This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
Listeningcast, you can't predict anything.
The Meat Eater podcast is brought to you by first Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com, f I R S T L I T E dot com. I don't know if listeners can appreciate the impact of Phil's setup. I think people are thinking I'm exaggerating when I said I didn't know twice now, this room is not big. How big this room was it?
Twelve by twelve, it's about fourteen by fifteen.
I think fourteen by fifteen.
Yeah, And there's been two times I've been there's no internal walls, no curtains, And two times I've been in here and been startled by Phil's presence or.
That he's not here, and he was actually, oh yeah.
I got earlier.
I was mad that he wasn't here at work, but he was back there behind his array.
I gotta admit I kind of like it that way. I like being a little hidden.
This is the third time I brought it up.
Yeah, it's really it's really bugging yet, I stuck in your craw.
Dude, I can't even see you if I try.
You know, that's right, Well, the listeners can see me.
We're kicking around, either putting little pictures of Phil where he would normally be or making an election. If there's any mirror specialists out there. I had an electrician there today. I asked me if I ever needed any electrical work, he'd be happy to do it. But he was in Texas. But if there's a mirror specialist in town that had could array, I guess it'd be one mirror that he's looking at, then that mirror blasts off the wall behind him, and then a mirror by the Muskox picks it up.
Sounds like a lot of work.
Yeah, we'd have to consider it from all angles too, So I think this room would be mostly mirrors at the end of the day.
It would be like one of those things at like county fairs that you walk into and you run into the walls.
Yeah. People that make action movies can't help but have shootouts in them.
Which one's real?
Uh Chester, what can you uh produce that your jig.
And rap again. Oh yeah, yeah, Chester put me onto a phenomenal jig and rap bite last night.
How phenomenal.
We caught our limit of wally dogs, which is about four or five. Yeah, little shavers, great eaters eat yeah, perfect saying when walleye there's no such thing as small walleyes and big ones. There's eaters and biggins. It's like it's a win win eaters and biggins. But the givers, yeah, little shavers eaters. That is a lethal weapon.
These things are is it really is.
Like the odds of that wallye being just hooked in the lip are low.
Well, the thing so these are are glide baits essentially, and any glide bait kind of has little wings on it and it's a very sporadic darter bait. So they go, oh yeah, all over and the fish cannot help. But like they're just like see something dart by their face and pop in the mud. They go and investigate it and like kind of they kind of like hop on top of it essentially, and then you go to do your your quick jig again and next thing, you know, when you're next thing, you know, you got one.
I'd love to have a camera down there, see what's what's going on. Well, you know when I use now that I use so for link. When I used to use leadhead jigs with a big grub body on them, they can catch it, you know, and you get fewer. I've been onto like slow pitch and flutter jigs last couple of years. Man, they have a hard time catching it, like because he misses it.
You'll feel him.
He'll miss it.
Bam, he'll miss it bam.
Then he either gets bored or you hook him on the third or fourth time, or he gets like screw this and he just goes off looking for something easier to catch. But I think they can't grab it so to a.
Rabbit, Yeah, it's unpredictable, but.
They sure want to bite it. Yeah, you should could have, you shoulduld have. Uh what do you call me? A jiggen rap jiggen.
Rap sponsor glide bait?
Yeah, so mus.
Just send Chester like a bunch of glide baits.
You just get a mold because that's like a real cost.
Chester.
When he's doing the when he's doing his family finances, he's like tackle.
Those are probably what eight eight bucks a pop too?
Eight nine Bucks.
Yeah.
Yeah, I got that one for Chester because I lost one of his yesterday.
Well, thank you, Brody. Are we gonna hang this in the podcast studio?
No, you get it right, hag wrap.
Down there, dude.
We were talking about though, you need they need to make some of these for when you guys are up in Alaska at the fish shack.
A big one for ling.
Cod twelve ounce.
Yeah, I think that. I was saying, Man, if you can get like a ten or twelve ounce jigging wrap, he would do two things.
One, you'd snag.
Everybody else like you'd be like, guys, I'm gonna fish lines out. I'm gonna fish for a.
While, try myself.
Yeah, clear the anchor, and then uh, the other thing is is you Yeah, you'd get a lot of hits.
Yeah, you gotta be you gotta be careful with them though they're dangerous. This is like the number one thing getting your fingers hooked right here. Oftentimes I'll clip off this front front hook here because rarely you do do you hook him on there? But anyways, chicken wrap, great bait.
We'll come back to something else you got sitting there and on top about Okay, I'm holding Brodies. You can bring this all to Alaska. Yeah, tell about this your your priest here man that my dad made that.
That's a homemade persuader, I think he called it.
We used to call him the priest. Yeah, because it gives your last rite.
Yeah, but yeah, my dad made that. And and like the late I think I got the time frames roughly correct. But Lake Ear used to have a salmon fishery, like started sometime in the sixties and didn't last long, like a decade maybe a little longer. And my dad would troll for coho like on the beaches just between the He was in a canoe with a little two and a half foot Evan rude.
He just really between the sandbars and stuff. Yeah, like he just catch a nice browns caught some people would catch nice browns, like the troll on the beach.
He'd troll spoons and like bomber plugs and ship like that. And when he would catch one, he'd put a notch in that sucker.
Well, I'll tell you right now.
Oh really, it's like rings in New York.
Is that wood or is that is that a no?
No, it's it's a steel.
Rod under there.
He got sixteen but that that, uh, it's satisfying. What's under there, steel.
Rod, what's on the outside, it's like a baton.
I don't know why you put that rubber coating on there so he could cut notches into it.
Whenever Steve gets something like that in his hand, he just has his look.
In his own Yeah, it's not his picture man like Brody like in trivia or something. I'm just.
Yep, you're wrong, but that uh, that same and Fishery they changed their management for Lake Erie and went to Steelhead. They don't manage for salmon at all anymore. Yeah, Ohio and New York, Pennsylvania. Occasionally one shows up. I don't know where they're coming from, but yeah, that that thing didn't last long, you get it. They got like a six week season for those salmon at least like inland, you know, on the streams and beaches and stuff.
But they're not stocking the piss out.
It's a Steelhead game.
Yeah. And some of the other areas in the Great Lakes, they've really started to emphasize the native lake trout right right, do it more around there's some of those around Lake trout recovery and not worrying so much about the Pacific send.
Yeah, there's all kinds of shit that. Like Lake Erie, I think you used to have a commercial whitefish fishery. Sure they don't anymore. They used to have a commercial walleye fishery.
Still a fantastic walleye fishery.
Unbelievable. Yeah.
Is it because people don't want whitefish or there are no white fish there?
I think it has a lot to do with the pollution that they destroyed.
I mean, in the eighteen hundreds, they destroyed the sturgeon fishery, they destroyed the white fish fishery. You know. One of the biggest things they did in the Great Lakes to ruin the fisheries in the Great Lakes, the original fisheries is when they were logging all that they would raft all that, they would raft all that, all those trees, all that white pine and stuff, they would raft it
and the bark would come off. So in all the bays and estuaries and stream miles during that period just became covered and in some cases over twenty feet of bark and destroyed yeah deep oh yeah, destroyed spawning habitats. That was like one of many things. And he had, you know, the tan like at that time, the tanneries were horrible. Yeah, all kinds of pollution and some many of those fish, like the sturgeon and the white fish that were just very, very sensitive to any kind of disturbance.
The food sources got all screwed up, and so they started just trying to backfill it with other stuff. So like when I was grew up in Lake Michigan, we had we had three of the five Pacific salmon. Yeah, we had pinks, pinks or humpies, kings or chinook silvers are co hos. I never heard of them doing dogs or chunk dog slash chum. I never heard of them doing sake. And then they up up the sky up in Uh. Sue Saint Marie worked for a long time on Atlantics.
Yeah, I Ontario to bring in the.
One Atlantic salmon, and they would take these Atlantics. There's a thing. Uh. I lived up there for a short period of time and did a semester at school at Lakespeare State University, which reminds me of the Edmond Fitzgerald. Let me tell you something about that. In a second up at Lake State University, that there's this thing called the Sue Edison hydro electric damn. And when water comes off Lake Superior, it drops about twenty three feet, I think,
which forms the Sue Rapids. So Superior sits I think. I think it's twenty three feet higher than hereon. Okay, So the connection between Lake Superior and hereon, you know, and it eventually obviously goes out the Saint Lawrence Seaway, you know, out into the Atlantic. But that drops twenty three feet through the Sue Rapids into the Saint Mary's River, which is a very short river that then flows into Huron. And they used to peel water off of not used to they still they peel water off of the off
of Lake Superior on top of the falls. Run it through town and this, like everybody calls it the power canal. Run it through town and then and then get gain that twenty three feet to drop right and blast it through this hydro electric facility which had I don't remember how many turbines, forty or fifty turbans or whatever.
One of the first articles, the first article I ever sold for a chunk of change, was about fishing for whitefish and steelhead in the discharge canals.
Not as far as they could get, like spotting.
So many mayflies. It was real silty in there, and there'd be these huge mayfly hatches in that power canal. And so when the mayflies were hatching there, all that shit's going out that yeah, through that high through those turbines and shooting back out into Saint Mary's River. And so fish at the right time of year would just jam into all of these turbine outflows. And they're like these like it look similar to a underpass bridge, a cone, like a half colvert, a half round colvert, just big
enough to pull a boat into. You could pull a skiff into the thing. And what I wrote my article bout was, uh, my brother Danny and our buddy DROs they pioneered this thing, and I just would go with
them after they pioneered it. But they would on occasion leave the bar that close it because the good turbans were coveted, and they would leave the bar and just go and pull in there and sleep in there, and there's a there's the eyebolt sticking out of the top, and they would just tie off, and it's warm in there, and you're in the dam. There's probably no way they
let you do it. And then old men who'd get up early to get the spot would get thwarted because there's college dudes up in there sleeping and half drunk. And then you just lower the rope back at daybreak and we would take it, would take, so we would the rig they would use. And again like they pioneered it, I just benefited from them pioneering this whole strategy. They would take a fly rod. You remember those, Remember that reel called the Martin multiplier. Remember to me to bring
this background to Atlantic salmon. So there was a geared fly reel, so not one to one. You could take up some serious line with a Martin replyer reel. You follow me?
What do you? What the hell you call it? You know what I'm talking about?
Chester, I don't know.
Like one crank on the handle is a bunch of revolutions on the spool?
Yeah, it's not ringing a bell?
What type it in?
That's not what a center pin is. That's different, right.
Type in Martin multiplier, that's what we called them. Anyway, we used to use the We used.
To do all the salmon and steelhead stuff with these.
These were you fishing like with a fly line.
Or just no, hear me out, all right, so you would run remember that stuff called amnesia, yep, Okay, that hard mono you'd put backing on regular amount of backing, and then you'd put a bunch of amnesia on there. Okay whatever, forty fifty yards amnesia, then eight feet a whatever,
twelve pound maxima and then a tip it depending. You might use four pound maximum, six pound maximum off that you put split shot where the heavy maximum met the light maxima, and then we just do you do like a little flies so for fishing this thing, and that's what we'd use for steelhead and salmon too, but for
fishing this thing. And then you'd use a little fly tip with a maggot and with that amnies, you'd lay all that amnesia in the you'd get a bunch of amnesia laid in the on the bow of the boat, and you got that split shot on there, so you could like.
You could shoot it way up into that culvert.
How wide was that thing?
How wide was the culvert?
Yeah, it'd be about the size of that wall right there all right.
Hit me with the dimensions in this room again.
Phil about fourteen by fifteen, so maybe like a twelve foot tube.
Shoot it up into that dark tunnel.
You take that line and with all that lead on there, you could just and shoot it perfectly right yeah, up in there, and then you'd get tight on it and you'd fall. It's the water's hauling ass out of there, but it'd fall, and you'd be able to stand there.
You could stand there and look that water so strong, the current so strong coming out of your boats.
You on your boat is in a fast current, boat swinging back and forth. And if it was a clear day with the right sun, you'd look down and see whitefish and steel head darting all around down in there. But you'd shoot it way up into the turbine in order to get down ten twelve, fourteen feet down, and you'd be hooking them right under your boots so.
Much, and then when you hook one with all that current.
Oh, they blast back behind you.
Not exactly a purest fly fishing method, because the mag Yeah.
Those are just multiplier reels, multiplier reels large like a large arbor multipliery.
Yeh, God, it was fun.
Man sounds, Steve, sounds like you need like a jiggen rap or something back then shrap.
So the the university somehow the Sioux Edison Electric thing had gifted a couple of these turbans to Lake State University's fisheries program. Okay, And there was a guy there at that fisheries program who was dicking around with trying to introduce atlantics.
That was back when they're still okay with introducing all kinds of crazy stuff.
And he converted some of these hydro electric channels into rearing habitat because he's just running actual river water, right, He's running like high velocity river water through this thing. And you'd go in there and they'd take I watched or do it one time they take they take a bunch of row from a fish. I mean literally in a five gallon bucket. You got a bunch of fish eggs in a five gown bucket. You dump in like a scoop a seamen, stir it up with a paddle,
and it's ready to go, yeah, fertilized. And so they had these raceways and they would rear these atlantics in these raceways. So we're talking like like I can't remember it. Let's say it was forty some of pulp picture pulp su Edison hydro electric dam. You can count the turbans. Let's say there's forty turbines the university owned, like turbine two, three, four, and he'd raise atlantics in one of these, in two of these turbues.
How are they keeping them in there?
That just because it was all retro fitted. It was like he was just using this spot where all this natural river water to come through. And I don't I can't remember how they break up, but it just looked like these little fish tray raceways. It had actual temperature controlled water coming through them. And he'd rear Atlantics in this thing. Okay, there's eight, like, no way more eight?
Oh, here we go. Here it is.
Chester report back in a second. Chrinis is what the whole show is about.
So but hear me out.
This is just gonna start getting interesting now it hasn't been yet, No, so check this out. So it was like turbine number I can't remember what it was. Let's let's say it was turbine number five was the Atlantic salmon raceway. Okay, he'd rear them in there until they were of whatever the hell size Atlantic salmon is when it goes back to the ocean.
And then cut them loose right there.
They Yeah, so you know how salmon returns to its natal spawning stream. These Atlantics had go out, okay and get big, get huge, and no sons of bitches would come back, and I'm not kidding you. To the raceway number five, they had to fence it off.
Raceway number five would be stacked with giant Atlantics who were like, I'm.
Home, anyone home?
Yeah, I'm not kiddy man, huge Atlantic salmon's. And then raceway would I say five, yeah, okay. Raceway four and six would have some like two or three, right, Raceway seven and three might have one, but they were in. They knew what that smelled like, and they were like there.
And the reason they had to fence it off is because the Jibwe they had snagging rights, like the native tribe there had snagging rights, but they sort of felt like these Atlantics kind of fell outside and snagging right, So they had to fence it off so they couldn't cast a snag and hooking air and drag those Atlantics back out of there. That's what I was getting at, right.
Mm hm.
Great Lakes fisheries.
Oh Brody's little beaten stick. It was a nice beating stick.
Yeah, okay.
Uh.
Now to bring this full circle back to the Edmund fits oh when we're doing the when we're doing the book tour. I don't think Brody caught this because he was off bs of the trivia fans. But a guy comes up to me and he says, he's like, dude, what in the world is what the Edmund Fitzgerald thing? All the time?
No, I didn't hear any of that.
You wanted to complain about it, so I couldn't really explain it. He never even listened to the song. He's just filing a complaint.
A lot of people come up to file complaints stuff.
Uh, well, I told you. Were you here when I told you about what? Someone came up to me and talk about with Krin.
I don't know put on for this that she Uh they thought she looked smart.
They couldn't figure out why she did so bad at trivia, and they looked at her picture and it was especially confounding because she looks so smart.
Uh smart and getting You know, it.
Had eighty turbine chambers. Does that sound right? And only forty of which were used when the plant was operated?
Yeah, that could be. That sounds about right now.
I counted, but it was it was hard.
I can't remember the numbers, But I think that we used to have a real affinity for like twenty four and twenty six or something like that, acause they were higher velocity for some reason. Dude, I wish I yeah, I'd like to go back there and hit that fishery.
God, I was a lot of I was going to ask you if you know if it's still going on there.
Dude, we were at Lake State, Man, we lived off the land. Seriously, me and my roommates. We ate four deer between.
Air and white fish.
We ate four deer.
Between October one archery opener and Christmas break and hound.
You get all that hunt and fishing done if you were in school.
Just didn't take the school too seriously.
That's why I transferred out.
Man.
That's an old trick.
People don't realize if you live in a state. If you live in a state like Michigan has this deal where if you bounce round, like I went to three colleges, right, if you bounce around, the other colleges will accept your credit hours, but they don't care about the GPA. So if you're in Michigan, this is a hot tip for michigan Anders. If you're in Michigan. Never start where you're gonna finish and your finishing school. How many credit hours is like a college degree?
I think it's like no. I think it might be one hundred and eighty.
Say, they might dictate to you that they want you to wrap her up like they want you to get the final eighty or whatever.
It is like a school. Like, let's say you wind up at MSU.
Spencer's right, it's because it'd be eight times fifteen, roughly one hundred and twenty.
Okay, So let's say you're going to land at where where I landed at. I landed at Grand Valley State University just to close her out, Okay, Grand Valley State is going to dictate to you that they're like to get a degrief. Must you have to get your final X number of hours from I think I actually had to do more credit hours and was normal. I had to do like an extra few because I needed to hit their minimum requirement. You go to other schools, easy ones, and.
When's where you can fish and hunt there hunt fishing.
All you got to do is pass. Okay, serious, this is I'm not joking, this is true. All you have to do is.
Pass, so your goal is definitely not to learn anything.
No, all you have to do is pass.
You go to where you want to go.
Then you got to do good yep, and you get you leave with a fake gpa, You get a you graduate with a gpa that is not reflective of your college experience. It's only reflective of where you wrapped her up. So I wrapped her up at GVSU and I walked out of there was like a three six something.
Yeah, go mess around when you're taking all that jen ed shit. You're your freshman sophomore year.
So I did two years of night classes at my local commut unity college. My first two years of college night classes, I didn't go down until six at night.
Were you still living back in twin.
I was trappeh trapped all day, hunted all day, whatever else had going on. Chop Firewood went to school at night, walked out of there, and I was in the same position. Is all these jokers that were working hard and in the end had a good GPA and got into good graduate program.
Yeah I would have.
I would have.
I would have taken you for a little bit higher than a three six kind of guy.
Three six is pretty much.
That's pretty high.
That's high man is great.
I wasn't sure when that was going to turn into a hot tip. But it's a hot tip, No it is. Yeah, there's so MU should do a pamphlet. But you've got to remember how old I am. Like they might have changed, they might have figured this out and caught up to people. Did you use a common practice among my social circle? Did you brew your own beer in college too?
But my my brother's brewed beer in high school?
Did that work out for them?
The problem they would have is it would get a quarter inch of white stuff on the bottom and it didn't matter. You'd have to open it so gradually and gently to not disturb the yeast, you know, like most parents like, you can't drink in high school for whatever reason, Like we weren't supposed to drink, but for every reason. If they like, they wouldn't make this beard. It was just my parents were fine with it. I thought it was interesting.
I had buddies who got like beer making. Kids had garage sales and they had dollar signs in their eyes, like thinking of how far ahead we're gonna come. Yeah, they never never worked out. They never made a big man.
No, God, I had some other thing I was gonna add in here, something about not being oh krint, I know we had a whole plan, but you got a talking point.
I got to add one thing about fish priests.
Yeah, then I'm done.
This is exciting, though I can't wait fish priests.
When I wasn't allowed to get bad grades in high school, like I had to get an A or B. If I got a's or b's, nothing bad happened to me. And in wood shop I got a bad grade because we had to do a lathe project.
It seems unlike you woodshop.
Well, because for the lathe project, I made a large wooden mallet.
It's the it spins wood, then you use the tools, and so we had to laminate.
We were supposed to laminate a stack of wood together and then lathe it into something cool. And I lathed mine into like a very coarse cylinder, drilled a hole in it and put a handle in it, so that I had a big, heavy wooden mallet. That I was saying it was like a fish priest. Got bad grade and my dad took me down to school to have a like arranged a little conference. I got a C minus.
But that why would you get a bad grade for that. That's that doesn't seem.
People were making really cool stuff. They're making lamp stands, and I made a blocker. I made an eight inch cylinder, and it was like, well, I made a Most guys were making cool stuff, or they were making their parents lamp stands.
Okay.
I I thought I've been drilling them out and warning them. I was like, oh, I use a handle.
I thought that the teacher was being unfair and kind of judging you, not on your level of relative level of skill, but on the fact that you were making something used to you know, he.
Thought I was being a smart ass, and he thought I was being a slacker, both of which are true. And I don't know.
We just wanted to go back to sniff and wood glue.
I don't know.
Anyhow, Well, you got to tell us, what would your old man do?
Oh? He was pissed and took me down, pissed at you were pissed at the pissed at me. I got you took me down and humiliated me in front of the teacher, and then I had to improve my grade. Would you remember what I made? After that? He was he was not happy, and my dad was big woodwork or so kind of stunn you know. Yeah, it'd be like one of my kids got a bad grade and hunting. Should I skip this thing about the Edmond Fitzgerald, I'll put it.
I'll say this.
You know when David Grant was on and he said all those things that have a maritime back, that was so interesting, under the weather, under the ah, three sheets to the wind.
It's like one more good one that we say all the time. We have no idea what.
I forgot.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to get Dan pressed.
Okay, whole pilum.
Yeah, that's that's underwriter, an insurance underwriter.
I just I just googled marry time or nautical phrases. Pipe down one of them, batting down the hatches, dry, scuttle butt, threw thick and thin, smooth sailing, seems obvious. Yeah, down the hatch.
Yeah. Sure, you're saying a lot of them, aren't that interesting?
It was, you know, it was interesting to listen to you struggle to come up with that.
You felt that was more interesting.
Hear me, hear me, do not say he broke. I know, I was having a great moment. I was having a great hosting moment, and the Spencer came in and ruined it. Underwriting is a maritime insurance thing. Like in the old days they would, uh, it's kind of interesting. So he so the connection Edvan Fitzgerald, and this is the last note on the Edmond fits the boat was that the boat was actually owned by an insurance company. It was owned by Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The company had invested a lot of their earnings in iron ore and mineral mining. The Edmund Fitzgerald was just the CEO of Northwestern Mutual when they built the ship. Had no idea that that is not cool. That's like in the old days. In the old days, you would it was okay for you to name birds and animals after yourself. That's considered not cool anymore. What's his name, barn No.
Stellar Stellar. He's got all kind parents.
Stellar Stellar's like I'll take that Ja, I'll take that sea lion or whatever. Lewis everything you saw, yeah, Lewis. And now it's it's uncool. You don't name stuff after yourself anymore. There's a movement now to give things names from indigenous people's indigenous language.
It also seems fashionable and name things after other people though, Like Edinburgh has a lot of things named after him that he didn't discover.
Yeah, but that's I think that's that's okay.
Uh, because you're paying you're like paying homage, You're paying amage homage. This guy, he's like, I got a great name for the boat.
He helped bring baseball back to Milwaukee, is what I'm reading too.
In your head?
Who was Edmund Fitzgerald before you learned this? Never thought about it like a war captain.
That never was to me. Uh. They used to be able to publicly, you would publicly sell insurance on cargoes and vessels. An underwriter was just someone that would write there, literally write their name under the post looking for insurers.
That is pretty interesting.
Uh Oh remember how I was saying, Well, I feel like if this happened today, it'd be a conspiracy theory.
No, certainly, like.
An insurance company guy named it after himself to get famous when it sank.
Couldn't happen. You know. One of my favorite movies, I don't like the book, but I like the movie that doesn't happen very often is Inherent Vice. And there's a prominent character and Inherent Vice, played by Benicio del Toro is a maritime lawyer and inherent vice, so it's a Thomas Pinchon novel. Inherent Vice in maritime insurance is all the things that one can't control, like shipping on the seas,
there's inherent vice. Things rot, things get wet. Whatever. It's like, you know when you see like act of God stuff. Inherent vice is just stuff's gonna happen to the cargo.
Two pieces that came out from so does.
We've had a podcast guest on I believe maybe a couple times at our Neett who used to be the chief scientist that Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and he left.
He rsp on great terms.
Because he got to go and be the CEO of the Wildlife Society. And the Wildlife Society funds and orchestrates. They might be screwing this up. Someone looked that up. What do they call their mission statement? They fund an orchestrate wildlife research.
Spencer's got it.
Best, Typer.
What is the Wildlife Society's mission statement?
Our mission is to inspire, empower and enable wildlife professionals. Starts with giving you the resources to succeed.
Yeah, there you go. So they published a lot of new wildlife research coming out and there's two that ed passed aloandis recently one. I had caught one of this, but this this is like a month old now or so. Florida just became the latest state to have for them to have found c w D in Florida.
M hm.
Uh.
And you know the odds that you found the first deer that shows you know, you're right, it could have been could have been there for years. They just found it, you know, with enough testing they found a deer with c w D. So Florida is now the that's a good question for you. Spencer, is now the blank state to have c w D.
I'm guessing it's got to be high thirties or say forty.
That would be a good tributa question. Why don't you find the answer to that, Spencer?
And it was because a roadway accident of vehicular Is that where the.
Deer came from?
Testing roadkill?
Yes?
Yes, huh, because hunters probably don't really get him tested too much.
I mean, I mean there's a massive amounts of there's no way that I bet you anything.
There's more hunter tested.
I don't know this for a fact, but I bet you there's more hunter tested deer than roadkill test the deer in Florida. Oh, Florida. I don't know. Yeah, I'm I'm just saying Florida in a super populated state like that.
This was the white tailed deer had been struck by a vehicle in Holmes County, and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission confirmed the presence of chronic wasting disease in this wild deer that was killed on the highway.
This this says thirty one US states and four Canadian provinces. That's as of June sixteen, twenty twenty three. From the USGS.
Alaska and Hawaii will obviously be the holdouts.
We're talking to. That guy on the book Toy said, Utah hasn't had any yet is a surprise.
Yeah, I think it's the current.
What's there?
This map shows Utah is full of it.
Yeah. Oh, with current regular under current guidelines and the way they're handling it right now, in the way that the USDA is looking at deer breeders and stuff. It's everybody will have it except for Hawaiian except for Hawaii.
In Alaska, and Alaska's.
Getting you know, they get muledier coming into Alaska now and then and it's shoot on site for meal to Alaska. Uh.
Another one.
And we've talked about this a bunch but and I haven't really looked into this, but sometimes you'll live in a state and there might not be any wild pigs in your state, or there might be a few wild pigs in your state, and they will all of a sudden say it's illegal to hunt wild pigs. And you'd say to yourself, well, that seems stupid. If we're trying to get rid of wild pigs, why would it be
illegal to kill wild pigs. What's motivating that legislation is they realize that the like what is caught not not CWD? Here talk about another thing that spreads Hunters spread wild Yeah, pig enthusiasts, enthusiasts.
It's weird when you go down to some of those places, you know, down in like Texas and in Florida, because they'd be people would be like, I kind of you know, I want you to get all the pigs off my property. But then they're also like they like like having them around. Oh, you know, there's like this weird vibe there.
It's a hobby of mine. Is I like to ask landowners who complain about pigs if they could too. There's two questions. I'm like, if you could make it wave a magic wand and they just would be gone. I've never met someone that said yes there. I was like, wow, yeah, not all of them, Yeah, because they know people like
to eat them. Yeah, people like to eat them. And the other thing is, and you always bring this up to people, is like Cal was telling a landowner Hawaii this they're talking about complaining about the pigs, and Cal said, I know how you can get rid of all these pigs. Put up a big sign that says please hunt this property for sure. And the person said, you know what kind of people we'd get on this property if we did that, to which Kel said, barbecuers. Uh tails, I talking about the pigs.
Oh, so there's this.
There's this also this thing in a wildlife society article, like a like a journal article that state that that there's that this article is arguing that states that are being strict around strict around not being able to move wild hogs, not being able to hunt wild hogs, right like very lined in the sand about wild hogs are slowing the spread more than states that are facilitating the hunting of wild hogs.
Makes sense that it's effective.
Yeah, and whenever look, you know Missouri. I remember being in Missouri where they were like like I can't. I was talking to a wild hog expert and he was like, they were categorically that's how they're there. They're there from people that go down south and they like hunting hogs, and why not have them closer to home.
Yeah.
We talked the today about when we uh when we had that zeb zeb Hogan. We're talking about fish that are tolerant. We spent a lot of time on fish
that can handle fresh an, salt water or not. And we were talking about the spread of northern pike out of the siouxsitting a drainage where they were introduced by someone that likes to fish northerns and how from that drainage are then bouncing to other drainages by just swimming out into salt water and coming back going these fish And they can see it when they take these fish out of these other systems. They can look at the stable isotopes and they can see where that fish was.
That fish has marine stable isotopes where that fish was spending time in the ocean and then shot up a different river system.
That's an they're spreading through the ocean.
Really, I wonder how long they can. I've got a lot of questions.
Now his ask gets washed out or whatever, I don't know, goes on a tour and he's like, I gotta get out of here, I don't know, and find some stream and shoots up it and then finds a boy or girl to make love to.
Well the pit it's illegal to hunt him here, right, Pigs.
And mont the band hog hunt them Montana.
I think they might have, but I want to know, Like I'd love to talk to someone from FWP to know, like if they feel like it's a serious threat from Canada.
They branded it, what do they call him? Northern super hard right right?
I want to know if it's like.
Yeah, you know what, you know what?
Uh?
We covered that and I get all I spent all this time, my kids all worked up about Canadian super hawks Like it's I say some So listen, there's the old kind of hog. Does the whole world over? Any pig year eight, any piece of bacon you ever ate, anyone you ever talked to hunting wild hogs in America.
Same thing.
It's sus scrafa. It's it's that's okay.
The only thing that can take down those Canadian superhogs is a Canadian super wolf.
Yep. So it's suscraffa. Yeah, and he's all worked up about Canadian super hogs. And I realized that on our own website when we covered that group, that population of hogs that are north of Montana, the best Canadian super hogs.
It's what a great name.
Yeah, it's like the Wisconsin super sou and Canadian superhogs.
But it's it's it can be.
They're demonstrating here that that those regulations which strike you as being so counterintuitive, if you don't.
Want hogs, why would we not hunt.
Them, that it's actually effective in preventing the introduction of hogs.
I mean those outfitters and stuff down and axis, they make some a serious living, you know, making sure they have hogs on their properties.
Mm hmm.
I mean it's got it. They've got to be moved around and trapped. And I bet you some of those guys buy hogs. You know, if they're starting to get low. It wouldn't surprise me.
Brandon Butler.
When we were hunting in Missouri for turks, he took me out and showed me like sort of wildcat hog traps. The dudes are just going out in the woods to construct from catching their own hogs in areas that have them so they could bring them to bring them to places that don't.
Uh.
Quick correction, A couple of corrections. So you know, we always point out that doctor Randall is the only doctor that works at this company.
That's who are we leaving out.
Well, Jordan Siller's like kind of quietly snuck in with a PhD. Does have time to be getting a PhD. I to get one of those. I need to figure out how to get one. What's his pH d in?
It's in English? So, speaking of our Meat Eater website, he I don't know if he was the person who wrote that article on the super hogs.
What's shaking your head about?
Okay, because it's like, dud, Jordan, It's like, that's cool.
It's not philosophy, and I have a I have an advanced I'll point out I have the.
Old you know, I just don't have a pH d.
So on our episode Glassing for sheds, which is quite a while ago now when we had bed Ben Detamantian, we were talking about can you say strewed.
And that was in the context of of a of antlers and uh shed antler piles being found found by like seas not found seized by and then cut up like dog treats and thrown across or scattered across.
Hear me out, so as Crena said, so a guy got bosted for hunting sheds ahead of time before an area was and he'd even cut some up. So down in Wyoming, they just go back out and they scatter him about so people can rEFInd.
Him the cut up ones, even the cut up.
You're finding, which I was pointing out.
It was a little bit like like Easter egg hunt, right, you know, like someone just was touching that egg earlier today, so uh do you know.
Right they're chili me.
Yeah, great, can't got your tongue.
You guys are pull that mic up close.
You guys are just talking having grand all the time.
So I said that they went and strewed him about the landscape, and I thought that can't be a word and our and this is coming from an actual pH D in English, in English of all things.
So he would your PhD be in I don't think you can get.
A PhD in what I studied, Okay, but if you were going to get a PhD, definitely not would work.
Oh if I was going to go now, I would pursue a pH d in American history?
Or would you go to law school?
Well, no, that's a whole different deal.
They're not, you know, the whole ticket in raffle.
To study sleep, steaks, and an expert on that.
Yeah, I would love to be.
A world expert, world expert on sweep stakes and raffle man. It comes from the Old English Struian ustre Oian, meaning to scatter. I think the reason it sounds weird is because it seems to be used most commonly as the past participle strewn. That's right. Past participles are words formed from verbs that can be used as an adjective to form perfect verb.
Tenses, as in, they were strewn across the.
Land and to form the passive voice, which your English teachers will be out of you eventually. So people would usually use the passive voice. The sheds were strewn, were strewn on the landscape, as opposed to the active wildlife officials strewed the shed on the landscape.
Can you say it? Look at those guys strewing antlers?
Oh yeah, all right.
We recently had an episode called The Guru Comes Up for Air? Is that crarect?
Oh right there? Episode four or fifty two The Guru Comes Up for Air, in which we interviewed a formal apostle, a former apostle of the Health Guru, wim Hoff, who has strayed from the orthodoxy, to question some of his judgment and character. In this we got to talk about shallow water blackouts and yeah, I don't think he wasn't familiar with shadow water blackout.
I think perhaps he's familiar. Yeah, go ahead, Brody.
Well, it felt like you were talking about one thing and he was talking because he said he mentioned shallow water blackout. But it was like, I felt like, you guys are talking about two different things.
And I feel like we weren't. We weren't totally clear as to why I was called.
Well, yeah, I wasn't there.
I was like, my understanding, I told him, my understanding is that maybe I'm wrong. My understanding is that people tend to black out by the surface and that's where why shallow water blackout? But I didn't really know, so a lot of people wrote in. Greg Fonce wrote in about this. It's called shallow water blackout, but I'm using this one because it's so it's so perfect the connection to watch this. Remember how we were talking about sus
Saint Marie earlier. I do well, A Navy seal wrote in to offer a correction, points out, I was born and raised in Sus Saint Marie, Michigan, Wow, and grew up two blocks from Lake State University, active duty seal. He teaches UH seal medics dive medicine. Okay, so he teaches future seal medics dive medicine, which is why he wants to put so highly credentialed. Here's why free divers and others dive. Here's why when they black out, they
blackout at the surface. This will tickle your fancy. I could do the short and palatable, or I could do long and boring. He gives the option, Let's go with long and boring. He starts out by saying the pathophysiology is long and drawn out. Okay, follow me. The pressure at depth pushes blood from the thoracic cavity to the peripheral space like the brain, because the lungs aren't taking up much volume.
Smaller lungs use less blood.
So you have air and under pressure, right that it shrinks your lungs squeeze in it.
That's why like trachia squeezes, lung squeezes like an issue people can get when they're diving at depth.
Yeah, and I'll point out here he doesn't have this in there. But I'll point out you can't compress You can pressurize water, but you can't compress water. Like no matter how much pressure you put on water, you don't make it smaller, right, you know it doesn't. It's still volume wise, it still takes up the same volume air under pressure, you can pressurize air, it takes up less volume.
So when you dive down, and they talk about atmospheres, so it's like thirty feet, sixty feet, ninety feet correlates to these these different atmospheres at which pressure becomes noticeably different. So when you go down, your lungs shrink because you're full of air. You went down on a full breath hold. Like I mentioned when I was teaching my boy how to hold his breath I'll say, imagine filling your ball sack with air. You're feeling your breathe so deep, you're feeling your testicles there.
Could he imagine that he laughed okay, and.
Then the air came out, and then he lost all his air.
You're breathing that deep, but you go down and all of a sudden, it's pushing less.
So he's saying that when this happens, blood.
Is moving out of there all right, and the increase in blood being pushed to the brain, So more blood is shoved to your brain, which compensates for the lower arterial oxen saturation that occurs when your body metabolizes the
oxygen deering your breath hold. So you're got a big bunch of air and all that blood goes in and the blood's going somewhere, so you're sending more oxygenated blood goes to your brain, right, which helps compensate for the fact that you're not breathing now now the ascent you're ascending. When you ascend, if you were so borderlined, that the only thing keeping your oxygen saturation in an acceptable range for consciousness generally twenty five to twenty mmhg's whatever the hell.
That means, all of.
A sudden, your lungs, as you knew the surface, your lungs fully expand.
And it pulls that blood out from your your noggin.
That extra blood that was hanging out up there.
Your lungs go because now, like the whole thing with the Benz, right now, your lungs are well, the bends different. That's breathing on a tank, not the Benz. Your lungs are going back to normal. His noise they're making, right, Did you get that fill?
Yeah, that's great.
Thanks.
Uh sucks the blood out of your head and then you pass out, and you pass out. He goes on to say his name is Smooch who wrote in He goes on to say snobs would call this ascent blackout, but not me, no way.
And m M HG HG is mercury on the periodic table, and mm is millimeter and a millimeter of mercury is a menometric unit of pressure.
Got it? That clarifies things for me.
It's a it's a weird it's a weird thing that shallow water blackout because you can just be feeling pretty good and fine and then the next thing you know, someone's unconscious.
I haven't done it yet. Well yeah, but I mean I know so many people that have and they don't. They don't they one minute, the way they describe it, one minut they're swimming up toward the surface and the next minute someone's blown across their face at the surface and they're trying to figure out what the hell happen. No panic, so feasibly it would be a painless way to die.
Did you say that you did it or you were close to do it?
I've never shallow water, I've never done it.
No.
There's a thing called the Samba two that that free divers talk about.
And that's break.
Yeah, you break the surface and then you like not beneath surface. You break the surface and you get woozy and tippy at the surface. They'll say you sambaed, meaning you kind of like had a little bit of a you kind of passed out a little teeny bit once you broke surface. But in shallow water black ou Let's say you black out three feet shot of the surface
and stop kicking and you're underwater. Yeah, so you have a mamillion you have that mi million dive reflex, so you don't breathe, right, away, you sink and don't do anything, and eventually whatever amount of energy it requires to have the MA million dive reflex activated, that subsides and then you take your death breath.
But then you're taking your death breath of water, basically.
Don't They usually say that's like typically about two minutes before that happens.
Oh, I don't know, I never heard.
I've heard, I've heard, and I'll probably get corrected. But yeah, like when you pass out, you have ballpark about two minutes before you take that, oh, death breath. I don't know, someone can maybe look that up and see. But that's what I was always to know.
That, so I would. I mean, that's not surprising to me. It's not thirty minutes.
Right, Yeah, But like they said, if somebody passes out in the water, you have about two minutes.
Before like to find it its lights out. So yeah, and this is a big part of why, uh, you know, the serious spear fishermen that are being safe. We'll always practice one guy on surface, one guy down, one guy on surface, one guy down, and so the guy on surface is presumably paying attention to hey, he should.
Have he shouldn't be floating.
He should be up here and you go down to hunt him down.
I'm gonna do some diving this weekend.
Are you. We're at.
A lake in the ocean lake in Montana taking.
A spear, nice.
Chili. Can can you explain this? Can you explain that pistol? And then we're gonna hang that in the new studio?
Well do you want like the history of it or like the story how I got it?
Both?
Both? All right?
So not a very interesting interesting story how we got it.
My dad got it from a work call league back in the day that's had a I mean I think she had this and like an old fifty cow flint lock and gave the flint lock rifle to somebody else and then gave this to my dad and then it's just been hanging up in our house for the entirety of my life, and then passed it on down to me and my brother and then But so it's a it's a if you want to.
Look at it, oh man, Yeah, damn, get it towards the camera.
No trigger guard back then?
Huh no, No, And I'd actually love you pulled that thing out of there? No you want to?
Yeah, you got to break the back.
Yeah, you got to break it to get in there.
I don't think the case came with the gun, So.
You can break it with your palth.
We can busted up like a pick of that.
Yeah, you don't need to do that. That's pretty sweet though. Yeah.
So it's a it's a thirty two caliber rim fire. It's an old Civil War era pistol. They made them from six eighteen sixty one to eighteen seventy four. There's roughly about seventy seven thousand of them made a man roughly seventy seven thousand, and it feels like that.
I would have guessed ten.
Yeah, yeah, No, they mass produced for sure.
They also think that the first thirty five thousand in production had a very good chance of actually being in the Civil.
War, so it would have been issued to soldiers.
Correct, it was ago. I won't read this whole thing, but again, I think.
ReBs, I think, I think again, my people weren't here yet, so I don't need to worry about that gun having felled one of my people.
Yeah, we were Midwest.
It's not so they probably failed your people probably probably.
Um.
Yeah, So they say that first thirty thirty five thousand probably were in the war, and then It goes on to say, so all the serial numbers are on it. This is on the hilt I think it's called the hilt of the handle, right on the bottom side of the pistol grip.
Oh, that piece of metal that runs that the plate's going.
To Yeah, I can't remember what it was, but it has a serial number, and this one starts with the forty four thousand, So it wasn't necessarily probably.
In the war. Oh.
But what's interesting is since they only made them to eighteen seventy four, that put if it was made then at the last year, it's still one hundred and fifty years old.
Wow.
Hilt says that the handle of any weapon or tool.
So this this it's a revolver or with no trigger guard. No, a trigger that is not trigger like correct, But that's not a great description. How would you describe that trigger? It's and then a cylinder with no no notching in the cylinder. It's a smooth cylinder.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's in a very rudimentary bead and groove to aim it.
Have you guys had a red dot on that thing?
Oh yeah, no, no, we could do.
You know, the barrel's rifled, you know, I don't.
I really don't.
I don't know a whole lot about like all the things, all the research that I did on this was pretty much the same stuff. It kind of goes into the history of it, not like the dynamics of the pistol itself.
Is it like Brody's Priest?
What do you call this persuader?
Is it like Brody sam and Persuader where it's got notches in the handle?
No, I don't.
I don't know.
I I think I would rather take that into a fight than this thing, though, that's for sure.
You don't know anybody started taking that out and taking a crack on it.
No, I can't say that I have.
It's always been this was hanging up in our stairwell going downstairs, and it was there for I don't know eighteen years that I lived there, and my dad always that don't touch it.
So no, and then.
And then you brought it here, and then and then and then I grew up and I got out of the house and he's like, yeah, you want it. I'm like, sure, you got to take it to It's probably he's going to catch you now.
Yeah.
He gives him a big old whooping.
Right, persuader little pants down smacks a little butt right here for touching his pistol.
Can I see it?
Yeah?
Absolutely, Yeah, you got to take it to someone to make sure there's not something you should be doing to like preserve it or what. You know what I mean.
Well, I mean it's one hundred and fifty. I think it looks pretty good for a hundred.
Sure it does, but you know, yeah, there's probably some better method to take care of that thing. And I would actually be really interested in someone that knows what they're doing with that particular.
There's someone out there that knows everything about that gun, yeah you know what I mean, but like.
Just like but you'll get some people writing in about it from here.
Oh, I'm sure. And my biggest curiosity is that trigger, Like I want to know like how that works. And because I mean that it just looks weird.
Yeah what there would be some kind of antique firearms enthusiasts out there. Oh maybe he's maybe there's a mirror expert who's also an anti he come and take care of it here.
I think those triggers are like are relatively common because I feel like I've seen them at antique stores. I'm like little little pistols and twenty two years.
It just like hangs you take a stab at it. There's a little hang down, a little tear drop shape hanged down in the trigger rest, and the trigger.
Is like a little.
Never mind, great, great crack.
A little button.
But just think about it.
I think, I think when you you know cock that like what I can picture is when you cock, the handle goes yeah, and then it becomes whatever active and then you pull it back.
And I don't think.
I know how to explain it. It's like a savage ACU trigger. It's like a Savage ACU trigger if the it's only the ACU part of the ACUT. It's the Savage ACU trigger if this If the trigger trigger was solid and the safety blade that moves inside an ACU trigger was the trigger, it was a phenomenal.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, now I explain savage.
Got our expert right here.
Everyone google it.
Hmmm.
Yeah, that's got to be a single action, right, cock and fire.
Yeah, that's pretty sweet. I like that thing.
Yeah, no, it's it's great. Yeah, if anyone has more information about it.
They still making thirty two rimp fire shells.
You know, I can't say that they are.
I don't think that they are.
Here's like, oh maybe the guys that are making our punt gun ammo when they finish that w able to do this.
We still got to hang that up and we got to get the.
So, bro, you couldn't find you weren't able to find the email the guy sent in.
We recently had a guy right in.
Well, I found the email. I just didn't find anything about an age. It was the size of the skull that.
He Oh, and that's what was certified by the state.
Yeah, they had it measured twenty three inches, which is out of what state is at Minnesota. No kid, but that's also where the oldest black bear was from too.
So a guy wrote in and he found a twenty three inch found it dead, died on his land. Found a twenty three inch bear skull.
Well, I think he might have found the bear.
Oh so like so just for context here all time Boom and Crockett is twenty one Yeah, enormous blackbirds.
Yeah, a bear died on his land and there was some back and forth about whether he could claim it or it was the States, and it ended up in a lawsuit.
I'm thinking of something different. Give me me, there's something different, Bears. There's another guy that just had this old ass.
I did not see that one. Sorry, no, no, no, I thought we were talking about that campfire one. Sorry Phil.
Oh you're good. If anyone wants to fill the space with some interesting bandits.
If if the world record Boon and Crocket black Bear's skull measured twenty three and ten sixteenths, yeah, so this.
Is twenty three.
It's like, uh, it's gigantic, enormous anyway, like, well, this will probably all get cut. But this guy ended up in a lawsuit with the state over possession of that skull and got it. Which is weird because you know, in a lot of places you just watch around a different stories pick up dead heads.
And that that world record was also picked up in YouTube.
Just hold offer because we're not recording right now.
Just a reminder that now we're doing a live editing with the video. It's uh kind of a pain to cut things out. I'll make it work. I'll make it work, just only if we can just sorry to avoid it from here.
On out back to the bear and he can be testy like that back there because he doesn't have to.
Look at it.
It's like it's like getting testy with a customer service wrap over the phone, you'd say something you never say in person.
I kind of agree with you, but I feel like you're a little hard on Phil.
Sometimes I wish she was here looking me in the eye.
That's what the morphil.
Yeah, I want more Phil, not less Phil.
Well, we can talk about the oldest bear?
No, I do want to hear?
Yeah, yeah, so so, but either way, there's some dude recently wrote in and I lost it, but he wrote in and he found this this bear and it looked like you had taken an angle grinder and removed its teeth. And he got some certification back and this bear was I feel like the spar was in the thirties and then whatever the hell state he was in, it was the oldest bear found in the state.
But I can't find his thing. Yeah, but you found that.
Okay, what's the biggest black bear on record?
Twenty three and ten sixteens. It came from Utah and it was picked up.
And if people aren't familiar that measurement, all it is is length the skull and width the skull added together.
Isn't it weird? How the biggest of most stuff is picked up mm hmm, like so often the biggest specimens picked up. So the biggest big horn sheep pick up, the biggest white tail picked up, the biggest black bear picked up this. So this was twenty three inches. And then the oldest bear on record was thirty nine years old out of Minnesota. Yep, yep.
It's not killed by a hunter, died natural causes.
M And then so the dude that found it got in a little custody battle. And who wound up with the skull? He did? He did? Okay, but that brings us a round to how Chester has an old ass bear.
Yeah. I shot this bear with a recurve.
Wild back home.
I made, made the bow, and this is a local bear and it was a sow. But when I brought it in to f w P, well, no.
Tell what happened before he brought it in.
Tell us about the hunt.
Okay, it's a it's an interesting hunt. So it was a snap jiggen in a meadow anyways, No, I uh. In the springtime in Montana, a lot of the time you can find bears in green metals, you know, up in the mountains. They're coming down out of the snow and chowing on wild flowers and grass, and that's exactly what I was doing. I was glassing over these green meadows and this bear came out, and I had been glassing up another bear, and this one looked substantially bigger.
And I got to the edge of this field. The wind was absolutely perfect, but it almost looked like a manecured field, like some landscaping company came in there and made it look all pretty. There was there was one juniper in the middle of it. So I got to the edge of this field and the wind was right, and I took my shoes off, and I was just like, I'm going to see how close I can get to this thing. Took my shoes off so I could try and be.
With Yeah, I think your feet were itchy or an itchy.
No, but it was facing away, and like I said, the wind was right, and I just kept creeping towards it, real slow, not crawling or anything.
Using the tree between you and the bear.
Nope, just staying on its hind end. And luckily it just stayed facing away from me. And I probably got like sixty seventy yards and that juniper was I was getting close to that juniper, and the bear was just on the other side of it, and I was like, as soon as it gets on the other side of this juniper, I'm gonna just hustle my butt up and be right there. So shake hands, shake hands with it. It gets on the other side of that juniper, that's
exactly what I do. And it steps out broadside. It's you know, probably fifteen to eighteen yards, I don't know, somewhere in there. And I shoot it, and I think it's just a beautiful, perfect shot. And if any of you guys have hundred bears before, they got a lot of fur, a lot of hair, and it can kind of be deceiving because you're shooting at a black blob,
you know. So I think it's just a perfect shot, and you know, my heart's going and it takes off down into the woods and I start blood trailing and there's no blood to be found whatsoever. And I look and look and look, and I'm just getting super discouraged. So I start doing what every hunter would do. They grid search it, you know, they kind of get on onyx and start making a track. And I was gridding this hill signed and I was a.
Lot of seconds. Yeah, we should just put this in the fucking Discoveries thing.
Yeah, I mean I don't know the rest of the story, but if you haven't figured that out, Yeah, we shouldn't talk about this a little interstitial never mind, you got to go in the book. Sorry, Phil, show us your face to be too good of a it's like too good of a little Yeah, if it was, we need it in campfire for sure.
No, it's anyways.
Uh, you can't tell I'm doing fine? Is it a learning process for everyone? I'll take it.
Phil is back there?
Show us your face again, Phil, What does it look like right now?
You know what, Phil?
Because they don't know what happened except you said teaser.
Okay? Can you is it easy for you to go back in and bleep stuff out or easier just to edit the whole thing out bleeping?
Probably?
Okay? Can you just go back and bleep all the thing that would make it this is actually an ad for can't fire stories? Okay?
Or just cut all the audio.
Lemons and the lemonade sort of thing. Here we go.
Can you just try It'll just sound like I'm swearing the whole time.
And then Phil blur for the whole video.
I want you to blur that skull so people don't know that he got it.
Okay, And second thought, let.
Edited out's face.
No, Phil, just bleep, just just act like he swore a lot, and bleep the parts out that you think would matter.
And you don't need to do any of the work.
Sounds sounds good.
Here's the work Phil's trying to get out of. You can watch.
You can watch, we're making we're starting to record our show. And and and Phil is back there in his little command and control center hitting what camera he wants on all the time. Isn't that right, Phil? Is that how you'd express it?
Camera four? Yes, it is, Steve back to camera one.
Okay, So that's what he's That's what's going through his little head back there, and he doesn't want to have to have a big old headache of going back in and trying to undo all his camera work.
Yeah. So on that note, I'd like to apologize for all the weird camera cuts I just made during that segment when I thought it was going to be cut out, So just to ignore.
Those because we were going to be thinking, Man, that guy's not very good at that. That was a great story. Chester. I'm on the edge of my seat.
Dude told me.
Is that bleeping he bleeping the one in your office?
Yes, yep, that's where am I going to be able to hear the real story?
Now? I'm a little confumaters Campfire Stories Volume three. So volume one was close calls, Volume two was more close calls, and then we had to catch you little subtitle. Volume three is gonna be called crazy shit I found, but not what we called it? Do we know yet? Like the yeah, not really amazing, archae discovery whatever, finding plane crashes, finding missing bodies, finding archaeological sites, finding just whatever. Weird jump Sure, well what do you got right in front
of you right now? Do you ad any talk about this? But I'm not Yeah, I don't think. Do you feel like it's gonna make the Uh, it's not gonna make them. It's not gonna No, go ahead, I want to hear about it.
Okay, this, this here is an extinct sea creature. I was hunting in Montana.
Looks like I've found the little chunks before, but go on.
I was hunting in Montana in twenty nineteen, and that morning I was sitting behind my spotter and I glassed this up. It was in like some bad Lands country, and I glassed it up from a long ways away, and I didn't know what it was.
You gotta explain what you saw, though.
I saw that exactly.
People people have home who are listening.
People want to say that it's a it looks like a core sample that you took from the here.
I thought when I came in and this was sitting here, I thought for some reason there was a core sample in here.
It is not a core sample. It looks like you when.
You look at it carefully, it's oval.
You know how some people got a game.
I Spencer's got a thing and yeah, and mushroom eye really bad. I'm a very bad shed hunter. I think I'm very good at mushrooms and rocks.
Are you interested in sheds?
Though terribly interested in shed are?
Yeah?
I wish I was better because I didn't know if it was just like games.
No, Seth Morris has the best shed I know.
Yeah, It's it's hard for me to not do one and do the other, because it seems like the best shed hunters are like scanning a large area, and when you're looking for mushrooms and rocks, you're often looking in like a very small area. Your cone, like your sonar, is tiny. The sheds you're you're like looking over a big area. I can't I can't come to that.
I was walking through the woods with Seth. I had to duck my head to not poke a shed antler in my eye that his buck had gotten hung up in some grapevine and missed that. And it's like, look a shed hanging from a grapevine at high level in the trail you just walked down.
This looks like a core sample. It's about as thick as a beer can. A little little smaller, a little smaller. Okay, white, it's good if you put like two white claws on top of each other, right, one and a half. Okay, it's very good describing stuff. It's in your hand right now, not mine. This is an extinct sea creature. It's called a back you light. Back you lights lived from about sixty six million years ago, which is when the dinosaurs
also an extinct to one hundred million years ago. Sounds like a long time, but if you if you want some context, like dinosaurs showed up like two hundred million years ago and then disappeared sixty six million years ago, So dinosaurs had already been around for one hundred million years by the time these came around. It's a long time and they their closest relative would be things that are cephalopods like squid, octopus. Their whole order family genus,
it's all extinct. None of these are are around anymore or even close to it. They grew up to about seven feet long. They had extreme sexual dimorphism. A male was only about a third of the size as a female, and they were They hung out in the middle of the water column. They ate plankton, and those little like fissures that you're seeing, those are called sutures on there, and that is how they would regulate the gas in
their body. This to imagine imagine a squid. Take a squid right and then give it a long cone body like five or six feet long. Yep, that's what a vacuu light looked like. And then those little so that's the body right there.
This is like the shell of it. Juter tentacles fossilized well well.
Usually things that are soft don't fossilize very well. Mushrooms, for example, which would be similar in material to tentacles. I think there's been twelve in the world that have been found of fossils. So no, the tentacles really really poorly fossilized. This would be the hard shell of it.
So my question, let's back up a little bit. When you said you glass us up.
Yep, I didn't know what it was, right, I mean, you found it in your noox.
In my spotting scope.
Were you looking for deer?
I was looking for deer, but looking most of my deer hunts evolve.
And that's why he's got that buck sit next to him, because he got that buck later that day. That's right.
So I found this vacuu light in the morning, and then that afternoon, only a few hundred yards away, I killed this buck.
So you're telling me you saw that through your scope. I didn't know what it was.
I knew it was unnatural, like I was like that that's something I was painted picture too. Is it like in the middle of like just something. When I look at that, I see how rock It was in some bad landsy stuff that had a lot of like dead grass on it. This was late in November and it was just laying there. It actually had a couple other smaller VACUU lights next to it. Steve, you mentioned that you found some vacu lights before. Here's a smaller section.
I found the sections. This.
This I found him on Tana. This came from Wyoming. It's also a bad that's what I have these.
My kids have found him too. Yeah. Can I tell you a neat little story. Yeah. I know an old timer that he's well into his eighties. He had one of these sitting on a shelf in his house and I didn't know what it was. And I said, dude, what is that? And he said, I don't know, some kind of fossil. And he had had it for I mean decades. I gather because I never found anybody that could tell me what that was. He doesn't know the first thing about internet stuff. So I put it on Instagram.
I'm like, hey, what is this? And within seconds I'm like, that's evaculate And so I go and I show them. We go into Google and type in vaculate and I pulled all these pictures of them. Yeah, okay, And he's pretty surprised by this whole revelation. It's very convinced that that's what he's holding. Was very happy. A while later, he calls me and he says, what was the website you were showing me the pictures. I was like, it's called it's Google. Yeah, all right.
Native Americans would find those lots, and they call them buffalo stones because if you look at the bottom, you could see like you're looking at the undercarriage of bison. I think the black Feet specific had some origin stories about how they were good luck. There was a woman who found one when they were in the middle of a famine, and then the next day a whole herd of bison showed up and it like really turned things around for them. So back you light or buffalo calling stones.
M I've heard that buffalo calling that's a buffalo calling stone.
That does work. If you're applying for a buffalo tag.
Well, it helped me kill this deer that afternoon.
I stick one of those in with your application.
Uh huh.
Yeah. This is a cactus buck.
No.
Normally, white tails and mule deer will shed their velvet in late August early September. It happens when the photo period changes. Day start getting shorter, bucks elevate their testosterone and then their velvet sheds. When that doesn't happen, it's a cactus buck and it's kind of a catch all term right. Cactus bucks can come in many forms, many shapes and size. It could be an antler dough. It could be a hermaphrodite that has man and female sex organs.
It could be a buck that lived a normal life as a buck, and then one day he messed up his testicles, crossing a bar boy or fence, got hit by a vehicle, was in a fight with another buck, and got stabbed in the nuts, and then that can mess with their hormones and create a cactus buck.
Or I was told you keep going with that list.
I was liking that.
Yes, okay, I can't think of any other examples.
You know, I suppose you get right in the sack. You can take this leather. That's good as way.
This buck, for example, though, was born this way. His testicles had never dropped, and they were about the size of a cashew.
Is that right?
So when you went to gut him, was there a sack or it was an empty coin purson?
What was like a full sized sack but empty.
It was it was like absorbed up into the stumach. You could see like, okay, this is where his his sack and testicles should be. And it was just like a slight change in the topography.
H there, Did you shoot him like you knew what he was? And you shot him for that reason.
I knew what he was. He was with a few other bucks what he was because he was he wasn't hardhorned right right? And we had seen other bucks that weekend. Do you know when you see them that time of year that it's a cactus buck?
Did you see any other cactus bucks? And I feel like we've talked about a lot of it, man Will. I have found like there's specific area that we hunt and it's like we've seen so many of them, and it's just it's bizarre.
This idea gained traction after EHD. Twenty twelve was a terrible year for EHD. Gotcha, and the worst years of EHD are often when it's a wet season followed by a dry season. Twenty eleven was super wet. Twenty twelve was very dry for much of the country. That was when I think biologists started to notice more. They're like, oh, you can have some weird stuff that happens to deer when they survive EHD. You see it with the hoofs that get curled. Have you ever seen that.
Oh yeah, so.
That that was an example.
Not that hoof rock that's wreaking havoc in the Northwest.
No, not that, And I think some folks, I don't know that it's been proven, but they've they've come up with the idea that if you have an area that was hit by but hit bad by EHD, but you have some deer that survive it, cactus bucks become more common. I shot this buck in twenty nineteen. I went through a check station on the way home. They had told me they checked about one hundred deer that day and
this was the second cactus buck. So for that area it was about two percent of deer, but I think, you know, it could be all the way up to ten percent in some spots.
I remember, I can't remember what some guys are telling me about. One of those islands in Alaska and more western Alaska that has the introduced Kimera field is a fog Nak or Kodiak or one of those islands has introduced you know, introduced blacktails. It's almost some area where it's just like a pile of them running around. I never found out if it was true or not, but it's just like common in some spot like it introduced herd.
Yep, that was one of my favorite days of hunting.
Ever. I found this to either two of the three things you like? Oh, what's the third?
Four?
What's the fourth? Where you like sports a little bit, you like your wife, you like stones.
And you like bucks.
That's right? Yeah?
Are you with your wife that day?
No?
I wasn't. So you get two of the four things he likes.
Yeah, one of my favorite rocks and one of my favorite bucks. Have you ever seen how they preserve the velvet on a deer?
That was my next question.
Yeah, they have like three ways. My understanding, that's going to.
Live here in the studio for a while.
Yeah, for sure. If if we're good with it, we're still decorating. We're still like three ways trivia mm hmm about cactus bucks. One of them is freeze drying, which I think has become more common.
Hadn't heard that.
Another one is they'll scrape the velvet off and then they'll put an artificial velvet on. I don't like spraying, you know, insuly.
Yeah, I'm composed of that.
And then the third way, which is how this one was done, is they have a chemical cocktail it's similar to embalming fluid that they just inject all over.
I'm familiar with that.
That's that's how this one preserved it.
It's hard to take care of.
Yeah, cost me an extra fifty dollars from the taxi gervists.
Man, well, we used we used to hunt caribou in August when they had all that velvet. My god, is that stuff getting nasty? Man? Like, you don't think of flies. It's all full of blood, so you go to grab them and your hands get bloody. You don't think of flies getting on antler. Yeah, they love it. So it's just these fly ridden messes. And so I used to think that something. I was gonna try to save one, but you just can't. Yeah, and then it starts to
rot and it's falling off and it's nasty. But I did want to get a big bunch of that velvet and get it tanned and make like a bra for my wife man lined with that antler velvet.
Man, Uh huh, that's funny.
This one was.
Oh yeah, I wanted to do one out of like, Yeah, I always telling her about it. She's like, you just don't understand.
I just don't understand you wouldn't get it.
She doesn't understand to get her like a fur of velvet lined bra.
Krin is that? Why is that not appealing?
I find it appealing?
Yeah, yeah, well Krinn, Yeah she also has animal part earings.
I do it.
See is like to be warmer and I'll get out.
Yeah, I think it'd be real comfortable.
She's like, it's just not a cold area, like your fingers get cold, cold, cold cold.
You can think about it as I mean, I wouldn't think about it as whether it's insulating or not, but more just like a texture, like what's what's comfortable to the touch?
Sure?
Yeah, yeah, she's thinking about it the wrong way.
She's like, it's like lots of things.
Like your cheeks get cold, your hands get cold.
Lauer, you shouldn't move forward with it.
Yeah yeah that's great man. I like that.
Thank you.
That's true. We got what are we going to kick out?
There's a lot of white space, there is this is this like the.
We're going to keep redecorating and we oh, we should move our Warner Bratzler meat tenderizers. Put a little meat eater cap on him, call him warrener b.
Yeah, or he can go on one of the other shelves in the new place.
I'll point out this fossil is found on public land and was on b l M and it's not against the law. It's not against law. It's legal to collect common invertebrates. And they specifically call out you know, they're not very specific, but they say, like common invertebrates such as mollusks, clams, things like that, this would be a type of mollusk. They're very common. They' found around the world. So I kept it, and that's legal.
I had a great exchange with Spencer one time. I think I hit you up on an inReach device, okay, And I said we had found a huge block of old seafloor. There was a clam bed, I remember, and my daughter wanted me to pack it out. Yep, it's still sitting there because this is about seventy pounds.
It's quite a way is off the river.
Huh.
And I texted you about what are the rules.
About it and what was the pounded you're allowed?
Well, so they get into specifics for petrified wood. It's like, I think it's twenty five pounds a day. Can't exceed two hundred and fifty pounds in a year, and then they have something like you can't take a piece that's larger than X amount of pounds.
I don't remember what that was.
When it comes to the fossils, though, they just say you cannot collect to trade, barter or sell, and you must collect in reasonable quantities.
That's what that's what the that's what you text.
I don't know what a reasonable does it seem like a reasonable.
Hat?
It'd be a reasonable quantity.
And I'm like, it's unreasonable that I would tote this out of here, but it seems like a reasonable quantity.
But no, I propped it up. It's still sitting there where I found it.
Presumably what's that unless someone thought it was a reasonable quantity and they.
I don't think anyone could.
Carry that out of there. Man. Uh, all right, one last thing, Max, you have your grand You've taken the possession of your grandfather's fishing hat.
I wouldn't say it's a fishing hat, it's a do it all hat.
Is he no longer with us?
No, he's not. He passed away in twenty nineteen. Oh yeah, So.
Did he specifically leave that hat to you? No?
I think my dad took it and then I took it from my dad.
Okay, but yeah, it's kind of a funny story behind this hat.
It's uncomfortable as crap. If you can't see it now.
It looks like very wax, very wax.
It is like an old man hat, like a nice clean hat.
Oh yeah, yeah, I'm bald. Like it's got to feel good, know that in your hat with antler velvet.
Well, now that you.
Mentioned that, it's not a bad idea, but my dad, it was my grandpa's birthday and my dad got that for my grandpa for his birthday.
Well, not this hat.
Sorry, he got a different hat for his birthday, and my Grandpa hated it, and so he took the hat that my dad gave him, put it on the shelf, went out, took my dad's credit card, bought this hat, which was more expensive, and didn't tell my dad about it. And then he was just walking around with his hat, and my Dad's like, hey, what happened to this hat? And Grandpa didn't say anything about it. And then my dad's birthday came around next month and the hat that my dad got my grandpa, my grandpa.
Just gave it back to him.
Sure, because he didn't like it as a present. Yeah, as a present and he found this at.
Was that when you maint that was one of your main outdoor mentors?
Yeah? Big time?
Was he prone to stealing people's credit cards?
I guess I don't know you do you wear that hat?
I do not know.
This hat sits on, sits on the wall, sits on the shelf, so keep sack.
Yeah, big time. But yeah, I think my I think I was six.
Uh, there's a photo of me my grandpa when we're when I was six out pheasant hunting and he's wearing this hat.
Really yeah, it's pretty sweet.
Think of all the adventures this hell oh, big time, big time.
But no, I was.
Just just trying to think of something cool to bring in and I was like, that's really cool to me because without my grandpa, I don't think I would have got involved in hunting. And then if I wouldn't have gotten involved in hunting, I would never picked up a camera. And if I never would have picked up camera, I wouldn't be here right now.
So maybe we shouldn't put that on a shelf in the studio. I feel like it's a little too precious for.
Well, what's the how do you preserve something like that?
We're talking about the pistol. Only put some Scotch guard on.
Like put it in like a blocks of apoxy.
Oh yeah, you know what man? You know how people do that? Or they resin set it in the block.
Man? If that I got real good, that's all I would do. I'd have like stuff that I was like, damn, shouldn't put that in there?
You could build a house out all that.
Oh yeah, just make your house out of stuff he sunk into blocks, all your cool stuff.
You would need to hang it on the wall because it was the wall.
That's very cool.
I don't think I'll do that with this.
Steve, did you know that Max is a fresh trivia champion?
You won one? Yeah?
Sure did?
Who was there?
Doctor?
Who was there?
Was Doctor Randall?
Doctor Randall's there?
Barren Square? Whooped down?
Did you beat?
You?
Beat you?
Honestly?
There was a three way like you won one with doctor Randall and Brody in the room. Yep?
Do you want to play the tiebreaker?
Steve?
See if you did gotten close, I'll ask you.
A wrap show up?
Go ahead?
What year did Steve her when pass away? If you can remember he passed away by sting Ray was right.
I didn't win trivia, but I got the tiebreaker.
Yeah, you got the correct.
Two thousand and six. Brody was right on the nose, so we had the extra hundred dollars donation. But he wasn't in the tiebreaker.
You did that, Oh yeah, but you didn't let him win it.
No, no, no, Max one, he said. Two thousand and eight.
Me and Brody argued about that game.
There an eight Brody did. Brody just sat there. But I had a lot of.
You know, there's sore losers. I told Steve he's a sore winner.
I had to yell over his bolt multiple times to give him various thoughts on why I felt like it was a scam.
Uh huh, just what even though, all right, everybody, thanks for joining studios, shaping up.
It's gonna look good. I like, whose idea was the muscos. That's great.
It's a whole dang wall.
Yeah something.
Someday I'm gonna comb that and get all.
The kiviat you remember giving me the yeah flies Halloween mask.
I want to comb out enough of that stuff to have a hat made out of that kiviot. I think it's the word for it kivot, it's more. It's like better than any wool for insulatory quality. And I think you'd comb out a whole hat out of there, and you wouldn't even be able to tell from looking at it because it looks like a big foot hanging there. That's what I first thought walked in here. I thought someone got a big foot?
Did you get did you get that?
I killed that nan Back Island.
And you thought it was a big foot.
Years ago? Years ago, I drew, I don't even think you can draw it right now. Years ago I drew, uh uh muskox tag for none of that island. Yeah, it was like d x O one or something like that was the hunt number. And yeah, man was we had a good time. Steve.
You're fixing to put First Light out of business with all this muskox and velvet clothing.
Roll it into the lineup.
Man, Yeah, I know that would be bad, wouldn't it?
Because I could just picture them being like, you know, my brawl line came out.
Okay, bye everybody.
Thanks on the seal, gray shine like silver in the sun. Ride, Ride, Ride on alone, Sweetheart, were done, beat this damn horse to death, taking a new one and ride We're done beat this damn horse today, so take a new one and ride on