The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 423: Spittin' and Struttin’

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Richard Martinez, Janis Putelis, Seth Morris, Chester Floyd, and Garret Smith.  Topics include: The original Live, Laugh, Love sign; Florida's for fighting; three P's and a W; moving some Texas super cougars to Florida; Chester opening for Trampled By Turtles and how you need him to open for you to get a sold out show; deer nuts and a note; spearing in Wisconsin; more human deadheads; the 3,500 year old brown bear; how the news covers turkeys; copulating the air behind the head; Florida's giant turkey poaching bust; hunting osceola turkeys; Jani becoming a Grand Slam holder and Steve becoming a two-time Super Slam holder; trimming your beard down; what a hammock is; rolling your foot; masturbating turkeys; all the divisiveness; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go go farther stay longer all right everybody we're coming uh coming at you from florida where i'm where i've basically become an honorary resident i've been down here so damn long it's like i've met everybody in the state back to back heard all the problems i've been like i've been on a uh man, I've gotten an earful. It's like two weeks. I've gotten an earful. For what? Oh, just all the issues in Florida. Oh, you've heard all the issues in Florida. Yeah. I've been on a

whirlwind tour talking to many different sportsmen. The most surprising thing to me down here is how unpopular uh how unpopular among the folk i've met how unpopular the panthers are in what way okay like people think they're gonna get their dogs and no just from a hunting standpoint it's remarkably similar it's like it's such a parallel yanni am i boring you no not at all

just gotta just take care of a little loose end right here seems to be important. I'm listening. Okay. The parallels between the wolf debate in the Northern Rockies, soon to be in the Southern, the debate that's being relocated to the Southern Rockies, but the wolf debate in the northern rockies and the panther issue in florida even though we're talking about far fewer numbers of the actual animals on the ground is remarkably similar similar down to the point no i listen i'm not uh i'm gonna what i'm doing right now i'm i'm trying to be like a journalist

right now i'm not saying what this this is not me saying what i think is oh i'm gonna preface this saying something joined today by richard martinez hey steve most interesting job on the planet can you tell people what you do for work i uh i'm an art handler that's my profession uh i help manage an art handling company in west palm beach and uh yeah i handle fine art any kind of fine art logistics moving packing shipping installation protection of fine arts storage you know uh me and Ponder, we think we found in this very house the original Live, Love, Laugh sign. Might be worth something. Well, we were thinking about stealing it and hiring you to move it back up to where we live.

Absolutely. This is Live, Love, Laugh from from a long how a long time when do you think the first one was like this one but what what does it look like 1950 we role played how we thought it came about we thought it came about or there's a guy saying there you know he's like and i thought to myself what do i really care about live laugh love and he said, I like to be alive. Because, you know, if you ain't alive, you're dead. And then he thought, what else do I like?

I like to laugh. That's pretty good. And then his wife walked in. I like my wife. And he hadn't named her yet. And he got guilty feeling. And he's like, you know i love my wife that's what's important to me check check check and that's where that came from and spread like

wildfire until today we found yesterday we found the original it's a little plaque what was i saying oh well my before you go on mine would be live, laugh turkeys. Not move. Live, love turkeys. Yeah, live, love turkeys. Careful there. So we're down here hunting with Richard Martinez. And that's just one of the main things I've done in Florida. But the minute I got here.

Chester's also here and Seth Morris. I'm not too that part of it. Garrett Smith. And Janice Vittal. Thanks. Just for my dad. Stay tuned for that part, folks. The minute I met Richard, well, no, because we met at a live show.

We did a live show in Boise. Yes. And you said you guys should apply for a turkey tag at one of the wildlife management areas in Florida. And how many years did it take? Four. Took a while to draw it. Yeah, four years. Because we're like non-reses with no points or whatever.

Starting from scratch. Starting from scratch. Is it easier for a resident to draw? You'd have to fact check me, but what I've been told is that there's a 10% cap for non-residents on the quota. Gotcha. That's why it took me and Yanis so long to draw. So, the minute I met Richard for the second time, so I met him the first time at a live show, and do you remember why we liked him?

I can't remember why I liked him. I mean, I like him all over again, but I can't remember why i liked him i mean i like him all over again but i can't remember why i originally like he's got a good because he offered to take turkey no he's got a great demeanor to him now we got a lot of people that offer us calm cool and collective yeah well something struck me my first impressions first thing when i meet him he tells me about his friend who hates me and i'm like what do you mean he hates me and he's talking about his friend hates me this is the perils of of doing journalism like i'm about ready to do on the panther issue because the reason he hates me is we had a uh we had a uh

a usgs bio so you united states geological service biologist on talking about the burmese python and this biologist who's working on the burmese python problem uh he's talking about how his friend hates me for something the biologist said who's working on the burmese python problem and i was like oh so he loves pythons oh no no he hates pythons too but he didn't like a thing that the individual said about pythons right is this your snake biologist buddy no no no no so he didn't like that the guy said that numerically python hunters aren't having a meaningful impact on pythons that was this guy's take.

Can I ask a side question to Richard on that? Yeah, if you really want to get into it. But I'm trying to get somewhere else, but go ahead. Yeah, but just while it's in my head. What's the chances of one of those big pythons being on the property we were hunting this morning? Probably low. I think they're more prolific as you move further southeast.

We saw what seemed to be a snake track going across the road. Well, we've got a lot of snakes here. But it looked big, didn't it? Okay. Didn't it look big, Yanni? Yeah, but I don't think it was like python big. Gator? No, it was a snake.

Oh, yeah. Well, I asked some other dudes and they said, uh-uh. They said they'd heard of it, but they haven't seen one. That snake track struck me as a big snake. Like a Chester Eaton size? Anyway, go ahead. So that's been weighing on my mind. And it's weighing on my mind as i weighed into this because i

realized you know that saying uh uh you know in the west water is for drinking no whiskey's for drinking water's for fighting oh yeah about water rights issues i've been thinking about how well since i've been here i've been thinking florida's for fighting well made up mostly of water florida's for fighting we're fighting over water yeah every every and these are like honest like these are like hard work and honest to goodness out outdoors people and man just a lot of contentious issues in Florida around pythons, panthers, the three Ps. Pythons, panthers, and people. People. Oh, it is the three Ps.

Pythons, panthers, people, and water, which is a W. And man, like a contentious environment. Absolutely. and man like a contentious environment absolutely but the point i was getting as how contentious the panthers are um and it has parallels to the wolf issue in the northern rockies right down to the idea that the panther here now isn't the panther that was here before to the point that i'll meet uh hunters i've met hunters who say deer numbers have collapsed now i'm just reporting what people i've been getting a year full from everybody on different things um deer numbers have collapsed in many of these areas okay they've collapsed because of the introduction of panthers and i'll say but home when you say introduction that doesn't make sense

because it was not even a reintroduction like the florida panther was always on the landscape admittedly it got down to very few. It got down to less than 50. At the point that it was less than 50, they brought in seven or eight females from Texas to supplement the population because they were seeing some inbreeding issues. So they brought in some females from Texas,

which in and of itself, even among Panther people, people got to fight about that because they had fallen in love with the some folks had fallen in love with the idea that the florida panther was not like everybody else's panther yeah now it's all puma con color it's all the same species so whether you're talking about a cougar in California, mountain lion in Montana, someone hits one on the road in Connecticut, you're in Southwest Florida, it's all the same species. A lot of people think panther,

and they think black panther. It's the beast of many names. Mountain lion, cougar, painter, catamount there's more all the same critter all the same critter yeah and the florida panther like florida made the same mistake with their black bears which we'll get to in a minute here and we got some more stuff to cover up made the same mistake with their black bears by declaring that it's the florida black bear and not just like the same, like the black bear that used to exist everywhere from California to New York,

from Yukon to South Florida, like the black bear. The panther. Versus Americana? Versus Americana. The black, the panther was at a time the most wide like of any it had the most widespread distribution of any large mammal

in the new world whoa i didn't know that meaning they've turned up in the mackenzie delta okay so where the mackenzie river flows into the know that meaning they've turned up in the mackenzie delta okay so where the mackenzie river flows into the arctic ocean they've turned up from the mackenzie delta to was it tierra del fuego chile this to the southern tip of chile chile to the southern tip of patagonia that's how widespread coast to coast top to bottom in the western hemisphere two continents two continents that's cool well it got eliminated through poisoning and other things and it went up in patches so at some point florida's like it's the florida panther not like that it's just a little stronghold of the regular old cougar mountain lion painter catamount panther

that exists all across the continent numbers got down and they brought in some from texas and the way i've been like the people the folk i've just been talking to like various hunters are like that now it's a super cougar that lives in florida the same way when you're in the northern rockies they talk about the reintroduction and was it 96 or 97 six i believe when they did the wolf reintroduction there's a widespread belief they brought down the meanest nastiest super wolves like the meanest we even heard a guy we even met a guy one time in british columbia who's saying that he was like oh yeah my buddy worked on getting those wolves, and they'd poke them all with a stick and get the meanest, nastiest ones.

Yeah, they had 30 or 40 of them in a big old pen, and then they weeded out the ones that were growling the most. He said they'd poke them with a stick, and whatever wolves got most riled up, they're like, send those to America. Yeah, stupid Americans, here you go super wolves and there's the idea that by bringing in these seven or eight can you do you mind looking up how many females they brought in check me on that from and look up where in texas they came from that's the first time they'd introduced they supplement or supplemented the the native they supplemented so

they had let probably less than 50 okay less than 50 florida panthers and i was getting to something a minute ago why were people mad about that they were mad about that because they felt that the panther the florida panther was like special and unique and people were like oh no if you bring in these texas panthers you're gonna like mess up the florida panther and most conservation biologists were like listen man you can have a you're gonna have no panthers or you can have a hybridized panther but the way you're going right now it's choosing between those two things they're either going to blip out or you're going to supplement with genetics from texas and it really wasn't going to be a hybridized one because puma con color yeah anyhow they did this and it

was very effective that and a bunch of their protections it was very effective. That and a bunch of other protections. It was very effective. And now they got less than 300? 250? Yeah, that's debatable. Debatable. Depends on who you ask. Same thing with wolves. Oh, yeah. Same thing with wolves in the Northern Rockies.

Depends who you ask. Yeah. Right? But it is a widely held belief under the among the deer hunters i've spoken to that um that that has caused a a impact cratering of deer populations in southwest florida which like you're saying up north people would say wolves some people would say wolves are doing that yeah which is like that's it's not a debate that it's an objective reality it's objective it's not a debate point it's an

objective reality that bringing wool like introducing wolves reintroducing wolves on a landscape has a profound immediate impact on elk numbers like you can't that doesn't mean that that doesn't need to mean to everybody that they're bad but it is nonsense to it is nonsense to sit and act like that's not true yeah it's it's like infuriating when people want to act like introducing wolves to a landscape doesn't have a dramatic impact on elk numbers. It just does. Take it or leave it. Applause it or not, but it does. And acting like they eat nuts and berries is ridiculous.

And it's not just that it's not just like them physically eating things is it causes a dramatic shift in behavior and it's like they climb out of it but when it hits when it hits like when if they do it in florida or sorry when they reintroduce wolves into colorado and the numbers they're talking about, they are going to see a massive decline in elk numbers in those places. It'll crater, and it'll creep back up. It won't get as high as it was. It'll drop fast. It'll climb up.

This is my prediction. This is my crystal ball. It'll drop fast. It'll slowly climb up, and it won't get as high as it was because how could it? Yeah, there's predators. It's like you're putting a – there's a niche that isn't currently occupied, and it'll be occupied, and they eat seven pounds of meat a day.

It's like you can't get around this yeah um i had i had no idea the way i had no idea that the the the the that that increase of from sub 50 to 250 300 more than 300 panthers is attributed to to a point where i was talking to a guy and he was talking about the absence um not for turkey hunting but in part of my wanderings we were down by the everglades national park and he's talking about an absence of um mid-sized mammals okay so that raccoons basically you know raccoons basically gone grinners possums basically gone armadillos basically gone on and on and on and i said oh man i thought that was uh the i thought that was the whole deal with the whole pythons like i thought that was attributed to the pythons he's like he thinks that the pythons are like a scapegoat this is just a dude oh but listen this is a dude like this is like this is a guy that has spent his whole life out on the land

his father his grandfather that's like all they've done yeah right they're like self-identified Gladesman that's all they've done and he's not a pessimist he still gets very excited about turkey hunting very excited about squirrel hunting but uh and he's you know he's not like a conspiracy theorist he's like man that's an impact in my view I it's like a scapegoat because you can go to the dry areas that just aren't even suitable habitat and instead of those dry areas that aren't suitable habitat becoming like a refugia for all the stuff fleeing the pythons yeah they're still impacted it's not there yeah but our experience today would say that those are the refugia because we were in country that uh doesn't doesn't supposedly doesn't have or hasn't been has pythons haven't been seen and we saw all

those critters that's a good point in a short period of time. Yeah. Today we went over on to a, like a, so we hunted two days on a WMA, which, holy cow, it's just beautiful, man. Oh, gorgeous. I got to hand it to like, in talking about all the contention in Florida, the state does a beautiful job on those WMAs, man. Mm-hmm. I thought it was gorgeous. Gorgeous. And very diverse.s, man. I thought it was gorgeous. Gorgeous.

And very diverse. Yeah. Yeah. Like, gorgeous. Yeah, and big country to walk around in, which is not something I expect when I leave the West, right? But you can go wear your feet out if you want. Yep.

And like a pretty good, and I found too, like a pretty good blend of walking hunting but still some road you know what i mean and we never ran across another hunter now that we're talking we definitely did but we didn't i mean in the field we saw other people on the road but yeah yeah not in the woods not in the woods uh-uh I really liked it. So hats off on that. Oh, what'd you find, Chester? So in 1986, three females from Texas, I couldn't find exactly where they were from, were brought to Florida.

In 1988, seven wild-caught mountain lions captured in West Texas were released in Florida. Super cougars and um let's see in 1993 19 mountain lions 11 females and eight sterile males both captive rays as well as wild caught are introduced into the local panther population really why and then why sterile males i don't know and then in probably just for study purposes um in 1995 eight wild caught females oh were are captured and released in effort yeah so what's the source so a total of how many i had some okay see it being

that's what you get for just listening to people i had someone the other day telling me all about where they came from and it was like seven females and that was like the extent of it okay so shows you those were like 37 those were the most recent that really caused that spike sounds like prior to that it wasn't happening it could have been where the success began was that last and this source is the mountain lion foundation okay so west texas super cougars and people are pissed man like i i thought it was like widely i didn't know there was the same i didn't know there's the same element but what surprised me what surprised me is the idea that it wasn't like

a saving existing population the perception it wasn't like saving the Florida Panther. It was sort of like they made, they created a predator and let it loose upon the landscape. Yeah. Something needed to occupy that space of what the Florida Panther was occupying for various different reasons. And the degree to which deer hunters are not happy. No. And also that some people are like, they just don't want them. It's like my whole take, like in the Northern Rockies,

I think like generally with the wolf issue generally among my peer group which is broad if i was going to make a consensus the consensus would be people welcome wolves on the landscape but they want to see them managed right heavily-hmm. Right? Heavily. Yeah. Well, but it's not like, if you went to most people, if you went to most people you hang out with and said, hey, I'm going to give you a magic wand, if you wave the magic wand, wolves are gone from the lower 48.

The vast, vast majority of people I hang out with would not touch that wand. There's a happy medium. Do you know the main people that would wave the wand? One guy is pretty tight with less wood. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Oh, but does he have like mixed up because...

I don't know what. Because he's got lion hounds. Oh, no. Oh, no. Just speaking of the good old days of elk hunting oh i got it okay that's all i hear about they're like we know it's good the way you have it right now and you're enjoying your elk hunting but if you had been here to see how great it was before those wolves showed up you would want them gone too yeah i gotta say i started hunting in montana

the year the wolves showed up right which was the good old days it was good well it could be a pressure issue too oh 100 there's different factors well no i mean like most those populate i want to talk about florida i want to talk about a couple things besides florida but most those i mean you saw like generally you see two-thirds declines. Well, I got a question. With the Florida impact of the panther boost to the population, was that aligned with, because during the pandemic, Florida's population boomed, right? A lot of people move yeah and that is definitely a factor to the deer population no this good yeah oh before that

yeah okay i was just curious i had a um i had a girl the other day telling me that uh i like this is hard to measure she She said, Florida is the freest state. Oh. I was like, oh, pretty free. Yeah. The free. It feels pretty free. That was like the first time anyone's ever, the first time anyone's ever like rated like freedom levels.

This is a fact. Yeah, like freedom levels. That's got to be pretty. In Arizona, they're like, damn it. Well, yeah. I would think that there would be some Texans that would disagree with it. Yeah, that's what I was thinking with Texas. She's like, Florida it. Well, yeah. I would think that there would be some Texans that would disagree with it. Yeah, that's the thing with Texas.

She's like, Florida's a free estate. How big is the Florida Panther range in Florida? Well, that's debatable. The whole state. Depending on who you ask. Yeah. I hate it when you ask questions so easily learned by just looking it up. Look that up, Chester. Come on. Yeah, all you listeners out there, just looking it up look that up chester come on yeah all you listeners out there just look it up no chester chester's the today's researcher man that's a

fast thumb chat that's contentious meaning there's well i don't believe it is because like with i mean lord knows florida's got a lot of trail cams in it uh-huh holy smokes i just feel like there's not many panthers that aren't getting photographed yeah well there's also been a lot of trail cams in it. Holy smokes. I just feel like there's not many panthers that aren't getting photographed. Yeah. Well, there's also been a question of are they roving males that are going north or are there actual breeding populations moving north? So I think there may be sightings or there may be people who feel like they have them in certain places and that some people attribute that to a roving male or other people's attribute that to an established population but how would

anyone expect anything else to happen than that they would move north you have a expanding population you have unexploited prey base to the north panther populate like mountain lion cougar whatever you want to call it their populations are expanding all across the country why would they not move north especially as the population grows it's an animal that doesn't like to be crowded no shit they're not gonna go south nope there's more it's it's denser population north though right there's more urban in pockets pockets, yeah. And that's another thing I appreciate about Florida is that there is somewhat of a corridor that's still intact.

So there is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, rarely do they get farther north of Orlando. Like there's barely any. Let me see that picture. Oh, huh. Wow. farther north of orlando like there's barely any picture oh huh yeah halfway up man we're in the pocket right now though dude yeah that map have you seen panthers out turkey deer hunting oh yeah yeah me and clay caught two tracks here today

really um okay i gotta put that on hold for a minute oh chester's got big news but not it's it's news that has no relevance to anybody why are you looking at me like only he knows he's excited for this musicians musicians worldwide need to pay attention to what i'm gonna say because i found the pathway to to riches for musicians chester's gonna open for trampled by turtles oh yeah check this out again yeah he's gonna open for trampled by turtles july 19th and you know what the date that they got chester booked for is booked up or sold out chester's show sold out nice the other shows haven't sold out so Already sold out. Chester's show sold out. Nice. The other shows haven't sold out. So if you're a musician and you want to sell out some shows.

Good old Chester. You need to get Chester because that's how you sell tickets. Nice. Damn. Chester's show. Can we get on a list maybe for friends and friends? Yeah, sneak me in. How do we get in?

I didn't even know about this. Chester's show has sold out. Are you going? What's the capacity? Sold out? When's the tour? It's not a tour. It's just age.

When are you playing Florida? Yeah. Dude, I don't know, man. One step at a time, you know? One step at a time. They were talking about what Chester's all strung out on heroin and shit, man. Your career has kind of been like one giant leap at a time. Oh, yeah, man.

Oh, yeah. I kind of wish it were, not wish, but I'm very happy and excited, and I'm learning very quickly, but sometimes I wish it were just maybe a skosh slower. What do you mean, man? You got like a big show coming up now? Now you're trying to dance? Well, I guess it's already sold out,

so it doesn't matter what you say. Well, it's a lot of pressure though, right? I mean, I just mean like I feel, nah, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm excited. Yeah, super excited. But I wish I were a little better at my guitar. You do got an angel. And I'm working working on it a voice of an angel though too good originals yeah so i i would do a service announcement and

say that buy tickets now to see chester open for trampled by turtles but sold out too late maybe find a scalper at the door. And other musicians, if you want to get serious about making money and selling tickets, book Chester. Yeah, Luke Combs. Dirt, you and I got to do a show. Yeah, we do. Yeah, I wonder if Luke's listening.

I think he sells the shows out. Well, you know what? He definitely sells the shows out. If that star stops burning so bright, you know what? He definitely sells his shows out. If that star stops burning so bright, I know what he can do to fix things up. The old chatticle. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking that's right you were always talking about, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it,

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

onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Here's a good story. I already put this on Instagram. So a guy writes in from Michigan, and a couple years back he had to move to another, so he's from Michigan, but he had to move to another state for a job opportunity.

He's living in a hotel. And living in a hotel where he's at, where he's moving to, he's trying to buy a house, but he has to come back to Michigan to gather up the stuff out of his house, his old house all of a sudden remembers that he had he had a tree stand um that he left out on state land down the road so he's like shoot and he runs out to get his tree stand says when i got to the stand i noticed a piece of paper at the base but didn't pay any mind until i climbed the stand and was eye level with something

I didn't expect. A fresh pair of deer nuts sitting in the seat of my stand. Sends a picture of it. I got a picture of the note and the buck nuts. He wonders about this, climbs down and goes and finds the scrap of paper,

and the scrap of paper says this. It's like a scrap of paper written by a, I presume to be a gentleman. Creeping on other people's stands. I'm sorry. Creeping on other people's trees stand is immoral and how you end up with nutsacks on your stand. Creeping on other people's tree stand is immoral and how you end up with nut sacks on your stand i bet you never shot deer dang wow it's getting out of control that's what he gets for creeping

on other people's tree stands what's really funny is that uh well one i'm trying to there's a guy we're trying to get on the show that has a on like instead of just reading about it there's a there's a story of a of a public land tree stand spot dispute that spun so wildly out of control i'm trying to get the guy to come on the podcast just as a guest to be on the show for the whole show to tell the story not hair say but it'll curl your hair i had a guy recently i saw an email the guy sent in recently and he he blames so we covered we've been covering a lot of these like public land debates people stand my spot he says it's all a result of this public landowner movement because he sees he sees the public landowner t-shirts

and he's like it's these people that think they own the land i got side note a michigan factoid please the dog with the longest tongue ever was a Michigan dog. It was like 18 inches long. How do you know that? I heard it on the radio station back home. Wow. If I don't get my phone checked, could you check that? There's a fact.

The longest tongue of a dog is aigan dog okay here's here's a news alert chest real fact check that here's a news alert um this this is i wish i understood michigan or wisconsin law a little bit better like how laws get made you So, Chad, how many years have me and Yanni been applying for our Sturgeon-Spearing permit in Skani? I don't know, but I feel like I didn't put in the last year or two. Oh, there's no way you wouldn't have put in. I've only got two points. How many are you up to?

I thought you took care of it. Did we fall off the board on Spearing permits? I don't know. I checked my points the other day and i was like what how can that be if you've been putting if we got we should only have two okay well maybe that's right then three either way lay that out for people okay Okay. In Wisconsin, on Lake Winnebago, it's kind of like a big party fest, and people go and – Party fest.

Party fest. It's my kind of festival. It's a party – Burning sturgeon. Drinking fest. Yeah. Party fest. You don't have to drink.

You don't have to party. You can just spear Lake Sturgeon through the ice. Mm-hmm. And you go out there you cut a big hole in the ice with a chainsaw you back your ice shanty up over the top of it throw a decoy down if you want and wait and wait and wait for a sturgeon to swim under the hole however there's these upper lakes in the winnebago system. And you have to put in. Don't tell people about this because it means you're out and you're putting in.

There's just a better chance for you to spear sturgeon. I thought you asked me to explain. No. I just wanted you to explain as much as you explained. Now explain to me this. How could it be that you can spear a sturgeon through the ice, but you can't spear a northie through the ice? Well, because it's illegal. It blows my mind.

When I read this the other day, there's a thing. I'm getting to a news blip. Yeah, I know about that. How in the hell? I had no idea you couldn't spear northerns through the ice in Wisconsin. No, but I've wanted to for a long time. It seems like it would be like the target target species because there's a spearing culture there yep shocked me maybe they just think too many people will do it yeah they're like wisconsin

people are too apt to do it you know how to practice for sturgeon beer. You go down to your local gas station and you get a six pack of light beer. Then you come home and you open up the closet, bring a chair in there with you, shut the lights off and shut the door and you can't come out of the closet until all six of those light beers are all drank. So, there's a citizen's resolution

well okay during the past year we've progressed our citizen resolution through multiple wisconsin dnr committees and it will finally now be up for a statewide vote online during our spring hearings, April 10th to 13th, in order to legalize the spearing of Northies. Oh, nice. By which I mean Northern Pike. I wonder how that's polling. Yeah, I don't know.

I think it would be polling good, but like, you know, pro-spearing. Mm-hmm. But I don't know for sure. Man, I really, really, my recommendation to people that live in Skane, Wisconsin, is to go,

I don't understand this though like you can vote online i wish i understood this better so on april 10th to april 13th if you live in wisconsin apparently you can go online and vote to give you guys a northern pike spearing season i know what i'd be doing between the 10th and 13th. I think there's a lot of fishermen, regular old rod and reelers, that don't like the idea of throwing spears at fish. If God didn't want you to spear pike, you wouldn't have made pike spears. You know what the funny thing is, though? People in Wisconsin, they keep fish, man, and they fry them up.

Yeah, but they like to keep them when they catch them on their rod and reel. They're not spearing steelhead. They're not spearing walley dogs. It's like you're spearing northerns. Here's my advice to people that are spearing. I think we should have a spearing season, and I think there should be maybe kind of – it doesn't have to be. No, we don't have to have a slot limit,

but just use your best judgment and not be killing. If you want Northies in your lake, don't be killing those big, big females. Yeah, but you can't expect, let's just say you got to write the law because you can't expect, you can't make a law, you know, the reason they put specificity to fishing regulations is because you can't just like can't make a law you know the reason they put specificity to fishing regulations is because you can't just like make general recommendations to people yeah i know there's a hundred ways but you can on a podcast when a bunch of people are are listening no you can but i'm saying like i would like if it comes down to that you have no pike spearing yes and

you're like well we can't have if we allow people to spear pike they'll spear all the pike okay then why don't you make it that they won't spear all the pike by having a okay i don't know if you're that scared of it that you're allowed you know what's the daily bangla but on northern wisconsin i'm not sure i think it's lake dependent okay what would be a what would be a reasonable number five yeah probably okay so right now a guy with tip-ups can kill five make it that the spear guy i'm not recommending this but i'm just saying make it that the pike spear has a little bit fewer bag limit different season structure i was playing devil's advocate from what i heard when i did my little ice fishing tour there and chatted with people about spear and

stuff and a lot of people feel like you're gonna spear not non-target species and oh by catch and Oh, bike itch. And then, you know. Well, any musky waters. The biggest thing is, I think, musky. Because you can tell the difference between a largemouth bass and a pike. Yeah, but I wouldn't leave it to people to tell a musky from a northern. No. So musky waters. Don't let them. You can't spear in musky waters.

Why couldn't you use an example of a state like Montana where you can spear a pike? And you can't spear in... Wait. I don't know if that's true in Montana, but I know in North... Was it North Dakota or South Dakota? North Dakota, you cannot spear in musky waters.

Okay. If you're talking about if you're talking about wisconsin spearing and it like first off i would be that i would limit it to like native musky waters and not these experimental populations of hybrid hybridized muskies. Like tigers. Yeah, like native musky waters. I could see some legitimacy in saying you can't spear, that you can't spear northerns. I haven't sorted it all out in my head, but I can tell you what I have sorted out. You should be allowed to spear pike in Wisconsin. Yeah, it's a blast. I don't care what Giannis says. You should be allowed to spear pike in Wisconsin. Yeah.

It's a blast. I don't care what Giannis says. Yeah, you do. Note from a listener. In our recent episode, oh, okay. So we recently had an episode called Snarge, and the episode was about the profession of keeping animals off runways let me guess saw afterward did you see that picture I had on Instagram when dude that's where the actions as my oh I did that pilot hitting that dude at Steven Rinella one of the pictures was

I don't shy away from the gruesome but since I'm older I don't do like multiple pictures and stuff on there I don't set it to music right just clean old style instagram you know pictures worth a thousand words yeah i don't put like the media it says up top like you know acdc i don't do any of that just clean picture um after that show a guy wrote in also from michigan where uh he wrote in where his old man ran over a deer on a runway with a plane and he said it cut the deer in three equal pieces which i didn't get based on that post because i know what you're talking about well say i had a deer that weighed 90 pounds yeah and i cut it into three 30 pound pieces you'd say that i cut it into three equal pieces no but why did the airplane do that why

like the problem oh it got three circulations probably right or they wouldn't hit it with the tire tire in the wing left side yeah yeah i have a picture of how it was arrayed but i didn't put it on there not because i was chicken i just put i thought the plane picture is another plane was cool bloodied up airplane yeah um anyway on that thing i was saying i was talking about if you go to control so so just if people didn't listen to the episode remember what the miracle on the hudson solely yeah right he hit a his plane hit a fucking bird strike yeah okay and part of the work of like mitigate or trying to reduce airline strikes against wildlife is you'll need to go obviously it's a bigger footprint than just the

airport yeah and they even talked about they've had people that where people are like feeding grained ducks nearby and they've had to be like try to approach them about curtailing those activities that are creating um potential hazards for airplanes okay and i was saying i wonder at what point most airplane collisions with wildlife happen below a thousand feet and i was saying well how like how far around do you got to get to get that and a pilot wrote and he said on my flight today i tested this theory what airport's agl oh above ground level uh is that right yeah yeah we learned that yeah uh it's less than a quarter mile in your thousand feet oh so it's fairly small space yeah tight well being in florida they got they got to do

some of that management for the rockets i bet imagine a rocket smoking a bird yeah um vaporize on another episode we recently covered uh we covered a guy that was out shed hunting looking for antlers and found uh um found a skull human skull oh older like hair on a still. A few years old. Oh. And then our frequent guest and contributor, Heffelfinger, since then found one. No kidding. This spring. Mm-hmm. Jammed in.

What do you do in that situation? He didn't even touch it. Yeah. Whoa. What was the story you know hunting uh hunting javelina with his old man yeah with the story on the person doesn't know they don't know he didn't just call it in he didn't want he said he didn't even roll it over he went no he called in he didn't want to get involved and haven't been that he messed with it or right any idea of the age

i don't know i haven't followed up with him he was like he he didn't want to you know he's like well it would seem to me that there's a high likelihood that i'm at a crime scene yep and i don't want to move anything around was he like down in new mexico in some remote area border country arizona so it could have been someone that was coming across the border. Yeah, yeah. But think about no country for old men. If you came across a buttload of money and a skull.

I'd put all that money in that skull, man. Walk off. A little suitcase. I don't know if you heard about this. So just coming out of the permafrost, there's pictures of it, in Siberia, a 3,500-year-old brown bear just melted out of the permafrost. Astonishingly good condition. Nice.

Fully furred. Still had his brain tissue. Still had his brain in it. Whoa. You know what he'd eaten? He'd eaten, his stomach was packed full of bird feathers and bird feathers and plant matter. What kind of critter? Brown bear. It's like one of the first.

3,500. I mean, that's not that old. I mean, it wouldn't be any different than today's brown bear, but it's cool. Yeah, it is cool. 3,500-year-old brown bear out of the permafrost. It's like one of the first times they've been able to test some brain tissue of something that old too, right? See what he was thinking. How does a bear smoke a, get a bird?

That would seem pretty tricky. Ground nesters probably. Or just dead crap you left laying around or picking up ground nesting birds wouldn't surprise me. One of my favorite stories I like to tell is when I was calling turkeys and called in a black bear that was like

feet behind me. I mean he was coming to get a bird. That's interesting. You can still see the yellow fat when they dissected it. Wow. It had a spinal injury.

Avalanche debris or something? Don't know. That would be my... On an island. No. Callahan recently, speaking of stuff and stuff, stomach. stomach callahan they recently cut open a uh cougar cut open a texas mountain lion see that texas mountain lion think about him well

he's gotta be pissed because he's like man i could have been brought down to florida oh hot kinds of lonely women down there instead they got shot in texas they opened his gut up and uh he cal sent me a picture had eight pounds chewed up cal says mule deer meat how's he know oh that's good maybe it was a bunch of mule deer hair in with it colombo down here that's probably that's probably right man yeah eight pounds of mule deer hair in with a colombo down here that's probably that's probably right man yeah eight pounds of mule deer meat wow it looked like i told cal to save it because it looked like something i could put right under my trunk like i could put it right under my trompo no problem just like minced up remarinated minced up meat um corinne who's not with us today

she's been uh really spent a lot of time reading about how the news covers turkeys turkey attacks um turkeys driving people out of their homes like like very aggressive turkeys mailmen right attacking mailmen mailman mailman carrying pistols and pepper spray to pepper spray turkeys oh yeah like turkeys yeah there's a turkey hunter thinks the turkey's one way and suburbanites think it's another way there's an instagram account that uh seth pointed me on too and some of those turkeys were carrying like and a little shield. Well, like you said, with that bird you got,

those are some sharp spurs down here. Oh, yeah. Listen to what this woman went through. You don't want to carry a male in his neighborhood. Okay, listen to what this woman went through. I think this is reported in the Washington Post. The headline is, a turkey settled near her minnesota home now she carries weapons this is this is unbelievable i'd read that story she lives in coon rapids minnesota

around 2021 summer 2021 a turkey dropped from her roost and forced her to the ground. The turkey ripped her jacket, scattered her bag of eggs, coffee, and other groceries on her front lawn. Downright assaulted by a turkey. From above. Build the eggs. Damn it. Okay. She calls her fishing game agency and says she wants the turkey relocated.

They say they don't do that. Relocate turkeys. Good for them. Gross, this is the woman's name. Her last name is Gross. Gross 41 said the turkey has placed her and her neighbor's lives in turmoil. She now wears safety goggles when she steps outside and carries a broom, a golf club, and a water bottle for self-defense.

I'm pretty stressed out and pretty anxious all the time, Gross told the Washington Post. I can't even have peace. The turkey appeared at a Moral Home Park with seven others in the summer of 2021, Gross said. When the pack departed a few weeks later, this turkey remained. Okay, I'm paraphrasing and reading. The turkey became attached to Gross, following her on drives to Chipotle where she worked.

No, following her on drives when she went to get food at Chipotle. That might be wise following her. I wonder how far Chipotle is from her house. I don't know. And following her. She works at a nursing home and the turkey would follow her there. Bad journalism here.

It's here 24-7. Okay. Did the journalist ever ask, are you feeding or did you ever feed the turkey? Hear me out. It's going to emerge. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Girl said she called emergency services and Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources. Experts advised her to remove bird feeders across the neighborhood because the turkey would flee without a food supply. It would flee. They can't help themselves, man. Journalists writing about wildlife can't help themselves man journalists journalists writing about wildlife

can't help themselves the turkey would flee if it didn't have food but gross said she sees corn strewn around the mobile home park where she lives she believes someone's feeding the turkey soon after the first attack girl said the turkey pecked at her feet and left a scar. Around that same time, the turkey attacked another resident. Since the turkey settled near her home, Gross said neighbors have blamed her for entering their neighborhood. The turkey sleeps on her roof or on a tree outside her home. The turkey gobbles throughout the night.

When she opens the blinds on her kitchen window in the morning, the turkey glares at her. No way. Listen, man, this is the true story. Grossette first named the turkey Gladys, but as it grew grew she came to believe it was male changes named to Reggie there's a picture of it it very definitely is

though she hasn't confirmed the type the turkey's gender or age gross says she has applied every precaution from wildlife experts doesn't keep any food outside of her home. Doesn't play loud music out of fear it'd attract the turkey. Hasn't grilled outside in two years. Just Chipotle.

She would not be able to buy our new outdoor cooking cookbook. It would be irrelevant in her life. She bought a horn to scare the turkey, but it just provoked the bird. She got shot gobbles out of it. She sprayed water on it,

and that scared the turkey away for two weeks. October 21, okay, the whole neighborhood canceled the Halloween trick-or-treating because of the turkey. She now has to walk neighborhood children to the bus stop to protect them. Where is this at again? The kids use sticks in Minnesota. She says the turkey so aggressively attacks her car's tires that she has to refill the tires with air weekly.

Speaking of scapegoats. When family members come to visit, they can't because they're scared to enter to approach her home. I'm so exhausted, she said. I hope this gets a solution and someone comes to help. Yanni.

She wants to have a peaceful summer with her kids and grandkids and actually have a barbecue and just be able to relax now why don't they relocate it when a turkey is rounded up after wounding people that turkey is euthanized and served as food to someone who needs it that's what the article says. Yeah. And this woman doesn't want the turkey to be hurt. Oh, geez. Man, it's probably driving down the property value around there.

She recently walked out of her house and jumped when a bird flew because she thought it was the turkey coming for her. That's old Reggie. Old Reggie. Causing all sorts of trouble. the other day when he was talking to she was talking to journalists and she said quote he's out there pecking at my tires uh quick another hit on turkey news which is really interesting so this is an old study from the 1960s where they were trying to find out um sexual arousal in turkeys okay and they began taking a male turkey

and trying to find out what on a female turkey is the male turkey attracted to okay so they start out with a turkey model and they start removing parts from it to see at what point the turkey wants to stop these are domestics at what point the turkey wants to stop breeding it this is a government survey? University researchers. This is like a decoy that they're putting out in a farm? Dr. Pennsylvania State. Seth, you'll appreciate this. Penn State.

Ooh. Ooh. They began with a taxidermically prepared female turkey model and a pen of active males. In order to learn what specifically gets the turkey visually interested in making more turkeys aka making love the two that's my input the two men slowly remove parts of the turkey model one by one they detach the feet the wings and eventually the entire body of the taxidermy turkey until the stick mounted head and neck held like a puppet remained the paper is called stimuli

eliciting sexual behavior male turkeys presented a body without the head okay yep follow me male turkeys presented a body with no head would display but they wouldn't mount it if you presented the head alone and held it upright they would go try to copulate the air behind the head can we mention what your theory about what happened yesterday i was gonna say we have a side note story about turkey sexual arousal. Can I finish this real quick? Yeah. That's what I was going to get to afterwards.

They're thinking, and this is academic thinking, they're thinking is, I don't want to get into how they all did it, but why would that matter? They're thinking is that when a turkey okay picture your male turkey when you're um you know right aroused a little bit when you're going to make love with a female turkey they're saying well he can't see nothing but her head neck anyway that's what it actually says in his paper oh my gosh this is contemporary no it's from the 60s oh okay it goes on and on oh it's from the 60s you said yeah it goes on and on people just thought different back then

i mean i could read this for days and i wouldn't be done Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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if you visit onxmaps.com onxmaps.com onxmaps.com Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. One last thing. So I'm going to bring it back.

So check and see how this has flowed. Okay. We got into turkeys with florida we got into turkeys now we're gonna get into florida turkeys tracking yep huge just the other day a couple days ago florida's fish and wildlife commission have you heard about this giant turkey poach and bust no they just released just a couple days ago huh no i have not charges filed against a feller by the name of sydney brent hurst born in 85 37 good math 37. Good math. Charge with the following.

Taking over the season bag limited turkeys, taking over the season bag limited deer, scheming to defraud, armed trespass, unlawful use of two-way communication device, and cheating. So this is an interesting thing about uh how do i spend more time on this did you guys listen to clay's did you guys listen to bear grease podcast episode about the cereal turkey poachers in ohio oh where it was like part of the i think so yes it's clay's

one of clay's masterpieces yeah yeah i do remember that hiding the guns right no no no different one like he's got clay has two bear grease podcast is two masterpieces there's a series on the original outlaws that's the one i'm thinking of and then he's got a series on undercover game warden oh okay and in this series on the undercover game warden focuses very heavily on a turkey, on him inserting himself in an undercover sense, like moving to their town, becoming friends with, spending years undercover with turkey poachers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And reading it, you might think to yourself how is that like how does the the juice warrant the squeeze all that effort yeah this guy a paid undercover no no discredit to the guy he's doing his job you sent in a paid undercover guy to like move into a town assume a false identity and live for years to get some turkey poachers to bust some turkey poachers it just seems like it seems it strikes me as weirdly asymmetrical well it shows how much value we put on our wildlife sure it does but in the end like normally when you picture someone an undercover agent spending years with someone you picture that people are going away to jail for a long long time like organized crime or something you don't picture someone's gonna do like 30 days in the local slammer and have a

revocation of hunting privileges for five years it's just you know i mean it's like you think of like it's like oh they must be trafficking and narcotics and murdering people i don't know you know like i said like i don't mean to discredit but like the thing that i i enjoyed it thoroughly i get the work i support the work it just felt asymmetrical like the the effort from the agency the the effort in the way, I mean, like change these people's lives, right? For the relatively light, the relatively light punishment that goes, that goes to those offenses. Maybe the punishment should be worse. I don't know. But here's what's crazy.

So they started investigating this guy in 2020. Okay. No undercover guys, but they started investigating this guy in 2020. And it just started with, so Florida Fish and Wildlife, it starts with they get a guy where they realize that a guy and his young son had both

taken over the season bag limit of wild turkeys which is two two okay um and they start looking into him they realize this guy killed between 15 to 20 wild turkeys my caramba. In a season. Spring 20. Spring 2020. 15 to 20 wild turkeys. I'm reading from this piece right here. My FWC. So as reported by the state. Given the extent of the violations uncovered during the 2020 season and the necessity to ensure hearse would be held accountable for all his actions the decision was made to extend and widen the investigation to

gather any and all information regarding his poaching activities so here you got a guy you already know he killed 50 to 20 birds maybe they didn't have good admissible evidence right whatever and they're like let's let him keep at it for another season and see what he does in the next season during spring 2021 did a bunch more so what did he do in the 2021 2021 spring season 30 damn now the criminal trespass thing armed criminal trespass thing, armed criminal trespass, is he's trespassing on four different properties with a gun and killing birds off, trespassing to kill birds. 30 turkeys during the spring season. Guess how many bucks he killed during the 2020-2021 general gun season?

14. Shot 20 bucks. Jesus. What's he doing? Is he selling mounts and stuff? Doesn't get into it. Remember that? This is where I'd like to talk to someone involved

in this investigation. Corinne, you should find someone to talk about this just to help explain it from Florida Fish and Game. They then extend the investigation into the spring 22 season killed 15 turkeys that season numbers dropped eventually they go and do a search warrant that they know of oh yeah when they searched his place, they executed a search warrant. 156 pairs of turkey spurs. 155 turkey beards.

21 buck antlers, buck racks. He was a collector. Jeez. Man. Got to screw loose. Yeah. A lot of turkeys man I wonder how he did it

I don't know it doesn't get into that those are all call-ins or shooting with a rifle well that's what I'm saying cause like on one hand you're like if he's calling that many birds in he should be applying his skills somewhere else yeah I mean, the guy,

but I just got a feeling that ain't the case. Yeah. Maybe. If he is, he's a hell of a, whatever. If that's, two things can be true at once, right? Yeah. Horrible person, hell of a turkey hunter. Yeah, good woodsman.

Did it say if they were all males, gobblers? Well, they confiscated 155 sets of spurs you remember steve there was that big poacher and the sealy swan he got some serious prison time yeah i don't know what they do down here but that was like that was when i was i was at a i was at a one time. I was at an event one time and I met, we are, we should get this guy on the show too. There was a warden presenting at a thing about super poachers. Yeah. And his take is that you have that, that 10%, you know,

the old like 10% of blank, you know, 10% of the fishermen catch 90% of the fish, 10% of the poachers po the fish 10 of the poachers poach 90 of the game yeah and he was he was a specialist in psychological profiles of super poachers and um he was kind of like the gist of his deal was that fishing game agents would be better suited to learn to recognize the patterns of super poachers and focus on super poachers um put more energy into recognizing when that's what you're dealing with and catching those individuals who will poach massive amounts of stuff over an entire lifetime yeah um he didn't i don't think he meant like instead of but like in addition to the normal

patrolling you do on a day-to-day basis like aha you didn't buy your license yeah you know it'd be like this is a thing to be taken seriously yeah like these these chronic super poachers and in the work he did on super poachers he's like they are they're sociopaths yeah they're like the same level of sociopath that that you you might be a sociopath and become a murderer there's a form of sociopath sociopathy that becomes that but he felt that it's driven by the same thing that is it's like sociopathic behavior yep and it's in and that's what you are but for whatever reason some sociopaths go in in that direction to become like habitual chronic illegal killers of wildlife this dude seems like,

Florida dude, definitely. If you're keeping all that. And there is a collection. There's a collection aspect. And what he got into is like a thing that drives them is that they're smarter than everybody else. They're getting away with it. They're smarter than everybody else.

And that's like a common, that's common in that behavior type what the floor it's like you're proving how smart you are yeah you know would the florida guy get sentenced if they found all that shit i'm sure he's been charged right or no they haven't sorted all that out yet judicial proceedings are pending sociopath okay y, what did you think about hunting Osceola turkeys? He only got one. I got 30.

What did you want to say about the interesting thing about the turkeys? By the turkeys having mating and having sex? We saw some interesting mating activity Johnny's theory. Well, we... By the turkeys having mating and having sex? Yeah. Well, we saw some interesting mating activity during my turkey hunt.

Yeah. Which we'll get to. Yeah. We'll hit on it when it comes to that. But top level, what I find interesting about them, very fickle turkeys around when they want to gobble. Mm-hmm. Silent bobs man it's not just a high pressure low pressure thing which seems to be most places we hunt you know you don't mean atmospheric pressure yeah oh i'm sorry when you say pressure oh yeah obviously hunting pressure yeah messes with them too but uh you know it seems

like most places we hunt if it's high pressure you feel like you're gonna hear more gobbles and low pressure you'll hear less but here uh the clouds and the fog and how much uh sun they can see in the morning really seem to affect them first morning we're out you know amazing gobbling amazing scout we were scouting yep scouting the day before season bright bright sunny morning sound like a gunfight out there i kept talking maybe it's directly related to how many skeeter bites you get that was the worst skeeter morning. The worst skeeter morning.

It was unbelievable. If the mosquitoes are bad, the goblin's good. And that was a scout day. It was not a hunt day. No one hunted those birds. And the next day, silent bob. Was that a spit? No, that was his beak zipping shot oh not a go on the honest you know i'm uh i was already a super slam holder you were so there's no sense me you know explain everybody knows everybody knows. Yes, I'm some kind of slam holder now that I got my Osceola.

I don't know which one. Grand slam? Mm-hmm. Grand slam. Super slam is when I go get my ghouls, right? The other day I became a two-time super slam holder. This is the first I've heard of this. Two-time super slam holder.

Right, which I could easily catch up to you if tomorrow morning. No, you'd become a two-time grand slam holder. Well, I know, but then in a year's time, when I go to Mexico, Mexico is two-bird kind of a hunt. Yeah, it might all be dead by then. I don't know. Well, how about this? Yanni, this is your opportunity to be the first one to be a single slam,

single season slam holder. Ooh, that's right. I could hold that over Steve for a long time. Steve's expression is... He doesn't like that there's a prospect of this. I'm trying to interview Yanni about Osceola Turks. I'm not here to have a big old... It's not a competition.

I'm not here to have a big old... Who's better? You started it. A big old... It's not a competition. I'm not here to have a big old... Who's better? You started it. A big old snood measuring contest here, man. Big snood swinging contest. I'm going to face Steve up, put my feet right on

his little pillow. Look how big those feet are. I'll also remind you, Steve, that on this trip, Yanni had the bird with the biggest beard. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Steve's bird, we went to put it in at the check station, and the guy that checked the bird in, he said.

Yeah, he emasculated me. He said, oh, just a little guy. No, I didn't hear that. Oh, yeah, he did. It was a long beard, though. Listen, I didn't shoot. When he was coming, I was. It was a long beard, though. Listen, I didn't shoot. When he was coming, I was like, it was too early in the hunt for Jake. I got nothing against shooting Jakes, and shooting Jakes is legal in Florida.

I saw his head coming through the grass, and I was like, I wonder if that's a long beard. You said legal, right? No, sorry. It's permissible to shoot a Jake in Florida. I am not above shooting Jakes i'll shoot jakes um like a last day jake great by me are you are you opposed to it uh it's complicated okay my first bird was a jake so i wouldn't i wouldn't say I'm completely opposed to it, but I feel like once you're into turkeys, I don't know why you'd shoot a Jake.

You ever think about trimming your beard down so it's just a big turkey long beard? I've thought about it. If you took about three quarters of that beard off, you'd have an eight-inch beard, man jake going on now so you did it once and won't do it again yeah yeah i'm just like you know you know here's the check the box but but let me bring that back that's at home right like maybe if i was out traveling and i had like a trip that's like, oh, I got three days. I got four days.

On the fourth day a turkey's in front of me, things might, I might think differently. Yeah. So I'm like a no jakes at home. Here's a weird thing people do. Like this is a weird logic thing people do. People that are opposed to killing jakes. For you listeners at home that don't have any idea what we're talking about, we're talking about a one-year-old turkey. So you hunt turkeys in the spring.

A jake is a male bird that was born the spring before. He's one year old, and he'll have a beard one, two, three inches long. And he doesn't have any spurs. He's got little nubbins. He's got little warts where his spurs will eventually develop uh people that don't like it don't the people that are opposed to shooting jakes are like well you're shooting the bird that will become a long beard like spike okay well i'm like well you know a really good way of getting rid of a long beard is to kill him it's like to be like oh no in another year

if it's still alive it will have turned into a long beard it's like well the long beard is a long beard right now if you want more long beards don't shoot the long beard that's a great way to have more long beards there's also the argument that like a Jake's stupid, right? Or stupider than the gobbler. Yeah. So it's like, eh, it's easy. I don't have, listen, I don't, I'm all for if I had my pick, like I said. I said that, remember?

I was like, I'm not above it, but I wasn't ready yet. I wanted to make sure it had a beard. I saw it had a beard i saw i had a long beard but tomorrow last day see what happens we got we have two turkey tags we have a turkey tag that's good for we have like a turkey tag that was good for a wildlife a state wildlife management area it's like a public land turkey tag and then we have turkey tag that's good for a private land turkey tag if tomorrow I was presented with an opportunity on a Jake, I would take the Jake.

Because I like eating turkeys. I've got a question. I wouldn't give you a hard time. I wouldn't give you a hard time. Jakes can breed, right? Yeah. Anyways, I shot a longbeard. He had big nice spurs and we checked it in and the person tried to emasculate me and said it was little.

It's fine little it's fine it's fine if you're wondering the osceola turkey ranges like the biggest one the wma checked in was 20.5 pounds which was an exceptional bird because you had looked to me like a very respectable bird and he was what 18 right Did you guys catch the low end? Was there anything? I didn't ask him about it. Well, he definitely thought mine was on the low end at 13. Yours only was at 13.

Was it 15 or 13? 13, I think. Wow. What was yours, Young? That was with the guts in it. That's quite interesting that there's a five-pound difference. And that was with the guts in it. Yeah, mine was un-gutted too, 18 and a half.

No, no, mine was 16. Let me take that back. But still, five pound range, you know? It's interesting. And this bird had developed sharp spurs. Inchers? No. Richards were inch. Remember when he measured them? Inchers? No. Richards were inch.

Remember when he measured them? Inch? Yeah. I think he said three-quarter inch when he measured mine. I can't remember. Well, Yanni's one was inch. One was three-quarter. Yeah.

Well, he had a weird – one of his spurs was weird. It looked like it had broke at some point or something. It was like kind of even turned. So they're fickle on fickle on goblin smaller than mid like midwestern eastern birds oh 100 percent and uh man you know people are gonna say ah no it's just whatever you might even here, but the gobble is definitely different. And between that, the humidity I'd like and the weather, not only in what they sound like,

but what my own calls sound like and how far they travel. And it took me, maybe I'm still figuring it out. Like it's hard to say exactly how far those birds were now i'm thinking the first morning i think i overran one because i was looking back to my listening spot to where i ended up and i'm like i'm 1200 yards awake there's no way i was hearing this turkey you got a good point about that vegetation has a huge impact on that here yeah because you could be like a bird could be inside a hammock and you could be 300 yards away and not a bird could be inside a hammock and you could be 300 yards away and not hear it tell people what a hammock is rich a hammock is it's

basically uh an ecology of higher elevation that like supports oak trees cabbage palms it's just a drier environment where basically it's it's dry all year round. So it changes depending on the hydro periods, like what kind of ecology, a pine island, a hammock, or a prairie, or whatnot. So a hammock is basically like our hills. So vegetation becomes very dense, a lot of tree cover, and... Squirrels. Squirrels, yep. And it's not like necessarily a hill it could it's like it's a

foot of elevation different that that's i mean that's sort of like what defines uh southern florida is just like it's not a you know ecology doesn't change in thousands of feet it changes in inches like complete change you can't see the elevation change any way you know it's there is the different plants growing look at the different plants and like yeah that's a foot lower so so if he's if he's out overlooking a prairie or in some thin pines you could hear him from a mile away especially if he's like on the edge of a big prairie that whole prairie just works like a echo chamber and it just project that gobble well like i said inside a hammock i mean you could be standing right outside the thing and you're like was that a goblin his gobblers like

i mean i and the cypress domes as well they kind of act in the same manner. It eats the gobble up. Yeah, it eats the gobble up unless he's on the edge of it over the water. But if he's inside that dome, it's like, you know, I've had one bird that I hear that gobble. I'm like, man, that's far away. And I call him again. And all of a sudden, the next gobble is, and I'm like, oh, no, like sit down, you know. And it's just eats up that sound so it's it's very like you have to like kind of gauge not only distance but like what they're in like what are

you looking out across yeah you know and you can say like there's this hammock there and like we had that one situation where we heard that bird way off and from where we were at we're like man is that across the prairie or on our side like you couldn't even tell till you got around the island we were on like once we had the island behind us then we were like oh it's all the way across the prairie yeah which then we tried to cross the prairie and yeah that's a good point that's a lot of times listening to critters i feel like it's that way you have to get close enough to then source it to go oh yeah okay now i know you know but that's not always the case here because like

like i said with like those thin pines if if if what everything in front of you is those thin pines, you can also gauge that differently. Like I've put pins on birds that I've heard from way off, and it's three-quarter of a mile, and I get there, and he's right there three-quarter of a mile. It's just like it just changes relative to the habitat and ecology. And it must, I mean, I think that the humidity in the air and how foggy it is sure and the wind right right wind's going at your back it's gonna be harder to hear them because

that's one of the things i think we might have missed out on and like yesterday morning we didn't we didn't really look at which direction the wind was going in and like where we had set up was basically not in favor of where the birds were so there could have been more that we weren't hearing because the wind at our back behind us i haven't been hearing any birds roosted in there everything was in front of us so and i you know i didn't even think that morning to take a look at that so but it has an impact. You guys did good. Yeah. I mean.

Oh, Richard put us on them. You guys did really good. How many weekends did you scout? Two days of hunting. I've been out here the last five weekends before season. And three of which I camped. So I was here, you know, Friday through Sunday. How hard would you, if you weren't hosting us

you'd still scouted but you wouldn't have scouted camped yeah probably just do like one day a weekend so i probably would have just hit it on a saturday and then hit a different area on a sunday but i basically you know saturday and sunday i called you took us off man well i wasn't scouting for one person i was counting for three people so you know i called Richard up. Scouted you a little. Took us off, man. Well, I wasn't scouting for one person. I was scouting for three people. I called him up before we did this, and I said, just like, how are you feeling about it? What are the chances we're going to get some birds?

He was like, well, I basically kill a turkey every opening weekend, but I'm worried about four people you know the film he was real worried about having four people in there with with us falling yeah i told me the quiet professionals is it's i mean as you guys found out you know very thick vegetation a lot of noise like a lot of things can make too much noise especially you multiply that times four yeah it's uh yeah yeah but it wasn't any different than what we've encountered in the past no i and i after having spent this week with all you guys like i realized that you know you guys all know yeah like you're all aware of that and my fears and my anxiety that I'd spoken to you about before it's just my I've

never filmed a hunt right I've I've taken people out who are like new to hunting or you know they're like hey you know I'm trying to figure this out like yeah let's go scout whatever and you know I take them out and it's through the water and crack stepping on palm trees you know and so that's just in my head of like my experience of you know being with people because i spend most of my time alone out there so but it was you know it was really nice to hunt you know to be with you guys to be with guys who like are that conscious or like that present of like sound and like movement and like you know all of that because i'm usually the guy like stop you know and it was it was nice to be in that company well you still had to give us some

tips on how to walk through the water oh yeah that really helped and coincidentally or not coincidentally we're approaching a bird getting closer we had been calling adam at probably 400 yards he was answering we decided he was on the other side of a slew we were like well let's get closer anyways and just you know get on top of him as close as we can and see what we can make happen and we got to that whatever it was 150 yards and had to go through some water to get there, and he never gobbled again. He's like, big old gator coming. What's the tip? Roll your foot. Yeah.

He don't like any kind of foot slapping noise on the water. Yeah. If you step down on the water, you're just going to clap it. Just clap, clap as your foot's coming down on the water. So when you're walking through that water, you got to hit with the heel and just roll. And I'll even go as far as like do it on an angle. So my foot, my feet will almost be like turned in and just kind of like, you know, walking like that.

And like, you know, the loudest noise, the water coming. Yeah, the loudest noise is then the water coming off your boot and hitting back down on the water. Which is probably as close as you're going to get to a deer walking through the water. And we could hear the turkeys walking through water as a big indicator, which we would be way louder than that. You guys heard turkeys walk through the water? First morning, we had a hen go through the puddle that was on the road that we had set

up on. Oh, a road puddle. Yeah, we could hear. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try on x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all so go on with to Tell everybody about what happened. Just my whole hunting story? Yeah, because yours is better than ours. We killed a couple of silent bobs.

No, mine was silent bob too. Yeah, but you get to watch them do all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah. Well, and what's really cool about it. And you saw some lovemaking. Yeah, and I think probably the coolest part about it that uh i was able to use some turkey woodsmanship and even though i knew you know richard had given me a i the scouting morning we had heard a bird in this area didn't go after him didn't get any closer just had heard him gobble a few times. And then the first morning of hunting,

we ended up just doing a loop out into this zone. And we get out into the giant prairie. It's late in the day. It's like 11, 1130, giant prairie. We're walking down a road on the edge of the prairie. And it's hot. I mean, coming on, it's 80 plus. We're thinking about hitting the pool.

We're enjoying the breeze that's now in the opening after we just had walked through a hammock for a quarter mile or half mile or whatever. And I'm looking at the ground like, man, a bunch of turkey tracks. You know, I wasn't a good enough woodsman at that moment to be like,

slow down and start looking for turkeys. And we took five more steps. I'm like, don't! Get down! And we didn't bump them hard, but when I peeked back up over the grass, I could see them moseying off. They saw just enough to mosey them off.

But mark the location, mark the time of day. And I said, okay, well, tomorrow, if if it's 11 30 now i'll be here by 10 and i'm just going to be hanging out waiting if you guys like to do this thing daily and the other thing i liked about that spot was we hadn't seen boot tracks we had seen boot tracks other places but that place no boot tracks no trail cameras so it seemed like it was a little untouched next day we have kind of what I just described we'd chase some birds in the morning they gobbled all right but they were across the slough couldn't get on them and then we make the move over there we get to where I want to set up and Richard

didn't quite like it in this gap it was too sunny didn't really have a lot of shade to hide yeah that was that's a hot tip of his he don't like that direct sun he wants because here you got so much good stuff to hide in yeah you don't want to get picked off and get into the dank you know like even the fabrics of your clothes will just shine well that's anywhere you always want to set up in the shade but i'm saying i know but here you really can hunker in yeah yeah i mean like you know if you're hunting grasslands studded with ponderosa pines yeah there's no place to hide out there you know it's like it's just different than here i mean you can you can nestle in yep you know you can you can nestle in too much can't see anything and then and you can always just cut one maybe two of those

saw palmetto uh branches i don't know what you call them saw palmetto yeah and and just they're perfect they gotta a seek if you cut it at an angle it's like a little steak yeah it just right and i mean boom you got ground blinds so i don't know yeah it's somewhat like a like i don't know like a palm frond frond yeah that's the word you can make a quick little blind out of palm fronds yeah and uh so you kind of move around a corner it's a smaller prairie that's connected to a bigger prairie by the 30-yard gap of hammocky trees and then there's kind of a road parallel in the both of them so we come in on the side road and finally we find one spot it's too uh covered up in poison ivy so we

move down the road a little bit find another spot spot. Again, getting late in the day. Everybody's kind of losing their edge. And we get in there, break some branches, do some things, set up. We got Seth and Garrett with us. Snack bar time. Have some snacks, some water. I kept telling Garrett, just like,

let me know when you're all tucked in and ready because we're going to give a couple calls and we gotta be like ready to not move when it's go time you know we're gonna give it an hour here and see what happens and uh he says he's ready seth's ready we're all set up and i don't even get through the first set of clucks, and a hand starts clucking back at me. Close. What pot call are you using right now? That was the, I was using that new Morgan Stern Green Slate over teak.

Is that what it's called? Green Slate over teak? Something like that. Phelps made it. Oh, I know what you're talking about, yeah. Yeah, sounds good and uh immediately she's uh clucking back at me and i'm like garrett he's here and he's just like yeah they're coming down the road i'm like holy shit you know i mean we must have just snuck in ahead of him yeah i mean by seconds like a little bit later you just spooked him yeah exactly

walk right in yeah or had we not just decided to sit there and gone 50 more yards down that road, we probably would have bumped into them. So here come the first couple of hens. One hen kind of eyeballs us. We're not that far off the road. 10, 15 yards at the closest. Less, less.

Five yards. She makes a bias. And as soon as one makes it by us the day before i had seen oh so when i when we bumped that group it was a strutter and six or so i thought six to eight hens maybe she makes it by us and i'm thinking perfect as long as the lead hens by us everybody else is eventually going to follow her and filter by. It takes a while. Here come more, but it doesn't take too long and we can hear somewhere off in the jungle.

Yeah, it was more like... Oh, man. You could hear it so well too. It doesn't sound like a wet fart. I just like that sound, man. It's not like you're spitting a stream of tobacco.

And so we know there's a strutter in the bunch, and it's just a matter of time. We've just got to sit still enough. Come on, do it once. What's yours, Richard? That was a good one. That was a big gobbler. Well,

I don't know where to speed up the story a little bit. There's multiple hens. I lost count, but it was probably getting upwards of double digits. Really? It's a giant pile of turkeys. Giant, yeah. All around us. We have hens go behind us in the hammock.

And before we've even seen the gobbler, I think. Now, Seth and Garrett were on my left. They saw him long before. Had I been in Garrett's sitting spot, I would have shot the turkey at least 20 minutes before I did, maybe 30. They got to sit there and watch the show forever. I could just see a tip of the fan and a flash of the white head here and there. They got the show, which is cool.

I would have knocked him out with the butt of my shotgun. Boom! He goes down out of my way. Holy cow. Tom probably would have just sat there and been like, what was that? Poor guy. People are fighting.

One's unconscious. We have a hen behind us. Out of nowhere, she jumps up and flies. I don't think she actually cleared, went over the tree that we were on, but right next to the cabbage palm that we're sitting on, just flies and then lands five, six, seven yards from us. Just to do like a micro adjustment. Yeah.

She's like, I'm done feeding here. I'm just going to pop back out to the road. Over us. Just hopped us. And that was cool. But she landed so close and I was looking left. I couldn't even look right. You know, I just had to stay.

She'd have picked up your head movement. So all this is going on. Seth and Gare are getting the show by the show meaning Gobbler's in there strutting his tail off drumming and spitting yes super cool at one point I think boy if I just kind of lean out I had some small uh saw palmettoes on my left I thought if I just lean out around those you and I get on him, I can probably take the shot. But he still had a couple hands around him. I'm like, yeah, seems like I'm going to push it.

There was a Jake in that group too. And at one point, that Jake popped into full strut. And that's what brought him the closest he came. Because that Jake popped into full strut, and it pissed him off. He like went racing over towards him. I never even knew about that. Yeah.

That's what brought that turkey the furthest. Towards us. Towards us that he got. Yeah. So what also happened, what we could hear but couldn't see, this is Richard and I listening, is we could hear every now and then

like a wing flap. I could hear every now and then like a like a wing flap i could hear but seth and garrett could watch him masturbating they had never seen it i guess but all we could hear was i don't know if you're hearing that it'd be like a clap or two i'm like man it sounds like there might be like a turkey beating another turkey with his wings or something. And then later, they're like, yeah, we saw him there and it looked like Seth actually thought, you thought it was

mating. Yeah, so when I first saw it, I could only see he was kind of behind a tree and I could only see the right side. He was facing directly away from me. I could only see the right side of his body. And I could see him doing the little wing flap thing, you know, when they mount a hen and breeder.

Yeah. They do that little like wing flap thing. I could see him doing that and I could hear him doing it. And I actually leaned over to Garrett and I said, he's breeding a hen. Was Garrett like, those turkeys are fighting. But he wasn't on top of a hen. And then he did it again in the wide open in front of me, and he was not on a hen.

He was just doing it for funsies. Or was he like, yeah, I mean, or just like excited. Jake and the gobbler did it at the same, the Jake started doing it, and the gobbler started doing it right. He's like, I'm going to be like this. Jake's like, I'm going to be like this. And the hens didn't want anything to do with the strutter. He was trying, but they weren't.

Yeah. They were like... They were, like, gross? No, they were just going about their day. Ew! They weren't ready, I guess. Yeah. Anyways, the last two birds i think are the i never even saw where the

jake went because we never he got pushed back yeah so when that jake went into full strut he came around that's when he came the furthest um to from our left to right and then work that jake back around the prairie there to where he eventually disappeared so yeah hen to me it almost looks like she spooks and goes back down the road and the gobbler follows her i'm like oh that's it it's over but then we could keep hearing him drumming and spinning i'm like seth what'd And he said, they went out into the prairie. And we're talking, this prairie is, it's a wet spot, but no big trees on it. It's about a hundred yards.

It's like a big dish. I don't know about yours. Is it dish-like? Yeah. It's not, it does, it's not holding water though. Maybe right in the middle. Right in the middle. To clarify, yeah, the middle of it gets a little deep. So the vegetation right in the middle right in the middle to clarify yeah the middle of it gets a little deep so the vegetation right in the middle is really tall so it's not

like something like you could see across so that that center of it is blocking our view from the turkey so it's like a reverse you know like almost like a donut but yeah we can just hear him and he keeps drumming and spitting, drumming and spitting. And finally, Richard's like, man, I think he might pop out right here in front of us. But at a distance, because he's going around the long, the backside of this prairie. And all of a sudden, Richard sees him. He's like, I can see him. I'm like, I can't see him.

But then there's his fan. And I and i'm like all right i'm on him and he's and he's i think he's actually coming to us at that point just a little bit maybe a little on an angle yeah the first thing i saw was the white head through the grass and as soon as i saw that flash of white just kind of bobbing through the grass i was like i see him and i think you said something like where where where and then his fan went up and you're like oh there because you were calling intermittently as well uh no we hadn't called since the beginning i didn't i didn't call till he was he was in this gap and we were about to lose sight of him again and he was about midway through the gap and i did i ask you should i call should i call him like heck yeah so i hit him with the you know and his head just

yeah he did the periscope of all periscopes i mean you could barely see his head on the tops of that vegetation and when he periscoped i, it looked like there was a solid foot. He was on his tippy toes. Head and neck. Yeah, maybe he did stretch up his legs too. He was all the way up. But then you said, shoot him. And I'm looking at him.

I'm like, I think he's out of range. And then Richard said something like, well, you patterned that gun, didn't you? And I took that to mean like dude shoot him and it was a poke he's did we do we talk about how far the distance was yeah or I shot yeah I said I feel like it's 50 yards yeah I'm like sounds good to me so I touched off and roll him but I took off after him. And even though he was flopping, he had that kind of flop that wasn't crazy erratic.

When you got near him, he was trying to inch away from you. So even though he doesn't even have his neck with him anymore, he's got something enough in his head where he's like, I'm trying to get away from that big thing towering over me right now. Man, so those number nines at 60 did some work rolled him from hard I mean I still had to you know choke him out but more if that breasts gonna be full of them pellets that we're gonna know here shortly but uh yeah yeah we arranged it from where i finally stopped when i got on his neck it was 66 back to the cabbage palm but i think he had flopped solid five six yards yeah he kind of

almost chased him a little bit that's a little poke and it's a mega poke mega poke but i don't know we probably could have let him ease out of that prairie we knew where he was going and then we probably could have made another approach but we would have gone full bushwhack style after that we would have been belly crawling in on him you know you all you had to bushwhack him yeah him and him and his i felt good though it was like that periscope the way his head was like so high up like that there was like just so much neck there right that's why i felt like i felt confident about that you know and you've got that red dot on there like it was like i don't know i didn't in that moment i didn't i didn't see a question in it yeah no i had patterned it at 50 and it had patterned great yeah

had i arranged him and it was at 60 i probably would have let him go but you know it's hard to tell 50 but the difference between 50 and 60 is super hard to tell so totally anyways dead bird yeah he's in the fridge that's the end of my osceola and at that moment i became a grand slam turkey holder you know what quote i heard the other day no roost it ain't roasted nope not your first time hearing that one had you you heard that before? Many a time. I like that. You did? Yeah. You've never heard that?

You know, I just wrote a quote earlier today. I like this one. What was that? It's called, I was criticizing these boys fishing in the river down here. I said, you're fishing the way you wish the world was, not the way it is. Which means we're targeting largemouth bass and not throwing crawlers and not sinking chicken legs down there for big catfish yes i see yeah we're in florida you gotta you gotta try and catch it at least one bass they're down there trying to catch a 10-pound northern on these 10-inch...

Largemouth bass, not northern. Sorry. Largemouth. Foulmouth bass. Bucketmouth. Trying to catch a big bucketmouth, and they come back with nothing. I'm like, I'll tell you one thing. If I was down on that dock, I'd catch a fish because I'd put a crawler under a bobber, and I'd find out just what was

living there. He motivated that to happen. That's what we're doing. Chris was living there and he motivated that to happen that's what we're doing chris went down there caught himself a couple of tilapia while we've been state record maybe yeah he thinks he had state record which is great so i went tilapia we're gonna end the show but i'll i'll end on this um i went tilapia bow fishing the other night in Okeechobee. And they dig a bed. You've seen it, Yanni, because you've met bowfish before. They dig

a bed the likes of which I have never seen. It's amazing. I mean, it looks like a bomb went off underwater. Not only is it the size, like, you know when someone says the size of a bushel basket? You know, when I have, when my kids get older and I'll talk about something being like a bushel basket they're probably gonna know what i'm talking about yeah it's not not often it's barely relevant now to most people

i know but i grew up man you'd go buy tomatoes you'd buy like a pack a bushel basket or a pack you know so yeah it's barely relevant now but for you old-timers who grew up going with your mom down and picking shit bushels pick and pay produce places it's a bushel basket in diameter and they dig that son of a bitch half a bushel basket deep for their eggs or oh yeah and they clean it out are they trying to get through the muck to get some gravel they clean it down and they clean it out and even at night when you're going along it's like they just stand out and you might look at the night we are out you might look at eight or nine empty ones i think a lot of those the fish already skittered out

because just surrounded by dense vegetation so when they slide out they like slide out you might you might catch a little movement where he's hitting the weeds you know but he's gone but every whatever eight nine ten of those beds he's just sitting on there and if you're not right over the top of them with your bow it's fun man is it what's the tilapia uh what's it related to is it's own it's a cichlid cichlid is that right oh man chester look that up my phone's over there i got you i got you it's a cichlid i think it's a cichlid c-i-c-i-c-h-l-i-d they are native i know this they're native to the middle east and north africa they've been exported all over the world as an aquaculture species one

of the things they do with them and i saw this in the philippines for rotational farming and in rice patties you'll like get a crop or whatever number of crops of rice out of a rice patty you'll then flood that patty put tilapia in it harvest the tilapia out but then it also like they you know they fertilize so you run a cycle of tilapia in there raise those up to eat in size eat the tilapia and then put the rice patty back into rotation so i saw that a long time ago but they've escaped all over and here the big ones are the blue tilapia incredible abundance of them non-native it's illegal to have a live one in your possession really you know because they take the other water can't like throw them in a bucket and be like oh

i'm just bringing them home fresh if you when he's in your possession he's gotta be dead yeah and we went out bow fishing we were not we were just kind of a fly by night deal uh we were just fly by night and we didn't have the right lights and everything we're just shooting off headlamps but uh tell you what man if you're fishing if you want to go gator hunting or fishing in okachobee or he does a lot of bass fishing, a lot of bass fishing, guiding bass fishing, Captain Bobby Stafford. Hell of a nice guy. We were doing a different, I don't even want to get into what we were actually doing.

We were doing a whole different project, but we got to go bow fishing with that guy for a night. Yeah, great. If you're in this area and you want to have a hell of a good time and go gator hunting, he does gator trips for trophy gators like trophy gators being 10 plus gators large mouth does a lot of that when i was with him he booked a client for large mouth um does a lot of large mouth fishing and i don't know what i don't even know what all the hell he does he's got regular boats boats, does crappie fishing. He's got regular boats.

He's got air boats. If you ask him real nice, maybe he'll take you out for tilapia. That's not his normal deal. We just happen to go for tilapia. Captain Bobby Stafford. Bob Stafford. Everybody calls him Bob Stafford. You were right.

It is a... A cichlid? Cichlid. Delicious grilled. Listen, man. I thought it was pretty good. It was all right, but not as good as it would have been if you'd have fried it. And if you get a tilapia and you want to eat it, get the red muscle off it,

trim it nice, and fry that sucker until there's no bubbles coming out of your, almost until there's no bubbles coming out of your deep fryer. I would call a heavy fry and that's a heavy fry firms it up firms it up and it gets rid of that ever so slight muddy taste and apparently I was reading when I was reading up on these your dad gave an extensive read up I don't know how when they in the aquaculture facilities oh i'll tell you another little fact a little you won't a little surprise you'll you'll you won't be wondering why you listen to this show after you hear this because you learn all this the fourth most consumed fish

by pounds consumed per person in the united states of america however they do a broad grouping shrimp is part of that shrimp's number one yeah and lord knows how many species of shrimp but there's multiple species of tilapia so like shrimp salmon, tilapia. Pounds consumed per person per year in the U.S. of A. That'd be a good trivia question. Oh, dude, I know. I blew it. Maybe he can still use it.

All right, everybody. If you're listening to Game On, suckers, and that comes up, you'll know where that came from. Hey, wait. I have one follow-up. That dog's tongue was 17 inches long. With Gene Simmons. Was it Gene Simmons' dog?

No. What state was it from? Michigan. That's what I thought you'd be interested. It was a boxer. 17 inches long. Oh, man. Richard, anything we missed that you want to add about your beautiful little part of the United States of America you got down here well I heard once uh Stevie said on a podcast

it was you were reflecting on your your last experience hunting down here uh turkeys and you had been uh I believe private land like pasture type land and that that property boarded up to uh wma and you had said that side of the fence was a lot different than the side of the fence we were on and you wanted to know what was that on that side that wasn't a wma that was a uh a waiting it was like a some kind of like not a refuge system refuge it was some kind of like locally administered waiting bird refuge okay yep not a wma so but not cattle grazed i'm glad i got to take you over to outside yeah you took me to their side of the fence yeah i liked it better cool that was great man awesome i love tons of wildlife tons of

birds super well managed yeah yeah i feel like a lot of clothes like i like all those closed roads you got to walk around like when you think about wild places and it's it's easy to look at something like the grand canyon and like the scale of that and like you know be impressed right this grand big big stuff and like here everything we have is is on a micro level and it's like spending two three days you start to zoom in and see all those little things and kind of see like how many layers there are and like how compounded the wildlife here is and that scale is completely different like once you tap into that you're like wow you know yeah but pounds of life per unit of space is high in the water especially oh yeah very high we didn't even get it all you know

my whole thing like florida's for fighting dude we didn't even get into all the fighting that's yeah that's like another two hours i want to do a preview of the fighting you ever see that movie warriors oh oh or is this movie from the it's either the late 70s or early 80s and it's about these all these gangs in new york like and one of them's like the clown gang one of them's the warriors they all have like have these different themes right and the warrior gang they get into some trouble and they gotta make it back and it's just like you know this how do they get back to coney island like just kind of like all these different gangs like all after each other and all that that's like kind of like where we're

at oh my god yeah there's little like i find i could be wrong i found there's like very like a like in my brief experience talking to people in a wide variety of places a wide variety of people in southwest florida i was surprised by the factionalism the surprise by the factualism even right down to like you have like people who are trying to do stuff to to clean up the estuaries and improve the fisheries but then the people that live inland are mad at those people because their prescription of how the water should be handled is not good for deer hunting and so you know i hate them and i hate them and i hate them the problem is the system

is so fractured that putting it back together is not simple and also putting it back together also means that you can't you can't put it back to the way it was like it's not it's not ever going to go back to the way it was so what it's ever gonna go back to the way it was. So what it's gonna be in the future is something different, something resembling what it was, but a completely new thing. What I think about is post-wilderness. So the problem with that is that that also involves

a vision of what that thing is. And there's a lot of different folks fighting for their version of that vision. like a vision of like what that thing is and there's a lot of different folks like fighting for their version of that vision you know and i think that's what makes it so hard because in honest most of those folks each one of them care for various reasons each for each one of those their their intentions are because of their passion or their love for a place right but like those values conflict sometimes and there's no like there's not a good place where they all kind of like can come together and like it's a shame because there was a time you you know, back in the 70s, where we almost lost, like, a very large

part of this place, and it was only because those types of groups, groups that wouldn't normally get along, had to, because if they didn't, there'd be, you know, there'd be no toys for anybody to play with, you know, that whole thing that whole thing that like well if you guys are arguing i'm gonna take your toy both your toys away you know and like how can we get back there you know how do we get back there when i first was trying to describe the fat the factionalism that i had been hearing about i told richard it was like when the soviets pulled out of afghanistan and all the warlords had to jockey yeah and it's it's political it's who has money who has influence conservation groups shit talking other conservation groups values of like what the land should be used for is big if we had more time and i and i wasn't wrapping her up you know what i want to talk about too how you guys are going to get your

bear season back yeah well you only had one it's how you're going to get a bear it's included it's included in the management plan the only problem is it's quota of zero so it just has to be voted back into in some way or another i know i was going to wrap it up but but florida did a did a bear hunt and they really underestimated hunter efficacy they had a quota that was 200 somewhere around there yeah i think so too but they issued 5 000 tags and they had a 48 hour shut off i think they shut it off once they hit the quota and that was two days but so they were looking to do 200 people were already all animal rights people and new jersey cat ladies were already all they were looking to do 200 people were already all the animal rights people in new jersey cat ladies were already all they were already pissed they were at the check stations already they

turned that hunt on and they got too many they had too many tags and that they couldn't fit they this wildly underestimated hunter efficacy and man they opened it up and they couldn't shut it off fast enough they blew up to 330 or something like that before they could turn it off dang and then that little blunder basically that little blunder basically like eliminated any prospect for that i would have said like, wow, next time we should let fewer tags out. But the Florida public said, wow, ain't gonna happen again.

Well, it's also, you know, it also would have a huge impact that too was just who showed up to those commission meetings. And unfortunately, they showed up more than the hunters did. I don't want to get into it too much but i met a person who i was very surprised he was opposed i've met a person of influence i was

very surprised to learn he opposed that bear hunt yeah it was heartbreaking it was very painful for a lot of sportsmen down here they had he had a perspective that was interesting he's like man we can hunt everything in florida no one messes with us you do this they're gonna mess with you right now no one messes with us we do whatever we want but you mess with that animal and you're gonna invite a lot of attention i told him i said uh i, I don't agree with that. All right, y'all.

Thanks for joining. Richard, thank you. Oh, yeah. Thank you, man. Thanks, Richard. It was a long time coming. You did real well by us, though. Yeah.

Good scouting, good guiding. No, it was fun. We'll go jump in the pool. Yeah. Let's go catch some fish. Yeah. All right. Thanks, everybody.

Oh, ride on. Ride on. Let it run on. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun Ride on, ride on, ride on Sweetheart, we're done beat this damn horse to death Take a new one and ride on. We're done beat this damn horse to death. So take your new one and ride on.

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