00:00:05 Speaker 1: We have a natural flood pulse of the lower miss whereat you don't have it in the Upper miss you don't have it in the Ohio, you don't have it in the Arkansas. It's all damned all the way up. So that's the unique nature of it. And the fact that it joins the Missouri and goes another twelve hundred miles makes it the longest free flowing stretch of river. 00:00:26 Speaker 2: We've traveled in good ways down the Mississippi River in the last three episodes to understand its power and size, its ancient connection to man, the settlement of the Delta in some of the world's richest soil, the great engineering feat of taming the river, and the Great Flood of nineteen twenty seven. We've covered a lot of ground, all of this for the purpose of trying to understand how the Mississippi River has impacted America. On this episode, though, we're getting into the nitty gritty of river life and the fisheries hell and status, and I think you might be surprised by what you learned. I was doctor Jack Kilgore, who's a fisheries biologist for the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi will tell us about the great beasts of this river, the giant catfish, paddlefish, guars, and turtles. We'll also hear about finding giant groundsloth claws, bison skulls, and dead bodies. Will get to meet a man who spent the last fifty years commercial fishing on the river and hear his wildest stories. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. 00:01:36 Speaker 1: I hear that a lot too. You know, look how muddy it is, and it's got to be polluted. I've heard it's not. I tell people it's not. In fact, you know, I would catch a fish out of the Mississippi Way before and eat it. Before I would eat a fish out of my lake there in the subdivision. 00:01:52 Speaker 3: Is that? 00:01:53 Speaker 1: Oh yeah. 00:02:03 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by f h F Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place. 00:02:29 Speaker 4: As we explore, how are you doing good? How about you, Klay Nukelem. 00:02:46 Speaker 3: Yeah, Bill, good to meet you. 00:02:49 Speaker 2: This is my colleague and partner, Brent Reeves. 00:02:53 Speaker 3: Brent, yes, sir, A yeah, pretty good. 00:02:56 Speaker 2: Yeah you've been on the river this morning? 00:02:58 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I went and got those hoping now. 00:03:00 Speaker 2: So Brent and I just crossed the big River from Arkansas onto the Mississippi side in a truck on a bridge, and that's some uptown living. We didn't have to ferry across it or build a raft. If you remember, Old James Buchanan Eads was the first guy to build a bridge on the bigger sections of the Mississippi in eighteen seventy four. It's in Saint Louis. Where we get out of the truck. The air is thick and muggy. It's incredibly flat compared to where I came from. And if you're not looking at a crop field, the vegetation is as thick as a cane break. Welcome to the Mississippi Delta. Bill Lancaster is a commercial fisherman and he's just come off the water. He's wearing a ball cap, T shirt, shorts, and white rubber boots. He kind of reminds me of the country singer Tracy Lawrence, but a lot grittier. So how long you been fishing on the Mississippi River? 00:03:58 Speaker 3: Probably I probably started actually fishing in nineteen sixty nine. Yeah, that's that's the year I bought my first hook and net graduated from high school. My dad belonged to a hunting club on the Mississippi. A good friend of mine that was in the same grade that I was. We moved over there that summer and commercial fished on the river in the fall of sixty nine and then then went off to the to the army. So you got that winter. Yeah, So we we fished all summer over there and sold fish, you know to a local guy that was on the river at that time from Arkansas. 00:04:35 Speaker 2: And you you were just like, hey, I can make a I can make a living. 00:04:38 Speaker 3: Well with this. 00:04:39 Speaker 4: You know. 00:04:39 Speaker 3: We were, you know, eighteen seventeen, eighteen years old at that time, you know, and we were up for pretty much anything. But we you know, both grew up hunting and fishing, you know, and we enjoyed, you know, being on the river, and we thought, you know, that'd be a great thing to do. It'd be fished this summer, you know, and try to make a little money, just something to do before we went off to the the service. 00:05:01 Speaker 2: That was over fifty years ago. 00:05:02 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sixty nine. 00:05:04 Speaker 2: So yeah, so every year since then you fished, fished. 00:05:08 Speaker 3: Off and on for a number of years, and then started fishing full time, probably around nineteen eighty five eight a year round, yeah, year round, Yeah, twelve months out of the year. You know, it doesn't matter how cold it is, how hot it is. You know, we fished. Yeah, wow, Yeah. 00:05:25 Speaker 2: You spent a lot of time on the river. 00:05:26 Speaker 3: Oh I wish you know, I wish I knew exactly how much time I had spent out there. Yeah, unbelievable. 00:05:34 Speaker 2: Mister Bell is seventy one years old and has spent over fifty years on the water. With all this talk from Mark Twain about the treacherous river and its incredible power, one of my first questions which struck at the heart of my curiosity and had nothing to do with fish, but had to do with close calls. I asked him if he'd had any and you better believe that he had. Eventually we're going to talk to him about fishing, but not yet. 00:06:01 Speaker 3: Yeah, I've had a couple of experiences out there, I was running a small sixteen foot boat with a fifty horse motor on it, and earlier that week I had broken the trim tab off of it. And when you do that, the motor will torque hard to the right. That trim tab is what keeps that motor running in a straight line, even if you let off the tailor handle. So I broke that trim tab off and I was running hoop nets, and I had gotten through running the hoop nets. I was headed back up river with about a half a load of fish, and there was water in the boat, and I was going to reach back and pull the plug out and let it drain the water while I was running back to the boat ramp. Well, I pulled the plug out, had one hand on the tailor handle, and I was running about half throttle, not wide open. And somehow, when I pulled that plug out and started to turn around, my hand slipped off that tillor handle, and when it did, it made a hard ninety to the right, and it sent me out of that boat just in an instant. I mean I didn't even realize what had happened. The first thing I knew I was under the water. And when I came to the surface, I could see the boat going off away from it, still in gear. It had idle itself down to idle speed and it was going off, you know. But when it did that hard right turn, it threw all the fish over to the left side of the boat. You know, everything in the boat went over to the left side when it made that hard right turn. And when it did that, it sent the boat into a turn, and it was running at half speed with the plug out, coming around and making a circle. Well, I was in the river, had my rain gear on, had boots on, had blue jeans under the rain gear, you know, and it was heavy. 00:07:50 Speaker 1: I kicked the. 00:07:51 Speaker 3: Boots off, you know, to light myself up, you know, and I was just dog paddling, try to stay afloat. And the boat I could see it, you know, coming around. It was gonna make a and it you know, it looked like it might come back by me, you know. So it started that turn. I said, well, if I can catch it when it comes around, I can make it. So we're floating down the current in the current, you know, floating down river, and it's coming around just at I speak, coming around. Well, when it did, it was just out of reach. I was trying to get to it, but it was just out of reach, and my hands just barely missed the guntle on that boat. I was going to just grab hold of the side of the boat, you know, and hold on. Well I missed it, you know. It wasn't quite close enough. So as it went around again, it made a wider circle. It was widen itself out. It was coming at a wider make it a wider turn every time it went around. Second time it went around it, I was lined up with it pretty good. And when it passed me, I just locked my arms over the guntle of the boat and just held on until I got my strength up and got my wits about me. You know, I just hung on and let it be. It was dragging me through the water, and I just rolled myself over the in the boat with just brute strength. Just rolled myself over in the boat and laid in the bottom boat for a second. You know. Then I reached back there and I got the plug back in and I got control of it. 00:09:16 Speaker 1: You know. 00:09:17 Speaker 3: But if that boat hadn't come around and picked me up, Wow, I probably would have been gone. 00:09:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, really, you think you would have well, I would have you right in the middle of the river. 00:09:27 Speaker 3: Yeah. Well I wasn't in the middle, but I was out out. 00:09:30 Speaker 2: In You don't think you could have made it to the bank. 00:09:32 Speaker 3: I don't think I could. It was cold, so the water wasn't that cold in October, you know. But it was just the current and the weight, the sheer weight of those that wet clothing and that rain gear, and I had no life jacket on, nothing. It just sapped my strength almost immediately. It was all I could do to hold myself up. Yeah, just keep my head above water, you know. That was that was one of the closer calls. 00:09:57 Speaker 2: You just got back in the boat, got back in the boat and probably say thank you lord. 00:10:01 Speaker 3: Yeah, well my composure and it went onto the boat ramp and carried on, carried on that day. Yeah, sold a fish, you know, did it all? Yeah? 00:10:10 Speaker 2: What does your wife say when you told her that story? 00:10:12 Speaker 3: Well, she was everybody else I've told it to you. You know, they just say, you know, you you just it wasn't your time, you know, just lucky, you know. 00:10:20 Speaker 2: You know Davy Crockett had a boat wreck on the Mississippi River and he said, if you're born to be hung. You'll never drowned. It wasn't his time to drown, that's right. 00:10:30 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:10:31 Speaker 2: How old were you when that happened? 00:10:32 Speaker 3: That was probably in two thousand and probably eight. 00:10:36 Speaker 2: Okay, now you're seventy one. 00:10:38 Speaker 3: Now I was in probably what sixties about or sixties? 00:10:42 Speaker 2: Wow, that's incredible. Boat wrecks on the Mississippi are common. As a matter of fact, the worst maritime disaster in US history happened on the Mississippi River on April twenty seventh, eighteen sixty five, near Memphis, Tennessee. Two hundred and sixty foot long steamboat called called the Sultana was carrying Union prisoners, just two weeks after the Civil War ended, who had been released from a Confederate prison camp at Vicksburg. They were headed to Saint Louis to go home to their families. The boat had a carrying capacity of three hundred and seventy six passengers, but they'd packed on two thousand, one hundred and thirty seven people aboard. At two am on that April morning, a boiler explosion sunk the ship in a fiery ball of chaos. Eleven hundred and sixty nine people died, most Union soldiers. Despite the size of the disaster, the shipwreck didn't get much press because Lincoln had just been assassinated, the war had been raging for years and had just ended, and the country was tired of bad news, and there was a possible government cover up because of the overcrowded ship on a US sanctioned transport. Today, there is a Sultana Disaster Museum in Marion, Arkansas. The boat was missing for over one hundred years. It's sank in the river, but in nineteen eighty two, over two miles off the current river, the Sultana was located in an Arkansas soybean field. The river bed had shifted that far and the boat is still there. Soon, we're going to talk about some fun stuff like the charismatic fish of the Mississippi River with doctor Jack Kilgore, with who else, and I think you'll be surprised to hear how well they're doing. But I had to ask mister Bill another question, kind of a dark question. And if you're listening with kids, we're about to talk about d EA d people stand by. Don't judge me. I'm just asking the questions that everybody's thinking. 00:12:52 Speaker 3: But it's an interesting lifestyle. You know, you see a lot of different things. 00:12:55 Speaker 1: You know. 00:12:56 Speaker 2: You ever found a dead body on the river? 00:12:58 Speaker 3: Yep, found a couple of those over that year. Really, yeah, found two. Actually, what was the story. Yeah, I found one just several years ago. She was right down here south of town. Yeah, And I was going upstream. You know, I've done running running gear. You know, it was in March, it's cold. I was running upstream and I was just looking, you know, out across the river, you know, just paying attention to where I was going, and I saw something, you know, floating downstream. You know, it looked a little bit different, you know. Then I said, well, that's probably a deer. You know, you see bucks, you know, somebody had shot upstream or whatever coming down. I passed by and I picked up big deer before, you know, I'm a big deer, and you know, I said, I'm going to go back and I'm going to look at see exactly what that was. And then when I turned around and I got a little bit closer to it, I could tell I said, oh my lord, here we go. 00:13:56 Speaker 2: Mister Bill reported these incidents to the authorities and worked with law enforcement to help them recover the bodies, but it's clear the Mississippi is no stranger to the dead. In the first episode, we learned that Hernando de Soto, credited as the first European to see the river in fifteen forty one, had a water burial not far from where the Sultana sank. My intent is not to be morbid, but rather to present a slick scientific segue into the next section of the podcast. But I'd say there's a high probability that de Soto's body was eaten by an alligator snapping turtle. If you know wild places, you know that organic matter in water does not go to waste. I now want to talk with doctor Kilgore about the health of the Mississippi River. This first segment is a bit of a review, but it will quickly get into the new stuff. 00:14:52 Speaker 1: All the other great rivers of the word, the Congo, the Nile, the Antsee, all of those they have near the mouth of the river, whereas the Mississippi, the first dam you encounter is up in Saint Louis, which is twelve hundred miles up. However, a fish can take a left on the Missouri and go another twelve hundred miles to the Gavin's point dam on the Missouri. So I tell people this that if you put all of that together, there's almost twenty four hundred miles of free flowing Mississippi Missouri River. There's nothing else like that in the world except for the Amazon. All the other great rivers have been dammed, which influences set thement, transport, water quality, migratory fish. You know, it has all those negative impacts. And that's one reason in particular the Lower miss because it has an intact floodplain, it has a natural flood pulse. There have been no extirpations or extinction of species in modern time. 00:15:55 Speaker 2: Really, even with all the manipulation. 00:15:56 Speaker 1: That's right, despite all that river engineering, we still have a very robust, diversed aquatic assemblage in this river. 00:16:04 Speaker 2: That's incredible. 00:16:05 Speaker 1: And that's what we're trying to understand and protect and conserve because it really has never been evaluated in a, you know, in a very holistic quantitative way until the last twenty years or so. 00:16:20 Speaker 2: It's essential to understand the river is what it is because of its intact floodplain, the batcher as it's called, or the space inside the levees. Here's why a healthy floodplain is important for fish. 00:16:36 Speaker 1: What happens then is every spring, you know, the river comes up and it floods, and the fish and other aquatic organisms they follow that floodpulse up into the floodplain, and what they encounter are tens of thousands of acres of lakes, scatters, breaks, slews, just perfect habitat for spawning and rearing and feeding. And then when the river begins to contract and go back down, a lot of these recently spawned fish will follow the retreating flood down into the river and they repopulate the river, so they sustain the numbers the biodiversity year after year because we have a natural flood pulse of the lower miss whereas you don't have it in the Upper miss you don't have it in the Ohio, you don't have it in the Arkansas. It's all damned all the way up. So that's the unique nature of it. And the fact that it joins the Missouri and goes another twelve hundred miles makes it really one of the longest. Other than that, I think it is the longest free flowing stretch of river. 00:17:41 Speaker 2: The flood pulse, the movement of the river up and down in its floodplain, feeds the fish of the river and can be important for their breeding cycles. It's just that simple. Doctor Kilgore will now talk about why having extended stretches of free flowing, non damned rivers are good for fish, and this might even bolster the tattoo idea from episode one. Don't do it, but it's a good idea. 00:18:09 Speaker 1: And so we do telemetry studies and we tag fish, and we've had multiple examples of fish moving upstream one thousand miles, moving downstream a thousand miles. 00:18:21 Speaker 2: A thousand miles. Yea, what fish? What kind of fish are doing that? 00:18:25 Speaker 1: Sturgeon, paddlefish, the invasive karp, we've had, buffalo. They make long migratory runs as well. 00:18:32 Speaker 2: Why are they Why are those fish doing that? Like, what's what's biologically advantageous about going that far? 00:18:38 Speaker 1: Well? I think one reason is that they're spreading out their progeny. Some of them, we believe, we don't know for sure, have certain homing instincts, just like salmon, that they'll actually go back to their natal spawning area or in that general area. Some fish may move from the Missouri down into the Mississippi, but they spawn in the Missouri. They go back to the Missouri to spawn, so as a homing behavior, it's a behavior we don't fully understand, but we do know that there's there's a lot of movement both upstream and downstream of fish. 00:19:11 Speaker 2: Doctor Kilgore is an expert on fish, and as usual, I was delighted when he talked about all the things they don't know. Mysteries remain brothers, and he and his teams have done some seminal work on the river and still are. But let's talk catfish. 00:19:29 Speaker 1: But the catfish. We have three species of giant catfish. The new state record of Mississippi a blue cat was broken last year one hundred and thirty pound blue cat. We regularly catch fifty sixty pound flatheads and blue cats out there. The catfish population is unexploited. I mean, there are there are so many catfish in this river, and there's so few fishermen really and there's and there's so much habitat and it's in you go down the bigger the catfish tend tend to be too. From based upon a study we did, you know, in some ways, because this river fluctuates fifty feet a year, and you got these huge floods. You know, we haven't even reached the carrying capacity of some of these fish. They can continue on, and that's what's happened. Unfortunately, with the invasive carbon, they found the lower Mississippi River to be very hospitable. 00:20:25 Speaker 2: Unfortunately, now the catfish I'm interested in catfish. I would have thought that commercial fishermen were hitting the Mississippi really hard, but they're not. 00:20:37 Speaker 1: Yes, they are, But the numbers of commercial fishermen have dwindled over the years. 00:20:42 Speaker 2: Is that a market thing or like the part of farm raising catfish that was part of the decline forbid, people aren't eating as much catfish as they yoused to. Was that true? 00:20:52 Speaker 1: I think we are. There's more store bought catfish. The farm raised catfish certainly took a head on commercial fishing. However, I worked with the commercial fisherman for years, Bill Lancaster. 00:21:04 Speaker 2: We've already met mister Bill. He and doctor Kilgore, Old Brose. 00:21:09 Speaker 1: In fact, I'll diverge for a minute and tell the story about Bill. We were coming in and we'd been out there sampling. We came into our boat ramping. Here comes Bill in his boat and his boat was full of fish. He's a commercial fisherman, of course, just full of catfish in Buffalo. And we started talking to him and we've told him that we're interested in catching sturgeon on the Mississippi River and he goes, did you have any suggestions? He goes, I catch sturgeon all the time on my trot lines. Go really, well, would you like to go out with us and show us? 00:21:42 Speaker 3: And he did. 00:21:43 Speaker 1: One January nineteen ninety nine, a cold January morning, we went out with Bill. He had set trot lines on the Mississippi River and one of the first hooks that came up he had a ten pound pallid sturgeon, which is the endangered species of sturgeon. MM and so okay, hey, Bill, would you like to work with us on contract? And so for twenty years we worked with Bill and we put out over ten thousand trot lines, and we trot lined all the way from the mouth of the Mississippi River up to the chain of rocks in Saint Bos. And that's how we figured out the status of the sturching population. Wow, he's to catch. 00:22:23 Speaker 2: Them on troutline ten thousand trot lines. I'd say, these guys know the river as good as anybody. I want to go back to mister Bill. I've got a question about his fishing. What are you mainly fishing for when you're on the river. What's your target species? 00:22:41 Speaker 3: Two main species that's a buffalo fish and the catfish. You know, all species of catfish, channel cat, blue cat, and flatheadcit. 00:22:52 Speaker 2: To the market everybody, it doesn't matter what kind of catfish. 00:22:55 Speaker 3: It really doesn't pay the same. They prefer. They prefer the blue cat and the antle cat over the flathead. 00:23:01 Speaker 2: Really, yeah, that will be opposite out in just on the street. 00:23:05 Speaker 3: Wasn't it right. Yeah, a lot of people like the flathead far as eating, but it's harder to dress. Yeah, it's more waste probably to the flathead. 00:23:13 Speaker 2: Okay, So form for the commercial market where people are where they're processing a lot of fish, they want channels and blue. 00:23:19 Speaker 3: Yeah, channels and blue cat, you know, and preferably smaller fish. You know, they don't they don't really care about the big fish, you know, over thirty or forty pounds. You know, they'll they will take one or two or three, but they don't want to boatload of them. Really. 00:23:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, So you're not targeting big fish. 00:23:33 Speaker 3: No, not at all. Yeah, anything sellable, you know, from a two pounds up to you know, fifteen to twenty pounds. That's about the range. That's what i'd be looking forward. 00:23:43 Speaker 2: What are you doing with the buffalo? 00:23:45 Speaker 3: Well, the buffalo are sold, you know, sold straight to the market as is, you know they are. There's a big demand here for buffalo, I mean a huge demand. Probably probably sell more buffalo than catfish. 00:23:56 Speaker 2: Really, buffalo ribs, Is that what people are eating. 00:23:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, they'll take the ribs, you know, of course, when they dress a buffalo, they take the ribs out and then they have the loin, you know, which they cut up. 00:24:05 Speaker 2: What's your favorite fish to catch? What do you get excited about when you see when you see a net flatheads? Probably really, even though that's not as marketable. 00:24:15 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but I can still sell them all that I catch, so you know, it doesn't it doesn't matter. Yeah, but I like to see, you know, a net full of flatheads when they come up. Why because you can feel them before you ever, before you ever raised the net. You can tell what's in there just by the way they're hitting that net, you know, way they feel, and when you pull it to the surface, it just erupts into a massive ball, you know, and then you can see them. 00:24:40 Speaker 1: You know. 00:24:42 Speaker 2: He's not targeting the big catfish. That's interesting, and he sells more buffalo than catfish, that's interesting. But he loves catching flat head. That is not surprising. Buffalo fish, the genus Ichtiobis is a large suckerfish that's not gained as much popularity as a game fish like catfish because they're hard to catch on rod and reel and their bony but they're very good to eat. Any fish restaurant in the South Worth it's watermelon salt is going to be serving fried wild caught buffalo ribs. It's a honky piece of white meat on a single bone. You eat them like chicken wings. I've got another question, And if I'd left Mississippi without asking him this, I'd be forced to resign for my position at meat Eater. You're not targeting big fish for the commercial market. Yeah, but just in your fifty years on the river, what's the biggest fish you've seen come out of Mississippi River. 00:25:43 Speaker 3: I caught a one hundred pound blue cat in twenty seventeen. That's the biggest biggest fish I've caught. Caught a lot of fish in the seventy down you know, sixty seventy fifty sixty seventy pound range, but that hundred pounder was the biggest that i've I've landed. I caught him on the trot line too, using the I was using a two hot stainless steel hook, A two. I was not very big, you know, if you know anything about hooks, you know, but it was. It was I think March when I caught that fish. The water was super cold, and uh, you know he was. He just came up to the surface and I got the dip net under his tail, and of course I knew he was big, you know. I got the dip net under his tail and got him about halfway in that dip net because he was too big to get in. Well, I guess with the adrenaline I had pumping, you know, I just rolled him over into the boat and then I looked at him. I said, Wow, this is big fish. 00:26:40 Speaker 1: Here. 00:26:41 Speaker 2: How long you think he was? 00:26:44 Speaker 3: He's he was as tall as I was almost when he was hanging when we hung him up the wig. 00:26:48 Speaker 2: And you're not You're you're tall year six two. A one hundred pound blue cat is giant. You're glad, I asked, aren't you. In April twenty twenty three, the Rodden Reil, Mississippi state record blue cat was caught in the river near Vicksburg and at weigh one hundred and thirty one pounds. And just for reference, the world record blue cat weighed one hundred and forty three pounds and was caught in a North Carolina lake. The world record flathead catfish weigh one hundred and twenty three pounds and was caught in the lake in Kansas. The world record channel cat came from South Carolina and weighed fifty eight pounds. And that's a pretty good blueprint for the size of these cats. So the blue cats get the biggest flathead second and then channels. But most people prefer to eat flathead. And it would be a miss if I didn't learn something about the gear commercial fishermen are using on the river. Here's mister Bill, what kind of equipment is a commercial fisherman on the Mississippi River using. 00:27:51 Speaker 3: Well, people use different kind of equipment. Some people you know, will fish maybe all gillnet, gil webbing, and then you know, you people that have the do mostly hoopnet, then you have some that just trot line didn't like myself. For you, though, I do a little of all of it, depending on what time of year it is and what kind of fish I'm looking for. 00:28:10 Speaker 2: A gill net is simply a net stretched across a section of water that catches fish traveling up and down the river. A hoop net is shaped like a barrel, often baited, but not always, and the fish enter into a wide opening that nexts down and they can't get out. A trot line is a long string with baited hooks dropped off every few feet. I want to get back with doctor Kilgore about his experience on the river. He's gonna talk about the general health of the fishery and some of his river sampling projects, and will bring up an interesting idea the river as wilderness. What he said was very surprising to me. 00:28:54 Speaker 1: Of course, you know, you're sampling the bottom of the Mississippi River, so you're not just getting sturgeon. You're getting these giant catfish we're talking about. You're getting a gar, buffalo, drum goog, gasper goo, all of those fish. And over time, you know, you start getting this appreciation that there's hardly any limit to the number of fish that you can catch out of this river. People are afraid to get on it. They're afraid to fish for a good reason. Really, you have to really know what you're doing initially, but once once you understand the things you've got to watch out for, it is a wonderful experience. And that's one of my passions. I Mean, you go out there and it's just I can look one way, and that's exactly the way Mark Twain saw the river when he was a cub pilot, and then you work look another way and you see dikes and revetment. You know, that's modern day Mississippi. But my point is that you can still see a lot of natural features in this river that still exist and haven't changed over the eons. 00:29:57 Speaker 2: You know. It's kind of I like to think a lot about wilderness, and I really value like wilderness with the capital W yes in that just a place untouched by man. You wouldn't really think of a I wouldn't think of a river system as a wilderness. And it's not the perfect analogy, but what I'm hearing you say is that you can be on that river and you're dealing with something ancient. Yes, you're dealing with something very old and intact, which is rare. Rarely would you go into a natural terrestrial system today and be able to We have places like this, but where you would say this thing is a lot like it would have been pre EUROPEA. Yeah, and you're telling me in the river with the fish endangered species other than the invasives, it's doing pretty well, which is kind of surprising to me. 00:30:48 Speaker 1: It's doing very well in fact, really even with. 00:30:50 Speaker 2: The pollution and all the stuff. 00:30:52 Speaker 1: See the pollution, I mean, yes, we had before the Clean Water Act, there were certainly polluted waters throughout our nation, including the Mississippi River, but the legacy pesticides like the DDT and the toxaphene, they are not detected in fish tissue anymore. 00:31:09 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:31:10 Speaker 1: And you hear about, oh, that the Mississippi River is polluting the Gulf of Mexico with all that nitrogen, Well that's true, you know, because it does drain all the agriculture, almost all the agricultural land in the United States, so there is fairly high nitrogen and phosphorus, but mainly nitrogen. But it's not a form of pollution for the Mississippi. It might be a form of pollution for creating a golf hypoxia right dead zone, but it's not. But it's actually a lot of this nitrogen is being sequestered in the floodplains as a flood spreads out, and that's what's helping, you know, the plants and the soil to grow and be nutritious and support the aquatic life there too. So, yes, it is a wilderness. A colleague of mine, Paul Hartfield, he worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service for you, he called it an engineered wilderness because you get the levees, you know, you have the dikes, you have the revetment, So it is an engineered system. But it still did not diminish or eliminate the natural features of this flood polse type river that we have. I hear that a lot. Oh you know, look how muddy it is, and it's got to be polluted. I've heard it's not. I tell people it's not. In fact, you know, I would catch a fish out of the Mississippi Way before and eat it. Before I would eat a fish out of my lake there in the subdivision. 00:32:36 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that is kind of shocking to me. 00:32:38 Speaker 3: I love it. 00:32:39 Speaker 2: It's kind of surprising to. 00:32:41 Speaker 1: Me and Bill Lancaster, the commercial fisherman. He has plenty of customers, you know, that buy his catfish in Buffalo. Like I said, commercial fishing and the commercial fisherman. Unfortunately, as a dying breed, they're just not being recruited. I said, it's probably the economics of it. 00:32:58 Speaker 2: Well, me and me and Brent Reeves, you're gonna come. Commercial fisherman a friend of ours. I've got I got big dreams, big dreams. 00:33:05 Speaker 3: Okay, there you go. 00:33:07 Speaker 2: Big dreams, folks, big American dreams. If the bottom falls out of the podcast market, I have a diverse financial plan to make a living as number one stand up comedian, number two, a commercial fisherman with Brent Reeves, with our Sea Arc catfish boat Laura, named after the Laura and Tied ice sheet. Number three. I'll work remotely as a Nashville singer songwriter, and those things will obviously be a supplement to me already being a major player in the high end mule market. A. I don't know if I want to tell my plan or not. Somebody might steal it. Cut that out seriously, though, we've got to get back to what doctor Kilgore was talking about, we're treading in some complicated water. Regarding the health of the river. I was completely expecting Kilgore to say the big Muddy was America's sewer, manipulated by man so much that it was a dainty relic of its past. But that's not what he said at all. From a fish perspective, the river is healthy. I've also got to mention two things that were just not getting into in this series. Number one, the dead zone in the Gulf. Number two, coastal erosion in Louisiana. There's a zone of hypoxia with very little aquatic life in it in the range of seventy five hundred square miles along the Gulf coast. This dead zone is the result of excess nutrients primarily nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture, fertilizer runoff from lawns, and just human existence that pools in the non moving water of the Gulf, creating algal blooms that suck up the oxygen in the water. However, nutrients in a moving current have less impact. These nutrients aren't in and of themselves elves harmful, but in excess they cause big problems. This drainage basin definitely has problems, but the natural fishery of the river isn't suffering from this. I'd say that's a pretty incredible report considering a lot of the environmental news that we hear on a day to day basis. And the hero of this fishery is that intact natural floodplain inside the levees of the river. Don't forget it. The other thing that we're just not getting into, which is a major issue, is the coastal erosion in South Louisiana, where they've lost over two thousand square miles of land in the last fifty years as a result of sea level rise and less sediment moving down the Mississippi River. It's incredibly complicated and serious. However, this next section is wild and we're going back to talk to our friend and old boat captain Hank Burdine about a significant factor influencing river health. It has to do with the monetary and cultural value of hunting. 00:36:05 Speaker 5: Stand by within the what we call the batcher between the levees, the land between the levees that flood. You can't build a house, and unless you build it fifteen sixteen twenty feet up off the ground. So the majority of the whole area down the river is in hungrams. It used to be timber companies, but the timber companies realized that there was an inherent value in those lands recreationally for hunting. And it was about in the seventies and eighties that Anderson Cully, Chicago Meal, all these huge timber companies that owned one hundreds of thousands of acres of land between the levees said look, and we have I can't eat it too. We leasing this land out of these hun clothed for nothing. Really, why don't we sell them the land, keep the timber rights fifteen to twenty years. They sell the land at top dollar for recreational purposes, They keep the tumble for twenty years. They got doubled up money. So the majority of all this land now along the river is in private hunt camps clubs. 00:37:16 Speaker 2: So really in a way, and that's why the hunting, the value of hunting, and the money that honey brought in is helping preserve the wildness of the Mississippi River. Absolutely absolutely yeah. 00:37:31 Speaker 5: And when you talk about a hunting club, you're talking about catfish point twelfth, our negg hunt club, you know, hunting and point dunt Own. 00:37:38 Speaker 2: I mean from from Memphis all the way down to New Orleans along the Mississippi River inside the levees, is hunting camps. 00:37:46 Speaker 5: From Memphis, I would say, all the way on down toward getting close to badon Rouge. 00:37:50 Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, he's hunting camps, hunting camps from Levity to Levy. 00:37:54 Speaker 5: They don't want those trees cleared. If they do, it's select cutting. I mean the tumble companies are out of it now. But they've got a managed program. Yeah where they go in so let cut the tree, leave this, leave that have their food blot all like that. 00:38:08 Speaker 2: And that's powerful for the health of the whole system as these as these natural floodplains inside the levees which your man made but are remained timbered and managed, managed for wildlife, and I mean it's a wildlife mecca. It's a wildlife mecca. Water systems are a product of their riparian zones. The value of hunting camps inside the levees of the river being managed for wildlife, which is primarily whitetail, turkeys and ducks, is creating a healthy natural floodplain unique to the world at one time the value is in timber, but that is changing. I can't express what an incredible conservation story this is, once again hunters of the good guys, saving habitat and wild places at a time in Earth's history when it couldn't be more or important. That's the muddy boggy truth. I now want to talk to the dock about the big fish other than catfish of the Mississippi River. 00:39:12 Speaker 1: Yes, there are several different species of fish that I categorize as iconic megafauna. The first is what we've been discussing, are sturgeon. There are two species of sturgeon that live their entire lives in the Mississippi River, the palid and the chovell No sturgeon. The Pallid is the federally endangered species, whereas the shovel Nos is not. But they only get here in the lower miss maybe ten or fifteen pounds. They're not like the giant sturgeon that you see along the coast. And the reason, of course that the demise of sturgeon was due to the building dams and the caviar market. But today sturgeon are thriving and you can almost walk on their hacklebacks. You know, they're so really the two most abundant bottom oriented fish are blue cats and chauvenet. 00:40:06 Speaker 2: Sturgeon more than the other cat fish, more more than more. 00:40:08 Speaker 1: Than flathead, more than channel catfish. Blue cats are by far number one of the big bigger fish. Sturgeon come in number two based upon our trotline catches. Wow, the largest North American fish alligator gar. An alligator gar really got a bad rap. What happened to them is that people misunderstood them. I mean, they get to three hundred pounds plus and they're ugly and they're mean looking. I can understand that, but they misunderstood them thinking that alligator gar are eating their sport fish. They're bass, they're blue gill, they're croppy, and so they put a bounty on their head, considering them a rough fish, and they just about wiped them out. And then they started doing scientific studies and found out, well, they eate shat, they're not eating, you know, our sport fish. And plus they're an apex predator of the Mississippi River. We did not want to eliminate an apex predator. And they may also be a bi all control for some of the invasive carp and so once we we hated them, and now we love them. And there's hatchery programs introducing them back into the Mississippi River and we're slowly seeing them come back. 00:41:18 Speaker 2: How big you said, three hundred pounds? How long would that fact? 00:41:21 Speaker 3: Ten feet? 00:41:22 Speaker 2: Ten foot long. 00:41:24 Speaker 1: The other iconic megafauna which is even more interesting than all the other fish, all the paddlefish, spoon bil catfish, and they're very abundant here, although they also have the black eggs, and so now they're being targeted for the caviar because all the sturgeon are now protected. So all the states are really watching harvest of paddle fish. But the paddlefish, they can get over one hundred pounds. They're their gentle giants, just an amazing you know, and they're. 00:41:56 Speaker 2: You call them. You call it a spoon bill catfish. Yes, is it a cat fish? 00:42:00 Speaker 4: No? 00:42:00 Speaker 2: Okay, that's just the kind of colloquial. 00:42:03 Speaker 1: That's why it's a colloquial name. The sturgeon and the paddlefish are very primitive. They were around during the age of the dinosaurs, that's how long they have lived the same with the alligator guard they're very primitive. Fish. 00:42:16 Speaker 2: What does it mean biologically? Like, what does it say biologically when a species is so stable for millions of years. 00:42:25 Speaker 1: They have overcome the evolutionary challenges of adaptation. They have adapted to that environment to be perfect. But these fish are uniquely adapted to this flowing water fluvial environment. And if you take away that flow, you take away that flood pulse, then you eliminate those species. And that's what's happened in the upper Mist. You don't see a lot of paddlefish and sturgeon things up there because of the dam. 00:42:50 Speaker 2: But would they be considered an indicator species? 00:42:53 Speaker 1: Yes, for free flowing natural river system. 00:42:57 Speaker 2: I like the idea of that that fish that old would indicate that he kind of has met his optimum design, Yes, and to exploit the environment that he's got, and then we could deduce that if he's still here, the conditions are like they were a long time ago. 00:43:18 Speaker 1: Well, and the main channel of the Mississippi River provides the same sort of habitat quality that it did pre Europeana. So that's why we have had no extinctions or extirpatients. 00:43:31 Speaker 2: That's that's amazing to me. What other natural system can we say exists in relative similarity to pre European arrival. The only places that could compare would be our wildernesses with the capital W the federally protected terrestrial wilderness. That's some wild stuff. And I'd love to see a three hundred pound alligator gar, wouldn't you. Let's hear doctor Kilgore talk about something a lot smaller that lives in this river. This surprised me. 00:44:05 Speaker 1: The river shrimp are prior to you know, the exploitation of white shrimp and brown shrimp along the coast, which is where we get most of our shrimp. Now, the river people and the Indians, indigenous people would eat the river shrimp because there are billions of them out there. Well, we'll put a troll through there, and the trall sometimes is so full of river shrimp we can't even get it on board. And you can imagine how important those river shrimp are to the forage base of. 00:44:36 Speaker 2: How how would they have caught How would have Native Americans caught river shrimp? 00:44:41 Speaker 1: They could put traps in there where you can, like a weir or something. And because what they do is they they swim and walk along the bottom of the Mississippi River all the way up to the Ohio. They can go over dams, they can they can go up to the Missouri. But in order to complete their life cycle, they have to go back down to salt water. So those little shrip have to walk all the way back down one thousand miles to get to the gulf to complete their life cycle. 00:45:09 Speaker 4: Who knew? 00:45:10 Speaker 2: Now, though, I want to talk about turtles and the big picture of fish in the river. Yeah, tell me about the turtles. 00:45:19 Speaker 1: Along the river into the swamp areas. You get these alligator snapping turtles that can get over one hundred pounds I mean actually several hundred pounds. And you know there are another primitive species as relatively unchanged over the years, and they have that specialized appendage on their tongue. They can remain under water for hours and hours, and they open their mouth and they stick out their tongue and they have this little red appendage that flips back and forth and that attracts the unwary fish close to their mouth and bang, you know, they'll snap shots. 00:45:54 Speaker 2: They have a little bait they go. 00:45:55 Speaker 1: They're tracting their bait to Wow, this is. 00:45:58 Speaker 2: The out the alligator snapping that's right. 00:46:01 Speaker 1: The alligator, snapping turtle. Like I said, there's about one hundred species of fish that maintain reproductive populations in the Lower miss If you include the tributaries, then there's probably about two hundred and fifty species of fish that are associated. 00:46:16 Speaker 2: How does that compare with the other rivers of the world. Is that that's quite biodiversity? 00:46:20 Speaker 1: Yes, it is, But it's nothing compared to the Amazon, which has probably over two thousand species of fish. Wow, I mean, I know, I mean Amazon is such a anomaly. 00:46:30 Speaker 2: You know, like Amazon's the NBA and we're playing like in yeah high school one a basketball dow d. 00:46:36 Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, I mean, you can't compare any river of the world to the Amazon. It's in a class by itself. The outflow of the Amazon is up to twenty million cubic feet per second at a major floods on the Mississippi, we only get two point five million cubic feed per second. Wow, It's ten times higher, and it's longer. The drainings basin is wider, and there's no dams, no damn Amazon, whereas all the other great rivers of the word, the Congo, the Nile of the ant Sea, all of those they have dams near the mouth of the river. 00:47:19 Speaker 2: The Amazon is a beast. I waited until the end of the series to mention it because it makes our beloved Mississippi look like a creek. The Amazon is the river all rivers are compared to. Doctor Kilgore has spent a lot of time on the Big Muddy, and I want to hear him talk about the perils of navigating the river. You said that people are afraid to get on the river because of how dangerous it is. Anybody in American history that has been on the Mississippi River has some boat wreck story. Our boy Davy Crockett crashed a boat just south of Memphis and nearly died on the Mississippi River. And then you know all of Mark Twain's riding talk about the dangers of Thessissippi River. And today it's still dangerous, even though it's it's been tamed from those days. 00:48:10 Speaker 3: Right. 00:48:11 Speaker 2: What do you You said there was some safe some things that you would look for you can be safe. What would those be? 00:48:18 Speaker 3: Well? Uh? 00:48:19 Speaker 1: I mean for me, Number one is I watched the wind because there's nothing worse being on the Mississippi River. When you have a south wind pushing against a northern moving river and the waves are like this. So in small boats that we're in, you know, we're just we can't. You know, you can't get on plane. You know you're getting inundated by all this water. It can be very dangerous out there in high wind. The most dangerous thing out there are the stone dykes, There's no doubt about it. We've had some tragic stories about folks leaving Vicksburg and never being seen again other than their boat turned over because of a You have to first of all, know kind of where the dikes are, what the tailtale signs of these dikes, because they may be underwater, but they're still not deep enough and you can still hit your lower unit on it and flip the boat. So you have to know and have navigation charts. Is good, but I don't. I mean, I'm familiar with this river around here. I know where all the dikes are. But if you don't, you better be real careful and stay along the booy line because the coastguard generally not all the time, but they'll adjust the booyes according to the flood height. And then the other thing you have to watch out for the towboats, because towboats can't stop on a dime, so you don't want to get in front of them. But when they're pushing upstream, they're creating these really big wakes and that's going to slow you down too, So you know you have to be able to take these wakes slowly and get out of it. You don't want to hit them hard because it'll flip your boat too if you're careful. So it's the wind, the stone dikes, and the towboats. But once you have a feeling and understanding, you know, it's just like I said, it's a wilderness out there. Usually the only people, the only thing you see out there are the part of the toboats. You don't see a whole lot of recreational boats out there. Yeah. Now, during the summer, if it's a nice day, that sand bar across from Vicksburg gets got boats up and down that thing. People are just laying out on the beaches. That's another thing about the Mississippi River. It's got these giant point bars. There is more sand beaches along the lower Mississippi River than all along the Gulf Coast, Is that right? 00:50:31 Speaker 3: Yes? 00:50:34 Speaker 2: Do y'all remember when Hank Berdine called the Mississippi America's fourth Coast. 00:50:39 Speaker 1: I like that. 00:50:40 Speaker 2: I'm doing some cleanup work with doctor Kilgore. I wanted to ask him about shipwrecks, and turns out he was holding out a great story on us this whole time. So you think, are there a lot of shipwrecks in the Mississippi River hundreds hundreds. 00:50:55 Speaker 1: Hundreds, and some of them may be in a n agfield because the Mississippi River has changed course as at meanders. Remember that meander belt. A guy named Henry Fisk, he did this geomorphic study and he mapped out all the meander belts on the Mississippi River over the last ten thousand years. And it's it's beautiful. I mean, you just can't believe all these meander bins that have cut off. 00:51:18 Speaker 2: So you maybe twenty five miles from the current Missippi River today and find a I mean, the channel could have been there. So you got a shipwreck exactly four hundred years ago on your place. 00:51:28 Speaker 1: That's right. We discovered one on the Old White River right where the White River comes into the Arkansas. The Old White River mouth is kind of a meandering shoot, and we were there during low water, and we looked up there and there was this long wooden boat that had been exposed by the bank slopping off. And we reported to the Arkansas folks and they had heard about it, but they came out and excellent hold of it. It was an eighteen hundreds version of it. 00:51:55 Speaker 2: I don't know, Isaac. Can you believe he wasn't going to tell me the story he's holding out on. What other interesting things have you found in the river. 00:52:04 Speaker 1: I haven't found him, but I've been with folks who have found him. A giant ground sloth claw. 00:52:10 Speaker 2: Wow, how big is that? 00:52:11 Speaker 3: Yeah? 00:52:12 Speaker 1: It's probably eight or nine inches long, curved black, unbelievable. And I've seen all kinds of teeth and Indian artifacts like old bottles. You'll find old bottles, You'll find pieces of pottery, You'll find old whiskey jugs, pieces of the old whiskey jugs, and find china that used to be on the boats that sank out there. You'll find chips of them. 00:52:37 Speaker 2: Do you ever see the bison skulls? 00:52:39 Speaker 3: Yes? 00:52:39 Speaker 1: In fact, yeah, they Bradley another guy down there, we were walking on one and all of a sudden his foot hit something and he starts digging around and he picks up an entire intact bison skull. Wow, that was preserved out there. 00:52:52 Speaker 2: You should have pushed him out of the way, and I touched it first. 00:52:55 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:52:56 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:52:56 Speaker 1: When we say okay, let's take a break on this gravel bar, and we all just spread out, you know where everyone's looking. Some people are running, you know, for big stuff, and others are just going real slow looking at wild. 00:53:06 Speaker 2: The river just constantly revealing news. 00:53:09 Speaker 3: It does. 00:53:10 Speaker 2: When Brent and I start commercial fishing and we find our first shipwreck, trust me, that will be the first thing we bring up in conversation for the rest of our lives. Hopefully it's not Laura Misty would get burned out quick on a shipwreck story if I found one or was ind one. Undoubtedly, the Mississippi River is one of America's most extravagant natural systems, rivaling the Rocky Mountain Range, the Appalachians are great deserts, our giant inland lakes, our majestic coastlines. This river, its size, and its location has been a fundamental component of what makes America America, both functionally and culturally. I want to end by asking mister Bill about why he's dedicated his life to working on the river. You love fishing the river. Yeah, Why what is it that you love about fishing the Missisi River? 00:54:06 Speaker 4: Oh? 00:54:06 Speaker 3: Just the solidarity of it. Yeah, just being out there. If you're out there, you know, before the sun comes up and you see the sun come up or you see the sun go down, it's just a almost a spiritual experience. You know, when there's nobody, you know, there's nobody to talk to, there's nobody around, you don't see anybody. You're just out there in the wilderness. You know, almost like like you know, you're the only person on earth. Yeah. 00:54:46 Speaker 2: In episode one of this series, we learned about the river's incomprehensible power and size, along with man's ancient connection to it. The first Europeans saw it in fifteen forty one, and we'll never know when the first Native America, the first human sought time has forgotten. In episode two, we talked about how the Mississippi Delta was one of America's last frontiers that kept civilization that babe because of constant flooding until the advent of levies, long after most of America was settled. We talked about the plantations, slavery, sharecropping. We talked with mister Earl Jasper about growing up in the Delta and the sharecropping family that was big. We talked about the art and literature of the Delta and how prior to the Civil War this region was one of the richest places in America, fueled by some of the richest alluvial soil in the world. On episode three, we talked with author John Barry about the engineering feats that defined the century staring men sought to tame the river, and how human nature and ego helped formulate the circumstances for America's most costly natural disaster, which changed America forever, Flood of nineteen twenty seven. On this fourth episode, we've talked about the health of the fishery of the Mississippi River, and I am highly encouraged to learn that the river is thriving, and much of it has to do with an intact floodplain preserved by the value of hunting camps inside the levees. We've just begun to scratch the surface of really understanding this river. Like I've said so many times, there's so many directions this story could have gone, and I just had to choose some directions to go. But I believe every American ought to know about the Mississippi River. I started off with a knowledge gap that plagued me and a desire to understand this river is a natural system and how it's impacted America. And I think we've taken a pretty big swing and understanding the Mississippi River. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear gris Hey. Be sure to check out the Phelps acron Inhale, exhale, grunt and bleak call for deer hunting. It's made of fine white oak wood and we only made five hundred of these calls, and they've even got my dad gums signature on them. For real. I stand by these calls as incredible deer calls. Nothing else on the market like it. Have a great week and I look forward to talking with the folks on the Render next week.

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