00:00:00 Speaker 1: All right, everybody right up top here before anything happens. I owe everyone listening a huge thank you. A couple episodes ago, we released an episode called Begging and Pleading re Ducts. In that episode announced the release of our latest book title, The Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, in which I had gone on the pot, in which the podcast episode that is, I had implored you to make the purchase not only for your own benefit, but because I have a lifelong dream of having one of my titles hit the New York Times bestseller list, and you guys knocked it out of the park. The mea Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival debut as number four on the New York Times Bestseller List. So thank you to everyone who went out and bought a book. It's still for sale, it's still a good book, but you did it. Thank you. This is Me Eater Podcast coming in you shirtless, severely bog bitten, in my case, underwear listening podcast. You Can't Predict Anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Nor where you stand with on X. All right, we're joined. I hate to say this, people, I hate to say it, but we're joined remotely. It's like the COVID deah COVID. We're joined remotely by Clay Newcomb Newcombe h and Mark back Forty, Kenyon Houdy Clay. How you doing, man, I'm doing good, doing very good. Mark? Are you well? Arrested right now? Finally, for the first time about a month, I do feel arrested. It's been a been a busy spell here. So the last two days I got to sleep in and that like, uh, you being like, um, you know, kind of a like a white tailed rut fanatical kind of guy. Um, there's there's still raging around though, So why are you resting now? Yeah, So it's kind of just I'm not completely resting. I'm gonna start hunting again tomorrow. But I needed to take a couple of days because the last thirty I've hunted of the last thirty days, so starting October that was when it all got crazy. So I got to see my wife and kids a little bit, get a little sleep, and then uh, and then yeah, I'll get back after it. I need a good job like a job like you got, Mark, I'm work. I'm still getting the regular working too. Don't worry, it's just after dark. It's amazing what one day of sleeping in will do for you after you've been pounding the daylight hunting. I've got an equation. I think one morning of sleeping in makes up for ten days of hunting. It's amazing what one little break can do. Yeah, I agree, Yeah, that's true. You come back pretty reagged and recovered pretty quick, and it almost makes you think like you could build a system out of it, and it's worth it. I have. I used to think that I would feel really guilty if I wasn't hunting every single possible moment I could, But I think that you get that eventual point of diminishing returns where you you go ten days straight and you've just lost focus and you've lost some edge. If you get that one morning, it's totally worth sacrificing four hours of hunting to get the much you know, much more effective seven more days after that. I think, Uh. The thing that messes with me about it is all there. There's a lot of really compelling research um that sleeping is real, real good for you. And that there's possible links. And I usually hate when people say there's possible links between you know this and that. But um, early onset dimension stuff man from not sleeping enough. M hm, like you need to do it. And I used to not do it much, and when I did, I was mostly kind of like sleeping, like like a lot of times they kind of hung over and whatnot. Now I try to really prioritize, uh, getting enough sleep. Do you know what your magic number is? A lot of people kind of feel like they find that sweets about how much they need every night. Yeah, but I'm embarrassed to say eight hours. Dude, you don't need about that eight hours. Did you guys catch this news this news item ott of Wyoming? In Wyoming, they have are you Are you guys similar with the one shot the one shot Antelope Hunt? Yeah, I know that. I'm an alumni, an alum of the one shot so for eighty years in Lander, Wyoming, the governor of So for eighty years in a row. I think it's been like what sixteen governors or something have been involved in this. Uh. They host this antelop punt and you have these like it's very uh. In describing it. It can sound a little compromised, but it's like this. You have these teams, right, and the governor hosts it. It raises money for some habitat improvement work. UM. The governor hostet and all these groups come out and you make these little teams, and the teams go out to hunt antelope and even get special game commission analope tags. Right, the teams come out to hunt antelope and uh, you gotta you can only shoot once. Okay, if you shoot more than once, you can't, You're you're disqualified. So everybody has to shoot one time and get an antelope. And so if you're group of three people can go out and fire three shots one eat, one shot for each of you and get an antelope any basically throughout the whole day. There's like a timing element to it. But basically if you can accomplish that and all three people get one with one shot, you have a very good chance of of winning. And they do it in conjunction with UM a local tribe, and there's all these like banquets and everything. I did this a couple of years ago where I was invited by UH so, I was invited by Colorado's governor, and I went with a former Special Forces soldier who's on our team. He said he likes to get ringers. M So it's me a Special Forces guy and him and we went out and did this thing. Now, at that time, there was starting to be a lot of like heat, a lot of heat on the one shot Annelope Hunt Club because it was dudes only, bros only, and had been dudes only for eighty years. And like usually I do all kinds of things with just guys that just happens to be just guys, but I usually would shy away from anything meant to be just guys. Like the minute someone says it's just guys, all of a sudden, it gives me a creepy feeling. Like anything like just for men or like a men's club or a men's group, I'm like, home, why you mean? Like if I wanted to bring my super good buddy who's a woman, she can't come. It's against the rule. It just strikes me as so weird, right, I'm surprised that was still the case. Well, with a lot of old stuff that's been going on a long time, Like I honestly, honestly didn't put too much thought into it because there's so much like culturally, there's so many old institutions that are dudes only that it's almost like it's not like it's stand it's beginning to stand out. But for a long time it didn't like stand out because my old man, uh like growing up mild man belonged to well, he's big at he liked to go to drink at the VFW after you ice fished, and that wasn't men only, but at that time it was men only. And then he belonged to a thing called the Wise Men, like a philanthropic group that raised money for the y, and you had to be a dude to be a wise man. And then his church group was for dudes only, like his particular group within the church was a dude only group. Like if a woman wanted to go, they would like not let her go. So it was very it's like very to me, right or wrong, very normal, appearing, normal feeling to have like these gender exclusive things. I didn't pay much attention to it, but when I went, I was just the buzz. There's buzz around two issues. There's buzz around that these people that participated got these dedicated tags which chapped the asses of a lot of people around town who are like, I have to draw the permit, but like if people go to this, they like get permits, and that that was irritating to something And was this like a unit that was tough to draw otherwise and it would have been but a good unit, a good union, and it would have been invitation only sum you have to apply. But I was there like I was invited. So the governor of Wyoming always has a team. The governor Colorado always has a team. This has always been like the thing. The new governor of Colorado apparently the first guy and forever like the new governor of Colorado his uh I gathered that his husband is um big anti hunter. Yeah, so this dude isn't going and he broke the whole tradition of it being like the governor of Wyoming and the governor of Colorado hunting together. I was there like like I had met Wyoming's This gets a little complicated. I was at a concert. I was at an event one time where Wyoming's governor Matt Mead in Colorado, those governor John Hick and Looper who are who are friendly and there on the other sides of the political spectrum, but they're friendly in respect, you know, respectful to one another. I met them both, like, we had a cocktail one time at of an event where they were being honored for their collaborative work around sage grouse habitat Okay. So they were being honored as this like Democrat and Republican who set their differences aside and came together around sage grouse work and habitat work. So I shot the ship with both of them, and afterward I was invited to go down and do this deal. So here I get one of these tags, and I don't do ship to get it. I just get it, okay. So you someone could look and say, oh, that's not fair. But then the Wyoming Game Commission um they put like apparently they put value on this sort of like collaborative conservation thing that has been going on for eighty years and fuels a lot of economic activity in the area and brings different politicians and figures together to in this like collaborative mood of doing habitat work. So right, like everything, like everything, there's two sides of the story. But the women thing was just becoming an issue, and they started like somehow they got other commission tags to start, like a woman's antalope hunt. So now you've created Now they had like two of these things at this point. Now this new story just came out that now for the first time since nine women will be allowed to compete in the twenty one lander one shot antelope hunt. So they combined them, they didn't. I don't know if they officially combined them or if they got competitive, you know, remember like when I don't know if it's like a situation where remember how the UM girl Scouts and boy Scouts gotten a little piss and match because the boy scouts were gonna let girls into the boy Scouts and that piste off the girl scouts. I don't know. I don't know enough about what went on, but a lot of people are applauding this, even even like people who are participating the Another body of mine sent this article to me, and he had done the one shot UM and had a good time there. He was also a governor. He was like on a governor team. He had done the one shot and thought that this is a step in the right direction. So it's like a similar all women like you can have all women beyond a team or you can have you know, men women groups. And the way this thing works is you apply. So when I was there, like some there was like I think some a group of firefighters right had applied to come down and they were accepted into it. And like I said, a lot of banquets and elbow robin, what's the what's the prize? What do you get if you win this thing? Oh? I think that the Governor's I know, between the two governors, there's this statue, this little ship and statue of an antelope, and it lives at the governor's mansion and it swaps back and forth, and there's a lot of spirited uh, there's a lot of spirited you know, rivalry around who did it? So when I was on it, it went to it flew home with the Colorado governor. M hm, so say it again, I says, Colorado is not gonna have a team. Then this year I heard that the governor of Colorado, hick and Looper always took a lot of heat. You know, it could potentially take a lot of heat, and took some heat. And after hick and Looper had gotten involved in some things that uh, Hicky Looper had gotten involved in some gun control measures that were very unpopular with hunters and gun owners. And when I was there with uh, when I was there with him, that was an issue, and I thought it was um bold of him to go right, but he went and took it and tried to you know, and and like that collaborative spirit even though people being on different sides of the aisle on such an important issue. Um yeah he But yeah, now apparently the Colorado's governor won't go well. And just I say that some women tend to better long range shooters than men when it comes to like sitting on a bench. You know, if you were to like train man and a woman the same a lot of times, that woman would be a better shot. Have you heard that? I mean, I don't know why that wouldn't be true, But no, I don't. I don't know that. I don't know that I've heard that. You've heard that wouldn't kind of surprise me. I've heard that from a guy that that had a long range shooting school. He told me that. Yeah, I wanna Danielle Prewitt, who man her? Have you guys made Daniell's Um, have you guys made Daniell's Uh, whiskey butter sauce heart recipe just looking at it. But I haven't tried to ship man anyhow. She did though she did the I think she did the woman's one shot aloud. I gonna ask Danielle I should have I'm gonna see if Danielle and Karin our producer. I feel like they should apply and go down apply for the old boys one get a little team going go on down there. Yeah, she'd place up. Can you are you allowed to ever go back against Eve or is it a once in a lifetime opportunity? No? I was allowed. Weirdly, yeah you are, and there's all these stipulations to it, but you are. Um, and it's it works in various ways. But just for scheduling and other reasons, I was not able to go um. Someone tried. There was a because Hick and Looper, Uh, Hick and Loopers U in Colorado. You know, he's kind of a centrist, so he won the he went from he turned out as a governor in Colorado and just took a sentence. See he's a centrist Democrat, right, So he gets a lot of heat from the left and he gets a lot of heat from the right. Um, someone had done. Uh. There was a little bit of a hit piece out on Hick and Looper for have for um, a hit piece out on him for having participated in the one shot. Well did he do you know if he killed Nlop with one shot? I mean that's the main thing I think. Well, here's the thing. No, he did not. He did not. And I heard that back the other direction, if you Yeah, I had heard people say there was like grumblings, Um, I should ask him about this. There was grumblings some people either like I don't the guy doesn't do it, Like I don't. Think it's like an avid hunter. There's grumblings that he throws his shots. Yeah, yeah, that's I was going. It's like I went. But so the reason but the reason he got to return with the statue, with the to bring it back to his I think he had had the thing in the first place. It was like he has it in his office quite a lot, or had it in his office quite a lot. I think the reason he got to do it is because, like I said, he brought in some ringers, you know, And um, so I did. I got mine very I got one early in the morning and this former Green beret. He got one early in the morning. UM. And then Hick and Looper did not get one. UM. But then Governor mead the way it worked was like he can't fill he can't get all ringers. Like he gets a signed there's some weird tradition where he could to sign someone like and like like some person who's been involved for a long time gets as signed to him. And I think he can only get one ringer. You're tracking me. It's a strange institution. Oh, listen, listen, you don't. Yes, I had quite a good time. I had quite a good time. But yeah, and they you know, they're evolving with the times. Do you think is that is? This is this thing pretty well received by the people in Colorado? And I mean because it kind of it does kind of make people uncomfortable sometimes these even the governor tags and and I understand, Yeah, it's controversial. It's controversial for sure. I didn't like. I didn't. I'm guilty of having not known what it was until I was until I was invited, and I didn't give it. I didn't spend too much time on it. Um. When I got invited, I called Rourke Denver because Rurk Denver had who's a former Seal Rourke Denver had been brought down there by Governor Mead as as a ringer on that side, and he got you. You were recruited as a ringer though, Is that true? Well? Are you are you questioning the lot that? Are you saying that that wasn't Are you Are you trying to consulting to me? No? No, no, no no no. I just I mean, you know, you're like making a little dig I mean, I guess I'm just kind of like, you know, like an NBA draft. You know, it's like first round draft picks like that, dude's a ringer. You get into the second round and it's like, you know, he's good enough to play an NBA, but he's not. These references, these NBA references are gonna fall flat on Steve. He's not following you. I know, I know, I know that's not true because I just watched um the last dance M fascinating, dude. I now know everything about basketball. I know all about the field they play onsten that was a little dig clay and all I can say. All I can say is, let's just take a look at the facts. At daybreak at daybreak, I got a buck. Yeah, can I argue with that? The cold gray lighted on? Yeah, I'm with you. How far was the shot? How far was the shot? Too? Okay, one seventy six? Maybe if I remember digging back in the old memory bank. Mm hmm what like what dude, Phil, can you cut him off? Yeah? Clay is getting little old. It's like wow, man, for he like half quarantined. And then I gotta have like, all right, so that's a great that's a great shot. Man. Too late, buddy, too late? Uh? Yeah, this is this is this is coming from a guy who lives in a state you can't see more than fifty yards in any direction. Yeah, like a long shot for me is like a you know, twenty two yard traditional archery shot. So I uh, I for the first time in quite a while missed a big game animal with a rifle this year. And now I'm not saying that all my hits are great hits, because that's definitely not true. But just to like flat out um to flat out miss really shook me up. Man. You know, I thought you guys did. Uh. Your description of all the factors that went into that miss was pretty compelling, though, I mean, you know, the the length of the hair, you know, the you know, there were a couple there were two factors I think that were causing you to maybe shoot a little bit high. That had to do with the with the gun itself. And so anyway, I appreciated the in depth look into the miss and I didn't want to. I didn't really want to bring that up. But you know, you're Clay's referring to a previous episode called the Miss and the Return. Um, Clay, what is the name of the now like super famous bear that that that has roamed into your home state there? Yeah, Bruno. It's a bear named Bruno. You're familiar with the legacy of Pedals the bear, right, yes, Yeah, in New Jersey was missing the front leg, would walk on two legs all over all over the place. Yeah, he had a real penchant free and bird seed. I'm talking about pedals. Clay is going to tell us the saga of Bruno the Bear in a minute. Here. It was like now and then a bear really makes the news, and right now Bruno is in the spotlight. But Pedals the bear had some sort of deformity um where it would walk around a fair bit on its behind legs. Yeah, you know, we had a to put a pause on pedals for a minute. When we were floating a river up in Alaska this year looking for moose. We had a sow grizzly who was irritated with us, stand up on her back feet and just swinging her pause wildly and agitation, but a hundred yards away. Have you ever seen that? I never have? Yeah, like shadow boxing, like like shadow like swiping her paws, like just all worked up and stood there for a remarkably long time. M hmm. And then later kind of around the next bend, kind of like half charged of raft, all worked up so pebbles and petals would get around on his back feet and he got real famous around New Jersey. Um, and it was very popular with like New Jersey cat ladies and whatnot. So then some dude New Jersey had a bear hunting season and some dude knowingly or unknowingly, I don't know what, shoots petals and New Jersey has this kind of awful practice, had this maybe Yeah, the governor New Jersey, if you if you live there, like, don't vote for that dude ever. Again. The Governor New Jersey sort of ran on an anti bear hunting platform, like a plank in his platform was to be anti bear hunting. Yeah, just a joke of a position, and you know, contradicting his own state phishing game agency. So he Uh, they had this unsavory practice which is like where you had to go to these check stations when you're bear hunting, and they would allow like like open to the public, so people could go down and like get riled up about. So if a hunter goes out legally kills a bear and is trying to you know, follow the letter of the law and bring the bear into a check station, you gotta go in there and deal with hecklers. You know. It would be like if if planned parenthood, Like you could come into the lobby if you didn't like what they had going on in there and standing a lot, Like how would that go over with people just asking for trouble? So yeah, Pedals everybody had a ship fit. There was even a newspaper that ran an obituary on Pedals and um, I read that he was assassinated. Wow, you know there's there's some new stuff with that. Steve. You probably you may have seen it. We we ran an article in it about it. But he's so it's the guy's name is Phil Murphy, and he is who's the guy named Phil Murphy? Phil Murphy? Sorry, yeah, Governor of New Jersey's name is Phil Murphy, and he has vowed that in one there will be no bear season in New Jersey and on state land. Right, that's right, But you can still hunt on private land, which quite a bit of bear hunting in New Jersey does take place on private lands. Hasn't totally shut it down, but you know, obviously all the game officials are trying to find ways to manage this large population of bears, which is it's a super dense population of bears and people. So I mean, it just you know, I mean we're preaching to the choir talking about it here, but I mean it just makes common sense. It just makes rational sense from every single perspective that that hunters would manage that bear population. But uh, yeah, it's a it's a sticky situation. Does new do you guys know someone could even look real quick, does New Jersey have the have have they gotten the right to hunting fish? Uh? Constitutional amendment? I don't know that one. We'll find that out in a second, So start telling us about Bruno the Bear, who's now like the latest Internet Darling. Yeah, so it kind of here here's the timeline, Steve, and here here is what we believe has happened. Some of some of this is like very documentable, some of it is speculation. But so Bruno the bear they believe came out of northern Wisconsin. And I've talked to multiple people about this that are in the know. I've talked to the Arkansas bar biologist, Missouri bar biologist, and another guy named Darryl Radajack and who's a biologist who's kind of covered the whole story of Bruno the Bear. But basically, in as I understanding, northern Wisconsin would be where most of the bared density, you know, high bared density areas are Southern Wisconsin would be like farm ground in in southern Wisconsin. They started noticing this bear traveling through urban areas and agricultural areas, and it was enough of of oddity that people in southern Wisconsin started saying, Hey, there's a bear in an odd place. Okay, that bear gained some recognition on he's wearing a collar. The bear to this day has no tracking collar. The bear he does not Okay, the bear. Let me just give you the general overview and then we can talk about the details. The bear traveled from what they believe northern Wisconsin into southern Wisconsin, into Iowa, crossed, swam the Mississippi River into Illinois state. In Illinois for some time, swam the Mississippi River again. All this is very I mean, people videoed him doing this. Came back into Iowa, and then in early July ended up in Missouri. Traveled, traveled south in Missouri, basically got himself cornered into a very populated area north of St. Louis, where the bear would had no way out other than the across major interstate highways. The Missouri Department of Conservation sends their bear team in. They capture the bear, sedate the bear, and take the bear to southern Missouri where they have a a population of bears and good bear habitat. So they, you know, the Missouri Department of Conservation, they handled this bear just like they would have any other, you know, nuisance bears. I'm trying to take the perspective of the listener here, as a listener to this story, what is it without a distinguishing markings. I just assumed it had a collar on, because how in the hell else would they know? Like, what is it doing that? People are like, Oh, there he is, that's him. Okay. I asked the exact same question to Darryl Raderjack and he said that the bear has an uncanny desire to walk down roads, to walk through crop fields, and basically to stay extremely visible and to be undeterred by humans. Man, I'm serious. There are videos with forty fifty people standing relatively close to this bear, like following it, and it's a four to five year old male. They think, so it's I mean, it's a good sized male. It's not a young male, which is odd because usually a dispersing male would be a young one. That's what's so odd about this is this is an adult male. The only time it's been marked was when the Missouri guys got it. They put in they put ear tags in it that are distinguishable. Okay, Can I can I add? Can I add another thing in here too? That, um the has to do with this, the Wisconsin component of this. Real quick. We've had Dr Carl Malcolm on the show many times when Carl is a bear researcher. Came early in his career, he was a bear researcher and did a lot of work on looking at these bears that were coming out of northern Wisconsin um into southern Wisconsin and how successful they were. He had this thing about this animal he named the Wisconsin supersow that put off, put off and raised to one pounds two litters of five cubs mhm. In such a mild climate in southern Wisconsin that when she went to hibernate, she would just lay down under a tree mhm. And if you look at bear, I think it's helping with this story. If you look at like bear populations and clay, you know this way better me you can speak to this for people that it's like it's like bear black bear populations in the country aren't aren't like intuitive and it's patchy. You know. If you look at like moose, right, you look and be like, Okay, there's a bunch of moose across the north or whatever. Right with bears, there's like they're here and they're there, there's holes in between, and it might not make immediate sense to someone right like how could you have why do you have bears in Arkansas Missouri? But then north there could be holes in their distribution to the northeast, south, and west right, So if you don't mind speaking to that a little bit. So, the the natural range of the black bear in North America was would have been from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, from the boreal forest all the way down into Mexico with a small, a sizeable hole in the Great Plains. Okay, but all these populations would have been connected, you know, pre European settlement. And so now just with urban urbanization, fragmentation of wilderness just that has happened with civilization. We now just have these pockets of really quality bear habitat and it's it's relatively big. I mean, there there's surprisingly for such a large carnivore. There's a lot of black bears, and black bears are thriving. But what it does create is what they'd call in the biology world Alipatrick populations, meaning like isolated populations like for instance, like the Arkansas, Oklahoma, Southern Missouri bear population they would have said was an Alpatrick population. That population is not breeding with bears from East Tennessee, that that population is not breeding with bears from northern Wisconsin. But That's what's so crazy about this is that now we're seeing like a connection between these really vastly separated populations of bears. And so this bear ends up in Arkansas, I mean to to fit to kind of give the whole macro view. The bear started in northern Wisconsin and is today in Arkansas. And the question how many just linear. I think it's around a thousand miles. And so here here's the most interesting thing, Steve, is that there's with talking to all these biologists. I just asked him, like, what do you why do you think this bear did this? And there was some interesting responses like a bear disperses for two reasons, to find new territory because he's being pushed out of his territory, or to find mate. To find a mate, or to find a food source. And essentially, Darryl said, if this bear was looking for a mate, he wouldn't have had to go all the way to Arkansas. He could have stopped in southern Missouri. Like he passed through lots of like pretty good bear areas, so he clearly wasn't looking for mate. He wasn't looking for food because he passed through all kinds of great food sources, and he's an older male, so he wasn't dispersing just to find new territory, or he would have just found new territory in southern Wisconsin. The only thing that makes any sense from a biological perspective is what they call the homing instinct on these bears, which they relocate these bears all the time when they get in nuisance trouble, you know, so they'll they'll bearrel be getting in trouble, you know, digging into somebody's trash can. They'll capture that bear. They'll drive it thirty forty miles away, turn it loose, and the next day the barrel be there eating out of that trash can. Again. There's so many incredible stories up to you know, guys taking bears a hundred and fifty miles away and that bear ended up back. This bear acted like he was coming home. That's that's the only like biological driver. The way he was just headed due south. There was nothing I'm looking at it now like if you remove any zigzagging around, he covered between seven and eight hundred miles as the crow flies. Yeah, yeah, hey. In in that whole time, Steve, he never got into any nuisance trouble, that that that thing walked on roads. It chose populated areas rather than like walking in like river drainages. So Tomyron means the Arkansas Bear Coordinator. He told me that to his knowledge, the bear never got a single nuisance call, Like, it didn't go on people's porches. It ate natural food. It kept its nose out of the out of the you know, out of the bad stuff. That's incredible. Okay, now here's here's the coolest part. So if the bear was coming home, why did he like, how did he get up there? And there's a theory. And you're gonna like this theory, Steve, it's it's it's it's crazy. There is a theory that this bear got trapped in a grain barge on the Mississippi River in Arkansas and he was transported up the Mississippi River, got out into Wisconsin and has been on a journey back home. I love that's well, you know what, there's a story you guys grew up reading about Paul Revere, right yeah, one by land too, by sea. You know the British are coming. Yeah. Later historians really started, uh poke some holes into the story of Paul Revere and I don't know the details of it, but it seems like there's this this idea that it was a little more a little more fiction than fact, right, or like an embellished legend, and some politicians I can't remember who it was, said I love Paul Revere, whether he wrote or not. Yeah, so that I like that theory true or not, I'm sticking with that ship. That's that's what I'm buying. That's what I'm buying. Story. Hey this uh so here, here's the the social odd thing about this is that this is the first time that something like this has been documented on social media. There's a Facebook page with two hundred and thirty thousand followers that's called keep Bruno Safe. I'm pretty sure that's the name of Yeah, I Keep Bruno Safe. And so Mayron means Arkansas Bear Coordinator Large carnivore coordinator received the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission when they found that bear was here, received an incredible amount of pressure to collar that bear so that he would then be protected by law in Arkansas because you cannot shoot a collared bear in Arkansas the world. But back back up hold on a secondary Bruno is coming from a state that has bear seasons. Yes, his journey began in a bear season state, right, Yeah, but then he spent some time in a couple of states with no bear season and got famous. Correct, that's right, people start falling in love with him. And then now in his southern journey, he has now re entered a bear hunting state, that's right. And now people are like, I don't care about all the bears that live where he used to live, and I didn't care about him when he lived there, and I don't care about the bears that live in Arkansas normally anyway, I don't want anyone to hurt that bear because I know about that one. That's right, Okay, so go on, Well, I was proud of the Game and Fishes response here is Myron. Myron said that bear is no different than any other bear that we have in this state, and we're not going to call her him. I mean, they just they just said we're not going to call her that bear because they don't call her male bears. The only reason they call her bears and expend resources to do salve studies, den studies and whatnot, and so the bear right now, they think they know where it's at supposedly a hunter took a photo of this bear in a den cavity tree and it is just outside of one of the bear zones um in Arkansas. But but it's a deer hunter. Yeah, deer hunters. Yeah, yeah, so it's not it's not even in a bear zone right now where the bears out. It is not in a ari zone as I understand it. But hey, you'll like this, Steve. So all this happened in the summer, and then the bear came into Arkansas and September, okay, the Arkansas bear season opens in September. My mother, my sweet mother, calls me on the phone and says, Clay, don't kill Bruno. My mom's like my pr manager, and she's like, whatever you do, don't kill Bruno. And I said, okay, mom, got it. I won't do it because she doesn't want you to take the heat or she doesn't want oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. She she she could foresee you know, me killing this famous bear. Which there is a thing though, man, where there are dudes out there, like like for there are dudes out there who would be like I want that bear, And there are dudes out there which would imagine most people I hang out with will be like, I want anything to do with that bear. That seems like trouble. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, here's what happened to is that, so they were posting all over social media, like these daily updates on this bear, like you could have tracked, you could have known where this bear was any given day of the year. Some day, like when the bear came into Arkansas, somebody got online, a hunter and made a comment and said, wow, I've got two hundred thousand guides telling me exactly where a bear is, you see. And so after that the thing shut down on the daily updates exactly where. That's that. That's what I heard. That's what that's what. That's what one of the biologists told me. I mean, like they kind of went quiet. They were like, oh wow, we're giving out too much information. There is a there is a bird I'm not gonna name. I'm not gonna name the species. There is a non native There is a very small population of a non native bird that lives in one state in America. Um and they live in one specific mountain range in one state in America. And you're allowed to hunt for this bird non native. It is exceedingly difficult to get one. They live in very inhospitable, very high elevation, cliffy terrain, and they're hard to find. And we took an interest in seen about going and checking this whole situation out. And I realized that when birders see the bird, they they log it's where they saw it. And I remember thinking that that was not that great of an idea to do that over the line. In a similar situation, something we've covered in the past is in the state of Montana, the state has gotten I can't remember in the in what timeline twenty four requests for radio collar data off game animals, and they have a little choice about to comply what's coming from who hunters? You can just get that information. Apparently they don't. It has through through whatever legal structure they work under. It's public information because it's a state project. So if the state puts a collar on a elk, a bull elk, apparently someone can come and say, I would like to see the collar data off that elk, and they don't have I think they don't have a way in which they can say screw you. M hm. That's surprising. Yeah, I was in Fairbanks one time during moose season, and I was talking to a biologist and she was telling me she's got collars on a handful of bulls that live right around the edges of Fairbanks and she could have any minute tell you where those bulls are standing. M hm, and doesn't want to do that. And maybe they have different rules up there. But it was an interesting conundrum. You gotta be pretty like, you gotta be pretty pathetic if that's your hunt plan. Hey, this was this was public knowledge, so I'm not like divulging a secret. I saw it on social media. But our buddy Mike Chamberlain, the Turkey dock, he uh you know, he's radio collar and all these uh gobblers and places I think in Alabama. He at one time gave information to um. Well he tells the story on this podcast. Okay, okay, Well there's no okay, got it, No need for me to like, they couldn't kill it even when they had the information. They were studying how he was I can't remember the name of that episode, U Mike, guess Mike Chamberlain. They were studying how turkeys respond to various stimuli and how turkeys respond to hunting pressure. They had his bird no one could kill, and he would tell people where it is, just to watch what it would do. And then but here's they had this one bird no one could get and some dude gets in a fight with his wife and storms off, gets in his car and drives down. And the second he enters the um, the second he enters like the game management area, wildlife management area of some sort, pull is over like at the entrance gate, walks over a hill, sits down against a tree, does a hand clock, and kills the turkey. The name of that episode was Gobble your ass off. If anyone wants to listen to it, Gobble your ass off. Yeah, so he sent all these stone cold killers after this turkey. You couldn't get him. And then some guy gets in a fight with his wife and storms off and a huff and gets it. I remember you asked, Mike if you knew what the fight was about between the husband and wife. So, so where does it stand right now with Bruno. He's alive, he's alive, he's he's denning in Arkansas, and uh, he's he's all okay. So that we had hoped, I'd hope that they had pulled a hair sample off the spar. If they had a hair sample, they could tell from d NA where the spare came from. And they didn't do it, and I'm it was unclear. It just wasn't protocol to pull a hair sample off a nuisance spare. And so they don't want to do anything out of the They don't want to do anything special. Yeah, and and so, but that would have told us because we have all this DNA data here in Arkansas. They got it in Wisconsin. But here's the kind of my last thought on this, Steve, is that you know, all the biologists said, like, this is really unusual, but bears are notorious, and large carnivores are notorious, notorious for these wild like travels. I mean, there's there's stories of mountain lions that started in the Dakota is getting hit by a car in Connecticut. Uh, there have been there've been gray wolves in northern Missouri. There's there was a linx that was seen or killed in Missouri. Like these these animals do these big wild migrations. And and the question I asked all the biologists was do you think this is more normal than we think? And because you know how many bears you know, there's eight hundred thousands of million bears in North America right now, probably you know, probably less than five hundred or radio collared that we can actually track, and we never would attract this except for social media. If this bear had just been a little bit different, we would know nothing about this bear. There just be a bear in northern Arkansas that it just we just thought was an Arkansas bear, you know, like this was just such an the bear. The reason the bear we know this is because of how visible he was. But maybe this happens more often than not and we don't know it. I'd put my money on that. Yeah. I think biologically, and in doing quite a bit of just looking at research projects and stuff, I think there's biology favors the odd bear that does something crazy, because you have these populations that pretty much all do the same thing, but there's always these outliers. And I think over like long long periods of time, sometimes that outlier is the one that survives because of maybe some catastrophe in the home range. Do you understand what I'm saying. So like, inside the mechanism of bear populations, there's the crazy uncle, wild hair, you know, bear that just leaves and does something crazy. Maybe he's not biologically successful, but maybe he is, and he is what passes on jeans to the next generation when all those back home got killed in some catastrophe, you know. So anyway, it's kind of like a broad view of bar biology. There seems to be a reward for doing crazy stuff. Sometimes not all the time. I think about that often. Um. An interesting example is how we love the fact that and celebrate the fact that sam and have fidelity to their natal spawning stream. Right, it's kind of amazing that, like a salmon could be born in some little stream and go out as a little fish to the length of your finger length to your pinky spent a few years out on the ocean traveling around, probably leave us international waters right and come back twenty pounds and go up and lay an egg right right where that sun bitches was born. But some don't, Some like screw up and go to the wrong stream and think about the ramifications of that like you always have. If everybody was spot on, you would never be able to as climates change and habitat changes, and forest fires burn and phill rivers full of soot, right, you'd never have the possibility of like expanding your range, but here you always have these freak outliers probing new spots to see, right, and that's got to be how things shift around. Another example, I think about the way the Polynesians, seafaring Polynesians were able to colonize these insane places, Like to find the Hawaiian Islands, people had to have just gone off and died and gone off and died. But for whatever reason, people would like make a boat and head off towards ship that you had no concrete idea, maybe from birds or cloud formations or whatever. Maybe you had a suspicion there his land, but all of a sudden, bam, like you just found Hawaii. Mhmm. Your family is loving so yeah, that ability to strike off is um, it's probably richly rewarded, yeah, or it's quickly cut off or you or you're just like one of the ones that get screwed. How many Polynesians didn't make it to Hawaii? I would you know? That's one of the questions I would most like to know is just probably just the awful heartbreaking stories of people that just didn't find land. Man. Mm hmm. Yeah, all right, Mark, We think about that whole bear story, Mark, I love it, and it's actually I've been following a somewhat similar bear story over there in Wyoming and the Teatimes. You know about Bear three, that whole thing that's that's a saw with four cubs that's been there for twenty four years, photographed all the time, and just recently she's been leaving the park and going into the suburbs around Jackson, and so there's all sorts of news around that worrying that she's going to get into trouble and this famous bear is gonna have issues. So yeah, she's just struggling with age. Maybe. I don't know. It's a weird thing. From everything I've seen and read like she's healthy, she's been happily in the park, and then just recently she's she's got into some human food sources for the first time. So I don't know. Mm hmm, Mark, update, everybody give give people a quick crash course in the Back forty project. Yeah, so the Back forty is the complete opposite of a thousand mile roaming bear, and that instead of large stretches of land, we're talking about one tiny postage stamp piece of ground in Michigan. The Back forty is a the little piece of property that we picked up about a year and a half ago, and the idea was to try to find a representative piece of private land that has been farmed and worked over the years and to see if we could take that and transform it into a wildlife paradise. Can we bring this thing back to life for all sorts of creditors and out of it not farm the guts it had been Oh yeah, historically it had been yes. So can we take something like that that kind of been burned to the ground and turn into a wildlife paradise for not just deer which sometimes folks like me or tempted to focus on just the big bucks. But could we do something that's that's that's good for dear good for turkeys and and everything else though too, birds and bees and squirrels and and all that kind of stuff and still have the good hunting. So that was the the question we set off to to try to at least get the beginnings of an answer in two years. So yeah, we started last last summer and we're wrapping it up this winter. So that's that's what we've been doing in the back forty acres. Yes, I can get a lot of comments about that. Why didn't y'all name at the back because it just sounds like like something sexual or something man. But like the back forty, it just it feels landish. It feels landish, like the back ford is that kind of ubiquitous term that people used for for like, yeah, that's my piece, you got twenty four bonus acres man. Yeah, yeah, you'd be like, I don't know, shot it out on the back forty there whatever. Yeah, So this is supposed to be kind of that stand in for everyone's a little back forty. People can follow like the we we chronicle. We chronicle the back forty story through a series ye available on YouTube called Back and Mark does a phenomenal job of of bringing viewers along, bringing viewers along on the journey of trying to do this. It's a really compelling story about like land management, because I mean people that like to hunting fish and you know, it's everybody's dream that you're gonna buy this little chunk of land and have your own you know, this little paradise. Like I think about it all the time. Uh, And so it's like what goes into that? What are the heartbreaks and work that goes into that, and you know, and eventually we're gonna hand uh hand off the keys of the gate. This isn't something that you know here at meat Eat here, We're not gonna like keep it, We're gonna give it away. But um, when Mark first started out, when I came out there, the first summer, Mark was like kind of depressed because you thought like like how daunting it was going to be because you couldn't find like you couldn't find you like, mature bucks on it. But then you got like a sweet buck the first year, and in this year it's like even better. Yeah, yeah, I mean, how much do you think is a freak? Like, like, how many so here's the place? How many big bucks did you have? Like big like big like mature, Dear, how many mature here do you see running around there? Now, we've had pictures of relatively consistent pictures of probably eight or nine different bucks that are you know, three four or older than that? Up from zero we had like there was one that was there a lot last year? Is that the one shot? The one I shot? Yeah? What do you think the age was that, dear? You shot Mark? That deer I shot last year was definitely four or older. He was fully mature. Yeah, he's yeah, crazy looking old buck. Yeah. Uh. Do you think it's a freak. Is it a freak that it worked, or do you think something happened that. Do you think something happened that made it that all of a sudden these deers start showing up? You know, I think it's a combination of factors. I think. I I'm calm that the changes we have made have absolutely helped, no doubt about it. They've helped. But I don't want to claim that it's on me, right, because there could have been these random things going on. We only have a two year sample size to look at, so it's just not it's not enough to draw really really hard conclusions. But you know, last year could have been an outlier potentially, right, maybe for some reason that I can't put a finger on. Last year's just really bad, But the previous five years before that maybe had been pretty good, and we just happened to start on the worst year or the flip side. Maybe last year is normal and this year our stuff helped, but then there was some randomness outside of our control that helped. You know, it's some combination of that. I still believe though, that the things we have done have made noticeable positive differences. Um you can't deny that. Just the way that we're seeing these deer use the property and and all sorts of wildlife use the property. Um, so that has been really encouraging. I probably couldn't have written it any better if I had control the world and I could say, all right, this is how it's going to pan out. I probably would have told it would be great if year one was pretty tough and then we see this wonderful transformation in year two it looks dramatically different and deer popping out all over the place and we kill a bunch. That's how I would have written it, and maybe we got a little lucky it turned out kind of close to that. Like, explain to people what kind of what are the main things that you did? Yeah, so, like here's a chunk of land, you want to fix it up? Yeah, walk people through like you know, the sort of X, Y and Z of how to sort of rehabilitate a chunk of ground. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways to go about something like this, but we had the somewhat unique circumstances of of just having a couple of years to try to do something, So we did have a shorter time frame in which we were looking at, how can we identify kind of quick turnaround possible projects that can make a noticeable difference quickly, um knowing though that they're still right the long term gain that that could and should and hopefully will be worked on by whomever takes it on next. Um. So that said, the way I would look at this, and the way we did look at this is try to identify, like, what are the missing pieces of the puzzle. And on any piece of ground, whether it's public land somewhere or your own piece that you're buying, you can look and see, like, what are the basic things that wildlife need to thrive here? And you know, for for most species dear especially right, they need high quality food. They need high quality cover so they feel secure and they can bed and and live safely. Uh. And then you know they need water. And if you look at any piece of property and look at how your piece fits into the larger picture, you can start to identify, Look, what's the missing piece here, what's the where's the water seeping out of the bucket and then try to plug that whole. That's a great place to start. So in the case of the back forty, you know, we had essentially the property has a big Uh what am I trying to say here? There's two very different habitat types in the property. There's these old fields that are old farm fields that have now kind of been left for two years to grow into whatever was there. So you have these old open fields and then you have this big swamp and some timber in the middle. And what we quickly identified was that deer and critters love that swamp. There's tons of security cover. Um, there's a lot of places they feel safe. There's natural browsing there. But these old fields, which are fifty the farm, left a lot to be desired. So fifty of our farm was hardly being used by deer, hardly being used by turkeys except for you know a little bit of starting around first thing in the morning, that kind of deal. Uh. There wasn't a lot going on for birds and and all these other things because it was mostly just an invasive monoculture of something called mayor's tail. See a thirty two acres of like a bean pole. Like if you were to look at a soybean field after the soybeans dried down. Anyone you know that lives in farm country, I think you can follow me here. Imagine a bean field that's dried down with no leaves and no beans on it, just as bean stalks. That's kind of what all these fields looked like. There was no reason that birds or bugs who want to hang out in there. Deer didn't feel safe in there, um, squirrels didn't want to be in there. So a lot of what we tried to do was transform those old fields. Uh. We did that in a couple of different ways, Steve. We did that by one trying to improve the cover out there and the diversity out there. So I didn't want this great, big, dry down bean field of of no food, no cover. So we we did a few things. We planted switch grass, which is a warm season grass. It provides a lot of cover for deer, great polting habitat for turkeys, great for all sorts of different game birds. Um, a grassy cover provides a year round visible, high cover. Animals are gonna feel safe out there. Now. We planted a blend of different pollinators, so wild flowers, certain grasses, and forbes that our bees are gonna like that, our butterflies are gonna like We planted them some milkweed out there, and they're great stuff for for butterflies and all these different bugs and small birds help pollinate everything else. That's important for everything, all the plant life. So we wanted to help out there. Uh. Something else we did was plant strips of sorghum, which is essentially a tall grass, really tall grass that looks kind of like corn. But it was just a way too quickly. This this goes back to the quick turnaround in our case. I needed to quickly find a way to take these big, wide open ten acre fields and make them feel much smaller, more compartmentalized. Again, most critters don't like to walk out into why don't you know, wide open spaces. They'd much rather be feeling tight to cover, tight to edge deer and turkeys and most of these animals really like to be near edges where they can go from a place where they can feed to quickly feeling like they're safe again. We didn't have a lot of that to start, so by planting these big strips and half circles of this thick cover, all of a sudden you had that We planted trees is another thing we did, doug Old Doug Durren came out to help me out and we put fifty some trees in the ground this summer. Um, that's more of a long term play. It's gonna be a while till those are, you know, as as big and as substantial as they could be, of course, but right there were again adding these different pockets of structure. Um. So really we're just trying to take this big, wide open sameness in turn into in a bunch of secure differentness. That's what animals want. And so that was a lot of what we did with the fields. Um. And you could right away see this fall, how much more comfortable, you know, in the case a deer season, we're focusing on deer. How much more comfortable these deer were coming out and moving and feeding in these pockets where they where they never would have last year. Um. So that was step one, UM, going to keep rolling through them. Yeah. Hey, can I say my favorite part of the back forty so far, just real quick, because when Doug dur and you were planting trees and the new guy came to help you, Doug during tells the guy to turn his hat around forward. Yeah. I was like, that was a good scene and it really um he did it a very surprisingly forceful yet loving way. And then the next scribes Doug well the very the very next scene the dude has his hat on backwards again, told him he couldn't work with his hat on backwards, and he fixed it. But then later there he used with his hat backwards hard? Do you believe I know this is true, so I don't really care what you say, But do you believe that dogs urine really is especially it's called buck Man juice, that it really is especially attractive to dear that there's something about dogs urine? You know? I used to I actually I'm going to contradict you here, Steve, because I used to believe that, and then I had him out last October and we had him split some around force and it did not help for ship. So really, yeah, because he's too far from home, that could be it. Maybe the Michigan deers aren't trained up on it like Wisconsin deer. Probably food source, different food source was he was eating different stuff and everything. So did he leave you the bottle of buck Man juice? No? I should ask for some you've seen the evidence, all right, the trail camp evidence. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And I and you know, I can't real if we talked about it here somewhere before. But studies have shown that human urine is just as effective as an attracting in scrapes as actual deer urine. That's proven. We've had a lot of guys right in that deer coming inspect their chew spit piles. When they're spitting chew off the tree stand. That stresses me out that they come in and they like that. Yeah, that's funny. One of our one of our cameraman does a little chewing and I kind of gave him the talking to and said, hey, man, I don't think we should be chewing in the tree stands spitting this all over the place. So if he had, if he's seen this research you found her or whatever these stories where he might have been able to prove me wrong, it was okay. You know the dear biologists, uh well general biologist but does does a lot of deer work. Jim Heffelfinger, he used to chew Levi Garrett and named his kids Levin Garrett. Dear like I have it on good authority that dear love Levi Garrett. All right, so continue on. The trees came from Doug During. He brought some pines. He brought some pines, and yes, that was cool. There's a little bit of the dug During legacy on the back forty, which you know is a nice is a nice little bit of of history to put in the place. There's so there's so many little memories and stories now attached to this piece of ground that it's nice to have Dug add his to that. So, yeah, we we put some white pines in. We put some cedars, We put some spruce again, different kinds of you know, coniferous trees that are going to provide structure and cover out there, right, deer gonna eventually bet around, These turkeys are gonna hang out around, their birds are gonna nest in them. And in the way the trees and the way we looked at it was that by playing these pockets the trees out in the wide open, you're gonna have kind of the effect like you might see in a lake where you drop a Christmas tree in the middle of a lake or sunk tree and all of a sudden fish congregate around it. Large mouth bass love that structure or cover inside of a water source. That's the same deal with deer. Another what do you guys call croppets clay man, crappy? You guys had some stupid word for it. No, man, that's when I yeah, I heard that about that. Go on. So anyways, Christmas tree out in the lake. Yes, we we've planted these pockets of Christmas trees or evergreen trees all around these old fields to again give animals a reason to come out into these fields, travel around and and you know, if you could imagine if you ever seen you ever been an urban flying across the country and they have the TV screen in the back of the um chair in front of you, and you can hit that and it will show a map of all the different flight paths from the various cities. That's the effect we wanted to create on a property like this. So instead of having just you know, Detroit, Texas and Washington, d C. I would rather have you know, eighteen different air ports on our property that these deer want to travel in between and across from. Super interesting. Man, that's an interesting way of looking at it. You make a little ship that he needs to go look at exactly. So we're gonna see that every year, as these pockets mature and the fields mature, you're gonna see that happen more and more often. Already this year we've we've seen deer hitting visiting those trees and and rubbing on them, scrape underneath them, so they're already starting to use it in that way. Once those trees fell out, we're gonna start to see does bedding in these pockets and then all of a sudden, bucks are need to check these pockets for doughs that may be ready to breed. So in a few years, it's it's going to be that airport effect for sure. This year we just started to see a little of it. I like that, I like that, look do you cover that? And uh, you cover that? And back forty Yeah, we we talked about it. I don't think I used that airport analogy in the actual video, but I don't necessarily need that exactly analogy. But it's it's a it's like when you already go away for a week and you come home, you kind of make the rounds to see, like who did annoying stuff to your stuff while you were gone? Like before I walk if it's summertime. Before I even go near my house, I go into my garden right and you look and you go look, and then eventually, like an hour later, I'm seeing if they put the pans back where I like the pans, and that my my my tongs are in the top drawer next to the stove, you know, like I just check everything. I got my little circuit. I love that idea with like habitat that a buck He's like, I'm gonna go see what's going on with the ladies. He's just got a lot of little spots. He's got them check out just one little brush patch and then he's off on the neighbor's property exactly. Hey, Mark, and I can I ask you a question, just an observation. So the aerial video, like the drone shots of the of the back forty, I was struck by how it's there didn't seem to be any real big blocks of timber that the sixty four acres was connected to. Did I miss some of that or or is that common? I mean it's kind of like being from the kind of whitetail habitat I'm used to, like Central Kansas, seems like it would be void of deer, but you know they're bedding in grass and there's hardly any trees there, so maybe that effect happening on me. But it seems like there's not any big timber close to that property, so I guess it's all relative when you say big um. There are some substantial blocks of timber that our property connects into north and south of us Um. So basically we're in the middle of a little bit of a watershed, and there's that swamp that runs through the middle of our property and then farm fields on the east and west, and that same pattern follows as you go north or south to the neighbors. But they still have those big chunks of timber in the middle that kind of coincide with that wet with those wet spots, and you see that a lot down here in egg Land where if it's good dry, relatively flat land, it's going to be farmed. But the plot the spots you do still have timber and good cover. That's because it couldn't farm it, and and so there's a there's a pretty good amount of that around here. So that's not a limiting factor though, because I mean a lot of with a small property. You know, you're always trying to evaluate the properties around it because those properties are like for sure going to affect your property. So on the back forty you're not you feel pretty good about the surrounding habitat. Yeah, so it's it's relative to a lot of places around here, it's really good. We have a lot more cover than most people do, um a lot more timber than most other places around here do. And that was a big part of why I picked this spot. I was really careful to think about exactly what you describe the neighborhood, because when you have a small piece you you don't control everything. You don't don't influence everything. These animals are all over the place, so you really want to pick a spot within a high quality general area because you're gonna be sharing. You know, those wildlife are gonna be passing through all your places. So it's great to be in the middle of really good stuff. And so that's that's what we have. We have a good neighborhood, high quality, relatively high quality habitat around us, and we're just able to kind of plug a gap in it and make it extra good in this in this part of it. So talk about the buck you found this year. You um, the way you hunt deer where are you hunt them? Which is kind of like a little bit different than wilderness type hunting is you often are very specific in particular where you're not hunting like deer, you're hunting a deer yep. And that's usually out of necessity now because well sessy, because you got you gotta you'll have a bunch of deer round, but you got one on your mind, and you tailor your activities for that one. Yeah. But but usually that's because I'm hunting in this case one small property. In the other places that hunt in Michigan, they're also pretty small properties, and I usually only have like one mature buck. So he ends up being the one deer I really want to take because he's the only one that meets that age criteria. That for me is what I want with you. So you know, you don't have like you're not you don't have ten to choose from. Yeah, So it was a little different on the back forty this year and that we had a bunch of relatively mature deer. So we had, like I said, eight or nine different bucks that are probably three and a half or older and your name. You always like to name them all. We have a buck we named here at my house called old Limpy. Olymp We got and uh, old Limpy last year had a bad front leg and oh, Olympi this year has a bad back leg. But no, no, my kids, it's Olympian. It's just Olympi. The limp moved, the limp moved, but it's him. Yes, we've got an old one eye. We got a one eyed buck out there. Um, he's a buck that was around last year too. He's the only one that for sure I can identify from last year to this year. So that was cool to see a hold over. Um there was a little droppy, just a little he's got a little drop time And when I first saw him, I was like, yeah, he's got a little drop he time. And so that just nat his name stuck. Um there was Usually these names are just kind of just labying, a labeling, a characteristic. So there's the sticker eight. There's a tight eight point. It has some stickers off of his base on one side. Um, there's a heavy eight, just a really heavy solid eight point. Sometimes you're very clever, right like last year. Last year there was a buck called the wide eight and guess what that buck looked like. Man, it's it's I used to I used to do the whole naming thing. It used to be a thing like I think when I when I was getting into hunting to this degree, I saw these other people doing it and I was like, Oh, that's like, that's the cool thing to do. And I started doing it from that perspective, and that kind of faded for me, and now it's simply just it's a practical thing to do. Because I see these deer over and over and over, and I have to talk about these deer over and over and over. It's really difficult. It would be very difficult for me to be on a podcast and say I saw that one eight pointer that's on the six acre property has got a patch on his neck. Man, G four, that's not quite this tall. So some keep it pretty simple. Um, so yeah, there's the stick or eate the good Uh oh god, I need to ask you why you can't get that one tron buck. But don't don't bring that up. What other names? Uh? Yes, I'm trying to think. What haven't I covered yet? There was a heavy eight, there was the sticker, ay there was droppy, there was all one eye, there was there's a funky side of buck that Tony Peterson, one of our mediator contributors, he was out there with me the summer and we're looking at trail camera pictures and there was a buck that has one really nice four point side and then the other side is that really funky, strange couple of forks and daggers coming off. So if you look at him from one side, he's real straight and normal. But if you were to get to know him a little bit more, you see he's very strange and a little bit unique. And so Tony thought that was it would be fitting to call him Spencer, after our mutual friend Spencer. So so there's Spencer, um, and I'm to thin who I'm forgetting here? Those are Those are the bucks I can remember off the top of my head. And when you but when you're hunting and you know, you know, you had a crew with you, so you're filming the hunt when you're hunting, and you can see the hunt on the back because it's like a cool, successful hunt. But were you tailoring it? Were you like trying to generalize it, or are you tailoring your activities for one of these or for all of these m HM. So in some places it would be for one of these. In this case, it was kind of for any one of these. We had to see which one of these deer or which which of these deer would spend the most time during hunting season, during the period we would actually hunting there. So as you know, coming into the season, I saw all these deer were there. I was looking at pictures of all these different deer using the property, and we can only hunt certain windows, right because that's when we're gonna be there hunting it and filming and everything like that. So it was a little bit of a waiting game and saying, Okay, these bucks are there right now, which of these bucks will be around here when we can start hunting them, and what can I learn about that? And so as the season started progressing, you would see there was you know, this buck is spending a lot of time in this corner, and these two bucks are hanging out in this bottom section, and so you start to have a little bit of a pattern related to one or two of these bucks. But once we started hunting, you had to kind of given the fact is so small, you simply don't have a lot of options. There's a few good spots that are probably gonna be where it's gonna happen. Yeah, it's not like you're like driving off to this end of the place. It's just like you can walk it off. Mark, how many truck cameras do you have up on that six acres? You know, I think we had ten. It's like a convenience store. It's it seems to me like on a property that small, it would be hard to I mean, to answer or to add to the question Steve's asking. It's like on that sixty acres. So there wasn't like a section that you were like, Okay, that buck is always there, that buck is always there. It was there you were hunting travel areas that any one of those bucks could come through. Now at any given time, it might have been a trend for one of those bucks to be showing up there. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. And so you know what happened is that eventually, um, as we started hunting, I noticed that that droptime buck was our most frequent visitor to the southern half of the farm. That's where he was spending a lot more time based on pictures and sightings of any deer that we saw. I saw him the most, and he was spending a lot of time down there, so he became the deer I thought was most likely that we'd have a chance at um. And I saw him the first time we hunted the farm all year, I saw him come out down there. And then the first night of my rut hunt out there in early November, I saw him and almost got a shot. Had him come in chasing a dough and in those fields, one of our little food plots there, and he came running around and several times stopped at about fifty five yards. I just didn't want I wasnt gonna take that kind of shot. And uh so after that, I said, Okay, this buck, the draftime buck, is hanging out in and around this betting area. We call it the honey hole. He's in here a lot. And if I spend enough time around this betting area and make sure that the wind's right so I'm not spooking dear. If I if I'm in this area with the right winds for enough days during the rut, He's gonna come through and and I'll be in the game at least so to oversimplify things. That was was my strategy when I actually started hunting, which was during the rut um, and you know, and eventually it kind of came together. I don't know, if we want to get into that pan out. Yeah. So two days after that encounter with him, this was in November nine, I think or eight um ninth I guess, I went and sat in that honey hole spot. So this is this patch of native prairie that we found last year. It's really unique. It's rare. There are not many spots that native prairie ecosystems still exists in southern Michigan. You recognize it right off and knew that it was gonna be like a producer. Yeah. That was what sold me on the farm. When I walked at the very first time. That was I walked it from a clockwise in a clockwise direction. So I started up in the panhandle at kind of eleven o'clock and then walked the outside edge all the way down to about eight o'clock. Eight or nine o'clock is when you get to the honey hole. And when I got there, I said, oh, this this has something special going on here with the grasses and the cedars just tremendous betting habitat for all all types of animals, but deer especially. UM. So this is actually the spot the first tree I prepped to hunt last summer ended up being the tree we killed that buck from this year. And we did a prescribed fire in there this summer to improve it in that starting summer in the spring, so we actually went in there and lit the place on fire, which is a cool thing. I'd never done that before. Um, It's amazing the power that fire has to naturally revive and restore an ecosystem. Basically, it burns all the extra detritus and and leaf cover and and dead material on top of the soil and and opens it all up for new growth, adds new nutrients to the soil. Um. Right, that that's what happens out on public lands out west when a fire comes through. It restores a lovitality to that to that area. And so that's what we try to do here. We had a special little rare prairie. Let's let's boost it, let's help it along, let's help it grow. So we remove some of these invasive autumolives and buckthorn trees in there too. So all that to say is that we we it was neat to make some change to this already pretty neat spot. See that come together hunt the first trey I ever thought we should hunt from on my last hunting trip on the back forty and have it come together where you know. That morning I got in around the edge of this and oh, an hour after daylight, spotted a buck way down the swamp beneath me, and pulled up my binos and it was that spencer buck was the funky side of deer, and you could just see he was cruising across the swamp. He wasn't with the doughe but he was. He was searching for a doll. Just you could see the way he was moving on a mission across the swamp. So that got me excited. And maybe ten minutes later I saw another flash of white down there. I pulled up my binoculars and I see a doll running across and then a big set of white times behind her and run. Soon after I could see the drop time, so I could see it was not was the drop buck that I've seen a few days before. So I'm watching watching, I see the dough squired out and maybe fifteen minutes later, here she comes again, and here comes the droptime buck again. So I was excited by that, but it was pretty far away. This is five yards away maybe, and on the neighbors, you know, off in the distance. I could there, You could just see him through the binoculars, so that I knew they were in my world, but I did not necessarily think they'd be on top of me anytime soon. Um, So fast forward forty five minutes when I saw a flashing movement right underneath me, about sixty seventy yards away, passing through the cedars. I wasn't expecting it necessarily to be one of those bucks, but I saw a nice set, a nice kind of profile view of of of antlers passing through the cedars, just like a flash. Really quick, I knew it was a buck that I wanted to get another look at at least though, So I grabbed my grunt tube, let out a couple of just deep grunts, and five seconds later, this deer comes popping back out from behind the seedar and instantly saw it was the draftime buck. And it's it's beautiful. It's so neat that we have a captured on film and I can relive that moment because just a really cool deer, and he came into the grunt, walked underneath one of these seeds, just ripped up a scrape dirt and leaves, like kicking twenty behind him. You can just see it thrown way back there. Yeah, he was fired up and made that scrape and then kind of walked across behind a big oak tree that's in there, and I couldn't get a shot, And it was there was a moment of significant tension where he was. If he continued on that route, he was going to hit where my wind was blowing. It was blowing r the edge and he was headed right for it. And so in my head, I'm thinking, all right, if he steps out from behind that oak tree, he's gonna be right. He's gonna be right in my wind, and it's gonna be either I'm gonna have a quick moment to get that shot or he's gonna blow out of there. So I was mentally preparing myself for that, and then just out of pure luck, he stopped, turned around and started to go back the way he came, but angled even closer to me. So he came back, came around the oak tree and walked right to the most perfect place for a shot something like that. Perfect. I stopped him with it a little map, it's a little sound, stopped him and uh, it's a pretty good grunt. When you went, when he went? When he went? Man? Did he? Um? Did he peg you? Or did he just stop? He stopped and looked right in our direction yet? But you know, I don't I guess I don't remember if he looked up or towards us. I'd have to go look at the video again, I don't remember, but either way, whatever, along. Yeah, I was a full draw and he had an air on him seconds later, so and he ran like he ran maybe fifty sixty yards and was down. Um, So that was it was super cool, like between that wide eight which is so cool lash. Yeah, that's great man, It was, it was. It was awesome. I mean, it's been a project that's been a ton of work and a lot of a lot of Last year felt like we were just beating her head against the wall, and I was I was surprised by how little um progress we were seeing. To see it change this year in pretty dramatic fashion. Just this really encouraging to me. And uh, and what you can do. And it wasn't like we did anything really crazy with with an insane budget. We we went. We didn't sink tons and tons and tons of money into the changes we made. We we use small equipment. We rented something for a day to plant the trees. Um, you know this is something that that I could have done, you know on my own. Maybe. Um, what I'm trying to say here is is not outside of the possibility for anyone else to do something similar. Um m hm. How how bad do you wish? Like like if you had that place, if all of a sudden we said, like, I know you wouldn't want to back out onto plan, But if also it was just yours for whatever reason, would that be like a favorite hunting spotty yours? Last week while we were hunting, I thought about this a lot, and even one of the cameraman I joked that maybe we should save up some money and whenever the new owners want to get rid of it, will buy it from Because yeah, is this place pretty far from where you live. Mark, It's clote relative the close it's within. You know, I could hunt it if I wanted, um on a frequent basis. There's so much potential. Like to see the difference we were able to make in one year. I could I could sit here for two hours talking to you about all the other projects I'd like to do if we had this for ten years, and how how much, how just how awesome it could be. It's it's I think what we've proved here was that you can make progress towards a goal like we had, and I think you can. I can confidently say like we made positive steps in the right direction in two years basically a year and a half. Um. But there's a lot lots more we could tackle if we had the time. And hopefully, you know, some days somebody will yeah. Well. One of the beautiful things about the project is it you're starting to, you know, helping create a blueprint. Not that you're you know, like like we're inventing anything here. It's like a thing that people do. We're just doing a version of it. We're creating a blueprint for how to come in and and maximize wildlife habitat, like you know, restore piece of property that has been You know that that the priority for that land was different. The priority for that land wasn't wildlife habitat. The priority that land was making food for people to eat, which is like noble and been great. But what can be done when you can take a little piece of ground and bring some you know, environmental stewardship and good conservation practices and and kind of watch that impact. And if you could do that, or people can do that in a lot of places all across the country and create like this extensive patchwork of pieces of ground like that with some protections on them into the future, it's good for everybody. Yeah, yeah, that's the truth. Are you are you want to talk about what's gonna happen with that place or should we hold off? Yeah? Yeah, I can talk about that, but I want to give a little prelude to that in in and that this project not only open my eyes from a habitat perspective, but it also opened my eyes from the perspective of how you can use and enjoy a place like this. Um, there's definitely a tendency, especially within like the hardcore white tail hunting world. Two look at a property. If you were to have access to a property, whether you own it or have lease or it's a hunt club or whatever. UM, there's there's often a tendency to be hyper sensitive to keeping it all to yourself or keeping it all to just you know, no extra impact, no extra people, because especially if you're trying to target mature deer or big deer or whatever. Um. One of the overarching principles for being able to have deer like that around and to be able to get a shot at deer like that is to keep those deer unaware of the fact that there's a bunch of hunters trying to kill him, so keep pressure low. So for a lot of years I have obsessed over the idea of you know, nobody else out in these property if you can control it, you know nobody else out there. I'm only going to go in there a few times and everything's just right, and I don't want to mess it up because if I do that, Buck is gonna be out of here. Um. And and so that was a little bit of a h that was like a lens that I looked at habitat management in hunting through for for many of my years leading up to this. But taking on this project, we decided that, hey, this isn't going to be a place that just Mark hunts, and this isn't gonna be about just Mark trying to kill a big buck. This is also going to be about sharing it with other people. So last year we invited um Uh, we invite a researcher out. We invite Doug during a come out and hunt. We invited my dad to come out and hunt. We invited uh Cal and a new hunter last winter to come out in hunt. This year, we brought my dad back again. UH. We brought the hunt winner out last week to come and spend some time out there. We brought another new hunter out there, and what I learned was two full number one. I learned that even on a small property like this, even in a state like Michigan where there are a lot of other hunters there's a lot of pressure on these deer, um, you can still share and have other people out there doing this these kinds of things and having a good time and still have quality hunting. We had way more people hunting this property than I ever would have thought we could have got away with and still killed some nice bucks. Um. So, from from that standpoint, that was eye opening and encouraging to me. But most importantly, I also was just reminded of how much more enjoyable hunting can be when you share it with people. A lot of my white tail hunting and a lot of other like really serious white tail hunters, you sometimes can get stuck in the solitary nature of it, and it's just like me trying to achieve my goal in my spot, in my way, and it's it's me waking up at three thirty in the morning and going out and hunting all day and I'm very mission focused or whatever you want to say. Um, there's a lot of folks like that, and it was a great reminder to me. And getting to share this place with other people and hunt with other people and and see them enjoy this place of just and this is a simple thing and it's obvious, but sometimes you gotta get smacked over the head with it, like how great that is. It was great to be able to take a new hunter out there and see him get a shot at his first buck, and the highs and lows and the excitement it was. It was amazing to get to take my dad out there, and I got the opportunity to spend time with my dad on the property last fall and this year come back again. We changed a bunch of things to try to make it, uh, you know, a better situation for him, and he actually got to kill his first deer with arch equipment ever, his biggest buck ever. Um, getting to see all that, the the joy I got out of spending time in the property with my dad and with Dan and with Dane hunt winter and last year, or those of the people, that is what I will probably remember even more than those nice bucks I shot. And And so I think, if I take anything away from this personally, that is actually been my greatest lesson from the back forty. Um, you can transform a property not only in habitat and wildlife use, but also in how we as humans enjoy it and enjoy it together. And that was that. That was the moral of the story for me. That's good, super good. So tell us real quick, what's gonna happen? Les's unless you don't want to get into it. Oh no, yeah, So that was that was my long wind up to answering your question. Um, So, as I just described, I think that we have both I personally and we as a company obviously see the value and sharing places like this and and using it as a tool as a as a as a as a place where we can't help others experience something like that. UM. One of the things that came about this year is that I invited a new hunter, Dan j Jo, out to the property to hunt with us. And I had met him last year at a q d M a field to fork event. Steve, I know you had those guys on the podcast. I think it was last summer. We're all out here together. UM. Basically, it's a mentorship program that that is is kind of been scaled across the country to help bring new hunters out there into the field, partner them with a mentor and spend a weekend teaching them how to do everything from shoot across bow to find deer and find deer sign and then actually how to gut a deer, process a deer, cook a deer, all these different things. So I met Dan at a program like that last year that I was mentoring at and I noticed in him that he, you know, I was really passionate, was excited about learning, but really struggled without a mentor. And we invited him back out this here. We had him come join us on the farm with Doug and helped plant trees and plant food plots and help to teach him along with all these different things and coming out of that. We just saw that man. This place, the Back forty, it it's a perfect place to facilitate that kind of learning experience, both in the off season and then actually in the season. He came out and hunted and and had a really awesome experience. And so we've been looking at ways to find, um, how can we scale that, How can we keep that kind of learning experience happening here. How can the back forty not just be a terrific launching pad for Dan, but could it be something like that for other people too? And what we have settled on and what we're gonna do is we are going to give away the Back forty to the organization formerly known as the Quality Deer Management Association, now it is the National Deer Association. We're gonna donate it to the National Deer Associate and so that they can continue using this place as a um as a as a learning tool, a place that they can bring folks out and show them um things like have the habitat management we've done, and show them how to set up a tree stand and how to find deer sign and how to improve native grasses and why deer like to use these pockets of evergreens and then eventually take them out there for these hunts and and have a great, high quality place to have a first deer hunt. I know from working with some friends that have that worked for the Quality Deer Management Association and set up these mentored hunts that oftentimes finding a place to bring these new hunters is your greatest challenge. A lot of times private landowners, um, they don't necessarily want to open up their ground to a bunch of new hunters in the middle of October. So that has been a struggle, and we thought, hey, let's let's help as much as we can there by providing a great place to do that in a great um essentially a living museum of of of learning opportunities here. That's what the back Ford it can be, and we're what we're hoping it will be. So the NDA will be taking on the property and using it to help other folks and teach other folks and and hopefully mentor a lot of people into the future. And that's at high level, that's our plan. Okay, tell people uh to close out, tell people how to go check out, and UH engage with back forty. Yes, So the best places go to the meat either YouTube channel and watched the show there. Season one came out last fall. Season two is being released right now every Sunday, I believe, Um, I can't run with time, but every Sunday a new episode is dropping through December. Um, so check that out. You're gonna get to see all the preseason work I've been talking about. You'll get to see my Dad's hunt, You'll get to see my hunt for the Droptime Buck. You'll even get to see the hunt where we take Dan the new hunter out and Dane the sweepstakes winner. Um. And then we're we're gonna be putting the some content also documenting what's gonna happen next year, these mentorship opportunities. We're gonna we're gonna create some stuff around that as well, so you'll be able to see all that at the meat eater dot com. We'll be sharing articles and podcasts about it as well. Mark. How many episodes of the back forty and season two are there going to be? There's six regular episodes, so there's there's two up. Well, by the time this comes out, there will be more, yeah, but yees. Six six episodes of the regular series and then some bonus content to come next year. All right, thanks a lot, Mark, Thank you again, Clay Newcomb Newcomb, thanks for joining them, Thanks for the X and Clay that. Thanks for the excellent um book report you did on Bruno the Bear. Bruno, I'm gonna be giving you fascinating Still give you a lot more assignments in the near future. You did original research. Sounds good, like like a like a like a like a hard hitting journalist. It's like watching sixty minutes watching you work. Man. You should have seen me on the phone. Man, I was giving them left and rights bam bam at those biologies back in the corner. Good stuff, man, nice a lot. All right, guys, thank you. Everybody. Go check out back forty. It's a great story. We're super proud of it. Enjoy