The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 297: Crap No!

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Sean Weaver, Dylan Graves, Max Barta, and Phil Taylor.Topics discussed: "Steve, Cal, and Rorke Denver walk into a tiki bar...;" guiding in Kansas; eating Bugles with Cheez Whiz and olives; the inseparable duo of Sean and Max; shooting Sean's upcoming waterfowl show, Duck Lore; even more oddities to be auctioned off; old-timey names; eating a deer with that deer's own teeth; throwing your kids into the deep-end of the internet; cremating a racoon; a collared deer mount; genetics v. nutrition in whitetails; Nebraska's two-tiered duck bag limit option; the wild world of waterfowl regulations; 'Whatchagot Pot;' and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go go farther stay longer all right everybody we're coming from michigan's upper peninsula the up and uh here was sean weaver who has me in pain right now to be recording a stupid podcast in the cold gray light of dawn on the duck hunt right at sunrise recording a podcast it's just it's just it should be illegal but the way it worked out like phil's here all the way all the way to to take his engineering abilities on the road that's true did you have fun yesterday phil out duck hunting oh yeah no it was especially, I mean, we'll get into it later, but seeing those boats you were using and everything, it was something I was not aware of. You weren't aware of layout boats? No, not at all. Yeah. The last time we were, this is a different experience, because the last time we were on the road together to record a show, we got to go

to a tiki bar. That's true. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I was planning on going by myself. I wasn't going to subject youiki bar. That's true. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I was planning on going by myself. I wasn't going to subject you to that. And then for some reason, you and Cal, Rourke Denver, your wife all decided to join. Yeah, yeah. And it was embarrassing

for you to witness me in that sort of space. But was it your birthday or my anniversary it was my wedding anniversary and we shared a drink out of a pineapple that's right yeah it's pre-covid people yeah that's true no it was the birth of covid yeah that's it was february it was february 2020 before shit hit the fan yeah national wild yeah we're at. Yeah, we're at the National Wild Turkey Federation. There's no way of knowing, but us sharing that drink could have spread it. Yeah, it was the pineapple. Yeah.

Okay, so Phil's here, joined by Sean Weaver and also Dylan Grapes, Michigan native, Lake State University. Did you graduate? I did. Oh, alum. What'd you study? Fisheries and Wildlife. Oh, you did?

Yeah. Man, everybody I know that went there did that. Well i haven't used it yet but i got it well no you use it like uh you use it like uh like what it was meant for man yeah yeah you got a major in duck hunting with a minor you don't feel that you ever killed have you ever killed a duck you wouldn't have killed if you hadn't gone to lake state and learned something? Probably not. Probably not. I've forked out a lot of money to kill one extra dog.

Yeah, it makes me return to a thing that Pat Durkin said, I think on this podcast, where he was talking about, Pat Durkin used to be the editor of Deer and Deer Hunting magazine. And so he got to spend a lot of time with and profile a lot of like sort of the most famous big buck killers right on the planet and he gradually became disheartened uh because he said that somehow many of them um as polished as they are at killing deer, would be incapable of telling you what kind of tree their tree stand is in. Yeah. Wow. And he wanted it to be otherwise.

Right. You know. But it's good that you got like a fish and wildlife deal. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It brought me to this area that I'd really never explored a whole lot. And I got four years to drive around and look at all sorts of shit. So you started up here? Yeah, I came up here in 2015 was my freshman year.

And you did it because of the hunting potential. The big thing for me was that when you lived on campus at our public safety, you could check in your shotgun. Yep. So if you lived in the dorms, you could put your gun at the public safety, and then you could go in, check it out, go hunting, and then bring it back in. So you lived in dorms? Yeah, my first two years. Yeah. See, when I was up here, we got a waiver somehow or another they had like a like a sign off you could do that they had to approve if you want to live yeah i did that within the first two years yeah but i did the dorm dorm

life for two years and then moved off it's interesting this. I'm glad to hear that Lake, that Lake state and the UP still sucks in hunting and fishing kids from downstate because me and my two brothers, uh, they both want to do fish and wildlife. So we all did community college, which we call it like 13th grade, Mesquite community college. Um,

and then they came up here. I came up and did one year but i was like a i wanted to be a writer by that point mostly so i only did one semester here and then went back downstate where you could get like a writing whatever the hell yeah at grand valley but then we hung out here this is our primary hangout for years yeah Yeah. Up here to fish steelhead. Oh yeah. Yeah. Everything else, man. Hunting deer. Yeah. There's all sorts of, if you just kind of get out and, you know, explore, you can find

all the fishing and hunting opportunities you want. Oh, it's amazing, man. Oh, and it's like a 20, 30 minute drive. It's not. Exactly. You're not ranging like you find out in the west where you got to go a few hours yeah yeah yeah no that's a good spot man so how so now you you're a waterfowl guide yep uh but you work out in kansas i died out in kansas um for bid kansas outdoors and then uh what's that place

uh we're out of hutchinson um do you recommend it oh yeah really yeah it's good people yeah would you tell me if you didn't recommend it that'd put you in a weird spot as long as ben's not listening to the podcast no i i uh last year was my first year um i really didn't really enjoyed it um it was completely different for me um um, coming from Michigan where you're hunting honkers and going out there and you're hunting lessers and specks and snows. And that was just completely different. Yeah.

Um, so I had to, there was a big learning curve. Um, I'm sure I'll learn more this year too, but there's a lot of birds. Everybody at the, at the business does their part uh everybody works hard and we put our clients on birds but that was your first year i'm just i'm confused so last year was your first year guiding there or first year as a guide ever um first year guiding there and i did a few controlled uh pheasant hunts here in Michigan at some ranches. Um, but that was about it.

And then obviously out there is like four and a half months of guiding. So it's a grind. Um, and then I come back here and this year I have a good buddy, uh, kind of central UP that runs bear hunts and i went out there and i helped them run bear clients um in september and then i ran a few haunter hunts up here too oh you did i did so when you're doing the bear clients you guys are are it's it's like draw tags but you're running uh you're running baits in september yeah so it's all we have a point system for our bear tags here um and then we run we took on 20 clients and we run 35 different baits um so we stay busy do you guys get big bears um we had a lot on camera uh the biggest bear we killed was 300 pounds

which for michigan our average black bear is 125 pounds yeah yeah so it's a good bear uh but we had a lot of pictures you know four or five hundred pounders but when you get clients in the stand that have never seen a bear before the smaller ones always going to come in first so when that when that 150 175 walks in to them it looks like the 400 pounder and they shoot it, but we didn't have like when I lived in lower, the lower peninsula, we didn't have bear hunting.

It was just, there was bear hunting a little bit North of us. We didn't have bear hunting where we live. So like bear tags weren't really on our radar. Right. Um, well, my brother Danny started going to school up here.

He right away drew a bear tag. So we started going out and shooting carp with our bows, which isn't the best bait, but we didn't really know what we were doing. And I had a big freezer I would use to freeze muskrats and stuff during trapping season. We filled that thing up with bags of carp that we shot with our bows. And so he started a little bait station up here and right away killed uh and i remember he had a nice one he killed like a 200 pound boar nice

um right away and then my other brother when he came up here he got a bear tag and he went and did like the thing where you go around and get expired groceries yeah yeah you know i remember it was so funny. He came into a case of Bugles. You know, it was like little Bugles treats. Oh, yeah. Put them on your fingers. Yeah, you put them on your fingers.

Or you get cheese. Like, I remember a guy used to, when I was working for, doing millwright work for Ronnie Bame, there was a guy that he had, who had had too many DUIs and couldn't drive anymore. So I was like,

he's basically his chauffeur because he knew how to do a lot of the jobs. So I became like, I had to drive him around because he couldn't drive. Then I learned how to do all the stuff he did.

His favorite treat on a Friday night driving back from a job is he'd get bugles in a thing of squirt cheese. Squirt cheese. In black olives. And he liked to fill that bug a thing of squirt cheese. Squirt cheese. In black olives. And he liked to fill that bugle up with squirt cheese,

top it with a black olive, and eat it while he's going down the road. And you can imagine he had a drink accompaniment. Yeah. So anyhow, like my brother would wander around out in the woods, and I even have a picture of him. He's like standing there with like all these bugles. but he'd always have a box of the bugles under his arm and he'd be eating the bugles but then he's like dumped them then he dumped some of the

box into the bait thing but it finally becomes the first day and he comes out there with a he comes out there with a bucket of what to add to the bait pile? And he goes and dumps the bucket on the bait pile and he's getting situated and is blind and realizes, shit, I left the bucket at the bait pile. So he says he spins to look and there's already a bear standing there.

And that was his bear. Just like very productive. Did he top the pile off with squirt cheese and olives no no i don't know that was that was a different guy's trick but that would have brought in that would have brought in the big ones but yeah man it was a whole other world you know yeah living up here man yeah yeah it's uh you can get away from people and it's kind of nice it's quiet and there's lots of wildlife lots of good opportunities to get out even if you're not

like into hunting and fishing if you just you know you want to hike you know toquamanon falls is right here pictured rocks i mean there's a lot of good seeing sites to go you know to go and look at yeah and i did up here what would have been almost like unimaginable where we grew up hunting is as soon as i moved up here i got one day i got two deer with my bow in one day which would have taken three years which would take three years and some of the ground we used to hunt in you know down below yeah it's the deer hunt's definitely not what it used to be. No, yeah.

That's what I understand. From what I've heard. Yeah. But our wolf population is getting pretty big. I remember cutting my first wolf track up here and being very surprised by it. Yeah. You know. But now, yeah.

But in those days, it was like 35. What are they talking about? Like 35 deer per square mile and stuff, man. Just, it was unbelievable. And the bad winter would come and they'd be like yarded up and starving to death everywhere. And it was wild. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got, you know, obviously we ran all the bear baits and, uh, it wasn't uncommon that at least one of your baits every night had wolves on it. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. And we got pictures, like three, four wolves in one trail cam picture on your baits every night had wolves on it oh no kidding yeah and we got pictures like three four wolves and one trail cam picture on your baits and they'll they'll rip them right open move all the logs right out of the way oh really oh yeah they'll run the bear right off huh that's interesting sucks for us but you don't do any fur trapping, do you? I do not. The buddy of mine that owns the company, his name's John Ron.

What's his name? John Ron. Huh. Oddly enough. Really? Yeah. See, that's like a weird thing. It's not his fault, man.

It's a weird thing parents do now and then, you know? They're probably thinking Jonathan Ron. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if his full name is longer i know his dad is also john ron oh really oh so he's like ron john sure surf shop right he's uh he's a junior but uh the his company is youper outdoors 906 and he does his big things bears uh but he does he actually takes uh trapping clients and basically the clients will come in and trap with him and like run the line with him what and then they get to kind of see how it's done and like the ins and outs of it because they're because they're doing like a class they want to learn it or they want to experience it both and then um huh so they

kind of see how it's done you know what to look for how to do it um and then hopefully they they get something and then um he'll take them you know tan it and everything and then they get to take the the belt back with them really yeah so he's just kind of getting into that. And then he just got his captain's license. So he's running, starting next year, he's going to start doing lake trout jigging on Lake Superior and then walleye trips as well. Real go-getter.

Yeah, he's a really good dude. When I took, when I was in high school, you'll know this name because of where you're from. When I was in high school, you'll know this name because of where you're from. When I was in high school, I took a day of trapping lessons for $250 from Mark June, who when fur prices plummeted, he became like a big deer guy, like a big whitetail guy. He started doing whitetail products and all that. You know that name, Sean? Yep.

Yeah. Day of trapping lessons. I personally have never really done it, but I know it's been around here. I was going to ask you if you're allowed, because back in the old days, you were allowed two river otters here per year, and you're only allowed one river otter per year in the southern part, in the northern half of the southern part of the state. Okay. So it's cool because you can catch two up here.

Yeah. I don't know if it's still two or if it's down to one. Oh, Sean, I wanted to return to something. Yep. This is your second time on the show. Second time. The first time you were on the show, we were with your friend who blew his toes off. Yeah, we were with Danny Tutow Morrison. Who blew his toes off in a layout blind.

Yep. And what's funny about this is yesterday we were hunting in layout boats and I at first I was trying to figure out like where I wanted my shotgun to lay um thought about your friend blowing his toes off

in a layout blind. Were you keenly aware of like all of a sudden I should not put my gun down. And then I put it together that you would not only blow your toes off in a layout boat, but you would then sink. Yeah. And so then I was like, oh, that's why one would never, ever put their barrel inside the boat. It would be bad news. Yeah, in 35 foot of water.

Yeah. Joined also by our very own, sitting here, the first person to ever be on this show in Birkenstocks. Rubber Birkenstocks. Introduce yourself, Max. My name is Max Barta, and I'm a camera guy. Are those actual Birkenstocks? Yeah.

40 bucks. Really? Yeah. Do you tend to side with the, like, do you have a lot of conspiracy theories? Do you think, like, are chemtrails and stuff like that? No. I don't think so. You just like them?

They're comfy. Yeah, not like that. They're like Crocs like crocs but more fashionable oh is that right yeah you should try them listen i have yeah i like them i'm not down on them i think they're great you are have you tried them before no i never have can i run what size are you 10 yeah can i put them on for a while today? Yeah. Yeah. Do it. If I put them on, I start going, right on, right on. You'll know it's working.

So you're longtime production partners with Sean. Yep. It's been about, I think this is our fifth year. Working together. Six, yeah. Working together. You know what you need to realize? One thing I like about Sean, and it makes me like about you,

is how loyal Sean is. Because we didn't know each other. But when we're trying to get Sean to come work for us, Sean was like, there's just only one way this will happen. And that it's Max comes too, to the point where he legitimately would have not come work for us yeah no i thought you owe his ass yeah i definitely do so i was either like either sean is the most loyal dude on the planet or max is the greatest dude on the planet tbd but either way either way it seems like a win right yeah no i mean um sean and i've been working together like we said about for six years and we found out right away what worked and what didn't and we just stuck with it

so and you guys have done the you guys have done a lot of the waterfowl work together but also predator stuff yeah we've been chasing fur and feathers for a long time. Is that the main thing you guys work on, though? Yeah. Yeah. You know, part of working with Max and me wanting to have Max come along is there's few, not a lot of people can handle the road time of traveling, chasing ducks. And we've been on the road for two and a half weeks now yeah there's not a whole lot of production people that like want to be on the road chasing

ducks for two and a half weeks i think they think they do right yeah until it happens you guys ever get in big huge fights oh there's arguments here and there. Oh. Give me a preview one for me. Oh, man. I don't know. Max broke my tailgate hitch. Yeah, I did. Or my tailgate handle. Did he holler at you?

No. You could tell he was pretty upset. Yeah. No, it was just like. More just frustrated. Yeah, it was just like, I didn't break that tailgate handle. You broke that tailgate handle. No, I'm with you. Yeah. I think just like, I didn't break that tailgate handle. You broke that tailgate handle. No, I'm with you.

I think it broke itself. Sean, lay out what we're working on here. We're working on a new show called Duck Lore. We're in Michigan hunting ducks, hunting divers on the big water, and we're putting together a whole new waterfowl series. Sean's at the helm. At the helm. You get to see him every single time.

We're covering all kinds of different ducks, different places, really gathering the waterfowl experience across the whole range of places. Started in Texas. Now we're all the way up here in Michigan, which seems backwards for the migration. Yeah, where'd you stop along the way? North Dakota and Nebraska. So we're on trip four.

Then you're going to head west from here. Yep, yep. We'll talk more about that in a minute, but a couple updates. The House of Oddities, so the Auction House of Oddities, we're on to group three now. Well, when you're listening to house of oddities run to group three now well when you're listening to this run to group three we're a couple days ahead of the schedule

here because right now we got uh what kind of how do you say daniel's dog we always been calling it a drop or something just for short yeah i'm the wrong guy to ask. The dog's kicking ass on the auction house. What's it sitting at? Currently it's sitting at like 5,800. It's a good puppy. But you know what? They have four pups. So the way it's going to work is the winning bidder works with the breeder

to select which dog is what they want to... That's cool. Basically it's pick of the litter. Male, female. Well, pick of the litter. Yeah. Male, female. Well, pick of the litter from their perspective. Yeah. They get to pick. Yeah.

Because there's four different dogs. So the breeder will work with you to find out what you want. Because someone might want a male. They might want a female. Whatever the hell. Yeah. Anyways, group three is now launched. We have a, so we got a lot of cool friends.

We have a signed Pittsburgh Steelers jersey from Steelers linebacker Joe Schobert. He donated his football jersey to the auction house and got a bunch of teammates to sign it. That's pretty cool. Including the quarterback. Ben Roethlisberger and TJ Watt, Joe Hayden. There's a bunch of good names on there.

Minka Fitzpatrick, Chase Claywood, Devin Bush, Cam Hayward, Juju Smith-Schuster, Najee Harris. Anyways, all these fellas signed this jersey, and this signed jersey is up in group three. So all the signatures on it. We got a hand-forged carbon knife donated by Cal, but made by Riley Kirkpatrick Forge in Sheridan, Oregon. Cal was supposed to use it for special occasions, but according to Cal, he doesn't have enough special occasions. And it's more beautiful than something he should own. So it's going up on there.

It's meant for carving large hunks of meat. There's this other thing that's kind of this crazy set of things there's an artist david burgess burgess he uh he made these mugs that have everybody's ugly ass mug on them so there's a cow mug a yanni mug there's even like a dirkin mug as a naval captain all the people's mugs are on the set of mugs. No one in the world has a set. This is like not a thing. Right.

These are like one-offs. You can get the whole set of ugly mugs by Dave. Spencer now, everybody knows the Spencer Newhart's Big Rock Hound. Spencer, his wife, Shelby, took their shit Spencer's always finding out in the woods and made a custom petrified wood necklace, Montana moss agate hoop earrings, and a pair of Montana moss agate stud earrings, all being auctioned as a collection for that special someone in your life. We also have framed original art by one of my favorite wildlife artists,

Jamie Carmody. She does like, you should go look on her, Phil, pull up her Instagram deal. It's unbelievable, her work. I was trying to get her, she didn't want him not being too happy with it, but I was trying to get her, she didn't want him not being too happy with it, but I was trying to get her to have me a painting of wolves that have disemboweled a bison. But it's still standing, but they're eating the entrails.

That's a hard one to get right. Came to me in a feverish dream. And she's been working on it, but wasn't happy with it. Either way, we have a painting of her of dogs baying up a mountain lion, which is cool. It's like you just got to go look at it. Yeah. You got to go look at it. It's an incredible painting.

We have another meat crafter knife, and as you know, these are like rare in hen's teeth now and sell for a bunch of money. Another meat crafter knife. And the main thing, here's the main draw. Everybody knows season two of Das Boat, which includes a boat that my, the boat is

my childhood mentor, John Gary, my childhood fishing mentor, John Gary, his boat, his 1973 Starcraft, which then became my family's boat and then became the DOS boat season two boat. But we got rid of John Gary's old 25 horse, Evan Rood, and this boat has been paired with

a Honda, a brand spickety new Honda four stroke 40. All kinds of add ons, all kinds of customization. You can go sign up right now, go to the auction house of oddities. You don't need to buy anything, but you can just sign up for free and we're going to give that boat away. So that's John Gary slash my old fishing boat paired with a brand new 40 horse four stroke Honda.

It's a sweet boat. Everything on it's like it's old but like redone. Get it for free. Get it for free. That's a giveaway. That's sweet. Here's the

let me give you some behind the scenes. What it does is it drives traffic to the auction house about it. We wanted to auction it off, and that would have been a high ticket item, but we thought it would be not fair to people that can't get in on the bidding because of whatever financial constraints. This way you just go win the damn boat. Yeah, that's sweet. To come back to her art, it jamie underscore wild art see i knew everybody

says a wild everybody does an underscore it's it's you look at what i'm talking about with those pictures of hunting dogs yeah they're pretty sweet it's unbelievable yeah it's pretty cool stuff she's got one here with a mallard that i'm a fan of. Yeah. It's unbelievable looking. She's cool. Uh, piece of feedback. We had on Paul Lewis from FHF gear, who is a retired police officer. And we were trying to do a segment with Paul, like called ask cop. Cause like weird stuff.

Cops do. You could ask, like he's retired. He has got no skin in the game anymore. You can be like, why do you guys always right yeah do whatever they do so we were like asking paul why do you guys tend to all of a sudden decide to turn on your lights and squirt down the road and then turn them back off again you know yeah it's a thing they do well a cop from cheyenne wyoming wrote in and he said i was this

is to quote him i was shocked shocked to hear paul describe the use of light sirens to get back to the office he recognizes that paul was joking, but this is a thing that he really wanted to, a myth that he wanted to dispel. He's a firefighter, Cheyenne, Wyoming. He's in the officer's seat, meaning he's in control of the lights, sirens on the fire truck. He's very aware of public perception of this very activity and it always bothers me. He calls it running emergent and then shutting off light sirens prior to making it on scene.

He says uppercase never. So like a Trumpian use of uppercase, we would uppercase never use an emergent response to get back to the station to get dinner to get to the bathroom or any other non-emergency you could get fired for doing that and not only it's an inherent danger to ourselves and the public here's what he says happens someone calls 9-1-1 holy shit bunch of smoke coming out of the neighbor's window yep okay the first information you have is there's an emergency situation you respond accordingly

then it's often it's minor you're still going but it's not worth all the lights all the pomp and circumstance says that's why we we trigger turn the shit on information continues to feed in. It's determined that it's not emergency. You shut it off, and that's why that's happening. This guy hates when this occurs. Oh, you got to feel. But then listen, it goes on because Paul from FHF has a response.

Corinne arranged a response, so now we have a debate. Paul says, I would agree with him in that this is something that would not be looked at favorably by the public or administration. Certainly not something we'd stand for normally, and I was trying to add a little humor. It's something that we joke about but really not do. That said, that said, I saw a bathroom emergency happen once in the middle of the night after leaving a standoff with a guy with a gun. Ten years ago, times have changed.

But he does concede 99.9% of the time it's because of changing circumstances from the caller. Now, here's the other interesting deal. When we're talking about antelope hunting, and we have an antelope hunting episode up on Netflix right now, and in it we use a game bag. Yep.

That was a good episode. Yeah, we use a game bag on a, like a, I can't remember if I put it on a tripod or a gun barrel. I think I put it on the barrel of my rifle. And wave it in the wind to get an antelope's attention. Now, I always felt that the white mattered. Because, like, antelope are emblazoned with a big white panel on their flank. And it's not for camouflage it's for visibility yeah seeing each other out in wide open you know on wide open ground but this guy

ran into this uh this historic account so there's a report a report on an expedition down the Zuni and Colorado rivers by Lorenzo Silgreaves in 1851. And the expedition had a naturalist assigned to the expedition named S.W. Woodhouse. He talks about what a pain in the ass it is to get within rifle range of antelope back in 1851. They see it coming and they book off and these guys are you know shooting at that point in time these guys are shooting uh you know muzzleloading rifles but either way he can't get in and he said the hunters would just tie a red handkerchief to a stick and creep through the grass holding the red handkerchief up on a stick. And he said that would inspire a lot of curiosity on the thing, or it'd even come near.

So that a little bit undoes my whole white thing. Yeah, why does it need to be red? I think that he thinks a bloody antelope is coming. And he's like, why is that antelope so drenched in blood? Got into a fight. Does he need help no i don't know i think or can they even see it what's that can they see the difference i don't under i don't know enough between a red and a white well i mean they could is it that much of

a difference and that through an antelope's eyes that it would be like oh i'm gonna go there because it's red not white or white not red well, oh, I'm going to go there because it's red, not white, or white, not red. Well, here's the deal. I thought the white because... Because it matches the natural. Because it was like he's seeing... Right. Now I believe, or maybe, I don't know,

maybe this guy, I don't know enough about Francis Wharton and who's this other hoser? No, that's not him. Francis Wharton, that's his old...'s not him. No. Francis Wharton. That's his old. Listen, you won't believe Francis Wharton. S.W. Woodhouse and Lorenzo Sitgraves. I don't know.

They sound like trustworthy names to you, Phil? If you can judge them by that. I think it's weird. Let's say the antelope saw his buddy all bloodied up. I'm joking about the blood. Oh, okay. I don't think that he thinks it's a bloody antelope saw his buddy all bloodied up. I'm joking about the blood. Oh, okay.

I don't think that he thinks it's a bloody antelope. Okay. I think it's just curiosity stuff. Sure. But what's funny is when you're reading historic stuff, these are the kind of names everybody has. Lorenzo Sitgreaves and S.W. Woodhouse sound like dudes.

Yeah. From 1851 Expedition. Yeah, you can hear those names in like a Ken Burns documentary. Oh, yeah. You're like, that sounds right. Like we would never be sitting here and I would never be like, I'm sitting here with S.W. Woodhouse. Because, you know, he's dead already.

Right. Can't come on the show. Sick dreams. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can

be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. This next story is super interesting. I don't know how we never heard about this before. Some Canadian guy wrote in. Because we're always talking about stuff to do with bones and whatnot, you know? Yeah.

Like making truck shifters out of your own hip joint when you get your leg amputated. Well, this guy sends in about this dude named Francis Wharton, who also sounds like a guy who'd be dead for a while now. He was at Little Fort British Columbia in the 50s and 60s, missing all of his teeth. Couldn't eat meat anymore. He goes out and kills a deer. And then ends up eating the deer with the deer's own teeth.

Made a pair of dentures out of the deer's teeth. I'm curious. And ate the deer with those deer's teeth. I'm curious how quick And ate the deer with those deer's teeth. I'm curious how quick he made those dentures. That's the part that I don't understand. That's where I smell the fish. I think he might have

ate the next deer. Right. Deer number two. But I don't mean to take away because there's a photo of this guy. And when you look at him, he's kind of got

this half smile. He's got what you might call a shit-eating grin. And you can tell something's not quite right with his teeth. Right? Would you look and be like, there's something not quite right with his teeth? It looks like someone took a file to him. But listen, you can go to a museum and see the guy's damn teeth.

He made a full upper denture out of Adir's teeth. The collections manager at the Museum of Healthcare in Kingston has the teeth on display. Filed them down, put them into a base of wood plastic and household

cement. Wore them for three years. They described him as kind of loose, kind of dark and dirty. He must have used a lot of polydent. It's a great idea. It's impressive.

I feel like eating meat with him had to have been kind of challenging because deer teeth aren't naturally... Deer don't eat meat. I know. had to have been kind of challenging because deer teeth aren't naturally, like deer don't eat meat. I know. You know? Yeah.

And these are, to be clear, he had to kill, he had more than one deer's worth of teeth in there. Yeah. Because these are just the incisors. Right? He's got like a whole row of incisors. Look at the set of those dentures pretty wild looking yeah you just kind of have to gnaw away at it yeah wow that's great i like hearing that there's

a place called the museum of health care is that something you do you get steve do you get like satisfaction that's sort of like if you want to call it poetry whatever of i of him eating the deer meat with the deer's own teeth because to me that just makes me roll my eyes a little bit yeah i like the poetry of it okay there's something that speaks to you like uh there's something kind of writerly that speaks to you but then also what's my you know my favorite quote right uh brevity no skepticism that's right skepticism is the chastity of the intellect so when i hear it i need to go to a skeptical place uh-huh which my skepticism drives my kid bananas because everything he tells me because probably here's the thing with kids they they they mess up every youtube video they see oh yeah i know

she's like i was watching a video about a guy's name he's like mr money and he always finds envelopes and every envelope he finds has a million dollars in it. And I'm like, well, hold on a minute. I'm going to need some more details. At first, I'm only half listening anyway, so I hate hearing people describe YouTube videos to me. And then all of a sudden, he'll get to the end. I'm like, what? And then he gets pissed.

You don't believe me? It's like, no. It's not that I don't believe you, buddy. I think you're messing up what the video is about. Oh, it nuts i need to find more envelopes oh yeah no it's like everything like i don't like watching youtube uh and you might think it's because like trying to protect your kids from the world and all that yeah it's because they mess up every youtube video they see it makes me so so worried to act because I feel like I kind of grew up with the internet

a little bit. Yeah, you're like a product of that. I was at that perfect age range where I can kind of tell when something is like a scam or not real or like these pop-ups like this is all, I can just point it out and I'm so scared of putting my kids on the internet because they're just going to be thrown into the deep end

and have no idea what to do. No, they have no idea he'll because he likes to hunt so he'll be watching he's watching hunting videos oh my god like just the mana so there's like settings you can use on youtube for kids you use that i should well it prevents like oh you might also like you know and they go down a crazy ass exactly you know here's a good story guy wrote in about some adults could use that too yeah oh yeah you know what there should be a setting you could go into your if your friend's kind of a dumbass you should be able to go in and do like a setting that he doesn't know about that protects him turn off the algorithm yeah that protects him from stuff he's not gonna be able to uh-huh apply skepticism to yeah like like a little sliding bar of you can turn up or down how skeptical the person is uh-huh and if your buddy's like not

skeptical he's gonna slide that bar way down and it only serves him like very plausible fact-check material. There you go. Full proof. No more million-dollar envelopes for Max. Yep. A guy from Minnesota wrote in with a great trapping story from when he was 13. So he was an outdoor-obsessed kid. He would trap mink, raccoons, beavers all over a nearby river.

And his old man check this out you gotta pay attention his old man's a veterinarian apparently, I didn't know all this but it makes sense veterinarians have a carcass freezer for all the dead dogs and what not dead cats and dogs

okay and cause when they gotta euthanize a dog they freeze it and then it gets sent to the not dead cats and dogs okay and because when they got a euthanized dog they freeze it and then it gets sent to the dog cremation place since they had the big freezer he would store his trapped animals in there waiting to skin them or

waiting to go he would bring him in like if he would sell him he would sell some of his fur in the round it's for a trapping term. He one time goes down to the fur buyer, and he's emptying all of his bags out, and out comes a miniature schnauzer in place of his raccoon. Got the bag swapped. Goes back home, and there is no raccoon

in that freezer. So, someone, he thinks someone to this day, has the cremains of their dog, but in fact, it's his raccoon. Probably sitting above the fireplace.

Exactly. Yeah, never got it right. The fur buyer's face when that dog got dumped on the table. Dog came rolling out. That's a weird looking raccoon. Here's another good thing that we found. Corinne drugged us up. You were talking about whether or not you should,

not the morals of shooting collared deer. It's not a moral issue. The aesthetics of shooting a collar deer like i would have and i've made this clear many occasions i would have a very hard time not not that i wouldn't be able to do it i couldn't do it shoot a deer the collar on it whatever the collar on it just to me because it feels um tainted by the hands of man yep and it brings up the thing of why is a banded duck cool to which i just like i don't know i agree that they're cool but i can't explain it i can't explain it but a collard deer is not cool but this guy got himself a doe not only with a collar but two ear tags and got it mounted ear tags and collar and a little radio

antenna sticking out of it oh yeah full-on mounted on his wall i grew up near the usda clinic in ames iowa and you know they've got whole pens of deer outside ear tagged and it looks like a runaway. Yeah. Got through the fence. Yep. Well, no, but it's got that collar on it. Yeah, the collar's the extra.

So the guy that shot the collared whitetail doe was Roy Winnings of Illinois. He's got some hunting land in Moultrie County, and he watches doe tromping around on there for four years wearing a GPS tracking collar. Killed her in 2012. It appeared to him that her health was declining. She'd been tagged

by the Southern Illinois University Carbondale near Shelbyville, nine miles away from his land. Okay? So she made it nine miles away from his land. Okay. So she made it nine miles to his place. Turned out the doe was seven and a half years old in 2009. So three years prior to her, uh, to him killing it, she had an annual home range size of 106 acres.

That's pretty interesting. Just does not seem that big. at all no when you bump it and you think it's like gone yeah a square mile is 640 acres yeah when you bump her and you're like oh it's like they don't go far no not at all but it's interesting that, but consider this too, though, she moved nine miles, right? So she's running like an annual home range of 106 acres, but at points of time, whatever was inspired to like move nine miles to over the course of time,

the human handling could have been that too, though, possibly, but I don't think it's, if you look at like, cause I'm going to talk about this dude, Kevin Monteith for a minute, who's runs all these, these deer collaring projects in wyoming and

they act real normal and then they go do something weird and then they act real you know yeah or i shouldn't say act normal they're in a spot and then now and then for whatever reason they strike off. We were having on the show an argument. Yeah, it was an argument. Jason Phelps from Phelps Game Calls. I've been laying out for him the emergent thinking that nutrition

is more important to antler growth than genetics. Because Phelps is still like the old like oh that area's got good genetics that area doesn't have good genetics and researchers are turning up that like nutrition um not only is it perhaps more important but it's more controllable if you look at herd size and habitat quality and we had kevin monteith on to explain some of his work a couple years ago but i want to recap a little bit because we're having like a

somewhat spirited email exchange between phelps and kevin monteith from university of wyoming and trying to convince phelps of what we're saying. And I'm going to refer back to something that Monteith discussed when he was on the podcast a couple of years ago. They took whitetails from the Black Hills and from Eastern South Dakota. So you have, go ahead. They actually put them, that was at South Dakota

State where I live. Yeah. So they're taking whitetails from a piss poor genetics area, Black Hills, and they're taking whitetails from a good genetics area, Eastern South Dakota. Yep. Right? Yep. And they're saying, okay, so supposedly they got this whole genetics thing and they bring them into captivity and have them raise fawns under identical conditions.

So here you have the good genetics deer, the bad genetics deer, you keep them separated. So you got the same males and females from the genetics area, but everybody's eating the same shit in the same place. Okay. Now, what they find when they do this, as they raise these fawns under identical conditions, the deer are radically different sizes as adults when they're brought there. Okay. But they're only bred within their respective regions of origins. Now, the male fawns made up for more than 70%

of the difference in size that originated between the two regions. So already, just the first batch of fawns makes up 70% of the difference under similar circumstances. The reason it didn't do it all the way is because the in utero effects of it still haven't been borne out meaning a buck's potential is in some ways decided by the condition that the doe is in when she becomes pregnant. Yeah.

Like the in utero conditions, that that thing will hit the ground with its fate already sealed based on the condition of its mother as she lactated and the condition that the mother's in as she developed the fetus. It goes on to talk about, well, some areas where you have different stuff. You could have, they got deer where they have, there's a doe that has a very good year and she puts off a total slob of a buck. But it takes five years for that buck to reach maturity. But what's going to happen in five years has already been determined

by what happened in her belly. So she could have a bad year and put off a buck that will never develop into anything five years down the road. The next year could have a great year and put off a buck that will turn into a tanker in five years. But you're not seeing the results of that for such an enormously long time. They had a buck that was born in 2017 following a winter in which his mom nearly died of starvation. But she pulled through and raised both him and his sister. He bore the consequences of that experience, that prenatal experience.

He bore it for the rest of his life. When he was a two-year-old, he had a tiny, forky antlers that anyone would have said without question he was a yearling. As a three-year-old, he was the size of a small two-year-old. People looked and said, oh, he had bad genetics. Monty said it's crap. He had a mom that was barely surviving and did not have adequate nutrition to give him the silver spoon and instead passed on a negative maternal effect that this male will never be able to pull out of for his life. He goes on to bring up this thing. He will never be able to pull out of for his life. He goes on to bring up this thing.

He will never be able to express his genetic potential. Meaning genetically, he might have the potential to have big antlers, but he just can't and won't. It's called the cohort effect. Wherein males born in some years on average have larger or smaller antlers than those born in other years, even if they are harvested at the same age and live in the same places. It comes down to what mom was able to do for them. Even more nuanced is each female within each year.

Maybe mom raised twins. I'm reading Monty's own email right now. Maybe mom raised twins one year and paid the price for it and goes into the next year in poorer than average condition. She will have less to give than the mom right next to her that lost her fawns early the year before and carries a heap of fat. They are liable to produce males with different expressions of potential. And yep, there are also micro nuances in the ranges they inhabit and the quality of the resources they have access to. He goes on to say that this applies to horns, not to antlers. But it brings up an interesting thing that deer hunters always talk about.

They'll be like, it's a good antler growth year this year. Right? You always hear that. Yep. What you might be seeing is you might be seeing that four years ago was a great year. Mild winter. Good crops. Was a great year. Mild winter, good crops. Was a great year for does. A great year for big, healthy, fat does that produced a batch of great bucks

that are now coming into maturity. And you're seeing a great antler year as an expression of great times before so that we need to as we talk about this we need to point out this difference you wildlife student you'll be able to you'll be able to track what i'm saying antlers of course i this as i had to explain to my kids every week antlers are a bony material that falls off every year. Antlers and horns are different. Horns and animals carry, with the exception of the American pronghorn, horned animals carry their horns their entire life.

So they're looking at a population of unhunted bighorn sheep in the Sierra Nevadas. They can explain over 80% of the variation in horn size of adult males just by knowing how fat the moms were in those ranges. Sean's got his hand up. Not his hand up, but his hand open in an expression of wonder. It just makes me wonder, like like how new is all this knowledge because you've heard the genetics discussion for so long but it seems like you know mom's being healthy is like

with what monteith's writing here it seems that plays way so much more of a factor than genetics why is genetics always been the discussion i don't know but but here it's a great point and it frustrates him because one of the things he gets at is if you're interested in herd health and and you accept uh that and i think you should according to what he's saying you look at me like why do big antlers matter? Right? They're cool, you know, whatever. They're cool to look at, cool to hang on a wall.

You could look, and if you take this work, like this work has implications. If it is this crazy genetic stuff, and he never denies that genetic, like it's a thing. Yeah. But it's a thing we can,

it's a thing that we have no ability to influence or control. But he goes, we can absolutely control quality, not control. We can influence quality of habitat. We can influence herd size. And if you can say that, and not say, you show, demonstrate, prove that big antlers are a function of habitat quality. Right. Yeah. It winds up being a thing that we can talk about and work toward and measure.

Yep. And like apply the logic to the landscape of how do we measure and demonstrate like a healthy herd of deer? What's too many? Antler growth. What is quality habitat, right? And if over time you see that areas that traditionally were producing big bucks and they don't anymore, is it that the genetics went to shit?

Or is it that we've degraded the habitat? Right. Or we're not managing herd size effectively. Do you think at some point those two go hand in hand over a long enough period of time? Like if a line of whitetails just were malnourished over enough years, wouldn't that kind of lower their genetic potential?

No, because it has to be heritable. Okay. And Monty talks a lot about like, when you talk about genetics, you have to be talking about things that are heritable qualities and monty talks a lot about like when you talk about genetics you have to be talking about things that are heritable qualities okay uh remember we were talking with cal we're going to touch on this later we're talking with cal about people saying that you're driving with rattlesnakes that when you kill rattlesnakes that rattle you are you're making them more

dangerous you're making rattlesnakes more dangerous because you're only leaving the ones that don't rattle first heffelfinger wrote in about that he goes well first you'd have to believe that its tendency to rattle or not is heritable meaning that its tendency to rattle is something that it inherits inherits from its mother or father rather than its tendency to rattle is based on conditions time of year air temperature proximity of threat, right? Yeah. That why do you think that it like got it from its dad rather than it has to do with what its physical circumstances are at the moment? So Monteith gets into this, in this email chain we're having, he gets into this idea of people saying you shot out the genetics.

It got over hunted. They shot all the big bucks and now there's no big bucks genetics to go around. To this he says, quote, crap no. It's like hell no. Shit no. I've never heard of crap no.

There's a few other words that I've heard before crap no. He's using the university email deal here. Oh, there you go. heard before crap yeah well here's the thing he's he's he's uh using the university uh email deal here man oh there you go yeah he's in a respectable you gotta understand his position man he's a respect he's a respectable dude and knows what you know i like it yeah he knows what he's doing he explains that it takes such an extreme level of harvest intensity that is perfectly selective to achieve that. He says it's something we will never achieve in the real world.

He says bighorn sheep, again, a horned animal that has very selective pressure on small populations, is the one place you could perhaps achieve this. And he points to a paper by a guy named LeChar, which he attached, to be like, that's a thing you could potentially see, but in the antler world, quote, not stinking possible. Isn't going to happen. I want to recap again.

Go ahead. Sean's got his hand up. Sorry. I want to i want to like not on the antlers but on the rattlesnake thing i mean isn't that what adaptation is though is eventual genetic change to you live or you die and so like saying that rattlesnakes no longer rattling is just like a, a fluke and isn't like a genetic adaptation to the ones that rattle get killed and the ones that don't, don't. We're going to cover. Eventually it has to happen.

Well, we're going to answer all that. Okay. All right. Because when we get into half a finger's thing about snakes, we're going to cover just how many rattlesnakes are out there. Mm-hmm. about snakes we're going to cover just how many rattlesnakes are out there um approximately how many are killed every year the factors that lead a rattlesnake to rattle the impacts of air temperature on rattling um it ain't gonna happen I remember that

that was another Black Hills South Dakota original they're gonna kill off all the rattler I remember hearing that on pretty sure it was NPR South Dakota Public Radio years ago

was a piece they did on that rattlesnakes in the Black Hills don't rattle anymore. He also gets into the only really industrialized killing of rattlesnakes at Rattlesnake Roundups, for instance. Where really are snakes

dying by humans? It has nothing to do with rattling. They're getting them out of denning locations. It's just a thing i'm telling you we'll cover it i want to get back to monteith though yep he's an eloquent dude oh yeah says finally all this comes back to what has become for me a bit of a long-term goal in my career relative to impact. And that is, I hope that someday, when an incredibly large male is harvested, rather than the response being, oh, look at those genetics,

it is instead, that boy must have had a fat mom. He's talking about humans here? No. No. No. Big bucks. Big bucks. bucks no i like that he says for one this is reality for two it importantly shifts our focus as something that matters and that we can influence we will never be able to tip the scale in the unseen and imaginary world of genetics to grow bigger antlers.

Tell that to all them deer farmers. That's a whole different world, though. But the scale we can tip is that of nutrition, both through considering herd density and habitat quality, all of which shifts our focus from what is on the head of the animal to what is on the ground. To make more headway in the world of conservation, that is where our heart and minds need to go. Look at that.

I like it. Dude's good. Hey, folks. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand

picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Okay. Ready, Sean? Yep. You going to explain something? The two-tier nebraska duck system now someone might be sitting there at home thinking why the hell would i care about nebraska's whatever that means

two-tier duck system but i don't know man it's a test plot or it's a test and they're doing it south dakota too i don't think i like it explain it so nebraska and south dakota are testing a tiered license system where you have a tier one which is your normal federally set by flyway license um or by flyway bag limits so you have for example in the central Flyway with South Dakota and Nebraska, you get six ducks a day and a variety of like species have more stringent, uh, more stringent bag limits by species. So mallards, you can shoot five mallards a day in Nebraska, only two of which can be hens, or you can only shoot one pintail. But Nebraska and South Dakota are testing

a second bag limit tier or a different license that allows you to just shoot three ducks a day, but whatever you want them to be. It just, they're selling this as to get more people duck hunting yeah and my problem are we really like are there really like a lot of ducks flying around that no one's hunting for and i have never exactly and i've never met a a person that's like i would buy a duck hunting license but i can't tell what a mallard hen is so i'm not gonna go that's like, I would buy a duck hunting license, but I can't tell what a Mallard hen is, so I'm not going to go.

That's what the thinking is, though. It's like, it's too hard to tell ducks apart, so just sell a little shit and license where someone can just go kill whatever they want, count it up to three, and that's one tier. The other tier is people that will will uh learn what ducks are what yeah i just think access is such a bigger problem like having a place to duck hunt especially in nebraska which is like

not overflowing with public land opportunity you know a lot of nebraska's waterfowl hunting is like the north platte river bottom. That's private leased, um, you know, across the state, the whole way is leases across that whole river bottom. And so I just struggle with like, Oh,

there's all these guys in Nebraska or young kids in Nebraska that want to go duck hunting. But the thing holding them back is that they don't know what a pintail looks like versus if they had access to, you know. What's the price difference between the two tags? I think it's the same, but I'm not sure. I haven't found that.

Do you know anyone personally doing it? Mm-mm. Yeah, I don't either. The thing that, like, makes me real reluctant on it is pintails and canvas bags. I mean, in general, I guess they're going to be less harvest because there's less of them. But man, if someone's all of a sudden whacking three pintails a day, not a huge fan of that because they're struggling as it is. Well, it's a four-year plan

and they're going to be monitoring the difference of the harvest differences between the two tiers right to see they're probably looking for just that yeah right because these hosers i don't want to call hosers these fellers what? The tier two folks could go out. Yeah. And whack three canvas backs a day. Hens. Yeah. Three hens a day. Three pintails a day. Yeah, they could shoot three pintail hens.

Mm-hmm. And it's a three-day possession limit. Right. So they could come home from the three-day trip with nine ten pintails and this is an anecdote but one i'm pretty familiar with maybe some of the easiest decoying ducks are typically going to be like a hen pintail or hen mallard like when a hunt's going rough the ducks that still end up decoying yeah are the hen pintails and mallards the one that winds up

just landing in the decoys all of a sudden it is a pilot program they just say it flat out the idea behind this pilot program is to allow novice hunters who have not yet properly learned duck identification the opportunity to go waterfowl hunting without fear of breaking bag limit laws they want to recruit new duck hunters i will say that like it is intimidating if this does help some people like understand what what it is they're shooting at first light it's a good thing because when you've shot your one hen pintail 20 minutes 10 minutes after legal legal light and you're real cautious the rest of the morning yeah i mean if you can't exactly tell what you're looking at you let a lot of ducks keep flying so they got got kind of a, it's not frequently asked questions

because it's like, this is more like questions they can imagine in the future becoming frequently asked questions. Can you switch tiers? Uh-uh. You sign a deal. Can't switch tiers. If you're under 16,

can you do tier two? Yes. Does it affect goose hunting? It does not. Quote, geese are easier to identify than ducks. What will be the effects of tier two hunters on restricted harvested species? Tier two hunters will be asked to participate in a parts collection survey. So they got to send in the wings from the ducks they harvest.

That's the interesting thing about ducks is like a wing tells you everything you need to know. Yep. To a trained eye, a wing gives you species, gender. Yep. You got to send in a wing. So they can monitor the species and sex of ducks harvested and determine how much of a difference in harvest there is between tier one and tier two hunters. Therein lies the, there's the rub. Yep.

If they do that work and there's no discernible difference, then, right? Yeah. I think in general, the tier two hunters, if I was like foreshadowing or forecasting this, they're just going to end up with like more early season ducks and more hens because inherently someone that doesn't hunt waterfowl and is testing it out is going to be like hunting those early season environments. For sure. So they're going to end up with probably more, more hens, more drab, you know, early season ducks. Have you hunted up in a, uh, you've hunted in the North where you start hunting early

and the ducks are so drab because they don't have their full fall plumage yet. Man, it's hard. It's really hard. Hard to identify ducks. You know, that's a whole nother point, but Canada gloves off on pintails. Right. They can shoot four a day. And hen mallards too.

And, but see, because duck ID is so hard early in the year, you know, Canada's season open September 1. Well, ducks are like right at the tail end of their you know they're they're just coming out of the nest right yeah and they've pretty much said like we don't expect people to be able to identify hens and drakes that early yeah so you can just shoot four pintails a day in Canada and doesn't matter sex. So if I'm, I guess if I'm complaining about this ending up killing some extra hen pintails and hen mallards, I have to complain about that too. Well, it's, it's, it warrants pointing out though that not like waterfowl, just

to just, we should explain this to folks a little bit. Most wildlife, most all game animals are just administered within a state, right? Like each state runs their own program because a state it's deer kind of it's deer, right? Yep. And one state could like totally screw up its deer herd and that doesn't necessarily

immediately impact the neighboring state. Waterfowl does. state waterfowl does so waterfowl is managed by the federal government and the state governments who work in collaboration to set limits and right because you can't have one state totally screw the pooch on it yeah and then have it be that the next state suffers the consequences during the migration. But not only that, but we have international treaties. Like our ducks are managed at a state level. Our ducks are managed at a federal level. And they're managed in collaboration with Canada and Mexico.

So no one's really like totally going at rogue. No. I don't want to be the kind of guy that just hates everything new so i'm gonna i'm gonna back up i'm gonna reserve judgment on the tier one tier two thing until you see if there's like any kind of like crazy ass harvest difference yeah in south Harvest difference. Yeah. In South Dakota and Nebraska, there's things that don't concern me quite as much. But if this was the case in Iowa or Wisconsin, where you can only shoot one canvas back and you get 90% of the migratory canvas back population

stopping at Pool 8, Pool 9 on the Mississippi River. Is that a thing yeah okay so like the the mississippi river is the big staging ground for canvas backs in late october early november but if all of a sudden like everyone decided to do this i think you'd have these guys that love shooting canvas backs. Oh, they manipulate, they'd manipulate it. And they'd go to a tier two license and be like, well,

now I can shoot three canvas backs a day. That's a great point. And that worries me. Yeah. You know what? When it's a good point, when I was living in Washington state, um,

I know that we're not talking about Washington state, but I say Washington state had this when I was living in Washington State on the coast, you would absolutely do it for pintails. Right. Yep. Of course you would. Because your duck hunting boils down like around Thanksgiving, it's lights out for pintails.

Yep. So I would just be like, oh yeah, I'm going tier two. So I can just go shoot three. Pintails a day. Because that's all I'm hunting anyway. Right. I'm out there busting my ass trying to get Drake pintails. Yeah.

Uh. Right. Yeah. Right. Do you know what I mean? Single one. Yeah. To get a Drake pintail.

Yep. Now I can go like, who gives a shit? I'm just going to do tier two. There's, there's locations and states that would have to be like exemptions where you just can't do it. Therein lies the rub. It's like Michigan, the Blue Bills, and the Redheads. Our Blue Bills dropped to one in November,

and if you're hunting Lake Erie or Saddenaw Bay in November, you have a ton of Blue Bills. Yeah, you're passing on Blue Bills. Yeah, exactly. So if you could buy a license and now you can shoot three instead of one i mean there's guys that shoot a lot of blue bills that are gonna get that license hmm hmm coastal texas i think the same thing pintails and redheads down there like those boys just pass on pintails and redheads right most of their hunts because they're already limited like waiting for an extra species to show up you know

we'll see we'll see remember earlier when i said hey man just because you might not care about duck hunting but you should still listen to this. It's because of how beautifully complex the regulatory structure. So complex. For wildlife is. We have a guy we had on the podcast long ago. He's a social scientist. And he's working on this thing where you find people who are opposed to hunting or suspicious of hunting.

And then you walk them through certain arguments. Not arguments. You walk them through certain realities. And then you ask them, how did you feel about what I just told you? Right? And they'll tell you like, oh yeah, you know, hearing that I feel a little better about it. And they tested all these different

things. They tested food, right? They tested financial structures, so like conservation funding. Dude's name was Greg Blazkowicz. He explains this whole thing. But try all these different arguments out, right? And you Greg Blazkowicz. He explains this whole thing.

But try all these different arguments out, right? And you see what makes people what changes their impression. One of the things that I want to sauce this up by telling you what doesn't. The thing that they found that's

interesting that people are not buying it. Overpopulation. They don't buy overpopulation when you're like if you don't hunt deer we're gonna be overrun by deer they don't buy it yeah but think about it too who's likely to be anti hunting is people like from a more urban setting you know it just isn't gonna like people from a they're not from the ag community right so when someone from an urban environment you're like oh yeah we're gonna be overrun by ducks yeah they're probably like what we're not gonna be overrun what are you talking about i've seen a duck in three weeks right it's like it doesn't that's fair you know if you imagine like who probably is adversarial it's like people

with urban sensibility so when you lay out to them like overpopulation of wildlife it's just not something they live with right and they're like yeah just this is not keeping me up at night yeah the snow geese are destroying the tundra they're like i've never seen a snow yeah it's like it's hard for me to like you know i can, it's just, I don't buy it. Or whatever the hell. But either way, explaining the regulatory structure, like how shit like what we're talking about right now is determined and goes on. They're like, you know, then people are like, oh yeah, that's cool. We can see that. Put some at ease. Put some at ease put some at ease well especially waterfowl should and would because

laws with wildlife as a whole it seems like it's taken to the next level with waterfowl it's just that much more complex i have uh through my career like i've had a lot of exposure to you know people publishing production worlds who like do not come from a nature background do not come from a rural upbringing do not grow up hunting I have found time and again people being pleasantly surprised to hear that there are rules that govern the taking of game where they thought that in their mind they hadn't thought about it but their mind is just like it must be that you just walk out in the woods and shoot whatever and just shoot shit yeah yeah and they're like and you're like oh no check this one out you know and you'll tell them like for instance there is a you know you're the the end of your muzzle like

the end of your barrel there's a diameter okay there's like a thickness they tell you what's too thick and too thin right yeah that's a rule and not only that but what the projectile is made out of is regulated yep they're calling no shit i'm like yeah i'm just scratching the surface bro every single aspect of it is regulated no as someone who didn't grow up in in this world that is absolutely true people just think it's bloodlust antiquated bloodlust i'd say that there's like a decent amount of people i think that's what hunting is yeah damn straight you don't think that do you feel uh of course not. All right. Oh, one last thing I wanted to talk about.

So now Sean's going to come on with regularity. Yep. To do duck segments, waterfowl segments. Talk about ducks. The kind of shit we're talking about right now. Come on. He's going to tell you something you don't already know. Yep.

For the most of you but uh as a teaser to titillate everybody talk about the complexities that you have right like you're traveling around hunting dark state state state yep in a truck for the most part yep like driving from pulling the boat driving on a boat driving all over explain to folks some of the complexities of managing your kill, managing your take. Yeah, it is so much more complicated once you get into even moving a duck. For starters, it has to be wing or head attached, depending on where you're at. Moving it anywhere. Moving it anywhere. Moving it anywhere. Except it's final resting place.

Final resting place of like your home. Yep. So not your camper trailer. No. So there's no breasting out birds when you're on the road. And this is something that I've seen very neglected, I guess I would say just in general with waterfowl hunters, that people don't really care about it or know about it

until they get written a ticket for it, right? They don't realize that this is a thing, that it has to have a wing or a head naturally attached until you get to your house. Yep. And they're content going somewhere and breasting out their birds. And they've probably done it dozens of times and driven home with, you know, no problem. But then it's the one time they, you know, run into a game warden that they'll send.

They're aware of the and see a lot of these water it's a federal offense yep and a lot of these waterfowl regulations are so stringent because of the market hunting days because there was no rules around waterfowl in the market hunting days that once the rules did come about they were like really laid down the law really really had to be serious and particular to stop the market hunting and you actually had certain places that were like holdouts the illinois river valley is notorious for like even when the bird treaties came about and market hunting was no more they were like screw it we're gonna keep doing they're reluctant to get on board yeah and eventually it had to just be like wardens and federal officers like pushed into the illinois river valley to finally put the kibosh on

on market hunting yeah because they were gonna lose it all man i because they were going to lose it all, man. I mean, we were going to lose ducks. Yeah, it's amazing that we have, that we can even sit here and talk about shooting three canvas backs a day because there was a point where they were just on a string. There was almost no canvas backs. Wood ducks as well. And giant Canada geese.

That's a whole other story. Yeah, it's crazy when you read Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, which he was writing in the 1920s. Yep. His idea of what it means to see a goose compared to now, like trying to get him off the golf green

so he can finish out the round or whatever and play golf. Just wildly different situation. Yep. And that was in Wisconsin. Right. What it meant to see a Canada goose in Wisconsin. Which now is, you know, one of the better goose hunting states and like they're everywhere. Yeah.

Also in Wisconsin, Doug Duren talking about about being a kid and you saw a deer track. Southwest Wisconsin, you saw a deer track, you ran home and told my dad. It's so crazy. Yeah. So back on the traveling with waterfowl. So you have to have them attached, the wing or head. But then in addition, you have to have them attached the wing and winger head but then in addition you have to have the birds tagged which is another thing that like people are just so not aware of it's like your name your address your hunting license number etc this you, what the bird and sex is.

All this information has to be like with the bird as you travel. And the birds have to be separatable. Yeah, that's the thing. So they can't be frozen altogether. That's a rule I violated a thousand times in the field. Yep. Is that you're in a blind with a couple guys or in a boat with a couple guys and you got a pile of ducks laying there yep and i am they're supposed to be those

birds are supposed to be like that's mine that's mine yep keep mine a string it can't be that there's a pile of ducks in the boat nope and you have to you know i think uh i think that's been something that for a long time game wardens didn't bother with, didn't prosecute. It was one of those things that was a law that wasn't acted on. Was like when they show up to a boat, say, okay, you tell me whose birds are whose, right? But now it seems like it's kind of had a almost a renaissance of sorts or maybe people are just more aware of more cases of it across the country but in general party hunting is not allowed for waterfowl period like you have to claim what what you shot or what you didn't and it's hard because you have a flock of birds coming in and everyone's you know

together shooting at these birds sometimes it can be hard to know like who shot that hen mallard as a waterfowl hunter you just have to be responsible of like acknowledging that's the law and making a conscious effort to be like oh i shot duck. Like that is going in my pile in this boat. Or Max, I know you shot that duck. So you need to like claim that duck. Take ownership of the duck. Not just throw it in the big master pile. Right.

And because ultimately, if there's four hen mallards in the boat and two hunters, okay, yeah, there's, you there's two hen mallards a guy. It'd be nice if that was the law, right? If it was like a party hunting deal, but it's not. It is a, you cannot party hunt for waterfowl. So Max can't go shoot four hen mallards and give me two of them and be like, we're good. We're at our hen mallard limit.

It's just not the case. gotta you gotta keep it separated and if you're doing a lot of duck hunting you gotta keep eating ducks you gotta eat a lot of duck boy do we eat a lot of duck because you can't because possession limit possession limit and we you're cooking ducks right now cooking in the crock pot right now we eat duck every day we gotta find a new chili recipe yeah we gotta find a better chili you guys are making duck chili right now we've already had it two trips just put all that just well you know you get the birds that are your nice pluckers right that you want to like keep the skin on and do up nice. Then you get the ones that like. Got a little shot up.

Yeah. There's just no saving them. And those are chili ducks. Mm-hmm. So what do you got? Tell everybody what you got going on right now. I saw you cutting up jalapenos. Yeah.

It's, oh, it's a, there's nothing fancy about that chili recipe, but it's good. There's jalapenos, onions some chili packets celery um green peppers bunch of duck legs yeah a bunch of legs is goose in there too there's some goose in there and you cook it all down pick the meat off fill the bones out yep then shred it throw it all back in veggies crock pot yep crock pot chili pretty pretty good after a hot after a cold day on the water it's kind of like a what you got pot yeah yeah oh yeah we were just hearing the other night just just to close out uh one of our he's not in the room right now but one of our camera guys was talking about being at a remote shack in Alaska,

and this guy had this rule that anyone that didn't clean their plate, that food went into a pot, and on Friday, that was the meal. Yep. Just the scattered leftovers warmed up in a pot. Very motivational for his kids. Zero waste, man. Zero waste. I want to try it for a while yeah just see really what what that ends up tasting like all right we're gonna we're gonna go hunt

yeah now we're gonna go try to shoot some redheads now that it's totally daylight out yeah it's all right divers are a little different than your traditional puddle ducks. All right. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. You ready to let me try those shoes on? Yeah, go ahead. I'm putting some burks on. Here it is. Let me know what you think.

I'm just squeezing there real quick. Right on. You've got to walk around. It's going to take a couple laps. Right on. Perfect. Oh, last thing, too. Remember this.

Check out Duck Lore. It'll be on our YouTube channel. Right on. Perfect. Oh, last thing, too. Remember this. Check out Duck Lore. It'll be on our YouTube channel. Meat Eaters YouTube channel. Check out Duck Lore. Subscribe. Do that. Subscribe to the YouTube channel so you get all of our shit delivered to your house.

All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

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