The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 438: Big Bird Good to Eat

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Craig Harper, Jason Phelps, and Seth Morris.  Topics include: Tree stand accidents; season delays; the special little tree cuts and our Line One turkey call; managing habitat for hunting; the launch of The Element's "Buck Truck" series; MeatEater and Jani's new gear giveaway; Chat GPT's anti-hunting bias; the various turkey slams; tasing turkeys; when your uncle claims your deer as his own; adaptive resource management; long spurs and selectivity; when the the objective is the quality of the herd; the debate over early vs. later season; initiating the nest and when multiple hens lay in the same spot; being on the curve and turkey reintroduction; historic highs; the need to define "wildlife" and managing with specificity; the edge and the interior; being where they wanna go; 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.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt.

First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Okay, everybody, we're coming at you from Kansas. Uniontown. Well, kind of. Near Walnut, Uniontown. Yep. That's the voice of Jason Phelps. Seth Morris is here.

We're on Phelps that had been to this property before and Seth. Yep. Doing a bit of logging. Little timber felon. I had to show Phelps how to fell a tree. Yeah. Then we got attacked by chiggers.

Yep. Ticks, chiggers. And then, and now we're back. Yeah, so two summers ago. Two summers ago? Yep. You sure? Yeah, July, two summers.

Sold them last year. We're back to falling here. I remember all the chiggers, man. Two summers ago. Yep. You sure? Yeah. July, two summers. Sold them last year. That's when we were all in here. Chiggers, man. Everywhere. Yeah. This chigger story is worth telling.

So we came and we selected a big walnut tree. We're on a friend, you're, you're, how did you, how do you know Randy? So a mutual friend,

Chris Parrish. Oh, great. He talks about him all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Great. One of the best turkey

colors of all time. That's what he said. Got to know Chris well, and we were just trying to plant a turkey hunt together and he was like, you know what I think I got a, one of my buddies in Kansas might let us do that hunt here. So he came out, met Randy three years ago, turkey hunting and got to be good buds from then. So we had an idea where we wanted to make turkey calls, but cut the trees down. Um, and just kind of go through the whole thing and you'd get all the raw timber.

Raw lumber. Yes. Yep. but cut the trees down and just kind of go through the whole thing and you'd get all the raw timber raw lumber yes yep so we came out here to randy's place and got a walnut tree not far from what we later i didn't know at the time but not far from walnut kansas yep and we had some walnut experts come out we picked the walnut tree sawed it down picked an osage orange barber chariot barber chariot another osage orange dudes from like the 12th generation of loggers and then uh and then barbara chariot we don't cut trees i'm not making any excuses i'm barbara chariot but the with this whole like little teeny front cut enter your saw halfway and cut your way out the back that was a little special little cut yeah that's the one i still screwed it up yeah they got away a felon they got away a felon walnuts

where i never i wasn't really familiar with that no like high-end like high-end veneer logs they're basically taking that thing down to the dirt yep and not cutting a wedge because you could be cutting hundreds of dollars you could be cutting like hundreds of dollars out of that tree. Yep. Cutting the wedge. So what do you even call that little process? So yeah, they, they cut maybe a three inch face cut and then they just dog their saw in.

Burrow a hole through it. Yeah. You dog the tip of the bar in behind that. Hoddle it all out. Get yourself squared up to that, that notch. And then you just cut your way out the back. And, uh, yeah, when you're done, dude, it's like, it looks like paving stones, man. yourself squared up to that that notch and then you just cut your way out the back and uh yeah when you're done dude it's like it looks like paving stones man i mean that thing is you haven't

wasted anything yep but i like that method but i was like the whole time i was like so does the tree come down on me where's the tree go cut the walnut down cut some osage orange down oh and i remember when we got the walnut i think we had in our head we're like we're calling it a thousand pot tree yeah and i want to be pretty close yeah yeah a little slightly over but yep um and and made these calls with that made strikers with the osage orange yep did i haven't told you i lost my striker i got i might have an extra one yeah but i also have a striker with sentimental value. So anyways, then we made all the walnut pots.

And what we wanted to do, but on this podcast, I'm always joking about sweepstakes and raffle law, being like, if I could go back in time and take another career path, I would go into sweepstakes. I'd become a lawyer and specialize in sweepstakes and raffle law. We wanted to have them be that they all had a number it's called the line one call and they all have a number we wanted to be that we'd sell them and then get all those ping pong balls with numbers on them and it blows them in the wind we're gonna make our own leaf blower

and then you grab a ping pong ball out and whoever that number has that call we were then going to take them back to the same property to hunt turkeys we just thought it'd be fun and we went through with the whole plan until we realized that according to the to the vagaries of sweepstakes and raffle law, you can't do that. Or it's very cumbersome, like free entries and all of this. Every time you go to give something away and a lawyer looks at it, he's like, you can't do that. So instead what we did is we just did it,

and then later after the fact, picked someone and called him and took him turkey hunting. But he's still out turkey hunting. me and phelps are tagged yeah we brought a guy this looks bad dude that we're tagged out but our guy hasn't gotten one yet yeah he's gonna be like so i won this like turkey hunt and the guys that were supposed to be taking these shots and i didn't what's the chat to get on that yeah it looks bad it doesn't it doesn't sound as bad if we were to explain well no we did because i went so i went out with him i went out with the winner opening morning and the landowner so you got like landowner advantage and the spot that hadn't been hunted all year yet so like the spot

that hadn't been hunted landowner who's a very good turkey hunter, very serious hunter, owns the place, has been hunting here for decades, went to, right, stacked a deck in the winner's favor. Phelps got one. So then we moved him over. Yeah, Kyle got a crappy guy. Yeah, but then we had like the landowner's buddy even, making sure that everything's like, we can go there, can't go there.

Just bad luck. Yeah. Well, and to be fair, he has had a terrific time. Yeah. And some great hunts. He's probably learned a lot. Yeah. Hopefully he'll close the deal.

I got Jake. He might not want Jake. I think Jake's here hoping for him today. Are they? I mean, yeah, I think he's been, like he said, he'll remember this morning for like the most picturesque turkey hunt ever. It was pretty cool.

But yeah, just, you know, I think we got a couple good birds within 60 yards. It's not real comfortable taking them, which is fine. Like I have a ton of respect for, you know, he wanted them 40 and in, but yeah turkeys being turkeys and uh doing what they want to do i told you about my kid i kind of like bad mentoring that worked out good but he i still he killed turk at 70 yards you know poke and well i don't know if i told you but he's like he said i'm gonna he's gonna take he's like he wants to take the beard and fill that shell full of hot glue

and stick the beard down in the empty shell and he said i'm gonna write the yardage on that shell that's what matters he's like listen i was telling him i said listen man usually people drag brag about how close the turkey was no he thinks it's great now he thinks yeah he already thinks he's invincible because he one time like we were going down a big hill hunting deer and I got out ahead of him and he was just lollygagging behind me we're kind of like done doing what we're doing and we're just kind of in the regroup phase you know headed back down the hill be like we'll figure out what's next we blew

it and all of a sudden we jump buck and I turn around I like register the buck's presence. And I turn around to see that he's up and this buck is running. And as I'm going, no. As I go, boom. Yeah. Drops it. I'm like, oh my God. So now he's like, you know, he just thinks he's John. He's like John Wayne now, man.

He thinks he's John john wayne now man he thinks he's john wayne now dude it's like yeah he just thinks that just this whole everything he's been told about distances and running is all it's all this stuff if you're just trying to slow him down man it's everybody trying to slow people without the skill set he has can't do it. Also joined by Craig Harper, professor of wildlife management at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I assumed you were from Tennessee for some stupid reason, but you're not. No, from North Carolina. Tenth generation.

Family's been there a long time, just west of Winston-Salem. Good place to be from. What does that go by, 10th generation? What's that mean? When did your family get there? In the mid-1700s. Dang. Really?

Long history. Yeah. Been there a long time. Used to have a lot of land. Now it's whittled down to a postage stamp with all of the generations. Carving everything up. There's still a heavenly piece of early successional vegetation right there in the middle of all the suburban development and winston-salem expanding where

all kinds of wildlife that enjoy that type of vegetation are very happy they uh they still hang out there you were talking about after you fell out of that, you told us a great story about falling out of a tree stand and getting all crippled up. Yes. And then you went out to hunt your favorite holler. That's correct. If it wasn't for my uncle and dad and cousin,

that wouldn't have happened. I couldn't get around. So they essentially helped carry me and get me in position. And there I sat and a deer walked up late in the evening and I was able to shoot it. And of course I couldn't go get it. They had to do all of the work, but that was, uh, that was a real blessing from God right there number one to live and number two to to be able to get some of my sanity back after laying in the bed for for months not knowing if i'd walk again you know we have a guy uh we have a friend um who's an emergency room doctor in michigan and he's a hunter and he's taken a great interest in tree stand accidents i was going to point in

the direction because he's actually published on tree stand accidents what happens why it happens the suite of injuries that comes so much of that can be prevented um and in my case, I was not hunting as we talked about, I was actually checking cameras and I came upon this stand that I had not hunted in four years and had forgotten that it was there. And I knew the straps would be bad. So, you know, I climbed up to take the straps off and take a stand down and figured I'd come back later and, you know, put the stand back up and use, uh, straps, but the straps appeared fine. And so, you know, uh, it's pretty dumb. You even took them off and looked at them.

Yeah, I took them off and everything looked good. They weren't frayed. They didn't look like squirrels had chewed them, whatever. Uh, they seem just to be perfectly fine i put them back on you know with the ratchet strap and thing you know banjo string tight all was good but uh and there was a big limb and grabbed hold of the limb and you know felt the stand before i got in it and then got in it and kind of you know put all my weight on it jumped up and down etc it was solid as a rock the bottom strap was but then when my butt hit the seat pow it's just like a 22 rifle going off and down i went you know like a trap door straight down oh man yeah was it was that spot was that

don't climb without some some type of safety harness and something keeping you up there. It's a, it's a pretty simple thing to do. It's easy to, to climb up without it because we're all in a hurry, you know, whatever, but that's, it's risky. Tell people real quick, Craig, what you do, what kind of research you do. Then we'll get into a heavy duty in a little bit. I've been at the University of Tennessee since 1998. As you mentioned, I'm a professor of wildlife management and the extension wildlife specialist. So my primary responsibility is developing wildlife management programs,

especially for the extension agents throughout the state and helping them with concerns with wildlife that come in from clientele in the counties. But I work in lots of other states. I work very closely with state wildlife agencies. Obviously, I conduct research. I have since I got there. Although my primary responsibility, of course, is extension uh we also have the freedom to do research or to teach in the classroom if if uh if you wish but all of my research is directed

towards applied land management uh the vast majority anyway so how can you manage land to better wildlife, obviously create better wildlife habitat for various species. And something else I concentrate in that I've gotten into over the past several years is how to manage land for better hunting. You know, how can you set up your property such that the hunting is better, you're more successful so that that's been very rewarding to to work with landowners all over the place and help them with some of that got it and you do a bunch of work on turkeys yes we i've been a part of several turkey studies and we have one right now it's still going on we're in the seventh year it's been very very interesting what's that real just tell me the real quick snapshot version then we're gonna we seventh year it's been very very interesting what's that real just tell me the

real quick snapshot version then we're going to we'll get back to it we have looked at the survival habitat use of wild turkeys in an area of tennessee that had experienced a population decline and we involved counties where the decline was happening as well as adjacent counties that there was no decline. And so we were able to do that for four years, looking at all of the reproductive parameters, survival, habitat use, movements, etc. for four years. And then the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, their commission voted in a two-week season delay. And that was implemented in those counties where the population had been declining. And so we were able to follow that for two years. So we have before and after data upon implementing that delay in both treatment counties where the delay

occurred as well as control counties where the delay did not occur. So that's been very interesting to see if the delay influenced reproduction in any way. I want to talk about that a whole bunch because because folks might not yet appreciate the significance of what you're saying so we get into a little bit more but people had to freaked out if you tell a bunch of people that they're going to hunt turkeys that turkey season is going to be delayed by two weeks so some scientists can do some research i can imagine people being pissed by and large you're correct but you, when it's couched in a way that, hey, we're doing this to help turkeys, you know, turkey hunters and hunters in general, they want to do what's best for the resource. And so you might be surprised at the percentage of people, and we've done surveys every year within the treatment and the control counties.

And about roughly half of them were perfectly fine with the delay. Probably a quarter didn't really feel one way or another toward it. And of course, another quarter was very much against it. Sure. And then that's largely remained constant through the period. And now we're in the seventh year, and we'll have another round of surveys going out this spring. Because last year, the commission voted to implement the two-week delay statewide. So all of Tennessee this year, the turkey season opened April 15th, which traditionally it opened on the Saturday closest to April the 1st.

Got it. All right. Stay tuned, everybody, because we're going to get way into why, like I said, you might be wondering why that matters, but we're going to get into why all that matters. I think you'll find it interesting. But first, a couple of things. A couple of promo issues so Casey and Tyler from the element have launched on our on the meat eater YouTube channel the buck truck series will drop every Tuesday through June 13th on YouTube and the meat eater site

so tune in for those boys and so element Element episodes of the Buck Truck on MeatEater's YouTube starting now. And huge new giveaway. I didn't even know about this. I'm going to win this. We're launching a huge giveaway. So you get a chance to win $3 thousand bucks in hunting gear from all our brands along with a personalized outfit and session with our very own janice who tells you know i'm doing one of these outfit and sessions i'm actually going all the way down to haley idaho to the first light

store um because i agreed to do one of these to the first light store to meet someone then i'm gonna be like their personal stylist and set them up with all kinds of hunting gear at the first light store in Haley, Idaho. We're going to hang out and I'm going to be like, Hey, you might want these and these. Um, so for your chance to win 3000 bucks in gear from all of our brands.

So FHF, Phelps, First Light, and a personalized outfit and session with Giannis, where Giannis goes over what you need, why you want it, what are your plans this year. You win all this. Runs now through May 21, so head over to TheMeatEater.com slash giveaway to enter. The winner will be randomly picked and contacted on May 22nd. The other day I was drawing, I drew the hat for who wins next year's free turkey hunt, TRCP turkey hunt.

It's a dude out of Austin, Texas. Is that all you're giving right now? That's all I know right now. I mean, some name that I forgot. Out of Austin, Texas. Are you coming back here? Nope. We do it every year in Michigan to raise money for TRCP. And we raised a boatload of money this year.

Nice. That fundraiser did a lot. And then in a couple days, we're hunting with last year's winner. Here's the thing that came across that someone sent in. And I didn't believe it, but we verified that it's winner. Here's the thing that came across that someone sent in, and I didn't believe it,

but we verified that it's true. You know how everybody's all worked up about chat, chat GPT, end of the world and everything? First off, all right, so what everybody likes to do is they like to go on these,

into the chat bots, you know, chat GPT and ask it a question and, and then, you know, use should be worried about this. As a writer, I'm just not. Like, it doesn't bother me. Because it's only harnessing what's already been done by people. So if you were already doing things that were original to people, it's not that much of a concern. It's like looking at what's been done, but it can't look at what's not been done. Maybe in the future, though, it can take, it can look at everything that's been done but it can't look at what's not been done um maybe in the future though it can take it can look at everything that's been done and then do something predict things that could happen in the future yeah like will i win that three thousand dollar package only if you sign up

so they've coded in this one has that where they've coded in an anti-hunting bias. Imagine that. So AI, artificial intelligence. Could be arsehole intelligence, AI. Okay, so this guy goes into chat GPT and says, what is the best way to hunt deer in Alabama? Got it. And the answer kicks back. As an AI language model, I do not encourage or endorse hunting

or any activity that involves harming animals. Here's where it gets good. However, I can provide some general information about hunting deer in Alabama. He types in, what is the best way to hunt eastern gobblers in west Tennessee near the Mississippi border? As an AI language model, I do not encourage or endorse hunting or any activity that involves harming animals. However, I can provide some general information about hunting eastern gobblers in west Tennessee near the Mississippi border. And then it goes on to have like a lot of very manila, like a lot of very, very manila. Am I saying manila?

Like the place in the Philippines? I think it's manila. It is. I don't know why I'm saying manila. I've been to manila. Am I saying Manila? Like the place in the Philippines? I think it's Manila. It is. I don't know why I'm saying Manila. I've been to Manila. That was a busy town in the Philippines. It says the first step to successful turkey hunting is scouting. That's a great point, though.

That is a great point. Then, when you find a good spot, you set up your decoys and calls. And it says that geese and goblers can be lured with a variety of calls. Yelps, clucks, purrs, and gobbles. Be patient and stealthy. Always follow the rules.

Wear blaze orange. So it's like, yeah, it's, I know that we're just in the beginning of this, but at this, like with the amount of hand wringing, it just, if someone's going to be satisfied by that answer, that's about the level they're going to be operating on. Now, why they have to bake in their disapproval of hunting. You know, has anybody said, like, what is a good way to get, like, what's a good way to get drunk? Does it say, I don't condone getting drunk, but you might want to try liquor.

Oh, we could, we could see, we could type it in. So I didn't buy it, but then, uh, Corinne had it checked out and someone else used the, you know, another AI language model. So as an AI language model, blah, blah, blah, I hate hunting. And then it did a bullet pointed. They found a bullet pointed list of five things you should try. Hunt in the morning. Use decoys, scout, call strategically, and stay still and patient. So there you go.

Guy wrote in, Gould's turkey not in the grand slam he's from egypt oh okay i am a u.s army national guard member in a peacekeeping mission in egypt okay why are gould's turkeys not included in the turkey grand slam by the national wild turkey federation their exclusion doesn't make sense to me. Objections to their inclusion in the Grand Slam don't seem to hold up. I deleted this then put it back in because I wasn't going to talk about it.

I decided to talk about it since the person's in Egypt and everything. There's a million kind of slams, right? There's Grand, Super, and World. they have a there's a million kind of slams right there's grand super world in world i think that what they're getting at is that ghouls are okay ghouls are mostly found in mexico the ghouls turkey is mostly found in Mexico, but it is found in, you know, you can get them in Arizona and New Mexico, right? Yep, those two states.

And he's like, well, if rarity is an issue, why is the Osceola turkey from South Florida, that's only in one state. If it's a rarity or just a one or two state thing, then Osceola wouldn't be in it either. I think, and again, I'm getting into this because you're a service member and you're in Egypt. Because you can buy an over-the-counter tag

to hunt Osceola turkeys. Yeah, I think it comes down to the opportunity. But in Arizona, you have to apply. I've been trying to draw, and I've hunted Goulds in in old mexico i have been applying for a decade in arizona good luck for a ghouls and you can get two points a year i mean obviously there's so many more osceolas in the united states florida than there are ghouls in the united states and so the opportunities are exceptionally limited for ghouls in the united states yeah i think it's like you

of the of the five this is one of my questionskeys of the the five subspecies of the american wild turkey um there are east osceola's easterns miriam's rios and goulds um But it's questioned whether they're legit, like whether they should be legitimately regarded as subspecies anyways. Do you have an opinion on that? Rather than just phenotypes or, you know, variants. Yeah. There are differences between those groups for sure.

And that's the case with many wildlife species. It's very common to have subspecies or races, you know, within a species. And I think it's very interesting and it adds more flavor to turkey hunting for people to be interested in harvesting one of each subspecies. Yeah, but do you, seeing as how a turkey can, in one day, be an eastern or an Osceola, depending on where he stands along an arbitrary line, right?

There's a little bit of make-believe here. Oh, well, sure. And obviously there's hybridism, if you will, where Easterns and Osceolas come together and you'll see characteristics of both and a blend. But once you get on down into Florida, you're definitely going to see a darker bird, doesn't weigh on average as much, typically has longer spurs.

There are certainly physical differences between the subspecies, but there's going to be gradation as they come together in those areas. Yep. Oh, you know what I keep wanting to tell people about, because we've talked about it before, I want to talk about it again. The Merlin app by the Cornell Ornithology is unbelievable. Have you been messing with that? I've just been hearing Chris talk about it on this.

Dude, it's unbelievable. I've been running it in the morning. You know like when it's getting daylight out and every bird in the world is going off? I've been just turning on merlin and uh i had 10 species going what'd you get uh let me see if i still have this one second i'm gonna try to pull it up um i see i've been stupidly i've been deleting all my recordings so oh man i got rid of it i do know that it substantiated you and randy the other morning though oh that's what i'd like to hit yeah is every time someone calls it'll bing on wild turkey and sitting there in the dark listening for gobbles it'll pick them up it'll pick them up

pretty distant now you can hear it better than your phone can hear it but it'll pick it up and i do it and whenever, when we're sitting there and someone calls, it'll punch wild turkey. So I was sitting there at one point and I had red-breasted woodpecker, northern cardinal, American robin, American crow, a tohi, red-shouldered hawk, tufted titmouse.

Did you say goldfinch? I had a goldfinch, which surprised me. This is all in one spot. Blue Jays. Bardells. I had a Flycatcher on there. And as it listens, and there's like a sound chart, and as it pings stuff, it just starts adding them to a list.

And then anytime some particular bird's going off, that bird turns yellow. And so then someone will call, and they'll be like wild turkey you know and then you hear a gobble and it'll bing wild turkey but then there's a crow going off it is amazing man it is amazing those guys do such a good job so so it didn't say peacock when somebody was calling no but i keep wanting to make uh i keep wanting to make Chris Gill call. He don't love it, but he's just been trying to learn how to call turkeys. He's got them around his yard, you know? And so I want to see if he's good enough that Merlin will pick him up now.

Another interesting thing about it is I didn't check this, but Chris said, I got to look at this. I almost don't want to say something that's true chris said that when the woodpecker's going it'll it'll id that woodpecker on cadence but i don't know if that's true that's good because you think like like a pileated and then some of those things like yeah they're real fat yeah yeah like they got the machine gun style. He said it was picking up that. And then I had a squirrel get pissed at something. Well, a hawk flew through.

I watched a hawk come through the woods. The squirrel got all bent out of shape last night. And I turned Merlin on. And you can see that squirrel in there. But it didn't do nothing. It didn't pull that squirrel out or misidentify it or even identify it so it's only a bird out a pissed off a pissed off squirrel did not register on there even though you could it was definitely picking it up because you could

see its markings but it didn't do it i think it's an amazing app. I think it's good that you bring that up because if more people were in better tune with what's going on around them in nature, whether that be bird sounds or frogs or learning a few of the plants on the property where they're hunting and trying to manage, that really increases your enjoyment and appreciation of nature. And, you know, just hardcore hook and bullet guys, if, uh, you know, and I know several who finally got into not necessarily birding, but at least being able to identify different bird species by their call or by their song, all of a sudden, wow, you know, and they start recognizing how many different species are on the property and it just, it adds to your enjoyment. The best, without a doubt, far and away,

the best woodsman I ever spent time with would be like Amerindian hunters in South America, like indigenous hunters in South America. Um, far and away in terms of like tracking ability, just everything you can't, what you get from, so where you're hunting 250 days a year in a, let's say, a 50, 60 mile radius of your home. And your dad hunted that many days a year within that radius. Your grandfather hunted that many days a year within that radius. Back perhaps thousands of years. Any little noise of anything you hear i don't care if it's a bug and it's in the jungle it's all noise it's like it's it's

there's so much noise it's stressful any noise and you go like make the what was that thing they know the answer yeah they gotta think about you know i mean they're in tune with what's going on no dude any noise any noise we've talked about this bunch where there's a friend of ours a writer pat durkin and he used to be the editor at Deer and Deer Hunting Magazine. I know Pat. He's a great guy. Oh, you know Pat? Yeah.

When he was doing that deer and deer hunting thing, he would profile someone to kill a big buck, and he'd have to report on someone killing a big buck. And he had to spend a lot of time with a lot of very successful big buck killers. And he's like, man, there's just some guys that are phenomenal big buck killers. But he said, the thing that would surprise me about them is that many of them, as good as they were, they couldn't tell you what kind of tree their tree stand was hooked into.

So there's some things you can do and not need to know that kind of stuff but just for the general enjoyment and like like old school woodsmanship man yeah knowing the sounds around you i don't get into this but one of my graduate students mark turner he tries to see how many tree species he can kill a deer from. That's like a different kind of grand slam. I got one out of a magnolia one time. Did you? Was it a southern magnolia? Yeah, it was in Alabama. So I guess that'd be, do you think that that would fit under is the merlin app does that fit

under ai yeah of course it does oh yeah for sure yeah now what i i wish that so the cornell ornithology lab or lab of ornithology what they're phenomenal dude they do so much cool stuff yeah um i keep thinking they're gonna they should send me like a hat or something i'm always promoting why i'm always talking about the cornell ornithology lab anyhow Yeah. I keep thinking they should send me like a hat or something. For promoting it? I'm always talking about the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Anyhow, if they, see, they were not going to do this because it's not birds, but I think that that should be developed. I would like to see that be developed into frogs, toads, insects.

Yeah, that'd be sweet. So that you could sit out and be like oh that's that frog you know or even it'd be cool if there was like animal ones because sure i've heard several different times i've heard like bobcat mountain lion screaming most people are like what in the hell yeah someone's getting murdered up on the hill we've had people send in crazy noises you know and you listen to it, and you're like, that's something slowly killing a cottontail rabbit. Or whatever, right?

Like, yeah. If it would just, like, be able to pick off all those sounds. Yeah. I was in the Yucatan three weeks ago. We were hunting oscillated turkeys. Oh, nice. And some howler monkeys started going off. Now, that's something that will get your attention.

When those big males are up in the trees just growling, hollering at the females and young. And it was rather fascinating to see. Phil, when you're putting this together, this is just a quick note to Phil. You can leave the note in, Phil. Play Howler Monkeys real quick going off in the trees. So that is an intimidating noise. Oh, yeah. And you're in the dark, going through the jungle in the dark,

and when it's just getting light out, and those things going off right over your head. Oh, my God, man. And obviously, I have never been confronted by one or whatever, but they're said to be rather aggressive. Mm-hmm. I was with some guys that shot one, and we ate it. A red howler monkey.

Really? Yeah. How was it? I didn't like it. You didn't eat the brains, did you? No, they did. Do you remember those videos from years back? What was it called?

Eating the live monkey brain. Yeah, yeah. What was it? Faces of Death. Yeah. back uh uh what was it called eating the live monkey brain yeah yeah what was uh faces of death yeah yeah where the monkey's head would be in the center of the table and then people had these little like ball ping hammers and pop pop pop you know all the way around the table until they finally killed the monkey and then they cracked his skull open and all of them had spoons and would no i didn't do that but they uh they had so they had a monkey they'd kill it with a 16 gauge shotgun chamon these guys were chamane was their tribe. They killed it with a 16-gauge shotgun.

Man, they had to clean the intestines and everything all to eat. One of them was walking around. He had that little baby and he was just eating that little head like a little apple. Cooked. Cooked.

I just thought it was too much like eating folks. I ate it, but I thought it was too much like eating folks yeah i ate it but i thought it was a lot like eating folks i had eaten i had eaten in in um i had had occasion overseas as well i'd had occasion to eat domestic dog a bunch and that bothered me but it didn't bother me like monkeys you know we also made me feel sweaty we also saw spider monkeys but they didn't have nearly as exciting of a vocalization but you mentioned somebody shot one now our guides when we were down there they were very strict about you know not being able to shoot the mono yep no monkeys yeah i've been so i was with the other group that it's taboo um taboo to eat monkey like they don't eat monkeys taboo to eat iguana but you know what it's just different like we have all kinds of taboos like you might come

with us to be like well there's this good looking animal right there but that's my dog dude you know everybody's got their taboos that's one rule i have no problem in abiding by it's easy to hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there 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 way waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now 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 question that came in. If you're in New Richmond, Wisconsin, there's a piece called the 10-mile waterfowl production area,

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land. There's a, okay, I'm just going to read from what the guy has to say. Recently, a group of individuals in my neighborhood want to have the easement removed leading to U.S. Fish and Wildlife land. So there's a group of individuals in this individual's neighborhood who want they have an easement um into the 10 mile waterfowl production area in new richmond wisconsin their argument is they should close that easement because there's other easements anyways

because what happened a new landowner purchased some land, knowing damn well that there was an easement there, and they want to build their, quote, dream home. Whenever you see someone's going to build a dream home, it usually precedes a problem. Do you know what I mean? They're like, oh, no, no, no, no. It wasn't any home. It was my dream home.

So the land that is being accessed is not... The people are saying, we should close the easement because you can get there from other ways anyways. You can get into this area. Other routes. This gentleman is saying the other routes suck. You got to go through a bunch of

swamp and muck and wetland or across the river. It's not comparable. He said, it's my belief that the individuals fighting this easement and seeking to have it removed just want this land for their free use and to prevent hunters from walking through it they have said hunters can request access through their property but in my eyes this defeats the purpose of public land. Why should I have to request access from a private party to use the public easement? He says that his position on this is so controversial in his neighborhood that his kids will lose friendships with neighborhood kids if he were to bring this up publicly?

What would you do? Would you stand up to the whole neighborhood? Yeah, well, I'd make it be like it was in the neighborhood's benefit. Right, I wonder why the other neighbors feel so strongly that the easement should be kept. Yeah, you'd be like, well, who's being the good neighbor here? I feel that all the people in our neighborhood can right now walk on over there. But if this guy builds his dream home, then the neighborhood's boned.

Yeah, it seems like a real slippery slope to allow somebody the ability to say, yes, you can go, or no, you can't. Yeah, I don't get it's like he you know what he's doing he's getting best he's getting beat by someone who's better at rhetoric than he is but someone's out rhetoric in him the guy that wrote in he's getting out rhetoric but he should he should have the upper hand here if his kid's going to lose buddies over this, they're going to take his bike or something. We had a while ago on the episode, we talked about the way turkeys get reported in the news. The idea of the rabid, mean downtown turkey.

We had a police officer from Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Mount Pleasant Police Department. He wrote in where they had a turkey that was viciously attacking people in the neighborhood. This turkey, he says, this turkey actually managed to knock a lady down and broke her wrist. I don't mean to laugh at the poor lady. Knock a lady down and broke her wrist. I don't mean to laugh at the poor lady. Knocked her down and broke her wrist.

They tried to catch it in a net gun but couldn't catch it in a net gun. They eventually put together a coordinated approach to immobilize the turkey. Since they knew that the Tom would routinely charge vehicles, they used an SUV as a blocker, had officers hide behind the SUV as it approached the Tom. When they executed the plan, they did not consider that a taser gun, part of the plan fell apart when they forgot that a taser gun has a five-second sequence that prevents a cop from over-tasering people.

They hide behind the vehicle, and the turkey approaches the vehicle to attack. So an officer tases the turkey, at which point the other officers all run out to get it into a fishing net. He had to keep tasering it, but the five-second thing made it that the turkey recovered and actually spurred up and injured an officer with its spurs. They eventually got it into a box from a cardboard pool. A large pool cardboard

box. They then drove the turkey five miles out of town and let it go on a farm. Two weeks later, he was back. Even two weeks later he was back even even if the turkey never came back that seems like a big giant waste of oh people lose their mind about turkeys i mean a 12 gauge is a great cheap way to take care of that problem you know i'm just sitting here listening to all this and thinking,

of course, turkeys were not numerous in the 1950s, but had that problem occurred in the 1950s, what you just described would not have happened. No. Oh, in the 1950s, if a turkey attacked the lady and broke her wrist, would they be then having meetings to figure out what to do about the turkey? Yeah, they would have a meeting to eat it that evening. That's what they'd be doing.

We did our big Chatticott episode, but the Chatticott questions keep rolling in. So we had a Chatticott episode with Luke Combs. We took care of a million Chatticott questions, but a couple keep coming in. This is an interesting one. So you guys got to do a morality. This is a moral question.

So this guy, a few years back, he buys a house. He buys three acres out in the country, as he puts it. And on it is a one quarter acre where he describes as a scummy duck pond the neighboring property owner has 35 acres with three other larger ponds this guy takes a shine to the pond that he now owns his there's four ponds three are on the neighbors place ones on his he takes a shine to this pond, and he has it dug out and deepened. He has it treated with beneficial bacteria. He adds an aerator, and he says this pond turns out awesome. The neighbor that has 35 acres with three ponds sells his place. Okay.

The person that buys this new place now has these three ponds and he decides to have it surveyed. And when he has it surveyed, it turns out that he owned the actually got the guy. She sent in a little illustration. He actually owns a little bit of the shore of the sweet new pond. Now the people that bought the three ponds with 35 acres now camp out and hang out on their little sliver of the pond that he rehabilitated about 100 yards from his kitchen window. Oh, man.

And he's wondering, sure, man, it's on their place, but really? What's the etiquette on that? That's a tough one. It is a tough one. It's a tough one. It's their place. I would say there just needs to be give and take on both sides, you know? I mean, the dude fixed up the pond.

It's unfortunate that it's actually owned a portion of by somebody else, but all parties involved should realize, you know, we have a little issue here and let's, let's be nice to each other. Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough one because here's one thing um i am like i empathize with the guy that dug the pond up but at the same time dude you like you like you didn't survey your property line yeah the whole thing could have been fixed when you bought your property and not just and then you would have known all right at this point do you want to put the money and effort into it and so this guy buys a place, and he gets to walk around,

and there's a sweet pond on his, as far as he knows, there's just a sweet pond on his place. He may not know what all happened. Maybe if he just lets his pond go back to the scummy duck pond, the neighbors won't want to hang out by it. Yeah, he needs to call the contractor and be like, I want you to put all that fill back in the pond. What if he, I'm going to run my sewage out into that pond.

And I'm going to get it right back the way I found it. What if he paid to have one of the neighbor's ponds fixed up just like his pond? And in trade, we work out an agreement where he can purchase the land around his pond. Either way, it's going to cost him something. Dude, that's the fix. It's going to cost him something. Dude, that's the fix. It's going to cost him something. Craig should be on all the etiquette episodes. Yeah. He says, I got

a proposal. I'm going to do just what I did on my pond to your pond. I'll make it better. And then you'll cede to me that little chunk of beach. Yeah. Just be nice. Property boundary adjustments. Okay. Here's another one. This one's,

this one, that one was great. This one is not great. This is a horrible person. 14 year old kid, Thanksgiving Eve, is hunting a property with his uncle,

who's his hunting mentor. Big buck pops out. Big buck for North Carolina, he says. Big eight pointer. He's a North Carolina, he says. Big eight-pointer. He's a kid. He's 14. Bam!

Hits it in the leg. Says he pretty much takes off the lower third of the deer's leg. Deer runs over towards the uncle. Bam! Uncle gets it. The uncle kept the buck. Oh, wow. It's hanging in his house come on dude argument being you might not have found that deer that doesn't matter that doesn't matter

i would even if that uncle if it wasn't his nephew and it wasn't even the same property dude give the person the deer that got them now they made a whole movie called first blood obviously i don't know the guy but i don't like him no or if he did it to a neighbor i think he was wrong so i was going to change up the question if it was an adult that made the bad first shot oh and a kid got it oh no like adult made a bad first shot and then the buck ran to you so i made a shot wounded a buck bad shot and then the buck ran to you. So I made a shot, wounded a buck, bad shot, and then you killed it. Are you giving me the deer back? Absolutely, without question.

Is there any wounding that doesn't count, like a hide wound? Or like... Oh, that's a good question. Well, give it to me. Let's say you shot a tine off it. You can keep it now. Okay, you shot a tine off it. You can keep it now. Okay, you shot a tine off it, or you hit hair. What if it was a hit?

I wouldn't give it to you. What if you shot a deer with a bow that just went through muscle? That deer's going to live. 100%. Not 100%, because you never know. I'd give it to the person, because you don't know. Can I twist the question one more time for you? It's the new Michigan State record.

I ding it in the knee joint, and it runs to you, and you kill it. It's your buck. I don't believe you. Who else are you going to ask what I would do besides me? Jason, that dude would be on my wall. See, the ethics change a little bit. No, I think if a kid's involved, you would. Yeah.

His own nephew. You specifically just, yeah, it's going home with the 14-year-old. Can I tell another story that's somewhat related? Oh, please. Uh, Marcus Lashley at the university of Florida. He is on the committee of one of my current graduate students, Jake bones. And Marcus was a graduate student of mine years ago. So I have a long relationship with Marcus. Great guy, guy very smart knows a lot about turkeys and fire and other things well thinking about the etiquette he was coming up to hunt with us and spend time to meet with jake on his project etc and it happened to be coincidentally in april

during our turkey season so of course marcus wants wants to turkey hunt. And so Jake says, hey, I know where there's a couple of birds hanging out. It's on some public land. He said, let's take Dr. Lashley and hunt over there. Great. And so Marcus and I had hunted a couple of different spots. And then on this third morning, we went to the public land that Jake was going to go to. And I had not been there. And back story a little bit. Jake had only killed one turkey ever in his life. Okay. And so he's giving up this goblin bird to what's going to be his committee member, you know, which can be important when it comes to voting time.

And so. He's got a border lock. And so we drive to the spot, we get out, and the bird is gobbling literally within 100 yards. I said, well, you know, gosh, we're really close. And I did not know Jake that well at this time about his turkey hunting ability, savvy, whatever. I didn't know. And so I just figured, you know, Jake's probably longtime turkey hunter and he knows what he's

doing. And so we're walking down the gravel road headed to this goblin bird. And, you know, I'm, I've been kind of hanging back the whole time. Let, let Jake kind of take control of this situation. But it dawns on me, I'm going to have to do something because we're fixing to mess this up royally. And so I speed walk ahead to get up to Jake and I said, hey, what's your plan here? And he said, well- So we're going to be with the turkey. Exactly. And by the way, it's already plenty light enough to see. It's not like

even gray light. It's after that because the place is a ways off that we had to drive to when we were a little late getting there. So anyway, I said, you know, what's your plan? He said, well, I figured we'll just walk up here and sit down. I said, well, we need to get off of the road and get in the woods now, like right here. Come, let's go. And so guided them into the woods. And so we get a little closer to where the bird is and it's next to an opening. It's a very good situation. We sit down, we certainly are within 70 yards of the bird, bird's goblin, which is good. I was afraid that we'd spooked everything. Hens are calling and, uh, and I'm calling for Marcus and get a lot of response. You know, the bird's just tearing it up. The hens fly down, they fly down near us. They ease out in the open.

And so, oh, this is looking really good. Right. And so here comes the gobbler, but there was a little rise, not far from us. And the gobbler got behind that. And so now he is at eight yards and Marcus does not have his gun in just the right position. And so he finally eases his gun over the bird, sees it. He's starting to walk a little you know quick walk a little bit marcus shoots hits the bird the bird tumbles and rolls and marcus shoots again and again and the bird jumps up and flies and you know i didn't't have a shotgun. I'm not hunting. And Jake is sitting behind us. And I said, you know, shoot, shoot. And Jake shoots, and the bird, you know, kind of does a slow dive.

And so he lands about 120 yards out in this recent clear cut. Now, Jake's a tall boy. He's like 6'7 or something and long legs he is just striding out there chasing this turkey and now the turkey's flopping and flying and half running and whatever else and there's jackie flops onto the bird he was out of shells uses the shotgun as a club to try to get the bird down. Finally wrestles with him. Feathers are flying everywhere. And he finally comes up with this bird in his hand.

He's got this huge smile on his face. And we all meet and congratulate and whatnot. So who gets the bird? The guy that shot it first. And so there's Marcus. Now, Marcus shot it first. But here, and I'm learning as the morning goes on, Jake has only killed one bird. The guy that shot it first. And so there's Marcus. Now, Marcus shot it first. But here, and I'm learning as the morning goes on, Jake has only killed one bird.

You know, here's a new graduate student. And I'm, hey, Marcus, you know, what are you going to do here? What are you going to do? Oh, well, you know, I shot him. And I said, Marcus, I said, Jake's only killed one bird before. So long story short, they split the meat. Marcus gets the spurs and Jake got the beard. So that's how they divvied it all up. I thought that was pretty good, man.

That's good. A couple more quick things, but it's good because it has to do with turkeys. I got two more questions. Couple more questions for you. Here's one that came in from a guy, and I just experienced the same thing, so let me hit you with this. Let me hit you with this, Craig. My name is Luke Birch.

I'm from eastern North Carolina. I have lived here my whole life. I love hunting in this great state. Recently drew a tag to hunt game lands here. I don't claim to be a wildlife biologist, but just have to ask your opinion on controlled burns. I am all for controlled burns, but can't understand why it seems the state always does them in nesting season.

I just got an earful. Before you answer, I want to tell you what happened with me. I have discovered multiple scrambled turkey nests in these pine plantations that are under prescribed burn plants. Our state started planting longleaf pines some time back and are also trying to bring back a healthier quail population. But I don't see that as being super efficient considering prescribed burns seem always to take place during nesting season when i was just down in in florida out in big cypress i was there i was there before the turkey season opened we weren't hunting turkeys but i was with a turkey hunter doing a little tour they had stuff burning everywhere in there and he said the same thing why do they got to burn it when the

like they got to be cooking turkey nests? True. How much time do we have? As much time as you want. Well, this is, I hate to say this, a hot topic. That was good. I wouldn't hate to say that. I'd like to say that. I'm not one with puns,

but it is a very hot topic, and it's discussed a lot and has been a lot over the past few to several years. Some turkey nests very well may be burned up, but whether that is having a detrimental effect on the population or not is more related to the scale of burning, how often they are burning. So if you're burning on a relative small scale and relative can be defined in a little bit, but on a small scale and you burn up a nest or two, whoop-dee-doo, that's not going to affect the population in that area per se. But if you're managing your property for turkeys, and let's say you have

a hundred acres or 700 acres or whatever, and you're managing it for turkeys, then I'm in agreement with the guy. I'm not going to be burning during the nesting season when I could destroy some nest. And so I want to give the turkeys every bit of advantage I can because it's very easy to, uh, do my burning earlier prior to the nesting season or do my burning later. You know, one thing that, uh, should be considered among fire practitioners is that every day is a potential burn day. You don't just have to burn in March or April. You can burn in August, you can burn in September, you can burn in July, you can burn in December, whenever. Now your timing of burning can have a differential effect

on the vegetation, but if I'm managing specifically for turkeys, I'm not going to be burning during the, uh, during the nesting season. Now I'm sure what he's talking about is probably on the Cruelton National Forest down in Eastern North Carolina. And so they're doing, uh, their scale of burning is larger. Uh, they largely are managing for an ecosystem for which turkeys are a part of, but not managing specifically for turkeys. So fire during all seasons can play a role in that and should be done. But even for them and other federal and state agencies, I would strongly encourage to burn at other times of the year also, even for, you know, quote, ecosystem management in various ecosystems,

not just in March, April. Chris Mormon is a professor at North Carolina State University and he led uh projects at Fort Bragg and uh one of those was was on on turkeys and I was on the committee for the graduate student there and what we found was the preponderance of nests wild turkey nests were in the drainages that did not burn. They were burning on a two-year fire return interval and in longleaf pine and in the sand hills of North Carolina. And they're promoting endemic plants, especially wiregrass underneath the long leaf in in many of those areas and they conducted most of their fires during the early portion of the growing season and most of that would be done in april may and and some in june for example but most in in April and May. And we did not document many turkey nests getting burned. I

think it was like, it was, it was less than 10%. I think it was like 6% or something like that, that were disturbed or destroyed by burning, which would not in and of itself have an effect on the population. And so one message then could be, oh, growing season fire doesn't have an effect on wild turkey nests. But wait a minute, when you looked at the distribution of the nests, where they occurred, the turkeys were avoiding that grassy understory, which was very sparse with regard to cover, but concentrating their nests in the drainages, which would not burn. And so, you know, you can twist the results a little differently there. And so there's no doubt that the timing and frequency of their fire strongly influenced wild turkey nesting,

essentially forcing them to nest in other areas that were relatively small, oftentimes linear. You could make the argument that then you could have increased amount of predation on those nests because of how they were placed and arranged. So they had effectively removed a lot of what would be much better cover for nesting by their burning regime at that time. Man. Here's another one from a listener. Oh, no, it's just a thing.

It's just a piece of reporting. And it's apropos because we're in Kansas right now. Kansas, it looks like they're going to do away, fixing to do away with fall turkey hunting season. The number of fall, this really surprised me. The number of fall turkey hunters across the state has fallen greatly since 2015 at a rate of 20% per year. In 2019, they dropped fall turkey season dates so they they reduced them meaning

they used to be open october 1 to january 31st what the hell is that october damn four months of fall turkey season so then you're figuring that they were at plus they were at it was basically close to six months out of the year it was turkey season. Like, usually turkey season in Kansas, right? Then they reduced it October 1 through November 10, so they axed off a lot. Right now, Fish and Game agency staff

are recommending that fall season be suspended altogether in 2023. What's your take on shooting turkeys in the fall? That's a good question and something that we've thought a lot about in Tennessee here in recent years. You know, in Tennessee, there's been a fall season for a long time and for the longest time, and I don't remember when the fall season began and when either sex could be taken, but for many years, you could shoot hens or males, females or males, during the fall turkey season.

That was changed a couple of years ago to male only. But still today, the regulation is you can kill a male per county in the counties that it's open and it's open in a bunch of counties. Like there's 95 counties in Tennessee and I think it's 77 counties where you can fall turkey hunt now. So you were like the most crack command or turkey hunting on the planet. You kill 75 gobblers in the fall. Well, there's not that many days in the fall season,

but you theoretically kill one every day of the fall season. But while that theoretically could be a problem, it's not because in Tennessee, I think there's only like four to 500 birds harvested annually during the fall season. Yeah. But in my opinion, a fall bird should count toward

the statewide annual bag limit. And in, in many cases it does not, uh, in, in Tennessee, it does not. Uh, I think that's something that could be improved. Uh, you know, it really matters as to how, how many are killed, but, uh, the, the thought of shooting females in the fall in areas or in a state that is suffering a decline in Turkey population, I don't think that's smart. Uh, I would not agree to have a female harvest in the fall. If there are concerns about the turkey population and the harvest has been going down as as it has in in so many states what do you what do you to what do you attribute the general um decline in turkeys that we're seeing in the southeastern u.s missouri arkansas kansas

um i'm not sure other areas how widespread it is in other areas but like to what i know it's a very complicated question but what do you think like when you had to name the things that are going on what's going on there's it is a very complicated question um and we were discussing some of this over the past couple of days and with uh one of the guys that was asking me about it while we're walking around the property you know i mentioned think about what are the main issues or problems that could lead to a decline in turkey population. One is hunter harvest, you know, that kills more males than anything else. Predators, predators can be an issue. Disease obviously can be an issue. And then other things such as weather.

And so there's an adage that you'll hear commonly, death by a thousand cuts. Yeah. And I generally agree with that, but some cuts are deeper than others. And some cuts are deeper in some areas than in other areas. And so nothing is the same over all the states or all the places where turkeys have declined. How many properties do you hear of? I know I've visited many and they might be 70 acres or they might be 700 or they might be 5,000 acres, what have you. And they'll say, man, we used to have, you know, groups of a hundred birds or, you know, some properties even more than that, or it might be, we would regularly see groups of 30 birds.

And now we only see eight or we only see 20 or whatever the case may be. And, uh, we used to kill 10 gobblers a year or 20 or 40, whatever the case may be on these properties. Now we only kill eight or three or whatever the case may be. Well, think about the productivity of, of turkeys, how it goes up and down. We have typically now more relatively poor hatch years than good hatch years, but the hunter harvest, the hunter effort largely remains the same. And so if there's a certain number of gobblers on a property and you've been killing on average, you know, 10 or 12 every year or whatever, and then you, you, you have a poor hatch year or a couple of them in a row or whatnot, that's going to show up in, in a couple of years with regard to the number of goblin birds. And it might be that you, the landowner,

or one of the people who hunt, you only kill one or maybe you try to kill your statewide limit on there or whatever. And there's other people who also hunt the property with you. Everybody's going to try to get one. Usually that's the case. And so the harvest intensity, the pressure remains the same, although the productivity has lowered. And I am confident that on many properties and likely in many regions and larger, that has been problematic as the productivity of turkeys has gone down, but the harvest intensity has remained the same.

But people have been told, and I've even mentioned this maybe erroneously that hens are going to get bred so whether you have let's say you have let's come up with some hypothetical population you fill in the numbers for me we We have a hypothetical population of 100 breeding-age females. Okay? And I don't know the exact numbers, but maybe you can help me with the exact numbers. There's 100 breeding-age females. Let's say there's 60 breeding-age males. You'd be like, okay, all those females, they're going to get bred.

Their eggs will be fertilized. But then there's only 40 breeding-age males, right? All those females will still get fertilized. So, and perhaps I'm wrong, but since all this hunter harvest is targeting males and not hens, they're still going to lay the same number of eggs they would lay. Is that not true? Well, there's still natural mortality other than hunting, which also is placed on the females. And so, uh, the ratio of males to females in the clutch might be biased a little bit

towards males, but, uh, still then the number of females is going to go down also with, you know, perhaps a, a 15 to 30% natural mortality rate on the females and, and males typically, you know, we're seeing 20 to 30% natural mortality rate on the males, but the hunter harvest is, is usually greater than that. And in Tennessee, we've, uh, seen anywhere from 20 to 45% male harvest. In any given year? Yes. And so if that is continued and you have poor productivity over a couple of years or whatever,

the number of mature gobblers on a property is going to go down. You're shooting them. Now, I'm not saying that has happened everywhere, but I'm confident that that has happened on many properties. The other issues, for example, with predation, I mean, I don't think anyone would disagree that the meso mammals have exploded over the past 20, 30 years. The coons, possums, skunks, armadillos in many places, and nobody is killing them. And we've identified that as the primary problem

with regard to nest success. You know, most of the nests are being depredated, and on average we're seeing about 30% to 33% nest success overall, which is decent, but the main problem is the predation. One thing that we have not noted is disease as a problem. Now, we've seen blackhead and other diseases but not at any rate that would cause a population decline. And so we have not been able to identify disease, and I'm talking about in the Tennessee study as a reason for, for the Turkey decline in, in those areas. Um,

predation is, is a problem. Um, we have not been able to identify weather as a problem, and there's been some other projects that looked at that, but, but weather is one of those that is very difficult to, to get a handle on because most of the studies will rely on weather data from some nearby weather station. That might be a mile, that might be five miles or whatever away. Well, a weather event can be relatively small with regard to intensity. And so a lot of that may not be captured. You know, we could see problems related to weather that we're not capturing in the data. But I would not doubt that weather in some areas in some years can be problematic, but it's difficult to quantify that and get a good handle on it.

But we do know that predation is a problem, and we do know that hunt hunter harvest can be a problem whether that be uh usually continuing to shoot as many as you can and you're continuing to do that when the productivity has gone down at least in certain years and so there's a thing called adaptive resource management where you try to adapt the regulations according to what's going on, but there's no state that changes its bag limits, for example, from year to year based on pulp or hen surveys or anything else. And even on a WMA with quotas, more times than not, things have to get pretty bad before they

change the number of quotas issued, et cetera. So I think that can be a real issue with regard to a sustained hunter pressure. But in the face of lower productivity, we're shooting a lot of gobblers and they're not being recruited at the same rate that they're being removed hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater podcast. Now, you 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. Welcome to the onX club, y'all. What are some of the extremes that you're aware of in terms of how many male turkeys out of a population are killed by hunters? I know you said like in Texas, it's really low. Texas is low. Where you have large properties and not that many people especially large private

properties it's it's typical to have lower hunter harvest as you might imagine but in areas where the property sizes are smaller and you have a lot of hunters it's uh not unusual to hardly ever see what you figure to be a three-year-old bird uh Most of the goblin birds are two-year-olds. So what does that sound like? It sounds a lot like deer management, doesn't it? You know, where, well, let's back up for a second. Thanks to Joe Hamilton and Al Brothers, most deer hunters in the country practice what we call quality deer management.

And that has lots of facets. But one of the main things is to let young bucks walk and let them gain some level of maturity before you kill them. We don't have that luxury with turkeys. We can look at body conformation characteristics to be able to estimate the age of a buck. We can't look at a male turkey and estimate the age really beyond a Jake versus a two or two plus year old, either a Jake or a gobbler. If we could look at a turkey and know that it's a two year old, there's a lot of people on a lot of properties that would let that one go. They'd like to see if they couldn't shoot more gobblers with inch and half spurs, for example, but we can't do that. I have hunted properties that are extremely well managed and call in birds, might call in four or five birds in the morning, look at the spurs with a binocular and let them

go until, because I know there are some out there with really long spurs and killing a bird on this property is not an issue. And so I can be very selective, but that's exceptionally rare. Few properties are that good. Few hunters are going to go to that extent to look at spurs before they shoot the bird. And that's not necessarily a reliable indicator of exact age anyway. But we don't have that luxury of being able to age turkeys like we can deer before we shoot them. But that only. And if I can interrupt. And so what that means is we typically shoot gobblers like we would quail flushing up.

You know, you're shooting whichever one you can get. So if a goblin bird comes in, hey, yeah, here's a gobbler, and you shoot it. And so we're not paying attention to allowing the age structure to increase across a property, for example, with the number of gobblers that are there. You're shooting whatever comes in, and with a lot of heavy hunter pressure, it leads to more younger birds. Okay, here's the thing I've never understood. I get it, but I'm trying to think how to express this.

Let's take quality deer management for a minute. Is the objective with quality deer management, is the objective to satisfy hunter desires to get bigger deer, or is the objective the health of the deer herd? I would strongly argue that it's the health of the deer herd. However, of course, many hunters, their objective is to shoot the biggest deer they can. But if you're allowing a balanced age structure, then you can see the behavior of the animals take place such that you have dominant animals that are doing a majority of the breeding.

And that pretty much always for most of us leads to a more exciting hunting opportunity. So why do you, why is there not a deer management strategy by which you only kill year and a half old deer and anything that slips through you don't touch meaning you kill spikes and forkeys okay but once something becomes a two and a half year old never touch it because you are so committed you're so committed to having these different age groups represented that in your management practice, no one is allowed to kill big, huge bucks. Because you just shoot the little ones. That way you got these big ones doing the breeding. That would take a lot of conviction. But this is not a thing that exists.

No. Because the hunting excitement is where the tire meets the road. I mean, there, there is a hunting strategy where people will shoot, uh, young deer like that, especially for meat, you know, because the meat in general is, is more tender with, with younger aged animals. But usually when that happens, the, the harvest

is high and you're killing such a high percentage of the bucks you're not getting many into those older age classes yeah yeah they're not like i was kind of i'm asking a rhetorical question because i i you know at the one where i grew up at the time i grew up um throughout my entire childhood i could tell you about the two deer that were killed within like an eight mile radius of my house i could tell you about the two deer that weren't one and a half years old you know they're both hanging on the living there's to this day hanging on the living room wall of uh my mom's house and and that's the two that in a lot of hunting, that's the two we saw. And to show how this is so widespread across the country, the National Deer Association, they put out the Whitetail Report every year.

And Kip Adams is the principal author of the Whitetail Report. And just here in the last year or two, we are killing, you know, whitetail hunters across the country are killing fewer yearlings than ever before. And the number of three and a half plus year old deer that are killed is greater than ever before. So just to show how that practice is being conducted broadly among deer hunters all over the country.

One of your colleagues, I'm sure you know Mike Chamberlain. We had talked with Mike Chamberlain, we've talked a lot about his Instagram page, Wild Turkey Doc. He's been on the show uh he has expressed concerns about killing turkeys too early in the year right a friend of mine robert abernathy who was a turkey biologist um for a long time has expressed concerns about states allowing harvest early in the year. And I don't want to put words in these guys' mouths, but basically there's this management idea that let turkeys get through nesting,

at which point, or initiate initiate whatever the hell it is at which point um whatever allow most of the reproduction to take place before you open the season on on the males and then whatever you that then the idea being whatever you've taken from hunters up front, tack it on to the end. Meaning, shoot turkeys all through May. For instance, I was just in Wisconsin for the youth turkey season. So you have a two-day youth season. Then you have season A, B, C, D. And those are all limited.

One tag. And then you get into the end seasons. B, C, D and those are all limited one tag and then you get into the end seasons you can kill a turkey a day. So you can apply for years to try to get an A season tag

and you're going to get one thing or you go to Wisconsin for those last two and you can just have at it every day. What's your take on, what's your take from the research you've done and whatever anecdotal things you've picked up on, is it actually detrimental to the resource to be gunning turkeys,

and the dates change around the country based on day length and latitude and all that but like what's your take on the idea that if you're killing turkeys early you're doing a greater harm to the resource than if you're killing turkeys later yeah well for for decades turkey biologists have broadly pushed for opening turkey seasons once a majority of the reproduction has taken place. And, and certainly theoretically that could be an issue. Um, for example, in Tennessee, nest initiation peaks on April the 11th. That's what we've determined after six years of, of following, uh, around 500 hens. And are you, when you say initiation, I mean, she lays the first egg?

That's correct. She's, she's initiating her nest. The peak of that is April 11th in Tennessee. And then she's going to, just to walk people through this cycle, that hen is going to lay one egg a day. Correct. For about 12 days, at which time she will then start incubating them and they'll hatch on the same day, even though they were laid perhaps 10 days apart, 11 days apart. Yeah, about 28 days later.

And there's another couple of days that is included in the laying season. She might skip a day initially. And you're correct. The clutch sizes vary. In some areas, it might only be eight or nine. In some areas, you know, 12 or 13. In our study sites in Tennessee, we average 10 eggs for the clutch size. And it varies a little bit, but that's the average.

That clutch, is it just one tom fertilizes all those eggs? That's a good question. There are some data, and it's not much. There's at least one study with a fairly small sample size that does indicate more than one male can be involved in the clutch. In that study, I think it was about 50% of the eggs involved one male, or maybe 75% of the nest involved one male, roughly a quarter of them involved more than one male and at least 25 involved more than one female. And most, most times we, we figure what's called a dump nest. And we see that, you know, fairly commonly that might have, you know, 18 or 20 some eggs in it. And a lot of times many of them

will not hatch because they weren't all incubated equally. Interestingly, we had a nest in Tennessee that had 23 eggs, obviously a dump nest and 22 of them hatched. So a bunch of different females finding that spot and laying an egg on it. Right. And so, but the, the other thing is this dump nest and occurs and there might only be nine eggs in the clutch.

So it's extremely interesting. Uh, I don't know just exactly how, uh, another hen finds another one's nest. If, uh, you know,

they're, they're walking nearby walking nearby or what have you but anyway that that happens more frequently than what you would imagine i find that very interesting and so obviously that's increasing the genetic diversity when you have multiple females and multiple males that are involved in in a single clutch. How do they determine who sits on that nest? Is it just the hen that starts it? That initiates it. Gotcha.

That's not a bad deal for those other hens. I don't really want to raise these things this spring anyways. Don't put them on someone else. To get back to your question about the timing, certainly the timing of the hunting season can be problematic. That that's definitely possible. And a number of States have, have set back their season dates because they perceive that that could be a problem and studies are being done right now to look at that and and hopefully some data will be provided soon that substantiates that this is or is not happening in in various states uh in tennessee though i can

tell you that it is not a problem at least with regard to when the season opens in early may you know i mentioned that we had experimental two-week delay in three of the counties and in the two control counties there was no delay. Well, in those two years, the season opened on April the 2nd and April the 3rd. And following the treatment counties, both pre- and post-delay, and the control counties, both pre- and post- post delay, we found no effect on any reproductive parameter, whether that be the percentage of hens that nest, the timing of nesting, the clutch size, the hatchability, or poult survival. They were exactly the same with regard. Now, they would vary year to year, but they were exactly the same with regard, now they would vary year to year, but they would vary the same way. So if, for example, nest success, that would be the percentage

of nests in which at least one egg hatches, went up a little bit in the control counties, it also went up a little bit in the treatment counties. It also went up a little bit in the treatment counties. So everything trended exactly the same way, and the delay at least through two years, and this is a two-week delay. This is not a five-day delay. It's a two-week delay, and there was no change in any reproductive parameter,

which was telling. So I'm not saying that is not occurring in other states i haven't you know collected data in this spot that in tennessee no that that like dudes out hunting that's not preventing these hens from being successful nesters or these eggs getting fertilized or whatever i do not believe that in any way, shape or form. That dudes out hunting are causing a problem. Um, look, look at, look at the harvest rate, what it did from the 1980s, for example, through the mid two thousands. I mean, it's going up exponentially in most states and, uh, obviously hunters on the landscape did not cause a problem at that time.

The Turkey population was going up. There are more Turkey hunters in some places now than there were in Tennessee. That number has increased. Well, uh, it, it increased about a thousand per year for a few years. And then of course, 2020 happened with a problem with the virus and everything. And we went from like having 90, 92,000 hunters up to around 110,000 hunters. So, uh, the, that situation increased the number of hunters in, in, in a lot of places. Has that dropped off now? I have not seen the data for 2021 yet on the number of, of turkey hunters in the state,

or at least the, the number of hunters who had a license that would enable them to, to turkey hunt. So to get back to the earlier point, we didn't have in Tennessee the season open on the Saturday closest to April 1st, which means some years the season can open on May 28th. Well, during this experimental delay, we didn't have turkey season opening, excuse me, on March 28th. So we didn't have turkey season opening in March during the course of that experimental delay. So I would not propose Tennessee to go back to open the season on the Saturday closest to April 1st when our peak nest initiation is April the 11th. But I would feel comfortable if that season opened sometime during the first week of April, because that's when it happened during our experimental two-week delay,

and we found no issue surrounding that. And so if the season opened in Tennessee, sometime during that first week, whether it's, you know, you could say the first Saturday in April. That way it would vary from April 1st to April the 7th. And that could be, you know, on average about four days later than it was traditionally. And from the data that we've collected, opening at that time is not having a detrimental effect on reproductive production. But again, that's not to address other states because, you know, of course, the timing of nesting is going to vary from place to place and states have different opening season dates, of course. How far apart are the counties that you're separating with the opening dates?

They're touching. I know you're interested in turkeys more than turkey hunters, but that has to have changed where people are like more intent now and doubling up on the double opener. I would be. Yes. And we have surveyed some of that and that that is happening some um so in those experimental counties they opened two weeks later well some hunters in those counties of course they would go to other counties where they could hunt during that initial season but but that only happened during those two years now of course it's a statewide delay so the statewide the season

as of this season uh opens on april the 15th and so you you can't do that in tennessee now go from one place to another but it does impact out-of-state hunters uh i spoke with the executive director the other day and he mentioned how revenues from out-of-state hunters were down as of yet but i imagine that will pick back up because now the tennessee season will go through i think it's may the 28th i mean good night that's what you said jason the the turkey season is in washington state you know april 15th through through the end of may so you better believe there'll be some hunters from alabama and mississippi georgia coming to tennessee during the the last half of may so you're almost ready to start shooting off fireworks by then man the end of may one time someone said this to me and i've quoted it and I worry that it's not accurate.

They were saying, here's a way to picture turkeys as a rule of thumb. They're saying 75% of the eggs that hit the ground won't hatch. Of those that hatch, 75% won't see their first birthday. Of those that do see their first birthday, 75% won't see their second birthday. How close to accurate is that according to your understanding? I would say that is accurate, yeah. But the other night you were talking about the possibility, even though it's hard to tell,

you were saying that there can be turkeys out there that are four or five years old. Absolutely. Males. So for a male to get that age, he's defying. He is defying the odds. Yes, that is absolutely correct anywhere, but you're not going to see turkeys that are four or five years old on these heavily hunted areas. And it can happen.

It does happen, but they are going to be exceptionally few on areas that are either hunted lightly where the hunting hunting pressure is is well managed or on unhunted properties absolutely you'll see turkeys that are four five six even eight years old males males were uh band recoveries or tag birds has indicated you know you know the exact age. What the hell kind of spur do they got at eight years? How long does that thing grow? About the same as a four-year-old. Again, hardly ever are you going to see, for example,

eastern turkeys with spurs longer than an inch and a half. Usually they're worn before then. And, you know, you can take it with a grain of salt, the length of the spur and a half. Usually they're worn before then. And, you know, you can take it with a grain of salt, the length of the spur and the age, but that's not an accurate way to age the bird. I would not, you know, somebody say, oh, this spur is an inch and an eighth. So it's three years old. Now you only God knows how old that bird is, but you know, it's not a Jake. Uh, it's very unlikely to be a two-year-old but you just you don't know i wish you i wish you did i wish they had some you know mark on their back

you know two white feathers if uh if it's a two-year-old and three if it's three or whatever and you could tell the age very easily uh if if so i think turkey uh hunters would manage the populations on the lands they hunt very, very differently. Oh, if they could tell. Absolutely. Just like with deer, what I was getting at earlier. Oh, if you knew that it could happen and you could create it. On this property that we're on right now, with a landowner that we have, Randy, who's a tremendous guy and tremendous to allow us to come out here

and and enjoy the property with him if there was a way to age turkeys you know and randy and you see in the deer that around on these walls well i don't see any fork horns on on the wall around here i mean we're looking at 160 to 200 inch uh white tails they don't grow that large at two or three years old now i know there have been some six uh three-year-olds that have been 160 inches but the point is he's allowing young bucks to walk so he can shoot them at five to seven years old because of their size if you could age turkeys in the same way, they would be managed very differently. And, and I think a lot of that gets to the bag limit. I think the bag limit is a very important, uh, regulation, you know, for years in Tennessee, there was a four bird statewide bag

limit, but actually you could kill a lot more than that. Uh, if you killed a bird on some federal lands, uh, land between the lakes or Fort Campbell, for example, that didn't count towards your state bag limit. And then, and this, this, this drives me nuts. There were like, uh, 15 plus WMAs across the state for which if you killed a turkey on it, it was free. A bonus gobbler. That's ridiculous. Any bird killed should go into the bag limit.

And so in Tennessee for years, you could, and that didn't even count you fall birds. So you could easily kill, well, not easily, but you could kill eight, 10 or more birds a year, but it really wasn't that big of a problem because very, very few people did that. But these large bag limits, now you're seeing them back off dramatically on the bag limits. And in Tennessee, it's, it's down to two now. Um, and, and I have been one of those who all into turkey hunting and I've killed as many as I could because I absolutely love it going to, you know, five, six, seven states every year, uh, to hunt. But, you know, a bag limit of four, that's too many in my opinion.

That's, that's, that's too many, in my opinion. That's too many. There was some interesting data in Tennessee. I want to interrupt you for one second. Early on, I was talking about how I was going to explain why this matters. I want to back up for a minute. I failed to really do that effectively in talking to listeners about why we're debating some of these issues. And I want to do like a quick American history through the wild turkey.

Okay. I'm going to start with my favorite pieces. The pilgrims almost certainly were not eating turkey at the first Thanksgiving. They had a catch-all word, which meant big edible bird uh probably a goose they're probably eating geese um there's similar things uh we use the term um you'll hear people use the term it's a game bird and that's a catch-all um i've heard people use um in spanish i think it was in spanishall. I've heard people use in Spanish, I think it was in Spanish-speaking areas, I've heard people use a word like poes in South America.

It's like a big bird that's good to eat. So you see one running along, poes. What one? Oh, curacao. But meaning a big bird good to eat. They threw that word around. They probably ate geese. However, if you look- I bet they also ate deer.

Yep. They definitely, there's no doubt that at the first Thanksgiving they ate deer. And so when we have Thanksgiving at the Ronella household, we always have deer meat. I don't care about the deer. Yes. So there are accounts from the long hunters

and the first Western frontier of them describing areas where it seemed like this, it seemed that the forest floor was literally moving with turkeys. So at times in places that were like outstanding numbers of turkeys by the early 19 hundreds, um, we had had really really depleted turkeys everywhere of the states I can't remember what it is I think that maybe I don't know what it was at the time of European contact

we probably had wild turkeys in 34 states maybe um we had we had but by the by the early 1900s they had been removed from over a dozen of those states altogether there were only a few little pockets i think south carolina maybe always hung on to some form of a turkey season. But most places, turkey hunting ended. And then they started into, through a lot of failed efforts in trying to get it right, they started to reintroduce turkeys. They initially tried to reintroduce turkeys by turning out pen-raised birds. And it was a disaster.

It didn't work. Then someone hit on the idea of capturing wild-bred birds. And so they went to those little pockets, like the deepest swamps, the worst mountains in the southeast, and they started catching turkeys and turning them out and that those efforts really started to gain ground in the 70s and they pushed all the way up into the 90s so where i grew up there weren't turkeys when i was a little kid by the mid 90s there were turkeys because they had been reintroduced by national wild Wild Turkey Federation in conjunction with state agencies.

And then they exploded. And so where you live, if you're a listener, where you live, you are probably sitting at some part of this crazy, is it fair to call it a bell curve? You're sitting at some part of this like crazy is it fair to call it a bell curve you're sitting at some part of this curve you're probably at a part of the curve where you're you're not at the climb anymore you probably are at the crest or you're on the the falling edge of the crest like the saturation crest yeah because they came in and it was like like admit where i grew up it happened kind of right when i moved out west but all of a sudden it was like you could draw a turkey tag here and there and then it was everybody was killing turkeys every year my dad was just killing turkey every year um and it exploded and i think people thought that

it would always be that way and it was like the the turkey heyday right and then now you're having these these areas where we're coming out of it and it's dropping off and people are people who love turkeys are wondering where's the where is the bottom like where's the actual line gonna sit so when I've on the show raised questions about fall turkey seasons, about being able to kill a turkey every day, being able to kill hens, it's not that I'm against shooting hen turkeys. People are like, well, you kill doe deer. Why isn't it okay to shoot hen turkeys? I'm not talking like a morality thing.

It's not a morality thing in my view it's like as we go through this big experiment of turkey reintroduction and in certain areas in the northwestern u.s an introduction they weren't there before but they're there now um what is gonna be or is there gonna be be a are we going to achieve a normal where turkey hunting is a normal part of our lives for decades to come or will we look back 50 years from now at this kind of weird thing that happened um where we had all these turkeys and then we're right back where we started because of various concerns so when i say say why this matters is there's no normal. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app

is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater Podcast. Now you

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.

Welcome to the OnX club,com slash meat. Welcome to the, to the on X club y'all. To answer your question. No, I don't believe that'll happen. I think states are making adjustments right now, all kinds of things, uh, whether that be seasons or bag limits or predators, disease, et cetera. Um, you know, you mentioned that the, the Turkey population's going up. And I mentioned that about the harvest from the eighties to the mid two thousands or whatever. And so when you look at harvest rates or as a proxy you know the the population increase how long can it do this you know at a essentially

a 45 degree angle how long yeah not infinitely no and so we have reached infinity right now and and i believe that in many areas it reached the point where the area could not support any more turkeys than what it has because of various factors and so then it begins to drop off and then it begins to fluctuate now if the harvest pressure remains the same as it's going down and the amount of habitat is deteriorated or reduced, then you're not going to get back up to some historic high. I've brought this out with different folks. Think about what the landscape was 20 years ago. And, and I keep going back to Tennessee in that area, South of Nashville and South middle Tennessee that had some of the highest Turkey populations, if not the highest Turkey population of anywhere in,

in, uh, the country in the late nineties, early two thousands, you could see a winter flock of a thousand birds. That's like unbelievable. So how long is that sustainable? It's not going to be that sustainable for that long. We have more roads. We have more buildings.

We have more infrastructure from humans. So many properties are quote lost with regard to it being turkey habitat because they're subdivisions. And so the amount of land that turkeys have to live on today in many areas is considerably less than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And so we, you know, had this steep incline of the population. It reaches the point where that cannot be sustained anymore. Then it drops and then it's going to fluctuate. And I think our change in regulations can have a strong impact, of course, on leveling that out into what you call the new norm. But over time, the human population, at least in the foreseeable future, is going to continue to do this, go up and up.

And so conserving our lands is hugely important, as it always has been. But that can't be discounted when you think about how many turkeys were and are or will be killed in a particular county, for example. We can't expect to go back to historic highs in all areas. When you are talking to someone to get into your extension work, let's say a landowner, you know, let's say someone's got 40 acres of land. And they're like, I want to make it better for wildlife just in very general sense wildlife being like whatever the hell is available what what are the um what are the top suggestions you have well the the number one thing is you got to define wildlife. Are you talking about chickadees, horned owls, copperhead snakes, deer?

What is it that you're talking about? So the landowner has to identify, and that's very common. I want to make it better for wildlife. Okay, I'll say this. All native wildlife. Here's my thing i got 40 acres i'm like i just want to make it as good as i can for all native wildlife whatever assemblage of native wildlife i could hope to attract well you're going to help a

diversity of wildlife by having diverse conditions on the property but that's not going to help all species you know if you're an eastern metal arc you will never hang out in the woods you see what i'm saying and so there's no such thing as managing appropriately for everything you've got to choose something because each species have certain requirements that have to be met and they are very different among some species. And so that's why, you know, and you're like on two ends of the spectrum, think of, uh, an Eastern gray squirrel or, uh, a pileated woodpecker versus a grasshopper sparrow, you know, that they will never be found in the same place. One requires forest, at least wooded areas, woodlands and forest as well.

And the other one requires not just grassland, but vast amounts of grassland. And so there are different area requirements by different species. Some species, if you have the perfect conditions on 10 acres, will never be found there because they require a much larger footprint than that. And Northern Bobwhite is a great example. So frustrating because so many landowners would like to manage for quail, but they only have 70 acres and around the 70 acres is non-habitat for Bobwhite. And, you know, you just you just got to tell them look you can make your place uh absolutely perfect for quail but you're never going to see a population response because of what's going on around you and so with regard to your question about improving it if they then

identify the species and we kind of stick to turkeys, then you got to meet their habitat requirements. And so you have to have, or ideally, you would have good cover for nesting. You would have good cover for brooding. Obviously you would have roosting areas. You would have areas that provide good foraging during the summertime, as well as during the fall and winter. And so you've got to meet their food and cover and water requirements as their requirements change throughout the year. What's the difference between nesting and brooding territory? Well, the cover that generally is selected by turkeys for nesting is going to be relatively dense. The visibility is not going to be that far.

For example, one interesting thing that we found in the Tennessee study is that just less than 50% of the nest, I think it's 46% of the nest, occur in either what we call early succession, you know, like overgrown fields, or shrubland, you know, where there's a preponderance of small tree stems, you know, 10, 15 feet tall, something like that, or shrubs or what have you. 46% of the nest are in those vegetation types, but only 7% of the landscape is represented by those vegetation types. So certainly you can see selectivity by the birds when there are different vegetation types available for them to select from. And so think of an overgrown field that can provide excellent nesting cover, but it probably won't provide good brooding cover because, you know,

if you imagine you're a poult that's, you know, three or four inches tall, you literally can't physically navigate through that dense vegetation at ground level. And even for the hens, when they're nesting, they don't like to navigate through that either. And so with a number of studies, including ours, something that we find commonly is that the nest will be within 20 to 40 yards of the edge of this dense cover or, you know, 40 yards from some trail or what have you. So she doesn't want to walk through that dense, thick stuff to get to her nest as she has to come off of the nest each day for at least, you know, usually at least one recess to go feed and defecate, what have you. And so that then gives rise to the notion of, hmm, what's the scale that I should be managing for with regard to nesting cover? And so if I'm managing a property specifically for turkeys, I don't want that nesting cover to be any more than about 80 yards wide.

You know what I'm saying? Because in the interior of that, then it's likely to not go in there. But for the broods, they may be around the edges of those fields because they can walk and get around. And that's caused lots of people to consider, you know, whether it be turkeys or deer or bobwhite or rabbits or whatever to be edge species. Personally, I don't agree with that. If you find a species that is only using the edge and the edge is defined as where two or more vegetation types or two or more successional stages join each other,

if you find a species tied to that edge, then what that should tell you is not that the species likes the edge, but the species doesn't like the interior of one or both of the adjoining vegetation types. And what that means is you need to manage that vegetation type differently such that you can see use in the middle of it instead of just along the edge. And so when you see broods around the edge of the field, that immediately tells you the structure in that field is probably not adequate for the broods to be using in there. And so that's when your management comes in to make these fields and your, your woods better with regard to cover, whether

it be for nesting or brooding or, or even, even roosting. Uh, so there's different things that we do to enhance an area to make it more attractive to turkey. Why do they like certain spots? So there's management that you can fix up all of these. They like to roost in certain spots and you can't always tell what it is about the spot, but like, it's like you feel like if you took every turkey off and put new turkeys there they're probably going to

go roost in that spot yes absolutely have you guys ever looked at like what is it well one thing that is important is the visibility and so when i'm managing specifically for a roosting area. Uh, I might choose and number one, you start to where that, you know, birds are roosting, or if you don't know, or you want to, to make a roosting area somewhere, it's usually a place where it's up a little higher than the surroundings, uh, or at least on the upper portion of a slope where, you know, at least for a gobbler, they can call and I'm, I'm referring specifically to springtime and surrounding hunting and trying to make, uh, set up a property for, for better hunting. And so we manage that with fire and we use low intensity fire and we're preventing a dense mid-story from coming up.

We're keeping the understory. Mid-story is those trees that are above four and a half feet and before they get into the overstory condition. And then the understory is that vegetation as defined as being under four and a half feet. We're keeping that low. We're keeping it open. We're killing trees

that we don't want and leaving the trees that we do want primarily according to species or form for, for roosting, allowing a little bit of sunlight to come into the area, but not too much because if you do, the understory is going to blow up and it's going to be more difficult to keep it open. So these roosting areas probably have anywhere from 70 to 100% shade, no more than about 30% sunlight coming in. Now, before somebody screams, I fully understand that turkeys roost in more open areas. And, you know, ever been to Kansas? I mean, you know, individual cotton trees along a drainage, there are going to be turkeys there. But I'm talking about in forested conditions,

if you want to enhance an area such that you're increasing the preponderance of birds to be roosting in a given area, manage that where it's open. And what we do, what I prefer to do, is leave it alone. hundreds of birds to be roosting in a given area, manage that where it's open. And what we do, what I prefer to do is leave it alone. Um, I know people are going to think this is crazy, but on lands managed specifically for turkeys and turkey hunting, think of the roost area, like you would a bedding area for deer. Do you go into the bedding area to hunt deer? No, that's kind of dumb. You're going to run that buck off and, you know, it might not return to the property for the rest of the hunting season. And so your roost areas to me, and this is just a personal

view, it's kind of like your anchor and, and, uh, you know, a gobbler is going to usually have three or four areas that they typically use for roost and is not going to go back to the same area every night but if you know okay i'm managing these roost spots and i'm not disturbing the birds uh immediately when they come off of the roost and how many people you know they're they call and they mess up the bird uh they move, they spook. You know, when the birds are spooked at their roost site, that just damages your chances of them returning there and them going somewhere else. Instead, if you know where the birds are going to go,

hunt the birds on the way there, or you can even go there and wait on the birds. And for a lot of people, that means you don't have to get up, you know, two hours, four day lights. You can go into the turkey woods at nine o'clock in the morning and have excellent hunting. One of my favorite times is like from nine o'clock till 2 p.m. And so you're allowing the birds to do their thing early in the morning when they come off the roost. And then when they start to move out, that's when you know where they're going to go and when you do that at least in my humble opinion

your success rate goes up yeah but man you might as well be asking people to quit i realize coffee and stuff i really like dude yeah it's like a the world's most powerful magnet. I think in Star Wars they call it a tractor beam. Well, you know. Pulls you into that roost tree. You still can hunt near the roost where you're hearing the bird, you know, gobble off the roost, but, you know, trying to crawl right there under the bird, you're risking messing things up if you don't kill him. One of my favorite things about turkey hunting, though,

is when you get real close, let's say you're 70 yards from that roost tree, where you're like, it seems like there's no way we're not going to kill this turkey. But the other part of your brain knows you won't. This morning. I think I heard that very recently this morning i was like how would it like these of course we're gonna kill these turkeys and then they hit the ground and they stop gobbling and in a while later when they gobble and it's like some bitches a half mile you like, what happened? It is amazing how they can avoid death.

By us, anyway. We have these in our studio. We have various formulas. We had an original one and people corrected it. We've made it into a t-shirt. It would be that if you get within 70 yards of a roost tree and don't do anything creep in and don't do anything don't put out a decoy don't touch a call can i interrupt yeah you immediately have a 25 chance of killing that bird 13

you have a 13 chance of killing that according to which choke tube you have right yeah well we varied i was like it's hard to pin down because you get into certain brush types and stuff i think we figured right we tried to figure your 70 yards out and you got 30 yards okay you know and um it's not a given no and i know it's and it's like but i sometimes wonder um if setting up on them is that much better than 13 it's a little better but it's not 100 it's very similar to duck hunting uh i love to to listen to phil robertson and one of the things that he said and i'm sure i'm not stating this verbatim, but you know, if the ducks are coming, don't call. If you know where the ducks are going to go, there's your

best bet for being a successful duck hunter, not trying to call them into a place they don't want to go, just be where they want to go. And the same thing is true for turkey hunting, which I found myself in that position yesterday. You know, how did I get in this position? I would never choose this position to try to call a turkey, but situations happen. Here's where I am and I can't move. This is, it's, I can either just not call or i can try and more times than not i'm gonna try we got this this this uh trcp fundraiser hunt we got coming up me and janice we we have a spot where we agree if If you went there

and didn't just crept in and didn't do anything, we have a few days to hunt. But if you went there and didn't do anything and just sat there, you are absolutely, you're going to kill a turkey every day.

Steve, that is exactly what I was mentioning. But he's like, no one wants to do that. If you set up the property correctly, you can take someone who has never turkey hunted and just say, sit right here. Sit right here and be patient. Yeah. And whatever you do, don't put out a decoy. No.

Don't call. Just sit. They're going to come right through here. Now, if you can't stand it and you want to scratch on a call a little bit, you know, give them a slate or a box call and just don't hit it more than three times and they'll feel like they're doing something. And okay, you're, you're being active, but just sit here. You're 80%. You're going to shoot a bird.

Yeah. There are spots on this place. If you go where, um, where um uh i think a couple of them in particular it's like yeah there's just no if you had that time there's no way if you just sat and ambushed and had a little shooting hole out into an intersection every day if every day but no one no one wants to do that man they want to get out. They want to make noise. But like I was saying, if you set the property up correctly, and if you have the luxury of having a property, private property, where you can manage, and you just observe turkeys, just observe them.

And the same is true with deer and other species. But, you know know you're not necessarily hunting but you're going out and you're observing and watching what they're doing or when you are hunting take you know exercise some patience and and just watch them instead of just trying to get in close or call them to you watch what they do watch where go. And then you can set up areas where there are some type of objects or funnels where the birds are going to walk through here. They're going to use this area. And then we will set up these specific spots to see it. And even if you're not a good caller, you're going to have excellent success because you know the property and you know the birds on on your property and

you're not just setting up under the roost tree trying to get them to come to you at first light but uh you're allowing them to do their thing you're not shooting too many of them you know instead of like there's there's five guys that hunt a hundred acres and the other properties around are also small and everybody's trying to kill the birds you know back off of that to where you know this property can only sustain so much hunting so much harvest and still have some of those older age turkeys out there so i think paying attention to that is very important And in those years where you're not seeing or hearing as many, I realize private landowners, you know,

they don't have a pulse per hand surveys or whatever necessarily, but at least your visual and auditory senses, what you see and what you hear, if you're not seeing or hearing, hearing as many back off of the kill some you know stop trying to kill every goblin bird on the property and leave some so they can get into that older age group and you're helping ensure that there's uh mature birds out there yeah you've mentioned that a couple times that's sticking with me that it seems like a thing you hear people say like like, I used to always get my turkey the first day.

Yes. Now it takes me six days. I still get them. Right. Or we, you know, the group of hunters, we used to kill 12. Now, you know, we're lucky if we'll kill three. Well, look at how many there are out there. And during those years of low productivity, that's going to show up in a couple of years once those birds would get to be two. And if you have really poor hatch years or really poor poult survival, you've got to meter your harvest along with that.

How do people, you have your services available. You do work for people. Like people can contact you. Well. Or is that not true? I have a day job. No.

I work for the University of Tennessee and, uh, that keeps me extremely busy. I'm on the road all the time. I didn't know if for some aspect, if you had clients that you went and worked with. I do. And I do a few of those each year. You know, we're allowed to do, uh, some consulting out of state. Um, but I don't do much of that and I don't advertise that also. Although I just, I guess I just said that to a whole lot of people. Yeah, so you don't want people emailing you their turkey questions.

You know, email is like the bane of my existence. You just want them to call. You want them to call. It's like it rules my life, man. I mean, that's my job. I've got to answer emails, and there's just so much email pressure. Well, hit people with your cell phone. Would you like for me to get my cell phone? But if people want to look at, if people want to see about,

let's say someone is so interested in wild turkeys, they want to start, instead of listening to the guys at the bar, right, they want to start educating themselves about all aspects of turkeys they want to start instead of listening to the guys at the bar right they want to start educating themselves about all aspects of turkey okay turkey behavior turkey management turkey biology um what do they do like what would you recommend someone does who wants to be on like cutting edge of turkey understanding i think a great starting place is to look at your universities that are conducting turkey research look at the products that they have available whether that be written or podcast there's a lot of those out there at no time in the past have people been able to access scientific information and scientific information that has been written or delivered in a way that the lay person can

understand than now and so i would look specifically to those uh those universities that are doing the research. Everything is online now, and there are gobs of sources of not just information, but accurate information that isn't just someone's opinion, but this is science-based and data-driven. Mm-hmm. And when you crystal ball it, when you look in your crystal ball, we're still hunting turkeys. And so my kids, uh, my kids, 12, is he hunting turkeys when he's 62? 100%. You think so?

Yes, I do think so. I do think so. I do not believe, uh, turkeys are going to crash everywhere. They're resilient birds, and we are taking giant steps ahead with all of the research that's being done to help fine-tune the regulations and learn more about their needs and how management can make positive adjustments for all of that. You know what question I wish you could answer for me? Is my kid's 12 when he's 32,

is he hunting grizzlies in the lower 48? That's a political question. I was about to say, considering the political climate, that I would not guarantee. That's purely a political question. That question is completely divorced from anything having to do with biology. I've heard you have some opinions with bio i've heard i've

heard you have some opinions on that yeah i do um and i and like i said i don't uh i don't personally need to be i'm not personally asking or needing to be the one in fact if i could i would if someone said to me okay i'm gonna give going to give you a choice, there's a choice here. We will follow the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. We will follow their direction and follow what they've tried to do repeatedly and delist grizzly bears and some of the distinct population segments the greater yellowstone the northern continental divide populations that the u.s fish and wildlife service has asked for the bears to be delisted if people said to me um we will allow the fish and wildlife services wishes to be carried out,

and you have to agree that you'll never even try to draw a tag, I would say no problem. Right? It's not like a personal thing. It's not a personal thing. All right. Tell people where you're at again. You don't want them to come find you, though.

University of Tennessee. Do you have grad students? Oh, yeah. We've talked about that. You want people to come apply for? Always look for good students. I have several really good graduate students right now. That has been my biggest blessing of this job is having

the graduate students that I've had. They, they have everyone literally without exception have been fantastic, fantastic people, uh, fantastic workers, uh, developed into fine scientists. They're all over the country and every one of them has a wildlife job. I'm very, very proud of them. That's great. It's the, it's, it's the biggest blessing that I've gotten out of this job is my relationship with the graduate student. I got one, one, I do have one last question.

What percentage of your graduate students are hunters or anglers? 100. Is that right? Oh yeah. Every one of them. Now there's a couple of them that don't hunt much, but every one of them hunt. You know, there's a screening process steve you know when when we're riding around during interviews and uh i ask them where do y'all want to go eat uh that's a telling question right there oh you you want to eat that well

i wish so bad if they don't like fried fish and barbecue and whatnot, we could have some issues. And number one, if you don't eat deer meat, we got a big issue. I wish I could tell you who said this, man, but I know someone that gets a lot of grad students and technicians and stuff, you know, and they're saying they're walking me through, they're walking me through when they're looking at the applications. And they're looking for, you know, they're looking at the applications and they're looking for you know they're looking for the kid out of minnesota that just did the cruddiest jobs on the planet

you know creel surveys net surveys you know i mean and he says man the minute i see costa rica that one's in the trash. He's like, I want people that can work. You asked me when I started about what I do, and I'll bring this back to the graduate student question. When I finished my master's degree, there literally was no job even to apply for in wildlife in the region. There was nothing. And so I then looked at PhD positions. I had a couple of offers. I got into a PhD program, not because I necessarily wanted to,

but I was married to the love of my life and had one daughter at that time and I had to have a job. And so I was intrigued with the PhD possibility. So fast forward, I finished my PhD at Clemson, had a wonderful, wonderful experience at Clemson. But then I thought, now what am I going to do? You know, I'm not, quote, a professor. That's not me. I'm a manager. And I have just educated myself out of every job that I ever wanted. And it was at that time, this position came open with the University of Tennessee in extension. And that extension responsibility fit me perfectly. And because I could have graduate students, I then decided this is my goal for my professional life. And that is to produce, although I can't be an on the ground manager anymore. You know,

I've just educated myself out of those jobs. But my goal is to produce the best managers that any state agency could possibly ask for. And that's what my graduate students, that's what they are. They are outstanding. They are managers. They become scientists while they're there and they've done a fantastic job. Good. Congratulations. Keep pumping those hunters through the system. We are trying. All right. Every bit.

Professor, can I call you professor? No. Doctor? Craighart. Dr. Craighart. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Ride on, ride on, ride on, ride on Sweetheart, we're done beat this damn horse to death

So take your new one and ride on We're done beat this damn horse to death So take your new one and ride on Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and

crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.