Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 066: Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Steven Rinella, Pat Durkin, Garret Smith (a.k.a. Dirt Myth) and Janis Putelis join Doug Duren at his family farm.

Transcript

Ep. 066: Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Steven Rinella, Pat Durkin, Garret Smith (a.k.a. Dirt Myth) and Janis Putelis join Doug Duren at his family farm. · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: This is a me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
0:13
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening Hunt don't
0:16
Speaker 1: meet to eat podcast. You can't predict anything. So Johnny,
0:24
Speaker 1: there you are. The clock's ticking. You are. You just
0:29
Speaker 1: can't get it done. You got in the evening, hunt morning,
0:37
Speaker 1: hunt left. No. I can hunt tomorrow evening, possibly another evening.
0:45
Speaker 1: But you just can't get it done. If we don't
0:47
Speaker 1: kill one tonight, you probably won't see me tomorrow. I
0:49
Speaker 1: don't care what my responsibilities are. I'll just be in
0:52
Speaker 1: the woods. You just can't get one. Meanwhile, I've gotten
0:57
Speaker 1: to turkeys. Mm hmm, dogs gotten to turkeys. Is that really?
1:02
Speaker 1: How are you gonna paint this? I feel like you're
1:04
Speaker 1: being a little a little harsh on me. Well, I've
1:06
Speaker 1: gotten I haven't gotten into the details yet. I'll come
1:11
Speaker 1: to your rescue. Yeah, I was trying to make for
1:14
Speaker 1: the for the listener. I was trying to paint like
1:16
Speaker 1: a dramatic, you know what I mean, like drama coming
1:20
Speaker 1: down to it. Yeah, like I was trying to make
1:22
Speaker 1: like a dramatic. So people at home, right we're like,
1:27
Speaker 1: oh my god, Johnnie, and they get all excited and worried,
1:32
Speaker 1: and they have an enhanced listening experience. Well, let me
1:37
Speaker 1: ask you this, Let me ask you this, has the
1:40
Speaker 1: up thought entered your mind? Are you starting to grapple
1:46
Speaker 1: with the idea that you may not fill your turkey
1:49
Speaker 1: tag your Wisconsin Zone one season see turkey tag? Not
1:58
Speaker 1: at all, because this morning at daylight, we were exactly
2:02
Speaker 1: halfway through our hunt. We had four days this morning
2:07
Speaker 1: when I started, I had two left, a lot of
2:10
Speaker 1: hunt left to do. So I'm not too worried. Tomorrow
2:15
Speaker 1: at about this time after the morning hunt, if I'm
2:17
Speaker 1: still gobbler less, then I'll be sweating it a little bit. Okay.
2:21
Speaker 1: Now the second thing is have you um are you
2:25
Speaker 1: have you entered into Jake time yet? Yes? Now? Uh?
2:31
Speaker 1: Jake is a is a one year old male turkey. Yeah,
2:37
Speaker 1: maybe not even quite Jake when you like, when you're
2:39
Speaker 1: hunting the spring season, right, yeah, you might be catching
2:42
Speaker 1: him at eleven months of age. Okay, depending on how
2:46
Speaker 1: the season falls like. Generally, spring turkey seasons are comprised
2:50
Speaker 1: portions of April portions of May. Pretty if you're gonna
2:54
Speaker 1: average out spring turkey hunting, I think you'd probably wind
2:57
Speaker 1: up like you like. Most turkeys in the country are
3:01
Speaker 1: killed between like April one and May ten or something. Yeah,
3:06
Speaker 1: mid May um. So the turkey a male that's born
3:14
Speaker 1: one spring, once his egg hatches and he is in
3:19
Speaker 1: his first spring. He's got a little teeny teeny beard,
3:26
Speaker 1: which is the it's a feather the girls out of
3:29
Speaker 1: their chest. Now a big rope drag or like the
3:32
Speaker 1: one I got. We'll have a beard that's twelve inches long.
3:39
Speaker 1: But a jacob have a little dinker beard that's anywhere
3:42
Speaker 1: from three quarters of an inch too, about five inches about. Yeah,
3:50
Speaker 1: Doug shot like a big stomper. The other thing is
3:56
Speaker 1: that Jake so so years ago I was in the
3:59
Speaker 1: Philip Means and I went to see cock fights, and
4:04
Speaker 1: you know the chicken fights with his spur right when
4:07
Speaker 1: you hear of a cockfight. What they do is they
4:09
Speaker 1: enhance the spurs with these big long sickles, these big
4:12
Speaker 1: long stainless steel razor sharp sickles that they strap onto
4:17
Speaker 1: his feet so he can spur as opponent and kill him. Uh,
4:22
Speaker 1: that's a spur. So turkeys have spurs, but Jake's just
4:26
Speaker 1: have a little nubbins, a little nub that looks like
4:29
Speaker 1: the tip of your pinky. And then did you're a
4:33
Speaker 1: big giant rope dragger like the one I got, but
4:36
Speaker 1: not Jake's don't have any right, No, they always have
4:40
Speaker 1: a mark. They have a little pebble. The one I got,
4:44
Speaker 1: the Jake I got today, um had a little didn't
4:49
Speaker 1: had a little nubbins. Not as big as dougs of
4:52
Speaker 1: the nubb but not as big as dougs nubbing dogs.
4:55
Speaker 1: Snubbing was like a half inch of it. Yeah, I'm
4:58
Speaker 1: talking as turkey nubbing h on a platter. So Doug
5:09
Speaker 1: Snubbings was remarkably bigger than the nubbins on my Jake.
5:15
Speaker 1: But now I got two turkeys. Um, I'd like to
5:19
Speaker 1: say twice as man as Johnny, But I don't know
5:21
Speaker 1: when someone has zero, I don't know how to do
5:25
Speaker 1: like mathematics to talk about how many more I have
5:30
Speaker 1: than him. But my big rope dragger had spurs that
5:36
Speaker 1: you could that once a turkey is like three years old,
5:42
Speaker 1: that spur will be it'll get a hook to it,
5:47
Speaker 1: It gets very sharp on the end, and it'll get
5:50
Speaker 1: where you could hang that son of a bitch in
5:52
Speaker 1: turkey up from allege off his hooks. But there's great
5:57
Speaker 1: variants in that, yes, from I think, well, probably a
6:02
Speaker 1: lot of factors, but what they're eating, their diet, certainly
6:06
Speaker 1: you know how much you're growing. And then they're walking
6:10
Speaker 1: walking on in the in the mountains where it's rocky um,
6:14
Speaker 1: like those Mountain Marrias were hunting, they rarely get one
6:17
Speaker 1: that has those nice, big curved because he's scraping them off.
6:22
Speaker 1: Or you killed turks that have the spurs busted, which
6:26
Speaker 1: I've killed. I killed broken, busted spurred turks. But in
6:31
Speaker 1: this fertile farm country, deep rich loamy soil, they they
6:38
Speaker 1: have pristine spurs or as Yanni calls them, hooks um
6:44
Speaker 1: years ago for the misses, I took a hack saw
6:50
Speaker 1: and hacksawed off some I don't remember where I killed
6:54
Speaker 1: this turkey. Hacksawed off the spurs and they were black
7:00
Speaker 1: like like like rhino ivory, rhino every black what I
7:05
Speaker 1: imagine rhino ivory to look like, it's what these look like, black,
7:10
Speaker 1: beautiful like black pearls. Okay, hack saw them off and
7:15
Speaker 1: took him to a jeweler, in fact, the same guy
7:17
Speaker 1: that I bought her wedding ring that you know the
7:20
Speaker 1: I guess you called the wedding rings that I bought
7:22
Speaker 1: her wedding ring from. Took him to him and had
7:25
Speaker 1: him take those little pieces that they set gemstones in
7:28
Speaker 1: for ear rings and had turkey spur earrings made, and
7:32
Speaker 1: she wears them, and uh, A lot of people have
7:36
Speaker 1: no idea what you're looking at. They think it's teeth
7:39
Speaker 1: or something like that. But it's those turkey spirits, beautiful earrings.
7:42
Speaker 1: How big were the for those earrings? Big fatties, big
7:48
Speaker 1: mam so like an inch plus spur is a big
7:51
Speaker 1: as spur and they get sharp, like if you walk up.
7:55
Speaker 1: The spurs can be so sharp if you walk up,
7:57
Speaker 1: like when you first hit a turkey in the head
8:00
Speaker 1: um his life he's dead, like his life force has
8:05
Speaker 1: left him. But if you, you know, really clawed him
8:09
Speaker 1: in the head of the shotgun. But they do a
8:11
Speaker 1: lot of jumping around, um and a lot of people
8:17
Speaker 1: get injured from those spurs by running up to grab
8:19
Speaker 1: that turkey because I want to grab it by the
8:22
Speaker 1: foot and catch that spur. It'll hook you. Is that
8:24
Speaker 1: a badge of honor and turkey hunters? No, I think
8:27
Speaker 1: that's a badge of stupid turkey hunters, first stand on
8:33
Speaker 1: its neck for a while, is the better thing to do? Yeah,
8:36
Speaker 1: one time my mother's hunting bears. My brother Danny, and
8:39
Speaker 1: we beats our boat and went up and he shot
8:41
Speaker 1: a bear and I was worried about the bullket beach
8:44
Speaker 1: by the tide, and I ran in after the bear,
8:46
Speaker 1: and I thought that I'd come out and he'd be like, man,
8:48
Speaker 1: that was badass. The way he ran in after that bear,
8:50
Speaker 1: and he goes that was foolish. So yeah, I think
8:54
Speaker 1: it's a badge of foolishes. But all this talk is
8:56
Speaker 1: just trying to clarify to Jake's now also a Jake
9:00
Speaker 1: is um, there's two more important things to consider about
9:03
Speaker 1: what makes it Jake and Jake. Jake isn't that big.
9:06
Speaker 1: So what what you waited? You weigh your big turbot Jake?
9:10
Speaker 1: What he weigh out at? Uh, just under fifteen and
9:13
Speaker 1: a half pounds. So the Jake I killed this morning
9:15
Speaker 1: is smaller than that Jake him yet shorter beard like
9:19
Speaker 1: shorter Noubbins. Little atrophy not atrophy doesn't have never grown.
9:25
Speaker 1: It's not that they shrank. Atrophy would make you think
9:27
Speaker 1: his spurs shrank, undeveloped spurs and not a hefty bird.
9:33
Speaker 1: Now the rope drag, I killed pounds four ounces? Why
9:39
Speaker 1: are you shaking your head? I'm not just like a
9:41
Speaker 1: jealous shake it well a little bit, I guess. Yeah. So,
9:44
Speaker 1: although I think I got you on total poundage. Yes,
9:49
Speaker 1: so there is a big size difference. Now here's the
9:52
Speaker 1: important part, and this is what Yan He's gonna speak to.
9:54
Speaker 1: Here's the important part. Jake's are um gullible, so Jake's
10:01
Speaker 1: will gang up with other Jake's and hens don't want
10:04
Speaker 1: to have sex with him, so they're just like they're like, uh,
10:09
Speaker 1: they run around little groups to Jake's three Jake's nine.
10:13
Speaker 1: Jake's run around little groups just dying for like attention
10:17
Speaker 1: from other turkeys. If they go to a big gobbler,
10:21
Speaker 1: like a big rope dragon, he's gonna kick their ass.
10:23
Speaker 1: Hens won't do it with him, and they're just around
10:26
Speaker 1: trying to like fit into the whole scene. And there
10:30
Speaker 1: they come to calls like pretty aggressively. So for all
10:35
Speaker 1: of these reasons um size goal ability, some people will
10:41
Speaker 1: not shoot Jake's. I do not have this problem, but
10:49
Speaker 1: Yanni passed up Jake's and now it's fixing to shoot
10:55
Speaker 1: at Jake, And it goes against one to Yanni's beliefs,
11:02
Speaker 1: which is, don't pass up on the first day what
11:06
Speaker 1: you'd be happy to have on the last day. So
11:11
Speaker 1: now I was thinking about that, because I do say that,
11:15
Speaker 1: but I was also thinking about that. I'm like, okay
11:19
Speaker 1: with going home empty handed. You know what I mean.
11:24
Speaker 1: You don't want to have a little turkey starfry or
11:28
Speaker 1: a little turkey Schnitzel or a little turkey supper. Turkey
11:34
Speaker 1: s got two rope draggers already packaged and wrapped up,
11:38
Speaker 1: and he's been on another states. Yeah, so feeling a
11:44
Speaker 1: little cocky that, but yeah, I'm okay with going home
11:47
Speaker 1: empty handed. So I'm weighing, you know, the experience. I
11:52
Speaker 1: kind of want the show and I want to, you know,
11:55
Speaker 1: interact with that old gobbler and and and and now
11:59
Speaker 1: I've had that, you know, I mean twice with Dog
12:02
Speaker 1: and we've had a couple other sessions, you know, so
12:04
Speaker 1: I've sort of like I'm satiating myself with that, with
12:08
Speaker 1: the experience part of it. And now I'm like, all right, yeah,
12:12
Speaker 1: I get it, but like I shoot Jake's But even
12:15
Speaker 1: though I shoot Jake's. I still in my life have
12:17
Speaker 1: shot more non Jake's and Jake's. Yeah, for sure, you know,
12:22
Speaker 1: because I'm like, I don't know the other day that
12:24
Speaker 1: I haven't even seen that many Jake's. Yeah, Like I'll
12:28
Speaker 1: go out now. This morning I went out and purposefully
12:34
Speaker 1: targeted a big rope dragger. Okay, like I was playing
12:39
Speaker 1: on the rope dragger. I was trying to get him.
12:43
Speaker 1: So it's not like I like put together playing to
12:46
Speaker 1: try to go get a Jake. But later in the morning,
12:48
Speaker 1: I like went out thinking, I'm gonna go find that
12:50
Speaker 1: those Jake's and call him in and get one. So
12:53
Speaker 1: it's not like you deprive yourself of the experience of
12:56
Speaker 1: of of matching wits with a slile Tom who's not
13:00
Speaker 1: actually that old because a two year old turkey is
13:03
Speaker 1: already an old man, a four year old turkey is dead,
13:09
Speaker 1: a three year old turkey is very old. M h.
13:14
Speaker 1: Now this this varies a lot, but I got a
13:15
Speaker 1: turkey bill just this one's telling me seventy of the
13:20
Speaker 1: eggs that get hatched, they get sorry. Of the eggs
13:26
Speaker 1: that get laid get destroyed. Now, now the female will
13:29
Speaker 1: have multiple clutches, so like when she loses a clutch
13:33
Speaker 1: of eggs. This is true with many birds pieces. But
13:35
Speaker 1: if she loses the clutch eggs, she'll go having you know,
13:37
Speaker 1: a second clutch, So she gets a couple of chances.
13:39
Speaker 1: But seventy five about like you know, just the generay
13:43
Speaker 1: to think about this, seventy five percent of the eggs
13:45
Speaker 1: that hit the ground will never hatch. Seventy five percent
13:49
Speaker 1: of the birds that hatch will not see their first
13:53
Speaker 1: year of age seventy five About seventy five percent of
13:58
Speaker 1: the turkeys of this about of Jake's will not become
14:04
Speaker 1: rope draggers because attrition, MHM death. Everything wants to kill turkeys,
14:14
Speaker 1: except Yanni. Everything from the minute they hit the ground.
14:23
Speaker 1: That's why they get paranoid. It's like the minute they
14:26
Speaker 1: hit the ground, just like everybody wants to kill him.
14:29
Speaker 1: I gotta say a clarify something on the Jake's if somebody, okay,
14:34
Speaker 1: can I can I preface this with that that this
14:36
Speaker 1: is coming from the world's worst wildlife observer, the world's
14:39
Speaker 1: the world's worst wildlife observer. Dirt myth will now well,
14:45
Speaker 1: now it's not going to weigh in on Turkey's Jake's psychology. Well,
14:50
Speaker 1: just to clear five, you made it I feel like
14:53
Speaker 1: you made it seem like the Jake's were a guaranteed success,
14:58
Speaker 1: and yesterday we saw I don't feel that way. I
15:01
Speaker 1: guess I shouldn't say we spooked. That's like saying is
15:04
Speaker 1: yesterday we saw a thirteen, right, Yeah, but that also
15:08
Speaker 1: is like that's the thing about Jake's, Like we spooked
15:12
Speaker 1: a bunch of groups of Jake's yesterday because they because
15:16
Speaker 1: they're not shy and they're standing out in the middle
15:19
Speaker 1: of fields in the middle of the day. So it's
15:21
Speaker 1: very hard to walk through agricultural across the agricultural landscape
15:26
Speaker 1: because they're not doing like a little sneaky little rope
15:29
Speaker 1: drag or activities like hiding out in little wood lots,
15:32
Speaker 1: and you know, they're just like out running around willy
15:35
Speaker 1: Nili in the middle of the fields, so they kind
15:37
Speaker 1: of like run into you as much as you run
15:38
Speaker 1: into them. And if you go to call, like you're
15:43
Speaker 1: out trying to locate turkeys, it's a risky maneuver maneuver,
15:45
Speaker 1: but you can locate it by going like a crow
15:49
Speaker 1: and shot goblin where they just respond to a loud
15:52
Speaker 1: noise by goblin, or you can go around and like
15:55
Speaker 1: in and go out and make hand calls. Okay, So
16:00
Speaker 1: the think it is, if it's a big old a
16:02
Speaker 1: big old boss Tom and he hears the hand, he's
16:06
Speaker 1: gonna he's gonna gobble. But then because he's an old
16:10
Speaker 1: sly old dog, he's not gonna come pouring in like
16:14
Speaker 1: you're gonna romance him and play this game. Right, But
16:17
Speaker 1: if you go and you're just trying to locate it
16:19
Speaker 1: time and you make a noise that got the damn,
16:22
Speaker 1: Jake's might over be like on a full tilt towards you,
16:25
Speaker 1: you know, so you do bump Jake. So yeah, it's
16:29
Speaker 1: like they're not it's not. Yeah, you can just go
16:32
Speaker 1: out and necessarily kill him because things happen. Yeah, And
16:35
Speaker 1: that's what I sing is if I were to I
16:37
Speaker 1: haven't turkey hunted yet in my life, but if I
16:40
Speaker 1: were and I saw Jake and I shot it harvest
16:43
Speaker 1: it successfully, I'd be stoked. So yeah, let's yeah, we'll
16:47
Speaker 1: come back Janni from it. And what goes on in
16:49
Speaker 1: his mind? Um uh, dirt, you've never hunted turkeys, I
16:55
Speaker 1: mean I've been on I mean you holding shot to
16:58
Speaker 1: kill Turkey. Do you let's say tomorrow. I was like, Dirt,
17:03
Speaker 1: we didn't we have a surprise for you. We didn't
17:04
Speaker 1: tell you, but you we have. We bought you a
17:06
Speaker 1: turkey take and we're just our whole day focused on
17:09
Speaker 1: Dirt getting the turk. Now, would you hunt for a
17:13
Speaker 1: Jake just one day? No? I mean, okay, no, no,
17:18
Speaker 1: I'm saying, forget this elaborate scenarial. Do you see? Like
17:22
Speaker 1: if you were Turkey, honey, would you be like, I
17:24
Speaker 1: don't give a ship if it's a Jake or not? No, No,
17:27
Speaker 1: I would be it would It depends on the timing.
17:30
Speaker 1: I mean I think the psychology, the thought process would
17:32
Speaker 1: be the same as you guys who are season hunters.
17:35
Speaker 1: Like the first day out of a four day hunt,
17:39
Speaker 1: I would be holding off for the big one, the
17:41
Speaker 1: big show. Yeah, just so you're a you're already into it,
17:44
Speaker 1: you already see it. Yeah, well, I mean the lure
17:47
Speaker 1: of of a of a monster. Yeah for sure. But
17:51
Speaker 1: if I had one day and the first morning, you know,
17:54
Speaker 1: out there sitting for an hour and I saw Jake
17:57
Speaker 1: and that was my only day, I shoot it. Pat,
18:00
Speaker 1: Are you a Jake man? Like when you put the
18:02
Speaker 1: jake breaks on a jake, not usually, I mean, not
18:05
Speaker 1: not till later in the hunt. If I get a
18:07
Speaker 1: chance late in the hunt, I'll I'll shoot him with
18:09
Speaker 1: audience thinking twice. But early on, though, I I like
18:13
Speaker 1: to see that big rope coming through, Let you see
18:15
Speaker 1: the fan, all that kind of fun stuff. And then
18:17
Speaker 1: when you see uh, a gobler pop up and you
18:20
Speaker 1: see the little extra where it's not an even fan,
18:23
Speaker 1: and you know it's a jake. Initially I get bummed
18:27
Speaker 1: that's a jake. But then late in the hunt, I
18:29
Speaker 1: think I'm willing to go home without one. I mean,
18:32
Speaker 1: I don't have a problem doing that, but I think
18:34
Speaker 1: that's why. Really in the hunt, when you start passing
18:37
Speaker 1: them up, you don't. A lot of times you don't
18:38
Speaker 1: get that chance back. You just don't. Now, this is
18:42
Speaker 1: coming from a man who I found out earlier today
18:47
Speaker 1: has a personal pact that if he shoots a buck,
18:53
Speaker 1: he gets it mounted. It's an inviolable pact with himself.
19:00
Speaker 1: He has a lawyer, the doctor, the c p A
19:04
Speaker 1: and the taxidermist. That's right, and you have mounted. And
19:10
Speaker 1: he has thirty white tailed deer mounted in his house.
19:14
Speaker 1: No exaggeration, um, how many did you kill before you
19:17
Speaker 1: got the first one? Stuffed A lot? A lot? So
19:21
Speaker 1: then what year did you be like from now when
19:23
Speaker 1: I'm stuffing them all? My big year was I shot
19:29
Speaker 1: three at that point where the biggest bucks that was
19:31
Speaker 1: shot in my life, like bang bang bang, and went
19:34
Speaker 1: on a hunting um Buffalo Connie Wisconsin, bow and arrow.
19:37
Speaker 1: First morning out, got nice eight point bucked with with
19:41
Speaker 1: split browl times I'm gonna get that buck mounted, but
19:44
Speaker 1: probably about one forty class buck. And I went to
19:47
Speaker 1: Ontario two weeks later shot this big I call him
19:51
Speaker 1: the Cathedral Antler's nice tight thirteen inch spread through to
19:55
Speaker 1: Denis and spread and that was when it was bucks
19:59
Speaker 1: you doing man, and in between I forgot that the
20:02
Speaker 1: other big bucket out was one out in eastern Colorado
20:05
Speaker 1: whereas I I was very after a blizzard had blown through,
20:08
Speaker 1: nasty hunt and the wind was just gusting. But I
20:13
Speaker 1: made a It was a long shot, but I got
20:16
Speaker 1: we had missed a couple of shots, and Mr Musk
20:18
Speaker 1: a couple of shots and we figured out you gotta
20:21
Speaker 1: aim a lot more out in front of that bucket
20:22
Speaker 1: that distance, and shot broke his neck went down so
20:25
Speaker 1: I had these three bucks. I knew I was gonna
20:28
Speaker 1: get them all mounted, and I just made just packed myself.
20:30
Speaker 1: I thought that's um. Up to that point, I one
20:34
Speaker 1: buck on the wall that was had shot that one,
20:39
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, now I got four of them
20:41
Speaker 1: and three or basically not all the tax dermist you know,
20:46
Speaker 1: if now I'm just not going to shoot a buck
20:48
Speaker 1: unless I really want to put him on the wall.
20:50
Speaker 1: And what's uh, what's what's uh Mrs Dirk and like,
20:55
Speaker 1: what's your take? I mean, people do always ask me
20:57
Speaker 1: that because I have a lot of stuff from I
20:58
Speaker 1: have a lot of schools and hides that I never
21:00
Speaker 1: got anything stuff before. But okay, no, well I got
21:03
Speaker 1: rugs right, which is their stuff because they had stuff
21:06
Speaker 1: down them. But I never got anything stuff to hang
21:08
Speaker 1: on the wall. But I have all kinds of ship
21:10
Speaker 1: hanging all over my house, hides and schools and whatnot.
21:14
Speaker 1: But thirty stuff, dear, what do you think about that?
21:19
Speaker 1: I feels like a whole other level of stuffness. I
21:23
Speaker 1: chose wisely, and like all that I'm married wisely. My
21:27
Speaker 1: my wife, I remember one of her comments first first
21:30
Speaker 1: time I got buck monted. We're about thirteen years into
21:33
Speaker 1: our marriage, and I remember I get find it a
21:35
Speaker 1: was buck mounted and she says, I saw as kind
21:38
Speaker 1: of stranged with the editor of Deer and Deer Hunting
21:40
Speaker 1: magazine didn't have any um deer heads in the wall.
21:44
Speaker 1: He's making a statement. Well, no, No, My statement was
21:47
Speaker 1: I was shooting everything that moved early in my hunting life.
21:51
Speaker 1: Anything that had antlers, I shoot it. And then by
21:53
Speaker 1: time I got into mind, I was probably late thirties.
21:56
Speaker 1: By at that time, I start getting little more picky,
21:58
Speaker 1: a little more picky more. And then, like I said,
22:01
Speaker 1: it's a big breakout year where you just to have
22:03
Speaker 1: everything falls into place. And my wife felt, we have
22:06
Speaker 1: a house that has an interior that just kind of
22:09
Speaker 1: fits that that look, you know, it's it's old barnboard.
22:13
Speaker 1: Um is our host's barn board interior on the ceilings. Yes,
22:18
Speaker 1: I would argue that. I would argue that it uh
22:22
Speaker 1: that it's supredictable. It could be because I have a
22:26
Speaker 1: very modern house with a lot of hides and schools,
22:30
Speaker 1: and it creates like a tension that I like a lot. Yeah,
22:33
Speaker 1: it's like you know in Quentin Tarantino movies when they'll
22:36
Speaker 1: have a very air udite, Like, he'll have a person
22:39
Speaker 1: right who's very genteel and extremely like his characters be
22:44
Speaker 1: extremely well spoken, very genteel, but then they say the
22:48
Speaker 1: most violent profane thing in the world, and it creates
22:51
Speaker 1: a tension right between the persona and then this thing.
22:55
Speaker 1: So he'll have his characters that have like this like
22:58
Speaker 1: way they speak, and then when they say like really
23:01
Speaker 1: like long drawn out strings of profanities, you sense this
23:07
Speaker 1: sort of right, this push and pull, and so with
23:12
Speaker 1: modern decor and skulls creates like an on a thing that, um,
23:19
Speaker 1: you walk into it, it's almost like you you you
23:21
Speaker 1: stepped into a fight, right guy. He has a log
23:26
Speaker 1: home and he's leary about overdoing it on buckheads and
23:31
Speaker 1: whatnot because it's like, oh, yeah, it's a long home,
23:36
Speaker 1: so a bunch of my house isn't quite quite like that.
23:40
Speaker 1: And I think when I get the tension thing, I
23:43
Speaker 1: think it's cool that my wife, who grew up on
23:45
Speaker 1: the East Coast never knew a hunter till she met me.
23:48
Speaker 1: That's attention. I think that's attention for us. You know
23:50
Speaker 1: that that people walk into house and that's the first
23:52
Speaker 1: thing I always ask hers, did you kill all this?
23:55
Speaker 1: You put up with this? She gets question a lot,
24:00
Speaker 1: how do you how do you put why do you
24:02
Speaker 1: put up with this? And curly curly rules got The
24:05
Speaker 1: only rule she has is no deer heads in our
24:07
Speaker 1: bedroom everywhere else. I hear a lot of guys say that,
24:10
Speaker 1: But I don't understand that either. I don't. I don't
24:12
Speaker 1: understand it. But um, it's I figure. She gives me
24:15
Speaker 1: free rein in the living room on the staircase. The
24:19
Speaker 1: kitchen area like kitchen, the kitchen, but we have an
24:22
Speaker 1: adjoining kitchen and dining room. So dining room has got
24:25
Speaker 1: quite a few white tails around it. And we also
24:27
Speaker 1: have a big wallet in there, and we have a salmon.
24:31
Speaker 1: And in our room, I have a wild pig from
24:33
Speaker 1: Florida that my daughter's shot. That's in um kind of
24:37
Speaker 1: like a big guest room area. And then we have
24:39
Speaker 1: an elkin there that my daughter Leah shot. You ever
24:41
Speaker 1: stuff a turkey? Got two of them to full full
24:44
Speaker 1: body molts. Yeah. One to see the inside of this house, right,
24:48
Speaker 1: it's like walking into a Cabela's. Like, no, no, kids
24:57
Speaker 1: were all home. I have three daughters, Bubba see palace.
25:04
Speaker 1: My daughters used to bring boyfriends home. The boyfriends were
25:07
Speaker 1: more interested in seeing all the dead animals in my
25:10
Speaker 1: house than they were. And if they didn't, they in't
25:12
Speaker 1: show my my daughters enough attention when they were touring
25:15
Speaker 1: the house with you know, I having me showed them
25:17
Speaker 1: around and talk to them about different deer. If they
25:20
Speaker 1: spent too much time with talking to dad, you know,
25:22
Speaker 1: it's kind of it for them. As far as my
25:24
Speaker 1: girls were concerned, they thought they didn't want a boyfriend
25:28
Speaker 1: who wanted to talk to the old man all right
25:29
Speaker 1: about because if the only reason you want to see
25:32
Speaker 1: me is because you want to, you know, talk deer
25:34
Speaker 1: hunting with my dad and they cut them off, you know?
25:38
Speaker 1: Was that the case with all three of them, not Leah,
25:42
Speaker 1: but then the lead always and the date guys that
25:44
Speaker 1: weren't in the hunting. So figure out how many buckheads
25:49
Speaker 1: are hanging in the rumor in right now? Well, there's
25:52
Speaker 1: a lot of racks stuff in here, but actual amounts.
25:55
Speaker 1: For there are slightly fewer buckheads in here that are
26:01
Speaker 1: in Pat Durkin's house. But these are just racks mostly
26:04
Speaker 1: where Doug during style of a tax during where he
26:07
Speaker 1: saw the uh saw skull cap off and screwed to
26:11
Speaker 1: a board. Now, Doug, what's your feeling on shooting Jake's?
26:17
Speaker 1: I shot one so like, but but what's your feeling
26:20
Speaker 1: on it? Because you passed a bunch of Jake's up once.
26:24
Speaker 1: So but we have talked about that once. That was
26:26
Speaker 1: the first time you passed Jake's in your life. No, no,
26:29
Speaker 1: just the other morning. You've passed up other Jake's in
26:31
Speaker 1: your life. Yes, because they're not good enough for you.
26:36
Speaker 1: Uh No, because similar circumman, it's only happened twice before.
26:40
Speaker 1: So it's not like I have this vast experience of
26:42
Speaker 1: turkey on jake passage. But uh we saw the scroup
26:48
Speaker 1: of Jake's that I eventually shot one from come across
26:51
Speaker 1: the field and you know, you looked at it through
26:52
Speaker 1: the through the knox and he goes the one that's
26:54
Speaker 1: by itself kind of on the outside is a bigger one,
26:57
Speaker 1: what do you think? And we talked about it, and
26:59
Speaker 1: they came into the decoys. We still had a gobbler
27:02
Speaker 1: in the tree a hundred yards of the other direction
27:04
Speaker 1: that we thought, if that's right, A big reason that
27:07
Speaker 1: that pass happened to the morning is because no more
27:11
Speaker 1: than a hundred yards away there was a gobbler hammering,
27:14
Speaker 1: and we and he was still in the tree late
27:16
Speaker 1: in the morning, and we figured if he landed on
27:20
Speaker 1: that strip of you know, basically grasp between the woods
27:24
Speaker 1: and these pines that we were set up in, he
27:26
Speaker 1: would for sure look down there and cr decoys and
27:30
Speaker 1: those Jake's Jake's coming in there and start a fight
27:33
Speaker 1: and they're you know, fighting Perrin and making noises and
27:37
Speaker 1: we're like, We're like, it's gonna happen. But I think
27:39
Speaker 1: if we should point out because earlier I was trying
27:40
Speaker 1: to like catalog the things that distinguishes Jake from a
27:45
Speaker 1: from a Tom, like a mature tom. One of them
27:49
Speaker 1: is a mature time can gobble like a good robust
27:56
Speaker 1: gobble that you will like part your hair, right, And
28:00
Speaker 1: Jake has kind of a little like a goofy kind
28:03
Speaker 1: of gobble. Yeah, and a lot of times they don't
28:05
Speaker 1: make any noise. Yeah, this week we haven't heard of
28:07
Speaker 1: Jake gobble yet. I think it might just be too
28:09
Speaker 1: early in the season. You know, they're not just quite
28:11
Speaker 1: feeling like what you're saying. He saw some Jake's gobblin
28:14
Speaker 1: earlier there, You did you tell me that? No, he
28:19
Speaker 1: was telling me that that he was telling me. He
28:21
Speaker 1: was telling me that those Jake's, yeah, not all of them,
28:25
Speaker 1: but that one that one did. Like if a normal
28:29
Speaker 1: gobbler goes gobbl gobbl, gobl gobble, this dude went yeah.
28:35
Speaker 1: So when Yanni says that he could hear off, so okay,
28:40
Speaker 1: the night, explain what happened, how you went out the
28:42
Speaker 1: night before all that. Just just tell people the whole
28:45
Speaker 1: deal like you're trying to do, like you're giving someone.
28:48
Speaker 1: We weren't hunting because it was the night before the season.
28:52
Speaker 1: Here was the night before season. Here in Wisconsin, they
28:55
Speaker 1: have six nine day, seven day, six seven day seasons.
29:03
Speaker 1: We're here for season C and uh we got here
29:07
Speaker 1: the evening before and we had just enough time run
29:09
Speaker 1: out and try to roost a bird rooster, Tom, which
29:13
Speaker 1: means you brought up something. I want to explain that
29:15
Speaker 1: instead of just having turkey season right where people's heavilized
29:19
Speaker 1: as you go hunting turkeys, Wiscotts breaks everything up A B, C,
29:24
Speaker 1: D than what E as it goes. So it's like,
29:32
Speaker 1: you know, you gotta be like you gotta know what
29:34
Speaker 1: week you want to hunt turkeys, A, B and C
29:40
Speaker 1: your heart like A, B, and C sellout D, E, F.
29:43
Speaker 1: Generally you can keep get more tags people like. Generally,
29:47
Speaker 1: like if you're a nonresident of Wisconsin and you send
29:50
Speaker 1: in your application, if you put down C, you'll get
29:54
Speaker 1: the C. If you put down B, you'll get beat
29:56
Speaker 1: out by residents and won't get an award or a tag.
29:58
Speaker 1: Probably if you do eat, you're guaranteed you're virtually guaranteed
30:03
Speaker 1: that you will get a turkey tag to hunt. And
30:05
Speaker 1: people want to go earlier because they think all the
30:07
Speaker 1: you know, rightfully, So a lot more birds are still alive.
30:11
Speaker 1: There are more turkeys alive at the day one of
30:15
Speaker 1: season A than there are the last day of season
30:19
Speaker 1: F by by a long shot. Sometimes it's made fifty
30:23
Speaker 1: in this stay. Yeah, there's fifty thousand more times alive
30:28
Speaker 1: when A starts in their are when F ends, and
30:31
Speaker 1: they haven't been educated by uh, you know, people in
30:35
Speaker 1: the woods making them up. So yeah, so when we're
30:39
Speaker 1: talking about season see, that's what we're talking about. It's
30:41
Speaker 1: like it's like the earliest season that uh that uh one,
30:45
Speaker 1: it's the earliest season that non resident can draw and
30:48
Speaker 1: also it's the earliest season that once tags go on sale,
30:52
Speaker 1: and they sell excess tags. It's the earliest season that
30:55
Speaker 1: you're gonna be able to buy an excess tag for
30:57
Speaker 1: and they sell out quickly. Like we were on the phone,
31:00
Speaker 1: ion see tags, I got one. I was on the
31:02
Speaker 1: phone with Yanni. He's hitting like refresh, and he never
31:05
Speaker 1: got one. They had sold out by that the second tag.
31:08
Speaker 1: So I have two Season CE tags because I got
31:11
Speaker 1: one through the lottery and one through buying excess tags.
31:15
Speaker 1: And Yanni got one through the lottery and was on
31:19
Speaker 1: a phone call and ship and missed the first couple
31:21
Speaker 1: of minutes of the excess tag sale and then they
31:23
Speaker 1: were gone. They're sure, we're That's how I got the
31:26
Speaker 1: second one. Also, um, so if you apply for Season
31:30
Speaker 1: CE in Wisconsin, at least in his own one, you're
31:32
Speaker 1: gonna get a tag. Yeah when you if you apply
31:36
Speaker 1: in December tenth deadline and all of that. So I
31:39
Speaker 1: was just telling listeners. Yeah, and I wonder if if
31:41
Speaker 1: that's the case with UH with season B two. No, No,
31:45
Speaker 1: you won't a non resident won't draw B second year
31:49
Speaker 1: because you get a point. Yeah. But here's how it
31:51
Speaker 1: works is if you if you're willing to not this
31:57
Speaker 1: is gonna be boring a ship for people. But listen,
31:59
Speaker 1: if you're willing to not hunt and you put down
32:03
Speaker 1: first choice, BE no second Choice on your application, then
32:09
Speaker 1: you would get a bonus point. But they pull your
32:13
Speaker 1: bonus point as long as they send you a tag.
32:15
Speaker 1: So I thought I had accumulated bonus points in Wisconsin
32:19
Speaker 1: by applying first choice, be second Choice C they would
32:23
Speaker 1: send me my tag. But I thought since I didn't
32:25
Speaker 1: hit my first choice, I get a point and I
32:28
Speaker 1: call because it's showing that I have no points, and
32:31
Speaker 1: they said no, because you got a tag. So what
32:33
Speaker 1: you have to do is you have to put down
32:36
Speaker 1: BE no second Choice, not get a tag, and then
32:40
Speaker 1: call them buy an excess see your D tag, and
32:44
Speaker 1: then you'll accrue a point to help you get a B.
32:49
Speaker 1: That is way more complicated than it should be. No,
32:51
Speaker 1: it's not. I love this stuff. It's pretty easy. The
32:53
Speaker 1: reason I like all this stuff is because it favors
32:55
Speaker 1: the It favors the serious. I like anything that may
33:00
Speaker 1: sit that last minute jackasses right the last minute, like
33:06
Speaker 1: oh you know, I don't know my boddies are going.
33:08
Speaker 1: I decided like and to keep those people out of
33:11
Speaker 1: the woods, and favors people who are obsessive. I think
33:15
Speaker 1: it's like a good thing. If they made a rule
33:19
Speaker 1: you have to be able to do push ups to
33:22
Speaker 1: get a turkey tacher, Like, okay, sure, why not any bear?
33:28
Speaker 1: I'm joking, but any barrier to entry, And I don't
33:32
Speaker 1: mean physically. That's not fair. I take it that back.
33:35
Speaker 1: That was an awful thing to say. But sending it
33:37
Speaker 1: a little bit of paperwork in a in a stamp,
33:40
Speaker 1: it's not like it's like you're going out to kill
33:42
Speaker 1: a big giant bird. It's like, it's not that bad
33:44
Speaker 1: you gotta do, like sending a form stating your intent
33:48
Speaker 1: to hunt. I just checked that landowner box. That makes
33:52
Speaker 1: it easier, does it? Yeah? I get whatever season I
33:55
Speaker 1: want because you don't land It's like the European system.
34:00
Speaker 1: Do you ever catch a little robin hoods out here
34:02
Speaker 1: and hang them? I got a couple of them sitting
34:05
Speaker 1: here right now. So I run up to the top
34:12
Speaker 1: thirty minutes before dark to roost the teve of season scene,
34:19
Speaker 1: which means that you go out there in the evening
34:22
Speaker 1: and you make some sort of loud, obnoxious sound, usually
34:28
Speaker 1: the call of a barred owl coyote crow slammed the
34:33
Speaker 1: truck door, scream yell um, yeah, yeah, we've shocked him
34:39
Speaker 1: up by going hey, yeah, you could blow on the
34:42
Speaker 1: elk bugle. Kevin Murphy's horn was sure as hell. I
34:48
Speaker 1: have heard bird shot gobble from coyotes, car horns, crows,
34:57
Speaker 1: sonic booms from aircraft, um dogs barking, my brother Matt screaming, uh,
35:06
Speaker 1: coyote yips. I used to take an elk call a
35:11
Speaker 1: bite and blow elk call and just make a heinous, loud,
35:14
Speaker 1: high pitched sound of that and shot gobble him up.
35:17
Speaker 1: Will Primos says that, so says the wider turkey shot got.
35:21
Speaker 1: His answer is it's just them saying this is my
35:25
Speaker 1: time of the year. I like that. Yeah, roosters crowing,
35:31
Speaker 1: pheasant roosters, geese, ducks, shotguns, shots, shotguns, shots, trucks going
35:38
Speaker 1: over rumble strips, but not every time. Every time today
35:41
Speaker 1: when you there were crows making noise all along that ridge. Yeah,
35:46
Speaker 1: but I do what's called the power crow right in
35:49
Speaker 1: my ears ducks. I thought I got a shot, got
35:52
Speaker 1: a lot of him, and he's looking for Morrel's and
35:55
Speaker 1: I ripped out a power crow into his face without
35:57
Speaker 1: getting my heads up. So there you are, Johnnie. Yeah,
36:01
Speaker 1: and you're trying to put one to roost. Yes, and um,
36:06
Speaker 1: I'd like to get all my I like the least
36:08
Speaker 1: calls I can have on me, the better. So one
36:11
Speaker 1: day maybe I'll be able to make a hand sound
36:13
Speaker 1: with my own voice. Can't do that yet. Yeah, I
36:15
Speaker 1: carry one shot gobble thing. I used to carry an
36:17
Speaker 1: owl and a crow, but I just have good luck
36:20
Speaker 1: with my crow. Yeah, I have tokyo because I can
36:23
Speaker 1: it can it can? It reaches out the farthest, you know,
36:26
Speaker 1: I feel like it really reaches out there. But I
36:28
Speaker 1: gave him myer do it for real? Any one thing
36:33
Speaker 1: would be too loud. I'm not claiming to be a
36:37
Speaker 1: good barred owl. The thing I want I want, like
36:40
Speaker 1: I don't at the risk it interrupt in your tail.
36:44
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. A lot of turkey hunters are like
36:47
Speaker 1: really obsessed about these realistic shot gobble sounds. You're right,
36:52
Speaker 1: You're right. I don't think it matters. No, it doesn't
36:56
Speaker 1: matter to the turkeys. You go on YouTube, dudes like
36:59
Speaker 1: exactly like, oh yeah, it a bart owl. It's like
37:02
Speaker 1: they don't. I just want to was that a real
37:05
Speaker 1: shotgun shot or a fake shotgun shot because I might
37:08
Speaker 1: shot gobill. I want to impress my buddies and what
37:10
Speaker 1: I like and Pat can attest to this is today
37:13
Speaker 1: I had a bart owl respond to me. So it's like, great, no,
37:17
Speaker 1: just general woodsmanship. Yeah, great, it's great to know how
37:20
Speaker 1: to do a bar. So I usually do a whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah,
37:27
Speaker 1: something like that's good, it's convincing. And yeah, and I
37:29
Speaker 1: heard bart Owel's answer you. So a couple of birds answer,
37:33
Speaker 1: way off in the distance, and uh. I run down
37:36
Speaker 1: a fence line, maybe a couple hundred yards, and before
37:39
Speaker 1: I can do another call, a bird goes off pretty close,
37:44
Speaker 1: like less than two hundred yards to where I know
37:47
Speaker 1: what ridge, what line of trees he's roughly on. I
37:51
Speaker 1: listened to him for a few minutes and back out
37:54
Speaker 1: of there. Yeah, this is so yeah. You you preface
37:58
Speaker 1: this right by saying this is like turkey hunting one
38:01
Speaker 1: on one, right, like ex how to how to rooster bird?
38:06
Speaker 1: So now you know what tree he's sleeping in in
38:09
Speaker 1: the morning under the cover of darkness, Doug and I
38:11
Speaker 1: slipped in and you can kind of suss out the terrain, yes,
38:17
Speaker 1: and be like if he's roosting there. Where is it? Like,
38:21
Speaker 1: what's this? Probably where is he gonna go in the morning? Right,
38:25
Speaker 1: you can kind of suss it out, Like if you
38:27
Speaker 1: got one roosted up and on one side is this
38:29
Speaker 1: giant thorny hellhole and then the other size this little
38:33
Speaker 1: open meadow area, you'd be like, my guess, chances are
38:38
Speaker 1: better than not that he's gonna not going to the
38:42
Speaker 1: thorny hellhole and want to pitch out and land down
38:44
Speaker 1: where he can actually hit the ground without crash landing.
38:48
Speaker 1: And so it's helpful when you know where he is.
38:52
Speaker 1: And both times we've said I've set up on rooster
38:54
Speaker 1: birds this week, they've pitched down into the hellhole gayon,
38:59
Speaker 1: never to be scene again. And when they have any
39:03
Speaker 1: kind of topography they like to they like to roost
39:05
Speaker 1: near slopes. Yeah, I think I think it's easy for
39:10
Speaker 1: them to get into the tree. You know, they're up
39:12
Speaker 1: on a bench or something and they make a short
39:14
Speaker 1: little pitch out, you know, the ground drops out from
39:18
Speaker 1: underneath them and then they're We watched in Mexico one time,
39:24
Speaker 1: hunting out in the desert. We watched where they were
39:27
Speaker 1: roosting in cotton woods down along was it. I think
39:31
Speaker 1: it was cottonwoods down along like a near a little
39:35
Speaker 1: water hole, and they would climb up the slope and
39:39
Speaker 1: get higher than where they were going to roost and
39:41
Speaker 1: pitch off the slope and then land out in the
39:44
Speaker 1: riparian zone in the cottonwood. And it would be funny
39:49
Speaker 1: because they just would like as part of us getting
39:51
Speaker 1: in the tree, they just do that walk and then
39:53
Speaker 1: shoot out and land in the treetop rather than trying
39:56
Speaker 1: to lift off. Smart critters. So there you are. The
40:02
Speaker 1: next morning. Next morning, Doug and I slip in. We
40:06
Speaker 1: set up three decoys d S d S Dave Smith decoys.
40:12
Speaker 1: We uh had a feeding hand and upright hand and
40:18
Speaker 1: big boss yeah strutter with we're out and we're in
40:22
Speaker 1: Wisconsin where they have the Eastern turkey subspecies. And I
40:27
Speaker 1: have a Merria tail fan on this and I was
40:30
Speaker 1: a little worried, kind of like I'm a little worried
40:32
Speaker 1: if my barret our call sounds good. It was stupid
40:35
Speaker 1: to think that a turkey is gonna be like, hey,
40:37
Speaker 1: that dude's tail feathers are at Animals hate different, right,
40:42
Speaker 1: they hate different, So it's better because they're like I'm
40:47
Speaker 1: especially gonna beat that thing up because it's got a
40:49
Speaker 1: weird colored fan like deer will beat up deer that
40:53
Speaker 1: have a limp. They do not like ship to be different.
40:59
Speaker 1: It's a rigidity to nature. Differences are not celebrated unless
41:05
Speaker 1: it's just strength. Strength is admired, limp is fighting drop time.
41:12
Speaker 1: Do they like it? You don't know if they like it.
41:15
Speaker 1: When I'm aware of is that they don't like weakness,
41:18
Speaker 1: and they don't like deformities. They don't like anything to
41:20
Speaker 1: suggest weakness. Still go after it, you know. Dear turkeys
41:23
Speaker 1: whatever they when a turkey gets shot, gobbler gets shot
41:26
Speaker 1: that the galders beat the crapout them. That's always weird
41:29
Speaker 1: when you hit a turkey and the air turkey's beat
41:30
Speaker 1: it up. But I've seen um doose in in the
41:34
Speaker 1: winter when there somebody has a feedure out in their backyard.
41:39
Speaker 1: This one fun had I've broken like I've broken, distorted
41:42
Speaker 1: neck and it come in and it was always askew.
41:45
Speaker 1: The other deer to always push it off, get it
41:47
Speaker 1: out there, and they're just mean as hell to it.
41:50
Speaker 1: Only the only dare that would have penned that dear
41:52
Speaker 1: any kindness with its own mother they're always a shun it,
41:56
Speaker 1: kick it or albino is at the same treatment. A
41:59
Speaker 1: lot of times they went going near the other deer
42:01
Speaker 1: and get beat up. That's why he sailed vinals by themselves. Yeah,
42:04
Speaker 1: I went to you when I was working on my
42:05
Speaker 1: book about Buffalo. I went out to see this famous
42:09
Speaker 1: white buffalo called white Cloud, and um, white clouds always
42:15
Speaker 1: way away from the herd. And the people are like
42:17
Speaker 1: they run the place. We're like, well that you know
42:20
Speaker 1: the other buffalo. No, he's special, right, and he has
42:23
Speaker 1: special magic. And this one guy that works out there
42:26
Speaker 1: is like, no, he tells me that he goes, No,
42:29
Speaker 1: they beat the ship out of that thing, he goes.
42:32
Speaker 1: It's so just stays off by itself. Now, well, I
42:36
Speaker 1: saw that turkey that I assumed got that big tom
42:39
Speaker 1: down here last week that I assumed got hit by
42:42
Speaker 1: a car just kidding, ship kicked out of it by
42:45
Speaker 1: another one and uh killed it or finished it off,
42:50
Speaker 1: finished it off. And I'm assuming, I mean there was
42:52
Speaker 1: some activity there that looked like there may have been
42:54
Speaker 1: a fight, but um friend came in, UH got it,
43:00
Speaker 1: tagged it, and uh when they cleaned it, it didn't
43:03
Speaker 1: have any you know, like big cut marks in it
43:06
Speaker 1: or anything like it. So we're kind of assuming you
43:08
Speaker 1: get hit by a car. But there it was. I'm
43:10
Speaker 1: driving up and it's thirty yards off the road and
43:12
Speaker 1: the other one is just punching it, pecking it, and
43:15
Speaker 1: then he walked off when I walked out to see
43:17
Speaker 1: what the heck was going on, and then you went
43:18
Speaker 1: and found a dead badger just out doing farm boy activities. Well, yeah,
43:24
Speaker 1: that was the dead animal. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little
43:28
Speaker 1: bit like you're playing uh rhythm guitar as you tell
43:33
Speaker 1: your story and other people are soloing on top of
43:35
Speaker 1: your story. So there you are. I don't mind that.
43:39
Speaker 1: There you are. You got your d S d S,
43:43
Speaker 1: got my d S d S. I always said, I
43:45
Speaker 1: want to finish on the roosting. Uh thought, is that
43:48
Speaker 1: what it really gives you is it gives you a
43:50
Speaker 1: nice place to start in the morning. You're not like
43:53
Speaker 1: in the darkness blind going on. I hope there's like
43:57
Speaker 1: a gobbler somewhere around here at some point, and you're
44:00
Speaker 1: getting like you have anxiety because like you're like, should
44:02
Speaker 1: we go here? Should we go there? You're like you
44:04
Speaker 1: can walk out calmly a couple of coffee and you
44:07
Speaker 1: and just go right where you're going, knowing that it's
44:09
Speaker 1: probably not gonna work out. Yeah yeah, but it gives
44:12
Speaker 1: you a place to start, and uh sometimes it does.
44:16
Speaker 1: But uh yeah, So we set up our three decoys,
44:20
Speaker 1: and uh, this bird when we got there, he was goblin, goblin, goblin,
44:24
Speaker 1: goblin goblin. I mean it was. He gobbled hundreds of
44:28
Speaker 1: times like he's a rope dragg and uh stayed in
44:33
Speaker 1: the tree and before we had seen any other turkeys,
44:36
Speaker 1: it was probably close to an hour after daylight, right,
44:39
Speaker 1: and when these jakes came out. Yeah, and we didn't
44:43
Speaker 1: spook this tongue because we're just too far away. He
44:46
Speaker 1: just could not see us, He couldn't see our decoys.
44:48
Speaker 1: He's just gobbling away. I mean I was. I inspected
44:52
Speaker 1: every tree down that, you know, rich trying to find
44:54
Speaker 1: it with my binoculars, and just could not see him.
44:56
Speaker 1: So he was just out of sight. And uh, yeah,
44:59
Speaker 1: these j pop up on the horizon, I don't know,
45:01
Speaker 1: a couple hundred yards at least two yards away, and
45:04
Speaker 1: uh I'm calling a little bit here and there, and uh,
45:08
Speaker 1: those jake's you know, you see one get his periscope,
45:11
Speaker 1: his neck Nike nice and high. He looks down to
45:13
Speaker 1: where we are and they just turned and just marched
45:16
Speaker 1: right on in four pack. Well, yeah, I wonder if
45:20
Speaker 1: they were different age because it was like there was
45:21
Speaker 1: three and then there was one, and one had like
45:25
Speaker 1: a you know, we had kind of a where's the
45:29
Speaker 1: the younger ones have like an artist's brush, just a
45:33
Speaker 1: little tiny. Yeah, his was a little wider and yeah,
45:37
Speaker 1: but definitely a right. I mean that it's not a
45:40
Speaker 1: two year old sixteen pounds, So maybe born earlier or
45:45
Speaker 1: hatched earlier, or a good nutrition or power jake, power jake,
45:51
Speaker 1: And he got like maybe he was really good um
45:56
Speaker 1: and a it was throwing out a lot of seventy
45:57
Speaker 1: five percentiles earlier. But when they're a poult, they eat
46:03
Speaker 1: about their diet is about insect matter, plant matter. For
46:11
Speaker 1: a good healthy turkey, a lot of the need to
46:13
Speaker 1: be a lot of growths, a lot of worms out
46:15
Speaker 1: of insects, and then later in adulthood it's flipped a
46:21
Speaker 1: lot less protein, a lot more green. So maybe he's
46:24
Speaker 1: just really maybe he had a little honey hoole grub patch.
46:28
Speaker 1: It was just cleaning house and it makes you wonder
46:30
Speaker 1: if they're from you know, the same brood, or you
46:34
Speaker 1: know all of that. I mean they brothers or they
46:36
Speaker 1: just like freshman boys at the high school dance. You know. Yeah, no, Non,
46:41
Speaker 1: you're a big guy. You're probably bigger than all the
46:43
Speaker 1: other kids. You like that. Jake, Well then let me
46:48
Speaker 1: see your nubbles. So n there you are. You got
46:53
Speaker 1: your d S d s out, big flock of hungry
46:55
Speaker 1: Jake's coming at you. Are you scared? No, We're just
47:00
Speaker 1: we're like, that's what we're there for, right is to
47:03
Speaker 1: see the show. And we got it. I mean it
47:05
Speaker 1: was great. You know, four Jake's come in just bypass
47:07
Speaker 1: those hands didn't even there were two hands, Like they're
47:11
Speaker 1: more interested in beating up a turkey than they are
47:13
Speaker 1: having and they had to walk through the two hands.
47:16
Speaker 1: I do guys like that in high school, right, guys
47:21
Speaker 1: that would be like they would pass up ladies to fight,
47:26
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like you got your
47:29
Speaker 1: priorities crooked. But we had decided we talked about it
47:33
Speaker 1: as they were coming down, because we're sitting pretty much
47:36
Speaker 1: side by side. Well it's early and that other guy's goblin,
47:40
Speaker 1: so we thought we had the perfect scenario with these
47:43
Speaker 1: decoys coming into our decoys. Yeah, so you feel like
47:48
Speaker 1: we were doubling down. You thought the rope draggon is
47:50
Speaker 1: gonna come out and just start kicking everybody's ass decoys. Yeah,
47:53
Speaker 1: because how could he decoys? Jake's this blood, How could
47:57
Speaker 1: he stand having four Jake's in there fighting pern and
48:01
Speaker 1: cackling and you know, flapping their wings around. I mean
48:04
Speaker 1: that turkey activity. You could certainly hear it where he was. Yeah,
48:07
Speaker 1: that time would be like, whatever is going on down there,
48:10
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go down and settle it. Yeah. They're starters.
48:14
Speaker 1: They're starters and sets instead. They eventually had enough of
48:20
Speaker 1: the decoys and uh, they saw a couple of dudes
48:23
Speaker 1: eventually buy some trees and they're like, yeah, we're gonna
48:27
Speaker 1: piece out of here because you guys are thirty yards away. Yeah. Oh,
48:30
Speaker 1: we had him a couple of times at at feet
48:33
Speaker 1: were on the other side of a pine tree that
48:35
Speaker 1: I was sitting on the other So they got suspicious
48:39
Speaker 1: as they laughed. They did some putting, you know how
48:41
Speaker 1: Jake's They're not like evenhen they're putting away from you,
48:43
Speaker 1: they're kind of like, I'm scared I'm scared, but maybe
48:45
Speaker 1: that was fun. Whish I go back? I don't know,
48:48
Speaker 1: I don't know. And so they kind of fade off,
48:50
Speaker 1: and they just happened to fade right underneath the gobbler,
48:53
Speaker 1: and it sure seemed like as they went there, he
48:56
Speaker 1: finally came out of the tree and then went away
48:59
Speaker 1: from us. Then time goes by, you fellers come back
49:06
Speaker 1: to the farmhouse. Doug had had as he put there day,
49:10
Speaker 1: what would you call a blessing here on the farm?
49:13
Speaker 1: What do you call it? Yeah, yeah, you use the term.
49:17
Speaker 1: Kiefer came over and you said, we had a small
49:19
Speaker 1: blessing or a miracle on the farm today something I
49:23
Speaker 1: don't I don't remember what I said, but yeah, we
49:24
Speaker 1: had a calf and a Kyle birthed a calf. And
49:27
Speaker 1: I was a little concerned about the calf because it
49:29
Speaker 1: was didn't seem to be getting the idea down about
49:32
Speaker 1: how I get something to eat. So we came down,
49:35
Speaker 1: we got a little cup of coffee, little breakfast, and
49:36
Speaker 1: I said, hey, I'll check on that calf. And we
49:38
Speaker 1: walked down there, kind of climbed up on the fence
49:41
Speaker 1: and was looking at the calf, and yeah, he looks
49:43
Speaker 1: way to the north and goes there's some turkey stuff.
49:47
Speaker 1: They call him the lavine Eagle. Well, no, I just
49:50
Speaker 1: call myself. Yeah, not much game gets by this kid. Well,
49:56
Speaker 1: now he'll spot it up. He's the turkey I as
49:59
Speaker 1: far as I'mcoln's the Latvian. So he said, and what
50:04
Speaker 1: do you think? And I'm just like, well, So we
50:06
Speaker 1: came back, got our stuff and pretty much went back
50:09
Speaker 1: to the spot that we had already set up in
50:11
Speaker 1: because we were trying. By the way those birds were moving,
50:14
Speaker 1: it looked like they were going to come pretty much
50:16
Speaker 1: where we had been in the morning, like they had
50:18
Speaker 1: done their whole thing. So some little adventure and we're
50:21
Speaker 1: working the way right back to their If I've come
50:23
Speaker 1: to realize something in ten years of turkey hunting now
50:27
Speaker 1: is that they are creatures of habit loops, creatures of loops,
50:32
Speaker 1: and if unless they're messed with or bombed or whatnot,
50:35
Speaker 1: they're gonna do their loop and come back. And this
50:39
Speaker 1: time you're waiting for him and you put your decoys down. No,
50:43
Speaker 1: we well barely we got there and peeked around the
50:46
Speaker 1: corner and I saw one of them statue stand there
50:51
Speaker 1: like a statue for fifteen minutes to the point where
50:53
Speaker 1: I thought he had us, and he just kind of
50:55
Speaker 1: he look our way, look, you know, just nine degree
50:58
Speaker 1: head turns straight away and then towards us, or ninety
51:02
Speaker 1: degrees to us, towards us, back and forth, back and forth,
51:05
Speaker 1: not moving. I'm thinking, man, we screwed it up, you know,
51:08
Speaker 1: like he saw us, just something in the pines. It
51:10
Speaker 1: ain't gonna last, Belly very well. We'll try it anyway.
51:14
Speaker 1: So Doug gets in a position. I'm watching him. He
51:16
Speaker 1: hasn't spooked yet. I back out, look at him one
51:19
Speaker 1: more time. He hasn't spooked yet. Do a little loop,
51:22
Speaker 1: belly crawl out with strutter again, just him, said him.
51:26
Speaker 1: Belly crawled back and called for I don't know, maybe
51:29
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty minutes, long enough that we were starting to
51:33
Speaker 1: doze off. I was close, Doug was said, maybe he
51:38
Speaker 1: had actually made it. It's the worst kind of sleep,
51:43
Speaker 1: like because you get when you're like, what'sipp We've been
51:45
Speaker 1: sending you a larning for so we got a three
51:49
Speaker 1: forty five in the morning, right, and then when you're
51:51
Speaker 1: out in the evening hunt, you're out there until past eight.
51:53
Speaker 1: It's just like, yeah, your dinner and all that ship,
51:55
Speaker 1: get your gears squared away. It's like get low on
51:58
Speaker 1: sleep and you can't help. When his son comes up
52:00
Speaker 1: and it gets warm, you get nappy feeling. So you're
52:04
Speaker 1: so nappy feeling. But at the same time, the minute
52:07
Speaker 1: you doze off, you like feel like you heard a
52:09
Speaker 1: gobble or something. It's just it's like a very fitful
52:11
Speaker 1: nut and it's like it really puts you in a
52:13
Speaker 1: bad place. Yeah, and there trying to sleep in the turn.
52:17
Speaker 1: I mean, we are in naptime. Well, I hadn't seen anything. Nothing,
52:24
Speaker 1: we didn't know we thought. I figured it was it's
52:26
Speaker 1: gonna have a chance that they had spooked off, is anything.
52:29
Speaker 1: I called for a bit and Austin I hear, I
52:32
Speaker 1: think it's squirrels hopping around, because we've seen a bunch
52:34
Speaker 1: of squirrels. And then I'm hearing I'm like squirrels, you know.
52:43
Speaker 1: But then I'm like, yeah, there's some jakes, like not
52:45
Speaker 1: too far from here. Now there's some noise. Maybe I
52:49
Speaker 1: should just get my gun up and no sooner and
52:51
Speaker 1: I like, I didn't even get my gun to my knee.
52:53
Speaker 1: I was like I had it halfway up to my
52:55
Speaker 1: knee and I look and there's one red head and
52:57
Speaker 1: then another red head. Oh my hope, dogs awake. We
53:02
Speaker 1: were at that point, we were probably thirty yards we
53:04
Speaker 1: were sitting together. We were probably thirty yards apart and
53:07
Speaker 1: that and we had talked about not shooting into the
53:10
Speaker 1: pines because we were both sitting in the pines. We
53:12
Speaker 1: you know, we done the whole We had a safety plan.
53:16
Speaker 1: And I'm looking back in the spot and I see
53:20
Speaker 1: that movement. I can't hear anything, so I didn't hear
53:22
Speaker 1: those that noise, and but it was the same thing
53:24
Speaker 1: on and so I'm trying to get turned to where
53:26
Speaker 1: i can shoot, and I'm thinking, well, I could shoot
53:28
Speaker 1: left handed me because they're really close to me. And
53:31
Speaker 1: it was the fourth one was the one, the biggest one,
53:34
Speaker 1: like we had decided earlier in the day. So yeah,
53:38
Speaker 1: he could have had that bird, but he didn't pull
53:40
Speaker 1: the trigger as quickly as I did. Yeah, I was.
53:43
Speaker 1: I was going to brag that I've only passed up
53:45
Speaker 1: a jake one time, being that morning when we had
53:48
Speaker 1: the gobbler, But then I remember that I must have
53:51
Speaker 1: passed up a jake later that day. So I passed
53:54
Speaker 1: up to Jakes in mind, because they were kind of
53:56
Speaker 1: lining up for you, weren't they. I mean, you could
53:58
Speaker 1: have probably shot two of them with one shot and
54:03
Speaker 1: then you and then you blouch. Do you know what
54:07
Speaker 1: they called Jake breaks? Jake breaks? Jacob Industries makes that
54:12
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know. They still do plays called Jacob
54:15
Speaker 1: Industries makes that compression break. Me and my brother used
54:19
Speaker 1: to live in a trailer park alongside the Highway ninety
54:21
Speaker 1: in Montana, and holy shit, you get sick of listening
54:24
Speaker 1: to those things, man, because it was on the down slope.
54:27
Speaker 1: People coming down out of you know, around they come
54:29
Speaker 1: down bowls and pass I don't know, blasts awake every
54:32
Speaker 1: night with them freaking things. But it's my brother calls
54:36
Speaker 1: when he shoots Jake, he puts the Jake breaks out.
54:40
Speaker 1: That's not very nice. Um, So you got to Jake,
54:43
Speaker 1: got to Jake Downey went. That was over. We were
54:46
Speaker 1: very excited about it. Now meanwhile, I had gone out.
54:51
Speaker 1: I hadn't gone out and roosted a turkey. I had not.
54:55
Speaker 1: I wasn't as aggressive and as good of a hunter
54:58
Speaker 1: as Yanni was, and I just was trusting that I
55:00
Speaker 1: would find gobblers and I did. I went out to
55:03
Speaker 1: what I referred to as the navel of the Durn farm.
55:08
Speaker 1: You could call it the heart of the Durn farm.
55:10
Speaker 1: But the navel like the center where all activity is centered.
55:18
Speaker 1: I'm gonna use that from now on. That's where the
55:20
Speaker 1: navel of the farm. Dug says. If you hit a
55:22
Speaker 1: deer and you wound a deer and you're once you're
55:25
Speaker 1: trailing it, you will pass through the navel like it's
55:29
Speaker 1: just they just just the navel of the farm, the whole. Yeah, yeah,
55:35
Speaker 1: it really place, you know. So I went down to
55:37
Speaker 1: the navel and I'm sitting there and up above me
55:41
Speaker 1: at a place called known widely as Ranella rich Uh,
55:48
Speaker 1: there are three gobblers like you tell you can tell
55:52
Speaker 1: the roosted up the trees, like when you sit there
55:54
Speaker 1: in the dark, you get a sense of where they
55:56
Speaker 1: all are when they're gobbling, and you can set you
55:58
Speaker 1: don't even hear how they're like a differ trees and
56:00
Speaker 1: there's a cascading effect like one will go like an
56:03
Speaker 1: aggressive one to go. He'll hammer and then his buddies
56:06
Speaker 1: will hammer over him. But the sound like jumps down
56:10
Speaker 1: the ridge because they're like in these different trees. I
56:13
Speaker 1: was like, go go, but it just moves, you know,
56:15
Speaker 1: and then it starts back at the top and moves down.
56:18
Speaker 1: It's like someone like running their fingers down a piano,
56:21
Speaker 1: you know. And then there's this other gobbler just hammering
56:24
Speaker 1: his ass off up and he's this pine area, and
56:30
Speaker 1: they were all too far away for me. Like it's like,
56:34
Speaker 1: I mean, I knew that I could eventually might come
56:35
Speaker 1: through the navel, as all things do, but they were
56:38
Speaker 1: like far away gobbles and they hit the ground. One
56:44
Speaker 1: hit the ground and gobbled for a while. Then he
56:46
Speaker 1: kind of gobbled his way farther away, and the other
56:48
Speaker 1: ones I can never figure out what happened to him.
56:50
Speaker 1: And I worked up at to a place called the
56:52
Speaker 1: Wet Spot, which my brother used to like to think
56:55
Speaker 1: up names for bars, like if he was to buy
56:58
Speaker 1: a bar, what he would name it? And um repeat offender,
57:04
Speaker 1: tight Fit, the wet Spot, and ginger Snapper was four
57:10
Speaker 1: names that he had. You know, he never bought a
57:11
Speaker 1: single bar in his life, but he had four names ready,
57:13
Speaker 1: and one of them was the Wet Spot. And it's
57:15
Speaker 1: weird because I'm during farm maps there's a place called
57:18
Speaker 1: the Wet Spot, and I asked Dug. I'm like, you
57:20
Speaker 1: know the big mud puddle that's always there, and Dougs like, yes,
57:24
Speaker 1: you're referring to the wet spot. So I went up
57:26
Speaker 1: to the wet spot, which was around where the gobbling
57:31
Speaker 1: was occurring, and then I sit down, get camouflaged and
57:38
Speaker 1: rip out a hend, call a couple of yelps, and
57:43
Speaker 1: as turkeys are wants to do, they gobble back the
57:45
Speaker 1: direction I had just come from, which happens because it
57:48
Speaker 1: was a roundabout way of getting there, call call, call dead.
57:54
Speaker 1: They just went to you know, working with hens, one
57:57
Speaker 1: of the things that makes turkeys hard to call in it, Dave,
58:00
Speaker 1: as they when they're up in the roost, they're probably
58:03
Speaker 1: up in the roost of the hands, and I know
58:04
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of hands cutting, like cutting up
58:11
Speaker 1: in the tree with them. Yeah. In fact, I kept
58:14
Speaker 1: thinking there's no gobbles and just hands purn and cutting
58:17
Speaker 1: and carrying on up in the trees. And I thought,
58:20
Speaker 1: there's no way there's no gobble gobblers with those hands.
58:23
Speaker 1: And it wasn't until well in the daybreak when they
58:25
Speaker 1: started goblin. But what what the reason I knew that
58:29
Speaker 1: that was there was because the hens so the reason
58:32
Speaker 1: that gobbler is hard to call in Sometimes in the
58:33
Speaker 1: early mornings he's still with his hands. He's like traveling
58:37
Speaker 1: with the hands and displaying for them. Now as the
58:40
Speaker 1: day goes on, if they're laying, the hens will leave
58:43
Speaker 1: him and go off to lay eggs, and then he
58:45
Speaker 1: might then become very susceptible to calling because now he's
58:49
Speaker 1: got no females around him. So all this talk about
58:53
Speaker 1: getting up and roosting them and all that. The most
58:56
Speaker 1: the turkeys I killed, I started killing turkeys around nine am.
59:01
Speaker 1: I kill a lot of curcus a be nine in noon.
59:04
Speaker 1: It seems like in the morning it either happens right
59:07
Speaker 1: away or not lucky. But you get in a situation
59:11
Speaker 1: where you're set up where he wants to be and
59:13
Speaker 1: he hasn't and the hens calm or whatever, and you
59:16
Speaker 1: get him and that does happen. But kill a lot
59:19
Speaker 1: of turkeys in the late morning. So I was like,
59:22
Speaker 1: never mind these turkeys, Um, I'm just gonna go on
59:24
Speaker 1: a little walk about. And I walk quite a long
59:29
Speaker 1: ways and I get out to anywhere. I'm confused about
59:32
Speaker 1: property ownership, and I don't want to cross the fence
59:35
Speaker 1: because I don't really understand, like what else what? And uh,
59:39
Speaker 1: I rip out a power crow and get old Goppel
59:44
Speaker 1: from a tom down in this the word this section
59:48
Speaker 1: of this big wood lot butts up against a field
59:51
Speaker 1: and and I'm sitting there glass and oh and I
59:54
Speaker 1: glass up two hens feeding around out in the open,
59:59
Speaker 1: set up at try to call the gobbler that I gobbled.
1:00:01
Speaker 1: He never showed up that night. I went back, What
1:00:06
Speaker 1: time we go down there, dirt? I went back about
1:00:09
Speaker 1: three and set up where I was calling into where
1:00:12
Speaker 1: that one had shot gobl And you were sure the
1:00:14
Speaker 1: property lines you know too, Yeah, clarified property lines with
1:00:17
Speaker 1: dug went down there and kind of like crept in
1:00:20
Speaker 1: there and got set up where I could where I'm
1:00:23
Speaker 1: calling into this where I feel that that bird shot
1:00:26
Speaker 1: gobbled out of even though he was hundreds of yards
1:00:28
Speaker 1: away when I shocked him up. And I get comfortable
1:00:33
Speaker 1: almost to a nappy degree, and um start calling And
1:00:38
Speaker 1: how long do we lay there? Three hours? No toy
1:00:44
Speaker 1: for two hours, calling probably every twenty or thirty minutes,
1:00:50
Speaker 1: just on a slate, calling a pot call every minutes,
1:00:54
Speaker 1: calling no response, just dead ass silent. And then at
1:00:59
Speaker 1: one point I look and coming through the wood lot
1:01:02
Speaker 1: at full strut, without ever making a sound. There he
1:01:06
Speaker 1: is the Boston Boy and he comes out and it's
1:01:10
Speaker 1: like you're not talking abot how Jake's are out in
1:01:12
Speaker 1: the middle fields all day long raising Holy hell. He's
1:01:15
Speaker 1: coming out of the woods and gets to the edge
1:01:18
Speaker 1: of the woods and will not leave that wood patch.
1:01:21
Speaker 1: He's just in the woods at a full strut. What
1:01:25
Speaker 1: do you lay at then wind row a wind roll
1:01:29
Speaker 1: that t bones that wood lot. So I'm looking like
1:01:33
Speaker 1: through my wind row into the wood lot, and I
1:01:35
Speaker 1: could see him in there at full strut, I mean,
1:01:38
Speaker 1: balls out, full strut, will not leave the woods, and
1:01:43
Speaker 1: my call and I had somehow wound up on my peg,
1:01:47
Speaker 1: and I was he was looking up like he was
1:01:49
Speaker 1: like looking where that sound had come from. He knew
1:01:51
Speaker 1: where that sound had come from. And he's like looking, looking, looking,
1:01:54
Speaker 1: and I'm feeling around. I eventually find my peg and
1:01:56
Speaker 1: very slowly, like somehow gotten on top of it. I
1:01:58
Speaker 1: very slowly get it up and I call a little
1:02:01
Speaker 1: bit and then he comes out into the field. But
1:02:05
Speaker 1: he still obstruct when he was at the edge of
1:02:07
Speaker 1: the woods sixty yards seventy yards, but very obscure heavily obscured.
1:02:13
Speaker 1: You're just seeing, like as you kind of would spin
1:02:16
Speaker 1: around in there, You're just seeing, you know, fan head,
1:02:19
Speaker 1: but not you couldn't take even if he was, if
1:02:21
Speaker 1: he was forty yards away, it would have been like
1:02:23
Speaker 1: it's a little too much, too much obstruction, like too
1:02:26
Speaker 1: much ship to absorb pellets. You're getting You're getting a
1:02:29
Speaker 1: show at this point. Is that what you're thinking? You're like, man,
1:02:32
Speaker 1: oh yeah, but no, I'm thinking about that. But I'm
1:02:34
Speaker 1: also thinking, like, you know, you're thinking about killing the bird, right,
1:02:37
Speaker 1: he just gonna get the bird. So I call a
1:02:39
Speaker 1: little bit more and he starts stepping out on the
1:02:42
Speaker 1: field and then I hear something dude digging around on
1:02:44
Speaker 1: a quad runner away is away but getting louder, and
1:02:49
Speaker 1: I've already been hearing him for a long time, like
1:02:51
Speaker 1: what is that guy doing? Like quad running around? And
1:02:55
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I'm like, how could this be happening?
1:02:57
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, that quad runner starts getting very
1:02:59
Speaker 1: close around and I'm watching and the turkey's kind of
1:03:04
Speaker 1: moving out, and I'm like, that's gonna freak that turkey out.
1:03:09
Speaker 1: The other thing I'm trying to do is now I'm
1:03:10
Speaker 1: trying to adjust for where the turkey is gonna be,
1:03:12
Speaker 1: and I'm moving my shotguns. So I don't know what
1:03:15
Speaker 1: did it. If it was the increasingly loud quad noise
1:03:20
Speaker 1: or me trying to get my shotgun around, But all
1:03:24
Speaker 1: of a sudden he drops out of strut. But then
1:03:28
Speaker 1: I really quickly like reached up and compiled and bouched him.
1:03:32
Speaker 1: That was a shocker to me too. Just the other
1:03:35
Speaker 1: two hunts I've been on with you, turkey hunts, it
1:03:39
Speaker 1: was all about the audio, and then that guy crept in.
1:03:43
Speaker 1: No never a peep, not a peep. Yeah, But the
1:03:50
Speaker 1: last time I hunted with you, I glass those We're
1:03:55
Speaker 1: up in the wood timber and I glassed. I was
1:03:58
Speaker 1: just looking into the woods with my knockers and called
1:04:01
Speaker 1: a tail fan. Do you remember that? I glassed up
1:04:03
Speaker 1: a tail fan seventy five yards through the woods and
1:04:07
Speaker 1: we hit the deck and started calling. And I don't
1:04:09
Speaker 1: know how long it took before that thing finally walked over.
1:04:12
Speaker 1: Long time, never repeat. Right at the end, like he
1:04:17
Speaker 1: had almost a death gobble. He sensed the end was
1:04:24
Speaker 1: near all of a sudden and gobbled, yea death gobble
1:04:29
Speaker 1: that you guys were saying that that's unique somewhat unique
1:04:32
Speaker 1: to the Easterns, the that they don't gobble as as
1:04:36
Speaker 1: frequently the reputation of Easterns because they're more pressured the
1:04:41
Speaker 1: reputations that are they're less vocal than than than the other.
1:04:48
Speaker 1: So yeah, so wild turkeys, all wild turkeys are wild turkeys.
1:04:51
Speaker 1: If he has geneticists they didn't really like believe in
1:04:54
Speaker 1: the taxonomy so much. Some don't. But you have Eastern
1:04:57
Speaker 1: wild turkeys, which are you know, east of the Mississippi,
1:05:02
Speaker 1: but there are eastern western Mississippi. But just a way
1:05:04
Speaker 1: of thinking about this, Easterns lived east of the Mississippi
1:05:09
Speaker 1: and down halfway down the Florida Peninsula from about Lake
1:05:14
Speaker 1: Okeechobee south down the Florida Peninsula, you have the Osceola
1:05:21
Speaker 1: wild turkey. So you have the Eastern wild turkey, which
1:05:23
Speaker 1: has an enormous range um the Osceola and South Florida.
1:05:32
Speaker 1: And then you have Rio's like Rio Grands, which used
1:05:36
Speaker 1: to hang out around areas of Texas, Oklahoma. And you
1:05:42
Speaker 1: had the Miriams, which you had New Mexico up in
1:05:46
Speaker 1: the southern Colorado. And then you have the Goulds, which
1:05:52
Speaker 1: was the sky Island mountain ranges of Arizona, southwestern New Mexico,
1:06:00
Speaker 1: and then the Sierra Madre and other areas of North Mexico. Now, I,
1:06:06
Speaker 1: unlike my friends here, I am a a turkey Grand
1:06:11
Speaker 1: slam holder, which means which means, which means that I
1:06:20
Speaker 1: have harvested all of these turkeys I'm discussing now. What
1:06:23
Speaker 1: what separates me from a world slam holder is that
1:06:27
Speaker 1: there is a bird, another type of altogether different, like
1:06:33
Speaker 1: a different, altogether different species called the oscillated turkey of
1:06:38
Speaker 1: the tamp Peninsula done in the Guatemalia, Guatemala. I think
1:06:43
Speaker 1: there's something o Bolivia that's the oscillated turkey. It's like
1:06:46
Speaker 1: a souped up turkey, cross between a turkey and a peacock,
1:06:50
Speaker 1: not really, but resemble. I've never I've never tangled with
1:06:55
Speaker 1: the oscillated. Are all those different types of turkeys those
1:07:03
Speaker 1: areas I was just given where they're from. Now it's
1:07:06
Speaker 1: a Now it's a mess because what happened was those
1:07:12
Speaker 1: are their their native range. That's their native range. So
1:07:17
Speaker 1: if you live in California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, in
1:07:27
Speaker 1: the shipload other states, you do not live in native
1:07:30
Speaker 1: Turkey Country. If you live in Maine, you probably you
1:07:33
Speaker 1: might not live in Native Turkey Country. At the time
1:07:37
Speaker 1: of European contact, there were turkeys and thirty nine states.
1:07:42
Speaker 1: After all, the market hunters got done with them. By
1:07:45
Speaker 1: like the early nine hundreds, you had turkeys left in
1:07:47
Speaker 1: nineteen states, and the holdouts in those states lived in
1:07:53
Speaker 1: the remotest, nastiest, swampiest backwater spots. They were like survivors, holdouts.
1:08:03
Speaker 1: Then in camp largely the work of I mean, you know,
1:08:08
Speaker 1: when you say something like this, you're never like someone's
1:08:10
Speaker 1: gonna get pissed. But largely through the work of the
1:08:13
Speaker 1: National Wild Turkey Federation in in in coordination with many
1:08:20
Speaker 1: rod and gun clubs and and state phishing game agencies
1:08:23
Speaker 1: and all that kinds of like, like the Turkey Federation
1:08:25
Speaker 1: can't act unilaterally like but they provided money and expertise
1:08:30
Speaker 1: and know how, and in conjunction with state phishing game agencies,
1:08:34
Speaker 1: began first putting turkeys back where they belonged, so filling
1:08:39
Speaker 1: out Native Turkey ground. Then they took it a step
1:08:42
Speaker 1: further and put turkeys and play introduced. So they did
1:08:45
Speaker 1: all their reintroductions and got a lot of the puzzle
1:08:49
Speaker 1: put back the way it was supposed to be, and
1:08:51
Speaker 1: then kept going and started putting turkeys. But they had
1:08:55
Speaker 1: never before been hm. So now you have turkey seasons
1:08:59
Speaker 1: and forty nine states. The only state that doesn't have
1:09:02
Speaker 1: a turkey season is Alaska, and we have it on
1:09:04
Speaker 1: pretty good authority that there are some feral turkeys running
1:09:08
Speaker 1: around the Kenai Peninsula, So someday you might have a
1:09:10
Speaker 1: turkey season in Alaska. So when they were doing these
1:09:13
Speaker 1: reintroductions or introductions, they would experiment like I know that
1:09:17
Speaker 1: they tried Rio's. Know that they tried Miriams, like up
1:09:22
Speaker 1: around Hell's Canyon and they didn't take, but Rio's took there.
1:09:29
Speaker 1: So they would do a little bit of messing around
1:09:31
Speaker 1: and in some areas became like these like hybridization areas,
1:09:35
Speaker 1: where now it's a total mess. You'll have guys say
1:09:36
Speaker 1: like I have a farm in Nebraska and on my farm,
1:09:39
Speaker 1: I have Easterns your Miriams, and it's like they're they're
1:09:43
Speaker 1: it's just like a big interbreeding mess. There are some
1:09:46
Speaker 1: morphological traits you can look at and be like, yes,
1:09:48
Speaker 1: this turkey is you know, has some traits of X.
1:09:52
Speaker 1: But it's a mess now they're all mixed up. When
1:09:55
Speaker 1: you hunt the i A corridor, they're along the um
1:09:58
Speaker 1: what is that river there in Nebraska? Is that this
1:10:02
Speaker 1: South Platt? Yeah? Yeah, um, you know Austin. Like two
1:10:07
Speaker 1: birds will get killed and you bring them together and
1:10:09
Speaker 1: one is the sky of super you know, buffed out
1:10:12
Speaker 1: white tail fan and the one next to its copper brown.
1:10:17
Speaker 1: So one of the ways that's a regular Joe Schmo
1:10:19
Speaker 1: can tell all the subspecies of part is. Some people
1:10:23
Speaker 1: say they're not actually subspecies, but the different varieties or
1:10:26
Speaker 1: let's just say subspecies is by looking at the tail,
1:10:29
Speaker 1: the coloration on the back. Um my theory and I've
1:10:34
Speaker 1: checked this out with biologists think it's not that bad.
1:10:37
Speaker 1: Is that the hotter the area, the more dry and
1:10:41
Speaker 1: hot the area, the more light colored they have on
1:10:46
Speaker 1: their back. I think it has to do with heat
1:10:48
Speaker 1: dissipation and heat retention. The same way you don't run
1:10:52
Speaker 1: black ang is cattle in northern Mexico they die baked
1:11:00
Speaker 1: to you know where that doesn't hold true, is uh
1:11:06
Speaker 1: like Texas and Florida. Well no, because look at the ghouls.
1:11:11
Speaker 1: He's got like more white that he but he's not
1:11:15
Speaker 1: in Texas and Florida, he's over in but in Texas,
1:11:17
Speaker 1: Miriams and Rio's have a lighter colored back in the eastern,
1:11:22
Speaker 1: more intense sun. Well, I feel like is the rio
1:11:26
Speaker 1: is he lighter colored in the eastern not by much
1:11:29
Speaker 1: a little bit? All right, Well then if the Florida Okay,
1:11:35
Speaker 1: so it's not it's not seamless. But Bergman's principle, right,
1:11:40
Speaker 1: Bergman's principle as if you look at a mammal's range,
1:11:44
Speaker 1: mammals the as as they go north and latitude. The
1:11:51
Speaker 1: largest specimens of a species in the mammal world, the
1:11:54
Speaker 1: largest specimens are at the north end of the range.
1:11:57
Speaker 1: But some animals fall outside of Bergman's rule, like, for instance,
1:12:00
Speaker 1: white tails definitely do not, but mule deer fall outside
1:12:03
Speaker 1: of Bergman's principle. So you can have I could call
1:12:06
Speaker 1: this the Ranella principle, okay, and it can have an exception, right,
1:12:12
Speaker 1: Just like when you put mammals on islands, they tend
1:12:16
Speaker 1: to become diminutive, when you put reptiles on islands, they
1:12:21
Speaker 1: tend to become larger. And your pipe and smoking. So
1:12:28
Speaker 1: I have a question about all that, um, please, So
1:12:32
Speaker 1: you're talking about this big introduction and introduction. So, uh,
1:12:41
Speaker 1: how long ago did all this work happen? Because I
1:12:43
Speaker 1: know in this area when I was a kid, Uh,
1:12:47
Speaker 1: there were not turkeys here in the seventies. And I
1:12:50
Speaker 1: was gone for a while, and then I came back
1:12:53
Speaker 1: and this turkey flew in front of me as I
1:12:54
Speaker 1: was coming down the ridge row, and I thought, you
1:12:56
Speaker 1: thought the Russians were here? What the hell is that? Yeah,
1:12:58
Speaker 1: it's a red dawn. And then I left again for
1:13:01
Speaker 1: five or six years, and I came back and everybody
1:13:03
Speaker 1: was turkey home. I left Michigan right before turkeys began.
1:13:08
Speaker 1: Like when I moved away, it was just becoming a
1:13:11
Speaker 1: thing you could go up by, like new Ago and
1:13:13
Speaker 1: maybe like draw a turkey tag. And I moved to
1:13:16
Speaker 1: Montana and it wasn't I wasn't gone a year or two,
1:13:19
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, my old man's killing turkeys
1:13:21
Speaker 1: every spring within a couple of miles of the house.
1:13:23
Speaker 1: It just bam, it'd be like the turkey. Like the
1:13:27
Speaker 1: introduction effort. The reintroduction efforts, I think began kind of
1:13:32
Speaker 1: an earnest in the seventies. Like they got good at it.
1:13:35
Speaker 1: Because if you want to look at like the history
1:13:37
Speaker 1: of hell of this happened. They were they were screwing
1:13:40
Speaker 1: up for a long time where they thought that they
1:13:41
Speaker 1: could hatch and incubate eggs in captivity. Uh. And so
1:13:47
Speaker 1: they were putting a lot of money and a lot
1:13:49
Speaker 1: of effort into trying to pen raise birds and release them.
1:13:55
Speaker 1: And it took a long time to think in that
1:13:56
Speaker 1: that does not work. They don't take so in the
1:14:00
Speaker 1: capturing and and then the rocket propelled capture net hit
1:14:06
Speaker 1: the scene. And once the rocket propelled capture net hit
1:14:09
Speaker 1: the scene, and that had to that had to join
1:14:13
Speaker 1: up with Another thing is you had to have some
1:14:15
Speaker 1: states doing good enough on turkeys that they were willing
1:14:18
Speaker 1: to spare them. Right Like our friend Bart George who
1:14:20
Speaker 1: works on caribou in Idaho and Washington, he'd love to
1:14:25
Speaker 1: like supplement those herds. But to get the right animal,
1:14:30
Speaker 1: there aren't a lot anywhere. So you gotta go and
1:14:33
Speaker 1: be like, hey man, can I get thirty caribou off?
1:14:35
Speaker 1: And people like dude, I can't spare thirty you know,
1:14:38
Speaker 1: I can't spare thirty species. I can't spare thirty Just
1:14:42
Speaker 1: immediately to the north of you give you the bird,
1:14:45
Speaker 1: to give you the animal you want. So it's a problem.
1:14:47
Speaker 1: So you had states that were like getting a shipload
1:14:49
Speaker 1: of birds, and they were getting comfortable with their birds,
1:14:52
Speaker 1: and then they had to get over this idea that
1:14:54
Speaker 1: you could just incubate eggs and hatch them in captivity
1:14:56
Speaker 1: and get them up to like keep her size and
1:15:00
Speaker 1: them loose because they don't live. They're not they're not
1:15:02
Speaker 1: paranoid enough. So once they figured out that you go
1:15:05
Speaker 1: and get captured with rocket rocket nets, you captured real
1:15:09
Speaker 1: birds and put them on the ground, and then it
1:15:12
Speaker 1: just took off and they I mean it took off
1:15:15
Speaker 1: and over the course of a couple of decades they
1:15:17
Speaker 1: filled the country back up. I'm simple fying it. But yeah,
1:15:20
Speaker 1: Pat might know about this. For some reason, it is
1:15:23
Speaker 1: in my head that Wisconsin traded grouse to Missouri for turkeys. Yeah,
1:15:29
Speaker 1: initially they can't remember what the exact numbers are, but
1:15:31
Speaker 1: they treated with Missouri got them going. Then they got
1:15:35
Speaker 1: from smaller states to theo in Wisconsin and they also
1:15:38
Speaker 1: got um. It was it was pretty cool back in
1:15:41
Speaker 1: the eighties. They were pushing them up in the central Wisconsin.
1:15:44
Speaker 1: It's about ten years into the program, and they thought
1:15:47
Speaker 1: that area where I live around will Packaged Steven's Point,
1:15:50
Speaker 1: right across the center of the state. They thought that's
1:15:53
Speaker 1: probably the extent of the native turkey range. They didn't
1:15:56
Speaker 1: think turkeys would ever go beyond there, like the turkeys
1:15:59
Speaker 1: had ever. Yeah. Yeah, they thought that's where they had
1:16:02
Speaker 1: basically pushed up. You know, it's funny you ever look
1:16:04
Speaker 1: at the line what they think, what they think the
1:16:06
Speaker 1: where buffalo lived in Wisconsin. Yeah, get cuts like it
1:16:12
Speaker 1: ascends and like goes. It's a line that goes like
1:16:17
Speaker 1: at an upward, upward angle, ascending northwest through the middle
1:16:21
Speaker 1: of Wisconsin. When they draw out where buffalo probably lived
1:16:25
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, it probably probably wasn't a whole lot different
1:16:27
Speaker 1: from the turkey. What they thought open open country and
1:16:31
Speaker 1: the grasslands. Yea. You know, they came up in that
1:16:33
Speaker 1: central Wisconsin here that has it's hills aren't like yours,
1:16:37
Speaker 1: but they're they're hills and it's a lot of oak ridges,
1:16:39
Speaker 1: and they thought they should do fine here, and they
1:16:41
Speaker 1: did well. Then the next thing, you know, you know,
1:16:43
Speaker 1: you can go up for a deer hunt up in
1:16:45
Speaker 1: Aston Colony, just Salted Lake Superior, and there are decent
1:16:49
Speaker 1: turkey flocks up there. Because they got because there's eggs.
1:16:52
Speaker 1: They lived way beyond what any biologist thought was possible
1:16:55
Speaker 1: as far as extending the range and there, and the
1:16:57
Speaker 1: biologists maybe thought that because of winter conditions and stuff
1:17:01
Speaker 1: as opposed to and what allowed them to be there
1:17:04
Speaker 1: is because of the egg field. Yeah, I think that
1:17:06
Speaker 1: we rewrote the like there's winners, Like there's things that
1:17:09
Speaker 1: win from people and things that lose from people. Right,
1:17:13
Speaker 1: wolves are losers from people, white tail deer, turks, crows,
1:17:20
Speaker 1: Canada geese, European starlings, snow. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, for sure,
1:17:29
Speaker 1: um our people are winners and turkeys were big ass winners.
1:17:36
Speaker 1: Turkey seasons in Hawaii. I saw turkeys in Hawaii. I
1:17:40
Speaker 1: was hunting a different non native at the time, but
1:17:42
Speaker 1: ran into that non native hunting up there. Why is
1:17:48
Speaker 1: the one that that one that you don't have for
1:17:50
Speaker 1: the world, Why is that counted in with the North
1:17:57
Speaker 1: American ones in there? Because there's other gotta be other turkeys.
1:18:02
Speaker 1: What do you mean this guy and other no another
1:18:04
Speaker 1: countries regions and stuff. Yeah, well yeah, like like no
1:18:09
Speaker 1: guy ona, like those those birds, wands kwans aren't turkeys dirt, No,
1:18:15
Speaker 1: But actually I shouldn't go down retract my collections still
1:18:22
Speaker 1: got that good solid be over there. Though. Yeah, we're
1:18:25
Speaker 1: start a book series like Dirt on Like they'll be like, not,
1:18:29
Speaker 1: We're not gonna do dirt photography because that'd be a
1:18:31
Speaker 1: boring book because he'd be like, here's like you take
1:18:32
Speaker 1: a picture right every We'd be like, yeah, that's all
1:18:35
Speaker 1: really good cutting edge information give there. But what I'm
1:18:39
Speaker 1: interested is dirt on ship that Dirt doesn't pay attention to,
1:18:42
Speaker 1: so like Dirt pays a lot of attention to photography.
1:18:45
Speaker 1: And I would never read a book like Dirt on
1:18:47
Speaker 1: rock climbing, right, because it'd be like, oh, the ship,
1:18:49
Speaker 1: you need to know about rock climbing, But dirt on
1:18:51
Speaker 1: ship that he has passively that Dirt has like kind
1:18:55
Speaker 1: of overheard us talking about. It'd be like drunk history,
1:19:01
Speaker 1: like Dirt, I want to do Dirt on linguistics and
1:19:05
Speaker 1: then I'm Dirt. I'm all, my it's a fox spirrel
1:19:12
Speaker 1: all right? So Doug, uh, what happened with your evening bird?
1:19:18
Speaker 1: So because here here in our more lessons about turkey,
1:19:22
Speaker 1: every one of these turkeys tells a different story. So
1:19:28
Speaker 1: Joanna says, I think we should go back up there,
1:19:32
Speaker 1: get ourselves a little nap. Who go up there about
1:19:34
Speaker 1: five o'clock, We'll get ourselves a little nap. And he said,
1:19:38
Speaker 1: turkeys creatures a habit. We didn't mess up that bird
1:19:41
Speaker 1: in the morning. That the big tom. Let's go back
1:19:44
Speaker 1: up there. I'll bet he's gonna come back to that
1:19:46
Speaker 1: area to roost. You had a feeling because they do
1:19:50
Speaker 1: not They do not have roost fidelity. It used to
1:19:54
Speaker 1: be believed. People used to believe they had more fidelity
1:19:57
Speaker 1: to their roosting area than they do. And I pat,
1:20:01
Speaker 1: you're not. You had you know what you're talking about.
1:20:04
Speaker 1: Now that they put little trackers on him, a little
1:20:06
Speaker 1: track and GPS devices, those sons of bitches unpredictable. Yeah,
1:20:11
Speaker 1: you'll think like, oh, he's always roost there, but it
1:20:13
Speaker 1: might be different turkeys and roosting he's off here was
1:20:16
Speaker 1: they so here? Here was my theory one Janni as
1:20:21
Speaker 1: he killed the biggest turkey ever killed on this far
1:20:24
Speaker 1: What three years ago? Was that? Two years ago? Man?
1:20:30
Speaker 1: That was a big bird. All right, I think it
1:20:33
Speaker 1: wasn't on a certified scale like okay, but it's not
1:20:36
Speaker 1: like he was out like judging. It's like it's like, okay,
1:20:40
Speaker 1: but that was but give him any that doesn't give
1:20:43
Speaker 1: him any credibility and it doesn't like make me think like, oh,
1:20:45
Speaker 1: listen to him. It's like, that's the one that happened
1:20:47
Speaker 1: to show up, like if a dude, no, no, no, no,
1:20:49
Speaker 1: he hunted that bird and killed it and that was
1:20:52
Speaker 1: the one spurred monster bird. Okay, So having killed the
1:20:56
Speaker 1: one s bird monster bird, you knew that you should
1:20:59
Speaker 1: listen to him. Three other hunters had been hunting him
1:21:01
Speaker 1: that spring, and I came in and he could not
1:21:05
Speaker 1: resist anyway. And it was up in that area happened
1:21:12
Speaker 1: napping with you there you go. So we go up there,
1:21:15
Speaker 1: and you know, I think, well, I couldn't believe whether
1:21:20
Speaker 1: that is true or not, but my thought was, well,
1:21:23
Speaker 1: the conditions are exactly the same this afternoon as they
1:21:26
Speaker 1: were the afternoon, and he had and he hadn't been
1:21:29
Speaker 1: muffed with. So let's you know, he says, let's go
1:21:31
Speaker 1: back up there, and I'm all right. So we go
1:21:34
Speaker 1: up to those pines and we cut through the middle
1:21:36
Speaker 1: of them and we sat up within twenty yards where
1:21:40
Speaker 1: I killed the one in the morning. Yeah, but see
1:21:43
Speaker 1: we just so now you gotta explained people, because you
1:21:45
Speaker 1: just said he had muffed with he was off. He
1:21:47
Speaker 1: was already gone, he was off doing other Turkey activities.
1:21:51
Speaker 1: So you had been in there shooting and raising Holy Mayhem,
1:21:54
Speaker 1: but he wasn't there for that. Yeah, So like in
1:21:58
Speaker 1: the morning, you could go away in the morning from
1:22:00
Speaker 1: your house and have no idea that anything happened when
1:22:02
Speaker 1: I came whatever the maleman or the milkman or something,
1:22:05
Speaker 1: and then you come back later you didn't know any
1:22:07
Speaker 1: that happened. The pool that you don't own got cleaned,
1:22:14
Speaker 1: So so there you are. So anyway, we decided to
1:22:17
Speaker 1: go back to the very similar spot and there you
1:22:22
Speaker 1: can see the feathers on the ground from the one
1:22:24
Speaker 1: that I shot in the morning in the mid morning,
1:22:26
Speaker 1: after the big time had already gone. And uh so
1:22:32
Speaker 1: we set up fairly far apart again, and then we
1:22:37
Speaker 1: had the discussion about not shooting under the pine trees again,
1:22:40
Speaker 1: and uh I sat down, but Johnny said, let's make
1:22:44
Speaker 1: sure we get an hour of sleep. Now. It's a
1:22:46
Speaker 1: good time to get a nap because sometimes that will
1:22:48
Speaker 1: draw him in well in deer hunting, it does, it
1:22:52
Speaker 1: seems too for me. But anyway, so it's so important, though,
1:22:55
Speaker 1: I gotta interrupt you your brother. I was hunting with
1:22:58
Speaker 1: Steve's brother Matt Ronella for Opener in Montana, and he
1:23:02
Speaker 1: forced a nap upon us in pretty shitty conditions. But
1:23:06
Speaker 1: when he awoke, he said, man, the world is twice
1:23:11
Speaker 1: as crisp and clear as it was an hour ago.
1:23:15
Speaker 1: And that's a very good way to put it, because
1:23:17
Speaker 1: you just get like, there's certain spring turkey anytime you're hunting,
1:23:22
Speaker 1: like any hunting you do, that's in proximity to the
1:23:25
Speaker 1: summer solstice. So now you're into May. Right, It's like
1:23:28
Speaker 1: the days are too long. If you go caribou hunting
1:23:33
Speaker 1: in August and you're gonna hunt from the time it
1:23:35
Speaker 1: gets light to the time it gets dark, you're not
1:23:38
Speaker 1: gonna not hunt. So you're gonna do that for seven days,
1:23:42
Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day for seven days. It cannot
1:23:44
Speaker 1: be done. You have to A turkey hunter has to
1:23:49
Speaker 1: take a nap if he's pounding it. Now, some states
1:23:52
Speaker 1: are more humane, like California, they gotta cut off you
1:23:56
Speaker 1: can just Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah, So that's like a gesture
1:24:02
Speaker 1: towards humanity. They probably have too many people getting too
1:24:06
Speaker 1: exhausted and committing crimes and suicides and whatnot. And they
1:24:10
Speaker 1: realize these people are too tired. So we get up there.
1:24:14
Speaker 1: You are, there, you are, So we get up there.
1:24:19
Speaker 1: We have our little little chat and everything, and and
1:24:23
Speaker 1: I couldn't fall asleep right away, but I noticed that
1:24:26
Speaker 1: Yanni called a little bit, and then it was just
1:24:29
Speaker 1: quiet over there. So I kind of pulled some pine
1:24:33
Speaker 1: needles up and kind of this a little soft thing.
1:24:36
Speaker 1: And I wasn't just leading up against a tree sleep.
1:24:38
Speaker 1: And I laid down on the ground and curled up
1:24:40
Speaker 1: and went to sleep. And uh, when I woke up,
1:24:45
Speaker 1: the world was crisp and new, and I had pine
1:24:48
Speaker 1: needles in my mouth. And then I sat up and Yanni,
1:24:54
Speaker 1: I hear, Yanni. You know a little call over there? Yep,
1:24:59
Speaker 1: I no way more subtle than that. Yanni's way more
1:25:03
Speaker 1: subtled than that. That was. That was more like it. Yeah,
1:25:08
Speaker 1: And oh, Yanni's up. I'd better start paying attention. Little
1:25:13
Speaker 1: did I know that he had crawled over to talk
1:25:14
Speaker 1: to me sometime before that, but saw me curled up
1:25:18
Speaker 1: on the ground and didn't have the heart to wake
1:25:20
Speaker 1: me up from my nap. So and then we hear
1:25:24
Speaker 1: a gobble to the south of us and quite a
1:25:27
Speaker 1: ways away, and he calls and we hear the gobble again,
1:25:31
Speaker 1: and the gobbles getting closer, and they kept moving across
1:25:34
Speaker 1: the ridge. I saw them for the first time in
1:25:38
Speaker 1: the same place we saw the Jake's in the morning,
1:25:40
Speaker 1: and they got to that point when I say they
1:25:42
Speaker 1: there were two gobblers, but he picked up a friend. Well,
1:25:46
Speaker 1: we wondered about that because in the morning we thought
1:25:48
Speaker 1: there might be two in the tree. Probably yeah and uh.
1:25:54
Speaker 1: And were they returning to that tree or did they
1:25:56
Speaker 1: come in because Yanni had called him chick, I don't know,
1:26:00
Speaker 1: whatever he wants to do, whatever he wants to do,
1:26:04
Speaker 1: just what they were coming back to that roostery. It
1:26:11
Speaker 1: influenced their thinking. So we're all set up. Why do
1:26:15
Speaker 1: you not why did you not even want to respond
1:26:17
Speaker 1: to that? Well that I that's what Yanni thought, So
1:26:21
Speaker 1: that was that was the reason for going there. So
1:26:24
Speaker 1: I'm I'm convinced to that as well. So I see
1:26:28
Speaker 1: him coming across and it was wasn't there were two
1:26:29
Speaker 1: hundred yards away, and there wasn't any question that we
1:26:31
Speaker 1: had two times coming at us, and that they were
1:26:33
Speaker 1: big birds, and they were one of them was gobbling,
1:26:36
Speaker 1: and one of them was walking, and every time the
1:26:39
Speaker 1: one would then one would display and the other one
1:26:42
Speaker 1: would walk ahead of him, and then he dropped his
1:26:44
Speaker 1: display and then catch up with him, and then he gobbled,
1:26:46
Speaker 1: and they were kept doing this thing like not letting
1:26:49
Speaker 1: ten seconds go by between. Yeah, it's interesting to do that,
1:26:52
Speaker 1: Like you're saying, you told me that too, that that
1:26:55
Speaker 1: he would stop and strut in the but but he
1:26:58
Speaker 1: didn't want his body to get ahead, Like it's like
1:27:00
Speaker 1: I don't want you pouring the coals to write, Well,
1:27:03
Speaker 1: I'm doing all the worst hen and I'm back here strutting.
1:27:06
Speaker 1: So it's like I want to strut, but I don't
1:27:07
Speaker 1: want to strut so bad that you're like running point
1:27:11
Speaker 1: and like encountering all kind of adventures and whatnot. Well
1:27:13
Speaker 1: I'm back here all puffed up, well cooler, and heck
1:27:16
Speaker 1: to see him come from two yards, like I think
1:27:17
Speaker 1: it helps. I mean a lot of times with animals
1:27:20
Speaker 1: you don't want multiples because they're just more eyes, more noses,
1:27:24
Speaker 1: more chances of getting busted. But when you have two
1:27:26
Speaker 1: golllers coming in and they're like not only are they
1:27:30
Speaker 1: like in love and and and sick, for what you're
1:27:32
Speaker 1: offering them. But then they're like, I gotta beat my
1:27:34
Speaker 1: buddy there. I'm going over there. I'm going, I'm going.
1:27:38
Speaker 1: That's what they're going, that's what they're actually saying. So
1:27:45
Speaker 1: they drop down into this ditch and come up out
1:27:47
Speaker 1: of there, and you know, it's just so the way
1:27:49
Speaker 1: they're waddling up up through there, and I'm I'm ready,
1:27:53
Speaker 1: and I've got a little bit of a screen in
1:27:54
Speaker 1: front of me, and I'm I'm set, and I'm thinking, well,
1:27:58
Speaker 1: the way this is going, they're gonna come one behind
1:28:00
Speaker 1: the other, I'm gonna shoot and possibly killing both. So
1:28:04
Speaker 1: you know what's going to happen. And they get within
1:28:06
Speaker 1: about fifty yards and they slowed down, and the sun
1:28:12
Speaker 1: is kind of in my face, and I have glasses
1:28:15
Speaker 1: and even though i have the net down, face mask net,
1:28:19
Speaker 1: face mask net, and I've got I don't have one
1:28:21
Speaker 1: of those fancy turkey hunting shotguns with the camo on
1:28:25
Speaker 1: it and stuff. I've just got a you know, farm boy,
1:28:28
Speaker 1: farm boy eight. And so I'm ready. I mean, I'm
1:28:35
Speaker 1: not moving, and nothing's happening. And then they still sort
1:28:38
Speaker 1: of stopped. They got Leary Lear, what do you think,
1:28:43
Speaker 1: what do you think they were suspicious of? Because you
1:28:47
Speaker 1: guys had like one of two things. It was either
1:28:50
Speaker 1: Doug or the decoys. Did you fast? I'm not saying
1:28:53
Speaker 1: it was Doug. I'm just I don't think it was.
1:28:55
Speaker 1: They could have been anything else. You feel like you
1:28:57
Speaker 1: did a fast movement. No, I felt like I was
1:28:59
Speaker 1: very still. And I mean when I saw him coming,
1:29:03
Speaker 1: I got my I dug my heel into the ground,
1:29:05
Speaker 1: got my knee up with the shotgun on it. I
1:29:07
Speaker 1: was ready for they were gonna walk right into me.
1:29:09
Speaker 1: I'll say one thing at Turkey hates movement. I don't
1:29:14
Speaker 1: think I moved, and I had built a little screen
1:29:18
Speaker 1: I had. I was set up for accusing moving. Yeah,
1:29:22
Speaker 1: decoys are not fool proof. They can make it nervous.
1:29:26
Speaker 1: They could have seen something, well, the white tail feathers
1:29:29
Speaker 1: of some bit and travel here, come all the way
1:29:37
Speaker 1: out here from Montandard Messadar women. So I arranged it
1:29:44
Speaker 1: after the fact. But I guessed at that point that
1:29:47
Speaker 1: to that to be about forty yards, and I thought
1:29:51
Speaker 1: they're gonna keep coming and I'm gonna wait until they
1:29:53
Speaker 1: get right in front of me. And they stopped at
1:29:55
Speaker 1: forty yards and they took this began to take this
1:29:57
Speaker 1: little turn down into the woods and the first one
1:30:00
Speaker 1: they were done. They're well, no, because they were doing
1:30:03
Speaker 1: kind of following the same route that uh, Jake's had
1:30:07
Speaker 1: earlier of the one that I shot, although I didn't
1:30:09
Speaker 1: know they had that Jake's had followed that route where
1:30:11
Speaker 1: they well, it makes sense. They Jakes were down there
1:30:14
Speaker 1: in the woods when we saw him and around they can.
1:30:16
Speaker 1: We actually saw the Jakes twice do that same move.
1:30:20
Speaker 1: So for a second, I thought I should wait because
1:30:25
Speaker 1: they're going to come out into those decoys right in
1:30:27
Speaker 1: front of Janni and he's been well, he's the world's
1:30:30
Speaker 1: most affable man, and I just have this. Uh, it's
1:30:34
Speaker 1: his turn because I shot one earlier. For a second,
1:30:38
Speaker 1: there's all that stuff went through my head in one second,
1:30:40
Speaker 1: then went I thought about him for that split second,
1:30:45
Speaker 1: disregarded those thoughts. Well, that one he had stuck his
1:30:48
Speaker 1: head up. So I shot, and he rolled and then
1:30:51
Speaker 1: he got up and he ran into the was running
1:30:54
Speaker 1: into the pine. So I shot again, and then I
1:30:57
Speaker 1: got up and uh made a pretty quick sprint. It
1:31:02
Speaker 1: was not the word that I would use, but I
1:31:06
Speaker 1: peeked around the corner and I thought there was an
1:31:09
Speaker 1: Olympic sprint going on who same bolt was out in front.
1:31:12
Speaker 1: Doug was right behind him. So I tear down to
1:31:15
Speaker 1: where that turkey went up into the trees and there
1:31:18
Speaker 1: it's a pine plantation, so there's rose, you know, and
1:31:21
Speaker 1: I can see that bird up there. So and now
1:31:23
Speaker 1: he's further so I raised the shotgun up a little
1:31:26
Speaker 1: bit further and I shoot again, and I only had
1:31:28
Speaker 1: three shells in the gun. I tried, well, I mean,
1:31:33
Speaker 1: I thought you guys were in a gunfight with a
1:31:34
Speaker 1: neighboring land so okay, I actually grabbed dirt, grabbed shells,
1:31:41
Speaker 1: started going up there because I was out and likes,
1:31:46
Speaker 1: we need some help up here. So now I've shot
1:31:49
Speaker 1: three times. And when I shot at the bird the
1:31:51
Speaker 1: three times, the third time he disappeared into that into
1:31:55
Speaker 1: the next strip. But I'm out of my My gun
1:31:58
Speaker 1: is empty. So I reached the vest and I'm trying
1:32:01
Speaker 1: to jam shells into the thing, and you know, you're
1:32:04
Speaker 1: I was really excited. I mean, he was a big bird,
1:32:06
Speaker 1: he you know, So I jammed shells in and I'm
1:32:09
Speaker 1: you know, realizing two things that I think this bird
1:32:13
Speaker 1: just got away and I may have pulled my hamstring,
1:32:17
Speaker 1: and so I'm starting to limp a little bit, and
1:32:21
Speaker 1: I look up the hill and I kind of go
1:32:22
Speaker 1: back and forth a little bit, looking up the different
1:32:24
Speaker 1: priine rows, and now I see this bird and he's
1:32:27
Speaker 1: heading for the the south west corner of the of
1:32:31
Speaker 1: the pines. He was thinking that, I'm gonna head towards
1:32:34
Speaker 1: south west corner. He was thinking I'm gonna get out
1:32:37
Speaker 1: of here. But he was limping two so he was
1:32:39
Speaker 1: kind of he wasn't He was not at his best,
1:32:42
Speaker 1: I can tell you that. And so I made my
1:32:46
Speaker 1: way over a couple of more rows and moved up
1:32:48
Speaker 1: the hill closer to where he was, and it was
1:32:50
Speaker 1: almost up that's fourteen acres and he was almost to
1:32:53
Speaker 1: the top of that fourteen acres. And then when he
1:32:56
Speaker 1: stepped out, I shot him and blouch and finished him.
1:33:00
Speaker 1: When I cleaned that bird, I think I hit him
1:33:01
Speaker 1: all four times, just not very well. Any of those times. Well,
1:33:06
Speaker 1: the last time I hit him good enough, but but yeah,
1:33:09
Speaker 1: that was It sounds bad. You know, some people might
1:33:12
Speaker 1: be thinking, man, chasing after a bird, Yeah, I'm thinking
1:33:17
Speaker 1: that when it happens, you don't always make the perfect shot,
1:33:21
Speaker 1: and when a turkey gets back up and starts going,
1:33:25
Speaker 1: you have to just do whatever it takes. At that point,
1:33:28
Speaker 1: they don't like, yeah you gotta go, yeah, yeah, go
1:33:31
Speaker 1: after you listen, if everyone was super concerned about the
1:33:34
Speaker 1: well being of the turkey, you wouldn't shoot at in
1:33:36
Speaker 1: the first place. So it's like it's like at that point, yeah,
1:33:41
Speaker 1: you're gonna like let it run off, crippled up. I
1:33:44
Speaker 1: also had that one second when I shot, because I've
1:33:48
Speaker 1: never had one run off before. When he rolled, I
1:33:50
Speaker 1: had that second, that second him and then ship he's running. Dude,
1:33:56
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a seasoned turkey hunter's got that second
1:33:59
Speaker 1: shell it right. Yeah, but like I I catch myself.
1:34:02
Speaker 1: They go down so dramatically. Did I catch myself now?
1:34:06
Speaker 1: And then you know, like not doing it. But I've
1:34:10
Speaker 1: hunted turkeys with a lot of guys. They they shoot
1:34:14
Speaker 1: and they're racking that second round and they're already up
1:34:17
Speaker 1: and walking before the turkeys had even hits the ground.
1:34:21
Speaker 1: The storm net turkey because they've lived through that. You
1:34:25
Speaker 1: rolled it. And and years ago one of the first
1:34:28
Speaker 1: turkey hunts I went on, We're hunting on a very
1:34:30
Speaker 1: steep mountain, side, and I pasted a turkey, called in
1:34:34
Speaker 1: with a box call shot it. It went down. We're
1:34:38
Speaker 1: all excited because we're just trying to figure out turkey
1:34:40
Speaker 1: hunt and actually called into turkey turned back just in
1:34:43
Speaker 1: time to watch that turkey set its wings and take off,
1:34:46
Speaker 1: never to be seen again. Well, I racked another show,
1:34:50
Speaker 1: all right, from now on when I shoot turkey watching
1:34:54
Speaker 1: the turkey, Well, I mean that's what I did, you know,
1:34:58
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just hunting, you know everything, right, But yeah,
1:35:01
Speaker 1: that's how I am. I mean I touched that trigger
1:35:03
Speaker 1: and aside from making a bad shot and lifting your
1:35:06
Speaker 1: head off the gun too quickly, but yeah, as soon
1:35:09
Speaker 1: as I know I've hit him, I mean I'm out
1:35:11
Speaker 1: of that seat and running towards him. Yeah. I don't
1:35:15
Speaker 1: get up as quickly as you guys do though, either.
1:35:18
Speaker 1: I mean, so I kind of got to get to
1:35:19
Speaker 1: my knee and that up. No, it depends on because
1:35:21
Speaker 1: of the turkey. Like the jake got shot today, it
1:35:24
Speaker 1: was close. Oh he didn't have a chance here. Well no,
1:35:26
Speaker 1: I mean besides that, like I don't need to get
1:35:28
Speaker 1: up and run over there. Yeah I could from a
1:35:30
Speaker 1: seated position. He he's got twenty five yards to cover
1:35:34
Speaker 1: before he's out of range. So if I just right,
1:35:38
Speaker 1: I don't need to like he can stand up, like
1:35:40
Speaker 1: he stands up. I have seconds of him, you know well,
1:35:44
Speaker 1: And so I had that sort of like the second
1:35:48
Speaker 1: of well, maybe I'll let him go to Ni. I
1:35:50
Speaker 1: had that second of oh I got him. But when
1:35:52
Speaker 1: I'm about the next shelling and I'm I'm getting up
1:35:55
Speaker 1: and it happened that fast where he's going into the tree,
1:35:59
Speaker 1: you know, he's going into the pintes. He was like,
1:36:01
Speaker 1: but I had shot him again, as he had a
1:36:03
Speaker 1: happy and it had a happy end, not for him,
1:36:06
Speaker 1: for you, for dr No. Doug was so impressed. He said,
1:36:11
Speaker 1: from now on, if Yanni told him if we're going
1:36:16
Speaker 1: out naked, Doug would say, hold on a minute. While
1:36:20
Speaker 1: I stripped out, He's like, when the eagle tells me
1:36:25
Speaker 1: to do something, I do it. Well, that's that I
1:36:30
Speaker 1: did say that, and which makes me which makes me
1:36:35
Speaker 1: a tad You wonder if I want to see it
1:36:37
Speaker 1: makes me a little jealous. It makes me a little jealous. Um.
1:36:41
Speaker 1: So the last turcue we have to talk about, and
1:36:45
Speaker 1: there's a this is an unfinished no matter what we
1:36:47
Speaker 1: do here, this is an unfinished story because me and Yan,
1:36:49
Speaker 1: you're heading back out into the woods right quick here, um,
1:36:55
Speaker 1: so who knows where it's going. But the last turcue
1:36:59
Speaker 1: we have to talk out. I went out this morning,
1:37:02
Speaker 1: so all right, Dirt, now I'm gonna try to do
1:37:05
Speaker 1: this quick. Me and Dirt went out last night to
1:37:07
Speaker 1: check out a different property down the road owned by
1:37:09
Speaker 1: a friend, a family friend, not my family friend, Dugs.
1:37:14
Speaker 1: And we get out there and he's like, you know
1:37:17
Speaker 1: what I would do is I would go and take
1:37:18
Speaker 1: a look up there and and have a look sie.
1:37:21
Speaker 1: And I even kicked around, not grabbing my scatter gun
1:37:24
Speaker 1: just because we're just gonna go up and try to
1:37:25
Speaker 1: roost one. No, yeah, I'll grab a shotgun. And we
1:37:29
Speaker 1: get up to a spot and I rip out a
1:37:31
Speaker 1: power crow come and like bird gobbls not far away
1:37:38
Speaker 1: at all. So we kind of moved over a little bit,
1:37:44
Speaker 1: didn't do a taco and all that ship just got
1:37:45
Speaker 1: set up because this bird is gonna come. It's that
1:37:48
Speaker 1: time of day. And I started hand calling and he
1:37:51
Speaker 1: just starts triple gobblin. He's like shot goblin himself. Yeah,
1:37:56
Speaker 1: I thought it was just like Goblin is ass off.
1:38:00
Speaker 1: But he's got a hand with him, and they're coming
1:38:03
Speaker 1: through the woods just out of range, going down, down, down, down,
1:38:05
Speaker 1: and I can't figure out he will not peel off
1:38:07
Speaker 1: that hen And all of a sudden the hand. It's evening,
1:38:10
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the hand flies up into
1:38:12
Speaker 1: a roof tree. Oh, I was gonna ask you. It's
1:38:15
Speaker 1: a good reminder. What time did they roost? I'm very
1:38:18
Speaker 1: interested in that. Yes, s yeah, no, no, the sun
1:38:25
Speaker 1: was set, but it was so seven thirty or something. Yeah, seven.
1:38:31
Speaker 1: She flew up in a tree. But here's the thing,
1:38:34
Speaker 1: I now question what I thought. I mean, absolutely, she
1:38:38
Speaker 1: flew up in a tree, but I remember being surprised
1:38:40
Speaker 1: at how low the limb was that she landed on.
1:38:44
Speaker 1: Remember thinking like, what, what's weird that she's like the
1:38:47
Speaker 1: roose higher than that? Right? Yeah, well, I think they
1:38:49
Speaker 1: hoped limbs sometimes, so I caught. They get down and
1:38:54
Speaker 1: he's gobbling his face off, and he's full strut down
1:38:56
Speaker 1: in the woods on a steep slope which is not
1:38:58
Speaker 1: a normal like strung area, and she flies up to
1:39:02
Speaker 1: a limb a dead snag, and he's on the ground,
1:39:06
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking that now I'm wonder like is it
1:39:08
Speaker 1: possible to call a gobbler away from like a hen
1:39:12
Speaker 1: up in a tree and he just carries out and
1:39:15
Speaker 1: gobbles and gobbles and gobbles and gobbles and gobbles, and
1:39:18
Speaker 1: all of a sudden he just goes quiet, and by
1:39:19
Speaker 1: the time it's dusky, goes quiet. And then I hear
1:39:23
Speaker 1: a loud branch snap, and I felt, oh, he jumped
1:39:27
Speaker 1: into his tree. He's up there too, and they're just
1:39:30
Speaker 1: gonna work their way up into that roost. So we
1:39:33
Speaker 1: belly crawl out of there, and then we come back
1:39:36
Speaker 1: in the pre dawned darkness and get set up, not
1:39:41
Speaker 1: anywhere near them, but like up on the little ridge
1:39:43
Speaker 1: top where they might go to get set up. Morning
1:39:48
Speaker 1: comes on, start scratching out a couple of hand calls,
1:39:53
Speaker 1: and the roost, the roosting birds that were gobblin. We're
1:39:59
Speaker 1: not gobbling from that tree, So I don't know if
1:40:02
Speaker 1: we belly crawled out of there, they we bumped them well,
1:40:06
Speaker 1: But there was other other gobblers. There's four gobblers this morning. Yeah,
1:40:12
Speaker 1: but no one was gobbling from that tree from that area.
1:40:15
Speaker 1: But could have they like he said you had mentioned,
1:40:17
Speaker 1: maybe he actually peeled. That's what I think I think
1:40:20
Speaker 1: that when now when I look at it, I think
1:40:22
Speaker 1: she jumped up in that limb, and then there was
1:40:24
Speaker 1: enough disturbance with us calling him carrying on us belly
1:40:29
Speaker 1: crawling out of there. I think they still had enough daily.
1:40:32
Speaker 1: I think they moved. I think they went down to
1:40:34
Speaker 1: hop into a different roost tree further down the hill,
1:40:37
Speaker 1: or they were just absolutely dead silent this morning. So
1:40:40
Speaker 1: we're calling this morning and we're hearing goblin and they finchy.
1:40:44
Speaker 1: We can tell they kind of flew down, and then
1:40:46
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, bouch, some guy shoots right by
1:40:48
Speaker 1: us so that I could hear his bird flopping around
1:40:52
Speaker 1: on the ground. We left. Come back here and get
1:40:57
Speaker 1: Doug run around doing farm chore activities. Get him go
1:41:02
Speaker 1: up the hill, stretch out his hamstrings. He wants to
1:41:04
Speaker 1: stretch his hamstring. Walk over to a neighboring property, blow
1:41:09
Speaker 1: a power crow in my ear. Dogs here, Doug shot gobbles,
1:41:15
Speaker 1: another turkey, shot gobbles. Get all set up, start scratching
1:41:20
Speaker 1: out some hand calls, and he doesn't show up, but
1:41:23
Speaker 1: a giant package Jake shows like a bunch of them,
1:41:28
Speaker 1: and they come running in and wanting to slaughter my
1:41:30
Speaker 1: decoin I shot one, but it's incomplete story because I
1:41:36
Speaker 1: wish I had more turkey permits, because I have more
1:41:39
Speaker 1: ideas than there are tags left. But I'll say it publicly.
1:41:46
Speaker 1: You can come back. I'd like to have you come back,
1:41:49
Speaker 1: you know, because I don't want you'd be incomplete in
1:41:52
Speaker 1: your turkey hunting. Here. Will come back as long as
1:41:54
Speaker 1: Johnny comes back with you. That's the only condition. Hey, man,
1:41:59
Speaker 1: you're she only a be Dirt. Yesterday, Dirt, a chipmunk
1:42:04
Speaker 1: goes run along. Chipmunk goes run along, and there's like
1:42:08
Speaker 1: there's a squirrel and it hops up a new tree
1:42:11
Speaker 1: and I'm like, what Dirt's like? And then Dirt spreads
1:42:14
Speaker 1: his hands out like two ft apart and goes, no,
1:42:17
Speaker 1: what I saw coming was this long now? And I'm like,
1:42:22
Speaker 1: but where is it now? Because Dirt, it's five ft
1:42:25
Speaker 1: from me. Garrett recently had LASI and I'm wondering for
1:42:32
Speaker 1: some money back. Well his eyes just having adjusted, thank you.
1:42:38
Speaker 1: He wouldn't he wouldn't give up on it. I'm like, Dirt,
1:42:41
Speaker 1: that's a chipmunk. He's like, no, it must have been too.
1:42:45
Speaker 1: He like it must have been a chipmunk and a
1:42:47
Speaker 1: squirrel come running right now next to you, next to you,
1:42:52
Speaker 1: just hanging on to that farm wrestling, and he's like,
1:42:57
Speaker 1: and now only the chipmunk's here and you didn't see
1:42:59
Speaker 1: what I saw, and like, won't give it up. I
1:43:01
Speaker 1: gave it up, though fairly quick after that I did.
1:43:04
Speaker 1: I did try. It was like three tries before you
1:43:06
Speaker 1: find gis. Well, one more condition would be that that
1:43:10
Speaker 1: dirt came along with you, or was allowed to come along.
1:43:12
Speaker 1: Don't don't make it too tricky for me to ever
1:43:14
Speaker 1: fulfill the situation. I can't just come out here with
1:43:17
Speaker 1: my kids. Well, yeah, you can come out of here
1:43:19
Speaker 1: with your kids too. I was described, you know what.
1:43:21
Speaker 1: I was on the phone my boy this morning he'll
1:43:24
Speaker 1: be seven in a couple of days here and now
1:43:26
Speaker 1: was describing to him the kind of He says, was
1:43:28
Speaker 1: it in the woods or in the field? And I said, well,
1:43:33
Speaker 1: we're in an area that's sort of mixed wood lots
1:43:36
Speaker 1: and farmland, and he goes, is it like where we
1:43:38
Speaker 1: hunted with Doug? And I said it is so, so
1:43:45
Speaker 1: he remember, And I just like that. He's asking like
1:43:47
Speaker 1: those are savvy questions. It is, yeah, No, he's he's
1:43:51
Speaker 1: a hunter. He's gonna be a hunter man. He's real
1:43:52
Speaker 1: curious about animals. Um, very very curious about animals. Now, Yanni,
1:43:59
Speaker 1: were gonna go out in the woods. I have a
1:44:02
Speaker 1: hunt plan. You have your own hunt plan. Yeah, I
1:44:07
Speaker 1: think we are in agredient. Is that a word, Dirk
1:44:11
Speaker 1: and do? Is that a word? I think agreement? I
1:44:15
Speaker 1: like it. There's two kinds of Remember that there's a
1:44:19
Speaker 1: that there's a descriptive approach to language in a in
1:44:22
Speaker 1: a in a prescriptive approach to language. So some dictionaries
1:44:28
Speaker 1: are descriptive in nature that they want to capture. Oh,
1:44:33
Speaker 1: y'all need just pulled it up what website? I just
1:44:37
Speaker 1: didn't have the confidence. Yeah, sectionary dot com. Pulled up
1:44:42
Speaker 1: at a better dictionary to go to Websters pulled up
1:44:47
Speaker 1: on webster dot com. So y'any just pulled it up
1:44:50
Speaker 1: on what This is perfect because it tells what I'm saying.
1:44:53
Speaker 1: Y'alli just pulled it up on what would be known
1:44:54
Speaker 1: as a descriptive dictionary. So a descriptive dictionaries, like our
1:44:58
Speaker 1: job is to tell you how to use the language.
1:45:00
Speaker 1: Our job is to capture how the language is used.
1:45:04
Speaker 1: A prescriptive dictionary is telling you how to use the
1:45:06
Speaker 1: language so agreeance. It's like someone might say, I feel
1:45:13
Speaker 1: that it was a successful There was a successful use
1:45:17
Speaker 1: of the language. We're not we're not an agreeance. Everyone
1:45:21
Speaker 1: knew what he was talking about. It worked, he got
1:45:24
Speaker 1: his point across. That's what language is here for, is
1:45:27
Speaker 1: to facilitate communication. It's like a right. Like I teach
1:45:34
Speaker 1: my kids, I'm like, use ain't, just use it. And
1:45:38
Speaker 1: my wife has a prescriptive approach and she's like, it's
1:45:42
Speaker 1: just try to shy away from a like don't go
1:45:47
Speaker 1: out of your like contrary to what your father is
1:45:49
Speaker 1: telling you. Don't go out of your way to say ain't.
1:45:52
Speaker 1: But I like to I like that tension in the
1:45:54
Speaker 1: language of of um good word, choice and ship you
1:46:00
Speaker 1: were choice all rolled in together because it creates the
1:46:03
Speaker 1: same tension that you get when you have a modern
1:46:05
Speaker 1: home with with antlers in it. That's interesting. Yeah, it's
1:46:10
Speaker 1: all about full circle and consistency. Yeah, and I think
1:46:14
Speaker 1: you do that in your writing also. You know what
1:46:17
Speaker 1: I think about, Well, yeah, what do I like about
1:46:23
Speaker 1: my beloved friend Doug, with whom I've passed many an
1:46:25
Speaker 1: autumn day? It is such a freaking right. You know,
1:46:36
Speaker 1: I gotta finald I want to do my concluder first.
1:46:39
Speaker 1: If you like turkeys and you like turkey hunting, and
1:46:41
Speaker 1: you're curious about turkeys, you should go and join and
1:46:45
Speaker 1: lend your support to the National Wild Turkey Federation. Yeah.
1:46:49
Speaker 1: Some people might be like, oh, yeah, but they already
1:46:50
Speaker 1: did all the work because there's turkeys everywhere. But it's like,
1:46:52
Speaker 1: it's not like we're in the good old days of
1:46:56
Speaker 1: turkeys right now. But there's no real reason to think
1:46:58
Speaker 1: when you look at the EBB and flow. If there's
1:46:59
Speaker 1: a reason to think that we're going to remain in
1:47:01
Speaker 1: the good old days of turkeys, there's gonna be disease issues,
1:47:05
Speaker 1: habitat issues, legal issues right like attacks on the very
1:47:10
Speaker 1: culture of hunting. Um access issues like do you have
1:47:14
Speaker 1: a way to get on to land the shirts turkeys everywhere?
1:47:16
Speaker 1: If there's nowhere to if you can't get on the
1:47:17
Speaker 1: ground to hunt them, you got a problem. Um I
1:47:21
Speaker 1: would I always joy I am a member National Ball
1:47:25
Speaker 1: Turkey Federation. Yeah. I think right now they have a
1:47:28
Speaker 1: thing going. Uh you already are. Remember they have a
1:47:31
Speaker 1: thing called turkey Karma going. I think that's for like
1:47:34
Speaker 1: ten bucks you can buy like a turkey Karma coin
1:47:36
Speaker 1: and you get to put it on your Instagram account
1:47:38
Speaker 1: or something, but it's just you know, actually showing you're
1:47:41
Speaker 1: kicking a little money for turky. Yeah, did that ten
1:47:45
Speaker 1: box this spring? You know. No, if you're some guy
1:47:48
Speaker 1: and you've been out hunting turkeys for the last ten
1:47:49
Speaker 1: years and haven't pitched in a dime like payoff man,
1:47:54
Speaker 1: because the reason you're hunting turkeys, like most places, and
1:47:57
Speaker 1: unless you live in the swamps of Alabama or South
1:48:01
Speaker 1: Carolina or something, you're if you're hunt turkeys right now,
1:48:04
Speaker 1: you're hunting turkeys because that organization. And damn sure if
1:48:07
Speaker 1: you're hunting turkeys and one of the many many states
1:48:10
Speaker 1: and never had turkeys, If you're hunting turkeys and one
1:48:12
Speaker 1: of the eight states that now has a turkey season
1:48:15
Speaker 1: the historically had no turkeys, pay up. That's my thought.
1:48:23
Speaker 1: Doug Well, I agree with that. Uh, but if you
1:48:27
Speaker 1: hunt or live in the Kasnovia area, don't hunt turkeys.
1:48:32
Speaker 1: No hunt turkeys, and and support our little local organs, turkeys,
1:48:37
Speaker 1: turkey busters, all that bunch of good friends who are
1:48:41
Speaker 1: part of that, and we do all kinds of good
1:48:42
Speaker 1: stuff in the area trying to help turks out, not
1:48:45
Speaker 1: just turks, but just kind of helping wildlife and and
1:48:49
Speaker 1: uh we stock we're buying stock, walllightes and stuff in
1:48:52
Speaker 1: the in the lake in Kasinovia. UM do good things
1:48:56
Speaker 1: for the community and support landowners and turkeys. Went. And
1:49:00
Speaker 1: there are members who belong both the Cast Turkey Busters
1:49:03
Speaker 1: into the National Wild Turkey Federation. But so if you're in,
1:49:07
Speaker 1: if you're one of the three people in the Casanova area,
1:49:10
Speaker 1: I think we've got up to half a dozen members,
1:49:15
Speaker 1: which actually the town because they're all no there. It's
1:49:19
Speaker 1: it's a really nice group of people, some from uh
1:49:22
Speaker 1: just folks who yeah, outside of Casanova. Um and UM,
1:49:29
Speaker 1: but I know I would join a group called the
1:49:30
Speaker 1: Casanova Turkey Busters. Well, I just want to say a
1:49:35
Speaker 1: lot of good friends and and really good uh good
1:49:38
Speaker 1: times with those guys. And can you give me for
1:49:41
Speaker 1: instance of what is a thing that the kas Turkey
1:49:44
Speaker 1: Busters what would be a thing that they've done for turkeys? Uh,
1:49:50
Speaker 1: food plot installations, um specific to turkeys, you know, corn
1:49:55
Speaker 1: and sorghum and and that sort of stuff. Um. And
1:50:01
Speaker 1: encouraging landowners by uh we have a party every summer. Um.
1:50:08
Speaker 1: But encouraging landowners to allow people to access their property,
1:50:12
Speaker 1: you know, with permission. And if if that's happening, then
1:50:16
Speaker 1: we invite him to this party with a nice, really
1:50:17
Speaker 1: nice party every sun for the local landowners. Yeah, yeah,
1:50:20
Speaker 1: that's nice. Yeah, it is cass Turkey busters people. Yeah,
1:50:25
Speaker 1: if you're living Reno, join up. Pat Um. I think
1:50:30
Speaker 1: thirty bucks stuffed on the wall and here's what he
1:50:34
Speaker 1: has to say, and two turkeys and two animals too,
1:50:37
Speaker 1: prong horns. Um. The thing I think is coolest about
1:50:41
Speaker 1: turkey hunting we did it today again, was it's a
1:50:44
Speaker 1: low tension hunt compared like deer hunting. Deer hunting tends.
1:50:48
Speaker 1: I don't know who you've been hunting. Yeah, but it's
1:50:59
Speaker 1: a trick. It's it's a fun thing that hurts me
1:51:03
Speaker 1: a little bits. I think I never realized how important
1:51:06
Speaker 1: it was to have a good, good hunting partner with
1:51:07
Speaker 1: turkey hunting, because I used to always go with my
1:51:09
Speaker 1: daughter Leah when she was around, from the time she
1:51:12
Speaker 1: was about ten years old and she couldn't hunt to
1:51:15
Speaker 1: a time she went off the Navy, which was like
1:51:16
Speaker 1: twelve years later. I always had this good little partner
1:51:19
Speaker 1: and she had great she has great hearing, and my
1:51:22
Speaker 1: hearing is really off. My left ear is not very good,
1:51:25
Speaker 1: my right ears. Yeah, and so it's really cool to
1:51:29
Speaker 1: I always have this little guide with me almost and
1:51:32
Speaker 1: then um, when she went off and left, we left
1:51:34
Speaker 1: the navy, my interest in turkey hunting just really wasn't
1:51:38
Speaker 1: all that all that strong. Yeah, and I think I don't.
1:51:43
Speaker 1: I didn't have that problem with deer hunting or elk hunting.
1:51:45
Speaker 1: I still love it. I can go by myself all
1:51:48
Speaker 1: the time not think twice about the like with Yanni
1:51:51
Speaker 1: last day and a half, it was really cool again
1:51:54
Speaker 1: beer on someone that has good sharp hearing, good sharp.
1:51:59
Speaker 1: My eyesight is pretty good. But it was just reminds
1:52:02
Speaker 1: me how much fun it was to hear that gobble
1:52:05
Speaker 1: the man. Yeah, I was wondering if your daughter would
1:52:09
Speaker 1: think that she had a good hunting partner. Um. I
1:52:12
Speaker 1: actually addressed that in my my father at the bride speech,
1:52:15
Speaker 1: that she took one for the team. You know, she Lee,
1:52:18
Speaker 1: It was Lee was great that way she um, she
1:52:22
Speaker 1: talk about her like she's dead. No, well, when it
1:52:25
Speaker 1: k she joined the navy, she made she moved away,
1:52:33
Speaker 1: and no, I shouldn't talk that way. That way, but
1:52:36
Speaker 1: it has the sentimental side of me that misses that.
1:52:39
Speaker 1: And I get you. She'll come back for for deer
1:52:42
Speaker 1: hunting because that's still probably her favorite thing to do.
1:52:45
Speaker 1: But she she only has so much time left to
1:52:47
Speaker 1: do things, you know, she has she has to work
1:52:49
Speaker 1: for a living, and so she didn't gonna come back
1:52:51
Speaker 1: for the spring hunt. Like yeahest and I were walking
1:52:53
Speaker 1: on today and think what a wonderful time to be
1:52:55
Speaker 1: in the woods, and oh my god, it's beautiful around here. Man. Yeah, dude,
1:53:00
Speaker 1: this is like if I if I had a job
1:53:02
Speaker 1: like to paint, uh, like butter packages and ship like that,
1:53:06
Speaker 1: I'll just come out here or like paint Like if
1:53:08
Speaker 1: someone said, hey, man, paint the painting for the front
1:53:10
Speaker 1: of a milk jug, I'd come out here and paint
1:53:13
Speaker 1: this area this time of year beautiful. It's not like
1:53:18
Speaker 1: when you come here in the snow's blowing sideways and
1:53:20
Speaker 1: you can't get the you can't get the screen door open.
1:53:22
Speaker 1: And yeah, but like right now it's like, holy shit, gorgeous. Man.
1:53:27
Speaker 1: You know, deer hunting it's always just kindless endurance element there. Yes,
1:53:32
Speaker 1: it's like he's very like these like valleys and all
1:53:36
Speaker 1: these openings and pastures and like wood lots, and it's
1:53:41
Speaker 1: just beautiful, big pictures everywhere right now in the trees.
1:53:46
Speaker 1: If you took away the greenness of the meadows, the
1:53:49
Speaker 1: canopy is almost as colorful as it is in the fall.
1:53:53
Speaker 1: I mean there's reds and oranges, all kinds of greens. Dude,
1:53:57
Speaker 1: this gorgeous around here. Man. It makes where I'm from
1:54:00
Speaker 1: look like ugly. And I thought, you know, it's a
1:54:04
Speaker 1: good looking area. But man, in Michigan where from? Yeah,
1:54:08
Speaker 1: But what you guys have going for you is is
1:54:10
Speaker 1: the topography you have, like discernible valleys and stuff, the
1:54:14
Speaker 1: driftless area. So that was Mikelin hot And was it
1:54:18
Speaker 1: fun to be here again? Well, please come back, dirt.
1:54:22
Speaker 1: What's your concluder? I want to get out, letting you
1:54:25
Speaker 1: go last, because I'm punishing you about the chipmunk squirrel.
1:54:32
Speaker 1: I won't make that mistake again. And I do want
1:54:35
Speaker 1: a turkey hunt. Now. I don't know if this season,
1:54:37
Speaker 1: because we're going we're gonna be away for work again,
1:54:42
Speaker 1: but I do want a turkey hut. And I want
1:54:44
Speaker 1: to I want to take either a Jake or a
1:54:47
Speaker 1: Tom Edward. That was your conclude that's yours. You're fired up.
1:54:59
Speaker 1: Say when we get shoot four days left in Montana,
1:55:05
Speaker 1: Dirt Man, No, but I was towny, and you guys
1:55:07
Speaker 1: are gonna ostracize me for this. It's boating season. All
1:55:12
Speaker 1: the rivers are swelled up and rapid. That's the other
1:55:15
Speaker 1: reason I'm not letting Dirt go last is last year
1:55:18
Speaker 1: Dirt like, it's like, it's like elk season. So I
1:55:21
Speaker 1: give Dirt a rifle, give him a bunch of ammunition.
1:55:25
Speaker 1: Oh here, go get him Dirt because he had some
1:55:28
Speaker 1: time off. Two days elk season opens up, and it's
1:55:31
Speaker 1: not like Dirt couldn't go into the mountains. Dirt goes
1:55:34
Speaker 1: into the mountains during elk season, into elk country to
1:55:38
Speaker 1: go ice climb because it was a unique like what
1:55:42
Speaker 1: like yeah, He's like, oh, it's just once in a
1:55:45
Speaker 1: lifetime thing where this little icy area. So he's up
1:55:49
Speaker 1: like walking up to ice climb up in the mountains,
1:55:52
Speaker 1: passing by him bullshitting with elk hunters. I'm like, how
1:55:55
Speaker 1: could you do that? I'm spoiled. I gotta do a
1:55:58
Speaker 1: lot of you know, observation of the beauty of hunting
1:56:01
Speaker 1: for work. So when I'm off work. We should maybe
1:56:04
Speaker 1: cut him off on the free teat of milk or
1:56:08
Speaker 1: of meat that comes out of the meat shoots. Yeah,
1:56:12
Speaker 1: because Dirt always gets a cut of the meat that
1:56:15
Speaker 1: pack and help with it. His old ladies being probably
1:56:19
Speaker 1: killing more stuffs last couple of years, and he had
1:56:21
Speaker 1: so he's got meat at home. He didn't have to
1:56:22
Speaker 1: go home. Yea dirts old anyone else shot him shot
1:56:25
Speaker 1: a buck all by herself in the season called it.
1:56:27
Speaker 1: What's the weird part about that is that was one
1:56:29
Speaker 1: of the rare days when Dirt actually went hunting, but
1:56:31
Speaker 1: he went hunting with other people elsewhere. Well, and I'd
1:56:34
Speaker 1: hunted with his girlfriend who had never hunted before, is
1:56:38
Speaker 1: hunting by herself on dirts like off hunting with other
1:56:41
Speaker 1: guys in another spot, and she kills a buck. Well,
1:56:43
Speaker 1: I got a buck that same day. But yeah, I
1:56:46
Speaker 1: should have been here to bring a book with her
1:56:48
Speaker 1: to figure out how to gut it. Pictures of your book, No,
1:56:52
Speaker 1: we had We had went together a handful of times
1:56:54
Speaker 1: that year. You had already gone together. Yeah, and we
1:56:57
Speaker 1: had a blast. But all right, Yeah, I know what
1:56:59
Speaker 1: you're concluding through real quick. Another reason to pass on
1:57:02
Speaker 1: the Jake early in the hunt. Is that Lenny Longbeard
1:57:10
Speaker 1: k A k A Tommy has a much higher Um? Yeah,
1:57:25
Speaker 1: Ronnie Rope dragger. Um. We're learning about alliteration the other
1:57:33
Speaker 1: day with the kids. Anyways, Um, that would be a
1:57:38
Speaker 1: good book dirt on literation. Like we weighed some birds
1:57:46
Speaker 1: this week, right, we should have weighed the processed like
1:57:51
Speaker 1: the take home meat. But you know, Dougs, Jake is
1:57:55
Speaker 1: a power. Jake comes in fifteen and a half. Both
1:58:00
Speaker 1: your birds are plus it's a sub. You're talking about
1:58:06
Speaker 1: ten more pounds on there. The feathers don't weigh that much.
1:58:10
Speaker 1: It's a lot more meat. Yea tough meat. My brother Danny,
1:58:14
Speaker 1: I'm just talking my brother. Listen, don't shoot the messenger.
1:58:17
Speaker 1: My brother Danny uh targets Jake's because he thinks the
1:58:22
Speaker 1: meat is better. Yeah, go ahead. I think if you
1:58:25
Speaker 1: prepare it right, and you have a hard time telling personally,
1:58:29
Speaker 1: but we did that Jake. Meat came off that Jake.
1:58:32
Speaker 1: Meat came off the smoker and you could just gnaw
1:58:36
Speaker 1: into that thigh like it was a chicken. So go
1:58:42
Speaker 1: ahead with your concluding thought. Put that in your concluding thought,
1:58:46
Speaker 1: that that Jake was brined for twenty four hours, then
1:58:49
Speaker 1: smoked on low heat for three plus hours. Very well prepared.
1:58:55
Speaker 1: Might have something to do with the way at eight um.
1:59:02
Speaker 1: We Uh, my family and I did one breast off
1:59:05
Speaker 1: of a mature golber the other day, turkey nugget style,
1:59:09
Speaker 1: and uh, we had leftovers and we were it was
1:59:11
Speaker 1: the first turkey turkey breast. Yeah, and we were, you know,
1:59:15
Speaker 1: we were. It was the first turkey nuggets of the year.
1:59:17
Speaker 1: People were excited. I mean the kids were eating them
1:59:19
Speaker 1: right out of the fry. And then we sat down
1:59:21
Speaker 1: had dinner and like I was sick, you know, from
1:59:24
Speaker 1: eating too many, and we had leftovers. Yeah, just have
1:59:28
Speaker 1: We only used half a breast for the schnitzel. Yeah,
1:59:31
Speaker 1: and that was fun. We used one. Yeah, that's what
1:59:35
Speaker 1: I'm saying, well half. When I said that, I think
1:59:37
Speaker 1: if it's a turkey dishes schnitzel with pancoat and lemons
1:59:43
Speaker 1: and then a little potato sell vinegare potato salad, just
1:59:48
Speaker 1: like potato cell potato sell, because that's what those mugs.
1:59:52
Speaker 1: And Austin I used to go to an Austrian restaurant
1:59:55
Speaker 1: and I would get the venus. There's some kind of schnitzel.
1:59:58
Speaker 1: They schnitzeled every damn thing they got their hands on
2:00:00
Speaker 1: over there, and it would schnitzel out. I don't know
2:00:04
Speaker 1: what part where were those boys like the schnitzel eyes.
2:00:08
Speaker 1: They would schnitzel it and serve with the cell. So
2:00:11
Speaker 1: that's what I started doing with my turks. And holy mackerel,
2:00:16
Speaker 1: is that good? It is? Um? All right, Yahny, we
2:00:19
Speaker 1: gotta go back in the woods. Thanks for listening to
2:00:23
Speaker 1: never know what happened. Bouch