00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcasting in you shirtless, severely fog bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. Get everyone today. We're joined by most prominently Becky Humphreys from National Wild Turkey Federation, who's been on before. N w TF. Um, we're talking to you a whole bunch. Before we do that, we're gonna talk to our very own Joe Fairto. That's all. Well, I know, Joe, you were Italian. I know, but a lot of that's been lost, a lot of my Italian this has drifted fair Nado. Sure, I couldn't find your phone number my phone, but this is your first time you've ever been on this, first time you've ever stepped on, and you only here for a minute. The trial run, we did the reason Joe is here. Um, we did a if you write and if you write an email into us, Joe will likely reply or at least knows what's going on. Joe was the gate Joe's the gatekeeper. Uh. We recently did the thing where we were raising money. We we had we had my former fish shooting bow right and we told people, Hey, whoever promises to to whoever promises to send the highest amount of money to t r CP gets the fish shooting bow and Joe tell him what happened, some of the challenges we faced and how we handled him. So, I mean, we had a lot of people writing in about it. Um my single not saying I'm not okay, go ahead, I'm engaged. Yeah, he's heading out in the opposite I was gonna putting a little plug for you know, I'm good man. Okay, great, you can talk up that fair Tono guy. Go on. But yeah, So, I mean we had a lot of people right in, lots of good donation offers. Probably the biggest struggle is people donating the money before they received the bow, like a preemptive emptive donation, thinking that they were going to get in anyway, which I mean is awesome, but on on this next giveaway and make sure that you don't donate until until you realize that you're the one getting the bow. So if you want, you could certainly donate, Yeah, I mean, if you want to, it's always no. And I think what they were trying to do was I don't think they thought they had got the bow. I think they're like, look, how serious I am here? It already is. But then we got another strange offer, another strange offer. It's twenty five dollars a month for the next fifty years. Yeah, he was thirty five, to live till eighty five. He said, he's not planning to die until he was eighty five years old. Credit card's gonna keep the same credit card number for fifty years and then just donate a month for the next fifty years. And we spent a long time talking about that offer. Yeah, how did we fall in the end? Um, we fell on the U. Probably wouldn't happen, probably wouldn't be continuous throughout that fifty years. So we decided to do a lump sum right up front. Nothing to get. Nothing against that fellow. Nothing agains. Just a complicated process, very complicated legacy partner program which here at Mediator, and we're not really set up to facilitate. Yea, not really And tell them, um what that bow was, not the one in your hand, not the new give boy, the old fishbow, the oneida osprey. Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty good fish left And here's the big thing. Left handed, Yeah, left handed, because you're you're a left and left handed osprey. Now explain the new bow. And this this is you have to because Becky's here, So honor Becky being here. You this bow. Whoever pledges to give the high US amount to n w TF gets the bow. Explain the boat because this is full. This is a ready to shoot bow, always left the quiverful world traveling the world travel bow. You could tell by the string needs a new string. It's we might actually cut that string before we send it to make sure you put a new string on it, so be prepared to have it arrived put no string on it. What do you think? What do you think? Do you think it's the real liability like that? No, I don't think it's gonna break. It just needs to be waxed. Okay, we're not cutting a string. This is a ready to shoot bow. And Joe was gonna walk you through the accessory package. Can I tell him what the bow is first? However you want to do it? Yeah, So he's trying to tell Joe. He was gonna be like Van of White, but Joe doesn't know who Van of White is. The age is Joe, I'm young, I'm sorry, but it's a white carbon spider left handed obviously, Um, it's got the spot hug. I believe it's called the hunter UM five pin side on it with the microadjust it is. It's a good site. Um. I've had it on my bows for many many years. Um has the hoit ultra rest so it's just like the q A D ultra rest drop away. Joel is good at this, like knows the product names. He shoots a bowl. Yeah, I'd be like, it's gotta you know, uh flippy things, this thing that you lift up with your stay. No, it's a it's a it's a great rest uh in good condition. So you did a good job taking care of it. Um. Then it has the strings on it and yeah, like a little pulley things on there, little thing. Yeah, you know it's good. It's a sixty to seventy pound pound boll. Looks like it's not maxed out right now what you're pulling like sixty five Steve, Oh that's actually you know. Um. Then it has a two piece white quiver, the one that attaches straight to the bow. So it's not a removable quiver, but it's a great bow. It's an awesome GiB away And check this out when our new episodes uh roll up on Netflix. You'll see that bow used. That boat makes an appearance of quite a few. I was using that bowl and we did our like Nevada hunt with Roguan use that bowl and killed a real whopper of elk. And last year, which will be on a thing, use that bow down and I don't know if you ever made it into the cut, but it was down in Guyana. Definitely the curse out. Yeah, hunting birds down in South America. Another episode where I miss um at point blank range, I miss the Sika deer or that bow. Not the bow's fault any mistakes you see, it would be like, not that bow's faulty. You know, you know what should you tell him? The draw links u UM. I'm guessing since you're a twenty nine in a link that this has said at twenty nine, and if it's not you, that's probably I think it. To be honest with you, I think so. Alright, So here's what you do. Tell them how to do it, Tell him how to do it that makes your life easier, and tell him what how long you're willing to field offers. So this podcast will drop on the Monday, and we'll leave that open for two days. Will decide Wednesday. I'll reach out to the person of the highest donation on Wednesday, and uh, that's how you'll get the bill one time donation, that one time donation. Don't try and finance your donations. We're not gonna do that. We're not gonna set up the legacy partnership with you. So do they send you like a like a receipt or they just sit send an email that says, hey, I'm going to pledge this much documentation. Yeah, So once I reach out to them, I'll have them go forward and send the receipt back in so with confirmation that they don't make the money. They just send an email saying I'm planning on pledging this amount exactly. You have Becky here, have one of her people verify that they that it came through. Yeah, we want to make sure it's verified because we don't want to just send Steve's world traveling bow to somebody didn't donate the money. White carbon Spider, what do you I think We'll get okay? Going and went for quite a bit above retail. Quite a bit is the collector's item. This is a collector's item. It's a world traveling Carbon Spider. We're getting real QBC over here that he's been in the hands of Steve and Ronella. Yeah right, good, Yeah, I'm good, we got it. We gotta get a picture, oh with you with that bow. Yeah, we got a lot of pictures. Feel we'll get We'll get that all right, sounds dead, Ladies and gentlemen. Joe Ferronado, he said it right, Thanks Joe, and thank you. That's awesome. Now here comes strapping on Joe's still warm headset is Spencer new heart. Okay, back in. We got a lot of stuffing on top. But I gotta tell you about something first. If you don't know all, that's fine, Okay. What is more diagnostic on a turkey in terms of age and all the time about is like Jake not Jake, so a one year old or older than what am I trying to say? Yeah? What is more diagnostic the tail fan in the length of the feathers relative to one another, or the spur. Well, we usually use the tail fan just because we know when they do replacement of those tail feathers. That's the most really, I mean, that's the one that everybody uses to determine between the Jake and the adult Tom in terms of the tail fan. And it's the easiest to see at a distance too. I mean those those spurs and various you know, various um types of turkeys have different spur link too, so you've got to compare it to the other the other birds here in terms of that. So, but I told you that we shot a long beard. Okay, it's a Miriams like a seven eight inch beard on it, full tail fan, gobbling his space off. Who had one kind of spur and then one no spur. And then I says to my brother, Wow, that's where he goes. Not here, it's not because I've seen I got another one just like it. Yeah, did you ever hear of that? Well, I've heard of it. Where you have anomalies like that, you know, it's interesting you get gene pool in certain areas where you get some anomalies. Um last year I was in um Oklahoma, I guess it was, and the when the guy was hunting with it told me he had seen a bearded hen. And he saw this bearded hen that was actually um strutting. And then I wound up going out that day and we had a bearded hen. It was in full strut, beaten up on decoy for hours. That's so you get some anomalies that get in the gene pool where you know, you don't have spur development for whatever reason, and they persist. Now, obviously that bird is not in a situation where they're needing their spurs to fight an awful lot because that bird doesn't have them. He's going to be at a hindrance. But I presume it was an area where there wasn't probably a great density of turkeys. No, it's like a little island ecosystem, yep, So he could not literally an island, but but yeah, yeah, an island of habitat where they're they're around. So he didn't. He didn't. You don't even really appreciate how island eed. This island habitat is nuttill you look at satellite imagery and you're like, wow, these turkeys are just then they had to satellite in there, they had to air drop in there. Yeah, there's just they probably don't run into turkeys that they haven't but they don't know. Yeah, so they have their pecking order already established. They know what they That bird doesn't he have to fight all the time to maintain position in the in the flock or accepts it. That's the other thing. Um, I've heard that spur length can be dictated by the landscape they live on. So like a bird that lives on the mountains where there's very rocky soil or like real gravelly substrate, their spurs get worn down, so they're real short and nobody where's like a bird down south in the marsh, nothing wears on their spurs, so they grow longer and anything to that. I'd tell people that all the time too. Yeah, I mean there could be I mean, there could be differences like that. You see it between the various um, you know, subspecies of birds that they have various links of spurs, and down in Florida, those birds, those osciolas are real limb hangers. They tend to have really nice long spurs, and so that would go along with your theory. But they're also pretty sandy soils down there, so which is you know, if anybody has dog kind of knows if you're in sandy soils, you tend to that wears down anything like that in terms of nails or the rest of it. So you know, you know, so you think it might be more to do with the it might be more to do with the bird. The bird, the food that they're getting, you know that, you know, the keratin development on that for the subspecies of it, and then the age. Yeah. Man, I always tell people that I'm like reason, he's not a big limb hanger, as you say, can you explain what lim hangers? Lim hangers? Birds will hang by his up in a limb by his spurs because his spurs are so long? And uh, how many how much do you I know you work in turkeys? How much you actually hunt turkeys? Do you get the hunt a fair bit? Are you just too busy all the time? Some years I hunt more than others. This is one of those years where I've done less, Honey. I've only hunted South Carolina and now hunt a little bit in Michigan while I'm up there. But other years I try and get around. You know, we were really fortunate. We have a lot of great hunts. We have governor hunt some lieutenant government hunts around the country, and try and get out there with those folks, try and get some of our mentored hunters in. I always try and take out somebody hasn't hunted before. As one of the things that I do each season because I mean that's what you know. It gives you juice in this business. And and it's as much fun as as taking a bird, or even more fun taking your bird yourself. So some more funky, So the right person, it's more fun. Yeah. So it varies from year to year. Sometimes I schedule myself for more hunts. This year I laid back on it. I just moved, I'm heaving into a remodel project, and we've got a lot of stuff going on at work. So with all that, I didn't schedule myself for as much hunt which gets me real itchy this time of year because we're fast approaching. I mean the seasons have ended in many of the southern state South Carolina where the offices is closed now that season ended, Michigan still going through the end of May, so I can capture some of that layout for me. Um layoff from me, just kind of give me the landscape of NWTF. You've done it before, we just do it again, kind of like mission statement, where you're at with membership all that kind of stuff. Well, the National Wild Turkey Federation is, uh, we're forty six going, I'm forty seven years old. It was it was set up to restore the wild Turkey. UM. Tom Rogers, the original founder of it, had a vision that we could restore the wild turkey to North America, and we're an organization that came together and did that. In the early days, we really were a group that did fundraising to help states UM with trapping efforts. We taught the technology of a lot of the trapping to the state agencies, and then we helped broker the deals so you could trade wildlife between states, because you can get yourself in trouble with the Lacey Act if you put dollar figures on it, and that's why that happens. Yeah, I realize that that's why people did swaps. Yep, that's because the Lacey Act. You know, when we passed a Lacey Act in this country to prohibit interstate movement and trade in birds or wildlife in particular, it was a great thing. But state agencies then if they're trying to swap out wild turkeys, those have they also have value to the residents of that state, and so giving away their precious wild birds usually they want to and then they want to explain to their residents that we're getting something in return for that so I mean we swapped turkeys for otters, and turkeys for elk, and turkeys for rough grouse, and there were all kinds of deals around the country. The rough exchange right in your mind. I don't even know now, you know, at one time, I was it always seemed a little I mean, were people real literal about value or was it kind of like almost like a gesture. It was a gesture, But in most situations, that's when a state really wanted to re establish something else. So for instance, you know, when we were getting turkeys, we were trapping rough grouse and in parts of Michigan around grass at Saginaw, and we ran grouse trapping operation all all summer long to try and get those birds, to get to fulfill the requirements so we could get birds turkeys back in that winter. I mean, you were trapping grouse in order to swap them out so we could get turkeys back. Who who was after grouse? I think it was Iowa at that particular time that we were getting our turkeys from, But I don't know who they were swapping with in order to get the grouse. So somebody in the Midwest. I do remember that state's ever trade turkeys for turkeys, like one state wants Easterns and the other state wants Miriam's. They have in the West, but I'm not aware of situations where they swapped various you know, subspecies between that, but I'm sure they probably have where the menu's gotta be real interesting when you're dealing with the state like Texas, Zebras, anything at it. Yeah, but you keep your you keep your exotics to yourself, Thank you very much. Come on the draft man turies for a draft. Yeah, but it was wild in terms of some of the swaps that went on. But anyhow, from there, the National Wild Turkey Federation is one of those organizations that actually achieved it some mission. We worked with the state agencies and restored wild turkeys to to it's historic range and beyond. I mean, we have turkeys and places that that really weren't historic at the time. The you know, settlers, European settlers came over here and that's we've got habitat forum and they're doing well in some of those areas now and that's great and there's a lot of social enthusiasm for um. And you know, it's hard to I was just gonna ask if you ever got any pushback from that where people say, well, you know they weren't here. Yeah, there's a far amount of that in California. Umah, there were I mean, we we wound up doing studies there. There were concerns with the turkeys would um negatively impact the vineyards that they weren't historic to that area. And you know, the question is how far do you go back on at there is historic evidence a wild turkeys and California and so as birds expanded into those areas, and those were restored efforts, and we were able to go in and show that turkeys, you know at the time that they're feeding in vineyards where you've got a lot of um, great maturity and all the rest of it. They're really after more high protein than they are. They might be incidental takers of of grapes and the rest of it, but usually a lot of damages coming from other species out there. You got raccoons that are going out there and cleaning them out and the rest of it. But the turkeys are very visible because they're seeing more commonly during the daylight hours, and people see them and they assume they're causing damage. So I was reading about that same problem in Wisconsin when they first started seeing lots of numbers and the same thing. They're so visible he's seeing out on the fields, and the farmers were like, they're gonna eat us at a house at home, and they had to do a big study to prove that, well, no, actually it's like ten percent of their diet and they're usually just picking up the scraps that you've left behind anyway, right, are the insects. I mean, that's the other thing is beneficial where they're out there feeding heavily on insects in those in those fields. So the National Wild Turkey Federation really around year two thousand UM had completed most of those efforts to restore, and we moved into UM. We had Alreadys incorporated creating hunting heriage, maintaining the hunting herriage, and really trying to create that next generation of hunters so we can carry on the lifestyle and the appreciation of hunting and the use of of hunted animals in our food base. And then we added in habitat restoration because at that point we're starting, you know, in parts of this country we're seeing actual declines and turkey populations. Now that they've been restored, they're starting to taper back off, especially this southeastern United States, and you know what's going on with that. We're seeing large landscape level changes. I mean, we know we're losing a lot of mass crops in the Midwest. Um hickory trees went by the wayside, American chestnut has has gone and we've left it now. Oaks are starting to diminish in that Midwestern landscape, and those mass crops are practice in development well. And our forest are turning over to those those oak forests that appeared and grew up after logging and and um wood lot development and large forest tracks now are turning over to beach maple forests in many areas. And they don't have they don't have a mass crop. They don't provide the food that is readily available for a while of the wildlife species that we all love, I mean, dear turkey squirrel um are that hard mass is really really important a lot of wildlife populations. What w did you say that deer had to do when they were in a lab lollypine and they had to pack a lunch and take it with them. And you've seen that in red pine stands in Michigan. I mean those pine forest are all needles on the floor. There isn't a forb that grows underneath there. There's not good un light, and they just there's not anything for them to eat. So it's um. I think that's what's happening. I think there's I think there's a whole range of things that are happening. To be honest with you, I think that's heard that Missouri had its worst turkey harvest than seventeen years. That could be like that could be like a you know, that could be weather too. It could be weather. It could be what weather was last year for brood production. Last year coming out of it had wicked They had a wicked snow storm, I know. And usually your year after really bad weather conditions, when you have you don't have the kind of nest success that you'd really like. Is where you really feel it the following year, so you feel that there's real We had a piece about this on the Meat eater dot com about turkey no you know, turkey populations dropping in a lot of areas, and then we got a lot of emails and people who are really upset, like not in my woods. Yeah, I don't know how to find them. Yeah. Yeah, A lot of folks would be like, well, my bird feeder, there's like three of them around that be more. Well, they are opportunists, there's no doubt about it. But you do feel that there are like systemic There are some areas where, you know, South Carolina is one of them, that they have really been struggling. We are seeing a definite decline even though hunter numbers are staying, are up, are actually increasing in some cases, so interesting turkeys is increasing. Let me float an idea by you. Okay, a body of mind put this to me. He says, you know, what's really going on with turkeys. He says, we're killing them too early. I think in some cases we are. I think, you know, he's not a irrational guy. He's like people who say, like, get into mid May and they say the turkeys are all gobbled out. Because they're not gobbled out, they're dead. Well, when they shut up, I mean, that's the other thing. Most of the studies that take a look at what's happening to birds, they react to hunting pressure. It's like predator pressure. We are predators out there. They move. We did telemetry studies um here most recently, and it was fun to watch it on a screen. We showed it for our board couple of years ago. But you'd see a hunter walk into an area, you know, and and that bird would walk in further to that area, and the hunter would leave and that bird would walk back. I mean, they are they avoid they know we're there. Um they you know, even if you're a decent hunter, they know that you're coming into that and they shut up. We don't see as much gobbling activity and the rest of it, So it's a response just like other predators would be where they'll shut up more. And we've all seen that when birds, they'll do a gobble on the roost and then they when they land on the ground, they're done talking. They'll come in silent at that point. So, um, you know it it it. I think that in some cases, though, there's been a lot of controversy right down in South Carolina about what should be the right starting date. That that state is a state that has temperature changes and climate change from the coastal area gets warmer sooner, they want to start hunting sooner. But the peak gobbling activity and the nest initiation is really about UM April ninth. That's most of the studies are most recent studies shows that the when nest initiation is is April ninth. Then they go in there in South Carolina and South Carolina. Now it varies in other parts of the contract. That point she's dropped her that's right. And if you're hunting, if you start your season before that time period, she's still in breeding cycle at that point. That's you know, that's just the peak. There's some that start earlier, there's some that start late, but that's kind of the peak that occurs with that population. So there's discussion down there that they by they move their season to start in the March, and you're probably disrupting those birds and not getting all the birds bread and you're not getting as much success on those nests because you are having that disruption early during that breeding cycle. Goal. So states are taking a look at that also. UM, it's been interesting to take a look at what we're doing with hunting seasons as we move forward, and we know that, UM, the timing of the season is really important. The amount of pressure on the birds is really important. And you know what happens is people want to have lots of opportunity. They want to have lots of days to hunt, and they think that by cutting back bag limits they can limit what the pressure is on that on that population. But really, in almost all your wildlife populations, the length of season the number of people that hunt are the two factors that have the biggest impact on the population harvest. In this article that Steve reference was called A New Silent Spring Where the Turkey's Um. The author was David Hart, and he touched on a number of different theories as to where the turkeys have gone, why the population have been falling the recent decade. One of the things that he kind of suggested but then dismissed was yes, besides that was disease, specifically West Nile UM. You kind of brought up how states have thought that that's what's decimated grouse populations. So maybe it's doing the same thing with turkeys, but there's just not enough information available. What are your thoughts on like West Niles and turkeys. Well, you know a good friend of mine, John Fisher, and as ahead of the weld or he was. He just retired as head of the Wildlife Disease Cooperative at University of Georgia, and John and I shared a lot of the health committees for the Association Estate Agencies, and you know, everybody wants to look to disease. They especially as places where poultry farms, you know, spread manure from poultry houses and all the rest of it. Is there an opportunity that we're really spreading disease out there? And I'm not saying that we can't or it won't happen, but um, and you never want to have birds feeding over um situations where they could be exposed to that where you have dead birds. But with avian influence and stuff, we just haven't seen the die off. I mean, we've done an awful lot of surveillance the States have with avian um influence and what their impacts. And we know there are indicator species there are far more susceptible to that particular disease. And when you're not seeing the indicator species go, we're not seeing it with with the turkeys. Are you saying that, Um, there are other species that are a better indicator of West Nile. Yeah, crows and yeah Corvitt, Yeah, cart really hard they and they're there are first ones when you have that disease show up, when you start seeing crow dios or raven dios, you've got a good indicator. You've got avian influenza out there. Oh not West Now Avian influenza. I didn't know that. So they're susceptible. Yeah, and this is because your body doesn't handle it well, because they're more likely to get stung by mosquitoes. I don't know the answer to that one. I don't know enough about it. So, but in West Nile virus, the same thing. I mean, these viruses have been going. We really expected with West Nile um that we would and corvitts are really susceptible West West Nile speci, these two. So that was where we first indicated it. But um we really expected that we would see major die offs as that started getting in the in the populations, and and we did in places. Um So, but we also look for high path avian influenza. That's one of the ones that found in waterfall and is really susceptible path high path, highly path energetic Aida avian influenza. There's always low path, low pathogetic avian influenza that' center waterfall populations. It's just endemic and we have it. But when you get in the high path energetic that's where you have it kills off major populations of it, and that's a real concern. So and there's you know, there's avian pox. There's a number of different diseases out there, um avian it can be spread through populations. So it's probably through touching close proximity. FEE sees that kind of stuff. It's not an insect born. What are those theory? There are theories is nothing's happened. Oh there's another theory, and I don't understand it's one. I mean I understand, like I get the concept, but I don't know how true it is. That there's just a natural like when you bring in it, when you reintroduce a species or introduce a species. There's a thing where they don't call it, like I know, founder effect is something entirely different. There's some name for it, almost like a bloom. Yeah, and then they go like and then exploiting some environment for the first time. There example, food predators aren't tuned into it yet and they have this like they bloom, Yeah, they bloom. They do really well. And there's a time leg before your predator species catch on to it. You know, you wind up having the disease issues that come along with it. The disease is part of this phenomenon. Yeah, and then at that point in time, the population trails off a little bit. And you see that historically in some cases, and we see it with exotic species, non native species that come in. I mean, all you gotta do is look at things like the Great Lake where you wind up having these zebra muscle populations that just were tremendous blooms. They were over all the intake pipes and all the rest of it, and and creates this, you know, fills this unfilled niche out there. Or more a greater concern is they replace native species because they're more competitive in that environment because they don't have predators or parasites that have adapted to them yet, and so they have a competitive edge out there. So yeah, there's some of that. I mean. The other theory is there's there's been lots of discussion about fire on the landscape um and and this is more a discussion in southeastern United States with the large the Forest Service has really worked to try and and be more active in their management get those fuel loads down, especially in those pine forests that are fire driven habitats, and we're used to have a lot of lightning strikes and wildfires that would move through and burn off the understory, the fuel load, and and help promote the grass those ground of those needles, that's right, would allow stuff to come up, that's right. And you those habitats were originally savannah left to their own where they're very open canopy, but you have trees and and fire moved through it. And then in the southern plains that's the pine savannahs you tend to get up. In the midwestern you get the oak savannahs, the same type of habitat, their fire driven habitats that had a lot of fire that moved through them on a regular basis before we got involved in the in the ecosystem of living there, and then we suppressed that fire. And what has happened then is you wind up having a lot of woody vegetation. Turkeys don't like to have really a lot of heavy cover that's woody right around them because they can't see. They they feel um unprotected in that. They much prefer to have good grass cover where they have greater visibility, but yet they have good nest protection. And then you wind up getting a lot more insect damnage or insect not damage, but insect availability for protein, food source and all the rest of us. When you have that sunshine that comes down to the forest floor, you think, yeah, I would imagine that fire could be bad for insects, but habitat wise it makes up for it makes up for it. Yeah, And there's you know, the insects live on those landscapes. When you when you um see those landscapes after their burn, quite often there's um a very large ant colonies that go in conjunction with it. Those sandy soils are very heavy mineral, there's not a lot of top soil on them, and those ants are really important for breaking down what vegetative material are there and getting some organics and you know, um placement back in place. It will burn those ant colonies if you get too hot to fire. Normally it will pass through it. But if you get a really hot fire out and I've seen where it's will burn out the ant colonies also. But it comes back. Now it's not bad, it's it's it's part of what happens there. So by putting that fire back on the landscape, we're getting it overall back in better shape for turkeys because it's getting that open grassy component to the savannah back in place. But people see where birds might be nesting and and the nest gets burned during that time period, and they think we're losing lots of turkeys to those large scale fires that are prescribed fires, when in fact, a lot of times they go back into renest. Sometimes the nest is even harmed. I mean there you'll see photographs of from researchers that they'll go back in. They'll take a photograph of the nest. You know, an egg will even be singed, but the nest will hatch, the hen picks up. It's the fire. Most true. She comes back right afterwards. And if you are in those landscapes, right after the burn, turkeys moved back in when it's still all black. I saw you guys that a study on that. Yeah, I saw you had turkeys to tracking devices and looked at how they respond to fire, and they respond very favorably. So short term losses long term gain on that landscape. I can device look like on a turkey. It's a little a little transmitter. It goes on the back. There's two you can do it through a radio signal or a little larger one will be a satellite signal. So now we have the ability to track them through satellite. And that's like embedded in the turkey glue. Yeah, yeah, it's it goes right on the back between the shoulders is where it goes. But yeah, we we put it under the skin. Originally with some of these devices, they used to have harnesses that fit on them. Now we've gotten to the point where we embed it right in there, and it's nice. You can you can actually um embed it, but it actually you can crazy glue it right on the on the skin, pull some a few of the feathers out, crazy glue it right on the skin, and it's there. It stays there. That area that I was in in Tennessee was kind of has a lot of these components that we're talking about. Where you know, we were on one side of the county. There's birds everywhere on really some of the same property about fifteen minutes away. Like, yeah, this used to be exactly like the stuff that we were hunting where there were tons of birds. In the last year, no birds, and they had captured a handful of birds out on um well all reads property out there and put those tracking devices on them to try to get a better understanding what's happening. But went from hundreds of birds to uh when we went out there, we saw saw one lone tom out cruising around. But they think they moved or died. He thinks they died. Yeah, And it's the same deal out here in eastern Montana that I was telling you about, like the you know, the person doing the observation, the rancher. It's like the only thing I can think of as a disease because there were so many birds and then no birds. Well yeah, we've seen that out here as well. Just they're just there and it's like tons of them, and then all of sud they're not there and it takes some years to come back. Well, that's it. When you lose a population, when you get down to a critical mass where you don't have a good breeding population, when you lose a couple of production cycles, it takes a long time for those birds to come back in and fill it. But you know, sometimes these landscape changes that happened, we don't even recognize them. Um, give you a perfect example where I live in Michigan. We had we have had turkeys for years. We hunted our back hillside. It was a really nice oak mixed hardwood stand with some really old oak mass trees that are roost trees on it and stuff. And you know, I I go out there every year, I've seen less turkeys. There's more development in the area, more homes. I'm thinking, it's just disturbance. My son comes home, who spent a lot of time out back there, and he hadn't been back in three years, and he said, you know, Becky, we're losing our oak. This is moving over to beach beach maple. And you know, it wasn't until Joel said that to me that I started really looking around and thinking, should have been on this property for thirty years. I don't see the kind of maturity changes because every year I'm out there during that time period, and and you don't see that continual maturity and the changeover and how some of the dominant trees are starting to die out and become you know, sub dominant in that that forest stand. So what's a solution for that? If you cut it? Not everything I mean to go in into a shelter, would cut and bring up some of those I should cut out. Some of those big older oak trees are starting to die out because they're starting to die and there's some younger oaks and I need to release those on the hillside. It's pretty steep hillside. It's not that much acreage. It's hard to get in somebody to cut it. We don't have a lot of small cutters anymore, um, you know, in a lot of these timber markets. So it's really hard to get somebody in there to do it. The chainsaw. I'm good with chainsaw, our buddy dog. He manages a family farm. He works his ass off to try to keep oaks. Yeah, it's yeah, because the thing is too is like there's so many more deer now where he is, and so they have the way they like to feed and um, and he has he has to do a lot of like active forestry management to try to to to keep the you know, the sweet the sweet of trees on the on his place that he'd like to see because if he didn't, I can't remember what one it is. If you just like let it go, what do you want it with? Red maple? Something he doesn't like a lot of. It's probably red maple. It takes over in those upland hardwood stands, and so if you just didn't do it, and you just had a bunch of deer there, no one did anything and no one was doing any kind of select work with a lot of maple on wouldn't support the doesn't support doesn't support the amount of life. No, it doesn't. It doesn't have the mass crop that you really need to support the wildlife they really want there. I'll tell you a start of you ought to do. Get your pencil out, get your it's a lot because it's a good study. I've seen this happened a couple of times. Now let's we're talking about. I'm sure it happens in other states, but you should go in. There's a this this state here that we haven't be sitting in right now is divided into seven regions. Okay. Over the years they've added on which regions you're allowed to use and over the counter turkey tag for so as the region is coming into its own with turkey numbers. It's a draw. And I have come in and hunted turkeys in areas where it's a draw where you have to apply and win a lottery to get a turkey permit. That's a very different kind of turkey hunting than when it's an over the counter because people over the years, as they watched this, they know where all the turkeys are, and the minute you can just go, they go right. It would be really interesting to um, there's one region left in this state that's still hard to draw a turkey tag. Presumably it'll get to where they're going to open it up. It'd be interesting to do a gobble study or something, because here you have like a great scenario of a turkey population and all of a sudden the floodgates get opened and a lot more pressure on it, and watch and try to put some numbers to how they respond where they're spending their time, like how much they gobble, where they like to hang out, how much are they gonna how much does that that influx of hunting pressure because it happens like overnight. You know, what, what is what are they doing? What does that do? What's the population responds to us? It's gotta be significant, man, Because we just had a thing this year. We went to a place that only a couple of years ago went general and UM and had a couple of individuals say to us, like man in that place change because people have been watching those turkeys for a decade. They knew where they were. I spent a lot of years in my life dealing with regulations, wildlife regulations on these very issues. And yeah, it's always a tough balance to try and balance the opportunity of making sure that people can get out there and hunt it and um understand the entry system to get into it, because you got to think ahead and apply, you know, and and meets that deadline, which is well advanced to the turkey hunting season, versus have an open entry and make it easy for people to get in there. And states struggle with this concept and try and balance those two so that we're not unnecessarily restricting people. But on the other hand, we're not unnecessarily over harvesting the population or putting too much pressure on the population. I'm not even so much over harvest as much as the kind of pressure that goes in the behavioral changes that I talked about before. With that, in the Big Game world, we divide the whole world into two things. You got your quality states and then you got your opportunity states. That's exactly it. You're right, we do. We do and and you know, it's tough because you don't want people to um, you want them to have opportunity to go in and take birds and and have that that place of hunting if they didn't even apply for it. But on the other hand, you don't want to diminish the quality. And some states have fall seasons too. We talked a little bit about that last night. What's your take on that, Well, fall season tends to be a season to restrict the population, to pull it back. I mean, it's that's what it's intended. That's what it's intended. So you've got agricultural interests, you've got the areas you know where the where you open up those hunting seasons to fall hunting. Your your game plan is to reduce the population, and why not reduce it in the spring. That's what I thing I understand, like why in the fall are you allowed to shoot hens? And states that have fall seasons like once she's killing. If you want to kill hens, why why not killing the spring? Well, the idea is that, um, your spring season is a quality season that is not trying to restrict the population. And so we started spring hunting and have had spring hunting even as we restored populations. That was one of the things that Turkey Federation really did a good job on. They brought a lot of science to the States so that you could introduce wild turkeys, get that population expanding, and still hunt it in the spring season because those birds are still those You're not taking the hands. You're trying to time your season after the birds have have have bread, and you're not disturbing those nests too much in that regard, and you could open up hunting early as you're restoring those populations, then use your fall seasons to to reduce populations where you have overabundance in that population. Who is it when you say, like, oh, there's too many turkeys? Who is saying that? Usually who says it are people that call in they have nuisance birds. Um. Your your local biologists will have people that will call in. And when I was a biologists, i would have this. I'd have people that would say, you know, I've got turkeys hanging around my property. They're roosting over the cars at night. They're um, they're out in the fields causing problems because they see them out in those particular fields. Sometimes it's just the presence of turkeys they're not used to it. They don't want to have turkeys around there. Sometimes they're habituating those turkeys. They've got bird feeders up and supplemental feed out. Those birds are taking advantage of it. It's an education process to get them to realize pulling your feed or stop putting out throwing out your chicken feed out in the yard and having the turkeys come into it. Also, it's a behavioral change. And then sometimes we do have too many birds in particular suburban settings, and that's where it tends to get the most um turkey to manage. Is where you you have this mix of of nice field habitats, some small wood lots and then a lot of homes in there, and you can support pretty good bird populations. And then you're not if it's an area where people are it's privately owned and they're not let people into hunt not getting much pressure. You can have some islands of really pretty dense populations and at that point you're gonna get someone who's like, there's too many turkeys. Yeah, I don't want them to get them out of here. A lot of depredation tags in Idaho turkey depredation turkey depredation tags. And so if you're a landowner and you say you want to have some turkeys taken off your place in the depredation system, then folks who apply for those tags, you can get a phone call says, hey, this land owner has got a bunch of turkeys on there, here's the number, and they have to provide access if they're part of that program. And then you get dispatched out there to hunt turkeys. Yeah. And a good good friend of mine got a call last year for a region that is a difficult place to Yeah, you have to draw a tag to go over there and hunt birds, but he got a call for depredation in over there. Guys like, yeah, he's like, I got one standing on top of my car right now, come kill him. I want to get into some legal some stuff you guys do around lobbying and whatnot. Is that a dirty word? Lobbying congressional? What do you guys call it? What do you like to call it? Um, we like to call it education and advocacy, Yeah, advocacine ed. I want to talk to a little bit about that, what that world's like. But I want to ask a couple of things. First, what in your mind. What's a very old male turkey and what's a very old female turkey? You know, ten is an old bird in the wild. Now, you see, domestic birds will get up, people keep them their bar and they're older than that. But you know you're a show called Cal's Weekend Review. Yes, tell her about the bird. Tell her about the bird from the episode one of Cal's Weekend Review, real quick. I mean they will go older, there's no doubt. A turkey. Yeah, this is a lays An albatross. It's the oldest known, oldest known bird. Yeah. Yeah, and she's sixty eight and still rearing chicks or a chick a year. But it was banded at roughly five years of age. Yeah, because they don't start laying until they're about five. So pretty amazing, is yeah. Yeah. And think how little time she's spent on the ground. They think that she's covered how many miles in her life? Yeah, because I mean they go up in the air and they don't come down for long periods of time. I think this is a very conservative number when you look at all the other data that's out there, But three million miles on this one bird. Yeah, I think that it's interesting Stus Review more hot, and so you think between there's no Tom that lives ten. Tom's right, not in hunted populations X would be like your mega. Oh yeah, I mean I'm talking about the really unusual situation out there because you asked, what's the oldest you know, that's that's probably not the oldest A really old oh, a really old one. Yeah. If you get a bird that's you know, five six years old, that's an old bird in the wild. That's I mean, especially if there's much in terms of um hunting pressure on that particular bird. You know, you're you're lucky. If you have very many three year old birds in the population. Three and four year old birds, well, thosezards in Texas that we got, how old do you think they were? Three? We all, yeah, three to four. But scars. I don't think they're hunting those birds real hard out there. Maybe no, But I just think just disease or you know, bacterial infections and stuff. Because we had a couple of birds with like real puncture holes in them and old scars and staff each other. What's a rough life out there, Yeah, it's a rough life. I heard somewhere that a poult so a young turkey eats animal matter. They do eat a lot of protein and an adult vegetable matter. Is it that clean? I don't. I couldn't tell you that if it's that clean. But you know, turkeys are omnivorous, so they they they're opportunistic, um, and they're as they are adults, they do eat a lot more vegetative material. We know that those young birds, those pouls really used protein. They grow really quickly, and so they need those high energy sources and those high calorie sources to really put on the kind of growth that they put on. Because you know, when you look at a turkey, it doesn't take them very long to get to the point where they are feathered out and able to fly. So they grow really quickly. Um. As young birds like protein. Yeah, they go out and I mean those those hens take them out and they just you know, snurf up whatever insect life they can find out there. Yeah, the questions you wanted to happen with, John, No, I want to come back to the d C stuff we're about to get before we get into that, Like quick, hey, what's up with type questions? So in South Dakota, a male turkey tag allows you to shoot a turkey with a visible beard or spurs. And in the Black Hills there's a lot of bearded hands. I shouldn't say a lot, but more than most places. I've ever seen a dozen. Like in my years of hunting there in the spring, I have twice shot bearded hands knowing that they were hands. Does that make me a bad person? Steve can shoot hands in spring, I would shoot a bearded hand. Why is that different than a normal hand for you, it's not because i'd be I'd be against it, begins the law. So only because it's legally you're okay with it. Then it's not like it complicated that if spring turkey season. Well, here's what the I have, Like I have most states forty or so states, I have a lot of uh faith in the wildlife managers. Okay, states, I have a lot of faith in the wildlife managers. Where I would say if they were saying that, um, we're gonna open it up for hens most states, I'd be like, they probably know what they're talking about. This is probably okay. So if I knew that there was a hen, like there's there's a part of this state we can shoot hens in the spring. Yeah, three of them. So I'm like, must be I'm gathering a lot of hens because there's a lot of parts of the states where you can't and there's some parts where you can't on turkeys. So they're have an elastic model. And if in this little corner over the area they've determined that they want to kill some hens in the spring, I would have faith that they were operating in the best interest of hunter. So in those places, yes, the bearded hand. I don't think that the American wild turkey is gonna live or die or thrive or not thrive based on the occurrence rate of hunters harvesting bearded hands, which are an anomaly. So if you were to see one of these, I've never had a bearded head in front of me with a shotgun in my hand. If I were to see one and get it, I don't think that that that's gonna then mean that we're going to see this population wide decline in turkey numbers. I always have a bit of guilt because I feel like I'm gaming the system all the time. Twice, that's not all the time, So tell me, tell me yes, Because it's like the the idea of the tag is for you to shoot a male turkey. Yeah, that's the spirit of the law. And I'm knowingly shooting a female turkey, which is legal to get a turkey. I feel it's like if you found a rain bow and there was like a little leprechn and he stole his gold, it would be like, sure, it never happens there I was. I took it. We call it backy off, Tell me, I think it's an individual choice. I mean, you knew it was a weird hand. Okay, that bird I had in front of me last year in Oklahoma. I knew she was a hen. She was a legal target. I didn't take it. Why that? Why did I do it? Because I couldn't believe her behavior. I had never seen a hand to a full strut like this and be that aggressive. But that doesn't account for why you didn't shoot it. Well, so you saw a regular turkey to a backflip. Yeah, that's true, but it was you know, I knew it was an egg layer. You know it was out there. I got more enjoyment out of watching her that day then I did. And naming her that day and her behavior and laughing about it, we well we lame. We named her a pretty aggressive female name, so she just wound up being she she was scaring the tom off. I mean, she was a really aggressive hen. So it was one of those situations where I got more joy out of that with the people I was hunting with than I did would have by taking it and end in the scenario what she's saying, Spencer, I'm reading between it. What she's saying is because she wouldn't do it because it's wrong. No, But I don't think we should shame one another on this. I mean, it was It's okay you you could easily change my mind if you like said no, you shouldn't be doing that. Well you obviously you feel that way, you wouldn't ask the question that you had some trepidation about it. But I don't think as hunters we should ever criticize another hunter for taking a legal target. I used to see this all the time in deer hunting, with people getting into it and somebody during an antler's season would take a buck vawn and they couldn't tell it was a buck vawn. They didn't they just couldn't tell it from the head, you know, don't criticize him for doing it. It was legal. It's it's ethical and the person didn't know it, so let's not chastise them for that. It's legal when you're asking that person to get on board with something that that there, you're asking them to get on board with some long term manage the plan that maybe they don't even they don't share that, they don't share the desire. That's right. They shot a perfectly legal target there. That was an animal that is going to give them quality meat. They're gonna enjoy it. Don't ruin it for him. And the same thing I would say with that, we take it into a fact that um on harvest when biology just make those recommendations, they know there's a certain percentage of bearded tom's it's so much or bearded hens. It's small enough it doesn't factor into a significant part of the population that's going to hurt the population. So it's perfectly legal. Go ahead and do it. And it's probably the cleanest indicator for someone who's starting off turkey hunting to determine whether it's a tom or a hand. Is that beard? You can pick it up and see it and and visualize it for folk start just getting started. They're not used to looking at all the heads and behavior cues and all the rest of it. Oh, it's one of the hardest things. I remember struggling. So for at least two or three years, I'd have turkey's coming in close for age and the world is just all of a sudden, moving a million miles an hour, and it's spinning faster, and you're, you know, in your heart's beating between your ears with anticipation. Could just never be like, yeah, that there's a time that's him right there. Hunting with the hunting with Maggie and Tracy. One was their first turkey hunt. She's like, well, how do I know that. I'm like, oh, you'll just know. I thought I thought about, well, you know what to talk about this. I think we should touch on bag limits, because you know, the there's a difference between the face value of a bag limit and what the actual practical application of that bag limit is. Like there you can shoot four birds with no tags in Tennessee, but you can only kill one bird per day. That's right. So you know, bag limits have have their overall see season implications, but people need to realize that season length and the number of hunters are really the controlling force on it when you put bag limits on. For instance, I'll just use South Carolina because it's been hotly debated in the legislature lately. They wanted to go from a few years ago, they moved their season, they provide a longer season. With that, they cut the bag limit from five to three. Well, it really didn't do a whole lot because there aren't very many people that were shooting five turkeys, and so you're only nipping back the population of hunters for a very small percentage of those folks that were successful enough every year to take five birds. And something that I think about also is that the bird per day rule, because it's definitely happened to me where if it were legal to fill those tags and when one morning you would do it, I would have had the opportunity. But because I gotta wait to the next day to then have a valid turkey tag, again, I had no opportunity. No opportunity, no opportunity. Sometimes the birds don't cooperate. Sometimes you can't go out, You've got to actually go work for a living. You know, it could be that, you know, as a Sunday Monday, it could be the weather conditions are different. Um and those birds. Just about the time you think you've got them patterned and figured out, they prove you wrong every time. So you uh, I'm trying to I'm trying to track what you're saying, so you instinctively don't see a problem or do see a problem with the state saying like, oh, yeah, five turkeys, no problem. It depends on the state and whether their population is. But I do think a lot of times when you have um populations that when the biologists are setting up season recommendations, a lot of times in some states it's their legislature that sets the season's, not the agency itself. Its varies by state, but a lot of times what you'll see is UM legislators wanting to trade off days and then nip back the bag limit to comp and state. So, okays, that doesn't work that well, I mean, it just does. It's not a trade off. Your season length and the number of hunters are going to have a far greater impact on your harvest than what your bag limit is going to be. So I'm tracking what you're saying. Now, Okay, I got what you're saying now, So that's where they really need to listen to the biologists and realize that it isn't for you can't necessarily compensate for a super long season because you might be harvesting them before the birds are are really fully bred. You might be disrupting that breeding. And number two, having that really long season and a high hot hunting population. Even if you cut back that bag limit, there's such a small percentage of people that that can put it together take you know, five birds or whatever the maximum is, that you're really not having that much impact. I'm restricting that season at that point. So you could have the bag limit and double the season, and you're gonna have a lot more dead birds, you got it? Yeah, I mean, I just looking at fishing regulations this morning, and it's just it's really hard to put reality on those regulations. I'm like, oh, man, I really want to put a bunch of fish in the freezer. Oh great, here's a reservoir that I can put thirty croppy per day. Yeah. I'm never caught a croppy in my life. The odds to me putting thirty croppy in the boat are pretty bad, you know. But I look like if I'm about fifty a day and there's no closed season, I'm you know, thousands upon thousands of croppy you talked earlier. You mentioned with big game hunting you have the quality states and you have the opportunity states. Okay, that usually is reflective when you go back and look at how many people are a licensed hunter within that state. Usually it is tied to if you have a smaller hunting population or a smaller population in your state. For the population of an moles out there that you're hunting, you're gonna be able to support a quality regulations and seasons that will because you're not exploiting that population as greatly as you would with a population that has a lot more hunters, and and they go out there and they take a lot more animals. Michigan's perfect example. When I start my career, we had we had damn near a million licensed by your arm hunters. You don't grow old deer in that scenario. No, can I get in one more question before we move on. So, in some place like the Great Plains where you have potential for all three species of turkeys, Rio's, Mariam's Easterns, is there any more species? It's part of the question. Is there any concern for hybridization? Like long term there is like having turkeys could potentially be a problem. Well, I won't say concerned, but does does hybridization happen? Absolutely? Right? But is there any cern about it happening? Or like places that are like in Nebraska or whatever, they're like you could kill Miriam's a rio on the eastern all all the same farm. It's like, come on, well, no, but that's not what he's getting at. If there's any like worry that that could negatively affect turkey populations, that that would be bad for right, Like if all of a sudden, white tails and mule deer were just hybridizing all the time, that'd be a bad deal. Those are two distinct species. I know what most people consider these like varieties. They're not even like legitimately subspecies. So yes and no, um, And I'll give you an example in the Waterfall front okay, um, I'll take it away. And when we had when we don't dealt with geese populations up on the tunder, we had these subspecies and we tried to manage it by subspecies in the flyway, so that you had James Bay birds and and Mississippi Valley birds, and we tried to keep you know, distinct populations. You mean Canada geese. Yeah, and it's in fact, when I thought we had twenty some kinds of Canada geese, that's right, and they're breeding up on the grounds. So we had the We did it geographically, and we tried to just harvest and maintain those separate populations of those geese within it. And everybody was concerned when one population started to decline. Well wound up happening. As we started to use DNA to to sample those populations, we realized there's a lot more in breeding going on there, and there's a lot more of the mutts, you know, that really had genetic pools, and it wasn't as clean geographically as we really thought. So taking into turkeys, yes, you want to keep variability in your population because the more variability you have, the more ability you have that population to adapt to changes. You know, they're going to have, just like diversity in any population, the more diversity you have in it, you're gonna have some survivors that stand a better chance. And if it's a really homogeneous population, so yeah, you want to maintain that, but there's always gonna be some interbreeding of those birds and with it comes different diversity with it also, So yes, we don't want them all to be crossbreds or highbreds between those populations. But on the other hand, you're always going to get some variability because of the range and where they're located. They're going to breed. What I'm getting at here, Spencer, there's no okay, take the Eastern turkey and the Osceola turkey. It's you we like draw some arbitrary line across the state, right, but they just bleed into one another, I understand. But the National Wild Turkey Foundation draws that line. Excuse me, federation draws that line in the record books. You guys define them as the different subspecies. We do, and well, you know, it's it's how people like to classify and go out and gather the different birds. But you know, don't forget there has been interbreeding a wildlife, I mean, and there's mixing of it over time. And sometimes we like to look at a point of time and think it's clean and neat and tidy, and it's just not. It's messy. But when it comes to the different types of turkeys, Rio's Miriam's, Gould's easterns Osceolas, that's everybody, right, Uh, how like with current thinking and our understanding, a taxonomy changes all time with current thinking, like how legitimate are those designations and how is it not just that there's this thing it's the wild turkey, and there are slight color variations throughout the country. They're distinct enough that they're distinct um subspecies there um with it. But you're always going to have some of that interbreeding and part of it man is created too because we've moved these birds around um with that, so you've got populations where the habitat type might have looked like it was more attractive to various species, and we tried it. But we did that with other species around the country too. It's not just turkeys, you know. As we restored wildlife populations in this country, we moved wildlife. Heck, we moved it from Europe and Asia over here, and we put it out in landscapes and when it did well, it you know, it did well. And so the same thing is true with these restoration efforts. A guy wanted to me the thing that made me that keeps me like not fully understanding the subspecies thing or meaning half the time I feel like it's just there just different colors in different places, and half of time I'm like, okay, there's like a legitimate difference. Is a guy in Oregon was telling me when they were trying to get wild turkeys established in some areas of Oregon, they tried miriams and couldn't get them to stick and put reels in there and they took off. Now, they asked my well, what happened, and he had mentioned something about the I can't remember that one of them has like a higher likelihood of having a brood, just fit in that characteristic and was more successful. And he felt that it was the person outside who felt that it was that that was the thing where they took the birds from. And one couldn't figure it out, and one figured out and the other one figured it out. Yeah, So I mean there are things genetically different. I mean, look at what we tried to do with turkey restorations. Before we really had the technology to trap live birds, we tried to use these birds that were raised in game firms, I mean Pennsylvania Michigan birds for populations, and several where we had turkeys back in the fifties came from game farm. So then they were bronze broad breasted turkeys, but they were not genetically bred for real good survival in a wild environment. And those populations got out there and they maintained, but they were always they never grew, they never did really well. And when we brought in live birds and released them in adjoining habitats, they took off and did really well. So there's genetic variability in these populations. And and with that sometimes it fits different climate situations, you know, micro climates with the habitat is there and the rest of it. All right, good, good, No more like basic turkey trivia. I got a thousand basic turkey. But most of my fail most of them, most of them are, most of them are unanswerable. Um, we did have we did want to ask about the roost. Thing we didn't know about ruce was that in reference to that study that we were looking at. The study that really surprised me. It was on Southern Colorado. I believe so Miriam Turkey's Southern Colorado from back in the nineties, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, And it was like that that on average a turkey only had a thirteen like a turkey only had a thirteen percent chance that he would roost in the same tree two nights in a row, and on average would roost a thousand yards away for where he roosted the night before, and that the first number decreased during turkey season and the second number increased during turkey season, which would legs you to believe that they really responded to the fact that every day when they wake up, there's some guy down there trying to call him in and shoot him. He's like, man, tomorrow night, I'm roosting way far away from here. Yeah. You know, it probably depends on how many hens are in the area and all the rest of it. Um. You know, when you hunt the same property over and over again, um, it winds up being one of those situations where you learn that where there you think about roost and traditional roosts and stuff, where they'll they'll come in there and roost one night, and then there won't be any birds there the next night, or they'll be half as many birds, and then the third night there's nobody there, and you wonder if it's you or whether those birds just move around. I personally think those birds move around and they they're they're opportunists, so they you know, they make good use of their daylight hours. They you know, they're kind of like we are. They get about get up about the same time. Even the days are getting longer, they get up about the same time every day. Um, they go out, they forage, their looking for hens, they're breeding, and then when it gets starts to be getting close to sunset, they're looking for the place to go to bed. Now every few days are coming back in and and having kind of in the same vicinity if their if their habitats that way, I mean when you look at those home ranges in terms of how far they stray and stuff, it's going to depend on the habitat quality. It's going to depend on how many hens are there in terms of how far he needs to roam and and how frequently he's coming back to the general vicinity. And then also with that forest type is going to be for whether there are a lot of trees. I'm sure they're a river corridor. They're cotton woods down in the southwest where they get hit up and roosted pretty routinely because there just aren't that many roost trees. And there are other woodlots and places and forested habitats where there are a lot of really significant roost trees that are gonna have good growth patterns that turkeys are comfortable on them. They're big enough, they're high enough that they're comfortable there that they're going to use. Um, they have lots of choices, so they're they're opportunistic, they're going to go out and not frequent the same particular roost tree. All that. Often, what's a long walk for for a male turkey in one day? Um, it depends on the habitat and where it is no turkeys around, you know, it varies from area to area across. With a particular study you're talking about, they were talking about a thousand meters was about the typical what they did. How far would he just in his travels throughout the day, how many miles would he put on? Well, I mean at that point you're looking at most of those turkeys are it's fairly small those turkeys, UM, in that particular study you're looking at during the breeding season, they were anywhere from fourty to eighty when you when you factored out the hectors translate it back in, so those aren't big areas, like that's what he's spending his day in that type of a little area. Yeah, I mean it's a fair so it's really but that was probably an area that had some decent habitat and they had some hens around and the rest of it. In other areas, you know, you can see it. So you've got several sections that those birds are moving around. So they're moving several miles to get around in those areas because there's not much cover um to get to roost trees at night, they got to move further. So some of those really wide open landscapes, those birds are moving further on a daily basis. And then other places where they're staying really tight in. They've got everything they need in pretty short areas, and there's competition if they move into their habitats. Man, them spending their whole day in forty acres makes you think it's just good. I just sit down and those situations are too good. Little trails of roads come together, and just that's thing I always say, like jerkey hunting, if you spend a few days on the property and you're looking at tracks, like, you know what we could have done just said that, pick a spot at the intersection of two trails and say, you know what, you guys do your thing. I'm gonna spend my three days sitting right here. I'm not gonna do anything. I'm not gonna make any noise. I'll be here at sun up and I'll wait till sundown, and you'd probably be a very effective turkey hunter. Just abide your time, you know. And the other thing that I thought that turkey hunters need to remember is a lot of folks go out. They get out there real early in the morning, before the birds get off the roost. You know, they're going out way before daylight, and then they're coming in a couple hours after sunrise. You know, they're working for a couple of hours. And that's a great time to be out in the turkey woods. Yeah, you know, when it's eight, nine o'clock, ten o'clock in the morning, that's the time where you want to sit tight and let all those other yahoo's in the vicinity go to work do what they're gonna do. But about their time, they're going back and make their money. That's right, get their cup of coffee, whatever they're going to do. You need to sit tight at that point because those birds move in a response to it. Okay, that's a hot turkey hunting tip from Becky Humphreys. Now, you guys spend a lot, like your organization spends time on government policy. We do what does that look like? Like, what do you go down there and you're like, we need more turkeys about the federal level, we don't do that because management and wild turkeys falls to the state authority. So we do that. You know, we we have through our chapter system, we advocate when it comes to regulations, seasons, um, funding for research, those types of things. So you guys will go to a state and say, we feel that you're going about this the wrong way. Yeah, most of the time we're working with the agency along with it through helping to fund research to help move forward good science on it. So we like to work hand hand in hand with that that state agency. We're partners with most of them. And we actually have a technical committee that was formed before we even had biological staff with the Turkey Federation. That's made up of Turkey specialists for the state agencies in our federal agencies, and we call that the Technical Committee. They meet a number of times during the year and we share that that good scientific information. We try and come in and help them so that there UM we can support good management, and typically it's when an agency is getting pressured doing something UM legislatively that's going to be detrimental that population or restrict hunting too much. At the federal level, we try and we try and narrow our focus so we can really be effective on the areas where we have good expertise. We really work on UM forest management issues. So a lot of the the work that's been done to try and get more active forest management and try and correct this fire suppression funding problem we have in the country, we've been very active on that. I've gone fire suppression funding. You're not saying you want more money to suppress well, I'm saying the forest US Forest Service over the course of time, because we've had we've had we've not kept up with the growth cycles and we have more are more fuel loads building up in our national forests, not burning enough, not cutting enough. We've got older forests, so we're getting a build up on it, and with that, we're having these large wildfires that are occurring. And it's we've also come off a period of UM unusually high rainfall. Now we're heading into a more drought type situation. And then you've got disease. I mean, we've got trees dying off, We've got some climatic changes going. But all that's culminating in these mega forest fires that we're seeing, and so we have the Forest Service has has moved a lot, had to move a lot of their funding to fight those forest fires and put in specialists and fire suppression to try and combat and control those fires. And as a result, they have less funding available to do the proactive management to keep our forests healthy. So we've been working with Congress and trying to get the money in the right direction, money in the right direction, and also take away some of the barriers that there are. Um, they're always going to be people that don't like the idea of active forest management. They want to leave it alone. But it has you know, we're not living in a situation anymore where we can just let it go and it's we're gonna like the results of it. But you're not leaving me alone when we do fires, when we put out fires. No, you're not leaving alone. You gotta you gotta make up for you know, I mean, you've already like you've already entered into sort of a false pretense on it, that's right. I mean, we have as humans, we have taken away a lot of these these fire driven habitats. We have taken away the cycle of fire on it that occurred so regularly. It kept those fuel loads down low. It would burn the pine needles and the dead woody vegetation, so you didn't have it ladder up, you didn't have it climb up those trees and crown and then just go on these huge fires that burn everything down. And when you have these really hot, extensive forest fires, it actually burns the top soil off the ground. And then the problem is afterwards you have rain and you have you have the soil gets loose, so you have mud slides and tremendous you know, saltation in your streams and your water course as a result of it. And it takes it takes decades to restore those those landscapes to that um. You know, you can see areas um in my home state of Michigan where I was, you can see places where those forest fires after they cut down the white pine forests in northern Michigan, they had fires that literally swept across the peninsula. And with that because they had all that down vegetative material that had died off, and it burned that top soil in places where we are just now starting to see forest cover back come back into it. It wasn't capable of growing anything but liking for decades and decades and fire, Oh my god, it's a horrific story, man. Yeah, I mean some of these wells and getting live in their own wells and crazy fires, well families getting wiped out, I mean, you know, in those dats, and so I mean it's it's we have altered the landscape. So we've got to deal with the fact that we don't at this point in time on our on our forest, we're not keeping up with the growth cycles, and we're getting these fuel build ups, and we either have to become much more engaged and actively manage those forests or we got to be willing to suffer the consequences. And part of the consequences is we have people actually building in some of those forests also, so you've got homes, large homes, sometimes very expensive homes right within it. And there it takes resources to go out and try and put in fire lines and protect those resources and get people evacuated and get them out of those communities that are built right in fire prone landscapes, and that sucks money out of doing the kind of wildlife work. That's right, that's right. So I'd rather put the money towards the proactive management and get our forests so that they don't have these build up a fuel loads, that we manage them more actively with prescribed fire and cutting regime regimes. And then that we also need to think about some of these places, how much how much we're as a public going to invest in people that want to build large homes and in holdings and some of that problem. Look at the risk, right, risk your fancy home in a spot that nobody built there for a reason. You put a lot of people at risk when you ask some fire crew full eighteen year old kids go in there and try to say it. Yeah, it's and you know it's heartbreaking for people. Um you know, you see whole communities wiped out. So anyhow, we've been working with Congress on that and and there are um some folks that feel very strongly and we've used a lot of our laws that are on the books right now that we're intended to give the public input into planning processes and and bring challenges against government when they are unduly negatively impacted. But we've got groups and individuals are using those laws to really slow down the active management process outside public comment, yeah, or bringing lawsuits. Primarily it's lawsuits, bringing lawsuits against the Forest Service in these particular cases. And over time, then your processes get so expensive. You're spending all your time and energy on the planning process, you're not ever getting to the management, and then you're having to pay even more because of the result of lack of management, because they have this kind of like childish, sort of naive idea that the best thing for all forests has let all even though you're not even talking about and most often the case, you're not talking about native old growth stuff anyways, you're talking about disturbed egos. They're already disturbed from the start, that's right, And so it's a philosophical difference. It's a very expensive way to iron out that philosophical difference. Uh. To back up for a second, you're talking about your you guys talk about state involvement, federal involvement. Don't name any names or please eas but I doubt you'll want to. Uh. Do you encounter states that seem to be very receptive to your professional input in states that kind of run a course where you're like, that's not the way to do this, and they don't want to really listen, or do you or do you guys get pretty good buying from state I have to say we have, UM, we have pretty good buy in from state wildlife agencies. We a couple of things that you know, having run a state agency before. UM, we don't come in and try and lecture states how they should do things, especially there are regional differences and cultural differences on how populations like to run their natural resources, and we try and be respectful of that. We also try and be proactive in helping the state agencies if they have needs, if they have scientific needs, if they've got questions, if they want to learn from other states on stuff of sharing that information behind in a safe environment that they can get hold of it and have those conversations and really try it out and and and know what they're getting into as they get into those discussions before they come real public, because at that point in time, you're you know, it's tough to be wrong on things once you've gone out publicly and or whatever that's right, So we try and take a proactive approach on that. UM. You know, there are other issues we work on a national level. We try and maintain making sure that there's really good access to our public lands out there, making sure that regulations that unnecessarily hamper the ability to go out and hunt those those lands are we're not putting those in place. UM, try and get the make sure that the federal agencies are respective of UM people that want to go out and use firearms and those lands and hunt those lands, fish those lands, hike those lands. Involved in that stuff. Yeah, we take a very active role in it because that's one of the criticisms I have of the conservation space in generals. I feel like you have, you know, a lot of groups who focus very heavily on hunting rights, and you have groups that focus heavy on habitat and wildlife. I feel like in a lot of cases, I think that those two things should be melded together a little bit better too, as a holistic package. It's why I'm at the Turkey Federation. And to be honest with you, when I looked and I worked with a lot of different conservation groups out there, and there's a lot of really good ones. But I agree with you. I think it takes both habitat management and it takes people using that landscape, carrying about it, and being those future conservationists to really get the full picture. We can't pull people out of the equation. You just can't. We're part of the ecosystem, We're part of the influence on that landscape. And um I want there always to be segments and a big chunk of our population that really understands what's going on in those landscapes and advocates for wise management and also realize that our wildlife are renewable resources. We don't have to I mean, most of these populations, they have high turnover and and hunting can be compensatory. It replaces other types of mortality out there. And I just as soon have people use that that food source it's out there and have it us and value it as a way to get part of their protein and what they like to enjoy and be connected to that landscape and understand it on the federal level, like in d C. What are some of the what are some of the changes you've seen going on in d C. Do you do you find that people is it like, Uh, you're enjoying. UM, a lot of people who sort of instinctively understand the concerns you have. Is that landscape changing a little bit? Is it harder to explain your mission? Um? It depends. I see there's glimmer as of hope. I mean we have in the House. We have UM Congressman Westerman, who is a forester and he's really been the lead on a lot of this forest initiative. So it's been helpful to be able to work with him and his staff because he's a trained forester, or he gets it and he's willing to work with leadership and and and move forward. Good regulations, UM, good changes that are going to think help move us forward. There isn't necessarily I will say, Washington, d C. Since I've been working in it, it's got more contentious, more polarized. It's tough with some of the big issues our country is facing right now, a lot of the issues on conservation and some of the challenges we have. Do you wind up getting positions and polarization where people are talking, Um, they're not talking about ways that they can work together to achieve getting there, but they're taking positions and whenever that happens, where it's all or nothing or we don't this is off the table, we can't even talk about it. That doesn't lead us on the path of really great decision making. But it takes people sitting around the table, and by it has to come about with bipartisan support. It has to be by Camber. Can't be just a Senate, can't be just a house. It has to be both in order to get it into law. So it's it's tough, and we have people, more and more people in Congress who have not I mean, we're as a population in general, and Congress represents that population. We are now several generations off the farm and ranch. By and large, fewer and fewer people are living in those rural environments, living off the land, and so their direct knowledge and understanding of those landscapes is impacted by that. Yeah, I always tell people, it's really easy to understand how detached these folks are from some of these outdoor situations. All you gotta do is go walk around the tunnels in d C. Or at those those folks working on the hill don't even get to go outside. Yeah, it's and you know, and you can't blame them. It's not that they don't want to know, they just don't know. So some of the most effective things you can do sometimes they're getting getting people out to see stuff in the field, to actually do tours of active management, to see that, so that they're not hearing it from people that saying, oh my gosh, this timber cut was just devastating. Look at looks terrible. Go out and look at a forest that was hasn't been thin, look at one that has been thin, look at one that that see an area that's been burned over, and see some of the degradation that occurs from that forest fire as opposed to a timber cut um and and have that real life knowledge so that when they're talking about these issues they can visualize that it makes more sense to them. Yeah, I think that you're also asking I mean, you're kind of asking a lot of people to understand all the complexities and nuance that are involved in landscape management where there's not a lot of hard and fast rule to live by. I think that, you know, we have a cabin up in Southeast Alaska and they're, um, there's a very legitimate argument, and I and I feel this way personally where um, I think we're cutting too much old growth timber. So but that's a very different thing where you're talking about these coastal like coastal rainforest areas that have five and six hundred year old trees that you're not gonna like. It's not that you're not gonna go back that. So it's like, how could I say, oh, I don't want them, I want to slow down, Curtail. I'd love to see the end of old girls timber harvest on public lands in southeast Alaska. But how can I then turn around and say in northern Michigan, Um, we need to be catton Because people are like, well, how could both those things be true? And it's like, because it's just we live. It's a complicated planet. It is complicated, and it gets to accessibility, It gets to what those those species are, It gets to how quickly it regenerates, what those soil types are, and what's already happened, and there is you know, And that's the thing that we talk in generalities when we it, we try and simplify the system for discussion sake, and in that simplification you lose some of the nuance with I think it became logging is bad. People love absolutes, right, It's like, well, tell me what the problem is, loggat it? What's next? And isn't that as a biologist, You're like, well, actually, there's a myriad of problems. I'm like, well, I don't have a time for that. Yeah, that anti logging campaign you know that we all grew up with. It must have been like the eighties. I'm guessing right, that must have been when the spotted owl. It's the spotted owl late eighties, early nine, early nineties and think the way. But yeah, I mean it took me a while into adulthood to sort of have my own personal you know, enlightenment about logging to be like, oh, yeah, it's not always bad, because that was just pounded into my head through whatever channels. My parents never told me that logging was bad, but the marketing of that, you know, you got into my head. Well. And I mean Smoke of the Bears another one of those campaigns that's been highly successful, to the point where people don't like prescribe fire that much because they have fire is bad. She wouldn't do that. It seems like a straightforward fellow. He's like a straight shooter old smoky. Okay, you had mentioned that you wanted to discuss personal goals for mentoring a new hunter. Well, I think we should all have personal goals, so I'll look at all you don't want to tell us about your personal goals. So, uh well, I mean, we have a new pledge going on with our corporate sponsors right now, trying to get every one of our members to make a personal commit method. They at least mentor one new hunter every year, and so, and you know, we we asked him to sign a pledge form. We asked him to report back on that pledge form with us. You're already good, all right, Spencer? Not this year yet? Last year yet? Yeah? I don't know about last year either. How about the year before? Yes? Good? Possibly last year definitely the year before, Yes, And that wasn't just because you met your wife or something. Now and taking an old college room mate the first time, that's good stuff. I'd like to I'd like to brag that last year I did it as well. My neighbor took him out hunting first time. Yeah, tearing it up on the pledge. We need to give him a retroactive pledge. There you go, well, it's an actual sheet. It's an actual sheet. We asked him to sign it, um write their name down on it. We kicked it off at our annual convention this year, and we are trying to get every one of our members to do that because that's what's gonna take. I mean, when you look at the demographics of hunters in this country, we're going to see a pretty start start decline with the baby boomers as they start to age out of hunting. And if we don't start getting other folks to replace that. And everybody loves to do the kids programs, and we're one of them. We have a really robust Jake's program. We've done it for years. You love it. But those kids aren't going to grow up fast enough to replace the baby boomers. We've got to get those adult hunters out there. We've got to get the twentiesomthing's that either weren't exposed to it or or didn't do it enough to make it part of their lifestyle. We've got to get them to feel welcome and that's something that they want to do and enjoy the lifestyle and and think of themselves as hunters. There's gonna be somebody listening, probably more than probably ten percent. Maybe I don't know. A bunch of people listening, they're gonna say that ain't true. We're not losing any hunters. Show me one person that can say there's less hunters where I hunt now than there was ten years ago, which is a really good interesting point. You can't. You can't flip it about it. You can't. You can't at all. It's like, oh, yeah, right, hunt used be guys everywhere. Now I go there and no one's around. It's just Turkey's gobblin every which way. I did want to run it into one guy in Colorado. It's been a few years now, this is maybe five seven years ago, but he did say that he noticed it because they hunted very dense forest and he felt like there was there's less camps along this road, this forest Vist road everybody used to camp and then he felt like a lot of success was due to more guys in the woods back in the day, moving more animals around, and now they didn't have that, there was less success, and he did complain about having less people out there. But that's interesting. That being said, I wonder sometimes if it's not a Western thing right, we hunt big western open vast landscapes. We can see a lot more so we see more people. Well, plus more people are people that the people that are are hunting are more inclined. There's a greater likelihood that they are hunting multiple states and traveling around. That's that's true too. Like use, habits change, and then you have a lot of states that aren't seeing declines you have, you know, then you go to these states, so you know, you say, it's like Michigan, Pennsylvania and you're seeing declines that you're not experiencing whelming. That's true. There's changing, I mean, and it has changed over time, but overall the licensed number of licensed hunters as a whole is declining through the federal surveys. Do you find it more like maybe where you guys are at in the southeast, Um, yeah, I think the Eastern United States is seeing it faster than the Western United States. Um. And and it varies by state. Some states are seeing nice. You know, part of it is populations of those states also, you know, I happen to be from a state. In terms of Michigan that we lost overall population, we lost almost two million people during the ecademic downturn. What really, Yeah, so the one from ten years ago, Michigan came out of that with fewer citizens. It did a lot of fewer and so as a result of that, you lost hunters as part of that. Also, so where they go sun Belt all all over, they're like, dude, we're in the rust belt, this place called the sun Belt, and you have other states that are seeing population gains and with that, um changing demographics in those particular states, and and sometimes um with it, you're seeing increasing hunters and sometimes you're seeing a decrease in hunters. So it's you know, it changes around the country. But overall, the total number of hunters and the age of hunters is getting older every single year, which means you've got no bottom of the population of hunters coming into the scenario. Go on with your point, you're gonna make a point of the people are gonna, well, no, that was it. They're just gonna say, how can that? How can that be? I though, you're gonna extend that to what, like the perspective of why in the world. No, I mean, we've explored why in the world would you ever even suggest a desire to have more hunters like that? Makes no sense, right, Why would you want more people out screwing up your hunt, which is also legitimate thing to say, Oh yeah, we're our own worst enemy when it comes to that, Yeah we don't. I mean, we're all guilty of it. Not in my spot, you don't, especially coming out of from a turkey hunter. Turkey huntings where you gets shot well, and we've all been there where you're out, you go out, you set up that morning, you've got that perfect place, and then there's somebody else calling. You're like, darn, yeah, we hunted some public Animasouri last spring, Mienani did. And when you heard a gobble, instead of like wanting a gobble gobbler to keep gobbling, you heard a gobble, and you're like, please shut up, please shut up, please shut up, no matter what. Pretty soon it's like your car door on some ridge and then like the races on. Let's right, so, but it is I mean, if we've got a window of time here that is pretty short that we've got to replace those baby boomers, which are the biggest bubble of licensed hunters in the country right now, to participate their parents. Hunting participation was so high for their parents, that's right. So as much as it hurts, go out and mentor somebody that's right, and don't pick else. Don't pick anybody that's less than twenty years of age. I think. I think that is a point that shouldn't be glossed over. Is is there is no set age for a first time hunter. No, there's not. And you know, it's the cool part of it is you can take people out that might have hunted their entire life, who have wanted to go hunting, or maybe they don't even recognize they wanted to go hunting, but they go out and enjoy it and it opens up a whole new world for him. But you know, the other part of it is stick with them. It takes more than one hunting experience. You know, it's intimidating to try and figure out what kind of equipment you need and how it's fun to go out with somebody who's all done all the research and scoping and loans your their equipment, takes you out there and and calls in a bird or whatever you're hunting species is, and you get a chance to go out and be part of it. It's another to then go out and be self sufficient, so you gotta stick with them to be there, that mentor that tells them, Okay, you want to go out and get a firearm, here's here are some recommendations. I'll go with you if you want to go talk to the person at the at the gun store, or here's here's what I recommend for some basic equipment. Or you know, here's so and so that also hunts. Maybe you want to link up with them, because I'm gonna be gone next month, but maybe you'd like to go hunt with them, because we know it takes social that social network. You guys have it because you you live it every day. But for other folks, as we become more mobile as a popular nation, trying to link up with other people in our communities who share that same lifestyle, it's we're not we don't join clubs anymore. We don't join conservation clubs and some of that stuff. So and and I, you know, I hope they do. I hope I'll give a plug for National Wild Turkey Federation. You know, if you moved to a new community, or if you're just are part of a community and you want to meet people that hunter and can introduce you to it, go join the local chapter of the Nationale Turkey Federation. That's the hot tip I've been giving people all because we we when we do live shows. We here, we talked to a bunch of people and um, it's like, all right, what's the best tip for getting involved? Like a hunted two years and haven't seen anything yet, And I'm like, I didn't do this because everyone's different, Like I just grew up like very immersed in it. I was like, what I would do now that I realize how things work is I would get involved volunteering with the conservation group in your area. Because you're gonna get in there and start doing stuff and people are gonna be feel sorry for you. They're gonna make You're gonna make friends and and get involved in activities through social interactions and through organized events. That's the other part of it. And you get those people a little drunk and you'd be like and pretty soon they'll say something like, I haven't been in there myself, but I have a good feeling that if you tried that spot those kind of conversations and fella might that's the sentence you're looking for. Well, on the other part of this helps motivate you to get out there, you know, when you're you're socializing talking about it, somebody has you over for you know, for venice and dinner afterwards, you're you're more inclined as you get immersed in the lifestyle to remember how much you enjoy it and make that effort to get out doing some rough math in my head, I feel like you need to have them mentor could you say in one person every year at least one, Yeah, because I think that it takes about four to have one stick. Just looking at my own set of experiences, You're probably right. Everyone. I've never had someone be like I wish I hadn't done that. There are always liked it was really like, very informative and really kind of change my perspective on things. Glad I did it. But that doesn't mean that they're going to then start, you know, go off on their own and starts. We've been you know, one of the things that we've been doing on these we've tried to move away from one and done um events that's what we call them. Where you come in, you take them out for a hunt, and then you're done. That's it. Where we try and work with other conservation organizations, so we we teach them the life skills. They learn how to hunt safely, get hunter safety, move through, go out on a hunt, try several different hunts. What we ideally would like to do is move people through that system so then they can become mentors to other folks. But it takes having them have exposure and meeting different people and having those different experiences multiple times to really start thinking themselves as hunters and getting the confidence to go out on their own or take somebody else out who hasn't hunted before. So you can't let those assumptions lie either. Like if you are successful to the point of having a bird or a buck on the ground, you can't just be like, cool, well take that to the processor. You're successful. Good job. Show him what to do with the meat too, I think he is a big deal, Like you gotta and then check their freeze or make sure they're using it. If not, yell at him, yes, exactly, humiliate them in front of their freaks. Well, and humiliate him. Got got final thoughts about a wedge in there, kel, I know I've been wearing a hat and a briar patch. Well, you know he had a tiny little head and only certain hats fit me, so I gotta stick with him while I got good. When you get one of the works, you stay and you stand by it. Yeah. Yeah, no man, I think we covered a lot of a lot of good stuff. And thanks for coming out and my pleasure, love love hearing all the good info. What's a lifetime membership cost? At the Old Turkey Federation, lifetime membership you can an annual membership is thirty five dollars, sponsorship is to fifty and then we stack memberships so you can continue to be lifetime memberships. Um, not a one lump some lifetime membership thing. No, I mean you can do that, but typically what we do is we like to get people back every single year and continue with someone buying and once then going that's right, because we want to have we want you to be active with us. I mean that's one of the things with National Wild Turkey Federation. We have so we have a pretty high percentage of folks that not only are members but are volunteers. So they come in, they put in and learn to hunt workshops, they go out there and do the Women in the Outdoors events, they do the Jake's events, they do the Willins events, they go out and do habitat work or they work at the capitol in their respective states and so, and that is what's special about it because those people are really engaged in Yeah, I can't just like cut a check and then go vanish for the rest of my well, you can, but really rather have you come back and be more invested. The strangest thing you've heard of? A turkey eat the strangest thing, because they mean they eat anything, They eat just about anything. It's the strangest or contender. I don't know that I can think of something that's really strange. What have you seen that on the lookout for that? Well, in Colonel Tom Kelly's a tenth Legion, he talks about watching them out eating crayfish from underwater. That's interesting, Oh that is that's true. That's true. I've heard a number of people bring that up. I've seen deer eat fish. Now that's pretty weird. Waiting and eating ale wives the footage of a deer eating baby birds out of a nest, which really changes how you feel about deer. That's true. I mean watching a watching a turkey swallow a snake is whether interesting. After the snakes, Yeah, they get really excited they do. Yeah, I've seen footage of that where a turkey standing out the field beating a snake to death, whipping it back and forth, trying to kill it and eventually gets it, yeah, and then gulping it down. Concluders, you know, you should you know what your concluders should be. You should have a concluder question where you say, what's the strangest way you've ever heard of a turkey dying? Unless you got something else. I got something else. You can take that one. But no, I'm always just so impressed. Man. We have a lot of guests on this show, and uh, Becky, you rarely say I don't know. Today I think you said I don't know to one of these questions, like oh yeah, what happens there. It's just very like I don't know. She's been Yeah. I'm just always so impressed because now knowing your background, because last time, the last podcast, I wish I knew the number off the top of my head. You should listen to that one too. But we really got your wory of you know, how you came career path and all your experiences and then it just it just so thoroughly comes out when we're chit chatting because like, yeah, the fact I've been around in the mill a couple of times, but that before finish your point a little more solid, beaus I might have misunderstood it. No, my own point is just that I'm impressed. Man, Like I said, she has the humility. You're saying that you appreciate that she has the humility to say I don't know, or that she rarely doesn't know. I didn't say that about the humility. That's a great um uh characteristic of people. I like to think that I can say that often too. I say it often, you know that I don't know, But she doesn't say it often, which is so impressive, you know, because she has a lot of yes, yes. But I took note of when she did and felt uh proud and happy to know where that she would be like, I don't know. It's great for us Turkey geeks because we just it around here and just ask weird Turkey questions and she's like, yeah, yeah, let me tell you about this that. And you know, that's where you run up against the trouble talking to biologists is I'm interested in like what's the weirdest, right, and they're kind of biologists is more like, well, we're kind of a little more focused on sort of like what happens, happened, what normally happens, So I appreciate it. My concluder is that before we started recording, Becky and I were talking about the National Wild Turkey Federation Convention that happens in Nashville every week around Valentine's Day, that's right, And she was telling me what a good time it is, and I was saying that it must be right, but you didn't stay along. I think we should go back next year. We would love to have you back, maybe do a little something. Call and I were talking about doing a little uh, like a seminar called drumsticks and dies, something along those lines, as you can make them real good and and be like, tell me this ain't good. You know, that's what we call that booth something like that, this ain't good. But yeah, she just tell me what a party it is and what a good time, how people like take family vacations to be there. And I was just I was noticing that a lot of other conservation organizations there annual conventions aren't so hot anymore, and they might be losing participation where it seems like the Turkey Convention is just like we hear everybody's going there and it's not. People love it. Over fifty six thousand people or there last year. Yeah, that's where I met Will Primos real quick. Yeah, I mean, I mean it's so fun because you can you can we have secretaries of UM Agriculture, Secretary of Interior was there, in chief of the Forest Service and rcs and they're they're they're having dinner with people and you can have conversations with our members with those folks and then who's who of Turkey calling and all the rest of it. And so between the trades, know the events, the talks, the seminars. You you get a wide variety and it's fun. It's like a big family reunion. Is it Nashville this year? Yeah, it's in Nashville. Well, we used to move it around. UM. Last time we had we moved out in Nashville as when the glor wound up getting flooded and had to be closed. So it's probably about eight years ago, seventy years ago, and we had it in Atlanta, much smaller participation, but we have gotten so large that there are very few facilities that we can really host it. Um, well, don't move that thing to Las Vegas. Man, Well that's what I said. That and our membership. You know, historically our membership was more um heavier to the eastern United States, so we're within driving distance for a lot of our membership, so they can bring the whole family down and makes it really nice. Yeah, I have to go down and hang out. Please do around that floor and just pick up every single pot call and go you and everybody else. We should get a big stack thighs and drumsticks and do something fun. I'm gonna mend our title. It's gonna be called Turkey drumsticks, not just for driving intense stakes. So that would be great, man, if we had, if we were solicited from listeners a whole bunch of thighs and drumsticks, then went down and just had a taco truck. M we just gave out, don't talk too much about is gonna be held held to it now? Said if would be, We'd love to have you come down, Spencer, I don't have any concluders. Go ahead. Uh. The Turkey recovery stories like one of the coolest conservation stories there is. You know one time they said there was like thirty thousand that were left. And when people think of like imperiled species today like an I'm ranging t hang or an elephant, there's hundreds of thousands of those left and people think of how few there are. And so when you think about thirty thousand turkeys and how they're seven million today, that's crazy. So it's thank you to Becky, the NWTF and the agencies and all the people before you, because it's a really cool animal that you have brought back to this status that they're all over the continent. People think there's a trap of people thinking that things only get worse. That's right. And then when you learn about the story of American wildlife, like, oh, you can make the world better. You can. I used to give a talk when as a state director that these are the golden years, the great years, because you know, we spent a hundred years restoring a lot of these wildlife populations that just weren't around. But the Turkey Federation and then the Wild Turkey is a great success story. And it's it's nice because it's confidence boost to people that you really can with working together and effort, we can we can restore these species. We can enjoy them today and have them tomorrow. That's pretty cool. Yeah, good old American elbow Greece man uh in a in a nice incentive program. It is because you can go out and interact with these birds and hunt them and eat them. And that makes people be like, I'm in that's right, let's do it. And they're they're they're gorgeous. I mean, as I said, I probably told you guys this before my daughter when she was Lawi's used to calm glowbirds because they glow. You know, you bring back those toms and they're still they just glow in the iridescence and the feathers and everything else. Pretty spectacular. Yeah. One that you guys should work on is there's nothing that looks worse than a wet turkey. That's true. You have to think some way to when you get a wet turkey to make them look nice again, because then you walk up on a wet turkey, it's not like walking up it's not like walking up on a dry turkey. You're right, it's not not a glow bird anymore. Yeah, to tell the person normally a spectacular all right, Well, thank you very much, thank you people can find you guys obviously if you type in National Wild Turkey Federation, I mean they dot org. Yeah, and you're looking to get into turkey hunting man, go there and read because there is a just a I'm not going to use the expletitive term there, but just a lot of information. Like I still go there. I'm like, how could I not have read that article? And you can go there for good, um all like vocalizations and stuff, yep, all kinds of information and look up a local chapter. Get involved, get to know some of the people in your community that already are active and participate with the National Wild Turkey Federation. They're great people and we'd love to have new members join us. And get in your bids for the carbon carbon spider used the used left handed hoy carbon spider. Make your let us know your top bid and then we'll send the boat to whoever pledges the highest dollar amount to the National Wild Turkey Federation. And thank you Becky for coming on. Thank you m