00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. We're looking out the window right now and there's a green heron fishing. When we just looked at that a second ago and I wanted to mention it. We used to my old man had um, you know, like the drum inside of a washing machine, like, and they'll like the old days, they just had like these big steel perforated drums inside of top loading washing machine. We use one of those for alive well off of some industrial size washing machine, right, because it's already perforated. So you just set it out in the lake, throw some rocks in there, some bricks in there, and then you could put all your bluegills in perching there right and wait till you had enough where it warranted cleaning them. So we just go down and catch a few and throw them in there, and then when you had this whole thing full, we'd go down and scale him and flam him. But there was this heron that lived on our lake, or spend a lot of time hunting our lake, and he would never get in his head that they were that they were captive, so he would land way the hell down the beach and stock this thing, like just painstakingly sneak up on this thing and then bam, grab a blue gill out of there. It never just got comfortable with the idea he was, I could do the Hunt's high fence right where they still go through all the like they get like their camo on, you know, and they you know, they go through all the rigmarole. But then he would just come up and uh yeah, never got into his head that he could just land there and started bluegills. Um, Parker, it's really I'm really glad here. Do you mind if you touch on a few things before we start talking to you, please? Okay? Uh, another point to raise. Be honest, you know how you think that you know how you think that it's stupid that I think that there is confusion around what constitutes a half her whole breast. Yeah, yeah, I think you're burning precious time. I'm worrying about that. Check this out. A guy rode in. He was at the grocery store this weekend and there was a woman fixing to buy chicken breast which were on sale, and she was having a disagreement with the meat purveyor about are you talking about the whole breast or half abreast? He says that at one point in time she even groped on her body what she thought amounted to a breast and in the end hold on. So she was right, and the butcher was saying, no, that's not a whole breast, and she's like, well, what do you mean. I gather that she felt it meant that she should get too or whatever, but that she registered confusion, point being this is not just the thing that comes down to turkey hunters. Parker. You know what I'm talking about. I know what you're talking about. What do you think about that? I think a whole breast is two halves. So if I say I'm gonna smoke up a turkey breast, what do you think I'm smoking? I think you're smoking. I think you're smoking a half. But I think it's slang. I think it's slang for if I said I'm I'm getting turkey breast, that means half. If you're smoking a turkey breast, that means whole. Man, I don't stay in half. But what he's saying is it slang. So but you're saying on a bird, if you were, like I shot him in the breast, you'd be talking about both. Correct. A guy rode in and said, this doesn't even need to be a problem if we would adopt um things from the poultry industry where they call them lobes. Mm hmm, because you don't talk about it. You talk about lobes, and an all confusion falls away. I don't know if that words that appetizing. Though smoking up the lobe, I would think it was like he was smoking a joint of some slang term for the type of jointing. Some guys says, ye, I'm smoking up a big old lobe this weekend. Really, uh, moving on, just cleaning up a couple of housekeeping issues here. We just did a podcast about all the nine million acres of landlocked land in the West, and the guy rode in. He says, I'm not like taking this as a slam on the East, because you weren't talking about the East. But he says he spent some time on on that he lives in North Carolina because he knows about a lot of landlocked land around his house in North Carolina, so he spent some time on X and within a twenty minute drive of his home in North Carolina, there are eight hundred and forty seven acres of landlocked land around him. One chunk, he says, kind of because it's river accessible, but there's no boat launch anywhere. There's no public boat launch anywhere near there, so it would be hours on the water. Sounds I know. That sounds like a freaking honeyol Man. He doesn't give any details about where. It is a lot of national forests, but there's landlocked land within the national forest. So he said, this is a problem that plagues us as well out here. And I believe that they said that they're going to be working on more states, that those thirteen western states is just where they decided to start. I think they should um another question. Podcast episode one thirty four, Steve mentioned their Bush pilot was dismayed at something they wanted to bring back to town, and I was supposed to talk about it later but never did. What the pilot was dismayed about is that we had a generator to charge camera batteries and it was insult The idea was insulting to him that you would move gas back to town. Like I think a lot of his career has been spent getting gas out to people in weird places who need gas, and he was insulted by the idea that one would bring a two gallon can of gas back to town, whereas he explained us, there are gas stations all over the place and wanted us to go find at least go find a quad runner and pour that gas into it. He also had the personality that like that's that was his stick was to be just dismayed at everything he was. Then the only thing that got got his feathers ruffled up. He we almost so we're packing out trash, and he gave us a hard time about that. Didn't like the trash. He especially didn't like that we had camera equipment. No one likes that. No one likes pelican cases. No person in aviation likes a pelican case. So upon seeing the pelican cases and asking what's in there and hearing that it was camera equipment except for our buddy John Varko, he didn't give a ship no but that that dude's cool. He's a pro this guy. Upon learning what was in our pelican case, it says, fun, uh, one last thing, this is something that's been brewing for a long time. I think people are gonna need to start paying a little bit at attention to it. There's two there's two last things. So this is one of them, and this is gonna have like this could have major ramifications. It's just something that people need to watch. It's gonna go to the Supreme Court. Lord knows you've been hearing a lot about the Supreme Court lately. Um meaning who's who is? I'm gonna perhaps be sitting on it in the near future. But this has something to do with this. M There's a thing that's gonna that's probably probably gonna be heard in the Supreme Court soon. They'll have a big major ramifications for big game. It's called the Herrara case. It's started in two thousand fourteen when a member of the Crow tribe in Montana was out hunt with two other tribal members and they went onto national forest land off of the Crow Reservation out of season with no licenses. They go into the Bighorn National Forest and Wyoming. So they pushed across the state line into Wyoming and they shoot four trophy sized bull elk no season, no licenses, Okay, a game warden. Uh, here's about this does an investigation and comes to issue citation to the tribal members. Two of the guys pled to their crime and presumably pay their fine or whatever happened to him, but one of them, Herrera, makes a claim that in eighteen sixty eight treaty between the United States and the Crow tribe allowed him to hunt unoccupied This is a quote from the treaty quote unoccupied lands of the United States without any sort of state or federal regulation. So he's convicted and his appeals with the Wyoming state court system is denied. But they keep pushing it and they and they pushed it up to have it heard by the Supreme Court. Because this is something that's been waiting to be finally settled for a long time. Some people think it is settled. They think that Bureau of Land Management land national forest land is in fact not unclaimed, it's claimed or you know, it's not unoccupied or it's not open and unclaimed, but it's occupied and claimed. And so if it's heard by the Supreme Court, um, it might change our definition of this stuff. And if Wyoming loses the case, so it's like rare of the Wyoming If Wyolming loses this case, Wyoming and ten other states, as well as the federal government, will lose the ability to enforce hunting and fishing laws on any tribal members pursuing wildlife off reservation. Because there are a handful of treaties that use similar language, you could theoretically, depending on how this goes, you could tribal members could theoretically hunt within the Yeloso National Park. So a lot of statement state game managers are watching this very carefully and trying to understand, like what the implications of this could be ridgical? Cool man, I did have a thought about breasts lobes. No, the tribal thing. I'm not a subject matter expert. It's more like a like a racism sort of issue because I remember in Michigan go On there was always like uh growing up the Um tribe and like manesty, I think it's the Ottawa, but they could fish salmon out of season. I remember like a bunch of dudes growing up that we fish, which were always like goddamn Indians can fish and blah blah blah. I remember here next because because tribal members in the Sioux can snag ye and then it led to like they didn't just focus on that. They then like expanded and then just like became racist against Native Americans. So like I think I'm hearing that stuff. I'm always just like thinking about like where that'll go socially, where management ends and racism begins, because I think, I mean, you gotta you do have to think about the animals if that's the m the main issue. But then like you know, the random person who's like, oh God, damn India now gets to come in and shoot this ouk out of season or whatever it's like, then then it becomes less about like the issue and more about something that isn't really related but kind of related. I understand what you're saying. And even in um like I look at that. So I look at the Horrare case, and I damn sure know how I hope the if it gets hurt in the Supreme Court, I damn sure know what I hope the court says. But in the back of my head, I do wonder, m hmm, am I tipping that? Like, what are my motivations for tipping the way I'm tipping? Is it an us versus them? Yeah? Right? Or is it strictly that I'm viewing is what would be the implications for wildlife management. I feel and everyone feels this way about themselves. I feel as though, Um, I'm not tipping that way out of some latent bigotry. I feel as on tipping that way, but it's in the back of my head. That is that a thing that's going on in my head and us them? Yeah, I think keeping that in check is important. And at least if you're thinking about it, then I don't think it's an issue. If you're not thinking about it, then it's then you can get into the the weeds on it. But if you are, if you're conscious of like, oh is this in us them over wildlife? If you're already thinking that, I think you can have a I think you can make an objective decision. You know, what's your take on Annie? Nothing? While I'm with you, you know, I really hope it's gonna you know, don't decide that it's it is occupied land and throw it out. What would be helped full for me too? And no one could answer this because we just don't know where things are going down the line. What would be help with me too is to understand the scale of exploitation that we would be talking about if we knew there was just like very minimal exploitation of the resource, I would feel differently. But you just don't know where things are going to go and now and then we make rulings and things. Um, we make rulings like look at the Wild Horse and Borough Protection Act, Right, we make a ruling and then wind up down the road being like my goodness, I had no idea that it would cause this level, like at the time, I couldn't foresee the level of trouble. We would be like the Pandora's box that would be opened. Well yeah, and that in this case, it could be one individual that you know, if they decided to exercise that right and uh, I think about if if you went away from Elkin went to big Horn sheet, You're going and take every possible you know, regular hunters opportunity in one unit with a with a couple of pulls the trigger. Yeah yeah, you could. Someone could do in a relocation of a handful of big horns and spend you know, a few hundred thousand dollars on it, and someone could decide well sweet, yeah, thanks thanks, yeah, No yeah, no oversight, no game regulation oversight here and that Yeah, it does sound like you need to adjust treaties from the eighteen hundreds now because the landscape was very different. You know. That's like one of Rogan's jokes, one of his his latest jokes would be like Thomas Jefferson coming back and being like, hold a minute, you guys haven't changed any part of this. You guys just left it like this. Uh, Where to begin? Where to begin? I was thinking about that this morning. How to begin? What would we go complete? Linear? Linear? Or do we choose set the set, choose a species, set the stage. Nas, We're Missouri visiting our new friend Parker Hall, who's been on the show before, Yep, the podcast program, and we decided to come back to make a television program and to uh try to catch big giant catfish. Can I can sure? Speaking of program, sixteen brand new episodes are up on Netflix right now. Yeah, go watch them and tell your friends to watch him, and tell your family to watch him. My grandmother les her heart. When she was live, she liked watching meat. Either she's not really into watching hunting or hunting didn't let me tell hunting stories. So tell everybody to watch it. It's good ship. Go on now, um, yeah, so we're trying to catch our big catfish by a method called bank polling, and then uh go and shoot a few squirrels behind Parker's dog. Those are like main activities while we're here. And uh yeah, I was just having a hard time decide any whether we I wanted to talk squirrels first or catfish first. Let's set the table like this. I got a good way to set the table, Parker. Explain why, Explain why it's good right now to go for flatheads and shitty right now to go for squirrels will in short order winners coming to Missouri. Al though it doesn't seem like it this week, chicks are out, chickers are ound ninety degrees. But this time of year, those flatheads I think really put on the feed sat getting ready for that slow time where they're inactive. They're laying on the bottom and they're just trying to wait for spring to get through get through winter. So they're really get active this time of year, and it's it makes for good fish and good bank polling. The reason it's bad for squirrel hunting with the dog, it's good squirrel hunting without a dog right now. But you think like good Yeah, this is the time. This is the mast is out. The squirrels are in the trees cutting nuts and and getting ready same thing, winners coming, you know, real active, a lot of white oak acre. And so this is the time you could slip around. And we talked about it before, you know, slipping through the trees and seeing them and listening hearing them, and you can kill them with the dog. It's bad for that same reason. With the dog. The squirrel has it come down out of the tree, get on the ground, mess around. The dog uses its nos chase to squirrel back up a tree. The squirrel then hides and you find it. Well. With leaves all over the canopy so dense and thick, it's almost impossible to find the squirrels almost um during the winter months January February, there's no leaves, the squirrels are much easier to find and much more um able to be harvested. Yeah, and then it's bad for creeping through the woods. They can almost get real bad for creeping through the woods. Almost impossible because they're so paranoid. They're so paranoid because they're so exposed I think to avian predators. When there's no leaves that it is paranoid coming from a mile away. Yeah, the forest floor this time of year, it's year old leaves that have been rained on and decayed, and just inherently it's quieter when this fall, when all the leaves come down their new brittle. Man, it's crunch, crunch, crunch. They can hear you see from a great distance. That's a good point, man. I mean I've known that but never thought about it. You're right right now. It's the quiet like this time before the leaves start to fall as the quietest the woods will get because the leaves are the most decayed, right, it makes for good slipping. Yeah, because that's a great point in the spring. You know, you would think that through the winter. And you know, remember how crunchy it was when we were down here in Missouri turkey hunting, very crunchy. It's really frustrating to hunt squirrels right as leaves come down, remember, like we're hunting dougs places for squirrels. Just like dealing with the leaves down and new leaves on the ground. You had just go out and sit, get into a likely spot before dark and just sit and just lean against tree and wait for one to come into your zone. But then when you blouch, it's like, you know, everybody knows. Then it starts over. It's like really hard to have a great day. We used to hunt them around Christmas time, and man, it was tough hunting. If you got a squirrel, you've been doing good around that time of year, and you've done it before. This time of year was particularly when they're cutting hickories. You can shoot several out of one tree, shoot them with a twenty two or whatever, and the others don't even hardly check up eating just shoot another one. You know, sometimes you can kill three or four out of one tree. Not like that in the winter. Um, what next? You honest? Have you thought about how you want to dig in? Let's talk flatheads? Linear? That's how I vote. You're voting linear. Do you want to Can you introduce yourself? You've never been on the show before, Michael linnimouth camera man, first time on the show, first time filming the show, and you're taking a cameraman's a show business sensibility to this discussion. You want linear? Okay? That would mean that we start out with a really I don't want to call it a bad but a disappointing squirrel hunt. Absolutely, and that's going to open up one of the big questions I have is what the hell happened between that morning and last night? Is there like an explanation? Well, there's infinite explanations that you go through in your head. I don't know one of them is correct. Weather changed. We'll get to that, but let's start out with that day. So we're down in we're Donna, Missouri, and we go to Mark Twain. You don't mind like you're really because you're moving anyways. You're moving anyways. Mark Twain's Mark Twain National Forest. Now, anyone who's who had the pleasure the joy of reading, uh, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Uh, and then all Mark Twain's beautifully written accounts nonfiction accounts of working on the riverboats on the Missouri and Mississippi. UM know that Mark Twain should know the Mark Twains from hand. Was born in Hannibal raising, Hannibal, Missouri. Was a river man. His name was Samuel Clements. His pen name was Mark Twain, and his pen name came from when you're running riverboats on the river and the old days the river channel would just changed constantly. It still does. It still shifts, but I mean it would shift wildly. Like the river was nothing like it was today, because this is prior to when they channelized it and Levi did and everything. Um, it would just move as a meandering channel, and it was running the river was very difficult and paddle wheel boats, Um, they'd run aground all the time. And there'd be a guy whose job it was to stand up in front of the boat and he had a weighted line. He's got a rope with markings that would not is tied in it and a weight on it. And as you're going through a treacherous spot, he's up there hucking that way out ahead of the boat. The weight he hits the bottom and he counts the marks on the wine to tell death. And if I'm not mistaken, Yanni could check into this forest just a fact check me. If I'm not mistaken. They nodded the rope at three ft increments. Safe passage was six ft of water. And I believe that as he's up there yelling out the marks the river, the guy who's doing the depth soundings mark twain was two marks, which meant safe passage, and so drawing upon that, you know, his drawing upon his heritage and time spent upon the river. Samuel Clemens took the pen name Mark Wayne. So the Mark Twain National Forest, uh became that? About that, Parker, I thought it just occurred to me and maybe we'll get to it later. Uh Pounder over there, similar to the depth checking man, we'll definitely touch we'll definitely touch on Ridge Pounders attempt at taking a depth sounding. There's not a case of like what happens on the river stays and every sort of thing. Uh. So we go to Mark Twain National Forest and you because because you being a squirrel man and a river man, um and you took your You grew up in Georgia and it was real common to have kind of make a corraction. Oh really, yeah, you're just just still know just a little bit. But it's not three ft, it's six for a fathom, and so actually safe passage is twelve. Well, how the hell are you gonna get anywhere? Twelve ft really must not have been John boats. It's a snow. No, they're talking Steave s safe debt for the steamboat twelve ft of water. Yep. So there's fathom soundings and The second mark is Mark number two, Mark Twain sing about Mark Twain. Here it's just says half Twain, quarter Twain, Mark Twain, no ship fathom soundings. I had no idea those boats drew that much water. Huh No, you know, do me another favorite man. I'm gonna keep talking to Parker about being from Georgia and everybody has squirrel hounds and whatnot. Pull up Mark like two or three of Twain's doozyst quotes. Please you can do that. So there you are Georgia. Everybody's got a squirrel dog. I don't know that. I would go as far as to say everybody, but more common than other places. If you want to know how legitimate Parker Hall is as as a houndsman, he's the hunt Coons with a man named Festus. If that doesn't, if that doesn't established some legitimacy, that's like out of a Jerry Clower story, Hunt Coons and a man named Festus. Yeah, I've never met a Festus. I've never heard of a fist. Yeah an he wore and yeah, also out of Jerry Clower as fastest war overalls with no shirt beneath it. And you know what you said another thing. Did you tell me that? Yeah, and another thing you told me that it was funny because we're about the same age. You're in your early forties. Um, I guess I'm approaching mid now forty four. But you mentioned like when those maglights came out, they were like baseball bats, and people thought they were so we thought it was like, uh, like it was. It was like a revolutionized being out at night, right when those big you put those three or four big D cell batteries into a magalit and you thought you were invincible. Man, Now you can have a flashlight the size of your index finger that throws a bigger beam than that. I remember, like the one thing that everybody wanted. It was like, for five years in a row, the only thing anyone got for Christmas was a D cell mag late. They just got longer and longer. Man. You did install the little holster in your car. Yep, I had that holster. Yeah, you could screw into your dashboard truck a thing that held your light there. And they had that rubber ring you could put on your waist belt and they got longer to the point they were like baseball bats, and policemen carried them around. Maglite was tearing it up and then they got like something happened to him. I don't know, man, They weighed six pounds and yeah, load everything up and you got the mag oh yeah, like running traps and like everything. It was different when Maglay came on the scene. Yeah, big and you get in your stocking like you get that light and you're stocking just be full of decl bad. That's like a whole era. Man. God, people got excited about those, so um yeah, and tell the kind of dog. He got a little bit about the dogs lineage, not that particular dogs linneys, but the breed you know, and what occur in a feist and all that is. So there's two main I mean there's a lot of different dogs that are tree squirrels. I mean I'm seeing black labs tree squirrels, but reliably, no, not reliably. You know, they're not bread to do that. But you get one every once in a while that'll that'll tree a squirrel. But mostly the tree dogs are the you know, a blue any of the in any of the coon hounds with tree squirrels and some guys so Walker, red Bone. Yeah, they're all tree squirrels. Why don't squirrel men use them because they're a lot rangier and they want to run and trail on the ground and put something up a tree. Now, a lot of squirrel men do use um, some of those hounds, some of those bigger hounds. It just depends on what. Um. When you say a ranger, you mean they're running out too far. Yeah, they want to run far. You know. The squirrel dogs generally stay a little closer, check back in with you. You know, the curs and the fists, I'll go out and run a little circle. Um. They use their eyes as well as their nose a little bit more than a hound will. A hound is just nose to the ground, kind of trail up a tree, bark tree. So there's these These dogs are um bread for small game hunting and chase. And the one I have is is a cur called a tree and cur um. And it's because of the size um this particular this particular dog. The fice dogs are a little bit smaller like um. You hear a lot of people like Jack Russell's treeing squirrels. I think people try those. That's that's kind of like a feist size. These curves can get get pretty pretty big. You know him, And it's a it's a measurement at the shoulder, measurement at the shoulder to distinguish a fight from a cur fights being the smallest in years is like one size up right right, So mine would be a small curve. And when if someone goes to get one of these, how do you go about getting one? And how much does it cost to get one? The gentleman that I got my squirrel dog from charges two hundred dollars, and he always has and I think he probably always will just because it's squirrel man on her code. He's not in it to make money. He's in it to produce high quality squirrel dogs and give them the squirrel hunters. And you know this his life's passion. That's what he does. And you were you were actually mentioned to me that you heard of somebody selling the squirrel dog for like twenty grand or something. I heard that a squirrel dog has fetched. Man, I would like, but I think, but this is this is the competition squirrel dog. And I didn't verify this, but I heard it from from a very reliable source that there has been a case of a single squirrel dog selling for that. But I think it's an anomaly, right, it would have to be. It'd be like saying, hey, how much does a car cost? And then you talk about how much a car costs, You're like, oh, you can get you know, most sedans with this, and then some guys like, oh, one time a car sold for it. Right, Yeah, that isn't like, it's not really relevant. I kind of want to meet the man who paid twenty dollars for a squirrel dog, because that must be a heck of a good squirrel man. I got a feeling he's doing something besides squirrel hunt. I think he came into some came into some money somewhere along the way, so two d bucks. And this dude doesn't want you're saying to that, this guy, he won't like if you said, I just like the looks of that dog. I just wanted for a house dog. He's not interested. He's not really interested in that. He wants them in the hands of squirrel hunters. Absolutely, he produces high quality squirrel dogs. Not saying I have a great dog, but he he's had some good dogs with great lineage, and he's known in that part of the country for having really good squirrel dogs and his breed comes out if you were saying, kind of comes out of Alabama or his type of dog Alabama. Right, that's where he is. And and you know, I don't I don't want to speak to the man's lineage of where he got all of his dogs, but I know some of it's out of that, you know, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Smokey Mountain area. Um. And he has his own own line of squirrel dogs that he's worked hard to develop. What uh growing up? How old when you got your first squirrel dog? Um? I was. I wasn't too young. I was maybe in high school, ninth grade, ninth grade maybe grade maybe, And it was kind of it was kind of a um. It was you know, we knew guys that that had squirrel dogs. We've been hunting with them before. But we had a somebody gave us a dog that was half cur half feist, and we didn't do anything. We actually had him to as a hog dog. Right. It's kind of just a mixed up, old, nasty looking dog. And we'd take them hog hunting and turn them loosen here and off and tree squirrels and all the other dogs. He was like he wasn't interested in hogs. He wanted to and my brother and I were like, hey, man, we're into something. Um. You know, we'd always squirrel hunted, you know, from the time we were little bitty kids. We'd always squirrel hunted hard. But it was early season hickories and slipping around this time of year, you know. But we got into the squirrel dog again. Man, we took off. We've had one ever since. Did you have to train your dog or is it like out of the box ready to go as somebody else was asking this question. And you know, the different dog breeds are kind of bread. They want to do their thing. Like a retriever. If you get a tennis ball in the yard and throw it and throw it and throw it, he wants to bring it back. Now, the difference between a yard dog that will fetch a tennis ball and a good duck dog, you know, day and night. So you work with them a little bit, but they, you know, the instinct to do that activity is in them. When you when he's treated. When a squirrel dog goes out and trees a squirrel, you think that he normally needs the death squirrel has come down and hit the ground right unless he just catches a glimpse of it or hears it or whatever. But typically he's knows of the ground and he finds where a squirrel is hit the ground. Is he like a rabbit beagle where he can run that trail back and forth and tell which direction the squirrel went. Yes, And you can see when the dogs working sometimes it'll go up a tree, look up it, maybe stay, maybe go off and check all the trees around, and then come back in tree on that tree, um, and then identify that that that the squirrels in there. Now, we had several run and you could tell um I was telling. You said, the squirrels on the ground and the dog. You can see that the high yipping people kind of like a beagle. And then up the tree the squirrel goes. And then you hear that tree bark that repentitve and then you know what's in the tree. And then there's a sound he makes when you know that he's seen the squirrel. Yeah, that's the Yeah, that's the squeal. You know, just that I cannot contain myself noise, and it's different every time, you know, And you said, and I can tell that the dog has seen the squirrel. It's it's the squeal bark. Oh my god, I can't take it. Noise. Yeah, it's funny because all the noises he makes, you know, the noise that he makes for he doesn't know what's going on. Right, that's she Ruby? Man. Since Hunt with that Dog, I've got that song stuck in my head, that old Kenny Rogers song, Don't Take your Love to Town, where it's a guy that uh went off and got sent off the Vietnam and got paralyzed and came home and can't satisfy all of his woman's needs. And he understands the wants and needs of a woman her age, but she goes into town at night and he's imploring her to not take her love into town. I remember, and he says, if I could move, I'd get my gun and I'd put her in the ground. Just a hurtful song. Man. I had that song stuck in my head since Hunt with that Dog, Ruby. Where was that going with that? I don't know. Oh yeah, So you're out hunting the dogs making all these noises, and it makes some noises where you just think that it's it's just it's just something. It senses, something's going on. There's something that goes on, and you're listening, and I'm watching you listen, and you're saying it's chasing one. There's sort of a noncommittal kind of hay, this might be the tree. There's a this is the tree, and then there's this is the tree. And not only that, but I have seen it in the tree. I have seen the squirrel hurry come now. Yeah, And that's when you run through the woods. And then okay, this is the hard thing that you don't really know. It's in the dog's head. But how can it tell? Like if you picture pictures, you're sitting in the woods watching squirrels, and squirrel comes along, comes down a tree, spirals down a tree, hits the ground, runs fifty yards and spiles up another tree. It surprises me that the dog can tell that the scent on one end of that is older than the scent on the other end of it. But unless what help might help answer it is what is the time stamp on a scent that will interest that dog in the evening? Is it running a morning cent? No? So it's deal. It deals in fresh. It deals in fresh, fresher than like a hound wood, a hound some of those hounds can get take very old tracks. The squirrel dogs work on fresher yea, yeah, within you know, I think within minutes. I got you, because a lion hound he'll go out to work an eight hour old track. But a lion hound can't tell you what way the line went, is dealing in just faint residual order and can't make and can't say like relative to fifty yards over there, This scent is newer here, and so when a lion hounds running a line, he might be running the wrong direction. You gotta find a track to verify the line of travel. What it makes sense because you know squirrel's home ranges. I don't know the actual answer to that, but I'm gonna guess. You know, come a hundred very yards right, lions going you know, ten miles. So yeah, I bet you a day in day out activities, the squirrel uses an acre ground. What would you think? Yeah, I think so that's fair. Probably moves according to the sea like seasonal movements, of course, of course, I always it's really interesting you mentioned that, because given the opportunity, I would want to be able to have the sense of smell that a dog has just to see what that's like, Like, wow, a deer ran through here and I know what that is, or a squirrel ran up this tree, or you know, the sensory overload must be amazing for a dog to be able to pick that out. Yeah, you step into a dog's head running through the woods for a minute to be like, oh, so this is what it's experiencing. You can't know because, like you know, we'll go out. You'll go out and you'll get a whiff. You think, oh, it's smell something rotten somewhere, or I smell elk, like elk had been here. But really you're just not you know, we got we got our eyes and we got our ears, right, And then you think that that his nose is more important to him than those two things. It's really hard to pictures seeing the world that way. Yeah it is. And if you watch anybody's dog, if you watch your dog, it could be youth what you think asleep and watch its nose work. I mean it's senses things with his nose. I think that dog's nose, or maybe many animals, is their number one sense. Ours would be our eyes. I think it's I think it's full factory for animals, and your dog does use its ears because it knows the word squirrel, and you need to be careful to not say squirrel around that dog or let it see a squirrel when driving down the road. Yeah, we're driving to the hunt spot and a squirrel ran out on the road and you quickly reach back and blindfolded the dog with your hand for fear that it would see that squirrel. What happens, don't you see? If you will look at the dashboard of my truck, you will see the claw marks and the nose slobber on the windshield. From the inside, and she barks loud. You know, you hear outside, but inside the car it's a deafening sound and it's repetitive and fast, and yeah, I can't make her be quiet. It's something I think that even I've only been on three or four dogs squirrel hunts. But like it takes them getting used to, you know, you, Like I can see my dad being annoyed me having to be like, look, it's just like after a while, three or four days, it's just normal right at dogs is going there and it's like a part of it. But at first it's a little jarring to be in the woods with something that loud, except at home when I'm at home and there's a yard squirrel and she goes to barking entree and at it. I know that's what she's wanted, what she wants to do, and I have her, but it annoys me to the ins degree. It really does. Like barking dogs be quiet. So when we struck out from the little parking area there on Mark Twain National Forest, Um, hold on, I got another question. So at home because I'm thinking about going squirrel dog hound for our first family. You lived two hours away from squirrel hunting, I know, but just now because I was reading up about some curR stuff and there's a bunch of different cur type dogs and and there are a lot of them are very versatile. You know. They can they can run cougar tracks and squirrels. They can defend your family from uh from what cougars bears? Um, dude, I don't you've been you've been to my house lately? You know a little kids run around. Man, if they're a hundred yards away from yeah, like notify you sure or yeah, give my kids a chance to trick and not get eaten. Like it's it is a slight possibility in my house. I called in the bull moose on Yanni's property. Yeah, I almost got your kids or your kids thought there. My kid did not like that. Man. That bowl came in hot and you've seen that. He'd seen video and you get charged by a moose and that's what was running through his head. Yeah, he got nervous man. All right. So but so here's medal. Yeah, I'm two hours away from good squirrel hunting, but I've got a pile of pine squirrels right like thirty yards from my house. Have you ever tried that? Am I gonna be able to train my dog to say, don't worry about those squirrels. We want fox squirrels are gray squirrels. It's a delicate balance when the dog first starts traying, you're gonna you're gonna have to shoot those things down. You can't tell it not to do that, and you can eat them. They're not bad. Yeah, so you're gonna have They're not great like a gray squirrel or fox squirl. You're saying they're super small, it's just small. It's like there, you know, bigger than chipmunk, smaller. They sit right between a chipmunk and a gray squirrel and people say they taste like up in tye or piney. It's just a squirrel meat. So it's I'm gonna put a couple into the crock pot. In the next week or two, I'm gonna bring back some. Um. I'll give you some notes down like what I've done with those things that I just put them in a crock pot, braised them down, Pick the meat, season the meat, put it on a taco, put it on a tortilla. Delicious. It's just his meat, right, could be people, cat, could be anything in there. When you do it like that, it just tastes like meat. Yeah, it's just a taco. No one in the world would come over you serve that too, and they're gonna be like pine squirrel, It just isn't you know? You could just take up pine squirrel hunting. Yeah, why not? That's you would be the first guy I think. But here's the thing though, here's the problem with that is it's not that helpful and pine where pine squirrels live in the kind of trees they live in, noe, what tree he in is in isn't very helpful unless the dog could pressure him into a tree that he didn't want to be in because if he goes to his preferred tree, the density of these trees, he goes up some big mature for or whatever. The density the home trees are so big and so dense and they go so high. That's like it's not that helpful. Yeah, to know where he is up there, you need minoculars. Yeah, you need a chainsaw, or like Jerry Clower wanted. Jerry Clower's stories, the guy that has the rack, the monkey that he hunts with, and he says, the monkey up in trees with a flashlight and the pistol if you had if you had a monkey like that, you'd be in business. Um, well, you know, here's our quick question. Long was on the subject because my kids sorely want a dog, and I sorely don't want them to have a dog. But if I do get one for him, I want to serve my purposes as well. What are the chances that you'd have an ace squirrel slash cotton tail dog very high? The litter mate to Ruby is a really good cotton tail and squirrel dog. So much something's got to sacrifice though, right, There's like there's no way it's great at both? Or is this dog great at both? The gentleman who has this dog is a retired gentleman who hunts every day. And those dogs, like your honest was saying, are really versatile. And any dog you get him in the field day after day after day and and they pick up what you're going after. Um, I don't know, it's the you know it's a good dog both. I take it either way. But you know how a beagle runs a rabbit Like not that he runs rabbit. It's like a rabbit runs a loop. Yea, when the rabbit spoon, he's gonna run a loop, go out and he's gonna come back to his home, his safe spot, his home spot. And that's you hunt with a beagle. Is the beagle starts to trail and you just get two to the somewhere on the circumference of the loop and wait because he's just gonna do his loop and come by. Now. Will will of squirrel dog run that loop with him? Or does he just kind of function as a flushing dog. From what I've seen, the squirrel dog's running around and when it jumps a rabbit, it'll run it, and it runs it a lot faster than a bagle wheel. And I think it's it may be head up, just getting the getting the scent behind the red slow as dogs short legs didn't do anything quick. Yeah, with with the with the curve feist dog, it's generally a pretty quick loop. Yeah. You know. We used to have a lab that we wheel as our wall, her foul duck dog, and it was very good. I mean it's something. This dog would pull ducks out of eighteen inches of water all the time. Man pick up the scent on the surface and stick its head down there and find that thing. It bring you ducks to other guys killed. You go on the swamp, you won't even have fired the shot yet the dog be standing there with a duck. So it was a great dog. But we would take a cotton tail hunting and she would just be a good flusher because she knew the story, she knew what was going on, and would go into likely patches of cover that you didn't want to go into, and she hunted close and would just kick up rabbits. It would have never been a million years occurred to that dog to chase. It just flushed. And one time, the one time I can think that it saw a rabbit and chase it. My buddy shot the rabbit, and later in the day I was one of when my dog was bleeding out of her nose, and I pinched her nose and squirted the shotgun pellett out of her nose, but no one would fast up. So she was chasing the clothes enough at some point in time where she caught stray pellet. You know. Yeah, but that's an interesting thing. Man. If I could get one, the guy you know that has the one that does both, what would he sell that dog for my hand? I don't know that he'd sell it. How old is it? It's rubies literally three years? And how many years can you get out of one? On the squirrel dogs, they can get old, um man. You can hunt them for twelve fourteen years, they start slowing down. No any dog when he gets that age slowed, but it'll treat him. Yeah, so you could like your dogs. Three and it's already a crack hound. It's coming along, dude, the dog just coming along. When we're on the ones, that dog spends more time barking up a tree than it does anything else. It finds squirrel after squirrel after squirrel after squirrel some days. So we we strike we strike off, we strike off from the parking spot. My first question to you was, so who is in charge? Right, it's O the dog. We're somewhat in charge the dogs hunting for us. We're not hunting free it, um, So we can direct it in a direction. But I generally try to hunt into the wind because the dog naturally wants to work into the wind. Um. So I kind of think about that, and you might even park your truck accordingly, or I do, and just because she will naturally drift that way. And so if you think about that, it makes for a little easier hunt. Then you can call it. And unlike a hound, those those smaller curves and fast, they'll they'll respond to you call them off, you know, like a big hound. Sometimes you put them on a track and man, they're gone. The stopping point is who knows where? And then you got like GPS collars and they're in some other county and you're driving around all night trying to find them. Right, so those dogs will stay within earshot and and they're bread to come check back in with you every once in a while. Yeah, your dog is very responsive to your whistle right where you can call it off a tree. Yeah. And and that's that's because is oftentimes when you stay with the dog enough and you whistle to it, it it knows you want it and you're gonna put it on something to do something, you know what I mean, Like, Uh, well, I guess we'll get to it. But uh a squirrel to hit the ground and you go over there and it's not there. You need to call the dog over to trailer squirrel up to see where we went. And and you know, once it figures that out, it'll come to you. So what was going on that first morning? We hunted? Because your dog must have treated a dozen times. Yeah, So part of it was the squirrel gods, and we got one. It must have treated a dozen times or more and we got one. Yeah, but a lot of some of that wash roll of the dice too, because several of them were giving us a slip. We saw some more we couldn't get shots at. I missed one, Yeah, you missed one. And and so I don't know had we killed what we saw? We'd had four or five and what end up with one of the first day, first of all, we got one, and then last night, we go out for a third of the time and get nine right, do we have any getaway? Last night after we watched him for tween this when the tree right into a hole, and I told you, like when they hit the ground running, they are going to a spot. They're not blindly running. That squirrel be line. He knows his turf, right, he knows his turf. We had a bear bio just in one time who was talking about doing some research. Was what state was he doing that black bear research? In North Carolina? And he finds that black bears Tennessee. That's right in this particular area where he was doing his work. Black bears then twenty feet up in trees, in hollow trees, which raises the question how many trees have a black bear sized cavity twenty ft up? Not many? And how they ever get to where? Right? How they ever get to knowing those cavities. And I think what he's saying that was typically in chestnuts. It was a masked I can't remember what I had to go read this to it. It It was a mask They typically denned in a mast producing tree. And the only thing you can think is that they're going up there they're climbing into these things to harvest mass crops, and they're taking no, oh wow, there's a large cavity that I will come back two months from now and utilizes a denning site. Because how would you ever have that level of spatial awareness. It's like they're not operating on just like stupidly going through the woods climbing trees. Yeah, you're right. When a squirrel bee lines off on the ground, he's like, I know a place that I can fit into, and this a going ass thing behind me. Cannot get can't fit into it, right, And then he goes into a into a hole with a two and a half inch four inch diameter orifice. That's not a word you get to use very much in a way like in this kind of conversation. Orifice. No, it's a nice word I haven't used in days. So he goes into the orifice. Um. A lot of the squirrels we lost on our first day out would be the dogs treeing. Do you guys use bathe or is that just something more for hounds? We use the word tree, and if it's up a tree, bade would indicate to me on the ground, Oh more so than in a tree. So there he is treed, and you go and right away you look in fifteen feet up the tree whatever, they're just like a squirrel nod hole. And then you know where that squirrel went. You say, they sometimes will pass the whole by. Sometimes they will, and you will let's go. Oh no, there he is fifteen ft above it in a crotch, trying to hide like he passed it up. He passed it up. But you know what I've seen in the past hunting deer. I've seen a squirrel try to go in a hole and then another squirrel come out and kick his ass, not his hole. Yeah, And I've seen a mink fight a squirrel through the squirrels hole. Wow. Ye. The mink was trying to go in the hole to raid the young and the squirrel is at the entrance to the hole, fighting so voraciously that the mink is giving here a mink screech. The mink is screeching, and they're dueling it out at the hole. So it could be that he goes in, gets his ass kicked and then has to shoot up and being a less than optimum position. Yeah, the squirrels like no room at the end. Bro right, I wonder if that's the offspring of the squirrel that's in that hole. Oh, that squirrel knows that holes there, but he's not welcome, not welcome anymore. They'd be like, like you see the your your kid's car coming down the driveway with cops behind him. He's locked it over. So that happens, and then there's nothing that happens is you guys call it treat out. Jerry Clower calls it tap in the tree. But it be that the squirrel dog is on the ground and he's like a squirrel cross through here. He's going this way to this way, and he went up this tree. But the dog, unless he saw it or heard it, he has no way to know what the squirrel did after he went back into his arboreal environment. Exactly. There in lies the problem. They're in lies a big problem because I noticed, you know how Yani's really good at spot and squirrels. Well, let me tell you why. It's not that he's good at it. It's not that he's good at it. Here's what I figured out. Here's what I figured out. In his role as a producer. He know, he understands his role as a producer, and he's there observing, and he's got camera guys doing their job. A squirrel bayze up there, the tree, dog trees, squirrel dog trees, ridge pounders with his camera with me. Michael's with his camera with you, not bleeding, not bleeding because he's not pushing through briars hard, Seth. Have you said anything yet, Seth? You did say something earlier about how I was too steep to get built out. That's right, Yeah, yeah. Your theory about how Idah holds these hunts that that's fine man, that you can steer. Everybody want to Idaho, I don't care. So, uh, Seth's got a camera. He's trying to look up in the tree tops to find this world. I look at what you're doing, and I watch your line of approach, and I'm trying to do one a d off your line of approach. So if you imagine there's the tree, and then you have a circle around the tree, you want one guy in each side of the tree, because if you both stand on one side of the tree, the squirrel is just gonna squirt around and paste his body up against the other side of the tree and hide. And so you gotta get one guy in each side. To try to make it move, and then if he moves, everybody's got a chance to see him. So we're doing that, and I move into shotgun range and I get on my side and you're on your side, and we've got the camera guys, and Yanni can't crowd the action, right, he needs to stay clear of the action. So in one and wonder how is he spotting so many damn squirrels getting away? It's because he's getting back enough right where he's not looking in the one tree that the dog smelled the squirrel going to. He's looking in the three or four trees in the cluster girls actually in because the squirrel probably tapped the tree. So I later yesterday, after wondering like why he was so on fire and feeling and feeling inflamed with jealousy, thinking about maybe should giving him a dick change in him right, just not because I'm so annoyed, I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna stand back like this too and taking the big view because the dog knows the tree, but these trees, the spacing on him isn't great. And I think a lot of times, yeah, he went up and very smoothly just hid in the next tree, and so you can't just looking his tree. No, it's the grouping of trees, the periphery. Yeah, and that's how you pick off squirrels. Don't run into the crop, don't run into the stump looking up, stand back and get the view right, because nothing that would happen is And you brought this up. The squrel eventually get overwhelmed with anxiety, have to move. I can't take it in. It could be six seven minutes into staring up there, like your stay up there and you do not see the squirrel. He's gone and you're ready to wander off, and all of sudden, honest hooting and hollering about there he goes, goes because of the anxiety got to him and he panicked. Yeah, although I might be observing like more of the periphering, I might have less blinders on. No, no, no, I think that you know, we killed nine, And be careful not to be fulled by coincidence, because remember, there's like more than two sides to a tree. If you two are covering two angles, I'm gonna go to the angle that you guys can't see. And the coincidence was that all of a sudden you know, he popped up on that side and you know I saw him. I don't know, man, your spot at they have squirrels. If we did, if there was a hundred and I had pulled ninety of them, then I okay we had to, you know, say a shirt. But I don't know. I think it was a market difference. You see, spotted a lot of squirrels. That spotted something too, and he spotted a lot of squirrels not in the tree we're looking in right that. I learned a real lesson there. Man. It's different this time of year because you're dealing with the canopies so much. You know, you can scan those that periphery of trees when there's no canopy and the leaves are down pretty easy, you know, and you you get to know where they are. And the difference is now there's just because there's leaves, they go to the same spots. I noticed, like, what is it different? But no, they go to the same spots in the tree, but you just can't pick them out. Well, no, because they use different trees different ways. A hickory. Seth explained what the doing a hickory because we saw it twice last night. We had to find him with binoculars. They were going all the way up to the top, tippy tippy tippy tops because the leaves are so thick on a hickory. They'd climbed that hickory till they're on the final twig and lay up there in the thick, thick leaves And okay, it wouldn't work because you'd pick them off that one that one tree we're about to give up on. Remember I said, I think he's in that hickory, and then you pulled out your glass and found him in the top. Yeah, I'd like you to speak on that a little bit. Can you speak about your transformation? And I always thought it was like a Western big game hungry latest thing, like got my my binknox on my special strap on my chest and I think in my mad like I'll never do that, man um. But honey, yesterday you said we're binoculars. I'm like you even I'll point you mocked me for having my Well you'll notice that the first day we went out SETH and I both we didn't bring him the first day, right, you're the only one, see that rought him, and man like, I was like, yeah, it's gonna be too may leads. I think we're gonna see it's gonna be up close. There's no reason for him and man, it wasn't two squirrels into it. I was kicking myself like that was I was. I was kicking myself at the parking lot. I wanted to wear him, but Parker, the way he was talking, I was like, yeah. I was like, I don't want to. I don't want to disappoint playground bully. Yeah, like you get a new coat in the playground bully, Max, You're so bad you want leaving your locker and go out cold and suffer on the play For me, this is this is my favorite time to like still hunt squirrels and you see him go up a tree and then you got your binoculars. The fun part for me is finding them. I feel I really feel like you were kicking me when I'm down right now, I'm about to I'm about to admit I'm going to use but ooculars. Do you own something? Can I send you something? Sure? Are you gonna get the strap? I was running and I don't know about the strap, the harness. Can you got it? Like the front strap? Are you gonna keep him your pocketing. I don't know, you're gonna have to give me like a lesson on what to do, but I will know. You know, we'd come up to a tree and I'm surrounding looking looking, oh say it, and there's an army of dudes with binoculars and somebody goes, got him. I'm going, what you've got him? Yeah? And so I was thinking about it last night. We culled nine last night, and I know, I think four of those we're found with binoculars. The tail like a scroll, doesn't realize he has a tail, right. They don't do a good job concealing. They don't do enough to hide their tail or. It's just a hard thing to hide. Oftentimes I pick out the tail hairs with the light. That's the thing behind it. The light it's off. It's off. Yeah, because he can pace his body against a thing, and like a gray squirrel, particularly on most tree bark, oh, hickory whatever thing, when he when he welds his body to to that bark, it's a hard thing to see. But the flight will always filter through that tail in a in a very distinguishable fashion. Evolution never cleared that up for the squirrel. I don't know what you know, they need it for balance. The tail is really important for balance. I mean, think about how they just run treat a treat, you know, a hundred feet up. I'd like to talk to a physiologist about what all a squirrel gets out of the tail. And I imagine also there's something going on with um signaling. Perhaps if you're watching a squirrel pist in a tree. Yeah, they move their tail a lot when they're barking at you, which heavily hunted squirrels seem to not bark at you. You go out like open day squirrels a bark at you in the woods. Later in the year, when all those squirrels are gone, the ones that are alive don't bark. But when he's barking, he's doing that. He gets in that position where he's like using his tail as like an alert thing, and I think he's clueing other squirrels in. I heard a theory about like why does the white tail dear flag? Why does he put his flag up when he's running? And it will never know? This is the kind of question you like, you can't test the no, but but person that theory about it that when a white tail runs away and he lists that big brush up. You follow it like it's almost like you got it, you know, And so he's like, why would he do that? Because it's so easy to see where it's going. But when he runs and stops and lays it down, the thing that you were paying attention to, like what you I, what you I adjusted to, all of a sudden vanishes and the health the deer perhaps slip away helps the deer switch away, like you see that thing and then that thing goes away and you're focused on that and not that. I think what you can wind up saying about it isn't that that's why he does it. But that's definitely a thing that if you pay attention to it and watch it, that's a thing that happens that would be advantageous to the deer. But it could also be that it's it's a display for other deer. Other dear see that, and they know that there's trouble. There's a there's an altruistic quality to it about that. So what else happened between how we went out tree the same in number of squirrels, roughly the same number of squirrels, but got one versus nine? Do they do they Is it an evening morning thing. Well, um, I generally like to hunt him in the evening. Um, And I think it helps stand And I think that cooler air starts coming down from the from the night. It helps with the with scent a little bit better the morning. And this is just all squirrel man theory. This doesn't I don't know if this is right or wrong. This is just what I've observed this time of year. They don't come out of the trees. They don't really need to. They're up there and eating white oaks and whatever mass they can, and so they if they do come down, it's for very short periods of time and then right back up um in the evening they've had their feel. Then they're going to bury in and getting ready for the for the winter time. And they're down on the ground getting to drink of water, you know, cash and nuts, digging, and I think they're on the forest floor a little bit, a little bit more in the afternoon. The morning hunts always seem to be hinky, you know, it's like that's weird, or you've got a runner, or we're covering a great distance and we're not putting many many squirrels up. It's over time. It's just a rather hunt the evening, no matter the time of year, no matter the time of year, right, no matter the time of year. Now, the first day we went squirrel hunting, it was ninety degrees um. The dogs having a hard time. Um. Scent probably is not as fresh as when we went yesterday, and it was damp. It rained the night before. There's a lot more humidity in the air. Um. It was in the evening. I think the squirrel the squirrels were down and the dog could smell them, probably a little bit better. I don't know why they hailed or we found them. Maybe it's because of the binocular. A lot of knockers, a lot of knockers. And we did have a couple of multi uh squirrel trees, which helps. Yeah, we shot three out of one tree. Right, that helps. That adds that, That adds numbers. It does help too that like Mike and Chris are they're they're staring through their cameras, you know, really working. But Seth and I uh, definitely, I mean we doubled up basically eyes you guys are you know, each have an extra pair of eyes to find these squirrels. That helps a lot. Yeah, you were there in the morning. Oh yeah, I was just making a general general statement that. Okay, one last squirrel question for you. What are your favorite ways to uh prepare the squirrels you get. You're saying you eat about two hundred a year your family it's about two hundred a year. Yeah. How do you guys like to do them? And how did you like to do them when you were a kid, and hasn't changed over time. So when I was a kid, it was squirrel and gravy over rice and squirreling gravy over mashed potatoes or fried squirrel very little deviation. Um. When I was a kid, we we barbecued some on a grill and those sorts of things. But can you take us through a brief recipe of squirrel gravy how that's made? My mom made squirrel gravy. And I know this is I'm gonna uh just talk about something else. One time I remember going deer hunting, um, and my dad got me. I don't know if it was an old timer thing, but my dad would make me get up at like three or four in the morning, sit in the tree for like an hour, before it got light, you know, like get in there before the deer. And I think it was low deer numbers back then, and they were just starting to come on, and those guys thought you had to be their way before light. And I remember getting up at like three in the morning and my dad made some week old warmed up some week old squirrel and gravy and put it over grits, which was a Southern food. And remember I had a little hair in it, and I just, I mean, I'll never forget that. My brother and I are like three thirty in the morning, week old squirrel, gravey and grits are like, oh man, what about a pop tart or something? But we ate that. Uh but no, it's just uh, it's just like any other gravy you would would cook. You know how you cook the squirrel before it gets into the gravy. So you if you fried squirrel or you can crock pot squirrel either way and just use the use a little bit of grease drippings or whatever from that and make your gravy and then you can put it back on it oftentimes in the cast iron skillet and now go in there, so you're picking the meat or not picking the meat at this at this point in my squirrel eating career as a kid, it was not picking the meat. It was quarters, you know, dipped out quarters on rice with gravy and then up and then you picked it up and shoot up the shot and the hair spit out, shot, bone and hair, all of it, and you pick it now. I pick it now. I swear to myself, I will not do this to my children. Not that I didn't like it, but I still eat it, and I still it's a nice squirrel dish man like my mouth waters for it. It's to me one of the best meats in the woods. And so now I do a variety of things. Um, I messed up the first time a a I was trying to press my wife. I killed a squirrel and I gutted it and just had a splayed out like like a squirrel would be on a spit. Yeah, like Don Argentina and a Montamon those Uh yeah, yeah, I did that, and I'm crucifixed amount of mine. Man. I made that for my wife, and I presented her in very professional fashion, in my opinion, as a squirrel man, I splayed delectable squirrel. I picked a young one too. I didn't give her a great big old this when you were when that was when I was Courtner. Yeah, it was a prize. She's not a squirrel man nahr river man. Nah, She's none of the above. Uh So I present her with this squirrel and man that went over like a turd and a punch bowl. It was good. And so it was just too much. It was too much she I mean, just the look on her face was It's that it went into my mind, I'm gonna have to change this up a little bit. And for years she wouldn't need it, and just because of not because the flavor of the squirrel or that it was a squirrel, just the presentation went into her mind every like you just served to me at a rat um. But now I changed it up and it's mostly picked um and the way that I've been doing it lately, and I was telling you honest about it, the way I'm so I'm so proud of as I've been crock potting it with some spices, garlic, picking it um and rolling it up in a croissant with either cream cheese or cheddar cheese or peppers, onions, jalapenos, which whatever little fixings. I want to clarify too, though the crock pot. You're saying, like not completely covered in liquid in the crock pot. I put no liquid in the squirrels. Um that I cooked so well. You can't put a squirrel in the crock pot turn to cry pilon, That's what I was saying. You can, Otherwise it's boiling it. I put a little bit. I hit it with a little bit of um oil in there, and there's there's enough moisture. Yeah, and it'll so those I threw those nine squirrels in there, and there was two inches of moisture. And this morning and I just pulled the bones right out. You got onions in there, um, yeah, onions. Throwing onions in there and those sorts of things. Otherwise it's boiling it. You know, if you put liquid in there, that's a good point, man, But it's just you know, we would fry them. My my mom would do um. She would brown oftentimes, this is one of the ways I like it the most. And sometimes we put them in a deep friar. But also my mom would brown them in oil, dust them in a seasoned flour, brown them in oil, then put him on a sheet pan and put them in the oven at three degrees and that makes like it's like we would call it, and it's different because other people use different things. We would call it chicken fried squirrel even though like chicken fried steak, because that's how my mom would. If my mom went out and bought chicken chicken thighs, she would brown them in oil and finish them in the oven. So she would just do squirrels the same way. Man. Sometimes it was just like perfect on the bone, brown, real nice, and then baked that low heat to tenderize them a little bit. It was pretty good. But when you say you roll it, I want to get back to this croissan thing. You roll it? What do you roll it? The croissant? And then baked the croissant right, just like your baking you by those little triangle croissans, right exactly. But yeah, I spread the triangle and then I put all my fixing like a taco right, everything that I want. I've been putting some time in there lately, like a sprig of time, which I really like. A roll that thing up, folded up nice little a pouch of squirrel meats with everything else, bake it and then the croissant bakes into a itself and all that, the little hot pot, it's like a thinking man's hot pocket and the and the and I knew I was onto this when my kids started fighting each other over those things, the last one like, no, give it to me, and and my wife's eating them and going, that's good, and old squirrel Man's going, oh, I'm onto something here. Yeah. But it's hard to burn through two squirrels shoving them inside croissants because you're just not getting a lot of bulk in there, you know. And we gumbo a too fe we fry them. You make a t and gumbo, yeah, we and we we you know, yeah, we make all that stuff, you know. And it's just the meat we use as opposed to chicken. For us, it's squirrel. And your wife likes to cook with game, obviously she does. The one conversation I have with your wife when I met her, she was going home to make uh fish stew, coconut curry fish stew. And asked her what kind of fish, and she said catfish? Was there any other kind? And she had asked her if she was gonna put it in cooked or put it in raw? She said, I put it in raw and cook it in the soup broth. And she said that you don't like it spicy. I love that that she only keeps you around because you're cute. That's not true. Do you have a name for this recipe yet? No, I don't. I love to come up with him. Squirrels squirrel sing, squirrel st squirrel, squirrel pocket. You haven't had a good luck. How do you freeze your squirrels? I freeze them um with the old milk jug water and then most importantly, after you cut the top off the milk, fill it up with water and freeze it. And being scolded from a child by my dad, you have to then go back and make sure that there's none exposed on the top of Man, that's stuff. Freezer burns bad, right, and so you have to hit it with another layer of water. And so that's how I freeze them. But you know what I think you ought to reconsider is just for freezer management and capacity issues. Squirrels vacuum the vacuum bag beautifully with the bones. Yeah. Man, man, you're busting me about having cheap bags. Maybe that's my thing. I got sorry bags because I can't do it listen. I used to not like back when everybody's running those um right, when vacuum seelers came out and it was like infomercial era and shipped for like Homeowner vacuum steelers. They came out with a lot of bad vacuum steelers and bad bags. I'm sure there's a variety of good ones out there. But I have one of these things. It's it's big, but it's like the it's like the Western Pro Series. It's big. I mean you can put a nerve football and back the air out of nerf football with one of these things to make it look like a flat pancake. But I have that. And I use their bags, which is like a like a heavier gage bag, and you can put them in there, lay them out in there, suck it out and ate just it's like nothing bad happens to him, and squirrel freezer burns bad like a squirrel in the ziplog bag is a disaster done last long. It's a lot of surface area, like per It's a lot of surface area per volume. If you when you cut him, though, you know how I was getting on you about how I think you're cuts too high when you cut his legs off. That's one thing that can puncture the bags if you have jaggedy bones. But if you cut at the joint so you have nice rounded bones, you can put a whole bunch of quarters in there, or splay them out like you're talking about with your presented as with your wife. You can pack them in there. I've even packing them in there where they're all spooning, like the squirrels are spooned out, four or five wide whole and vacuum in there, and it's like a page in a book, like a nice flat package full of squirrels. And you could stack a thousand of them in your freezer because I used to do that jug of water thing, and man, you just wind up with a freezer full of jugs. So when you're and can I finish selling you on this, you put that thing in cold water. You take the vac bag out of your freezer and poor a mixing bowl of cold tap water and lay that vac bag in there, and that ship is ready to eat in forty five minutes, ready cook, ready to cook. Yeah, sorry, it's red. It's thought. You gotta get a blowtorch out when you want to get him out of a milk jug the day before or that morning the thall. But or you burn through ga lins of water by setting it under the thing and turning the water on to run over it. I'm telling you, man, it's like just like you gotta get on with actors. And I'm not coming at you like like you've got you're a better outdoors than to me. No way. But you're wrong about knockers, and you're wrong about you've adjusted on, but you're wrong about back bags. I really like the ideas flop for flatheads. For anything, you need to invest in a real vac steeler and some good damn bags. And that's my problem. I got the whatever when they first came out. But I want to talk a little bit about the joint cut on the squirrel. Are you so you're taking the time when you have tin squirrels lined up on the back of a tailgate and you have your cutters out, you're taking them time to find that little joint with your fingers and then game sharing and got it off. Or you're skinning and then visibly cutting because you have hit it. No, No, you don't know, you don't You need to move your cut three six of an inch towards the tone nails, and I'm gonna hit it every time. You're gonna hit it where you wind up with a nice rounded product. Picture that you went down and bought a chicken drumstick with a jaggedy ass bone sticking out the end of it. They they it's a nice joint, nice round joint. I get the idea. I just don't know about speed. But you know your cuts are nice, but you got really nice cutters. That's important. I noticed that you don't use games shares because your cutters are better than games shots. I do not use games shares. I used tin snips. Yeah, that's the way to go. Why do they even make games shoot? I don't know. I don't know own a pair your tin snips? Yeah, my games hears, it's like they kind of crap. You gotta then get into a knife. Things are nice. That's a hot tip. You wanna talk about hot tips? Tin snips? Tin snips? You have some Irwin's? Is that where they were? I got? I have several different ones. I go in the home depot or Lows or the hardware store, hit me with the tennis nips. That's what that's what you want new stock. That's right. Okay, So you need some vinyls in a backs either, I'm gonna I'm gonna work No, I'm gonna work on it for you. I'm gonna work on it for you. Man, I'm gonna work up where owe you one? So I'm gonna work on it. Everybody cool on squirrels, Raidy, move on Rich. Yeah, unless we want to talk about the the byproducts that we're dealing with from our squirrel I would like to speak on that. Uh, you're from the South, South, You're from Georgia. You keep calling this the Midwest. We all feel like we're in the South. If you get out of a boat and get scared by armadillo, you're in the South. They're relatively new to this part of the country. That's Seth was saying. Seth was saying, Armadillos are headed north and they're taking the South with I feel like we're everything about it, including the I was saying I had three hundred chigger bites, but I kind of did like a little count. I have two hundred chigger bites around my waistline, in my groin, my groinal area. You had to do like a fisheries count. Where you count like one sect and then multiply that out because you have so many. I count bait that way, and I count chigger bites that way, where I like, look at a sample size area right like you make like a six packy thing with your adsmen, and count how many lean over and clinch how many bites around one one of the beer cans on a six pack And then and then go like, okay, there's twelve there, and then start moving around your crotch and groin and scroll area and and add them all up. And I feel like I have two Hondo, he's probably got a good one fifty chiggers. So I don't think. I don't I don't really I can speak on this, but I don't really want to because listening to you guys talk about this is just been a great experience for me, like just our bafflement. Yeah yeah, And on the Google and researching and man, I've learned a lot about chiggers that I didn't know, Like some of the wives tales that I heard that aren't aren't true, and uh, you guys are researching. God, what are these things all over me? It's been interesting. I mean, I don't know that I've seen worst cases of chiggers. Well, I think we made some real rookie mistakes, man like not. I was just it was a hot day, so I had just the loose t shirt, no tuck in, no bug spray around my middrift and wading around in that tall grass. Right. Yeah, it was like when I first moved to area, they had a lot of deer ticks and a lot of lime disease. I didn't do any of the things that everybody that lives there is like they know what to do, talk your pants into your socks, use deep. I didn't do any of that. Jump, I didn't do tick checks right, and I paid the price. So here it just happened to be that my one. If I had gotten a dozen bites, I'd be like, huh, you know, next time. But just to get so overwhelmed by them. That's been in areas obviously have them before, but I've never, I've really never experienced just a real hard hit from chiggers. I'll fesce up, I'll fesce up to the listeners. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't concentrate, and I had to go down and I went down to a medstop and got around the steroids. Is that bad? It's bad you got you guys got it bad. And it's it's lucky the draw too, because you just like walked through them. Man. But I did spray, and I remember offering you guys. But I went around and hit everybody's ankles. I just put a little squirt in my ankles. And we were thinking about seed takes. We weren't thinking chiggers. I use it like breath freshener all over. So off does prevent Shakers said, so on the can oh, because well we're like what we deal with a lot with in the northern in Northern States, and the summer is no SEMs, gnats, white sox for that stuff. I just carry a little teeny bottle of a deep and you get like behind your ears in a couple of places they'd like to hit. But it's not like like I was when I went out last night. I had so much that junk. I mean my clothes were wet. Yeah, good, I hosed down. You didn't pick up anymore shakers, man, good on squirrels. Yeah, what's interesting is that Mike Seth park Well Parker sprayed down properly. We didn't spray down the first morning. Yeah, I wouldn't around and hit your ankles. You didn't notice. But it might be that they don't. But you know how like some people are more susceptible to mosquitoes and stuff. It might be that I'm just like, there's something about I was thinking about it because like I was, I was on like behind your honest the whole time I was wearing that pack with a hip belt. I had my shirt tucked in, but I had that hip belt tight around my waistline the whole time, which might have helped. It's a it's a micro not it's not microscopic, but you're not gonna notice it readily. They're very very small, and it's a it's a large it's a larval stage of some Iraqi and uh there they hang out in clusters and you pass through a cluster and get them on there and they latch on, the latch on for four hours. They have an enzyme. They secrete an enzyme onto you which liquefies your skin cells. And they laugh that stuff up, and that the residue from that little activity causes intent itching and inflammation. Sons of bitches, man, But you started itching the night of I was feeling it when we were rigging flathead Tackle. I kept being like looking lifting my shirt up and probably causing more trouble for myself, lifting my shirt up, trying to be like, why do I feel like something's on me? At first, everyone thought it was poison ivy because we had hit that that field just a sea of poison ivy, and Mike threw his headphones down in it. And that's when you told me, you walk by instad I would watch your headphones or laying in poison ivy. So I'm waiting for that. It'd be here by now. Yeah, I think so, it'd be here by now if we I think it's dying, it's dying down and it's not oily right now. But it took two days for the chiggers for you, but if you look online different people, it could take it could be hours or a day or two days later for the chigger bites to emerge. Poison ivy has a really nasty he like it's that's what's so kind of that's just so kind of um nasty about poison ivy is is that that delay where you like you just have like this, don't know, you get hit by a horse fly, fuck you know it. Poison ivy gets you. Man, it's like secrety. How long Like if you go walking through poison ivy and it's on your boots and like the cuff your pants, how long is it? Like if you're like untired boots that day and then the next morning put your boots back on and tie, Like, should you be washing your hands again the next day? Yeah, that's that's when you get like, but there's different kinds of poison ivy effect. Is when you get like you get back from somewhere and all of a sudden you get some poison ivy bubble stripes on your knuckles and stuff. I think you're dealing with that kind of junk, But I don't think like the direct exposure of when you're getting like plant to skin, plant to skin leaves these marks where you can just almost see the the impact of it. But I do think that you do get it on your boots then later and if you get into it real bad and you're real set, are you're supposed to take rubbing alcohol and wipe down your wipe down your stuff, wash your clothes and hot water. But I've had a lot of that where you like, you get it around your knuckles and inside your arm. Then like a week later you get a couple more spots, and I think that you're getting some residual oil transfer. But it's nothing like like Senior Skip Day when I was in high school. It's a tradition of my high school to everyone's skip school on Senior Skip Day and you go canoe the White River. Um. I was telling this story the other day. Uh, Senior Skip Day. I shimmied up a tree because you climb trees and also jump into the river. I shimmied up a tree. The head poison ivy vines on it, and I wound up going to Uh. I went up having to go to the doctor about that. That was bad. That and burning it. Burning in a brush pile can make you really sick because you're inhaling it. Oh that hurts. We're going on, squirrels, We're good, m flatheads. Uh. Explain poke polling what you call bank polling? Oh m hmm. It's just like limb lining. If you know what limb lining is, were you, Well, you find a limb overhanging a likely place where a catfish would be. That's somewhat limber enough to hang a line off of, and that hangs in the water with a bait on it, the catfish grabs it, and then that liam acts like a fishing rod with some um, you know, some resistance when it pulls down, it pulls back against the fish and holds it on on the hook. Um bank polling. It's similar to that. And as much as you use a tin or twelve ft fiberglass rod poked or stuck into the bank on the side of the river with your line and then on it, and that big fiberglass rod acts like a fishing rod or gives that resistance. The difference between the two is the fiberglass rods you can put where you want to where a likely place a fish would be, unlike limb line and you're just you're kind of the mercy of where a limb would be. UM. And so these we try to pick the best likely spots, stick them in with a bait um a live bait when you're targeting flatheads, and man go from there. Talk about the bait a little bit first, the bits of the issue. The baits always the issue. So we ran oh eighty or so hooks and to go for a flathead catfish like we were going. Big baits are better, um, and so you need eighty big baits and a big bait. A big nice bait would be like a hand size blue gill or a carp minnow or something you know, four to six to eight or ten even twelve inches long. You need eighty of those to be successful. To be successful, and you're you're allowed to run thirty three hooks per per per person, thirty three hooks, so we were running a three of us were running eighty or so. We weren't quite there, but you know, you get bait, and after you have a hundred and fifty baits, you think, man, you have bait for days, but you don't, and you gotta come back and go for bait. And I'm indiscriminate bait collector, and we'll collectibate in any way, shape or form that I can. And we ran into that problem. We're in out of bait, and you casting net for bait, casting net for bait, and the uh, you can, man, you can get it anyway you can. You could sin it, you can catch it on a hook and bober. However you can get it. And you guys used like hoop traps for bait too, writ hoop nets No, yeah, a little little ones in the creek or something like that, you know, going for carp shad have We haven't had any luck with the little hoops though. Actually would you set them in the in the current channels and they don't keep swam up in there? But you try it that way you had a little fish traps. So we've just had very little luck. Now suppost diameter on your hoop traps. The one we don't have one that we try it and it's a I bet it's a eighteen inch er. My brother has hoop traps. He does an area we allowed to hoop net yea for rough fish, and they used to bait their hoop nets. But then he thinks that the bait doesn't matter. He just puts them in lines of travel. Like if you got like a let's see you got like a little gravel Let's say you got a stream it's got the shallow in and you got like a little gravel trough up against the up with a deep cut bank and a little gravel off down in there. He'll lay that hoop trap, obviously opening up towards the down stream side and he pulls up some halls of suckers net thing. Yeah, I don't have a figure, just catching them on their path, but he's got But these are huge, right, No, they're the one I have a little bit. He's like thirty hoops. I think. Yeah, it's mostly cast netting. Yeah, so you're going to cast that a bunch of but you can't use a large mouth as bait. Cannot use game fishes bait. No, but you like shad carp. I like shad, but they're tough to keep alive. Um, if we can keep them are aiding. I like those, They're they're a good size, a big shad, hand size shad um carp which are super tough blue gill which I think personally everything in the river likes a blue gill. I think it's like flathead candy. But they're not as tough as the's like a carpet. Uh, and now explain a likely place for flatheads. This is you know, this is a great debate, but UH, generally behind um a blow down or some sort of cover in the river. You know, UM, a blowdown, a wing wall or dike rocks, those places where fast water goes to slow water. Like, yeah, big an ambush um spot. You know, it would be like in any other stream or creek where the fish would be. You would think of those eddies and pools, um, the flatheads would frequent frequent those areas. That's what that's what's good about the bank poll because there's not a whole lot of limbs that hangover like the Missouri River where we were. I mean it's like trees falling down. There's no big limbs that hang over those places that would be I mean a few, but not enough to be able to do what you want to do, particularly when we're going for We would like to catch big flatheads, and that's kind of our kind of a little thing, you know, catching giants. Yeah, big ones. At what point in your mind is a flat big thirty pounds or abuff? That's a nice flathead thirty plus pounds. Now, I like all of them. I mean, I think the best eating fish in the in the rivers probably three pounds flathead. But I just like those big ones. Man, Oh, it's impressive they are. I mean we caught some doozies. Yeah, we call some nice ones. So you go up down the river and you got all your imagine the old days, like when I was introduced to bank polling and it was described to me as poke polling on the Ohio River. These guys were using hand cut limbs, basically go out like with a machete and cut like what I would think of as muskrat trap and steaks like big long steaks, and run those into the bank. And I'm sure that that's probably what people used to use. I'm sure. But the fiberglass rides is pretty damn nice because you could fit just like laid up along the gunnal in the boat. You know, you got thirty forty of them in a very nice little package. What's the diameter on that? We have five eighths and to now we do have um half inch poles, but we've discarded the half inch poles. And the reason we have is we never called anything over like twenty five pounds on a half inch pole. And I don't know the reason other than we think that the fish can't hook itself, or I don't not rigid enough. It's just not rigid enough. It's it's like the twenty five pound cut off and then ridge pounders throw your last half inch or into the river. That's the benefit of cutting your poles. Those will float. Yeah, five classes, that's a good point. And a ridge pounded even even yell Mark Twain or anything. I don't know what happened, man, Let's just get to it. We were making a set. We were making a set, and I just asked Ridge. I kindly asked Ridge, Hey, can you take that poll and see how deep it is here? Easy task. I think he just just kind of lowered the pole into the water and then just let it drop. Dude. It just literally came out of my hand. I was like, oh, I got this, and then it just this. I just watched it like disappear. It was the weirdest. It was one of the stranger things I've seen. Neither of them said anything either, They just just he just sort of like releasing it. That just happened. Ten ft fiberglass pole. That wasn't a good morning for me either, because then I threw a bait overboard. That was right before. It's right after he discarded a bait. Yeah. Um, so you have it rigged where it's a ten foot pole and you run ten ft of of twine. Not twine, it's not cotton, nylon braided nylon. And then in the in the Pacific Northwest they call it gannyon, damnyon li gannon. Have to remember that it's gannyon like you're that material used in that for that peris would be ginny. So you have roughly it's ten foot poll and you have ten ft of eight ft of leader right or not leader, eight feet of mainline mainline, and then you put a plumb syncer on. It was like a one ounce plumb one ounce lead right or whatever else we can find on the riverbank h one ounce lead. Then you put then you tie to a barrel swivel, big barrel swivel. Then off that barrel swivel you got another two ft a leader. And then you use a big gass halbet hook, big circle hooig circle hook. And on that circle hook you like to tail hook or lip hook, depending on the velocity of current. Correct speak to that there are tailmen and there are head men. I'm a headman as a general rule, and because this is the reason when you're fishing current it's coming down, I like to hook them in the nose or in where in the in the lips. So the current is the fishes oriented facing the current, and it's like it would be a natural swimming type of motion for them if you hook them in the tail, they're facing backwards in that swift current, and I mean in actuality, they drown um that the water is going backwards over their gills and they don't stay alive and they die in a very unnatural shape at a ninety, like they're all out a ninety. You're right, Yeah, they look like ship look terrible and their scales are all fluffed out. You know. But if in a the argument for tails has got to be the longevity in no current, that he's gonna have more action and then have action for longer. I think they stay on the hook better the tailhook. With the tailhook because you're deep in the meat and it stays on. So in a in a an eddy or slow water, I like to hook him in the tail if if there's no current, because the smaller fish can't pick pick it off for you know those sorts of things, they do stay on the hook better. Yeah, I'll point out that um bait loss is a big problem giant. So I want to walk through couple of points. I explained the rig. You get a whole boat load of these rigs. You go down, launch your boat and you just start punching in poles all over and you're not and you're that easy just to punch in a bunch of poles. No, it's hard to punch in poles. And they make a little thing where you were a rubber palmed a tight fitting rubber palm gloves and get a good grip on the fiberglass steak and you guys make a little which which I don't know why he didn't turn me onto these or let me know about these. I had like kind of discovered on my own after a lot of poles. Keith runs those that they have a little block of wood. Parker's body has a little block of wood that he took a half or five eights drill bit like a five eights auger bit drill and made a little circular cut board, a little circle into the block of wood that fits the end of the fiberglass pole. You stick this block of wood under your type fitting rubber palmed glove so that it's like well that joke, you know, those old things use those buzzers you put in your hand to shock people when you shake your hand. It's fits in your hand like that you Because what I was doing to sink the poles prior to my discovery of the wood block was I would get it started and then put the end of the pole right up against my heart because I had a p f D on, a personal flotation device on with good padding, and I would put it against the padding of my life jacket and use the force of my body to drive it in. And this is all about the boats swirling around the current and the motors running. It's tricky and you need to drive it in enough to hold a sixty pound flathead, which is shocking that it works. It is shocking. But then I discovered that block of wood, and you put that block would fit the hole over the end of the thing, and then you can just drive that sum a bit and then it's so satisfying. Man. You're just like, yeah, and got him forty five degree angle and you're not driving it into the dry banks so much. Oftentimes you're driving it into two three ft of water where it's hanging out at a forty five degree angle over deeper water, right, And you'd like to put all your poles in because we're gonna touch on bait loss. You don't like to bait until dusk. So you go through and make all your sets, get all your poles in ready to go, then hang out factory and how much time it's gonna take to where you're getting done. Just at the moment you need to start using your head lamp and then go back through and bait all your hooks because big Mambo John Bow flatheads come out at dusk or at night, and you don't want all the turtles and gar destroying all your bait, right. You want to have the bait hit the water at the magic moment. Right, but still you come back in the morning nine easily of that bait's gone in the morning easily. Yeah, that's a fair assessment. I'd like to know what gets the largest percentage of I don't know. I don't know if you're missing fish, I don't know, if it's turtles, guards, combination of everything, I don't know. I feel as though you have to lose a lot of turtles and you have to lose a lot to cars. The reason I say the garden things, I've seen it happen limb lining where with the bright sun, this is baiting. In the bright sun, we can see what's going on in the water. Hang that bait down, and all of a sudden there's three or four guards nosed up against it that fast. They just know they're down there anyway, That's why we don't do it a whole lot in the middle of the summer with the guards when these were shorten those guards but just like pecking at it, you know. So that's an issue. But it's amazing to me how many baits, especially those cart minnows and then the bluegills, that would survive the whole night. We'd be there at nine or ten o'clock in the morning and you can finish that bait another day, just fresh and and then I'm it's the big debate, does does this spot suck? You know? You know it's like, well, it's a great, big, good bait and it hasn't been touched in twenty four hours. Should I move it or just let him run? You know, Parker saying he likes to let those baits go and reward those baits I do just like a hard working bait. Like man, you got caught, you were put in the bait bucket. We drove a big hook through your mouth. You're on there for two days, we're pulling our poles. I take that hook out as gingerly as I can, and it's like a brook trout fisherman. I let him just slide into the water and go free. Takes a little picture of it. Keep thank you, sir. You did a great job. You did not get eaten by flathead when you go out and check them. You'd like to start checking ready daybreak? Yeah, what what's the thinking on that? The thinking on that is it's very visible to see, you know, those big poles bouncing, guys running the room. It's titilating the passers by. It is people running. Yeah, be a big pole bouncing looking around, going hey, uh, there's a big old flathead over there that I could get. So you kind of want to get out before all the people start running the river. And also, you know, the longer anything's on a set line like that, the more chance it has to escape. We could offer work a big hole, So try to get there early as we can. And you go down the river and you can tell, you know, a big flathead the way he works a pole, you can tell it's as exciting as it's as exciting as like I like in my mind I keep going to muskrat trapping on the whole thing. It's just exciting to go out and check it is. It's like Christmas, go out and check the line and talk about the way a big flathead is on that pole. So if you visualize the pole sticking out of forty five degree angle and a fish on the line of it, a smaller fish, it will be more of a bouncing, bobbing type of action. You know there's a fish on it, but you don't really know how big it is. But a big flathead, just with the weight that pole just goes down slow or it will be bent or stay you know, kind of at a twenty degree angle, or and slowly go under the water and disappear um and then ease back up. You know, it's just sheer poundage that's doing that. That fifty pounder suck that pole slowly, sucked that pull under water and held it underwater long enough that we thought he pulled the pole. We thought it was gone. I was worried that it pulled the pole. I was too, I was thinking he pulled it. We spooked him and he pulled it, but at eased back up. Dude, It's so fun man um and sometimes they're on there and they don't buck, And you kept saying that I didn't believe it. We eventually saw it. Yeah, as you can't approach every pole if it's not moving. Take a little bigger fish, they'll just lay on the bottom. And what what you don't want to do is have the pole come up to the pole and a fish take off and that pole go down and hit the gunnale or side of the boat because on those large fish they snap that stop or break or the ring off. You got to let him have that action, so the same way you wouldn't grab the tip of someone's ride when he's fighting to fit exactly exactly the same premise. So you come up and with a pole, particularly one that ridge pounder through in the bottom of the drink, you use that to feel the line before you get there, and if there's resistance to it, you know there's a fish on it, even if the poll is not moving. And I was telling you that you you kind of get lack a daisical because you're running poles nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you pull up to one that's not moving. Bam, you know you got a thirty five pound blue cat on the end of it. Yeah, that's a good transition. There's the trifectors, the catfish trifecta, which we pulled every day. Yep. We checked for two days and pulled trifectors on two days. So I lost one. Oh yeah, I think it was an incomplete tri factor the first day because I tried to horse him up into the boat and didn't use the landing that and he came unbuttoned. And I was actually glad that that one got away because I was our first pole, and that's the ominous sign. Although we didn't do well. If you catch one on your first pole, man, because it's like that's bad juju. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, you go, we're gonna we're gonna cross unless unless if it was a fifty pound on your first pole, yeah, then you're good. But to catch a little channel on your first pole is not good luck. No. The thing about catching a fifty pound flathead is like the trips made. Even if it's on your first pole, there's no way you things can go bad because you're just you're peacocking around like just your fan is fully exposed up and down the river. Yeah, you're hoping to run into some passers by. That's right, see what I got. Yeah, you were saying, this is one of the internet more interesting things you told me about. This is that you go through like your family eats five year in a year, right, and you're saying, uh that you don't even really care for deer hunt. And if someone came and just dropped off five got it out deer in your driveway, you'd be just as fine with that, hand would I? I would. And when you moved up here, the flathead fishing was so good that you dropped down to three deer year and are eating too deer worth the flatheads? Too deer worth flatheads. It's a good trade. It's a good trade. So that's probably roughly a hundred pounds flathead probably two deer process me right, hundred pounds of flathead felets. How many times a year do you need to go up and do how many times a year do you go a limb line or bank poll? I do it too, like you do two sessions sessions a year. And it depends on the amounts of biomass that I accumulate. Look at my freezer and I go, I have enough, or and it's good that it's two times a year because it's spring. And then if you look in the fall and you open and you go, man, I'm low on flathead, and then you hit it hard in the fall or I still have something from the spring, so I don't need to hit it too hard. Yeah, And you when you get all set up, it's a lot of work to get set up to usually do two or three checks or one. Yeah. I generally run them two or three nights for sure. And and uh, we watched the river levels and generally you get them better on a rise of the river. So we watched the river. Lif there's on a steep drop, we won't go. And when the conditions are right and we feel like we're gonna have good good luck, then we'll go. Um back to the catfish trifecta, channels, blues and flats. Can you speak to the the edibility and mystique and rank them out in a hierarchy. I can give my opinion that because this will be met with resistance. I know among each every catfish man man has different thoughts. So for me, I like flatheads, but that's that's universal though. I feel like people that have access to flatheads like flat heeads. Yeah, they're not. They do scavenge, but not as as much as the other two species. They prefer live their predators, predators, not scavengers. Hence the giant mouth you know. So, Um, they don't have as much fat on them. The meat to me is better tasting. It's it's a little firmer. It's not a real flaky meat. Um. Yeah, catfish fat, we should point out, taste like ship. Yes it does. And it's not so much when you when you go to cleaning a catfish. It's not so much the red meat that you're seeing now. I trimmed that, But it's the it's the light colored fat. It's like a gelatinous like you skin. If you take when you were skinning those blue cats with a pair of skinning players, and you pull the hide on a blue cat, a big one, underneath it is just a full on gelatinous fat that when you touch, your hands are too greasy to hold your knife. That stuff tastes like hell. It's bad. So And now, don't get me wrong, blue cats are really good to eat, but you have to trim that off. If you leave it on, it's it can be. That's why I think a lot of people don't trim that and they eat it and go, God, this is horrible, muddy, this is muddy. This tastes bad. It's just it's not the it's not the meat, it's the fat. Oh. And we talked about this the other day, and I mean we've mentioned on the podcast before, but we bought that catfish for the shoot for the film for yeah, a little film shoot we had going on to do a recipe with catfish, and we just assumed that it's in the store, it's gonna be trimmed out properly. And it was disgusting. It was farm raised catfish. They hadn't deep fat, and I just assumed they did. And we just caught it up through it in the friar to take a picture of a cat fried catfish play. But we eat all that stuff, you know, like, oh yeah, but it tastes like dogshit though. It was bad. So you can see how the world over, you know, at least in the first world country where they're buying meat in a store, you get turned off on catfish if that's what they're selling in the Midwest. I know, you think that we're in it now, but the real let's say, the in the upper in the upper Great Lakes, um, because they have yellow perch wallee small mouth. People don't target catfish, and catfish has a reputation as just being a muddy tasteing fish. And I grew up thinking that and used to and we would catch them and fry them. And it's just not widely known. It is down here, for sure among people who target them. Is not widely known that you needed that you need to trim your filets because people up there used to eat in flames that need no trimming, right, So the so there you are, You're you're ranking them out. The other argument is, and I think one that's more highly debatable. I think, like you said, flatheads are our tops top shelf in the catfish shelving world. The blues and the channels or where a great debate happens. Um. I prefer channels a little bit more than than blue cats because of the fat contact. And I do I want to point out that we caught a maybe a seven or eight pound channel. You said that's a channel. I was going, man, I think that's a blue cat um because they're they're similar, and you were right. Um, we asked one of our fisheries, buddies, and it's the it's the shape of the was it the anal anal ray and a chance that's the best. That's the best tip I've ever heard. Because they both have a forked tail, right, Like some people call channels forks because they have a forked tail, and the blue has a fork tail. But the anal ray that's a good tip. That's a hot tip that he that's a good one. And and so the anal ray on a channel catfish. So if you go to the fin that sits on the bottom side, the bottom side that fits between the between the vent in the tail, in the caudal fin or tail, there's an anal ray and it's you go ahead, yeah, um on a channel it's it's curved like like the bottom of a channel would be. And that's that's the way he remembers it in his mind. So it's it's like a like a D shape or a curved canoe shape. It describes like an arc an arc on the blue cat that fin is flat like a straight line. Yeah, it's like a radius along straight line and another radius that comes back up into the fish. I'm not going to forget that and I've struggled with it a lot, and I've had people send me pictures being like, hey, it's a blue cat, and I'm like, I feel like it's a channel cat, and you go, no, I think it's a blue cat, right. But it's just a final, done deal done because there's a little bit of color variation. But them, damn, the blue cats are gorgeous. Yeah, they're blue, man, and they look like it looks like it looks like they got skin like a mako shark man, that kind of color, you know. And then uh, channels have that like a yellowish grayish and then the flats and the Great Lakes, the flats are a deeper, almost chocolate brown. But here they that some people then call them yellows, right, yellow cats, right, yeah, And you get some color variation in those even here, Yeah, there will be some dark brown. That fifty pounder had like a ghostly yellow to it. Those big ones are like that. You see that big old yellow head come up on a bank pole. It's exciting. Man, he doesn't see the sun much. It's one of the biggest freshwater fish you're gonna monkey with. Yeah, other than sturgeon, I think so widely available, well managed right sustainable yield type thing. I mean, sturgeon are big with they're hurting right all over the hurt like no one's let's say there's places, right, there's places where you can do some freezer filling on sturge and in a tightly regulated fashion. But like flatheads are like you know, and as they as they phase out some of the commercial fisheries, because there's still this is the kind of a little known thing that you know, there's very few freshwater commercial fisheries in the US, particularly for native fish. Like when you rule out there's some commercial fisheries for non natives, but when you rule out the non native commercial fisheries, there's very few freshwater native species commercial fishing that goes on in this country. You know. Then you got like a salmon in Alaska and the people debate, like our salmon saltwater fresh water. My brothers a fisheries biologist. He points out that they begin their life and end their life and fresh water. There are they spend a lot of time out in saltwater, but there are some that never even touched saltwater. And he says, he's like, it's arguable that the salmon is a it's a freshwater species. So there's a commercial fishery for those up there, right, but here's very little. And I think there's you know, there's not like an increased there's not an increasing commercial exploitation of catfish. It's a decrease in commercial exploitation of catfish. Absolutely, catfish are being uh, you know, even if even with aquaculture or growing catfish, the catfish farmers have really been hurting, you know, the past few years, because that's the species is just not looked at as that great of a food fish as it has it has been in the past. And I don't know, I don't know why. You know, some of these other things are becoming more more popular to others, specs and easy to grow, and you know, telapia kind of overtaken catfish, and man, you couldn't get me to eat a telopia for anything. Those they market under different names to nile, well, Nile Perchase, because they're you know, that's one of their native ranges. You don't like tapia, you just don't like the idea. I don't like the idea of it. I don't you know the I think I heard um in Florida and the everglades like half the biomass of fish telopia, you know, invasive and and there. Uh, I mean, I don't know the I mean they're like a carp They're a vegetative, vegetative eating I don't know, man, they grow them in cesspools on like a catfish. And I don't know, I don't know. I was in the Philippines and they have rice terraces. These are like communities where you can't not even roade accessible. You have to like hike into these areas in the Philippines, and there's people that have the thousand year old rice terraces and they do a rice harvest, so they'll grow a crop of rice, harvest it, and then as a way of fertilizing and regenerating the capabilities of the soil, they'll put in a harvest of tilapia and let the tilapia live in there and the fish defecate, right, and then you harvest the tilapia and then replant rice. And that system tilapia seemed cool to me because it seemed like this very like harmonious kind of system that they've developed. And in that way, like eating tilapia was cool. I thought was just like a cool way they had to go about it, and that in that particular situation, I looked at sloppy is being like a badass fish. But you know them as a non native, it becomes not as a them as a non native. In the u s, they somehow lose a little bit of that. A friend of mine caused them to away green of what was that movie, charl Soiling Green. We're eating people. It's people. Yeah, he calls it the soiling green of the fish world. But you know, a rainbow trout is equally as synthetic. It's a manmade fish, farm raiser, just gen if you look at like what we've done with the rainbow trout propagated all around the world, moved in barrels everywhere the stocking right, So it's it's like a you know, outside of the Pacific rim um, it's a man made fish because rainbows aren't native to like Midwest or any of that brown trout in this country. It's a manmade fish. Brown trout too. Man, you're eur asing man. It's an invasive he's audit. Brooks are native. Brock trotter native in the East, cutthroat native in the West, native in the west. That's yeah. Yeah, when you're on some pristine river casting dries at a brown, it's a it's a barrel fish. Dude came over in the barrel. Give me the muddy river and a big flat man. Well you're a river man, though, So you like channel. Explain the other side, the flip side of this, because you like a channel better to blue. Explain what you're saying. It's contentious. It is contentious. Uh. The good thing about a blue catfish is they get great big and so there's a sheer amount of meat argument that you could use for fishing blues. The channels don't get nearest big um. So there's that aspect of it. But man, I don't know. Some of some of the guys just really prefer one over the other. And I don't know. Um, I'm a channel man, if if if given the opportunity. Now, I like channels because out in my neck of the woods, that's the one we have greatest access to. So the lower Yellowstone River, like, we fish channels and there that's what you find there. I've heard rumors, they're unsubstantiated. Yeah, I don't know. I've heard rumors about how far up that system Blue is making and sometimes they pushed the that they've been found way above their known westward terminus. I don't know, but we go after channels. But after this hanging out doing this, I'm definitely like, I agree with you. There's a mystique of those flatheads. Like I'm with you. If I live in a place that had flatheads, I would be if I would be a flathead guy. Um, I like to fish yellow. I would probably abandon a lot of my activities in favor of fishing flatheads. They're cool, They're super cool, and I know that they're so cool in fact that a lot of people now are sort of trouting them, trout eising them where it's becoming taboo, Like some people want to take like the bat the large mouth bass aesthetic and apply it to flats where they become like this touchable. You're not supposed to eat them, hey man, I'm good with that. As long as people could keep putting flat heads back in the river, that's fine with me. It's more for me to catch. You got a good point. Can you explain your point on or I could do it for you. On what your thoughts on uh heavy metal contamination yeah, I think. I like to think in my mind this every time somebody asks me, well, what about the heavy metals, And it goes and through my head like the flesh contamp, the contamination of flesh from industrial plutes. Aren't you worried about mercury or whatever? And I think, in my mind, man, if I can fish, catch clean, cook, fry up, and eat so many flathead catfish that I get sick and die and die, I will have one at life. Man, Like, look at Parker. He's ninety, but the mercury finally got him. He's gray, right, Yeah, that dude caught a bunch of flats. He must have some good spots. Yeah. Uh. It's the same argument when when you go with deep, like or is that deep good for hims? Like I don't know, man, maybe he catch cancer in like sixty years, But do you want lime disease or cute you know, spinal swelling from some other disease or chiggers spray it on? Man? Yeah, I'm with you. I used deep, Yeah, and I was like I was explaining to you, I saw a deep warp the back of my phone case off and destroying my phone. I still put it on my body now and then because I've also had lime disease and I've also had chigger infestations. So we got on cats. Anybody got anything any final thoughts on cats? Cast some baggin's. They're cool fish, just a giant they look like dinosaurs. Yeah. Yeah. We were looking at after Parker uh finished cleaning the big one. We like, I mean, steps were like looking at it hanging on the tree and there was like you can look up through its guilt plate into its mouth. It's just like such a simple thing because like you could just look up and you're like, oh, and then that's the inside of it, and it's like, I mean what you're looking into that gaping mall. Yeah, and it's just so yeah, man, I like that they don't um no, like teeth. I mean they have like sand paper, yeah a really their mouth, their bottom and top lip or colda with a really grippy sandpaper, and then they have these crushers in the back of their throat that are colded with sandpaper. Like when he gets a hold of something that something's not going anywhere, but he doesn't have It's nice. It's a nice fish when you can just reach in there a fifty pounder and reaching there and his grab his lip and not ribbing your hand. That's nice because this is satisfying to pick up those cats by that bottom lip. Man, I think I don't like the bottoms. How long? How long they live in the bottom of the boat. My sister in law when we fished, our sister in law, Juanita, she makes us promptly kill every fish, and it's time consuming when you're into them real good. She will not be in a boat with a live fish in that boat. This is getting me in trouble right now. Just so you know, My wife's the same exactly. She'll sometimes not even she'll stop fishing just to be the person who dispatches all the fish. She'll the fish because we remeb brother that wo'll get him later. But she treats it like, yeah, that you need to promptly dispatch the fish. She would not like bank polling. She had to bring a shotgun. It's not easy to dispatch a fifty pound fish in the boat. You have to use cover. You have to bring a snake charmer out with you and hang them over the side the boat and hit h with a snake charmer, like like castaways drawing lots Man. Have you ever read that book in the Heart of the Sea. Oh? Thanks goodness? Um anything else, no one. I have one thing that I thought about on the way over here. I want to go back to what happened at the end of the squirrel hunt. We're back to squiring yesterday, and I was thinking the reason to be missing that rabbit. The reason people don't use slings that are jump shooting rabbits or quail or jump shooting it just in general is because of what happened yesterday. I think, because that's a real that was an issue. I used my sling on my shotgun turkey hunting, and I used my sling on my shotgun squirrel hunt, where you're doing a lot of walking around, and was Rohn, because I need to use my binoculars. I need to be able to put my shotgun on my shoulder whatever to look for my binoculars. Same use bnoculars turkey hunt. Used binoculars all the time turkey hunt. So if I was out quail hunting or cotton tail hunting, I wouldn't have the sling on it. But it saved that rabbit's life. It did. It was it was apparent a rabbit kicked up right at the end of the hunt, close to the truck and ran directly away from a beautiful j route to you, and they got ja. Yeah, the here I come, you know, like going around a greyhound ring, you know, like here I come, and then ran directly away from you for like until it disappeared, like sixty or seven at a trajectory where you need to do no aiming, right, just pointing that general direction, and I fling my shotgun up and the sling of somehow tangle around it. You can't see, but Gabriel, you know, good blouch anyways, but just like off in that direction looking through a sling. Yeah, I was dumbfounded. And you said you said the slings and I couldn't see. I was like, ah, because it was it was. It wasn't a thin sling that when you he know, it's like a padded shoulder. It's called a Folks should know this. It's called what do they call those quakes? Those some nice freaking slings. Man? What I do on them? Know, the hardware on them is no good when you buy them? What's that company makes? No grove tech? I take the quake sling and cut the herd. One end, you can just undo the hardware because it comes like Uncle Mike's on it. So on one end or something, I can't hember what hardware they used, but anyways, on one end I undo, you can just undo it and put a grove Tech mount on it, grove Tech hardware. On the other end, the other end, you actually got to cut through the still itching. Put a grove Tech on there. You just order the growth text online, put a grove Tech on there, put it back, and then I gotta get dental flossed in my big gass needle and redo all the stitching, and then you got a sling and then you got live rabbits. Yeah, that should be should be in your bag. That was embarrassing. What a treat that would have been, that little added rabbit. Man, it was embarrassing. But from a camera perspective, like me and Mike were like right that you guys are just talking and it just had like for the camera, it just happened so naturally, and it would have been so it's like the rabbit, I just see everything Mike's on Parker. It's just like if the scene was I mean, it still was a fun scene, but like yeah, if that rabbit that the whole thing, man. Yeah, yeah, we were right there really. Yeah. It was like I was like, this was over the shoulder, over the shoulder man. Everything. It was like the perfect We dig out that footage so I can use that footage. Man. Yeah, that was embarrassing. I don't think you should be embarrassed. It was an issue. It's a sling issue. You couldn't see. I would have made fun of you if you'd have just missed that one. But that was nice to have that little crutch. That wasn't your little thing, like that wasn't your fault anything else. Well, I got a concluder um after a like our our merch store, it's been lackluster for a long time, but we're getting a really hardcore back up and running. And we just got in stock a whole bunch of meat Eator podcast t shirts, including our blouch shirt. So if you go into the to the meaater dot com and go into the story, you'll be able to get yourself a Mediator podcast T shirt. And I was saying in the description the even if you don't know what it means, it's just a cool shirt with a weird word on it right, keeps people guessing. You can go with the ladies in the bar and be like, check this out. What do you think that means? I recently heard about a guy who goes to the bar and brings as the only want to bring this up, He for some reason puts tic TACs. He carries the thing a tic TACs around in his pocket and he reaches when he's talking to a woman in the bar, he reaches into his pocket and shakes that tic tac thing goes. I hear rattlesnake, there's a rattlesnake in my pants or something. Remember thinking that, like the quality of person that that's gonna dredge up, I always used as a filter of who I didn't want. I feel like the quality matches quality. Like if you're the type of dude to go into a bar and do that, the person that you're gonna go to net probably the person that that trick is gonna net. Yea perfect matter. There's a rattlesnake in my pants. Yeah, that's what he says. That's known as the local factor. I don't call him any I don't I agree. I don't I agree at the bar, H you know, I actually got a double concluder. Because here's the deal. I go fish channel catfish every year, um on the Lower Yellowstone and we have over the years go out there with my kids, and over the years we have developed we have perfected, between me and my bro the perfect fried catfish sandwich. And we have a link to a video about how you can go No, not a link, Let's go watch the damn video if you go to the meat eater dot com, or you can go to the show notes and find a link in the show notes and you can see our video about how to make the perfect It's not it's like a I I like it because we make the sandwich with catfish, but it's good for anything. And in fact, I don't know, man, you can make the sandwich with any kind of fried fish, rock fish, catfish, smallmouth, bassball, I don't care. But um we break it all down to this video and you go check it out again. Go to the meat eat dot com and you'll find the perfect catfish Sandwich recipe or like I said, link in the show notes. And here's the deal is it's it's also captured in our forthcoming The Meter Fishing Game cookbook. UM, so you can find it there as well. Any more concluders anyone ridge. Uh, you don't make one up for no reason. No, not making one up, just reflecting on the life of a river man and a squirrel man. And then it's a good one, good rewarding, rewarding life. Man. You could see it. I could. Yeah, I could. In a different life, I could be a part of it. Fully. Yeah. That was on your fortune cookie last night. It was yeah, business opportunity, trapping pigs. We're just living on a river, trying to avoid math seth final thoughts. Ah, that was just cool hanging out with you, Parker. Learn a lot it. Come on, it's a good time. It was fun. Yeah. And you grew up chasing the wildly squirrel Yeah, I grew up chasing squirrels. But my first flathead experience good. So no flatheads in Pennsylvania. I don't. I don't even know. We never There's something we just never pursued, you know. You know what, man, we caught a big flat one time out of I need not native there. We caught a big flat one time out of the Delaware between pencilhere it flows between Pennsylvania New York. Yeah, I need to go back and look at a picture of that catfish. Man, it was a long time ago, but I feel like I can't. Yeah, I feel we caught a big flat out of the Delaware. Knowing what I know now. If you know, if I was back in Pennsylvania and I knew they had flats, that'd be all over him. Well, we're not like these ones, you know. I mean, I don't think there's not any place you're gonna go out and get them like this. I speared, going too big flat. I don't Lake Michigan because sometimes in the late summer the lakes get so hot. You know the break walls they have with the Great Lakes at all, you remember the break wall is so like and the Great Lakes, oh like, if you go on the western side of Lake Michigan, you have all the river systems that are they're flowing west towards Lake Michigan, and the river systems usually passed through like a large you know, like like a large estuary where should be like the lake so white Lake Moskegon Lake are the river mouths, and so the rivers will spill out and they'll form these big lakes that form against the sand dunes that formed the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and then they hold back these big bodies of water, and then there'll be a channel that leads that drains that lake out into Lake Michigan. And the channels used to migrate, but they eventually came in and channelized them with big channel walls. So they built channel walls for shipping so that ships could come off the Great Lakes through the channels into the big lakes. And the cities are built around the big lakes, and you had mills and you know, coal fire generators and all this stuff they needed to get coal and lumber out all that um. To protect those channel mouths, the channelized channel mouths, you'd build these brake walls to bust up the surf. And so they would just take rip rap giant slabs of concrete and ship and build these big protective arms that sort of stretch out and come back in almost like a like a diamond shape, but the points cut off it to protect the channel from waves. And when the lakes get super warm, if it's a really hot late summer, the big flatheads would come out of there and go out and then live in those rock piles. Because it also gets so hot that a lot of suckers and stuff will come out, or they're coming up from the depths of Lake Michigan, don't know, but they will come out, and yellow perch will come in and all be living in those rocks where the water is nice, much cooler than inside. And the big flat has to come out and land there and you can uh there. You're allowed to spear gun. There's the only certain things you can spear gun or shoot with a bow. But catfish are among them. And I went out one time when we were diving down spearing red horse suckers, but I ran into in spirited giant flathead out in Lake Michigan. So in that way, I'm among a very small, small minority of the American population who spearheaded a flathead out of Lake Michigan. Yeah, two or three dudes are gonna write in and be I did it too. But it's a small subset of the American population that the spirit flat Lake Michigan. Yeah, any of you see, I told you that's my concluder. Michael Um. I had a great time, enjoyed it. Yeah, following you guys. And by the way, I did bleed a few times more the first day. But yeah, that was a fun first time filming you guys. I've been watching in the show for a while, so it was kind of weird to be following you. But it's helpful because you probably knew what we how it goes, yeah, what it looks like. It did help and I'm excited to eat some catfish and squirrel Johnny, me too. Man. My com cleaning thought is we need to cut this, shut it down because I need to go and apply some anti itch cream. All right, turn it off.