00:00:04 Speaker 1: Smell us now, Lady, Welcome to Meet Eater Trivia mea podcast. 00:00:26 Speaker 2: Welcome to Meet Eater Radio Live. It's eleven am Mountain Time. That's also eleven am for our friends in moab Utah on Thursday, January twenty second, when we're live from Meat Eater HQ in Bozeman. I'm your host, Spencer, joined today by Jannis and Seth. On today's show, we'll interview Sue Richardson about the historical figure Wilson Snowflake Bentley. Then we'll review some items for gear Talk, followed by a batch of top threes, and finally we'll interview Michael Hadsel about the world's one and only search and rescue otter. First, Seth, Yanni, what have you boys been up to? 00:01:04 Speaker 1: Cold? January? Uh? Cold? Cold this weekend? This is like the first weeks cold feels notable. 00:01:13 Speaker 2: Have you seen the forecast for like east of US, Northern Minnesota, negative seventy wind chill. 00:01:20 Speaker 3: Well northern Montana, like up on the high Line, Malta. They're they're getting real cold stuff. 00:01:26 Speaker 1: Everybody's getting real winter. 00:01:27 Speaker 3: Besides US, Pennsylvania's getting real cold stuff, a lot of snow. 00:01:33 Speaker 1: Right now, we've boy's been up to I went and did a little. 00:01:37 Speaker 3: My wife and I went out to eastern Montana last weekend, did a little looking around for things, fossils and whatnot. 00:01:43 Speaker 1: You're the only one who was rock counting in January. 00:01:46 Speaker 3: Well, I used getting old, but uh, you know it's been warm and there's everything's not covered up in snow. So yeah, it was a perfect Did you find found some back lights? 00:01:58 Speaker 1: How big? Show me? Uh? 00:02:00 Speaker 3: I found one that was probably four or five inches long. Good, And then we found like three of those and then found, uh the part of a bison vertebrae that has the thing sticking up real high on them. 00:02:15 Speaker 2: Oh, like the on their back. Yeah, way cool. That showed me how big that was. 00:02:19 Speaker 1: That was probably six seven inches tall. And then. 00:02:25 Speaker 3: We found I just I can't like confirm how authentic this is, but we found some carvings in Sandstone. That one was in June twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, Frenchy the Trapper. 00:02:39 Speaker 2: Oh and you're suspicious that may not have been in nineteen eleven from Frenchy the Trap. 00:02:43 Speaker 3: Yeah, you just can't tell, you know, like I want to, it totally could be. I believe it's hard it's hard to tell. And then we found another carving that, you know, like the famous Western artist Charlie Russell, like the. 00:02:57 Speaker 1: Cmrs named after. 00:03:00 Speaker 3: We found a cm carved in sandstone that looks very similar to his signature. 00:03:09 Speaker 1: That's way cool. 00:03:10 Speaker 3: So Kelsey's a big fan of Oh yeah, a huge fan. Yeah, we have his work, prince of his work hanging in our house. Huh. But yeah, I can't, like I said, can't confirm if it's really authentic stuff. 00:03:22 Speaker 1: But are you gonna are you gonna bring these findings to someone else's attention that could maybe authenticate them? Yeah? 00:03:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we know a guy that's part of like the the Charlie Russell Historic Society thing or whatever. 00:03:37 Speaker 1: Wouldn't that be something? 00:03:38 Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be cool. It'd be super cool. But yeah, that's what I've been doing. 00:03:44 Speaker 1: Johnny Lyon, Man, you like the winter? Love it? You don't? 00:03:49 Speaker 2: I mean, if I were ranking the four seasons, it's an easy fourth place for me, no question about it. 00:03:56 Speaker 1: I've never thought about ranking the seasons like you above four. I would not live in a place it doesn't have four seasons, I agree, but I don't know, Like, yeah, that's one of those like Steve things of God's pointing a gun at your head and you have to pick you know, the great like they're all great. Sure, running is great in the winter. Running is great in the summer too, but for different reasons. 00:04:21 Speaker 2: Right, Fall number one, Summer number two, Spring number three, Winter number four? 00:04:27 Speaker 1: Easy you go now? Oh geez uh? Fall one two, Spring three, Winter for summer? Wow, what an upset? So you love winter? You freak a lot of good things to do in the winter. Okay, tell me what you've been doing then, Well, yeah, we haven't been doing the normal winter activities because of our lack of snow here. But ming has not been trying to catch lions, uh, not doing real good at that. I have not caught a single one yet. Been getting not really messed up by the lack of snow so much, but I've had a lot of One time we had too much snow happened while we were on a fresh track that we knew was a fresh track from the day before. I might have already talked about this, but this track literally filled in. That was like the only snowstorm that we've had this winter, and I just happened to be on a track that day. But I've had a bunch where they've gone into private. It's just a thing with Montana, man, there's like a even though we have a lot of public, there's just always some private around. And then you know those cats take a left instead of it right, and they're going towards private. Nothing you can do about it. 00:05:37 Speaker 2: Sure, and you can get access to that private and you know, especially if you're within an hour of Bozeman here, like that private could be very skinny. And then he's already three private parcels away. 00:05:48 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, it doesn't make sense to call somebody to access forty acres or even a couple hundred acres. Now, if it's like thousands, it makes sense. And I've been I've been calling them. But we did catch our first Bobcat ever solo two weekends ago, which was a you know, it's a real proud moment for me as a houndowner, do mag. 00:06:12 Speaker 2: It's know, the difference when he's like on a track like this is a Bobcat, this is. 00:06:16 Speaker 1: A you don't think so no, I don't know. There's no way that I could I would know. But what was cool about it is that he'd already tracked one for a while, and he's so poor at catching bobcats. A lot of times, if I know it's a bobcat track and it's early in the day, I'll kind of let him do it, but I'm gonna sort of start like keep meandering the way I'm gonna I'm going because I want to see if we can find a lion track, right, And the reason being I've talked about this before too, but just to explain to everybody, lions have small lungs. They cannot outrun a hound, so when they get pressured by dogs, they immediately go up in a tree or they bay up or whatever. Sometimes there might be a quarter mile, you know, a little bit of a sprint or something, but they don't have the endurance to do things like bobcats do, which have much bigger lungs. And I guess that it's just because a bobcat is prey to more animals than a lion is. Lion just sits on to higher up the hierarchy. You know. The only thing that really chases the line around might be a giant bear or a wolf, and they're probably not really chasing them so much is they're just running them off of kiels and whatever. A bobcat though he's you know, pack of coylots can take them out, you know, who knows what else, so they can stay ahead of hounds. And if they have a jump, then they start to do figure eights, backtrack, go up trees, jump from one tree to another tree, come down the other tree, and do different things. So they're just harder to get close to to put the pressure on, because again you got to put the pressure on and make them go up into a tree. Well, while they're doing these loops of stuff, like if you're in the zone, there's a chance you can see a bobcat, right And it's never happened to me. But Jennifer was with me, why my wife, and we're staying there and Mingus has been on the track now for I don't know half an hour, and I could hear it in his voice that something had changed, like there was a little more intensity to it. The barking was becoming more rapid. I'm like, man, he might have jumped him, you know, like there he might be onto something. And I said to Jennifer, wouldn't it be cool like if we just like saw bobcat come sneaking through here? You know, while Mingus is on his track, and two minutes later, five minutes later, I look up the hill and here comes a bobcat, not worried whatsoever that he's got one hundred pound pound somewhere one hundred yards behind him. He's just slinking through the woods, not looking over his shoulder. How far away was Mingus? You think one hundred plus one hundred to one hundred and fifty yards and uh yeah, this bobcat comes down the hill, comes by Jennifer for and I at ten yards. I should have gave this video to Philly, could have shared it and it was cool. I got my camera out fast enough and got you know, maybe three four seconds I've been walking through. Did you hear him coming or you just saw him? No, just happened to look up the hill and saw him, and they just flowed across the earth. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Just silent and deadly, you know, not butt deadly, but silent and deadly. Unfortunately, Jennifer's like digging in her backpack when I look over at her, so I'm like trying to make noise, but not too much noise, because she was, I don't know, fifteen feet away from me and luckily she heard me, looked up and saw it too. We're both sort of so astounded at the what we had just seen. We're just sitting there in awe, being like, whoa man like keep believe that? 00:09:46 Speaker 4: You know? 00:09:46 Speaker 1: That was so rad And it takes me a couple of minutes and I'm like, oh shit, I better call Mingus over here. That's a hot track right there. There hasn't been a hotter track ever. And Mingus calms call him over and it still took him probably fifteen twenty minutes to put enough pressure on him to get him into a tree. Like again, I wasn't thinking we were going to catch it. So we continued down the hill, went to the creek bottom, took off our packs, started snacking and by the time We've gotten a couple of bites and I'm like, oh, he's barking treed. So we packed up and walked up there, and sure enough he had him. 00:10:22 Speaker 2: Good did he see the bobcat in the tree? Oh yeah, yeah, he knows, Oh yeah good. 00:10:27 Speaker 1: He did not want to leave the tree because I didn't have my uh wish Steve was here so he could make more fun of me about this. But in Montana, probably a lot of places. You got to buy a fur bear license before the season starts if you want to kill a bobcat. I had not done that this year, just slip my mind. So they're safe. And so yeah, we had to walk away from one in the tree. But honestly, it's like, I don't know, I'm trying to think how to put it, But if it's one or the other, I'd rather just have my dog catching bobcats and looking at him and walking away like that's waycore than to say I like, I'd rather have three the Mingus had caught on his own and taking pictures of it than one he had caught and I got to kill it. Yeah, good for Mingus. Yeah, more more Mingus stories to come. So luckily we have. You know, it's only the end of January. We still have February, March, half of April to keep hunting lions and cats. 00:11:26 Speaker 2: The winter pervert lovers like you, honest, a lot of winter to go. Speaking of winter, let's go to our first guest of the day. Joining us on the line now is Sue Richardson, the VP of the Jericho Historical Society. Sue is here to talk to us about her great great uncle, Wilson Snowflake Bentley. 00:11:46 Speaker 1: Sue, Welcome to the show. 00:11:48 Speaker 5: Thanks, it's puny to be here. 00:11:50 Speaker 2: First thing, Sue, please explain who your great great uncle was and how he got the nickname Snowflake. 00:11:57 Speaker 5: Well, if you grew up on the snowflakes are like, it's because of Wilson Bentley. He was the first person to ever photograph an individual snow crystal. He went on to do photograph more than five thousand of him over the next forty six years, and he not only photographed them, but he studied. Each photograph had a corresponding entry in his journal with which documented temperature, humidity, what part of the storm it came from. All of this weather data, and from that he developed many many theories on how these crystals form and what factors impact how they change and grow. And in fact, most of what scientists today know about snow came from his research in the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds. So the nickname was actually given to him by a reporter from the Boston Globe. We did a story on him in the early nineteen hundreds and gave him the handle the Snowflake Man, which kind of Morphed into Snowflake Bentley. 00:12:58 Speaker 2: His images are beautiful, filled with so much detail that it's shocking that he pulled this off with technology from the eighteen hundreds. Tell us about the setup that he used to capture these pictures which we're looking at right now. You can see these on our YouTube channel. 00:13:13 Speaker 5: He had a Bellows camera and he replaced the lens with a microscope, figured out a way to attach it, and that's how he got the magnification. And of course those cameras used glass negatives, so they were very it was very stable. 00:13:33 Speaker 6: For the tipe. 00:13:34 Speaker 5: For the timeframe, photography was pretty much in its infancy, only twenty twenty five years that photographs have been real easily taken if you will. But he was a brilliant man. He was seventeen years old when he started this process when his mother bought him that camera and microscope for his they and it took three years of trial and error to figure out how to put it together, how to make it all work. He had to experiment with different stops to get the to control the amount of light coming in, and he worked in an unheated woodshed at the back of the house because it needed to be cold so the snow crystals wouldn't melt while he did the process. 00:14:22 Speaker 1: How can I ask how did he capture the snowflakes. 00:14:26 Speaker 5: He had wooden tray they made with wire handles. He would step out of this woodshed into the storm, test the falling snow on this tray. Then he would step back into the woodshed, out of the wind and grab a magnifying glass to do a quick scan to see if there was anything worthy of photographing, and if they was, he made a He initially used a straw from the old room as a tool to touch it to the center of this little snow crystal and transfer it to the microscope slide. In later years he created a stylus of wood with a sharp point on a larger end so it was easier to manipulate that. He would transfer to the microscope slide and put it under his microscope, his observation microscope, to make sure it was again worthy of photographing, and then he would He had this weird process because the the slide had to be vertical in the stage on the microscope slash lens, so he used a turkey feather because they saw that would press the cold snow crystal to the cold glass, slide it into the stage on the microscope, go to the back of the camera. Go the black cloth over his head. You know you've seen it in the old movies. That's legit, how those work, and bring it to the focus and. 00:15:41 Speaker 6: Take a picture. 00:15:43 Speaker 2: Wow, that's cool, Snowflake. Was you and said that had never been done before. And I imagine that this elicited some strong feelings from those around him. What did his friends and family think of his work? 00:15:53 Speaker 5: They thought he was crazy. These people are practical formon farmers and messing with snow. To them, they just could not fathom any particular, any purpose, any sense in doing this. And it doesn't add there no production from me, dairy cow's. It doesn't make your crafts go any better. They just thought it waste of time and pure foolishness. Later years, they did come to appreciate it. After he became basically known all over the world, they did come to. 00:16:30 Speaker 6: Appreciate it, But they initially thought he was. 00:16:35 Speaker 1: Nuts. Yeah. 00:16:36 Speaker 2: What about the scientific community, what did they think of his work? 00:16:40 Speaker 5: Well, for the first dozen years or so that he was photographing these, he didn't write about it or talk about his own. But he studied these and he started developing all these theories, and when he was finally published in eighteen ninety eight in a scientific magazine. He then worked prolifically over the next decade, and he was ignored by the scientific community for a decade. I think there was probably some arrogance there, you know, what does sometimes a farmer know that we don't know. And also he was very eloquent in his style of writing, and of course scientific writing is supposed to be purely objective, just factual, and he would go off in these flowery pros because he was so enamored with the beauty he's on and he couldn't help himself. So they ignored him until he couldn't. But in the meantime, colleges and universities from around the world were buying copies of his negatives and his prints for teaching purposes. And he touched five cents apiece for duplicate which is exactly what it cost him to make a duplicate negative. And when he died in nineteen thirty one, he was still charging five cents apiece. He never raised his price. He spent more money than. 00:17:58 Speaker 2: He ever made Besides the five thousand snowflakes, what else did Snowflake Bentley take pictures of? 00:18:06 Speaker 5: Well, he took he had another camera that he took pictures of clouds and snow rollers and different weather phenomena. In addition to family members and just life on the farm. He also photographed frost on window panes and on plants, and do on plants and spiderwebs and insects. Just he was fascinated with it, with pretty much everything in the natural world. 00:18:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, SOE please tell folks how they can experience Snowflake Bentley's work in person and online. 00:18:44 Speaker 5: Here in Jericho, Vermont, in a historic building called the Old Red Mail, which is an eighteen hundred s gistmill, we house the Snuffy Exhibit, which is his cameras, his microscopes, all of the equipment that you worked with, some of these original photographs and negatives. It's a neat exhibit. We literally have people that come from all over the world to see this exhibit and actually see the equivalently work with. There's a children's book that was published in nineteen ninety eight that's still in print, the Wiman Caldecot Award. So we get teachers from all over the world because it's published in multiple languages, so it's really it's a fascinating exhibit. Definitely, if you're anywhere in this part of the country, it's definitely worth the time to come by. 00:19:30 Speaker 6: And see it. 00:19:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for joining us to and thanks for continuing the legacy of your great great uncle Snowflake Bentley. 00:19:37 Speaker 6: You're welcome. Thanks for having me. 00:19:39 Speaker 1: Thanks Sue, Thanks Sue. 00:19:41 Speaker 2: I'm fixing to order me one of those pictures of snowflakes, Snowflake and. 00:19:46 Speaker 1: Hang that up at home. Oh yeah, I love that they're from the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, that'd be a great little print to have hang on the wall. Yeah all right. Our next segment is gear Talk. 00:20:00 Speaker 6: Talk about gear. 00:20:01 Speaker 4: But I know how fun Who has his name is Johannis to tell less, it makes me wonder Fan Feet still wants to talk up about gear. 00:20:12 Speaker 1: Because he doesn't have a choice. 00:20:15 Speaker 2: How much funny when he spends it's Yanny talking gear again. 00:20:21 Speaker 1: Yanny talking gear again. Great tune. What are you reviewing for us today with gear talking? Well, Spencer, I brought in my new favorite. 00:20:31 Speaker 2: Backpack okay, loaded up with gear too. That thing must be what thirty pounds. 00:20:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, i'd say somewhere around there. Did you pick it up? No? Yeah, it doesn't have any water in it right now. So it gets about two pounds heavier when I go out. And the reason being is because my pistol and my rifle are in here, and uh, you know, guns just they add a lot of weight. But if I continue to not sheot bobcats out of trees and I don't need to carry yeah either of those. Just walk around with your camera. Get all right? Tell us about this backpack. Yeah, initial Assent. I found out about him. I think it was right about a year ago. I was at the Western Hunt Expo and my buddy Duke Wastony from First Light came by our booth or we were maybe at the First Light booth, and he's like, hey, you need to go check come check out these Initial Ascent packs. And so I went over and I saw it. I'm like, yeah, whatever looks like a pack. 00:21:30 Speaker 2: Duke is the guy that the First Light guys talk about as though he's a god in the mountains. Yeah, like Duke is the badass mountain hunter. Yeah crew, yeah, okay, And he told you to check out. He told me to check it out. So, yeah, when Duke tells me to check something out, I usually pay attention. They had it, man, I can't remember the exact numbers, but they had the pack itself loaded with like eighty pounds, and I put it on. I'm like, all right, yeah, it feels all right, feels heavy, and they're like, okay, now we're gonna add on. I forget what it was sixty more or something. They basically hung these. 00:22:05 Speaker 1: Sand filled dry bags off of these hooks right here on each side, and then they're like, now, go walk around for ten minutes and come back. And after that little tour, it was enough to be like, Okay, I definitely need to try one of these. A lot of packs carry weight. I feel like decently, well, does this one excel at it? You know, better than the other ones I've been using. Maybe it's one percent better. I don't know, Like I know I can carry weight with it. It's like when you have a one hundred pounds on your back. It all starts to hurt after a while, no matter how good the pack is. What I really like, though, is because ninety five percent of the time when I'm wearing this pack, it doesn't have one hundred pounds of meat in it. Instead it's got thirty pounds of gear in it, or maybe even just twenty and I'm sneaking through the woods trying to put an arrow through an elk or whatever it might be. And so how it rides in those cases, in those scenarios is probably more important me than how well it carries the weight, right. It's one of the things that stands out for this pack for me is that when it's on my back, there's I have to really try to get my elbows or my tricep to touch the pack behind me, and so it's not like it's a big bulk thing sticking out my sides. It's very slim profile and looking at it, it doesn't necessarily look like that when when you see it, but yeah, wearing it like I can draw my brooke bow freely, it's just not in my way whatsoever. I'm a fan of simple packs too, And as you can see here, it's basically got the one main compartment. The main compartment has I think another two zippers inside of it, and then it's got these one outside compartment. Very tidy, very yeah, super super tidy. I'm not a fan of the packs with you know, fifty pockets and fifty zippers. It just adds weight and complicates things that I don't need it. So yeah, the frame, uh, carbon fiber frame, and who else does that? Uh people have stays that are carbon fiber. I don't know anybody else that has a full frame like this. Yeah, that seems pretty unique. Catches your eye right away. Yeah, for sure. 00:24:15 Speaker 3: The top part of the frame here is that like a can you like hook your your you're right rightfless thing on that. Oh yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, definitely very easy to take the bag off and and put it back on if you're going to take it off, just to care if you don't want to carry the bag itself while you're packing meat. It's got a load shelf in there. So yeah, just simple. 00:24:40 Speaker 1: I like simple things at work, and this pack definitely does that. So I put a few pictures up the pills shown now where I think I've packed at least a half dozen animals in it. That was my bull elk there. The picture prior was my Idaho mule deer from this fall. And there's a care that was a short pack job right there. It wouldn't like it really tested the pack out, but anyways, been putting it through the faces and uh yeah, I'm pumped on it. 00:25:10 Speaker 2: So is that gonna be the backpack for the fall of twenty twenty six as well? 00:25:15 Speaker 1: Okay, you're convinced, sweet, I'm gonna go next for gear talk. 00:25:22 Speaker 2: I'm going to talk about my favorite gloves that I have ever owned. They are the first Light Cody gloves ever. 00:25:29 Speaker 1: Ever, I don't I. 00:25:30 Speaker 2: Can't think of a pair I've liked more than these. Maybe my first pair of glomets. I had a pair of glomets from Cabella's back when I was in high school, and I really loved those for ice fishing specifically. Do you know what a glomit is? That's like the flip over May two? You still got the ash? Sure, So I loved those at the time. Now they wouldn't be as practical for me, but for ice fishing specifically anyway, the Cody gloves from First Light. I love these things. They are soft but durable. Uh they're they're insulated, but you can still like use your fingers when you're wearing them. I've had these, I think for two falls. They're the gloves that I use the most for hunting and fishing and snowblowing, and you would think I just got these yesterday. Like they do not show much sign of wear at all, and I'm not doing anything to take care of them. I'm not like oiling them or something like that, or making sure that they don't get blood on them or water. I think they are really special gloves, and they are first lights. They say they are their ranch inspired hunting glove. I use these pretty much all fall when I was deer hunting in Illinois, when I'm deer hunting in Montana, when I'm deer hunting in Nebraska. And in Nebraska, I have a rancher there that I have deer hunting permission from. He's a cattle rancher. He also farms. I asked him one time, he says, are you considered. 00:26:45 Speaker 1: A farmer or a rancher? 00:26:47 Speaker 2: And he says, well, I farm so that I can ranch, so you know, beef are his passion. Anyway, I gave him a pair of these gloves that he's now used for two calving seasons. Calving season for much of the North is happening right now, like January to March. He texted me the other day. He said I love these gloves. You gave me best winter gloves I've ever had for caving. So if that's not an endorsement, yeah, I don't know what is. That's great the first like Cody gloves, I bet. 00:27:14 Speaker 1: His look a little bit more warm in yours. He's doing real work. He's got extra fluid. By the way that yours look, you're actually not doing that much work out there, I think. So I love that glove too. I have burned through the very first pair I have finally now has quite a few holes in the fingers. But that's I don't know, three four seasons, and I wear them almost every single day, especially cat hunting, you know, snow cat gloves, yeah, snowmobiling. If I get that warm where I can't wear them because they're too warm, I just stick them out of pockets and go gloveless. But you need something that's you know, protecting you from the elements, but keeping keeping your warm. Not too hot. Mine will if it's been wet kind of snowy conditions, they'll start to wet out, and so I do nick wax them periodically, you know, I don't know, maybe three four times a winter, and uh yeah, just when they're wet, I squirt you know, a couple of tablespoons of that stuff on there and just rub it all in and then stick them on a couple of times of an antler in the house. Let them drive for a day or two and they're ready to rip again. But yeah, I'm a big fan of that kind of glove where I'm skiing too. 00:28:25 Speaker 2: Oh, there you go first, like Cody glove. There's seventy dollars. I'm looking right now. We have small through excel available in both colors. 00:28:34 Speaker 1: Seth, what do you got for gear talk today? I got a little homemade piece of gear. 00:28:38 Speaker 2: Okay, so this is a and it does not look homemade. It does all come it's like you bought it like this, which is a compliment. 00:28:46 Speaker 3: It's a mobile power station like you know, like Jackery or Blue Eddy or Goal zero makes. 00:28:54 Speaker 1: But those things are so expensive. What is the average price for something like that? Oh? Look it up, quick, spencer. Okay, give me tell me what brand I should be looking up? Look at uh Jackery. And this is no shade on these companies. 00:29:09 Speaker 3: You keep telling us about this, But anyway, this is so what I what I did here is I took just the yetty. 00:29:18 Speaker 1: What are these things called, like load out boss go box box. 00:29:21 Speaker 3: Yeah, And I went on Amazon and bought a one hundred amp hour lithium battery that was like one hundred and sixty bucks, and I put it in this box and then hooked up two cigarette outlets and then this one is two USB's and a USB C for charging. And it's all kept in this little box. Nice and neat, waterproof, very nice and neat. And I use this thing to run my Dometic refrigerator. I used it to run my diesel heater and the lights in the back of my pickup truck bed. And yeah, I use it literally all all season long. Every time I go on trip. This thing comes with me if I'm truck camping. And yeah, it's just like a cheap alternative to the mobile power stations that you see online that are very expensive. And all together, I think this box and you don't have to buy a yetti box. I just happen to have this one. 00:30:24 Speaker 1: It fits it real nice. 00:30:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, it fits it perfectly. I think this thing's like one hundred and twenty five bucks. Batteries one sixty and then you know another probably thirty or forty bucks for all the the outlets here, so you know, very cheap compared to the alternatives. 00:30:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm looking at a Jackery base model right now. It's on sale for eight hundred listed originally at fifteen hundred. 00:30:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:30:49 Speaker 3: And if you look at that catch it probably doesn't have one hundred damp hour Liian battery in it. 00:30:55 Speaker 1: No, what does that mean? How many? Like can you go for a full weekend and not charge this thing and do all? 00:31:02 Speaker 3: Oh? 00:31:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet he could go for a month. 00:31:04 Speaker 3: I went, I went a full week run running a refrigerator. I go a full week with the refrigerator for sure. On this and charging phones, charging phones and stuff too. Wow, it's a great little tool. And I bet you'll use that then like three sixty five. 00:31:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. 00:31:20 Speaker 3: And and like you know, eventually the batteries do go bad in those things, and this one, I just go on Amazon, buy another battery and pop it in there. 00:31:28 Speaker 1: M hm. Keep on trucking. 00:31:30 Speaker 2: You got a nice little spot in the back of your pickup where that gets tending down yep. 00:31:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:31:36 Speaker 3: And then it's nice because I can just like pick it up and take it wherever I need it to take it into the office. 00:31:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, check it out. Very good piece of gear. 00:31:47 Speaker 2: All right, let's take a break for some listener feedback. Phil, what's the chat I have to say? 00:31:53 Speaker 4: Yes, first shout out here. It's from Catherine Berglan. Mama, Hey, I was wondering if you could wish my beautiful mountain girl Isabella happy birthday. She'll be eight tomorrow and she loves me eater happy. 00:32:06 Speaker 1: Should we sing? Is going to sing for you? Yes? Go ahead, take it away so I'll sing with it. 00:32:11 Speaker 2: Happy birthday, Isabella, Happy birthday, mountain girl Isabella turning eight tomorrow. 00:32:17 Speaker 4: Another question for Yannis another the first one. Is there already a thought of a meat Eater roast tournament, either a one v one playoff bracket style or some sort of competition format where there's an elimination thing happening. 00:32:31 Speaker 1: There has been thought of a playoff bracket style cooking competition. 00:32:38 Speaker 2: Yes, you know what I think we should do before that is have Yanni compete. 00:32:42 Speaker 7: Mm hmm. 00:32:43 Speaker 1: I feel like you and Steve or something. 00:32:45 Speaker 2: There you go, you versus Steve. I get host, I'll volunteer to host, or whoever you want to host can host. But we should put Yanni on the spot. 00:32:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, now, and then that would be a good idea. What else you got? 00:32:56 Speaker 4: Phil Melody asks for some tips on keeping toes and fingers warm during below freezing ice fit ice fishing trips. She has terrible circulation, she says. 00:33:05 Speaker 1: Hot hands. 00:33:07 Speaker 2: Yep, every every person who lives north of the Mason Dixon can use hot hands and it will genuinely keep you warmer. 00:33:14 Speaker 1: What do you guys got. 00:33:15 Speaker 3: I went to a bunny boot this year m hm, and it's been phenomenal. 00:33:20 Speaker 1: Oh, they're amazing. Yeah. If you don't know what a bunny boot is, it's a it's like an air filled, old school military all rubber boot. If you're if you ever. 00:33:31 Speaker 3: Are always white, No, no, there's black ones that are they call Mickey Mouse boot. 00:33:37 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:33:37 Speaker 3: But the Alaska Gear Company is like they're really like doing a remake of the original bunny boot. 00:33:45 Speaker 1: They're all like military surplus. 00:33:47 Speaker 3: Yeah and yeah, this company, Alaska Gear Company is making bunny boots now and they make like a lighter version and like a heavy version that are rated to you know, minus seventy or something crazy. But keep you warm. Oh yeah, yeah, very warm. Yeah, And I struggle with my feet getting cold. 00:34:06 Speaker 1: I think the other thing you can do too is skiers have had heated footbeds forever and they're amazing. I don't use them. I don't need them that bad, but I don't know. For a couple of hundred bucks, you can get battery operated, you know, heated insoles, and you're not gonna have cold feet or cold toes going that way. If you don't want to go that route, I think having boots that are a little bit bigger than smaller is going to always help to keep a nice air layer in there because that's what's actually doing the insulating and keeping it dry in there. So once you get sweaty at all, you're getting cold, like, take the time undressed, put on some fresh dry socks, get them back in there, and you'll be definitely toastier though than you were beforehand. 00:34:52 Speaker 2: Another like reasonably cheap piece of gear that I love for cold weather is a hand muff, especially for ice fishing. If you don't want to be rocking your biggest gloves and you want to be using your fingers hand muff you can find a real good one for pretty cheap, or you can spend a lot of money on one It's something that like, once it's below forty and I'm doing something active outside, I like having a hand muff. 00:35:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can load those full hand warmers too. 00:35:16 Speaker 2: You can you load it full of cell phone snacks, handwarmers, all kinds of things. 00:35:23 Speaker 1: Good luck ice fishing. 00:35:24 Speaker 4: Melody Kale Flynn is in the market for a new spotting scope, debating between compact or full size which you prefer. And have you ever had a compact out hunting and then wished you had a full size or vice versa? 00:35:36 Speaker 1: Be honest what you got for Kale, I always go full size because the reason I'm packing the spotting scope is not to just see if it's an animal or if it's a deer versus an elk. It's gonna be to see details like how big the elk is or the deer, or you're looking so far out that you're gonna need something big to tell a different between elker deer. Yeah, the compact ones. I've just always felt like if I put my binoculars on a on a stable platform, I'm getting the same performance and gain the same result doing it that way. Yeah, So yes, And I have been out there with small spotters and every time, I'm like, oh, I should have brought the big one because right now we could actually tell what's going on over there, Seth, What do you got for Kale? Yeah, I would say, I guess it. 00:36:31 Speaker 3: Also, he doesn't say where he's what he's hunting for, where he's at right, No, I don't think so No, so pipe in Kale if you just kind of what you're hunting for where. But I would always go full size because you can you can use kind of full size for everything. Yeah, that covers all the bases. A compact is not gonna you're not gonna want to go coops dear hunting with a compact. 00:36:56 Speaker 2: But my endorsement for full size is that I have It's like obviously annoying to carry around because they're so big and heavy. But if I'm trying to like get the details on a mule deer bucks antlers, I have to now get like half a mile closer or something. If I don't have a full size, I would have saved myself that half mile of hiking and moving around if I just would have had the full size with me. So it's like bigger and more annoying to hump around, but it might save you some like hiking in the end as well. 00:37:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, Phil, let's do a few more. Yeah. 00:37:30 Speaker 4: Sure, we got multiple people Seth asking for more specifics on your build. Oh just someone was even like you should make a social video kind of exactly. 00:37:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, I do plan on doing that at some point. Cool. 00:37:44 Speaker 4: And then another one, mostly for Seth, I would say, is the Great Adventures of Mitten Men. He asks for just kind of like getting started in beaver trapping for someone that doesn't have people to learn from, and. 00:37:55 Speaker 2: It looks like he's in the Great Lakes first step based on that photo. 00:38:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess if you don't have anyone to mentor, you just go on YouTube and you know, try and find as much info there to like get you started. But then other than that, just just get some get some traps that are legal in your state and go look for some beaver sign and and and set them out. Like it's kind of the best way to learn without a mentor is just by doing it and sometimes doing the wrong things. You know, there you go, makes you learn a lot faster. But yeah, a lot of a lot of resources on YouTube about beaver trapping. 00:38:35 Speaker 2: Thanks to YouTube, the learning curve has never been smaller. 00:38:38 Speaker 1: I know it comes to uh stuff like this. Let's do one more phil before we move on. 00:38:42 Speaker 4: Sure, this'sn't got a lot of chatter in the chat, but will ask for go to's of American classical literature to read with your kids. 00:38:50 Speaker 1: I'm guessing outdoor themed stuff. 00:38:54 Speaker 2: I'm going to pass on this because I'm gonna cover it in our next segment, but set you're. 00:38:58 Speaker 1: Gonna cover it for reading with the kids. 00:39:01 Speaker 2: For top threes, I've got some book recommendations. I don't need to spend another minute beyond what I'm going to talking about books on this podcast, So go for it it. 00:39:10 Speaker 1: What can you recommend? I'm trying to think that top man, we read all the classics, which which were uh where the red Fern grows? Uh, summer a Monkey's What about Hatchett? Had Hatchett? Yeah, Hatchett's a great one. Yeah, gosh, what else? It's been a while now, seth soon to be father, what are you going to be reading? Well? Hatchett was the first thing that came to mind. 00:39:39 Speaker 3: There's a book called My Side of the Mountain and if you guys ever heard of that. It's like this kid kind of leaves town and goes up in the mountains and lives in a hollowed out tree. 00:39:50 Speaker 1: A couple of people in the chat where suggests that's a good one. It's cool. 00:39:55 Speaker 3: It's kind of like tells the story of a young young boys like adventurous and. 00:40:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's cool. Great book, Tom, Sawren, huck Finn. There you go. We'll have some more book recommendations for you in a second. 00:40:09 Speaker 4: And Spencer, actually, can I suggest we call an audible and switch segment Since it looks like our next guest has his guests with you right now. 00:40:16 Speaker 1: We're going to do that. 00:40:17 Speaker 2: Joining us on the line next is Michael Headsel, the founder of Peace River Canine Search and Rescue. He's here to talk to us about Splash, the world's one and only search and rescue otter. Michael, welcome to the show. 00:40:32 Speaker 6: Hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. 00:40:34 Speaker 2: Uh, and you can see and here Splash is with us right now. 00:40:39 Speaker 1: Please tell us about Splash. How old is he? Where did he come from? What kind of otter is he? 00:40:44 Speaker 6: Splash is a two year old Asian small plod otter Worldwide Wildlife Zoo out of Phoenix, Arizona, and so he was donated to the program and we put him to work. So he's all trained up and out in the field right now working what we call is proofing here right now working cases in the field. 00:41:08 Speaker 1: And those noises we're hearing. Is he happy? Is he annoyed? Is he is he snugly? What is splash his current mood? He is? 00:41:15 Speaker 6: I think he's horny. I think that's what. Oh wow, I think he's problem. But he's actually, uh, just giving me a lot of a lot of sass. 00:41:30 Speaker 2: At the moment, a lot of sass. What's specific What specifically is Splash trained to do? 00:41:37 Speaker 6: We use Splash. 00:41:38 Speaker 1: I'm gonna put him down real quick, just like I said. 00:41:48 Speaker 6: He's enough. He's gonna go pick on Dutch for a while. That's my dog. 00:41:52 Speaker 1: What is Splash trained to do? 00:41:54 Speaker 6: Splash is a what we call it recovery honor. He is trained to locate human remains underwater. So that's what he does. We use it for cold casework. His original concept is a lot of our cases, murder cases and stuff in where the victims been disposed of in water in water environment, and water is very harsh on human remains and the bodies go away fairly quickly the tissue does and the bones sink down into the buck and that muff can be a foot two feet three feet deep. And once the bones get down in there, the dive teams and myself being a forensic diver, we won't ever find them because of just no way to tell where they are. The cadaver dogs working from the boat can alert and say, yeah, the odor from the bones are coming up, it's there, but we get down to the bottom, we can't find it. So what Splash's job original concept was, is to deploy from the boat, go down, find the area down in the muck where the bones have settled in, and then identify that area, tell us about it, and then we put a grid over the top of it, and then we go in there with trials and we start working our way down through until we finally get the bones and make the recovery. That's what his original purpose was. It's expanded now because I've got other agencies, law enforcement agencies like fish and wildlife extuff they call them and we have a fisherman that's falling off the boat and they can't find him. He's drowned. Their dive teams not having anyone finding him bo calumn, he sent Splash out and splash it goes and makes the recovery. So his mission's kind of morphed. So he still does a lot of call case work that we do, but his his job kind of changed over it's expanded, and that's good. I mean, no one's ever done this before. We're the only ones ever tried to do anything like this, and so we're learning as we go on. It's as need is needed, we can go out and change the mission around whatever is required. 00:44:01 Speaker 1: So, Michael, I got a question, how does he notify you? How does he communicate with you that he's found something or hasn't found it. 00:44:09 Speaker 6: Well, if he hasn't found anything, he's not going to come back. He's on what's called a refined and refined and search work means that he finds what it is that we're looking for the target, comes back and tells me about it and then takes me back to it afterwards. High splash and see you're down. Okay, So if we launch him from the boat, he goes out, he'll swim around the surface, he finds the odor in the surface, just like the dogs don't do, and then he'll zoom down, and he goes down. We live in him about thirty feet of water. We don't want him get any deeper than that. And then he will come back up and start squeaking and making a lot of noise and letting us know that he's found something. And at that point we tie a line onto him. Because he's free. At that point, we don't have anything on him, just as harness, and we cook a line on him. He goes back down to where the odor is present, lays there. The diver will follow the line down to him, and then he waits for the diver to get there and back. Now he can hold his breath. Uh a minute, We let him five minutes is what we average is. But he's done eight and uh which scared the hell out of me. But it was bread longer if he needs to and uh so the and that's and he just waits for the diver to get there, and then he comes back. Once he's the diver's on scene, we release him from the line and then comes back up to the boat and gets his fish. He's we feed him. His reward is salmon. He likes farm raised salmon. That's his thing. And so he uh gets his salmon for his reward. He goes back in his crate and then his job's done for the day. 00:45:48 Speaker 1: And when he's not working, is he just cruising around your house? 00:45:51 Speaker 6: Yeah, hey, that's the house. Uh. He was out earlier when we were talking. He's out swimming in the kiddie pool and burning up some calories, and now he's in the house screaming at me. I don't know what he wants. He's been fed, so I'm not sure what he's after. He may want to go play or something. I haven't done a lot of work. He worked last week for we're working for Georgia Buro Investigation GBI last week and then this week he's kind of not had a lot to do, so I think he's it's kind of like we're kind of ignoring him. But I've had other stuff we would training. This is our training season for the canines because it's cool right now in Florida, so we put a lot of time into getting the dogs tuned up and the horses. We have a horse team as well, and so Splash is kind of getting pushed off a little bit and he's not getting his training as much. So I think he's a little irritated that he's not getting attention. 00:46:44 Speaker 1: What has the training process been like with Splash? Is it just like training a dog? 00:46:50 Speaker 6: Very similar in a lot of ways. The biggest problem with the otter is that he's not a dog. Dogs are brought up to work with humans through breeding programs, you know, in genetics and and so the dog that you buy now is very packaged to work with humans and to do a specific job. Otters are wild creatures. And this is even though this guy came from a zoom he is. He's very much a wild animal. They have a different set of priorities. And so the biggest thing I have to do is find out what motivates them, what reward system? Will he worked for? And can I get the trust from him to work for me? And will we work with humans? And so that's the big deal that we had to work on with him, and we did. We found out he's actually about the fifth otter that we've trained up for this work, and we had American River otters before that, which are much bigger. They're very bidy, they're very aggressive. Yeah, you got to wear thick gloves when you work with them because they can take your finger off in a heartbeat if they want to, and so you got to be careful with them. I've got a lot of scars, and they're stoic. They're not as animated. So one of the reasons that we went to Asian otters is that they're much more animated. They're very chatty, they're very vocal. When they get excited, they let you know about it, where the river otter doesn't do that so as much. They're a little bit like that. But I had one that was named Squeakers. She was very animated. She was really good and did a great job. But the boy ones like Hondo and then excuse me, Splash and go back there and pick them up. 00:48:29 Speaker 3: Mike, I have a question for you, how long? Like how many years will you get out of splash? Like? 00:48:33 Speaker 1: How many years will you be able to work with them? 00:48:36 Speaker 6: They say from talking to the zoo people that the lifespan of a captive odor can be fifteen to twenty years. Oh wow, So his grandmother is sixteen currently. And the honest longest otter that I know, oldest otter that I know of in captivity was at the Miami Zoo was twenty six years old and she just passed away recently, so we're hoping to get ten years. He's not. He is in a wonderful environment. He gets the best food, best medical care, lives in the house, sleeps with me at night, you know, down the bed, over the blanket, you know, it's where he likes to be at night. And then so he gets exercise and stimulation, and you know, he's got a job. So he's got a pretty good life here. But he works in a lot of different environments, meaning a lot of different water environments, and sometimes the waters are not as best as we'd like him to be, and so he that could probably cause a problem for him down the road, we think, We don't know. We had another honor Squeakers who had loaned out to another law enforcement agency that was using her over in Europe, and she got into some bad water and passed away about a month ago. So she gets sick. So's it's one of those things that we're finding out about as we as we work with them. Otters are very susceptible to human diseases, so they get sick. It flews, colds. They picked them up from people and then COVID wiped out a bunch of otters when when COVID came. I think we lost like a quarter of the otter population in the United States from COVID when it hit back in twenty twenty. So I have to be really careful with him, making sure that he doesn't get handled by people they're sick, you know, so he doesn't pick up if you think he's He's been really good so far. We's got a little frostbite from last week. We were working in Virginia when that storm hit and it got down to seven degrees and he loves the cold, but he was walking on some concrete. I think his foot was sticking to the concrete and got a little frost by on his foot. So he's been even nursing that back up. 00:50:44 Speaker 2: Michael, can you tell us about some of the successful missions that Splash has been on so far. 00:50:49 Speaker 6: Yeah, he's got one evidence recovery so far and one recent drowning and then three that our human remains really and the evidence one was really kind of lucky. It was the first time out. We were working for a long course and agency out in the South, the Mississippi area, and they wanted to check this lake area, which we did, and we had done it with the dogs and Damon, who was my cana at the time. She had been alerting like crazy that there was cadaverr in this lake and we couldn't locate it. And so doctor, the doctor I was with, he was a forensic anthropologist, as watch you throw a splash, and I said, well, he's all the six months old, he's only had two months of training, and he said, well, go ahead and throw them in where the hell we're here a month as we'll do it, you know. So we put him in and he identified an area down at the bottom that he was really interested in. So we dug it up and found a brick in there, you know, a clay one of those clay red bricks at Schem in the area for construction, and we brought it up and as soon as you brought it up that the dector says, I want that, and we gave it to her and she packed it up, took it in, matched it up to the big event, and the X ray from that killed the guy that picked it, and turned out there was still DNA on the brick because the clay and the clay soil had held it all together. So they were still able to get some DNA off of the brick and match it up. So that case, even the suspect had passed away at this point because it was twenty two years old case and there was nobody to charge in the case. But the case was finally cleared, which made the sheriff very happy because he was one of the original detectives on the case, so he was happy to get that off and that got him started. After that, things just started happening very quick. So we weren't originally intending on him using him for what we call law enforcement searches. We use it for private work. Most of that was for a lot of the universities like University of Tennessee, of Florida State, University West Virginia. These places they get calls out to do private cop work that they do using their sciences what they call fast team stuff, forensic applied science work, and so Splash is going to be working in that category. But then once law enforcement realized they had him available, we get calls from the Department of Justice, you d O, J, FBI, S, D L, E, G B I, T B I, all these groups sell these three letter you know, alphabet groups calls up and say hey, can you bring splash out for help. So we've been really busy and having on the road consistently with him since since he got discovered in this last year. So he's up to uh, he's got the one evidence recovery. He's got four body recovery so far, and so it's total of five recoveries maybe six or waiting to hear on this other one that happened recently. So he's he's on his way. So this is a satellite program. We don't know when we started it it was kind of work or not. It appears to be working at this point. We do have some challenges, a few issues with him the begin of trying to resolve and we're working on it. But this is only territory here, so we're blazing blazing away here. 00:54:06 Speaker 2: He's the world's only cadaver or otter. What gave you the idea to employ him? And do you think that this is something you'll try again in the future. 00:54:14 Speaker 6: Well, I had I had seen otters used in the Orient. They use it for hunting and hunting fish and hunting and lambs and oysters and all kinds of stuff. They train him up in the Orient to do this kind of work. And I was flying home from Los Angeles after working on a cold case, and I was reading like a Smithsonian type art magazine that I think about otters and how they use scenting abilities underwater to help locate prey and food and things underwater. Splash's now you want to be hill or what's your deal? He may be younger, I might have to be. 00:54:50 Speaker 1: He's a noisy bugger, Yeah. 00:54:52 Speaker 6: He is today. He's chatting today, so he's got uh that they use him for hunting. And I thought, and the you could do scent work out that well, I've been training sent dogs. I'm going in my forty six year doing this kind of stuff. And I said, maybe we could train an honor because I dive all the time. There's nothing more frustrating than diving on a case and knowing that your victim is somewhere in this lake or wherever you're at, river, wherever you're at, and you've got visibility that's this bad light. I can't see my hands in front of my face, and we're using guide ropes and we're down there. It's all tactile, running along, trying to feel our way around down there, trying to find something, can't find it, and you got to enw try for a day, maybe two days at it, can't get anywhere near it, can't figure out what's going on, and you have to walk away from the case. And it's one of the most frustrating things that we do, knowing that this family is trying to get resolution and we can't get there because we just don't have the technology to do it. And hopefully with Splash that we would be able to figure out if you can do this odor, if you can do that, maybe we can resolve more of these cases. And that's that was my thing. I came back from the and I started doing some research on it. And we've had an aquarium that far from me up here in Sarasota that I thought I would go up and talk to their people about it, and they said yeah, And I said, can we drive some and do some guests to work with them? And they secure, and so we went in and we started doing some testing and found out that they were very good at odor work on land and in the water. But since we've been working with them, we found out that it's not just odor work and how they find things. They're very related to Their first cousin to a wolverine, but also a platypus, and platypuses have electromagnetic sensors they use. They sense magnetic fields, is how they find stuff under water. And we found out that the whisker array on the front of these otters, which is massive, is high and lead, and so it gives them the ability to the tech magnum fields with their whiskers. And we found out that they hunt the same way that the platypus does in using their whiskers to find what they're looking for. So they basically learn the magnetic signature of what a human being is. And they're down there with their whiskers plombing along there until they run into that same resonance frequency and they're like, boot pay, it's right here. And then you'll see him pump these bubbles out and they start spitting bubbles out like crazy, and they taste some of them. They step back in and they taste them, and they taste it has the error confirmation because they have lands in their mouth that transfers this into a set response, and so they say, oh, that's what I'm looking for, and then they confirm it that way, and that's how they do it. So there's a two prong thing. They use magnetic field and they use this the bubble scent technique in order. It's pretty amazing. We got a lot of video of it working and trying to because I used to see him find stuff in the videos, but he wasn't blowing bubbles, and I kept looking at that, going how this is working? If he's scent working, he can't pull the set through his nose because he drowned. Okay, you can't do that. So their mammals like we are, they can't do that, So how is he I see the bubble technique working. We figured out the bubble part and then but then he would find stuff with his head and put it on there, and then all of a sudden he would start blowing bubbles at it afterwards, and I'm thinking, okay, what drew him to that to want to put the bubbles on it? And then we realize that they're working the dnamic those does, so we thought, okay, all right, so now we kind of figured out how this is working. And it's amazing. I mean, they're really very accurate. So he he's good at his job. He's learned it and seems to really like it, and he's gotten to where he's part of the family now, part of the pack. When I put this blue shirt on, which is my search shirt, and I'm going out working, and he's right at the back door with the dogs saying, all right, where are we going? So, you know, we load up and he jumps up in the front of the van and gets in his crate and the dog's getting their crates in the back of the van and then we're off and run. So's he's become part of the pack, so to speak. Although out don't have packs, they have what they call props, they're not called so he's very much a part of all that. What are you doing? 00:59:10 Speaker 1: Incredible stuff, Michael. 00:59:12 Speaker 2: Thank you for joining us and thanks for having this nonprofit and training Splash to do the work that you do. 00:59:17 Speaker 6: You're welcome. Thanks for having us on so it is fun. 00:59:20 Speaker 1: No, thanks, Michael, Michael, cool stuff. That's all. I could see a little Disney movie being made about Splash finding dead bodies. 00:59:31 Speaker 4: We have a lot of people in the chat torn on whether to be pro or anti honor going between the women who were attacks. 00:59:36 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that was an American river otter. This one was as Michael said, they're not they're not as fun. 00:59:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, well I think he was. 00:59:45 Speaker 2: Wasn't he talking about would he say a sea otter two or no? Was he just talking about river otters? I think just biting his fingers. 00:59:52 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:59:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, And this one was some some Asian Fellah. That'll be fun for our audio audience. 00:59:58 Speaker 1: Maybe not. They might get sick of that squa. 01:00:01 Speaker 2: But you should go watch it too because you just see the otter running around in the background the whole time. I think one time you went in the pantry and then someone closed the door and he had it. 01:00:08 Speaker 1: Come scurrying out of there. 01:00:11 Speaker 2: We are now going to do our top threes. 01:00:21 Speaker 7: Such talent, that's a word for it. 01:00:34 Speaker 1: Wow, that's a heck of a note there, Phil. 01:00:37 Speaker 2: All right, this week we've all brought our own top three list seth start us off. What are you ranking today? 01:00:43 Speaker 1: I'm going top three Turkey hunts? Okay? Ever, well, yeah, yeah that. 01:00:49 Speaker 3: I can that I one had in my phone and two that I can recollect your Yeah. Ever, so this one, this was last year, triple Yeah, this was all all in one morning night before we put these birds to bed, and the forecast was calling. 01:01:09 Speaker 1: For like a nice calm morning. 01:01:10 Speaker 3: Uh, get up the next morning and the wind is just cranking and if you know anything about turkey hunting, it's not great. You know, very windy mornings aren't great for hearing gobbles. So we kind of get down in the area where these birds were. We couldn't the night before. We couldn't exactly like locate the tree that they were in, but we kind of had a general area where they were, so we get down there, get down there in the morning, can't hear them, so we just kind of start sneaking into where we think they are and I eventually see one like I just glassed it up. So we moved into where we thought the birds could hear us, start calling, do that for a while nothing. Then we get up and move a little closer and I called again and struck them up. They're just like they're pretty close, but there was there. They're about forty fifty yards from us, but there was like a ravine and turkeys don't like crossing that kind of stuff, no, and we didn't really have any other play, so we sat down and started calling, and eventually those birds went down in that ravine and came up the other side, and there was five of them all together, abs, all gobblers, Yeah, all long beards, pretty country. 01:02:21 Speaker 1: Yeah. We ended up getting three out of that pack. 01:02:24 Speaker 2: How far apart were the shots? Did you guys have a double and then later you get a single or what it was? 01:02:30 Speaker 1: Kelsey shot first and then I shot two after that? Oh yeah, it's great. 01:02:36 Speaker 2: So just three trigger polls, three trigger poles. Yeah, and Seth has his little otter with him there. 01:02:41 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's why she's always with it. She's been on multiple turkey hunts. 01:02:44 Speaker 1: What's her role during a turkey hunt? 01:02:45 Speaker 3: Well, so she's she's a very smart dog and and she knows now like once, like once I start calling and she hears Turkey's goblin. 01:02:54 Speaker 1: It's funny. 01:02:55 Speaker 3: She starts shaking like real, real bad, and she just like lays lays down on the ground and hunkers down, doesn't really move, like a lab waiting for a cupping duck. 01:03:04 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:03:05 Speaker 3: Yeah, and then as soon as you pull the trigger, she's up and like looking for whatever whatever dead. 01:03:11 Speaker 1: What does she weigh? 01:03:13 Speaker 3: I think she's like fourteen to sixteen, Yeah, like a small gobbler, less than those gobblers. 01:03:20 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:03:20 Speaker 3: And then this morning we end up, So we took those birds back to the truck, got them all cleaned up, and then ended up going about ten minutes down the road to another spot and struck up like a late morning bird and Kelsey killed that one. So we killed four in one day. 01:03:35 Speaker 2: Pretty Merriam snow white fans, all right, sess got another. 01:03:38 Speaker 3: People, This is the opposite end of the country. Down in Florida. Last year, Kelsey and I went down there and got our first ossiolis. 01:03:48 Speaker 1: This was a buddy's place. 01:03:49 Speaker 3: He invited us down to go hunt his his little. 01:03:53 Speaker 1: Hunting club that he's a part of. 01:03:55 Speaker 3: And this this hunt's actually, i think on the First Light YouTube chain, and it's called the Art of Turkey's kind of the story of Kelsey and her artwork and us turkey hunting. 01:04:06 Speaker 1: Together and stuff, So you can go watch it if you want. 01:04:09 Speaker 3: But this one was, you know, your typical Osciola turkey hunting. They gobbled a bunch in the morning on the tree and flew down, shut up, And we got these guys midday, just sitting kind of calling every once in a while and just sitting in the spot where we knew they were traveling through. And those two gobblers came in and we doubled up and yeah, that was that was our first osciolas. And and man, it's like osciolas are cool because of like for me at least the country you're in, it's just like super cool to hunt turkeys down and stuff. They're just not like your typical you know, Eastern or merriams where they're just like coming in gobbling and hammering. 01:04:53 Speaker 2: We swat mosquitos that whole hunt. Oh yeah, that looks like the state bird would be a mosquito there. 01:04:59 Speaker 1: And then the next one another triple. This was another morning. 01:05:03 Speaker 3: So the bird i'm holding there killed that one right off the roost. Was was trying to get Kelsey a bird, and that that one ended up skirting around her and came into me. 01:05:13 Speaker 1: So I shot that one. 01:05:15 Speaker 3: And then about mid morning we struck up those two birds that she's holding there and called those in and she ended up shooting both of those with one shot. 01:05:29 Speaker 1: That's great. 01:05:30 Speaker 3: Purposely, no, no, not purposely, but she had two tags. 01:05:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, it worked out nice. There's some open country there, yeah, difficult turkey hunting country. That's just where you. 01:05:43 Speaker 3: Well, that's just where we took the picture. It was it wasn't that open where we killed them. 01:05:47 Speaker 1: How many turkey is you gonna kill this year? This year's gonna look a lot different with the baby coming in March. Uh still like five or six. We'll see, we'll see how much. So much time I get. But well, no, you just got to take the baby and Kelsey with you. Oh that's the plan. Yep, we's that easy. They're well, yeah, when they're that little, they're easy because they're they don't require much. They're not moving, you don't have to walk. They're not gonna get in trouble unless you put them in trouble. Easy. Yeah, I'm telling you some good advice I got man from a doctor. Early on, they're like, man, before they start actually being able to grab and walk, take a turkey, take advantage of it and go do things because you won't have that time later, because when they're two, it's not like you could have them out on a turkey hunt. Yeah, I mean, let's say, unless you can just plan it like they're falling asleep right when they're gonna come off the roost or something. All right, I'm gonna go next. 01:06:47 Speaker 2: I'm ranking the top three books that I read in twenty twenty five. I read forty books last year, most of them about the outdoors or history, or in some cases both, And so here are my three favorites. Number three in the Heart of the Three in the Heart of In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. This was written in the year two thousand. It's about a routine whaling voyage that's flipped on its head when a sperm whale attacks and destroys the two hundred and forty ton Essex ship. This happened in eighteen twenty. It's actually the inspiration for Moby Dick. The book explains the whaling industry and its global impact and its impact on New England at that time, and how it just changed the economy and the culture. And then it also tells the story of the twenty men who were aboard the ship that day. They spend months floating across the open ocean, just getting destroyed by the sun and saltwater. And here's the spoiler, there is some cannibalism in the book. One of the most shocking things about this story, though, is just how young the crew is. Most of the men are in their twenties. Six of them were actually teenagers, with the youngest crew member being fourteen, So it just makes like this whole awful advance venture really hard to fathom. That is in the heart of the Sea. I loved this book. That was my third favorite book that I read last year. Number two, The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, and this was written in twenty twenty three. This is about Stephen Breitweiser. He's a twenty something year old from France who steals two billion dollars worth of paintings and artifacts in the nineteen nineties. He does it over the span of six years. He lifts two hundred and thirty nine items from one hundred and seventy two museums in Europe. Some of the things that he thiefs include a medieval crossbow, ancient pottery, ivory statues, an antique pistol, Napoleon snuffbox, a Rembrandt painting. And you're probably thinking he does all this with elaborate heists that resemble Ocean's eleven, But it's actually nothing like that, and I won't spoil how he does it. 01:08:51 Speaker 1: You'll just have to read the book for those details. 01:08:54 Speaker 2: This is a super fun read if you're into true crime or artifacts or museums, and the author of the book actually interviews the man, so you get all the details just as they happened. And there's a really tragic ending for this stuff that he stole, and it's a surprise ending for the actual thief himself that the author tells you about when he meets this man. 01:09:15 Speaker 6: All right. 01:09:15 Speaker 2: The number one book that I read last year was Endurance by Alfred Lansing, and that was written in nineteen fifty nine. This is about Sir Ernest Shackleton's attempt to reach the South Pole in nineteen fourteen. He has a twenty eight man crew aboard the Endurance ship and it gets crushed by ice. They then spend two years stranded at the bottom of the globe. They're fighting the cold and snow and starvation and depression and the ocean and leopard seals and each other. It's a really incredible story, and it's so fantastical that you'd think that this is fiction. But what makes Endurance extra special is that it was written in the nineteen fifties and the author, Elfred Lancing, got to interview a bunch of the peop who were on the expedition, so you're getting first hand details from the men who experienced this. The storytelling is just as good as the story itself. That was my favorite book I read last year. Endurance by Alfred Lansing, and then I've got three honorable mentions here. Other books that I really loved. Killers of the Flower Moon that was written by David Grant in twenty seventeen. It's a historical account of how Oklahoma's Osage tribe became the most wealthy and the most hunted people in the world. The story is probably well understood by people who live in that area, but I had never heard of this, and it's just like a really fascinating bit of American history that more folks should learn about. I have not seen the movie yet, but I hope it's as good as the book itself. Killers of the Flower Moon and then God's Country by Percival Everett. This was written in nineteen ninety four. This was the best fiction that I read last year. It's a clever spoof on the Western genre. The book follows a drunk gambler, Kurt, and the best tracker in the West, Bubba. They go on a big misadventure. It's got a lot of colorful dialogue, ridiculous characters, dark humor, and it's a really quick read, just two hundred pages long. God's Country Personal Ever and then Squanto by Andrew Lippman twenty twenty four. This is the best account of how Squanto traveled from North America to Europe and then back to North America, and then he changed the history of both continents. The story of Squanto has been very disneyfied. I feel like in this book does a great job of giving the truest possible Squanto account. And this would be an extra fun read if you're from the New England area, specifically Massachusetts, because it talks a lot about that part of the world, you know, before written history really existed it Squanto. Those were my six favorite books that I read last year. 01:11:45 Speaker 1: Cool. Have you guys seen Killers of the Flowers? I haven't. No, I saw it yet, Phil give me a review. Did you love it? I loved it. 01:11:52 Speaker 4: I know people complained about it being too long, that it didn't feel long at all to me. I thought it managed different times very well. There was some really striking imagery in it that I had never seen before in a movie. 01:12:05 Speaker 2: So you also loved Leo's most recent movie, right, One Battle after Another? 01:12:08 Speaker 1: You say it was the best thing you've seen? What this year? It's my favorite movie I've seen this year? Yeah, yeah, I thought it was twenty twenty six. 01:12:15 Speaker 4: No, well, I mean twenty twenty twenty. I said this year twenty twenty five. Okay, I'm talking movies in terms of this year, just because there's a lot of Oscar talk happening. 01:12:24 Speaker 1: The nominations are really. 01:12:25 Speaker 4: Morning, so it just makes me think this year. 01:12:27 Speaker 2: Okay, but yeah, big Leo fan, all right, Yanni, what's your top three? 01:12:32 Speaker 1: We're gonna watch that. But these days we have to do like a uh, there's some kind of website where you can check to see exactly what the rating means, and then like if you're a twelve year old, which movie can watch it? The One Battle after Another? And it turns out that it's not for twelve year olds, And so I might be a little bit like, get to watch it? What age is it for? 01:12:55 Speaker 3: Oh? 01:12:55 Speaker 1: I don't know exactly, but just like reading like what's actually in there and you know the things that happened that yes, it's not for a twelve year old. Honest, your top line? Top three I chose to tell you about my top three filmed hunts for twenty twenty six. And it's hard to pick these like favorite hunts for twenty twenty six, because I get to go on a lot of them. If I could just have it my way, I would just go on hunts with my kids and my gal, not do any hunts with Spencer Seth Brand or anybody else. But for work, I'm gonna go to a an Alaskan bear hunt with the Newcombs, both Bear and Clay and myself Drew, Prince of Wales Island bear tags, and we're gonna go up there and test the theory if hunting those bears with a wets in a wet suit is the way to get close. So all three of us are just the theory. Well yeah, because they did it last year and in a couple of stocks, Clay gets to like ten yards and kills a bear or maybe it's two years ago now, and you know, after that happened, they're like, wow, that works, like everybody should do this, and so now we're gonna go and test to see if that's truly the case. Sweet, Yeah, it should be fun. I've got a wyoming elk on with my dad. He's got enough points to draw wyoming elk twenty seven or eight. It's a good general attack. But we've got a through a friend of mine. We've got a sweet ranch so we can get in on. It's very much an old guy hunt. You know. We're gonna go during archery season. There you can use a crossbow, so my dad has graduated to crossbow use and yeah, sounds like he's been doing getting in shape for that hunt. So that'll be it'll be fun. I don't know how many elk hunts, you know he's got left in him. It's coming up on mid seventies. Chopping mountains is not in his future, you know, he's in his crossbow prime. Though, crossbow prime, we'll see as long as he can see down the scope, you know, and take good aim. And then Kansas deer hunt with mister Brent Reeves. Uh Yeah, super fun human that I've gotten to hang with a little bit, and I'm excited to hang with him more and get to know him some more. But he's also got a friend who runs an outfit in Kansas who said that we can come and hunt his outfit like an outfitter. Yeah, Okay, Yeah, we're gonna go hunt his spot. Sounds like this guy's quite the character too. I'm not gonna spoil that because he's gonna be a big part of the episode. But Brent and I are going to sell film the whole thing, So we're sort of gonna film each other sell film. We're not gonna have videographers there, and I think it's gonna be a whot something different that we've never done that. What season you go that way? Like archery? Okay, yeah, like primer out you going. I don't know if we'll go primer or not. We're gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna let the outfitter, you know, point us in the right direction. As long as that lines up with with schedules, sure we'll do that. 01:16:08 Speaker 2: So Kansas has some unique seasons if you have like the October muzzleoader, I think, and then they write rifle season in December and. 01:16:17 Speaker 1: That October muzzle. A lot of people like that for especially for finding big box. It sounds like it's fun spot and stock. But you know, Brent and I both like hunting with the bow and so we're gonna, yeah, go do that. So Top three hunts. I'm looking forward to good stuff filming. Not jealous at all, Phil, your top three? What do you got? Goodness? Okay. 01:16:40 Speaker 4: On a previous episode, on a previous episode, I went over my top three video game characters that I would like to eat consume. So this this time, I decided to go with nineties cartoon characters that I would. 01:16:55 Speaker 1: Like to eat. Wow. 01:16:56 Speaker 4: Uh So, first up, we've got we've got cat dog. You know, I don't I don't know if cats or dogs taste very good. I've had Mountain Lion before. It was it was, it was all right, but you know, I just it's it's an abomination. 01:17:09 Speaker 1: And I want an off of the planet. Yeah. 01:17:11 Speaker 4: Also, it's you know, long backstrap is kind of lean. I don't know that might be, I might not not not be a great thing, but I'm honestly, I'm just curious that things like Yeah, so anyway, it could go either way. Next up, we've got mister Crabs from SpongeBob. I've always been a crab crab over lobster guy. It's the Pacific Northwest in me. I think Bikini Bottom is technically I think it can't canonically. It's like in the Marshall Islands, like between Hawaii and like Malaysia, somewhere around there. I don't know what kind of crabs would be there, but I'd like to imagine that he's like a like a like a human sized dungeon ess that I could just dig into. 01:17:51 Speaker 1: And that's what I choose to believe. He's got some real meaty claws. 01:17:53 Speaker 4: Though, definitely, I think I think that would be tasty. Number one, we've got Crumb from ah Real Monsters. Again, this could go either way for those for the audio listeners who haven't seen a real monsters, Crumb is just kind of like a big blob of flesh who has arms for ie stocks and holds eyeballs in his hands. Got some hairy armpits and really disturbing looking feet. Basically no leg, It's all just kind of cankle and foot. But you know it, look, I bet he tastes incredible kind of humanoid, little humanoid. 01:18:24 Speaker 1: I'm just gonna look past that. 01:18:26 Speaker 4: And also could be a scrotum that could have been the artistic inspiration. Yeahs, you're not wrong, and I'm just gonna move past that. They do yeah, yeah, and that under honorable mentions, we have Repti from Rugrats, who's a fictional dinosaur in a fictional cartoon, So I don't know if that really counts. We've got the angry beavers, and then from season four, episode eleven of Doug. This isn't a character, but they just make a really cool look in Lasagna. That's the episode where Judy has a date with her art school boyfriend and she wants her family to be cool, so she makes them pretend to be different people. And there's a bomb of fake bomb in the lasagna that Doug pretends to deactivate but by diving into the lasagna is Reptar? 01:19:15 Speaker 1: Is he the mascot for a chocolate bar? Or is that wrong? No? I don't think so. They might have. 01:19:20 Speaker 4: They might have made like a tie in candy after the cartoon. Okay, now he's his own thing. Yeah, he's just kind of his own cartoon character within the show. 01:19:27 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:19:28 Speaker 2: Yeah, he's like the Mickey Mouse of that universe lost. 01:19:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, all those cartoons. I just I don't even know what's going on anymore. Are you following along? Yeah? You were? 01:19:39 Speaker 2: Okay, here is where we're at, Yanni. That's the end of this week's show. Okay, So we're gonna get lunch style feedback from the chat Phil. 01:19:46 Speaker 1: What do you got for? 01:19:47 Speaker 4: Oh, I haven't been reading it for a while, but we've got someone and I've I've heard this feedback before. Some people said they people who read the book didn't like The Killers of the Flower Moon movie annoptation because the book doesn't really reveal what's going on. It's more of like a mystery. I don't know, if you can speak to the Spencer. It's kind of like a mystery till the end, whereas the movie lays it all out in the beginning and you just kind of like live in the horror and the rot that's like kind of consuming this community. 01:20:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, you certainly are not told off the bat in the book as to what is happening. So if the movie does reveal the whole plot at the beginning. 01:20:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be it. It basically does. Yeah, just do you have both have the movie and the book. Yeah. 01:20:25 Speaker 4: This is an update from Christy Holmes, who was part of the thirty six women who went smelting and asked for good luck from us on the show. They had a wicked good time and the smelts were running and they're inviting us next winter, Christy, that sounds like a last So glad you had a good time, Christy. 01:20:41 Speaker 2: I think last year joined us for one minute fishing while she was smelting, so she had a baby on a hip and did not catch any smelt that day. So maybe we need to bring Christy back again to see if she can redeem herself for a five hundred dollars donation. 01:20:56 Speaker 4: Young Troe says, Yanni and Phil, which one of you two could grow a better musclesh to compete with Seth and Spencer. I've never seen Yanni with facial hair, but I can almost guarantee that he could grow a better mustache than I could. 01:21:09 Speaker 1: I would have said the same about you you Phil. Well, maybe we should make this happen next week. I'll well can put up a picture, because there's one time where I grew some facial hair. It was COVID. It took me the entire pandemic to come up with a beard and a mustache and it still look like shit. So you gave up. You're not not going to bring that back. No, no, no. 01:21:30 Speaker 4: Any recommendations from CSC broncos fan on red dot sites for a Turkey shotgun. Do you guys use red dots? I don't use red dot. 01:21:41 Speaker 1: No I do. I use to sig. I believe it's the Romeo Excel now nice and low. Whatever you get, make sure it's low profile because there's nothing worse and having a site that makes you have to get your cheek up off your shotgun. So yeah, get the mount to be low profile, the and the red do itself to be low profile. Two more, phil No. 01:22:06 Speaker 4: I don't even know if we have two more, or at least ones that I have. 01:22:10 Speaker 1: Uh we cat. There was a geared Talk question about the about if you guys have seen anything less? Instead of doing a wall tent, he was gonna save some money and just like double up on ice shelters. Anything about that seth. 01:22:25 Speaker 2: I feel like that's become very popular in the last like five years. Guys will take their like their Eskimo would be a classic example. Insulated ice shack and front Country Camp out of that. 01:22:37 Speaker 3: Well, there are a lot of those, A lot of those companies that are making ice shelters like that are building them for ice camping, and I'd imagine if you camp on the ice with them, you can camp on hard ground. So Yeah, they're they're they're just putting in features that are sure more conducive to like camping. 01:22:56 Speaker 1: Buddies that have done it. 01:22:57 Speaker 2: I've slept in a few of them, and most of them don't have flo so they'll take and they lay down like the sort of matt that you would put in a workout room. 01:23:06 Speaker 1: Yep, just a floor. Get it together. 01:23:11 Speaker 2: That seems like a pretty important thing to have with you and not very expensive to make happen either. Yeah, it seems seems like it's become quite popular. 01:23:19 Speaker 1: Floors are for babies. Yeah. The only thing I would say about going to have a baby sit. The only thing I would say about that is that the the wallton I think is going to outlast like the ice fishing pop ups. Sure, I feel like those have a little bit of a disposable feel to them. 01:23:38 Speaker 2: But maybe you're you're just like solo hunting, so you don't need a whole wall tent set up. And maybe you only got three hundred dollars instead of fifteen hundred. 01:23:48 Speaker 1: Sure, Yeah, but I'm just saying, yeah that if you yeah, if you only spend three hundred, it's not gonna last year, Like your. 01:23:55 Speaker 2: Kids may not inherit it. No, is this the gear talk thing you wanted. 01:23:59 Speaker 4: To cover, Johnny, that's the thing he was talking about, saying, Yeah, I've just had it on there. 01:24:04 Speaker 1: We'll do one more shout out. 01:24:05 Speaker 4: I don't really know the specifics because this question came in or statement came in an hour ago, and I don't know if he can provide more details. But he just he said he's this is from Actually Tea. He says he's here in South Carolina. He just formed a state branch of end of the National Deer Association, consolidating local chapters into one statewide branch. Maybe send a shout out to spread awareness. I don't know if it has a name or anything, but South Carolina people. 01:24:28 Speaker 2: South Carolina Branch of the National Deer Association. Uh, maybe they could receive some trivia funds in the future from a winner like Giannis or Seth. You keep that in mind for Actually Tea. All right, that's the end of this week's episode. We'll see you guys bank here the same time and place next week. 01:24:43 Speaker 1: By now,