The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 468: Bugling for Bulls and a Decoy Genius

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Dave Smith, Jason Phelps, Janis Putelis, Seth Morris, Chester Floyd, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Pleasing poses; our punt gun resurfaces and how Steve almost lost his eyes; the MeatEater Auction House of Oddities is back; an owl pellet containing a banded bird leg bone; the GoFundMe for a NV state bear biologist who's been slapped with $150,000 in damages; Jason Phelps advises on three things to keep in mind this elk season; when you start off making decoys with canvas bags; hunting collars; Dave's accumulation of bands and 100+ neck collars; a grind of birds; how Dave used to design Air Jordans midsoles; subtracting material vs. shaping material; how you really don't want a buck getting injured on your decoy stake; placement vs. presence; when toms mount jake decoys; if folks behaved like turkeys; Hell's Basement; sitting there and watching the show; 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.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com all right dave smith is here from dsd dave smith decoys hates doing podcasts i'm glad to be here thanks so much guy knows a lot about hunting he knows a lot about hunting yeah every time i talk to him i i've learned something new that i've never learned in the whatever 31 almost 32 years i've been alive

yeah he's an artist yeah an artist decoy designer built a great business dave smith decoys likes to hunt comfortably likes to hunt comfortably self-deprecating funny what more could you ask you're already married though right well i i mean i'm just jealous of all you guys are going to actually move around the mountains and everything like that and are physically fit and everything so i just hunt the way that i have to and also i've noticed that i'm old i'm like easily the oldest person in this entire organization oh yeah you might have beat brody uh whoever he is i'd call him a kid how old are you i just turned 60 yeah you might be the oldest person that's right so you guys i expect to be treated as such so when he talks listen up

exactly uh we also got jason phelps joining remotely he's going to tell you with with uh I expect to be treated as such. So when he talks, listen up. Exactly. We also got Jason Phelps joining remotely. He's going to tell you with the elk bugle coming up, elk season coming up, elk archery. Phelps is going to share with you, our esteemed listeners, three things that people ought to keep in mind. And he's going to share three things that people ought to keep in mind. We got Chester here, chastity seth corinne's wearing her headphones today yannis looking good corinne thanks yanni phil's over in his little corner um everything's great we got a couple announcements to make up top we are re-kicking off what is that yanni's playing on his phone.

Come on, Yanni. Trying to plug stuff. Me too. Listen. We're re-kicking off the Auction House of Oddities, which comes and goes, as you know.

But holy smokes, the lineup this year. So, when does it start, Corinne? This week. Oh, it does it does this week how's that possible oh yeah as in this week in the future when this is i'm with you we haven't i'm holding a couple of them so one thing i'm not holding i don't know if sunday it might wind up on the auction house of oddities is we finally after forever so we bought a punt gun at a antique auction for way more money than i'd care to admit but the barrel i'm only holding the action um the barrel takes a couple people to hold

yeah if you're watching on if you're listening on youtube you can see what i'm talking about you it takes two people to pick the barrel up. That's a hundred pound barrel. It's more like a cannon. Can you use that to like exercise your biceps? It's seven feet long. Is there going to be a raffle for who gets to hold the barrel when we shoot it? No, because I think the liability, you don't hold the barrel when you shoot it. Yeah. I wouldn't want to.

No, it's an amount. Two people don't hold it? The way a punt gun works is you had a little vessel. You had a little boat. Picture like a little canoe that just basically accommodates the punt gun. On like a swivel. Well, no, it's on a frame. The boat is the swivel.

It's on a frame. You don't move the punt gun. You move the boat. It's on a sliding block filled with bags of uh sand or they would use sea oats to absorb some of the recoil because that boat when you pull the trigger that boat's going backwards the shell i'm holding the shell right now this shell so it's a two gauge shotgun but this is the shell is nine inches long. This thing throws over a pound of lead. Made for getting things.

And you would go up, often at night, you would go up on rafted ducks, aim your bow at them, cock it, and pull the rope. Don't aim that at me. me well you're safe right now so almost had an accident this morning so we had to go to an engineering firm to get ammo made i'm holding a an original casing it's a two gauge shotgun um gauge being inverse like wire and whatnot uh they don't sell it as such but it's basically a two gauge shotgun we went to an engineering outfit meaning that if you took a pound of lead and split it into two balls one of the balls would fit is that how it goes yeah well the way yeah i shouldn't yeah so what we did is yes gauge

traditionally comes from a 12 gauge shotgun means 12 it takes 12 lead spheres that diameter to comprise a pound a 20 gauge shotgun takes 20 lead spheres that diameter to comprise a pound a 410 is obviously a measurement um four tenths of an inch so does it hold true for the two gauge so this is just extrapolated up on bore diameter but i haven't correlated it to lead spheres but i'm assuming i'm assuming so they didn't sell them as such but yeah and then also the other thing about it is the casing is, um, I'll do that. I'll make a lead sphere with my micrometer.

Perhaps we sent it to an engineering firm and they made us a partial shell with a primer and I needed to test the punt gun. So I have here, I'm cocking it. You can hear that's the cocking. Here's the punt gun. So I have here, I'm cocking it in here. That's the cocking. Here's the rope pull. Now,

when you hit it on your finger, you could feel the firing pin, but we didn't, we wanted to make sure before we went through all this hassle, we want to make sure that the mechanism was still good in it. So these guys loaded up a primed practice shell. Today, in demonstrating how a shotgun shell normally worked, I wasn't really thinking clear.

First off, I cut the shell open, poured the shot off, pulled the wad out, dumped the powder out on my workbench, and then I wanted to knock the primer out of there. But I had it upside down, and I was trying to push it out and couldn't get it, so I eventually took a Phillips screwdriver and put it through the shell against the primer. It was trying to push it out, but wouldn't come. So I picked up a pair of bullnose pliers, trappers pliers, and whap, whapped the end of that thing going the wrong direction. But it still activated that son of a bitch.

Scared the shit out of me. Yeah, me too. Blew that primer off with all that powder laying there, man. Oh, no. Glad you're still with us, dude. Oh, my God, man. I could have hurt my eyeballs. Yeah.

That would have been the thing is it would have really hurt your eyeballs. Oh, yeah. Because it was right in my face. It surprised the hell out of me when it went off. Oh, I know. And I was even in the back. You were there too. Yeah, I was filming it.

At the moment I took those bullnose pliers and was kind of coming down on that handle, that screwdriver. I was thinking, does it work in reverse? Bam! All that powder was like, what, 18 inches away? But it could have just

as well. I would not have done anything different if that powder was like right in a pile below. But you think that it would have been the flash that would have hurt your eyes? Yeah. Just the debris. Can we watch that footage? Oh, yeah. Just the debris from that primer hurt my eyes.

Yeah. It was loud. Then Spencer was like, I need some hearing protection. Yeah, you need some eye protection. So we screwed it in. You see this thing. So this punt gun action threads in. Right? You'd kill 20 ducks with a shot with this thing in a good that'd be a good i we have a whole book

we have a book called the outlaw gunner it's about punt gunners and um he was like people get the wrong idea 20 is a good pull nine is a good pull as people weren't killing whole flocks of ducks with a single shot from a punt gun. But my old man, who was old when he had me, my old man remembers seeing punt gunners, illegal punt gunners that had three punt guns

stacked. One off the water, then you pull the next rope and it hits them as they're taking flight and the third shot hits them a little higher. He said they had three of them stacked at different angles. I don't know where the hell he was when he saw that. How wide is the spread?

I don't know yet. So, you remember Gallagher, the comedian Gallagher? Okay. Wow. I'm out. I'm on the house. Dave, you know about Gallagher. What about you two?

Too young for Gallagher? I know Gallagher. Not too young. He's on the house. Dave, you know about Gallagher. What about you two? Too young for Gallagher? I know Gallagher. Not too young. He's dumb. He's got the striped shirt and the mustache and the hair and the hammer. He was bald. Imagine a bald husky. Remember when you were a kid and the word husky?

If you were like a chunky kid, they would say you were a husky. Husky pants. Husky used to be pants. Yeah, I know. It was for like kind of chunky kids i remember my mom brought me home a pair of husky pants one time by accidentally and i i thought she she was saying i was like fat kind of tore me up a bit but so gallagher there he is gallagher imagine weird al if he was husky and bald but still had all the long hair so like it's the kind of long hair and it's kind of a sweet look when you go bald on top but you grow real long that little half moon

toilet seat deal but you grow that out long are you gonna do that i've often talked about but i'm gonna do it and slick it back man so anyways gallagher had two gallagher had two groups he had two lines of comedy they were very different but he'd combine them into one set one of his thing was how ridiculous the english language was so he'd get a lot of mileage. How could there be like their T-H-E-R-E, you know, but then there's their T-H-E-I-R. And he got a tremendous amount of mileage out of the idiosyncrasies of the English language, how things spell. And then he'd start to lose people or whatever.

And he'd get out a huge sledgehammer and fruit. And then he would proceed to smash fruit with a sledgehammer and people in the know would buy tickets to gallagher and they would wear raincoats and get this queen uh and whatnot to protect themselves and gallagher would set up a watermelon or whatever and hit it with a hammer point being that's what this punt gun is for so when you were saying you were asking me if i knew of gallagher i was just sitting there thinking like the first thing that came to my mind was that dumb comedian and i was sitting there trying to well that can't be it like like who is this person that knows all about waterfowl lore you know i'm trying to think who's gallagher who's gallagher you know no we want to shoot stuff like watermelons and whatnot with this punt gun there you go but one

of the things i want to do is just put out a couple sheets of plywood at 50 60 yards whatever and see what kind of pattern you get out of those we put out a whole flock of dave smith decoys well yeah just see what happens or some other brands i'm gonna round up i'm gonna round up people that have old faded out like i have some in my collection i have some old faded out you know decoys oh yeah you get like some old flambeaus where like they like they paint the beak in the wrong spot on them and whatnot get some of those and line them out and maybe shoot at them when we do i just don't want to put a pound of lead out into a pond is the problem. When we do that, we should paint the decoys in such a way

that the shot would really read well. Or fill them with that stuff that people fill targets with nowadays. Tannerite? Tannerite. Then you'll know with the ones that blow up, you know that they got hit. Yeah. We'll figure it out. I know the perfect guy that you got to talk to,

Worth Mathewson. Is he a punt gun man? Well, he knows all about them. He does? He still hunts with an eight gauge. Goes to Scotland every year and hunts. And he's a heck of a great guy and just a waterfowl and mentor of mine.

And he's been around a long time. Oh, really? And he'd be able to share with us some info about punt guns absolutely does he own a punt gun he he might um i'll check with him i'll send it i'll call him up um he might he talks about him all the time you see how this is at holland and holland h and h punt gun and the barrel you couldn't see it because i mean the the this part's beautiful it's very ornate it's all inscribed but the barrel, you couldn't see it. I mean, this part's beautiful. It's very ornate. It's all inscribed. But the barrel just looks like a cannon off a warship.

Someone had painted it gunship gray. And I dremeled off some of the paint. You can see the old address, London Street, the address for H&H in London. It's cool, man. But that's that. Was I talking about the Auction House house of oddities that's not in it sorry if you got your hopes up yeah you got your hopes up well point being it might someday be there auction house of oddities this year you can do an opening weekend deer hunt at the Duren Family Farm.

Or you can go on a turkey hunt at the Duren Family Farm and get a tour of the Duren Family Farm. And when you're there, ask Doug if he will take you to the spring house. And depending on your age, ask for the spring house story. Hmm. Is that the odd part about it? Oh. Because it's auction house. What makes the auction house odd? He's odd?

Yeah. Doug's an odd guy. Okay. He'll probably take you down to get curds. Oh, yeah. You'll definitely go for a little tour over to Car Valley. Oh, and Doug will be like, what? That's squeaky.

You've been to Car Valley? You'll take Dern Road. You'll take Dern Road, doug will drive around real slow and tell you like stories about his family murder and mayhem and cousins and who owned what and what that guy okay yeah this and that right and that tree one time and you know one time he urinated all the way over the top of that stop sign but his friend tried to do the same and shat his pants what like i don't know that's pretty odd and then you'll get to do you'll get to do a uh a hunt on the durin farm where we filmed hunts and have done hunts and i take my kids there every year for spring turkey or a deer hunt on the durin farm just for 300 so that's in

the auction house of oddities you you win the package, and then pick what you want, and you get a tour of the Dern Family Farm. The oddity part, I don't know. It's what you just said. All that. The Spring House. Go to the Spring House, and depending on age and everything, Doug might tell you the

Spring House tale. I don't think I've heard that one. Well, my kids have not. Maybe I'll bid on it. You should bid on that, Chester. A handmade log home from Naughty Log Homes. Really? I'm not kidding you.

12 by 20 trappers cabin. They're donating any of this? They have donated to our land access initiative a log home. A 12 by 20, 240 foot square trappers cabin, four foot overhang off the front, shipped anywhere. Wow. What do you mean anywhere?

When you auction, when you buy it at auction, you'll have to pay to have it shipped. Oh. But they're in Idaho. They're in Idaho. Say I could use one of those up at the shack. Better dig.

Yeah. So back to that end. Better dig deep. I think you meant to say it because I need one of those in Idaho. Say I could use one of those up at the shack. Better dig. Yeah. So back to that end. Better dig deep. I think you meant to say it because I need one of those in Wisconsin. You need to talk to someone with a Chinook helicopter. Yeah. And get it dropped in where you want it. 12 by 20.

I wish I had that damn thing. Yeah. A lot of art. So people might see can we put we don't have I wish I had this in here from Jamie wild art she did the commissioned painting of mine of the wolves disemboweling the bison eating it

alive she also does a lot of canine art so we have a print of my commissioned painting which hangs just outside our studio door of the wolves eating a bison alive while still staying in there and disemboweling it um a print of that that jamie and i will both sign and then a piece of custom work from jamie we have custom artwork from Kelsey Morris, Seth Morris' wife, Kelsey Morris of Studio Gallery. What's it called? The Studio Gallery in Three Forks,

Montana. Dinner for four at my house. That's an auction item. You, three friends, come to my house and we will serve you many courses of phenomenal food at my house. Yanni's going to join in, I believe. I don't know if he knows it yet.

Hopefully, Cal will be there to serve. This is separate from the big giveaway dinner at your house. That's a different dinner. Yeah. Is there a vegan option? That one, yeah. If you want it to be vegan, I'll make it vegan. I know.

If you win the auction, you win the auction. It's up to you. No, we have another giveaway dinner that we're doing here at the office. This is a dinner at my house. You and three friends come to my house. I will cook you dinner. Yanni will be there to help serve. We'll get a whole bunch of our crew down there to help with the meal.

A fob harness, an FOB FHF harness called the Fur Trappers Edition, where Paul Lewis from FHF is going to face one of his fob bino harnesses in furs that I caught. Oh, that's sweet. If you want it done in mink, we'll do it in mink. If you want it done in Martin, we'll do it in Martin. If you want it done in beaver, we'll do it in beaver. So you get a fur fob harness, one of a kind. That's up for auction.

The elk bugle tube that Phelps used on the hunt where he and I hunted in New Mexico. Signed. Scrolling down. I'm holding right now, if you're watching you can see this, I'm holding an arrow that says Ted Nugent 91. Now check this out. I've got to put my spectacles on. Gearing up. Ready? We had a while ago, a long time ago, Uncle Teddy.

Teddy Nuggets, as Cal calls him. We called him Uncle Ted growing up. We had him on the show, and he talked about doing a show in Northern Michigan where he missed a target. A guy wrote in and said, I happened to be working backstage security for that concert up at the castle in Charlevoix.

After the shot and subsequent miss, Ted's assistant came back and set Ted's bow and arrow down on a table that was just backstage. Long story short, they asked the security guy to keep an eye on the bow until they'd come back

and retrieve it after the show. They just left it on the table. By and by, here comes a guy that comes and grabs the bow and goes to walk off with it. The security guy's like, what the hell are you doing?

He goes, they told me to grab the bow. He said, no, no, no, no, no. Someone told me to watch the bow until Ted comes and gets it. You ain't him. I'm holding the bow. Another guy comes up and says, what's going on? He said, this guy says he's supposed to pick up the bow.

Why don't it be the guy who was trying to steal the bow? Now, the arrow that Ted had missed with Was broken When Ted found out that the guy saved his bow from getting stolen He said let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you The guy said yeah you could I would like to have that arrow Uncle Ted then signed the arrow We have the full

In art this is called the provenance The provenance We have the provenance of the arrow I then emailed Uncle Ted then signed the arrow. We have the full, in art, this is called the provenance, the provenance. We have the provenance of the arrow. I then emailed Uncle Ted and said, check this story out. His reply was, damn cool, huh? This will be in the auction house of oddities. Aluminum shaft, Ted Nugent 91.

That's cool. Checks out. Full freaking story. You might have already said this, but he missed the target. Is that the one where he missed a target and then he decided to get down on his hands and knees and pray to the... No, I shared that story with him. That was at a whiplash bash. He missed a target and then

got down on his knees and he missed the target of a white buffalo before doing great white buffalo right got down on his knees and bowed before the white buffalo target me and my late friend eric kern um we didn't catch that one but me and my late friend eric kern went to the whiplash bash and uncle ted threw out jerky and me and eric picked up some jerky off the floor and ate it rock and roll nice times that's some rock and roll right that's in the auction house of oddities my personal weatherby mark 5 chambered and 300 wind mag left-handed which we filmed a bunch of media episodes is in the auction house of Oddities. And also,

if you've watched the show, you've seen a hundred times this thing where a moose gets up and charges me and I go, blah, something like that. That gun. Now, if you watch that episode, you'll see that the gun appears to misfire. So a lot of people have asked

about the misfire. It didn't. I shot at the moose it ran off and i changed i immediately instinctively chambered around ran after the moose and forgot that i had chambered the round because i i'd hit in the brisket and went down and got up and i knew it was probably not mortally wounded so it wasn't like oh well wait let him run off and die so i ran after him to try to get another one in him. The minute I started running, later reviewing the footage, the minute I started running, I re-chambered. So I had three in the magazine, none in the chamber.

Chambered, shot the bull. Two shots left. Spit the empty out, put a live in. Started running, forgot, spit the live out, put a live in, shot at the moose again as it ran through the brush. Chambered again, now I'm empty. I walk up to the moose to dispatch it and click. So people are like, oh, his gun misfired.

The gun didn't misfire. That gun's fine. I still own it today. It is a Carolina custom rifle chambered in.300 short mag. That gun from that moose charge and those episodes will be in the auction house of oddities i have a quick question you just said you just referred to that moose as charging like i just watched an episode not too long ago of uh a 600 pound grizzly bear running at you and cal as fast as a bear can run. And you called it false charging.

And I'm just kind of curious, what does charging look like? He made contact with me. Okay. So, I mean, I was thinking like, you know, it's like you come home, you know, from somewhere and your truck is riddled in bullets and stuff. And what do you say to your wife? Like, oh, I got false shot at. Like none of the bullets actually hit me.

So I got false shot at. Like, I was thinking. Yeah. Corinne, hit me, so I got false shot at. Good point. Corinne, I'm holding up another item from the Auction House of Oddities. These are from some Martins I caught. A pair of earrings. Yeah, Steve caught Martins this past year. Had a hat made for my wife. We had the tails left over.

Wow. Corinne has fashioned these into gorgeous earrings. Can you describe them, Corinna. So they're Herkimer Quartz Diamonds from Podcast Listener. Herkimer? Mm-hmm. Herk Diamonds. And the, oops, pardon me, the Martintales from Steve's Martins and then a sterling silver wire wrap.

So it's all sterling silver. Do you have holes in yours, Eli? I did, but I think it might have closed up. The front's still. This is like an adorning costume for the Latvian Eagle. The Latvian Eagle with martintales dangling. The back's closed while I try. Ah, too bad.

So. Sweet. It was phenomenal. So the Auction House of Oddities, back better than ever. All of the money raised in the Auction House of Oddities goes to our own land access initiative. With the land access initiative, we've done, so we contributed on a land access, a the land access initiative we've done so we contributed on a land

access a public land purchase in maine we um participated on a public land access purchase in northwest montana cal is eyeballing one along the yellowstone river right now um and plus we will use some of the items. Another item I should throw this in. You know the Missouri Corner Crossers? This is kind of fresh this morning. The famous Missouri Corner Crossers. They have donated their ladder.

Oh, nice. So you can buy a piece of American history at the mediator auction house of eyes. You can buy the device that has now been covered and by every news agency on the planet, still working its way through the courts. You can buy the ladder used in the Wyoming corner crossing case. The stipulation there is the,

the revenue from that. And this is part of land access. The revenue for that will go in a legal defense fund um which has been mighty successful thus far a legal defense fund um for the corner crossers who have been putting a um regardless of how you feel about whether corner crossing should be legal or not these guys have been placed in an extremely unfortunate position after getting very mixed signals from multiple law enforcement and land management agencies

and they are, at this point they have become victims of a system that is whacked. And there's many more items than that. Many more items. I have something I could donate but it's probably nothing compared to those things but

i just thought of something i have an owl coughing and one of and there's an exposed bone and it has a leg band on it holy cow is that taxidermy a coughing no i'll tell it yeah i'll tell it oh so it ate a bird that was banded and it it coughed up all the feathers and bones, and right on the outside of all of it is... That is incredible. That sounds incredible. That is incredible. Let me get it clear.

Another word for an owl pellet is a coughing. So an owl eats... Yeah, I understand how it works. Yeah, I just thought it was called a pellet, not a coughing. So an owl eats. In our book, Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars, we have a thing about, we have an instructional about how to dissolve and dissemble owl pellets in order to see what all they've been up to. So an owl will eat its food whole and then digest food and regurgitates the bones.

Yep. In these little balls. And you'll look at these little balls and like the bones. Yep. And these little balls. And you'll look at these little balls and like a standard thing to see in these little balls is mouse jaws. Yeah. They stand out real good. Yep. Mouse molars. But you didn't answer my question.

Is another word for an owl pellet an owl coughing? I've never heard him. I've never heard that word before. Is that what you said? Yeah, that's why I asked my dumb question. The reason why that we've used that term before is to let people know that it's it's that they're not pooping it it's not out of their out of their mouth because they might think it's gross if you shat it out it wouldn't be quite as the the auction value would definitely go down if it wasn't yeah

if it wasn't a piece of owl shit man we've had some see we've had some auction house of oddities donations that we've had lawyers prevent us from selling this isn't one of those things was like me showing up at someone's house with luke combs guitar and like playing him a song one of them that they nixed yeah that brought up liability problems you could be lured into a sordid you could be lured into some kind of sordid situation put the lotion on the skin yeah it was gonna be we had one that was chester's gonna show up like you could have him he'll wear whatever you want right down to right down to his his thong no we never said that i never agreed to that you'd be like i'm out there at midnight and thaw i think one that got nixed was spencer and i getting tattooed oh yeah that got nixed yeah you were gonna be able to pick whatever tattoo you wanted on seth and spencer that got nixed

a lot of things get nixed kind of this owl pellet so it just gets better this is like do you know when i was a little boy they would do a fundraiser jerry lewis the actor jerry lewis would do a a fundraiser for ms uh remember jerry's kids he would do a fundraiser and he would do it for 48 hours just get delirious at the end i feel like that right now you couldn't tell what he was saying at the end of it it was whole part of the event that he would stay up that long wow but this just this is like that because it just keeps getting better and better dave smith has now donated an owl pellet with a banded bird foot sticking out of it did you lacquer it to hold it together or is it pretty good no it's it holds together really well it's just in a little plexiglass case i might have to come up with a more decorative case or

something to put it in but that'd be wonderful it's just sitting you know it's just sitting at my house it'll be there till the next glacial period if i don't do something you know with it so do you know what kind of bird it is yeah i think it was a pigeon a pigeon yeah oh yeah that makes sense all right the auction house of oddities coming soon better never All the money goes to land access initiative. We will be using the funds primarily for land access purchases, enhancing and improving public access. One other little money thing.

This is kind of a convoluted story. There's these animal rights activists that um in nevada that target bear biologists oddly they target nevada state agency bear biologists um one of these animal rights activists actually had a restraining order against her for harassing and targeting a female biologist, um, with Nevada state wildlife agency. Their, their Facebook page,

just to give a little more context around them says, uh, that this page is dedicated to monitoring and publicizing the actions, Nevada department of wildlife and the the why is it cut off sorry i guess they just failed to write a full sentence but gives you an idea they're like they're watching everybody yeah so dealing with animals there at a state agency a bear biologist could be engaged in a ton of different things state agency a bear biologist could be engaged in

a ton of different things they could be doing monitoring they could be doing disease research they could be doing population demographics distribution but inevitably they're going to get rolled into dealing with problem bears as well and oftentimes in states that have really high black bear populations i'm not even saying this is going on here i'm just clarifying for people in states that have really high black bear populations it is so expensive in all times so oftentimes futile to relocate black bears oftentimes problem black bears will get euthanized because you could spend you could send someone on a eight hour drive in some direction to drop off the bear but once the once the bear is habituated and tuned into human food sources,

there's nowhere you're going to put it where you're taking it out of action. It's also very expensive, consumes tons of time. You have very stable bear populations. So a lot of times someone has to make the call and the bears get euthanized. It's not work that anybody likes to do, but a bear biologist can get,

they're doing a lot of stuff to help enhance, improve bear populations. They're also sometimes involved in lethal control. I'm not even, that sits outside of what I'm talking about now. But this guy, Carl Lackey, so these guys start this Facebook page and targeting this individual, Carl Lackey. He sues him for defamation the animal rights activists spend 150 grand defending themselves on free speech grounds okay meaning that they host a facebook page and people are making threatening remarks on this page but ultimately because of free speech issues they can't be held responsible for what other people are saying. I'm not weighing in on, you know, I'm a free speech advocate.

I'm not weighing in on that it was a right decision, wrong decision. What I'm weighing in on is that here you have a state bear biologist doing his job. Okay. Getting threatened and harassed by animal rights activists and the long and short of it is they won their free speech case okay they won it that's fine but now this biologist is personally liable for the 150k that has been found liable for the 150 K that the people he was suing for defamation and harassment had to spend in their legal bills. Does it go fund me for the guy?

If you can help out, he needs to make up this 150 grand that he owes these people. And again, not weighing it. Like, like I understand a platform isn't responsible for comments to get posted on their platform. Okay. Who cares?

Someone should help this guy out in, in, in his line of work and trying to defend him and his family from online harassment has incurred a massive bill. Yeah. That's, that's shitty. Yeah. That's right. And doing state wildlife work. Yeah.

Doing your job. It's insane that he's's that he's just supposed to suck it up and have these people start like trying to broadcast his whereabouts his image calling on people to do acts against him i wonder if people like that feel good about themselves after giving this dude threats or whatever they did and then making them pay them you know back 150 000 i wonder if they're like yes yeah probably because they've already arrived at some kind of mental calculus that an individual bear's life is more valuable than an individual human's life or an individual not even that and that a bear the individual bear's life is more valuable than the life of a public servant

working on behalf of wildlife so yeah i imagine they've gotten there mentally the go fund me is uh www.gofundme.com here's where it gets complicated sorry dot com slash f slash carl dash lackey dash bear dash biologist type some version of that and you'll find it in the show notes or you can go fund me and google his name yeah one and one thing we got to remember is we need good people in the world to become biologists and you know this will de-incentivize people to become biologists who would want to become a biologist it'll be the situation we are with politicians like all the good people in the world don't want to be politicians we need good biologists oh yeah and yeah and uh you know in our neighborhood right now we're dealing with a bear that is really um pushing people's tolerance like our whole neighborhood we got this whole tax exchange going and um he's now in people's garages you know and like the bear is pushing people's tolerance

and at a point that bear is going to wind up uh not alive if someone from the state agency needs to come out and trap that bear it's not like they're like yippee i get to go you know i mean it's just like they're like they've tried with this bear they have tried their hardest to button up the situation and make the bear not a problem they've at this point they've got months into the into trying to help people help this bear by stop the the cause but at a point probably maybe the way it's looking something's going to need something's going to happen and the fact that that person would become like an online target because they get sent out to do a thing a public safety issue it's ridiculous not it but again i'm not speaking to the particulars of why this guy got targeted go ahead and read up on that on your own. I'm just pointing out the complexities of the whole thing.

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

this season the hunt app is a fully functioning functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Phelps, you ready yeah yep okay so uh i was asked to uh come on talk about since

september's uh right around the corner um archery elk kind of consumed september at least in my life so we're going to talk about elk bugles and kind of what they are, when to use them, and what I think about when we're trying to make those. So the first up is location bugles. This is a call when we're out in the woods, we're going to use that 90% of the time while we're hunting. And we're just looking to get a response from another bull. I like to think of it as kind of that game of Marco Polo, right?

I'm going to make a sound. It's non-threatening.? I'm going to make a sound. It's non-threatening. I'm just trying to get a response. So after my morning glassing session, throughout the day as I'm walking ridgelines, trails, when I get to a new spot that I feel a bull can hear me, I'll beagle. In my opinion, it can't do much harm. And a lot of times, people say you beagle too much um and a lot of times i'll get six to eight hundred yards away when i was just two or three hundred yards away

from a bull and i'll finally get him to respond so there's sometimes not any rhyme or reason um when a bull hears you or when he'll elect to respond um and so what is a a location beagle and one thing i want to do the people that say you call too much do they kill more bulls than you not usually i don't want to i don't want to be that guy but um yeah you try not to not to talk about that uh and like there are times there are times where you don't bugle a lot but that's kind of our our go-to so a location bugle, and some people we've, in my opinion, we've coined terms that, that we use to describe an elk's vocals, you know, and so location bugle might be one thing. This is kind of what we call it. So it's a, a two to three note high pitch bugle that you're

just trying to elicit that response. Um, and so being high pitched, we're going to apply a little bit of pressure. If you're using a diaphragm, um, if you're using a, like our easy bugler system, you're going to start with more pressure than you would on say a challenge bugle or a moan or, you know, uh, a deeper tone. And, and you're going to just kind of blow into it very shortly, two to three seconds. Um, I want to be able to listen. A lot of times a bull is very quick to respond or and you may not hear it you may not be able to tell what direction is or you may miss it altogether so in my opinion a two to three note high pitch bugle lasting three seconds maximum it's a clean bugle non-threatening

you don't add any growl you don't add any resonance into it it's just a high note looking to get a response and you know you're doing a location bugle right when the volume and the tone and the resonance kind of rings your own ears um you don't you know a lot of guys are like i'm not getting as many responses um i like to be as loud as possible i want that bugle to reach as many elk as possible high pitched and uh short and that's really the extent of it and as much elk calling as we do and all these different types of bugles grunts chuckles challenge bugles you know all the cow calling i would say that once again 90 of the time this is the call i do all year long until

we locate a bull you want to rip one out for us yeah i'll turn away from the mic so i don't blow it out but um this is where our location bugle sounds like tell us what you're using um this that was a bad uh this is actually a new call that we're we're bringing out in 23 so it's going to be in our freedom pack so i'll just i'll leave it there but um i had it sitting on my desk so it's a brand new it's a it's our amp diaphragm it'd be really similar to like the maverick um in our lineup and then you got what in your hand so this is our metal beagle tube um it's the one i've been using the last couple years we do have our new unleashed v2 but um this one had a cover on it and i didn't have to run

downstairs and grab one got so well thought yeah as you can tell i'm a little i was a little bit lazy i had a diaphragm on my desk and I had a tube on my desk. Nice and quick. Just, yep. Just real quick. Um, there were times like I've got examples like in the Bob Marshall, um, and, and some places where I would get a response. Like I couldn't figure out how the bull could hear me that quick, decide to make a call, and then end it almost at the same time I was. And there's lots of examples where if I hadn't have been a short beagle, I would have missed it altogether. Yeah, I think it's similar to just trying to locate turkeys, where you want something so fast and abrupt that you can go from making the noise to listening mode real quick. Yep, Yep. Missing it all together. Or a lot of times, and I talk about this a lot,

of not bugling too much at them. There are times where if I can't tell the direction off of that first bugle, I'm like, dang it, now I've got to call again, you know, so I know which direction to go or get the wind right. So I really want to try to get as much information out of that first bugle I get back as I can without screwing it all up. Second thing to keep in mind. Yep.

And then this next bugle, which we'll call a challenge bugle. Can I ask a quick question, Jason? Do you hear bull elk doing location bugles? Yeah. elk doing location bugles yeah yeah if you if you go out in the morning don't make a peep and you're in a good spot with you know the bull to cow ratio is high or there's multiple herds that have joined into you know an overnight feed zone or whatever it is you know we kind of call them those little bit of rut fests um they may be challenged back and forth but you will have bulls just locating um we've been in and it usually happens at better units just cause you're getting more action, but we've heard bulls like running up and down ridgelines. Um, obviously just looking

for cows when we've called them in, it's been probably your semi-mature bulls, not quite big enough to have a herd, but, but definitely, you know, five and a half years or older, and they'll just run around looking for cows, locate bugling. And they're very, very talkative and they locate a lot. And so that's really kind of what I relate that to is well real elk are out there doing the same thing um we've heard them do it we've we've been across the canyon and literally heard a bull walk up a ridge or out a ridge line and bugle its way down i'm just trying to pick up cows you feel like he's listening for bulls to respond or cows to respond so cows to respond or cows to come to him. Like a lot of times when I've been able to observe like an openings or across the Canyon, you know, the way that, that nature

works is that bull bugle. And then any cow that's looking, you know, cause the cow will choose the bull that she wants to reproduce with. Um, that cow will just walk to that bull and go check him out and see if he's, you know, if he's the one. Um, so, so in, in nature, that's how it's working. That bull's running up and down ridges or out ridges and those cows are going towards him. Thank you. Yep. Um, so this next bugle, once we've located a bull, now we're going to go into challenge because, and this is where it gets a little bit fuzzy on like what people consider a challenge bugle. You know, there's screams, there's, um, you know, there's chuckles, there's bark screams, there's all of this stuff elk will do to kind of show

aggression. But what I look at in a challenge bugles, when I get in close, I've got the wind right. I've, you have to get within that, that threat zone, especially if you're hunting herd bulls, a satellite bull, you've got a little more leniency on how close you have to get, but if you're going to steal a bull or get him to peel away from his cows you have to get close so we're talking getting in within 100 you know even closer if possible wherever the train and the vegetation allows but then we're going to switch to challenge bugles and and when i switch to a challenge bugle can i jump in just to i want to comment i haven't time i spent hunting with you is your location bugles i don't want to say you having time. I spent hunting with you is your location bugles.

I don't want to say you're flipping a bottom, but you just kind of looking for a good spot where you can hear, you know, maybe see around a little bit and do them. But when you go into the mode of, of preparing to do that challenge, Buell bugle, you do not take that lightly.

No, no. I mean, you are like extremely thoughtful about the wind, where you're going to want to be the topography, probably where exactly is that thing? How might it approach? Um,

yeah. What shot, what shot avenues do you have? How are you going to be, how are you going to move to cover or utilize cover like plan B? I mean, you are doing a lot of chess by that point. Yeah.

I mean, to, you know, something that everybody's maybe seen our season 10 episode in New Mexico, both our bulls, we got very, very tight. We kind of pushed into a spot on yours where we couldn't shoot, but we needed to be that tight. And we kind of readjusted, you know, my bull, we locate him. And then we really, would we walk for an hour without making a peep? Like we put a spot on Onyx. We went all the way around him to get the wind, right.

And then we literally didn't beagle at him or talk to him again. He didn't make a peep either. We just had to go on our gut, but we didn't make a beagle until he was 80 yards away. And I think you beagled a couple of times. I beagled a couple of times. And that bull literally had to get up out of his bed and walk 30 yards for me to get a shot. And so it's very calculated, um, before we go use these challenge vehicles. And like you said, I don't hold anything back if I've did all of these other calculations, right. Um, and, and

did what I, and I feel like I've got a bowl with that right temperament. Um, yeah, we, we're going to kind of unleash everything we've got. And that's really what I'm going with on this challenge beagle is I'm going to have a little more growl in the beginning of my beagle. I'm going to kind of open up my vocal cords and really kind of get some rasp in the middle. I'm going to end and kind of kind of scream at him. And I usually add some grunts to the end of my challenge beagle. It's really just kind of throwing the entire kitchen sink at him to let him know that i'm here to kind of take over your area or i'm in your zone and you're either going to lose your cows or you're going to come check me out and

see if if we're going to you know if we're going to lock horns or you're going to breed him yeah yeah yeah so that's really what we're going after, um, on the challenge beagle. And a lot of times, you know, we shock and awe, whatever you want to call it. A lot of times, if you get close enough and you, you haven't made another call until you get there, you really give that bull no other chance besides coming in and, um, you know, dealing with you, you've got too close to his cows. He can't take them and run. Um, and that's what we, we typically will do. Um, when we go to challenge bugle. And so I can, I can demonstrate kind of what my initial challenge bugle is. And a lot of times this bull will answer right back, or we've painted the picture where we may let a cow call out right prior to our challenge bugle to kind of paint the scene that there's a

cow that may be one of his or a cow that came to his bugle but now there's this other bull very close i'm willing to take care of her so this is what my typical challenge bugle sound like so there's a little bit more to it a little bit of rask and you're really um not holding anything back you know a lot of guys ask me you know when when we're at shows or when they're talking like hey i really want a a bull call that um isn't as threatening or it's a smaller bull um and i've been around a lot of great callers um that are just as loud as me and when you're in the woods the comparison of somebody that's loud on an elk call that we think versus a real bull, like it's the, the real elk is always exponentially louder. So in my opinion, you can't overblow these calls. You can't be too loud.

So we, we just give it everything we've got. We're, we're loud. We're in their face. We're pointing the beagle tubes at them. And that's kind of what I think is a challenge beagle. And those are the two that I probably use 95% of the time, um, when we're out there hunting. And then there's those, what I would consider kind of the third category, um, which the first one that I'm going to say is accessory, um, bugles or accessory noises and raking is one of those sounds that isn't what necessarily, you know, coming from a call, but it's something that we can all do. And there are some great elk hunters out there that rake more than they call. And so we typically always add that in, um, to our calling scenarios. It adds a ton of realism.

Um, and, and elk just, uh, you know, it, it, I feel it turns our temperature up a little bit, add some, some of that aggressiveness. And it's a sign of the bull's mark in his territory. You know, he's putting his scent and marking those trees. And so I think raking is, is something that should be included in almost every call in. Um, and then you've got all these other sounds that elk will make, you know, and I'm not going to get into the, to the intricacies of whether what I consider a chuckle is different than a grunt. So you got like chuckles, which are usually typically like very quick and almost ape-like sounds. You've got grunts, which is what I just did. It's more elk sound, more of a slower pace, more elky. You've got screams. So there's a lot of times where bulls will get madder in like a screaming match. It's very short burst to, you

know, two seconds max where it's very raspy and just kind of a scream. Bulls, a lot of times, if you do make a sound and they don't see you, they'll bark at you. And then you've got all of those moans that they'll make as they're following cows or even like glunking as those bulls are right on a hot cow as they're pushing the cow around. And usually if you can hear glunking, you know, you're within 80 to 100 yards. And those are kind of those accessory sounds that we always throw into situations to add more realism would you say like uh i didn't hear you say like a lip ball in there would you say like that's like the most aggressive like because i've heard that before you know what i'm saying like is that like the the high end of all this most being most aggressive for calling that's a that's a great question and a lot of times um

lip balls i i use a lot of mimicry so if the bull i'm calling at me is going to lip ball in this challenge bugle i'm going to do that if the bull that i'm calling in wants to you know do a three second challenge bugle with four grunts i'm going to mimic him exactly and one thing i really love to do that really seems to get them more fired up is if i start my bugle about halfway through theirs and i don't let them finish their bugle it seems to be a way to just like you know piss them off a little bit more and so we use a lot of mimicry but yeah lip ball is a great way to to add to the challenge bugagle um you know one thing i've noticed is the further south you go the the higher percentage of lip balling type bulls there are the further north

you are it doesn't you know there may be more chuckles or grunts like can you crank out a couple of these noises real quick yeah so i want to i want to tell you something too that i don't know if i told you about yet uh you're talking about thrash and brush right yep when i was hunting moose with clay last year in alaska we were going down a hill on the last day of the season we were going down a hill to go to a bull that was about a mile away that we just saw and we were going down the hill fast because it was like evening on the last day. We're running down the hill trying to get to a place,

hoping to hit an opening where we might be able to call from. It was just dense thicket, just like just never ending Aspen. As we ran down that hill, we're making so much noise because it was just like there's nothing to lose at that point. We ran down that hill, we were making so much noise because it was just like there was nothing to lose at that point.

We ran down that hill and stopped and realized that bull, we never called, that bull was coming. Two bulls were coming up that hill and met us dead on just because of the noise we were making coming down that hill. And we were making a hell of a lot of noise, climbing over all this burned down junk, all this burned down spruce that was growing back as aspen just smash crash bam it probably sounded like a hell of a fight and we stopped to call and realize that they're standing there like they're looking for us based off that noise yep you know when we were in new mexico i

had scouted a couple days days prior. And, um, one day I was trying to get through an area. I knew there were elk and just walking through the grass. Um, I had to hang out behind a tree for about 15 minutes because that bull chased me down the Hill, just hearing my feet walk through the grass. And so I, my dad always kind of joked with me and we grew up in a rifle hunting elk family where, you know, they go out and hunt in their new white new balances so they can be absolutely silent. You know, that's the type of elk hunting i grew up with my dad's like you know what jason you're not real quiet you're meant to be an archery elk hunter and it really did kind of play to my favorite because i'm i'm stepping on sticks and crack and brush and and it just kind of works

for an archery elk hunter you know because an 800 pound animal in the landscape they can be whisper quiet at times but for the majority of the time they're going to make noise um which you just add that realism into it and um elk elk definitely take note on on the noises that they're hearing yeah especially when if you've ever listened to a half dozen of them playing grab ass on a steep slope it's loud oh that that's one of my favorite things ever you're sitting there eating lunch or something and you hear that you can i can just picture it that that downfall branch go pop and you know and you're like that was a big animal you know yeah yeah so raking um i i can't make that sound in here but you know i i always recommend you get a big stick everybody wants to grab a little twig like get something that's robust not going to break on you through it and

the other thing is like yadi puts on leather work gloves before he sets to it yeah yeah i mean yeah if your knuckles and fingers aren't bloody you're not making enough noise and trying yeah and i like to i like to be as realistic as possible so i try to find a couple limbs you know from two feet up the tree to four feet you just kind of rattle back and forth you know you hit the brush and you hit the top limb hit the bottom limb. I don't know if it matters that much. There are times where I want to break a bunch of small, small limbs just to add to it. You know, you can kick the ground. But you know, raking that's, that's, it's easy. But yeah, like, you really need to get into it and picking up a bigger stick,

make sure that you can get through that. Chuckles, like I said, are a little more ape-like. So a lot of times you'll get these on the end of a bugle. Around here where I've got Roosevelt's in my backyard, I grew up with a lot of our bowls chuckling and grunting more so than like the high notes that we're talking about. But here's what a chuckle, or in my opinion um a little more ape like where the grunts are a little more drawn out they get a little bit more of that high pitch from from the bull yeah man and his belly gets into it yeah you see it like his belly's like bouncing you know jason's or the bulls no not felt i mean his belly might be bouncing i don't know that's between him and his wife i'm talking about the day of the bull so so here's what i would consider a grunt

it's a little more that oaky sound um scream like i say two two and a half second real raspy real short and um usually when you get a bull to scream back at you his temper is very high and we usually have real good success with calling them in and if they scream i'll typically scream so it's a scream and then you got your barks and a lot of times you'll when you do hear a bark it's it's about my second least favorite sound to hear in the elk woods, aside from wolves howling. But barks, usually they have seen, seen something they don't like or heard something they don't like, but they can't necessarily get wind on you.

So a bark's really a come show me your, you know, come show yourself from out of here. I'm on alert, but, and then what we will do in response is we'll bark back at him because you're basically saying, well, I seen and heard something I don't like you show yourself. And, um, in 2019, when I was in Wyoming, I have a bull bark at me and I barked back at him and he kind of comes trotting out in the middle of open. I was able to get a shot. So always be, if you get barked at bark right back at him, but it's just a quick blast of um you know it's a come show yourself sound so you get like he's nervous and you might set him at ease by by doing it back like he might be like oh there's no yeah yeah you know what you can hold for a

long time with their warning cry is um you can turn the tide on antelope big time on pronghorns with their own warning call back at them. Get them to hang out. They'll start coming more if you hide and start doing it back at them. It just really gets their curiosity, man. Can you do that? That's a weird. Yeah, it's like a. Yeah, I mean mean i'm not good

at it but man you can you can take one is gonna be out and and he'll start coming he'll be he'll like turn around and start going back your direction you know i don't think they hear a lot from people for sure pressure yeah cut all that out. Phil Phelps new call idea. Yeah, and then you like the moans and stuff, you know, but if they bark, usually what happens if they don't see what they like, they're going to run out the ridge and scare every elk or every elk in the whole entire country know that they and they bark for you know until you can't see him anymore. So it's best to get him calm back down and then moans are just those sounds as he's running his herd.

As we get in tight, you'll hear him making little sounds that you can't hear from very far away. And we just add those in for realism. This is kind of what a moan, just real light on the latex. So as they're pushing cows around, they're just making small little noises that um just at like i say just you're just adding to the realism they're more accessory sounds but um there are times when we'll throw those in just to to be part i feel like i kind of hear that too sometimes jason when they're they're sleeping when they're or they're just in their beds right like almost like a moan just like a real quiet like little yeah

you know one thing that they do it takes a fairly trained ear but uh location beagles we talked about them being high pitch and sharp and to the point like a bedded bull to a trained ear we can we can pick out usually when it's a bedded bull yeah the time of day usually helps us do that as well but you'll know if a bull's on his feet versus bedded especially if you followed that same bull all morning his his bugle cuts to about half intensity it's a real lazy bugle and so you can you know start to tell when that bull's bedded everything gets a little bit softer and quieter and deeper all right phelps you good man yeah yeah thanks for having me on. Yeah, man. So everybody, as you're gearing up, check out Phelps Game Calls. Just a true elk calling mastermind, great elk call maker, great communicator.

He'll give you all of his hot spots. Just hit him up. And if you want to listen to him. We're going to auction off, Jason, we're going to auction off Phelps' uh on x password at the auction house of oddities if you want to listen to like full i don't know how long the show is usually jason 45 minutes an hour cutting the distance yep yeah but you can go yeah we're just getting ready dirk's gonna jump on as a as a co-host here by the time this drops so we're gonna for the next couple months you're

gonna get um as much elk hunting information as you you want to yeah that's that's a great heads up so uh thanks for the reminder yanni go listen to cutting the distance so uh hosted by jason phelps dirt durham there that used to be bi-weekly it's not weekly um and when these boys go into elk mode this time of year it's just gonna be all elk all the time so you'll you'll you'll learn more and you can remember um by checking that out and again man like just uh lifelong elk hunter grew up hunting the hardest elk on the planet in the pacific northwest phenomenal calls thanks a lot pelts thanks thanks guys all right dave smith yes why uh give me the crash course on how dsd came into existence uh this was the short not not so boring version it's all boring um the crash course is i was uh massively into goose hunting and i didn't um have any decoys i couldn't find any decoys that were working the way that i

thought that they should i'll back up way more than that okay i mean i'll be like i was a i was born i was an anemic child i was born i was born in cottonwood idaho and okay born in idaho well so i yeah i was born in idaho yeah i mean my i I had an older brother. I say had because he did pass away when I was 19. When he was 19, I was 17. And he and I, we dreamed about goose hunting our entire lives. We used to literally draw pictures of goose hunting with crayons. So when most kids are drawing army tanks and monster trucks, you guys are drawing goose hunting pictures? Pretty much.

And it's kind of a weird thing. I mean, our dad hunted, and he was a great archer, but he hunted mostly before we were born. But my brother and I, we both had the hunting gene, you know, for sure. We could just tell.

And for some reason, we were just obsessed with geese, even though we didn't really have any exposure to goose hunting and we didn't even have any geese around. And so all of a sudden, we started getting geese. Just because you're old enough that goose numbers weren't what they are. Yeah. So where I live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, really the only goose was the dusky canada goose so and those and so in the 60s there was an earthquake in alaska that uplifted the delta where they where they nest and then um

all of a sudden mammalian predators could access it so the the the numbers of dusky canada geese you know really crashed so there wasn't a snow it's funny though we hunt a spot i have hunted a spot not hunt i have hunted a spot in alaska that was hayfields and it recessed and became marsh in the same earthquake that's oh that's good to hear it became a wetland in the same earthquake yeah so what that there's still equipment laying out there yeah that thing sunk yeah that's that's what i think with all this stuff. There should be an upside that can't always be a downside only. And that probably helped cacklers.

Got it. So we did have geese in the valley and we couldn't hunt them. And there was a while where we could and when i was very young i i went to you know quite a quite an effort to hunt to hunt them and that's all we could hunt is dusky canada geese i mean i built i would i would dig pits with a shovel big huge pits pits with the shovel and build these really elaborate wooden pits with like trap doors that you know spring open and swiveled chairs and everything and go and drop them into those those holes and i made homemade decoys out of you know i mean i was dirt poor so i made decoys out of like you know canvas bags and anything i possibly could and um you know uh the first i have

pictures of me and my brother danny in high school hunting geese when they first opened the early goose season in michigan and our decoys we took five gallon buckets cut them in half lengthwise and then made plywood heads and laid out all those five gallon buckets with plywood heads on yeah and then sat smoking uh making corn cob pipes because the corn was still standing making corn cob pipes and smoking corn silks and they're trying to get a goose to land in those buckets yeah i love it i mean like for us to get a goose to even fly by in range was a big deal yeah well and it's like yeah all those decoys were working reasonably well and then somebody had to come along and make like a ultra realistic like it's an arms race right yeah it's exactly and then and then it kind of had it affected the whole industry um

you know so and then everybody had to make uh realistic decoys so um but in my in my case i got to the point where more and more geese were were wintering in our in our valley so they were numbers improved oh they were. Just as numbers improved. Oh, they were just, they just kept coming up and up and up. And so. Was it changing agriculture practices or was just geese numbers were increasing? It was neither, honestly. Oh, neither.

So what was happening is all the geese. So the dusky, dusky numbers never really came, came up to levels that are like, they're not, they're not huntable or anything like that. What happened was all the geese that were wintering in the Central Valley of California or Northern California, it's just started wintering in the Willamette Valley. Because of drought patterns or it's not well understood? I don't know because that changes, that goes in cycles, you know, every 10 or 20 years and we're starting to get snows where we never had snows before.

Things like that just change, and I don't really know the answer to that. Only the geese know. So now we had all these geese, and nobody really knew how to hunt them. And they were trying to work out a way that you could hunt them because the farmers were kind of alarmed by this. So they worked out a way where you could hunt you could hunt canada geese we had seven subspecies of canada geese in the valley and um but that was before they shrank didn't it didn't we go just because of lumpers and splitters on in taxonomy didn't we go from 28 geese down to three or four well because the the or the ornithological society

one day just said just scrap all that it's just it's we're splitting hairs yeah i mean there's definitely there's definitely some of that it went from 28 down to maybe 11 okay and and and one that's extinct um but people still argue about that you know like um so you know there's isolated breeding there's isolated breeding groups uh especially of lessers and some people will say that is a separate subspecies and some people say it's the same and that part is so confusing i mean nobody knows the real the real answer but yeah maybe because it's all definitional and just varies on the person it's just it's it's highly subjective right yeah yeah yeah um so what what we were most concerned about

was concerned about is just like from a legal standpoint what we could shoot and what we couldn't and everything so we you had to um take a course and pass the course that proves that you would know how to hunt without shooting a dusky canada goose and tell me more i i don't know that i've ever laid eyes on a dusky okay so tell me what like walk me through this they're they're really pretty they're really neat birds they're they're and they're sort of cool because they're sort of like our our our original goose they're kind of like like coho salmon or cutthroat trout or you know black-tailed deer um where i live so they're medium large goose and they're very very very dark so thank god they're medium, large goose and they're very, very, very dark. So thank God they're really dark because otherwise, you know, in flight, there wouldn't be any great way to tell.

Do they still have a white cheek or is that white cheek at dusk here too? Yeah. So that white cheek is white. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. All Canada geese have a white cheek and some people call them, you know, white cheek geese and everything. So yeah, they still have that. And it's that, believe it or not, probably Aleutians have the lowest amount of white on their cheeks.

Okay. Just mostly because it usually doesn't cover the bottom of the throat. But Dusky Canada geese have a pretty prominent white cheek patch and stuff. But they're just really, really, really dark. And they have, they sound white cheek patch and stuff. But they're just really, really, really dark. And they sound different. They act different. They're in certain size groups. They fly around fairly low, and they kind of keep to themselves.

They don't mingle too much with other Canada geese. So you take this test, and then you get a goose card that's your permit to hunt. And you can only hunt. This is how it was originally. You could only hunt between the hours of 8 and 4. Okay. And you had to check all your geese in at a check station when you were done. And they would carefully measure the Coleman length, which is the measurement of the top of the bill. That was one of the things

that they would use. And then like the length of the legs and the color of the breast. And if you shot a dusky Canada goose, your card was punched and you're done for the season. Really? Yeah. What year was this? Well, I don't know. This was back in the, yeah, I'm terrible about dates. I mean, this was all up until about eight years ago. Okay. So then eight years ago, what they did is they added. Yeah, this is all new to me. Yeah. I'd never heard this.

Yeah, it was kind of cool because it just kept out a lot of the pilgrims. You had to be pretty dedicated to this. And you had to, you learned a ton about geese because we would get set up before it would get light. Like some people would go out and they'd start setting up at seven and they'd be set up by eight. Well, the geese are trying to get in, you know, they're trying to get in before that.

So what we would always do. Is the 8 a.mm restriction because they want good daylight exactly yep they want you to be able to see to see them so uh but it was it worked for us because we just learned so much about geese by being set up and and having to watch them for the first hour hour and a half and having them come and land in the decoys and seeing what you know what works and what doesn't work and all you ever get your card revoked what's that did you ever get your card punched i never did i never did so um uh one time brad you know my partner brad he's a phenomenal goose hunter he's honestly he's one of the best goose hunters on on the planet um one time he and and one of our one

of the other guys that we work with, they got their cards punched because there's also this flock of lessers that hang out around Wasilla or Anchorage. And those birds were fairly dark and fairly large. And so it was close, but we felt like we knew those birds really, really well. So we didn't have any problem fairly large. And so it was close, but we felt like we knew those birds really, really well. So we didn't have any problem hunting those. And one time Brad and I think it was Brian Stone got their cards punched because they shot banded Anchorage lessers.

And we've done that several times, but usually, so they have a smaller band than the duskies do. So we shoot those with confidence. And most of the checkers at the check station just know. And they also have a reference of band numbers. And so you're supposed to be able to go into the check station, and they'll see that it's a smaller band, or they'll check the number,

and they'll say, okay, you're fine. It's not a Dusky. Well, in one case, they got their cards punched and it worked out great for me because he uh they called me and told me and they're like yeah we're getting you're getting bombed in by all these lessers and a bunch of them have neck collars and you know radar transmitters and tarsus bands and leg bands and so i went and sat in their blind i got to hunt the next day they just left all their decoys out and I got some nice birds. And then they sort of went to a review panel

and found out that, yeah, they were Anchorage Lesser. So they got their cards back. Oh, is that right? That was vindication, man. And twice for me, hunting on Willapa Bay, I got to the check station and the checker was gone and assumed that everyone was done for the day. But I was, I had such a good relationship with the biologists and the state, uh, state police. This was in the state of Washington that they both times they

said, okay, Dave, well tell us what you got, you know, tell us what your birds are. And I told them, they're like, okay, yeah, we'll send you a new card. And they sent me a new card right away. So that, you know, I was lucky in that respect, but I never got my card punched, luckily, like not for real. I've come dang close. I mean, I've, you know, I've had, I've had some checkers that, you know, there was a big turnover of checkers, and some of them really didn't know what they were doing, and some of them did. I've had some scary situations, but it's fine. I survived it. And now it's to the point where there's no more check stations. Now it's illegal to shoot a dusky Canada goose.

And the problem with that, it's good and bad, but the problem with that is now everybody goose hunts. Every duck hunter shoots, you know, a goose flying over and stuff. And so it's just changed the goose hunting dramatically. Like, I mean, I had some just beautiful, you know, periods of time, several seasons in a row where I just had just fabulous goose hunting. And a lot of it was because of the difficulties and the check stations and all that stuff. I mean, the funnest hunting of my life was six seasons on Willapa Bay. There were several birds that were, um, they were actually across between a Western and a Dusky. They called them Waskies. And the biologists really wanted them gone.

And so they would put white neck collars on them. And so none of the locals would bother hunting those birds because, I mean, you go out on a tide flat and you're hunting in this huge area and it's a pain in the ass to get out there. And you got to tide flat and you're hunting in this, this huge, this huge area, and it's a pain in the ass to get out there. And, um, and you got to figure out how you're going to hide once you get out there and decoys getting decoys out there and all that stuff is all difficult. And then you get some birds to come in and there's a very good chance that it's going to be a whole bunch of big dark birds and none of them have a white collar. So you can't shoot

unless it has a white collar. And so none of the locals were bothering. so you can't shoot unless it has a white collar and so none of the locals were bothering um and to me it was just paradise like i absolutely loved that it was just so much fun and and uh i love shooting you know those collared birds and every one of them had a leg band and i just started you know accumulating those those. And it was just super exciting every time I shot one. And that was the funnest goose hunting I've ever had. Do you got a lanyard pretty loaded up with bands? I do. You want to arch it off?

Yeah. Yeah, and I have over 100 neck collars. Do you really? Yeah. Oh, man. Really? And from a lot of different subspecies. So I can blame Brad Cochran, I think, for that.

So I tried to stick with mostly white collars, which doesn't disrupt anything, any studies or anything like that. But man, once you've learned how to spot a collar in the air and you would think that it'd be like you'd see the color of it or something like that, and it's not it at all. It just looks like a little kink in the neck. It just looks kind of like a broken neck. And once you get that down, you can't help yourself but to shoot them. Like when you're hunting cacklers or something like that,

that's just the funnest thing ever too is just you get a big grind of cacklers going and just keep watching them, keep watching them. And maybe look at a block of four or five at once and make sure that they're on a line to where you have that second that it takes to sit up and shoot. And, you know, I mean, I went like dozens of days where I didn't fire a shot all day. Just watch birds all day long. You wouldn't see one. And once in a while, you'd see one. You're just looking for collared birds. Yeah, it was fun.

It was just something that we wanted to do. And we've also, you know, always felt like that's how we learned a lot about geese is just well for one we never wanted to shoot into big flocks so like when i was hunting those wuskies i mean there was only so many of them and they were mixed in with other birds and i just could not shoot into big flocks or I would have had it ruined in one season. I wanted it to last and last. And so I was pretty patient. But I would definitely, like on cacklers, I would definitely make that exception because, well, one thing about cacklers is they're so gregarious and they're so loud and they're in such large flocks that if you have a giant grind of cacklers going and you sit up and make one shot and drop a collared bird

and get back in your blind instead of getting out and whooping it up and all that stuff, whatever, get back in your blind, most of the time the grind will keep coming. Because the birds that saw you and saw the boogeyman, they kind of freak out, but the birds on the far side of this giant grind, they don't know what it is, and they just keep coming. What would you consider, in your mind, what's like a giant grind?

Can you explain grind? I've never heard that term. I know the grind from just being the daily grind of getting up so early and setting out decoys and pulling in decoys. And just like it's a frequently waterfowl people will talk about the grind of just how the drudgery of hunting hard. Yeah, well, that's the real grind for sure. And that's a grind too. Yeah, I mean, like a tornado or, you know, whatever.

A lot of people have different names for it, but I mean it, you know, it's like, we would still probably call it a grind if it was 200 birds, but, but it could be 10,000, you know, and, and a lot of times it's a thousand, you know, um. And you're talking about just like an aggregation of birds that is kind of on the same schedule and they're coming through in a group. Uh, they're. through in a group uh but they might be spread apart by many minutes no oh no no no i'm talking about a flock yeah a big a big giant flock sometimes other flocks are joining at the same time but um so then like it's a a grouping that you can like put your eyes on at one time yeah yeah yeah tornado yeah it's like a snow goose tornado. Yeah, like a snow goose tornado.

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Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX x club y'all all right get me to because i asked you a bunch of questions got us off so at a point you you got into guiding and then i want to get to how you got into how you thought to make your own decoy which doesn't occur to everybody yeah so i mean the the the decoys came first um and then the decoys worked so well that that's what got us into guiding um so i was buying every

every brand of decoy that that was available and um and i I was just, the birds just weren't landing in them. And I had everybody tell me, oh, God, they're not going to land in them. And I was reading Dennis Hunt books and stuff, and they were saying things like decoys are, you need them, but at the same time, geese hate them. They're just used to lure birds into gun range. And I just called bullshit. To get a flyby. Yeah.

And I was like, I watch real birds land with real birds all the time. And I just felt really confident that there just has to be a better way. And that the whole industry was just really complacent. And I heard people say things like, oh, geese have a pea-sized brain and everything. And I just had way more respect for them than that. So I set out to sculpt. I do clay sculptures. I don't carve anything. I do everything as a clay sculpture. And I set out to sculpt the most accurate decoy I possibly could. And it was a Tavener's Canada goose. That was my number one goose that I hunted and loved to hunt and everything.

And now we call it a lesser because it's, that's way more common and people are more familiar with that term, but that's really what the first one was. So if you look, when you say way more realistic, I would think that, and you can, you can correct me on this one. I would think that there's a mad, there's an issue of size. There's an issue of size there's an issue of contours shape say and there's an issue of coloration yep what what is it for real well and one more thing is the finish and the finish is the biggest one of those okay those four okay so um yeah the sculpture um needs to you know, anatomically correct. And then a pleasing pose.

The pose has to be, I guess that's a fifth element right there is the pose. It's really important with turkeys. The pose has to tell what you want, what you want the decoy. You don't want a decoy of a scared ass turkey ready to run off. Exactly. Yep. want the decoy you don't want a decoy of a scared ass turkey ready to run off exactly yep um but the finish it turns out the finish is probably more important than anything and that is um it just can't have the wrong reflections i mean you know birds can see colors that we can't see and a lot

of decoys have you know some reflection to them and and all that stuff and and in in some ways we probably luckily stumbled on the right paint um but that that's a big one uh that helps a lot but you know at the time the decoys the the decoys that were working the best for me um before i made a decoy were were bigfoots and carry light full bodies and big foots were neat because they were, they really were. One minute, one minute. What's so funny about that? No, it's, it's, it's funny because Pat Durkin sent me a, a report from somebody.

Why is the report in quotes? Well, because I mean, it's not a real report if you actually read it. So it's a quote report. It's highly unsubstantiated. Okay, gotcha. But about big foot behavior of jumping into trees. So I just had that.

Oh, so he was talking about the brand Bigfoot decoys, which had like a little pedestal that looked like their feet. You were thinking about Bigfoot's? Yes. Bigfoot's. Yeah. Go on, Dave. Sorry.

Apologies on behalf of Corinne. I did see Bigfoot when I was. We can edit that out, Corinne. No problem. Not anymore. I don't like to edit anymore. Yeah, I mean, I had a ton of respect for Bigfoot decoys because they were made in America, and they really were really goosey.

But the problem is they were a large-raised Canada goose. They were a honker. They were a big, long-necked. And most of our geese were really small, short-necked. So that's why the carry lights looked a little more like Argies, but we just, I just needed to make something that was more accurate. And the very first decoy that I made, it actually had the tail was a separate piece and the wings were separate, the wing, the primary feathers, they were separate pieces that glued on separately so i had full separation in there it

was like probably way more than it really needed to be um we made those and they worked so well it was just unbelievable how many did you make well i mean i started out with with with one pose just a resting one and then i finally before i even hunted with that i realized i needed to make a feeder um and so i had two poses and i went out with and hunted with that, I realized I needed to make a feeder. Um, and so I had two poses and I went out with, uh, and hunted with those. Um, and I would make like 18 total decoys, um, for my own hunting. And then I kind of realized I need an upright, but that came along later, but they were just, they looked like the real birds. So what I figured, what I, what I learned, um, the biggest epiphany, I guess that I had was when I was hunting and I could have, I mean, I put out 24 dozen decoys before.

And if six real birds came and landed 150 yards away, any other birds that came would go land with those six so i realized right away that wild it's yeah it's not a numbers thing the numbers thing is what's most important is that they're convinced that those are real birds and so the beauty of our decoy right now is the way that people have so much damn fun with them is in places where you have normally had to use you know five dozen you can use 18. And even like on some of the places like Front Range, Colorado, where people feel like they have to use 20 dozen, they can use six dozen. And so that really helps. It just makes it more enjoyable because it's just not as much work.

Less of a grind. Yeah, you're not out there in two in the morning. Less of a grind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can sleep in and I love, I love sleep. Can you take us through, you just sort of casually say, oh, I whipped up 18 decoys.

But what does that look like? And can we also get into like your carving or the materials that you're using and you know, you're kind of not one. Without giving away too much. Yeah. When you say make them, you made a mold, obviously. Yeah. So, I mean.

In your garage. Yep. You had to buy a lot of equipment, right? I had. Yeah, I did. I had a shop already just because I've made fish replicas like my entire life. My artistic mentor was Ron Pittard. He's the greatest fish replica artist that ever lived by far.

And I just was a complete, I just bugged the hell out of him for 30 years. Do you still do it, the fish? Yeah, I do, you know, a few. I do just a few. Like maybe one a year. But yeah, that's. Maybe Auction House donates. I do just a few. Maybe one a year. Maybe Auction House donate. I mean, they're so stunning. I was saying that big molly that I got.

You do replicas of fish people caught. What's that? You do little, like, whatever the hell a fish taxidermy is these days because there's no taxidermy. It's just replicas. Yeah, yeah. So I do a lot of steelhead and and um i have a lot of molds of steelhead so and um wild steelhead you know there's only a few

places where you can still keep wild steelhead but you i don't encourage that at all um wild steelhead are really uh low in numbers and everything like that so i have all these molds of fish you know up to 30 pounds and um that you, that you made, uh, I made, or I inherited from Ron Pittard, either one. So, and I've got like, I'll be, I'm, I'm finishing up, uh, 3.26 pound white crappie for John Brown. John, if you're watching, I'm, I'm, I'm getting it done. I'll have it done. Um, and then, um, I'm doing a big 30 pound steelhead for a guide who's been waiting eight years.

He's been really, really, really patient. He's going to be really mad when he sees that I did the crappie. And then I have lots of experience in sculpture, in industrial sculpture. So I worked for Nike for seven years. I did clay sculptures of footwear as part of the design process. You're like the guy in that movie Air. My goodness, was that a bad movie? I liked

it. Dude, we have to talk about that sometime. I'll talk you out of liking it. Fine. Okay. Oh, there you go. That had about every problem a movie... We'll talk about that. You had a job there yeah it did what were you did you carve shoes yeah clay sculptures yep seriously yeah i did five um

now i only did the midsole outsole so i didn't have anything to do with the upper but i did get to do five seasons of air jordans working working with tinker Hatfield. And that was a, and my time at Nike was really, I'm super thankful for it. Like it was really good people. And I learned a ton about molding and casting and, and all that stuff. So that was hard. I got, I got headhunted from Nike to go to Fila and I worked for, and, and also I'm sorry for any of my friends that work at Nike. And I told you that I didn't get headhunted, that I quit. And now you're just now finding this out. So I apologize.

I'm sorry I had to lie to you. And I went to Fila. And I was the manager of the model shop there and did more clay sculptures and everything. And before all this, I did clay sculptures of taxidermy mannequins. So I worked for Research Mannequins and did clay sculptures. So I had the clay experience. i didn't have any training um i uh but i just winged it and just you know yeah muscled through it or whatever like i'm not i can't do a clay sculpture like really well like really fast or anything like that and i'm not like naturally talented at it or anything like that but i'm

pretty good at looking at two things and figuring out what the difference is between those what can i tell you one of my favorite writing quotes i think it was rw rw apple he once said i can write better than anyone that can write faster than me and i can write faster than anyone that can write better than me it's perfect so that than anyone that can write better than me. It's perfect. So that might be you and clay, right? Or you got to think of something like that for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like it's already been done. Somebody beat me to it or whatever, but yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm slow and, and there are some people that are super talented and can

do these things super, super fast. And, and what I mostly have to do is I have to assemble a blob of clay roughly in the shape before I can... I mean, I more or less have to build something wrong and then start picking it apart. Rather than building something right the first time, I usually just have to get it... I have to get something going. And then I can start to see what the difference is. So I got to have really, really good reference material. I got to have that thing to compare it to. So that could be a mount or a bunch of photographs or something like that. That's a great way to go about building something.

You just got to start it. Yeah. My dad was a woodcarver. Man. And he said that his strategy was if he was making like an otter, he said, I'll just start taking away everything that doesn't look like an otter. Yeah. Well, and that's another thing is I have a lot of respect for woodcarvers because you

can only subtract material. So in my case, I mean, I- Oh, you put it back when you make a mistake. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, then I made, I made molds of those first decoys. And I finally had to buy a rotational casting machine, which was a pretty big investment.

But at this point, are you like, you know what? I'm going to start selling these. No, no, no. Hold on. We're getting too far ahead of ourselves. Yeah. I got questions before. When you just whipped up the 18 that you first started with, how do you whip up 18?

You made the clay sculpture. Okay, made the clay sculpture and then made a silicone rubber mold with a fiberglass shell mold over the top of that to hold it to shape. Yep, got it. the top of that to hold it to shape yeah and then since i didn't have a rotational casting machine i had to rotate it by hand that was the workout portion of my of my life and dude this steelhead you did is amazing man oh thank you i appreciate that and the and the rotational part comes because once you spray you so you've got your mold and then what material would you spray in there so it's liquid urethane okay so it's like two parts you mix a and b together stir it up and pour it in the mold and then close the mold and then you rotate it keep it keep it moving drip to one side or the

other yeah and coat the whole inside and then you have to keep rotating it until that stuff is hard. And then you may have to do a second pour. And then I was like, screw this. This is a lot of work. I'm not exactly Charles Atlas. I guess I would have been if I just would have never bought a rotational casting machine. I love it, dude.

There's nothing I like more than a way out of date reference. So I bought a rotational casting machine. And at the time, when I was working for Fila, everything that we would make for Fila, everything that we would design for them, they would send it back to the group in Italy. And the ownership group would say, no, no, no, that's not what the Americans want. And we were just pulling our hair out of it. They were just turning down everything that we made, and we were sure that we were making really, really, really good shoes. And most of the time, they wouldn't even make them. And I just watched our stock go from $76 a share down to $5 a share over a course of a very short amount of time.

So then they finally said, hey, we're going to close the Portland office. Your choices are to move to New York City or Italy. And there was about 40 people in the office. Every single one of us said, we take neither. So now I was out of work and I was tempted to go back to Nike and stuff like that. But I just, I was so into goose hunting and I, as much as I loved, you know, working, uh, at Nike and with the people, at least at Fila, it wasn't related to, to hunting and nature and stuff. So, so I was out of a job and my sweet wife, Elda Smith, I love her so much. We, here we are, we're just getting married. And right at that point,

I'm like, lose this high paying job. And I'm just fully expecting her to just ditch my ass. And she's just like, we'll be fine, whatever you got to do. And I'm working on this sculpture for six months and I'm having to cash in my 401k, you know, a little bit at a time to, to, to keep, you know, keep the roof over our head and stuff like that. And, and she's just such a sweetheart. She was just like, I believe in you and this will turn into something. And, uh, and you know, God bless her. But, um, so I did, so then I bought this rotational casting machine and, and, uh, that made it way easier to make these decoys and stuff. And then Brad Cochran and I, we were hunting a lot together.

Brad is a phenomenal, phenomenal goose hunter. He really is. He's one of five people in the world that I would actually hunt with these days. What makes a phenomenal goose hunter? So Brad is super, super hardcore. He is so freaking into it, it's unbelievable. He just absolutely lives for it. After all these years, he is just as passionate about it today as he ever was.

And I can't match that because I need to go on. I'm spay fishing for steelhead. I'm archery blacktail hunting. I need these 10-year at a time things, and I need new challenges and stuff like that. He has absolutely stuck with it the whole time, and he's just accumulated so much knowledge, and he has great instincts. I rely on my instincts 100% when i'm setting up in the morning and he has instincts plus it's just incredible knowledge base so and then he's a great shot that's important and that

and he he he can spot collars really well too um and and so like so when you're when you're collar hunting you you can only hunt with somebody who's on the same page as you. You can't go hunting with a bunch of guys. I've done it. I've shot collars when I've gotten invites. But it's usually you sit up and shoot. And usually everybody's like, what the? But if you're hunting with someone else who's on the same page and you're looking at all the birds on the on the right and he's looking at all the birds on the left and you know that nobody's going to shoot until they spot a collar uh it's just way better than than than you know like i knew so many people

that were hunting in big groups and they were sending me texts saying like done by eight done by 8 15 done by nine and and then they would say man I sure wish I could get a collar and I'm just like okay well I sat out there all day long and I didn't shoot anything but you know three or four days of that and you're gonna have a collar like you can't you can't be uh dying to get your limit as quick as possible and then complain that you didn't get a collar. Because that's how you get a collar, by not shooting. It is kind of funny, the waterfall hunters, you hear that a lot. Done by this. Sure, man. Is it so miserable?

You really want to be done so fast? Oh, yeah. You want to be at the Cracker Barrel by 9 or whatever. Just chow your biscuits and gravy. All right, two questions. Like, one, you can answer this one quickly. Have you guys gotten good enough to where you can spot the leg bands? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you set up for the lighting. We had to do that, especially on Anchorage Glaciers, because there was a lot of them that only had a leg band. And so, yeah, the lighting is everything. So in Oregon, we don't have a lot of sunshine. And on a cloudy day, it's the lighting is everything so in Oregon we don't have a lot of sunshine and on a cloudy day it's it's incredibly difficult so I don't think I have ever gotten a band that didn't bling that didn't sparkle I think some people have and I've tried I mean I've got a giant grind of pintails pintails, they corkscrew down like swans do, where you can see every one of their legs,

one after another and stuff like that. I've never gotten one that way. And I have gotten several leg band-only geese by spotting the leg band. And at least one where I spotted the shape while it's quartering away. But I've gotten several that were, the lighting was really, really good. And as the birds are coming and landing one at a time, um, you know, they're dropping their feet and you set up quick enough. You don't, you never

let them land. Like if a bird lands, our general rule is they're safe. Like, and everybody assumes if we're shooting a lot of bands and collars, we hear people say all the time, like, yeah, we're going to shoot bands and collars. We just let them land and we get out the binos. It's like, oh, my God, you can't do that because you would shoot 25 geese. You know, like, so you pretty much have to shoot them out of the air. Otherwise, you know, you're just going to have just too much, too many other. What is it with the waterfowlers and the collars and the bands?

There's no antlers. There's no age group or anything like that. So that's how you guys found the next level of difficulty where some guy might say, I only hunt four and a half year old bucks or older. Yeah. And you're like, well, to get this with geese, what are we going to do? We'll shoot the collared.

Everybody looks at it different. Brad made a comment a month ago, and I was just kind of appalled by it, honestly. He was saying a collar is equivalent to like a 340 bull and i was like this this is a this is coming this is definitely a guy who hasn't shot a 340 bull so like and what i but in his defense i think what he means is and you got 100 call well no a 340 bull is a thing of nature a collar is a thing made at a human factory exactly exactly it's like you're handling a bird that's been handled yep i've always had a real like i recognize it's cool and i have a couple of my little box of like special things but it's been taught you're not

the first person to lay a hand on that yeah yeah and some of the magic's gone in fact it was out of birds man yeah it was one of the dumber ones because they got caught, right? I can't speak to that. Well, what Brad was getting at, what he was meaning is waterfowlers want a collar as bad as big game hunters want a 340 bull. All right, so at what point did you say to yourself, this has all been great, Ani um but we got to move along i understand when you started making them and here you got to be honest you start making decoys for yourself

in your garage you have to in your head unless you're going to lie to me you have to in your head be thinking um i could see going into business making these and selling them i mean that that came about fairly quickly once i realized uh how expensive the like the materials were and the molds were um and i had i was i really didn't want to because i just wanted um for myself because they were working really good and i I am like super, super secretive with so much of my hunting and fishing and I don't post a lot or anything. I don't have any stickers on my truck.

And once in a while, I'll take my wife's car so that nobody knows where I'm at or what I'm doing. How secretive though, you did just give us a ton of antelope information. But not while we were recording. Hey, we're family right here. and i and he doesn't know this but i held back some pretty important things i mean just the reality set in that i've got a lot of money in in these molds and everything like that and then and so many many people were asking for them.

And then when we started guiding, I was like, well, that's how I'll make the money. That's how I'll make the money back. Got it. Being a successful guide. But when you're guiding, more people than ever asked, wanted to buy decoys. And we were having fun guiding. Brad and I were guiding together. And we were remembering the other day, one season, we limited out with our clients every single day of the entire season except for two days, but we still killed 56 geese in those two days.

So we were doing really well, and we were having a lot of fun, and life was good, and gas prices were fairly low and everything like that. But more people asked for decoys, gas prices started getting high, more people started hunting. Some of the places that we hunted were getting leased out from under us, even by clients and stuff. And Brad, you know, Brad with an accounting major, the last thing in the world that he wanted to do is go become an accountant. And he was just

like let's let's start making decoys and and i was all for it so that's that's what we did and and um it's it's not a super lucrative business that's for sure but it's a super fun business. The people, all the clients, all the customers are, are great. Um, and everybody that you work with are all super, super fun, really, really cool people. So, I mean, I could have done a lot better if I'd have stayed at Nike and kept, you know, hammering on my 401k. I wouldn't be here right now and I'd be retired. But I have no regrets whatsoever. And I mean, I would just encourage anybody that is just thinking about, you know, I mean, I don't want you to quit your job necessarily. But I mean, it's very doable. me can can you know scratch out a living and um doing something that you just absolutely love i just encourage people to just go for it you know so at what point did you go from uh like

the goose decoys to like turkey decoys or the buck decoy yeah i got turned on you guys years ago because of turkey decoys and that was through yanni yeah yanni got turned on to you guys years ago because of turkey decoys, and that was through Yanni. Yeah. Yanni got turned on to them. Yeah, and I know, and I feel so bad because, you know, my hearing is so bad. And one of our first conversations, you mentioned that, but I didn't hear what you said.

You were telling me that it was Yanni, and I didn't hear what you said, and I feel really bad, so I apologize. But, yeah, I do kind of recall that and everything like that, but yeah, we, so we made Goosey Quays for, and I, the, the years of all this stuff is kind of hard for me to keep track. I think I started the first Goosey Quay in 1998 and I finished it in 1999. Um, and, uh, then turkeys didn't start until like i roughly 10 years later and how did you get turned on to me honey jay scott oh yeah jay scott we love jay scott yeah he's a great guy that guy's a turkey shooting no he's a watching people shoot turkey son of a gun yeah yeah yeah he likes turkey hunting man yeah he does he likes he loves turkey hunting he loves here he's got you know he likes turkey hunting man yeah he does he likes he loves turkey hunting he lives here he's got you know he likes being you know he does surprisingly small amount of hunting himself i mean as a guide yeah yeah but he's in on an extraordinary amount of turkey hunts yeah not

behind the trigger but on the calls you know yeah it's it's funny he has these incredible opportunities for elk and and coos deer and and you talk to him and he's just so passionate about turkeys you know more so than and then almost anything um but yeah and so turkeys it was just we had a lot of our customers talking to us and just saying my gosh like if you guys can make a goose decoy like this the turkey the turkey market the turkey hunting is ready for an ultra-realistic turkey decoy. And there were so many people that didn't like to use turkey decoys. But a lot of the reason, because most of the turkey dec it was just overwhelming support and demand for that like we were like like kind of like scared if we if we would have had the product

we could have sold so many thousands upon thousands of turkey dugoids over the next five years after that because it took five years before other companies kind of caught on like, crap, DSD is selling the shit out of turkey decoys. We got to make one. And so we had five or six years before the rest of the industry caught up. And we were making them as fast as we could make them, but we couldn't catch up. And now everybody has an ultra-realistic turkey decoy.

And some of them actually look an awful lot like ours. And that happens. That's a great compliment. And then the deer decoy was kind of the same way. The deer decoy was kind of a weird thing. So this guy, Randy Birdsong, who I've actually never met, but he hunted a lot with Lee and Tiffany. He was kind of sending messages through our, you know, I don't know, through phone calls or website or email or whatever, saying you got to make a buck decoy and it's got to be in this posturing position.

So I make it. I agree to 100%. I think he was dead on. And I agreed 100%. And I just started on it right away. And I love deer, love deer hunting. Where can people go to watch? You know that video you show me of bucks working over your buck decoys? Where does that video live?

Yeah. So I have a whole bunch of them. I just, I just downloaded a bunch of them. Yeah. I want to, okay. But you guys had a montage put together. Oh, oh yeah. So that was, that was just all our customers.

You know, Melissa Bachman, she's a very good hunter, and she's very good at decoying. And, you know, decoying is a little different. It's like if you're just a really, really good whitetail hunter, you're not necessarily a really good decoy hunter. It's just a little bit of a learning learning curve to it but she's very good she's very very good totally knows what she's doing and she provides a lot of footage for us got it yeah i always remember seeing the heartland bow hunter guys yeah have like wicked

footage of using that decoy those guys are great but is that montage available on your website maybe or somewhere? I'll follow. Or no, you just made it, the montage. No, no, no. It's like branded DSD in the end, but it's all those bucks doing that same head motion. Yeah. Smashing that decoy and they all do that little tip of the head. It's so wild, man.

Yeah. They roll their eyes. Their eyes are rolling around in their head and they lick their nose all the time. And then they cock their head. They always cock their head at that weird angle man yeah oh when you see that there's an explosion getting ready to happen yeah we're lucky enough to see two mule deer do it i i was just like kind of in and out of binos but my daughter got to watch it through a spotting scope and my brother-in-law through another spotting scope but just came in you know two big herds of does behind them each and heads almost upside down and like you're saying you

can see the eyes just doing these weird things and i mean seconds later it's like that cock of the head is like someone putting their hand on their pistol yeah you said you said the wrong putting your hand on your pistol when he cocks his head. Their blood is just starting to boil and boil. Yeah, it's amazing watching deer interact with that thing. So anyways, this guy comes. What's his name? Birdsong? Yeah, Randy Birdsong.

And I just feel like it's really important to point that out because I could not get a hold of him. I wanted to give him a decoy afterwards. And I wanted to tell him thank you and and and all this stuff or whatever and he just disappeared off the face of the earth and it's just like still found him no i mean he's around somewhere and he just deserves credit for that and and i i want to give him a decoy well hopefully someone could pass this along to him yeah yeah i remember i remember watching that guy's hunting stuff back in the day. Randy Bird song. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He was on TV shows and stuff. Yeah. He seemed like a great hunter and obviously he knows, you know, about white tail behavior and everything like that. So it's like. So describe the posture that the deer's in. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, all their, you know, all their hair is bristled.

It's raised in the same way that an animal would do for heating and cooling. And it's just to look big, just to look as large as possible. And then what happens with the deer is, when that happens, there's not this perfect division of hair. So it'll end up with a bunch of vertical cracks along the side and then vertical cracks along the neck. And that's kind of important, and that's on the decoy and everything and the ears are pinned back as far as they go and that i think is to make the the the neck look big and the antlers look big

and so you know i first made that pose it's like like with a lot of poses we had a whole bunch of people saying like that is the goofiest thing i've ever seen you'll never sell it looks like a donkey blah blah blah and then people do just a little bit of research and next thing you know they find out that we're not so far off um and then the the back is just slightly arched you know and the head is um raised a certain amount and uh that's really all it takes did you choose a specific age class of of buck to mimic yeah so all these decoys because i love blacktail hunting so much i cheat them just a little bit and i'm i'll make the i'll make the the snout the muzzle just a little bit shorter and and lean them this is a terrible thing to admit to all heart.

Do you like change the decoy for your own black tail hunting purposes, your own esoteric deer hunting? Good for you. Well, not as specific, like for the actual production decoy. So every, and we sell them all over the Midwest, like that's where they get used like crazy. And so all you Midwesterners that are using, you know, a DSD posturing book,

I'm sorry that it looks a little bit like a black tail, but that's just what I did. But yeah, it's, but there is some important things that it doesn't look, it has to look old enough and mature enough to be a threat without being too much of a threat. So it's not going to work in every region. I mean, you know, there are certain parts of the country

where that buck would be way too big. Like if it was some 350 pound, 180 inch buck, a lot of bucks might be like, yeah, he can, I'll let him handle this situation. And it brings them down off the bluffs and stuff like that. Like in broad daylight, like my friend Paul Meinel, he's got 500 acres in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, and it's just a magical place and super fun to go.

And that decoy has brought big bucks out in the daylight that I don't think would have otherwise come out. And we get reports of that all the time. So I'd say the hardest thing is knowing when to shoot and you don't always get a perfect shot with that, with that buck, you know, like, like if you can get him to, to be coming and he'll be walking slow. And if you can get him to quarter, you know, quarter away or broadside, like that honestly is, is usually the time to shoot.

If the buck crashes the decoy, there's no guarantee that you're going to get a shot. And at what distance, because he'll jump away. Sometimes he keeps running and never stops. And sometimes he jumps away 20 yards. And all of a sudden, if you had the decoy at 20 yards, now you've got a 40-yard shot. And you don't know what angle he's going to. In that video, it's amazing how many of those deer eat it because they're expecting resistance yeah that's not there yeah so they're like running into this thing so hard and like you know they're assuming that

there's something that's gonna stop them but then that thing goes and then they go ass over tea kettle and just get like this totally like but not like infusing their toilet like take that yeah then they look back at it like what did i just do like i leveled that thing yeah i'm good at this um but that's also why we encourage people to use the stand instead of the stake because the deer can actually hurt hurt himself on the stake you know as they crash the decoy can impale himself on the stake yeah so the stand breaks away everything breaks away um and that's that's the best system and i thought that's all we were selling is the stand and those were mine wishes

and my instructions and then i just found out at the gt that like, no, it comes with a stake. And I'm like, aye, aye, aye. Like I'd really prefer. Just a hungry bar? No, the stake is fiberglass. Yeah. But, you know, the problem is, is that they, they could hurt their, you know, they could hurt their scrotum on it. And then, then they would.

Didn't you have one hurt at scrotum? Yeah. Yeah, I did. That's kind of. And he became a cactus bug. My own fault? Yeah. Yeah, I did. That's kind of what else. And he became a cactus bug. My own fault. Yeah. Well, that one was a, that was a big four point, like a 140 inch four point.

And then what did he do? He grew the next year. He grew his, I can't remember exactly the timing of all that because he crashed the deer in the fall and then he, it's like he grew antlers the next year and they were in velvet and then they, that was it. That's, that's, that's the, uh, they never, he never came out of velvet ever again. He had his antlers year round and they, and over the years they crumbled, They got shorter and shorter and shorter. And he just got gigantic because he didn't go through the rigors of the rut.

He just ate all the time and he didn't have to put any of his eating into dealing with the rut. So he just got gigantic and he never came out of the rut. One of Yanni's shirker bucks, dude. But his antlers didn't get gigantic. Only his body did. Yeah. No, his, well, his antlers never grew again. And they actually got shorter every day because they got so brittle that they would just crumble.

The tops of them would crumble down. So he hit that decoy and got his nuts caught on the stake. Well, we are assuming that. I've got some videos. I've got lots of videos of blacktail bucks crashing the decoy, but it happened so fast that I can't tell for sure. Yeah. But it could have been a, a barbed wire fence or something.

Um, I, we don't know for sure. It was just one of the things that we sort of assumed may have happened. I, we don't, unless anybody knows of any, I don't know for sure of of anything real bad happening but it looks like for sure something could happen and then you're working on a female and you're talking about her posture but you kind of you don't want to make it that her posture is like too much of a good thing because then a buck might not buy it yeah yeah so um like her just standing out in the open like just ready to roll is not what you're after. Yeah.

Yeah. So, um, and the same thing we had to worry about age too, because if we made her, you know, a big, giant, mature doe, then, you know, there, a lot of does would, would, um, you know, blow at her and, um, and that could cause a lot of problems and stuff like that. So, so she's, she's also supposed to be, she's supposed to look like she's just a breeding age,

like just old enough to, to breed, um, without being like a big old, you know, horse face, like, you know,

dominant doe. And then, yeah, her body posture, she's mostly standing and relaxed and stuff but um little hint yeah just a little hint she's dropped down in the rear a little bit to kind of look you know kind of look like yeah it could happen here you know and maybe yeah it's worth it and you know those bucks like they like blacktail bucks i can't wait to use them on blacktails because

blacktails if i mean one of the primary areas that I hunt black-tails, I think last year there was like 22 bucks on two does. So if you use a buck decoy, it hasn't been very effective there, but a doe decoy, like any black-tailed buck will just come running right up to it. Because if they see a doe, I mean, they just come running up to it right away. It's like we've all been there. You know, it's like you get desperate. It's like Bozeman 12 years ago. Yeah. And she, you know, I've had some people tell me that have seen her like, oh, my gosh, you should have had her in the full squatting position.

And I don't 100% agree with that just because the doe stands to be bred really only when the buck is right, right on her. So for her to be standing to be bred, it might not look so much. You say standing, almost squatting. Yeah, it's a little low. It's lower than our decoy. And, you know, like what we were saying

is it could end up looking like she's just like taking a shit or whatever. And so if she's out in the middle and like, oh, there's a doe, but oh, she's taking a shit. It's like,

I don't know. No, not that. Might not be the most appealing thing or whatever, but I know a black-tailed buck would charge right in there. You sell the pellets? I don let me know what you're doing you sell the pellets or is that an add-on she can't shit she can't shit forever 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.

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if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Two questions. Earlier you said in Buffalo County it would make these bucks come out that otherwise would not have come out in daylight. Yeah. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Because I'm trying to figure out how did they get did they get the, like, did they place them where the buck could see it from its bed? You've seen it from the slope, a brushy slope. Yeah. So that's bluff country in Buffalo County. So it's a lot of, there's ag, and then there's, you know, rocky bluffs all around it. And the deer all, we don't go up into the, and we we don't go up really we don't go more than 50 yards high into that ever i mean not even for shed hunting or anything like like literally there's

a bunch of that that no him that's a sanctuary yeah that's a sanctuary yep and so they're cruising along that edge they look down to the field they see the decoy yeah but you know those those cruising bucks don't look they They just do not look. Yeah, they're all scent-checking areas and stuff, and sometimes they'll literally be on the other side of the top of the bluff. The way that the wind comes up the bluff and it curls and stuff, it's kind of crazy what they do. But they are beddedded and they do get

up occasionally because they know they're they're in such a sanctuary that they know that they're safe and everything like that they get up and feed a little bit and they're bedded and stuff like that and they might watch you set up the decoy and then like i mean and some of that is assuming because you know you can't you can't really see them up there. But you are in a big, wide-open field. Yeah, you drove up in a bad boy buggy, and you get the decoy out and everything, and you do it early enough in the afternoon. And then that's at the times when they would be able to see you,

but otherwise it would be in the mornings when it's dark. But there's times when we don't really want to do that either, too, because in the mornings when it's dark um and but there's times when we don't really want to do that either too because in the mornings in the dark um those bucks are moving or moving around and they're down on that bottom just like with blacktail hunting i don't even hunt mornings i give them the mornings i don't i do not like going in my tree stand or or ground blind and bumping deer out or anything like that i go in in the middle of the day and sit till dark because i can get out of a stand with deer around at dark but i i can't get into a stand in the mornings with the dark and i think that's one of the biggest problems that people have with black

tails and that's how i've and i want to come out hunt black tails with you man man yeah come on out like there's the the way that i've finally cracked it the code is by getting permission on good private properties because some of the public stuff is just kind of horrible or burnt to the ground. But I spent six years writing over 100 letters a year in the spring and ended up with some pretty good properties. I just have to kind of get the okay from the landowners and stuff. But, I mean, some of them are just super great, great people. And, yeah, blacktails are super fun. They're not as smart and cagey and difficult as whitetails. So they're not nearly as – like those Midwest whitetails are crazy when it comes to human scent

and encroachment and pressure and all that stuff. And they are just super, super smart. And everybody that hunt blacktails assumes and always wants to believe that blacktails are the smartest, most cagest thing. The thing about blacktails is their hearing is really, really good. So the clothing, you know, has to be unbelievably quiet to get your bow drawn. And then the other thing is, is that they just don't come out in the daytime, you know, like whitetails do. Yeah.

But other than that, they are very forgiving. Like I could, like in, I can't hunt the same tree stand in the Midwest, you know, more than two times probably for whitetails and it's done. You've burned it probably for the season. But with blacktails, I've, I've hunted the same tree stand like seven days in a row. Okay. So you can get away with murder with blacktails, but you just need them to come out during the day.

That's really the difficult part about them. Yeah. How do you deal with the scent issue around running a deer decoy? Well, so the most important thing is that it's been manufactured long enough and it's aired out long enough since it's been manufactured. So that's the biggest thing. And then you don't touch it with your hands. So your deer decoy will work reasonably good. If you buy one in july um and then air it

out and everything it's gonna work good but it will work it's like a like a mink box or something it'll work better every year as it gets older more earthy yeah more earthy and and um and scent free and everything like that and you just don't touch And you just don't touch it with your bare hands. And, you know, don't breathe on it. And then don't ever put scent on it. You know, if you want to use any kind of scent, you put it, you know, under the decoy or near the decoy or something like that. But you keep the decoy scent-free.

Because if you put scent on it, you know, that'll get kind of rancid over time and stuff. But you also don't put scent all over the ground or anything like that because then you can't pull that scent with you when you leave. I mean, that's what's worked for me is I'll put scent in a bottle or with cotton or whatever you got to do and just open it, um, underneath the decoy. That's when I do use sand. It doesn't matter that much. I mean, or I'll put tarsus, you know, tarsus glands, uh, tarsal glands from a, from a buck that does work at times pretty, uh, pretty, pretty darn well with blacktails. Um,

Have you ever listened to Clay's, bear grease podcast no he had an episode called deer stories and there's a guy that tells a story about shooting a buck and taking the glands off it and tying the glands to his ankles and he about gets his ass kicked by a buck yeah yeah i probably wouldn't do that you realize this buck is coming down his trail and it's coming for him oh geez yeah it's a funny story. Well, that could have been way worse because that could have been like dough in heat scent, you know. Like, as long as the buck just wanted to kill him, that's okay. Not as humiliating.

So that's bad in your obituary, man. Yeah, you can live through that. When you're sitting, like, say I'm sitting in a tree stand facing a field and I want to put a decoy out, how do I place that decoy for the best shot? I mean, like maybe quartering away. But that just depends. Like quartering away would be with a doe and then possibly quartering two with a buck. But I'll tell you what. Probably wind dependent too.

Yeah, it's wind dependent. Yeah, they'll try to get downwind of it and stuff. And so with a buck, quartering two works pretty good. But there is no guarantee whatsoever. Like anytime you think that you know how they're going to approach it, like people, the idea of quartering two is, the idea behind that is that they'll come and come head on. The square up to it.

They just don't do that. I mean, they definitely don't do that with any major consistency. Gotcha. Because the way to do damage is to ram one completely on the side in the rib cage. And so there's just a lot of... Deer decoying is just super fun because it's not a guaranteed thing.

There's certain things that it does for you. You can get your bow drawn so easily when you're using a buck decoy because they're just so easily. Like when you're using a buck decoy. Because they're just so distracted. But there's also the downsides and that is like you're not sure you're going to get a good shot or whatever. But I think quartering two is probably the best

and that's assuming that you have the wind more or less in your face. Gotcha. Will you hunt them in like woodland, forested terrain, or are you always sticking to more of an open field type place where deer can see it from as far away as possible? So I've set up for blacktails in old growth timber, but not successfully.

I've tried it in the woods, but the best successes that I've had, and I'm not majorly into deer decoying. I will be now that we have a doe. But the best successes that I have have been on the edge of where ag meets timber. And that's the same with blacktails too. Meadow-y areas and stuff. Old abandoned orchard that I hunt, I've had success with the blacktail decoy there. But with white tails, I mean, I've had it to where they're coming along through the woods and all of a sudden they see it and it kind of startles them a little bit. Really? Yeah I mean it's just like we were

talking about with the antelope blind and stuff. It's just better if they can see it from a distance away. But have you used it in conjunction with rattling where they're expecting to find something standing there? That's what I feel like the real value would be is he's coming in but then all of a sudden like oh there it is yeah i mean i i have but like my gosh one of my hunting partners justin casmar he gets so mad at me because i'll go sometimes a whole season without rattling rattling is super fun and i've rattled in some nice bucks and shots on with my bow in the in the upper clackamas um and that's public land blacktails um but i like and now i'm hunting more down in the valley um i treat all my goose hunting has taught me that everything everything about goose

hunting is not educating animals that's what goose hunting that hunting, that's the trick of the whole thing. And so now that's affected all my other hunting. So that's why, I mean, like on elk hunting, I've shot some big bulls and I've even got some by calling and stuff, but I've got more out of a tree stand on a ground blind and everything like that. And I would be a way better elk hunter if I was willing to move into those those areas and move where I need to um but I'm just so about staying on the perimeter staying out of those creepy you know hidey holes out of those bedrooms and giving them all kinds of space and all kinds of refuge give them the mornings give them give them tons of space, it, it bites me in the ass at times for sure.

Um, but what, what I love about it, um, is if you don't, if you don't kill one, you have the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day. You should write a hunting book, like Duncan Gilchrist book, hunt high. I, I've never heard of it. Well, I shouldn't say that but anyway what would it be called uh hunt the perimeter well see the thing about hunt high is just gen it's so it's a lifelong hunter and it's just all these like really just general pieces of information one minute he's talking about his camp how he likes to set up his camp stove.

Next minute he's talking about the way mountain goats act. But it's just gold all through the whole thing. Just random. He kind of accidentally writes like Hemingway. It's just page upon page of just gold ruminations from a very seasoned hunter. And a lot of stuff you're like, I haven't thought about about that that way before i haven't thought about that way before you know you got a lot of that stuff laid up in you i want to read it i want to read that what's funny man is um yeah good he's dead so check this out he's dead and he self-published these books

and and when we i started talking about and i'd always put them on like favorite book list and all that hunt Hunt High, and it got to be where if you wanted to buy one, it was hundreds of dollars because we'd driven a lot of interest. One day, I lent mine to someone, and someone took it and never gave it back, so I went online and bought one for 100 bucks from some dude in Texas,

and I just buy it on Amazon on used books, and it comes with a sticky note on it that says dude you're the reason i bought this book wow hey that's cool yeah that worth worth matthewson has lent me a couple books about the early martin trappers and um wayne nugis and paulie rossborough and martin i have known, is one of them. And it's the same thing. You go to try to find those books, like Worth lent me one of them and gave me, he gave me the other.

Um, but yeah, trying to find those books on Amazon, uh, this is next to impossible, but I sure would like to get more, more copies. Those books are incredible. Let me hit you with one last one before we end um if you're not placing turkey decoys properly do you think you'd be doing more damage than than good meaning you got a gobbler he's coming in right can you ever have it be that it'd be just better not even to use the damn thing than to have it set the way you have it set you mean because because he's going to be searching and covering?

Yeah. Like do you, I mean, because you would put your decoy out in such a manner or in such a pose or in such a position that when he sees it, he's like, what? That's not what that end supposed to be doing.

I'm out of here. Oh, let me put, let me phrase it a different way. How important is placement over just having the presence be there? Well, I've only ever done it the right way. So, no, I don't know. I mean, I just, you know, you can screw up goose decoys really bad, really bad.

With placement. Yeah, with placement. Like flock configuration. Yeah, you can have them all facing the wind. You can have them crooked on their stakes. You can have them spread way too far apart. And people do all of those things all the time. And it can make a huge, huge, huge difference.

On turkeys, I mean, I haven't really found a really wrong way. I haven't seen any spreads from our from our customers where i looked at it and just went you know like um i i think you know because turkeys are they're they're a little different than geese um and i i i'm sure there's a wrong way to do it but there's not as sensitive safe to say just based on what you're telling me it's not as sensitive as waterfowl placement yeah yeah yeah for sure i mean you think it's is and then but you wouldn't say the same thing about deer you think there is a you found that there is like the wrong place and wrong way to set deer decoys well meaning you don't like them in timber. Yeah. I don't like them in timber, but I probably need to experiment more on that and stuff.

So I wouldn't consider myself to be an authority on that. And I like to experiment a lot. And the animals always surprise me. You know, every time I think that there's a rule, the animals show me otherwise. I know that, you know, there's times when using a strutter, like, let's see. I'd say there's times when using hens only has helped me make some good shots with my bow because the birds came in strutting. Yeah. And then there's times when using a gobbler decoy has made me miss some pretty important birds that would have really meant a lot to me.

And I couldn't get my bow drawn. Because he came in too hot on it. Came in too hot. But they'll also come in and just put off and you're thinking what i do wrong and then after a while you're like i didn't do anything wrong he saw that thing and didn't like it you know i i hear that happens man i know it does i know i've surprised them before where they come over you have your decoy up they come over a little knoll or something too close they see that decoy they don't

feel like duking it out yeah oh yeah totally well and i've had i've had blacktail bucks do that where um they stepped out 100 yards away and saw the decoy and i was just like oh my god it's it's happening i'm getting back putting my release on and everything and i'm all excited and i'm just waiting and waiting and waiting and i look and i look and expecting him to be you know real close and now he's high high tailing it away it definitely i mean you see a lot of them plow in to beat that thing to death but it does happen where they put off and they like i used to think inevitably i think that we spooked that bird someone moves someone spooked that bird but the turkey biologist robert abernathy who's a very experienced decoyer yeah has been decoying for a long time yeah he's convinced too he says i think sometimes those birds come in they see that they see that gobbler

and they don't like it well and they're putting off they're putting off or just ghosting out because of that presence he still uses it but he says that's the thing that happens yeah i agree 100 and also you just never know what and what that decoy represents it could be could represent a bird that he's already familiar with and is already you know uh lower lower on the hierarchy level no then he like he hears a hand he comes in be like damn it gobblers already here billy's here yeah he woke my ass last week. My answer to that is, when in doubt, well, for one, you know, use a lot of hens and a lot of, like, preening hens and feeding hens. That always makes everything look, you know, relaxed and stuff.

And even if there's a gobbler there. And then also, you know, like, our three-quarter strut Jake, which is actually a half strut Jake, and somehow it got named a three-quarter strut Jake, but that's for another day. But that's a good decoy to use with a bunch of hens because it looks a little less intimidating, and it just looks like, well, I mean, I've had so many when uh gobblers will come in that i know are even a mature tom that i know is not really a dominant bird and even with even with the jake there they just come in slow enough and then before i know it they're mounting one of the one of the decoys and you can also put a submissive hen a distance away. Like, so he's not necessarily standing over her and stuff.

So it feels like there's always a combination that will give you the best chance, but there's always going to be situations where just you've flat. And I'm glad. Our buddy guy, Zuck, who's a, who's very seasoned turkey hunter. He has a little rule. He's not the kind of guy that believes that everything is, you know, one way or the other, but he has a little rule he wouldn't like he's not the kind of guy that believes that everything is you know one way or the other but he has a little rule for himself he don't set a male decoy in the evening because he's like they're just not in that mood i don't think yeah he goes you're just

less like he finds in the evening you're less likely to get that i'm gonna kick that thing's ass oh response in the evening and you're more likely to push him off and he likes hens in the evening because they're just more mingly you know he might want to follow them to the roost whatever but they're not wanting to deal with a big old strutter at night yeah that's just his take on it right so i have killed some some big mature toms like where it was like literally in the last five minutes of shooting time and and and i've had them go hundred yards out of their way to come up to the decoys. But the lesson that I've learned and I've got burned multiple times doing it

is they'll come up and they'll jump on, they'll, they'll jump at the decoy one time. And then I'm like thinking, okay, here we go. It's going to, it's just going to thrash the decoy for the longest time.

And I'm going to have this perfect shot. They'll jump on the decoy one time and they're about done that's it like it's just i agree with that 100 and that's if they even jump at the decoy sometimes they'll come up but i mean there's in the evening yeah in the evenings late at night it's just and that's only when it's a if there is a if there's a tom that is the absolute boss and he's got lots of hens and he's going to go up to roost and he sees a strutter with hens, a lot of times they will come and check it out. But they're not going to be aggressive. And I've killed some nice ones with my bow at real close range that way. But I've learned the hard way that you you don't have much time you better shoot

um you better shoot like as he's approaching the decoy yeah because you're not gonna get get him i've never had one just thrash the decoy like crazy like they do and like mid-morning you can't get in your head that like i'm gonna have a big show and then sometime later shoot them yeah yeah yep that's the thing i still do hunting turkeys is um now and then maybe not but i usually when i get a shot i take it yeah yeah you know even though you will see where you know they come in and interact with the decoy for a long time like if there's the one i want and i get a shot i'm shooting yeah you know what i mean yeah just rather than expecting that it's going to be this crazy you know fight and breeding decoys and all that kind of stuff yeah i mean and

some of that it's just it's just so weird like i mean and brad and i have joked about like what if you what if humans did exactly the things that turkeys have done? Because we've had times when this whole flock comes in, and there will be, I mean, they're like humping the decoys, and they're fighting the decoys, and they're fighting each other, and they're humping each other, and it's like some of this stuff. And then we'll shoot one, and sometimes we'll use like a magnus bullhead, and it just shoots there it decapitates them instantly um and we feel like sometimes that's a good way to get a quick clean

kill and then like this this turkey's laying there with no head and it's flopping around and other ones are coming in and jumping on top of it and trying to fight it and and um it's just like it's just so bizarre i know i got some bars i could remember that that might have been a little bit of the groove but that's about it yeah it is way different way different than folks and they can fly yeah i had a blacktail buck a few years ago that um came in and gave me a really good shot and i double lunged him and he went short distance and bedded down. And five minutes later, a nice big black-tailed buck came in

and just went right over to that. He just knew right where that buck was just by scent. Really? And kicked him up out of his bed. What? Yeah, kicked him up out of his bed, and then he went and bedded down again, and he went and kicked him up out of his bed again, and I was like, I don't know what to do. And so, yeah, there's a lot of strange things that happen in nature.

And, yeah, I agree. That show, it's like some shows are better than others. A Big Grind of Geese, that's a really pretty show, and it's a really neat thing, and it's worthwhile. And if you don't shoot at all, that's just super fun, and it's really, really neat thing. And it's worthwhile. And if you don't shoot at all, like that's just super fun. And it's a totally successful day. But, you know, when turkeys come in, I agree. If you get a good, quick, clean kill, you know, and that's, and you're there to kill one and, you know, it's like you take, take, take the shot.

You don't have to necessarily see them like beating up a decoy for an hour. Yeah. You know. you don't have to necessarily see them like beating up a decoy for an hour yeah you know our buddy parker hall he thinks that if you kill a turkey over a decoy you go to hell which makes me wonder where's the guy that makes turkey decoys end up in parker hall a special place they got a real hot corner in the basement yeah no it's i've had people say that too they uh that'll be maybe that's dave's book of hunting tidbits called hell's basement yeah well in the old days we couldn't in the old days we would have named this episode hell's basement jay scott's uh ripping what little hair he has left out here and you say you just let him you know cut shoot him as you as soon as

you can because he likes to see him come in. He likes to sit there and watch the show. Yeah. Yeah, he likes to get him when they're leaving. He enjoys the show. I like to get him coming. All right, Dave Smith, thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for having me.

I don't know who told me you don't do podcasts. This made me really eager to have you on. Yeah, you know. It's the guys that really want to do them that made me leery. Now, the people that really want to do them that made me leery. Now, the people that I work with are probably surprised that I even, you know, agreed to it. But I just, you know, things have changed now. I just want to be as cooperative and helpful as possible.

Well, listen, you did such a good job. I've already told Corinne to put you back on the returning guest list. Oh, yeah. You got to join the all-timers, man. You know, bring Brad Cochran and Mike Hallion, Greg Hogan, Scott Sprecher. Those guys, I'm not kidding. They have a lot of information. They're super fun guys. Next time, you guys, I want you to bring your whole team.

Okay. And we're just going to do where they got to think. We used to do these things called hot tip-offs where it was like a showdown of hot tips. We should revitalize hot tip-offs. Yeah, I was watching some the other day. I was watching yesterday. Logan is revitalizing them right now

on the website. That's great. So a hot tip-off. You have a competition. Who's got the hottest tip? You bring all your crew in and you guys could have an hour-long hot tip off where it just goes around the table. And then we'll score it, and we'll wind up with a winner out of the whole, just goes round and round and round and round, and then we'll score the whole performance.

How good are you in the kitchen? The DSD hot tip off. What's that? How good are you in the kitchen? TerribleD hot tip off. What's that? How good are you in the kitchen? Terrible. You're married, right? What's that? You're married or not married?

Yeah. Yeah. You guys will still be fun to play trivia with. You've been married a long time? Yeah. Yeah. I think he'd be good at trivia, man. Yeah, but if you say you're terrible in the kitchen, boy, that's 25% of the questions.

Yeah, but I bet you he's got some hot tips about it being in the kitchen. Like when your wife's gone, go get a frozen pizza or something. It'll be 25 years of spring. And my wife is of Mexican descent. She's a great cook. She doesn't think that she is, but everything she makes is amazing. Was your wife born in Mexico? No, no, she wasn't think that she is but uh she everything she makes is amazing so um was your wife born in mexico no no she wasn't born she's like three generations out yeah i see but 25 years got the whole uh she's got all the traditions down everything about her grandma

didn't speak any english at all and um and where her parents live in eastern washington it's just you know we go over there and make tamales and and it's a lot of culture mexican culture i once traded someone a bunch of um a woman from uh damn it i wish i could remember where she's from. She's from Central America. Either way, they make tamales. Slightly different than Mexican tamales that I know because they would put like dried fruit in them. Uh-huh. Where was she from, man?

Maybe Colombia? That sounds so good. So I gave her a bunch of muskox meat. The deal being that she made tamales with that muskox meat but i got half of the yield which she thought was a screaming deal i thought it was a screaming deal so whatever she made like 20 pounds worth of muskox meat tamales which is a shitload of tamales and then i got half of the take nice Nice. No, it was a phenomenal deal. I had them all lined up like bars of gold in my freezer, man.

But we went through them pretty quick. But they had like dried fruit, which I thought was unusual. Yeah. I'll have to find out what that is. But yeah, our family doesn't do it like that. Just traditional with pork meat and all that. Give me your hottest piece of marriage advice. Give me a hot tip off on marriage advice. i mean i just i don't know i i just feel like i just got so lucky

and i'm just so blessed and everything like that i don't i don't know what i just i think my wife is just the rock of our of our family and um she's just a total sweetheart and and um you know it's like she's the reason though i guess why I don't do very many trips. I feel like I found her sort of late in life, even though we've been married 25 years or whatever. And so I love my home life so much. So it's turned me into a homebody, like steelhead fishing and bass fishing. And a lot of the stuff that I do are stuff that's close close to home because

i like being home yeah eating them tamales and you never know how much time you'll how much time you'll have you know i got some marriage advice to find the right one my buddy tony my buddy tony had this little tidbit one time he said we're he and i are both got in trouble with our wives one time which we didn't even deserve because we had taken all of our kids clam digging. So you think, how could you be in any trouble? Normally, if I take my kids to do something, my wife's very, very happy with me. If they're all gone, there's nothing to complain about. Anyways, on this trip, Tony had his kid in one of those kid carriers on your back,

clam digging, but he didn't tie her in there. He's out in the water and leans over comes right out of that backpack carrier because he was like leaning over fishing around in the water for something anyways on the way home we got pulled over by a cop like next thing you know it's like one in the morning it's just a whole late deal anyways he said to me steve and i and i got yelled at by my wife on speakerphone. He got yelled at by his wife. He said to me, Steve, if we were the way they wanted us to be, they wouldn't like us.

I told my wife, she said, yeah, I would. Yeah, I think that's true. I don't think that's marriage advice. That's just funny. All right. Maybe like a meat't think that's marriage advice. That's just funny. All right. Maybe like a meat eater's guide to marriage advice. I can come up with a couple tips. I don't know about you, Chester.

I've heard that Chester get yelled at eastbound and westbound on the same highway. No, but then he's just got to sing that beautiful song that he wrote to danielle and then he'll make everyone weep and it'll all be forgiven yeah i've been driving down the road with chester he's in all kinds of trouble because he's late from getting home from fishing and i said what are you supposed to be doing when you get home he said going fishing he was late for his second fishing trip because he'd been gone too long on his first fishing trip of the day that's yeah it's always bad when you tell you tell your wife you're going you're going for a half a day and you come home she's like i thought you were going for a half a day and you're like well 12 hours is half a day in chester's defense he was supposed to take his

wife fishing she was pissed that he wasn't home from his other fishing to do that fishing alright thanks for coming on Dave did you like it? thanks for having me I appreciate it did you like it or hate it? I liked it I was kind of stressing it a little bit I didn't sleep much last night don't go on all kinds of other podcasts

well yeah you know what I mean? don't become one of them guys yeah yeah no keep it tight man we'll keep it yeah for sure yeah keep it tight and everyone can find uh dave's decoys at davesmith decoys.com we haven't we'll merge that into the meat eater site at some point soon but right now it's one no i heard he prefers dsd because he's uh he's so modest he doesn't like being such a showboat right decoys that's why he always goes with dsd i'm just i'm just giving the audience the uh url well yeah see the decoys are so good to prefer dsd

i get yeah because he doesn't want to detract from his co-workers efforts by saying dave's yeah yeah that's the thing is like we, and that's, that's one of the things that's, we're having a hard time with that adjustment of, and everyone's having a hard time with that adjustment is at DSC, we've always operated as a group, you know, and made all our decisions as a group and,

and a consensus and, you know, discussing everything. And so there's definitely not one person that is sort of the, you know, the North star of DSD. Cause you didn't flex a lot of muscle. You're so self-deprecating. Yeah, well, I don't know.

I mean, I'm just being real. Like I definitely, you know, I didn't do anything. I mostly just work in my shop, a distance away from the decoy shop, and do clay sculptures and everything. And so, you know, I just surrounded myself with people that are really good at all those other things. And I never wanted to be super involved with all the headaches of the business side of it and stuff like that. And so, um, you know, we're just definitely, we're definitely a team and operate, operate that way and stuff. And so, um, you know, that's take some adjustment for everyone to realize that I'm,

I am not, you know, I am not the, the, the decision maker representative and, you know, of DS of DSD. Well, you just love playing. You didn't name it Dave Smith decoys, which doesn't lend someone to think that, that like when you're talking to Dave Smith, you know. Yeah, I get that. I get that. And again, I, I tried.

You're willing to see that. Yeah. Okay. Well, you guys do make some really, really good realistic decoys. Like the other day when I saw more of that full spread, I was very impressed. Oh, thanks, Chester. I appreciate that. They're good.

We didn't even get into fur trapping. We got to wrap up. We didn't even get into fur trapping. Oh, yeah. Now you just have to come back. Maybe just make a Martin decoy. Oh. to wrap up we didn't get into fur trapping oh yeah now you just have to come back like a martin decoy oh fur trapping is um one of the things that helps me set up ground blinds and tree stands like i think if like if you if you don't have that i think you're you're you know

sadly missing out a tiny little bit on setting oh it's very. We'll save that for the next time you're on. Sounds good. So you'll come on, we'll do a hot tip off with you and your guys. Then you'll come on, we'll talk fur trapping. Sounds great. And then you win trivia. I think I'm going to still beat him. It's not maybe beat him horribly bad.

Alright man, don't go doing a bunch of podcasts now. Yeah. Don't go doing a bunch of podcasts now. Yeah. Don't worry. Don't worry. I wanna see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun. Ride on, ride on, ride on, sweetheart. We're done beat this damn horse to death. Take a new one and ride on.

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