Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 314: Skip the Flip
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is Me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
- 0:13Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening un podcast.
- 0:18Speaker 1: You can't protet anything presented by first, like creating proven
- 0:23Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
- 0:27Speaker 1: for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. Isn't
- 0:35Speaker 1: Bill Smith the most popular name? Listen, start the machine.
- 0:40Speaker 1: I'll tell you listen. There are some names that the
- 0:47Speaker 1: world's gonna run out of, Yes and Bill, the world
- 0:51Speaker 1: will will there will be like the world will run
- 0:55Speaker 1: out of bills before people get back in the name
- 0:58Speaker 1: of their kids Bill, Like after Harry Potter came out,
- 1:01Speaker 1: everybody named their kid Henry. They wanted to name him Harry,
- 1:06Speaker 1: but they thought they knew that people know that it
- 1:08Speaker 1: was because they liked those books, so they named him Henry.
- 1:11Speaker 1: Huge proliferation to Henry's. I didn't know that well they were.
- 1:15Speaker 1: We almost ran out of Henry's and not. Now you
- 1:17Speaker 1: can't throw a rock without hitting the Henry Under all
- 1:20Speaker 1: ten years older Under, I feel like we're not even
- 1:23Speaker 1: runn out of bills. What about Frank? Frank seems to
- 1:27Speaker 1: be dying to Okay, Yeah, my dad was frank. We
- 1:31Speaker 1: almost named our daughter Frankie, so I was gonna name
- 1:35Speaker 1: her frank after her paternal grandfather, and then Rose, yeah,
- 1:41Speaker 1: and Rose after her paternal grandmother and great grandmother. So
- 1:46Speaker 1: I was gonna name her Frankie Rose, and then found
- 1:49Speaker 1: out that there's some musician named Frankie Rose and just
- 1:52Speaker 1: change it to Rosemary because that's my mom's name. But yeah,
- 1:55Speaker 1: we'll probably run out of Frank's, but they'll Frankie's. What
- 2:00Speaker 1: about George. I think we'll get very low on George's. Yeah,
- 2:05Speaker 1: but do you think there's gonna be revival. It's hard
- 2:08Speaker 1: to know what's going to be revival. No one saw
- 2:10Speaker 1: it coming that everyone was going to name their kid Henry.
- 2:12Speaker 1: They named their kids Henry because I think they thought
- 2:14Speaker 1: that they'd be smart. I like the name Henry, but
- 2:16Speaker 1: I had no clue. There's like a majority of kids
- 2:20Speaker 1: now are named him. I know nobody. I don't know
- 2:24Speaker 1: what it was a city. You go to a city,
- 2:26Speaker 1: you can't throw a rock at a playground without hitting Henry,
- 2:31Speaker 1: and you think it's for Harry Potter. Do you think
- 2:32Speaker 1: that's like my theory? I think it's a sound theory,
- 2:36Speaker 1: but it's just I think they were, like, I really
- 2:38Speaker 1: want to name him Harry, but then everybody's gonna know
- 2:40Speaker 1: I like those kids books. So they named him Henry
- 2:43Speaker 1: cause that seemed because it reminded them. I thought you
- 2:45Speaker 1: were pulling legitimate research into that, But that's just your feelings.
- 2:51Speaker 1: There's certain theories I'm into that are hard to substantiate.
- 2:53Speaker 1: Like my brother Danny believes that he can't untangle in
- 2:57Speaker 1: his head that Bill Clinton became president and all kids
- 3:01Speaker 1: started wearing bike helmets, Like he feels that there's like
- 3:05Speaker 1: he feels that something he doesn't he hasn't untangled it yet,
- 3:08Speaker 1: but he feels that there was a somehow a link
- 3:11Speaker 1: mhm between the Clinton presidency and for how many hundreds
- 3:16Speaker 1: of years kids didn't have bike helmets and then they
- 3:19Speaker 1: all got a bike helmet when Bill Clinton became president.
- 3:22Speaker 1: That's his theory. So I don't know. I don't share
- 3:24Speaker 1: the theory. I'm saying, like some theories are hard to
- 3:26Speaker 1: like prove and disprove. They all started playing saxophone in
- 3:29Speaker 1: their boxers too. Now, in terms of names, it would
- 3:35Speaker 1: be interesting to know, like, just to tie this all together,
- 3:40Speaker 1: did Monica drop off in prevalence following the Clinton presidency.
- 3:47Speaker 1: I could see that happening very probable. I don't know,
- 3:52Speaker 1: because that was during that Friend show where the peak
- 3:57Speaker 1: friends popularity. Like right now, I wouldn't be surprised. And
- 4:01Speaker 1: if this podcast had a different if we had a
- 4:03Speaker 1: different sort of focus, we could dig into this stuff
- 4:05Speaker 1: a little bit more. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeffrey,
- 4:08Speaker 1: if there were some people who were going to go
- 4:10Speaker 1: with Jeffrey, had a change of heart. I'm not falling
- 4:15Speaker 1: the fellow named Jeffrey Epstein I'm following was hung to
- 4:21Speaker 1: death in his jail cell. No, I didn't say, no,
- 4:29Speaker 1: that's right. If I put it like hung to death,
- 4:31Speaker 1: like someone did it, I feel like I think there's
- 4:36Speaker 1: a chance that's true. Which, since we're off topic, do
- 4:42Speaker 1: you want to know the leading do you want to
- 4:43Speaker 1: know the leading conspiracy theory? Someone explained I didn't understand,
- 4:46Speaker 1: like what they're leading. You want to the lead conspiracy
- 4:49Speaker 1: theory about Epstein? This might be now, but like at
- 4:53Speaker 1: a time, this was the one has explained to me
- 4:56Speaker 1: by someone who traffics heavily and conspiracy theories. It was
- 4:59Speaker 1: that Epstein was a massad agent. That's good man, that's
- 5:06Speaker 1: old news man. Listen, Tode, I didn't if I made
- 5:10Speaker 1: it up, I would have said I made it up.
- 5:12Speaker 1: I'm saying this is so you know this, Sean. You
- 5:14Speaker 1: follow this kind of stuff. Oh you're talking about that
- 5:17Speaker 1: rabbit hole for like two years. Um, Shawn's here, Sean.
- 5:22Speaker 1: We were's here to talk about ducks. But somehow and
- 5:23Speaker 1: he's not a big and he's not a big Jeffrey
- 5:25Speaker 1: Epstein expert o. Can you tell us the theory? Sean? Yeah,
- 5:30Speaker 1: I know the link or the thing that they say
- 5:34Speaker 1: is that I'll tell you this. No, you did not
- 5:37Speaker 1: tell me this. Mm hmm. Is that Gallaine Maxwell, the
- 5:43Speaker 1: lady that was just on trial. Yeah, as it goes,
- 5:47Speaker 1: her dad was a massad. That's what they say. It
- 5:50Speaker 1: starts to make some gravy m Yeah, but here you're
- 5:54Speaker 1: not filling it in. Let me just fill it in.
- 5:55Speaker 1: This is we're so far off. This is not what
- 5:57Speaker 1: this show is about, ladies and gentlemen. It's just not
- 6:00Speaker 1: what it's about. In fact, Stue Miller from Coon Creek
- 6:02Speaker 1: Outdoors is here and he's supposed to be flipping a
- 6:04Speaker 1: bobcat hide right now, which he's gonna explain in one second,
- 6:08Speaker 1: So bear with us. We're gonna get into appropriate subject matter.
- 6:12Speaker 1: Epstein was a massad agent. How he served the Massad
- 6:17Speaker 1: was he would get prominent academics, politicians, financial individuals into
- 6:23Speaker 1: compromising situations, film them, film them whatever he did, and
- 6:31Speaker 1: then later, when Israel needed them to do or not
- 6:35Speaker 1: do something, okay, they would say, oh, and by the way,
- 6:43Speaker 1: we happen to have a very interesting video. You might
- 6:46Speaker 1: not like to be out. And as the conspiracy theory goes,
- 6:52Speaker 1: that was why Jeffrey Epstein had to be silenced on
- 6:55Speaker 1: that fateful night in his jail cell while the guards
- 6:59Speaker 1: slept in the security camera malfunctioned. M plausible mm hmm. Anyway,
- 7:06Speaker 1: Phil looks very titillated. You can tell Phil like really
- 7:10Speaker 1: want us to get into it, but he's also uncomfortable.
- 7:12Speaker 1: How off subject matter this is to introduce yourself, Oh, Brodie,
- 7:17Speaker 1: real quick, Brodies here Chester the die Master, which Chester
- 7:22Speaker 1: is a very dying name. It's just been hanging on
- 7:25Speaker 1: for like a hundred years. I feel like, yeah, I
- 7:27Speaker 1: feel like that might be why I like you so much,
- 7:30Speaker 1: because you're the only Chester I've ever known. The pets
- 7:32Speaker 1: are keeping it alive though like dogs. Yeah, Rick Huttons here,
- 7:38Speaker 1: Ses here, we're gonna talk about sets up coming wedding
- 7:40Speaker 1: a little bit. I'm here, high folks. Yeah, we're also joined.
- 7:43Speaker 1: He's remote, but I still feel his presidents. Sean Weavers
- 7:46Speaker 1: here and he's gonna hit us with the latest installment
- 7:48Speaker 1: of Shawn's Duck Report, which is one of my favorite
- 7:51Speaker 1: things we do. What's up, Sean, what's going on with you? Well?
- 7:54Speaker 1: I just finally got off the road after two straight
- 7:58Speaker 1: months of film and Duck lawre are you duck hut
- 8:00Speaker 1: and show Um I'm actually the reason I'm doing this
- 8:04Speaker 1: remote is I got a little sick, got a little
- 8:06Speaker 1: ran down from being on the road that long. The
- 8:09Speaker 1: utility company actually called while I was gone and they
- 8:12Speaker 1: wanted to check if my water meter was broke because
- 8:17Speaker 1: I hadn't used any water in my place for two months,
- 8:20Speaker 1: so he's been like dead or Yeah. It was kind
- 8:27Speaker 1: of a nice wellness check. Knowing the utility companies got
- 8:31Speaker 1: me coming, like, dude, at least someone knows what I've
- 8:34Speaker 1: been gone. Also, Duck Lore, the first episode is coming
- 8:39Speaker 1: out February, and that's a Texas teel hunt with me
- 8:43Speaker 1: and Jean Paul and I like it. It's it's pretty cool.
- 8:48Speaker 1: Walk us through a couple more episodes that are gonna
- 8:50Speaker 1: be coming up. Yeah, so first few episodes are going
- 8:54Speaker 1: to be Texas Teal, then Callahan and Me in North Dakota,
- 8:59Speaker 1: Janna in Nebraska, and yourself in Michigan. So jumping kind
- 9:04Speaker 1: of all over the Midwest. Ads. Yep, learn a lot
- 9:10Speaker 1: about ducks with a guy that knows a lot about
- 9:12Speaker 1: duck Seawan Weaver. Uh but okay, now, stew introduce yourself alright.
- 9:16Speaker 1: So I'm Stu Miller. I uh run a couple different
- 9:20Speaker 1: YouTube channels. Uh, con Creek Outdoors is the one that
- 9:24Speaker 1: that I'm here for um and I'm kind of a
- 9:27Speaker 1: trapper more or less. So that's how I came to
- 9:31Speaker 1: meet Steve. And uh yeah, I dabble in uh trapping
- 9:35Speaker 1: and for handling. So tell her everybody where you're from.
- 9:38Speaker 1: I'm from Illinois, Southern Illinois. Oh we get into this
- 9:43Speaker 1: for a minute. So this is on point, Phil, don't
- 9:48Speaker 1: don't get nervous. I have a problem with I have
- 9:54Speaker 1: a real problem with people in southern Illinois who think
- 9:56Speaker 1: they're southern. And I told you to if people ice
- 10:03Speaker 1: fish in your state. You are not Southern, Like, I
- 10:07Speaker 1: don't care where the Mason Dixon line is. That's the thing.
- 10:12Speaker 1: There's a lot of people ice fishing right now because
- 10:14Speaker 1: they call this is the perfect time for this. You
- 10:18Speaker 1: can't be a Southerner in a state where ice fishing
- 10:20Speaker 1: is occurring. Stu says that he explained to me that
- 10:29Speaker 1: there's so much dissatisfy that there's such a cultural divide
- 10:32Speaker 1: between the greater Chicago area and then like the agricultural
- 10:36Speaker 1: segment of Illinois, and I am I okay to say this.
- 10:41Speaker 1: There's such a cultural finance, like just as a huge
- 10:43Speaker 1: cultural divide that that it's pushed southern Illinois to the
- 10:48Speaker 1: south in mentality rather than be associated with with the
- 10:55Speaker 1: the political corruption and ongoings in Chicago. I'm saying it. Yeah,
- 11:00Speaker 1: you get somebody five miles south of Chicago and they're
- 11:02Speaker 1: gonna say they're from southern Yeah, they're like by which
- 11:06Speaker 1: I mean not Chicago, not Chicago. I fell in love
- 11:10Speaker 1: with Steve's videos because I would go, um, I found
- 11:14Speaker 1: you in a totally organic way. I would be curious
- 11:17Speaker 1: about how to do something with her handling, Like for instance,
- 11:23Speaker 1: last year, UM a little over well over uh fourteen
- 11:26Speaker 1: months ago. Um, we got onto a couple of red
- 11:30Speaker 1: foxes one morning and got the red foxes. I had
- 11:34Speaker 1: a little uh seventeen h mr with me. We got
- 11:39Speaker 1: a breeding pair of red foxes, and I was like,
- 11:42Speaker 1: I wanted to get him tanned and put up real
- 11:43Speaker 1: nice And now they adorned my daughters. Actually they hanged
- 11:46Speaker 1: for my daughter's bunk bead thing and she loves him,
- 11:48Speaker 1: but and I wanted to like get him tanned for myself.
- 11:55Speaker 1: And I used to put up red foxes and sell
- 11:56Speaker 1: them when I was young. But I was just kind
- 11:57Speaker 1: of curious about how to do the feet, you know,
- 11:59Speaker 1: and all that kind stuff different than how you do
- 12:01Speaker 1: for fur handling for fur trade. And I would get
- 12:05Speaker 1: typed in like how do you do x Y and Z?
- 12:06Speaker 1: And I'd wind up on your thing, or how do
- 12:09Speaker 1: you do x Y and Z with a skunk? And
- 12:10Speaker 1: I'd wind up on your page. So then I sent
- 12:13Speaker 1: you an email and it's been we've been interacting ever since.
- 12:17Speaker 1: Oh yeah, every day I asked him a question. No,
- 12:19Speaker 1: it's been it's been fun. So, Um, that's how we met.
- 12:22Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about that. Now. Here's what I wanted
- 12:24Speaker 1: we had a lot of stuff we gotta cover off on.
- 12:26Speaker 1: But I want you to to explain Grab the Bobcat
- 12:30Speaker 1: and explain what's been done and what people can listen
- 12:33Speaker 1: to you now do like why we did what we
- 12:36Speaker 1: did and where we're at with it now. Alright, So yesterday, um,
- 12:40Speaker 1: we took a bobcat that was skinned and then Steve
- 12:44Speaker 1: you fleshed it and we tubeskin. Tell everybody with tub
- 12:48Speaker 1: skin skin. So basically, um, the way that furs are
- 12:52Speaker 1: sold through the fur market is their tube skin. And
- 12:55Speaker 1: that's basically where you're gonna make a cut kind of
- 12:59Speaker 1: on its back end and you're gonna kind of peel
- 13:01Speaker 1: the hide off, very similar to it like taking off
- 13:04Speaker 1: a sock. Basically, Yeah, that's you know, and you're gonna
- 13:07Speaker 1: peel that that critter down and you're gonna end up
- 13:09Speaker 1: with it. As you say, a tube of it's not
- 13:13Speaker 1: gonna be cut open where you know, if you've seen
- 13:16Speaker 1: like traditional pictures, you know you see where they split them,
- 13:20Speaker 1: split them up the belly across the back and imagine
- 13:22Speaker 1: that you're like the the incision being that like when
- 13:25Speaker 1: you're gutting a deer, you make that incision all the
- 13:27Speaker 1: way up to his chin, and then you've got like
- 13:29Speaker 1: an open hide. So then you would lay the hide
- 13:31Speaker 1: or the pelt flatways, Um this is it's not gonna
- 13:35Speaker 1: look like a bear rug when you're dumb. No, it's
- 13:37Speaker 1: gonna be all all together. And as like you said,
- 13:40Speaker 1: a tube skin you cut, just think about like this,
- 13:42Speaker 1: cut around and like the only cut you make through
- 13:44Speaker 1: the hider around the ankles. Right, Yeah, that's it. So
- 13:48Speaker 1: imagine that you cut around the back, cut around the
- 13:50Speaker 1: rear ankle, a circle around it on each leg, and
- 13:55Speaker 1: then you run a slit up to the anus, and
- 13:59Speaker 1: then the whole thing comes off just like that, peel
- 14:01Speaker 1: it right off. So that's what I did to that bobcat.
- 14:04Speaker 1: That's a small female bobcat, small female bobcat. Yeah. And
- 14:08Speaker 1: then so after it's my favorite my prize possession. My
- 14:11Speaker 1: favorite thing I owned used to be my buffalo skull
- 14:13Speaker 1: that I found that I wrote a book about. But
- 14:14Speaker 1: now it's that we better not screwed up there. So
- 14:18Speaker 1: now after you after you fleshed it, then we put
- 14:20Speaker 1: on flesh and beam and we used the flesh and
- 14:23Speaker 1: knife to flesh all the all the all the membrane
- 14:26Speaker 1: and the fat and all the residual fats. So we
- 14:28Speaker 1: got it just down to the skin. And after we
- 14:31Speaker 1: did that, we split the ears because you're gonna tan
- 14:35Speaker 1: it for yourself, so we wanted to make sure. You know,
- 14:36Speaker 1: that's something I never had done before, So we split
- 14:39Speaker 1: the ears and then we put it on a board.
- 14:43Speaker 1: So different critters are sold different ways and with like
- 14:47Speaker 1: a canine. So your fox or coyotes and your bobcats,
- 14:51Speaker 1: all those are sold for out so you can see
- 14:53Speaker 1: the the presentation the pelt. Uh. Some of your other
- 14:56Speaker 1: critters like muskrats, minks, and coons, they're all sold for in.
- 15:02Speaker 1: So do you know why Seth and I were speculating
- 15:06Speaker 1: about that the other day? Who decided that has does
- 15:11Speaker 1: it ever change? Have you ever heard of changing? Back
- 15:13Speaker 1: in the day they sold coons actually flat, you would
- 15:18Speaker 1: split them up. The reason that I always been told is,
- 15:23Speaker 1: you know, with with a bobcat, say, and a coyote,
- 15:26Speaker 1: you're you're using basically all of that. So you want
- 15:30Speaker 1: to be able to visually see that that whole hide.
- 15:33Speaker 1: You want you want to see the fur all of it.
- 15:36Speaker 1: So whereas like on a coon, you know, we we
- 15:39Speaker 1: boredom for in, but you also cut a window and
- 15:44Speaker 1: inspection window and the greater will actually grade that. And
- 15:48Speaker 1: that's actually kind of the prized part of that hide
- 15:50Speaker 1: is what's in that inspection windows. He can get a
- 15:53Speaker 1: good general idea of the quality of that hide through
- 15:57Speaker 1: that inspection window. Take a muskrat, for instance. I remember
- 16:02Speaker 1: selling muskrats at auction and they would still sort of open.
- 16:09Speaker 1: They would bend it up to look inside it, to
- 16:12Speaker 1: look at the back. For why is a muskrat not
- 16:15Speaker 1: just stretched first side out? I think a lot of
- 16:18Speaker 1: it is so they can see the prime nous of
- 16:20Speaker 1: the pelt, you know, because you know how a muskrat
- 16:22Speaker 1: so muskrats and we'll kind of talk pelt prime nous.
- 16:25Speaker 1: But you know the reason that we trapped critters in
- 16:28Speaker 1: the winters, because that's whenever the furs prime, the pelt
- 16:31Speaker 1: is prime. And if you ever, it's because it's because
- 16:35Speaker 1: you do it between big game hunting and ice fish.
- 16:37Speaker 1: You know, it's because there's a month when you might
- 16:43Speaker 1: get bored. Now, this goes way way back. This goes
- 16:47Speaker 1: why they set regulations in Europe like four hundred years
- 16:51Speaker 1: ago to trapping regulations, so where you would actually target
- 16:55Speaker 1: prime critters. And uh so if you ever heard the
- 16:58Speaker 1: term a blue pet pelt, Okay, so blue pelt is
- 17:02Speaker 1: essentially kind of an unprimed pelt early season pelt or
- 17:07Speaker 1: or late So that's point out. I mean literally blue.
- 17:11Speaker 1: It's blue like if you ever kill a deer, like
- 17:13Speaker 1: an early if you live in a state where you're
- 17:15Speaker 1: allowed to, like get rolling in September something, you skin
- 17:18Speaker 1: that deer and it's like the leather is blue. It's blue. Yep.
- 17:21Speaker 1: So that's what they call it blue pelt. And what
- 17:24Speaker 1: happens is a lot of people are in the assumption
- 17:27Speaker 1: that temperature is what makes that for a prime and
- 17:31Speaker 1: that's actually false. It's actually based more on daylight hours,
- 17:35Speaker 1: which has a correlation to temperature obviously. So you know,
- 17:39Speaker 1: as as winter progresses further north you are, you're losing
- 17:43Speaker 1: daylight quicker than south, so the pelts will generally prime
- 17:47Speaker 1: up quicker. So like the winter, the hell they call
- 17:51Speaker 1: the shortest day of the year winter. So yeah, that's
- 17:54Speaker 1: when yany goes out burning log around his house bunch times.
- 17:59Speaker 1: People hits all kinds of lavian things. Um when he's
- 18:07Speaker 1: doing that. Uh, the shortest day of the year like
- 18:11Speaker 1: peak prime nous. Well, not necessarily, no, not well, because
- 18:15Speaker 1: there's other factors too. So you know, for instance, um,
- 18:18Speaker 1: whenever we're talking with coons, they have a running season,
- 18:21Speaker 1: which is you know, kind of right now, a couple
- 18:23Speaker 1: of weeks ago and we're talking, you know, kind of
- 18:25Speaker 1: the middle into January where I'm from. So they will
- 18:28Speaker 1: actually go from Dan to Dan to DN to rut,
- 18:31Speaker 1: no different than like a buck will. But what will
- 18:33Speaker 1: happen is going from Dan to Den to DN, they'll
- 18:36Speaker 1: start to get a patch and rub fur on their
- 18:38Speaker 1: back and it will actually become bald from squeezing into
- 18:41Speaker 1: the hole from running around so much from Dan to
- 18:43Speaker 1: DN to DN. So you've seen I was here like that.
- 18:46Speaker 1: They're rubbed. You've seen it where they actually wear their
- 18:49Speaker 1: hair out squeezing into holes and logs. It will become
- 18:53Speaker 1: infected that they will rub it down raw raw meat
- 18:58Speaker 1: from going. I mean, they get crazy. It's just no
- 19:00Speaker 1: different than a deer and rut. You see, I haven't
- 19:03Speaker 1: seen it. I've seen it worn down. I haven't seen
- 19:05Speaker 1: it worn down like raw. It'll be scabbed over. And
- 19:09Speaker 1: you know that's obviously I'm not prime pelt, you know,
- 19:13Speaker 1: if you want to trap, so you know, even though
- 19:14Speaker 1: there's a season for him, generally quit trapping. Then you know,
- 19:18Speaker 1: I gotta interrupt you real quick. So I don't want to.
- 19:19Speaker 1: I don't want to establish a rivalry between you and Seth.
- 19:22Speaker 1: But there's something you need to know about Seth. When
- 19:25Speaker 1: Seth was a little boy, he uh would go down
- 19:29Speaker 1: to a fur buyer in in Uh flesh and stretch raccoons.
- 19:35Speaker 1: In high school. That was my job. Piece work, no hourly,
- 19:39Speaker 1: no piece work, peace work, piece work. How would they
- 19:42Speaker 1: give you for one not much? Is like three or
- 19:44Speaker 1: four bucks? Sound like more than stuff's worth. Now anyway,
- 19:50Speaker 1: I was like, I forget what it was. No, it wasn't. Yeah,
- 19:54Speaker 1: it didn't seem well at the time, it seemed like
- 19:56Speaker 1: a lot. Oh, I U appeal log home logs for
- 20:00Speaker 1: thirty five cents a foot, which at the time it
- 20:03Speaker 1: was pretty good. I wouldn't be able to feed one kid.
- 20:06Speaker 1: I would be able to feed one of my kids
- 20:08Speaker 1: on that. Now it was a good night. Then it
- 20:11Speaker 1: was a good good night flash And then oh man,
- 20:16Speaker 1: it all depended because we would sometimes we'd like get
- 20:19Speaker 1: behind freeze a bunch of hides. You know, we we
- 20:22Speaker 1: guys would guys would bring him in either like you know,
- 20:25Speaker 1: like whole animal, or they would bring him in skinned
- 20:28Speaker 1: all already. Just I just needed to flash and put
- 20:30Speaker 1: them up. But would you go down and skin the
- 20:32Speaker 1: whole ones too? Yeah? Oh you would, okay, Yeah, so
- 20:38Speaker 1: you get paid more for like one that you had
- 20:40Speaker 1: to skin, flash and put up. Yeah. It was like
- 20:43Speaker 1: it was like two two or three bucks to skin it,
- 20:47Speaker 1: two or three bucks to flesh it and put it
- 20:49Speaker 1: up something like that. Um, but I mean we used
- 20:53Speaker 1: to do we should flash from dark to dark some
- 20:57Speaker 1: some like start early in the morning, start before it
- 21:02Speaker 1: got light out, and quit after the dark. And what
- 21:05Speaker 1: might you do in today? You know you remember I
- 21:07Speaker 1: don't remember at all more than ten oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
- 21:11Speaker 1: I do, like ten or so in an evening after school,
- 21:15Speaker 1: m sometimes more. Sometimes it all depends on what people
- 21:19Speaker 1: were bringing in going to school all greasy, No I
- 21:23Speaker 1: was after school. Um yeah. So anyways, I don't want
- 21:27Speaker 1: you to I don't want you, you and Seth to
- 21:28Speaker 1: have like a little thing in an hour you like
- 21:30Speaker 1: feel like you're at odds with one another, And I
- 21:32Speaker 1: just want you to know you're you're across from across.
- 21:34Speaker 1: I feel like I feel I feel like we're brothers. Yeah,
- 21:37Speaker 1: you're a crossing. You're sitting across from a former professional.
- 21:40Speaker 1: It's a dying trade. So like, yeah, that's very young.
- 21:43Speaker 1: So this isn't that long ago. If I say high school,
- 21:45Speaker 1: it's like people look like that, Like, uh, like, you
- 21:49Speaker 1: know a lot different back then. Alright, So go on
- 21:54Speaker 1: and circle background of the damn Bobcats too. Yeah, you
- 21:56Speaker 1: keep getting me dist They go into holes, they rub
- 21:59Speaker 1: their hair off. Talking about I was trying to make
- 22:01Speaker 1: the claim that like prim nous might be the winter solstice,
- 22:04Speaker 1: but you're saying there's other factors that override that, a
- 22:07Speaker 1: lot of other variables. Yeah, kyotes, you know, their prime
- 22:10Speaker 1: nous is usually earlier in the season. They'll start to
- 22:12Speaker 1: degrade fairly quickly. Um, you know, a lot depends on
- 22:16Speaker 1: like his hair, the hair wears out or what, depending
- 22:18Speaker 1: on where they're at. If they're in like an open country,
- 22:21Speaker 1: you know, where they're not having to like push through
- 22:23Speaker 1: a lot of brush and stuff, they're gonna stay you know,
- 22:26Speaker 1: prime longer. Where if you're out you know west, where
- 22:29Speaker 1: they're pushing through a bunch of sage brush and different things.
- 22:31Speaker 1: Like that that'll slowly wear out that fur. Oh yeah,
- 22:35Speaker 1: there's a bunch of different variables. Yeah, they tell about
- 22:38Speaker 1: the one that happens the beavers in the spring. So
- 22:41Speaker 1: what d what what sort of ends the season on beavers.
- 22:44Speaker 1: So beavers will actually start fighting as they come out,
- 22:47Speaker 1: depending on if you have ice or not, but they'll
- 22:49Speaker 1: start fighting and they'll start biting each other. And so
- 22:52Speaker 1: whenever the beavers start, they'll have bite marks on them,
- 22:55Speaker 1: very similar to muskrats to do the same thing. Whenever
- 22:57Speaker 1: you start getting beaver with a bunch of bite more
- 23:00Speaker 1: and two marks on them, it's time to quit. And
- 23:02Speaker 1: that might happen before the season even ends. Yeah, yeah,
- 23:05Speaker 1: no difference in like like the ar coon season right now, Um,
- 23:09Speaker 1: you're you're gonna get coons that are rubbed during season.
- 23:12Speaker 1: They are still in so you've got to make that
- 23:14Speaker 1: decision to either release them or quit trapping or you
- 23:17Speaker 1: know whatever. So you know, let him growing on a
- 23:19Speaker 1: better pelt. Yeah, and you'll see that, you know, because
- 23:22Speaker 1: especially on your boar coons, they'll have a big scar patch,
- 23:25Speaker 1: usually right on the back and it'll be from years
- 23:28Speaker 1: and years and years. Really, Yeah, it's all you'll notice
- 23:32Speaker 1: it will be a darker patch right down the center,
- 23:34Speaker 1: and that's all scars. And whenever you're skinning and flesh them,
- 23:37Speaker 1: you've got to be kind of careful of it too,
- 23:38Speaker 1: because that's not like all scar tissue, and it's all
- 23:41Speaker 1: scar tissue. Yeah. On a lot of your older big boards,
- 23:45Speaker 1: you'll see that. And as you as the pelt dries,
- 23:47Speaker 1: you'll see that kind of brownish, darker brown hue right
- 23:51Speaker 1: down the back. And that's that's from them rubbing year
- 23:53Speaker 1: after year after year going into squeezing into dense just constantly. Yep,
- 23:58Speaker 1: they just go from densite to denside, didn't. They will
- 24:01Speaker 1: run themselves. I mean you'll see them out in the daytime.
- 24:05Speaker 1: They'll get real skinny and just just just like a
- 24:07Speaker 1: buck and rut, they'll just run themselves stupid covering ground. Okay,
- 24:11Speaker 1: back to the Bobcat. Back to the Bobcat. So we've
- 24:14Speaker 1: got the Bobcat and uh so we put them on here.
- 24:16Speaker 1: You know what we're talking about his wife for in,
- 24:18Speaker 1: for out and all that. Okay, yeah, yeah, well that's
- 24:21Speaker 1: what we got distracted on. So we put the Bobcat
- 24:23Speaker 1: on a board yesterday. Um, because this Bobcat is going
- 24:27Speaker 1: to be we want them fur out um and that's
- 24:30Speaker 1: how they're sold, which you're gonna tan it. So it
- 24:32Speaker 1: really doesn't matter because on a Bobcat, the buyers want
- 24:35Speaker 1: to see they want to see the spots. You know,
- 24:37Speaker 1: that's your prime. You know, on a coyote, it's kind
- 24:40Speaker 1: of that back or the belly. Um a coon, it's
- 24:42Speaker 1: the back. But on the Bobcat, they really want to
- 24:44Speaker 1: see those spots. That's that's where the money is at,
- 24:47Speaker 1: the spotted belly, that spotted belly and generally, you know,
- 24:50Speaker 1: the clear more predominant spots are you're hired dollar furs.
- 24:55Speaker 1: So I've heard guys say that if the belly like,
- 24:58Speaker 1: they'll go buy you. How many fingers the belly strip is? Like,
- 25:02Speaker 1: if you have a belly strip that's like four fingers
- 25:04Speaker 1: wide and nice bright clear spots, that's a good one. Now,
- 25:08Speaker 1: I gotta admit the one your hand on right there
- 25:09Speaker 1: is a two f it's got a two finger belly
- 25:12Speaker 1: on it. Yeah. I just got a pretty nice one
- 25:15Speaker 1: believable Bobcat. Yeah, that was a nice one. That's like
- 25:18Speaker 1: two hands wide belly. That was a big boy. And
- 25:23Speaker 1: if you look at them compared to like the Western
- 25:25Speaker 1: bobcats versus the Eastern bobcats. You know these bobcats out
- 25:29Speaker 1: here a lot clearer our Our Eastern bobcats are just
- 25:32Speaker 1: almost brown. Yeah, totally different trash cats. Yeah, not not
- 25:36Speaker 1: worth so uh okay, tell everybody it's on a split board.
- 25:41Speaker 1: A splain all that. So we we boarded this cat
- 25:44Speaker 1: on a split board. Um, you know you can board
- 25:47Speaker 1: them on a solid board or split board. I have
- 25:49Speaker 1: a preference of a split board simply because with the
- 25:52Speaker 1: split boards we're going to flip this heide anyway, so
- 25:56Speaker 1: we're gonna have to manipulate them, and the split board
- 25:58Speaker 1: just allows us to remove the animal from the board
- 26:01Speaker 1: just a little bit easier. Now, if if, if it
- 26:04Speaker 1: needs to be if it needs to be fur out,
- 26:07Speaker 1: why did we start it for in because we want
- 26:11Speaker 1: to get that critter to dry. There's a there's and
- 26:14Speaker 1: depending on who you talked to, some guys will what
- 26:17Speaker 1: they call skip the flip, which is they will that's
- 26:20Speaker 1: a good T shirt, skip the slip flip. Yeah, but
- 26:25Speaker 1: we need an illustration Hunters. We need to call Hunter
- 26:27Speaker 1: Spencer and see if he can capture in an image
- 26:29Speaker 1: a man who has simply not flipped it. Skip the flips.
- 26:34Speaker 1: There's a lot of because it's a picture of a
- 26:36Speaker 1: dude with a bobcat. How do you know if he
- 26:37Speaker 1: flipped it or not. It's a hard illustration. I'm gonna
- 26:43Speaker 1: think about that. How would you capture that illustration? And
- 26:45Speaker 1: then it would say skip the flip. But we're gonna
- 26:49Speaker 1: flip this one because the reason why we're gonna flip
- 26:51Speaker 1: it is we want to make sure that hide is
- 26:53Speaker 1: good and dry and that we're not going to have
- 26:55Speaker 1: any issues with you know, molding or drying issues. So
- 26:59Speaker 1: we bore did this thing for in on a split
- 27:02Speaker 1: board and we've let it sit, you know, depending on
- 27:06Speaker 1: temperature and humanity, everythings like that. Twelve sixteen hours. But
- 27:10Speaker 1: that one, because of because of our schedule day, he's
- 27:12Speaker 1: been sitting and sitting a little longer, a little longer,
- 27:15Speaker 1: so it's gonna be a little bit more of a
- 27:16Speaker 1: trick now. One day I called stew and I asked,
- 27:18Speaker 1: I was doing a martin and I had to leave town.
- 27:22Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna be around to flip, so I didn't
- 27:25Speaker 1: know the slogan skip the flip, And I said, can
- 27:29Speaker 1: I skip the flip, and he said, people do and
- 27:33Speaker 1: it's something that you can get away with. And that's
- 27:35Speaker 1: some of a bit dried on that board. I was.
- 27:39Speaker 1: I got to where I was thinking about how I
- 27:41Speaker 1: was going to try to destroy the board because somehow
- 27:44Speaker 1: get my I wanted the Martin more than the board,
- 27:47Speaker 1: and I was like, maybe I can split this board
- 27:49Speaker 1: and crack it into little pieces and somehow get it
- 27:51Speaker 1: out of there. And then after much trial and error,
- 27:54Speaker 1: I eventually got that some bitch off but dried on
- 27:57Speaker 1: the board. When I do him right for in overnight
- 28:01Speaker 1: and then flip it, it just falls off just so
- 28:04Speaker 1: much easier, no different than this. So I see you
- 28:06Speaker 1: guys got it salted too, or a little bit of borax.
- 28:10Speaker 1: Sorry about that now, Phil, Sorry not Phil. You know
- 28:12Speaker 1: I don't want to Phil talking about that. But Bill,
- 28:19Speaker 1: Phil his name Bill, he'd know, Uh yeah, explain the
- 28:22Speaker 1: borax a little bit, A little bit borax. So a
- 28:25Speaker 1: lot of people assume use salt for whatever reason. I guess,
- 28:29Speaker 1: just an old timey thing you salted hide. If you're
- 28:32Speaker 1: selling to the fur trade, that's actually you don't want
- 28:35Speaker 1: to use salt. And the reason being is the salt
- 28:38Speaker 1: interacts with the hide negatively, whereas the whenever they actually
- 28:42Speaker 1: go to tann it, you know, it has a negative
- 28:44Speaker 1: impact on the hide. So we use borax, which is
- 28:47Speaker 1: just twenty mule team borax. It's just detergent, is all
- 28:49Speaker 1: what it is. And it just helps us. Uh. In
- 28:53Speaker 1: areas that would be like under the arms that are
- 28:55Speaker 1: not able to have air circulate quite as good, use
- 28:58Speaker 1: a little borax just to help help the drying process.
- 29:01Speaker 1: A trick I learned on Coon Creek Outdoors that I
- 29:03Speaker 1: need that you need. You need some feedback on is
- 29:08Speaker 1: uh where you live it's more humid. So you were
- 29:11Speaker 1: talking about you have a block of boax, like you
- 29:14Speaker 1: let it sit out and it turns into a brick
- 29:16Speaker 1: and you just rub it on. Yeah, so you have
- 29:17Speaker 1: a thing that looks like a bar of soap, but
- 29:19Speaker 1: it's a block of boax and you rub it on.
- 29:21Speaker 1: I was like, man, that's like a ship. It works great. Yeah,
- 29:23Speaker 1: you can't get that here. I don't care how long
- 29:27Speaker 1: you let that stuff sit in your garage, it will
- 29:29Speaker 1: not turn into a block. It's too arid. Put it
- 29:33Speaker 1: in the bathroom with you take a shower, let it
- 29:36Speaker 1: collect a little bit moisture, then go stick it outside.
- 29:38Speaker 1: That's a good idea. You need to make a video
- 29:41Speaker 1: addendum to your video and then you need it. It It
- 29:43Speaker 1: needs a pause and like you hit a certain button
- 29:46Speaker 1: if you're from the air. It was see me in
- 29:47Speaker 1: my bathroom in the shower of block of box. So
- 29:51Speaker 1: you think i'd be able to get a block of
- 29:52Speaker 1: boar X. If I did that, you're putting humidity to
- 29:55Speaker 1: I almost was gonna have you send me a block
- 29:57Speaker 1: of boar. Actually, I thought he'd get to where I
- 29:59Speaker 1: live and dry out the fall turn back into powder.
- 30:03Speaker 1: So there's a lot of goods. There's not a situation
- 30:05Speaker 1: where you'd salted. No, no, not. The only situation if
- 30:09Speaker 1: you're gonna salt it is if you are going to
- 30:11Speaker 1: tan it yourself, So then you're actually gonna use and
- 30:14Speaker 1: and you know, there's a lot of different ways to tan.
- 30:17Speaker 1: But essentially what the salt does is really remove all
- 30:21Speaker 1: the oils from the hide and pull all the oils out.
- 30:25Speaker 1: But the tanning process that you're gonna do at home
- 30:27Speaker 1: versus a tanning process that's done commercially is different. So
- 30:31Speaker 1: the salt kind of has a negative impact on it
- 30:33Speaker 1: in that manner. So I've heard people describe I'm curious
- 30:35Speaker 1: if you'd agree with this. I've heard people describe home
- 30:38Speaker 1: tanning as more of a preservation method than like uh
- 30:43Speaker 1: then than uh kind of like an archival. I'm not
- 30:48Speaker 1: finding the right words, but that that you're talking to quality, Yeah,
- 30:52Speaker 1: that that it's more like it's it's pretty temporary home
- 30:56Speaker 1: tan job. Like maybe you get ten years out of it,
- 30:58Speaker 1: but you're not gonna get out of it what you
- 31:00Speaker 1: get out of it from a commercial tannery. Do you
- 31:01Speaker 1: agree with that or not agree? Not necessarily. I think
- 31:04Speaker 1: it's all it's all how much love you put into
- 31:07Speaker 1: tanning it. You know, that's where a lot of people
- 31:09Speaker 1: will fail. A lot has to go into the breaking
- 31:12Speaker 1: process and the way that further or tan commercially, they're
- 31:17Speaker 1: able to be broken like like garment material, you know,
- 31:20Speaker 1: very soft, you know, but home tanning, you know, you
- 31:23Speaker 1: can brain tan something, which is what the Indians did.
- 31:26Speaker 1: So there's I was at a museum yesterday and there's
- 31:29Speaker 1: still stuff around from this been brain tanning. That's that
- 31:31Speaker 1: was that was brain That's kind of what I was
- 31:33Speaker 1: hearing about brain tanning is that it didn't um that
- 31:36Speaker 1: like moisture can really be hard on it. You know,
- 31:40Speaker 1: it's all in how you like I said, how you
- 31:42Speaker 1: tann it. A lot of the brain tanning involves like
- 31:45Speaker 1: a smoking process to water proof it, keep the bugs
- 31:49Speaker 1: out of it. You know what, You're basically just replacing
- 31:52Speaker 1: the natural tannins in the hide with some sort of
- 31:58Speaker 1: synthetic material for the majority of your home tanning. So
- 32:02Speaker 1: like if you've seen the orange bottle or the different
- 32:05Speaker 1: acid I mean there's a million different ways acid tanning.
- 32:08Speaker 1: There's some egg white tanning. I mean, you're what methods
- 32:11Speaker 1: do you do? You use? I brain tan and I
- 32:14Speaker 1: use the Orange bottle Hunters and Trappers high tanning formula.
- 32:18Speaker 1: Those are my two favorite that I've had a lot
- 32:20Speaker 1: of success with deer brains, any brains. It's the I
- 32:24Speaker 1: believe it's the landeline. I believe is what it is
- 32:26Speaker 1: in the brains. And there's tell me what all kinds
- 32:29Speaker 1: of brains you've used. I've used everything everything I can
- 32:32Speaker 1: get my hands on deer. Deer brains are the easiest,
- 32:35Speaker 1: you know, to acquire during the season. But there's this
- 32:39Speaker 1: kind of a myth, and I've found it to be
- 32:40Speaker 1: fairly accurate where whatever animal you have, basically their brain
- 32:47Speaker 1: is sized accordingly to tan there and I've found that
- 32:50Speaker 1: to be fairly act. Yeah, So which I I just
- 32:54Speaker 1: save everything up at the end of the year and
- 32:55Speaker 1: mix it all together. And big old bucket of brain,
- 32:57Speaker 1: big old bucket of brains. I'd like to see that
- 33:00Speaker 1: big old bucket of brains. Don't drink that. Um. Okay,
- 33:05Speaker 1: back to the Bobcat because then we gotta cover off
- 33:07Speaker 1: on some stuff. I just want to get to the
- 33:08Speaker 1: part where you're flipping it, okay, and tell people how
- 33:10Speaker 1: not to tear it. All right, So this thing's dried
- 33:13Speaker 1: on the board for set a number of ours and
- 33:16Speaker 1: it's uh, I don't know if you can hear it
- 33:17Speaker 1: through the microphone, but it sounds almost like dry paper.
- 33:21Speaker 1: And that's kind of what you're going for. You know,
- 33:23Speaker 1: you don't want it to be to dry it's gonna
- 33:26Speaker 1: be hard to flip, but you also don't want it
- 33:28Speaker 1: to be too wet where you're gonna have mold issues.
- 33:30Speaker 1: So we've got it to that point right now. You
- 33:32Speaker 1: know what, Brod, I gotta tell you something. You really
- 33:35Speaker 1: distract me on this, but I'm trying to but to
- 33:38Speaker 1: your credits I'm trying to get everything that you know
- 33:40Speaker 1: outright for a wall, because that's gonna be a wall hanger.
- 33:45Speaker 1: Stu turned the ears, which is not something that most
- 33:51Speaker 1: like trappers for the commercial market would do, but he
- 33:54Speaker 1: turned the ears out of concern for my wall hanger. Bobcat,
- 33:58Speaker 1: you better explain that, all right. So we split the
- 34:00Speaker 1: ears side, Yeah, split them. We split the ears. And
- 34:03Speaker 1: traditionally anything from below the ears up in the commercial
- 34:09Speaker 1: trade is not used. So generally, you know, flashing process,
- 34:13Speaker 1: different things like that, we don't normally use that. But
- 34:16Speaker 1: since you're gonna tan it and use it for a
- 34:17Speaker 1: wall hanger, we went ahead and split the ears. And basically,
- 34:21Speaker 1: on on an ear of of most critters, you have
- 34:24Speaker 1: an inner ear kind of in an outer ear. The
- 34:26Speaker 1: inner ear is actually what has the cartilage and on
- 34:29Speaker 1: like a coyote, say, that's what makes the ears pronounced
- 34:32Speaker 1: stand up, and then the outer skin has the fur
- 34:36Speaker 1: on it that you see. But on a bobcat there's
- 34:38Speaker 1: fur on both sides, and you want to keep that
- 34:41Speaker 1: so in order to let the tan solution penetrate. And
- 34:45Speaker 1: this is just over my ears of doing it. If
- 34:48Speaker 1: you actually separate the cartilage from the skin in the ear,
- 34:52Speaker 1: you're able to let that tan solution kind of penetrate
- 34:55Speaker 1: up the ear and ideally save both sides of the ear,
- 35:00Speaker 1: and then by doing so, you've actually saved the cartilage
- 35:03Speaker 1: as well. So after you get your tan pelt back,
- 35:06Speaker 1: your ears still look like ears. Basically, it don't look
- 35:09Speaker 1: all all wrinkled up, you know and kind of shriveled up.
- 35:12Speaker 1: But I like a way to imagine it is imagine
- 35:14Speaker 1: that you're going to cut off your own ear and
- 35:16Speaker 1: tan it, because I think about like, like grab your
- 35:20Speaker 1: ear flap, right, you have skin and skin, Yeah, you'd
- 35:25Speaker 1: have to get like how are you gonna you know,
- 35:27Speaker 1: you'd want to get in there and split it open
- 35:28Speaker 1: so that you were getting each side of the skin
- 35:34Speaker 1: to keep your ear properly tanned up. Yeah, And I mean,
- 35:36Speaker 1: you know, just from my experience over the years, it
- 35:39Speaker 1: just seems like if you don't split the ears, generally
- 35:41Speaker 1: that inner part where the cartilage sets, it won't take
- 35:44Speaker 1: the tan solution very well, and then it'll end up
- 35:47Speaker 1: slipping the ferral slip, which basically just means it it'll
- 35:50Speaker 1: fall off. So, yeah, we tried to do a favor
- 35:52Speaker 1: here and split the ears and hopefully whenever it gets
- 35:55Speaker 1: tand it'll they'll come out right. So we did that,
- 35:59Speaker 1: and now it's time to finally flip this this critter.
- 36:02Speaker 1: So I'm gonna take it off the board. There's a
- 36:04Speaker 1: couple of different ways to flip it. And basically, like
- 36:06Speaker 1: I said, we've got this thing tube skin, so we
- 36:09Speaker 1: want to turn it out outward and we're gonna roll
- 36:13Speaker 1: it kind of like you would turn a sock inside out. Um. So,
- 36:17Speaker 1: generally you have a lot more tendency to rip the
- 36:21Speaker 1: hide if you start from the bottom and go up.
- 36:24Speaker 1: But if you turn them from the nose in and
- 36:26Speaker 1: kind of push the head in and roll it down,
- 36:29Speaker 1: generally that's a safer bet uh to not not ripping
- 36:33Speaker 1: the hide or tearing the hide. You know, a lot
- 36:35Speaker 1: has to go on how far you let this thing dry.
- 36:38Speaker 1: There's just that fine window uh in in flipping the
- 36:41Speaker 1: hides that you know you kind of need to hit.
- 36:43Speaker 1: But I think we'll I think we'll be okay. Is
- 36:45Speaker 1: there some critters that their hide tears a lot easier,
- 36:49Speaker 1: so like fox have really thin skin. Um. There there's
- 36:53Speaker 1: a big number trapper that I follow and he's skipped
- 36:57Speaker 1: the flip on foxes for years. You know. Uh, he
- 37:01Speaker 1: puts them up on wire too, so a lot of wire.
- 37:03Speaker 1: So you know, there's just there's one way to do it,
- 37:07Speaker 1: and then there's a hundred other different ways to do it.
- 37:08Speaker 1: You know, there's not really one set way, which is
- 37:11Speaker 1: which is kind of cool. So it depending on who
- 37:13Speaker 1: you talk to and what part of the country it's.
- 37:15Speaker 1: But we're gonna do it this way because it's the
- 37:17Speaker 1: way I've always done it, and we're gonna basically start
- 37:20Speaker 1: at the nose and we're gonna just kind of need
- 37:22Speaker 1: that head down through the body and and pull it
- 37:25Speaker 1: through and then we'll have the have the bobcat fur
- 37:29Speaker 1: out and you'll be able to see your cat. All right.
- 37:32Speaker 1: So Stu Miller, Coon Creek Outdoors, he's gonna start turning
- 37:35Speaker 1: do it as loud as you can because we're gonna
- 37:37Speaker 1: cover off on our other stuff and I want people
- 37:39Speaker 1: to be ablit to hear you doing it, and I'll
- 37:41Speaker 1: keep people posting on what's going on. Let's hope I
- 37:43Speaker 1: don't rip it. Oh, if you rip it, dude, first
- 37:47Speaker 1: thing it's gonna happen is this show is over. If
- 37:49Speaker 1: you rip it. Stew All you have to do is
- 37:50Speaker 1: say just do it yourself next time. Then I ripped
- 37:55Speaker 1: a few of my day people get pissed. It's like, well,
- 37:57Speaker 1: I can't imagine. Maybe I'll be living taking to someone
- 38:00Speaker 1: else and here someone so mad that they become apoplectic.
- 38:05Speaker 1: They'll be me. I've never heard of that. If Steve
- 38:07Speaker 1: rips my bobcat All right, so we gotta touch off
- 38:11Speaker 1: on this. You weren't even here when I was talking
- 38:14Speaker 1: about this. What are you are you going? I was
- 38:16Speaker 1: going to run in the bathroom quick, but I'll stick
- 38:18Speaker 1: around talking about your marriage. Oh yeah, I had better
- 38:23Speaker 1: stick around. Um am I still officiating. Yakay, No we haven't.
- 38:29Speaker 1: We haven't found someone else. Uh, because if you want to,
- 38:34Speaker 1: Yeah that I was reading up on what I gotta
- 38:36Speaker 1: do very simple to become a minister. No, you didn't
- 38:38Speaker 1: tell me, but I listened to the podcast, okay the listeners,
- 38:42Speaker 1: and I had a guy was pointing out interesting thing
- 38:45Speaker 1: that you can get married. Um, in Montana you get
- 38:49Speaker 1: married by proxy. Mm hmm. You could have a wedding
- 38:53Speaker 1: that you're not at. I didn't realize this. Montana recognizes
- 38:57Speaker 1: what's called a double proxy marriage. So both of us
- 39:02Speaker 1: don't to be here. There's a marriage. Yeah, you could
- 39:05Speaker 1: get married here where no one shows up. Huh that yeah, well,
- 39:11Speaker 1: let me I'll run that by Kelsey. See what she says.
- 39:14Speaker 1: The guy that wrote and this is interesting about the
- 39:16Speaker 1: the US military. So the guy wrote in his active
- 39:19Speaker 1: duty military we're to the front legs. Now, it's gonna
- 39:25Speaker 1: be hard. Do you like it that there's a loud
- 39:27Speaker 1: noise in the background. I mean, I think it's great.
- 39:29Speaker 1: Normally I would hate it, but in this circumstances, what
- 39:32Speaker 1: I'm worried about. Here's what I'm worried about, is how
- 39:34Speaker 1: he's gonna get those legs inverted. It sounds like paper crinklin.
- 39:40Speaker 1: Like you know, guy, this guy's active duty military. And
- 39:45Speaker 1: I didn't realize this, but it makes sense. The military
- 39:47Speaker 1: does not recognize engagements in terms of like shuffling you around,
- 39:54Speaker 1: so you could get sent somewhere else there. Yeah, you
- 39:56Speaker 1: could be like, oh, we're engaged, like it doesn't matter
- 39:59Speaker 1: to them. No, no paperwork or price speak of this
- 40:02Speaker 1: a little bit um. So he and his woman were
- 40:07Speaker 1: getting a PCs, a permanent change of station where they
- 40:11Speaker 1: be sent to different military basis. But they're both gone
- 40:16Speaker 1: on they were both gone uh un deployment, so neither
- 40:22Speaker 1: of them is there and they got married anyway double proxy.
- 40:27Speaker 1: Then they were able to move back to the same
- 40:29Speaker 1: location because in the military recognized their union. Isn't that
- 40:31Speaker 1: happy ending, Phil, That's great because you get to skip
- 40:35Speaker 1: all the bullshit and just have a party later. I
- 40:37Speaker 1: don't want to call you outside. But you don't seem
- 40:39Speaker 1: like you're too warm to that idea. Well listen, it's yeah,
- 40:46Speaker 1: Kelsey is not gonna be warm to that idea. Do
- 40:48Speaker 1: you guys have one of those little registries going? No,
- 40:52Speaker 1: you can do that. I think you should get one going.
- 40:55Speaker 1: We should advertise it on the podcast. What else we're
- 40:59Speaker 1: gonna be talking do single We gotta get to that
- 41:04Speaker 1: to find stew more girlfriends. Um no, no, So we're
- 41:07Speaker 1: not doing the registry thing. We're saying like, if you
- 41:10Speaker 1: if you feel if you feel like you want to
- 41:13Speaker 1: wanna give us something, just throw us a little cash
- 41:16Speaker 1: because there ain't no, there's no registry out there. It's
- 41:19Speaker 1: gonna like knock a wall out in my house. I
- 41:22Speaker 1: got it. So you're just like you just want money, Yeah,
- 41:24Speaker 1: that's great. You don't need China. I don't. I don't
- 41:26Speaker 1: need like kitchen aid mixer or something like that. You know,
- 41:30Speaker 1: it's Kelsey going to listen to this podcast and here
- 41:32Speaker 1: you throw her under the bus so savagely like that. No,
- 41:35Speaker 1: she is, She's totally on board with this. No I
- 41:38Speaker 1: I was going about the double proxy. Yeah she ain't
- 41:42Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, okay, yeah, uh in Florida right now? Update?
- 41:48Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, we're gonna give up Bobcat update. Look
- 41:51Speaker 1: at that. You know, I should have brought my fur brush,
- 41:54Speaker 1: my fur home, because right now he's the way can
- 41:57Speaker 1: I can I see it from ittt Oh? You know,
- 42:02Speaker 1: while we're speaking of updates, I just want to up
- 42:04Speaker 1: there our listeners that the kayak is sold. So tell
- 42:09Speaker 1: tell about what the guy that bought it gave us.
- 42:11Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so the the guy that bought the kayak,
- 42:16Speaker 1: I should I forget his name? Man, I'll look it up. Um,
- 42:19Speaker 1: did you have a lot of people wanted the kayaka? Um?
- 42:24Speaker 1: The guy that bought the kayak was. He's active duty military.
- 42:28Speaker 1: He's up at stationed up in Great Falls, and he
- 42:31Speaker 1: gave Steve and I a hundred and five millimeter shell casings,
- 42:36Speaker 1: which my son is very interested in that. Uh, we're
- 42:40Speaker 1: fired on a deployment. And I think he said like
- 42:44Speaker 1: Afghanistandard or Iraq or Syria. I got. I don't know
- 42:51Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do with my It's sweet. Here comes
- 42:53Speaker 1: the front legs? Oh? Is he doing the front legs? Now? Okay,
- 42:55Speaker 1: the Bobcat is now revealed. We can see the hide
- 42:59Speaker 1: the beautifully speed years and he's trying to do the
- 43:01Speaker 1: final thing of get the legs inverted, which is tough
- 43:06Speaker 1: because you left him so long whenever you skinned him.
- 43:10Speaker 1: So we're trying to pull them through like I left
- 43:12Speaker 1: him too long. Well that's differen a wall hanger and
- 43:16Speaker 1: in a commercial trade Bobcat, it's very exciting. Uh. In Florida, see,
- 43:22Speaker 1: I don't know what the weather is going. I want
- 43:24Speaker 1: to cover off on a news bit. But the problem
- 43:25Speaker 1: is this, this isn't gonna release right away. It's gonna
- 43:28Speaker 1: be a couple of days. So the cold snap might
- 43:30Speaker 1: be over, but there was a national cold snap um
- 43:35Speaker 1: still going on right now. And in Florida, they they
- 43:41Speaker 1: they're releasing warnings about the iguana is falling from trees.
- 43:48Speaker 1: So Florida is full of gotta got an invasive iguana problem.
- 43:52Speaker 1: We actually had some of that iguana fat, and uh,
- 43:55Speaker 1: Kevin Gillespie made us iguana fat cookies, which are wonderful,
- 43:58Speaker 1: like sugar cookies with a on a fat um. And
- 44:03Speaker 1: the guy rode in how these frozen iguanas fall from
- 44:08Speaker 1: trees and get stunned and they're just laying around on
- 44:10Speaker 1: roads and sidewalks. We have a bunch of pictures of
- 44:12Speaker 1: just iguana as it fell from outer space, laying around,
- 44:17Speaker 1: and he's kind of wandering about if there's like an
- 44:19Speaker 1: ethical dilemma to picking up in to dispatching iguanas that
- 44:25Speaker 1: are in such a compromised position, kind of like shooting
- 44:28Speaker 1: cariboo in a river or something like shooting cariboan a
- 44:30Speaker 1: river or whatever, shooting fish in a barrel. Yeah. Uh,
- 44:35Speaker 1: we're also thinking about whether or not this falls under
- 44:38Speaker 1: the umbrella of chetica. I feel that does not. What
- 44:40Speaker 1: do you think, Chester, No, it's more of an ethics thing,
- 44:44Speaker 1: just a moral dilemma, which Karin, what did she right
- 44:48Speaker 1: up there? Cheffical? Is it cheftical? I mean, like I said,
- 44:53Speaker 1: it's a moral dilemma. I think if you knew how
- 44:56Speaker 1: good that fat was for making cookies and if you
- 45:01Speaker 1: like eating them, why the heck not? They want them
- 45:04Speaker 1: out of there. Um, But this guy's moral dilemma is
- 45:08Speaker 1: like some of these are too small to eat, so
- 45:11Speaker 1: he doesn't want to damage the resources. Like he doesn't
- 45:13Speaker 1: want to damage the resource. He doesn't like killing things
- 45:16Speaker 1: that he doesn't eat, you know, So so he's weighing
- 45:21Speaker 1: out do I serve the goal of eliminating the iguana
- 45:25Speaker 1: from Florida or do I serve my personal ethic, which is,
- 45:31Speaker 1: don't kill stuff you're not gonna eat, which Trump's which? Man?
- 45:36Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like these guys really have a problem. Um,
- 45:43Speaker 1: are you clear of what the problem is? What do
- 45:46Speaker 1: we do A lot of burrowing and like sea walls
- 45:49Speaker 1: and house foundations and things. That's the problem. It's not
- 45:54Speaker 1: like a biological issue, I don't think so, Like I
- 45:57Speaker 1: don't think they're eating native bird eggs and stuff off
- 46:00Speaker 1: like that that I that I know of. And you
- 46:02Speaker 1: think that you think think that I thought they were
- 46:05Speaker 1: like doing something to native that's possible, But what I've
- 46:09Speaker 1: heard a lot is like they're doing damage to structures
- 46:13Speaker 1: and like that. We have a headline in front of
- 46:16Speaker 1: his cold weather could bring frozen too iguanas this weekend.
- 46:21Speaker 1: It's just like a picture of some iguanas just taking
- 46:24Speaker 1: a quick nap um. But yeah, I think like, if
- 46:29Speaker 1: you take the ones you're gonna eat, you know, do
- 46:33Speaker 1: a little a little both there. I don't know, no,
- 46:38Speaker 1: I would think so man. But here's the thing I
- 46:41Speaker 1: could weigh out. Let's say I really developed the taste
- 46:43Speaker 1: for iguanas down there, okay, and I had like a
- 46:45Speaker 1: little yard and now and that would get me a
- 46:48Speaker 1: big fat iguana. And I was watching some small ones
- 46:51Speaker 1: lurking around, and I knew that I I don't know
- 46:53Speaker 1: what their life expectancy is, but I knew that they'd
- 46:55Speaker 1: get big. And then I'd have like, I'm never eating
- 46:58Speaker 1: I've eating their fat. I never eat. Let's add loved it.
- 47:01Speaker 1: I could see a situation where one would fall from
- 47:04Speaker 1: a tree, A little one would fall from a tree,
- 47:06Speaker 1: and I would resuscitate it and warm it up in
- 47:10Speaker 1: order to grow it big because I love the iguana
- 47:13Speaker 1: met and not and not go out and do what
- 47:16Speaker 1: I was supposed to do, which is go out and
- 47:19Speaker 1: kill it. Here's the thing, I don't know if it's
- 47:21Speaker 1: legal or not. Why don't you just make a little
- 47:23Speaker 1: iguana cage, take those iguanas, start feeding, and start raising
- 47:27Speaker 1: them yourself. It's like, get out. Just thought of a
- 47:31Speaker 1: real I just remembered the real world version of what
- 47:33Speaker 1: I'm talking about, not that this isn't the real world,
- 47:35Speaker 1: but a personal version. You know how lake trout um
- 47:40Speaker 1: got into Yellowstone Lake and started there real hard on cuts,
- 47:44Speaker 1: not bull trout, yellowstone cutthroat. So someone thought was a
- 47:49Speaker 1: good idea to let some lake trout go in Yellowstone Lake,
- 47:53Speaker 1: which is in Yelsta National Park, and it's the head
- 47:55Speaker 1: of the Yellowstone River. And it was it was very
- 47:57Speaker 1: detrimental to the native cut wrote the east slope cuts cracked.
- 48:03Speaker 1: I believe it was a yellow actually, which is like
- 48:07Speaker 1: a more of a pumpkin colored orangeish yellowish cutthroat got
- 48:13Speaker 1: it um. They at a point made it that you
- 48:17Speaker 1: were not allowed to turn back a live lake trout.
- 48:23Speaker 1: It was a mandatory kill situation. No like like catch
- 48:28Speaker 1: and release became illegal. It might still be today. I
- 48:31Speaker 1: don't know. I had a friend. I don't want to
- 48:33Speaker 1: tell what his name is. I'll tell you. I don't
- 48:34Speaker 1: want to tell his last name because he was a lawbreaker.
- 48:37Speaker 1: His name was Mike Uh And Mike would always go
- 48:42Speaker 1: and fish there and he really liked he made like
- 48:45Speaker 1: smoke lake trout. He made lake trout sushi rolls. He
- 48:49Speaker 1: was big time into eating lake trout. He would turn
- 48:52Speaker 1: back the small ones and would be and wouldn't want
- 48:57Speaker 1: to hit it too hard. And he was very nervous
- 48:59Speaker 1: about what he called damaging the resource and just wasn't
- 49:03Speaker 1: buying the whole thing about He was like, I love
- 49:06Speaker 1: those fish. I hope they stay there forever. Yes, his
- 49:09Speaker 1: take on it. I mean in an area like that,
- 49:11Speaker 1: man though, like there's not many places in the world
- 49:14Speaker 1: that have yellow stone cutthroat um and there are a
- 49:19Speaker 1: lot of places in the world that have lake trout,
- 49:22Speaker 1: Like you gotta get them out of there, and no,
- 49:24Speaker 1: I know it's almost impossible, but like they've made some progress. Yeah,
- 49:29Speaker 1: so Chester, you know your idea about how you're gonna
- 49:32Speaker 1: keep them and fatten them up. Yeah, I was saying,
- 49:34Speaker 1: I don't know if it's legal or not. Well, Karan
- 49:38Speaker 1: um Uh just pointed out here that you would be
- 49:43Speaker 1: in violation of law. And and so if if you
- 49:48Speaker 1: know everybody has the joy cooking in their house, the cook,
- 49:51Speaker 1: the joy cook cooking. I have one that's so old.
- 49:55Speaker 1: There's information in it about how to fatten a possum. Really, yeah,
- 50:00Speaker 1: you've caught a possum and how to fatten it and
- 50:04Speaker 1: like m put it on a good diet for consumption.
- 50:08Speaker 1: That's not in there anything. It's not by now, it's
- 50:13Speaker 1: not in there. That's pretty awesome. They have that one.
- 50:16Speaker 1: So Chester has this idea like, Okay, a little dinky,
- 50:18Speaker 1: little dinker falls out of the tree. You're trying to
- 50:21Speaker 1: do the right thing by law, and you say to yourself, well,
- 50:24Speaker 1: I feel bad letting it back out because I'm supposed
- 50:26Speaker 1: to kill it. It's not big enough to eat. I'm
- 50:28Speaker 1: gonna warm them up, resuscitate them, pen him, and fatten him,
- 50:35Speaker 1: which is illegal. Turns out, so Florida has a list
- 50:40Speaker 1: of like stuff you can't have. It's Florida's prohibited species list,
- 50:47Speaker 1: and it has it had sixteen new and it had
- 50:51Speaker 1: recently added sixteen new high risk non native reptiles you're
- 50:58Speaker 1: not allowed to have in your possession. The Argentine black
- 51:02Speaker 1: and white tigoose. What the hell is that? I think
- 51:04Speaker 1: they're like monitor lizards. I think you're not allowed to
- 51:08Speaker 1: have a tigu. You look it up, Brodie. Yeah, you
- 51:12Speaker 1: can't have one of those in Florida. You can't have
- 51:14Speaker 1: a green iguana. You can't have a nile monitor lizard.
- 51:19Speaker 1: You cannot have a Burmese python, which is a big issue.
- 51:23Speaker 1: They got no shorte of them done. Yeah, they look
- 51:24Speaker 1: like a monitor lizard. They're pretty they're pretty big. You
- 51:27Speaker 1: cannot have a reticulated python. You cannot have a green anaconda.
- 51:35Speaker 1: H uh. I mean it makes sense, you know. They
- 51:39Speaker 1: that's how they kind of got there. Right of them
- 51:42Speaker 1: can survive in Florida. I was years ago in South
- 51:46Speaker 1: America and m and I was with a Makushi, a
- 51:50Speaker 1: guy who is Mkushi from the Mkuschi tribe, and we
- 51:54Speaker 1: were standing there looking at a green anaconda. It's probably
- 51:58Speaker 1: I don't know, fourteen a teen feet long. This your
- 52:02Speaker 1: bullet anti Nope, no, different times he was telling me
- 52:07Speaker 1: I wanted to It was just sitting there. I mean
- 52:09Speaker 1: you could walk right up to it. And I was
- 52:12Speaker 1: asking about is it okay if we kind of like
- 52:14Speaker 1: jab it with a stick to see what it does, right,
- 52:16Speaker 1: And he was pointing out to me like their in
- 52:19Speaker 1: their mythology. He was saying, if I touched that antaconda
- 52:23Speaker 1: with the limb of my bow, it will die a
- 52:27Speaker 1: very painful death that takes about forty five minutes. But
- 52:31Speaker 1: you can touch it with another stick and that's fine.
- 52:34Speaker 1: But you can't touch it with a bowl limb just
- 52:37Speaker 1: to bow limb or is it? What was it like weapon?
- 52:41Speaker 1: He said, if I touch it with my bowl limb,
- 52:43Speaker 1: that will kill it very painful. Really, Yeah, there's like
- 52:49Speaker 1: a limit. I mean, it was just part of their mythology,
- 52:51Speaker 1: and there was like a limit to how much we
- 52:52Speaker 1: could communicate about it. But I gathered that much. Can't
- 52:55Speaker 1: touch him with a bow limb, can't touch a green
- 52:57Speaker 1: antaconda with a bow limb. You didn't try it, No,
- 53:02Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't say, like, I just I thought
- 53:06Speaker 1: that was a great little you know, a great little thing.
- 53:17Speaker 1: Oh did you get one leg? Ste got one leg?
- 53:22Speaker 1: He's close to getting there leg the bobcat is nearly inverted.
- 53:26Speaker 1: Then it's gonna be exciting because it goes back onto
- 53:28Speaker 1: the board. However, here's another ethics question. This is that
- 53:33Speaker 1: this is This seems like an ethics question, but it
- 53:35Speaker 1: ends up being a practical question. This guy works for
- 53:39Speaker 1: a small town police department in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem,
- 53:42Speaker 1: Regent and he he mentions that they are at the
- 53:47Speaker 1: time of this writing in an ongoing c w D
- 53:50Speaker 1: management hunt f w P. He's saying, the state Fish
- 53:57Speaker 1: and Game Agency is allowing antler bucks to be harvested
- 54:01Speaker 1: on this hunt. A lot of this guy's bodies believe
- 54:05Speaker 1: the hunt should be since it's meant to lower the
- 54:08Speaker 1: population to slow the spread of c w D. He's like,
- 54:13Speaker 1: why is it that you can kill bucks? It seems
- 54:15Speaker 1: like you'd be killing does because if you want to
- 54:17Speaker 1: lower a deer population, the way to lower it is
- 54:19Speaker 1: killing does. Like Bucks doesn't like have a long Killing
- 54:23Speaker 1: Bucks doesn't have a long term impact on deer numbers.
- 54:27Speaker 1: Killing dose does because you kill her and you kill
- 54:30Speaker 1: every baby that she'll ever have. I would point out,
- 54:34Speaker 1: if this gentleman really wants to get into understanding this,
- 54:39Speaker 1: there's quite a bit of data that suggests that c
- 54:43Speaker 1: w D is more readily transmitted by bucks. They move
- 54:46Speaker 1: around a bunch, They traveled to daim much. I think
- 54:50Speaker 1: there's a couple of reasons they're They're they want any
- 54:53Speaker 1: deer eliminated right and to convince people that hunt white
- 54:58Speaker 1: tails in February and Monte Hannah or January, you know,
- 55:05Speaker 1: sweet sweeten the deal. Yeah, we're letting you get a buck.
- 55:08Speaker 1: And then I remember some stuff with Doug looking at
- 55:12Speaker 1: the and you know, all the things like c w DS,
- 55:15Speaker 1: like COVID a little bit where the information changes so
- 55:17Speaker 1: fast it's hard to keep hip to what, like what's
- 55:19Speaker 1: actually the current sort of academic consensus. But at the
- 55:25Speaker 1: time it was the young bucks dispersed more. They like
- 55:32Speaker 1: young bucks left their population dispersed farther distances were more
- 55:36Speaker 1: likely to be bringing c w D into introducing c
- 55:40Speaker 1: w D chronic waste and disease into new herd groups.
- 55:45Speaker 1: I read something recently about that, though, where in a
- 55:50Speaker 1: study where they studied a certain amount of you know,
- 55:54Speaker 1: let's say they study fifteen bucks and and twenty dos,
- 55:58Speaker 1: the does traveling you know, five miles and the bucks
- 56:03Speaker 1: were traveling like six miles on average, So it wasn't
- 56:06Speaker 1: a crazy difference between the two. But again, now I
- 56:13Speaker 1: was just saying that the like they've done studies. I
- 56:17Speaker 1: was reading a recent study where they took a set
- 56:20Speaker 1: number of deer and studied them how far they go
- 56:22Speaker 1: and the distance between how far the dose traveled and
- 56:25Speaker 1: the distance between how far the bucks traveled was not
- 56:28Speaker 1: that um but that was just one article. So uh,
- 56:35Speaker 1: you guys got you guys got the appetite for one more. Um,
- 56:38Speaker 1: I guess two more etiquette, two more ethics etiquettes. People
- 56:42Speaker 1: looking for feedback. Your dog kills a deer? What then?
- 56:52Speaker 1: What then? My friend's dog killed a deer not too
- 56:55Speaker 1: long ago. Well, this guy, this guy was asking, like,
- 56:58Speaker 1: you know, should he eat it? You to do whatever?
- 57:01Speaker 1: I think he did the right thing, he said. He
- 57:02Speaker 1: called the local authorities, the game warden, which is a
- 57:08Speaker 1: good thing to do, and then from there, you know this,
- 57:13Speaker 1: it said, the warden determined it did not have c
- 57:16Speaker 1: w D, which is you can't really necessarily. Um so
- 57:22Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure they're but like, well, because he okay,
- 57:26Speaker 1: in this case, the warden did a little knee cropsy
- 57:30Speaker 1: and saw that it had two busted legs. And that's
- 57:34Speaker 1: why the dog is able to get ahold of it.
- 57:36Speaker 1: And that's why it looks like what are the Yeah,
- 57:39Speaker 1: that's why it looks sickly, likes like what are the
- 57:41Speaker 1: odds that had c w D and then broke two
- 57:43Speaker 1: legs from a car hitting it. But what this guy
- 57:45Speaker 1: seems to be trying to do is is like say,
- 57:48Speaker 1: what his dog did is not like there's not a
- 57:51Speaker 1: problem with it, Like that's what it seems to be
- 57:54Speaker 1: getting at. Well. I mean, you don't want your dogs
- 57:57Speaker 1: obviously killing deer, but when in a blue moon, you
- 58:00Speaker 1: just never know what's gonna happen. So I think calling
- 58:03Speaker 1: the warden, and then if this deer had two broken legs,
- 58:07Speaker 1: he's also asking what should I do with the meat?
- 58:10Speaker 1: I would say, if the warden lets you take it
- 58:12Speaker 1: and eat it, eat it, But if it's got two
- 58:15Speaker 1: broken legs, you might want to check for infection and
- 58:17Speaker 1: stuff first as well. Um, you know, yeah, I would say.
- 58:21Speaker 1: So it is an interesting conundrant because a lot of
- 58:25Speaker 1: times in public land you're supposed to have your dog
- 58:29Speaker 1: under control. So if you're on public land somewhere and
- 58:33Speaker 1: your dog kills a deer, you might, I mean, you
- 58:36Speaker 1: might find whether you self report or someone else reports
- 58:39Speaker 1: you you're asked, might be in trouble with the state.
- 58:40Speaker 1: There are places where if you're out hunting deer and
- 58:43Speaker 1: you see a dog chasing deer, you can shoot the dog.
- 58:46Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, there's definitely places like that. Yeah, it's
- 58:52Speaker 1: pretty easy to train your dog to not mess with deer.
- 58:56Speaker 1: You know, I've had a couple of bird dogs, and
- 58:59Speaker 1: you can train and him just not pay attention to
- 59:01Speaker 1: those deer. When our dog chases a deer, it comes
- 59:04Speaker 1: back knowing it's in trouble, like it can't help itself.
- 59:09Speaker 1: It's like it's like I know I did like I
- 59:11Speaker 1: did it, I know I shouldn't have done it. And
- 59:13Speaker 1: they come back like they know they're going to get
- 59:14Speaker 1: in trouble, but they just couldn't help themselves. So I
- 59:17Speaker 1: think a proper etiquette is just train your dog not
- 59:20Speaker 1: mess with deer. But if it does, I think that, yeah,
- 59:24Speaker 1: you know the salvage dude, call your call your game warden.
- 59:28Speaker 1: That's probably the first step if you're deal with any
- 59:30Speaker 1: of that stuff. Here's another one. This guy is righting in. Uh.
- 59:37Speaker 1: This guy lives in the state Virginia. Were you allowed
- 59:38Speaker 1: to hunt turkeys with a rifle? And he says, I
- 59:42Speaker 1: believe rifles should be outlawed like it is in Maryland
- 59:46Speaker 1: in most states. You can't quite say most dates. There's
- 59:48Speaker 1: a lot of states. Three you can kill turkey with
- 59:50Speaker 1: a rifle in the fall. He's got friends that killed
- 59:55Speaker 1: turkey's at two yards with Varmitt rifle setups. What do
- 1:00:02Speaker 1: you think about that? I just don't where's the fun.
- 1:00:08Speaker 1: I just want to say this, I'm not talking about
- 1:00:10Speaker 1: laws and not laws and all that. Spring turkeys is
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: meant to be something you do with a shotgun. There's
- 1:00:15Speaker 1: there's a purpose to it, the calling, the getting them
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: to come in. And we used to bush whag turkeys
- 1:00:21Speaker 1: in the spring. I don't think there's any reason to
- 1:00:22Speaker 1: shoot a turkey with a rifle in the spring. One thing,
- 1:00:26Speaker 1: it's like it's dangerous, using camel out in the woods,
- 1:00:32Speaker 1: making turkey noises, sitting against trees, trying to sit close,
- 1:00:36Speaker 1: trying to be close to turkeys. When I was very young,
- 1:00:39Speaker 1: you could hunt. I'm pretty sure you could hunt turkeys
- 1:00:42Speaker 1: with a rifle in Pennsylvania in the spring. Really, I
- 1:00:45Speaker 1: know you can changed it. Yeah, well, especially with decoys
- 1:00:49Speaker 1: getting better and better every year, you know, dude. Yeah,
- 1:00:53Speaker 1: Like I look at my own decoy. It's about going
- 1:01:00Speaker 1: and the fall. It finds out hunting deer and had
- 1:01:03Speaker 1: turkey tag in my pocket. I probably, Yeah, I think
- 1:01:06Speaker 1: it's different and what's interesting people people don't understand here
- 1:01:10Speaker 1: is that in a lot of in states where you
- 1:01:13Speaker 1: are allowed to kill turkeys in the fall with the rifle,
- 1:01:15Speaker 1: you're often allowed to kill females. But they're also not
- 1:01:20Speaker 1: I mean, they're spending time out in those open areas
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: in the fall. But I feel like spring gets predictable.
- 1:01:24Speaker 1: You know, those birds are gonna be out on strut
- 1:01:27Speaker 1: zones and be out and open. So that's like another
- 1:01:29Speaker 1: thing that's just makes it easier picking and the spring
- 1:01:33Speaker 1: you shoot him, And why I don't, I don't personally
- 1:01:35Speaker 1: like that. Or I just think if you're like sitting
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: there in your truck and there's a turkey hunter fifty
- 1:01:40Speaker 1: yards way out in the field, and you decided to
- 1:01:44Speaker 1: take a couple of rips at it with your fifty
- 1:01:47Speaker 1: it's like, I don't. It feels very dangerous to me
- 1:01:50Speaker 1: because you don't know if there's some camel up dude
- 1:01:52Speaker 1: and his kids sitting back there. Yep, yep, yep, yep.
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: It just takes the fun right out of that spring
- 1:01:57Speaker 1: turkey hunting too. Well. I hear the story one time,
- 1:02:01Speaker 1: and I believe the story. I heard that, and so
- 1:02:06Speaker 1: it was a time when Florida. You were allowed to
- 1:02:08Speaker 1: hunt turkeys in the spring with a rifle, okay, And
- 1:02:13Speaker 1: a lot of turkey hunters felt that it just was
- 1:02:15Speaker 1: not a good idea. You got flat country okay, get
- 1:02:20Speaker 1: people out in camel with decoys, like it's like a
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: safety issue. And they even went to they took the
- 1:02:29Speaker 1: time to go to the gun community and be like,
- 1:02:33Speaker 1: this is not like, this is a safety turkey issue.
- 1:02:37Speaker 1: Let's not make this like a gun gun right issue.
- 1:02:40Speaker 1: This is a safety turkey issue. And it got turned
- 1:02:44Speaker 1: into a like gun right, gun got turned into a
- 1:02:48Speaker 1: gun rights issue when they were I remember someone telling me,
- 1:02:51Speaker 1: who was on the side of not being able to
- 1:02:53Speaker 1: rifle hunt turkeys, that they always felt a little bit
- 1:02:56Speaker 1: disappointed that they couldn't get it framed. Outside of that
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: the disc rushing about it, you know, it was more
- 1:03:03Speaker 1: like I don't want to get shot. Yeah, there was
- 1:03:06Speaker 1: a centerfire rifle. There was that one video that viral
- 1:03:11Speaker 1: a couple of years ago with that the two there
- 1:03:13Speaker 1: was two young guys turkey hunting and they were filming
- 1:03:15Speaker 1: it and I think they were working a bird on
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: the edge of a big opening and in the footage
- 1:03:20Speaker 1: you too see like the all the dirt get kicked up.
- 1:03:23Speaker 1: Someone shot with like a two forty three there decoy
- 1:03:25Speaker 1: and they were on the opposite end and it blew
- 1:03:27Speaker 1: into the tree next to him and bark went flying
- 1:03:29Speaker 1: and everything, and they immediately jumped up. It was a
- 1:03:32Speaker 1: couple of years ago, but it went viral, but I'm
- 1:03:34Speaker 1: sure you can find it on YouTube. But it was
- 1:03:36Speaker 1: guys shooting at a decoy a centerfire rifle, and they
- 1:03:39Speaker 1: were If he would have been a foot or even
- 1:03:42Speaker 1: six inches offset, he would have hit one of those
- 1:03:44Speaker 1: guys and killed them. So yeah, I've seen videos like
- 1:03:48Speaker 1: that guy shooting a goose decoy, Sean, you might have
- 1:03:50Speaker 1: seen something like that, but shooting a shooting goose decoys
- 1:03:54Speaker 1: of centerfire rifles just like you know, totally illegally, Yeah, totally.
- 1:03:58Speaker 1: There's nowhere you're allowed to do that. Well, New Zealand
- 1:04:01Speaker 1: you can do that. I killed Uh, I killed a
- 1:04:05Speaker 1: Canada goose in New Zealand with a seven millimeter m meg. Yeah,
- 1:04:09Speaker 1: they're kind of like a that's a good shot, wonderful shot.
- 1:04:15Speaker 1: All right, brought you ready for your book report? Oh,
- 1:04:17Speaker 1: how's a bobcat that's ready to be bordered? I wish
- 1:04:21Speaker 1: we had our fur home with us. Man. Snap it,
- 1:04:24Speaker 1: You've got more room over there. Snap it real hard,
- 1:04:26Speaker 1: set all the fur. Snapp it hard. A couple of times.
- 1:04:30Speaker 1: Are you ready for your book? Your part, Brody? Yeah,
- 1:04:33Speaker 1: my article report. Um. So, there's been a push to
- 1:04:38Speaker 1: dlist grizzlies from the Endangered Species List from both Montana
- 1:04:46Speaker 1: Governor Gene Forte and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. So to
- 1:04:52Speaker 1: give some background, Uh, grizzly bears were put on the
- 1:04:57Speaker 1: e S A in I think something like that. There's
- 1:05:01Speaker 1: like a hundred and fifty of them left threatened, not
- 1:05:04Speaker 1: not in danger. Yeah, there's about a hundred fifty of
- 1:05:07Speaker 1: them left in the seventies, hundred thirty six. And the
- 1:05:10Speaker 1: g y E the thing that Steve hates saying, Oh,
- 1:05:15Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm somewhat okay with that. You're okay
- 1:05:17Speaker 1: with a greater Yellowstone ecosystem? Okay, a little bit okay. Anyway, Uh,
- 1:05:23Speaker 1: fast forward to current times, and the estimates vary, right,
- 1:05:29Speaker 1: like minimum is seven hundred. A new population study model
- 1:05:36Speaker 1: that Wyoming used places them over a thousand. But either way,
- 1:05:42Speaker 1: the recovery goal was I believe five hundred bears in
- 1:05:45Speaker 1: the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which was met you know, twenty
- 1:05:50Speaker 1: years ago or so. Um, so there's there's been these
- 1:05:54Speaker 1: off and on pushes to get them off the list.
- 1:05:57Speaker 1: Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon is petitioning the US Fish and
- 1:06:02Speaker 1: Wildlife Service to get him removed again. I said, the
- 1:06:04Speaker 1: same things going on in here in Montana, and uh,
- 1:06:09Speaker 1: you know, it's this back and forth fight that never
- 1:06:13Speaker 1: seems to end. It doesn't. Yeah, it's just NonStop. And uh.
- 1:06:20Speaker 1: I was interviewed for an article for Fox News Digital.
- 1:06:24Speaker 1: Um and and uh, apparently they think I'm a grizzly
- 1:06:28Speaker 1: bear expert. They also interviewed, uh, Wyoming governor's Wyoming Governor
- 1:06:33Speaker 1: Gordon was quoted pretty heavily in the article. Um and
- 1:06:37Speaker 1: they quoted what is her name, Andreas A Cardi from
- 1:06:42Speaker 1: a Center for Biological Diversity. They always have names like that,
- 1:06:47Speaker 1: you know that that makes them sound like there's something
- 1:06:49Speaker 1: other than what they are, which is like, you know,
- 1:06:52Speaker 1: animal rights, anti hunting group. Um. The most interesting thing
- 1:06:57Speaker 1: I think she said, She's said a couple of things
- 1:07:00Speaker 1: that are interesting. There's no science to back the claim
- 1:07:04Speaker 1: that grizzlies no longer need protection, meaning they I don't
- 1:07:07Speaker 1: understand what that means. I don't know, but I mean
- 1:07:10Speaker 1: there's plenty of science because their way past the stated
- 1:07:14Speaker 1: recovery goals. Um. And that's such a such a subjective
- 1:07:19Speaker 1: statement too, because to her, grizzlies will always need protection
- 1:07:22Speaker 1: no matter what, everywhere. And uh. She also says, of course, Um,
- 1:07:28Speaker 1: this outrageous request from my Wyoming's governor is the latest
- 1:07:32Speaker 1: attack on animals like grizzly, embarrassed by states that see
- 1:07:35Speaker 1: them as little more than targets for trophy hunters. Um, pushpins.
- 1:07:41Speaker 1: Do you know? It was just like absolutely untrue. Um.
- 1:07:47Speaker 1: Here's here We've covered to so many times. I ever
- 1:07:49Speaker 1: wrote an op end the New York Times about this
- 1:07:51Speaker 1: the last time they were trying to do it. The
- 1:07:54Speaker 1: last thing the states are gonna do. That's what they
- 1:07:58Speaker 1: the state Why Montana are not going to lobby their
- 1:08:02Speaker 1: asses off for decades to get state management of grizzlies
- 1:08:07Speaker 1: back in order to then really quickly kill them all
- 1:08:10Speaker 1: and get them back driven back onto the endangered speed.
- 1:08:13Speaker 1: The whole point is trying to get them recovered and
- 1:08:15Speaker 1: off the list, right and then like they're just like
- 1:08:18Speaker 1: they're like rubbing their hands, like who the minute I
- 1:08:20Speaker 1: can get them off the list, I'm gonna put them
- 1:08:22Speaker 1: back on the list again. Yeah, and let's say ridiculous
- 1:08:25Speaker 1: Wyoming or mon Montana. Let's let's say they get taken
- 1:08:30Speaker 1: off the list and and a hunting season gets approved.
- 1:08:33Speaker 1: The number they're gonna be so careful with a number
- 1:08:38Speaker 1: of tags that they issue for these bears. That's it's
- 1:08:41Speaker 1: going to have absolutely zero impact on the Like, do
- 1:08:44Speaker 1: you know how many tags the last go around? You
- 1:08:46Speaker 1: know how many tags Idaho is going to issue one
- 1:08:51Speaker 1: Wyoming I think was a total of low twenties. Maybe
- 1:08:55Speaker 1: in Montana, I thought at the time. And I don't know,
- 1:08:58Speaker 1: there's a different administration now, so I think we'd have
- 1:09:00Speaker 1: a different approach. I thought it was a little bit
- 1:09:02Speaker 1: chicken ship. Yeah, And and you know, in a decision
- 1:09:07Speaker 1: there was coming from people who I admire, just like
- 1:09:10Speaker 1: an area where I disagreed with them is they were
- 1:09:13Speaker 1: going to sit it out, obviously sitting it out because
- 1:09:16Speaker 1: they didn't want to wade into the they didn't want
- 1:09:19Speaker 1: to wade into the social Yeah. I respected Wyoming fishing
- 1:09:23Speaker 1: game for how they just I mean, they knew it
- 1:09:26Speaker 1: was gonna they were gonna take a lot of flak
- 1:09:28Speaker 1: and heat for everything, and I think they did a
- 1:09:30Speaker 1: great job and how they handled it, and that bummed
- 1:09:33Speaker 1: me out. That f WP kind of I don't know
- 1:09:37Speaker 1: but that But basically the gist of the article here is,
- 1:09:41Speaker 1: and we've said this before, the point of the endangered
- 1:09:44Speaker 1: species list is not to keep them on the list
- 1:09:47Speaker 1: forever it stood, recover them, get them off the list,
- 1:09:51Speaker 1: turnover management to the states. And these groups like this
- 1:09:55Speaker 1: just used lawsuits to like postpone thing and delay things
- 1:10:01Speaker 1: and keep them on the list, you know, potentially forever.
- 1:10:05Speaker 1: So that's where we're at. Montana and Wyoming are trying
- 1:10:08Speaker 1: to In Montana, it's the the Northern Continental Divide population
- 1:10:13Speaker 1: that they're trying to get delisted. What winds up happening
- 1:10:16Speaker 1: with this, I mean, like I said, we've we've covered
- 1:10:18Speaker 1: the dickens out of this. Winds up happening UM around
- 1:10:24Speaker 1: grizzly delisting, around wolf delisting is you have two situations
- 1:10:29Speaker 1: where we had species that were legitimately imperiled, like wolves
- 1:10:34Speaker 1: are legitimately imperilled at a time, UM, grizzlies were legitimately
- 1:10:39Speaker 1: imperiled and they needed at that they that needed protections
- 1:10:44Speaker 1: and they put protections in place, and you in in
- 1:10:47Speaker 1: the different you know, stakeholders and has come together and
- 1:10:49Speaker 1: they're like, okay, what does recovery look like? Right? And
- 1:10:52Speaker 1: people agree on like, well, if we had this many
- 1:10:54Speaker 1: of this, that many of that living in this many places,
- 1:10:57Speaker 1: we would accept that that was like recovery at which
- 1:11:00Speaker 1: will move on to the next problem. Um. What happens
- 1:11:04Speaker 1: is people really kind of like get used to there
- 1:11:07Speaker 1: being no hunting for these animals, and later when recovery
- 1:11:12Speaker 1: objectives are met and hunting might be resumed, people just
- 1:11:16Speaker 1: they get where they just cannot accept that. And so
- 1:11:20Speaker 1: the way these things get held up in court, no
- 1:11:23Speaker 1: one comes and argues that there aren't like no one's
- 1:11:27Speaker 1: gonna argue in courts that there aren't enough of them.
- 1:11:29Speaker 1: They're gonna argue in court weird little you know, like
- 1:11:34Speaker 1: technical issues be like oh you did uh, you did uh,
- 1:11:39Speaker 1: you did a study, but did you consider the potential
- 1:11:44Speaker 1: impacts of white bark pine blister rust and if anything,
- 1:11:51Speaker 1: always didn't fully consider the impacts blister rust. So then
- 1:11:54Speaker 1: a judge and it's always that it's always a judge
- 1:11:56Speaker 1: of Missoula because that always winds up in that district
- 1:11:59Speaker 1: and a judgement rule and throw all the whole thing. Yeah,
- 1:12:01Speaker 1: based on a technicality and why they're not they're never
- 1:12:05Speaker 1: arguing the main point. Yeah. And another thing that kind
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: of never comes up is that there's like, like take
- 1:12:13Speaker 1: the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, Like you can't have bears every
- 1:12:17Speaker 1: grizzlies everywhere. There's only so many places that can support them.
- 1:12:20Speaker 1: And so in the g y E there's like a
- 1:12:23Speaker 1: finite number of grizzlies that that place can support. And
- 1:12:27Speaker 1: then they start moving out into like the urban uh
- 1:12:32Speaker 1: wild interface like around here in Bozeman, and they get
- 1:12:35Speaker 1: in trouble and then they get shot for getting in
- 1:12:38Speaker 1: a dumpster. Um. There's like a carrying capacity there, And
- 1:12:43Speaker 1: you can't have bears running around in Golden Gate Park.
- 1:12:47Speaker 1: You say, grizzlies. I wish they were everywhere, Sure, but
- 1:12:51Speaker 1: I have a high tolerance. It's just not possible, but
- 1:12:54Speaker 1: I do. Yeah. The other part of this that gets
- 1:12:56Speaker 1: really technical is is people instead of saying like, like,
- 1:13:00Speaker 1: if you're gonna what is the entirety of grizzly bear range,
- 1:13:03Speaker 1: the entirety of grizzly bear ranges um basically the Hunter
- 1:13:08Speaker 1: Meridian and westward like everything. If you're if you're like
- 1:13:12Speaker 1: west of the Big Bend in the Missouri Um, you're
- 1:13:15Speaker 1: in grizzly bear habitat. So people are like, it's not
- 1:13:19Speaker 1: really plausible that we're going to cover bears across the
- 1:13:21Speaker 1: entirety of the American West. So let's pick adequate areas
- 1:13:26Speaker 1: where they could feasibly be, and then when one of
- 1:13:28Speaker 1: those areas is full, you delist the area. And people
- 1:13:32Speaker 1: are always using they're always attacking that logic, Well, we
- 1:13:35Speaker 1: can't recover them everywhere. But you know, I always point
- 1:13:37Speaker 1: out elk are only recovered across what of their native range?
- 1:13:43Speaker 1: How come no one says that about elk elkrt recovered
- 1:13:46Speaker 1: in Illinois, but you can hunt them in Utah? Yep?
- 1:13:51Speaker 1: Why would someone not say, we haven't recovered elk across
- 1:13:53Speaker 1: the entirety of their range. You shouldn't be allowed to
- 1:13:55Speaker 1: hunt out. Yeah, they should be an endangered species in
- 1:13:58Speaker 1: Illinois by their logic. Yeah, it should be that no
- 1:14:01Speaker 1: one in Utah should be able to hunt an elk
- 1:14:03Speaker 1: because Illinois doesn't have them yet they need to hire
- 1:14:09Speaker 1: us to do these arguments. I like that the Broidy
- 1:14:11Speaker 1: gets some you're such a that from doing these book
- 1:14:15Speaker 1: reports and stuff that you get to go on the
- 1:14:16Speaker 1: news and talk about it. Yeah, man, it was fun.
- 1:14:20Speaker 1: But you know what bugs me is that they never
- 1:14:22Speaker 1: interviewed a damn biologist for these articles, like a from
- 1:14:27Speaker 1: the US Fish and Wildlife Service or from a state
- 1:14:30Speaker 1: game agency. Do you point that out to him? I did.
- 1:14:32Speaker 1: He said he should talk to some of those people.
- 1:14:36Speaker 1: Did you say, like, you shouldn't talk to me, you
- 1:14:38Speaker 1: should talk to them. I said, I am not a
- 1:14:41Speaker 1: grizzly bear expert. I have an opinion you should talk
- 1:14:44Speaker 1: to a grizzly bear expert. Yeah. You know what it
- 1:14:47Speaker 1: might be is that they're not going to get a
- 1:14:48Speaker 1: fiery They're not going to get a fiery opinion of either,
- 1:14:52Speaker 1: like a like a grizzly bear expert isn't gonna give
- 1:14:55Speaker 1: a fiery opinion because they only need to be careful
- 1:14:57Speaker 1: what they say. They had to get a raging hot
- 1:15:00Speaker 1: like Brodie Henderson. Yeah, Brody smoke coming out of his
- 1:15:05Speaker 1: years all the time. Alright, Sean, you ready you bet
- 1:15:09Speaker 1: Shawn's duck report. Yeah, you have an assignment. You gotta.
- 1:15:13Speaker 1: We gave you an assignment, right, Yeah, you did last
- 1:15:17Speaker 1: last time we did a duck report, you had brought
- 1:15:20Speaker 1: up that you wanted uh age demographics to be discussed. Yeah,
- 1:15:24Speaker 1: like what's the old asked duck. Mm hmm. And you
- 1:15:27Speaker 1: had referenced a sand hill crane you'd shot when you
- 1:15:31Speaker 1: were in Texas that you said you believed was seventeen
- 1:15:36Speaker 1: years old. And to be fair, I called Dr Chris
- 1:15:41Speaker 1: Nikolai from Delta Waterfowl about this because age demographics gets
- 1:15:45Speaker 1: pretty complex, um, and there's a lot to it, but
- 1:15:50Speaker 1: for starters, um. He told me to go look at
- 1:15:54Speaker 1: the U. S g S website that they have a
- 1:15:59Speaker 1: They have a cool called the Longevity Records of North
- 1:16:02Speaker 1: American Birds and this tool allows you to look up
- 1:16:06Speaker 1: all the all the band reporting and the age of
- 1:16:11Speaker 1: those birds that are reported. And it's not just waterfowl,
- 1:16:16Speaker 1: it's kind of everything. It's got snow buntings and sparrows,
- 1:16:22Speaker 1: you name it, pretty much anything they can report, um
- 1:16:25Speaker 1: on how old some of these birds live. It's on there.
- 1:16:28Speaker 1: For example, I did look up a snow bunting, which,
- 1:16:31Speaker 1: by the way, the oldest one reported was eight years
- 1:16:33Speaker 1: and nine months old. Um. Anyway, I also went ahead
- 1:16:41Speaker 1: and looked up sandhill crane. Since you had referenced shooting
- 1:16:45Speaker 1: one seventeen years old, the oldest sandhill crane was thirty
- 1:16:50Speaker 1: seven years and three months old, And which is so old?
- 1:16:57Speaker 1: And it was banding older than Seth? Yeah, not way older,
- 1:17:01Speaker 1: but I would have been in first grade. How Seth
- 1:17:04Speaker 1: was born? How old can parrots live? I'm just thinking
- 1:17:07Speaker 1: about birds in general, Yeah, because they're like I remember
- 1:17:10Speaker 1: how I had a girlfriend whose mom had a great
- 1:17:12Speaker 1: parrot and she had to have a will about what
- 1:17:14Speaker 1: was going to happen to the parrot after she died.
- 1:17:17Speaker 1: But that's living in a cage. Yeah, that's true. Because
- 1:17:20Speaker 1: what happened to this and tell everybody what happened to
- 1:17:22Speaker 1: this crane? Man, what happened to this crane is sad.
- 1:17:25Speaker 1: So it's banded in Florida in nine two. And what
- 1:17:30Speaker 1: finally got it was it got hit by a car
- 1:17:32Speaker 1: in Wisconsin coming home from the bar. Coming home to
- 1:17:38Speaker 1: the bar, hop up on cheese kurds, double bubble. No,
- 1:17:43Speaker 1: everyone talks about hitting deer in Wisconsin, and nobody talks
- 1:17:46Speaker 1: about hitting sandhill cranes. Thirties seven years old, super old.
- 1:17:53Speaker 1: So then I went ahead and looked up. I went
- 1:17:56Speaker 1: real down the rabbit hole looking up pretty much every
- 1:17:59Speaker 1: speed sees I could looked up, like blue geese and
- 1:18:03Speaker 1: snow geese. Which oldest blue goose was thirty years old
- 1:18:07Speaker 1: and eight months oldest mallard was twenty seven years and
- 1:18:11Speaker 1: seven months. Is this is that off banding data too?
- 1:18:14Speaker 1: M hmm yep. So these are all and Chris Nikolai
- 1:18:19Speaker 1: did bring this up as well. All these are based
- 1:18:22Speaker 1: on either found dead or hunter harvest shot and removed bands.
- 1:18:29Speaker 1: These are not recapture data. So Nikolai has had birds
- 1:18:38Speaker 1: where they catch them in rocket nets, you know, thirty
- 1:18:41Speaker 1: thirty five years later and they're they're putting third or
- 1:18:45Speaker 1: fourth set of bands on birds that are still alive. Yeah,
- 1:18:49Speaker 1: like all these birds that were looking at all these
- 1:18:51Speaker 1: ages like this mallard it's twenty almost twenty eight years,
- 1:18:56Speaker 1: it was lesser snow it's twenty seven and a half years.
- 1:18:59Speaker 1: These are things that, um, they didn't die of old
- 1:19:03Speaker 1: age mm hmm. Yeah, these these ones died of getting shot.
- 1:19:08Speaker 1: So they're teal that got banded in Saskatchewan got shot
- 1:19:12Speaker 1: in Cuba. Yeah, twenty three years later. That's crazy. It's
- 1:19:18Speaker 1: pretty cool by like Castro because that sounds like an
- 1:19:23Speaker 1: a real life story. It's amazing because you look at
- 1:19:28Speaker 1: it like you see a deer in a duck, and
- 1:19:30Speaker 1: you have so much more empathy for a deer at lesa,
- 1:19:33Speaker 1: you know what I mean, It's got eyelashes and everything.
- 1:19:36Speaker 1: They're like, you could fit seven deer lives inside of
- 1:19:42Speaker 1: a duck. Yeah, it's crazy. You don't look you when
- 1:19:45Speaker 1: you see a duck on a pond. You don't think like, oh,
- 1:19:47Speaker 1: there's something that's twenty five years old. No, definitely not.
- 1:19:51Speaker 1: It was wild turkeys a long time. Oh yeah, wild
- 1:19:55Speaker 1: turkeys like dude, I'm lucky to get become too well.
- 1:20:00Speaker 1: To be fair, though, where these numbers are these ages
- 1:20:03Speaker 1: really become wild is when you start calculating what the
- 1:20:09Speaker 1: average age of waterfowl is like, when you get down
- 1:20:13Speaker 1: to what's actually probably gonna happening actual. So the numbers
- 1:20:19Speaker 1: that Dr Nikolai had given me to work with our
- 1:20:23Speaker 1: survival rate year over year on Drake Mallard's and sixties
- 1:20:28Speaker 1: six on hen Mallards, those are not exact numbers, but
- 1:20:33Speaker 1: they're close and they flesh out the thought experiment here. Um.
- 1:20:38Speaker 1: I'll also come back to the why there's a difference
- 1:20:41Speaker 1: between drake and hen survival rate. But if so, if
- 1:20:48Speaker 1: you start with a hundred of each, you know, year one,
- 1:20:51Speaker 1: you get down to seventy drakes and sixty hens. By
- 1:20:54Speaker 1: year two, year at forty nine drakes and thirty six hens.
- 1:20:56Speaker 1: So now you're below fifty how alf or dead. So
- 1:21:00Speaker 1: there's your average age um. Your average age for a
- 1:21:04Speaker 1: duck is two years for a drake mallard and not
- 1:21:06Speaker 1: even two years for a hen mallard. So it makes
- 1:21:10Speaker 1: a seven year old mallard that much more impressive. The
- 1:21:15Speaker 1: hens live shorter because they just are they getting so
- 1:21:18Speaker 1: beat up from you know. Yeah, that's what I was
- 1:21:21Speaker 1: wanderings why hens? I was thinking maybe because of they're
- 1:21:24Speaker 1: sitting on nests and getting eaten while they're on nests. Yep,
- 1:21:29Speaker 1: that's the average then, Yeah, the average age man is
- 1:21:35Speaker 1: twenty seven years. Imagined the attrition rate of friends. You
- 1:21:38Speaker 1: go through a lot of friends, and that if you're
- 1:21:40Speaker 1: that mallard that made it to twenty seven years, how
- 1:21:43Speaker 1: many friends have coming gone? Yeah? How is it that?
- 1:21:46Speaker 1: Like you remember in Sand County Almanac, Uh, in Sand
- 1:21:50Speaker 1: County Almanac when he's doing the stuff with the chicken,
- 1:21:53Speaker 1: eas like he's like catching a chicken ee Elder Leopold.
- 1:21:58Speaker 1: This isn't the twenties. He's like catching chicken's. He made
- 1:22:01Speaker 1: up a little chickenie trap and he's like putting a
- 1:22:02Speaker 1: band on chicken eas and you know they all just die.
- 1:22:07Speaker 1: But this one that just never makes a mistake and
- 1:22:11Speaker 1: he gets a year after year after year after year
- 1:22:14Speaker 1: at the same bird feeder. I don't remember that part
- 1:22:16Speaker 1: of that, but everyone else just gets dusted like he doesn't.
- 1:22:22Speaker 1: He's like very special. I wonder what the O dometer
- 1:22:26Speaker 1: would be on a seven year old Mallard the miles
- 1:22:30Speaker 1: he's put on, Sean, that's a good one for your
- 1:22:32Speaker 1: book report, dude, Okay, I'll start. You know, there's uh
- 1:22:37Speaker 1: some real cool GPS work being done by a group
- 1:22:41Speaker 1: called Osborne Labs. I'll see what the highest sodometer they've
- 1:22:45Speaker 1: got on a GPS tracker is right now, Yeah, that'd
- 1:22:49Speaker 1: be really cool. So where that survival rate gets even
- 1:22:54Speaker 1: more nuanced, right, is that that's based on pretty much
- 1:22:59Speaker 1: a going from year one to year two and then
- 1:23:02Speaker 1: year two to year three, so to speak. That's not
- 1:23:05Speaker 1: counting when they're in the egg or even once they've hatched.
- 1:23:10Speaker 1: And are going through, you know, the whole process of
- 1:23:14Speaker 1: growing up to be old enough to fly. So Chris
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: gave me some even more staggering numbers that make you
- 1:23:22Speaker 1: wonder how we even have any ducks to hunt to
- 1:23:24Speaker 1: begin with, Like, how there's any around at all. Yeah,
- 1:23:27Speaker 1: it's amazing that there's even ducks. So right now, a
- 1:23:32Speaker 1: good nest success is point one five or fIF so
- 1:23:38Speaker 1: fifteen eggs even ever hatch out of a hundred eggs
- 1:23:41Speaker 1: laid then from then from not catching enough raccoons. Oh yeah,
- 1:23:49Speaker 1: so that's that's the real end of the story here. Um,
- 1:23:55Speaker 1: So if fifteen eggs hatch, half of those will die
- 1:24:00Speaker 1: before they ever get too old enough to fly. But
- 1:24:03Speaker 1: she brings you down to you know, seven and a
- 1:24:05Speaker 1: half ducks eggs that hit the ground m hmm, and
- 1:24:11Speaker 1: then won't make it through that first fall roughly, so
- 1:24:15Speaker 1: you get too about after that first fall, you got
- 1:24:18Speaker 1: about three ducks out of a hundred eggs, and then
- 1:24:23Speaker 1: some duck went on and lived in twenty five years.
- 1:24:29Speaker 1: So I'll circle back to the hen and drakes survival
- 1:24:33Speaker 1: rate thing, and we already kind of touched on it.
- 1:24:37Speaker 1: But the reason that hens have a lower survival rate
- 1:24:41Speaker 1: than drake's. Especially right now is nest predation. If drake's,
- 1:24:48Speaker 1: you know, drake's don't have to go sit in grassland,
- 1:24:51Speaker 1: they don't have to risk um, risk getting jumped on
- 1:24:57Speaker 1: on a nest. He can hang out out in the
- 1:24:59Speaker 1: middle of some big lake. Mm hmm exactly. And what
- 1:25:03Speaker 1: that's led to the last thirty or forty years, they've
- 1:25:06Speaker 1: really noticed it since the late nineteen eighties is we've
- 1:25:11Speaker 1: seen a population wide change in the sex ratio. We
- 1:25:15Speaker 1: have more drakes than hens, and not by just a
- 1:25:20Speaker 1: little bit. Um. In the late nineteen eighties, pintails were
- 1:25:27Speaker 1: about one point to drakes for every hen, and now
- 1:25:31Speaker 1: they're at four and a half drakes to every hen.
- 1:25:36Speaker 1: So we're at a hen shortage and a drake surplus
- 1:25:39Speaker 1: by a lot. And that's been going over how long, Uh, well,
- 1:25:45Speaker 1: it's it's going up every year. But it's been really
- 1:25:47Speaker 1: noticeable Incline since the late nineteen eighties. They do they
- 1:25:52Speaker 1: relate that to low fur prices. Delta waterfowl definitely points
- 1:25:59Speaker 1: to miso predators because there's a there's a Turkey biologist
- 1:26:03Speaker 1: that we had on the show one time, um that
- 1:26:09Speaker 1: you know, he felt that was a very interesting argument,
- 1:26:13Speaker 1: is looking at for prices relative to predation of birds.
- 1:26:17Speaker 1: That's kind of when you got out of the professional
- 1:26:19Speaker 1: trapping game when in the late eighties, I set my
- 1:26:23Speaker 1: last trap for seth No. I set my last trap
- 1:26:28Speaker 1: for commercial purposes in nine but it was dismal by then.
- 1:26:37Speaker 1: Ten years earlier it had been really something, but I
- 1:26:41Speaker 1: was only ten years old. Another thing Chris had brought
- 1:26:44Speaker 1: up there like North Dakota hadn't even described raccoons living
- 1:26:48Speaker 1: there until the nineteen fifties and now they're everywhere. So
- 1:26:54Speaker 1: it's interesting. Uh, well, we'll talk more on that in
- 1:26:57Speaker 1: another Duck report because there is so much interesting information
- 1:27:02Speaker 1: about the sex ratio and predation on nests and all that.
- 1:27:06Speaker 1: But the age disparities are are wild. How you can
- 1:27:12Speaker 1: have a thirty year old or thirty three year old
- 1:27:14Speaker 1: Canada goose, but then you know a lot of them
- 1:27:18Speaker 1: never even make it out of the nest. And Barry
- 1:27:21Speaker 1: Lopez's book Arctic Dreams, he's with a pilot and they're
- 1:27:26Speaker 1: doing some polar bear work and they're talking about how
- 1:27:28Speaker 1: old polar bear can get and didn't get pretty old,
- 1:27:31Speaker 1: and he mentions how the biologist says to him, if
- 1:27:34Speaker 1: it doesn't make any mistakes, you know, which is just
- 1:27:38Speaker 1: not something you'd like that, you know what I mean,
- 1:27:41Speaker 1: It's just not something you think about. If it doesn't
- 1:27:42Speaker 1: make any mistakes, it never messes up. It's never like, hey,
- 1:27:46Speaker 1: that looks like a real duck even though it's not moving.
- 1:27:50Speaker 1: It seems Sean, I have a question for you through
- 1:27:55Speaker 1: that research did that? Is there anything about that like
- 1:27:59Speaker 1: snowball ing or turning in and eat, like that separation
- 1:28:04Speaker 1: of how many hens to drake's because of the drake's, Like,
- 1:28:06Speaker 1: since the drakes are so rough on hands usually when
- 1:28:09Speaker 1: they're mating, like with that many drake's to low hand ratio,
- 1:28:14Speaker 1: couldn't actually start killing more hens and lower that and
- 1:28:18Speaker 1: that separation, that gap is gonna widen. Is there anything
- 1:28:21Speaker 1: research you know? I don't know. I don't think there's
- 1:28:24Speaker 1: any talk about I don't think Drake's. I mean, I
- 1:28:28Speaker 1: guess I can't speak for biologists, but I don't think
- 1:28:30Speaker 1: they kill enough hens to have a Okay, you don't
- 1:28:33Speaker 1: think it's like a right now, It's definitely a definitely
- 1:28:38Speaker 1: a habitat and predation story. You know, when you buy
- 1:28:43Speaker 1: a dozen or six pack of decoys. It's like mostly Drake's.
- 1:28:48Speaker 1: It turns out that's actually accurate. I wonder if that
- 1:28:53Speaker 1: by I thought you feel like you're getting more value
- 1:28:57Speaker 1: or just a contrast thing easy for the duck to
- 1:29:00Speaker 1: see the Drake's. I don't know. I don't know either. Oh,
- 1:29:03Speaker 1: they're probably just doing it because we like looking at
- 1:29:06Speaker 1: the pretty decoys. Right, So you're good on at Sean, Yeah, no,
- 1:29:12Speaker 1: that's what's the next report? What are you working on? Well,
- 1:29:15Speaker 1: I think we'll dive more into the predator story. Oh
- 1:29:23Speaker 1: some of the people start thinking ran I predator, which
- 1:29:25Speaker 1: I'm not. But you're gonna get into that little bit
- 1:29:28Speaker 1: predation mm hmm yep, definitely. I'm ready for you. Man.
- 1:29:34Speaker 1: What Stu I'm gonna slowly transition is into talking to you.
- 1:29:37Speaker 1: You want to see how I'm gonna do it. Can't
- 1:29:39Speaker 1: wait check this one out. Uh. We were talking on
- 1:29:44Speaker 1: previous episodes about mistaken song lyrics. When you all your
- 1:29:48Speaker 1: life you think they're saying one thing, you realize of
- 1:29:50Speaker 1: saying something else. Um, there's a song and you heard
- 1:29:54Speaker 1: this damn song Loggins and Messina, who's that? Kenny Loggins
- 1:29:59Speaker 1: and oh they Andy Loggins. You said I looked like
- 1:30:01Speaker 1: him one time. Well, you know when your hair was long.
- 1:30:04Speaker 1: Oh so the Loggins and Messina's Kenny Loggins. What a
- 1:30:08Speaker 1: weird groove. He had gone for a while of doing
- 1:30:11Speaker 1: movies movie the main songs, and movies foot loose, what's
- 1:30:17Speaker 1: the one with the pilots Top Gun? So they got
- 1:30:20Speaker 1: a song called Danny Song and in the song they
- 1:30:23Speaker 1: say Pisces that they get into astronomy. Pisces virgo rising
- 1:30:28Speaker 1: is a very good sign. This guy thought he was
- 1:30:32Speaker 1: saying the price of fur is rising. It's a very
- 1:30:36Speaker 1: good sign. I like when this dude wrote in he
- 1:30:41Speaker 1: signed off with negative tempts here in West Michigan making nice. Okay,
- 1:30:49Speaker 1: we're gonna get a new, big old thing about where
- 1:30:51Speaker 1: trappers and predator hunters are having a versus hound hunters
- 1:30:54Speaker 1: in Virginia. We're gonna put that on hold. That's very
- 1:30:56Speaker 1: interesting to me though, in fighting hunter, in fighting and
- 1:31:00Speaker 1: unlikely enemies. We're gonna cover this very soon, how trappers
- 1:31:06Speaker 1: and predator hunters are and and hound hunters are all
- 1:31:10Speaker 1: at each other's throats. Mhmm, cannibalism. I don't see it.
- 1:31:19Speaker 1: I hound hunt and I trapped, Stu hates himself. It's
- 1:31:27Speaker 1: a rich field of inquiry. We're gonna cover it, but
- 1:31:30Speaker 1: I want to do a real quick one. Colorado, who
- 1:31:32Speaker 1: seems like every other day as bannings trying to ban something. Uh,
- 1:31:35Speaker 1: this time they were trying their eighteenth time to ban lying.
- 1:31:40Speaker 1: It's so funny. They always throw in links. That's the thing, man.
- 1:31:42Speaker 1: They are like, didn't Arizona include jaguar When they tried that,
- 1:31:46Speaker 1: they always got a sneak in an animal that you
- 1:31:49Speaker 1: can't hunt anyway, because people because they're standing out in
- 1:31:51Speaker 1: front of the whole foods getting signatures for these things, right,
- 1:31:55Speaker 1: and so like here comes someone lady hasn't seen a
- 1:31:57Speaker 1: wild animal three years. Uh, comes the long and they're like,
- 1:32:01Speaker 1: were you sign our petition? Right? And they want to
- 1:32:04Speaker 1: sweeten the pot. So they're like in band links, honey,
- 1:32:07Speaker 1: because he's like, Jesus, I can't. They're killing links, like
- 1:32:11Speaker 1: you can't kill links in Colorado, but they're gonna ban it. Yep,
- 1:32:16Speaker 1: lest I don't know. Yeah in Arizona, like and no
- 1:32:19Speaker 1: killing jaguars by the way, Yeah, you can't kill jaguars,
- 1:32:24Speaker 1: but they like the because yeah, I think it is
- 1:32:26Speaker 1: adds like it sweetens the pot. You know. The great
- 1:32:29Speaker 1: thing about this one is it didn't get dragged out
- 1:32:32Speaker 1: over a long period of time, but like came up
- 1:32:35Speaker 1: and whamo got rejected right away. It's great. Crim was
- 1:32:40Speaker 1: pointing out that a guy named Vinny from New Jersey
- 1:32:43Speaker 1: road in, which makes that the second Vinny to ever
- 1:32:45Speaker 1: have anything to do with this podcast. So at this
- 1:32:47Speaker 1: point we had two Vinny's, both New Jersey mentioned on
- 1:32:51Speaker 1: this show, and not a cat lady from New Jersey.
- 1:32:55Speaker 1: So yeah, that builds over, it'll come up again. Yeah,
- 1:32:59Speaker 1: I just like, here's the thing, man, here's the thing.
- 1:33:03Speaker 1: This is all I want in the world. I want
- 1:33:07Speaker 1: there to be a I want the environment to be
- 1:33:11Speaker 1: extremely clean, clean air, clean water, healthy wildlife. I don't
- 1:33:18Speaker 1: want to I want to leave as much of it
- 1:33:19Speaker 1: as pristine as humanly possible, even to the point where
- 1:33:22Speaker 1: we have to make sacrifices. I want the earth to
- 1:33:25Speaker 1: be the let's just keep in the country. I want
- 1:33:27Speaker 1: this America to be full of pristine wild places, full
- 1:33:32Speaker 1: of animals that we have access to as renewable resources.
- 1:33:36Speaker 1: It's not that complicated. If you want to help cats,
- 1:33:40Speaker 1: help habitat yeah, if you want to help the How
- 1:33:45Speaker 1: many links are in Colorado right now? Not very many?
- 1:33:50Speaker 1: Secure Linx habitat, Yeah, sure, Lynx habitats. What what there
- 1:33:57Speaker 1: is in Colorado is doing. It's great, you know, like
- 1:34:00Speaker 1: will betterly protected wilderness areas. You know, keep it secure,
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: keep it secure. That will be the thing if you
- 1:34:08Speaker 1: want links in Colorado. The thing that will make it
- 1:34:10Speaker 1: that there's links in Colorado is that there's habitat. Quit skiing.
- 1:34:14Speaker 1: Quit skiing too. There's I can hear people typing already.
- 1:34:22Speaker 1: There's a battle over those skiers and big horns down
- 1:34:25Speaker 1: in Jackson right now. If you want the links to
- 1:34:28Speaker 1: be fine, make it that there's a shipload of links habitat,
- 1:34:31Speaker 1: and then all your problems will be solved. It won't
- 1:34:34Speaker 1: be because someone who can't anyways were too. It's just
- 1:34:38Speaker 1: you're missing the point. Yeah, let's move on, all right,
- 1:34:51Speaker 1: ste how on the Sam Hill. Because here's the thing,
- 1:34:57Speaker 1: here's my biggest question for you, here's my excuse for
- 1:35:00Speaker 1: becoming a trapper. I was born in nineteen seventy four,
- 1:35:05Speaker 1: the great fur boom of the of like seventy eight
- 1:35:09Speaker 1: to eighty two. I was born in seventy four, and
- 1:35:12Speaker 1: so I was aware of that, and I didn't set
- 1:35:15Speaker 1: a trap till the last year of the fur boom,
- 1:35:18Speaker 1: but I was informed by the fur boom like all this,
- 1:35:22Speaker 1: you know, this is in four dollars, seventy five dollar
- 1:35:26Speaker 1: red fox, fifty dollar mink, forty dollar raccoons, eighty dollar beavers,
- 1:35:33Speaker 1: seven dollar muskrats. Somebody, Phil, what was all? What's all
- 1:35:37Speaker 1: that mean in today's dollars? And that was in the round.
- 1:35:42Speaker 1: Can you can you real quick explain why the prices
- 1:35:46Speaker 1: were so high at that time, like just based on
- 1:35:49Speaker 1: demand for I think there was at that time there
- 1:35:52Speaker 1: was still strong domestic demand. And I'm guessing I don't know,
- 1:35:56Speaker 1: maybe still remembers are better. But the big consumers China,
- 1:36:01Speaker 1: South Korea, Russia, right so at times Italy. So I'm
- 1:36:10Speaker 1: guessing that those economies were very strong. I'm guessing the
- 1:36:15Speaker 1: oil prices, well, we know oil prices got incredibly high.
- 1:36:19Speaker 1: Their economies are strong. Oil prices are high, and you
- 1:36:22Speaker 1: had tons of consumer demand, and you had domestic you
- 1:36:25Speaker 1: had us demand for luxury stuff. One hundred dollars in
- 1:36:30Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four would be about five hundred and sixty
- 1:36:33Speaker 1: nine dollars according to okay, so tell me what a
- 1:36:36Speaker 1: seven dollar telling me would have No, tell me what
- 1:36:38Speaker 1: at I did. A forty dollars in nineteen eighty four
- 1:36:43Speaker 1: would have been a hundred nine dollars today. Okay, So
- 1:36:46Speaker 1: a hundred nine dollar mink today pretty good money. And
- 1:36:51Speaker 1: I was seduced by those figures because we mow a
- 1:36:53Speaker 1: lawn for five bucks and a muskrat was worth more
- 1:36:57Speaker 1: than well, it depends on who's law. Like the Musselmans
- 1:36:59Speaker 1: paid fifteen bucks to molder lawn. Yes, you have to
- 1:37:02Speaker 1: take a lunch break. You couldn't get it done at
- 1:37:05Speaker 1: one shot. You had like mo a bunch and then
- 1:37:07Speaker 1: like you'd go home and eat and go swimming and
- 1:37:09Speaker 1: ship and go back and mow again. So two muskrats
- 1:37:14Speaker 1: was like musculiman's lawn. That's why I got into it.
- 1:37:18Speaker 1: There were guys, but there were guys taking two weeks
- 1:37:20Speaker 1: of vacation and then like teaming it up with like
- 1:37:25Speaker 1: their holiday vacation and buying trucks with muskrat money. Pretty
- 1:37:31Speaker 1: cool considering you could go, I built up, I built
- 1:37:34Speaker 1: a barn. You could really live off the land back then.
- 1:37:38Speaker 1: So what's your excuse? How old you you missed all that.
- 1:37:42Speaker 1: I missed all that occasionally though, right occasionally, every now
- 1:37:49Speaker 1: and then, something like last year or two years ago,
- 1:37:55Speaker 1: like Western coyotes, it was like, yeah, boom, they were
- 1:38:00Speaker 1: worth a lot of months a good point now and
- 1:38:01Speaker 1: then to be a freak. But it's because of some
- 1:38:04Speaker 1: type of weird niche market typically, right that like typically
- 1:38:11Speaker 1: so like the fur boom, like you're talking the fur
- 1:38:13Speaker 1: room that I remember with the upper case F. Yeah,
- 1:38:16Speaker 1: would have been like two thousand eleven, two thousand fourteen.
- 1:38:21Speaker 1: Well that's what you called your that's my that's my
- 1:38:23Speaker 1: generation for boom, that's your generation muskrats. Yeah, I was
- 1:38:27Speaker 1: selling fourteen dollar muskrats. I averaged almost twenty five dollars
- 1:38:31Speaker 1: on coons that year. I sold several coyotes, you know,
- 1:38:34Speaker 1: which we were talking Midwestern coyotes, so yeah, pretty bad ones,
- 1:38:38Speaker 1: you know, and having an average of seventy seventy on them.
- 1:38:42Speaker 1: You know, that was a good little fur room. I Yeah,
- 1:38:44Speaker 1: I did really good then. So yeah, you were making money.
- 1:38:47Speaker 1: I was making money. Yeah, I was actually making money trapping.
- 1:38:50Speaker 1: Now you're just doing it pretty much for the hobby
- 1:38:52Speaker 1: of it. But fur prices definitely have gone down. But
- 1:38:55Speaker 1: that's the fur boom that I remember. So is that
- 1:38:58Speaker 1: what got you into it? No? So you know, traffing
- 1:39:03Speaker 1: is traffic is hard, like it really is hard. And
- 1:39:07Speaker 1: you know, growing up, I I was outdoorsman. You know.
- 1:39:10Speaker 1: I deer hunted, I bow hunted, I duck hunted. I
- 1:39:12Speaker 1: did everything. You know, ski though, did you I did
- 1:39:15Speaker 1: not ski, being a Southerner, we just didn't have the
- 1:39:19Speaker 1: ability there, so I didn't ski. But you know I
- 1:39:24Speaker 1: was I was hunting everything. There was a season four
- 1:39:27Speaker 1: I was fishing for everything that there was a season,
- 1:39:29Speaker 1: you know, we could catch and trapping. Just it was hard.
- 1:39:33Speaker 1: And I remember this was kind of never hard, like
- 1:39:35Speaker 1: technically hard or physically hard. I know the answer both both.
- 1:39:41Speaker 1: And I remember this is kind of whenever. Like inline
- 1:39:43Speaker 1: muzzleloaders were really becoming a thing, you know, like really
- 1:39:47Speaker 1: and in Illinois we can't use rifles centerfire rifles, and
- 1:39:52Speaker 1: so it's shotgun or muzzleloader or pistol. And I remember,
- 1:39:56Speaker 1: you know, muzzleloaders were coming out, and I bought a
- 1:39:58Speaker 1: real good in line muzzleloader. And remember I shot a
- 1:40:00Speaker 1: deer like two hundred fifty yards. You know, I'm like, well,
- 1:40:03Speaker 1: it's I'm done like what you peeked, you know. I
- 1:40:06Speaker 1: mean it's just deer walk out across forty acre field
- 1:40:09Speaker 1: and you just drop him. You know, It's there's not
- 1:40:10Speaker 1: much to that. You know, it's sitting a deer stand.
- 1:40:13Speaker 1: And I'd always trapped as a kid, and you know,
- 1:40:16Speaker 1: after that, I remember I kind of I bought some
- 1:40:18Speaker 1: sets and you know the time, there wasn't a lot
- 1:40:20Speaker 1: of education about it or information. You know, you pretty
- 1:40:23Speaker 1: much had to kind of learn on the fly or
- 1:40:25Speaker 1: was self taught, and uh, they just slowly progressed from there.
- 1:40:29Speaker 1: You know, Trapping is one of those things that if
- 1:40:33Speaker 1: you get past the whole Disney thing where you know,
- 1:40:35Speaker 1: you go out and set three sets and you come
- 1:40:36Speaker 1: back next day and you have three critters, what Disney
- 1:40:38Speaker 1: youre talking about? That's what everybody always tells me, you
- 1:40:41Speaker 1: know that that's the assumption I would say, is that
- 1:40:45Speaker 1: there's Disney movies where people have super high catch rates. Well,
- 1:40:48Speaker 1: I mean, you know, you get the Big Bear traps,
- 1:40:50Speaker 1: and you know, just the the illusion of that people
- 1:40:52Speaker 1: have of that trapping is almost like a there's just
- 1:40:56Speaker 1: like it's just mayhem blood. I call it Disney, But
- 1:40:59Speaker 1: I mean, you know, actually the general assumption, you know,
- 1:41:01Speaker 1: which it's not. Um. You know, you're going out there
- 1:41:05Speaker 1: and you're trying You're going out in an area that
- 1:41:09Speaker 1: this critter, you know, he knows the same as you
- 1:41:11Speaker 1: know your backyard. You're going out in their area, and
- 1:41:15Speaker 1: you are trying to trick that animal. For the most part,
- 1:41:18Speaker 1: to step on an area that is the size of
- 1:41:20Speaker 1: a top of a soda can, that's pretty hard to do.
- 1:41:24Speaker 1: You know, consider that that critter could go anywhere he wants,
- 1:41:26Speaker 1: and that's what you're trying to do. And I think
- 1:41:28Speaker 1: that's what drew me to it more than anything like
- 1:41:31Speaker 1: a thousand acre home range, is the challenge to step
- 1:41:34Speaker 1: on a beer can, the top of a beer can.
- 1:41:37Speaker 1: You're trying to get that critter to put his foot
- 1:41:39Speaker 1: on and that's that, to me was kind of the
- 1:41:42Speaker 1: allure of it. That's what drew me to it. Was
- 1:41:45Speaker 1: was the challenge, because I mean, you've trapped, you know,
- 1:41:49Speaker 1: you've trapped. Trappers are a different breed, you know. And
- 1:41:52Speaker 1: I don't mean that being like the you know, Jeremiah
- 1:41:56Speaker 1: Johnson or old Dingy construction worker, you know, one of those,
- 1:41:59Speaker 1: which I him. But I mean, you've got to be driven,
- 1:42:03Speaker 1: and you know, there's a different mentality to it to trap,
- 1:42:07Speaker 1: and you there's a lot of work involved with it,
- 1:42:10Speaker 1: um physically, mentally, you know, I'll say so deer hunting,
- 1:42:15Speaker 1: a lot of people can relate to deer hunting. So
- 1:42:18Speaker 1: you're gonna deer hunt, and you're gonna you're gonna deer
- 1:42:21Speaker 1: hunt every day in December or every chance you get. Right. So,
- 1:42:25Speaker 1: for the majority of us that work a forty hour week,
- 1:42:27Speaker 1: you're not gonna be able to hunt during the week.
- 1:42:29Speaker 1: You're gonna be able to hunt on the weekends, right
- 1:42:31Speaker 1: because sunrises it seven o'clock and sets at four thirty.
- 1:42:35Speaker 1: So you hunt every single chance you can. During December,
- 1:42:39Speaker 1: you're gonna get to hunt eight times eight days basically. Right.
- 1:42:43Speaker 1: If I want to go trap and I want to
- 1:42:44Speaker 1: trap every day in December, I'm in the woods thirty
- 1:42:48Speaker 1: one days in December. That takes a lot of drive
- 1:42:51Speaker 1: and a lot of you know, a lot of you know,
- 1:42:54Speaker 1: you just gotta be involved with it so much more.
- 1:42:57Speaker 1: And I think that's that's what drives me to do it,
- 1:42:59Speaker 1: is just the challenge of it. That's a pretty good
- 1:43:01Speaker 1: point where one of the four years that I really
- 1:43:05Speaker 1: trapped hard. Would be like my last two years of
- 1:43:07Speaker 1: high school where I got where I could get out
- 1:43:09Speaker 1: of school early. I'd go early, but get out earlier,
- 1:43:12Speaker 1: and i'd get out pretty like remarkably early, be done
- 1:43:15Speaker 1: like one forty or something like that. UM. And then
- 1:43:18Speaker 1: in my two first years of college, I did community college.
- 1:43:21Speaker 1: I took all night classes so I could trap, so
- 1:43:23Speaker 1: I didn't have to show up until five. No, I
- 1:43:26Speaker 1: either had to be there at six or seven, and
- 1:43:28Speaker 1: I only went four days a week and i'd be
- 1:43:30Speaker 1: there until ten at night. UM. I would start October
- 1:43:34Speaker 1: fifteen when Fox opened, and I would be in the
- 1:43:39Speaker 1: woods every single day. Every day between October and the
- 1:43:47Speaker 1: end of January. I would have some business in the
- 1:43:50Speaker 1: woods every day. And don't you feel that you have
- 1:43:52Speaker 1: a kind of a little better relationship with kind of
- 1:43:55Speaker 1: I guess the outdoors or your area, and you're seeing
- 1:43:58Speaker 1: stuff every single day. You're in the woods way more
- 1:44:02Speaker 1: than like the average deer hunter. I mean, you're interacting
- 1:44:05Speaker 1: with stuff that most people can't, and that to me
- 1:44:07Speaker 1: is just that's cool. You know, looking for tone ail
- 1:44:10Speaker 1: marks in the mud, Yeah, that's all you're prints in
- 1:44:13Speaker 1: the mud. But no, to me, That's that's what draws
- 1:44:16Speaker 1: me to it is just the challenge. And then you know,
- 1:44:19Speaker 1: for my instance, I go ahead and I take it
- 1:44:22Speaker 1: a step further if you will, with with my fur
- 1:44:24Speaker 1: handling side of it. So, I mean, you know a
- 1:44:26Speaker 1: lot of people selling the round or they sell green,
- 1:44:28Speaker 1: which is just a skinned critter um and it round
- 1:44:32Speaker 1: is hole on the carcass. You caught the thing, you
- 1:44:35Speaker 1: dispatched it there lays that's in the round, and like,
- 1:44:39Speaker 1: who explain who the hell you'd sell a raccoon in
- 1:44:43Speaker 1: the round. Two. So whenever we have times of high
- 1:44:47Speaker 1: fur prices, um, there are you know the auction companies
- 1:44:51Speaker 1: of fur buyers that will buy that, you know back
- 1:44:53Speaker 1: like your fur boom, remember people talking about that's they
- 1:44:56Speaker 1: wouldn't even bother taking the time to skin their coons
- 1:45:01Speaker 1: because the price difference between finish fur and in the
- 1:45:05Speaker 1: round it wasn't enough to justify going through all the
- 1:45:08Speaker 1: trouble of it. They could just go out and catch
- 1:45:09Speaker 1: more coons and there every night dropping by the fur buyer,
- 1:45:14Speaker 1: or you could freeze them, you know, depending on depending
- 1:45:16Speaker 1: on your climate too. But yeah, selling in the round
- 1:45:18Speaker 1: or selling in the green, um, nafa there at the
- 1:45:21Speaker 1: end of their kind of run. They were offering um skinning.
- 1:45:25Speaker 1: You could you could, you could send them green furs
- 1:45:28Speaker 1: and they would flesh them and stretch them. So a
- 1:45:31Speaker 1: lot of buyers, to a lot of your county buyers
- 1:45:34Speaker 1: sometimes prefer having green fur or or in the round,
- 1:45:39Speaker 1: mainly just green, simply because they know you're not gonna
- 1:45:42Speaker 1: screw it up. Got so, I mean, they know that
- 1:45:46Speaker 1: they've got a skill set. They're gonna flesh and stretch
- 1:45:48Speaker 1: it just how they want it. Because your local buyers
- 1:45:51Speaker 1: are selling to the auction houses anyway, so they want
- 1:45:55Speaker 1: to get a premium and they want to have it right.
- 1:45:57Speaker 1: So you want to know something that's gonna increase tension
- 1:46:00Speaker 1: between you and Seth, and it's going to create tension
- 1:46:03Speaker 1: between you and Rick, making all sorts of enemies. Seth
- 1:46:07Speaker 1: had a top lot mink, Yeah, which he's gonna tell
- 1:46:10Speaker 1: what that means. And you had a top lot something.
- 1:46:12Speaker 1: I had a top lot gray fox. Okay, tell tell
- 1:46:14Speaker 1: Stu all about that. What that means? Oh, the top lot, uh,
- 1:46:20Speaker 1: Stu priority knows. Yes, Stu knows about the top lit guarantee.
- 1:46:23Speaker 1: I've had a few. Yes, we talked about it. What
- 1:46:27Speaker 1: hurts me more is I got that top lot and
- 1:46:29Speaker 1: seth He's like, hey, Rick, you're gonna back up, back up,
- 1:46:34Speaker 1: back up. Okay, who wants to explain what the hell
- 1:46:37Speaker 1: the top lot is? I've never had one, but I
- 1:46:39Speaker 1: can do it. Yeah, whoever go for to explain the
- 1:46:44Speaker 1: top lot? Yes, his for knowledge is because this is
- 1:46:46Speaker 1: for handling one on one okay. So a top lot
- 1:46:49Speaker 1: and generally when we we're talking top lot, we're talking
- 1:46:51Speaker 1: about selling through the auction houses. So you've got a
- 1:46:54Speaker 1: few different ways to sell. Obviously, you can sell to
- 1:46:56Speaker 1: your county or local buyer, and then normally they will
- 1:47:00Speaker 1: actually sell to the auction houses. So a few years
- 1:47:02Speaker 1: ago there were two main auction houses. There was NAPFA,
- 1:47:05Speaker 1: which was North American for auction and then FH for harvesters. Right,
- 1:47:09Speaker 1: NAPFA went under a few years ago, so now there's
- 1:47:11Speaker 1: just for harvesters. So these auction houses they will gather
- 1:47:15Speaker 1: up giant lots of fur and they will grade them
- 1:47:18Speaker 1: down by size, by color, whole, different whole, different lists
- 1:47:22Speaker 1: of stuff. So to get a top lot basically means
- 1:47:26Speaker 1: that you have your your pelt in the very top
- 1:47:32Speaker 1: of what's selling. So you've got the best color, the
- 1:47:34Speaker 1: best size, the best quality. You've got the best of say,
- 1:47:39Speaker 1: all the coyotes that are being sold at that auction,
- 1:47:42Speaker 1: that top lot. You've got your your pelt in that
- 1:47:46Speaker 1: lot that's being sold. And I mean it's a pretty
- 1:47:49Speaker 1: big honor really, you know, to be able to get
- 1:47:51Speaker 1: that um and they give you a hat, they give
- 1:47:53Speaker 1: you a hat, they give you a pen, they give
- 1:47:55Speaker 1: you a little certificate with your name on it. It
- 1:47:58Speaker 1: tells you so you gotta hear rix very sad story though,
- 1:48:02Speaker 1: So it was. It was actually because or maybe actually
- 1:48:09Speaker 1: yeah it was. And uh, I gotta this certificate in
- 1:48:14Speaker 1: the mail the top lot for that gray fox. And
- 1:48:16Speaker 1: I told Seth about it, and he was like all
- 1:48:18Speaker 1: pumpt He's like, hey, when you go sell for next time,
- 1:48:20Speaker 1: you could take your certificate and show the driver and
- 1:48:23Speaker 1: you'll you'll get a hat. And I'm like, oh, sweet,
- 1:48:25Speaker 1: well explain what the driver's Oh yeah, okay, so well
- 1:48:28Speaker 1: Stu can talk so much better this, but you gotta
- 1:48:31Speaker 1: it's a very it's a weird. It's a weird. So
- 1:48:34Speaker 1: I'll back up even more. You're doing something illegal to
- 1:48:38Speaker 1: the point, and the gentleman Seth used to work for.
- 1:48:42Speaker 1: We're kind of my trapping mentors, and they're telling me.
- 1:48:45Speaker 1: He's like, all right, you gotta sell your fur now,
- 1:48:47Speaker 1: you gotta. I'm like, how do I do that? So
- 1:48:50Speaker 1: they're explaining they you gotta go with the th a
- 1:48:52Speaker 1: truck seven thirty and drive around back just a truck stop.
- 1:48:59Speaker 1: And I thought, Seth and this, gentlemen, we're messing with me,
- 1:49:03Speaker 1: and side to show up and then I'll just know
- 1:49:05Speaker 1: what to do. And I have my little my little
- 1:49:08Speaker 1: bag they gave me and my my sat my Napha sack,
- 1:49:12Speaker 1: and I'm sitting there and then when you get there,
- 1:49:14Speaker 1: pull your pants, don't and it's always a sketchy And
- 1:49:25Speaker 1: I'm sitting there and I started noticing all these other
- 1:49:27Speaker 1: trucks pull up and I'm like, okay, I think, and
- 1:49:29Speaker 1: it's yeah, like six in the morning. Then this budget
- 1:49:31Speaker 1: rental truck comes ripping into the parking lot, just parks
- 1:49:35Speaker 1: in the middle back. Guy gets out, opens the back door,
- 1:49:38Speaker 1: and I think, I told you. I felt like it's
- 1:49:40Speaker 1: like when you're young kid going into gym class for
- 1:49:42Speaker 1: the first time in the showers and I'm like, have this.
- 1:49:45Speaker 1: I have this little bag I'm like, yeah, I got
- 1:49:47Speaker 1: twenty furs in here, and then these dudes are just
- 1:49:49Speaker 1: on loaded white bags. I'm like, oh shit, wow, that's
- 1:49:53Speaker 1: a lot um. But that was the first couple of times.
- 1:49:56Speaker 1: So you you you go there and you get in
- 1:50:00Speaker 1: the line, hand in all your bags. They give you.
- 1:50:03Speaker 1: It was like the old certificate styles, like they'd write
- 1:50:06Speaker 1: on it. They'll be like a pink sheet, a yellow sheet,
- 1:50:09Speaker 1: and you'd have to throw one in the bag and
- 1:50:10Speaker 1: they'd hand you your you know, and I'm butchering this
- 1:50:13Speaker 1: stup and no money changes hands. But that's the pickup
- 1:50:18Speaker 1: I'm referring to. So a couple like in the next year,
- 1:50:22Speaker 1: I'm at this pickup and I'm like, I have last
- 1:50:26Speaker 1: year's top Lot certificate in my hand and I can't
- 1:50:29Speaker 1: wait to get that naff a top Lot trapper hat.
- 1:50:31Speaker 1: I know it sounds so stupid because I was so
- 1:50:35Speaker 1: into it great because the Golden broadered anyway feel and
- 1:50:40Speaker 1: I walked up. I was one of the last guys
- 1:50:42Speaker 1: in line. We did my for exchange. He uh did
- 1:50:46Speaker 1: my sheet and I was like, sir, I also have
- 1:50:47Speaker 1: a top Lot certificate here. I was like, I'm wondering
- 1:50:49Speaker 1: do you have the hats. And it was this old guy.
- 1:50:52Speaker 1: He looks right, just so serious. He's like, oh, I'm sorry, son,
- 1:50:55Speaker 1: I'm all out of those hats. I just gave them all,
- 1:50:58Speaker 1: like my last one out. And I was like, oh,
- 1:51:00Speaker 1: that's all right, you know. But I was so crushed.
- 1:51:03Speaker 1: I walked off like I was tough, but I was like,
- 1:51:05Speaker 1: oh my god. All I wanted was a damn hat.
- 1:51:08Speaker 1: To this day, I don't have one in it. Like
- 1:51:10Speaker 1: you're tearing up right now. Man, it's emotional. Yeah, see, man,
- 1:51:13Speaker 1: I want to see. I've never had a top lot
- 1:51:15Speaker 1: but kind of what I mean, I never would and
- 1:51:19Speaker 1: you should be shot if you do. But I'd be
- 1:51:22Speaker 1: very tempted to wear that hat. Yeah you got you got?
- 1:51:27Speaker 1: What did you wore? And got exposed? People like, let
- 1:51:29Speaker 1: me see your certificate? Do you know I'm gonna I
- 1:51:31Speaker 1: was gonna frame my certificate. After we talked about it
- 1:51:33Speaker 1: a few months, I was like, you have it, I
- 1:51:35Speaker 1: still have it. Can hang in the studio here of course. Yeah,
- 1:51:38Speaker 1: we're talking about You're like you should frame that, and
- 1:51:41Speaker 1: I was like sitting in your truck, like you know
- 1:51:42Speaker 1: what I should? Yeah, I've got mine frames? How many
- 1:51:47Speaker 1: top lots you got, I've got three through NAFA for
- 1:51:49Speaker 1: which ones. I've got a coon, I've got a beaver,
- 1:51:52Speaker 1: and I've got a kyote because see the problem is
- 1:51:56Speaker 1: now I say a kyote because I'm from Illinois, Midwest, right,
- 1:52:00Speaker 1: So there's kind of this thing amongst trappers. You have
- 1:52:03Speaker 1: your top lot and then you have your top lot sections.
- 1:52:07Speaker 1: So like my beaver, I my beaver was the top lot,
- 1:52:10Speaker 1: My coon was the top lot. My coyote was the
- 1:52:14Speaker 1: top lot of the section. So like the top the
- 1:52:17Speaker 1: best of the ship. It's like you're standing on the podium,
- 1:52:20Speaker 1: but the guy your top of the podium, but there's
- 1:52:23Speaker 1: still somebody just above you because it's not the top top,
- 1:52:27Speaker 1: but it's still the top of that section. The Western
- 1:52:30Speaker 1: Pales would be top. They are top. Like I'm never
- 1:52:32Speaker 1: gonna get a top lot kyo or I trap ever,
- 1:52:35Speaker 1: It's just not gonna happen. But I got the top
- 1:52:37Speaker 1: lot of the section. Do you got three hats? No?
- 1:52:40Speaker 1: I got one hat because I've got two similar stories
- 1:52:42Speaker 1: to what they really dropped the ball on the hats.
- 1:52:45Speaker 1: I've got three pins though, yeah, I see how don't
- 1:52:47Speaker 1: know the pins with so I cheated out of a
- 1:52:51Speaker 1: pin and and yeah, man, but the hats were cool,
- 1:52:54Speaker 1: like ninety I've wore mine until it was so ratty
- 1:52:56Speaker 1: and nasty. Stu, you kind of talked hat and I'm
- 1:53:01Speaker 1: not a hacky. I don't. I very rarely actually wear hats.
- 1:53:04Speaker 1: But that was like a badge of honor because I
- 1:53:06Speaker 1: do think in the tear of like outdoorsman, trapper is
- 1:53:09Speaker 1: a pinnacle and like not a lot of people in
- 1:53:12Speaker 1: our generation, we're in the trap and that's what it's like.
- 1:53:14Speaker 1: I want that hat so I can wear it, and
- 1:53:16Speaker 1: I don't know, I just yeah, I felt like it
- 1:53:18Speaker 1: was like a metal And when that old man told
- 1:53:20Speaker 1: me I couldn't have one or didn't have it, I
- 1:53:22Speaker 1: was like, where's your hat, Seth. I think it's back
- 1:53:24Speaker 1: at my mom's place in Pennsylvania. Do you have your certificate?
- 1:53:29Speaker 1: I think it's there too, somewhere. Can you ever hunt
- 1:53:32Speaker 1: it down? Yeah? You probably have her. Look look around
- 1:53:35Speaker 1: for it. Do you want to plug your mass Boot company?
- 1:53:37Speaker 1: While we're talking about the Center Boot Company in Belfont, Pennsylvania,
- 1:53:41Speaker 1: check it out. If you need to buy boots, don't
- 1:53:42Speaker 1: buy him anywhere else. Don't buy him at Zappos. Don't
- 1:53:45Speaker 1: buy him at Amazon. Drive to Seth's Mom's store Center
- 1:53:49Speaker 1: Boot Company, um Work Hunting Western. They also sell all
- 1:53:56Speaker 1: sorts of stuff like belt buckles and leather good If
- 1:54:00Speaker 1: you're over there in Pensylvan If you're ever here, go
- 1:54:01Speaker 1: to Schnads. If you are there, go to Sasma check
- 1:54:04Speaker 1: them out. I have a booth at the the the
- 1:54:09Speaker 1: Big Sportsman Show in Harrisburg. Here you can actually go
- 1:54:13Speaker 1: meet the real Sess mom. Go go look up their
- 1:54:16Speaker 1: booth if you're gonna be there and ask her if
- 1:54:18Speaker 1: she can please find Sess hat and top lots certificate.
- 1:54:21Speaker 1: Yes that I'm sure that hats because you had it
- 1:54:25Speaker 1: in college. You had it on like your wall. Yeah,
- 1:54:28Speaker 1: that kind of lost track of it. I don't know
- 1:54:29Speaker 1: where it is. But you see, they only give top
- 1:54:32Speaker 1: lots for certain species. So for some reason where I'm at,
- 1:54:36Speaker 1: we grow like awesome possums. I don't know why, right,
- 1:54:41Speaker 1: but back in the day you could pay for all
- 1:54:43Speaker 1: your gas by by putting up possums. What is the
- 1:54:46Speaker 1: day eleven through fourteen? That's that's my fur boom. Okay,
- 1:54:51Speaker 1: so explain the possum market. Well, I mean, you know
- 1:54:55Speaker 1: you've got kind of a lower end market with the possums.
- 1:54:58Speaker 1: But normally you catch them as I catch and I
- 1:55:01Speaker 1: would put them up and I mean, we we grow
- 1:55:03Speaker 1: some big possums there, and I would remember, I can't
- 1:55:07Speaker 1: say the exact I want to say, like seventeen dollars
- 1:55:10Speaker 1: I sold a possum for back in the day. I
- 1:55:12Speaker 1: mean I averaged like twelve dollars on them. Yeah, And
- 1:55:15Speaker 1: is that is that market collapse now? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
- 1:55:19Speaker 1: it's hard to even get rid of them right now.
- 1:55:21Speaker 1: But you were saying. One thing you're telling me that's
- 1:55:22Speaker 1: interesting is the skunk for market doesn't fluctuate, not really, No,
- 1:55:28Speaker 1: depending on who you go through in the different avenues
- 1:55:31Speaker 1: you go through. Skunks are at least what I trapped
- 1:55:34Speaker 1: in my area. They're the most consistent cell every year,
- 1:55:38Speaker 1: mainly just because their novelty item. So who do you
- 1:55:42Speaker 1: sell the skunks to. I've got a couple of private
- 1:55:45Speaker 1: buyers who I'm not gonna say, but got you. I mean,
- 1:55:49Speaker 1: it's it's kind of a it's it's a niche market, right,
- 1:55:51Speaker 1: So I mean, you know you flood the market with
- 1:55:53Speaker 1: these niche buyers, then you know you're not gonna have
- 1:55:56Speaker 1: your market but yeah, it's it's a very consistent market.
- 1:56:00Speaker 1: And how many skunks did you put up this year?
- 1:56:03Speaker 1: Probably I don't know number. I'm saying between sixty and
- 1:56:06Speaker 1: seventy so far you flushed and stretched between sixty and
- 1:56:10Speaker 1: seventy skunks this year. You don't even smell, Like, how
- 1:56:13Speaker 1: do you dispatch them? Because that's that's always real controversial. Uh,
- 1:56:19Speaker 1: A lot of guys will inject them with acidtone. I
- 1:56:22Speaker 1: I shoot everything. I'm not going to take the time.
- 1:56:24Speaker 1: I'm running in gunning the whole time, So I do
- 1:56:27Speaker 1: a center body shot, try to hit the vitals. I
- 1:56:29Speaker 1: think the trick is a very slow bullet, something that's
- 1:56:33Speaker 1: not going to create a lot of impact, and you
- 1:56:36Speaker 1: probably get maybe one out of eight, one out of
- 1:56:40Speaker 1: nine that spray because I want the essence, right, So
- 1:56:43Speaker 1: that adds to the value of the skunk, is that
- 1:56:45Speaker 1: you sell the fur. But then you there's also a
- 1:56:48Speaker 1: market for the essence, and so essence right now is
- 1:56:51Speaker 1: you know right about ounds average? Yeah, So how much
- 1:56:56Speaker 1: do you get out of one skunk about? I mean, like, oh,
- 1:57:01Speaker 1: since wise, So it just depends on if they spray
- 1:57:04Speaker 1: or not, if they're full, you know, all over half
- 1:57:07Speaker 1: an ounce. So you take a skunk that's you know,
- 1:57:12Speaker 1: if he's got good white stripes, and if he's full essence,
- 1:57:15Speaker 1: you know, throw another ten to twelve dollars on it.
- 1:57:18Speaker 1: That's not a bad deal for something you're not necessarily
- 1:57:21Speaker 1: targeting either. I mean there are guys that target them,
- 1:57:23Speaker 1: but for me, there by catch, ye, So well why
- 1:57:27Speaker 1: not just set specifically for him because I'm out there
- 1:57:31Speaker 1: targeting other species And I say by catch and the
- 1:57:35Speaker 1: fact that I'm in the same general area so I
- 1:57:38Speaker 1: catch them in a lot of my coon sets is
- 1:57:40Speaker 1: where I catch them. Because you're gonna catch them whether
- 1:57:41Speaker 1: you're targeting him or not. Yeah. So, and like I said,
- 1:57:45Speaker 1: you want that, you want the good ones. Um, you
- 1:57:47Speaker 1: know you're gonna get a little bit more money for
- 1:57:48Speaker 1: the good white stripes. That's what they want. I mean,
- 1:57:51Speaker 1: that's that's what the novelty market is wanting. But no,
- 1:57:54Speaker 1: the skunk is an underrated for for sure. And if
- 1:57:56Speaker 1: you have never seen a skunk for in general, they've
- 1:57:59Speaker 1: got all some for it's real long, kind of silky
- 1:58:03Speaker 1: for I mean, it really is a student you say,
- 1:58:06Speaker 1: they're trappers even starting to target them now just because
- 1:58:09Speaker 1: of that market for sure. Yeah, there there's several guys
- 1:58:11Speaker 1: that I know that they go out and pretty much
- 1:58:15Speaker 1: target them. You know, do you think me and Rick
- 1:58:16Speaker 1: would be all pull top Lot off those giants I
- 1:58:18Speaker 1: was showing you earlier today, we'll see. That's one funny.
- 1:58:21Speaker 1: I never did get a top Lot skunk. I don't
- 1:58:24Speaker 1: think they give out the certificates. That's a funny, you know,
- 1:58:26Speaker 1: it's kind of I haven't gotten that hat. Yeah, and
- 1:58:28Speaker 1: I never sold a skunks. I don't know because those
- 1:58:31Speaker 1: are some big skunks though. You have to Yeah, you
- 1:58:35Speaker 1: have to go to Fern harvests now. And I don't
- 1:58:37Speaker 1: know if they give out for forgiven my ignorance here,
- 1:58:41Speaker 1: what is the market for the essence? Like what are
- 1:58:44Speaker 1: people using it for? What do they want it for?
- 1:58:47Speaker 1: So the main market is for bait makers. Um, it's
- 1:58:52Speaker 1: also you can google essence and come up with I
- 1:58:56Speaker 1: mean it it is there's a large market for The
- 1:58:59Speaker 1: main market is essence for for lure, for trapping. That
- 1:59:04Speaker 1: takes a lot of it. Um. You know when it's
- 1:59:07Speaker 1: so like we were running Martin sets, right, There's not
- 1:59:10Speaker 1: a lot of skunks in the mountains, so those guys
- 1:59:12Speaker 1: can't access you know they don't have access to skunks.
- 1:59:15Speaker 1: So but there are different different markets for it too
- 1:59:18Speaker 1: as well. Um, I think I could be wrong. I
- 1:59:22Speaker 1: think there's some food additives that stu you might have hurt.
- 1:59:27Speaker 1: I feel like years ago was used in perfumes a
- 1:59:29Speaker 1: lot perfect. They would pull apart the scent, but like
- 1:59:32Speaker 1: what sticks and there's some way to break it down?
- 1:59:36Speaker 1: Casts huge? Yeah, casts a hundred bucks of pound right
- 1:59:40Speaker 1: now casts a hunter bucks. So like castor is always
- 1:59:43Speaker 1: funny because like around the holidays, we're talking about it.
- 1:59:46Speaker 1: We're talking about a thing that like when you skin
- 1:59:47Speaker 1: a beaver on each side of the vent, it would
- 1:59:50Speaker 1: be like if you're like if you reach down and
- 1:59:52Speaker 1: grab on yourself male or female whatever, above your how
- 2:00:01Speaker 1: would I put it? What would be that little area?
- 2:00:05Speaker 1: I know, a vulgar term for that little area exactly
- 2:00:08Speaker 1: between the in between zones, not your taint. It's like
- 2:00:17Speaker 1: just like a vulgar term for what that is? What
- 2:00:19Speaker 1: is it like if you were gonna I don't know,
- 2:00:22Speaker 1: like above your genitals and on either side it's like
- 2:00:26Speaker 1: a little soft area where your legs join up to
- 2:00:29Speaker 1: your body. What is that called that spot? If you
- 2:00:32Speaker 1: had a hernia. Oh yeah, picture you had a hernia
- 2:00:37Speaker 1: on a beaver, there sits. If you had a double hernia,
- 2:00:41Speaker 1: growing area, Yeah, you're growing area. There sits. These two
- 2:00:44Speaker 1: sacks full of castor, it looks like a brain, looks
- 2:00:47Speaker 1: like two brains hiding out down in there um. And
- 2:00:51Speaker 1: they use it for imitate like artificial vanilla. Vanilla extracts
- 2:00:55Speaker 1: a big one, a lot of the goals. I think
- 2:00:58Speaker 1: there's a big market in Turkey for something. They fume.
- 2:01:00Speaker 1: It's huge and perfume because it really does have a
- 2:01:02Speaker 1: sweet smell. Hundred bucks of pound right now, the castor.
- 2:01:06Speaker 1: If you get a beaver loaded with castor, his caster
- 2:01:08Speaker 1: is worth more than all of his other parts. Is
- 2:01:11Speaker 1: that has I've been with Steve sitting on a bunch
- 2:01:14Speaker 1: of pounds of it trapping? Is it the weight the
- 2:01:18Speaker 1: dried out weight? Yeah? Generally there's a few different ways,
- 2:01:21Speaker 1: but generally the accepted way is to have it dried.
- 2:01:24Speaker 1: Can I give you a huge bag of beaver casters
- 2:01:26Speaker 1: and then you'll like on me like a stretcher or
- 2:01:29Speaker 1: something like that. Were already gave me two stretchers. If
- 2:01:32Speaker 1: I give you a big bag of beaver casters, we
- 2:01:34Speaker 1: call it into even get that hat from him? Would
- 2:01:38Speaker 1: you fly home with the beaver casters? We can fly
- 2:01:41Speaker 1: home with. I don't know. I'm gonna let you home
- 2:01:42Speaker 1: with a bunch of beaver casters. Now you need him
- 2:01:44Speaker 1: for bait, because that's one universal bait. I know, it's
- 2:01:47Speaker 1: a universal attracting No beaver caster is is where it's
- 2:01:51Speaker 1: at if you're trapping right now. So I'm gonna give
- 2:01:54Speaker 1: you a bunch of beaver cast and the oil sacks too.
- 2:01:56Speaker 1: You can also take the oil sacs. I kind of
- 2:01:58Speaker 1: quit saying because me and Seth here we're old lure makers.
- 2:02:00Speaker 1: I don't let you know that, and we would we
- 2:02:04Speaker 1: made We made like a lot. Oh yeah, is that
- 2:02:08Speaker 1: that stuff we used the other day? Is that's still
- 2:02:10Speaker 1: from the main stuff? We made like a couple of
- 2:02:12Speaker 1: quart jars of that stuff, and we took a valerian
- 2:02:15Speaker 1: root appalescence and a lot of beaver caster and a
- 2:02:20Speaker 1: lot of glycering. I should work that stuff now, the
- 2:02:29Speaker 1: castor definitely where it's at. Are you selling castor I'm
- 2:02:33Speaker 1: selling caster? I take what because I make a lout
- 2:02:35Speaker 1: of my own bait, So I take every year what
- 2:02:38Speaker 1: I need to get me through Basically the next year
- 2:02:40Speaker 1: and then I'll sell the rest. Let me give you
- 2:02:42Speaker 1: a couple of bags of it. Okay, that's why you'd
- 2:02:44Speaker 1: have it. I want it. What's your beaver pressure like
- 2:02:47Speaker 1: in southern Illinois is is there a lot of people
- 2:02:49Speaker 1: trying to catch beavers there? There's not a lot of
- 2:02:52Speaker 1: beavers where I'm at. Okay, So that's that's the problem,
- 2:02:55Speaker 1: more than anything, is that you've got to be very
- 2:02:57Speaker 1: conscious about. You know, I've always said where I'm at
- 2:03:00Speaker 1: right now, if I wanted to, I could take two
- 2:03:02Speaker 1: weeks and I could basically trap out my my area.
- 2:03:06Speaker 1: And so I've got to be very conscious about how
- 2:03:08Speaker 1: I trapped the beaver. I trapped far away from the house,
- 2:03:11Speaker 1: trying to get the big, the big you know, parent
- 2:03:14Speaker 1: beat far away from the beaver house. Yeah, because generally
- 2:03:16Speaker 1: the further way you get from the house, you'll kind
- 2:03:19Speaker 1: of keep yourself from catching the small kit beavers. They
- 2:03:22Speaker 1: just don't travel as far. Uh. And then I just
- 2:03:25Speaker 1: you know, once I go in, I'll take you know,
- 2:03:27Speaker 1: two or three out of the house and then I'm done.
- 2:03:28Speaker 1: I'll leave it just to kind of have seed for
- 2:03:30Speaker 1: next year. And that's just like how big is your
- 2:03:34Speaker 1: trapping area. Like, so my trapping area is dictated a
- 2:03:38Speaker 1: lot by my work, being that I work construction, so
- 2:03:41Speaker 1: I have a giant range that I've worked over the years,
- 2:03:44Speaker 1: and over the years I've set up sort of trap
- 2:03:48Speaker 1: lines to correlate with where I'm working, you know, because
- 2:03:51Speaker 1: I mean I'm working every day, so I want to
- 2:03:53Speaker 1: be able to run the line on the way back
- 2:03:55Speaker 1: home from work. You know, tell tell priority this, This
- 2:03:58Speaker 1: will help them conceptualize it. Like if you tell them
- 2:04:01Speaker 1: how many permissions permissions, how many permissions you maintain at
- 2:04:05Speaker 1: any given time, between a hundred fifty landowner permission getting
- 2:04:10Speaker 1: that many white tail permissions, it would never happen. Well,
- 2:04:14Speaker 1: because that's the only way I can trap. So we
- 2:04:16Speaker 1: have very We have no public land where I'm at.
- 2:04:19Speaker 1: But yeah, he mad, but you don't give him your spiel. Yes,
- 2:04:23Speaker 1: So I mean he walks up with traps and starts
- 2:04:27Speaker 1: jamming his hands into him. Don't give him an education,
- 2:04:30Speaker 1: you know, because I mean the first So in general,
- 2:04:33Speaker 1: people are worried about their dogs. So in general, I'm
- 2:04:37Speaker 1: gonna get nine knows to one yes, even for trapping permission. Yeah,
- 2:04:42Speaker 1: that's people, don't they don't understand. They don't want you
- 2:04:45Speaker 1: on it, which you know, it's their lands whatever, But
- 2:04:47Speaker 1: I mean that's kind of my ratio is is nine
- 2:04:49Speaker 1: knows to one yes. So you'll go up, you'll have
- 2:04:51Speaker 1: a conversation with them. That's better than Spencer's white Tail
- 2:04:55Speaker 1: ratio wasn't like a hundred and fifty and he got
- 2:04:57Speaker 1: one or something. He got one a hundred and fifty letters.
- 2:05:03Speaker 1: He got like an A plus. He was like grading.
- 2:05:07Speaker 1: He got like an A plus, a couple of season
- 2:05:11Speaker 1: a D minus. Anyway, go on, So no, I'll go
- 2:05:14Speaker 1: up and try to, you know, more than anything, try
- 2:05:16Speaker 1: to educate the people about trapping, because I mean a
- 2:05:17Speaker 1: lot of people just don't know about it, you know.
- 2:05:19Speaker 1: And then, like I said, then they have the illusion
- 2:05:21Speaker 1: that I'm gonna go trap where you're gonna bring out
- 2:05:23Speaker 1: a giant bear trap with teeth, you know, and and
- 2:05:27Speaker 1: you know it's just not the case. So you know,
- 2:05:29Speaker 1: if that fails, I'll normally get out traps and I'll hear,
- 2:05:32Speaker 1: this is what I'm gonna use, and you know, nine
- 2:05:35Speaker 1: times out of ten, I'll stick my hand in him
- 2:05:36Speaker 1: and show, you know, I'm not losing fingers or breaking
- 2:05:39Speaker 1: bones or anything. And you know for me where I'm at,
- 2:05:42Speaker 1: because I do live in what I would consider a
- 2:05:43Speaker 1: fairly populated area. Kind of last resort, I'll go to
- 2:05:47Speaker 1: the dog proof traps, which if you not understand what
- 2:05:51Speaker 1: a dog proof is, it's basically a cylinder and so
- 2:05:55Speaker 1: like a coon of skunk apossum, they all have a
- 2:05:58Speaker 1: lot of dexterity in their paws. They kind of have
- 2:06:00Speaker 1: a hand, if you will. So with a dog proof trap,
- 2:06:02Speaker 1: if you can picture about a three inch tube that's
- 2:06:05Speaker 1: about an inch and a quarter in diameter and very
- 2:06:08Speaker 1: bottom of it as a lever on it that you
- 2:06:11Speaker 1: actually have to pull, as opposed to a foothold trap,
- 2:06:14Speaker 1: where you know, the critter just puts his paw in
- 2:06:16Speaker 1: it and then the jaws closed around. With these dog
- 2:06:18Speaker 1: proof traps, the opening is small enough that that ideally
- 2:06:23Speaker 1: a dog can't get his paw down in there, and
- 2:06:25Speaker 1: you have to actually have dextery to pull up on
- 2:06:27Speaker 1: that track. You can only catch things that could pick
- 2:06:29Speaker 1: a lot pretty much. So I will use that as
- 2:06:33Speaker 1: you know, kind of a last resort so to speak,
- 2:06:36Speaker 1: to get permission, you know, and say hey, I can
- 2:06:37Speaker 1: you know, with the right bait, I can trap around
- 2:06:40Speaker 1: all your cats and you know, your farm dogs and
- 2:06:42Speaker 1: everything like that, and sometimes that kind of seals the deal.
- 2:06:45Speaker 1: If you have a hunter, let's say you had a
- 2:06:47Speaker 1: how many you got like a hundred permissions? If you
- 2:06:50Speaker 1: let's say that hundred permissions, how many those are dog
- 2:06:53Speaker 1: proof only? I would say close to half. Huh, close
- 2:06:58Speaker 1: to half. I mean that's the only way I can
- 2:07:00Speaker 1: do it. And that's the reason I use so many
- 2:07:02Speaker 1: dog proofs in my trapping is because you know, I've
- 2:07:05Speaker 1: gotta do what I gotta do what I like. You
- 2:07:07Speaker 1: can't do kyote work on those places. Can't do kyote work,
- 2:07:10Speaker 1: can't set one and A have no two twenties. Have
- 2:07:12Speaker 1: you had any luck like getting permission where like a
- 2:07:18Speaker 1: hunting leases where they're like after white tails or turkeys
- 2:07:21Speaker 1: or waterfowl because those guys want you coming into there's
- 2:07:24Speaker 1: a few. Yeah, they want the predators gone. Um, you
- 2:07:28Speaker 1: know which they always have stipulations though, I don't want
- 2:07:31Speaker 1: you in here a week before season or you know,
- 2:07:33Speaker 1: a week after season, and they want to really make
- 2:07:35Speaker 1: you work for it, you know, which is at least
- 2:07:37Speaker 1: in Illinois. You know, we've got a shotgun firearm season
- 2:07:41Speaker 1: starting November. Every other weekend for a month and a half.
- 2:07:45Speaker 1: So it makes it really difficult to work around, you know,
- 2:07:48Speaker 1: so you've got to do a lot of planning and
- 2:07:50Speaker 1: and different things like that to be able to work
- 2:07:51Speaker 1: around and actually trap an area like that. Explain your
- 2:07:54Speaker 1: we talked about otters today, Explain how it works for you,
- 2:07:58Speaker 1: like in a regulatory sense when you talk about like
- 2:08:01Speaker 1: you talk about like getting my honors, so to get
- 2:08:04Speaker 1: my orders in Illinois, we got a season. I guess
- 2:08:06Speaker 1: it was eight nine years ago or so by now, Uh,
- 2:08:10Speaker 1: so I can go out in Illinois. I'm allowed five
- 2:08:13Speaker 1: orders for my license, so I can go out and
- 2:08:17Speaker 1: and target the order. Once I catch it, I make
- 2:08:20Speaker 1: a phone call to the d n R and they
- 2:08:22Speaker 1: send me a a site tag and then I tag
- 2:08:25Speaker 1: that order wants it as a site tag on it,
- 2:08:28Speaker 1: Then I'm good to sell it. And you every year
- 2:08:34Speaker 1: can get five. I can get every yeah, every year.
- 2:08:36Speaker 1: And what do you do with those five? I sell
- 2:08:38Speaker 1: them to taxidermy trade or fur trade. I sell a
- 2:08:41Speaker 1: couple every year to taxidermy, but the majority of them
- 2:08:44Speaker 1: goes to fur trade. Normally I can find somebody local
- 2:08:47Speaker 1: that wants I'm as a wall hanger that I could
- 2:08:49Speaker 1: sell them to, you know, because we're only dealing with five.
- 2:08:51Speaker 1: So it comes and goes back in the day. You know,
- 2:08:54Speaker 1: I was selling them back in the day again, you know,
- 2:08:58Speaker 1: there's more money and so on them at the fur
- 2:09:00Speaker 1: trade than it was selling them local. But what was
- 2:09:03Speaker 1: the highest and otter Pelt went for it that you
- 2:09:04Speaker 1: can remember in terms of your furbroom. I remember selling
- 2:09:08Speaker 1: a couple for fifty bucks, So I mean nothing crazy,
- 2:09:11Speaker 1: you know, which whenever you're looking at a fifty dollar
- 2:09:14Speaker 1: or you're looking at a huge critter, you know, you
- 2:09:15Speaker 1: feel like you should be getting more for him anyway,
- 2:09:17Speaker 1: you know. But so how is it that you wand
- 2:09:20Speaker 1: up deciding to do like all the instructional videos. Did
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: you do it as a way to like did you
- 2:09:25Speaker 1: think it would be a way to make money? No? No,
- 2:09:28Speaker 1: because there's there's no money in it. But there's no
- 2:09:31Speaker 1: money just making YouTube videos not for me, because YouTube
- 2:09:34Speaker 1: so restricted and you don't have and you don't have
- 2:09:36Speaker 1: you don't sell equipment or anything. No. No, so YouTube
- 2:09:40Speaker 1: so restricted on their stuff that you know, everybody hears
- 2:09:43Speaker 1: about monetization of videos, and my content is not monetization,
- 2:09:48Speaker 1: you know, the YouTube won't let you monetize your videos,
- 2:09:52Speaker 1: or YouTube won't monetize because of my content because they
- 2:09:55Speaker 1: feel that it's it's like an animal cruelty issue, and
- 2:09:58Speaker 1: there's a fine line you to play. You know, YouTube
- 2:10:01Speaker 1: is huge with blood. You know you can't show blood,
- 2:10:04Speaker 1: and you know there's a strike rule too, so you're
- 2:10:06Speaker 1: always kind of walking that fine line of you know,
- 2:10:09Speaker 1: even if this is demonetized per se, I've still gotta
- 2:10:12Speaker 1: not get a strike on my channel because then they
- 2:10:14Speaker 1: could just you could wake up one morning and it
- 2:10:16Speaker 1: could just be done. You know. But you've never lost
- 2:10:18Speaker 1: your channel, never lost my channel. I've had two strikes before.
- 2:10:21Speaker 1: And you're telling me that too, that YouTube's policy makes
- 2:10:24Speaker 1: it that you're afraid to like redo and make new
- 2:10:27Speaker 1: versions of your high performing videos. Correct. Yeah, yeah, so
- 2:10:31Speaker 1: a lot of my videos, which I guess to kind
- 2:10:33Speaker 1: of get back to your initial questions. So we're talking
- 2:10:36Speaker 1: back back in the day. Um, this was ten years ago.
- 2:10:39Speaker 1: I've been doing YouTube now for this is my tenth
- 2:10:41Speaker 1: here doing it, and uh, which kind of correlates right
- 2:10:45Speaker 1: with the middle of the last fur boom. And I've
- 2:10:48Speaker 1: been trapping for a few years, you know, and I've
- 2:10:50Speaker 1: been putting on my fur and you know, not to
- 2:10:52Speaker 1: pat myself on the back, but I mean I kind
- 2:10:53Speaker 1: of felt like I knew what I was doing. And
- 2:10:55Speaker 1: I remember, like what was Rick was saying. You go
- 2:10:57Speaker 1: up to the NAFA truck, you know, and you're sitting
- 2:10:59Speaker 1: there and it standing there, and you know, of course
- 2:11:02Speaker 1: during a fur boom, you've got a lot of new
- 2:11:04Speaker 1: guys coming in. You know that that aren't there because
- 2:11:06Speaker 1: they're just there for the money. And red fox are
- 2:11:10Speaker 1: pretty rare around my area, you know, not very common.
- 2:11:13Speaker 1: And at this time, you know, ten years ago, there
- 2:11:17Speaker 1: wasn't a lot of literature out there about trapping. You know,
- 2:11:20Speaker 1: you were fur fishing game, you were trappers, but there
- 2:11:22Speaker 1: was just a few magazines, you know, but for the
- 2:11:24Speaker 1: most part, there wasn't a lot of information out there.
- 2:11:27Speaker 1: It was kind of secretive. Really. I remember walking up
- 2:11:30Speaker 1: to the NAFFA truck and there was this guy and
- 2:11:33Speaker 1: he must have found a pocket or red fox, which
- 2:11:36Speaker 1: you know, like I said, around my are is pretty rare,
- 2:11:38Speaker 1: and he had him hanging there and he didn't have
- 2:11:40Speaker 1: an alfa back because it was the first year and
- 2:11:42Speaker 1: those things were just butchered. I mean, they you could
- 2:11:45Speaker 1: just tell the guy did not know what he was doing.
- 2:11:47Speaker 1: And I remember that I told myself. I was like, well,
- 2:11:51Speaker 1: I could do this. I could. I could put out
- 2:11:53Speaker 1: content you know that people could could view and put
- 2:11:56Speaker 1: up there their fur right, you know, because I feel
- 2:11:58Speaker 1: like you're gonna take the animally, might as well do
- 2:12:00Speaker 1: it justice and put it up right. And it was
- 2:12:02Speaker 1: actually that night I went home, made a YouTube channel.
- 2:12:04Speaker 1: And then that following season, Yeah, that following I was
- 2:12:09Speaker 1: the first thing you launched on it. I was hunting
- 2:12:11Speaker 1: with my coonhound because the season was still in the
- 2:12:14Speaker 1: season was still in for that. So that was the
- 2:12:16Speaker 1: first video I ever uploaded. Was was hunting with my coonhound.
- 2:12:20Speaker 1: And then that following year, uh, that following trapping season,
- 2:12:24Speaker 1: I started with the for handling videos, and I did
- 2:12:27Speaker 1: for handling videos on them just about all the all
- 2:12:29Speaker 1: the critters in my area from you know, the processes
- 2:12:33Speaker 1: catching them, skinning them, fleshing. I'm stretching them, the whole deal.
- 2:12:35Speaker 1: So and and talk about why you can't why you
- 2:12:38Speaker 1: don't want to redo them. So I've tried to redo
- 2:12:40Speaker 1: them a couple of times, and every time I upload them,
- 2:12:43Speaker 1: they very quickly get demonetized, which sucks because you know,
- 2:12:46Speaker 1: they find it because it's new, Yeah, because YouTube finds it.
- 2:12:50Speaker 1: Because so all my old videos are demonetized anyway, but
- 2:12:53Speaker 1: they're still up there, so it's not like they can
- 2:12:55Speaker 1: strike me on them. You know, they've already demonetized them,
- 2:12:58Speaker 1: but new videos, so they don't go strike you about
- 2:13:01Speaker 1: ten year old stuff. No. I woke up one morning
- 2:13:04Speaker 1: a few years ago and I had like seventy five
- 2:13:06Speaker 1: videos that were all demonetized, and I had a strike overnight. Yeah,
- 2:13:11Speaker 1: it's just all yellow on my on my page. They
- 2:13:13Speaker 1: hit me hard. I couldn't I couldn't upload for fifteen,
- 2:13:17Speaker 1: fifteen or twenty days. I can't remember what it was.
- 2:13:19Speaker 1: They like banned me from it. So yeah, no, I've
- 2:13:23Speaker 1: tried in the past because I said, obviously I didn't
- 2:13:25Speaker 1: know what the hell I was doing back then. You know,
- 2:13:26Speaker 1: I had a borrowed camera that I set up in
- 2:13:29Speaker 1: my shop, you know. And do you ever think about
- 2:13:31Speaker 1: doing what's that called? Were you like a lot of
- 2:13:34Speaker 1: podcasts are doing it Patreon? Right, have you ever thought
- 2:13:38Speaker 1: about trying to do a fur handling thing? Um, a
- 2:13:41Speaker 1: fur handling series like Patreon where people just donate like
- 2:13:45Speaker 1: people just come in and view and donate a little money.
- 2:13:48Speaker 1: So I actually do have a Patreon I and I've
- 2:13:52Speaker 1: tried it. The problem is, especially nowadays, YouTube is where
- 2:13:56Speaker 1: the traffic is I understand. So you the video streaming
- 2:14:01Speaker 1: service on the plan. So you've got to have that
- 2:14:04Speaker 1: audience in that draw to be able to So if
- 2:14:07Speaker 1: you do on yourself, you're just never gonna people are
- 2:14:09Speaker 1: gonna find it. You're gonna go find something find and
- 2:14:11Speaker 1: very few people I mean especially now. You know, back
- 2:14:14Speaker 1: then I was one of the first people. I was
- 2:14:17Speaker 1: putting out trapping content, you know, and and that kind
- 2:14:20Speaker 1: of content. Now everybody and the Brothers got a channel.
- 2:14:23Speaker 1: You know, they're putting out the content. So people aren't
- 2:14:26Speaker 1: gonna go pay to watch something that you know, they
- 2:14:29Speaker 1: can just go right down the search bar and go
- 2:14:32Speaker 1: search too. So it's tough. You know, you're in a
- 2:14:34Speaker 1: real pickle. Pickle, Yeah, but it's been fun. Can they
- 2:14:38Speaker 1: just still support though? Anyway? Yeah, I've got to pay
- 2:14:43Speaker 1: be set up for it. But I mean it doesn't
- 2:14:47Speaker 1: have a lot of traffic that goes towards it. Like
- 2:14:49Speaker 1: I said, huh, some people it just searched con Creek
- 2:14:54Speaker 1: Outdoors on on Patreon, but you won't find it through YouTube. No, No,
- 2:14:59Speaker 1: it's and a link underneath all my videos. So if
- 2:15:02Speaker 1: people are out there to listen to this that like
- 2:15:04Speaker 1: Stue Miller's Coon Creek Outdoors for handling and trapping videos,
- 2:15:07Speaker 1: they would need to go to Patreon and then find
- 2:15:09Speaker 1: you there and give you a little jingle. Yeah, that's
- 2:15:12Speaker 1: one way to support, you know. I feel like that's
- 2:15:14Speaker 1: why I'm gonna give you all that beaver cast, because
- 2:15:15Speaker 1: I haven't been in that page to pay you. There's
- 2:15:19Speaker 1: not there's not a lot there, and I don't honestly,
- 2:15:20Speaker 1: I don't post a lot of videos there simply just
- 2:15:23Speaker 1: because the traffic there is not justifiable to all the
- 2:15:27Speaker 1: work that goes into it. But no, it's like I said, I,
- 2:15:30Speaker 1: you don't do it for the money, you know, just
- 2:15:32Speaker 1: like Rick probably knows. You know, you don't trap for
- 2:15:35Speaker 1: the money either, not right now. I mean you can
- 2:15:37Speaker 1: trap for the heritage and the sport of it, you know.
- 2:15:40Speaker 1: Yeah that romantic Yeah, it just drips the roman you know,
- 2:15:45Speaker 1: you're all about traditional practices and trapping is one of
- 2:15:48Speaker 1: the oldest. You know, it drips the romance. Yeah, that's
- 2:15:52Speaker 1: all I wanted to read about when I was a
- 2:15:53Speaker 1: kid man, because kids want to go live out in
- 2:15:55Speaker 1: the woods and make the living off the woods. And
- 2:15:57Speaker 1: I didn't know about writing. I thought you had to
- 2:15:59Speaker 1: do it through trapping. What was I am for a surprise?
- 2:16:07Speaker 1: Do you ever do uh any uh like road trip
- 2:16:10Speaker 1: trapping vacations for stuff you don't get to trap for
- 2:16:13Speaker 1: this year near home? This was my first year. Yeah,
- 2:16:16Speaker 1: this year. Yeah, the one to me, Stu came out
- 2:16:19Speaker 1: and me and Rick and Stu uh got abused out
- 2:16:23Speaker 1: in the that was that was a hard, hard trip.
- 2:16:27Speaker 1: But no, that's a tough road to home. Podcast is
- 2:16:30Speaker 1: not from that trip, is no, No, definitely not. No.
- 2:16:34Speaker 1: That is one thing that YouTube has given me. It's
- 2:16:36Speaker 1: it's let me meet people, go places and do things
- 2:16:38Speaker 1: that I would never been able to do. You know,
- 2:16:40Speaker 1: So plug your plug your hunting fishing channel. So if
- 2:16:45Speaker 1: you want to check me out, you can search Coon
- 2:16:47Speaker 1: Creek Outdoors. That's where the good stuff is. That's where
- 2:16:50Speaker 1: the gold is. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's where I put
- 2:16:52Speaker 1: up all my content. When I say the gold, that's
- 2:16:55Speaker 1: where like the stuff that like, Um, I shouldn't say
- 2:16:57Speaker 1: that cause I want to hack on yourself saying that's
- 2:16:59Speaker 1: where like like you excel um at like a skill
- 2:17:04Speaker 1: set that's not widely known, and like the fur handling
- 2:17:08Speaker 1: trapping information like to me is like there's I don't
- 2:17:13Speaker 1: think there's anyone When I want to know something, I'm
- 2:17:16Speaker 1: gonna go look at that. I appreciate that, you know
- 2:17:18Speaker 1: that means a lot. But yeah, I pride myself on
- 2:17:21Speaker 1: on the put up and the fur handling side of it.
- 2:17:23Speaker 1: So I mean, you know, there's nothing special about what
- 2:17:26Speaker 1: I do, you know. I mean I'm not the best
- 2:17:28Speaker 1: trapper and I'm not the best of putting up stuff.
- 2:17:30Speaker 1: But you made a boat from scratch. I made a
- 2:17:32Speaker 1: boat from Yeah. I came across the video at one
- 2:17:33Speaker 1: time looking up just like looking up boat stuff on YouTube. Yeah,
- 2:17:38Speaker 1: well welded a boat because he likes to fish, catfish.
- 2:17:41Speaker 1: He likes fish crappy, so he weld it up a
- 2:17:44Speaker 1: catfish crappy combo boat, Sweet che On. That's on my
- 2:17:49Speaker 1: main chapel, Conker Outdoors. Okay, tell peopleout the other channel though,
- 2:17:52Speaker 1: So I've got another channel branched off of my main
- 2:17:56Speaker 1: channel simply because the audience just wasn't there. But I've
- 2:17:58Speaker 1: got a fish and channel that I do a lot
- 2:18:00Speaker 1: of content on in summer. It's a couple of years
- 2:18:02Speaker 1: old now called Total Angling Experience. And that's that's where
- 2:18:05Speaker 1: I'm slowly trying to put all my fishing content and
- 2:18:08Speaker 1: you know, educational side electronics and different things like that.
- 2:18:11Speaker 1: Because you like, you like cats, like cats, and like
- 2:18:13Speaker 1: crop That's that's what I fished for home. So cats
- 2:18:16Speaker 1: and croppies speaking, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, yeah,
- 2:18:20Speaker 1: that's I don't bass fish, so catfish and croppies where
- 2:18:24Speaker 1: I'm at. I think that everyone out there needs to
- 2:18:26Speaker 1: send stum Miller a few pounds of beaver castor or
- 2:18:30Speaker 1: go to the Patreon deal and throw a little jingle
- 2:18:33Speaker 1: this guy's way. Well, you're you're your fishing stuff is
- 2:18:37Speaker 1: probably not demonetized, right, Fishing stuff is not demonetized. That's
- 2:18:40Speaker 1: that's another reason, you know, I wanted to have kind
- 2:18:43Speaker 1: of a backup, if you will, you know, just because
- 2:18:46Speaker 1: all the problems with YouTube, you know, I mean, there's
- 2:18:48Speaker 1: there's a huge deal right now with just kind of
- 2:18:51Speaker 1: all the outdoor community with YouTube, you know, kind of
- 2:18:54Speaker 1: demonetizing and picking what they want to see. Man a
- 2:18:57Speaker 1: conversation we have all the time is how can you
- 2:19:01Speaker 1: come in and, ah, how could you come in and
- 2:19:06Speaker 1: create an alternative for outdoor How could you come in
- 2:19:11Speaker 1: and create an an alternative for outdoor pursuits that would
- 2:19:17Speaker 1: get that you would build up so big that it
- 2:19:19Speaker 1: would actually have traffic, would be a reliable place to
- 2:19:22Speaker 1: go look. But it's like YouTube is so that the
- 2:19:26Speaker 1: most it's where all the traffic is, you know. I mean,
- 2:19:29Speaker 1: you want to know something, you search it on you
- 2:19:31Speaker 1: think I don't know what it is. Every minute, four
- 2:19:33Speaker 1: hundred hours of stuff gets up volded to YouTube or
- 2:19:36Speaker 1: something like that. YouTube is a Google company, aren't they?
- 2:19:42Speaker 1: Man like if somehow? But it's it's almost like it's
- 2:19:45Speaker 1: like the Q tip thing. It's just YouTube's not even
- 2:19:48Speaker 1: it's just where do you find information? It's not it's
- 2:19:51Speaker 1: a It's bigger than just seeing I feel like socially now, No,
- 2:19:55Speaker 1: we launched, we put every day every day our company.
- 2:20:00Speaker 1: We put material on YouTube every day, like I'm not
- 2:20:03Speaker 1: hacking on it. But what I don't like is I
- 2:20:06Speaker 1: don't like the hostility to the hostility to the disciplines.
- 2:20:10Speaker 1: It's like uncertainty in that environment, right, you never know
- 2:20:13Speaker 1: what's going to happen like putting out that kind of content. Yeah, yeah,
- 2:20:17Speaker 1: they can take it. They can take it away from
- 2:20:19Speaker 1: you tomorrow if they really want, without any questions. Because
- 2:20:23Speaker 1: their platforms, so you know, as much as you want
- 2:20:25Speaker 1: to be on their love it or right it, you
- 2:20:27Speaker 1: still got played by their rules. I do want to
- 2:20:30Speaker 1: say just is a very humble person. But I started
- 2:20:34Speaker 1: trapping right around the time student and Just. I love
- 2:20:37Speaker 1: old trapping books, but there's a lot of times I
- 2:20:40Speaker 1: read that where I'm like, yeah, someone's gonna have to
- 2:20:42Speaker 1: show me how to actually do that, like ses or
- 2:20:46Speaker 1: the black and white photos that are so horrible on
- 2:20:49Speaker 1: my I was gonna ask to like how, Like where'd
- 2:20:52Speaker 1: you learn it all? How did you get good at it?
- 2:20:54Speaker 1: I was self taught for the most part everything, you know,
- 2:20:57Speaker 1: because like I said, I did learn a lot um
- 2:21:00Speaker 1: for fishing game. I've had a subscription to them forever,
- 2:21:03Speaker 1: and there was a lot of educational stuff then a
- 2:21:05Speaker 1: lot was just trial and error. I thought Trapper and
- 2:21:08Speaker 1: Predator Collar blew fur fishing game away on instructional that
- 2:21:11Speaker 1: you think. So when I was a kid, fur fishing
- 2:21:15Speaker 1: game was more fun to read, but instructional I mean
- 2:21:18Speaker 1: a lot of it. And like like Rick said, you know,
- 2:21:21Speaker 1: you can read and you can watch somebody do it,
- 2:21:23Speaker 1: but a lot of us just getting out there and
- 2:21:25Speaker 1: doing it trial and error. You know, there's a lot
- 2:21:27Speaker 1: of real rough DVDs out there that will get you by.
- 2:21:31Speaker 1: I appreciate your channel, though. You kind of one thing
- 2:21:34Speaker 1: and we talked about what we were trapping, was you
- 2:21:37Speaker 1: you cut through the bullshit pretty well because I went
- 2:21:40Speaker 1: down rabbit holes on like Trapperman Forum and stuff where
- 2:21:42Speaker 1: I'm like, oh my god, I gotta I gotta wear
- 2:21:44Speaker 1: it has matt suit. So when you're making a set,
- 2:21:49Speaker 1: you need to squint your left and your left hand
- 2:21:51Speaker 1: and I you know, I guess the work. I got
- 2:21:54Speaker 1: so wound up on that. And your channel is really good.
- 2:21:57Speaker 1: It cuts through it and it's so yeah, everyone, don't
- 2:22:00Speaker 1: you go subscribe to Con't Creek Outdoors. And I appreciate that. No,
- 2:22:04Speaker 1: that means a lot. And like I said, you know,
- 2:22:05Speaker 1: a lot of guys are just out there to make content.
- 2:22:07Speaker 1: But like so, I mean, it doesn't take a lot
- 2:22:10Speaker 1: of people overthink trapping. They really do. Like you said,
- 2:22:13Speaker 1: they go down a rabbit hole and they got to
- 2:22:15Speaker 1: be this and nine inches sit back and four inches
- 2:22:17Speaker 1: over and this, that and the other. You know, there's
- 2:22:21Speaker 1: whenever you really break it down, there's there's a few
- 2:22:25Speaker 1: simple things that you gotta do to be able to
- 2:22:27Speaker 1: be successful at it. And once you have those few
- 2:22:30Speaker 1: fundamentals down, you're golden. I want to just touch on
- 2:22:34Speaker 1: one of the things you taught me that I walked
- 2:22:36Speaker 1: away from our little trip with that I ignored very much,
- 2:22:41Speaker 1: and I think it's that romantic little side of it.
- 2:22:43Speaker 1: You were like set on sign and every time we
- 2:22:45Speaker 1: came to a picture perfect area, you were like, well,
- 2:22:48Speaker 1: is there a sign here? Because if there's not, we're
- 2:22:50Speaker 1: not putting trap. And it hit me such a reality checks, like, man,
- 2:22:55Speaker 1: I put traps in areas like this is what the
- 2:22:59Speaker 1: manual tone to do. This is what that little book
- 2:23:01Speaker 1: told me, and this is perfect. I don't see any
- 2:23:03Speaker 1: sign here, but I'm gonna put a set here. And
- 2:23:06Speaker 1: these animals are so dumb they don't know they're supposed
- 2:23:09Speaker 1: to be. Uh So, just something like that, Yeah, I
- 2:23:13Speaker 1: took away from that stew and yeah, so no, you
- 2:23:16Speaker 1: gotta you gotta be setting where the critters are, you know,
- 2:23:18Speaker 1: and a lot of people I'm trying to catch kyotes
- 2:23:21Speaker 1: and I can't catch because everybody gets a heart on
- 2:23:22Speaker 1: for kyotes, right, Like that's like kind of the pinnacle predator.
- 2:23:26Speaker 1: You know, well, if you're gonna catch a kyle, you
- 2:23:28Speaker 1: gotta be where a kyo it is. You know, you
- 2:23:30Speaker 1: gotta be where he's gonna travel. And you know, it's
- 2:23:33Speaker 1: the same thing with a lot of things we're doing
- 2:23:35Speaker 1: in the outdoors, like fishing. You gotta be fishing where
- 2:23:38Speaker 1: the fish are. And yeah, I mean it's easy set
- 2:23:41Speaker 1: you know, you can say that and people like, of course,
- 2:23:43Speaker 1: but you gotta put your time in scouting, and sure
- 2:23:48Speaker 1: there's a lot of you're not setting where you want
- 2:23:50Speaker 1: them to be. It's do you do social media too? Yeah,
- 2:23:56Speaker 1: a little bit. I got Facebook, Instagram, So tell people
- 2:23:58Speaker 1: where that's at. Conkerg out Wars. It's all you need
- 2:24:01Speaker 1: to remember. Coon Creek Outdoors as simple as it gets.
- 2:24:04Speaker 1: Let's say you fella has a Kyle, they're out deer hunting.
- 2:24:07Speaker 1: Here comes a beautiful cow run along. They're like, man,
- 2:24:10Speaker 1: I'm gonna hang that sucker on my wall. What do
- 2:24:13Speaker 1: you do? Go to Coon Creek Outdoors you can find
- 2:24:16Speaker 1: videos of how to set the traps, skin and flesh,
- 2:24:19Speaker 1: and I've got videos on tanning for home use and
- 2:24:22Speaker 1: garment use everything else. So remember send him a pound
- 2:24:25Speaker 1: of castor or go to what's it called not Pantheon patrion,
- 2:24:33Speaker 1: don't go there? Who stude? Thanks for coming out, man,
- 2:24:39Speaker 1: No appreciate. It's been a blast. Man, it's been awesome.
- 2:24:42Speaker 1: Speaking of wall hanger coyotes. You know what you're doing next.
- 2:24:46Speaker 1: Now we're doing stuff going over to my garage, all right, man,
- 2:24:50Speaker 1: Thank you very much,