The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 450: Apical Dominance

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Michael Snyder, Ryan Callaghan, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: The day Phil died; Michael's book, Woods Whys; why conifers are shaped like cones; a hot tip on pickup lines that work; the maple syrup business; the Wyoming corner crossing victory; when Hunter Biden becomes an unlikely poster child for the Second Amendment; tree weight to fruit weight ratio; how trees aren't throwing off more "akerns" to help critters get through a tough season; 43560; flat vs. hilly; old forests and being defined by function; sap wood, heart wood, and fat wood; why paper birch trees are white; how the injury response of trees causes burls in wood; how Smokey Bear lied a little; being disconnected from our daily consumption of wood products; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. All right, we're in our brand new studio. It's like Phil died. I couldn't, when I got here, I was so, it was like I was sad and I realized that it's like Phil died. I'm still here, I promise. Yeah, but I wouldn't know that.

That's true. Yeah, you can't see him behind all those monitors. Speaking from beyond the veil. He's like a ghost. Yeah, he's got like a little command and control center where it was like purposefully set up to not like you could you wouldn't even know even right now sitting here looking for him i wouldn't know he's in here it's like it's like the wizard of oz just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain cal suggested we get like a heart rate monitor up on the wall above Phil so we can at least see his vitals.

I think Steve would have some fun games with that. That would be very confusing to the listener. Just trying to see how he can spike poor Phil's heart rate back there. Man, one time I had I was doing this life insurance policy where I had to lay up some dude came over and I had to lay on my couch and he hooked me up to a bunch of those little stickies on me to monitor your heart rate.

And I'm laying on my couch and periodically I could hear my kids fight upstairs. And you hear like,thew stop it right and i and i'm and i had to be on this thing for 20 minutes and i asked the guy can you see that he goes oh yeah he goes every time that like when those kids make that stop it noise nice it takes a toll on you man slowly kills you make that stomach noise. Nice. It takes a toll on you, man. Yeah, I bet.

Slowly kills you. But back to Phil, he... Phil, why you got it wrapped up in black blankets and stuff back there? That's another temporary solution, Steve. There's a lot of cables. I was trying to make it less of an eyesore. I think it might have had the opposite effect. He's waiting on a little coffin.

He's waiting on a little coffin where he'll hide back there. We've been talking about Phil's going to get a DJ deal. Like a platform. Yeah, because picture... Well, no, DJs don't use screens though. No,

they don't, but they're on platforms. You should take a picture of him and be like, where's Phil? And post it and just see if anyone can really see that he's back there. It's killing me. Joined today by author and forester Michael Schneider. Do you go like a Snyder? It's Snyder. You're not like Schneider.

Not like Schneider. like schneider not like corinne it's it's been anglicized from the snyder yeah uh man when i got your book woods wise i'm trying to say this in the nicest way possible i was initially dismissive because i've never read a forestry book in my life and you're in a big club yeah like most of me yeah like most americans like an overwhelming majority of americans i never read a forestry book and the minute i it sat on my desk and sat on my desk then one day i opened it and realized how it was structured it's it's structured in like questions many of which are great questions and it's like it poses a question and answers the question it addresses the question addresses the question and some of

them are unanswerable correct i'm big on that the minute i opened it up and saw that there's a thing why are conifers shaped like cones i was like i never thought about that why are they shaped like cones awesome no that No, that's what I wanted. That's why I told Krim, we should have this guy on to talk about all the, like, cause this is great for people's bar room banter capabilities. Totally.

Imagine some single fella. Imagine some single fella down in the bar. Everyone go get Michael's book. You picturing this? It sounds like my past. Yeah. You're down in the bar. There's a lovely young lady next to you. And you're like you're like shit man i can't think of a good icebreaker you know i can't be like you

sure are pretty because i don't fly he'd be like hey man did you ever wonder why uh you know pine trees are cone shaped. That's good. That is rock solid. Put that one in your, uh, in your pickup. That's real audience specific. I just came back from a wedding in LA and,

um, I don't think that would've got you anywhere. Been like, uh, let me tell you why your lips look like that. No, so we're going to dig in. But tell about your job. Because you know the comedy Parks and Rec?

You were actually at a place called Parks and Rec. Yeah, Forests, Parks and Rec. Did you guys love that show? Yeah, and I got a lot of that over the years. You know, like, oh, okay, sure. But, and so I was the commissioner. So that's also fun because you get to be the commish. Yeah.

You were a high level individual. Well, yeah. In a, you know, big fish in a small pond kind of way. But, you know, so I am, as of January 1st, I am no longer the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forest Parks and Recreation. But that's what you're referring to. and that's what I was for 12 years. Are you glad about this or sad about this? It was my choice. There's stuff I miss, the good people, the good stuff.

The mission is amazing. Incredible staff of professional foresters, biologists, recreation specialists, parks people. But it's heavy to politics and bureaucracy, and that gets old. And I did it for an inordinate amount of time. Uh, historically speaking that, you know, I, I served through two governors, it's an appointed position, um, by the governor. Um, you lead a department, um, that has the, it's well named with a statutory mission for forest, forest health, forestry, uh, the state

park system, which is really quite excellent in Vermont. And then sort of broadly speaking, outdoor recreation. And we're a sister department to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. And so our forests are their habitat, right? And so we managed public lands cooperatively together. It's a really cool tradition of kind of interdepartmental work. And so it was amazing. I worked for 14 years prior to that within the department as a forester and as what we call a service forester. Most states have in a department of forestry, an arm that includes people who give technical assistance to private landowners, municipalities.

And that's what I did. That is like the best job you can have. It's so cool. You're just out with interesting people, walking interesting pieces of land and helping them. You don't have to drum up business. You're not really much of a regulator. You're just facilitating conservation on private lands, which as you know,

in the East is like, it's the majority of the lands. And so, uh, that's what I did. And that's where the book really came from was just being with people and their fascinations with the woods, their ignorance with the woods, their love of the woods, and then, you know, collecting questions and realizing that I'd answer a lot of questions. And I'm kind of a geek, um, coming from a background in forest science in particular, and had this thing about, I disillusioned with, we produced, you know, published peer reviewed papers that didn't really go anywhere except other scientists citing them and their proposals and their, their work. And so I'd left wanting to get, I took a chance at being one of these county foresters with a county as a geography of area of jurisdiction to give that kind of technical assistance

with a hope that, you know, maybe I can help bring the science to the management and stewardship of private woodlands. And did that for 14 years. And then out of nowhere, an incoming governor, the transition team contacted me and said, hey, that for 14 years. And then it out of nowhere, the, an incoming governor, the transition team contacted me and said, Hey, we're hearing things. We wonder if you'd like to be the governor's, you know, commissioner for, who was the governor then Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, uh, who kind of, who had been in this state Senate and was Senate pro tem, uh, ran for statewide office,

uh, won that election and was putting a team together. And they reached out to me. I said, no, are you kidding me? I mean, maybe when I'm old, then, you know, my knees go and I can't roam the woods anymore. And maybe I'll be like wise and then I'll be commissioner. And they're like, we're asking you now. And I went to, I said, no, I don't really, I'm not interested. And then some, I would call them elders and people in my life that, you know, were, you know, that I trust and, and, and have some wisdom.

They were like, you gotta do it. And so I took a chance. I said, okay. And I, I lasted three terms with him. He decided to not run again. And the new governor, Governor-elect Scott came in. He notified all the appointees, which is very typical. Please send in your resignation letters.

If you want to work in our administration, you're free to, but you can apply just like everybody else through the web portal, which is what I did. And I was kind of like, really? Okay. Was that a different political party? Yes. I should have mentioned that.

Yeah, totally. He's a Republican. Oh, I see. Yeah. That's why the assumption was you mentioned that. Yeah, totally. He's Republican. Oh, I see. Yeah. That's why the assumption was you're out. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty traditional. The web portal.

And so, you know, I did. And I'm pretty sure I was the last kid picked, you know. They announced all these new appointees and new secretaries of this and commissioners of that. And it was stressful because I'm into it. I'm like super into it. So you went to the web portal. I fill it out you know uploading my resume what it says like current job it'd be like this job yeah exactly it was a little surreal and I feel like I have very relevant work experience since I have this job exactly uh I'd like to say to his everlasting credit, he, now they brought me in and, you know, it was, it was pretty intense. They had some very tough questions and some concerns. Because I, you know, into it and had kind of a big mouth and was pushing for certain things. Actually, to be honest, it was, Corinne and I talked about a little bit, it's like forest fragmentation, the breaking of forest into smaller and smaller pieces to the point where they become non-functional as forest and habitat and connected lands.

And so in our statewide land use plans and regulation permits, there's no lens for forests. There's a lot of other criteria you have to consider when proposing some development. Are you going to have an adverse impact on the environment in these various ways? But forest wasn't in there. And I was saying, you know, they're so important. They confer so much power and strength to our state. We should have that as one of the checkboxes. No undue adverse impact or you avoid it, you minimize it, or you mitigate that.

And they were really concerned because they thought that was only, the only solution would be regulation, which this governor was very against taking property rights away from people. These are things that matter to me too. And I was like, no, actually there's an economic way through this. Let's reinvest in the loggers, the workforce, the mills that are dying and eroding. Let's rebuild the culture of forestry in our state as our last best hope to keep forest forest and to keep all of the many benefits that accrue to all of us from these private lands, um, flowing. And they were like, oh, okay.

And he reappointed me and I had another three year term with governor Scott, which I'm for, which I'm extremely grateful and had to navigate all that, you know, being kind of a tree freak, not kind of certifiable. Not a tree hugger or tree freak? I hug some trees, but sometimes when you need to- Slap them too, don't you? Yeah. So, you know, but, you know, sometimes oddly when you're, you know, you're going to, you know,

bore cut into one to fell it, you get to wrap your arms around a little bit sometimes. So it's a mixed bag, right? Yeah. But yeah, so. You know how to bore cut? Oh, absolutely. I recently learned that. Yeah, you need control.

You need control. Yeah. I was not into the bore cut. Where I come from. You're in control until the tree. You whack a huge piece of pie out of one side and then you come in from the other side. Well, you come from a long tradition there. So yeah, directional felling, bore cutting, the hinge, control. It's really cool when you get in from the air. Well, you come from a long tradition there. So yeah, directional felling,

bore cutting, the hinge, control. It's really cool when you get it and it works. I've had so many loggers that I was like, you should go to the game of logging training. And they're like, no, I know how to do this. You know, pencil neck, Forrester geek over there.

Leave me alone. Tell me my business. And then a couple of them did it and they were like, wow, you know what? I got to admit, this is pretty cool. So much more control. You're not chasing the tree down. You're holding that wood together until it's safe and ready and then flip it off.

When we were learning it, it was explained to me. We were cutting down a big walnut. Okay. Yeah. And these were like walnut specialists. these guys i was with the walnut specialists and they're saying on a veneer law i mean these guys are cutting like they're down in the dirt man oh yeah they're like cutting it down like in the roots yeah yeah and they're saying no you're not gonna come in here and that cut a big you know 800 wedge exactly knee high and then whatever you know they're like very precise about

they want it zero waste way down low i mean that thing was ready for the stump grinder yeah when they cut that thing down and they were showing me that little that cut which i was like that can't work but i was slick yeah i went out with steel power equipment, right? Sure. And worked on a forestry project example that they had going in Oregon in conjunction with some tribal management. of, um, they wanted to drop these trees and they wanted them to overhang ever so slightly into the river in order to provide overhead cover for spawning rainbow trout. Nice. And so they're like, yeah, you can drop them kind of in the water.

But not all the way. But not all the way. Right. And it, you know, like it Right. And it was a big deal. And these two fellers that they had come out that work with steel all the time, the most painful part of the process for them was doing it slow enough. So everybody else, all the state foresters and everybody could learn from it and it was just so day-to-day for these folks but they're like yeah we're gonna put like these six limbs over the river the rest of that tree is gonna lay right here and by right here we mean and they walk out and they put a little flag right there and they walk back and it's like

okay and then this happens and you could just tell they're like, let us get on with this. Jeez. But it was amazing. Yeah. Like every tree was just like that. And these are huge. And it's a thing. It is impressive because it's not sort of by chance or they get lucky once in a while. Like they have control and it's pretty impressive,

especially with leaning trees, trees with defects, decay inside. They're not structurally sound. They're really unpredictable. And yet people that really know what they're doing approach it with a plan that is real and it works. And I was standing with like the, you know,

kids with soft hands on the other side of the river. And when that tree hit the ground, it was like, it went through you, you know, and you're like, wow, that is a substantial chunk of wood. Yeah. No doubt. Dude, I don't want to say where I was. I was at an event recently where I shook

dozens of the softest hands I've ever touched. Like real nice and moisturized? To the point where I started to anticipate it. If it made it, it was like... It was kind of like the noise when you shook the hands oh so weird um how you doing back there phil you good i'm doing great i uh i take offense to these soft hands comments

but please continue uh we got to touch on a couple things but i want to get when we come back i want to um i got two things i want i want to ask you about your disappointment about no one getting the vermont honey thing or not, not honey. I got my honey and syrup from Vermont. I'll point out. Right on. Yeah. But,

uh, I got a friend that does both, but the, the, the sugar business. Yeah. Maple syrup business. And two.

Sugaring we call it. Sugaring. Yeah. And two, I want to tell you about one time I put a chainsaw into an oak tree, and the gallons and gallons and gallons of water. It was like slicing into an old tractor tire, how much water come out of that tree. We'll get to that in a minute.

First, Cal, lay out the corner. Lay out the current. I think you got to explain your tractor tire. Oh, in the old days, maybe they still do, Seth will know. They still do. Some guys do. They use that sodium

whatever. It's whatever. It doesn't freeze, fill with water, just freeze in the winter. We were doing a project one time where we had to cut, me and my brother had to cut a hundred of these little jack pines out and limb them and cut them to length and put them on stickers out in the field

and we were cutting to get in there and left some little punji sticks oh yeah and put one through a tractor tire and i didn't know i was young i didn't know. I didn't know that thing was full of brine. Not air. Yeah. I think they used to do a lot more with before tractors were four-wheel drive. This was a two-wheel drive. It was a Ford tractor.

What was it? Like an A-Dent? Smaller? I don't remember, man. It had tires about as tall as me. Yeah. Anyway. Is that helpful? The guys that I knew I don't remember, man. It had tires about as tall as me. Yeah. Anyway. Red. Is that awful? The guys that I knew that used to do it had two-wheel drive tractors. They'd put them in the rear tires.

It added weight to the tractor. That's exactly what this situation was. It would give you more traction. I think it also – Well, tipping tractors over is a real common thing. It lowers your center of gravity. Ballast. No. Keeps you from tipping over.

So anyhow, like that come out of this oak tree. But it wasn't flying squirrels. Cause that's another thing. Well, listen, man, the house I grew up in had a flying squirrel infestation,

but I never had flying squirrels come out of a tree hadn't come out of my house bad especially one time we came up and and got on an extension ladder and started dropping moth balls down into a hole in the cedar siding 24 flying squirrels i one time was sitting in a tree stand in new jersey and i'm sitting there dark waiting for the sun to come up and it's just it's like that gray light and all of a sudden like all the cold gray light something like whizzes past my head and smacks the tree and runs up and it's like one of those deals you're like holy shit like what was that and then like a couple seconds later another one and i'm like what in the hell is going on here it was flying squirrels like soaring into the

tree that i was sitting on and it was they were like landing on the tree and then running up the tree yeah there was i don't know probably a dozen of them that did that and he like hit the tree that i was sitting on and ran up to the top they don't get enough credit for how cool they are right yeah you when i was a kid you could turn we had a bird feeder outside the kitchen window like on the sill the kitchen window and sometimes you turn the light on at night in the kitchen and it'll illuminate that thing. Like the last thing you're expecting is a bunch of little squirrels sitting there eating. Flying squirrels. That's an interesting waterfowl kind of comparison that you had there.

Like you can start a new little hunting club, right? Where you like identify the mast tree that those flying squirrels are going to in the morning oh and you go and set up yeah wait for him to fly in all right corner crossing we've covered it to the dickens and it might not it it's just a long story it's like like let's say you're the news you don't apologize every time you cover the president you don't be like oh my god here we are talking about the president again and it's a big deal it just it never ends it just continues to run so the corner crossing deal and and i don't even know like what if you're the news and you report on the president every day you don't need to give

back you don't need to go like uh so there's this country the u.s and they have executively they have they have a triumph uh triumvirate what's the word i don't know that is a word executive judicial whatever basically yeah you're like this is united states of america they have a judicial system uh they have a congressional system and an executive leadership system and it's a triumvirate um check system of checks and balances and so that feller yesterday right you don't need to do all that um so the wyoming corner crossing case if you're not familiar i don't know what to tell you you just go have to go back and listen to all let's just go back and listen go back and listen to all up in your airspace.

That was an episode. Yeah, that was one. Or go back and listen to Busted for Touching Air. Yes, yes. Listen to that. Or read all the articles on the website. Or read all the articles at TheMedia.com. And Cal's going to take it away.

Thank you, Steve. Over to you, Cal. I want to, we're going to go off of this assumption that everybody knows what we're talking about for the most part. And then I just want to hit on a couple of parts that I think people need to focus on and pay attention to, because this is what is going to be brought up again and be central to the case going forward. Can I interrupt you for a second? Yes. You know, we're having interrupt you for a second? Yes. You know we're having a forest round right now?

Yes. Can you imagine the tension that Doug Dern is feeling right now? He's holding his phone. He doesn't know what he's going to write in about. But as soon as that sumbitch makes a mistake. He doesn't know what he's going to complain about to me yet, but he's ready. Or what he's going complain about to me yet but he's ready or what he's gonna fact check he's ready that's not what we call that he probably got off his tractor and he's ready for something to be like well that's not quite how i'd put it but anyways go

on cal a lot of woodlot managers out there. The minute you said private forest, I think he'd like just whatever he's doing, he's not doing. He's poison ready. Long time ago, chased a lady out to Vermont and did like a eight month stint in Vermont. And there's a lot of foresters doing non-forestry jobs in Vermont that came out of forestry school and just couldn't, couldn't find a forestry paycheck, you know, so there are a lot of experts out there. Oh yeah. Lots of experts. Yeah.

Yeah. So, and there's a lot. I'm good friends with one of them. There are a lot of experts, uh, on, uh, this case and it's really interesting, right? Because it has to do of course with, um, public and private interface here. So, um, in this case, corner crossing, which of course is stepping from one piece of public land

to an adjoining corner of public land at the intersection of four parcels. I like the old checkerboard analogy. It is a checkerboard. Yes. So your public is black say private is red sure and you're yeah stepping from red to red stepping from yeah on on the diagonal black to black sure yeah um so uh four hunters from missouri use this method to access pieces of blm land that are and

of course the other adjoining corners are private land um in this case that we're speaking of um this fellow fred eshelman's uh private oasis in, in Wyoming called the Elk Mountain Ranch. And, uh, Eshelman decided to sue these folks for criminal trespass. Um, and I believe this is the, the civil case. Yeah. They got acquitted.

For the, on the criminal. Criminal. This is the civil case that uh the idea was it was going to be tried in a civil court in wyoming but it was picked up by um the supreme court i always like to point out how the juice got off on criminal and they stuck it to him in civil. Was that on TV too? Yeah. And these guys,

criminal, the criminal court's like, you didn't break a law. Because, and this will give you like the reason as to why, right? Um, judge Scovdall,

who is the, um, the federal justice here writes in his opinion, the court finds that where a person corner crosses on foot within the checkerboard from public land to public land without touching the surface of private land and without damaging private property, there is no liability for trespass. Very convenient that this line is in the opinion because this is kind of where it stands in court is, oh, really? You want to sue? Where are the damages? How do we prove that there are damages to private land? Now didn't,

didn't just a little bit earlier in another wrinkle in this, the landowner had said the, the landowner comes and says, because my, because I used to have exclusive access to this public land, and I now don't, I feel that I've lost $7.5 million in land value. Of land value. Because I understood my ranch to sort of have to come with exclusive BLM access. And now that it's not, my ranch feels to me 700 or seven and a half million dollars less

valuable and didn't like in some prior thing the judge bring up i'm not buying that that that's these guys problem or that that's that that i think you're mixing up like that. How are, how did these guys cost you seven and a half million dollars? When we, there's a, a good chance. There is a probable chance that we can't determine those damages because it's not illegal. Yeah.

Right. It's like, it hinges on it being illegal. Yes. And it's like, you bought a ranch that has this type of land configuration, this checkerboard land configuration on part of it. Um,

that's, that's your private dealing and you should, should have been aware of the risks. Yeah. I always felt that his gripe was, should it be with the realtors and the lawyers that did the deal when he bought the ranch? Cause he bought the ranch under the

under the someone gave him the impression that he had exclusive access to this and it and that idea hadn't been tested in the courts and he should have and someone maybe falsely advertised this yeah but you understand you've you've listened to my strip club analogy right no please um so i bought a uh condo heart rate meter just heart rate meter just spiked we're gonna have some good background music yeah um so i bought a condo and get here in in bozeman okay it's in a commercial area of town it butts up to commercial property it is a at least a partially commercial property in itself right you're putting the strip club and the the property behind that directly abuts up to my property uh was for sale at the time it's it's been rented in long-term leases for five years now. It just

was up for sale again and sold again. And speaking about the future of this property, right? Cause you're investing in the property. I was like, so the big risk here is this, because of the nature of this changing face of this commercial property that is directly out my back window if they were to put in some sort of like oh i don't know like bozeman thing these days of like a wine bar and tasting room or tomahawk throwing bar yes with yeah and who knows like my property value could very well go up however if it were to turn into like an ultimately like super seedy like liquor store slash strip club situation my property values would very much likely go down and this is me a non uhogul of any sorts by anyone's standards, right? So I find it absolutely ridiculous that this particular fellow, with his long list of financial accomplishments, could turn around and be like, Well, the real estate agent said so

i mean who's the victim here uh that's a good point you know what i mean it's like that is part of what you do in your due diligence as an adult purchasing anything caveat emptor yes sir buyer beware so hmm so you're pointing to the no liability yeah no no yeah somebody forced him to purchase this before he was of legal age and he didn't quite understand um yeah you'd have to tell me quite quite the story there so anyway the end and there's been these previous instances. The blue sky scenario here for this whole situation is this guy, Eshelman, would have been like, all right, just don't tell anybody that you guys are doing this. I don't want to see a bunch of cars parked here. It's a pain in the butt.

There's going to be trash. There's reasons that we don't want people corner crossing in here because you're going to spread weeds around. There's always a risk of fire. We just want good neighbors, right? You guys be good neighbors. We'll be good neighbors. Nobody ever cares about this.

That might've been the strategic approach. Now in hindsight, that might've been the strategic, the strategically sound approach. Yes. Now, however. Holy moly. Yeah. You have to wait in line to jump that corner.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's an easy to get tag because it's all private land with very little access. So, you know, now that corner crossing is highly publicized i guarantee there's going to be more traffic yeah if you're just playing if if the landowner's just playing for himself and isn't interested in policy which is probably true you're right he should have said boys you got me but here's the deal yeah yeah i'm gonna build a quonset hut over here and you guys can park in it and then you come back out to the county road and you corner cross

yeah you let me know when you're gonna be out there i'll let you know when i'm gonna be out there and this is just gonna be our little thing exactly exactly that's the long game so that's some good that's some good insight, Cal. You should have brought that up a long time ago. Should have hit him up on Facebook. Interesting points of this, and I'm very much burying the lead here. So obviously we got a great opinion from this

judge and that opinion stands and these guys aren't going to get dinged with anything in this particular civil suit, which is great. However, it does not mean that, okay, now corner crossing is totally legal. There still exists some gray area, but this opinion says based off of several cases, and I found it very interesting that he also looked at cases within the state of wyoming um and he didn't cite the unlawful enclosures act which is a federal act and i thought this is exactly what this is going to be totally based off of but this judge, which says that you cannot create an obstruction that limits the public's ability to access public land. So at this corner, this common corner, an agent of Eshelman put two T posts and I think a little length of chain right at the corner that was

supposed to be enough of an obstacle to where these gentlemen would have had to come into contact with private property in order to get over private property so they went through the I would say a very ceremonial effort of creating a ladder to go over two t-posts that don't connect to anything right like a lot of folks could have jumped it um but they did this in order to signal to the land agents that hey we are here to do this and we're going to do this ridiculous thing to show you that our intent is such and it's not to mess with your your private property in any way 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, to the on X club. Y'all. People are really getting hung up on this ladder thing. Like, Oh, that's what you have to do himself.

Yeah. Oh yeah. He's a fence maker. He's a fence professional. Yeah. Um, so he's like, it wasn't hard.

Um, but people are really getting hung up on this ladder. And a ladder, like I said, it's a symbol. It's not necessary to corner cross. Wasn't he talking about let us have the ladder? Do we follow up with him on that? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I'm in touch, but I think that we should sell some ladders on the website. Well, no, but can't he? I want that ladder. Yeah, we should. I mean, we have the, we got weights and fish. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know. We're adding to our, you know, we're going to

amass so many things. Artifacts, dude. Are going to be incredibly valuable at a Sotheby's auction or our own auction. So another case known as the McCabe v. Uinta Development Company case back in 1914 is ruling that Justice uh, justice. In 1914?

1914, yeah. What was going on back then? Well, uh, it is, it's just an extension of what was going on when this, uh, checkerboard system of land, uh, was laid out. But it wasn't, it was probably not a hunting thing. It was probably whatever else. Yep. Grazing, mining. Grazing. This is grazing, right? But just as it is now, it's, you know, the landscape changes with new ownership coming in, people put up signs or, or three strand barbed wire fence where

it used to be open range. And I think that's what the case was here. So a guy was just moving his sheep, uh, to his historic grazing area on public land. Um, the new land was, uh, it was, it. And, um, somehow some way I should really read up on this. Um, McKay, uh, took, took his right to access his public grazing allotment to the court and won. So that's another case. And then there's a 1974 case from the 10th Circuit Court that was cited as well. And again, these come down to damages, right to access, the public's right to access public ground and um a new

uh case that just passed here not case but a new law in wyoming um that clarified some trespass language without it was kind of an interesting thing because it didn't directly name corner crossing, but it absolutely pertains to, uh, corner crossing and proof in the pudding here is Justice Gobdall used it, um, where the Wyoming legislature passed law, um, actually passed this year, um, traveling through private property to access public land. This clarified what traveling through required, um, physically touching or driving on the surface of private property, which would not apply to the hunters in this case. Um, and so all these little building blocks kind kind of build up right now because of the this is a relatively narrow opinion according to uh a mutual friend of ours who used to be with the blm is now at the national wildlife federation but because it does lay out like trespassing or walking from corner to corner in the checkerboard fashion versus, uh,

a corner that's not in the checkerboard fashion, which is kind of confusing to me, but anyway, that's where we're at right now. Um, it's, I think a very positive thing and everyone's pretty much in agreement that this landowner is going to, um, appeal the case and, and try to take it to a higher court. So, uh, it's not over yet. If it's, this is a, you know, these are like federal actions. These are cases that would very well be cited by somebody else who is in this legal position. Um, even if it is not in the state of Wyoming, which makes it a national thing. So, um, tons of checkerboard here in Montana, uh, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming. So I, uh, I got a handful of thoughts that I'm going to give in no particular order about on this issue. There was a, a little detail emerged recently where the, the Missouri corner crossers who've been,

who were in our, I was gonna say, who've been here, they've been in our old studio. So we had, we had a couple of the Missouri corner crossers on the podcast. Um, they had their on X account subpoenaed.

Okay. Which is, is very common. So like game wardens, people, you know, they can, they can subpoena that

kind of information and there emerged is it being called waypoint number six yes yeah so when they had their on x account subpoenaed here's this waypoint that was made very definitely well not made a pin was dropped very definitely on private property yeah and these pins when you drop them are dated and everything so you could drop it from your house well that's that's the rub is they can't um you know you can't say for certain that the pin was created there was also a lot of like apparently a lot of deleting of waypoints but there was a pin that was made very much on private property and that's been brought up and brought up and brought up but it can't definitively be said was that pin made by someone who set who hit mark my location or was that pin moved or just dropped for whatever reason

dropped a pin over on the guy's place hard to say so that was like an interesting little wrinkle that i was watching and um i think it might be it's like you know like the grassy knoll i think it's like waypoint six because there's like we don't i guess i don't know if we need to go in it but like i'm cleaning up waypoints and trying to use folders uh mainly so when i'm like showing off stuff on my computer i'm not showing people all the other places i go you know like where if i look at this computer it's like awesome spot awesome spot right exactly like you're sitting down with spencer new hearth and he's like yeah but what about this turkey waypoint we're not talking about that one

i'm like i can't hide half my computer anyway um so you you know there's a lot of general waypoints out there i'm like looking i'm like oh it's totally landlocked like totally landlocked there's no way to get in there or now i've been there and that's not actually a county road it's totally landlocked, like totally landlocked. There's no way to get in there. Or now I've been there and that's not actually a county road. It's a private road or there's all these things where, where it's like, I don't know, we're going to head this way. Here's the way point, Steve, you'll figure it out type of thing. Right. Where you're, and then there's other ways to do it too,

where you're like zoomed out far enough to where you're like fat fingering. Or you could say like hey i saw a strutter right here oh if you get on like but you can get on public and just try to get as close to where i saw the strutter from my car so then you might have a way i don't know there was a ton of that this spring just from me oh yeah i'm just saying it's like i have a bunch of waypoints like that where they're on private, but it's like, I see a turkey here on private, but I'm on

public. Well, if your stuff, if your account ever gets subpoenaed, someone might say, what were you doing all over this guy's place? Well, they can clarify that. They can listen to this podcast. You can refer them to show. Interesting wrinkle, number one. Number two, people keep sitting back waiting for precedent setting or waiting for it to be ta-da here's clarification um but the fact that

that that like the rules aren't being rewritten yet. Right. Right. It's just a matter of, it's just a matter of, even if the law isn't clarified, like if it's not publicly clarified, you know, in,

in the statutes, it is, it increasingly is what prosecutor is going to want to take this on. And it might be, you better have nothing going on in your County. Yeah. Aside from this, it might be that the the when you go look at the statutes it might still be confusing but you would then look at the prosecution history and say the legal language is confusing yet no one and they've sure tried no one has been successfully prosecuted so it's like looking

for this to all of a sudden we're looking for the issue to get legally clarified might not happen to anybody's satisfaction and it might just be inference that when someone says can i because i don't understand when i read the law i can't tell if it's okay or not okay. Or why does the state recommend against it? What the hell does that mean? And then you'd point, one might point and say, well, here's the history of people trying to prosecute this. Up to you if you really feel like going through all that. But generally, so far to date, no one's been hung for it i like to point out also that

right now it's very much a motivated foot access only situation and i think the longer this goes on the door gets wider and wider to like well i i have a high step and quarter horse i'll guarantee i can put all four feet from public to public on my quarter horse as we walk across this pan oh right or you know the means of transportation because if you go through the threads and all the talking online about this it's like well let's just make an easement on everyone right well is it a five foot wide easement is it a 40 inch easement enough for uh you know a small trail side by side like what you know where do we go from here and um you know again if i was a big landowner with the public interest in mind. And also, you know, all those things that I mentioned of like wanting to protect

like good grass stock or be free from worrying about fire danger, all those things. Um, I just be like, let's just, let's just not, let's just, just keep it how it is. The folks that want to figure it out they can figure it out and and that's just going to be the best thing for everybody uh number three of my five wrinkles or or things that i'm uh that occur to me as i think about this accuracy fences aren't aren't on surveyed lines for the most most part. A lot of times, fences are a guess. It's a matter of convenience. This is where we always understood it to be. You cannot go out. Let's say all of a sudden

the law was clarified very deftly. Corner crossing is legal. As long as you don't step foot on private land. Dude, this corner we're talking about in wyoming was a surveyed corner that had a marker on it you cannot go out and use mapping apps fence placement and be that you're right on the money i picture a future in which access proponents are spending money surveying corners. And even that is going to get touchy because those corners are not going to be where these fences that have been there for 100 years stand. They're just not. They're just not. one time was curious about a corner, um, in Eastern Montana and went to that corner.

Cause. Was it like ever so close to the road easement? Like one of those. It's close to a road. It, you can either go around and it takes a lot of miles and a lot of time to get into this area. Or it's like,

you can hop a corner close to a road. And I was just like curious about it. So I went to that corner and I found a corner pin, looked at my Onyx and the corner pin was not like Onyx and the corner pin were off slightly. Yeah. But I mean, yeah, they don't advertise as being like, it's like you don't like settle.

You don't pull up an app on your phone and settle like legal disputes about property lines. I know. Cause like mine, if that's the case, my driveway is a little bit out in the road, but I don't think it is. Yeah. Right. When you're hunting on a grand scale, you're not like, you know, they're not saying like, oh yeah. Accurate to point to a quarter inch. Yeah.

It's just not what it's it's not it's not its intention so for people to think that you're just gonna run around willy-nilly jumping fences if this really becomes like a contentious thing and you're just gonna willy-nilly run around jumping fences thinking you're never stepping foot it's like i wouldn't trust anything yeah but a corner mark and In this case, it had a corner mark. Number four, I'd like to point out, these boys, these Missouri guys,

this is a detail that matters a lot to me, asked and asked about can we do this? Can we do this? A game warden came out and said, they're not doing anything wrong.

Another officer came out from a different enforcement agency said, they're not doing anything wrong. So they were doing like, they did more due diligence on the issue than I've probably ever done on any access issue in my entire life and got completely mixed messaging. So in some ways, when they were talking about these guys being owing someone damages, I couldn't escape the feeling that there's a system that failed them. And being able to get a straight answer when you're really trying to go out and be like well what about blank everybody's like oh yeah you can do that

i'm calling the cops the cop comes out they can do that well i'm gonna call a different cop that comes out and says yeah let's try to arrest them it's like you can't do that to people uh what was my last one? Oh, they weren't activists. They definitely, your point about in hindsight to strike a deal with them, like, I've always felt like I'm

in dangerous waters when I try to bring up Rosa Parks in relation to this situation, but like, they were not activists. They weren't trying to set precedent. They weren't trying to challenge precedent. They were trying to challenge precedent they were legit like and i've met him and i didn't think this was true until i met him when i met him and heard the whole story from their mouths i was like these dudes were legitimately just going hunting and they probably would have never said a word to anybody yeah and they have to drive from missouri We found a sweet spot. I'm not going to tell anybody about it.

They were not activists. No. People think they were activists. I assume they were activists. They're not activists. Yeah, they basically had an over-the-counter tag opportunity as a non-resident in an area that had good game populations. They have to drive all the way from Missouri. Like, these guys were not going to all of a sudden have 20

trucks at camp, right? They're a bunch of middle-aged, love to hunt friends. Not activists. But you can picture it being activists though, right? You can picture someone saying, we're going to push this to the Supreme Court and I'm going to call the police and tell them to be there at 8am when I jump the corner and I'm

going to drive this home by God. They were like, man man i think he's probably some good elk back there and if we like call around and clarify that what we think is true is true we can go in there and hunt and holy cow has it become talk about department of like unintended consequences my god yeah yeah absolutely that's my final point but also i mean hats off to them too because they weren't gonna just like swallow a bad pill no right they're like well no that we are right um yeah they weren't activists but they weren't suckers yeah so when someone tried to stick it to them they're like okay i'm not i mean i'm confident in what i i'm confident that what i

found out is true i'm confident about the research i'm confident about what I found out is true. I'm confident about the research. I'm confident about the informed assumptions I made. And to date, they've been borne out legally. Yep. Yep. We do have to, I mean, Wyoming chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers for their expediency and backing these boys and making sure that we're going to figure it out. I mean, that's amazing. I do have to say, I think this little story that I've told before is like really paints an interesting picture when we talk about, because it's just so easy to simplify things

into like landowner, public land hunter, opposite sides of things, right? Well, this buddy of mine, Leo, I used to guide on his place. He had an enormous chunk of petroleum County, sweetheart of a human being. Awesome. Awesome guy. Um, and I used to ride around with him all the time. He'd come down to our camp. We outfitted, our base was on his place. Um, and just to like, nothing's black and white, right? He is a huge private land owner. He's got a bunch of his property in our private land public access program, which, you know, you can't outfit on. Uh, but we had our camp on a chunk of private that wasn't in his, uh, block management chunk. So, you know, we had a sweet spot right

there. Um, so he had private, private access. He had private access open to the public. Truth be known, if he ever knocked on his door, he was just going to say yes anyway, right? Just give you regular old fashioned access. Yeah. Um, but he'd come down and he'd pick me up in the truck and we'd go, um, just, he'd want to check on stuff and I'd open gates for him, right? Like very normal deal out there. And, and, um, I was always interested in learning more of the country and I, uh, finally got a GPS and we came up to, um, uh, it's interesting because it's a state section of ground but the new leasee on that state section was the first person to fence it and the fence was ended up taking about a quarter mile

of my buddy's private property like you could stand on the corner post and you're like, man, this, I'm like, Hey, look at this. I mean, look how far the fence is on to your place. Right. I mean like GPS, plat map, the whole nine yards. Right. Cause I was like doing my homework, driving around with him. And he goes, right? Because I was like doing my homework driving around with him. And he goes, huh?

He goes, well, Ryan, can't own the whole damn world. And just like away we went and nothing was set. You know, it's like, huh, well, can't own it all. You know, it was just like, oh my God. Corinne just deleted on me the thing that I'm most

dying to talk about, but we're short on time. Well, no, let me just hit it real quick. Because this is the most interesting. You want to talk about legal wrinkles. It's so funny. It's the weirdest thing. When you go, if there's anyone out there who's never went and bought a gun, when you go buy a gun from an FFL, a federal firearms licensee,

you come in and do a question, a questionnaire. 10 questions, 11 questions. Stuff such as, are there any restraining orders against you have you ever renounced your citizenship are you a fugitive from justice are you a felon are you addicted to drugs okay there's like child support questions on there or something or i don't believe i don't i can't think of a child support question there may there may be like are you owing i don't remember, that's not on there. Last time. Okay. Look them up. Well, Hunter Biden.

Dude, I'd never thought in a million years I would say that name in public. Because I like, right? I don't like to go near politics that doesn't intersect with our areas of focus. However, he just intersected a thing that I'm interested in he bought a gun in 2018. okay where a time when he has openly admitted he was a crack addict so every 15 when he filled out his FFL form he said that he's not addicted to drugs but then clarified that he is addicted to drugs in his book in his book which puts him that he lied on the ffl form so now his many enemies okay are coming after him to be like dude you lied on a gun control

form and his legal representatives are saying that if this becomes a legal exposure to him he's gonna sue on behalf of his second amendment rights that a crack addict should certainly well be able to get a gun talk about like landing in an landing in a very unexpected spot almost as unex almost as bewildering as i was when i saw it into that white oak and all that water came out a lot of water came out. A lot of water came out of that tree. What was happening there?

Hollow tree. Uh-huh. Big cavity in the middle. A lot of times the pith, the heartwood of a tree will decompose over time. And, you know, that's important for all kinds of critters that use those cavities and the space inside as habitat is it potable water and everything not to me no uh and so you know stem flow water runs down through the you know lands on the canopy runs down the branches and

finds its way into that so you think it was it was rainwater hiding in there? Yeah. Filled up a hollow. Yeah. All right. Why are... Just trying to push your buddy's buttons now, Steve. Oh, you haven't done anything yet. He's going to be... This next one's not going to rile him up.

Okay. Okay. Explain how, why, like when you go look at a spruce tree, fir tree, okay, Christmas trees. Yeah. Why are they shaped like a cone yeah they're it's uh it's a story of dominance and control and uh this ties back to what i was just talking about a second ago a lot of back and forth transitions i'm listening i'm listening now it's uh uh it really begins with

that and you know the imperative of the tree to grow up towards what? The sun, right? And so it's like hormones that are activated in the top of the tree, the growing tip, the leader, right? There's a leader at the top on these spruce and firs in particular. They all have them. But at the top and at the ends of each branch, there is a bud that's enclosed next year's leaves and shoot growth that is controlled. The opening and the extension of which is controlled by the – each of those leaders exerts control over all the other buds below and behind it. And so the leader at the top of the tree is exerting control over the ones just below. You look at the leader growth this summer on any of these trees, and you'll note an incredible pattern is that the top has that internotal length,

the shoot length is longer on the top than it is that internodal length with the shoot length is longer on the top than it is on any of the subordinate branches. And that's because the leader is saying, I'm the leader and I'm going up. And it exerts this hormonal control over the, it sort of regulates the growth of the others to keep them from going out sideways and trying

to get up above it. Right. So it's, it's this. But it's competing against its own self yeah you can see it competing like it is right it's an organism it's like a single individual sure you can see it competing against its neighbors big time but just a weird way to express at the top of the tree but i guess it's like an ordered exactly it's ordered because it would be for one of the other branches to get uppity

would be damaging to the whole tree. Right. Because it's not really going in the right direction. We need to get above. It's in fact a way of ensuring or maximizing competitive edge over its neighbors is by making sure this, the shoot, the leader is the leader and can really climb and get up above the competing plants around it. Right. And so that's really what it is. It's just this pattern of control that, um, based on the way those, those coniferous species are built, uh, results in this sort of conical form. Um, and then we can get into, well, what good is that? And that's a fun question in all these tree questions is like any given trait, why is it this way? Why is it that way?

Well, two basic answers. One is it happened. It is sort of a mutation genetically. It just sort of occurred. And there's no good reason for it to be eliminated through selection. It doesn't harm the tree. So it sort of sticks around. The other answer is because it confers some

advantage to the tree. Right? And so in this case, you're growing up and having this form. It's easy to imagine, well, where do these grow? In montane environments, heavy snow loads. And it's really good for shedding snow. As opposed to being all out here, bushy,

and then you get branch breakage and snow loading. So it's a means of- That's a good point, man. They do slough snow real effectively. Wicked, yeah. Yeah, like when you get like a June snowstorm and all the deciduous trees are like snapping and limbs falling off them,

those things just shake it off. That's right. And so, you know, it sort of starts with this hormonal control as sort of a growth regulation in the shape. Uh, and we can all imagine it confers some ability in their environments to kind of out compete others and, and actually just survive. First of all, it's the first order of business. I have a Colorado blue spruce that the top got busted out of it it's

chaos up there exactly and i've gotten up there and tried to tie a new dude in there to see if he could like i tied him with a rope see if he'd like assume the yeah dude it's chaos in the top of that tree yeah i've always given up on that was the next point, exactly that. And you've experienced it is that when something does, in pines there's a weevil that often goes for the terminal shoot, the leader. Oh, that's what did it. And it kills it and then it's chaos as you described it. Looks like a crow. Looks like a crow.

Not a crow as in it's like on a sailboat. It looks like, I mean, like literally a crow. Yeah, a witch's broom. Yeah. And so what we do in that circumstance in your yard or Christmas tree growers do it all the time is you shear. And so when you have one that the leader that's

broken off, you can get up in there and just trim back that chaos a little bit and choose one. That's what I've advised countless landowners is, oh, you know, it's not the end of the world. You can just choose that next best one, that secondary branch that was not the leader, but who has done pretty well and seems to be in a favorable position. Clip the other ones around it. Take a third of their shoot elongation, clip it off, pruning shears.

And then that one that you left now has this advantage and it will assume what we call apical dominance and become the one, the boss shoe. What's that word? Apical. It's a great name for the episode. Yep, yep. Apical dominance. Look for that in your podcast feed.

I'll see it. Nice. Joseph, here's a forester. We discussed that already and I immediately knew I liked him for a reason and now I know why. Did he tell you about the test he had to take tell him about the test oh um we had a i think it was it was yeah it was dendro dendrology um the we had a twig test where oh yeah like an id test where they gave you a section of of twig from the leaves leaves are for yeah no he said leaves are for soccer you had to

identify i forget how many different species. Well, it was a lot. I thought you said it's like 70 or something like that. Yeah. It's something high like that. Yeah. Yeah. We had it.

Just by the bud. Just by the buds. No, it's classic. We had our dendro final at the University of Vermont when I, back in another century. It was a hundred samples. And so it was mostly buds, twigs, leaf scars, fruits, you know, like all different kinds. Um, and, uh, it was sort of legendary as this like real ball busting exam, but a lot of pride

in, in like smoking it and getting it. Oh, for sure. Oh yeah. Yeah. I got a question for you. It's not in your book. How dumb are you if you say acorn? Asking for a friend.

Yeah. You know, I like, I got to say, and I'm, I'm hip to this. Are you an acorn man? I'm not. I'm, I'm, I'm from Vermont. You guys are real acorns. I will just say this, Steve. I really like hearing people who sound like they're from someplace.

You know what I mean? America. And I can't even say it. Is it acorn? Acorn. Acorn. I love it. I'm guessing when I hear some tree-loving nut say acorn, I'm like, all right, he's from

somewhere I'm not. That's all. There's a, I don't know if we have them on the website anymore, but apparently there's some kind of patch or something with an acorn that says A-K-E-R-N, acorn. Oh, we got shirts, too. Oh, is that? Well, I think Paul Lewis made clay some of those patches on the laser machine. Yeah.

Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a hind 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, um, you guys in the great white North can, 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

speaking of acorns you know my friend that I said is going to be like fact checking everything you say yeah me and him had a bet one time man and I can't remember the details of the bet I remember I won it it's going to get into a question that you had or a question Yeah. Me and him had a bet one time, man, and I can't remember the details of the bet. I remember I won it. It's going to get into a question that you had, a question you deal in woods-wise.

But how many pounds, what's the most pounds of acorns that an oak tree might throw off? Yeah, I don't know. In a given amount of time. I think Bubly dog might have said something like hundreds of pounds and i was like that can't be true i can't remember the details of the bet i don't know that that's crazy i mean it's you've walked around out there in a big year it's like marbles underfoot yeah you know um you know, it begged a lot of branches, a lot of leaves. They put them out. Uh, one tree, I mean, hundreds of pounds seems, maybe it's a little steep.

That, that probably was, that I'm sure that wasn't what it was, but I just didn't know if you, if you happen to know. I don't. I mean, I could, I could, that's actually findable. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.

And acorns are nothing when like, that's like a piddly ass little fruit compared to like a horse chestnut or black walnut. And you're like, there's some trees out there that produce some. Hefty, hefty fruits. Yeah. That's right.

That'd be an interesting, you know, like how, is it caribou that have the highest ratio of horn weight per body, antler weight per body weight maybe or something like that it'd be interesting the what tree probably damn apple tree right no maybe citrus like an orange throws the highest weight per pineapple i mean just highest weight per weight you know ratio but here's what okay so on the acorn subject. You're going acorn. Oh yeah, big time. Now that he knows it's not stupid.

Does a bumper crop of acorns predict a harsh winter? That's a thing that I've heard my whole life. Of course you have. The trees made a lot of acorns. The thinking goes. Trees produce a lot of acorns this year. And the logic is they're very nice they're very kind and they are wanting to help their animal brethren get through this severe knowing it's going to be such a bad winter and all the animals are going

to be hard up they have uh magnanimously thrown off a hellacious crop of acorns. It's like the amount of black on a woolly bugger. Right. Did you ever hear that one? Sure. Oh, yeah. They're like a woolly bugger back east. It's brown and black.

And sometimes you see some that have a little bit of brown. I've seen them all black before. And what's that tell you? I've heard that the more black on the woolly bugger, the harsher the winter's going to be. And there's that the animals have a particularly thick fur this fall. It's going to be a hellacious winter.

Yeah. So like those subjects you don't like to go near, this is, who am I to interrupt generations of folklore, you know? That, you know, it's coming from a good place, but no, they're wrong. It's, uh, in the case of masting, the sort of synchronous, uh, bulk production of a seed

or fruits, uh, within a species across quite a range. Explain synchronous. All at the same time. One year where all the trees, uh, are the oak trees in a given valley or whatever are all putting out a lot of acorns every year, that year. So in synchrony with each other, right? Yep. So that's masting in general. So this idea, when that happens, it's any production of fruit really is more of reflection of past environmental conditions in particular and energetic conditions of the tree.

It's sort of status, health status. It's way more about what it has experienced in the last few years than what it is thinking the next year is going to be. So it's more a prediction of what has happened than a reflection of what has happened than a prediction of what is about to happen. It's not a good predictor of the future.

It's telling you that did pretty well the last couple of years, growing season in terms of moisture, nutrient uptake, uh, solar gain. It's, it's, it's, it's takes a lot of energy to produce all of those fruits and it's at the expense of root growth, diameter growth, shoot growth, height growth, right? Um, but it's the biological imperative,

pass those genes on. And so they're built to do this. And what's really cool when you look across a range of species over a long march of time and geeky forest scientists kind of tracking and then hypothesizing and testing

is what has emerged is this predator, it's a seed predator satiation hypothesis. That is, it's a strategy, a reproductive strategy to bulk up your energy, store your energy reserves, and then put out a bunch of acorns in this case. This year, everybody doing it kind of together to overwhelm all the seed predators. Think squirrels.

Are you familiar with the term predator swamping with birds and animals? Meaning like when you get these huge aggregations of nesting birds, for instance, like geese, like snow geese in the Arctic. Yeah. Huge aggregations, synchronized egg laying, and they're getting hammered by predators.

Right. But it happens so fast that even with all the arctic foxes, all the red foxes, everything eating all those eggs, they can't get to them all in time. This is the same notion. Yeah, had you spread it out over the whole summer,

they probably would have gotten every last one. But also it's like, wham, we're going to lose 50%, but 50% they won't get to. Exactly. And then those ones will be able to fly by the time they get to them, you know? Very similar sort of idea here is that, yeah, in those big years, you put out so many that some acorns are going to become oak trees. You know, they just, and then the lean years where you don't put it out, that's actually keeping those squirrel populations somewhat in check. It's limiting them by limiting their availability of food resources, right?

So it's kind of both. And the idea is somebody gets a little wacky and an oak tree starts putting out in an off year, well, they're going to lose all their acorns because the predators are kind of hungry for it. Right. So it's the same idea of like doing it at the same time and doing it over every few years instead of every year to build. So it's also allows you to then kind of rebuild your reserves, um, your energy and nutrient reserves, uh, so as to be able to make, uh, flowers and then fruits, um, in the case of acorns. Make sense? Yeah. You were pointing out, excuse of acorns make sense yeah you were pointing out

in your book you're pointing out an interesting thing as well that a lot of oak trees are the same age same same birth date because that system is is effective like that meaning on these years where they got like a piss poor amount of acorns right they're just getting eaten because there's not that many around and there's so many animals that are going to find them. That's right. But then on those bumper crop years, you find that when you go into a stand, right, you'll find that those bumper crop years being actually reflected. In the regeneration. In recruitment.

Yeah. Meaning like whatever, 2022 had a big bumper crop. You might find that down the road, when you like age a bunch of trees, you age them back to the, that, that, that worked. Yep. Like that big year was effective and made oak trees. It's a sort of cost benefit analysis, if you will. I mean, we're dangerously close to wild anthropomorphisms here all over the place, but it's helpful for the conversation, you know, to think of it this way.

Yeah. And it stands to reason. And you brought up a thing that I've tried to explain in the past. You remember Stephen Gould? Of course. Stephen Jay. Stephen Jay Gould. He had like, I'm going to butcher this thought he had.

Such great stuff but he was like we're always looking at when we look at nature we're always saying well why is that that way and nowadays like at a time you would have looked and everything would have you know everything would have been explained as something divine or hidden right and then we fell in love with rational thought and and and how how we define scientific rational thought we fell in love with rational thought and and and how how we define scientific rational thought we fell in love with with natural selection evolution and so we came to this idea that like everything you see must be advantageous exactly okay so why is that tree's bark grayish brown what is the advantage of its's bark grayish brown?

What is the advantage of its bark being grayish brown? And Stephen Jay Gould, I can't remember where he wrote this, is he was saying maybe just because. Exactly. Maybe really thick bark is advantageous to that tree because it's fire resistant. And for whatever reason um that really thick bark is grayish brown it doesn't hurt the tree doesn't help the tree it's just grayish brown yeah there's

no why and i think a lot of times we like to say animals do this because yeah what's its job yeah you're like they like to do that because and i'd like i agree that they sure seem to like to do that because, and I'd be like, I agree that they sure seem to like to do that. The because part, man, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. It's rampant, as I say. And, you know, God bless them.

Forestry students, natural history students, they were asking these questions. Why, why, why is it doing this? And it's really, I found that it really bums people out when I say there may not be a good reason. The reason may be that there's no reason for it to go away. However it emerged, genetic mutation or what have you, it's here now. It's not conferring an advantage. It's just not a disadvantage.

There's no selection pressure against it to remove it from the population. So it kind of perpetuates. A salmon's egg might just be orange. Yeah, exactly. And if they were blue there might be just as many salmon yeah there might be just as many salmon around or not and that gets fun too sure like what's going on here that's why i'm always advocated for parallel universes in which we could run one with blue salmon eggs one run with orange salmon eggs and check in with

each other now and then and see like i like it you know no one's taking me up on this i have a feeling that when when you're doing research you if you were doing field science and research you know have you the control group yeah you know you don't i have a strong feeling that you'd always want to be in the out of control group sure right yeah i'd keep an eye on that one yeah uh here's one you had in your book that um we've talked about 100 times in in context of property taxes does a hilly acre contain more land than a flat one i've always wondered this like if you own deeply incised like like a certain however we define an acre of land okay and it's deeply incised or it's mountainous like that person is getting a screaming deal on property taxes

over the guy that owns the flatland yeah because the person with the the super steep ground has to own more square footage of surface area than the than the person in western kansas paying taxes on acre ground you got it i mean it's like how wildly off can it be like how much square footage of land can you own that's still being called an acre well funny you ask because i i did push the pencil around a little bit on that. Does it wind up being significant? On a large enough area, yes. Okay. But in most ownership sort of size ranges, yeah, it's some, but not huge. So the deal is, you're right.

The thinking is sound. With all this hilly terrain, there's more surface area. Yeah. And you nailed that. But real estate- And explain what an acre is too. So an acre by definition is 43,560 square feet of. That number was drilled into my head. Oh yeah.

Over and over and over and over and over. He explains where it came from. 43560. It's like, it's there. Yeah. I can tattoo on my back. It will never leave my head. 43560.

I didn't memorize that. Yeah. So originally, I mean, so that's a two dimensional that, right. And this comes back, we'll get back to the question. That's, that's the issue. It's a two dimensional measure, uh, an acre.

It's, if it was square, it'd be 208.7 feet on a side. Um, it's 43,560 square feet. And that, uh, as I am, I understand we came originally from, um, a furrow, which became a furlong, uh, which became the acre. So this all be, all started from the length, uh, uh, the distance an oxen could plow before

needing a break, uh, was the, the length. And then- Love it. Yeah, you got to love it, right? And then that turned into a team in a certain period of time, that was the acre. Do you think the oxen standard existed somewhere? Like, oh, that is measured off of that oxen.

Yeah, right. That we keep here. I'm a badass oxen and I'm doing way more than that. They're like, i'm all for measuring the ground but who's picking the axe excellent point uh so with that prehistory there an acre is a fixed square footage of of area and where it comes back to this question of hilly acre have more land than a flat acre is, well, a hilly acre has more surface area. And that's what you said, Steve, and that's right.

But real estate, back to the corner crossing, I don't know if we're allowed to go back there, but these lots are laid out not on surface area, but as horizontal distance sort of floating above the ground. This is known as plane surveying, P-L-A-N-E. It's a plane. And so the concept is the acre is like sort of hovering above the ground in this two-dimensional thing.

So if you go out and measure from one corner pin to another down a steep into a canyon or whatever, pulling a tape to measure the distance, that slope distance, the ground distance, would be more simple geometry than the horizontal distance floating above those two points. And so by convention, that's all, by convention, that surveying is based on plane surveying.

Now there is, at large large like big ass scales there's surveying that takes into account the curvature of the earth oh there is yeah but that's not how property is measured and transacted right but that's a whole nother kind of surveying so in a best case scenario you might have a one point what acres of surface area per you know maybe 0.15 you might get on this sort of garden variety oh so people are getting a real scream not a real screaming deal but the bigger it gets the steeper the the more of these folds that you have yeah i mean you take um takes a lot more to cover it if you were covering the surface. And that does translate, and I touch on this in the book, to growing conditions, opportunity, sites for trees to exist. Yeah.

You know, on the slopes. Probably more important though, where productivity of trees, timber, acorns, deer, because of their relationship with those trees and the fruits. It's more, it's probably more about aspect, the direction that slope faces, right? Where you will have a greater influence on what's growing there or the habitat conditions there. But anyway, the big version here is that the

hilly acre has more surface area, but not more acres. Yeah. Because acres are measured as this plane hovering above. What about acres? I still do a whole lot of looking out the airplane window every time I fly. And I honestly think about this a lot.

Like us folks love to talk about like the grandeur of the landscape, right? And you're looking at all this amazing stuff, but you know, damn good and well, there's somebody who's like, yeah, but wouldn't it just be nice if it was all flat oh right so we really knew how much we had and how who owned what right like you just just make it even when i see people when i see someone building a big like a new big mansion on a steep hill i'm always like yeah he's got no flag round the hell's he gonna put a garden no tillable here's one that the answer really surprised me i'm gonna spoil it by giving the answer it's your show and then you do what you want with it what did new england's forests look like prior to european settlement when i dug into that one in the book i was prepared to be depressed

and was shocked to see that you're like you the answer was probably like they do now there's some differences but no yeah i was for some reason i i was like uh i felt good about it well because the question is very specific to the forest not the landscape right like like now we have less forest yeah sure we have more egotoriums, right? Uh, so the forests though, then sort of the composition structure, uh, species composition, the arrangement of the trees, um, that is surprisingly, I would agree with you evidently, because remember, nobody really remembers, uh, surprisingly similar, um, in terms of species composition with some changes, with some notable exceptions. Uh, in the Northeast, we have more Aspen, more Cherry, more Birch, um, and more Red Maple than it was believed to be the case pre-European contact.

Okay. So, so. At the expense of. Um, what I, those, what do they all have in common? They're more early successional, um, sort of, uh, they have poor shade tolerance. These are fast growing pioneer type species, you know, live fast, die young. Um, so at the expense of the other, the late successional, the hemlock, sugar maple, beech, that yellow birch that live hundreds of years. So we've, so the records indicate oak has, particularly in Southern New England, has gone down in preponderance, you know.

To me, the interesting thing about all that work is it's, I guess it's surprising. You would have thought, oh man, radically different. Oh yeah, I thought you'd be like, oh, beach trees that were 20 feet across at the stump. Well, so, so there's two things. One is the other piece is that the species mix that largely looks very much the same evidently, um, is, is one, but I think it's really important to quickly move to, but that, but the forest is very different. There are fewer lunkers, big ass giant trees, big old trees. There's way fewer down dead trees in a variety of sizes. Of course, woody material that we know now plays this really important habitat, nutrient cycling and water roll.

Way less of that now than in the pre-settlement forest. So when I said I was going to answer the question, I didn't do a very good job of answering it. Okay. No, when I felt like you said like, eh, about like it would now. Yeah, so in species, you got it right. A lot of caveats.

A lot of caveats here. Well, it's just that, what do we mean by different? So the species mix is surprisingly similar. You were right about, and that's where you were going. I'm saying there's more to a forest than the names of the trees out there. It's right about, and that's where you were going. I'm saying there's more to a forest than the names of the trees out there. It's what sizes, what ages, what physical

spacing and arrangement. There were, so old forests, which those primarily were, are exceedingly rare everywhere now, particularly in the Northeast. Well, 1% of the landscape is in what we would call actually old forest. Is that right? 1%?

Yeah. And so old forests are more than just the species that are there. So in other words, the species haven't changed all that much with some notable exceptions. It's the composition, what we call the structure, the three-dimensionality of the forest has changed a lot. A lot. And also, I think there's reason to think that, I mean, these woods have been worked hard, right? They were cut repeatedly, and then they were, it was sheep pasture,

then it was cows. And so there's been an export of wool, milk, wood, and let's not forget soil from these places, you know, over a few centuries. So they're much depleted. And I think it stands to reason that they're probably not, they're different in other ways that maybe we're not able to see quite yet in

terms of their, what other organisms have gone missing, right? That we don't really pay attention to, not the charismatic megafauna, right? They're largely the same with some, you know, we had elk, they're not there anymore. I mean, there's some big differences, but does this make sense?

Like that's sort of like. Is it a fecundity type of question? Well, I'm sure the basic productivity of the sites, I shouldn't say I'm sure. I suspect strongly with reason that they're much depleted. The other piece I would, thing I'd say about this piece is that really floored me and I

thought was really fun was, well, how, how does it, how do I know this? Well, I know it from some published papers, peer reviewed. How did they know it? This, this description of the change from the pre-settlement forest to today. As I start the thing with kind of a wise-ass remark, well, nobody remembers, but fortunately the surveyors that were laying out the King's lots and original kind of doing, doing the surveying in the North, in the Northeast where they first landed, those first woodsmen going through the woods and surveying and laying out lots. And, um, they were making notes of witness trees, right? On every corner, what are the trees around this? And so these researchers, uh,

went and poured over, you know, hundreds and thousands of these old surveyor records and then kind of summarized and computerized them and kind of analyzed them. And that's the basis of this, like, what's the occurrence of species then versus now? And I just find that to be a really cool little bit of science that somebody went and kind of creatively found a way to get at an answer. It was like accidental citizen science. Yeah, really cool. Yeah, from the 1800s.

Right. That these guys then cultivated and sort of unearthed in sort of an archaeological kind of approach to those records and then rebuilt a picture of the species mix, but not the, as, um, as I say, the, the, the, the structure and comp and other forms of composition of the forest that are really important. Uh, me and me and my colleague, Dr. Randall were discussing something like this recently where we're working on.

It sounds so official when you put it in those terms. Doc Rand. Uh, he's an official. We had, we've made up a song about him. It sounds so official when you put it in those terms. Doc Rand. He's an official guy. We've made up a song about him. It's like, what good is being a doctor when you can't prescribe no drugs? Gotta work on those lyrics a little bit. Yeah, it's like, how could there actually be a doctor of history? I gotta work on the tune.

The melody and the lyrics are suffering. But Dr. Randall and I were observing. We're working on these audio... We're working on these audio books about long hunters and mountain men. Okay? And rather than focusing on all the geopolitics and world events and stuff,

focusing very heavily on the day-to-day nuts and bolts of how they did what they did. Meaning we know that Daniel Boone, uh, spent most of his career hunting deer hides. Okay. How, how did he hunt deer when he got up to a dead deer what did he do

how did he prepare the hides for the market how were they handled in camp why didn't they all rot when it rained who did he sell them to and where and for how much who wanted that leather and for what purpose okay um so many of these questions are exceedingly difficult to find out other things that chroniclers of the time were fixated on are of low relevance to us right meaning how an area was watered and what grew on it was of great importance to chroniclers. I went to the head of this creek. It was well watered here, here, here, and here with springs. There was a salt source here.

This is what the timber array looked like. Why in the hell would I write down how he skins deer? Who cares? You skin deer like you skin deer. Like, no. Like write down what we ate. Who would ever want to know that?

What they want to know is is it well watered and how right right and it's like it's a in that way and again there was always like the the blazing of trees it was it was they were going about what they were doing for money and they were two steps ahead to to describing land for other people and um i bring that up only because one it's a frustration that we're dealing with and two like those people did in new england that might be an interesting um that might be an interesting thing for for foresters trying to understand that middle ground that that area like kentucky at that time because their descriptions do not conform at all to what the amount of american cane right yeah the amount of time they spend hiding in

living in storing things in hollow trees it's like go find me some hollow trees now that a couple guys are going to sleep in. It's like, what are they even talking about? That stuff is just not. Boone lost one of his hunting buddies who got wounded, hit by a musket ball and was high. Eventually bled to death in there, but went and hit himself in a hollow tree. Gun and everything. It's like, where the hell is that tree? Yeah.

It's few and far between not there anymore but in reading this stuff it seems like it was like every time you turn around there's a hollow tree big enough for you and your buddy to like axe a hole into and camp in yeah yeah no doubt and that to me it raises a really important point that like these old forests that i would suggest are like the that that the best, the best expression of a forest. Like it is, that's what they're supposed to be. Right. So you look at those as the archetype of what a forest can be. It's like these old forests.

A real common misconception is that it was this open, it's just this unbroken expanse of bomber trees, you know, huge trees from Maine to Missouri. Squirrel number, touch the ground. Yeah, that whole bit. Now, even in these old forests, the evidence indicates and stands to reason that there's, trees are under all kinds of daily, seasonal, yearly, long-term assault, right? Their branches break, there's insect outbreaks,

wind throw, ice storms, fire, and they occur in various return cycles and in various intensities. And that results over the long time in this kind of mixed mosaic of, so you have even in these, the point is even in big, old, awesome, perfect, if you will, old forest, there's baby trees, there's little trees, there's broken trees, there's ugly trees, there's patches of open,

there's wetland complex, beaver associated areas that with early successional habitats. The matrix, if you will, was big bomber trees, old and long lasting, but interrupted here and there with all, every conceivable stage of growth and type, right? So that's what makes them powerful is they have all these different substrates, all these different surfaces, all these different possibilities for everything else associated to make a living.

And that's what's really lacking now almost everywhere. Yeah. Is there an age kind of definition for the cutoff of, you know, old, of old. Yeah. It depends by species. So like, uh, in the Northeast, uh, so Eastern hemlock will go for maybe 500 years, uh, uh, balsam fir, not so much, you know? So an old balsam fir stand might be a hundred know, 150 would be wicked old for a bunch of balsam fir.

But mid-adolescent, late adolescence for a hemlock stand, if you will. Right? And so we define it less. I think ecologists define it less by just age and more by age and other evidence of having escaped human disturbance. Stumps, fences, you know, barbed wire buried in trees, stone piles, all of it. Oh, I got you. Right?

So we have a definition for our tax abatement program for forest landowners that you can qualify for, you know, sort of different treatment, different management requirements for old forest if you can demonstrate, yes, Corinne, you meet this certain threshold of age for the appropriate to the forest type. But you also have to show that is not just a couple of big old trees that just escaped harvest or other disturbance,

but that there's been no human disturbance for that long period of time. And then you look for other things like the presence of downed trees in all diameter classes, not just little twigs on the ground, but big trees in various stages of decay. So, you know, it's all the parts and pieces that are considered when, and I think most, I think it's fair to say that's the conventional approach to kind of defining or creating a threshold for what is or isn't an old forest. I had a couple real interesting days of hiking in Northwest Montana here last week and it was really gorgeous. But it all changed for me once I kind of realized what was happening is I was looking for this roost tree. Like I knew these turkeys were in this area.

And, you know, typically a lot of landscapes is not that hard. Like if you, if you have a general area where the gobbles are coming from early in the morning. Oh, it'd be like, yeah, I bet they're hanging out in that tree. Exactly. Like that one.

Right. Well, because all of a sudden I'm, I'm looking through this new lens. I started looking around this forest that was previously like very pretty and pleasant. And I'm like, there is not a tree here that is of a different age class. Every single tree, you know, it was like the same. And it just, it just like totally changed my experience because of that. Yeah.

Because it was just like, whoever was doing the forestry in that area, like, I mean, it was amazing. It was beautiful. It was wonderful. But there was no mistaking that everything had been touched by the hand of man. Right.

I was just like, oh. Yeah. I am in like a, a city park almost, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It was just like oh yeah i am in like a uh a city park almost you know what i mean yeah yeah it was just very different silviculture yes hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Let's get to the one everybody here wants to talk about. What's the difference between sapwood and heartwood? I can't go anywhere without people asking me that one, Steve. It's all wood and you're gonna tie this into making light lighter material sure okay um uh sap you know i'm talking about pine knots and whatnot does that tie into this or not oh no not those are knots uh and i like the stuff that's got all the resin what the hell were you yeah? Yeah. You had. Yeah. Fat, fat wood. Oh. Oh yeah. I want to do sap wood, heartwood and fat wood.

Fat wood. Okay. All right. So sap wood. Let's start with fat wood. Start where it makes most sense. Okay. We started with heartwood and sap wood.

So I'll go there. And heartwood is, is the wood in the inside of the tree. The oldest, all of the oldest of the oldest wood within a tree. And the sapwood is the outermost ring of wood inside the bark. So we got to go anatomy 101 here. And you've got xylem is the word that's just, it's just a fancy name for wood. And, you know, the cambium is this thin layer, a veil of living cells really near the, just under the bark that divides and multiplies. It's really where tree growth happens in diameter.

Shoot growth is different. That's that apical bud that's extending the length of the tree. But diameter growth of the stem and the twigs, that all comes from the cambium producing wood cells to the inside of itself and bark cells to the outside of itself. Hmm. Got you. Okay. And so as the tree and it, and think of a- So the action is all happening at that layer.

At that layer. Exactly. And every year the tree puts on a layer and you, best way I think to think about this is like highway pylons, you know, traffic cones, like you stack them on top of each other. That's how the cone of growth is formed on a tree as well. So that why when you, imagine cutting, stacking up 10, 12 highway cones on each other

and then sawing through it transversely, you know, horizontally through, what would you have? Counting rings. You'd have rings. And that's how it works with trees. They lay down a layer of growth every year and it's wood on the inside, bark on the outside. Well, wait a minute, wait, how come there isn't

this whole chunk of bark out there, right? You got wood adding on every year. Oh, yeah. But the quick answer there is that the bark sloughs off, it's exposed and it, it, you know, so you have this relatively, relatively thin layer of bark on the outside,oughs off it's exposed and it it you know so you have this relatively relatively thin layer of bark on the outside even though it's been created just like the wood gets created on the inside people usually so yeah so let's say you're talking about a 400 year old tree yeah

okay the oldest part presumably is like down at the bottom of the tree dead center yes okay that's the oldest part right so on a 400 year old, how old do you think the bark is? That's, you know, the, the bark, uh, that's there is only, it depends on species and where, um, so it'll range, but it's way less than 400. Huh. Right. Way like, like more like tens, uh, I would think. Is that right?

Okay. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Um, so you got wood on the inside, bark on the outside, and then the wood on the More like tens, I would think. Zero? Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. So you got wood on the inside, bark on the outside, and then the wood on the inside keeps adding. And so the innermost portion, which is the pith, the first formed wood on the center of the tree,

that usually gets crushed and kind of dissolves or whatever. The rest of those wood layers, they just become kind of, they're structural. It's like it's the structure for the photosynthetic apparatus up top. But they're alive in some way. They're not like hair. They're not like human hair. This is what's great.

Most of a tree is dead. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. So including most of the wood. Nothing's going on in there. No, I didn't say that. But it's dead. And so that's, that heartwood, which is the dead wood on the inside, is still a place where the growing points on the outside, they send through.

So if you look at a stump, sometimes you can see like spokes, almost like. Oh, yeah. Those are called rays. And those are, they allow this transport of stuff from the near the bark side of the tree to the center. That's kind of like the dumping ground for waste products. And that's why in your walnut you were speaking of earlier, the prized wood is the dark wood, right? That's a product of phenols, terpenes, other kind of secondary compounds and products, chemicals that get sort of sent there. And they discolor the wood.

They play some antimicrobial kind of role, I think antifungal role, but they, they discolor the wood and, and that's why the value in black walnut is all heartwood because it has this thin band of relatively white, light colored wood around the outside. That's the most recently laid down last few years worth of wood that's still, most of the cells there are dead, but there have some live cells within them. And that's the plumbing system, the vascular

system of the tree that pumps water from, and nutrients from the, from the ground up and takes carbohydrates formed by the leaves and sends it to the roots and storage and through the stem to growing points. So that's mostly all happening just inside the bark, just inside the cambium. Those last several years, and it varies widely

by species. So I'm generalizing, but it's the last, it's the most recent wood near the outside of the tree, but still on the inside of the cambium, that is sapwood. And it tends to be light colored and where all this translocation is going on. And it's the, the center wood that is sapwood. And it tends to be light colored and where all this translocation is going on. And it's the, the center wood is the heartwood,

which is kind of mostly structural. It's just allowing, it's like the telephone pole on which all the living cells just continue to elevate and try to access sunlight and out-compete their neighbors. Um, it has some other stuff going on, as I mentioned, the storage, the discoloration, et cetera.

So that's heartwood on the inside, sapwood on the outside of the inside. Yep. And then cambium and then bark outside that. Fatwood is not, I should, you know, this is a Southern thing, not my expertise, but my understanding is this is from softwood, Southern yellow pines, pitch pine, loblolly, shortleaf, I think in particular, which are very big on resins. And in softwoods that's often inside the, you

know, in these, these rays and other places where you have, uh, resin ducts, uh, that are kind of used to stop infection, keep insects at bay, et cetera. You have these deposits of that stuff, which is really combustible. And so you split that kind of softwood, those pines that are high in those pitch compounds,

and they become just great kindling. It's dry, and it has this extra flammable stuff in it. Where'd you get that big old pile of it you had? I was suspecting it was from a fur. Well. Just because of the shape of the base. So what's interesting about fur, now Doug fur is not a true fur. So if it was Douglas fur. I was, in my world, the Doug fur is a fur. Okay. You know, because it has fir in the name. Yeah, right. So it's called Pseudosuga menziesii is the Latin name because it's, that would be false. That's a great name. Yeah. Well, we could do a whole podcast on really fun names, Latin names.

They often mean something, right? But anyway, no, Douglas fir is not a true fir. It's not a fir. It's just, that's why it's Douglas Dash fur. What is it? It's a, well, it's a false hemlock. It's in its own kind of category. And so, but all of those, so it would have resins

and pitch, whereas, what do you have? White fur, white bark. What's the white? White fur. White bark pine? No, that's a pine. So the firs you have, like you have, you have subalpine fir.

Subalpine fir. Yeah. Yeah. Those wouldn't have the stuff. Um, they're just owing to the peculiarities of, of true fir wood. And then, uh, where's, where's like tamarack fall? Another awesome species, uh, and, uh, Western

Larch. Yeah. Yeah. Another name. Um, it's its own genus. Um, and, uh, you know, we have an Eastern Tamarack, Eastern Larch, there's Japanese Larch, they're commonly planted.

Um, but they all have, they're different because they're, they're built differently and they largely, the, the taxonomic differentiation planted. But they all have, they're different because they're built differently and they largely, the taxonomic differentiation is based on reproductive parts and they differ, but those also sort of translate, they bring along other anatomical and physiological differences as well. So they're all kind of different and they're grouped. So spruces are different from pines, are different from firs, are different from false firs, are different from pines are different from furs are different from false furs are different from larches and tamaracks

and the way they're, it's usually for those you tell them apart by the cones. That's, and then you go from there to other characteristics that we kind of correlate with those differences too. So they all translate into different wood properties that end up being different for structural use use for,

um, for visual appeal, uh, and for these ecological differences. For this fatwood harvest that we're talking about, um, because it, you can light anything on fire with it. It's crazy. Oh, it works wicked good. Crazy flammable. In my experience, it is a tree. Not that I've been around for this entire story, mind you, but it's what I've, what I've put together from what I've discovered on the ground, right, is it's a tree that stood for a long time dead, dead standing tree. All that resin has migrated down and super condensed. At the base.

At the base. Interesting. And then eventually that, that tree tips over and then those shards are super easy to, to harvest in sometimes very large chunks, but they are very, very dense, super heavy. Right. And that's, that's the, like if they're, it's almost fossilized. Like to me, like the really good stuff is it's got almost like a plastic sheen to it. Yes.

Very dense, very heavy. Yes. You should ask him. Cal's all over this. Did I mention I don't know a lot about this? You did a little bit. Yeah. Because you put it to another people.

Yeah. You put it to the acorn people. Yes, exactly. But I, and I don't mean to suggest that it doesn't exist in your Western conifers. And it sounds like you've experienced that here, Cal. And that's, that's all stands to reason to me. And I can't refute it.

My, my identification is piss poor. Like Western larch, no problem. Right. Yeah. Ponderosa. Cedars, you probably, you probably got cedars down. Cedar, yeah. No, no problem.

Yeah. But I gotta get, I gotta get better. Gotta spend more time with Seth. We can, we can help you with that. Yeah. It's knowable and it's good to know those differences. It is. Yeah. no problem. Yeah, but I got to get better. Got to spend more time with Seth. We can help you with that. Yeah, it's knowable. And it's good to know those differences. It is, yeah, for sure. Quick aside, you know, back in dendro, dendrology, study of trees, the naming thing,

it's kind of basic in a forestry course of study, right? I was lucky to have a couple of really great professors. One of them, he had this thing that stuck with me forever. He said, when we go out in the lab, you know, you do the lectures, but then you go out and you look at stuff and he'd say, the last thing I'm going to tell you about this tree is what its name is. I'm going to tell you what it's doing here, how it got here, what, how it relates to everything else around it, the critters, et cetera. Cause you know, that's what matters. And then we give it a name and that's the handle and the way we speak about it. And I think that was a really important lesson for me and countless others.

It's like, and this is why I've said similarly, we like to say that, you know, we talk about forest ecology and people kind of immediately start to get nervous. Like that sounds hard or that's going to hurt. I think it's really helpful to think of forests more as a verb than a noun. Like forest is like not forested or foresting, but like a forest because it's, they're just defined by function. And we're really connected to it, even though we've lost that connection in a big way, which is a whole nother topic. Maybe we can get to it. But I think it's really helpful to start with what are they doing?

And that's what you're all about. You're noticing that out there and you're probably more tuned into that than the names. You're like, oh, I'm bad at that. But my guess is because of what you do and your passion for spending time out there, you've got all kinds of knowledge about function that you don't even know about,

that you're just putting together. And that's what's really cool. I think about the woods, there's a lot of that going on. Yeah, what's eating that. Yeah, exactly. Uh, for whatever reason, something likes to sleep there. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what sort of dude with a musket is camped out inside there, you know?

But, uh, I just, I offer that as kind of a helpful kind of premises. Think about them more as functional and connected. And when we, the more and better we do that, the more and better pretty much everything else will be about our relationship with forest. Oh, it's, yeah, you're, you're so spot on. Cause like, you know, I can run through like a field of wild flowers and name a handful, but

when, whoever I'm hiking with, when I'm like, and that's Larkspur, poisonous to cattle. Right. They're like, holy shit. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Exactly. You know, remember how we had that conversation about how some stuff just is?

Yeah. Right? And I think that maybe Gould or one of those guys even called it that. Just stuff that is. It seems like paper birches being white maybe isn't just is yeah right uh what's with that i mean they so stand out and everything's kind of green or brown and then they're there they are being all super white and uh where do they get off yeah so, the thinking here is that this one may, maybe just no reason for it to go away, but, um. There's a compelling case.

There's a really compelling case that has been made that this is about where they live. Think about paper birch. It's transcontinental. It's circumpolar. It's one of those tree species that exists all around the North country. Yeah. There's a band of latitudes and no matter where you go on the planet at that band of latitudes, you'll find that tree. Yes. And that latitude tends to be what in a general way? Around the fifties? Well, cold.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Less about the latitude, but the conditions there, right? And, uh, and so the short answer here is it's been posited that that, and it's true for other associates, like you caught your aspens here at higher elevations.

They're kind of light barked too. Thin and light barked is, uh, suggested to be a mechanism to reflect solar radiation. Why would a tree ever want to push away? You say it's thin. They are, they tend to be thin and white. Very thin and white. And this is to keep them from heating up in

winter with solar radiation. Which is like the opposite of what you'd think. Right. But you know, I was just recently saw a piece of a black piece of paper on a wall and a white piece of paper next to it. And I said, you know, on a sunny day, go ahead and touch it.

And you put your hand on the black and it's hot. Put your hand on the white, it's cool. And so like, it really makes a difference. Why does this matter to the paper birch tree? In the winter, in those cold climates, you don't want to, they have, there's green living cells tissue underneath that bark and they're ready to rip if the conditions are right. You don't want to warm up and then be like, oh, let's start some cellular activity here. Like psych.

And then have, right, and then have a cloud move over and then it's back to, you know, 15 degrees and those cells die. So this is presumed to have evolved as a mechanism to allow them to live in these super cold environments and not turn on growth when it gets a little warm on the stem because the sun is hitting it for a while, which happens. So it's reflecting away that incoming solar radiation in the winter, uh, to avoid that damage that would ensue,

um, if they tried to get, get going. And what, what backs it up is, uh uh you look at other northern deciduous trees and you start seeing that yeah like they all get a little lighter yeah they tend to exactly like you get like you get alders that have you get alders that are like not quite as dark aspens a northerly tree yeah not white but definitely not dark lighter Lighter. Exactly. Whereas lower latitudes, the preponderance of trees have dark bark because maybe just the opposite. It's kind of good to get, to stay warm when it's kind of cool out.

You can heat, you can warm up and, you know, optimize your sort of metabolism and other physiological activity in, in, on a cool day because you're, you're actually able to absorb a little warmth more warmth from the sun got one more for you i think corinne might have one all right you know how um old guns like you know clay was just clay just got to see uh speaking of acorns clay just got to see davy crockett's actual gun betsy

where's that what's that where's that some family owns it oh okay he's talking about curly maple is curly and bird's eye maple the same thing or no no not not as i understand it um it's very similar as this you know particular grain pattern in the wood of particularly maples, sugar maple, hard maple, where you get this tiger curly, is this wave-like pattern in certain views of the wood. That's just, you know, it's just cool. It's favored. It's highly prized.

And it doesn't, they'd like it for guns because it doesn't split. It's dense. It's right. It's right. It's not uniform in the direction of the grain. It's not all like, and so that would make it much harder to split. It's like a burl that's kind of like almost

like cells growing out of control. You just referenced our genuine buck, bowed, and burl. Exactly. Yeah. Which is beautiful. Isn't it? And that's like.

He'll spot those from his airplane now and then. Nice. He'll spot a good one from his airplane and go find it later. But it's important for your listeners to know the bulls don't grow on those trees. No. The burls do. You gotta make it a bull. Someone's gotta make it a bull.

This is the bull hanging there. So, you know, that's, so that's this, you know, atypical cellular division and growth, atypical with particular respect to direction of how it grows. And you get these funky growth patterns that are beautiful and they're really hard to split because it's denser probably. Right. Um, and, uh, so I write about here bird's eye, which is a particular type yet again of figure. Um, you might even say disfigure in maple wood. That's highly, highly not a kind of maple, but like, it's not a kind of maple, but it could be in any maple or no, it tends to be, I think it's really limited to sugar maple. I see. I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of it in a red maple or a silver maple, for example.

Gotcha. But, um, so it's this odd growth in terms of wood development, uh, that it results in these little, that little figures that look like bird's eyes. That's why it's called bird's eye. And when you have like a, like a spray of them across a surface, it's quite beautiful and striking.

And there's legend about, you know, which trees have the bird's eye in it. Cause you, you know, it commands a premium price when you sell a tree, a log that has bird's eye, you're gonna pull that and put it in a different pile. And then, you know, you're gonna put your veneer sort, your bird's eye sort, your firewood sort, your regular saw log sort, you know, um, and you're going to market those differently.

And this is the highest and, uh, there's little of it. So that accordingly, there was this, there's this great, you know, there's traditions of, you know, I knew one landowner once he was convinced Canadians from Quebec were coming down marauding and stealing his, his, his, uh, with machetes were hacking away to look at the base of trees to look for evidence of bird's eye. Canadians. That's the Canadians. Sons of bitches. Yeah. Yeah.

Doesn't surprise me one bit. No. Everybody knows a Canadian and a machete go hand in hand. I mean. Well, I don't think George was really, uh, accurate on that one, but you know, this is the kind of lure and the things that develop. That's telltale hack mark of a Canadian. Yeah.

Yeah. I had one forester, uh, who, um, helped me. We were looking and, and he, he's convinced that there's this like Coke bottle, um, the old fashioned Coke bottom Coke bottle that at the bottom it's one diameter, but then it tapers and then it comes back up again. And then he would see that in certain sugar maple stems near the base and he'd say, oh,

let's look at that. And he has a correlation there. And he knows bird's eye. And yeah, and he's looking for bird's eye. Yeah. And everyone's got their way of doing it, you know? And it's a really low percentage of the trees

that have it. It is, it's not really well understood why, but it basically comes from any kind of a ding in the tree that can, it's an injury. It could be, could be a bird pack. It could be somebody getting crazy with their lawnmower, you know, whacking it, uh, uh, or any number of things that go wrong out there that can can in the young life of a tree can ding it. And then that little, the wound response that trees have can result in this, in this particular

case of like this, this odd growth pattern that then results in, you know, ironically enough, highly valuable wood that was from damage. When that, when that term first caught my interest, I was reading something in the Great Lakes region about what was floated down a river and it named species of trees but then included in the list was that they would float bird's eye maple huh down the river and i thought it was peculiar that they were like grading it yeah right and then someone took note of that that that specifically is what they're sending down

the river right because it's or no no you know maybe maybe it was what maybe that's too dense to float and they wouldn't send it down the river but they were like sledging it out whatever the hell it was right it was like it was like white pine or whatever white pine oak bird's eye maple right you know and that's to be you know that's reflecting its, its economic value. That's like way more than your garden variety saw timber. I got a real broad question for you and we can skip it if you don't want to tackle it, but do you have anything you want to say about fire? Like I'm just interested in regards to like how

we do with fire in the U.S. right now in regards to our forests. Yeah, there's a lot here and I'm happy to speak to it. Recognizing as a caveat, right, I'm from the northeast, said to be the asbestos forest. I'll quickly point out that, like, I think asbestos burns. It just burns at really particular conditions. So we have, in Vermont, we have like 400 acres of, like, wildfire a year,

mostly brush burners getting out of control at the wrong time of year. It's after snow melt, before leaf out. So the point is we don't have, these days, great incidents of wildland fire. We had a history of it. There's whole paper birch stands in the Green Mountains that were originated in the early 1900s with railroads and lack of spark arresters and a different forest type without a lot of spruce slash on the ground and highly familial. So we have a history of fire,

but it's really been, it was very wet, relatively speaking, and it's known as the asbestos forest. Whereas out here, it's a big deal and has been for some time. And I think it was kind of well said that somebody I heard say like, Smokey lied a little bit, you know? Like fire is a part of these ecosystems. There are certain species that have what we call serotinous cones. They need the heat of fire to open as an adaptive strategy to shoot their seeds out and land in that seed bed that's been prepared by fire. You mentioned the thick bark of, say, a giant sequoia.

It's fire adapted. And so fire is part of the ecosystem. We've done an incredibly good job of eliminating it to the detriment of the ecological kind of functioning. And now we have monocultures and we have that, you know, clear cut and plant and keep fire out. And this is just a recipe for disaster and you're seeing it now. And now it's exacerbated by climate change, mountain pine beetle. And this is this perfect storm. And again, I should say, you know, remember, I'm from the Northeast. You know, I don't live it.

And there's a lot here, as you're all well aware. And it's very intense. But I think for me, I'm willing to say we have a problem in having excluded fire for so long that now we have whole new approaches to fuels management, fuel load reduction. That's going to require, you know, people getting involved and actually doing stuff and thinking differently about fire. We do use controlled burn, prescribed fire in certain natural community types in the Northeast because they've evolved with it. Pitch pines, sandplain communities, for example, need that fire.

And we go out and set fires and it's really not popular with the neighbors, you know, with smoke and everything else. It's dangerous and it's really carefully controlled. So there's a role for fire naturally. And now, because everything's so unnatural over decades, centuries really, or at least a century, we're in a position where we're vulnerable and it's kind of meeting up with these other forces, climate change, drought, et cetera,

that are exacerbating it. And it means intervention is called for and new approaches to forest management that think differently about wildland fire. And now we have more and more people living in that urban wildland fire interface, right? And, you know, firewise communities, like we've had to shift a lot of things because of it. I don't know. There's a lot here things because of it. I don't know. There's, there's a lot here. Oh yeah. And, and I think it's easy to say,

you know, kind of like, yeah, we need more fire, but not if you live there. I mean, this is people's homes, livelihoods.

It's, it's a, it's a big, it's a hot mess really in a lot of ways. But even ecologically, I think there's a case that's made that we got to get this right. And we were a long way from being right there now. You ever feel bad for a tree you sawing into it?

No, you know, honestly, and I'm really glad you asked because all these things are balance. And balance is a poor word. It's no balance when humans are involved. We have an incredible footprint on this planet. We ask a lot of these forests, and that's a big thing for me, is just that we are so disconnected generally as a culture from our daily consumption of wood products.

We're really into things like the burl bowl. That don't hurt a tree. But we use an awful lot of wood. This table will hurt. This is bamboo. I will tell you that when I cut a tree and put a saw into a tree, I think about it. I'm like, and when I'm out there with a paint gun marking trees for harvest, I'm like, really?

What am I going to make this place better? Really? And then, so I think the premise for me is forests don't need us, but we really need them. In the history of people, there's never been a time when people weren't utterly dependent on wood for shelter, fuel, tools, you know, ever. Where's the evidence that it's ever going to change? In fact, we're moving back to wood from plastics and all kinds of cellulosic applications. Basically anything made from plastic was once or could be made from wood, which is renewable if you do it right. It's not automatic. So we have to look at our, just acknowledge our consumption of wood. And then we have to probably dial it back a little bit.

And then we need to think about a new relationship with the land and how we obtain our wood and do it differently so that it, and I think it's really possible. And that's what really excites me and keeps me going is, and to somewhat, to some extent, a proselytizer, I suppose, about an ecological forestry that is available to us now. And that can, that's honest in that it meets our needs. And so every article I've read, we discussed this a bit, Corinne, they go on about, well, we need trees and the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis. And it's all true. But every one of them, I don't know that I've ever seen one that didn't stop short of saying, yeah, it's because of us.

So I'm seeing documentaries that say it's because we're cutting these trees down and turning them into two by fours. And they stop there. As if we're just doing that for a joyride. We're putting them into two by fours. And they stopped there as if we're just doing that for a joy ride. We're putting them into two by fours because people, we need human habitat too. Right. And so what's the deal here? We got to get past this very convenient, uh, the trees are, we've, we've, the pandemic

showed us how important it is for people to get outside. Historic spikes in outdoor recreation. That's really good. It puts pressure on in outdoor recreation. That's really good. It puts pressure on certain places, but it's really good. Um, it also showed us that as the pandemic showed us this, how vulnerable we are in this global supply chain of wood products. In Vermont, in the immediate shutdown, forestry logging and manufacturing wood products was not considered essential.

And as commissioner and my deputy commissioner and I, our phones were ringing off the hook for about a 24 hour period. And you gotta be kidding me. We have hospitals that are heated with wood. A third of Vermont school children go to schools heated by wood. All the Amazon packaging comes from trees, man.

Uh, tongue depressors, swabs, and all this medical supplies that were made from wood and that were needed now in a big way in the pandemic. And yet we weren't being, so two things, the pandemic for it's shining a light on the importance of people getting outside and connecting with nature. And it's shown a light on our vulnerability and our dependence on wood and our vulnerability in a global supply chain that we don't control everything. That combined with climate change, which has put a bright light on the importance of forests as our last best hope at mitigating atmospheric CO2

and conferring enormous landscape resilience in a changing climate. You'd think that those two things, putting all this new light, they'd be like, these forestry people were right all along. We should give them more money. Yeah.

And no, it didn't. What it turned out is we got to stop logging on public lands. I'm, I got sued as commissioner. I was personally named in a lawsuit saying we're illegally logging, uh, which is just the science, the settled law of the land and the, you know, economic realities don't, they all say something different. But the reaction to these things is let's, trees are good. Let's leave them alone.

And that's fine. If, if you don't have any need for them. So I'm back to forests need, forests don't need us. We need them. With one exception, forests do need us when we've gummed them up significantly. Invasive species, the fire thing. So we do have to kind of get back in there, but

generally it begins with, no, we need them. And until we confront that massive need and consumption, we're not going to get anywhere in policy and we need a culture that is of the land, from the land. And I feel like this is a real strong parallel with your conservation work and the mission at the Meat Eater for being realistic about food

and about where it comes from and, and honestly acquiring it. And in a way that's, you know, the North American model and like, it's a way of conservation. And it's, it's, this is a very parallel story. Real finally, I'll tell you what the commissioner of fish and wildlife previously, when I was there, he was getting a lot of flack from protect our wildlife bills to you've written about them, anti-trapping, anti-hounding, a lot of anti-hunting fishing stuff going on right now in the Northeast.

And he was saying, you know, we'd go out and commiserate and have dinner or beer or something. And, and he'd say, you know, it's over. And I'm like, yeah, it's, it's a drag, man. It's over for you. And he's like, well, you don't, you'd be too comfortable.

They're coming your way. And I was like, no, no, people get trees and wood too comfortable. They're coming your way. And I was like, no, no, people get trees and wood and we use it. And you know what? I think he was right. It's like,

it's like, it feels like it's kind of over. And maybe we just have to go this really dark period of disconnection from the land before things are going to really go bad. And then maybe someday we'll get hip to it and come back around. I think that there's a,

uh, there's a little bit of a mental trap you fall into. And I'm, I'm guilty of it too, where I'm comfortable looking at a piece of wildlife habitat. I'm going to use a tree analogy, which is going to confuse things, but I'm comfortable looking at a piece of wildlife habitat as an apple tree,

an ache, an Oak. Okay. And when you kill a bear, kill a deer, you're picking up acorns. Meaning you maintain the integrity of the tree, the tree is going to continue to drop acorns. You can use these acorns in a measured way

and the tree stays there. So it's the thing I try to explain to people often about why hunters spend so much time talking about the well-being of habitat conservation minded individuals spend a lot of time talking about the well-being of habitat but they don't spend a lot of time talking about the well-being of an individual deer right they view it as expendable a product of the bigger thing um but man like i have a place that's that's old growth coastal rainforest okay um in my yard so to speak we have cedars that are what are they set six? Six, seven feet? I don't know.

Yeah, or bigger. Diameters, bigger. I'll shoot all deer in the world, not all deer in the world, but at a measured pace with giving them time to replace, I'd be comfortable getting deer the rest of my life. I could not. I could not. And this is just me.

I'm not condemning someone that does. I personally would not be able to stick a saw into that tree. Right. And I wouldn't, I don't know why, like I don't, but I don't know why it's like, that thing has been there since before the country was a country.

And that's it. That's the answer. And there are damn few of those. And especially in association with others in this functional unit, like that's special. And so don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that we need to just mow down every acre hilly or flat no i get what you're saying we need to have but we're going to

need to meet it and it's possible there's this sort of triad model that's been put out this years ago is actually a professor of wildlife biology at the university of maine coined this idea of the triad approach to kind of land use that there's intensively managed areas with maybe even clear cut and plant in his day um Um, and then there's wild land reserves. They need to be part of the mix. And then the vast space in between is an ecological forestry. That's, you don't cut all of those. Maybe you don't cut any of those.

Yeah. And it's site dependent and, and, um, and it's about natural regeneration and retaining, you know, the great Aldo Leopold, he said, right? The first precaution of intelligent tinkering is to keep every cog and wheel. It doesn't mean keep all the trees, but keep all the representatives of the different types and like keep the function alive.

So that's what modern forestry is in my mind. It's beautiful and it's needed. Yeah. Just, I don't like, I don't like where I left my comment because I, i failed to acknowledge like another part of this being that that as a hunter i can look at the habitat and be the integrity of the habitat will be able to put off game but i like what you're proposing that the integrity, if the forest's integrity is kept intact, it'll continue to put off forestry products. Meaning the same way that a deer, you'd be like, well, no, that deer is expendable as long as the big broad mechanism is capable of making more of them in perpetuity.

And so like, yeah, but like what you're, what you're looking at with forest care is, is the tree, that tree, it's older than a deer significantly, but those trees can come out and that forest can maintain its integrity and make more. The timescale is very different. My work here is done. Yeah.

The timescale, it won't be ready for harvest in a year but it'll be ready for harvest yeah it's great stuff and there's a lot here uh the book we've been talking about is wood wise woods wise woods wise i looked at that title for a couple minutes trying to figure out if it should have been punctuated differently or anything but i think you nailed it all right man pardon me wanted to put like a uh the apostrophe but it would have been an imposter yeah it would have been an imposter apostrophe woods wise an exploration of forests and forestry by michael snyder can you buy this on amazon and all that kind of place you sure can we like to support local bookstores but i don't but you know just be real listen yeah me too me too but i know that some people yeah it's way you don't have access to it and they're not you

know what i mean and i hope people will look it up we have people listen to the show in interior alaska it's like this is not it's just not an option for them god bless them and uh yes it is available on amazon and by all means if you got a way to do it um if you've got a way to do it uh help out local bookstores because you can go down there and find books you wouldn't know about and it's great. But like I said,

I also want people just to read. Exactly. Whatever it takes. Remember I used to say like, you got to think out of the box. I think we need to lower, I think we just need to think. It doesn't really matter

where you're thinking. Let's not get, we'll get to that. Like, where are you thinking. We'll get to that. Where are you thinking? Set the bar so low. Can we get some thinking going on? It's a lot of fun.

Woods Wise, an exploration of forest and forestry. Michael Snyder. Michael, thanks for coming on the show, man. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Thanks, Michael. Cheers. Oh, I don't ride on, little blood.

I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun. Ride on, ride on, ride on, my long sweet heart 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.