Latest / Ducks Unlimited Podcast / Public Timber Project: Conserving Habitat, Culture, and Community (Ep. 712)

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Public Timber Project: Conserving Habitat, Culture, and Community (Ep. 712) · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• 0:00
  Jerad Henson: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm doctor Jared Henson. I'm gonna be your host today. We got a cool episode.
• 0:06
  Special guest today is Ich Stewart with a public timber project. Eech, thanks for being here, man.
• 0:11
  Ich Stewart: Thanks for having us.
• 0:12
  Jerad Henson: I I've been kind of a fan of what y'all been doing for a long time and really wanted to get you on here. Tell us about your story, tell us a little about you, and kinda take us through the progression of things where you're hoping to see this project go. And so I think I'll start off with just turning the mic over to you. Tell us a little bit about who you are, your backstory, and and kinda how you got to where you are now.
• 0:35
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. Thanks for that. I think first off, I'm a I'm a duck hunter. Just a regular nobody, average, everyday boat ramp duck hunter in Arkansas. Family's been in Arkansas forever.
• 0:48
  I think we're like twelfth generation hillbilly Arkansas family. Family's all originally from up in that Walnut Ridge, Perigold, Black River country, but
• 0:57
  Jerad Henson: Gotcha.
• 0:57
  Ich Stewart: We hunt all over the state, we got a camp further south from there. I had a career in land management working for the feds. I retired from the US Forest Service a number of years ago. I spent most of my adult life fighting forest fires actually for the Forest Service, so that took me all over the God's green earth, all the mountain states and southern states, you name it. And and eventually, they told me to put the chainsaw down and stop fighting fires, and they put me in an office, and I got more involved with land management at the higher levels and management with the forest service, and and retired as a district ranger on the Ouachita National Forest Yeah.
• 1:36
  Out of Mount Ida, actually, the Catawambo Ranger District. They detailed me in there and right before I set sales and and and left the agency. Had a great career. Definitely worked for the agency back in the glory days when more of our money and our attention was spent on on the groundwork. Right.
• 1:55
  And we weren't so top heavy and and process oriented. We're more product oriented agency back in the day. And I was grateful to grateful for my career and, you know, wife wanted to know what the heck are you gonna do when you retire with all your free time and it was a firefighter retirement, so it got me out fairly young. I was able to retire just a few years ago and I'm fixing to turn 50 this next weekend, so I still have a little youth on my side, I guess. You do.
• 2:22
  Jerad Henson: That's a that's a good retirement plan.
• 2:24
  Ich Stewart: And so I just, you know, I'm just a sick and the head duck hunter, that's all I've really ever cared about, so before I retired, I was in the position where I could take off most of our duck season in Arkansas, you know, I could take off most of them sixty days and hunt anyways, and and so now we just crappie fish a lot, do some turkey hunting, and chase white tail with our bows, and when it's duck season, we chase ducks, I do a little dog training too, I like to play with dogs, and it's just kind of been my life. It's been my family's life and hunting and fishing and trapping, that's just kind of always been the main focus. I actually one of the reasons I got into fighting fire is when I first looked at career paths and I didn't really have a good plan for my life, but I found out this is a twenty year retirement. I was like, you kidding me? I get to run around the woods with a chainsaw and fight fires for twenty years and then I'm I can retire and go hunt and fish the rest of my life?
• 3:14
  That sounds like the best deal ever. Of course, most most fellas don't make it to twenty years because it's a tough job. Gotta think I was too dumb to quit, so I just kept going. I didn't have a plan.
• 3:24
  Jerad Henson: Especially going out west. Yeah. That's that's tough. Yeah.
• 3:27
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. It's fun though. I can imagine. Especially back in the days when they didn't give us a whole lot of rules.
• 3:32
  It was it was the Wild West, man. It was it was a good time. Yeah. So, you know, that career was able to get me back home to Arkansas, me and my wife, and and so great career. Also, a lot of frustrations coming from a career in land management for the feds, and and a lot of insight in terms of maybe some of the some of the hurdles we're facing in terms of land management, some of the disconnects that we're dealing with between federal agencies, nonprofits, and the public.
• 4:01
  You know, seeing all that firsthand as a district ranger, seeing shrinking budgets and Staff. Shrinking personnel Yeah. Tension between the agencies and the public, and then what ends up suffering is the resources. It's the land and the wildlife. And so just seeing that firsthand, I mean, it left a bad taste in my mouth before I got out.
• 4:22
  And getting out and just kinda just putting all my effort towards hunting ducks and chasing ducks, I think we're probably like a lot of duck hunting crews across the country, especially over in Arkansas. We there we love to complain, you know.
• 4:36
  Jerad Henson: Of course.
• 4:36
  Ich Stewart: Sit around and talk about why we're not shooting more ducks. Of course, it's never our fault.
• 4:40
  Jerad Henson: Or we wanna complain about the other guy
• 4:42
  Ich Stewart: that Always.
• 4:43
  Jerad Henson: That ran his boat too fast and was acting like a jerk.
• 4:46
  Ich Stewart: It's never our fault. It's always somebody else's fault. Yeah. You know? It's it's AGFC's fault, or it's the US Fish and Wildlife Service's fault, or it's
• 4:54
  Jerad Henson: those Somebody should clean
• 4:54
  Ich Stewart: the fish. It's their fault. We ought to outlaw that, you know, and you never look in the mirror. And so I think I think, honestly, we got sick of hearing ourselves complain, and we thought, well, what's what could we do? What could we start here in the state that's solution oriented?
• 5:11
  That's awesome. Yeah. And that sort of kinda led us down a mental exercise of coming up with ideas and brainstorming and inevitably, that sort of leads you down the little rabbit trail of what are we really facing in terms of duck hunting in Arkansas? What are the trends we're looking at? Are we headed in a good direction and what direction might we wanna kinda turn and face towards a little bit moving forward?
• 6:03
  Yeah. Yeah. As as access to private land has become less and less obtainable by poor folks, you know, well, it's it's just it's changed, right?
• 6:13
  Jerad Henson: In general, right?
• 6:13
  Ich Stewart: Access has changed the access to land has changed so much.
• 6:16
  Jerad Henson: These are things that I've talked about a lot. I mean, if you look back twenty years ago, if you had a a median household income job, you could afford a duck lease. Right. You're gonna really struggle unless you go in with 10 friends to try and pick up a lease.
• 6:33
  Ich Stewart: Boy, and even then
• 6:34
  Jerad Henson: And you're gonna
• 6:35
  Ich Stewart: stretch it. Season, you're gonna get a call from the farmer and say somebody just doubled your price. You're out there.
• 6:40
  Jerad Henson: That's it. Right? You know? And so it's changed. And so now you've got, like, you're you're I think kind of the the point you're taking is you've got more people pushed on on a smaller piece of property or public lands and they got more money.
• 6:53
  Yeah. You see more fancy duck boats and trucks than you think you ever would have seen 20,000
• 6:57
  Ich Stewart: Well, You don't spend that money on a lease, you're gonna buy a faster boat, new set of tires, and a couple of new decoys and just hit the public hard. Yep. And so, you know, here's here's to start this whole conversation off with just dispelling some truths, I think, here, some facts. Okay? So we all I think everybody in the duck world knows that nationally duck hunter numbers are down.
• 7:19
  Right? That's Yes. That's just sort of that's the world we're living in and we'd like to see those numbers on the rise again.
• 7:25
  Jerad Henson: We would. That's more voice and more You
• 7:28
  Ich Stewart: bet. But on public land in Arkansas, even though nationally our numbers are down, our hunter density is up. It is. Yep. So that's that's sort of contrary to this this larger national discussion of hunt hunting numbers are down, but on our public lands, and it's not just in Arkansas, it's in North Texas, it's in Oklahoma, I mean, we're all in this together.
• 7:50
  Jerad Henson: And you go up into the the Prairie States and people trying to make trips up to to South Dakota, North Dakota. Yeah. Mean, you see the same thing.
• 7:56
  Ich Stewart: So we see we see more hunter density which that equals more pressure. It does. And you just start to see some trends and we can get into some of them and and and, you know, especially the some of some of us older hunters that have been around and hunted for a while, we we see these trends head in a dangerous direction.
• 8:14
  Jerad Henson: Yeah.
• 8:14
  Ich Stewart: And so we've got more and more hunters hunting smaller and smaller areas, you know Of course. Less and less access, increased density, increased pressure, which, you know, whenever you increase pressure on wildlife, you push wildlife, you push waterfowl off of an area.
• 8:31
  Jerad Henson: Yeah. Any wildlife in general.
• 8:33
  Ich Stewart: Right. Yeah. And so we just There's a whole trend going on, and there's there's a whole lot you can break that down into lots of little categories. But if we look at this whole thing and it's like, man, we what is missing in the waterfowl world in terms of the in terms of management and conservation? We need to have a voice for the public land hunter.
• 8:53
  We need to have I think so much of the frustration and and anger in the public hunting community is because they don't feel like they've got a voice. They don't feel like they have a say in things. Right. And part of that's our own fault. We can get into that a little bit later.
• 9:06
  But so what would a what would a polite, professional, constructive, solution oriented public land hunter voice and perspective look like? What would a movement that's positive and solution oriented look like? And so that was that was the mental exercise, well, let's just go clean up a boat ramp. Let's just clean up a boat ramp and turn on a camera and have a discussion and and we'll just take it from there because, shoot, every time we go hunting, it starts the boat ramp, it ends the boat ramp, so maybe maybe our conservation work should start right there at the boat ramp. Yeah.
• 9:42
  So we went down to Clarendon on The Wight. I don't know if anyone's ever hunted out of Clarendon. It's access to a lot of great country, but it is it is a trashy boat ramp, man.
• 9:51
  Jerad Henson: It's also real easy to get to.
• 9:52
  Ich Stewart: It's really easy to get to and they I mean, talk about it at the place. It just got broken glass and garbage just everywhere, you know.
• 9:58
  Jerad Henson: I mean, I've I grew up hunting out of out of there. I think the last time I went I haven't been out of out of Clarendon in a long time, but I think at 03:30 in the morning, were a 130 trucks. Right. You know? Yeah.
• 10:12
  It's busy. Yeah. It's busy.
• 10:14
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. So So we did clean up there. Yeah. It was just us. Uh-huh.
• 10:18
  And and we launched a little Instagram page, you know, and we started trying to tell our story. We weren't a nonprofit. We weren't really anything more than just an idea at that point in time. This is How long ago was that? Less than a year ago.
• 10:31
  Jerad Henson: Okay. That's what I figured. Yeah.
• 10:33
  Ich Stewart: This was like teal season last year. We're just coming up on a year. Not even quite.
• 10:37
  Jerad Henson: So I was gonna say, I really saw your presence pick up November.
• 10:44
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. That's awesome that you even noticed this.
• 10:46
  Jerad Henson: Think that's cool. Algorithm throws me those things. Right? I'm a, you know, a lot of things in common with what you're saying. One of the things I also wanna back up just a little bit, kinda you were talking about what brought y'all to this point, I think, and some of the concerning things you talked about, and one of those things that that really resonates with me, you know, the the social media duck hunter, right, and what looks cool and and those types of things, and, you know, you're focused on one state and you're like, well, we wanna stay on this.
• 11:16
  That one, everything happening right there tends to be a major part of that social media scene around duck hunting in North America and in The US. Oh, yeah. You know, that boat ramp scene, the boat race, all of that, that that tends to get a lot of attention.
• 11:35
  Ich Stewart: Oh, we've turned into the cool kids of duck hunting over there running our boats in public land in Arkansas. Everybody's watching us, the good and the bad.
• 11:42
  Jerad Henson: The bad too. Right?
• 11:43
  Ich Stewart: And that's the thing.
• 11:43
  Jerad Henson: And that's what Right. And that's kind of what I wanted or what I wanted to back up and show is it's kind of ground zero for for the good and the bad.
• 11:53
  Ich Stewart: That's right.
• 11:53
  Jerad Henson: Right. Yeah.
• 11:54
  Ich Stewart: A 100%. A 100 So there's a, you know, there's different layers of of conservation. Right? There's what y'all are doing with DU on a big international scale, landscape scale. Right.
• 12:06
  That's huge, man. That's important. You know, there's what all their other partners out there are doing. But when you look at that, just small scale, just that WMA you're hunting for the day and the way we're behaving, the noise we're making, the pressure we're putting on wildlife, the footprint we're leaving behind, that's that small scale that we're trying to we're trying to deal with that because we believe that leads little things lead to big things sometimes. They do.
• 12:29
  Yeah. That whole thing, how do you change the world? Well, you start by making your bed. That was sort of one of our mantras when we thought, how can we how can we fix public land duck hunting in Arkansas? Everyone thought we crazy with them.
• 12:41
  Well, let's start the boat ramp, picking up some garbage at the boat ramp. Of course, everyone says that's the dumbest thing, and how did But it's a
• 12:46
  Jerad Henson: start, right? You're not talking anymore.
• 12:48
  Ich Stewart: We're not talking. That's
• 12:49
  Jerad Henson: right. You're doing. Gotta show up. Got action, and that's what's really cool.
• 12:54
  Ich Stewart: Yes. We did our first cleanup over there in Clarendon, and we thought, this is pretty cool. Let's let's do another one. Yeah. So we started we organized more.
• 13:00
  Of course, we had zero followers and we had zero voice, but wouldn't you know, the the next cleanup we did, one fella showed up, Hillbilly from the Ozark Mountains, he's now one of my best friends, Blakely Cobb, coolest dude ever. He showed up more than anything because he knew a couple of my buddies that showed up to clean up because they got some followers and they're kind of respected duck hunters, and he was hoping he might find some mentorship, get to connect with some cool older dudes. And so this relationship with Blakely and how he opened our eyes, this really changed us. We we pivoted quickly and we turned into something more than just sort of an idea. Mhmm.
• 13:38
  So he showed up and we got to be pretty tight and he wanted to be really involved. This this guy was like, hey, I'm in. This is cool what y'all are doing. I wanna get involved. Well, Blakely Cobb is now our vice president of the Public Timber Project, which we're a legitimate of an organization now.
• 13:55
  We've got a vice president. It's crazy to even hear me back. That's cool. And he really helped open our eyes to how young duck hunters are getting involved with public land duck hunting now and I think I kinda knew it maybe intuitively a little bit, but I didn't know it for a fact. And Blakely is a guy, one, he's a heck of a good duck hunter and he's a great conservationist, he's a good man, but he didn't have a mentor.
• 14:21
  Jerad Henson: Right.
• 14:21
  Ich Stewart: And so, you know, he starts explaining to us and now we've got a lot of young members and they all are telling us the exact same story that, hey, we didn't have a mentor. I didn't have a dad or an uncle or anyone to teach me right from wrong. I just I had YouTube videos.
• 14:37
  Jerad Henson: Right.
• 14:37
  Ich Stewart: Doctor Duck and all the different cool channels and I would just watch them videos, rewind them, pause them, rewind them, watch them again and again, dissect them. And so this YouTube hunting culture that you were talking about, this online duck hunting culture, it's without us knowing, it's turned into the hunter's education for today. Right. These are the dads that your drunk uncle ain't teaching you how to blow a duck hole anymore, it's YouTube. Right.
• 15:04
  That's just what it looks like now. And so started doing more cleanups, and we started doing cleanups on the black, we started seeing a lot more young young hunters showing up, really cool young guys that are new to duck hunting. Maybe they're having some success, but again, they're hungry for this older mentorship, someone to maybe show them the way. And with that, you know, we felt that responsibility because now these kids are I'm a nobody. Right?
• 15:30
  I'm not some like great duck hunter, but these kids are looking up to us a little bit and they're looking for some guidance on how to duck hunt. And I think that's really when this thing kinda went from just a little simple project to a little bit of a movement, a little grassroots movement, and it started to turn into something else, and we started thinking a lot harder about how could we use how could we build a platform on social media and become a legitimate organization and help steer a whole new generation of public land duck hunters and maybe be a voice for the problems we're seeing on public lands. It just started with these cleanups, and the cleanups continued going where I'll tell you, we're we're at 84 cleanups in our first less than our first year plus a dozen site cleanups.
• 16:12
  Jerad Henson: That's awesome.
• 16:13
  Ich Stewart: And we'll hit a we'll hit a 100 I said eighty four eighty four boat ramp cleanups and about a dozen separate site cleanups. We'll hit a 100 boat ramps in our first year if I have to count backwards from our anniversary date and do every one of them myself because I just think that's cool to hit a 100 in a year, and that's not nothing.
• 16:29
  Jerad Henson: That's that's that's awesome.
• 16:30
  Ich Stewart: That's a 100 boat ramps that you'd be proud of if you pulled up Tim right now. I mean, of all the places, I'll just brag on one spot. Black River gets more hunting pressure than anywhere. I
• 16:39
  Jerad Henson: mean Oh, yeah.
• 16:40
  Ich Stewart: Social media and lack of access is you'd say Black River is Mad Max beyond Thunderdome during duck season.
• 16:47
  Jerad Henson: Man, like, it always blows my mind, especially past two to three years. Like, you see people start to line up and camp at the boat ramp.
• 16:56
  Ich Stewart: Oh, a week before opening.
• 16:57
  Jerad Henson: Ten days, fourteen days before. Right? Stacking up, that's kind of pressure, and because of that, there's people staying at those boat ramps and there's a lot of activity, and
• 17:06
  Ich Stewart: It's our bedroom, and it's our bathroom, and it's our kitchen, and it shows when you pull up to do cleanups and you're seeing so much duck hunter garbage. And and so, you know, real quick, people wanna say, well, that could be fishermen, that could be high school kids partying, it ain't it's us. This this stuff we're picking up, this is this is left behind by duck hunters.
• 17:27
  Jerad Henson: Yeah.
• 17:28
  Ich Stewart: And and that, you know, you start to see that maybe we ought to be looking in the mirror a little bit as a as as as just a community and there's some things that we're missing the boat with.
• 17:39
  Jerad Henson: Some accountability is is huge, man. Mean, that's
• 17:44
  Ich Stewart: I'll tell you right now, we'll see by the time opener gets here, but right now, if you are up to the black, you go back up to black this weekend and mess around. They're clean.
• 17:52
  Jerad Henson: It's clean. I saw some pictures. Y'all had them We've
• 17:55
  Ich Stewart: got a chapter up on the Black River, and them boys, you put out you throw a cigarette butt out your truck, somebody's picking it up. And and I'm a tell you something about the I'll just I feel like I'm probably just jumping all over the place here, but let's talk about Black River a little bit and clean up because it it if you wanna talk about WMAs, we gotta talk about the black. And I'm not even a Black River hunter, but I'm spending a lot of time up on the black working with guys and trying to solve some of the problems up in the black because it it really is ground zero. If we can't get things figured out in the black, the other WMAs are they're in trouble. Yeah.
• 18:25
  Jerad Henson: And this expands I mean, it's not just Arkansas. It's not just Arkansas. Oh, for sure.
• 18:28
  Ich Stewart: Mean, this
• 18:28
  Jerad Henson: is all We can go as far along.
• 18:30
  Ich Stewart: These things are just symbolic of the That's whole exactly we're seeing with public lands across the country. So Black River is sorta like it's the perfect little little test. You know? Right. Like, tensions are the highest there.
• 18:44
  They are. Politics are the most divided. Black River politics has probably eaten AGFC's lunch more than any other topic. I'm sure they're spending more time talking
• 18:53
  Jerad Henson: now for sure because they're they're proposing doing some Right. Some revamps, and that's yeah. It's definitely taken a whole lot
• 18:59
  Ich Stewart: of Let me tell you a little bit about who our chapter members are up there because it's about the coolest thing in the world. Mhmm. So I've got I'm not gonna mention their names. They gave me permission to mention their names, but I'm not gonna do that. But we've got one fella up there that I think he lost his license for three years for game and fish violations.
• 19:16
  I mean, he was the definition of a duck country outlaw, you know, which we love to romanticize. We love to romanticize the duck hunting outlaw, man. You know, there's even products named after it. And when he was younger, he lost his license. We got another guy up there, lost his license for a year Mhmm.
• 19:32
  For violations. Another duck country outlaw, you know, bad boy from the Black Swamp kind of fellas. Right?
• 19:37
  Jerad Henson: Yep.
• 19:38
  Ich Stewart: And a lot of other guys with plenty of points on their license that are now our members up there, some of our biggest supporters, folks that have they're scared now. They're seeing the trend, and they've realized that they've been part of the problem for so long and that if the change has to start from within. And so some of our most vocal supporters and conservationists for Public Timber Project are guys who used to be the problem. They used to be the ones out there setting the bad example, and this is to me, this is kinda where the hair on the back of my neck stands up over this whole project because you start to see the culture shift. Right.
• 20:16
  And when you start getting these outlaw boys on board and changing their ways and picking up garbage, you know, this is this turned into something bigger than we ever thought it would.
• 20:26
  Jerad Henson: Yeah. You got them picking up garbage, they're starting to see ownership in that property, they're starting to take pride in that, they're starting to take pride in the habitat, take pride in the resource, the ducks, and that just changes your appreciation of all of it and how you're gonna treat it, and that's that's pretty dang awesome, man.
• 20:46
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. Because I mean, you look at all the problems we're having out in the woods, and there's a lot of hunter pressure related issues, I'll just say. Right? Yeah. There's a reason that we're seeing less ducks on public and more and more ducks on private, and it's because those boys on private, they're managing pressure.
• 21:01
  They're doing a they're doing a better job of managing the ducks we are.
• 21:04
  Jerad Henson: Yeah, of course.
• 21:05
  Ich Stewart: And when we start talking to folks about the fact that, you know, this isn't new, I didn't come up with this, but public land hunters, we're the members we're members of the largest duck club in the country, And if we thought about it that way and treated one another like we were fellow club members and we managed our public lands like it was our own private duck club, we would hunt different.
• 21:25
  Jerad Henson: We would. Yep.
• 21:26
  Ich Stewart: We'd be more cognizant of our noise, or just overall disturbance, which is, of course, from the research perspective, that's the terminology they tend to use
• 21:36
  Jerad Henson: is Right. This hunter disturbance. Right? Disturbance. It's noise, but it's just the your presence.
• 21:42
  Yeah. Right? Your presence in there moving about, whether it's with a mud motor or an outboard. If you run through ducts, you're gonna move them.
• 21:53
  Ich Stewart: That's right.
• 21:54
  Jerad Henson: Right. Now you can make more ruckus with some of those, but it doesn't matter what you got if you're running through the middle of them.
• 22:01
  Ich Stewart: Right.
• 22:03
  Jerad Henson: So it's somewhere
• 22:03
  Ich Stewart: else. It's not a discussion about mud motors versus megas versus four strokes. We don't we don't wanna go down that path at all. No. Because I've owned a lot of mud motors, got a lot a lot of buddies that have them, but
• 22:16
  Jerad Henson: it's It's the disturbance how they're reading it, how the tool's used.
• 22:18
  Ich Stewart: Exactly.
• 22:19
  Jerad Henson: It's that that's why I know and I've made this comment on here before, I run a mud motor now. It's a great tool for the job, but it's loud, and so I need to be cognizant of that as I'm running it. Right. Don't go running around everywhere. I go to to my hunting spot, I come back, you know.
• 22:40
  If I'm gonna go scout, I don't run that thing down the river or or down the channel, park it, go for a walk.
• 22:46
  Ich Stewart: That's right.
• 22:47
  Jerad Henson: You know?
• 22:47
  Ich Stewart: That's right. Minimizing your disturbance on wildlife.
• 22:50
  Jerad Henson: That's it. And, you know, you're not even on on federal ground now, and I believe in WMAs as well, most of them, and this this is branching out into other places. And I think you mentioned this, I think, on a social media post the other day talking about scouting and just being aware of your impact on birds. Right? Yeah.
• 23:10
  You wanna run around, you wanna find those birds, but as you run around, the more you run around, the more you harass them, the more they leave. Exactly. And that's kind of a a cool point to get across and just to help, hopefully, I'll say the younger generation, but just I won't even say younger. The newer duck hunter, the one that didn't have that mentor, doesn't see that. My grandfather killed a lot of ducks with a 15 horse seven rig.
• 23:34
  Yes, exactly. He drug that boat all over
• 23:37
  Ich Stewart: the place. So I've got a I've got a lot of holes that I hunt on public that me and my buddies hunt, and they're not like good holes. They're out of the way holes. Right? Oh, yeah.
• 23:44
  That I can get to every day and I'm fighting folks for. And I've learned this is this isn't anything original, but this is some of the mentorship I've been fortunate enough to have, and I've had a just I've been blessed to be able to hunt with a lot of really, really good duck hunters over my life and continue to. And there used to be a lot more talk and knowledge about how to manage a duck hole on public. Yeah. Yeah.
• 24:06
  And, you know, there's even some famous hunters, and and I I feel like you start talking too much about this, you start giving away hunting secrets and old timers get mad at you for talking about it on national podcast. But, you know, there used to be a lot of knowledge on, you know, you could hunt a hole and depending on how you hunted it, you could that hole could hunt better and better and better day after day after day, or you can shoot it out and burn it out
• 24:28
  Jerad Henson: real quick.
• 24:29
  Ich Stewart: And that's all on how you hunt. Mhmm. And we're not talking about that stuff enough. No. Funny enough.
• 24:35
  Nope. One of my buddies who's who's one of the behind the scenes inspirations and and and guys that's gonna be helping us a lot with our research is Bradley Cohen. Mhmm. And we're actually working on a project with Bradley right now. What I'm gonna I've kind of been referring to loosely is the 10 commandments of hunting ducks on public based off of Bradley's research.
• 24:56
  I'm not I'm gonna pretend to be smart enough to understand all this research, but what I do read from some really cool GTS data is that it's all lining up with how our grandpas hunted. There's not even anything new. No. He's talking about pressure. He's talking about noise and disturbance.
• 25:11
  Mhmm. When he when Bradley Cohen says that even though there's fewer hunters in The US today, we're creating more pressure on birds than we ever have, that's that's us. That's how we hunt. That's that's cultural. Yep.
• 25:25
  That's not regulatory changes. That's not AGFC. That's not fish and wild. That's us. That's how we're hunting.
• 25:32
  We're Right. We're changing in ways that we may not know we're doing and that's hurting us. And so we look at boats being louder and faster. We look at music in the woods, stereos in boats, Bluetooth speakers in boats. You look at increase in hunter density, all of this starts to paint a picture of disturbance.
• 25:54
  Jerad Henson: That's it.
• 25:55
  Ich Stewart: That's not turns out that's not good. Ducks like I say this, it sounds silly, but it's kinda one of those things I think a lot of young duck hunters need to hear. Ducks have eyes and ears and they do not want to be shot, turns out.
• 26:05
  Jerad Henson: Right. Who'd have thought? And it's it's something that those GPS data, band data tells us the same thing. A mature duck, a mature mallard that survived at least one season is a hard duck to kill. That's right.
• 26:19
  They're really good at not getting shot. Who'd have thought? Right? And they queue into all those things, and so the more things like that that you're doing, whether it's noise, disturbance, whatever whatever bell and whistle you got running in the woods with you, those ducks key on that, and they're not they're not dumb. They're gonna move on, and it's gonna and they're gonna go find habitat elsewhere.
• 26:47
  One of the cool things with Brad's stuff too, as you're talking about that is you put that pressure on them, they start to feed at night and go sit in a sanctuary all day.
• 26:57
  Ich Stewart: That's right. And it takes a long time to reverse those behaviors.
• 27:00
  Jerad Henson: It does. It takes a it takes a weather event. Right. Or a massive event, whether it's a big front, cold front, or a big rain event, right, to put a ton of water on the landscape to make those ducks rework and move around. And so once they find that safe pattern, that's they're gonna stay on it until they have to break it.
• 27:23
  Ich Stewart: Right.
• 27:23
  Jerad Henson: Yeah. And so that's, you know, I'm trying to think back. I wanna say it was six, seven years ago. Like I said, I grew up hunting out of that Clarendon area. I don't hunt anymore, but and I and we keep referring to that that area.
• 27:38
  That's just kind of a a spot that's a a really good example of this. You could pretty much never shoot the ducks out of that place when the water got right.
• 27:49
  Ich Stewart: Right.
• 27:50
  Jerad Henson: They were gone in ten days the last time I hunted it.
• 27:53
  Ich Stewart: Yeah.
• 27:56
  Jerad Henson: So it was that was impressive. Was the first time I'd ever seen like, oh, the water's right. If water's right, you go and if I, oh, I got a decent hole. I stared at blue sky. A lot of blue sky.
• 28:06
  Maybe saw some high flying ducks. They wanted nothing to do with those woods.
• 28:09
  Ich Stewart: And we're we're seeing a lot of Unsettled. We're seeing a lot mallards in January flying low at treetops, doing those mating, playful mating flights.
• 28:17
  Jerad Henson: Mhmm.
• 28:17
  Ich Stewart: Typically, you start seeing that sort of duck behavior, at least the way I was taught, that's it's I mean, that's I was fixing to get good boys. Right? Yeah. This is they're low to the trees. The water's high.
• 28:29
  The ducks want to die today. Right? They're flying low, and they're just that's gonna gonna
• 28:34
  Jerad Henson: do it. Yeah.
• 28:34
  Ich Stewart: They're gonna finish big groups typically. Oh. And we're seeing as part of what's getting people so alarmed, think, little bit is is you're watching lots of ducks work these woods and they don't want in them woods for some reason. They're moving right over these woods to private refuge areas
• 28:50
  Jerad Henson: on the other side. Yep.
• 28:52
  Ich Stewart: They're finding places where they're not getting pressured and they're not coming in these woods and
• 28:55
  Jerad Henson: And they learn it quick.
• 28:56
  Ich Stewart: That starts to scare folks, you know. And I think if you're if you're new to duck hunting, if you're one of these newer, you know, younger guys who just or gals that just bought a boat and you're just braving it and you're driving to some public land and you're figuring it out, And just to understand that what you're seeing up in the sky, this is this is really different than what we've seen traditionally for a long time. Oh, yeah. They're they're behaving differently. Yeah.
• 29:20
  And you look at the research and you go, oh, maybe maybe we're playing a factor in this.
• 29:25
  Jerad Henson: We are, and especially and and I'll I'll come back since we did the b pop kinda broadcasted waterfowl reports yesterday on on that, and, you know, duck numbers stayed the same as they were the year before, but we're still we're still down on duck numbers. Right? May ponds were low, so habitat's not not what it was. So you're not getting crazy duck production. Right?
• 29:46
  You're not getting a lot of reproduction, not getting a lot of first year Mallards or first year ducks in general. And based on that conversation we just talked about, that's gonna make the sites that you're seeing and I'm seeing in the woods even worse because you don't have those young dumb ducks that are just gonna come right in a hole and fly around and go in the woods. You got older smart ducks that know how to avoid it, and that's gonna make the game much tougher. We need water, you know, on the prairies to try and hopefully give us some new ducks, but until then, we gotta figure out how to work with what we got.
• 30:20
  Ich Stewart: That's right. And part of that is educating our public land hunters to be a higher higher caliber a duck hunter. Yeah. We need to start sharing some knowledge and we need to collaborate with research and science to make sure that this, again, this isn't duck hunting according to our drunk uncle.
• 30:38
  Jerad Henson: That's exactly right. And and Brad's lab has done some great stuff. Right. That's a Cohen lab is what we're talking about there over at Tennessee Tech. And then Doug Osborne's lab has done some really cool stuff too.
• 30:49
  They've done some stuff on some Arkansas, WMAs,
• 30:53
  Ich Stewart: and We're working with them as well and talking to them along with some of the researchers from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Eli Stinson, some great folks, some other Mallard studies. Mhmm. So if a bunch of nobodies from the boat ramp started doing these cleanups, we could get all these smart guys to talk to us and help us understand all their research, and we can cross reference this with the way our granddads taught us to hunt, and we can bring our field experience, what we're seeing out there, like, hey, I may not be very smart, but I see what I'm seeing them doing now. They didn't used to And do here's the other things I've seen change, all the noise, the disturbance, how we're hunting's changing. It seems like we might have a responsibility to just maybe open up a discussion about educating us to hunt in a different way.
• 31:37
  Jerad Henson: Yeah, and I think I think that track, that mindset that you've got right there is is critical. You're taking you're taking science, you're trying to take some of the the best data you can get to show how our impacts on on wildlife are changing their their habitat use. But not only that, you're also trying to take that and disseminate that information down to new hunters to make the hunting experience better for everybody. Right? That's right.
• 32:04
  And that's a cool and and a really, really cool and awesome approach. Right? You you've taken you've got all of it pulled together. I think one of the cool things about it is it's scalable. We can take that same approach, you can go to Great Salt Lake.
• 32:18
  You can go to, you know, Central Valley in California. We can go out to to Chesapeake Bay. We can have that same approach. And and if if duck hunters will do that and the problem with duck with public land duck hunters is it is a competition. Everybody wants a good hole.
• 32:34
  Oh, yeah. And that creates some issues. But we all gotta come back home every day. You're gonna have if you hunt and especially if you hunt out of a boat long enough, you're gonna need somebody to stop and pull you back to the boat ramp.
• 32:48
  Ich Stewart: Right.
• 32:48
  Jerad Henson: You're all on the same team. Hey, if we're playing Some healthy conflict is fine.
• 32:52
  Ich Stewart: If we were playing a pickup game at the hoop right now Yeah. We might have to just time out real quick and and lay down some ground rules. Right? That's this good, fair sporting game, and we can get right back to competing. That's right.
• 33:05
  But but maybe there's some things we can do so we don't get injured, so we don't wreck the you know, there's that's all we're talking. We're not we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. Matter of fact, you know, our concept of what success would look like in terms of change, and it's it ain't changing everything. It's just that 5% change. It's just changing the course heading on the ship by like two degrees.
• 33:26
  It's almost imperceivable in the moment, but over the course of five, ten years, you're in a totally different spot of the ocean.
• 33:32
  Jerad Henson: Well, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. And that first step. That's right.
• 33:36
  You've taken that first step, you're moving. So I think we've got a really cool idea now, and the listeners now probably have a really good idea on kind of the background, what your focus is. We're gonna take a real quick break, and then we're gonna jump back in and come back. And I wanna talk about where you see this going and what your next steps look like. So y'all stay tuned.
• 36:26
  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I got mister Ich Stewart, Ich Stewart, not itch.
• 36:32
  Ich Stewart: I've heard itch plenty times. That's alright.
• 36:37
  Jerad Henson: With a public timber project coming back, we've been talking about kind of the Public Timber Projects, kind of the the way it came about, the reasons, the need, and I think now we will kinda wanna shift gears a little bit and kinda talk a little bit about where you see it going. What's the next step? So you've you've done a couple of the big things you've already said. You've took that first step. You got people's buy in.
• 37:06
  Where now? What's that next step look like?
• 37:09
  Ich Stewart: Well, along this journey, we became a five zero one c three nonprofit. Awesome. We're insured. We've got legal representation. We've even got an accountant because I don't know how to count past 10.
• 37:21
  I run out of fingers and I get into trouble.
• 37:23
  Jerad Henson: Got to start wearing flip flops.
• 37:25
  Ich Stewart: We've received starting to receive some donations. Awesome. Which and I'll tell you why we need that here in a second when I talk about the projects. We're we can fund all our work on our end for next to nothing, but it does solve this takes a little bit of money. Right.
• 37:40
  And we got a website coming out, and we're gonna have a research page link on there that's gonna be linked to the Osborne lab and to the Cohen Wildlife Lab and kind of so public land hunters have one spot they can go to. If they wanna nerd out, they can nerd out. We're gonna have some, like, cheat sheet educational products on there. Brad Bradley Cohen's working on one of those with us. I mentioned the 10 commandments, public land duck hunting, that'll be on there, and we'll have a link to for all of our upcoming events.
• 38:09
  So there'll be one spot people can go. They can get a little bit smarter, they can figure out how to get involved. So that's pretty cool. That'll be coming out shortly. That'll be the publictimberproject.org.
• 38:18
  It'll be our our website name. We'll have a link for you all below. So that's pretty that's sort of new for us because we went from just some rednecks with an Instagram page to seeing this turn into a grassroots movement and then deciding that we wanted it's time for us to be professional and start thinking bigger about what we can do.
• 38:37
  Jerad Henson: Well, that's what drew our attention. That's why we're here today and that's why we're talking because I saw it, as I mentioned earlier, like, saw this early on last year during ducks season, you said that was pretty new catching on, but but I saw kind of what you're doing, where it was going, and the most inspiring thing about it was watching that follower level tick up. You were getting attention, you were gaining traction. And I was like, oh, this is awesome. How can we help out?
• 39:03
  Ich Stewart: Yeah, what's How can
• 39:04
  Jerad Henson: we get involved? That's, and as I talked about, I told you, as you kind of walked in, it was really funny because I've been talking about this a little bit, and then I had one of our regional directors and a development director call me on the same day, like, hey, we gotta do something here. I was like, that's all I need. I need someone to just say go and I'll jump on this because I'm a big fan. And so you gained attention, you gained attention from the right people.
• 39:33
  Ich Stewart: I hope so.
• 39:34
  Jerad Henson: I think that's the really cool part. And so you're looking at doing cleanups, that's kind of where you've been, but what's your next next step now?
• 39:43
  Ich Stewart: So, you know, we talked about a little bit on the break that part of our motto is don't don't don't come with advice and don't point fingers, come with solutions. That's it. We're only interested in solutions for problems on the public land. I don't care who's to blame. I don't care about the history and old animosities.
• 40:03
  We don't care who caused the problem even. Right. We're just we're just interested in how we can fix it and solutions and how we can do that on our own. We think believe that a lot of these problems, we can just fix on a Saturday afternoon ourselves if we just show up and do it. But obviously, there's some bigger issues we'd like to get involved, so we went down that legal path to to become an actual nonprofit legal entity, and that that's important because it turns out government land management agencies and even Ducks Unlimited, y'all can't partner with a Facebook page.
• 40:35
  No. That's not a legal entity.
• 40:38
  Jerad Henson: Right.
• 40:38
  Ich Stewart: But y'all can partner with us now. We can actually start having discussions. Public land hunters can start having productive discussions with these agencies of what partnerships would look like.
• 40:48
  Jerad Henson: Yeah.
• 40:49
  Ich Stewart: And so we're having some of those discussions right now, and it's pretty exciting. I think one of the biggest success stories yet so far is with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and all the refuges in Arkansas. I've had the pleasure of meeting with all of the refuge managers in the state Mhmm. And in particular, on the White and with the Cache River And Bald Knob Refuge and those folks, man, we're in like ticks with them boys.
• 41:16
  Jerad Henson: They're good they're good folks. Yeah. I know them and and they're grossly understaffed.
• 41:21
  Ich Stewart: Cash River right now has one employee. Tire Cash River. So if you're if you're a fan of Rex Hancock, anyone who's watched the the Shin film on Seven Mile Wound and Rex Hancock and and, like, shed a single tear, which I do every time I watch that movie, that's like prerequisite of my duck camp. Gotta watch the Rex Hancock Shin movie, you know. And you think about that whole place that that our predecessors fought so hard, and we got one feller out there meant to manage the whole thing.
• 41:49
  I think he's got, like, a 180 beaver dams holding trap water on trees, killing them. All the roads need to be graded, all the ditches need to be mowed. Plus he's doing all the field research himself. One gentleman. Mhmm.
• 42:01
  So that, you know, that's a that's a huge opportunity for us to get engaged right there and to say, hey, if you love hunting these places, even if it's not where you hunt. I mean
• 42:11
  Jerad Henson: Yeah.
• 42:11
  Ich Stewart: We've got Black River Boys coming down to the Cache River, even though they'll never hunt the Cache River. They're coming down to help us on work project stays to help ban birds, help Eli and us with beaver dam removal, all that kind of stuff. Those sort of projects are so we're able to have those discussions now and sort of form those partnerships. We're we're having a lot of really great discussions with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. We don't have a partnership agreement in place yet.
• 42:36
  I'm hopeful that that will come one day, but we're talking to them. We're actually having discussions with them about what it would look like for us to to work together and not be adversaries anymore. Right.
• 42:47
  Jerad Henson: Well, and and I don't want you to to jump too far down that and put any incorrect information out, but what is the your hopes, I guess? What are you what are you wanting? Yeah. So because I think you've you've talked a little bit about this a little bit, and it's not that it's not a major ask.
• 43:01
  Ich Stewart: No. That's what I'll tell you, you know, we wanna start small and have successes and and build some trust and relationships with these agencies so that we can build on that trust and tackle bigger projects. Yeah. So where where we would like to aim for this next season, if we can't do it this next season, we're gonna aim for the season after. Came up during the cleanups, Came up in particular up at Ashbaugh on the Black River.
• 43:26
  Mhmm. I think Ashbaugh had a thousand boats and trucks lined up for opener this last year. That's a This is wild. That's a lot of boys lined up to go duck hunting.
• 43:34
  Jerad Henson: That is.
• 43:35
  Ich Stewart: They all had to go to the bathroom. And I hate to talk about unclean acts on a nice show like yours, but when we start cleaning up, you get back in the woods, that's a thousand trucks, you figure that's two fellers per boat, nobody takes a bigger poop than a duck hunter, They had to go somewhere. You get back in the brush just about 15 yards further away from where the garbage is, and it's poop city, brother. I mean, it's and toilet paper all over the place. Wow.
• 44:00
  And that's not something that I can ask some volunteers to go just clean up with the garbage bags. We saw that and that we're hit the pause button when we started really seeing that, and we started seeing it all the boat ramps, and it it makes sense because we're spending the nights there. Like, this is where we sleep.
• 44:15
  Jerad Henson: People are sleeping in their trucks, getting in line.
• 44:17
  Ich Stewart: You're gonna go to Sonic, get you double bacon, and you're gonna hit the gas station up, you're gonna go get in line, and about three in the morning, you know, it's gonna you're gonna go someplace.
• 44:27
  Jerad Henson: Things starts happening.
• 44:28
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. Things happen. It's nature. Yeah. And so, you know, right off the bat, we thought, well, we need to put porta potties and trash services at these boat ramps.
• 44:36
  If they're gonna get this much pressure, this is a way we can manage ourselves and not point the finger at another agency or the hunters themselves, we can bond bond together and say, hey, let's fix this problem ourselves. So we're working on agreements with the state of Arkansas and with the Fish and Wildlife Service to permit us to manage sanitation services and we'd like to start off simple and small Right.
• 45:00
  Jerad Henson: Just a
• 45:01
  Ich Stewart: few boat ramps up we'd like to start off with a few boat ramps up on the Black River and a few boat ramps down on the Cache River Mhmm. Because we're gonna have to work through some things. There's Yep. There's gonna be some problems. There's some concerns.
• 45:11
  Jerad Henson: Of course.
• 45:12
  Ich Stewart: So if we start with a small pilot program and we see where it goes and we can prove to these agencies that we can successfully manage ourselves and manage our public lands in a real common sense way, then we could look at expanding that program all across the state, any high use area where we're really hammering.
• 45:30
  Jerad Henson: Well, I think that's a really unique niche you've got there too because the WMA managers, they're biologists. They're not people managers. They they have to be, but that's not what they're trained to do. You know? Right?
• 45:43
  They're they're out there to put habitat on the ground and to maintain that type of stuff, and they're they weren't taught in school how to deal with a thousand boats at a boat ramp, you know, and the game wardens are like, I don't know what to do with this.
• 45:54
  Ich Stewart: Game wardens aren't even hardly sleeping during hot season. They're running so thin. Yeah.
• 46:03
  Jerad Henson: The personnel's not prepared to handle that, and so just having that one little thing out of the way to keep things cleaner, more sanitary around around a boat ramp, I think that's a awesome place to start.
• 46:14
  Ich Stewart: Yes. That's our that's one of our one of our big projects we wanna hit. We also are looking at a number of these boat ramps that, you know, there's a handful of boat ramps that have turned into really busy access points, but they're not even officially boat ramps. Not adequate parking.
• 46:29
  Jerad Henson: Right.
• 46:29
  Ich Stewart: It might just be kind of a muddy spot between a couple of trees that folks are sliding their boats into. So let me talk about the business end of doing some of these projects, and this this I get really excited about this. So we started looking into I got some bids for porta potties on the Black River and Cache River so we could propose these ideas to the agencies. Yeah. And I had a great discussion with a gentleman from AGFC.
• 46:52
  I won't mention his name, but great guy. I've been working with a bunch. They've all been really awesome working with this and this whole thing. And he said, you know, we used to do this years ago, some of these WMAs. I don't remember this, but I believe them that they used to put them out and they they they quit putting them out there because they were just they weren't cost effective.
• 47:09
  And I asked him, you know, can you tell me what state was paying for some of these sanitation contracts? And he told me, I won't quote it on here, but it was a lot of money. Right. Well, for us to do it as a nonprofit with a partnership agreement or a special use permit, don't even have to be you know, there's different layers of ways we can hold hands with these agencies. Right?
• 47:30
  Yep. But just with a special use permit, I could do both rivers, write a check right now for less than $10,000, and I could have two porta potties at three boat ramps in the black and two porta potties apiece, I mean Yep. At three boat ramps in the cache plus dumpsters for less than $10,000. So that's I mean, $10,000 is lot of money, but when you start talking the scale of and serviced on a regular basis, that's so much cheaper than the government can do it through their bidding and contracting process. Right.
• 48:04
  So it's so streamlined. Mean, this is kind of like the perfect marriage of how can nonprofits and you guys
• 48:12
  Jerad Henson: And we know we know this story. We know the story pretty well. Yeah. And and I'm gonna kinda take a quick tangent and come right back because you talked about all these places and and one of the pleasures I had at the Ducks Unlimited Expo was I had Lake Pickle on from On X, and we have a a layer on On X, and there's a little duck head on that layer on every piece of public land we've done a project on. There's over, I think, over 4,000 dots on AllsMath.
• 48:42
  Right? You'll see them on every every WMA you just mentioned has some form. So so DU's invested in in those types of things, but we don't do that type of stuff. We're helping that refuge manager or that WMA manager, we're helping them get a new water control structure.
• 49:01
  Ich Stewart: Right.
• 49:01
  Jerad Henson: Things like that because we can do things a little differently than they can. Right? So and it it works as a great partnership. And so I think this is a really cool niche that y'all found in a way to take some of the stress off of the system.
• 49:17
  Ich Stewart: That's right. That's all we're trying to do. We're not we're not fooling ourselves that we're gonna fix everything. We're just we're just trying to make it better.
• 49:25
  Jerad Henson: You're making it better, but also you're also creating this this really unique and cool community where duck hunters can come together. And so if you start coming together to boat ramp cleanup and you meet people, right, and especially if you've got guys like, this is your duck camp, you got three or four duck camps coming together, say, on Black River or one of these public WMAs, whatever, and they meet each other. Right? You know that's Oh, it's powerful. We've we've seen some connections.
• 49:52
  Larry, whatever. You see each other in the woods?
• 49:55
  Ich Stewart: Oh, yeah. That ain't your
• 49:57
  Jerad Henson: enemy no more. You got a different story. It's that's your competition maybe.
• 50:01
  Ich Stewart: Yeah.
• 50:01
  Jerad Henson: But that's your buddy.
• 50:02
  Ich Stewart: You might end up getting together now.
• 50:04
  Jerad Henson: That's it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we only got two guys come with us. You know?
• 50:06
  Yeah.
• 50:07
  Ich Stewart: So I'll throw I'll throw two buddies under the bus here Okay. Because just to tag on to this story because this is this just happened about a week ago. Hunter Helms is a buddy of mine. He runs with the doctor duck crew, Dennis and Billy. He's he's the he's the resident redneck there from Jonesboro that hunts the black with them boys, Hunter's an awesome man.
• 50:25
  Great great dude, great conservationist, good duck hunter, just good good all around dude. And I got another buddy up in Pocahontas, Bryce Decker, Black River Duck Calls. Folks know Bryce, old black ops Bryce black ops Bryce Decker. Mhmm. And just speaking about this, I don't even know how it got started, but those two boys have had been picking on each other online probably for for a while.
• 50:48
  Yeah. You know, I wouldn't say they were enemies, but they were they were they were, you know, lobbing some some Internet grenades back and forth a little bit. I think Bryce maybe was pretty critical of the Doctor. Crew and Yeah. And and was so Hunter's on board, and Dennis and Billy have been on board with Public Timber Project.
• 51:05
  They're doing everything they can to support us, and Bryce is a buddy and he's completely on board. Russ Deckers of Public Timber Project, one of our Yeah. Our leaders. And and so this tension between these two fellas surfaced up, and they kissed and made up. I mean, to make short long story short Yeah.
• 51:22
  They kissed and made up, and and and we're thick as thieves now. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if, like, we all start and these are folks that were we didn't see ourselves the same team six months ago, but people are coming together in ways that we never anticipated when we did our first cleanup, and I tell you, that's pretty cool when we start seeing this stuff, it starts to get a lot bigger than what we had originally planned this thing to be.
• 51:46
  Jerad Henson: You're having that impact that you're looking for. You're you're not just changing a a trash pile or a boat ramp.
• 51:50
  Ich Stewart: And the young guys are watching this happen. That's And gals, these young hunters. Serious.
• 51:55
  Jerad Henson: You're talking about some of those internet grenades, so they're on some of those forums and and pages that are
• 52:00
  Ich Stewart: That's right.
• 52:00
  Jerad Henson: That are are vocal, and that that helps kinda fuse that, and I mean, that's that's incredible. Well, I think one of the things I wanna talk about we still got a little bit of time, but one of the things so how do you scale? Like, you're in Arkansas now, but you've been doing stuff in Mississippi, Louisiana, maybe, and Texas, I guess, too.
• 52:20
  Ich Stewart: Oh, yeah. And so think we're in 10 states in Canada now.
• 52:24
  Jerad Henson: This is we've talked about Arkansas because this is ground zero. This is home for you. This is where this idea came to fruition, but I don't want to set the impression that it's limited to that ranch.
• 52:38
  Ich Stewart: And and not even just just timber, we'll be in South Louisiana this fall where I don't even think there's a tree inside doing Right. A cleanup, so
• 52:45
  Jerad Henson: It it this is public timber project, but it's it's public lands and it's ownership and it's duck hunter motivated and it's it's trying to bring that culture, that change, that camaraderie back.
• 52:56
  Ich Stewart: So let let me tell you, there's kinda two ways this thing's scaling and and and they also it goes into the question of how can folks get involved. It's kinda
• 53:03
  Jerad Henson: That's it.
• 53:04
  Ich Stewart: Answers both those questions. So so one thing that happened right off the bat is we were organizing cleanups and folks would message us and say, hey. I can't make it. Is there any way I can get involved, and how can I get one of the hats? Because we you know, what's the point in doing anything if you don't got a cool hat?
• 53:19
  You gotta
• 53:20
  Jerad Henson: have a cool hat, apparently.
• 53:20
  Ich Stewart: So that was was number one priority is we've gotta have a whole bunch of cool hats and Yeah. Every kind of camo, you know, why even get up if you don't have a cool
• 53:29
  Jerad Henson: hat to put on? You know?
• 53:30
  Ich Stewart: Like, let's prioritize things here. We're still duck hunters.
• 53:32
  Jerad Henson: That's it. Yep.
• 53:33
  Ich Stewart: So folks wanted these hats bad, and and the hats aren't for sale. We don't we don't sell a hat to anybody. Yeah. You've got to pick up garbage to get a hat. You wanna put a sticker on your boat?
• 53:44
  You got to show me a bag of garbage to get a sticker. That's all. So folks, they wanted a hat, you know, and I don't blame them. You can look at it,
• 53:51
  Jerad Henson: things are Yeah. Hot,
• 53:52
  Ich Stewart: That's what I'm saying. So they'd reach out and say, how can get one of these hats? I can't make the cleanup, and I don't know. I just kinda had that flipping idea. I said, well, just go do cleanup on your own and send me a picture of the trash bag next to the boat ramp sign, and I'll send you a hat and a sticker and a beer koozie with Boat Timber Project on it and as a thank you for cleaning up your boat ramp, and that took off like wildfire, And folks started doing cleanups left and right all over Arkansas.
• 54:18
  All of our nonresident Arkansas hunters were going home and cleaning up boat ramps. Thoughts all over the South, Mississippi
• 54:26
  Jerad Henson: Mhmm.
• 54:26
  Ich Stewart: And we've had so many cleanups come from I bet you we've had two dozen cleanups come from Mississippi, and those are folks just doing cleanups on their own. So that's one way how this scales out and spreads, turns into like a virus, little counterculture virus in the duckeye world, which I love, is just you don't need anyone's permission. We don't need the government's permission and you don't need my permission to go clean up your local squirrel woods, deer woods, turkey woods, anything. Clean them up, take a picture, let me tell that we wanna tell that story. We want that to be the story that you see on Instagram and TikTok, not big log shots and lots of just kill culture, lots of dead ducks.
• 55:05
  Right. We want to tell the story of conservation, grassroots conservation. Send me that picture and one of us in the public timber project, you got a hat in the mail, brother. So that's one way. The other thing, and I'll and I'll this will lead into one of the projects we've got coming up, is folks will reach out with larger issues, something that maybe isn't just a quick afternoon cleanup job for one or two buddies.
• 55:28
  Yeah. One of which is Delta National down in Mississippi. Yep. You're familiar with Delta National?
• 55:33
  Jerad Henson: I am.
• 55:34
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. So how would I describe Delta National to to listeners who've never been there? It's national forest land for one.
• 55:39
  Jerad Henson: It is.
• 55:40
  Ich Stewart: It's not refuge land, but it's public flooded timber
• 55:43
  Jerad Henson: It is. Right. Yeah.
• 55:45
  Ich Stewart: So Delta National's in trouble. Like, you talk about budget cuts and personnel and funding cuts. Delta National has zero operational funds for this year. And Brad Eldridge with Parish Waterfowl down there in Vicksburg, good friend, and he's I don't know. He's a chapter president for Public Timber Project,
• 56:02
  Jerad Henson: by the
• 56:03
  Ich Stewart: way, too. Awesome dude. He's been trying to take the lead with trying to get Delta National back and operationally functional so that folks have a place to duck hunt down there. Mhmm. And so we're gonna do a huge Delta National workday.
• 56:16
  I'm not sure when this podcast podcast comes out, but that'll be October 11.
• 56:20
  Jerad Henson: October 11. So y'all be listening to that because this may may come out maybe a week or so before. So
• 56:26
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. So that's and this this is just gonna be a big cleanup day, weed whacking, chainsaw work, getting the whole whole place cleaned up, and then having a real discussion about special use permits, and then and then just the funding, what it's gonna take to actually get the pumps up and running, fuel for the pumps to get the whole place flooded and ready for duck season. Yeah. That's a long term project. So so you can do cleanups on your own, or if you've got a larger project where you live, maybe some public access issues that you're running into, reach out to us because we'll collaborate and you can be the project leader.
• 57:03
  Jerad Henson: Mhmm.
• 57:03
  Ich Stewart: Obviously, we're we're getting big enough now. I can't be the project leader for every one of these projects.
• 57:08
  Jerad Henson: Right.
• 57:09
  Ich Stewart: But I can we can help guide you. We can show up and have meetings with the right officials from the agencies. Mhmm. We've kind of figured out a little bit of how to talk to some of these folks, and of course, being an ex Fed myself, I speak that weird weird rhetoric that land yeah. Managers speak
• 57:25
  Jerad Henson: There's a
• 57:26
  Ich Stewart: weird lingo to it. So that's the other big that's kinda how we're scaling out is folks are reaching out to with individual projects and and saying, hey. And as long as they're clear that you're gonna be the project leader and you need to follow some of our rules, our rules are pretty simple. Be polite, be professional, and be solution oriented. Yeah.
• 57:47
  And if you can follow those rules, then we're on board. We'll support you however we can. Great being a five zero one c three because we can receive donations to pay for some of these projects and we can facilitate the permits to make it legal to work with these agencies, and then we'll show up with the volunteer force to get it all done. And we're seeing duck hunters cross state lines and help each other. We did a huge cleanup in North Mississippi a couple months ago, and we had had hillbillies in Red Necks from Arkansas running around in the North Woods of Mississippi, people cleaning up garbage in places that we will never hunt.
• 58:24
  Jerad Henson: Right.
• 58:24
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. And that's pretty exciting to see that because, you know, duck hunting's always been so tribal. People just care about, this is where I hunt, I don't care about that river because I don't hunt that river, you know? Yeah. And we're we're really flipping the script on that narrative and we're kinda getting folks to realize that, hey, what's happening down in Louisiana and what's happening in Delta National, you know, us, that's going down and helping Delta National get up and running, that alleviates pressure in Arkansas.
• 58:50
  It does. It does. All this stuff is connected. It's just all tied together. Opportunity, right?
• 58:54
  We
• 58:54
  Jerad Henson: all need opportunity, we crave opportunity, and and that's gonna be kind of the big, one of the big things going forward, right?
• 59:01
  Ich Stewart: That's
• 59:01
  Jerad Henson: right. Well, we're kind of wrapping up close on an hour, but I did have a couple more questions. Of the things I want to to ask is if people want to get involved. Yeah. How do they get in contact?
• 59:15
  Ich Stewart: So reach out to us on we're on Facebook at The Public Timber Project. We're on Instagram, The Public Timber Project. We'll have a website out shortly, but hold on by the time this thing is I hope so. Released while our website will be up and running.
• 59:30
  Jerad Henson: And we'll put that we'll put links to all that in the the show description.
• 59:34
  Ich Stewart: That's right. And, you know, you message us on there, and if if my spotty senses tells me that you're not completely crazy, then that leads to a phone conversation, we can chat and just get to be buddies and figure out really how we can help. But just know that if you wanna get involved, we don't need any more advice. Duck Hunt's full of smart guys with advice and who's to blame. Yeah.
• 59:54
  Show up with solutions and be willing to kinda show up and shut up and do some work.
• 59:59
  Jerad Henson: Do some work. Yep.
• 1:00:00
  Ich Stewart: And if it's if it take it's a big project, be willing to take the lead, and we'll help you. We'll we'll help you navigate those those waters a little bit, and then we'll show up. If we got a project going on someplace, we'll show up and I'll bring boys from all over the place and we'll help clean up. So reach out to us like that. In the meantime, just do a just do a local cleanup and send us a picture on Instagram.
• 1:00:22
  Send us a picture on Facebook. We'll post it. We'll get you a hat, and then you're part of things. One cleanup. Just do one cleanup.
• 1:00:29
  It'll change the way you think about that Yep. Piece of public land. It'll you'll have ownership in it. After one cleanup, It will change your relationship with that land after doing one cleanup. It's kinda crazy, but it'll change your heart a little bit.
• 1:00:44
  Jerad Henson: And that's that's awesome, and that's kind of an an incredible way and an incredible statement to kinda wrap things up on. So I'm gonna let that lie. I am gonna ask you one other question.
• 1:00:52
  Ich Stewart: You got it.
• 1:00:54
  Jerad Henson: Are you gonna try and do any early season hunting? Any teal or or or Canada geese? I won't ask any any places or anything like that.
• 1:01:02
  Ich Stewart: I I go crazy for the early teal season. Yep. Teal on public land is just folks just don't do it. No. And it's a little bit harder.
• 1:01:11
  Jerad Henson: It is. There are a lot of them a lot of them, especially down here, a lot of snakes and mosquitoes.
• 1:01:15
  Ich Stewart: Oh, yeah. And I'm a dog trainer dog guy, so it's always a little sketchy because I have a hard time going hunting without my dogs.
• 1:01:21
  Jerad Henson: And if you go far enough south, you get into the the big lizards.
• 1:01:23
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. The big lizards. Yeah. Snakes with big teeth. Yeah.
• 1:01:26
  Jerad Henson: Well, yeah.
• 1:01:27
  Ich Stewart: Yeah. We chase we've already been chasing some geese, we'll chase teal and of course, the dove hunting, we get after it, but it's I think it's those early season opportunities. You talk about setting the tone for regular duck season, chasing the big ducks in the woods and kinda having that old man's patience, that wait wait wait wait attitude towards every group of birds that you're working, that's a lot easier if you get that trigger finger itch all taken care of during early teal season. Sometimes, especially these young duck, you just need to go shoot something. Like, I hate to say it.
• 1:02:00
  A dove's a good warm up for that bird
• 1:02:02
  Jerad Henson: of shells.
• 1:02:02
  Ich Stewart: Go beat up some doves, and then and then, you know, and then take a deep breath when the big ducks show up and put on your big boy pants or you know
• 1:02:10
  Jerad Henson: what I mean? That's amazing.
• 1:02:11
  Ich Stewart: And yeah. That's right. That's right.
• 1:02:12
  Jerad Henson: Well, h, this has been awesome, and I I absolutely love what y'all got going. I'm so glad you could come on and talk about it today. Listeners, if if those of y'all are out there, please reach out to each. If y'all have any questions, comments, go look up their page on Instagram or on Facebook and look for that new website coming out. I think we can get behind them and we can do we can do better.
• 1:02:36
  I think we can do some awesome stuff and I love the work you're doing. So I wanna wrap this up. I've gotta thank Rachel and Chris who are hiding behind the screen over there, who who put together an awesome podcast for us. And then I gotta thank the listeners. Thank you all for listening in, and I I hope you all enjoyed this episode.
• 1:02:53
  We'll catch you all next time.