Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 468: Bugling for Bulls and a Decoy Genius
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless,
- 0:12Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to podcast,
- 0:18Speaker 1: you can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought
- 0:21Speaker 1: to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams,
- 0:24Speaker 1: hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELP. First Light has
- 0:27Speaker 1: performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check
- 0:31Speaker 1: it out at first light dot com. F I R
- 0:34Speaker 1: S T L I T E dot com. All Right,
- 0:40Speaker 1: Dave Smith this year from DSD. Dave Smith decoys hates
- 0:42Speaker 1: doing podcasts.
- 0:44Speaker 2: I'm glad to be here. I thanks so much for.
- 0:49Speaker 3: Guy knows a lot about hunting.
- 0:50Speaker 1: He knows a lot about hunting.
- 0:52Speaker 4: Yeah, every time I talk to him, I've learned something
- 0:55Speaker 4: new that I've never learned in the whatever thirty one
- 0:58Speaker 4: almost thirty two years i've.
- 0:59Speaker 1: Been Yeah, he's an artist. Yeah, an artist, decoy designer,
- 1:05Speaker 1: built a great business. Dave Smith Decoy's likes.
- 1:08Speaker 3: To hunt comfortably.
- 1:09Speaker 1: Likes to hunt comfortably, self deprecating, funny, well more could
- 1:13Speaker 1: you ask? You're already married though? Right?
- 1:15Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I'm just jealous of all you guys
- 1:18Speaker 2: that can actually move around the mountains and everything like
- 1:21Speaker 2: that and are physically fit and everything. So I just
- 1:23Speaker 2: hunt the way that I have to. And also I've
- 1:27Speaker 2: noticed that I'm old. I'm like easily the oldest person
- 1:32Speaker 2: in this entire organization.
- 1:34Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you might have beat Brody.
- 1:37Speaker 2: Whoever he is, I'd call him a kid.
- 1:40Speaker 1: How old you?
- 1:41Speaker 2: I just turned sixty.
- 1:42Speaker 1: Yeah, you might be the oldest person.
- 1:45Speaker 2: That's right. So you guys, I expect to be treated
- 1:49Speaker 2: as such exactly.
- 1:54Speaker 1: We also got Jason Phelps joined to remotely. He's gonna
- 1:56Speaker 1: tell you with with the Elk bugle coming up, Elk's
- 2:00Speaker 1: Heason't coming up, Elk Archie Phelps is going to share
- 2:03Speaker 1: with you our esteemed listeners. Three I I asked him
- 2:07Speaker 1: three things that people are to keep in mind, and
- 2:10Speaker 1: he's going to share three things that people ought to
- 2:12Speaker 1: keep in mind. We got a chaster here, Uncle Chastey
- 2:16Speaker 1: seth Krin's wearing her headphones today. Mm hmm, fills over
- 2:23Speaker 1: in his little corner. Everything's great. We got a couple announcements.
- 2:27Speaker 1: Make up top. We are re kicking off playing on
- 2:33Speaker 1: his phone, trying to plug stuff.
- 2:39Speaker 5: Me too.
- 2:39Speaker 1: Listen, We're re kicking off the auction House of Oddities,
- 2:45Speaker 1: which comes and goes, as you know. But holy smokes,
- 2:48Speaker 1: the lineup this year? So, uh, when when's it start?
- 2:51Speaker 1: Krinn this week?
- 2:53Speaker 5: Oh it does this week?
- 2:56Speaker 1: How's that possible? Oh? Yeah, this week? I'm with you.
- 3:02Speaker 1: We have I'm holding a couple lels for one of
- 3:04Speaker 1: thing I'm not holding. I don't know if Sunday it
- 3:06Speaker 1: might wind up on the auctionsvanities? Is we finally after forever?
- 3:10Speaker 1: So we bought a punt gun at an antique auction
- 3:13Speaker 1: for way more money than I'd care to admit. But
- 3:17Speaker 1: the barrel, I'm only holding the action. The barrel takes
- 3:23Speaker 1: a couple of people to hold. Yeah, if you watch
- 3:24Speaker 1: it on if you're listening on YouTube, you can see
- 3:26Speaker 1: what I'm talking about.
- 3:27Speaker 3: You.
- 3:28Speaker 1: It takes two people to pick the barrel up. It's
- 3:32Speaker 1: a one hundred pound barrel. Yeah, it's seven feet it's seven
- 3:36Speaker 1: feet long.
- 3:37Speaker 5: Is there going to be a raffle for who gets
- 3:39Speaker 5: to hold the barrel when we shoot it?
- 3:42Speaker 1: No, because I think the liability You don't hold the
- 3:44Speaker 1: barrel when you shoot.
- 3:45Speaker 5: Yeah, two people don't hold it.
- 3:48Speaker 1: The way a punt gun works. You had a little vessel.
- 3:51Speaker 1: You had a little boat picture like a little canoe
- 3:54Speaker 1: that just basically accommodates the punt gun. It's well, no,
- 4:00Speaker 1: it's on a frame and it's on a slide. It's
- 4:05Speaker 1: on a frame. You don't move the punt gun, you
- 4:08Speaker 1: move the boat. It's on a sliding block filled with
- 4:12Speaker 1: bags of sand. Or they would use sea oats to
- 4:17Speaker 1: absorb some of the recoil because that boat when you
- 4:19Speaker 1: pull the trigger, that boat's going backwards. The shell. I'm
- 4:25Speaker 1: holding the shell right now, this shell, so it's a
- 4:28Speaker 1: two gage shotgun, but this is the shell is nine
- 4:31Speaker 1: inches long. This thing throws over a pound.
- 4:34Speaker 2: Let made forgetting things.
- 4:39Speaker 1: And you would go up often at night. You would
- 4:42Speaker 1: go up on rafted ducks, aim your boat at them,
- 4:48Speaker 1: cock it and pull the rope. So well, you're safe
- 4:55Speaker 1: right now. So almost had an accident this morning. So we
- 5:01Speaker 1: had to go to an engineering firm to get AMMO made.
- 5:04Speaker 1: I'm holding an original casing. It's a two gage shotgun,
- 5:09Speaker 1: gauge being inverse like wire and whatnot. They don't sell
- 5:15Speaker 1: it as such, but it's basically a two gage shotgun.
- 5:19Speaker 1: We went to an engineering.
- 5:21Speaker 5: Meaning that if you took a pound of lead and
- 5:23Speaker 5: split it into two balls, one of the balls will fit.
- 5:28Speaker 5: Is that how it goes?
- 5:28Speaker 2: Yeah?
- 5:29Speaker 1: Well the way yeah, I shouldn't say yeah. So what
- 5:31Speaker 1: we did is, yes, gauge traditionally comes from A twelve
- 5:38Speaker 1: gage shotgun means twelve It takes twelve leads spheres that
- 5:43Speaker 1: diameter to comprise a pound. A twenty gage shotgun takes
- 5:48Speaker 1: twenty lead spheres that diameter to comprise a pound. A
- 5:52Speaker 1: four to ten is obviously a measurement four tenths of
- 5:56Speaker 1: what does it hold true for the two gauge? So
- 5:59Speaker 1: this is just extra affilated up on board diameter. But
- 6:02Speaker 1: I haven't correlated it to lead spheres. But I'm assuming,
- 6:06Speaker 1: I'm assuming, so they didn't sell them as such. But yeah,
- 6:10Speaker 1: and it also the other thing about it is the
- 6:12Speaker 1: casing is I'll do that. I'll make a lead sphere
- 6:16Speaker 1: with my micrometer. Perhaps we sent it to an engineering
- 6:21Speaker 1: firm and they made us a partial shell with a primer.
- 6:27Speaker 1: And I needed to test the punt gun. So I
- 6:31Speaker 1: have here, I'm cocking it. You can hear that's the cocking.
- 6:35Speaker 1: Here's the rope pull. Now when you hit it on
- 6:39Speaker 1: your finger, you could feel the firing pin. But we didn't.
- 6:42Speaker 1: We wanted to make sure before we went through all
- 6:44Speaker 1: this hassle, we wanted to make sure that the mechanism
- 6:47Speaker 1: was still good in it. So these guys loaded up
- 6:50Speaker 1: a primed practice shell today in demonstrating how a shotgun
- 6:56Speaker 1: shell normally worked, I wasn't really thinking clear. First off,
- 6:59Speaker 1: I cut the shit I'll open, poured the shot off,
- 7:01Speaker 1: pulled the wad out, dumped the powder out on my
- 7:05Speaker 1: work bench, and I wanted to knock the primer out
- 7:07Speaker 1: of there, but I had it upside down and I
- 7:11Speaker 1: was trying to push out and couldn't get it. So
- 7:12Speaker 1: I eventually took a Phillip screwdriver and put it through
- 7:16Speaker 1: the shell against the primer and was trying to push
- 7:19Speaker 1: it out, but wouldn't come. So I picked up a
- 7:21Speaker 1: pair of bullnose plyers travers plyers and whapped the end
- 7:25Speaker 1: of that thing going the wrong direction, but it's still activated.
- 7:29Speaker 1: That summer bitch scared the ship out of me that
- 7:32Speaker 1: primer off with all that powder land there. Man, Oh
- 7:38Speaker 1: my god, man, I could have hurt my eyeballs. That
- 7:41Speaker 1: would have been the thing is. It would have really
- 7:43Speaker 1: hurt your eyeballs because it was right in my face.
- 7:46Speaker 1: It's probably and that was even the moment I took
- 7:52Speaker 1: At the moment I took those bullnose plyers and was
- 7:55Speaker 1: kind of coming down on that handle that screwdriver. I
- 7:58Speaker 1: was second, does it work in reverse? That powder was
- 8:04Speaker 1: like what eighteen inches away? But it could have just
- 8:07Speaker 1: as well. I would not have done anything different if
- 8:10Speaker 1: that powder was like right in a pile below.
- 8:12Speaker 5: The But you think that it would have been the
- 8:14Speaker 5: flash that would hurt your eyes or just a debris.
- 8:18Speaker 1: Can we just a oh yeah, just a debris from
- 8:21Speaker 1: that primer hurt my eyes. Yeah, it was loud. That
- 8:24Speaker 1: Spencer's like I need some hearing protection. Yeah, you need
- 8:26Speaker 1: some eye protection. So we screwed it in. You see
- 8:29Speaker 1: it like this thing, So this punt gun action threads
- 8:32Speaker 1: in right the like you know, you'd kill twenty ducks
- 8:37Speaker 1: with a shot with this thing, and a good that'd
- 8:40Speaker 1: be good. I we have a whole book. We have
- 8:42Speaker 1: a book called The Outlaw Gunner. It's about punt gunners.
- 8:44Speaker 1: And he was like, people get the wrong idea. Twenty
- 8:47Speaker 1: is a good pole, nine is a good poll. It's
- 8:50Speaker 1: people weren't killing whole flocks of ducks with a single
- 8:52Speaker 1: shot from a punt gun. But mile Man, who was
- 8:55Speaker 1: old when he had me. Mile Man remembers seeing punt gunners,
- 9:01Speaker 1: legal punk gunners that had three punk guns stacked one
- 9:06Speaker 1: off the water. Then you pull the next rope and
- 9:09Speaker 1: it hits them as they're get taken flight, and the
- 9:11Speaker 1: third shot hits them a little higher. He said, they
- 9:13Speaker 1: had three of them stacked at different angles. I don't
- 9:15Speaker 1: know where the hell he was when he saw that.
- 9:17Speaker 6: How wide does the spread?
- 9:19Speaker 1: I don't know yet. So you remember Gallagher, the comedian Gallagher? Okay, wow,
- 9:28Speaker 1: I'm out. Do you know about Gallagher?
- 9:30Speaker 5: What about you?
- 9:30Speaker 2: Two?
- 9:32Speaker 5: Too young for Gallagher? I know Gallaer's young.
- 9:37Speaker 4: Striped shirt and the.
- 9:44Speaker 1: Husky. Remember when you were a kid and if the
- 9:46Speaker 1: word husky if you were like a chunky kid pants pants, Yeah,
- 9:53Speaker 1: you like and it met It was meant for like
- 9:54Speaker 1: kind of chunky kids.
- 9:55Speaker 4: I remember my mom brought me home a pair of
- 9:57Speaker 4: husky pants one time by accidentally, and I thought she
- 10:00Speaker 4: was saying I was like fat.
- 10:02Speaker 1: Kind of tore me up a bit. But so Gallagher
- 10:04Speaker 1: there is Gallagher. Imagine weird al if he was husky
- 10:09Speaker 1: and bald but still had all the long hair, so
- 10:13Speaker 1: like it's the kind of long hair, and it's kind
- 10:15Speaker 1: of a sweet look when you go bald on top
- 10:18Speaker 1: of you grow real long that little half moon toilet
- 10:23Speaker 1: seat deal, but you grow that out long. But I'm
- 10:28Speaker 1: gonna do it and slick it back.
- 10:30Speaker 3: Man.
- 10:34Speaker 1: Anyways, Gallagher had two Gallagher had two groups. He had
- 10:38Speaker 1: two lines of comedy and they were very different, but
- 10:40Speaker 1: he'd combine them into one set. One of his things
- 10:44Speaker 1: was how ridiculous in the English language was, so he
- 10:48Speaker 1: get a lot of mileage. How could there be like
- 10:52Speaker 1: there th h e r e, you know, but then
- 10:56Speaker 1: there's there th h e i r And he got
- 10:59Speaker 1: tremendo amount of mileage out of the idiosyncrasies of the
- 11:03Speaker 1: English language how things spell. And then he started to
- 11:07Speaker 1: lose people or whatever, and he'd get out in huge
- 11:11Speaker 1: sledgehammer and fruit and he would proceed to smash fruit
- 11:16Speaker 1: with a sledgehammer. And people in the know would buy
- 11:19Speaker 1: tickets to Gallagher and they would wear raincoats and get
- 11:22Speaker 1: viscueen and whatnot to protect themselves. And Gallagher would set
- 11:28Speaker 1: up a watermelon or whatever and hit it with a hammer,
- 11:33Speaker 1: point being that's what this punt gun is for.
- 11:37Speaker 2: So when you were saying you were asking me if
- 11:39Speaker 2: I knew of Gallagher. I was just sitting there thinking,
- 11:41Speaker 2: like the first thing that came to my mind was
- 11:42Speaker 2: that dumb comedian. And I was sitting there trying to well,
- 11:45Speaker 2: that can't be it, Like, who's this person knows all
- 11:48Speaker 2: about waterfowl lore? You know, I'm trying to think, who's Gallagher?
- 11:51Speaker 2: Who's Gallagher?
- 11:52Speaker 6: You know?
- 11:53Speaker 1: We want to shoot stuff like watermelons and whatnot with
- 11:58Speaker 1: this punk gun.
- 11:59Speaker 2: There you go.
- 11:59Speaker 1: But one of the things I want to do is
- 12:01Speaker 1: just put out a couple of sheets of plywood at
- 12:03Speaker 1: fifty sixty yards whatever and see what kind of pattern
- 12:06Speaker 1: you get out of those.
- 12:07Speaker 4: We can put out a whole flock of Dave Smith Decoy's.
- 12:10Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to round up I'm going to round
- 12:17Speaker 1: up people that have old faded out like I have
- 12:20Speaker 1: some in my collection. I have some old faded out,
- 12:22Speaker 1: you knows. I get old flambos or like they like
- 12:27Speaker 1: they paint the beak and the wrong spot on them
- 12:29Speaker 1: and whatnot. Get some of those and line them out
- 12:31Speaker 1: and maybe shoot at them. When we do want to
- 12:33Speaker 1: put a pound of let out into a pond, is
- 12:35Speaker 1: the problem?
- 12:35Speaker 5: Yeah, when we do that, we should paint the decoys
- 12:38Speaker 5: in such a way that the shot would really read well.
- 12:42Speaker 1: Or fill them with that stuff that people fill decoy
- 12:45Speaker 1: targets with nowadays.
- 12:49Speaker 2: Then you know with the ones that blow up, you
- 12:51Speaker 2: know that they got hit.
- 12:52Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll figure it out.
- 12:54Speaker 2: I know the perfect guy that you got to talk
- 12:55Speaker 2: to Worth Matthewson.
- 12:57Speaker 1: Is he a punt gun man?
- 12:58Speaker 2: Well, he knows all about him, and he does. He
- 13:01Speaker 2: still hunts with an eight age. It goes to Scotland
- 13:04Speaker 2: every year and hunts. And he's he's a heck of
- 13:06Speaker 2: a great guy and just a water fell and mentor
- 13:08Speaker 2: of mine. And he's been around a long time.
- 13:12Speaker 1: So really and he knows about he'd be able to
- 13:14Speaker 1: share with us some info about punt.
- 13:15Speaker 2: Gun absolutely punk gun. He he might. I'll check with him,
- 13:21Speaker 2: I'll send it, I'll call him up. He might. He
- 13:23Speaker 2: talks about him all the time.
- 13:25Speaker 1: You see how this is it Holland and Holland h
- 13:27Speaker 1: and h punk uh huh. And the barrel you couldn't
- 13:29Speaker 1: see it. I mean, the the this part's beautiful, it's
- 13:32Speaker 1: very ornate, it's all inscribed, but the barrel just looks
- 13:35Speaker 1: like a cannon off of warship and someone had painted
- 13:38Speaker 1: a gunship gray and I drembled off the I drembled
- 13:43Speaker 1: off some of the paint. You can see the old
- 13:45Speaker 1: address that London street, the address for H and H
- 13:48Speaker 1: in London. It's cool man, but that's that. Well, I
- 13:53Speaker 1: talk about auction House of Oddities. That's not in it.
- 13:59Speaker 1: But sorry, if you got your hopes, yeah, you got
- 14:02Speaker 1: your hopes up well, point being, it might someday be
- 14:04Speaker 1: there Auction House of Adities. This year you could do
- 14:08Speaker 1: an opening weekend deer hunt at Doug Dirt at the
- 14:11Speaker 1: Duran family farm. Or you can go on a turkey
- 14:14Speaker 1: hunt at the Durham family farm and get a tour
- 14:18Speaker 1: of the Duran family farm. And when you're there, ask
- 14:21Speaker 1: Doug if you will take you to the spring House
- 14:23Speaker 1: and depending on your age, ask for the spring House story.
- 14:31Speaker 3: M hmmm. Is that the odd part about it?
- 14:35Speaker 1: Because I'll make a house of odd Yeah, Doug's a
- 14:38Speaker 1: odd guy. Okay, He'll probably take you down to get kurds.
- 14:42Speaker 5: Yeah, you'll definitely go for a over the Carr.
- 14:44Speaker 7: Valley you'll take You'll take Duran Road and Doug will
- 14:52Speaker 7: drive around real slow and tell you like stories about
- 14:56Speaker 7: murdering mayhem and cousins and who owned what and what
- 15:00Speaker 7: that guy this and that right and that tree one time,
- 15:05Speaker 7: and you know one time he urinated all over the
- 15:09Speaker 7: top of that stop sign, but his friend tried to
- 15:11Speaker 7: do the same and shat his.
- 15:12Speaker 3: Pants, Like, I don't know, that's pretty odd.
- 15:16Speaker 1: And then you'll get to do You'll get to do
- 15:19Speaker 1: a hunt on the Durham farm where we filmed hunts
- 15:23Speaker 1: and have done hunts, and I take my kids there
- 15:25Speaker 1: every year for spring turkey or a deer hunt in
- 15:28Speaker 1: the Durham farmers for three hundreds. So that's in the
- 15:29Speaker 1: auction house of Hoonities. You you bid, win the package,
- 15:33Speaker 1: and then pick what you want and you get a
- 15:35Speaker 1: tour of the Durham family farm. The oddity part, I
- 15:39Speaker 1: don't know.
- 15:40Speaker 3: It's what you just said, Oh that spring house.
- 15:43Speaker 1: Go to the spring House and depending on age and everything,
- 15:46Speaker 1: Doug might tell you the spring house tail.
- 15:49Speaker 3: I don't think i've heard that one.
- 15:51Speaker 1: Well I have not, kids have not. Maybe you should
- 15:55Speaker 1: have bid on that chester a handmade log home from
- 15:58Speaker 1: Naughty log Homes. Real, really, I'm not kidding you. Twelve
- 16:01Speaker 1: by twenty trappers cabin they're donating they have donated to
- 16:07Speaker 1: our Land Access Initiative. A log home, a twelve by
- 16:12Speaker 1: twenty two hundred and forty foot square trappers cabin, four
- 16:14Speaker 1: foot overhang off the front, shipped anywhere?
- 16:17Speaker 4: Wow, what do you mean anywhere when you auction?
- 16:22Speaker 1: When you buy it at auction, you'll have to pay
- 16:25Speaker 1: to have it shipped. Oh, but they're in Idaho.
- 16:28Speaker 2: Say I could use one of those up at the shack.
- 16:31Speaker 1: Better dig Yeah, factor that in better dig D.
- 16:35Speaker 5: I think you're meant to say, because I need one
- 16:36Speaker 5: of those in Wisconsin.
- 16:37Speaker 1: You need to talk to someone with a Chinook helicopter. Yeah,
- 16:41Speaker 1: and get it dropped in where you want it. Twelve
- 16:43Speaker 1: by twenty. I wish I had that damn thing. Yeah,
- 16:47Speaker 1: a lot of art so people might have seen can
- 16:55Speaker 1: we can we put? We don't have? I wish I
- 16:57Speaker 1: had this in here from Jamie Wild Art. She did
- 17:01Speaker 1: the commission to painting of mine of the wolves disemboweling
- 17:04Speaker 1: device and eating it alive. She also does a lot
- 17:08Speaker 1: of canine art. So we have a print of my
- 17:13Speaker 1: commission to painting, which hangs just outside our studio door,
- 17:16Speaker 1: of the wolves eating a bison alive while still staying
- 17:19Speaker 1: there and disemboweling it, a print of that that Jamie
- 17:24Speaker 1: and I will both sign, and then a piece of
- 17:27Speaker 1: custom work from Jamie. We have custom artwork from Kelsey Morris,
- 17:33Speaker 1: Seth Morris's wife, Kelsey Morris of Studio Gallery. What's it called? Yeah,
- 17:38Speaker 1: the Studio Studio Gallery and three Forks Montana. Dinner for
- 17:42Speaker 1: four at my house. That's an auction item. You three
- 17:47Speaker 1: friends come to my house and we will serve you
- 17:49Speaker 1: many courses of phenomenal food at my house. Yannie's going
- 17:53Speaker 1: to join in, I believe, I don't know if he
- 17:55Speaker 1: knows it yet, there to serve.
- 17:59Speaker 5: This is separate from a big giveaway dinner at your
- 18:01Speaker 5: different dinner.
- 18:02Speaker 2: Is there.
- 18:05Speaker 1: That one? Yeah, if you want it to be vegan,
- 18:07Speaker 1: I'll make it vegan. If you win the auction, that
- 18:09Speaker 1: you win the auction, it's up to you. No, we
- 18:11Speaker 1: have another giveaway dinner that we're doing here at the office.
- 18:14Speaker 1: This is a dinner at my house. You and three
- 18:16Speaker 1: friends come to my house. I will cook you dinner.
- 18:19Speaker 1: Yani will be there to help serve. We'll get a
- 18:20Speaker 1: whole bunch of our crew down there to help with
- 18:22Speaker 1: the meal. A fob Harness an f O b f
- 18:26Speaker 1: HF harness called the Fur Trappers Edition, where we're gonna
- 18:29Speaker 1: Paul Lewis from f HF is going to face one
- 18:32Speaker 1: of his fob inyl harnesses in furs that I caught sweet.
- 18:37Speaker 1: If you want it done and mink, will do it
- 18:38Speaker 1: in mink. If you want don Martin, will do it
- 18:40Speaker 1: in Martin. If you want done in Beaver, will do
- 18:42Speaker 1: it in Beaver. So you get a fur fob harness
- 18:46Speaker 1: one of a kind that's up for auction. The elk
- 18:50Speaker 1: Bugle tube that Phelps used on the hunt where he
- 18:53Speaker 1: and I hunted in New Mexico signed scrolling down. I'm
- 19:02Speaker 1: holding right now. If you're watching, you can see this.
- 19:05Speaker 1: I'm holding an arrow that says Ted Nugent ninety one.
- 19:09Speaker 1: Now check this out. I gotta put my spectacles on,
- 19:13Speaker 1: gearing up ready. We had a while ago, long time ago,
- 19:19Speaker 1: Uncle Teddy Teddy Nuggets, as Cal calls him. We called
- 19:23Speaker 1: him Uncle Ted growing up. We had him on the
- 19:26Speaker 1: show and he talked about doing a show and rock.
- 19:28Speaker 1: He talked about doing a show in northern Michigan where
- 19:32Speaker 1: he missed a target. A guy wrote it in and said,
- 19:36Speaker 1: I had to be working backstage security for that concert
- 19:39Speaker 1: up at the Castle in Charlolavoyle, Charlavoy. After the shot
- 19:44Speaker 1: and subsequent missed, Ted's assistant came back and set Ted's
- 19:47Speaker 1: bow and arrow down on a table that was just backstage.
- 19:50Speaker 1: Long story short, they asked the security guy to keep
- 19:55Speaker 1: an eye on the bow until they come back and
- 19:58Speaker 1: retrieve it after the show. Just left it on a table,
- 20:03Speaker 1: Bye and bye. Here comes the guy that comes and
- 20:05Speaker 1: grabs the bow and goes to walk off with it.
- 20:08Speaker 1: Teds like, or the guy the scary guys like, tell
- 20:10Speaker 1: you doing? He goes, they told me to grab the bow.
- 20:13Speaker 1: He said, no, no, no, no U. Someone told me to
- 20:16Speaker 1: wash the bow till Ted comes gets it. You ain't him.
- 20:20Speaker 1: I'm holding the bow. Another guy comes up and says,
- 20:23Speaker 1: what's going on? He said. This guy says he's supposed
- 20:25Speaker 1: to pick up the bow? Why not being the guy
- 20:26Speaker 1: who was trying to steal the boat. Now the arrow
- 20:29Speaker 1: that Ted had missed with was broken. When Ted found
- 20:38Speaker 1: out that the guy saved his bow from getting stolen,
- 20:40Speaker 1: he said, let me know if there's ever anything I
- 20:42Speaker 1: can do for you. The guy said, yeah, you could.
- 20:44Speaker 1: I would like to have that arrow. Uncle Ted then
- 20:49Speaker 1: signed the arrow. We have the full in art. This
- 20:51Speaker 1: is called the provenance. The provenance, we have the provenence
- 20:55Speaker 1: of the arrow. I then emailed Uncle Ted and said,
- 21:00Speaker 1: check this story out. His reply was, damn cool. Huh,
- 21:09Speaker 1: this will be in the auction House of Audities a
- 21:11Speaker 1: lunum shaft Ted Nugent ninety one. That's cool checks out.
- 21:16Speaker 1: And the one freaking story.
- 21:18Speaker 5: You might have already said this, but he missed the target?
- 21:21Speaker 5: Is that the one where he missed a target and
- 21:22Speaker 5: then he decided to get down on his hands and knees.
- 21:24Speaker 1: And no I shared that story with him. That was
- 21:27Speaker 1: at a whiplash bash. He missed a target and then
- 21:32Speaker 1: got down on his knees and he missed the target
- 21:36Speaker 1: of a white buffalo before doing great white buffalo got
- 21:40Speaker 1: down on his knees and bowed before the white buffalo target.
- 21:45Speaker 1: Me and my late friend Eric Kern. We didn't catch
- 21:48Speaker 1: that one. But me and my late friend Eric Kern
- 21:50Speaker 1: went to the whiplash bash and Uncle Ted threw out
- 21:52Speaker 1: jerky and me and Eric picked up some jerky off
- 21:55Speaker 1: florin ate it.
- 21:56Speaker 3: Rock and roll Nice Times has some rock and roll
- 22:01Speaker 3: right there.
- 22:01Speaker 1: That's in the auction House of aodities, my personal weather
- 22:05Speaker 1: be Mark five chambered and three hundred win mag Left Handed,
- 22:09Speaker 1: which we fillmed a bunch of media episodes is in
- 22:11Speaker 1: the Auction House of Oddities. And also if you've if
- 22:15Speaker 1: you watched the show, you've seen a hundred times the
- 22:17Speaker 1: singer a moose gets up and charges me, and I
- 22:20Speaker 1: go something like that that gun. Now, if you watch
- 22:26Speaker 1: that episode, you'll see that the gun appears to misfire.
- 22:29Speaker 1: So a lot of people have asked about the misfire.
- 22:30Speaker 1: It didn't. I shot at the moose that ran off,
- 22:34Speaker 1: and I changed. I immediately instinctively chambered around, ran after
- 22:38Speaker 1: the moose and forgot that I had chambered the round
- 22:41Speaker 1: because I had hit in the brisket and it went
- 22:43Speaker 1: down and got up, and I knew it was probably
- 22:45Speaker 1: not mortally wounded, so it wasn't like, oh well, wait,
- 22:47Speaker 1: let him run off and die. So I ran after
- 22:49Speaker 1: him to try to get another one in him the
- 22:52Speaker 1: minute I started running. Later, reviewing the footage, the minute
- 22:54Speaker 1: I started running, I rechambered, so I had three in
- 22:57Speaker 1: the I had three in the magazine, none in the chamber,
- 23:00Speaker 1: chambered shot the bowl, two shots left spit the empty out,
- 23:06Speaker 1: put a live in started running forgot spit the live out.
- 23:10Speaker 1: Put live in shot at the moose again as it
- 23:14Speaker 1: ran through the brush, chambered again. Now I'm empty. I
- 23:17Speaker 1: walk up to the moos to dispatch it and click.
- 23:20Speaker 1: So people are like, oh, gun miss fired. The gun
- 23:22Speaker 1: didn't miss fire. That gun's fine. I still own it today.
- 23:27Speaker 1: It is a Carolina custom rifle chambered in three hundred short.
- 23:30Speaker 1: Make that gun from that moose charge and those episodes
- 23:33Speaker 1: will be in the auction house of Aodities.
- 23:36Speaker 2: I have a quick question. You just said, you just
- 23:39Speaker 2: referred to that moose as charging, Like I just watched
- 23:42Speaker 2: an episode not too long ago of a six hundred
- 23:46Speaker 2: pound grizzly bear running at you and cal as fast
- 23:50Speaker 2: as American run and you called it false charging, And
- 23:54Speaker 2: I'm just kind of curious what does charging look like?
- 23:57Speaker 1: And if he made contact with me?
- 23:58Speaker 4: Okay?
- 23:59Speaker 2: So I was like, it was like you come home,
- 24:02Speaker 2: you know, from somewhere, and your your truck is riddled
- 24:05Speaker 2: and bullets and stuff, and what do you say to
- 24:07Speaker 2: your wife, like, oh, I got false shot at Like
- 24:09Speaker 2: none of the bullets actually hit me, So I got
- 24:11Speaker 2: false shot at like, yeah.
- 24:15Speaker 1: Krin, I'm holding up another item from the auction as
- 24:17Speaker 1: about it. These come from these are from some a pair.
- 24:21Speaker 6: Of Steve caught Martin's is past year.
- 24:24Speaker 1: Had a hat made for my wife. We had the
- 24:26Speaker 1: tails left over. Wow, Krina is fashioned. He's into gorgeous earrings. Yeah,
- 24:32Speaker 1: describing Grin.
- 24:33Speaker 6: So there Herkimer quartz diamonds from a podcast listener, Herkimer
- 24:42Speaker 6: her herk diamonds and uh the mink this oops, pardoned
- 24:51Speaker 6: me the Martin tails from Steve's Martin's and then a
- 24:55Speaker 6: sterling silver wire wrap. So it's all sterling silver stone.
- 25:02Speaker 5: I did, but I think it might have closed up.
- 25:07Speaker 6: This is this is like an adorning costume for the
- 25:09Speaker 6: Latvian eagle. Martin tails.
- 25:17Speaker 5: So sweet.
- 25:20Speaker 1: So the Auction House of Oodities back better than ever.
- 25:25Speaker 1: All of the money raised in the Auction House of
- 25:27Speaker 1: Oodities goes to our own land access initiative. With the
- 25:30Speaker 1: land access initiative, we've done so we contributed on a
- 25:34Speaker 1: land access a public land purchase in Maine. We participated
- 25:41Speaker 1: on a public land access purchase in northwest Montana cala Is,
- 25:47Speaker 1: eyeballing one along the Yellowstone River right now. And plus
- 25:52Speaker 1: we will use some of the items. Another item I
- 25:54Speaker 1: should throw this in. You know the Missouri corner crossers.
- 25:58Speaker 1: This is kind of freshest morning. Yeah, the famous Missouri
- 26:02Speaker 1: corner crossers. They have donated their ladder. So you can
- 26:07Speaker 1: buy a piece of American history at the media or
- 26:12Speaker 1: auctional sdvice. You can buy the device that has now
- 26:15Speaker 1: been covered by every news agency on the planet, still
- 26:20Speaker 1: working its way through the courts. You can buy the
- 26:23Speaker 1: ladder used in the Wyoming corner crossing case. The stipulation
- 26:26Speaker 1: there is the revenue from that, and this is part
- 26:29Speaker 1: of land access. The revenue for that will go in
- 26:31Speaker 1: illegal defense fund, which has been mighty successful thus far,
- 26:38Speaker 1: a legal defense fund for the corner crossers who have
- 26:44Speaker 1: been putting a Regardless of how you feel about whether
- 26:49Speaker 1: corner crossing should be legal or not, these guys have
- 26:51Speaker 1: been placed in an extremely unfortunate position after getting very
- 26:54Speaker 1: mixed signals from multiple law enforcement and land management agencies,
- 26:58Speaker 1: and they are at this point they have come victims
- 27:01Speaker 1: of a system that is whacked.
- 27:05Speaker 6: And there's many more items than that, many more items.
- 27:09Speaker 2: I have something I could donate, but it's really there's
- 27:12Speaker 2: nothing compared to those things. But I just thought of something.
- 27:15Speaker 2: I have an owl coughing and one of the and
- 27:20Speaker 2: there's an exposed bone and it has a leg band
- 27:23Speaker 2: on it.
- 27:25Speaker 6: That taxidermy coughing.
- 27:29Speaker 2: Yeah, out pellet. So it ate a bird that was
- 27:32Speaker 2: banded and it coughed up all the feathers and bones,
- 27:36Speaker 2: and right on the outside of all of.
- 27:38Speaker 5: It is let me get it clear, for an owl pellet,
- 27:46Speaker 5: is is a coughing. So an owl eats.
- 27:53Speaker 1: In our in our book Catching Crayfish Count the Stars,
- 27:56Speaker 1: we have a thing about We have an instructional about
- 27:58Speaker 1: how to dissolve and dissemble owl pellets in order to
- 28:03Speaker 1: see what all they've been up to. So when owl
- 28:04Speaker 1: will eat its food whole and then digest food and
- 28:09Speaker 1: regurgitates the bones in these little balls. And you'll look
- 28:14Speaker 1: at these little balls and like a standard thing to
- 28:16Speaker 1: see in these little balls is mouse jaws. They stand
- 28:19Speaker 1: out real good mouse molers.
- 28:22Speaker 5: But you'll answer my question, is another word for an
- 28:25Speaker 5: owl pellet and owl coughing?
- 28:27Speaker 1: I've never heard him. I never heard that word.
- 28:29Speaker 2: So the reason why that we've used that term before
- 28:33Speaker 2: us a lot of people know that it's it's that
- 28:35Speaker 2: they're not pooping. It it's not.
- 28:39Speaker 1: Because they might think it's gross.
- 28:40Speaker 2: If you shat it out, it wouldn't be quiet, as
- 28:43Speaker 2: the auction value would definitely go down, will shift. It
- 28:46Speaker 2: wasn't Yeah, if it was a piece of owl shit.
- 28:49Speaker 1: Man, We've had some see we've had some auction House
- 28:52Speaker 1: of Oddities donations that we've had lawyers prevent us from selling.
- 28:57Speaker 1: This is one of those things.
- 28:58Speaker 3: It's like me showing up at his house with Luke
- 29:01Speaker 3: Comb's guitar and like playing him a song on one
- 29:03Speaker 3: of them that they.
- 29:04Speaker 1: Next, Yeah, that brought up liability problems. You could be
- 29:09Speaker 1: lured into his sorted, some kind of sorted.
- 29:15Speaker 3: Put the lotion on the skin.
- 29:17Speaker 1: Yeah, it was gonna be we had one of those.
- 29:18Speaker 1: Chester is gonna show up like you could have them.
- 29:21Speaker 1: He'll wear whatever you want, right down to right down
- 29:23Speaker 1: to his his thong.
- 29:26Speaker 3: Said that I never agreed to that, even.
- 29:30Speaker 1: Like I'm on there at midnight. The thong.
- 29:35Speaker 4: One got nixed with Spencer and I getting tattooed.
- 29:38Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that got mixed. You were gonna be able
- 29:40Speaker 1: to pick whatever tattoo you wanted on Seth and Spencer.
- 29:44Speaker 1: That got mixed. A lot of things get mixed, so
- 29:47Speaker 1: he just gets better, just like do you remember when I
- 29:49Speaker 1: was a little boy, they would do a fundraiser. Jerry Lewis,
- 29:53Speaker 1: the actor Jerry Lewis would do fundraiser for ms. Remember
- 30:00Speaker 1: Jerry's kids. He would do a fundraiser and he would
- 30:03Speaker 1: do it for forty eight hours, just get delirious at
- 30:05Speaker 1: the end. I feel like that right now. You can't
- 30:08Speaker 1: even tell what he's saying at the end of it
- 30:09Speaker 1: was a whole part of the event that he would
- 30:11Speaker 1: stay up that long.
- 30:13Speaker 2: Wow.
- 30:13Speaker 1: But this is like that because it just keeps getting
- 30:16Speaker 1: better and better. Dave Smith has now donated and I
- 30:18Speaker 1: will pell it with a banded bird foot sticking out
- 30:21Speaker 1: of it. Did you lacker it to hold it together?
- 30:24Speaker 1: Is it pretty good?
- 30:25Speaker 5: No?
- 30:25Speaker 2: It's it holds together really well. It's just in a
- 30:27Speaker 2: little plexa glass case. I might have to come up
- 30:30Speaker 2: with a more decorative case or something to put it in.
- 30:33Speaker 2: But it's just sitting, you know, it's just sitting at
- 30:36Speaker 2: my house. It's it'll be there till the next glacial
- 30:39Speaker 2: period if I don't do something, you know, with it.
- 30:42Speaker 3: So do you know what kind of bird it is?
- 30:45Speaker 1: Yeah?
- 30:45Speaker 2: I think it was a pigeon.
- 30:47Speaker 3: Pigeon.
- 30:47Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, that makes sense, all right. The auction's
- 30:50Speaker 1: about it. He's coming soon, better than ever. All the
- 30:52Speaker 1: money goes to land Access your initiative. We will be
- 30:55Speaker 1: using the funds primarily for land access purchases, enhancing and
- 31:02Speaker 1: improving public access. One other little money thing. This is
- 31:10Speaker 1: kind of a convoluted story. There's these animal rights activists
- 31:15Speaker 1: that in Nevada the target bear biologists. Oddly, they target
- 31:24Speaker 1: Nevada state agency bear biologists. One of these animal rights
- 31:28Speaker 1: activists actually had a restraining order against her for harassing
- 31:33Speaker 1: and targeting a female biologist with a Nevada State wildlife agency.
- 31:41Speaker 5: There are Facebook pages to give a little more context
- 31:43Speaker 5: around them. Says that this page is dedicated to monitoring
- 31:47Speaker 5: and publicizing the actions Nevada Department of Wildlife and the
- 31:53Speaker 5: why is it cut off? Sorry, I guess they just
- 32:02Speaker 5: fail to write a full sentence, but gives you an idea.
- 32:07Speaker 5: They're like they're watching everybody animals there.
- 32:11Speaker 1: At a state agency at bear biologists could be engaged
- 32:13Speaker 1: in a ton of different things. They could be doing
- 32:14Speaker 1: and monitoring. They could be doing disease research, they could
- 32:17Speaker 1: be doing population demographics distribution. But inevitably they're going to
- 32:21Speaker 1: get rolled into dealing with problem bears as well, and
- 32:24Speaker 1: oftentimes in states that have really high black bear populations.
- 32:28Speaker 1: I'm not even saying this is going on here. I'm
- 32:30Speaker 1: just clarifying for people in states that have really high
- 32:33Speaker 1: black bear populations, it is so expensive in all times,
- 32:37Speaker 1: oftentimes futile to relocate black bears. Oftentimes problem black bears
- 32:42Speaker 1: will get euthanized because you could spend you could send
- 32:44Speaker 1: someone on an eight hour drive in some direction to
- 32:48Speaker 1: drop off the bear, but the once the bear is
- 32:50Speaker 1: habituated and tuned into human food sources, there's nowhere you're
- 32:53Speaker 1: going to put it where you're taking it out of action.
- 32:56Speaker 1: It's also very expensive, consumes tons of time. You have
- 32:59Speaker 1: very stable bear populations, so a lot of times someone
- 33:02Speaker 1: has to make the calm the bears get euthanized. Okay,
- 33:05Speaker 1: it's not work that anybody likes to do, but a
- 33:10Speaker 1: bear biologist can get They're doing a lot of stuff
- 33:13Speaker 1: to help enhance improve bear populations. They're also sometimes involved
- 33:16Speaker 1: in lethal control. I'm not even that sits outside of
- 33:21Speaker 1: what I'm talking about now, but this guy, Carl Lackey,
- 33:24Speaker 1: So these guys start this Facebook page and targeting this individual,
- 33:29Speaker 1: Carl Lackey. He sues him for defamation. The animal rights
- 33:36Speaker 1: activists spend one hundred and fifty grand defending themselves on
- 33:39Speaker 1: free speech grounds, okay, meaning that they host a Facebook
- 33:44Speaker 1: page and people are making threatening remarks on this page,
- 33:48Speaker 1: but ultimately, because of free speech issues, they can't be
- 33:51Speaker 1: held responsible for what other people are saying. I'm not
- 33:56Speaker 1: weighing in on, you know, I'm a free speech advocate.
- 34:00Speaker 1: I'm not weighing in on that it was a right decision,
- 34:03Speaker 1: wrong decision. What I'm weighing in on is that here
- 34:05Speaker 1: you have a state bare biologist doing his job, okay,
- 34:11Speaker 1: getting threatened and harassed by animal rights activists. And the
- 34:16Speaker 1: long and short of it is they won their free
- 34:18Speaker 1: speech case. Okay, they won it, that's fine, But now
- 34:22Speaker 1: this biologist is personally liable for the one hundred and
- 34:27Speaker 1: fifty k that has been found liable for the one
- 34:31Speaker 1: hundred and fifty k that the people he was suing
- 34:34Speaker 1: for defamation and harassment had to spend in their legal bills.
- 34:39Speaker 1: Does it GoFundMe for the guy? If you can help out,
- 34:44Speaker 1: he needs to make up this one hundred and fifty
- 34:45Speaker 1: grand that he owes these people and again not weighing
- 34:48Speaker 1: like I understand a platform isn't responsible for comments to
- 34:52Speaker 1: get posted on their platform. Okay, who cares so much
- 34:56Speaker 1: to help this guy out in his line of work
- 34:58Speaker 1: and trying to defend him and his family from online
- 35:01Speaker 1: harassment has incurred a massive bill.
- 35:04Speaker 3: Yeah that's that's shitty.
- 35:06Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, and doing state wildlife work, Yeah, doing
- 35:10Speaker 1: your job. It's insane that he's just supposed to suck
- 35:14Speaker 1: it up and have these people start like trying to
- 35:16Speaker 1: broadcast as whereabouts his image calling on people to do
- 35:20Speaker 1: acts against him.
- 35:21Speaker 3: I wonder if people like that feel good about themselves
- 35:28Speaker 3: after giving this dude threats or whatever they did, and
- 35:33Speaker 3: then making them pay him, you know, back one hundred
- 35:36Speaker 3: and fifty thousand dollars. I wonder if they're like, yes.
- 35:38Speaker 1: Yeah, probably because they've already arrived at some kind of
- 35:41Speaker 1: mental calculus that an individual bear's life is more valuable
- 35:45Speaker 1: than an individual human's life, or an individual not even that,
- 35:48Speaker 1: and that a bear, the individual bears life is more
- 35:50Speaker 1: valuable than the life of a public servant working on
- 35:55Speaker 1: behalf of wildlife. So yeah, I imagine they've gotten their mentally,
- 35:59Speaker 1: the o fund me is uh www dot go fund me,
- 36:05Speaker 1: dot com. Here's where it gets complicated, sorry, dot com,
- 36:10Speaker 1: slash f slash, Carl dash, lackey dash, bear dash, biologists
- 36:17Speaker 1: type some.
- 36:17Speaker 6: Version of that, go fund me and google his name.
- 36:22Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 36:22Speaker 2: Well, and one thing we got to remember is we
- 36:24Speaker 2: need good people in the world to become biologists. And
- 36:27Speaker 2: you know, this will de incentivize people to become biologists
- 36:31Speaker 2: who would want to become a biologist. It'll be the
- 36:33Speaker 2: situation we are with politicians, like, oh, the good people
- 36:37Speaker 2: of the world don't want to be politicians. We need
- 36:39Speaker 2: good biologists.
- 36:41Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and have yeah, and and uh, you know,
- 36:45Speaker 1: in our neighborhood right now, we're dealing with a bear
- 36:47Speaker 1: that is really pushing people's tolerance. Like our whole neighborhood.
- 36:54Speaker 1: We've got this whole tax exchange going and he's now
- 36:58Speaker 1: in people's garages, you know, and like the bear is
- 37:01Speaker 1: pushing people's tolerance. And at a point that bear is
- 37:03Speaker 1: gonna wind up not alive. If someone from the state
- 37:06Speaker 1: agency needs to come out and trap that bear. It's
- 37:08Speaker 1: not like they're like, yippie, I get to go, you know,
- 37:11Speaker 1: I mean, it's just like they're like they've tried with
- 37:14Speaker 1: this bear. They have tried their hardest to button up
- 37:20Speaker 1: the situation and make the bear not a problem. They've
- 37:23Speaker 1: at this point, they've got months into the into trying
- 37:26Speaker 1: to help people help this bear by stop the cause.
- 37:32Speaker 1: But at a point, probably maybe the way it's looking,
- 37:34Speaker 1: something's gonna need something's gonna happen. And the fact that
- 37:37Speaker 1: that person would become like an online target because they
- 37:42Speaker 1: get sent out to do a thing a public safety issue,
- 37:44Speaker 1: it's ridiculous. But again I'm not speaking to the particulars
- 37:47Speaker 1: of why this guy got targeted. Go ahead and read
- 37:49Speaker 1: up on that on your own. I'm just pointing out
- 37:51Speaker 1: the complex and he's a whole thing.
- 38:01Speaker 8: Phelps you ready, Yeah, yep, Okay. So I was asked
- 38:07Speaker 8: to come on talk about since September's right around the
- 38:12Speaker 8: corner Archie, ELK kind of consumes September, at least in
- 38:15Speaker 8: my life. So we're gonna talk about ELK bugles and
- 38:19Speaker 8: kind of what they are, when to use them, and
- 38:22Speaker 8: what I think about when we're trying to make those.
- 38:24Speaker 8: So the first up is location bugles. This is a
- 38:28Speaker 8: call when we're out in the woods. We're gonna use
- 38:30Speaker 8: that ninety percent of the time while we're hunting and
- 38:33Speaker 8: we're just looking to get a response from another bowl.
- 38:36Speaker 8: I like to think of it as kind of that
- 38:38Speaker 8: that game of Marco Polo. Right, I'm going to make
- 38:40Speaker 8: a sound, It's it's non threatening. I'm just trying to
- 38:43Speaker 8: get a response. So after my morning lasting session throughout
- 38:47Speaker 8: the day, as I'm walking ridgelines trails, when i get
- 38:50Speaker 8: to a new spot that I feel bul can hear me,
- 38:53Speaker 8: I'll bugle.
- 38:56Speaker 1: I in my.
- 38:56Speaker 8: Opinion, it can't do much harm. And a lot of
- 38:59Speaker 8: times people say you bogle too much, and and a
- 39:03Speaker 8: lot of times I'll get six to eight hundred yards
- 39:05Speaker 8: away when I was just two or three hundred yards
- 39:07Speaker 8: away from a bull, and I'll finally get him to respond.
- 39:09Speaker 8: So there's sometimes not any rhyme or reason when a
- 39:12Speaker 8: bull here is here whin he'll elect to respond? And
- 39:16Speaker 8: so what is a location bugle? And do the people
- 39:19Speaker 8: that say you call too much? Do they kill more
- 39:21Speaker 8: bulls than you?
- 39:24Speaker 6: Not?
- 39:24Speaker 8: Usually I don't want to. I don't want to be
- 39:26Speaker 8: that guy. But you try not to not to talk
- 39:29Speaker 8: about that, And like there are times, there are times
- 39:33Speaker 8: where you don't bigle a lot, but that's kind of
- 39:36Speaker 8: our our go to so a location bugle, and some
- 39:39Speaker 8: people we've in my opinion, we've coined terms that that
- 39:43Speaker 8: we use to describe and Elk's vocals, you know, and
- 39:47Speaker 8: so location bugle might be one thing here. This is
- 39:49Speaker 8: kind of what we call it. So it's a a
- 39:51Speaker 8: two to three note high pitched bugle that you're just
- 39:53Speaker 8: trying to elicit that response. And so being high pitched,
- 39:58Speaker 8: we're gonna apply a little bit of pressure if you're
- 40:00Speaker 8: using a diaphragm, if you're using like our Easy Bugler system,
- 40:05Speaker 8: you're gonna start with more pressure than you would on
- 40:07Speaker 8: say a challenge bugle or a moan or you know,
- 40:10Speaker 8: a deeper tone, and you're gonna just kind of blow
- 40:14Speaker 8: into it very shortly two to three seconds. I want
- 40:17Speaker 8: to be able to listen. A lot of times a
- 40:18Speaker 8: bull is very quick to respond or and you may
- 40:21Speaker 8: not hear it, you may not be able to tell
- 40:23Speaker 8: what direction is, or you may miss it all together. So,
- 40:25Speaker 8: in my opinion, a two to three note high pitched
- 40:27Speaker 8: bugle lasting three seconds maximum. It's a clean bugle, non threatening.
- 40:33Speaker 8: You don't add any groul, you don't add any resonance
- 40:36Speaker 8: into it's just a high note looking to get a response.
- 40:40Speaker 8: And you know you're doing a location bugle right when
- 40:43Speaker 8: the volume and the tone and the resonance kind of
- 40:46Speaker 8: rings your own ears, you don't. You know a lot
- 40:49Speaker 8: of guys are like, I'm not getting as many responses.
- 40:52Speaker 8: I like to be as loud as possible. I want
- 40:54Speaker 8: that bugle to reach as many elk as possible, high
- 40:57Speaker 8: pitched and short. And that's really the extent of it.
- 41:00Speaker 8: And as much out calling as we do, and all
- 41:03Speaker 8: these different types of bugles, grunch chuckles, challenge vehicles, you know,
- 41:07Speaker 8: all the cow calling. I would say that once again,
- 41:10Speaker 8: ninety percent of the time. This is the call I
- 41:12Speaker 8: do all year long until we locate able. You want
- 41:15Speaker 8: to rip one out for us, yeah, I'll turn away
- 41:18Speaker 8: from the mic so I don't blow it out.
- 41:19Speaker 9: But this is where our location beagle sounds like, tell
- 41:22Speaker 9: us what you're using.
- 41:25Speaker 1: This? That was a bad Uh.
- 41:27Speaker 8: This is actually a new call that we're we're bringing
- 41:29Speaker 8: out in twenty three, So it's going to be in
- 41:30Speaker 8: a in our freedom pack. So I'll just I'll leave
- 41:32Speaker 8: it there. But I had it sitting on my desk,
- 41:34Speaker 8: so it's a brand new it's it's our amp diaphragm.
- 41:37Speaker 8: It'd be really similar to like the Maverick in our lineup.
- 41:40Speaker 1: And then you got what in your hand.
- 41:43Speaker 9: So this is our metal Beagle tube. It's the one
- 41:45Speaker 9: I've been using the last couple of years.
- 41:47Speaker 8: We do have our new unleashed V tube, but this
- 41:49Speaker 8: one had a cover on it and I didn't have
- 41:50Speaker 8: to run downstairs and grab one.
- 41:53Speaker 1: That's a well thought.
- 41:55Speaker 8: Yeah, as you can tell, I'm a little I was
- 41:57Speaker 8: a little bit lazy.
- 41:58Speaker 9: I had a diaphragm on my desk and I had
- 41:59Speaker 9: a tube on my.
- 42:00Speaker 8: Dead nice and quick, just yep, just real quick. There
- 42:10Speaker 8: were times like I've got examples like in the Bob
- 42:12Speaker 8: Marshall and in some places where I would get a
- 42:15Speaker 8: response like I couldn't figure out how the bull could
- 42:18Speaker 8: hear me that quick decide to make a call and
- 42:20Speaker 8: then end it almost at the same time I was.
- 42:23Speaker 8: And there's there's lots of examples where if I hadn't
- 42:26Speaker 8: have been like a short bugle, I would have missed
- 42:28Speaker 8: it all together.
- 42:29Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's a similar, dude, just trying to
- 42:31Speaker 1: locate turkeys where you want something so fast and abrupt
- 42:35Speaker 1: that you can go from making the noise to listening
- 42:38Speaker 1: mode real quick.
- 42:39Speaker 8: Yep, yep, missing it all together or a lot of times,
- 42:43Speaker 8: and I talk about this a lot of like not
- 42:46Speaker 8: buggling too much at them. There are times where if
- 42:50Speaker 8: I can't tell the direction off of that first bigle,
- 42:52Speaker 8: I'm like, dang it, now I got to call again,
- 42:54Speaker 8: you know, so I know which direction to go or
- 42:55Speaker 8: get the wind right. So I really want to try
- 42:58Speaker 8: to get as much information out of that first bigle,
- 42:59Speaker 8: like it back as I can without screwing it all up.
- 43:04Speaker 1: So that's the next thing to keep mine. Yep. Yeah.
- 43:08Speaker 9: And then this next bugle, which actually challenge.
- 43:10Speaker 5: Ask a quick question, Jason, what do you hear uh
- 43:16Speaker 5: bull elk doing location bugles?
- 43:19Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, if you if you go out in the morning,
- 43:22Speaker 8: don't make a peep and you're in a good spot
- 43:24Speaker 8: with you know, the bowl of Cali ratio is high,
- 43:26Speaker 8: or there's multiple herds that have joined into you know,
- 43:28Speaker 8: an overnight feed zone or whatever it is. You know,
- 43:31Speaker 8: we kind of call them those little bit of retfests.
- 43:33Speaker 8: They may be challenged back and forth, but you will
- 43:35Speaker 8: have bulls just locating. We've been in and It usually
- 43:39Speaker 8: happens at better units just because you're getting more action.
- 43:42Speaker 8: But we've heard bulls like running up and down ridgelines
- 43:45Speaker 8: obviously just looking for cows. When we've called them in.
- 43:48Speaker 8: It's been probably your semi mature bulls, not quite big
- 43:51Speaker 8: enough to have a heard, but but definitely you know,
- 43:53Speaker 8: five and a half years or older, and they'll just
- 43:55Speaker 8: run around looking for cows, locate bugleing, and they're very
- 43:57Speaker 8: very talkative, and they locate a lot and so that
- 44:00Speaker 8: that's really kind of what I relate that to, is well,
- 44:02Speaker 8: real elker out there doing the same thing we've heard
- 44:05Speaker 8: him do it. We've we've been across the canyon and
- 44:08Speaker 8: literally heard a bull walk up a ridge or out
- 44:09Speaker 8: a ridge line and beagle its way down. I'm just
- 44:12Speaker 8: trying to pick up cows.
- 44:13Speaker 5: You feel like he's listening for bulls to respond or
- 44:16Speaker 5: cows to respond.
- 44:18Speaker 8: So cows to respond or cows to come to him.
- 44:20Speaker 8: Like a lot of times when I've been able to
- 44:22Speaker 8: observe like an openings or across the canyon. You know,
- 44:25Speaker 8: the way that that nature works is that buwll of
- 44:27Speaker 8: bugle and then any cow that's looking, you know, because
- 44:29Speaker 8: the cow will choose the bull that she wants to
- 44:32Speaker 8: reproduce with. That cow will just walk to that bowl
- 44:35Speaker 8: and go check him out and see if he's you know,
- 44:37Speaker 8: if he's the one so so in nature, that's how
- 44:41Speaker 8: it's working. That bowl is running up and down ridges
- 44:44Speaker 8: or outridges, and those cows are going towards him.
- 44:48Speaker 1: Thank you. Yep.
- 44:51Speaker 8: So this next bugle, once we've located a bowl, now
- 44:53Speaker 8: we're going to go into challenge beagles. And this is
- 44:55Speaker 8: where it gets a little bit fuzzy on like what
- 44:57Speaker 8: people consider a challenge bugle. You there's screams, there's you know,
- 45:02Speaker 8: there's chuckles, there's bark, screams, there's all of this stuff.
- 45:05Speaker 8: Elk will do to kind of show aggression. But what
- 45:07Speaker 8: I look at in the challenge bugles, when I get
- 45:09Speaker 8: in close, I've got the wind right I have. You
- 45:12Speaker 8: have to get within that that threat zone. Especially if
- 45:15Speaker 8: you're hunting herd bulls a satellite bowl, you've got a
- 45:18Speaker 8: little more leniency on how close you have to get.
- 45:19Speaker 8: But if you're gonna steal a bull or get him
- 45:21Speaker 8: to peel away from his cows, you have to get close.
- 45:24Speaker 8: So we're talking getting in within a hundred you know,
- 45:26Speaker 8: even closer if possible, wherever the train and the and
- 45:30Speaker 8: the vegetation allows. But then we're gonna switch the challenge, Bugles.
- 45:32Speaker 8: And and when I switch to a challenge, Bugle.
- 45:36Speaker 1: Just I want to comment, have time I spent hunting
- 45:38Speaker 1: with you? Is your location? Bugles. I don't want to
- 45:43Speaker 1: say you're flipping about them, but you're just kind of
- 45:45Speaker 1: looking for a good spot where you can hear, you know,
- 45:48Speaker 1: maybe see you around a little bit and do them.
- 45:50Speaker 1: But when you go into the mode of preparing to
- 45:53Speaker 1: do that challenge, Bule, Bugle, you do not take that lightly. No, No,
- 46:01Speaker 1: I mean you are like extremely thoughtful about the wind,
- 46:05Speaker 1: where you're gonna want to be, the topography probably where
- 46:10Speaker 1: exactly is that thing? How might it approach? Yeah? What shot?
- 46:16Speaker 1: What shot avenues do you have? How are you going
- 46:19Speaker 1: to be how are you going to move to cover
- 46:22Speaker 1: or utilize cover like plan B I mean you are
- 46:26Speaker 1: doing a lot of chess by that point. Yeah.
- 46:29Speaker 8: I mean to you know something that everybody's maybe seen
- 46:32Speaker 8: our season ten episode in New Mexico. Both are bulls.
- 46:35Speaker 8: We got very very tight. We kind of pushed into
- 46:37Speaker 8: a spot on yours where we couldn't shoot, but we
- 46:39Speaker 8: needed to be that tight and we kind of readjusted,
- 46:41Speaker 8: you know, my bawl. We locate him and then we
- 46:43Speaker 8: really would we walk for an hour without making a peep,
- 46:46Speaker 8: like we put a spot on on X. We went
- 46:48Speaker 8: all the way around him to get the wind right
- 46:50Speaker 8: and then we literally didn't beagle at him or talk
- 46:52Speaker 8: to him again. He didn't make a peep either. We
- 46:54Speaker 8: just had to go on our gut. But we didn't
- 46:56Speaker 8: make a biegle until he was eighty yards away. And
- 46:57Speaker 8: I think you be agled a couple of times. I'd
- 46:59Speaker 8: be agle a couple times, and and that bowl literally
- 47:02Speaker 8: had to get up out of his bed and walk
- 47:03Speaker 8: thirty yards for me to get a shot. And so
- 47:05Speaker 8: it's very calculated before we go use these challenge beagles.
- 47:09Speaker 8: And like you said, I don't hold anything back. If
- 47:11Speaker 8: I did all of these other calculations right and did
- 47:15Speaker 8: what I and I feel like I've got a bowl
- 47:17Speaker 8: with that right temperament. Yeah, we we're gonna kind of
- 47:21Speaker 8: unleash everything we've got. And that's really what I'm going
- 47:23Speaker 8: with on this challenge Bagle, is I'm gonna have a
- 47:25Speaker 8: little more growl In the beginning of my my Bugle,
- 47:28Speaker 8: I'm gonna kind of open up my vocal cords and
- 47:30Speaker 8: really kind of get some rasp in the middle. I'm
- 47:33Speaker 8: gonna end and and kind of kind of scream at him,
- 47:36Speaker 8: and I usually add some grunts to the end of
- 47:38Speaker 8: my Challenge Beagle. It's really just kind of throwing the
- 47:40Speaker 8: entire kitchen scenk at them to let him know that
- 47:43Speaker 8: I'm here to kind of take over your area or
- 47:44Speaker 8: I'm in your zone and you're either gonna lose your
- 47:47Speaker 8: cows or you're gonna come check me out and see
- 47:49Speaker 8: if we're gonna, you know, if we're at.
- 47:51Speaker 1: Lockhorns, or we're gonna breed him.
- 47:54Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's really what we're going after
- 48:00Speaker 8: on the Challenge Bugle. And a lot of times, you know,
- 48:03Speaker 8: we could shock in awe whatever you want to call it.
- 48:05Speaker 8: A lot of times if you get close enough and
- 48:07Speaker 8: you you haven't made another call until you get there,
- 48:10Speaker 8: you really give that bowl no other chance besides coming
- 48:13Speaker 8: and you know, dealing with you. You've got too close
- 48:16Speaker 8: to his cows, he can't take him and run. And
- 48:19Speaker 8: that's what we typically will do when we go to
- 48:22Speaker 8: Challenge Bugle, and so I can I can demonstrate kind
- 48:25Speaker 8: of what my initial challenge bugle is, and a lot
- 48:27Speaker 8: of times this bull will answer right back. Or we've
- 48:30Speaker 8: painted the picture where we may let a cow call
- 48:32Speaker 8: out right prior to our challenge bugle to kind of
- 48:35Speaker 8: paint the scene that there's a cow that may be
- 48:37Speaker 8: one of his or a cow that came to his bugle,
- 48:40Speaker 8: but now there's this other bowl very close willing.
- 48:42Speaker 9: To take care of her. So this is what my
- 48:46Speaker 9: typical challenge, bugle.
- 48:47Speaker 8: Sound like, little bit more to it, a little bit
- 49:01Speaker 8: or ask and you're really not holding anything back. You know,
- 49:04Speaker 8: a lot of guys ask me, you know when when
- 49:06Speaker 8: we're at shows or when they're talking to me, like, hey,
- 49:08Speaker 8: I really want to a bull call that isn't as
- 49:12Speaker 8: threatening or it's a smaller bowl. And I've been around
- 49:15Speaker 8: a lot of great callers that are just as loud
- 49:18Speaker 8: as me. And when you're in the woods, the comparison
- 49:21Speaker 8: of somebody that's loud on an elk call that we
- 49:23Speaker 8: think versus a real bowl, like it's the the real
- 49:26Speaker 8: elk is always exponentially louder. So in my opinion, you
- 49:29Speaker 8: can't overblow these calls. You can't be too loud, So
- 49:33Speaker 8: we we just give it everything we've got. Where we're loud,
- 49:35Speaker 8: we're in their face, we're pointing the bugle tubes at them,
- 49:38Speaker 8: and that's kind of what I think is as a
- 49:40Speaker 8: challenge bugle. And those are the two that I probably
- 49:42Speaker 8: use ninety five percent of the time when we're out
- 49:45Speaker 8: there hunting. And then there's those what I would consider
- 49:47Speaker 8: kind of the third category, uh, which the first one
- 49:50Speaker 8: that I'm going to say is accessory bugles or accessory noises.
- 49:54Speaker 8: And raking is one of those sounds that isn't what
- 49:58Speaker 8: necessarily in you know, coming from a call, but it's
- 50:01Speaker 8: something that we can all do. And there's some great
- 50:03Speaker 8: elk hunters out there that rake more than they call,
- 50:06Speaker 8: and so we typically always add that in to our
- 50:09Speaker 8: calling scenarios. It adds a ton of realism and elk
- 50:13Speaker 8: just you know it. I feel it turns our temperature
- 50:17Speaker 8: up a little bit, adds some some of that aggressiveness,
- 50:19Speaker 8: and it's a sign of the bulls mark in his territory.
- 50:21Speaker 8: You know, he's put in his scent and marking those trees.
- 50:24Speaker 8: And so I think raking is something that should be
- 50:27Speaker 8: included in almost every call in and then you've got
- 50:31Speaker 8: all these other sounds that elk will make. You know,
- 50:33Speaker 8: and I'm not gonna get into the to the intricacies
- 50:36Speaker 8: of whether what I consider a chuckle is different than
- 50:39Speaker 8: a grunt. So you got like chuckles, which you usually
- 50:41Speaker 8: typically like very quick and almost ape like sounds. You've
- 50:44Speaker 8: got grunts, which what I just did it's more elk sound,
- 50:47Speaker 8: more of a of a slower paced, more elky. You've
- 50:51Speaker 8: got screams, so there's a lot of times where bulls
- 50:53Speaker 8: will get madder and like a screaming match, it's very
- 50:55Speaker 8: short burst to you know, two seconds max. Where it's
- 50:58Speaker 8: very raspy and just kind of a scream. Bulls a
- 51:01Speaker 8: lot of times if you do make a sound and
- 51:03Speaker 8: they'll see you, they'll bark at you, and then you've
- 51:05Speaker 8: got all those moans that that they'll make as there
- 51:08Speaker 8: is there following cows or even like glunking is those
- 51:13Speaker 8: bulls are right on a hot cow as they're pushing
- 51:15Speaker 8: the cal around, and usually if you can hear glunky,
- 51:17Speaker 8: you know you're within eighty two hundred yards. And those
- 51:20Speaker 8: are kind of those accessory sounds that we always throw
- 51:23Speaker 8: in the situations to add more realism.
- 51:27Speaker 3: Would you say, like, uh, I didn't hear you say
- 51:30Speaker 3: like a lip ball in there? Would you say, like,
- 51:33Speaker 3: that's like the most aggressive, like because I've heard that before.
- 51:38Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Like, is that like the
- 51:40Speaker 3: the high end of all this most being most suggressive
- 51:44Speaker 3: for calling.
- 51:45Speaker 8: That's a that's a great question, And a lot of
- 51:47Speaker 8: times lip balls, I'd use a lot of mimicry. So
- 51:51Speaker 8: if the bull I'm calling at me is gonna lip
- 51:52Speaker 8: ball in this challenge bugle, I'm gonna do that. If
- 51:55Speaker 8: the bull that I'm calling in wants to, you know,
- 51:58Speaker 8: do a three second challenge bugle with four runts, I'm
- 52:00Speaker 8: gonna mimic him exactly. And one thing I really love
- 52:03Speaker 8: to do that really seems to get them more fired
- 52:05Speaker 8: up is if I start my bugle about halfway through
- 52:08Speaker 8: theirs and I don't let them finish their bugle. It
- 52:10Speaker 8: seems to be a way to just like, you know,
- 52:13Speaker 8: piss them off a little bit more. And so we
- 52:14Speaker 8: use a lot of mimicry. But yeah, lipball is a
- 52:17Speaker 8: great way to add to the challenge bugle. You know,
- 52:20Speaker 8: one thing I've noticed is the further south you go,
- 52:23Speaker 8: the higher percentage of lip bowling type bulls there are
- 52:26Speaker 8: the further north you are, it doesn't you know, there
- 52:28Speaker 8: may be more chuckles or grunts, Like can you crank
- 52:30Speaker 8: out a couple of these noises real quick?
- 52:32Speaker 2: Yeah?
- 52:33Speaker 1: So I want to I want to tell you something
- 52:34Speaker 1: to that I don't know if I told you about yet. Uh,
- 52:38Speaker 1: you're talking about thrash and brush right, yep. One. I
- 52:43Speaker 1: was haunting Moose with Clay last year in Alaska. We
- 52:47Speaker 1: were going down a hill on the last day of
- 52:50Speaker 1: the season. We were going down a hill to go
- 52:53Speaker 1: to a bowl that was about a mile away that
- 52:55Speaker 1: we just saw, and we were going down the hill fast.
- 53:00Speaker 1: It was like evening on the last day. We're running
- 53:02Speaker 1: down the hill trying to get to a place, hoping
- 53:05Speaker 1: to hit an opening where we might be able to
- 53:09Speaker 1: call from. But it was just dense thicket, just like
- 53:13Speaker 1: just never ending aspen. As we ran down that hill,
- 53:17Speaker 1: We're making so much noise because it was just like
- 53:20Speaker 1: there's nothing to lose at that point. We ran down
- 53:23Speaker 1: that hill and stopped and realized that bowl we never
- 53:26Speaker 1: called that bowl was coming. Two bulls were coming up
- 53:31Speaker 1: that hill and met us dead on just because of
- 53:35Speaker 1: the noise we're making coming down that hill, yep, And
- 53:38Speaker 1: we were making a tell of a lot of noise
- 53:40Speaker 1: climbing over all this burned down junk, all this burned
- 53:43Speaker 1: down spruced it was growing back as an aspen. Just smash, crash, bam.
- 53:47Speaker 1: It probably sounded like a hell of a fight. And
- 53:51Speaker 1: we stopped to call and realized that they're standing there
- 53:54Speaker 1: like they're looking for us based off that noise. Yep.
- 53:58Speaker 8: You know, when we were in New Mexico out at
- 54:00Speaker 8: a couple of days prior, and one day I was
- 54:02Speaker 8: trying to get through an area I knew there were
- 54:04Speaker 8: elk and just walking through the grass, I had to
- 54:07Speaker 8: hang out behind a tree for about fifteen minutes because
- 54:09Speaker 8: that bold chased me down the hill just hearing my
- 54:11Speaker 8: feet walk through the grass. And so my dad always
- 54:14Speaker 8: kind of joked with me. And we grew up in
- 54:15Speaker 8: a rifle hunting elk family, where you know, they go
- 54:18Speaker 8: out and hunting their white new balances so they can
- 54:20Speaker 8: be absolutely silent. You know, that's the type of elk
- 54:22Speaker 8: hunting I grew up with. My Dad's like, you know what, Jason,
- 54:24Speaker 8: you're not real quiet. You're meant to be an archvl hunter.
- 54:27Speaker 8: And it really did kind of play to my favorite
- 54:28Speaker 8: because I'm I'm stepping on sticks and cracking brush and
- 54:32Speaker 8: it just kind of works for an archvl hunter, you know,
- 54:34Speaker 8: cause an eight hundred pound animal in the landscape, they
- 54:37Speaker 8: can be whispered quiet at times, but for the majority
- 54:39Speaker 8: of the time they're gonna make noise, which you just
- 54:41Speaker 8: add that realism into it. And elk Elk definitely take
- 54:45Speaker 8: note on the noises that they're hearing.
- 54:47Speaker 1: Is yes, especially when if you've ever listened to a
- 54:49Speaker 1: half dozen of them playing grab ass on a steep slope,
- 54:52Speaker 1: it's loud.
- 54:53Speaker 3: Oh that's one of my favorite things ever. You're sitting
- 54:56Speaker 3: there eating lunch or something and you hear that, you
- 54:58Speaker 3: can I can just picture it that that downfall branch
- 55:02Speaker 3: go pop and you know, and you're like that was
- 55:05Speaker 3: a big animal, you know.
- 55:07Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, so raking.
- 55:11Speaker 1: I can't make that sound in here.
- 55:12Speaker 8: But you know, I always recommend you get a big stick,
- 55:15Speaker 8: and everybody wants to grab a little twig, Like, get
- 55:18Speaker 8: something that's robust, not going to break on you through it.
- 55:20Speaker 1: And the other thing is like yeah before he sets
- 55:24Speaker 1: to it, Yeah yeah, I mean.
- 55:26Speaker 5: Yeah, if you're your knuckles and fingers aren't bloody. You're
- 55:29Speaker 5: not making enough noise and trying.
- 55:32Speaker 8: Yeah, and I like to I like to be as
- 55:35Speaker 8: realistic as possible. So I try to find a couple
- 55:36Speaker 8: of limbs, you know, from two feet up the tree
- 55:39Speaker 8: to four feet and you just kind of rattle back
- 55:40Speaker 8: and forth, you know, you hit the brush and you
- 55:42Speaker 8: hit the top limb, hit the bottom limb. I don't
- 55:44Speaker 8: know if it matters that much, MAYI There are times
- 55:46Speaker 8: where I want to break a bunch of small, small
- 55:48Speaker 8: limbs just.
- 55:49Speaker 1: To add to it.
- 55:50Speaker 8: You know, you can kick the ground, but you know raking,
- 55:53Speaker 8: that's that's it's easy. But yeah, like you really need
- 55:56Speaker 8: to get into it and and picking up a bigger
- 55:58Speaker 8: stick make sure that you can get through that. Chuckles,
- 56:01Speaker 8: like I said, are a little more ape like, So
- 56:03Speaker 8: a lot of times you'll get these on the end
- 56:05Speaker 8: of a bugle around here where I've got roosevelts in
- 56:08Speaker 8: my backyard. I grew up with a lot of our
- 56:09Speaker 8: bulls chuckling and grunting more so than like the high
- 56:11Speaker 8: notes that we're talking about. But here's what a chuckle er.
- 56:14Speaker 8: In my opinion, a chuckle sounds like so a little
- 56:23Speaker 8: less elk sound a little more ape like, where the
- 56:26Speaker 8: grunts are a little more drawn out. They get a
- 56:28Speaker 8: little bit more of that high pitch from from the bowl.
- 56:30Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 56:31Speaker 1: Man, and his belly gets into it. Yeah, yeah, like
- 56:34Speaker 1: his belly is like bouncing, you know, not his belly
- 56:40Speaker 1: might be bouncing. I know that's between him and his wife.
- 56:43Speaker 1: I'm talking about they have the bull.
- 56:47Speaker 8: So so here's what I would consider a grunt. It's
- 56:55Speaker 8: a little more that elkie sound. Scream like I say,
- 56:59Speaker 8: two two and a half second, real raspy, real short.
- 57:02Speaker 1: And usually when you get a bowld.
- 57:04Speaker 8: To scream back at you, his temper is very high
- 57:06Speaker 8: and we usually have real good success with calling them
- 57:08Speaker 8: in and if they scream, I'll typically scream m So
- 57:16Speaker 8: it's a scream and then you got your barks, and
- 57:18Speaker 8: a lot of times you'll when you do hear a bark,
- 57:20Speaker 8: it's it's about my second least favorite sound to hear
- 57:23Speaker 8: in the elk wood, aside from wolves howling. But barks
- 57:27Speaker 8: usually they have seen seen something they don't like or
- 57:31Speaker 8: heard something they don't like, but they can't necessarily get
- 57:33Speaker 8: wind on you. So a bark's really a come show
- 57:37Speaker 8: me your you know, come show yourself or I'm out
- 57:39Speaker 8: of here, I'm on alert. But and then what we
- 57:41Speaker 8: will do in response is will bark back at him,
- 57:43Speaker 8: because you're basically saying, well, I seen and heard something
- 57:46Speaker 8: I don't like. You show yourself. And in twenty nineteen
- 57:49Speaker 8: when I was in Wyoming, I have a bowl bark
- 57:51Speaker 8: at me, and I bark back at him and he
- 57:53Speaker 8: kind of comes trotting out in the middle of open
- 57:55Speaker 8: and I was able to get a shot. So always
- 57:56Speaker 8: be if you get bark at, bark right back at him.
- 57:59Speaker 8: But it's just a quick blast of you know, it's
- 58:03Speaker 8: it's a come show yourself sound.
- 58:08Speaker 1: So you get like he's nervous, and you might set
- 58:10Speaker 1: him at ease by by doing it back like oh
- 58:14Speaker 1: there's another help. Yeah, yeah, there's you can hold him
- 58:17Speaker 1: for a long time with their warning cry is you
- 58:22Speaker 1: can turn the tide on antelope big time on prong
- 58:25Speaker 1: horns with their own warning call back at.
- 58:28Speaker 9: Him, get him to hang out.
- 58:31Speaker 1: They'll they'll start coming more if you start. If you
- 58:34Speaker 1: hide and start doing it back at him, it just
- 58:35Speaker 1: really gets their curiosity.
- 58:37Speaker 3: Can you do that? And that's a weird Yeah, it's
- 58:39Speaker 3: like a.
- 58:41Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm not good at it, but man,
- 58:43Speaker 1: you can you can take one. It's gonna be out
- 58:46Speaker 1: and and he'll start coming. He'll be he'll like turn
- 58:51Speaker 1: around and start going back your direction. I don't think
- 58:55Speaker 1: they hear it a lot from people, for sure.
- 58:58Speaker 2: All that out phil idea, Yeah.
- 59:02Speaker 8: Right, and then uh, you like the mones and stuff,
- 59:05Speaker 8: you know, but if they bark, usually what happens. If
- 59:07Speaker 8: they don't see what they like, they're gonna run out
- 59:09Speaker 8: the ridge and scare every elkre let, every elk in
- 59:11Speaker 8: the whole entire country know that they and they bark
- 59:14Speaker 8: for you know, until you can't see them anymore. So
- 59:17Speaker 8: it's best to get them calm back down. And then
- 59:19Speaker 8: mones are just those sounds as he's running his herd
- 59:21Speaker 8: as we get in tight, you know, you'll hear him
- 59:23Speaker 8: making little sounds that you can't hear from very far away,
- 59:26Speaker 8: and we just add those in for for realism. This
- 59:29Speaker 8: is kind of what a moan just real light on
- 59:31Speaker 8: the latex. So as they're pushing cows around, they're just
- 59:40Speaker 8: making small little noises that just at like I say,
- 59:43Speaker 8: just you're just adding to the realism. They're more accessory sounds.
- 59:46Speaker 8: But there are times when we'll throw those in just
- 59:49Speaker 8: to be part.
- 59:50Speaker 3: I feel like I kind of hear that too sometimes, Jason,
- 59:53Speaker 3: when they're they're sleeping, when they're or they're just in
- 59:57Speaker 3: their beds right like almost like a moan. It's like
- 1:00:00Speaker 3: a real quiet like little yep.
- 1:00:03Speaker 6: You know.
- 1:00:03Speaker 8: One thing that they do. It takes a fairly trained ear.
- 1:00:07Speaker 8: But location bugles. We talked about him being high pitch
- 1:00:10Speaker 8: and sharp and to the point, like a betted bull.
- 1:00:13Speaker 8: To a trained ear, we can we can pick out
- 1:00:15Speaker 8: usually when it's a bedded boil. Yeah, the time of
- 1:00:17Speaker 8: day usually helps us do that as well. But you'll
- 1:00:20Speaker 8: know if a bull's on his feet versus betted, especially
- 1:00:22Speaker 8: if you fold that same bowl all morning, his his
- 1:00:25Speaker 8: bugle cuts to about half intensity. It's a real lazy bugle.
- 1:00:29Speaker 8: And so you can, you know, start to tell when
- 1:00:30Speaker 8: that bull's betted. Everything gets a little bit softer and
- 1:00:33Speaker 8: quieter and deeper.
- 1:00:36Speaker 1: All right, Phelps you good man? Yeah, yeah, thanks for
- 1:00:39Speaker 1: having me on. Yeah man, So everybody as gearing up.
- 1:00:42Speaker 1: Check out Phelps game calls. Uh, just a true Elk
- 1:00:45Speaker 1: call and mastermind elk great elk call maker, great communicator.
- 1:00:50Speaker 1: He'll give you all of his hot spots. Just hit
- 1:00:52Speaker 1: him up. Off Jason, we're gonna have Auction Off Phelps
- 1:00:58Speaker 1: is on x password at the Auction House Bodies.
- 1:01:03Speaker 5: If you want to listen to like full I don't
- 1:01:05Speaker 5: know how long the show is usually Jason forty five
- 1:01:08Speaker 5: minutes an hour. Cutting the Distance Yep.
- 1:01:11Speaker 1: Yeah, but you can go. Yeah, we're we're just getting ready.
- 1:01:13Speaker 8: Dirk's gonna jump on as a as a co host
- 1:01:16Speaker 8: here by time this drop, So we're gonna for the
- 1:01:18Speaker 8: next couple of months. You're gonna get as much elk
- 1:01:20Speaker 8: hunting information as you you want to do.
- 1:01:22Speaker 4: That.
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: That's that's a great heads up. So thanks for the reminder, Yahni,
- 1:01:25Speaker 1: go listen to Cutting the Distance so hosted by Jason Phelps,
- 1:01:30Speaker 1: Dirt Durham. There that that used to be bi weekly,
- 1:01:33Speaker 1: it's not weekly. And when these boys going to elk
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: mode this time of year, it's just gonna be all
- 1:01:38Speaker 1: elk all the time. So you'll you'll you'll learn more
- 1:01:41Speaker 1: than you can remember by checking that out. And again,
- 1:01:45Speaker 1: man like just lifelong elk hunter, grew up hunting the
- 1:01:49Speaker 1: hardest elk on the planet in the Pacific Northwest. Phenomenal calls.
- 1:01:54Speaker 1: Thanks a lot Phelps.
- 1:01:55Speaker 9: Thanks, thanks guys.
- 1:01:57Speaker 1: All right, Dave Smith, Yes, why uh give me the
- 1:02:03Speaker 1: crash course on how DSD came into existence.
- 1:02:07Speaker 2: The short, not not so boring version. It's all boring.
- 1:02:11Speaker 2: The crash course is I was massively into goose hunting
- 1:02:17Speaker 2: and I didn't have any decoys. I couldn't find any
- 1:02:21Speaker 2: decoys that were working the way that I thought that they.
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: Should back up way more than that, Okay, I mean
- 1:02:27Speaker 1: I feel like I was born, I was an anemic child.
- 1:02:30Speaker 2: I was born. I was born in Cottonwood, Idaho, and okay,
- 1:02:34Speaker 2: born in Idaho. Well, so yeah, I was born in Idaho. Yeah,
- 1:02:37Speaker 2: I mean my I had an older brother. I say
- 1:02:41Speaker 2: had because he did pass away when I was nineteen.
- 1:02:43Speaker 2: When he was nineteen, I was seventeen, and he and
- 1:02:46Speaker 2: I we dreamed about goose hunting our entire lives, Like
- 1:02:49Speaker 2: we used to literally like drop you know, pictures of
- 1:02:53Speaker 2: goose hunting with crayons.
- 1:02:54Speaker 1: So when most kids have drawn army tanks and monster tracks,
- 1:02:57Speaker 1: you guys are growing goose hunting.
- 1:02:59Speaker 2: Pretty much, and it's it's kind of a weird thing.
- 1:03:01Speaker 2: I mean, like our dad hunted, but then he was
- 1:03:05Speaker 2: a great, great archer, but he hunted mostly before we
- 1:03:09Speaker 2: were born. But my brother and I, we both had
- 1:03:12Speaker 2: the hunting gene, you know, for sure, we could just tell.
- 1:03:16Speaker 2: And for some reason we were just obsessed with geeese,
- 1:03:19Speaker 2: even though we didn't we didn't really have any exposure
- 1:03:21Speaker 2: to goose hunting, and we didn't even have any geeese around,
- 1:03:24Speaker 2: and so all of a sudden we started getting geese.
- 1:03:29Speaker 1: Because you're you're old enough that goose numbers weren't what
- 1:03:32Speaker 1: they are.
- 1:03:33Speaker 2: Yeah, So where I live in the Willammett Valley of Oregon,
- 1:03:36Speaker 2: there's they really the only goose was the dusky Canada goose,
- 1:03:40Speaker 2: so and those and so in the sixties, there was
- 1:03:43Speaker 2: an earthquake in Alaska that uplifted the delta where they
- 1:03:48Speaker 2: where they nest, and then all of a sudden, mammalion
- 1:03:51Speaker 2: predators could access it. So the numbers of Dusky Canada geese,
- 1:03:56Speaker 2: you know, really crashed.
- 1:03:58Speaker 1: So there was hunt a spot. I have haunted a spot.
- 1:04:03Speaker 1: Haunt I have haunted a spot in Alaska that was
- 1:04:07Speaker 1: hay Fields and it recessed and became marsh in the
- 1:04:11Speaker 1: same earthquake.
- 1:04:13Speaker 2: That's oh, that's good to hear. It became a wetland
- 1:04:15Speaker 2: in the earthquake. Yeah, so what happened.
- 1:04:17Speaker 1: We're still equipment laying out there. Yeah, that things sunk.
- 1:04:20Speaker 2: Yeah, That's that's what I think with all this stuff,
- 1:04:22Speaker 2: there should be there should be an upside. That can't
- 1:04:24Speaker 2: always be a downside only you know, like and that
- 1:04:27Speaker 2: probably that probably helped cacklers, you know.
- 1:04:30Speaker 1: Got it.
- 1:04:31Speaker 2: So so we had we did have geese in the
- 1:04:35Speaker 2: valley and we couldn't hunt them, and and there was
- 1:04:39Speaker 2: a while where we could. And when I was very young,
- 1:04:42Speaker 2: I I went to you know, quite a quite an
- 1:04:45Speaker 2: effort to hunt, to hunt them, and that's all we
- 1:04:47Speaker 2: could hunt is dusky Kennedy's I mean I built, I would.
- 1:04:50Speaker 2: I would dig pits with a shovel, big huge pits,
- 1:04:52Speaker 2: pits with a shovel, and build these really elaborate wooden
- 1:04:55Speaker 2: pits with like trap doors that you know, sprang open
- 1:04:58Speaker 2: and swivel chairs and everything, and going to off them
- 1:05:00Speaker 2: into those those holes. And I made homemade decoys out
- 1:05:03Speaker 2: of you know, I mean, it was dirt poor, So
- 1:05:05Speaker 2: I made decoys out of like, you know, canvas, bags
- 1:05:07Speaker 2: and anything I possibly could.
- 1:05:09Speaker 1: And you know, uh, the first I have pictures of
- 1:05:14Speaker 1: me and my brother Danny in high school hunting geese
- 1:05:17Speaker 1: when they first opened the early goose season in Michigan.
- 1:05:20Speaker 1: And our decoys. We took five gallon buckets, cut them
- 1:05:24Speaker 1: in half length wise and then made plywood heads and
- 1:05:32Speaker 1: laid out all those five gallon buckets with plywood heads on,
- 1:05:35Speaker 1: and then sat smoking making corn cob pipes because the
- 1:05:39Speaker 1: corn was still standing, making corn cob pipes and smoking
- 1:05:42Speaker 1: corn silks. And they're trying to get a goose to
- 1:05:44Speaker 1: land in those buckets. Yeah, I mean, like for us
- 1:05:49Speaker 1: to get a goose to even fly by and range
- 1:05:51Speaker 1: was a big deal.
- 1:05:52Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and it's like, yeah, all those decoys were
- 1:05:55Speaker 2: working reasonably well, and then somebody had to come along
- 1:05:58Speaker 2: and make like an ultra realistic it's arms race, right, yeah,
- 1:06:01Speaker 2: it's exactly. And and and then it kind of had
- 1:06:04Speaker 2: affected the whole industry, you know, so and then everybody
- 1:06:09Speaker 2: had to make realistic decoys. So but in my in
- 1:06:14Speaker 2: my case, I got to the point where more and
- 1:06:16Speaker 2: more geese we were were wintering in our in our valley,
- 1:06:20Speaker 2: So they has numbers improved, Oh, they were just they
- 1:06:22Speaker 2: just kept coming up and up and up, and so.
- 1:06:23Speaker 1: There was it was it changing agriculture practices or was
- 1:06:26Speaker 1: just geese numbers were increasing.
- 1:06:28Speaker 2: It was neither, honestly neither. So what was happening is
- 1:06:32Speaker 2: all the geese. So the dusky dusky numbers never really
- 1:06:36Speaker 2: came came up to levels that are like they're not
- 1:06:40Speaker 2: they're not huntable or anything like that. What happened was
- 1:06:44Speaker 2: all the geese that were wintering in the Central Valley
- 1:06:46Speaker 2: of California or northern California. It's just started just started
- 1:06:50Speaker 2: wintering in the Willhammette Valley.
- 1:06:52Speaker 1: Because of drought patterns or it's not well understood.
- 1:06:55Speaker 2: I don't know, because that that changes, that that goes
- 1:06:58Speaker 2: in cycles, you know, every ten or twenty years, and
- 1:07:00Speaker 2: we're starting to get snows where we never had snows before.
- 1:07:03Speaker 2: Things like that has changed, and I don't really know
- 1:07:05Speaker 2: the answer, so that only the geese snow. But so
- 1:07:10Speaker 2: so now we had all these these geese and nobody
- 1:07:12Speaker 2: really knew how to hunt them, and they were trying
- 1:07:14Speaker 2: to work out a way that you could hunt them
- 1:07:16Speaker 2: because the farmers were, you know, kind of alarmed by this,
- 1:07:21Speaker 2: so they worked out a way where you could hunt.
- 1:07:23Speaker 2: You could hunt Canada geese. We had seven subspecies of
- 1:07:26Speaker 2: Canada geese in the valley.
- 1:07:27Speaker 1: And but that was before they shrank, didn't it didn't
- 1:07:31Speaker 1: we go just because of lumpers and splitters in taxonomy.
- 1:07:36Speaker 1: Didn't we go from twenty eight geese down to three
- 1:07:39Speaker 1: or four? Well, because the Ornithological Society one day to said,
- 1:07:44Speaker 1: just scrap all that. It's just it's we're splitting hairs.
- 1:07:47Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's definitely there's definitely some of that.
- 1:07:49Speaker 2: It went from twenty eight down to maybe eleven and
- 1:07:53Speaker 2: one that's extinct. But people still argue about that, you know,
- 1:07:57Speaker 2: like so there's isolating breeding, there's isolated breeding groups, especially
- 1:08:03Speaker 2: of lessers, and some people will say that is a
- 1:08:05Speaker 2: separate subspecies, and some people will say it's the same.
- 1:08:07Speaker 2: And that part is so confusing. I mean, nobody knows
- 1:08:11Speaker 2: the real, the real answer.
- 1:08:12Speaker 1: But yeah, maybe because it's all definitional and just varies
- 1:08:15Speaker 1: on the person. It's just it's it's highly subjective, right yeah.
- 1:08:20Speaker 2: Yeah, So what what we were most concerned I was
- 1:08:24Speaker 2: concerned about is just like from a legal standpoint, what
- 1:08:26Speaker 2: we could shoot and what we couldn't and everything. So
- 1:08:29Speaker 2: you had to take a course and pass the course
- 1:08:32Speaker 2: that proves that you would know how to hunt without
- 1:08:35Speaker 2: shooting a dusky Canada goose and tell me more.
- 1:08:38Speaker 1: I don't know that I've ever laid eyes on a
- 1:08:39Speaker 1: dusky Okay, so tell me what, like, walk me through this.
- 1:08:43Speaker 2: They're they're really pretty, they're really neat birds. They're they're
- 1:08:46Speaker 2: and they're sort of cool because they're sort of like
- 1:08:48Speaker 2: our are our original goose. They're kind of like like
- 1:08:51Speaker 2: co hosts am and our cutthroat trout or you know,
- 1:08:54Speaker 2: black tailed deer where I live. So they're medium large
- 1:08:58Speaker 2: goose and they're very, very very dark. So thank god
- 1:09:01Speaker 2: they're really dark, because otherwise, you know, in flight, there
- 1:09:04Speaker 2: wouldn't be any great way to are there.
- 1:09:07Speaker 1: Do they still have a white cheek or is that
- 1:09:08Speaker 1: white cheek as duskier too, so that white cheek is white?
- 1:09:12Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yep. All Canada geese have a white cheek
- 1:09:15Speaker 2: and some people call them in a white cheek geese
- 1:09:17Speaker 2: and everything. So yeah, they still have that, and it's
- 1:09:20Speaker 2: that believe it or not. Probably illusions have the lowest
- 1:09:26Speaker 2: amount of white on their cheeks, just mostly because it
- 1:09:31Speaker 2: usually doesn't cover the bottom of the throat. But but
- 1:09:36Speaker 2: dusky kenadedies have a pretty prominent white cheek patch and stuff.
- 1:09:39Speaker 2: But they're just really really really dark, and they have
- 1:09:42Speaker 2: they sound different, they act different, they they're in, they're
- 1:09:46Speaker 2: in certain sized groups. They fly around fairly low, and
- 1:09:50Speaker 2: they kind of keep to themselves. They don't they don't
- 1:09:54Speaker 2: mingle too much with other Canada geese. So you take
- 1:09:57Speaker 2: this test and then you get a a goose card
- 1:10:01Speaker 2: that's your permit to hunt, and you can only hunt
- 1:10:05Speaker 2: This is how it was originally. You could only hunt
- 1:10:07Speaker 2: between the hours of eight and.
- 1:10:09Speaker 1: Four, ok.
- 1:10:11Speaker 2: And you had to check all your geese in at
- 1:10:13Speaker 2: a check station when you were done, and they would
- 1:10:15Speaker 2: carefully measure the Coleman length, which is the measurement of
- 1:10:20Speaker 2: the top of the bill. That was one of the
- 1:10:23Speaker 2: things that they would use, and then like the length
- 1:10:25Speaker 2: of the legs and the color of the breast. And
- 1:10:28Speaker 2: if you shot a dusky Canada goose, your card was
- 1:10:30Speaker 2: punched and you're done for the season. Really yeah, and
- 1:10:34Speaker 2: what year was this, Well, I don't know. This was
- 1:10:37Speaker 2: back in the Yeah, I'm terrible about dates. I mean,
- 1:10:42Speaker 2: this was all up until about eight years ago. So
- 1:10:47Speaker 2: then eight years ago what they did is a.
- 1:10:49Speaker 1: Yeah, this is all new to me. Yeah, I had
- 1:10:52Speaker 1: never heard this.
- 1:10:52Speaker 2: Yeah, it was kind of cool because it just kept
- 1:10:56Speaker 2: out a lot of you know, the pilgrims, Like you
- 1:10:59Speaker 2: had to be pretty dedicated to this, and and you
- 1:11:02Speaker 2: had to you learned a ton about geese because we
- 1:11:06Speaker 2: would get set up before it would get light. Like
- 1:11:09Speaker 2: some people would go out and they'd start setting up
- 1:11:11Speaker 2: at seven and they'd be set up by eight. Well,
- 1:11:13Speaker 2: the geese are trying to get in, you know, they're
- 1:11:15Speaker 2: trying to get in, uh before that. So what we
- 1:11:18Speaker 2: would always do.
- 1:11:19Speaker 1: Is the is the eight am restriction because they want
- 1:11:21Speaker 1: good daylight exactly.
- 1:11:23Speaker 2: Yep. They won't you to be able to see to
- 1:11:25Speaker 2: see him. So but it was it worked for us
- 1:11:28Speaker 2: because we just learned so much about geese by being
- 1:11:32Speaker 2: set up and having to watch them for the first
- 1:11:34Speaker 2: hour hour and a half and having them come and
- 1:11:36Speaker 2: land in the decoys and seeing what, you know, what
- 1:11:40Speaker 2: works and what doesn't work.
- 1:11:41Speaker 1: And do you ever get your card evoked?
- 1:11:42Speaker 2: What's that?
- 1:11:43Speaker 1: Did you ever get your card punched?
- 1:11:45Speaker 2: I never did? I never did so one time. Brad,
- 1:11:50Speaker 2: you know my partner, Brad, he's a phenomenal goose hunter.
- 1:11:53Speaker 2: He's honestly, he's one of the best goose hunters on
- 1:11:56Speaker 2: the planet. One time he and and one of our
- 1:11:59Speaker 2: one of the other guys that we work with, they
- 1:12:02Speaker 2: got their cards punch because there there's there's also this
- 1:12:07Speaker 2: flock of lessers that hang out around was still like
- 1:12:12Speaker 2: our anchorage, and those birds were fairly dark and fairly large,
- 1:12:18Speaker 2: and so it was close. But we felt like we
- 1:12:21Speaker 2: knew those birds really really well, so we didn't have
- 1:12:23Speaker 2: any problem hunting those. And one time Brad and and
- 1:12:29Speaker 2: I think it was Brian Stone got their cards punched
- 1:12:31Speaker 2: because they shot They shot banded anchorage lessers and we've
- 1:12:37Speaker 2: done that several times, but usually so they have a
- 1:12:39Speaker 2: smaller band than the than the duskies do, so we
- 1:12:44Speaker 2: shoot those with confidence. And most of the checkers at
- 1:12:47Speaker 2: the chech station just know and they also have a
- 1:12:49Speaker 2: reference of band numbers, and so you're supposed to be
- 1:12:53Speaker 2: able to go into the tech station and they'll see
- 1:12:56Speaker 2: that it's a smaller band or they'll check the number
- 1:12:58Speaker 2: and they'll say, okay, you're fine, it's on a dusky. Well,
- 1:13:01Speaker 2: in one case they got their cards punched, and it
- 1:13:04Speaker 2: worked out great for me because they called me and
- 1:13:07Speaker 2: told me and they're like, yeah, we're getting bombed in
- 1:13:09Speaker 2: by all these lessers, and a bunch of them have
- 1:13:11Speaker 2: net collars and you know, radar transmitters and tarsus bands
- 1:13:14Speaker 2: and leg bands, and so I went and sat in
- 1:13:17Speaker 2: their blind. I got to hunt. The next day. They
- 1:13:19Speaker 2: just left all their decoys out and I got it.
- 1:13:21Speaker 2: I got some nice birds. And then they sort of
- 1:13:25Speaker 2: went to a review panel and found out that yeah,
- 1:13:28Speaker 2: they were Anchorage lessers, so they got their cards vindication
- 1:13:33Speaker 2: man and twice for me. Hunting on Willop a Bay,
- 1:13:38Speaker 2: I got to the check station and the checker was gone,
- 1:13:42Speaker 2: and assumed that everyone was done for the day, but
- 1:13:44Speaker 2: I was. I had such a good relationship with the
- 1:13:47Speaker 2: biologists and the state state Policies was in the state
- 1:13:50Speaker 2: of Washington, that they both times they said, okay, Dave,
- 1:13:54Speaker 2: well tell us what you got, you know, tell us
- 1:13:56Speaker 2: what your birds are. And I told him, They're like, okay, yeah,
- 1:13:59Speaker 2: we'll send you a new card. In the sent me
- 1:14:00Speaker 2: a new card right away, so that you know, I
- 1:14:03Speaker 2: was lucky in that respect. But I never got my
- 1:14:06Speaker 2: card punched luckily, Like not for real. I've come dang close.
- 1:14:10Speaker 2: I mean, I you know, I've had I've had some
- 1:14:15Speaker 2: checkers that you know, there's a big turnover of checkers,
- 1:14:19Speaker 2: and some of them really didn't know what they were doing,
- 1:14:21Speaker 2: and some of them did. And you know, I've had
- 1:14:26Speaker 2: some scary situations, but it's fine. I I survived it,
- 1:14:31Speaker 2: you know. And now it's to the point where there's
- 1:14:32Speaker 2: no more check stations. Now it's illegal to shoot a
- 1:14:35Speaker 2: dusky Canada goose. And the problem with that. It's good
- 1:14:40Speaker 2: and bad. But the problem with that is now everybody
- 1:14:43Speaker 2: goose hunts, every duck hunter shoots, you know, a geese
- 1:14:46Speaker 2: flying over and stuff, and so it's just changed the
- 1:14:50Speaker 2: goose hunting dramatically. Like I mean, I had some just beautiful,
- 1:14:57Speaker 2: you know, periods of time, several seasons in a row
- 1:15:00Speaker 2: where I just had just fabulous goose hunting, and a
- 1:15:02Speaker 2: lot of it was because of the difficulties and the
- 1:15:05Speaker 2: check stations. Almost I mean, the funnest hunting of my
- 1:15:09Speaker 2: life was six seasons on Willipa Bay. There were several
- 1:15:14Speaker 2: birds that were they were actually across between a well
- 1:15:19Speaker 2: western and a dusky. They called them whiskies, and the
- 1:15:23Speaker 2: bile just really wanted them gone, and so they would
- 1:15:27Speaker 2: put white neck colors on them, and so none of
- 1:15:31Speaker 2: the locals would bother hunting those birds, because I mean,
- 1:15:36Speaker 2: you know, you go down a tide flat and you're
- 1:15:38Speaker 2: hunting in this huge, this huge area, and it's a
- 1:15:42Speaker 2: pain in the ass to get out there, and you
- 1:15:44Speaker 2: got to figure out how you're going to hide once
- 1:15:46Speaker 2: you get out there, and decoys, getting decoys out there
- 1:15:48Speaker 2: and all that stuff. It was all difficult. And then
- 1:15:51Speaker 2: you get some birds to come in and there's a
- 1:15:54Speaker 2: very good chance that it's going to be a whole
- 1:15:55Speaker 2: bunch of big, dark birds, and none of them have
- 1:15:58Speaker 2: a white collar, so you can't shoot unless it has
- 1:16:00Speaker 2: a white collar. And so now the locals were bothering,
- 1:16:05Speaker 2: and to me, it was just paradise, Like I absolutely
- 1:16:09Speaker 2: loved that. It was just so much fun. And uh,
- 1:16:12Speaker 2: I love shooting you know, those collared birds, and everyone
- 1:16:15Speaker 2: of them had a leg band and I just started,
- 1:16:18Speaker 2: you know, accumulating those, and I it was just super exciting,
- 1:16:22Speaker 2: like every time I shot one, and that was that
- 1:16:25Speaker 2: was the funnest goose hunting I've ever had.
- 1:16:27Speaker 1: Do you got land you're pretty loaded up with bands?
- 1:16:30Speaker 2: I do, yeah, yeah, And I have over one hundred
- 1:16:36Speaker 2: net collars really yeah, really, and from from a lot
- 1:16:42Speaker 2: of different subspecies, so I can blame Brad Cochrane, I
- 1:16:45Speaker 2: think for that. So I tried to stick with mostly
- 1:16:48Speaker 2: mostly white collars, which doesn't disrupt anything any studies or
- 1:16:53Speaker 2: anything like that. But man, once you once you learned
- 1:16:57Speaker 2: how to spot a collar in the air, and you
- 1:17:00Speaker 2: would think that it'd be like you'd see the color
- 1:17:03Speaker 2: of it or something like that, and it's not it
- 1:17:05Speaker 2: at all. It just it just looks like a little
- 1:17:08Speaker 2: kink in the neck. It just looks kind of like
- 1:17:10Speaker 2: a broken neck. And once you get that down, you
- 1:17:15Speaker 2: can't help yourself but to shoot them. Like when you're
- 1:17:18Speaker 2: hunting cacklers or something like that, that's just the funnest
- 1:17:20Speaker 2: thing ever too. It's just you get a big grind
- 1:17:24Speaker 2: of cacklers going and just keep watching them, keep watching them,
- 1:17:28Speaker 2: and you maybe look at a block of four or
- 1:17:31Speaker 2: five at once and make sure that they're on a
- 1:17:34Speaker 2: line where you have that second that it takes to
- 1:17:37Speaker 2: sit up and shoot. And you know, I mean I
- 1:17:41Speaker 2: went like dozens of days where it didn't fire, shot
- 1:17:46Speaker 2: all day, just watch birds all day long. You wouldn't
- 1:17:50Speaker 2: see one, and once in a while.
- 1:17:52Speaker 1: You'd see it was just looking for collared birds.
- 1:17:54Speaker 2: Yeah, it was fun. It was just something, I mean,
- 1:17:57Speaker 2: something that we wanted to do, and we've also so
- 1:18:00Speaker 2: you know, always felt like that's how we learned a
- 1:18:03Speaker 2: lot about geese. It is just well, for one, we
- 1:18:06Speaker 2: never wanted to shoot into big flocks. So like when
- 1:18:10Speaker 2: I was hunting those whiskies, I mean, there was only
- 1:18:13Speaker 2: so many of them and they were mixed in with
- 1:18:15Speaker 2: other birds, and I just could not shoot into big
- 1:18:18Speaker 2: flocks or I would have had it ruined, you know,
- 1:18:22Speaker 2: in one season. I wanted it to last and last,
- 1:18:25Speaker 2: and so I was pretty pretty patient. But I would definitely,
- 1:18:29Speaker 2: like on cacklers, I would definitely make that exception because well,
- 1:18:33Speaker 2: one thing about cacklers is they're so gregarious and they're
- 1:18:36Speaker 2: so loud, and they're in such large flocks that if
- 1:18:39Speaker 2: you have a giant grind of cacklers going and you
- 1:18:42Speaker 2: sit up and make one shot and drop a collared
- 1:18:46Speaker 2: bird and get back in your blind instead of getting
- 1:18:50Speaker 2: out and whooping it up and all that stuff whatever,
- 1:18:52Speaker 2: you back in your blind. Most of the time the
- 1:18:54Speaker 2: grind will keep coming because the birds that saw you
- 1:19:00Speaker 2: and saw the boogey man, they kind of freak out.
- 1:19:02Speaker 2: But the birds on the far side of this giant grind.
- 1:19:05Speaker 2: They haven't, they don't know what it is. And what
- 1:19:07Speaker 2: would you keep going?
- 1:19:08Speaker 3: What would you consider a in your mind? What's like
- 1:19:12Speaker 3: a giant grind?
- 1:19:13Speaker 5: Like how many birds grind? I've never heard that.
- 1:19:15Speaker 1: I've never heard that. I know, the grind from just
- 1:19:17Speaker 1: being the daily grind of like getting up so early
- 1:19:23Speaker 1: and setting out decoys and pulling into decoys and just
- 1:19:25Speaker 1: like it's a frequently waterfoul. People will talk about the
- 1:19:29Speaker 1: grind of just how the drudgery of hunting hard.
- 1:19:32Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's a that's the real grind for sure.
- 1:19:35Speaker 2: And that's a grind too. Yeah, I mean like a
- 1:19:38Speaker 2: tornado or you know whatever. We've a lot of people
- 1:19:41Speaker 2: have different names for it, but I mean it. You know,
- 1:19:44Speaker 2: it's like we would still probably call it a grind
- 1:19:46Speaker 2: if it was two hundred birds, but but it could
- 1:19:49Speaker 2: be ten thousand, yeah, you know, and and a lot
- 1:19:51Speaker 2: of times it's a thousand.
- 1:19:53Speaker 1: You know, you're talking about just like an aggregation of
- 1:19:56Speaker 1: birds that is kind of on the same schedule and
- 1:19:58Speaker 1: they're coming through in a group. Uh there, they might
- 1:20:01Speaker 1: be spread apart by many minutes.
- 1:20:03Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, I'm talking about a flock. Yeah,
- 1:20:06Speaker 2: a big, a big giant flock. Sometimes other flocks are
- 1:20:09Speaker 2: joining at the same time.
- 1:20:10Speaker 1: But so they didn't like it's a grouping that you
- 1:20:14Speaker 1: can like put your eyes on it one time.
- 1:20:16Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
- 1:20:19Speaker 4: Tornado, it's like a snow goose tornado.
- 1:20:23Speaker 2: Yeah Tonado, Yeah, yep, exactly, yep.
- 1:20:35Speaker 1: All right, get me too, because I asked you a
- 1:20:37Speaker 1: bunch of questions got us off. So at a point
- 1:20:41Speaker 1: you you got into guiding, and then I want to
- 1:20:45Speaker 1: get to how you got into how you thought to
- 1:20:47Speaker 1: make your own decoy, which doesn't occur to everybody.
- 1:20:51Speaker 2: Yeah, So I mean the the decoys came first, and
- 1:20:56Speaker 2: then the decoys worked so well that that's what got
- 1:20:59Speaker 2: us into guiding. So I was buying every every brand
- 1:21:04Speaker 2: of decoy that that was available, and and I was
- 1:21:10Speaker 2: I was just the birds just weren't landing in them.
- 1:21:12Speaker 2: And I just and I had everybody tell me like,
- 1:21:14Speaker 2: oh god, you know you're they're not going to land
- 1:21:16Speaker 2: in them. And I was reading like Dennis Hunt books
- 1:21:18Speaker 2: and stuff, and they were saying things like like, uh,
- 1:21:21Speaker 2: you know, decoys are you need them? But at the
- 1:21:25Speaker 2: same time, geese hate them. They're just used to lure
- 1:21:27Speaker 2: birds into gun range, and I just called yeah, yeah,
- 1:21:32Speaker 2: and I was like, I watched real birds land with
- 1:21:34Speaker 2: real birds all the time, and I just felt really
- 1:21:37Speaker 2: confident that that there just has to be a better way,
- 1:21:41Speaker 2: and that this that the whole industry was just really complacent.
- 1:21:44Speaker 2: And I heard people say things like, oh, geese have
- 1:21:46Speaker 2: a you know, a pie sized brain and everything, and
- 1:21:48Speaker 2: I just had way more respect for him than that.
- 1:21:52Speaker 2: So so I set out to sculpt. I did a
- 1:21:56Speaker 2: I do clay sculptures. I don't carve anything. I do
- 1:21:59Speaker 2: everything as a clay sculpture. And I set out to
- 1:22:02Speaker 2: sculpt the most accurate decoy I possibly could. And it
- 1:22:05Speaker 2: was a Taverner's Canada goose. That was my number one
- 1:22:07Speaker 2: goose that I hunted and loved to hunt and everything.
- 1:22:09Speaker 2: And now we call it a lesser because it's that's
- 1:22:13Speaker 2: way more common and people are more familiar with that term,
- 1:22:17Speaker 2: but that's really what the first one was.
- 1:22:19Speaker 1: So if you look, when you say way more realistic,
- 1:22:22Speaker 1: I would think that you can correct me on this one.
- 1:22:26Speaker 1: I would think that there's a mad there's an issue
- 1:22:28Speaker 1: of size, there's an issue of contours, shape, say, and
- 1:22:33Speaker 1: there's an issue of coloration. Yep, what what is it
- 1:22:37Speaker 1: for real?
- 1:22:38Speaker 2: Well, and one more thing is the finish, And the
- 1:22:40Speaker 2: finish is the biggest one of those of those four.
- 1:22:44Speaker 2: So yeah, the sculpture needs to be you know, anatomically
- 1:22:52Speaker 2: correct and in a pleasing pose. The pose has to
- 1:22:55Speaker 2: be I guess that's a fifth element, right there is
- 1:22:58Speaker 2: the pose. It's really important with turkeys. The pose has
- 1:23:02Speaker 2: to tell what you want. What you want the decoy.
- 1:23:05Speaker 1: You don't want to decoy of a scared ass turkey exactly.
- 1:23:08Speaker 2: Yeah. But the finish, it turns out, the finish is
- 1:23:14Speaker 2: probably more important than anything, and that is it just
- 1:23:18Speaker 2: can't have the wrong reflections. I mean, you know, birds
- 1:23:21Speaker 2: can see colors that we can't see, and a lot
- 1:23:24Speaker 2: of decoys have you know, some reflection to them, and
- 1:23:28Speaker 2: and all that stuff. And and in some ways we
- 1:23:31Speaker 2: probably luckily stumbled on the right paint. But that that's
- 1:23:35Speaker 2: a big one. That helps a lot. But you know,
- 1:23:38Speaker 2: at the time, the decoys, the decoys that were working
- 1:23:41Speaker 2: the best for me before I made a decoy we're
- 1:23:44Speaker 2: bigfoots and carry light full bodies, and bigfoots were neat
- 1:23:48Speaker 2: because they were they really were.
- 1:23:52Speaker 1: What's the funn about that?
- 1:23:53Speaker 6: No, it's it's it's funny because Pat Dirkins sent me
- 1:23:57Speaker 6: a report from somebody, well because I mean it's not
- 1:24:05Speaker 6: a real report if you actually read its high substantiated,
- 1:24:09Speaker 6: but about bigfoot behavior of jumping into trees.
- 1:24:12Speaker 2: So I just had that.
- 1:24:13Speaker 1: Also, I'm talking about the brand Bigfoot decoys, which had
- 1:24:16Speaker 1: like a little pedestal to look like their feet. You
- 1:24:18Speaker 1: were thinking about bigfoots bigfoots. Yeah, sorry, pologies on behalf
- 1:24:24Speaker 1: of grint. I did see.
- 1:24:27Speaker 2: We can edit that out, no problem that. Uh yeah,
- 1:24:33Speaker 2: I mean I had a ton of respect for Bigfoot
- 1:24:35Speaker 2: decoys because they were they were made in America, and
- 1:24:37Speaker 2: they really were really goosey. But the problem is they
- 1:24:40Speaker 2: were they were a a large race Canada goose. They
- 1:24:44Speaker 2: were a honker. They were a big, long neck and
- 1:24:46Speaker 2: most of our geese were really small, short necked, you know.
- 1:24:50Speaker 2: So that's why the carry lights looked a little more
- 1:24:52Speaker 2: like our gaze. But we I just needed to make
- 1:24:54Speaker 2: something that was more acculate, and the very first eco
- 1:24:57Speaker 2: that I made it actually had the tail was a
- 1:25:00Speaker 2: separate piece, and the wings were separate. The wing the
- 1:25:04Speaker 2: primary feathers, they were separate pieces that glued on separately.
- 1:25:07Speaker 2: So I had full separation in there. It was like,
- 1:25:10Speaker 2: probably way more than it really needed to be. We
- 1:25:14Speaker 2: made those and they worked so well. It was just unbelievable.
- 1:25:18Speaker 1: How many did you make? Well?
- 1:25:20Speaker 2: I mean I started out with one pose, just arresting one,
- 1:25:24Speaker 2: and then I finally before I even hunted with that,
- 1:25:26Speaker 2: I realized I needed to make a feeder. And so
- 1:25:29Speaker 2: I had two poses and I went out with and
- 1:25:32Speaker 2: hunted with those, and I would make like eighteen total
- 1:25:35Speaker 2: decoys for my own hunting, and then I kind of
- 1:25:39Speaker 2: realized I need an upright, but that came along later.
- 1:25:42Speaker 2: But they were just they looked like the real birds.
- 1:25:45Speaker 2: So what I figured, what I learned. The biggest epiphany
- 1:25:49Speaker 2: I guess I had was when I was hunting and
- 1:25:53Speaker 2: I had I could have. I mean, I put out
- 1:25:55Speaker 2: twenty four dozen decoys before and if if if six
- 1:26:02Speaker 2: real birds came and landed one hundred and fifty yards away,
- 1:26:06Speaker 2: I any other birds that came would go land with
- 1:26:09Speaker 2: those six. So I realized right away, Yet it's yeah,
- 1:26:12Speaker 2: it's not a number thing. The numbers thing is. What's
- 1:26:15Speaker 2: most important is that they're convinced that those are real birds.
- 1:26:18Speaker 2: And so the beauty of our decoy right now is
- 1:26:21Speaker 2: the way that people have so much damn fun with
- 1:26:23Speaker 2: them is in places where you have normally had to
- 1:26:28Speaker 2: use you know, five dozen, you can use eighteen. And
- 1:26:31Speaker 2: even like on some of the places like the front
- 1:26:34Speaker 2: Range Colorado, where people feel like they have to use
- 1:26:37Speaker 2: twenty dozen, they can use six dozen, and so that
- 1:26:42Speaker 2: that really helps. It just makes it more enjoyable because
- 1:26:46Speaker 2: it's just not as much work.
- 1:26:47Speaker 5: Less of a grind.
- 1:26:48Speaker 2: Yeah, you're not out there and two of them more's
- 1:26:50Speaker 2: of a grind. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I can sleep in
- 1:26:53Speaker 2: and I love I love sleep.
- 1:26:55Speaker 5: Can you take us through you just sort of casually say, oh,
- 1:26:59Speaker 5: I whipped up eight teen decoys, but what what does
- 1:27:02Speaker 5: that look like?
- 1:27:03Speaker 6: And can we also get into like your carving or
- 1:27:06Speaker 6: the materials that you're using, and you know you're kind of.
- 1:27:11Speaker 5: Giving away too much?
- 1:27:12Speaker 1: Yeah, what were you when you say make them? You
- 1:27:14Speaker 1: had that you made a mold obviously.
- 1:27:16Speaker 10: Yeah, so I mean in your garage yep, you had
- 1:27:19Speaker 10: to buy a lot of equipment, right, I had Uh Yeah,
- 1:27:21Speaker 10: I did. I had a I had a shop already
- 1:27:24Speaker 10: just because I've I've made fish replicas like my entire life.
- 1:27:29Speaker 10: My artistic was Ron Petter Is is the greatest fish
- 1:27:33Speaker 10: replica artists that ever lived, by far, and I just
- 1:27:37Speaker 10: was a complete I just bugged the hell out of
- 1:27:41Speaker 10: him for thirty years.
- 1:27:43Speaker 3: Do you still do it the fish?
- 1:27:44Speaker 2: Yeah? I do, you know, a few. I do just
- 1:27:47Speaker 2: a few, like maybe maybe one a year.
- 1:27:50Speaker 6: That's but yeah, that's maybe auction house, don't it.
- 1:27:53Speaker 3: I mean they're sounding.
- 1:27:55Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna do because of fish people caught.
- 1:28:00Speaker 1: What's that look you do a little like like whatever
- 1:28:03Speaker 1: the hell they fish tax drmy is these days, because
- 1:28:05Speaker 1: there's no tax dermy, it's just replicas.
- 1:28:07Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So I do a lot of steelhead and
- 1:28:09Speaker 2: and I have a lot of molds of steelheads, so
- 1:28:13Speaker 2: and wild steelhead. You know, there's only a few places
- 1:28:16Speaker 2: where you can still keep wild steelhead, but I don't
- 1:28:18Speaker 2: encourage that at all. Wild steelhead are really low in
- 1:28:22Speaker 2: numbers and everything like that. So I have all these
- 1:28:24Speaker 2: molds of fish, you know, up to thirty pounds, and
- 1:28:29Speaker 2: you may I made or I inherited from Ron Pittard
- 1:28:33Speaker 2: either one. So and I've got like I'll be I'm
- 1:28:36Speaker 2: I'm finishing up three point twenty six pounds white crappie
- 1:28:40Speaker 2: for John Brown John, if you're watching, I'm I'm getting
- 1:28:43Speaker 2: it done. I'll have it done, and then I'm doing
- 1:28:46Speaker 2: a big thirty pound steelhead for a guide who's been
- 1:28:50Speaker 2: waiting eight years. He's been he's been really, really, really patient.
- 1:28:54Speaker 2: He's going to be really mad when he sees that
- 1:28:55Speaker 2: he did the Crappie. But so so I and then
- 1:29:00Speaker 2: I have lots of experience in sculpture, in industrial sculpture.
- 1:29:05Speaker 2: So I worked for Nike for seven years. I did
- 1:29:08Speaker 2: clay sculptures of footwear as part of the design process.
- 1:29:11Speaker 6: You're like the guy in that movie Air My goodness
- 1:29:14Speaker 6: was at.
- 1:29:15Speaker 1: A bad movie. I liked it, dude. We have to
- 1:29:18Speaker 1: talk about that sometime.
- 1:29:20Speaker 9: I'll talk you fine, Okay, Oh there you go.
- 1:29:24Speaker 1: That had about every problem movie. We'll talk about a
- 1:29:29Speaker 1: You had a job there it did. What did you
- 1:29:32Speaker 1: carve shoes?
- 1:29:33Speaker 2: Yeah? Clay sculptures? Yep, seriously, Yeah, I did five. Now
- 1:29:38Speaker 2: I only did the midsol Altsoul, so I didn't have
- 1:29:40Speaker 2: anything to do with the upper. But I did get
- 1:29:42Speaker 2: to do five seasons of Air. Jordan's working with Tinker
- 1:29:47Speaker 2: Hatfield and that was a and my time when Nike
- 1:29:50Speaker 2: was really I'm super thankful for it, like it was
- 1:29:53Speaker 2: really good people. And I learned a ton about molding
- 1:29:56Speaker 2: and casting and and all that stuff. So that was
- 1:29:58Speaker 2: hard I got. I got headhunted from Nike to go
- 1:30:02Speaker 2: to FILA and I worked for And also I'm sorry
- 1:30:06Speaker 2: for any of my friends that work at Nike. And
- 1:30:08Speaker 2: I told you that I didn't get headhunted, that I quit,
- 1:30:11Speaker 2: and now you're just now finding this out, So I apologize.
- 1:30:13Speaker 2: I'm sorry I had to lie to you. And I
- 1:30:16Speaker 2: went to FILA and I was the manager of the
- 1:30:18Speaker 2: model shop there and did more clay sculptures and everything.
- 1:30:21Speaker 2: And before all this, I did class sculptures of taxidermy mannequins.
- 1:30:26Speaker 2: So I worked for research mannequins and did class sculptures
- 1:30:29Speaker 2: animal so so I had the clay experience. I didn't
- 1:30:32Speaker 2: have any training, I but I just winged it and
- 1:30:37Speaker 2: just you know, muscled through it or whatever. Like I'm
- 1:30:41Speaker 2: not I can't do it class sculpture like really well,
- 1:30:43Speaker 2: like really fast or anything like that. And I'm not
- 1:30:46Speaker 2: like a naturally talented at it or anything like that.
- 1:30:49Speaker 2: But I'm pretty good at looking at two things and
- 1:30:53Speaker 2: figuring out what the differences between those.
- 1:30:56Speaker 1: Well can tell you one of my favorite writing quotes.
- 1:30:59Speaker 1: I think it was RW You R W Apple. He
- 1:31:01Speaker 1: once said, I can write better than anyone that can
- 1:31:05Speaker 1: write faster than me, and I can write faster than
- 1:31:08Speaker 1: anyone that can write better than me.
- 1:31:11Speaker 2: It's perfect.
- 1:31:13Speaker 1: Or you have to think of something like that for yourself.
- 1:31:15Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well it sounds like it's already been done.
- 1:31:17Speaker 2: Somebody beat me too it or whatever. But yeah, I mean,
- 1:31:20Speaker 2: I'm I'm slow, and there are some people that are
- 1:31:23Speaker 2: super talented and can do these things super super fast.
- 1:31:25Speaker 2: And and what I mostly have to do is I
- 1:31:28Speaker 2: have to assemble, you know, a blob of clay roughly
- 1:31:32Speaker 2: in the shape before I can. I mean, I more
- 1:31:34Speaker 2: or less have to build something wrong and then start
- 1:31:39Speaker 2: picking it apart. Rather than building something right the first time,
- 1:31:42Speaker 2: I usually just have to get it. I have to
- 1:31:45Speaker 2: get something going and then I can then I can
- 1:31:47Speaker 2: start to see what the difference is. So I got
- 1:31:50Speaker 2: to have really really good reference material I got to have.
- 1:31:53Speaker 2: I got to have that thing to compare it to,
- 1:31:55Speaker 2: so that could be amount or a bunch of photographs
- 1:31:58Speaker 2: or something like that.
- 1:31:59Speaker 3: It's great way to go about building something. You just
- 1:32:02Speaker 3: gotta gotta start it.
- 1:32:04Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 1:32:04Speaker 1: My dad was a wood carving and he said his
- 1:32:07Speaker 1: strategy was if he was making like an otter, he said,
- 1:32:10Speaker 1: I would just start taking away everything that doesn't look
- 1:32:12Speaker 1: like an otter.
- 1:32:14Speaker 9: Yeah.
- 1:32:15Speaker 2: Well, and that's another thing is I have a lot
- 1:32:17Speaker 2: of respect for wood carvers because you can only subtract material.
- 1:32:21Speaker 2: So in my case, I mean, you put it back
- 1:32:23Speaker 2: when you made a mistake all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
- 1:32:27Speaker 2: so so yeah, then I made I made molds of
- 1:32:32Speaker 2: those first decoys, and I finally had to buy a
- 1:32:34Speaker 2: rotational casting machine, which was a pretty big, pretty big investment.
- 1:32:39Speaker 1: And now but at this point, are you're like, you
- 1:32:40Speaker 1: know what, I'm gonna start selling these No, No.
- 1:32:42Speaker 5: Hold on, We're get too far ahead of ourselves.
- 1:32:45Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 1:32:46Speaker 5: Before it, when you just whipped up the eighteen that
- 1:32:50Speaker 5: you first started with, Yeah, how do you whip up eighteen?
- 1:32:54Speaker 2: You made the clay sculpture, Okay, made the class sculpture,
- 1:32:58Speaker 2: and then made a still cone rubber mold with a
- 1:33:02Speaker 2: fiberglass shell mold over the top of that to hold
- 1:33:06Speaker 2: it to shape. And then since I didn't have a
- 1:33:08Speaker 2: rotational casting machine, I had to rotate it by hand.
- 1:33:12Speaker 2: That was the workout portion of my of my life
- 1:33:15Speaker 2: and is amazing.
- 1:33:17Speaker 1: Man, oh, thank you.
- 1:33:18Speaker 2: I appreciate that.
- 1:33:20Speaker 5: And the and the rotational part comes because once you spray,
- 1:33:25Speaker 5: so you've got your mold, and then what material would
- 1:33:28Speaker 5: you spray in there?
- 1:33:30Speaker 2: So it's liquid, You're a thane, So it's like two parts.
- 1:33:34Speaker 2: You mix A and B together, stir it up and
- 1:33:37Speaker 2: pour it in the mold and then close the mold,
- 1:33:39Speaker 2: and then you rotate it, keep it, keep it.
- 1:33:42Speaker 3: Moving, griped to one side or the other.
- 1:33:44Speaker 2: Yeah, and coat the whole inside. And then you have
- 1:33:48Speaker 2: to keep rotating it until that stuff is hard, and
- 1:33:51Speaker 2: then you may have to do a second, a second
- 1:33:53Speaker 2: pore so and then I was like, screw this, this
- 1:33:55Speaker 2: is a lot of work. Like you know, I'm not
- 1:33:58Speaker 2: exactly Charles Atlas, and I guess I would have been
- 1:34:01Speaker 2: if I just would have never bought a rotational casting machine.
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: D I like, it's like more than a way out
- 1:34:08Speaker 1: of date reference.
- 1:34:11Speaker 2: So so I bought a rotational casting machine. And at
- 1:34:15Speaker 2: the time, I when I was working for FILA, like
- 1:34:20Speaker 2: everything that we would make for Fila, everything that we
- 1:34:23Speaker 2: would design for them, they would send it back to
- 1:34:25Speaker 2: the to the group in Italy and the ownership group
- 1:34:30Speaker 2: would say no, no, no, that's not what the Americans want,
- 1:34:32Speaker 2: you know, And and we were just pulling our hair
- 1:34:34Speaker 2: out of They were just turning down everything that we made.
- 1:34:36Speaker 2: And we were sure that we were making really, really
- 1:34:39Speaker 2: really good shoes, and most of the time they wouldn't
- 1:34:42Speaker 2: even make them. And we just I just watched our stock,
- 1:34:45Speaker 2: you know, go from seventy six dollars a share down
- 1:34:47Speaker 2: to five dollars a share over a course of a
- 1:34:49Speaker 2: very short amount of time. So then they finally said, hey,
- 1:34:52Speaker 2: we're going to close the Portland office. Your choices are
- 1:34:55Speaker 2: to move to New York City or Italy. And there
- 1:34:58Speaker 2: was about forty people in the off every single one
- 1:35:01Speaker 2: of us said where we take neither. So now I
- 1:35:04Speaker 2: was out of work, and I was tempted to go
- 1:35:06Speaker 2: back to Nike and stuff like that, but I just
- 1:35:07Speaker 2: I was so into goose hunting, and I as much
- 1:35:10Speaker 2: as I loved, you know, working at Nike and with
- 1:35:14Speaker 2: the people at least at FeelA, it wasn't related to
- 1:35:18Speaker 2: hunting and nature and stuff. So so I was out
- 1:35:22Speaker 2: of a job. In my sweet wife, Elda Smith, I
- 1:35:25Speaker 2: love her so much. Here we are we're just getting
- 1:35:27Speaker 2: married and right at that point, I'm like, you know,
- 1:35:32Speaker 2: lose this high paying job, and I'm just fully expecting
- 1:35:36Speaker 2: her to just, you know, ditch my ass. And she's
- 1:35:39Speaker 2: just like, she's just like, we'll be fine. Whatever you
- 1:35:42Speaker 2: got to do, you know. And I'm like working on
- 1:35:44Speaker 2: this sculpture for six months and I'm having a cash
- 1:35:47Speaker 2: in my four oh one k you know, a little
- 1:35:49Speaker 2: bit out of time to keep you know, keep the
- 1:35:52Speaker 2: roof over our head and stuff like that. And she's
- 1:35:55Speaker 2: just such a sweetheart. She was just like, I believe
- 1:35:57Speaker 2: in you and this will turn into something. And uh
- 1:36:01Speaker 2: and you know, you know, God bless her, but so
- 1:36:05Speaker 2: I did. So then I bought this rotational casting machine
- 1:36:08Speaker 2: and that made it way easier to make these decoys
- 1:36:10Speaker 2: and stuff. And then Brad Cochran and I we were
- 1:36:13Speaker 2: just like we were hunting a lot together. Brad is
- 1:36:15Speaker 2: a phenomenal, phenomenal goose hunter. He really is. He's one
- 1:36:18Speaker 2: of five people in the world that I would actually
- 1:36:21Speaker 2: hunt with these days.
- 1:36:24Speaker 5: What makes a phenomenal goose hunter so.
- 1:36:28Speaker 1: Brad.
- 1:36:31Speaker 2: So Brad is super super hardcore. He is. He is
- 1:36:35Speaker 2: so freaking into it, it's unbelievable. He just absolutely lives
- 1:36:39Speaker 2: for it. After all these years, he is just as
- 1:36:42Speaker 2: passionate about it today as he ever was so and
- 1:36:45Speaker 2: I can't match that because I need to go on.
- 1:36:48Speaker 2: I mean, I'm spade fishing for steelhead, I'm I'm archery
- 1:36:51Speaker 2: black tail hunting. I need to I need these tenure
- 1:36:55Speaker 2: at a time things, and I need new challenges and
- 1:36:57Speaker 2: stuff like that. He is absolutely stuck with it the
- 1:37:00Speaker 2: whole time. And he's just he's just accumulated so much knowledge,
- 1:37:04Speaker 2: and he has great instincts. He like, I rely on
- 1:37:07Speaker 2: my instincts one hundred percent when I'm setting up in
- 1:37:09Speaker 2: the morning, and he has instincts. Plus it's just an
- 1:37:13Speaker 2: incredible knowledge base. So and then he's a great shot.
- 1:37:16Speaker 2: That's important and that and he he can spot callers
- 1:37:20Speaker 2: really well too, and and so like so when you're
- 1:37:25Speaker 2: when you're collar hunting, you can only hunt with somebody
- 1:37:28Speaker 2: who's on the same page as you. You can't go
- 1:37:30Speaker 2: hunting with a bunch of guys. I I've done it.
- 1:37:33Speaker 2: I've shot collars when I've gotten invites, But it's usually
- 1:37:38Speaker 2: people you sit up and shoot, and it's usually everybody's
- 1:37:41Speaker 2: like what you know? And but if you're hunting with
- 1:37:44Speaker 2: someone else who's on the same page, and you're looking
- 1:37:47Speaker 2: at all the birds on the on the right, and
- 1:37:49Speaker 2: he's looking at all the birds on the left, and
- 1:37:51Speaker 2: you know that nobody's gonna shoot until he spot a collar.
- 1:37:54Speaker 2: It's just way better than than than you know, Like,
- 1:37:59Speaker 2: I knew so many people that were hunting big groups,
- 1:38:01Speaker 2: and they were sending me texts saying like done by eight,
- 1:38:04Speaker 2: done by eight, fifteen, done by nine, And then they
- 1:38:07Speaker 2: would say, man, I sure wish I could get a collar,
- 1:38:11Speaker 2: And I'm just like, okay, well I sat out there
- 1:38:13Speaker 2: all day long and I didn't shoot anything, But you know,
- 1:38:16Speaker 2: three or four days of that and you're gonna have
- 1:38:18Speaker 2: a caller, Like you can't you can't be dying to
- 1:38:23Speaker 2: get your limit as quick as possible and then complain
- 1:38:25Speaker 2: that you didn't get a caller because you got it.
- 1:38:27Speaker 2: That's how you get a caller, Why not shooting.
- 1:38:29Speaker 3: It is kind of funny the the Waterfall hunters. You
- 1:38:35Speaker 3: hear that a lot done by yeah, done by this.
- 1:38:38Speaker 2: That's like, yeah, is it so miserable? You really want
- 1:38:41Speaker 2: to be done so fast?
- 1:38:42Speaker 5: Like oh yeah, you want to be at the cracker
- 1:38:44Speaker 5: barrel by nine or whatever. Chat your biscuits and gravy.
- 1:38:49Speaker 5: Yeah right, two questions like one. You can answer this
- 1:38:52Speaker 5: one quickly. If you guys gotten good enough to where
- 1:38:54Speaker 5: you can spot the leg.
- 1:38:55Speaker 2: Bands, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you set up for the lighting.
- 1:38:59Speaker 2: We had to that, especially on anchorage lessers, because there
- 1:39:03Speaker 2: was a lot of them that only had a leg band.
- 1:39:05Speaker 2: And so yeah, it's the lighting is everything. So in
- 1:39:07Speaker 2: Oregon we don't have a lot of sunshine, and on
- 1:39:10Speaker 2: a cloudy day it's it's incredibly difficult. So I don't
- 1:39:13Speaker 2: think I have ever gotten a band that didn't bling,
- 1:39:19Speaker 2: that didn't sparkle. I think some people have, and I've tried.
- 1:39:24Speaker 2: I mean I've I've got a giant grind of pintails,
- 1:39:28Speaker 2: and pintails they corkscrew down like swans do, where you
- 1:39:32Speaker 2: can see every one of their legs one after another
- 1:39:34Speaker 2: and stuff like that. I've never gotten, never gotten one
- 1:39:37Speaker 2: that way. And I have gotten several leg band only
- 1:39:40Speaker 2: geese by spotting the leg band and at least one
- 1:39:45Speaker 2: where I spotted the shape like while it's quartering away.
- 1:39:49Speaker 2: But I've gotten several that were the lighting was really
- 1:39:53Speaker 2: really good and as the birds are coming and landing
- 1:39:56Speaker 2: one at a time, you know they're dropping their feet.
- 1:39:59Speaker 2: You set up quick, you don't. You never let them land,
- 1:40:03Speaker 2: Like if a bird lands, our general rule is that
- 1:40:06Speaker 2: they're safe. Like and everybody assumes if we're shooting a
- 1:40:09Speaker 2: lot of bands and colors there. We hear people say
- 1:40:12Speaker 2: all the time, like, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna shoot
- 1:40:13Speaker 2: bands and collars. We just we just let them land
- 1:40:16Speaker 2: and we get out the buy notes. It's like, oh
- 1:40:17Speaker 2: my god, you can't do that because you would shoot
- 1:40:21Speaker 2: twenty five geese, you know, Like so you pretty much
- 1:40:27Speaker 2: have to shoot them out of there. Otherwise, you know,
- 1:40:31Speaker 2: you're just gonna have just too much, too many other.
- 1:40:34Speaker 5: What is it with the waterfowlers and the collars?
- 1:40:37Speaker 1: In the bands?
- 1:40:38Speaker 2: There's no antlers, there's no there's no there's no age
- 1:40:42Speaker 2: group or anything like that.
- 1:40:43Speaker 5: Like so that's how you guys found like the next
- 1:40:47Speaker 5: like the next level of difficulty where some guy might
- 1:40:50Speaker 5: say I only hunt four and a half year old
- 1:40:52Speaker 5: bucks year older. Yeah, you're like, well to get this
- 1:40:56Speaker 5: with geese, what are we gonna do? So shoot the collar.
- 1:40:59Speaker 2: Everybody looks at a different like Brad. Brad made a
- 1:41:02Speaker 2: comment a month ago, and I was just kind of
- 1:41:04Speaker 2: appalled by it. Honestly, he was like saying, like a
- 1:41:07Speaker 2: collar is equivalent to like a three forty ball, and
- 1:41:10Speaker 2: I was like, this is a this is coming. This
- 1:41:14Speaker 2: is definitely a guy who hasn't shot at three forty
- 1:41:17Speaker 2: bull so like, But in his defense, I think what
- 1:41:21Speaker 2: he means is.
- 1:41:24Speaker 1: A thing of nature. A collar is a thing made
- 1:41:27Speaker 1: a human factory, exactly exactly. It's like you're handling a
- 1:41:31Speaker 1: bird that's been handled.
- 1:41:33Speaker 2: Yep.
- 1:41:34Speaker 1: I've always had a real like, I recognize it's cool,
- 1:41:36Speaker 1: and I have a couple of my little box of
- 1:41:37Speaker 1: like special things, but it's been You're not the first
- 1:41:41Speaker 1: person to lay a hand on that bird. Yeah, and
- 1:41:43Speaker 1: some of the magic's going. In fact, it was birds man.
- 1:41:47Speaker 2: Yeah, it was one of the number ones. Because I
- 1:41:48Speaker 2: got caught, right, I can't speak to that. Well, what
- 1:41:52Speaker 2: what Brad was getting at, what he was meaning is
- 1:41:57Speaker 2: waterfowlers want a collar as as bad as as big
- 1:42:02Speaker 2: game hunters want a three or fording bowl.
- 1:42:04Speaker 1: All right, So at what point did you say to yourself,
- 1:42:06Speaker 1: this has all been great, Johnnie, but we got to
- 1:42:09Speaker 1: move along.
- 1:42:10Speaker 2: I understand.
- 1:42:13Speaker 1: When you started making them, and here you gotta be honest.
- 1:42:15Speaker 1: You start making decoys for yourself and your garage. You
- 1:42:20Speaker 1: have to in your head, unless you're gonna lie to me,
- 1:42:23Speaker 1: you have to in your head be thinking. I could
- 1:42:27Speaker 1: see going into business making these and selling them.
- 1:42:31Speaker 2: I mean that that came about fairly quickly once I
- 1:42:35Speaker 2: realized how expensive the like the materials were and the
- 1:42:39Speaker 2: moles were, and I had I was I really didn't
- 1:42:44Speaker 2: want to because I just wanted for myself because they
- 1:42:47Speaker 2: were working really good. And I am like super super
- 1:42:51Speaker 2: secretive with with so much of my hunting and fishing,
- 1:42:54Speaker 2: and I don't post a lot or anything. I don't
- 1:42:56Speaker 2: have any stickers on my truck and I once in
- 1:42:59Speaker 2: a while I'll take my wife's car so that nobody
- 1:43:01Speaker 2: knows where I'm at or what I'm doing.
- 1:43:04Speaker 3: How secretive though, you did just give us a ton
- 1:43:06Speaker 3: of antelope information.
- 1:43:07Speaker 2: But we're family, right, you know, Like yeah, and I
- 1:43:13Speaker 2: and he doesn't know this, but I held back some
- 1:43:15Speaker 2: pretty important I mean, just the reality set in that
- 1:43:23Speaker 2: I've got a lot of money in these molds and
- 1:43:26Speaker 2: everything like that, and then and so many people we
- 1:43:29Speaker 2: were asking for them. And then when we started guiding,
- 1:43:33Speaker 2: I was like, well, that's how make the money that's how.
- 1:43:35Speaker 1: Make the money back being a successful guide.
- 1:43:38Speaker 2: But when you're guiding, more more people than ever asked
- 1:43:43Speaker 2: wanted to buy decoys. So and we were having fun guiding.
- 1:43:46Speaker 2: Brad and I were guiding together, and we were remembering
- 1:43:50Speaker 2: the other day. On one season, we limited out with
- 1:43:53Speaker 2: our clients every single day of the entire season except
- 1:43:57Speaker 2: for two days, but we still killed fifty six geese
- 1:43:59Speaker 2: and the two days. So we were we were doing
- 1:44:02Speaker 2: really well and we were having a lot of fun,
- 1:44:06Speaker 2: and life was good, and gas prices were fairly low
- 1:44:08Speaker 2: and everything like that. But more people ask for for decoys.
- 1:44:13Speaker 2: Gas prices started getting high, more people started hunting. Some
- 1:44:16Speaker 2: of the places that we that we hunted were getting
- 1:44:18Speaker 2: leased out from under us, even by clients and stuff.
- 1:44:21Speaker 2: And Brad, you know, Bradd with an accounting major. The
- 1:44:25Speaker 2: last thing in the world that he wanted to do
- 1:44:27Speaker 2: is go become an accountant. And he was just like,
- 1:44:31Speaker 2: let's let's start making decoys, and and I was all
- 1:44:35Speaker 2: for it. So that's that's what we did. And and
- 1:44:39Speaker 2: it's it's not a super lucrative business, that's for sure,
- 1:44:43Speaker 2: but it's a super fun business. The people, all the clients,
- 1:44:48Speaker 2: all the customers are are great, and everybody that you
- 1:44:54Speaker 2: work with are all super super fun, really really cool people.
- 1:44:59Speaker 2: So I I mean, I could have done a lot
- 1:45:01Speaker 2: better if I'd just stayed at Nike and kept, you know,
- 1:45:04Speaker 2: hammering on my four to one K, I wouldn't be
- 1:45:07Speaker 2: here right now, and i'd be retired, retired. But I
- 1:45:10Speaker 2: have no regrets whatsoever. And I mean, I would just
- 1:45:13Speaker 2: encourage anybody that is just thinking about you know. I mean,
- 1:45:19Speaker 2: I don't want you to quit your job necessarily, but
- 1:45:21Speaker 2: I mean, I mean, it's it's very doable. If an
- 1:45:24Speaker 2: idiot like me can, can you know, scratch out a
- 1:45:28Speaker 2: living and doing something that you just absolutely love. I
- 1:45:32Speaker 2: just encourage people to just go for it.
- 1:45:35Speaker 6: You know.
- 1:45:36Speaker 4: So at what point did you go from like the
- 1:45:40Speaker 4: Goose decoys to like Turkey decoys or the Buck decoy.
- 1:45:44Speaker 1: Yeah? I got turned on you guys years ago because
- 1:45:48Speaker 1: of Turkey decoys. And that was through Yanni. Yeah, Yanni
- 1:45:51Speaker 1: got turned on to them.
- 1:45:52Speaker 2: Yeah. And I know, and I feel so bad because
- 1:45:54Speaker 2: you know, my hearing is so bad. In one of
- 1:45:56Speaker 2: our first conversations, you mentioned that, but I didn't hear
- 1:45:59Speaker 2: what you said. You were telling me that it was Yanni,
- 1:46:03Speaker 2: and and I didn't. I didn't hear what you said,
- 1:46:06Speaker 2: and I feel feel really bad, so I apologize, but yeah,
- 1:46:09Speaker 2: I I do. I do kind of recall that and
- 1:46:12Speaker 2: everything like that. But yeah, we so we made Goosey
- 1:46:14Speaker 2: coys for and the the years of all this stuff
- 1:46:18Speaker 2: is kind of hard for me to keep track. I
- 1:46:19Speaker 2: think I started the first Goosey coy in nineteen ninety
- 1:46:22Speaker 2: eight and I finished it in nineteen ninety nine. And
- 1:46:26Speaker 2: uh then Turkey's didn't start until, like I roughly ten
- 1:46:31Speaker 2: years later.
- 1:46:33Speaker 1: And how did you get turned down to me? Yannie?
- 1:46:35Speaker 2: Jay Scott? Oh yeah, Jay Scott. We love Jay Scott. Yeah,
- 1:46:38Speaker 2: he's a great guy.
- 1:46:39Speaker 1: I got a turkey shooting No, he's a watching people
- 1:46:42Speaker 1: shoot turkey son of a gun.
- 1:46:44Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
- 1:46:46Speaker 1: He likes turkey hunting man.
- 1:46:47Speaker 2: Yeah he does. He likes he loves turkey, and he
- 1:46:50Speaker 2: loves here.
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: He has got you know, he likes being you know,
- 1:46:53Speaker 1: he doesn't surprisingly small amount of hunting himself, I mean
- 1:46:57Speaker 1: as a guide.
- 1:46:58Speaker 2: Yeah, he's in on.
- 1:47:00Speaker 1: An extraordinary amount of turkey hunts. Yeah, not behind the
- 1:47:03Speaker 1: trigger on the calls, you know.
- 1:47:06Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's funny. He has these incredible opportunities for
- 1:47:08Speaker 2: Elk and cous Dere and you talk to him and
- 1:47:11Speaker 2: he's just so passionate about turkeys, you know, more so
- 1:47:14Speaker 2: than almost anything. But yeah, and so Turkey's it was
- 1:47:19Speaker 2: just we had a lot of our customers talking to
- 1:47:21Speaker 2: us and just saying, my gosh, like, if you guys
- 1:47:23Speaker 2: can make a goose decoy like this, the turkey, the
- 1:47:26Speaker 2: Turkey market, the turkey hunting is ready for an ultra
- 1:47:30Speaker 2: realistic turkey decoy. And there were so many people that
- 1:47:33Speaker 2: didn't like to use Turkey decoys, but a lot of
- 1:47:37Speaker 2: the reasons because most of the turkey decoys were just terrible.
- 1:47:40Speaker 2: And so we you know, I did I did the
- 1:47:43Speaker 2: sculpture of an upright hend and Brad took it to
- 1:47:46Speaker 2: the NWTF show and the I mean, it was just
- 1:47:52Speaker 2: overwhelming support and demand for that. Like we were like
- 1:47:56Speaker 2: kind of like scared if we if we would have
- 1:47:59Speaker 2: had the product, we could have sold so many thousands
- 1:48:03Speaker 2: upon thousands of turkey days over the next five years
- 1:48:07Speaker 2: after that, because it took five years before other companies
- 1:48:10Speaker 2: kind of caught on, like crap dsd is selling the
- 1:48:13Speaker 2: ship out of Turkey decoys. We got to make one,
- 1:48:16Speaker 2: and so we had, you know, we had five or
- 1:48:19Speaker 2: six years of before the rest of the industry caught up,
- 1:48:23Speaker 2: and we were making them as fast as we could
- 1:48:24Speaker 2: make them, but you know, we couldn't catch up. And
- 1:48:26Speaker 2: now now everybody has an ultra realistic turkey decoy and
- 1:48:30Speaker 2: some of them actually looking an awful lot like ours,
- 1:48:34Speaker 2: and that you know that happens, it's a great compliment.
- 1:48:38Speaker 2: And then the Dirty okoy was kind of the same way,
- 1:48:40Speaker 2: though Dirty cooy was kind of a weird thing. So
- 1:48:42Speaker 2: this guy, Randy bird Song how I've actually never met,
- 1:48:46Speaker 2: but he hunted a lot with Lee and Tiffany. He
- 1:48:51Speaker 2: was kind of sending messages through our you know, I
- 1:48:55Speaker 2: don't know, through through through phone calls or our website
- 1:48:57Speaker 2: or email or whatever, saying you got to make a
- 1:49:00Speaker 2: buck decoy. It's got to be in this posturing position.
- 1:49:03Speaker 2: So so I make it. I agreed to one hundred percent.
- 1:49:06Speaker 2: I think he was dead on and I agreed one
- 1:49:09Speaker 2: hundred percent, and I just started on it right away.
- 1:49:12Speaker 2: And I love deer, love deer hunting.
- 1:49:14Speaker 1: Where can people go to watch what you let video
- 1:49:16Speaker 1: you show me of bucks working over your buck decoys?
- 1:49:19Speaker 1: Where is that video? Live.
- 1:49:20Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have a whole bunch of them.
- 1:49:22Speaker 1: I just down one day a bunch of them. Yeah,
- 1:49:24Speaker 1: I want to. Okay, but you guys had a montage
- 1:49:26Speaker 1: put together.
- 1:49:27Speaker 2: Oh oh yeah, so that was that was just all
- 1:49:30Speaker 2: our customers. You know. Melissa Bachman, she's she's she's very good,
- 1:49:35Speaker 2: very good hunter, and she's very good at decoying. And
- 1:49:38Speaker 2: you know, decoying is a little different, you know the key.
- 1:49:43Speaker 2: It's like, if you're just a really really good white
- 1:49:45Speaker 2: tail hunter, you're not necessarily a really good decoy hunter.
- 1:49:48Speaker 2: Like it's it's just a little bit of a learning
- 1:49:50Speaker 2: learning curve to it. But she's very good, she's very
- 1:49:53Speaker 2: very good, totally knows what she's doing, and she provides
- 1:49:55Speaker 2: a lot of footage for us.
- 1:49:57Speaker 1: Got it.
- 1:49:57Speaker 4: Yeah, I always remember seeing the art Lambeau Hunter guys
- 1:50:01Speaker 4: have like wicked footage of using that decoy.
- 1:50:04Speaker 2: Those guys are great.
- 1:50:05Speaker 5: But is that montage available on your website maybe or
- 1:50:09Speaker 5: or somewhere. No, you just made it the montage.
- 1:50:13Speaker 1: No no, No, it's like branded DSD in them. But
- 1:50:15Speaker 1: it's all those bucks doing that same head motion, yeah,
- 1:50:18Speaker 1: smashing a decoy, and they all do that little tip
- 1:50:20Speaker 1: of the head. It's so wild, man.
- 1:50:22Speaker 2: Yeah, they rolling their eyes, Their eyes are rolling around
- 1:50:25Speaker 2: in their head, and they lick, They licked their nose.
- 1:50:28Speaker 1: They cocked their head. They're always cocked their head at
- 1:50:30Speaker 1: that weird angle. Man.
- 1:50:31Speaker 5: Yeah, when you see that there's an explosion getting ready
- 1:50:35Speaker 5: to happen, you're lucky enough to see two mule the
- 1:50:38Speaker 5: or do it. I was just like kind of in
- 1:50:41Speaker 5: and out of Bino's. But my daughter got to watch
- 1:50:43Speaker 5: it through a spotting scope and my brother in law
- 1:50:46Speaker 5: through another spotting scope. But just came in, you know,
- 1:50:49Speaker 5: two big herds of does behind them each and heads
- 1:50:52Speaker 5: almost upside down, and like you're saying, you can see
- 1:50:55Speaker 5: the eyes just doing these weird things. And I mean
- 1:50:58Speaker 5: seconds later, it's like the dog.
- 1:51:00Speaker 1: It is like someone putting their hand on their pistol. Yeah,
- 1:51:06Speaker 1: on your pistol.
- 1:51:07Speaker 3: When he cocks his head, their blood is just starting
- 1:51:10Speaker 3: to boil and boil.
- 1:51:11Speaker 1: And yeah, it's amazing watching deer interact with that thing. Well,
- 1:51:15Speaker 1: some ways, this guy comes what's his name bird Song.
- 1:51:17Speaker 2: Yeah, Randy Birdsong, And I just feel like it's really
- 1:51:20Speaker 2: important to point that out because I could not get
- 1:51:23Speaker 2: a hold of him. I wanted to give him a
- 1:51:25Speaker 2: decoy afterwards, and I wanted to tell him thank you
- 1:51:28Speaker 2: and and and all this stuff or whatever, and he
- 1:51:30Speaker 2: just disappeared off the face of the earth. And it's
- 1:51:33Speaker 2: just like no, I mean, he's around somewhere and he
- 1:51:38Speaker 2: just deserves credit for that, and and I want to
- 1:51:40Speaker 2: give him a decoy.
- 1:51:42Speaker 1: Well, hopefully someone could pass this along to him.
- 1:51:44Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I remember, I remember watching that guy's hunting
- 1:51:46Speaker 4: stuff back in the day, Randy Bird song. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
- 1:51:50Speaker 4: he was on TV shows and stuff.
- 1:51:52Speaker 2: Yeah, he seemed like a great hunter, and obviously he knows,
- 1:51:55Speaker 2: you know, about white tael behavior and.
- 1:51:57Speaker 1: Everything like that. So, so describe the deer's in Yeah.
- 1:52:01Speaker 2: So, I mean, first of all, all their you know,
- 1:52:04Speaker 2: all their hair is bristled. It's it's raised in the
- 1:52:08Speaker 2: same way that an animal would do for heating and cooling,
- 1:52:13Speaker 2: and it's just to look big, just to look as
- 1:52:15Speaker 2: large as possible. And then what happens with the deer
- 1:52:18Speaker 2: is when that happens, there's not this this perfect division
- 1:52:23Speaker 2: of hair, so it ended up it'll end up with
- 1:52:25Speaker 2: a bunch of vertical cracks along the side and then
- 1:52:27Speaker 2: vertical cracks along the neck and that's kind of important.
- 1:52:31Speaker 2: And that's on the decoy and everything, and the ears
- 1:52:32Speaker 2: are pinned back as far as they go, and that
- 1:52:35Speaker 2: I think is to make the the the the neck
- 1:52:38Speaker 2: look big and the antlers look big. And so, you
- 1:52:41Speaker 2: know I first made that pose. It's like like with
- 1:52:43Speaker 2: a lot of poses, we had a whole bunch of
- 1:52:45Speaker 2: people saying like, that is the goofiest thing I've ever seen.
- 1:52:48Speaker 2: You'll never sell. It looks like a donkey, blah blah blah.
- 1:52:51Speaker 2: And then people do just a little bit of research
- 1:52:53Speaker 2: and next thing, you know, they find out that we're
- 1:52:55Speaker 2: not so far off. And then the back is just
- 1:53:00Speaker 2: slightly arched, you know, in the head is raised a
- 1:53:05Speaker 2: certain amount, and uh, that's really all it takes.
- 1:53:09Speaker 5: Did you choose a specific age class of of buck
- 1:53:14Speaker 5: to mimic?
- 1:53:15Speaker 2: Yeah, So all these decoys, because I love blacktail hunting
- 1:53:19Speaker 2: so much, I cheat them just a little bit and
- 1:53:22Speaker 2: I'm I'll make the I'll make the the snout, the
- 1:53:25Speaker 2: muzzle just a little bit shorter and and lean them.
- 1:53:28Speaker 2: This is a terrible thing to admit to all heart.
- 1:53:32Speaker 1: You change the decoy for your own blacktail hunting, your
- 1:53:36Speaker 1: own esoteric.
- 1:53:37Speaker 2: Well not as specific like like for the actual production decoy,
- 1:53:41Speaker 2: like so every and we sell them all over the Midwest,
- 1:53:45Speaker 2: like that's where they get used like crazy, and and
- 1:53:47Speaker 2: so all you Midwesterners that are using, you know, a
- 1:53:51Speaker 2: DSc pastoring book, I'm sorry that it looks a little
- 1:53:53Speaker 2: bit like a black tail, but that's just what I did.
- 1:53:56Speaker 2: But yeah, it's but the but there is some c
- 1:54:00Speaker 2: things that it doesn't look. It has to look old
- 1:54:02Speaker 2: enough and mature enough to be a threat without being
- 1:54:07Speaker 2: too much of a threat. So it's not going to
- 1:54:08Speaker 2: work in every region. I mean you you know, there
- 1:54:10Speaker 2: are certain parts of the country where that buck would
- 1:54:13Speaker 2: be way too big.
- 1:54:16Speaker 1: It's some three hundred and fifty pound one hundred and
- 1:54:18Speaker 1: eighty inch buck. A lot of bucks might be like,
- 1:54:21Speaker 1: yeah he can, I'll let him handle this situation, and.
- 1:54:24Speaker 2: They and it brings him down off the bluffs and
- 1:54:26Speaker 2: stuff like that, like in broad daylight.
- 1:54:28Speaker 1: Like I.
- 1:54:30Speaker 2: My friend Paul Minew He's got five hundred acres in
- 1:54:34Speaker 2: Buffalo County, Wisconsin, and this is a magical place and
- 1:54:37Speaker 2: it's super fun to go and and that decoy has
- 1:54:40Speaker 2: brought big bucks out, you know, in the daylight that
- 1:54:43Speaker 2: I don't think would have otherwise otherwise come out, and
- 1:54:47Speaker 2: we get reports of that all the time. So I'd
- 1:54:49Speaker 2: say the hardest thing is knowing when to shoot, and
- 1:54:53Speaker 2: you don't always get a perfect shot with that. With
- 1:54:56Speaker 2: that buck, you know, like like if you can get
- 1:54:59Speaker 2: him to to be coming and he'll be walking slow,
- 1:55:02Speaker 2: and if you can get him to quarter, you know,
- 1:55:03Speaker 2: a quarter away or a broadside like that. Honestly, is
- 1:55:08Speaker 2: is usually the time to shoot. If the buck crashes
- 1:55:12Speaker 2: the decoy, there's no guarantee you that you're gonna get
- 1:55:15Speaker 2: a shot and at what distance because he'll jump away.
- 1:55:18Speaker 2: Sometimes he keeps running and never stops, and sometimes he
- 1:55:22Speaker 2: jumps away twenty yards and all of a sudden, if
- 1:55:23Speaker 2: you have the decoy at twenty yards, now you got
- 1:55:26Speaker 2: a forty yard shot and you don't know what angle
- 1:55:29Speaker 2: he's gonna So.
- 1:55:30Speaker 1: In that video, it's amazing how many of those deer
- 1:55:33Speaker 1: eat it because they're expecting resistance. Yeah that's not there. Yeah,
- 1:55:39Speaker 1: So they're like running into this thing so hard, and
- 1:55:41Speaker 1: you know, they're assuming that there's something that's gonna stop them.
- 1:55:44Speaker 1: But then that thing goes and then they go ass
- 1:55:46Speaker 1: over tea kettle and just get like this totally like
- 1:55:49Speaker 1: but not like if views their toylet like take that.
- 1:55:53Speaker 2: Yeah, the then they look back at it like what
- 1:55:55Speaker 2: did I just do?
- 1:55:56Speaker 5: Like a level that.
- 1:55:58Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm good at that. But that's also why we
- 1:56:01Speaker 2: encourage people to use the stand instead of the steak,
- 1:56:04Speaker 2: because the deer can actually hurt hurt himself on the steak,
- 1:56:08Speaker 2: you know, as they crashed the deco. So the stand
- 1:56:12Speaker 2: breaks away, everything breaks away, and that's that's the best system.
- 1:56:17Speaker 2: And I thought that's all we were selling, is the stand,
- 1:56:21Speaker 2: and those were mine wishes and my instructions. And then
- 1:56:25Speaker 2: I just found out at the GTM that like, no,
- 1:56:28Speaker 2: it comes with a steak, and I'm like, ah, yeah, yeah,
- 1:56:30Speaker 2: like i'd really hold now the steak is fiberglass. But
- 1:56:36Speaker 2: you know the problem is is that they they could
- 1:56:39Speaker 2: hurt their you know, they can hurt their stroke. Crote
- 1:56:42Speaker 2: them on it, and then then you have one heard
- 1:56:45Speaker 2: it scroll them. Yeah yeah I did. That's kind of
- 1:56:48Speaker 2: he became my own fault. Yeah. Well that one was
- 1:56:53Speaker 2: a that was a big four point, like a one
- 1:56:55Speaker 2: hundred and forty inch four point And then what did
- 1:56:59Speaker 2: he do? He grew the next year he grews. I
- 1:57:03Speaker 2: can't remember exactly the the timing of all that, because
- 1:57:08Speaker 2: he crashed the gear in the fall. And then it's
- 1:57:12Speaker 2: like he grew antlers the next year, and they were
- 1:57:15Speaker 2: in velvet and then they that was it. That's that's
- 1:57:18Speaker 2: that's the uh. They never he never came out of
- 1:57:21Speaker 2: velvet ever again. He had his antlers year round and
- 1:57:25Speaker 2: they and over the years they crumbled. They got shorter
- 1:57:29Speaker 2: and shorter and shorter. And he just got gigantic because
- 1:57:32Speaker 2: he didn't go through the rigors of the rut. He
- 1:57:35Speaker 2: just ate all the time and he had didn't have
- 1:57:38Speaker 2: to put, you know, any of his eating into dealing
- 1:57:41Speaker 2: with the rut, you know, So he just got gigantic
- 1:57:44Speaker 2: and and he never came out.
- 1:57:47Speaker 5: But his antlers didn't get gigantic, only his body did.
- 1:57:50Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:57:50Speaker 2: No, Well, his antlers never grew again, and they actually
- 1:57:53Speaker 2: got shorter every day because they got so brittle that
- 1:57:55Speaker 2: they would just crumble, the tops of them would crumble down.
- 1:57:58Speaker 4: So he hit that decoing. God is nuts caught on
- 1:58:01Speaker 4: the steak.
- 1:58:02Speaker 2: Well, we are assuming that I've got some videos. I've
- 1:58:08Speaker 2: got lots of videos of blacktail bucks crashing the decoy.
- 1:58:11Speaker 2: But it happened so fast that I can't tell for sure,
- 1:58:14Speaker 2: but it could have been a barb bar fence or something.
- 1:58:19Speaker 2: We don't know for sure. It was just one of
- 1:58:20Speaker 2: the things that we sort of assume may have happened.
- 1:58:24Speaker 2: We don't unless anybody knows of any I don't know
- 1:58:27Speaker 2: for sure of anything real bad happening, but it looks
- 1:58:31Speaker 2: like for sure something could.
- 1:58:34Speaker 1: And then you're working on a female and you're talking
- 1:58:37Speaker 1: about her posture, but you kind of you don't want
- 1:58:39Speaker 1: to make it that her posture is like too much
- 1:58:41Speaker 1: of a good thing, because then a buck might not
- 1:58:43Speaker 1: buy it.
- 1:58:43Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, So.
- 1:58:46Speaker 1: Like herd is standing on the open like just ready
- 1:58:49Speaker 1: to roll, it's not what you're after.
- 1:58:50Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. So and the same thing we had to
- 1:58:53Speaker 2: worry about age too, because if we made her, you know,
- 1:58:57Speaker 2: a big giant mature dough, then you know, there are
- 1:59:01Speaker 2: a lot of does would would you know, blow out
- 1:59:06Speaker 2: her and and that could cause a lot of problems
- 1:59:11Speaker 2: and stuff like that. So so she's she's also supposed
- 1:59:14Speaker 2: to be she's supposed to look like she's just of
- 1:59:17Speaker 2: breeding age, like just old enough to to breed without
- 1:59:21Speaker 2: being like a big old, you know horse face like
- 1:59:24Speaker 2: you know, dominant dough and then yeah, her body posture,
- 1:59:28Speaker 2: she's mostly standing and relax and stuff. But but yeah,
- 1:59:33Speaker 2: just a little hint she's dropped down in the rear
- 1:59:35Speaker 2: a little bit kind of look you know, kind of
- 1:59:38Speaker 2: look like it could happen here. Yeah, and maybe yeah
- 1:59:42Speaker 2: it's where the and you know those bucks like they
- 1:59:45Speaker 2: like blacktail bucks. I can't wait to use on blacktails
- 1:59:47Speaker 2: because blacktails if I mean one of the primary areas
- 1:59:51Speaker 2: that I had blacktails that I think last year there
- 1:59:52Speaker 2: was like twenty twenty two bucks and two dos. So
- 1:59:56Speaker 2: if you if you use a but a you know,
- 1:59:58Speaker 2: a buck decoy hasn't been very effective there, but a
- 2:00:01Speaker 2: dough decoy, like any blacktail buck will just come running
- 2:00:04Speaker 2: right up to it, because if they see a dough,
- 2:00:06Speaker 2: I mean, they just come running up up to it
- 2:00:08Speaker 2: right away. Like there. You know, it's like we've all
- 2:00:11Speaker 2: been there. You know, it's like you get desperate.
- 2:00:14Speaker 3: So it's like Bosman twelve years ago.
- 2:00:17Speaker 2: Yeah, and she you know, I've had some some people
- 2:00:25Speaker 2: tell me that I've seen her like like, oh my gosh,
- 2:00:27Speaker 2: you should have had her in the full squatting position,
- 2:00:29Speaker 2: you know, like and I don't one hundred percent agree
- 2:00:33Speaker 2: with that. Just because you know, the dough stands. He
- 2:00:37Speaker 2: the dough stands to be bred really only when the
- 2:00:40Speaker 2: buck is right right on her. So so for her
- 2:00:44Speaker 2: to be standing, you know, standing to be bred, it
- 2:00:47Speaker 2: might not look so much standing almost squatting. Yeah, it's
- 2:00:52Speaker 2: it's a little low. It's lower than our than our decoy.
- 2:00:55Speaker 2: And you know, like what we were saying is it
- 2:00:57Speaker 2: could end up looking like she's just like taking a
- 2:00:59Speaker 2: ship or whatever. And so if she's out in the
- 2:01:01Speaker 2: middle and like, oh, there's a dope, Oh she's taking
- 2:01:03Speaker 2: a ship, It's like, I don't know, I mean, that's
- 2:01:06Speaker 2: might not be the most appealing thing or whatever, but
- 2:01:08Speaker 2: I know a black seal buck would charge heright in there.
- 2:01:11Speaker 2: You sell what you're doing.
- 2:01:13Speaker 4: You sell the pelletsers on.
- 2:01:15Speaker 2: She can't ship, she can't ship forever.
- 2:01:27Speaker 5: Two questions earlier, you said in Buffalo County, it would
- 2:01:30Speaker 5: make these bucks come out that otherwise would not have
- 2:01:33Speaker 5: come out in daylight. Yeah, can you explain that a
- 2:01:36Speaker 5: little bit more because I'm trying to figure out, like
- 2:01:37Speaker 5: how do they get the like did they place them
- 2:01:40Speaker 5: where the buck could see the.
- 2:01:43Speaker 3: Bluff?
- 2:01:44Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's bluff country and in Buffalo county. So
- 2:01:48Speaker 2: it's a lot of there's ag and then there's you know,
- 2:01:51Speaker 2: rocky rocky bluffs all around it, and that the deer
- 2:01:53Speaker 2: all we don't go up into the and we don't
- 2:01:56Speaker 2: go up really, we don't go more than fifty yards
- 2:02:00Speaker 2: into that ever. I mean, not even for chad hunting
- 2:02:03Speaker 2: or anything like. Like literally there's so munch of that
- 2:02:05Speaker 2: that know human that's a sanctuary. Yeah, that's a sanctuary, yep.
- 2:02:09Speaker 5: And so their cruise along that edge, they look down
- 2:02:11Speaker 5: in the field, they see the decoy.
- 2:02:13Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, those those cruising bucks don't look.
- 2:02:16Speaker 2: They are just they just do not know. Look. Yeah, yeah,
- 2:02:20Speaker 2: they'll yeah, they're all scent checking areas and stuff. And
- 2:02:24Speaker 2: sometimes they will literally be on the other side of
- 2:02:28Speaker 2: the top of the bluff then that the way that
- 2:02:31Speaker 2: the wind comes up the bluff and it curls and stuff.
- 2:02:33Speaker 2: It's it's kind of kind of crazy what they do,
- 2:02:35Speaker 2: but but they are betted, and they do get up
- 2:02:38Speaker 2: occasionally because they know they're in such a sanctuary that
- 2:02:41Speaker 2: they know that they're safe and everything like that. They
- 2:02:43Speaker 2: get up and feed a little bit, and they're betted
- 2:02:46Speaker 2: and stuff like that, and they might watch you set
- 2:02:48Speaker 2: up the decoy and then like I mean, and some
- 2:02:51Speaker 2: of that is assuming because you know you can't you
- 2:02:55Speaker 2: can't really see them up there. And then but you
- 2:02:58Speaker 2: are in a big, wide open field. Yeah. Yeah, you
- 2:03:00Speaker 2: drove up in a bad boy buggy and you get
- 2:03:03Speaker 2: get the decoy out and everything, and you do it
- 2:03:05Speaker 2: early enough in the in the afternoon, you know, And
- 2:03:09Speaker 2: then that's at the times and when they would be
- 2:03:12Speaker 2: able to see you. But otherwise it would be in
- 2:03:13Speaker 2: the in the mornings when it's dark. And but there's
- 2:03:18Speaker 2: times when we don't really want to do that either too,
- 2:03:20Speaker 2: because in the mornings, in the dark, those bucks are
- 2:03:24Speaker 2: moving or moving around and they're down on the bottom.
- 2:03:26Speaker 2: Just like with blacktail hunting, I don't even hunt mornings.
- 2:03:28Speaker 2: I give them the mornings. I don't. I do not
- 2:03:31Speaker 2: like going in my tree stand or ground blind and
- 2:03:33Speaker 2: bumping deer out or anything like that. I go in
- 2:03:35Speaker 2: in the middle of the day and sit till dark,
- 2:03:38Speaker 2: because I can get out of a stand with deer
- 2:03:40Speaker 2: around at dark, but I can't get into a stand
- 2:03:44Speaker 2: in the mornings with the dark. And I think that's
- 2:03:46Speaker 2: one of the biggest problems that people have with blacktails
- 2:03:48Speaker 2: and that's.
- 2:03:49Speaker 1: How I've I want to come out and hunt blacktails
- 2:03:51Speaker 1: with you, man, man.
- 2:03:52Speaker 2: Yeah, come on out, Like there's the the way that
- 2:03:56Speaker 2: I've finally cracked it the code is by getting permission
- 2:03:59Speaker 2: on good private properties, because some of the public stuff
- 2:04:03Speaker 2: is just kind of horrible or burnt to the ground.
- 2:04:07Speaker 2: But I spent six six years writing over one hundred
- 2:04:11Speaker 2: letters a year in the spring and ended up with
- 2:04:15Speaker 2: some with some pretty good properties. I just have to
- 2:04:17Speaker 2: kind of get the okay, the okay from the landowners
- 2:04:20Speaker 2: and stuff. But I mean, some of them are just
- 2:04:22Speaker 2: super great, great people. And yeah, blacktails are super fun.
- 2:04:26Speaker 2: They're not They're not as smart and cagy and difficult
- 2:04:30Speaker 2: as white tails, so they're not nearly as like those
- 2:04:32Speaker 2: Midwest white tails are crazy when it comes to human
- 2:04:36Speaker 2: scent and encroachment and pressure and all that stuff. And
- 2:04:38Speaker 2: they are just super super smart. And everybody that hunt
- 2:04:41Speaker 2: blacktails assumes and it always wants to believe that blacktails
- 2:04:44Speaker 2: are the smartest, most cage just thing. The thing about
- 2:04:47Speaker 2: blacktails is they're hearing is really really good. So the clothing,
- 2:04:52Speaker 2: you know, has to be unbelievably quiet to get your
- 2:04:54Speaker 2: get your bow drawn. And then the other thing is
- 2:04:57Speaker 2: that they just don't come out in the daytime, know,
- 2:05:00Speaker 2: like white tails do. But other than that they are
- 2:05:03Speaker 2: very forgiving, like I could like and I can't hunt
- 2:05:06Speaker 2: the same tree stand in the Midwest, you know, more
- 2:05:09Speaker 2: than two times probably for white tails and it's done,
- 2:05:12Speaker 2: you've burned it probably for the season. But with blacktails,
- 2:05:16Speaker 2: I've I've hunted the same tree stand like seven seven
- 2:05:19Speaker 2: days in a row. So you can get away with
- 2:05:21Speaker 2: murder with with blacktails, you just need you just need
- 2:05:25Speaker 2: them to come out during the day. That's the hardest.
- 2:05:28Speaker 2: That's the lot, that's really the difficult part about them.
- 2:05:32Speaker 5: How do you deal with the scent issue around running
- 2:05:35Speaker 5: a deer decoy?
- 2:05:37Speaker 2: Well, so the most important thing is that it's it's
- 2:05:41Speaker 2: been manufactured long long enough and it's aired out long
- 2:05:46Speaker 2: enough since it's been manufactured. So that's that's the biggest thing.
- 2:05:50Speaker 2: And then you don't touch it with your hands. So
- 2:05:53Speaker 2: your dear decoy will work. It'll work reasonably good. If
- 2:05:58Speaker 2: you buy one in July and then air it out
- 2:06:01Speaker 2: and everything, it's gonna work good. But it will work.
- 2:06:04Speaker 2: It's like a like a mink box or something. It'll
- 2:06:07Speaker 2: work better every year as it gets older, more earthy, yeah,
- 2:06:12Speaker 2: more earthy and and and scent free and everything with that,
- 2:06:16Speaker 2: and you just don't touch it with uh, don't touch
- 2:06:18Speaker 2: it with your bare hands, and you know, don't don't
- 2:06:21Speaker 2: don't breathe on it, and then don't you don't ever
- 2:06:23Speaker 2: put scent on it. You know, if you want to
- 2:06:25Speaker 2: use any kind of scent, you put it, you know,
- 2:06:28Speaker 2: under the decoy or near the decoy or something like that.
- 2:06:30Speaker 2: But you keep the decoy sent free because if you
- 2:06:33Speaker 2: put scent on it, you know that that'll get kind
- 2:06:37Speaker 2: of rancid over time and stuff. But you also don't
- 2:06:39Speaker 2: put scent all over the ground or anything like that,
- 2:06:42Speaker 2: because then then you can't pull that scent with you
- 2:06:45Speaker 2: when you leave. I mean that That's what's worked for me,
- 2:06:51Speaker 2: is I'll put scent you know, like in a in
- 2:06:54Speaker 2: a bottle or with you know, with cotton or whatever
- 2:06:58Speaker 2: you got to do, and just open it underneath the decoy.
- 2:07:01Speaker 2: That's when I do use scent. It doesn't matter that much,
- 2:07:04Speaker 2: I mean, Or I'll put tarsus, you know, tarsus glands,
- 2:07:07Speaker 2: tarsal glands from a from a buck. That does work
- 2:07:10Speaker 2: at times pretty pretty pretty darn well with black tails.
- 2:07:15Speaker 1: If you were listened to Clay's Bear Grease podcast. No,
- 2:07:19Speaker 1: he had an episode called Deer Stories, and there's a
- 2:07:21Speaker 1: guy that tells a story about shooting the buck and
- 2:07:23Speaker 1: taking the glands off and tying the glands to his ankles,
- 2:07:27Speaker 1: and he gets his ass kicked by a buck.
- 2:07:30Speaker 2: Yeah, I probably wouldn't.
- 2:07:32Speaker 1: Realize this buck is coming down his trail and is
- 2:07:36Speaker 1: coming for him. Oh geez, it's a funny story.
- 2:07:38Speaker 2: Well it could have. That could have been way worse,
- 2:07:40Speaker 2: because that could have been like dough dough in heat scent.
- 2:07:44Speaker 2: You know, like, as long as it the buck just wanted.
- 2:07:47Speaker 1: To kill him, that's not as humiliating.
- 2:07:53Speaker 2: Yeah, he can he can.
- 2:07:54Speaker 4: Live, So David, when you're sitting like say, I'm sitting
- 2:07:57Speaker 4: in a tree stand facing a field and I want
- 2:07:59Speaker 4: to put decoy out, how do I place that decoy
- 2:08:02Speaker 4: for the best.
- 2:08:03Speaker 2: Shot, I mean like maybe quartering away and but that
- 2:08:10Speaker 2: just that just depends like a quartering quartering away would
- 2:08:13Speaker 2: be with a dough and and and then possibly quartering
- 2:08:17Speaker 2: two with a buck.
- 2:08:18Speaker 3: But I'll tell you what, right, wind dependent?
- 2:08:22Speaker 2: Yeah, it's wind dependent. Yeah, they'll they'll try to they'll
- 2:08:25Speaker 2: try to get down window, try to get down wind
- 2:08:27Speaker 2: of it and stuff, and so with a buck, you know,
- 2:08:30Speaker 2: quartering two works pretty good, but there is no guarantee whatsoever,
- 2:08:36Speaker 2: Like anytime you think that you know how they're going
- 2:08:40Speaker 2: to approach it. Like people, the the idea of quartering
- 2:08:43Speaker 2: two is the idea of behind behind that is that
- 2:08:46Speaker 2: they'll come and come head on. They just don't do that.
- 2:08:50Speaker 2: I mean they don't. They definitely don't do that with
- 2:08:53Speaker 2: any major consistency because the the the way to do
- 2:08:57Speaker 2: damage is to ram one like completely on the on
- 2:09:00Speaker 2: the side in the root cage, and so there's just
- 2:09:03Speaker 2: a lot of deer Decoying is just super fun because
- 2:09:08Speaker 2: it's not a guaranteed thing. There's there's certain things that
- 2:09:11Speaker 2: it does for you, like you can get your bodrawn
- 2:09:14Speaker 2: so easily, like when you're using a buck decoy because
- 2:09:20Speaker 2: they're just so distracted. But there's also the downsides and
- 2:09:25Speaker 2: that is like you're not sure you're gonna gonna get
- 2:09:28Speaker 2: a good shot or whatever. But I think quartering two
- 2:09:31Speaker 2: is probably the best. And that's assuming that you have
- 2:09:34Speaker 2: the wind more or less in your face.
- 2:09:35Speaker 1: Gotcha?
- 2:09:36Speaker 5: Will you hunt them in like woodland, forested terrain or
- 2:09:41Speaker 5: you always sticking to more of an open fuel type
- 2:09:45Speaker 5: place where deer can see it as from far away
- 2:09:48Speaker 5: as possible.
- 2:09:49Speaker 2: So I have I've set up for blacktails in old
- 2:09:56Speaker 2: growth timber, but not successful, not success. I've tried it
- 2:10:01Speaker 2: in the in the woods, but the best successes that
- 2:10:06Speaker 2: I've that I've had and I'm not majorly into deer decoying.
- 2:10:10Speaker 2: I will be now that now that we have a dough,
- 2:10:15Speaker 2: But the best successes that I have have been on
- 2:10:17Speaker 2: the edge of a where ag meets meets timber. And
- 2:10:21Speaker 2: that's the same with blacktails too. Meadowee Meadowee areas and stuff.
- 2:10:24Speaker 2: I'm old old a man and orchard that I hunt.
- 2:10:28Speaker 2: I've had success with the blacktail decoy there. But with
- 2:10:32Speaker 2: white tails, I mean I've had it to where they're
- 2:10:35Speaker 2: coming along through the woods and all of a sudden
- 2:10:37Speaker 2: they see it and they kind of it kind of
- 2:10:39Speaker 2: kind of startles them a little bit, because yeah, I mean,
- 2:10:41Speaker 2: it's just I mean, it's it's just like we were
- 2:10:45Speaker 2: talking about with the antelope blind and stuff. It's just
- 2:10:48Speaker 2: better if they can see it from a distance away.
- 2:10:51Speaker 1: But have you used it in conjunction with rattling where
- 2:10:53Speaker 1: they're expecting to find something standing there. That's what I
- 2:10:56Speaker 1: feel like the real value would be is he's coming in,
- 2:11:00Speaker 1: but then all of a sudden like oh there it is.
- 2:11:02Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I have but like my gosh, one
- 2:11:07Speaker 2: of my hunting partners justin Kasmar, he gets so mad
- 2:11:09Speaker 2: at me because I'll go sometimes the whole season without rattling.
- 2:11:12Speaker 2: Rattling is super fun. And I've rattled in some nice
- 2:11:14Speaker 2: bucks and shot some with my bow in the in
- 2:11:17Speaker 2: the upper Clackamus and that's public land blacktails. But I
- 2:11:23Speaker 2: like now that I'm hunting more down in the valley,
- 2:11:27Speaker 2: I treat all my goose hunting has taught me that everything,
- 2:11:31Speaker 2: everything about goose hunting is not educating animals. That's what
- 2:11:34Speaker 2: goose hunting. That's still that's the trick of the whole thing.
- 2:11:37Speaker 2: And so so now that's affected all my other hunting.
- 2:11:40Speaker 2: So that's why I mean, I've like on elk hunting,
- 2:11:44Speaker 2: I've shot some big bulls and I've even got some
- 2:11:46Speaker 2: you know, by by calling and stuff. But I've got
- 2:11:50Speaker 2: more auditory stand on ground, bline and everything like that,
- 2:11:52Speaker 2: like all, and I would be a way better elk
- 2:11:54Speaker 2: hunter if I was willing to move into those those
- 2:11:58Speaker 2: areas and move where I need to. But I'm just
- 2:12:02Speaker 2: so about staying on the perimeter, staying out of those
- 2:12:05Speaker 2: creepy you know Heidi holes, out of those bedrooms, and
- 2:12:09Speaker 2: giving them all kinds of space and all kinds of refuge.
- 2:12:12Speaker 2: Give him the mornings, give him, give them tons of
- 2:12:15Speaker 2: space and the the It bites me in the ass
- 2:12:18Speaker 2: at times, for sure. But what what I love about
- 2:12:22Speaker 2: it is if you don't if you don't kill one,
- 2:12:27Speaker 2: you have the next day and the next day and
- 2:12:29Speaker 2: the next day and the next day.
- 2:12:30Speaker 1: You should write a hunting book like Dunk and Gil
- 2:12:32Speaker 1: Chris book Hunt High.
- 2:12:35Speaker 2: I've never knowing that.
- 2:12:37Speaker 1: Well I shouldn't say that, but anyway, what.
- 2:12:39Speaker 6: Would it be called?
- 2:12:42Speaker 2: Hunt the Perimeter?
- 2:12:44Speaker 1: Well, see, the thing about Hunt High is just so
- 2:12:47Speaker 1: it's a lifelong hunter and it's just all these like
- 2:12:50Speaker 1: really just general pieces of information. One minute he's talking
- 2:12:58Speaker 1: about is can't how he likes there's that up as
- 2:13:00Speaker 1: camp stove next to me. He's talking about the way
- 2:13:02Speaker 1: mountain goats act. But just it's just gold all through
- 2:13:07Speaker 1: the whole thing, just random. He kind of accidentally writes,
- 2:13:10Speaker 1: like hemingway, it just it's just a page upon page
- 2:13:13Speaker 1: of just gold ruminations from a fairy seasoned hunter and
- 2:13:19Speaker 1: a lot of stuff. You're like, I haven't thought about
- 2:13:20Speaker 1: that that way before. I haven't thought about that way before.
- 2:13:23Speaker 1: You know, you got a lot of that stuff laid
- 2:13:24Speaker 1: up in you.
- 2:13:25Speaker 2: I want to read it. I want to read that.
- 2:13:27Speaker 1: What was funny? Man is?
- 2:13:29Speaker 2: Yeah? Good?
- 2:13:29Speaker 1: He's dead, So check this out. He's dead and he's
- 2:13:31Speaker 1: self published these books. And and when I started talking
- 2:13:34Speaker 1: about and I always put him on like favorite book
- 2:13:36Speaker 1: lists and all that huh high. And it got to
- 2:13:39Speaker 1: me where if you wanted to buy one, it was
- 2:13:41Speaker 1: hundreds of dollars because we'd driven a lot of interest.
- 2:13:45Speaker 1: One day I lent mine to someone and someone took
- 2:13:47Speaker 1: it and never gave it back. So I went online
- 2:13:49Speaker 1: and bought one for one hundred bucks from some dude
- 2:13:53Speaker 1: in Texas. And I just buy it on Amazon unused books,
- 2:13:57Speaker 1: and it comes with a sticky note on it that says, dude,
- 2:13:59Speaker 1: you're the reason I bought this book.
- 2:14:01Speaker 2: Wow, that's cool. Yeah that worth worth. Matthewsons has lent
- 2:14:08Speaker 2: me a couple of books about the early Martin Trappers
- 2:14:11Speaker 2: and Wayne Nigs and Pouli Rossboro and Martin I have
- 2:14:16Speaker 2: known is one of them. And it's the same thing.
- 2:14:19Speaker 2: You go to try to find those books like Worth
- 2:14:22Speaker 2: lent me one of them and gave me he gave
- 2:14:24Speaker 2: me the other. But yeah, trying to find those books
- 2:14:27Speaker 2: on Amazon U this is next time possible. But I
- 2:14:31Speaker 2: sure would like to get more and more copies. Those
- 2:14:34Speaker 2: books are incredible.
- 2:14:36Speaker 1: Let me hit you with one last one before we end.
- 2:14:41Speaker 1: If you not place in Turkey decoys properly, do you
- 2:14:43Speaker 1: think you'd be doing more damage than than good? Meaning
- 2:14:48Speaker 1: you got a gobbler, he's coming in right, Can you
- 2:14:51Speaker 1: ever have it be that it'd be just better not
- 2:14:53Speaker 1: even to use the damn thing than to have it
- 2:14:55Speaker 1: set the way you have it set.
- 2:14:56Speaker 2: You mean because because he's going to be searching and covering.
- 2:15:00Speaker 5: Do you know, because you would put your decoy out
- 2:15:02Speaker 5: in such a manner or in such a pose and
- 2:15:05Speaker 5: position that when he sees it, he's like, what that's
- 2:15:08Speaker 5: not what that ends supposed to be doing. I'm out
- 2:15:09Speaker 5: of here.
- 2:15:10Speaker 2: Oh, let me let me.
- 2:15:11Speaker 1: Phrase it a different way. How important is placement over
- 2:15:16Speaker 1: just having the presence be there?
- 2:15:18Speaker 2: Well, I've only ever done it the right way, so no,
- 2:15:23Speaker 2: I don't. I don't know. I mean, I just you know,
- 2:15:29Speaker 2: you can. You can screw up goose decoys really bad,
- 2:15:33Speaker 2: really bad because yeah placement. Yeah, you can have them
- 2:15:37Speaker 2: all face into the wind. You can have them crooked
- 2:15:40Speaker 2: on their steaks, you can have them spread way too
- 2:15:43Speaker 2: far apart. And people do all of those things all
- 2:15:46Speaker 2: the time, and it can make a huge, huge, huge difference.
- 2:15:50Speaker 2: On turkeys. I mean, I haven't really found a really
- 2:15:53Speaker 2: wrong way. I I haven't seen any spreads from our
- 2:15:56Speaker 2: from our customers where I looked at it and just went,
- 2:15:59Speaker 2: you know, like I I think you know, because turkeys
- 2:16:05Speaker 2: are they're they're a little different than geese, and I
- 2:16:11Speaker 2: I'm sure there is a wrong way to do it, but.
- 2:16:14Speaker 1: There's not as sensitive safe to say just basically what
- 2:16:18Speaker 1: you're telling me. It's not as sensitive as waterfoul placement.
- 2:16:21Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
- 2:16:22Speaker 1: I mean you think it's as an end, But you
- 2:16:24Speaker 1: wouldn't say the same thing about deer. You think there
- 2:16:26Speaker 1: is a you found that there is like the wrong
- 2:16:29Speaker 1: place and wrong way to set deer decoys. Well, I
- 2:16:33Speaker 1: mean you don't like them in timber.
- 2:16:35Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't like them in timber, but I probably
- 2:16:38Speaker 2: need to experiment more on that and stuff. So I
- 2:16:42Speaker 2: wouldn't consider myself to be an authority on that. And
- 2:16:46Speaker 2: I like to experiment a lot. And and the animals
- 2:16:51Speaker 2: always surprise me. You know. Every time I think that
- 2:16:56Speaker 2: there's a rule, they the animals show me otherwise.
- 2:17:02Speaker 6: I know that.
- 2:17:03Speaker 2: You know, there's times there's times when using a strutter
- 2:17:08Speaker 2: like a like let's see, i'd say there's times when
- 2:17:13Speaker 2: using hens only has helped me make some good shots
- 2:17:16Speaker 2: with my bow because the birds came in strutting. And
- 2:17:19Speaker 2: then there's times when when using uh, you know, a
- 2:17:23Speaker 2: gobbler decoys has made me miss some pretty important birds
- 2:17:29Speaker 2: like that would have really meant a lot to me.
- 2:17:31Speaker 2: And I couldn't get my boat my bow drawn, or
- 2:17:34Speaker 2: I couldn't came hot on it came into hot. They'll
- 2:17:37Speaker 2: also come in and just put off, and you're thinking
- 2:17:40Speaker 2: what I do wrong? And after a while, I didn't
- 2:17:42Speaker 2: do anything wrong. He saw that thing and didn't like it.
- 2:17:45Speaker 1: You know, idea that happens, man, I know it does.
- 2:17:50Speaker 3: I know I surprised him before. Where they come over,
- 2:17:52Speaker 3: you have your decoy up, They come over a little
- 2:17:56Speaker 3: knoll or something too close. They see that they don't
- 2:17:59Speaker 3: feel like duking it out.
- 2:18:01Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, totally. Well. And I've had I've had
- 2:18:03Speaker 2: blacktail bucksty that where they stepped out one hundred yards
- 2:18:07Speaker 2: away and saw the decoy and I was just like,
- 2:18:10Speaker 2: oh my god, it's it's happening. And I'm getting back,
- 2:18:12Speaker 2: putting my release on and everything, and I'm all excited,
- 2:18:14Speaker 2: and I'm just waiting and waiting and waiting, and I
- 2:18:16Speaker 2: look and I look and expecting him to be, you know,
- 2:18:19Speaker 2: real close, and now he's high high tailing it away. Definitely.
- 2:18:23Speaker 1: I mean, you see a lot of them plow in
- 2:18:26Speaker 1: to beat that thing to death. But it does happen
- 2:18:28Speaker 1: where they put off and they, like I used to
- 2:18:31Speaker 1: think in Neville Ice, think that we spooked that bird.
- 2:18:33Speaker 1: Someone moves, someone spooked that bird. But the turkey bile
- 2:18:37Speaker 1: just Robert Abernathy, who's a very experienced decoy, yeah, has
- 2:18:40Speaker 1: been decoying for a long time.
- 2:18:42Speaker 2: Yep.
- 2:18:42Speaker 1: He's convinced too. He says, I think sometimes those birds
- 2:18:45Speaker 1: come in, they see that, they see that gobbler, and
- 2:18:49Speaker 1: they don't like it well, and they're putting off. They're
- 2:18:52Speaker 1: putting off or just ghosting out because of that presence.
- 2:18:55Speaker 1: He still uses it, but he says that's the thing
- 2:18:56Speaker 1: that happens.
- 2:18:57Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree one hundred percent. And also you just
- 2:18:59Speaker 2: never know what what that decoy represents. It could be
- 2:19:03Speaker 2: could represent a bird that he's already familiar with and
- 2:19:06Speaker 2: is already you know, uh lower lower on the hierarchy level.
- 2:19:11Speaker 1: Then like he hears a hen, he comes in and
- 2:19:13Speaker 1: be like, daw damn it, Gobbler's already here, Billy's here.
- 2:19:18Speaker 1: Last week.
- 2:19:19Speaker 2: My answer to that is went in doubt. Well, for one,
- 2:19:23Speaker 2: you know, you use a lot of hens and a
- 2:19:25Speaker 2: lot of like praining hens and feeding hens. That always
- 2:19:28Speaker 2: looks makes everything look you know, relaxed and stuff. And
- 2:19:31Speaker 2: even if there's a gobbler there. And then also you know,
- 2:19:34Speaker 2: like our three quarter strut jake, which is actually a
- 2:19:39Speaker 2: half strut jake and somehow it got named a three
- 2:19:41Speaker 2: quarter shrut jake. But that's for another day. But but
- 2:19:46Speaker 2: that's a good decoy to use with a bunch of
- 2:19:47Speaker 2: hens because it looks a little less intimidating and and
- 2:19:52Speaker 2: it just looks like, well, I mean, I've had so
- 2:19:55Speaker 2: many times when uh gobblers will come in that I
- 2:19:59Speaker 2: know are even a mature tom that I know is
- 2:20:01Speaker 2: not really a dominant bird. And even with even with
- 2:20:05Speaker 2: the jake there, they just come in slow enough and
- 2:20:09Speaker 2: then before I know, they're mounting one of the one
- 2:20:11Speaker 2: of the decoys. And you can also put a submissive
- 2:20:15Speaker 2: Hannah distance away, like so he's not necessarily standing over
- 2:20:18Speaker 2: her and stuff. So it feels like there's always a
- 2:20:20Speaker 2: combination that will give you the best chance. But there's
- 2:20:23Speaker 2: always going to be situations for just you've slat and I'm.
- 2:20:27Speaker 1: Glad our body guys Uck's who's very seasoned turkey hunter.
- 2:20:32Speaker 1: He has a little rule. He like, he's not the
- 2:20:34Speaker 1: kind of guy that believes that everything is, you know,
- 2:20:36Speaker 1: one way or the other. But he has a little
- 2:20:38Speaker 1: rule for himself. He don't set a male decoy in
- 2:20:40Speaker 1: the evening because he's like, they're just not in that mood.
- 2:20:44Speaker 1: I don't think. Yeah, he goes, you're just less like
- 2:20:46Speaker 1: he finds in the evening. You're less likely to get
- 2:20:48Speaker 1: that I'm gonna kick that thing's ass response in the
- 2:20:52Speaker 1: evening and you're more likely to push him off. And
- 2:20:54Speaker 1: he likes hens in the evening because they're just more mingly.
- 2:20:58Speaker 1: You know, he might want to find them to the
- 2:21:00Speaker 1: roost whatever. But they're not wanting to deal with the
- 2:21:03Speaker 1: big old strutter at night. Yeah, that's just his take
- 2:21:06Speaker 1: on it. Right.
- 2:21:06Speaker 2: So I have killed some some big mature toms, like
- 2:21:10Speaker 2: where it was like literally in the last five minutes
- 2:21:13Speaker 2: of shooting time, and and I've had them go one
- 2:21:17Speaker 2: hundred yards out of their way to come up to
- 2:21:19Speaker 2: the decoys. But the lesson that I've learned, and I've
- 2:21:21Speaker 2: got burned multiple times doing it, is they'll come up
- 2:21:25Speaker 2: and they'll jump on They'll they'll jump at the decoy
- 2:21:28Speaker 2: one time and then I'm like thinking, Okay, here we go.
- 2:21:31Speaker 2: It's gonna it's just gonna thrash the decoy for the
- 2:21:34Speaker 2: longest time and I'm gonna have this perfect shot. They'll
- 2:21:37Speaker 2: jump on the decoy one time and they're about done.
- 2:21:40Speaker 2: That's it. Like, it's just I agree with without one
- 2:21:43Speaker 2: hundred percent. And that's if they even jump at the decoy.
- 2:21:46Speaker 2: Sometimes they'll come up, but I mean there's in the evening, Yeah,
- 2:21:49Speaker 2: in the evenings, late at night, it's just and that's
- 2:21:52Speaker 2: only when it's a if there is a if there's
- 2:21:55Speaker 2: a tom that is the absolute boss and he's got
- 2:21:58Speaker 2: lots of hens and he's gonna go up to roost
- 2:22:01Speaker 2: and he sees uh, he sees a strutter with hens.
- 2:22:05Speaker 2: A lot of times they will come and check it out,
- 2:22:07Speaker 2: but they're not gonna be aggressive. And I've I've killed
- 2:22:10Speaker 2: some nice ones with my bow at real close range
- 2:22:12Speaker 2: that that way. But I've learned the hard way that
- 2:22:19Speaker 2: you don't have much time, you better shoot. You better shoot,
- 2:22:23Speaker 2: like as he's approaching the decoy, because you're not gonna
- 2:22:26Speaker 2: get get him. I've never had one just thrash the
- 2:22:29Speaker 2: decoy like crazy, like they do and like midmorn.
- 2:22:31Speaker 1: I can't get in your head that like I'm gonna
- 2:22:33Speaker 1: have a big show and then sometime later shoot him. Yeah, yeah, yep,
- 2:22:38Speaker 1: that's the thing I still do hunting turkeys is now
- 2:22:42Speaker 1: and then maybe not. But I usually when I get
- 2:22:44Speaker 1: a shot, I take it.
- 2:22:45Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 2:22:46Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, even though you will see where you know,
- 2:22:49Speaker 1: they come in and interact with the decoy for a
- 2:22:50Speaker 1: long time. Like if there's the one I want and
- 2:22:53Speaker 1: I get a shot, I'm shooting.
- 2:22:56Speaker 2: Yeah you know what I mean.
- 2:22:57Speaker 1: Yeah, I just rather than expecting that it's gonna be
- 2:23:00Speaker 1: this crazy you know, fight and breeding decoys and all
- 2:23:05Speaker 1: that kind of stuff.
- 2:23:06Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and some of that. It's just it's
- 2:23:08Speaker 2: just so weird. Like I mean, and Brad and I
- 2:23:11Speaker 2: have joked about like what what if humans did exactly
- 2:23:15Speaker 2: the things that turkeys has done, because we've had we've
- 2:23:18Speaker 2: had times when this this, this whole flock comes in
- 2:23:22Speaker 2: and there will be I mean, they're like humping the
- 2:23:25Speaker 2: decoys and they're fighting the decoys, and they're fighting each other,
- 2:23:28Speaker 2: and they're humping each other and and it's like some
- 2:23:31Speaker 2: of this stuff. And then we'll shoot one and sometimes
- 2:23:35Speaker 2: we'll use like a Magnus bullhead or and it just
- 2:23:38Speaker 2: shoots there to decapitates them instantly, and we feel like
- 2:23:44Speaker 2: sometimes that's a good way to get a quick, clean kill.
- 2:23:47Speaker 2: And then like this this turkey's laying there with no
- 2:23:50Speaker 2: head and it's flopping around and other ones are coming
- 2:23:52Speaker 2: in and jumping on top of it and trying to
- 2:23:54Speaker 2: fight it, and and it's just like it's just so bizarre.
- 2:23:58Speaker 1: I got some bars I could remember that that might
- 2:24:01Speaker 1: have been a little bit of the groove, but that's
- 2:24:03Speaker 1: about it. Man. Yeah, it is way way different than folks.
- 2:24:06Speaker 1: And they can fly.
- 2:24:10Speaker 2: I had a blacktail buck a few years ago that
- 2:24:13Speaker 2: came in and gave me a really good shot, and
- 2:24:15Speaker 2: I double belonged him and he went short distance and
- 2:24:18Speaker 2: betted down, and five minutes later a nice big blacktail
- 2:24:21Speaker 2: buck came in and and just went right over to that.
- 2:24:26Speaker 2: He just went he just knew right where that buck was,
- 2:24:29Speaker 2: just by scent really and kicked him up out of
- 2:24:31Speaker 2: his bed and what Yeah, kicked him up out of
- 2:24:34Speaker 2: his bed, and then he went and bedded down it
- 2:24:36Speaker 2: down again, and he went and kicked him up out
- 2:24:37Speaker 2: of his bed again, and I was like, I don't
- 2:24:39Speaker 2: know what to do. And so yeah, there's there's a
- 2:24:42Speaker 2: lot of strange things that happened in nature, and yeah,
- 2:24:46Speaker 2: I agree like that show. You know, it's like some
- 2:24:49Speaker 2: shows are better than others, Like a big grind of geese.
- 2:24:52Speaker 2: That's a really pretty show and it's really really neat
- 2:24:55Speaker 2: thing and it's worthwhile and if you don't shoot at all,
- 2:24:58Speaker 2: like that's just super fun and it's a totally successful day.
- 2:25:02Speaker 2: But you know, when turkeys come in, I agree, if
- 2:25:05Speaker 2: you get a good, quick, clean kill, you know that's
- 2:25:08Speaker 2: and you're there to kill one, and you know it's
- 2:25:11Speaker 2: like you take take take the shot. You don't have
- 2:25:13Speaker 2: to necessarily see him, like beating up a decoy for
- 2:25:17Speaker 2: an hour.
- 2:25:18Speaker 1: Yeah, you know our buddy Parker Hall. He thinks that
- 2:25:22Speaker 1: if you kill a turkey over a decoy, you go
- 2:25:24Speaker 1: to Hell, which makes me wonder, where's the guy that
- 2:25:26Speaker 1: makes turkey decoys end up?
- 2:25:28Speaker 2: Park Special Place?
- 2:25:31Speaker 1: They got a real hot corner in the basement.
- 2:25:35Speaker 2: Now it's I've had say that too.
- 2:25:38Speaker 1: They that would be maybe that's Dave's book of hunting
- 2:25:40Speaker 1: tidbits called Hell's Basement in the old days. In the
- 2:25:46Speaker 1: old days, we would have named this episode Hell's Basement.
- 2:25:48Speaker 5: Jay Scott's ripping what little Harry has left out here,
- 2:25:52Speaker 5: and you say you just let him, you know, shoot
- 2:25:55Speaker 5: him as you as soon as you can, because he
- 2:25:57Speaker 5: likes to him he likes to sit there and watch
- 2:25:59Speaker 5: the Yeah.
- 2:26:00Speaker 1: Yeah, he likes to get him with me.
- 2:26:02Speaker 5: He enjoys the show.
- 2:26:04Speaker 1: I like to get him coming, all right, Dave Smith,
- 2:26:07Speaker 1: thanks for coming on, man, thanks for having me. I
- 2:26:10Speaker 1: know who told me you don't do you don't do podcasts,
- 2:26:13Speaker 1: may be really eager to have you on. Yeah, you know,
- 2:26:15Speaker 1: the guys that really want to do them to make
- 2:26:17Speaker 1: me leary.
- 2:26:19Speaker 2: Now, the people that I work with are probably surprise
- 2:26:21Speaker 2: that I even you know, agreed to it, but I
- 2:26:23Speaker 2: just you know, things have changed now and I just
- 2:26:27Speaker 2: want to be as cooperative and helpful as possible.
- 2:26:30Speaker 5: So well, listen, you did such a good job. I've
- 2:26:35Speaker 5: already told Karin and put you back on the put
- 2:26:38Speaker 5: you on the returning guest.
- 2:26:39Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you got to join the all timers, man.
- 2:26:41Speaker 2: You know, bring them, Bring Brad Brad Cochran and Mike Callian,
- 2:26:46Speaker 2: Greg Hogan, Scott Sprucker, those guys. I'm not kidding they
- 2:26:51Speaker 2: they have a lot of information. They're super fun, fun guys.
- 2:26:53Speaker 1: And next time we next time you guys, I want
- 2:26:55Speaker 1: you to bring your whole team. Okay, we're just gonna
- 2:26:58Speaker 1: do where they got to think. We used to do
- 2:26:59Speaker 1: these things called hot tip offs, where it was like
- 2:27:02Speaker 1: a showdown of hot tips. We should revitalize hot tip off.
- 2:27:05Speaker 5: Yeah, I was watching something the other day. I was
- 2:27:08Speaker 5: watching yesterday vitalizing him right now on the website.
- 2:27:12Speaker 1: That's great, So hot tip off, you have a competition
- 2:27:14Speaker 1: who's got the hottest tip. You bring all your crew
- 2:27:17Speaker 1: in and you guys could have an hour long hot
- 2:27:20Speaker 1: tip off or just goes around the table and then
- 2:27:23Speaker 1: we'll score it and we'll wind up with a winner out.
- 2:27:27Speaker 2: Of the hole just goes round and round and round
- 2:27:30Speaker 2: and round.
- 2:27:31Speaker 1: And then we'll score the whole performance.
- 2:27:34Speaker 5: How good are you in the kitchen?
- 2:27:35Speaker 1: GSD? Hot tip off?
- 2:27:37Speaker 2: What's that?
- 2:27:37Speaker 5: How good are you in the kitchen?
- 2:27:39Speaker 2: Terrible?
- 2:27:40Speaker 1: You're married? Right?
- 2:27:42Speaker 2: What's that?
- 2:27:42Speaker 1: You're married or not?
- 2:27:43Speaker 3: Yeah?
- 2:27:43Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, Luckily you.
- 2:27:45Speaker 5: Guys will still be fun to play.
- 2:27:47Speaker 1: Been married a long time? Yeah, yeah, I think you'd
- 2:27:50Speaker 1: be good at trivia man.
- 2:27:52Speaker 5: Yeah, but if you're not, if you if you say
- 2:27:54Speaker 5: you're terrible in the kitchen, boy, that really that's twenty
- 2:27:56Speaker 5: five percent of the questions.
- 2:27:57Speaker 3: Yeah, but I bet you he's got some hot tips
- 2:28:00Speaker 3: about it being in the kitchen, like get a frozen peat.
- 2:28:07Speaker 2: It'll be twenty twenty five years of spring. And my
- 2:28:10Speaker 2: wife is of Mexican descent. She's a great cook. She
- 2:28:13Speaker 2: doesn't think that she is, but uh she Everything she
- 2:28:16Speaker 2: makes is amazing.
- 2:28:17Speaker 1: So was your wife born in Mexico?
- 2:28:21Speaker 2: No, No, she wasn't born. She's like think three generations
- 2:28:25Speaker 2: as Yeah, but twenty five years. Got the whole She's
- 2:28:31Speaker 2: got all the traditions down and everything, and that her
- 2:28:33Speaker 2: grandma didn't speak any English at all, and and where
- 2:28:37Speaker 2: her parents live in eastern Washington. It's just you know,
- 2:28:40Speaker 2: we go over there and make to Molly's and and
- 2:28:43Speaker 2: it's a lot of culture, Mexican culture.
- 2:28:45Speaker 1: I once traded someone a bunch of a woman from
- 2:28:50Speaker 1: damn it Comish. I can remember where she's from. She's
- 2:28:55Speaker 1: from Central America. Either way. They make to Mollies slightly
- 2:29:00Speaker 1: different than Mexican Tomali's, I know, because they would put
- 2:29:04Speaker 1: like a dried fruit in them.
- 2:29:06Speaker 5: Uh huh.
- 2:29:07Speaker 1: Where was she from? Man? Maybe Columbia? Okay, So so
- 2:29:13Speaker 1: I gave her a bunch of muskox meat, the deal
- 2:29:17Speaker 1: being that she made Tomali's with that muskox meat, but
- 2:29:21Speaker 1: I got half of the yield, which she thought was
- 2:29:24Speaker 1: a screaming deal. I thought it was a screaming deal.
- 2:29:27Speaker 1: So whatever, she made like twenty pounds worth of muskox
- 2:29:30Speaker 1: meat Tomali's, which is a shitload of Tmali's, and then
- 2:29:33Speaker 1: I got half of the take.
- 2:29:36Speaker 2: Nice.
- 2:29:37Speaker 1: No, it was a phenomenal deal. I had them all
- 2:29:39Speaker 1: lined up like bars of gold in my freezer. Man,
- 2:29:41Speaker 1: but we went through them pretty quick. But they had
- 2:29:43Speaker 1: like dried fruit, which I thought was interesting.
- 2:29:46Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't have to find out what that is.
- 2:29:48Speaker 2: But yeah, they our family doesn't do it like that,
- 2:29:52Speaker 2: just traditional with pork meat and all that.
- 2:29:55Speaker 1: Give me your hottest piece of marriage advice. Give me
- 2:29:57Speaker 1: a hot tip off on marriage advice.
- 2:30:01Speaker 2: I mean, I just I don't know. I just feel
- 2:30:04Speaker 2: like I just got so lucky and I'm just so
- 2:30:06Speaker 2: blessed and everything like that. I don't, I don't know what.
- 2:30:09Speaker 2: I just I think my wife is just the rock
- 2:30:11Speaker 2: of our of our family, and she's just a total
- 2:30:15Speaker 2: sweetheart and and you know, it's like she's the reason
- 2:30:18Speaker 2: though I guess why I don't do very many trips,
- 2:30:20Speaker 2: Like I feel like I found her sort of late
- 2:30:22Speaker 2: in life, even though we've been married twenty five years
- 2:30:25Speaker 2: or whatever. And so I love my home life so
- 2:30:27Speaker 2: much so it's turned me into a homebody like steelhead
- 2:30:31Speaker 2: steelhead fishing and bass fishing and you know some you
- 2:30:35Speaker 2: know a lot of stuff that I do or stuff
- 2:30:37Speaker 2: that's close close to home, because.
- 2:30:39Speaker 1: I like you home, Yeah, eating them to Molly's and you.
- 2:30:42Speaker 2: Never know how much time you'll how much time you'll have,
- 2:30:45Speaker 2: you know.
- 2:30:45Speaker 1: I got some marriage advice, find the right to buy.
- 2:30:49Speaker 1: Tony had this little tidbit one time. He said he
- 2:30:53Speaker 1: and I were both got in trouble with our wives
- 2:30:54Speaker 1: one time, which we didn't even deserve because we had
- 2:30:56Speaker 1: taken all of our kids claim digging. So you think,
- 2:31:01Speaker 1: how could you be in any trouble, Like normally, if
- 2:31:03Speaker 1: I take my kids to do something, my wife's very
- 2:31:05Speaker 1: very happy with me. Right if they're all gone, there's
- 2:31:08Speaker 1: nothing complain about. Anyways, on this trip, he Tony had
- 2:31:10Speaker 1: his kid in one of those kid carriers on your
- 2:31:13Speaker 1: back clam digging, but he didn't tire in there, and
- 2:31:17Speaker 1: he's out in the water and leans over comes right
- 2:31:24Speaker 1: out of that back back carrier because he was like
- 2:31:27Speaker 1: leaning over fishing around in the water for something. He's
- 2:31:30Speaker 1: on the way home, we got pulled over by post
- 2:31:32Speaker 1: like next thing. You know, it's like one in the morning.
- 2:31:34Speaker 1: It's just a whole late deal. Anyways, he said to me, Steve,
- 2:31:37Speaker 1: and I got yelled at, but my wife on speakerphone.
- 2:31:40Speaker 1: He got yelled at but his wife. He said to me, Steve,
- 2:31:43Speaker 1: if we were the way they wanted us to be,
- 2:31:46Speaker 1: they wouldn't like us. My wife she said, yeah, I would.
- 2:31:53Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's true.
- 2:31:55Speaker 1: I don't think that's marriage advice. That's just funny, all right.
- 2:32:00Speaker 1: Maybe like a meat eater's guy, do marriage advice.
- 2:32:04Speaker 3: I come up with a couple of tips.
- 2:32:07Speaker 1: I don't know about you, Chester. I heard of Chester
- 2:32:10Speaker 1: get yelled at eastbound and westbound on the same highway.
- 2:32:13Speaker 6: Man, But then he's just got to sing that beautiful
- 2:32:17Speaker 6: song that he wrote, and then he'll make everyone weep.
- 2:32:23Speaker 6: Just be forgiven.
- 2:32:24Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been driving down roll of Chester. He's in
- 2:32:26Speaker 1: all kinds of trouble because he's late from getting home
- 2:32:29Speaker 1: from fishing. And I said, well, here you supposed to
- 2:32:31Speaker 1: be doing when you get home? He said, going fishing.
- 2:32:36Speaker 1: He was late for his second fishing trip because he'd
- 2:32:39Speaker 1: been going too long on his first fishing trip of
- 2:32:41Speaker 1: the day.
- 2:32:42Speaker 2: That's yeah, it's always bad. You tell you, you tell
- 2:32:45Speaker 2: your wife are going, you're going for a half a day,
- 2:32:47Speaker 2: and you come home she's like, I thought you were
- 2:32:49Speaker 2: going for half a day, and you're like, well, twelve
- 2:32:50Speaker 2: hours is half a day.
- 2:32:53Speaker 1: In Chester's defense, he was supposed to take his white
- 2:32:55Speaker 1: fish and she was pissed that he was at home
- 2:32:57Speaker 1: from his other fishing to do that fishing. All right,
- 2:33:00Speaker 1: Thanks coming on, Dave, Did you like it?
- 2:33:03Speaker 2: Thanks for having me? I appreciate it. I was like
- 2:33:05Speaker 2: it or hate it.
- 2:33:06Speaker 1: I liked it.
- 2:33:07Speaker 2: I was kind of stressing it a little bit. I
- 2:33:09Speaker 2: didn't sleep much last night.
- 2:33:11Speaker 1: Don't go on all kinds of other podcasts, you know
- 2:33:15Speaker 1: what I mean. Don't become one of them guys.
- 2:33:17Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, no, keep it tight, man, We'll keep it, yeah,
- 2:33:21Speaker 2: for sure, keep it tight.
- 2:33:23Speaker 6: And everyone can find uh Dave's decoys at Dave smith
- 2:33:30Speaker 6: decoys dot com.
- 2:33:31Speaker 2: We haven't.
- 2:33:31Speaker 6: We'll merged that into the meat Eater site at some
- 2:33:34Speaker 6: point soon. But right now, it's he.
- 2:33:37Speaker 1: Prefers DSD because he's he's so modest. He doesn't like
- 2:33:40Speaker 1: being such a showboat. That's why he always goes to DSD.
- 2:33:43Speaker 6: I'm just I'm just giving the audience the u r L.
- 2:33:47Speaker 6: Well see the decoys are.
- 2:33:49Speaker 1: To prefer DSD. I get, yeah, because he doesn't want
- 2:33:52Speaker 1: to detract from his co workers' efforts by Dave's Yeah.
- 2:33:56Speaker 2: That's the thing is like we and that's that's one
- 2:34:00Speaker 2: of the things that's we're having a hard time with
- 2:34:03Speaker 2: that adjustment of and everyone's having a hard time with
- 2:34:05Speaker 2: that adjustment. Is at d SC we've always operated as
- 2:34:10Speaker 2: a group, you know, and made all our decisions as
- 2:34:13Speaker 2: a group. And and a consensus and you know, discussing everything,
- 2:34:16Speaker 2: and so there's definitely not one person that is sort
- 2:34:20Speaker 2: of the you know, the north star of DSD a.
- 2:34:26Speaker 1: Lot of muscle.
- 2:34:28Speaker 6: You're so self deprecating.
- 2:34:30Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, I've just been
- 2:34:34Speaker 2: I've just been real like like like I I definitely
- 2:34:38Speaker 2: you know, I didn't do anything. I mostly just work
- 2:34:42Speaker 2: in my in my shop a distance away from the
- 2:34:46Speaker 2: from the decoy shop and do clay sculptures and everything,
- 2:34:49Speaker 2: and so you know, I just surrounded myself with people
- 2:34:52Speaker 2: that are really good at at all those other all
- 2:34:54Speaker 2: those other things, and I never wanted to be super
- 2:34:57Speaker 2: involved with the you know, with all the headaches of
- 2:35:00Speaker 2: the business side of it and stuff like that, and
- 2:35:01Speaker 2: so you know, we're just definitely we're definitely a team
- 2:35:06Speaker 2: and operate operate that way and stuff, and so you know,
- 2:35:10Speaker 2: that's take some adjustment for everyone to realize that I'm
- 2:35:14Speaker 2: I am not you know, I am not the the
- 2:35:18Speaker 2: the decision maker representative and you know of D of DSD.
- 2:35:23Speaker 1: Well Decoys doesn't lend someone to think that that, Like
- 2:35:29Speaker 1: when you're talking to Dave Smith, you.
- 2:35:31Speaker 2: Know, yeah, I get that, I get that and again
- 2:35:34Speaker 2: I tried, you're.
- 2:35:35Speaker 1: Willing to see that?
- 2:35:37Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, well you guys do make some really really
- 2:35:42Speaker 3: good realistic decoys. Like the other day when I saw
- 2:35:46Speaker 3: more of that full spread, I was very impressed.
- 2:35:48Speaker 2: Oh thanks, Jess, I say that.
- 2:35:51Speaker 1: You know, we didn't even get into we got to
- 2:35:53Speaker 1: wrap up, we didn't get into fur trapping.
- 2:35:55Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you just have to come back.
- 2:35:58Speaker 1: Maybe make a Martin decoy who for trapping.
- 2:36:02Speaker 2: Is one of the things that helps me set up
- 2:36:05Speaker 2: ground blinds and tree stands. Like I think if like
- 2:36:09Speaker 2: if you, if you don't have that, I think you're you're,
- 2:36:13Speaker 2: you know, sadly missing out a tiny little bit unsetting.
- 2:36:16Speaker 1: Oh, it's very educational. We'll save that for the next
- 2:36:19Speaker 1: time you're on.
- 2:36:19Speaker 2: Sounds good, you'll come on.
- 2:36:20Speaker 1: We'll do a hot tip off with you and your guys.
- 2:36:22Speaker 1: Then you'll come on, we'll talk for trapping.
- 2:36:24Speaker 3: Sounds great, and then you win trivia.
- 2:36:28Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna still beat them, maybe beat them
- 2:36:33Speaker 1: horribly bad. All right, man, don't go doing a bunch
- 2:36:37Speaker 1: of podcasts.
- 2:36:38Speaker 2: Now, don't worry.
- 2:36:55Speaker 1: Seal Gray Shine like Suit in the sun.
- 2:37:04Speaker 2: Ride, Ride, Ride on along, sweetheart.
- 2:37:13Speaker 3: We're done.
- 2:37:14Speaker 1: Beat this damp horse to death, taking a new one
- 2:37:19Speaker 1: and ride away.
- 2:37:23Speaker 6: We're done beat this damn horse today, so take a
- 2:37:29Speaker 6: new one and ride on.