The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 289: We Did Start the Fire

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Paul Hessburg, Rick Hutton, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis. Topics discussed: How Jani doesn't like growling bear rugs; the coyote on the couch; second degree kindred; FHF's upcoming gear launches; Brody's three and a half legged bear; Jani drawing his first bighorn tag; all the math required to pack well; redemption: the FUODS calendar sold out in 24 hours; Season 10 of MeatEater on Netflix dropping on September 29th; Ep. 258: "The Chit and the Poof"; Sunday hunting in PA; documentation that the ell of bear grease is a real thing; highschoolers working with skunk oil and fox urine; Fish Joyce's Dock; whitetails with Covid antibodies; the real impact of climate change and the increasing intensity of wildfires; the importance of prescribed burning; soil severity and seed caches; why big fires aren't news; what happens if we do nothing?; having a trigger reaction to logging; where we're headed; 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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First Light, go farther, stay longer. Yanni, I don't know if you noticed, but I have a giant bear rug over my lap right now. Holy shit! I brought this. So this is the bear I got this spring. Yanni has often criticized bear rugs. For what reason? And just general bear mouths.

Bear mouths and bear rugs. Yeah, because their mouths are open and snarling and growling and making them look vicious and mean. And I feel like when we see bears, and most likely bears 99% of their lives, their faces are not in that position. Their faces look more like this guy. Yeah. This guy just looks like a bear. Yeah. Not growling.

Mm-mm. So Clay Newcomb, host of the Bear Grease podcast, introduced me to his taxidermist buddy, John Hayes, Hayes Taxidermy Studio, which is in Libby, Montana. And Clay brought, like Clay delivered my bear over to him. And we were driving down the road with the bear still in the back, just a green hide. And I was saying to him, why are your bears always,

why are their mouths always growling? And he was saying, I'm paraphrasing a little bit but the gist i got from is people do like that but also it's easy to do it easier than the clothes somehow it's easier to make them look normal and there's a lot of forms that there's a lot of forms to do that, but there aren't forms readily available for rugs to do it otherwise. So he started to develop how to do a closed mouth bear by using a form meant for a different application. So he was already doing closed mouth bears. There was enough demand for it that he was working on it before you brought oh no he doesn't he says like i do them but i don't buy he don't buy i feel like if i'm screwing this up john you can cut well we're gonna have you call in or no just

come into the studio and you can explain it better if i'm screwing this up they don't sell like what you need to do this he buys a form for a different purpose and kind of manipulates it and changes it in order to be able to do this on a rug. So this bear, you can see his chin, mouth, everything. He's not growling. And I have three other, I gave one away, two in my house right now where they're all growling. And you're right. I've looked at a pile of bears.

Most of them look like that. Or they're all growling and you're right i've looked at a pile of bears most of them never seen one grow like that yeah or they're eating some grass i like that but when i get mine i'm gonna have his head even sinking more into the rug a little lower profile so i'm gonna have him cut it like maybe like right at the top lip and go straight back and even have it uh just like sink into the rug a little bit more. You follow me? No, I'm following you. Yeah. And I was going to, I thought when you were first showing it,

how it was kind of, it's got a little give to it. Like there's not quite a pillow in there, but I believe Clay did a video with John Hayes. John Hayes is his name. Where John makes like what he calls like a soft taxidermy coyote. Did you see that little video? No. I know about the coyote.

I know about the coyote though. Yeah. And that thing looked cool. Because then it's like it becomes more practical because it's like, oh, there's a coyote on the couch. Oh, but you can also lay your head on him and take a little nap. And it'd be kind of cool to have that all through that bear hide. Oh, yeah, I would like that. Seth, if you had to rate, how close did I come to getting a wolf?

Okay, here's the thing. Ten is you got it. One is you never saw it. Oh, man. So, well, there's a couple factors that go into it. Yeah, a lot of factors. One would be you're shooting at long distance. Okay.

Let's say extremely good. Okay. I would say, let's say moderate. I would say you came really close. I would put you at like an an eight three oh really yeah because if you were when that wolf was standing up there still for all that time and you weren't set up just imagine if you were set up at that point in time you could have gotten a shot oh yeah for sure so we were sheep hunting in alaska um i was sheep hunting my brother, Danny, who's a resident. So we're able to hunt

like in Alaska, there's this thing like second degree kindred, um, that, that you can hunt without a guide for species that normally require a guide. If you have a rel a close relative that lives there and you're hunting with that person, um, grizzlies, mountain goats, and sheep. Um, so if they're white or tend toward whitish, you, uh, have to have a guide or second degree kindred. So I can hunt with my brother and we were hunting and we went up to the, we were going

up to this basin, um, that like you going up this pass, you wouldn't really guess it's up there. The canyon gets real narrow. There's a big glacier in it, but all of a sudden it's like, ta-da, it's up there the canyon gets real narrow there's a big glacier in it but all of a sudden it's like it's giant basin and we slip up in there and it had snowed the night before this just what i don't know a week ago two weeks ago yep snowed the night before and we get there there's sheep tracks running everywhere in that new snow and i'm like god we blew them out

like how'd that happen like you must have spooked them and then we get to look at all the tracks realize there's wolf tracks running all over, zigzagging around. And then we find where all the sheep went and hid. Rams, ewes, everybody sitting on a rock pile in a way that they normally wouldn't, like, arrange themselves. And it was because, like, they clearly, like, got into a big line and went up on top of a cliff and were sat up there. And I don't know how long we wandered around. An hour? Yeah. hour and all of a sudden there's the wolves up on the other ridge yep i started wailing on a predator call and i can't really say this for certain or not but they like gave a look or didn't just happen to look but didn't really care no they didn't care at all i feel like they

gave a look oh they gave a look yeah they. There was a gray one and a black one. And they were up on this ridge. And then they'd disappear from the ridge. And then all of a sudden, you'd see a head pop up and look. Did they know you guys were there? I don't think they did know we were there. We were 600, 700 yards away. I don't think they knew.

Oh, what was also weird is these are sheep. I'm not saying they only hunt sheep. They were hunting sheep. Absolutely. Their whole groove was they were hunting sheep. But the weird thing is all of a sudden they kicked up a U, one U that ran from the, they kicked her out of the craggy stuff. And she ran down into an open bowl and they didn't chase her. I'm like, that seems like the the whole yeah plan yeah that's like that's what you'd want to have yeah where they can get her

what they keep on doing like what we couldn't tell because they dropped out of view i would have thought we were like get ready yeah i was thinking that they're just going to come chase her and they're going to come, you know, close to us. It didn't. Hmm. They didn't like something. But I got all lined up. In the unit we were in, you don't even need, there's no locket for a non-resident. You don't even need a lock and tag.

I was going to have, I was going to make breakfast sausage, film an episode of Pardon My plate and have that big old wolf hide all in one. That'd have been your first one, right? That black, that black one was pretty. Oh, I was licking.

I told my brother, he's my brother has zero interest in like, he lives in Alaska, like zero interest in grizzlies. He likes them, but hunting them like not it just doesn't even register with them zero interest in wolves wolf hunting i said dude you can think of me like cruella deville man

i want that wolf hide so bad he does not get it like doesn't get it could you tell by the tracks like how they were hunting them or no like do you think those they stumbled upon those sheep or do you think they were following them for a while or could you not here's my theory based on absolutely nothing okay go ahead um i understand from conversations with the bush pilot that there are always a bunch of yous in that basin always okay i think that they have a little sort of checklist a little mental map and they come in there and whatever periodically and run around ray's hell but this is just based on nothing yeah well no sounds solid maybe kill a damn lamb now oh then. Oh, I'm sure.

I'm sure. Yeah, those wolves are definitely like ridge runners. Yeah. Like they're up there looking for sheep. And I felt that when they didn't chase the one, Danny postulated that they must have killed a lamb. Oh. And we went up there and looked and you would have definitely known it was there because of the snow and we couldn't find what was going on. But then weirdly, we, not near, not there, a ways away, found a dead lamb, a little ram lamb.

Is that a thing? Yeah. Sounds good. A ram lamb. Hadn't been touched. We're going down this cut and I'm like like that's a weird place for a snow patch to still be lingering because there's no snow around and stuff's like that's a sheet did like did it fall to its death listen man i gave it like an amateur knee crop

i gave it an amateur knee crop scene determined that there were no um No visible injuries. But I feel that it's rear left leg, rear right leg was busted at the femur. Based on a very amateur. That being my first ever doll sheep, lamb, necropsy, I feel that that's, that that leg felt pretty wonky and felt broken. Yeah, you're comfortable with that assessment.

Hadn't even had its eyes pecked yet. Oh, wow. So fresh, in fact, that we kicked a U, we were going down out of there, and we were kind of like out of sheep country. And here comes a U, and we're down out of there, and we were kind of like out of sheep country. And here comes a U, and we're like, what the hell is she doing?

Like, why one U in that weird place? And we didn't see her with it, but she left that spot within a, like, not a lot of precision because you just couldn't see down that area at that time. But anyways, one came out. It was weird enough that we commented on it and then got down in that zone and there was that dead lamb. So maybe you guys spooked it. Spooked?

Yeah. No, because its hair was starting to slip. Oh, gotcha. So it wasn't that. So not fresh enough that you guys considered eating a little chunk. Well, no, because I didn't want to get – you can't do that kind of stuff. I don't think you can do that. Yeah, with a sheep, I'm sure they'd probably

frown on that. Yeah, I don't think you can be like, oh, I've like, I got a bunch of sheep meat because I found it. I think that they would say like, that's not your, I don't know how you'd take possession of that thing. I noticed when you're done, when you're done doing your little examination there.

My clothes were coated in hair? Yeah. I saw your pants had sheep hair all over them. I was like, that's going to be a tough one to explain. I actually know it's funny, man. I actually, when we were waiting to get picked up, I actually went through and tried to remove it all because it'd be like a trooper. So why are you coated coating sheep hair again? I'm like, listen.

Hey, quick survey here in the room. If you guys ever get a bear rug or bear mount done, are you going to go closed mouth or open mouth? Oh, seeing Steve's, I'm going closed. I like that one i don't i don't i know about your idea about like sinking it into the carpet i like that i like seeing the mouth i know a guy that has multiple open mouths and like all the all the teeth are missing the tongue's broken out just because they buy something it's on the ground they just buy actually kick them with their

shoe or whatever. Yep. Breaks teeth out. My kids jumping around on those, I'm always afraid they're going to bust the ears off. That's why I hang them up on the wall. Yeah. Because they're like riding on it, using the ears as handles and stuff. It's like they can't put up with that kind of stuff. I was going to say, Steve, have you ever seen the mounts that are, they're pretty much a rug, and they're the rug shell, but there's no felt and they're meant to hang on the wall.

Like some people call them a trapper's mount. Yeah, clay has those. Clay has one of those with a white tail buck. Oh, that's sick. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, that's what I would do. I like those fur bears.

I don't, I would not do the felt. I'm not a felt person. Okay, all right. All right. Joined today by Rick Hutton. Yep. Freshly married. Yeah, I am. Do you like that? Yeah, yeah. That, alright. Joined today by Rick Hutton. Freshly married. Yeah. Do you like that? Yeah.

Yeah, it's awesome. I like the married life. What did Seth, if you had to rate his... Best man speech? Yeah, 1 to 10. I think he did, I'll give him a solid 9. Oh, come on. Yeah. He sure gave himself a 9. Yeah.

I asked him how it went. I said, does anybody laugh? He said, a few times. Yeah, no, he did good. I even told him, because we went into the wedding, I was like, Seth, I didn't even talk to you really bad. I was like, but do you want to do a best man speech? You don't have to if you don't want to. He's like, oh, no.

This is the day of the wedding. I think it was like two days before. Yeah. Two days before I finally discussed this. I'm glad you didn't just have that as he's getting up there. Because that would dishearten him. Yeah, no, no. But you sure you want to give a best man speech? No, no. I didn't phrase it like that.

I even said, I'm like, I didn't even, I just assumed, I never talked to you about it though, but do you want to do this? And he's like, oh yeah, I got something planned, everything. I'm like, okay. Give him a nine. Yeah, man, he did good. He made everyone laugh. It was good. So, I was happy with it. Yeah.

And how are things over at FHF gear, Rick? Good. Really busy. Extremely busy. We got a lot of cool stuff in prototype, a lot of growth happening. But it's August. It's one of our busiest months of the year. What's the most exciting thing you guys got coming up?

Future. Well, whatever. Now, future. Think of what I can talk about. Yeah, they don't want to say anything. Yeah. Listen, man, that's an offline conversation,

but I got to adjust your thinking on that. Okay. All right, it's fine. If you gave me five minutes, I could, I feel like I would, in three minutes,

I feel like I would make you reconsider everything you think about that. So, it's not so much my thinking too. It's top-down stuff being told. And then too, just making sure we can get. Then you would pass along that thinking.

Okay. Well, let's, let's, let's chat about that. Yeah. Let's chat about that. Okay. Um, we have some cool stuff coming out for fall. More along another accessory for our chest rig. We'll have that to more diversify the use of that.

It's more in that fowl kind of hunting realm. And then a backpack accessory that you can use. So we have that coming out fall here, probably a couple weeks after this podcast gets out there. And then January of 22 will be a big year or a big time for us. We'll be launching a bunch of new products, uh, for the more for the rifle hunter. So yeah, so it'd be real exciting. We're finalizing a lot of that now. So.

Excellent. Joined also by Brody. Hello. Who's got a, tell everybody how many legs your bear has Brody. Three and a half. No, but I'm going to send it off to that guy um yeah i shot a bear last fall that i still haven't sent to hide anywhere in colorado it was a big big boar big head lots of fat um but he had he was missing the lower half i gotta think about this lower half of his left front leg and it

basically at what would be the elbow on a person and it was just all healed over but coated in fat yeah like i think i got four gallons of rendered fat off of him oh yeah yeah i mean you had some of it um he's like i actually like it better without this foot. Yeah. And like totally healed over. It looked like it had been surgically removed. You know, there was just fur growing on it, skin there. Um, fur growing on it. Yeah.

And when I took it in to, to get it checked in, I, obviously it's all speculation. Like the one, the lady who checked it in said maybe it was an illegal snare when you know it was a cub or maybe a boar had ripped its leg off or a hunter had shot it years ago who knows but he it didn't affect him you know he's an older bear they figured 10 to 12 years old oh that's wild yeah that dude john hayes the taxidermist i was talking to i was bragging up i was showing him a picture of a bear i had that was 17 that i got aged at 17 he had a bear come through there that had been aged in its 30s yeah i can't remember exactly what i remember i think the oldest documented is something like 39 maybe i don't know if that's right, but I think that might be right. Yeah, they can get a lot older than 10.

Joined also by Seth Morris. Howdy, folks. Fresh off of Best Man Speech. Yep. Phil Taylor. Recently engaged, Seth Morris. Oh! Yeah, we covered that.

We covered that on the podcast. It's a whole episode. You can check it out. But still, there's context here for that. Yeah. That covered that. We covered that on the podcast. It's a whole episode. You can check it out. But still, there's context here for that. Yeah. It's good. He's still engaged? Still engaged.

Still feeling it? Yeah, we're making plans. Sweet, man. And then Giannis. Giannis, who, a couple big milestones, drew his first bighorn tag and ran his first something. That's right. What a lucky guy. Tell us now what you ran.

The Bridger Ridge Run, which is like maybe the kind of most popular, best known Bozeman local race. Did you place in a way that you were satisfied with yourself? I wasn't really going for, I didn't have a goal around placement. I shouldn't say place. Did you perform in a way that satisfied yourself? Yes, very much so. You got to describe, lay out the race. Yeah, lay out the specs of the miles and elevation.

It's roughly 20 miles. There's some different routes you can take at certain points. It's kind of a choose your own adventure. A little bit, but you can be at certain points. It's kind of choose your own adventure a little bit, but you can be between 19 and 20 miles. I think I probably ran it, ran like a 19 and a quarter mile version. Um, and it starts at Ferry Lake, uh, the trailhead and, uh, you climb up to, uh, the pass above Ferry Lake. So I don't know the name of the passes, but then you go up to the pass above Fairy Lake. I don't know the name of the passes, but then you go up to Sacagawea Peak,

and then basically from there, you just run the actual spine of the Bridger Mountains through Ross Pass, around Ross Peak, and then all the way past Bridger Ski Resort, Saddle Mountain, Bald Mountain, and then down to way past Bridger Ski Resort, Saddle Mountain, Bald Mountain, and then down to the M Trailhead. And you gain about 7,500 feet, and I believe you lose about 9,500 feet in those 19 miles.

Jeez. Hold on a minute. You climb 7,500 feet? Yeah. That's with ups and downs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not at one time. No, no, I got you. But like total elevation gain.

How long did it take you? It took me five hours, 17 minutes. I feel the same way. See, what I'm worried about now is now I feel like now you're just smoke me when we're out hiking around i don't know man i did a uh backpack trip right on the heels of that and i remember thinking to myself that uh you know just because you're in running shape doesn't mean you're in backpacking i know that's the thing i always rely on is like um does not it's its own thing yeah it's its own thing a lot of times people think they're good at something else they think they're gonna tear it up you always do this thing where your first hunt of the year is a sheep hunt too like you come out of the gate hard yeah yeah

seth is all bragging up how he took he took it a run in a mile and a half every morning with his wife girlfriend whatever else beyonce in between those, it helped a lot, I think. I felt great during that sheet. Oh, yeah, it helps. Oh, and the bighorn. Okay, so you're pleased with your performance. Yeah, totally. Not relative to other people.

I was hoping for around a five and a half hour finish time. I did it, whatever, 13 minutes faster. And how educated was your hope? Well, cause I had done it on my own couple of years prior and I did it, I did it in like 620, but it was very casual. I was, I had to carry all my own water. So I carried like 10 pounds of water and I did it on my own. Cause I carried a gallon and a half of water. And now we had aid stations. The whole event was really cool.

Like, I highly recommend anybody that's in, like, looking. I don't want you to take away my spot next year. Because they, about 500 people, 500 or 600 people apply, and they let in 300. So it's a lottery to get in because you can, like, the race can only support. Oh, it's a lottery to get in because you can like the race can only support oh it's a lottery draw yeah well like if you've done it 10 years or more i think if you're a top place top 30 place finisher in your age group there's a couple things that will get you in every year you know um did you call our buddy rick smith is uh run it more than 10 times so he's just automatically in at during that five hours how often could you

huck a rock and hit another person if you're a real good rock man i probably only ran out of five hours i probably only ran really by myself for maybe an hour out 90 minutes not much so there's usually someone around. Somebody around, yeah. I think we went through four or five aid stations, which was great. Like a lot of people cheering, helping you on. They really take care of you because there's a lot of exposure, right?

When you get up there, the sun's out there, the smoke can be a factor. And so they really, they check your bib number twice at every aid station. Like on the way in, there's two different groups going, okay, number 205 just came in. Somebody else marks it. Then 10 steps later. Oh, that you didn't peel off the ridge and have a heat stroke somewhere.

Yeah, exactly. In the bushes. Yeah. And then I actually got held up for five minutes. So right there, I'm down to actually like 512. But at the final aid station, the main like med nurse doctor was like hey how you feeling I'm like I'm feeling great and she's kind of patting me down she's like you're not sweating I'm like yeah I'm not a big sweater I'm telling you I've been like pounding the water I've drank at least six liters

of water since I started I feel great and she's like nope come back here and she turned me around and I went she had she took me to like this ice station and they basically crammed my vest and my shirt full of ice. And she said, take these two other pieces, hold them in your hands, and, you know, keep going. What would you have done if you just ran off in order to keep your time? Oh, it's funny because they're like, look, you're not getting top three, so just like take care of yourself. That's kind of the whole attitude of the whole thing.

It's like, nobody cares how fast you run. Let's all make sure we can do it, have a good time. If you run across somebody that's struggling, ask them if they need help, offer them some food, whatever. I saw a lot of that because I came out very conservative. I didn't even make a running stride for probably the first five or six miles. Even then, when I would catch up to a group and we'd be on something flat, didn't even make a running stride for probably the first five or six miles and even then when i would like catch up to a group and we'd be on something flat everybody else would go into like a jogging kind of a pace or look and i can just kind of do like a fast walk and stretch my legs

and kind of keep up with that same pace uh but like two three hours into it i started to overcome people that went in earlier waves and they'd have like a almost like a zombie like look you know a little bit like oh what did i get myself into the bridge or ridge walk doesn't sound nearly as cool no no no listen i watched a lot of it you know i'm not running up that super steep stuff the fastest i think this year was around like three and a half, three 45. The course record is three hours. It stood for quite some time, I think. Uh, and then I think I got eighth in, in the male 40 to 49 age group. I got 60th out of 250 people. And the last person to finish was close to 10 hours this year. Wow. Yeah. Freaking dart going around. Nobody cheered anymore.

Yeah. But I saw Kurt Smith. It's funny because you just don't know who's involved in it in this community. But the very first, I think it was on top of Sacagawea. He was from Schnee's. Yeah. Kurt Smith from Schnee's is up there with like two gallons of water just cheering everybody on.

Really? And filling everybody's water bottles up. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, that's cool. Hey, I want to see how good you are, Yanni. You know how you mentioned smoke? Mm-hmm. Okay.

You could segue off that to two very important things happening in this room right now. I want you to do a segue for each. Okay. Speaking of smoke, when I saw Brody post a picture of this lake trout that he smoked, I was like, man, it looked a little dark. Is this going to turn into a compliment sandwich? Well, I haven't tried it, but it's sitting right here in front of us.

I can smell it. It smells good. And so I was going to ask him if maybe the dark color was, you know, he did it on purpose. He might have put a syrup glaze. Maple syrup. Oh, you did do a syrup glaze. Okay, let me hear you segue the other thing. See how good you are.

It's been very smoky here the last, I don't know, six, eight weeks. It's interesting, though, I found this year how it seems like this morning morning right at daylight 7 a.m. it was almost bluebird and then by like 9 like it's rolling in it seems like I've had I've seen a lot of days where super smoky then it clears out vice versa it was bad

anyways but we have a to educate all of us as a our main guest today we have Paul Hesburgh who's going to tell us all about wildfires. God, man, he nailed it. That was good. Watch this segue.

You know who didn't nail it? Here it comes. Oh! Overcooked it, Brody. You overcooked it a little bit, man. I like it a little dry, man. Pass it over here, Rick. That's good, though, man.

Oh, I thought it was great very good especially on a cracker but you chipped a little bit just i mean i'm not gonna you know what i'm not gonna infantilize you put it back on for like i'm not gonna infantilize you by building a compliment sandwich i'm just gonna give it to you straight yeah i get i get shit from yannis about my bear grease i get shit about my smoke lake trout from you i shouldn't even bring it in for you guys no i love it it's extremely good yeah screw that brody it just went past its glossy phase it lost i get it i like it just a little dry because packing it around in a backpack that moist stuff is i just you know it gets smashed and shit and boy you can have a whole mess on your

hands no matter how clean you try to be out there in the woods and then you just got greasy hands all day oh yeah you didn't you gotta provide a quick little bit of detail mm-hmm we a lot we got to do but you the the drew a sheep tag have you done with this not really I've been kind of keeping it on the DL because I just figured it would attract a lot of attention. You can probably snoop around and figure out where I drew it. It's in Colorado. Oh, so should I not brought it up? We can just edit it all out.

No, it's fine. Just say a lie about where it is By By this point in time When you're hearing this Hopefully I'm going to have a dead ram On my hands But you know There's a high demand On sheep in general

And I've been asked by multiple people If I wouldn't mind just like not mentioning Like where the actual You know unit is Just to like not create unneeded attention. Um, but, uh, yeah, I'm going, uh, like I said, you'll, I'll be hunting probably when you're listening to this, but, uh, I'm going down in two days to start scouting season open September 7th. So I'm hoping that I'll have one tied up to the tree, as they say, and be able to put some crosshairs on him morning of the 7th. All right, man.

Quick update. So you're good there because you're not looking to really overdo it. What do you mean? You're good on talking about it. Oh, I don't know. I mean, I can keep talking about it. I've been having a lot of fun. I've been building a gear list.

I was going to mention this. I just decided I was making a gear list for my own purposes. It's very good, Brody. A little dry. That's a big chunk you got there. It's almost got like a hint of citrusiness in there. Oh, it's good. Did you catch that?

Did you put like some kind of? No, it was just a dry brine, brown sugar and salt, and then a little maple syrup at the end. Smoked lake trout. The bag Brody gave me says grease ball. Yeah. That's a derogatory lake trout term. Yep.

Yep. I don't know. People just don't know what's going on. Oh my God, it's good. I'm telling you, if you went to whatever they call them, fish house, smoke house, or whatever, you would have to pay probably, what do you think? At least 20 bucks, if not 30 bucks a pound

for something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Way better than smoked salmon. Anyways. I like it. So I was making a gear list,

so I wouldn't forget anything. This is the one hunt I really want to be extra dialed in on. And look at this. You really want to be extra dialed in on uh and uh look at this you're gonna be impressed you probably don't even know what a google sheet is what uh what's your uh cartridge of choice i'm going six five rpm good choice yeah so i'm looking at yanni's little deal here he's got a miscellaneous category, which covers things such as tracking poles. That's his bear defense system.

Won't need any of that. Down through binos. It's weird that binos is in miscellaneous and not in optics. Well, because the optics sort of package fell in under the zone of in my backpack optics, not the worn or carried optics, and that's why it fell into my face. Oh, he's even got poundages.

Okay, so he's got rifle and ammo, so all the things that go into shooting. Yeah. And the poundages. Yeah. And he's got clothing-worn. So what you're bringing, what you're wearing. Correct. He's got his food.

Right all the way down to electrolyte tablets. He's got his gear at truck in case of worsening weather. How many days are you prepared to be in there at a time? Oh, I think I could easily do, I don't know, the limit would probably like how like when you go in where do you well i'm gonna go scout for just like three or four days so i'll pack food for that and then when we go back in um i'll probably pack for five or six something like that is it tough to get in there Yeah, depending on where you park and where we kind of want to start in, what drainage.

Like where I saw the sheep when I went into Scout, I was almost nine miles from the truck. Oh, okay. But pretty easy approach, pretty just like straightforward flat trail system. Oh, home. More stuff's filling in now see slow to load oh it's way more okay it's just been slow to fill in okay might be it's got a pack system he's got a pack category a water category about how to deal with water yeah and there is an optics category it just, it's been populating slowly.

A shelter and sleep category, a cooking category, a med kit category, emergency kit category. Are you going light on the shelter? Kill kit. What are you taking in there for that? Miscellaneous. Toiletries. Scouting.

I'm just going to run a tarp yep and then uh when i go in with uh the photographer for the actual hunt we're gonna split the uh stone glacier skyscraper oh cool so that's like a little over four pounds so we'll each be at you know a couple pounds for yeah yeah but i'm happy i got my kit down to roughly uh if i'm going in solo 35 pounds no food or water so if i go in five days that's 10 pounds of food that's up to 45 and the add you know however much water you're gonna carry half a gallon be four pounds what's uh what's a boned out sheep way and the cape and the head man uh i was actually just talking to kurt rasko about that and uh he feels that you can get a whole boned out sheep if you are diligent about trimming um into one of the stone glacier load cells so i'm actually going to maybe flip my program and just carry one of those and not carry any game bags,

maybe one extra in case there's like overflow, you know, or maybe a place or a way to wrap up the cape and the head. So probably. But he said about 65. 60, I was going to say 60. 60, 65 pounds boned out. The head and cape, you know, I didn't ask him that. I should.

That'd be a good number to know. Those capes are valuable. Very. The FUDS calendar. cape you know i didn't ask him that i should that'd be a heavy good number to know those capes are valuable very the fuds calendar effed up old deer stands calendar there was granted it was supposed to be a book we haven't ruled that out listen passion a lot of people got upset about that that sold out and what oh that it went from coffee table book to calendar because i had to prove the concept, man. I know. Who got upset?

People just like being upset about shit. Listen, you can't tell people you're making a fine art coffee table book and then give them a calendar. But you can. But I'm asking you. Was it the general public that got upset? No, general public. We had spent months talking about a fine art coffee table book. Well, Steve, you seem upset, but you were proven

right. This is a redemption story. Dude, listen. This is like the... Do you know that when It's a Wonderful Life... Of course, yeah. Do you know it tanked commercially? It tanked critically? The company that

produced that movie went out of business based on the financial loss of It's a Wonderful Life. Wow. And what happened in the end, Phil? Classic. Watch it every year. Every American family. Yep. Every American family watches it every year. 100 years from now, every deer hunter in America will have that book

on their coffee table. So listen, this is a story like that. We did the calendar, and we had a, what I, Savannah, book on their coffee table. So listen, this is a story like that. Uh-huh. We did the calendar and we had a, what I, Savannah called it a modest print run or some word like modest. Yeah. I called it a robust print run. I think it was a good number to go with

initially. 24 hours gone. But we reordered a shitload more. Good. So don't worry. The naysayers have been silenced. Yes. And everyone who's pissed the first day it came out

and it sold out, you will get your chance to get one. I feel a robust print run sold out in 24 hours. Oh, less than. Less than. Sold out in a few hours. And now we ordered 4X. Yep. That print run sold out in 24 hours. Oh, less than. Less than. Sold out in a few hours. And now we ordered 4X. Yep. That print run.

I think, can you put your name out, like notify me when available? I think I probably got something like that going on. I think so, yeah. New episode immediately to the TV show hitting Netflix September 29th, so mark your calendars. New season, not just one episode. Sorry, what did I say? Episode? New season. New season. Not just one episode. Sorry, what did I say? Episode? New season.

Can we give them any hints as to what? Rick and Seth are in it. Rick and Seth, that's true. I'm in it. Yanni's in it. Clay's in it. Our buddy LC is in it. Who's that?

Luke Combs. Oh, Luke Combs is in it. Yanni's dog's in it. Yanni's dog's in it. Mingus. Mingus. Can you play that quick, Phil?anni's dog's in it yeah and he's dogs in it mingus can you play that quick let's do it uh we talk about we recorded so seth and you'll meet Rick and Seth again in there. Is that your first time on the show, the Netflix show?

Yes. Never had a cameo? Jan used to do cameos all the time. No cameo. You must not have done anything. I did realize, though, that our beaver trapping episode hit mainstream television because I've been getting a lot of notifications about that. Oh, yeah, yeah.

On Outdoor Channel. I didn't know that was happening. That's cool. Yeah. The Chit and the Poof was the previous episode. Episode 258, if you want to revisit, The Chit and the Poof about our flintlock hunt. So when you watch the show on September 29th, you can skip ahead to the Flintlock one

and you'll meet Rick and Seth. Yep. What do you think about that, Rick? That was back when you weren't even married. Yeah, no, wasn't married. That was before I was engaged. Is that when you taught Dirt Myth about a hang fire? Yep.

Do you have a favorite video of all time? That was the greatest video of all time. If you go on Instagram, I don't know when that was. It was sometime around last Christmas. If you go on Instagram, so at Stephen or Nell was. It was sometime around last Christmas. If you go on Instagram, so at Stephen Rinell and you go watch the world's greatest hang fire video. Dirt's like,

run you scoundrels! Pulls the trigger and forever goes by. He was like lowering the guard. He was about to walk away and I was like, kaboom! It was like a fuse burning straight out of Looney Tunes. That was crazy. Yeah, it's dangerous.

I'm writing an article for the website that the nuts and bolts of it is going to be the gear list. So you can check it out. Oh, Yanni's gear list. And see what we're using. And I think that gear list can definitely be applied for an early season deer, archery elk hunt as well. It's a good idea. Inspired by this, but used for many other practices. Yeah, look for it on the meateater.com.

The whole thing about when I screwed up that word macro fructation, when it was supposed to be macro fructification. Well, some guy sent in this. He looked up Google search trends for macro fructification and found that it had not been googled in a single time in five years then when we talked about it on july 19th 2021 in the episode cat scratch fever it got searched a hundred times people well i think that's a real i think that that graph you're looking at is a relative scale so it's not literally a hundred times people well i think that's a real i think that that graph you're looking at is a relative scale so it's not literally a hundred times but i mean i think

it's showing you like the relative difference in the interest so it's probably a lot more than a hundred but also probably was googled at least once or twice in the last five years it got um yeah quite a spike but we did a t-shirt, a macro fructification t-shirt run, but they're all gone. That was a modest print run. That itself was a modest print run. They're collector's items now. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps,points and tracking that's right you were

always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's,

Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com

slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Seth, break down the I call this the civil rights issue. The civil rights issue. Yeah. The civil rights issue of Sunday hunting in Pennsylvania. Give us the whole deal.

Yeah, so for as long as I know, you weren't able to hunt on Sundays in Pennsylvania. We talk about this in the episode, so you'll have to check it out but um last year was the first year they allowed three sundays of hunting um which was the last sunday of archery season the first sunday of was the first first sunday of the rifle season and then one of the sundays during bear season um but right now there's a bill, Senate Bill 607, that was introduced that would pass Sunday hunting authority fully from the legislator of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which currently has the authority to only allow three Sundays. So it gives them the right to do it. Yes. But you don't know if they will do it. Or is that the assumption?

I mean, the assumption, I think the Game Commission is on board. Got it. And there's lots of studies that show how this will help economically. It gives more opportunity to people that are out-of-staters that want to come hunt Pennsylvania, but you only hunt one day during the weekend. More opportunities to kids. Just like for the average person knocking out your

school teacher, and you got obligations Monday through any infinite number of occupations, but let's just say a school teacher, you got obligations Monday through Friday to keep you damn near till dark in the winter, and then the government's saying, oh, and of the two days you can hunt, uh-uh.

Yep. Can only hunt one of them. If you don't want to go hunting and you want to go to your local church, go to your local church. Yeah. Yeah. Just because you're allowed to hunt on Sunday. No one's making you go. Just because you're allowed to hunt on Sunday doesn't mean you have to.

I know years ago Seth and I added this up, but if you bow hunted and then rifle hunted in Pennsylvania and you took the opening day years ago, which traditionally is the Monday after Thanksgiving. If you took that as your holiday, but you didn't take any other days off and you didn't hunt the flintlock season. This was not counting that. Back up. I wasn't ready for thisintlock season. This was, I'm not counting that. Home, back up. So. I wasn't ready for this level of thinking. Okay. Okay.

Do it again though. Just the average Joe in Pennsylvania. If you bow hunted. High school teacher. Yes. Yes. So if you bow hunted the entire season and then every, all of our rifle season, no flintlock hunting after Christmas and you just did Saturday hunts and you took the first day of rifle off.

That was your only vacation day you took. You hunt nine days. Really? I remember we used to talk about that. Yeah. So, I mean, it's changed. That'd be like you poured the coals to it. Yes.

Every possible, you know, besides, like I said, that flintlock season. But if you didn't take any other vacation off besides the opening day, we gave that because most people. Yeah. Most schools are off opening day. And how many days would that same person gain now being able to hunt Sundays? Well, probably double that easily. Yeah, you're also an 18 day hunter, man.

Yeah. That's a livable number. Yeah, it's a big difference when you're not allowed to hunt Sunday. And just like, who's going to deer, who wants to go to deer camp for a day? You know, like you can get a whole weekend in at least. Seth, can I, can I give you grandpa's perspective on it?

Yeah, go for it. This is a great argument we love to have. Yeah. God bless him. Oh yeah. No. Great guy. Yeah.

He hosted us. Yeah. Listen, very gracious host. Put us up, fed us, hosted us. Great company. His argument. His argument. a very gracious host put us up fed us hosted us great company his argument his i'm not trying to his argument was he likes it that way because he told me on saturday you can get up to your hunting camp and quote get all your clothes ready and everything and then hunt on sunday and no one's out in the woods that was no no no how did it go oh how did it go i don't remember i was like yeah he doesn't he doesn't like the sunday

i know he i'm sorry that's i'm trying to give it was i screwed it up and and also the opener is now on saturday rather than monday he. Oh, he liked to go up on Sunday and get all of his clothes ready. Hunt Monday. And that's how they've always done it. And by God, why would you change that now? Traditionally, we would, the Friday after Thanksgiving,

we would go to camp. That's when everyone would meet there. Saturday we would do whatever, work on camp, go grouse hunting or whatever. Sunday, we'd get up, go to church. At camp. Yeah. We'd get up, go to church.

The priest always had like a blessing for all the hunters going out on Monday. We'd come back. He's going to start doing that on Friday. We'd come back to camp, have a big meal, and then, you know, go to bed because you're getting up early Monday morning to hit the woods. Oh, dude, now I'm back to thinking that I support Sunday the band.

No. No. Don't do that. Well, that painted such a nice bucolic image, man. You can make more traditions. It just screws everything up when now you can hunt on Saturday, but now you can't hunt on Sunday. Then it's back to hunting on Monday. It's a weird... Yeah, man you can make more traditions. It just screws everything up when now you can hunt on Saturday, but now you can't hunt on Sunday. Then it's back to hunting on Monday. It's a weird.

Yeah, but, man, Seth's just painted such a nice little. Yeah, man, that brought tear to my eye. Thinking of that coming to a close. Well, can Phil cut that out? I'm conflicted now. Yeah, you know what you might do, Phil? Because Seth was going to do a call to action, but I think he just undid any progress he was going to make by painting that.

No, listen. There are way better traditions to be made in the future if Sunday hunting is allowed. Like shooting bucks on Sundays. Yeah, how's this for a tradition? Get up on Sunday, shoot a big old buck. That's my kind of tradition. All right, give a call to action. If you want to be in control of your own life and hunt when you want to hunt and not when uh the government says or no not because not like

of course the the the commission sets the seasons if you want to hunt when the game commission says and not when the state legislature says do this yeah so there's there's a article on national deer association um it's deer association dot com slash action alert support sunday hunting in pennsylvania with a whole listen yeah just just do like a tell how to do a google search just yeah you could probably go to deer association dot com and in the search thing type in pennsylvania sunday hunting and it'll come up there you go um there's a there's like a click here link you can go there fill out some information and it it sends um it sends this you know basically a thing saying that you want this to pass. Now, can residents of any state do this and participate

or only residents of Pennsylvania? Yeah, I did it. And it asks where you're from and stuff. I put Montana. I'm going to queue it up right now. I'm fine. Yeah, let's all do it. Clay is redeemed after almost, I thought,

embarrassing himself on this show, he found documentation of an L, an eel, an L of bear grease. Just to refresh people's memories. Clay was telling me all about how there was a unit of measurement, which is the little, it would be a sack. If you took a doe's skin, a deer skin off, you skinned a deer's neck out. Now you got a little tube of like, right? You got a little tube of hide. Stitch one end closed, fill that with a liquid and then stitch it shut.

That little sack was a unit of measurement. I challenged him on this. And rather than doubling down, he did a mild retreat. Would you agree, Phil? You were there. Yeah, that's a perfect way of framing it, I'd say. He didn't double down. No.

He did a mild retreat. He was still sticking to his guns a little bit. He was pretty sure he kept he said i've written an article about it i quoted it i must have read it some but he wasn't like um you calling me a liar and want to fight that's not really clay's style plus he was remote you know yeah you talk a lot of shit remote so he found it uh it's from he's got a picture of the image a photo of the book it's all about gerstocker clay's buddy gerstocker goes on and on guy ends up saying this the black bear was a valuable commodity to early settlers of Arkansas.

The price of bear skins at Arkansas Post in 1806 ranged from $1 to $2 each, and that's sourced. Bear oil sold for $1 per gallon in 1834. In the early 1880s, an L of bear grease formed from the hide from the head and neck of a deer was a standard medium of exchange. A man's status as a provider was judged by the number of L's of bear grease that stood by the fireplace. Bear meat sold for 10 bucks per 100 pounds.

That's good stuff. Look at that. Clay Nukem coming through. Coming through. This guy wrote in. They have us at his high school. he doesn't say what high school he went to they had a tradition where you um did a prank was like a senior prank and for some reason i like the idea it involves skunk essence skunk oil. So they wanted to sneak into their high school

and lace some stuff with skunk oil. Totally understandable. But they chose hay bales. That's what puzzles me. Outside of the school? No, no. You gotta read that 18 times and you realize that it's inside the school. Oh. They soaked some hay bales. They put skunk oil on hay bales and put them inside the school. The prank went awry, though.

The next morning, they discovered that school had been canceled. It was so bad. The police came for him. The concentration of skunk oil was so high that it soaked completely through the bales and into the carpet, causing thousands of dollars worth of damage, which he and his buddies had to pay for. Look at that. And they were arrested. I had a, I had an anti-establishment, uh, renegade buddy named Emmett Lombard in high school. Oh, you should give his full name.

I mean, what if he's like, uh, you know, on the up and up now? Oh, he is. Oh. I think the statute of limitations has run out on this one. But he poured fox lure, fox urine on, you know, our school was an older building, so it had those old radiators. And he cleared out the school with that. People were throwing up stuff. Really? Mm-hmm.

Was he a fox trapper? Is that why he had fox urine? No, not at all. I don't even know where he got his hands on the stuff, but it was a good, you know, he had a good plan. Here's another little clarification. We've talked about 50 freaking times about how Mark Twain, so the writer Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer. I really liked his clarification.

Jumping frog of Calaveras County. His birth name was Samueluel clemens of course and he assumed the pen name mark twain and we have talked about what what mark twain meant um on the riverboats in the mississippi river there's a feller whose job is to stand up front with a marked rope like knots tied in a rope or something, or the anchor on the end. And you flick that rope out and then check how deep the water is.

And the thing is marked in six foot increments, fathoms. So one fathom increments. Mark Twain means second mark, two fathoms, safe passage. So Twain had, that's the understanding of why twain took the name mark twain but this guy gets into this book tells the book a biography about john mckay a contemporary of samuel clemens whose past intersected with his at the Comstock Load in Virginia City, Nevada.

The guy says, in the book, the guy says this, While Sam Clemens' use of Mark Twain as a pen name did have roots in his time on the Mississippi, his intervening use of the phrase in Virginia City to order his whiskey is an even better story to share over a few drinks. He quotes from the book, Clemens claimed he'd appropriated his by then famous gnome de plume from a stayed Mississippi riverboat captain. However, according to more convincing Virginia City legend, Clemens acquired the nickname before it appeared in print, derived from his habit of striding into the old corner saloon and calling out to the barkeep to Mark Twain. What he meant was he was ordering two whiskeys and bartenders would keep track of what you

drank on a chalkboard next to your name. And Mark Twain, two Marks, mark him down for two whiskeys. Think of that. I don't know. That's cool. I don't know. Why do you like it, Yanni? I don't know.

It's just next level. I like it. Especially because we were so sure about the other version of the story. And I think it also makes him just more of a human. Kind of takes him off of a pedestal when it's just a dude that was calling out for drinks of whiskey so often that they started developing his own little deal mark twain i wish spencer newharf is here right now because i'd tell him i'd cajole him into doing a uh little fact checker myth buster on uh on all this um guy wrote in anti-fishing sprinklers on docks are real. I was saying, so people were writing in about people putting sprinklers on docks to keep everybody away, keep fishermen away.

And someone was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not to keep fishermen away. It's to keep ducks and geese from shatting on your dock. They put a sprinkler out and then anytime something comes near it, the sprinkler shoots out water and it spooks off ducks and geese so they don't shat on their dock. This guy's like, this guy wrote in and says, listen, not true. In Florida, there are many docks I've fished that are definitely watered not for ducks or geese. These sprinklers are intentionally aimed into the surrounding water to detour boats from fishing too close to their dock. It is very common.

Then he goes on to say my favorite thing here. This is probably like, he says, there was a lady in the Tampa Bay area named Joyce. Who was? Damn that Joyce. Yeah. Remember how like, like a couple months ago it all soon became a thing, like to be like a Karen.

Yep. Yeah. Now you can be like a Joyce. Yeah. Joyce. So. like a couple months ago it all soon became a thing like to be like a karen yep yeah now you can be like a joy joyce so says there's a lady in the tampa bay area named joyce who was caught on camera giving anglers a hard time for fishing her dock so these guys made a facebook event with a public invitation called Fish Joyce's Dock. I hope everyone showed up. Everybody, all the area fishermen could show up at all Fish Joyce's Dock at the same time.

But what kind of like. Dude, I love it, man. What kind of angler is going to be scared off by a sprinkler? Yeah, half the time you're fishing, you're wearing right gear anyway. I mean, come on. Listen, man. Yeah, Half the time you're fishing, you're wearing rain gear anyway. I mean, come on. Listen, man.

Yeah. It's just a little annoying. Picture that I had a hose. I see those sprinklers. Picture that I have a hose on your, for somehow I have a hose on your boat and you're fishing away. And all of a sudden, like periodically I hose

you down. You're telling me that you. That's what rain gear's for, man. Okay. We'll do that. I gotta figure out how to do it. I gotta down. You're telling me that you would be like. That's what rain gear's for, man. Okay, we'll do that. I got to figure out how to do it. I got to figure out how to get me a little pump and everything. But now, if I was down there and I saw a sprinkler on a dock, I'd be like, ooh, that's a good spot. Yeah, no one's fishing that spot.

Yep. Fish Joyce's dock. Love it. Just got to cast for it. Okay. Yeah. Look at this. I'm on Fish Joyce's doc on the Facebook.

And look at that old boy trying to keep people off of his... This has already been going for like... Oh, is he out spraying a hose? He's standing on his doc with a hose in one hand and some kind of a stick or pole in the other hand, banging his doc. He's trying to scare fish away. Yeah. Yeah.

And then the guys that are angling are laughing so hard they can't even make a cast. Yeah, he's out banging a broomstick on his dock to spook fish out from under his dock. If you go on YouTube, there's like 10 million videos of people doing the same shit. I don't understand. What's the problem? That't know he's that that old timer right there is an interesting situation oh look now he's just started his uh engines on his boat that are next next to the dock and just has him sitting there uh you know above idle speed it's probably not good for whatever where the boat's sitting just revving them just because

fish and marinas and docks aren't used to motor running. He's making a weird calculation. This dude is like, he's saying to himself, I could be doing whatever it was I'd normally be doing. Okay, mowing my lawn, watching tube, playing golf, whatever. You're the old guy in Florida. Okay.

And do that knowing that someone might be fishing. It's just needle and needle. Out of my awareness. Or I could be down on my dock, banging on my dock with a broomstick. Hmm. I know what I'll do. He's probably like,

I don't want people fishing my dock because it's going to damage it or something. And there he is smacking his dock with a broomstick. Holy cow. I want to go fish. I think people just like to be king of the mountain. Yeah.

White-tailed deer. There's another thing I want to get into, man, but it's like very complicated. Let me give it to you real quick. It's so complicated. I was actually emailing with someone at

National Shooting Sports Foundation today to get clarification that's very complicated so the center for biological diversity and the natural resources defense council which uh two organizations which are they are not outspokenly anti-hunting. Yeah. They have a proven track record of, well, every time there's an issue, they're always on the anti-hunting side of it. Coincidentally. Or not. They're petitioning.

We should get someone from those organizations. You know what? That's what Corinne needs to do, but Corinne's not here right now. She needs to get someone from one of those orgs to come and be like no no we're not any of that honey and and explain it i'd love to hear it uh they're petitioning the department of the interior and the u.s fish and wildlife service to quote to ban trade in wild mammals and birds and for regulations instituting a comprehensive chain of custody system for all plants and wildlife imported into or exported from the United States. What they're saying is this. This is one of those weird, this is one of those like, this is a weird COVID thing, a COVID related thing that might not immediately seem like a COVID related thing.

So you have two groups, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council. They're coming and saying, you shouldn't be able to bring wildlife parts into and out of the country without meeting certain criteria. And they're calling for an immediate ban while we sort out the system. So they're saying like, stop now until we can put in place a satisfactory system to trace any movement of wildlife parts. So the stop now part would mean you don't come into the country. You go to, like Clay Newcomb right now is up in Manitoba hunting bears. Clay does not bring any part of that bear.

No hide, no meat, nothing crosses that border. They don't point out in here that they're proposing, I'll get to the COVID part of this in a minute they don't point out explicitly in here that they're proposing interstate bans as well but some different uh legal experts have looked at their use of the lacey act the the lacey act is used in the u.S. would be that, I'm trying to, a quick way to explain the Lacey Act. The Lacey Act gives a lot of teeth

to wildlife regulations because let's say you had a state with very lax wildlife regulations and you broke a wildlife law in that state. So let's say you go into a state and you poach a deer. And then you drive your poached deer from Ohio to Indiana

or Ohio to Illinois. You drive your poached deer from uh ohio to indiana or ohio to illinois you drive your poached deer um you have just violated the lacey act so now you've committed a federal crime and that allows it gives like an enhanced ability for people to go after interstate poachers the lacey act does and they're calling upon they're justifying this ban in terms of laciac and so some people are pointing out that the way this is worded and the enforcement strategy would de facto mean that it would make interstate movement of wild animals wildlife parts would ban that most immediately you look and you think it has repercussions for anyone that hunts Canada, hunts in Africa, being able to bring

stuff back with you without going through whatever kind of thing that might presumably be onerous. Now what they're doing is they're saying, oh hey man, we should do this because of COVID. Which I feel is a little opportunistic it's like does they're sort of selling the idea based on that you're going to reduce they're saying hey we all know or we don't all know we all thought a while ago that covid absolutely came from bats now it's kind of like a 50 50 toss-up between a lab and bats but absolutely came from bats um we'll slow down or stop the movement of diseases by stopping the movement of wildlife parts but it seems

opportunistic to me it's like they're going, how can we leverage COVID into, how can we leverage the pandemic and public awareness around the pandemic into getting a thing we want, which is that you can't move wildlife parts? Yeah, well, I mean, the same kind of people that are going to latch on to moving wildlife parts are the same kind of people that are going to latch on to you know the covet reasons right like no overreach is too much over right i mean it does it seem like the end goal is interstate trafficking and not international i saw a clarification about that i want to read the whole email international. I saw a clarification about that. I don't want to read the whole email exchange, but I saw a clarification about that today. And there was a learned, I received a learned reply about why that, why it's likely that as pursued would have impact on interstate travel. Yeah, which would impact, I mean, anyone who goes on an out-of-state hunt at that point. Watch this transition.

Speaking of COVID. Hey, I think we should just do a quick shout-out, though, if you want to keep in, before you go to your transition, think about it some more. But if you want to keep an eyeball on that um you can probably keep up with uh that at uh www.nssf.org which is the national shooting sports foundation as well as um our buddies over at the uh yeah sportsman Brody. So, again, this isn't like, this isn't a law that's been passed. This is a petition.

It's a request, right? It's an official request on behalf of two organizations, which we need to get people from one of those organizations or the other on to explain their mission. Maybe I got it all wrong. I don't know. I'd love to hear more. Speaking of COVID, ready for this transition?

Whitetail deer are showing up with covid in staggering numbers it seems not to mess with them but they're getting it 33 of white-tailed deer tested in illinois michigan new york and and pennsylvania let me start over because this is so kind of surprising. 33% of deer tested in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania were positive for antibodies, meaning they had been exposed at some point, but doesn't necessarily indicate they had active infections. Between January 2020 and March 2021, so a narrow window of time, they tested 481 deer. Michigan, 67% of 113 samples,

67% of the tested deer had COVID antibodies. This has not been peer reviewed. Peer review means you do like a little thing. You do a little research. And you send it out to scientists in your field and they kind of go through and check your work. And they'll poke holes in it. Right. And a lot of things don't make it through a peer review like someone might look and be like oh yeah but had you thought

of this i mean it's and then they're like oh shit we didn't think of that and then it doesn't it doesn't the idea doesn't advance this has not been peer reviewed even though it has it it seems completely plausible right like well no not to me it doesn't i'd have to. I'd have to know so much more about when you test, are there false flags? I don't know enough about it. Right. Would a deer's version of a common cold trigger the test? I don't know. But wasn't there instances where minks, wild minks were infected with it?

And all kinds of zoos have had animals. No, that's a good point, Brody. A lot of zoo critters. Did you hear about that lady that got banished from that zoo for having an affair with that chimpanzee? Jesus. Wish I could make that whistle noise.

I got to say, see, that was a poor transition. Hope that chimpanzee didn't have COVID. Speaking of being a wreck. They did say, I read something a little bit that was more than what we have here in our notes. It did say that these blood tests

have been going on for like a decade and so they were able to look, because I'm sure there's a lot of people that are saying, oh, well, maybe they've always carried these SARS viruses and there's, you know, we all know that there's like different versions of COVID all the time, right? Yeah.

Well, they looked back like 10 years in history and they're like, no, it didn't. There was, those markers were not there back then. Oh, see, Yanni knows a lot more about this than I do. Dr. Yanni. You should lead the discussion, Yanni. That's all I know about this. Well, that's a pretty important damn point.

Interesting, though. Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask, but you cleared that up. So, obviously, questions arise. Are whitetails spreading the virus among themselves and or getting it from close contact with humans? How might this effect spread between and among animals and humans are deer not showing symptoms but acting as hosts for novel mutations that are then passed back to humans it'd be cool if we could get a sound of someone doing one of those astonished whistles

and then just insert it i can't really now picture what it's actually supposed to sound like i'm sure phil can find like an astonished whistle yeah we can do that do you want me to get a live soundboard in here i have that yanni one when i first like this two years ago right oh when yanni wasn't here yeah oh yeah yanni wasn't here phil took a bunch of yanni saying a bunch of different things and you could just hit whatever you wanted yanni to say. Yeah. He'd be like, is that right? Just have him say whatever he wanted to.

And then we could also make him look dumb, because we could play it saying something real obvious, but then have Yanni be like, I don't understand. Phil would be like, God, that Yanni, man, he doesn't get anything. Here's an interesting story. Out of Florida. This is another one that's hard to explain. Yeah, buddy. So there had long been.

Let me try to think of a different way to tiptoe into this one. Depending where you live here in the good old United States, and for you listeners elsewhere, you'll have your own version of this. Your state may or may not have a law about how far away from a occupied dwelling, from a building, you can discharge your gun.

Meaning, in Michigan, for instance, let's say a guy had a house and he built this house like right dead nuts on the edge of the national forest. You got to be, what is it? 450 feet? Something like that. Oh, in Michigan. I can't remember. You can't go stand. Like, let's say his house theoretically is like right on the line. You can't go stand like, uh, outside his bedroom window and be like, hey, bro, I'm on National Forest. Bam, bam.

Bouch. Start shooting. Because even if you're okay to be on the ground, you still have to keep distance from that. Safety zone. Yeah, safety zone. Well, the state I'm sitting in now, as well as you're sitting here now, they don't have it.

We used to float a river for ducks, and it felt so weird i called fishing game to say like man there's something that just doesn't seem right even though we've been doing it and he said we don't have a law like that i said so what would happen he goes what would happen is you hit the guy's house and that's negligent discharge or something, but the simple fact of you firing that in and of itself out of you endangering someone, just the simple fact of you firing in close proximity, we don't have a rule about that.

I would have assumed there was. I just assumed there was. So did I. But that's why I called. It felt naughty. Yeah, I got a deer spot like that. I was talking to Game Warden recently. I was talking about something that felt naughty,

but wasn't. And he was saying like, he basically said, well, why don't you listen to yourself? Yeah. Why does that not feel right to you? I'm like, just feels like I shouldn't be able to do that. He goes, well, you should listen to those instincts.

So, Florida, there's like been some tension between water, like there's some tension. And some waterfowl hunters have even wanted to clarify because there's like a debate and people getting in arguments about where you're hunting. So, some

hunters wanted to, you know, some people in the non-hunting community and some people in the hunting community have sought to clarify what is the restricted area and they're creating this restricted hunting area and it there's a movement to create this rule the rule provides a clear path for a municipality to establish that on their choice to establish a restricted hunting area with certain housing density requirements and capability by municipal law enforcement to enforce distant rules outlined in a restricted hunting area.

So they have it. 300 feet from an occupied dwelling. You cannot hunt within 300 feet of an occupied dwelling. This guy wrote in what he's worried about is rampant development in Florida. So right now it might

seem like a good idea. Okay, I see all the houses. I know where the houses are. We can't shoot within 300 feet. But as he's looking along the lakeshore with all the development i know where the houses are uh we can't shoot within 300 feet but as he's looking along the lake shore with all the development building going on you look 10 20 years into the future and he's saying i see an area where even with the duck hunter support even if a duck hunter supported this rule in order to have it be clearly defined so that everybody knows where they're standing legally he's worried about as our you know urban rural interfaces um are they going to negotiate themselves right out of all their hunting spots because every time a house gets built you've created a circle with a 100 yard radius that can't be hunted.

Think about that. It's a refuge. 1,000 people per day moving to Florida. Jeez. And he points out ducks are found along the shoreline. You know, you go to a lake, where do the ducks hang out? I mean, you know, sometimes not, but I mean, typically, yeah, you go to a lake, they're on the shoreline. They also have this thing where it matters who owns the house. So the law provides private property rights on public land to those who live inside an RHA. If you live inside an RHA, you can duck hunt inside the 300 foot boundary or give others permission to do so within 300 feet of your dwelling.

So you can hunt it. It effectively privatizes the lakeshore. That's interesting. Can you hunt it if your house is less than 300 feet from the next? Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, because where do those spaces? That comes back to like the density thing.

Like if you live on a lake without a lot of houses and suddenly. Yeah, does that just wave? But it's interesting, man. A couple of dudes go by a place, a couple of places, a couple of little shacks. All of a sudden you're like, nah, it's our spot now, bro. Yep. Yeah, and what if a dude builds a little floating house

out in front of your place where you're going to hunt? And then he's like, well, bro, you can't hunt within 100 yards of my little floating house here. The listener that wrote in, Fletcher, him and his fellow anti-rural colleagues my little floating house here. The listener that wrote in, Fletcher, him and his fellow anti-rule colleagues are trying to work with the FWS. What's that stand for? Fish and Wildlife?

Fish and Wildlife Service. Commission. Florida. To negotiate a rule that would be a little more palatable. He thinks there's an egregious oversight by the commission. Some of the stuff they're not looking at. Steve, did I hear you correctly that like the municipality can just make up their, like they have authority over that? The municipality can declare a restricted hunting area.

So I think that would get super messy with, depending if you have a hunter friendly municipality or not, or just duck hunters going, that's ridiculous. Oh, if you pick a bunch of New Jersey cat ladies down in Florida. Is there such thing as a Florida cat lady? Joyce is out there screaming. Yeah, Joyce. A bunch of Joyces. All the Joyces get together and they're like, I got an idea. Let's make this a RHA community.

Yeah. That's a good one, fletcher good for keeping out good on you for keeping an eye out very good one hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-icked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. All right. Now we're going to move on to a subject that just really troubles me. Keeps me up at night and that is just how much of our landscape we are burning every year in big hot fires not the nice ones the hot soil burners and holy cow man like fire is in the fire like was the news it got bumped by cobble it got bumped by the hurricane but other than that man fire has had it has maintained a real position in the news over multiple years of like news cycles you get the feeling

something weird is going on something new is going on then you uh try to make it be that it's not because that's scary so then you'll sit around thinking oh oh, yeah, but what about the Peshtigo fire of 1871 that killed 1,200 people? Maybe it's not so bad. I don't know. We're going to get into that. And we're going to get into it with our guest, Paul Hesburgh. So Paul Hesburgh is a research landscape ecologist with the USDA's Forest Service. He'll tell us what that means. But he's affiliated as a research professor

with a handful of universities, including University of Washington, Oregon State University, University of British Columbia. All right, so we're just going to ask him direct. Paul, can you lay out for folks what it means to be a research landscape ecologist, and how does that bring you into the fire world? That's a great question. Thanks for having me on the show, Steve. So a landscape ecologist studies how patterns of different conditions drive processes. So a wildfire would be a process, an insect outbreak would be a process. And so over the last several decades, I've been looking at and reconstructing historical landscapes throughout the West and asking

the question, what species of trees were growing? How dense were they? What were the sort of patchworks or mosaics? What did they look like? And then how did fire behave as a consequence of those conditions? And then I reconstructed current landscapes for the same places and I compared them. And what I found out was that forests of the present day don't look or function anything like forests of even 100 years ago. We're on a landscape that doesn't resemble what European colonists found when they got here to the West. Let's start with the kind of question I laid out earlier, that forest fires seem to just, you know, I don't like log sort of the number of mentions of

forest fires that occur in the news, in conversations over the course of my life. But like, man, it really feels like they have just dominated public thinking, particularly in the West, in a way that they did not once upon a time yet. You know, you imagine there's that book called, Rick, was it The Big Burn? The Big Burn, yeah. About the 1910, like the catastrophic fires of 1910. Earlier I mentioned the largest forest fire, I believe still today,

the largest forest fire in U.S. history, 1871, the Peshtigo Fire, which burned across Wisconsin, michigan's upper peninsula killed over a thousand people so you look at these these monster fires historically and then you try to soothe yourself just into thinking like well it can't be it's not that bad so maybe nothing new is happening um what's your take on that are we in a new era of forest fires or is it business as usual we just hear about them more we're in a new era steve uh the the pestigo fire killed about 1200 people and the firefighting infrastructure

wasn't around there it It wasn't really well developed. And so it caught them all by surprise. Windy fire season, an awful lot of logging had gone through in the lake states. There was a lot of slash hanging out. So the fire grew over 3 million acres as a consequence of lack of a big fire suppression infrastructure, caught by a real significant wind and weather event, a lot of fuel hanging around. And it was incredibly frightening and damaging, but it didn't get the U.S. thinking about doing fire suppression wholesale and really scaling up to develop just an amazing resource to attack fire. And if you read the history, there's a lot of other really big fires over a million acres that occurred long before the era of fire suppression.

We're in a new era now because the climate's getting warmer, it's getting hotter, drier, and there's a lot more windy days when it's hot and dry. It's interesting that you brought up, i've always called the pestigo fire but you just said pestigo so uh thanks for the correction there but if if it's interesting you bring up that that might have um that that fire other later fires might have brought on the of fire suppression, but can you lay out what factors are at play right now? Um, because you hear multiple culprits, right? You hear that we have a history of fire suppression and then, um, forest management rights and wrongs, a changing climate. Um, is there a long list or is it a pretty simple list? It it a pretty simple list? It's a pretty simple list, really. It's taken a lot of work on a lot of people's part to get to the place we are right now. But we know in the West, for example, that the Little Ice Age only

ended a short time ago. So it was really mild and sort of equitable in the West. And that made the climate not too hot, not too dry, not too wet. It was sort of in the Goldilocks spot for a fairly long period of time. And so there was a lot of forest growth that occurred during that period of time. And what we see from the climate data is after about 1985, we see a really different signature on the climate of Western North America. And it's all the way across the western states on into British Columbia and Alberta. It's a really big scale thing. In fact, in British Columbia and in the Arctic and subarctic, temperatures are rising at a much faster rate than they are here in Washington state, where I live, for example, two to three times the rate of warming.

And so those systems are just changing abruptly right now. And so they're burning, too. We're seeing really extensive fires and the climate unequivocally is driving this rising area burned. Everywhere we look, climate drives increasing area burned. It was that way thousands of years ago. It is this way going forward. Can you lay out the current fire situation for people? I just know where we are, it's smoky. It's been smoky for eight weeks. We hear a lot about it, but can you give sort of like a more holistic snapshot of what's happening at the moment? Sure. Happy to do it. So think that we're sort of, I'm giving you a snapshot and the numbers

aren't done yet, right? Because an awful lot of places have a much longer fire season. So the snapshot is basically we've got something like 43,000 and counting fire starts in the continental U.S. About plus or minus five million acres have already burned. And we expect that number to continue rise on into the fall and even early winter in some of the southern states. And globally, it appears that 2021 is one of the worst fire years on record. So places that normally get fire, like Australia and Africa and the Mediterranean countries that have that Mediterranean climate, basically. We're seeing those countries really being hit hard as well. And what has been predicted for the last probably 35, 40 years is actually occurring.

The climate's warming and the burned area is on the rise. And what we can see from here is that the area burned since 2000 till about today is going to double, triple, some estimates, or even quadruple by 2050. So it's not a new norm. Let's actually not settle down. The best years are behind us. That's what the research is telling us. We were talking a little bit before we had Jan here. Ask the question you were asking, about at what point do you run out? Yeah, it just seems like, you know,

back in the day, we know that there used to be like a recurring mosaic, kind of a fire pattern, right? And that seemed to keep the big fires from happening. And as much as it's been burning over the last 10 years

or however long it's been since 1985, it would seem as though at some point the fires would have to start coming back on top of the, the, you know, what they've already burned. And thus it would start to limit like how big they could get. So it's like a two part question.

Like, is that happening? And then in general, can you say what, like what percentage of, I don't know if you want to do it nationally or just pick a state, of stuff that can burn has already burned in the Northeast. There's a ton of prescribed burning in the South and the South Coastal Plain, and that's having an incredibly positive effect on low-burned area in places like the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. Those Southern pine forests,

they do a lot of prescribed burning. And so they have a different story right now that's going on. In the West, we don't have license to burn that many acres. Georgia, I think in the last two or three years, had one year where they prescribed burn a million acres, which is a really big deal. And what that does is it changes the dynamics. If you burn it under the right fuel and weather conditions, you get good fire behavior and you get good fire effects. We're not up to those kinds of acres and we need to be burning that. A really central part of your question, though, and it's a super clever question, you think severe fires are driven by woody fuels. And once you start burning up a lot of the woody fuels, you would expect that, hey, it's going to tip back to a sort of a more benign system, right? We're finding out

it's different than that under climate change. Let's say an area burns and you get, you know, half a million acre fire. Let's say the bootleg fire, right? You've been reading about that in Oregon. And there's a lot of severe fire behavior in that area. What we're seeing is those areas then get a lot of meadows and shrublands developing in them. That's the first thing that comes back after the removal of forest, right, by a severe fire. What happens is you'll get recurring ignitions on the margins of some of those and it will reburn again. And when it reburns, if you had surviving forest or you had seedlings and saplings that started to seed in and regenerate a new forest, they get burned out. And so you start converting big areas of forest

into areas where it's very difficult for forest to walk back again. And the question you asked before about that patchwork, you know, I think about all the elk stands I've ever sat in before where I look across and I see a really cool meadow and I'll see areas where the elk are bedding first thing in the morning. And I'll look across a drainage and it's open and I can see for two miles a herd of elk coming in in the late season where the larch has dropped its foliage. And you see this mosaic, this patchwork of conditions that provide sort of everything in a fairly small neighborhood. Well, that's not what's repeating under the current fire regimes. We're getting a really different patchwork. It's really coarse. The burned areas are large because we're putting out all the small and medium sized fires because they occur under more moderate fire weather.

They're easier to hook. They're easier to hold, right? And so the things that are burning the landscape are the fires that escape under really difficult, hot, dry, windy conditions, and they escape initial attack. They escape all valid attempts to try to keep it in a small paddock, you know, to keep the fire small. And resources, firefighters have to fall back because otherwise it's dangerous there'll be high loss of life can you can you explain um this is another debate we were having or not debate we're just discussing this uh how some fires you know you'll hear laymen such as myself you know we'll talk about a fire, burn too hot, right? Or what was the term you were using, Seth?

Soil glazing. Right, where it creates this situation where it's hard for the forest to recover as opposed to certain kind of fires that maybe are not the case. Like, what's the vocabulary for what I'm trying to get at here about these fires that just strip it of organic, strip the soil of any kind of organic matter? It's very hard to come back versus, I don't know, a good fire, a happy fire. Yeah. So in terms of the words,

intensity means the energy that's released at the head fire, the flaming front of a fire, right? And that's in kilow severity as it relates to what happened to the forest that used to be there. How much got killed? And we think about severity in both of those ways right now. When soil severity is low and we have sort of intermediate fire severity in terms of fire effects on the forest, what you see is all sorts of opportunities for forests to walk back. But when you have soil severity that's really high in centuries, millennia of duff and litter and organic accumulation gets cooked out to, you know, 10, 12 inches, you're literally starting over and it can take hundreds of years for a forest to reobtain when fire soil severity

is high it can burn down you're saying it can it can burn down 12 inches like some seed hiding out down there is just gone so uh there's some seeds in the soil what we call the soil seed reserve or the seed cache that um have got a lot of apps for being able to hang out. And they actually, many of them are turned on by high heat. So when you're hunting in a lodgepole area and you see a bunch of ceanothus, for example, hanging out, seeds in the seed cache got turned on by the heating. And that's the treatment that allows them to germinate and become shrubs um others that uh that rely on perennial root systems if the the heat is too high then an

awful lot of the herbs and the grasses and stuff it's a do-over for them and they have to get seeded in from someplace else so soil severity soil severity is a big deal, and it's a super smart question because in this whole mix of how do patterns influence forest fires that we like versus those that do damage to habitat and resources, all of this comes into the mix. How much duff and litter is there available to burn? If you have a really hot fire, a lot of times you'll see this smoldering combustion go on for weeks. And that smoldering combustion is what, if it's hot and dry, is what will cook out the soil. So it's just constant heating sitting on top of that soil. And you'll see these red soils and ash soils right when you're out there in the bush

and it's because high soil severity has occurred and it's going to be tough for the forest to come back i find that when people talk about you know oh the problem is that we didn't do this or the problem is this it sometimes kind of demonstrates someone's particular worldview um meaning someone from a certain industry you might point and be like oh it's because we're not doing forest management it's because the you know or it's because the radical environmental um element won't let us do what we need to do or someone might say oh it oh, it's because, you know, climate change. And a lot of times it sort of like ties into sort of, you know, where your biases are. But talk about management for a minute. Meaning, if we had the public will and the resources to address what we could address outside of trying to tackle global climate change.

Not that we should leave it untackled, but just that like that's a bigger, probably decades, centuries long problem. What in the immediate in the immediate term, if we had public will and resources, could we actually be doing right now to get a grip on the problem? And who what stands in the way of this? Well, I got a lead was saying that the big ticket item is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That's what's driving the bus on big area burned right now. And so grabbing a hold of it and having the mindset that we're going to do something about those emissions is super critical because it's going to take decades for that change to pulse through the system and for CO2 in the atmosphere to come down. So it's yesterday we have to start that process. That's driving the bus.

In terms of what's going on with the forest, we know that area burns driven by hot, dry climate, windy, severe weather, that kind of thing. But we know that fuel and forest density and that sort of thing is what creates the intense heating that causes soil severity and fire severity. And so going back to the things that I study, when I look back on the historical landscapes, what I see is on the rid open pines on dry Doug fir sites, open woodland of Doug fir, that sort of thing, open limber pine sites. And what's happened during this period of fire exclusion, which starts with the loss of indigenous burning 150, 170 years ago, trees started seeding in and they started getting bigger and they kept seeding in, especially the ones that are fire intolerant and shade loving. Okay. So, Doug firs, grand firs,

white firs, those sorts of things are seeding in. And so, open becomes closed over 150 years. And it's that patchwork of open and closed conditions that changed how fire flowed on the landscape. When you had an open canopy condition, fires would stay on the forest floor and they'd burn up the dead wood that accumulated. And frequent fires increased the likelihood that the next fire would be low severity. So you had these frequent low severity systems in the drier forests. Down in the valley bottoms around the north aspect, you would see conditions that would be more, they'd be denser and they'd be more layered. And that's where different kinds of habitats were occurring. But they didn't dominate the entire landscape, right?

And so the way fire flowed on the landscape was influenced by how much deadwood, how open or closed and how layered the canopy was. And so you'd see this mosaic being repeated, not in the same place, but you'd see it, the shifting mosaic occurring. And those were feedbacks to reducing the severities of the next fires. Big fires are not noteworthy. In the historical record, there are many, many big fires. It's what's going on inside of them, those boundaries that's changed. It used to be a patchwork of low severity, didn't burn, high severity, kind of in between, right? And so you'd get this very blotchy pattern. And that produced all the habitats for the critters that were interested in.

And that's what went out of the system, right? And I think a lot of it has to do with a lot of factors that sort of collaborate or come together to create a condition. Forests and forestry were not the original intent of the U.S. Forest Service. It was protecting water and grazing that was the original intent of the Forest Service. After World War II, trees and logs became important, and we started logging the big trees because they had the most volume at the time, and they were most merchantable. And every time we'd pull out big sticks, trees would regenerate and release and make the forest denser. So you can see that evolution of several factors coming

together. And by 1934, we got the 10 a.m. rule. We're putting fires out by 10 a.m. and we're keeping them less than 10 acres. And so now you have 50, 60 years where the forest has a chance to get dense, layered, and be now prone to severe fire in a lot more places. I got a quick question. Paul, is that something like those open grown forests like you were talking about back in the day? Is that something that with management today that like Forest Service is trying to get back to? Or is that something that's just like never going to happen again? That's a great question. And it's a big ticket item. Not just the Forest Service, but a lot of

forest managers are literally trying to put those open ground conditions with the bigger trees on the landscape because big trees, thick bark, fire tolerant, you know, pine, big dark fir, big western larch, they can tolerate fire. And so getting stuff, you know, 15 to 30 to 40 inches back on the landscape and having those be the dominant veg cover is the bet hedge on climate change and changing fire regimes. So they're doing it in many places that they can, where really it makes sense in the landscape, right? Hot, dry places, places that are going to need to stay open to stay in forest. When you get into where the next big fire is going to hit, do you have a sophisticated modeling mechanism that allows you to in some way predict what's most likely to go, or is there just too much randomness around cause that prevents you from really understanding, you know, what's next?

If anybody if any of us had that model, we'd be wealthy people, wouldn't we? The there's a lot of cool modeling going on right now that predicts if you have ignition. So a lot of my modeling friends will nuke the landscape with random ignitions and they'll ask the question, what will fire size and fire severity be under different weather conditions, right? And so they can create sort of map surfaces of what's likely. They call it a quantitative risk assessment. It's being done all over the United States right now with some existing tools. The problem is there are random factors. There's a ton of human ignitions.

Where are they going to occur? Nobody knows. So often conditions are ready to burn across an enormous area, tens of millions of acres, but nobody knows where the human ignition is coming from. Nobody knows where you're going to get the dry lightning. We get these dry convective storms all the time, right? You've seen them out there on the landscape. Sometimes they're wet. They're thunderstorms with a lot of rain. Sometimes they're dry and they'll just bomb a mountain range and, you know, put it on fire. So

there's a lot of wild cards in the mix for these factors as they have to come together. And in the randomness of the ignitions is a big part of it. Do humans lead lightning for causes of major fires? In a lot of areas, they really do. A lot of areas, 80-90% of the fires are actually human-caused. What are they doing? What are they? What are we doing?

Flicking matches? Throw throwing cigarettes out the window. Like what is the primary thing that folks are up to? So, um, so we look at all the ignition data across the Western U S right now, we have ignition data sets over the last decades and And believe it or not, hunter campfires are a big deal. We see sort of the ignition period of the normal fire season, but when we get into the rut and we start seeing people in the woods starting in late August, September, on into October, there's another peak from hunter fires that essentially are igniting, continuing to night the landscape. So hunters can contribute an awful lot by, you know, making sure they tamp their fire out. But we actually see a pulse in the data most years. You know, that's really interesting, man, because I kind of wrote him off, but

I had a guy I know who's a firefighter in Wyoming, and he swore up and down to me that when elk archery opens, they have a busy few days of responding to fires. I was like, that can't be true, man. He goes, I'm telling you dude every year it's a real thing and it's it's bigger than wyoming right um and a lot of us when it's pretty darn cold out there we'll put together a little warming fire and um and they you know critters come through the neighborhood and all of a sudden we're shooting and flinging arrows and sometimes that fire doesn't get tamped down so yeah um and and they'll take a walk because the fuels are still dry. Right. Uh, I want to get back. I'm going to let, let it, I'm going to let these other guys hit some questions, but I want to circle back on a part of Yanni's question that I was

particularly intrigued by and you didn't get around to it. And maybe it's too hard to answer, but, um, if you model, let's take, you can do your own state, Washington, you can do California, whatever you want, if it's possible to answer this. You take a map of what could burn or, you know, like take a map of like highly likely, high likelihood landscapes in Washington that are prime for a fire um and what percentage of that have we like whittled away at over the last couple decades meaning well in five years will california or washington have run out of have like run out of what could burn because they burned? No. No, I did answer the question. What I basically said is the model that you're thinking about is actually not the right one. As the climate warms and ignitions continue to increase over time, areas that already burned produce all sorts of flashy

fuels and they're available to burn every single year. So depending upon the severity of the previous fire, you can continue to burn and re-burn those areas. And more often you re-burn them in a short time span, the less likely that they'll come back to forest if the fires are severe. Okay. That was the gas being smarter than the host. I forgot about that. You did answer that. Thank you. All right. What else you guys got? I got one.

Paul, so we know that like low intensity fires are generally good for deer and elk and all kinds of other, you know, animals and birds. When you, when you get one of these giant high intensity fires, how do animals like elk, like how does that affect how they use the landscape after one of these really high intensity giant fires? Like where a herd of a couple thousand elk may have lived in one drainage and now that it's all burned out yeah well that happened to me in my favorite hunting spots in the blue mountains of oregon i think it's happening to a lot of hunters these days yeah so so but i what i wanted to use is a specific example um where i was there before the fire and then after the fire and, and had the hunting experience after the fire each year. Okay. So we hunted in an area where there was 55,000 acre fires,

a big fire is super hot and it killed most of the forest. This is a, uh, an area we hunt in the late hunt. So we're there last week of October and first week of November, right. And we're hunting in snow. And so, and it's a, it's a fabulous time to hunt. The bulls are in bachelor groups and a lot of times we'll get a lot of excellent looks, all right? And so, we hunted this before the fire and it was very, very productive area. After the fire, it was so hot, but the forage conditions were really good for about five or six years. So,

we still tag bulls in this area after the fire. And then the ceanothus came up, the lodgepole pine started falling down and jackstrawing. And we hunted for two years after that. We had a hard time even getting around the dog hair lodgepole pine, cutting lanes, that kind of thing. But eventually it became too hard for hunters and elk to reoccupy the area. So this is a vast area that's going to have to grow up in forest, a lot of lodge poles, smaller stuff's going to have to fall down, creating openings in the woods, shade out the sea and north, that sort of thing. I'll never get to hunt there in the rest of my life. What generation will?

Really depends on sort of the disturbance history that happens in there in the coming decades. If they just allow it to grow up, it's going to be a very dense dog hair place with ceanothus and lodgepole pine. You know, the stem counts in most of the areas where I had stands were in the 5,000 to 20,000 lodgepole stems per acre. They're just like hair on the dog, literally dense lodgepole pine after the fire. This is 6,000 to nearly 7,000 feet of elevation. So we're up in the Subalpine, right in the gold forest. And it's going to be a long time if If other fires come in there and they start pockmarking that landscape again, then you'll start to see those habitats come alive again, but it's not interesting for forage. It's hard to get around and eat. I sort of used to think from the days when my father

took me hunting that if it's hard for me to get around, it's going to be hard for whitetail to get around. I grew up in the Lake States hunting in Minnesota. And same thing, you know, if they're really having to pussy toe to get from place to place, and it takes a long time, and it's difficult to find forage, they're not going to hang out. And there were tremendous bedding and forage areas in this patchwork for many decades, and that's gone. That's a completely different look and feel to the place. So decades, and there's got to be fire and other stuff going on to start breaking it up again, recreating that mosaic. I have a question, Paul, you kind of touched on it about, you know, it's super popular now in forest management to bring prescribed fire now, uh, as you talked

about in the South, but more so with with that like inner mountain west or western landscapes especially in the wuis like all those wildland urban areas um are we losing our window with climate change to do have a lot more prescribed fire because i know that you have the weather conditions have to be perfect safety everything and have fire conditions and have the burn you want. Are we, is that affecting like how much prescribed fire we can put on the ground? Or no, is it not as much as we would think? It's a smart question. The window's really shifting. It's getting smaller. It's not getting bigger. And a lot of, but there's still a ton of management going on in interface environments by a lot of different kinds of managers. A lot of what they're doing is they're coming in and they're thinning,

they're creating small piles for the fuel concentrations, they're burning those piles, and you'll see a lot less broadcast burning, which is the wild card, right, in those situations where you got homes tucked in and and dense developments but you still have the pile burning that you can do and if you think about it you can do pile burning all winter long um so uh and there's a pretty big window for that so even with uh i guess a two part of that so even with climate change are you're still saying we're doing good by pre-commercial thinnings and mastication and all that, just reducing that trees per acre in a lot of that area, even though we are getting hotter and drier. That's still a good movement of forest management. and treat these areas, basically keep people and their infrastructure safe

and then move out from that because if you think about it, how the fire comes to those communities is also a really key variable. Remember Paradise in California burned from spot fires five miles away, right? And so changing how fire operates on the broader landscape needs to be coupled with really creating those safe environments in the WUI and places near them. So yeah, use as much of the window as you can. And the really cool thing we're seeing is once we bust into an area and we get good treatments, the window gets bigger. We have more and more opportunity because we've knocked the fuels down. And so the maintenance work that goes on is a lot less hazardous. But the one key part of your question is,

if we don't have a fairly large footprint, as the window shrinks, it's going to be less and less likely that we'll be able to have the sort of size of the footprint that we need. So timing matters. Paul, a couple of years ago, the governor of Wyoming had made an interesting comment. It was during the sort of height of this movement to take federally managed lands and privatize them or transfer them to the states. And the governor of Wyoming had made a comment that if Wyoming had all of the federal lands under its jurisdiction, one fire season would bankrupt the state or something to that effect. Him just pointing out the incredible cost of firework. You mentioned your own agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and it's sort of, you know, it's evolving, gradually shifting set of priorities. Can you quantify the sort of time, money, brain space that your agency is now

dedicated to fire, presumably at the expense of other priorities? 25 years ago, 17% of the gross National Forest Service budget went to fire suppression. On an average fire year, that varies now between 50% and 60% of the budget. Wow. So you can see that the fire issues is much larger, and it's incomprehensible for an agency like the Forest Service or any other responsible agency to say that we're not going to try to keep people safe and to protect the land. And so you'll see those investments increasing, but the proactive work has lagged behind. And if you stop and think about it, the research is showing that being able to work on the landscape before the fact has a higher payoff than reacting in some of the worst moments

when it's going to be difficult to stop the fires and keep them small. So there needs to be this coupling at fairly large scales of trying to keep people safe while with proactive work we're able to be able to buy down the changes that have occurred over the last century and a half. And you're seeing the current administration talk pretty seriously about making some significant events. And a lot of our neighbors, California has invested $500 million. The state of Oregon is investing hundreds of millions. Washington state, kind of the same thing. And so you're seeing a lot of state and federal folks looking at how they can put together the people and the resources to operate at scale on the problem. Yeah, I imagine it's hard to get policymakers, politicians convinced

when budgets are tight to convince them that you can spend a dollar now and save two later, right? Like the logic adds up, but I imagine it's still a hard conversation to have. And it's probably hard to get people to want to invest upfront rather than waiting till it's, you know, literally a house on fire and deal with it then at a higher cost. Absolutely. And, you know, we're starting to get some really good data. Headwaters Economics, a number of our partners across the West are capturing the cost after the fire kinds of estimates and they're comparing it to the suppression estimates. And I think increasingly, as these data get out, people are basically seeing it's a clever move to be able to minimize the total impact on society because the after the fire impact is much larger than the suppression cost or even the cost to do the proactive work. So you're seeing that starting

to hit pay dirt and you're starting to see those kinds of decisions and investments happening. But if you think about it, it's a fairly significant shift and people have to really sharpen their pencils and look at the trade-offs because there's not an endless supply of money, right? They're having to make tough decisions about where to invest resources. So Paul, just we touched on climate change with fire intensity and then like early succession like a lot of forests transitioning from that early successional to late successional you know age class trees breaker but what about is there any significant impact on over on fire as a landscape level um with like insect and disease so they have like like white pine blister rust with white pine mountain pine beetle or even just invasives to like cheatgrass and stuff like how how big of a

role is the shifting of insect disease or invasives playing in the change of fire intensities in the west so in terms of invasives the more severe the fire and the more the soil severity impact the likelihood of invasives really getting a stronghold and expanding is a big deal. Invasives are a less than well understood problem in the public eye. And they really have the ability to change the landscape. Think about cheatgrass in the places that you've hunted. When cheatgrass obtains across the landscape, it changes the fire regime. So the bunch grasses that used to be there, when they're replaced by cheatgrass, you have a continuous fuel bed, and those areas can keep burning.

And so cheatgrass gets a purchase on the landscape, and it keeps growing in a much larger area. The same with a number of invasives. it keeps growing in a much larger area. The same with a number of invasives. So invasives are a big deal. The bark beetle thing, the bark beetle feedback is on the front end, right? So you have too many trees. They're low vigor during the hot, dry years. You get a lot of bark beetle mortality. Think of the 25 million acres in British Columbia that went down early in the 21st century, right? Awful lot of that collapses over one, two, three decades. And now you've got this incredible injection of fuel into the system.

And that will produce a very different response across fairly large areas where you have big beetle outbreaks. So that's kind of the tail wagging the dog and that sort of thing. Does do wildfires sanitize so that you don't have bark beetles? Yeah, for a time. And if the forests come back and if they come back really dense and once they get to diameters that are host material for the beetles, you'll see that cycle happen again. So the fire regime, having a characteristic fire regime for the forest type is a key to keeping those things in balance over big space and time. Does that make sense? The fire regime, having a characteristic fire regime is the engine that drives the system. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. Thank you.

Yeah. I know with climate change and fire shifting a lot now, do you feel like we are making a positive advance socially socially like people are getting more accepting of like prescribed burning understanding fire has a role but then you know high severity fires are damaging um and do you think management is kind of transitioning to you know it kind of seems like it's a pendulum swinging back and forth from the you know 10 a.m policy of fire suppression know, but like, do you think we're going in a positive route, I guess? I do. It's another really smart question. So when I talk to my social scientist friends, what they're basically telling me is people get it.

They're accepting of the treatments that are important to to move the compass heading right from where we are to a better place. But we're also learning from them based on past experience that if treatments in the woods are driven primarily by a commercial desire, there's mistrust in the process. But where the timber removed is a byproduct of getting the right stuff done in the woods to be able to change conditions, there's a high degree of trust in that. And that's a certain, they call it a zone of agreement. People want to do that, but the trust depends on being driven to climate change adapt and fire regime adapt the woods. Does that make sense? Yes, it does.

Do you feel like the public is generally being more trustworthy of the federal, especially the U.S. Forest Service, as far as whenever kind of, you know, any timber management is done, it is not for timber production, but more for a silviculture based landscape level management? Do you think that's changing in the public's eye? They're more, you're more accepting of that? Or do you think it's still when they see any timber management being done, they look at it as it's for that value? That's a good question, man, because I think a lot of people who aren't well-schooled reflexively, like if they see logging activity,

they're sort of trained to be like, oh, that's bad. Yes, immediately. Yeah, and how are those timber companies managing compared to the Forest Service? Like, I assume they're probably doing a fairly good job, but the perception is probably much different. Yeah, so there's a bunch of layers there. I'll try to hit it with one sort of overarching idea. The public's a big thing, right? It's made up of all sorts of disparate groups with different histories and attitudes and concerns and values. By and large, there's expanding trust to do good work, but the

devil's in the details, right? What we generally see from the social science studies is people who live closer to the land. So I'm thinking of the rural communities, people that are natural resource-based. They've got mills nearby. They're ranching communities, farming communities where people live close to the land. There's very strong concern about the current conditions and people are cooler about getting the work done. Where people live in more metropolitan areas and they're a little bit more detached, we see more of this highly differing view and sort of disaffection with forest management techniques and silvicultural techniques, because there's still a deep vein of mistrust in some communities.

And so an awful lot of, when I speak in public, I basically say, I'm talking to you about a social problem that has an ecological explanation. All right. Because the solution lives in the social domain. It's people coming together to agree on what to do, where to do it and how to do it. I can explain from my research and that of a bunch of other colleagues how we got here and what the science suggests represents good work. But in the end, it's people coming together to forge those agreements. And whether that happens fast enough in that scale, it remains to be seen. We're not there. Paul, I think we're good, man.

I appreciate it. Hey, thanks. Thanks, Paul. I enjoy the work you guys do. Keep it going. Thanks a lot. Again, Paul Hesburgh. He's got like a he's got

some kind of TED talk you can go check out too. Maybe we'll put that in the liner notes. Oh, yeah. Thank you guys all sitting here. Brody, thanks for the smoked lake trout. Next time I won't dry it out. Pull it a little earlier. I got a few more fillets in there to experiment with.

Rick and Seth, thanks for hosting me on the Flintlock Hunt. Yeah, well done. The Chit and the Poof, available on Netflix. Yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. Phil, thanks for stepping above and beyond, man. Taking on like a producer role. Yeah, it's harder than it looks. Sweating.

Tearing it up. Yeah. Yanni, thanks for drawing that sheep tag. Hey, you're very welcome. I'd sure like to have one of those. I'll keep you all posted how it goes. All right. See you guys soon. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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