The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 670: The Secrets of Blacktail Deer

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Jim Baichtal of The Blacktail Foundation, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: When you only shoot with a muzzleloader; all the records; the old ass deer bone; the conservation of blacktail deer; the "shirker buck" theory; moon phases; an animal at the edge; timber management and harvest; long days on the hunt for blacktail; how half of the blacktail fawns are eaten by black bears; licking branches; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up, we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men, 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it.

We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade, which is titled The Long Hunters, 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840 by Stephen Rinella. This is 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-L-I-T-E.com. Joined today by Jim Bechtel, who doesn't shoot shit unless he can shoot it with a muzzleloader. I know how to use a rifle. I just choose not to.

When did you quit? 1986. What happened? I decided I wanted to get close with a single shot. But you still get close to the same, you wanted to force yourself to get close to the same shot. What'd you shoot prior to shooting a muzzleloader? I got my dad's 30-06, a 721 that he bought in 1950. Bremington 721.

And now's your gun? I still have it. I still hunt with it. I take my dad with me every year. We go out and do a hunt together and then I put him away and I take the muzzleloader out. So you keep, you house his gun for him. My father's passed away. And so my, I made, I made a promise to him the

day he died, him and I'd go hunting together every year. So you take it out. I take it out and we go hunting together every year. All right. Works. But then other than that, all muzzleloader all the time? I try to. Sometimes I falter.

Some days it's really wet up in Southeast Alaska. Okay. Makes it really hard to do flintlocks and percussion and stuff like that. Yeah. Cause you live in the worst place to be a muzzleloader hunter in the world.

Pretty much. But you know, I figure all those, the people that came before us, the English and the Russian trappers and the natives who got muzzle loaders for straight items and stuff like that, they figured it out. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I use a wool bag. I placed my firearm in a wool bag and, uh, and the wool swells up, keeps the moisture from getting in there. And I think I've had one or two times in 35 years of being up there that that cap hasn't gone off. No kid. Yeah.

No, our friend in common, uh, Jim Heffelfinger said, if you look at the Alaska muzzleloader records, it reads like a Bashtail phone book. That's a great line. That's a great line. And they're all named Jim. So you submit, how many state records do you have? Uh, quite a few.

Yeah. Well, just brag up for me. I asked you, so you're not bragging. I'm just asking the question. I think I have over 30 deer. I have the world record sick of black tail with, for a muzzleloader and number two, somebody's got number three and then I have four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 and a bunch more.

That's incredible, man. And you shoot flintlock or cap? Cap, but I'm experimenting now with flintlock. That's where we've been talking back and forth. And so, uh, because I worked for Alaska Department of Fishing and Game for so many years, the gentleman that was the wildlife biologist, Dave Person, was a master gun builder.

And as a thank you for all the years of darting deer and following deer and stuff, he built me a beautiful, beautiful flintlock. And, uh, I've taken probably eight or nine deer with that flintlock. And, uh, I've got a couple of smoothbore flintlocks that I've, I've killed, uh, black bear and caribou and, and stuff like that with them. So, do you have a fouling piece? I do.

Do you shoot dogs with it? Uh, I have killed four turkeys and it doesn't have a fouling piece? I do. Do you shoot docks with it? Uh, I have killed four turkeys and it doesn't have a choke. And so the best pattern I get is about 15 yards. So I, I set 20 yards as my maximum. I won't shoot beyond 20 yards when I call those birds. Got it. Got to be close. Really close.

Yeah. There's a fouling piece, what you call a shotgun. Yeah. If it was specific to, to just birds, but one of the during my back and forth with Jim and, uh, it makes absolute common sense. So it's not like a big epiphany, but like the, the reason that the round ball and smooth bore stuck around for so long, even when technology was readily available and far surpassed it, is folks just could only have one firearm. So they'd take

a smoothbore 58 caliber Hawken or whatever it got bored out to, and they'd use that for small game, birds. Like whether you're pouring shot down it or jamming a lead down it or. Yep, exactly. So using it for, with one piece of shot for big game, the big, big solid ball, or pouring a bunch of small shot down there. And it gives you a tremendous versatility. I've, I've hunted moose with a smoothbore flintlock and interior and it's a 62 caliber French

fusel fin. So if we would have been French voyagers, we would have been issued this gun. And you take the round ball and I stitched the patch on and I set it down on there and in the morning I would go and hunt moose. And then I reached down and I pulled the round ball out and put shot down and I went down along

the river and shot a brace of grouse down along the river and put my round ball back on and hunted moose all the way back up to camp. Got it. So I was like, super, super, super flexible. Yeah. There's nothing more efficient than that. No. When we were doing all of our research for our

mountain man audio book, we'd read these guys at night would take and at night they would put five buckshot in their gun and then they'd cap it with a, or maybe vice versa. They'd take the rifles and put five buckshot in them and then they'd cap it with a ball. Okay. Now it's their nighttime home defense. Home defense thing? Home defense system.

I'll tell you what, they had, must have been pulling that ball then come morning because years and years ago, years and years ago I was in the interior and I was hunting ptarmigan and I came over a ledge and there was a beautiful bull carib was in the interior and I was hunting ptarmigan and I came over a ledge and there was a beautiful bull caribou 20 yards away and I backed off and I had an ounce and a quarter of shot, number five shot. And I just set a round ball down on top of that and belly crawled forward and shot that caribou.

And I figured out later it about tore my shoulder off because that was like 700 grains of lead in there when you did that. I didn't think about the equal and opposite reaction thing to recoil. I killed the caribou. You did. Yeah. And actually, and I had like four or five pieces of shot in the heart too. It penetrated deep enough. I could have killed him with a shot load. He was really close. You always worked as a geologist. Yep. Where'd you grow up? I grew up around Mount St. Helens country, southwest Washington. We had a small farm there and we had about 120 acres of timber. That's where I disappeared into once my chores were done.

How'd you get into geology? I was a kid, my folks decided we needed to have some kind of a family hobby and they picked rockhounding or lapidary where you go out and dig up petrified wood and agates and jaspers and opals and obsidian and other stuff and fossils and somewhere, I don't know, 11, 12 years old, I got to thinking this can't be random. We're finding this agate here because of a process and we're finding this thunder egg here because of a process and the petrified wood. And basically that's geology.

And so I always knew what I wanted to be. I'm still looking for those answers. How'd you come to be doing it in Alaska? Luck. I grew up listening to my grandfather. My grandfather on my father's side was in Alaska in 1919, 1920 and 21. And then he was back again in 37 through 42.

And I heard all the stories of Alaska. What was he doing? He was a trapper. Uh, he soloed all the way down, uh, from basically, uh, the Yukon. He soloed all the way down the, the Yukon drainage in 1919 and 1920 and ended up in Kotzebue in the winter of 1920, trapping along the Yukon river.

Had a canoe and was by himself going down there. And I grew up listening to all those stories and had a huge fascination. And so in 1990, there was a position opened up with the Tongass National Forest to be a geologist there and I applied for it and luckily got it. Most forest service people kind of come for three or four years and move off on some other kind of

thing. And I fell in love with Southeast Alaska and realized that very little was known about the geology. They had mapped around the shoreline, but they'd never really mapped to the interior of the islands. about the geology. They had mapped around the shoreline, but they'd never really mapped to the interior of the islands.

And then I got into the whole cave and karst management thing up there that there's thousands of caves across vast areas of the rainforest. And there was a thing called the Federal Cave Protection Act. And so you were supposed to protect caves on federal lands.

And the more developed the cave areas were, the bigger the trees were. So they were direct conflict with timber management going on. So I was tasked with going out and finding those caves and mitigating the impacts of any proposed activity. So I got to explore all those woods all over Southeast Alaska. And I just felt, just fell in love with it. Just fell in love with the place and the unknown things of geology, the things that you could map,

the glacial history, the uplift history, uh, the kind of geoarchaeology side of things like where are people on the landscape and how could I help define that. Why is that important to map that sort of stuff? If you have an idea of the geology, it's kind of like a soils map, it's a productivity thing. Where's the vegetation?

What plants are there? Why are those plants there? How did the glaciers interact with the landscape? Why does landscape look like it does? And that's all controlled by the bedrock geology. And Southeast Alaska is bits and pieces of continents that's all controlled by the bedrock geology. And, uh, Southeast Alaska is bits and pieces of continents it's been added on. So it's like this little, uh, pile up of pieces.

I think we call it a terrain wreck. It's terrains are what this was in there. And so the geology is super varied as you kind of move, um, Northeast, Southwest across the island. But as you, or it's similar to move Northeast, Southwest, but as you move towards the East across there, you're just going from terrain, terrain, terrain, terrain, where they all have their blocks

of rock that have a similar geologic history and how they were added onto the continent. So it's, it's, it's a fascinating geology that, that again, the original mapping was around the shorelines and wherever there were mineral deposits found, but kind of the rest of that had not been worked on very much. So I partnered with the US Geological Survey, a woman by the name of Sue Karl and I for 25 years have been trying to fill in some of those holes in the geologic maps and, and get that information out there. You, what you and me were running around.

And I remember you showing me about how the trees grow extra big over the cave networks, but I can't remember why you told, what it was that you told me that. Well, there's, there's two in Southeast Alaska. There's two incredibly productive forest areas. What is a alluvial fan or riparian area down along a stream of gravels, well-drained gravels, but nutrient rich. And the other one's on the carbonates. And so the fractures of the limestone are, are

open down maybe 50 feet, little teeny hairline fractures, and the roots are open down maybe 50 feet, little teeny hairline fractures and the roots can get down into that and they access the non acidic waters then, because the limestone has buffered the rainwater and the organic water that's very acidic. So you have nutrient rich water that's basic in a well drained landscape, much like a gravel pile is well drained, except fluctuates with rivers and streams. And so this is, this is another type of productive landscape. And the other thing is most of our big trees are big spruce and stuff like that.

And the Southeast Alaska have a very shallow root system on top of glacial till. You've seen that. And they fall, when they fall over, you got a 30 foot diameter root mass. That's like 18 inches deep. That always blows my mind when you see that and they tip and you're like, what in the hell is the whole nine two anyways? It just peels away. And then you look and there's a rock sitting there and it's got like a never ending disc

of shit that was a hand deep. A hand deep. It's amazing. And you wonder how it ever stood there anyways. So in the limestone, it can get down in those fractures and it's holding on. And so you'll see, instead of a root ball tip over frequently, you'll see it snapped off 40 feet up when the, when that sail in the top of the tree gets big enough that it can't take the wind

pressure of our storms, it'll snap off instead of turning over the roots because it's still holding so tight. So a lot of the trees grew older and larger. So a lot of the original timber harvest in Southeast Alaska was focused on the limestone areas, which makes total sense. It's the big trees.

I explored those areas, locating the caves and the rivers going underground, the streams going underground and the vertical pits and that kind of thing. But then I also put together expeditions of folks who would come and explore those caves. And we had paleontologists and that, and we basically started. When I got to Southeast Alaska, any published document that you read said we were a blanket of ice to the edge of the continental margin until 10,000 years ago and nothing lived there. And the first thing we did was find a cave full of bones that were 10, 11,

12,000 years old that started challenging that. We kept pushing that back. And so we changed that paradigm through time on when did the ice pull back and what was the environments like and who was living there and stuff like that. What was the old ass deer bone you found? Hekata Island and a cave called Nautilus Cave and what used to be a vertical pit coming

into that cave that had filled with sediment and a little alcove, I found tree, it was leg, leg bones and those were basically 9,200, 9,500 years old somewhere in that vicinity right there. Black-tailed deer. We now know they're black-tailed deer. We didn't know what it was then because we'd

actually found a bunch of caribou bones in the caves, so there were caribou on Prince of Wales Island until 10,500 years ago. But recently working with Charlotte Lindquist and her students back in Buffalo, they did the paleogenetics and it is a sick of black-tailed deer. Pardon me, it is a black-tailed deer. So the first deer to show up, so we have three bones. We have one out of that cave, one out of Xena cave that's 7,800 years old

and a bone out of a shell midden left by natives at a campsite, their waist basically. There was a deer leg bone in there that turned out, I mean, a bone that had been identified as a caribou bone. But what we did, the genetics, it came out as a blacktail bone. Those three blacktail are definitely Sitka black tail, but they contain a little bit of mule deer mitochondrial DNA. Which should be different than now.

Yeah. And so then we've have, we have hundreds and hundreds of deer bones in caves. Can you talk about how those bones get caught in the caves? I mean, you may have the opportunity to go look. hundreds and hundreds of deer bones in caves. Can you talk about how those bones get caught in the caves? I mean, you may have the opportunity to go look, just for people, listen, we're filming our show, Hunting History, we spent a day with Jim in caves. So Jim was able to show me how they function, but can you tell people how the caves trap shit?

And also just to, it'll come out in your thought process, I'm sure. But like when you find a bone in a cave versus like the shell midden bone, there's probably some conclusions that you jump to from one or the other. When you find a bone in a cave, you absolutely don't know how old it is. It, it, they usually turn slightly brown from the tannins and the organic waters of Southeast. You've seen that many times around your place there. But the bone itself, a 20,000 year old bone will look like a hundred year old bone.

You cannot tell by picking up the bone and just looking at it. And, uh, mostly what happens is either a predator was in a dry portion of a cave and brought part of its meal in. Yeah. Or, and a lot of times we have bones in the, in one particular cave that had so many bones.

Uh, it was Arctic Fox bringing bones in from a large predator and, and depositing into caves, or they're a vertical trap. So, um, remember as we came around from the flooded sinkhole, there was that vertical pit right off of the trail. That scared the shit out of me. I mean, we were safe looking at it, but I was like, man, I didn't know there's shit like that around here. We were on that boardwalk. Remember looking down that hole? So that was a hole that was roughly

the size of this room that the entrance was about three feet across. And that was an organic mat. So if we would walk on that, you'd go right through. Well, that's what the dude- You would never know how. On some of that stuff, you would never, if you were just about dicking around, you would 100% walk down in there and just gone.

How many dudes must be laying in those holes? We have, we've actually had a few vertical pits that have a little pile of bones, deer and bear and stuff right where they, one I can think of as 150 feet deep. We called bears plunge because the entrance is about the size of this table, but at the bottom it's a hundred feet in diameter and it just bells out. So when you repel into that, you're like a spider coming down off of a web. And here was this mound of bones at the bottom that had accumulated over several thousand years. What all was in that pile? That was mainly a black bear and deer, but there was a few small rodents and stuff like that.

No people. No, no people in that. So, yeah, it's a, so either a vertical trap or somebody brings it into the cave. They can wash into the cave, but it's a really hard, the bones usually then get washed on through the cave. If they get into a stream course or something like that. Uh, I want to jump out of this a little bit to get to something different.

Um, after you retired from geology after 30 years, right? Yes. And then instead of just kicking it and hunting with your muzzleloader and everything, you got involved, uh, on a volunteer basis with Meal Deer Foundation. I'm actually a contractor for the Meal Deer Foundation. Oh, okay.

But there's also some, there's, there's, there's, I am kind of going out and getting other things. And so I'm not always working for him, but I'm still working for him. Yup. Got it. And in particular, you became like particularly focused on black tail deer. So, uh, Miles Moritty was the CEO for years and, uh, working, and I had, I had started

going down in 2006 and I manned a booth at the hunt expo in Salt Lake City about sick of black tail on the Tongass National Forest, which is kind of funny. I was the geologist representing the Tongass National Forest talking about sick blacktail deer. They weren't sending biologists down there. I went down. And so I kept saying, you know, like in your mission statement, it says, field deer and

blacktail deer in their habitat. That's what your focus is on the conservation of that. And I said, what can we do for Blacktail? And so I was pretty relentless with that for years and years and years. And then Joel took over as CEO three, four years ago now. And he goes, what are we doing for Blacktail deer? And about that time, Steve Belinda, a good friend of mine called and said, it's time to pony up. He knew I just retired. And I said, what's

going on? And he goes, we want to start creating a focus on Blacktail Deer. And I said, I was really enjoying retirement. And I said, I was really enjoying retirement. And I said, but I meant a hundred percent because this is where we've always wanted to get to. And so we, uh, we went to, uh, Leopold, uh, put on, and the Mielder Foundation put on a black tail summit that all of the, uh, agencies and a lot of the forest sent people to, and it was held at Leopold's headquarters

in April of 22. We really realized that the conservation of blacktail is pretty much the same issues from Northern California to Alaska as related to habitat and how man has changed the landscape through timber management. There's different challenges, there's different things, different predation schemes and stuff like that, but the challenges were the same. And so we started putting a much larger focus in that and trying to get more chapters, get chapters established. There was no Mule Deer Foundation chapters up there. established, there was no Mieldeer Foundation chapters up there. And one of the biggest problems I had in Alaska was going into a community and sitting down with a group of

people and the first question was like, well, why does the Mieldeer Foundation want to help us with black tail? So I spent most of my time talking about that and finally get around to substantive things that we could do on the landscape. Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver Trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West

represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous

volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled the Long Hunters 1761 to 1775. So again you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840 by Stephen Rinella. Let's back up to that question though. Why do people think of mule deer and black, like talk about the taxonomy of a black tail. Right? I mean, it's like, they're like not brothers, but cousins, mule deer cousins. They're mule deer cousins. And so it was Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger, who we talked about, did a genetic paper that

showed that starting about at the beginning of the last series of ice ages, the great last ice ages, two and a half million years ago, probably because of snow levels and glaciers in the Cascade coastal mountain range there of Washington, Oregon, Idaho down to California. It separated whatever was a proto deer from what we now know as a mule deer. And in coastal refugia or coastal areas, black tail developed separated from those mule deer. And so they got separated by ice. They got separated by ice and time.

And they also was a slight divergence as you move north through Oregon and Washington away from California. So if I remember that paper, right, uh, that the Californian black tail are a little closer to mule deer and are distinguishable. And, but they're, they're still Columbia blacktail. So that's one of the separate subspecies.

And then Sika blacktail exists only from halfway up the British Columbia coast through Prince Rupert and then into the islands of Southeast Alaska and then they'd have been translocated in 1924 up to Kodiak and several places around Southeast Alaska. And so there weren't any on Kodiak before. But they're native to Prince William Sound. No. They're not native to Prince William Sound?

No, they were translocated to Prince William Sound. They were translocated to Yakutat. They were all the whole Prince William Sound area. And there were several other places they tried to plant sick of blacktail that didn't take. So what was the northernmost, if you go back, I don't know what the hell, 200 years, whatever,, some timestamp 200 years ago, what was the Northern most sick of black tail deer? It was probably in the Juneau areas. So I've been telling people the wrong thing. Yeah.

So Gus Davis, the front range of Glacier Bay national park around maybe up towards Skagway and Haynes a little bit up in there. I'm not sure how far the historic range was. I know they were on Admiralty, Chichagof, and Baranof Islands and around- They were there naturally. Naturally around there. Why do they look like,

so why do they have such a vibe, like they kind of got to look like a little whitetail deer kind of, that's your bad ass. I love this. No, but what is it like? Why are they, why are the sick of black tails look different? Why do they, cause you look at them and you look like they, they look like they got some kind of like a white tail deer influence, but that's not true.

You're comparing them to a Colombian. Yeah. They just like their antler configuration. I think it's environmental. I think it was that tight coast range forest that they evolved in. And so overall body weights, they're not much different than Columbia and some of the other stuff. So like I did a study with Alaska department of vision game where I waged stuff, um, with the state over a two year period, and it was nothing to have a sick of black tail come in field dressed

at one 45 to one 65. And there were a few big outliers. So I mean, substantial deer. They're just a lot shorter and bulkier. Oh, little squatty little suckers, man. And their tail is not ropey at all. It is more white, a Veed with a black top and that white. And they'll use it to flag just like a white table flag.

Of course, it's not quite as dramatic because it's not as long. And they're just, I think they're the perfect rainforest animal because their antlers are probably more close in because of that vegetation and stuff they evolved in. Yeah. So it's not because of white-tailed deer love making. It's just like it's convergent evolution. Right. Rather than diverge or whatever. Yeah, there was a Val Geist years ago suggested that the black tail were a function of

mule deer and white tail breeding or something like that. Yeah. You want me to tell you the whole idea that he had? It was that, do you remember this? You just offered this up, not me. I don't remember this. It was that, like, there was some period in time he proposed this. So Yanni's a big Val Geist disciple,

because Yanni likes his shirker buck theory. Val Geist proposed this idea, he's still alive or he passed away recently. He passed away. Yeah. That white tails, white tailed deer have been down in like the Southeast for millions of years, Southeast US. And at some time climatic conditions were such that white-tailed deer spread all the way across the continent, okay? And then the middle dried out

and then you developed mule deer and whitetails. Then something happened and all of a sudden these whitetails came back out, made love with these mule deer and somehow, maybe I'm screwing it up, and that produced like a black tail. It was elaborate. Yeah.

It was elaborate. You're not far off. I actually had beers with Val one time and he described it. And he, in later years, he through genetic analysis, he said, yeah, I had that wrong. Oh, he did. Yeah. Okay. Do you know what his shirker buck theory is? Yanni will tell you. No. You don't know? No. I think he said he applied it to any servant, but that a buck, there are certain bucks that he deemed as shirkers because they would shirk the responsibility

of mating or rutting with the plan, with the long-term goal that if they shirked for three, four, five years, that the year that they decided to enter in, their body mass and health and antlers would be so much bigger than any of the competition that they could then dominate the breeding period and thus spread their genes across the whole pool.

He's like, I'm gonna lay low for a couple of years. When I come down, I'm coming down. That's right. I'm gonna be bigger and better than everybody. Yeah, it'd be like if you never went to the bar and you just worked out and did skin treatment. Did you need drinking? No, you just did like skin treatments and worked out

and worked on your hairstyle until you were- Read a lot of books. And you were ready. Yeah. And then one night you go to the bar. Hmm. Just witty, witty and pumped. It just lay waste.

No, he didn't share that with me. Heffelfinger finds that theory, it's insulting to Heffelfinger. I know it is. I could see it too. Ask him how to pronounce coos or cows. Oh, real quick on Heffelfinger, I said we were somebody somebody

somebody in our camp was using a app to predict deer movement sure and Was saying that this app was so Good that it could be within minutes that when it said excellent time for movement You just look at the guy watch and just start looking across the hillside and here they come. I didn't see it proved to be so good but I asked Heppelfinger I said because he was talking about these pages of information that he produces about myths around wildlife. I said I said do you have anything about moon or lunar tables affecting deer movement do you have a page on that?" He goes, no, because that would be real short. It'd just be one word. No.

That's one of my favorites. I mean, I joke about the one that red squirrels bite nuts off big squirrels, but the moon thing is just never, you're never gonna convince people otherwise. In fact, Mark Canyon, you present all the evidence to Mark Canyon. Like Mark Canyon's, I don't know if he is now, Mark Canyon traditionally was a big moon guy. And you present all the evidence to Canyon. Radio collar data from deer

that don't change their groove because of the moon. Deer car collision data that doesn't show differences because because the moon, dear car collision data that doesn't show differences because the moon like on harvest data, like on and on and on and on. And in Canyon, um, he one day says to me, well, if it affects it by a minute science, like I'm paraphrasing, he's like, science might not be able to capture. Or they capture, but they say that but to me that minute matters a lot.

Cause it could be the last minute of daylight. There's also the, what question are you asking or solving for? Because Jim went on to say, he's like, now, if the moon's bright enough, deer may bed in a more open area or feed in a open area at night because there's increased light. He's like, but that's not the moon phase so much as it is a photovoltaic bioluminescence, I think, is what he was saying.

It's like if it's brighter, they're more active. I'm like, well. We should do a podcast. Now Jim's modding the whole damn water up. We need to get back to Jim here, but we should do a podcast, Corinne, and bring in Mississippi Deer Lab. They just recently processed a bunch of caller data

speaking to, you know, because so many people like these moon believers were just continually emailing in and just being like, yeah, but you guys aren't asking the right questions. You guys aren't, you know, you're looking at your data, but you're not aligning the red moon with the blue moon and the wind and the underfoot and the barometric pressure. And you need to look at that specific point they're like all right why don't you

guys all tell us we'll do a big survey and tell us exactly what we should look for in our data and then we'll do it and we'll look for it and they did it and of course the conclusion is that it doesn't matter can you guess produce this segment segment we should do a whole podcast guess produce the whole episode sure okay I'll help Corinne with it I don't think she wants me to take over if you like a be like a internship interning at your old job back in the saddle and it'll be the episode back to. All right, back to black tail deer.

Our black tail deer don't even know there's a moon. One last thought on the moon thing. For a while, what I thought was this. For a while, I thought when it's bright out, you see a bunch of deer because it's bright out and maybe that's where it came from. Meaning when it's pitch black black you can't see shit. When it's moonlit, you're like, oh look at that deer. Right?

Like picture walking out when there's snow on the ground and a full moon and you're walking out. You're also aware of all kinds of stuff you didn't know was going on. Yeah, there's no such thing as end of shooting light. No. All right. Back to black tail deer.

So Columbia black tail, let me ask you this question about black tail deer, because this is something we've mused about a fair bit. I've shot one Columbia black tail deer in California. Dude, I mean, it looks like a mule deer. And I've often talked about, just went and talked about the sort of arbitrary nature of certain classifications of wildlife. I've talked about how according to the Boone and Cocker Club, if a deer is standing on the west side of I-5 in California, he's a blacktail. If he were to run across I-5, he's now a mule deer.

But we have to be able to do a better job than that, nowadays, right? Like, what is a Columbia black tail and what is a mule deer? Actually, Booted Crocket is offering genetic tests that you can send in your deer and get that answer. To get the real answer. And Jim and, Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger came up with a percentile graph looking at deer samples that they had and they cut it off at 0.9 percent. In other words, if it's over 10 percent mule deer, they're not calling it a

Columbia blacktail. So are they going to go in and start kicking all kinds of, uh, mule deer out of the Columbia blacktail record book? No, because it depends on location. So the record book is a line that comes down. It doesn't always follow I-5. It takes off on one meridian and comes down to through Bedford, Oregon and down in there. Um, but there has to be a bunch of mule deer in the club.

Like there's gotta be a bunch of top end. Yeah. There's gotta be some fakes. There's gotta be people that have record Columbia blacktails that they just shot a mule deer that happened to be on the wrong side of the road. Yeah. And we, as, when I grew up in Washington, we used to purposely go up and we called them bench leg muleys.

They, they were these, we would shoot them and they'd field dress it like 225 to 240. They were these beautiful blacktails, little teeny racks and stuff like that with huge bodies. And we went up into the cascades and targeted them. I mean, that's where we hunted because they were much larger deer. And you're saying that those were black hunted because they were much larger deer. And you're saying that those were blacktails or they were mule deer?

They were cross. Okay. I'm kind of a cross in there. Got it. But then a Sitka blacktail is like much more distinct, right? Sitka blacktail. Because they don't have any exposure. Like Sitka blacktails don't bump up against any other kind of deer.

Yes, they do. Oh, they do. Okay. There's mule deer moving into Skagway. And in 1991, I took a photograph of a mule deer doe with a fawn inside of Alaska up by hider. And so there is the possibility of some contact. There's mule deer just outside of Prince Rupert. So they could come down with a Skeener River in there and come out of the interior. And so I think that's probably the first batch of deer

that made it out to Prince of Wales Island. Probably it had some kind of a contact like that and interbreeding between mule deer and that isolated population that became sick of black tail. That's why they identified mule deer in that genome when they, in those three oldest bucks that we have. You gotta realize we have a really small sample

size and that the researchers say that it's, you know, we're basing this on just a handful of samples, but that all of the older ones were very distinct, that they had a little bit of mule deer in them. So is it fair, like I know we were talking about Val Geist's theory, sort of like pre-genetics theory, but is it right that at a time you just had these little pockets of deer that were bound in by glaciers and they survived along the Pacific coast. That's what the idea is. That, that was kind of a, what they referred

to kind of like a chain of pearls of, of habitat that wasn't overridden by ice. That if it wasn't so severe, if the winter's so severe that they, and they could have existed there, you got to realize too, we had much lower sea levels. Our sea levels were 400 feet less than they are today. So there was a lot of land between 17,000 and about 13,000 that was, uh, exposed on the shelf out there.

So, and you know, and so we have land ice interactions with the weight of the ice pushing down on the land and the land rebounding back up. And so there were some of that stuff going on. And that's how. Which means these deer could have existed in a landscape that we basically can't see at, at all. Like it could have changed dramatically and

they could have evolved to be like their, uh, high alpine tundra environment could be closer to what they evolved in as in flat, um, brushy in areas versus any, any of the stuff that we hunt them on in the slopes, like the rocky mossy dark timber terrain. in the slopes, like the rocky mossy dark timber terrain. Absolutely. In fact, it looks like this, according to the, uh, I've done a lot of coring with palinologists and links and looking at also at the sphelio thems in the caves, hold a record of climate, that somewhere at about 11 to 10,000 years ago, Somewhere at about 11 to 10,000 years ago, a very dry spruce and hemlock forest started to appear on the landscape, replacing a herb dominated tundra that had willows and altars

around stream courses and stuff and in disturbance areas. You start seeing that and that fires were on the landscape in southeast Alaska till about 7,800 years ago. And then it got, then you start seeing cedar and cabbage and sphagnum and stuff dominate the pollen record. And the wetter climate plants start showing up. So the rainforest that we all know and love today and, and hunt it up there is only maybe about 6,000 years old.

That's relatively young. Those, those great big red cedars are by your place there, they may be the 10th generation on the landscape kind of a thing. When you think about that. So it's, it's been a really dynamic vegetation change over a relatively short period of geologic time. And the topography, those humps that we fish halibut off the coast on were

Alpine ridge tops when the sea level was lower. I love that stuff. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So what, what does that mean? Like the overall picture of blacktail deer conservation, right? that stuff. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So what does that mean? Like the overall picture of blacktail deer conservation, right? So just, just as an example, we, this would be months ago, right? We talked about, um, Arizona offering, uh, moose lottery draws to hunt moose and part of their reasoning is like moose aren't they're a remnant of a remnant population in Arizona they're they're

here right now but long term they're they're not gonna be here more than likely is one of the the arguments in regards to black tail deer when they're in a such a You know geologically speaking like a very rapidly changing ecosystem Are they adapting well to that ecosystem? Is there anything that says there were a hell of a lot more black tail in? when a Different environment was more prolific What kind of where are we at? in when a different environment was more prolific, kind of where are we at?

The biggest thing that controls sick of black tail populations in my, not that predation doesn't, but it's bad winters. A bad winter can do more to wipe out a population. 2006 and seven on Admiralty Island and at Bayhuna, we lost like 85 or 90% of the deer. Uh, I was working with Dr. Sophie Gilbert on her, uh, PhD and we had a bad winter on Prince of Wales Island in 2011, uh, at

Control Lake Junction right there where you split to either go to Thorn Bay or go north. There was five feet of snow May 1st. It was horrible. I followed those fawns that year. She went into the year, that went into the winter with 50 fawns on the collar. We came out with three.

So we basically lost a whole cohort of age class because of that bad winter. So I think about the little ice age. The little ice age ended what, 300 years ago. There might not have been as many deer on the landscape. There's maybe more deer now than there was 300 years ago. And what was the winter's like coming out of glaciation, that as glaciers were more prominent and stuff, even though we were in a wetter climate from 6000 to the present, those first 5000 years the sick of black tail

may not have been prolific on the landscape as they are today. And I think that timber management when it was super active and there was still a lot of good habitat left, was creating all that forage. Of course, that forage wasn't available in a bad winter when those clear cuts get buried. So I have seen in just the 30 some odd years I've been on Prince of Wales, I believe the population of Sitka Blacktail on Prince of Wales Island is half of what it was when I got there in 1990. And that's not a result of predation in my opinion. It's a result of now all those older clear cuts have grown up and there's no forage.

It's what we call stem exclusion, that there's no light gets to the forest floor. It grows mosses and lichens and mushrooms. That was gonna be a question of mine. Earlier you mentioned timber management. Generally is it good for blacktails? As long as you maintain what they need to survive in a bad winter, they need to,

so they're, they're an animal of the edge, like all deer and they'll, they bed on their little knobs and stuff like that. And when it starts getting snowy and stuff, they, they need to be able to access food. So they might be even on a steep slope with a modest forest on there. You still got a lot of canopy interception because of the angle of the way the trees interlock and they're getting around fine.

When the snow depth gets higher than their brisket. So basically on a sickle blacktail, that's eight or higher in about 18 inches. They need to be able to get to someplace to eat. So you have to have corridors for them to get to some place to eat. So you have to have corridors for them to move either laterally or vertically, and you have to have something for them to go to that's got thermal cover and food. So the mosaic that's been created by past forests, the challenge is going into that habitat and where should we be

doing improvements and stuff like that. And that's what we're hoping to focus on is, is where are those, where should we put those improvements on the landscape to do the biggest bang for the buck as it was? Hmm. Damn thought about that. Oh, go ahead.

For the deer. So can you walk through what just as part of a broader conversation about timber management and harvest, can you walk through the sort of lifespan of a clear cut? Only in terms of deer, because I've watched them where they're fresh, nothing's really going on.

A couple years into it, they start getting loaded up with deer and I've been fortunate now to see one get to the point where it's, there's nothing living in it. So lay out like what it does as it grows. Cause a lot of guys think the answer to more deer is more clear cuts. And where does that get complicated? The food that's produced is incredible. The amount of forage that's in those clear cuts at about year three, three and four and five. Crazy nuts.

Like the blueberry. So the primary thing that the deer eats are the vaccinium. So there are your huckleberries and your blueberries and especially the red huckleberry. They love the red huckleberry and some of the leaves. They're eating the leaves.

They're eating the leaves. They're eating the leaves. huckleberries and your blueberries, and especially the red. Huckleberry, they love the red huckleberry and some of the leaves and twigs and stuff right at the very end of the new growth. And you've seen that stuff in the clear cuts up there where it's browsed back to where it's a brush, you could hardly push your legs through.

So you start out, we don't have any of that for about two years. Okay. And then that finally starts really taking over. And then, so you got from year, let's say year three to about year 10 or 12, it's doing pretty good. And now your trees are getting up to the point that they're starting to shade out more patches and stuff, but there's still a lot of forage in

between. Mm hmm. point that they're starting to shade out more patches and stuff, but there's still a lot of forage in between. That continues to close in. So the bigger the trees are, they get the less forage there is in that vegetation. So you, and then you start getting maybe a little more salmon berry and stuff in there.

And, and depends on there and depends on the site. It depends on how much alder's in there. There's a lot of variables. We'll kind of do generalities. Forest Service historically has gone into the stands. So I'd say by year 15, it's starting to get pretty closed in. You're starting to lose your forage.

But of course a clear cut is not ubiquitous. Some of it regenerates really well and some of it regenerates more poorly. So there's places to eat out in there. Then the forest service goes in, excuse me. Somewhere between year 16 and year 20 and pre-commercially thins. So they, there's so many stems per acre come

back under natural regeneration that they need to drop that down to a certain spacing because of over-competition by the trees that are growing back. And you've seen this, they go in and they fall those trees and your slash load is enormous. It can be 10, 12 feet deep. It releases sunlight gets to that and the vegetation responds, but the deer

can't access that under that slash. And if you're wondering listener, neither can a hunter. It's not fun to walk through. You can't go through that with a D8 cat. It is amazing stuff. And besides the fact, because that was commercially thinned, you've got all of the, usually about 12 to 24 inches high, the bases of the trees that they cut, like Pungy stick sticking up through that stuff.

So you fall through that. If you're up walking on that mess and you fall down, you got to watch where you land, uh, anyhow, but deer deer don't access that, uh, that if you're up walking on that mess and you fall down, you gotta watch where you land. Anyhow, but deer don't access that. Forest Service has identified certain trails and left unthin strips through some clear cuts to allow for deer movement vertically, at which they use sometimes.

If they were well-placed spots, the deer continue to use. If they were, if they were well placed spots that deer continue to use. If they were using them in the original clear cut, they use them post, post commercial thinning. Then 30 years in that's growing back shut again. And then that continues to get less and less and less light to the fours four. That slash starts to rot less and less and less light to the forest floor, that slash starts to rot and break down and you've got all of the, then it's usually like maybe 18 inches thick with just

the bowls of the trees that were originally fell in there that might still, but then they won't support your weight, but they're up in there. But by that time there's no forage until that stand gets up a hundred years old or something like that and starts to naturally select and wind starts punching holes through it and you start to get some light filtering down in around the sides you get light coming in maybe that's doing pretty good but there's a there's at least a period there of, you know, between 30 and a hundred, 150 years that there's just not a lot of forage for deer in that piece, unless it's managed, unless you go in and open that up.

God, that doesn't speak well for the deer hunting around my little spot. No. So I got an 80, 90 year dry spell coming up. Was, was. Actually, actually what I, what I did years ago is I saw this coming. I mean, it was the wave of green that was

going to be there and I stopped hunting any managed areas and I started moving, uh, out into the unharvested areas and learning how to hunt that. Yeah. Because I knew this was coming. I mean, it was, and so what's happened. My, you wanted to step outside of the, the, the, the clear cut system.

Right. And good Lord, I have killed hundreds of deer in harvested areas. When, when they're productive and it's crazy, we used to go into clear cuts in the early nineties and you'd blow out a deer call and 40 deer would stand up. It was, it was totally different than you have

today. And it was, there was, you virtually went out and selected what size of buck you wanted kind of a thing. It was a of a thing. That was, I told it everything. Yeah. Alpine areas you were talking about when we were first doing that in the eighties or nineties, it was nothing to crawl up onto a ledge and stop and glass 60 deer.

And like half of those would be bucks. Wow. It was amazing. With so much of the island that hasn't been logged, or just not even that island that you happen to live on, but all through Blacktail deer range. Okay. Yep. A lot of it hasn't been logged.

Oh, no. You've got big wilderness areas. So why are Blacktail numbers down? No, they're down in unit two. They're down where you and I both have explored. And you think that is because all those old clear cuts have entered the shitty period. That's right. And, but unit four, uh, so Admiral Tchitjikov,

Baranoth Island, they're doing really good. They haven't had a bad winter since 2011 that the deer population is going nuts and they're starting to get age class on bucks. I'm seeing four points being shot out of Sitka, which I'd never seen before. They haven't had a bad winter since 2011. The deer population is going nuts and they're starting to get age class on bucks. I'm seeing four points being shot out of Sitka, which I'd never saw before. So they're doing good.

Unit three, which is Kiuu, Mitkoff and Kupernoff Island. 1972 was a killing winter. There was six feet of snow on the beach June 1st in 1972. They stopped the hunts in Unit 3 for years and years and years, decades, and started it back up for a two, one week and then a two week period where you're allowed to take one buck. Those deer now are really rebounding. And there's a camera trap thing going on right now out of Petersburg and Wrangel,

maybe not Wrangel, maybe Wrangel, that's being conducted by the state. And the deer numbers are really up in Unit 3. Ketchikan is responding and all of that area around Ketchikan is responding really well with deer numbers. So the only place that the deer numbers are down really is unit two on Prince of Wales Island. And that's not ubiquitous as you move south. So if you get down south at Craig and you move down Island and stuff and some of those rebarter areas, that's warmer and they have less effects of snow down there and stuff. And so there's areas that are doing a little bit better. Then there's pockets up in the, I kind of hunt mainly the north end of Prince of Wales

and central to north, actually I hunt a lot in central, and there's pockets in there that have higher deer numbers and so it's not all been cut and it's not all gloom and doom but it's definitely different just in my experiential time being on the island it's definitely different and it has been partially due to the state of Alaska having to walk a very fine line there for a number of years while the wolf was being suggested to be listed and limiting the amount of trapping that could go on for wolves. But the bottom line is I believe we all agree here that if you have great habitat and your habitat is functioning really well, it can take the pressure of predation.

And right now we have a compromised habitat because of past management. Not so much as past management, it's just right now we have not transitioned at all to a second growth harvest economy on the forest. Tell me what that means. We are and we're not cutting second growth. We're not cutting, we're not going into those stands, commercially thinning those stands or doing patchwork or small clear cuts or we're just not cutting those trees yet.

Some of them are ready to harvest now. There's rules on how you can harvest, but most of it's gonna reach critical mass in like 2030 and 2033, that there's gonna be a bunch of stuff that could be ready to harvest. The problem is there's not the infrastructure to do manufacture of

the wood on the island right now. The one large mill that's there really doesn't want to do anything with second growth. He's tooled for old growth. And you have to have different saws and different processes and stuff like that to be... Karen, my wife, works on biomass. Nobody is... There's only one place doing biobricks on the island. You could be taking all of the slashing of the non-merchantable trees and grinding that up and making biofuels out of it.

Biobrick, biopucks, some kind of log or something like that, or wood pellets. That infrastructure is not in place, so the only market is the export to Asia. For the little shit. For the young growth that could be harvested. And there's been a couple of young growth sales, but mostly it all was exported to Asia.

What's the situation, like go way down to California, what's the landscape look like right now? I mean, where do black- blacktail deer stand down there? I am by far no expert in the Columbia blacktail in Washington, Oregon and California. I will tell you from what we learned from that summit in Oregon, and I'm gonna, I won't do California because I don't have enough knowledge, but what I picked up from the wonderful folks at Oregon Department of Fish and Game, and they took us out on field trips,

there's a lot of that as a checkerboard of ownership and Southern Oregon, Central Oregon and stuff within the Blacktail home range. And so you have timber industry blocks next to state blocks or BLM blocks. And if they want to do a habitat enhancement project or something on those, a block next to it is being intensely managed to produce second growth wood for, for lumber.

And so the challenges are in the land ownership makeup with the Pacific Northwest. And I'm going to, I'm going to adventure to guess that that slops over into Northern California. Like it makes it hard to have a cohesive plan. Cohesive plan. Um, it also makes it hard when they're, they're trying to get, of course, I guess this is across everything is how do you do population estimates

of a rainforest deer? You can't fly over. They don't have winter ranges where they congregate and stuff like that. So doing population estimates on the landscape. Down in Oregon they were using deer pellet DNA and dogs to locate the piles of turds out in the clear cuts. And so they had a contractor out there picking up samples using the dog to find where the

deer had pooped, why it was feeding out there and then samples using the dog to find where the deer had pooped, why it was feeding out there and then doing a population estimate. In Southeast Alaska, Todd Brinkman developed this. He's a professor at University of, at Fairbanks up there, University of Alaska. And he developed a way of doing DNA. So he did transects. He did 1200 meters, one meter either side. He went and removed all poop from that. And then he started running that transect and picking up fresh pellets.

And from that, you can get individuals and sex off of that. And after you do that time and time and time again through seasons, you can start to get an idea of how many deer are on the landscape, what the demography is, whether how many males per female, a hundred females and stuff like that. And that's the only way we've been able to do

population estimates. They've, they're trying some right now, the one I was talking about, I think it's at Petersburg, they're trying to use both deer pellet transects and trail cameras to see if they could come up with a population estimate on the landscape. So it's really hard to estimate just how many deer are out there. What might be what might be black tails per square mile in southeast Alaska? I've heard things of 12 to 20. And that's just more than I would have figured man. Yeah, that's that seems positive.

Because holy shit, can you go a long time and not see one? They're sneaky little guys. Yeah. I, you know that and 20 might be winter range where they get a little more compressed. Yeah. a little more compressed and stuff. So, um, there's definitely areas that it's not 12 to 20. Oh yeah.

Like those areas where within a hundred yards, you're crawling as flat as you can on your belly to get under a tree. And then you're also 15 feet above other trees that are tipped over those areas. Might be a little hard for deer to travel. Hard for us to travel. It is, it is probably the most challenging landscape that I have ever traveled.

I have a particular place that I like to hunt that's super hard to get to. And when you get off on the beach to gain 1200 feet in elevation, a mile and a quarter from the beach, I've never done it in under six hours. Oh, that's misery. So what's optimal or in is there an optimal considering just like the huge variance of optimal habitat density? I think you're probably in that 12 to 15 range, something like that.

But they get, I mean, they get, when you get into even yet today, when you get into really good, uh, Alpine habitat, you may have 25 deer per square mile, but that's just a seasonal thing. Yeah. And then they, as the snow comes and fills that up, they start moving down that slope. They get into those crumholed trees where you can never find them just below the beautiful

vegetation in the alpine. And so I've got a theory that every piece of alpine across the landscape, I know, every piece of subalpine, because alpine is going to define, that's those true highest peaks. But all those little bus gag ridges have the highest point on that ridge that's got the best forbs and stuff that's around. And I think that the best buck of those watersheds goes to the best forage every year, and that's where you're going to find them. That every ridge has that spot. The best buck is on the best spot. Just like the best bear goes to the best fishing hole.

You know, that that best buck knows where that best stuff is. And that's the theory that I apply. And in fact, I'm not hunting traditional alpine much anymore. I'm kind of hunting those lower ridges and stuff and finding those little pockets that's going to hold two or three really good cracker jack bucks. I want to get back to conservation work but real quick. What percentage of the bucks you killed you call in and what percent do you creep up on? 50-50. And how you creeping up on them? Just creeping? Alpine mostly. Yeah. Or dumb luck. No I'm talking those low nasty

musket ridges. How do you hunt them? Hike up, put a tent up, because if it's nice weather, because we're not generally up there when it's really lousy weather, by seven o'clock in the morning those deer are in the timber. You've got between four 30 in the morning and seven o'clock in the morning, that's your window to get success. If you're not there, it's not going to, if you're starting out at the truck at four 30, you're not going to be there at seven.

You've got to be there when they get up. At four 30. They're already out feeding. Yeah. And what I usually, I usually find them, they're either bedded right on the edge of the timber, kind of chewing their cud and thinking about the great night they had out feeding. Yeah. And what I usually, I usually find them, they're either bedded right on the edge of the timber, kind of chewing their cud and thinking about the great night they had out there forging on those forbs and they're just taking those last few things before the sun gets too warm.

And then they've drift back into the timber. And so I usually hunt those edges at bedding areas that I know around those upper level Muskeg, you know, like 23 to 2600 foot elevation ridges. Do you get an evening period of movement as well? If you have an overcast day, yes. Full moon. No, not full moon, which we never see. No, because I have, I go up with my tent and I stay there and I glass and I don't see anything before I go to bed. Interesting.

And bed then at those times. So our season opens up the 24th of July. So from the 24th of July through August up there, I'm up in those things and hell, it's light till 11, 1130 or something like that. And I'm not seeing those deer. And I'm not seeing those deer and I wake up in the morning and they'll be in the meadows. Interesting because knowing that most of these deer get up every four to six hours, right? Yep.

To do some sort of feeding, moving around, they must be then doing that down in the timber where you just can't see them. They've got to be. Yep. Yeah, you just, I always take something good to read because you're going to have long days up there. You're just not going to have, there are some places I've found patches of snow and stuff like that where they'll go out and dig holes and they'll bed in the patches of snow. If you've got a snow that persists, but the last few years, since 2011, we haven't had snow in those. So it just hasn't been there. Earlier you talked about starting the Blacktail Deer Foundation, right? That's what it's called? Yeah, so we actually hadn't got to that. We were going towards that. We actually hadn't got to that. We were going towards that.

Is that what, we'll get to it, but you'd mentioned it. And you'd said that the Mule Deer Foundation had looked for a long time and they hadn't been doing black-tailed deer conservation work. If I had to take a guess, like a stab at why, I would picture that if you came to me and said, what can we do to improve mule deer habitat and mule deer numbers?

I feel like you'd have a, you'd really quickly generate a list of projects. Meaning, well, this place, we have a huge amount of highway deer collisions. This place, they like to move from this mountain range down into this sage flat, but there's a bunch of fences and developments that are impeding the movement so we can do some micro work

to help the deer in that area. Or in this little basin, some well-timed predator control would help in May when they're dropping fawns, right? And you can kind of go and do these little distinct projects that improve mule deer

in these funnel points or these focal areas of activity. But then you go and you look at this just seemingly never-ending sea of timber that's very hard to access, very hard to tell what's going on. And someone says, well generate me like a chore list for how to help black tales.

I feel like you'd be like, pray for weather. Do you want me to like, what do you, like where would you even put money if you had it? Right? That would be my explanation of why no one's doing anything on black tales. Because like, how do you, where do you begin? I think that there was a lot of truth to that. I think you'd hit the nail on the head and you know, you've got to look at, it is absolutely

quality of habitat driven. If there is a lot of places out there, we don't need to do anything. The habitat is just fine. But because of past timber management and in Washington, Oregon, land ownership changes and stuff, but I'm thinking I'm very Southeast Pacific. We have native lands, a lot of timber harvest on native lands and forest service lands with a lot of harvest on there. And all of that has grown back into a dense forest with no forage under it.

I think we have unlimited opportunity. But where to do it on that? So you have this that's going to get the best return to those deer. So anything you do in opening it up and creating forage, deer are probably going to find it and use it. But there's better places on the landscape to do it. And right now we're in the process of looking at that whole thing called Southeast Alaska Past Timber Harvest of X-Age and where should we focus the Tongass National Forest is going through a forest plan revision. We're looking at where should we focus our efforts.

If we only have a small amount of money coming in and we only are gonna be able to do so much per year, where should we go first and why? Okay. And so that, those are the challenges that we're looking at, right? We actually, there's a contract existing out there right now where we've got, uh, it's a GIS, uh, biology ex or, uh, exercise to take a look at that landscape, taking in LIDAR, taking in slope aspect, uh, conductivity

with existing habitats that's out there, uh, plan projects, where roads, where can we access? Now, one of the things that, uh, at least the Blacktail deer foundation has looked at too, is if we do a treatment out there, if we create forage for deer and deer get back on the landscape, are those deer going to be accessible for hunters? Can, are they going to be proximal to a road or

can they walk in easily into that? Um, if you're going to put deer on the landscape, it'd be nice to know that that would also create additional opportunity to put meat in your freezer. The people on the Island that I live, Prince of Wales, they rely on deer in their freezer. And this is the first time in the last couple of years I'm hearing people that haven't been finding the deer they normally would have to put meat in their freezers. So this is serious stuff, especially as prices go up. So what would be a thing you would do if you identify, is this part of the project

you're working on where you're running all those cameras? No. But the camera thing started out with, uh, Sophie Gilbert and I had an idea. So the forest service would go in in the past and they would log most of a drainage, but they would leave where you'd have a huge bunch of creeks coming down and alluvial fans, they would leave those as a leaf strip in between clear cuts. Then they come back and they fell, they did the pre-commercial thinning and created the slash that was 10, 12 feet deep. And so the only vertical movement that could go on was in those leaf strips in between

the clear cuts. So the deer were squeezed into narrow slots. Okay. So we had control areas and so we had 20 control area cameras and 20 leaf strip cameras. And we started that and then they went in and they wanted to harvest in there, so we had to move. So I moved over to where I'm at now. And so at that time, Dr. Sophie Gilbert was working for the University of Idaho in conjunction with Todd Brinkman up at Fairbanks at the University of Alaska.

And we were trying to look at deer movement. And I had an idea and a concept in my brain, my working thesis was, as it greened up in the spring, the deer were down in the lower elevations and they slowly moved up as it greened up and they finally got up to the alpine when the forbs came out and they foraged up there. Then as it started to snow, they moved back down in the landscape. And I started monitoring these cameras in 2018. So I've got 26 cameras out there right now. That's anything but the truth. The does and fawns above the lower elevation valley floor, bed 500 to 800 feet above the valley floor, and they come

down to feed daily in the dark usually, almost always doctrinally, and not always for the does, and they move back up as the sun comes up in the morning. I do see the bucks and velvet as they're developing antlers will be milling around down feeding in the bottom and then they go up, which I'm assuming they go up into that better forage up in the higher elevation because I don't see them for a long time until rut. So I didn't know there was a daily vertical movement of deer on the landscape.

They're climbing five, 800 feet every time they want to eat. Yes, sir. And you could almost set your clock by it. They're so nocturnally driven. And then as it comes into October, about on where I have my cameras. This changes so as you move north in the Tongass, Petersburg and Wrangel, they run 12, 14 days before Prince of Wales so that the lower, higher latitude, little colder stuff runs a little bit sooner, probably moon phase. Anyhow, all of a sudden you start seeing much more fork and horns and spikes and they're starting to move vertically daily right before, right?

As soon as it's dark, 10 minutes after dark, they're coming down 10 minutes before daylight. They're going back up and that down into what the bottoms are all the lakes and ponds. The females are feeding down in the,, in the, not completely in the valley floor, but in the lower elevations of the valley. And those bucks are coming down that they don't know why they're doing it. They're too young to probably do much of the breeding.

I also have found sick of black tail do not make scrapes, but they have marking trees, they have hemlock overhanging hemlock branches that they mouth, and they push their pre-orbital gland in there, and there are secretions between their antlers, and they urinate under those things. And I have 12 or 14 bucks come into the same marking tree, just day after day after day. And that progresses until about the 25th or 6th of October and then the big bucks start showing up. Bigger bucks start showing up. The more older age-clash bucks come up and they start showing up down in there. There's a frenzy between about October 25th and about the 6th or 7th of November, waiting for that first doe to come into estrus.

And I'll have bucks all over the cameras. I mean, and they start showing up in the day, and I mean, it's just a progression of... I've got this all plotted up because I'm really anal and weird about this stuff. And boom, the big bucks disappear. Nobody comes to the marking trees anymore. So the first does have come into heat and they're, they're on them. And that persists until about the 17th or 18th of November. And then they bucks start coming back and marking that thing again, and then magic happens. What's that? These bucks that you have never seen,

these oh my God bucks, show up about the 17th or 18th of November, and they persist on the landscape till about the 25th or 26th, maybe through Thanksgiving. And then they disappear, they vanish. And you hardly see any of those other bucks when those, that's the guy that has been pumping iron for four years and shows up, but it's just like, whoa, where have you been? It's just like, whoa, where have you been?

Okay, walk me through all that. No, I like it, but walk me through all of it. So you're saying that- There's about three days of the year that you should be in the woods. So they're running all around. Okay, you got does on your cameras. Then also you start seeing bucks showing up because the rut's coming.

Yep. Then you see all this buck movement. And the first bucks that show up are the spikes in the fork and horns. Yep. Then you start, then you see a bunch of buck movement. Then you have, then you see the next stage class. You see the two to four year old. Timing is a little better.

Yeah. They're closer to estrus. They have, they're not putting that much energy into chasing because they pretty much know when the first dough is gonna come into heat, the moon phase. That we never see. Yep. And then bang, they disappear and they're locked down. That means they're on a dough.

They're actively on a dough until she's receptive. That's when I must be always hunting. Locked down. And at that moment, so that's the key thing for me, at that moment her head is not switched from save the fawn, save the fawn, if you're doing a fawn bleat call. He wants to chase her and you call her in and he's going to come in behind her because he thinks she's just running away from him. Or you will have bucks coming to the call. There's no doubt about that. But at that moment, that just before the estrus.

What date are you in now? The 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th of November. Okay. These are days I'm never not in the woods. You got to realize this is Jim Bechtel's belief system. Understood. Well, you're here, but you're here for a reason. I'm telling you, there are certain days that you don't, you're there because magic can happen. All right.

Then tell me the next thing that happens. Now, explain to me what happens when all of a sudden all these big bucks are running around again for three days. So you have really good two to four-year-old bucks to the initial breeding. And I think there's up at the higher elevation, there's also a population of deer that don't come down. And I think the really big, huge dominant four-year-old and better bucks are up there

taking care of that. And as soon as they've taken care of everything on the rest of the landscape, they come down to see what was not taken care of at the lower elevations. And that tends to be the 17th, 18th, 19th of November through Thanksgiving. And you're in the woods. Man. And I don't hardly ever care about anything because I am absolutely locked into, I know that the possibility of me, and they actually become less nocturnal and a little more reliable that they're going to be out

sometime during the day. Okay. I like it. I have this tattooed on my arm. No. have this tattooed on my arm. No, no, it's a, and it's, but that transition time between estrus, no estrus right in there. That shifts seasonally. It might be slightly earlier.

It might be third, fourth, fifth, sixth of November, or it might be eighth, ninth, tenth, 11th of November. I think I've killed more deer on the 11th of November than any other day. Okay. Now get back to how you'd fix the black tail deer problem. But for real, when you got huge thousands of square miles, you know what I mean? Like what are you going to do really? So just roughly on Prince of Wales, a ballpark, I think just on the forest

service, there's like 360,000 acres of young growth that's at or approaching stem exclusion phase. If you do the math with 12 to 20 deer per square mile, that's somewhere between six and 8,000 deer that ain't there. Pretty simple math. It won't be for 80 years. Or yeah, until something is done with that second growth. And so we needed, this is my perfect world. We need a active young growth management industry. And that industry has to be good enough. There's, there's going to be some clear cuts made and they're going to go in and

do some industrial larger scale logging and stuff, but we will have identified where we should, I, where the stands are that should be approached to a habitat point of view and make the decisions why those are important for habitat. And those won't be intensely managed by clear cutting and stuff like that. We'll go in and do commercial thinning of those stands, opening that stand up and getting daylight down in there. And there would be an industry that would locally manufacture that stuff that the biomass would be used that comes off of it. How the hell are you going to create like it's rare when you say like for the conservation of a species and proliferation of a species we need to develop a timber industry. I

mean how did like... Yeah how do you incentivize an industry and what specific, like is it the heating fuel, wood pellet, camp chef trigger industry, right? Like what is the market for that growth that is currently like being ignored, waiting for maturation or further maturation. Oh, Cali gotta share something with you. There's two things that have thwarted

Dirt's dad that he cannot make himself. Uh huh. Well, he can make anything himself. Making his own dip. Earwax. Growing his own dip, making his own dip, and then making his own, uh, pellet grill pellets. There it is. So there's your opportunity. He just can't figure it out. It's killing him. We actually, because my wife works at Biomass and I love it, we heat all of our house with wood pellets. But I'm shipping them up from Idaho. I thought you were heating with all that red alder. But I'm shipping them up from Idaho.

I thought you were heating with all that red alder. Oh, I do the red alder firewood stuff. So we also have a fire wood stove. And so I cut red alder. In fact, I'll probably be cutting it if I can get out in the woods when I get back from this. Okay. But you got a pellet. Yeah.

Yeah. So we have a timber industry that's an old growth timber industry and that industry needs to shift its, and we have several small mills that are actively milling and kill drying lumber and you can buy second growth lumber on Prince of Wales Island. They just can't take the volume that would be needed to make a difference in deer's lives. And the free market economy is not going to take care of this. I personally think if the, if the, if the management strategy shifted

from the old growth strategy that it occurred is on federal lands to a restoration economy based on we're gonna do better for the deer and water and streams and stuff like that but we're gonna also support some large-scale timber management and this is what we're gonna be putting up we're not gonna be doing old growth anymore we're gonna be cutting second growth mm-hmm that would allow people to know that there was a supply of second growth there that would be coming and then they could look for the capital

to incentivize developing the plants to handle that. Then that would be both biomass and wood. I mean, there's no, you go to Home Depot, you're not buying old growth, Doug, for two by fours. Those are all second growth. And that's what we have.

We just, we're still on the initial harvest of trees in Southeast Alaska, and we have it transitioned over to young growth. Got it. But that initial harvest is winding down, man. It is winding down. And, uh, do you think they ought to quit altogether? Well, I hope not.

I hope not. And old growth. I hope not because there's a lot of, uh, specialty mills that they don't need very much wood a year to produce an incredible product. So, you know, small old growth timber sales, I hope they continue and I think sustainably they could. But on large scale timber management that could be steered very focused towards improving deer habitat, we need to change to a young growth industry. And they can do all that young growth on old

infrastructure. Yes. Because they've already got the roads. But see, so very selfishly, I don't want to take any habitat earmarked dollars and rebuild roads and bridges and log transfer sites at salt water and stuff like that. I would like to see a viable timber industry that keep those roads and bridges and stuff in good working order that we can benefit from for deer. And that's why I think they need to be there

together. Is any of the stuff we're seeing, is any of the stuff we're seeing with the incoming administration and like the tariff wars and all this stuff that we might be starting in on, is any of that going to have a positive or negative impact on getting the industry you want established establish, or is this stuff play out too slowly? I think it's going to play out too slowly and actually don't know what's going to come out of this, uh, because the agencies and funding and people and all that is in flux right now.

And we've got to kind of let the dust settle here for a few months to find out what, where we're at before we could pick back up. Yeah. But some well-placed tariff isn't going to all of a sudden spur the industry in the next few years. I don't know. I don't know what those answers are. I know what I'd like to do on the ground.

If I had the, if I was king, what I would do, I mean, that's habitat work, focused habitat work in the right places. That there was a, a, a bunch of folks that have put a lot of thought into why we want to improve that place for deer. And what would we do there? Do you feel that you're going to be able to start doing this? Like what does it take to start doing the work?

We actually have right now, we don't know, the Blacktail Deer Foundation and Miele Deer Foundation does not know the status of the funding dollars that we had agreements in place for right now because of the changes that's happened in the last couple of weeks. So we have to let that settle and the people that we were working with inside the agencies. Um, we hope that we are solid in the agreements that we have.

And so we actually have four projects in southeast Alaska that will impact close to 2,000 acres of wildlife habitat improvements. So we've already started down that road. We were going to do the layout this summer and award the contracts this fall for work in 2026. Okay. But to make a... That money might not be there.

We don't know. To make a meaningful impact on 360,000 acres of young growth that are sitting there ready that is going to stem exclusion phase, we're going to have to do several thousand acres a year to start making a difference on the deer population. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of cash. A lot of cash, a lot of work. It's a lot of cash a lot of cash a lot of work and

But it could also it can be if the philosophy of management of the forest was such That it was focused on making those changes We wouldn't be relying on habitat enhancement dollars to make that that would be normal Timber management practices and focus change in the way they're doing work on the landscape. Yep. And then they just have to sign on to adhering to some areas of exclusion. Or kind of like they did with like stream bank setbacks and stuff like that. Right.

And a lot of that's a lot of the early management virtually, again, not passing judgment, walked right up the bottom of the streams with cats and removed all the large woody debris. So as we're doing this young growth management strategy, we could provide the logs that actually trout unlimited and a few other folks with the forest service where they're putting them back in the streams to get those pools and the riffles and the stuff back in there for salmon habitat and stuff. So we can work to do repair and management thinning for deer, but providing the wood for the end stream restoration projects at the same time. And then, um, we got to tackle what about the Washington and Oregon folks?

Yeah. So we've got a group of folks in California, I guess. Yeah. So we got to work. We have a group of folks that are working for the Blackdale Deer Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation that's there. I just, I, and I know that there's some grants and some funding coming along. I just don't know what opportunities exist.

I don't have a breadth of experience and know enough what's going on there. Uh, and that would be working with Oregon department of, of fishing game, Washington department of fishing game and stuff and, and State, and BLM, and Forest. Yeah, there is forests that are on that side of the highway and the black tail world on the coast range stuff. So I'm sure, I'm more than sure that these same kind of conversations and these same opportunities exist on those landscapes there. It's just again, taking a look at where and why. Because there are places that are, they're working great.

We don't need to go in there and muck it up. There's stands on Prince of Wales Island that have regenerated with a spacing of trees wide enough that there is forage underneath there, and it's not in that exclimate exclusion phase. We don't need to be dumping money into that. Do you feel that all the money, do you feel that the habitat is the way to go, or do you think that all the energy that people spend talking about predation, do you think it's a waste of energy? No, no, no, no. No? about predation. Do you think it's a waste of energy? No, no, no, no, no. No, there's a balance between those two.

And, um, I totally understand the predation aspects of this and, and I've, one of the things I've learned from my trail cameras. Yeah. It's when wolves moves into that valley, the deer shut down, the deer don't come down to the lower elevations for two days when the wolves go through, there is a definite impact on the wolves on the landscape. So, there's a lot

of people saying, I go out deer hunting, I don't find any deer and I see all these wolves sign. If you think about it, so if we went out hunting together at the time that the deer wolves were in there, the deer are all compressed in the smaller habitat blocks because of all of this older second growth out here. Where do we go? We go to where the deer are compressed to because we know that's the best places to hunt and we go there and we find all these

wolf sign, let's say it's snowed and we see all the tracks and everything like that. We don't see any deer. Yeah. I mean, no different than seeing a bunch of human boot tracks. Yeah. So, our conclusion that we draw is there's nothing but predators on the landscape and there's no deer there. When in fact, there's probably quite a few deer there. They just, for that time period, have slowly changed where they're at on the landscape.

So there's a definite impact. I mean, I've got the, I've got the graph. The rut was in full swing. I had wolves move into the camera area for a two day period. And when I finished plotting my rut, usually the rut is a big bell curve of activity. It starts up here. It goes crazy nuts.

I have 50 bucks a day past my 26 cameras and it drops off to nothing. There's a little teeny bit for a second rut in the beginning of December. That rut split into two bell curves around that time that the wolves were there. It was a dramatic departure from the normal rut activity.

It doesn't mean the rut was stopping, but it was stopping where my cameras were. They were still going on up higher. I'm quite sure they just weren't coming down and checking on, and the does weren't coming down and stuff like that. And those lower elevation, they're like, Oh, I'm out of here.

Yeah. But I imagine there's like a more effective time of year for predator harvest wolf and, and, uh, you guys are, so they're right. Mountain lions are starting to creep in and that been a few more. I'll tell you what are the black bear. Yeah.

So I've been, I've been involved in three studies with telemetry callers where we monitored fawns right at birth through the first two weeks of their lives. And the last one that Sophie did, and it basically agreed, not quite 50% but like 48% of all Sitka blacktail fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their life by black bear. And what we didn't know is if a fawn has 48% of all blacktail fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their life by black bear. Wow. So, okay. That's a lot. That is a lot.

So, one half the deer, boom. By black bear in two weeks. Two weeks were gone. And what we found out was, which we had no knowledge of, because then we got does on collar that had twins that were on collars. She would take a geomorphic, some kind of a structure, like a ridge or a hill or a river or a road or something, and she would put one fawn over here, two to three hundred yards away and one fawn over here, two to three hundred yards away. And she would live in between that and nurse both of those for that two weeks. That's amazing. So if she lost one,

she lost only one instead of losing both of them. And so there's a natural, so there's always been black bear there. The deer have grown up with black bear on the landscape, the deer have changed their habits to reflect the predation that the black bear put on those deer. When there was a lot of black bear before 2004, when we were doing deer darting, there wasn't a day when I was calling to bring does in to shoot them to put radio collars on them that I didn't have one to two black bears smoke into me. And I've got, I've had them get closer than you and I are and had them look past me to see where the fawn was. They were so locked into that sound. They knew I wasn't the fawn and they didn't care about me. They just want to know where that fawn, I always thought, what would it be like if you set

a fawn decoy out? It would be boom, it would be gone. Oh wow. They'd just bowl over it. So they're super focused on that fawn distress call. And most of the fawns what we find is the black bears feeding, the female has left them. The black bear may not be actively hunting, but it's feeding and digging up skunk cabbage in the spring. You've seen all that stuff. And all of a sudden it must get a scent or that fawn hears movement, thinks it's bombs and lets out one little bleat. And you see this acceleration and it's, it's gone. Yeah. So more effective from your based off of your research, more effective to target black bears in the ahead of time, right?

Early spring. Well, see, we saw, so this is what, why I get back to the habitat and that the fact that we have a habitat challenge. Again, this is Jim Bachelors world. I moved there in 1990. We had tons of clear cuts, tons of food, young clear cuts of that two to 15 year age. We still had all kinds of old growth and we had

good conductivity, even though the landscape was fractured. Lots of deer, unbelievable number of bears. I can't even fathom to tell you how many bears were there. And wolves were numerous. I saw wolves weekly. I saw black, I would see, my third day in the woods, I still have my journal entry, I saw 27 black bears working in the woods the first, the third day I was on the Prince

of Wales Island. I mean that's the kind of numbers you used to see. It became really popular to hunt black bear. And if you look at the graph, it went from 70 bears per year to almost 500 bears per year coming out of unit two. Harvested bears. Harvested bears. Wow.

That was what like the whole era. Nod residents could take two. Yeah. The whole era of like bringing in truckloads of dog food and hunting bait stations off the road system. And yeah. And that crashed in 2005, wonk. And the state started managing it first with a registration

and now with a draw. And they're actually, I think they're doing an incredible job, I'm starting to see those older age class bears. So the first thing we lost was the big boars. Then we lost the older females. And when we started losing the older females, you start losing the knowledge of where to den, how to den, where to fish, and all that kind of stuff.

And so there was an impact. Wolves, I think, have stayed relatively constant in that 300 to 350 estimate population in there. We've had another 20 timber sales since I got there on federal lands, and this young growth that was all this forage is growing up to be nothing. So now we have hardly any bears, but we're starting to see them come back. We still have wolves on the landscape. Why aren't we, and we haven't had a killing winter since 2011.

Why aren't we seeing tons of deer? And I think the reason is, is because we're losing the habitat on the other end. And that's my take on the landscape there. That the wolves are still taken about the same number of deer that they always did. And the bears are too, but there's less bears. But the deer used to be able to, when there was tons of bears, the deer could still absorb losing 50% back. So we see a reduced deer number, not so much because of predation,

because the predation is probably roughly the same. It's just a lower number. But it's the fact that we just lost those deer that aren't in those older stands of timber anymore, where they used to be. It doesn't bode well for us on Prince of Wales for the next few years. I don't know how to tell you this. Me the next 80 years. I'll be gone. But it's, it's, you know, so I, I moved to Southeast Alaska and I grew up hunting Columbia black tail and Washington state. And I moved up there and I just fell in love

with these deer. And I realized like, nobody knows anything about these deer. Like they were, there's, you know, there's tons of stuff written on white tail and there's quite a bit of stuff written on mule deer and I realized like nobody knows anything about these deer. Like they were, there's you know there's tons of stuff written on whitetail and there's quite a bit of stuff written on mule deer and stuff but like nobody knows anything about that. That was one of the reasons why in 2009 I bought the URL sick of blacktail.org and about 2015, for 13 Sophie and I and Todd created that webpage, sickofblackdale.org, the Sick of Blackdale Deer Coalition.

I wanted a place somebody could go find out information about Sick of Blackdale. So it's got all the stuff on translocations. It's got all the stuff in there about all of the written things, both peer-reviewed publications and not peer-re peer reviewed publications, the stuff that's been written. It's a place you could go find out about Sick of Blacktail. And I'm excited to see this, the emphasis on Blacktail throughout their region, both Columbia and stuff through the

Blacktail Deer Foundation. Are you going to roll sickofblacktail.org into blacktail deer foundation? What you looking for? No. We might put it up on the page, but if you look at the blacktail deer on the blacktail foundation thing, that's what Sophie and I have on our webpage. Okay. That same photo? No, that drawing, the characterization,

Oh, that- Right up there, that right there. That's on our webpage. Okay. They needed something, and Sophie and I agreed that that was a good thing to allow them to use that. So will the Blacktail Deer Foundation sit separate outside of Mule Deer Foundation,

or is it just like a wing of the Mule Deer Foundation? It's within, kind of like the difference Foundation sit separate outside of Mule Deer Foundation or is it just like a wing of the Mule Deer Foundation? It's within, kind of like the difference between Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever kind of a thing. And so, Who's the director? Greg Sheehan came on as director. I don't know if you know Greg.

He's awesome. He wasn't there very long. And Steve Belinda called me one morning and said, you need to get on a call. Steve's got an idea and Steve says what do you think if we created the Blacktail Deer Foundation and I said I said three years ago I told Steve I would give him two and a half to three years on the emphasis that the Mule Deer Foundation was putting on Blacktail and I was kind of getting ready to retire again and I said I'll give you three more years. I'm all in. I want to see this thing be successful. So what will your role with Blacktail Deer Foundation be?

To try to be an advocate for deer in Alaska, deer habitat work in Alaska. And, and the work that we could do. We have a full-time wildlife biology trained employee for the Black Dog Deer Foundation, Liz and Juno, Scott Lenora. Scott's awesome. Scott has been working up with Alaska Department of Fish and Game to do the modeling thing to answer the where.

So they're doing across all of the Tongass, native and non-native lands. Where? Where should we, if we get dollars to do things or if the agencies and the other landowners focus on a habitat restoration and a second growth industry, where should we be putting our efforts and work? And so they're working on that right now.

And so I'm helping to develop chapters and be a spokesperson basically for the Blacktail Deer Foundation and to educate people on what, why, why, why do we care? I love these deer. I just, I, I, every day I go to the woods, I try to go out and learn some. And I think every day I get schooled.

Yeah. Which keeps you learning, right? No, it is, you know, like, I like, wow, I wouldn't have thought that. You know, at every once like, wow, I wouldn't have thought that. You know, at every once in a while, like the licking branch thing, there's not a lot of that. I went out in the snow to start GPSing trails. Cause if you go out there, there's a hundred trails, hundreds of trails.

You go out in the snow. And I found you put a camera on one of those trails and there's a trail there, but it doesn't necessarily mean something's going to come down that trail. But go out in the snow. And I found, you put a camera on one of those trails and there's a trail there, but it doesn't necessarily mean something's going to come down that trail. But go out in the snow and GPS the one or two trails that are really ran and go to, and you'll see they go like this and they'll come to a node. Put your camera at that node. That's where three or four of the really used trails come together. They come together in the high spots? No. They come together. They just across the landscape the deer trails will kind of mingle and sometimes they

intersect. Oh. And when they... So you're not saying they intersect at a particular type of feature, just where they intersect. And at that intersect I'll almost guarantee you there's a licking branch somewhere right there. Do you ever sit in the licking branch? That really surprises me, sorry. Do you ever sit in the licking branch? Huh? Do you ever do you ever set up just sit on a licking branch? Oh yeah. If you go to I got a YouTube channel and if you go there I have tons of videos I've put together of licking branches. You can watch buck after buck after buck come to these things.

Have you done like mock scrapes and mock licking branch? Have you set up a totally synthetic one yet? No. I've thought about it. Well, first off, it would have to be a synthetic lure because all natural lures are forbidden in Alaska. That's been outlawed because they're so worried about CWD getting out there. And so they're going to have to, it'll have to

be something a deer attracted. I know several people that used, I can't remember the name of the company that does the rope, hemp rope and you soak it in some kind of a lure and I can't remember the name of the company that does the rope, hemp rope, and you, you soak it in some kind of a lure and I can't remember it. Anyhow, they've, they put that up and, and our bucks just beat the pee out of there. The problem is, is we have so much rain, you've got to put lure on it about every two days. You ever hear of a thing called Buckman juice? No, the urine from a man named Doug Dern.

No, might be worth checking out. I could try to get you a bottle of Buckman juice. I could tell you that I, 2013, I had a really beautiful four by four with eye guards coming through one musket between two and four for three days. And I hung a tree stand and I, I'm not a patient man. I hate being sitting there, but I went in and hung a tree stand and I got out of that tree stand. Cause I had to backpack it in three quarters of a mile and it got cold. I got cold cause it, I sweated and then went after I hung it.

I got down out of there and the next day my trail camber 18 minutes after I got down, he pushed three does right by bystander. So the next day I got it there and I sat from 7 30 in the morning until 2 30 in the afternoon and this doe came out. Well, I had peed out of the sand and she came over and she smelled every place I had peed and I I had dropped the little rope that I had pulled

the muzzle of her up by and she mowed that and stuff. And then she just slowly walked. She followed my tracks and smelled me and the frost I could see she was exactly following my tracks. We don't have any predators that come from above. So she never looked up. I was only 12 feet above her, but she never looked up.

And she took off and I cocked the gun and swung over to the opening she came out and he comes smoking into that Opening and I got that buck. Whoa. All right fact. I'm not this good. It was an accident But I my camera was set on a three-shot burst and he ran by the camera and it turned set it off I mouth-grunt him to a stop and I didn't know you could actually see me in the tree stand. And next thing you see is a big puff of smoke and he's dying on the edge of the picture. It happened that fast. That that fast. Unreal. Now we were told. But she did not, she was not wigged out by where I had peed at all. Just absolutely did not care. She was curious,

really curious, but had not, she wasn't wigged out by that at all. Jim, we were told that you end up shooting a lot of bucks head on in the chest. Yep. And then you, uh, what's your aiming spot? Uh, the bottom center, the bottom throat patch. And you recovered the round ball against

the rear throat patch. And you recovered the round ball against the rear leg bone. You'll hope you'll find this out someday. I hope so too. I hope so too. But why, how does it end up head on so frequently? Because they're coming to the call. Oh God. Yeah.

They're coming to the call. The other thing is I try to set up a blind call all the time. And if he's sneaking in, what I do is I try to set up. So if there's a ridge over here or a travel way that I think they might be using, I set up here knowing that the wind is blowing across me this way with an opening on this side so that he's going to come and he's going to try to circle behind me. You catch him crossing that opening. And you catch him crossing that opening. And I catch him crossing that opening. And that's,

a lot of times they'll still turn and look at you, but you can get them broadside. If you're just don't, man, you can, like when I start calling, I don't move because they're locked on. They know the minute you blow that call from five, six, 700 yards away, they know the stump you're sitting by. I've watched them across large, open, fast bus gate systems come at full-tilt run across there to that spot. I'm quite sure because what I'm trying to do now is be a little more patient.

I find that big bucks come in between 30 and 45 minutes. What? And I'm not that patient. I call for 10 or 15 and I want to go over there. I might do something different. I'm sure that there has been hundreds of bucks come to where I had just called it. I'm no longer there. I'm off hunting something else.

Or what I'll do is I frequently when you set up to call, how long you sitting there, you should be there between 35 and 40 minutes. Can I give you a little bit of math that Mercer Lawing is a man named Mercer Lawing gave me what so similar situation, call them Bobcats predator, call them bobcats. Predator call them bobcats. Bobcats will sometimes show up like 40 minutes later. So most guys that call coyotes, they'll sit for 15 minutes. That's kind of the rule of thumb, right? 15 minutes

everybody gets bored and they want to leave. But a bobcat might show up at 40 minutes. And I was talking to my friend, Mercy, who calls tons of bobcats and used to do it professionally. He's like, yeah, but I can hunt twice as many spots at 20. Sure, some will show up at 40, most show up before, like most show up before, so I'd rather hit twice as many spots than wait around for the one that might show up at 40.

Do you know, like a calculated loss. So you're saying that when you run it, you don't sit there 40 minutes, but you should? Or you could. I should. If I time myself and make it happen, I have tended to kill better bucks at the 30 to 45 minute period.

That is a long time. Which means, Steve. I call look around like, nah. So if, and you and I both know sometimes you call in there, boom, they're there. That's what I'm looking for. The one that just is all of a sudden in your face. Yeah. And we love that. That's exhilarating. I mean, my God, you're talking to an animal that all of a sudden it's like smack in your face, like at five feet. It's like crazy stuff. I have- 40 minutes later.

Yeah. And you're calling at what, like how often you calling? I usually start out with a really aggressive call sequence. I'm much louder and I've been told that I'm too loud. Bah, bah. Oh no, that's half the volume. I really crack at it. But this is all the classic black tail deer whistle that's sold in Alaska, that's half the volume. I really crack at it. But this is all the classic black tail deer whistle

that's sold in Alaska, that's what you're using. No. Oh no. I don't know, can I use brand names here? Oh, you don't have to give away any secrets either. Oh no, there's no secrets. You know the cow talk came out years ago, the first cow call that ever was made. Oh yeah, the rubber band.

Rubber band, the plastic thing. That's what I've killed all my deer off of. I tighten that rubber band and you use it like the thorax in theber band, the plastic thing. That's what I've killed all my deer off of. I tighten that rubber band and I, it's got, you use it like the thorax in the back and can change my pitch. I start out really quiet. Just make the noise of your mouth. Eee, eee, eee.

Oh, okay, yeah. I start out really, really quiet. And then I crescendo to louder and louder and louder. I'm reaching out for the- You know what, you just used crescendo right. I've always used it wrong my whole life. It's like, I thought the crescendo was the top. No, it's the build.

The build. Someone told me that one time. My whole life, I said, when it reached a crescendo, meaning the cap, the apex, they're like, no, the crescendo is the climb. Good job, Jim. It's like throwing a pebble into a pond. Your sound waves go out, you never know how it's gonna come back to you. And so I imagine, I know in my mind,

every time I call, some deer hears it. They may not choose to come, but they are hearing it. And so I start with a really loud bang. I try to get them to stand up and start. Now, they may not complete it, but I try to get them to do that. And so I start that, then I go back down, and I build and build. And then if I'm doing a rattling sequence, I start out super loud and a roar grunt. The deer, our deer are, when they're aggravated and they do the roar grunt, you'll hear that from 200 yards away. It is nuts how loud they are.

This is getting me excited for a, uh huh. Yep. For sure. Yeah, go on. Anyhow, no, that rattling stuff is interesting. The other part of that is when, if a buck responds to a rattling Anyhow. Now that rattle and stuff is interesting. The other part of that is when if a buck responds to a rattling sequence and you decide not to shoot him, keep it going.

Numerable times I've had a smaller buck come in first and Mr. Holy Jesus walk in later. Like oh my God, it's just like five minutes later you'll see these really big antler chips out in the brush moving around. And a lot of people will bang kill that buck and go over and deal with it and they didn't realize that there was a smoker buck coming in. I had Sophie with another biologist there and I called it a beautiful three point and Sophie took that three point and she jumped up and I said, no, no, no, no, let's keep calling and they went like, no, let's take pictures. They ran out across the bus gate and I was like, shoot.

So I went over there and I stepped away from my gun, took my backpack off and I laid my muzzleloader down and I went over and I grabbed their camera and I hear snort and I turned around and there's this four by four with eye guards 20 yards away, steam just rolling off of it. And I looked at my gun, which was about 10 feet away in that buck and he took off and he ran down the edge of the muskeg and I grabbed my muzzleloader and I rolled out into the muskeg and he went down 60 yards and went in and stopped, but he stopped with a sweet spot between two trees. And he ought not to done that. But I mean, that was a classic example of a, he was hot and he was looking for a fight and he came in just virtually smoking.

Little off topic, but 60 yards, black tail, broadside. Is that an offhand shot for you? Or do you look for a rest in that situation? I almost always try to take a knee. I tried, I don't care if they're five yards. I try to, I can do it. I've done it. I'm in 70 yards, 80 yards last two years ago.

I killed a bucket of alpine. I had none of the rest on it. I was like, suck it up, buttercup. And I aimed and just did a perfect shot on him. But aim small, miss small. I'll tell you, you only got one shot. You're not going to reload in any kind of lifetime of that deer running off or anything else.

You've got to make that one shot. And that's the challenge. That's why I went to Musclehead and eventually it's just a challenge myself to make that one shot that's the challenge that's why I went to Muslim eventually is just to challenge myself to make that one show you've been married to help a long time haven't you 26 years on the 14th I forgot asked you like your marriage advice I can't remember what you told me I did ask you marriage advice did you tell me that you always treat your wife like a princess? No, no, no. That wasn't you? No, that was Randy. Oh, that's right. But I did ask you in that parking lot on the island. We did. What would you tell me your plan was? Oh, I went through the whole thing about why

we got buried in February. The fact that, you know, like trapping and bear season started in March and through April, the trapping fell off. But then there was field season and it was hunting season for deer all the way down through into November. And then trapping season picked up again. And usually things were froze up in February and that was a good time. But it happened to be a three day weekend that year with Valentine's Day on it. So we got married on Valentine's Day. No, it's cute. So I'd be home on anniversaries. So have you guys got all those years of marriages because good luck or do you got like a strategy? I think she's tolerable to me.

She just got lucky. You just got lucky. I got lucky. We got together in the garden, I said, I hunt. She says, oh, I've known guys that hunt before. I said, no, you don't understand. She does now. We get along good. She loves helping process, and she's got a few hunts with me and stuff like that. But mainly I go out and hunt by myself, and she does all the, helps all the cutting up

and stuff when I bring it home. Okay. Has she shot a deer? Nope. Not even interested. She's watched me kill a bunch, but other than that. What she say when you get one? She get excited? Oh yeah. She doesn't feel bad for the deer? She'll point out every once in a while like, we don't have any elk in the freezer. Yeah.

I love those kind of statements. Like, go forth and kill elk. You know, like, Hey, what's up with, uh, you know how you're allowed to kill elk on Prince of Wales if you run into one? As long as you have a deer tag or something like that. I've seen tracks and I found them. You haven't laid eyes on one? No.

I had a guy that was feeding me a lot of Intel about where it was somewhere, but I never looked into it. I can honestly tell you in about year 2000, Karen saw a cow and a calf in the middle of the road just before you get to goose Creek, thorn Bay intersection near come to thorn Bay. She came home and said, I just saw something, a deer that I don't know what it was. She had never seen a winter calf with their kind of that brushy mane. And I think I went to a bugle magazine and I held up, has it looked like that? She said, yes. I said, let's get bugle magazine and I held up, has it looked like that?

She said, yes. I said, let's get in the truck and we drove back out there and their tracks were there. I mean, I tracked it for 800 yards and I never caught up with them. So they swam over. They, they were kind of brushy and shrubby is not very far from Zorimbo. And so they went from Atland to Zaremba, and then they can come straight across Brushy and Shrubby across Snow Pass there and onto Prince of Wales. So there was dozens of sightings there.

So they first planted Roosevelt elk over at Atlan Island, and then they came back with Rockies and the Rockies went off, I don't like this stuff. And they would, so that's what was happening. So they expanded and there was a three year, Rockies would strike off swimming. There was a three year period where we had a lot of elk sightings on Prince of Wales Island. And I know three times during that period that I cross trail tracks and I tracked them. But those are the years... Never put eyes on one. Those are the years that we were doing the deer darting and we were free-ranging darting and getting off the road system and calling deer in and processing deer and stuff and

during those years were the same expansion years of elk and I definitely saw elk tracks at remote areas on Prince of Wales. So do you think right now there's none on Prince of Wales Island? I don't think so. I think they've got to settle down and they have a population on Zaremba now and they've all interbred and they're not striking off. They're not, I don't think they're striking off. I'm sure some young male thinks that there's a whole island over there.

It might be full of cows that I don't know about. So they might come over. But you know buddy mine, he one time, this is the same buddy was telling me about where to go look for elk, but he one time found two, he pulled two blacktail fawns out of the water. Couldn't find their mom anywhere, little fawns, they were swimming. He got them both in his boat, one died right away. He got one wrapped in a space blanket, got it all warmed back up again, brought it up to the beach and it ran off. So some number of those things die like that. Pete Slauson That and also when they're walking on the beach, a bald eagle will take them and they'll grab them.

And sometimes they let them go, but they punctured their insides with their, I've found several that has the talon marks in them. But I've also had like a 12 mile arm down to the back road, down towards your place down there. by alarm down to the back road, down towards your place down there. I've, I've saw where Eagle was swimming across, you know, how they'll get a salmon and they can't take off. Well, when it came out, it had a fawn in its talons. No, there's a grabbing them out in the water and drowning them.

So there was, there was quite a, there's quite, we don't know what percentage of fawns get taken by Eagles, but it is a predator of Fonz. Yeah. Especially when there are those first two or three day wobbly leg kind of things. That's definitely a, definitely a thing. You know, what do you get like, you can sort of this idea, you know, think about turkey hunt, if you're a turkey hunter or not, but people, you're calling turkeys

and people are like, Oh, you know, he turkeys and people like, oh you know he's not gonna want to cross the, he's not gonna want to cross the ditch or you know you're trying to call him through the fence, you won't want to try to cross the fence. And people talking about stuff like that, like these little perceived obstacles, you know, when you're trying to call something in. When you get up there, there's so much water and you think of, like you think of a a bear deer coming down to the water and he's going to like, kind of psych himself up and get ready, you know, and then go for it when you're watching them.

It's like, they don't even think, man. If you're a rutting buck on one side, they just like, just like in the water swim, they don't, they're not like, you know, they're not like, who I got to build myself up for the swim. It's like, they don't even, they seem as comfortable swimming as they do walking. I've had wolves swimming in front of my boat and get out on the beach to shake off,

sit down and howl at you. Whatever. Yeah, it's wild to watch deer like come down into the saltwater and just, fast. They're fast. You can't even catch them in a canoe. They don't even have little webby things or nothing. It seemed like they really go well. Yeah, it's just, they don't give a shit. They just fast. You can't even catch them in a canoe. They don't even have little wibby things or nothing. It seemed like they really go well. Yeah, it's just they don't give a shit. They just go. Yeah. They just swim. You'll see them on these dinky little islands now and then. You're like,

what the hell is he doing on that island? Actually, I think a lot of times, right about the end of May, the does go to those little islands to have fawns because there's less predators out there. Well, I've seen that time of year, you see black bears striking out for little teeny islands, you know, and I was wondering if they're all fawns. Yeah. Yep. I absolutely agree with that. Well, how do people get involved with a black tail deer foundation?

Go to the web page, black tail deer.org. Yeah. Black tail deer.org. You guys are going to start chapters. blacktaildeer.org. Yeah, blacktaildeer.org. You guys are going to start chapters? People can start chapters? We've got chapters. I think we had a lot of the mule deer chapters. We went to them and said, do you want to become a dedicated blacktail chapter?

And I think most of them said yes. Some of them live in California that have mule deer close or in Washington and Oregon that also care about mule deer in eastern Washington and eastern Oregon and stuff like that. They were trying to figure out how to go both ways on that stuff, which is totally cool. In Alaska, it's a no-brainer. Is there going to be a chapter in Craig? Yep, there already is. Really? Yep. I'm the chairperson.

Oh. Can you join if you're just a poser from out of town? Yeah, we'd like you. Really? Yep. I'm the share person. Oh. Can you join if you're just a poser from out of town? Yeah, we'd like you. Oh, okay. Yeah. So you could go to the website. That's the easiest way. There's several options on how many years you do it and what level of chapter and whether

you're sponsoring and we'll eventually have a deal on there for life memberships and stuff like that. We've already done some chapter award stuff on Kodiak. We have a really functioning, really good chapter on Kodiak. Was that right? And we're not going to do anything on Kodiak for Habitat. And Habitat's fine on Kodiak. But what we're doing is helping the research the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is doing on Kodiak on sick of blacktail deer. And that was the decision of the chapter of there that they wanted to help, um, the area biologist

and his assistant up there work on the projects that they're doing. And there's a bunch of camera traps going on and they're actually going to have the blacktail deer foundation members running the, running the line of cameras and helping change out cars and batteries and stuff Which will save money for the day. Oh, that's cool. Yeah So there's a me that'd be some good volunteer work and we're gonna be doing that in other areas

So we got we're gonna have a chapter in judo. We've got a chapter in Cisco Prince of Wales catch a can Palmer was Silla We want one in Fairbanks, we've got one in Anchorage. Trying to think, I might be missing one. And of course those guys don't have deer, but they go to Kodiak or they care, you know, and that's what I tell people.

We all have, we all have organizations that we support and we think about and it's your choice to put your money where you best see fit and I the folks that really care about blacktail deer across the West and then Alaska I hope they seriously consider a blacktail deer foundation. I know I got a lot of buddies that are in the interior that that's a part of their annual cycle, is because things wind down. Pete Slauson That's right. Jared Slauson And so, guys go to Kodiak, Prince William Sound,

Southeast. It's part of the annual deal is to get like another huntin', you know? Pete Slauson Every year. Jared Slauson Which for them, huntin' November is very late season. Pete Slauson Right. But they're also out of the, by that time the weather's deteriorating up in interior, it's really cold, they can come down and be warm. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm really excited to see the emphasis that Greg and the board on the Muehler Foundation Board and stuff and Steve and his conservation group is putting on this because it's to me it's it's where I wanted to get to starting in about 2006 and I think it's exciting it's just for me it's really exciting to see this focus on a deer that really had nobody focusing on him in the past

and I don't know what strides could be made I don't know what landscape management policies can be changed or what, but I hope to be part of it. Well I think that if you are able to promote, like you can definitely promote research, you promote awareness of issues, right, and you can unify groups of people who love the animals to, you know, look out for their, the best interests of the hunting, even outside of the habitat work that you want to do. I think that doing those things and making a sort of like political body, so to speak, of like, of, of black tail fans who are educated and aware, um, I think

that in and of itself is valuable. One of the questions that come to us all the time would be supportive, intensive management programs on predators, and we focus on habitat. I want to be very clear about that. We don't take a stance on there unless some management would come down that would greatly negatively affect the deer population. But mainly we're looking at habitat and what can we do?

Is there truly something that can be done for habitat? And I think there really truly is something that can be done for habitat. It's not going to be planting sagebrush taken down fence. It's not going to be working on migration corridors and stuff. It's going to be working on conductivity of that animal on the landscape. And where is it going to get its next meal? And can we do better in creating those salad bowls out there for those things to go forage on?

And give them a way to get to the salad bowl. And I want people to be able to have access to the areas that we create those opportunities for deer so that they also can hunt those areas. I don't want to leave that rural resident or non-resident or anybody else out of that equation. Okay. Thanks for coming on, man. And you got to do it with a flintlock. That's the new rule. Don't let that rumor get out there.

Yeah, that's true. I know. I called for my best flintlock story that I called for an entire hour. I had trees like this that were being rubbed in this area. I called for a whole hour. It was cold. It was like 15 degrees that morning. So you're not 35 minutes past your usual tolerance.

I timed myself for an hour and at an hour I was starting to get really cold. And I stood up and I kind of brushed around and I put my backpack on and I reached out and I picked up my. Flatlock and I come around my tree and there's this huge five point walking down the trail right at me. He's about 85 yards out. Again, steam rolling off of him. I remember the steam out of his nostrils that morning. It was so beautiful. He was all vivid, vivid Alder rubbed orange antlers and he turns around and he goes back up the hill. All I would have had had was an 85 yard shot with a fletlock off hand.

I'm not going to take that on a sickle black tail looking straight at me. Turns around, walks back over the hill. I run up the hill and I look and it's tracks go off and it goes into this timber. And I had a can, one of the little long cans. And I reached out. Only it's never that loud.

And I reached out and I flipped that can and he flew up out of the timber and came broadside at 50 yards, turned broadside with the morning sun sitting against him, steaming, reached back and scratched his butt with his antlers. And I dropped to go to one knee and I couldn't see him over the curve. And I said, stand up.

You do this at the range all the time. Focus, focus, focus. And I, when I, when I shoot a flintlock, I try to imagine that round ball going clear through the target before I come out of my hold and I reached up and I and when I got the smoke cleared, he was gone, just like he'd never been there. I got the smoke cleared, he was gone. Just like he'd never been there. And I walked over and here's a chunk of lung laying on the swag and the moss.

And I'm like, all right. On the right track. But then I went aboard and it was, I wish I could play in my brain, the sun on his body and the steam rising off his body there at about 50 yards. That was, that was a special moment. Heck yeah. I'm fired up. Sign me up for the black tail deer foundation as well.

All right. Thank you guys. Man. Thanks so much for coming out, Jim. blacktaildeer.org That's right. That's easy to remember. It is. blacktaildeer.org, start a chapter, join a chapter. And go check out Cicca Blacktail.org.

That's Sophie and Todd and mine's webpage. Learn about Cicca Blacktail. That's where all the research is. Yep. Got it. Thanks, dude. All right. Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up, we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series.

In this edition, titled The Mountain Men, 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear

they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10 percent of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History The Mountain Men 1806-1840 by Stephen Rinella.