00:00:14 Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukeleman. This is a production of the bear Grease podcast called The bear Grease Render where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. I love it. If there's one thing I love about being having a bear Grease podcast and such is that you guys have no choice if you show up of what I get to say and do. And I am not a talented musician, like that is not a secret, but I love to play and sing, and so Misty says that the only reason I do this is because I make someone sit and listen to play. Well, you've been trapped to hear us, But I do have something pretty cool. We're gonna we're gonna play only two songs and then we're gonna jump into the podcast. But the first song we're gonna play has never been played publicly before. It's a song that I wrote and it's called the Ballot of a Backwoods Then yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And for those of you that fall along, you know that we have a We have a hall of fame in the Bear Grease world. Y'all know the Bear Grease Hall of Fame. It's a real man, it's not a joke. And the first, the first duct team to the Bear Grease Hall of Fame, it was a man by the name of James Lawrence says he is a man by the name of James Lawrence. James Lawrence lives with Mina, Arkansas. Dear, dear friend of mine. James Lawrence is a He's an incredible mountain deer hunter. He's spent his whole life out at the Washingtons and was killing deer when other people weren't, killing deer when there weren't. Dear, and James has always carried in my mind an intangible quality of the mountain people of Arkansas. Humble, earnest, art working, independent. And what I loved about James is nobody ever told him he was cool until maybe me and his wife and James was gonna be here today because the song is about James Lawrence. He doesn't know there's been a song written about him. He's never heard it before. So he was gonna be here today that he he was not able to come and so we're gonna introduce this song. Okay, that's stage one. Stage two of stuff I gotta say is that you gotta know a little bit about what this song is about, because it's it's quite specific. There's there's several reference points that are gonna help you understand it. First of all, there's a reference of the Constatat River. Y'all know where the Constat River is. It's gonna be wood down in southwest Arkansas. Okay, James Lawrence was born at the headwaters of the Constat River. There is you will hear the term shock pouching in this song. Do y'all know y'all know what a shock pouch is? Okay, that's a that's when. That's an old mountain way that James Lawrence's grandmother taught him how to do to carry a deer out of the woods on your back by cutting different parts of his legs off, tieing the deer's legs and knots and using it like a backpack. Stroud. James Lawrence hunted deep and still does hunts deep in the mountains and shock pouched me in the deer. You're gonna hear that phrase. You're gonna hear reference to the sawdust pile. James hunted a particular area and they always camped at what they called the sawdust pile, which was deep in the mountains. You couldn't drive there, you had to walk there, and it was the remnants of an old sawmill where the sawdust stayed there for like seventy five years. I mean they pulled the log and equipment out of there forever and there's still remnants of that sawdust pile. So they camped at the sawdust pole. Okay, it's a complex song. Okay, we're complex people, right. So and then there's there's reference to bucking horses and motorcycle rex. When you talk to James, he's seventy five and he's doing great for seventy five, but he's pretty banged up and he always says, man, it was those bucking horses and motorcycle rex that that did me in. So that's in the song. So I hope you enjoyed it. We're gonna give it a go. Order the washingbas Market song. He loved his Mama, and he loved his call raised by his Grandma, The Chase of the Tree, the banks of the cost. Time he was free. She taught him out of hunting out to shock couch of deer. That's Indian trick because you didn't hear very buck on your back. Time's legs in the Nanso, you can get in their deep and hunt his floods hot. James Florence says a backwoods man by a living let his own to half didn't work for the man. No serve I go, why I tell fuck he loved the land, humbling Earnest, I can kill you. I know it first day. I have sawdust file. He wouldn't camp us a sign for a pillick. He his head getting damp, beach stops gaps. He would slip along and find a buck scrapy to be there before dawn. He hunt three full days in the same Spotty says he'll kill that buck if you sign it's hot. When a big old sack will kill a slipping along it three away would singing salt food. James Flawn says a backwoods man may a living let his hand didn't work for the man. No serve I go, why I tell fuck he loved the land, humbling Earnest, I can tell you I know it first hand. I rarely met a man, it's can you wine? He sends his toe wrong as a long leave finding the bucking horses hold a cycle, recks about Dinny man broke his neck, tell me what was? But now he's old, still got fire in his books like Time to Gold and when you need a friend to be by your side and you kill a bird, do help your skin the high Damn Lawrence is a backwood fan. He live with his own two hands, didn't work with a band. I go and tell the buck you love the land, humbling earnest, I can tell you I know it first hand. Dame Lawrence is a backwoods man. Ain't living with his own two hands, didn't work in the fan, No serve, I go, I tell Buck you love the lambright Great time guy. Welcome to the Live Beargreas Render Podcast. Thank you guys so much for coming. It means a lot to me and Misty and I know all of Beargrease people for for everybody to come out. I know a lot of people travel the long ways to get here, all the way across the country. Have we done the whole like who traveled the furthest thing? Yet? Has that happened? We did a little bit of that earlier this morning. Okay, yeah, so we got tickets from North Dakota, South Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, down in the tip of Florida, out west Montana. Yeah, young lady from Minnesota. Yea, Minnesota's here. Yeah. So it means a lot to me that everybody would would drive that far to come to a black bear event in Arkansas. So that's awesome. And I don't I don't do this kind of stuff very often. I feel like, I feel like my community has supported us, you guys, and and and wider people not from Arkansas, but really northwest Arkansas has been really good to me. And so I wanted to do an event where, you know, we just came together and had a good time. And so I'm thrilled that everybody's here, and everybody knows who's here. This is Brent Reeves. Brent's from down in the swamps. Brent does not like being called a hillbilly. I mean, he's like, well, I'm not a hillbilly. I literally live in like flat ground. So and on the next Bear Grease podcast you're gonna learn why he doesn't want to be called a hillbilly. Like the Deep, the Deep anthropological science of why, being from the flat lands Delta of Arkansas, he is opposed to being called at learn something about yourself here. I'm fiting to teach you. So the superficial reason is because if a cat had kittens in the oven, you wouldn't call him biscuits. One time I called Brenda hillbilly and he said, don't call me a hillbilly. We had hillbilly's mowing our grass. This is my This is my wife, Misty Nucam. Yeah, yeah, man, I think it's pretty cool that I can have my wife with me on my podcast. Misty do you know anybody else that puts their wife on their podcasts. I use this to my advantage, asking to be on the podcast. She didn't want to be. No, it's it's so great to have Misty. And then everybody has met Myron means he's been up here earlier. Myer and I, Myron and I have been really we've known each other for a lot of years now. And uh, I mean when you first got the job as the as the bear coordinator, which you were the bear coordinator of the state. Correct, Yes, that changed, but I think I talked to you within a month of you having that job. Yeah, probably so too long, too long, yeah, yeah, but now it's great to have Myron here for real. James Brandenburg, James is uh, he's he's a big wig here in Arkansas with for Arkansas BHA. James would and his team are responsible for this and I don't really have anything to do with this other than just show up. And so James has one doing all the work and in his team A got you, thank you. There it's the guys, it's the everybody else is doing all the work. And Josh Landbridge is still yeah, Josh's Uh. Josh has been one of my best friends for a long long time and uh and his mustache inspired me in two thousand and six to learn about the Bearing Landbridge So h that's a different story. But no, you're welcome. Yeah, yeah, we have. I think we live in an incredible We live in an incredible state. Did you guys hear the podcast that just came out about the Bear State and the Arkansas the Big Bear of Arkansas. That story. Man, what's so wild about this place that we live not this place being Arkansas, but this world that we live in is that humans are only here for just like a really short period of time, So we typically gather information that seems pertinent to our to our best interests in the moment, and we can lose the bigger picture of why stuff is the way that it is. And there's life is so complex, stories are so complex. And I love it when you can almost any single thing that you wanted to mind down into, like why is Arkansas? Why were we called the bear state? Why did we move away from that? Man? There's like deep stories inside of it, deep deep stories. And it's so interesting because because we now get to script who we are, what our identity is, and we look back at history and see how things happened, it's like you can you can you can begin to say, Okay, we are active partakers in something that's happening right now that we get to build on purpose. And I don't know why, and I think everybody up here would agree. Admiring for sure, someone who's dedicated a big part of his life to bears. From the first time that I killed a bear in Arkansas in two thousand and one is the first year that it was legal debate in Arkansas. And I've said it before, I think I said it last year. I claim to have killed the first legal bear in the state of Arkansas over bait because October first, two thousand and one, at the crack of dawn, me and Gary Nucom were, where's dad at? Is he over there? Where's Dad at? He's somewhere? Me and my dad were hunting and killed a bear. I mean, I'm serious, Like it was heartily daylight and killed a bear heartily daylight. It was. It was bear legal statutes of limitations, and I was perfectly legal. And at that time I was twenty one years old, and I it hunted a fair bit, I mean I was. I killed deer and turkeys and had been involved in honey my whole life. And when I walked up to this bear that I had just killed, I realized that I knew nothing about it, like nothing. I didn't know. I didn't know what it ate, I didn't know where it wanted to bed, I didn't know when it dinned. I didn't know about its reproduction cycle, and it it felt hollow. At twenty one years old, I was like, man, this is this is a great beast and I know nothing about it. And something was happening inside of me that I couldn't have calculated. I wouldn't have it was just unconscious. But really what was being said and demonstrated is that the hunt and partaking inside of taking wildlife is so much bigger than just taking an animals. There is a powerful component of connection that we have with hunting and this. And from that point, I was going to the u of A. At that time, I was living in Faddeville, and I started going to the University of Arkansas library and found these old dusty books of the of all the research that had been done in Arkansas at that time by Clark and who else was it Clark, Kimberly Smith, Joe Clark, Dan Clapp, Stephen Hayes. They kind of did all the you know, a lot of the research we based our managements on for thirty years. Yeah, they did that work back in the mid to late eighties, right, And so I started I started reading that stuff and that's where that was the first time that I read that Arkansas was formerly known as the Bear State. And to be honest with it, there's been a couple of times in my life when I was upset at all the people around me because they didn't teach me something. And that was a moment when I was like, why didn't they tell me? Why didn't they tell me that this was the bear state? And uh? And I was just fascinated by that and began to just study about bears and continue to hunt bears and and we I'll tell you another thing. When I first started getting y'all mind, if I just have my own little podcast, I can hear y'all breathing. Ye. No. When I when I first started getting interested in bears and in media as well, I had I had some pretty legitimate people who had my best interest in mind, advised me not to get into bears. Like there's a lot of different things I could have done. I started with in the white tail world, writing articles for North American white tail and different things. And that's what me and dad did. That's what my dad mainly we did grown up. Were we white tail bow hunted public land in Arkansas. It's just what we did. And then twenty one killed a bear, and then you know, a lot of stuff was going on. But I started tiptoeing in outdoor media and started just like leaning into this bear stuff. And I remember one guy, a good friend of mine, he was like, what are you doing? Man? Why are you focusing on bears. He's like, you kind of focus on deer. Yet it's exactly what he said. And and and I just I just said, I don't know, man, I just I just like him. And I kept going that direction and it ended up being the best thing that I ever did for a lot of different reasons. But I but I felt like and I wasn't the only one doing this, But I mean, I can just talk from what I experienced. I felt like I started to mine into stuff that people hadn't talked about or thought about, or brought to the surface in a long time. Because bear hunting was pretty much stamped out of our culture for about eighty years, almost entirely. When you go to the Appalachian Mountains, you go to East Tennessee in North Carolina, they never lost their bears and they maintained a bear hunting culture all through that time. Arkansas, our bears were extirpated, like Myron told us about earlier in the early by the turn of the twentieth century nineteen hunt well, nineteen forty, pretty much our bears were gone. People forgot about bears. They did they forgot how to use them, They forgot about bear grease. They forgot that bear meat was incredibly good tasting meat. They forgot how to hunt bears. Literally, dads didn't teach their sons how to hunt bears because there weren't bears here. And then in nineteen eighty was of our first bear hunt, first modern day Our first modern day bear hunt was in nineteen eighty and the bear population just continued to climb, continue to climb, continue to climb, continue to climb. And then two thousand and one is when the Game and Fish made the decision, the management decision that we were going to manage our bears using primarily using bow hunters on private land over bait, which is genius. Never if you're from Arkansas and you've ever looked to be in the eye, never ever talked bad about baiting a bear. It is God's gift to us to be able to bait a bear, because I can tell you something, they're hard to find out in the mountains by themselves. When I bait bears for a month in Arkansas, it is I call it my month with the bears because you see stuff that you never see any other time of year. And it's a fantastic management tool that allows us to be selective, allows us to shoot older age mails, all kinds of stuff. Are y'all my monologue? Yeah, I love it when I get people cornered him. We may play some more music. No, I'm trying to set the context for opening this up for no, because it's it's it's bigger. It's bigger than just all we can hunt bears. No, And there's there's there is no doubt, there's no doubt a trend in our society today. And it's not ever gonna come to Arkansas. Never. Never is it gonna come to Arkansas because we're not gonna let it right where people would say, you shouldn't be hunting predators, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be using bait, you shouldn't be you know, telling like someone who doesn't know telling us what we should do. Um, And it's it's it's a fantastic and incredible opportunity that we have. But when they opened up bear season, it opened up the floodgates for Arkansas bear hunters to be able to partake of something that had been culturally forgotten for generations, for real. And now we're twenty three years into having a bear baiting season. And we're now like fifty years into having a bear season, fifty three years into nineteen three to have a bear season. And I mean there's a there's a revival of the bear state. That's what I want to proclaim to the world. And it's and and it's uh and it's not just in Arkansas, man. Whatever is happening ecologically in this in North America, whatever it is, there's there. They're drastic weather pattern changes that have been going on for the last fifteen twenty years. A lot of wild stuff is happening. For whatever reason, it has been highly beneficial to the generalist omnivores and specifically the black bear. You will not here about a population of bears anywhere in the country that isn't expanding. And that's massive inside of a country with as much urban sprawl, habitat loss, civilizations spread, all kind of habitat fragmentation. For us to be able to stand up and say, man, the icon of North American wilderness, the black bear is coming back, you know, and it's it's it's coming back all over the country. You know, Our our game and fish brought in these bears in the nineteen fifties and sixties two hundred and fifty four bears and transplanted them here in Arkansas, three different places. And now we got a hunting season in Oklahoma. There's a hunting season in Missouri. There are bears in northern Louisiana. There are bears in these Texas. There are bears on the other side of the Mississippi River in Mississippi. Not a lot, but they're there. And you look at this one little place, it's one little dot on the map, and it's in that range is growing like this. And while I have you, this is so important from a social perspective because bear numbers are increasing all over the country. People that didn't know we had bears have them in their backyard, urban people maybe, people who don't have a connection to rural America and hunting. They don't understand how someone would want to kill an animal. And with the increase of bears across the country, there's never been a more opportune time for the bear hunters of America to become educated, to become passionate, to know how to utilize the resource at the highest level. When it comes to utilization of the commodities that a bear gives us, There's never been a better time for us to learn how to talk about predator hunting in a way that that that dominant. Somebody wants to talk to me about bear hunting and have and challenge me, and I'd be nice to him, Probably I wouldn't. I just don't want one self help. Yes for you, Yes, you need to work on the passion party. Pop it down a little passionate man. I know about him. Well, what I'm saying is is that this is not an argument of of of right and wrong, and we're trying to decide we're right and uh, but we're not. We're not in a battle against people. We're we're in a we're in a battle against ignorance at the most, at the high, at the at the very definition of the word ignorance, not not the derogatory thing. But that's what we can do, is educate people and learn how to us really value respect and love the bear. Like in that Big Bear of Arkansas story, this short story written in eighteen forty one, he said, Uh, the fictitious character Jim Doggett, Okay, if you listened, you'll know. If you didn't, you should have. You should have known coming here. You should listen to Last Bearer's podcast. This fictitious character. He's an Arkansas bear hunter and he says he sees a bear being bade by hounds walking across the hill and he said, oh, wasn't he a beauty? I loved him like a brother. And man, that's the North American hunter. What we do inside of the North American model of wildlife conservation is a functionalization of a love for wildlife and a love for wild places. Yeah, I mean, that's what it is. And we have a track record in this country of where we messed up pretty bad for a while, like the market hunting here era and just rampant exploitation of wildlife. Like yep, that did happen, and we knew when we saw we messed up. But then we rebounded and have have escorted onto planet Earth the most robust endeavor for wildlife husbandry ever in the history of the planet. For real, what's happened in North America, not just with bears, but with deer, the wild turkey, the elk, the sheep, everything. It's incredible. And man, we can't we can't lose that inside of our culture. Like the very definition of being an American should have. Not everybody needs to be a hunter. Not everybody needs to be but the very definition of American at one time there was a sector of that that was that that had hunting as a primary component of American identity. And we can't lose that. And the way we don't lose it is we do stuff like this and you take time out of your life to come and support something and joint organizations and and hunt by a hunting license, be an active and active participant inside of what what What we're needing from the broader sports is like the Game of Fish did a big survey this year bear hunters surveys and uh, I mean, you guys learned a lot. Tell me about that survey. It did learn a lot, you know, a lot of the Uh. The survey went out to people that have successfully harvested a bear in the last three years, and uh, they got a pretty good response rate. I believe it was something like forty eight percent. Wow, of the people that they sent it out to returned a response on it. And it was a lot of Uh. It wasn't necessarily geared to our well do you hunt bear? What zone you honey? And it was more geared toward uh people's associations with bear hunting. How long have you bear hunted? You know, have you bear hunted zero, two years or fifteen years? Or you know, how did you learn to bear hunt? Like doctor Ballard was saying, you know, did you learn it through podcasts? Did you learn it through agency employees? Did you learn it through a newspaper articles or magazine articles. So a lot of it was geared toward trying to trying to quantify or put on paper what the attitudes are towards bear hunting across the state. And you know, social science isn't just new to game and fish. It's new a lot of natural resource agencies around, but it's becoming an ever more important part of our management goals or strategies is to incorporate social science attitudes of the public into that. You know, we had a targeted audience bear hunt successful bear hunters. You know, hopefully in the future we could expand that to What I would like to see is if, if, and when we ever have a licensed system in place where I'm able to determine how many bear hunters we have in the state, I would like to send that survey out to you know, not successful and unsuccessful bear hunters. Yeah, so it's it's a lot of it's geared aimed at determining attitudes more than it is like someone's success rating things like that. Is there anything you can point to that you learned from that? Oh, yeah, there's a lot of stuff I learned. Uh, there's a there's a lot bigger culture out there about utilization of bare parts other than meat. And you know, I kind of suspected it, but you know, you don't know if you hear about people rendering down fad or you know, doing things making soap, like one of the gentlemen here gave me some soap. Uh, you hear about people doing that, but you think, well, you don't know if you know, those are outliers in the general consensus of how people utilize bears. Why they want to hunt bears, they want to hunt it for all things included, or just the meat or just a trophy. But actually, like sixty five percent or more of the people that responded in it utilize several parts of the bears, not just the meat. Yeah, and so that's really good to know. It helps me as a manager understand, you know, how people want to utilize bears, which is important. You know, it's not just all about people harvesting bears. As I said, there's a lot of let me say something about that. The oftentimes in talking to people just about hunting in general, you'll talk to somebody and say, yeah, a bear hunt, and they'll they'll go, I, you know, I don't know if I'd want to kill a bear. I don't know if I'd want to eat it or not. And there are parts of the country that have that for years, manage bears in a depredation way, like some of that states out west, like you don't legally have to take the meat. That's just old school way that they did things. Okay, I can't understand that. Yeah, that that's an old mentality. What what we're doing now and what Daniel Boone did and Jim dogg It did and you know, is we're utilizing more of a black bear than ninety nine point nine nine percent of people use of a white tail, of an elk, of a quail, of a turkey. I mean, we're most bears that are killed are the hide is gonna be tanned. I mean most people that kill a But I've never killed a bear that I didn't tan the hide. Um, we're rendering the fat and we're using the meat. And I mean, you know, when's the last How many dear have you killed in your life? How many tan hides have you got at your house? You know? Not many? So that is a powerful tool to be like, man, we absolutely utilize these animals that were taken, and I think that's really cool. And again, just another another mechanism that helps people understand bear hunting. Really Oh yeah, man, we use we use everything. So that's that's good. You know, when one of the other questions was geared at, you know, how did you learn How did you learn to bear hunt? You know, did you learn through podcasts or social media this day and age? Or do you have friends that bear hunt? Did you learn from friends? Did you learn from family members? You know? So it kind of speaks to the whether or not there is a quote tradition of bear hunting in the Bear state. So it's you know, it's it's aimed at determining a lot of things like that that you know, I can sit here and speculate all day long, you know, how what I get, what the feedback I get is about just but that doesn't necessarily put it on paper, you know. Yeah, so yeah, it's very very good information. Who's got the best bear story up here from last year? Josh, you didn't hunt, James, you hunted? Yeah, I saw a bear, didn't you. Yeah. I walked one up. I'm not gonna say where it was, don't tell it, but I was. I was hunting on public land and walking along about. I was deer hunting, actually, and I stopped in a spot, set my pack down, hung out for a while. I got hungry, like I'm gonna get my pack and get a snack out. I turned around. I had about set my pack down in a pile of bear scat. Didn't realize it at the time, and it was fresh. So then all of a sudden, I's kind of on a bear hunt and a deer hunt. And I kept on throughout the day, and I moved a little farther along and got down below this bluff line and got warm. I stopped and taking some layers off, and I turned around behind me. There's this bear just staring at me. It's like a couple of rocks like this, and thirty yards probably no more in yards. Late season two November. Yeah, Yeah, so um, looked at him, and it was legal. I could have shot him. Put the gun up, look out his muzzleloader hunting. Um and uh and this was on a permit hunt. That's why he's muzzleloader hunting in November, Myron, because because you know this was this was a special permit for that. And uh, looked at him, put my gun down, looked at him with my two eyes. I'm like, well, heck, yeah, put the gun back up, and he was gone, like the black mist over the fence. He disappeared, disappeared. I mean I looked for stood there for five minutes with my binoculars, looking all over the hillside everything. I have no idea where he went, but I climbed up there, and I mean there's a pile of scat up there as big around as my hat. Nice big spot was all worn out where he just been hanging out, just waiting for winter. And I went back in hunting him a couple more times, but I never get never got on him. So that's pretty good for two James killed the bear on public land the year before, right yep. Yeah, So that that's a good encouragement for people. You heard me speak highly of baiting bears, which we can on private land, but we've got a lot of public land in Arkansas and you can you can kill him on public land. It's a it's a. It's much harder. It's much harder. It takes a lot more work, and it's my favorite hunt on planet Earth for real. Like the moose I got. I killed a moose in Alaska last year. Man, I throw that moose in the river. To kill a big black bear on public land in Arkansas. I better not tell your boss that you stole that shot, remember I did. They didn't show all that. I'll tell the story about that sometimes. Um No, I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit, not much, but hunting bear on public land in Arkansas is um you know you're going to big to simplify it. And we've talked about it extensively. Actually the best thing if you really want to know. I had a couple of guys today ask me about public land bear hunt in Arkansas on the Bear Hunting Magazine podcast, which is still up there is uh. We spent episodes talking like talking as much as we knew how to talk about killing bear on public land. That's still on there. Kobe, do you remember it in the names any of those episodes bear Hunting, bear Hunting for Dummies. Yeah, I was the dummy. Yeah, and look what it did for you. I know. I'm still Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot to be said for that kind of stuff. Hey, we've got a lot of moms and wives and children here. Raise your hand if you are here as a supportive person, but you yourself are not a bear hunter. Big big hand raise. Hey, that's awesome as awesome kudos for you guys. I just want to say when Clay talked about killing his first bear, he was twenty one, and we had just found out that I was. I was pregnant with our first our oldest daughter. She's not here. Two of our our boys are here, Baron shep are over there, but our girls. We had just found out I was. I was pregnant with Willow, and like a lot of women, we found out that I was anemic. And so one of the things that you got to do is pump up your iron levels, and it turned out that wild meat was a great way to do that, and so that's kind of how I got into to eating wild game, because bear meat tasted so much better than dear meat, those game, those gamey wild bucks as for protein than it does. And so that's how we started eating bear meat. And we were like broke. I mean, we were college students and pregnant with our first kid, and he had this two hundred fifty pounds of bear meat that he brought in and I had to learn how to cook it. And you know, you got to learn how to cook it because it's not you know, it's not like grocery grocery, the stuff you buy the grocery store. But oh yeah, over the years, as our kids grew up, they all started bear hunting. And I got to sit with Shep on his first bear, because you know, you have to have an adult sit with you, and so I got to sit with Shep on his first bear. It was Shep and me and James Lawrence who Clay just sang that song about. I called James. He had a walkie talkie and I had a waukie talkie and Clay and Bear and River, our other daughter. They were out too far to help us, and James and Sheff and I went and found that bear chef accidentally sprayed the woods with bear spray. So that was fun for James and I mainly Chef and I and then last year, I think a lot of you've heard bear story about going out and hunting and as a you know, just being sent out to public land for three days and we kind of hung around for that. Last year, Clay was you know, Bear is named Bear. I mean, that's that's how much this guy loves bears. Be named his son Sun Bear, and Bears kind of grown up hunting and it's been really cool to watch his his migration from just like the guy that took pictures whenever we got the big Bear to the guy who's out there taking care of business. And he last year Clay was out, he was out a lot, traveling to different places. And so Bear took on the mantle of that gorgeous the Kentucky water pronounced Moulay. But Bear went out and baited the bear all by himself to get it ready for Clay when he came back home, and and him went ahead and started. He took out the mules and Caleb, who's over there as I think I saw Caleb come in as well. Yeah, yeah, Caleb was. And those guys would go hook up. Yeah, those guys would go hook up. The mule trailer, dragged the mules two and a half, however, many hours away from from our house, and and hike up into the wherever they were, and it was it was pretty impressive. I wasn't one hundred percent sure that I was comfortable with Bear, you know, taking a trailer hours at a time. And anyway, Bear got his own big, gigantic bear. How big was your bear this year? Four hundred pounds Bear? John did that and he, yeah, let's get Barrett bringing home the meat for the family. And he had to load that thing up him. James Lawrence, Papa Gary Gary was there. Brent came in and they loaded it up. And Bear had to do a whole lot of it by himself and travel through the night. And I was watching them, you know, thank goodness for cell phones because I was watching them, and it was it was. He got home at five in the morning, like had having to carry that thing out out off the woods. He didn't have He was way out there, so he didn't have, like, you know, an easy way to get it out of the woods. And so he got home at five in the morning, had the mules in the back of the trailer with him, and and the bear, and it was as a mom. The support that we provide these guys actually is something that gives back to us. It's been really cool to see bear hunting has kind of been woven in our family. It really was the only way I could eat wild meat because it was it was better and and it was palatable. We've since learned how to make the other stuff good as well, but but it's it's been something that's been a part of our family culture and a really special tradition, from just putting our little babies, you know, on a on a bear hide for a picture, to watching them grow up and become a hunters themselves. And it's just part of our family culture. So kudos to you guys who are here supporting whoever it is you're supporting that's a hunter. It gives back, It gives back in a lot of different ways, and it's part of our culture, as our Kansas and as Americans, as Clay says, and it's a part of all of our culture, even those of us who don't actually get out there and do the hunting itself. That was good. I think mine was better, tell you what, it was pretty succinct, certainly shorter short, it was a shorter fishing trip. Brent, you got a bear hunting story for us? Yeah, last year I killed this many bears. So if anybody needs some help or advice on how to kill no bears, come see me happy right over here. Yeah. How many were at the Warner Glenn film premiere last night? Did y'all enjoyed the film? Yes? Yes, yeah that was fun? Um I was. I was supposed to tell who paid for all that, who sponsored it and presented it? And I didn't. I didn't any guesses who sponsored that event? That's right? Yeah, for real, man, these guys they got wind. They I didn't ask them. They got wind of that we were thinking about doing a film premiere and they said how much money do you need? And I told him and he said, well how about we give you more than that? And they allowed us to rent that facility. The guys on X are incredible and um, if you go ahead, they're they're also presenting sponsors of this event today as well, and as a chapter, we're very thankful for that support as well. So they're they're helping us out a ton um to keep access to open up access to public land. So no, seriously, though on X has been very good to us. I know a lot of you all have been up to do that stuff today and we appreciate their support. How many people have on X on their phone? All right? Everybody drop? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, they they were They're incredible. Um. You also forgot to say who did all the work behind the scenes? Oh yeah, Isaac Neil did all the work. See the guy with big ear rings. Yeah, Isaac. Isaac help with Beargreas. He's the he's the assistant to the regional producer of Beargreas, which is me. Uh Maran. Let's talk about bears a little bit more so. We now have a hunt in the Gulf coastal plan we do? And how many bears did they kill this year? Yeah that's a big deal. Yeah, it's a big deal. How many How many bears did were killed? Done? This year? They harvested twenty eight bears, of course there was a quote of twenty five. The season ran from December tenth to December sixteenth, or when the quota was met, whichever came first. The quotas met Monday evening roughly five or six o'clock. It wasn't closed until Monday three days into it, and which there's, there's, it's a little bit of information, but I consider it great information. I consider the fact that the season ran through the week end. I considered that a great success. Tell me what you mean by that, Well, well, it was long enough to at least get through the weekend, Okay, okay. So what I really didn't want to happen was set the season at such a time frame in the fall that you open a season on Saturday, and by noon Saturday they had already checked enough bears in the season closes and you got a lot of spill over and everything else like that. So what. But I also didn't want the season set so late that a lot of bears weren't on the landscape. Remember what I talked about the dening chronology of males and females. We want to set it late enough to where the females, some of them, or at least in the den, to where they're protected. They're in a den cycle, making the males. We want to buy us the harvest towards males. So it ended up being fourteen and fourteen, which isn't great, but at least it didn't close in the first half day of the season. It was long enough, the quota was large enough that you know, the way I took that is, most people were able to hunt through the weekend that wanted to bear hunt, and so you know, it was a success. I felt like it was a great success on where we placed the quota based on the best research information we had. How when we started the season, I think there could be some fine tuning on the season, but you know, really just the fact that we had a bear hunt in the Gulf coastal plaine of Arkansas and we have a bear season and roughly four fifths of the state now, which is something that I mean, I just don't think people would have envisioned that forty three years ago. Would you have thought it? Inside of your career. I was really skeptical at one point if it was going to happen. I mean, I knew we had research on going and depend on what that search said, but we kept having you know, historic flood events, you know, one hundred year flood events two out of five years, I mean, you know, so that affected our research. So the research kept getting put off and put off and put off and everything like that. So I was beginning to wonder if it was going to happen in my career, but it did, and man, I feel I feel really proud that I got to see it in my career. Yeah, that's big. The first time that I went on a den study with Myron years ago, probably it was at least ten years ago, I was I remember, I had never never been to a bear den, and we walked way back in to an area and Myron kind of snuck up to where he believed this bear to be. And first of all, I was shocked that this tiny little hole. I was expecting a bigger hole, you know, for a bear to be able to fit in. Ye, But they're like a squirrel, you know, if you if you got a hole that big in a tree, a gray squirrel that's about that big can fit in it. Bears are the same way. And he walks up to this little bitty hole that couldn't have been more than about that big, and you wouldn't. You've been the hundreds of den so you probably don't remember which one it was. But I could take you to that den today, like I remember where it's at. I'm trying to remember, and I'm I'll tell you later it was. It was. It was kind of a It was on the side of a ridge and the hole though, was like in the ground, like an armadilla hole, like it wasn't like a cave. And Myron he stuck his head down there and crawled in and it's like his rear end and his legs are the only thing sticking out. And he stays down there for a minute and he comes back out and he hands me his flashot and he says, stick your head in there. And I said, I said, how how close is that bear? And he said, oh, it's just like right there. And I said, like how close? And he was like oh. Like from like me to you, I said, is it awake? And he said yeah, And question does have cubs? And he's like yeah. And now I remember leaning upside down into this hole and turn it on this flashlight and from like me to Brent, for real, there's Brenda. It was Brenda, like a she was big, just setting his glowing eyes just like for me to Brent. I was looking and I'm hanging upside down this whole shine and you hear the cubs chuckling and feeding, and uh, I'll never forget doing that with you. And then I've been several times since then. Pretty incredible. What have you learned about bear dinning in the Gulf coastal plain that's different than in the mountains. Has there been some different stuff? Well, I've learned that I don't know near as much about bears as I thought. I mean, I really have. This has been Uh. Man, They're just different down there. Uh. It is a different world. Their behavior is so different than mountain bears. Uh. You know, I mean I knew that the dinning chronology was later in the year. You know, the cycle starts for for pregnant females later, you know. But man, it's just I've just learned a lot in the past six months about their behavior, what there, what their preferences are. They're you know, they're kind of nomadic down in that part of the world, which makes them incredibly hard to trap. Uh. And I did learn one thing that that corn is the acron of the South, is it? Yes? It most definitely is tell them Tell them what you mean by that? Well, I mean, they're just not interesting anything else you have to offer trying to bait. Even in the summer months, you know, when we were trying to bait, I've literally stuffed snare sets full of pastry donuts. I mean, how can a bear pass up a you know, a nice Chrispy cream donut. I was stopping at the Mini Marchs and buying extra glazed honey buns because I'm thinking, this is it now. They just walked by and turned their nose up at it and go over and eat, you know, a polo corn. You know. So it's just it's just different behavior. You think they get acclimated to that because of all the deer hunting down there over the years. Well, I think they've become acclimated to that food choice because that's what has been available to them. You know, maybe not thirty years ago, but certainly in the last twenty years. I mean, and if you got bears they are twenty years old, you know what did their mom teach them when they were cups? You know, where to find the food in the fall? So I learned that, you know, bear populations in the Gulf Coastal Plain aren't homo genius across the entire Gulf Coastal Plaine. They're kind of patchy. You know, there aren't bears everywhere in the Gulf Coastal Plaine, even though it's a big zone eleven County zone bear zone. But you know, like southern Bradley County has a lot of bears, Eastern Union County, Western Ashley County has a lot of bears. Dallas County has a lot of bears. Washtaw County doesn't have that many bears, even though as the Washtaw River running right down the side of it, so and bears use those river systems and breaks as travel routes. If you if you look on the display we had out here showing some of the movement patterns of some of those bears. I mean you can watch them over time. Do you know they're running around running uh these smzs or strange stream manage zones in between these corporate timber products are running through these through these river systems and stuff like that, the corridors, the riparian zones. I mean, that's that's what those bears do, just running around in between that to get from point A to point B. A lot of times it's not necessarily straight across a ten year old you know production that's where they din. So yeah, it seems like every bear in the Gulf coastal plane wants to find the perfect geographic center of the thickest thicket you could ever imagine, and that's where they want to have. Where are they denning? Are they digging holes and root balls? Uh? Well not really. Most of them are ground nesters in the Gulf coastal plane in areas that don't flood. I'm talking about timber production land in Dallas County, Washtaw County, Drew County, Bradley. They'll just din a ground, just make a ground nest, but it will be in a thicket. You could be walking through the woods and see just see a bear laying on the ground and he's he's denning. That's pretty incredible. I mean, you know, we run across it in the in the Ozarks and the Washingtall's ground nesters. Typically they're gonna be in thick it's uh Washtall dens are typically dugouts under root balls. Ozark dens are typically crevice type dens. But the Gulf Coastal Plain, if they're now, if they're in the flooding regime, they're going to be up in a tree. Uh. Last I believe it was last two Wednesday, we were down there and trying to find one particular female named Memphis and uh, you know, we found her and she was in a flooded break Uh not far off the Washtall River, but it was flooding and she was eighty feet up a cypress tree. And that's where she's been in the last three months. Well, you know, and there's there's a cavity up there. She just happened to be out sunning that day. But there's a cavity up there. And uh, based on the GPS locations we had over and everything last like that, more than likely she has cubs up there. She just happened to be out sunning that day, y'all and bring the helicopters into No, you know, there was a time back when I was a young man. I used to climb trees and do tree work, but not so much anymore. That's why we have game cameras for Yeah, you guys may have heard me talk with Myron about this. But so, your your job title used to be bear Coordinator the State of Arkansas, and then three years ago it was longer than it was about yeah, about twelve years ago. Well no, no no, no, no, no, the title changed. You became bear coordinator that long ago. The name change though, that's what I'm talking. Became bear coordinator about sixteen years ago. Name change came about ten or twelve. Large carnivore. Yeah, okay, well I thought it was baking news. This is so. But why did they change your name? That's that's the important thing here. So you were the bear coordinator, you became the large carnival coordinator. Why why did they change your name? Well, you know, mountain lions started showing up that we were documenting. I'm gonna I'm gonna put mountain lions start showing up that we were documenting, and uh you know, in order to I guess monitor what's happening with mountain lions statewide and everything, that had to really kind of assign a program coordinator to it. Well, the most likely candidate was, well, you know, mounta lions are large carnivores. Bears are large omnivores. So hey, you know, and I mean honestly still to this day, uh ninety nine percent of the work I do is very related. Uh you know, I do uh some reports on while on mountain lions, but that's basically just an the current's type. Matt. You know, once a year put together information for a foilier or something like that. But it's it's it's pretty cool that there are documented mountain lions. Yeah, do you think there's a mountain line in Arkansas today? Probably good possibility of it. What color is it? Yod question? What colored? To come up? I knew it. Can you tell a mountain lion scream what color it is? Gary depends on what county it's in? Knows How can you tell by their scream whether they're black or just the regular ones? Secret? Now I'm really interested in uh in in mountain lions and uh Myron said that the majority of I should just follow Myron around and infamous. Myron said, no, you said that you get a lot of reports of mountain lions coming in. We do. We get about one hundred I'm gonna say a hundred, one hundred and twenty sightings to you, okay? And then of those that are a mistake, what are they usually? What are people seen? Housecats and bobcats? Housecats and bobcats. It's a big house. How many people here have claimed to have seen a mountain lion? Are? Just say, Jessica Llewellen, come on, I know every one of you have told someone you've seen a mountain lion. How many grandmas have seen them? Yeah. No. One of the first podcasts we ever did was it was called the Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion, and I had Myron on there and we talked about how everybody in the South except for these fine people have seen mountain lions, have one hundred percent and seen them. We do have a lot of people here from not Arkansas. Remember all that geographic distribution we talked about, So we can forgive them. We'll forgive them a little bit. It's so, it's so, it's a funny social it's it's it's interesting to look into because mountain lions were here. They were like bears. They were here in great number, documented, big time. I mean, the mountain lion had a range from the Atlantic to the Pacific, massive geographic range. They were here. They were in our lore, they were in our writing, they were in our hunting culture. Dads told their sons and daughters about mountain lions, and then they were extirpated. But dads kept telling their kids about mountain lions and uh, and then it's so funny to me. I love it because we don't have that many mountain lions in the state, maybe one or two at any given time, maybe ten or twelve. I mean, it's just we don't I mean, there's no way to track them. We just don't know. All I can say is I get about one verification a year. So he gets one hundred and fifty people saying I saw one, and one of those they're able to verify and say, it doesn't mean that somebody didn't see one line in the state. Have you seen evidence of a mountain lion in the state, Yes, there you get. So I gotta share one one story mountain lion story. When I was in Oklahoma deer hunting in November and it was one of these real cool nights, bright moon. It was very still, and we me and another guy were walking out of the woods and you could just hear so good. It was just it was cold and no wind and just bright night. And man, I hear just a scream just like I don't even want to replicate it, but it was a loud oka't I can't do it loud what It was so loud that I ignored it for three times. Me and this guy walked together in the dark, and I finally go, are you hearing that? And he's like, yeah, what is that? And I said, I have no idea what that is. But it was loud, so loud, it was just wow. And I knew I was like half of the people I know would right now say that's a mountain lion screaming. How many if you heard a mountain lion scream raise your hand? Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. OK So anyway, I hear it's like a and I said, I told Dave, I said, man, I would swear that was a cat. I just would swear it was a cat. We got back to the truck and I had my coon light with me, and that thing was was was screaming so consistently that and we were in a big open field that I just said, let's just go over there, and so we turned our light off and we kind of just started trotting across this field. Superrational thing to do, and it quit, it quit making the noise. But as soon as we got over there where I said it, I had to have been right in here. I turned on my light and just light up the world with this big light and there's a bobcat in a tree. Oh yeah, bobcat was making an incredibly loud and I've read about I've heard people call it yowling why o w L. But it was so loud you could have heard it from I mean three four hundred yards just wow wow. And I think that's what all you heard. When you thought you heard him outline, I think you heard a bobcat. He said I should work for the game and fishing to build those calls. Ma'am, you didn't. You didn't see a bobcat or you didn't see the outline. Nope, your daddy live surprised at how many housecat pictures I get. Yeah, any year, you know, someone sends a pig to AGFC, ask AGFC, Yeah, and it's you'd be surprised at how many housecats yea. And then some of them aren't even tony coated housecats, you know, they're just people think they're great with stripes. Yeah. I wanna, I wanna. I want to end. We've been going for about an hour here. We're gonna wrap things up. Thank you guys so much for coming and for for for wanting to be here. So we're gonna have We're gonna do a couple more things. We're gonna have the al hooting contest and this is a little bit, it's gonna be a lot of fun, and yeah, we're gonna be here rest afternoon. So thanks, thanks a lot, guys,

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