The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 762: EHD Reports and Competitive Birding | MeatEater Radio Live!

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Hosts Spencer Neuharth, Ryan Callaghan, and Seth Morris speak with competitive birder Owen Reiser, talk gear in preparation for the fall season, soak in nostalgia for Throwback Thursday, and chat with Kip Adams of the National Deer Association about all things EHD. Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel. Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Meat-Eater trivia. your podcast. Welcome to Me Deeder Radio live. It's 11 a.m. Mountain Time. That's 10 a.m. for our friends in Fort Bragg, California, on Thursday, September 11, and we're live from Me, Deeter, H.Q, and Bozeman. I'm your host, Spencer, joined today by Cal and Seth. On today's show, we'll interview Owen Riser about spending a year as a competitive birder. After that, we'll have gear talk. Then we'll look at old hunting and fishing pictures for throwback Thursday.

And finally, Kip Adams from the National Deer Association will join us to give an E.HD report for every region. Now, we got a few plugs to get to before we move on with the show. Me Deeder is heading south for the holidays. We are thrilled to announce Me Deeder Live, the Christmas, Two. We're coming to you this December. We have stops in Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis, Fayetteville, Dallas, and Austin. Come hang with Steve Janice, Clay, Randall, and Brent.

For a night of laughs, trivia prizes, and stories from the outdoors, go to the meat eater.com slash tour to sign up for pre-sale access, which starts September 23rd. That will give you a chance to buy tickets before they officially go on sale to the public. That's me, themeeditor.com slash tour. We can't wait to see you there. Also, the Meteor Tailgate Tour presented by Demetic rolls on

this Saturday. Me and Jesse Griffith will be hanging out at the Longhorns game in Austin. Next Saturday, it's me, Mark Canyon, and Chester and Garrett Long. We'll be at the Wisconsin Badgers game in Madison. The week after that, you'll catch Seth and Brody at Penn State.

And finally, Janice and Garrett head to Notre Dame on October 4th. Come hang with us. Come stump us with some trivia. Tell us on stories eat our food uh we'll have a good time tailgating cal and set what do you boys been up to lately oh so much been uh digging deep in the freezer i have many many projects going on simultaneously right now give me an update um been uh breaking in new strings for the bow and uh throwing darts and uh things are things are looking really good on the archery front

Is there a specific hunt you're prepping for? Yeah, brown bear in Alaska here at the end of the month. And then I, everywhere I look, there's just things that needs to be straightened up and done so I can have an efficient and good hunting season. Yes. So I stuck my head in the freezer and I was like, oh, there's this bag of grind staring me in the face that I haven't turned into burgers. yet and it had a hole in the bag of course so I threw that in a box to take home and then basically underneath that I was like what what is this bag because I have like a nice freezer that's all visually appealing and organized same and then I have the vertical freezer

yes yeah exactly and then I have the chest freezer yes and then the chest freezer is like bulk yet to be refined so like big roast shams yeah quarters sometimes whole birds um uh the the big sacks they like grind and things that i'm going to get to later on yeah um that's the freezer you put like a gun case on top of so no one is tempted to open it up and look in there yeah because the vertical freezer that's the that's the company freezer yeah that that's one that makes you look like you know what you're doing and are respectful so I'm like what is in this bag in the vertical freezer in the ice freezer and it was um these turkey carcasses that i realized that i didn't turn into stock

because i ran out of jars during stock making season at the end of turkey season so i threw those in the box and then i got to looking around some more and there's all this like random couple years collection of hearts antelope and deer and l carts so i threw those in the box and then a bunch of tongues. So I threw those in the box. And then there's this big package of goose breast that also had a hole in it. And that went in the box. That went in the box. Now what the box is the deep freeze? No, the box is the thing that I was that was going to go in the truck and then come and then I was going to start processing. So literally this morning, I've been going to bed at like 11 o'clock and waking up at 4.35 getting all this stuff.

done. So I have the pressure cooker going, uh, finishing off the last jarring. Right now. Yeah. Okay. Uh, well, I turned it off to come over here. Sure. Um, that'd be crazy, Spencer. She's just clarifying. And then you could have been doing it in the kitchen, you know, 10 steps away. I, yeah, I should have. And then I had one slow cooker with the goose breast in it. I was like, I'm going to make, uh, uh, uh, like barbecue sandwiches out of goose breast, which turns out awesome. But I didn't label these things properly and they were a big thing a corned goose breast so i had like onions and all sorts of stuff in the slow cooker and then i got to looking at them and i'm like oh this is beautiful corn beef um which you know so it's still going to me as a good taste in sandwich but then i'm like

god you just never learn and then i had another slow cooker with all the tongues in it and i trimmed up all the hearts and i put that in with the grind and then ground all that stuff and made burgers out of that we got all that packaged up and then back in the nice vertical freezer and the just the list is endless it just keeps going prefall is stressful i'm a better hunter if if things are taking care of at home in the yard in the freezer yeah i don't have to think about those things then yeah i'm trying to kill exactly i'm at the point where i just burn all this stuff in town down give it away uh-huh destroy it yep and then i just the dog and i head off Yeah. There you go.

It's now occurring to me as I look at your two handsome faces. We have too many mustaches on this show. We've hit our quota. We've hit our quota of mustaches. Phil, you cannot grow a mustache. You don't have to worry about that, Spencer. Okay. It's going to get real weird if we go four for four on mustaches in this studio.

All right, moving on, joining us on the line. First is Owen Riser, the director of Listers, a glimpse into extreme birdwatching. That documentary is available on YouTube right now. Owen, welcome to the show. Fellas, thanks for having me. I dug out my club of landowner shirt for you boys. Love it. Good job.

All right, enlisters, you and your brother spend a year as competitive bird watchers. Explain what that is, and more specifically, what it means to go for a big year. Yeah, so we heard about this group of people that try to list as many bird species as they can. in one calendar year, and that's called a big year. And we thought, you know, we didn't know anything about the culture of birdwatching. You know, we're big out, like fans of the outdoors and stuff, but we'd never mess with birdwatching. And we were like, you know, we should try that. We should learn about extreme birdwatching by becoming bird watchers.

And that's what we did. And it was right, you know, we made fun of them a little bit, but it's a great hobby. And we enjoyed the hell out of it. Before you try doing this, what was your experience with? bird watching. Exactly zero. It was zero experience. We knew a handful of birds like, you know, the Cardinal, the bald eagle, the, you know,

the junior varsity birds. We knew all those. But certainly didn't know what a rose-throated Bacard was or any of those, you know what I mean. So competitive birding can be a very expensive hobby, which you guys learn in the documentary. But you try to do it as cheap as possible. Tell us about some of the ways you saved money while traveling across the country looking for rare birds. Yeah, my brother and I are, I'd say, experienced dirt bags. So we knew how to live out of a car and eat rice and beans and tuna and all that kind of stuff.

But, yeah, most people doing a big year, we found out they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to look at little birds, which is, you know, insane. But we get it now. We understand. and uh yeah we slept in a minivan spent the whole year on public land basically with the exception of 42 nights at a cracker barrels across the uh it's the only it's the only place you can bang on uh free nights rest when you need to be near a city or if there was a rare bird report like you know in an area that didn't have public land so that's kind of uh that's kind of how we saved money What was the process like for sleeping in a cracker barrel parking lot?

Do you go in and talk to the store manager? Do you call them ahead of time? Or is it just known that that's cool to do? You know, that's kind of a rookie move going in and asking the manager. We found out that that's kind of a rookie move. You just kind of pull out back and you don't even have to eat in the restaurant. And you shouldn't eat in the restaurant. Let's be honest.

Now, I sat down Clayd Newcomb one time and watched him just devour Cracker Barrel. specifically the grits. I was blown away. Oh, the grits. We saw somebody, uh, maybe the, their last moments in their life in a, in a cracker parking lot. They, they evacuated the entire restaurant and they pulled somebody out on a stretcher. And, uh, Quentin has a line in the movie.

It says from the grits to the gallows because it's, uh, it's a war zone in there. What an adventure. Uh, during this journey, you learn about, uh, some of the bird watching drama. Tell us about stringing. And more specifically swallowgate. Yeah, so it's probably similar in like hunting and fishing. You know, people want that record or, you know, they want that like, I don't know, you guys know better than me, but like they put weights and fish and stuff, right?

Is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what these guys do. Yeah. Yeah. So in birding, it's called stringing. And it's basically the whole thing's built on an honor system, right? But, you know, it's like, you know, there's cheaters out there.

And so stringing is basically stringing along these rare bird sightings where, you know, you say you saw the bird and you didn't or you exaggerate that you saw the bird and you put it on this bird software called eBird. And there's a famous incident from like a decade ago called Swallowgate where a guy thought he or he said he saw a bird called a violet green swallow. And it would have been a state record for North Carolina. And a bunch of birders in the area got skeptical of him. they dug in they found out where his location was on the date he said he saw the bird and it was uh they somehow found his location and then they dug him to the metadata on the photo and they found out it was like uh you know didn't match the date he said it was at and then they went to a bunch of natural history museums and matched the feather molt

the specific feather molt on this this bird and they were like no at this time of year it should have more white on this specific type of feather on the back of it and like it's crazy so they nab the guy and he's kind of blacklisted from the community so in the movie i interviewed the guy and i got his perspective and uh i kind of i kind of believe that he he really saw the bird he said he just faked the photo and he was like a young kid at the time but he explained it i kind of i'm kind of on his side now i know i know i love it i love it uh at some point you guys find out that there is a rare bird email chain and it leads to a lot of new sightings tell us about that yeah so uh about probably two or three months

into the year we found out we were missing out a lot because there's something called a the rare bird e bird alert thing and so we went on there and our numbers went up after that for sure and uh you check this email thing and a bunch of nerds basically just send out where they're seeing all these uh you know rare birds we saw one there we got one report of something called a cattle tyrant and it was in Corpus Christi I think Yeah Corpus Christi And they just tell you the location

Of the bird you just drive there You look at it, you go nice And you put it on your fancy little list And you're good to go All right, what's your favorite bird That you found in the big year? Mine is the I like the common birds

I'm not a rare bird guy I like the common Nighthawk Big fan of that one Quentin is a big fan of the roadrunner standard you know stock what was the rarest bird you guys saw um

there was one there's one called a gray collared bacard it was like the first time it had been seen in the country it's one of those it's like right on the border at texas in the u.s so it like flies flies from mexico or yeah from mexico to the u.s flies from mexico

and then you can count it on your big fancy little list and then you know if it's if it's like a hundred yards south you can't count it's kind of one of those deals but the other one is super rare and what's the weirdest place that you guys checked a bird off the list uh we camped right outside of a women's prison in new mexico some uh you know some bad ladies in there and uh we uh we woke up in the morning and saw our uh the first time we'd ever seen something called a clark's grebe and i'll never look at one of those the same again they're out in the pond just

Kind of right outside the prison there. A few times you guys had sightings that were actually rejected. Tell us about that. Yeah, again, they say it's an honor system, but we should have got a lot of emails that were saying, you know, this wasn't the bird you saw because we were so new at it, right? And they're pretty quick to take those away. But, you know, it's an honor system, you know. Yeah, you call them we got some. The bird cops, right?

Yeah, they're the bird cops. They're a vicious group out there. Did you side with them or were you like, no? Oh, they're right. No, yeah, no, they're definitely right, obviously. We didn't know what we were doing. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

No, yeah, yeah. Okay, so your sightings are tracked on the app Ebert, and that's who makes the leaderboard. I saw that Ebert had over 1.1 million users last year. Tell us how many birds you saw and where you ranked among those million competitors. Yeah, so we saw 579 species of bird. and if you'd say that at the bar it's not a great pickup boy nobody really cares

but the record is now 758 and so they saw 200 I don't know how to do math but that's like a lot more than we saw and yeah it's the fact that there's people out there that saw that many more than us it's a passionate group and where did that 500 some get you on the leaderboard

oh that would be 23rd in the in the United States 23rd that that is very impressive. Yeah. They don't make a trophy for that. There we go. If someone wanted to get into birding but doesn't know where to start, what advice would

you give them? I'd say get the Merlin app. It's great. The Merlin app's so good. It's like helps for beginners. And then I would say just leave like the bucket hat and the vest at home. You don't really need that. You can just be good with the binoculars and the Merlin app.

Okay. Very good. Listers, a glimpse into extreme bird watching is available right. now for free on YouTube. It's a really fun documentary. Everyone should go watch it. Owen, congrats on your big year and thanks for joining us. Thanks, guys. You guys rule. Keep it up. A business opportunity out there too. If you're not finding gals at the bar with your bird list, you build the bar and they will come.

Hey, that's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah, that's free before you. That's for free. Bye, Owen. Thank you. That was awesome. See you, boys. In the documentary, they also discover, they get an old birding book and it's got all these bird hotlines you can call and they call like 50 of the numbers only one is still working and it's in ohio uh and they learn after they're talking to the person on this rare bird hotline who's giving them an update on where to find some rare birds uh that it's an omish hotline which hit close to home because we know that our podcasts are all available on an omish hotline as well so shout out to the uh the umish folks who are dialing into some phone number and

learning about where the rare birds are and listening to uh Cal of the Wild. It's citizen science. It's awesome. It's great. It's super cool. Any birding interest from you, too? Well, I like to keep track of some of them birding websites if I'm trying to figure out where birds that I would like to hunt are.

They do pop. That's a dirty, dirty little secret out there. Yeah. Mark Kenyon and I, we put the full on sneak on some birds in Alaska when we were up there in the Arctic Circle with the Merlin app. Mark with this Merlin app fully extended trying to get a bird call to identify some birds

that I mean that was very fun yeah yeah lost a camera feed here I don't know what happened and the Merlin fix that app

you can keep talking everybody can hear you they just can't see you I just busted it out the other day because we had this this group of hawks that got really friendly

with our backyard they were like tearing squirrels and stuff open on well that I was like Oh, it's a sharp shand hawk. And I'm like, oh, no, it's a rough-legged hawk. And then finally I was like, oh, I got to re-download the Merlin app.

And it's a Swainson's hawk. Okay. And they were super cool. Yeah. They kind of moved on. My interest in birding is I don't like not knowing what I'm looking at. If I'm like out in nature deer hunting and see some bird I'm not familiar with, it's annoying if I don't know like the name of that thing.

Yeah. I don't like that. It's also fun, though, to, like in the duck blind, you know, people will be like, oh, and I, and I just say, BOP, B.O.P. Bird of prey. Oh, okay. Bop. That gets the message across. We don't shoot those.

Right. Exactly. That Merlin app is one of my favorite things ever. So impressive. In the springtime, when I'm turkey hunting, I'll just turn that thing on and set it down next to me is, like, the woods come alive. And just, like, all the different birds that pop, I like just seeing. how many different birds I can get on it. That is, yeah, the audio part is really amazing because for whatever reason in my brain, it's going to be like, it's going to identify one bird,

but it's all the noises. Yeah, which is, yeah, it's awesome. It's great. Oh, and his brother, um, they try to trick the app and like use a flute to play a bird call and they successfully do it in one instance. They're able to replicate. I don't remember what the bird is, um, but they, they do it well enough to make Merlin think that they are that bird. Oh, Great minds think alike. I tried to do that. We were in Alaska one time Bear hunting with Clay Newcomb.

And we were trying to get him to trick the old bard out. And it worked? Yeah, he was able to trick it. Cool. Yeah. Heck yeah. Give him a ribbon.

Yeah. Thought I had the right trill for the Swainson's Hawk. And it didn't work. Nope. Again, Owen's documentary is called Listers. It's available on YouTube right now. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart.

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audiobook series is available for pre-order right now. Meat Eater's American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, Guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what has happened.

happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre-order Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks, and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14. All right, our next segment is Gear Talk.

Let's talk about gear, baby. Let's talk about goats and beats. Let's talk about boots and bino's camo patterns with Yonleet. Let's talk about gear. Let's talk about gear. For Gear Talk, each of us has a gear review for you today. Seth, start us off. All right, the piece of gear, I'm talking about.

talking about today is this right here, ski goggles. It's something that probably a lot of hunters don't think about carrying with them. No. You're not a skier, are you? I've never skied before, and I probably never will. Not a snowboarder. Not a snowboarder. God, that's a long time to go without skiing for living in the mountain west, the inner mountain west.

Yeah, I just do other things. Well, yeah, I hear you. We were talking before the show. started about things that you end up having to do as an adult and I think at a certain point set it like becomes a thing like I'm not a skier I'm just never going to ski and so like yeah I've just like more incentive to not go skiing oh I've gotten to the point where I'm like I'm never going to I'm never going to invest in like I could go buy a bunch of like wrapple of lores or something I'd rather do that than buy skis whatever so why do

ski goggles um investment how's your portfolio saff great i just got some rappel of lures bunch of d t10s a lot of shad raps still in the box um so uh ski goggles i use them um a lot of times in the wind like if there's snow on the ground when i'm hunting and it's blowing snow yeah i'm tracking on that for sure um eastern montana when it's super windy no snow on the ground and you're just i one time was walking with the wind at my back on a real windy day and I was just in a bunch of dusty type ground and like, you get like an eddy in front of your face and you're just eating dust all this.

So, yeah, ski goggles for that. And then anytime you're on a skiff in colder weather or rainy weather, there's a picture on here, Phil, of me and a skiff in Alaska wearing these same ski goggles. It was raining, you know, 10 minutes before this photo was taken. We were on a black tail honed up in Alaska. Keeping your forehead warm.

Yeah. Just, I wear them all the time. It's like listen to Bubba Gump talk about shrimp over there. Yep. Ski goggles. Cal, where do you stand on ski goggles for dogs when they're hunting? Boy, I think they can be a good idea. Just snort ever wear them?

No. You know, these seasons vary so much for us when we were, like, really getting after it. The amount of doctoring of her eyeballs that was going on every day was pretty intense there for a while. And I was like, I am going to get this dog, uh, doggles, as some call them. And is that, are those made for dogs or do you just use like Seth's pair? No, there's a couple of companies out there, you know, and because it like started in the tactical world. and then, of course, became hip. You know, those tactical things become so hit that we have to have them.

But, and then, like, you know, folks who use dogs for crane hunts, it's good eye pro for them because cranes can lash out at dog's eyeballs. But, yeah, once you get late in the season and your dog's been running hard through, like, sorghum and really abrasive grasses, they lose all the hair around their eyeballs and then and their cheekbones and stuff start looking real real tough and they just get a lot of seeds

and dust and you're hunting around cat tails and those things explode yeah exactly so it's not it's not a like I don't look at it and be like ugh poser like there's there's a legit use case And, yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, it's not like your weekend warrior type of thing. Like dogs handle that stuff just fine.

You approve. Yeah. All right, Cal, what are you reviewing for Gear Talk? Well, I had a couple of directions. He's going to go. He's reaching in his pockets. He's deciding as he rifles through his blue jeans pockets right now. We'll see what he's going to pull out.

now he's looking on the ground there it is his keys no his hoodie no he's reaching past that I wanted to find something economical okay he set his sunglasses aside it's not those what do we got in Cal's hoodie pocket?

Oh Phelps Predator Call so I in all my FHF bino harnesses of which I have three now orange one camel one another camel one set up for archery, one set up for a rifle, you know.

I either have a external reed cow elk call or a predator call. Mm-hmm. And either one has year-round applications because you can use that external read cow call as a predator call, but it's also good at just like stopping deer. You know, like you're on a pretty good ratio. Yeah. If you bump something, it'll stop and take a look and you can do the same thing with the predator call. Predator call, you get like one shot at it because if you reef on it too much,

you can just blow all the deer out of the country. Give me an example of what it would sound like if you were trying to stop a deer right now. Oh, I'd just go. Okay. That works. And yeah, it can work. But then for bringing in the critters, I suggest like crying like a baby. Like, in your brain, this is how I do all my calling. I have, like, the conversation in my head. Motivation, you could call it. But I am like a baby human child left out on the prairie exposed to the elements. That'll get them coming.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I hunted with some very good predator hunters when I worked at Peterson's hunting magazine. And this was a decade ago, and it was around the time when I feel like e-callers had hit their peak. Like everyone either had one or was about to get one. And they had now flipped it to the other way where they were like, mouth calls are now the way to go because every coyote in the country has heard that e-call sequence of a dying jackrabbit or the Tweedy Bird, whatever. So they liked the variety you can give yourself with a mouth call.

Yep. I mean, variety in all things. I used to just archery elk hunting used to be everything to me for, you know, in between live dogs. In that dead dog time, you get real obsessed with the things that you're not normally doing when you have good dogs. And I would buy, I would often replace my cow calls, but I would buy one brand new cow call that I had never used before. Um, just betting on the fact that it's going to have some pitch tone, uh, that I wasn't, uh, currently in my repertoire and nobody else was using. So like, I used a, like a big woods wise cow call that I found in some bargain bin someplace, uh, you felt like that didn't sound like much else that dudes were blowing on. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. For gear talk today, I am reviewing, uh, gas cans. I haven't owned a good gas can in my adult life The only good gas cans I've ever used were pre-2009 gas cans Which is when the new EPA regulations were into effect And I was trying to recently explain to someone

That old gas cans are something that sons are going to fight over in the will Someday just because they were such superior products Like 15 years ago So here is my plea to the audience If you know about a good gas can email radio at the Meteor.com with the subject line gas can. I'm going to compile your recommendations and then I will share them

on the next episode that I host in two weeks. There has to be a good gas can on the market. If you know what that is, please email me so I can share that with everyone and then we're not going to be pissed off anymore when we have to like fill the snowblower or the boat or the side by side with gas. Again, that's radio at themedeater.com

subject line gas can. Do either of you boys have a good gas can recommendation? well my my little hot tip is you buy a gas can and they all come with the freaking BS safety that's the which I've never 2009 problem I've never spelt spill more gas in my life agree until they switch to that system yeah it's so true that thing it like either wants to give you all the gas or none of the gas yeah um but you can go to like a hardware store or something and buy like or

go on Amazon or whatever um and buy like aftermarket gas can nozzles that are just like doesn't have all the BS maybe that's the hot tip yeah for whatever reason the high volume cans never work

but I have a low volume you know it's like a half gallon for that I just towed around for the generator when I throw it in the in the camper and that's got the weird like no drip

plunger you know you hook it on the edge and yeah yeah yeah And that thing works great until it sticks on occasion. And then you're just like, I had this happen the other day. Yeah. I had some gas in the gas can that I was like, if it's probably going to sit here for a while, so I'm just going to dump it in my truck. Uh-huh.

That way it gets used. And I'm frightened to put gas in my truck with any of my gas. Half of it went down the side of my truck and made a big old puddle on the sidewalk. Yep. Someone listening, though, they know about what the best gas can is. Maybe it's like 20 of you. Oh, we got Vermont millennial homesteaders is suggesting Stens no spill. Okay.

But can build up some pressure when you first open. All right. Okay. Again, radio at the meteor.com, subject line gas can. It makes you feel like you're going to die in a tragic gasoline fight accident. Yes. If I was running for president, this is something I'd campaign on is old gas cans. And I think that issue alone would win me a few states.

Oh, I guarantee you would. People want a good gas can. Yeah. And then you could be like, and what's the deal with these new six-pack holders? Can't we go back to the old? That'd give me a couple more states alone. All right, let's take a break for some listener feedback. Phil, what's the chat have to say?

Titus asks, hey, Cal, have you ever chucker hunted in Montana or heard of anyone doing it? Yeah, Chucker are listed as a game bird in the state of Montana. Have you ever done it? No. Little devil birds All right Nate is asking for a good

Venison breakfast sausage recipe Last attempt was a 7525 mix With some pre-made country sausage Nate we have a recipe on our website

It's literally called The Only Breakfast Sausage recipe that you'll ever need It's from Danielle Pruitt Go check that out And make that Your starting base

And then if you want to make adjustments from there Like it needs more fennel It needs a little more spice I think try to start with that recipe and see where that gets you. Seth, Cal?

I think that's great. I like, sage is like the only ingredient in breakfast sausage that, like, I want in my breakfast sausage. Yeah, I've made breakfast sausage a couple times and just never turned out like I wanted it to. Daniel Pruitt's recipe, the only venison breakfast sausage recipe you need. Danielle is just very, very pro. Like, she tests everything. And, you know, she's, again, professional.

Yeah. Like, very good. Yeah. Keegan, this is a question for Seth, I'd say. So, asks, what batteries slash tricks does the crew use to keep camera equipment charged throughout long hunts? Uh, carry a lot of batteries. Yeah.

There's not a whole lot you can do out there as far as charging. I mean, some, it depends. Some spots, like, if we get flown in somewhere and we have, like, a plane where you can haul gear, we'll, like, drop a generator at a spot. and like we've done that in Alaska where we can like after a couple days come back and charge but it's just like on a on a long hunt when you don't have any access to charging stuff you just got to carry a bunch of batteries the cold obviously messes with your batteries does the heat mess with your batteries as well well they no I've never had heat I've had heat mess with cameras just overheating cameras but not batteries it's not like my cell phone doesn't like to charge If it's too hot. Yeah. I wasn't sure if your camera had similar issues.

I've never run into that. No, all these rechargeable batteries, they all just slowly degenerate over time. So even if you're stockpiling fresh batteries, if you're on day seven, eight, whatever, you pop that thing in and it's going to be 20% under what you think it should be, right? Don't you think? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, if it's cold, it's just a whole different story. Bill, let's do one more.

Uh, sure thing. Brad asks, what's the most disappointing loss of meat you've had due to spoilage or a broken freezer? Mm. Mm. Uh, for me, it was I killed the deer a few years ago in Wyoming that had CWD. So that wasn't spoilage or, uh, broken freezer. But like, I had gotten all the boneless meat home. It was ready to, uh, to get, like, put away.

nicely in the freezer and be eaten and processed. And then yeah, when the CWD came back positive it just went into a landfill. No one in the office was interested in giving it to their dogs. I don't blame them. So that was a bummer to lose

a deer to CWD. What do you guys got? I'm trying to, I never lost a freezer, knock on wood. I lost a yeah, I mean, the most disappointing by far and away. was going to this just a funny story popped in my head when we were like very very poor dirt bag college kids I was like guiding and building houses and going to school and and my mom gave me like a five bone

rib roast for it must have been my birthday so a prime rib beef fatty beef prime rib and some But he unplugged the freezer, probably to do something stupid and never plugged it back in. And I had antelope in there, too. And that was just like a horrible gut punch at that time in life. I called Montana Fishwall Life in Parks. I was like, hey, I'm going to dump a bunch of game meat in the landfill. Wanted to let you know about that. And they were like, oh, okay.

And they recorded it. So I wouldn't get dinged with wanton waste. you guys like so you're just going to toss the whole freezer i was like no no i'm cleaning it out and yeah it was but it was gross it was like five inches of blood in the bottom of that thing stanky blood and then i i lost a bull elk in new mexico a handful of years ago it was the only time i personally had at that point it was the only time i personally had had a um elk tag in new Mexico and made, um, what turned out to be a good shot on this bowl, but I was so convinced it was a bad shot.

I kind of talked myself out of, um, really properly following this thing up, even though I had, I'd done 95% of the work, and it was, it was a horrific loss of, uh, of the meat and just a challenge to myself of like you know better you always do better why'd you stop this time it was horrible was there any meat recovered zero yeah i mean it was like a hundred degree new mexico hunt and um yeah man i mean i i basically process that whole thing like going something on here is going to be good and it was just wasn't just all sour A few years back, I was hunting in Nebraska for whitetails and shot a buck with my bow. And I ended up getting one lung and liver, but it like ran off into this cornfield.

And I waited a couple hours. And then after the morning hunt went in there, ended up jumping that buck. He was still alive. And it ran into the corn more. and I was like, I'm going to wait till just back out, wait till the next day. Went back in there the next morning, and I went and sat in the tree stand that morning just to see what happened, you know, what was going on. And then got down, I was with some buddies too, so after the morning hunt got down and started looking for this buck. and I noticed like

some bald eagles and crows sitting in this tree along the cornfield I like made a mental note of that and that morning I'd heard coyotes yippin over in that area too and I walked over there and just found the buck and it was like devoured

by coyotes pooped on and devoured yeah like 24 hours just completely devoured well we got some neck meat a little bit of backstrap off of it but no fun yeah yeah all right moving on our next segment is Throwback Thursday

Throwback on a Thursday More Throwback Thursday is where we look at old hunting and fishing pictures of the crew Cal start us off What picture did it? What picture did Philson.

Okay. There we go. This is way back in my youth. Look at that. How long? Look at that. Well, it's still. Well, you can see the male pattern baldness, but it was still rocking some hair.

This would have been probably 2009, 2000. Yeah, right in there, 2009, I bet. Back when gas cans were still good. Back in gas cans were still good. This is in the, Bob Marshall, that's the cabin at Cabin Creek, and we were in there hunting grizzly bears for a combined grizzly bear study. And those are two old, now dead dogs, scout and fish, the big fish and scout, real good dogs. And we got charged by a grizzly bear on this one, and this was like a light charge.

We were both very startled to see each other And he bailed off the hill And probably stopped at like the 50 yard mark And then spun and bailed But giant grizzly bear How many bears have you been charged by in your life? Three Was this number one?

This is number two Hello A other one Corinne calls me She, Corinne This show has been going on for over a year At the same time, the same day of the week And Corinne has no idea she so it's

Corinne I love you figure out the schedule she wants to participate and throw back Thursday maybe answer Phil and see what she's got to say maybe she's just excited because of that handsome dude up there

on the screen I'm calling it to see who it was but the cool deal so we did the rest of our big huge loop that day and then came back

at the end of the you know in the waning hours of the night and the cabin and the outhouse and everything had been rubbed by I can only assume that bear because that would make it more powerful but so had big gris scratches down the doors and then we were pulling hair off the logs and stuff but I was like his objective to get in there

you think I think his objective was to be like I wasn't that scared uh-huh swear to God and this my area because I mean it was early spring you can't tell by that photo but you know it was like we were the only people in there all the all the passes were all snowed over and stuff it was pretty spectacular very good failure up next for throwback Thursday what he got oh geez okay here we go um this was tough for me uh I was just telling Spencer my mom is uh in Europe and I I texted her to send me pictures because I do not have any so this is uh that is mount adams in washington state this is a tacklack lake in the gifford pincho national forest oh very cool this is between mount st helen's and mount adams this is kind of our go-to camping

spot uh growing up um i think this is probably 2005 if i had to say uh there's me on the right there looking good um wait which one are you and then the mariners hat um yeah i mean just i mean obviously gorgeous view of the mountains And then we do some fishing here. There's me in my jean shorts and my Star Wars shirt. Give us a fishing report. Well, that was my next point. If you see in all of these pictures, it's just me with a rod.

I actually don't have any fish in my hands. Why is that? I couldn't tell you. You can do the investigating yourself. But yeah, these are the only pictures I think I have of me fishing at all growing up. Oh, come. So you didn't stick with it, Phil. I didn't stick with it.

I enjoyed it. plenty, but, you know, camping was time for me to, to hike and canoe. I didn't, I didn't really want to touch the icky fish. That was my, I gotta say you age very well, Phil. Oh, that's so yeah. Yeah. And you appear to be holding the fishing rod the right way, which I just witnessed some folks in Northern California this last weekend, not even having that step right. Oh, spinning real up. Yes. Oh, yeah. You hate to see it. Which, uh, we also had folks sending us, I don't know, probably a year or two ago in a sporting goods store printable ad that someone was holding a fishing rod wrong. Oh, God.

But yeah, I think they stock that lake with rainbows, but there's some cutthroat in there as well. And I know this because I just looked it up on the Schomania County, Washington Department of Fishing Wildlife website. Good. Now we know Phil's street cred for hunting. I like it. It's not non-existent. all right i'm going to go next um this is me probably like 1995 1996 three or four years old and i am at uh maryweather marine in yankton south dakota um maryweather marine is a boat shop

and one time they had a motor uh that they were working on where they found a bull snake wrapped around the prop uh and that snake's name was bumpy the thing had a had a messed up skeleton it couldn't move correctly i don't think they felt good about releasing it again so they kept this snake as a pet, and whenever we were in Yankton, I would go see the thing and hang out with Bumpy. The ironic thing is, is I hate snakes now. I don't know what happened between this moment and that moment, where I could, like, happily handle a bull snake, and now if I am walking out in the woods, mushroom hunting, and I see

one 10 feet away, slithering away from me, who's clearly scared, I will just get shivers up and down my whole body. I can't. I'm not a big snake now either. Can't explain it. It makes me feel the worst. One, that I like, I'm scared and then two, that I don't like that I feel scared over a dang snake who doesn't want anything to do with me.

Big old brain, opposable thumbs. Yes. But back then, I was all about it. I was a big fan of Bumpy, so we'd go hang out with it. Ice site that's effective in multiple ranges. Yeah. Yeah. It's totally unreasonable.

But I did not possess that. fear at that moment. Yeah, that's, that's a good memory, man. That's Americana right there. I like, I'm not going to... Merry weather, Marine. Make the same comment I made about Phil, but... Please don't.

I get the same, like, mammalian reflex, you know? I'm like, oh, danger. About a snake. Yep. But then I'm, like, I'm going to catch it or check it out. That's built in. Yeah. Yeah.

When you see a snake. I would like to be interested in them enough to, like, pick one. off and really mess with the thing before letting it go? Because I have that instinct with frogs and salamanders totally love handling them and encountering them. Not snakes, though. All right, Phil, or excuse me, Seth, Seth, you are last. What do you got for throwback Thursday?

Oh, let's see. We have three generations of morsees here. Oh, very nice. This is on my grandfather on the left. I used to call him Pops. He's no longer with us, but um doing a little catch and release yeah yeah you know my this is how you're supposed to hold a trout by the gills uh-huh um but no this is up in maine my grand grandparents uh they were school

teachers and uh in the summertime when they were off they would they would uh be camp counselors up in main oh nice so they ended up buying a place up there and i spent most of my childhood um going to Maine every summer. Mm, very cool. And, uh, yeah, it's kind of where I, like, learned how to drive a boat. That, that boat, that little lawn on the right there was, like, the first boat I ever drove and learned how to, you know, handle myself in a boat and learned how to fish and why it would be nice to have ski goggles.

Yeah, exactly. Give us a fishing report for that lake. Um, so this lake, it's, it's a small lake. Um, they call them ponds up there. Um, so. Oh, yeah, Shiloh. That's, that's Maine, right? But that thing ain't a pond. Oh, yeah.

I mean like it traditionally someone looking to be like that's a dang lake it's big yeah yeah yeah um this is the belgrade lakes region in main and uh um this was it's i would love i've never fished this this lake with electronics like we it was purely visual like go to spots where you could see rocks catch small mouth go to spots where you could see weeds catch large mouth fish structure fish like flip docks um go out in deep water and just sink a worm and float for hours until you finally hit the school of of white perch you know like that's the kind of fishing we did very simple um and i haven't fished in years but it'd be fun to go back with like electronics and just see like what's going like what what was what was

i missing back then you know um but yeah it's where i cut my teeth on bass fishing and we used to i may we used to fish just all day out there just hours very good i like pops rocking the action wax. Oh, yeah. Oh. That's a good move. Yes. The gray new balance sneakers was, you know, classic. Made in Maine, it was like every old timer in Maine had a pair of new balance sneakers. Perfect. Yeah.

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the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre-order right now. Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunting. who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first

place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our meat eaters American history projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era, and don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre-order Meat Eaters American History, the Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks, and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14. Joining us on the line last is Kip Adams, the chief conservation officer at the National Deer Association. Kip is here to give us an E.HD report for deer in each region. Kip, welcome to the

show. Hey, thanks for having me, Spencer. Good to see you guys. Good to see you. Good to see you, too, Kip. First thing, Kip, explain what E.HD is. H.D. stands for episodic hemorrhagic disease. It's a viral disease of deer. It's probably the most common disease that the white tails get. There's a few other deer species and some livestock species that can get it as well. But from 100 standpoint is typically a disease we think of late summer when you start finding dead deer near water sources. Yeah, what are some of the signs that we can look for to determine that a deer died from E.H.D. Or maybe something else. Yeah, since it is a virus and it is a hemorrhging disease, we often can see, you know, like red, puffy eyes, thick tongue.

The rumin can get all messed up. From a hundred standpoint, though, basically, these are the deer that because they have fever, they end up near. water sources. So we find them dead in ponds and ditches and cricks and in the likes. Why is it that some years and regions have a lot of E.H.D. while others don't. Well, it's because the virus is carried by noceums, you know, those little biting midges that drive us crazy in the summer. Years of drought sees deer get sucked into these water sources. And that's also years where we often have a lot of the vector of the midges that are their carrying this. So when we have a drought,

We have dry areas. Deer get in and around these areas makes it much easier for the midges who carry the disease or, you know, to bite a deer that has it and then share that with another deer. So basically, deer are congregated in areas that make it perfect for the noceums to bite them and then transfer it from deer to deer. Is there anything that landowners can do to protect herds from E.HD? Well, not a lot. The perfect breeding grounds for these midges are the muddy areas around. dried up water sources. So in areas where we have a lot of rain and water sources are full, we don't tend to see a bad hemorrhagic disease years. But because of the droughts and deer are

congregated, then you have more of those exposed mudflats. That makes it way worse. So from a landowner end, in many cases, there's not a lot that they can do unless they have access to management of some of these areas. And think of, you know, like cattle ranchers. Cattle ranchers that let cattle into ponds, those are terrible areas in bad hemorrhagic disease years because of all the mud that's right in and around them and the cattle disturbing that. In large part, though, Spencer, there's not a whole lot that we can do to stop this. We can react if you find a bunch of dead deer. You know, that year may be reduced an antlers harvest if necessary. But as far as specific things we can do to try to safeguard against the disease, there's really nothing we can do. Okay. Let's go region by

region to talk about EHD reports in 2025. Starting with the Northeast, what have you heard there? Well, there's at least five states in the Northeast that have confirmed present so far. And basically, this is worse in years where you have a really wet spring followed by droughts. So droughts are bad for this anyway, but they're even worse if you start that off with a really wet spring because that allows more of the noceums to breed. So the Northeast, it was extremely wet in April and May, and then it's had almost no rain since. So kind of the mid-Atlantic region, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and New York have thus confirmed it.

And it's pretty early for, like, this is at the beginning of the hemorrhagic disease season. And we're seeing a bunch of it already in the Northeast. So things are still really dry. It's set up to be a really, really bad year for this here in the Northeast. But that's not like don't go to Pennsylvania thing, right? That can just be localized in certain areas of the state. Yeah, you're exactly right, Cal. And the thing with hemorrhagic disease is, first of all, not all deer that get the disease

die from it. Some will live, and if they live, they develop antibodies against it. The ones that die, it tends to be very localized. So, like, I'm in northern Pennsylvania. Fortunately, there has been no disease in my area. However, you know, 20 miles down the road, it can hit and people can lose a bunch of deer. So you're right. It is very specific, very localized where deer get hit hard by it.

And just nasty, too. Like if you're on site when this is happening, it is really brutal. Kim, you had mentioned. Sorry, go ahead. Oh, go ahead. Nope. Sorry, Spencer. You mentioned that not every deer dies who gets E.H.D.

if you were to kill a survivor, how could you confirm that that deer maybe once had EHD but lived through it? One of the symptoms are they get sloughing of the hooves. So the incubation period is very short, like five to nine days. So if a deer's going to die from it this year, it's going to be done.

You're not going to be shooting it in, you know, bow or rifle season. But if you do shoot a deer, there's hunting season, and you look at the hooves, and you can see, like, growth interruptions or what looks like the hooves are sloughing off, That's a sure sign that that deer had the disease, survived it, and then continued to live, you know, and start to grow again.

Wow. And to be clear, that that deer is still safe to eat, right, Kip? Yes, it is. Yep, absolutely. Okay, what are we looking at for E.H.D. in the South this year? Well, it's a, we see six states so far to South that have confirmed it. I'd be in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. and the South has had this disease forever.

And I vividly remember when I was doing my undergraduate work at Penn State. You know, we got to hemorrhagic disease. The professor said, this is a disease of deer in the southeast. Moving on. And that was it. That's the matter of all we learned. That is very different today. It is today this disease is all across the U.S.

It's up into Canada. Basically, it's warmer. So the midges just live in a lot of places they didn't used to. But the southeast has had it the long. So those deer are more used to it. And basically, they have it everywhere in the southeast every year. But those deer are not hit very hard. So usually not many of those deer die. In the northeast where our deer are more naive, it kills a snot out of them. But the southeast, six states so far probably is not going to be nearly as bad there as other parts of the country, partly just because

they've been exposed to it for so long. They're just more used to it. Moving to the Midwest, I've seen the most EHD reports out of Ohio this year. What are you hearing from there and the rest of the region? Five states in the Midwest so far have confirmed it. That's Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri. And of those, you are right, so far it has been the worst in Ohio. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of dead deer in Ohio. All throughout the state, the southeast part of Ohio has been hit worse than anywhere else.

kind of right across the border from West Virginia and not all that far from Pennsylvania, but that region of the country has been hit far harder so far than any place else. Finally, what do we have for EHD in the West? Two states so far, Idaho and Washington have both confirmed it. The West typically doesn't get that bad of hemorrhagic disease. Fingers crossed, it'll be that way again this year, because in addition to white tails, mule deer can get it, elk can get it, although elk are less susceptible to it.

But a pronghorn and big horn sheep can also get it. So because of that, you know, the West is especially sensitive to the disease. But thus far, it's been pretty light out there. And hopefully first frost comes in a hurry. That ends the midges. That ends the disease season. So the first frost can't come quickly enough. Last thing, Kip, on a science front,

is there anything encouraging you can tell us about how biologists are working to reduce EHD in America's favorite game animal? well there's there's a lot of research just looking at doing a better job predicting you know when when it's going to be bad because it's a virus there's really nothing that we can do to protect deer against it but there's definitely some ways you know that we can at least predict if we think it's going to be bad hence when i mentioned earlier you know it's worse in drought years and especially worse if it's preceded by a wet spring so while there's a lot of disease folks just taking a look at all those factors trying to combine them just to be able to help predict a little more for hunters across the U.S. I'm trying to understand if they're likely to have a bad hemorrhagic disease year. All right, Kip, thanks for fighting for deer.

Thanks for the EHD reports, and thanks for joining us. Thanks. All right to see you guys. Good luck this season. Thanks, you too. You boys run across many E.H.D. deaths in your day? Handful. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, what Kip was saying there about, you know, drought years and then we would see it um also when you get like a little just a little bit of uh rain in august um and the the those those midges would just explode and i had a way back when i used to um we we never guided archery uh deer or or antelope but so i would take that time to go set up our outfitting camp in eastern montana and haul all the stuff out there clean everything up and it was amazing because i'd be the only person archery hunting deer and one year there's this bachelor group eight mule deer bucks that um i kept sneaking in on and and um definitely flung a couple arrows never never connected but um you know had all this time to work these deer and eventually there were six and then five

and then zero and every single one of those deer died all of them damn like while you were trying to kill one. Yes. Yeah. And, um, and those are the years like where you can just smell the death. Oh. And, um, the hay, you know, hay was still still high. Um, that last cutting hadn't come off yet. And yeah, I mean, just, just gross. Yeah. Kip had talked about how it's especially bad if you have wet spring, dry summer. Um, similarly, it can be really bad if you have a wet year followed by a dry year. In southeastern South Dakota in 2011, we had record breaking rainfall. The Missouri River was like, the highest it had been in hundreds of years as far as back as they could look and then 2012 was an extreme drought so we had extremely wet followed by extremely dry um and i i personally found probably

20 dead deer that that summer that died from e hd and uh what i always remember is the smell cow just just brutal and you could like follow your nose right to where dead deer would be um and we could be cat fishing uh on the the gym river in you know august and you would know that like somewhere within a mile and a half of here, there are three or four dead deer from EHD right now. Yeah. And you'll just like never forget that overpowering like stench of death. Um, and, and now when I'm outside, it's like very easy to confirm like,

oh, something died over there a few weeks ago, um, because of that 2012, you're finding all those EHD dead deer. Yeah. Um, folks who had, uh, travel around with the, with their sawsalls. Mm. Oh, just lacking skull cats off. Yeah, just pulling deer heads off, yeah. A couple years ago, my wife shot a mule deer out in eastern Montana that the hooves were sloughing.

Was that the cactus buck? Yeah. Yeah, I don't, you know. I think they're related, yeah, that it was cactus buck and it had the messed up hooves. Yep. Cool buck. Real cool buck. I, um, to the part of South Dakota, I was hunting in that 2012, they responded, um, appropriately and cut back tags an enormous amount.

And it sucked, but then I, I personally had a theory that we were going to come out of this and be in like this golden age of white tail hunting for that area because these deer were not being bothered for years. If there was like a one and a half year old, a two and a half year old that survived EHD. And then all of a sudden, the tag count in that county went from a thousand to 50. Those bucks just lived for a couple years, not knowing what it was like to be hunted or bothered. So I, I really, really enjoyed that kept me going like, oh man, this sucks. and the deer are gone, but there's going to be some dumb deer after this. Yeah, yeah. Randall Williams said that on his trip through Ohio, he saw like yard signs saying stop the deer hunt because of E.HD.

Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to argue with those folks. Yeah, I got, I have some cell cameras out in Pennsylvania right now. And there's some bucks that were running around that I haven't seen for a while. So hard to say what happened. They could still be there, but yeah, hopefully it's not that. All right, that brings us to the end of this week's show.

Phil, let's get some final feedback from the chat. Sure thing. Last call for questions. This is from Nate. He says, I am a bad cook? Or am I a bad cook? Or are some birds just impossible to get the skin crispy, even among the same species? Cal, what do you got?

Yeah, Cal. Very hard. I mean, you have to dry the heck out of that bird. so score the little fatty bits just enough to like scratch the skin and allow that moisture to come out rub a little salt on there and then hang that thing up in front of a window or even a fan and and like get it to desiccate a little bit and that's your that's your best shot there's some other I was I never followed up with them I was talking to a food scientist,

uh, super nice dude out of Oklahoma. And we were debating about, uh, baking soda as this hack for getting dry skin on birds, which is sometimes used with like big turkeys and stuff. And there, there's some food science in there.

I'll dig that up and we'll, maybe write an article or something on it. Uh, we, we were singing the praises of Danielle Pruitt earlier. She has an article on our website, the meat eater.com, how to get perfectly, crispy skin on gamebirds. In about 800 words there, she gives you all the details you need to know as far as how long to dry it, how much salt to apply, if you want to do a wet brine instead, if you're going

to throw this thing in the oven and a cast iron skillet, what the temperature should be. So again, go check out Danielle's article, how to get perfectly crispy skin on gamebirds. But if you're talking like a quail, a dove, Hungarian partridge, even sharp tail grouse, All those birds are great in the deep fat fryer. Yeah. And that's getting crispy. What else you got, Phil? First, this is from a different Nate.

He says, Spencer, my kids just picked up their 43rd, 44th, 45th, 46th, and 47th junior ranger badges last week. And they also found two fossils at Badlands and got a special patch for that. Good on you, Nate. That's awesome. That's good parenting. That's fun for them. I bet they appreciate it now and they're going to appreciate it in the future. For sure.

Ethan asked Cal, thanks for mentioning the Fawn situation I sent to you on Cal of the Wild. What sources should I send people to about CWD other than Uncle Ted? Thanks a bunch. Before you jump in, I will say in about a week and a half, I believe you've got a pretty all-encompassing podcast that Cal is actually a part of with the turkey doc, Mike Chamberlain, but also his, one of his buddies, Mark Ruder, who studies like free-ranging disease pathology, or it teaches it. at the College of Vet Medicine at the University of Georgia. So that's a pretty wide-ranging conversation that Steve has with them. But, Cal, if you have anything else? I would wait for this podcast to come out because it's got the most up-to-date information on CWD.

And it's, if you're interested in it, it is a very good podcast. It's going to be a great source for people to be up-to-date. the the nuts and bolts of of cWD right now is you need to turn in your information lymph nodes report deer that you find that you think may have died from CWD the push is to manage like hyperlocal for CWD so if you have let's say you have of a CWD case here in Boz Angeles, the entire state isn't going to start reducing deer numbers.

And in fact, that now, because they're trying to figure out where each county, each region, each CWD zone is on the scale of CWD on the growth scale

that they can plot very effectively now. There may be instances where that data says don't harvest dose. We need to help the population rebound. On the other side of the scale, it could be harvest more deer, especially the bucks. Don't let them go because we're going to try to knock it down and get CWD to stabilize at ideally a lower prevalence rate. So do what they tell you to do. Don't be transporting things all over the place

and disposing of spinal columns and brain buckets in places where deer can come in contact with them, take them to a landfill, find your local Doug Duren with a good deer dumpster and get those things taken care of properly and turn in your lymphs. nodes help build this base for good, effective scientific management. And our last guest, Kip Adams, he's from the National Deer Association.

They do a great job of having common sense takes on things like this while still balancing the science. So go check out what NDA has to say on stuff. They'll also do a nice job of explaining things in layman's terms. So Ethan's buddy could come away from that, have a better understanding of CWD. Yep, for sure. Mogher wants to know what each of your longest hunts in the bat country was, like the longest stretch of time you were off the grid.

Cal, what do you got? Oh, it just makes me cry thinking about the good old days. And many, many trips in that, like, probably sub-15-day range, but between 10 and 15 days, like lots of those trips. And, you know, guiding is a little bit different where, like, you stay back, back there and then clients kind of rotate in and out. So a couple of months here and there. But as, like, a good, solid, I am hunting backpack trip, I would say on average, like 13 days. I don't have any real impressive backcountry stats like Cal.

my longest deer hunts though where I'm just like car camping sleeping in a tent uh Kansas I think I went for eight days probably like six years ago in Wyoming I think four years ago I had eight days uh sleeping in my tent trying to kill a deer and uh both of those I killed my deer the Wyoming one I pushed my deadline like an extra day like I'm gonna stay one more day and that I killed one that morning so it was very very satisfying uh ending for me nice yeah I got uh I think 10 days is my longest, but several, you know, eight, nine, 10 day up in Alaska, mostly, mostly those are the longer trip, so. Phil, let's do two more.

All right. This is from Kyle. And a different comment, he says that he's a proud randomal and then apologizes to me for that, as if I'm not also a proud randomal. So, Kyle, I'm on, I'm on your team. But he says, he's starting his fall turkey hunt this coming Monday, and he tips on fall versus spring turkeys. He says he has a stand decoy and calls, but not sure what he should focus on.

Hens and Tombs are allowed in Michigan. You guys do a lot of fall turkey? Any advice? I used to back in the day, back in when I was living in Pennsylvania. We used to do it, but we always would just find them and try and break them up and call them back in. Yeah, I've killed two fall turkeys in my life. Both times it was just opportunistic. It was deer hunting.

I knew there'd maybe be some turkeys nearby. I spotted them, got my shotgun, went and killed one. I don't have any good strategy for you, though, Kyle. Cal? I think my, may have been one of my first turkeys ever, if not the first bearded hand in the fall. Got her right in the back of the head as she was running away from me. That's perfect. Yeah, you know, fall turkeys would be targets of opportunity that white meat's so scarce in the freezer.

Oh, yeah. That it's like, it's real hard to pass them up if you have a tag for one. Yeah, just a lot of eyeballs that time. year. They're going to be in some bigger flocks. So be ready to make a shot where they're running away in the back of the head. Yeah, there's a lot of running involved in the fall turkey games from what I've seen. We have an article on our website just called Fall Turkey Hunting Tips from Tony Peterson. Tony's one of the best dang turkey hunters I know. So I'd trust the words that he can offer you in that article. One more, Phil. Chase is going to Lake Erie next weekend

for a four-hour trip, 2 to 6 p.m. Seth, should he talk? get walleye perch or bass hmm you got if you're going to eerie you got to catch walleye I like that yeah there's big ones there um yeah catch some walleye yeah that eerie fishing that we did too

like the dragon rippala Rappala's around was just shockingly automatic very productive yeah and yeah that's like historically eerie is like a trolling

lake There's a lack of structure, right? Yeah, but yeah. Is there a lot of re-fishing in Erie? Well, there's a lot of like suspended fish in Erie. But these days with forward facing sonar, I think that's kind of starting to shift where people are casting to them more than trolling these days.

Maybe not more then, but they're starting to do more of that on Erie. We did a big wind drift day. a friend of mine and I this several years ago and just you know leaded jig heads and like

you know goofy looking plastics and just tap in the bottom on the wind drift and it was very fun because you were just constantly picking up something between like catfish drum

walleye bass yeah it was great well there you go do that then you'll catch all kinds of different stuff that sounds fun all right one last reminder uh the me eater christmas tour happening this december go to the medeater dot com slash tour for those details and pre-sale access and while you're there check out the tailgate tour uh we got four stops left we'd love to hang out with you guys see you guys

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