The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 291: Hiding from Bulls
Episode Date: September 20, 2021Steven Rinella talks with Jason Phelps, Samantha Bates, Dirt Myth, Seth Morris, and Chester Floyd. Steve and Jason harvesting black walnut tree that will spawn the Line One turkey call; how this podc...ast made a baby; Steve recalls The Juice’s ride in the white Bronco; the need for a MeatEater book on fishing etiquette; palpating cloacas and sexing beavers on the daily; $5,000 for Chester to come to your door and sing the "hoo yip, hoo yip!" song; Steve's suspicion about the connection between CoV2 in deer and Buckman Juice; Texas as the deadliest state for death by animal; on antelope horn and sheath size; "30 by 30"; assisting in opening water bottles; Samantha's philosophy on hiding; Jani's philosophy on routes and death marches; thumbs down on floorless tents; strategizing for elk; the Phelp's brag board; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Alright, Jason Phelps,
before we get into elk hunting and all that, explain to
everyone the Line 1
turkey call.
We gotta think of a, like a, it's gonna be the
Line 1, but like, maybe like the
we'll think of some other things
to add on to the name but the
concept of the line one turkey call so this was your baby that you brought to me and at first i'm
like why does it doesn't matter why does anybody care where your turkey call comes from right it's
just another turkey call but steve had this idea he brought to me he thought it would be uh cool
to go out to a property and uh harvest the the the tree that the turkey call was ultimately made out of.
But more so than just doing that, it was a documented process of us cutting the green tree
off of the stump, us taking it to the mill, us then taking it to the kiln, getting it dried out,
and then turning that specific tree into a specific set of calls.
So I am a believer now.
The more we talked about this and I seen the way. You're getting excited now.
I am, yeah.
It was a pretty good idea, Steve.
I'll give you that.
At first, I didn't like your idea.
Well, hold on.
You actively didn't like it.
I just didn't think it was worth it, the effort to like,
but then the more we worked, I'm seeing why this is such a cool project.
I shouldn't have doubted you.
Yeah, but Jason found a guy,
a friend of his,
who had a,
it wasn't even by walnut,
black walnut standards,
a huge black walnut.
No.
But the fellas we were talking with over there
estimate that there's a thousand turkey calls
hiding in that black walnut tree.
Yep.
Yeah, pretty straight and not a lot of limbs in that,
that bottom 20 feet.
So we'll get a good yield out of that,
that tree that we found.
So what was it shortly after the 4th of July,
me and you?
Chigger season.
Yeah.
I know,
I know the chiggers and ticks were alive,
very alive in Kansas.
Flew to Kansas at my good buddy's property there.
And Steve cut down probably a 60, 70-foot walnut.
And I cut down an Osage orange, our ultimate plan.
And we're only building as many calls as we can get out of these two trees
or combos that we can get out of these two trees.
Yeah, and we fetishized the tree.
Oh, yeah.
With a drone.
It's like you really get intimate with the tree.
Oh, yeah.
You watch like a huge canopy, and then this tree just falls out of it it's pretty um so we're gonna we're gonna offer
a pot call we don't know exactly what plane surface yet um we're still kind of going through
that process but we do have we cut down an osage orange hedge also known as what was the third
but man it's got it's like it's like a burb it's got like five million yeah
yeah so basically most people know it as a hedge or an osage orange is what it's burdock burdock
yeah burdock it's but it's better known as osage orange in the call making world so we're going to
do a one piece osage striker and pair it up with the black walnut pot and it's going to be very
very limited um in the run but then we haven't figured out the legal on this.
But, well, okay.
So it's called the line one turkey call.
And they'll be numbered sequentially.
Yep.
Like when you buy a print.
Seth will know what I'm talking about because his wife-to-be sells prints.
Yep.
Or paintings.
K. Ray Johns.
That's right.
On Instagram.
No one's going to know how to spell that.
Just search Kelsey Johnson.
Kelsey Johnson on Instagram.
You see her wildlife art.
She sells prints that are numbered.
Numbered turkey calls.
Now, we already had an offer.
Am I right?
We did.
Yep.
Someone's trying to preempt and buy the number one line one call,
but we might use the number one line one call for our land access initiative.
Maybe.
I like that idea.
And auction that off and use that as a fundraiser to do access enhancement projects with.
The rest will sell, but we want to try to figure out some legal way,
like with all them ping pong balls in a ping pong ball bubbler
yep that are like numbered one through a thousand and then pull a ping pong ball out and if that's
your number of your call you get to go hunt and sit on that stump and call turkeys from that stump
yep and i think that you would probably be able to kill a turkey from that stump exactly well from the black walnut and osage we cut i killed my
turkey this year a half mile from it so the property is great and that was kind of we didn't
kind of get to the whole idea and we'd go hunting with you yeah yeah me and steve will be on that
hunt calling doing whatever we need to do for you on that hunt uh but the idea was this you know
treat a turkey line one is that you would then go back use that same call on that hunt uh but the idea was this you know tree to turkey line one is that you would then
go back use that same call on that property to kill the turkey on that stump yeah on that stump
you know or close to that no nope on the stump the first setup on the stump the first setup is
on the stump and then whatever happens happens but it starts out on the stump okay i could i
could buy into that so where's the wood at now we now? So we cut the tree down on Jason's friend's place.
Do you want to say his name?
Yeah, Randy.
I don't think you'd have a problem.
Randy Milligan's place there in Kansas.
Took it to Walnut, Kansas.
Yep.
These black walnut experts, and they milled it.
Yep.
I got chiggers real bad while they did it.
I helped. You had ticks crawling all over us during that. And then they're going it. Yep. I got chiggers real bad while they did it. I helped.
You had ticks crawling all over us during that.
And then they're going to pallet the usable pieces.
Yep.
They're shipping them to you.
Yep.
So as of today, 9-13, they're all bundled up, I believe, on two pallets.
We've got a trucker picking them up sometime this week,
and they're going to be heading to spokane washington
to sit in a kiln and you're going to film that hope yes yes it's very logistically it's tough
right now but uh we will get that man just someone at the place just needs to get their phone out
yeah and show that what it looks like yep exactly it'll be easy yeah so you'll have a whole movie
like sometimes you buy a turkey call and it comes with a little piece of paper this one comes with
a movie we'll have a little qr code on the back where if you want to watch
where this turkey call came from yeah click on it you get to meet all the trees yeah oh it's
gonna be solid uh so stay tuned on that that's gonna be all done when we're hoping i mean we
need to have them ready by january or something i mean yeah they've got it but i think we're we're
still on pace.
I just don't want to eat up all of our float time in the process.
So the quicker we can get it through the kiln, about 60 days,
we can get those machined out.
Yeah, and stay tuned at the yet-to-be-launched auction house of oddities where we raise money for access enhancement projects
because we've already had a generous large, a generous
offer for the number one line one call.
This podcast made a baby.
Did you guys hear about this?
Hear about what?
How this podcast made a baby.
Did you hear what I said?
Yeah. I heard about this.
Chester heard about it. Dirt, you hear about it? Nope. I'm curious know. I heard about this. Chester heard about it.
Dirt, you hear about it?
Nope.
I'm curious, though.
I didn't hear about it.
Sam?
No.
Jason?
Not at all.
Now I'm really curious on what type.
Has to do with turkeys.
Has to do with turkeys.
Oh, that's great.
So this guy wrote in saying he was always kind of a half-ass.
First he wrote in saying that the podcast made a baby.
Then he says that
he's not accusing us of breaking
the sixth commandment.
So he's going to give us the back story.
He said he was always a half-ass
Minnesota hunter.
But in recent years he's gotten way more
serious about it.
His wife, who used to be
a vegetarian,
has taken to pestering him about being ready to start a family and he was reticent he took her out turkey hunting called in a turkey she shot a
tom ran over there so fast she kind of like he said she could have punted the hen that was with the tom.
She got there so quick.
This got him, this inspired in him,
this inspired in him an appetite for reproduction.
Oh.
They formed a baby that night
wow
weeks later
he was cooking schnitzel with the turkey
and she said
do you need the oven
you should probably check in there
before turning it on as he's making dinner
so he opened the oven
and there was a single bun placed in the oven.
That's cute.
Oh, yeah.
So there's that.
On the dock debate.
So we've been talking a lot lately about this whole like Fish and Joyce's dock thing.
Oh, yeah.
People rigging up their docks so that they like spray fishermen if you get near it was what and like they hook up hoses and stuff
to like spook fish and spray fishermen and then some guy was like that's not what it is it's meant
to keep ducks and geese and then a bunch of people roll in like that's definitely what it is
and they sent us this footage of like you'd come this guy that when you go by his dock in Florida, he comes out and bangs the dock with a broomstick and turns his boat motors on to churn up the water because he doesn't even want fishing by his dock.
And this woman who would always be real mean, a woman named Joyce, who'd be real mean to people who are fishing.
And they started a Facebook, they started a day on facebook a group called fish joyce's dock and they coordinated a day when everyone could go fish
joyce's dock together a listener wrote in to say that he's looking at statute 379.105 of the florida
state statutes and many states have these i I'll point out. This is Florida.
That's the number for Florida's.
Prohibits the harassment of hunters, trappers, and anglers.
Violations of this statute are subject to a $500 fine
and up to 60 days in prison.
And it goes on to talk about,
on any public lands.
Okay, so a person may not this is florida's law a person may not intentionally within or on any public lands or publicly or privately owned wildlife
management and fish management areas or in or on any public waters. Interfere with or attempt to prevent the lawful taking of fish, game, or non-game animals by another
within or on such lands or areas or in or on such waters. attempt to disturb fish, game or non-game animals,
or attempt to affect their behavior with the intent to prevent their lawful taking by another
within or on such lands or areas or in or on such waters.
It goes on to say, the guy revving the boat and banging on the dock is
such a clear violation of this
law. It's ridiculous.
Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
Maybe 60 days in prison will change his
mind. Can you imagine?
In
Norm MacDonald's, me doing stand-up,
he has a big thing about
when how OJ
got off
for killing his
wife
and that waiter,
Ron. What was his name?
Goldman.
But then later he got in trouble
for stealing his own sports
memorabilia. You know about
this whole thing? No.
You know OJ went to jail, right? Yes.
OJ
like
he killed his wife in the waiter
and then
viciously stabbed him to death.
Was acquitted.
What year was all this?
Some of you guys are so young
it blows my mind.
I remember sitting in a bar with Eric
Kern, watching OJ
drive around the Bronco.
The white Bronco. This was 1999?
99-ish. I don't know if we were in there legally,
but I feel like I was probably in there legally.
Eight years old. I was in a bar called Bo Nicky's.
Watching
the Jews drive around in that white
Bronco.
And you were like... Sounds like a good time and you were
in a baby carriage or something no it wasn't baby carriage all right so like i was at a point i was
young enough where i didn't begin to care about it i imagine i always say yeah i could be your daddy
could be beginning after young yeah but like physically i could be his daddy i'd have to
check the dates but i mean close so point just a brief history lesson seth there's a guy named
oj simpson i know yes i know famous athlete i know the general rundown but i don't know
the details he got he got away he literally got away with murder yes i understand that went
on to even write a book called if i did it didn't read the book okay i didn't i haven't read the
book but it but it was a thing um later he went in he was trying to reclaim some sports memorabilia
that some sports memorabilia guys were dealing and he felt that it had gotten
away from him in some way that shouldn't have been or they didn't have a legitimate claim to
the memorabilia or whatever he hires a couple heavies and they come into a hotel room and they
got a gun and they say don't no one move and steal the sports memorabilia back by saying with a gun, don't no one move,
they got kidnapping charges.
And the judge that sentenced the Jews to prison
built all this symbolic things into it.
Like restitution was, you know, for,
I can't remember, all these symbolic gestures she sentenced him
on the anniversary of the murders or some such and like built in like i am sending you to jail
for killing your wife basically but i'm just using this as a sort of proxy yep to get to give
you what you deserve gotcha and like had like a fine that had something to do with the restitution to the family
that he never paid from the civil trial.
Okay?
Yep.
But then Norm MacDonald, the comedian, and me doing stand-up,
Norm MacDonald has a...
I'm getting the background to Joyce's doc.
Okay.
In Norm MacDonald's thing, me doing stand-up,
he has a bit where the juice goes to jail for stealing
sports memorabilia and he's talking about the hierarchy in jail about like what you're in for
like the severity of the crime sort of places you higher in the hierarchy
and the juice being in there for stealing um sports memorabilia would place him very low in the hierarchy.
Yeah.
And he was imagining the juice being like, but no, man.
I killed two people savagely with a knife.
And the other prisoners being like, no, you didn't.
We saw that trial.
If the glove don't fit so point being if you went to jail and you were in there for um
banging a broomstick on your own dock i feel like you would be yeah the bottom the bottom of the
barrel yeah in the prisoner hierarchy wait so the dude who was banging the broom his name was joyce
or those two no joy Joyce is another lady.
Okay. That was another person.
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, but then a doc owner wrote in.
We try to be fair and balanced.
Yeah.
Isn't there another news organization that goes by that?
We try to be fair and balanced.
They all say Steve.
Yeah, journalistic.
So in the spirit of journalistic integrity, here's a dock owner's perspective.
A guy named Tyler wrote in.
He has a cabin on a big wide open lake, and he likes to go and fish off his dock for pike, crappie, walleye, and bass.
And the kids like to fish out there but what happens is
people will come by and want to troll off the end of all the docks
slower trolling and he's saying it puts him in an awkward position where there will be five to ten
minutes where he like can't make a cast as the boat is cruising along the front of his dock in order to like avoid
confrontation and he said sure they bounce their cast and they they hit his boat with their lures
in order to get good placement they're bouncing off his dock bouncing off his boats i can live
with all that but he goes i feel that if there's a fisherman standing on a dock why would boaters not give him a wide berth
well yeah that's fair yep he says so it's like you can't put all the blame in one place because
he has seen um really sort of like aggressively rude behavior from fishermen to another fisherman
who's a shore-based fisherman on the end of a dock. Yeah. So he said it's something that everyone should be mindful of.
The fisherman, like, courtesy rule.
I wanted to write a book about that.
I think it'd be great.
And this book will be called what?
Courtesy rule.
No, it's just, like, the rules of, I don't know.
I don't know what I'll call it, but just like anglers and the rules.
And it'll be like just a small little book.
And what you can do would be boat ramp etiquette, fishing etiquette.
I mean, like rolling down the Yellowstone River.
I mean, there's been so many times when you see a guide or a recreational fisherman float right next to this guy with his daughter drowning worms with bobbers.
And it's like, I always made it a point to tell all my anglers to reel up or cast the other side.
We roll out to the middle, roll back in.
Sure, man.
Like, keeps everyone happy.
Yeah.
You know, long ago, like, just the same way we've been covering
Doc Etiquette and Florida and Joyce and everything,
a long time ago, we paid a lot.
We were covered with a bunch of listener feedback
and tried to refute, covered and tried to refute this idea that there's a sort
of hunter hierarchy and like archery hunters who are hunting deer acting really mad because a
squirrel hunter would um be so rude as to be out in the woods during the rut yeah Yeah. He should hang it up.
You know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is like little rules.
Like if you see a guy in a tree stand
while you're out squirrel hunting,
maybe don't walk underneath him.
Maybe just kind of skirt around.
You don't need to go back to your truck.
You don't need to hang up your gun for the year.
But maybe like, you know.
Yeah.
No one needs to be throwing each other's bird.
I mean, I'm on board with squirrel hunting
being shut down during deer season.
Is that right?
That's a controversial position you're taking.
Are you going to write a little book about it?
It'll be a little bit bigger than Chester's book.
Chester, I'd like to get first right of refusal on that book project.
Okay.
Yeah. I need to check his contract.
I think it could be a lengthy book.
Can he do a book like that?
You can go into like...
Not for myself. It has to be under the Meat Eater
brand. Yeah, I feel like I'd go after you pretty hard
about that one.
Hey man, I'm not trying to screw
anyone over here. I'm not writing
this book anymore.
Contract etiquette should be another book.
Yeah.
You could just have a whole little etiquette series.
Yeah, be illustrated by Kelsey or something.
Yeah, chest around etiquette.
Oh, skunk oil.
I was talking about my thing I'd like to do, which is how I'm saving an ounce of skunk oil. I was talking about my thing I'd like to do,
which is how I'm saving an ounce of skunk oil.
And I was going to wait until I had a vendetta against someone
and inject it into the upholstery of their car.
Or truck.
Grumpy old man.
Yep, just with a big syringe.
So you'd never, you'd look and look and look.
You could never find it.
Haven't done it, but oh,, recently we have a guest house.
And there's a fridge, there's a dorm fridge in the guest house where we keep like, just, you know, for when people are staying out there.
Like this kind of?
Yeah, exactly like that.
But I keep all my diaphragm calls, trap and lure, spear gun bands.
Worms, maybe.
Leeches, worms.
I keep all that in there and just wait for my wife to find out and argue it out.
But I had my skunk essence in a bottle, in a vacuum sealed bag, in a vacuum sealed bag.
And I haven't got my smell back since after i had covid
really so i never smelled it but apparently it was getting pretty ripe in there
and now i have it thumbtacked to the outside of my house that's where i keep my skunk oil
if you go to my garage door and look to the left it's thumbtacked right there
you think you can i can't Really? You think you can...
I can't smell it.
You think it can go bad in the heat and stuff?
I mean, it ain't any worse.
It's true.
But a guy wrote in.
So then we talked about these dudes
that did a skunk oil prank.
Well, here's another guy that wrote in
about doing a skunk oil prank in Wyoming.
They took a combination of doe urine and skunk scent.
And as a prank at their school,
no, home it.
He didn't do this.
These other kids, he's blaming these other kids on it.
These other kids went in and took doe urine and skunk scent.
Sprayed it all over the school.
It was so bad that some of the janitors in the morning
experienced nausea and vomiting.
One reported loss of consciousness.
Holy shit.
The incident was classified, the FBI got involved,
because the incident was classified as a chemical weapon attack.
Oh my God.
A lot of trouble.
One of the guys lost a football scholarship
at UW.
Damn.
They didn't go to jail, but they had to do a ton
of community service.
No federal time.
Now that,
in my mind, would land you high on the prison hierarchy.
Let me tell you what I did.
Carmen Van Bianchi.
We,
we questioned like how to tell a,
how to sex a beaver,
how to tell what gender a beaver is without skinning it.
And Carmen Van Bianchi has been on the show three or four times.
She's a research biologist.
She wrote in, she used to sex beavers every day.
That was her morning routine.
She said, beaver sexing used to be a nearly daily occurrence for me
when I worked on the Methow Beaver Project.
They would live-trap problem beavers and move them into high mountain streams to study the before and after effects of beaver ponds to stream temps and flow.
They would also use these problem beavers to restore channelized and degraded streams,
which is the hard part when it goes to relocating beavers to restore channelized and degraded streams which says the hard part when it goes to
replacing to relocating beavers is they don't stay put but they would find that if you put a male and
a female at a release site together it would up the odds that those beavers would stay put
meaning it's it's looking for a mate that's perhaps sending them off into who knows where.
So she says, hence, Saxon beavers every morning.
She says, as you probably know, tucked in next to the castor glands are the anal glands.
By palpating the cloaca, that's this little uni-hole,
you can get the anal glands to evert,
popping out of the cloaca,
and it's shaped sort of like a little empanada.
That's either sex.
You then squeeze and work that anal gland
until you milk out a secretion.
If you do that,
and you, okay,
you palpate it,
and you get a dark, thick
secretion that smells like motor
oil, that's a male.
If you get
a thin secretion, smells
like old cheese,
it's a female.
God. A gender reveal.
You following this? It's a gender reveal party
She goes on to clarify
Of course the beaver has to be restrained
To do this
We designed a cone shaped
Canvas bag
That we could put the beaver in
Nose first and then wrap tightly
Up like a burrito
With their hind end sticking out
That's a different kind of party.
There you have
empanadas, burritos,
and old cheese.
Some more
information, really good information on the
we're covering how deer all have
COVID. Not all, but like a lot of
surprising number of deer
have COVID.
We covered that story.
And I was mentioning like, how do they, if you weren't checking for COVID earlier, because you didn't know it didn't exist, right?
How do you know what they had before?
You know what I mean?
Like meaning if you went out now and tested a bunch of deer and there's some marker that demonstrates COVID, but you can't compare it to anything.
I just wonder about the likelihood of false positives or how does that actually work?
I wasn't being incredulous.
I was just being like, I don't know.
Seems like a reasonable question.
Heffelfinger, who we cover every week.
We should come up with a theme song.
Like, Phil should work up something for when we talk about something that Heffle
Finger told us.
Like Heffle Finger's Corner.
If it was like CNN,
they'd call it like the Heffle Finger Report.
Check and strum up a couple
chords on the guitar. Yeah, you ought to work that
up, Chester. Make a little jingle.
Hooyip, hooyip,
Heffle Finger. up chester make a little jingle oh you know i don't know if we can say
this yet i guess we can probably say it
so i want to tease another thing we got
going on for our land access initiative
we have a very famous,
might I say probably the leading country singer today has donated a guitar.
He's donating a guitar that he has used at live performances
to our land access initiative fundraising mechanism,
which is called the meat eater auction house of oddities.
So we will be able to auction that guitar on that for an additional $5,000.
This is all,
this all goes to just like land.
So he's donating his time in the name of land access
for an additional five grand chester will fly to your home and play the
song on that new guitar
right chester sure yeah he will visit your home and personally,
he's going to be there for like 10 minutes.
He comes in, he'll engage in a very small amount of small talk. Do I have to wear like a suit?
Nope.
He comes in fresh from the airport.
He will engage in a very small amount of small talk.
You can have whoever you want to be there, be there at a set time.
Chester will come in, do the song, and the coyote says, whoop.
And then do the whole song, and then he leaves.
Man, that sounds kind of weird.
Oh, it's going to be creepy as all get-up.
You know, my buddy Matt, he was a salesman,
and he used to talk about putting on his little boat peep costume now and then when he really needed to make a sale.
He might have to get that costume for Chester
to wear when he comes and does that.
Hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot for Chester.
Oh, so where was I?
Yeah. A theme song
for Heffelfinger would be great.
Heffelfinger wrote in How This Is True About the COVID
Thing.
They bank
serum. They bank samples from deer when they're doing other kind of deer
research probably just for this with this kind of thing in mind so if you're like working up deer
you'll draw serums of blood and they bank vials of it which is great thinking So they were able to go in and look at samples.
What they did, they went and looked at serum samples out of their archive
dating back to 2011 and analyzed those samples for antibodies.
Really?
Nothing.
So they looked at all these samples from 2011.
They looked at one positive from 2019,
used a separate test,
and it appears that that was a false positive.
Heffelfinger says,
it's pretty,
Heffelfinger read the whole damn thing
and was into this big meeting and stuff about it.
It's pretty clear that SARS-CoV-2 was not present in the deer herd before 2020.
It goes on to say that they can't find that no one is pointed to
in any symptoms in the deer.
What they're testing for is they're testing for antibodies
produced in response
to exposure.
In this one study we were talking about, I think it was
64% of the deer they checked in
Michigan, and it was over 100, I think,
had been exposed.
That's pretty wild.
Nuts. I think if you traced it,
you might trace it back to Doug Duren's farm because of Buckman juice.
What's Buckman juice?
Buckman juice.
There's something about Doug.
No one understands what it is.
If Doug pees on a bush, deer flock to it.
If Doug wants to see what's going on, he puts a trail cam up.
It goes out in front of that trail
camera and urinates on a bush every deer man juice every deer in richland county will come in
to smell that buckman juice well did he have covet no he might i got they these people want to get
down to the bottom of this they they'd test Doug's urine for antibodies
and then work up the genetics on it
and see if that strain that all these deer have
all comes from Doug.
Yeah, that really gets you thinking
where these deer got it from.
Doug.
It's someone who's real good at hunting
if he's getting that close to a lot of deer
Well maybe it's captive deer
That you know
People are like
Someone who has COVID
Is in the barn working on them or whatever
Giving them shots
Put them out to pasture
They end up nosing wild deer
Through the fence
Do you know how many angry emails are being generated right now
about what Seth just said?
Seth's going to be the latest target
of the captive servant industry.
Bring it on.
Doug's got to
market his buck juice.
That's extremely valuable.
It's really something.
He's even done things where he'll photograph a tree
a bunch to show that nothing's there and then where he'll photograph a tree, a bunch,
to show that nothing's there, and then he pees on the tree,
and everything's show.
He's got like A-B testing.
He's like, no deer like this tree.
I'll tell you another item in the auction house of oddities.
It's the thing of Buckman juice.
That's a great idea.
That might be a really good idea.
Yeah. I will get a thing of Buckman juice. That's a great idea. That might be a really good idea. Yeah.
I will get a thing of Buckman juice.
Can you sell that?
Like a pint of Buckman juice.
Oh, yeah.
There might be some.
Is that something that you can do?
Gosh, that's gross.
I was just on Minnesota brand.
I buy trapping equipment from,
what's that place called?
Yeah, Minnesota Trapping Supply.
Minnesota Trapline Products.
They make the MB traps.
Yep.
I could go in there right now, Sam,
and buy fox piss,
bobcat piss,
coyote piss.
I don't see any reason you couldn't have...
But not human piss.
I haven't seen it yet,
but I don't see any reason
you couldn't have some Buckman juice in there.
That's a great idea, man.
All right, Doug. I'll give you a call
and figure out how to work that up.
Here's a good news story that came in.
This was fed to me.
No, my buddy Matt sent this to me.
Texas is the deadliest state
when it comes to animal on human attacks.
520, this is amazing.
520 people in Texas were killed by animals between 1999 and 2019.
California is second place, the most populous state, bear in mind,
is second place, but a distant second.
299 deaths during that time span.
The state that you think would be winning all this is only in third place.
Florida.
Closely trailing California.
247 deaths. What's the animals i'm gonna get to that
what do you think the safest states are two or two make sense and one doesn't
new jersey yeah new england state somewhere rhode island delaware and north dakota Delaware, and North Dakota.
Yeah, I can see that.
Not much folks.
You got a low population,
but I feel like they kind of are out there mixing it up.
Like they're out and about.
What is it in North Dakota that can kill you?
Snakes?
Rattlesnake.
Yeah, well,
guess what kills you in Texas?
I know because I read it.
Dogs.
Like feral dogs.
Dogs, mountain lions, and snakes were registered among animals that caused deaths.
We don't know which caused the greatest number.
Yeah, I suppose.
201 out of the 520 people.
Okay. Oh, yeah. So Rhode of the 520 people. Okay.
Oh, yeah.
So Rhode Island, Delaware, and North Dakota, during those 20 years,
no reports of animals killing people.
Oh, that's significant.
But see, that's reported.
So who knows?
But still, I mean, like, right?
Not common.
Yeah.
If someone missed one, I don't know.
In Texas, dogs, mountain lions, and snakes.
They don't do it relative to what. But, okay, 201 out of the 520 deaths were from mammals.
So not snakes for you people that aren't hip to taxonomy.
Were from mammals biting or striking a person.
Infection.
Or like.
Sure.
I could see those feral hogs down there.
Sure.
Tearing people up.
Yeah, they did kill a person.
Here's one for you, Phelps.
You ready to be shamed?
Yeah.
I'm ready.
I was explaining to Jason Phelps, you ready to be shamed? Yeah. I'm ready. I was explaining to Jason Phelps,
who was not adversarial to the knowledge I was giving him,
but had a lot of questions.
And we were talking about areas that,
everyone knows that in the hunting world,
we speak of an area having good genetics, right?
Like, you know, there's certain areas that we know produce, In the hunting world, we speak of an area having good genetics.
There's certain areas that we know consistently produce big bucks or big bulls, and people will be like, man, that place has great genetics.
I was explaining that we did a podcast a long time ago.
I can't remember what number.
Someone should look up that number, what number episode it was with Keith Monteith and
Kaufman
from University of Wyoming.
They've been doing a lot of research that talk about nutrition
being perhaps, I'd have to go
read this and do it myself myself but nutrition and stress being perhaps
a bigger indicator of an animal's ultimate growth and then horn representation or horn or antler
representation than genetics and talked about how you can take deer from an area that supposedly
have poor genetics put them them on the ground,
like the nutrition and ground conditions,
and not them, they don't turn into something.
But a couple generations later,
their offspring will,
meaning that a buck,
by the time a buck hits the ground,
its fate might already be sealed depending on the body condition
of the doe in prenatal so like in development in the uterus and then how much nutrition she had
while during lactation that that that deer's history is kind of written at that.
Could be like, kind of have already been written
at that point.
Like that, those months could be like
what that thing's going to look like as a five-year-old.
Jason was like, well, I don't know about that.
I had lots of arguments.
Lots of questions.
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listen to this one because this comes from a helpful figure as well
he said something he thought would be very interesting about pronghorn data in the southwest
now with deer it seems that like with deer it seems that you're going to throw your best
antlers five six seven years of age okay pronghorn um do it much quicker in fact at seven
so let me back up to say this so pronghorn are a horned animal that sheds its horn
i think they're only yeah they're the only horned animal i think in the world that sheds its horn
so it annually sheds its horn so it's got a horn but you can kind of look at this you know it grows over the years and it like sheds
and a new one grows up in its place it's kind of already it's kind of this stinky little black
little weird thing growing under itself so the sheath falls off and there's another one already
growing up in there and when you're out in the woods or out in the prairie you know out in the
plains you'll find shed shed pronghorn horns.
They don't seem to last that long on the ground.
They kind of deteriorate.
But they're saying that for a long time,
the world record pronghorn was a three-year-old from Arizona.
Yep.
Half a Finger says this. I'm doing a horrible job right now, but just bear with me. half a finger says this i'm doing a horrible job right now but just bear
with me half a finger says this in a nutshell age is not the most important factor in producing
large antelope horns environment contributes to this annually replaced sheath but once animals
reach three years old there's no significant increase over the next few years in horn size based on age.
It's just variation according to their nutritional condition during horn growth and some contribution from genetics.
He goes on to say, managing a population where the average age of pronghorn bucks, he's using antelope and pronghorn synonymously here.
Managing a population where the average age of pronghorn bucks killed is three years old will not produce significantly fewer trophies than a population managed for the average age of the buck being six years old.
At seven, they produce smaller horns.
This is very different from deer,
in which antler growth peaks between five and seven years old
in both mule deer and white-tailed deer.
Then he goes on to say,
incredibly, the longtime world record pronghorn was three years old from Arizona,
but then it got beat by a New Mexico buck in 2013.
Ends with this little interesting thing.
Pronghorn are different critters.
They are the last remaining species in their entire family worldwide.
As Bart O'Gara, one of the researchers, mentions,
they are not the same as cervids in many ways so we shouldn't be surprised by certain differences such as the fact that yearling
pronghorn weigh more than 80 percent of their adult weight this is way different than yearling
bull elk that weigh only about 50 of their potential adult weight
well that felt for that your pipes put that in your bugle tube and smoke it I don't have I don't
I'm not an antelope expert so I mean I mean body size though which now you just like you ruined my
whole argument I was building that time I was listening is that but what about their bodies they're back up you're the kind of guy that when he's hearing something i'm
formulating my rebuttal yeah before i'm even done but then you like you knock that right out of the
park there with that like 80 of their body weight because you see those you know your bigger horn
bucks they're already you know big bulky size compared to the size compared to the does and whatnot.
Yeah, so that just threw my whole argument.
I can't argue with anything there.
Do you do that when you're arguing with your wife?
Oh, yeah.
I'm already, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I stay like three steps ahead of her.
I should probably spend more time listening, but instead of listening, I'm just already
formulating on the last point I didn't agree with.
Oh, yeah.
I'm just sitting there being like, God, I can't wait until she's done so I can save
my rebuttal.
I don't know much about antelope,
but I guess, I mean, it is what it is.
I thought I was going to get to argue
like horn size against deer genetics,
but he pulled the antelope card
and I don't know anything about them.
It says they shed them after the rut October through December. Antelope card and I don't know anything about them. It says they shed them after the rut
October through December.
Antelope.
I haven't had this happen.
I've killed
them late in the season
where they feel kind of wiggly.
I've had guys
tell me that they've gone up to them
toward
the tail end of the antelope season which stretches into October. That they've gone up to them toward the tail end of the antelope season,
which stretches into October,
that they've gone up to them
and were dragging them by the horn
and had the horn sheath pop off in their hand.
Yeah.
I've never seen it.
He's just that close to shedding.
So there's another fully formed horn.
Oh, yeah.
Then there's this greasy little,
hairy little horn under there.
Yeah. Yeah. it's kind of
weird yeah pop off in your hand or they people being out and seeing where they've they've shed
yeah like they've dropped one or whatever you know yeah i just looked that up because i was wondering
like how long they'll last on the ground before they disintegrate and i've found them before but
i'm trying to remember what time of year it was and i feel like it was spring like hiking around and out east for turkeys
and finding a couple in i found one in wyoming i found one while hunting antelope in wyoming
last year that looked like an old dead piece of sagebrush and you could almost kind of crumble
it in your hand.
I don't know how long they last.
I don't know when the hell that one fell,
but I just never got the feeling they last a long time.
I found one last season too, a skull,
and then I found a sheath,
and I have them both sitting on my bookshelf right now.
Are you going to put them in the auction house oddities?
No, that's mine.
Yeah, I found one last. We got other stuff to put in there.
I found one last October
that was not from that year
so it was probably a year old
what kind of shape was it in?
it was in good shape
I'm sure it's environment
sitting on my windowsill at home
you want it?
for the auction house of oddities?
we'll see, maybe
yeah, probably
is it a nice one? It's small,
but it's cool. I like that one that had the skull with it.
Oh. Yeah, we'll put it on there.
I don't want to mess your
windowsill up. It's a pretty cool windowsill.
It's got lots of cool stuff on it.
Alright, let's throw it in there.
Okay.
Chester will hand
deliver that.
It's going to be quick in and out out he comes in and he's like here
they told me to bring this here
okay I got one more thing we're going to cover
one more newsy thing
but it's so complicated and we touched on it before
I want to just tease it and then we're going to get into it
to a greater degree
later but it has to do with the thing you're probably gonna be hearing a lot about and
people getting all up in arms about it and many in my view up in arms about it
a little prematurely and without thinking it through and it's a it's an initiative
it's known as 30 by 30 what the 30 by 30 initiative refers to is there's a goal of
conserving okay so we talked about this for when whit fosberg from theodore roosevelt conservation
partnership was on and just everybody knows like i'm friends with wit i'm on the board of trcp
uh wit was on and we discussed briefly the concept of 30 by 30 and it's the goal of conserving
30 of the planet's lands and waters by 2030 now the biden administration put out a thing about saying how
30 by 30 was a goal. And people immediately
felt that 30 by 30, the 30 by 30 initiative
and the Biden administration are synonymous and that it was a creation of the Biden
administration. It is not political and
it does not come from the biden administration it existed
long before the biden administration it's also not clearly defined people are hearing conserve
30 of lands and waters and they're imagining that it means like preserve okay so they're
imagining it means wilderness areas national parks parks, monuments, stuff like that.
That's not the case.
It is yet to be defined.
But any definition that comes up, in my view, has to include well-managed and protected working lands.
And we talked about that with WIT, meaning cattle ranches within conservation easements.
Recreational properties.
So properties people own for hunting purposes that they have no plans when they sort of write up the legacy of the landscape, how it'll move generationally, that it remains as is.
It remains as a recreational property.
Doesn't get subdivided and developed.
This concept is important.
It's important that we do this and get it right for a variety of reasons,
like to maintain good hunting and fishing, to maintain biodiversity,
to be prepared for increased changes in our climate by making sure that we have a lot of habitat
for wildlife to live on, to have space to adapt.
It's a thing that we need to help shape, but it's a concept that is not owned by any
political party.
It will inevitably fall across partisan lines to some degree
because people are going to view it as a land grab.
But at this point, no one's grabbing anybody's land.
This, I think, done properly, it's a great goal and it's a good idea.
If you like to hunt and fish, you should pay attention to it.
If you're worried about private land rights
i think you should be involved in the conversation about how this stuff's going to be defined
some of the trcp's viewpoints on it
they just want to know that like it was it was born of scientists
they want to see that conservation must be clearly defined.
It's critical to understanding what, where, and how lands managed specifically for conservation
under public and private ownership, and not just permanently protected areas, are contributing
to the broader goals of 30 by 30.
They want to know where we stand right now in relation to the goal.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 12% of the country's lands are already permanently protected.
26% of U.S. ocean waters, mostly in the Pacific, are currently protected.
How do we achieve the remaining 18% of land needs to be defined?
Like what we have now, what we're going to need.
They want hunters and anglers to have a seat at the table.
It says we have a very long legacy of conservation stewardship,
and there's no reason we would abandon that now.
And community-driven conservation is key.
That's another point they have.
Fresh water needs to be included.
And 30-30 should not ignore degraded habitats
that need restoration.
Meaning, instead of just saying stuff that's already pristine needs to be held pristine it would be that stuff that is degraded habitat
wildlife habitats is degraded should be restored and added to the total so we're going to talk about this a whole bunch more coming up but
they have a thing uh they put out an article what hunters and anglers need to know about 30 by 30
as it sort of gains traction and gains detractors think about that phelps you're gonna read up were
you formulating a rebuttal are you going to read up on that no i just have so many questions no skepticism is the chastity of the intellect right
no just lots yeah lots of questions like what check boxes to get it back to normal and
yeah you know definitions yeah conserve versus and then like is there equity across like the
west versus east like could the west hold the whole entire like percentage or does it need to be
like spread out across you know the country and kind of how everything fits yeah and bear in mind
it's like a you know there's sort of like the global output the the global outlook and then
there's like what we could do yeah do we shoulder more i mean we're a huge country do do we just do our percentage
do we shoulder more to make up for people that aren't paying any attention to this
yeah that's tough like we can do we do our whatever our 12 to 30 we we put all this effort
in and then in like the global you know the global scheme it doesn't even matter that makes it tough
like you still feel good about what you did but does that change like the little change inside the U S does it,
does it ultimately even matter in the, in the global outcome if nobody else is on board?
I was a long time ago imagining, um, that there was a sort of,
that there was room for a sort of, um um this is going to come off sounding weird and
wrong but i haven't clearly defined it there's room for a sort of environmental nationalism
i feel uh that that like part of american exceptionalism you know if you sit and think if you imagine america
as being like the greatest country on earth with the the greatest liberties political system
whatever that um that exceptionalism or that nationalism would lead to
in you know an equal bit of environmental stewardship, conservation leadership.
And that way, I would be like that we would aspire to do better than our share.
But again, as we talked about a little bit, it really comes down to a lot of things.
Like you could have, I think people are automatically going to reflexively think like,
oh, this is going to be someone
telling me what to do.
But it might be someone encouraging you,
helping you do what you already wish
you could do
in terms of recreational properties
and other hunting lands and ranch lands.
And the point they make
is how we take places
that aren't doing anything for wildlife
and make them good wildlife areas.
Yeah.
I'm all for that.
So it's not just
peeling away from what's already there, but creating it.
I just don't want
people to right away be like, oh, damn.
Yeah. Biden.
And there's all kinds of reasons
to be mad at Biden right now.
Yeah.
I'm all for it.
All right. Sam, it's your turn now.
You've been on the show before.
Samantha Bates.
Yes.
I've asked you this before,
but I can't remember what you said.
You actually prefer Sam.
I don't have a preference.
Sam, Samantha, anything's fine.
This is the first time you've, I don't know quite how to put it.
This is the first time you've,
how would you call it?
I don't know what title you would have right now.
Oh, this is the first time that I have produced and field produced a meat eater.
Produced and field produced a meat eater episode.
Yeah.
What did you think about that?
Not being the first.
How did you feel about the experience?
Oh, overall overall really positive um i think it's just good for me to
be able to get out in the field and be able to observe a little bit and kind of see what
everyone's roles are so i'm looking at this very much from a production standpoint of like
um how everyone's working and cohesively you know doing this together and i i like i like this crew because everyone is so self-sufficient
um and that's actually a rarity to find on um film crews i don't know i don't know if
garrett and lauren can speak to that a little bit more but it's a rarity for sure give me some more
what do you mean by that um there's a lot more hand-holding. There's a lot more direction that needs to be offered.
Holding people's water bottles, giving people their water bottles,
opening the caps to the water bottles.
These are real scenarios.
These are things that you get involved in.
Absolutely.
Or someone needs to be helping people get them open.
Absolutely.
And it's just kind of like you know you're never gonna
ask me to carry your bow and arrow for you or shoot an elk for you because you're gonna do it
yeah like that's a thing that happens sometimes on other sets really absolutely not the bow and
arrow scenario but literally opening a water bottle for someone. And you expected to be open in water bottles?
No. Oh my god, no. I didn't.
But I think I was pleasantly
surprised by how everyone
owns their shit and
does their role. It's just really
awesome. Did you find that you
were...
Just so people know, we're in New Mexico.
We just finished in Elkhunt.
Got a couple bowls.
Did you find that you were did you feel like in the normal day-to-day goings-on
were you more working or more kind of like sort of into the elk hunting thing
oh it's an absolute combination I really wouldn't be able to because I'm I'm definitely thinking
about the story
and how things are unfolding
and maybe what we're missing.
And it's just interesting that also
finally understand like how the story
kind of evolves on these hunts.
But I definitely felt like I was getting
a little bit more in the hunting
and I'd be like asking Seth and Chester,
like, okay, what's happening right now and um you know really intrigued by Jason's calls
and trying to figure out like why you're using certain calls and when because there definitely
seemed to be a little bit of a pattern um but that was my first ever archery hunt my first ever elk
hunt to witness so um everything was new to me and i
can't believe that we were in a spot like this in new mexico where we saw so many elk that doesn't
happen it wasn't the numbers like the numbers sure like you can go places and see more meaning
oh there's 250 of them all balled up and looking extremely agitated.
Like hearing them.
I've never heard that many elk before constantly throughout the night.
And then however many run-ins you all had too and how many times you could call in elk,
I imagine that's pretty unique.
We had, let me think, let's say inside of 40 yards, we had, well, one we kind of got caught twice because we called them in twice. I think. Let's say inside of 40 yards, we had...
Well, when we kind of got caught twice,
because we called him in twice,
I think...
Let's count him as two,
because who knows?
Either way, he came in twice.
Yep.
One, two,
three,
four, five, six.
Six bulls inside 40 yards. Yeah. In how many days? Three, four, six. Six bulls inside 40 yards.
Yeah.
In how many days?
Three or four.
Yeah.
And that's short hunting days
because it's so unbelievably hot.
What'd we get, 97?
Oh, yeah.
That one day I said it feels kind of like abnormally hot.
That was 97 that day.
That makes sense.
Oh, it was.
Yeah, it was miserable.
It was brutal.
Can you give people
your philosophy on hiding, Sam?
It does not matter
what shoot I am on,
whether it's for hunting
or anything else,
I am hiding all the time.
That is like...
For real hiding.
For real hiding.
Versus like Chester
and Seth hiding
where their heads are poked up.
I'll tell you like most people, when you tell most people people to hide but there's like an elk coming they're not
gonna hide they're gonna like find a way to sort of you know be hidden to see what's happening
like the curiosity kills them yeah no i am i am just high because i i don't want to ruin something
i mean i've been on plenty of shoots with lauren where like he'll be filming and then all of a sudden you'll see me just like crouch down to
the ground i just i'm hiding all the time yeah i said i asked her about a bull like did you see
that no i was hiding i was doing my job everybody else is like i saw uh and then yeah the one thing is you had to help with you had to do do a pack out as your
first pack out with us too yeah my first elk pack out we used to have not used to like it was the
thing we'll talk about like a death march um and we're trying to define what constitutes a death
march and yanni feels that it's not a death march until
there's a fight and the fights are always about one thing routes yep and he says it's really a
death march when the group splits and i felt like you were within, you know, fractions of an inch of witnessing a death march yesterday.
Because there was some descent.
There was some route descent.
There was a lot of route descent.
Does nighttime play a role in the death march?
Yeah.
The worst death march I've ever been involved in was just never ending.
It involved dirt.
Mexico.
I hope the statue,
I don't know what the rules are in Mexico,
but it was the night
that dirt killed a quail
in the trekking pole.
Oh my gosh.
Just venting some of that frustration.
Yeah, actually bagged himself
a quail in the trekking pole.
I later overheard him
describe it to someone
as a night bird.
He couldn't remember what it was um but wandering all over the place in the dark in mexico and eventually at one point
we come across one of the like three million rocks we had passed that day it's like a head
size rock and dirt having the audacity to say i remember that rock
crew split that on that hike there was a split
yeah when you get a descent and someone's like i'm out i'm out i'm going this way that's a death
march um so all night like you would go again you don't have to tell me now. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I had a great experience.
I really enjoyed it.
You guys are all relatively fun people to be around,
so I'll do it again.
And you like all the camping?
I love all the camping.
I would say my thorn of the trip was that damn tent
that I brought with me.
Tip to everyone,
if Ryan Callahan gives you a floorless tent,
don't take it.
Just because it's lighter
is not going to be ideal.
The pollen mites could get to you that way.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Snakes.
Yeah, we got into some kind of,
we're trying to research it.
A chigger-like thing that's not quite a chigger.
You get bit by everything.
Dude, I know, man.
They'll find you.
It's my real weakness.
You called it a souped-up chigger.
Yeah.
It has to be.
It seems like some sort of spider bite.
Yeah, half of us got lit up pretty good.
Yeah.
Bad news.
Okay, Jason, give your rundown of what what went on there you're like i
haven't been i haven't hunted elk with you yet no i knew that you were like when i think that i
explained this before i think that yanni in my mind yanni was sort of like a godlike figure to
me for elk calling because one day he called out three or four bulls in and i was like man
this guy like he's just good i thought yeah i thought he is good well he's not
because then yanni came to me and yanni talked about jason phelps the way i
he thinks about you the way i think about him yeah i this this area is good first off um and i i think i was recapping and that's
why i got down here early just want to make sure we were in elk um but these elk almost made my
job too easy i was telling you last night i didn't have to go through like progression
two or three or like what do i do next because these elk were just oh they're just going to
eat up the first thing we throw at them and it was it was it was you know almost too easy yeah that bull that you got yesterday i've never had this feeling going
into an out but once we kind of like knew where like pinpointed sort of topographically where he
was um you never feel this way but i was like as we're like going in walking in i'm like this bull
will come yeah 100 and like i saw like i knew we were going to call the bull in.
Yeah, the only thing we need to do is be quiet so we could get to that 100,
150 yards, which we did.
And it was, you know, it was a guarantee at that point.
Once we, I think we let one lip ball off.
I let one lip ball off and then I kind of put my bugle tube away,
maybe two, and then let you do it.
That way we could get them close enough to us.
And it was just, it was one of those things where the, um, I think we even said it before we're going to sneak
in on him. We're going to surprise him. And then we're going to, you know, challenge him kind of.
And that's what we did. Um, kind of went to a two man collar there and it was, it was just,
it was a great hunt. Lots of bulls. Um, I think the only, I was trying to remember last night,
the only bull that we tried to call in and we didn't was the satellite bull right before you ended up um killing your bull uh you know everything that we set up on
i think we called to bow range yeah you know as far as um you know what we were trying to do
besides maybe that bigger bull running up the mountain which we didn't really ever get set up
on but um it was a fairly unique situation but the the i don't know if we just hit the rut right
or what um but it was it was a fun hunt we had a really interesting thing play out it kind of played out over two
days i think but primarily on one day where we had another hunter working the elk we were working oh
yeah doug flutie yeah and it was amazing to watch um to be able to watch a bull so we're watching
a bull on the hillside
and there's a guy approaching it from one direction
and we're kind of approaching it from another direction.
And
to watch
the elk
ignore
his bugles.
Like that if it's not
right, the elk would ignore it
and would return every to jason's
bugles he's like something about it like i don't know what it is i don't think i don't know if he
thinks like oh that's a person whatever it just doesn't it didn't trigger in him like that guy's
bugles did not trigger in him what yours did to the point where i have multiple times would
he would like the other guy would bugle and the elk would look that direction and go to like in him what yours did it to the point where I have multiple times would he
would like the other guy would bugle and the elk would look that direction and go
to like maybe bugle and then you'd cow-collar bugle and he just completely
divert his attention yep and you could draw it back in and there's something
about like the authenticity of the sound was so much more compelling to that elk
yeah not that he never did like he paid attention to and bugled at, but you could trigger a response out of him every single time.
Yeah, and I want to maintain some humility in this next comment, but there is a huge difference.
If you don't sound...
I mean, we would hear that guy right out of the gate, and I think we called it right off the bat, like, that's a guy.
He's doing stuff that real elk don't do.
He was lip ball chuckling.
He was doing stuff... real elk don't do. He was lip ball chuckling. He was doing stuff.
Explain what that means.
So lip ball, a lot of times, especially it's more prevalent down south,
but all bulls will lip ball.
It's kind of a very unique sound that the bulls will make
where it's almost like a rattle.
You know, as they bugle, it's, you know, as it goes through.
And we replicate that by sputtering our lips really, really tight.
And so usually they just do a long drawn out lip ball and then they go kind of back to their clean chuckles, but he was lip ball chuckling.
I don't even know how you, you know, it's a noise that I've never heard in the woods,
no matter how many times I've, I've did this.
And so if we can pick that up that easy, wouldn't you think like the creators of the language would be able to pick it up just as easily or better at one point you
commented that you could hear that he had saliva in his bugle tube yeah i could hear
like he had some spit bubbles or something because you'd hear him go to like start his
bugle i'm like well that's he's he's got like air bubbles and saliva trapped in his reed or whatever he's
using and uh so we we kind of played like the reverse marco polo game with that guy like just
hear him beagle and then try to stay away from him and not mess with his dude it made me massively
self-conscious man because uh when we like you remember those um everybody had one you remember
those black primos bite and blow calls from whatever late 90s, I guess?
Yep.
Like everybody had the same one?
Yeah, the hyper lip.
Yeah.
I remember we used to, you know, there's all kinds of wrong ways we would approach it in the late 90s when we first started doing it.
But we would regard blowing that as a way to get the elk going the other way.
Like if you wanted to send them the other direction, blow that.
That's not hacking on.
That's absolutely not hacking on pre-molts calls.
That's wrong call, wrong time, not understanding what you're doing.
Added to the fact of a lot of people also doing that and creating a sort of
signature um creating a sort of signature that things would start to associate with a certain
kind of trouble yep there's probably people that could at that time taking that call and called in
all kinds of bulls with it but yeah we just like weren't thinking about it the right way weren't
employing it at the right moment yeah you know so yeah yeah
not a hack in any respect but uh it was amazing to watch um
you do what you do and the biggest thing is like
like you describe that sort of in a very aggressive style elk hunting but it's not it's that's almost underselling it it's like
aggressive but it's so authentic yep it's you know and and we'll all go back to like seth and
uh chester that very first night um i think it was the second bull we had called in got very
the the real big bull that got what 12 14 12, 14 yards from you and bumped.
Or it didn't bump.
You were just getting ready to squeeze.
Oh, he picked me off out the corner of his eye and never even turned his head, man.
But this just goes to one of the things where, like, I don't know if it drove these guys nuts.
I could tell they were a little bit, like, anxious that we were, like,
because that bull had kind of seen us then.
We were aggressive.
We were going to the next beagling bull, right?
And I think we had walked by maybe 100 yards of that bull just staring at us. But
it was one of those things where that's my style. We've got another bull bugling that has no idea
we live on the earth right now. And this bull's obviously seen us busted. He's a little bit
nervous. He's kind of went rogue. And they were like, Hey, Hey guys, there's that bull, right?
You know, they could see it. And we had seen it already, you know, before he'd he ran off and it was one of those things where we're so aggressive that i'm willing to like
forget about the bull that we just had very very close because we're moving on to the next bull
that is going to be easier to call in because we've just kind of screwed this one up oh yeah
it's hard for a fellow to walk away from a bull that's 110 yards away that's a big old six point
yeah it is uh but that's just kind of that style where i big old six point. Yeah, it is.
But that's just kind of that style
where I've already wrote that off.
Like we can try him again in the morning
because we've just, we've had him at 12 yards.
He's seen us at 80.
We tried to call him back in.
You know, he did that bark chuckle,
which, you know, scared everybody.
You know, just a very, very aggressive sound.
Like, hey, something wasn't right there.
I didn't smell you guys,
but I tried to bark chuckle back and do some of my tricks but he just wasn't gonna pull you know he
knew something was wrong about the bush that he came around and seen you know steve at and almost
killing him yeah he was kind of gone and so you know that aggressive style kind of not only plays
into to uh moving in to call a bull in but also like like bypassing elk or, Hey, that night I had seen
that same bull, I believe rip across the meadow and leave his cows. And we just kind of ran at
him. Like we're going to bump his cows completely after, you know, out of this area, because after
he's done running up on the hill and chasing this other little bull away, he's going to come back to
his cows and guess what? We're going to be sitting on them. So stuff like that, where people are
like, Oh, I don't want to scare this elk because they're so content
here and they don't know we're here like heck with it let's just let him see us like i'm going to
wave matter of fact i think i was waving my beagle to bottom like get the heck out of here and we
want you to go right and not left like don't go back to your bowl go right because this is the
way i'm going to set this plan up yeah because i'm going to be sitting where you're at now and
sure enough he came back but he did a big old circle and came back the wrong way but um it's just stuff like that um you know
that that one day me and garrett i said hey this is gonna be a little bit aggressive i'm just gonna
run at this bull um you know and and it's just different things and it's tough to explain like
every situation sometimes it depends on you know what see you, what the terrain looks like, what the vegetation looks like.
But that bigger bull we called in the night that we got to 16 yards, he had kind of got behind a pile of brush, but he expected to see an elk there.
And I think he kind of got nervous.
Hey, I'm really close to you guys and I can't see anything.
Nothing that resembles an elk.
He kind of froze.
He went back to his cows.
We had some really good terrain. I said, said hey let's just run at this thing and so i mean you let out a nasty
lip ball and you cover 30 more yards because that might give you a different lane and it might also
trigger that bull so there's just stuff going through your head all the time on every situation
but i i would think if you can you know put underline any word it's just try to keep that
aggressive style um on all
of our calling you know and what we did most of the time like the bull yesterday like it can be
considered aggressive because we got really close but it really was a pretty conservative play you
know we made a big loop on him we got close but then we went way the hell out of the way to come
in with the right wind at the right elevation and then didn't call until we sort of like had an
idea how he would approach what the wind was doing that was all very very calculated yeah
you know if we would have went right at him like we had kind of mulled over the wind was right to
come at him from you know downhill and go up to his point but we also knew that by time we did
that the wind's probably going to switch you know and so we were making very calculated very um you
know conservative decisions to make sure that whatever we did we could control every aspect you know and as long
as that bull didn't move we were going to have a very good shot at him um one of the things i think
about when i think about the aggressiveness is and this is based a lot on my own experiences
um i don't care where you go you go the to the most heavily hunted area. Okay. A lot of pressure.
But when you're watching elk off in the distance, there's things they're doing.
Bulls rake brush.
Like high-pressured bulls rake brush.
Yep.
High-pressured elk play grab ass.
They chase each other around.
Yep.
They knock rocks.
They bust branches.
They make a lot of racket.
You hear them, right?
Yep.
It's like they might be very attuned to human pressure, and they don't want anything to do with people,
and one whiff of a person is going to send them.
But when they think they're safe, they make noise.
Yep.
And maybe they don't bugle late in the morning or whatever,
but at night, whatever, they bugle.
They might not bugle a lot, but they make some noise.
But then, for some reason, you get into them,
and you know they're skittish, and you're so full of paranoia
that you, in some way, your caution prevents you
from creating the atmosphere that you personally
watch them create around themselves
because you're like you you you kick a rock like yeah do you know what i'm saying yeah yeah but
then when you watch it was like they're you can hear them 100 yards away sometimes yeah chasing
around when the bulls like chasing cows running other bulls off they might not be bugling but
they're doing all this stuff yeah so to then
get in where you get in like you get into his bedroom you watch him going you know where he's
bedded he bugles a little bit beds down it's like you know where he's at and then you're gonna like
sort of quietly and cautiously mimic another bull encroaching on his space but if you watch that
happen he's not doing it quietly and cautiously i mean he's in
there banging shit around rake and brush yeah so you're kind of like you're sort of like it's not
that you're like you're not being more aggressive than an elk you're sort of like acting like what
a bull acts like exactly when he's pissed yep or when he's like confronting another bull he's doing
shit yeah but the only time i try to reserve like any of that noise making is trying to just get to
my setup because of it's that little bit of element of surprise like i'll get in really quiet
and then like oh you know that to that bull is like oh shit there's a bull right here that quick
like i have no other option but to go check him out you know or lose my cows um you know but
packing the bulls out like there's i got to learn really quick that you know my bulls wasn't a
monster but you can't walk there is no clear lane mean, just to carry the width of the horn. So, I mean, that elk's got to try to
navigate. He's knocking brush every step. Um, you know, we're rolling rocks, but as soon as we start
to call, I'm not, I'm not opposed to, you know, sticks breaking rocks, rolling matter of fact,
in both of my setups, I ended up being turned a little bit wrong and had to turn myself. I don't
give a crap about, you know, rolling a rock or kicking a rock as i move like all of that's okay the only if they're really close i'd maybe be
concerned with him like pinpointing exactly where i am or like drawing to that noise of a rock
rolling but um you know they kind of already know where we're at anyways from our calls like they
are very their their doppler system their their sense of like specific location of where that
sound is like you very, very good.
They know exactly what tree you should be sitting behind
based on where that beagle or that cow call came from.
One of the things I saw from Yanni was that if we were calling
and had a bull hanging up 70, 80 yards out, kind of walking,
trying to figure out why he can't see anything,
he's dropping off a roll in the hill.
So the shooter's set up, but Yanni drops off where he's down in a little hole
or beyond something that can't be seen.
And he'd put a pair of, you know, pull on some gloves and rake brush.
It's funny because the bull you're watching is raking brush.
And then he's like wanting to come because he can't confirm that makes him need to change
position because he can't confirm where that's coming from exactly and that felt to me like
at first i was like jeez man don't be doing that dude yeah i'm like well he's doing it yeah no
yeah on those situations uh we didn't that's where i was mentioned like we didn't have to
go to progression two or three and do any of this stuff um but yeah what is progression two or three
so like that that is a lot of times these bowls will hold up which i try to prevent from that
setup if we can set up on a roll of a hill or a hard edge like on your bowl a hard edge of brush
versus open like if you can set up to to shoot that edge then you don't get a lot of hang-ups
but that bowl the way it works in the wild,
if we're not involved,
is that bull, as he's bugling,
expects that other bull to come a certain distance.
Or if we're actually going to get him to commit,
as soon as he gets to that vegetation break
or that roll in the hill
and can see where that cow or that bull,
whatever's calling to him should be,
he's done.
Like he's not going to commit should be, he's done.
He's not going to commit that open space of 100 yards, or in Yanni's case, 70 or 80,
because he's now hung up.
Yeah, he's not going to come look behind the tree.
Yeah, he's done.
And so that's why we try to set our shooters up to prevent all that.
But no, progression, too, is that fallback.
If we have hung up, we've got him to commit to so far, but he's like, he's drawn an imaginary line and I'm not coming past this.
A lot of times we will start to do those fade, you know, fade, bugle back, rake, brush.
But then once we get to a certain distance, we'll kind of do like the recharge.
We will come back at him bugling.
Like we're coming again.
We're coming to get you and maybe get him to pull, you know, that extra distance.
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We were in an area where the Forest Service,
I don't know what the hell, I was asking Seth about this, i don't know what the hell i was asking
seth about this i don't know what the motivation was maybe probably just wildlife work right
had done some like beautiful thinning wildlife or you know overall forest health or timber quality
i don't know what it was for but it was like a like they created like a beautiful sort of like
grassland savannah it looked like they had maybe prescribed burn in that area too at some point in time.
Freaking gorgeous, man.
Yeah.
For like great turkey, elk, and the elk were in there.
Yep.
There was some water there too, which obviously makes it all possible.
But beautiful area.
But even before we started hunting, you were talking about not liking that from a calling perspective.
Very, very difficult because you could see 300 yards in every direction.
Yeah.
And you were trying to get the situation where they had to come in
and couldn't really ascertain what was going on until they got 30, 40 yards.
And we wound up them very close.
And you pulled that off because we had very close encounters.
Yep.
That's just ideal.
If you can meet them at the edges is where we want to meet the elk,
not out in the middle of something that's very consistent.
Whether it's a steep slope, you don't want to be on a consistent steep slope.
You don't want to be on a consistent flat slope.
You don't want to be on a consistent vegetation.
Because even if you pile yourself in a big pile of brush um there there's no there's no like definitive line he needs to get to so it's
very hard as a hunter to know where to set up um or you know the the heavy brush also kind of
screws up your shooting angles where you may give yourself one or two yeah we had we had one set up
the only setup we had that made me like not nervous but we got it was kind of we were kind of forced into the situation but we got a
place where there was in most respects zero visibility one shooting lane but a very well
defined trail yep and for a minute i thought this bull's gonna come down this trail the brush was
such he was not gonna see me the wind was good but he was
gonna be from me to you when he got there yeah yeah under 10 yards and that's and i remember
being like this is a little tight yeah that was that was the only i even went i even walked down
and you saw i had to walk downhill and break one stick because that was my one place to shoot so i
snapped one stick out of the way and then back up thinking,
I'm basically going to stick the broadhead against his flank.
If he kept coming, you know.
That bull, he did something a little interesting.
I don't know if he was trying to get the wind on us or he wouldn't commit to going down that trail.
That was the one scenario where I started behind you calling,
ended up going down below you calling, and by the time we were done,
I was in the shooting lane calling
because he did a big circle and i was trying to pull him through you know keep you between me
and that bull the whole time and ultimately he just he walked that whole top and we we just reset
up on that one in a better location um because that bull didn't for some reason that was the
one that didn't come just like boiling in um how we had drawn it up so that was the one where we
circled and then just reset up and worked really really well do you know the one there's one encounter i still haven't got
your feelings on to find out what you were thinking it was one where the other hunter was
kind of working them too but that big six point that had the cows on that open hillside you were
like reticent and i know i was reticent about not wanting to get in on the other hunters groove, but you were kind of also reticent about something about the,
so he was in the wide open.
Him and his cows were in the wide open.
We had no way we would have had to,
we couldn't go towards them.
We couldn't go like towards them into the right.
Our only play would have,
we would have had to back out and go way around him.
And, you know, you're just looking at the time.
You're looking at, you know, we've spent some time messing with him.
I just, it was one of those things where whether it's gut or not,
yeah, maybe we could have ran up there.
And maybe in an area where there weren't so many elk,
we would have, if that was our only play, we would have tried it.
We would have backed in, but we would have had to come through the same route
that the other caller was, you know, other hunter was going through.
And then we would have had to try to beat him up the hill for that wind to change so there was just a lot going on on that
one where it just didn't seem like the odds were kind of in our favor yeah if we were to approach
that you know i we tried it for a little bit thinking that i think i had range you know used
a range finder on me is about 400 yards away which isn't undoable um we just that was the same
situation where he wasn't paying any
attention to the other caller. He would look at us every time I threw everything at him,
you know, lip balls, you know, as much cow calls as I could give him, you know,
kind of everything in my arsenal. And he just really wasn't going to budge and leave his cows.
Um, so that was, that was one of those ones where we're going to have to bring it all the way to
him. And it was just kind of like, man, I don't know what the right approach is and so we just kind of looked at him for a while and went a different way you talk a
lot about that you don't really know what you're going to do oh i just i'm flying by the seat of
my pants half the time just kind of what what i feel but if you like imagine that you i feel that
that's not true no you're flying by the seat of your pants but like talk a little
like what do you what are the things that you like even though it's a comp there's a computation
going on in your head maybe you don't understand it the same way well when you're going about daily
life uh you'll get a feeling that uh i have a feeling that person's agitated yeah why i don't
know just something about yeah like they're agitated and then you I don't know. Just something about they're agitated.
I don't know. The alarm went off in my head
that this person is agitated.
It's hard to later
articulate what it was that was going on.
If you had to get into your own
mind and get into
what is being
computated in your head
about the animal's mood, know like take a stab at it
like what do you what are you kind of basing on so we're trying when you're weighing his when
you're weighing his opinions and weighing his mood i'm gonna get all kinds of help for this
but i'm gonna start off by prefacing it with i don't play into like this elk is saying something
specific with this call okay i i don't buy into chuckles mean we're rounding up cows i don't play into like this elk is saying something specific with this call.
I don't buy into chuckles mean we're rounding up cows.
I don't believe that this bugle here is a bull trying to round his cows up.
I don't believe that this, you know, there's a few things I know,
like grunts or alarm barks means that he's just either seen you or heard you and can't figure out what the heck you are.
You know, there are certain things.
But, you know, I've heard bulls chuckling that are just mad at the other bull so i don't
play off of that i i play more off of temperament okay and there's a lot of testing um that goes
into that kind of like throwing fish and lures like spinner you know bottom you know jig you
know top top bait whatever just trying to see what's going to work and so there are i do it
on everything even for my location bugles.
You know,
I'll throw the high note out first.
I noticed that man didn't answer.
All right.
I'm going to go to like a low mid note.
Didn't answer.
Now,
if I really feel that there's an elk there,
I'm going to throw a lip ball at him just to see if he's going to answer
that.
I started to pick up on that.
You're sort of like your locator sequence.
Yep.
Yeah.
Did the high one work?
Yes or no.
Did the,
did the,
the low note kind of mid note work? Yes or no. Did the, did the, did the low note kind
of mid note work? Yes or no. Almost. And then you're going to like a lip ball if I think there's
an elk there. So we kind of run through progressions and then I kind of use that all the way through
the scenario. And as we've set up a lot on this hunt, I was able to see a lot of what was going
on or get very good audio feedback from the elk, know through their answers and so i would say if you look at it like what's in my bag of tricks for cow calls i've got
you know the estrus wine which i did a lot just the the real drone on yeah you know kind of wavy
kind of not your traditional cow mule we did some calf calling just to kind of add some social
you know volume to the situation like there's more elk here than just the cow.
We did some just normal cow meows.
Yeah, yeah.
And then we did some buzzing.
The buzzing is kind of always my last chance,
especially if you've got multiple bulls coming
or a bull that's just kind of not really hung up,
but we just can't get them to pull.
I would try to use that to add some excitement.
That cow really needs some, somebody needs to come check check on her and so if you looked at like my cow
call bucket i've got those i i stick with that estrous wine a lot and see how they react um and
and even in our bugle situations i feel like i need to throw a cow call in at some point uh there
now i i may be a hypocrite because there might have been some this this time where it
was just straight bugling but you know i can't think of any time when you didn't you need to
give that bull some incentive to come over like unless he just wants to come fight or sparred
because he wants to you know test out how powerful he is or what his abilities are you're not giving
that bull any reason to come like check you out if you're just a bull randomly bugling and you're
not presenting him with something he's losing yeah yeah he's just
well we can just sit here and bugle back and forth there's nothing for me to come check out
over there see if i can steal your cow yeah so i always try to throw some mix of cow calls in
and a lot of times um if i'm able to get in close and quiet enough we'll we'll maybe reserve that
cow call for later like i want my very first bugle in my head, if I can just piss this bull off and startle him and be like, Oh,
somebody's right on me, you know, and they're here and I've got cows or whatnot, then,
then I need to go defend that. So a lot of times that will kind of get it started.
On the bugle side, it's really just, um, I use the lip ball as, as an aggressive sound.
You know, a lot of times, I don't know how many times this trip I had to use the lip ball as an aggressive sound. A lot of times, I don't know how many times this trip,
I had to use the lip ball.
If a bull's interested to a point that maybe he gets to 60 or 70
and I've seen him turn, like, oh, shoot, he's losing interest.
I hammer him with the lip ball within the first step of him turning.
That's my get your ass back here call.
We're not done yet.
In my head, if I ever see a bull turn,
like that's instantly a lip ball situation.
And a lot of times I'll add very temperamental,
like emotional grunts to my ending of that.
Like the first one may be a little lighter second.
And then like the third one, I'm really hammering on the grunts.
Like, you know, trying to like add some intensity into those grunts even.
Like everything I'm doing has got like a little bit more purpose on,
hey, get your ass back here.
Yeah.
But then there's times where, you know, just the scream.
You know, you're just screaming at the bull.
Really short two to three second bugles.
Like you're really, if he's eating those up, I'll stay with those.
And then there's a lot of like intricate sounds especially that first night i know i was using like the the bigger bowl that came in was breathing heavy i could hear him at like 50 or 60
and so i was kind of breathing across my reed which like i say i want to maintain some humility
here was doing that but there are guys that couldn't figure out how to even make that sound
on a reed you know or a diaphragm where if i if you have the ability i i just matched him and that's
where that mimicry came in he was breathing heavy like well i'm gonna breathe heavy over top of the
reed and it's just a real slight subtle sound but deep breaths um you know really really hollow
chuckles that i'll throw in a lot of times i've observed when a bull rakes a tree we're doing a
lot of raking.
You know, I'm trying to, of course, I was a dummy most of the time set up calling for you and I'd
sit next to a tree with no limbs. I'm like, well, yeah, I don't got any, I don't have any trees to
rake, but I'll stomp the ground or whatnot, or break a few limbs. But just adding a lot of times
a bull will rake a tree, you know, maybe 45 seconds, a minute, two minutes. And he comes out
of that with a chuckle or a bugle. Like like he come and so it's just trying to put everything together exactly how how i've
seen it done in the woods so all right we break a tree i pick up my beagle tube and i give like
a hollow chuckle yeah um same thing you know there were times when you were beating on a tree when
when i was calling i would let you just finish your Aiken and I would do a chuckle. Just to kind of keep that scenario as realistic as possible.
But yeah, little intricacies.
I don't know if I explained it well kind of why I do what I do.
But it's a progression of, well, let's try our normal challenge bugle.
And then we'll try a lip ball.
And then we'll try and just kind of see what's working on that specific elk i had a guy i'm uh like email friends with right in one day wrote me a letter explaining
that he was worked up like kind of worked up about phelps game calls he says everybody's not jason
phelps so people that want to like do like jason phelels but they don't have like the skill he has
has resulted in a lot of guys running around trying to act like agro callers but they just
have no idea what they're doing oh yeah i'm i'm blamed for like ruining the elk rat by a lot of
people like everybody in those damn phelps tubes and no nothing bugles anymore and uh nothing works
and it's all your guys's damn fault for promoting bugling. You know, a lot of guys think that you should just walk in and cow call, I guess.
But, yeah.
What's your take on that?
If done wrong and if you're educating the elk,
it could be very detrimental to just walk.
I mean, if they associate your bugle with a smell or being seen,
it can screw up areas, and that bull will become educated you
know i think you can get away with it once and maybe kill him the second time but if he if he
experiences like your scent and being called in all you know multiple times that bull's gonna be
very very hard to kill they're they're you know they might not be the smartest critter especially
during the rep but they're smart enough not to get killed by you um you know and you think that
that would move over
even to a good caller would have a hard time?
Yeah, I mean, I feel that if you're a good caller
and can sound like elk,
like a real elk as much as possible,
then it maybe helps you get over that hump of,
I'm a very distinct caller.
I can maybe fool him once, but maybe never again.
Versus if you sound like a real elk,
what more can you do?
How is he going to now be able to tell that you're a person versus a real elk if you're that good?
Yeah.
And so that's why I don't think you need to be a great caller.
But I also believe that it can help you out in the woods.
Oh, dude, listen.
I think that being a good caller like yourself is pretty advantageous.
It was amazing to watch, man.
Thanks.
It was amazing to watch.
Agreed.
And that's where I'm so concerned.
We ask the hiders a lot.
I think I had a conversation with Seth.
You don't have to tell me I'm good just because I'm asking you, but I want to know for myself, because if I can get better, I want to, you know, on the bowl that I was able to take
yesterday. I think they had, you know, a hundred yards behind me and they were telling us like,
they could tell, you know, when I beagled, they could tell when you beagled, but then I'm like,
well, that's fine if you know who I am, but which one i was but was it accurate like was there something in my beagle that i can work on and that's just like
my pursuit of perfection and and they probably got some feedback on that but well there was that one
time where we kind of got separated from you guys and we're going up that hill uh there was elk
bugling everywhere i was like i don't know which one is jason it's like i hope we're not screwing
something up but and that same setup that's that setup that you guys didn't kill that big bull
we were quote unquote hiding seth and i sam was actually hiding but we're i was able to watch
that bull leaving with his cows and i don't know if it was when you ran at him or lip-balled,
but he was leaving with his cows.
And I saw him spin on a dime and go right back to the timber line.
That's because I ripped the bugle.
Which was cool to see because that was like obviously you he was leaving but he heard
something that was like whoa i do not like this turned on a dime and went right back to that tree
yeah and so like in that situation i guess i can elaborate maybe spend like in that one i'm thinking
this bull's got cows and you could hear him and you guys could see him i i could hear him rounding
cows up he would run up on this little knob try to grab a cow and push her down.
Well, there was so much chaos there.
I'm like, I can get away with running at him.
And he's got his cows so like mismanaged right now that if he thinks I'm going to come in
and like swipe one up, maybe that will be enough.
Like, hey, I don't care about my cows.
I'll round them up later, but I'm at least going to stop this guy.
And so that's kind of what's going.
But that's one of those things where it's just you know the pursuit of perfection
like i i don't feel there's any better way to call elk and then to actually sound as much like a real
elk as possible and i don't want to give my own products a plug here but i think that metal bugle
tube like truly is a little bit of a differentiator between some of our old plastic tubes um by all
means go buy our old plastic tubes are great but but that metal tube it just got something to it where i feel like i can no
longer tell like on my grunts or lip balls that i'm calling through a plastic tube yep
the uh there's a thing that i know sometimes i make the comparison all the time uh
in aspects i did to you multiple times.
Aspects of turkey hunting and elk hunting.
It annoys people because it's just different.
But there's some similarity
in that...
There's a couple areas of similarity.
That calling turkeys...
There's a thing that happens at a certain proximity.
At a certain proximity,
it becomes harder for it to
ignore you yep right and there is that that um you're at times mimicking a female okay you're uh
you're exploiting like the the the sexual desire of the animal right there's there's certain
overlaps yep you go out you listen to figure out where
you're going to go you sort of pick a bird you're going to try to work you pick an elk you're going
to try to work um so there are like undeniable similarities they don't nearly amount to the
number of differences but there's some reference points there yep in turkey hunting there's a thing
that everyone resorts to you hear it all the time it's like the old silent treatment right that you'll get you'll be hen calling to a bird to a gobbler he's gobbling his ass off
but after a while he realized that like he's gobbling he's having the time of his day
uh he's probably strutting and he realized that like he's really enjoying himself yeah
do you mean like he doesn't he's not in your head he's like he won't come in whatever
he's just like he's thinking that he's doing what he's supposed to be doing he's like what
what more can i do i'm gobbling i'm strutting why is the hen not coming over here like i'm
yep this is great and any minute she's gonna show up um and then you do the old silent treatment
thinking that uh cure you know whatever it is yeah curiosity will kill him and he'll come over
to see what the hell happened i don't know i do it oh yeah i can't tell you i don't know i can't
tell you like empirically that it works but it's like one of the plays in the playbook i kept
waiting for you to at times do that but you don't do that without i i have like the patience of uh
like none and so the times i tell myself i'm gonna
wait like five seconds to cow call or five minutes to cow call i usually get about 36 seconds in and
i'm cow calling again uh the only time i tried to like stagger things out was when we set up on
the bull right before the bull that you ended up killing that one that was kind of i tried to put time in there but it's
just i feel like that time of nobody talking either me or that bull is giving him a chance
to get away without me knowing what the heck's going on and so like that pause like did he just
did he now just walk 100 yards away from us and i didn't know because i sat and waited for three
minutes until i let a call out.
So there's, maybe there's some like anxiety on my side that if we don't keep him talking,
but then there were times where I also realized on that specific bowl that if I, if I cow called five or six times in a short time, he would stop. He would only answer the
first cow call. Right. And then the other five were kind of just extras or he wouldn't but then if i would wait a couple minutes he would then respond again
so it was like he was only answering that first round of cow calls um and that was the only bowl
i think i didn't beagle at maybe till the end because i lost his interest we couldn't even get
him to answer a cow call after what 20 minutes of you guys being set up uh but yeah we try the
silent treatment a lot uh but more that's
more of like progression three or four like we never got there to the point where these things
were just is he there is he hanging up do we need to be quiet do we need to uh yeah so so why i think
they're they're you know similar to turkey hunting there's a lot of being quiet um i'm not good at it
and i try to i try to make a play where there's a little more noise involved.
I feel like I asked you about this one in the past.
This is my last out question for you.
And we'll see if these fellers have any for you. But we talked about
in the past, sometimes
you rip a bugle
and
at least people discuss this as being
true. You rip a bugle and it
pushes a bull away. Not that he's like, oh, it's people discuss this as being true you rip a bugle and it just and it it pushes a bull away not that he's like oh it's a person but it could be that he doesn't feel like having a
confrontation and we had one where i don't we couldn't really tell if they went at us it didn't
seem like they did but there was a bull that would respond but then when we got eyeballs on him
everybody was just going the other direction do you think that uh do you think that that's a thing?
That they just bail because they don't want to deal
with another bull?
I find it more in
your semi-mature bulls.
If he's been fortunate enough to somehow peel
some cows off of a herd.
There were a couple herds
I guess with seven or eight cows.
The majority of these bulls here, there's a
high bull to cow ratio. They've got very small herds. Even the big bulls, with seven or eight cows. But the majority of these bulls here, there's a high bull to cow ratio.
Oh, it's ridiculous, yeah.
They've got very small herds.
Like even the big bulls are running four or five cows.
Yeah, like two cows and a calf is like their harem.
Yeah.
So you take a semi-mature bull
that's been able to peel a few cows off.
That bull is less confident in his ability
to probably defend his possession of those cows.
Yeah. So if you announce that you're coming to him
and that you're getting closer and closer by bugles,
that guy's best option is to grab his cows and leave.
Like avoid the confrontation completely.
Now, if you can get him to answer,
he will sometimes answer for four or 500 yards away
and just hold tight because he's just kind of,
you know, social talk like, hey, I'm here. Well, here well hey i'm over here but if you were now to be quiet and kind of guessed
where he was at and then sneak in on him you've now taken away his ability to like round his cows
up and leave and so that's kind of why we try to use it's kind of surprise but we know he's there
so we know it's going to be you know it's a surprise from our end but he doesn't really know
he's getting set up yeah for us to be that close and give him you know it's that whole fight or flight response
we're giving him like no other option but to fight or just run away and leave his cows to us
yeah or you're close enough that if he moves 30 yards to investigate he's in your zone yeah yeah
you're there and so that's where a lot of what we did was just you know we fought the wind a little
bit not too much new mexico treated us pretty well with pretty consistent winds there was a couple
days where our morning hunts were tough because we were coming off the top trying to go down but
yeah just get the wind right semi right and then um moving close otherwise otherwise that beagle
could potentially just scare him off and then you're like dang it every time you know that's
where that's where i think the bad the bad reputation for beagling comes in is everybody's like man i beagled at this bull
and he just took his cows and ran away well did you do it from 500 yards and then 400 300 200
your whole way in or did you then go silent get close and be and it's it's a different
it's a completely different message you're sending versus beagling your whole way in
we had um a couple years ago i was hunting with my brother two years two was it
two falls ago i think two falls ago either way we watched the bull all morning and tried to call him
in and he had a bunch of cows with him and eventually he bedded down it would bugle a
little bit from his bed and we'd worked him all morning from different angles but he bedded in
such a place that we could like drop a pin on
where he was come around the other direction i mean we got 75 yards from where he was bedding
and my brother snuck out a little bit ahead of me and one bugle and he you know my brother killed
him at like 20 yards yep but that was all morning trying to get him to do stuff we were down below
he's on the hillside it was just that one minute where somehow he was like what in the hell yeah yeah and they're pretty
it got up you know but it was just like we were like in his in his zone man yeah you know what i
mean and then we got him to do what we could not get we couldn't get him to take one step in our
direction all morning but he was bedded the cows are bedded around and at that minute he's like
for whatever he's like no i'm gonna go over there and look yeah yeah real protective we didn't have
to get into a whole lot of bedroom strategy.
But yeah, they're very protective of their bedroom when you get that close to him and his cows.
What do you guys got?
You got any questions?
I got an observation.
Oh, please do.
The other thing I really like being with you on these elk hunts where you're calling is like, I get riled up the more you're reacting to the
the other like so do you feel like you're a cow elk or bull elk bull elk with my buddy like at
the bar being like you empathize with the bull you empathize with the bulls yeah yeah yeah and
and the like you know how like a conflict with humans will slowly escalate and people start
chat like yelling over each other, Jason would do the same.
Initially, there'd be the pauses of this is who I am, this is what I got.
Then when he gets fired up,
you'd step on his...
Like when we were arguing
about nutrition.
Yeah.
Pretty soon we're just yelling over each other.
Then that physically
would bring
them in it's just it was really cool being able to watch that or feel it you know even yeah feel
the energy yeah yeah and like oh yeah like the real you know it's getting like heavy when i'm
like quickly reaching for my tube like damn it if i would have had that in my hand i would have been
better off but i'm trying to grab it as fast as i can and you know i shouldn't have set it down
but yeah it's you start the conversation out cordial yeah and then you you end up pissed off at him by
the end that's kind of what you're and i i as a bystander was getting pissed off at him too
like yeah tell him what's up jason don't take that shit yeah i've i've got a um so i think a
lot of people at least myself and a lot of guys that I know, are hunting elk that have been called to quite a bit, fairly high pressured areas.
And the key to killing those elk with can practice to sound like a real elk?
I mean, like break and brush is great.
Yeah.
And then not a lot of people, you know, probably think of that as much.
Yeah, I've got a very, very good buddy that, very, very successful elk hunter and he doesn't call near as much as me. He's as aggressive as I am,
but he, he feels that he can get the bigger bulls to break just with breaking brush and making
noise. Um, you know, you pair that, I would sounding like a real elk is going to take a ton,
a ton of time. Um, you know, we've, time. We've got products that we try to use,
like the Easy Bugler, to really cut that learning curve down to make you sound as realistic as
possible. But there's still going to be stuff left on the table. You can't lip ball through it like
you can. And there are certain situations where I'd be dead in the water without that.
I'm not going to be able to give you a great answer. I would say if you can perfect just
your normal cow mule get it very very clean
and um and then you need to have some sort of a challenge bugle but there's no easy way to sound
as realistic as possible without just like yeah i mean a lot of i think 95 of your elk hunters
pick their calls up you know a couple days before season and they go out and they're they're good
enough um but the high first first you bake it on your dashboard for a while.
Yeah.
In late August.
Let it melt.
And then you call at stop signs.
Yeah.
Call the red light.
So as a guy that's dedicated the last 20 years of my life
to being the best elk caller I can,
a lot of people don't have that time to mess with it, but
between external cow calls,
figuring out one or two good
bugles, and it's just a lot of practice.
I would say as far, I would go in with
a cow call,
maybe an estrous wine, go in with
a challenge bugle, and then go in with a
high-pitched clean locator bugle,
and get very good at those three calls.
I don't remember, what's the type of golf where you can only pick like two clubs or something i don't know man mini golf
no it's like that's one club there's like a certain type of golf where you can take like
three clubs and play the whole course but that's that's yeah that's like minimalist golf yeah yeah
you pick your three clubs that you need you don't golf do you no i i've drank beer and chased my
golf ball around and deep stuff a couple times, but never golfed.
Seems like the golf industry would not like a kind of golf where you don't have to have a lot of clubs.
It's some special kind of tournament, I think.
Do you know there's a volleyball where you can't touch it with your hands?
Only because you were telling me about it the other night. You have to use your feet.
Yeah, we're sitting in a bar in the airport, me and Seth,
and I was surprised the volleyball was on TV.
And then realized I couldn't figure out what seemed weird about it,
and I realized that they couldn't use their hands.
I was like, man, these guys are leaving off one of the best tools in the toolbox.
The old spike.
Yeah, so those three.
A good cow call, a good challenge
beagle, and then a locator. And then figure
out what tools you need to make that.
There's a bunch of different ways to do it.
Man, that lip ball was effective, though,
if you can get that down.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of those main tools where
like
two of the bulls, at least two of the bulls I seen turn and they were leaving.
Like I've had enough.
I don't believe you.
I can't see you and hit him with a lip ball.
And it's,
that's one of the most special things to see.
And we saw it a couple of times to see one leaving and then change his mind
and come back.
It's pretty incredible,
man.
That's, that's like some real emotional up and downs for the heart I like that's if I could
hang my hat on like anything I can do calling that would be it like I just turned he was leaving and
I turned him all the way like he had already changed his mind and I like got him to recommit
yeah it's like you're in a fight yep and you like the mama joke yeah you're in a fight argue with your wife you like walk out and you come back another thing yeah um i was talking about i was talking about norm
mcdonald but somehow that made me think of uh the late comedian mitch hedberg you know him i don't
he's talking about how he was talking about why he didn't like camping and he felt that it was uh
when he got in a fight with his girlfriend,
it was hard to express his anger.
Because he tried to aggressively zip the tent shut.
He's like, fuck you.
Zip, zip, zip.
Oh, man.
It was great hunting with you, man.
Yeah, it was fun.
To find you, we always Yeah, it was fun. To find you,
we always like how to find everybody.
Go to Phelps Game Calls.
Oh, and tell everybody
what you do in September
with the crazy...
Dude, if I go on Instagram right now,
you're pretty...
It's overwhelming.
I want to talk about
your desire to be on there.
Oh, yeah.
Like on the breakboard.
Because you were giving me all kinds of,
I was unsure of whether Steve could be on there
with his kill before anything else was posted.
But he wanted to be on the Phelps brag board first,
which I appreciate.
Yeah, the Phelps brag board.
Explain it.
So we did something,
we started it I think three or four years ago
where it's kind of that customer appreciation,
customer success um we post anybody's elk that they kill with our calls on our instagram page for the world to see and we just kind of want to know like what calls he used kind of a little bit
about the scenario and it's not just big bulls even though there's a lot of them showing up but
anybody that's using our calls calls in a cow a spike a bull we're posting it up and giving some feedback and it's meant to be you know
kind of a thank you to all of our you know call users but also a little bit of
an education of what calls people are using maybe a little bit on the setup
what call they actually did to get that bull in and then kind of what state so
we're kind of just sharing information from some of our customers success I
mean it just it may piss people off if they follow us, but when you get on there,
there's probably going to be 20 or 30 posts, you know, every couple hours from us with
just, you know, bulls that are.
I love it, man.
That are coming to.
What I like about it too is, I mean, it's big bulls, first bulls, hundredth bulls, cows,
spikes.
Yep.
It's fun, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's just what, what you're out there for. It's fun man yeah yeah it's just what what you're out there
fun to look at it just rolls out a friend of mine called up he's like man it is staggering
the number elk people kill phelps game calls yeah it's a matter of fact somebody asked me
the other day do you ever like stop and think about what you what you did like how many elk
have like died and i don't like to think of it as necessarily elk killed,
but we were able to add to that experience.
We were able to add to the success and add to their experience,
but I'm not like that bloodthirsty.
It's not occurring outside of game management objectives.
Yeah, not necessarily bloodthirsty.
Like, oh, 4,790 elk all died because of us.
Yes.
No, when you look at it, one thing about it is thirsty like oh we you know 400 4790 elk all died because of us yes you're looking at no it's like
when you look at it is one thing about it is um the amount of human joy and sense of accomplishment
captured in the photos yep yep it's just like well i was looking at a bunch of this morning
it's like first out finally did it uh you know my my brother-in-law finally got his first bowl
my wife finally got her first bowl it's whatever man it's just like people like that's a cool being
out in the woods like having fun yep and then feeling like thankful that they had the experience
and had the tools and expertise it's a lot of fun man yeah no i i i get a ton of enjoyment out of
that and you know i get to deal with them a little bit on the back end like ask them about their experience and it's
cool you know everybody wants to couldn't have did it without yours i'm like do not say that like
it's it's just like a carpenter yeah they got a hammer that's just a tool that lets them get their
job done but the skill was still yeah you you made all the right decisions um we're just we're
just a tool in your toolbox but i'm'm glad you trusted in us to use our calls
and to use our stuff in your experience.
And Jason had to defend the honor of a man
who was criticized for shooting a spike,
which is the stupidest criticism in the world.
Oh, I got so mad.
I was going to, Chester was,
me and Chester bunked together in our spike tent
and Chester was the only thing close enough.
He was going to get punched
just because I was getting so frustrated
and I told chester
like i hate dealing with these assholes bring it on chester's gonna punch me back i'd like to see
you and chester duke it out but now it's one of those things like is it is it legal is it that's
all that really matters is it legal and who the hell else cares about anything you know this guy
was making a first he attacks him, which pisses me off.
Like, oh, look at you.
You don't need to eat a spike.
Like, basically commenting on the guy's stature.
What do you mean?
Oh, he's saying like...
He's a bigger guy.
A bigger guy.
Oh, he's just saying, so you don't need the meat, I can tell because of your body.
Yeah, yeah, obviously you've been eating well, so you can't say you killed the spike because
of its size.
Really?
So first he attacks him personally.
Then he attacks him like on a population, elk population.
But I completely like reduce
that to that spike isn't going to probably reproduce for four years and me and you talked
about this a little bit like the only argument that guy would have is that maybe in four or five
years if he's this big quote unquote professional you know mature bull killer he would maybe have a
shot at killing that bull in four or five years but other than that there's like no legitimate
argument and i don't have time to sit and
pigs love to wrestle in the mug
and I just was out of it. I wrestled with him for a little
bit and I'm like, oh, the block button.
It just takes care of all
my issues and my blood pressure
can come back down. Didn't even need to punch
Chester. No.
Chester was trying to go to sleep and I saw
my phone just over there lit up and getting
frustrated as all hell.
That makes me want to shoot a spike this year. Chester was trying to go to sleep and I saw my phone just over there lit up and getting frustrated as all hell.
I was over itching sugar bites.
That makes me want to shoot a spike this year.
I like those spikes, man.
I've never gotten a spike.
Me neither.
A lot of areas that we hunt and you can't,
they've got to be branch antlered bull.
My brother, Danny,
he was working in Washington on some salmon projects and he used to hunt
these units where it was spike only
and he said
you know you're out hunting you think like oh shit
how hard can it be to find a spike he goes man
you go into a spike only area and you realize
like how hard it is to find a spike
like on one hand it seems like they're around
because when you're looking for one
every bull is a big bull.
How many spikes did we see on this hunt?
Zero.
Zero.
Yeah.
He was saying like, oh, that can't be that hard.
Turns out a whole different story, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, guys.
Sam, thanks for the producing.
No problem.
Oh, this episode we just made is going to be part of our season 10.
Yeah, last episode of season 10.
It's a wrap.
So it rolls out in two batches.
We got one batch launched in September 29th.
So we got a batch of episodes hitting Netflix September 29th,
followed up a couple months later with a batch of five more episodes
of which this will be a part.
So you'll be able to watch all the stuff
we're talking about. This is going to be one of our
best episodes, man.
Because just the amount of interactions,
the amount of wildlife interactions in it.
And besides Archery Oak,
is the coolest thing. I know you like it.
We're talking about deer.
Jay said, all the deer hunting I've done, not one of them
has bugled at me.
The deer don't bugle.
The ducks and geese don't have horns.
There's all kinds of reasons why Elkin's up being the best.
And he also vowed to not kill a whitetail until he's 70?
I changed my mind.
My good buddy Randy Milligan, where we cut the tree down, invited me to Kansas,
and he's got some good bucks, so I'm going to entertain that.
But, home, you're not going to do that before we go coos deer hunting, are you?
No, after.
Okay, good. So if I'm'm with you that'll be your first
whitetail yep i hope i spot it i hope you do too that'd be sweet i'm like yeah i got phelps you'd
be crazy to turn down a hunt on randy's place oh yeah that place is what dreams are made of
when it comes to whitetail i just got a chigger habitat i'll go in there in the winter i was gonna say
chiggers in the fall should be down right yeah but what i'm gonna do when we do this
line one turkey hunt giveaway i'm gonna um probably carry a bucket of permethrin
like a wash tub of permethrin put it around no i'm gonna stand in that tub
i'm gonna carry it around set that tub down and stand in that tub and hunt out of it
that's my plan that's and hunt out of it.
That's my plan.
That's my hunt plan.
It's a trigger bite giveaway.
All right.
Until then, Jason, we'll have you back on when we hunt coos deer.
Thanks again to everybody.
Sam, thanks again to you for the wonderful job you did putting this episode together.
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