The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 314: Skip the Flip

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Stu Miller, Brody Henderson, Rick Hutton, Seth Morris, Chester Floyd, and Phil Taylor. Topics discussed: Danny Rinella's theory about Bill Clinton and bike helmets; Stu's educational videos at Coon Creek Outdoors; on whether you can be a Southerner in a state where people ice fish; explaining how to tube skin; fur handling as a dying trade; Seth and Stu, Top Lot rivals; double proxy weddings in Montana; it's raining iguanas in Florida; how you ought not shoot a turkey with a rifle; will grizzlies be delisted in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem?; a 37-year-old sandhill crane; hen and drake survival rates; how you should support lynx habitat in Colorado instead of messing with bobcat hunters; the last great fur boom; buying trucks with muskrat money; that time when Stu welded up a boat; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Isn't Bill Smith the most popular name? Listen. Start the machine. I'll tell you. Go ahead. Listen. There are some names that the world's going to run out of.

Yes. And Bill, the world will there'll be like the world will There'll be Like The world will run out of Bills Before people get back Into naming their kid Bill Like after Harry Potter came out

Everybody named their kid Henry They wanted to name him Harry But they thought They knew that people would know That it was because they liked those books So they named him Henry Huge proliferation of Henrys I didn't know that Well We Huge proliferation of Henrys.

I didn't know that. Well, we almost ran out of Henrys. Now you can't throw a rock without hitting a Henry. They're all 10 years old or under. Okay. I feel like we're not going to run out of bills. What about Frank? Frank seems to be dying too.

Well, okay. Yeah, my dad was Frank. We almost named our daughter frankie so i was gonna name her frank after her paternal grandfather and then rose yeah and rose after her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother so i was gonna name her frankie rose and then found out that there's some musician named frankie rose and just change it to Rosemary because that's my mom's name. Good choice. But yeah, we'll probably run out of Franks, but they'll – Frankies. What about George?

I feel like that's – I like that name, but I – I think we'll get very low on Georges. Yeah, but do you think there's going to be a revival? Sorry, Phil. It's hard to know what's going to be a revival. No one saw it coming that everyone was going to name their kid Henry. They named their kids Henry because I think they thought that they'd be smart. I like the name Henry, but I had no clue there's like a majority of kids now are named Henry.

I know nobody named Henry. Yeah, but I mean, you go to a city, you go to a city, you can't throw a rock at a playground without hitting Henry. And you think it's for Harry Potter? You think that's like? My theory. Okay, that's your theory. I think it's for Harry Potter? You think that's like. My theory. Okay. That's your theory. I think it's a sound theory, but it's just,

I've never heard. I think they were like, I really want to name him Harry, but then everybody's going to know I like those kids books. So they named him Henry because it seemed, because it reminded them of him. I thought you were pulling legitimate research into that statement, but that's just your feeling.

This is your gut. Listen, there's certain theories I'm into that are hard to substantiate like my brother danny believes that he can't untangle in his head that bill clinton became president and all kids started wearing bike helmets like he feels that there's like he feels that something he doesn't he hasn't untangled it yet but he feels that there was a somehow a link between the clinton presidency and for how many hundreds of years kids didn't have bike helmets and then they all got a bike helmet when

bill clinton became president that's his theory so i don't know i don't share the theory i'm saying like some theories are hard to like prove and disprove they all started playing saxophone in their boxers too. Now, in terms of names, it would be interesting to know, like just to tie this all together. Did Monica drop off in prevalence following the Clinton presidency? See, I could see that happening.

Yeah, for sure. That seems very probable. I don't know though, because that was during that Friends show don't know though because that was during that friend show where the oh that was true it was peak friends popularity like right now i wouldn't be surprised and if this podcast had a different if we had a different sort of focus we could dig into this stuff a little bit more i wouldn't be surprised if jeffrey if there were some people who were going to go with Jeffrey had a change of heart.

I'm not following. There's a fellow named Jeffrey Epstein. I'm following. I got you now. That's very recent. Who was hung to death in his jail cell. Wink, wink, wink, wink. No, I didn't say. No, I said.

Yeah, that's right. Good point. I put it like hung to death, like someone did it. I feel like. I think there's said. Yeah, that's right. Good point. I put it like hung to death, like someone did it. I feel like. Which I give, I think there's a 50% chance that's true. Which circles us back to the Clintons. It could be linked to Clintons. Just like those bike helmets too.

Since we're so off topic, do you want to know the leading, do you want to know the leading conspiracy theory? Someone explain. I didn't understand like what the leading, you want to know the lead conspiracy theory about Epstein? Let's hear it. This might be passe now, but like at a time this was the one that's as explained to me by someone who traffics heavily in conspiracy theories it was that epstein was a massad agent that's good man oh i think that's

old news man well listen dude i didn't if i made it up i would have said i made it up i'm saying this is so you know this sean you follow this kind of stuff oh i thought you're talking about that rabbit hole for like two years yeah yeah um sean's here sean weaver he's here to talk about ducks but somehow and he's now a big he's now a big jeffrey epstein expert okay you tell us the theory sean yeah no the the link or the thing that they say is that i tell you this no you did not tell me this okay is that glaine maxwell the lady that was just on trial yeah as it goes her dad was massad that's what they say starts to make some gravy

yeah but you're not filling it in let me just fill it in this we're so far off this is not what this show is about ladies and gentlemen it's just not what it's about in fact stew miller from coon creek outdoors is here and he's supposed to be flipping a bobcat hide right now which he's going to explain in one second so bear with us we're going to get into appropriate subject matter. Epstein was a Mossad agent. How he served the Mossad was he would get prominent academics, politicians, financial individuals into compromising situations. Film them. Film them.

Whatever he did. And then later when Israel needed them to do or not do something, okay, they would say, oh, and by the way, we happen to have a very interesting video. You might not like to be out. And as the conspiracy theory goes, that was why Jeffrey Epstein had to be silenced on that fateful night in his jail cell while the guards slept and the security camera malfunctioned.

Plausible. Anyway. Phil looks very titillated. You can tell Phil really wants to get into it, but he's also uncomfortable how off-subject manner this is. Stu, introduce yourself. Oh, Brody.

Real quick, Brody's here. Chester the Divestor. Which Chester's a very dying name. It's just been hanging on for like 100 years, I feel like. Yeah, I feel like that might be why I like you so much. Because you're the only Chester I've ever known. The pets are keeping it alive, though. Like dogs.

Yeah. Rick Hutton's here. Seth's here. We're going to talk about Seth's upcoming wedding a little bit. I'm here. Hi, folks. Yeah, we're also joined... He's remote, but I still feel his presence. Sean Weaver's here, and he's going to hit us with the latest installment of Sean's Duck Report, which is one of my favorite things we do.

What's up, Sean? What's going on with you? Well, just finally got off the road after two straight months of filming Duck Lore, our new duck hunting show. I'm actually, the reason I'm doing this remote is I got a little sick, got a little ran down from being on the road that long. The utility company actually called while i was gone and they wanted to check if my water meter was broke because i hadn't used any water in my place for two months so it's been like dead or yeah it was kind of a nice wellness check you know knowing the utility companies got me covered you're like dude at least someone knows when i've been gone uh also duck lore the first episode is coming out february 15th and that's a

texas teal hunt with me and jean-paul and i like it it's it's pretty cool walk us through a couple more episodes that are gonna be coming up yeah so first few episodes are going to be Texas Teal, then Callahan and me in North Dakota, Giannis in Nebraska, and yourself in Michigan. So jumping kind of all over the Midwest. Good stuff, man. Learning all kinds of stuff about ducks. Yep.

Learn a lot about ducks with a guy that knows a lot about ducks, Sean Weaver. But, okay, now okay now stew introduce yourself all right so um i'm stew miller i uh i run a couple different youtube channels uh coon creek outdoors is is the one that that i'm here for um and i'm kind of a trapper more or less so uh that's how i i came to meet steve and uh yeah i dabble in uh trapping and fur handling so tell everybody where you're from i'm from illinois southern illinois oh i like when students we gotta get into this for a minute so this is on point phil don't don't get nervous i have a problem with,

I have a real problem with people in Southern Illinois who think they're Southern. And I told Stu, if people ice fish in your state, you are not Southern. I don't care where the Mason-Dixon line is. That's the thing. There's a lot of people ice fishing right

now because of the cold this is the perfect time for this you can't be a southerner in a state where ice fishing is occurring i disagree i disagree i so disagree stew says that he explained to me that there's so much dissatisfaction that there's such a cultural divide between the greater Chicago area and then like the agricultural segment of Illinois. Am I okay to say this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's such a cultural, just a huge cultural divide that it's pushed Southern Illinois to the South in mentality rather than be associated with with the the the the political corruption and ongoings in chicago am i saying this correct 100 yeah you get somebody five miles south chicago

and they're gonna say they're from southern illinois yeah they're like by which i mean not chicago not chicago uh i fell in love with uh stew's videos because I would go, I found you in a totally organic way. I would be curious about how to do something with fur handling. Like, for instance, last year, a little over, well over 13, 14 months ago, we got onto a couple red foxes one morning and got the red foxes i had a little uh 17 hmr with me and we got a breeding pair of red foxes and i was like i wanted to get them tanned and put up real nice and now they adorn my daughter's actually they hang from my daughter's bunk bed thing and she loves them oh cool but uh and i wanted to like get them tan for myself and i used to put up red foxes and sell them when i was young but i was just kind of curious about how to do the feet

you know and all that kind of stuff different than how you do for fur handling for uh fur trade and i would get typed in like how do you do x y and z and i'd wind up on your thing or how do you do x y and z with a skunk? And I'd wind up on your page. So eventually I sent you an email. Yeah. And it's been, we've been interacting ever since. Oh yeah. Every day I ask them a question. Yeah.

No, it's been, it's been fun. So that's how we met. We're going to talk about that. Now, here's what I want you to, we got a lot of stuff we got to cover off on, but I want you to explain, grab the Bobcat and explain what's been done and what people can listen to you now do. Like why we did what we did and where we're at with it now. All right. So yesterday we took a bobcat that was skinned and then Steve, you fleshed it.

Yep. Tube skin. Tell everybody what tube skin is. Tube skin. So basically the way that furs are sold through the fur market is their tube skin. So basically, um, the way that furs are sold through the fur market is their tube skin. And it's basically where you're going to make a cut kind of on its backend. And you're going to kind of peel the hide off, uh, very similar to where you're like taking off a sock basically. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it.

You know, and you're going to peel that, that critter down and you're going to end up with a, as you said, a tube of, it's not going to be cut open where, you know, if you've seen like traditional pictures, you know, you see where they, they split them, split them up the belly or across the back. And then you imagine that you're like the, the incision being that like when you're gutting a deer, you make that incision all the way up to his chin and then you got like an open hide. So then you would lay the hide or the pelt flat ways.

Yeah. This is, it's not going to look like a bear rug when you're done no no it's gonna be all all together in as like you said a tube skin yeah you cut uh just think about like this cut around and like the only cuts you make through the hide are around the ankles right yeah that's it yeah so imagine that you cut around the back cut cut around the rear ankle, a circle around it on each leg, and then you run a slit up to the anus, and then the whole thing comes off just like that. Peel it right off, yeah. So that's what I did to that bobcat. Yep. That's a small female bobcat. Small female bobcat, yeah.

That's my prized possession. My favorite thing I owned used to be my buffalo skull that I found that I wrote a book about, but now it's that. Well, we better not screw it up then. So now after you, after you fleshed it, then we put on a fleshing beam and we used a fleshing knife to flesh all the, all the, all the membrane and the fat and all the residual fat. So we got it just down to the, the skin. And after we did that, we, we split the ears because you're going to tan it for yourself. So we wanted to make sure, you know, that's something I never had done before. Yep. So we split the ears and then we put it on a board. So different critters are sold different

ways. And with like a canine, so your fox, your coyotes and your bobcats, all those are sold fur out. So you can see the presentation, the pelt. Some of your other critters like muskrats, minks, and coons, they're all sold fur in. So do you know why Seth and I were speculating about that the other day? Who decided that? Does it ever change? Have you ever heard of it changing? Back in the day, they sold coons actually flat. Oh, they did?

You would split them, yep. The reason that I've always been told is, you know, with a bobcat, say, and a coyote, you're using basically all of that. So you want to be able to visually see that whole hide. You want to see the fur. You want to see the fur, all of that. So you want to be able to visually see that, that whole hide. You want to see the fur. You want to see the fur, all of it. So, whereas like on a coon, you know, we, we board them fur in, but you also cut a window, an inspection window and the grader will actually grade that.

And that's actually kind of the prized part of that hide is what's in that inspection window. So he can get a good general idea of the quality of that hide through that inspection window. Take a muskrat, for instance. Yeah. I remember selling muskrats at auction and they would still sort of open. They would bend it up to look inside it, to look at the back fur. Yeah. Why is a muskrat not just stretched fur side

out? I think a lot of it is so they can see the primeness of the pelt. Got it. You know, cause you know how a muskrat, so muskrats, and we'll kind of talk pelt primeness, but you know, the reason that we trap critters in the winter is because that's whenever the,

the fur is prime, the pelt is prime. And if you ever. No, it's because you do, it do it's because uh you do it between big game hunting and ice fishing it's because there's a month when you might get bored no this goes way way back this goes way they set regulations in europe like 400 years ago to trapping regulations. So where you would actually target prime critters. And so if you ever heard the term a blue pelt. Yep. Okay.

So blue pelt is essentially kind of an unprimed pelt, early season pelt or late. So that's. And point out, I mean, literally blue. It's blue. Like if you ever kill a deer, like an early, if you live in a state where you're allowed to like get rolling in September or something, you skin that deer and it's like the leather is blue. It's blue. Yeah. So that's what we call a blue pelt.

And what happens is a lot of people are in the assumption that temperature is what makes that for a prime. And that's actually false. It's actually based more on daylight hours, which has a correlation to temperature, obviously. So, you know, as winter progresses, further north you are, you're losing daylight quicker than south. So the pelts will generally prime up quicker. So like the winter,

what the hell they call the shortest day of the year? Winter solstice? Yeah, it's when Yanni goes out and drags a burning log around his house a bunch of times. Tosses lead at people. Hits it with an axe and throws lead into a bucket. All kinds of Latvian things. When he's doing that, shortest day of the year, like peak primeness. Well, not necessarily.

No? Not, well, because there's other factors too. So, you know, for instance, um, whenever we're talking with coons, they have a rutting season, which is, you know, kind of right now, a couple of weeks ago, and we're talking, you know, kind of middle end of January where I'm from. So they will actually go from den to den to den

to rut, no different than like a buck will. But what'll happen is going from den to den to den to rut. No different than like a buck will. But what will happen is going from den to den to den, they'll start to get a patch and rub fur on their back. And it will actually become bald. From squeezing into the holes. From running around so much from den to den to den. So you've seen, I always hear like that they're rubbed. You've seen it where they actually wear their hair out, squeezing into holes and logs. It will become infected, that they will rub it down raw,

raw meat from going, I mean, they get crazy. It's just no different than a deer in rut. You'll see that stuff. I haven't seen it. I've seen it worn down. I haven't seen it worn down like raw, raw hide, you know.

It'll be scabbed over. And, you know, that's obviously a not prime pelt, you know, that you want to trap so you know even though there's a season for them generally quit trapping then yeah you know i gotta interrupt you real quick i don't want to i don't want to establish a rivalry between you and seth but there's something you need to know about seth when seth was a little boy he uh would go down to a fur buyer in in uh flesh uh, flesh and stretch raccoons. That's awesome.

In high school. Yeah. That was my job. Peace work. No, hourly. No, peace work. Peace work. Peace work.

And how would they give you for one? Not much. It's like three or four bucks. Yeah. Something like that. That's more than stuff's worth now anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

I was like, I forget what it was. No, it wasn't. Yeah. It didn't seem, forget what it was. No, it wasn't. Yeah. It didn't seem, well, at the time it seemed like a lot. Oh, I used to peel log home logs for 35 cents a foot, which at the time. Was pretty good.

Yeah. I wouldn't be able to feed one kid. I wouldn't be able to feed one of my kids on that now. What was a good night then? What was a good, good night flushing then? Oh, man, it all depended because we would sometimes we'd like get behind freeze a bunch of hides you know we'd we'd guys would guys would bring them in either like you know like whole animal

or they would bring them in skinned out already just i just need to flesh and put them up. But, uh. Would you go down and skin the whole ones too? Yeah. Oh, you would? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So. You get paid more for like one that you had to

skin, flesh and put up? Yeah. It was like, it was like two, two or three bucks to skin it, two or three bucks to flesh it and put it up. Something like that. Mm-hmm. Um, but I mean, we used to do, we used to

flesh from dark to dark some, some weekends. What's that mean? Just like start early in the morning and start fleshing. Oh, you start before it got light out and quit after it got dark. Yeah. Yeah.

And what might you do in a day? You know, do you remember? I mean, I don't remember at all. Yeah. More than 10. Oh yeah. Yeah. More than 10.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd do like 10 or so in an evening after school. Hmm. Sometimes more, sometimes less. It all depends on what people were bringing in. Going to school all greasy. No, I was after school.

Yeah. So anyways, I don't want you to, I don't want you and Seth to have like a little thing now where you like feel like you're at odds with one another. Oh no. I just want you to know you're, you're across from a, you're across from a former. I feel where you feel like you're at odds with one another. I just want you to know you're across from a... No, I feel like we're brothers. You're sitting across from a former professional. It's a dying trade.

Seth's very young, so this isn't that long ago. If I say high school, it's like people looked like a lot different back then. All right, so go on. And circle back around to the damn bobcats, Stu. Yeah, you keep getting me distracted. No, they go into holes, they rub their hair off. You're talking about

I was trying to make the claim that like primeness might be the winter solstice, but you're saying there's other factors that override that. A lot of other variables, yeah. Coyotes, you know, their primeness is usually earlier in the season. They'll start to degrade fairly quickly. You know, a lot depends on... I mean, like his hair, the hair wears out or whatever.

Yeah. Depending on where they're at. If they're in like a open country, you know, where they're not having to like push through a lot of brush and stuff, they're going to stay, you know, prime longer where if you're out, you know, West where they're pushing through a bunch of sagebrush and different things like that, that'll slowly wear out that fur. No kidding. Oh, yeah. There's a bunch of different variables, yeah. Hey, tell about the one that happens with beavers in the spring.

What sort of ends the season on beavers? So beavers will actually start fighting as they come out, depending on if you have ice or not. But they'll start fighting and they'll start biting each other. And so whenever the beavers start, they'll have bite marks on them. Very similar to muskrats will do the same thing. Whenever you start getting a beaver with a bunch of bite marks and chew marks on them, it's time to quit. And that might happen before the season even ends. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. No difference in like, like the, our coon season right now, um, you're, you're going to get coons that are rubbed during season that are still in.

So you've got to make that decision to either release them or quit trapping or, you know, whatever. So, you know, let them grow another better pelt. Yeah. And you'll see that, you know, cause, uh, especially on your boar coons, they'll have a big scar patch usually right on the back. And it'll be from years and years and years. Really? Oh yeah. I never noticed that, man.

You'll notice it'll be a darker patch right down the center and that's all scars. And whenever you're skinning and fleshing them, you've got to be kind of careful of it too, because that's not. It's like all scar tissue. It's all scar tissue. Yeah.

Tough. Huh. On a lot of your older big boars, you'll see that. And as the pelt dries, you'll see that kind of brownish, darker brown hue right down the back. And that's from them rubbing year after year after year going like squeezing in the dens yep just constantly yep they just go from den site to den site to den so they they will run themselves i mean you'll see them out in the daytime they'll get real skinny and just just just like a buck and rut they'll just run

themselves stupid covering ground yep okay back to the bob. Back to the bobcat. Back to the bobcat. So we've got the bobcat and, uh, so we put them on. Oh yeah, you know what we were talking about is why fur in, fur out and all that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what we got distracted on. But we put the bobcat on a board yesterday, um, because this bobcat is going to be, we

want them fur out. Um, and that's how they're sold, which you're going to tan it. So it really doesn't matter. Because on a bobcat, the buyers want to see. They want to see the spots. That's your prime. You know, on a coyote, it's kind of that back or the belly. A coon, it's the back.

But on the bobcat, they really want to see those spots. That's where the money is at. The spotted belly. Yep, the spotted belly. And generally, you know, the clear, more predominant spots are your higher dollar fur. So. I've heard guys say that if the belly, like

they'll go by how many fingers wide the belly strip is. Mm-hmm. Like if you have a belly strip that's like four fingers wide and nice, bright, clear spots, that's a good one. Yeah. Now I got to admit the one you're handling

right there is a two finger. It's got a two finger belly on it. Yanni just got a pretty nice one. Oh, yeah. That was a nice one. That's like two hands wide belly. Yeah,

that was a big boy. Jeez. And if you look at them compared to like the Western Bobcats versus the Eastern Bobcats, you know, these Bobcats out here are a lot clearer. Uh, our, our Eastern Bobcats are just almost brown.

Yeah. Totally different. Trash cats. Yeah. Not worth it. So, okay. Tell everybody, it's on a split board. It's on a split board.

Explain all that. So we boarded this cat on a split board. You can board them on a solid board or a split board. I have a preference of a split board simply because with the split boards, we're going to flip this hide anyway, so we're going to have to manipulate them. And the split board just allows us to, to remove the animal from the board just a little bit easier. Now, if, if, if it needs to be, if it needs to be fur out, why did we start it fur in? Because we want to get that critter to dry.

There's, and depending on who you talk to, some guys will, what they call skip the flip, which is they will. That's a good t-shirt. Skip the flip. Skip the flip. But we need to illustrate, we need to call Hunter Spencer and see if he can capture in an image a man who has simply not flipped it. Skip the flip. Skip the flip. There's a lot of guys if it's a picture of a dude with a bobcat how do you know if he flipped it or not it's a hard illustration i'm gonna think about that how would you capture that in the illustration and then it

would say skip the flip but we're gonna flip this one because and the reason we're gonna flip it is we want to make sure that hide is is good and dry and that we're not going to have any issues with, you know, molding or drying issues. So we boarded this thing for in on a split board and we've let it sit, you know, depending on temperature and humidity of things like that, 12, 16 hours. But that one, because of, because of our schedule today, he's been sitting... He's been sitting a little longer. A little longer. So it's going to be a little bit more of a trick. Now, one day I called Stu and I asked,

I was doing a Martin and I had to leave town. I wasn't going to be around to flip. So I didn't know the slogan, skip the flip. And I said, can I skip the flip? And he said, people do, and it's something that you can get away with. And that son of a bitch dried on that board. I got to where I was thinking about how I was going to try to destroy the board. I wanted the Martin more than the board.

And I was like, maybe I can split this board and crack it into little pieces and somehow get it out of there. And then after much trial and error, I eventually got that son of a bitch off but dried on the board. Maybe I can split this board and crack it into little pieces and somehow get it out of there. And then after much trial and error, I eventually got that son of a bitch off, but dried on the board. When I do them right, fur in overnight, and then flip it, it just falls off. Just so much easier. No different than this. So I see you guys got it salted, too, or had it salted. No, a little bit of Borax.

Oh, Borax. Talk about that now, Phil. Or, sorry, not Phil. You know, I don't want Phil to talk about that. But Bill, that guy. If Phil was named Bill, he'd know. Yeah, explain the borax a little bit. A little bit of borax.

So a lot of people assume use salt for whatever reason. I guess it's just an old-timey thing. You salt a hide. If you're selling to the fur trade, that's actually, you don't want to use salt. And the reason being is the salt interacts with the hide negatively. Whereas the, whenever they actually go to tan it, you know, it has a negative impact on the hide. So we use Borax, which is just 20 mule team Borax. It's just detergent is all what it is. And just helps us uh in areas that would be like under the arms that are not able to have air circulate quite as good use a little borax just to

help help the drying process you know a trick i learned on coon creek outdoors that i need that you need you need some feedback on is uh where you live it's more humid yeah so you were talking about you have a block of borax yeah like you let it sit out and it turns into a brick and you just rub it on yeah so you have a thing that looks like a bar of soap but it's a block of borax and you rub it on i was like man that's like a shit it works great yeah you can't get that here i don't care how long you let that stuff sit in your garage it will not turn into a block. It's too arid. Put it in the bathroom with you. Take a shower. Let it

collect a little bit of moisture, then go stick it outside. That's a good idea. You need to make a video. You need to make like an addendum to your video, and then it needs to pause, and you hit a certain button if you're from the arid west. See me in my bathroom in the shower. So you think I'd be able to get a block

of borax if I did that? You're putting humidity to it. I almost was going to have you send out and block a borax. So you think I'd be able to get a block of borax if I did that? I mean, you're putting humidity to it. I almost was going to have you send me a block of borax and I thought it'd get to where I live and dry out and fall apart and turn back into powder. A lot of good tricks. There's not a situation where you'd salt it. No, no.

The only situation if you're going to salt it is if you are going to tan it yourself. So then you're actually going to use, and you know, there's a lot of different ways to tan, but essentially what the salt does is really remove all the oils from the hide and pull all the oils out. But the tanning process that you're going to do at home versus the tanning process that's done commercially is different. So the salt kind of has a negative impact on it in that manner i've heard people describe i'm curious if you'd agree with this i've heard people describe home tanning as more of a preservation method than like uh then then uh kind of like an archival i'm not finding the right words but that that you're talking quality

yeah that that it's more like it's, it's pretty temporary, a home tan job. Like maybe you'll get 10 years out of it, but you're not going to get out of it what you'd get out of it from a commercial tannery. Do you agree with that or not agree? Not necessarily. I think it's all, it's all how much love you put into tanning it. You know, that's where a lot of people will fail. A lot has to go into the breaking process. And the way that furs are tanned commercially, they're able to be broken, like, like garment material, you know, very soft, you know, but home tanning, you know, you can brain tan something, which is what the Indians did. So there's, I was at a museum yesterday and there's still stuff around from. There's been brain tan.

That was, that was brain tan. That's kind of what I was hearing about brain tanning is that it didn't, um, that like moisture can really be hard on it. You know, it's all in how you, like I said, how you tan it. A lot of the, the brain tanning, uh, involves like a smoking process to, to waterproof it, keep the bugs out of it. You know, but you're basically just replacing the natural tannins in the hide with some sort of a synthetic material for the majority of your home tanning. So like if you've seen the orange bottle or the different acid, I mean, there's a million different ways. Acid tanning, there's some egg white tanning. I mean, you're just. What methods do you use? I brain tan and I use the orange bottle

Hunters and Trappers high tanning formula. Those are my two favorite that I've had a lot of success with. With deer brains? Any brains. Really? I believe it's the lanolin, I believe is what it is in the brains. Yeah. Huh.

And there's- Tell me what all kinds of brains you've used. I've used everything. Everything I can get my hands on. Deer brains are the easiest, you know, to acquire during the season. But there's this kind of a myth, and I've found it to be fairly accurate, where whatever animal you have, basically their brain is sized accordingly to tan their height. I've heard that. And I've found that to be fairly accurate.

Yeah. Okay. So, which I just save everything up at the end of that to be fairly accurate. Yeah. Okay. So, which I just save everything up at the end of the year and mix it all together. Big old bucket of brains. Big old bucket of brains. I'd like to see that.

Big old bucket of brains. Yeah. Don't drink that. No. Okay, back to the bobcat. Okay. Because then we've got

to cover off on some stuff. I just want to get to the part where you're flipping it. Okay. And tell people how not to tear it. All right, so this thing's dried on the board for, said, a number of hours. And it's, I don't know where you're flipping it okay and tell people how not to tear it all right so this

thing's dried on the board for said a number of hours and it's uh i don't know if you can hear it through the microphone but it sounds almost like dry paper and that's kind of what you're going for you know you don't want it to be too dry it's going to be hard to flip but you also don't want it to be too wet where you're going to have mold issues so we've got it to that point right now oh you know what bro i gotta? I got to tell you something. You really distract me on this. But to your credit, because I'm trying to get everything you know out. All right.

Because that's going to be a wall hanger. Right. Stu turned the ears, which is not something that most tra trappers for the commercial market would do, but he turned the ears out of concern for my wall hanger Bobcat. You better explain that. All right. So we split the ears. Yeah, split them. We split the ears and traditionally anything from below the ears up in the commercial trade is not used. So generally, you know, fleshing process, different things like that. We don't normally use that, but since you're going to tan it and use it for a

wall hanger, we went ahead and split the ears. And basically on, on an ear of, uh, of most critters, you have an inner ear, kind of in an outer ear. The inner ear is actually what has the cartilage and on like a coyote say, that's what makes the ears pronounced stand up and then the outer skin has the fur on it that you see but on a bobcat there's fur on both sides and you want to keep that so in order to let the tan solution penetrate and this is just over my years of doing it if you actually separate the cartilage from the skin in the ear, you're able to let that tan solution kind of penetrate up the ear and ideally save both sides of the ear. And then by doing so, you've actually saved the cartilage as well. So after you get your tan pelt back, your ears still look like ears, basically. They don't look all wrinkled up, you know, and kind of shriveled up.

But I think a way to imagine it is imagine that you're going to cut off your own ear and tan it. Because think about it, like grab your ear flap, right? You have skin and skin. Yeah. You'd have to get like how you're going to, you know, you'd want to get in there and split it open so that you were getting each side of the skin to keep your ear properly tanned up.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, just from my experience over the years, it just seems like if you don't split the ears, generally that inner part where the cartilage sets, it won't take the tan solution very well. And then it'll end up slipping. The fur will slip, which basically just means that it'll fall off. So, yeah, we tried to do you a favor here and split the ears and hopefully whenever it gets tanned, it'll, it'll come out right. So we did

that and now it's time to finally flip this, this critter. So I'm going to take it off the board. There's a couple of different ways to flip it. And basically, like I said, we've got this thing tube skin, so we want to turn it out outward and we're going to roll it kind of like you would turning a sock inside out. Um, so generally you have a lot more tendency to rip the hide if you start from the bottom and go up. But if you turn them from the nose in and kind of push the head in and roll it down, generally that's a safer bet to not ripping the hide or tearing the hide. You know, a lot has to go on how far you let this thing dry. There's just that fine window in flipping the hides

that, you know, you kind of need to hit. But I think we'll be okay on this. Is there some critters that their hide tears a lot easier than others? So, like, fox have really thin skin. Yeah. There's a big number trapper that i follow and he's skipped the flip on foxes for years you know uh he puts them up on wire too so a lot of wire so you know there's just there's one way to do it and then there's a hundred other

different ways to do it you know there's not really one set way which is which is kind of cool so and depending on who you talk to and what part of the country it's but we're going to do it. You know, there's not really one set way, which is, which is kind of cool. So, and depending on who you talk to and what part of the country it's, but we're going to do it this way because it's the way I've always done it. And we're going to basically start at the nose and we're going to just kind of need that head down through the body and, and pull it through.

And then we'll have the, uh, have the bobcat fur out and you'll be able to see your cat. All right. So Stu Miller, Coon Creek Outdoors, he's going to start turning, do it as loud as you can. Because we're going to cover off on our other stuff and I want people to be able to hear you doing it. And I'll keep people posted on what's going on. Let's hope I don't rip it. Oh, if you rip it, dude.

First thing that's going to happen is this show is over. If you rip it, Stu, all you have to do is say just do it yourself next time then i ripped a few in my day people get pissed it's like well i can imagine i'll be i'll be livid take it to someone else i don't know yourself you ever hear someone so mad that they become uh apoplectic they'll be me i've never heard of that if stew rips my bobcat uh all right so we gotta touch off on this. You weren't even here when I was talking about this. Where are you going?

I was going to run to the bathroom quick, but I'll stick around. Talking about your marriage. Oh, yeah. I better stick around. Am I still officiating? Yeah. Okay. No, we haven't found someone else.

Okay. If you want to. Did I tell you? Oh, yeah. Did I tell you I was reading up on what I got to do? Very simple to become a minister. No, you didn't tell me, but I listened to the podcast. Okay.

We told the listeners. And a guy was pointing out an interesting thing, that you can get married. In Montana, you can get married by proxy. You could have a wedding that you're not at. I didn't realize this. Montana recognizes what's called a double proxy marriage. So both of us don't want to be here. There's a marriage.

Yeah, you could get married here where no one shows up. Huh. That, yeah. Well, let me, I'll run that by Kelsey, see what she says. The guy that wrote it, and this is the interesting thing about the U.S. military. So, the guy wrote it, and he's active duty military. We're to the front legs now. Oh, yeah. It's getting interesting.

Now, see, it's going to be hard. Phil, do you like it that there's a loud noise in the background? I mean, I think it's great. Okay. Normally, I would hate it, but in this circumstance, I'm letting it slide. Well, here's what I'm worried about. Here's what I'm worried would hate it, but in this circumstance, I'm letting it slide. Here's what I'm worried about is how he's going to get those legs inverted. Sounds like paper crinkling.

This guy's active duty military. And I didn't realize this, but it makes sense. The military does not recognize engagements in terms of shuffling you around. So you could get sent somewhere else. Yeah, you could be like, oh, we're engaged. Doesn't matter to them. No paperwork has been signed. Rick could probably speak to this a little bit. It's true.

So he and his woman were getting a PCS, a permanent change of station where they'd be sent to different military bases. But they were both gone on deployment. So

neither of them's there, and they got married anyway. Double proxy. Then they were able to move back to the same location because then the military recognized their union. Isn't that a happy ending, Phil? That's great because you get to skip all the bullshit and just have a party later. I don't want to call you out, Seth,

but you don't seem like you're too warm to that idea. Well, listen. Yeah. Kelsey's not going to be warm to that idea. Do you guys have one of those little registries going? No.

You can do that? A registry? No. I think you should get one going. We should advertise it on the podcast. Walleye boat. Oh, you know what else we're going to advertise? Stu's single. We got to get to that. To find Stu more girlfriends. No, no. So we're not doing the

registry thing. We're saying if you feel like you want to want to give us something just throw us a little cash because there ain't no there's no registry out there it's gonna like knock a wall out in my house i got it so you're just like you just want money yeah no that's great you don't need china i don't i don't need like a kitchenaid mixer or something like that you know is kelsey going to listen to this podcast and hear you throw her under the bus so savagely like that?

No, she's totally on board with this. No, I was going about the double proxy. Oh, yeah, she ain't going to like that. Yeah, okay. In Florida right now, should we pause and give an update here? Oh, yeah, okay. We're going to give a Bobcat update.

Look at that. You know, I should have brought my fur brush, fur comb because right now you he's the way can i can i see it for a minute oh you want to speak while we're speaking of updates i just want to update our listeners that the kayak is sold so oh no tell tell about what the guy that bought it gave us. Oh, yeah. So the guy that bought the kayak, I forget his name, man. I'll look it up. Did you have a lot of people wanted the kayak? Yeah. The guy that bought the kayak, he's active duty military.

He's stationed up in Great Falls. And he gave Steve and i 105 millimeter uh shell casings which my son is very interested in that uh were fired on a deployment and i think he said like afghanistan or iraq or syria i can't tell what to do with a gun for your be like a hell of an ashtray or so i got i don't know I'm going to do with mine. Yeah, it's sweet. Here comes the front legs. Oh, is he doing the front legs now? Okay, the bobcat is now revealed.

We can see the hide, the beautifully split ears, and he's trying to do the final thing of get the legs inverted. Which is tough because you left them so long whenever you skinned them. So we're trying to pull them through. Like I left them too long. Well... But that's the difference between a wall hanger and a commercial trade bobcat. It's very exciting.

See, I don't know what the weather's going to be. I want to cover off on a news bit, but the problem is this isn't going to release right away. It's going to be a couple days, so the cold snap might be over. But there was a national cold snap. Still going on right now. And in Florida, they're releasing warnings about the iguanas falling from trees. So Florida's got an invasive iguana problem. We actually had some of that iguana fat,

and Kevin Gillespie made us iguana fat cookies, which were wonderful, like sugar cookies with iguana fat. And a guy wrote in how these frozen iguanas fall from trees and get stunned, and they're just laying around on roads and sidewalks. We have a bunch of pictures of just iguanas that fell from outer space laying around. And he's kind of wondering about if there's like an ethical dilemma to picking up and to dispatching iguanas that are in such a compromised position. Kind of like shooting caribou in a river or something.

Like shooting caribou in a river or whatever. Shooting fish in a barrel. Yep. Yeah. We're also thinking about whether or not this falls under the umbrella of Chetaket. I feel it does not. What do you think, Chester? No, it's more of an ethics thing.

Just a moral dilemma, which Corinne, what did she write up there? Chethical? Yeah. Is it Chethical? Is it Chethical? I mean, like I said said it's a moral dilemma i think if you knew how good that fat was for making cookies and if you like eating them why the heck not they want them out of there um but this guy's moral dilemma is like some of these

are too small to eat so like he doesn't want to damage the resource like he doesn't want to damage the resource he doesn't like killing things that he doesn't eat you know so so he's weighing out do i serve the the goal of eliminating the iguana from florida or do i serve my personal ethic which is don't kill stuff. You're not going to eat which Trump's, which man. I mean, it sounds like these guys really have a problem. Um, are you clear on what the problem is? Just anybody would do a lot of burrowing and like seawalls and house foundations and things like, yeah,

that's the problem. Yeah. It's not like a biological issue. I don't think so. Like, I don't think they're eating native bird eggs and stuff like that, that I know of. Man, you think they would. Yeah, you think they would be.

I thought they were like doing something to native. That's possible. But what I've heard a lot is like they're doing damage to structures and things like that. We have a headline in front of us. Cold weather could bring frozen iguanas this weekend. It's just like a picture of some iguanas just taking a quick nap. But yeah, I think like if you take the ones you're going to eat, you know, do a little, little both there.

I don't know. No, I would think so, man. But here's the thing I could weigh out. Let's say I really developed a taste for iguanas down there. Okay. And I had like a little yard and now and then I'd get me a big fat iguana. Yeah. And I was watching some small ones lurking around and I knew that if I don't know what their life expectancy is, but I knew that they'd get big.

And then I'd have like, I've never eaten the eagle. I've eaten their fat, but I never eaten. Let's say I loved it. I could see a situation where one would fall from a tree, a little one would fall from a tree and I would resuscitate it and warm it up in order to grow it big because I loved

iguana meat and not, and not go out and do what I was supposed to do, which is go out and kill it. Here's the thing. I don't know if it's legal or not. Why don't you just make a little iguana cage, take those iguanas. Start feeding them. Start raising them yourself.

It's like rabbits. Get them out of the wild. I just thought of a real, I just remembered a real world version of what I'm talking about. that this isn't the real world but a personal version you know how lake trout um got into yellowstone lake and started to they're real hard on cuts not bull trout yeah the yellowstone cutthroats okay yeah so someone thought it was a good idea to let some lake trout go in Yellowstone Lake, which is in Yellowstone National Park and it's the

head of the Yellowstone River. And it was, it was very detrimental to the native cutthroat, the East Slope cuts, correct? I believe it was the Yellowstone. It was the Yellowstone cutthroat. The actual Yellowstone cutthroat. Which is like a, more of a pumpkin colored orangish, yellowish cutthroat.

Got it. They at a point made it that you were not allowed to turn back a live lake trout. It was a mandatory kill situation. Like catch and release became illegal. It might still be today. I don't know. I had a friend. I don't want to tell what his name is.

I'll tell you. I don't want to tell you his last name because he was a lawbreaker. His name was Mike. And Mike would always go and fish there. And he really liked, he made like smoked lake trout. He made lake trout sushi rolls. He was big time into eating lake trout. He would turn back the small ones

and would be and wouldn't want to hit it too hard and he was very nervous about what he called damaging the resource and just wasn't buying the whole thing about he was like i love those fish i hope they stay there forever yeah that's his take on it i mean in an area like that man though like there's not many places in the world that have yellowstone cutthroat um and there are a lot of places in the world that have lake trout like you got to get them out of there and no i know it's almost impossible but like they've made some progress yeah so chester uh you know your idea about how you're going to keep them and fatten them up yeah i was saying i don't know if it's legal or not no yeah well corinne um just pointed out here that you would be in violation of law and so if if you know how

everybody has the joy of cooking in their house the The cookbook, The Joy of Cooking? Mm-hmm. I have one that's so old, there's information in it about how to fatten a possum. Really? Yeah. That you've caught a possum and how to fatten it and put it on a good diet for consumption. Really? Yeah, that's not in there anymore. It's not.

Well, that's pretty cool. If you buy one now, it's not in there. That It's not. Well, that's pretty cool. Buy one now. It's not in there. That's pretty awesome that you have that one. So Chester has this idea like, okay, a little dinky, little dinker falls out of the tree. You're trying to do the right thing by law, and you say to yourself, well, I feel bad letting it back out because I'm supposed to kill it. It's not big enough to eat.

I'm going to warm them up, resuscitate them, pen them, and fatten them. Which is illegal. Turns out. So Florida has a list of like stuff you can't have. It's Florida's prohibited species list. And it had recently added 16 new high high risk non-native reptiles. You're not allowed to have in your possession the Argentine black and white Tegus.

What the hell is that? I think they're like monitor lizards, I think. You're not allowed to have a Tegu? You can look it up, Brody? Yeah. Can't have one of those in florida you can't have a green iguana you can't have a nile monitor lizard you cannot have a burmese python which is a big issue yeah they got no shortage of them yeah they look like a monitor lizard they're pretty they're

pretty big you cannot have a reticulated python you cannot have a green anaconda i mean it makes sense you know they that's how they kind of got there right and all of them can survive in florida i was years ago in south america and um and i was with a makushi a guy who was makushi from the Makushi tribe. And we were standing there looking at a green anaconda. It was probably, I don't know, 14, 15 feet long. This your bullet ant time? Nope.

Nope, different time. He was telling me. I wanted to, it was just sitting there. I mean, you could walk right up to it. And I was asking about, is it okay if we kind of like jab it with a stick to see what it does right and he was pointing out to me like they're in their mythology he was saying if i touch that anaconda with the limb of my bow it will die a very painful death that takes about 45 minutes but you can touch it with another stick and that's fine but you can't touch it with a bow limb just a bow limb or is it was it like weapon no

he said if i touch it with my bow limb it will kill it very painful really why yeah there's like a limit i mean it was just part of their mythology and there was like a limit to how much we could communicate about it. But I gathered that much can't touch them with a bow limb. Can't touch a green Anaconda with the bow limb. You didn't say try it. No. And I didn't say like,

Oh, I just, I thought that was a great little, you know, a great little thing. 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

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be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all.

Oh, did you get one leg? Oh, yeah. Stu got one leg. He's yeah. Stu got one leg. He's close to getting the other leg. The bobcat is nearly inverted. Then it's going to be exciting because it goes back onto the board. However, here's another ethics question. This seems like an ethics question, but it ends up being a practical question.

This guy works for a small town police department in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem region. And he mentions that they are, at the time of this writing, in an ongoing CWD management hunt. FWP, he's saying, the State Fish and Game Agency, is allowing antlered bucks to be harvested on this hunt. A lot of this guy's buddies believe the hunt should be, since it's meant to lower the population to slow the spread of CWD.

He's like, why is it that you can kill bucks? It seems like you'd be killing does. Cause if you want to lower a deer population, the way to lower it is killing does. Like bucks doesn't like have a long killing box doesn't have a long-term impact on deer numbers. Killing does does because you kill her and you kill every baby that she'll ever have. I would point out if this gentleman really wants to get an understanding this. There's quite a bit of data that suggests that CWD is more readily transmitted by bucks.

They move around a bunch. They travel too damn much. Yep. I think there's a couple reasons. They want any deer eliminated, right? And to convince people to hunt whitetails in February in Montana or January, you know, they might be more inclined.

You sweeten the deal a little bit by letting you get a buck. And then I remember some stuff with Doug looking at the, you know, all the things, like CWD is like COVID a little bit where the information changes so fast, it's hard to keep hip to what, like what's actually the the current sort of uh academic consensus but at a time it was that young bucks dispersed more they like young bucks left their population dispersed farther distances and were more likely to be bringing cwd into introducing, chronic wasting disease, into new herd groups. I read something recently about that though, where in a study where they studied a certain

amount of, you know, let's say they studied 15 bucks and 20 does, the does traveling, you know, five miles and the bucks were traveling like six miles on average so it wasn't a crazy difference between the two but hold on say that again now i was just saying that the like they've done studies i was reading a recent study where they took a set number of deer and studied them how far they go and the distance between how far the does traveled and the distance between how far the bucks traveled was not that oh is that right difference huh um but that was just one article so uh you guys got up you guys got the appetite for one more um i guess two more etiquette two more ethics etiquettes people looking for feedback sure your dog kills a deer

what then what then my friend's dog killed a deer not too long ago well this guy this guy was asking like you know should you eat it should you do whatever i think he did the right thing he said he called the the local authorities the game warden yep which is a good thing to do and then from there you know this it said the warden determined it did not have cwd which is you can't really necessarily yeah unless you test it um so i'm not quite sure there but like well he because he okay in this case the warden did a little necropsy and saw that it had two busted legs and that's why the dog was able to get a hold of it and that's why it looks so it'd be like what are the uh yeah that's why it looks sickly like it's like what

are the odds it had cwd and then broke two legs from a car hitting it. But what this guy seems to be trying to do is, is like say what his dog did is not like, there's not a problem with it. Like that's what it seems to be getting at. Well, I mean, you don't want your dogs obviously killing deer, once in a blue moon you just never know what's going to happen so i think calling the warden and then if this deer had two broken legs he's also asking what should i do with the meat i would say if the warden lets you take it and eat it eat it but if it's got two broken legs you might want to check for infection and stuff first as well um you know yeah I would say so.

It is an interesting conundrum because a lot of times on public land, you're supposed to have your dog under control. So if you're on public land somewhere and your dog kills a deer, you might, I mean, you might find whether you self report or someone else reports you, your ass might be in trouble with the state.

There are places where if you're out hunting deer and you see a dog chasing deer you can shoot the dog i think yeah there's definitely places like that um yeah it's pretty easy to train your dog to not mess with deer you know i've had a couple bird dogs and you can train them just not pay attention to those deer. When our dog chases a deer, it comes back knowing it's in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Like it can't help itself.

Yeah. It's like, it's like, I know I did, like I did it. I know I shouldn't have done it. And they come back, like they know they're going to get in trouble, but they just couldn't help themselves. Yep. So I think a proper etiquette is just train your dog, not mess with deer. But if it does, I think that, yeah, being able to salvage deer. Sure.

Hopefully they'll do it. Call your game warden. That's probably the first step if you're dealing with any of that stuff. Here's another one. This guy's writing in, this guy lives in a state, Virginia, where you're allowed to hunt turkeys with a rifle. He says, I believe rifles should be outlawed, like it is in Maryland, in most states. You can't quite say most states,

because a lot of states where you can kill a turkey with a rifle in the fall. He's got friends that kill turkeys at 200 yards with varmint rifle setups. What do you think about that? I just don't. Where's the fun? I just want to say this.

I'm not talking about laws and not laws and all that. Spring turkeys is meant to be something you do with a shotgun. There's a purpose to it. The calling, the getting them to come in. Yes. And we used to bushwhack turkeys. In the spring, I don't think there's any reason to shoot a turkey

with a rifle in the spring. One thing, it's like, it's dangerous. Yeah, you got a lot of dudes out in the woods. You got dudes in camo out in the woods making turkey noises sitting against trees. Yeah. Trying to sit close, trying to be close to turkeys. Yeah. When I was very young, you could hunt,

I'm pretty sure you could hunt turkeys with a rifle in Pennsylvania in the spring. Oh, really? Really? I know you can in the fall. They changed it. Yeah. Well, especially with decoys getting better

and better every year. Yeah. You know. Dude, I, yeah, I like, I look at my own decoy and go, oh my God. Oh, that's right. I mean, in the fall. In five minutes, I'm like, holy shit.

Oh, that's my decoy. In the fall, if I was out hunting deer and had a turkey tag in my pocket, I'd probably shoot it. Without a doubt. Yeah. I think it's different. And what's interesting for people to understand here is that in states where you are allowed to kill turkeys in the fall with a rifle, you're often allowed to kill females. Right. Yes.

But they're also not, I mean, they're spending time out in those open areas in the fall, but I feel like spring it's predictable. You know, those birds are going to be out on strut zones and be out in the open. So that's like another thing that's just makes it easier picking in the spring to shoot them. And why I don't, I don't personally like that or care for it.

I just think if you're like sitting there in your truck and there's a turkey 150 yards way out in the field. Strutting that. In the spring, strutting the field and you decide to take a couple of rips at it with your 22, 250. It's like, I don't, it feels very dangerous to me because you don't know if there's some camoed up dude and his kids sitting back there. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yep. It just takes the fun right out of that spring turkey hunt too. Well, I heard a story one time and i believe the story i heard that and so it was a time when florida you were allowed to hunt turkeys in the spring with a rifle okay and a lot of turkey hunters felt that it just was not a good idea you got flat country okay you got people out in camel with decoys. Like it's like a safety issue.

And they even went to, they, they, they took the time to go to the gun community and be like, this is not like, this is a safety Turkey issue. Let's not make this like a gun gun, right issue.

This is a safety Turkey issue. Let's not make this like a gun gun right issue. This is a safety turkey issue. And it got turned into a like gun rights thing. It got turned into a gun rights issue. I remember someone telling me who was on the side of not being able to rifle hunt turkeys that they always felt a little bit disappointed

that they couldn't get it framed outside of that. The discussion about it. You know. It was more like, I just don't want to get shot yeah there was a centerfire rifle yeah there was that uh one video that went viral a couple of years ago with that the two there was two young guys turkey hunting and they were filming it and i think they were working a bird on the edge of a big opening and in the footage you just see like, all the dirt get kicked up. Someone shot with like a 243, their decoy, and they were on the opposite end and it blew into the tree next to him and bark went flying and everything.

Really? And they immediately jumped up. It was a couple of years ago, but it went viral, but I'm sure you can find it on YouTube, but it was guys shooting at a decoy, a centerfire rifle. And they were, if he would have been a foot or even six inches offset, he would have hit one of those guys and killed him. I've seen videos like that, guys shooting a goose decoy. Sean, you might have seen something like that.

But shooting goose decoys with centerfire rifles, just like, you know. Totally illegally. Yeah, totally. There's nowhere you're allowed to do that. Yeah. Well, New Zealand, you can do that. I killed a Canada goose

in New Zealand with a seven millimeter rim mag. Yeah, they're kind of like a guan. Right in the noggin. That's a good shot. Yeah, wonderful shot. All right, bro.

Are you ready for your book report? Oh, how's Bobcat? Ready to be boarded. I wish we had our fur comb with us man snap it you got more room over there snap it real hard set all the fur snap it hard a couple of times uh you ready for your book report brody yeah my article report um so there's been a push to delist grizzlies from the endangered species list. From both Montana Governor Gianforte and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

So to give some background, grizzly bears were put on the ESA in, I think, 1976. Something like that. There was like 150 of them left. Unless it has threatened not not in danger yeah there's about 150 of them left in the 70s 136 in the gye the thing that steve hates saying no i don't know i'm somewhat okay with that you're okay with the greater yellowstone ecosystem okay a little bit okay anyway uh fast forward to current times and the estimates vary right like minimum is 700 a new uh population study model that wyoming used places them over a thousand, but either way, the recovery goal was, I believe, 500 bears in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which was met, you know, 20 years ago or so. So there's, there's been these off and on pushes to get them off the list.

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon is petitioning the U S fish and wildlife service to get them removed. Again, I said, same thing's going on in here in Montana. And, uh, you know, it's this back and forth fight that never seems to end. It doesn't. Yeah. It's just nonstop and uh i was interviewed for an article for fox news digital um and and uh apparently they think i'm a grizzly bear expert they also interviewed uh wyoming governors wyoming governor gordon was quoted pretty heavily in the article um and quoted, what is her name? Andrea Zaccardi from, uh, a center for biological diversity. They always have names like that, you know, that, that make them sound like there's something other than that, what they are, which is like, you know, animal rights, anti-hunting group. Um, the most interesting thing I think she said, well, she said a couple of things that are

interesting. There is no science to back the she said a couple of things that are interesting. There is no science to back the claim that grizzlies no longer need protection. Meaning they should. I don't understand what that means. I don't know. But, I mean, there's plenty of science because they're way past the stated recovery goals. And that's such a subjective statement, too. Because, like, to her, grizzlies will always need protection no matter what.

They could be everywhere. And she also says, of course, this outrageous request from Wyoming's governor is the latest attack on animals like grizzly bears by states that see them as little more than targets for trophy hunters. Oh, come on. I need another push pin, Stu. I brought them in here, but I don't know what. I need another push pin, Stu. I know. I brought them in here, but I don't know what... You know, it was just like absolutely untrue. We've covered this so many times. I even wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about this the last time they were trying

to do it. Yeah. The last thing the states are going to do. That's what they... Yeah. The state, Wyoming and Montana, are not going to lobby their asses off for decades to get state management of Grizzlies back in order to then really quickly. Kill them all and get them back. Get them driven back onto the endangered species.

The whole point is trying to get them recovered and off the list. Right. And they're like rubbing their hands like, ooh, the minute I can get them off the list the list i'm gonna put them back on the list again yeah and let's say ridiculous wyoming or montana let's say they get taken off the list and and a hunting season gets approved the number they're going to be so careful with the number of tags that they issue for these bears that's it's going to have absolutely zero impact. Did you know how many tags the last go-around, do you know how many tags Idaho was going to issue?

One. Oh, a tag. And Wyoming, I think, was a total of low 20s maybe. In Montana, I thought at the time, and there's a different administration now, so I think we'd have a different approach. I thought it was a little bit chicken shit. Yeah.

And, you know, in a decision that was coming from people who I admire, just like an area where I disagreed with them, is they were going to sit it out. Yep. Obviously sitting it out because they didn't want to wade into the. Right. They didn't want to wade into the social. Yeah. Right. They didn't want to wade into the social. Yeah. Yeah. I respected Wyoming fishing game for how they just, I mean, they knew it was going to, they were going to take a lot of flack and heat for everything.

And I think they did a great job on how they handled it. Oh, I. And that bummed me out that FWP kind of, I don't know. But basically the gist of the article here is, and we've said this before, the point of the endangered species list is not to keep them on the list forever. It's to recover them, get them off the list, turn over management to the states. And these groups like this just use lawsuits to like postpone things and delay things and keep them on the list you know potentially forever so that's where we're at montana and wyoming are trying to in montana it's the the northern continental divide population that they're trying to get delisted yeah what winds up happening with this i mean like i said we've we've covered the dickens out of this what ends up happening um around grizzly delisting around wolf delisting is you have two situations where

we had species that were legitimately imperiled like wolves were legitimately imperiled at a time um grizzlies were legitimately imperiled and they needed at that they needed protections and they put protections in place and you in in the different you know stakeholders and this come together and they're like okay what does recovery look like right and people agree on like well if we had this many of this that many of that living in this many places we would accept that that was like recovery at which we'll move on to the next problem right um what happens is people really kind of like get used to there being no hunting for these animals and later when recovery objectives are met and hunting might be resumed people just they get where they just cannot accept that yeah and so the way these things get held up in court

no one comes and argues that there aren't like no one's going to argue in court that there aren't enough of them they're going to argue in court weird little you know like technical issues yeah be like oh you did a you did a um you did a, but did you consider the potential impacts of whitebark pine blister rust? And they'd be like, well, no, we didn't fully consider the impacts of whitebark pine blister rust. So then a judge, and it's always a judge in Missoula because it always winds up in that district. And a judge in Missoula would then throw out the whole thing. Yeah, based on a technicality. Yeah. And judge in Missoula and throw out the whole thing. Yeah.

Based on a technicality. Yeah. And another thing. They're not, they're never arguing the main point. Yeah. And another thing that kind of never comes up is that there's like, like take the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Like you can't have bears,

every grizzlies everywhere. There's only so many places that can support them. And so in the gye there's like a finite number of grizzlies that that place can support and then they start moving out into like the urban uh wild interface like around here in bozeman and they get in trouble and then they get shot for getting in a dumpster um there's like a carrying capacity there and you can't have bears running around in golden gate park you said you said grizzlies i wish they were everywhere sure but i have a high tolerance it's just not possible but i do yeah the other part of this

that gets really technical is is people instead of saying like like if you're gonna like what is the entirety of grizzly bear range the entirety of grizzly bear range is um basically the hundredth meridian and westward like everything yeah if you're if you're like west of the big bend in the missouri um you're in grizzly bear habitat so people are like it's not really plausible that we're going to cover bears across the entirety of the American West. So let's pick adequate areas where they could feasibly be.

And then when one of those areas is full, you delist the area. And people are always using, they're always attacking that logic. Well, we can't recover them everywhere. But you know what I always point out? Elk are only recovered across what? 14% of their native range?

Yeah. How come no one says that about elk? Elk aren't recovered in Illinois, but you can hunt them in Utah. Yep. Why would someone not say we haven't recovered elk across the entirety of their range? You shouldn't be allowed to hunt elk. Yeah. They should be an endangered species in Illinois.

By their logic. Yeah. It should be that no one in Utah should be able to hunt an elk because Illinois doesn't have them yet. Yep. They need to hire us to do these arguments. I like it that Brody gets, um, you're such a,

that, that from doing these book reports and stuff that you get to go on the news and talk about it. Yeah, man, it was fun. But you know what bugs me is they never interview a damn biologist for these articles, like from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or from a state game agency.

Did you point that out to them? I did. I said you should talk to some of those people. Did you say like, oh, you shouldn't talk to me, you should talk to them? I said, I am not a grizzly bear expert. I have an opinion. You should talk to a grizzly bear expert.

Yeah. You know what it might be is that they're not going to get a fiery. Right. They're not going to get a fiery opinion out of them. Either like a grizzly bear expert isn't going to give them a fiery opinion. Yeah. They always have to be careful what they say. Yeah.

They had to get a raging hothead like Brody Henderson. Oh, yeah, man. Brody, get a raging hothead like Brody Henderson. Oh, yeah, man. Brody, smoke coming out of his ears all the time. All right, Sean, you ready? You bet. Sean's duck report. Yeah.

You have an assignment. We gave you an assignment, right? Yeah, you did. Last time we did a duck report, you had brought up that you wanted age demographics to be discussed. Yeah, like what's an old-ass duck? And you had referenced a sandhill crane you'd shot when you were in Texas that you said you believed was 17 years old. And to be fair, I called Dr. Chris Nicolai from Delta Waterfowl about this because age demographics gets pretty complex. And there's a lot to it. But for starters, he told me to go look at the USGS website. They have a tool called the longevity records of north american birds

and this tool allows you to look up all the all the band reporting and the age of those birds that are reported and it's not just waterfowl it's kind of everything it's got snow buntings and sparrows, you name it. Pretty much anything they can report on how old some of these birds live, it's on there. For example, I did look up a snow bunting, which by the way, the oldest one reported was eight years and nine months old. Anyway, I also went ahead and looked up sandhill crane since you had referenced shooting one 17 years old the oldest sandhill crane was 37 years and three months old and which is so old and it was way older than seth yeah not way older but yeah i would have been in first grade how seth was born how old can parrots live i'm just thinking about birds in general yeah because

they're like eight i remember i had a girlfriend whose mom had a gray parrot and she had to like have a will about what was going to happen to the parrot after she died yeah those things last forever but that's living in a cage yeah yeah that's true what happened to this? Tell everybody what happened to this crane here. Oh, man. What happened to this crane is sad. So it was banded in Florida in 1982. And what finally got it was it got hit by a car in Wisconsin. Scotty.

Probably chest and brain hit. Probably coming home from the bar. Yeah. Chest and brain hit it coming home from the bar. All hopped up on cheese curds. Right in Sheboygan. Double bubblish. You know, everyone talks about hitting deer in Wisconsin, but nobody talks about hitting sandhill cranes.

37 years old. Super old. So then I went ahead and looked up. I went real down the rabbit hole looking up pretty much every species I could. Looked up blue geese and snow geese, which the oldest blue goose was 30 years old in eight months. Oldest mallard was 27 years and seven months. Is that off banding data too? Mm-hmm. Yep. So these are all, and Chris Nicolai did bring this up as well, all these are based on either found dead or hunter harvest,

shot and removed bands. These are not recapture data. So Nikolai has had birds where they catch them in rocket nets, you know, 30 30 35 years later and they're they're putting third or fourth set of bands on birds that are still alive yeah like all these birds that we're looking at all these ages like this mallard it's 20 set almost 28 years it's lesser, it's 27 and a half years. These are things that, they didn't die of old age. Mm-hmm. Yeah, these ones died of getting shot.

A blue-winged teal that got banded in Saskatchewan and got shot in Cuba 23 years later. That's crazy. It's pretty cool. By, like, Castro. That sounds like a real life story. It's amazing. Because you look at a deer, like you see a deer and a duck,

and you have so much more empathy for a deer. You know what I mean? It's got eyelashes and everything. They're like, you could fit seven deer lives inside of a duck. Yeah, it's crazy. You don't look, when you see a duck on a pond, you don't think like, oh, there's something that's 25 years old. No, definitely not.

Those wild turkeys, God, they live a long time. Oh, yeah, wild turkeys. Like, dude, I'm lucky to become two. Well, to be fair, though, where these numbers or these ages really become wild is when you start calculating what the average age of waterfowl is and like when you get down to what's actually probably going to happen to a dog what's actual so the numbers that dr nicolai had given me to work with are 70 survival rate year over year on drake mallards and 60 60 on hen mallards those are not exact numbers but they're close and they

flesh out the thought experiment here um i'll also come back to the, why there's a difference between Drake and hen survival rate. But if, so if you start with a hundred of each, you know, year one, you get down to 70 Drake's and 60 hens by year two, you're at 49 Drake's and 36 hens. So now you're below 50 half are dead. So's your average age um your average age for a duck is two years for a drake mallard and not even two years for a hen mallard so it makes a 27 year old mallard that much more impressive the hens live shorter because they just are they getting so beat up from you know yeah That's what I was wondering is why hens. I was thinking maybe because of they're sitting

on nests and getting eaten while they're on nests. I don't know. Yep. So Sean, you're saying that's the average then? Yeah. The average age. Man. Is.

27 years. Imagine the attrition rate of friends. You go through a lot of friends in that, if you're that mallard that made it to 27 years. How many friends have come and gone? Yeah, how is it that, like, do you remember in Sand County Almanac, in Sand County Almanac, when he's doing this stuff with the chickadees, like, he's, like, catching a chickadee, Aldo Leopold.

This is in the 20s. He's, like, catching chickadees. He made up a little chickadee trap and he's like putting a band on chickadees and you know they all just die but there's one that just never makes a mistake and he gets it year after year after year after year at the same bird feeder i don't remember that part of that book and everyone else just gets dusted off but somehow he like he doesn't he's like very special i wonder what the odometer would be on a 27 year old mallard oh the miles he's put on sean that's a good one for your book report dude okay i'll start uh you know there's a

some real cool gps work being done by a group called Osborne Labs. I'll see what the highest odometer they've got on a GPS tracker is right now. That'd be cool. Yeah, that'd be really cool. So where that survival rate gets even more nuanced, right, is that that's based on pretty much a bird going from year one to year two and then year two to year three so to speak that's not counting when they're in the egg or even once they've hatched and are going through you know the whole process of growing up to be old enough to fly so chris

gave me some even more staggering numbers that make you wonder how we even have any ducks to hunt to begin with like how there's any around at all yeah it's amazing that there's even ducks so right now a good nest success is 0.15 or 15 so 15 eggs even ever hatch out of a hundred eggs laid. Then from, then from those two is not catching enough raccoons. Oh yeah. So that's, that's the real end of the story here.

So if 15 eggs hatch, half of those will die before they ever get to old enough to fly which brings you down to you know seven and a half ducks out of a hundred out of a hundred eggs that hit the ground and then 40 won't make it through that first fall roughly so you get to about after that first fall you got about three ducks out of a hundred eggs if you're and then some duck went on and lived then 25 years 27 so i'll circle back to the hen and drake survival rate thing and we already kind of touched on it but the reason that hens have a lower survival rate than drakes especially right now is nest predation if drakes you know drakes don't have to go sit in grassland they

don't have to risk um risk getting jumped on on a nest yeah he can hang it out in the middle of some big ass lake exactly and what that's led to the last 30 or 40 years they've really noticed it since the late 1980s is we've seen a population-wide change in the sex ratio we have more drakes than hens and not by just a little bit. Um, in the late 1980s, pintails were about 1.2 drakes for every hen. And now they're at four and a half drakes to every hen. So we're at a hen shortage and a Drake surplus by a lot. And that's been going on for how long?

Well, it's going up every year, but it's been really noticeable incline since the late 1980s. Do they relate that to low fur prices? Delta waterfowl definitely points to mesopredators. Yeah, because there's a turkey biologist that we had on the show one time that he felt that was a very interesting argument, is looking at fur prices relative to predation of birds. That's kind of when you got out of the professional trapping game, in the late 80s

right i set my last trap for south no i set my last trap for commercial purposes in 1994 okay but it was dismal by then yep 10 years earlier it had been really something but i was only 10 years old. Another thing Chris had brought up there, like North Dakota hadn't even described raccoons living there until the 1950s. And now they're everywhere. Yeah.

So it's interesting. We'll talk more on that in another Duck Report because there's so much interesting information about the sex ratio and predation on nests and all that. But the age disparities are wild. How you can have a 30-year-old or 33-year-old Canada goose, but then a lot of them never even make it out of the nest in barry lopez's book arctic dreams he's with a pilot and they're doing some polar bear work and they're talking about how old a polar bear can get and they can get pretty old and he mentions how the biologist says to him if it doesn't make any mistakes you know which is just not something you like you know i mean right it's

not something you think about if it doesn't make any mistakes. It never messes up. It's never like, hey, that looks like a real duck. Even though it's not moving and it seems to be made out of plastic. Sean, I have a question for you.

Through that research, did that, is there anything about that, like snowballing or turning in, like that separation of how many hens to drakes because other drakes like since the drakes are so rough on hens usually when they're mating like with that many drakes to a low hen ratio could it actually start killing more hens and lower that and that separation that gap's gonna widen is there anything research you

know i don't know i don't think there's any talk about i don't think drakes i mean i guess i can't speak for biologists but i don't think they kill enough hens to have okay you don't think that's like enough gotcha all right no no it's definitely a definitely a habitat and predation story. You know when you buy a dozen or six pack of decoys, it's like mostly drakes? Yeah, it turns out that's actually accurate. Yeah. I wonder if they're doing that by design. I thought you felt like you're getting more value.

I don't know. Because it's more paint. Or just a contrast thing, easy for the ducks to see the drakes. I don't know. Yeah, i don't know yeah i don't know either oh they're probably just doing it because we like looking at the pretty decoys right that's true so you good on that sean yeah no that's what's the next report what are you working on well i think we'll dive more into the the predator story oh some of the people are gonna start thinking we're anti-predator which i'm not but you're gonna get into that a little bit predation

yep definitely i'm ready for you man what stew i'm gonna slowly transition us into talking to you okay you want to see how i'm gonna do it it? I can't wait. Check this one out. We were talking on previous episodes about mistaken song lyrics. When all your life you think they're saying one thing and you realize they're saying something else. There's a song, I don't even know if you've heard this damn song. Loggins and Messina, who's that?

Kenny Loggins and... Oh, that Kenny Loggins. Yeah, you said I looked like him one time. Well, yeah, when your hair was long. Oh, so Loggins and Messina's Kenny Loggins. What a weird groove he had going for a while of doing movies,

the main songs and movies. Yeah. Footloose. What's the one with the pilots? Top Gun. Top Gun. So they got a song called Danny's Song, and in the song they say, Pisces, they get into astronomy. Pisces, Virgo rising is a very good sign.

This guy thought he was saying, price of fur is rising. It's a very good sign. I like when this dude wrote in, he signed off with negative temps here in West Michigan. Make it nice. Okay, we're going to get into a big old thing about where trappers and predator hunters are having a versus hound hunters in Virginia. We're going to put that on hold.

That's very interesting to me, though. In fighting. Hunter in fighting. And unlikely enemies. We're going to cover this very soon. How trappers and predator hunters and hound hunters are all at each other's throats.

Hmm. Cannibalism. What, Stu? I don't see it. I hound hunt and I trap. Stu hates himself. Stu's going to end up stabbing himself. It's a rich field of inquiry.

We're going to cover it, but I want to do a real quick one. Colorado, who seems like every other day is trying to ban something, this time they were trying their 18th time to ban lion. It's so funny they always throw in links that's the thing man they are like didn't arizona include jaguar yeah when they tried that they always got to sneak in an animal that you can't hunt anyway because people because they're standing out in front of a whole foods getting signatures for these things yeah right and so like here comes some old lady hasn't seen a wild animal in three years uh comes along and they're like will you sign our

petition to ban right and they want to sweeten the pot so they're like and ban lynx honey because she's like jesus i can't they're killing lynx yeah like you can't kill lynx in colorado but they're gonna ban it yep lest i don't know yeah in arizona. And no killing jaguars. By the way. Yeah. You can't kill jaguars. But I like the thought. Yeah, I think it is. It sweetens the pot. The great thing about this one is it didn't get dragged out over a long period of time.

It came up and whammo, got rejected right away. It's great. Kareem was pointing out that a guy named Vinny from New Jersey wrote in, which makes that the second Vinny to ever have anything to do with this podcast. So at this point, we've had two Vinnies, both from New Jersey, mentioned on this show. And not a cat lady from New Jersey. So, yeah, that bill is over. It'll come up again.

Yeah. I just, like, here's the thing man here's the thing this is all i want in the world i want there to be a i want the environment to be extremely clean clean air clean water healthy wildlife i don't want to i want to leave as much of it as pristine as humanly possible even to the point where we have to make sacrifices. I want the earth to be, let's just keep it the country. I want this America to be full of pristine, wild places, full of animals that we have access to as renewable resources. It's not that complicated.

If you want to help cats help habitat yeah if you want to help the how many links are in Colorado right now oh I not very many secure links habitat yeah well and really links habitats what what there is in Colorado is doing it's great you know like will the federally protected wilderness areas. Keep it secure. Yeah, exactly.

Keep it secure. That will be the thing. If you want links in Colorado, the thing that will make it that there's links in Colorado is that there's habitat. Quit skiing. Quit skiing. I'm going down there. I can hear people typing already. A little skiers.

There's a battle over those skiers and bighorns down in Jackson, Wyoming right now. If you want the lynx to be fine, make it that there's a shitload of lynx habitat, and then all your problems will be solved. It won't be because someone who can't anyways were to, it's just, you're missing the point. Yeah, let's move on.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. All right, Stu. How in the Sam Hill? Because here's the thing. Here's my biggest question for you. Here's my excuse for becoming a trapper. I was born in 1974.

The great fur boom of like 78 to 82. I was born in 74, and so I was aware of that. And I didn't set a trap till the last year of the fur boom. But I was informed by the fur boom. dollars seventy five dollar red fox fifty dollar mink forty dollar raccoons eighty dollar beavers seven dollar muskrats someone phil what was all what's all that mean in today's dollars and that was in the round too can you can you real quick explain why the prices were so high at that time like just based on demand for i think there was at that time? Like just based on demand for... I think there was, at that time,

there was still strong domestic demand. And I'm guessing, maybe Stu remembers it better, but the big consumers, China, South Korea, Russia, right? So at times, Italy. So I'm guessing that those economies were very strong. I'm guessing that oil prices, well, we know oil prices got incredibly high. Their economies are strong. Oil prices are high.

And you had tons of consumer demand. And you had domestic, you had U.S. demand for luxury stuff. $100 in 1974 would be about 569 according to okay so tell me what a seven dollar tell me what a no tell me what a 40 i did a i did a 40 in 1984 would have been 109 today okay so 109 mink today pretty good money that is good money and i was seduced by those figures because we'd mow a lawn for five bucks and a muskrat was worth more than well depends on whose lawn like the musselman's paid 15 bucks to mow their lawn but that was paying yes you had to take like a lunch break you couldn't get it done in one shot you had like mow a bunch and then like you'd go home and eat and go swimming and shit and go back and mow again.

So two muskrats was like Muscleman's lawn. That's why I got into it. There were guys taking two weeks of vacation and then like teaming it up with like their holiday vacation and buying trucks with muskrat money. Pretty cool. Considering you could go i built i built a barn you could really live off the land back then so what's your excuse how old are you 32 you missed all that i missed all that yeah occasionally though right occasionally every now and then something like last year or two years ago like western coyotes it was like yep boom they were worth a lot of money that's a good point now and then there'll be a freak but it's because of some type of weird niche market typically right that like typically so like the fur boom like you're talking the fur room that i remember of weird niche market typically, right? That like... Typically.

So like the fur boom, like you're talking, the fur boom that I remember would have been... Like the uppercase F. Yeah. Would have been like 2011, 2013, 14. Well, that's what you called your fur boom. That's my fur boom. That's my generation fur boom.

That's your generation's fur boom. Like muskrats in 13? Yeah. I was selling $14 muskrats. I averaged almost $ 25 on coons that year i sold several coyotes you know which we're talking midwestern coyotes so like shit coyotes yeah pretty bad ones you know and have an average of 70 75 on them you know that was a good little fur boom i yeah i did really good then so yeah you were making money i was making money yeah

i was actually making money trapping now you're just doing it pretty much for the hobby of it, but fur prices definitely have gone down, but that's the fur boom that I remember. So is that what got you into it? No. So, you know, trapping is, trapping's hard. Like it really is hard. And, you know, growing up, I, I was outdoorsman, you know, I deer hunted, I bow hunted, I duck hunted. I did everything, you know. You didn't ski though, did you? I did not ski. Being a Southerner, we just didn't have the ability there.

So I didn't ski, but you know, I was, I was hunting everything there was a season for. I was fishing for everything that there was a season, you know, we could catch. And trapping just, it was hard. And I remember this was kind of whenever. Hard, like technically hard or physically hard? Both. I know the answer. Both.

Yeah. Both. And I remember this is kind of whenever like inline muzzleloaders were really becoming a thing. Mm-hmm. You know, like really. And in Illinois, we can't use rifles centerfire rifles and uh so it's shotgun or muzzleloader or pistol and i remember you know muzzleloaders were coming out and i i bought a real good inline muzzleloader and i remember i

shot a deer like 250 yards you know i'm like well that's it i'm done like i where you peaked you know i mean it's just deer walk out across 40 acre field and you just drop him, you know, it's, there's not much to that, you know, sitting a deer stand and I'd always trapped as a kid. And, you know, after that, I remember I kind of, I bought some sets and, you know, at the time there wasn't a lot of education about it or information, you know, you pretty much had to kind of learn on the fly or was self-taught. And, uh, it just slowly progressed from there you know trapping is one of those things that if you get past the whole disney thing where you know you go out and set three sets and you come back next day and you have three critters oh what disney you talking about

that's what everybody always tells me you know that's the assumption i would say is that there's disney movies where people have super high catch rates. Well, I mean, you know, you get the big bear traps and, you know, just the illusion that people have of that trapping is almost like 100% success. Oh, it's just mayhem. Yeah, I call it Disney, but I mean, you know, that's just the general assumption, you know, which it's not. You know, you're going out there and you're trying, you're going out in an area that this critter, you know, he knows,

same as you know your backyard. You're going out in their area and you are trying to trick that animal for the most part to step on an area that is the size of a top of a soda can. That's pretty hard to do. You know, considering that critter could go anywhere he wants and that's what you're trying to do.

And I think that's what drew me to it more than anything. He's got like a thousand acre home range. Yeah, is the challenge of it. And you want him to step on a beer can. Yeah. The top of a beer can, you're trying to get that critter to put his foot on. And that's, that to me was kind of the allure of it. That's what drew me to it was, was the challenge because I mean, you've trapped, you know, you've trapped trappers are a different

breed, you know, and I don't mean that being like the, you know, Jeremiah Johnson or old dingy construction worker, you know, or one of those, which I am, but I mean, you've got to be driven and, you know, there's a different mentality to it, to trapping. There's a lot of work involved with it. Physically, mentally, you know, I'll say, so deer hunting. A lot of people can relate to deer hunting. So you're going to deer hunt and you're going to deer hunt every day in December or every chance you get, right? So for the majority of us that work a 40-hour week, you're not going to be able to hunt during the week. You're going to be able to hunt on the weekends, right? Because sun rises at seven o'clock and sets at 430.

So you hunt every single chance you can during December. You're going to get to hunt eight times, eight days, basically. Right. If I want to go trap and I want to trap every day in December, I'm in the woods 31 days in December. That takes a lot of drive and a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, you just got to be involved with it so much more. And I think that's what drives me to do it is just the challenge of it. That's a pretty good point where the four years that I really trapped hard

would be like my last two years of high school where I got where I could get out of school early. I'd go early but get out early and i'd get out pretty like remarkably early be done like 140 or something like that um and then in my two first years of college i did community college i took all night classes so i could trap so i didn't have to show up till five no i either had to be there at six or 7, and I only went four days a week. And I'd be there until 10 at night. I would start October 15th when Fox opened, and I would be in the woods every single day. Every day between October 15th and the end of January. I would have some business in the woods every day.

Don't you feel that you have a little better relationship with the outdoors or your area? You're seeing stuff every single day. You're in the woods way more than the average deer hunter. You're interacting with stuff that most people can't. That to me is just cool. Looking for toenail marks in the mud. Yeah. That's all you're doing.

Footprints in the mud. But no, to me, that's, that's what draws me to it is just the challenge. And then, you know, for my instance, I go ahead and I take it a step further, if you will, with, with my fur handling side of it. So, I mean, you know, a lot of people sell in the round or they, they sell green, which is just a skinned critter. And a round is hole on the carcass. You caught the thing, you dispatched it, there he lays that's in the round. And like who explained who the hell you'd sell a raccoon in the round too. So whenever we have times of high fur prices, um, there are, you know, the auction companies

of fur buyers that will buy that, you know, back to like your fur boom. I remember people talking about that. They wouldn't even bother taking the time to skin their coons because the price difference between finished fur and in the round wasn't enough to justify going through all the trouble of it. They could just go out and catch more coons. And they're every night dropping by the fur buyer. Or you could freeze them, you know, depending on, depending on your climate too.

But yeah, selling in the round or selling in the green, uh, Napa, they're at the end of their kind of run. They were offering, um, skinning. You could, you could, you could send them green furs and they would flesh them and stretch them. So a lot of buyers to a lot of your County buyers sometimes prefer having green fur or, or in the round, mainly just green simply because they know you're not going to screw it up. Right. Got it. So, I mean, they know that they've got a skillset. They're, they're going to flesh it and stretch it just how they want it. Because 90% of your local buyers are selling to the auction houses anyway.

So they want to get a premium and they want to have it right. Do you want to know something that's going to increase tension between you and Seth? And it's going to create tension between you and Rick? I'm making all sorts of enemies. Seth had a top lot mink. Yeah. Which he's going to tell what that means. And you had a top lot something. I had a top lot mink. Yeah. Which he's going to tell what that means. And you had a top lot something.

I had a top lot gray fox. Yeah. Okay. Tell Stu all about that. What that means. Oh, the top lot? Stu probably already knows. Yeah. Stu knows about the top lot.

I guarantee you. I've had a few. Yeah. Stu's had a few. We talked about it. What hurts me more is I got that top lot, and Seth told me. Oh, that's right there right now. He's like, hey, Rick, you can go get a hat.

Back up, back up, back up. Okay. Who wants to explain what the hell a top lot is? I've never had one, but I can do it. Stu? Yeah, whoever. Go for it. Stu's probably going to explain a top lot.

Yes, his fur knowledge is. Because this is fur handling 101. Okay, so a top lot, and generally whenever we're talking top lot, we're talking about selling through the auction houses. So you've got a few different ways to sell, obviously. You can sell to your county or local buyer. And then normally they will actually sell to the auction houses. So a few years ago, there were two main auction houses. There was NAFA, which was North American Fur Auction, and then FH, Fur Harvesters, right?

NAFA went under a few years ago. So now there's just for harvesters. So these auction houses, they will gather up giant lots of fur and they'll grade them down by size, by color, whole different, whole different list of stuff. So to get a top lot basically means that you have your, your pelt in the very top of what's selling. So you've got the best color, the best, uh, size, the best quality. You've got the best of say all the coyotes that are being sold at that auction, that top lot, you've got your, your pelt in that lot that's being sold. And I mean, it's a pretty big honor really, you know, to be able to get that. And they give you a hat.

They give you a hat. They give you a pin. They give you a little certificate with your name on it. It tells you. So you got to hear Rick's very sad story though. So it was, it was actually 2013. I cry. I got to leave the room because I cry every time.

So it says 2013 or maybe actually, yeah, it was 2013. And I got this certificate in the mail, the top lot for that gray fox. And I told Seth about it and he was like all pumped. He's like, hey, when you go sell fur next time, you could take your certificate and show the driver and you'll get a hat. And I was like, oh, sweet. Well, explain what the driver is. People aren't going to know. Oh, yeah.

Okay. So, well, Stu can talk so much better than this, but you got to, it's a very. It's a weird experience. It's a weird. So, I'll back up even more. I feel like you're doing something illegal. Yeah. I, to the point, Seth and the gentleman Seth used to work for were kind of my trapping mentors.

And they're telling me, he's like, all right, you got to sell your fur now. You got to. I'm like, how do I do that? So, they're explaining, you got to go with the now. You got to, I'm like, how do I do that? So they're explaining, they, you got to go at the TA truck stop. You meet at the TA at 7.30 and drive around back. Like TNA or TA?

Yeah, no, TA, just TA truck stop. And I thought Seth and this gentleman were messing with me. So I just show up and I'll just know what to do. And I have my little, my little NAFA bag they gave me and my, my, my NAFA sack and I'm sitting know what to do. And I have my little Napa bag they gave me in my Napa sack. And I'm sitting there.

When you get there, you got to pull your pants down. Oh, my God. And then they'll know it's you. They'll know it's you. And it's always a sketchy truck stop too, right? Because they're trying to make that line. I'm sitting there and I started noticing all these other trucks pull up. And I'm like, okay.

And it's, yeah, like six in the morning. Then this budget rental truck comes ripping into the parking lot, just parks in the middle. Back guy gets out, opens the back door. And I think I told you, I felt like it's like when you're a young kid going into gym class for the first time in the showers. And I'm like, I have this little bag. I'm like, yeah, I got 20 furs in here. And then these dudes are just unloading white bags. I'm like, yeah, I got 20 furs in here. And then these dudes are just unloading white bags. I'm like, oh, shit.

Wow. That's a lot. But that was the first couple of times. So you go there and you get in the line, hand in all your bags. They give you, it was like the old certificate styles. Like they'd write on it and there'd be like a pink sheet, a yellow sheet. And you'd have to throw one in the bag and they'd hand you your, there'd be like a pink sheet, a yellow sheet, and you'd have to throw one in the bag and they'd hand you your,

you know, I'm butchering this. Stu can explain. No money changes hands. No money changes hands. But that's the pickup I'm referring to. So a couple, like in the next year, I'm at this pickup and I'm like excited. You have last year's.

I have last year's Top Lot certificate in my hand and I can't wait to get that NAFA Top Lot trapper hat hat i know it sounds so stupid oh you go to the bar meet all kinds of girls i was because i was so into it it's great because they're gold embroidered anyway you feel like a king yeah and i walk i was one of the last guys in line i had we did my our fur exchange he um did my sheet and i was like sir i also have a top lot certificate here. I was like, I'm wondering, do you have the hats? And it was this old guy. He looks right just so serious. He's like, oh, I'm sorry, son. I'm all out of those hats.

I just gave them all like my last one out and I was like, oh, that's all right. You know, but I was so crushed. I walked off like I was tough, but I was like, oh my God, all I wanted was that damn hat. To this day. To this day, I don't have one. It's like you're tearing up right now.

Oh man, it's emotional. See, man, I want it. See, I've never had a top lot, but I kind of want, I mean, I never would. And you should be shot if you do. But I'd be very tempted to wear that hat. Hat, yeah. We should look on like eBay or something. What if you wore it and got exposed?

People were like, let me see your certificate. You know, I was going to frame my certificate after we talked about it a few months. I was like, yeah, you said it. Do you still have it? I still have it. Can we hang it in the studio here? Of course. Yeah, we can do that.

Oh, what a great addition to the studio. But we were talking about it. You're like, you should frame that. And I was like sitting in your truck. I'm like, you know what? I should. Yeah. I frame mine.

Do you? I've got mine framed. How many top lots you got, Stu? I've got three through NAFA. For which ones? I've got a coon. I've got a beaver. And I've got mine framed. How many top lots you got, Stu? I've got three through NAFA. For which ones? I've got a coon, I've got a beaver, and I've got a coyote. Because, see, the problem is, now, I say a coyote because I'm from Illinois, Midwest, right? So there's kind of this thing amongst trappers.

You have your top lot, and then you have your top lot sections. So, like, my beaver was the top lot. My coon was your top lot sections so like my beaver i my beaver was the top lot my coon was the top lot my coyote was the top lot of the section so like the top the best of the shit coyote it's like you're standing on the podium but the guy you're top of the podium but there's still somebody just above you yeah because it's not the top top but it's still the top of that section the western pales would be top they are top like i but it's still the top of that section. The western pails would be top. They are top. Like, I'm never going to get a top lot coyote where I trap, ever.

It's just not going to happen. But I got the top lot of this section. Do you have three hats? No, I got one hat. Because I've got two similar stories to what Rick has. Really? They really dropped the ball on the hats. I've got three pins, though.

See, how do you know the pins? We never got pins. So I got cheated out of a pin and a hat. Yeah. But the hats. I've got three pins though. See, how do you know the pins? Yeah, we never got pins. Yeah, they got a pin. So I got cheated out of a pin and a hat. Yeah. Man. But the hats were cool. Like mine is, I wore mine until it was so

ratty and nasty. You know. I was so proud of that thing. Stu, you kind of talked, that hat, and I'm not a hat guy. I very rarely actually wear hats, but that was like a badge of honor. Cause I do think in the tier of like

outdoorsman, trapper is the pinnacle. And like, not a lot of people in our generation were in a trap of honor. Cause I do think in the tier of like outdoorsman trapper is the pinnacle. And like, not a lot of people in our generation were in a trap. And that's why I was like, I want that hat so I can wear it. And I don't know. I just, yeah. Felt like it was like a metal. And when that old man told me I couldn't have one or didn't have it, I was like, oh God. Where's your hat, Seth?

I think it's back at my mom's place in Pennsylvania somewhere. Call her and tell her to send it out. Do you have your certificate? I think it's there too, somewhere. Call her and tell her to send it out. Do you have your certificate? I think it's there too somewhere. Can you have her hunt it down? Yeah, I could probably have her look around for it. Do you want to plug your mom's boot company while we're talking about this? Center Boot Company in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

Check it out. Yeah, if you need to buy boots, don't buy them anywhere else. Don't buy them at Zappos. Don't buy them at Amazon. Drive to Seth's mom's store. Center Boot Company. Work, hunting, western. They also sell all sorts of other stuff like belt buckles and leather goods. If you're over there in Pennsylvania, if you're over here, go to Schnee's.

If you're over there, go to Seth's mom. Yep. Check them out. They have a booth at the big sportsman show in Harrisburg here. You can actually go meet the real Seth's mom. Yep. Go look up their booth if you're going to be

there. And ask her if she can please find Seth's hat and top lot certificate. Yes. I'm sure that hat's, because you had it in college. You had it on like your wall. Yeah.

I kind of lost track of it. I don't know where it is but you see they only give top lots for certain species so for some reason where i'm at we grow like awesome possums i don't know why right but back in the day you could pay for all your gas by by putting up possums what is the day? 11 through 14. That's my fur boom. Okay. So explain the possum market. Well, I mean, you know, you've got kind of a lower end market with the possums, but normally you catch them as bycatch and I would put them up.

And I mean, we grow some big possums there. And I would, I remember, I can't say the exact, I want to say like $17 I sold a possum for back in the day. No shit. I mean, I averaged like $12 on them. Yeah. And is that market collapsed now? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

It's hard to even get rid of them right now. But you were saying, one thing you're telling me that's interesting is the skunk fur market doesn't fluctuate. Not really. No. fur market doesn't fluctuate. Not really. No, depending on who you go through and the different avenues you go through skunks are at least what I trap in my area. They're the most consistent sell every year, mainly just because they're a novelty item. So who do you sell the skunks to? I've got a couple of private buyers who I'm not going to say, but got you. I mean, it's kind of a, it's a niche market, right?

So, I mean, you know, you flood the market with these niche buyers, then, you know, you're not going to have your market, but yeah, it's a very consistent market. And how many skunks did you put up this year? Probably, I don't know, numbered, I'm saying between 60 and 70 so far. You've fleshed and stretched between 60 and 70 skunks this year. You don't even smell like a skunk. Wow.

How do you dispatch them? Because that's... That's always real controversial. A lot of guys will inject them with acetone. I shoot everything. I'm not going to take the time. I'm running and gunning the whole time. So I do a center body shot, try to hit the vitals.

I think the trick is a very slow bullet, something that's not going to create a lot of impact. And you probably get maybe one out of eight, one out of nine that spray. Because I want the essence, right? So that adds to the value of the skunk is that you sell the fur, but then you, there's also a market for the essence. And so essence right now is, you know, right about $20 an ounce average. What? Yeah. So.

How much do you get out of one skunk? About $25. I mean, like. Oh, essence wise? Yeah. So it just depends on if they spray or not. If they're full, you know, a little over half an ounce. So you take a skunk that's, you know know 25 dollars if he's got good white stripes and if he's full essence you know throw another 10 to 12

dollars on it that's not bad deal for something you're not necessarily targeting either i mean there are guys that target them but for me they're bycatch yeah so well why not just set specifically for them because i'm out there targeting other species and i say by catch in the fact that i'm in the same general area so i catch them a lot my coon sets is where i catch them because you're going to catch them whether you're targeting them or not yeah yeah so and like i said you want the you want the good ones uh you know you're going to get a little bit more money for the good white stripes. That's what they want. I mean, that's what the novelty market is wanting.

But no, the skunk is an underrated fur for sure. And if you have never seen a skunk fur in general, they've got awesome fur. It's real long, kind of silky fur. I mean, it really is a... Stu, didn't you say there's trappers even starting to target them now just because of that market? For sure, yeah. There's several guys that I know that

they go out and pretty much target them. Do you think me and Rick would be able to pull a top lot off those giants I was showing you earlier today? Well, see, that's one funny thing. It's like 100 pounders.

I never did get a top lot skunk. I don't think they give out the certificates. That's a funny... That's why I haven't gotten that hat. Yeah. And I never sold a skunk. Yeah. I don't gotten that hat. And I never sold skunks. Those are some big skunks, though.

You'd have to go through fur harvesters. And there's no more Napa, so... You'd have to go through fur harvesters now, and I don't know if they'd give out for... Forgive my ignorance here. What is the market for the Essence? What are people using it for? What do they want it for? So the main market

is for baitmakers. Um, it's also, you can Google essence and come up with, I mean, it, it is, there's a large market for it. The main market is essence, uh, for, for lure, for trapping that takes a lot of it. Um, you know, and it's so like we were running Martin sets, right? There's not a lot of skunks in the mountains. So those guys can't access, you know, they don't have access to skunks. So, but there are different, different

markets for it too, as well. Um, gotcha. I think I, I could be wrong. I think there's some food additives that. Stu, you might've heard, I feel like years ago was used in perfumes a lot like they would pull apart the scent but like what sticks yeah is that correct yeah and there's some way to break it down uh caster's huge yeah caster's 100 bucks a pound right now right caster's 100 bucks a pound so like

caster's always funny because like around the holidays caster is we're talking about it we're talking about a thing that like when you skin a beaver on each side of the vent it'd be like if you're like if you reach down and grab on yourself male or female whatever above your how would i put it between what would be that little area are they i know a vulgar term for that little area. Yes, exactly. Between. Just say between. The in-between zone. No, not your taint. It's like a vulgar term for what that is. What is it?

If you were going to, I don't know, above your genitals and on either side, it was like a little soft area where your legs join up to your body. What is that called? That spot. If you had a hernia. Oh, yeah. Picture you had a hernia. On a beaver, there sits.

If you had a double hernia. It's like your groin area. Yeah, your groin area. There sits these two sacks full of castor. Looks like a brain. Looks like two brains hiding out down in there. And they use it for imitate like artificial vanilla. Vanilla extract's a big one.

A lot of it goes, I think there's a big market in Turkey for something they produce there. It's huge in perfume because it really does have a sweet smell to it. 100 bucks a pound right now.

100 bucks a pound right now. The castor, if you get a beaver loaded with castor, his castor's worth more than all of his other parts. Yeah, 100%. Is that,

because I've been with Steve when he's Well, I'm sitting on a bunch of pounds of it. Trapping. Is the weight the dried out weight?

Yeah, generally. There's a few different ways, but generally the accepted way is to have it dried. Can I give you a huge bag

of beaver casters and then you'll owe me a stretcher or something like that? Well, you already gave me two stretchers. If I give you a big bag of beaver casters and then you'll owe me a stretcher or something like that? Well, you already gave me two stretchers. If I give you a big bag of beaver casters, can we call it even? Call it even. Call it even.

Get that hat from him? Would you fly home with the beaver casters? We could fly home with them. I don't know. I'm going to send you home with a bunch of beaver casters. No, you need them for bait. Because that's one universal bait. I know.

It's a universal attractant. Yeah. No, beaver caster is where it's at if you're trapping right now so i'm gonna give you a bunch of beaver cats and the oil sacks too you can also take the oil sacks i kind of quit saying though because me and seth here we're old lure makers i don't know if you know that okay yeah and we wouldn't take your lures we made l we made like a lot oh yeah is that that stuff we used the other day? Is that still from the main stock? We made like a couple quart jars of that stuff. And we took valerian root, apple essence, and a lot of beaver castor, and a lot of glycerin.

That should work. Oh, it's magic. Oh, it worked. It should work. It worked. We got a lot of beavers with that stuff. Yeah. No, the castor definitely definitely where it's at.

Are you selling caster? I'm selling caster. I take what, because I make a lot of my own bait. So I take every year what I need to get me through basically the next year. And then I'll sell the rest. I'm going to give you a couple bags of it. Okay. That's why you'd have it.

I want it. Okay. What's your beaver pressure like in Southern Illinois? Is there a lot of people trying to catch beavers there? There's not a lot of beavers where I'm at. Okay. What's your beaver pressure like in Southern Illinois? Is there a lot of people trying to catch beavers there? There's not a lot of beavers where I'm at. Okay. So that's, that's the problem more than anything is that you've got to be very conscious about, you know, I've always said where I'm at right now, if I wanted to, I could take two weeks

and I could basically trap out my, my area. Yeah. And so I've got to be very conscious about how I trap the beaver. I trap far away from the house, trying to get the, the big, the big, you know, parent beaver. Trap far away from the beaver house. Yeah. Cause generally the further away you get from the house, you'll kind of keep yourself from catching the small kit beavers. They just don't travel as far.

And then I just, you know, once I go in, I'll take, you know, two or three out of the house and then I'm done. I'll leave it just to kind of have seed for next year. And that's just the area that I trap. Like how big is your trapping area? Like. So my trapping area is dictated a lot by my work being that I work construction. So I have a giant range that I've worked over the years. And over the years I've set up sort of trap lines to correlate with where I'm working. Because, I mean, I'm working every day, so I want to be able to run the line on the way back home from work. Tell Brody this.

This will help him conceptualize it. Tell him how many permissions. Permissions. How many permissions do you maintain at any given time? Between 115 and 120. Landowner permissions. Try getting that many whitetail permissions. It would never happen.

Well, because that's the only way I can trap. So we have no public land where I'm at. But give him your spiel. Yes. So he walks up with traps and starts jamming his hands into them. Give him an education you know because i mean the first so in general because people are worried about their dogs yeah so in general i'm gonna get nine no's to one yes oh even for trapping permission oh yeah 100 yeah that's

people don't they don't understand they don't want you on it which you know it's their land whatever but i mean that's kind of my my ratio is nine no's to one yes. So you'll go up, you'll have a conversation with them. That's better than Spencer's whitetail ratio. Wasn't it like 150 and he got one or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he got one A. 150 letters, he got like an A plus.

He was like grading. He got like an A plus, a couple Cs, and a D minus. Right. Anyway, go on. So now I'll go up and try to, you know, more than anything, try to educate the people about trapping. Because, I mean, a lot of people just don't know about it, you know. And, like I said, then they have the illusion that, oh, I'm going to go trap. Well, you're going to bring out a giant bear trap with teeth, you know.

And, you know, that's just not the case. So, you know, if that fails, I'll normally get out traps and I'll hear, this is what I'm going to use. And, you know, nine times out of 10, I'll stick my hand in them and show you, you know, if I'm not losing fingers or breaking bones or anything. And, you know, for me where I'm at, cause I do live in what I would consider a fairly populated area kind of last resort, I'll go to the dog proof traps, which if you not understand what a dog proof is, it's basically a cylinder. And so like a coon, a skunk, a possum, they all have

a lot of dexterity in their paws. They kind of have a hand if you will. So with a dog proof trap, if you can picture about a three inch tube, that's about an inch and a quarter in diameter and very bottom of it has a lever on it that you actually have to pull as opposed to a foothold trap where you know the critter just puts his paw in it and then the jaws close around with these dog proof traps the the opening is small enough that that ideally a dog can't get his paw down in there and you have to actually have dexterity to pull up on that trap. You can only catch things that could pick a lot. Pretty much.

Yeah. So I will use that as, you know, kind of a last resort, so to speak, to get permission, you know, and say, Hey, I can, you know, with the right bait, I can trap around all your cats and you know, your farm dogs and everything like that. And sometimes that kind of seals the deal. If you have a hundred, let's say you had a, how many, you got like 120 permissions? Yeah. Around about that. If you, let's say out of you had a, how many, you got like 120 permissions? Yeah, around about that.

If you, let's say out of that 120 permissions, how many of those are dog proof only? I would say close to half. Huh? Close to half. I mean, that's the only way I can do it. And that's the reason I use so many dog proofs in my trapping is because, you know, I've got to do what I got to do. So you can't do coyote work on those places?

Can't do coyote work. Can't set one and a halves. No two twenties. Have you had any luck, uh, like getting permission where like at hunting leases where they're like after whitetails or turkeys or waterfowl, cause those guys want you coming in to. There's a few. Yeah. They, they want the predators gone.

Um, you know, which they always have stipulations. Oh, well, I don't want you in here a week before season or, you know, a week after season. And they want to really make you work for it, you know, which is at least in Illinois, you know, we've got a shotgun firearm season starting November every other weekend for a month and a half. So it makes it really difficult to work around, you know, so you've got to do a lot of planning and, and different things like that to be able to work around and actually trap an area like that. Explain your otter. We talked about otters today. Okay. Explain how it works for you, like in a regulatory sense, when you talk about like, you talk about like getting my otters. So to get my otters in Illinois, we got a season, I guess it was eight, nine years ago or so by now. Uh, so I can go out

in Illinois. I'm allowed five otters for my license. So I can go out and, and target the otter. Once I catch it, I make a phone call to the DNR and they send me a, a site tag. And then I tag that otter. Once it has a sight tag on it, then I'm good to sell it. And you, every year can get five? I can get every, yeah, every year. And what do you do with those five? I sell them. To taxidermy trade or fur trade?

I sell a couple every year to taxidermy, but the majority of them goes to fur trade. Normally I can find somebody local that wants them as a wall hanger that I could sell them to, you know, cause we're only dealing with five. So it comes and goes. Back in the day, you know, I was selling them back in the day again, you know, there's more money in selling them at the fur trade than it was selling them local. But what was the highest an otter pelt went for that you can remember in terms of your fur broom? I remember selling a couple for 50 bucks. Okay. could remember in terms of your fur broom i remember selling a couple for 50 bucks okay so i mean nothing crazy you know which whenever you're looking at a 50 dollar order you're looking at a huge critter you know you feel like you should be getting more for him anyway you know

but so how is it that you wound up deciding to do like all the instructional videos did you do it as a way to like did you think it would be a way to make money no no because there's there's no money in it but so there's no money in it. There's no money in just making YouTube videos. Not for me. Because YouTube's so restricted. And you don't sell equipment or anything. No, no.

So YouTube's so restricted on their stuff that everybody hears about monetization of videos, and my content is not monetization worthy. YouTube won't let you monetize your videos or YouTube won't monetize your videos because of my content, because they feel that it's, it's like an animal cruelty issue. Yeah. And there's a fine line you got to play, you know, YouTube's huge with blood, you know, you can't show blood and, you know, there's a strike rule too. So you're always kind of walking that fine line of, you know, even if this is demonetized per se, I've still got to not get a strike on my channel. Cause then they could just, you could wake up one morning and it could just be done, you know, but you've

never lost your channel. Never lost my channel. I've had two strikes before. And you were telling me that too, that YouTube's policy makes it that you're afraid to like redo and make new versions of your high performing videos. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of my videos, which I guess to kind of get back to your initial question. So we're talking back, back in the day, um, this was 10 years ago. I've been doing YouTube now for, this is my 10th year doing it. And, uh, which kind of correlates right with the middle of the last fur boom. And I've been trapping for a few years, you know, and I'd be putting up my fur and, you know, not to pat myself on the back, but I mean,

I kind of felt like I knew what I was doing. And I remember like, was Rick was saying, you go up to the NAFA truck, you know, and you're sitting there and standing there and, you know, of course, during a fur boom, you've got a lot of new guys coming in, you know, that aren't there because they're just there for the money. And red fox are pretty rare around my area, you know, that aren't there because they're just there for the money. And red fox are pretty rare around my area, you know, not very common. And at this time, you know, 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of literature out there about trapping. You know, you were fur fishing game, you were trappers, but there was just a few magazines, you know, but for the most part, there wasn't a lot of information out there. It was kind of secretive really. And I remember

walking up to the NAFA truck and there was this guy and he must've found a pocket red Fox, which, you know, like I said, around my area is pretty rare. And he had them hanging there and he didn't have a NAFA bag because it was his first year. And those things were just butchered. I mean, they, you could just tell the guy did not know what he was doing. And I remember that I told myself, I was like, well, I could do this. I could put out content that people could view and put up their fur right. Because I feel like you're going to take the animal. You might as well do it justice and put it up right. And it was actually that night I went home, made a YouTube channel.

And then that following season. Oh, really? Yeah. What was the first thing you launched on it? Uh, I was hunting with my coon hound because the season was still in. Yeah. The season was still in for that. So that was the first video I ever uploaded was, was hunting with my coon hound.

And then that following year, uh, that following trapping season, I started with the fur handling videos and I did fur handling videos on them. Just about all the, all the critters in my area from, you know, the process of catching them, skinning them, flushing them, stretching them, the whole deal. So, and talk about why you can't, why you don't want to redo them. So I've tried to redo them a couple of times and every time I upload them, they very quickly get demonetized, which sucks because, you know. Cause they find it cause it's new. Yeah. Cause YouTube finds it cause it's new. Yeah. So all my old videos are demonetized anyway, but they're still up there.

So it's not like they can strike me on them. You know, they've already demonetized them, but new videos. So they don't go strike you about 10 year old stuff. No, I woke up one morning a few years ago and I had like 75 videos that were all demonetized and I had a strike overnight. Yeah. It was just all yellow on my, on my page. They hit me hard. I couldn't, I couldn't upload for 15, 15 or 20 days. I can't remember what it was. Yeah. They like banned me from it. So yeah, no, I I've tried in the past because like I said, obviously I didn't know what the hell I was doing back then. You know, I had a borrowed camera that I set up in my shop, you know, and do you ever think about doing a, what's that called?

Where you, uh, like a lot of podcasts are doing it. Patreon, right? Have you ever thought about trying to do a fur handling thing? Um, a fur handling series, like Patreon, where people just donate, like people just come in and view and donate a little money. So I, I actually do have a Patreon patreon i i and i've tried it the problem is especially nowadays youtube is where the traffic is i understand so you've got the biggest video streaming service on the planet yeah so you've got to have that audience and that draw to be able to so if you do it on yourself

you're just never gonna people aren't going to find you. They're going to go find something. Find it. And very few people, I mean, especially now, you know, back then I was one of the first people that was putting out trapping content, you know, and, and that kind of content. Now everybody and the brothers got a channel,

you know, they're putting out content. So people aren't going to go pay to watch something that, you know, they can just go right down the search bar and go search too. So, I mean, it's tough. You're in a real pickle. Pickle, yeah. But it's been fun. Can they just still support, though, anyway?

Yeah, I've got a Patreon page set up for it. But, I mean, it doesn't have a lot of traffic that goes towards it. Like I said. What is it? Huh? Tell people what it is. Just search Coon Creek Outdoors on Patreon. But you won't find it through YouTube. No. No, it's in a link underneath

all my videos. So if people are out there listening to this that like Stu Miller's Coon Creek Outdoors fur handling and trapping videos, they would need to go to Patreon and then find you there and give you a little jingle. Yeah, that's one way to support. See, now I feel like that's why I'm going to give you all that beaver caster because I haven't been in that page to pay you.

There's not a lot there. And honestly, I don't post a lot of videos there simply just because the traffic there is not justifiable to all the work that goes into it. But no, like I said, you don't do it for the money, you know, just like Rick probably knows, you know, you don't trap for the money either. Not right now. I mean, you trap for the, the heritage and the sport of it, you know? Yeah.

That romantic. Yeah. There's something cool about it. It just drips the romance. You know, I mean, you're all about traditional practices and trapping is one of the oldest, you know, it drips the romance. Yeah. That's all I wanted to read about trapping is one of the oldest. It drips the romance. Yeah.

That's all I wanted to read about when I was a kid, man. Because kids want to go live out in the woods and make a living off the woods. And I didn't know about writing. I thought you had to do it through trapping. What was I in for a surprise? Do you ever do any road trip trapping vacations for stuff you don't get to trap for? This year. Near home?

This was my first year. Yeah? This year, yeah. The one thing was- Stu came out, me and Rick, and Stu got abused out in the coyote. Oh, that was- I didn't know you were on that one. That was a hard trip. But no, that-

That was a tough road to hoe. Is that- That bobcat's not from that trip, is it? No, definitely not. No, that is one thing that YouTube has given me. It's let me meet people, go places, and do things that I would never have been able to do. Plug your hunting and fishing channel. So if you want to check me out, you can search Coon Creek Outdoors. That's where the good stuff is.

That's where the gold is. Yeah. Yeah. That, that's where I put up all my content. When I say the gold, that's where like the stuff that like, um,

I shouldn't say that cause I don't want to hack on you or something. That's where like, like you excel, um, at like a skillset that's not widely known. And like the fur handling, trap and information. I like to fur handling, trapping information, like to me is like,

I don't think there's anyone, when I want to know something, I'm going to go look at that. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, no, that means a lot. But yeah, I pride myself on the put up and the fur handling side of it.

So, I mean, you know, there's nothing special about what I do. You know, I mean, I'm not the best trapper and I'm not the best at putting up stuff, but. You made a boat from scratch. I made a boat from scratch I mean, I'm not the best trapper and I'm not the best at putting up stuff, but. You made a boat from scratch. I made a boat from scratch.

Yeah, I came across that video one time, looking up, just like looking up boat stuff on YouTube. Oh, you found him? Yeah. Well, I used to see what. Welded a boat, because he likes to fish catfish, he likes to fish crappie, so he welded up a catfish crappie combo boat. Yeah, it's a sweet for a trailer. What channel is that on?

That's on my main channel concrete outdoors yeah okay tell people about the other channel though so I've got another channel branched off of my main channel simply because the audience just wasn't there but I've got a fishing channel that I do a lot of content on in the summer it's a couple years old now called total angling experience and that's that's where I'm slowly trying to put all my fishing content and you know educational side electronics and different things like that. Because you like cats? I like cats and I like crappies.

That's what I fish for at home. Cats and crappies. Oh, you're speaking my language. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, yeah. I don't bass fish, so catfish and crappies is where I'm at. I think that everyone out there needs to send Stu Miller a few pounds of beaver caster or go to the Patreon deal and throw a little jingle this guy's way. Well, your fishing stuff's probably not demonetized, right? Fishing stuff's not demonetized.

That's another reason. I wanted to have kind of a backup, if you will, just because all the problems with YouTube. I mean, there's a huge deal right now with just kind of all the outdoor community with YouTube, you know, kind of demonetizing and picking what they want to see. how could you come in and create an alternative for outdoor? How could you come in and create an alternative for outdoor pursuits that would get, that you would build up so big that it would actually have traffic would be a reliable place to go look. But it's like YouTube is so advanced. That's the problem.

It's where all the traffic is. You know what I mean? You want to know something, you search it on YouTube. I don't know what it is. Every minute, 400 hours of stuff gets uploaded to YouTube or some shit like that. Yeah. YouTube's a Google company, aren't they? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Man, like, somehow. But it's almost like, it's like the Q-tip thing. Like, it's just YouTube's not even, it's just where you find information. Yeah. It's not, it's a, it's bigger than just video streaming. I feel like socially now.

No, we launch, we put every day, every day. Yeah. Our company, we put material on YouTube every day. Like I'm not hacking on it, but I, what I don't like is I don't like the hostility to the disciplines. It's like uncertainty in that environment, right? You never know what's going to happen with putting out that kind of content. Yeah, they can take it away from you tomorrow if they really want it. Without any question either.

Yeah, it's private. Because it's their platform. So as much as you want to be on there or love it or hate it, you still got to play by their rules. I do want to say just because Stu is a very humble person, but I started trapping right around the time Stu did, and just I love old trapping books, but there's a lot of times I read that where I'm like,

yeah, someone's going to have to show me how to actually do that. Like pencil sketches. Or the black and white photos that are so horrible. I'm like, this is terrible. Well, that's what I was going to ask Stu. Like, where'd you learn it all? How'd you get good at it? I was self-taught for the most part.

Everything, you know, because like I said, I did learn a lot. FurFish and Game, I've had a subscription to them forever. And there was a lot of educational stuff then. A lot was just trial and error. I thought Trapper and Predator Collar blew Fur Fishing Game away on instructional. Do you think so? When I was a kid. Fur Fishing Game was more fun to read, but instructional.

I mean, a lot of it, and like Rick said, you know, you can read and you can watch somebody do it, but a lot of it's just getting out there and doing it. Trial and error, you know. There's a lot of real rough DVDvds out there yeah that'll get you by um i appreciate your channel though you kind of one thing and we talked about we were trapping was you you cut through the bullshit pretty well because i i went down rabbit holes on like trapper man forum and stuff where i'm like oh my god i gotta i gotta wear a hazmat suit you know so the coyotes don't smell me when you making this set, you need to squint your left eye.

Squint your left eye. And I, and you know, I got so, That was a lot of work. I got so wound up on that and your channel's really good. It cuts through it

and it's, so yeah, everyone should go subscribe to Coon Creek Outdoors. Well, I appreciate that. No,

that means a lot. And like I said, you know, a lot of guys are just out there to make content, but like you said, I mean, it doesn't take,

a lot of people overthink trapping. They really do. Like you said, they go down a rabbit hole. They got to be this and you get nine inches set back and four inches over and this, that, and the other, you know, and there's, whenever you really break it down, there's, there's a few simple things that you got to do to be able to be successful at it. And once you have those few fundamentals down, you're golden. I want to just touch on one of the things you taught me that I walked away from our little trip with that I ignored very much. And I think it's that romantic little side of it. You were like set on sign. And every time we came to a picture perfect area, you were like, well, is there a sign here? Because if there's not, we're not putting a trap here.

It doesn't matter because it looks so cool. And it hit me with such a reality check. I was like, man, I put traps in areas so many times because I'm like, this is what the manual told me to do. This is what that little book told me, and this is perfect. I don't see any sign here, but I'm going to put a set here. These animals are so dumb. They don't know they're supposed to be here.

So just something like that. Yeah. I took away from that stew and yeah. So. No, you gotta, you gotta be setting where the critters are, you know, and a lot of people like, I've been trying to catch coyotes and I can't catch coyotes. Cause everybody gets a hard on for coyotes, right? Like that's like kind of the pinnacle predator, you know?

Well, if you're going to catch a coyote, you gotta be where a coyote is, you know, you gotta be where he's going to travel and, you know Well, if you're going to catch a coyote, you've got to be where a coyote is You know, you've got to be where he's going to travel And, you know It's the same thing with a lot of things we're doing In the outdoors, like fishing You've got to be fishing where the fish are I mean, it's easy set You know, you can say that and people are like, of course

But you've got to put your time in Scouting and Oh, sure, there's a lot of correlation Not setting where you want them to be yeah yeah all right stew you you do social media too yeah a little bit i got facebook instagram so tell people where that's at kuhn creek outdoors kuhn that's all you need to remember kuhn creek outdoors simple as it gets let's say a fella has a coyote they're out deer hunting here comes a beautiful coyote run along bam Bam! They're like,

man, I'm going to hang that sucker on my wall. What do you do? Go to Coon Creek Outdoors. Yep. You can find videos of how to set the trap, skin and fleshing.

I've got videos on tanning for home use and garment use, everything else. Remember, send them a pound of castor. Or go to, what's it called?

Not Pantheon. Patreon. Pantheon. Don't go there. Who knows what's at Pantheon. Stu, thanks for coming out, man. No, I appreciate it. It's been a blast, man.

All right. It's been awesome. Speaking of wallhanger coyotes, you know what you're doing next. No, we're doing stuff. Going over to my garage. All right, man. Thank you.