The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 845: Can Ruffed Grouse and Woodcock Be Saved?

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with Karl Malcolm of the Ruffed Grouse and American Woodcock Society and Brody Henderson. Topics discussed: Forest health issues; less and less access to good ruffed grouse and woodcock hunting; the story of population decline due to habitat; scaling up conservation work into outcomes; financial woes; technology and glowing woodcock; definitions of birders; 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 I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26, presented by Maltry Mobile and On X Maps. 12 of Meat Eater's biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes, so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bird.

bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eater's YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

Hot damn, we're joined today by one of the greatest guests. Oh, man. I mean, for like, in terms of just consistent performances over the years, dude. One of the greatest guests of, all-time greatest guess. Wow. I mean, like, I'm not talking about just of guess. Did you feel like I'm buttering them up a little much? You're going big. I didn't expect this. Normally he tries to knock you down first and then it'll let you back up.

If you took all the greatest guests, oh, man. And then had a showdown among those guests. The car would emerge at the top, maybe not the top, but like he would. He might be too nice to make it to the top. He'd be up there. Carl Malk, wildlife wildlife biologist. Long history at the...

Every time you've ever been on, I think you've been on... No, every time you've ever been on, you've been on as a guy from the Forest Service. That is true. That is true. Yep. You and I started doing podcasts not long after I joined Federal Service, which was back in late 2011. Yeah. Okay.

But Carl's got a very deep history in all things. outdoors, grew up big time hunter, big time angler, got into things like, um, weird stuff, man. Like got into doing, um, deer work on, uh, deer work on air, airport runways. Yeah, like wildlife damage management. Wildlife damage management. Yep. Got so into muskrat trapping. I don't let you know this, Brody.

Nope. Phil probably knows about this got sewing the muskrat trap and that he used to put in a bid to lock down a chunk Don't tell me I can't think of a chunk Oricon Marsh Oh that's gonna do it

Oricon Marsh Well that's a famous one Yeah In the world of muskrat trapping Regardless some of the best muskrats on the planet Yeah Carl used to bid He used to put in a bid to get his own private

chunk of the marsh The Horicon Marsh During the mini boom Yeah. The mini boom of like 2011 to 2014. Did you have like trapping rivals like trapping wars? No, because he had his own. No, that's the thing.

Yeah, with my dear, my dear buddy. People like didn't come in and. No, no. No, they had, I mean, the federal, the federal agents out there. Stay close. That microphone's going to make. Oh, you already got your headphones on there. The, uh, the federal agents there do not mess around in these boundaries are very clearly defined.

That was with my, my dear buddy, Jacob Zykechie. What we got? How many musgrass were you guys catching? Hundreds. Hundreds, yeah. During the mini boom. Yeah, because they would do a sting out there. The federal agents would do a sting out there.

There's a highway that cuts east-west across Horicon Marsh. And there's so many muskrat trappers going across this bridge, federal agents would put a road-killed muskrat out there and see who would stop to pick it up. Because that was one of the ways they could pinpoint folks who were not following the rules because it was technically illegal to gather up a road-killed muskrat. That seems kind of cheap. Come on, man.

That seems kind of cheap. Come on, man. I knew what your sentiments would be on that. But the point is. Yeah, it was. The point is they, they strictly enforce those boundaries. I got to return to that in a minute here to tell you something interesting. Reason Carl's, what we're here to talk about is Rough Grouse and also American Woodcock,

because Carl's now the VP of Conservation at the Rough Grouse Society and the American Woodhouse Society and the American Woodhouse. Woodcock society and what we're here to find out about is this. Our rough grouse screwed. If so, how screwed? And what like why? What's it going to take? What is the what is the future of the bird in America? Before we're going to get into all that. Before we do, I'll tell you funny story. My friend Stu, who's a trapper in Southern Illinois, he's been on the show, Stu Miller's, Stu Miller Coon Creek outdoors. He makes some of the best. If you want to see good fur handling information online. I don't think anybody has better fur handling information

than Stu Miller from Coon Creek outdoors. Like if you were like, how do you skin and flesh and stretch and otter, raccoon, coyote, whatever? Stu has a phenomenal series on YouTube. Anyhow, he was trapped in Kansas. You know, skunks are real high right now. All that wants the tail. Interesting.

Okay. Stu said when he was in Kansas, he was seeing dead skunks on the side of the road. Road kills skunks on the side of the road, minus their tail. Now, everybody's used to seeing deer on the side of the road somehow minus their head. Right.

But skunks minus their tail on the side of the road. I just saw a nice skunk on the side of the road yesterday. Dude, because it could be $30 laying there. They just want the tail. And if you cut the tail and you learn what you're doing, you can cut it without getting into the sacks. But I wonder how many guys hop out and cut a little too close to the base

and have just a mess that they are not was it worth the 30 bucks ready to deal with grade like how are just before we get in all the details like in your organization what is up with rough grouse right now? I mean

why are we seeing like there's states that had rough grouse seasons that don't have rough grouse seasons like restrictions are down yeah it just doesn't you know it just doesn't feel like we're in the good old days of rough grouse hunting that is true in much of the country that is true and i think you know as we get into the topic at hand i want to just kind of like zoom back and we're going to be talking about rough grouse and american woodcock over the course of this conversation but i really want to frame it in terms of what's going on with forests and forest habitat and kind of the history of these forested ecosystems will focus primarily east

of the Mississippi River, which is sort of the core of what we think about being habitat for rough grouse and American woodcock and the upland bird hunting tradition that goes with it, recognizing there's certainly plenty of forest grouse west of the Mississippi as well. We can talk about that too. But I think the history of these forests and what the status of rough grouse and American Woodcock today tell us about the status of these forests is the most important part of this conversation because I think, you know, I'm somebody who loves these birds. There's plenty of people out there who do, but there's a lot more people that

really appreciate forested ecosystems and being able to understand the dynamics of those places and understand what we can and should be doing differently to make sure that we leave these places better than we found them is a much bigger and deeper and more significant conversation than just what's the letter grade of current status for rough grouse and American woodcock. And those two things are inextricably linked. So I really want to anchor into kind of the history and status of forests. But to answer your question. Well, I want to say that opening bit where you're saying we can't talk about rough grouse without talking about forests and forest health.

Yeah. Now, if I had sat down on my chair and the first thing out of your mouth was we can't talk about rough grouse without talking about mosquitoes and West Nile virus. Or we can't talk. about rough grouse without talking about avian influenza. Mm-hmm. Like I wouldn't have been surprised. Hmm. Well, those things, we can talk about all those things.

And I think, when you teed it up like it's, we're talking about, we're talking about we're talking about, we're talking about forest. We're talking about forest. And I love the fact that you're bringing up, you're bringing up West Nile virus. You're bringing up avian influenza. West Nile virus, by the way, way, a way bigger deal for rough grouse. Um, and I want to talk a little bit about the sort of moderating or mediating effect that good habitat can have on helping. Hmm.

A species like rough grouse. while facing a stressor like an expanding disease, which West Nile virus is. And there's some really interesting interconnections between habitat, rough grouse abundance and distribution and climate as well. It's one of the really great examples of how shifting climate can influence a disease vector that has very clear ramifications for the status of a species. that many people care a lot about. But at the bottom line, the story of how these forests have changed, and I think even just the misconceptions of what these forests are,

is something that I think we can turn some light bulbs on for folks. Can I tee you up with this whole thing about going back in time? Yeah. Why was it, because like Rough Grouse, I feel like the pinnacle of their popularity and like king of the forest or, you know, their nickname and all that like that's like in the past that reputation that they had i don't think it's like a thing with hunters like it used to be like why was it like when my dad was

like he was a big rough grouse hunter like and why was it so good in the 70s when he was out there in pennsylvania and there was just grouse everywhere yeah like ammo ads shotgun shell ads were like the the featured critters it was like you go back far enough engraved on shotgun rabbit and stuff. Yeah. But there's a point when like ammo ads. Yeah. The king of the game birds. Which, which I was raised to call Pats.

Yeah. Partridge. Yeah, there's a good debate. We grew up just, I was a little bit north of you there in the northern lower. Within that, like, what is, within that, you got, you probably got a way to hit this, but like, what is the sort of timeline? And it also, where are we talking about? That might be the best thing. Yeah. Just real quick. Yeah. Where are we talking about?

Yeah. So I think. Focusing the conversation on the Midwestern United States, down into Ohio, Indiana, across into the mid-Atlantic and up into the northeast, Maine continues to have tremendous grouse hunting, and down into the Appalachian Mountains as well. You know, a lot of people associate rough grouse, rightly so, with the presence of Aspen. Aspen's one of those species for grouse that provides tremendous cover and also availability of food. but if you start looking at more southern grouse habitat essentially if you have good structure if you have high stem densities and if you have the sun hitting the forest floor and promoting robust availability of various massed species you have grouse all the way down into northern Georgia but the general storyline Brody we could talk about Pennsylvania a little bit as an example where just in the span of the last handful of decades many states particularly particularly at the southern extent of their range are seeing grouse decline rapidly. And it's noteworthy, you know, a lot of folks understand the dynamics around sage grouse decline.

Like sage grouse get a lot of attention, rightly so. Sage grouse habitat, sagebrush ecosystems are tremendously imperiled for a variety of reasons. That story is out there. And it's noteworthy to me that you have this species, to your point, Brody, that like in your dad's generation in our in our father's generations um grouse were a big deal and i think the the simplest and best answer to why that's not the case

is that fewer and fewer people have access to robust populations now where i spend a lot of my time grouse and woodcock hunting which is across the northern tier of michigan wisconsin and minnesota we are still in the good old days. It's phenomenal. And I had I had great rough grouse. Good old days relative even to the good old days. Yeah. I mean and there's a cyclical dynamic at play with with grouse, woodcock. So so just a sort of if we step back and look at the big picture, the general story is one of decline for both of these species, having nothing to do with hunting pressure, having everything to do with habitat and also some of these other variables like we can talk about the disease issues. But habitat is the bottom line. And at the southern extent of their range, where we start getting into some of the more acute issues with disease dynamics, the influence of climate. So Pennsylvania, for example, there's a really important elevational gradient at play here where, you know, you can think about grouse contracting northward.

So sort of retreating from a latitudinal perspective. but then there's also this elevational retreat that's occurring where grouse are being pushed higher and higher. Because it's one and the same. Right, right, exactly. Because those climatic variables are influencing the availability of habitat. And in the case of West Nile virus, the presence of the mosquitoes that carry West Nile is influenced by longer, wetter summers. So you have the disease sort of marching up slope as climates continue to you mentioned Aspins for grouse like like get can you give people like what is like the ideal chunk of rough grouse habitat what's it look like because you hear like early success

you know a lot like things like that like if people aren't seeing them or around them as much anymore like what does a good chunk of grouse habitat look like yeah if I have one word to answer that question, the answer is diversity. Young forest habitat, super important. Yes, early successional habitat is very important and a lot of the work that we do at the Rough Grouse Society in American Woodcock Society is focused on trying to get more early successional habitat

on the ground. The reason for that is not because early successional habitat is the only thing that matters. The reason for that is that we are limited in early successional habitat. We're an organization that's very interested in overall forest health and in terms of these eastern forests,

the bottom line there is diversity of habitat. We want young forest, we want middle-aged forest, we want old forest, and we want these things in a juxtaposition where an individual grouse, because these birds have a very strong site fidelity, they do not travel to great distances, but having the access to these different age classes

over the course of their life cycle, for foraging, for raising their broods, for escaping predators, it's that availability of diverse habitat within a small area. And being able to maintain that over time is a huge part of the challenge, right? So if we go back and think about what these forests were like centuries ago, this idea of diversity is critically important. And I think one of the, I'll give you two misconceptions when it comes to forests.

Number one, I think a lot of people when they step into the forest like where we grew up, Steve or where you grew up, Brody, Michigan, Pennsylvania. You know, you walk into the woods and it's this peaceful, serene, beautiful place. And it's easy to fall into the trap of failing to recognize the complexity for one, the interconnections among different species in that system. and then also the fact that there is a constant battle playing out among all of these species at a time scale that makes it hard for us to perceive. So everybody in the forest, woody vegetation, grasses, forbs, shrubs, all the plants from the understory to the canopy are duking it out in real time for access to nutrients, access to sunlight.

and historically in these forests there were a lot of drivers of disturbance that are gone now and this is one of the things that I think is both most interesting and also saddest to contemplate when you think about the forests of the eastern United States and again I'm thinking like east of the Mississippi River and when the first European settlers arrived on the east coast they did not arrive to some massive, homogeneous, pristine, untouched forest.

What they arrived to was a very complex system that had a tremendous diversity of drivers influencing the structure of that forest. And it included wildlife that we all, I think we can think about these species in their own right, but we don't often think about them as drivers of ecosystems. So species like elk, species like bison, species like beavers, species like passenger pigeons, and also the people who are already here burning these landscapes to benefit those species I just mentioned, particularly elk and bison, but maintaining the landscape in a way that made their lives possible. So you have all of these interesting connections between those

inhabitants of the North American continent that have been tremendously disrupted. So elk largely gone from the east, although amazing work being done. Of course, we're all familiar with Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. The work that they're doing with state agency partners to bring elk back, that's phenomenal. RMF's a great partner of ours, by the way. A lot of partnership opportunities there. We're talking about elk habitat and grouse habitat in the same breath. Bison gone. Passenger pigeons gone gone right and beavers like nothing like they were at european contact with this continent and then indigenous fire largely gone so these five drivers that created all of this heterogeneity all of all of this diversity in structure and the one that i really wanted like we can if any of those

geek either you guys out and you want to dig deeper into any of them we can we can dig deeper but i want to talk about passenger pigeons just for a minute because I think a lot of folks you know we all if you're a nerd around conservation and wildlife in America we all know the stories of like the sky blackening and the rivers of birds and John James Audubon and others trying to come up with estimates of the billions of passenger pigeons like one and four land birds in North America being a passenger pigeon right just like you can't wrap your head around it those are all stories that are really familiar to us but I want to I want to flag one of the most sort of haunting books that folks probably haven't heard of written by a guy named Peter Matheson called Wildlife in America and in that book Matheson does a phenomenal job of capturing the stories in just the most haunting and poetic language around the loss of wildlife on this continent.

over the span of the last handful of centuries. And one of the things that's most memorable about that book for me is the way that he talks about the passenger pigeons and them as a driver of disturbance. And this is the important part. And there are stories like up around Potoskey, Michigan of these. That's what the last big shoot was. Well, and these nesting events that would span for tens of miles in length and multiple miles and width where the forest was absolutely inundated and in some cases decimated by the presence of nesting

passenger pigeons so they would come through and these were birds that were heavily dependent on mast species like oak uh species like beach species like american chestnut and there's a whole other story of loss right the loss of chestnut to the blight starting in 1904 but the passenger pigeons they'd find a place where they had the resources that they would need to nest. They had the structural support with the tree canopy. They had availability of mass, et cetera. And they would arrive in such numbers that they would physically level portions of the forest. Like if you were out there during one of these nesting events, you would just hear for miles in any direction, the sound of branches breaking.

of trees falling, of guano raining down to the point where the forest floor would have inches of accumulated droppings that would be so high in nutrient content that that would have its own set of effects on vegetation, like basically killing the understory because it was so nutrient rich with all this pigeon guano raining down. And the birds themselves would reset succession in those places where they would nest. The next year they're not coming back to nest in that same spot again, but years down the line, those systems would recover and promote the availability of the very habitat features that the passenger pigeons need to thrive. So if you step back and think about the continental scale of that species interacting

with the land, it's not unlike any a beaver or any other ecosystem engineer where they're influencing their own habitat in a way that benefits themselves over time, over generations, right? but also influences the structure to the advantage of all of these other plant and animal species that occupy that habitat. And that's just one of the five examples that I gave you. You know, we can talk about bison and they're wallowing or they're, the fact that they established these movement corridors that were the precursors to a lot of our roads and highways, right? They would call them roads. Exactly. The traces, right? The buffalo traces. They would leave, they would leave a path of disruption. And so this idea, and this is one of the biggest challenges, if you think about

current condition in these systems now and trying to get good habitat back on the ground for species like rough grouse and American woodcock, there's this misconception of what forests are, which I touched on, like failing to see the fact that all of these species are out there, that the vegetation is battling for resources in real time. And, the reality that for thousands of years, for hundreds of thousands of years, prior to European settlement of this continent, these forests were tremendously disrupted by a whole host of drivers that have been eliminated from the system. So what that means in terms of current context is if we're taking a hands-off approach to these systems,

we are starving them of the things that they need, the things that the forest needs to provide the types of habitat and diversity, not just for rough grouse and American woodcock, as much as I love those two species, but for a whole host of plant and animal species. And this is why, if we look at land bird conservation more broadly, I've got a copy of the 2025 U.S. State of the Birds report here in front of me.

Any bird species that depends upon that diversity of habitat in a forested context is struggling. Like we are seeing tremendous loss. Like think about Whipper Will is there a good example. When you grew up, you're hearing that whippoor will, whippoor will call. Yeah. And now if you hear one, you're like, oh, you know, that was like the sound of summer in our childhoods, right? They have dropped off a cliff and we could go through the list.

Golden Wing Warblers are one that's commonly brought up. So it's important to recognize, and I think from the standpoint of our organization too, there's an advantage of being able to sort of hitch our wagon up to these two iconic upland game bird species. But I also want to make sure that people understand the why of our work is about much more than thinking about having lots of grouse and woodcock to hunt. What we're trying to do is find ways to redeem our responsibilities to the places that we love and help leave these forested ecosystems in a state that's going to be better for wildlife and for people into the future. So that's a, that's, I think a good entry point into this conversation about current condition for those couple of

species. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind and now got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeart Radio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Moultry Mobile and On X maps. 12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026.

These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. you mentioned disturbance being important and like if you talk to a couple of my buddies in Pennsylvania that are still like die hard grouse hunters despite yeah the fact that they might only flush a few birds in an entire season yeah like it's always like they don't log enough

they don't log enough yeah they don't log enough like is that like and i know like west nile on avian flu like play a role but like is that perspective from just like a grouse hunter is there a lot of truth to that there is and i think the language is really important too um and i'm just thinking about the way that we frame up this work um and and you know logging logging can be a terrible thing and it can be a tremendous thing and part of the problem is when it comes to social license and public discourse around what doing right by these forest means, there's not enough time or effort put into having like a really thoughtful, nuanced conversation about what it is we're talking about. So logging, like, let's talk about logging.

Part of the challenge. And like, I'll go just to clarify, we're talking about logging. You're talking about there's these historic forest disturbers. Yep. passenger pigeons, fire, bisoned elk beaver. Yeah. Beavers, large animals that are like out disturbing forest. Yep.

Grazing, bowling stuff over, knocking stuff down, clearing stuff out. Yep. And over time, we've developed a system where we have, one, a lot of those places become paved over. Yep. Or grassed over or golf course over or parking lotted over. Yep. Or subdivisioned over. And so they're out.

Yep. That's all just out. Yep. What remains is wood lots. At times, woodlots that aren't having habitat disturbance on them. They grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Yep, right? Yep. So when we talk about just for people, just for listeners and understand, when we talk about logging, I mean, Carl will get into it,

but what we're talking about is like a modern disturbance driver. Yep. right so if when broadie's saying if a rough grouse guy if a rough grouse hunter or a guy in lower you know the northern lower peninsula michigan where i grew up when we bitch about that there's no logging yep what we're saying is there's it's not that we you know it's not like you know i used to cut firewood i used be a tree surgeon i understand the siren song or the chainsaw right nothing brings the old man out of his house yeah nothing brings the old man out of his house like hearing chainsaw down the road there's so but when People talk, they're not, they're not lamenting the act of logging.

Right. They're not necessarily lamenting the loss of jobs around logging. What they're talking about is they're lamenting what happens after you log. Yeah. Which is you invite a lot of sunlight onto the forest floor and it grows up thick. Yeah. The kind of stuff where if you're out walking around your wife, you just go around it. Right.

You go around it. Unless she's dressing with you, man. You might go through it. Like, yeah, the kind of stuff that the only business you have going through it is grouse hunting. Right. Like that thick. Right. Right.

And that. So we talk about logging. We're talking about is the thick, the period of car car car car car car car car car car. It's a long time. Yeah. It's enough to like kind of get used to it where you have a thick stuff. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate this question because I want to go back to this idea of the

forests that were, you know, pre-European settlement, all that disturbance happening. And then there's a really important story that we can't lose track of where this word logging, right? What I want to get at is the idea that not all logging is the same. Yeah, sure. And so if we go back to this arc of time, post-European settlement and think about the things that happened on these forests from east to west, and the wholesale liquidation of forest resources. I mean, like the most sort of vivid, powerful example of intensive resource extraction that you can imagine, right? This is when the white pines of the lake states are childhood home range, Steve, when those forests

were being liquidated. This is the chapter of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic and the declining chestnuts being felled. And all of the clearing for agriculture and all the fragmentation that was happening, the forests just being liquidated, building the cities of Chicago, all the lumber that was being shipped across the Great Lakes

to build these exploding communities. It was a period of tremendous. Exploitation of the land and I think that's one of the problems is when people think about a word like logging What a lot of folks here is exploitation, right? So it's important to honor the reality that in a lot of places and our country we do not have a long history man We're talking about a few centuries here and so for for the majority of that time we have not had our act together in terms of how we think about logging being done in service to the land as opposed to being a source of exploitation

of the land so I want to make sure we we paint this picture with a lot of intent and we have to own the fact that places like I'm thinking about the Monongahela National Forest as an example right now in West Virginia

where on forest service land. Like there was clear cutting. There was a tremendous amount of erosion. There were huge impacts to these incredibly biodiverse streams. A legacy of terrible management. You can't even call it management. A legacy of exploitation of forest resources. And if I think back to like, I remember being in maybe sixth or seventh grade and them talking about logging the rainforest, right? And how much rainforest is being lost in Brazil and you know every day there's this many square miles of rainforest being cut down spotted owl on the north of the north of the spotted owl wars man like pacific northwest this tension between trying to keep uh an imperiled species on the landscape and that industry that's like

the backbone of those rural northwest communities so there's all this history that gets wrapped up in this word logging right that you have you have to be eyes wide open about and i think it's all also a fallacy to suggest that all logging that's happening today is good logging. There are plenty of examples where people are high grading forests. They're just basically thinking about, they're thinking about what value can be taken from this land now as opposed to thinking about what forest conditions for the future am I trying to create. That's a very important distinction. And that's not to say that it's important. possible to extract value, like monetary value from a forest and also put that forest on a trajectory to be healthier as a result of that intervention. That is 100% possible. In order to do that, though, you need robust industry. Like there has to be a market. You cannot move habitat without being able to move wood. And the forest products industry is in a difficult state of affairs right now. So there's a lot of smart people putting a lot of thought into how to revitalize the forest products industry.

But just in the past week, I read in my home state of Wisconsin now, there's a little mill up in the town of Mose and E where, by the way, I chased a couple of bears around as a grad student right there in Moseon E. They are shutting down a couple of their paper production machines. And they're going to be jobs lost. There's going to be an impact at this Moseon E mill. And that's just the most recent in a long string of mill reductions, mill closures, the disruption of these forest products industries that are important for so many reasons. But one aspect of it is this relationship between habitat and rural economies. So being able to find ways to reinvigorate the forest products industry. And there's some cool examples of things on the horizon, things in the works.

things like mass timber, trying to replace steel in the construction of high-rise buildings with mass timber. And there's an amazing building in downtown Milwaukee that was just constructed using essentially replacements for where you'd have steel beams using these laminated wood products. So that's an example. There's a push to find ways to convert woody biomass into sustainable aviation fuel. That's a budding industry. There's some amazing work going on looking at very high quality packaging being derived from molded wood fiber. So trying to replace all the plastic that we have everywhere around us all the time. Basically, anywhere you see plastic, there's probably a potential to replace that plastic.

stick with a molded wood fiber product. So there's reasons for optimism, but in terms of the overall picture of the forest products industry, there's a lot of reason for concern right now and a lot of reason for action in terms of policy, in terms of having conversations with the public around the importance of these concepts. But this idea that logging has the potential to be good and grouse hunters, grumbling like man there hasn't been enough logging um what i hope they mean is and what i think they mean and what i mean when i say that is there hasn't been enough active forest management where we

are thinking both about what value are we extracting from these systems and you know i would argue even more importantly thinking about our long-term commitment responsibility of these places and what are we leaving behind i think that's the key question if you're focused if you're focused more on what you're them what you're leaving behind, you're probably looking at it from a more extractive standpoint. If you're thinking about both of those things in concert, that's a beautiful space to operate. And I think we've got a ton of examples of the kind of work that we're doing on public land, on private land, with a lot of partners to derive both forms of value. Yeah.

You think about our, no, go ahead. No, think about our mutual friend, Doug. Yeah. Yeah. No, he needs to make, he manages a family farm. Yeah. spending their family a long time. He needs to make the farm pay.

Yeah, right, right. They do timber harvest. Absolutely. This is very small scale in terms of talking about the entire everything east of the Mississippi. Yeah. It's a little teeny chunk. It's a perfect little anecdote.

But when you're looking at what Doug's going to cut, he's explaining to you what it's going to look like in five years. Right. Do you follow what I'm saying? 100%. He's like, he's got a, he's got a dollar figure rolling through his head. but he's like and it'll be like this yes and then I'm gonna do yes you know I'm saying I do and Doug you know I was just with Doug this past week and we're both up in Minneapolis at

Fessentfest and I was talking with Doug Doug Doug is Doug is absolutely emblematic of that philosophy where yeah he's got the farm he needs to make it pay he agonized over decisions about whether to cut down some of the oak trees that they harvested that were you know, they're for generations prior to him showing up. But he's making those decisions with with an eye on the financial side of it, which is 100% his responsibility. And also thinking about that legacy, you know, it's not ours. It's our turn.

What is he doing to make sure that the folks who have the next turn are grateful in hindsight? Let's be clear too. Doug agonizes over what to do about mud puddles. Well, but, but I was on the one hand. But, but he's coming at, he's coming at it from that space, man. And I think, you know, that, so on the private land context, this is one of the things. This is one of the reasons why I think there's a lot of, a lot of room for optimism and hope is you have so many people who cherish these forests for which they have personal responsibility. and there's value in the forest products and there's a need for good intervention in those systems.

And again, this isn't a new thing, right? It's not a new thing for humans to be looking at the land and trying to figure out how to engage with it in a way that makes the land better and makes the humans' lives better. That's actually, like, that's the story of our species for millennia, right? we've been in the business of manipulating the ecosystem to benefit ourselves. Unfortunately, we're at a period in human history now where fewer and fewer of us have those levers of responsibility at our fingertips. And there are also a lot of people who have those levers of responsibility at their fingertips who don't know what to do, right?

They don't know how to care for a forest. They haven't been taught that. you know, the the expertise that somebody like Doug has, the training and the knowledge, he is an outlier in that regard. But where I think he is not an outlier is in having a desire to do the right thing for the forest under his purview. I think a lot of folks want to do the right thing but don't know where to start. So for an organization like ours, being able to work with those private landowners and help them think through how to generate revenue from their forest,

but doing that through the lens of what are they leaving in terms of future habitat value, that is a really cool service. And we're doing that in a private land context as well with agencies like the Forest Service, like State Departments of Natural Resources, where we're helping them implement their management plans, which are always rooted in this idea of sustainable and wise use,

but also desired future conditions. So those are really good spaces. So where does the wildlife component come in? Like from fishing game agencies. Like are they involved? Are they like we want to improve this for grouse and everything else. But like say Pennsylvania game commissioner, do they come to you guys and say this patch of forest like used to be good for grouse? We'd like it to return to being good for grouse.

Like is that stuff that you guys do like working with? The game agencies. Totally. But wasn't it historically, though, if you think of the metaphor of like, you know, people say like, the tail wagging the dog,

for a long time, the dog, the dog was industry. They inadvertently, they accidentally created great habitat. I would say about the history, this big chunk of ground,

right, like, that we would walk over and hunt as a kid. It had always been, the property of the summer camp. I'm sure historically it had been logged, but it hadn't been logged in forever. And it was giant oaks with canopies interlocked.

Yeah. And there was no, now and then a little sassafras, maybe a big white pine, but for the most part, it was just wide open. And the ground was covered in like inches of oak leaves. Mm-hmm.

It had squirrels in it, but there was nothing. There was not much in there. Mm-hmm. it sold. The first thing I did was do a timber harvest. A couple years after that timber harvest, the first time we ever,

ever saw a deer in there, the first time we ever, saw a roughed grouse in there. All kind of grapevine, multifluor rows, thickets. Yeah, man. And then, wham, houses.

But you, but you, it was like, no one was saying, hey, I'm going to go do, timber stand improvement on the old summer camp. Right.

It was inadvertent. Yep. So when people, when we talk about like the return of logging or forest service products, we're talking about like making the dog healthy. Yeah. Yeah. But on the other hand, you hear a lot about like habitat work. But imagine habitat work is limited in scale because it's not financing itself.

Yeah, I see where you're going. Yep. Do you know what I'm saying? So is it more, so in restoring forests or restoring forests to have successional forests where you have these patchworks of different things happening. Yep. Like can you even get at, can you scale conservation work? Or will that never work?

You'd have to scale industry. Yeah. I love the language of making the dog healthy again. Yeah. I think that's a really good way of looking at it. Because that's what Brody's bringing up. He's bringing up. when the dog wags, the tail wags, dog,

when we do like habitat work. Yeah. Which wound up being like a little chunk. Yeah. Or whatever. I don't know. Maybe not. I mean, maybe like if agencies are flush with money.

Well, yeah. And there's a lot of different directions we could go here. So, so let me just focus in on this idea of trying to scale up conservation outcomes and forested habitats. I like that. Conservation outcomes. Yeah. And accidental or on purpose.

It's expensive. Yeah. You know, like a lot of the things that we do, um, were involved in non-native invasive species control, like buckthorn removal or timber stand improvement treatments, um, prescribed fire just to give folks like a sense of the cost of some of these treatments. Imagine anywhere between like $500 an acre and a couple thousand bucks an acre to do a treatment, right? Like no one's making profit. No, this is where there's, it's non-commercial work.

Like if we're contracting or if we're going in and trying to like have people in there with like a hand felling crew with chainsaws trying to implement a habitat project where there's not a commercial angle, it is expensive. It is tremendously difficult to scale that up. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind and now got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Maltry Mobile and OnX Maps.

12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bird. bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. I'll give you a contrasting model that I think is really powerful and really cool.

We've got a number of national forests where we're partnering on stewardship agreements where the Forest Service has the ability to hand responsibility over for the administration of timber sales to a nonprofit organization like ours. We can administer the timber sale, generate revenue through the timber, cover all the administrative costs of handling the sale, and then also have, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars, left over from the value in that timber that we can put right into the ground. And the feds aren't after that money. Why are they letting you do that? That's great, but I can picture a hundred reasons they're not going to want to do that. Well, let's

so think about it. Think about it. They have more work to do on these forests than they can get done. They have backlogs of habitat need. They have limited capacity. And

the way to look at it is not that somehow a nonprofit organization like the Rough Grouse Society is is somehow benefiting in isolation. The way to look at it is we have such alignment with the Forest Service in mission delivery that we are joined at the hip trying to implement the Forest Service's mission. We are there providing additional capacity. Yeah. And that revenue, to be clear, that revenue is not coming to the Rough Grouse Society and American Woodcock Society. It's paying for our staff time to help do that work.

Like we have, as an example, we have an amazing young forester on the Green Mountain National Forest. A young lady named Mellie Knapper, who's been administering timber sales on the Green Mountain National Forest. And she basically functions as a Forest Service employee. She's there at the office. She's out painting the sale. She's administering the sale, interacting with the focus. who are executing on the sale. She's fielding questions from the public.

She's talking to reporters about the why of the work. She's representing our organization and the Forest Service. And even more importantly, she's representing the story about why this work is so important, which is a win for everybody involved.

And in a period of time where the Forest Service cannot hire additional people, they don't have enough people to implement their mission, being able to work with a partner to fill some of those gaps. That is a win for the Forest Service. When you guys do that,

does the logging like the whoever gets the the actual logging work the concession for that do they do that work differently than they would if they weren't working through you like if they are just like forest service timber sale we're going in and we're getting our stuff versus forest service timber sale through the rough grouse society no they do it the same and here's why in order for that sale to move forward it has to be cleared through the exact same process that any other activity on the forest service. So they're not going in that you're not like this is kind of the habitat results we're looking for in advance. No and in this case like so this

example on the Green Mountain National Forest where is that national forest? It's in Vermont okay and the the decision in that case I might have a word slightly off but I believe the name of this project is the early successional habitat creation procession

Love it. The Forest Service. It's right to the point. Yeah. And you know, in Forest Service Parlance, you have what's called an interdisciplinary team that gets together to develop a proposed action. So you have biologists and soil scientists and silviculturists and folks who are experts on heritage and our responsibilities to archeological resources, et cetera.

Everybody gets together and looks at a piece of ground and says, all right, what do we want to do here? In the case of a project like this early Successional Habitat Creation Project, the biologists are the ones in the driver's seat there. It's a veg management project, right? And there's valuable timber being harvested, but the whole focus is on what kind of trees, like what are we leaving behind in the wake of this treatment?

And that's the language that we use. It's a treatment as opposed to an exploitation of a resource, right? So in that case, you have the sale. You have someone bid, right? It's open to public bidding. You have an operator. This is a business coming in to bid. Yeah.

They're there to make money. Yeah. Right? And they are there to make money. And also they are the source of capacity to implement the veg management outcome, period. Without industry, we cannot get the work done. But in this model, you're leveraging the value in the timber to pay for all of those administrative costs. And then you have this surplus of value.

And this is the really cool part. And in some cases, we're talking literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. from some of these timber sails, where you then turn around and say, all right, with this money, what other good things do we want to do on the forest? So it could be things like replacing undersized culverts at road stream crossings to promote aquatic organism passage. It could be paying for decommissioning roads that are resulting in stream sedimentation. It could be helping cover the cost of a prescribed fire. It could be helping treat non-native invasive species, et cetera, et cetera. So in that model, the forest service is relying on partner organizations like ours to unlock the value in the timber in a way that leaves the forest habitat better.

Yeah. So that to me, like, that's the dog as healthy as the dog can be. And the tail also like really benefiting from the healthy dog. But you got to have industry there to be able to have that. Yeah, on the green river forest, what is the product? Green mountain. What is the product they're cranking out? That's like dimensional lumber.

Yeah. Well, probably hardwood. They're harvesting hardwood there primarily. Yeah. Okay. So like veneer logs and trim and whatever else. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, pulp, you know, the pulp market has been one of the real weak spots. So why, why is that? Well, huge part of it. Because like we're, you know, you know, we grew up in the same area. Yeah. When stuff happened there, it was pulp. Right.

Yeah. Cut and pulp, man. Like all that great rough grouse country and like the UP or northern lower peninsula was like, Cut and pulp. It was pulp. And you were looking at stuff, you weren't looking at when you were a kid and you were looking at logging, you weren't looking at old growth logging.

Right. You were looking at stuff that had been logged several times. Right. Yeah, second growth, third growth. I mean, and those forests, you know, there's, but that's making paper. Making paper. And, you know, I'm old school.

I'm sitting here. I've got like stacks of paper around me from stuff I printed off, you know, notes and things for the conversation today. But this is rare, man. Like, when's the last time you bought a newspaper? Right? I mean, now, like, the thing in terms of... Because they, and also they taught you to think it was bad.

Well, that's true. You know, like going... I think about this every time I'm in the bathroom and you got... Both sides, save a tree. You got paper towel and you got the, you got the electric hand dryer, right? Yeah. I've gotten in the habit of going for the paper towel every time, man. Like, use up some of that paper towel.

Yeah, but the, you know, now, like, one area where there's still, I would say, like, robust and growing demand, like, cardboard boxes for Amazon. Okay. Like there's a portion of the industry where packaging. We're making a lot, we're shipping a lot of stuff around. But when it comes to,

when it comes to like newsprint, I mean, newsprint's basically dead, right? Like if you've got a subscription, like pick your favorite newspaper, you're probably looking at it on your phone as opposed to waiting for the kid on his bicycle to throw the paper against your door

on a Sunday morning, right? So it's, it's been a tremendous disruption to the demand for pulp. and a lot of those pulp mills have closed down just in the span of the last, I mean, I told you about the one in Moseni just in the last week, but if you look at the last decade, we've lost a tremendous amount of pulp capacity, but on the wildlife side, you think of it in terms of demand for those habitat outcomes to be implemented, right? So there's this really important connection. And just to hammer this one more time, like without robust forest products industry, the ability to deliver habitat outcomes at scale is tremendous. compromised. So there's just not a situation where like wildlife management agencies or the Forest Service or whatever are just going to like go in and chop trees down just for the sake of chopping them down. So so now we start getting into this whole other realm that I think is also

very timely and very important and we could have a whole other conversation on this one. But just in terms of thinking about conservation funding and the constraints that a lot of state agencies are starting to feel. Steve, you and I've been sharing materials and texting back and forth a bit about the financial woes of some of the states that are near and dear to our heart. I'm thinking specifically about Michigan and Wisconsin is a couple of examples right now where just trying to make ends meet under a funding model that was built on the backs of hunting and fishing license sales where that model is, from my perspective, starting to unravel.

there are cracks in the foundation starting to show. And Carl believes that that declining numbers of hunters is of, is like an existential threat to conservation. I mean, I agree. I'll give you a kind of a different scenario. In Pennsylvania, there's shitloads of state game lands that the game commission, you know, owns and manages. And they have like,

historically had tons of fracking leases on those lands. And they're flushed. Like they have money. Yep. That they can put into potentially projects like this. I understand that's like probably the rare case as far as these agencies go. But yeah, you know, it's something to think about. It is.

It is. And I, you know, I would, I would rephrase your characterization of my perspective on this a little bit, Steve. I think, well, home, I did a great job. I'll push back. I'll push back a little. I said like half a sentence. You said that I Carl believe declining hunter participation poses an existential threat to conservation. You need to clarify that?

Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. What I think is the declining participation in hunting is representative. of a broader trend that is a real threat to conservation. What's the broader trend? So from my standpoint, I look at hunting in particular, but really like a whole suite of outdoor activities that are pathways to people having a connection to the land

as being sort of the backbone of conservation. Like if you don't have people who feel a sense of connection to the natural world. Just less people around who give a shit. Right. That's a blunt way of putting it. But it's like if you don't have people who feel that sense of responsibility, that is an existential threat.

I think the hunter participation piece, and I do believe, and I'm obviously biased here, but I think these activities of hunting and fishing and trapping and procuring food from the land, in any form. It's one of the most just obvious, deep, significant kinds of a relationship that you can have to a place. It's so visceral, right? It's a very personal, visceral connection

to the land, which is not to say that it's the only way to develop an appreciation for place. I don't believe that at all. I think there are a lot of different pathways to caring for the land. But the fact that we see these, declines in participation in activities like hunting, which are, I believe, among the most

strong and meaningful relationships to the land that a person can have, that is representative of this broader trend of disconnection and apathy around conservation. And that, I believe, is an existential threat. I want to comment on that, but I want listeners to understand very well that this is Steve talking and not Carl talking. Okay. I don't want Carl to get rolled up. You should say, I, Steve, or no? I, Steve. I don't know if you read it. There was a, I think it was in the New York Times.

There was an op-ed. But the guy's arguing, he's like, he's arguing that part of the, he argues that as the Republican Party has moved away from conservation, particularly under the Trump administration. And he's like, because you don't have those old style hunting and fishing, like in that circle aren't like the, the, old style hunting and fishing Republicans. Mike Lee don't care about hunting. These are Florida golfers. Do you know what I'm saying? And he was kind of saying that like this, like, it's kind of like, this is a moment of kind

like the indoor Republican. Mm. You follow me? That's interesting. I'm following you. Yeah. Yeah. And had a bunch of examples, but it's like they just, they don't know.

They don't know. They don't know. Yeah. They don't care. Yeah. They're not, their vacation isn't fly fishing. Yeah, like out in Jackson Hole. Like their vacation is West Palm Beach.

Right. Or whatever the one, I can't remember. What's the nice one? Is it Western? I don't know. Never been. There's one that's like super swank. Either Palm Beach or West Palm Beach is super swank.

Yeah. And one's not. Like Jeffrey Epstein lived in one but kind of did his pursuits in the other one. I can't remember how it all worked. Well, like what you're talking about, like they lack a connection and it ties into this too, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Like there's like when I grew up, people knew what a rough grouse and a woodcock word.

It was a pet. I mean, but like you could ask someone. Yeah. Anywhere on the East Coast or the Midwest and they might have no, they'd be like, I don't know what that thing is, what they look like, you know?

Yeah. Exactly. And I think, you know, this idea of finding opportunities for folks from whatever political persuasion, but also whatever sort of circumstance in which they enter their human experience. So whether you're born in a rural community, whether you're born in an urban community, whether you're born in a conservative family or a liberal family, this idea of a sense of connection to place and a sense of responsibility to place and also to community. You know, we talk a lot about in this country, we talk a lot about rights, right? Rights are a big deal, and they are. But the flip side of all of these rights that we have are certain

unalienable rights as Americans. We don't spend enough time thinking about responsibilities and what it means to go through life in a way where we are enjoying the rights that we have been given, but also asking ourselves, what are we doing to redeem the responsibilities that we have as members of our community? Those are, I think, big important questions that in the conservation space, it's like, if your community extends to the places and the species that you interact with, whether it's as a hunter or otherwise, it frames your worldview such that decisions around policy, you start thinking, you start thinking

in terms of what kind of world do you want to create, what kind of world do you want to leave behind. And that framing to me is one of the keys to success in terms of having a really vibrant, healthy culture as a nation, which I would suggest we've got some room to improve right now on that front. So just thinking in terms of how are we positioning ourselves to take care of the things that take care of us. How are we showing up in our community? There's an education component to it for sure. I don't want to hover too long on this thing about declining hunter participation in the Midwest or wherever. But a third. thought on it. Nationally, but

nationally. Okay. You'll say, you're like, well, it's, it's a part, it's a part of people disentangling themselves, stepping away from caring about wild landscapes. There are plenty of people that

aren't going to come out of those backgrounds that would, that would say, oh, I love seeing wildlife. I love walking in the woods. Yeah. But what they don't know because they weren't culturally educated around like a hunting, angling, outdoor background. What they don't know is they don't know how to look critically of what they're seeing. Yes. Meaning if they see someone cutting a tree, boom, that's bad. Right. 100%. 100%. Okay. If they walk through a big closed canopy forest, it's easy to walk through. And it's really

pretty because there's a bunch of big trees. Yeah. They love all that stuff. But they don't know. They're not looking at it. And I'm not saying there's only one way to get there. They're not looking at it with a hunter's eye or an educated eye about what are you not seeing? Yeah. Yes. That is true.

Right? You're seeing a handful of woodpeckers up in the top, some squirrels, not many. Right? But they're like, this is perfect. It's a big woods. Yeah. like it takes I don't know

a level of exposure and some kind of like professional understanding a little bit to start to move not just from caring about places but to like understanding them yeah well

because a lot of people care they just don't care in the right way right it's like the kind of people who think that the way to support wildlife is to be an animal rights activist right in their mind they're like well of course it is Right.

They don't understand the damage they do. Yes. I agree with that point. I also think there are, there are a lot of non-hunters who care about these concepts and are very supportive of hunting. In fact, there are more non-hunters who are supportive of hunting than there are hunters. Yeah.

So, you know, we have to be careful of painting with too broad a brush. I agree. I'm not, but I mean, we're met, in some ways, I'm not countering you. I'm saying in some ways, we're talking about the same kind of thing. And I want to dig into it a little bit. There's an instinctive. What I'm saying is I don't think that we're going to run out of if, let's say hunting does decline or declines long term or something.

We're not going to run out of people who would tell you they love wildlife. I picture we run out of people who knowing what that we risk running out of people who understand what that means. Yeah. There'd still be a lot of people around who care about the Yellowstone version of wildlife. They would tell you like, I love wildlife. Right. But you don't understand it. I'm Luke Wilson.

Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26, presented by Maltry Mobile and On X Maps. 12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and badest hunting. from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes,

so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel

and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming month. The language that comes to my mind is I'm thinking about rather than focusing on like a particular activity, whether it's hunting or wildlife viewing, this idea of thinking in terms of encouraging experiences for people that foster a sense of connection and responsibility to a place. Because if you have that sense of responsibility and you want to execute on that, you need to know, what the place needs from you. And I think hunting is a phenomenal gateway to just like experiencing in a visceral way a sense of being part of a system, right?

It's like you are not observing, you are a participant actively engaged in a system, which is something we have been doing since the beginning of our species existence. But I think in terms of messaging, as you were talking, I'm just looking back at this 2025 state of the birds report.

And it talks in here about there being 100 million Americans engaged in birding and the economic impact of that, et cetera. So, well, give me a moment here, man. That just makes me roll my eyes so bad. I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised to hear that. But listen, here's the thing.

Here's the thing. So here, let me give you like a sense of some of the organizations. You don't want to know why I'm rolling my eyes? Okay, go ahead. So listen. Listen, here. I'll tell you later later. I do want to hear your thoughts on this,

but I want to give some shout out. So organizations including American Bird Conservancy, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ducks Unlimited, National Audubon Society. Can you tell me how many birders are? 100 million. But, and that includes. 80 million of those are watching birds in their backyard. What does that mean? It means people.

It means when someone asks you, you say you like birds. Yeah. Okay. Sure. That's, I think that's an important data point, man. I believe that's an important data point. And guess what? That includes virtually all.

So there's over 200 million people in this country. don't. I get what you're saying. It's at least people that are interested, that are aware. People who have enough interest to be like, yeah, birds are cool. But I would low, are you, what I would also, I would also. What an extraordinarily low barrier to entry. Do you like birds?

Yes. Okay, I'm going to put you down on my list of birders. And I would say like you were talking about hunters versus not hunters earlier. Like a hunter, a good chance he's going to walk around a chunk of woods and be like, man, there's no rough grouse. year, there's no wood got here. Yeah. A lot of those 100 million birders, they wouldn't.

I would at, like, okay, but to be on my list, do you have a bird book? And like, you got to, like, there has to be some thing. Showing a picture of a cardinal and an Oriole. Yeah, test them. So let's check their book shelves. There's got to be something other than being like, I like birds. Listen, the reason I'm bringing this up is not to get you all fired up about the data. Why?

I live with four birders. Sure. And by the way, the report also talks about like including virtually every hunter. Like what hunter is going to say, you know. Right. No, when I'm out elk hunting, I always avert my eyes when I see a Lewis's woodpecker. Damn birds. Right.

Those damn birds keep interrupting my elk cut. Right. But that's why I rolled my eyes. So I'm not surprised you did. But the reason I'm bringing this up is because I think there are going to be times where these concepts that I think. we hold deer around people's connection to place. Having the voices of other organizations in this space with us who are coming at it from a different lens. So like American Bird Conservancy is a great example.

That is a nonprofit where there is so much alignment in terms of what we want to get done on the ground. And they're talking to a slightly different audience. And they are 100% supportive of the kinds of, hunting that we're talking about sustainable responsible yeah relationship based there's no there's no mismatch in terms of what we want to see happen and it's rooted in good science and so like the state of the birds report you can go ecosystem by ecosystem through the country and talk about the status of sea ducks western forest birds shore birds dabbling whatever you want to look at the point i want to make here though is when it comes to a very troubling picture in terms of bird conservation including

but not limited to rough grouse and American woodcock in the eastern forest of the United States we know what we need to do in these systems like we know we have the science to tell us what we need to do it's a matter of figuring out how do you scale up and and have those outcomes delivered and we're watching as these species whether we're talking about whippoorwills or woodcock we're watching not even a gradual, like in the span of our lifetime, we're watching these declines happen before our eyes because of our inability to take care of these habitats.

So having an organization or a chorus of voices that are coming from different perspectives and talking to different audiences, and obviously the Rough Grouse Society and American Woodcock Society were a very proud hunter conservationist-oriented group, but I would offer that anybody who cares about Forest Health should be really happy about the work that we're doing, whether they ever want to pick up a shotgun or not.

Like, we're in exactly the same business as the Audubon Society, American Bird Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy. Like, we're partnering with these organizations to try to get the same things done. I understand what you're saying now. I don't mean to hack on all those guys. I understand what you're saying in that if you can get, again, the $100 million, come on.

But whatever, how many are truly there? 10 million? If it's less than one in three people who are in, of birds in the country? I don't think that's like a job driving. No, I'm saying where, no, no. Okay. Let's say you got,

let's say you pulled Americans and said, do you like the thought of a beach? Okay. Mm-hmm. And 200 million are going to be like, yeah. Yeah. Sure. I'd be like, hey, what was the last time you were at a beach?

Mm-hmm. Right? It's a smaller number. Okay. And then I'd be like, do you plan? plan your schedule around visiting a beach every

year. Now there's a smaller number. Sure. Somewhere within that hundred million is hiding a number of like diehard beach goers. Borders. Yeah, hardcore birders. Or hardcore beach goers.

We're like, no, next weekend I'm flying down to Florida to go to the beach. I'm like, that's a beach man. I'm waxing my surfboard as a lot of service. I'm fake tanning as we speak. Like, that's a To be fair to Carl, though, like hunters suffer from myopia just as much as everyone else, right? Like, I might be aware of this, this bad thing that's happening to Rough Grouse and Woodcock and not be aware of a bunch of other things that are happening with other species that the hardcore birders might be aware of.

I know, but the reason, and we spent way too much time in this array, but I have to have my point here. the hunt i don't think oh they if i thought to myself oh thank god there's a hundred million diehard birder allies out there wanting to fix america's forests that'd be great but i don't think that yeah i think yeah it's probably like maybe 10 million yeah maybe as many as there are hunters like like like burders yeah burders who are like showing up thinking about policy ready to invest because when you go out and just ask people like do you like seeing a birdie You're not collecting. Yeah. Yeah.

I hear you. People who want to fix America's forests. Right. But so a counterpoint to that argument is if you were to ask the question about caring about fixing America's forests, you might find a lot of other allies who care about it for reasons other than birds. I don't bring them on. I just couldn't have you say that number without comment. I'm not surprised that that. Here's a way to change the subject.

Here's a way to change a subject. Let's hear it. I picture there's two things happening Okay with habitat. Okay. There's loss Meaning irrevocable harm. Yes.

Development. Yep. Right. And then neglect. Yeah. Good word. Okay. Can, I don't know.

Like, how do you picture the relationship between those two numbers? Like, meaning for every hundred acres of subprime bird habitat in the east, U.S., right? For every hundred acres of prime habitat that's been lost in the last 50 years, what is the ratio of acres lost to irrevocable damage? Yeah.

Pavement, whatever. And what is the acreage lost to mismanagement? Or neglect? Yeah, I'm not going to hazard a guess on that, but those are the two. keys and i think one thing that i could put a little bit finer point on here i mean we we know all of us have the stories of the places where we grew up playing the the woodlot that you described with the oak trees getting cut and then all of a sudden boom houses popping up we've all got those stories right to be depressed every time i visit my mom i listen there's a place there's a

place where i had my my sort of illicit campground along a trout stream uh in leilinaw county that the last time I went and checked it out, there was a trampoline sitting where my fire pit used to be. So we've all got those places, right? We know we're losing ground to development, of course. Pragmentation, et cetera. The story of the, I like the word neglect,

because I think a lot of folks, you know, if you're driving through the forests of the eastern United States and looking out your window, you're like, yeah, you know, there's, there's a lot of forest here what we have is a lot of the the forests that have regrown after that era of exploitation and so we have a tremendous amount of like middle-aged forest okay that is very homogenous how old is middle-aged forest like 80 to 120 years old okay i mean yeah so i'm i'm using like some some non-precise non-scientific language but if you think about the timeline of when these

forests were slicked off when the when the era of exploitation and liquidation of our timber resources occurred a lot of what we have now is the growth that has replaced if you were standing in a middle-aged forest what would you be seeing well that's so that's great especially in these in these landscapes i'll tell you a few things you're going to see you're going to see take me to indiana a canopy overhead that is allowing very little sunlight to hit the forest floor you're going to see very little understory plant diversity or community. There's leaf litter on the floor. A lot of leaf litter.

And I'll throw a cool term out here and a shout out to one of my retired forest service colleagues, a guy named Greg Noacki, who coined this term mesophication, which refers to the increasing sort of moisture tolerance of a forest over time. So a lot of our forests in the east, when you think about that era of all, all this disruption occurring, the passenger pigeons, the bison, the elk, you had forest where things were drier as a result of more sunlight hitting the forest floor. So in places like Indiana is a perfect example where the species of woody vegetation that are less tolerant of shade, so like oaks are a prime example. We historically had tons more oaks on the landscape,

much more fire maintaining those oaks. If you just take a hands off approaching those systems, remove all those drivers of disturbance, you'll start a successional process where in the understory you'll start getting shade tolerance species like red maples, a good example. That'll come up in the understory. And then if the oaks are dropping their acorns

in a sea of red maple seedlings, those oak seedlings are going to be out-competed because they don't do as well in the absence of direct sunlight. So you have a canopy come up eventually to where red maple will be the dominant species and the oaks will not come back. So that transition from shade intolerant

to shade tolerant species, which corresponds to increasing moisture content in the understory, that's mesification, referring to a more meesic site as opposed to a more it's xeric site. So a mezic site is more moist, a ziric site is more dry.

my good buddy Greg Noacki was the one who kind of termed this this misification idea through his research looking at that change over time so if you're in this forest stand you're going to have a very consistent aged overstory like all the trees came up in the same cohort made it to the canopy they're now shading out the understory you don't have the robust grass forb shrub understory you don't have a lot of mid mid canopy complexity Squirrels see you way too far away. Squirrels see you way too far away. And you're not going to have, you're not going to have nesting habitat for a whole species, a whole, a whole cadre of species of birds that require that diversity. And also like the, the understory plant community, the pollinators, you know, we could talk about rusty patch bumblebee comes to mind, a species listed under the Endangered Species Act where we're not talking about birds anymore.

We're talking about insects, but it's the same story of disturbance being a limiting factor. So the forest is going to have a closed canopy. It's going to be real shady. It's going to look the same as far as you can see. And I think if folks pay attention as you're driving through a lot of these eastern forests, you're going to notice some of those characteristics. And I'll throw one more thing out there for you now that's very different from what things looked like three or 400 years ago on these landscapes.

And that is an overabundance of whitetail deer, which are not a replacement for the elk and the bison. the the browsing dynamics of white tail deer in these systems are a very different driver of disruption ecologically they're not letting any of those species uh join the you know the older age classes so this is where you get into maybe another feature that you're going to see in a lot of places is a pronounced browse line from white tail deer which is a whole other set of ecological issues so this is where you know we can't fall into the trap of thinking oh well we've got deer and so maybe deer are playing the role that elk or bison did deer in the absence of sufficient predation are another driver of a decline of ecological integrity

in these systems so that's i think a good picture of what you'd see and then the other piece is if you are one of these maybe 10 million diehard birders and you're out there with your Cornell lab of ornithology app and you're listening to the birds you're going to hear very little diversity in those systems as well for a variety of reasons but the structural complexity lacking being one of the keys. I wanted to ask about the Woodcock, because you guys just recently kind of took Woodcock under your, officially under your umbrella. Yeah.

Are they, are they more at risk for these kinds of problems because they migrate or are they better able to deal with these problems because they migrate? Because Roughgrass, like you said, like small home range, right? Right. Woodcock might fly 900,000 miles twice a year. year. Brody you're the man. I'm so glad we could talk about Woodcock a little bit, man. Timber doodle. Timberdoodle. Mudbat, man. Bog partridge, bog sucker. The names go on. Yeah, the timber doodle. Thank you. Because if you asked my buddy in Pennsylvania, I was talking about, he would be like,

holy crap is the Woodcock hunting good these days. Well, is it really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the only birds where you can trust them with his own beak. Listen, Woodcock, man. Should do a whole separate episode just on Woodcock. Cuck. Listen, here's the thing. A really cool aspect of working for this organization is you have the opportunity to focus on this high sight fidelity, king of upland gamebirds where, you know, everything we've been talking around about forest diversity and managing it at a tight local scale is the key.

And then you get to shift gears and talk about a migratory upland game bird that is just this like bizarre, amazing outlier. Birders love them because they do that cool little. dance. Well, the whole sky. Watch them do that on the gas line. Yeah. The whole sky dance.

Yeah. They are, they are so damn cool. They're like, they're like, free flight or they call that. One of my, I half jokingly sometimes say to folks on our team at RGS and AWS, I'm like, you know, people think I came for the rough grass, but I'm really here for the Woodcock, man. So I think the answer to your question, Brody, is the fact that Woodcock operate ecologically at a continental scale, you need, you really need those habitat elements to be in

the right places at the right times at a scale that makes, it makes the system much more fragile to disruption, right? And we're seeing that in terms of Woodcock declines. So I'll give you like a quick stat here that's helpful. State agencies, state fish and wildlife agencies are responsible for developing state wildlife action plans in order to qualify for federal funding through Pittman Robertson Act. So every state Fish and Wildlife Agency has a state wildlife action plan. And one of the things that happens in these state wildlife action plans is they go through all the species and they try to identify what ones warrant listing as a species of greatest

conservation need. That's an indicator that a particular critter is in some level of decline or threat. And for rough grouse, there are currently 18 states that have, rough grouse listed as a species of greatest conservation. Did Ohio just do something like that? Ohio, Ohio is right now considering what to do with their hunting season. And there's a proposal on the table just in the next couple of weeks they're going to be talking about a proposal to reduce the rough grouse hunting season to include just a handful of properties where we know we still have grouse on the landscape versus just closing it outright. but back to this idea of the state wildlife action plan so 18 of them have rough grouse listed 29 of them have American woodcock listed as a species of greatest conservation need and that includes

Michigan Wisconsin Minnesota like states where we're sort of in the bread basket of upland bird hunting and this year one of the highlights of the time I've been with this organization was I had a chance back in December to go down to Louisiana flew down to Baton Rouge and had a chance to spend some time with folks from the state agency down there. And we went out and banded, we banded 53 Woodcock one night on one of their state game areas, which was an absolute class. Call them how. Oh, man. It's, it is such a cool, uh, example of technology and action. So the biologists down there, um, and I'll give a shout out to Richard Temple at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Um, he and the team from the state, um, um, um, I'm, um, um, um, he and the team from the state,

First, they have a drone with infrared, and they fly it over these open fields at night. And the infrared camera can, I mean, these woodcock glow. Like, they blow up out of the background. And then the drone also has a spotlight on it. So they can hover like, I don't know, 100 feet above the field, see where these woodcock are. And then they can, they have a camera with such incredible resolution

that you can see the woodcock blink from the drone. Got it. And if a woodcock defecates, you can see like the heat of the splash at a woodcock's backside. It's like it's just incredible view of the field. And then we go out with like a four-wheeler and spotlights on the ground. And basically it's like a deer in the headlights. You shine a spotlight on the woodcock and you can take a fishing net or even you can grab them by your bare hand with the spotlight shining on the bird. Oh, really?

And then we're aging them and sexing them and releasing them. And I have to say, like, after having a lot of woodcock, like dead woodcock in my hands or having a woodcock that's crippled and you're dispatching it to have these little woodcock that were banding and releasing, watching them fly away out of my hands was, it was pretty damn cool, man. So we did all this banding work. And then also did some hunting. I was down there for the opener of the woodcock season, got to hunt with, uh,

guy named Paul Frischertz and Keene Jones, who are a couple of guys down there looking to kind of resurrect an American Woodcock Society chapter and their bevy of pointing dogs. But the coolest part about all of that experience was when the biologist, this guy, Richard Temple, showed me the map of the band return data. So all these Woodcock that they're banding right there around Baton Rouge, he puts up this map of where the bands have been returned from like hunters have shot a woodcock that's banded and they call it in just like what we're used to with ducks and geese and there were a couple of points that within like 15 miles of my family camp up in the in the west oh really like right where i growls in woodcock hunt man so these birds you know you're down here like worried about your dog running into a cotton mouth there's alligators hanging out in these like bayous yeah hanging out with all these

great Cajun upland bird hunting guys, but it's exactly, exactly the same individual birds that we're chasing around like in October up in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota. Here they are down in, you know, the Gulf Coast in December. So I had that experience and then I'm flying back. You know, I'm on my trip from Baton Rouge back up to Milwaukee and I'm looking out the window, just watching the miles, right, pass under the plane. And I'm thinking about these little birds, like, just making that journey. And then they're also nesting. Like, they're laying eggs and hatching chicks during their return migrations north, too.

So you've got the, you've got like the summer ground in the north. You've got the wintering ground. And then there's all this stopover habitat where we know these birds are nesting. Part of the reason we know that is this amazing collaborative. called the Eastern Woodcock Migration Research. They're not nesting in their northern chunk? They do most of their nesting in their northern chunk. But what the recent research has demonstrated is that there are hens rearing clutches,

rearing chicks during this, you know, it's not like a cut and dried. Like, I'm going back to Minnesota to lay my eggs, right? Like it's happening over that latitudinal gradient north. Yep. Um, and so I've been, you know academically like, oh yeah, they're migratory. And your buddy, him talking about, man, the woodcock hunting sure has been great lately. It's like, yeah, it might be like Monday. There's woodcock everywhere.

And then Tuesday like, right. Right. Right. And anybody who's hunted woodcock, when you, when you hit these migration events, it can be, like, you can't, you can't walk without bump and birds. Like I've had, I've had situations. where you know I'm hunting pointing dogs of dog on point a bird goes up shoot the bird dog goes to retrieve the bird but like points another bird on its way to get the dead bird or it's bringing a bird back and pointing another bird on their like yeah when you get into

these flights it can be amazing but the big picture in terms of woodcock numbers is a is a gradual decline continentally so you need the good habitat in the north you need the good habitat in the south you need the habitat along the way and um one of the really a great exciting things is this this work being let out of the University of Maine the eastern woodcock migration research cooperative the two leads dr. Eric Blomberg and Dr. Amber Roth are leading a collaborative to try to understand the use of habitat during this migratory period and they've put out at this point over 700 backpack transmitters on Woodcock they and their collaborators lots of other

academic institutions, one of our team members, one of our forest conservation director, Sarah Serve, has been a collaborator in this work. They've got like 30,000, actually close to 40,000 GPS coordinates of migrating Woodcock now. So we can see at the flyway scale, like here are places that are very important for us to think about providing habitat, whether it's along the Atlantic coast or along the Mississippi Flyway, being able to target these treatments in a way where you're providing key habitat in places where it might be limited and it gives you just some tremendous insights into the trials and tribulations i mean one thing if folks are interested in looking at recent news stories these big spring storms or i guess late winter

storms is a better way to describe it obviously that have happened on the east coast um there have been some tremendous woodcock casualties as a result um there's a there's a point in new jersey called cape may which is sort of like a funnel along the Atlantic Flyway that is notorious for getting lots of young Woodcock into that area. And that's a place where a couple of big storms ago between frozen ground and snowfall and really cold temperatures, they had hundreds of Woodcock die on site, like freezing and starving on site during these migration events. So that all paints a picture of just how demanding for a bird of that size these seasonal migrations are. Like any bird that makes it through one of those cycles and is able to reproduce and rear offspring, it's a hell of an accomplishment. Yeah, like, you know, a two, three-year-old turkeys, an old man, like gobbler's an old man.

Like how long, like Rough Grouse and Woodcock? Like, I assume like not many make a pass the first year. Very high mortality from one age class to the next for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And in the case of Woodcock, you know, the migration poses a whole set of risks that rough grouse aren't subject to. You know, they're flying into windows. They're flying into buildings.

They're getting smoked by owls. A lot of the movement that Woodcock are engaging in during migration is happening at night as well. So they, yeah, they're subject to very high mortality. And certainly in the case of grouse, too. Like there's nothing in the woods that eats meat that doesn't want to eat a grouse, right? Like a grouse is a snack for anything out there. So very high mortality during that first, basically if you look at from year zero to one, one to two, two, two to three, every one of those stages, you're seeing very high mortality for both of these species.

I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind and now got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, in us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Maltry Mobile and OnX Maps. 12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 26. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode.

My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. I had a question I wanted to ask you. That actually has to do with turkeys and maybe a conspiracy theory.

Is there any correlation between like the rise of the wild turkey like the comeback and the fall of the grouse because it's kind of like happening at the same time right? Yeah, I've heard those stories and I think my answer to that is when it comes to thinking about

drivers of either success or failure for both rough grouse and wild turkeys and like pick your hunted species if you want to just look at this from the lens of hunting I mean white tail deer you mentioned your story from Michigan Steve we're dealing with species that evolved with forests where disturbance equals habitat, period. So when we talk about doing things that are good for grouse or doing things that are good for turkey

or doing things that are good for white-tailed deer, we're talking about benefiting the forest and the rising tide lifting all boats. And this idea of like, oh, we've got turkeys back on the landscape now, that's going to be terrible for grouse. My answer to that would be if we have good habitat and a good juxtaposition of that diversity that's accessible to turkeys and to grouse, there may be some fluky case where a turkey disturbs a ground nest i'm sure that happens i mean turkeys are they're they're a source of disturbance and disruption they're clawing and digging and i have no doubt that that has happened and does happen but nest mortality is par for the course there's a whole host of other things out there that are taken out nests too we should never expect rough grouse or

woodcock to you know succeed in every nesting attempt but if we have really good habitat. And if we have lots of females attempting to nest, we're going to have lots of birds. So I would, I would debunk that a bit and say, focusing in on habitat. It brings up, there's an interesting point to it that, there's an interesting point you make that I hadn't thought of a lot of times we, because we focus on, like, as hunters or anglers, wherever, you focus on your favorite game species. Right. Meaning like, you might look, maybe you bass fish some lake. you kind of track like what's going on with the bass net lake.

And you'll, you'll have pet theories about what impacted bass, right? Or you might look at like, what's impacting muleer? Yeah. And you look and it's like, you find this suite of factors that maybe like pertains very particularly to mule deer.

Yeah. Or some things that pertain very particularly to elk. Mm-hmm. Right. it's interesting to think of the woodcock and rough grouse decline as being that like we know those ones and love them but what we're talking about is like land birds yeah forest health yeah what we're talking about is forest health yeah and these are because i think that you tend that like in my mind like if i'm you know whatever if i'm talking about blacktailed deer on some island in a lot of Alaska, I'm usually looking at, well, what is impacting blacktailed deer? Yeah. Right.

It's interesting to take a thing like this and be like, what is impacting birds? Right. One of which or two of which are these ones that you're intensely focused on. But that, that unbeknownst to you, they're going away as well. You know? Yes. But you missed it. You missed it.

because you're just thinking about the ones you are looking for. You know? Right. Yeah. And even if you want to get into some of the specific drivers, like just briefly back to this idea of the West Nile virus as a cause of decline, there too, the idea that you can really focus on habitat quality to help kind of buffer the impact of that disease agent. If you think about a bird that's like, I'm getting at this idea of cumulative. effects, right? If you have a bird that is struggling to take in enough calories, and it's also subject to slightly higher predation risk because it doesn't have the structural complexity

to hide from death from above, you know, hawks, owls, or coyotes, fox, whatever. And then on top of that, you add a disease that's further weakening that bird versus a bird that is diseased, but also has really good forage, really good habitat. It's not any one of these things, right? It's very rare in ecological science to be like, nope, there's the cause, there's the effect, right? Much more often, it's these complex interconnections and feedback loops and death by a thousand cuts as opposed to,

well, here's the one thing that explains it all. But in the case of these eastern forests, it's like the one thing that explains at all, is that we have not done a good job of maintaining the diversity and disturbance. And that includes everything ranging from driving passenger pigeons to extinction, extirpating eastern elk and bison up through. I love the word use neglect because I think that is a perfect label for many of our eastern forests is that they have been neglected.

and part of the tragedy is that now you have people who I think their hearts are in the right place but they are strongly advocating for continuing to neglect the forests that they claim to love like me getting mad at yani for cutting down all those trees in his place neglect by inaction just letting them sit yeah this idea that this idea that um and i think this is this is such a powerful, it's such a powerful thing to really think about. Because a lot of folks who I believe have their hearts in the right place, they think about human beings as being only capable of making things worse in the environment. We're the problem.

Too many people, you know, all we do is pillage and pollute. And when you really start looking at our history as a species and you start looking at, at all the different cultures and relationships that people have to different ecosystems around the planet. And thinking about it more carefully, for the vast majority of our existence, we have been in the business of actively taking care of the places that support our existence.

We have been dependent on the action that we take mediated through the land for our very survival. So this idea that somehow you still, step back and take a hands off approach, nature will take care of itself. That ignores the reality that we are fundamentally a part of nature. So it's a troubling worldview at the deepest of levels because it takes this role that we should be embracing and points to that as if it's a problem. The only thing we can do is make things worse in the environment.

is just simply not the case. We have been in the business of interacting with and being a part of these systems. And that's the thing, man. The more I'm thinking through this, that's the problem, is it takes us and removes us from the system. And we, you know, we look over there. There's nature. Don't mess it up. As opposed to we are in this thing. And if you want to zoom back to like a global scale, whether you live in an urban environment, whether you live in a rural landscape, whether you're in a fluella somewhere in South America or whether you're living in remote Alaska, all of us are existing within this closed system, right? And we're all making decisions individually and cumulatively that influence the trajectory of that closed system.

So approaching it in a way where you're actually embracing the fact that you have a responsibility to take action to try to make things better for the future as opposed to, well, that's nature over there. I'm over here doing my thing. let nature figure it out. Like that is a very deeply flawed worldview in my opinion. When we talk about the Anthropocene, meaning that like the Anthropocene is this concept that, you know,

like we think of the Pleistocene as the Ice Ages that was followed by the Holocene. Then we very quickly entered the Anthropocene, meaning that humans, when people use that term, what they're saying is that humans are the dominant force, the dominant global force on habitats,

the dominant global force on ecology, right? Yeah. We're the dominant force. Part of recognizing that is needs to be embracing that role. Yeah. To be like, okay, if that's the case, then maybe we need to be the dominant force of good as well.

Yeah, I love that. In some places. I love that. You know? Yeah. I mean, there's no more powerful ecosystem engineer than homo sapiens, right? like we have been manipulating the face of this planet to benefit ourselves for forever. But we have absolutely reached a point in our history as a species where we have these controls at our disposal

and we can either do things that will promote a future of continued prosperity or, and in a lot of places this is already reality, we've gone so far down this path of manipulating the system for short-term gain that we've compromised the ability of those systems to be a source of prosperity to us. So there's a lot of cleanup work to do in those places. But I think what you just said is a super important message. It's like we need to acknowledge that reality and then approach that with a focus on

what are our responsibilities in light of that reality. Do you think that how relational is it? Do you think that, when I say relational, It's a terrible word choice. How much do you think a habitat project? Let's say you do a habitat project on a thousand acres. Can you do a habitat project on a thousand acres and then come back a couple years later and be like, oh, the grouse are back? Really depends on where you are.

I think in a lot of places the answer is going to be no. Once grouse are gone and you lose like a source population and they do this. they have this life history trait where you know they hatch in the spring the broods kind of stick together if you think about bumping into grouse early season when you're hunting them oftentimes you'll flush like broods of birds you'll get almost like a covey flush of grouse but then they get into a dispersal mode midfall and birds start striking out to essentially occupy new territory spread their genes across the landscape

avoid competition avoid inbreeding so they will cover considerable distances to pioneer unoccupied habitat but if you do a restoration project in an area where there's no source of rough grouse they're not going to they're not going to find it and

we're not there's a very poor track record of trying to relocate grouse into previously occupied habitat they don't do well so being able to hold on to grouse where we still have them and then focus on trying to restore habitat around the places that are occupied us a much better at a course of action we had a researcher we had a deer but you know

does a lot of work with cervids on the podcast one time and he was talking about when you look like let's say your meel deer hunt and you look and that perfect stuff and you're like god it seems like they'd be here it looks like it would be perfect yeah he's like it might be they're just not there yeah something happened to they have a lot of fidelity to their area something happened to that group yeah and it might be a a long time. It might be perfect. It might be the most perfect meal to your country in your area, but there's just not any there. Yeah. Because they don't, they haven't colonized it. Yep. They got their own, the ones nearby have their little plan and they're not looking for a new

spot. And it can take a long time to put them back when you have an event. Yeah. Carry them away. Yep. I think there's some applicability there. And that's in obviously direct contrast with Woodcock where they're, they're going to find it, they're going to find it, which is one of the advantages. We've talked about some of the disadvantages of being a migratory species, but in advantages, you're surveying that landscape with fresh eyes every year and taking advantage where habitats popping out. It's interesting to me that putting grouse out on the ground doesn't work like putting turkeys out on the ground. They have not done well with reintroduction. What do you think it is? Because they just don't, they don't carry with them like a sort of generational land use

plan? It's a good question, man. I wish I knew, I wish I knew more about the constraints on survivorship of translocated grouse. I know that it has been attempted in many settings, and I'm aware of no successful reintroduction efforts. You got to do their own thing. Yeah. So you got to preserve those pockets. Yeah, and build out from there.

And, you know, we do have just some tremendous strongholds still. But the thing that is both, like, most frustrating and most encouraging is that it's not, we're not scratching our heads like man if we could just figure out oh right it's like we know we know it needs to be done and and it's also a set of actions that is broadly beneficial beyond these two iconic species so that's where like the idea of trying to get some coalitions built around leaving those conditions like the partnership with the rocky mountain elk foundation the partnership with American Bird Conservancy. We have a shared vision of what needs to be done.

Yeah, those kind of things are frustrating in their own way. I think when you look at big conservation problems, you have the ones, you'd be like acidification of the oceans. You know, like, good luck with that. Do you know what I mean? Like something that would call for sort of like a global change in the habits that would impact every person on the planet. Yep.

You know, like, that ain't going to happen anytime soon. But then you got conservation problems where you're like, dude, it's right at our fingertips. Yeah. It's right at our fingertips. It's not even like, it's so achievable, right? Yeah. You know, King Salmon. People were like, they don't even know where to begin.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean with King Salmon? It's hard to know where to begin. It'd be a bummer to see, like, that species. that hunting opportunity, like, blink out in your lifetime? Because so much of it has gotten better over time, right? Like, if you're an elk hunter, it's a pretty good time to be an elk hunter. Whiteale hunter, you know, you name it.

It's pretty good. But to see, like, do you envision the trend being more states, closing seasons, or restricting seasons or status quo? Yeah, I think, I think we're on a trajectory where we're likely to see. continued loss of opportunity. Yeah. And, you know, a couple examples, New Jersey's a state where they had a season that's been closed, I think 2019 for that one.

Indiana lost its season in 2015 and now rough grouse are listed on the state endangered species list in Indiana. Missouri no season. Ohio flirting with potentially a steeply restricted season. Yeah, I think Pennsylvania had an early and a late and they got rid of one. be the late season like after christmas god michigan still just got a doozy of a season man yeah it's long yeah yeah yeah on them right up through the end of the calendar year and september 15 right yeah that's right opener a sacred day for uh those hillbelly kids of the north woods man he's take that day

off of school go squirrel hunting and grouse hunting um those are all restrictions that came out like in our lifetimes for sure oh yeah what else What else you got on that list? Well, I just, I think. But speak to the fact that this is all southern extent, right? Is it because it was the poorest populations? Well, I think there's just kind of naturally borderline, it was naturally fringe habitat.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're starting to get, you're starting to get into areas where the, um, if you look at the distribution of Aspen, I made the comment earlier that Aspen is not the key, but it's a really important aspect of grouse habitat in many places. You're starting to get into areas where that species is not available to provide food and cover. You're also looking at places where these forest change dynamics that we've talked about,

mesification, lack of disturbance. That is absolutely the case. One of the most compelling examples of that, going back to Doug Duren, the Driftless area in southwest Wisconsin, if you look like 25, 30, 40 years ago, grouse numbers in southwest Wisconsin were off the charts. like phenomenal grouse, rough grouse habitat. Now it's unusual to hear. I've talked about a drumming grouse in the drifeless area. So, yeah, man.

So what happened? Just the habitat change, lack of, lack of disturbance. Gone for now. And the problem is, you know, like we were just talking about with the sort of mule deer story there, if you get to the point where the habitat's gone long enough and the population is dwindled to the point, I'm not going to say you're never going to get them back, but you are facing a very steep uphill battle at that point. So for like the northern populations, like whatever,

northern Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, where they're doing well, is it just like, why are they doing, like, is it just that stuff's not getting mess with? It's the right habitat and it's staying the right habitat. Like, because if it, if this good habitat depends on disturbance, like what kind of disturbance?

is going on up there that keeps things yeah well you're you're right you're right in the core of their range in terms of climate yeah yeah of the vegetation community you know I'm thinking I'm envisioning this spot right now in the in the UP where it's just like this tangle of 15 10 to 15 year old Aspen understory of which hazel it's like every you've got like winter green it's it's just food everywhere covers phenomenal um typically you have a good snow pack and rough grouse will burrow into the snow and seek thermal refuge in cold conditions so having that snow cover is a big deal if you have crappy snow years grouse are at higher risk of freezing and cold temperatures that's not good news around here you know so so you're in a really sweet spot it's like you're right you're right in the wheelhouse of where those birds evolved to be and um so now i'm thinking about some very cool work that's been happening in the central

Upper Peninsula, Michigan, looking at the management of these remnant boreal forest ecosystems where you're kind of on the fringe for, like, I'm thinking about snowshoe hairs as well, right? Populations of snowshoe hairs, roughed grouse, a whole host of species that have significance from the standpoint of food and medicine for tribal communities. So there's some really cool work. My buddy, Eric Clark and collaborators from the Sioux-St. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians, working on the Hiawatha National Forest to get more fire back into those systems to promote the diversity of habitat. And if you go back, there are places where, particularly in red pine, you can look at the

dendocrinology, like the tree history of fire activity in those systems. There's a place called Batchelor's Marsh, as an example, on the Hiawatha National Forest, where red pine dendocrinology data shows how frequently fire was burning through those systems prior to European settlement. And it was very high frequency, so very often fire at a low enough severity that the trees were surviving it. And as they've been starting to get

some of those fire regimes back into those systems, with the tribe really leading that work, the grouse response has been phenomenal. But it's also a great habitat. They're doing a lot of work trying to keep moose on the landscape, right? We haven't talked about moose at all. a lot of the work that we're doing thinking about rough grass habitat in those northern lake states a ton of it is also phenomenal moose habitat yeah there's a collaborative up on the arrowhead

in Minnesota focused on moose habitat we're right in the mix partnering with the forest service partnering with the state partnering with the tribes trying to get moose habitat on the ground you call it whatever the hell you want yeah it's great moose habitat it's also great for all these other species that we're talking about i'm luke wilson join me each week for film never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Moultry Mobile and OnX Maps.

12 of Meat Eater's biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. I think two of those northern latitudes you get, I don't really, it's just something I sort of noticed and suspect. I guess is that

in those northern latitudes with the really deep snow different vegetation regimes whatever good habitat lingers long time do you know what I mean like it's a

it seems like success it seems like success yeah then it might be in other places yeah I mean those sites like it I mean just think of places

that stayed good I can think of like good grouse spots that have just stayed good for forever yeah then I can think of good grouse spots

that was like they were very ephemeral. Yeah. Yeah. They were good for a minute. Totally. Yeah. You know. So there's a couple things going on. I mean, they were good for a few years, but places seem like you're like, shoot, we shot grouse out of there for 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. So we talk about like site index or site, site richness, site quality. And, and that takes into account. It's basically like the capacity of a particular place to grow vegetation. And there's obviously a strong climate component to that. There's also a really strong soil component to that. And a lot of the places, when I think about really good

Grouse and Woodcock habitat, places where I grew up hunting, you're dealing with pretty poor soils too, right? It's not like you expose the earth to the solar rays and you get like a jungle immediately growing. It's a more drawn-out process. And that's in contrast. And I'm thinking back to the time down in Louisiana this past winter and the site richness on those sites is like off the charts. So they'll they the amount of effort and and investment that they have to, uh, make in order to keep woodcock habitat on some of those state game lands. Oh, it's crazy. Cause like they'll mow it and the next year it's like a jungle has reemerged, right? So you're, you're pointing to something that's in a lot of that northern grouse habitat,

like in the upper great lakes region. Um, you'd be like, why no one's farming this, but because you can't. Dude. Because yeah, the Norwegians will not grow, man. There were a lot of, there were a lot of frustrated potato farms in the UP, man. A deal I've noticed, too, man, you probably have seen this. Like, I'm thinking of in the county where I grew up and around that area. A lot of times, a good grouse pocket would be centered around. This is going to sound weird. It'd be centered around Christmas tree plantations.

Oh, yeah. Doesn't sound weird. Because when you'd go out and hunt in late season, like you go home for Christmas break or something. Yeah. And you go out, yeah. All the grouse were in there. Christmas tree plantations. Yeah.

And it'd always be that around those big blocks, like, you know, whatever, you got like 10, 20 acres of Christmas trees or something. Yeah. It would always be good grouse. Yep. But there's a certain look to those areas, too. But I'm just saying it would be like that was sort of like a real holding position. Totally. I can think of one on, I can think of one of these that was on public land, a Manusie National Forest was a pine plantation.

Yeah. Always good grouse in that area because they had that, like you said, they're home. bodies and they had that like feature yep and this other on this dude's place he used to grow pumpkins and he'd hire me for a couple days here to pick pumpkins and bring them down and sell him but um he had a pine tree plant to christmas tree plantation yeah and always good whether they were in there or not yeah and it was just that like i think of them in there like it's where they go to survive the cold yeah totally so so i love that and and one of the things when i'm looking for grouse like really good grouse habitat having a component of kind of

conifer in the mix is awesome. You know, it might be spruce or fur, um, but in terms of shelter from predators and also in terms of thermal protection. Yeah. Um, and, and hiding from precept too. Like they do not like getting. Oh man. They can disappear in those, those tree that those conifers, you get, get a kid trying to find

one that's perched up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because they're not sitting way out. They'll sit up close and toward the thing. Totally. Yeah.

So that's where you get like, if you're in a hunting scenario, taking turns flanking, like having one dude on the backside. Sometimes they just don't budge, man. That's true. And oftentimes, you know, you'll hear him flush and you'll never see him.

But dude, the guys, when you're hitting those patches, I'm talking about the dudes that are going to get the shooting or the dudes on the outside, man. That's what I'm saying. So that's flank. That's the flank. And you want to kind of go, like,

if you picture a Christmas tree plantation, like a lap, picture a laptop computer. Okay. Okay, and you got your pushers, and you're pushing it the long way. Yep. A lot of guys are going to make the mistake of having their pushers out. Like, you're entering one end of the laptop. Yeah.

Your pushers are, and you've got your sitters. Yeah. You're thinking you're going to position them off the points off the other end of the laptop. That's like a good trick is to have a guy mid-laptop. Yeah. Yep. The one, because the bird doesn't conceptualize in that pine tree patch the way you are. Right.

Like, you think he's going to go to the end. Right. And then hop out. Right. You know, but they're blowing out the sides, man. You got to have a guy in the side. That's what I'm saying flank. Like, you'll never hear me talk about a stander.

A flanker is somebody mobile. Yeah, he's moving. They're flanking and maybe a few steps up ahead. And he's recognizing those gaps in the trees that he knows they're going to use to get out of there, man. The other thing that's nice is then you can be within eyesight of each other too. So you can take your shot and knowing where your buddy is. Yeah. Because a lot of times in grouse habitat, like you can, if you're more than like 30 yards from your friend, you're not going to be able to see him.

Yeah. Carl, I had one more question for it. Let's hear it. It's like, I'm surprised it didn't come up because it like it usually comes up in these kind of conversations, which is like predators and predator management. Like, does it matter on grouse? Because I know a lot of grouse hunters be like raccoons are eating or whatever. Do they? I don't know.

Like, I feel like that's things. But there's something there with turkeys. But anyways. Yeah, man. So what, who's killing grouse and everybody? Like nobody traps anymore. That's part of why. you know yeah everybody's killing them man like grouse and woodcock are delicious uh they are little

nuggets of energy on the landscape waiting to get eaten and the nests too and these systems are full of things that are going to eat them and that's okay uh the lever that matters is the habitat yes to be thinking about like oh if i kill all the coyotes kill all the fox or these possums getting nest or whatever that is like that is not going to be not going to be that is not going to going to move the lever. You want people to stay focused. I want people thinking about Habitat, man. Yeah.

Let all that other stuff sort itself out. And the thing is, man, we know this. We had a guy on your seat came on top. Same conversation, Bob White Quail. Yeah. He was your thing with Habitat. He didn't do what you're doing. Oh, he downplayed that.

He came in on Quail and he was like parasites. Parasites, parasites, parasites, parasites. And man, we got. just more negative feedback and pissed off people. Yeah. Because he jumped to, he had the audacity to talk about. He also had a product he was, that he worked on. Yes.

Yes. Let me throw a couple of things in response. But I'm saying, he shifted. And people were like, you got to stay on the habitat. You can't talk about, right? And people were pissed. They should be. Here's the thing.

Here's the thing, man. Let's talk about parasite loads. Not unlike the conversation around West Nile. A lot of these birds are going to pick up all sorts of maladies. Okay. Diseases, parasites, etc. Having quality habitat is going to mediate those effects. It's like the thing to do.

And since you brought up quail, I want to just like briefly point out the fact that we spend a lot of time talking about Eastern forests. And again, I'm looking at the state of the birds report. In terms of declines, eastern forest birds, 27% decline over the course of the last 40 years, looking at this graph from this report. There are two categories that have steeper declines that I want to highlight. Erid land birds and grassland birds.

Okay. So grassland birds in particular, and I want to tie this back to the conversation about quail, um, we have talked today about the importance of markets and being able to move wood and not being able to move habitat without being able to move wood. One of the challenges with grassland ecosystems is, is figuring out how those ecosystems can pay their way, right? This is where the farm bill and programs like CRP, um, incentivizing, you know, stewardship.

And there's, which isn't paying their way in the same way. Right. Yeah. And those are long term investments. Long term investments. And there's, there's just some amazing success stories of, of ranchers,

taking a long view on habitat and trying to, you know, trying to do right by grassland birds and also right by their herds and their bottom line. And it's, it's harder in a system where you don't have the timber helping with those. economics but I want to just highlight you know folks have opportunities to be really involved with moving the needle and I'm thinking back to last week being at pheasant fest you mentioned quail decline and quail in a lot of places in most places continue to struggle and in fact that's one of the reasons Woodcock

are getting more attention as people who have historically loved hunting quail and have pointing dogs and all that they're like discovering Woodcock as an alternative in some places where quail like in the quail stronghold but i just want to highlight um the experience of last week being up in minneapolis at pheasant fest so hosted by pheasants forever and quail forever another organization that's really dialed in on this habitat piece in a different system right thinking about these grassland systems um and i'm a i'm a big proponent for folks to think about being a affiliated with lots of different organizations and finding ways to support the missions of lots of different organizations. And I couldn't be more impressed with how pheasants Forever and Quail Forever rolled out a red carpet for our organization and a whole host of other like prairie grouse organizations.

We had this little corner, not a little corner. We had a great space at the at pheasant fest to talk about grouse conservation, both forest grouse and prairie grouse. and the thing I love about what pheasants Forever is doing is taking this stance like I think it'd be really easy for folks to imagine there being a lot of competition among conservation organizations it does not have to be that way man there's so much work that needs to be done across these different ecosystems we've got a niche with thinking about forest grouse thinking about woodcock but I've already told you like there are other non-profits American bird conservancy Audubon society tnc there's so much work work that needs to be done that from my perspective there's there's no excuse for there to be a sense of competition among these organizations we've got to be taking the tact that I saw last week from pheasants forever and quail forever where they're creating a space to try to elevate the missions of all these different organizations so my hope is that well it could be that it's it could

be that there's a problem where the efforts are too scattered and not and not streamlined well that's there is a risk there. And that's where I think having some strong alignment among collaborators and keeping your eye on the prize and finding ways to leverage the strengths and expertise of different partner organizations. I mentioned Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation earlier,

another group where they've got a strong presence in the West. They want to be able to implement work in the East. We can help them do that. So we're able to funnel some of their conservation investments through our organization. So I just, I hope as folks are thinking about all of the needs, taking some time to learn about the bigger picture and not just, not just focus on one ecosystem or one species,

but think about these big concepts of what these landscapes need from us. And then finding ways to align and become a member of communities with organizations that are trying to drive that. And I want to throw one other thing out that I'm really excited about right now in terms of collaboration. And that is when we were at Feasant Fest, one of the coolest things happened in there was we had a partnership with the Aldo Leopold Foundation at Feasant Fest. So anybody who was joining RGS and AWS as a conservation member, they were all getting copies of a Sand County Almanac through the Leopold Foundation. Okay. And I think that's a significant collaboration because what we are what we are doing with our work

and what I've been trying to communicate through the conversation today is that the significance of this effort is much, it's about much more than just having really good grouse and woodcock hunting, right? We're trying to approach these big questions around responsibility to place and thinking about showing up in community in a meaningful way. And for anybody who's familiar with Leopold's work, those should sound like familiar concepts. And so this idea of highlighting those ideas and that legacy through the work that we're doing and trying to be exemplary ambassadors of that land ethic and action is something I'm really excited about.

And so just in the last week, we've gotten a further commitment from the Elda Leopold Foundation for anyone who joins our organization. in our membership drive right now, that deal is going to continue. Oh, is that right? Online. Yeah. So tell them the deal.

Yeah. So if you go, we've got a, we've got a slick little URL now to use, which is ruffed. And make sure you spell roughed, rufft, Ruffet, rough. And you'll get,

that's your guys website now? This is a tight little URL that will take you to our, rough. Rough. org. It'll take you to. to our membership campaign right now. Not roughed like roughed you up, but roughed, right?

A rough around your neck. Are you, RUFFED.org and get a copy of a Sand County Almanac and get yourself a cool trucker hat with the grouse and woodcock on it and, uh, get newsletters from both the Leopold Foundation and the Rough Grouse Society and American Woodcock Society. Um, and the thing I want to highlight here,

like, memberships are great, but we're really, trying to figure out is building this idea of building community around taking care of the land. That's what we're about, taking care of these forests. And we do that with memberships. We also have people who are volunteering, and I want to say a huge thank you to everybody who volunteers to support our mission. We have tremendous, we have folks who have been volunteering for this organization for decades, hosting banquets, fundraisers, all that kind of stuff, just pouring

a ton of time and passion. We had volunteers at Fescent Fest helping staff our booth. So I want to say a huge thank you to the volunteers who are part of this organization. We have some incredibly generous private philanthropists who support our mission. But this idea of just having a community of people who are affiliated with the work that we do and want to see these forests left in a better condition than we found them, that's what we're trying to build. And I think in the conservation space, with some of the trends that we've talked about around declining participation, like what is the future of,

of the funding model for conservation in this country, these questions about how do we build community around these ideas of responsibility to place? I think that is where the answer lies. And so we want to be one of the leaders, along with our partners, in helping drive that kind of community building. So, rough.org, check it out. Join us.

Thank you, Carl. Thanks, Carl. And again, this is Carl Malcolm. He's the VP of Conservation with the Ruffed Grouse Society and the American. American Woodcock Society. Thanks so much for coming on, man.

And please go check out. It's so easy to remember. Rough. RUFFED.org. Get yourself a membership, Rough Grouse Society in America, Woodcock Society. Get perhaps the greatest,

not even perhaps, the greatest conservation book ever written. I won't argue with that. The greatest conservation book ever written, San County Almanac, what, Aldo Leopold. And Carl doubles that. as a Leopold expert for you guys that you guys know that if you watch Meat Eater the TV show

and have listened to Carl's past appearances on this podcast. Again, thank you, Carl. Appreciate the opportunity. Steve, good to see it. Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Moultry Mobile and On X Maps. 12 of Meat Eaters' biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long-form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba.

If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on Meat Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months.