The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 269: The Mooch

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Robert Abernethy, Rick Smith, Chris Gill, Seth Morris, and Chester Floyd.Topics discussed: How you need to watch Joe Cermele's B-Side Fishing; caught on trail cam: tractor driver hangs out of tractor to defecate; Steve's tooth improvement and a mountain goat hunting dentist; the impulse to make everything a competition; how Robert Abernethy has been shot twice; incident vs. accident; Chester's daily Bitcoin Liquid Index report; MeatEater's House of Oddities Auction; Metamucil, a regular buck; when you accidentally hit a rabbit while lawn mowing, then inhale the tularemia bacteria and get sick; "Seth" by MISS; a beautiful ending to a story in the Sierra Madres; the rewilding of the Savannah River nuclear site; two tiny fawns sitting in a fish bowl; longleaf pine and turpentine camps; making a place for quail; 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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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We are the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light.

Go farther, stay longer. All right, first off, right before we do anything, YouTube right now, you can go watch The B-Side of Fishing with our very own beloved Joe Cermelli. So Joe Cermelli used to be, in the old days, it was Hook Shots with Joe Cermelli. But now Joe Cermelli works with us. He's got a brand new fishing series

that we're launching on YouTube called The B-Side of Fishing with Joe Cermelli. You can go right now and watch. And we're doing it like how they used to in the old days. In the old days when you had to, when there would be a day that it would. So on Tuesdays, we're going to keep putting out B-Side of Fishing with Joe Cermelli's. Tune in every Tuesday.

And while you're there, subscribe. So go to the MeatEater YouTube channel and subscribe. You'll get all of our stuff because you're a subscriber. So check that out now. Joel Cermelis is great. Also, you should go follow Joel. Hey, what's Joel Cermelis' Instagram handle? Let me look. If you want to keep track of all of Hey, what's Joe Cermelli's Instagram handle? Let me look.

If you want to keep track of all of our fishing stuff, and Joe Cermelli in particular, and all of our fishing stuff, Seth will tell you. It's joe.cermelli138. What's the 138 all about? I don't know. J-O-E dot C-E-R-M-E-L-E-1-3-8. Yeah, because Joe, that's a long story.

Hookshot's Joe. He's now B-Side of Fish and Joe. And then also the Bent Podcast. So if you love Joe and I do, you can also listen to Joe on the Bent Podcast. We got a lot more stuff. I'm going to be fishing with Joe in New Jersey coming up here real soon. What are you fishing for stripers oh nice yeah you didn't know about that no heck yeah that's cool i'm not gonna tell people

why but yeah fishing stripers with joel sermelli sweet the bite uh speaking of instagram unbelievable engagement a podcast list that wrote in that he had the greatest trail cam video ever taken. And I was like, can't be true. Send it to me. It's the kind of trail cam video where he needed to explain it before, because

he felt it was irresponsible to send it without first explaining what it was. It is a trail cam that they had set up on a field edge and they caught a farmer driving by in a tractor and the farmer without stopping the tractor opens the door and hangs out of the tractor to defecate. Not even stopping the tractor.

Doug Dern, I ran this by Doug Dern, and Doug Dern acts surprised there's any other way to go. As though, you know, he has his coffee in the morning and then goes and gets in a tractor. Like, very common practice. A guy, half a million people watched this farmer. There's some great comments. I had Will blur out the farmer's face. But I also left it open that I was so impressed with the farmer's work ethic

that if he wants to come work with us he's hired right now any man that that believes in his job that much that doesn't even stop to you know him and the amazon workers have a lot in common yeah but the difference is they complain he didn't yeah he looks he might have been complaining he looked fine to me you don't know have you got to talk to him. I haven't talked to him yet. Yeah. You know what? You're right, Rick. He could be real upset about that he has to keep to schedule.

He's like, I'm on such a tight schedule. Doug also pointed out that he's pulling a manure spreader. So it could be in his mind. He's like, listen, they're paying me to spread manure. Why would I, right? Not contribute. so it could be in his mind he's like listen they're paying me to spread manure why would i right not contribute why would i go off in the bushes when my whole thing is i'm out here spreading nerf yeah don't long-haul truckers engage in something similar in a jug yeah yeah when you're driving down the road and you see a yeah have you ever peed in the jug oh yeah i did it the other day i was stuck on the freeway in la and i had to do it man i didn't know i'll do it i swear to god it's hard do you know that guy clark song yeah i was

thinking about it when i was i was trapped the angle can be tricky because if it's tilted too tilted it was it was nerve-wracking yeah it's terrifying. Yeah, it's hard. Moving along. I got to do a... Okay. A few episodes ago, I was complaining about my new tooth, my molar. Complaining bad.

And I wasn't thinking about how my dentist listens to the show. Like, I wasn't thinking... Listen. I'm the one that... It was my tooth problem. And I should have alerted him. I shouldn't have chosen that way to let him know

that I wasn't happy with my tooth. But boy, did he make it right. He heard me talking about it, had me down. It went from being my least favorite tooth to my most favorite tooth. Did he put a little gap in there so stuff doesn't? Took the gap out. Oh, it's tight.

Here's what happened. Remember how I was telling you that you should get your molar replaced because your teeth migrate? Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, he put the tooth in and then the other tooth moved away from the tooth. And that's what made that food trap. Didn't like it. No, but now it's my best tooth.

I asked my dentist if he needs an endorsement he said he's been around long enough that it doesn't that he doesn't need to go out and look for clients but he's a hunting dentist well i'm gonna tell you his name kevin pierce i'm gonna be kevin pierce i'm gonna be a client of his dds you should go to him he is the reason i'm bringing this up he is very concerned about how you won't replace your molar i know that's why i want to go down there and talk to him about that he previewed for me how he's gonna convince you of the need to get a new molar and it has to do with a doll sheep he shot one time well i hope he's i think that he's a ton of dolls i hope he's bringing his A game. My dentist...

This is funny because this is going to tie into a thing we're going to talk about in a little bit. About where Corinne, who's unfortunately not with us right now, is curious why we always have to turn everything into a competition. Who did most of what? To the point where there seems to be a bragging about who's been shot most. But... where there seems to be a bragging about who's been shot most um but uh uh he's gotten double digit mountain goats because he grew up in alaska whoa yeah he grew up where like you get out of school and go hunt mountain goats for a couple hours that's like the casual yeah he was telling me a great story about his old man got uh mauled by a grizzly mauled by a brown bear

and then his old man killed the brown bear and then other brown bears came and ate that brown bear and the whole thing was so vicious and heavy and everything that he said it stripped all the blueberry bushes were all broken off and gone and he and his brother were back there recently and he said you can still tell that area because the blueberry bushes that grew back aren't as high as the blueberry bushes well really around it he said there's still a big like death circle around he's like they're walking along so that's the tree where dad got mauled that's crazy yeah cool dennis man yeah great dennis yeah totally cool like man did not just you know publicly uh my it's my favorite tooth now um another thing i want to touch on real quick i had uh my kids got this new game. It's called on a scale of one to T-Rex.

And in this game, it's kind of hard to explain, but we were playing the game a lot and you have to, it's like there's a charade component to it. And one of the charades is you need to act like you're driving a car and someone's pursuing you. And we were playing the game, and that night I had a dream that needs to be turned into art, and I had a dream of a fox riding a horse

with a rabbit in his mouth looking over his shoulder as though being pursued. I bring that up. You should have him with a chicken in his mouth, like the fox in the hen house. Yeah. He's being pursued with a chicken. I'll bring that up for any artists out there.

Inspiration? Oh, yeah. Amazing. It'd be an amazing painting. A fox riding a horse with a rabbit in his mouth, looking over his shoulder as though very alarmed about who's pursuing him. Kelsey.

Fan art. He's too busy robert abernathy's here with us we're gonna get to you we gotta take care of a few things up top no problem okay hang tight you're actually gonna come into this in a minute here uh tons of listener responses that we've had to deal with about, because we like to talk about fleshing and how Seth's super good at fleshing stuff. The whole thing of pressure wash, everybody's like, oh, you should pressure wash. Are you familiar with this, Robert? No.

Fleshing raccoons with a pressure washer. Fleshing beavers with a pressure washer. Never heard of it. It's not a real, granted like some people do it it is it is not a thing worth recommending to people um i agree now a friend of mine is a professional hide handler and i asked him what his take on it is and he said here's his sentence just imagining beaver fat and meat spread over an acre after being sprayed in every direction has limited my interest and it's and he says also that it only works when it's they do it in the winter and it's frozen

outside so you can't do it but yeah it's like you take a pressure washer and you take a hide you want to get tanned or tan yourself and strip it of fat and meat clean down leather with a pressure washer this dude stew i was watching this because like it has a horrible i mean it blows the stuff everywhere yeah so there's a professional fur handler named stew and he's got this thing if you want to learn like great fur handling techniques this dude stuff coon creek outdoors he does a big explanation of like why it is complete horse shit he has a video on his channel about it right yeah he's like all right here let's set it up let's do everything just right and set it up it's just not the same thing he's a guy that throws him in the washing machine

too right he does wash all of his hides in the washing machine after fushing or before he's adamant that it's pre-fleshing whoa why is that it's easier to dry with fat and stuff on it yep huh so when he everything he does when he skins a fox he skins the fox no detergent just cold water washes it in the classic washing machine he's got washing machine in his fur shed with no lid on i noticed puts it down in there and washes it pulls it out hangs it's dry but the dude is very very attention to detail very attention to detail if you want to learn nothing gets you set no no i i go to him all the time yeah i go to his channel you know to learn stuff what's his last name is it stew miller i don't remember has he been on here no he should be uh he hasn't coon creek outdoors great stuff

i mean like if you just like seeing how to do stuff he does an interesting job of explaining how to do stuff uh when i was thinking about why that's the wrong way to do it there's this book and i'm gonna do a major book report on this book but alaska's wolfman which i've been talking about a lot in this book he goes to this prospector's house and the prospector's house is the it's he talks about it's the kind of the grossest grimiest place he's ever spent the night but the prospector keeps his plates screwed to the tabletop i read i read the book yeah it's a great book isn't it it's a great you read that book i read that book really i remember you and me my brother daniel the only people to ever read that book he has dogs and the guy wonders like why are the plates screwed to the table permanently and it's because he just eats and then the dogs

can get up and lick the plates clean and the plate doesn't move around so they can get it extra clean and then that's how he does this just lets it be oh i like that idea dude and i'm just saying that that that's that'd be like people if i if every time me and seth talked about washing dishes if someone's like oh no no you don't need to wash dishes just screw the plate to a table get a dog get a dog that's like the pressure washing flasher people but steel plate i don't know yeah i imagine because you can't. You can't drill a hole in another plate. Yeah, you could. You'd take specialized equipment.

You're familiar with Preston Pittman, Robert. Oh, yeah. As a big turkey man. Yeah, I've met him several times. He was on the show. We're still in our listener feedback section here, Robert. Okay. He was on the show, and he was talking about how he got shot twice.

And then Corinne, our producer, was curious, why did we then get so many emails of people talking about that ain't nothing uh based on how many times i've been shot and a guy writes in a guy named zach he writes in i've been listening to episode 264 of the podcast the guest was shot twice and you all think that's crazy my father has been a guiding outfitter for almost 40 years he's been shot 13 times jeez what's he guided that'd be the question and it's had several dogs shot just find you might all find that interesting uh best bird dogs yeah it's gotta be bird hunting corinna why do folks, dare I say mostly men in my own experience,

seem so often to give in to the tendency of making something a competition? I understand that some things might reasonably and legitimately be structured as competitive, but why is there an impulse, in this case, to one-up Preston regarding the number of times he's been shot? Because it didn't kill him my dad was shot one time he was yeah hunting what happened uh as he likes to point out made it all the way through world war ii without getting scratched by a bullet got scratched by other stuff but never scratched but shot through his rain poncho during the war yeah shot through his rain oh geez man shot through his rain poncho never i brought this up never forgave the germans um

got home and was hunting rabbits with his nephew and his nephew they're walking along and his nephew put a load of birdshot right into the side of his foot oh and they kept it secret was he aiming at a rabbit or was he just walking just shot they were walking side by side and shot it right into his foot and they kept they kept it secret kept it secret and he was at his and he went and laid on his couch i can't remember if he was his grandma or if he was at his grandma's or his mom's or something was laid up on the couch and everybody talked about how lazy he was at his grandma's or his mom's or something, was laid up on the couch, and everybody talked about how lazy he was now and everything, but it was because he'd been shot in the foot.

Oh, God. Yeah. But how did he, it must not have been a serious wound, or did? No, he would, back when they used to x-ray your foot to see if your shoe fit right, this was before my time, he would go and show everybody all those shotgun pellets in his foot. Oh, wow. Yeah. I've explained this a bunch.

When we had, I ran all of his ashes through a screen. Oh, to get the lead back? Yeah, but I think it, you know. Melted? Melted, yeah yeah couldn't find it found all kinds of dental work and couldn't find the lead it says the guy's been shot 13 times chester where have you been well i know but i'm just bringing that up again and saying that i feel it sounds like anybody that wants to brag about being shot 13 times

it's probably their problem like they gotta think about who they're hunting with and where they're hunting he's a guy he's hunting with he's hunting with clients yeah i know but he should do a better job yeah there's something he's not doing right something but yeah so to take on corinne's thing about it's not like i think think Corinne, God bless you. It's not bragging. I don't think you're bragging. Like generally, like I put in my note here, at any given moment for Corinne to see, I wrote, at any given moment, most people are trying not to get shot. Like generally, among all the other things you're doing, you're trying not to get shot.

Yeah. And it's only the survivors that wrote in so it's not like you're not you're not bragging you're like observing about it yeah because if you were said like i go to the gym every day look at my big muscles that's bragging because you're trying to get them and then you got them and you alert people but if you go through life trying not to get shot and then then you get shot, it's not a bragging point. It's more of a, you're right that people make stuff into competition. We had a bench press competition the other day,

and a pull-up competition. There is a sense that if you get shot and you survive it, that it's a badge of honor, that you've avoided something that could be far worse. So once or twice is like, I got struck by lightning. It's like, and I made it, like somehow, miraculously. Is that man bragging?

The man that says, I've been struck by lightning. Well, if somebody then goes, but I've been struck, that's pretty cool, but I've been struck five times. Well, that's just called one-offsmanship. Yeah, so it's related to

attention-seeking impulse. Like, this unique fact about me, we might all be similar looking, but guess what, guys? I've been shot three times. However, if we were sitting here, one guy got struck by lightning, and then the other guy got struck

five times legitimately, it'd be very hard for him to sit here and not say anything. I was going to say the same thing. It's not bragging, though. No, it's like when people go talking about their international travels. Oh, this one time I went to Papua New Guinea,

and then somebody else was like, oh, that's pretty cool. But I lived in, I don't know, with the Bush people. It's one-upmanship. So it is related to a, I think it is gender related to something. Oh, for sure. But we all know that I'm, has your dad been shot, Chester? My dad has not been shot. But we all know that I'm... Has your dad been shot, Chester? My dad has not been shot.

So we all know. We all know. Not that I'm aware of. We all know. We all now know that I'm cooler than Chester. Because my dad was shot. That story was great. So that's better than Chester. That makes me

better than Chester, clearly. And that impulse actually helps. I think it's like a storytelling impulse. Oh, yeah? Well, my dad was a mushroom grower. My dad's kind of been struck by lightning. Oh, well. Yeah.

But if somebody were to say, I've been struck 13 times by lightning, I would be very curious why they keep getting struck by lightning. Well, I got a question. Are they counting like if he's running like if he's doing like bird hunting are they counting incidents of him getting shot are they counting like the amount of bb's in his leg oh i'm sure it's instances because you can't count the look we'll have to have we'll have we'll have to have corinne see if she can get the guy to come on the show for a minute. We'll ask him how he keeps getting shot. Maybe we can give him some insight about how to at least reduce the amount of shootings you're involved in.

Because one of them is eventually going to get him. Yeah, I wonder what he considers shot. Listen, it might be, I've been shot, if you count catching bird shot. Yeah, same. Like dove hunting and stuff. Yeah. Just like, oh, someone, you know,

we're going to go, twat, twat, twat. A hundred yards away from you, it shoots at the dove. Stings a little bit. Yeah, I don't count that. It smacks you. But the reason I bring it up, the reason I bring it up,

oh, and then Corinne also went on to say, then she also is asked, like, why do people, like this competitive thing, and then gets into like fishing contests coyote hunting contests it's different those are completely different i don't know how many talking about whether you've been shot or not is not the same thing as going to a fishing derby no but i also don't know if it's a gender thing because like i'm very uncompetitive and i know women that are extremely competitive

like i have friends who are very competitive so i don't know if it's like because she's saying it is a gender thing i think if you took she she's saying in her experience it seems to be weighted that way and i would think that if you took um a hundred men 100 american men randomly selected men and 100 randomly selected american women and put a question to them like um raise your hand if you've been in a competition in the last week i feel i i have a suspicion that more male and it could there's it could it's social you know cultural social yeah i'm not saying it's like it's like like a genetic thing but but i just think you'd have more i think the the hundred dudes would have more hands shoot up i think you're right yeah it could be like it could be like totally socially constructed i do think when people are asked if they're competitive, it's sometimes

in certain circles is a negative thing. Oh, no. If you're competitive, you care too much about little things. I could get real upset if we were trying to make baskets into a trash can. I would just be like, God, I lost. We played horse

today. I mean, I really don't want to lose ever i lose all the time but i mean it upsets me it doesn't matter how yeah minor but there's also a thing that happens there's like a bullshit thing that happens to women where it's more like if a dude is described as competitive he's a competitive you know it's like oh that's laudatory but it can also be a thing that you'd say about a woman that would be like, like not flattery. Right. Oh, she's very competitive. Yeah.

And it's like, it's a bad double standard. Yeah. Anyhow, we, Oh, go ahead. I was gonna say we,

amongst like our friend group, we have a little shed hunting competition going. I must be out of the friend group. Well, it's just like, it's a different, did you catch that? Yeah,

me too, man. It's a different, it's a different friend group. Uh huh. But, uh, just like, like the not, a different friend group. Just like the not good friends. No, they're good friends. Better, in fact.

This is not the point. Still different. The most competitive person in this little shed hunt competition is Kelsey, my girlfriend. She's out there right now. Literally, she's out there right now literally she's out there right now shed hunting all right for the competition purpose and to get cool i mean she loves to do it

but yeah but she wants to win she wants to win all right there you have it settles that reason i bring this up robert you were you were actually uh um you expressed some opinions about uh birdshot that people use. And I noticed you actually factored in the experience of one being shot in your birdshot selection. Right. I've been shot twice. Not 13 times, just twice. But I count it as peppering. I mean, if I get peppered and it penetrates clothing, you know, it doesn't have to draw blood, but I got shot turkey hunting.

And the guy shot me with a duplex load. Hold on, back up. I got to get a couple things straight. All right. You're saying that you count it being shot if it penetrates your clothes. Yeah, if he aims a gun at me and pulls the trigger with the intent of causing bodily harm, That's what the turkey hunter did. He thought I was a turkey. Yeah, I got you.

He shot me. And then a kid shot me pheasant hunting. The pheasant flushed between us, and I saw the shotgun barrel. I looked down the shotgun barrel and hit the dirt, and the gun went off as I was falling, and it went through my hat. Oh, man. And luckily didn't draw blood. One pellet hit me between the eyes oh and if it had

been a half an inch to either side it would have gone through an eye but it hit me on the bridge of the nose and uh and two or three pellets in the shoulder or something but they they didn't penetrate the skin but it wasn't getting rained on you know oh yeah that happens all the time it rains down on you but the turkey hunting i'd working a bird, and he quit gobbling. And just like one did this morning, he quit gobbling. And so I slipped down in this little bottom, and I was looking, and there was a clear cut. And I said, well, maybe he went out in that clear cut.

And I was glass, and I was looking. I heard a cluck up on the hill. And it wasn't a gobble, it was a cluck. It was just one cluck. And hunters never just make one cluck. They're like, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck. They're just calling, calling. It's just one cluck.

But there was a fire break running up the hill. And I just thought, you know, if there's somebody walking that fire break, maybe he's, it's 80 yards to the top of the hill. I'll see him if it's a hunter. But I got behind a tree anyway. Thinking about getting shot. Yeah, I got behind a tree. But why were you thinking he was going to shoot you?

I'd been shot once and didn't want to get shot again. And I got shot that morning. I don't want to get shot a third time. But I turned to look out into the clear cut. And as I turned, I picked my leg up and set it on a stump. So, you know, I was standing up straight. And I kind of went like that to rest myself. And he shot me.

And two pellets hit me in the leg. And one hit me on the side of the head. If I hadn't turned my head at that moment, it would have hit me in the face. It was only one pellet. And I yelled, and he came running down the hill. When the game wardens investigated the incident, he said, oh, well, it looks like you're okay. We'll see you later.

And he left, and I called, you know, you're supposed to report an incident, so I reported it. He was 85 yards away when we found the shell. We found the shell that, that's how we knew it was a duplex shell. Then we went down to the tree I was standing behind. There were 25 pellets in the tree that I was standing behind. Oh, jeez. And he was shooting a three and a half inch duplex shell with twos, fours, and sixes,

or twos, sixes, seven and a halves, I'm not sure. But the two is what penetrated the seam on my pants and it's the only one that really stung the sixes you know they didn't sting it wasn't bad but the the number two penetrated the uh you know my camouflage you know not just the cloth but the seam of the cloth and went in and you know number two's number two's tell you some states it's legal to shoot turkeys with buck shots some of the states there's no limit i mean you shouldn't with anything oh dude and um you know and same thing with rifles you got people and you can that's a whole debate but you got people hunting in full camo no blaze orange and other people using rifles how does he how i just don't

understand anybody like especially after this week where the turkeys come in they came in within like 25 yards right 40 maybe yeah how do you confuse that with a person well he he came over this hill and and and i don't know it was early in the morning, you know, it was first hour of daylight. And he saw that movement of my leg. And he said what he saw was a gobbler with a red head going to full strut. How in God's name?

And he shot at 85 yards. I mean, it's like 85 yards. I saw a gobbler going into full strut for the first time in my life on this trip. Close. Close. And I would never think like, oh, that dude's leg definitely looks exactly like that turkey. That's a question that comes up whenever people get shot is, and often deer hunters shoot people. Yeah.

So not only did you think that that man was a deer yeah you thought you were aiming like behind a shoulder yeah that's a good point too yeah and that you'd uh like had seen what it has on its head and well and it can happen to a more experienced hunter than a less experienced hunter because the hunter is expecting something and his brain processes what he sees faster and he processes it wrong and so he might see a bit of movement or he might be our little brains are fallible yeah today uh you gotta be careful you gotta hunt defensively today i saw a raccoon yeah and i thought it was a hen well to your credit though there was a gobbler ripping yeah right on the other side of the log the raccoon was on yeah and i thought it was a turkey

like the back of a fan or a hen slinking over a log but did you start firing shots over there absolutely not no i was gonna wait unload on the raccoon and be like, oh, I thought it must have been a turkey. Yeah, sorry, guys. And we looked at a lot of hunting accident reports, and one of the highest incidents, and they now call them incidents. They don't call them accidents anymore. You don't have hunting accidents. You have hunting incidents. And that's because it's not an accident until it's been investigated.

Until then, it's an incident. And most of them are buddies shooting other buddies. The shooter knows the victim in most instances. Yeah. Especially turkey hunting, where somebody might separate and say, hey, I'm going to hunt on this side of the road. You hunt on that side of the road. And the guy on this side of the road hears a bird just tearing it up

on the other side, and he's going, you know, there's no way he can hear that bird. He doesn't hear that bird. I know he doesn't hear that bird. And pretty soon he's crossing the road, and he's hunting the same bird his buddy's hunting. And that's where accidents happen. That's why I like hunting remote areas like we were hunting. I like hunting as remote an area as possible or private land. But statistically in the southeast, more accidents occur on private land than public land.

Because it's 90-some percent. Exactly. It's the most common type of land. I know dudes that were, this was in Pennsylvania, they were working a bird. And the bird kind of did the same thing the one did this morning. Came close and then then drifted away. Right. And there was three or four of them together hunting.

And they got up and were standing in a group together talking about what had just happened, and someone shot all of them. Yeah. What was he thinking? I have no clue. Dude, I feel like there's some bad intent there? It's like gotta be, you can't just,

I don't remember the outcome of it. He heard a bird, you know, you'd have to ask the shooter, but he heard a bird gobbling and decided to slip up on it. And the chances, it's just so hard.

You can do it. Sure, you can do it. But the odds are, you just can't do it. You're supposed to set up and call the animal to eat yeah i mean that's that's how it works but um you just gotta be careful you just gotta be super careful super careful do you know what type of hunting has the most incidents bird usually bird right yeah swinging i think it's swinging on a bird swinging on game yeah yeah swinging on

game most you're focused on and you also get trained doing it where you're shooting through brushing all the time you're focused on the bird you're not focused on what's between you and the bird yeah that's how uh that's how dick cheney yeah yeah shot his buddy yeah everybody had a good time with that and i don't i'm not trying to stick up for shooting your body but uh definitely see how that would happen i'm not forgiving it but i mean just realistically yeah it's like but you got to look at the odds you got to look at the statistics that's the it's much much safer i mean the most dangerous thing you do when you go deer hunting is you get in a car and you drive down the highway and you know that's the most dangerous

thing you're doing because car wrecks cause car accidents and then second most dangerous is you climb up in a tree stand and the the accident rates with tree stand has gone down dramatically because people wear belts now they wear safety harnesses i mean when when i was coming along we didn't wear we didn't wear any harnesses yeah you told us some fun stories a Yeah, I fell out of two tree stands and climbed back up and kept on hunting. But I got buddies that didn't climb back up. They crawled out of the woods. And I had one buddy that fell out and broke a leg and crawled out of the woods.

And we got to the highway. It was a chain link fence. He couldn't get to the highway except he had a leatherman and he sat there and he cut the chain link fence and crawled through the chain link fence and got on the edge of the highway and started flashing his blaze orange vest oh my jeez really if he hadn't had if he hadn't had wire cutters no you know is that guy still alive yeah far as i know i haven't heard from him a long time but yeah far as I know. I haven't heard from him in a long time, but yeah, as far as I know. Had another guy fell out of a tree stand.

He climbed all the way up there, and he was one of those climbers. And by the time he got to the top, the tree had gotten smaller. As they do? As they do, as they all do. Not as bad with a longleaf pine. That's right. They don't have taper. And he had gotten up there and you

know he was kind of hanging down so he turned around and he reached around the tree and he he opened it up and readjusted it on both sides he he missed he missed the pins so when he slid it around and put the pins in they didn't they didn't go through the bar that went around and he sat back down and leaned back make sure it was sturdy went straight over back didn't have a safety belt on went over back landed on his leg and broke his lower leg and the only kept the only thing kept him from bleeding to death was he had high top snake boots and so his leg immediately swole up and effectively acted like a tourniquet because it it was a it was a compound fracture through the leg and then he started screaming and he had a buddy a couple hundred yards away

tree stands are dangerous i mean you got to be careful you got to be careful they got warnings they got multiple warnings on every one of them you know yeah you know so so you know we're talking about shooting as an accident but there's there's a lot more things out there that are a lot higher risk than going hunting. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful. And you shouldn't be defensive and be aware. Don't lean your shotgun against the side of a car. Go lay it on the ground or go put it in the crotch of a tree or something. You've got to think about that all the time i was looking at these statistics about injuries hunting related injuries compared to

other sport like if you call it a sport right other sports i mean you line up all like the the sports that we talk about and think about um hunting ranks in at pool and billiards right oh for safety wow well yeah i mean because you when you compare it to like football yeah yeah yeah you start comparing it to like skiing climbing dude you want to oh man yeah skiing injuries dude everybody i know that skis is always breaking an arm, breaking a collarbone, something. All right, we're going to move on. No, I'm good with that. Oh, you know that guy, you know what the guy finished for us?

Our electrical, our engineer? What? We got a guy that's, we're taking possession of it soon. It's a master light in the middle of the table. And everyone has an dial oh it's oh you're doing it you're an engineer made it for us oh dude everybody has an interest dial yeah but it it calculates all input oh and comes up with an average for the so if someone's talking about something that you don't think is interesting, you don't need to hurt their feelings personally. You just very quietly turn your dial down. I don't know.

That's going to psychologically. No, that's great. You turn your dial down. No one knows. It's like, you know when they used to do the executions with the firing squad and they'd give some of the guys a blank? So nobody knows who's responsible. They'd give some of the guys a blank, right?

Yeah. It's like that. So you don't have ownership over the. Yeah, but someone will be sitting there talking and they'll see that light just getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And later you'll be like, oh no, bro, I was cranked up. Yeah. I don't know why.

Other people must have. I was fastening. I cranked my thing all the way up. That must have been other people. That probably will happen. Yeah, it must have been other people who didn't like your story. But how are people going to transition out of that once they see that light turning colors?

They better wrap it up. Or get to a good part. Listen, I got some stories. Oh, that's scary. I got some stories I'm going to tell where I'm going to be like, I know that sucker's going to dim down. Oh, but you're just going to test the- I'm just playing it.

Yeah. Because then I know that it's going to start getting bright. Yeah. Bright, bright, bright. Now, is dim interested? No no dim is not interested yeah now you're like oh yeah it's dim now buddy you wait a minute it should it should be a perk right up i wonder if you could do a thing where it gets to a point it's just like it's too bad and like if everybody has their mic turns off the problem is the guy that's making this that it turned into a lot more work than he reckoned with.

So if I told him that I also wanted to have the capability of shutting that person's mic off, I think I might need to send it back in a year and have him work on that. Yeah, let's not do that to him. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

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

onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Phil's going to play the Bitcoin update song. The continuing adventures of Chester the Investor. Come to Papa Moon. That's it. Come on.

Can you sing your little song, Chester? What song? Your favorite little song. The Coyote song. What I want to do is I want to revamp the the chester the investor theme so it has yeah i can do some element of that in there uh how's it going chester i understand that bitcoin has really just stabilized and you're not very close to the walleye boat uh it's stabilized it went up to date to $61,000 per Bitcoin. And immediately some gambling folk sold.

Oh, some short-termers? And it went down just a little bit. It's sitting at $58,185. But it's kind of been that $55,000 through $60 through 60 for quite some time, which is fine. Robert Chester, he had a bunch of money in a drawer in his house. Was it a sock drawer? It was a nightstand. He was keeping all of his money in his nightstand.

And just to be clear, I don't keep any money in my house. If anyone thinks of breaking into Chester's house, he moved it to a different drawer. Different house. It's in his car now. All of his money is in his car. He moved it to a different drawer. Different house. It's in his car now. All his money is in his car. He moved the Bitcoin. He took the money out of his nightstand and invested it in cryptocurrency

because he knows that it's blown up and he's just saving for a walleye boat. Okay, good. What's funny today is, Chester, can we talk about your family planning? Yeah. Well. It's not, okay, can I say this?

Can Phil leave this in? That I could say that it's not inaccurate to say that Chester may someday desire to have a family. That is not, that's true. Okay. That's true okay that's true and i was observing to chester if that's the case he might think about getting this walleye boat first to which robert said he might think about getting his hooks first because money can get tight. Yes, exactly. Hey, that's why I'm doing a little investing, you know?

There's a guy I know, Alfred. He's an investor, sort. He was saying, this is good news for you, Chester. He was saying how a lot of asset managers are purchasing cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, to gain exposure in this new asset class. The theory is that Bitcoin is the bellwether of an altogether new asset class to which they should have some exposure. For example, 1% of net asset value. this if sovereign central banks buy as well he's saying there's going to be increased meaningful demand for a finite asset i read that to say walleye boats yes for sure but like we were talking about in the last segment might keep that that in there. Sell my drift boat here real soon.

And get a walleye boat with that. Keep the Bitcoin rolling. Yeah, what's the opportunity cost of not having that walleye boat? Like, how much is it costing you? He fishes out a sets walleye boat. Well, then it's not costing him anything. Yeah, it is. To hang out with my wife,

because she'd be able to fit in the boat, which is priceless. The problem is right now, we have my boat, and we can only fit three people in there. Yeah, but you guys only usually fish together. It's like if one of you is going out, you want more people in the boat,

is what you're saying. You can't bring your... Yeah, like if Chad had a boat, I could bring my gal. Steve can come. He can bring his gal, and then we have two other people. You can come, Chris. No, I don't want Chris to go. Okay.

Come on, man. Chris, you're out. Damn it all. I finally got my invitation. Guy wrote in. Oh, you good on that yeah i'm good on it oh i got a proposal for you we're gonna start a thing we're gonna start a thing called the the the meat eater auction house of oddities for conservation and we're gonna sell one-of-a-kind oddities and raise it for our land access initiative. I love it. Yeah, we got a lot of items we're putting in this auction house.

I got some things I regret doing other stuff with that I wish I would have put in the auction house, but we got cool stuff that's going in the auction house. What if you knew what amount you needed out of your boat and we've sold your boat at the auction house knowing that you could peel off? Yeah. There's a minimum bid, and that's what you need.

Yeah. Every extra dollar we get goes into our land access initiative. Oh, man. Oh, that's a good idea. Kick it around, Chester. Kick it around, Chester. I like that. Guy wrote in about how they had a buck

you know everybody names bucks do you guys name bucks robert i don't know i mean we you know you look at the antlers and you say well that one we got one with a broken antler we got one with five on one side four on the other but we don't i don't name them you don't they don't become like dave and bob no that's a little too personal for something to eat you know yeah this guy uh listener named marty wrote in they had a buck um in michigan's upper peninsula an eight point buck he said it was he was so regular that he would enter their hayfield from the tree line of the neighbor's property every afternoon at the same time within five minutes and he says they went he was so regular they named him metamucil afternoon at the same time within five minutes. He was so regular that they named him Metamucil.

Then his brother shot at the buck and missed it and they never saw it again. Oh man. Never saw it again. Got plugged right up. Bunch of feedback on tularemia

also we found this out okay a lot of feedback on tularemia because we're talking about tularemia and brody mentioned how they'll teach you all the time and we even mentioned this in our wilderness skills book when we talk about like the risk of tularemia, and we mentioned that it's a common practice. You probably know this, Robert. What do you do to see if a rabbit has tularemia? You tell me. I don't. Just clean it?

No, there's this thing you're supposed to look at the liver. I didn't know that. Maybe. Probably good that you didn't. There's a thing like you can look at the liver, and you're looking for spots the liver and that'll be indicative yeah that'll be uh indicative of tularemia so a guy wrote in um he's a molecular microbiologist studied tularemia and its pathology on human cells wrote his master's thesis on tularemia. He went on to say this, as you know, and he goes on to plug our own Wilderness Skills book,

as you know, and it may also be found in Meteor's Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, ulceroglandular forms of the disease can be contracted by humans following interaction with small rodents and lagomorphs lagomorphs people like to say rabbits are rodents rabbits are not rodents rabbits are lagomorphs rabbits and hares are lagomorphs as well as through mechanical and vector transmission by biting arthropods so that's the thing like when you're carrying a rabbit around i feel like we't know. Weren't you guys here and we did this thing. It was about the guy that went to a dude who was selling. He was a Tonka truck enthusiast and bought old Tonka trucks from a guy on

Craigslist, but also bought a rabbit and brought the rabbit home. The rabbit scratches daughter about killed her. I heard about that, but I, yeah, this guy wrote in to clarify some points about that stuff. So if you kill a rabbit in the early season, in the fall,

and you're carrying that rabbit around, and all of a sudden you realize he's got little mites, little fleas biting your arm. Which I see all the time. All the time. That's why in the old days, I think still now, we were always taught that you don't hunt rabbits until you've had a good

bunch of freezes but it's funny because that doesn't work in the south no so do you ever hear anything that you don't kill rabbits till some point in the winter I've known hunters that would hang them in a tree okay they'd shoot them and hang them in a tree and swing around the field come back two hours later yeah pick them up because as the body temperature left the rabbit the fleas would jump off yeah and we would and people would tell us we were kids like that's why like oh you don't hunt right you don't hunt rabbits till january because as the cold weather comes it kills off the parasite load and there's less of them jumping on your arm and biting you so you can get tularemia from cutting your hand and you just get the bacteria in your hand or the little bug can jump and get you and bite you and that can give you tularemia he also points

out in addition inhalation of francicella tularensis he's giving us the linnaean name for this species it's very problematic only a few bacterium need to cause the pulmonary disease and he mentions that this is what happened remember i was talking about the person that hit a rabbit with a lawnmower that was in martha's vineyard on martha's vineyard someone hit a dried out rabbit with a lawnmower inhaled and then got tularemia that way inhaled the bacteria and how that was deadly for that person right the one i'm i don't know the one they're talking about but the one i'm thinking of the person died from it how deadly is it if you get a cut or bit by one of the treatable treatable you don't want your lungs yeah goes on to say this uh rabbits are famous for uh not showing sickness, not demonstrating sickness,

then all of a sudden just dying. And he was saying, if you are going around looking for tularemia by a cursory glance at the liver, it's not a great idea. Tularemia-infected rabbits may exist, may have necrotic tissue on the liver, spleen, or lymph nodes,

but this would be a late-stage disease and more than likely wouldn't be the indicator that a rabbit was sick and shouldn't be eaten or, better yet, even handled. Meaning, it's only at the last minute that that shows up. In this country, 1.1% of lagomorphs in the northern hemisphere have tularemia it's pretty that's pretty high i don't think so you every hundredth rabbit yeah every hundredth rabbit you clean be careful he suggests um or a group of 100 rabbit hunters. One person is going to... The first 99, it's only going to be the last.

What he recommends here, he's like at a minimum, handling rabbits, latex or nitrile gloves. If you want to go the next layer up, get a face mask. Oh, wear a mask. Use some of your COVID equipment.

Take your leftover COVID mask and put it on your face. He's saying that, but he's saying at a minimum wear gloves and long sleeves. And hang your rabbits in a tree. Do they carry the plague too? I don't know, but everything does. But I know rodents do. Yeah yeah chipmunks do i've never heard

of rabbits i know that a couple a young couple in mongolia um contracted plague from marmots yeah eating marmot liver oh they were extracting marmot liver i I believe. It's a popular dish, I feel like, though. Really? A guy wrote in, the guy we had on the squirrel doctor, we had on a squirrel doctor, who researched the squirrels, and he was talking about the very impressive

how squirrel nut sacks swell and shrink you notice yep yep like sometimes you look at squirrels like oh my gosh right he can't even bring his legs together do you know what i mean yeah no and other times they don't and as its breeding season comes it swells this guy wrote in talking about how that's not uncommon there's a monkey a vervet monkey that when it's ready to breed not only do they swell they turn a brilliant blue whoa he was so impressed by the blue that he's going to his local hardware store and have him do a color match he says he's gonna paint a wall in his house with it so what is he doing bringing in a picture of the like yeah he wants to paint a wall in his house with it so what is he doing bringing in a picture of the like yeah he wants to paint he wants monkey ball blue he says just a brilliant

dazzling i want to see the picture that he's bringing into the ace hardware wherever he's going because if it's a tight shot that's one thing but if it's like a wide where you see the monkey and everything like give me that yeah let me quiz you on something let's say you were going to transition as i am about to between that story and albino porcupines what would you go with are you going to give me an option oh right there there you go oh oh that is a beautiful blue i'd'd be like, you know what? It's incredible. I'd be like, you know what doesn't have a blue Skrill?

It's a white porcupine. Yeah. Something like that. Speaking of colors, that's what Corinne thought would be good. There you go. Corinne went with speaking of colors and presenting the material that we've pulled together here. Albinoino porcupines we talked about an albino porcupine on the show that a guy got a road found a roadkill albino porcupine and supposedly cabela's offered him what sixty thousand dollars sixty thousand dollars for his albino porcupine

apparently everybody every time dick and harry in the it's got an albino porcupine. We heard from all kinds of them. Carl in northern Minnesota shot one while hunting, and he has it mounted. He has it mounted almost nibbling on moose antlers. So there he is. He also has two real nice walleye mounted there behind him. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So albino porcupines are all over the damn place

one out of apparently one out of ten thousand really that's what holy smokes quick google so that's that's a good percentage of them that's incredible did the guy sell it for 60 000 before they did all that research what god is talking about it was the fact that he, I find that it's like a thing people say a lot is that they were offered exorbitant amounts of money for things by places like Cabela's. But I do know some cases where some people have done some great transactions. And we got to talking about about is that really true? The first guy that had an albino porcupine, his old man turned down an offer from Cabela's of $60,000. And then that led me to believe

like really? Really? For a roadkill porcupine? But he could be independently wealthy. That's probably why they just got bought by Bass Pro because they're spending that much money on broil kill. It's like, good God, man. Yeah, the diligence process.

Why haven't all that money? Yes. Poor you, Brian. But you should have seen the nuts on this squirrel. You'd have dug deep too if you yeah we paid half a mil for that one uh worth it barefoot is robert i'm learning all sorts of oh no we're gonna get to a thing we're gonna get to something coming up soon that you'll be able to plan in on. So we, oh, no.

Oh, no, we want to talk about this one first. I was saying on the show, I don't know why I had the idea. Robert, do you remember the Kiss song, Beth? Beth, I hear you calling. I don't remember it. I wasn't into heavy metal. Well, it's symphonic for starters. Well, it's Kiss.

I never listened to kiss so i don't remember the song yeah i wanted to do i wanted to do a rewrite i didn't have time to do i wanted to do a rewrite that was instead of beth i hear you calling it was seth i hear you calling and it was gonna be a turkey hunting song and a lot of guys wrote in and wrote the song so great so hayden And a lot of guys wrote in and wrote the song. That's great. So Hayden, one of our audio guys, and Cal, and then Phil the engineer, they took the best lines from the versions that came in, and they have done Seth, I Hear you calling which will phil will share with

you then i think in the end what we'll do is instead of the the songs we normally use at the end of the show if you want to hear the whole seth i hear you calling then uh you want to hear a little bit of it? Sure. Yeah. Let me hit you with it. You'll recognize it. Oh, it's good. It's good. Seth, I hear you calling But we can't hunt birds at night The flip-flop flesher is eager To use that turkey call just right Just a few more hours

And the birds will leave the roost. I think I hear them calling. Seth, what can I do? What can I do? Seth, what can I do? Seth, I hear you calling. Cal normally only, not only. Cal sings a lot of Neil Diamond.

So I was excited to see that Cal has expanded. Yeah, has expanded. A guy wrote in to say this. He says, we're always talking about pot calls and strikers getting gunked up, but we never talk about how to fix the problem. He's a chemist. That's what he says his credentials are, and he says, as a chemist, here's my tip. Soak a section of clean paper towel in pure non-dyed acetone.

Rub it on the striker surface or pot surface, making sure to wet it well with the acetone. Use mild force. Then dry it with a fan or your car's ac so that it's dry air repeat two more times this will remove the grime corinne took this piece of feedback to jason phelps phelps game calls he was not familiar with this hot tip he tried it it. He said, it works, but I don't know how much better it works than just wiping it with a rag.

Okay. Here's another, here's a rule thing that we want to clarify. We talked about a recent thing. You're in, in, in,

there are rules coming out. Again, like, like laws saying that you can't do the turkey hunting strategy of fanning. Correct. Or reaping. And we were talking about, well, how do you explain, like, what is the legalese or what is the verbiage? Well, South Carolina, this was the first year where it was illegal to use a tail fan on public land yep and i was just curious like how do they describe what's legal it's what i have right here this this is one from south carolina where we're sitting right now um fanning slash reaping so fanning or reaping is defined as hunting or stalking wild turkeys

while holding or using for hunter concealment any of the following items a tail fan a partial or full decoy with a tail fan or a tail fan mounted to a firearm tail fans include those made of real or synthetic feathers or an image or likeness of a tail fan applied to any material this regulation does not prohibit the use of male decoys or decoys with tail fans that are placed away from a hunter so pretty clear yeah they did a good job of explaining it yeah i thought they did because i, if you're hunting on public land, you don't have a tail fan with you, period. You just don't.

But if you're hunting on private land, you're fine. Legally, you're fine. Yep. Yep. Do you know, is it more like they're heading off trouble or has there already been trouble? I'm not as up on that subject as I was 10 years ago when I was with the National Wild Turkey Federation.

But I have not heard any incidents where there was a problem with somebody being shot because they were hunting with a tail fan. We've had some come in. Okay. I hadn't heard with this state, though. But yeah, there's been a number of cases. Yeah. So that's the reasoning. I know when this started coming up eight years ago when I was with the Turkey Federation,

there was debates, there was discussion among the biologists about this. And then I went to work for the Longleaf Alliance and kind of got away from the hunter incident, hunter accidents. On public land, I mean, it's another way to get shot we're talking about getting shot before but the tail fans are um i wouldn't i'd never use it where there's rifles available i mean you ever see those ones where it's a hat no yeah they make it that it's a tail fan mounted to your hat let's put some deer antlers up there for the fall. I mean, that's not smart.

But, you know, you got to be careful. I don't know. But, like, I've used that approach for sure, man. I have too. It works. I've crawled up on turkeys and stuck the shotgun barrel out between the feathers of the fan. Yeah, it works. Pulled the trigger. You've got to be careful where you're using it and how you're using it.

It's like anything else. I mean, there have been a lot of decoys shot that didn't have a tail fan. You just have to be careful. You've got to be careful. You've got to be careful. Yeah, you've got to be careful how you put your boot up on a stump. You do. You get shot.

Don't put it up on a stump like a turkey fanning out right uh robert you know what i wanted to tell you what i wanted you to tell me um because i feel like i told this story before and messed it up okay but can you share with me the story about the guy in Mexico. Yeah. That when they were arranging to get Goulds, tell that story. Yeah. So we were trapping Goulds turkeys in Mexico when I was with the Turkey Federation. We were working with Arizona Game and Fish and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, APHIS, Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, because we were bringing poultry across an international border into Arizona.

And we were down in the Sierra Madre trapping turkeys. And we were working with a local guide who knew all the landowners. And the deal we had worked out with them is for every landowner that lets us trap a turkey on their property, we'll give them $ hundred bucks for that turkey because the whole problem of getting the ghouls wild turkeys they're not very many in arizona new mexico which is where they were found down in the sky islands and we were down there and one of the other one of the other biologists bobby madry was down there the week before i was and he he was setting stuff up, and then I was coming down. But we had one rancher that they had contracted with.

Were you guys flying in and out? Both. We were driving and we were flying in and out. How were you moving the turkeys? Both. Sometimes driving, sometimes flying. When I was down there working, we flew, I can't remember if it was 30 birds, but we flew about 30 birds across the border in small aircraft. And we had a little bit of a challenge with that too.

That's another story. Oh, you tell that one next. Okay. Well, remind me about that. Small aircraft crossing the international border from Mexico. And so this rancher every day for a couple of months, he would walk up to his property, six or seven miles out of the little town of Yakara.

He'd walk up there with two five gallon buckets of corn and bait the turkeys where we were gonna trap them. And we went up there, man, his place was wrapped up with turkeys. We called 36 turkeys. And so when Bobby started paying the guy $3,600 in U.S. $100 bills, $3,600, he started crying. He was like, no, no, no, it's too much.

It's way too much. And, of course, he was speaking Spanish that we didn't understand. We were speaking English, and we had a translator, and something was getting lost in the translation. And finally we figured out that he had been working for us for two months to bait those turkeys so that we could go trap them with the expectation of getting $100 for trapping on his property. And we were giving him $100 a bird and we caught 36 turkeys. He got $3,600. When he realized that that he started crying and we found out later that that was enough to go buy enough cattle to start his cattle herd on this high mountain ranch in the sierra madres it was pretty cool that's cool yeah man a little

bit of money for wildlife and and the poaching of turkeys during that time period in that town and in that surrounding mountain range when we were in there trapping ended nobody was selling turkeys in the market for three dollars but that but when we were flying them out so we had another biologist in the u.s that was meeting the plane and we were in we were you know talking on cell phones saying okay the plane's plane's getting ready to come in and and the border patrol is sitting there watching on their radar and said we don't see a plane we'll see a plane and the guy's saying no we're crossing the border right now we're coming in we're coming

in and and apparently the pilot we had hired to cross the border didn't know how to fly above 100 feet and so when he crossed the border he came in under radar and then came in and landed and the plane had to land in a little circle they directed okay you got to land over there and then border patrol comes up with up with the sniffer dogs and everything. And they had a Labrador retriever. That was a sniffer dog. And Bobby told the story, that sniffer dog went berserk on that plane. Because it was full of turkeys?

Because it was full of turkeys, not cocaine, not marijuana, not any kind of drugs. And when they opened the door there was a breast feather that flew out of the door because you know they're turkeys it flew out of the door and that dog caught it on his nose and just sucked it right against his nose this is the best smell he'd ever had and then they let us get uh there's another two things i want you to explain you've been explaining to me down here is uh explain the dog hunt thing around here for deer on the the whole thing about the department of energy and all that stuff real quick however long you want to spend on it well

this is fascinating man i had no idea this went on so So dog hunting in South is traditional. It's been around forever. I mean, I know about that part, but go on. So when the deer population started to increase on Savannah Riverside, one of the things that they did is they had dog hunts and still hunts. But you've got to explain what the site is. Oh, the Savannah Riverside. It's a 200,000-acre federal facility, Department of Energy, that was administered by

the u.s atomic energy commission and so it since the 1950s it was making uh radioactive material for the use of atomic weapons and they moved like this is a crazy story man in the 50s height of the cold war yeah like there's no debate and whether this is important business or not right moved declared this area that that's what this is for and moved 20 000 people you're like your farm is not here anymore it's now over there your town we're moving your town over to there right new ellington dunbarton patterson mill all these little towns in the 1950s uh i don't know i don't remember if it was two years or three years to to get out but they were condemned and that was that was part of the

deal that's how they i mean this is all this isn't this isn't the west where you got a lot of national forests and you got you got blM land, you've got federal land. It's all private land. And they wanted 200,000 acres in basically a circle so you could put the reactors in the middle of it so you had a five-mile buffer. And they condemned the property, took the property, and paid the people.

But yeah, it's like if you want your house moved, we'll move it. If it's here, we're burning it moved we'll move it if it's here we're burning it tearing it down burn it cemeteries if they can find a a descendant who's alive we'll dig up the bodies and move it if not it stays yeah wow yeah so there's little cemeteries emptied the place out yep dude and then hired then hired 25 000 people yeah to come in and build the reactors and build the reactors at the time and then they had to plan dots and they had to plant all the agricultural fields so the the the ventilation on the reactors was as i understand it it was forced air ventilation and you couldn't have dust and so all these agricultural fields all

the pine trees on savannah river site i don't right now it's been too long i don't remember how many tens of thousands of acres of agricultural fields on the site and the u.s forest service was brought in to plant the fields plant all the trees and for three years they planted trees they planted uh slash loblolly and longleaf pine to get something growing on that land so they wouldn't have dust storms and because there were no longer any crops on it and it was the largest tree plant in operation in the united states at that time it took all the trees from the southeast for either two or three years and directed them to savannah river site to plant i don't know 100 000 acres i can't remember man it's a nut

story man yeah it's it's it's an interesting site you're talking about the deer hunting so oh yeah so you wind up with so so you're right you're re you're like it's like the weirdest sort of rewilding process right and the and the deer um i had read a wildlife survey from like 1951, 1952. And there were not very many deer. I remember the turkeys. They estimated there were 12 turkeys on the property, 200,000 acres. There weren't hardly any deer. But with this rewilding, the deer populations began to increase.

Eventually, you had deer car collisions. And that was the justification to start hunting the site and they had uh still hunting and dog hunting and then the the still hunting was outlawed in i came 1990 it was outlawed in the 80s sometime in the 1980s and they went to just dog hunts and you would get drawn for a dog hunt as a stander or you would be a dog man that would bring a helper and six dogs and then you would you would have a dog hunt but they they'd put the standards out 100 standards a day 900 feet apart and turn the dogs loose yeah it's crazy yeah because you told me my dial was red hot but then you told me a lot more about this that you're not telling everybody now i want you to tell everybody all the parts which what am

i leaving out that they take the hunters like you apply to go hunt oh yeah yeah so so now load them in a van yep 10 person minivan used to be school buses listen to this this goes on right now this is amazing that was a great tidbit it used to be school buses or or you know big buses and now and now it's small buses and you know you 10 person vans and you drop them out 900 feet apart and then you got a guy that runs around picks up the dead deer and carries them over and designated skinner you got a designated gutter and doesn't skin him he guts him puts him in a refrigerator truck so. He doesn't skin them. He guts them, puts them in a refrigerator truck so the meat doesn't spoil.

And then at the end of the day... And then you got 25 dog men. Yeah. Wait, but does anybody know each other? Like... How does this work, man? No, because you're randomly... It's a lottery.

You're randomly distributed. Whoa. Now the dog guys... It's like luck of the draw about where they make you get out of the van. Oh, could get either get paired with somebody everybody has buckshot yeah dude yeah rifles are illegal it's buckshot only the the dog men have generally been doing this for years and years and years because once once they know they have a highly qualified hunter with good dogs as long as he wants to hunt he comes if somebody drops out 25 houndsmen with

25 helpers six dogs a piece all turned loose and in that swap we were and then you got all those dudes in the vans distributed around with buckshot to get everything stirred up dude what was the thought it's an amazing hunt to get rid of the still hunting they just didn't want it doesn't make a good story doesn't make a good story the guy got killed oh oh so yeah he got killed so they were they were they had the still they had still hunting and uh as i understand it he he went in before daylight and climbed up in the tree stand had a had a climber had some kind of tree stand it was either i think it was in the 80s i don't remember when it was in the 80s and um as he was sitting his stand before daylight there were other hunters coming into the woods and he could see flashlights he could see people climbing the tree stand

and uh but that's not a still hunt that's an ambush well that's climbing yeah hunting out of a tree i mean down here they call it still hunt really you guys don't know what still hunt that's an ambush well that's climbing yeah hunting out of a tree i mean down here they call it still hunting really you guys don't know what still hunting is down here yeah they call it still hunting so you know what still hunting is yeah you're slipping through the woods yeah what you're walking still hunting is where you sit still and so you don't sit still when you're still hunting right when you're still hunting you move right if you're sitting still that's ambush hunting well if you're still hunting in the south and you move you fall out of a trick then you gotta call doug then you gotta call doug durin and ask him what a mooch is a mooch it's yep it's it's it's sort

of a combo of still hunting and stand hunting it's a mooch they had to come up with a whole other word to describe this method but this guy this guy decided he wanted to get it and they suspect this i mean they don't know it for a fact but they suspect it because right at sunrise he climbed out of his tree started to walk out and he got he got shot and he got he was carrying a stand on his back he got shot in the back and he turned around the second shot hit him in he meant oh geez dude so he didn't get shot once he got shot twice and he got killed and that was the end of still hunt on on the savannah river side and they went to dog hunting only after that let me tell you some more interesting stuff chris uh-huh that robert shared with me earlier got my dial you don't budge when they drop you off right if you get a hit and gotta track it

they come track it for you yeah or a dog man will come yeah wait so lay this out for me they drop the hunters off i don't know they drop the hunters off in a designated spot 900 feet apart from each other they do not move no they don't move they stay right there and so they're waiting for the dog to drive the deer is it like a deer drive i want to get involved in this so bad it's a deer drive it's i mean but that's traditional that's that's not any different than all the southern states and ontario canada also they hunt with dogs yeah they just push the dogs one thing but this is a whole this is like the organization to this and i'm not dogging on it i would do it right now if i could and it's extremely

effective and that was why they did it because you know a still hunter the a guy sitting in a tree stand the average success is 10 in a in a you put 100 still hunters in the woods 10 of them are going to kill deer you put 100 hunters in the woods with dogs on these hunts you're going to kill 50 deer wow now that was before coyotes so the coyotes is a crazy story now this is where this story starts to make its own gravy here yeah so that was before the the the hunts in the 80s and the early 90s killed about a thousand deer on the savannah river out of 200,000 acres and then the numbers started dropping about god i'm not sure when late 90s john kilgo would know and um the late 90s we're gonna get this guy on the show but you

can preview all this yeah so the numbers started dropping and everybody says you know why why are we not killing the bucks well on one of the um one of the hunts the scanner was talking to the biologist and he's good he said you know we haven't killed any six-month-old deer this year this fall you know deer born in spring fall they're six months old we haven't killed any six-month-old deer this year or today and they killed about 100 deer a day and he said no that's crazy about 50 of what you kill is young of the year it's the it's the six-month-old deer and uh they went back looked at the data and it's like we've killed two and they went back to the weekend before

to see how many they killed and it was two or three or four there were no fawns no fawns were being were no fawns were entering the population in the fall of the year they were gone they were gone by the fall of the year and so that's when us forest service came along and started doing some radio telemetry work by putting intrauterine devices into the uterus of the does and when she gave birth the fawn would come out and the transmitter would come out and go into mortality mode so when that transmitter quit moving with the movement of the doe it it would stop. And after an hour of no movement or two hours of no movement, it would start ticking. And it would go in and, you know, the fawns are just tiny at that time.

You'd catch them, put a collar on them. They'd dispatch out like grad students or field techs or something. Yeah, grad students. To go scour the woods, right? Go scour the woods. Dude, I didn't know they could even do that. Oh, yeah. We found them hunting morels down then.

Really? Yeah. It's like the. No, no, no. that. Oh, yeah. We found them hunting morels down then. Really? Yeah. It's like the... No, no, no. Sorry. Fawns. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Like brand new fawns. Oh, really? Yeah. You can reach down and pick them up. I mean, that's why you're not supposed to because you can't. They're just... I mean, they're only this big. People think you're crazy when you say they're literally the size of a ham.

They're smaller than a ham. My dad's buddy had a fishbowl. His buddy, Eugene Groters, had this fishbowl. And in this fishbowl, it was full of formaldehyde and had two whitetail fawns curled up in a fishbowl sitting on the counter as a decoration. Whoa. It had like a cap on it. Yeah.

But in his house. Yeah. It was amazing, man. When we were kids, dude, we'd stare at that thing on it. Yeah. But in his house. Yeah. It was amazing, man. When we were kids, dude. Oh, I bet. That's cool. We'd stare at that thing nonstop. Wow.

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

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Go on. So the first year, the first year they put radio collars on, it was about 10 years ago, so I don't have all the data on the tip of my tongue, but my memory tells me that they put radio collars on 17 phones. And within two weeks, 15 of them were dead. I'll back up because maybe I was thinking about that fishbowl.

Yeah. So I make sure the listeners are getting this. So you covered this, right? The sensor passes out, goes into more clicks. everybody's the listeners are getting this so you covered this right that the the the the sensor passes out goes into more clicks then you go out and hunt around find the fawn put a radio collar on like a full-on collar yeah on a neck put a neck collar on it gotcha and then wait for that to have a mortality signal right and then when that one has mortality you go in determine why the fawn died and within two weeks and you know john may come say, no, he's got it all wrong.

It was within three weeks. I remember it being within two weeks. The 15 of the 17 fawns were dead. And 14 of them by coyotes and one by bobcat. Which, we never had coyotes here in the 80 the 80s they didn't show up till the 90s so this is a new predator in a new system and all of a sudden this is happening to the fawn production well you couldn't you couldn't kill does if you had that kind of depredation on your on your deer population there's there's you wouldn't have it you wouldn't have any

deer and so some of the hunt clubs started you know well maybe we don't need to kill as many does or maybe we don't need to do this and and or do we need to bring in a coyote trapper or what do we what do we need to do what do we need to do and the research i haven't kept up with the research but the research has continued and it's not true all over the South. It's weird. It's in some areas coyotes have become extremely effective predators on fawns. Extremely effective. And that is new to the South because we did not have coyotes in the South.

The big predator in the South was red wolves. They got wiped out a long time ago, except for coastal Louisiana, coastal Texas. And that was maybe in the 70s that red wolves were all captured and put into a captive breeding program to keep them from going extinct. And then re-released on Bulls Island, South Carolina and on Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge

in Eastern North Carolina. So the big mega predator in the east disappeared hundreds of years ago. And they're back. I mean, my son shot one coyote, weighed 44 pounds. I don't know if that's a big coyote or a little coyote, but seemed big to me. Had big old choppers. But that was, you know, that's what it was it was just interesting here was this issue that came up because the skinner on a hunt said hey there's

something going on here the biologist started talking with him he started looking at him it raised a question they went out did research came up with some preliminary answers but as most of your viewers are going to say, it was only 17 deer. The sample size is too small, and that's true, but it raised a question, and then they started doing more research, more research, and more research, and so it's been going on about 10 years now. And the hunt began as a management tool because there was too many deer running around. Right, they're not killing a thousand deer now. But now everybody likes the process.

Yeah, so it continues. So they want to. Yeah, it's not going away. I mean, it's a public hunt. If you want to hunt, you put in. If you get drawn, you hunt. Is it still a nuclear facility now? It is.

It's still a nuclear facility, and it is still nuclear facility and it's pretty much in in cleanup mode gotcha yeah how do they determine so do you get your own deer oh yeah it's tagged when it comes in is you're giving you know you gotta you got so you get your deer back yeah you get your deer back you know how you guys call you know still hunting you know what it means slipping through the woods real quiet. But you're saying sitting in the stand. That's still hunting. Why do you call a gutter a skinner?

I just did. I don't know. Yeah, he was a gutter. You can't defend that. No, I can't defend that. He was a gutter. I mean, he didn't skin the deer. He gutted them.

Skinner sounds more noble. Yeah. My daddy was a skinner. I was mistaken. I was mistaken. My daddy was a skinner. I was mistaken. I was mistaken. My daddy was a gutter. Yeah, I like skinner better. What do they manage that property for?

You got Seth right perked up about this. Is it timber? He was low before. Well, it's an ecological research park. Oh, okay. In addition to this. So they do a tremendous amount of ecological research on it. A lot of the universities, University of Georgia, Clemson, University of South Carolina,

a lot of the universities do research on it because it's got gates, it's protected, your scientific equipment doesn't get disturbed. You can go out there and it's done some groundbreaking research. That's cool. and it's done some groundbreaking research that you could run for 20 years and not have your – still go to the same spot and it's not turned into a subdivision. Yeah. It's still like that. That's cool.

Anything else, Seth? No. Go ahead, man. That's all I had. And will it stay as its current designation as kind of like a wildlife – is there any plans to? They talk about it all the time, what's going to become the site. There's people who want their land back.

Yeah, I went to public. When I worked out there between 90 and 95, I'd go to public meetings, and there'd be at least one old guy, two old guys stand up at the public meetings and say, I want my land back. You're not generating nuclear radionuclides anymore back you're not generating you know nuclear radio nuclides anymore you're not generating radioactive material i want my farm back so i would totally understand that if i if it was my arm but i'm so happy like every time you had to drive by i used to own that it'd be terrible but i think it's just if you can imagine just various places

it's just nice to have a chunk like that. It's a big chunk of land. It is, man. And it's like the, you know, I'm not putting the farmer as a broken egg, but like, you know, breaking eggs, making omelets, all that kind of stuff. Like, I understand, man, but it is.

Just in two generations. Because at the time, at the time it was probably presented as your patriotic duty. Yeah. Right? It was right after the Second World War. And then that ends.

You're like, okay, cool. I'm an American. I understand. We got to beat the Ruskies. And then that all ends. And then you kind of got to be like, okay. I know. So it's not the Russians anymore.

In my mind, having intact ecological systems is also our patriotic duty, which I know. So it's not the Russians anymore. In my mind, having intact ecological systems is also our patriotic duty, which, you know. I'm just getting in the, I'm offering, as you said, the very understandable perspective of the individual who's removed from his property. I know a dude that had his farm taken by eminent domain for a golf course. There's no way, dude. A golf there's no way would i allow that to happen i know i would be the crazy guy hold up in the house talk about a chapped ass over that one

man he has to go by and see like a bunch of people wearing his old shirts eminent domain over a golf course yeah i would make everyone that you know what I'd give that guy's place back and then make all those people that ever played golf on there be his farm hands for no compensation. Yeah. Really? Oh, it's terrible.

Oh my God. It's a war on Christmas. Nice. Yeah. It's like my dad used to hunt geese there and all sorts of, they used to hunt waterfowl,

deer, all sorts of stuff. In China, the holdouts, they call them, they call them nail houses. I don't know, but like somebody that refuses in a big development, everybody else will sell, but they'll refuse, and it'll just be like their little... A golf course. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's a damn shame. I don't even see how they can do that. I'd rather be a mini golf course. Yeah. I'd be like, at least tell me it's putt-putt golf. Oh, that's a travesty.

Okay, Robert, you ready to switch gears? We can. You got to tell everybody all about longleaf pines. Okay. all about longleaf pines okay so in the south the dominant pine species the dominant ecosystem in 1491 was longleaf pine um it's a tree that grows 350 400 years most people that don't that aren't foresters or botanists and they look at a pine it's pine it's a pine tree they can't tell the difference you know seth's a forester i didn't know that i went to school for it okay so in the south we've got a bunch of different pines but the

two most common one three most common ones are slash loblolly and longleaf and oh when you said slash slash pine i thought you meant it was some kind of like cultivar. No, no, it's a species. I thought you meant like a hybrid and you were saying slash like blank slash. Oh, like a hyphen or something. Yeah, that's a species of pine. I didn't know that. Okay.

So we've got three that, we got more species in there. We got white pines and we've got spruce pines but the slash loblolly and longleaf are the three important commercial pines okay so before settlement and and really up to 1900 the longleaf pine was one of the dominant species in fact we think that it probably covered about 92 million acres in the south based on the habitat and the soils and where we think it grew by 1950 it was way below half and by 19 let's see 1990 1989 it was down to three million acres so because of what good question the first thing was cutting it down, make turpentine out of it. You would bark the trees, drain it of turpentine. And during the wooden ships industry, that's what you used to caulk the ships,

was tar, was rope or caulking that had been soaked in tar and then hammered between those boards to keep it from leaking. So the tar pitch and turpentine. When you're getting that material out right so so the long leaf sap produces what rosin and well the the sap comes out you you bleed the tree okay and that's that's fatal to the tree eventually eventually eventually but they would leave um they might box the tree it's called boxing a tree you might box a tree on both sides if it's a really big tree you might put three boxes on it i've seen one stump that had four

boxes and they would leave maybe a three inch strip of bark between the boxes so the tree wouldn't die so as long as it as long as it had something where the phloem and the xylem would connect from the roots to the to the needles and needles to the roots they'd be in exchange and tree could survive tree could live did you see how he he gestured towards seth when he said phloem and xylem it would be all over your head yeah yeah chris don't know those yeah flow you listeners at home robert did very very sort of like a like a little gesture nod to seth like we seth will follow yeah seth here will follow this is over everyone i appreciate that that little moment there about the zolomon the fly them so after you tap the tree uh there would be a period of time where they would produce the crop and a crop of turpentine, crop of sap that you would then processed into turpentine.

Okay, I want to get this right. That goes on for so long, but the tree dies. Yeah, eventually it dies and it would get cut down. And generally you didn't turn that that face into lumber and i say generally they would cut the tree down cut that face off leave the face in the woods oh you mean the part that was all the scarred right the box the boxed section uh leave it in the woods and cut the upper part into timber heart pine timber red heart timber um but it's kind of interesting on if you own that land you weren't going to waste those trees so you went ahead and sawed

out those butt logs and we've we've located at least four two by fours in my grandmother's house that was built in 1921 that actually has the cut marks on it from the so my grandfather when he cut the trees to take them to the sawmill he didn't leave that butt log laying in the woods he hauled it to the sawmill that's cool and he sawed it up into two by fours and there's only one you can see but if you go up in the attic there's two others of the ceiling joists that that has the cat face on it where that's cool where they cut it out of the ceiling joists that has the cat face on it. That's cool. Where they cut it out of the tree.

Yeah, which is really cool. And then they use them for fence posts because they don't rot. They last forever. We've got fence posts that have been in the ground. This year will be 100 years they've been in the ground. Wow. Yeah, they've gone through two. Down here in the south.

They don't rot. They've gone through two or three metal fences. Wow. The metal doesn't last this long and they have big camps yeah the turpentine camps where they're extracting this stuff right and that was that was uh yeah forever because it's out in the boonies i mean you go where the trees are you it wasn't something you could bring into town to do and so you'd have the folks out there tapping the trees and processing it out in the camp. Robert was explaining to me how they needed labor. Right.

And they made vagrancy laws. So you were highly encouraged to go work in the turpentine camp. If you didn't have a job, you could be picked up for vagrancy. Right. Had to have a job. It's against the law to not have a job, you could be picked up for vagrancy. Right. Had to have a job. It's against the law to not have a job. No loitering. If you get picked up for vagrancy,

you go to prison. When you're in prison, you get rented out to the turpentine camp. Oh, God, dude. So your choices are turpentine camp or turpentine camp. One way or another. Yeah, you're either getting paid

or you're going to the camp. You're going down to work. It was bad. And that really, that program didn't peter out until the second world war and when there were so many jobs during the second world war uh they could they could get out of the camps and they could they could get an option they had options they could work at the naval shipyards yeah yeah so what do you call what drips out of the longleaf pine then? Sap?

Yeah. I don't know if that's exactly the correct term. I may be mistaken on that, but it's sap. It's pine sap. Or pitch or whatever. Yeah, pitch. But they make a bunch of products from it. Right.

It's basically tar pitch and turpentine, and they were all used in the naval industry. The naval stores. name the naval stores they call naval stores and of course when i went through school it's like what was the number one export in colonial north carolina i was born in north carolina it was naval stores good you got that correct but nobody knew what naval strain teach you what naval stores were that was just the question on the test when you were in you know the eighth. But the naval stores was the tar pitch and turpentine that allowed the ships to be waterproof and resistant to marine worms that could bore through the bottom of the wooden ship.

It would waterproof the ropes. It would waterproof the tarpolions. The word tarpolion had tar on it. You still see that in old, if you're reading like old books, how-to books and wilderness travel books they're always talking about getting it i always saw it's pronounced tarpaulin yeah but like t-a-r-p-a-u-l-i-n correct and it's taken now just to mean like i remember uh like guys my dad's

age would even call a plastic tarp a tarp yeah blue tarp you have a hurricane the roofs are all covered in blue tarps yeah but they'd call it tarpaulin right yeah right and so then the the so you so you ask why how did we lose all the longleaf so we used them until we used them up every time somebody needed to grow a field of corn you had to cut trees down corn won't grow in the shade and so you cut the trees down and cut them up build your house like my grandfather did and then you can plant your corn crop or your tobacco crop or whatever. And then in the 1950s, the pulp mills came to the South and loblolly pine could produce more pulp faster and more timber faster on an acre of land than longleaf was.

So they would cut out the longleaf and convert longleaf to loblolly and that was pretty much the death knell because the landowner could make the landowner could grow the same size tree could grow the landowner like where we were hunting those trees that were 20 inches in diameter but 38-year-old trees. They were loblolly pine. To get a 28-inch longleaf might take 200 years. Oh. And so why would the landowner plant a species that he would never see a return on?

Yep. If he can plant a species that he can get three or four returns on in his lifetime and people people were whacking them and then you as more and more of them were cut the wildlife that was dependent upon that ecosystem the Red cockaded woodpecker the gopher tortoise the indigo snake down in Georgia and Florida They became more and more and more rare. And the red cockaded pine or the red cockaded woodpecker was actually one of the first species put on the endangered species list in 1974. So when they organized the first endangered species list, the RCW was on it because their the habitat was disappearing so rapidly

we met we don't need to get into who this is but we hunted on a property of a woman right who was 86 right 86 years old they used to run cattle when she was young right as in her 40s i guess they quit. Yeah, 40s or 50s. And her and her husband went out and she hand planted. Every tree on that property. How many? 500 acres. Hand planted?

Well, out of a tractor. The husband drove the tractor and she sat on the tree planter. Yeah. And she had her box of seedlings and she's just sitting there backwards, going through the fields, sticking trees in the ground ground she planted every one of those and when she was in her 50s and now she's 86 and lives off lives off those trees she planted she's cutting those trees and she's thinned them three times and and she just you know one of the areas that we were were hunting she clear cut this past january and um it's it's you know you uh you shot that you shot your turkey in a stand of timber that when we uh we started leasing the property 10 years ago

that stand of timber was so thick you couldn't walk through it it was blackberries and pine trees and she's thinned it once this she thinned it about when did she oh she thinned it last year when she clear cut the piece beside it she thinned that piece and um and we shot turkeys in it called in two long beards a jake and a hen and you kill that and that that really nice bird um so yeah that's a that's a working forest, generating income for her, and her kids will get income from it as long as it stays in the family. But if you just strolled over there 200 years ago, it would have been longleaf pine. It would have been longleaf, and there is longleaf around there. There's longleaf in the boundary line trees there's longleaf by the road uh the

place that we call that jake in and then we went down by the lake that area was longleaf that some of the big trees there was still were still longleaf uh the trees we were leaning against when we call that jake in were all loblolly but the thicket that we were facing all those big trees in that thicket those were longleaf explain what um what was lost in the between the combination of cutting off and heart killing harvesting all the longleaf but also with fire suppression so when when we lost the longleaf ecosystem we didn't lose just the tree we lost the ecosystem longleaf some people described it as a grassland with trees because the entire the the canopy of a longleaf forest is not like most pine forests it's lets a lot of sunlight in and that sunlight allows grasses to grow but only if you have. So the South has one of the highest incidents of lightning strikes.

I know in North America, I think in the world. But one of the highest incidents of lightning strikes, its evidence shows that it probably burned on a three to five year basis. Often frequent, low intensity fires. You didn't have the western fires. You didn't have crowned out, kill everything. You had flames that might be anywhere from a foot high to six feet high because it burned every year. There wasn't anything to burn. Just burning pine dust. Burning pine needles, burning grasses, small bushes. But after years and years and years and years, the bushes were knocked down pretty good.

I mean, the hardwoods were killed in the uplands and driven down into the swamps. So you had hardwood swamps, but you didn't have many hardwoods in the uplands in the lower Piedmont and the coastal plain. The mountains, you had hardwoods, but what I'm talking about is the lower Piedmont and the coastal plain all the way, you had hardwoods, but what I'm talking about is the lower Piedmont and the coastal plain all the way from Virginia

around to Texas. So nine states. This was the dominant ecosystem. So what was lost was that ecosystem and the animals that depend on it. And that's a lot of, I think there's 29 species of state or federally listed animals,

plants and animals, that inhabit that longleaf pine ecosystem. It's surprising driving around here how much evidence you see of controlled burning now. It's good. Is that catching on? It is. It's really good. The Longleaf Alliance touts it a lot. The Turkey Federation helped people with it. The Longleaf alliance touts it a lot the turkey federation helped people with it the longleaf alliance helps fish and wildlife service will provide funding through their

ecological services for burning the nrcs natural resource conservation service through the u.s department of agriculture will help landowners pay for burning and and the whole the whole, I was given a presentation at the university just late March. And one of the women, one of the students asked me the question, well, if you're doing all this burning, you're killing the hardwoods, aren't you? And I said, yeah, you are. You're knocking them back. But the species that we want are those species that are adapted to this ecosystem. And the hardwoods that are getting killed and knocked out are not adapted to it. The turkey oaks that are adapted to it, the big ones don't get killed.

The little ones get killed. And if you lay off fire or maybe you have a creek down here or something, then there'll be some that grow up and they'll become big. But we have a lot of land in the south that is a thicket and so the animals that require a thicket have a lot of land we don't have a lot of land that is a grassland and so like even that clear cut that one-year-old clear cut that we were hunting in there were bachman sparrow that morning when we were listening for turkeys to gobble there were bachman sparrows calling all over that entire clear cut because it was it was a grassland

it was coming up so they liked that one-year-old clear cut but they they like they they had the bunch grasses and the habitat that they required um seth went up on the national forest and shot some some video or rick did rick went up and shot some video on the national forest and that area is a grassland with widely widely spaced trees that let enough sunlight in so that the grass will grow now the one where you're shooting the drone videos were um loblololly and shortleaf. There was only one longleaf on that whole track that I've found and that anybody else has found that I know about. It used to be a mixture of shortleaf, loblolly, and longleaf because the habitats, the ranges were coming together in that upper Piedmont area right there. So you ask, what have we we lost we've lost the system we've lost the animals and the plants that are associated with that system

in exchange for in exchange for cheap paper lumber for your house two by fours for your house toilet paper notebook paper newsprint packaging, all of that. I mean, it's a trade-off. You can't blame the landowner for making the most money. It's us. It's our society that demands a paper product, which is renewable, timber, which are renewable, and the landowner is going to try to make the most money as possible. And what we're hoping is one of the things that's coming along now is carbon sequestration to help with global warming if the landowner could be paid to grow trees longer than is currently profitable for them. So if they're raising loblolly pine just for money,

they're going to thin, thin, clear-cut at age 30 or 35. Plant a new crop, thin, thin, clear-cut at age 35. Well, if we had a way to pay them to take those 35-year-old trees to 50 or 75 or 100 and offset the funds that they're going to be losing that would sequester carbon and help with the reduction of you know climate change and encourage the landowner to grow older trees on his property which would help all the wildlife associated with that but then we'd be doing the burning we were talking about that because when you burn you release carbon into the air but and that's true but we're the the big worry is that fossil fuels because we're digging carbon up out of the out of the ground instead of what is

naturally rotting burning yeah and in this country it's going to burn it's either going to burn with a lightning strike it's going to burn with a wildfire or it's going to burn with prescribed fire there's no getting around that there's no getting around it and we can burn every three to five years with prescribed fire during the during the right conditions where the smoke that we're sending up is not as is hazardous not as toxic as what it would be in a all-consuming wildfire like you see out west that's a good point man it was yeah it was bad we were out there elk hunting and his i went through medicine bow um national forest in wyoming and it was 60 miles of smoke on the interstate and camped in Nebraska, and you could still smell the smoke in Nebraska.

Dude, we had orange all day and ash raining in our backyard. They were having orange sunsets on the East Coast. My folks were saying in Pennsylvania that the smoke was coming that far from those California fires. Yeah, it was not a good idea. So that's not that's what we don't want we don't want catastrophic wildfire and one of the ways to prevent it is is to is to do prescribed fire we burn our place up in north carolina and the highest flame heights

we get are three or four feet and burn every four or five years and just creep the fire back it in and once you back it off a line you can go through and set a strip head fire that that runs a head fire and then set another one it runs set another one it runs set another one it runs and you got to get permits you got to have training and work with the state forestry commission on all that what uh is my last question for you what if we look at how quail numbers just every decade seems to be worse yep and people point to a lot of things that like fire ants right proliferation of fire ants right um but this has to be a factor in that well it's a huge factor so i was raised in north carolina

quail hunting and we go down Eastern North Carolina. We quail hunt the quail population started crashing where we quail hunted in Eastern North Carolina. It started crashing in the seventies and by the nineties that you, I mean, it's no point in quail hunt and there were no fire ants there at all. They didn't make it there until the late 90s early 2000 2000 they're there now but my point is it couldn't have been fire ants that caused the crash in the carolinas because

there were no fire ants yeah it could it could have it could be an extending um circumstance in alabama mississippi georgia and florida because they got there first they came in and i think they came in in Mobile but they came in from South America and fire ants are contributing nest predation with raccoons are a factor but it's habitat habitat habitat habitat if you've got it if you've got enough highly if you got enough good habitat you're gonna have quail you're gonna have all those species associated with it she put in that clear cut and last year and i i don't know where they came from i jumped coveys of quail three different times it's not enough to to go buy a dog and start training a dog but you could hear when i was scouting, I heard quail calling in that 50-acre clear cut almost every day.

They were in there. Like you make a place for them and there they are. And they show up and they breed and they produce and they survive. But the problem is those trees then grow up into where you killed your turkey. Wide open, pine straw, no habitat. And they need grass they need they need bunch grasses where those little ones can run around and catch insects they need thickets where they can get away from the avian predators from the hawks and they need bare ground where they can actually pick up a seed and that habitat is rare for for bobwhite quail yeah yeah um man a lot sorry no i get into i

start talking no that's what that's why they had to hear but uh we had a great time hanging out with you we had a blast what year did you and i meet in Hell's Canyon? We met in the spring of 2012. That was nine years ago. Yeah. Yeah. We've had some good conversations since then. We have. That was a good hunt.

Go in by jet boat, take mules into Hell's Canyon, wilderness area, and turkey hunt for a week. It was a great time. It was a great time. Yeah. Best thing about it was meeting you because then I got to come down here and hunt turkeys with you

well and you invited me to Florida pull my hamstring all right Robert thank you very much well thank y'all this was a blast ladies and gentlemen

Robert Abernathy thank you yeah thanks for throwing us around thanks Robert yeah man it was great it was fun

and thank your wife For the food I will Yeah, you guys are very Very hospitable I'm gonna eat good for a week For the food y'all left Alright, thank you very much, man

Seth, I hear you calling But we can't hunt birds at night The flip-flop flesher is eager To use that turkey call just right Just a few more hours And the birds will leave the roost I think I hear them calling Seth, what can I do?

What can I do? Seth, what can I do? Seth, I hear you calling And I know that you won't stop But I have to take a growler and I just can't find a rock just a few more hours and the birds will leave the roost I think I hear them calling, Seth, what can I do? What can I do? Seth, what can I do? Thank you. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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