range those are draw only hunts now being that they want that population centralized on the florida mountains they offer an unlimited ibex tag for off range anywhere outside of the Florida mountains. So when I did see those billies, I made a beeline back into town

to go get an off range IBEX tag. Came right back out the next day and never found them. How long did you look for them? Probably two and a half weeks. And never could find them? Never. Never could find them. Your guess is as good as mine. The area I was was just the fact that i even saw them there was unbelievable it was you know flatland country

with just this single lava rock mine mound and on the top there they were and you know it's not uncommon for for hunters or individuals to see ibex around some of these surrounding mountain ranges right every now and then you'll get a hunter who kills a billy or a nanny off the floridas and that's that's a feat i mean that's an accomplishment right those they're small they're hard to find and so you know i think two years ago when I did draw the archery tag, I feel like there were a lot more ibex. Just two years ago? Two years ago. And mind you, you know, the archery tag and the rifle tag are different.

Archery is a little at the beginning, so they're not as pressured. So they're probably more spread, you know, they're not as spread out as they are. But from my experience, I felt like there were a lot more ibex than this hunt we were on, which is a testament to the management approach that the game department has taken and increasing the number of tags offered. And hunters have been successful in bringing the population down. But it's a big mountain, right? I mean, 400 animals, like we were about on a on a mountain like that mind you you know the onyx map high resolution map doesn't put it

in a perspective it covers that whole mountain range but once you're on that mountain there are crooks and crannies and thick vegetation that could hide a lot of ibex going into it i was not inspired by the count number once i saw the mountain range and knowing that they're running around in groups i was like that's not that like if you had four of them 400 of them and you told him each to stay in his own little spot you know it'd be one thing but the fact that they're in groups i was like man that's not that there's a lot of places that don't have an ibex yeah i have friends who you know with probably within the last five years have seen groups of ibex well you know 50 to 100 in one in one group when you look at it from that

perspective to where we're at now that's a quarter of the population and one big group now you know i don't think there's large groups like that at the moment but but there were and and it's a it's it's a big mountain i think there's a lot of places for ibex to to hide jeremy lay out the season because there's like a bunch of different seasons for these right yeah so there's when can you start hunting them when and when does like the last season end so this hunt right now is the last i believe this is the last hunt and it's an immature male-female hunt. Now before that, you have opportunities for archery for billy or either sex. Archery tags are either sex tags. And that's the club you belong called the 98%er club.

I belong to the 98% club because 98% people who draw that archery tag do not fill it and do not get a billy or or an ibex for that matter so I am a proud member of the 98% club and that starts in October that starts in October so you have a archery hunts for October and January gotcha um and then in between there you have a a multitude of once-in-a-lifetime billy rifle hunts for those who are lucky enough to draw it. You have youth muzzleloader hunts, rifle hunts, I believe. But it kind of just varies like that. And then it goes into more of what we want to call population management, which is immature male, female. And in order to kill an immature male, it has to be less than 15 inches um ibex are small

judging a 15 inch ibex can be difficult yeah and i was surprised how spooky they were oh my god but then jerry brought brought up that they've been people have been hunting these things since october yeah it's march and they've been getting hunted since october yeah but to touch on that that they are exceptionally spooky but ibex i've seen few things like i've seen i have seen few things as touchy yeah as they are touching and they're like that in in october i mean you know there might be a lot more ibex that you have plays at because they're not as pressured but they are still on edge they are still just as sketched out, cagey. I mean, it's the same show. Those animals, when they want to get up and go

and run to the top of the mountain for no reason, they do it. They hear a rock fall. They hear a backpack slide. For instance. For instance. They don't like it. They don't like it.

It's really incredible. And then they have that mountain goat thing too where you know a whitetail hides like a whitetail hide kind of where they can see but they're also comfortable hiding where they can't see much but nothing can see them at times you know but they these things have a real knack for picking some spots to hang out yeah they pick the makes it that i have a real knack for picking some spots to hang out. Yeah, they pick the roughest. That makes it that I have a cliff behind me that's vertical. So if you're on top of it, you can't look down and see, you're not going to look down and see me down here. And then I see everything in front of me.

Yeah, and if you're on the bottom, you know, chances are they're going to be so high up there, you can't even look up and see them. Yeah, they're good at like picking their spots. Yeah, for that archery hunt, there was a lot of times where i was underneath cliffs on billies you know and you're looking straight up like i could hear them up there they're overhang and the cliffs coming over you and there's just no way you're able to get a shot we had times of crawling up like a lot of times you spend a lot of time going up toward a ridge or saddle or something that's

going to give you a view of a new country. And one day we had a few times when you'd get to the crest and you're prepared for the fact that you're going to be looking at some new ground. And it's intense sun, so you got a lot of shadows and there's a lot of brush. And you'd be like, here's the perfect place to pop up. I'm going to crawl up under this juniper and use the juniper as shade cover. And there's a rock and I'm going to like belly slide in and do everything perfect.

And I'm going to slowly raise my binoculars. And you do that and you meet eye to eye. Some ibex is 400 yards away, like very aware that you're there yeah yeah you know we were talking about it i feel you know those ibex they're they're so smart and they're so cagey that i feel like they they bed or reside in areas where they know they can see danger whether that's from prior history or interactions or that's just the natural wiliness ability of these ibex to position themselves in areas where they can feel vulnerable and that's exactly it every time we came into a saddle where we thought we were

going to have a great opportunity ibex were looking at us i mean they had us pinned down you know it's funny too is we found uh we found a a deadhead or the remain like a portion of a dead we found two horns yep um the the skull was gone but we found two horns under a cliff and what we count like it wasn't even that big but we counted seven growth rings seven growth rings you start hunting ibex season start in october they run into march he's been alive seven years that doesn't that's a lot of data to pull from for that animal he probably lays there he's like you know what when i'm here i always watch that spot because that's where some asshole always climbs over and like they probably get a very detailed sense of like where right like how things move yeah i think because that mountain has what the trail yeah what the trick because

it's very there's not many ways to get around right it's either cliffs or finding these little trails and cuts to get to saddles you know find those little grooves in between the cliffs to make your way and i think those animals know that i think they know most most predators or or uh others other species aren't going to be on the cliffs so where are you going to be looking off the cliffs yeah but these little it's like most of the places not a lot of the places up there that you can access on foot there's one way to get there and one way to leave there's not there's not like through there probably are somewhere but it's not like a place where there's a lot of like through hunting it's like you got to kind of go up

and finagle your way through and then when you go go to leave, it'd be like, the only way you're going to leave is to do exactly that. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't make sense to try to find an alternate way out, right? You can't just plunge off places you haven't been before. That mountain is so dangerous, especially when you're burning light. You want to be able to get off that mountain safely. And if you're trying to bushwhack and find a potential way to get off that mountain that you haven't previously taken, there's a good chance that you're going to get cliffed out. You're going to get put in a tough spot and you're going to run out of light and you're

going to have to make the choice of either hunkering down, continuing your path or going back the way you came, which you know is a safe route. And that's always something to factor in when you're up on that mountain, right? right i mean there are numerous times where we probably could have kept going we probably could have threaded the needle and pushed it to pushed it to nighttime and walked off that mountain on the dark in the dark but even even at that at night everything looks different even if you have your track going up that mountain everything looks different and so it's a it's safe to say you want to get off that mountain and with ample light to be safe about it. Cause the last thing you want to be doing is getting stuck in a spot where you have to make the decision.

Am I going to stay here? Am I going to walk back the way I came? Cause it's going to be a lot farther. You're going to be doing it at night. Or do I, do I push forward and hope that this path I took leads, leads to an exit. So I looked at the harvest data that's available through New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and there were according to that there were no ibex harvested outside of the floridas on the statewide over the counter tag

last license year and there were two billies harvested the license year before that so it's not a rich hunting opportunity. Right. So like Jeremy's saying, if you find some off-range, that's not something that happens all the time. Don't tell anyone and get on it. That's right. That would be, to me, one of the cooler things to do, man,

if you could find one and get it like that. Oh, yeah. That's badass. Let me hear the crystal ball question. Then we're going to talkvin murphy about rabbits um take mountain goats we're gonna talk about mountain goats for a minute here's a native animal native to the continent right so mountain goats are native to coastal alaska some of the interior ranges in south central alaska all down through bc okay uh native to portions of washington portions of oregon native to western montana there's some other areas that

are debated native to the eye they were historic populations in the idaho panhandle okay so like it's at least from the continent over time motivated by the same factors as they did to introduce ibex to increase hunting opportunity they put mountain goats um on neighboring mountain ranges like sometimes really that meaning that put them for whatever you can understand why, like why are they in this mountain range, but not this mountain range. And people would just help them out by bumping them over a mountain range. And, and now in Grand Teton National Park, Olympic National Park, they're taking steps to bring in using public hunters, using government sharpshooters, all kinds of things.

They're bringing in efforts to eradicate mountain goats off of some of these mountain ranges where they weren't historically, even though they were 100 miles off in some other direction. That makes it seem like, in my mind, things don't bode well for the o ibex because you can't even make that argument for me they're from another continent man yeah like i feel like as more some people are like your buddy carl malcolm love him to death but he's always oh we need more voices in the room more stakeholder you know those people are not going to be too sympathetic to the ibex they're not going to be like well you know those guys like to hunt them so let's keep them around it's just not going to be what their view is on it you could picture in a year or two or in a decade or two someone saying they got to go i mean i'm sure it's happening right now but

are they what are they hurting desert bighorns bighorn habitat so there yeah there are bighorns in the floridas not in the floridas um and and i'll be the first to say that i am stepping out of my zone right now and so the the conflict would be native bighorn sheep habitat right similar and correct me if i'm wrong to to the mountain goat right yeah that was made in grand teton so an olympic national park i think it's like a vegetation they're using it's a vegetation issue in grand teton it is rocky mountain bighorn conflict but one might look and feel that those are proxy arguments and it's more of an argument about the the kind of audacity of moving non-native species in and then you that is offensive to someone and they'll look and be like well what's the big deal and then

you go like oh well this yeah, this. Yeah, I mean. And it's like a proxy fight. My personal thought is, you know, back in the 70s when they were having that discussion, that was the time to really, you know, have the talk about, is this the right thing to do? Or should we be focusing our resources and attention into reintroducing native native fauna to the landscape right so let's get bighorn sheep back in there but that wasn't the case we got we got to deal with what we got to deal with now right and the fact is is that persian ibex are on that mountain and according to from what i know from our uh you know biologists and listening to the department is the Ibex and the bighorn

sheep, there aren't any potential issues there as far as disease transmission, as far as complicating reintroduction efforts of bighorn sheep. There's been considerable efforts to reintroduce desert bighorn sheep in There's been considerable efforts to reintroduce desert bighorn sheep in some of the surrounding mountain ranges, and they've been very successful. And in doing so, the Game and Fish Agency has, and the public as well, have warmed up and accepted the IBEX, per se, to call that mountain range home um i personally like ibex i personally like the opportunity to go chase ibex now if you put me in the room back in the 70s i would have advocated for bighorn sheep to be on that mountain and they were there

they were they were there before i i don't know that pre-70s i think like wasn't everything here desert bighorn country well yeah you would think yeah i mean i i would say that's probably a safe assumption but i i don't know entirely if big if the florida mountain range was was home to to desert bighorn sheep when we uh we were having a very similar conversation about neil guy and uh that live in south texas and i use someone's quote where someone described them as being an honorary native and boy did i get a lot of feedback from biologists about calling them an honorary native yeah including me yeah you're one of them yeah that's enough of that it's one of my favorite stories about about you because i said whatever i said

about using that term honorary native and then somebody said like basically you're an a-hole steve rinella would never want to hang out with you oh yeah i guess i guess before we move on move on to the rabbit piece the last thing i would say about hunting ibex is you know next to making sure you're careful and getting up that mountain safely and back down safely is it's it's frustrating oh right to say the least ibex hunting is frustrating and the reason i say say that is you bust your tail. Every day you're climbing 1,000 plus vertical feet, damn near straight up. Hands, feet are always usually on a rock.

If not on a rock, they're getting poked by a cactus. And it is just a difficult mountain to hunt and so when you have an opportunity to lay your crosshairs on an ibex draw your bow back and lay that 100 yard pin on an ibex you have to you have to factor in other factors that usually don't in other hunts right and the biggest one is am i going to be able to recover that animal you know these animals are standing on cliffs they're in sketchy places and you know it's it happens more times than not where hunters see that opportunity as oh here's an animal i can harvest it and they take that shot only to find out that they cannot recover that

animal yeah we had opportunity you know it was like an opera yeah yeah we we had situations where i was just we were looking at animals um that one could have shot at for sure and be like you're just not gonna get to it despite dirt myth guaranteeing i can get there that he would get there with a rope and a harness guaranteeing i mean i personally i'm like not what i'm looking at garrett like yeah but that's unless you got a helicopter unless you're putting a helicopter in the mix i don't buy it i'm gonna watch it from here and jeremy you were pointing out spots in the mountain where there were still ropes hanging yeah cliffs absolutely so you know folks like i mentioned hit ibex they go die in these precarious

areas on the top of a cliff and hunters will actually hire rock climbers you know to go up there and climb up to the top and repel their their goat down for them and you know sometimes they bring their ropes down sometimes they don't and so it's not uncommon to, as you're glassing these nasty cliffs, see these ropes tethered and just hanging down to the bottom. You just know someone scaled up there to lower an ibex down. Yeah, Rick Smith read an article about some guy that killed a billy at 830 yards and then hired climbers to go find it for him. That's the problem right is like

that's like i'm just not gonna take this shot right not interested in the work yeah yeah i mean and that's like that's a hard conversation to have right when you're when you're glassing an ibex and it's well within shooting distance and you say i don't think you should take that shot i don't i don't think you should take that shot. I don't think we can recover that animal. That's a hard concept to grasp and you just busted your tail to get up to that saddle to have that opportunity just to come to find out that, sure, you can shoot that animal

and it's going to fall 200 feet to the bottom. Is that even worth it? I mean, that animal is going gonna be so beat up there's not any meat to recover yeah the one we got fell what do you think 40 feet yeah if that it scrambled its guts real good but the meat unscathed but i mean it's like stomach contents were it was pretty beat up like like its innards had been homogenized. You couldn't tell. Yeah. It was just everything was. You couldn't tell what was going on. Everything was everything.

It was everything. Inside its innards. And that, you know, that billy fell, like you said, maybe 30 feet, landed in vegetation, which was fortunate. Yep. And that. Landed right on a yucca. Right on a yucca.

A little bit of a cushion. And worked out perfectly. You know, we saw right where it went in. And to the point where I'm saying is, you know, making sure you can recover an ibex is we were looking at that. But, you know, where is that when you take that shot, where's the likelihood of that animal going to go? And we were certain that if you took that shot, we were going to be able to recover that animal. The two, yeah, two instances where, like two, just to give people an idea

what we're talking about. There was one instance where there was a chute that we could pretty much picture getting to the chute. And it was in the chute, but if you follow the chute up, it was like, man, you probably could pick your way up that chute, but there's a big Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder

that had at some point in time fallen off the mountain, ran down the chute, and then got wedged in the chute. I mean, this boulder's like 12 feet high. Yeah. Crammed in there. And I was like, man, you could, if you can, and it seems like you can, but I'm not sure, get up the chute, you sure as shit not getting past that boulder.

Would Dirt guarantee you he'd be able to? Did Dirt guarantee you he was going to get it? We have the Dirt guarantee. With his harness and his saddle, he guaranteed he would be able to retrieve it. And the more we looked at that from more angles, I really wish we could have taken him up on his bet. The other one, we're looking at an Ibex, and you couldn't really picture where it would quit falling,

how far it would go, but it would wind up in a chute. And I was like, oh, shit, you can definitely go up that chute. But then I raised myself up to follow the chute down more and realized that the chute just ends at a cliff. But had I not done that, in my head, it was like the easiest thing in the world. And there's no way to come in from the sides into that chute. I shouldn't say no way, but you weren't. And then it was far enough away that once you shot

and it fell from its cliff, it was going to vanish into the brush. And so you'd have to finagle your way over there, which would have been an hours long job. And then be like, I don't know, it's somewhere in the 500-yard expanse from that cliff down to here in this brushy-ass chute. You're not going to blood trail it. Frustrating.

You might find tufts of hair stuck on stuff here and there. You know what I mean? And they're the size of a Labrador. Yeah, I mean. So small that when we went to, you you retrieve a body, a carcass, you want to move it somewhere nice to gut it. I grabbed its back foot in my hand and then bent it up and grabbed its horn in the same hand

and lifted it up and carried it down and set it where I wanted it. Yeah, it was like just passing the billy down to our spot where we can process it. Yeah, you carry it like a suitcase. I mean, and even packing it out was pretty interesting. You know, if there's an animal to pack out whole and leave it fully intact, it'd be an Ibex. Yeah, I put the whole thing, the whole thing fit in my backpack. In a small game bag like not a large

game bag that you would fit an out quarter in a small game bag like a deer a deer quarter game bag we slid a whole ibex into it took the hooves up to the head and just oh it's my kind of hunting, man. Yeah. It was fun. It was brutal. Anything to add there, Mike? No. Mike was my glassing buddy. Meanwhile, we were down at the bottom. Pouring the coals to it. Which is important, right?

To say it again, or to add to the whole experience, it's like having a team and having people that can have eyes on the mountain for you and say, you know, ibex are still there. As you're hiking up and down these hills and through these crooks and crannies, it helps. And it's really beneficial to have someone with some eyes on the mountain. Oh, just have people i mean just even in the morning just to try to find some yeah i had heard from a guy that was saying in the earlier season there was a lot of people not finding any at all which i could very easily picture yeah we got fortunate Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. All right, Kevin Murphy, you ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. This is called the saga of kevin murphy the saga of kevin murphy's beagles when we were on oryx this june and jeremy and mike were there um i was kind of flabbergasted by the number of rabbits running around and we talked a bunch about why don't people have beagle beagles

out in the desert and how many rabbits you'd kill with your beagles because they're all over the damn place and i started getting kevin interested in uh how he ought to come out and bring his high test rabbit his high test beagles out here and run rabbits how'd that go coven well it was an experience you know when you you asked me about that i said well i don't know for sure i said we did take a trip two years ago down to north carolina to hunt some marsh rabbits with two of my friends that are beagle manias that's what they live for is uh getting on chat groups talking about rabbit hunting and we packed up and went to what's your guys favorite chat group in the rabbit community you know i don't stay connected like that so i don't know i'll find out for you

i don't know but um we loaded up went to north carolina and sandy soil but moist down there and so we would get after some rabbits and i was running like four of my dogs and they had probably four so i had 12 beagles out there trying to run some rabbits and we ended up killing just a few and then like in the third day we're sitting around the couch just kind of like we are now talking and they said well says you know we read a lot about this that dogs coming from up north and going down there to run had lots of issues and lots of problems running the rabbits you know typically you jump a rabbit up and it's gonna if you just post up there be quiet look at the landscape and the terrain he He's going to make a circle around.

A huge circle. Yes. Some, some. I mean, when I was with you hunting swamp rabbits, I mean, they'd go so far. You couldn't even hear the damn dogs anymore. Now, a swamper will go further than a regular cottontail. But sometimes, initially, they'll go out and they'll come back in. Just one time.

And then the next time they go out of the country i mean out of here out of here and then when they start coming back and i didn't learn this to uh i got a garmin astro they'll start they won't make us just a continuous circle it's a spiral little short circles in there and you remember when we're down on um the band hunting i was looking at my gps and the dogs was running and running and running but never running back to us and i told you said we're gonna have to go after that one i don't know if you remember that or not because i said this is what he's doing and i had learned that hunting him before that they start making these small spiral circles and you just have to go in there and try to figure out now when we hunt rabbits uh snowshoe hare on drummond island uh to kill

one snowshoe hare usually the dogs have to run four to six miles so you can that's the like it's it's not that the dogs are running the rabbit in a circle intentionally. It's like the rabbit is going in a circle. He doesn't want to leave his familiar territory. Yes, correct. That's what I think. So when we go to Drummond to hunt, up there, I had to look at the GPS and figure, so, well, this rabbit has crossed, like, three times.

Because a snowshoe, he'll run in the shade in the dark. And I didn't realize that the first time i hunted those was up around benedicta main and we get out there in that fir forest and try to look for them and like man i can't you know you just got to get right on top of them so your shooting lane is reduced very small um i didn't really know what i was doing up there we hired a guide and um we ended up killing seven or eight a little bit different condition than the drumming you said you've been on drumming for it's a glaciated island we used to hunt snowshoe hares they're just uh still hunting them yeah which man you can spend a lot of time like you can spend a lot of time on great sign and not kill shit but you look at your

gps and you say well this this hair has come through this little trail out here like three times maybe four i'm gonna go down there and get set up and maybe just have a 15 20 yard shot no further than that is a long ways when you're in that forest like that and then all of a sudden he crosses 50 yards down there he heard you or saw you you weren't you weren't still enough but you know you can completely run a dog down if you're not careful i know uh the second morning that we were there i've got a faster dog lucy the little tricolor blue tick beagle she's getting some age on her now so i turned her loose that that morning and we had the best races of the day but by one o'clock she had shut down and we carried her out in the back of

our game bag that afternoon completely recovered but that's tuckered her out yeah she was just she just ran and that's what a beagle to do they just run and run and run until they got nothing left in them so we we came up here you know we had the discussion i says i don't know how my dogs are going to do in this dry desert terrain and i says i'm a little bit concerned about can you back up a minute what do you think like the give me the north carolina example what do you think the problem was for the beagle you know i don't know i don't know if it's the soul down there that sandy soil because it was damp you know we're hunting these marsh rabbits which were very similar to uh the swamp

rabbit but a little bit smaller not near as big they would leave their sign latrine stumps and logs so we saw that sign in there but i do not know what the trouble was down there i don't know why the beagles but they had remarked that people yes from the the rabbit dog chat groups remarked that they had taken their dogs down there and they had trouble running the rabbits in that moist sandy but are there dudes down in north carolina that have beagles that do good i'm sure there is you know um i went uh black bear hunting down there one year with with the bear guys and their dogs could just pound those bears but i mean they all lived down there and they were acclimated to that's what they were used to hunting yes so you know and it's sometimes it is hard to to pack a dog up and like we did we drove two days 1200 miles to get here and

then open up the dog box and say go run me a rabbit you know even myself after four or five days i feel better i see more out there i learn more you know what these rabbits are doing and it just takes a while maybe if i spent two three weeks here or whatever maybe they could pick it up i don't know. It is so dry. I mean, this air here is like some kind of ozone generator. I mean, I cannot believe just smelling fresh. You know, the rabbits have no smell to them. It's just a different landscape and, you know, atmosphere.

If you were going to lay out the best ground conditions for a beagle to smell a rabbit it would be what snow grass uh on a melting snow melting snow out for my days of running bobcats with dogs not a fallen snow or a frozen snow but a melting snow it seems that is the ideal condition that's sticky for oil yes yeah yeah that it's releasing something or whatever but they can really run on a melted snow or damp and wet not too too too uh wet but you know a lot of us dog people there when you let the dogs out in the morning they go over there and take a crap and you smell that it's like right in your face tight that's not going to be a good morning to hunt i don't know if that scent is just laying you know low

on the ground and not not rising up but so you're saying if your dog goes out and takes a growler in the yard and you can smell it real good well it's just like it smells right in your face yes that's gonna you know it's a good hunting day. Yes. Huh. Because the smell is going to be sticking around. That's the only thing that adds up for me. Yeah, that's good. That's an astute observation. I like it. I will be 62 in September, so I have been following dogs probably since I was seven, eight years old.

And trying to put what I see together. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong, but just... Smells like crap. It's going to be a good day. Yep. When the winds from the south blows the bait, you got to make up one of those things, man. I'll be working on that.

I'll be working on that. So here, it's very definitely not melting snow. It's dry, dry gravel. And I thought... With a lot of rabbits. A lot of rabbits. Lots of rabbits and just tremendous amount of rabbit sign. You know, everywhere you look, you see a peel.

Because nothing decomposes here, man. Right, right. I swear, you're looking at 300 year old rabbit like what what would happen to it it's like you lay it out on the ground zero moisture laying on gravel it's like every rabbit turd that's ever hit the ground here is still laying here and probably i'm not gonna argue with you yeah i noticed that noticed that there was just an ungodly amount of... I don't think anything happens to it. It dissolves at some point, but...

Some of that rabbit shit we were looking at could have been two years old. I wish you could radiocarbon date and it wasn't as expensive. We could find out how old... There's reasons that wouldn't work, but something like that would be interesting. I think that you're looking at a great history of rabbit droppings. You know, a rabbit is a critter, I forget the scientific term for it, that can eat its own waste. And you'll see that sometimes.

Oh, it's a caprophagic. There you go, Mike Rule, caprophagic. You know where he's in the wildlife business or something like that. Is that what he's saying? I don't know. I thought it was a sketchy. You can picture it. You almost picture it. Caprophagia, eats poop. Yeah, what he said? No, no. I thought it was a sketchy. You can picture it. You almost picture it.

Caprifagia, eats poop. Yeah, but they will. Likes poop. You know, you see some that are really green, and then you see some back home. This is the way it goes. You know, you see some really green, and then some that are very light color.

And you're just saying, well, that is one he's probably eaten, because everything rots back home. You know, we've got 50 inches of rain per year. I looked up here, and it said 11. And then y'all said, that's kind of high. You know what it is where my fish shack is? Probably, sure, up there, like 60. 169.

13 feet of rain. I'm sure. No place for a clothesline. No. It's like 15 years worth here. So I'm seeing this rabbit peels, droppings out there. You know, just everywhere you look in some places. And Jeremy gave me, we arrived here and on sunday

afternoon we went hunting he shared three onyx hunt points with me he says this would be a good location here here and here so we headed out with one and we jumped a bunch of rabbits in there we had the dogs uh they were getting the mesquite thorns in them. And they may have like a little mesquite branch, you know, three or four inches long. You know, it's sticking out on both sides of the pot. And they keep hobbling with it. You know, I've got a bird dog. It was raised out west.

And she gets a thorn in her. She just stops and pulls it out. You know, we had the discussion. And I was saying, i don't know how my beagles are going to do around all these cactus and thorns and then you said well people bird hunt with their dogs here all the time i got to thinking well he's right about that but i took the beagles out here and you know we spent a they didn't get as many as what i thought they would get but when they got one they never you had to actually pick them up, you know, and pull it out.

And sometimes it would just be a single thorn. And then sometimes it would be like a part of a branch. Like they hadn't learned. Yeah, they hadn't, they wouldn't even look at trying. They just kept on, you know, hobbling and trudging through that. So we went that afternoon, they would get after a rabbit and in the grassy parts where there's some vegetation, they could smell it good, and they jumped some,

and they run them until they got to the sand and the gravel, and after that, they just could not smell them at all. And you'd go and put their nose in where it was. I saw one. I saw them jump up one and go down this chute there, and I called them. I give them my rabbit call. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they all come running over there and put them and it's like nothing not even a tail wag or anything they just could not smell it a buddy of mine who's a houndsman who's a lion hunter i brought this up to him ahead of time and i'm sure you talked to plenty of people too but um i brought him what we were fixing to do because he used to be a beagle man too but he's now a lion uh houndsman uh he hunts bobcats and lions and he he he didn't know but he was more thinking about the acclimation he wasn't like did it would work or wouldn't work it was just that what are they accustomed to and what he pointed out was um if you have lion hounds in the north and you run lions in the snow okay uh and then he's seen where those dogs have gone down to try to hunt dry conditions and they just can't do it

but meanwhile you have the exact same dogs like exact same breeds and lines um not lions but the same breeding lines of dogs that are reared in those conditions and they excel in them and so he thinks it's just a matter of it's not that it can't be done it's just a matter of of his skill set is just not adapted to this. And over time, they would start to piece it together. But you're just asking too much of them. I agree with you on that. It's just like in my country.

When people come in, they may come from the eastern end of the states and they want to go swamp rabbinining. So take them down into the Clarks River bottoms in there, a lot of little swamps in in water ditches and the hill dogs that come out eastern kentucky are not used to running in water and swamp rabbit you put enough pressure on they'll hit hit the water swim across and it's the neatest thing in the world to see a swamp rabbit swimming because they make no wake they've got these little bitty you know their feet they're just barely paddling right there and they see this rabbit looks like he's

just gliding out across the water but they'll bring their dogs down that are not accustomed water and they'll trail a swamp rabbit to the edge of the water and maybe they wait out just a little bit and then they won't go swimming you know after those those swamp rabbits and then a lot of times a swamp rabbit just go out 10 20 feet 10 yards or so and just squat down in the water and just just stay there sometimes just with their head just barely barely submerge i have i have not seen one but they will go underwater. I have talked to people that have seen them do that like a Rambo rabbit, go underwater and then come out. So I've got a friend of mine, his dad saw one do that one time.

But I have seen them on three or four occasions swim through swamps across the Clarks River and some little bitty water hose just go in there and it's the neatest thing in the world to see that but i see people bring their dogs down that are not accustomed to the water and they won't follow a swamp rabbit through through the swamps and or across the river to the other side and which my dogs are got lucy out there and when she was a puppy i just would get her out there to follow me around and get her swimming in the ponds, get them accustomed to water as soon as I can. So they're not afraid to go out swimming to no degree. I tell everybody she's half river otter because I've got a real neat picture where Raymond and Jason, you met Jason and you met Jody.

We all boated into the KOW, I think it's about three or four years ago the river was coming up and Raymond hunted that ever since he was a kid he says Murphy I'm pretty sure it's going to probably push a bunch of rabbits up into this hill down it's all flat river bottom land anyway so we can boat in about four or five hundred yards and go in there and hunt that big area it's still be a couple hundred acres in there that's not flooded out of about a i think it's about five thousand acres down so you're concentrating all those rabbits onto that one patch yeah that one patch so we went down there and we killed eight swamp rabbits that on that hunt and after it was all over 40 pounds for the swamp rabbit

pretty much after that hunt raymond says i thought we might kill one or two yo down here and that like i said it concentrated pushed them all up there and we had a really good hunt a couple of them hit the water on us and got away didn't get those and we're going down through there and And all of a sudden, we see this blue kayak coming out across the water. And Raymond looks at me and says, who in the hell is down here in a blue kayak? Must be some birder or something. Well, they see us, and they start paddling. Well, it's Raymond's brother.

Mike, he is down there deer hunting because he knows that. Like I said, they've hunted this place since they were kids. He knows that the deer are going to be up there. Yeah, he's going to be the deer up there. So we're all sitting around through there looking, and all of a sudden Mike says, man, there's something swimming way out there. He says, it's a swamp rabbit. So Raymond wheels around there and shoots,

and he's the only one that wore chest waders that they luckily he did that because my boat wouldn't start that morning so chester beware of used boats well he's gonna tear it up he's gonna wind up with a brand new boat on that big plane okay so so raymond shoots this swamp i mean he's way out like 50 yards or so so he goes out and picks up and i take a picture of him. He's got an orange head on it, and it's just a little bitty speck is all it is of Raymond out there. So he comes into the bank with this swamp rabbit. So we got his brother there in the blue kayak, got Jason, and then Jody's all down there.

So we got the whole gang out killing swamp rabbits that morning and i can remember when i was uh worked at the the power plant and there was a a boy from lbl before they flooded it and he said when we was kids the crops wouldn't be in and that's the cumberland river running through there says they the grown-ups would be talking about the river's getting ready to get up and we don't have our crops out he says all us kids was thinking about man the river gets up and the swamp rabbits getting in there we're going to take a tobacco stick in there and go on our way lamb so you know they were all excited that he's going to flood because they could get to go hunting but you know the adults were concerned you know just like adults should be you know they were going to lose their

corn crop but all the kids were ready to go hunting because it pushes that game up so that's we're with these boys these these tribal you know amerindians in one of these areas in south america and uh they were telling us that that's when they hunt is when everything floods and they just go island hopping because the the deer and these big you know they hunt these uh nocturnal rodents down there like oh the hell they call those things like there's the well there's they call it it's a paca but uh god's got another damn name and a goodie no it's different than the goodie either way i can't what the hell it was very good to eat we ate a bunch tastes it's like it's like very pork like anyways then they can when it floods and that's in their mind when to go hunting because it's so easy you just go check all the little islands and everything that everything that needs to breathe air is all in the same place and they

talk about sometimes you can go up and just club stuff. That's what they would take. It's so stuck. Yeah. They'd hunt with a stick. One of my friends, he saw, well, you know, that morning that we went swamp rabbit in the boat, there was three quail sitting on a log in the backwater. No kidding.

So, and then a friend of mine, he was out checking on his duck blind yesterday. He sent me a picture of a swamp rabbit up on a log. I think I showed it. Yeah, he showed that to me. He couldn't get out of the water. Yeah, that was just yesterday. Our river system is coming up two foot a day, so it's on a really big rise.

That's the river down there where Leon lives. It's about two miles wide down there now. Yeah. That's a tremendous amount of water that that i live around i knew these guys that lived in an area in alberta where it was legal to you could hunt beavers like normally you can't but you could hunt beavers for the markets and they would in the spring floods everything the water gets so high that all the bank dens and lodges would flood and they'd go out in a John boat with a 22.

And he was telling me one time, I can't remember. I remember he said something like, they hunted two days ago, like 99 beavers or something like that with a 22. All because everything was flooded out of its house. That's a tremendous amount of skin in there if you kill that thing in two days. Pure misery, man. Pure misery. Let me ask you this, though, Kevin.

Do you regret coming out to New Mexico with your dogs? Oh, no. No. It's been a pleasure. I met Mike and Jeremy, you two new guys, Seth and Chester, and see you again now. You know, we met the first time, I think, in 2012 in St. Louis. So here we are.

We were at the – I was signing something or another at the NRA convention. And I come up to you and started talking to you and said, man, you need to get some kids into small game, honey, because they can go right out their back door with a minimum equipment. That's not what attracted me to you. What attracted me to you and doing that, you're talking to all kinds

of people and after a while, it's hard to keep track. But the reason you and I, that's not the reason we became keep track but the reason you and i i don't that's not the reason we became friends but the reason i i we began to correspond is you were the first person in my life to ever come up to me and start making a guess about whether the squirrel hunting would be good this year and you were looking forward to the squirrel season because you felt that the mast crop was looking pretty strong in your area and in all my years i've never had someone come up and predict to me um and try to like make a guess to me about what the squirrel

season would look like based on mass crop and i said that's a special man it's all about food with rodents not people all day long oh a lot of good antler growth which is fine that that's a special man it's all about food with rodents not people all day long oh a lot of good antler growth which is fine that that's great but i've never had someone come up and be like there's a very strong mass crop and i think it's gonna be an exceptional squirrel year and i said i want to be friends with that person here we are we've hung out in a lot of states now man yes kevin murphy you know what the american treasure i just gotta get that joint technique down right kevin if you spent enough time here with your dogs, do you think your dogs would adapt to the landscape?

And second, if you took them back to your home, do you think they would perform better or worse? Oh, that's a good question. I like that. That's a great question. Would they be like, shit. Kentucky? You're not going to run around in New Mexico.

Backwards. You know, we left out uh let's see last saturday we could go saturday it was got up as a minus four degrees windshield and i had two friends down and was gonna go squirrel hunting and we had i think 14 days below 30 degrees it was a cold spell for us i think it was like the fourth longest on record from so-and-so there, but it was, the sun was warming up and the, I thought the squirrels would come out. So I told my friends,

let's just wait till about dinner time. So we went out and we, we killed some squirrels. I think, you know if i stayed down here for a month or so and figured out i think my dogs would get better i feel if i raised a generation of dogs out of those same dogs they would have no trouble down here with some teflon booty yeah i think they'd get toughened up with that but you know my dogs are used to running in muck and mire in leaf litter not abrasive grit and gravel and used all these thorns you know they'll go right through blackberry bushes the brambles no problems at all you know a little short but

these long mesquite yeah i don't think so but i think they would get better i don't think they would be ever be great but i think i could raise a litter of pups down here now if i took those back home i think they would be lost oh yeah because they're not used to the water unless i trained that went to the rivers and got them accustomed to swimming do you think you should start a kevin murphy southwest division i mean and have it be that you have a division of you that lives here with rabbit dogs? I would love to hear from some local rabbit hunter, beagle guy, or somebody that frequents here. I got on the internet and looked around and tried to find rabbit hunting in New Mexico with dogs. There was nothing.

Well, that's why I was so intrigued by it. When you brought it up, I was like, not only yes, yes but hell yes because i've never heard anybody doing that before here i got another i got another follow-up question for you kevin based on what you now know with your beagles what do you feel would happen would you be more or less enthusiastic about bringing out your squirrel dogs for abert squirrels or would you be like i've learned my lesson ain't gonna happen oh i'm coming because i've got you know i've got a look out not even tell me about it well abert sons of bitches okay here's the difference they invite you seth they invite the whole person here of it here's the difference you didn't get invited

jeremy we'll plan our own trip yeah man get some real squirrel man out here a beagle is in the way you want to be nose nose pretty much 95 that's what it uses it's using the nose or if you've got a good squirrel dog it's using its ears its nose and its eyes so if we go with those big ponderosa pines there, the squirrel dogs that I have, we'll be able to see those. And so when they see them, they're going to be able to trim. They're not going to have to worry about them. Jump into the next pine tree, right? I mean, the landscapes that I've seen, I haven't seen it in person, but just looking, they're going to be in that probably.

So you feel you'd have more luck. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm coming. You know, I'm going to do that. Dude, I want to go so bad. I can't believe you guys didn't tell me about it. Well, let's do it.

I did tell you about how many avert squirrels I saw this year. No, you did not be like, oh, I'm planning a trip with Kevin for squirrels. He's planning a walleye trip with Chet. Well, that's completely different. Yeah, but I at least was exposed to that plan. Oh, he invited you? No, but I was exposed to the plan. It wasn't like they were sneaking off in the bushes and planning out

avert squirrel hunts. Well, we'll see how things shake out and we'll call you if there's room. If it's working. I think that would be an amazing thing to try to do. I bet it would really work. I bet it would work a lot better than beagles

in the Floridas. There's going to be a lot less rocks, cactuses, pokies. Yeah, and then the audio visual is interesting. Yeah. That's a good point. All right, man. Kevin, thank you very much for coming out. Appreciate the invite.

You're an inspiration to me as an adventuring spirit. You like to go do stuff. I like to go out and live. I'm in the fourth quarter of my life, and I want to see the world. I find it amazing. I'm looking out and seeing things, and I'm asking, like Jeremy said, what kind of plant is this here? What is this animal mound here? So, I mean, those small things intrigue me.

I'm just not about going, I'm going to kill this animal or this one. I want to see everything that's out there and try to figure it out and try to put it together. I mean, I just love the world, how Mother Nature makes things all interact. The desert quail, to see those things out there. You know, what's it going to take to make them things fly, Jeremy? I mean, are they half a roadrunner? You know, I got into two bunches of them. I saw you guys, you know, pushing those down and they were just like running, running, Jeremy. I mean, are they half a roadrunner? You know, I got into two bunches of them. I saw you guys, you know, pushing those down,

and they were just like running, running, running. And I saw a covey the other day, and I tried to get on top of them, and I just saw them one time, and they was gone in a little drain area over by the two water tanks. But, yeah, you know, I've enjoyed this very much. I was talking to Dirt yesterday. Dirt was saying, asked if I was the kind of person that felt things will always just work out. I explained to Dirt that no.

I was saying you need to wake up every day paranoid. He said, but if you try, they'll always work out and i said oh absolutely man i think if you uh i think that we live in a land of tremendous opportunity and i was like if you apply yourself and try hard and focus things will work out for you but then i brought up that i was like there's a thing that happens to people that doesn't get talked about is so many of the people I know that eventually fall into it not working out for them so often is

they become pissed off and bitter. Like no one talks about the, not that no one talks about it. There's a real problem with becoming pissed off and bitter. Like it happens to people. And then it's just downhill. And the thing I like about you is how optimistic you are. Like you got to go in and get a whole new damn knee

and then get better and go get a whole nother knee. Yes. It can be fixed. And you're not even remotely irritated by this. Because it can be fixed. You're like, like a part of life yeah i mean as human beings we have the power to believe in something better that's out there and that we have the power to go after it that separates us from the animal kingdom animal

kingdom just does it's just instinct i've got to get some nuts buried up but we have the power to look out there and say hey i can build this i can do this i can go over there aspirational yes yeah i mean we can we can imagine things that are not there you know i feel like if my knee failed i would i mean i would battle it out but i would have a problem with turning pissed off it's just in my d. Arthritis runs into my family. And it's just part of life. I mean, I'll be 62 in September. And it's just, you know, I've got a lot of wear and tear on that knee, playing sports, walking, being outside. It's just I've used it and I can get it fixed.

You know, I've got it on the healing phase of the moon. So every card I can play, I'm going to play. I've got a really good doctor that cares about me. I'm putting an 18-inch sewer line through his backyard. Just to butter him up. No, this is part of a project that we couldn't get easy on some people through there. And they wanted me to go over. I was going to have to take out some trees or something.

So I said, I've got to go get an injection. So maybe I'm sitting on my schedule, my knee surgery, so I can, uh, maybe get to talk to him. And the contractor wanted me to talk to him because I had to get an easement from a former mayor that, uh, that I used to work for. And they wanted me to go in there and talk to him. So I got it. And, um, you know know the world's about politics making deals sitting here you saying what you need to say i say what i need and we come to a conclusion there for good of me and you both and our everybody and that's the way we need to stay but uh was going through there and then one neighbor comes up to me and says let me tell you something about Dr. Patel. He's my doctor. I don't mind saying his name. I really love him.

He says, you know, if you've got a doctor, you don't want a doctor that's a big duck hunter or a farmer or wants to be an artist. You want a doctor that likes to make people well. He said, that's what Dr. Patel is. So I just kind of kept my mouth shut and never, not until he got the end, because I was all ears waiting to see what he had to say about Dr. Patel is. So I just kind of kept my mouth shut and never, not until he got the end. Cause I was all ears waiting to see what he had to say about Dr. Patel. And then he said that, that really made me charge up and say, Hey, yeah, I've made the right decision on the doctor. And like I said, a friend of mine, he's 81, had a heart valve replacement. They were going to put in four stents in him. He picked out the right healing moon phase for the heart and went in there and come out of the operation with a new heart

valve and two stents in there and i'll see him monday night at the lbl sportsman club meeting and he's still guiding at 81 he's a fish guide mike you might want to want him you'd be better be glad that he lives in kentucky and and not New Mexico because he would wear your ass out so um you know we all have that power to wake up in the morning and go out and do something good you know in work whether you volunteer if you go through your life I'm going to continue working that's something I've just seen in the last couple of years i thought when i retire i'm going to retire and go hunting and fishing and stuff well you can only do so much hunting and fishing really can't the older you get the less you get i mean i see jeremy out here i said how much gas you got left in your tank he said it's it's full it's always full it's topped off so you know remember, I said, I can remember days like that, but I'm not like that anymore.

I just want to go out and do my thing and watch other people hunt. I don't have to kill something every single time that I go out. I don't have to get the limit. If I can just get one, I'm completely satisfied. That's all I have to do. But, yeah, it's good to keep a good positive attitude. And that's what I'm going to try to do to the end of my life. You know, it's just work, be out in the dirt, outside, out in nature and just live. Damn straight. I like it. Kevin Murphy.

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