The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 737: A Life Changing Hunting Experience in Africa

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Morgan Potter, George Dodds, Seth Morris, and Garrett "Dirt Myth" Smith. Topics Discussed: Watching a new moon get full; last chance to get a raffle ticket for the TRCP turkey hunt with Steve and Janis; how African game animals just taste better; slow moving puff adders and truck-denting black mambas; tons of antelope species; burning to open up the landscape; the terrible tsetse fly and sleeping sickness; the magic of trackers; the honey guys; how wearing military style camouflage is illegal in Tanzania; how wealth is stored as livestock; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. What's hibernation? And why do some mammals hibernate? When animals vocalize, what are they saying? And what does it mean? Meteor Kids is back for season three. We're gonna give

you the hard-hitting answers kids for why things are the way they are and you better get ready for Guess That Critter and for our play along kids trivia. Search Meteor Kids hit that follow button now. 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. Okay everybody we're coming, we're recording in Africa. I'm pretty much African now. Yeah. Like in the real sense of the word, like from Africa. I've been here so long I've watched, I've watched a complete lunar cycle. Can you believe it? That's impressive. I came here on a on a new moon. What's it called? I'm screwing that. Yeah, no new moons. Yeah. Came here on a new moon, What's it called? I'm screwing that. Yeah, no new moons. Yeah. Yeah. Came here on a new moon. Watch that son of a bitch get full. That's all I've been here.

Watch forever. You watch the new moon get old and then it's getting new again. I know. It's all I've been here. It's a long time. Join by uh Morgan Potter is here today and Morgan Powers, but this is the third time you've been on the show. Third appearance. You came on the show and basically without meaning to, talked me into coming to Africa. Then you came on the show to get me up to speed for my upcoming African trip. And now you're closing it all out by coming on the show again to do a debrief. Yep. Old part of my cunning plan.

Yep. And then tomorrow we start picking our way back home. Yeah. Uh, also joined by George and George, help me with your last name. Dodds D O W D S D O W D S. Okay. George is from Morgan's from Morgan is from Australia as a, as a young man, moved to Africa to get into the hunting thing. Yep. That's right. Came here, like did what now seems to me impossible. Came here taught yourself learned Swahili. Yep. In order to pursue your career. Yep it's essential. Climbed from the bottom up right. Yep. And did that. Making my way up the ladder. Yeah. Chasing a dream.

George was born in Kenya so it seems weird like like in America we were really tiptoe around this thing of like you know when you say I'm a white Kenyan people in America be like what? Yeah there's not many of us. No. Yeah. He's a white Kenyan. Yeah. True and true. Family's been in Kenya for many generations. Yeah many generations early 1900s. Working you work in the farm and ranch world. Working in the farming and ranching world, yep. Yeah, and spokes were Healy from a young age, so quite lucky with that.

Made a lot easier for me. And you're pursuing the professional hunting thing in that you are in your second year, your second year internship to become a professional hunter. Correct. Yeah. That's the plan. Yeah. And a professional hunter means something very specific here. Uh, explain professional hunter. It doesn't mean like you hunt, you know, and you make videos about it or something like a professional hunter is a thing.

It is a thing. Yeah. We have to be licensed. So one has to complete a two-year apprenticeship and then be endorsed by the company with which you've done your apprenticeship to then ultimately go sit your license, which is a practical exam. There's some theory and some other bits and pieces sort of tied in with that. And that's all monitored and supervised by Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority. If you get through that stage, then you're licensed to guide clients in Tanzania. So, and that's, you know, even when you get licensed, that's kind of the beginning of the journey too. There's a lot of learning that that'll sort of

pursue you through your career. But yeah, getting licensed is the first step. Yeah, I'm being cautious about being too redundant if you've been following along from home You've heard all of our our five by now. Is that right five flop episodes We did a specific flop episode with George about his upbringing About why giraffes hate drones. No elephant elephant and me hate drones and The lay of land land with hunting in Kenya, Kenya moved gradually, not gradually, Kenya moving away from regulated hunting, even to the point where no bird hunting anymore. George talked about a little bit of his hunting there in his family's past and then coming

up to be a professional hunter in Tanzania. So if you want to refer back, you can check that out. Seth's here. Howdy. He's just looking next to him to Dirt. Dirt's here in love. Yep.

But we can't talk anything about who he's in love with. No, that's too great of a love. That's too great of a love. Dirt doesn't even want people to know. They're going to think you fell in love here now. Maybe I did. That's too great of a love. That's too great of a love. Dirt doesn't even want people to know. They're gonna think you fell in love here now. Maybe I did. Dirt doesn't want people to know even, he's so protective. I think he's afraid to get moved in on.

He's so protective that he doesn't want people to know, he was before the show began, he doesn't want people to know what country. This gal lives in. This gal lives in. Well, I will say gender. She is a woman. She is a woman. Okay, that narrows it down to like roughly 51% of the global population. She's great. So if you're looking to a dude next to you and you're wondering if that whose dirt is in love with, not. Other than that.

I wouldn't say if she's a dipper or not. Oh, is she a dipper? I won't say she might be a dipper. I'm not telling she's a dipper. No, she's not a dipper. Okay. So Dirt's love is very protective about wanting it. You don't want anybody to find out his, his, his, the love of his life. Lives a very private existence.

Yeah. Dirt doesn't want anyone checking in on her, talking about her, asking no questions about her. I have a quick thing to mention and then, oh, also people in the audience today, Corinne is going to represent the audience's interests. So if Corinne feels that there's like a burning audience question, she's going to shout it out in representation of the audience. You follow me? Yep. Because Corinne has quite a list of things in her head that she wants discussed.

So she's going to jump in from behind the scenes there. For many years now, we've done our annual Miannianus, the Labian Eagle. Every year we do our TRCP turkey hunt giveaway. It's that time of year again. The way the TRCP hunt giveaways went in the past is we used to auction them off to the highest bidder. And it was observed by many that by doing that, and I'm not hacking on orthodontist here. And in fact, we had some orthodontists, but by doing that, it's like, it's pretty much going to be orthodontists. Do you follow me?

Yeah. High bitters. Like it's going to be the, or when you say like, we're going to auction off a hunt, orthodontist perk up, right? So we switched it years ago to a raffle. So that any, any schmuck, any Joe blow off the street got like dirt. Yeah. Can come win the hunt. That's going on right now. So, uh, we've done them in the spring before, but this, it's a summer raffle

to win the TRCP Turkey hunt with me and the honest, how it goes is, uh, you buy your ticket, tickets, ticket, we pick a winner. The winner has a friend. The winner and the winner and his or her friend, all their expenses are covered. We agree on a date that works for everybody in the spring, so it'll be this coming spring. We pick a date that works for everybody. It's three nights, two full days of turkey hunting. We always find a great spot to go. We cover your airfare, lodging, food, all expenses.

If you need gear, we'll take care of the gear. If you need a shotgun, we'll bring you a shotgun to use. We cover your ammo. Did I say license? You pay nothing. All that money though doesn't come out of the the raffle pocket, the raffle pile of money. All that expense is covered by a donor so that when you buy a raffle ticket all of your money, all of your raffle ticket money goes to TRCP. Like it all goes there and

then we cover all the expenses for the trip We've done it a bunch of years We have everyone that comes has fun. We've had if you go on TRCP saying they got testimonials from past winners Those tickets are for sale from now to The end of the month Cren can you do you mind pulling up that what that's called? I'll do it. Where you go to get these tickets? One second. If a person wants these tickets,

they go to, I don't know, man. You can probably just Google TRCP turkey hunt giveaway. Yeah. If you search TRCP turkey hunt giveaway, then like add in like meat eater or something like that. Oh, even better. Go to trcp.org and one of the main things you'll find on the home page there is a link to buy your tickets. Then you win. And then we pack your bags because we're turkey hunt in the spring. If you Google TRCP turkey hunt giveaway the first link that comes up is the turkey hunt giveaway. That's good to hear. Nice. Yeah.

Okay now begins the the great African recap. I have a number of things that that's what we're going to touch on here. Top of my list, and these are in no particular order. But top of my list, we're going to kind of jump almost to the end by saying this. I remember growing up fishing freshwater fish, and I remember getting to an age where me and my buddies would start going down.

We would like drive down to Florida to fish in Florida and having one day realizing that man fish from the ocean. Taste way better. Just generally fish from the ocean tastes way better than fish from the freshwater. Um, I'm not, I don't think it's like me, dude. I think like stuff game animals are kind of better here. Oh, definitely.

But it's not like, I keep trying to ask myself, is it like a psychological thing? Cause there's like a novelty to it, but there's just like a consistent, like the antelope species, the African antelope species, I think are, I don't know, I hate to say it, are like a better table fair than American servants. They, um, I agree with that. It's pretty good. Just as an eater. Yeah. It's phenomenal. And that's really what you're saying. You're saying like, cause here there's so many species of antelope and in

North America, we have all these deer family servant species. There's just something about the, the, the antelope species. Yeah. Antelope are just delicious. I mean, I'm glad you said it. So I didn't have to because it's, I think it's, yeah, it's settled science now. Yeah. It's borderline sacrilegious, but it's settled science now because you're here and you've tasted them and no one can argue. Um, I mean, let's use, for example, the warthog. It's an old boar. If you ate an old boar, I mean, obviously, wild pigs aren't native to North America. I'm aware of that.

But if you ate an old boar of any other sort of species of wild hog, I think you'd be somewhat disappointed, especially in the way it was prepared for us, which is basically a grilled loin. But it was exceptional. I mean, it was like better than the best store-bought pork you could find. It was like a grilled loin. Yeah. But it was exceptional. Yeah. And it was like better than the best store bought pork you could find. It was unreal. Yeah.

And that sort of is, it's pretty universal. And then as I always remind people, we're eating the old males here. We'll never know cause they're illegal to hunt in Tanzania, but imagine how good the young females taste. Yeah. That jumps us to a thing on my list is a little bit of the regulatory structure that I was surprised by. Yeah. That jumps us to a thing on my list is a little bit of the regulatory structure that I was surprised by. No female anything. No. So even like a warthog. No. Has to be a male.

Has to be a male. Zebras which have very little like visually very little sexual dimorphism. Yep. Has to be a male. Has to be a male. You got to wait for its tail to flick. Yep. Yep. That's one way to tell. Um, yeah. Otherwise getting a good look between the legs there. That's about all you've got to work with. So, and you guys have a management strategy on this, on this piece of ground we're hunting where you're like, basically your philosophy is you're hunting things that are on death's door. Yeah.

Yeah. Ideally post-productive males. Yeah. So especially for our key species, buffalo and things like that, you know, there are certain times where we'll take a bull out of a herd for various species, but in general, those will be bulls that when we look at it, we're like, that's actually a really old one. He's not going to hold on to that herd position much longer. And it's not going to be a bad thing for a younger ball to come in and take his place. Yeah. But yeah, I didn't mean to suggest it was like, like crippled or something like you're like,

looking for you have an awareness of what is the, what are the sort of visual clues of an animal that's reached his on the decline, not just peak, but reached like kind of the end of the line. Absolutely. Yeah. In terms of horn growth, whatever. And that's who you're after males only old males only. Yeah. Even in, and that stuff is good. Oh yeah. Even in decline as far as horn growth, right? Like you'll have Buffalo, for example, like the one you shot that have worn down, you know, they would have been longer at an earlier stage in their life. So that for us is ideal.

That kind of is the cornerstone of the management strategy as far as off take is old males that are post-productive or can easily be replaced in the population. Yeah, to get people a sense that what that search is like, if you look at it, so we hunted, we focused on hunting and we hunted for four different species of big game animals. We knew that like Cape Buffalo was the primary thing we were after. Now, the experience, ultimately the experience we had hunting Cape Buffalo was a little bit different because it's, you can sort of,

through things we'll get into it when you w we're making episodes about all of this. So people will be able to watch this stuff happen in real time or in real life, you know, but you can make hunting decisions that put you in a position where you're like targeting old bulls. Absolutely. Yeah. Like you can make hunting decisions that put you in a position where you're like targeting old bulls. Absolutely. Yeah. Like you can, you can go out and kind of specifically like where you go, how you go about it, what tracks you follow where you're kind of dismissing the herds in order to focus on like a,

a lone animal or two animals that you can determine are old. So we were able to go in and kind of like narrow our search a little bit. But on the other stuff we hunted, I would say that two huge examples stand out like hunting sable, but dozens of sable balls. Yep. Yep. Correct. Yeah. We looked at dozens and dozens of them and I couldn't get comfortable with more so the age than anything. There was a couple of balls that I felt were mature, but perhaps had some growing still to do. And then there were a couple of bulls that I felt were mature, but maybe a little unimpressive as far as morn size.

And I felt that we could do better while also still getting an old animal. So yeah, it was something to where it's an unusual experience, right? It can be frustrating at times too. I mean, I myself was frustrated on this hunt multiple times with just like, how many of these things do we need to look at before I see what I'm happy

with? Yeah. We will see as half dozen war hogs. Sometimes because they're in groups. So since they're in small groups, half dozen war hogs a day, it became a run and joke that Morgan's like, Mr. No man. Yeah. Yeah. I became the, the crusher of dreams. Like I look at them. I look at them. I'm like, that looks like a spectacular specimen to me. And I look at him. Breaker of dreams. Yeah, I look at him. I'm like, that looks like a spectacular specimen to me. And I'm like, no, no, no, no.

But all that stuff paid off, man. All that stuff paid off. It has a way of coming together. I mean, that's the wonderful thing about this place. You never know what's around that next corner. It's so vast. Now that we've built up the hunt and run here, we're going to knock it down because I want to talk.

I want to discuss the black mamba. I knew it was coming. we've built up the hunt and run here we're gonna knock it down because I want to talk I want to discuss the black mamba yeah I want to discuss the black mamba because we come out and I don't even know how we got on it somehow someone's aware of black mambas because when you get George really quickly just give people a quick prime around what is a black mamba? Black mamba is probably our most venomous snake that we'll sort of encounter out here. Um, and he's, he's got pretty mean concoction of venom and you've got a pretty short window to, to get the antivenom and get help. Um, and then, I mean, come on, you got 20 minutes.

By the book, I think, I think I, think by the book you've got a couple of hours. You've got three hours, if I'm not wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's about three hours. Probably depends where you get zapped a little bit. But yeah, they're pretty mean and they get a lot of fanfare because they're quite an aggressive snake. Yeah, they're an attack snake. Yeah, they're an attack snake. Attack of a truck snake.

They're mean. Like, yeah, the only, I don't know, maybe not the only snake in the world. This is a snake, not just that you gotta like step on it to get it worked up. This is a snake that comes for you. Yeah, he's pretty moody kind of guy. You know, you'll walk past him and he'll just, he might be in a bad mood and chase you along for a bit. He defends his turtle. Yeah, this is my hangout. Yeah, you're not welcome here buddy. Move along. Yeah, if you want to see a great bit on the, a great bit on Black Mamba's, it's fictional, but if you get into the Kill Bill series, in Kill Bill 2, which is largely set in the desert southwest, Michael Madsen, rest in peace, died while we were here in Africa.

Michael Madsen's character gets killed by a Black Mamba in the possession of Darryl Hannah's character. And as he's dying, she has a little notebook. And as she's dying, she reviews some of her notes about the black mamba and gives a bunch of stats about black mambas as he's dying. So you could go watch that clip. Just type in kill bill black mamba. You can see it. So I never didn't think about it much.

We somehow it came up like, Oh, there's black mambas around here. Yeah. Should we be aware? And Morgan's like, they're here, but you know, odds running into one. Yeah. Just not going to happen. Yeah, just not gonna happen. Yeah. Stupidest thing I've ever said.

I knew when I said it too, I was like, I'm gonna live to regret this. Especially, yeah, I knew I was gonna live to regret it. And sure enough, sure enough, egg on my face. I'm thrilled that I have. It's cool to see what we saw. So first we ran into... Jabberwocker? No, that puff adder.

Puff adder. Yeah. We ran into a puff adder and, uh, that's chill snake. Yeah. But we'll talk about that. I want to talk about that one too. Cause it's, um, I mean, he was like totally minding his own business, but it led us to kind of a little bit like the thing that blew my mind about a puff

adder, no American snake does this. Like when you see a snake out, his ass is Snaking. Doing an S shape, kind of perpetual S shape. Locomotion via the S. Locomotion via the S. Yeah. Right.

Like a slither. A puff adder, which is another deadly snake, but you have a much bigger window, like a much higher survival rate with a puff adder, I gather. That puff adder, he goes down the, he goes, how do you explain it? He goes in his exact straight line. Yeah. He's like scales. Yeah. It's almost like he's got like a track, like, you know, like, like a

like a tank or something. Yeah. He's just, he just would be a track, like, you know, like, like a tank or something. Yeah, he's just, he just would be like centipede ish. No, because I've got little legs. It's what he's got is sort of his, his bottom layer of skin and his top, they sort of shuffle like that. You know, he sort of shuffles his body, sort of shuffles his bottom layer of skin forward, his belly, if you will. Yeah.

Um, not as easily as a roust as the mamba. Yeah. And they got a deadly bite. Yeah, deadly bite and very, very rapid strike, but yeah, not as easily aroused as the mamba. Two hits before a balloon pops. Yeah, George is saying he can hit a balloon before it pops, he can hit a puff at it or hit it twice. That's what they say. I don't know how true that is,

but they are one of the fastest striking snakes. Yeah, they're like an ambush snake. Yeah. And that's, that's our most common cases in Africa is puff out a bite because they're ambush predators. They don't move particularly fast. So you might step on him and if you step on him, he's going to defend himself and bite you.

Um, whereas most other snakes apart from the black man, but they move off pretty quick, but he's our most common, um common contender for, for snake bite victims. We saw one of those. We saw, we saw puff adder first, but it's just totally my on the road, but mine in his own business, we saw a Cobra. What kind of Cobra was that? I think it was an Egyptian Cobra. I only got a quick look at it.

He wanted nothing to do with this. Nothing to do with this. So he just, yeah, he scooted off. But the puff adder, or the mamba. We're in a, can you explain our war rigs? Oh, they're sick. Yeah. So it's a Land Cruiser FJ78 that's rigged for hunting. So it has a lot of kind of custom metal framework

on the back so that there's places for people to sit on the back on kind of an elevated platform above the cab. So you can kind of see out while you're cruising around. Aside from that, you know, we really enhance the suspension on those vehicles. They've got to take a lot of weight in the back. Like when we load a full Buffalo in there it's a lot of additional weight so there's souped up suspension and yeah a few other little

mod modifications and adjustments to the vehicle to make it suitable for Safari but they're a wonderful wonderful piece of equipment. Yeah loaded down with every kind of tool you can imagine. Oh yeah no no for sure. Wide array of machetes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Machetes, jacks, shovels, cold drinks. Sling shot. A sling shot. We had nine. All manner of chain and cable tucked into various compartments. There were rigs. We had nine rigs, nine folks in our rig the whole time, right? Tables, chairs. What else have we got on there, George? Yeah lunch box. Yeah lunch box. Got a little... We've got a bucket for brining. Yeah trophy care so we can do trophy care in the field if we have to. We've got hammocks in there. Bunch

of water. Yeah a bunch of water. Got a pretty serious first aid kit as well. Yeah we've got a big first aid kit like a trauma kit in case someone gets injured in the field. At times a package of cookies on the dashboard. Yeah They go quick. They go through an entire trip through the cookies in two days. Yeah, yeah. He thought it was like something that magically would refresh, you know. The cookie supply dried up real quick with you boys. I gotta blame Adam on that too.

Was he feeding? Was he belt feeding him? No, I was, that was my like friendship. We'll get into it in a little bit, but also a lot of matches. Yes. A lot of matches. A lot of matches. War rigs and we're going to touch on those matches in a minute.

What's hibernation and why do some mammals hibernate? When animals vocalize, what are they saying and what does it mean? Which critter has sharp projections inside their mouths, which aren't teeth that hold prey? Meteor Kids is back for season 3. We're gonna learn a bunch of neat things about nature and wildlife that you can tell your friends, your school, and your parents about. We're gonna give you the hard-hitting answers kids for why things are the way they are. Hyperphagia.

Man, that's a big word. And you better get ready for Guess That Critter. This noise is often made by a female when she is watching the young and asking her mate to come back soon with food. And for our Play Along Kids Trivia, the correct answer. It's seven, everybody got that one, right? Search meat eater kids hit that follow button now What the hell's that even getting at oh so on the war rigs the the safari rigs

There's a over the cab is a storage area. Yep, but we would just have rigs. There's a over the cab is a storage area. Yep. But we would just have our camera guy Chris Gill or dirt would usually sit up on that cab thing so they could film back and then swing and film forward as we're out having our adventures. And dirt you cruise along and we'll sometimes cover I mean I never turned a tracker function on, but I mean like easily a hundred miles. Oh yeah. And a day, no problem. Yeah. So we're, we're out on, we're out on a, like a, a game reserve that is, I keep throwing

this out there just cause I think it's easy for America to picture whether or not they actually can picture it or not, but they can but they can sort of comprehend the scale. It's a couple million acres. Yep. A couple million acres. So Yellowstone National Park is just over two million acres. This is about two million acres, but it's joined up with a national park. Yep, correct. We've got a boundary with a national park, and then the national park has a boundary with another game reserve, and so it's all kind of part of a big, contiguous ecosystem. Yeah. With a major river system through it

with all these lagoons and swamps and stuff. And there's a, we'll call it a road network, but it'd be probably better for an American audience to understand it'd be like a trail network. Yeah, yeah. Like two tracks would be the term I've heard used. Yeah, a two track network, pretty impressive two track network that like is tenuous.

The land will just eat the road. Oh, absolutely. They have to be remade almost every year. There's a lot of them that just go back to nature and have to be rebuilt from scratch. There's a lot of, there's the miambo, which is like a forest. There's a lot of, there's the miambo, which is like a forest. There's a lot of wetlands. And the roads are extensive, but tenuous in that time, slow

going. But, you know, by using winches, using people pushing and pulling, filling in wet spots with some logs and brush and stuff so you can get around you can do hun You know hundred plus miles of cruising around and then as you choose get out and walk to certain spots as well But there's a lot of big openings You can kind of pull into or pull through and glass from the opening So as you're cruising around your spotting game, absolutely all the time. Well There's a little bit of midday doldrums Yeah, when you kind of kick it like anywhere hunting, like you know that sort of 12 30 to 3 30 kind of socks. Mornings are great,

evenings are great. You spot a lot of game and we had this joke that dirt only can over the days, over the couple weeks, like dirt could now and then spot a warthog if it was in a 12 o'clock position. Because that's being aware of the branches at head heights too. Yeah. Cause he's watching for getting hit in the head by branches. And so as he's watching for branches, you would occasionally see a warthog. I'm getting to this. I'm getting to our black mama story. I'm going to tell my perspective because it was incomplete and then dirt can share his perspective of what happened.

So periodically, maybe once a day, once every two days, Dirt will gesture out front. He'll do like a gesture and I'll know to look off and I feel like I'm looking for whatever animal Dirt's out front. So we're cruising on the road. Dirt gives like the, like the out front gesture. And I'm looking and, and as I'm trying to figure out what it is, Dirt's gesture turns into him beating the top of the truck with his hand. Didn't know how to say stop in Swahili at that time. He's beating the, he's beating the rack. And I'm still trying to figure out what's going on. And only then does it like occur to me.

Cause by that point, Dyr is trying to get off the top of the truck. He's crawling into our laps. He's trying to like roll off the cab into the like back of the truck. And then Dyr can explain what, what he's seeing as this is taking place. Well, I was looking for the warthogs out at 12 o'clock and I remember someone just, I think you guys talked about her like out of the corner in the corner of my brain. I'd heard

if you see a black mama, you don't want to drive over it because it will raise up and potentially drive over it because it will raise up and potentially smack you through the window. Which in my mind was kind of fictitional but it just stuck in my mind. Yeah, we would then hit a stick and the stick would jump up and hit the side of the truck and then make the joke black mom. People were talking about they can dent trucks. And they will. When you're in the back there you're quite exposed and they do rear up as we saw. Oh, yes. I saw this big ass snake and it just kind of froze me up. And I was like, that's probably a freaking black mamba.

And we're about to drive over it. And I just couldn't use my words. We had been slapping the roof to stop for game. And I just started slapping and trying to back up. And then that sucker, I'll let you take it back over, but it, it was going away from us. It was going away from us. We were, I don't know, 15, 20 feet.

And at some point it became aware of our presence and busted up four feet. I'm saying I'm taking that to the grave. I don't know if that's true. Yeah. For, I mean, Chris could see him through over the hood, but yeah, lifted up his body and came at us. The only way I can describe it, I had no idea, like I'd heard about him, but I had no idea. The only way to describe it is like, he's got like a Loch Ness monster. Yeah, totally. Where he's like, you know, Loch Ness monster is

down in the water, but its neck is, I mean, he's cruising around. It doesn't make sense. Mechanically. No. If he's seven feet long, when he's cruising around three and a half feet of him are straight up. Yeah. But he can cruise around like that.

Yeah. He can move still. Yeah. And we love, like he goes through the woods, like he's like, he goes through the woods at that moment. Yeah. I'm sure normally they're sneaking along. He's going through the woods. He's like, like, uh, providing his own crow's nest. Yeah. And it's good that Morgan, before he reared up, you saw him and said, back up. Cause if we weren't backing up, he would have came. He looked like he was going to come on the hood. He was going to come on. He would have, but.

You never know. you never know. But yeah, once we sort of started reversing, he moved off, fortunately. Yeah. And then the guys were all gung-ho to go and see if they could grab him even more. Which I very quickly put the kibosh on that plan. Yeah, and like he like is going away.

I didn't see him going away. I see him like coming at the truck, and then he like, going away. I didn't see him going away I see him like coming at the truck and then he like it's a false charge Yeah, and he leaves off in the woods when he leaves off in the woods. He's still got his head up Yeah, so you can watch his head going cruising like Like belt buckle high cruise. Yeah, the woods man. It's the most crazy thing I've ever magic. Yeah Dating. Oh so weird and it's another one of those things that happens now and then like I remember like always hearing about lionfish you know. Oh yeah. And like you know you don't want to get hit by a lionfish and you get hit by a

lionfish and you're all worried about it and um but it might as well be like not that big of a deal. But you said it hurt like hell. Hurts like hell but not a big deal. Yeah. Like a bullet amp. People like oh watch out you know I got hit by a bullet amp, you know, and I got stung by a bullet amp. Not a big deal. But the more we get talking about these black mambas, dude, like big deal. It's a major problem. No, it's a serious problem. You've got a serious problem. But I have to, I mean, I'm obligated to say that black mamba sightings, snake sightings in general here, relatively rare, we just had a really good run of them on this safari. It's like for better or worse, there's, there is an absolutely perfect parallel.

There's a perfect parallel and it is grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies. Yep. Right. You guys, uh, spend all this time here around black mambas. You're like, probably won't see one, which I gather is totally true. We covered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles and walked all over hell and drove all over hell and saw a grand total of one. Okay.

He did not bite anybody. Right. So like non-issue, but for people that are sort of like, what now? What's this now about this thing? You know, and you see it, it like, it was not, you can't bucket it in close calls at all. Right. It wouldn't even, it doesn't even, it didn't even deserve like close call

relegation, but it was just like a shocking, I guess the thing that was shocking to me was the snake athleticism and the idea that a snake would ever decide to like, be like, I'm gonna like, I'm taking on this land cruiser dude and I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's an unusual, it's a wild set of behavior for a snake. Yeah, sure.

But we saw one. Yeah. Like I don't want to over blow it to people be like, Oh my God, you're gonna get killed by a black mom because that stuff's annoying. Like people think they're gonna get killed by mountain lions and they think they're killed by bears that they're gonna get killed by everything under the sun it's not gonna happen nothing happened to us George you ever been killed by a black mamba? I'm still here. The dude was born in the bush across the border and grew up on

a ranch and he's still alive. Yeah, yeah. They get a lot of fanfare because they're just different. Which is like the Grizz. Yeah, the fanfare. Yeah, it would be like the, yeah, back to the Grizz thing. Let's say you see a Grizz and, you know, he takes five steps towards you before running off. That sticks with you for the rest of your life. Yeah.

And people that know bears, be like, that bear was no risk to anybody. Yeah, yeah. He wasn't, he wasn't serious. He was wondering what you were and he ran away. Yeah. Yeah. But in your head you're like, good Lord. Yeah. It's personal. It's a grisly charge. Today on our, on our cruise, we passed some water and there was a crocodile in there. And I wasn't aware that the Swahili word for crocodile

was mamba. Yeah, everyone was so excited to see their second black mamba. Everyone was so ready and I had to put like pour cold water on it. No, it's a Swahili word for crocodile. Mambo means hello, right? Uh, jumbo is jumbo is sort of, yeah, it's a form. They're both forms of greeting. Yeah. Yeah. One's very informal. Um, one's sort of a little more formal, but mama, I think the only Swahili word I act for animals that I actually got was Bogo. Yeah. The buffalo. Yeah. It's a good one. Good one to know. Yeah. You always feel a little out of the loop.

Oh yeah. So we're sure they say a word and you're always gonna be like, no, what now? What is it? I try to be pretty quick on the draw with the translation. You do a great job. You do great. Well, there's nothing worse than sitting there and you haven't seen it. You're wondering if it's like your target species is a good one and like we're chattering back and forward without you even knowing what's there. So it's critical. But yeah, you were quick to point out today that there's in fact not a black mamba. It's a crocodile which will do us no harm where it is. I want to hit, I'm going the back out of my notes. I got

open. I'm going to run through. This is against my better judgment to run through our list because it's so damn long. Yeah, like who would have a tension span long enough to hear what we ran into? Yeah, and I suspect it's incomplete too. So let's give it a let's give it a listen to this now. too. So let's give it a, let's give it a listen to this now. I got the 10 game animals and got bored.

I'm going to do them all. I was just trying to tell people how many are on the list. Yeah. Okay. A common reed buck. That's the white tail deer. Yeah, they, they, it's a white tail. Sure. It has horns and go handlers. Runs to the woods. Like, like it, the white tail deer and this animal took totally separate paths and landed at a very similar group. Convergent evolution brought them together. They split at about the same time. Like, you know, you catch them.

He's like, Whoa, takes off. He's got a little tail. Just different. Totally different. Yeah. Coloration. Does that really? Yeah. Yeah. Totally different. Yeah. Coloration. Mm.

I kept, we kept, I think maybe to Morgan's annoyance, we kept joking about how much they remind us of white tail deer. No, no, I see, I see the similarity. But he's, is it an antelope species? It is an antelope. Okay. He's got a horn. Yeah, he's got a horn and they're beautiful.

I mean, they're gorgeous creatures. I really enjoy them. We saw a bunch of topi. Yes. Many, hundreds of topi, hundreds of topi, which are, you know, how you explain a man, crazy looking animal. They like being around the river flats, the water, the game, open plains. What are they? A couple hundred pounds? Yeah. Yeah. Something in that range. A couple hundred to 50, something like that. A big bull.

I will put it like most people who watched the group watching nature documentaries are familiar with a wildebeest. Yes. There's a couple animals that to me had a wildebeest vibe. Yeah yeah that sort of higher front and that sort of rocking gait. Yeah. You could certainly say that's true of Toby. They're a little smaller, a little less sort of boxy than a wildebeest. They're in that kind of harder beast family. Beautiful animals, again. So these are things like we had, we weren't,

if we were hunting them, we would have had a hell of a time. Oh, sure, yeah. We would have had a lot of opportunities. Oh, absolutely. The reed buck is an animal that like, seems that's gonna take some doing. Yeah, especially early season here with the high grass. The reed buck have got a lot of places to hide.

They're an open plains thing too. Those, you know, we call them Mbuggas, you know, those open areas where there's just sort of more sparse vegetation. It's not the forest proper. There's kind of an edge habitat there. They like that edge habitat. So they'll be in those Mbuggas. But this time of year, unless the grass has been dealt with through burning, they're extremely

difficult to spot. Edge habitat you say. Yeah. Once again, white tailed deer. Yep. The Lichtenstein heartabeast, quite an abundant critter. Yep, Lichtenstein's heartabeast, very abundant here. And in a coloration that really just says here I am. Yep, that sort of rusty brown. That's a beginner's, if you want to spot animals, that's a good beginners animal Yeah, the white rump. It's a white running reddish body. You're like, there's one. Yeah. Yeah, I don't do that. I go. What's that? Very wary, you know very very keen eyesight a very worthy species to hunt enjoy them a lot the defasa water buck

Which has if you ever see a deer on a super cold when they're one deer in the winter Put all their hair puff all their hair out. Mm-hmm the way some birds do like he's just trying to keep warm Puffs all his hair out like that. Yep, the water buck. Yeah, they've got a very coarse hair bush buck Yeah, the water buck. Yeah, they've got a very coarse hair. Bush buck. Sable, which we hunted for. This is like one of the most kind of like holy shit looking of the animals. The bulls, we're hunting sable. The bulls turn black. I mean black like a black horse is black with a main and then like an outstanding set of horns. Yeah. Exceptional. Really impressive. 40 foot sides coming out of their head. Yeah. 40 inch. I'm sorry. Yeah. I wish. Yeah. 40 inch sides coming out of their head. Like a

really like wow. Yeah. Look an animal. And the fact came, the females are reddish. The females are reddish brown, rusty. Yeah. Again, rusty brown. Nile crocodile, which is a game animal. Cause if you buy a hunting license is on your hunting license.

Correct. You can hunt crocodiles. Yep. We saw at night driving at night, we saw a leopard and also saw a lot of leopard tracks We did but one we got lucky probably real lucky real lucky and a female leopard came out And boogie down the road in front of us yeah, and at one point Morgan doesn't want to be quoted on this But we're talking about leopard so leopard is a mountain a little bit

I would say like a little bigger than a mountain lion. Right. So in this area, in this area, you see males that are what 160, 170. Yeah. A big male would be that 160 to 170 somewhere in the middle there. So it can happen with like that can happen with mountain lions, but in some areas, their top end kind of passes up the mountain lion top end. But the interesting thing about leopard, so leopards are spotted like a jaguar. But there are so many more there's such a denser and like there's so much more abundant on the landscape the

mountain lions. Yeah, absolutely. Much smaller home range, there can be many of them in the area. Yep, because there's a lot of game. And it's a much more like, like when you're out in this area, they're, they're just around like right now around our, our leopards. These guys commonly hear them at night. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. They walk right through camp sometimes. Um, so we saw one lot of Dikers, a lot of Dikers, which is a little shit. And how, how many pounds is that? Diker. 20 pounds, a bit more maybe? 30 pounds?

No, less. Less, somewhere in that 15-20 range I'd say. Maximum. And when you see him he's usually moving. 12 foot leaps. Yeah, they're very agile. Clip springers. Yep.

Which is a little Diker like rock. Very specialized antelope They like to hang out on rock outcrops They've got specially adapted little hooves with kind of a leathery pad on the bottom so they can kind of Hop around and get really good traction on the rocks. Yeah, I would say all told we saw 30 dikers. Yeah, and saw the grand total of one who stood still for one moment. Yeah. Yep. There was one that stood still. Yeah. Giraffes, not a game animal. Not a game animal. In Tanzania, it's the national animal. It's our bald eagle.

Correct. Well, now we have a national mammal, the American bison, but let's go with the bald eagle analogy because this is very much so. Because you can't hunt it. Do not shoot that thing. But lots of them. Lots of them them, daily occurrence of seeing it. Very much so. Yeah.

Very abundant in this area. Warthog. Uh, we'll talk about that. Cape Buffalo. We saw and got a rhone, which is a sable like we covered off on sables, but the rhone bulls are a rhone color or tan color. Yep. Um, a little bit of kind of maybe a little bit of a heavier horn, much shorter.

Yep. Heavy a horn, slightly shorter and, um, a bit of a stockier body than a sable. Yeah. Like a small, like, uh, I don't know, man, like, like the height of a small mule. Absolutely. Yeah. They're tall baboons all over the damn place. Lots of them. We saw Greater Kudu. Yeah. We saw lots, not lots, we saw maybe over a dozen zebras an or a bee yes and a male or a bee yep was that that

little guy it was the little guy here which I had never heard of yeah and I was told it was a fine specimen but I didn't feel comfortable shooting something I'd never heard of much to our dismay because they're delicious and it was a particularly good specimen. It was tiny again right? Yeah, a little longer in the leg than your Diker, a little longer in the body too and the neck as well for that matter but they're a very pretty animal. Again they hang out in those Mbuggas. We saw Eland. We saw Eland. Couple. We saw today one we hadn't seen yet.

Impala. We saw an Impala. Oh yeah. There's probably more stuff we have. Well Hippo, if we're collectively Hippo. Yeah, Hippo. That's a game animal too. All right down.

Impala. A couple of vervet monkey. Yep. We saw vervets. Hippo. We saw a number of very small cat species. We did. Yeah. We saw a Janet cat, an African wildcat, which is rare.

And then we saw, what's that little bugger that was out running out of the spod. Aardvark. Aardvark. Yeah. That was a big deal. That was very cool. That's a very rare sighting. We got extremely lucky on this safari with like headlight spottings of just cool and unusual animals that you don't typically run into.

So we saw we're talking about with the exception of, um, the now crocodile, we saw over, here's the point. We saw over 20 species of like medium to large size mammal game species. species of like medium to large size mammal game species. Yeah. And it's like this, it's this very obvious point that, that you could have said it to me and I would have like intellectually accepted it, but you have to live it. Be like, like the place has seen us alive.

All when we're talking, whenever we sit around and we do it often on this show, we have anthropologists come in, paleontologists come in, archaeologists, we kind of marvel about like the megafauna, the extinctions of the megafauna in North America. Yep. Right. Where we lost the horse, we lost all these different like giraffe species, you know, we lost our elephants, saw a lot of elephant tracks but did some weirdly. Yeah I was very surprised. As big as they are like we saw elephant tracks a lot of days because of the tall grass again

was not it and you'd be amazed at how well they can just melt into that tall grass. And um I've heard a lot of people mention in my readings that people talk about that you sort of like not seeing the forest for the trees a little bit. Very much so. People be like, you're 30 feet from an elephant and also you realize there's an elephant because it's just like not in the sea. Yeah. Yeah. It becomes like the lands. It's not, it's not an animal on landscape. It almost becomes like the landscape people talk about and thick stuff. You also realize like, oh my God, there's a ear. Yeah. They realize what's in front of them is an elephant. Yeah. Gray tree trunks sort of with the gray hide. They are deceptively difficult to spot.

It'll seem wild to people, but passing a, like going by a giraffe, you also, it's in plain sight, but you don't see it. You read it like, you read the legs like trees. Cause you're looking for like, I don't know, I'm looking for, you know, being, especially being a hunter from America. I'm looking for like, I'm looking for shit that's about 150 pounds. You know?

And you, you know, which is about yay high, right? So it's about like yay high at the shoulder, right? Belly button high at the shoulder. And so you get like, when you're out on the hunt, you have a sight picture and you're not realizing that four of those trees are like draft legs. It's it, you can't explain it until you live it, but you just, you look through them. Yeah. Yeah, you do. They, they are very,

very well camouflaged when they stand still, they kind of just, they blend in and that kind of the pattern they have just breaks up their outlines. So well they're impressive. To this place to see an extinction point it'd be like the richness of what's here that you have. So behind us right now somewhere out here we saw that we didn't see one we saw a lot of tracks. You have lions, leopards, and then a host of small cat species. You have a hyena. So now it's not, it's probably not even technically a canine, is it? But like hyenas, jackals, African wild dogs.

Oh, we saw a jackal. I had that too. Oh yeah, we saw it. Would m I had that too. We saw it. Yep. Would mongoose go on the list too or no? No, no, that's like a weasel equivalent. They're adjacent. But then like dozens of species of horned, dozens of kinds of horned animals. Yep. Yep. The biodiversity here is incredible. And the specialization is the thing that always impresses me. The Clipspring is a great example, an antelope that's adapted just to live on rock out crops

and graze the surrounding margins of those rock out crops, use them for shelter and to get away from predators. It's really impressive. Yeah, so you might be on a big, you might be like on a big, you might be like cruising along a big ridge top, like a big flat top ridge top, and on it you'll get into area where there's outcrops. Yep.

Then all of a sudden shooting across the road is a Clipspringer. You would point out like he's associated with that rock outcrop. Yep. Like that's his little zone. Did they, did you get the Kiswahili word for a Clipspringer?

No. Pretty cool. Call them Boozy Mawae, which direct translation is rock goat. Oh, really? Rock goat? Yeah. Pretty cool. What's hibernation and why do some mammals hibernate?

When animals vocalize, what are they saying and what does it mean? Which critter has sharp projections inside their mouths which aren't teeth that hold prey? Meteor Kids is back for season three. We're gonna learn a bunch of neat things about nature and wildlife that you can tell your friends, your school, and your parents about. We're gonna give you the hard-hitting answers kids for why things are the way they are. Hyperphagia. Man, that's a big word. And you better get ready for Guess That Critter.

This noise is often made by a female when she is watching the young and asking her mate to come back soon with food. And for our play-along kids trivia, the correct answer is seven. Everybody got that one right. Search meat eater kids. Hit that follow button now. There was a thing I had like, I keep pointing out the same to like maybe to the point of being annoying is you grow up on wildlife documentaries like out in the Serengeti. And I can see why. If you want to film a bunch of wildlife, go there, everything's wild. The grass is, you know, there's grass,

you have scattered trees, you can just see all the stuff. Here you're in a lot, you're in forested country oftentimes, you're in forested country. So you have in your head that you're going to have these like panoramic views of all of the stuff out mingling out in the open. And in the forested area, it's very much like being, you know, it's like, there's like deciduous trees here. Yes. A lot of times you're in that environment where you're like, it's not this great abundance. It's just like scatterings of things, but they're different. But then today we had a, today we went out and do a big, I don't know what you even call it, sort of a floodplain. Yeah.

Like a big grass floodplain, um, along a coursing, very swampy river, like picture kind of river, just got crocodiles and hippos in it. And there's this mass grass flats coming off that. And there was a time where you're like, you're standing there and within the thousand yards of you are hundreds of animals. Yep. Yep. There was an impressive concentration of game down there and that'll, that'll

happen more and more as the season wears on. So one of the things that we've been up against on this safari, and we've kind of used it to our advantage a little bit, but definitely been somewhat hindered by, is that there's still a huge amount of water inside the miombo, inside the forest. There's little water holes. I mean, we saw a lot of them when we were tracking Buffalo and tracking other game, you'll be kind of walking through the bush and then suddenly there's a bit of soil that's kind of low lying and there's standing water in there or there's a little spring that's still seeping from the rainy season that in a few weeks here will be dry or there's a rock, you know, a rock area where springs leaking into a rock and there's a collection of water. That stuff is

definitely dispersing the game because a lot of animals don't need to go down to the river to drink. There's grass on those and boogers, there's grass on the freshly burnt sections, and there's little pockets of water that they can locate throughout the Miyombo forest to where they don't need to concentrate on those floodplains. As those water sources dry up, you'll see a greater concentration of game later in the season. But certainly to your point about the Serengeti, those water sources dry up, you'll see a greater concentration of game later in the season. But certainly to your point about the Serengeti, this ecosystem doesn't have that kind of game concentration.

It's naturally just a more dispersed, lower kind of, yeah, lower yield as far as numbers of game per acre or hectare or whatever metric you want to use. But nonetheless, the biodiversity is incredible. Oh, it's unbelievable. But today we saw the mass amount we saw. There was like, you could see looking out ahead of us, there's 40 Cape Buffalo, about seven zebras, hundreds of Toby.

Yep. And then there was a couple, uh, some impala off there and there was some waterbuck as well. Yeah. But like hundreds, hundreds. Yeah. Unbelievable. It was unbelievable. All mixed in. Yeah. All mingling together, making noises, the bulls chasing each other around. It was impressive. It was a beautiful morning. Um, Oh, you know, I was going to mention, we watched one water source go. I don't know if you remember the, when we got here, we went to shoot. Yes. All these baboons took off at one baboon didn't realize all his bodies left because he had his head down and he was having a hole in the rock. Yep.

Drinking and I looked I peered down and there they are Dan it's gone. Dry. Yeah. Classic example. So he's like they lost his little water pocket. Yeah. And something like that could support one old Buffalo Bull or a handful of other planes game species that would come in just for that amount. And so now that's gone. Those have moved on to another water source and that'll kind of continue to happen until a lot of stuff's concentrating around the permanent water.

One of the things that surprised me most, um, grass fires. We got one going. Yeah. I'll say I'm going to, I don't know if you know, but I've told him, I'm just going to try to get a job with Robin hurt and it's going to be chief ignition officer. You were going to be VP. I think VP of ignition.

Yeah. He's going to have like a sort of an assessment role and monitoring. That's right. Yeah. Oh, perfect. Sign me up. Uh, in reading North American history, Native American land use, North American history,

like there's not, there's not many like landscape environmental historians that you can, that you can talk to about pre European history in North America that don't comment on the active quality of human caused wildfires on the landscape. Even to the point where like this is kind of I don't want to open up too I don't want to open up too crazy of a thing here but European diseases when European European diseases kind of like swept the

landscape quicker than Europeans did when they, when they arrived in the new world. So North and South America, um, European diseases, maybe, maybe killed as many as 90% of the humans that lived in North and South America. It's a, it's a debated thing. Like there's, there's no way it was left less than 50. There's like no one argues it was less than 50, maybe as many as 90% of people by diseases. Climatologists can see in like glaciers and things that store, I'm trying not to go too deep into this picture glaciers where you have annual deposition of atmospheric conditions that you can

dig a core and look climatologists can point to when that happened, that bracket of years when the Americas were depopulated by a sudden and dramatic reduction in ash. Interesting. Yeah. Makes sense. People were burning. People were burning. Like you read, and it's so hard to picture, you're reading about history, like they'd burn to attract game. They'd burn to open up the landscape, right?

They burn for agricultural purposes. You read about in the Great Plains, like a lot of people talk about big fires, the Plains tribes, they're like, oh no, they burned it all off to track buffalo on the Plains. That goes on here. It does. Yeah.

This is a fire adapted ecosystem. So same thing. You can easily imagine, and there is, you know, understanding the people that inhabited this place prior to, let's say, four to six thousand years ago is a pretty inexact science. It's not really clear exactly who was here and what they were doing, but you can easily imagine that they would have burned for all of those same reasons that we still burn today, which is getting rid of that excessive decadent grass that's of no value, feed value to animals, and is difficult for them to move through

and kind of navigate their way through. It's clearing out the forest of fuel load so you get a very cool, quick moving fire. It doesn't damage trees. A person can hop through it. Oh yeah, absolutely. No, we've had to drive through it a number of times because we've lit one and then realized

that the road we were taking is a dead end. Or it's blocked. Yeah, you can kind of like stop it out or go through whatever. Like doesn't harm the trees. No, doesn't harm the trees. Very slowly, very low heat. And when it's happening this time of year,

we don't get rain, so you're not putting runoff into the rivers. And it's, we saw on the safari, the way that fire helps the habitat and helps us as hunters kind of goes hand in glove. But the early part of the safari, we were burning furiously. I mean, anything that had taken match, we'd set a match to it just to burn that decadent grass.

And it might burn a patch the size of where we're sitting. Or it might burn 10,000 acres. You lit a couple of, a couple of beauties, a couple for the books. This is what I'm proud of. You should be, you should be. But then towards the latter part of the safari, we actually started to see that bearing fruit where we went places that we'd set fire to on day two or three on day seven, eight, nine, and there was already regrowth, green shooting grass and game.

Absolutely indisputable. Yeah. Indisputable. The game moves on. Like I was laying out a scientific experiment. I still want you to do. I want you to go in and in mechanically clear an area, rake it, clip everything and scrape it out and then burn an area next to it and see what the regrowth pattern is. It's like, man it comes back. Well a good example of that is the runway strip. Yeah that's mowed.

You guys mowed it and George was saying how they removed all the grass. Yeah we rake it so no burning on that stuff. So yeah, pretty good example. You could see it is a green up real nice. Not as well as the bird. Not even close. Yeah. There's something about that burning man where the grass like it's such a low like we're not talking about new grass. It's just the plants, the grass plants that are there reshoots just awesome. Yep, reshoots. There's enough residual moisture in the soil.

Not so much up here on these sort of rocky escarpments where we are now. A lot of that will stay burned until the new rains come in. But it's great to clear the fuel load out of here. So again, you're protecting the forest. If you do get a hotter burn, it could potentially damage this beautiful canopy we've got up here.

But down there lower, in the lower lying areas, the residual soil moisture is such that when you do one of those burns three, four days, you'll have fresh shoots starting to emerge. And it is, as opposed to the raked area, it's brand new grass. It's got all, you can just see from looking at it. They're like the vitality. It's so nourishing looking. It's like bright green and like tender. I mean, and it's just the game's just the one thing on it. And the main point being for, for fellow like me and Seth here is that you are transported to a time and place where anytime you feel like it, you can throw a match.

Oh, yeah. It's encouraged. You're encouraged to be like that. You're doing stuff all day long that you would be a felon for in Montana. Yeah. You drive down the road. It took me a while to get used to driving down the road and the track was just be with matches. You live behind. I tell you, while you see driving down the road, the trackers just be with matches.

Yeah. You know, behind his. We would stop to take a pee break and you get out, take a leak and I'd strike a match and light whatever on fire and hop back in the truck and where we go. Oh, it was 4th of July. We got to burn all kinds of stuff.

It was fun. Mayor Pat, one of my prime rippers. Was 4th of July. That one was great. It was a good one. When we were driving out and seeing that whole hillside on fire, it was fun. Matter of fact, one of my prime rippers was 4th of July. That one was great. It was a good one. When we were driving out and seeing that whole hillside on fire, it was beautiful. It was pretty cool.

After shooting at Buffalo. Yeah. Next on my list, the Tetsy Fly. Odd critter. Odd critter. Terrible critter. Flies normally last a day. A Tetsy Fly, he gets a six month run.

Lives six months. She gets a six month run. She gets a six month run. Live six months. She gets a six month run. Drawn to moving vehicles. Yes. They're very motion sensitive. They want to be where there's motion. You don't normally think about bugs. Like if you're cruising along, let's say you're back home and you're cruising along

and you're like, no, you're going to stop and get out. Right. If you drive along on a four wheeler or something or a K and M and you're like, you're cruising along and you're like, eventually we're going to stop and get out, right? If you drive along on a four wheeler or something or a can amp and you're like you cruise along and you're like eventually we're going to stop and get out when we stop and get out, we're gonna get sworn by mosquitoes. Here they get you while you're driving. It's all flipped.

Yeah. It's the opposite. They get you while you're driving. They just stop and they leave. And get you is like a serious app when they really get you good. Yeah. Chris likened to, he had a bunch had, he'd like him to get in taste. Sometimes they do really touch a nerve, but then like you,

you get out and all of a sudden it was like, yeah, they like fast. I don't know that there's a odd bug and they're hard to kill. You got to really roll them a few times to get them. Got a pretty strong exoskeleton. My program got way developed. Like Morgan, you wear a heavy gauge. I do, yeah. You wear a heavy gauge material. Cotton.

Yeah, he wears like a heavy. TC Pro. Yeah, you'd look at me like that might be a little uncomfortable in the hot part of the day, but he's thinking because it's like super light they can get through. And eventually kind of got my whole program squared away up to the point where the only thing I wished I had now and then is a light pair of gloves and face covering.

Yeah. I mean, the drivers are wearing jackets. Yeah. For peak tatsy, the driver's seat's a bad place to be. Yeah. We call it the fly box. The fly box. Yeah.

The titsy chamber, the TZ chain. TZ, TZ, TZ, whatever. Peak TZ is like what, like 530 to 430 to 530? Yeah, they get a little peckish before bedtime. In the morning they come in and you might be going through a bad spot and they come in and say hi, but at night they're like ready to rip. Yeah. And then it gets dusk and they're gone.

Gone, yeah. Smokes help too. Smoke helps. Um, yeah, we did the elephant dung bucket. Yeah. You get a bucket or a small can and you put some elephant, dry elephant dung in there and it's smolders, very smoky, smoldering, kind of greasy fire. And it definitely works. It puts them off well. Any kind of smoke puts them off. A breeze puts them off burned off areas. They don't like I don't that's not Little pockets so where you become like very aware of them suckers and I was always reading I knew him and read about him because how they used to be like a real

They used to be like a health crisis in some places in the like for sorry they used to be like a like a livestock Yes, they still are. Oh, they are they still like a like a livestock. Yes. They still are. They are. They still are. Like a major livestock. Oh, they'll kill livestock. I mean, when you think about how much we get bitten on a day, which is as extreme as it was for some

of you guys and you know, it is what it is. It goes with the territory, but- He was saying we didn't see better than a- We didn't see better than four out of 10. Four out of 10 was the worst day we ever had. A four out of 10 on a test. 10 out of 10 day we ever had. A four out of 10 on tissue. Ten out of ten, holy smokes. Ten is spicy, let me tell you, even for me, and I have a high tolerance.

But the game and livestock are just being bitten constantly. Constantly. So they do kill, they do transmit try panasomyosis to the livestock. The game has a natural immunity. The livestock does not. So for that reason, my relationship with the tetsi is complicated because I see them very much as part of the guardians of this area and of these wilderness areas. Because if they weren't here, it would have been all too easy to just bring cattle in

years gone by. Now, obviously we have the wonderful protection kind of regime that we have bring cattle in years gone by. Now obviously we have the wonderful protection kind of regime that we have, but in years gone by when there was a bit more of a free for all as far as that stuff, even during the colonial period and before, these areas would have had a lot of livestock in them and we're lucky we don't. Yeah, if you go down the path, and I think I'm just starting in and I'm gonna do some more, but reading about early European explorers trying to penetrate into Africa, like you'd think that they're all getting dusted off by lions and stuff. They were dealing with, early mention,

like European diseases going to the New World and people not being prepared to deal with them. Yeah. Europeans, like 1800s, late 1700s, whatever, Europeans would come to Africa and insect-borne pathogens. Absolutely, flattened by them. Yeah, that'd be like the thing that would get them. They didn't understand where it was coming from. No, no, there wasn't that knowledge of parasites and whatnot. And when you read the accounts and memoirs and biographies of those early explorers, they were constantly sick with the fever. You know, and fever is

kind of the catch-all term they use. So you can extrapolate a lot of it was probably malaria, dengue is another one, black water fever. I mean, even stuff, you know, waterborne stuff too that sort of under that catch-all of fever, but they were constantly sick. Morgan showed us a tree they call the fever tree and it's like down in some of the swamplands near the river there's this tree that it's kind of an inviting looking tree. It's very shady tree. Yeah and people like traveling on the river or whatever would come up and make camp and you'd go under the tree and then they eventually all get sick and he was saying they're like there's something about that tree Realizing that you know, they sort of made a whole area

Correlation between the treatment it was like you're right there near the water. That's where the mosquitoes are and so I wind up getting malaria One of the highlights of the trip for sure you talked to Trackers. Yeah, when we first did a show one of the things that excited me about Wanting to Hunt with You is how respectful you were to the job of the trackers, how you put a lot of credit on the trackers, right? And how you also like, um, you kind of put it that not mystically, but, uh, you put it like they understand things that you don't and won't never understand. Never see things that you don't and won't ever understand what you're looking at. Um, to the point where sometimes when we're out, you're like, you've just gotten to a point where you just take the word and you don't need to be like,

well, show me what you're talking about. Yeah. Like we're at one point tracking some buffalo, and we're going along and I'm like, I don't see what in the world. I say to Morgan, I don't get what they're looking at. Then Morgan said, that's the point. They see things, not that you don't, won't. He said, they see things that you can't see. Yep. And at the end of that trail is a buffalo. Yeah. Every time. It's just like, it's, it's so you'll just, at times they'll be like, that's what's going on. And you never like, well, show me the evidence. No, no, no. You're just like, got it. Yeah. No, for sure. No, I'm way past that point.

You don't argue. You don't like, you don't go like, are you sure? Show me what you're talking about. I'm like, what does he mean? What's he talking about? What's he looking at? Morgan's just beyond that. He's like, it's just what it is. That's just the truth. It is. It is the absolute truth. I mean, yeah, these guys are brilliant. They are brilliant, brilliant humans in so many more ways than one. And the tracking is, it's masterful. I mean, it's an incredible thing to watch, but they're real hunters too. Oh yeah.

I mean, they really like hunting tactics wise. I bounce a lot of ideas off them. Oftentimes, if I see one of the guys I bounce a lot of ideas off them. Oftentimes, if I see one of the guys has got a concept of how we might complete a stalk, I'll run with it because they have great instincts on that stuff too. They're very, very sharp on the hunting piece. Obviously the tracking piece and game spotting, they're second to none and like fun guys to be around.

Yeah, also just like- You can through the language barrier a lot. Yeah. Oh, no, for sure. 100%. Just ready to laugh and like- Oh, always. Just tuned in. There's a thing like this thing I'm marvelled about,

and one of the ways I'm marvelled about was families at work. Marvelled about is families that have for generations and generations been in livestock where I can't prove it. And it's like, I feel like there's some kind of science there and it's not well understood, but if you came into it, I'm meaning about a rancher at all, but like if, if you came into ranching at like 20 or 30 years old, you're never going to catch up. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. There's something you can't put your finger about. Like I said, it defies scientific understanding, but like someone, a kid who's born into a livestock family, sort of like through some kind of like genetic freakishness absorbs a bunch of the knowledge. Yeah, I agree with that. So me like a little kid, like he's looking at a horse

and he's seeing a set of things. Yeah. And you're looking at a horse and you see a horse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you follow me? I was like, there's certain things like that you just absorb and you're never going to

catch them. Right. And there's like, it's like with the trackers, it's not like the knowledge of what track is what is somehow in a genetic code. But there's just something about, you're not gonna catch them. No, you'll never catch them. Do you know what I mean?

And it's like, there's something about having, there's something about like the upbringing, the attributes that would have been necessary to like exist on the landscape for a long time. It's just something that like it probably isn't taught. No, it's not taught. There's- It's just like notice.

There's definitely- I'm like finding it. I can't find the words for it, but you're not going to catch them. No, you'll never catch them. My theory that I've kind of explained before is they're like both born and made. They have some inherent traits.

I think a lot of it's probably what you're talking about. Just being raised, the environment they're raised in has kind of shaped them. They've obviously got excellent eyesight, which is something that's, you know, you're born with that. But they have a knowledge. Because you guys are using the best of the best too. Oh, yeah. Like you're not just grabbing guys off the street. No, no, no.

You're using guys that stand out as like exemplary, like the best. Oh, yeah. They are absolutely the best. So among their peers, they're good. Oh among their peers they're extremely well regarded. I mean, they're they're famous. They're brilliant and I've always been fascinated by tracking and in not in the sense of like will show me because I don't believe you but a lot of times I'll ask to see what they're looking at and I've been doing this for years and years and years and there are a lot of times probably upwards of 25% of the time I can't see anything. Like I could not perceive that there is any change

in the stuff that's on the ground and they can say no that's you know it's walked there, there, there, there. So it's a beautiful thing to watch and I'm so glad that we got the opportunity to apply it to things other than just Buffalo we tracked a warthog for a while we tracked sable for a while what else do we track I think that was kind of it that in Buffalo but yeah they're also when it's not gonna happen they'll come and tell Morgan like ain't gonna happen yeah no for sure no he started running again and it's yeah yeah that happened with some point of diminishing. We'd already bumped something We bumped it twice. Yeah sable. So I bumped them bumped them again

I like very light bump Yeah, and then we did like a little bit more of a bump and then we followed and they're like they're running again like It's not worth it all based on track. Never mind. Yeah, just based off track Yeah, really a really great moment to with the trackers is one time we're going down and they spot a track from a truck someone spots track and um Still don't really understand what they saw but oh no, I do know there's like a broken piece of grass Whatever the hell and we get out and they very quickly like there's happens

We've got two trucks to get us for four trackers and they very quickly come to a consensus no dissenting voice there's four bulls going that way so I at that point I said Morgan help me out here what are they talking about why they all know that there's four bulls you know and this is in like eight foot tall grass yeah they're They're like, one's here. One was here. One was here. One was here. Yeah. And I'm like, okay. But there was like very little is like a very, I mean, we're talking like minutes. Yeah. Minutes. Yeah. No, you have to have complete faith and they are the most faith worthy people that you'll ever find.

I mean, faith in their ability, faith in their loyalty, faith in their desire to see you be successful, you can have that and you will not be disappointed. Like they will redeem you in every way. Oh, another really, there's so many things to mention like the way they read grass, like grass, it's been bent. Yep.

Grass has been stepped on. How to tell how long ago grass was stepped on. But also, um, what's really cool is there's these birds, oxpeckers. Yep. They like a lot of animals and they like buffalo. Yeah. They seem to like buffalo the most. And a real awareness of like what's going on with the oxpeckers. Like at daybreak,

where the oxpeckers were headed to. Yeah. And then that one time we got in that real tall grass and they were like pinpointing. We knew they were out in front of us somewhere and just by the bird chatter. Yep. They could hear that the oxpecker chatted like point like right there. Oh right there Yeah, right there cuz you can hear the birds they can hear the birds that are on them Exactly chattering back and forth. Yeah, it was fascinating. That's amazing All the little cues that they use to to just read these animals is amazing Okay The honey guys, yes

there is a There's a type of honey production that goes on Okay, the honey guys. Yes. There is a, there's a type of honey production that goes on. It's in the farmland, it's in the woods, whatever. There's a type of honey production that goes on, it's really interesting where it's like, instead of having a honey hive that you buy, like that you populate with honey bees, Yep. farmers and others, guys out in the woods will just build a, out of natural materials,

build a hive box and hang it way the hell up in a tree. Yep. And it'll draw, yeah, it'll be colonized by... It'll draw a colony of bees and it's like you're running a trap line. Yeah, very similar. Very similar. I go out and... I liked those parallels. Yeah, you go out and you like see if it got taken over by bees. The guys will climb way up in the trees. There's a honey season here. You can explain that's wrapping up right now. Yeah, we're right at the tail end of it now. So it's I think it's twice a year. They come into the game reserve under permit from the district supervised by us and Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority

to harvest their own honey from their own hives. And we've placed a lot of stipulations on their activities as far as what roads and routes they can use, what kind of equipment they can use, what kind of vehicles they can use to access the area and the hives themselves. As you saw in the past, the sort of popular method of manufacturing a hive was to like ring bark, basically take all the outer layer of bark in a sort of anywhere from three to four foot long section off of quite a large tree, let's say something that was sort of, you know, close to 20 inches around, and then sort of staple that back together with pieces of wood with pegs, and then put end caps on it, and that

was the hive. The problem with that- You hang it way up there. You want to hang it 20 feet in a tree so honey badgers don't get it. Exactly. Honey badgers and other things that would interfere with it, they'll hang it up there. And the problem with that was, if you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of hives, every one of those hives has been resulted in a good size,

mature tree being killed. Thousands of thousands of probably over, probably thousands of hives. So we've we've very much worked with these guys to implement a rule where that's not allowed anymore. They have to be manufactured. They're still manufactured from wood, but the wood has to be sourced from outside the game as if yeah and you know guy might come in they're camped out mm-hmm and they go around and do the deal but we ate some of the honey here's it's terrific super good honey very good honey

um so that's like I'll remember when I got here seeing the first one of those in a tree and be like what the hell is that tree? Just the interesting like feature. Absolutely. Out on the landscape. Yeah. Uh, I consult my list here. Yeah. It's one of those activities that, that we permit because it's a way that the

local communities can extract value from the reserve in a way that's non-consumptive. It's not destroying anything. It's not taking anything away from the reserve. It's a sustainable activity. What's hibernation and why do some mammals hibernate? When animals vocalize, what are they saying and what does it mean? Which critter has sharp projections inside their mouths which aren't teeth that hold prey. Meteor Kids is back for season 3. We're going to learn a bunch of neat things about nature and wildlife that you can tell

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Another sustainable activity that again regulated and it sounds like you guys from your foundations, from your wildlife foundation perspective and from the law enforcement perspective that you're involved in managing a big chunk of ground, there's a fishery, but it's also a fishery that without regulation can kind of run amok. For sure. Yeah, it could go, it could go side. Yep. It's, it's a gill netting. So there's the, the lake itself, Lake Sagara and then the Ugala river. There's permitted fishing in the reserve waters allowed in both places,

less so on the river, more so on the lake, but it definitely needs to be policed. There's issues with excessive use of certain types of nets, especially really small nets. A lot of them are converted mosquito nets or fishing nets that have been lined with a mosquito net that really just catches everything. And even those small fish will be dried and they have nutritional value. And again, we want to see people get adequate supplies of protein. We want to see people do well from harvesting enough fish that they can sell

some excess to pay for school fees or whatever else they want to pay for. We want to see all this happen. We want to see all this being done. But the risk is that if it just becomes a free for all, you get population collapse in those fish stocks. And the game reserve waters are an extremely important part of the piece of the puzzle because they refill the breeding. The spawning grounds there allow the waters that are more heavily fished that are outside

the game reserve to be sort of restocked with fish from the reserve waters. So we're very focused on keeping those waters healthy for the benefit of those communities, as well as the benefit of wildlife. Yeah, I don't want it like, I'm gonna choose my words carefully because I don't want it any way hack on, I don't want it any way hack on like government enforcement

because you're dealing with like huge, very, very wild, very remote areas. Absolutely. We're talking about, in this landscape, we're talking about in this landscape, we're talking about places that are seasonally inaccessible. Absolutely. Okay. With scatterings of human populations around and like you,

when someone thinks of, if you're coming from the U S you're thinking of like poaching, you got one thing in your head. You're thinking of a guy that, you know, generally it's like a guy that sees a huge buck and he doesn't want to wait for season and it makes a big, like a poacher got caught because he had killed like a buck out of season. Or he's keeping, he kept 10 walleyes instead of five or whatever. We kind of have this sort of a little more benign notion of poaching. Our threshold is pretty low, you know, like tolerance is pretty low.

Yeah. And you also have an enforcement structure that's pervasive. Yes. Right. It's hard for it. It's would be hard for like an industrialized poaching outfit to exist outside of view. Right. But here, because of the remoteness and

just historical factors and all kinds of stuff, poaching winds up being a thing that can have population level impacts. Absolutely. And it just doesn't play out anymore. It's not like that in the US. No, no. For sure, the US is way beyond that stage and poaching here it will take on a commercial flavor too where it becomes a commercial. It seems like it wants to, it sort of naturally wants to move that direction. It wants to go that way for sure and there's a subsistence element to it

which one can be somewhat sympathetic to and certainly we have been in the past and even in the present you know as you've seen here a lot of our trackers of ex-poachers a lot of people involved in our anti-poaching team or ex-poachers or guys that were at risk of kind of getting drawn into poaching so there's that subsistence element that one can be somewhat sympathetic to, but it very quickly devolves from that into mass snareings of thousands and thousands and thousands of heads of game. And that's not conversant with any kind of native hunting tradition. It's not conversant with anything that's sustainable.

It's not conversant with any of the Tanzanian government's goals as far as management, and as far as providing people with protein and employment and development opportunities, it is something that's just completely out of hand and verges on criminality. Well, we live through this. In the US, this is very, like that era is very much

was part of our own culture. Yeah. For sure. Where you had, you know, we had even with, even with Europeans, when Europeans came, there was like a sort of subsistence economy. And when the moment was right, it would really quickly move to like industrialized commercial stuff. Yeah.

And if we went like through very concerted effort, we eventually reined in kind of destroyed the markets, de-incentivized it and got there. Yeah. You can see here in some of these wilderness atmospheres here, it's probably a very similar situation than what we had in. Yeah, for sure. Then what we went through too with that trying to like get trying to find a point where you had some level of sustainable equilibrium of harvest versus

exploitation, you know, harvest. A balance between some harvest not tipping into grotesque over harvest. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And it goes together with development too, right? If you've got people that are very poor with very few opportunities like you would have had in the frontier of the United States at one time, you know, very limited industrial opportunities, then there's got to be a way here in Africa, our big focus and our big goal is to make sure that wildlife and the presence of wildlife and the presence of these protected areas serves the people on the periphery. Because as soon as it stops doing that, it just becomes a target for poaching.

And once everything's poached, once it's overutilized, the game populations are very low because of poaching, then it becomes no longer viable as somewhere where you can run a hunting operation. And then those areas are then subject to further degradation from things like logging, mining, et cetera, et cetera, as that protection goes away. And then you have the potential to lose a whole landscape, not just your pop in a whole habitat, not just your populations of wild animals. Yeah. And you can go any direction from here, I'm sure, and find places where slash and

burn ag is denuded of wildlife, denuded of forest, denuded of everything, just agriculture, which again, we're not in the business of telling people they can't make a living from agriculture, but these protected areas we have are. So important and such a mass provides such a massive opportunity to these local communities, as well as the international community and the Tanzanian nation as a whole. So that's what we're focused on. That's what we're doing here.

Last thing on my list, then we'll do any little wrap up thoughts anybody has. But it was funny because there's certain impressions of just kind of like seeing safari imagery and safari stuff. I had these like questions over the years you wondered about and so many of those have been satisfied now. I want to hit you guys both with a couple of these. For instance, I had no idea. Like why you don't see camouflage. For instance, I had no idea, like why you don't see camouflage. Yeah. And like, like in African safari culture in general, like camouflage isn't a thing. Yeah, it's well, it's not done.

If for one thing, military style camouflage is illegal here in Tanzania. It's not allowed. That's for the military only. Secondly, it, it doesn't provide, if I'm perfectly honest, with the exception of bow hunting, it doesn't provide a huge advantage for our style of hunting. Um, it, you know, a lot of our stuff is really close quarters where movement is going to be the thing that gives you away movement and sound. Um, you know, a lot of those Buffalo we bumped, they didn't see us, they smelled us or heard us

and took off. And so, yeah, I also think it's, yeah, it's something we just don't need. Yeah, it was the legality aspect of it. And I've heard there's a number of countries where I think there's sort of like, it's, I don't know, it's for the military. It's for the military.

Don't be wearing it. Yeah, no backpacks. So that's a big one. When you hunt dangerous game, you need to be as unencumbered as possible. You need to have, I mean, even these, I see some fairly elaborate kind of Bino harnesses sometimes. Your one was about the maximum amount of shit that I'd want to see on anyone at any

given time. That was about that. No, and you are to your credit. It didn't ever held you back, but the less stuff you could have on your person when hunting dangerous game, the better because you need to be able to potentially react very quickly to a situation. And if you're getting your scope and your rifle stock and what not hung up in harnesses and straps, that's no good. If you're not getting a proper gun fit because you've got another extra inch or inch and

a half of backpack strap with your silly little water straw there or whatever, that's no good. You need to be able to find your sites quick. You need to be able to get on that target quickly. And that means being unencumbered. Or get out of the way, or climb a tree maybe if things go really sideways. So the less nonsense you can have on your person,

the better you are positioned to hunt dangerous. And that ties in another one is like, you always see everybody carrying, uh, no slings, but it's another thing is like less and thick junk, like in thick cover when you got, you maybe got like a wounded Buffalo that you got to be very careful. It doesn't come for you. You just don't want anything that hangs up, slows anything down. A hundred percent.

Well, even unwounded Buffalo. Remember when we were tracking those three balls through that kind of river, it was like a dried creek bed, but the vegetation was thick. And oftentimes you had to change your rifle position, you know, three or four times in a minute, because one minute you're ducking under something, one minute you're squeezing between two things, you know, and so you're changing your rifle position all the time. Sling use isn't universally like not practiced here. A lot of professional hunters, a lot of people use slings. I'm personally not into it for that reason we just discussed and then kind of

tying back to the previous thing. I think that when you're hunting dangerous game, if you have your rifle in your hands, you have a small but not insignificant advantage in getting that rifle into action quicker. That might save your life. And out here, you never know. I mean, when you're walking past this eight, nine foot tall grass, that's like a wall, you can't see more than two feet into it. You've, and there is poaching in this area. It's very minimal, but it is you. There could be a wounded Buffalo from a poacher laying right there and you walk past it. You know, yeah. Roger got flagged

by one. He didn't wound it. It was wounded by lions or something and he'd never had any clue it was there until it was coming at him. So when you have that rifle in your hands, in those kinds of situations, you're better positioned to respond in my opinion. And that's why I like, I favor what we call Africa, Kerry, we hold it over your shoulder. Yeah.

Okay. So Dirk, give, what are your overall impressions of Africa, man? Oh, I mean, phenomenal landscape animals. I was, I was thinking too, which we touched on is just the people that we went down to. What community was that Gordo Gordo's school? It's called Lumbay.

When we went to Lumbay, like driving through those towns, just the kind of the celebrate through those towns, just like kind of the celebratory kind of, just everyone's happy, but quietly confident too. Yeah. Like there's not any angst it seems. And I know this is just like, you know, a scratching of the surface, but just people would

smile and wave at us. And then we had a meal with one of the staff's families and they were so appreciative to have us and just overall had a meal with one of the staff's families and they were so appreciative to have us and just overall like the landscape animals people all are just they seem very comfortable in what they are and who they are yeah I think that's a great observation Tanzanian people are really happy yeah and it's I mean it is it's a hard life out here in the bush you know you don't want to sugar coat it and say that, oh, they've, you know,

they've, I mean, it's really, really a lot of manual labor and a lot of hardship to be able to exist out here in these very remote rural places. Yeah. But everyone just has such a, a great view on life and a great way of going about everything. And the teamwork and all that. It's like a big family. And the loyalty that people will show you here is something you just, you can't find in many places.

And the mamba still. When Morgan and I were in Messiah Land. Oh, the crocodile? When Morgan and I were in Messiah Land before we came here to hunt, I was, what I'm referring to is my family came out for a week and we hung around and did, did some different things. And Morgan took us wildlife viewing out Messiah land in one of their hunting areas.

But we were having a conversation with the Messiah people, like, you know, like how do they perceive us, how do we perceive them? And Morgan made it come and he goes, I, I, I feel like they look at us and think we're idiots. how many goes, I feel like they look at us and think we're idiots. Yeah, they're like, dude, I got hundreds of goats. I got hundreds of cattle. Yeah, all this like we you know, yeah, we have land the random dude, you know, and he's like, yeah,

probably like whatever we got. It's not because I don't, you know, they're not not envying us. No, there's not. He goes, I don't, you know, they're not, they're not envying us. No, they're not envying us. They're probably like, these guys' problem. Totally, totally. Yeah. Just like a very, yeah, it's just a different perception.

But no, the people are phenomenal. I do wonder like all the time, you kind of like, it's very, it's harmlessly self-centered, but unavoidable to be like, what do they think of us? No, yeah, just out of curiosity. Yeah, like what would it be like? How do you picture people that pay money to come hang out?

What is the idea going on? Whatever it is, whatever the thought is, it somehow is, like the trackers and stuff that grew up here, whatever the thought is, it somehow is like the trackers and stuff that grew up here. Whatever the thought is, it's damn sure friendly. Oh yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's just like really protective, very protective and looking out for what you got going on, watching you don't make any mistakes and very warm.

There's some things you're never going to understand. You know what I mean? There's just like some aspects you're never going to understand. Um, like with the trackers, like meal time for them is very different than meal time for us. Yeah. They kind of communally out of a common, like a common, they'll have like some common dishes, they'll sit, the guys will sit around together in a circle, they'll have like some common dishes. They'll sit, the guys will sit around together

in a circle, no chairs, just different. And they look at them when we're, when they look at us eating, they're probably like, why is it with all the bullshit dude? Why is it such a production? Whatever, you can't, you don't know. You can't tell what anybody's thinking, but just like just the warmth and like human camaraderie.

Yeah high in the in the people involved you know. Yeah the hunting brings you together in a powerful way I think it's like it's a cross-cultural thing like and you see how invested they get in your success too. Super excited. Isn't that awesome? Yeah super excited. Oh yeah to find success they are ecstatic. They are driving success. Yeah it is like there's no kind of like oh this guy's not really into it. I mean

those dudes are like here they're playing for keeps. They're all up in my business sometimes like make this happen you know. Yeah playing for keeps. Telling me which way to go. I'm like, yeah, I'll take it. Let's do this. What's your impression, Seth? You made a lot of lasting friendships. I did. Yeah, my favorite part was the trackers.

Like, yeah, by far. Just hanging out with those dudes and like seeing how they operate. Like, I wish I knew more of the native language here because I would love to just like pick those guys brains about whatever's going on, you know? Yeah. But yeah, just watching like, you know, the one day we're just hauling ass down the road

and like Frank's yelling to stop because he saw a Buffalo track like in dry dirt as we're going like it just they would do shit like that all the time. It was mind blowing to me. Yeah, it's incomprehensible what they can see, what they pick up on is unbelievable. Yeah. And then just like kind of teaching them some American words and them teaching us Swahili words like it was, yeah, it was I, I, I'd never laughed so much with someone that like I don't even understand

It's true, yeah, it's true some comedy like transcend Yeah, totally and they've all got a phenomenal sense of humor. Yeah Laugh all day. Yeah. Yeah, they so that was an outrageous stuff That was fun and then light lighting fires was just a blast. Firelight's great. You really hone in on like what type of grass is the best and like where you should be throwing and like what time of day you should be hitting it hard.

Oh yeah, moto, fire. Oh. And what's the word for white people? Mazungu? Mazungu or mzungo as a singular, yeah. What's fire again? Moto. Moto?

Moto Mazungo. Yeah, because it's everything they wouldn't let you do growing up. Oh yeah. You can't flick matches. It's like, you know what's funny? At our fish shack, we draw the water off the creek So a kid can stand there with a hose. Oh, yeah, the holes all day and no one ever yells at you You know, like all you do growing up what you want to do is just be able to shoot the hose

But your parents won't let you and you just shoot the holes so kids can stand there 24 hours a day It's like that with light and fire. Yeah. So that was cool. And just seeing the culture and how, how the folks here live and it was awesome. And then the honey, the honey part was different on my end, just because we're truck too, and you just kind of miss out on a lot of things. Yeah.

Well, we invited, I mean, in all fairness, in all fairness. I got a little bit of riding in truck one, but. To hang with the big dogs. Yeah. But no, the trackers and stuff was awesome. Yeah. I would say like all in all, man, for me, like absolutely, I've texted and had multiple exchanges with friends of mine back home.

And I'm like, dude, like life-changing, life-changing experience. I mean, a hundred percent. I will refer to things I've seen here. Story. I'll tell stories from here for the rest of my life. And then like, like the rest of my life, I'll feel, um, like the impact of people I met and lifestyles I encountered, skill sets, like absolutely life-changing.

There's been a handful of trips like that, like, you know, going a couple of times, um, uh, a couple of times down to South America, changed my, changed me outside of my hunting self and hunting interests, changed me, but also really changed me in that area of focus around hunting. You know, the culture of hunting, the sort of the global landscape of hunting, like both of those things have changed. But also changed even outside of wildlife, just experiencing like another continent. Yeah. You know, different culture and had the opportunity to bounce around a little bit. Like we went to some larger towns.

Yep. Went to some villages, went to some larger towns Yep, went to some villages went to some very remote villages went to some remote wilderness portions you know over the course of a little over three weeks and Yeah Life changing hundred percent. I'm so happy to hear that the thing that drew me It seems so small now the thing that drew me is this idea that you can Hunt this hunt Cape Buffalo and you got to worry about getting stopped in close quarters. Yeah. It's like, you're going to get up, like, you know, you're going to get up to, you

know, an animal, whatever 1500 pound plus animal. And, and people are making shots on these things at like 20 yards, 30 yards closer, and as a chance they're gonna kill you. I was like, sounds great. Now it almost seems silly. Like that's a thing for sure. And we heard plenty stories about it. Like we, that's not the experience we had at all, but it's part of the lore. Yep. You know, is it, it's like, it's like a, it's a type of hunting where you gotta be careful. Yeah. Right. And that's exciting. Like there's like, there's more on your mind, right? You got to play everything.

You got to play your situation. Right. And as Morgan explained, a lot of that is, is if you wound an animal, animal and track it, you enter a whole other game. Yeah. Yeah. And you went, we didn't, we didn't do that. We, we got one of it that we didn't need to trail it, but like in trailing them,

you enter another realm. For sure. Like it's a different dimension. Yeah. It's a, it's a very unpleasant one. I might add. I far prefer the hunts that go the way you always did. And yeah, I'm, I'm very, I'm very, very satisfied to, to hear your take on all this because I've been banging this drum for years now that Safari is so much more than just hunting.

Oh yeah. You know, there is just all these elements to it and it tends to get, you know, it gets been banging this drum for years now that Safari is so much more than just hunting. You know, there is just all these elements to it and it tends to get, you know, it gets wrapped up in just killing exotic stuff, which of course is a component of what we do here on a very selective basis, but there's so much more to it. And it was great to see, very gratifying for me, and I'm sure George feels the same way to see the whole crew, you know, yourself and just everyone that's been out here, part of this production, just kind of soaking that up, you know, and getting a lot out of that. And kind of coming with really insightful questions and making a connection to the guys across that language

barrier that I think, yeah, if I went and asked them, they'd say the same thing that it was, it was a rare example of people really immersing themselves in it. So for that, I'm grateful, man, the thing we didn't even get into, but also just kind of like life changing too is, um, like, like my, my cultural self, whatever, you know, like a, like as a person that lives on the globe, like that part of me has changed, right? Just to see this, like I said, a new continent and so many new cultures.

The hunting thing too with the culinary app from a culinary standpoint. Oh gosh. Unbelievable. The sort of journey of the meat and the way meat's used and the way meat is coveted and the way meat is preserved, the way meat's enjoyed fresh, like we didn didn't get into that stuff, but just fascinating. That was, yeah, we could do a whole show just on that.

I mean, fascinating, man. Um, how stuff goes from like how stuff goes from the bush to the guys, to the guys, family, the people in the communities, the way they utilize it, um, the different perceptions of it. A thing Morgan pointed out is all of it has huge value. Right, like we'll talk about, oh, the back straps are so good. It's just like with a lot of the guys,

it's like, it just is all enormously valuable. Yeah. And when you butcher an animal, I went over with the, I went over to check on the sable yesterday and they were working on the stomach. When we left the buffalo, we left the grass clippings that were in his stomach and we left some intestine in the lungs, I think. Yeah. That's it. Everything. Everything consumed. Yeah. Absolutely. And the tail up. Well, that's it. Everything. Everything consumed. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The tail up. Well, tail, the tongue, yeah. Consume both ends. Yeah. Cause we got the tongue and we got the tail.

We sampled the mid, we sampled the mid range too, but we had the tail and the tongue. Yeah, we definitely hit the midsection. That was cool. And then going in, going to a village and seeing how how dry meat is a real commodity. Dry meat is a real asset. The climate is perfect for it. You cut meat in strips and dry it. And we went into a village to one of the guys that works here, he brings at the end of the

season, he'll bring bags of meat home. We went to a village and the way they take dry meat, cut it up, rehydrate it, turned it into, turned it into recipes, you know, turned it into food. But instead of it going to a freezer, it goes to a dry preserve state to a rehydrated state turned into just delicious food. Yeah. Fantastic. Very cool to see that stuff. And all cooked with wood heat. You know, everything. Yeah. It was crazy, man. Yeah. Amazing. Strip the bones down was crazy, man. Yeah. Amazing. Strip the bones down.

Also, when I went over there, the bones had all been, they'd strip the bones down to make dry meat, the bones were on the grill. Oh, just cooking on the marijuana. Yeah. To get the marijuana. Yeah. They were, yeah, they were cooking all them, all them femurs and shin bones were laid out on a fire.

Yeah. Yeah. It's proper. It's proper utilization here and it makes a big difference to people's lives. And you know, there's, you can go really down the rabbit hole of studies about how protein availability, brain development, ability to focus, all that kind of stuff. So it has a very important role to play in these communities. Where again, livestock are not common and not used in the way that we would recognize in the West.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. God, there's so many things. I don't wanna go on all night. It's getting late, but even that like, the last thing we're gonna open up, many people are unbanked. Yeah.. Morgan was saying wealth is stored as livestock.

It's not like I'm going to send those all off to slaughter this spring. It's like people have herds as a way of wealth management. Yeah, that's where they store all their money is tied up in cattle and goats. It's like money in the bank transactions. Yeah, absolutely. They transact with them too. Yeah. And Messiah lamb organs like goats are for small transactions.

Cows are for big transactions. He's like, that's your pocket change and that's your checkbook. That's exactly it. Yeah. Uh, just fascinating, man. I'm, I'm, I'm so glad we were able to make this work. I'm so glad you came. And I'm glad you guys told me crazy Kate Buffle stories and got me into it.

Thanks for bringing us. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Thank you guys for coming too. Seriously, professional team. It's been fun. Yeah. A lot of laughs on this trip too. Some of them might make the cut, but some of them definitely are not TV friendly. And George, good luck dude on your, on what you got going on. Yeah, thank you. No, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah.

I feel like if they weren't, I feel like if you were gonna, um, get next failure, like, I feel like if you were going to fail your, uh, apprenticeship, I'd be able to read, I'd be able to see it come in a little bit. I feel like you might be all right. I know it's kind of a shame. He's got a bright future in this business. Thank you. That I'm sure of.

I feel like if you were on the outs, we would have picked up on it. Oh no, we're with George again. Yeah, they'd have you over digging a hole. So yeah. Back of house. George, go dig that hole deeper. No, a lot of our success on this trip can be attributed to George's efforts.

So for sure a bright future. Thank you guys. Oh, it's been a pleasure having you. Yeah, remember when I said we saw dozens of warthogs before we saw a keeper? George spotted the keeper. Yes, sir. All right. Thank you guys both for putting this on.

Yeah. It's a lot of work and thanks, man. Loved it thank you guys both for putting this on. Yeah. It's a lot of work and thanks man. Loved it. Absolutely. Thanks for coming. Thanks guys. We've enjoyed it immensely. Great. What's hibernation and why do some mammals hibernate?

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