00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is Me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt 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 alright, chatter. We're gonna start right out with the with A with A with A segment, aren't you gonna say? I trust that Phil is going to put in the the jingle, the jingle the Continuing Adventures of Chester the Investor comes. That's it, Come on, and there's a there's a there's not an inside joke. There's a very obscure joke built into the intro for Chester the Investor. Yeah. I think that if you, if you, if you know what we're talking about, you should write in and explain what the joke is once you listen to it. Not you Chester? Yeah? All right? So yeah, where are we at? There is there a wall? Do you do you own a walleyeboat? Now? I do not own a Walleye boat. Um, Slowly but surely it is looking good. Eventually, eventually will be fishing. Steve and cracking a few cold ones. So since we last spoke, how is your how is your bitcoin investment? So Bitcoin right now is volatile, as my brother would say, it's you know, up and down. A lot of people are selling and buying and selling and buying, and it was down. They have weak constitutions, Yeah, they're they're not strong. You gotta stay strong in the bitcoin game. Um. But uh, it was down a while. Um kind of February, like late February bitcoin was down a little, but um, as of yesterday kind of rallied again and uh, and it's starting to go up. So earlier I was asking Chester about his thinking on this. Uh, if he as he does this thing to get the walleye boat, as he earns, the manipulates his bitcoin, not manipulates invests in bitcoin in order to get a walleye boat. I was asking him, does the initial investment get thrown in toward the boat. Yes, so so that money is committed to the walleye boat. Yes, But again, like I said, when I get there, I still will probably consult with you, you being included in that, um, just to make sure I'm at the right time. Yeah. I feel that if it's shot up and you got to a basic walleye boat. You might drag your feet and think you're going to get a sweeter walleye boat. Yeah. I mean over the long term of bitcoin, that would happen like you would wind up with like a walleye yacht. Yeah. I mean you look at the percentages, it's like return that anyone that's like, you know, if you've invested seven years ago or something like that in bitcoin, it's pretty darn Yeah. But do you want to wait seven years for that wallet boat? Yeah, dude, wal I might not even get around anymore. We got a fish. Now. They are saying that it may triple. Well, I read that to you this morning off CNN. Yeah, they're saying somebody's saying it. Now listen, let me tell you something here for uh. Sean Weaver wrote in a friend of ours he was listening to He was listening to a previous edition of Chester The Investor, and he wrote in to say this. An Econ professor of mine in college talked about the role of sentiment in markets and how it's an important part of a market trying to find equilibrium. There's an investing there's an investing strategy based around it around being a contrarian. The basic logic is the time to buy is when everyone thinks it's a horrible investment, and the time to sell is when everyone thinks it's great. Now here's when he has like a kind of weird dig on this show, like he takes a pop shot at like insults this show. Huh yeah, he says. He says, I got a good chuckle today because I can't help but think the Meat Eater podcast talking about bitcoin is a good signal to sell for contrarian investors, which is like us dig meaning like, if we know about it, it it must to be that the cats out of the bag. No, that's well, yes, that's what he means, but I would say that's not the case at all. I'm the only one sitting here who's invested in bitcoin. But I got jealous this morning and texted my wife to see if I could buy some bitcoin, and she said that ship is sailed. No, I don't think it has. I do not think it has, because, like I said, none of you guys in this room, as I'm aware of, are invested in bitcoin. So many people are skeptical, which is understandable because it's a lot of this stuff is right over my head and I don't even understand it. But luckily I have somebody to consult with that, you know, keeps me calm and keeps me in the game. Brother and uh, we just had a long conversation with him on the on the ride here about it, and uh, guy knows the stuff you can. You can ask him about anything, and you're you're saving up for a Lund. Doesn't have to be a Lund. But I like them both. They are nice boats. I like them. That eighteen footer that you run in Alaska. Get a little simple outboard tiller fish finder right next to mee just over seven thousand dollars for that whole with trailer, I think, so yeah, wow, I'm I was, I'm getting there. I was looking at him my line until until I found my boat. What's your child like? So we're gonna keep the segment going until you get the damn boat with the segment could last year's this show. Could let this segment and that fills jingle and everything. We might get years of material out of this investment. You know, if it triples this year, maybe uh maybe I can still keep some stuff in bitcoin and still get the boat. And then we'll change the segment and it will be a segment about your Walleye adventures. He'll come try that, can you? Can you put on the continuing Walleye Adventures of Chester into the into the We'll see homes. Yeah, continuing the continuing the continuing Walleye Adventures of Chester. The investor Mike and I have the first first idea for it. I'm coming down to New Mexico and we're gonna chase some New Mexico wall. Yeah, Mike, you were saying, this is the southernmost wall. I here in New Mexico, southernmost and in uh North America, as far as I know. What's your title again? What's my title? Can you tell us? You gotta keep secret. Let's just say I work in fisheries. He's a fisheries big wig, fisheries big wig that makes some more and bigger. Yeah, Michael's explaining that. Let's say one was in fisheries. You will find that the common feedback from the public is that they would what they would like more bigger fish. It's very it's really very simple. Here's anything to touch on quick before we get into everything else. We're supposed to be doing uh, first light, it's new Foundry bridges. The Foundry pants are out there, these sons of bitch and pants that it's been. But you're probably looking on jealously, very jealously. This I'm not joking. I'm trying to think out how to say that that people recognize. I'm telling the truth. It is the Foundry pants with the knee pads built into them, are I'm not shooting you, like, are the best hunting pants that I have ever ever had on my body. Ever, they haven't a kneepad in them. It's like a very lightweight, well integrated knepad. You can take it out to wash them, but it's in there so well. It's like it doesn't bother you hiking around you do not know what's there. But when you get out of your tent on your knees and the gravel or you're on your knees glass and or you're crawling up on something is such a game changer. And they got very like like a very durable blend of fabrics. But I've got I don't know, man, I've been wearing I'm wearing like a pair of all fall I've got well over sixty days into them. Um God, they're comfortable and they have side zippers. So if you get first lights zip on long John's and you've got the side zip around these pants, you can undo the side zip around the pants and through that little hole unzip your long John's and actually pull your long John's off like a magic trick. Have you seen me do this? You never have to drop your drawers. You don't even drop Yeah, you don't even drop your drawers. You unzip a zipper, reach in there and unzip another zipper like it's like a magic trick. Also, and you're standing here hold in your Long John's. Damn good pants like the just in terms of durability, comfort, pocket configuration, knee pads, side zipper fit, even the right amount of belt loops in the right places, like the best pants I have ever worn. Now, quick word about vass leaning dampons. A woman from Ashley, No, she's from. Her name is Ashley, She's from Austin. She wrote in to say it to have this to share about the Meteor Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival, which is available now at Amazon dot com. In there, we make a very spirited argument for using as your firestarter. You go find a friend who dips and get one of their used dip tins right chew ten and then you take cotton balls and rub vassilene into those cotton balls and pack that chew tin old the cotton full of vast Lane infused cotton balls. Because they make wonderful fire starters. It doubles as vast lane if you need, like you get chapped lips, a braided skin, um and t s A guys don't steal it from you because when you're toting around any kind of accelerant, like all those sort of fire starters from the sporting goods store, the t s A guys will take them from you and potentially find you. We gotta fine seven not not for a fire starter, but we had a seven thousand dollar fine from is a beutane fuel canstor my body that showed up in the security line with a loaded pistol that he didn't know he had in his bag had less of a fine than a jet bowl canister, which our lawyer got it knocked down to half. That how do you know you have a pistol in your bag that's loaded? I told, This is the feedback I provided for him. I said, I think the fine for having of trying to get on a plane with a loaded pistol you didn't know you had should be that you get shot with the pistol. Sounds right somewhere you can pick where, you pick where, but that's the fine as you get shot by it. And wasn't your fuel and check luggage like not? Yeah? So, uh, we're flying home from a trip and one of the one of you know, we just like checked all the gear and also one of our guys they paid them to come down security. So it goes down to security to the t s A dudes and they're like, hey, we found this fuel can in your bag and he's like, oh sorry, man, you know, just go ahead and throw it out, you know, definitely don't need it. Cool. And then some period of time goes by and all of a sudden, here's this big stack of paperwork with that fine. Right. Yeah, and my buddy that tried to bring his pistols loaded pistol line to the airplane, I think it was all said, and don't old a thousand dollars, right, and that was gonna go like in the cabin with him. He didn't lose his pistol and we lost our field can injustice Anyways, Astley from Austin writes in what got me on that? Oh yeah why you carry? Why? Why like bassline if you're traveling person. She was saying that, uh, she had this is interesting piece of feedback. She didn't have cotton balls, but she had tampons and vassilen and to start a fire. Took that tampon material kind of like crumpled it up, put vassilan on there, and she says it's a phenomenal fire starter. Think of that. Whatever works. Uh. We talked recently on the episode where a guy was saying that see a long time ago to talking about how people how cabella is a bass Pro shop, which is the same thing now and it is bought Sports's warehouse right, No, yeah, I didn't hear that. I heard at Yeah they did, that's it. Yeah, So like bass Pro bought Cabela's and that entity bought sports in his warehouse. So if you're like walking into a sporting good stores probably all by the same mugs. Um. We got to talk about when people sell like where's all that taxi durn you come from? Like you know you're going to a bass Pro or whatever. They sometimes had these massive dioramas of you know, he's sort of like stuffed menagerie's. And we're talking about the market of of when you get like an exceptional specimen of an animal, the market of selling it to to wind up in these things. How people can make that might be if if bitcoin doesn't work out for you, Chester, you might get that Walleye boat by shooting giant stuff and selling the sporting good stores. Well, I'll have to get out hunting and actually kill something I set in my game off. So this guy was saying that one of these the Cabella's offered his old man seventy grand for an l buino porcupine, And uh, I think that someone expressed even the idea that they weren't even buying it, even the existence of the porcupine, and he sent in and it's damn sure it looks like an albino porcupine to me. Or do you think Kevin Murphy cutest little porcupine I've ever seen? I've seen a few porcupins, my dogs have tangled and laws for the porkeypins. You ever seen an al buyo porcupine? Never heard of one cutest damn animal on the planet. Never heard that little guy. He's pretty cute, super cute. Here he is chewing on an antler. Now Seth is gonna report on this, which is this is an insane This is one of the most upsetting things I've looked at and forever. Yeah, it's it's it's like, I hate looking at it. I think that someone you know, what, do you want to put it on your Instagram so the people can go see for themselves? Yeah? Okay, so so you gotta you gotta, you gotta realize you're making the commitment here and you're gonna let people down. What do you mean if you don't do it? Yeah, I'll put it on my highlights where I put all the stuff. Put it on the main thing or not at all? Can't you do both? You should put it on yours because more people will see it, Okay, And I I have a certain certain aesthetic I keep with my Instagram. They explain that to me. Well, if you look at my Instagram, explain it's all high quality photos that are it's all fine art. Yeah, you don't want to put some hairy asked eyeball, dear, No, not unless I took a picture of it and fine art style. I'll put it on mind. Go ahead and tell everybody what's going on. It's it's one of the more upsetting things. I will have it. I guarant d amn t. I'm sending a note about this right now. Go ahead, everybody about It's a deer that has I believe it's pronounced corneal Dermoid's like yeah, So there was an individual that, uh or there was someone that saw this deer and reported that it was like the deer was circling, it was make going in circles. It had visible bleeding, lacked awareness of people around it, and had something on its eyes. It turned out to be this corneal dermoid. And what it is, it's like a abnormal growth of skin and hair follicles on areas where skin and hair follicles don't grow and just happened to grow over its cornea to gradually. Have you seen this mike to gradually where if you look at this picture, it's a buck and where you'd expect his eyeball to be like not as eye, but what's the part in the middle of your eyeball, your corna, that's the part that you say, like you have blue eyes. Whatever that's we're talking about, I think so, yeah, is hair, Yeah, gradually, gradually, gradually it grew into where he eventually became blind and he has a hairy Harry eyeball, a harry eyeball developmental glitch where the corny a tissue fails to form and it defaults the skin. If you get it, because the mug get it. Yeah, limbal dermoiden hair shafts over your eyeball. You people out there, Yeah, yeah, Oh, I wonder how like I wonder how often that happens or has happened before. Well, Karin included. Karin included, if you go down, there's a dude's eyeball who's got hair growing out. That book looks pretty young? Was that book? Born with included a fair a bunch of ex dreamly disturbing photos. Doesn't say if it was born with it or not. I'm interested in that, right, like if it if it's onset, wants the animals got some age to it, or if it's born with I would think it it's onset because there's no way a deer. I mean this. You can tell in this photo that the buck has antler growth, so it's probably least a year old. I don't think a deer that's a year could survive in the wild a whole year being blind. But that's just one eye, I said both eyes. I think the other thing it said it was both eyes. Didn't say it was both eyes yet. Yeah, even a blind horrible fund every now and then, that's true. You guts. Check out this deal with the person in the feeding the grizzly Barris, you know the story in Grand Seaton. Nope, So a bunch of people sent this into us. Some more like there's a neighborhoods, there's a there's a subdivision and it's called the Solitude Subdivision a Grand Tetown, Wyoming, Okay, And some neighbors report this lady for feeding grizzly bears. And you know that famous like there's that famous grizzly. A little bit, it's problematic that we have a famous grizzly, but like there's like like this three grizzly grizzly number three nine nine. She's like spend her whole life out now she hangs out in town and everybody's all worked up. This bear has all this offspring, and these offspring are all eaten in this lady's backyard. So they got to talk to her, be like, you're feeding bears. She's very excited about the fact that the bears are here. She explains that she has an aura that allows her to communicate with bears and that prevents her from being hurt by bears. And she's feeding many grizzlies in her yard grain soaked and molasses. But you are allowed to feed moose, so all she has to they're not prosecuting her because she says, I'm feeding moose. It's not my fault that all these grizzlies are in my yard. And while they're standing there, the agents that come visitor, they're staying there. There's five grizzlies eating off her back porch. But they're saying, that's not we gonna do because she's feeding moose. Difficult time prosecutor sounds like, sounds like they need to go ahead. Yet it sounds like that one guy who got killed in Alaska kind of um he wasn't feeding him, was a badass though Timothy treadwell, yeah, he don't camp anyone in this room. Why do they need to change the rule. They you shouldn't be allowed to feed anything yell, yeah, but that's the whole thing. In a a while, like what they're feeding their elk, feeding elk and deer feeding stations. I mean, they've created this weird problem. And I know cal has talked about this quite a bit. Is they At a time, you know, hunters wanted more game right in Wylming, like people wanted a big, healthy elk hirt and me too, write so people wanted a lot of elk, and having a lot of elk and wyloming as elsewhere would cause the enormous amount of strife with agricultural interests, right because where they gonna all go, So they live up in the mountains in the winter or in the summer, winter comes, they come down in the big riparian areas and there on cattle grazing lands. They're ingrained, they're they're on crop lands doing all kinds of damage. So at a time, people did this, you know calculus in their heads that were if we're gonna have herds of tens of thousands of elk in these areas, um, and we don't want to be a huge problem for landowners. We need to find something to do. And so they fell into the habit of feeding, making feeding grounds and to to support what some people claim is like a artificially high number of elk. They feed ungulates through the winter. The surrounding states don't, but they do, and they're staying true to it. What's finally drawing it into question now is like c w D transmission, where you got from hundreds of square miles. You have a magnet that sucks all those deer and elkin, and so they stand around in groups of thousands for the whole winter eating feed. So it's legal defeat. It's legal to feed. And this woman here is is taking advantage up with grizzlies, which is really weird. And then when they pointed out to whether it's dangerous, she accused the agents of being quote whimps. They cloned a blackfooted ferret, the first US and Dangers species, black footed ferret. They had a specimen um that died thirty years ago, and people are just getting into you know, people are starting to realize the potential around genetics, and they froze this ferret and the US So the US Fish and Wildlife Service is raising a black footed ferret in Fort Collins, Colorado that is a genetic copy of a ferret named Willa who died. Think of that. I think I like the name. I think Will is a cool name. But they'd be good name for a daughter. Actually was one of our plans if we had a girl. Ye, we're having a boy instead. What do you name that boy? I don't know yet. Cody Hunter. I don't think either of those. You're not gonna name a Cody or Hunter. Dude, everybody names their kids Cody and Hunter. No, but I think it's amazing to use, you know, technology like that to clone an animal that's that's gone, to try to bring some genetics back into the existing population. Yeah, it's like, but we we had a we had a if you go way back in our library, we had an episode called Cloning Mammoths. I think, Yeah, I remember with a with the ancient genetics you know, DNA specialists, and she kind of explained what they're really getting at, um some of the some of like the the ethical and practical limitations, because the real I think the thing everybody's aiming for is that you would, um that we would bring back the passenger pigeon, right ah, And people point out that what makes the animal okay? So pastor pigres are the things that were in flocks of millions, you know, and if you made one and had one, you could like put it in a cage and be like, that's a past your pigeons, Like is it do? I mean, like, is it really you know, does it qualify as a passenger pigeon? Like would you ever be able to bring that back? Right? But but I think in this situation with ferrets, what you're talking about is an existing population of endangered ferrets that there's active conservation work going on to try to bring them back on the landscape. Right. And then you have are you know, a ferret from not all that long ago, but that is very likely different or hold some genetic diversity that no longer exists in ferrets. And I don't know this for certain, but I could demand. I'm guessing it has to do with diversity. And and so you're not you're not really trying to you're not trying to take that one ferret and repopulate North America, you know, the planes with ferrets, you're trying to capture something that was essentially lost that could potentially ring genetic diversity back into those populations. Yeah, we've talked, we've we've covered this a little bit. For the blackfooted ferrets are what's called Lazarus or what's known as a Lazarus species, like Lazarus from was Lazarus in the Old Testament the New Testament I think, oh Man. Anyways, in the Bible, there's a fellow named Lazarus who comes back from the dead, and the blackfooted ferret is a Lazarus species. People thought at a time that we had we humans had wiped them off the face of the earth. And as the story goes, uh, one day a rancher and Matitzi Wyoming sees his dog carrying something unusual, and it was a black footed ferret, and they found the prairie dog colony that was supporting this black footed ferret and that in fact, they were not on right. And so from that, though right, you can imagine how narrow the potentially the genetic diversity of that species could have gotten. And you know, again I don't I don't know anything about faret conservation, but I can imagine from other things I know more about that being able to go back in time and and grab some genetic material from an individual that was you know, it's been gone for a long time now, and bringing that forward in order to incorporate you know, in the captive bringing or you know, even into the wild could really be of a lot of value. Yeah. Did I sound like I'm down on this? No, I'm super into it. Just that it's not just it's very different than saying like, oh, we're gonna bring back passenger pigeons, right, yeah, they're gone. If you know, if you had millions of specimens with you know, well preserved DNA, would you potentially clone each individual that you have out there and end up with millions of paste your pigeons and somehow maybe I'm right, not likely, but different than something that they're actively working on. Uh. When we talked about the passenger pigeon thing, it's interesting to get into this idea of what is the public's appetite. Like, let's say, because the last passenger pigeon to die I think died in or something. I know his name is Martha. I know it died in the Cincinnati Zoo, it would be weird, Like it's funny to think about that there was um that people knew it was the last one. This is it. Yeah, you could go to this zoo and they'd be like that right, there is the last passenger pigeon. When she dies, that species comes to an end. Maybe she died in one when you boys figure that out. So they're just sitting there. I just google the lazar a New Testament, New Testament, Thank you. Um. Anyways, they blink out right, and let's say you could uh, let's say you you were able to get them, make new ones, okay, and propagate them, and you had some plan where we're gonna be like no, no, no, we're gonna reintroduce and there will be flocks of millions of passenger pigeons that will descend onto your crop field. How does everybody feel about this? Fourteen? What did I say? Not that one? I was thinking like passed away September one, nine fourteen. Good job. Um. That would be an interesting test of public will because people don't be inconvenienced by wildlife generally. You know, it would be a hard sell for people. Some people. Some people will be like, I would like it from a hunting perspective, but I think you would probably encounter a fair bit of resistance if you were really going to do that. Yeah, and you may encounter some ecological drivers that would be hurdles. To it as well. I mean it's you know, the landscape things have probably changed quite a bit since they were really at their peak. And I you know, I've often heard over hunting cited as a reason for their demise, but you know that it was a different world and right the late eighteen hundreds when they were really starting to client. So who who knows if the ecological conditions still exists too, you know, would still exist to recover. I think the last big shoot I've read this sponge. I think the last big slaughter was around Alpina, Michigan. Interesting, was one of the last places where they really got on and shot, you know, right, hundreds of thousands or millions of them was in Michigan. And they would descend when trees were when mass producing trees were coming in. They would just descend and strip the trees. And people discussed, like so many landing on branches of trees at the trees, branches would be snapping. Geez, it's crazy. And I've also read that it was Some people point out that it was probably that those huge numbers were probably not hadn't always been that way, but it was like some perfect storm of decimation of other wildlife agricultural practices at the time, and maybe it made this sort of image that that's what it's like, or like that that's what it's supposed to be like, but in fact was a complete anomaly to have those explosive numbers of those Well, yeah, and that's part of what I mean, right it is think about eastern four you know that the timber harvests that happened through the ninete hundreds, like in Pennsylvania, you know, completely change those forests from was it white pine dominated seth anyway from from you know, coniferous forests. Oh, Kevin, that's really messing up the sound. No change those forests changed from coniferous forests the deciduous forest, just based on timber harvests that happened all across Pennsylvania. And then also consider what's you know, like what happened with chestnut, right, chestnut blake came in Chessnut were predominant species all up and down the East coast, and chestnut blake completely wiped him out. And so again I don't know anything about the ecology or natural history of passing your pinions, but you could imagine a situation where those you know, they played something like that that has complete change now played some key role in their ecology and it just wouldn't be around anymore. Yeah, that's why I think that the I think that the blackfooted ferret is a prime specimen for rehabilitation because you have we still have massive pray dog colonies that people spend a lot of money trying to control, but they control it with poison. Still it's weird, like as much as we hear about and the old that that that you know, during like the periods of predator annihilation in the late eighteen hunters and early that they were you know, indiscriminately poisoning carcasses to kill foxes, coyoes, wolves, whatever, mountain lions, bears to sort of like depopulate predators. Was all through poisoning campaigns. Um it's still used pray dogs. Like you go out and seed prairie dog colonies with poison pellets, and that's what's credited with killing off black footed ferrets is they're getting there they're eating poisoned prairie dogs. But it's interesting to think, like here, you have this surplus of food that's available if you can get these things on there, and then somehow prevent them from but then not use poison control which were then turned around and kill the black footed ferret. But I don't know if black footed farets ever are effective enough to like actually control pray dog populations, because when you read historical accounts like the entire great planes of the praye dog colony, Yeah, it's not like they were killing them off. Yeah, to be clear, way out of my depth. Oh no, you don't. You don't need to test, you don't need to be given expert testimony. But I'll tell you this that you guys brought up Pennsylvania. This is a good thing from Pennsylvania. We had an arborist. We had this squirrel guy on the episode was called the squirrel Doctors in he's a squirrel doctor um, like a PhD in squirrels um. And he talked a lot about how they're so good at not dying when they fall from trees. And an arborist wrote in Western Pennsylvania Arborist, he was saying he has seen realistically fifty squirrels jump out of trees over seventy high, some out of a hundred foot trees. He said that three out of four that he's seen this is when he's ascending a tree to prune it and bust squirrel out. Squirrel can't come down because he's in it. He said. Three out of four of them hit the grass, bounce three ft in the air and land running. He had a fox squirrel one time jump eighty ft and he said there was a two inch or two ft diameter puddle of water. A fox squirrel jumped eighty feet and hit that water pool like it was He said it was like it was aiming for it. But he says an hard time. He was not in a tree. He was just sitting in a driveway mine in his own business in a car, and he sees a fox squirrel fall out of a tree and hit a phone line ten ft from the ground, died right before his eyes. He then another squirrel came down, full grown squirrel, halfed it up his dead friend and carried him back up into the tree. What I witness account? That's crazy. It's good friend. I see him for just I've been walking through the woods and just squirrel hits the ground like it must have just fell out, just hits the ground, takes off round. No, yeah, I've definitely seen where they just come out and in uh iguanas or inexplicably fall from trees when it now when it gets to you know what if you see this like now when they get it gets super cold, you know they got the invasive iguanas in Florida during that big cold snap that just happened, they had to put out warnings about falling iguanas. No ship. Yeah, yeah, imagine you mess you up. But when just in Arkansas we found I told about we canna tell you about this mic rule and we're just an Arkansas. We found a lot of birds that it froze to death during that cold snap. One day, we found three froze to death woodpeckers in one day, just not a mark on them. It looked like a live woodpecker, but it was dead laying on the forest floor. Mike, we had a big bird guy off here in your Mexico. Do you recall what that was it was from? Was it the cold spell? Was it trout? My understanding was that it was it was mostly cold. Was that I think it was that October It was a cold snap earlier this year. Those birds didn't have a lot of fat on him, I think was what I heard. And uh, they died of exposure. They had a way to go for a bird. So we're recording right now in um how how it doesn't matter. We're indemning New Mexico and we're down here because I had a stellar year on my permit draw, to say the least. Now, listen, here's the thing. A lot of people are like, oh yeah, they give you special treatment because like you have a TV show, so you get all these permit draws. Listen, I apply for everything in every state, Okay. I apply for everything in every state, and every year like you get something, but I'm applying for everything in every state. You know, like this year in Alaska drew nothing. Last year in Alaska drew nothing. Okay, but I just so happened to hit not even know if it's statics. You guys can tell me how extraordinary it is. I happened to in one year in New Mexico draw and what's called an off range orics tag and drew a female or immature billy ibex tag all in one fell swoop one year draw. The New Mexico doesn't do bonus points, and and we've explained hundreds thousand times, but bonus points are like if you apply for a permit and don't get it, they sort of reward you as a repeat customer by giving you like a point, and then your name goes into the hat basically like your name goes into had an additional time the next year, and it's like it kind of like baits you in to keep you active. New Mexico doesn't engage in that. So I could be applying for an ORCS tag for fifty years and some whipper snapper comes in and applies for his first time, and the fifty year veteran and the whipper snapper have the exact same odds of drawn the ORCS tag. But I had put in for quite a few years for an ORCS tag, but drew the ORCS tag off range. And we talked about this in the past, and it's it's that on range means White Sands missile range, and off range means the rest of the damn state. The IBEX tag that I drew is for the Florida, not Florida with the Florida mountains, and which you New Mexicans wants to talk through, Uh, how this came to be, Why this is a thing, Why IBEX hunting is a thing, like how like how who? Well, Jeremy, can you say where you work or you have to not you have to tell Yeah, I work for the National Wildlife Federation on the Regional Connectivity Coordinator. See that, Mike, It just comes right out and says it. Try to act like he's in the CIA. I know af you but yeah, I mean, you know, going back to but but you know what before you do that, tell people more about what you're about your work? Well, UM, I work mostly on on landscape wildlife connectivity issues across the West, So looking at landscapes and how well connected they are UM most folks, you know, one of the best ways to describe that and put that in a perspective is through the lens of migration corridors, so ungulate migration corridors, you know, looking at that landscape and how well connected it is. One of the first measures you can do to look at how well a landscape connect is connected is by looking at the barriers right, so roads, fences, urban development, things that can impede and service barriers to to movement of wildlife and ensuring that landscapes UM stay connected. So a lot of my work is working with UM multiple stakeholders. Right, wildlife no no boundaries for the most part. So when wildlife are migrating across jurisdictional boundaries, it's important to work with those both those multiple engaged stakeholders, from tribes to private land owners to UH federal agents, land management agencies, state wildlife agencies. You know, it's it's important for folks to be on the same page and to manage cordinally for those species, because we want to make sure they're they're around right. We don't want them be having these conversations about al camilder that we're having about black for the ferrets and passenger pist You know, we're close after the border. You can see the surveillance blimp. Right do you work when you're doing connectivity stuff? Are you working with Mexico as well? So I'm I'm not as far south in New Mexico. UM, so I don't really work with Mexico, but I do have colleagues who do, and they do things like a black bear, um cougar, also birds. They do a lot of avian species of migration. I know. I think montezoomc quail is is a is a species of hot topic there at the border. But for the most part, I have not been focusing most of my work on on wildlife boarder issues. I do the people that do work on the um connectivity issues across the border, they've probably been spending their recent years like focused on one thing, which is the border wall. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, as I was mentioning, right, like barriers, barriers to movement, there's no bigger barrier than a border wall. Yeah. It was funny about that too. Is most of barriers you talk about and you talk about wildlife migrations are things that are sort of like accidentally a barrier, Like no one like it is like, let's put it in a highway. That would be a good barrier. It's like, let's put it in a highway because it's sweet because you can drive around real good. And then someone later is like, oh, ship, it's a big barrier. But there you're like, let's make a barrier. It's very purpose built. It's it's well distinguished. Um, there's there's purpose behind it. Um. You know. During the construction of the border wall, I think there was a lot of controversy to those exact issues on what they would do to the ecological state of that landscape and providing for a well connected landscape for various species, um, you know, and and the arguments still out there, I think I think it's safe to say that it was. The border wall has been pretty invasive in those landscapes where where they have been constructing it, And so I would go as far as saying that, you know, when you do something of that magnitude, there is going to be consequences that there are going to be repercussions in some way, shape or forman um. You know, sometimes the wildlife are the ones who are are the recipients of that. Yeah, I know, I know that. Like I'm I'm talking about I'm talking. This is me talking right now. This is not Jeremy talking like I'm I'm going to talk now. And I don't want you to be guilty, guilty by association. But the thing that it's so funny I found with people and talk about the border wall is people that support that want a wall are very uneasy if you bring up, if you even point out a problem with it, they want to act like that doesn't exist. You could still look and be like no, no, I like all things considered, all things factored in, I'd still like the wall, but they get I rate, if you suggest what the implications would be for wildlife, it's like they get mad that you bring it up instead, like I would imagine you would take the approach of, oh, yes, totally, I understand this is a big problem for wildlife, but my I'm giving priority to the human issues, to the economic issues, and even though it's not ideal for wildlife, I'm still deciding to support it. But people aren't, like they don't look at it that way, like if you bring it up, you're a bad person to bring it up, which is sort of emblematic of a general reluctance to sort of general reluctance these days to just to like discuss and debate things and consider them in their totality. I mean, it's been really like I've had people get so if we run articles or post articles about wildlife issues in the border wall, people just get piste, Well, it's a political issue too, right, Um. There's there's a lot to that argument, and I would I would think about it as as the new border wall that's been constructed. There was a border wall there before or right, um, and that didn't prevent a lot of things from happening, and even with the new border wall, things are still happening, right, Um, I think I just I just read an article the other day about a suv carrying I think it was twenty passengers that wrecked on the highway and they got through a hole in the border wall. So to what level is creating a border wall? Uh, actually solving the issue? Um? And with that comes all those arguments, right yeah? Um? And I think, like I do think it's we're talking about. But if let's say you point out let's say you're planning a family vacation. Okay, you're like, oh, I think we should go on family vacation, and someone says, um, you know, if we go on family vacation, we will have less money because we'll have spent money on our vacation. No one gets mad at that person. Instead, you'd be like, yes, correct, we will have less money, but the vacation is important. We're still going to go on the vacation. Like, you don't get pissed at people for bringing up the considerations except this, then it's you're you're a bad person to bring up It's just it's kind of I know, this is like a side pet Peeve, and I do want to return to Ibex, but just it remains in my mind and anytime I'm down here looking at the border, I start thinking about it again. I mean, it's it's real time here, you know. I mean the border wall or is a day to day issue that everyone here has to interact with for the most part. Yeah, it winds up not being like um, like up in the North, you're like, you know, southern border. I mean there's I mean there's places on our border where there's not a border wall. There hasn't ever been a border wall. All right. Back to the Ibex. Well, you know, the Ibex. Ibex were introduced in New Mexico and the Florida Mountain Range back in the seventies with the whole exotic push that our state took, you know, utilizing some of these barren landscapes to have hunting opportunity. And in doing so, they saw one of the game commissioners at the time, through his travels across the world, saw these various species and as I as I mentioned on previous Orex talk, um he saw um the opportunity to introduce some of these exotic species into New Mexico. Right, So, Stevie had the opportunity to hunting orix. That was one of the species. One of the other ones they tried to introduce was also the kudu that that never took um. And then they also introduced ibex. Two species of ibex. In fact, one was the Siberian ibex that was introduced into the Canadian River drainage. Uh folks probably know that as the sabiosa wilderness um. And then they also introduced the Persian ibex. People also call that the Bazaar ibex, and that was introduced into the Florida Mountain range. Was this was this coming from one individual? Is there like a person who's kind of like Johnny apple Seed of exotics was? Yeah, I don't recall his name, but he was a state game commissioner at the time, and he just saw this opportunity. He said, you know, my my home landscape doesn't hold animals, and I want to be able to have the same opportunities of hunting these exotic animals that I was overseas and from what I got from my researches. He worked with the other game commissioners to propose the idea. Um. You know, there's there's obviously. Uh, I think an economic driver behind it. You know, if you want to create hunting opportunities, and in doing so, they they assess the landscape for those species that would seem more appropriate and they seem to find them, you know, in New and sorry not New Mexico. In New Zealand, there was actually committees of people that the focus of the committee was to make the fauna similar to Europe's. Interesting it was to make it familiar and bring in like red deer and you know, all that kind of stuff. So it's like it's definitely not um uh, you know, it's not like exclusively in New Mexico thing, but it's interesting that three things took so well, oh yeah, I mean, you know, or x X and other and various other exotic species are are not in uton North America, right. You look at Texas, there's high fence ranches that have worrix other types of ris as well other exotic species. But New Mexico is a unique place where we have free ranging exotic animals right that are largely on public land, all predominantly on public land. The only ones that aren't on public land for the most part. You know, you've got barbary running around private land, but you also have orris on Department of Defense land on the missile range. Other than that, most of those most of those exotic species are calling public land home. Yeah, Jeremy's coming off of an exotic trifecta in one week. One week, I was fortunate enough to harvest a barbary sheep, and then a colleague of ours wife had a once in a lifetime RIX hunt on range, and so, uh, last Sunday, Saturday, I helped out and was fortunate enough to be a part of that little excursion where she where my buddy's wife harvested her once in a lifetime orix. And then I hustled down here to meet you to finish the trifecta for Jason Persian ibex. Uh, get into a little bit about how many of those, like how many ibex came to be in this mountain range, and what conversations had to come out about, you know where where other interested parties started have an opinion about this, because it's it's like an interesting thing that you see time and again with with wildlife politics. And yeah, yeah, so let's let's take it back to kind of the initial reintroduction. So New Mexico is a state where you cannot introduce animals from outside of the state onto the public land right, So in order for the state too introduce Persian ibex or x Siberian ibex, they had to do they had to reintroduce their or introduce their progeny. So a lot of these animals when they were brought to New Mexico, they were held in holding facilities long enough to have progeny. Once that progeny was old enough, then they introduced them into these different landscapes. So for ibex, for example, UM, I think the total number was give or take forty ibex that were introduced on onto the Florida Mountains. And since then that population rapidly expanded. Um I think within I think it was within four years of the initial introduction they were offering hunting opportunities on the Florida. Yeah. I want to give people some idea that when we talk about the Florida Mountains, um, when you go to download a map on on X, people are famliar with on actual note that when you go to download a map for offline use, you can download a map ten miles wide, Okay, and it's taller than it is. Why it's ten miles wide, and normal you're going to hang out somewhere, you wind up. I usually wind up taking the center of my activities, and I'll download four and I'll use that as like the center point, and I'll do like a square, a square, square, and a square, and they all meet at that middle point, and that's what I'll do to get the area I'm gonna be in. Well, I thought it was just to give a sense of scale here. When I went to download a map for this hunting trip, I put the center of the Florida Mountains on the center of the ten mile square map and it fits very elegantly top the bottom, side to side. It was like, and I had a good buffer of flat desert, but it's like a stunning pile of cliffs that just rise up out of the desert. Man, I mean, like the jaggedy It's like it's like a weird, sort of crazy castle constructed out in the middle of the desert. Yeah. I think I think we figured when we were sitting on the top of that mountain that we were gaining somewhere of three thousand feet in elevation as we were climbing going about a mile, going about a mile, give or take incredibly steve mostly rock five five five miles wide on that Onyx map and three thousand feet tall. I mean, it's just it's it's like it came out of nowhere, and that mountain range is just straight up like you said, it's it's an unforgiving it's basically a granite face with sheer cliffs. Everything there cuts and tears up your boots, pokes you, stabs you, cuts you. It's just a unforgiving landscape that Ibex just looked right at home, right, And yeah, it's funny because there's no one, there's no North American animals that would do it quite like they do it. In terms of living on cliff face. Yeah, I don't think there's an order basically eating gravel. Yeah, basically eating gravel. And I mean I've seen I've seen Ibex on a two hundred foot cliff eating just the tiniest little bush possible. And you're wondering, you're you know, you're asking yourself looking two d feet below where all the vegetation is. What I that animals standing two hundred feet up the cliff just well, that's what ibex do that they walk around the cliff face, like to walk on vertical cliff faces. And then when uh so, perfect kind of little spot for them and they don't men there, and what happens They put forty in and it just blows up. So they put forty in. It blew up. As I was saying, you know, within I think four years they were offering hunting opportunities. And then you know, when it comes to how many years, I think it was within four years of the population being introduced, they were they were already opening up hunts. And that's a pretty impressive growth, it is, I mean, And to put that in a perspective when ibex, when ibex have kids, right, Billy's nanni's kids are called kids. It's common for nannies to have twins and sometimes triplets. So you can imagine how quick that population, if it's not being if it's not being managed through through hunting opportunities, how quick it can can explode. And the topography isn't really conducive for anything outside of a mountain lion. Yeah, I mean, you know, lions and ibex, anything anything you need to run down its prey isn't gonna kill anything, right, No, I mean occasionally we'd see the old cotton tail ground squirrel up there, but other than that, you know, lions and ibex seemed to feel right at home there, and it blew so. At a point though, someone points out that like the land management agents and points out that, man, you've got too many these damn things running. Yeah, yeah, the the you know, the BLM, and I'm sure with coordination with the game and Fish determined that the carrying capacity for that mountain is about needs to be around four hundred and so, realizing through through various surveys that that numbers was well above the carrying capacity of four animals, they started to increase the hunting opportunities to control that population. And so um previous to the top the tag that you draw drew the immature male female tag, there were hunting opportunities, population management hunts where folks could come in and harvest too, nannies, um and it and might correct me if I'm wrong that that was probably over a five seven year, seven year span. And I got another question from Mike the real quide yet Yeah, I don't know that Mike would have any exposure into this, but do you have a sense Mike, how they count the ibex. Well, yeah, I know how to count the I know some people who well, well, before before the bound you sleep with one of them. So counting and quantifying the number of ibex on the landscape was has been described. Yea, this is a good quote that's been described. I was watching a talk about these exotic species and the big game biologists for the new Mexican Apartment game, and Fish does a great job. She said. The best way to explain to folks on how to count ibex is by taking a large barrel of ping pong balls and throwing it off a cliff and trying to count every one of those ping pong balls is they're bouncing, flying all over the place. Damn near impossible. So with that they do both aerial surveys with helicopters and ground surveys with lots of observers around the mountain range. Huh, So they knew the aerial part. So you send a bunch of people up with vinyls that just try to count ibex. Yeah, I just like imagine the glassing spots that we use this year basically on you know, for a day or two surround the mountain with lots of folks who are experienced set at glassing those things up, and it seems imperfect because how the skills, like the skill set required of glassing up ibex, observer bias, just observer skills that. Yeah, no, I mean it's all survey isn't perfect, right, I mean there's no, it's it's you don't get perfect numbers um. But what you do build up over time, of course, is is count data that as long as things are being done in the same way, you get what relative pictures, what folks would call an index of abundance. Right, And Mike, I think when I when I was watching that talk, they had explained that the aerial surveys were good at getting an idea of numbers, right, quantifying the amount um. The ground surveys were giving a better perspective of sex and age. So yeah, I believe that got you. It's easier to count running than it is to count IBEX running and determine what sex it is, right, and then when when, when it got to be there's so many ibex they really got serious about trying to kill them off. I think that they found that, like the difference in a male ibex. But there's difference in a billy and a nanny stunning because the billy will throw a up to like fifty inch horn and beats considerably larger. When those billies get mature, they get the old fashioned billy goat, gruff, goatee. They get these big, sweeping, you know, up to fifty inch horns, and the head they change a completely different color. Those those mature billies they get a lot wider. They get this big prominent black cross around their chest, in their back. And when you see a mature billy there on the mountain, you know it's a mature billy. They're distinguishably different than the rest. It's got a skull on any person would want to put on their book show to take a hell of a bookshelf. But I mean like an insane looking animal. But then the nanny's are Yeah, I think you know, they said no one wants to shoot them, so they had to like incentivize people to start shooting ibex well, I meaning that like the little tag draw thing. Yeah, I don't know if they were I don't know if they were offering nanny hunts prior to focusing on managing the population but in doing so to manage the population, they focused on nanny's and immature males um and they've I think it's safe to say that they've been pretty effective at knocking down the population to that carrying compassity because when they were when there was a ton of them, they were blowing out into other mountain ranges. Oh yeah, absolutely. When when there was that, when there was that high level of density of IBEX, they were looking for other areas. And so you know, when I was when I was in college, I saw two billies forty miles from the from their range and it's not so that's interesting, right, So billy ibex on range, those are drawing only hunts. Now, being that they want that population centralized on the Florida Mountains, they offer an unlimited IBEX tag for off range anywhere outside of the Florida Mountains. So when I did see those billies, I made a bee line back into town and go get an off range IBEX tag. Came right back out the next day and never found him. How long did you look for him? Probably two and a half weeks. I never could find them, never, never could find them. I your guess is as good as mine. The area I was was just the fact that I even saw them there was unbelievable. It was, you know, flatland country with just this single lava rock mind mound, and on the top there they were. And you know, it's not uncommon for for hunters or individuals to see ibex around some of these surrounding mountain ranges right. Um. Every now and then you'll get a hunter who kills a billiard in Annie off the Florida's um and that's that's a feat. I mean, that's an accomplishment, right Those they're smaller, hard to find, and so you know, I think two years ago when I did draw the archery tag, um, I feel like there were a lot more ibex just two years ago, two years go. And mind you you know, the archery tag and the rifle tag are different. Archery is is a little at the beginning, so they're not as pressured, so they're probably more spread you know, they're not as spread out as they are um. But from from my experience, I felt like there were a lot more ibex than than this hunt we were on, which which is you know, a testament to the management approach that the Game Department has taken and increasing the the number of tags offered, and hunters have been successful in bringing the you know, the population down. But it's a big mountain, right, I mean four animals like we were talking about on a on a mountain like that. Mind you. You know the on x map high resolution map doesn't put it in a perspective. It covers that whole mountain range, but once you're on that mountain there are crooks and crannies and thick vegetation that could hide a lot of IBEX going into it. I was not inspired by the count number. Once I saw the mountain range and knowing that they're running around in groups, I was like, that's not that. Like if you had four of them, four of them and you told him he's to stay in his own little spot, you know, it would be one thing. But the fact that in groups, I was like, man, that's not that. There's a lot of places that don't have an IBEX. Yeah. I have friends who you know, with probably within the last five years, have seen groups of ibex. Well, you know, fifty to one hundred and one in one group. When you look at it from that perspective to where we're at now, that's it's quarter of the population and one big group. Now, you know, I don't think there's large groups like that at the moment, but but there were, and and it's a it's it's a big mountain. I think there's of a lot of places for ibex too to hide. Jeremy layout the season because there's like a bunch of different seasons for these right yeah, so there when can you start unting on? When? And when does like the last season end? So this hunt right now is the last. I believe it's in the last hunt, and it's an immature male female female hunt. Now before that, you have opportunities for archery for billy or either sex archery tags or either sex tags. And that's that's the club you belong called. I belong to the percent club because people who draw that archery tag do not fill it and do not get a billy or or an IBEX for that matter. So I am a proud member of the club. And that starts in October. That starts in October, so you have archery hunts for October and January UM and then in between there you have a multitude of one in the lifetime billy rifle hunts for those who are lucky enough to draw it. You have youth muzzle loader hunts, rifle hunts. I believe, um, but it kind of just, you know, varies like that, and then it goes into more of what we want to call population management, which is immature immature male female, And in order to kill an immature male it has to be less than fifteen inches um. Ibex are small. Judge in a fifteen inch ibex can be difficult. Yeah, I was surprised how spooky they were, Oh my god. But then Jerry brought up that they've been people have been hunting these things since October. It's March and they've been getting on in since October. Yeah, but to touch on that that they are exceptionally spooky, but ibex are few things I've seen. I have seen few things. Is touchy as they are touching and they're like that in in October. I mean, you know, there might be a lot more ibex that you have plays at because they're not as pressured, but they are all on edge. They are still just as sketched out KG. I mean, it's it's it's it's the same show you those animals when they want to get up and go and run to the top of the mountain for no reason. They do it. They hear a rockfall, they hear a backpack slide, they for instance, for instance, they don't like it. They don't like it. It's it's really incredible. And then they have that. They have that mountain goat the thing too, where you know, a white tail hides like a white tail hide kind of where they can see, but they're also comfortable hide and where they can't see much but nothing can see them at times, you know, But they these things have a real knack for picking some spots to hang out. Yeah, they pick That makes it that I have a cliff behind me that's vertical, so if you're on top of it, you can't look down and see You're not gonna look down and see me down here, and then I see everything in front of me. And if you're on the bottom, you know, chances are they're gonna be so high up there you can't even look up and see them. Yeah, they're good at like pick them their spots. Yeah, there's for that archery hunt. There was a lot of times where I was underneath cliffs on billies, you know, and you're looking straight up like I can hear them up there. They're overhanging the cliffs coming over you, and there's just no way you're able to get a shot. We had times of crawling up, Like a lot of times, you spend a lot of time going up toward a ridge or saddle or something that's gonna give you a view a new country. And one day we had a few times when you get to the crest and you're like, you're prepared for the fact that you're gonna be looking at some new ground. And it's intense sun, so you got a lot of shadows, there's a lot of brush, and you'd be like, here's the perfect place to pop up. I'm gonna crawl up under this juniper and use the juniper as shade cover. And there's a rock and I'm gonna like belly slide in and do everything perfect. And I'm gonna slowly raise my binoculars and you do that and you meet eye to eye. Some ibex is four yards away, like very aware that you're there. Yeah, yeah, you know, we were talking about it. I feel, you know, those ibex they're they're so smart and they're so cag that I feel like they they bed or reside in areas where they know they can see danger, whether that's from prior history or interactions, or that's just the natural wiliness ability of these ibex to position themselves in areas where they can feel vulnerable. And that's exactly it. Every time we came into a saddle where we thought we were gonna have a great opportunity, ibricks were looking at us. I mean they had us pinned down. You know it's funny too, is we found uh, we found a deadhead, read the remain like a portion of dat. We found two horns. Um, the skull was gone, but we found two horns under a cliff. Well we kind of like there wasn't even that big, but we kind of seven growth rings. Seven growth rings. You start hunting. Ibex season start in October, they run into March. He's been alive seven years, That isn't that's a lot of data to pull from for that animal. He probably lays there. He's like, you know what, when I'm here, I always watched that spot because that's for some asshole always climbs over and like they probably get a very detailed sense of like where right, like how things move. Yeah, I think because that mountain has what the what the? Because it's very there's not many ways to get around, right, it's either cliffs or finding these little trails and cuts to get two saddles, you know, find those little grooves in between the cliffs to make your way. And I think those animals know that. I think they know most most predators or others other species aren't gonna be on the cliffs. So where are you gonna be looking off the cliffs these little It's like most of places, not a lot of the places up there that you can access on foot, there's one way to get there in one way to leave. There's not there's not like through. There probably are somewhere, but it's it's not like a place there's a lot of like through hunting. It's like you gotta kind of go up and fronaggle your way through, and then when you go to leave, it would be like the only way you're gonna leave is to do exactly that. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't make sense to to try to find an alternate way out right. You want to go that mountain is so dangerous, especially when you're burning light. You want to be able to get off that mountain safely and if you're trying to bush whack and find a potential way to get off that mountain that you haven't previously taken, there's a good chance that you're gonna get cliffed out. You're gonna get put in a tough spot, and you're gonna run out of light, and you're gonna have to make the choice of either hunk or and down continuing your path, are going back the way you came, which you know is a safe route, and that's always something a factory. And when you're up on that mountain, right, I mean, there are numerous times where we probably could have kept going. We probably could have threaded the needle and pushed it to pushed it to nighttime and walked off that mountain on the dark, in the dark. But even even at that at night, everything looks different, even if you have your track going up that mountain, everything looks different. And so it's a it's safe to say you want to get off that mountain with ample light to be safe about it, because the last thing you want to be doing is getting stuck in a spot where you have to make the decision am I going to stay here? Am I gonna walk back? The way I came. Because it's gonna be a lot farther. You're gonna be doing it at night. Ard I do I push forward and hope that this path I took leads leads to an exit. So I looked at the harvest data that's available through the Mexico Department of Game and Fish, and there were according to that, there were no ibex harvested outside of the Florida's on the statewide over the countertag last license here, and there were two billies harvested the license here before that. So it's not a rich hunting opportunity, right. So like Jeremy saying, if you find some off range, you know that's not something that happens all the time, don't tell anyone to get out of That would be to me one of the cooler things to do. Man, if you could find one and get it like that, that's badass. Uh let him let me hear with the crystal ball question. And then we're talking to Kevin Murphy about rabbits um take mountain goats. We're talking about montain goats for a minute. Here's a native animal native to the continent. Right, So mountain goats are native to coastal Alaska, some of the interior ranges in south central Alaska all down through BC Okay, native to portions of Washington, portions of Oregon, native to western Montana. There's some other areas that are debated native to the I. They were historic populations in the Idahoe Handhandle, Okay, so like it's at least from the continent. Over time, motivated by the same factors as they did to introduce IBEX to increase hunting opportunity, they put mountain goats um a neighboring mountain ranges like sometimes really that meaning that put them for for whatever you can't understand why, like why are they in this mountain range but not this mountain range? And people would just help him out by bumping them over a mountain range, Okay. And and now in grant Tee Town National Park, Olympic National Park, they're taking steps to bring in using public hunters, using government sharpshooters, all kinds of things. They're bringing efforts to eradicate mountain goats off of some of these mountain ranges where they weren't historically even though they were a hundred miles off in some other direction. UM that makes it seem like in my mind that made like things don't bode well for the old IBEX because you can't even make that argument for him there from another continent. Man like I feel like there's more some people a ride like your buddy KR Malcolm, love him to death, but he's always, Oh, we need more voices in the room, more stakeholder. You know, those people are not gonna be too sympathetic to the IBEX. They're not gonna be like, well, you know those guys like the hunt Ums, let's keep them around. It's just not going to be what their view is on it. You could picture in a year or two, or in a decade or two, someone saying they gotta go. I mean, I'm sure it's happening right now, but are they what are they hurting? Desert big horns big carn't habitat. So there there are big horns in the Florida, not in the Floridas. And I'll be the first to say that I am stepping out of my zone right now, and so the conflict would be native big horn sheep habitat right similar and correct me if I'm wrong to to the Mountain gold right that in Grand Tea ton so An Olympic National Park. I think it's like a vegetation they're using. It's a vegetation issue in Grand Teaton. It is Rocky Mountain Big Horn conflict. But one might look and feel that those are proxy arguments and it's more of an argument about the the kind of audacity of moving non native species in and then you that is offensive to someone and they'll look and be like, well, what's the big deal, And then you go like, oh, well this, yeah, I mean, and and it's it's like a proxy fight. My my personal thought is is you know, back in the seventies when they were having that that discussion, there was you know, that was the time too to really, you know, have the talk about is this the right thing to do or should we be focusing our resources and attention into reintroducing native native faunt into the landscape. Right, so let's get big horn sheep back in there. But that wasn't the case. We got We got to deal with what we got to deal with now, right, And the fact is that Persian ibex are on that mountain and according to from what I know from our uh you know, biologists and listening to the Department is the IBEX and the big Horn sheep. There are no there's there aren't any potential issues there as far as you know, disease transmission, as far as UH complicating reintroduction efforts of big horn sheep. There's been considerable efforts to reintroduce desert big horn sheep and some of the surrounding mountain ranges and they've been very successful. And in doing so, the Game and Phish Agency has has and and and the public as well have have warmed up and accepted the IBEX per se to call that mountain range home. Um. I personally like IBEX. I personally like the opportunity to go chase IBEX. Now, if you put me in the room back in the seventies, I would have advocated for big horn sheep to be on that mountain And they were there, they were, they were there before. I don't know that. I think like it wasn't everything here desert big horn Well, you would think, yeah, I mean I would say that's probably a safe assumption. But I don't know entirely if if the Florida Mountain Range was was home to the desert big horn sheep. When we we were having a very similar conversation about nil Gui and uh that live in South Texas, and I used someone's quote where someone described them as being an honorary native, And boy did I get a lot of feedback from biologists about calling them an honorary native, including me. Yeah, yeah, that's enough of that. One of my favorite stories out about you because I said I said whatever I said about using that term honorary native, and then somebody said like, basically, you're in a hole. Steve Ronella would never want to hang out with you. Um, yeah, I guess, I guess. Before we move on move on to the rabbit piece, the last thing I would say about hunting Ibex is, you know, next to making sure you're careful and getting up that mountain safely and back down safely, is it's it's frustrating, right to say the least Ibex hunting is frustrating. And the reason I say that is you you bust your tail every day you're climbing thousand you know, plus vertical feet. Damn, you're straight up hands feet are always usually on a rock, if not on a rock or getting poked by a cactus. And it is just a difficult mountain to hunt. And so when you have an opportunity to lay your cross hairs on an ibex, draw your bow back and lay that hundred yard pin on an ibex, you have to you have to factor in other factors that you usually don't in other hunts, right, and the biggest one is am I going to be able to recover that animal? You know? These animals are standing on cliffs there in sketchy places, and you know it's it happens more times than not where hunters see that opportunity as oh, here's an animal, I can harvest it, and they take that shot only to find out that they cannot recover that animal. Yeah, we had an opportunity you almost like an opera. Yeah, yeah, we we had situations whereas we're looking at animals, um that one could have shot at for sure, and being like, you're just not gonna get to it, despite Dirtmith guaranteeing I can get there. You would get there with a rope and a harness guaranteeing. Personally looking at Garrett like, yeah, but that's unless you got a helicop. Unless you're putting a helicopter in the mix, I don't buy it. I'm gonna watch it from here is Jeremy, you were pointing out spots on the mountain where they were still ropes hanging from cliffs. Absolutely. So you know, folks like I mentioned, hit ibex. They go die in these precarious areas on the top of a cliff, and hunters will actually hire rock climbers, you know, to go up there and climb up to the top and repel their their goat down for them. And you know, sometimes they bring their ropes down, sometimes they don't. And so it's not uncommon to as your glass in these you know, nasty cliffs, see these ropes tethered and just hanging down to the bottom. Um you just know someone scaled up there to to lower an ibex down. Yeah. Rick Smith read an article about some guy that killed a billy thirty yards and then hired climbers to go find into for him. That that's the problem, right, is like that's I'm just not interested in the working part, I mean, And that's like that's a hard conversation to have, right when you're when you're a glass and an ibex and it's well within shooting distance and you say, I don't think you should take that shot. I don't. I don't think we can recover that animal. That's that's a hard concept to grasp. And you just busted your tail to get up to that that saddle to have that opportunity, just to come to find out that sure you can shoot that animal and it's gonna fallot to the bottom. Is that even worth it? I mean that animal is gonna be so beat up, there's not even any meat to recover. Yeah, the one we fellah if that scrambled its guts real good, but the meat unscathed. But I mean it's like stomach contents were it was pretty beat up, like like it's ards had been homogenized. You couldn't tell. Yeah, it was just everything, everything was everything and that and you know that that billy, that billy fell like you said, maybe thirty ft landed and vegetation, which was fortunate, and that landed right on a yuka, right on a yuka, a little bit of a cushion and worked out perfectly. You know, we saw right where it went in. We and to the point where I'm saying is you know, making sure you can recover an ibex is we were looking at that, but you know where's that when when you take that shot, where's the likelihood of that animal gonna go? And we were certain that if you took that shot, we're gonna be able to recover that animal. The two yeah, two instances where like to just to give people an idea what we're talking about. There's one instance where there was a shoot that we could pretty much picture get into the shoot, and it was in the shoot, but if you file the shoot up, it was like, man, you could probably could pick your way up that shoot, but there's a big Raiders of the lost Are boulder. Then it at some point in time falling off the mountain, ran down the shooting and got wedged in the shoot. I mean it's bulls like ft high crammed in there. And I was like, man, you could if you can, and it seems like you can. I'm not sure get up the shoot, You're sure ship not getting past that boulder guaranteed to guaranteed with like with a harness, his harness and his sadd he guaranteed he would be able to retrieve it. And the more we looked at that from more angles, I was really wished we could have taken him up on his back. The other one, we're looking at a we're looking at ibex and you couldn't really picture where it would quit falling, but you like, how far go, but it would wind up in the shoot, and I was like, oh, shoot, you can definitely go up that shoot. But then I raised myself up to follow the shoot down more and realized that the shoot just ends at a cliff. But had I not done that In my head, I was like the easiest thing in the world, And there's no way to come in from the sides into that shoot. I shouldn't say no way, but you weren't. And then it was far enough away that once you shot and it fell from it's cliff, it was gonna vanish into the brush, and so you'd have to finagle your way over there, which would have been an hour's long job, and then be like, I don't know, it's somewhere in the five yard expanse from that cliff down to here in this brushy ass SHOOTE. You're not gonna blood trail it. You might find like tufts of hair stuck on stuff here and there, you know, I mean like, like, how do you in there? The size of a labrador? Yeah, I mean so small that when we went to we wanted, you know, like when you retrieve a body carcass, you want to move it somewhere nice to gut it. I grabbed its back foot in my hand and then bent it up and grabbed its horn in the same hand and lifted it up and carried it down and said it where I wanted it. Yeah, it was. It was. It was like just passing, passing the billy down to our tour spot where we can I mean, and even packing it out was was pretty interesting. You know, if there's if there's a if there's an animal to pack out whole and leave it fully intact, it'd be an ibex. We put the whole thing. The whole thing fit in my backpack and game bag, like not not a large game bag that you would fit an out quarter in a small game bag like deer quarter game bag. We split a whole ibex into it, took the hooves up to the head and just man, yeah, it was fun. It was. It was brutal. Uh, I need to add their mike, No, mike was my glass and buddy. Meanwhile we are down at the bottom pouring coal to it, which which is important, right, like to say it again, it or to add to the whole experience. It's like having a team and having people that can have eyes on the mountain for you and say, you know, Ibex or the Ibex are still there as you're hiking up and down these hills and through these crooks and crannies. It's it helps in it. It's really beneficial to have someone with some eyes on on the mountain, just to have people, I mean just even in the morning, just to try to find something I had heard from a guy that was saying in the earlier season there was a lot of people not finding any at all, which I could very easily picture, yeah, easily, but I got fortunate. All right, Kevin Murphy, you ready, I'm ready. I'm ready. When we were this is this is called the Saga of Kevin Murphy, the Saga of Kevin Murphy's Beagles. When we were on orcs Is, June and Jeremy and Mike were there. Um, I was kind of flabber gassed by the number of rabbits running around, and we talked a bunch about why don't people have beagles, beagles oh the desert, and how many rabbits you'd kill with your beagles because they're all over the down place, and I started getting Kevin interested in how he ought to come out and bring his high test rabbits, his high test beagles out here and run rabbits. How'd that go, Kevin? Well, it was an experience, you know. When you you asked me about that, it says, well, I don't know for sure, I said. We did take a trip two years ago down to North Carolina to hunt some marsh rabbits with two of my friends that are bagle manias, that's what they live. Forward getting on chat groups talking about rabbit hunting, and we packed up and went to what's your guy's favorite chat group in the rabbit hunt community. He now, I don't stay connected like that, so I don't know. I'll find out for you. So I don't know. But um, we loaded up, went to North Carolina and Sandy Soul but moist down there, and so we would get after some rabbits and I was running like four of my dogs and they had probably before. So I had twelve beagles out there trying to run some rabbits and we ended up killing just a few. And then like in the third day, was sitting around the couch just kind of like we are now talking, and they said, well, else is You know, we read a lot about this, that dogs coming from up north and going down there to run. We had lots of issues and lots of problems running the rabbits. You know, typically you jump a rabbit up and it's gonna if you just post up there, be quiet, look at the landscape in the terrain, he's gonna make a circle around a huge circle. Yes, some some I mean this. When I was with you hunting swamp rabbits, I mean they'd go so far you can't you hear the damn dogs anymore. Now, swamp will go further than a regular cotton tail. But sometimes initially they will go out and they'll come back in just one time. And then the next time they go out of the country I mean out of hearing, out of here. And then when they start coming back. And I didn't learn this too, uh, I got a garment astro, they'll start they won't make us just a continuous circle. It's a spiral, little short circles in there. And you remember when we're down on the band hunting, I was looking at my GPS and the dogs are running and running and running. But never running back to us. And I told you since we're gonna have to go after that one. I don't know if you remember that or not, because I said, this is what he's doing, and I had learned that hunting him before that. They start making these small spiral circles and you just have to go in there and try to figure out. Now, when we hunt rabbits snowshoe hair on Drummond Island, Uh, to kill one snowshoe hair, you to lead the dogs have to run four to six miles. So and that's the like it's it's not that the dogs are running the rabbit in a circle intentionally, It's like the rabbit is going in a circle. He doesn't want to leave his familiar territory. Yes, correct, that's what I think. So when we go to Drummond a hunt up there to look at the GPS and figure so, well, that's rabbit has crossed like three times because a snowshoe he'll run in the shade in the dark. And I didn't realize that. The first time I hunted those was up around Benedicta, Maine. And we get out there in that fur forest and try to look for him and like, man, I can't you know, you just got to get right on top of him, so your shooting lane is reduced very small. Um, I didn't really know what I was doing up there. We hired a guide, and um we ended up killing seven or eight. A little bit different condition than than Drummond. You said you've been on Drummond for it's a glaciated We used to hunt, know whats your hair is? They're just uh still hunting them. Which, man, you can spend a lot of time. You can spend a lot of time on great Sign and not kill ship. But you look at your GPS and you say, well, this this hair has come through this little trail out here like three times, maybe four. I'm gonna go down there and get set up and maybe just have a yard shot. No further than that is a long ways when you're in that forest like that, and then all of a sudden he crosses fifty yards down there, he heard you or saw you. You weren't you weren't still enough. But you know, you can completely run a dog down if you're not careful. I know the second morning that we were there, I've got a faster dog. Lucy, the little tricolor blue tich beak when she's getting some age on her now. So I turned her loose that that morning and we had the best races of the day. But by one o'clock she had shut down and we carried her out in the back of our game bag. That thing completely recovered, but that, yeah, she was of stuff. She just ran and that's what a beagle to do. They just run and run and run until they got nothing left in them. So we we came up here. You know, we had the discussion. I says, I don't know how my dogs are gonna do in this dried desert terrain. And I said, I'm a little bit concerned about what do you think, Like, give me the North Carolina example, what do you think the problem was for the beagle? You know, I don't know. I don't know if it's the soul down there, that sandy saul because it was damp. You know, we're hunting these marsh rabbits, which were very similar to the swamp rabbit, but a little bit smaller, not near as big. They would leave their sign latrine stumps and logs. So we saw that sign in there, But I do not know what the trouble was down there. I don't know why the beagles could. They had remarked that people, yes, from the rabbit dog chat groups, remark that they had taken their dogs in there and they had trouble in the rabbits in that moist sandy. But are there dudes down in North Carolina, the half beagles that do good? I'm sure there is. You know, Um, I went uh black bear hunting down there one year with the with the bear guys, and their dogs could just pound those bears. But I mean they all lived down there and they were acclimated to them. Yes, so you know, and it sometimes it is hard to to pack a dog up and like we did. We we drove two days twelve miles to get here and then open up the dog box and say, go run me a rabbit. You know, even myself. After four or five days, I feel better. I see more out there. I learned more, you know, what these rabbits are doing. And it just takes a while. Maybe if I spent two or three weeks here or whatever, maybe they could pick it up. I don't know. It is so dry. I mean, this this air here is like some kind of ozone generator. I mean, I cannot believe just smelling fresh. You know, the rabbits have no smell to them. Uh, it's just a different landscape and and you know, uh atmosphere. What is the if you're in a layout, the best ground conditions for a beagle to smell a rabbit, it would be what snow grass uh on a melting snow, melting snow out For my days of running bobcats with dogs, not a falling snow or a frozen snow, but a melting snow. It seems that is the ideal conditions sticky for us. Yeah, yeah, that it's releasing something or whatever. But they can really run on a melted snowe or damp and wet not to to to uh wet. But you know a lot of us dog people there, when you let the dogs out in the morning, they go over there and take a crap and you smell that. It's like read in your face, tight, that's gonna be a good morning to hunt. I don't know if that scent is just laying you know, low on the ground and not not rising up. But so you're saying, if your dog goes out and takes a growl in the yard, and you could smell it real good, which just like it smells right in your face. Yes, that's good. You know it's a good huh, because the smell is gonna be sticking around. That's the only thing that you know he's up for me. That's good. That's that's an astute observation. Like you know, I will be sixty two in September. So I have been following dogs probably since I was you know, seven eight years out and trying to put you know, what I see together. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong, but just smells like crap, it's gonna be a good day when the winds from the south blows. Debait. You gotta make up one of those things, man, I'll be working on that. I'll be working on that. So here it's like very definitely not melting snow. It's dry, dry gravel and with a lot of rabbits, lots of rabbits and just trimmendous amount of rabbit sign you know, everywhere you look, you see because nothing decomposes here man, Right, it's like you're looking at three year old rabbit sh like like what what would happen? Do it? It's like you lay it out on the ground, zero moisture, laying on gravel. It's like every rabbit turd that's ever hit the ground here is still laying here. Probably, I don't think I'm not gonna argue with Yeah, I noticed that. I don't think anything happens to it like that. But some of that rabbit ship we're looking at could have been two years old. We need to I wish you could radio carbon date and it wasn't as expensive. We can find out how, but it doesn't the reasons that wouldn't work, But something like that would be interesting. I think that you're looking at a you're looking at a great history of rabbit droppings. You know, a rabbit is a critter, if I get the scientific term for that, could eat its own waste. And you'll see that sometimes it's a capri fab Okay, Mike rule capage, you know where he's in the wildlife business or something like that. Is that what he's saying. You can picture Capropagi eats poop. Yeah, but they like poop. You know, you say something that are really green, and then you see something back home this way it goes. You know, you see something really green and then some that are very light color and just the same. Well, that is one he's probably eating because everything broughts back home. You know, we've got fifty inches of rain per year. I looked up here and instead of landing, and then y'all said, that's kind of high. You know what it is where my fish check is. Probably she're up there like sixty hundred and sixty nine thirteen feet of rain. Wait, no place for a clothes long. It's like fifteen years worth here. So I'm seeing this rabbit peels droppings out there, you know, just everywhere you look in some places. And Jeremy gave me a week. We arrived here and on Sunday afternoon we went hunt. He shared three on X hunt points with me. He says, this would be a good location here, here, and here. So we hit it out with one and we jumped a bunch of rabbits in there, and we had the dogs. Um, they were getting the mesquite thorns in them, and and they may have like a little mesquite branch, you know, three or four inches long. You know, it's sticking out on both sides of the po and they keep hobbling with it. You know, I've got a bird dog. It was raised out west and she gets a thorn in her she just stops and pulls it out. You know. We had the discussion and I was saying, I don't know how my baggers are gonna do around all these cactus and thorns. And then you says, people bird hunt with their dogs here all the time. I got to think him, Bill, he's right about that. But I took the beagles out here, and you know, we spent They didn't get as many as what I thought they would get, but when they got one, they never you had to actually pick them up, you know, and pull it out. And sometimes it would just be a single thorn, and then sometimes it would be like a part of a branch they had they hadn't. They wouldn't even look at trying. They just kept on, you know, hobbling in trudging through that. So we went that afternoon. They would get after a rabbit and in the grassy parts where there's some vegetations, they could smell it good, and they jumped some and they run them till they got to the sand and the gravel, and after that they just could not smell them in off and you'd go and put their nose in where it was I saw one. I saw him jump up one and take and go down this shoot there, and I called him, I give them my my rabbit. Call hell. You know. They all come running over there and put them and it's like nothing, not even a tail wag or anything. They just could not smell it. A buddy mine who's a houndsman, who's a lion hunter. I brought this up to him ahead of time. And I'm sure you talked to plenty of people too, but um, I brought him what we were fixing to do, because he used to be a beagle man too, but he's now a lion houndsman. Uh. He hunts bobcats and lions, and he would he he didn't know, but he was more thinking about the acclamation. He wasn't like, did it would work or wouldn't work. It was just that what are they accustomed to? And what he pointed out was, um, if you have lion hounds in the north and you run lions in the snow, okay, uh, And then he's seen where those dogs have gone down to try to hunt dry conditions and they just can't do it. But meanwhile, you have the exact same dogs, like exact same breeds and lines um not lions, but the same breeding lines of dogs that are beard in those conditions, and they excel in them. And so he thinks it's just a matter of it's not that it can't be done. It's just a matter of like his skill set is is not adapted to this, and that over time they would start to piece it together. But you're just asking too much of them. I agree with you on that. It's just like in my country when people come in, they may come from the eastern end of the States and the one to go swamp rabbit NTY. So take them down into the Clark's River bottoms in there a lot of little swamps and in water ditches, and the hill dogs that come out of eastern Kentucky are not used to running in water and swamp rabbit. You put enough pressure on them, they'll hit, hit the water, swim across. And it's the needest thing in the world to see a swamp rabbit swimming because they make no wake. They've got these little bitty you know, their feet, they're just barely paddling right there and they see this rabbitness like you're just gliding out across the water. But they'll bring their dogs down that are not accustomed water in they'll trail a swamp rabbit to the edge of the water and maybe they wait out just a little bit, and then they won't go swimming, you know, after those those swamp rabbits, And a lot of times the swamp rabbit just go out ten twenty ten yards or so and just squat down in the water and just just stay there, sometimes just with their head just barely barely submerged. I have have not seen one, but they will go under water. To have talked to people that have seen them do that, like a rambo rabbit go under water and then come So. I've got a friend of mine, his dad saw one do that one time. But I have seen them on three or four occasions swim uh through swamps across the Clarks River, and some little bitty water hos just go in there. And it's the neediest thing in the world to see that. But I see people bring their dogs down that are not accustomed to the water, and they won't follow us swamp rabbit through through the swamps and or across the river to the other side. And that which my dogs are got lucy out there and when she was a puppy. I just would give her out there to follow me around and get her swimming into the Pond's get him accustomed to the water as soon as I can, so they're not afraid to go out swimming to no degree. I tell everybody she's half river otter, because I've got a real neat picture where Raymond and um, Jason, you met Jason and you met Jody, we all boated into the k o W. I think it's about three or four years ago. The river was coming up and Raymond hunted that ever since he was a kid. He says Murphy, I'm pretty sure it's gonna probably push a bunch of rabbits up into this hill. Down there's all flat river bottom land anyway, So we can boat in about four or five dred yards and go in there and hunt that big areas to be a couple of hundred acres, and then that's not flooded out of about I think it's about five thousand acres down only, so you're concentrating all those rabbits onto that one patch. That one patch. So we went down there and we killed eight swamp rabbits that on that hunt, and after it was all over pretty much after that hunt. Raymond says, I thought we might kill one or two down there, and that, like you said, they concentrated, pushed them all up there, and um, we had a really good hunt. Uh. A couple of them hit the water on us and got away. Didn't get those. And we're going down through there, and all of a sudden we see this blue kayak coming out across the water, and Raymond looks at me and says, who in the hill is down here in a blue kite? Must be some birder or something. Well, they see us and they start started paddling. Well, it's Raymond's brother, Mike. He is down there deer hunting because he knows that, like I said, they've hunted this place since they were kids. Lady, yeah, he's gonna be the deer up there. So we're all sitting sitting around through there looking and all of a sudden, Mike said, man, there's something swimming way out there. He says, it's a swamp rabbit. So Raymond queels around there and shoots. And he's only one that wore chess waiters that day. Luckily he did that because my boat wouldn't start that morning. So Chester beware of used boats. Well, he's gonna tear it up. He's gonna wind up with a brand new boat on that big Okay. So so Raymond shoots this swamp right, I mean he's way out, like fifty yards or so. So he goes out and picks up and I take a picture of him. He's got an orange head on it. It's just a little bit dispec is all it is of Raymond out there. So he comes into the to the bank with this this swamp rabbits. So we got his brother there in the blue kayak, got Jason, and then Jodie is all down there. So we got the whole gang out out killing swamp rabbits that morning. And U I can remember when I was worked at the Pire plant and there was a boy from LBL before they flooded it, and he said when we was kids, the crops wouldn't be in and that's the Cumberland River running through there. Says that the grown ups would be talking about the river's getting ready to get up, and we don't have our crops out. He says, all those kids were thinking about. Man, the river gets up and the swamp rabbits getting there. We're gonna take a tobacco stick in there and going there White Laham. So you know, they were all excited that he's gonna flood because they could get to go hunting. But you know, the adults were concerned, you know, just like adults should be. You know, they were gonna lose their corn crop. But all the kids were ready to go hunting because they pushes that game up. So that we're with these boys, these these tribal you know Amerindians in one of these areas in South America, and uh, they were telling us that that's that's when they hunt, is when everything floods and they just go island hopping because the deer and these big you know, they hunt these uh, nocturnal rodents down there. Like the hell they call those things like there's the well there's they call it's a PoCA. But guy's got our damn name and a goody. You know it's different than the goody either way, you care, what the hell? It was very good eat we had it a bunch tastes. It's like it's like very pork like. Anyways, then they can win it floods and that's in their mind when to go hunting because it's so easy. Just go check all the little islands and everything that everything that needs to breathe there, it's on the same place. And they talked about sometimes you can go up and just club stuff. That's what it's so star. Yeah, they don't just hunt with a stick. One of my friends he saw, well, you know that morning that we went to a swamp rabbit had the boat. There was three quails setting on a log in the backwater. So and then a friend of mine, he was out checking on his duck line yesterday he sent me a picture of a swamp rabbit up on a on a log. I think I showed it because yeah, and that was just yesterday. Our river system is coming up two ft a day, so it's on a really big rise and that's you know the river downer where Leon lives. You know, it's about two miles wide down there now. So that's a tremendous amount of water that I live around. I knew these guys that lived in an area in Alberta where it was legal though you could hunt beavers like well normal you can't, but you can hunt beavers for the markets. And they would in the spring floods everything. The water gets so high that all the bank dens and lodges and flood. And they'd go out on a john boat with a twenty two. And he was telling me one time. I can't remember, I remember he said something they hunted two days because like nine beavers or something like that with the twenty two. Oh, because they were everything was flooded out of its house. It's tremendous amount of skin in there if you killed that being two days. Pure misery, man, pure misery. Let me ask you this, though, Kevin, do you uh do you regret coming out to New Mexico with your dogs? Oh? No, No, it's been a pleasure. I met Mike and Jeremy, you two new guys. Say in Chester and say you again? Now you know we met the first time, I think in St. Louis. So here we are. I was signing something another at the n r A convention. Yeah, and I come up to you and started talking to you. Some man. You need to get some kids into small game, honey, because I can go right out their back door with him. That's not what That's not what attracted me to you. What attracted me to you? And you know doing it. You're talking all kinds of people and after a while, it's it's it's hard to keep track. But the reason you and I be this is not the reason we became friends, but the reason I we began to correspond is you were the first person in my life to ever come up to me and start making a guess about whether the squirrel hunting would be good this year. And you were looking forward to the squirrel season because you felt that the massed crop was looking pretty strong in your area. And in all my years, I've never had someone come up and predict to me, um and try to like make a guest to me about what the squirrel season would look like based on mass crop. And I said, that's a special man. It's all about food, not people all day long. A lot of good antler growth, which is fine, that's great. But I've never had someone come up and be like, there's a very strong mass crop and I think it's gonna be an exceptional squirrel yar. And I said, I want to be friends with that person. Here we are. We've hung out in a lot of states. Now, man, Yes, Kevin Murphy, you know what the American treasure. You just got to get that joint technique down right, Kevin. If you spent enough time here with your dogs, do you think your dogs would would adapt to the landscape? And second, if you took them back to your home, do you think they would perform better? Wor that's a good question. That like that, that's a great question. Would they be like ship? You know we left out? Uh, let's see last Saturday, we could go Saturday. It was got up as a minus four degrees windshield and I had two friends down and was gonna go squirrel hunting. And we had I think fourteen days below thirty degrees. It was a coach spell for us. I think it was like the fourth longest song record from so and so there. But it was the sun was warming up and the I thought the squirrels would come out. So I told my friends, said, let's just wait untill about dinner time. So we went out and we we killed some squirrels. I think, you know, if I stayed down here for a month or so and figured out, I think my dogs would get better. I feel if I raised a narration of dogs out of those same dogs, they would have no trouble down here with some tough one booty. Yeah, I think they'd get tough enough with that. But you know, my dogs are used to running in muck and my in leaf letter, not abrasive grit and gravel, and used to all these sornings. You know, they'll go right through BlackBerry bushes, the brambles, no problems at all. You know, a little short but these long mesquite Yeah, I don't think so, but I think they would get better. I don't think they would be ever be great, but I think I could raise or litteral pups down here. Now if I took those back home, I think they would be lost. Oh yeah, because they're not used to the water unless I trained that went to the rivers and got them accustomed to swim. And Jesson started Kevin Murphy Southwest Division and happy to be that you have a division of you that lives here with rabbit dogs. I would love to hear from some local rabbit hunter, beagle guy or somebody that frequents here. I got known the Internet and looked around and tried to find rabbit hunting in New Mexico with dogs. There was nothing. That's why I was so intrigued by it. When you brought it up, I was like, not only yes, but hell yes, because I've never heard anybody doing that before. I got another I got another follow up question for you, Kevin, Based on what you now know with your beagles, what do you feel what happened? Would you be more or less enthusiastic about bringing out your squirrel dogs for abert squirrels or would you be like, I've learned my lesson ain't gonna happen. I'm coming because I've got I've got not even tell me about it, abert sons of bitches. Okay, here's the difference. Here's the difference. You didn't get invite. We'll plan our own trip. Man, get some real squirrel man out here. Bagel is and the way you want to bagel nos nos pretty much nine. That's what it uses. It's using. And that was where if you've got a good squirrel dog, it's using its ears. It's no in its eyes. So if we go with those big ponderosa pines, they're the squirrel dogs that I have, we'll be able to see those and so when they see them, they're gonna be able to tree them. They're not gonna have to worry about them jump into the next pine tree. Right. I mean the landscapes as saying I haven't seen it in person, but just looking they're going to be in that probably you feel you'd have more luck. Yes, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm I'm coming. You know I'm gonna do that, dude. I want to go so bad. I can't lef you guys and tell me, let's do it. I did tell you about you did not be like, oh, I'm planning a trip with Kevin for squirrels. Well that's completely different. At least was exposed to that place anybody, you know, But I was exposed to planning. Wasn't like they just sneaking off in the bushes and planning up avert squirrel hunts. Not. We'll see how things shake out and we'll call you if you know it's room. I think that would be an amazing thing to try to do. I bet it would really work. I bet it work a lot better than beagles. There's gonna be a lot less rocks, cactuses, Pokey's yeah, and in the audio the audio visual, it's interesting. Now that's a good point. Oh right, man, Kevin, thank you very much for coming out. Appreciate that you're you're an inspiration to me as an adventuring spirit, you'd like to go do stuff. I like to go out and live. I'm in the fourth quarter of my life and i want to see the world. You know. I find it amazing. You know, I'm looking out and seeing things and I'm asking, like, Jeremy soon, what kind of plant is this here? What is this animal mound? Here? So, I mean, those small things intrigued me. And I'm just not about going, you know, I'm gonna kill this animal or this one. I want to see everything that's out there and try to figure it out and try to put it together. I mean, I just love the world, how Mother Nature makes things all interact, the desert quail. To see those things out there, you know, what's it gonna take to make them things fly? Jeremy, I mean, are they half a road runner? You know? I got into two bunches of them. I soul you guys, you know, pushing those down, and they were just like running, running, running. And I saw a covey the other day and I tried to get on top of them, and I just saw them one time and they was gone in a little drain area over by the two water tanks. But yeah, yeah, I've enjoyed this very much. And I was telling a dirt there day yesterday, and Dirt was saying if I asked if I was the kind of person that felt things will always just work out. And I explained the dirt that that no, think. I was saying, you need to wake up every day paranoid. And he said, but if you try, they'll always work out. And I said, oh, absolutely, man, I think if you uh, I think that we live in a land of tremendous opportunity. And I was like, if you apply yourself and try hard and focus, things will work out for you. But then I brought up that. I was like, there's a thing that happens to people that doesn't get talked about. Is so many of the people I know that eventually fall into uh not it not working out for them so often, is uh they become piste off and bitter like. No one talks about the nothing, no one talks about it. There's a real problem with becoming piste off and bitter like. It happens to people and then it's just downhill. And the thing I like about you is how optimistic you are, like you gotta go and you you gotta go in and get a whole new damn knee and then get better and go get a whole another knee can be fixed and you're not even remotely irritated by this because it can be fixed. A part of life, I mean, as human beings, we have the power to believe in something better that's out there and that we have the power to go after it. That separates us from the animal kingdom. Animal kingdom just does it's just instinct. I've got to get some nuts buried up. But we have the power to look out there and say, hey, I can build this, I can do this. I can go over there aspirational. Yes, yeah, I mean we can. We can imagine things that are not there. You know. I feel like if my knee failed, I would I mean I would battle it out, but I would have a problem with turning piste off. It's just in my d n A arthritis runs into my family, um, and it's just part of life. I mean, I'll be sixty two in September, and it's just you know, I've got a lot of wear and tear on that knee, playing sports, walking being outside. It's just I've used it and I can get it fixed. Um, you know, I've got it on the healing phase of the moon. So every card I can play, I'm gonna play. I've got a really good doctor that cares about me. I'm putting eighteen inch suer line through his backyard. Just ther No, this is part of a project. If we couldn't get easy with on some people through there, and they wanted me to go, Breck was gonna have to take out some treaties or something. So uh, I said, I've got to go get an injection. So maybe I'm sitting on my schedule my knee surgery so I can maybe get to talk to him. In the contract, we wanted me to talk to him because I had to get an easement from a former mayor that that I used to work for, and they wanted me to go in there and talk to him. So I got it, and um, you know, the world's about politics making deals. Sitting here, you're saying what you would need to say. I say what I need and we come to a conclusion there for good of me and you both and are everybody, and that's the way we need to stay. But I was going through there, and then one neighbor comes up to me and says, let me tell you something about Dr Ptel. He's my doctor. I don't mind saying his name. He's really I really love him. He says, you know, if you've got a doctor, you don't want a doctor that's a big duck hunter or a farmer or wants to be an artists. You want a doctor that likes to make people well. He said, that's what Dr Betel is. So I just kind of kept my mouth shutting never you know, not until he got the end, because I was all ears waiting to see what he had to say about Dr Mattel. And then he said that. That really made me charge up and say, hey, yeah, I've made the right, right decision on the doctor. And like I said, a friend of mine, he's eighty one, had a heart vowel replacement. They were gonna put in four stints in him. He picked out the right healing moonface for the heart and went in there and come out of the operation with a new heart valve in two stints in there. And I'll see him Monday night at the LBL Sportsman Club meeting. And he's still guiding at eighty one. He's a fish guide. Mike, You might want to want him. You'd be better be glad that he knows a Kentucky and not New Mexico because he would wear your ass out. So um, you know, we all have that pire to wake up in the morning and go out and do something good, you know, and work, whether you volunteer, if you go through your life, I'm gonna continue working. That's something I've just seen in the last couple of years. I thought, when I retire, I'm going to retire and go hunting and fishing and stuff. Well, you can only do so much hunting and fishing, really can't. And the older you get, the less you got. I mean, I see Jeremy out here. I said, how much guess you got left? And you tank? You said, it's it's full. It's always full. It's off. So you know, I can remember, I said, I can remember days like that. But I'm not like that anymore. I just want to go out and and do my thing and watch other people hunt. I don't have to kill something every single time that I go out. I don't have to get the limit. If I can just get one, I'm completely satisfied. That's all I have to do. But yeah, it's good to keep a good positive attitude, and that's what I'm gonna try to do to the end of my life. You know, it's just work. Be out in the dirt, outside, out in nature, and just leave it damn straight. I like it. Kevin Murphy, thanks so much, Kevin, Thanks everyone for joining. See you soon.